Elisha Brown

“By banning this archaic practice, we will ensure that animals are no longer subjected to these inhumane and unnecessary procedures,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement.

The law goes into effect immediately and makes exceptions for medical purposes. Performing the procedure on a cat for any other reason could lead to a fine of up to $1,000.

Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, a Democrat, first introduced the bill in January 2015. “As a cat lover and someone who has cats, I said this is cruel, barbaric and inhumane,” Rosenthal said Monday.

She said she hoped a similar bill would also pass in Massachusetts, where legislators are considering a ban on declawing cats. “Other states tend to emulate what New York does,” Rosenthal said.

Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver were the first cities to ban cat declawing.

“Gov. Cuomo’s signing of this historic bill in New York is a watershed moment for the declawing issue, and we hope other states will follow suit by prohibiting this unnecessary convenience surgery,” Kitty Block, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement.

Declawing is often misconstrued as a “surgical removal of the nail,” said Dr. Eileen Jefferson, a New York state representative for the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association.

But declawing is an invasive, painful operation that removes individual toe bones from the cat’s paws, Jefferson said. She compared it to “an amputation.”

Declawed cats sometimes bite more or refuse to use their litter boxes, which are harder to use without claws, said Jennifer Conrad, a veterinarian and founder of the Paw Project, an anti-declawing advocacy organization.

The ban is a “positive for cats in New York,” Conrad added.

The New York state Veterinary Medical Society opposed the ban and said in a statement released in May that declawing “should be an available option when the alternative is abandonment or euthanasia.” The organization declined to comment on the bill becoming state law.

Going forward, Rosenthal wants to work on changing the perception of animals as property.

“Having this bill become law indicates that New York is changing the way we view animals and our relationship with them,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/nyregion/new-york-declaw-ban.html" id="014f978d-a950-344f-afa5-2ff266524da7">The New York Times</a>.

New York on Monday became the first state in the country to ban cat declawing, a practice that animal advocates consider cruel and unnecessary. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law after state legislators passed the ban last month.

New York State Bans Cat Declawing

New York Is First State to Ban Declawing of Cats

The letter, addressed to Hamilton’s good friend the Marquis de Lafayette, came to light last November when an auction house in Virginia notified the FBI after a South Carolina family tried to consign it for auction, according to a complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts by the U.S. attorney’s office.

An auction house researcher had discovered that the letter matched a copy of the correspondence on Founders Online, a National Archives and Records Administration website. It had been listed as missing.

Federal prosecutors are asking a federal judge to rule that the document be returned to its original owner. It is now in the possession of the FBI in Boston, a law enforcement official said Friday.

In 1950, a former Massachusetts Archives employee was arrested for stealing and selling documents, including the Hamilton letter and original papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers, to rare-books dealers when he worked at that institution between 1937 and 1945, the complaint said. It does not list the name of the employee or what happened to that person.

In the 1940s, Hamilton’s letter ended up in the possession of a rare-books and documents dealer in Syracuse, New York, who sold it to a now-deceased relative of the South Carolina family that tried to consign it last year with an auction house in Virginia, the complaint said. The family said it had inherited a collection that included the Hamilton letter.

The three-paragraph letter — now valued between $25,000 and $35,000, according to the Virginia auction house — warned Lafayette, the French general who commanded troops in several Revolutionary War battles, of pending danger from the British.

“We have just received advice from New York through different channels that the enemy are making an embarkation with which they menace the French fleet and army,” Hamilton, then a lieutenant colonel, wrote. “Fifty transports are said to have gone up the Sound to take in troops and proceed directly to Rhode Island.”

Hamilton told Lafayette that a British fleet was patrolling New York, said Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of history and American studies at Yale University.

The correspondence “marks a moment when coming soon would be a lot of French assistance in the war,” which ended in 1783, Freeman said.

Lafayette and Hamilton became close friends when the French general arrived in 1778. “Hamilton spoke pretty fluent French, so he was given the responsibility of being Lafayette’s translator,” Freeman added.

Aside from its intrinsic historical value, the letter is likely worth more now because of Hamilton’s newfound prominence after “Hamilton” the musical, a pop-culture phenomenon, debuted on Broadway in 2015.

“Hamilton was really not well known” before the 2004 Ron Chernow biography on the first secretary of the Treasury, and the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical it helped inspire, Freeman added. In 2017, a collection of hundreds of Hamilton letters and manuscripts sold for $2.6 million.

Stolen 1780 Letter by Hamilton Resurfaces at Auction

A letter written by Alexander Hamilton during the Revolutionary War has resurfaced more than seven decades after the document was stolen from the Massachusetts Archives, federal authorities said.

Stolen 1780 letter by Hamilton resurfaces at auction

Grace Coddington, a former creative director of American Vogue, was photographed with a collection of so-called mammy ceramics in her kitchen for a French lifestyle magazine. The images surfaced in early February and were condemned.

