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Recalling Green Book, Guide for Black Travelers
The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All
By CELIA McGEE
For almost three decades beginning in 1936, many African-American travelers relied on a booklet to help them decide where they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor, shop on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, or go out at night. In 1949, when the guide was 80 pages, there were five recommended hotels in Atlanta. In Cheyenne, Wyo., the Barbeque Inn was the place to stay.
A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome. Over time its full title — “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” — became abbreviated, simply, as the “Green Book.” Those who needed to know about it knew about it. To much of the rest of America it was invisible, and by 1964, when the last edition was published, it slipped through the cracks into history.
Until he met a friend’s elderly father-in-law at a funeral a few years ago, the Atlanta writer Calvin Alexander Ramsey had never heard of the guide. But he knew firsthand the reason it existed. During his family trips between Roxboro, N.C., and Baltimore, “we packed a big lunch so my parents didn’t have to worry about having to stop somewhere that might not serve us,” recalled Mr. Ramsey, who is now 60.
He is among the writers, artists, academics and curators returning a spotlight to the guide and its author, emblematic as it was of a period when black Americans — especially professionals, salesmen, entertainers and athletes — were increasingly on the move for work, play and family visits.
In addition to hotels, the guide often pointed them to “tourist homes,” privates residences made available by their African-American owners. Mr. Ramsey has written a play, “The Green Book,” about just such a home, in Jefferson City, Mo., where a black military officer and his wife and a Jewish Holocaust survivor all spend the night just before W. E. B. DuBois is scheduled to deliver a speech in town. The play will inaugurate a staged-reading series on Sept. 15 at the restored Lincoln Theater in Washington, itself once a fixture of that city’s “black Broadway” on U Street.
Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who is now a faculty member at American University, will take on a cameo role. Mr. Bond recalled that his parents — his father, a college professor, became the first black president of Lincoln University, in southern Pennsylvania — used the book. “It was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat,” he said, “but where there was any place.”
In November, Carolrhoda Books will release Mr. Ramsey’s “Ruth and the Green Book,” a children’s book with illustrations by the award-winning artist Floyd Cooper. It tells the story of a girl from Chicago in the 1950s and what she learns as she and her parents, driving their brand-new car to visit her grandmother in rural Alabama, finally luck into a copy of Victor Green’s guide. “Most kids today hear about the Underground Railroad, but this other thing has gone unnoticed,” said Mr. Ramsey. “It just fell on me, really, to tell the story.”
Historians of travel have recognized that the great American road trip — seen as an ultimate sign of freedom — was not that free for many Americans, including those who had to worry about “sunset laws” in towns where black visitors had to be out by day’s end.
For a large swath of the nation’s history “the American democratic idea of getting out on the open road, finding yourself, heading for distant horizons was only a privilege for white people,” said Cotton Seiler, the author of “Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America,” who devoted a chapter of his book to the experience of black travelers.
William Daryl Williams, the director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati, in 2007 organized a traveling exhibition he called “The Dresser Trunk Project,” in which he and 11 other architects and artists used the “Green Book” to inform works that incorporated locations and artifacts from the history of black travel during segregation. Mr. Williams’s own piece, “Whitelaw Hotel,” referred to a well-known accommodation for African-Americans in Washington and included several pages from the “Green Book.”
Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a co-sponsor of “The Green Book” play reading, said the presence of the guide into the 1960s pointed out that at the same time people were countering segregation with sit-ins, the need to cope with everyday life remained.
He added: “The ‘Green Book’ tried to provide a tool to deal with those situations. It also allowed families to protect their children, to help them ward off those horrible points at which they might be thrown out or not permitted to sit somewhere. It was both a defensive and a proactive mechanism.”
Although Victor Green’s initial edition only encompassed metropolitan New York, the “Green Book” soon expanded to Bermuda (white dinner jackets were recommended for gentlemen), Mexico and Canada. The 15,000 copies Green eventually printed each year were sold as a marketing tool not just to black-owned businesses but to the white marketplace, implying that it made good economic sense to take advantage of the growing affluence and mobility of African Americans. Esso stations, unusual in franchising to African Americans, were a popular place to pick one up.
Mr. Bunch said he believes African American families are likely still have old copies sitting in attics and basements: “As segregation ended, people put such things away. They felt they didn’t need them anymore. It brought a sense of psychological liberation.”
Theater J in Washington, which specializes in Jewish-theme plays, is a co-producer of “The Green Book” reading. The “inconveniences” (as Green genteelly put it) of travel that African-Americans encountered were shared, albeit to a lesser extent and for a briefer period, by American Jews. In Mr. Ramsey’s play the Holocaust survivor comes to the tourist home after he’s appalled by a “No Negroes Allowed” sign posted in the lobby of the local hotel where he had planned to stay.
“The Jewish press has long published information about places that are restricted,” Green wrote in his book’s introduction, adding, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”
The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and Mr. Green ceased publication.
Proposed Muslim Center Draws Opposing Protests
Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.
Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student’s face.
One man, his cheeks red, leaned in and hissed that if the police were not present, Mr. Rose would be in danger.
Before any threats could be carried out, the police intervened, dragged Mr. Rose away from the crowd and insisted that he return to the separate area, one block away, where supporters of the project had been asked to stand.
Minutes later, as Mr. Rose was still shaking off the encounter, he turned to find the red-cheeked man back at his side. The man had followed the student up the street, and the two now stared at each other for a tense moment.
Then the man stuck out a hand and, in a terse voice, said, “I’m sorry.”
“You have a right,” he told Mr. Rose. (He would not give his name.) “I am sorry for what I said to you. I disagree with you completely, but you have a right.”
The dual protests on Sunday, against and for the Islamic center, part of a complex on Park Place called Park51, had taunts, tensions and the occasional minor scuffle. Around 500 opponents of the mosque stood in a cordoned-off area, singing patriotic songs and speaking of a hijacked Constitution, while about 200 supporters held a counterprotest nearby.
As the rallies went on in Lower Manhattan, one of the main organizers of the Islamic center, Daisy Khan, said in a televised interview that the opposition to the plan was akin to discrimination against Jews.
“This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism,” Ms. Khan said on the ABC morning program “This Week.”
“That’s what we feel right now. It’s not even Islamophobia; it’s beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims, and we are deeply concerned,” she said.
But Sunday’s exchange of words, although harsh at times, never led to blows or other violence. No arrests or injuries were reported by the authorities.
“The rain was the biggest problem,” a spokesman for the police said.
That calm prevailed, in a charged atmosphere two blocks north of ground zero, was due in large part to a sizable and wary police deployment. Dozens of officers kept watch and aggressively stopped members of either side from approaching the other.
Those efforts did not keep activists like Mr. Rose from trying. He said he had waded into the opposing crowd “to get a better sense of what the protesters were saying or thinking.”
Was he surprised by their message? Mr. Rose shook his head. “There was nothing that Newt Gingrich isn’t saying,” he said.
But in interviews, some protesters said they had arrived not to advance a political agenda, but to express their belief that the center’s organizers had ignored the interests of the public.
“I’m upset at how this whole thing was handled,” said Dominick DeRubbio, 25, nephew of David P. DeRubbio, a firefighter who died in the World Trade Center. “The level of defiance is running high. They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this whether you like it or not.’ ”
Other protesters insisted that while they supported religious freedoms, the location of the planned Islamic center was an incursion on the rights of those who deemed ground zero a hallowed space.
“It’s a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site,” said Kali Costas, who said she was a member of the Tea Party.
The Littlest Redshirts Sit Out Kindergarten
AFTER all those attentive early childhood rituals — the flashcards, the Kumon, the Dora the Explorer, the mornings spent in cutting-edge playgrounds — who wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally time to set off for school?
Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Outliers" about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”
Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new. “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of waning.
In 2008, the most recent year for which census data is available, 17 percent of children were 6 or older when they entered the kindergarten classroom. Sand tables have been replaced by worksheets to a degree that’s surprising even by the standards of a decade ago. Blame it on No Child Left Behind and the race to get children test-ready by third grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many educators put it, “the new first grade.”
What once seemed like an aberration — something that sparked fierce dinner party debates — has come to seem like the norm. But that doesn’t make it any easier for parents.
“We agonized over it all year,” said Rachel Tayse Baillieul, a food educator in Columbus, Ohio, where the cutoff date is Oct. 1. Children whose birthdates fall later must wait until the next year to start school. But her daughter, Lillian, 4, was born five days before, on Sept. 25, which would make her one of the youngest in the class.
With the wide age spans in kindergarten classrooms, each new generation of preschool parents must grapple with where exactly to slot their children. Wiggly, easily distracted and less mature, boys are more likely to be held back than girls, but delayed enrollment is now common for both sexes.
“Technically, Lillian could go to kindergarten,” Ms. Tayse Baillieul said. Moving her up from part-time preschool would allow Ms. Tayse Baillieul to return to work and earn income. But Lillian’s preschool teachers counseled her to hold Lillian back. “They said staying in preschool a year longer will probably never hurt and will probably always help, especially with social and emotional development.”
Regardless, a classroom with an 18-month age spread will create social disparities. “Someone has to be the youngest in class,” pointed out Susan Messina, a 46-year-old mother in Washington. “No matter how you slice it.” When Clare, her daughter, who is now 9, entered kindergarten at 4, Ms. Messina was aware of widespread redshirting.
“I thought, I’m not breaking the rules, I’m not pushing her ahead, we’re doing exactly what we’re supposed to do,” she said. “Then it dawned on me that in this day and age, there’s a move to keep your brilliant angel in preschool longer so they could be smarter and taller for the basketball team. But my daughter doesn’t need a leg up. She’s fine.”
Still, it bothers her that children in the same class are as much as a year and a half older than Clare. “She has friends who are 11 who are going to get their periods this year, and she’s still playing with American Girl dolls.” Another mother complained that her 4-year-old became hooked on Hannah Montana by her aspiring-tween classmates. A 6-year-old wielding a light saber can be awfully intimidating to a boy who still sleeps with his teddy.
At the other tip of the age span, parents who promote children to kindergarten before 5 are often seen as pushy, “even ogre-ish,” Ms. Messina said. But suppose your child is already reading at 4? Do you hold her back where she may be bored to tears in preschool or send her into a classroom of hulking 6-year-old boys? In 1970, 14.4 percent of kindergartners started at age 4. That figure has dropped to less than 10 percent.
The self-esteem movement has inspired parents to care as much about emotional well-being as academic achievement, and with fragile self-images still in the making, the worst fear for parents is setting up their children for failure. One Connecticut mother in Fairfield County sent her October-born son to kindergarten at 4, despite “the informal rule of thumb that everyone holds back their September to December boys.” Kindergarten seemed to go well, but when her son entered first grade, she said, “I got hit over the head. They told me he was way behind.”
She watched in horror as her son’s self-confidence tanked. “He was spinning his wheels just to keep up,” she recalled. “He even got pulled out of class for poor handwriting.” At the end of a miserable second-grade year, she withdrew him to repeat the grade at a private school. “It’s been a long and difficult journey,” she said. “I totally regret starting him on kindergarten at 4.”
Many parents feel compelled to redshirt by what they see as unreasonable academic demands for 4- and 5-year-olds. But keeping children in preschool, according to both academic research and parental experience, doesn’t necessarily offer every advantage. Jennifer Harrison, a mother of two from Folsom, Calif., held her October-born son, Elliott, back so he “wouldn’t get labeled as out of control.” Over all, she said, it was the right decision. “But his math skills are far above those of his classmates.”
