Two towering figures of the Black community have passed away. Although from two generations, and in very different ways each has had a profound impact on the lives of Black folks in the U.S.

Civil rights leader Dorothy Height dies at 98 | Reuters

Trained as a social worker, Height began her career as an advocate for civil rights and gender equality during the 1930s, working to prevent lynching, desegregate the U.S. armed forces, reform the criminal justice system and work for free access to public accommodations in the United States.

Height died at Howard University Hospital of natural causes, a hospital spokesman said.

“Ms. Height was arguably the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership, but she never drew the major media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time,” the Washington Post said in an obituary in its online edition.

Dorothy Height

“Every struggle has the same concerns at the bottom of them,” Height says. “Race, color, creed, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, it all matters. We need to go back to the time of the March on Washington. That time in 1963. That coming together of all backgrounds with a fiery sense of righteous indignation.”

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Guru Dies Aged 43 | Billboard.com

Rapper Guru has died aged 43 after a long battle with cancer, according to statements published online.

The New York MC – whose real name was Keith Elam – suffered cardiac arrest on March 2 and had been in a coma.

His death was announced on the DJ Premier Blog site. Premier and Guru made up the hip-hop duo Gang Starr, which released six albums between 1989 and 2003. Guru went on to release a series of “Jazzmatazz” albums featuring collaborations with Cortney Pine, Roy Ayers and Kool Keith.

A very sad day.

[Trigger Warning]

Yesterday, WikiLeaks, a website that publishes anonymous leaks of sensitive information from governments, released a video of U.S. soldiers in an Apache helicopter firing upon and killing most of a group of non-combatant men, including a Reuters photographer, in Baghdad in 2007. The video is ghastly and depressing. At one point, the soldiers are literally begging for permission to shoot at a van that arrived to rescue the few survivors of the attack.

(video below the cut)

From the New York Times:

David Schlesinger, the editor in chief of Reuters news, said in a statement that the video was “graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result.”

On the day of the attack, United States military officials said that the helicopters had been called in to help American troops who had been exposed to small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades in a raid. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad, said then.

But the video does not show hostile action. Instead, it begins with a group of people milling around on a street, among them, according to WikiLeaks, Mr. Noor-Eldeen and Mr. Chmagh. The pilots believe them to be insurgents, and mistake Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s camera for a weapon. They aim and fire at the group, then revel in their kills.

“Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” the other responds.

A wounded man can be seen crawling and the pilots impatiently hope that he will try to fire at them so that under the rules of engagement they can shoot him again. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says.

A short time later a van arrives to pick up the wounded and the pilots open fire on it, wounding two children inside. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one pilot says.

At another point, an American armored vehicle arrives and appears to roll over one of the dead. “I think they just drove over a body,” one of the pilots says, chuckling a little.

Reuters said at the time that the two men had been working on a report about weightlifting when they heard about a military raid in the neighborhood, and decided to drive there to check it out.

“There had been reports of clashes between U.S. forces and insurgents in the area but there was no fighting on the streets in which Namir was moving about with a group of men,” Reuters wrote in 2008. “It is believed two or three of these men may have been carrying weapons, although witnesses said none were assuming a hostile posture at the time.”

The American military in Baghdad investigated the episode and concluded that the forces involved had no reason to know that there were Reuters employees in the group. No disciplinary action was taken.

In case it’s not clear, the Pentagon lied about the nature of the attack. And now that the video has been released, the coverage has been questionable to say the least. Don’t worry, though. None of this will distract anyone in the major news media from obsessively covering who Tiger Woods has slept with or how awesome the iPad is for too long.

Happy National Poetry Month! If you’re into this sort of thing (and really why shouldn’t you be?) don’t forget that Naional Poetry Month is also NaPoWriMo and if you’re looking for a little inspiration to get those poems written, ReadWritePoem and Poetic Asides are both sponsoring NaPoWriMo challenges along with prompts every day. I’m going to try and be ambitious this year and do both. Maybe I’ll even post some of them.

It’s really hard for me to not read these lawsuits against Federal health insurance reform as just more States Rights arguments, and you’ll forgive me if I’m a tad bit weary of those.

