“I sat there in agony thinking about all that had …

“I sat there in agony thinking about all that had led me to this private hell. My idealism, my patriotism, my ambition, my plans to be a good intelligence officer to help my country fight the communist scourge — what in the hell had happened? Why did we have to bomb the people we were trying to save? Why were we napalming young children? Why did the CIA, my employer for 16 years, report lies instead of the truth?

“I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children — especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me.” : Ralph McGehee former CIA intelligence analyst

=

“I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.” : General Smedley Butler. USMC (Ret.)

=

“Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished — only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina…” : William Shirer author 1973

=

“The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members”: Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1844

Lynchings revisited in stark detail

Activists seeking federal intervention in the unsolved lynchings of four people in Georgia in 1946 staged a dramatic recreation of the killings Monday.

View slideshow of reenactment

Never Forget

It’s the anniversary of the terrible riot in Detroit in 1967 that marked the beginning of the decline of one of the great manufacturing cities in the country. Detroit, thanks to mass assembly line automobile production, had become one of the great industrial cities in the world. Between 1910 and 1930, the population had grown from about a half million to more than one and a half million, of which many were southern blacks looking for good jobs at the auto factories.

By the ’60s, Detroit had one of the highest black populations of any city in the country. Racial tensions were growing. Through the 1950s there were incidents of cross burnings and hate crimes. The Detroit police force was almost entirely white, and Blacks were frequently harassed.

On this night in 1967—a hot and muggy night—an all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood. There was a party going on in the bar, welcoming home two Vietnam veterans. The police stormed the bar, arrested 85 black men, and started loading them into vans. There was pushing and shoving and shouting. A crowd gathered. People started throwing bottles. Within hours, store fronts had been broken into, and buildings were set on fire. The riot went on for five days. Thousands of National guardsmen were called in, resulting in tanks in the streets.

The National Guard was particularly trigger happy. They fired off more than 150,000 bullets over the course of those five days. Of the 43 people killed in the riot, all but ten were black. Most of them were innocent bystanders. 7,000 people were arrested, 5,000 left homeless, and $50 million in property damage. Whole blocks had gone up in flames. Along 12th Street, the whole neighborhood burned to the ground. Most of that area remained undeveloped for decades.

After the riots, many of the white residents moved to the suburbs. Thousands of homes were abandoned. The city’s population plunged from 1.6 million to under a million in just a few years. By 1990, Detroit was one of the poorest cities in America, with one of every three residents living in poverty.

One of the men who got shot the night of the riot was Officer Isaiah McKinnon, one of the only black officers on the Detroit Police force. He had spent twelve hours working riot control and was on his way home when white officers pulled him over and shot at his car, even though he was still in his police uniform. He went on to become the Detroit chief of police in the 1990’s. [The Writer's Almanac®, © 2005 American Public Media]
Read about the victims

KINDNESS

The accumulation of small, optimistic acts produces quality in our culture and in your life. Our culture resonates in tense times to individual acts of grace. ~Jennifer James

As perfume to the flower, so is kindness to speech. ~Katherine Francke

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. ~Plato

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again. ~Og Mandino

The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. ~William Wordsworth

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. ~W. Somerset Maugham

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate. ~Albert Schweitzer

Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share and sought advantage over no one. ~Robert Brault

Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the gratefully and appreciating heart. ~Henry Clay

The goal of compassion is not to care because someone is like us but to care because they are themselves. ~Mary Lou Randour

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions–the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts. ~Charles Dickens

Have you had a kindness shown?
Pass it on!
‘Twas not given for thee alone,
Pass it on!
Let it travel down the years,
Let it wipe another’s tears,
‘Till in Heaven the deed appears–
Pass it on! ~Henry Burton

How easy it is for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him, and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles. ~Washington Irving

I prefer you to make mistakes in kindness than work miracles in unkindness. ~Mother Teresa

If something uncharitable is said in your presence, either speak in favor of the absent, or withdraw, or, if possible, stop the conversation. ~St. John Vianney

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow. ~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path. ~Mary Webb

It is raining still… Maybe it is not one of those showers that is here one minute and gone the next, as I had so boldly assumed. Maybe none of them are. After all, life in itself is a chain of rainy days. But there are times when not all of us have umbrellas to walk under. Those are the times when we need people who are willing to lend their umbrellas to a wet stranger on a rainy day. I think I’ll go for a walk with my umbrella. ~Sun-Young Park

Kind words are a creative force, a power that concurs in the building up of all that is good, and energy that showers blessings upon the world. ~Lawrence G. Lovasik

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. ~Mother Teresa

The kindest thing you can do for the people you care about is to become a happy, joyous person. ~Brian Tracey

Kindly words do not enter so deeply into men as a reputation for kindness. ~Mencius

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind. ~Eric Hoffer

Kindness in words creates confidence
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness
Kindness in giving creates love. ~Lao-tzu

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom. ~Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D.

