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Apr 1, 2010

Incentivizing Adoption | The American Prospect

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Incentivizing Adoption | The American Prospect

Feb 27, 2010

To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case

By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA — For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences.

So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.

Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.

The idea resonated, said Nancy Smith, the executive director.

“We were shocked when we spent less money and had more phone calls” to the hot line, Ms. Smith said.

This month, the group expanded its reach, making national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species,” and a Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com.

Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans and encouraging black abortion opponents across the country to become more active.

A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations.

Black abortion opponents, who sometimes refer to abortions as “womb lynchings,” have mounted a sustained attack on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spurred by a sting operation by young white conservatives who taped Planned Parenthood employees welcoming donations specifically for aborting black children.

“What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said Johnny M. Hunter, a black pastor and longtime abortion opponent in Fayetteville, N.C. “The game changes when blacks get involved. And in the pro-life movement, a lot of the groups that have been ignored for years, they’re now getting galvanized.”

The factors fueling the focus on black women — an abortion rate far higher than that of other races and the ties between the effort to legalize and popularize birth control and eugenics — are, at heart, old news. But they have been given exaggerated new life by the Internet, slick repackaging, high production values and money, like the more than $20,000 that Georgia Right to Life invested in the billboards.

Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women.

Day Gardner, now the president of the National Black Pro-Life Union in Washington, said those figures shocked her at first.

“I just really assumed that white people aborted more than anyone else, and black people would not do this because we’re culturally a religious people, we have large families,” Ms. Gardner said.

Many black anti-abortion leaders, including Ms. Davis and Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the director of African-American outreach for Priests for Life, often recount their own abortion histories (each woman had two).

Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during the Super Bowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.

“The more I dug into it, the more vast I found that the network was,” Ms. Davis said. “And I realized that African-American women just did not know the truth, they did not understand the truth about the abortion industry.”

But those who support abortion rights dispute the conspiracy theory, saying it portrays black women as dupes and victims. The reason black women have so many abortions is simple, they say: too many unwanted pregnancies.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Loretta Ross, the executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta, listing a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence. “There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case,” Ms. Ross said.

But, she said, the idea that abortion is intended to wipe out blacks may be finding fertile ground in a population that has experienced so much sanctioned prejudice and violence.

Black opponents of abortion are fond of saying that black people were anti-abortion and anti-birth control early on, pointing to Marcus Garvey’s conviction that blacks could overcome white supremacy through reproduction, and black militants who protested family planning clinics.

But that is only half the picture, scholars say. Black women were eager for birth control even before it was popularized by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and black doctors who provided illegal abortions were lauded as community heroes.

“Some male African-American leaders were so furious about what they perceived as genocidal intentions that in one case they burned down a clinic,” said Carole Joffe, the author of “Dispatches From the Abortion Wars.” “But women were very resolute, saying, ‘We want birth control.’ ”

In 2008, Lila Rose, a college student at U.C.L.A. and the founder of an anti-abortion group called Live Action, released four audio recordings of a man trying to make donations to Planned Parenthood clinics to pay for black women’s abortions. In one, the caller, played by James O’Keefe III, the provocateur recently arrested on charges that he tried to tamper with the telephones of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said, “You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better,” to which the Planned Parenthood employee replies, “Understandable, understandable.”

Planned Parenthood has apologized for the employees’ statements and says they do not reflect the organization’s values or policies.

The recordings led to calls by black leaders to withdraw financing of Planned Parenthood, which receives about $350 million a year in government money for education and medical services. They reinvigorated old claims that the organization was a front for racial genocide and that Sanger viewed blacks as undesirable.

Scholars acknowledge that Sanger did ally herself with eugenics, at the time a mainstream movement, but said she believed that birth control, sterilization and abortion should be voluntary and not based on race. She was also allied with black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. King, who praised her efforts to bring birth control to black families.

“It’s unfair to characterize those efforts as racially targeted in a negative way,” said Ellen Chesler, a historian and Sanger biographer, who is now on the board of Planned Parenthood.

Still, enough threads of truth weave through the theory to make “Maafa 21,” the documentary whose name is a Swahili word used to refer to the slavery era, persuasive to some viewers, at least at a recent screening at Morris Brown College, a historically black institution in Atlanta.

“Before we saw the movie, I was pro-choice,” said Markita Eddy, a sophomore. But were she to get pregnant now, Ms. Eddy said, “it showed me that maybe I should want to keep my child no matter what my position was, just because of the conspiracy.”

Jan 18, 2010

Fewer Americans think Obama has advanced race relations, poll shows

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By Jennifer Agiesta and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 18, 2010; A03

Soaring expectations about the effect of the first black president on U.S. race relations have collided with a more mundane reality, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

On the eve of President Obama's inauguration a year ago, nearly six in 10 Americans said his presidency would advance cross-racial ties. Now, about four in 10 say it has done so.

The falloff has been highest among African Americans. Last January, three-quarters of blacks said they expected Obama's presidency to help. In the new poll, 51 percent of African Americans say he has helped, a wider gap between expectations and performance than among whites.

Although most of all those polled view Obama's election as a mark of progress for all African Americans, three in 10 say it is not indicative of broader change. About two-thirds see Obama's election as a sign of progress for all blacks in the United States, a figure unchanged from last year, but about half say his time in office has not made much difference in race relations. One in eight say it has hurt relations.

The new poll showed little change in the views of African Americans' current standing in society. About seven in 10 say blacks have already reached or will soon attain racial equality, about on par with the share saying so last January and during the 2008 presidential campaign. About two in 10 say equality will not happen in their lifetimes, and about one in 10 believe it will never happen.

African Americans' views on achieving racial equality have become more pessimistic since the inauguration, returning to their preelection levels. The share saying blacks have reached racial equality dropped 9 percentage points, to 11 percent, and the percentage saying equality will not be achieved in their lifetimes climbed 9 points, to 32 percent. About one in five blacks say they will never achieve racial equality. Among whites, four in 10 say African Americans already have it and 31 percent say it will happen soon.

The political polarization that drives much opinion about Obama's presidency carries over to perceptions of his impact on race relations as well. Among Democrats, about six in 10 say his presidency has helped race relations, compared with about four in 10 independents and just a quarter of Republicans. Expectations were high across party lines a year ago, with 75 percent of Democrats, 53 percent of independents and 43 percent of Republicans predicting that Obama's would help relations.

There is less of a partisan divide on whether Obama's election itself was a sign of progress for all blacks: 72 percent of Democrats say so, as do majorities of Republicans (59 percent) and independents (63 percent).

The poll was conducted by telephone from Jan. 12 to 15 among a random sample of 1,083 adults. The full results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. For the 153 African Americans polled, the results have an 8 percentage point margin of error.

For the complete poll, visit http://washingtonpost.com/politics.

