The Washington Post National Weekly - September 25, 2016

Politics Is Hispanic outreach enough? 5

Nation A gender barrier is KO’d 8

World Questions linger over Brexit 10

5 Myths Presidential health 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

N.C. governor can’t escape heat BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

A

national debate over LGBT rights. A court battle over voter ID laws. A public outcry over the police shooting of a black man that could become a turning point in the debate on police brutality.

Any one of those issues — among the nation’s thorniest, most attention-grabbing debates over social justice and race — has the potential to be a career-defining challenge for a state’s governor. In the span of six months, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) has had to deal with all three — even as he fights to win a second term in November.

Let’s start from the beginning.

The ‘ bathroom bill’ In a dramatic special session in March, North Carolina became the first state to require transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding with the gender listed on their birth certificate rather than the one they identify with. The law also took away municipalities’ power to create their own LGBT anti-discrimination ordinances.

Gay rights groups and Democrats seized on the law as an example of Republican bigotry in action. The business, entertainment and sports community — from PayPal to Bruce Springsteen to the NBA and the NCAA — did, too, taking their business elsewhere and dealing a damaging blow to McCrory’s argument that this law will protect North Carolinians, not hurt them. McCrory and his team desperately grasped for some way to explain themselves — the law would protect girls and women from sexual predators, they said. But few seemed to be listening.

Targeting African Americans ‘with almost surgical precision’ In July, three judges on a federal appeals

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court struck down the state’s controversial 2013 voter ID law, writing, “The new provisions target African Americans, with almost surgical precision.” They pointed to the fact that the law allows government-issued driver’s licenses but not government-issued public assistance cards, the latter of which are used disproportionately by minorities in the state.

VEASEY CONWAY/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) embraces officers at the CharlotteMecklenburg Police Department on Thursday.

The court ruling striking down the law was a huge win for voting rights advocates, who had been playing whack-a-mole with voter ID laws across the country. It was a blow to McCrory just months before the election: North Carolina is expected to be a major swing state in November, thanks in part to its increasingly politically active African American community, whose members overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

McCrory accused the court of “undermining the integrity of our elections and maligning our state” and tried to get the law reinstated, but the Supreme Court refused to stay the lower court’s ruling.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2016 The Washington Post / Year 2, No. 50

Charlotte erupts over police violence On Tuesday afternoon, 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by a police officer outside a Charlotte apartment complex.

Police said Scott, who was black, had a gun and posed an “imminent deadly threat” to police; his family says he was reading a book in his car while waiting to pick up his child from school.

Scott’s death hit a nerve in North Carolina's largest city. Nightfall on Wednesday brought with it a second night of protests, some of which turned violent. Police clashed with a majority-black crowd, and amid the demonstrations came a shooting that left one person dead.

McCrory declared a state of emergency late Wednesday. At least one protester compared the scene to that several years ago in Ferguson, the Missouri city that has become a symbol of the national debate over police brutality.

“We cannot tolerate” violence and destruction, McCrory said at a news conference Thursday, his first time speaking publicly since Scott was killed.

McCrory, who was mayor of Charlotte before becoming governor, added a personal plea for the image of his city: “Charlotte, North Carolina, is a great city. . . . And we’re not going to let a few hours give a negative impact on a great city.”

Even if the anger and violence roiling his state somehow fade soon, there are still plenty of land mines for McCrory to navigate over the next few weeks. Going into effect on Oct. 1 is a police-body-camera bill he signed in July that created a court-driven process for whether to make the footage public but which some critics said restricted public viewing of the footage. And less than three weeks later, North Carolina’s early voters begin casting ballots. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ENVIRONMENT BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., opened Saturday. Photograph

by JAHI CHIKWENDIU, The Washington Post

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

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POLITICS

Trump’s use of charity is questioned B Y D AVID A . F AHRENTHOLD

D

onald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the height of a flagpole.

In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.

In another case, court papers say one of Trump’s golf courses in New York agreed to settle a lawsuit by making a donation to the plaintiff’s chosen charity. A $158,000 donation was made by the Trump Foundation, according to tax records.

The other expenditures involved smaller amounts. In 2013, Trump used $5,000 from the foundation to buy advertisements touting his chain of hotels in programs for three events organized by a D.C. preservation group. And in 2014, Trump spent $10,000 of the foundation’s money for a portrait of himself bought at a charity fundraiser.

Or, rather, another portrait of himself.

Several years earlier, Trump had used $20,000 from the Trump Foundation to buy a different, six foot-tall portrait.

If the Internal Revenue Service were to find that Trump violated self-dealing rules, the agency could require him to pay penalty taxes or to reimburse the founda-

He spent $258,000 of foundation’s money to settle legal problems of his for-profit businesses tion for all the money it spent on his behalf. Trump is also facing scrutiny from the New York attorney general’s office, which is examining whether the foundation broke state charity laws.

More broadly, these cases also provide new evidence that Trump ran his charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy.

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Washington Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while,” Tenenbaum said.

The Post sent the Trump campaign a detailed list of questions about the four cases but received no response.

The New York attorney general’s office declined to comment when asked whether its inquiry would cover these new cases of possible self-dealing.

Trump founded his charity in 1987 and for years was its only donor. But in 2006, Trump gave

away almost all the money he had donated to the foundation, leaving it with just $4,238 at year’s end, according to tax records.

Then, he transformed the Trump Foundation into something rarely seen in the world of philanthropy: a name-branded foundation whose namesake provides none of its money. Trump gave relatively small donations in 2007 and 2008, and afterward: nothing. The foundation’s tax records show no donations from Trump since 2009.

Its money has come from other donors, most notably pro-wrestling executives Vince and Linda McMahon, who gave a total of $5 million from 2007 to 2009, tax records show. Trump remains the foundation’s president, and he told the IRS in his latest public filings that he works half an hour per week on the charity.

The Post has previously detailed other cases in which Trump used the charity’s money in a way that appeared to violate the law.

In 2013, for instance, the foundation gave $25,000 to a political group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R). That gift was made about the same time that Bondi’s office was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. It didn’t.

Tax laws say nonprofit groups such as the Trump Foundation may not make political gifts.

A copy of the Trump Foundation’s $100,000 check to Fisher House. The check was sent in the settlement of a legal dispute between Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and Palm Beach, Fla. The foundation is funded almost entirely with other people’s money, according to tax records.

Trump staffers blamed the gift on a clerical error. After The Post reported on the gift to Bondi’s group this spring, Trump paid a $2,500 penalty tax and reimbursed the Trump Foundation for the $25,000 donation.

In other instances, it appeared that Trump may have violated rules against self-dealing.

In 2012, for instance, Trump spent $12,000 of the foundation’s money to buy a football helmet signed by then-NFL quarterback Tim Tebow.

And in 2007, Trump’s wife, Melania, bid $20,000 for the sixfoot-tall portrait of Trump, done by a “speed painter” during a charity gala at Mar-a-Lago. Later, Trump paid for the painting with $20,000 from the foundation.

In those cases, tax experts said, Trump was not allowed to simply keep these items and display them in a home or business. They had to be put to a charitable use.

Trump’s campaign has not responded to questions about what became of the helmet or the portrait.

The four new cases of possible self-dealing were discovered in the Trump Foundation’s tax filings. While Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns, the foundation’s filings are required to be public.

Several tax experts said that the cases involving the flag pole and golf course settlements appeared to be clear examples of self-dealing, as defined by the tax code.

The Trump Foundation had made a donation, it seemed, so that a Trump business did not have to.

Rosemary E. Fei, a lawyer in San Francisco who advises nonprofit groups, said both cases clearly fit the definition of selfdealing.

“Yes, Trump pledged as part of the settlement to make a payment to a charity, and yes, the foundation is writing a check to a charity,” Fei said. “But the obligation was Trump’s. And you can’t have a charitable foundation paying off Trump’s personal obligations.

That would be classic self-dealing.” n

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Hispanic outreach fails to take hold

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Strategists fear Clinton and the Democrats are missing a chance to galvanize key voters

BY A BBY D . P HILLIP AND E D O ’ K EEFE

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agging support among Hispanic voters for Democrat Hillary Clinton and congressional candidates in crucial races has stoked deep concern that the party and the presidential campaign are doing too little to galvanize a key constituency.

While Clinton holds a significant lead over Republican rival Donald Trump in every poll of Hispanic voters, less clear is whether these voters will turn out in numbers that Democrats are counting on to win. Clinton trails President Obama’s 2012 performance in several Latino-rich states including Florida, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona. In those states, where Democrats’ goal of retak-

ing the Senate hinge, some downballot Democrats remain unknown to many Hispanic voters.

That reality has prompted a flurry of criticism of Clinton’s and the party’s Hispanic strategies.

Despite a uniquely favorable environment with Trump’s repeated attacks on undocumented immigrants, Democrats are increasingly worried that the opportunity is slipping away to meet a longstanding party goal of marshaling the nation’s growing Hispanic population into a permanent electoral force. The concerns are compounded by Trump’s surge in several battleground states.

“We’re not seeing the Democratic Party take advantage of this moment in time, really looking to leverage more engagement in a more strategic way with our community,” said Janet Murguia,

president of the National Council of La Raza.

One top criticism is that Clinton waited until this month to launch a sustained campaign of traditional, Spanish-language ads in key markets. Previously, the campaign’s Hispanic strategy centered on reaching millennial voters through new media such as Facebook and YouTube. Its television outreach was produced primarily in English and aimed at bilingual households. According to critics, Clinton missed a chance to deploy a broader effort such as Obama’s effort four years ago.

“This approach may end up being vindicated on Election Day,” said Fernand Amandi, a veteran strategist who led Obama’s research, messaging and paid media operation for the Hispanic vote in 2012. “I just find it to be

Hillary Clinton delivers a speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s 39th annual gala in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 15.

more risky than replicating what we know worked, which is the sustained approach that the Obama campaign put in place.”

Clinton aides and her allies insist that they are facing a very different opponent than Obama’s, along with new challenges posed by a Hispanic electorate that grows younger and less reliant on traditional modes of communication with each passing cycle.

The dispute goes to the heart of a debate among Hispanic operatives about how much emphasis should be placed on newer ways of reaching younger Hispanics, who, like millennials overall, are more resistant to backing Clinton than older Latinos.

“A lot of it has evolved to include outreach that isn’t obvious to people who are used to doing it continues on next page

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from previous page

old school,” said veteran Democratic strategist Maria Cardona.

“The Clinton campaign and the DNC are very strategically focused on Latino millennials.”

Much of the upset is also focused on down-ballot House and Senate races. Even Clinton has said any hope that Democrats can retake majorities rests on Hispanic turnout. Yet neither the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee nor the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee employ Hispanic outreach coordinators, according to Albert Morales, who held that job until March for the Democratic National Committee.

“The DSCC has never really had a robust or a Hispanic engagement effort that I ever coordinated with, and that’s saying a lot being at the DNC under three different chairmen. I couldn’t name one. If you were to ask me, name a Hispanic staffer who’s been at the DSCC, I couldn’t name it. That’s pretty sad,” he said.

