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VOLUME 95 - NUMBER 23
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA - SATURDAY, JUNE11, 2016
TELEPHONE (919) 682-2913 PRICE: 50 CENTS
Ali’s confidence, cockiness made him symbol of black pride
By Jesse J. Holland
WASHINGTON (AP) - For Muhammad Ali, the idea of being a humble athlete -
someone pre-packaged and palatable for white America - was never an option.
Instead, he demanded respect not only as a boxer but as a brash, unbought and un
bossed black man and endeared himself to African-Americans as a symbol of black
pride. He radiated courage and confidence, skill and showmanship.
“He became the incarnation of black defiance, black protest and black excellence at
the same time,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime friend of Afi’s.
Ali, who died Friday at 74, gave voice to many blacks frustrated with a white society
that asked them to fight communism in Vietnam but openly practiced segregation and
discrimination at home.
“At a time when blacks who spoke up about injustice were labeled uppity and often
arrested under one pretext or another, Muhammad willingly sacrificed the best years of
his career to stand tall and fight for what he believed was right,” said retired NBA star
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who like Ali converted to Islam. Abdul-Jabbar was among sev
eral prominent African-American athletes in the late 1960s who supported the boxer for
his religious beliefs and as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.
Unapologetically arrogant about his looks and his skills, Ali taunted opponents by
reciting playful poetry and frequently declared himself “pretty” and “the greatest.”
Many people had never heard a successful black man talk about himself so boldly in
front of whites. And it made a difference, Ali biographer Thomas Hauser said.
“Every time that Muhammad Ali looked in the mirror and said 'I’m so pretty,” what
he was really saying - before it became fashionable - is 'black is beautiful,” Hauser said.
“I can’t tell you how many people ... have come up to me and said, 'Before Muhammad
Ali, I thought it was better to be white than black. I was ashamed of my color, and Ali
made me proud. Ali made me just as happy to be black as somebody else being white.”’
Ali’s blackness infused everything he did and everything he was.
“If you wanted to make it in this country, you had to be quiet, carry yourself in a cer
tain way and not say anything about what was going on, even though there was a knife
sticking in your chest,” recalled the late black journalist Gil Noble in an essay written
by Hauser.
“Ali changed all of that. He just laid it out and talked about racism and slavery and
all of that stuff. He put it on the table. And everybody who was black, whether they said
it overtly or covertly, said 'Amen.’”
The day after winning his first world heavyweight championship, Ali announced he
had joined the Nation of Islam and had shed his “slave” name of Cassius Clay. He Ie-
fused to be drafted into the U.S. military to fight in Vietnam. He was convicted of draft
evasion, banned from boxing and stripped of his heavyweight title.
(Continued On Page 2)
This is a 1995 file photo showing Muhammad Ali smiling during a visit to New
York. Ali, the magnificent heavyweight champion whose fast fists and irrepressible
personality transcended sports and captivated the world, has died according to a
statement released by his family Friday, June 3,2016. He was 74. (AP Photo/Mark
Lennihan, File)
National, State and Local Policy
Makers Headed for Black Political
Justices taking on new
Texas death row cases
By Mark Sherman and Michael Graczyk
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court said Monday it will review two death-row cases from
Texas, the nation’s top death-penalty state, as the court continues to tinker around the edges of capital
punishment.
The appeals come from two African-American death row inmates from Houston, Bobby Moore and
Duane Buck.
Moore, sentenced to death more than 35 years ago, says he is ineligible to be executed because he is
intellectually disabled.
Buck argues his sentence should be thrown out because it is tinged with race. Ajury voted to sentence
Buck to death after a defense expert testified that black people were more likely to commit violence.
Buck’s lawyers have fought for years to win a new sentencing hearing.
Neither case poses a broad challenge to the death penalty. Just last week, the justices rejected a con
stitutional attack on capital punishment from an inmate in Louisiana.
But the Supreme Court maintains a steady stream of cases dealing with death sentences and race, intel-
lectual disability and the fairness of state death penalty trials.
The court’s January decision in a Florida case led to a halt in executions in that state, and also raised
questions about carrying out death sentences in neighboring Alabama.
Last month, the court effectively threw out the conviction and death sentence of a black man who
faced an all-white jury in the killing of an elderly white woman in north Georgia.
Texas has carried out 537 executions since the Supreme Court allowed the resumption of capital pun
ishment in the mid-1970s, more than a third of all executions in the United States. Harris County, which
includes Houston, accounts for 126 executions, more than any state other than Texas.
“Both these cases reflect Texas’ exceptionalism when it comes to the death penalty,” said Jim Marcus,
co-director of the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law.
The Harris County district attorney’s case declined to comment on Monday’s orders.
Buck came close to being executed in 2011, before the justices stepped in with a last-minute reprieve.
Three years later, the court denied a full-blown review of Buck’s case.
This time around, the appeal focuses on a claim that Buck’s legal representation was constitutionally
deficient.
He was convicted of capital murder and sent to death row for the slaying of his ex-girlfriend and a man
at her Houston apartment in July 1995. During the punishment phase of Buck’s 1997 trial, psychologist
Walter Quijano testified under cross-examination by a Harris County prosecutor that black people were
more likely to commit violence.
Quijano, called as a defense witness, had testified earlier that Buck’s personality and the nature of his
crime, committed during rage, indicated he would be less of a future danger.
Buck’s case was among six in 2000 that then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, now a Republican
U.S. senator, said needed to be reopened because of racially charged statements made during the trial
sentencing phase. In the other five cases, new punishment hearings were held and each convict again was
sentenced to death.