The health insurance reform (which should be distinguished from the health care reform that we have yet to see) that passed last night leaves me in an uncomfortable place. On the one hand, I want to share in the hope/change rhetoric that argues that the passage of this bill is a stepping stone towards more meaningful reform. There are few, either on the right or the left that will honestly claim that there aren’t some very good things about this bill, things that will make many people’s lives easier. It’s still hard for me not to ask at what ultimate cost the handful of good things come. There are a lot of good points being made right now about how this legislation could potentially backfire on the very people that it is supposedly designed to help. There are just as many good points being made right now about how this legislation will ultimately benefit us all and make the country a better place to live in. I think a lot of this is still up in the air.

But something huge did happen yesterday, and it goes beyond, or shall I say greatly reinforces, the historic nature of this piece of legislation.

The passage of this bill ultimately focused on abortion, with Bart Stupak & Co. holding President Obama and the Democrats hostage. The Executive Order, which cleared the passage of the bill by Democrats, has been the starting point of both conservative opposition and liberal praising of this bill. The conservative argument against the bill being that the Executive Order is meaningless and so leaves the cost of abortion services ultimately funded by taxpayer dollars, etc. and the liberal argument for the bill being that the Executive Order is meaningless and so leaves The Hyde Amendment open to repeal, allows Stupak to save face, etc. Both sides are correct, I suspect, of the legal meaningless-ness of the executive order. My concern, however, is with the left, and I suspect the left is failing to acknowledge with their argument that there is more to politics than hardcore, strict legality. While from a strict legal standpoint this executive order may be meaningless, politics, especially the politics of justice, doesn’t work itself out in purely strict, legal terms. There is also symbolism and ideology at play and neither should be underestimated. This executive order, while perhaps being legally meaningless, does still serve a purpose. This is a symbol of acceptance. There’s no reason to reaffirm a law unless you are also willing to ultimately accept it and endorse it. Coming from the leader of the Democratic Party, this is also a symbol of a rather large shift in official Democratic ideology with regards the pro-choice position. Regardless of the technicalities of the order, I’m not sure how you can’t see this as anything but an official shifting towards the right regarding pro-choice ideology on behalf of the Democratic Party.

I suspect that Stupak didn’t save face. Instead, he pulled off a major Democratic Party coup that will have the effect of shifting Democratic legislation further to the right.

I’m uneasy about how easy it was for him to do so.

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

A few highlights:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

…

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

…

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

…

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

…

Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

…

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

It’s just mind-boggling. The erasing, demonizing, and/or minimizing of people of color in this far-right version of United States history is par for the course, frankly. Heaven forbid conservative white men don’t get their due credit for ending racism. But now they also want to vanish a white-dude major political figure in United States history because he coined a phrase inconsistent with their political worldview? In what sort of deluded, made-up, historical world can one argue that the primary author of the Declaration of Independence didn’t help inspire the American Revolution?

In which I shake my head at the sad, pathetic things that people do and say:

We refer the Board to the following link – http://logansrogue.livejournal.com/1327524.html – which will corroborate our client’s allegation that their advertisement has been the subject of discontent for the feminist bloggers on the said site. We are sure the Board will note that the bloggers on this site do not represent the majority of society who are reasonably minded and less sensitive to an advertisement with a tongue in cheek approach.

This from a complaint regarding an ad banned in Australia for be wholly inappropriate.

Oh, those feminists and their unreasonable demands that women be respected! Any reasonable person man can easily see the relationship between almost naked women swimming in cream (oh the originality!) and purchasing a domain name, right?

I would laugh at this if I didn’t believe that a lot of people men will think that’s a good point.

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Many, many many of our great grandmothers were raped in slavery. But surely a few of em were loved and surely some…

…Some were cunning and brilliant enough to use their bodies to gain liberation thus fooling massa.

Of course most were raped, we know that, but some were sharp enough to trade that good-good for status or liberation.

They are absolutely not “hos.” They’re sexually heroic. They’re self-liberating by any means necessary.

Tweets by ToureX. I’m at a rare loss for words on this one. How that thought could even enter anyone’s mind is beyond me. Like Renee, however, I’m wondering why more people aren’t crying foul on this one. (MSNBC President Phil Griffin at 212-664-4444, EMAIL: viewerservices@msnbc.com. *hint, hint*)