Bones Hooks’ “Apartheid” Vision; Erykah Badu’s Stunt; Afflicting the Comfortable
by L. Arthalia Cravin

This website has garnered plenty of recent commentary about the newly installed sidewalks on North Hughes Street. Some of these comments have raised the question “Who Killed North Heights?” We need to put all of these concerns into historical perspective.

A couple of weeks ago I visited Bones Hooks’ gravesite. Mr. Hooks is buried in Llano Cemetery here in Amarillo, Section 61, Lot 11 near 34th Street. I followed the directions given to me by the main office and found my way through section after section until I found Section 61. What caught my attention first was the stark contrast between the area where Mr. Hooks is buried compared to the landscaping and large headstones and monuments in other nearby areas. I found Mr. Hooks’ grave site amid a very desolate- looking section of scattered flat gravestones, most of which were simple brick markers. Mr. Hooks’ gravestone has the name “Hooks” in the center, along with his name and the name of his first wife Anna. It was after I read Bruce Todd’s book, “Bones Hooks: Pioneer Negro Cowboy” that I fully understood where Mr. Hooks is buried. On page 99 of Todd’s book there is this sentence. “Bones was fifty-two when Anna died (at the age of thirty-nine.) She was buried in the segregated section of the Llano Cemetery, where Bones had his own plot prepared right besides hers.”

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Consumer Beware!! StoresOnline Coming to Amarillo
by L. Arthalia Cravin

Yesterday someone contacted me about an invitation they had received to attend one of two StoresOnline seminars to be held in Amarillo on Friday April 9th at the Fifth Season’s Inn and Suites, and Saturday April 10, 2010. I was asked to make a legal evaluation of what these people were offering a couple of years ago in Colorado Springs. I attended one of their Colorado Springs seminars and was sufficiently concerned to now offer this advice. Whoever is planning to attend the Amarillo seminars should do so with caution. What is StoresOnline?

Stores Online is a type of Internet marketing business with corporate offices in Orem, Utah. In a sentence they provide seminars around the country and world (according to them) to convince people that they can make money from selling on the Internet. The Amarillo invitation uses the same format as that of Colorado Springs. It includes an 800 number to call to make reservations for “limited” seating. Similar to two years ago, there was a promise of a free lunch, free admission, free gifts, (a Free MP3 player) but look out for the asterisk* next to the free gift, and a free Dell computer drawing—also with an asterisk*.

When I attended the seminar in Colorado Springs I took a front row then proceeded to watch the sales pitch unfold. What unfolded on the screen was a video of a big fancy house, fancy cars in the driveway, the “picture perfect” lovely family, and lovely sandy beaches. The video also included lots of testimony from individuals already in the program about “freedom” and wealth, or at least enough to do a pitch suggesting that those in attendance should seriously consider coming aboard. (Hey, you can quit your day job if you really want to.) The entire seminar is carefully scripted with various “top sales” people “working the room.” They are careful to avoid direct questions from the general audience, insisting instead that questions be held until the small group break-outs. Read more »

Book Review: “The Secret of “The Secret” by Karen Kelly
by L. Arthalia Cravin

“The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne was published in 2007 and became an instant best seller. It started out as a documentary by an Australian TV producer who then followed with a book using the same name. “The secret” is about the law of attraction, which is based on the concept that you can reach any goal, acquire anything you want, and attain perfect health by thinking positive thoughts about whatever your heart desires. The sub-text of “the secret” is “like attracts like” and that by thinking negatively you attract negativity to you. The book had the largest single re-print in history—2 million copies. It sold almost 4 million copies, not including the audio and DVD version of the book. Kelly’s book, tries to demystify why so many people bought the book and what was “the secret” people were searching for—or found.

Kelly’s last chapter entitled, “Are We a “Secret” Society?” says this: “Put aside the slick packaging and brilliant marketing, scientific claims and psychological theory—and at the end of the day “The Secret” is about the pursuit of happiness. She says that not only Americans, but that people all over the world from the beginning of time have sought happiness, and they have tried every formula, proscription, affirmation, and ritual to find it. “The Secret” is simply another formula for attaining the things (money, fame, power) that people think will bring them happiness and contentment.

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Book Review
by L. Arthalia Cravin

“Good Guys and Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes With the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business (And Everything in Between)” by Joe Nocera

Joe Nocera is a business columnist having written for esteemed publications such as The New York Times, Fortune, and Texas Monthly. He has earned numerous awards for his excellence in business journalism. His first book was entitled, “A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, published in 1994. “Good Guys and Bad Guys,” published in 2008, is a compilation of Nocera’s columns for various magazines. The first chapter entitled, “It’s Time to Make a Deal,” written in 1982 for Texas Monthly, is about former Amarilloan, T. Boone Pickens. Oddly, the last chapter of the book entitled, “Return of the Raider, written in 2002 for Fortune Magazine, is also about Pickens.

