The two incidents, 40 years apart, tell much about the forward and backward march of racial progress in America. Parks' courageous and long-overdue act staked out the moral high ground for the modern-day civil rights movement. It was classic good vs. evil. In the years immediately following her act, gory news scenes of baton-battering racist Southern sheriffs, fire hoses, police dogs and Klan violence unleashed against peaceful black protesters sickened Americans. All except the most rabid racists considered racial segregation immoral and indefensible. Parks and civil rights leaders were hailed as American heroes in the fight for justice. Martin Luther King Jr., who tops the list of those heroes and martyrs, owed a profound debt of gratitude to Parks. The Montgomery bus boycott launched him from obscure preacher to American icon.

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The first was the tragic and disgraceful images of hordes of New Orleans residents scurrying down the city's hurricane-ravaged streets with their arms loaded with food, clothes, appliances and, in some cases, guns that they had looted from stores and shops. The second was the 2004 Census Bureau report released the same day, which found that the number of poor Americans has leapt every year since Bush took office.

Criminal gangs, which always take advantage of chaos and misery to grab whatever they can, did much of the looting in New Orleans. But many desperately poor, mostly black residents saw a chance to grab items that they couldn't afford. That's still wrong, unless the items were necessary for survival. But it's no surprise. New Orleans has one of the highest poverty rates of any of America's big cities.

According to a report by Total Community Action, a New Orleans public advocacy group, nearly one in three of New Orleans' 485,000 residents has lived below the poverty level. The majority of that group is black. A spokesperson for the United Negro College Fund noted that before the hurricane, the city's poor lived in some of the most dilapidated housing in the nation.

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The choice that African-Americans make will tell much about the fate of multiethnic political alliances in Los Angeles and nationally.

At first glance, that choice seems easy. Blacks screamed for Hahn's head when he ousted black Los Angeles Police Department chief Bernard Parks three years ago. They felt Hahn had betrayed the black community by reneging on a pledge to back Parks as part of their price for delivering the black vote to Hahn in the 2001 mayoral contest. Blacks make up about 15 percent of the city's voters.

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It's not the first time that a King family member has sullied King's name and legacy to torpedo gay rights. In 1998, King's niece, Alveda King, barnstormed the country speaking at rallies against gay rights legislation. In case anyone missed the King family connection, her group was named "King for America." Gay rights groups everywhere countered King's "repent and save yourself" message to gays by quoting a public statement King's widow, Coretta Scott King, issued in 1996 in which she said that her husband would be a champion of gay rights if he were alive.

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Talk about going over the top. The Rev. Al Sharpton demanded an apology for, and Jesse Jackson was piqued over, two minutes of irreverent humor in the film. They actually took seriously the deliberately silly and inane crack by Cedric the Entertainer that the towering contributions of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. to the civil rights struggle had no value.

Certainly none of the characters in "Barbershop" believed it. They immediately jumped all over him.

In fact, it's due in large part to the magnificent contributions of Parks, King and other legendary civil rights heroes that entertainers such as Cedric the Entertainer and the writers, director and producers of "Barbershop" -- all of whom are black -- could even get a major Hollywood studio to bankroll their film. The civil rights struggle also opened doors to blacks in education, business and other professions. The crumbling of those barriers has given blacks the awesome economic muscle to help make "Barbershop" a smash box office success.

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Bush truly believes that the war on terrorism must override the freedoms that he promises to respect -- a sentiment that has come from the White House for more than 40 years. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon claimed that the battle to nail domestic subversives -- that is, communists, socialists, black nationalists, Black Panthers and civil rights leaders, most notably Martin Luther King Jr. -- justified bending, twisting, and ultimately breaking the law and violating civil liberties.

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The university professor is so "insulted" that the president would question his academic performance that he threatens to pack his bags and go to another prestigious university, which is also bidding for his services. Then the piqued professor's department head gets involved. He takes umbrage at the president's "insult" to his underling, and strongly hints that the president's suggestion that the professor live up to his professional billing and improve his teaching performance is really a sneak attack on the school's affirmative action program. Both professors, as well as a third colleague, make it known they are considering other offers from other Ivy League universities.

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Bush was savaged for weeks before the conference by top U.N. officials, Asian and African leaders, and even some of his European partners, for his wrong-headed threat to boycott the conference before any delegates had arrived and any resolutions were proposed or discussed. At the time, Bush's pig-headedness bothered even Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose aides told reporters that the general badly wanted to attend the conference. (In an interesting racial twist, it was National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the administration's other high-ranking African-American, who urged Bush to keep his distance from the convening.)

Powell understood what Rice did not -- and what the hotheaded delegates determined to use the conference to flog Israel clearly don't, either: The gathering was intended to draw up a battle plan to combat racism wherever it exists in the world, not merely to bash and marginalize countries for their racial, ethnic or religious problems. U.S. participation could have been crucial.

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The Lopez flap has by now become part of a well-worn pattern. A non-black celebrity, politician or sports figure slips or intentionally uses a racially-offensive word or makes any other racist reference. They immediately hear about it from outraged blacks. Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott, sports personalities Al Campanis, Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, former Atlanta Braves star John Rocker, author Pat Conroy and California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante were publicly crucified for making racially insensitive remarks or for using the "N" word. They quickly offer their mea culpas, and they hope and pray that their careers aren't ruined.

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But the massive public focus on McVeigh masks the chilling fact that the majority of those executed or awaiting execution are not whites such as McVeigh, but mostly poor blacks and Latinos. The gaping racial disparities in federal executions far surpass those in state executions.

