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      Alcee Hastings, Longtime Florida Congressman, Dies at 84

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      As a federal judge, he was impeached and removed from the bench. He was then elected to the House, where he became known as a strong liberal voice.Representative Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge who, despite being impeached and removed from the bench, was elected to Congress, where he championed civil rights and rose to become dean of the Florida delegation, died on Tuesday. He was 84.Lale Morrison, his chief of staff, confirmed the death. He provided no other details.Mr. Hastings, a Democrat, had announced in early 2019 that he had pancreatic cancer. He continued to make public appearances for a time but was unable to travel to Washington in January to take the oath of office.His death reduces his party’s already slim majority in the House of Representatives, which is now 218 to 211, until a special election can be held to fill his seat. His district, which includes Black communities around Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach as well as a huge, less populated area around Lake Okeechobee, is reliably Democratic.A strong liberal voice, Mr. Hastings was a pioneering civil rights lawyer in the 1960s and ’70s in Fort Lauderdale, which at the time was deeply inhospitable to Black people. Throughout his career he crusaded against racial injustice and spoke up for gay people, immigrants, women and the elderly, as well as advocating for better access to health care and higher wages. He was also a champion of Israel.He achieved many firsts. He was Florida’s first Black federal judge and one of three Black Floridians who went to Congress in 1992, the first time Florida had elected African-American candidates to that body since Reconstruction. He served 15 terms in the House, longer than any other current member, making him dean of the delegation.He had earlier in his career been the first Black candidate to run for the Senate from Florida.In 1979, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. In 1981, he became the first sitting federal judge to be tried on criminal charges, stemming from the alleged solicitation of a bribe. The case ended up before the House, which impeached him in 1988. The Senate convicted him in 1989 and removed him from the bench.But it did not bar him from seeking public office again, and he went on to win his seat in Congress three years later. He took the oath of office before the same body that had impeached him.If his wings were clipped in Washington, Mr. Hastings was adored at home, where his early fights for civil rights and his outspokenness helped him easily win re-election for nearly three decades.In a 2019 review of his career, The Palm Beach Post described him as “a man with immense gifts — boldness, intellect, wit — who repeatedly and brazenly strides close to the cliff’s edge of ethics, unconcerned that scandal could shake his hold on a congressional district tailor-made for him.”Mr. Hastings in 1987, when he was a federal judge. A year later, after a judicial panel concluded that he had committed perjury, tampered with evidence and conspired to gain financially by accepting bribes, the House impeached him; the year after that, the Senate removed him from the bench.Susan Greenwood for The New York TimesAlcee Lamar Hastings was born on Sept. 5, 1936, in Altamonte Springs, a largely Black suburb of Orlando. His father, Julius Hastings, was a butler, and his mother, Mildred (Merritt) Hastings, was a maid.His parents eventually left Florida to take jobs to earn money for his education. Alcee stayed with his maternal grandmother while he attended Crooms Academy in Sanford, Fla., which was founded for African-American students and is now known as Crooms Academy of Information Technology. He graduated in 1953.He attended Fisk University in Nashville, graduating in 1958 with majors in zoology and botany, and started law school at Howard University before transferring to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee. He received his law degree there in 1963.As a student, he was involved in early civil rights struggles. Recalling a drugstore sit-in in North Carolina in 1959, he later said: “Those were the early days of the civil rights movement, and the people in Walgreens were breaking eggs on our heads and throwing mustard and ketchup and salt at us. We sat there taking all of that.”He went into private practice as a civil rights lawyer in Fort Lauderdale. When he arrived, according to The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a motel wouldn’t rent him a room; throughout much of the 1960s and ’70s, parts of the county were dangerous for Black people.At a luncheon honoring Mr. Hastings in 2019, the newspaper said, Howard Finkelstein, a former Broward County public defender, called him a “howling voice” trying to change Broward from a “little cracker town that was racist and mean and vicious.”Mr. Hastings filed lawsuits to desegregate Broward County schools. He also sued the Cat’s Meow, a restaurant that was popular with white lawyers and judges but would not serve Black people. The owner soon settled the lawsuit and opened the restaurant’s doors to all.Mr. Hastings ran