Peace Messenger

T.R.M. Howard - Adventist Physician and Civil Rights Activist

Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power
by David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito
University of Illinois Press / 2009

From the Publisher's Description: He was a mentor to civil rights activist Medgar Evers, a nemesis of J. Edgar Hoover, and a target of the Ku Klux Klan. He also played a key role in the search for truth in the Emmett Till murder case. As a trained medical doctor, he kept the secrets of the white elite, and although married to one woman for forty years, he had many personal peccadilloes. His life was often in great peril, and his home was protected by armed guards around the clock.

But T. R. M. Howard's impressive accomplishments and abilities vastly outshone his personal flaws and foibles. He was a dynamic civil rights pioneer and promoter of self-help and business enterprise among blacks.

"Black Maverick's wonderfully told story about an important personality sadly unknown to most students of the Civil Rights Movement is a more than welcome corrective. Dr. Howard's life and accomplishments need to be better known!"--Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Dr. Howard was a graduate of Union College and the College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda. The North American Informant described him in 1966 as "a physician, civic leader, and humanitarian" who "has long been associated with, and has been a friend of Seventh-day Adventists" (Mar.-Apr 1966, p. 5).

Religion and Torture: A Disturbing Picture

The results of a recent survey on The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life:

Outcomes of Torture

From: Dr. James Zogby, "Bush's Tortured Legacy," truthout, 7 April 2009

Two major stories, prominently featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times last Sunday, dealt with the Bush administration's use of torture. When combined, they raised several important issues.

The front-page banner headline in The Washington Post read "Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots," with the subhead continuing "Waterboarding, Rough Treatment of Abu Zubaidah Produced False Leads, Officials Say."...While, early on, President Bush heralded the capture of Abu Zubaidah (calling him "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden"), the story notes how, within weeks of his imprisonment, analysts concluded that he was not an official member of al-Qaeda, serving more as a "travel agent" for recruits seeking to join the war in Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, the Post reports that, facing intense pressure from the White House, interrogators were pushed to use torture techniques in an effort to extract information from their prisoner. In the end, they found that the "fruit" of this torture was either

How Close to Presidential Dictatorship?

Analysis and commentary on the Bush-era memos made public on Monday, March 2:

David G. Savage, "Bush Memos on Presidential Power Shock Legal Experts," Chicago Tribune, 4 March 2009: Legal experts said Tuesday they were taken aback by the claim in the latest batch of secret Bush-era memos that the president alone had the power to set the rules during the war on terrorism.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin called this a "theory of presidential dictatorship. They say the battlefield is everywhere. And the president can do anything he wants, so long as it involves the military and the enemy."...

Alison Des Forges: Truthful Witness

The Economist (21 February 2009) paid tribute to Alison Des Forges, who courageously sought and reported the full truth as an investigator for Human Rights Watch in Rwanda and surrounding nations in Africa.  Dr. Des Forges was one of 50 people killed in the crash of a commuter plane near Buffalo, New York on February 12.

Having written a doctoral thesis on Rwandan history in 1972, she spent several years investigating the nation's political violence for Human Rights Watch, and was one of the first outside observers to warn that a full-blown genocide was taking place.  "But everyone who mattered ignored her."

After the genocide ended in 1994

Mrs Des Forges led a team of researchers to dig up the facts. She then wrote the definitive account: nearly 800 pages of scrupulously footnoted horror. Future historians will depend on it. Her testimony helped put several of the perpetrators behind bars. And she made it impossible to argue, as many did at the time, that the genocide was a spontaneous explosion of ancient tribal hatred. She read the plans. She saw the receipts for half a million machetes.

...She took extraordinary risks, rushing to the scenes of massacres and questioning killers when their blades were barely dry. She left out none of the ghastly details: the wives forced to bury their husbands before being raped; the baby thrown alive into a latrine.

She never went further than the facts allowed. Others might speculate that the genocide claimed 800,000 victims, or a million. She stuck with half a million, because she could substantiate it. Others assumed that if the genocidal Hutu regime were the bad guys, then the Tutsi rebels who overthrew them must be the good guys. Not so fast, said Mrs Des Forges: only one side was guilty of genocide, but both committed war crimes. The RPF killed perhaps 25,000 people in 1994, she reckoned....

What drove her? One story is revealing. In Burundi, Rwanda’s neighbour, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in 1993. The Western media barely noticed. Hutu officers in Rwanda concluded that they could do the same thing, and no one would give a damn. Mrs Des Forges wanted to document such atrocities so meticulously, and publicise them so persistently, that people would have to give a damn. Her book was called, after a killer’s cry, “Leave None to Tell the Story”. She knew that story-telling matters.