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White Howard University Grad Who Pretended to be Black Steps Down as NAACP President By Frederick H. Lowe

June 16, 2015

White Howard University Grad Who Pretended to be Black Steps Down as NAACP President
By Frederick H. Lowe
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Rachel Dolezal (c) resigned on Monday as president of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington. The men in the photo are not identified. Facebook photo
Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who was elected president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP, having assumed an identity as a black person, resigned her post June 15.

“It is my complete allegiance to the cause of racial and social justice and the NAACP that I step aside from the presidency and pass the baton to my vice president, Naima Quarles-Burney,” Dolezal announced on the NAACP Spokane Facebook page. She served as president for eight months after being elected on Nov. 17, 2014.

Dolezal had been under pressure to resign after her estranged parents, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal of Montana, told the news media that their 37 year-old daughter was German and Czech, not African American. Dolezal was born in Troy, Montana.

“In the eye of the current storm, I can see that a separation of family and organization outcomes is in the best interest of the NAACP,” she wrote on her Facebook post.

Dolezal earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Howard University in 2002. She graduated summa cum laude, according to her LinkedIn page.

She was able to turn her assumed blackness or education into several teaching jobs. According to her resume, she is a professor at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. Dolezal teaches African American Studies, African American History and African American Art History.

She was also an adjunct professor at Whitworth University in Spokane and North Idaho University in Coeur d’Alene. In addition, she owns Dolezal Studios, which she founded in 1997. She is a model and ethnic hair stylist.

Spokane is located in Eastern Washington near the Washington-Idaho border.

New Air Standards Could Disproportionately Affect Urban Communities by Hazel Trice Edney

June 15, 2015

New Air Standards Could Disproportionately Affect Urban Communities
By Hazel Trice Edney

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Rosa Gill

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As President Obama moves to implement policies that his administration says will reduce smog levels, he is facing a backlash in the urban and largely Black communities that are at the core of his political base and key to the Democratic Party’s success in next year’s elections.

In recent weeks, politicians, business representatives and other leaders in urban and racial minority communities have been warning that new air standards that government regulators are attempting to put in place may have negative economic consequences for local economies from New York City to St. Louis, Chicago, Denver and across North Carolina.

N. C. State Rep. Rosa Gill, a Democratic member of the N. C. Legislative Black Caucus, recently wrote to the White House warning the new standards would undermine the success the President has had in creating an environment that has fostered job growth in areas on the economic margins.

“The minority and disadvantaged population in my district is especially grateful for President Obama’s tireless efforts on their behalf,” she wrote. “So you’ll understand why I’m concerned that the newly proposed air quality standards would act as a drag on the long awaited recovery my constituents are now enjoying.”

The concern is being raised on the eve of the U. S. Conference of Mayors 83rd Annual Meeting in San Francisco, where President Obama is scheduled to speak this week. The debate centers on new ozone - or smog - standards that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to put in place in October. It requires states, counties and other localities to hold ground-level ozone to 65-70 parts per billion - or risk losing federal highway money. The current standard is 75 parts per billion of ground-level ozone in the atmosphere.

Ground-level ozone is sometimes called smog, and it has declined by nearly 20 percent in the past 15 years as a result of efforts by industry and government. It forms when emissions from industrial or construction activity, as well as from forest fires or decaying plants, mix with heat and sunlight.

There are a number of concerns that critics raise about the new standards. They include the fact that the EPA has limited ways to measure whether or not a municipality or other locality is in compliance with the standards.

Indeed, only 675 of the nation's 3,000 counties have ozone monitors in place. As a result, the EPA would rely on computer models to determine ozone levels in a given area – an approach critics call highly imprecise given the financial stakes involved.

More alarming to critics is the negative impact the new standards may have on businesses and job growth. By its own reckoning, EPA says it could cost businesses up to $15 billion a year. But, business groups say the figure is much higher.

For example, earlier this year the National Association of Manufacturers issued a study that concluded the new standard would drain U.S. GDP of $140 billion a year - or $1.7 trillion - from 2017 to 2040. It would also mean 1.4 million fewer jobs, according to the report.

The impact will be especially hard in urban areas that already have the most difficulty meeting the current standard, including Philadelphia, Camden, N.J., Atlanta, Chicago and St. Louis – all with sizable Black populations. In many cases, the communities hardest hit by the standards have lagged behind the rest of the country in rebounding from the economic downturn.