unsuccessfully for public office several times, including for the 1970 Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. He wanted to show that a Black man could run, but he received death threats in the process.Representative Charlie Crist, who was a Republican when he was governor of Florida but who later became a Democrat, said in a statement on Tuesday that he had “long admired Congressman Hastings’s advocacy for Florida’s Black communities during a time when such advocacy was ignored at best and actively suppressed or punished at worst.”Gov. Reuben Askew appointed Mr. Hastings to the circuit court of Broward County in 1977; the swearing-in ceremony was held at a high school he had helped desegregate. Two years later, President Carter named him to the federal bench.But in 1981, Mr. Hastings was indicted on charges of soliciting a $150,000 bribe in return for reducing the sentences of two mob-connected felons convicted in his court.A jury acquitted him in a criminal trial in 1983 after his alleged co-conspirator refused to testify, and Mr. Hastings returned to the bench.Later, suspicions arose that he had lied and falsified evidence during the trial to obtain an acquittal. A three-year investigation by a judicial panel concluded that Mr. Hastings did in fact commit perjury, tamper with evidence and conspire to gain financially by accepting bribes.As a result, Congress took up the case in 1988. The House impeached him by a vote of 413 to 3. The next year, the Senate convicted him on eight of 11 articles and removed him from the bench.Despite his tainted record, Mr. Hastings was elected three years later to represent a heavily minority district.Mr. Hastings at the Capitol in 1998. He was elected to the House in 1992 and served 15 terms.Paul Hosefros/The New York TimesHis impeachment was never far from the surface in the House. This was evident after the Democrats took back control in 2006. Mr. Hastings was in line to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Republicans started using his history against the Democrats, prompting Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, to give the chairmanship to someone else.Mr. Hastings’ survivors include his wife, Patricia Williams; three adult children from previous marriages, Alcee Hastings II, Chelsea Hastings and Leigh Hastings; and a stepdaughter, Maisha.Mr. Hastings never sponsored major legislation, but he could be counted on to express himself freely. He had a particular loathing for President Donald J. Trump, whom he once called a “sentient pile of excrement.”Saying what was on his mind was long a habit of his. It started getting him in trouble as soon as he was appointed to the bench, when he veered from judicial norms, criticizing President Ronald Reagan and appearing at a rally in 1984 for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination.But Mr. Hastings saw nothing wrong with giving his views; just because he was a judge, he said, that did not mean he was “neutered.” As Mr. Crist said, Mr. Hastings “was never afraid to give voice to the voiceless and speak truth to power.”Nor was his self-confidence ever checked.“I’ve enjoyed some of the fights, and even the process of being indicted and removed from the bench,” he told The Associated Press in 2013. “All of those are extraordinary types of circumstances that would cause lesser people to buckle. I did not and I have not.”Maggie Astor contributed reporting. More

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      The Youthful Movement That Made Martin Luther King Jr.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Youthful Movement That Made Martin Luther King Jr.In this moment made so dark by white nationalism and truth denial, Americans should look to the country’s legacy of young leaders with forward-thinking wisdom.Mr. Benjamin is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”Jan. 17, 2021, 7:00 p.m. ETMartin Luther King Jr. at home in Montgomery, Ala., in May 1956.Credit…Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThere’s an image of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that’s seared into my mind. Eyes inviting and innocent, face relaxed, the casually dressed Dr. King reminds me of a cousin at a card party — he looks so young. When Dr. King elucidated his dream at the March on Washington in 1963, he was 34 — younger than most Americans now, given the national median age of 38.Despite his youth, or perhaps because of it, Dr. King understood the long view of history. He could not have foreseen a crowd brandishing guns and ransacking the Capitol, abetted by a failed president and right-wing digital media networks peddling debunked conspiracy theories. But he might have foreseen the Senate election victories of two youthful Southerners, Jon Ossoff, 33, and Raphael Warnock, 51, the latter a charismatic preacher and a successor to his pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church.Dr. King was a mobilizer of voters as much as he was an orator. To put voting rights at the forefront of the country’s consciousness, Dr. King helped launch a voter-registration drive in Selma, Ala., in early 1965. In many marches, over many weeks, Dr. King accompanied hundreds of Selma’s Black residents to the county courthouse. During one voter registration trip, he