August 20, 2015
By Marian Wright Edelman
NNPA Columnist
What’s on the minds of many high school students these days—the start of a new school year, getting a driver’s license, worrying whether they’ll make the team, perhaps daydreaming about college and sweating over SAT exams? But that’s not what three Black male high school students told a Children’s Defense Fund audience this summer they’re thinking and worrying about.
Aijalon “AJ” Morris is beginning his senior year at Pearl-Cohn Entertainment Magnet High School in Nashville, Tenn., said: “I have no friends that I grew up with. I have lost five this year and I have lost three to prison . . . I was in fifth grade and I lost my [first] friend. He got killed. Seventh grade, my friend killed somebody, and he’s in jail for life . . . From my freshman year to now, I have been to 12 to 13 funerals. And I grew up with everybody that I went to those funerals with, and now they’re gone. It’s hard to cope with it. It’s hard to – sometimes I cry all night, you know, and I ask God why.”
In middle school, AJ was a star athlete. By eighth grade he was already receiving offers to play football in college but after he was sidelined by injuries his sophomore year, everything changed. “I lost hope. I stopped going to school. And during those times I was going through a lot with my family. I was homeless. I didn’t have anything to wear, didn’t have anything to wear to school, you know, nothing like that. I didn’t even know where I was going to get my next meal. And everything was gone.” No one seemed to care. “I remember a whole month – a whole month we ate bread. We ate toast for a whole month.”
E’Darrius Smith, a budding and talented artist, is also a rising senior at Pearl-Cohn. “I had a good friend that I grew up with . . . He ended up dying because he was robbed and he tried to fight back and they ended up shooting him in the chest. So they ended up killing him. And when I found this out, you know, I almost cried, but at the same time [you’ve] seen so many classmates and so many people …you just sort of say, ‘Man, I sort of knew that was going to happen.’”
Jermaine Simmons, a junior at Pearl-Cohn: “We live in the worst conditions where nobody helps you. And we live in a condition where you’ve got to watch your back every 30 seconds. You know, you don’t know when you’re going to get robbed, you don’t know [when] you’re going to get shot, you don’t know [when] you’re going to get stabbed . . . For some of us that is our reality.”
These three teens are very lucky that they have a mentor in Rev. Damien Durr, a gifted teacher-preacher, they can rely on. Damien is a member of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Nashville organizing team but also is a social and emotional counselor at Pearl-Cohn High with a special focus on helping Black male students stay out of the cradle-to-prison pipeline. AJ now dreams of becoming a kinesiologist, Jermaine — a social studies teacher, and E’Darrius — a freelance artist, one of whose fine paintings I look at every day when I step out of CDF’s national headquarters elevator.
Where are the other neighborhood, community, school, and faith congregation mentors and role models? And where are those calling for common sense gun laws so that walking down the streets or to school is not like a showdown at the OK Corral? Where are the outreach workers from community agencies to knock on doors from time to time and see who’s there and what children’s needs might be??
The violence, poverty, and trauma these young people face would be unthinkable for anybody – and yet we leave countless children to cope with death and fear daily and often all alone. What are our responsibilities to our children and youths to offer them respect and hope and education and jobs and open up rather than close doors to a positive future?
E’Darrius said Damien Durr has been an invaluable mentor because he taught him he can’t wallow in self-pity about the circumstances he comes from—he must rise up.
But countless other youths need but lack a Damien in their lives to help them overcome the overwhelming odds threatening to drag them down. They need parents and grandparents. They need caring teachers and principals and social workers and health care workers. They need faith communities whose doors are open to compete with the drug and gun dealers. They need positive alternatives to the streets and the gangs and sadly too often to the police and law enforcement agencies entrusted to protect them. They need positive role models who have experienced many of their struggles and show them that they can overcome them with perseverance.
Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org
August 13, 2015
By Lekan Oguntoyinbo
NNPA Columnist
I applaud the Black Lives Matter Movement for renewing attention on police violence against Blacks, an issue that is old as the republic – for Black lives do matter. And Black lives should always matter – even when the killers are not hyper- aggressive cops, White supremacists or other emblems of oppression.
In 2011, the most recent year for which data was available, more than 6,000 Blacks were murdered, according to the FBI, most often by other Blacks. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that more than 90 percent of Blacks are killed by Blacks. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of Blacks die at the hands of other Blacks as a result of warfare, ethnic and religious conflict and police and military brutality.
In fact, many crimes committed by cops against Blacks pale in comparison to Black-on-Black crimes.
In St. Louis for example, two males were killed in separate shootings and eight others were shot and wounded in six shootings.
A few weeks ago in a Detroit neighborhood, patrolling police officers spotted two men in a car. One of them appeared to have a gun. When the cops tried to pull them over, they sped off and a chase ensued. The driver of the fleeing car nosed his car onto the sidewalk and ran over a 6-year-old child, killing him instantly. He didn’t stop. He ran over another child, a 3-year-old who died within a few hours, before he was apprehended.