Kindness is more than deeds. It is an attitude, an expression, a look, a touch. It is anything that lifts another person. ~C. Neil Strait

Kindness is never wasted. If it has no effect on the recipient, at least it benefits the bestower. ~S. H. Simmons

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. ~Mark Twain

Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Let me, tonight look back across the span
Twixt dawn and dark, and to my conscience say-
Because of some good act to beast or human-
The world is better that I lived today. ~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Life is mostly froth and bubbles,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own. ~Adam Lindsay Gordon

Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind! ~Henri F. Amiel

Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none. ~William Shakespeare

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. ~Dalai Lama

The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt. ~Leo Buscaglia

The man with a heart cannot think about or see creatures without his eyes filling up with tears because of the immense compassion which seizes his heart. ~Isaac of Syria

Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that. ~Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves. ~Lawrence G. Lovasik

No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. ~Emma Goldman

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. ~Benjamin Franklin

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary? ~Sir James Matthew Barrie

The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity. ~Thomas Peters & Robert Waterman, Jr.

Thank you to all the people in the world who are always 10% kinder than they need to be. That’s what really makes the world go round. ~Helen Exley

Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind. ~Henry James

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. ~Leo Buscaglia

Try in thine own experience, each; that he speak not for one whole day unkindly of any… and see what such a day would bring to you. ~Edgar Cayce

We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne. ~Marcus Aurelius

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. ~Abraham Heschel

When one begins to purposefully perform acts of kindness, the spirit changes and soon doing good deeds becomes a focal point for our life; doing good begins to be the same as feeling good. The periods of emptiness when we search for the “meaning of it all” begin to fill with acts of kindness. ~Gary Ryan Blair

When you are kind to someone in trouble, you hope they’ll remember and be kind to someone else. And, it’ll become like a wildfire. ~Whoopi Goldberg

When you carry out acts of kindness, you get a wonderful feeling inside. It is as though something inside your body responds and says, “Yes, this is how I ought to feel.” ~Harold Kushner

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness. ~Seneca

You have not lived a perfect day, even though you have earned your money, unless you have done something for someone who will never be able to repay you. ~Ruth Smeltzer

You may be sorry that you spoke,
sorry you stayed or went,
sorry you won or lost,
sorry so much was spent.
But as you go through life, you’ll find–
you’re never sorry you were kind. ~Herb Prochnow

An Empty Apology

Bob Herbert
One of President Bush’s surrogates went before the NAACP last week and apologized for the Republican Party’s reprehensible, decades-long Southern strategy. The surrogate, Ken Mehlman, is chairman of the Republican National Committee. Perhaps he meant well. But his words were worse than meaningless. They were insulting. The GOP’s Southern strategy, racist at its core, still lives.

People Gather to Settle Pain

Dianne Chiles, left, cries as she and her longtime friend, Maye O’Bannon, both of Abbeville, S.C. take part in a reconciliation service Tuesday, July 12, 2005, at Friendship Worship Center in Abbeville, S.C. Hundreds gathered for the service, where white church leaders confessed the sins of their ancestors and apologized to blacks for the 1916 lynching of Anthony Crawford and other racial strife that took place nearly a century ago.

Service Atones for Past Racial Strife

By Ellen Barry Times Staff WriterWed Jul 13, 7:55 AM ET
ABBEVILLE, S.C. — By car, by foot, by Greyhound bus, the descendants of a black farmer named Anthony Crawford came back here Tuesday to accept an apology for his lynching.They gathered in an unadorned yellow-brick church in the city that proudly claimed it was “the birthplace and the deathbed of the Confederacy.” They waved trembling hands as a series of white preachers asked forgiveness for the slaying that took place 89 years ago in the town’s Court Square.

This summer has churned up painful history from the civil rights era with the trial of former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen and the exhumation of the body of lynching victim Emmett Till. Those cases reverberated in national news, but the service in Abbeville stood out for its intimacy: In the pews of the Friendship Worship Center, neighbors shouted and prayed together about a crime that had not been openly discussed for generations.”We do believe that when this is over, we will hold our hands in prayer together,” Pastor Wendell Rhodes said before the service began. “We do believe we will walk out of there with one bias, and that bias is love.”

Crawford’s death is not a comfortable topic in Abbeville, and there was a scattering of white faces in the pews. Johnnie Waller, the mayor of the neighboring hamlet of Calhoun Falls, said even for him — the first black elected official in his town — appearing at the service meant taking a political risk.

“That’s a pretty big biscuit to bite off for that pastor,” said Waller, 65. “I might take a beating across the head for participating.”

Crawford’s death at the hands of his Abbeville neighbors — sparked by an argument over the market price of cottonseed — was so outrageous that it became a rallying cry as the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People undertook an antilynching movement, said Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has researched lynching.