and 250 demonstrators were hauled to jail by the segregationist sheriff. That very day, county officers arrested some 500 schoolchildren who were protesting discrimination.When a 26-year-old Black civil rights activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was fatally shot during a march in nearby Marion, Ala., Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a voting-rights march from Selma to the state Capitol in Montgomery. The hundreds of demonstrators, including Hosea Williams, 39, and John Lewis, 25, chairman of the S.N.C.C., were stopped as they left Selma, at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama state troopers and local vigilantes attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. Alongside others badly injured, Mr. Lewis (a future U.S. congressman) suffered a fractured skull during “Bloody Sunday.”The march resumed days later with federal protection. It stood on the shoulders of longstanding action: As far back as the 1930s, Ella Baker, in her 20s and 30s, worked as a community organizer in New York. By the mid-1940s, she was traveling across the South, recruiting new members to anti-racist groups and registering voters.Personally and through their work, Ms. Baker, Mr. Williams, Mr. Lewis and Dr. King faced down legally sanctioned oppression. They confronted horrors that we do not feel as regularly in our bones. They lived through them. How is it that they remained patriots?In this moment made so dark by white nationalism and truth denial, Americans should look to these examples of young leaders with forward-thinking wisdom to carry us through, to show how our civil rights ancestors got things done. This country can survey their organizing tactics to see step-by-step how Dr. King and his allies accomplished so much. Commemoration involves studying their careers as a strategy and amending their efforts to provide a road map to achieving political power.At this tender juncture in our country’s trajectory, countless young grass-roots leaders and local organizations are reshaping human equality and power. Setting a national example, the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter and Georgia STAND-UP were part of an effort that registered roughly 520,000 overlooked, new voters after 2016. The New Georgia Project alone knocked on at least two million doors, made over six million phone calls and sent four million texts to get out the vote during the general election and the runoff, according to the organization.To Americans who voted for the first time this cycle, or to anyone else born after 2002, Bloody Sunday can seem like ancient history — as distant and abstract as the Teapot Dome scandal. I’ve spoken to young people who don’t know what a sit-in or redlining is. But to others who cast a ballot for Mr. Warnock or Mr. Ossoff, a direct protégé of John Lewis, watching Confederates storm a federal building after a failed right-wing attempt to invalidate votes in heavily Black Democratic strongholds, Bloody Sunday does not look like distant history at all.Georgia’s electoral upsets and the resistance to Trumpism belong to a larger narrative and pantheon of liberation campaigns. These movements do not peddle in transactional politics; they forge transformative politics. They don’t dwell in the greasy realm of back-scratching and short-term calculation. They work deeply in vision, courage and action, persevering and believing in themselves when no one else does.“You see, I think that, to be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement,” Ella Baker once reflected to an interviewer. “This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be.”As we commemorate Dr. King, we need to toss the “great man” concept of leadership, our knee-jerk longing to worship epic individuals and not citizen action. Contrary to the mythology of most King celebrations, Dr. King’s true contribution wasn’t as a single messiah of civil rights, but as a formidable organizer of people and causes. To peddle the great Moses version of Dr. King’s legacy is to betray the greatness of his extraordinary deeds, whose lessons and necessity are more urgent than ever.Rich Benjamin (@IAmRichBenjamin) is writing a book that will be a family memoir and portrait of America. He is the author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics Forever

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionHow Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics ForeverMartin Luther King Jr. under arrest, Oct. 19, 1960.Credit…Associated PressAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNINE DAYSThe Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 ElectionBy Stephen Kendrick and Paul KendrickThe African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights is replete with dramatic and harrowing stories, many involving intimidation and threats of violence from white supremacist defenders of the status quo. One of the most consequential of these stories is the subject of “Nine Days,” a compelling narrative written by the father-and-son team of Stephen and Paul Kendrick, co-authors of two previous books on race, law and politics.The story begins in mid-October 1960 with Martin Luther King Jr.’s incarceration (his first) in a Georgia jail cell and ends three weeks later with