8A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016
Local GOP: ‘I think we have a great man to lead our country’
Continued from Page 1A
At the Dorchester Confer-
ence, the annual gathering of
Oregon conservatives in Sea-
side in March, Ohio Gov.
John Kasich topped Trump as
the most favored candidate.
But Trump won two-thirds
of the vote in the Oregon
Republican primary in May,
and slightly more in Clatsop
County.
Bob Shortman, the chair-
man of the Clatsop County
GOP, said Trump has stood out
since Dorchester and consoli-
dated his support.
“I think we have a great
man to lead our country,” he
said. “Every vote will count,
and Republicans have to work
together.”
Ed McNulty, chairman of
the NW Tea Party, said he is
ready for an outsider.
“They’ve tried all the poli-
ticians, and they didn’t work,”
Edward Stratton/The Daily Astorian
Some welcome Trump as a political outsider.
he said. “He’s a businessman,
and I think he’ll be good for
America.”
Local Democrats were less
enthusiastic about the Trump
nomination.
Clatsop County Commis-
sioner Dirk Rohne, a former
Republican who switched
to the Democratic Party
amid the liqueied natural
gas debate in 2011, doubts
Trump’s earnestness.
“Like Howard Stern, I
think he’s a shock jock and
will pretty much say any-
thing,” Rohne said. “If you
were to take him seriously, you
should be alarmed about what
he has to say.”
Rohne said Clinton, the
Democrat and former U.S. sec-
retary of state, is more prag-
matic and experienced to lead.
Larry Taylor, chairman of
the Clatsop County Demo-
crats and a pledged delegate
for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders,
is worried about the global
effects of Trump’s rhetoric.
“I think if he was elected
president, it would be a com-
plete disaster and put the
nation at risk,” Taylor said.
“He’s reckless with interna-
tional relations, and he could
easily plunge us into the next
world war.”
Despite their misgivings
about Trump and the state of
the Republican Party, both
Rohne and Taylor said the U.S.
needs more than one powerful
political party.
Obama rejects
Trump depiction
of US in crisis
President
defends record
on crime,
immigration
By DARLENE
SUPERVILLE and
BRADLEY KLAPPER
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Pres-
ident Barack Obama iercely
rejected Donald Trump’s
depiction of an America in
crisis on Friday, arguing
that violent crime and illegal
immigration have plunged
under his leadership to their
lowest rates in decades.
Looking toward Novem-
ber’s election, Obama said,
“We’re not going to make
good decisions based on fears
that don’t have a basis in
fact.”
At a news conference
alongside Mexico’s pres-
ident, Obama sought to
undermine two pillars of
Trump’s speech Thursday
night in which he accepted
the Republican presiden-
tial nomination. Trump said
that if he is elected, “safety
will be restored” at home and
abroad.
“This idea that American
is somehow on the verge of
collapse, this vision of vio-
lence and chaos everywhere,
doesn’t really jibe with the
experience of most people,”
Obama told reporters.
The violent crime rate, he
said, has been lower during
his presidency than any
time in the last three or four
decades. While he acknowl-
edged an uptick in murders
in some U.S. cities this year,
Obama said the violent crime
rate today was still far lower
than when Ronald Reagan
was president in the 1980s.
Obama used the same
marker for immigration,
describing today’s rate of
illegal border crossing as
only a third of what it was
during the Reagan adminis-
tration, and lower than any
time since.
Speaking after an evening
when Trump laid out his case
to be the next commander
in chief, Obama grimaced
noticeably when a reporter
suggested the billionaire busi-
nessman’s message appeals to
working-class Americans.
“It’s not really clear how
appealing it was,” Obama
said.
Obama said he will let
the U.S. public decide if
the vision of Republicans
or Democrats for the nation
is more persuasive. Hillary
Clinton, Obama’s 2008 pri-
mary rival and then his sec-
retary of state, will receive
the Democratic nomination
next week. She is expected to
announce her running mate
soon.
Roden: Trial is set to
begin in September
Continued from Page 1A
criminal mistreatment. She
was sentenced to more than
15 years in prison, contin-
gent on her truthfully testi-
fying at Roden’s trial.
Roden is serving an
eight-year prison sentence
for violating probation from
a previous domestic vio-
lence conviction in Clatsop
County.
Testimony about Roden’s
background will be used to
help counteract the gruesome
depictions by prosecutors of
life inside the Seaside apart-
ment he shared with Wing.
Witnesses for Roden
include his close friends, sis-
ter, half brother and sixth and
third grade teachers.
Angela Hollingsworth,
Roden’s paternal aunt, is
expected to describe Roden’s
father as a violent and abu-
sive addict who mistreated
Roden and his mother before
he committed suicide when
Roden was 3 years old.
Hollingsworth claims she
never saw any of the anger,
meanness and violence in
Roden that was so apparent
in his father.
Barbara Rogers, Roden’s
stepaunt, plans to explain
how Roden was profoundly
affected by his father’s sui-
cide and how he was never
accepted by his mother or his
stepfather. Roden was des-
perate to it in with his new
family, but was treated dif-
ferently than his stepsiblings
and he became depressed as
a result, Rogers says.
“Ms. Rogers has unique
insight into who Mr. Roden is
and what his childhood was
like,” the defense lawyers
wrote in court documents.
