“It sucked out all my oxygen”- Profiling Wade Henderson

He was only 14 years old, it was 1963. He was going to Junior High School for graduation and had saved up some money. For him this was a big deal, it was the first time in is his life he was about to buy a suit in one of the well known department stores in Washington, DC called Garthickles. His father had given him the measurements and sent him away with the words in his mind:”Try it first before you buy it because if you once have bought it, it is hard to return.” He went to the men’s department, feeling sophisticated, proud and older than his years because he had earned the money he was about to spend on the suit. Out of all the suits lined up neatly in the store, he immediately knew what he wanted to buy. He picked the blue suit with black buttons and went to the salesman to ask him where the fitting rooms were. “I want to try this on.” The salesman just looked at him and smiled:”You know Nigger’s can’t try clothes on in Garthickles?” And then he started laughing and with him all the other customers around him. “I felt embarrassed and humiliated, it made me feel less than a person. Even though you could try clothes on you could not try them on because somehow you would soil them. That was the implication of it,” says Wade Henderson, remembering the incident that most affected him in his childhood. “This experience haunted me for much of my young adult life. And it motivated to push for change.”

Today, Wade Henderson is sitting in his office as the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “We are committed to build an America that is as good as its ideas. We do that by lobbying on legislation and policy that advances Human and Civil Rights.” His wall is filled up with pictures of recent presidents and him. On the cupboard right next to his desk is a letter by Nelson Mandela, dated February 7Thu, 2005. Mandela congratulates him in person for the work he has done on the occasion of a project called “Voices of Civil Rights“. A project by the Leadership Conference and the Library of Congress that collects thousands of personal stories of people related to the Civil Rights movement. The project won the PeaBody, an Emmy and several other awards. Just as Wade Henderson himself. He won several awards, the latest on Fri. March 26 by the American Immigration Council. He received an honorary Doctorate in Law from Queens College of Law, and is a professor at the David A. Clarke School of Law in DC.

“I was motivated as well by the injustice that I saw around me. I could see a contradiction how the US was viewed abroad and what they did at home, and this encouraged me to participate in changing the system,” says Henderson while he is looking at the letters and achievements hanging at his office. “Washington DC was actually a sheltered city. It did not have the violence that one normally associates with terms in Birmingham, Alabama. It operated under a strict code of social engagement that largely messed the brutality of racial segregation. And yet it sucked all the oxygen out of me. I found it hard to breathe in a city that did not respect my humanity.”

He remembers a hot summer day, August 27th 1963. A day that motivated him in his early years to begin the fight for Civil Rights. It was the day of the March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King hold his famous “I have a dream” speech.” My parents had not wanted me to go because they were fearful that there was going to be violence. The local newspapers had warned the African American community not to go.” He went anyway, took his bicycle, drove down to the Mall and became one of a quarter million people, dressed up nicely, protesting for their rights. Henderson describes the atmoshpere as intense, peaceful and with a spiritual quality to it. “This event had more impact on my life than anything else.”

　1966 til 1970 he studied sociology at the Howard university, where he not only met his wife but was in the center of a cultural Black revolution. It was a period of great awakening among Black students across the united states. “I was steeped in the culture of the Black movement. I was there when some of the great changes happening in the 60s.” He was inspired by poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the biography of Malcom X and books by W.e.b. du Bois especially “because he knew how to use his scholarship on an intellectual level for social change.”

He was about to finish is undergraduate studies and continue his studies in sociology at Colombia university when something else changed his plans. One of his professors, Herbert O’Weed, was one of the lawyers to defend Adam Clayton Powell in the case Powell vs. McCormack in 1969. He had been dismissed from the House of Representatives because he refused to pay a judgment. The former minister of a Baptist Church in Harlem challenged his dismissal and the case came to the Supreme Court. There were two other lawyers representing Powell in this case. One of them was Arthur Carnoy. “A little Jewish lawyer who became my mentor – a law professor at Rutger’s law school who had the audacity to challenge the actions of the committee. An extraordinary gifted lawyer who uses his skills for social change.” After Henderson had joined the group of protestors in front of the Supreme Court and the case was over, he went to speak to Arthur Carnoy in person. This made him change his mind. He now wanted to study law at the Rutgers University of School of Law. “I did not feel comfortable with challenging it from the outside anymore. I wanted to challenge it from the insight using law as a tool.”

During the summers of his semesters at Rutgers he worked for legal services for several Civil rights organizations. “Civil Rights was the watchword of the day. I wanted to use my skills for change.” And that’s what he did. After his graduation, he worked for the Council on Legal Education Opportunity, became the director of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and then the Washington Bureau director of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) before he became the director for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 1996.