How to attend to a child’s myriad needs, and which should be the priority? “There don’t seem to be any rules,” said Rebecca Meekma, a mother of two from Laguna Beach, Calif. “People are saying, ‘I want him to be big in high school for sports!’ What is that? You can’t know who they’ll be in high school.”
And what about children who aren’t Leo the Late Bloomer? “I have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that right? Is it fair?”
Ms. Finke’s son, Benjamin, is soon to start kindergarten at 5. “There will be boys in his class who are a year or more older than him. They’ll be bored in class and then the bar will be set higher, and the kids who are the right age will find that they can’t keep up.” What will happen in gym when the larger boys are picked first for brute force, leaving the pipsqueaks languishing? “I’m afraid my children will feel inferior.”
Not all parents can choose when their children begin kindergarten. “Though redshirting is common in the suburbs, in Manhattan, it’s the schools — not parents — who decide,” said Emily Glickman, whose company, Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, advises parents on kindergarten admissions. At New York City private schools, the cutoff date is Sept. 1; in practice, summer babies, particularly boys, generally enter kindergarten at age 6. “It’s a ramped-up world,” Ms. Glickman said. “And the easiest way for schools to assure that their kids do better is for them to be older and more mature.”
Meanwhile, New York City public schools have a firm age cutoff date of Dec. 31. Kindergarten isn’t required by the state, so parents could keep their children out, but then they would have to start the following year at first grade. And not everyone can afford two to three years of nursery school or day care.
“Among parents here, there’s a tremendous demand for kindergarten earlier,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Harlem Success Academy Charter School, which pushed its cutoff back to Dec. 1. “If these parents could start their kids at 2, they would.” Not everyone, alas, defines academic privilege the same way.
Amid Furor on Islamic Center, Pleas for Orthodox Church Nearby
Amid Furor on Islamic Center, Pleas for Orthodox Church Nearby
By PAUL VITELLO
The furor over plans to build an Islamic center two blocks from ground zero had already been joined by several politicians. On Monday, two politicians were joined in turn by officials of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, who sought to use the controversy to focus attention on their long-stymied effort to rebuild a church destroyed on 9/11 at the foot of the World Trade Center.
At a news conference near the trade center site, church officials appeared with former Gov. George E. Pataki and a Greek-American Congressional candidate from Long Island — both opponents of the Islamic center — to make their case: Government officials who appear to be clearing the way for the center, which includes a mosque, are blocking the reconstruction of St. Nicholas Church, the only house of worship destroyed in the terrorist attacks.
And though church officials did not go quite as far, Mr. Pataki and the candidate, George Demos, drew a sharp line between the rightness of the Greek Orthodox project and the wrongness of the Muslim one.
Mr. Pataki cast doubt on the wisdom of city officials’ allowing a community center and mosque near ground zero when “we don’t know the funding, we don’t know the view of the people behind it.” By contrast, he said, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the trade center reconstruction site, had failed to “reach out and engage in a dialogue” about rebuilding the church with Greek Orthodox officials, who, he suggested, were a known quantity.
Bishop Andonios of Phasiane, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, stood beside Mr. Pataki and Mr. Demos, who is seeking the Republican nomination in New York’s First Congressional District. Mr. Demos said, without offering evidence, that the Islamic center would be built with money from Saudi Arabia, “a nation that prohibits people from even wearing a cross or the Star of David.”
But the bishop said he did not intend to fan the bitter dispute over the Islamic Center with his presence at the news conference. “It’s unfortunate that it took a controversy over a mosque to bring attention to the church,” he said. He described that attention as “a silver lining” of the increasingly bitter clash.
On Sunday, demonstrators for and against the mosque faced off across police barricades at ground zero.
Opponents of the proposed Islamic community center, planned as a 13-story building at 51 Park Place, have voiced an array of arguments against it. Some say it is insensitive to the families of those who died at ground zero; others see it as a symbol of triumph for the Muslim terrorists behind the attacks.
Organizers of the project, led by a Sufi imam and a group he founded, the Cordoba Initiative, say the center would help foster understanding among people of all faiths, and stand as a symbol of pluralism and tolerance. Calls to the organizers seeking comment were not returned.
Unlike some religious leaders who have spoken in favor of the Muslim center, including the pastor of Trinity Wall Street, the historic Episcopal church near ground zero, Bishop Andonios said he and other Greek Orthodox leaders remained neutral.
“We didn’t want to say anything that might jeopardize the plans for rebuilding our church,” he said in a telephone interview. “That is our No. 1 concern: building our church.”
Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said there was never any doubt that the church would be rebuilt. In 2008, the authority agreed to accommodate a 24,000-square-foot church building just east of St. Nicholas’s original location on Cedar Street, and promised $20 million to subsidize construction. But the following year, he said, final negotiations broke down over the precise siting and size of the building.
Bishop Andonios said the issues were more complex than that, and he criticized the Port Authority as having “cut off all communications” with church officials. He expressed some discomfort at stepping into the dispute on the side of those who are adamantly opposed to the Cordoba project.
“To us, this is an opportunity for everyone — to see some progress in our negotiations with the Port Authority,” Bishop Andonios said. “But also, for the people involved in the mosque, this controversy is their opportunity to dialogue with the community; to reach a better understanding of people’s sensitivities, perhaps.”
It was the news media, and then a number of political candidates, who first brought attention to the purported disparity in the official treatment of the developers of the Islamic center and of the Orthodox church, the bishop said.
“Some Greek-American newspaper reporters called me first,” Bishop Andonios said. “Then I heard from the candidates. Then it was Fox News.”
Mr. Sigmund, the Port Authority spokesman, said the authority has no oversight of any building outside the ground zero reconstruction zone, including the community and mosque.
Immigrants are less likely to change their names nowadays
New Life in U.S. No Longer Means New Name
By SAM ROBERTS
For many 19th- and 20th-century immigrants or their children, it was a rite of passage: Arriving in America, they adopted a new identity.
Charles Steinweg, the German-born piano maker, changed his name to Steinway (in part because English instruments were deemed to be superior). Tom Lee, a Tong leader who would become the unofficial mayor of Chinatown in Manhattan, was originally Wong Ah Ling. Anne Bancroft, who was born in the Bronx, was Anna Maria Louisa Italiano.
The rationale was straightforward: adopting names that sounded more American might help immigrants speed assimilation, avoid detection, deter discrimination or just be better for the businesses they hoped to start in their new homeland.
Today, most experts agree, that traditional immigrant gambit has all but disappeared.
“For the most part, nobody changes to American names any more at all,” said Cheryl R. David, former chairwoman of the New York chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Precise comparative statistics are hard to come by, and experts say there was most likely no one precise moment when the practice fell off. It began to decline within the last few decades, they say, and the evidence of its rarity, if not formally quantified, can be found in almost any American courthouse.
The New York Times examined the more than 500 applications for name changes in June at the Civil Court in New York, which has a greater foreign-born population than any other city in the United States. Only a half dozen or so of those applications appeared to be obviously intended to Anglicize or abbreviate the surnames that immigrants or their families arrived with from Latin America or Asia. (A few Russians and Eastern Europeans did, but about as many embraced their family’s original surnames as adopted new ones.)
The vast majority of people with clearly ethnic surnames who applied to change them did so as a result of marriage (belatedly adopting a spouse’s surname or creating a new hyphenated one) or childbirth (because they were legally identified when they were born only as a male or female child or were adopting a parent’s name).
Iyata Ishimabet Maini Valdene Archibald of Brooklyn changed her name to Ishimabet Makini Valdene Bryce. Guo Wi Chan of Forest Hills, Queens, changed his to Ryan Guowei Chan. And after Jing Qiu Wu, the Flushing, Queens, mother of 5-year-old Star Jing Garcia, divorced, she renamed her daughter Star Rain Wu, dropping her husband’s surname.
Several dropped Mohammed as a first name, adopting Najmul or Hayat instead. And one older couple changed their last name from Islam to Khan, but they said they were conforming to other younger family members rather than reacting to discrimination.
Sociologists say the United States is simply a more multicultural country today (think the Kardashian sisters or Renée Zellweger, for instance, who decades ago might have been encouraged to Anglicize their names), and they add that blending in by changing a name is not as effective for Asians and Latin Americans who, arguably, may be more easily identified by physical characteristics than some Europeans were in the 19th century and early 20th century.
Also, at least in certain circumstances, affirmative action and similar programs have transformed ethnic identity into a potential asset.
“If you are talking about 1910, the social forces on conformity were much stronger,” said Marian Smith, senior historian of the United States Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, “whereas now an immigrant arrives with all these legal and identity documents, a driver’s license in their pocket, a passport, with one name on it. To change this is a big deal.”
Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton University sociologist, suggested that newcomers from overseas and their children no longer felt pressure to change their surnames beginning “during the 1970s and 1980s, as immigration became more a part of American life and the civil rights movement legitimated in-group pride as something to be cultivated.”
You can apply to the State Supreme Court to change your name (for $210) or to Civil Court (for $65) as long as you swear that you are not wanted for a crime and are not doing so to defraud anyone. Immigrants can simply check a box on their applications for naturalization. (The government said that in 2005 fewer than one in six did so, and for every possible reason.)
A century or so ago, some names were simplified by shipping agents as immigrants boarded ships in Europe. Others were transliterated, but rarely changed, by immigration officials at Ellis Island. Many newcomers changed their names legally, from Sapusnick to Phillips (“difficulty in pronouncing name, interferes with their business,” according to a legal notice), Laskowsky to Lake (“former name not American”) and from Katchka to Kalin (Katchka means duck in Yiddish and a particular Mr. Katchka was “subjected to ridicule and annoyance because of this”).
Most requests appear to have been granted routinely, although as recently as 1967, a Civil Court judge in Brooklyn refused to change Samuel Weinberg’s family name to Lansing “for future business reasons, such that my sons shall not bear any possible stigma.” The judge’s name was Jacob Weinberg.
During World War I, another Brooklyn judge refused the application of a Weitz to become a Weeks.
“There is no good reason why persons of German extraction should be permitted to conceal the fact by adopting through the aid of the court names of American or English origin,” the judge ruled. “It may involve some moral courage to bear German surnames or patronymics in these days, but the discomfort can best be borne by a display of genuine loyalty to this country.”
Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, said: “Jews and Italians changed their surnames in the past so that people wouldn’t identify them as Jews or Italians, the famous cases of course being movie stars. But if you look, phenotypically, nonwhite — East Asian, for example, or black — changing your last name is not going to make a difference. Betty Joan Perske became Lauren Bacall, and most people didn’t know she was Jewish; whatever name she used, Lena Horne was black.”
Lisa Chang, whose parents came from Korea in 1976, had assumed she would marry a Korean man, but decided to retain her maiden name when she wed a Caucasian instead.
“I felt like I would lose a part of myself and my Korean heritage and like I was cheating on my family’s name,” said Ms. Chang, 28, a troubleshooter for online advertising sites. “No one actually told me I had to change my last name, but I did feel some pressure from my future in-laws.”
Marija Sajkas, 40, a health care advocate who moved from Yugoslavia seven years ago, is adopting her Bosnian husband’s surname, Tomic — partly because it is easier to pronounce. “I am fortunate,” she said, “to have a great husband who also has a pronounceable surname.”
Even these days, finding precisely the right adoptive name — one syllable or not — can be a problem. Not long ago, David M. Glauberman, a Manhattan public relations executive, grew tired of having to spell his name every time he left a telephone message. Instead, he legally changed his name to Grant. The first time he left a message, a secretary asked: “Is that Grand with a ‘d’ or Grant with a ‘t’?”
