Civil rights kitchen serves last supper
Diner that helped transform US race relations
makes way for student dormitory
By Gary Younge
Aug. 4— In Atlanta they used to call it the
Black City Hall. Not just the venue for a generous soul food lunch of
fried chicken, grits and collard greens, it was also the meeting place
for the American civil rights movement, where Martin Luther King broke
cornbread with other civil rights leaders during the 60s.
Now Paschal’s, the diner once referred to as the kitchen of the
civil rights movement, is to be demolished — making way for a new
dormitory for the historically black Clark University.
It was a nostalgic, emotional and for some infuriating moment when the
serving hatches finally closed in the dining room where King and his
assistants planned the Selma to Montgomery march, which led to the passage
of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“As the primary meeting place for the leadership of the civil rights
movement, Paschal’s played a central role in the transformation
of race relations in America,” King’s widow, Coretta Scott
King, told the New York Times.
“It was the incubator for many of the strategies and tactics that
empowered the movement, as well as the site where participants in the
movement gathered to discuss and refine the ideas and philosophy that
undergirded our freedom struggle.”
Paschal’s closing stirred strong emotions in many, as it marked
the end of an era and an institution, which counted Muhammad Ali, Aretha
Franklin and Stevie Wonder among its patrons.
“I’m real sad,” said hostess Orah Sherman, who worked
at the restaurant for 39 years. “When I went home last night, I
couldn’t stop crying.”
Diner Henry Dodson was also nostalgic: “Not long ago, if you were
black and you came to Atlanta, you came to Paschal’s. This was
the center of things in its heyday.”
Even after King was assassinated in 1968 the restaurant maintained its
political and social significance for many years. In 1972, when Andrew
Young announced his bid to become the first black congressman from Georgia
since post-civil war reconstruction, he did it from Paschal’s.
The pending demolition has also sparked anger. Some believe that Clark
University, which bought the building in 1996, should have kept it open
to honor its history, despite the fact that it says it has been losing
$500,000 a year doing so.
“A member of our family betrayed us. I liken it to infidelity,”
said Ivory Young, a city councilor.
The rise and demise of Paschal’s is emblematic of the fortunes
of many black-owned businesses post-integration. For all its ills, segregation
imposed an economic and social cohesion on black communities in the
south, who were not allowed to eat in white-owned restaurants.
The Paschal’s story began in 1947 when brothers James and Robert
Paschal opened a small lunch counter across the road from the current
diner and then expanded to build what King’s right-hand man, Ralph
Abernathy, would call “a living monument to black capitalism”
— including a hotel and nightclub where the diner now stands.
Paradoxically, King’s achievements in removing the barriers of
segregation paved the way for black people to live and eat where they
wanted, thus dissipating Paschal’s once captive audience. A sizeable
black middle class moved to other areas of Atlanta, such as Stone Mountain,
while the poor remained in what was to become a run-down neighborhood.
Some buildings and areas of importance to the civil rights era, including
the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where King was assassinated, or Kelly
Ingraham Park in Birmingham, Alabama, where huge protests took place,
have been refurbished and revitalized. Others, like Paschal’s and
the “white-only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina,
where in 1960 four black teenagers led the era’s most famous sit-in,
have struggled.
The Atlanta congressman John Lewis, who marched with King in Selma and
met him often in Paschal’s, believes that with civic effort the
diner could have been preserved as an historic site.
“Paschal’s did not just nourish the bodies of the leaders
of our nation’s struggle for civil rights,” he said. “It
nourished our minds and souls.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
Malaysian arts groups rally
around penalized theater group
By Mustafa Ali
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, July 29 (IPS)— The
muzzling of the works of a popular theater group, whose satirical spoofs
about Malaysia’s politics and politicians were drawing in the crowds,
is generating a backlash of protest from arts groups, activists and
patrons alike.
Instant Cafe Theatre, whose most recent play drew controversial action
from the authorities, has responded to the July 17 canceling of its
performing license by the Kuala Lumpur authorities by stating that licensing
laws should not be used to control freedom of expression and the performing
arts industry.
“This cannot be reconciled with our constitution,” said Adeline
Tan, manager of the theatre company. The controversy centers on the
theatre’s group’s play, “The 2nd First Bolehwood Awards
— The Director’s Cut,” a satirical and hilarious spoof
about politicians and government policies.
Playing on the word “boleh,” which means “can” in
Malay, the group chose “Bolehwood” as its brand.
