From Clove Hitch to Hangman's Noose.

Knot tying is a part of the seamanship nomenclature taught onboard the CGC Eagle.It is part of the practice of marlinespike seamanship - the general knowledge of knots and the care of rope. The ability to tie knots, bends and hitches, splice rope and use lines properly sets the trained boater apart from the landlubber. Someone onboard the Eagle went from a Clove Hitch to a Hangman's Noose. That person might make a good sailor, but he would not make a good Coast Guard officer.



WE INTERUPT THIS BLOG TO BRING YOU A LATE BREAKING DEVELOPMENT FROM THE ACADEMY:
Now that the cat is out of the bag, the Academy had started to release bits and pieces of information about the cadet noose incidents. Hopefully this will keep New London from being inundated with a wave unwelcome guests from Jena, Louisiana returning from that noose incident.
Congressman Elijah E. Cummings asked the U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen on Tuesday, 25 September, to investigate two racially charged incidents where a noose was left in a Coast Guard Academy cadet's personal belongings and in a staff member's office.
“Whenever I see racism raising its ugly head, I'm going to address it,” said U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md., chairman of the House subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation.
Shortly after Cummings publicized his request to Commandant Adm. Thad W. Allen, the superintendent of the academy said he asked the Coast Guard Investigative Service to investigate the incidents.
“I am not satisfied we have done enough to address these heinous acts,” Rear Adm. J. Scott Burhoe said in a statement. “I want to do everything within my power to send a clear message to the academy, our community and our service that hateful acts such as these will not be tolerated here.”
But Cummings said Burhoe should have made this request sooner.
“It seems to me the superintendent's sensitivity to this issue should have been one to call for an investigation immediately,” he said.
On July 22, a third-class cadet, or sophomore, who is Black, found a six-inch piece of string tied into a noose in his personal belongings on the Coast Guard barque Eagle, the academy's training vessel. This incident was first reported in The Day on Saturday, 22 September. (That is about 2 weeks after it was first reported on this cgachasehall.blogspot.com blog on on 6 September.) The Academy had been sitting on it for over 2 months.
Capt. J. Christopher Sinnett, commanding officer of the Eagle, conducted a full investigation into the incident but was unable to identify the person responsible, according to the Academy. That was not the type of trained initiative and leadership that the American people should have to rely on. It appears to lack conviction. Even the cadets could have done a better job. Perhaps the CGIS should make deputies of some of the cadet leaders. There is one in Texas, who seems to have significantly narrowed down the list of suspects. He cared enough to write this:
From An Informed Party in Houston, Tx : Funny. The academy went on an all out man hunt to find who wrote the name "Webster Smith" on the Admiral's farewell flag when he "resigned" his post, last year, but they can't find out who put a noose in a bag on a ship with less than a quarter of the amount of eligible suspects and nowhere for that suspect to hide? Quickly, I can narrow it down some more. It was a male victim, no female is likely to walk unwelcomed into a male birthing area. The victim was a cadet, no enlisted crew member will walk into the cadets birthing area...there is separate birthing on the Barque Eagle. We can even bet that the person knew the watch rotation and when the Black cadet wouldn't be in the room. Despite what happened in other Coast Guard incidents, I'd be surprised if an actual officer would stoop so low as to perform a racist act. Yep, the young white future officer is smiling in exasperation right now. He is off the hook.
Informed Party
Houston, Texas

The Academy held race relations training for all the cadets in response. But then the assistant civil rights officer, a white active duty junior officer who was conducting the training, found a small noose on her office floor.
“We are preparing officers at the taxpayers' expense to go out and command troops who will be diverse and we want to make sure they appreciate diversity,” Cummings said. “The last thing we want is for an officer to be leaving something like a noose in a bag belonging to a cadet and or an officer. That's ridiculous.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, called the incidents detestable, and praised the academy for calling for an investigation. Cummings said he still wants Allen to visit the academy to make it clear that this conduct will not be tolerated.
Angela Hirsch, a Coast Guard spokeswoman, said the commandant is "NOT" currently planning to go to the academy, but that headquarters staff would provide support to Burhoe. When asked about the delay in contacting CGIS, Hirsch said the initial investigation on the Eagle was “a robust response.”

WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG TO BRING YOU THIS NEW DEVELOPMENT: THIS JUST IN:
Commandant Adm. Thad W. Allen has changed his mind. He has changed his travel plans and is now scheduled to visit the academy Oct 4th 2007 to address the cadets at the Academy in response to two racially charged hangman's noose incidents.
U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md., asked Allen to visit the academy to make it clear that such conduct will not be tolerated.
“I am very pleased to be accompanying (Allen) next week when he addresses the entire student body to convey the message that hateful, threatening behavior such as placing nooses among the personal effects of students and officers is both unacceptable and intolerable,” Cummings, chairman of the House subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, said in a statement Wednesday, 26 Sept.
Cmdr. Brendan C. McPherson, Allen's press secretary, said “Given the latest reports and Chairman Cummings' interest in visiting the academy, the commandant firmed things up for his plans this afternoon and extended the invitation for Chairman Cummings to join him,” and . "Allen plans to bring Terri Dickerson, head of the Coast Guard's Office of Civil Rights, on the trip."

“This is another step in the investigation, with CGIS becoming involved,” she said. “We are taking every step we can to make sure the overall climate is free of bigotry at the Coast Guard Academy and throughout the service.”
James Sloan, assistant commandant for intelligence and criminal investigations, said that CGIS agents will “diligently work to track down anyone involved with these acts.”
Rear Adm. J. Scott Burhoe, superintendent of the academy, said the commandant's visit will be “a clear symbol of the Coast Guard's commitment to eliminating discriminatory barriers here and throughout our service.”
“We are buoyed by the support our commandant has provided us as we address the hateful actions that occurred here at the academy,” Burhoe said in a statement.
U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, who spoke to Allen on Wednesday about the investigation, said he was convinced that the Coast Guard is taking the matter seriously.
“They're going to treat it as a criminal investigation,” Courtney said. “It really comes very close to a hate-crime type of incident, so I'm all for that. I think that people really have got to realize that this is not something like a prank.”

Burhoe said if the individuals are found, the academy will take action, including possible proceedings under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (Perhaps he will get a chance to court-martial another cadet.)
“There is absolutely no place for racism in our service or in our academy,” he said.

The Navy Times reported on 26 September that the Coast Guard is launching a criminal investigation into the discovery this summer of two nooses, one in the seabag of a Black Coast Guard Academy cadet and one in the office of a white faculty member at the Academy.
On July 22, a Black third class cadet aboard the training barque Eagle found a noose inside his seabag. On Aug. 2, a female diversity instructor found a noose on the floor of her Academy office during a break in instruction.
The incidents were first reported in The Day newspaper of New London on 22 September, about 2 weeks after they were reported on the cgachasehall.blogspot.com, and 2 months after the first incident occurred. They were not disclosed by the Coast Guard when they occurred. The were disclosed after a massive Civil Rights style protest demonstration in Jena, Louisiana.
Coast Guard officials initially said the incident on board Eagle occurred July 15. The service announced Tuesday that the actual date the incident occurred was July 22.
On July 14, a week before the third classman found the six-inch-long noose, made of string, two members of the Eagle’s crew — a white third class female cadet and a Black enlisted crew member — were allegedly assaulted while on liberty together in Veracruz, Mexico. The Eagle later sailed without them onboard. We have yet to get the Full Story on why the Eagle sailed so suddenly and why she left the female cadet and the enlisted man in Veracruz, Mexico.
An Academy spokesman said the subsequent administrative investigation did not determine a link between the two incidents.
Immediately following the noose incident, Eagle skipper Capt. Christopher Sinnett conducted race-relations workshops aboard the ship.
At the same time, diversity training was ramped up at the Academy; it was during a break in that training Aug. 2 that the female staff instructor found the second noose — another six-inch-long one made of string — near her desk.
When the second noose was found, the Eagle was at sea and had not yet returned to New London from its summer tour.
However, a number of personnel who were on the Eagle on July 22 may have been at the Academy Aug. 2, when the second incident occurred.
The ship had a “phase change” in late July in Miami, with some cadets heading home, or to the Academy, for summer liberty.
It is not clear what charges could be brought against any suspects if they are found.
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, no specific crimes are listed as “hate crimes,” although evidence that links any motivation to race, color, gender or sexual orientation may be considered by military judges or court members in meting out sentences, explained Brent Harvey, an attorney with the Washington D.C.-based firm Feldesman, Tucker, Leifer and Fidell.
“In and of itself, it’s not a crime, but I can certainly see — and I won’t speculate in this specific case — instances where this type of action might be part of a criminal case,” Harvey said.
The discoveries follow nearly two years of racial unease at the Coast Guard Academy that began in December 2005 with the investigation and subsequent court-martial of, Cadet Webster Smith, a Black cadet.
Former 1st Class Cadet Webster Smith, a 22-year-old from Houston, Texas, became the first cadet ever court-martialed at the 130-year-old school.
His accusers were all white female cadets.
During his criminal proceedings, Smith filed a civil rights complaint against the Coast Guard and several academy officers, saying he was treated differently during the investigation than others who had committed similar offenses because he is Black.
The Department of Homeland Security notified Smith on Aug. 20 that his complaint had been denied.
Smith has appealed his criminal conviction, and that process is ongoing.
As a result of the court-martial and its aftermath, which included the reassignment of then-academy superintendent Rear Adm. James Van Sice for issues allegedly unrelated to the Smith case, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen convened a task force to study leadership, culture and climate at the school.
That group made several recommendations regarding increasing minority recruitment at the school and improving diversity training.
Blacks account for roughly 4 percent of the Coast Guard Academy’s student body of 1,000 students.
Overall, the Coast Guard has 2,498 Black personnel out of 40,699 active-duty members.
On Tuesday, 25 September, Rep. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Coast Guard and maritime transportation subcommittee, asked Allen to examine the incidents thoroughly.
“I was utterly shocked when I heard about these implicit threats on both a student and an officer,” Cummings said through a press release. “Racial discrimination and intolerance have no place in either the Academy or the Coast Guard, and these incidents run directly against the efforts being made to increase diversity throughout the Coast Guard.”
Former Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard Vincent Patton, the Coast Guard’s top enlisted member from 1998 to 2002, said the service faces a tough road in recruiting black Americans but praised its current diversity programs.
He recalled one of his first duty stations in Cheboygan, Mich., where he was the first Black person many area residents had ever seen.
“We have units that are located in areas that have little and sometimes no minority population. That’s not to say that minorities can’t do well there, but the challenge is that young African American men and women, especially from urban areas, want to be welcomed in and happily know they will end up where they are not alone,” Patton said.