A few years ago, Al-Jazeera posted footage online of military personnel in Nigeria, the world’s largest Black country, murdering young men on a busy street of a large northern Nigerian city. The men were suspected of being affiliated with the terrorist group, Boko Haram. The soldiers had conducted a house-to-house search in a neighborhood believed to be sympathetic to the group. They pulled young men who fit particular profiles out of their homes, laid them on the sidewalk in full view of passing motorists and shot them dead in broad daylight.
The conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has resulted in the deaths of more people than any other conflict since World War II. To date, more than 5 million people have been killed. The conflict also has drawn in several neighboring countries. Some analysts have called the Congo crisis the closest thing to a world war in more than 70 years.
In Nigeria, large numbers of people are abducted each year and used as human sacrifices. Children are particularly vulnerable to these predators.
In parts of Tanzania, kidnappers frequently target albinos for ritual sacrifices. The belief is that the gods give you greater rewards if you present them with an albino.
On at least two occasions in the last five years, large numbers of Blacks in South Africa have viciously attacked expatriate Blacks from other African countries, killing scores and burning down their homes and businesses. Black South Africans see the Black expats as an economic threat.
And the list goes on and on.
For the record, I am sickened by stories of police brutality against Blacks, by the footage of the killings of Walter Scott and Samuel Dubose and by the gross insensitivity of the Ferguson police who left Michael Brown’s lifeless body baking on asphalt for four hours.
But I am even more horrified by what Blacks do to each other in this country and around the world. Pushing the idea that Black lives matter has to involve more than slogans, hash tags and protest rallies. And it must be more complex than urging federal officials to investigate police misconduct.
We have to place a higher value on Black lives in our own communities, block by block, city by city, nation by nation. It’s hard to persuade White authorities to respect our human rights and treat us with dignity when many of us don’t do the same. Until we get just as fired up about Black-on-Black violence in North St. Louis, in Detroit, on Chicago’s South Side, in South Central Los Angeles, in Lagos, in Kinshasa, in Kingston, in Port Au Prince and in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro as we do about cop killings, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” will remain no more than a pithy slogan.
And the killings of Blacks will continue unabated.
August 06, 2015
BY JESSE JACKSON
On August 6, the Voting Rights Act, keystone of the civil rights movement, will mark its 50th anniversary. This was an act, passed in the wake of the “Bloody Sunday” demonstrations in Selma, designed to correct, as President Lyndon Johnson stated at the time, “a clear and simple wrong.”
“Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color,” he said. “This law will ensure them the right to vote.”
But now, 50 years later, it is not time to celebrate that achievement; it is time to demonstrate against the concerted campaign to undermine it.
In 2006, after extensive hearings, the Senate reauthorized the temporary parts of Voting Rights Act unanimously. It passed the House with only 33 votes against it. President George W. Bush reaffirmed his commitment to enforce it. But the campaign to reverse or undermine the voting rights of people of color never ends.
After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed former slaves the right to vote and gave Congress the power to enforce that right on the states. Blacks voted in large numbers. Black candidates were elected to state legislatures and even to Congress. The white response was brutal. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized blacks trying to vote. Southern Democrats took back statehouses and city councils and passed a range of measures to lock blacks out of voting: poll taxes, literacy tests, double primaries and at-large districts.
In 1965, the Voting Rights Act changed this. Black voter registration surged across the South. Under Section 4, the states that had a history of voter discrimination were put under special Section 5 scrutiny, with the Justice Department requiring pre-clearance of any laws affecting voting.
Yet, as Jim Rutenberg summarizes in “Overcome: A Dream Undone” in the New York Times Magazine, the campaign to undermine the act began before the ink was dry on its signing. Republicans launched their Southern Strategy, making themselves the party of white sanctuary. Then, to win elections, they set out to find ways to weaken the Voting Rights Act and constrict the right to vote.
The five person right-wing majority on the Supreme Court led the way. In Shelby County, Ala v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts gutted the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, arguing — despite detailed congressional findings to the contrary — that discrimination in voting was no longer a problem.
That opened the floodgates. Republican-dominated state legislatures across the country immediately passed laws to constrict the right to vote. They demanded official ID that African-Americans lacked disproportionately, cut days for early voting, reduced voting on Sundays, ended same-day registration, invalidated students IDs for voting and more. They gerrymandered districts, revived at-large elections and other means to reduce the voting power of people of color. It is simply obscene that Republicans have devoted themselves to creating obstacles to voting to help them win elections.
The right to vote protects all other rights in a democracy. Yet the Constitution does not explicitly guarantee an individual right to vote to all Americans. The 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments only outlaw discrimination in voting on the basis of race, sex and age. All other aspects of voting are generally left to the states and localities. While the 1965 Voting Rights Act was rightfully hailed as the most important law of the 20th century, the fundamental right to vote for all Americans is still an unfinished task.
