Like most sports fans who grew up inside the beltway in the 1970s, I rooted for the University of Maryland. Rooted hard. The Terps basketball teams under Lefty Driesell were as lovable and entertaining as any local squad in any sport in my lifetime — where have you gone, Ernie Graham?  — and I screamed for ‘em through what I remember as last-second loss after last-second loss after last-second loss to Dean Smith. (Coach K is more despicable than Smith, for sure, but I’m too old and burned out by those years to work up the same bile for him that I had for Smith.)

 But, after getting sorta immersed in the Terps’ athletic and racial history over the last few months while preparing a story about a guy named Wilmeth Sidat-Singh for this week’s issue, it’s hard to feel anything but hate for the school and the state.

Historically, Maryland might have the worst combination of a liberal veneer and a racist foundation of any state in the union. You don’t have to know much more than what happened to Sidat-Singh back in 1937 to figure that out.

Rather than retell the whole story here, let’s just say a whole lotta people should be burning in hell for the way the state’s flagship university denied Sidat-Singh a chance to play ball because he was the wrong kind of black. 

Sidat-Singh was 19 years old at the time.

Sure, it was a long time ago. But, far as I can tell, the school has not only never apologized for the organized and contractual hate it directed at the teenager — it’s never even acknowledged any wrongdoing.

Somebody in the administration in College Park or the statehouse in Annapolis should step up.

ThugArmyLife says, for one, he wouldn’t buy food, gas, or bandanas anywhere in D.C. from May 25 through May 31. The boycott planned for D.C. and NYC and promoted on the Thug Army Tupac-fansite is in protest of cops getting off for shooting 14-year-old DeOnte Rawlings in Southeast and 23-year-old Sean Bell in Queens on the morning of his wedding.

It’s being organized by Black Legacy, a student org at Lehman College in the Bronx. The reason this will work is: “Society has a responsitility to protect all its citizens, yet society consistenly turns its back when black men are killed by the police. Yet black dollars drive the American economy. It’s time to send a message with money—or lack thereof.”

The boycott week includes Memorial Day. Anyone think people will actually refrain from buying meats for the grill to save the next DeOnte?

T’helah Ben-Dan, co-president of Black Legacy, says that’s up in the air. “To be totally honest I’m not sure of the reaction in D.C., but I do know we’ve been doing a lot to spread the word,” Ben-Dan writes in an e-mail. “I recently got a message from DeOnte’s cousin, who works for an organization called PeaceOholics, and I forwarded information to her so she could help publicize the boycott.” Ben-Dan’s also blitzing PR and media types, who’ve yet to pick this up with any kind of fervor.

 photo by jlmaral

If Catholics prefer Hillary, and Guam is overwhelmingly Catholic, then how did Obama win Guam? Is it the islander connection—Obama being from Hawaii, which is the New York of Micronesia? Is it, as Slate suggests, that Catholics generally prefer Hillary because they don’t want to support a non-Caucasian candidate—which presumably isn’t an issue in Guam, where the majority of the island’s people and politicians are non-Caucasian?

a Catholic church in southern Guam

I’m still looking for my amusing Christmas photos of Santas riding on Guamanian rooftops, under blue blue skies; they’re around, but have gotten lost on my computer

As a former resident of that part of the world, I have sent off some emails to smart friends involved with Micronesian politics to see what they think about Obama’s seven-vote victory. I’m curious what they have to say about it.

DC radio fixture Chris Core got canned from WMAL recently.

He used to be part of the AM-630’s’s feel-good duo, Trumbull & Core. But for the last several years, the station has been Hatemonger Central — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. — and Core tried like heck to blend.

Every time I heard Core, he was begging listeners to harass lawmakers who didn’t hate immigrants or gays.

He used every watt available, for example, to get the anti-immigrant movement focused on Herndon — he even hosted several on-air hate rallies from the tiny burg — and helped get the mayor thrown out for supporting a day labor center. He lobbied a Herndon councilmember to introduce a measure making English the official language there.

He gave listeners names and phone numbers of Montgomery County board of education members with directions to pester anybody who supported a sex education curriculum that acknowledged the existence of homosexuality. Like every other show at the station, Core’s became as predictable as it was hateful.