“I am ashamed and embarrassed that I didn’t see the mammy jars in the photo until an Instagram commenter pointed them out to me,” the photographer, Brian Ferry, said in a statement. “I’m sorry for my mistake and the hurt it caused,” he added. “I am committed to doing better in the future.” Representatives for Coddington did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The mammy stereotype portrays black women as obedient maids to white families. Like blackface, racist objects such as mammy jars perpetuate deep-rooted stereotypes about African-Americans by portraying them as docile, dumb and animated. But some white families view these objects as keepsakes, passed down through generations as relics of the past.

More than a century after the heyday of minstrel shows and the peak production of racist objects, some Americans are still learning about how these cultural products — viewed as forms of entertainment and decorations during the Jim Crow era — dehumanize black people.

This year, February — a month usually set aside for celebrating the achievements of African-Americans — was dominated by a national reckoning with blackface and a series of apologies for racist behavior.

Ralph S. Northam, the governor of Virginia, first apologized for appearing in a photo on his yearbook page that shows a man in blackface standing next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe, and then he denied appearing in the photo at all. The governor later admitted to putting shoe polish on his face to dress up as Michael Jackson. Days later, Virginia’s attorney general apologized for wearing blackface at a college party. (Both men are still in office.)

Conversations about racist controversies, in politics or fashion, are often framed in terms of how they are offensive to black people, but that leaves out a crucial issue, according to Chico Colvard, director of a new documentary about the history of racist objects.

“The other part of the equation is that these are persistent markers of white supremacy,” Colvard said.

Racist objects were originally used as propaganda tools to spread falsehoods about the Civil War.

Their production spiked in the 1890s, said Rhae Lynn Barnes, an assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University.

“A lot of this iconography is specifically around the kitchen and making jokes about cooking and cleaning,” Barnes said. While blackface, a signature of minstrel shows, was often performed in public by white men to mock African-Americans, black figurines were found in homes, according to Barnes.

Mammy miniatures — jars, salt and pepper shakers, kitchen bells — show a black woman with exaggerated lips in a red-and-white gown and a matching head scarf. Lawn jockeys depict hunched-over black men holding lanterns. Mechanical banks feature bugged-out eyes that roll back into a man’s head when coins are inserted into his smiling mouth.

“They were everyday objects which portrayed black people as ugly, different and fun to laugh at,” said David Pilgrim, founder of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan. “They were, in a word, propaganda.”

The objects still show up in our society today.

When Barack Obama first ran for president, “jolly Obama banks” appeared online as gag gifts.

And in an episode of Netflix comedy “Master of None,” the main character, Dev Shah, played by Aziz Ansari, ends a series of bad Tinder dates with a promising hookup. His partner asks him to grab a condom from her bedside table, and he finds one stashed in a mammy cookie jar.

“Isn’t it a little racist?” Dev asks the woman, who is white.

She gets defensive and asks Dev why he waited until after having sex with her to comment on the object. “Just show it to a black person sometime,” he replies.

Some people collect the objects as investment pieces: At antique shows a few decades ago, the banks were priced from $400 to $600, and mammy jars were sold for $200 to $400, according to Pilgrim. But sites like eBay led to lower price points.

“What an interesting culture we have, where you have price guides not just for mammy ceramics and salt and pepper shakers, but also for lynching postcards,” Pilgrim said.

“Black Memorabilia,” Colvard’s documentary, which aired on PBS in February, follows a worker who makes mechanical banks at a small factory in China, a woman who sells antiques at a flea market in North Carolina and an artist who grapples with racism through performance art.

Colvard, who is black, was born in Germany and raised in the United States. He grew up “unconsciously consuming a steady diet” of racist images, he said, from Aunt Jemima on boxes of pancake mix to Saturday morning specials with Shirley Temple in blackface.

“A child is not going to gravitate toward a toy that’s hideous or not well-designed,” Colvard said. “Of course it’s appealing — the colors are bright, welcoming and animated.”

His documentary often weaves in clips from Black Lives Matter protests and the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to draw connections between the pain African-Americans feel when seeing household caricatures of themselves and the political trauma they experience today.

One scene from the documentary shows Joy, the antiques dealer, at a market outpost in Massachusetts. The camera cuts to a black boy drinking water out of a spigot. “I want the little one; you’re too cute,” says Joy, who is white.

An innocuous comment on its own, her words take on a darker tone in view of the types of items she sells and collects: mechanical banks, minstrel postcards, slave documents, KKK pamphlets. “She sees herself as a preserver of history, of real black history,” Colvard said in an interview. “She sees this as a history of travail.”

The antiques dealer says she collects the artifacts to “take the wall down between the races.” But profiting from objects that exploit black suffering may suggest a skewed understanding of African-American history and identity. “These are objects used to dehumanize us,” Colvard said.