Selma moved us forward, but Shelby has pushed us back. We’ve gone from protecting the right to vote to suppressing it. It took a grassroots voting rights movement to gain a Voting Rights Act. It will again take a grassroots voting rights movement to add a right to vote amendment to the U.S. Constitution on the road to a more complete democracy.
PHOTO: OP-JesseJackson.jpg
Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
July 30, 2015
By James Clingman
NNPA Columnist
In light of the conversations about police abuse, unwarranted stops and arrests, and homicide cases involving Black people and police officers, many Black people get angry, maybe have a march, and then go home to await the next incident. Some of our organizations do their usual thing by making loud threatening statements and then get back in line until the next crisis hits. Amos Wilson said, “Until our behavior changes, the behavior of those who oppress and abuse us will not change.” In other words, the onus for change is on us.
Many of you may not know about the Uniform Reporting Law Enforcement Improvement Act (URLEIA), which is proposed legislation that calls for the creation of a National Office of Civilian Oversight that hosts meetings across the nation to garner citizen input. Law enforcement agents, their spouses, and unions are not permitted to attend or participate in the Civilian Oversight Conferences. These conferences are essentially designed to create policy that governs policing. Police unions and associations are largely responsible for developing the policing approaches we see in effect today; URLEIA will change that practice.
This legislative proposal is provided by ONUS, Inc., and Black Communities United for Progress (BCUP) for presentation to members of the United States Congress and the president of the United States. Now that’s what I call proactive work that will have a direct and positive effect on Black people. This is not just rhetorical bombast; this is attacking the problem of police brutality from a practical, logical, and legal perspective.
Immediately after a White woman was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco, Bill O’Reilly called for what he titled “Kate’s Law” to be passed by Congress. Within days 600,000 signatures were collected and members of Congress went to work to get the proposed law passed. They held hearings and brought the family of Kathryn Steinle to Washington to testify. They got swift action.
So where is the Tamir Rice law against cops shooting 12-year-olds in less than two seconds? Where is the Eric Garner Law against police officers choking a man to death? Where is John Crawford’s Law that punishes department store employees for lying to 911 and cops from killing a person for holding a BB gun that is on the shelf of that store? Where is Sandra Bland’s Law that would send a cop to jail for falsely arresting a young lady who questioned why she had to put her cigarette out while seated in her own car?
Why hasn’t O’Reilly’s TV news counterpart, Al Sharpton, gone to his good friend, Barack Obama, and all his friends in the Black Caucus and gotten them to hold hearings and write Sandra’s Law?
Instead of real action, we see our vaunted politicians genuflecting before the powers-that-be and our “Black” organizations – the NAACP and Urban League – walking 860 miles and issuing an annual report that tells us how bad our situation is.
This is exactly why we need and must support ONUS, Inc. and its URLEIA legislation. Instead of symbolic gestures, “ONUS is calling upon Congressional leaders to sponsor, endorse and enact the provisions contained in URLEIA in order to stop law enforcement agents from wreaking havoc on Black Americans…” says Jerroll Sanders, ONUS, Inc. president and CEO.
Sanders states, “The contents of the URLEIA legislative proposal stand in stark contrast to H.R. 2875 — a bill titled the Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act of 2015 that is currently making its way through Congress. While H.R. 2875 provides additional funding for grants and U.S. Department of Justice policing oversight activities and promotes the creation of national training, accreditation and operating standards, it provides few real solutions to adequately address America’s racist policing problem.
I would add that H.R. 2875 creates a National Task Force on law enforcement oversight composed of individuals appointed by the attorney general from various DOJ bureaus. The AG’s task force will consult with professional law enforcement associations, labor organizations and “community-based organizations.” Along with a few other loosely worded recommendations, of course, the usual suspects, to and through which funds would be channeled are named outright, i.e. NAACP and National Urban League.
“URLEIA, on the other hand, addresses the root cause of police brutality in black communities by holding law enforcement agents accountable for the actions and sealing loopholes that currently allow perpetrators of police brutality to walk free,” Ms. Sanders continues, “URLEIA is the type of tough legislation Black Americans have been demanding in order to bring a permanent end to centuries of police brutality and abuse.”
Please go to www.changeisonus. org and read the URLEIA legislation for yourself, and then support it by supporting ONUS. If all we do is say we need change, we will never obtain it. It takes work, and ONUS is doing that work. Get involved.
Jim Clingman, founder of the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce, is the nation’s most prolific writer on economic empowerment for Black people. He can be reached through his website, blackonomics.com. He is the author of Black Dollars Matter: Teach Your Dollars How to Make More Sense, which is available through his website; professionalpublishinghouse.com and Amazon Kindle eBooks.