June 25, 2015
By Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.
NNPA Columnist
While social change for some may appear to be inevitable, it does not happen by osmosis, and it does not occur without a focused effort led by those who are not restrained by the fears of social transformation. An effective reform of the system of laws, courts, policies and institutions defined as the criminal justice system in the United States of America requires more than a principled public debate.
What is needed today with a renewed sense of urgency, beyond the all-too-frequent expressions of justifiable outrage and protest in response to videotaped incidents of police brutality, is a committed, bipartisan, well-resourced nationwide criminal justice reform movement. Black lives do matter. In fact, all lives matter.
As President and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), the nation’s oldest and largest trade association of African American-owned newspapers, we reach more than 20 million readers per week through 205 affiliated local and regional print and digital media companies.
The issues of mass incarceration, overcriminalization, prosecutorial and police misconduct, equal justice, alternative sentencing, recidivism and judicial dysfunction are all serious problems that are having a severe negative impact, in particular, on the quality of life of African Americans. What is required today, however, is a multiracial coalition to ensure that a successful reform movement is representative of the interests of all Americans.
I know something about the movement-building process, dating back to my early days in the 1960s as a youth coordinator in my home state of North Carolina for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (SCLC). Dr. King said it best when he affirmed, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Dr. King, Jr. was a master movement builder. I learned firsthand from witnessing how Dr. King fused together a diverse coalition of intergenerational leaders to bring about change at the local, state and federal levels toward equal justice for all. Fifty years later, we need to rebuild and expand the movement to reform criminal justice.
I also know what it is like to be unjustly sentenced and incarcerated in a prison system that dehumanizes both the imprisoned and those in charge of vastly deteriorating overcrowded penal institutions.
As a member of the Wilmington Ten civil rights activists who were unjustly imprisoned for a combined sentenced of 282 years for standing up for the rights of equal education for African American students in Wilmington, N.C. in the 1970s, I have experienced the systematic degradation. Today, there are millions of people who not only want to see changes in the criminal justice system, but also are willing to join and support the emergence of a national “Criminal Justice Reform Movement” (CJRM).
My columns for the NNPA have always been about speaking truth to power in the vain of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois, two pioneering editors who knew the power of words. Yet today, we must also dare to speak the truth to ourselves. We must participate in helping to build this important reform movement. We cannot afford to be silent or stand idle on the sidelines while others in earnest strive to make changes to a system that will ultimately determine the quality of life in our communities for generations to come.
Thus, it is why without any hesitation that I am hereby publicly stating my endorsement of the coalition building efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), Charles Koch Institute and Koch Industries, Coalition for Public Safety, Center for American Progress, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and other national and regional organizations that have committed to support various criminal justice reform efforts. I believe it is now a propitious time to work together to establish a national bipartisan reform movement.
I was very interested and encouraged to learn that the controversial Koch Industries has been involved in the issues of overcriminalization and criminal justice reform for years. Yet, many of my colleagues in the Civil Rights Movement were unaware of this fact. Reforming the criminal justice system is not a concern to be constrained to the left or to the right on the political spectrum.
The respect for the moral dignity and wellbeing of every person, without the filter of race, class, religion or any other discriminating factor, is a paramount principle that has to be maintained in a society that strives to strengthen the inclusiveness of its democracy. The current social and political polarization over criminal justice reform is not healthy for our nation.
What is healthy is the budding bipartisan reform movement that is now emerging. Now is the right time. Now is the right moment to raise our voices and join forces together to build and sustain the criminal justice reform movement.
Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. is president of Education Online Services Corporation and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and can be reached at: http://drbenjaminfchavisjr.wix.com/drbfc
June 18, 2015
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
NNPA Columnist
If you want to see up-close what the political right wants to do to public education, take a look at Wisconsin. Recent legislation, aimed ostensibly at the city of Milwaukee, is attempting to remove local control of the schools and systematically expand the charter school system. And here is the punch line: they want to remove the requirement for teachers to be certified in order to teach. That’s right. You heard it first. These throwbacks suggest that teacher certification is both unnecessary and a hindrance to the hiring of teachers. Thus, there would be no requirements to teach.
There are several things to understand about the political right’s approach to education. Many people thought that they were simply interested in charter schools. Nope. Many thought that they were simply interested in vouchers. Nope. They are interested in the end of public education and its replacement with a system of publicly subsidized private education.
