March 07, 2013

By COREY WILLIAMS | Associated Press

DETROIT (AP) — Mayor Dave Bing acknowledged Wednesday that an emergency manager will be appointed to oversee Detroit’s finances and said he won’t participate in the city’s appeal of a report criticizing local officials for their handling of the economic mess.

The City Council approved a resolution authorizing an appeal of Gov. Rick Snyder’s finding that an outside overseer is warranted because Detroit is in a financial emergency with no good plan to get out of it.

Bing, who had the option of either joining that appeal or filing his own, told reporters that he sees no way of avoiding an emergency manager, even though he opposes it.

“We need to end the drama and the infighting and understand that whether we like it or not, an emergency financial manager is coming to Detroit,” Bing said.

Under Michigan law, emergency managers have the power to develop financial plans, renegotiate labor contracts, revise and approve budgets to help control spending, sell off some city assets and suspend elected officials’ salaries.

Snyder said Friday he agrees with a state-appointed review team that spent two months delving into Detroit's finances. The city’s budget deficit is at $327 million. It also has long-term debt topping $14 billion and has had trouble in recent months making payroll and paying other bills.

He scheduled a hearing date for next Tuesday in case his decision was appealed. Chief Deputy Treasurer Mary MacDowell will preside over that hearing in Lansing as Snyder’s designee, spokesman Terry Stanton said.

“There is no statutory time frame for the governor to either confirm or revoke his determination that a financial emergency exists in Detroit,” Stanton wrote in an email to the Associated Press.

Bing said he met with Snyder this week in Lansing and concluded efforts to head off a manager will be fruitless.

The Republican governor said he already has a person in mind to take the emergency manager’s job if he decides Detroit needs one to get out of its fiscal mess.

“For me, I don’t mind fighting, but I’m not stupid,” Bing told The AP Wednesday morning. “If I know I’m going to get in a fight that I have no chance of winning, why in the hell should I get in that fight? I'm much better off walking away from that and fight another day.”

Council President Charles Pugh said he was holding out hope that Snyder may ultimately not appoint a manager and that city officials “are going to try every avenue that we can.”

Bing said he disputes portions of the review team’s report, namely the determination Detroit has no plan to deal with its financial emergency. Bing also said he questions if Detroit is responsible for budget problems in the city’s 36th District Court.

The court had $279 million in outstanding accounts receivables as of June 30, according to the review team report. Of that amount, an estimated $199 million is owed to the city.

Court officials, as of early this year, had taken no actions to reduce expenditures and had 350 workers while budgeted for 285, the review team said.

If Snyder does appoint a fiscal overseer, Bing said he intends to work “collaboratively” with that person instead of battling with Lansing.

“This city has a reputation of fighting, fighting, fighting and so we wind up fighting each other,” Bing told the AP. “And when we do that, the city loses.”

February 28, 2013

By Zenitha Prince

Special to the NNPA from the Afro-American Newspaper

Essie Mae Washington-Williams died this month without ever publicly being acknowledged by her father, the infamous South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond. Yet, after his death in 2003, she became the embodiment of his legacy—as one of America’s greatest political hypocrites.

That a politician who had built his career on claims of Black inferiority and the condemnation of miscegenation had fathered a daughter with his family’s 16-year-old Black servant was, for some, the ultimate irony.

“If your public face is that you believe in a racially hierarchal environment in which sexual relationships between Black men and White women are forbidden but privately sexual relationships between White men and Black women are accepted it represents a great deal of hypocrisy and psychological contradiction,” said Dianne Pinderhughes, professor of Africana studies at University of Notre Dame.

“For a lot of people outside of the South, that was a surprise and a shock,” said AFRO Publisher John J. Oliver of the revelation.

For people in Edgefield, S.C., however, it was a simple matter of fact, and Washington-Williams was, perhaps, one of the worst-kept secrets of Southern political folklore.

The American South was littered with children like her, which a series of AFRO articles highlighted in 1948 when it revealed Thurmond’s other Black relatives.