As a result, critics say, the party is failing to capitalize on anger at Trump in a way that would help down-ballot candidates.

For instance: According to recent polls, just 40 percent of Hispanic voters say they believe that Trump will make good on his campaign pledge to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants. That means that a key argument of the Democrats’ case against him isn’t sinking in.

“What really scares me is the non-motivation down-ballot of targeting Latinos for Senate and congressional races,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic political consultant who worked on the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

In Florida, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has a seven-point edge among Latinos against Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy, according to a poll released by Univision News this month. Rubio’s Cuban American heritage may be Murphy’s biggest hurdle, but Murphy is also widely unknown among Hispanics: 6 in 10 said they didn’t know enough about him to register an opinion, the poll said.

Arizona tells a similar story.

Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who is hoping to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. John McCain, is unknown by 4 in 10

MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

Hispanics, even though she leads 50 percent to 35 percent among them, according to the same Univision survey.

In Nevada, where former Democratic attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto hopes to become the first Latina elected to the Senate, she’s leading Rep. Joseph J. Heck (R) among Hispanics 58 percent to 24 percent — but 38 percent of Hispanics don’t know enough about her to register an opinion.

“You can never do too much, there’s more to be done, yes,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). “I think there’s more to do around the country, but it’s just expensive.”

DSCC spokeswoman Lauren Passalacqua said the committee is in the process of rolling out a more focused strategy in the closing weeks in key states. She also noted that Cortez Masto and Kirkpatrick are already airing Spanish TV ads.

According to the DCCC, which coordinates House races for Democrats, Spanish-language television and radio ads are on the air in a House race in Texas and another in Florida, with more likely to go up soon. The committee’s biggest effort this cycle has been to hire local, Spanish- speaking organizers earlier than ever to register and turn out voters in key districts.

“This is a new approach that we believe will work,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), first Latino

chairman of the committee.

Also of concern to Rocha and others is the lack of messaging on bread-and-butter topics beyond immigration such as the economy, education and health care — issues that are important to most voters, including Hispanics.

In contrast, Obama’s first Spanish-language ads in 2012 were focused on health care and education, including Head Start and Pell Grants, which provide aid to poor students who attend college.

“Being part of the Bernie team for so long and seeing how the message of free college and raising the minimum wage resonated, I just don’t see that out there now that I’m working on these races where there’s a lot of Latinos,” Rocha said.

Obama also targeted the intricacies of the Latino community, according to Freddy Balsera, a Miami-based political consultant who crafted much of Obama’s Spanish-language advertising campaign in 2008.

“When we were talking to a Latino voter in Colorado, we were discussing issues that mattered to them there. We did the same thing in Florida and took it a step further by talking to South Florida Hispanics with an announcer who was more Cuban-sounding.

It was a more Puerto Ricansounding voice in Orlando,” Balsera said. “We really, really localized the message and understood there’s not a Pan-Hispanic community. And as such, there’s

Audience members listen to Hillary Clinton address the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual gala. Clinton has been criticized for waiting until this month to launch a sustained campaign of traditional, Spanish-language ads in key markets.

“We’re not seeing the Democratic Party take advantage of this moment in time, really looking to leverage more engagement . . . with our community.”

Janet Murguia

no universal pan-Hispanic messages.”

Veterans of Obama’s 2012 race said the campaign determined in early 2011 that they needed an aggressive strategy to turn out minority voters — especially Hispanics — in anticipation of a dropoff in support among white voters. It involved early, heavy advertising on Spanish-language television, including one voiced in Spanish by Obama and others by Cristina Saralegui, who has been described as the “Spanish Oprah.”

Those efforts were paired with targeted grass-roots outreach and an aggressive field program.

Clinton aides said they began putting Latino organizers on the ground in May, both in Hispanicrich battlegrounds and in other states with smaller but potentially pivotal Latino populations including Wisconsin, Iowa, Georgia, Ohio and Nebraska.

The effort includes programs targeting various groups within the Hispanic community, including undocumented immigrant children and their families, small business owners, and a program targeted at Latino faith leaders.

Soon, the campaign plans to bus Puerto Rican supporters from New York into Pennsylvania, to canvass in towns and neighborhoods full of Puerto Rican transplants including Bethlehem, Lancaster and North Philadelphia.

Also under consideration is flying Puerto Ricans from the island to door-knock in Florida.

But the campaign’s investment in the kind of targeted advertising that was pioneered in 2012 has been smaller and has come later.

And the question of language has been a key spark in the debate.

Until recently, much of Clinton’s television advertising to Hispanic voters has been in English, a concerted decision aimed at reaching bilingual households.

This year, Clinton’s Spanish ads only have her saying, “Soy Hillary Clinton and I approve this message.” Amandi, the Obama strategist, questioned the wisdom of waiting to engage in Spanish until the end.

“The question I would ask is what message does that send to the Spanish-dominant Hispanic voters?” Amandi asked. “That they’re not as important as the English-language Hispanic voters by waiting this late in the cycle to engage with them?” n

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In Illinois, a landmark Senate race K ATIE Z EZIMA Chicago BY

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he race for Senate here in Illinois is contentious and potentially historic.

Both Republican incumbent Sen. Mark Kirk and his Democratic challenger, Rep. Tammy Duckworth, are physically disabled and often use a wheelchair.

Kirk suffered a massive stroke in 2012; his left side is partially paralyzed. Duckworth lost both her legs and partial use of her right arm in 2004 after the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting in Iraq was shot down.

“We know the next senator for Illinois is going to be in a wheelchair,” Kirk said recently, his speech slurred and a cane by his side.

It’s a long way from the era when politicians kept their disabilities a closely guarded secret.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and his aides tried to minimize the public appearance of the president in a wheelchair or using braces. John F. Kennedy hid the extent of his crippling back pain.

Change started to come over the following decades, with disabled veterans including Max Cleland of Georgia and Bob Dole of Kansas winning congressional seats and the Americans With Disabilities Act passing in 1990. The U.S. Senate floor still isn’t wheelchair accessible; Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a quadriplegic, was responsible for adding ramps to the House side and making the speaker’s rostrum handicap accessible.

Here in Illinois, the Senate race between two people with disabilities is widely seen as a landmark — and comes during the same election cycle when the Republican presidential nominee mocked a reporter with a disability.

“I think it’s just another milestone, and in any civil rights movement you sort of lift up those milestones,” said Helena Berger, president and chief executive of the American Association of People with Disabilities.

Others, including the Democratic challenger, think it’s just another race.

BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Both candidates are physically disabled and, in a change from decades past, neither is hiding it “I don’t think it’s really a big deal,” Duckworth said. “I just do my own thing. I get out there and I campaign.”

But in an about-face from the days of FDR, some politicians now see an advantage in talking about their disabilities, discussing them in ads, interviews and public appearances as evidence that they can overcome obstacles and lead.

In Illinois, both candidates have released ads focusing or touching on their disabilities. Kirk spent months in a rehabilitation facility, a time during which he said he was depressed.

He allowed his recovery to be filmed, spurred in part by a local politician who kept his stroke a secret. In a minute-long ad released in May, Kirk chronicled his recovery, showing footage of him in a harness, learning how to walk again, and walking up the stairs of the Willis Tower.

Kirk’s doctor released a letter this month stating that the sena-

tor has made a “full cognitive recovery” and that he is quickly recuperating physically. Richard G. Fessler, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, wrote that Kirk has no use of his left arm or hand and has limited use of his left leg. Fessler said Kirk walks with the aid of a cane and brace and that he is not likely to regain a full range of motion on his left side.

Duckworth has long discussed the attack on her helicopter, her recovery and wounds. An ad released this cycle shows footage of her recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Duckworth started participating in marathons after her accident, first as a member of the “Missing Parts in Action” team at Walter Reed and later on the Achilles International Freedom Team.

“It gave me courage to run for office in the first place,” Duckworth said of being shot down and recovering. “At the end of the day, nothing will ever be as bad as that

Top, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, who suffered a massive stroke in 2012, arrives at the Capitol for a vote this month.

His left side is partially paralyzed. He’s running against Rep. Tammy Duckworth, above, who lost both her legs while serving in Iraq.

one day in Iraq and those months in the hospital.”

Disabilities aside, the race between Kirk and Duckworth has been typical of a hard-fought battle for a Senate seat. Kirk, who served in the Navy, has accused Duckworth of not properly caring for veterans when she was director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs and later an assistant secretary at the federal VA. Duckworth has slammed Kirk for embellishing his military record and walking back his endorsement of Trump. In June, Kirk said he could no longer support Trump given his past attacks on women, Hispanics and “the disabled like me.” Each candidate has accused the other of not doing enough for Illinois residents and of being ineffective.

Kirk has criticized Duckworth for being the subject of a lawsuit alleging workplace retaliation while she oversaw the state veterans agency. A $26,000 settlement was announced in June with no finding of wrongdoing, although the plaintiffs later rejected it and the matter remained unresolved.

Both candidates admit that campaigning, an inherently exhausting endeavor, is even tougher when disabled.

“I can’t work a reception like I used to,” he said. “Working a reception from a wheelchair is pretty tough, and I’m sure that Tammy has the same challenge.”

Duckworth said campaigning is exhausting, but so is caring for her daughter, who was born in November 2014. She gets phantom pain if she sits in what’s called a bucket — it covers her right side and the inch of leg she has left — for 10 to 14 hours at a time, a normal day for her.

“It sucks and you’re tired, but this is important to me and this is important to my community and important to my state and important to my nation,” she said. “For me to go home and feel sorry for myself and do nothing because I lost my legs . . . would spit in the face of the men who carried me out of that field in Iraq, and I’m just spending every day trying to pay back a debt that I can never pay back.” n

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NATION

Female cadets must enter the ring D AN L AMOTHE West Point, N.Y. BY

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rmy cadets Kiana Stewart and DeAdre Harvey squared off in a boxing ring at the U.S. Military Academy this month, circling each other with their gloves up. Watching classmates already had suffered bloody noses, but the women stayed aggressive, bouncing on the balls of their feet while delivering the occasional jab.

The female cadets are part of a first at West Point: women who must box. Beginning this fall, West Point officials shifted from banning female students from taking the course to requiring it for all approximately 1,000 students in the Class of 2020. The move follows the Pentagon’s historic decision last year to fully integrate women into all combat roles for the first time, and allowing women to box marked the fall of one of the last barriers to women being allowed to do anything they are qualified to in the U.S. military.

Female cadets said they heard about the decision to mandate boxing as they were preparing to arrive on campus this summer and were surprised.

“At first I was kind of upset, but now I’m getting into it,” Harvey said, after the metallic clang of a bell marked the end of her match with Stewart. “Hitting is not something I want to do necessarily, hand-tohand, like, if I don’t have to.”

She added: “In boxing, you have to hit them while looking at them.”

A year ago, West Point faced scrutiny about how many concussions cadets had suffered, particularly in boxing class. The New York Times reported that nearly 1 in 5 concussions at West Point occurred during boxing class, and that senior Army officials had discussed for months how to deflect attention from the issue before finally releasing the data.