Thurgood Marshall did more to improve the life of the damned, the dispossessed, and the downtroddened than any other attorney in the 20th century. He fought for the underdog in American society as an attorney and as a justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. As chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund for over 25 years, he fought Jim Crow segregation in the snake pits and hell holes of the solid South. He won 29 of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court; and, he should have won all of them. In a perfect and just world, he would have. His record of successful cases before the high court stands today unparalleled in American judicial history. President Lyndon baines Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967 where he served for 34 years.

When he traveled in the South, Thurgood Marshall never confronted "Jim Crow" headon; that is, he never sat in railway stations or lunch counters reserved "for whites only". However, in forays down South he could not always avoid person danger. In 1946 in Columbia, Tennessee, along with other defense counsels, he drove 200 miles round-trip daily from Nashville,TN to the trial in Colunbia,TN. There was no safe place for a Black lawyer to stay in Columbia, TN. At one point police officers picked him up and took him alone in their car, and charged him with drunk driving. Carl Rowan wrote a detailed newspaper article about how the police tried to lead Thurgood to the banks of a nearby river where a lynch mob had a rope hanging from a tree, ready for him. Brave armed Black citizens came to his rescue. a courageous white magistrate smelled his breath and proclaimed him sober and he was able to return to Nashvill. (Crusaders in the Courts, by Jack Greenberg, 1994, Basic Books, Harper Collins, p. 31,32)

In the Jim Crow segregated South, he was so revered in Black America that people mostly spoke of him in whispered tones. He is easily the most important American of this century. He rose from an humble birth to a position higher than any Black American before him. He built his reputation slowly in jerkwater southern towns where he was outnumbered but never outmatched and never outgunned in the legal arena. In virtually every case he was fighting for the right against a twisted white justice system administered by southern judges and sheriffs who had few second thoughts about beating in black heads.

Thurgood Marshall was the only Black leader in America during the Civil Rights era who could say that he defeated segregation where it really counted; that was, in the courts. He legal strategy was based on the U. S. Constitution. He forced civil and constitutional rights to be extended equally to the poorest and blackest American citizens as well as poor whites. The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King would never have won his first victory, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, if Thurgood Marshall and his legal team had not first won a Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on the city buses. Battles were fought in the streets, but the victories were won in the courts.

Also, it was Thurgood Marshall who argued the case of Brown v. Bd of Education before the Supreme Court. This case ended segregation in public schools.

Thomas G. Krattenmaker, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said it best. He said, "when I think of great American lawyers, I think of Thurgood Marshall,, Abe Lincoln and Daniel Webster. In the 20th Century only Earl Warren approaches Thurgood Marshall. Marshall is certainly the most important American lawyer of the 20th Century."

Drew Days, a former law professor at Yale University Law School, said that "Thurgood Marshall was the living embodiment of how far we as Americans have come on the major concern in our history-race- and how far we still have to go. He was the conscience of this nation. In the law, he remains our supreme conscience."
(Thurgood Marshall, Justice For All, by R. Goldman and D. Gallen, 1992 bt Caroll & Graf Publishers, Inc, NY,NY, 141,142.)