At the time, then Gov. Thurmond was running for president under the Dixiecrat (States’ Rights Democratic Party) banner on a segregationist platform—the party was formed by deserters of the Democratic Party, which had, under President Harry Truman, begun to advance civil rights legislation.

Thurmond represented the “mass resistance,” a powerful planter community consisting of strong advocates of White supremacy,” Pinderhughes said.

During his campaign, the candidate once declared that there were not enough troops in the Army to force White Southerners to “admit the (expletive) race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” But, apparently, Black women were welcome in their beds.

According to an Aug. 21, 1948 AFRO article, postal worker Robert Thurmond, of Morristown, N.J., revealed that the governor was his first cousin—his father, Thomas, was half-brother to James Thurmond, the governor’s father—and the relationship was well-known.

“I certainly do know Strom and he knows me and he knows about our relationship because we were the only Thurmonds in Edgefield,” he said. More relatives came forward.

In an Aug. 28 article, the Rev. James R. Thurmond recalled seeing the governor’s father visiting his grandfather, the blue-eyed Thomas Thurmond.

 “They used to sit and eat, and talk for hours,” he said. “I remember asking my grandfather why that ‘White’ man always visit our home. My grandfather told me they were brothers.”

And there were many more Black Thurmonds littered throughout Edgefield and surrounding counties, he said, a fact well-known.

“It is an old story and ‘everybody in these parts knows it,’” the AFRO quoted Thomas Thurmond, the governor’s half-cousin, as saying.

“We wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of the Southern attitude,” said Oliver, of the newspaper’s coverage. More specifically, he added, “We wanted to highlight the inconsistency of his (Thurmond’s) political vision and his personal life… [that] this guy is a racist but he has Black relatives.”

Oliver said the article likely had some impact, particularly in the elections.

“Thurmond did not get a lot of votes because he reflected a way of life that people no longer wanted to promote,” the newspaper executive said.

Thurmond’s duplicity, as manifested by his Black daughter, was evident in other ways. Those inconsistencies—for example, his authorship of the “Southern Manifesto,” which was created to counter the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case that banned public school segregation and, later, his support of legislation to create a holiday in Dr. Martin Luther King’s honor (Blacks are a powerful voting bloc in South Carolina)—seemed to suggest that his public positions were based on political expediency, said some critics, such as former Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.), who in 1966 became the first Black senator elected since Reconstruction.

In his biography, Brooke said that in January 1967, not long after his election, he went to the Senate pool and found Thurmond and several other Jim Crow defenders already swimming laps. Brooke was expecting objections to his attempt to integrate the pool. Instead, the Southern lawmakers invited him to join them.

“There was no hesitation or ill will that I could see. Yet these were men who consistently voted against legislation that would have provided equal opportunity to others of my race,” Brooke wrote. “I felt that if a senator truly believed in racial separatism I could live with that, but it was increasingly evident that some members of the Senate played on bigotry purely for political gain. They appealed to ignorance and prejudice to entrench themselves in office.”

February 28, 2013

By Krishana Davis

Special to the NNPA from the Afro-American Newspaper

As a gun debate rages at the national, state and local levels, a Baltimore man with two previous felony convictions was sentenced on Feb. 19 to 15 years for unlawfully possessing ammunition.

Local law enforcement agents executed a search warrant at the Baltimore home of Robert Hubbard, 37, after an informant purchased drugs from Hubbard at his place of residence. During the raid, police found a safe containing a .32 caliber revolver containing five rounds of ammunition, a box of ammunition, $150 in cash, a Ziplock bag of marijuana and bag containing seven Ziplock bags of heroin and another of cocaine.

Hubbard served time for two previous convictions of carjacking and two previous convictions of robbery, which made him ineligible to possess the ammunition.

Hubbard was initially found guilty after a three-day trial in November 2011. In addition to the 15-year prison term, Hubbard was sentenced to another five years of supervised release for being a felon in possession of ammunition.