(BTW - if you go to read that article on their website, don't click to read the comments. Apparently, not changing your name is akin to destroying the very fabric of society, and heaven forbid you mispronounce REAL names!)
At West Point, Hidden Gay Cadets Put in Spotlight
This is another one where you want to be careful with those comments. One thing, though - a lot of people in the comments are saying she "tricked" her way in. Isn't the whole dubious point of Don't Ask, Don't Tell that being gay isn't against the rules, so long as nobody talks about it?
Code words, secret societies, covert meetings, fake identities: these are tools that a certain set of cadets learn here at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
These cadets are not spies or moles. They are gay, and they exist largely in the shadows of this granite institution known for producing presidents and generals, where staying closeted is essential to avoid discharge under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“The most important thing I’ve learned here is how to be a good actor,” said one gay male cadet, who grew up in Philadelphia and is in his fourth year at the academy.
The resignation this month of Katherine Miller, a top cadet who blogged anonymously about her lesbianism, has turned a spotlight on the hidden gay culture here and revived debate on campus about “don’t ask, don’t tell,” at a time when Washington is also focused on the issue.
Ms. Miller, who wrote under the name “Private Second Class Citizen” about enduring gay slurs and faking a heterosexual dating history, is transferring to Yale University this fall and has become something of a media celebrity, appearing on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC and on ABC News.
Interviews with three gay cadets, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because revealing their identities could result in expulsion, as well as conversations with Ms. Miller and several gay alumni, painted a portrait of a vibrant, if tiny, gay underground at West Point. The hiding begins on Day 1: new cadets must sign a document acknowledging that revealing one’s homosexuality can lead to discharge, as can demonstrating “a propensity to engage in homosexual acts.”
In 1996, three female cadets resigned after West Point officials found a diary belonging to one of them that revealed their sexual orientation. In 2002, the academy discharged a cadet after his profile was discovered on a gay Web site. Ms. Miller, whose blog began in April but apparently eluded academy officials, said she quit voluntarily by submitting a letter revealing her lesbianism.
Asked about gay culture at West Point, Lt. Col. Brian Tribus, the academy’s director of public affairs, issued a statement saying that the school “will continue to apply the law as it is obligated to do,” but also noting that cadets must take military ethics classes that include “topics about unconditional positive respect for others.”
For gay cadets, repressing their sexuality is just one part of adapting to West Point, where life is regimented and lived mostly in uniform. Romance of any kind can be difficult: the 4,400 cadets, who live in one complex of large barracks and eat together at huge weekday breakfasts and lunches in Washington Hall, are allowed to date but not to kiss or hold hands while in uniform. “It’s like living in a snow globe,” said one lesbian cadet, who is in her third year.
But she and others said the lack of social freedom only primed the active social grapevine at the academy. They said that they knew at least 20 lesbian cadets (West Point is about 15 percent female), and that when a friend recently drew a diagram showing who had had relationships with whom, it revealed a tight web.
Trying to divine other lesbians takes “really finely tuned gaydar,” said another lesbian cadet, who is a senior, or “firstie.” There are code words and test phrases: “Are you family?” refers to inclusion in the lesbian sisterhood. Or cadets might throw out references to the television show “The L Word” to gauge the response.
An encounter during military maneuvers might result in flirtatious Facebook messaging back in the barracks. Those who earn weekend passes might make late-night runs to gay bars in Manhattan, about 50 miles away, or to gay parties on nearby college campuses, often with students they met through intercollegiate sports.
The two lesbian cadets described all this at 9 o’clock one night last week at Jefferson Library, amid dozens of classmates dressed in immaculately pressed gray uniforms, sitting up straight and studying textbooks. Both said they had been openly gay in high school but found gay socializing nearly impossible during the strict first year at West Point, then began to confide in a tight group of loyal friends as liberties increased.
“Anyone you meet here,” the senior female cadet said, “you have to assess their personality very closely, and see if you can trust them.”
She said she wore baggy clothing when going to a gay club in the city, but tighter garments — to “dress straight,” as she put it — when heading to the Firstie Club on campus. She and others also mask their orientation by using nonchalant greetings with other lesbians and feigning attraction for men. And, inevitably, they stay silent amid slurs and slights.
“I had a roommate who told me, ‘Whenever I see two gay people walking down the street, it makes me want to throw up,’ ” the senior female cadet said. “I was like, ‘Little do you know, I’m gay.’ ”
Even fending off advances from male cadets can create problems. “You can’t say, ‘Sorry guys, I’m gay,’ ” the senior said. “And if I say, ‘I have a boyfriend,’ I’m breaking the honor code.” Breaching the Cadet Honor Code — “a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do” — can result in serious discipline.
The male cadet in his fourth year said he had had sexual relationships with several other men at the academy. Last year, he fell for a guy at a gay bar in Manhattan who, to the surprise of both of them, turned out to be a classmate.
Back on campus, they enjoyed and suffered through a seven-month relationship on the “down low,” he said. They might share a meal at Grant Hall, but if they passed each other in company, they would simply nod hello or offer a casual back-slap. They did not attend the year-end formal dance together.
“I went alone and told the other guys my girlfriend from home had flight delays,” said the senior, who goes nightly to a deserted parking lot to make personal phone calls, for fear of tipping off his straight roommates.
Ms. Miller, 20, a sociology major from Findlay, Ohio, said she decided to leave West Point after two years because she grew tired of hiding.
“It was a whirlpool of lies — I was violating the honor code every time I socialized,” she said in an interview.
Ms. Miller, who ranked 17th in her West Point class, wrote in her Aug. 9 resignation letter: “I have lied to my classmates and compromised my integrity and my identity by adhering to existing military policy. I am unwilling to suppress an entire portion of my identity any longer.”
Becky Kanis, a 1991 West Point graduate and chairwoman of the group Knights Out, which offers guidance to gay West Point cadets, said Ms. Miller’s resignation provided a morale boost to gay cadets by alerting the public to the “shared adversity” they endured in having to mask their sexual orientation.
Ms. Kanis, a former Army captain who now lives in Los Angeles and works with a social services organization, Common Ground, said that her own sexual orientation was investigated twice during her years at West Point — friends interrogated, lockbox searched — and that gay cadets often spoke in code, using genderless pronouns, for example, when talking about significant others. “You have to operate in a ‘shush network,’ ” she said.
But it all “came in handy,” Ms. Kanis said, when she began doing intelligence work in the Army. “I was used to having a cover for my personal life,” she said. “Living closeted is excellent training for intelligence jobs. You’re always fine-tuning who you can talk to about what.”
When an Arab Enclave Thrived Downtown
Conjure, for a moment, a place just steps from City Hall but a world apart. Salaam.
Yes, that is the fragrance of strong coffee in the air, of sweet figs and tart lemons, of pastries that remind buyers of childhoods in Damascus and Beirut. Bazaars abound with handmade rugs and brass lamps and water pipes. Men wear fezzes. A few women retire behind veils. Al-Hoda is the leading newspaper. Business signs — at least those legible to a non-Arabic speaker — proclaim “Rahaim & Malhami,” “Noor & Maloof” and “Sahadi Bros.”
This is not what the lower west side of Manhattan would look like if the much-debated Islamic community center were built two blocks from the World Trade Center site. This is what it looked like decades before the World Trade Center was even envisioned. This is its heritage.
All but lost to living memory and forgotten in the current controversy, Washington Street was the “heart of New York’s Arab world,” as The New York Times described it in 1946, shortly before that Arab-American community was almost entirely displaced by construction of entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
To be clear: this neighborhood, called Little Syria, was south of what would become the trade center site, while the Islamic center would be to the north. And Muslims, chiefly from Palestine, made up perhaps 5 percent of its population. The Syrians and Lebanese in the neighborhood were mostly Christian.
But it is worth recalling the old sights and sounds and smells of Washington Street as a reminder that in New York — a city as densely layered as baklava — no one has a definitive claim on any part of town, and history can turn up some unexpected people in surprising places. (The Abyssinian Baptist Church, for instance, was once on Waverly Place.)
Washington Street was “an enclave in the New World where Arabs first peddled goods, worked in sweatshops, lived in tenements and hung their own signs on stores,” Gregory Orfalea wrote in “The Arab Americans” (Olive Branch Press, 2006). Among them was Mr. Orfalea’s grandmother Nazera Jabaly Orfalea, who arrived in New York from Syria in 1890.
“She would have walked Washington Street,” he said in an interview. “She was a peddler. I have no doubt she was grubstaked by suppliers on Washington Street.”
Mr. Orfalea attributed the migration of Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians to starvation, lawlessness, conscription, taxation and religious intolerance at home; to proselytizing by American missionaries; and to economic troubles that led them to a new world where cultures existed, sometimes bruisingly, cheek by jowl.
“The calls in Arabic of the mothers to their children romping on the street mingle with the jazz screechings from another home and the Homeric curses of the truck-drivers on their way to the wharves,” Konrad Bercovici wrote in the 1924 book, “Around the World in New York,” with a nod toward the nearby Greek settlement of Little Athens.
Little Syria was where the Linotype typesetting machine was adopted for Arabic characters, by the brothers Naoum and Salloum Mokarzel of Al-Hoda (The Guidance). This development “made possible and immeasurably stimulated the growth of Arabic journalism in the Middle East,” The New York Times wrote in 1948.
But the presence of the intelligentsia in the quarter was no bulwark against stereotype. A neighborhood brawl in 1905 was fought by “wild-eyed Syrians,” The Times reported. “The dim light from barroom and cafe showed the glint of steel in 200 swarthy hands.”
Mr. Orfalea discerned parallels with the present controversy. “We fail to deal with the Arab world in rational terms,” he said, “because we immediately reduce them to the irrational.”
Historical accounts describe no mosques on Washington Street, but there were three churches that served the Lebanese and Syrian Christians.
St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite still stands, at 103 Washington Street. It may be the last recognizable remnant of Little Syria. It is now Moran’s Ale House and Grill.
Pastor's Plan to Burn Koran Adds to Tensions
If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?
Mr. Jones, 58, a former hotel manager with a red face and a white handlebar mustache, argues that as an American Christian he has a right to burn Islam’s sacred book because “it’s full of lies.” And in another era, he might have been easily ignored, as he was last year when he posted a sign at his church declaring “Islam is of the devil.”
But now the global spotlight has shifted. With the debate in New York putting religious tensions front and center, Mr. Jones has suddenly attracted thousands of fans and critics on Facebook, while around the world he is being presented as a symbol of American anti-Islamic sentiment.
Muslim leaders in several countries, including Egypt and Indonesia, have formally condemned him and his church, the Dove World Outreach Center.
An Islamic group in England has also incorporated his efforts into a YouTube video that encourages Muslims to “rise up and act,” widening a concern that Mr. Jones — though clearly a fringe figure with only 50 members in his church — could spark riots or terrorism.
“Can you imagine what this will do to our image around the world?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. “And the additional danger it will add whenever there is an American presence in Iraq or Afghanistan?”
Mr. Jones, in a lengthy interview at his church, said he sincerely hoped that his planned Koran-burning would not lead to violence. He dismissed the idea that it could put American troops at greater risk, and — echoing his sermons — he said that his church was being persecuted.
He said his bank recently demanded immediate repayment of the $140,000 balance on the church mortgage; that his property insurance had been canceled since he announced in late July that he intended to burn copies of the Koran; and that death threats now come in regularly.
