White Man

NEW YORK -- It's Amateur Night at the Apollo Theatre, and a parade of aspiring black stars is getting ready to face one of the toughest crowds in show business.Apollo audiences have seen it all over the years: Jazz divas such as Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, a kid named Stevie Wonder, a mystery group called the Jackson 5. But tonight there's something different on stage: a white teen-ager who leaps out of the crowd to join in a hip-hop dance contest.As he shakes and rolls, a powerful, impromptu chant rocks the room: "White man in the house!"

TODAY, THE U.S. Postal Service officially issues its Malcolm X stamp. You have to figure the X-man is twirling in his grave.Just who is being honored here? The Malcolm who excoriated America for its anti-black racism, who frequently opposed his federal government's policies in Third World countries, who was the most powerful black nationalist spokesman since Marcus Garvey and who, even a month before he died, continued to wear that label.Or is it the watered-down Malcolm X portrayed by the 1990s media?

LAST JULY, I wrote an article about white privilege for The Sun and every week since it appeared, I have received at least a dozen letters from people who want to talk about race.A wire service carried the article and it was picked up by newspapers across the nation. More people found it on the Internet, where electronic copies wound up on discussion lists. And Ambrose Lane, who is black and hosts a talk radio show in Washington, D.C., discussed the article on the air and offered to send copies to anybody who requested one.Since the article appeared on July 19, 1998, I have given a lot more thought to who I am, and I've learned a lot more about why many white people can't come to terms with my premise: whites, whether overtly racist or not, benefit from living in a mostly white-run world that has been built on the land and the backs of non-white people.

WELCOME, Baltimoreans, to Hate Talk 101.Tuesday, Radio One owner Cathy Hughes took to the air on WOLB, her talk radio station. She ranted and raved and railed against Uncle Toms, handkerchief heads and crackers, leaving some listeners to start a pool on exactly how many screws she had popped loose.The next day, it was her hatchet man's turn. C. Miles, who has single-handedly reduced the talk show format to levels of buffoonery previously thought unattainable, figured he was just the guy to defend Hughes' honor.

"Cloudsplitter," by Russell Banks. HarperFlamingo. 768 pages. $27.50.Russell Bank's extraordinary new novel, "Cloudsplitter," recounts the story of radical abolitionist John Brown from the perspective of his son Owen, 30 years after Bleeding Kansas and the raid on the federal weapons manufactory at Harpers Ferry. Far surpassing Toni Morrison's works on this subject, it is the most important novel about race published in America since William Faulkner's "The Sound And The Fury.""Was my father mad?"

ENNERDALE, South Africa -- The youngsters in Anastasia Thomas' history class have just been given their new textbook on this nation's past, and they are excited."

TOWSON -- A District Court judge denied bail yesterday for a man arrested Saturday on charges of first-degree murder and robbery in the May 13 slaying of 59-year-old Rosalie Marie Bulkley at her Randallstown home.Derrick J. Foskey, 32, of the 3900 block of Innerdale Court in Randallstown was arrested after police said he used two silver dollars that were stolen during the slaying to make a purchase at a local business. Foskey is being held in the Baltimore County Detention Center.Bulkley, a grandmother of five and a retired Franklin High School teacher, was beaten and strangled May 13, a week before she was to have been honored for her 26 years as a teacher in county schools.

A pizza delivery man was robbed at gunpoint outside an apartment building in Ellicott City Tuesday night, Howard County police said.The delivery man for Papa John's pizza, whom police refused to identify, was accosted about 9: 45 p.m. in the 8700 block of Town and Country Blvd. by a white man said to be wearing two trash bags over his body, a white or gray cap and a dark-colored bandanna over his face, a police report said.The robber, who stood 5 feet 7 inches and weighed 140 pounds, carried what appeared to be a long-barreled rifle or shotgun and demanded money from the delivery man, police said.

As either a "Twilight Zone" episode or a civics lesson, "White Man's Burden" would be intriguing; as a feature movie, it goes on too long and makes its points over and over again.It's the reversal business, neatly imagined by screenwriter-director Desmond Nakano. He postulates an America exactly as the one we live in today, with the not-so-subtle difference that the powerful majority is black and the powerless minority white. Otherwise, the same network of racism and the same network of stereotyping exist.

A Baltimore man was robbed of his watch Tuesday by an armed man as he talked to a friend in the parking lot of La Fontaine Bleu in the 7500 block of Ritchie Highway, county police said.Police said Shawn David Sparks, 19, of the 1300 block of Sergeant St. in Baltimore and Daniel Calvert of Elizabeth Road in Pasadena were in front of the building just before 11:30 p.m. when a man with a small black revolver approached and demanded Mr. Sparks' watch.When Mr. Sparks turned over his watch, the robber ran to a small white station wagon and drove off.The robber was described as a white man in his 20s, 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighing about 190 pounds.