Nocera’s “Good Guys and Bad Guys” is a book worth reading, and rereading. Nocera not only knows the inside of a wide array of businesses, and business deals and debacles, he has gotten sufficiently close to the key players to unravel their personal stories. Nocera has been granted the type of access to the minds of business “movers and shakers” that few journalists have ever gotten. For example, Nocera takes us inside Apple Computers. His interviews with Steve Jobs give us a peek inside Jobs’ head when the idea of a personal computer market was first conceived as a business venture. Nocera then tracks Jobs’ successes and failures as an inventor and a business man—yes, Jobs failed and failed mightily during his early years. It is through Nocera’s early insights into Jobs that we can appreciate Jobs recent comeback after his bout with cancer.

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Emmett Smith’s Journey: Who Did He Think He Was?
by L. Arthalia Cravin

Last Friday night I fell into a chair in the den and watched television, primarily because television puts me to sleep. This time it didn’t because I happened to have the channel on NBC when a new show called “Who Do You Think You Are?” came on. I decided to keep watching as soon as Emmett Smith came on talking about a long-standing desire to trace his ancestral roots.

A few years ago I attended a seminar in Denver hosted by Dr. Rick Kittles, a Ph. D. biologist who specializes in human genetic, and learned first-hand what Dr. Kittles does—and why. Dr. Kittles is a pioneer in the area of tracing the ancestry of African Americans through DNA testing. Dr. Kittles grew up in Central Islip, New York received his B. S. in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989, then earned an M.S. degree in biology from the State University of New York at Brockport (1991) and a Ph.D. in biology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (1998). I became interested in Dr. Kittles’ work because of a probate case that I was working on involving the rights of inheritance. Briefly, Mr. D an African American man, died in Alabama in 1995 without a will. Mr. D’s sister filed a petition in probate to have her brother’s estate administered and to be named the administrator. Shortly after the will was filed, a California man filed a petition to determine heirship claiming to be the out-of-wedlock, only child of Mr. D. Mr. D’s sister denied that her brother had any children and fought the claim of heirship by the California man. The central question became how to prove that the California man was in fact the biological son of Mr. D. It was this case that opened my eyes to DNA research. I contacted Dr. Kittles to find out how to prove that the man was Mr. D’s biological child when there was no DNA available on the father’s side—only the mother’s side.

DNA is the abbreviation for deoxlyribonnucleic acid. Scientific work involving DNA research is called “the science of the genome—the combined words “gene” and “chromosome.” Genome research, which has been going on since the 1970s, is the science of unraveling how hereditary information is encoded in one’s DNA. The research is actually called “mapping or sequencing the human genome.” It is one’s DNA that contains the genetic information that is inherited by the offspring. It is undisputed that the DNA on the “Y” chromosome, which only men have, passes virtually unchanged from father to son. The same goes for the mitochondrial or female DNA (females do not have the “Y” chromosome) that passes through the female line. So in brief, when someone seeks to determine their ancestral roots using DNA, they are mapping their human genome through either the male side or the female side of the family. I later wrote a 272 page book about the probate of Mr. D’s and another estate to inform people about the ins and outs of probate. Chapter 26 on page 210 is entitled, “Illegitimates and Inheritance,” which discusses proving paternity, is included in the book because there are special problems associated with claiming rights of heirship for children born out of wedlock.

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You Have to “Sell Yourself”- Ho Ho Ho!! Beware Your Diction - Choice of Words
by L. Arthalia Cravin

We already heard about the Australian ban on Santa Claus’ use of the “Ho Ho Ho” laugh because it might offend some the local street walkers. I have an example that tops that.

Not too long ago an Amarillo AISD substitute teacher found himself in hot water for talking about careers and jobs and telling some Palo Duro high school students they needed to know how to “sell themselves.” Some of the students went straight to the principal and reported the sub for suggesting that they become streetwalkers and prostitutes.

The word “diction” has several meanings, including “style of speaking or writing as dependent upon choice of words” and “the accent, inflection, intonation, and speech-sound quality manifested by an individual speaker, usually judged in terms of prevailing standards of acceptability.” One has to be very careful these days about one’s diction—especially one’s choice of words. It has gotten a lot of people in trouble lately, including Harry Reid for his unfortunately “light skinned Negro” comment about President Obama, and Rahm Emanual’s “retarded” comment about disabled children.

I am not a big Jeff Foxworthy fan but some of his jokes are truly funny. For example, Jeff says that nowadays when a person yells “crack” in a crowded room, the response will be men pulling their pants up. Well, maybe not so funny, but you get the point of what listeners hear based on their milieu (environment.) So for those who are unfamiliar with the job acquisition skill of “selling yourself,” it should not come as a stretch that a high school student would misinterpret the intended meaning.

