Picking Brackets and March Madness

One thing that our family has enjoyed over the years is the excitement of the college basketball tournaments.  When Everly and I were making decisions about my graduate studies in 1986, the ACC had one of its great years with Duke and Georgia Tech battling it out as two of the best teams in the country, and no slack from UNC and NC State as well.  We got hooked on the tournament that year, seeing a great Duke team lose to Louisville in the championship.  By then, we were making plans to move to Durham, and David was getting close to being born.

Living in Durham and attending Duke turned us all into basketball fans.  One of our favorite family stories comes from a time when I was still a student at Duke and Everly was a visiting clinical professor in the department of education at UNC.  One day as we were driving in the car together, Naomi did as little ones often do.  She was sorting out the world and announcing it to the rest of us.  That day, she informed us that "Daddy's school is 'Go Duke' and Mommy works at 'Beat Carolina.'"  I couldn't have been more proud of how well she learned our sentiments.  Out of the mouths of babes....

David and I spent many an evening watching Duke basketball with neighborhood families.  David gets anxious about tense situations in ball games or movies.  He still is likely to hide his face.  But as a boy, he would pull his coat over his head, run to the other room, climb the stairs, get behind the couch, and otherwise entertain us with his acting out the tension in the room.

Eventually we bought season tickets to women's basketball at Duke.  David and I went most often, but Lydia got very interested during a few years when Iciss Tillis played for Duke.  We made posters with her name, and we managed to get some autographs and meet various players.  David was a huge Alana Beard fan.

After Baylor won the national women's championship in 2005, we spread our loyalty back to Baylor, where Everly and I met and earned our bachelor's degrees.  Then, when Lydia attended Baylor and Everly was working in Texas, we added season tickets to the women's basketball games there.  Many of our happy family times and pictures from Everly's last two years came at the Baylor basketball games.

So today I'm preparing to pick my brackets for the two tournaments.  It's happy to have both Baylor and both Duke teams in the mix.  Also having some other teams we're glad to see succeeding (at least this year) like NC State, Virginia, Mercer, SF Austin, and NCCU adds to the fun.  Getting to hate UNC, Texas, Louisville, and others from the legions of evil will also make it enjoyable.

Until getting interested in Baylor basketball and living in Texas, Everly was the least fan of basketball of all of us.  She would usually wait until the Final Four weekend to pay attention.  But her new interest led her even to pick brackets last year.  Not really a basketball aficionado, she did not excel in her picks.  This year, those of us in the family who get organized enough to do our brackets in time will not be able to count on Mom's bracket to be at the bottom of our group.

We'll miss Everly and we'll miss Brittney Griner this year for the tournaments.  But having Everly with us through these recent basketball seasons makes our joyful memories of basketball past even better.  She was a sold out fan for Baylor Women's basketball, and that makes me love the game more.

Jena 6 Case Finally Over

When the Jena 6 were charged far out of proportion for their fighting which injured Justin Barker, it touched a tender nerve among those of us who long for an end to white supremacy. I first posted about the story over two years ago, having read the Chicago Tribune news story and the earlier work by Alan Bean, director of Friends of Justice (If you don't know Alan's blog, you should check it out.)

All over the news and talk shows, self-righteous pundits were raging at Duke University and the Durham legal system for daring to believe and act on the charges brought against three young white men by a black woman. Tragically, in the Duke case, the charges turned out to be unsubstantiated. People pretended not to believe that this sort of thing ever happens in the good ol' US of A.

Yet the Jena case had been around almost a year before it got any attention. The DA in Jena said that the violent crime was "aggravated" because when the boy was kicked, it was with a sport shoe which he dared to call a deadly weapon. With no ability to meet bail, these boys were facing attempted murder charges even though the victim had not been hospitalized and attended a party the night of the fight. The story did not make sense.

Thanks to folks like Alan Bean, the news began to get out. In a few months, it became a major national issue. Now, years later, the case is coming to a conclusion. The boys who beat and kicked Justin Barker are paying restitution and fines. They have all served jail time. But they also have finished high school, and five of the six are now in college.

For more information, check out Alan Bean's post today.

I posted a while back about the racially charged events in Jena, Louisiana. Today I did some research to get an update on those events. So far, one of the young black men has been convicted of aggravated assault. "Aggravated" means, in Louisiana law, that a weapon was used. The prosecutor claimed that the boy's tennis shoe constituted a weapon when he kicked the victim. Ten white prosecution witnesses disagreed about whether Mychal Bell had been the one to initiate the assault. Strangely, the defense attorney called no witnesses and made no case for the defense, even though a coach at the school had observed the fight and publicly stated that Bell was not the one who struck the victim. The other five boys who were charged have not yet been brought to trial.