Jan 7, 2010

'Negro' Race Choice On Census Form Sparks Outrage - wcbstv.com

Question #9 Causes Uproar, Asks For Citizens To Pick 'Black,' 'African American' Or 'Negro' From Same Box

A fiery blast from the past is conjuring controversy in the new millennium. The word "negro" is now featured on an official U.S. document and now many are questioning if the Census Bureau is being insensitive.

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It's a word that many African Americans associate with segregation, so imagine how shocked many were to see it on the 2010 U.S. census form.

"The fact that it's 2010 and they're still putting 'negro,' I am a little offended," said Secaucus resident Dawud Ingram.

Question #9 on the this year's census asks about your race. One of the boxes you can choose is "black," "African American," or "negro," all placed next to the same box. Ingram said it's not a word he uses to identify neither himself nor anybody else.

"African Americans haven't been going by the term 'negro' for decades now. It's really confusing," he said.

But census officials disagree, saying they found some older African Americans identify themselves that way and they're trying to be inclusive. In a statement, they said: "Results from the census in 2000 showed that a number of respondents provided a write-in response of 'negro' when answering the question on race."

In fact, Congress approved the form more than a year ago. Newark resident Jabbar Ali can't believe it.

"I thought it was something we left behind a long time ago – the word 'negro,'" said Ali.

Chanou Wilshire said the census form doesn't give her an option since it's got "African American," "black," and "negro" next to the same box.

"It's highly offensive," she told CBS 2.

But not everyone is offended.

"How you define yourself I guess is subjective. But for me, that on a form doesn't offend me at all," said Brooklyn resident Tiffany Campbell.

Others don't understand why the question of race has to come up on any form.

"I'm an American. What's wrong with just being an American?" asked Newark resident Derri Gowns.

Census bureau officials said they're preparing for the 2020 form, asking folks now in a questionnaire whether the word 'negro' should be removed.

Jan 1, 2010

After Salahi incident, some blacks say Secret Service isn't vigilant enough

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By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 1, 2010; C07

Virginia socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi's crashing of President Obama's first state dinner in the White House on Nov. 24 prompted a ripple of concern among African Americans nationwide that lingers still.

"You are talking probably 100 percent concern about the president's safety from my listeners," said Joe Madison, known as "the Black Eagle," who hosts a popular nationwide radio program that attracts mostly African American listeners. "People are worried. My callers think there's not the intensity to protect this president given his unique history. It shouldn't be business as usual."

On the streets of Washington last week, the concern was palpable.

Joseine Applewhite, a 40-year-old legal assistant from the District, said she is worrying about Obama's safety. "I think the Secret Service needs to step up their game a little bit," she said. "After all, the first lady was there on the night of the state dinner, and I believe the kids were also. I think a lot of black folks are angry about it. And why weren't the Salahis arrested? Black folks are asking themselves that question. I am just upset about all of it."

Doug Pierce, 38, who was touring downtown Washington with his family from Cleveland, Tenn., where he works as a cook, also questioned whether the Secret Service is doing an adequate job.

"They allowed that couple to get in there, so obviously someone's not doing their job," Pierce said, standing near the White House gates. "You can't help worrying about the president. He's a black man, and it's probably a lot of people out in the world trying to get to him."

* * *

A poll conducted Dec. 9 by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics showed that 48 percent of black respondents were just somewhat or not at all confident in the Secret Service's ability to protect the president, compared with 37 percent who answered the same question in a poll conducted Jan. 9, less than two weeks before Obama's inauguration. The comparable figures for white respondents were 37 percent and 32 percent.

Many blacks as well as whites think Obama is in greater danger of assassination than some previous presidents because of his historic role. There are also some blacks who suspect -- rightly or wrongly -- that the Secret Service won't work as hard to protect a black president, a point of view that has its roots in the nation's complicated racial history.

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, who recently was called before a congressional committee worried about the security breach at the White House, said the agency is well aware of this suspicion but disagrees with it. The Secret Service is committing more resources to the security of the first family than it ever has, Sullivan said.

"Regardless of who the president is, we know there's always someone out there who wants to harm the president," Sullivan said. "The fact that he's African American has never been lost on us."

Sullivan noted that citizens have been quick to contact the agency to report worries. "We want the public to be engaged," he said in an interview at his H Street office. "We know the consequences of what could happen if we don't do our job right."

Sullivan said the agency put corrective measures in place following the state dinner incident. "Nobody has beaten up on us more than we ourselves have," he said. "But we have to move on. We don't have the luxury of sitting back, and we are moving forward. Our people are focused."

But such sentiments have been met with skepticism among many African Americans, who have long suspected that law enforcement at all levels of government is tainted by racism. That includes the 6,000-employee Secret Service, which is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit filed by black agents who allege discrimination. (Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the agency, said it could not respond to questions about ongoing litigation.)

"When J. Edgar Hoover was running the FBI, the image of law enforcement in the black community was at its lowest," said Ronald Walters, professor emeritus of government and politics at the University of Maryland. "Hoover had a feeling that African American leaders were not as patriotic as he thought they should be. He systematically went after them."

One of Hoover's longtime targets was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., father of the modern-day civil rights movement. Hoover had King's conversations wiretapped and spread rumors about him that many would come to find repellent.

"It took a long time and a lot of experience," added Walters, "for African Americans to develop the attitude that domestic security services were no friend of the African American community." Incidents of police brutality during and after the civil rights movement haven't helped, he said.

Walters said he and other blacks were alarmed recently at the sight of armed protesters in Phoenix and Portsmouth, N.H., near where the president was talking about his proposed changes in the health-care system. "Look at all those people who showed up with guns," Walters says of the Phoenix incident. "You just couldn't imagine Ronald Reagan speaking within 1,000 yards and there being people with guns, and the Secret Service or law enforcement not doing anything about it."

The Secret Service says the incidents in both Arizona and New Hampshire did not catch the agency off guard, explaining that it could not trample over local jurisdictions that allow for the open display of firearms. "Those people were in very strict parameters of being able to carry a weapon," Donovan said. "If they were going to impact our route of the motorcade, they were going to be removed. Part of the myth out there is that they were in close proximity to our routes. We would not drive a protectee near someone with a weapon."

What is the reality of the physical threat against Obama? It's hard to pin down.

Presidents typically receive about 3,000 threats a year, Secret Service experts have said, although the agency refused to discuss specific numbers.

In strategic budget documents, officials acknowledged that the threat environment was especially high last year -- because of factors including wars overseas, domestic tensions and Obama's history-making presidential bid -- and is expected to remain high.

While hostility directed at former president George W. Bush and vice president Dick Cheney tended to be associated with U.S. policies abroad, antipathy toward Obama emanates from domestic extremists, Secret Service officials said. He received the earliest protection for a presidential candidate in history-- less than a hundred days after he announced -- because of threats; and at the most visible moments of his trek to the White House, threat levels reached historic levels, government officials said. However, the number of threats has since fallen back to levels seen by Bush and Bill Clinton at this point in their terms.

But threats are only one barometer of security concerns -- and a poor one in some ways, Secret Service officials said. Research into dozens of individuals who have actually attacked presidents in recent decades shows nearly all were previously unknown to the Secret Service.