Army officials acknowledge that there is an ongoing discussion about whether boxing should continue in service academies. But, they say, that’s a separate debate than whether female cadets should be treated the same as male

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Mandated boxing comes to West Point in wake of decision to integrate women into combat roles students and be required to take the same classes, including boxing. The sport, academy officials say, teaches leadership by testing how cadets react while they are under attack.

Brig. Gen. Diana M. Holland, who took over as West Point’s first female commandant of cadets in January, said that when she was a cadet in the late 1980s, she had a hard time understanding why she wasn’t boxing and her male classmates were. The course this year incorporates graded two-minute bouts in which women face women, and controlled sparring in which men and women can be matched up against each other.

“The issue is men and women doing the same thing,” Holland said. “Now, whether boxing should be a requirement for anybody is a different discussion.”

In a boxing class this month, instructors guided students through a series of punches and sparring matches, with students matched up with someone their

own size. They wore black T-shirts and shorts, matching protective headgear and oversized boxing gloves designed to cushion the impact of blows to the head more than those professionals wear.

Capt. Juten Richard, a 2006 graduate who now teaches boxing, bounced around the room, shouting both encouragement and corrections. The burly infantry officer also stressed the need to watch for telltale signs of concussion, such as the pupil of one eye being more dilated than the other.

“If they can’t stand of their own free accord, we’re going to stop it,” Richard told the class. “And of course, if there’s fluid coming from some place other than a bloody nose or a bloody lip, I need to know. Eyes and ears, those are of concern.”

Statistics released by West Point show that cadets have suffered 185 concussions in boxing class over the past five full school years, accounting for slightly more than half of all 355 concussions record-

Female cadets spar during a required coed boxing class at the U.S. Military Academy in New York. Starting this fall, West Point officials shifted from allowing female cadets to take the course as an elective to requiring it for all students in the Class of 2020.

ed in physical-education classes.

But the total number of concussions and the number of boxingrelated ones have declined several years in a row. Last year, there were 38 total concussions, including 20 reported among the 948 cadets who took the boxing class. The number of boxing concussions peaked in 2011-2012, when 68 were reported among 1,022 students.

That year, boxing concussions accounted for about three-quarters of all those reported in West Point physical-education classes.

Adding women to the mix may complicate efforts to continue reducing concussions. Several medical studies suggest that young women are significantly more likely to sustain concussions.

Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., the superintendent and top military officer at West Point, said the academy’s boxing program has become increasingly conservative in how it handles suspected concussions, keeping cadets away from boxing until they make a full recovery.

Caslen said he was approached last spring at the 40th anniversary celebration of female cadets attending West Point and asked by alumni to review the ban on women taking the boxing class. After receiving approval from the Army leadership at the Pentagon, he did so because he sees boxing as a way to teach future officers how to lead in trying situations.

“Some people would say, ‘Well, can you teach cadets those skills — that tenacity and resilience — through other programs and other mechanisms?’” Caslen said. “Yes, you can. But boxing becomes the … one and only event for all cadets that pits one cadet against another in full-body contact.”

That doesn’t rattle Stewart. Upperclassmen have stopped her to ask about the experience, which she said was initially both “scary” and “pretty cool.” She’s already had her nose bloodied at least once but blamed herself with a laugh.

“It’s because I put my hands down too early,” she said. “I thought he blew the whistle and I got clocked in the face, and that was just dumb on my part. It definitely teaches you to be on guard.” n

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Police policies vary on rendering aid BY

W ESLEY L OWERY

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he frantic voice of Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby can be heard bursting into the video: “Shots fired!”

Just a moment earlier, Terence Crutcher, 40, had been hit in the chest with a bullet from Shelby’s service weapon. Now, he lay on the asphalt next to his vehicle, blood spreading across his chest.

Videos released this past week of the shooting, which occurred Sept. 16, next show officers milling about, as the wounded man lies unaided on the ground. Shelby is led away from Crutcher by two of her fellow officers. Two other officers can be seen appearing to check his vehicle for any other people or weapons.

After about two minutes, an officer appears to handcuff and search Crutcher. Thirty seconds later, that officer appears to begin providing medical aid. Later that night, Crutcher was pronounced dead at a hospital. Shelby was charged with first-degree manslaughter on Thursday.

The length of time between Crutcher’s body hitting the ground and the first officers attempting to give him any medical care has enraged many as video of the encounter has spread across the nation in recent days, raising again a question posed after a number of high-profile policeinvolved shootings: Why didn’t the officers more quickly render medical attention?

Crutcher was “left in the street to die,” said an attorney for his family. Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, said that by “shirking their legal and moral obligation to render aid as he lay dying in the street,” it was clear that the officers involved “could not care less about whether the black citizens they are sworn to protect live or die.”

The lack of medical attention has been a central grievance in protests over police-involved shootings of black people over the past two years. But, policing experts note, while best practices dictate that aid should be provid-

JOSEPH FREDERICK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

When officers shoot someone, how quickly they help often doesn’t match public expectations ed as soon as officers no longer feel they are facing a threat of violence, officers’ judgment of when that is the case — especially in the moments after a violent incident — is likely to differ from that of the public.

“People have a belief, and it’s a justifiable belief, that the officers should go from a tactical situation to a medical situation very quickly,” said Jim Bueermann, a retired police chief and president of the Police Foundation, a national police research organization.

In July 2014, officers listened to Eric Garner’s declaration of “I can’t breathe” 11 times before he died on a Staten Island sidewalk.

Months later, Cleveland residents were outraged by a video that showed more than four minutes had elapsed before anyone tried to aid Tamir Rice after the 12-yearold was fatally shot by an officer.

And this summer in Falcon Heights, Minn., Philando Castile

could be seen in his girlfriend’s live-stream video writhing in pain as he bled out. The video shows Officer Jeronimo Yanez, seemingly in shock after having shot Castile, providing no medical response.

Bueermann said that in the moments after a shooting, officers need to quickly cycle through several priorities — they must make sure the threat has ceased, secure any weapons or vehicles at the scene, check on the condition of fellow officers and search the person who has been shot — all before providing medical aid.

Still, he said that in most cases those priorities can be safely exhausted in a matter of seconds.

Expectations of how much medical care will be provided by officers after a shooting vary from department to department and often fall short of what some in the public might expect. For example, after the video of the fatal

Officer Betty Shelby of the Tulsa Police Department killed Terence Crutcher, a black man, on Sept. 16.

Top: The Rev. Al Sharpton, surrounded by Crutcher’s family, speaks in New York this past week about the shooting death.

shooting of Laquan McDonald was released last year, officials with the Chicago Police Department and the police union said that if an officer had radioed for a medical transport or called 911 after a shooting, he or she had fulfilled their duty.

“Our officers are trained to dial or to call paramedics,” the police union president, Dean Angelo, told Fox 32 in Chicago. “They’re not trained in first aid, they’re not there to supply CPR or to stop the flow of blood.”

After the Tamir Rice shooting, Cleveland officials authorized additional first aid training for 1,400 officers and implemented a policy requiring police to immediately call for emergency medical services and to in some cases provide trauma care to a wounded person.

Medical training for officers varies in the nation’s police departments, as does much of police training.

In Oklahoma, officers are required to undergo 583 hours of training before they can become certified by the state, said Chuck Gerhart, assistant director of the state’s Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training.

But in Tulsa, where Crutcher was killed, the department has no official policy regarding officers’ responsibility on tending to those shot or wounded. Officers do undergo about 16 hours of medical training, including instruction on stopping arterial bleeds, clearing blocked airways and treating penetrating chest injuries.

And, in many cases, there is only so much triage an officer can provide to someone who has been shot, medical experts say.

“The closer you get to a wound that is center mass, it eventually becomes essentially impossible for a police officer or a paramedic to effectively treat that wound,” said Alex Eastman, deputy medical director of the Dallas Police Department, where all officers receive medical training. “At some point there is nothing to do but get the person the fastest transportation to a trauma center that you can find.” n

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Mixed signals in Brexit planning G RIFF W ITTE London BY

“B

rexit means Brexit.”

So said Prime Minister Theresa May over and over this summer as she vaulted herself out of the hurricane-strength political wreckage of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and into the nation’s top job.

But two months after May took the keys to 10 Downing Street as her predecessor sped away without glancing back, Britain is none the wiser as to what “Brexit means Brexit” actually means.

Instead of a unified position ahead of what are sure to be lengthy, contentious and ultrahigh-stakes divorce talks with its 27 erstwhile partners in the European Union, the British government has instead treated the public to a near-daily display of mixed signals and evasive maneuvering.

Will Britain seek a clean break with the European Union, forswearing membership in the world’s largest common market so it can also slam the door on European immigrants? Will it seek an exit-in-name-only, formally leaving the bloc but carving out enough opt-ins that the departure is felt only gently? Or will it seek a bespoke deal that blazes a new path, tempting others in Europe to do the same?

In recent weeks, there have been nearly as many answers to those questions as there are ministers in May’s cabinet.

The government’s three leading Brexit advocates — the “Brexiteers” — have suggested they want a speedy and complete departure from the clutches of the bureaucracy in Brussels, in line with the will of the 52 percent of Brits who voted for an exit in the country’s June 23 referendum.

Boris Johnson, the country’s bombastic foreign secretary, has even gone so far as to record a video supporting an advocacy group that seeks to press May — Johnson’s boss — to fully liberate Britain from its Brussels shackles.

Meanwhile, David Davis, the country’s newly minted minister

JUSTIN TALLIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Two months since vote to leave and Brits are none the wiser on course government will pursue for Brexit, has said a continued presence in the bloc is improbable if Europe insists, as it has, that membership comes with the free movement of workers.

But May, who reluctantly backed the “remain” side in the June vote, has found ways to remind her countrymen that leaving will not be easy and that there is a clear downside to departure.

This month, a close May ally and fellow “remain” supporter, Home Secretary Amber Rudd, told the BBC that Brits hoping to vacation on the golden sands of the French coast or in the refined air of the Italian Alps could be forced to apply for a visa and pay a fee once the country is out of the European Union. For years, travel to the continent has been as simple as hopping on a Eurostar train or booking a flight on a budget airline. But new barriers, Rudd said, could be the price Britain pays if it wants a clean break.

May herself has sworn off any direct indications of what Britain

wants from Europe, saying that to give “a running commentary” on the country’s negotiating strategy would put it at a disadvantage.

Asked at Prime Minister’s Questions this month how the government would safeguard its financial-services industry — which has much to lose from continental rivals if it’s not protected in the talks — May delivered what has become her standard non- answer when pressed about any of the details of Brexit.

“This government will be working to ensure the right deal for the United Kingdom,” she said, prompting groans and jeers from Parliament’s green benches.

It’s unclear how long she will be able to get away with such vague responses to questions that cut to the core of what could ultimately be Britain’s biggest transformation in decades.

May is under pressure from her European counterparts to quickly trigger Article 50, the neverbefore-used mechanism for a

Protesters in London this month demand the invocation of the article that will officially trigger Britain’s exit from the European Union.

country to leave the E.U. But May has stalled, saying it will not happen until at least the start of the new year. Once Article 50 has been invoked, Britain will have two years to negotiate the terms of its departure. Many experts regard that as an unrealistically rapid timeline for such a complex untangling and say it is one that could put Britain at a disadvantage because it has more to lose than Europe does if no deal materializes in time.

