Free Gray Lady Down by William McGowan Page B

Board of Education case, for instance, was not an occasion to celebrate for Adam Cohen, an editorial writer who instead wondered if the civil rights situation in America had become even worse. A 2005 report on the number of African immigrants coming to America—more than in the days of slavery, according to the reporter, Sam Roberts—allowed Howard Dodson, a radical activist at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to assert that
“Basically, people are coming to reclaim the wealth that’s been taken from their countries.”
    To a large degree, the Times’ reporting and commentary on contemporary racial developments seems based on William Faulkner’s famous comment that the past is never dead, it isn’t even past. For example, voter identification laws in states like Georgia, Missouri and Indiana have been referred to editorially as the functional equivalent of an “illegal poll tax.” According to the editorial writer Brent Staples, disqualification of convicted felons from voting “recalls the early U.S. under slavery” and is no different from tools used to limit the political power of emancipated slaves in the Jim Crow era.
    Some of the stories on hate crimes against blacks that have appeared in the Times are deserving of the coverage, like the death of James Byrd, a Texas black man who was dragged behind a truck by racist whites in 1998, and a similar case in 2008. Yet in many other cases, the paper has been suckered by people who are perpetrating a scam or indulging in propaganda.
    In October 2007, the Times got caught up in a racial hoax—as it had several times in the 1990s—because it was eager to break news of rampant white racism. The story involved the discovery of a four-foot-long hangman’s noose on the doorknob of a black professor’s office at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The victim was Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, whose specialty is race, racial identity, multiculturalism and racial justice. The noose was particularly upsetting for Teachers College, which prides itself as “a bastion of liberalism and multiculturalism.” The local police said that their hate-crimes unit had mounted a full investigation, including testing the rope for DNA. The Department of Justice opened an investigation.
    Professor Constantine called the episode “an unbelievably blatant act of racism,” telling about two hundred supporters who had gathered outside Teachers College that she would not be intimidated. “I want to let the perpetrator know that I will not be silenced.” The Times gave ample space to accusations of racism. “This incident really gives you a new perspective on the state of race relations in this country,” said Michael J. Feyen, a doctoral
student at Teachers College. Another student insisted to the Times that “It’s the latest and maybe most visible and extreme case of a climate of racism that we face in our entire society but of course is manifested at Columbia as well.”
    Yet the more street-smart New York Post and Daily News, citing unnamed sources, said the noose might have been the result of an academic dispute with a rival professor, who was white, which had led Constantine to file a lawsuit in May 2007 charging her with defamation. The investigation mounted by the Hate Crime Task Force of the New York Police Department yielded few leads or clues. But in June 2008, more than a year after the incident, the Times was forced to reveal that the university had fired Constantine after what was reported to have been an eighteen-month investigation found that charges of plagiarism against her were accurate. According to the school, Constantine had lifted material from two former students and a former colleague prior to the noose incident. In fact, Columbia had sanctioned the professor in February, but allowed her to stay in her job to appeal the ruling. Columbia, however, had never released that information, and the