A true patriot loves, upholds and defends their nation, and treats fellow citizens, especially the president, with utmost respect, irrespective of their political affiliation. As legal scholar, Jeremy I. Levitt, has posited, “the U.S. president is the head of state and government, as well as the highest official in the country and commander in chief of the armed forces. He is not only the most-influential and -recognized political figure in the world, but also the living embodiment of our democracy.”

While I support spirited dialogue, passionate debate, and intellectual exchange, the far right has embarrassed America with its duplicitous, mean-spirited, racist attacks on President Obama. As a historian, I cannot recall a time when an American president has been so blatantly disrespected by so many people who lack the courage to reveal their true motivations.
The far right-wing anti-Obama rhetoric invoking abortion, health care, education, and gun control is nothing more than subterfuge that masks their disdain for the president and racist disposition. Raging marchers, gun-toting anarchists, chauvinistic radio personalities, bigoted congressmen who shout at the president with red faces and hate filled eyes, and “educators” who encourage our children to “stay home,” rather than receive a motivational speech from the leader of the free world, all need to do what black people are told to do everyday. Get over it. Obama won the election.

There are many Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, who are interested in civil debate. The far right, however, has shown that they are inspired by bitterness, envy, and veiled racial hostility. And no matter how many hand-picked, self-hating leaders of color they parade in front of the media, the majority of people of color know precisely what kind of racist vitriol lies behind this anti-Obama hysteria.

I encourage those who voted for Obama, especially whites like former President Jimmie Carter, and all who wish to maintain the esteem and power of the presidency, to repudiate this malignant right-wing behavior. Racists rarely acknowledge their hatred, and many are so insulated in their bubble of bigotry that they never consider their thoughts and anger to be byproducts of racism. Most Americans acknowledge that racism exists, but few will ever identify “a racist bone” in their bodies. Still, the rage we have seen directed at the president is unprecedented, and as Carter argues, these kinds of outbursts “are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care. It’s deeper than that.” Indeed it is, and while smoking guns of racism are hard to find, we can certainly hear the shots.

Arizona Informant
Wednesday, September 24, 2009

Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, and an Affiliate Faculty member of African and African American Studies and the Justice and Social Inquiry Program at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also the CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm that specializes in diversity and human relations.

Even in the midst of scandal and his often eccentric and inexplicable behavior, much of the music he produced and the performances he rendered bordered on perfection. He was one of a kind, an original that will never grace the earth again, and even though I never met him, I miss him. He gave us 45 years of his brilliance. His impact on the music industry is mind boggling, and he single handedly changed the music video game. It was he who made MTV a household name. He was no doubt tired, however, after entertaining and uplifting millions for so long. I know that he is resting in a more forgiving place now, and I know that he is not alone. I salute you, Michael Jackson, and I thank you for the many gifts that you gave us. You were one of, if not the, greatest entertainer of all time, and your brilliance will echo through the ages.

Arizona Republic
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Arizona Informant
Sunday, July 5, 2009

Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, and an Affiliate Faculty member of African and African American Studies and the Justice and Social Inquiry Program at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also the CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm that specializes in diversity and human relations.

As CNN political analyst Mark Preston has argued, this brouhaha “cast an unnecessary dark cloud over the school,” and compelled ASU officials to accelerate their nascent plans to honor the president in substantive ways.

I, too, was taken aback when I read reports that Obama was not considered for an honorary degree, reportedly because his contributions and accomplishments do not constitute “achievements of eminence,” and “his body of work is yet to come.”

I solicited answers from top ASU officials, including President Michael Crow. These conversations convinced me that much of the mess can be attributed to the challenges associated with scheduling a presidential visit with relatively short notice; ignorance about policies concerning the awarding of honorary degrees; a bumbling explanation by a “spokesperson”; and the public’s understandable sensitivity to any slight, real or perceived, toward any person of color, let alone the leader of the free world, by any white person or predominantly white institution in Arizona. After all, the state’s history of underappreciating, disrespecting and mistreating its black and brown residents is the stuff of legend.

Crow indicated that ASU was just beginning to discuss substantive, alternative ways of honoring Obama when a student journalist broke the story that an honorary degree would not be given. Only later did additional details emerge that cast the news in a different light. Initial reports failed to mention that in 2003, Crow had decided against awarding honorary doctorates to sitting politicians because he was inundated with requests by supporters of powerful politicians seeking honorary degrees for their favorites. Rather than defile the process by reducing the degree to a political tool, he eliminated the practice altogether.