Core has now taken out big ads on dcrtv.com, the great local media news/gossip site, saying that he’s “available!” and asking for another radio job. If I owned a station, I would want Core on my staff, knowing he’ll say anything he’s asked to say, and very professionally.

After writing this week’s Cheap Seats column about the bizarre impact the movie “Remember the Titans” has had on the historical record of Alexandria, I came across a September 2000 story apparently from the L.A. Times posted on the personal website of Gregory Allen Howard. Howard is the screenwriter of “Titans,” and also the author of this L.A. Times piece, which goes over the process that led to the movie being made.

Howard’s script is uplifting and entertaining; his newspaper story is astonishingly wrong and phony. It’s full of errors so blatant that Howard, had he done even a fraction of the research he claims to have done before writing the “Titans” script, had to know they were errors as he was typing them into his L.A. Times piece. It’s as if he wrote the article to justify the historical inaccuracies in his movie.

Howard writes here that Alexandria consolidated “three segregated [high] schools…two black and one white” in 1971 and that George Washington and T.C. Williams High Schools were “all-black.” Wrong. All three of the city’s high schools were integrated , and majority white (Hammond overwhelmingly so) when the consolidation took place. And according to Alexandria school board’s statistics for the 1970-1971 school year, GW was 51.4 percent white/47.7 black; T.C. Williams 75.4 white/22.2 black.

The schools in the movie script, however, were all-black or -white.

Howard’s L.A. Times piece also asserts that racial unrest hit Alexandria in the summer of 1971 after a kid was murdered in an convenience store.

In real life, the shooting happened in the spring of 1970. The riots in Howard’s movie, however, happened in 1971.

Howard also wrote the script for “Glory Road,” a feature film allegedly about the 1966 NCAA basketball finals, which matched Kentucky and Texas Western. I’ve always been interested in that game, but never saw the movie. Now I’m scared to.

But it’s one thing to make things up for a script. Newspapering is allegedly a whole different ballgame. How did the L.A. Times let this crap run unchecked?

And what’s the statute of limitations on running corrections, anyway?

The noose is hot. It’s passed the Swastika as the go-to hate symbol for high-school kids and bozos from the Deep South to South Capitol Street. Don’t even try to use it to sell magazines, or to defend those who try to use it to sell magazines.

So, let’s take time to give credit for this phenomenon to the man who put the noose back in play in American pop culture: Former Virginia Senator George Allen.

When he was a lawyer and state lawmaker, Allen felt cozy hanging a noose in his office. During campaigns for the U.S. Senate in 2000, the rope wasn’t a major issue, and Allen was able to pass it off as, depending on the interview, a token of his law-and-order leanings or of his fondness for the ways of the Old West.

Then came the great “macaca” episode while Allen was running for re-election to the Senate in 2006, and Allen’s history on matters racial became the focus of the campaign and, because of his presidential ambitions and status as a frontrunner for the 2008 Republican nomination, part of the national conversation.

Turns out Allen had the sort of resume Spike Lee would fabricate were he to create a “Politician Who Hangs Noose in Office” character.

There was Allen’s opposition to the MLK Holiday in Virginia while he was in the state legislature, his proclamation for “Confederate Heritage Month” as governor to answer Black History Month, and his support for Trent Lott during the Strom Thurmond episode. And old acquaintances were running to microphones to recall Allen as a guy who would drop “the N-Word” into casual conversation.

By the end of his losing and most likely last campaign, the days when a hanging rope could be dismissed as “more of a lasso,” as Allen had tried doing not so long ago, were over.

AP is reporting that two construction workers at the Nationals stadium are being fired after a noose was found in a breakroom.

DCist interviews the Super Furry Animals. The band is playing with the Fiery Furnaces on Sunday at the 9:30 Club. The Furnaces are an obsession around here especially in our editor-in-chief’s office.

Prince of Petworth gets furious over a destroyed mural.

And Now, Anacostia captures the good and ugly in real estate news. And finds yet another promise of a new restaurant coming.