“We have to be careful,” he said. He tapped a holster on the right hip of his jean shorts; it held a .40-caliber pistol, which he said he was licensed to carry. “The overall response,” he added, “has been much greater than we expected.”
Mr. Jones who seems to spend much of his time inside a dank, dark office with a poster from the movie “Braveheart” and a picture of former President George W. Bush, appears to be largely oblivious to the potential consequences of his plans. Speaking in short sentences with a matter-of-fact drawl, he said that he could not understand why other Christians, including the nation’s largest evangelical association, had called for him to cancel “International Burn a Koran Day.”
He acknowledged that it had brought in at least $1,000 in donations. But he said that the interviews he had done with around 150 news outlets all over the world were useful mainly because they had helped him “send a message to Islam and the pushers of Shariah law: that it is not what we want.”
Mr. Jones said that nothing in particular had set him off. Asked about his knowledge of the Koran, he said plainly: “I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.”
Nonetheless, his position and variations on his tactics have become more common, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Florida in particular has had a rise in anti-Islamic activity. In May, an arsonist set off a pipe bomb at a mosque in Jacksonville in what authorities called an actof domestic terrorism. A mosque and Islamic school south of Miami was vandalized twice last year, the first time with a spray of 51 bullets.
Just as disturbing to Florida’s Muslims, and to many Christians and Jews, is that anti-Islamic rhetoric has begun to enter the mainstream through Republican political candidates.
Some of the opposition predated the controversy about the proposed Islamic center near ground zero. In March, for example, Allen West, a retired Army officer running for Congress in Broward County, told a group of supporters that “Islam is not a religion” but rather “a vicious enemy” that was “infiltrating” the United States. (A campaign spokesman said last week that Mr. West meant to refer to radical Islam, not Islam generally.)
Ron McNeil, a candidate for Congress in the Florida Panhandle, told a group of high school and middle school students last week that Islam’s plan “is to destroy our way of life.” He added: “It’s our place as Christians to stand up for the word of God and what the Bible says.”
Similar sentiments now flow daily into the e-mail inbox of the Dove World Outreach Center. Mr. Jones said that the negative e-mails outnumbered the positive by about 3 to 1, but that strangers had sent 20 copies of the Koran and a church worker produced hundreds of supportive e-mails that had come in over the past three weeks.
A dozen of those messages revealed a wide range of motivations. For a few people — a Christian in Afghanistan, an Iraqi in Massachusetts, a Jew who called his co-religionists in the United States “soft in the head” — direct experience with Islamic extremists seemed to have darkened their views. Others seemed motivated by little more than hate, arguing that Korans should be barbecued with pork, which is banned by Islam.
Mr. Jones’s plan faced a new hurdle last week when the Gainesville Fire Department rejected his request for a burning permit. Mr. Jones said he would go ahead anyway (“it’s just politics”), and he predicted a quite a scene.
Some of his neighbors, like Shirley Turner, a retiree who shivered with disgust when Mr. Jones’s name came up in conversation, are already planning to protest with signs calling for unity. More than a dozen houses of worship, of various faiths, also intend to respond collectively on the weekend of Sept. 11 by “affirming the validity of all sacred books,” said Larry Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Christ.
Some pastors even plan to read from the Koran in their services.
For local Muslims like Saeed Khan, who came here in the 1970s to study for a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Florida, the collective rejection of Mr. Jones represents the America they want to believe in. In an interview at an Islamic center that used to be a Brown Derby restaurant, Dr. Khan said that “Mr. Jones is hijacking Christianity” just as “Al Qaeda hijacked Islam.”
What saddens him most, he said, is the lasting effect on Muslim youth. He now has three grandchildren under age 3 growing up in Gainesville, and he shook his head at the story of a friend’s daughter who woke up in the middle of the night and asked her mother, “Why don’t they like us?”
Still, like many others, he rejected the moment’s swirl of anger. Even if Muslims outside the United States respond to the planned Koran burning with protests, or worse, Mr. Khan said he would spend his Sept. 11 doing the same thing he did last year. He will be downtown, a few miles from Mr. Jones, feeding the homeless.
In a Hoarder’s Home, Going All Out to Find the Floor
The door to the apartment would open only six inches. The owner squeezed himself inside, grabbed the top rung of a wooden bed frame and hoisted himself over a mountain of objects — a stepladder, a bird cage, a pile of wood planks — until he was standing atop a waist-high ridge made of the flotsam of his life.
There was a batting helmet. A telephone shaped like a sports car. A tea-colored lampshade. A dozen broken umbrellas hung in a neat row from the bed frame, rising from the rubble like the mast on a shipwreck. The floor was entirely hidden. Over there — the man pointed toward a boulder of suitcases blocking a doorway — was the kitchen.
The owner of all this, the occupant of the 500-square-foot apartment in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, is a trim 54-year-old with short white hair, a thin gray mustache and a nervous, high-pitched voice. He asked not to be named for fear of public shame.
He tucks his T-shirt into his blue jeans. He has a weakness for puns. And he is a hoarder, an obsessive collector who has watched, over more than two decades, an ocean of plastic bags and rotting furniture swallow his bedroom, then his apartment, and then his life.
“It’s little by little,” he said, stumbling to explain his compulsion. “If I don’t need it now, I’m going to need it later. It’s almost like you don’t know what’s going on and then you’re like, ‘Where am I? What am I going to do now?’ ”
A social service organization near his home in the Bronx has stepped in to help answer that question. The organization, Part of the Solution, enlisted Kristin P. Bergfeld and her company, Bergfeld’s Estate Clearance Service, which specializes in hoarding cases, to help him sort through the mess and haul away the truckloads of castoffs he does not need.
“What we’re doing,” Ms. Bergfeld told the man as they tackled the mountain this week, “is getting your light out of a bunch of stuff so you can shine.”
Hoarders have long held a special grasp on popular imagination. One of the best-known cases was that of the Collyer brothers, whose bodies were found in 1947 inside their booby-trapped Harlem brownstone packed with more than 100 tons of phone books, newspapers and tin cans.
Today, two cable-television shows — “Hoarders,” on A&E, and TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive” — compete to lure viewers into hoarders’ overstuffed homes. The cleanup effort in the Bedford Park apartment this week played out like a real-life episode, only without the spooky music and sound effects.
Researchers say hoarding, which is sometimes connected to obsessive-compulsive disorder, is surprisingly common: 2 percent to 5 percent of the United States population suffers from excessive collecting and clutter, said Dr. Gail S. Steketee, co-author of “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.” She said experts were considering classifying it as its own mental disorder.
Every hoarder’s habit is distinct — some are obsessive shoppers, others cannot bear to throw anything away. The man in Bedford Park, a gifted repairman and tinkerer, is consumed by a need to salvage broken castaways.
“I’ve seen him fix a watch using the cut-up top of a cat food can lid,” said Antonietta Bertucci, who works for Part of the Solution and has known him for five years. “He made a seat for a bicycle out of scrap pieces of metal that he’ll find lying on the sidewalk. He has a very MacGyver-type mind.”
The man, who used to work in an industrial laundry room, has lived in the co-op apartment since 1988, when he bought it for about $20,000. From the hallway, it looks like every other apartment in the 56-unit red-brick building.
But a crew of five workers, some in full-body protective suits and face masks, spent two days this week emptying the place of moldy sofas, piles of chairs and folding tables, and filling more than 350 trash bags. Instead of simply transferring all the apartment’s contents into a trash bin, they sifted through each item, saving a portable television the man wanted, and throwing out two bar stools he decided he could live without.
The workers began on Monday morning by unearthing an old bicycle buried beneath a mound of apple juice bottles, roasting pans and beach chairs. Within 45 minutes, they had cleared enough space to open the door all the way for the first time in years. Throughout the day, Ms. Bergfeld kept checking the handwritten list of what to keep and what to throw away that she had asked the man to compile. “This way there’s less grief, less resentment, less backlash and more a sense that he’s rebuilding his life,” she said.
Diagnosed as having a mental illness that he would not detail, the man scrapes by on a Social Security disability check of about $700 a month. He sees a social worker regularly, and has eaten many of his meals at the soup kitchen run by Part of the Solution, near the New York Botanical Garden, for years.
The staff there knew him as an unusually friendly client who kept himself neat and could fix anything. Until he asked for help with his bills, they knew little about his living conditions.
“We asked, ‘Why don’t you use your stove?’ ” Ms. Bertucci said. “He said, ‘Well, because I put stuff on top of it.’ Then he felt comfortable enough to tell us: ‘I have tons of stuff. I keep everything.’ ”
He has gone without electricity for years, after failing to resolve a billing dispute with Consolidated Edison. At night, guided by only a flashlight, he would crawl between a rusty bicycle and an upended sofa into the small part of his bed that remained uncovered by a tangle of folding chairs, stepladders and side tables. He would bathe with a washcloth and a bucket: Metal bed rods and plastic bags long ago claimed the shower.
He said that he tried to get help five years ago from the city’s Adult Protective Services agency, which sent workers to clear his apartment, but that after a day or so of cleaning, he could not bear the indiscriminate sweep of his belongings any longer. He barricaded himself inside until the movers left, then began rebuilding his mountains.
This time, however, he said he was ready to change.
“I want to have people come visit me, that’s the main thing,” he said. “I’ve never been with anybody, and I blame it on my mess.”
He began to cry.
“Sometimes I feel like, just let me get buried.”
Ms. Bergfeld has been clearing homes for 23 years. She said this apartment, covered with roaches and mouse droppings, was a routine job. Normally, it would cost about $6,000 to clean it out, but she did the project pro bono and also arranged for Sleepy’s to donate a new bed, Anderson/Ross Temporary Personnel Services to provide workers and Perna Carting and Junk Junkies to haul the detritus to the dump. Ms. Bergfeld said she would continue donating her services to others in need.
As the cleaners worked, a bizarre stream of items poured out of the apartment: a framed painting of George Washington, a yellow tow truck strap, a bag of boxing gloves, a circular saw, piles of doorknobs. By 11:15 a.m., the living room floor — hardwood, it turned out — was peeking through.
Despite the man’s colossal mess, neighbors have lodged no complaints about his apartment — mainly because they were unaware of it.
“I didn’t know someone was living in such conditions,” said Thomas Pachla, a member of the building’s co-op board. “This is a hazard for all tenants. It’s shocking and kind of scary.”
By 12:05 p.m., the apartment’s owner could enter the kitchen. He was pleased at the progress, but nervously checked each bag to make sure he was not losing things he needed. Among the items he insisted on keeping were a cotton candy machine, a toy trumpet, a near-life-size horse doll and a toilet seat decorated with seashells.
“Sometimes I need stuff,” he explained.
Ms. Bergfeld said she sometimes had to return to homes she had already cleared. But Munir Pujara, a lawyer at Part of the Solution, said the organization and a social worker would help the man maintain the apartment.
At the end of the day on Tuesday, the man stood inside his living room, which felt as spacious as a football stadium. The walls needed painting, the bathroom needed serious work and a cluttered bookcase still needed to be pruned. But the man said that for the first time in decades he felt proud of his home.
“It’s like I have too much space,” he said. “I’ll be able to move around and do things that other people do.”
The Open Road Wasn’t Quite Open to All
By CELIA McGEE
For almost three decades beginning in 1936, many African-American travelers relied on a booklet to help them decide where they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor, shop on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, or go out at night. In 1949, when the guide was 80 pages, there were five recommended hotels in Atlanta. In Cheyenne, Wyo., the Barbeque Inn was the place to stay.
