While I was away...

While I was away -- more on that soon -- I saw these stories in the local news:

***A federal grant will allow researchers to piece together what exactly happened on the Chelsea Creek in May of 1775, when colonists sank and burned the HMS Diana, a British vessel that was appropriating supplies upriver for the Redcoat army. Considered the first naval battle of the American Revolution -- and taking place between the iconic battles at Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill, the confrontation is rarely cited as a key part of the nation's history. Researchers may attempt to find what, if anything, is left of the Diana. Our friends at EastBoston.com provide more on the Battle of Chelsea Creek.

***The parent company of East Boston Savings Bank is purchasing the South Boston-based Mt. Washington Savings Bank, which will increase deposits to over $1 billion.

***The specifics may still be a bit murky, but arresting Skip Gates, perhaps the leading African American scholar in the country, while he was in his own home is going to appear to many people as an indication that, despite our half-black president, the US is still a long way from being free of institutional racism. The fact that this happened in Cambridge, arguably the most liberal city in America, makes it all the more disappointing.

Remembering where we've been and celebrating where we are

In the early hours of August 28, 1955, four people drove up to a small home in the rural Mississippi delta, and two of them pounded on the door and told the man who lived there to send out his nephew. Being that the visitor was a white man, Moses Wright -- a black 64-year-old sharecropper and preacher -- had no choice but to do what he was told and wake Emmett Till. The 14-year-old was taken away in a car with four white people, and his body -- which had been savagely beaten, shot and weighted down -- was found the next day in the nearby Tallahatchie River.

Those involved were acquitted by a jury of a dozen white men, which took all of an hour to deliberate. Later, the defendants admitted to friends that they had killed the boy. Till was from Chicago and, earlier in the day, had spoken to or whistled at a white woman at a local store. When the badly disfigured body arrived home, Till's mother made the fateful decision to open the casket for the funeral, and the photos and stories elicited widespread outrage across the country and in Europe. Thus, the American Civil Rights movement began.

Today, 53 years later, another Chicagoan is poised to accept his party's nomination for president of the United States. Maybe in the last half century America would have risen up and come to the point where we have the chance to vote for someone that is partly of African descent, but as Barack Obama hits the stage in Denver this evening he, and all of us, should remember Emmett Till.

An ugly charge

An ad and a story in the Spanish-language newspaper La Semana seem to claim that racism is behind neighborhood attempts to deal with Tequila's Bar & Grill.

Joe Mason forwarded me clippings from the newspaper and, from what I could make out in the article and in an ad, Tequila's owner Luis Vasco is blaming his establishment's troubles on people in Orient Heights who are not happy that the business is owned by a Latino.

He appears to ask supporters to show up to the Boston Licensing Board public hearing about Tequila's that is scheduled for Thursday at 6 p.m. at the church hall at St. Lazarus on Ashley Street. On the agenda are proposals to roll back the bar's closing time from 2 a.m. to midnight and to suspend the liquor license for a period of time.

Flag down on the play

Back on Jan. 1, Ian Johnson seemed to be starring in a Disney movie: score touchdown on trick play to help small college beat perennial power in bowl game by one point to complete unbeaten season AND keep running through end zone over to girlfriend/cheerleader, get down on one knee, produce ring and propose on national television. If Chrissy Popadics had said no, it would have been quite a letdown, but she did say yes, and the couple is scheduled to get married on Saturday.

Here is where the plot moves from family feel-good story to reality in America today: Because Johnson is black and Popadics is white the groom has received death threats, forcing them to hire security for their wedding.

No fool, Johnson is aware of the irony here: "It's really sad because a lot of people that are probably [making threats] are the same people who were cheering me on."

FEMA: Let them breathe toxins!

In an infuriating and criminal lack of common sense, compassion and morality, the government agency that was universally ripped for responding lackadaisically to Hurricane Katrina allowed the disaster's victims to live in trailers that they knew were emitting dangerous fumes.

For more than a year FEMA -- the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- ignored the warnings of employees working to help the hurricane's refugees resettle that there were high levels of toxins in the trailers that people were being housed in. It turns out that there are levels of formaldehyde gas, a chemical that causes cancer and respiratory ailments, 75 times higher than the maximum allowed by law in the workplace.

"One man in Slidell, La., was found dead in his trailer on June 27, 2006," the Boston.com story says, "after complaining about the formaldehyde fumes," and in a conference call various officials from six different agencies recommended a deeper look into the circumstances. "But FEMA lawyers rejected the suggestions, with one cautioning that further investigation 'could seriously undermine the Agency's position' in litigation."

Are you kidding me?! This is outrageous! This is beyond incompetence, but rather criminal negligence, and it's about time that Congress is following up on its oversight obligations on such matters. This should be turned over to the Department of Justice for prosecution, and then something needs to be done immediately for the 66,000 families still in these trailers.

These revelations come as the Globe reports today on a Harvard study that shows how doctors unconsciously treat blacks and whites different in emergency rooms, often not prescribing the potentially life-saving treatments to African Americans that they would to Caucasians. Are these stories related? Just try telling me that race and class aren't real issues that impact the health and well being of people in America every day.

Ebony and ivory

Though some people point out that state-mandated slavery came to an end with the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865 or that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s put a stop to most of the country's Jim Crow laws, race is an issue that is integral to the American experience -- and not just for the purposes of academic and historical study.

In Georgia, for example, there is a high school that, up until this year, held separate proms for white and black students. That finally changed yesterday -- in 2007! Congratulations to the students at Turner County High School.