Instead, Crow named ASU’s most prestigious scholarship program after Obama. ASU’s solution is consistent with Obama’s vision and goals: It will make educational attainment and the American Dream a reality for many who would otherwise not be able to realize Obama’s promise of hope and opportunity. In the place of a symbolic tribute, ASU’s president has proposed a program that will honor Obama every year by providing deserving students with the financial opportunity to earn a college degree and pursue the American dream unencumbered. That will honor ASU, its students and the president of the United States.

ASU will be the first university in the country to honor Obama in a way that reflects his desires and vision. While an honorary degree is symbolic and soon forgotten, the Obama scholarship program will forge a lasting legacy. Perhaps future presidents of the United States will be able to thank ASU and the Obama Scholars program for putting them on the path to achievement and service.

Arizona Republic
Saturday, April 25, 2009

Matthew C. Whitaker is an associate professor in the Department of History at Arizona State University. He is also CEO of the Whitaker Group LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in diversity and human relations.

Since February 1 of this year, leading columnists from major newspapers have posed similar questions about this month, which is the legacy of historian Carter G. Woodson, who created Negro History Week in 1926. Cynthia Tucker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote that “the commemoration is a damaging form of apartheid” and “the nation of Tiger Woods, Oprah and Barack Obama no longer needs a Black History Month.” Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette argued, “Now that Barack Obama and his family have moved into the White House, it’s time to rethink the holiday Carter G. Woodson came up with nearly a century ago. Times have changed. Even the Republicans have a black guy running the party. Maybe February can go back to being for all of us.”

Nevertheless, Faye V. Harrison, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, said it’s shortsighted and “politically naïve” to say Black History Month is no longer relevant. “It [the election] says something about how far we have come, but it doesn’t say anything about how far we have to go,” she said. “I don’t think we can afford to forget about it.” Indeed, while I admire Freeman’s passion and agree with the spirit of his convictions, I disagree with his conclusions. Although “African American history is American history,” and as such should be integrated into the fabric of our education and daily consciousness, it also warrants particular attention.

America’s promise, past, present, and future will always be tied to, and measured by, the socioeconomic status of African Americans. No matter how much we grow, and no matter how unified we become, we will always be a post-slave and Jim Crow society. Black History Month, therefore, will never be obsolete. It will always be in our best interest to pause and explore the meaning of freedom through the lived experiences of a people who forced America to be true to its creed and reaffirmed the American dream. Those who would eliminate Black History Month, therefore, often miss the point. Should we educate ourselves about black history throughout the year? Of course we should. Should we also take time out to acknowledge the fact that, without African Americans, our understanding of “freedom and justice for all” would not exist? Yes.

If treated seriously and executed effectively, Black History Month could stimulate more concern for inclusive and probing educational curricula, inter-cultural communication, and democracy itself. Knowledge of African American history is essential to comprehending our nation’s character, and we should do everything that we can to ensure that all Americans know precisely who we are and how we came to be. Moreover, Black History Month not only reminds of how far we’ve come, given all of the challenges that remain, it also reminds us of how far we still must go.

Arizona Republic
Sunday, February 22, 2009

Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, and an Affiliate Faculty member of African and African American Studies and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also the CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm that specializes in diversity and human relations.

Unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party has benchmarks for racial inclusion, and Black delegates comprised 24% of the total delegation, and Latinos 12%. These numbers are not an “Obama and Bill Richardson factor.” The Democratic superstructure is measurably committed to diversity. Notwithstanding the historical appointments of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Republicans have shifted into reverse on matters of racial diversity. Many Republicans claim colorblindness. After watching the convention, I believe them. There was little color to be seen in Xcel Energy Center.

What statement is the Republican Party making about its position on racial diversity? How can such an overwhelmingly white convention take place in 2008? I expected Aunt Bee and Opie to take the convention’s stage. Do Republicans care how this looks to people of color and those who question homogeneity? Does this Leave-it-to-Beaver convention foreshadow a possible McCain administration? Perhaps some Americans will vote for a candidate who has virtually no substantive relationships with communities of color and knows more about hockey and moose burgers than about the history and lives of some 100+ million Americans of color. Perhaps these voters don’t care about communities of color. Voters who are at all concerned about inclusion and racial equality will be hard-pressed to find sanctuary, voice, or power in the Republican camp. If the GOP does not publicly diversify, projected changes in racial demographics will soon compel it to take “affirmative action” to include more diverse groups of people, including “elite” and “uppity” black people.