Now, let’s take a moment and look at this. One of the favorite arguments of the right is that everyone should have a voucher to go to a school of their choice. Well, if we were all born equal – and I don’t mean equal in front of the law but I mean equal in front of the dollar – that might be one thing. Yet, the reality is that if there is private education, it will always be to the advantage of those who have money. Vouchers simply mean that there is a pool of funds available allegedly for each student. But wait: will those vouchers guarantee that your child gets into the school of your choice? No. Why? Because, among other things, the tuition in that school may be more – quite possibly substantially more – than the value of your voucher. Vouchers will not guarantee that a poor student will get into a good private school. There is no guarantee that they will even be considered.
Privatization of education also raises some troubling issues about the content of education. This is a matter that has been arising a lot over the years. Will there be any standards? Obviously, if the right-wing in Wisconsin gets its way, there will be no standards for teaching. But what about the content of the curriculum? Every school teaching based on its own ideology? There is a name for this and it is “chaos.”
Public education has been weakened in large part because the resources that are needed are not being made available. Beginning with the tax revolts of the 1970s, right-wing movements have sought to starve the public sector generally and public education in particular because they simply do not believe in the need for or the right to have a public sector and public education. To them, whatever is “private” is automatically superior to anything “public,” despite repeated evidence to the contrary.
So, the next time you hear someone talking about more charter schools, more vouchers, etc., understand that this is a code for a dangerous agenda. They want your tax dollars and your family’s money in order to enrich the privateers. And none of this help’s your child’s education.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the host of The Global African for Telesur-English. He is a racial justice, labor and global justice write and activist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.
June 11, 2015
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
I only recently embraced my status as an “elder.” Actually, I describe myself as an “episodic elder,” eager enough to take one of those lovely “senior” discounts when it serves my purpose, yet reluctant to turn in my party card. Elder status hit me upside the head, though, when a young woman told me she was “tired” of my generation preaching to hers.
I’m willing to stop preaching when young leaders step up. I applaud the Black Lives Matter movement, and am excited when those who are of not African descent join this movement. Still, I am waiting for the same young leaders to demand that their peers stop killing one another. I’m not embracing the right-wing hype about Black-on-Black crime, because they don’t address White-on-White crime. I’m not suggesting that the movement for police reform take a back seat to anything else (after all, we can have more than one movement at a time). I am suggesting, however, that young African Americans confront their peers and say “enough.” When “elders” say it, we are accused of preaching, but someone needs to say it.
What if the young people who abhor the killing of their friends and neighbors took shooters and their associates to task? What if they got up in their faces (in safe spaces, of course) and demanded to know why some of the young people who could contribute much to our community have now been massacred in the streets?
Some of those who lost their life were victims of mistaken identity, or trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time – some were little girls playing on their porches or sitting on Grandma’s lap. Some of them were simply walking home from school. Some of them were in the middle of simple misunderstandings and lost their lives because of an errant glare, a careless word. Some, like Charnice Milton, survived childhood only to go to her grave at 27.
Charnice was a talented, ambitious young reporter determined to tell the story of Southeast Washington, the part of the nation’s capital with the highest concentration of African Americans, the highest poverty rate and, more recently, the primary target of gentrification that pushes poor Black residents out of the homes in favor of young, affluent, White “urban pioneers.”
Her death was more than a faceless statistic – it was personal. Charnice was in my office fact-checking my most recent book for a few weeks, and she literally shimmered when she spoke of the stories she hoped to tell. She didn’t want to be the story, she wanted to tell the story of the least and the left out and of the people and organizations making a difference.
Charnice’s dreams of telling untold stories, along with her body, were tragically shattered when a depraved young man used her body as a human shield to protect him from a drive-by gunman.
Tears have been shed, hands have been wrung, and teddy bears and flowers have been left at the place where Charnice was slaughtered. A few days from now, someone else will be shot and the crying and handwringing will begin again. So far this year, 18 people have been killed in Ward 8 – almost one each week. The tears shed for Charnice are special tears for this amazing young woman, and yet they are the all-too-regular tears for lost life, for names that don’t quite make the news.
