Three news stories:

• By: Matthew Pleasant

TAMPA - University of South Florida researchers have discovered 55 graves at the Dozier School for Boys, five more than they previously believed existed at the shuttered north Florida reform school with a history of extreme abuse.

The number of burials is also 24 more than official records indicate, said Erin Kimmerle, a USF associate professor leading a team of researchers who began excavating graves on the Marianna property in September. The burials that have gone unrecorded underscore the necessity of exhuming the remains, she said.

See photos here: http://bit.ly/1ndp2qQ

“We want to help bring the facts to light,” Kimmerle said.

Researchers have now begun work to identify the remains using DNA analysis at the University of North Texas, Kimmerle said. Researchers are also trying to date the burials of the boys using the numerous artifacts uncovered during the excavations, including pieces of coffins, some of them built on the campus.

Work began last year to exhume graves at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which opened in 1900 and closed in 2011 for budgetary reasons. Former inmates from the 1950s and 1960 have detailed horrific beatings and abuse at the school.

In September, researchers discovered the remains of two children, possibly between the ages of 10 and 13.

The team hasn’t given up searching for more graves, Kimmerle said, and they plan to continue looking using ground-penetrating radar and tips from residents.

To assist in identify the remains, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office is distributing a list of 41 names of boys believed to be buried on the property.

To see a list of names go here: http://wfts.tv/1neUdSE

Ovell Krell, who spoke at the news conference on the excavation’s status, hopes the remains of her brother, George Owen Smith, are among those found.

“It’s like buying a lottery ticket,” she said. “I’ve got as good a chance as anybody.”


Read more: http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/region_hillsborough/researchers-discover-remains-of-five-more-at-dozier-school-for-boys-in-marianna#ixzz2rlSvpMyN

Also:
http://news.usf.edu/article/templates/?a=5997&z=215
http://tbo.com/news/education/usf-researchers-find-more-bodies-at-dozier-school-for-boys-20140128/

The MASA Blog Wants YOU! (to write a blog post) Posted on January 27, 2014 by Jonathan Stillo The Medical Anthropology Students Association would like to invite graduate and undergraduate students from across the globe to submit 500-1000 word posts for for us to publish on the MASA blog.

These posts should be related to medical anthropology and can be about current events, your research, policy or anything else that you think we will be interested in. The posts should be well-written, clear, and without much jargon and technical language.  We are especially eager to hear about your own research and will be happy to publish your field photos (as long as you have obtained permission from the people in them).

Please post this to your department listservs and pass it along to anyone who might be interested in contributing. This is a great opportunity to introduce the medical anthropology community to your field site, and to start interesting conversations about research methods, ethics and for discussing interesting research in medical anthropology.

You don’t need to know WordPress to write a blog post, simply send us the text as a Word document, and we will let you know whether we will accept to publish it, or whether edits are necessary. The posts should not have been published elsewhere previously, but if they are, you must have permission to republish it and provide us with the original citation. In addition to appearing on our blog page, we will also link to the posts on our Facebook page so thousands of people will be able to see them. For more info or to send a submission please contact Jonathan Stillo (jstillo@gmail.com).

http://www.medanthro.net/masa/2014/01/27/the-masa-blog-wants-you-to-write-a-blog-post/

50 years later, the U.S. is back where LBJ started
Al Jazeera America

Shortly after New Year’s I drove through a distressed Tampa, Fla., neighborhood I have known for many years. It was gray and cold, and a light rain pelted my windshield. The streets I traveled looked terrible; every fourth house boarded up, with lots filled with debris and weeds. On the curb by a house that looked pretty good, furniture and assorted belongings were piled — a familiar sign of recent eviction. Two women with shopping carts were picking through the stuff, pulling out items of value. This neighborhood has had the highest foreclosure rate of any in the city. Since the Great Recession, poverty in the area has climbed from 43 percent to 52 percent. Statistics like that attract nonprofits, some of which have received small grants from Bank of America for things like classes for parenting and financial literacy. These are rather small prices to pay in return for the very profitable predatory loans that helped create the misery on display.

I wondered how we as a nation got to this point. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the so-called war on poverty, the day in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson gave his first State of the Union address and announced his proposals for fighting poverty. Congress is marking the anniversary by ending unemployment benefits for 1.3 million people who have been out of work for more than a year and cutting food stamps for 47 million people who rely on them to eat. At 15 percent, the poverty rate is the same today as it was in 1965, a year after the so-called war began.