* * *

African Americans have expressed concern about the safety of other black public figures aspiring to the presidency. There were concerns about Jesse Jackson's safety during his two presidential campaigns. Alma Powell, wife of Republican star and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, who had been wooed to seek his party's nomination, famously said she preferred her husband didn't run, fearing for his safety. Powell chose not to run.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee and is in contact with the Secret Service on security issues, says blacks have worried about Obama's safety because they still vividly recall the mourning in the aftermath of King's assassination and that reverberates on the federal holiday commemorating King's birth.

Norton said she was as shocked as anybody when the Salahis were able to gain access to the White House uninvited. "As an elected official, I go to the White House quite often," she said. "I never expected anybody to get past the palace gates without ID!"

Even so, she said, "I have every reason to believe this is not your grandfather's Secret Service. I have no doubt that the Secret Service has a whole new game book when it comes to Obama. They just didn't have it when it came to getting inside the White House itself."

It would appear that Obama shares Norton's confidence.

"Three years ago, the men and women of the Secret Service undertook an historic mission -- to put their lives on the line to protect a presidential candidate and his family, earlier than ever before," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said in a statement. "Every morning, President Obama wakes up grateful for their exceptional commitment to their job and their service to the country."

Dec 24, 2009

Black men hit hard by unemployment in Milwaukee

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By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 24, 2009; A03

MILWAUKEE -- Radolph Matthews was taught that hope starts at home. He followed the path his strict father set out and checked all the right boxes. But there he was last week on his way to cash an unemployment check -- $388. He ran the numbers through his head -- $200 for the cellphone bill, $60 for gas for the truck and the rest for food for nine people.

"I thought, I got my MBA, I'm set. I graduated with honors. I'm perfect. All of a sudden all of that was snatched from up under me," said Matthews, whose $60,000-a-year job at a nonprofit group was eliminated two months ago. "It's days before Christmas. I have four babies in the house."

At this moment, Milwaukee is a hauntingly jobless place for African Americans, who are more likely to be out of work than whites, Hispanics or Asian Americans. It's a reality reflected in the Matthews home, where Radolph's wife, Daniela, is the family's provider. His mother-in-law is disabled. His wife's sister has a newborn and is unemployed, and his wife's brother, who stays with them sometimes, also has no job.

For black people in Wisconsin, the jobless numbers reached a new high in October, the month Matthews lost his job. The unemployment rate for African Americans surpassed that of every other state, reaching an average of 22 percent for the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, the unemployment rate is 10 percent, but according to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, nearly one out of every two black men in Milwaukee is not working, compared with 18.1 percent of white men and 22.1 percent of Hispanic men.

Unemployment or fear of it consumes conversations in corners of this city of 600,000, and it sounds nothing like the talk about jobs in Washington.

Image by Amin Tabrizi via Flickr

The same day Matthews cashed his unemployment check, President Obama stood outside a Home Depot in Alexandria pushing for tax rebates for home energy-efficiency renovations -- an idea dubbed "cash for caulkers." The next day, House members cast a largely symbolic vote on a $150 billion jobs package that won't be debated until next year. The Congressional Black Caucus, meanwhile, continued to prod the White House and Congress to do more for unemployed black people, spending a late night on the House floor reading flowery resolutions to an empty chamber about their districts' troubles.

Milwaukee's jobless are wrestling with those troubles. Four times the usual number of people are showing up at the emergency food pantry saying they recently lost their jobs. A training program promoting "green" jobs for women and minorities has 30 slots but nearly 150 applicants. And Matthews, who has applied for more than 45 jobs each week for the past three weeks, says his advanced degree hasn't eased his search.

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In interviews with more than 30 African Americans here, the emotions among the jobless ranged from deflated to defiant, angry to hopeless. Nearly all said their frustrations have not affected their support for Obama. Most blamed Wall Street or the Bush administration for the deteriorating economy, though some said they think Obama should do more to create jobs. A few sided with members of the black caucus who have accused the president and those around him of not being sensitive to the higher unemployment rates among blacks.

All the same, the long-standing problem of joblessness among blacks in Milwaukee -- only intensified by this latest recession -- holds opportunity and fear for the people here. There is some hope that the federal government will find a way to spur job creation, and there is fear that the rest of the country will recover, leaving chronically jobless communities jobless.

That's what scares Vanessa Luster, an unemployed 42-year-old mother of two sons. On Tuesday she applied for technical school. On Wednesday she applied for food stamps.

"It's a mess out here," she said, standing inside the Milwaukee Hunger Task Force office.

Luster, who was born in the city, said her parents had a more stable life. Her mother worked off and on at the post office. Her stepdad worked in cutting and leather tanning. Government and manufacturing jobs were the way to a solid middle-class life for Luster's family and many other black families.

Everyone has lamented the havoc wreaked by deindustrialization, but Luster points out that right now the post office isn't hiring, either. She applied there recently.

"He should send more help to the community," Luster said of Obama before heading out into subzero weather.

* * *

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a two-term Democrat who recently announced his candidacy for governor, remembers a time when a worker could quit a first-shift job and have another by the third shift. "We know that this is a big problem," he said of the double-digit black unemployment rate.

The city is dotted with reminders of its boom days. There is the massive, hollow A.O. Smith plant that stretches from 27th Street all the way to 35th Street in the center of the black community. In the early 1980s, it employed more than 5,500 workers, said Michael Rosen, an economics professor at Milwaukee Area Technical College. The work began to peter out in the 1990s, and the plant closed in 2006.

Last week, the city bought the property with plans to turn it into an office park. What concerns Barrett is that not enough people have the skills for the jobs that will come. To deal with the problem, he is trying many "micro-solutions to macro-problems."

Last week, the city, in partnership with a local nonprofit group, held an informational session for an urban forestry course in its green-jobs program, funded in part by federal stimulus money. It promises to pay 30 minorities and women $12.76 an hour for six months while they train to become licensed arborists.

At the session, for which 46 men and two women were crammed into a room, one man said: "Say you don't make the cut. What y'all offering then?" He looked around. "Obviously all of us aren't going to get hired."

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) said questions like his are the reason she joined other members of the black caucus in a boycott of one of Obama's legislative priorities. "We wanted to punctuate what we see is a serious risk in allowing the entire minority community to entirely collapse," she said.

Obama has rejected the idea that his administration should target specific groups, saying that fixing the broader economy will help everyone, including African Americans. Moore, whose father made his living dumping vats of molten steel in a foundry, testily disagrees. "He's made statements that's he's going to try to resist making this about race," Moore said. "Well, that's fine. Let's target the poorest, and we are sure to reach our constituents."

But the struggle over unemployment and whether Obama is doing enough is more complex for some. Elizabeth Coggs, who is part of one of the state's prominent black political families and a county supervisor in Milwaukee, said, "Everybody wants him to pull a rabbit out of a hat in a year." A few minutes later, she complained that jobs funded by the stimulus program aren't trickling down.