The word has been turned into a national motto, as in “Malaysia
Boleh,” which is interpreted as “Malaysia can (do),”
and is part of a campaign by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad to boost
national pride.
The play also criticized Malaysia’s “bumiputra” policy
— affirmative action, particularly economical, for ethnic Malays
— which has long been attacked by the political opposition in the
country.
Clearly, the critical parody and satire went down well with audiences,
and ran to full houses between July 8 and July 13, with tickets sold
out in advance of the shows.
In its promotional material for the play, released weeks before the
first show, Instant Cafe publicized the show as “spoofs (of) everything
under the Malaysian sun and no one, no institution, no project, no cultural
norm, is spared.”
The action against Instant Cafe has provoked all-round support. The
Penang-based human rights group Aliran in a statement demanded that
the capital’s City Hall, its administrative center, respect the
right of the group to artistic expression.
“Instant Cafe are an accomplished group of performers who portray
Malaysian life satirically,” read the statement. “They force
us to look at ourselves and laugh at our idiosyncrasies and weaknesses;
they educate us on current issues in a hilarious way.”
Aliran also barracked the administration’s judgment on the show
as “myopic, irrelevant and totally without merit.” The rights
group has challenged the city administration “to air this show
on television so that the entire citizenry can watch and give their
verdict.”
In its protest statement, Five Arts Center, another Kuala Lumpur-based
performance group, called the authorities’ action “grossly
oppressive and alarming.”
What happened to Instant Cafe Theatre, it said, was a huge step backwards
for a Malaysia “that aspires to be progressive and enlightened
in all areas of development.” The statement added: “We from
the arts community cannot accept such repressive and retrogressive measures
by the authorities.”
The controversy first took shape, according to media reports, when the
city administration issued a letter to Instant Cafe demanding that the
theatre group cut five elements from the script which apparently pertained
to government policies and agencies, and made some references to religion
and race-sensitive topics in this country.
Reportedly after consulting its lawyer, the group decided not to comply
because, as Tan pointed out, this would remove entirely the point of
the play. The authorities then fined Instant Cafe 10,000 ringgit ($2,600)
for non-compliance, and also cancelled the group’s performance
permit.
This action apparently followed the publication in the Malay-language
daily Utusan, of a single letter of complaint from a reader on July
11, two days after the first performance. The letter writer appeared
to be disturbed by what he saw as vulgarism and the group’s mimicking
of the country’s racial and Islamic policies.
Confusion over the issue continued when Kuala Lumpur Mayor Mohamad Shaid
Mohd Taufek issued an apparently contradictory statement during an interview
with a newspaper soon after Instant Cafe had been fined.
“I did not find anything offensive about the show,” he was
quoted as saying. “Let the show go on.” But Instant Cafe manager
Tan said at a press conference that the group would wait until it received
a clearer message from the city administration before deciding to continue.
Artists have run into official interpretations of the role of the arts
in Malaysia before.
In February 2002, the 19-year-old Five Arts Theatre group was banned,
also by the Kuala Lumpur city administration, from staging a re-run
of the hit feminist play, “The Vagina Monologues.”
At the time, complaints from the public were cited as a reason, “Using
the word ‘vagina’ was one of many reasons of the City Hall’s
action,” said the theatre group’s executive director Marion
D’Cruz. “But they also gave us other reasons too.”
Among them was a scene in which a woman talked about her life and the
religious patriarchy that troubled her. “We did not intend to focus
particularly on Islam,” said D’Cruz. “In fact the play
talked about religion in general. Also, it did not intend to touch specifically
on religious issue; instead the play looks into many systems of patriarchy
that oppress women.”
D’Cruz said that artists can still express themselves, but that
the conditions under which they do so are left unclear. “We try
very hard not to compromise, to do what we want to do and to push to
say what we want,” she said. “But sometimes the unpredictable
atmosphere is still a big problem for us.”
Exhibit holds mirror
to follies of US ‘empire’
By Katherine Stapp
New York, New York, July 29 (IPS)— The US
public may be happily impervious to world opinion — only about
14 percent even hold passports — but a new museum exhibit in New
York forcefully brings home the good, bad and ugly perceptions that
define the last “superpower” for the other six billion people
on the planet.
The theory behind the “The American Effect,” now at the Whitney
museum of contemporary art in Midtown Manhattan, is to illuminate the
psychological impacts of US influence on trade, culture, politics, and
human rights.