Over and above the diction issue my question is this: How does the average high school student today expect to get a job after high school—especially those who will not be furthering their education? When I started working in high school, right here in Amarillo, I had already been told how to dress and act if I wanted to get a job, namely, 1) show up early for the job interview, don’t be late, 2) dress appropriately, no low cut blouses or very short skirts, 3) be neat and clean, especially hair and fingernails, 4) don’t chew gum, 5) speak good grammar, 6) smile, sit up straight, and look the employer in the eye, 7) sell yourself, that is, tell the employer about your skills set and why you, of all the candidates, should be given the job, and smile and thank the interviewer when it is over.

Pretty soon many of the current crop of high school seniors will be graduating and entering an already bleak job market. For those not going on to college or entering the military, what type of jobs can they expect to find? What exactly do they have to offer to meet the average employer’s needs in today job market? What have they learned in high school that prepares them for jobs right out of high school? Better put, how will these seniors “sell themselves” to their prospective employers?

Copyright 2010 - L. Arthalia Cravin. All rights Reserved. No part of this commentary may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Iraq and Amarillo—What’s the difference when it comes to representative government?
by L. Arthalia Cravin

If you have been watching the news lately, you know that the tyrannical form of government under the former, now deceased president Saddam Hussein, no longer exists. Yesterday, March 7, Iraqi voters in Baghdad began the process of casting their votes in the country’s parliamentary elections. Iraq is the home of approximately 28 million people. Those qualified to vote cast their ballots among 6200 people running for 325 parliamentary seats covering the eighteen Iraqi provinces. This year’s vote is the country’s second full-term legislature since America invaded the country in 2003. The first national election was held in 2005. We are familiar with the recent suicide bombings and raining mortal shells designed to stop the democratic process. But Iraqis are determined to forged ahead to move the country toward what they understand democracy to mean—namely the right of the people to vote directly for their representatives. Part of the electoral process includes a “quota” guaranteeing women at least 25 percent of the parliamentary seats. Uh, wasn’t it George Bush who exploited the term “quota” as a bad thing during his last campaign for re-election? But to the point of this column.

So far Iraqi voters have it better than Amarillo voters. Why? Because the city of Amarillo is governed by a commissioner form of government that most cities have abandoned because of real concerns that it violates the Voting Rights Act. By way of Texas civics awareness, Texas has 254 counties and some 4700 local governments. These cities and towns range in size from large cities such as Houston and Dallas, with populations exceeding 1 million, to small towns of fewer than 1000 people. How these cities and towns handle the wide range of issues affecting them depends on how the town is classified vis-a-vis the Texas Constitution as either “home rule,” or “general law” cities.

Amarillo is Texas’ 15th largest city with a population of 173,627. Based on the 2000 and 2006 census demographics, Amarillo is 63.6 percent white, 26.9 percent Latino, 6.5 percent black, and 1.9 percent Asian. In 1990 Amarillo’s population was 157,615; 82.7 percent white, 14.7 Latino, 6.0 percent black, and Asian 1.9 percent. In 1913, Amarillo became the first Texas city and the fifth in the United States to use the so-called Galveston Plan, a city commission form of government that originated in Galveston after the devastating hurricane of 1900. This type of city government combines the legislative and administrative functions into the offices of five city commissioners. Amarillo’s commission is composed of five elected commissioners, one of whom is the mayor of the city. The mayor and each commissioner serve a two-year term. Amarillo’s current form of city management harkens back to its so-called homogeneous origins in 1870 when it was known as “Ragtown” for the rag-tag bunch of workers who set up camp along side the then Ft. Worth and Denver City railroad tracks. Back then the town was 99.7 percent white. When the commission form of government was adopted in 1913, Amarillo’s population was around 15,000, and approximately 97 percent white. In 1930, Amarillo’s population soared to 43,000 with a black population up from 300 to 1600. I do not have the precise data on the Latino population in the 1930s, however, my black neighbor, who came to Amarillo in 1924, remembers a sizeable Latino population in the 1920s.