Lauri Wynn, a retired schoolteacher who once headed the state teachers union, feels the same kind of contradiction. She said Obama "is enough to make the worst of us proud." But when she looks at her hometown, she is angry and wonders whether his historic presidency will change anything there.

"Should we put our hope in Obama?" Wynn asked herself. "I don't know."

* * *

Ralph Hollman, who has led the local Urban League chapter for seven years, said a pervasive level of unemployment has become the community's "silent destroyer," leading to disparities in health outcomes, incarceration rates, educational achievement and other issues. In this economic crisis, he sees three groups of unemployed blacks: the chronically unemployed with little education and job training; the recently unemployed; and the disproportionate number of black men in the city who have felony convictions that effectively bar them from many jobs.

"Each of those groups needs a different response," he said.

But what response?

Matthews's has been to begin looking outside Milwaukee for work. He is not sure that the jobs programs being hatched in Washington will do anything to bring down the unemployment rate for minorities. But his wife hopes they will, for their family and for Obama, whose success she links to the larger black community.

"I just hope it turns around before he leaves office so it's not, 'Well we gave y'all a chance and look what happened,' " said Daniela Matthews.

Dec 17, 2009

Documents show DHS improperly spied on Nation of Islam in 2007

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By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 17, 2009; A09

The Department of Homeland Security improperly gathered intelligence on the Nation of Islam for eight months in 2007 when the leader of the black Muslim group, Louis Farrakhan, was in poor health and appeared to be yielding power, according to government documents released Wednesday.

The intelligence gathering violated domestic spying rules because analysts took longer than 180 days to determine whether the U.S-based group or its American members posed a terrorist threat. Analysts also disseminated their report too broadly, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.

The disclosure was included in hundreds of heavily redacted pages released by the Justice Department as part of long-standing FOIA lawsuits about the government's policies on terrorist surveillance, detention and treatment since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It marks the latest case of inappropriate domestic spying under rules that were expanded after the terror attacks to give intelligence agencies more latitude.

In a written statement, Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman Matthew Chandler said the agency has since implemented "a strong and rigorous system of safeguards and oversight to ensure similar products are neither created nor distributed."

The agency, he said, "is fully committed to securing the nation from terrorist attacks and other threats, and we take very seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people." The 2007 study, titled "Nation of Islam: Uncertain Leadership Succession Poses Risks," was recalled by agency lawyers within hours. The lawyers said it was not reviewed by the department's intelligence chief before release.

Charles E. Allen, who was DHS undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the time, said that although violations were unintentional and inadvertent -- only publicly available information was collected -- the report should never have been issued.

"The [Nation of Islam] organization -- despite its highly volatile and extreme rhetoric -- has neither advocated violence nor engaged in violence," Allen wrote in a March 2008 memo. "Moreover, we have no indications that it will change its goals and priorities, even if there is a near-term change in the organization's leadership."

DHS clarified its intelligence collection rules in April 2008, and last December, then-Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey issued new terrorism and other domestic investigation guidelines.

Telephone messages for Ishmael Muhammad, a spokesman for the Nation of Islam in Chicago, were not immediately returned.

Allen, now a consultant with the Chertoff Group, said it was important for U.S. authorities not to limit unnecessarily their ability to monitor people who are moving from extreme ideas toward ideologically motivated violence, noting that al-Qaeda in 2006 shifted its strategy to train North Americans to engage in attacks.

"It's a fine line," Allen said. "We should not make the rules absolutely rigid, and they should be reviewed from time to time."

Nathan Cardozo, a legal fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the documents "extremely disturbing."

Newly released documents also indicate the Justice Department considered bringing treason charges against John Walker Lindh, the Californian who became known as "the American Taliban" after he was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. That was contained in a December 2001 memo by John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general, and was released as part of FOIA litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. In the memo, Yoo wrote that "treason cases have been rare in the Nation's history," but that Lindh's conduct "may fit the elements."

Staff writer Peter Finn and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Nov 17, 2009

N.A.A.C.P. Prods Obama on Job Losses - NYTimes.com

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By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

With unemployment among blacks at more than 15 percent, the N.A.A.C.P. will join several other groups on Tuesday to call on President Obama to do more to create jobs.

The organizations — including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group— will make clear that they believe the president’s $787 billion stimulus program has not gone far enough to fight unemployment.

They will call for increased spending for schools and roads, billions of dollars in fiscal relief to state and local governments to forestall more layoffs and a direct government jobs program, “especially in distressed communities facing severe unemployment.”

In speaking out on jobs, N.A.A.C.P. leaders say they are not trying to pick a fight with the first African-American president. Rather, they say, they are pressing Mr. Obama in an area where they believe he wants to be pressured.

“It’s time for us to really stoke this issue up,” said Hilary O. Shelton, the N.A.A.C.P.’s senior vice president for advocacy and policy. “We’re not so much trying to convince him to do something he doesn’t want to do, but urging him to move forward on an issue we have agreement on.”

African-American leaders say it makes sense to pressure the president on jobs because the unemployment rate for blacks has jumped to 15.7 percent, from 8.9 percent when the recession started 23 months ago. That compares with 13.1 percent for Hispanics and 9.5 percent for whites.

The black unemployment rate has climbed above 20 percent in several states, reaching 23.9 percent in Michigan and 20.4 percent in South Carolina.

In recent months, the N.A.A.C.P. has lobbied Mr. Obama on numerous issues, including the hate crimes bill and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for employees to sue over pay discrimination. But this is the first time in Mr. Obama’s presidency that the organization is throwing its full weight into the economic debate.

It is being joined by another group that fought for civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

“Make no mistake, for us this is the civil rights issue of the moment,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference. “Unless we resolve the national job crisis, it will make it hard to address all of our other priorities.”

Mr. Obama has invited groups nationwide to voice their views and recommendations on jobs in preparation for his job summit next month.

“Obama keeps saying, ‘Push me to do the right thing,’ said Steven Pitts, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “I don’t see this as any break with Obama. The current political alignment of forces doesn’t support a new economic stimulus package. They’re trying to create an alignment of political forces to counteract that.”

Kevin A. Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative group, said it was laudable that the N.A.A.C.P. and other liberal groups were pressuring Mr. Obama, although he said their call for additional stimulus was wrong.

“Everybody should pressure him,” Mr. Hassett said. “And it might be the conservative groups aren’t pressuring him enough, because they think maybe he won’t listen. I would hope the people pressuring the president would push away from the divisive type of recommendations that we need more of the same, that we need more stimulus.”

Mr. Hassett called for cutting taxes to create jobs and for reducing many workers to three-fifths or four-fifths time in work-sharing programs to avoid layoffs.

The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, coordinated the jobs statement being released Tuesday, which will also be joined by the Center for Community Change.

“Despite an effective and bold recovery package, we are still facing a prolonged period of high unemployment,” the groups say. “Two years from now, absent further action, we are likely to have unemployment at 8 percent or more, a higher rate than attained even at the worst point of the last two downturns.”