Born into slavery, Crawford had gradually accumulated 427 acres of “the prettiest cotton you ever saw,” as one contemporary reporter put it, and had an estimated worth of $20,000. According to news accounts at the time, Crawford cursed a shopkeeper who offered him 85 cents a pound — he said the market rate was 90 — and, when he angrily left the shop, a crowd began to gather to give him a beating. Crawford hid in a cotton shed, then hit one of his assailants on the head with a hammer, breaking his skull.

The sheriff at the time, R.M. Burts, begged the crowd not to hurt Crawford and took him into custody. But the crowd stormed the jail, tied Crawford’s body to the back of a buggy and dragged him through black neighborhoods.

Finally they hung his body from a tree and shot about 200 rounds into it, in front of a crowd that reportedly numbered in the hundreds. Crawford’s body has never been found. Although the then-governor of South Carolina ordered an investigation, witnesses denied that they could recognize anyone in the mob, according to an account by local historian Lowry Ware. A grand jury considered the case in 1917 but did not hand up any indictments.

The story stands out even in the history of lynchings because Crawford was a prominent man and had not been accused of a violent crime.

“Here was an instance of an affluent black man being lynched for what can only be described as the status envy of whites,” Brundage said. “If it happened to Anthony Crawford, it could happen to anybody.”

But if the NAACP spread the word of Crawford’s killing, the opposite happened in Abbeville. Most whites interviewed said they had only recently learned about the lynching.

When Rose-Marie Williams, 68, interviewed Abbeville residents about racial tension, she found “that nobody in my generation knew the story” of the lynching.

Robert Speer, president of the Abbeville County Historical Society, said most natives regarded the lynching as “more of a family issue than a community issue” if they know the story at all. “It’s an unfortunate thing that happened,” said Speer, 57. “I don’t think people take pride in it. But it’s history, and the general public is not interested.”

About 350 people — including an estimated 25 descendants of Crawford — attended Tuesday’s service, where a series of white pastors assumed responsibility for the racism of the past. Pastor Johnson Dorn, whose father was a U.S. senator from South Carolina, described going home, shaken, to ask his father whether it was true that one of his relatives had been involved in a lynching in the town of Edgefield.

“When he bowed his head, I knew it was true,” Dorn said. “I am here tonight in the first person. The torturous history of the Civil War … and lynching was the history that surrounded me and my family. Tonight I need deliverance from that history.”

“My story is your story and your story is my story,” he continued. “So what if you were not in that lynch mob in 1916? Vicariously, you were there.”

Eugene Crawford, 82, a grandson of Anthony Crawford’s, rode a Greyhound bus from Philadelphia to attend the service. He left the city when he was 19, but this time returned, he said, to a changed place. “I didn’t ever think I’d see a day like this one,” he said. “I feel happy and safe…. I think I could live here now.”

There were some in town, though, who rejected the very premise of an apology.

Abbeville is the home base for the League of the South, a Confederate heritage organization attracted by the history of the town — it was the site of South Carolina’s secession from the union in 1860, and Jefferson Davis was staying with a friend in Abbeville when he agreed to end the Civil War.

Robert Hayes, the organization’s state director, condemned the killing as an illegal act, but joked that he had considered attending the reconciliation service because he “had never seen a 200-year-old person before.”

“No one can logically apologize for another individual,” Hayes said. “He can only apologize for transgressions that he himself has made.” The service, he said, “accomplishes absolutely nothing.”

Philip Crawford, the farmer’s 52-year-old great-grandson, who lives in Abbeville, said he had never talked about the crime with descendants of the whites who took part in the killing. He said he suspected they were wary of the topic because of the savagery of his great-grandfather’s death — and the force of his defiance.

“Look at it this way,” Crawford said. “When a man stands up to a mob, when he stands there and fights to his death, knowing that’s the way it’s going to end up,” if you were the descendant of someone in the mob, “would you want to deal with that man or his family later on in life?”

The most enthusiastic probing about the lynching has come from Crawford relatives who moved to Illinois when the family scattered out of South Carolina after Crawford’s killing.

Doria Dee Johnson, 44, a great-great-granddaughter of Crawford’s who has written extensively about the lynching, said she had felt uncomfortable during her trips to Abbeville. She said she was a little concerned for the pastor who organized the service.

“He seems sort of nonchalant,” Johnson said. “I hope he realizes what he’s doing.”

"The world is my country, all mankind are my breth…

“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

~Thomas Paine

“Humanity must turn around. What good are all its religious practices, what good are all its church services, what point is there in all its devout singing if God’s will is not done and hands remain steeped in blood? What does people’s faith mean if injustice is done to the poor as casually as one drinks a glass of water? What good is it to profess the divine if not even a little finger is lifted when countless children and poor people die?”

~Eberhard Arnold

“We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.”

~Hermann Hesse.