Some young leaders are quick to blame heartless police or and the right-wing obsession with crime – even while it is declining in some cities – but how many in Washington, D.C., in Baltimore (where 43 people were killed so far this year), in Harlem, in Third Ward or Fifth Ward Houston, in St. Louis, were killed not by cops, but people who look like us? At some point, we ought also be able to say, simply: Stop the killings!
According to the Pew Research Center, “While blacks are significantly more likely than whites to be gun homicide victims, blacks are only about half as likely as whites to have a firearm in their home (41% vs. 19%).”
Thanks to the National Rifle Association, there has been a proliferation of guns in our nation. According to federal figures, there were 310 million nonmilitary firearms in the United States as of 2009. That’s an average of nearly a gun per person in our nation of 318.9 million people, making us the most heavily armed country in the world. There are more gun sellers in the U.S. than McDonald’s or grocery stores.
Even so, the NRA opposes any legislation to reduce easy access to guns, and offer clichés such as “guns don’t kill, people do.” But guns don’t fire themselves. Meanwhile, young African Americans are mowed down like bowling pins, and except for the occasional reporting of an exceptional life, those who are killed are also ignored.
It is time for young leaders to take their peers on, to step up and demand that the violence stop. It is time for these leaders to demand that media outlets cover the cumulative loss of life and the individuals who have been killed, without tediously parroting the mindless and non-contextual conversation about Black-on-Black crime. I write this not as an episodic elder preaching, but as a seasoned warrior asking her esteemed young leaders to take this baton and run with it.
Julianne Malveaux is a Washington, D.C.-based author and economist. She can be reached at www.juliannemalveaux.com
June 04, 2015
BY JESSE JACKSON
Los Angeles just voted to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. The nation’s second-biggest city joins Seattle, San Francisco and little Emeryville, Calif., in forging the way to a decent minimum.
Similar measures are now being considered in New York City, Kansas City, Mo., and Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. Facebook is now paying its workers a $15 minimum and joins Apple and Microsoft in demanding that its contractors pay a $15 minimum and offer paid leave days.
These victories are a product of the demonstrations and protests of fast food and other low-wage workers. They risked their jobs to demand decency. They put a human face on workers who labor full time but can’t lift their families out of poverty. They exposed the lie that these were transitory jobs for the young while they went to college or high school. Their demonstrations — organized under the hashtag slogan #FightFor15 — drew national press attention. Their struggles touched the hearts of citizens of conscience. They built the coalition that forced the politicians to respond.
Dr. Martin Luther King taught us that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” There are three ways to respond to repression, he told us. The first is acquiescence, adjusting quietly to injustice and becoming conditioned to it. “Been down so long it feels like up to me.” Acquiescence, he warned, turns people into part of the problem.
The second way to respond is with physical violence and corrosive hatred. But violence never solves problems; it simply creates more difficult and complicated problems. An eye for an eye, he warned, would leave us all blinded.
The third way is nonviolent resistance. Nonviolence rejects acquiescence and violence. It confronts the oppressor, gives voice to the oppressed, and exposes the injustice. It starts always against the odds, so it requires faith. “Faith,” Dr. King wrote, “is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
The #FightFor15 workers had faith. They chose to resist, not accept their poverty wages. They demonstrated for decency. And they have created a movement that surely will spread across the country.
California is one of eight states that ban the subminimum wage that is inflicted on so-called “tipped workers,” the wait staff and service workers that serve our food, clear our plates or carry our bags. California also voted to start publishing the names of companies that have more than 100 workers on Medicaid and the costs that they force on the states. Informed customers may well prefer to do business with high-road employers rather than those profiting from a low road.
Most of our news coverage follows the frozen partisan politics of Washington. There, Republican leaders in Congress won’t even allow a vote on a modest Democratic proposal for a $12-an-hour minimum wage. The only time Congress seems to act is when the corporate community wants a tax break or a trade deal passed, or when the Pentagon demands more money to waste.
But across the country, people are beginning to stir. Blacks and whites are joining together to demonstrate that #BlackLivesMatter. Latinos are demanding immigration reforms that will bring millions out of the shadow economy. Gays and lesbians are demanding equal rights. Women are demanding equal pay, and men and women are insisting that the decision to have a child has to be one that they and not politicians make. Change will come, but only when people demand it and force their politicians to salute.
Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. is president and founder of Rainbow PUSH coalition.