The groups call for spurring private-sector job growth through tax credits and loans to small and medium businesses. They note that 17.5 percent of the labor force — more than 27 million Americans — are underemployed, including one in four minority workers. They say they expect one-third of the work force — and 40 percent of minority workers —to be unemployed or underemployed at some point over the next year.

“Americans are confronting the worst jobs situation in more than half a century,” the groups say. “This is not a situation we must continue to tough out. A robust plan to create jobs in transparent, effective, and equitable ways can put America back to work.”

A Racial Divide Is Bridged by Recession - NYTimes.com

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By SHAILA DEWAN

McDONOUGH, Ga. — During the housing boom, Henry County, a suburb of Atlanta, had its share of racial tension as more and more blacks joined the tens of thousands of others pouring in, creating a standoffish gap between the newcomers and the county’s oldtimers.

But the recession has begun to erase those differences.

Blacks and whites have encountered one another in increasing numbers recently in the crowded waiting rooms of the welfare office and at the food pantry, where many of both races have ventured for the first time. Struggling black-owned businesses are attracting the attention of white patrons. Neighbors are commiserating across racial lines.

At the Division of Family and Children Services, Keasha Taylor, 36 and black, helped explain the system recently to a white mother. Ms. Taylor, who was there because her family had been evicted, told the mother, who was in line for food stamps, that a child with acute asthma might be eligible for Social Security.

“Right now, a lot of white people are in this situation,” Ms. Taylor said, recalling the conversation later. “We’re already used to poverty; they’re really not.”

Denese Rodgers, the county director of social services, who is white, has held several lunch meetings at A J’s Turkey Grill, owned by Diane Walker, a black woman, in hopes of helping business.

“It was in one of our abandoned strip malls, a forlorn looking kind of place, but when you walk in, it’s just pristine,” Ms. Rodgers said. “She’s doing everything right, it’s just not full.”

Peggy Allgood, a 54-year-old black woman who lost her job and four-bedroom house and is now living in a trailer park, said she had noticed the recession obliterating racial differences up and down the economic scale.

“It’s gotten to the point where everyone I talk to, their hours have been cut, their jobs have been cut,” Ms. Allgood said. “My neighbor, she’s white, she’s trying to find a job. She hasn’t had any luck.”

The recession hit Henry County, for years one of the nation’s fastest growing areas, at a time when it was already struggling to come to terms with startling demographic change. In 1990, the county was almost 90 percent white. Now, as its population has more than tripled to 192,000, according to 2008 census estimates, the white percentage of the population has shrunk to 60 percent.

The county’s elected government is still all white and Republican, and some leaders and newcomers alike have tried in various ways to make local board and governments more diverse. But nothing else has worked to remove barriers as quickly as economic hardship.

“There used to be a lot of racial tension here, but everybody knows that we need each other to survive this recession,” said Eugene Edwards, the president of the Henry County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “People now, they seem to be starting to care for one another.”

Once fueled by construction, the county has been left by the recession with a blighted crop of abandoned white utility hookups, meant for new subdivisions, sprouted in the woods.

Last year, the Chamber of Commerce took a multiracial group of leaders to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but such officially sponsored efforts at bonding have slowed.

“The recession has pretty much tied folks down to survival mode,” said Steve Cash, the executive director of the Henry Council for Quality Growth, who is white. “A lot of things that were happening before aren’t happening now.”

And a lot of things that were unheard of before are happening now. Women in Jaguars pull up to the local food pantry, and former millionaires hunker down in grand, unsellable homes.

One reason blacks have not gained more political power is that they are not heavily concentrated in any single area in the county — the cul-de-sacs carved out of farmland and pastures in the last decade became racially mixed enclaves for the upwardly mobile. Now, the foreclosure notices and uncut lawns in those same subdivisions reinforce the notion that everyone is in the same sinking boat.

Statistics also suggest that the recession’s burden is falling with similar force on both races. In June 2006, 55 percent of the families receiving food stamps were black, and 44 percent were white. Those percentages remain the same today, although the size of each group has increased by about 50 percent.

Unemployment claims follow that pattern: in January 2008, 49 percent of those who filed for unemployment were white, and 45 percent were black. In August 2009, 49 percent were white, and 48 percent were black.

Across the country, there have been many reports about the recession’s racial divide, as blacks have lost their jobs and houses at far higher rates than whites. But Henry County, about a 30-minute drive south of downtown Atlanta, has a very different profile from the rest of the nation. In Henry, the median income of black families, $56,715 in 2008, approaches that of whites, $69,728 (nationally, the average income gap was $20,000). Blacks in Henry County, many of whom are retirees from the North or professionals who work in Atlanta, are more likely than whites to have a college degree.

That does not mean that Henry County is a perfect laboratory of equality. Blacks made up a disproportionately high number of those seeking government assistance both before and after the slowdown. Since 2006, the number of blacks on Medicaid has more than tripled, outpacing the increase among whites.

And as in the rest of the country, blacks in Henry were more than twice as likely as whites to take out risky sub-prime mortgages, meaning more black families than white are struggling to keep their homes.

Keith and Kenya Rucker, who are black, recently declared bankruptcy in an effort to keep the home they bought for $155,000 with an adjustable-rate mortgage when they had two incomes, before Mr. Rucker lost his job as a restaurant manager. Both said they could not rely on family members for help with their ballooning payments.

“I’m not racist, but it’s harder for black men,” Mr. Rucker said, as his wife huddled with their 8-year-old daughter, KéUnica. Mr. Rucker, who is from Orlando, Fla., echoed many experts who say that middle-class blacks have fewer resources, either financial or social, to fall back on if they get into trouble. “Where I’m from,” he said, “every friend that I had is a drug dealer, locked up, on drugs or dead.”

But Dennis and Jenny Duncan, a white couple who once owned millions of dollars in real estate assets as former developers, felt equally stymied. Interviewed in the lavish home they built for themselves, they said the sheriff had just come to call and told them their belongings would soon be seized to satisfy debts. Unlike Ms. Rucker, neither has a college degree, making work difficult to find.

The idea that the recession is an equalizer has become accepted in Henry County. Both black and white residents were hesitant to say that either race had taken a greater hit. But Ms. Taylor, the black woman who dispensed advice at the county food stamp office, said there were some notable distinctions between blacks and whites.

“They’re a little weaker than we are at handling things like this,” she said, adding without rancor, “but I know they get more sympathy than we do.”

Nov 14, 2009

The Known World of Edward P. Jones - washingtonpost.com

The Pulitzer-Prize-winning author may be the most celebrated writer Washington has ever produced. He also may be the most enigmatic.

By Neely Tucker
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Edward Paul Jones is sitting at a table in Guapo's restaurant in Tenleytown early on a midsummer evening, looking down into a glass of red wine. Nobody in the place recognizes him, although he's arguably the greatest fiction writer the nation's capital has ever produced.

