Mixed Race Studies

Editor who grew up black in Nazi Germany dies

The Miami Herald
2013-01-21

Freida Frisaro, Associated Press

MIAMI — Hans Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a distinctive memoir about his unusual childhood growing up black in Nazi Germany, has died. He was 87.

His son said Massaquoi died Saturday, on his 87th birthday, in Jacksonville. He had been hospitalized over the Christmas holidays.

“He had quite a journey in life,” said Hans J. Massaquoi, Jr., of Detroit. “Many have read his books and know what he endured. But most don’t know that he was a good, kind, loving, fun-loving, fair, honest, generous, hard-working and open-minded man. He respected others and commanded respect himself. He was dignified and trustworthy. We will miss him forever and try to live by his example.”…

…He writes that one of his saddest moments as a child was when his homeroom teacher told him he couldn’t join the Hitler Youth.

“Of course I wanted to join. I was a kid and most of my friends were joining,” he said. “They had cool uniforms and they did exciting things – camping, parades, playing drums.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

After the first black president, who will be second?

The Washington Post
2013-01-20

Vanessa Williams

President Obama’s historic election in 2008 and his reelection last year proved decisively that race is no longer an insurmountable hurdle to high political office in the United States.

But the current pool of possible candidates suggests that the next black president will not be taking the oath of office anytime soon.

“In the shadow of Barack Obama, there’s not been a lot of growth,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster who was involved in the president’s 2008 campaign, said. “It is really hard for minorities to get elected at the statewide level, and before you start talking about president, frankly, you have to get elected to statewide office.”

The notion of a post-Obama reformation of black politics has not been borne out at the ballot box, as black politicians continue to struggle to win the statewide offices that are the traditional paths to the presidency.

While the election of the first black president marked a significant break from the country’s history of racial prejudice, race still matters: The vast majority of black elected officials are put into office by black voters. Even Obama needed large numbers of black and Latino votes to win, particularly last year, when a majority of whites voters voted for someone else…

Read the entire article here.

In short and simple ceremony, Obama starts his second term

The Los Angeles Times
2013-01-20

Kathleen Hennessey

WASHINGTON — With a quick and simple swearing-in ceremony at the White House, President Obama formally ended his first term in office Sunday and embarked on another four years leading a nation hobbled by a weak economy and gripped by political division.
 
Raising his right hand a few minutes before noon, Obama swore to “faithfully execute the office” and “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution in a ceremony that lasted hardly a minute.
 
The president stood next to First Lady Michelle Obama, holding her family Bible, and their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the 35-word oath, more smoothly than he did four years ago, in front of rolling cameras and a small group of family and friends.

The intimate ceremony was a quirk of the calendar and an adherence to tradition. The 20th Amendment to the Constitution states that a president’s term ends at noon on Jan. 20. When that date falls on the Sunday, presidents have delayed the public ceremony a day and opted for a simple swearing-in at the White House…

…The president began his day at Arlington National Cemetery, where he and Vice President Joe Biden, fresh from his own swearing-in ceremony, laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns under a clear-blue winter sky.

From there, the president and first lady, infrequent churchgoers, made a rare visit to a historically black church, Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal, the oldest A.M.E church in the nation’s capital. The first African American president, who almost never discusses his own place in history, sat in the pews where 119 years ago congregants listened to Frederick Douglass’ last speech, a call for racial and class equality.

“Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another,” the former slave said in 1894. “Based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s inauguration carries symbolic resonance on Martin Luther King Day

The Guardian
2013-01-20

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

America’s first black president will be sworn in on the day devoted to its most famous civil rights leader

In April 1961, four months before Barack Obama was born, Bobby Kennedy told Voice of America: “There’s no question that in the next 30 or 40 years a negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as president of the United States.” Less than a month later a group of black and white freedom riders were firebombed and beaten with baseball bats and lead piping as they tried to travel through the south. The interracial marriage of Obama’s parents was not recognised in more than 20 states. Black people’s right to vote, let alone stand for election, had not been secured in much of the south. The prospect of a black president never seemed further away.

Four years later the essayist and author James Baldwin mocked Kennedy’s prediction. “That sounded like a very emancipated statement to white people,” he wrote in The American Dream and the American Negro. “They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear the laughter and bitterness and scorn with which this statement was greeted … We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become president.”

The fact that Obama’s inauguration is taking place on Martin Luther King Day – a federal public holiday to celebrate the birth of the civil rights leader – carries great symbolic resonance. The notion that America might vote in a black president now seems little more than a banal fact of life…

Read the entire article here.