Haitian Chinese Student Kristine Guillaume Becomes Harvard Crimson’s First Black Woman Editor
November 29, 2018
A black woman will lead Harvard University’s prestigious student newspaper for the first time since it was founded in 1873.
Haitian-Chinese student, Kristine E. Guillaume, 20, made history as the newly elected president of The Harvard Crimson. Her upcoming post has made headlines since it was announced earlier this month. Guillaume becomes the third black editor and the first black women editor, The New York Times reported, in the paper’s 145-year history.
The Crimson, which is the United State’s oldest daily student paper, has been edited by former US presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, former Microsoft head Steve Ballmer and CNN head Jeff Zucker among others.
Guillaume was appointed to this role after promising to guide the paper, which has struggled with diversity, “toward a more diverse, digital future,” the New York Times reports.
“If my being elected to The Crimson presidency as the first black woman affirms anyone’s sense of belonging at Harvard,” she says, “then that will continue to affirm the work that I’m doing.”
She took to Twitter to share the historic and exciting news with her followers:
Born to a Chinese mother and Haitian father, both immigrants and physicians, Guillaume says that she developed an interest in journalism while growing up in Queens. On Sundays, Guillaume’s father would take her and her younger sister to a diner and ask them to read Times’ columns by David Brooks and Paul Krugman.
“Both of my parents have a strong emphasis on education and knowing what’s going on in the world around us,” says Guillaume, a junior majoring in literature, history and African-American studies.
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US: HAITI LACKS FISCAL TRANSPARENCY
SUMMARY HAÏTI REPORT*
Haiti: As the government was in caretaker status for nine of the 12 months of the review period, there were no budget documents. Information on debt obligations was publicly available. In the past, publicly available budget documents did not provide a substantially complete picture of the government’s planned expenditures and revenue streams, including natural resource revenues.
The budget did not provide sufficient detail for each ministry or agency and did not include allocations to and earnings from state-owned enterprises. The government maintained off-budget accounts that were not subject to the same oversight and audit as other expenditures. Its military budget was not subject to civilian oversight. Haiti’s supreme audit institution partially reviewed the government’s accounts, but it did not make its report publicly available within a reasonable period of time.
The criteria and procedures by which the national government awards contracts or licenses for natural resource extraction were specified in law and decree. The government did not appear to follow contracting laws and regulations in practice. Basic information on natural resource extraction awards was only sporadically publicly available.
Haiti’s fiscal transparency would be improved by:
publishing budget documents within a reasonable period of time, publishing greater detail on revenue sources and types, as well as expenditures by ministry, providing more detail on allocations to and earnings from state-owned enterprises, subjecting its military budget to civilian oversight, ensuring adequate audit and oversight for off-budget accounts, improving the reliability of budget documents by producing and publishing a supplemental budget when actual revenues and expenditures do not correspond to those in the enacted budget, ensuring the supreme audit institution audits the government’s accounts and publishes the resulting audit reports, consistently adhering to laws and regulations for contracting and licensing in natural resource extraction, and routinely publishing basic information on natural resource extraction awards.
Haiti
Portraits of House Speakers who served in Confederacy removed ahead of Juneteenth after Pelosi order
WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered the removal of four portraits in the U.S. Capitol of former Speakers of the House who served in the Confederacy, a symbolic gesture to honor Juneteenth on Friday as the country continues to protest over systemic racism and police brutality.
The move comes as Congress debates how to respond to the killings of Black Americans by police and amid ongoing protests over racism and police brutality after the death of George Floyd. His death and the recent deaths of other Black Americans have led to widespread discussions over removing Confederate statues across the country – including in the halls of the Capitol – and renaming military bases named after Confederate military leaders.
Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when people in Texas, including 250,000 enslaved people, were told slavery was over, some two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Pelosi, at her weekly news conference, said she wrote a letter to House Clerk Cheryl Johnson requesting the removal of portraits of the four former House Speakers, who all served in the 1880s, because "there's no room in the hallowed halls of this democracy, this temple of democracy to memorialize people who embody violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy."