His three books, two of them collections of short stories set in black Washington, have been hailed as masterpieces. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic's Circle award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur "genius grant," the Lannan Literary Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a bunch of (by comparison) trifling stuff. He's won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone, never mind earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.

And yet he hasn't written a word of fiction in four years. There is not a draft in a drawer, not a scrap of paper with notes for a story or a novel. He's knocked off some nonfiction introductions to classic works and edited a couple of anthologies, but nothing of the sort that made him a name.

So when he swirled the wine around in his glass, looked up and asked if I'd like to hear the opening and closing lines of the first short story he's worked on in nearly half a decade, "The Waiting Room," a story that won't be published for who knows how long, I was startled.

Jones dictated the opener:

"In late May 1956 -- a little more than a year after my mother bought the Fifth Street NW house that was the beginning of her small empire -- she heard a rumor that my father was dying."

Here's how it ends:

"And it would have been a great church had it not been for the dead man and all his flowers way down in front."

When I scribbled it in my notebook, Jones told me that this was the first time it had been written down anywhere. Jones spent 10 years creating nearly all of his Pulitzer-winning, antebellum-era novel, "The Known World," in his head, until he finally set it all down on paper in a three-month rush in 2001 after being laid off from his job at a tax publication. "The Waiting Room" is still locked up tight in his mind, though he dictates the opening and closing three times in a row, down to the dashes and commas, without so much as blinking.

"I write a lot in my head," he says. "I've never been driven to write things down."

Jones is 59. The bar he has set for himself, to more or less to do for black Washington what James Joyce did for Dublin, is in the literary stratosphere. He has done this, so far, in 28 short stories, collected in "Lost in the City" (1992) and "All Aunt Hagar's Children" (2006). The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley wrote after "Hagar's" that Jones was "in the first rank of American letters" and "one of the most important writers of his own generation." In the New York Times, novelist Dave Eggers said "The Known World" was widely considered to be one of the best American novels of the past 20 years, as "its sweep, its humanity, the unvarnished perfection of its prose" made it seem not so much written as "engraved in stone." "Hagar's" he noted, merely had the ability to "stun on every page; there are too many breathtaking lines to count."

This D.C. portraiture is extraordinarily personal, for Jones's turbulent early life has provided the setting for almost all of his stories. He is also, it must be said, a quixotic character who seems to arise from the fantastic world of his own fiction. He has never married and has no children. He never knew much about his father, a Jamaican immigrant, long ago deceased. His beloved mother, Jeanette, died nearly 35 years ago of lung cancer. His only sister, Eunice, was hit by a car in New York and killed two years ago after an angry standoff with the driver. His only brother, Joseph, was born with a severe mental handicap and has always lived in a group home in Southeast Washington.

The family's lone survivor is shy, quirky, sedentary, average height, bespectacled, balding with salt-and-pepper hair and a frazzled beard, endearing in his earnestness, living a semi-hermitic existence.

He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver's license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television -- in particular, those judge shows -- he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event. He has no deep romantic attachments. He says his closest friend has been Lil Coyne, an elderly woman who for 20 years lived down the hall from him in an apartment building in Alexandria. She died this summer at age 90.

He has a friend cut his hair instead of going to the barbershop. Cooking, he says, is plunking a chicken in the oven "until it doesn't bleed when I stick it." He has a fondness for soul food, most particularly chitlins. If he is to have dinner with friends on, say, Wednesday, "I start worrying about it on Sunday. It sort of eats the whole week up, and then I get there, and I have a wonderful time and wonder what I was so worried about."

"I compare him to Thelonius Monk," says Georgetown University history professor Maurice Jackson, referring to the brilliant, eccentric jazz pianist. "Monk never liked to travel; he liked his own apartment; he got up when he wanted to; he played his own music; but he was always listening, always paying attention. Ed is like that."

Jones says, "I'm not afraid of my own company." And, "I was made to be at home." Carleasa Coates has known Jones since they were both at the University of Virginia more than 30 years ago. Now an attorney in Washington, she cuts his hair and found his current apartment for him. She laughs that " 'quirky' is a term I would safely agree with," in describing Jones, but quickly says that relates only to trivial matters.

"On the things that count as being a man, he's extraordinary," she says. "He's got a big, compassionate heart to go with his big, expansive imagination. He loves his nieces and nephews. He'd be the last to say it, but he's wide open to the world and what happens in it. He cares in a profound kind of way."

He is also an atheist who is committed to writing about the black Southerners who migrated to Washington in the middle years of the 20th century, the friends and neighbors of his youth, people who seemed to believe that God sat on a streetlight up the block. Say, at the intersection of Florida and North Capitol.

"The people I grew up around, almost all of them had been born and raised in the South," he says, during one rainy day when I was driving him through the city. "And, you know, they didn't always go to church, but they lived their lives as if God were watching everything they did."

***

Ed Jones grew up in an unhappy line of low-rent shacks and tenements in Washington, in astonishing poverty, mostly several blocks north and west of the Capitol.

There are writers whose beginnings have little to do with their body of work, and those writers are not Jones. The world of his youth is everything. His mother, whose stern but loving presence influences almost every page of his work, was a dishwasher at Chez Francois restaurant in downtown Washington. She also worked as maid at the Claridge Hotel, in which the restaurant was set. She was a Baptist and had come up from a speck on the map called News Ferry, Va. She was completely illiterate. She worked hard, desperate hours to keep her children one step out of foster care. Once, when she was ill, Jones was indeed taken to a city institution for children in need. The rest of the time, they lived on the hustle, shuffling from one shabby place to the next, a half-step ahead of bill collectors.

"The only thing she did was sign with an X" he said. "Maybe I heard her recite the alphabet, maybe not all the way to Z. She couldn't read at all, so far as I knew. I don't think she could recognize her name."

As a child, he moved so much that it cut off almost all friendships, and this left a lasting mark on the adult. "I have only a vague address and a heart that is breaking," he once wrote in an essay of a bicycle trip at 13, when he tried to find boys who had been his closest friends at an earlier residence. He never found them.

The family moved 18 times in 18 years, another of those Old Testament-like qualities of Jones's youth. They lived at 1004 Fourth St. NW, 1525 Sixth St. NW, 90 Myrtle St. NE, 459 Ridge St. NW, 1708 10th St. NW, 7 K St. NW, 1132 Eighth St. NW, 1217 N St. NW, 1221 Mass Ave. NW, and on and on. Almost all of these addresses can be found in his stories, a world teeming with characters. There was Roscoe L. Jones (no relation), the landlord so mean he'd come take the windows out of your place if you were late with the rent. There was Bishop C.M. "Sweet Daddy" Grace, who ran the United House of Prayer for All People. Grace was such a revered figure that Jones watched Grace's funeral from a front porch across the street, because the word among kids was that Grace would rise from the dead during the middle of the thing.

The bookish, never-popular Jones went to Walker-Jones Elementary School, Shaw Junior High and then Cardozo High, by which time he was recognized to have gifts in math and literature. He earned a scholarship to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., for an undergraduate degree (where he was a classmate of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), and then one to the University of Virginia for a master's in fine arts.