Fast forward to 2010 and even the late Ray Charles can see problems with a continuing form of Amarillo city government that does not recognize the voices and community needs of its divergent population, nor provide any incentive for direct participatory government. Read more »

Books Reviews
by L. Arthalia Cravin

Last week I read two books that might be of interest. The first book was entitled, “Same Kind of Different as Me,” by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. It was published in 2006. The book is written with alternating chapters of two writers, one white, the other black. Both men grew up in Navarro County, not far from Corsicana during the late 1950s and early 60s. The early setting for the book was of particular interest to me because my maternal grandparents migrated to Frost, Texas, about 30 miles from Corsicana, about this same time to work as sharecroppers, picking and chopping “Blackland” cotton. I actually lived in Frost, Texas from 1959 to 1962 with my sharecropper grandparents and pulled cotton from many of the long, crocked rows, of cotton patches that surrounded the two-room share-cropper shack we lived in. I could identify well with Denver Moore’s story about working from “can’t to can’t” (can’t see in the morning to can’t see in the evening,”) being paid 50 cents an hours for working in the cotton fields, the outright racism, and never getting any money because of the “company store,” practice of always keeping sharecroppers in debt. Even though I was only 8 or 9 at the time, I fully understood how Denver Moore grew up and why he eventually landed in Angola Prison in Louisiana, how he hopped a freight train to California, then wound up at a Mission in Ft Worth. It was Ron Hall’s story that was so different from mine and Denver Moore’s upbringing.

Ron Hall went to college, then became a wealthy art dealer, making more money on one art deal that my all my ancestors combined could ever dream of making. His lived the typical privileged life of a white man. The kicker is how Hall eventually crossed paths with Denver Moore at a Ft. Worth Mission orchestrated by and through Ron’s Hall devoutly Christian wife Deborah who urged him to get involved with helping the poor. As the story unfolds these two men, from miles-apart social and economic backgrounds, eventually meet and begin a friendship. The friendship lasts through the death of Deborah from cancer– and beyond. The story of their meeting, their different lives, their sameness, and continuing friendship led to a book well worth the read.

Ron Hall and Denver Moore will be in Amarillo for a book signing on April 7th and 8th so mark you calendars. Read more »

Dear God, Please Don’t Let Mo’Nique Win an Oscar
by L. Arthalia Cravin

The last first-run movie I saw was “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” I saw it in 1993 in Los Angeles at a theater on Hollywood Blvd. Angela Bassett didn’t win an Oscar but she should have for playing the multi-faceted and complicated role of Tina Turner. I chose not to watch the movie “Precious” although I read lots of reviews. One review said that Precious included every stereotype about black folks imaginable including, eating greasy fried chicken, incest, absent fathers, out of wedlock births, extremely vulgar head-rag wearing black women, abusive mothers competing with daughters over the same man, rampant community illiteracy, lazy trifling black men, obesity, cursing and verbal abuse, bullying, child abuse, lack of proper mothering of children, just to name a few. One review said that “Precious” made D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” look like a good movie about black folks. On the other hand there are those who claim that “Precious” brought the issue of familial sexual molestation out into the open to help free so many who were living in shame or dark closets about this type of abuse. Many others say that it is the Oprah, Tyler Perry production money that has pushed an otherwise bad movie up the ladder to at least five Oscar nominations.

Whatever anyone thinks of Precious as racist stereotyping or as “art imitating life,” it is up for Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actress (Gabourey Sidibe); Best Supporting Actress (Mo’Nique), Best Director (Lee Daniels); Best Film Editing (Joe Klotz), and Best Writing-Adaptation of a Book to a Screenplay ( Geoffrey Fletcher). I just don’t want Mo’Nique to win best supporting actress because she is one out of control, don’t know what to say, or how to say it with style and grace, open-mouth-insert foot actress. And I am being kind.

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Steppin’ “White Sisters”
by L. Arthalia Cravin

The air waves are abuzz since a white sorority from the University of Arkansas chapter of Zeta Tau Alpha, a predominantly white sorority, won the inaugural Sprite Step Off stepping competition, beating two predominantly black sororities. The contest was held on February 20, 2010 in Fayetteville, Arkansas and the first place prize was $100,000. After giving the “white sisters” first place, the sponsor acknowledged some type of discrepancies in judging and ordered that the first place prize be shared with the top black sorority.

The ongoing debate, including a whole slew of blogs and commentary, is over the fairness of judging the step moves, whether a white sorority should have been allowed to enter in the first place, and whether a traditional black form of sorority and fraternity initiation has been diminished, or compromised, after what the “white sisters” did.

The various and sundry blogs and commentary have ranged from judging’ bias and fascination with the white women, thus giving them the first prize, a type of reverse discrimination, to “who invited them anyhow?” Either way, the “white steppers” will be steppin’ some more real soon in an upcoming MTV program of some type. All of which points to the real reasons for the underlying rancor.

I attended Texas Southern University in Houston from 1965 to 1967, then went to the U of Wisconsin in Madison for a year of exchange student study. Before leaving TSU, I pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority. I was “on the line” for all of three weeks before I took that little pot of ivy plant and told them where to stick it. Part of my disenchantment with having pledged a sorority was my basic aloneness. I was never a groupie. So, within a week of pledging, I realized that a lot of what was required was not for me. I could not see myself washing some “big sisters” underwear, and engaging in a lot of other demeaning “on the line” groupie activities, including step dancing before a large boisterous crowd in TSU’s “The Pit.”

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