Ticker tape

Jet, June 2, 2003 by Simeon Booker

Confidential: Rap music has made a difference in politics for the first time. Hip-hop campaign songs and the presence of its musical heroes are credited with "turning on" young Black voters and resulting in the election of 32-year-old Kwame Kilpatrick as mayor of Detroit. Noting this victory, presidential candidate the Rev.

Al Sharpton of New York recently told a 13,000-person Detroit audience he intended to use rap music to recruit and register as many as a million young Blacks voters yearly for the next five years ... When Republicans announced a million-dollar gift to refurbish the Frederick Douglass home in the nation's capital, the happiest listener was Frederick Douglass, IV of Baltimore, the great-great-grandson of the Black abolitionist ... A standing ovation greeted civil rights stalwart Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Queen Noor of Jordan and ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the commencement of Virginia's College of William and Mary. Noor and Lewis received honorary degrees ... Proof of Laura W. Murphy's contribution as the first Black leader of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union--she was named as this year's "freedom and justice" awardee of the Detroit NAACP Branch ... Former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode, now a minister, plans to expand a program to reach the nation's 20 million children whose parents are in jail or prison. His spark: Goode's father went to prison for beating his mom with a hoe ... NAACP's 2003 Spingarn medallist-Senior New York Circuit Judge Constance Baker Motley ... Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas broke his long silence by speaking at the U of Georgia commencement. A native of Georgia, Thomas found the homecoming chilled by student objections to his selection as the speaker-even to some refusing to contribute to the class fund.