"You have to see the marks that they had made, how oblivious they were to what our founders had in mind in our country," Pelosi said. "We must lead by example."
She said the removal would be happening on Friday, which would mark the Juneteenth holiday, but instead the large portraits with bright gold frames were carefully taken down Thursday afternoon by workers at the Capitol, just hours after Pelosi sent her letter to Johnson.
The portraits depict Robert Hunter of Virginia, who served as Speaker from 1839-1841, Howell Cobb of Georgia, who was Speaker from 1849-1851, James Orr of South Carolina, who was Speaker from 1857-1859, and Charles Crisp of Georgia, who was Speaker from 1891-1895. All were Democrats, with Hunter serving in both the Democratic party and now-defunct Whig Party.
True Story of a Slave
Henrietta Wood was a former slave living in Cincinnati when the woman she worked for suggested a carriage ride across the river to Covington, Kentucky. There, she was abducted and forced into slavery – again.
It was the spring of 1853 and a deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward conspired with Wood's employer to kidnap and sell her. Wood was ultimately sold to slaveholder Gerard Brandon and taken to Natchez, Mississippi, to work in his cotton fields.
Ten years later, the Emancipation Proclamation, in effect Jan. 1, 1863, declared "all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."
But this didn’t immediately liberate all slaves, as the Union was still fighting the Civil War (generally considered over on April 9, 1865). As federal troops advanced toward Mississippi, Brandon forced 300 of his slaves – including Wood and her young son, Arthur – to march 400 miles to Robertson County, Texas, where he set up new operations near the Brazos River.
"The reason why people like Brandon went to Texas was because they knew that if they could get to interior Texas where U.S. troops had not yet reached, they could hold out as long as they could," says historian W. Caleb McDaniel, who teaches at Rice University. "So I think Texas became a place where die-hard slavers went to try to wait out the war and see if slavery could survive."
It would be two more years, on June 19, 1865, before troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and forced slaveholders to free their slaves. This is now known as Juneteenth, recognized by 47 states and Washington, D.C., as either a state holiday or ceremonial holiday. (The 13th Amendment, ratified at the end of 1865, would abolish all slavery.)
That moment in Texas when "die-hard" slaveholders like Brandon had nowhere else to run, that was 155 years ago today.
Wood's journey is recounted in McDaniel's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Sweet Taste of Liberty, A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America." How did the author learn about Wood? Newspapers.
Wood gave just two interviews about her ordeal. First was to the Cincinnati Commercial (once a sister paper to the current Cincinnati Enquirer). The second was to the Ripley (Ohio) Bee.
Early newspapers "are a gold mine for late 19th-century stories," McDaniel said. "I think there are a lot of stories still to be told of people whose experiences were recorded in these papers, but are waiting for investigation."
Federal troops may have freed slaves in Texas, but that didn't mean those men, women and children could easily go back to their homes or reunite with family. They had been marched hundreds of miles from home, with little or no support to get back. And, McDaniel writes, the roads leading out of town were violent and dangerous for the former slaves. Some white planters abducted freed slaves and took them to Cuba or Brazil, where slavery was still legal.
Wood signed a contract to work for Brandon for three more years for $10 a month in Texas and then in Mississippi. She told the Commercial she was never paid. She and Arthur made it back to the Cincinnati area in 1869. In Covington, she began working for an attorney named Harvey Myers, McDaniel writes. And he began working for her, filing a lawsuit against Ward for reparations, $20,000 in lost wages for the time she was enslaved.
Ward was then one of the wealthiest men in the South, making a fortune on convict-leasing schemes. His legal team created delay after delay, McDaniel writes. The case had dragged on for 72 months when reporter Lafcadio Hearn showed up at Wood's door.
He asked Wood to share her story "before freedom." The next day, April 2, 1876, a nearly 4,000-word story ran in the Commercial with the headline "Story of a Slave."