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Pity is a Four-Letter Word
“One thing we’re going to vote on is a revolution!” Deep-felt cheers erupt from the convention crowd. “Resolution” is the word that T.J. Monroe wanted. But revolution, really, is more like it. Monroe and the 300 people in the hotel ballroom are retarded
Help for Strangers in a Strange Land
In an upcoming NBC television movie, a black youth from Harlem graduates from Phillips Exeter Academy with honors. Three weeks later, he is shot to death by an undercover police officer who alleges the young man tried to rob him. The film is
The Devastating Power of Racial Belligerence
Sonny Carson is not the best known or even the most disruptive of New York’s freelance “black activists,” but he has proved the most painful thorn in David Dinkins’side. The two men’s names were first linked in the public’s mind in August 1989,
The New Enemy in Guatemala
The signs are visible everywhere in Guatemala. Newspapers carry frequent accounts of grisly execution-style murders. Immigration authorities report a surge in the entry of Colombian nationals. Deluxe apartment buildings and office complexes rise dramatically on the outskirts of Guatemala City. A newly chartered
Forging Controversy: Polluting the Amazon Rain Forest with Factories, Old and New
Acailandia, Brazil-On an August day in the Amazon, when the earth is brown and parched, you can smell this sprawling frontier settlement long before you arrive. Even as the train heaves towards the distant stop, the acrid aroma of charcoal is every where,
Forcing the Young into Nursing Homes
Photos and text by Joseph P. Shapiro. Jeff Gunderson’s voice is choked with worry. He is about to reenter the place he calls “the concentration camp.” It is a nursing home, one of two where Gunderson, who has cerebral palsy, was sent from
Importing Girls to Integrate a Connecticut Public School
Ridgefield, CT-The cute Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx perched atop her bunk bed in a boarding house and pondered her ambivalence toward this affluent, mostly white town where she attends school. Ana Negron, 17, delighted in the academically challenging school. She adored
Faces of the Anguished Middle East
APF Fellow James Lukoski has made several trips to the Middle East, focusing on Israeli-Palestinian issues. These photographs illustrate some of the tensions in the West Bank and Jerusalem and were taken before the U.S. declared war on Iraq. The funerals of two
Intolerance on Campus
After taping the poster announcing the spring activities of the black student association to his door in Wright Hall, Timothy Rey had gone to sleep around one o’clock that Saturday morning, his freshman year at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. When he
Gay Politics
Photos by Marc Geller NEW YORK-The walls of the elevator were polished mahogany. Inside stood four people. A somewhat severe elderly woman in a business suit was coming home at day’s end. An unmistakably wealthy gentleman with a maroon silk ascot and yellowish
“The Gift of the Indus”
If any one place deserves to be called the birthplace of modern irrigation, that place is the Punjab, a sandy triangle of pancake-flat alluvium where India’s British rulers built the first of their 46 “canal colonies” in 1849. The first colony consisted of
Hard Rows: The Amazon after Chico Mendes
SERINGAL CACHOEIRA, BRAZIL–It doesn’t look much like a battlefield. A huddle of wooden huts raised on stilts crowns a grassy knoll. Tidy dirt paths stitch the way between the houses. Lush orange trees dot the hill, throwing deep shadows, and at the crest,
Climbing Society’s Mountains – The Disability Rights Movement Arrives
Back home in Austin, Texas, Bob Kafka and Randy Jennings usually fight each other. Yet both came to Washington the same week leading delegations of Texans to lobby for passage of a civil rights bill for disabled people. They shared the same goal,
Clearing a Path from the Ghetto to Choate
In Judith Berry Griffin’s office on Boston Common, a watercolor called The People Could Fly hangs on the wall. It portrays blacks of every age and size taking to the sky like birds. As president of ABC: A Better Chance, Inc., Griffin’s job
The Palestinian Revolt: New Miseries in an Endless Feud
WEST BANK–Well into its third year, the most recent Israel/Palestinian conflict continues to grind along unrelentingly. Israel’s control of the 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is maintained through military occupation, provoking an internal political and moral debate
The Push for Diversity in America’s White Male Faculties
Until recently, the broad debate over race relations at the nation’s colleges and universities focused largely on students. No longer. Pushed by a series of dramatic events during the past year, that often fractious discussion has now expanded to include those who teach
Cold War Resartus
Whether or not the endless winter of menace known as the Cold War is actually over, it already seems bracketed in history. At the beginning was competition between Washington and Moscow for politico-economic control of a destitute Europe, lethalized by the spread of
Gypsy Liberation In Hungary
Text and Photos by Victoria Pope MISKOLC, Hungary–On streets without names, collapsed sheds circle the slag-heaps of the metal factory. Pigeons coo among the refuse. When dawn breaks, the wake-up sounds of coughing and coal-shoveling echo through the treeless hinterland. The gypsy community
A Contra Rampage–With Blessings from the United States
The October 1983 attack by U.S.-financed contra rebels on the northern Nicaraguan town of Pantasma was, militarily, a brilliant surprise strike, a classic town takeover, one of the few that the rebel forces ever achieved. It was also one of the single most
“A Flood From Below”: The Downfall of Irrigation
SHEPPARTON, Victoria, Australia–When spring came to the Riverine Plain of northern Victoria in September 1989, Peter Avram’s peach orchard slowly awakened and burst into leaf, just as it always had before. Peter Avram, a peach grower in Victoria, examines trees killed by rising