***

He didn't see a doctor, he says, until he was 17. His first dental visit was at 22. He labored for years as a proofreader or columnist for an obscure journal called Tax Notes. He wrote "Lost in the City" while working there in the late 1980s and early '90s. For most of the next decade, he wrote nothing but was thinking deeply about "The Known World," the tale of a black slave owner in Virginia. When he was laid off after 19 years, they gave him two weeks' severance. He lived on unemployment benefits while he hammered out the book in a dozen weeks. (It wasn't that hard, he said in interviews after its publication; he had almost the entire book mapped out in his head before he sat down to write.) It won the Pulitzer Prize.

***

There's an old chestnut about how when you ask a Southerner a question, you don't get an answer -- you get a story. By this standard, Jones is a card-carrying Southerner, an heir to an oral, stream-of-consciousness tradition that leaves people outside the region slack-jawed (in terror or in awe) that people actually speak the English language this way.

On a rainy April morning earlier this year, I was driving Jones around as he gave me a guided tour of his old haunts. We pulled in front of an apartment at 927 P St. NW. With the windshield wipers slapping away the rain, I asked:

"So, how long did you live here?"

This is his reply:

"It was in ... we were in Brooklyn visiting my aunt, and let's see, that place is gone. But before we went, went that summer of '65 to visit my aunt, we lived in this one room, 1132 Eighth St. And there was a hole about this size in the ceiling that went up to the bathroom. And once some guy up there, caught some guy looking down the hole to see what he could see in our place. And they condemned the place while we were gone. And my mother, I guess, was in a hurry, and she moved around the corner to a room, but she didn't get in touch with us. I think probably one of the big problems was she couldn't read or write, and I don't think my aunt had a phone, she didn't have a phone, and so we contacted her by going up to visit. It was a neighbor of hers, somehow we got in touch, my aunt didn't have a phone. So we came back down and get off the bus, in August, from the vacation, because my aunt and my cousin came down with me and my sister. And the place was boarded up [laughs].

"Well, my sister went down to where the landlord lived, and she told us where my mother was, and my mother was in this tiny room with all our stuff. And what happened apparently, each day she went off to work, people broke into her room. So my mother was still working at Chez Francois, and my aunt was down here for a few days. So my aunt took it upon herself to try to find us a place -- to live. So it was 1132, it was few blocks from here, she found that place. Problem is that, and my aunt had no way of knowing this, at 922 N St., my father was living with this woman he had been living with for decades [across the street from their new house].

"We lived here for two or so years."

***

The first time I met Jones was at an independent bookstore owners convention at a hotel on one of Georgia's sea islands in the summer of 2003. I was reading the just-released "The Known World," the tale of a black man who owned slaves, in my room upstairs. I came down to the room of authors -- we were all penned up before we were to go out to talk -- and there was Jones, sitting by himself in a corner. We sat together at dinner. I liked him immensely. He was utterly without pretense, kind, sincere and almost painfully shy.

It was an odd sensation. Jones was the titan of the room, on the cusp of literary fame and international renown, but no one seemed to know who he was, nor did he have any interest in making himself recognized. The rest of us, with our earnest but modest efforts, were only too happy to talk to any bookseller who would listen to us. Jones did not want to talk to anybody at all. He just wanted to go home.

A couple of months later, he turned down an all-expenses-paid trip to Jamaica to discuss his books because he was told the event would be at a hillside resort.

"I don't know that I like cliffs," he explained to me, without irony, "and I thought if I was up there, I might just get blown off the side."

Six years later, he's still the same man: quiet, kind and sincere. He almost always dresses in jeans and loafers, an untucked knit shirt over a slight paunch. He answers his phone, "Yeah?"

He was teaching a fiction-writing course at George Washington University this past spring when I dropped in on him one brisk afternoon in his sixth-floor office. He had a window. Out of the blue, he noted that he could see the spot where the old university hospital stood, the one in which his mother passed away.

"Any day I'm there, I can look across to this big hole, and that's where she died," he said, pointing. He paused, considering. "Here I am, this visiting professor and all the rest of it, and right across there is where my mother died. And she never knew whatever happened to me."

He laughs, a dry, unhappy thing.

(Such a momentous place is in his stories. In "A Rich Man," a story in "Hagar's," the fictional Loneese Perkins dies in the same hospital; she longs to be buried in Harmony Cemetery, as did Jones's mother.)

We walked across campus to his class. There were 11 students with their desks arrayed in a circle. Jones eschewed the podium for a desk among them. He sat down, clasped his hands behind his head, his left leg crossing his right at the knee. Before the class, the students had circulated their short stories to each other. They were now critiquing them as a group.

Jones let them chatter for a second, then coughed. It got quiet.

"Why don't we start with 'Sunday Best,' " he said. This was a student story about an 18-year-old girl with her mother at church. At the very beginning of the story, the girl uses an obscenity to tell her mother, between hymns, that she had sex with her boyfriend the night before.

"Comments, please?" Jones said.

There was a pause beneath the fluorescent lights.

"A Baptist church like that, it's hard to see her doing that," Jones said. The students looked down at their papers or looked at him. He explained the very short episode was a vignette, not a story, because it was just a scene. The girl, he said, "comes off as rather despicable," without a reason for her talking so baldly in church. This could work, he said, if there was more of a motivation for what happened the night before.

"The work is there," he said softly. "There just needs to be more of it."

It was a kind assessment.

The talk moved to another story, "Different Air," about a conversation in a cloistered room. The students talked it up, and Jones cut in; he didn't think the piece was realistic.

"In journalism," he said, "a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step. In real life, you could just start with Obama elected president. But in a story, you have to build how that happens."

A few weeks later, the students invited him for a beer at the Froggy Bottom, a basement pub nearby. There was a pool table, blaring televisions, pitchers of beer, college kids yelling at the top of their lungs. Jones sat at the edge of the booth, straining to make conversation, soldiering on, uncomfortable but doggedly hanging in there, The Good Professor W ho Will Have a Cold One With the Kids.

I had the same feeling I had at the convention in Georgia: Somebody, let this man go home.

***

You can read all about Jones's youth without ever asking him a question. In the story "Common Law," in "Hagar's," a woman is hit by her boyfriend on the second floor of an apartment building at 459 Ridge St. NW. She tumbles down the stairs as a group of wide-eyed children watch. As a child, Jones lived in the first-floor apartment at that address. Had such a fictional woman tumbled down the steps, she would have fallen into his non-fictional lap. He liked that address so much, in fact, that he set the title story of "Lost in the City," next door at 457 Ridge St. NW. The corner shop in "The Store," at Fifth and O St. NW, is the very shop he went into for treats as a child.

"The characters are fictional, but it's important to place them in real houses," he says. "I don't know what it is, but it's much better for me to say so and so lived there, it's a real place."