If there is a silver lining for Britain in its thus-far-incoherent approach to Brexit, it’s that Europe itself has been divided over how to approach the talks. European Commission President JeanClaude Juncker insisted recently that Britain will not be allowed “a la carte” access to the bloc without accepting the free movement of people across national borders, which is a core E.U. principle.

But others have advocated taking a softer line: using Brexit as an opportunity to address concerns about the European Union that extend far beyond British shores.

Limiting mass migration and cutting down on Brussels bureaucracy, for instance, are goals shared by countries outside Britain.

“Brexit was not just a British issue,” said Stephen Booth, codirector of the London-based probusiness think tank Open Europe.

“There are a lot of people in Europe who are unhappy with the status quo.”

Booth said anyone expecting a quick answer to the question of what Britain will look like outside the bloc is bound to be disappointed. The most likely solution, Booth said, is a “shades-of-gray” deal that gives Britain more market access in some areas than in others, along with some sort of limit on immigration. But that will take years of painstaking negotiation, followed by a long period in which Britain seeks to find its way in its new outside-the-E.U. world.

“The U.K. has to reshape its future,” Booth said. “It’s not as though everything will be completed on the day we leave the E.U.” n

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A Syrian family adjusts to life in U.S. L OUISA L OVELUCK Aurora, Ill. BY

A

ll was quiet as Rabia Haj Ali walked through this Chicago suburb this month. Pausing to feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, she watched as the only other moving presence — a small black squirrel — lolloped across the neatly cut lawns.

For Rabia, the silence felt unnerving. In her Syrian hometown of Daraa, a quiet street signaled danger and the need to move inside. “It’s hard to believe you’re safe when the brain is still on high alert,” she said. “This takes some getting used to.”

Two months ago, 36-year-old Rabia and her family had never heard of Aurora. And yet here they were, the state’s newest arrivals in a nationwide resettlement program that last month reached its goal of welcoming 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year.

The issue of what to do about Syria’s refugee crisis — the worst globally since World War II — took center stage recently in New York at the U.N. General Assembly’s global summit on migration.

After a slow start, the pace of resettlement across 231 U.S. municipalities now averages 2,200 Syrian refugees a month. And the White House has said that rate will increase in the new fiscal cycle, as the United States prepares to admit an additional 110,000 refugees, including but not only Syrians, in the year beginning Oct. 1.

But while refugee advocates welcome that commitment, in states like Illinois, the increase in numbers has put pressure on resettlement groups, leaving some families without formal housing on arrival, even as staff and volunteers work overtime to make the entry of large and often traumatized families run as smoothly as possible.

After spending their first week in a small house with their cousins — already a family of seven — the seven Haj Alis are now living in temporary accommodations

KRISTEN NORMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

After a slow start, the pace of resettlement has increased, though that has strained resources while resettlement agencies search for a permanent home.

“We want to welcome people and to place them on a path to thrive. But our willingness to help and our capacity are two very different things,” said Melineh Kano, the executive director of Refugee One, one of the main groups working with refugees in the Chicago area.

Rooms in the Haj Ali household are spartan but clean — Rabia makes sure of it — and are filled mostly with toys and books donated by the community.

The five children are learning English and getting used to life in different schools across the city.

For Boshra, the youngest at 8, it’s a bewildering experience. As the only Arabic speaker in her school, she understands little, but her teachers are using an array of translation devices to help her settle in.

Shy with dark brown eyes like her mother’s, Boshra shoots out of the school gates as she sees her

parents approach. She has something to report. “They’re calling it an ‘iPad,’ ” she whispered to Rabia, cocking an eyebrow as she sounded out the syllables.

“None of them find this easy, but we know this is the best place for our children,” said Rabia, speaking through a translator.

“These schools will give them a chance we could never give them once the war started. That is worth everything.”

The acceptance of families like the Haj Alis has become a campaign issue, and Donald Trump insists that the United States knows little about the refugees it accepts. “We don’t know where these people come from,” he told supporters recently in Canton, Ohio. “We don’t know if they have love or hate in their heart, and there’s no way to tell.”

Rabia countered with a laugh that, “If there’s a detail about me the Americans don’t know, then I probably don’t know it myself.”

To qualify for resettlement in

Fouad Haj Ali and his wife, Rabia, walk their daughter, Boshra, 8, home after school this month in Aurora, Ill. Their five children are learning English and getting used to life in different schools.

the United States, a refugee must first be identified by the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR as one of the most vulnerable cases among the 4.8 million to have been registered since the Syrian crisis began in 2011.

Next, refugee specialists with the Departments of State and Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center collect basic biographical information, running names, birth dates and fingerprints through databases, and assess the plausibility of the background story.

Only then will the family make it to a face-to-face interview in either Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey, where most Syrian refugees live. Three years after fleeing Daraa with just a set of house keys and the clothes on their backs, the Haj Alis’ interview took place amid the tightest security they had ever seen. “It was like they were scared of us,” said Rabia’s husband, Fouad. “It was funny, really, because that whole time we were scared of them, too.”

The resettlement of Syrians presents a depth of medical challenges that is unusual, even among new refugees. Local doctors discovered that some of the Syrians still carried shrapnel in their bodies; less visible but more pervasive is the trauma.

“We see it in everyone, and that is going to take a long time to heal,” said Suzanne Akhras Sahloul, the founder and president of the Syrian Community Network, a grass-roots initiative staffed by Syrians that has stepped in to fill the linguistic and cultural gaps that larger agencies are unable to address. “These people have spent a long time surrounded by communities where PTSD has become normal. The challenge now is getting them into therapy and allowing them to start talking through the nightmare.”

For the Syrian families, there’s also a determination to make their new lives work. They’ve started English lessons, the men have applied for jobs, and the bus timetable is slowly but surely being memorized. n

the s to ries t h ey t ell The task was daunting: How to fill a museum with essential artifacts.

More than a decade later, the objects donated from all around the country reveal the milestones, setbacks and perseverance of the black experience.

BY MARCIA DAVIS

E

JOSEPH TRAMMELL’S CERTIFICATE OF FREEDOM, 1852.

A paper certified by the county clerk that he was a freeman.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

laine Thompson is the keeper of her family’s stories. It’s been that way for decades. The former high school English teacher and civil rights activist, 83, can trace her lineage to the 1700s, to Samuel Thompson, who was free before the Civil War. On both sides, Thompson’s ancestry is filled with men and women who were free before Emancipation. They worked hard, kept loved ones close and built a way for their progeny in Virginia, a state that would become the heart of the Confederacy.

She has kept much of this history in her home office, in files tucked into the drawers of a wooden desk that sits below long bookshelves weighted with such authors as David Levering Lewis, Taylor Branch, Annette Gordon-Reed and Barack Obama. A historian, she’s there on the bookshelf, too, with “In the Watchfires: The Loudoun County Emancipation Association, 1890-1971.”

For years, in one of those drawers among the files sat a small tin box that belonged to her maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Joseph Trammell. Inside the box was proof of his freedom, papers certified by the county clerk that the then-21-year-old, who bore a small scar on his forehead and a longer one — six to seven inches — on his left wrist, was indeed a freeman. The year: 1852.

Traveling without those papers could mean being re-enslaved, or if you were born free, kidnapped into bondage for the first time.

Trammell made the box to protect his papers and his life, Thompson said. She speculated that he probably was free before 1852, because his name appeared on an earlier petition to have freemen removed from Loudoun County. Virginia required freemen to leave the state unless they legally requested to stay. Joseph Trammell stayed, most likely because of family, Thompson believes.

For generations, that freedom tin has passed from one hand to the next. Thompson got it from the daughter of her now-deceased Aunt Molly, a woman who lived into her 90s.

“She wanted me to have it,” Thompson said of the tin. “She wanted me to preserve it. And I wanted to, but then when I started, I said, ‘What am I going to do with this?’ Even though people in the family are interested in family history, I just couldn’t decide who to give it to.

“I said it needs to be in a place that’s safe, somewhere it will be cared for. This museum, well, that’s the place for it.”

Which explains how Joseph Trammell’s freedom tin, after traveling across more than a century, from one descendant’s hand to another, is artifact 2014.25 at the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Thompson went online and completed a form set up for people who thought they had something of historic value and wanted it considered for the 19th Smithsonian museum.

Curators came running.

T

his is how it’s been in the nine years that a team of curators, museum specialists and others has been working to fill a museum that itself was once a distant hope.

The lobbying for it began in the early 1900s, and Smithsonian officials are not being hyperbolic when they say it is a museum that was a century in the making, which is also the name of an exhibit on the subject.

Finally, it is fact, a deep footprint on the Mall, its doors opening months before the Obamas leave the White House.

“African American history is our history,” the website notes, meaning a nation’s. The point is underscored by the prime location, steps from the Washington Monument and where, through the frames of the museum’s glass walls, you can stare in the direction of Jefferson and Lincoln and ponder all of what America has been — and, Smithsonian officials hope, imagine what this country can still become.

Inside the museum are markers of a nation’s racial history and bloodied path to democracy: from the remnants of a slave ship to a slave cabin to a segregation-era train car and shards of glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, Ala., where four little girls were killed on a September Sunday morning not so long ago.

The museum also honors the road of a people struggling and striving and, in so many cases, soaring to places where they were never meant to be. A Tuskegee airplane hangs from the ceiling, Chuck Berry’s Cadillac gleams, and everywhere you turn are stories of excellence and achievement and a culture at the center of a nation. But when items were still in the talking stages, one of the questions was: What was left to be collected? There were African American museums across the country, the Smithsonian already had its own artifacts, universities had historical papers and singular art collections, and on and on.

Founding director Lonnie Bunch believed there was plenty undiscovered and pledged that a museum would open with 30,000 artifacts in its possession. “I knew in my heart that so much of the history was in the basement, trunks and attics,” Bunch said on a recent morning in his offices in the Capital Gallery Building in Southwest Washington.

“The goal was not to just collect to collect,” he said, “but to collect in a focused way to make sure you could tell the story of women in business, or you could tell the story of enslavement.

“The way to do it was to help people realize how crucial their story was, no matter how small, to understanding the whole narrative of African American history. So people really felt that giving was about legacy, the way to kind of honor those on whose shoulders they stand.”

The museum that started with zero artifacts is approaching 37,000. About 3,000 will be in the inaugural exhibition.

I

n assembling a team, Bunch looked for balance, the right kind of collaborative tension. He needed those who had worked at the Smithsonian and those who had not. He needed seasoned staffers and younger ones at the dawn of their careers. And mostly he wanted people who saw and believed in the museum’s mission above all else, above their egos and their ambitions.

“What I really was looking for were people who recognized that this was bigger than they were,” said Bunch, who was most recently the director of the Chicago Historical Society.

“That this was not about them. If you came to this job because it was going to make your career, that’s not who I wanted. . . . It was a family coming together.”

Because this would also be true: It was going to be difficult, weighted with the uncertainty of fundraising, lifted by a demanding vision and faced with the profound challenges inherent of a reckoning between a nation’s past and its present. And if they did it right, it could help the country reach higher ground.