“Since the end of the Cold War, America has become more and more
explicit about its right to act unilaterally — and even preemptively
— to maintain its security and economic interests through military
action,” according to curator Lawrence Rinder. “The recent
invasion of Iraq in the absence of United Nations support exemplifies
this emerging doctrine.”
“Reflected here are some of the direct consequences of America’s
ubiquitous military presence, de facto economic control and pervasive
cultural influence. In this age of American Empire, the image of the
United States has taken on almost mythic dimensions, symbolizing, consciously
or unconsciously, deeply held personal fantasies and fears,” he
says.
Globe-trotting for a year, Rinder amassed works from 47 artists and
filmmakers, and three collaborative groups, from 30 countries in Europe,
Africa, Asia, Australia, South and North America. Some had traveled
to and even lived in the United States; others had never been here personally,
but formed strong opinions nonetheless.
All the works were composed in the period following the end of Cold
War and the rise of US supremacy in the 1990s.
“The timing of ‘The American Effect’ is very much related
to a renewed urgency about this subject, with America now increasingly
coming to terms with how it is perceived abroad,” says Maxwell
Anderson, the Whitney’s director.
Works run the gamut from the slyly mocking to the openly scathing.
One of the funniest pieces, by French artist Gilles Barbier, stars life-sized
wax dummies of beloved US comic book icons like Superman, Wonder Woman,
and the Incredible Hulk -- now elderly and decrepit, reduced to staring
at the black-and-white television in a nursing home.
Very few of the show’s works are so light-hearted, however. Most
refer, directly or indirectly, to the United States’ imperialistic
ambitions and military meddling around the globe.
Take Filipino artist Alfredo Esquillo Jr.’s oil portrait of what
at first appears to be a loving mother holding a toddler on her knee.
A closer inspection reveals that the face peeking through the mother’s
bonnet is actually that of US President William McKinley, who annexed
the Philippines in a bloody assault from 1899-1901. McKinley’s
grasping fingers are tipped with razor-sharp eagle talons, and a gun
pokes out of his sleeve.
Not surprisingly, many of the works refer to the terrorist attacks of
2001 and their (ongoing) aftermath.
Chilean artist Cristobal Lehyt contrasts slides of the viewing platform
at Ground Zero and a Chilean military school, an allusion to the fact
that the World Trade Center bombing and the US-sponsored overthrow of
democratically-elected president Salvatore Allende in 1973 both took
place on Sept. 11.
“Take It or Leave It”, by Muhammad Imran Qureshi of Hyderabad,
Pakistan, uses gold leaf and a thick pigment called gouache to depict
boxlike forms, one decorated in camouflage and the other in leaves,
to symbolize the bombs and food aid packages that the US Air Force dropped
on Afghan villages.
Other works, like a pair of scissors looming over a landscape identified
by the artist as Iraq, also reflect this sense of outrage that “America
is trying to make policies for the whole world (with) military actions
everywhere, trying to resolve everything by force or by certain power,”
Qureshi says.
Zhou Tiehai’s painting “Libertas, Dei Te Servent!” (“Long
Live Liberty!”) takes ‘Time’ magazine’s cover picture
of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and recasts it in the style of an
idealized “great leader” portrait, with a wash of garish reds,
purples and pinks.
The punch line is that, concealed beneath the paint, Tiehai has added
two balls of elephant dung — a cheeky reference to another museum
exhibit four years ago that was nearly shut down by the city’s
devoutly Catholic and authoritarian mayor because it depicted the Virgin
Mary using elephant dung.
Other works look to earlier episodes of US history for inspiration.
Olu Oguibe, who was born in Nigeria and now lives in New York, contributed
22 ink sketches of various “types” found in the 19th century
United States and how they might have been perceived by a British traveler.
Titled ‘Arawak Indian’, one reads: “The Indians are to
be found in offices and colleges these days, although they naturally
cannot compete with our kind on account of their natural defects and
poor mental capabilities.”
Another, ‘Negro Lady With Hat’, condescendingly proclaims:
“Though far from the affluence and sophistication for which our
ladies are known, occasionally there is to be found a dark lady of dignity
among many across America.”
The list of archetypes includes” ‘Missionary’s Wife’,
‘Black Fellow Playing Harmonica’, ‘Asiatic Man From Indo-China’
and ‘Musulman in Carolina’.