Matthew C. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also the CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm that specializes in diversity and human relations.

The installation of Obama as President, therefore, is a substantive measure of this seismic shift in American life, and his very person embodies America’s promise. His ascendency is not a cure-all, but it offers the water of renewal and unity for a nation thirsty for further advancement. Obama’s rise is not the final chapter in America’s quest to fulfill the dream, nor has it eradicated the problems that confront us. America endures, and the fight for freedom and justice for all continues. The torch still burns in the hands of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States of America.

Matthew C. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also the CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm that specializes in diversity and human relations.

Arizona Republic
Sunday, January 18, 2009

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Most celebrations and commemorations of Women’s History Month focus on the aspirations and accomplishmets of distingushed women who have made their mark at the national and internationa levels. Many who celebrate and participate in Women’s History Month activities will surely invoke names such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojouner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan, Dolores Huerta, Gloria Steinem, Tonita Pena and other well known women. Yet, despite their immeasurable and unmistakable contribution to Arizona, America and the world, Arizona women usually do not receive the recognition they deserve, even in Arizona itself. I believe, therefore, that we must all pause to acknowledge the intellienge, courage, determination, creativity and compassion that Arizona women have demonstrated, often against overwhelming odds, throughout this state’s history.

Inspired by a passion for freedom, self-determination and equality, women in Arizona have helped shaped this state from its infancy. Beginning in 1897, Elizabeth Hudson Smith of Wickenburg emerged as one of the wealthiest (black) entrepreneurs in the southwest. In 1909, Sharlot Hall became the Territorial Historian and the first woman to hold territorial office. Due largely to the grass roots activism of Arizona suffragists, the state was among the first to extend the franchise to women in 1912. Two years later, Francis Willard Munds of Yavapai County became the second woman in America to be elected to a state senate. Arizona women formed model mutual aid and philanthropic societies during the Great Depression and World Wars I and II, to ameliorate the social and financial stresses of economic devastation and war. Of particular note are the women who served as pistons of the region’s Civil Rights Movement: Opal Ellis, Thomasena Grigsby, Fran Waldman, Madge Copland, Ruth Finn, Eleanor Ragsdale and many others. These tenacious women led the way in securing victories for racial justice in Phoenix, sometimes in advance of national milestones in civil rights.

Their activism, the wisdom of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, the fortitude of Arizona only black legislator, Leah Landrum Taylor, the confidence of our three female governors, Rose Mofford (1987-1991), Jane Dee Hull (1997-2003) and Janet Napolitano (2003-present), the heroism of Army Pfc. Lori Piestewa, the selflessness of nationally know activists, educators and philanthropists such as Betty and Jean Fairfax, and the literary accomplishments of celebrated writers such as Jewell Rhodes and Stella Pope Duarte, have all helped make Arizona one of the most dynamic states in the U.S., and the U.S. one the most promising nations in the world. Their legacy should inspire all of us to do whatever we can to demonstrate our appreciation by bearing the torch of freedom, progress and prosperity that they set ablaze.

Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker, a Phoenician native, is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also an affiliate faculty in African and African American Studies and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at ASU. He is also Co-Owner and CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm specializing in diversity and educational curriculum and instruction training.

Copyright © The Arizona Republic. All rights reserved.

• Lets_Recognize_Arizonas_Traiblazing_Women.doc

Before the Ragsdales arrived in Phoenix in 1946, white supremacy, racism and racial segregation was already firmly established in the city. Race and racism in Phoenix, as Paul Murray intoned, “was the atmosphere one breathed from day to day, the pervasive irritant, the chronic allergy, the vague apprehension which made one uncomfortable and jumpy.” Indeed, although Phoenix’s racial etiquette was less violent than that of its southern counterparts, white supremacy, segregation, and economic inequality existed in the city from its birth. De jure segregation was implemented in the Arizona Territory in 1864, when an anti-miscegenation law prohibiting marriages between “Whites, Negroes, Mulattos, and Mongolians” was passed. The law was amended in 1877 to include American Indians. Children of such marriages possessed no legal rights of inheritance. John “Jack” Swilling, a former Confederate soldier and deserter, is credited with laying the city’s foundation, and it was former Arizona Governor Benjamin B. Moeur, who spoke for many Arizonan’s when he proclaimed in 1909 that “I for one, won’t send my children to school with the niggers, and I will fight sending them until I die!” That same year the territorial legislature passed a law allowing Arizona schools districts to segregate students of African descent from pupils of European ancestry.