How do you speak honestly about the brutalities of slavery in a country in which many don’t know that it was enslaved hands that built the White House? How do you show “the unvarcontinues on next page

HANDMADE TIN BOX Joseph Trammell used this to carry his freedom papers.

SELF-PORTRAIT An oil on canvas by Earle W. Richardson, who struggled as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance. The painting has since been restored.

PERSONALIZED WALLET One of the few items recovered from the house of Harry T. and Harriette Moore, after it was bombed on Christmas Day in 1951. Both were killed.

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from previous page

nished truth” about the legacy of families being ripped apart, or the murderous terrorism of Jim Crow? Who could view Emmett Till’s casket — also in the museum — without its echoes ricocheting through the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice?

It would be a living museum, not one engaged with the past with cool detachment.

The facts of our collective past are meant to educate and offer context to our decidedly non-post-racial nation as it wrestles with its future.

M

useums are in the narrative business.

It’s their job to tell stories. Curators are its choreographers, the folks who understand the required intimacy between the story and the right artifact, who coordinate the waltz between the telling and the showing.

The process is collaborative. Curators meet regularly to present their finds and make the case for why they belong in the collection.

Artifacts have arrived many ways. The museum had a wish list for some, such as a slave ship and slave cabin; some have been purchased, such as the fur-collared green velvet dress Lena Horne wore in a scene for the 1943 movie “Stormy Weather”; and some donations have come through the museum-sponsored “Save Our African American Treasures” events across the country. The Smithsonian couldn’t visit every attic or garage, sort through every trunk or closet, so it issued a call.

And the people responded.

B

obbye Booker Coleman remembers the day in West Medford, Mass., when her mother sent her to the attic to retrieve a set of paintings. The then-teenager found them, four oils on canvas rolled up, worn and time-battered.

At 73, the retired assistant professor who last taught at Spelman College can still hear her mother’s words as Coleman unfurled the works of her uncle, Earle W. Richardson, who was born in New York and struggled as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance. He was her mother’s older brother, not an unknown artist — a few institutions have his work — but significantly lesser known than others.

“I just always remember her saying, ‘If he had lived he would have been famous,’ ” Coleman said.

Her mother told of Richardson’s work with the Works Progress Administration, how he and fellow artist Malvin Gray Johnson had submitted proposals to the federal government for a set of murals for the 125th Street Library, but that Johnson suddenly fell ill and died. Within a year, Richardson was gone, too.

He’d been stricken with a fever, the mother told her daughter, and jumped out a window to his death.

Richardson’s mother was so upset that she’d gone through their home cutting up as much of the artwork as she could. His sister, Alleyne Richardson Booker, salvaged other works and kept them until that day she sent her daughter

to the attic.

What Coleman, who went on to earn a doctorate in early childhood education, learned later from another scholar was a story of romance and tragedy: Johnson and Richardson had been lovers, and his suicide, it was believed, was an act of grief.

Like her mother, Coleman held on to those paintings.

But it wasn’t those works that she brought to a “Save Our African American Treasures” event in Houston, where she now lives. She brought a family Bible and other elements.

When Coleman mentioned that she was Richardson’s niece, curator Tuliza Fleming — known among staff for her ability to persuade reluctant art owners to donate works — told Coleman she’d heard of him and wondered if the next time she was in Houston she could visit.

Fleming loves to tell Richardson’s story, which speaks to his humanity. Artists who are African American have often been pigeonholed as black artists. They’ve had to struggle to be “able to self-identify, as opposed to having an identity imposed on them,” she said.

Richardson’s work, a self-portrait, has been restored. And Coleman believes there’s something providential in it all.

“I want to give these things to the world,” she said. “I want him to be appreciated, because he was a gifted artist, because he was struggling, because he was gay, he was black.

It’s just a beautiful story in and of itself.”

T

hat Christmas holiday in December 1951, when Juanita Evangeline Moore traveled to her home town of Mims, Fla., from Washington, she knew something was wrong.

Life had always been dangerous for her family because of her parents’ work on behalf of equal pay for black teachers, voting rights and anti-lynching efforts. In fact, they had been fired from their education jobs, and her father went on to become an organizer with the NAACP. That December day, when she was 21, fresh out of college and working her first job in the District, Moore had expected to see her parents and her older sister. They always met her at the station.

This time it was her aunt and uncle waiting.

The house had been bombed on Christmas, they told her, which also happened to be her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. Her father was dead, her mother hospitalized. They went directly to the hospital. Nine days after the blast, Moore and her sister, Anne, or “Peaches,” as they called her, stood by their mother’s bedside as she took her last breath.

Even now the story of the Moores is not as well known as others. This was four years before Emmett Till, and later Medgar Evers, and Andrew Goodwin and James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner.

When Evangeline Moore heard of the Smithsonian museum, she needed no prompting. For decades she had not spoken of the murders, but with the help of her advocacy, in

2004, the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Memorial Park opened in Florida. A replica of their home has also been built on the grounds, which includes the site of the original house.

Spencer Crew, the first African American director of the National Museum of American History, is a guest curator for the African American Museum. He and staff curator William Pretzer went to see Moore after she reached out to the museum. Moore wanted what had been recovered from the explosion transferred from the Florida museum to the Mall: a wallet, a watch and a locket.

“It’s the meanness of spirit that gets to you, and the lack of concern, or feelings of humanity of others,” Crew said about the bombing and the era of terrorism. “It really gets to you. It’s one of the hard things about doing this history.”

Crew added: “The stories are important to remember. . . . It reminds you of how hard it was to be an African American in this country for such a long time. . . . I’m hopeful that it will give people a more accurate sense of things. A greater understanding, sympathy and empathy. . . . And also to see how other people stepped up and collaborated. Not to focus on the viciousness, but to focus on how you find connection.”

LENA HORNE’S “STORMY WEATHER” DRESS, 1943 The velvet dress has an ermine collar, gathered waist and a buckle in back. Horne, as Selina Rogers, wore it in a dressing-room scene with actor Bill Robinson.

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NAVY BADGE One of the items awarded to William Goines, who was the first African American Navy SEAL.

At 24, Darren Pagan, who works for the Department of Defense, is trying to find his way through all of that. The Moores are his great-grandparents. He and his father buried Evangeline Moore last October. She was 85.

She experienced so much loss, he said of his grandmother, who struggled with anxiety and depression but was determined to make sure her parents’ sacrifice was remembered.

“It’s a story that I want people to know about it, but I don’t want the moral of the story to be about how much damage an act of hate can do to a family,” Pagan said. “It’s more about perseverance and being willing to fight for things that you believe in.”

“Everything my great-grandfather fought for, I’m able to benefit from it.”

A

s Simone Manuel, the first African American woman to swim to Olympic gold, was finishing her race in Rio de Janeiro, Marie Goines was calling to her husband.

“Come look at this, come look at this.”

William Goines made his way to the television.

“I hadn’t seen the start of the race, and I had

no idea she was African American until the end,” said Goines, or retired U.S. Navy Master Chief William H. Goines.

“I am so overjoyed to see them breaking through.”

In 1962, he was breaking barriers of his own as the nation’s first black Navy SEAL. Growing up outside Cincinnati, Goines taught himself to swim. In the era of segregation, the white high school in Lockland had a pool, but not the black one. In a nearby town, African American children swam on Saturdays, 8 a.m. to noon.

“They would blow a whistle and we’d have to get out,” Goines said. “They would drain the pool to get it ready for the whites.”

When segregation was ending, his home town filled the public pool with rocks and gravel.

He turned 80 this month, lived a good life, he said as he sat in his Virginia Beach home. He’s been married 51 years to a woman he adores, and he’s still occasionally helping to recruit for the SEALs. He wrote to the Smithsonian a few years ago about the SEALs, and retired Army Col. Krewasky Salter, a guest curator with 25 years of military service, got in touch and eventually paid him a visit.

Goines told Salter he could choose from his Navy SEAL artifacts. Among Salter’s bounty was a board known as “Tools of the Trade,” an unofficial gift given to retiring SEALs by their colleagues. The board has an array of weapons, from a knife to bullets to a grenade.

Goines retired in 1987 after 32 years of service. The ending was a lot easier than the beginning.

To understand the conflicting duality of black soldiers is to understand, at the most fundamental level, what it has meant to be African American. After World War II, for example, black soldiers were violently attacked, some slain in uniform by whites who believed that they should not wear it or that they were acting too uppity, demanding equality, stepping out of their social place.

“I went through some things that were not right,” Goines said. He doesn’t dwell on the ugliness of the past, but he hasn’t forgotten.

The SEALs did well by him, he said, though they “caught hell” traveling in the South in the early ’60s. Once, when they piled into a restaurant and were seated at tables throughout the place, Goines was refused service. “Our officer told everybody to just stop what they were doing and to get back on the bus,” Goines recalled. “Everybody got up without [complaining]. And we went down the road and bought some sandwiches.”

P

aul Gardullo is searching for the right place in the museum for a certain artifact. The museum only recently attained “The Friendship Quilt,” and preparation can take many months.

The quilt, said Gardullo, who has been with the museum since 2007, would fit well in the museum’s family history section. It holds with-

KLMNO WEEKLY

in its seams the story of family and community, and maybe something of a miracle.

The quilt is from Home Baptist Missionary Society, First Baptist Church of Sonora, Calif.

And in it is part of the story of African Americans in the West. In 1884, churchwomen gave the quilt to the Rev. Andrew Judson Sturtevant and his wife, Ella, who were moving away. Stitched on it are more than 100 names of congregation members. Among them are the names of several black congregants. It was an integrated church in an integrated community.

Some of those names belonged to members of the Sugg family, which had its roots in slavery back East. William and Mary Elizabeth Sugg were each brought to California by their masters. William Sugg came from North Carolina, Mary Elizabeth Snelling from Missouri.

They met after each had attained their freedom. They married in 1855.

Their modest home eventually grew into a three-story house with seven bedrooms. They had 11 children, and while William ran a livery business, his wife turned part of the home into a boarding house. Many of its original features remain, along with some furnishings, and the house is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Vernon Sugg McDonald, a grandson and onetime journalist, lived in the home until the 1980s. Vernon and his family had been close friends with a white family, the Brennans. When Vernon fell ill, Robert Brennan bought the home. Vernon lived there until his death in 1982.

The Brennans, who said Vernon was family to them, have spent years restoring the home.

Sylvia Alden Roberts, author of “Mining for Freedom: Black History Meets the California Gold Rush,” has been studying African Americans out West for decades. “The Sugg house is the jewel in the crown of history in the West,” said Roberts, who knows the Brennans and the Sugg story well.

Recently, the story took another dramatic turn when Sherri Camp of Topeka, Kan., connected with Roberts. After decades of digging, Camp found pension records and a death certificate that led her to Julia Snelling. It turns out that Snelling is five times Camp’s great-grandmother. Snelling was also Mary Elizabeth Sugg’s mother.

Camp and several family members visited Sonora this summer.

It turns out that before Julia Snelling was taken West, two of her children were sold.

Camp is the descendant of one of the sold daughters.