A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome. Over time its full title — “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide” — became abbreviated, simply, as the “Green Book.” Those who needed to know about it knew about it. To much of the rest of America it was invisible, and by 1964, when the last edition was published, it slipped through the cracks into history.
Until he met a friend’s elderly father-in-law at a funeral a few years ago, the Atlanta writer Calvin Alexander Ramsey had never heard of the guide. But he knew firsthand the reason it existed. During his family trips between Roxboro, N.C., and Baltimore, “we packed a big lunch so my parents didn’t have to worry about having to stop somewhere that might not serve us,” recalled Mr. Ramsey, who is now 60.
He is among the writers, artists, academics and curators returning a spotlight to the guide and its author, emblematic as it was of a period when black Americans — especially professionals, salesmen, entertainers and athletes — were increasingly on the move for work, play and family visits.
In addition to hotels, the guide often pointed them to “tourist homes,” privates residences made available by their African-American owners. Mr. Ramsey has written a play, “The Green Book,” about just such a home, in Jefferson City, Mo., where a black military officer and his wife and a Jewish Holocaust survivor all spend the night just before W. E. B. DuBois is scheduled to deliver a speech in town. The play will inaugurate a staged-reading series on Sept. 15 at the restored Lincoln Theater in Washington, itself once a fixture of that city’s “black Broadway” on U Street.
Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who is now a faculty member at American University, will take on a cameo role. Mr. Bond recalled that his parents — his father, a college professor, became the first black president of Lincoln University, in southern Pennsylvania — used the book. “It was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat,” he said, “but where there was any place.”
In November, Carolrhoda Books will release Mr. Ramsey’s “Ruth and the Green Book,” a children’s book with illustrations by the award-winning artist Floyd Cooper. It tells the story of a girl from Chicago in the 1950s and what she learns as she and her parents, driving their brand-new car to visit her grandmother in rural Alabama, finally luck into a copy of Victor Green’s guide. “Most kids today hear about the Underground Railroad, but this other thing has gone unnoticed,” said Mr. Ramsey. “It just fell on me, really, to tell the story.”
Historians of travel have recognized that the great American road trip — seen as an ultimate sign of freedom — was not that free for many Americans, including those who had to worry about “sunset laws” in towns where black visitors had to be out by day’s end.
For a large swath of the nation’s history “the American democratic idea of getting out on the open road, finding yourself, heading for distant horizons was only a privilege for white people,” said Cotton Seiler, the author of “Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America,” who devoted a chapter of his book to the experience of black travelers.
William Daryl Williams, the director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati, in 2007 organized a traveling exhibition he called “The Dresser Trunk Project,” in which he and 11 other architects and artists used the “Green Book” to inform works that incorporated locations and artifacts from the history of black travel during segregation. Mr. Williams’s own piece, “Whitelaw Hotel,” referred to a well-known accommodation for African-Americans in Washington and included several pages from the “Green Book.”
Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, a co-sponsor of “The Green Book” play reading, said the presence of the guide into the 1960s pointed out that at the same time people were countering segregation with sit-ins, the need to cope with everyday life remained.
He added: “The ‘Green Book’ tried to provide a tool to deal with those situations. It also allowed families to protect their children, to help them ward off those horrible points at which they might be thrown out or not permitted to sit somewhere. It was both a defensive and a proactive mechanism.”
Although Victor Green’s initial edition only encompassed metropolitan New York, the “Green Book” soon expanded to Bermuda (white dinner jackets were recommended for gentlemen), Mexico and Canada. The 15,000 copies Green eventually printed each year were sold as a marketing tool not just to black-owned businesses but to the white marketplace, implying that it made good economic sense to take advantage of the growing affluence and mobility of African Americans. Esso stations, unusual in franchising to African Americans, were a popular place to pick one up.
Mr. Bunch said he believes African American families are likely still have old copies sitting in attics and basements: “As segregation ended, people put such things away. They felt they didn’t need them anymore. It brought a sense of psychological liberation.”
Theater J in Washington, which specializes in Jewish-theme plays, is a co-producer of “The Green Book” reading. The “inconveniences” (as Green genteelly put it) of travel that African-Americans encountered were shared, albeit to a lesser extent and for a briefer period, by American Jews. In Mr. Ramsey’s play the Holocaust survivor comes to the tourist home after he’s appalled by a “No Negroes Allowed” sign posted in the lobby of the local hotel where he had planned to stay.
“The Jewish press has long published information about places that are restricted,” Green wrote in his book’s introduction, adding, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”
The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, and Mr. Green ceased publication.
Proposed Muslim Center Draws Opposing Protests
Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.
Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student’s face.
One man, his cheeks red, leaned in and hissed that if the police were not present, Mr. Rose would be in danger.
Before any threats could be carried out, the police intervened, dragged Mr. Rose away from the crowd and insisted that he return to the separate area, one block away, where supporters of the project had been asked to stand.
Minutes later, as Mr. Rose was still shaking off the encounter, he turned to find the red-cheeked man back at his side. The man had followed the student up the street, and the two now stared at each other for a tense moment.
Then the man stuck out a hand and, in a terse voice, said, “I’m sorry.”
“You have a right,” he told Mr. Rose. (He would not give his name.) “I am sorry for what I said to you. I disagree with you completely, but you have a right.”
The dual protests on Sunday, against and for the Islamic center, part of a complex on Park Place called Park51, had taunts, tensions and the occasional minor scuffle. Around 500 opponents of the mosque stood in a cordoned-off area, singing patriotic songs and speaking of a hijacked Constitution, while about 200 supporters held a counterprotest nearby.
As the rallies went on in Lower Manhattan, one of the main organizers of the Islamic center, Daisy Khan, said in a televised interview that the opposition to the plan was akin to discrimination against Jews.
“This is like a metastasized anti-Semitism,” Ms. Khan said on the ABC morning program “This Week.”
“That’s what we feel right now. It’s not even Islamophobia; it’s beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims, and we are deeply concerned,” she said.
But Sunday’s exchange of words, although harsh at times, never led to blows or other violence. No arrests or injuries were reported by the authorities.
“The rain was the biggest problem,” a spokesman for the police said.
That calm prevailed, in a charged atmosphere two blocks north of ground zero, was due in large part to a sizable and wary police deployment. Dozens of officers kept watch and aggressively stopped members of either side from approaching the other.
Those efforts did not keep activists like Mr. Rose from trying. He said he had waded into the opposing crowd “to get a better sense of what the protesters were saying or thinking.”
Was he surprised by their message? Mr. Rose shook his head. “There was nothing that Newt Gingrich isn’t saying,” he said.
But in interviews, some protesters said they had arrived not to advance a political agenda, but to express their belief that the center’s organizers had ignored the interests of the public.
“I’m upset at how this whole thing was handled,” said Dominick DeRubbio, 25, nephew of David P. DeRubbio, a firefighter who died in the World Trade Center. “The level of defiance is running high. They’re saying, ‘We’re doing this whether you like it or not.’ ”
Other protesters insisted that while they supported religious freedoms, the location of the planned Islamic center was an incursion on the rights of those who deemed ground zero a hallowed space.
“It’s a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site,” said Kali Costas, who said she was a member of the Tea Party.
The Littlest Redshirts Sit Out Kindergarten
AFTER all those attentive early childhood rituals — the flashcards, the Kumon, the Dora the Explorer, the mornings spent in cutting-edge playgrounds — who wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally time to set off for school?
Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Outliers" about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”
Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new. “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of waning.
In 2008, the most recent year for which census data is available, 17 percent of children were 6 or older when they entered the kindergarten classroom. Sand tables have been replaced by worksheets to a degree that’s surprising even by the standards of a decade ago. Blame it on No Child Left Behind and the race to get children test-ready by third grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many educators put it, “the new first grade.”
What once seemed like an aberration — something that sparked fierce dinner party debates — has come to seem like the norm. But that doesn’t make it any easier for parents.
“We agonized over it all year,” said Rachel Tayse Baillieul, a food educator in Columbus, Ohio, where the cutoff date is Oct. 1. Children whose birthdates fall later must wait until the next year to start school. But her daughter, Lillian, 4, was born five days before, on Sept. 25, which would make her one of the youngest in the class.
With the wide age spans in kindergarten classrooms, each new generation of preschool parents must grapple with where exactly to slot their children. Wiggly, easily distracted and less mature, boys are more likely to be held back than girls, but delayed enrollment is now common for both sexes.
“Technically, Lillian could go to kindergarten,” Ms. Tayse Baillieul said. Moving her up from part-time preschool would allow Ms. Tayse Baillieul to return to work and earn income. But Lillian’s preschool teachers counseled her to hold Lillian back. “They said staying in preschool a year longer will probably never hurt and will probably always help, especially with social and emotional development.”
Regardless, a classroom with an 18-month age spread will create social disparities. “Someone has to be the youngest in class,” pointed out Susan Messina, a 46-year-old mother in Washington. “No matter how you slice it.” When Clare, her daughter, who is now 9, entered kindergarten at 4, Ms. Messina was aware of widespread redshirting.
“I thought, I’m not breaking the rules, I’m not pushing her ahead, we’re doing exactly what we’re supposed to do,” she said. “Then it dawned on me that in this day and age, there’s a move to keep your brilliant angel in preschool longer so they could be smarter and taller for the basketball team. But my daughter doesn’t need a leg up. She’s fine.”
Still, it bothers her that children in the same class are as much as a year and a half older than Clare. “She has friends who are 11 who are going to get their periods this year, and she’s still playing with American Girl dolls.” Another mother complained that her 4-year-old became hooked on Hannah Montana by her aspiring-tween classmates. A 6-year-old wielding a light saber can be awfully intimidating to a boy who still sleeps with his teddy.
At the other tip of the age span, parents who promote children to kindergarten before 5 are often seen as pushy, “even ogre-ish,” Ms. Messina said. But suppose your child is already reading at 4? Do you hold her back where she may be bored to tears in preschool or send her into a classroom of hulking 6-year-old boys? In 1970, 14.4 percent of kindergartners started at age 4. That figure has dropped to less than 10 percent.
The self-esteem movement has inspired parents to care as much about emotional well-being as academic achievement, and with fragile self-images still in the making, the worst fear for parents is setting up their children for failure. One Connecticut mother in Fairfield County sent her October-born son to kindergarten at 4, despite “the informal rule of thumb that everyone holds back their September to December boys.” Kindergarten seemed to go well, but when her son entered first grade, she said, “I got hit over the head. They told me he was way behind.”
She watched in horror as her son’s self-confidence tanked. “He was spinning his wheels just to keep up,” she recalled. “He even got pulled out of class for poor handwriting.” At the end of a miserable second-grade year, she withdrew him to repeat the grade at a private school. “It’s been a long and difficult journey,” she said. “I totally regret starting him on kindergarten at 4.”
Many parents feel compelled to redshirt by what they see as unreasonable academic demands for 4- and 5-year-olds. But keeping children in preschool, according to both academic research and parental experience, doesn’t necessarily offer every advantage. Jennifer Harrison, a mother of two from Folsom, Calif., held her October-born son, Elliott, back so he “wouldn’t get labeled as out of control.” Over all, she said, it was the right decision. “But his math skills are far above those of his classmates.”
How to attend to a child’s myriad needs, and which should be the priority? “There don’t seem to be any rules,” said Rebecca Meekma, a mother of two from Laguna Beach, Calif. “People are saying, ‘I want him to be big in high school for sports!’ What is that? You can’t know who they’ll be in high school.”