This grounded-in-reality approach makes sense right up until one considers "The Known World," with its fictional Manchester County, Va., which doesn't exist at all. He just made the whole thing up, in all its stunning reality.

Here's an example:

"Fern and her husband had 12 slaves to their names. In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another's business. When the War between the States came, the number of slave-owning blacks in Manchester would be down to five, and one of those included an extremely morose man who, according to the U.S. Census of 1860, legally owned his own wife and five children and three grandchildren. The census of 1860 said there were 2,670 slaves in Manchester County, but the census taker, a U.S. marshal who feared God, had argued with his wife the day he sent his report to Washington, D.C., and all his arithmetic was wrong because he failed to carry a one."

***

There is no single defining event to explaining Jones's personality and its related offshoot, his fiction, how one works with the other, which wire is connected to what. There's no schematic blueprint. He says the gestalt, the worldview of his work, stems from the rootlessness of his youth:

"When you move 18 times in 18 years, you learn that the world is forever shifting; you can't be certain of anything. But if you're in your home, your apartment, and the rent is paid up, and there's reason for the landlord to knock on your door, then you're okay. But once you leave your apartment, once you leave your home, then you can't predict anything. It's not your world; you can't control it."

The decisive influence on his life, though, might be the fate of his mother, rather than their constant migrations. It's impossible to overstate how deeply he has been moved by her travails.

"My mother was a good and kind woman, and she never bothered anybody," he told me at dinner once.

Underneath the carefully modulated tone of the remark, there was a humming sort of rage that such a quiet, church-going woman could come to Washington and be run over by callous men, by a city that didn't particularly worry about the fate of black women. Even at the very end of his mother's life, when Jones rushed into her hospital room where she lay dying, he found that the staff had not bothered to "hook her up to anything."

He was beside her when she passed.

One of his favorite memories of her is when he was a child and told her he was going to grow up to be a doctor and that he'd bring her "five dollars a week!" Recounting that episode more than 50 years later, he was laughing hard, leaning forward onto the table. "Five dollars! It was a lot of money back then!"

And there was the day when a neighbor saw him, as a teenager, shoplifting some beer, and told his mother. She didn't get off work that night until 11 p.m., and was so mad she was pulling switches off trees on the way home.

"You got pulled out of bed in a nice deep sleep, saying 'What did I do?' " he remembered. "Man, the switches still had leaves on them. Sometimes she was too upset and mad and would leave them on there, and you'd get the beating and the leaves would be all over the floor, for the testimony."

She lived long enough to see him graduate from college. He is still thrilled she was there.

When she died, he asked for the best cemetery around and was told that was Fort Lincoln. That's where he buried her.

These are stories about love, of course. And honor and pity and sacrifice.

His first book was devoted entirely to "the memory of my mother." His second was dedicated to his brother, and also to his mother, "who could have done so much more in a better world." His third and most recent book was partially dedicated to the "millions who came up out of the South," and to his mother, "who came as well and found far less than even the little she dared hope for."

Reading the three dedications consecutively, realizing they were written over a 13-year period, makes it difficult not to feel the anger beneath the surface. And the heartbreak.

***

The D.C. characters in Jones's stories seem to believe that B.B. King line that goes, "Nobody loves me but my mother... and she could be jiving, too." They are earthy, hard and calculating, if not flat-out mean. They live completely within the world of black Washington and the Southern towns in which they were born. Whites are rarely seen.

The stories are told from God's point of view, or at least that of someone with a pitiless knowledge of everything that has happened and is going to happen to the characters. They are also almost impossibly dense, somewhere between Faulkner and Joyce and Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman. There are dozens of foreshadowings and flashbacks and references to things that haven't happened yet. "Years later," is a favorite device he'll drop into the middle of a sentence, showing what happened decades after the daily events he's describing.

Consider "Tapestry," the final story in "Hagar's." He calls it a "kind of summing up" of all his work. It's about a couple in Mississippi, Anne and Lucas, who wind up migrating to Washington. The story is half complete before readers are even told the year in which it's set (1932). A large part of the story is devoted to what would have happened to the couple's descendants had they stayed in Mississippi, which, of course, they did not.

There are endless flashes into the future. "Years and years later, she would describe for her grandson, talking into the cassette recorder, the dress Clarice was wearing." "It would be nine years before the work was completed." "They had, of course, never kissed and they would not kiss for the first time until three weeks before they married more than a year later." "None of her descendants were ever to become tapestry women." And, just a few sentences before the end of the story, we see all of Anne's life unfold: "... [T]he train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, and great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great-grandmother to twins."

One can't help but be moved by the generous attention Jones gives his characters and his stories. It's gone almost completely unnoticed, but the two collections are a matched set: There are 14 stories in "Lost," ordered from the youngest to the oldest character, and there are 14 stories in "Hagar's," also ordered from youngest to oldest character. The first story in the first book is connected to the first story in the second book, and so on. To get the full history of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the second story in each, and so on.

"The Sunday Following Mother's Day," the seventh story in the first collection, is about a man who kills his wife for no apparent reason. In the seventh story in the second collection, "Root Worker," we meet the killer's sister years later, working as a "day companion" for a wealthy woman who has gone insane.

This is vintage Jones -- the legacy of the black South, an older, church-going black Washington generation confronting its age, its losses, its godless offspring, the ways of a world that neither makes sense nor has any explanation. It's that hazy time after the Great Migration north and before the modern era of the post civil rights movement. It's hard to imagine any of these stories in full-blown color. It's a world etched in sepia.

***

As summer hit its high point, I told Jones I'd like to visit his mother's grave with him. He agreed. We drove out to Fort Lincoln Cemetery off Bladensburg Road early on a sweltering Saturday in mid-July.

We made our way from the street to a circular drive that wound uphill. Jones narrated. "I use to walk up through here. Every weekend, after she died. I lived in Philadelphia. I'd come down on the bus. One would take me to Bladensburg and South Carolina [Avenue], and I'd walk from there."

It is perhaps a mile, each way.

We parked at the top of a hill, in the shade of an overhanging tree. Jones stepped out of the car and surveyed the land spreading out below. It was all markers down in the grass, no headstones. He paused.

"I used to have a map," he said.

We started downhill, tentatively. The last time he was here, some years ago, with his now-dead sister. "I remember holding my niece -- she was a baby -- and watching her walk down to the water spigot. I don't see it now." And there had a been a tree nearby, he recalled from the funeral. "I remember the pastor saying it was nice to have a tree nearby."

But, for whatever reason -- passing time or shifting landmarks or fading memory -- we could not find it, not in nearly an hour of pacing back and forth. At one point, I wandered far out of our original search area, head down, looking at one marker and then the next, hoping to find a marker reading "Jeanette S. Jones." I stopped to look back, for we were now almost out of earshot of one another.

Jones was all alone, mopping sweat from his forehead, from his throat. He was looking in the near distance, standing still, looking in the sunlight, looking for her.

Neely Tucker is a Washington Post staff writer. He can be reached at tuckern@washpost.com.