Here's the scene on a hot Wednesday afternoon at the end of the wooden pier at Baltimore's Fort Armistead Park: A newly arrived immigrant from Vietnam struggled to reel in a 2-pound catfish from the murky depths of the Patapsco River. A black man from West Baltimore put a net in the water to capture the writhing fish. A white man from Arbutus grabbed the line and hauled it in. Then all three men - from two generations and three cultures and races - stood over the pail and admired the biggest catch of the day. Less than an hour earlier, a city judge had denied bail to a white man who police said came to this park early Tuesday and attacked a 76-year-old black fisherman while yelling racial slurs.

This is how John Davis became a slave: He was walking one evening from the train depot in Goodwater, Ala., when a white man appeared in the road. "Nigger," he demanded, "have you got any money?" The white man, Robert Franklin, was a constable. He claimed Mr. Davis owed him. This was news to Mr. Davis. "I don't owe you anything," he said. But what Mr. Davis said did not matter. He was arrested that night and summarily convicted. A wealthy landowner, John Pace, paid the alleged $40 debt and a $35 fine in exchange for Mr. Davis' mark - Mr. Davis was illiterate - on a contract binding him to work 10 months at any task Mr. Pace demanded.

As the story of Isiah Thomas' sexual harassment lawsuit unfolded, I could not help but wonder what his mother would think. The first time I really paid attention to the retired NBA star and current New York Knicks coach was back in 1989, when his mother's life story was dramatized in an NBC-TV movie, A Mother's Courage: The Mary Thomas Story. Alfre Woodard depicted the feisty mom who raised her children alone on Chicago's West Side after separating from her husband. When the Vice Lords street gang came to recruit her sons, she memorably greeted the gang-bangers with a shotgun and a threat to blow their sorry selves across the nearby expressway.

WASHINGTON -- Seventy-six years ago, thousands of people came to lynch James Cameron. In this, he was not unique. An estimated 4,700 Americans - the vast majority of them black men - suffered that fate in the years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Here's what makes Mr. Cameron different: He survived. The rope around his neck and the mob howling for his blood, but he survived. He is believed to be the only person ever to do so. James Cameron died last Sunday at 92 after years of failing health.

WASHINGTON -- Sometimes, I wonder about the white man. That's all the identification history has ever given him. We know the name of the man who was driving the bus that evening: James F. Blake. We know the names of the Montgomery, Ala., police officers who answered Mr. Blake's summons after a "colored" passenger refused to surrender her seat: Officers Mixon and Day. And of course we know the name of the passenger: Rosa Parks. But the past has closed like muddy water around the identity of "the white man" whose arrival on the bus precipitated Mrs. Parks' arrest that December night a little over 50 years ago. I've read reconstructions of the arrest, studied news accounts, looked at the police report.

Police were looking for the man who robbed a Bank of America branch yesterday in Baltimore County. Police said a man entered the bank in the 7900 block of Belair Road in Fullerton about 10:20 a.m. and gave a teller a note demanding money. The man fled with an undisclosed sum and was last seen running south on Belair Road, police said. The robber is described as a white man in his early 20s, between 5 feet 5 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a slim build. He was wearing blue jeans, a black flight jacket and a "Ford" baseball-style cap, police said.

WASHINGTON -- At a time when Americans could use a few laughs to help a lot of bad medicine go down, we have lost one of our wisest wits. Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux who authored more than 20 books about the Native American experience, died Sunday in Golden, Colo. He was 72 and recently was hospitalized with an aortic aneurysm. If his name does not spring quickly out of your memory, maybe you have heard of his most famous book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good. - the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Her feet were not tired. At least, no more so than usual. She always hated that legend, so let us, in this, the week after her death at age 92, set the record straight. And while we're at it, let's correct another misconception: It's not precisely true that she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The seats next to her and across the aisle were empty, vacated by black people who had already heeded the bus driver's command to get up. So there were places for the white man to sit. But under the segregation statutes of Montgomery, Ala., no white man was expected to suffer the indignity of sitting next to a black woman or even across from her. So driver J. F. Blake asked again.

YOU HAVE TO hand it to that Jesse Jackson: A dull guy, he ain't. Jackson was this year's keynote speaker at Johns Hopkins' 23rd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration yesterday. For most of his one-hour speech, he was the perfect man for the job. He preached. He taught. He scolded -- mostly conservatives, Republicans and the Bush administration. He cautioned his listeners not to focus so much on King's dream but on "the broken promise of the U.S. government that inspired the dream and made it necessary."

BLOCK ISLAND, R.I. -- There was a time when this island off the coast of Rhode Island was closer to the news of the day, more critically engaged in momentous events. But it was a long time ago. Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian explorer, is said to have noted the place around 1524 and named it Claudia, honoring the mother of France's King Francis I. But he didn't bother setting foot on the island. This probably suited its Indian inhabitants just fine, as their later encounters with the white man were not happy.