In one of the most visually arresting compositions, Ouseman Sow, a Senegalese,
constructed looming, muscular figures of wire, mud and cloth to dramatically
recreate the last stand of Lt. Col George Armstrong Custer at the Battle
of Little Big Horn — a rare victory for indigenous Native Americans.
“Ironically, despite the pervasive global reach of the United States,
many of its citizens know exceedingly little about the rest of the world,
let alone what the rest of the world thinks of them,” Rinder writes
in a long preface to the exhibit’s catalogue.
“Sometimes, difficult images are precisely what are needed to remind
us of our vulnerabilities and shock us into greater awareness of the
world around us,” he says.
Surprise!
The US is in Israel’s corner
dishonest broker
The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine
By Naseer H. Aruri
South End Press, 2003
Review by Seán Marquis
Aug. 6 (AGR)— Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war the United States has increasingly supported the state of Israel
while at the same time acting as a “mediator” between the
Israelis and the Palestinians.
It is precisely this deceptive role played by the United States that
lends itself to the title of Naseer H. Aruri’s new book dishonest
broker. Aruri, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University
of Massachusetts, demonstrates that the public face of the US as an
honest mediator or “broker” for peace between the two hostile
groups is actually a sham and the term “dishonest broker”
is much more fitting.
For dishonest broker Aruri makes extensive use of official documents,
statements, and predominantly, news records. One of the basic premises
of the book is that: “While the United States had voted annually
since 1948 in favor of UN Resolution 194, which recognizes the right
of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and property and
to receive compensation and restitution, it effectively blocked all
international efforts to give any practical application to that resolution.”
To demonstrate US backing of Israel Aruri points to the 1975 US-Israel
Memorandum of Agreement in which the US agreed to be “ ‘fully
responsive’ ” to Israel’s military needs, amounting to
some $2-3 billion annually in military aid through successive administrations.
Also according to Aruri, in the Memorandum the “[US] said it would
not recognize or negotiate with the PLO until it [the PLO] recognized
Israel’s right to exist and agreed to abide by UN Security Council
Resolution 242. No reciprocal demands recognizing Palestinian national
rights were made on Israel.”
The US position behind Israel took a bigger jump when in 1981 US president
Ronald Reagan suddenly declared, disregarding UN resolutions to the
contrary, that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are “not illegal.”
Aruri argues that in such instances the US and Israel, simply by saying
something is so, are attempting to make it so, and with the US holding
a veto in the UN Security Council there is no serious threat of any
UN sanctioned reprisals against Israel for illegal acts in this regard.
One glaring aspect of US backing of Israel is in regard to the status
of Jerusalem. Aruri points out that according to the UN “the legal
status of Jerusalem was the one governed by General Assembly Resolution
181-II of November 29, 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine
into a Jewish state and an Arab state and for the establishment of the
city of Jerusalem “as a corpus separatum under a special
international regime [which] shall be administered by the United Nations.”
This was backed-up by UN resolution 2253 in 1967 and Security Council
resolution 252 in 1968. Israel ignored these and other UN General Assembly
and Security Council resolutions and officially annexed Jerusalem on
July 30, 1980.
Bill Clinton cemented the illegal annexation in his first term when:
“He [Clinton] told American Jewish leaders on March 13, 1994, that
he opposed any reference to Jerusalem as occupied territory and that
he would adhere to his campaign promise to support the Israeli view
of Jerusalem as the ‘eternal capital’.”
Aruri’s point throughout is that given such brazen lop-sided dealings,
how can the US be “honestly” trying to negotiate a fair and
just settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians? Aruri’s
answer throughout Dishonest Broker is that the US has deliberately and
consistently pushed agreements favoring the Israeli positions and drawn
out the “peace process” into “endless negotiations”
while all the while propping up Israel militarily in order to establish
and maintain a strong presence of US proxy force in the Middle East.
Even with extensive footnoting, dishonest broker is an easy read
and a valuable resource for anyone wishing to cut through the short-sighted
mainstream media haze and US/Israeli political smokescreens to better
understand the US role in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The inclusion
of thirteen maps – highly informative just on their own —
taking the reader from the Palestine Mandate of 1920 through Ariel Sharon’s
spring 2001 land proposal gives a perfect visualization of just how
complicated the “two state” solution has become (and also
how Israel has slowly gobbled up more and more land) and lends some
credence to Aruri’s argument at the book’s end for a single
state solution — though this may be just as distant a possibility.