I got the image above from the website of a former Baptist preacher turned advocate named Alan Bean. His organization is called Friends of Justice, and he is the one who got the word out in April that led to broad coverage in national and international media. Another thing I learned from him was that when the black youths protested by sitting under the controversial tree, law enforcement and the District Attorney were called to the school for a sobering assembly. District Attorney Reed Walters has been quoted as saying (while looking at the black students), “See this pen in my hand? I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.” Sounds like he "Nifonged" them. A summary of other shocking details of the case can be found on the blog Pursuing Holiness. The news report from the local Alexandria, Louisiana, newspaper is here.

A quick web search will find many other sites discussing this case. Sadly, it still does not seem to be making the news. If you are so inclined, it would be good for the faith community to write letters to the editor, op-ed pieces, or otherwise make it known that this sort of thing is not any more tolerable in Jena than in Durham. In addition, I located a campaign to contact Governor Blanco and District Attorney Walters at colorofchange.org.

Building relationships across community lines is the surest foundation for social change that lasts and serves the common good. This past Sunday, the results of several years of relationship building began to bear fruit publicly in Durham, NC. Durham CAN (communities, associations, and neighborhoods), a community organizing group, gathered for a Delegates Assembly on the campus of Duke University. Holding the meeting at Duke was a major symbol of the relationship building that has been going on.

One of the priorities of Durham CAN for four or five years has been improving the economic conditions of all Durham citizens. One strategy for doing that has been promoting a "livable wage" policy with major Durham employers. Sometimes it is called a "living wage." It is an effort to make a more realistic assessment of the basic costs of a household, revised from the widely used "poverty line" figures which do not accord with current costs of housing, fuel, transportation, communications, education, etc. Over several years of work, Durham City Government (original ordinance preceded CAN involvement and amendment with CAN involvement), Durham County Government (policy in minutes of June 14, 2004 meeting, pages 12-14), and the Durham Public Schools all adopted the livable wage proposals put forth by Durham CAN and negotiated through the relationships built with leaders in those organizations and the community.

Students, professors, employees, and administrators at Duke University have been discussing issues relating to wages, job security, and health care for some time now. Some of the students and professors have for even longer been part of member organizations that make up Durham CAN. Duke University was also aware of these changes, and on their own set a "Duke wage" as a floor for Duke employees, much higher than the minimum wage and very close to the "livable wage" adopted by the city, county, and schools. At the same time, Duke students, professors, and employees began to organize more formally into a group called Duke Organizing. For about a year, Duke Organizing has been a member organization of Durham CAN, and together we have been engaged in conversations with Duke University administrators about employee wages and benefits. As anyone might imagine, the conversations and relationship building have not always been smooth, and the local paper highlighted some of the conflictual history. People on all sides have at times taken positions that did not immediately lead to agreement. But the persistence in building the relationships has been the key to getting results.

On Sunday, Duke University Vice President for Campus Services Kemel Dawkins, announced that the Duke wage and health benefits would immediately be a stipulation for all food service contractors who do business with Duke. It is a major step to help another 140 employees in low-wage jobs. It is also a major precedent which should continue to affect other employees at Duke. Finally, it is a major challenge to other employers in the Durham area to consider the way they compensate employees if they want to be able to retain them. In the long overview of the process, Durham CAN has led at many stages of the process, but we have also been blessed to be working with institutions and leaders who have shared our convictions of making Durham a better place for all its people. Together, we can see even greater things happen for Durham's workers, communities, businesses, and public institutions.

Another relationship building process also led to a public announcement at the assembly. The number of uninsured workers in Durham is rising, as it is all over the country. The County, the hospitals, the doctors, the clinics, the social services--everyone is working to do what they can to see that people have access to medical care. Yet there are many gaps. For instance, access to primary care is much more available than access to specialty care. To address this crisis, Durham CAN and a critical mass of major players: The Durham-Orange Medical Society (doctors), the Department of Social Services (records and referrals), the Lincoln Health Center (free and low-cost clinics), Durham County (health care funder), Duke (major charity care provider), and major insurance providers, have agreed to participate in Project Access. It should make available specialty care for thousands of patients a year who might otherwise let themselves get so sick that they end up in the emergency room getting crisis care, or even worse. It is an effort to fill gaps that could only happen if people start making relationships for the purpose of serving the public good.

The notorious Duke sexual assault case has been dismissed. I think it is accurate to say that the victim's account, the lack of evidence, and the missteps in the prosecutor's office really did not support a case. I am glad that when the evidence did not add up, young men accused of rape and sexual assault have been exhonorated.

However, I do not agree with one depiction of this case which I heard on the radio this afternoon. It said that the accused had "done nothing wrong." I will stand by the conviction that hiring and leering at a stripper is wrong, that participating in racist and sexist speech and carousing is wrong, that underage drinking is wrong, that promoting drunkenness is wrong, that writing an email which threatens to skin a woman alive is wrong, that disturbing a family neighborhood with despicable behavior is wrong, and that acting like none of these things matter is wrong.