And what about children who aren’t Leo the Late Bloomer? “I have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that right? Is it fair?”
Ms. Finke’s son, Benjamin, is soon to start kindergarten at 5. “There will be boys in his class who are a year or more older than him. They’ll be bored in class and then the bar will be set higher, and the kids who are the right age will find that they can’t keep up.” What will happen in gym when the larger boys are picked first for brute force, leaving the pipsqueaks languishing? “I’m afraid my children will feel inferior.”
Not all parents can choose when their children begin kindergarten. “Though redshirting is common in the suburbs, in Manhattan, it’s the schools — not parents — who decide,” said Emily Glickman, whose company, Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, advises parents on kindergarten admissions. At New York City private schools, the cutoff date is Sept. 1; in practice, summer babies, particularly boys, generally enter kindergarten at age 6. “It’s a ramped-up world,” Ms. Glickman said. “And the easiest way for schools to assure that their kids do better is for them to be older and more mature.”
Meanwhile, New York City public schools have a firm age cutoff date of Dec. 31. Kindergarten isn’t required by the state, so parents could keep their children out, but then they would have to start the following year at first grade. And not everyone can afford two to three years of nursery school or day care.
“Among parents here, there’s a tremendous demand for kindergarten earlier,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder of the Harlem Success Academy Charter School, which pushed its cutoff back to Dec. 1. “If these parents could start their kids at 2, they would.” Not everyone, alas, defines academic privilege the same way.
Amid Furor on Islamic Center, Pleas for Orthodox Church Nearby
Amid Furor on Islamic Center, Pleas for Orthodox Church Nearby
By PAUL VITELLO
The furor over plans to build an Islamic center two blocks from ground zero had already been joined by several politicians. On Monday, two politicians were joined in turn by officials of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, who sought to use the controversy to focus attention on their long-stymied effort to rebuild a church destroyed on 9/11 at the foot of the World Trade Center.
At a news conference near the trade center site, church officials appeared with former Gov. George E. Pataki and a Greek-American Congressional candidate from Long Island — both opponents of the Islamic center — to make their case: Government officials who appear to be clearing the way for the center, which includes a mosque, are blocking the reconstruction of St. Nicholas Church, the only house of worship destroyed in the terrorist attacks.
And though church officials did not go quite as far, Mr. Pataki and the candidate, George Demos, drew a sharp line between the rightness of the Greek Orthodox project and the wrongness of the Muslim one.
Mr. Pataki cast doubt on the wisdom of city officials’ allowing a community center and mosque near ground zero when “we don’t know the funding, we don’t know the view of the people behind it.” By contrast, he said, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the trade center reconstruction site, had failed to “reach out and engage in a dialogue” about rebuilding the church with Greek Orthodox officials, who, he suggested, were a known quantity.
Bishop Andonios of Phasiane, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, stood beside Mr. Pataki and Mr. Demos, who is seeking the Republican nomination in New York’s First Congressional District. Mr. Demos said, without offering evidence, that the Islamic center would be built with money from Saudi Arabia, “a nation that prohibits people from even wearing a cross or the Star of David.”
But the bishop said he did not intend to fan the bitter dispute over the Islamic Center with his presence at the news conference. “It’s unfortunate that it took a controversy over a mosque to bring attention to the church,” he said. He described that attention as “a silver lining” of the increasingly bitter clash.
On Sunday, demonstrators for and against the mosque faced off across police barricades at ground zero.
Opponents of the proposed Islamic community center, planned as a 13-story building at 51 Park Place, have voiced an array of arguments against it. Some say it is insensitive to the families of those who died at ground zero; others see it as a symbol of triumph for the Muslim terrorists behind the attacks.
Organizers of the project, led by a Sufi imam and a group he founded, the Cordoba Initiative, say the center would help foster understanding among people of all faiths, and stand as a symbol of pluralism and tolerance. Calls to the organizers seeking comment were not returned.
Unlike some religious leaders who have spoken in favor of the Muslim center, including the pastor of Trinity Wall Street, the historic Episcopal church near ground zero, Bishop Andonios said he and other Greek Orthodox leaders remained neutral.
“We didn’t want to say anything that might jeopardize the plans for rebuilding our church,” he said in a telephone interview. “That is our No. 1 concern: building our church.”
Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the Port Authority, said there was never any doubt that the church would be rebuilt. In 2008, the authority agreed to accommodate a 24,000-square-foot church building just east of St. Nicholas’s original location on Cedar Street, and promised $20 million to subsidize construction. But the following year, he said, final negotiations broke down over the precise siting and size of the building.
Bishop Andonios said the issues were more complex than that, and he criticized the Port Authority as having “cut off all communications” with church officials. He expressed some discomfort at stepping into the dispute on the side of those who are adamantly opposed to the Cordoba project.
“To us, this is an opportunity for everyone — to see some progress in our negotiations with the Port Authority,” Bishop Andonios said. “But also, for the people involved in the mosque, this controversy is their opportunity to dialogue with the community; to reach a better understanding of people’s sensitivities, perhaps.”
It was the news media, and then a number of political candidates, who first brought attention to the purported disparity in the official treatment of the developers of the Islamic center and of the Orthodox church, the bishop said.
“Some Greek-American newspaper reporters called me first,” Bishop Andonios said. “Then I heard from the candidates. Then it was Fox News.”
Mr. Sigmund, the Port Authority spokesman, said the authority has no oversight of any building outside the ground zero reconstruction zone, including the community and mosque.
Immigrants are less likely to change their names nowadays
New Life in U.S. No Longer Means New Name
By SAM ROBERTS
For many 19th- and 20th-century immigrants or their children, it was a rite of passage: Arriving in America, they adopted a new identity.
Charles Steinweg, the German-born piano maker, changed his name to Steinway (in part because English instruments were deemed to be superior). Tom Lee, a Tong leader who would become the unofficial mayor of Chinatown in Manhattan, was originally Wong Ah Ling. Anne Bancroft, who was born in the Bronx, was Anna Maria Louisa Italiano.
The rationale was straightforward: adopting names that sounded more American might help immigrants speed assimilation, avoid detection, deter discrimination or just be better for the businesses they hoped to start in their new homeland.
Today, most experts agree, that traditional immigrant gambit has all but disappeared.
“For the most part, nobody changes to American names any more at all,” said Cheryl R. David, former chairwoman of the New York chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Precise comparative statistics are hard to come by, and experts say there was most likely no one precise moment when the practice fell off. It began to decline within the last few decades, they say, and the evidence of its rarity, if not formally quantified, can be found in almost any American courthouse.
The New York Times examined the more than 500 applications for name changes in June at the Civil Court in New York, which has a greater foreign-born population than any other city in the United States. Only a half dozen or so of those applications appeared to be obviously intended to Anglicize or abbreviate the surnames that immigrants or their families arrived with from Latin America or Asia. (A few Russians and Eastern Europeans did, but about as many embraced their family’s original surnames as adopted new ones.)
The vast majority of people with clearly ethnic surnames who applied to change them did so as a result of marriage (belatedly adopting a spouse’s surname or creating a new hyphenated one) or childbirth (because they were legally identified when they were born only as a male or female child or were adopting a parent’s name).
Iyata Ishimabet Maini Valdene Archibald of Brooklyn changed her name to Ishimabet Makini Valdene Bryce. Guo Wi Chan of Forest Hills, Queens, changed his to Ryan Guowei Chan. And after Jing Qiu Wu, the Flushing, Queens, mother of 5-year-old Star Jing Garcia, divorced, she renamed her daughter Star Rain Wu, dropping her husband’s surname.
Several dropped Mohammed as a first name, adopting Najmul or Hayat instead. And one older couple changed their last name from Islam to Khan, but they said they were conforming to other younger family members rather than reacting to discrimination.
Sociologists say the United States is simply a more multicultural country today (think the Kardashian sisters or Renée Zellweger, for instance, who decades ago might have been encouraged to Anglicize their names), and they add that blending in by changing a name is not as effective for Asians and Latin Americans who, arguably, may be more easily identified by physical characteristics than some Europeans were in the 19th century and early 20th century.
Also, at least in certain circumstances, affirmative action and similar programs have transformed ethnic identity into a potential asset.
“If you are talking about 1910, the social forces on conformity were much stronger,” said Marian Smith, senior historian of the United States Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, “whereas now an immigrant arrives with all these legal and identity documents, a driver’s license in their pocket, a passport, with one name on it. To change this is a big deal.”
Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton University sociologist, suggested that newcomers from overseas and their children no longer felt pressure to change their surnames beginning “during the 1970s and 1980s, as immigration became more a part of American life and the civil rights movement legitimated in-group pride as something to be cultivated.”
You can apply to the State Supreme Court to change your name (for $210) or to Civil Court (for $65) as long as you swear that you are not wanted for a crime and are not doing so to defraud anyone. Immigrants can simply check a box on their applications for naturalization. (The government said that in 2005 fewer than one in six did so, and for every possible reason.)
A century or so ago, some names were simplified by shipping agents as immigrants boarded ships in Europe. Others were transliterated, but rarely changed, by immigration officials at Ellis Island. Many newcomers changed their names legally, from Sapusnick to Phillips (“difficulty in pronouncing name, interferes with their business,” according to a legal notice), Laskowsky to Lake (“former name not American”) and from Katchka to Kalin (Katchka means duck in Yiddish and a particular Mr. Katchka was “subjected to ridicule and annoyance because of this”).
Most requests appear to have been granted routinely, although as recently as 1967, a Civil Court judge in Brooklyn refused to change Samuel Weinberg’s family name to Lansing “for future business reasons, such that my sons shall not bear any possible stigma.” The judge’s name was Jacob Weinberg.
During World War I, another Brooklyn judge refused the application of a Weitz to become a Weeks.
“There is no good reason why persons of German extraction should be permitted to conceal the fact by adopting through the aid of the court names of American or English origin,” the judge ruled. “It may involve some moral courage to bear German surnames or patronymics in these days, but the discomfort can best be borne by a display of genuine loyalty to this country.”
Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, said: “Jews and Italians changed their surnames in the past so that people wouldn’t identify them as Jews or Italians, the famous cases of course being movie stars. But if you look, phenotypically, nonwhite — East Asian, for example, or black — changing your last name is not going to make a difference. Betty Joan Perske became Lauren Bacall, and most people didn’t know she was Jewish; whatever name she used, Lena Horne was black.”
Lisa Chang, whose parents came from Korea in 1976, had assumed she would marry a Korean man, but decided to retain her maiden name when she wed a Caucasian instead.
“I felt like I would lose a part of myself and my Korean heritage and like I was cheating on my family’s name,” said Ms. Chang, 28, a troubleshooter for online advertising sites. “No one actually told me I had to change my last name, but I did feel some pressure from my future in-laws.”
Marija Sajkas, 40, a health care advocate who moved from Yugoslavia seven years ago, is adopting her Bosnian husband’s surname, Tomic — partly because it is easier to pronounce. “I am fortunate,” she said, “to have a great husband who also has a pronounceable surname.”
Even these days, finding precisely the right adoptive name — one syllable or not — can be a problem. Not long ago, David M. Glauberman, a Manhattan public relations executive, grew tired of having to spell his name every time he left a telephone message. Instead, he legally changed his name to Grant. The first time he left a message, a secretary asked: “Is that Grand with a ‘d’ or Grant with a ‘t’?”