“I have sadness and I have joy all at the same time,“ Camp said.

Her family story, as for so many African Americans, is one of severed bloodlines, lost across time and oceans of hurt. But Camp’s line, in an amazing way, is being stitched back together.

Like the names sewn into a quilt that, more than a century ago, symbolized the promise of a nation and, at long last, has come to rest within the walls of the Smithsonian. n

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THE ENVIRONMENT

Next big extinction will look like this BY

C HRIS M OONEY

W

e mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling toward what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

In this case, the perturbation is us — rather than, say, an asteroid.

As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published this month in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species — rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.

From sharks to whales, giant clams, sea turtles, and tuna, the disproportionate threat to larger marine organisms reflects the “unique human propensity to cull the largest members of a population,” the authors write.

“What to us was surprising was that we did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that we studied,” said geoscientist Jonathan Payne of Stanford University, the study’s lead author. “So that indicated that there really is no good ecological analogue … this pattern has not happened before in the half billion years of the animal fossil record.”

The researchers conducted the work through a statistical analysis of 2,497 different marine animal groups at one taxonomic level higher than the level of species — called “genera.” And they found that increases in an organism’s body size were strongly linked to an increased risk of extinction in the present period — but that this was not the case in the Earth’s distant past.

Indeed, during the past 66 million years, there was actually a small link between smaller body

EMILIO MORENATTI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Largest marine species will die off first thanks to humans, study says sizes and going extinct, marking the present as a strong reversal.

“The extreme bias against largebodied animals distinguishes the modern diversity crisis from all potential deep-time analogs,” the researchers write.

The study also notes that on land, we’ve already seen the same pattern — and in fact, we saw it first. “Human hunting has been extensive for many thousands of years on land, whereas it’s been extensive for a couple of hundred years in the oceans,” Payne said.

Thus, humans already drove to extinction many large land-based animal species in what has been dubbed the Late Quaternary extinction event as the most recent ice age came to a close.

“These losses in the ocean are paralleling what humans did to land animals some 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, when we wiped out around half of the big-bodied mammal species on Earth, like mammoths, mastodons, sabertooth cats and the like,” said Anthony Barnosky, executive director of Stanford Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, who was not involved in the study but reviewed it. “As a result, terrestrial ecosystems were locked into a new trajectory that included local biodiversity loss over and above the loss of the large animals themselves, and changes in which kinds of plants dominated.”

Barnosky was the co-author of a study published last year that found

Atlantic bluefin tuna are corralled by fishing nets during the opening of the 2011 season for tuna fishing off the coast of Barbate in southern Spain.

an “exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.”

A particular problem, Payne said, is that if you take out all the top predators, then the species they used to prey upon can run amok and explode in population, having large reverberating effects on the entire ecosystem.

“The preferential removal of the largest animals from the modern oceans, unprecedented in the history of animal life, may disrupt ecosystems for millions of years even at levels of taxonomic loss far below those of previous mass extinctions,” the authors write.

Interestingly, if climate change was the key driver of species loss-

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WORKPLACE es, you’d expect to see a more evenly distributed set of risks to organisms.

“I’ve worked on the Permian mass extinction quite a bit, it shows environmental evidence of ocean warming, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation, the loss of oxygen from seawater,” Payne said. These are the very same threats to the oceans that we’re worried about now due to ongoing climate change. But the Permian extinction, some 250 million years ago, did not feature a selective disappearance of large-bodied organisms, Payne said.

Thus, as previous work has also suggested, the current study underscores that ecosystem risks are not being principally driven by a changing climate — yet. Rather, they’re being driven more directly by which species humans hunt and fish, and where they destroy ecosystems to build homes, farms, cities and much more. But as climate change worsens, it will compound what’s already happening.

“The losses the authors describe in the oceans do not include the extinctions expected from business-as-usual climate change,” Barnosky said. “Adding those human-triggered losses onto those we’re already causing from overfishing, pollution, and so on is very likely to put the human race in the same class as an asteroid strike — like the one that killed the dinosaurs — as an extinction driver.”

The study emerged as the U.S. State Department was preparing to open its third annual Our Ocean conference, where heads of state and ocean advocates convened this month to try to protect more and more of the oceans’ area from overfishing and other forms of despoilment (and climate change).

But Payne said that, in a way, the research is heartening for those who care about ocean conservation — precisely because human-driven large animal extinctions in the sea are not as advanced as they are on land, there is still a huge amount of biological life that we can save.

“I talked to a couple of people who said they found this a very discouraging result,” Payne says.

“I tend not to look at it that way. I think there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the oceans, because we haven’t impacted them much yet.” n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Even an extra five pounds can hurt your job chances BY

D ANIELLE P AQUETTE

T

he suddenly reluctant zipper can bring more than a sting of self-consciousness. A new study from the journal PLOS One out this month found slight weight gain can hurt a job seeker’s employment chances — especially a woman’s.

The authors, a team of Scottish and Canadian researchers, already knew that overweight applicants face discrimination on the job hunt. They wondered if going up just one size could trigger similar prejudice.

In 2013, they told a group of 60 men and 60 women to imagine themselves as company recruiters looking at photos of prospective hires. The snapshots showed four men and four women, all white and expressionless, at various, digitally enhanced weights. Each face reflected what doctors consider healthy body weights. (For example, a 5-foot-7 woman who weighs between 121 and 158 pounds would not be medically considered obese.)

The researchers told the group that the candidates had identical résumés. Then came the questionnaire: Based on your gut reactions, how likely would you be to hire each, on a scale of 1 (extremely unlikely) to 7 (extremely likely) for customer-facing roles or nocontact gigs?

A human resources manager might warn that deciding on the basis of a photo could invite a lawsuit. But the respondents made snap judgments. To faux recruiters of both genders, thinner faces registered as more hirable than the heavier ones, though the effect was stronger for roles that involved interaction with customers. The “original” versions pulled an average score of 4.84, while the modified, heavier mugs got 4.61.

The disadvantage, however, was stronger for larger women than for larger men. Respondents rated them 0.66 lower on average,

PLOS ONE

Test subjects were shown men and women at various, digitally enhanced weights and asked about whether they would hire the person. The weight disadvantage was worse for women.

compared to the 0.26 they docked the men.

“These results affirm that even a marginal increase in weight appears to have a negative impact on the hirability ratings of female job applicants,” the authors wrote.

“For women, it seems, even seemingly minute changes to the shape, size and weight of the body are important.”

Co-author Dennis Nickson, a business professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, said women tend to be judged more harshly for their appearances because of unfair societal expectations. Thin women who wear modest makeup appear more competent in the workplace and even take home higher earnings than their similarly skilled colleagues who weigh more or spurn cosmetics, studies have shown. (Other work has found

that men, regardless of beauty, simply look more inherently skilled, and indeed the respondents in this study rated male faces, on average, a full point more employable than female ones.)

Not that a man’s appearance doesn’t matter — his aura of employability just isn’t as strongly tied to his physique.

People, in general, still struggle to comprehend that one’s body says nothing about one’s ability to do (most) jobs, Nickson said. Rejecting a candidate because of body weight could mean letting a talented worker slip away.

“Including weight in things like diversity training,” he said, “could be an important first step in educating managers about the need to recognize and act on potential bias towards job applicants who are not ‘normal’ weight.” n

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BOOKS

Heroes wrestle with life after attack N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

D ANIELLE P AQUETTE

B THE 15:17 TO PARIS The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes

By Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone and Jeffrey E. Stern PublicAffairs. 245 pp. $25.99

efore they thwarted a gunman on a Paris-bound train, collected France’s highest honor and shook President Obama’s hand, the three friends from Northern California bonded in the principal’s office.

They were troublemakers.

Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos grew up next door to each other, roughhousing with pellet guns in their northeast Sacramento neighborhood. They both struggled at the public elementary school, so their mothers — who also happened to be best friends — sent them to a private Christian one. That’s where they met Anthony Sadler, another new kid, who had an athletic scholarship and a tendency to curse loudly on the basketball court.

They felt like outsiders in a place where everyone, a strangely obedient bunch, had known one another since kindergarten. So they stuck together.

“The 15:17 to Paris” details the trio’s journey from unremarkable childhoods to chance heroism to international fame and the complicated aftermath. Journalist Jeffrey E. Stern weaves together the friends’ stories with intimate detail, giving readers a more nuanced portrait than what emerged in the global news coverage (which initially and incorrectly labeled them U.S. Marines).

After high school graduation, they took different paths: Stone sold smoothies for a living until he decided to join the Air Force, Skarlatos opted for the Oregon National Guard, and Sadler went to college. They reunited last summer on a loosely planned, credit-card-funded trip, which was supposed to start in Italy and end with a clubbing spree in Spain. The adventure climaxed instead with a bloody fight for their lives at 185 miles per hour.

On Aug. 21, 2015, Ayoub elKhazzani boarded Train 9364 in Brussels. He carried an AK-47, a Luger pistol, a box cutter and 270

ETIENNE LAURENT/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

From left, Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos speak at a news conference in August 2015, two days after they stopped a terrorist attack on a train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris.

rounds of ammunition. He slipped into a bathroom, removed his shirt, slid his backpack around his chest — making it easier to reload — and slung the assault rifle over one shoulder. He waited until the train, hauling more than 500 passengers, crossed the Belgian border into France. Then he stepped into the aisle.

Khazzani, Stern reports, first tussled with a Frenchman on his way to the toilet. The terrorist broke free, continuing down his narrow path of would-be destruction, shooting another man through the neck. (The victim would later recover.)

Enter Stone, who snapped awake from a nap and spotted the gun-wielding man. He charged the attacker, who pointed the assault rifle in his direction. The weapon miraculously did not fire, because of an uncharacteristic jam. Stone tackled Khazzani, who slashed him repeatedly with the box cutter. Skarlatos and Sadler rushed to their friend’s defense.

“Metal tearing into flesh, but it

doesn’t hurt,” Stern writes from Stone’s perspective. “He feels no pain, he feels it as muted percussion waves coming off the terrorist’s body. Thumps. Spencer sees he’s not being hit, the terrorist is being hit — Alek is driving the rifle into the gunman, furiously.”

These up-close moments, flashbacks throughout the chronological memoir, make for a compelling ride, especially once we get to know the protagonists.

Stern dives into the minds of our three heroes, all in their early 20s, and the chain of events that put them in position to stop what could have become one of the West’s deadliest terrorist attacks.

(Not exactly spoilers: Khazzani ends up hogtied. No passengers die. French President François Hollande gives each American the Legion of Honor.)

Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler are revealed to be, well, regular guys.

They don’t have fancy résumés, and their imperfections make them relatable.

The book risks losing readers, however, when Stern mixes their

personal tales with modern history lessons. References to the European Union’s immigration landscape and various Muslim populations pop up throughout the book, with a focus that could come off as relevant context or off-putting politics, depending on who’s reading.

Geopolitics aside, it’s a relief when the narrative shifts back to the protagonists, who despite their newfound celebrity had trouble readjusting on American soil. They felt a nagging responsibility to stop evil and, simultaneously, a powerlessness against it. Less than two months after they foiled Khazzani’s plan, a gunman killed nine people at the Oregon community college Skarlatos had attended. They also experienced symptoms consistent with post- traumatic stress disorder, including sensitivity to loud noises and outsize, adrenaline-cranked responses to mild threats.