The attorney general’s office has said Buck’s case was factually and legally different from the five
others and that Buck’s trial lawyers first elicited the testimony from the psychologist. They also said the
racial reference was a small part of larger testimony about prison populations.
Alfred Estes, whose brother was among the two people Buck was convicted of killing, questioned why
the court agreed to look at the case again.
“Why are we still having to go through this?” he said. “My family deserves justice and he’s been
sentenced to die.”
Moore claims that Texas’ top criminal appeals court is using outdated medical standards in evaluating
whether he is eligible to be executed. Moore says that Supreme Court decisions in 2002 and 2014 bar
executing intellectually disabled inmates and require the use of current clinical standards.
^ 00re ’ l ^ en 20’ Was sente nced to death less than three months after the fatal shooting of James. Mc-
( arble, a 72-year-old clerk, during a robbery at a Houston grocery store.
Moore received an execution date in 1986 that was stopped by a federal judge. It wasn’t until 1999 that
a PP ea ' s “ urt ordered his case be returned for a new punishment trial. That occurred in February
-001 with a Harris County jury returning him to death row.
The cases, Moore v. Texas, 15-797, and Buck v. Stephens, 15-8049, will be argued in the fall.
Convention in Gary
By Hazel Trice Edney
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As
the U. S. presidential candidates
prepare for national conventions
and congressional campaigns re
main in full throttle, the National
Policy Alliance, a coalition of
16,000 Black elected and ap
pointed officials and more than
a million Black policy makers
has organized a National Black
Political Convention to be held
June 9-12 at the Genesis Con
vention Center in Gary, Ind.
The event is a follow up to a
historic gathering convened in
1972 by then Gary Mayor Rich
ard Hatcher.
“The Gary Convention was
perhaps the single most impor
tant political event for Black
America held during the last
century,” Tuskegee, Alabama
Mayor Johnny Ford said in an
interview this week. “With that
Gary Convention came the inspi
ration and motivation that led to
the election of more Black elect
ed officials than any time since
reconstruction.”
Although he is founding co-
chair of the National Policy
Alliance, Ford says there will
be no top leader. Other conven
tion convenors are former Gary
Mayor Richard Hatcher, original
convenor in 1972; current Gary
Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson;
and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka,
the son of poet and activist Amiri
Baraka, an original convenor in
1972.
According to NPA Execu
tive Director Linda Haithcox,
speakers will include Nation
of Islam Minister Louis Far
rakhan; Chicago Congressman
Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.); Dr.
Lezli Baskerville, president/
CEO, National Association for
Equal Opportunity in Higher
Education; NAACP Senior Vice
President Hilary Shelton; Dr. E.
Faye Williams, National Chair
of the National Congress of
Black Women; Flint, Michigan
Mayor Karen Weaver; and Spen
cer Overton, president/CEO of
the Joint Center for Political and
Economic Studies.
“We have no one leader.
We don’t have a Martin Luther
King. We don’t have a Malcolm.
We have diversified if you- will,
whereby all of us have leader
ship roles,” Ford said.
Some national leaders, in
cluding the Rev. Jesse Jackson
Sr., who had originally planned
to attend, had to cancel due to
Friday’s memorial services for
Continued On Page 2)
Trump’s ’myAfrican-American’
remark turns critics to target
By Don Thompson
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - A California man singled out by
Donald Trump as “my African-American” said Monday that he is
now the target of harsh criticism, including comments he feels are
more racist than the remark by the presumptive Republican presiden
tial nominee.
Trump’s reference to Gregory Cheadle at a California campaign
rally on Friday is bringing criticism to Trump for his possessive com
ment, but also to Cheadle for attending in the first place.
Cheadle said Monday that he wasn’t there to back Trump and that
he is considering other possibilities as well, including Democratic
candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.
But he didn’t take offense over Trump’s remark. In fact, he had
Trump autograph two campaign placards at the rally in Redding,
California.
“You would not believe the hate-filled messages that I get. Those
messages, by those people claiming that Trump is a racist, are infi
nitely far more damning and racist than Trump’s statement ever could
have been misconstrued to portray,” Cheadle said in a telephone in
terview.
Trump pointed Cheadle out while he was in the midst of describ
ing a past campaign event in which Trump said a black supporter
punched a protester wearing a “Ku Klux Klan outfit.”
He interrupted himself to point to Cheadle, who was holding a
Veterans for Trump poster.
“Oh, look at my African American over here,” Trump said. “Look
at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I’m talking about? OK!”
Cheadle, 59, a Republican who is running a long-shot campaign
for Congress, said he originally stopped by to hand out his own cam
paign literature but went in after a friend gave him credentials to get
near the front of the crowd. Someone else gave him the Trump cam
paign sign to shade his bald head from a blazing sun in triple-digit
temperatures that caused several people to collapse.
It wasn’t until hours later that Cheadle realized Trump’s remark
had gone viral. He said much of the criticism has come from fellow
blacks who don’t know him personally.
“Social media is ripping me apart,” he said Monday. “I think it’s
this mindset of, if you’re a black man, you can’t do certain things.
You shouldn’t be at a Trump rally. You shouldn’t do it. And I’m not
that way. ... I tend to think for myself and not have someone think
for me. But as a consequence that takes me out of the black, quote-
unquote, arena and places me in a white arena - and so oftentimes
blacks take offense at that.”
Cheadle said he considers actions by Democratic front-runner
Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to be
racist because they supported get-tough crime measures in the 1990s
that led to the mass incarceration of black men.
Cheadle said he is not upset with his critics. “I understand their
anger because they don’t know the whole story,” he said.