(BTW - if you go to read that article on their website, don't click to read the comments. Apparently, not changing your name is akin to destroying the very fabric of society, and heaven forbid you mispronounce REAL names!)
At West Point, Hidden Gay Cadets Put in Spotlight
This is another one where you want to be careful with those comments. One thing, though - a lot of people in the comments are saying she "tricked" her way in. Isn't the whole dubious point of Don't Ask, Don't Tell that being gay isn't against the rules, so long as nobody talks about it?
Code words, secret societies, covert meetings, fake identities: these are tools that a certain set of cadets learn here at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
These cadets are not spies or moles. They are gay, and they exist largely in the shadows of this granite institution known for producing presidents and generals, where staying closeted is essential to avoid discharge under the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“The most important thing I’ve learned here is how to be a good actor,” said one gay male cadet, who grew up in Philadelphia and is in his fourth year at the academy.
The resignation this month of Katherine Miller, a top cadet who blogged anonymously about her lesbianism, has turned a spotlight on the hidden gay culture here and revived debate on campus about “don’t ask, don’t tell,” at a time when Washington is also focused on the issue.
Ms. Miller, who wrote under the name “Private Second Class Citizen” about enduring gay slurs and faking a heterosexual dating history, is transferring to Yale University this fall and has become something of a media celebrity, appearing on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC and on ABC News.
Interviews with three gay cadets, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because revealing their identities could result in expulsion, as well as conversations with Ms. Miller and several gay alumni, painted a portrait of a vibrant, if tiny, gay underground at West Point. The hiding begins on Day 1: new cadets must sign a document acknowledging that revealing one’s homosexuality can lead to discharge, as can demonstrating “a propensity to engage in homosexual acts.”
In 1996, three female cadets resigned after West Point officials found a diary belonging to one of them that revealed their sexual orientation. In 2002, the academy discharged a cadet after his profile was discovered on a gay Web site. Ms. Miller, whose blog began in April but apparently eluded academy officials, said she quit voluntarily by submitting a letter revealing her lesbianism.
Asked about gay culture at West Point, Lt. Col. Brian Tribus, the academy’s director of public affairs, issued a statement saying that the school “will continue to apply the law as it is obligated to do,” but also noting that cadets must take military ethics classes that include “topics about unconditional positive respect for others.”
For gay cadets, repressing their sexuality is just one part of adapting to West Point, where life is regimented and lived mostly in uniform. Romance of any kind can be difficult: the 4,400 cadets, who live in one complex of large barracks and eat together at huge weekday breakfasts and lunches in Washington Hall, are allowed to date but not to kiss or hold hands while in uniform. “It’s like living in a snow globe,” said one lesbian cadet, who is in her third year.
But she and others said the lack of social freedom only primed the active social grapevine at the academy. They said that they knew at least 20 lesbian cadets (West Point is about 15 percent female), and that when a friend recently drew a diagram showing who had had relationships with whom, it revealed a tight web.
Trying to divine other lesbians takes “really finely tuned gaydar,” said another lesbian cadet, who is a senior, or “firstie.” There are code words and test phrases: “Are you family?” refers to inclusion in the lesbian sisterhood. Or cadets might throw out references to the television show “The L Word” to gauge the response.
An encounter during military maneuvers might result in flirtatious Facebook messaging back in the barracks. Those who earn weekend passes might make late-night runs to gay bars in Manhattan, about 50 miles away, or to gay parties on nearby college campuses, often with students they met through intercollegiate sports.
The two lesbian cadets described all this at 9 o’clock one night last week at Jefferson Library, amid dozens of classmates dressed in immaculately pressed gray uniforms, sitting up straight and studying textbooks. Both said they had been openly gay in high school but found gay socializing nearly impossible during the strict first year at West Point, then began to confide in a tight group of loyal friends as liberties increased.
“Anyone you meet here,” the senior female cadet said, “you have to assess their personality very closely, and see if you can trust them.”
She said she wore baggy clothing when going to a gay club in the city, but tighter garments — to “dress straight,” as she put it — when heading to the Firstie Club on campus. She and others also mask their orientation by using nonchalant greetings with other lesbians and feigning attraction for men. And, inevitably, they stay silent amid slurs and slights.
“I had a roommate who told me, ‘Whenever I see two gay people walking down the street, it makes me want to throw up,’ ” the senior female cadet said. “I was like, ‘Little do you know, I’m gay.’ ”
Even fending off advances from male cadets can create problems. “You can’t say, ‘Sorry guys, I’m gay,’ ” the senior said. “And if I say, ‘I have a boyfriend,’ I’m breaking the honor code.” Breaching the Cadet Honor Code — “a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do” — can result in serious discipline.
The male cadet in his fourth year said he had had sexual relationships with several other men at the academy. Last year, he fell for a guy at a gay bar in Manhattan who, to the surprise of both of them, turned out to be a classmate.
Back on campus, they enjoyed and suffered through a seven-month relationship on the “down low,” he said. They might share a meal at Grant Hall, but if they passed each other in company, they would simply nod hello or offer a casual back-slap. They did not attend the year-end formal dance together.
“I went alone and told the other guys my girlfriend from home had flight delays,” said the senior, who goes nightly to a deserted parking lot to make personal phone calls, for fear of tipping off his straight roommates.
Ms. Miller, 20, a sociology major from Findlay, Ohio, said she decided to leave West Point after two years because she grew tired of hiding.
“It was a whirlpool of lies — I was violating the honor code every time I socialized,” she said in an interview.
Ms. Miller, who ranked 17th in her West Point class, wrote in her Aug. 9 resignation letter: “I have lied to my classmates and compromised my integrity and my identity by adhering to existing military policy. I am unwilling to suppress an entire portion of my identity any longer.”
Becky Kanis, a 1991 West Point graduate and chairwoman of the group Knights Out, which offers guidance to gay West Point cadets, said Ms. Miller’s resignation provided a morale boost to gay cadets by alerting the public to the “shared adversity” they endured in having to mask their sexual orientation.
Ms. Kanis, a former Army captain who now lives in Los Angeles and works with a social services organization, Common Ground, said that her own sexual orientation was investigated twice during her years at West Point — friends interrogated, lockbox searched — and that gay cadets often spoke in code, using genderless pronouns, for example, when talking about significant others. “You have to operate in a ‘shush network,’ ” she said.
But it all “came in handy,” Ms. Kanis said, when she began doing intelligence work in the Army. “I was used to having a cover for my personal life,” she said. “Living closeted is excellent training for intelligence jobs. You’re always fine-tuning who you can talk to about what.”
When an Arab Enclave Thrived Downtown
Conjure, for a moment, a place just steps from City Hall but a world apart. Salaam.
Yes, that is the fragrance of strong coffee in the air, of sweet figs and tart lemons, of pastries that remind buyers of childhoods in Damascus and Beirut. Bazaars abound with handmade rugs and brass lamps and water pipes. Men wear fezzes. A few women retire behind veils. Al-Hoda is the leading newspaper. Business signs — at least those legible to a non-Arabic speaker — proclaim “Rahaim & Malhami,” “Noor & Maloof” and “Sahadi Bros.”
This is not what the lower west side of Manhattan would look like if the much-debated Islamic community center were built two blocks from the World Trade Center site. This is what it looked like decades before the World Trade Center was even envisioned. This is its heritage.
All but lost to living memory and forgotten in the current controversy, Washington Street was the “heart of New York’s Arab world,” as The New York Times described it in 1946, shortly before that Arab-American community was almost entirely displaced by construction of entrance ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
To be clear: this neighborhood, called Little Syria, was south of what would become the trade center site, while the Islamic center would be to the north. And Muslims, chiefly from Palestine, made up perhaps 5 percent of its population. The Syrians and Lebanese in the neighborhood were mostly Christian.
But it is worth recalling the old sights and sounds and smells of Washington Street as a reminder that in New York — a city as densely layered as baklava — no one has a definitive claim on any part of town, and history can turn up some unexpected people in surprising places. (The Abyssinian Baptist Church, for instance, was once on Waverly Place.)
Washington Street was “an enclave in the New World where Arabs first peddled goods, worked in sweatshops, lived in tenements and hung their own signs on stores,” Gregory Orfalea wrote in “The Arab Americans” (Olive Branch Press, 2006). Among them was Mr. Orfalea’s grandmother Nazera Jabaly Orfalea, who arrived in New York from Syria in 1890.
“She would have walked Washington Street,” he said in an interview. “She was a peddler. I have no doubt she was grubstaked by suppliers on Washington Street.”
Mr. Orfalea attributed the migration of Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians to starvation, lawlessness, conscription, taxation and religious intolerance at home; to proselytizing by American missionaries; and to economic troubles that led them to a new world where cultures existed, sometimes bruisingly, cheek by jowl.
“The calls in Arabic of the mothers to their children romping on the street mingle with the jazz screechings from another home and the Homeric curses of the truck-drivers on their way to the wharves,” Konrad Bercovici wrote in the 1924 book, “Around the World in New York,” with a nod toward the nearby Greek settlement of Little Athens.
Little Syria was where the Linotype typesetting machine was adopted for Arabic characters, by the brothers Naoum and Salloum Mokarzel of Al-Hoda (The Guidance). This development “made possible and immeasurably stimulated the growth of Arabic journalism in the Middle East,” The New York Times wrote in 1948.
But the presence of the intelligentsia in the quarter was no bulwark against stereotype. A neighborhood brawl in 1905 was fought by “wild-eyed Syrians,” The Times reported. “The dim light from barroom and cafe showed the glint of steel in 200 swarthy hands.”
Mr. Orfalea discerned parallels with the present controversy. “We fail to deal with the Arab world in rational terms,” he said, “because we immediately reduce them to the irrational.”
Historical accounts describe no mosques on Washington Street, but there were three churches that served the Lebanese and Syrian Christians.
St. George Chapel of the Melkite Rite still stands, at 103 Washington Street. It may be the last recognizable remnant of Little Syria. It is now Moran’s Ale House and Grill.
Pastor's Plan to Burn Koran Adds to Tensions
If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?
Mr. Jones, 58, a former hotel manager with a red face and a white handlebar mustache, argues that as an American Christian he has a right to burn Islam’s sacred book because “it’s full of lies.” And in another era, he might have been easily ignored, as he was last year when he posted a sign at his church declaring “Islam is of the devil.”
But now the global spotlight has shifted. With the debate in New York putting religious tensions front and center, Mr. Jones has suddenly attracted thousands of fans and critics on Facebook, while around the world he is being presented as a symbol of American anti-Islamic sentiment.
Muslim leaders in several countries, including Egypt and Indonesia, have formally condemned him and his church, the Dove World Outreach Center.
An Islamic group in England has also incorporated his efforts into a YouTube video that encourages Muslims to “rise up and act,” widening a concern that Mr. Jones — though clearly a fringe figure with only 50 members in his church — could spark riots or terrorism.
“Can you imagine what this will do to our image around the world?” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. “And the additional danger it will add whenever there is an American presence in Iraq or Afghanistan?”
Mr. Jones, in a lengthy interview at his church, said he sincerely hoped that his planned Koran-burning would not lead to violence. He dismissed the idea that it could put American troops at greater risk, and — echoing his sermons — he said that his church was being persecuted.
He said his bank recently demanded immediate repayment of the $140,000 balance on the church mortgage; that his property insurance had been canceled since he announced in late July that he intended to burn copies of the Koran; and that death threats now come in regularly.
“We have to be careful,” he said. He tapped a holster on the right hip of his jean shorts; it held a .40-caliber pistol, which he said he was licensed to carry. “The overall response,” he added, “has been much greater than we expected.”