 Charles Kamasaki, the executive vice president of the largest Hispanic advocacy organization in DC, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) worked with Henderson together on several Civil Rights cases over the last years. “When I first came to DC and work for the Immigration issues, Wade was a central player in a small group of people who were working for. All the people working on Civil Rights issues had something in common: they cared a lot about in acting a legal immigration program, they were working together to bring out thousands of people out of the shadows, etc. What Wade made stand out was that he was probably the only one of that group who understood the intricacies of the legislative group. Wade taught us every trick in the book. He has a spirit of generosity, ” describes Kamasaki Henderson. He also speaks about his audacity to do things that seem impossible. “I remember one meeting, when we were meeting with Chairman Miller, and the chairman was indicating that he planned to do a markup on a legislation more quickly than we wanted, Wade stood up and objected and said: But we have amendments. And I am thinking: We have amendments? And unbelievably Chairman Miller looked at Wade and said: OK, would a couple of weeks be good enough?”

His wife, Marsha Henderson met him during his years at Howard where she was impressed by his intellect and drive to change something. “He is addicted to justice. He always gets up for the fight. There is never victory for him because it is never enough. Unlike most of us who get tired and say enough, he just continuously gets up looking for more.”

“There were a lot of moments that were hard for our cause,” Henderson says and speaks about the Hate Crime Bill that Obama signed October 2009. “It is big achievement, but it took us 13 years. It takes persistence to fight for change. Every year we got knocked out. But you get knocked out, you get up and you do it again, you get knocked out and you do it again. Because that’s how changes are made.”

Random

I am entering the metro, not expecting anything. I am on my way to my internship. It sit down in the crowded metro, everybody is dressed in business clothes, looking really important. The women next to me starts talking to me..about something random. I don’t even remember what it was. We end up having a nice conversation. We have maybe 10 minutes. We talk about random things that are randomly important in our lives. She is working for the government, I think the department of state. She is just going to leave for South Africa. I get excited and teach her some Zulu words she can use while she is there. We are having a good time. I am talking to someone that I have not known 10 minutes ago and that I will maybe never see after 10 minutes of talk. And still. It changes me. It inspires. Broadens my horizon. It opens up a world that I have not seen so far. Someone working for the government, having a nice job to travel. And still. It is the contact to that random person that is sitting next to me that counts. I remember her way of talking and how her face changes when she speaks about her trip. And how she enjoys meeting someone that had been there and shares her excitement.

This is what I love. This is what I love about the US. And this is just one random story in the whole picture. It happens to me almost every day. I have met so many interesting people that I could almost write a whole book about it and on the other hand it is just a little drop of all the possibilities, of random face-to-face conversations with people that I meet, that leave me more inspired, that sometimes open up more questions for me. The one thing that I really enjoy about being here is that it is so easy here to meet people. To talk to random strangers. Many Germans would call it superficial. “Oh Americans are always asking “How’re you doing?” And in fact they don’t care about the answer.” That’s maybe half true. It is more a greeting than a real question, what I sometimes just forget. Then I start talking about my day and bla bla…

But what is nice, they listen. I like the friendliness, just the little things. Like saying “Thank you” to a bus driver that you don’t know. Or people saying: “Hey I love your earrings” like the lady behind the glass house in the metro station while I was just passing her. This is so much more the way I feel, I think than the German attitude of not saying anything, not being really friendly until you know the person sitting in front of you.  Germans always say Americans are superficial because they are friendly but you never know what they are thinking. I don’t get that vibe. I can feel the general friendliness and the difference when someone really likes you. It is just another way of communicating. I don’t want to marry my bank account manager that took the time to sit down with me for half an hour and talked with me about almost everything. Maybe I will never see him again. But what I will remember is the face-to-face conversation that I had with him. How he appreciated me by just being friendly. And you know what. That’s all I want. Because it makes me smile, and appreciate this moment, the person sitting there, appreciate life.

I mean there are also people that I meet that become friends, friends with whom I hang out now every weekend. Friends that I met eating a falafel. We ended up having a deep conversation about life, ex-boy friends and culture in general. Now I meet them every other weekend and could not imagine my time here without them.

“A stranger is a friend that I just don’t know yet.” I like this attitude. And this is why I really enjoy being here. Actually I get sad when I think that I have to go back. But while I am here “I appreciate it”. This kind of became my favorite sentence. Just a random note from a random stranger in a random situation. Just random.

I know this is just a very little episode of what I experience here. But it gives you an impression. Many people were asking me for a new blog entry..so sorry for all those who waited. Take care.

Exciting Days – Ride-Along with the Police

My officer had just heard a shot, a few seconds later we got a call over the police radio that there was an armed carjacking just about two blogs away from us. So we drove there quickly, left the illegally parked cars and drove down the road until we saw four men standing at the side. They were waving at us, as soon as they saw our rotating light on top of the police car. One of them was repeatedly shouting into his phone while his voice was almost cracking: “I can’t believe this! I can’t believe this just happened!”

