Black Policy Summit Draws Hundreds to the White House

By Hazel Trice Edney

As a part of his "We Can't Wait" campaign, President Obama signs an executive order to reduce spending on travel and end the purchase of promotional items -- and speaks to four finalists for this year's SAVE Award. With repeated rejections of his Jobs Bill from the U. S. Senate, the President has used executive orders as a strategy to get around the bottleneck. Some Leaders at a White House African-American policy conference encouraged the President to continue the orders. PHOTO: The White House 

(TriceEdneyWire.com)-A day-long African-American policy conference drew hundreds of Black civic, religious, political, social and business leaders to the White House last week to hear Obama appointees and the President himself list the Administrations successes in the Black community.

The group, consisting of about 250 White house insiders and those who have frequently visited the Administration over the past three years, also gave feedback on what must be done to further progress. But, with a year left in the first Obama administration, how much impact can realistically be made? Black leaders in the room were hopeful.

“This particular event today, I wish it had been done earlier,” said Martin Luther King III, who has toured the country the past five years calling attention to poverty. “But like my Dad used to say, ‘The time is always right to do that which is right.’ This is important, yes, to the African-American community. But it’s also important to America.”

Cloves Campbell, chairman of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the Black Press of America, says the forum was long overdue given that Republicans appear to dominate the airwaves with bitter criticism of Obama.

“We’ve been standing back and letting the extreme right frame the conversation. We need to take charge of the conversation. We’ve done a lot of good things in this administration, but we don’t hear about it,” says Campbell, publisher of the Arizona Informant. “I’d like to hear more about the platform, the agenda and how we’re going to aggressively move forward for the next term.”

Cabinet secretaries and high-ranking leaders from the Obama Administration, who attended the African American Policy in Action Leadership Conference, couldn’t talk election because of legal restrictions. But they rolled out their best successes, including a 44-page report that outlines programs and policies that the Administration says have directly impacted the Black community over the past three years.

“Over the last 30 months, HUD has been at the forefront of efforts to extend lifelines to our most vulnerable families while keeping middle class families from losing even more ground,” said Estelle Richman, acting deputy secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during an early morning forum.

Richman credited Obama’s Recovery Act with saving a million people from homeliness, including three-quarters of which were families with children. She also said HUD worked with the Department of Energy to modernize a half million public housing units and provided permanent housing to 99 percent of the 40,000 gulf coast families who were about to lose their temporary housing assistance when President Obama took office. She topped off her list touting the investigation of 10,000 discrimination complaints and elimination of 1,600 predatory lenders as vendors with the Federal Housing Administration.

Political analysts have said a major void in the Obama Administration has been its apparent inability to blast its message of successes to supporters. Rather, Republican criticism on almost every issue and Black criticism of the persistently high unemployment rate have dominated the news.

White House representatives acknowledged that there is much pain in Black America; therefore much to be done.

“Obviously, we have enormous challenges,” President Obama said in a surprise speech to the crowd, which received him with rock star applause and cheers. “The unemployment rate in the African-American community has always historically been higher than the norm.  And since the unemployment rate generally is high right now, it is way too high when it comes to the African-American community.  Many of the challenges that existed before the crisis have been worsened with respect to opportunities for decent housing, with respect to making sure that our schools are equipped to prepare our kids for the 21st century. So we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

That work must include help for people in the very grassroots, said Gary Flowers, executive director of the Black Leadership Forum. Flowers – who has been to the White House more than 40 times over the past three years - says he is pleased with the level of access to African-Americans that the White House has offered, but it must now transfer to change for the better in the Black community.

“Many of our people are still hemorrhaging. They’re hemorrhaging from loss of home, loss of jobs, and loss of hope in some areas,” Flowers said. “And if we want to turn out this sector of the electorate, then we have to get people at the barber shop level. Policies are good, wherein they affect people in the middle class, but we have to boldly use the word poverty again...Until they are doing well at the barber shop and the grassroots level, there is still going to be an inordinate [amount]of pain in the Black community.”

Flowers said he would encourage the President to continue using his power to sign executive orders to go around the Congressional stalemate that slowed down his American Jobs Act.

Other Black leaders in the audience included Ralph Everett, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies; Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter; and author and radio talk show host Michael Eric Dyson.

The conference was led by Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama, who in final remarks the Administrative had met its goal with the summit.

“We think it was a productive day. We did a lot of listening. We have some great ideas. Together, we are confident that we’re going to move our country forward,” she said. “But as we all know, we still have a long way to go.”

Michael Strautmanis, White House director of African American Outreach, said the participants at the conference were mostly people who had visited the White House frequently for briefings or to give input on policy. The only thing new about the gathering was that everyone came together at the same time, he said.

“I know it’s going to have an impact because we’ve done this since day one. We have not done it in a large setting where we’ve brought everybody together,” he said. “Ideas that come from community are ideas that we want to implement swiftly.”

He concluded that the purpose had been met. That was to “shine a spotlight on the successes and the work that we must continue to do now, together.”