John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard M. Nixon in the most competitive presidential election of the 20th century. Kennedy’s razor-thin triumph depended on several factors ranging from his youthful charm to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ability to pad the Democratic vote in Chicago. But, as the Kendricks ably demonstrate, one crucial factor in Kennedy’s electoral success was the late surge of Black voters into the Democratic column. In all likelihood, this surge represented the difference between victory and defeat in at least five swing states, including Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, ensuring Kennedy’s comfortable margin (303 to 219) in the Electoral College.This last-minute shift was precipitated by two impulsive phone calls: one from John Kennedy to Coretta Scott King, expressing his concern for her jailed husband’s safety; the second from the candidate’s younger brother Robert to Oscar Mitchell, the Georgia judge overseeing King’s incarceration. Arrested on two minor charges — participating in a student-led sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta and driving with an Alabama license after changing his residency to Georgia — King was thought to be in grave danger after a manacled, late-night transfer from an Atlanta jail to a remote rural facility in Klan-infested DeKalb County, and soon thereafter to the state’s notorious maximum-security prison in Reidsville.Coretta King, panic-stricken that her husband might be murdered or even lynched, contacted Harris Wofford, a friend and longtime civil rights advocate working on Kennedy’s campaign. Along with Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and the Black journalist Louis Martin, Wofford was part of a campaign initiative charged with expanding the Black vote for Kennedy by offsetting the senator’s mediocre record on civil rights — somehow without alienating the white South.On Oct. 26, after consulting with Wofford, Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call Mrs. King. The conversation was brief, but the message was powerful: “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.” When Bobby, Jack’s campaign manager, learned what had happened, he was furious, fearing this was a liberal stunt that would destroy his brother’s chance of winning the South. But after cooling down and realizing that the die was cast, he called Judge Mitchell to plead for King’s release on bail.Mitchell agreed, King was soon released and on the last Sunday before the election, the Kennedy campaign blanketed the nation’s Black churches with a flier later known as the Blue Bomb. The choice was clear, the bright blue flier insisted: “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” With Black ministers leading the way, Kennedy won an estimated 68 percent of the Black vote on Election Day, 7 percent higher than Adlai Stevenson’s showing in 1956.No brief review can do full justice to the Kendricks’ masterly and often riveting account of King’s ordeal and the 1960 “October Surprise” that may have altered the course of modern American political history. Suffice it to say that any reader who navigates the many twists and turns and surprises in this complex tale will come away recognizing the power of historical contingency.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Has Georgia Reached a Turning Point for Democrats? The Senate Is at Stake

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHas Georgia Reached a Turning Point for Democrats? The Senate Is at StakeThe growth of the Atlanta area and the efforts to protect African-Americans’ voting rights have transformed the state’s political landscape.Mr. Sokol, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, is the author of three books on the civil rights movement, most recently “The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.”Jan. 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Georgia’s Senate runoff elections, Republicans are banking on a strategy that generations of segregationist politicians perfected: Array the voters in rural counties, overwhelmingly white and conservative, against those in the Atlanta area. From the Jim Crow era to our day, the antagonism between rural enclaves and greater Atlanta has shaped Georgia’s politics.The Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have decided that the key is turning out their rural base. Yet the rapid growth of metropolitan Atlanta, combined with tireless efforts to protect African-Americans’ voting rights, has transformed the state’s political landscape.Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia was especially meaningful not only because it upended decades-long trends in party politics but also because it represented a possible turning point in a much longer racial history. Mr. Biden is the first Democrat to carry Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. Mr. Clinton, though, won the state with only 43.5 percent of the vote, and he performed well among white voters in rural areas. Mr. Biden put together a very different political coalition — more urban and suburban, more multiracial and more progressive. It is this coalition that the Democratic Senate candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, are counting on.Politicians in Jim Crow Georgia possessed a tool that Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler would have envied: the county-unit system. The winner of each county received all of its unit votes. The eight largest counties had six unit votes apiece, 30 counties possessed four unit votes each, and the smallest 121 counties held two unit votes apiece. In 1950, Georgia’s three least-populous counties — with 9,267 total residents — combined for six unit votes, the same as Fulton County, with 473,572 residents. This system of malapportionment empowered demagogues, none more successful than Eugene Talmadge.Wealthy executives bankrolled Talmadge’s numerous political campaigns, while many white farmers supplied the votes. (He served three terms as the state’s governor — two from 1933 to 1937 and one from 1941 to 1943.) Talmadge was a vocal opponent of the New Deal, yet he depended on the support of those impoverished Georgians who stood to benefit from many federal programs. The journalist Robert Sherrill, in his book “Gothic Politics in the Deep South,” explained why “the people” still stood by Talmadge: “Old Gene had never done anything for them, but he made them feel like people, fit for laughter, supreme over the black man at least, and sharing with him the sly knowledge that since only the rich could profit from government, the poor man was foolish to take government seriously.”In many ways, Talmadge — though he was a Democrat and his party backed the social programs of the early New Deal — created a blueprint for today’s Republican Party. He combined racial animus with anti-government rhetoric, piled up votes among rural whites and exploited a system that gave those voters disproportionate power.In the Georgia Senate races, the Republicans’ most insistent line of attack is that a Democratic-controlled Senate will lead America to socialism. Ms. Loeffler’s opponent, Mr. Warnock, would become Georgia’s first African-American senator. In one debate, Ms. Loeffler referred to “radical liberal Raphael Warnock” no fewer than 13 times. (Mr. Warnock responded that his economic philosophy derived from Matthew 25.) This is not so different from the way Talmadge raged against the New Deal as a socialist-inspired plot that would bring racial equality to Georgia.Talmadge defended white supremacy and encouraged his supporters to use intimidation and violence to keep Black voters away from the polls. After losing a bid for re-election in 1942, he ran again for governor in 1946. He whipped white Georgians into a frenzy. Just before a Democratic primary in July, Talmadge told a crowd, “If I’m your governor, they won’t vote in our white primary.” In Butler, a veteran named Maceo Snipes cast his ballot in that primary election, becoming the first African-American to vote in Taylor County. The next day, four white men went to Snipes’s home and shot him. Snipes died days later.Roughly 85,000 Black Georgians voted in that election, though tens of thousands were disenfranchised — by either voter purges or outright intimidation. An estimated 98 percent of African-Americans voted for Talmadge’s opponent James Carmichael, a businessman and more moderate Democrat. Carmichael won the popular vote by more than 16,000, but Talmadge won a solid majority of county-unit votes — and he thus won the primary election. (Talmadge also won the general election but died before his inauguration.)As Jim Crow began to crumble in the 1960s, so did the county-unit system. The Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr established the principle of one person, one vote, and its 1963 ruling in Gray v. Sanders outlawed Georgia’s system.The state’s politics have since been reshaped by demographic change. Democrats now perform poorly in white rural areas but rely on the expanding suburbs. Two counties tell this tale: Bacon County, in rural southeastern Georgia, and Cobb County, in suburban Atlanta. Bacon County was Talmadge country. In 1946, Talmadge defeated Carmichael by 1,317 votes to 277. Cobb County went strongly for Carmichael, and it formed part of the urban-suburban coalition that gave Carmichael a popular-vote victory.In 2020, the old Talmadge strongholds were President Trump’s territory. He won Bacon County by a margin of more than 70 percentage points, but suburban areas like Cobb County powered Mr. Biden’s victory. Cobb was a Republican bastion from the 1960s through 2012, but in the past decade, the county has grown even more racially diverse and decidedly Democratic, supporting Mr. Biden by a margin of more than 14 points.Mr. Biden won 30 counties in Georgia, and Trump won the other 129. Mr. Biden’s coalition encompassed the suburbs together with Atlanta, and Mr. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff are mobilizing voters in those places. Even if the architects of the county-unit system could not have fathomed the dramatic changes that have remade the Atlanta area, this was the kind of urban-suburban coalition that they feared. For those who believe the nation can achieve a multiracial democracy, the same coalition holds their most fervent hopes.Jason Sokol (@jasokol) is a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire and the author of three books on the civil rights movement, including “The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More