The war appears to be over. Poor people lost.

Actually, it was greatly curtailed soon after it started, defeated by the costlier conflict in Vietnam, followed shortly by President Richard Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. The U.S. is good at starting wars but typically bad at completing them.

Poverty came into national focus in the early 1960s, with the popularity of Michael Harrington’s riveting book “The Other America.” In the midst of growing optimism and prosperity, Harrington traveled to forgotten pockets of misery in Appalachia, the Deep South, migrant farm labor camps, hidden sweatshops and urban black ghettos. In highly readable prose, he described the despair and deprivation he encountered, the human face of what emerged as staggering contrasts with the shiny portrait of the rest of America. His book found its way to the nightstand of President John F. Kennedy. TV news broadcast scenes of fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators, snarling police dogs, club-wielding deputies, the escalating battle over civil rights in the South. These dramatic images helped stoke the national conscience and gave rise to what seemed like a new kind of politics. Empathy was in the air.

New foreign wars, a vastly expanded security apparatus, border control, unprecedented levels of incarceration and massive surveillance programs have continued to out compete domestic needs, especially for poverty. After Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s ascension to the presidency, he eagerly embraced the project of ending poverty in history’s most affluent society. He labeled it the Great Society, one with a heart and purse big enough to take care of everyone, a refinancing of the old New Deal. With a newly created Office of Economic Opportunity to coordinate policy and programs, LBJ launched his campaign. The initial formula involved community action programs (CAPs), promoting “maximum feasible participation” by the poor. New programs were developed — Head Start, Job Corps, Legal Services, VISTA, Medicaid and Medicare. They provided quality day care, job training for youth, access to lawyers, a domestic version of the Peace Corps and medical care for the elderly and indigent.

It was a remarkable period of political breakthroughs but one marked by a series of urban black uprisings that frightened politicians and most white people and cast doubt on the direction and speed of civil rights. Race and poverty were inextricable. A backlash against one would go hand in hand with a backlash against the other.

On June 4, 1965, LBJ gave a famous speech at Howard University, which seemed to redouble his support for civil rights but carried some disturbing language about problems in the African-American community. Three days later, Gen. William Westmoreland talked him into a massive expansion of troops in Vietnam. On Aug. 11, the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in a three day riot that resulted in 34 deaths and over 1,000 injuries. This outbreak prompted a state of panic over what seemed to be a dangerously escalating turn. Days later, the Department of Labor released a report written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young assistant secretary who helped draft the Howard speech. Titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the future New York senator argued that female-headed households were the underlying cause of what he termed a “tangle of pathology” that was mainly responsible for black poverty. The report gained instant notoriety, opposed by most civil rights leaders but embraced by conservatives and many liberals as explanation for the ungrateful violence of Watts and other restive urban enclaves. This report, combined with growing wariness about CAPs (whose workers were wrongly blamed in the press for inciting urban riots), altered the trajectory of the war on poverty. Rather than community activism, the focus became fixing the pathology of poor people. And the costs of the disastrous war in Vietnam greatly diminished resources for either approach.

New equally misguided foreign wars in the 21st century — along with a vastly expanded security apparatus, border control, unprecedented levels of incarceration and massive surveillance programs — have continued to outcompete domestic needs, especially for poverty. The ineffective approach of blaming poverty on the defective culture and personal shortcomings of poor people remains, although programs meant to alleviate poverty have been cut drastically, and much of the effort has been privatized in nonprofits and philanthropic initiatives. The dilemma that was originally about butter versus guns now has broadened into a losing contest between the needs of the poor and middle class versus those of wealthy bankers and corporations, whose interests are duly represented by lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Potential presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul claims that cutting benefits for the unemployed is actually a favor.

Many recent commentaries about the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s poverty programs stress the benefits that they have brought, and there is truth to these claims, but these gains are offset by unparalleled economic inequality, stubbornly high unemployment, blocked opportunity for higher education, crushing personal debt, declining wages, radical cuts in local and federal programs, assaults on collective bargaining and a potent campaign by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council to roll back not only the Great Society but also the New Deal. We need a new war on poverty, but this one should take aim at the political powerlessness of poor people and the insecure middle class, should reinvigorate community activism and should strive to eliminate the causes of poverty, not just its symptoms.

Susan Greenbaum is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of South Florida. She is writing a book about the Moynihan Report for publication in the year of its 50th anniversary in 2015.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/war-on-poverty-lbj50yearslater.html