Where were I? How did I end up in this situation? Wednesday night I went on a ride-along with the police. Anyone can do it. You just fill out some paperwork, choose the district you want to be on the beat and you ride-along with a police officer for up to four hours. Since we had to write a breaking news story for our journalism class I thought that might be a good idea. I was just worried that nothing was going to happen that night because “my” police officer said that because it was so cold and the midst of the week there might nothing going on that night. And then suddenly this happened and we were the first to arrive at the crime place.

Everybody was way too discomposed given the fact that one of them had just been shot at, their car stolen with all their belongings, musical and technical equipment. The three musicians had been on their way to a play at a club and had just waited for one’s cousin to come out of the house. They had seen a car stopping in front of them, a man walking towards them but had not paid any attention. The man passed the car, came back around the car to the driver’s side, pulled out his 40 caliber handgun and shouted: “Mo..fu.. Get the hell out of the car.” The three musicians, scared to death, climbed out of the car, walked away when suddenly the carjacker with dark hair and a scarf of an Arabic type shouted at them: “Do you think I am playing?” and fired a gunshot at one of them. The bullet went straight into his left side where it got stuck .

This had just happened minutes before we arrived at the crime scene. My officer – he was very kind, answered all my questions and tried to give me an insight into what the work of a police officer looks like – had just tried to explain me that it was inevitable for a police patrol to know his area and notice when something is different. When asked how he notices the difference he had answered: “You gain the experience over the years.” When we arrived at the crime scene he said with a wink :”See, here you see that something is different, do you?”

We both went out of the car and he started to ask them what had happened. I was very surprised by his calmness in this case. He explained to me later that you should not let stress take control over you especial in these moments. “Whenever I go somewhere I want people to feel better when I leave and not increase their fear. The most important when you arrive at a crime scene is not to let stress taker over. Stay calm, relax.”

I learned my first lesson as a journalist: Never start asking any participants any questions if the police is still or will be interrogating them. My second lesson: It could be very dangerous for any victims, participants or witnesses if their name was printed in a paper since the murderer could come back for them, so don’t mention anyone unless the police names him officially themselves.

So after one of them had been brought to the hospital, the three victims told the police what they had just experienced, and I had unintentionally locked out “my” police officer out of his car by pressing the wrong button, I got all the information on this case.

It was around four o’clock in the morning and I still had to write my article that was due the next morning. So I decided to call it a day – or a night- go home, write the article, get two hours of sleep and then go to the National Press Club to meet Richard Dunham from the Houston Chronicle and then John Walcott from the McClutchy Company.

Inspiring days – exiting moments. I hope the one man who got shot recovered well.

One quotation that I find very inspiring, forwarded from our professor:

“Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare… always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”–Joseph Pulitzer

DC- The City of Power

I am here, in the Capital city of the United States. It’s exiting, inspiring and it broadens my horizon in so many ways.

For all those who don’t know me: I am a student from Germany, right now part of the washington semester program for journalism in Washington DC. My dream is to become a good journalist and this is one big step towards the right direction.

For all those at home who are wondering how I am doing here and whether I had a safe trip: Yes and Yes I am doing great. And after I got stuck in London on my way to Washington DC I arrived safely. Since I missed some of the introduction classes it was a little bit hard to organize everything during the first days, but I made it. I am now living in a dorm on campus, I share my room with 2 other girls: a chinese girl who studied in France and is in my program and an American girl with South American origins. This is just a mirror for the whole mixed bunch of people that are here. We have people here from all over the world that are doing different programs.

<<<<<my class

So far, I have seen almost all the “tourist places” of DC.

The White House

The Capitol

The Library of Congress, with amazing arts on the walls, an immense collection of books and one of the three perfect existing first Gutenberg bibles in the world. I was very proud of being a representative for my home city Mainz where it was printed. Yeahh:-)

We went to the Senate,

where we had a lot of fun in the official press room where all the important statements are made. We met Ryan Grim, a reporter for the Huffington Post who gave us an insight into the tough business of reporting on the Hill.

This program is just awesome. We have been to the Wall Street Journal, today Ed Henry was our guest speaker, the white house correspondent for CNN.  Wednesday we are going to meet reporters from the Houston Chronicle and the National Press Club…to mention just a few.

So, there are so many new things happening everyday which makes it hard to keep up-to-date with everything. I will try to let you know what is happening here in DC but I can actually only give you a glimpse about what I am experiencing here.

Nevertheless, I hope you have fun reading. Enjoy and take care (how Americans would put it)

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