Mr. Jones who seems to spend much of his time inside a dank, dark office with a poster from the movie “Braveheart” and a picture of former President George W. Bush, appears to be largely oblivious to the potential consequences of his plans. Speaking in short sentences with a matter-of-fact drawl, he said that he could not understand why other Christians, including the nation’s largest evangelical association, had called for him to cancel “International Burn a Koran Day.”
He acknowledged that it had brought in at least $1,000 in donations. But he said that the interviews he had done with around 150 news outlets all over the world were useful mainly because they had helped him “send a message to Islam and the pushers of Shariah law: that it is not what we want.”
Mr. Jones said that nothing in particular had set him off. Asked about his knowledge of the Koran, he said plainly: “I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.”
Nonetheless, his position and variations on his tactics have become more common, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Florida in particular has had a rise in anti-Islamic activity. In May, an arsonist set off a pipe bomb at a mosque in Jacksonville in what authorities called an actof domestic terrorism. A mosque and Islamic school south of Miami was vandalized twice last year, the first time with a spray of 51 bullets.
Just as disturbing to Florida’s Muslims, and to many Christians and Jews, is that anti-Islamic rhetoric has begun to enter the mainstream through Republican political candidates.
Some of the opposition predated the controversy about the proposed Islamic center near ground zero. In March, for example, Allen West, a retired Army officer running for Congress in Broward County, told a group of supporters that “Islam is not a religion” but rather “a vicious enemy” that was “infiltrating” the United States. (A campaign spokesman said last week that Mr. West meant to refer to radical Islam, not Islam generally.)
Ron McNeil, a candidate for Congress in the Florida Panhandle, told a group of high school and middle school students last week that Islam’s plan “is to destroy our way of life.” He added: “It’s our place as Christians to stand up for the word of God and what the Bible says.”
Similar sentiments now flow daily into the e-mail inbox of the Dove World Outreach Center. Mr. Jones said that the negative e-mails outnumbered the positive by about 3 to 1, but that strangers had sent 20 copies of the Koran and a church worker produced hundreds of supportive e-mails that had come in over the past three weeks.
A dozen of those messages revealed a wide range of motivations. For a few people — a Christian in Afghanistan, an Iraqi in Massachusetts, a Jew who called his co-religionists in the United States “soft in the head” — direct experience with Islamic extremists seemed to have darkened their views. Others seemed motivated by little more than hate, arguing that Korans should be barbecued with pork, which is banned by Islam.
Mr. Jones’s plan faced a new hurdle last week when the Gainesville Fire Department rejected his request for a burning permit. Mr. Jones said he would go ahead anyway (“it’s just politics”), and he predicted a quite a scene.
Some of his neighbors, like Shirley Turner, a retiree who shivered with disgust when Mr. Jones’s name came up in conversation, are already planning to protest with signs calling for unity. More than a dozen houses of worship, of various faiths, also intend to respond collectively on the weekend of Sept. 11 by “affirming the validity of all sacred books,” said Larry Reimer, pastor of the United Church of Christ.
Some pastors even plan to read from the Koran in their services.
For local Muslims like Saeed Khan, who came here in the 1970s to study for a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Florida, the collective rejection of Mr. Jones represents the America they want to believe in. In an interview at an Islamic center that used to be a Brown Derby restaurant, Dr. Khan said that “Mr. Jones is hijacking Christianity” just as “Al Qaeda hijacked Islam.”
What saddens him most, he said, is the lasting effect on Muslim youth. He now has three grandchildren under age 3 growing up in Gainesville, and he shook his head at the story of a friend’s daughter who woke up in the middle of the night and asked her mother, “Why don’t they like us?”
Still, like many others, he rejected the moment’s swirl of anger. Even if Muslims outside the United States respond to the planned Koran burning with protests, or worse, Mr. Khan said he would spend his Sept. 11 doing the same thing he did last year. He will be downtown, a few miles from Mr. Jones, feeding the homeless.
In a Hoarder’s Home, Going All Out to Find the Floor
The door to the apartment would open only six inches. The owner squeezed himself inside, grabbed the top rung of a wooden bed frame and hoisted himself over a mountain of objects — a stepladder, a bird cage, a pile of wood planks — until he was standing atop a waist-high ridge made of the flotsam of his life.
There was a batting helmet. A telephone shaped like a sports car. A tea-colored lampshade. A dozen broken umbrellas hung in a neat row from the bed frame, rising from the rubble like the mast on a shipwreck. The floor was entirely hidden. Over there — the man pointed toward a boulder of suitcases blocking a doorway — was the kitchen.
The owner of all this, the occupant of the 500-square-foot apartment in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, is a trim 54-year-old with short white hair, a thin gray mustache and a nervous, high-pitched voice. He asked not to be named for fear of public shame.
He tucks his T-shirt into his blue jeans. He has a weakness for puns. And he is a hoarder, an obsessive collector who has watched, over more than two decades, an ocean of plastic bags and rotting furniture swallow his bedroom, then his apartment, and then his life.
“It’s little by little,” he said, stumbling to explain his compulsion. “If I don’t need it now, I’m going to need it later. It’s almost like you don’t know what’s going on and then you’re like, ‘Where am I? What am I going to do now?’ ”
A social service organization near his home in the Bronx has stepped in to help answer that question. The organization, Part of the Solution, enlisted Kristin P. Bergfeld and her company, Bergfeld’s Estate Clearance Service, which specializes in hoarding cases, to help him sort through the mess and haul away the truckloads of castoffs he does not need.
“What we’re doing,” Ms. Bergfeld told the man as they tackled the mountain this week, “is getting your light out of a bunch of stuff so you can shine.”
Hoarders have long held a special grasp on popular imagination. One of the best-known cases was that of the Collyer brothers, whose bodies were found in 1947 inside their booby-trapped Harlem brownstone packed with more than 100 tons of phone books, newspapers and tin cans.
Today, two cable-television shows — “Hoarders,” on A&E, and TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive” — compete to lure viewers into hoarders’ overstuffed homes. The cleanup effort in the Bedford Park apartment this week played out like a real-life episode, only without the spooky music and sound effects.
Researchers say hoarding, which is sometimes connected to obsessive-compulsive disorder, is surprisingly common: 2 percent to 5 percent of the United States population suffers from excessive collecting and clutter, said Dr. Gail S. Steketee, co-author of “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.” She said experts were considering classifying it as its own mental disorder.
Every hoarder’s habit is distinct — some are obsessive shoppers, others cannot bear to throw anything away. The man in Bedford Park, a gifted repairman and tinkerer, is consumed by a need to salvage broken castaways.
“I’ve seen him fix a watch using the cut-up top of a cat food can lid,” said Antonietta Bertucci, who works for Part of the Solution and has known him for five years. “He made a seat for a bicycle out of scrap pieces of metal that he’ll find lying on the sidewalk. He has a very MacGyver-type mind.”
The man, who used to work in an industrial laundry room, has lived in the co-op apartment since 1988, when he bought it for about $20,000. From the hallway, it looks like every other apartment in the 56-unit red-brick building.
But a crew of five workers, some in full-body protective suits and face masks, spent two days this week emptying the place of moldy sofas, piles of chairs and folding tables, and filling more than 350 trash bags. Instead of simply transferring all the apartment’s contents into a trash bin, they sifted through each item, saving a portable television the man wanted, and throwing out two bar stools he decided he could live without.
The workers began on Monday morning by unearthing an old bicycle buried beneath a mound of apple juice bottles, roasting pans and beach chairs. Within 45 minutes, they had cleared enough space to open the door all the way for the first time in years. Throughout the day, Ms. Bergfeld kept checking the handwritten list of what to keep and what to throw away that she had asked the man to compile. “This way there’s less grief, less resentment, less backlash and more a sense that he’s rebuilding his life,” she said.
Diagnosed as having a mental illness that he would not detail, the man scrapes by on a Social Security disability check of about $700 a month. He sees a social worker regularly, and has eaten many of his meals at the soup kitchen run by Part of the Solution, near the New York Botanical Garden, for years.
The staff there knew him as an unusually friendly client who kept himself neat and could fix anything. Until he asked for help with his bills, they knew little about his living conditions.
“We asked, ‘Why don’t you use your stove?’ ” Ms. Bertucci said. “He said, ‘Well, because I put stuff on top of it.’ Then he felt comfortable enough to tell us: ‘I have tons of stuff. I keep everything.’ ”
He has gone without electricity for years, after failing to resolve a billing dispute with Consolidated Edison. At night, guided by only a flashlight, he would crawl between a rusty bicycle and an upended sofa into the small part of his bed that remained uncovered by a tangle of folding chairs, stepladders and side tables. He would bathe with a washcloth and a bucket: Metal bed rods and plastic bags long ago claimed the shower.
He said that he tried to get help five years ago from the city’s Adult Protective Services agency, which sent workers to clear his apartment, but that after a day or so of cleaning, he could not bear the indiscriminate sweep of his belongings any longer. He barricaded himself inside until the movers left, then began rebuilding his mountains.
This time, however, he said he was ready to change.
“I want to have people come visit me, that’s the main thing,” he said. “I’ve never been with anybody, and I blame it on my mess.”
He began to cry.
“Sometimes I feel like, just let me get buried.”
Ms. Bergfeld has been clearing homes for 23 years. She said this apartment, covered with roaches and mouse droppings, was a routine job. Normally, it would cost about $6,000 to clean it out, but she did the project pro bono and also arranged for Sleepy’s to donate a new bed, Anderson/Ross Temporary Personnel Services to provide workers and Perna Carting and Junk Junkies to haul the detritus to the dump. Ms. Bergfeld said she would continue donating her services to others in need.
As the cleaners worked, a bizarre stream of items poured out of the apartment: a framed painting of George Washington, a yellow tow truck strap, a bag of boxing gloves, a circular saw, piles of doorknobs. By 11:15 a.m., the living room floor — hardwood, it turned out — was peeking through.
Despite the man’s colossal mess, neighbors have lodged no complaints about his apartment — mainly because they were unaware of it.
“I didn’t know someone was living in such conditions,” said Thomas Pachla, a member of the building’s co-op board. “This is a hazard for all tenants. It’s shocking and kind of scary.”
By 12:05 p.m., the apartment’s owner could enter the kitchen. He was pleased at the progress, but nervously checked each bag to make sure he was not losing things he needed. Among the items he insisted on keeping were a cotton candy machine, a toy trumpet, a near-life-size horse doll and a toilet seat decorated with seashells.
“Sometimes I need stuff,” he explained.
Ms. Bergfeld said she sometimes had to return to homes she had already cleared. But Munir Pujara, a lawyer at Part of the Solution, said the organization and a social worker would help the man maintain the apartment.
At the end of the day on Tuesday, the man stood inside his living room, which felt as spacious as a football stadium. The walls needed painting, the bathroom needed serious work and a cluttered bookcase still needed to be pruned. But the man said that for the first time in decades he felt proud of his home.
“It’s like I have too much space,” he said. “I’ll be able to move around and do things that other people do.”
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Date: 2010-08-30 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-28 12:11 am (UTC)www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/nyregion/24greek.html?_r=1
Mr. Sigmund, the Port Authority spokesman, said the authority has no oversight of any building OUTSIDE the ground zero reconstruction zone, including the community and mosque.
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That is, the Cordoba site is NOT in Ground Zero.
It was dishonest if the politicians to suggest that the same 'city officials' have authority over both projects.