Reflecting local bigotry, Ku Klux Klan chapters were organized around the valley in 1917 to intimidate and terrorize “uppity” black people, Jews, and other “un-American agitators”. Furthermore, by 1926 the meticulously constructed Phoenix residential PalmCroft District, and its Euro-American homeowners, created and maintained restrictive covenants limiting the sale of PalmCroft real estate to whites only. People of color were relegated to the area of the city south of Van Buren Street, and black Phoenicians and other people of color were segregated from whites in parks, swimming pools, theatres, grocery stores, restaurants, hotels and cemeteries. The resulting economic, social, and political isolation people of color experienced amplified not only the malignant socio-economic effects of institutional racism, but the negative effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and demobilization after World War II in the 1940s. Being the last to be hired and the first to be fired affected black Phoenicians in many of the same ways in which it affected American Americans at large. The majority of black Phoenicians attended separate and unequal schools; worked in low-wage, non-managerial, labor-intensive occupations; lived in geographically segregated, substandard housing, often amidst deprivation and squalor; and suffered physically as a result of there being few health care providers who administered to the black community. Longtime resident John Barber believed that Phoenix “wasn’t much different than in the South. The difference here was that they didn’t lynch you.” Phoenix, in fact, was referred to by many blacks as “the Mississippi of the West”.

Lincoln Ragsdale recalled that when he and Eleanor arrived, racism and racial segregation was so insidious that “the only bathrooms [blacks] could use downtown were [in] Phoenix City Hall, the bus station, the train station and the County Building”. Legendary Arizona politician and publisher, Cloves Campbell, Sr., who worked with Ragsdale as a young man, remembered that African Americans were frequently greeted by signs in local eateries proclaiming the “right to refuse anybody service.” “Well, you know what that meant,” Campbell exclaimed: “Nigga don’t come in here.” Blacks were not the only targets for racist policies and practices. African Americans and Mexican Americans who attempted to do nothing more than purchase a soda or an ice cream cone from local drug stores, were often turned away by signs that read “no Negroes, Mexicans or dogs allowed.” Jewish attorney Herbert Finn, and his family, became targets of anti-Semitic attacks, racist remarks, and terrorist activity when he spoke out against white supremacy and racial segregation. His daughter, Judge Elizabeth Finn, recalls her family receiving bomb threats, and on one occasion a letter addressed to her father denouncing him in the foulest terms as Jew sympathizing with Blacks.

The Ragsdales, and other black western activists, though isolated from the Civil Rights Movement in the American South, were not strangers to these kinds of attitudes or the requisite activism required to fight them. They were roused by years of racial discrimination, World War II, and America’s promise of democracy. They were buoyed by the burgeoning postwar broad-mindedness of local white leaders and Jewish activists such as Finn, attorney William P. Mahoney, and activist Fran Waldman, and sustained by the camaraderie of Mexican American leaders such as community activist Grace Gill-Olivarez and businessman Manuel Pena. Armed with their experiences, hope, and passion, and aided by an interracial group of sympathetic leaders, the Ragsdales often led the way in securing victories for racial and economic justice in Phoenix.

For example, in 1953 restrictive covenants and racial segregation in the “Valley of the Sun” found a cunning adversary in Eleanor Ragsdale. She used her knowledge of the real estate market, and exploited the retrograde color consciousness of many whites. As a real estate broker, she found a home on West Thomas Road, far from the African American enclaves in South Phoenix, that she wanted to purchase. When she was not permitted to purchase the home because she was black, she and Lincoln circumvented the restrictive covenant which barred them. Eleanor had a white friend purchase the home, and when the contract was still in escrow the friend transferred the title to the Ragsdales. When they arrived to move into their new home, Lincoln Ragsdale remembered, the realtors “wouldn’t let me in.” “Within a month of their move,” Lincoln Ragsdale recalled, three members of a neighborhood “improvement” committee told him that his family would not “be happy here.” The committee offered to buy the Ragsdale home if the family would move. The Ragsdales refused to sell. On another occasion, the family awoke to find the word “nigger” spray-painted on their white block home in “two-foot-high black letters.” Lincoln refused to remove the racial epitaph from his wall because he “wanted to make sure that the white folks knew where the Nigga lived.” By demonstrating their determination and courage, the Ragsdales transformed the humiliation of white despotism into a declaration of dignity. In the process, they alerted their neighbors of their distinction and self-respect.