“In the months after it was over, there was this feeling. That they had disrupted something large, used up all their good luck in those few moments, and had none left to spare,” Stern writes from Sadler’s perspective.

Weeks after the fateful ride, Stone recalled the weight of it all hitting him after a little girl asked: Are you a superhero?

“Then she said she wanted to hug me. But she was afraid to, because I still have the cast, and the stitches. . . . And it just all came out. I just bawled, man.”

It’s a reminder that celebrated feats of heroism can bring personal anguish. Stone drove off in a free car. Skarlatos boogied through “Dancing With the Stars.” Sadler met one of his favorite singers. Beneath the glamour, though, the friends quietly tried to make sense of what happened on the train and what it would mean for their lives beyond it. n Paquette is a policy reporter for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

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Sleuth returns to hunt wily con man

Young Churchill, hungry for fame

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

M AUREEN C ORRIGAN

he opening assignment in Amy Stewart’s new novel, “Lady Cop Makes Trouble,” seems straightforward. The year is 1915, and a prisoner being treated at Hackensack Hospital in New Jersey has escaped during a thunderstorm that plunged the facility into darkness. A sheriff’s deputy is ordered to recapture the prisoner — an elderly German con man named Herman Albert von Matthesius, who has been arrested for posing as the director of a sanitarium and going so far as to drug and marry a wealthy young woman while she was under his care.

Nothing, however, is routine about that assignment, starting with the identity of the deputy.

Constance Kopp is Bergen County, N.J.’s first female sheriff’s deputy.

A sturdy professional, Constance can pound the pavement and tackle fleeing ruffians, as well as — if not better than — any man. But as readers of Stewart’s first Kopp Sisters novel, “Girl Waits With Gun,” know, the most remarkable thing about Deputy Constance Kopp is that she is inspired by a real person of the same name.

New Jersey had only recently passed a law allowing women to serve as deputy sheriffs, matrons and police officers when the reallife Constance Kopp was hired in 1915 as a deputy by Bergen County Sheriff Robert Heath. Kopp’s exploits — which included firing a handgun and chasing down male criminals and slapping handcuffs on them — were breathlessly described in newspapers of the time. Stewart drew on those accounts for “Girl Waits With Gun,” which fleshed out some of Constance’s actual adventures, as well as imagining her off-duty life with her two real-life sisters — Norma and Fleurette.

Mysteries featuring 19th- and early-20th-century professional female detectives — whether based on real women or fictionalized ones — have been around for

almost as long as their male counterparts. But whatever their value as feminist texts, the characteristic flaw of many of these tales of female detectives in petticoats is that they suffer from a surfeit of quaintness.

Stewart’s “Kopp Sisters” series is sometimes guilty of being a bit twee. (There’s a running subplot, for instance, involving the sublimated romantic feelings between Constance and her married boss.)

Stewart offsets the series’s sentimentality, however, with her dogged attention to the specific — and often sordid — details of Constance’s work life.

As the novel unfolds, that job is threatened. The wily von Matthesius escaped while Constance was on duty outside his room at Hackensack Hospital. If he isn’t tracked down quickly, not only will Constance be booted off the force, but, in accordance with the laws then in place, her beloved boss will not only lose his job but also take von Matthesius’s place in jail.

Stewart starkly dramatizes what the loss of Constance’s paycheck would do. As the steady wage earner among her sisters, Constance keeps food on the table and underwrites Fleurette’s dubious career as an actress. Throughout the novel, Constance confronts nightmare images of female dependency: a young girl who answers an ad for a “housekeeper” and is pressured to perform other services; an Italian immigrant prisoner who would rather stay in jail than be returned to her life with her abusive husband.

“Lady Cop Makes Trouble” takes readers on a lively chase through a lost world. It’s a colorful and inventive adventure tale that also contains a serious message at its core about the importance of meaningful work to women’s identities and, in some cases, survival. n Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air.”

F LADY COP MAKES TROUBLE

By Amy Stewart Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

310 pp. $26

HERO OF THE EMPIRE The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill

By Candice Millard Doubleday.

400 pp. $30

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REVIEWED BY

L YNNE O LSON

or her third book, “Hero of the Empire,” Candice Millard focuses on Winston Churchill, one of the most written-about men in modern history, and the event that catapulted him into international prominence — his daring escape from a prison camp during the Boer War. This is well-trodden territory, and, unlike in her earlier works, Millard offers few new facts or insights about Churchill and his South African adventure. Yet, thanks to her formidable storytelling skills, she has succeeded in infusing this familiar narrative with color, excitement and life.

Particularly effective is her cleareyed view of the young Churchill as a bumptious self-promoter whose exploits in Africa were as farcical as they were courageous.

When Britain declared war against the Boers in October 1899, Churchill, then 24, saw it as a heaven-sent opportunity. Although he had served in several previous military campaigns as a cavalry officer and a war correspondent, none had brought him the fame and fortune he so ardently sought. Just a few months before the war began, he failed in his first attempt to win a seat in Parliament. Churchill “had no money, no occupation and, it appeared, no one who believed in him quite as much as he believed in himself,” Millard writes. What he needed, he thought, was another war.

As most Britons saw it, their empire, the mightiest in the world, would crush the upstart Boers in a matter of weeks, if not days. Desperate to get to Africa before that happened, Churchill persuaded a London newspaper, the Morning Post, to make him its war correspondent. Laden with an enormous cache of provisions that included 18 bottles of 10-year-old Scotch, he arrived in Cape Town at the end of October.

Two weeks later, Churchill accompanied an armored British train on a reconnaissance mission.

When a large Boer force am-

bushed it, he took control of the chaotic situation, helping to clear derailed cars from the tracks and loading injured soldiers onto the engine, which managed to escape.

He was captured, along with some 60 British troops.

Much to Churchill’s surprise, the Boers treated him and the other prisoners with civility. As lenient as his confinement was, however, Churchill considered it intolerable because, as Millard notes, it denied “him the glory of battle and an opportunity for recognition and advancement.”

On Dec. 12, Churchill rushed to the fence and clambered over it.

His resourcefulness in evading the Boers’ massive manhunt for him was matched by extraordinary luck, including a chance encounter with John Howard, the manager of a coal mine in the Transvaal and one of the few Englishmen allowed to remain in the Boers’ territory. For several days, Howard hid Churchill in his mine, then smuggled him onto a freight train to Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese East Africa.

Less than two months after his arrival in Africa, Churchill found himself the celebrity he had always wanted to be. Newspapers had avidly covered his exploits on the ambushed train, his imprisonment and escape, and the Boers’ relentless search for him. Stunned by their country’s string of defeats in the war and huge list of casualties, the British public needed a hero as much as Churchill wanted to be one.

Churchill returned to Britain in the summer of 1900 and was elected to Parliament soon thereafter.

Forty years later, he would win lasting fame in World War II when, as British prime minister, he rallied his countrymen to stand alone against Nazi Germany. In those dark days of 1940, Churchill finally achieved the greatness he had always sought. n Olson’s latest book, “Last Hope Island,” will be published in April.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

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OPINIONS

After decades of pushing, a ‘victory for humanity’ JOHN LEWIS is a congressman from Georgia. He was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was a leader of the Selma-toMontgomery march for voting rights in 1965 and is the last surviving speaker from the historic March on Washington.

I first learned there was an effort to establish a national museum dedicated to preserving African American history and culture during my first term in Congress after being elected in 1986. My colleague Rep. Mickey Leland (D­Tex.) discovered that the most recent legislative efforts had run aground a few years earlier because of an attempt by Rep. Clarence Brown (R­Ohio) and Sen. John Glenn (D­Ohio) to take the project to Wilberforce, Ohio. Mickey resurrected the idea and asked me to co­sponsor it in 1988.

I have loved history ever since I was a boy. I knew the power of legacy. Mickey did not have to ask me twice. I was on board to push the museum bill through.

Unfortunately, he was killed in a plane crash less than a year later. So the baton was passed to me. I continued to introduce the legislation in every session of Congress and worked to find a way to get the bill through. I knew that if I was persistent and consistent, I would at least play my role well in this effort, but at most I could win a victory for humanity.

Ultimately, I made a key alliance with Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), Sen. Sam Brownback (RKan.) and Rep. J.C. Watts (ROkla.). The bill won passage in the House and Senate and was signed into law in 2003 by President George W. Bush. My final drive to the finish line was the completion of a dream first launched by visionary supporters of black Civil War veterans 100 years ago.

On May 24, 1916, the National Memorial Association held a meeting in Washington at 19th Street Baptist Church, a nearly 180-year-old congregation still in existence today. Its members discussed the creation of “a beautiful building” they hoped to establish on the Mall. Their goal was “to commemorate the deeds American [N]egroes wrought for the perpetuation and

advancement of the Nation,” celebrating their contribution to America in “military service, in art, literature, invention, science, industry” and other areas of life.

On this Sept. 24, exactly 100 years and four months later, the National Museum of African American History and Culture finally opened in Washington, D.C., prominently at the foot of the Washington Monument.

Millions of black men and women built this country through hard labor, sacrifice and suffering, through creativity and ingenuity, sheer willpower and enduring faith. They have fought in every war and defended the principles of democracy knowing they would not share in the victory. They did this not because they anticipated any benefit, but because they believed in something greater than themselves. That faith and their ability to make a way out of no way is a demonstration of the character it took to build this nation, and that is why this museum deserves a prominent space among the memorials to the founders of this country.

People know so little about African American history. We want to try to hide nearly 400 years of history from ourselves, as though it will somehow disappear if we never mention it. But all around us we see pockets of the past erupting before our very eyes.

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., was set to open to the public Saturday.

Some people thought that the hostility and angst around issues of race, for example, no longer existed in America, to the degree that they actually believed we were living in a post-racial society. Why? Because we spent the latter part of the 20th century burying any discussion of a racial divide and refusing to admit that antagonism was still festering beneath the surface in our society. We vilified people who suggested race could be a cause of conflict, believing our denial would somehow make the problem go away.

But the upheavals in our society today demonstrate that avoiding the truth is impossible.

Covering a wound without treating it with medicine first only makes it fester and increases the danger of infection.

Actually, it is confronting the truth that leads to liberation from our past. Yes, it may require an adjustment in our thinking, but in the final analysis the truth can lead to only one conclusion: We are one people, one family, the American family. We all live in one house, the American house, the world house. It will lead us to see the divine spark that resides in each and every one of us and is a part of the entire creation. It will lead us to see that we are more alike than we are different, that we are not separate, but we are one. That is why this museum can have a

healing effect on our society.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Those are some of my favorite words by John Keats, and they resonate so clearly in this case.

Only the truth has the power to lead us to the beauty we seek in our democracy. Only then can we build a Beloved Community in America.

Let the truth speak to our hearts and minds. Let this museum share the complete, unvarnished truth, without whitewash or avoidance, without sweeping the discomforting parts in some dark corner or under a rug. Let the curators and directors create ingenious ways to expose ourselves to ourselves so we can light the way to a more inclusive, truly democratic society.