Pilgrim, who is black and has been a collector since he was a child, said some people collect the figurines to keep them off the market.

“I knew people who bought them because they wanted to remind themselves of how far black people had come and how resilient black people had been,” he said.

But others collect them as investment pieces and as a form of nostalgia.

“Where a person like myself is likely to see the vestiges of slavery and segregation,” he said, “someone else might be reminded of good times spent with their parents or grandparents and not see the connection at all.”

Nostalgia for these objects nods to the post-Reconstruction era, a time when the United Daughters of the Confederacy mapped out the blueprint for the Lost Cause, a cultural campaign that denied slavery was the reason for the Civil War.

“These figurines laud that time and present a ‘moonlight and magnolias’ view of slavery,” said Keri Leigh Merritt, an Atlanta-based historian and author of “Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South.” “They show happy slaves and try to minimize the brutality and the violence and the horror that we know actually happened.”

Pilgrim, whose museum houses over 5,000 collectibles, hopes the mass presentation of the memorabilia encourages people from various groups to interrogate the messages behind the figurines.

“There’s a reason we need to have these things: to serve as reminders so we’ll never forget,” Colvard said.

“They shouldn’t be erased from history,” he added, “but I’m not sure they should be casually bought and sold in a regular stream of commerce either.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="728efad6-0193-44dc-a97a-66041b2578c1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/arts/mammy-jars-black-history-month.html">The New York Times</a>.

Mammy jars mock black people, why are they still collected?

In a Black History Month roiled by tone-deaf scandals in politics and fashion involving blackface, shoes and balaclavas, you may have missed the one about mammy jars.

The 2016 film, based on a book released earlier that year, depicted the struggle of Johnson and other black women for equality at NASA during the height of the Space Age and segregation. The mathematician tracked the trajectories of crucial missions in the 1960s.

“I am thrilled we are honoring Katherine Johnson in this way as she is a true American icon who overcame incredible obstacles and inspired so many,” Jim Bridenstine, the administrator of NASA, said Friday in a statement. A dedication ceremony is to be held at a later time.

The newly renamed facility, in Fairmont, West Virginia, will now be known as the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility. The program housed at the facility monitors the software used to track high-profile NASA missions, according to the agency’s website.

“So happy and proud to see Katherine Johnson’s legacy cemented,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said on Twitter, noting the significance of the honor during Black History Month.

President Donald Trump signed the measure to rename the facility after Johnson in December after Congress passed a bill introduced by Capito to do so, according to a NASA spokeswoman.

Johnson, who turned 100 in August, “remains in awe and honored by” the accolades she has received, Joylette Hylick, one of Johnson’s daughters, said Friday. Hylick said her mother “can’t imagine why people would want to honor her for just doing a good job.”

NASA’s decision to name the facility for Johnson is not the first time she has been celebrated on the national stage. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Johnson was not always respected. Called “colored computers,” she and other black women who worked in NASA’s computing pool more than a half-century ago were separated from their white colleagues while they calculated trajectories for the Apollo missions and other programs. Johnson tracked the orbits of certain major missions, including Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 in 1961 and John Glenn’s Friendship 7 in 1962, the agency said.

“Hidden Figures,” the book about Johnson and other black women’s fight for equality in the workplace, increased awareness about her status as a trailblazer. The film of the same name received three Academy Award nominations.

“The thrilling thing to me about the book, and the movie, is this is an American story that we’re getting to see through the faces of these women,” Margot Lee Shetterly, the book’s author, told The New York Times in 2016.

Johnson even made an appearance at the 2017 Oscars ceremony, where Taraji P. Henson, who portrayed Johnson in the film, called her a “true NASA and American hero.”

Hylick said her mother was living comfortably and was humbled by the recognition. She added that she hoped the dedication would inspire others in the future, beyond Black History Month.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/science/nasa-hidden-figures-katherine-johnson.html" id="78cebcbe-5494-3cfb-a04e-96da35c24b5e">The New York Times</a>.

No Longer Hidden: NASA Renames Facility After Katherine Johnson

NASA on Friday officially renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician and centenarian whose barrier-breaking career was depicted in the film “Hidden Figures.”

“Hidden Figures,” the book by Margot Lee Shetterly about Johnson and other black women’s fight for equality in the workplace, increased awareness about her status as a trailblazer. The film of the same name received three Academy Award nominations.

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Elisha Brown

Articles written by the author

New York State Bans Cat Declawing

New York Is First State to Ban Declawing of Cats

Stolen 1780 letter by Hamilton resurfaces at auction

Mammy jars mock black people, why are they still collected?

No Longer Hidden: NASA Renames Facility After Katherine Johnson

No Longer Hidden: NASA Renames Facility After Katherine Johnson