Also in 1953, the Ragsdales helped black attorney and legislator, Hayzel B. Daniels, along with Herbert Finn and William Mahoney, desegregate Phoenix high schools one year before the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision of 1954. Lincoln Ragsdale, along with black activist, Reverend George B. Brooks, led the way in desegregating many of Phoenix’s most influential corporations, including Valley National Bank (now Chase/Back One), Motorola, Sperry Rank, and General Electric, as early as 1962. In 1963, Lincoln Ragsdale positioned himself as one of the cornerstones of the political Citizens Action Committee (ACT) campaign that wrested Phoenix city government out of the hands of an elite group of white male leaders. The Ragsdale’s were clever and potent, and their history illuminates the omnipresence of racial inequality in Phoenix during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Their story also demonstrates that no lacuna in effective African American leadership existed in the city.

Despite the advances that activist such as the Ragsdales helped engender, as late as 1960 de facto segregation continued to be one of the primary obstacles to black progress in the wake of Brown. The Phoenix Urban League reported that at least 95 percent of black Phoenicians continued to live South of Van Buren Street in the “worst housing areas in the city.” The Ragsdale’s were among a handful of wealthy black families who managed to secure housing north of McDowell Street. In 1960, a Phoenician resident noted that in South Phoenix “in almost every instance in education, employment, and housing, the minority-group members are suffering some degree of deprivation; less schooling, less employment, and more crowded housing.” Despite the passage of a public accommodations bill in Arizona in 1964 (and the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act at the national level), and the success of black families such as the Ragsdales, the effects of racial prejudice, substandard schooling, unskilled low-paying jobs, and discriminatory real estate patterns, led to persistent black isolation, concentrated poverty, militancy, and rioting in the streets of Phoenix by 1967.

Although these constituted major setbacks, the Ragsdales and their fellow activists continued fight and win victories for racialized justice and socio-economic progress into the 1990s, and in doing so they helped destroy generations of barriers to equal opportunity and racial equality. They helped transform the city and, arguably, the nation through their trailblazing and torch bearing leadership. Race Work tells the story of this remarkable pair, two of the most influential black activists of the post–World War II American West, and through their story, supplies a missing chapter in the history of the U.S., the Civil Rights Movement, race relations, African Americans, and the American West. I explore the Ragsdales’ family history and how their familial traditions of entrepreneurship, professionalism, activism, and “race work” helped form their identities and place them in a position to help desegregate Phoenix. Race Work, the first sustained account of white supremacy and black resistance in Phoenix, also uses the lives of the Ragsdales to examine themes of domination, resistance, interracial coalition building, gender, and place against the backdrop of the civil rights and post–civil rights eras.

More importantly, Race Work illuminates the hope that is imbedded in our ability to address the exigencies of class and race effectively when we choose to. As affluent leaders, it would have been easy for the Ragsdales to turn their backs on the poor, and as “successful” black people, it would have been convenient and perhaps profitable for them to adopt the prevailing “color-blind” ethos of most of their white counterparts. They did not. They repudiated racial and economic subjugation, and helped point the moral compass of the Phoenician community in the direction of equality, peace and prosperity. Whenever they witnessed de jure and de facto segregation, and racial and economic inequality, they lent their name, resources, and political influence to activists and organizations that worked to eliminate it. Many problems remain to be sure, and the Ragsdales were not without faults, but they rose to the occasion, and because of their efforts, and the work of their class and race conscious comrades, the Valley of the Sun became a much brighter place.

Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker, a Phoenician native, is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is also an affiliate faculty in African and African American Studies and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at ASU. He is also Co-Owner and CEO of The Whitaker Group, L.L.C., a consulting firm specializing in diversity and educational curriculum and instruction training.

Professor Whitaker will read excerpts from, and sign copies of, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West, at the Phoenix Public Library-Burton Barr Central Affiliate at 1221 N. Central Avenue in Phoenix, on Tuesday, October 25 at 7:00pm, and Changing Hands Bookstore at 6428 S. McClintock Drive, on Tuesday, November 8 at 7:00pm.

Copyright © The Arizona Republic. All rights reserved.

• Arizonas_Reckoning_with_Race.doc

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