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The shooting has outraged residents of Cincinnati, where sporadic but violent protests have led to the arrest of close to 250 people since Monday. The mayor of Cincinnati announced a state of emergency Thursday and issued an 8 p.m. curfew.

Cincinnati is a textbook example of the legal blind eye locals have turned toward police violence. Since 1995, Cincinnati cops have gunned down 15 black males. During the same period, not a single white was killed by police. The latest black victim, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, was unarmed. His big crime was that he failed to appear in court on misdemeanor charges.

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Drug reform groups made a frantic stampede to submit to the president the names of hundreds of petty drug dealers serving long stretches in federal prisons under crushing mandatory-minimum drug sentences. Those sentences were set in granite by Congress a decade ago and judges have no control over them; only a presidential pardon can undo them.

Clinton denied nearly all the requests for clemency. One of the few he didn't deny was the request to release one Carlos Vignali. According to federal prosecutors and police investigators, Vignali was the kingpin in a lucrative drug ring that shipped hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Los Angeles to Minnesota. He was sentenced to 15 years.

It was more than luck or Clinton compassion that sprung Vignali after he had served six years. His rich daddy, an Argentinian immigrant named Horacio Vignali, dumped tens of thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers of some of California's top politicians. Two of them -- the former speaker of the California assembly, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Rep. Xavier Becerra -- are leading contenders in Los Angeles' upcoming mayoral election.

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According to the prosecution, someone at the club flung money into Combs' face and his bodyguards allegedly whipped out their guns and started blasting away. Police claim that Combs threw a gun out the window of his limo as he sped away from the club after the shooting.

Combs' attorney insisted that prosecutors targeted him because he is a celebrity, and not a criminal. This is pretty much the same line that Baltimore Ravens superstar linebacker Ray Lewis and his defense attorneys shouted before, during and after his acquittal in the beating death of two men in Atlanta following last year's Super Bowl. They claimed that Lewis, who professed his innocence, was tried because he was a celebrity.

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In its latest report on imprisonment in America, the Sentencing Project, a Washington public advocacy group, reports that the number of women locked up in America has skyrocketed during the past decade. At the end of 1999, nearly 100,000 women were incarcerated in federal and state prisons.

Black women have been the hardest hit by the incarceration craze. More are now behind bars than at any time in American history. They fill jails and prisons in greater percentages than black men and are seven times more likely to be imprisoned than white women. For the first time in American history, black women in California and several other states are being imprisoned at nearly the same rate as white men.

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Surprised? A black cop killing an unarmed black under highly questionable circumstances is no longer an oddity. In the past two years black cops have gunned down unarmed blacks in Chicago, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington and Los Angeles. The irony is that black leaders have long clamored for more black cops -- arguing that black officers would be less likely than racist white cops to brutalize other blacks. This, of course, is pure fiction.

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But their anger is misdirected. The real blame for seven decades of lynching lies with the federal government. And the hidden history of the way federal officials looked away from the scourge of lynching -- even after NAACP leaders and other blacks documented the abuse -- needs to come to light, because it colors the current debate over the federal role in prosecuting hate crimes and police violence.

The 68 gruesome pictures Allen displays in his New York exhibit show black men and women being burned, dragged in chains, roasted alive and dismembered while whites crack jokes and mug for the cameras. According to official NAACP figures, between 1890 and 1960, 5,200 blacks were burned, shot or mutilated by lynch mobs. The horrid death toll is almost certainly higher, since in many cases sheriffs and local officials didn't deem the murders significant enough to report.

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Baden's findings were made public by the commander of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, an African-American. But even this probably isn't enough to persuade Jackson and other black leaders that white racists didn't murder Johnson. Not surprisingly, when Jackson was told of the latest conclusion, he did not return phone calls from reporters for comment. Hopefully, Mississippi's governor won't hold his breath waiting for Jackson and other black leaders to heed his call to apologize for smearing the state.

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Johnson's family openly disputed the coroner's ruling that their 17-year-old son was a suicide. They said he was murdered for dating a white girl.

Underlying their bitter charge was the recognition that Johnson, an African-American, had presumably violated America's oldest and most enduring taboo: black males having sexual relations with white females. And while civil rights leaders quickly joined the clamor over his death, lost in the shouting is the fact that relationships between black men and white women have become increasingly controversial in black circles, too.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson insists Johnson's death has the earmarks of a lynching. The NAACP hired a private investigator, and the Southern Poverty Law Center noted that the Klan had long used white fears of black men raping white women to terrorize blacks.

There is no tangible evidence that Johnson's death was anything other than a suicide.

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This at a time when the economy is sizzling, black unemployment is at its lowest level in decades and blacks are earning more and living better than ever. The huge rise in the number of police, the construction of dozens of new prisons and the passage of tougher laws have done little to curb the violence.

If young whites were killing other whites in the appalling proportions revealed by the Justice Department, policymakers would declare it a crisis and rush to find ways to stop it. Likewise, if whites were killing blacks by the thousands, African-American leaders would be marching in the streets.

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Al-Amin's supporters instantly joined in
the chorus and screamed that he was
targeted because he was a black man
fighting the system. They angrily note
that his clean-guy image as Muslim
spiritual leader didn't matter to
Atlanta police and government agents.
Nor did his community do-goodism in
fighting against drugs and prostitution.
Al-Amin supporters say that from the time
he landed in the city in 1976,
authorities did everything they could to
shove him back in a prison cell.

That some police and even government
officials may still be angry at
Al-Amin for his violent past and his
present community-organizing efforts
would not surprise me. As minister of
justice of the Black Panther Party in
the 1960s, Al-Amin repeatedly called on
blacks to kill the police and to burn
down America's cities.

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