The African American story is a collection of some of the most inspiring stories in human history that demonstrate the invincible nature of every human spirit. It is the story of those who were denied equality but who laid down their lives in every generation to redeem the soul of America.

“When the history books are written in future generations,” Dr. King once said, “the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people — a black people — who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ ” n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

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OPINIONS

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TOM TOLES

Snowden’s actions merit a pardon MARGARET SULLIVAN is The Washington Post’s media columnist.

Previously, she was the New York Times’ public editor and the chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown paper.

President Obama’s administration has an unfortunate record of prosecuting whistleblowers, some of whom have been important sources for journalists.

That’s not a legacy any president should want.

In the waning days of his administration, the president can turn that around, not entirely, but in an important way by pardoning the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and allowing him to return to the United States from his Russian exile without facing charges.

Obama absolutely should do so. Snowden did an important — and brave — service for the American public and, in fact, the world, when he made it possible for news organizations to reveal widespread government surveillance of citizens. Some of that surveillance broke the law; some, although within the law, was nevertheless outrageous and unacceptable. And, afterward, some of the wrongs were righted through legislative reform.

One of the beneficiaries was The Washington Post, which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for stories made possible

by Snowden’s leak of thousands of documents. (The Guardian U.S. shared in that award, given in 2014.) Some see it, then, as hypocritical for The Post’s editorial board to weigh in

against a pardon, as it did in Sept. 17’s paper — even though the editorial-writing side is separate from the newsroom.

At the time of the revelations, the president declared that national debate important and worthwhile, although he criticized Snowden for breaking the law in making the classified documents public.

“It is indisputable that our democracy is better off thanks to Snowden,” American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony Romero said this past week. “And it’s precisely for cases like his that the pardon power exists.”

The tiresome debate may rage on about whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero — no doubt to be rekindled with the recent arrival of “Snowden,” Oliver

Stone’s take on the affair. What Snowden was, without dispute, was an extraordinarily important source.

And notably, Snowden brought those revelations to those he trusted — at first, to Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who later became one of the founders of the Intercept, along with Glenn Greenwald, who was then at the Guardian. Poitras worked with several news organizations, including The Post. Barton Gellman led The Post’s reporting, after receiving documents directly from Snowden.

Snowden worked through journalists, rather than publish documents en masse himself, because he wanted the information to be carefully handled and responsibly vetted.

He has been critical, in recent weeks, of WikiLeaks because of that organization’s reckless justpublish-everything mentality.

In other words, Snowden acted carefully, responsibly and courageously — and squarely in the public interest.

The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, wrote this in 2014 about the revelations whose publication in The Post he championed: “In constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and

intrusiveness, our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight.”

Snowden may indeed have broken the law when he decided his only acceptable path was to give the NSA documents to journalists.

But another famous and public-spirited leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, who provided the classified Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, pointed out that there was a more important obligation at work. While they both signed a standard secrecy agreement as a condition of employment, Ellsberg said that their oath to defend the Constitution rightly took precedence: “As Snowden and I discovered, that oath turns out to be often in conflict with the secrecy agreement that he and I signed, and which we later chose to violate in support of our oath.”

Nothing but semantics? No, a crucial distinction.

Snowden made it possible for journalists to provide a historic public service to his country.

And his country ought to show him some appreciation, not threaten him with imprisonment or keep him in exile. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY MORIN FOR THE MIAMI HERALD

Too arrogant to come clean DANA MILBANK writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.

The 2008 financial collapse was eight years ago this month — and the big banks are back to their old shenanigans.

Venerable Wells Fargo has engaged in behavior that would have made a robber baron blush: It pressured low-wage workers with unrealistic sales targets, so these workers created 2 million bogus accounts over five years, causing customers to be hit with fees and damage to their credit ratings. Some 5,300 workers have been fired and $185 million in penalties assessed to the bank, but not a single high-level executive has been sacked or even forced to give back the tens of millions of dollars in pay earned based on the fraud.

When Wells Fargo chairman and chief executive John Stumpf sat before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, he represented a bank too big to fail, too sprawling to manage and too arrogant to own up to its failures.

Can’t Wells Fargo take back some of the executive payouts?

“I’m not an expert in compensation,” Stumpf said.

Would he commit to investigate whether the fraud began in earlier years?

“I can’t tell you that today.”

Did he learn about the fraud before reading about it in the Los Angeles Times?

“I don’t remember the exact time frame.”

Did the bogus accounts hurt customers’ credit scores?

“I don’t know the algorithms.”

Stumpf informed the senators that what Wells Fargo did “was not a scam,” disputed that “this is a massive fraud” and said he had no idea “why people did this.”

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) encouraged Stumpf to “make certain that the employees are not the scapegoat for behavior at higher levels.”

Stumpf repeated that “the 5,300, for whatever reason, they were dishonest, and I’m not scapegoating.”

The CEO even defended his decision not to tell investors earlier about the widespread fraud, because “it was not a material event.”

If high-level bankers didn’t go to prison for the subprime high jinks that caused the 2008 crash,

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY MATT DAVIES

it’s a safe bet that none will in the Wells Fargo scandal, either.

But if arrogance were a criminal offense, Stumpf would be looking at a life sentence.

The bank’s fraud, and the executive’s insolence, may have one salutary result: It takes off the agenda any plan to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the post-2008 regulatory creations and a top target of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. The Los Angeles city attorney and the Los Angeles Times may deserve more credit for exposing the wrongdoing, but the audacity at Wells Fargo shows that the industry isn’t about to police itself.

Stumpf also managed to create rare bipartisan unity on the Banking Committee — in condemnation of his actions.

Stumpf blinked rapidly while listening to his accusers, as if sending Morse-code distress signals. He offered obligatory statements of remorse (“I am deeply sorry that we’ve failed to fulfill on our responsibility. . . . I accept full responsibility for all unethical sales practices. . . . We should have done more, sooner”).

But how is it fair for executives to take home millions after thousands of workers

defrauded customers?

“It’s a good question,” Stumpf allowed.

Why didn’t he bring in somebody to investigate?

“That’s a good question.”

Why didn’t the bank detect the fraud earlier?

“That’s a good question.”

Answers, however, were hard to come by. Would he recommend taking back some of the $125 million payout to the head of the division that committed the fraud?

“I’m not on the human resources and compensation committee.”

Was she at least fired over this?

“No, Carrie [Tolstedt] chose to retire.”

Half a dozen times, Stumpf repeated that the 5,300 workers fired were only 1 percent of his workforce — much like an airline executive arguing after a plane crash that 99 percent of his planes landed safely.

A fraud involving only 5,300 people? “Every time you say that, you give ammunition to the folks who want to break up the big banks,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) told him.

And here’s more ammo: Stumpf, who presided over the whole thing, took home $19.3 million last year. n

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Presidential health BY

B ARRON H . L ERNER

Both presidential candidates have been pressured to release more in­ formation about their health. But this information may not be as useful as we think. Past assumptions about the health of presidents and candidates often have been shrouded in myth.

MYTH NO. 1 The Soviets got Eastern Europe because FDR was sick.

As the Soviet Union took control of more and more of Eastern Europe after World War II, critics of Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that he — increasingly lethargic and confused because of illness — had been unfit to negotiate. The “sick man of Yalta,” according to this theory, had been duped by his Soviet counterpart, Joseph Stalin.

The reality was much more complex. It is true that Roosevelt was suffering from severe hypertension and congestive heart failure, which the medications of the era could not effectively treat. And the trip to Yalta, located in the Crimea region of the Soviet Union, had been arduous. Roosevelt had suffered periods of extreme fatigue. But his personal physician Howard Bruenn, who was also at Yalta, observed that the president’s mental faculties remained intact.

Winston Churchill, who was surely of sound mind, had participated in the negotiations and had trusted Stalin as well.

And, as historian James MacGregor Burns has argued, the West had only so much leverage over the Soviets, who, after all, had suffered the greatest human sacrifices in defeating Hitler.

Roosevelt, Burns wrote, was a realist who had “reached the limit of his bargaining power.” His illness did not determine the fate of postwar Europe.

MYTH NO. 2 Sick presidents aren’t good at the job.

There is no clear relationship

between a president’s performance and his well-being.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had a series of medical issues while in office, including a heart attack, a bowel obstruction and a stroke.

But historians have written approvingly of his presidency and his ability to achieve consensus.

In a 2015 ranking of the presidents from a survey of political scientists, he came in seventh.

Perhaps one of the sickest presidents in the country’s history was John F. Kennedy, who suffered not only from a failure of the adrenal glands, known as Addison’s disease, but also from debilitating back pain. A physician, Janet Travell, treated Kennedy with narcotics, stimulants and various hormones.

Most worrisome, Kennedy retained the services of a shady physician named Max Jacobson, who injected him with amphetamines. Yet while some of Kennedy’s decisions, such as the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, involved poor judgment, Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek found no definitive evidence that the illnesses or medications were the cause. And historians have praised many aspects of Kennedy’s tenure, such as his handling of the Cuban missile crisis and his efforts to improve poverty and race relations.

MYTH NO. 3 A healthy candidate is a good predictor of a healthy president.

Being healthy at one point in time may have little relevance to what happens during a future presidential term.

Perhaps the most telling

MIKE SARGENT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

President Ronald Reagan, with Nancy Reagan, waves to reporters from a window of his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital on Jan. 6, 1987.

example was the case of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, who was 69 when he ran for the presidency in 1980, authorized the release of information from his doctors.

They raised no concerns, describing him as in “excellent health.” But many commentators, including Reagan’s son Ron, now think that Reagan was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease by the time of his second term.

MYTH NO. 4 Presidents’ doctors tell the public the truth.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981, one doctor stated that the hospital “recognized the need to provide accurate information to the news media.”

In practice, however, some presidential physicians have lied, often blatantly. Ross McIntyre, Roosevelt’s first White House physician, continually characterized his patient’s shortness of breath — from congestive heart failure — as a sinus problem. The most egregious lie, perhaps, was one of omission. When Paul Tsongas was running for president in 1992, his hematologist confirmed his patient’s history of lymphoma but not that the disease had recently recurred and thus probably was

incurable. Tsongas died two days before what would have been the end of his first term in office.

MYTH NO. 5 Presidents shouldn’t be, and haven’t been, mentally ill.

A 2006 study of the first 37 presidents concluded that 18 of them had some type of psychiatric disorder during their lives, such as depression, anxiety or alcoholism. Ten exhibited symptoms while in office.

Although the paper concluded that these conditions had negatively affected aspects of their presidencies, some of those affected were nevertheless extremely successful leaders. One of them was Abraham Lincoln, who is routinely at or near the top of “best presidents” lists, but had a major depressive disorder with psychotic features. Woodrow Wilson, who suffered from depression and anxiety in office, was listed at number 10 on the 2015 list. And Teddy Roosevelt, the study concluded, probably had bipolar disorder during his presidency, but his symptoms did not interfere with his effectiveness or performance. n Lerner, of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, is the author of “The Good Doctor.”

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016

24

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