Other friends and fam-
ily who were close to Roden
during his Georgia upbring-
ing are willing to testify about
his “positive and loving man-
ner.” They will describe gen-
erous acts and how Roden
was an animal lover who
was kind to the pets he kept
during his childhood.
Joseph Bales, Roden’s
best friend, will testify that
he never saw Roden become
violent, and he refused to
ight even when attacked on
several occasions. Bales, a
special forces soldier, says
if he was looking for a trust-
worthy and loyal friend to
take into battle with him, he
would not hesitate to choose
Roden.
The cost of round-trip air-
fare, rental car, hotel room
and food for each witness has
been approved by the Ore-
gon Public Defense Services
Commission.
The trial is scheduled to
begin in September in Clat-
sop County Circuit Court.
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Audience members shield their eyes from sunshine as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson speaks at Fort
George Brewery.
Ourselves: Her goal is ‘to reach the human heart’
Continued from Page 1A
dovetailed with two centennial
celebrations: the birth of the
Pulitzer Prize, and the dawn
of the Great Migration, the
roughly 60-year period when
6 million African-Americans
led the segregated Southern
states to regions that held more
promise and possibilities for
them.
Remarking on recent videos
of what many viewers perceive
as police brutality against Afri-
can-Americans, Wilkerson cau-
tioned against “focusing on a
particular moment and feeling
that that is all that there is” —
against making assumptions or
jumping to conclusions based
on those isolated moments.
“I think that what we
should remind ourselves is,
we’re looking at a screenshot,
a moment in time,” she said.
Like people walking into
the middle of a movie, “you
don’t have the whole story,”
she said. “And I don’t mean
the whole story of a particular
case, I mean the whole story of
how we got to where we are,
right now, in this country.
“It almost feels as if we’re
in this karmic moment where
we are called upon to face our
history, called upon to reckon
with what has not been dealt
with in the past,” she contin-
ued. “And we are in such des-
perate need of seeing our com-
mon humanity.”
“They were living in a caste
system. They were living in a
feudal order. They were liv-
ing in an artiicial hierarchy
in which everything that you
could and couldn’t do was
based upon what you looked
like,” she said.
Within that cruelly oppres-
sive system, African-Ameri-
cans were consigned to work
in ields and as domestics. The
lucky ones became teachers or
ministers of those doing the
menial work.
“The majority of these peo-
ple had never been outside the
county into which they had
been born. They had no idea
what this wider world might
actually look like,” she said.
A decision to leave the
South, based on scant infor-
mation and rumors of free-
dom and work elsewhere,
meant leaving “all that they
had known for some place that
they hadn’t seen,” she said.
In a sense, the Great Migra-
tion was a form of protest:
“They were protesting with
their bodies. That was the one
thing that they could do, was
to leave, and it took a lot of
courage.”
‘A space for empathy’
While on book tours, Wilk-
erson noticed that “older white
people” tend to become the
angriest about the subject mat-
ter in “The Warmth of Other
Suns” — angry because they
didn’t know about it. They
have trouble, she said, believ-
ing that their lives overlapped
with this period, and nobody
seemed to talk about it.
“There’s this feeling of hav-
ing been cheated of information
and an understanding of what
was going on,” she said.
Because many people still
do not know the true history
of the African-American expe-
rience in the U.S., they ind
themselves ill-equipped to
diagnose, much less address,
Ca sh
!
Prize
the problems that emerge from
that history.
“We love our country, and
we know the rich heritage of
our country, and we know how
important our country is on the
world stage,” she said, “and
yet, there are aspects of our
country that we may not know,
but that affect how things hap-
pen, even to this day.”
Though laws in the U.S.
have changed to accommodate
the rights of African-Amer-
icans, “that didn’t mean the
hearts had been changed,” she
said. The goal of her book is
“to reach the human heart, and
to open a space for empathy.”
And to supply some of the
historical context that helps
make current events more
explicable.
The traumatic videos and
the controversy surrounding
them are reminders that “these
challenges, these tensions,
these unresolved questions,
these divisions and disparities
are not just in the South, and
they’re not in the past,” she
said. “It forces you to have to
think about our country differ-
ently than what we might have
been led to believe.”
CON
T
Port of Call
Bistro and Bar
‘Marching and
migrating’
That history became the
basis for “The Warmth of
Other Suns,” a book that took
Wilkerson 15 years to write
and involved more than 1,200
interviews.
Wilkerson tells the Great
Migration story through the
eyes of three African-Ameri-
cans; one moved to the West,
another to the Midwest and
the third to the Northeast.
Together, the protagonists rep-
resent the three major migra-
tion streams.
Fifty years after the Eman-
cipation Proclamation, 90 per-
cent of African-Americans in
the U.S. lived in the South,
“almost, in some ways, held
hostage. They were not really
truly free to go,” Wilkerson
said.
The people who made the
journey were “the advance
guard for what would become
the civil-rights movement,”
she said, positing that, for Afri-
can-Americans, the 20th cen-
tury was all about “marching
and migrating.”
“They became the only
group of Americans who had
to act like immigrants just to
be recognized as citizens.”
ES
894 Commercial Street
T
is hosting a
KARAOKE CONTEST
on Friday nights
July 22 and 29
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will advance to the fi nale held at the
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