“As a business owner, I know how these regulations will adversely impact Minority and Women owned businesses,” Akilah Graham, a member of the Colorado Black Chamber of Commerce in Denver, wrote in a recent letter to the White House, adding that the costs of the regulations would be “borne disproportionately by those least able to afford them.”

Some political observers note the bind the situation creates for Democrats as election year approaches, given that many of these communities are heavily Democratic and stand to lose in one of two way: reductions in federal aid if they fail to meet the new standards or a slowdown in economic activity if businesses scale back to offset the financial costs of the new standards.

“The irony for Democrats is that the new standards pushed by Obama's EPA will have an especially large impact on metropolitan areas,” John Burnett, a financial analyst and Republican activist from Harlem, recently wrote in a column for the U.S. News. “In short, these regulations don't even make political sense, particularly in an election cycle.”

Special Report: Perils of Zero Tolerance Policing by Zenitha Prince

Gray’s death spawned outrage in Baltimore and, beyond that, manifested in violent clashes with police, looting and arson on at leastone occasion in Charm City. More significantly, Gray’s death, the unrest and the subsequent indictment of six officers involved in the incident spurred discussions about the relationship between minority communities and police, particularly the impact of a controversial zero tolerance policing policy. It’s an issue the AFRO has chronicled since such policy’s introduction to Baltimore back in the 1990s.

In 1999, then-Baltimore City Councilman Martin O’Malley, D-District 3, made an unexpected entry into the race for the mayoral seat left open when incumbent Mayor Kurt Schmoke decided not to seek re-election. The lone Caucasian among a field of primary candidates, O’Malley ran on a platform of public safety, preaching a zero tolerance policing strategy, which he had advocated for on the City Council, as a cure to the city’s crime.

The issue was one that played out on the pages of the AFRO, with columnists, experts and residents mostly expressing doubt about the policing approach that was modeled after New York’s.

As early as January 1997, then-State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy expressed caution about Baltimore’s adoption of the approach in an opinion piece titled, “Zero Tolerance – What does it mean?” Because Baltimore had different laws, less police manpower and fewer resources than New York, translating a zero tolerance policy to the smaller city would not necessarily work, she advised.

“Increasing the caseloads through more arrests and citations, places extraordinary strains on a system already lacking in resources. If we expect the criminal justice system to be efficient, effective and expeditious, the entire criminal justice system must be adequately funded and given the resources needed to get the job done,” she wrote.

In an April 2, 1999 AFRO commentary “Zero tolerance or no tolerance,” writer Joseph Brown Jr.—a local community and Republican Party leader—opined, “Zero tolerance has been hailed as the cure-all for crime-ridden cities. It trains its police officers to be more aggressive in the pursuit of criminals whether it is a jaywalker or a drug peddler. Both are treated as criminals.” However, he added, the approach will encourage an “arrogance” among “rogue” officers that would “exacerbate an already tense relationship between the citizens of Baltimore and its police department.”

In a September 1999 AFRO commentary entitled “The New York Experience,” Wiley A. Hall supported Brown’s statements, citing examples from New York’s own “broken windows” policing that resulted in incidents such as the Aug. 9, 1997 torture—including forced sodomy— of Abner Louima by police officers in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the Feb. 4, 1999 police killing of an unarmed 22-year-old Amadou Diallou outside his Bronx apartment.

The New York judicial system has been clogged with “junk” arrests of mostly Black and Latino residents; thousands of New Yorkers have been jailed without ever being charged for a crime; and the city has had to pay out millions of dollars to settle brutality complaints against its officers, Hall wrote.

“Zero tolerance policing is like Pandora’s Box. Once you unleash the police, it is very difficult to reign them in,” he said. “And police traditionally have resisted attempts to hold them accountable by outsiders. Baltimore’s Complaint Evaluations Board is virtually toothless and there is no serious proposal to create a civilian review board with bite.”

During Baltimore’s primary, O’Malley insisted Baltimore could learn from New York’s mistakes. “We can police the police,” he during the Sept. 7 televised debate on WMAR-TV, as reported by the AFRO.

O’Malley continued to defend his crime-fighting approach—which he referred to as “quality of life policing”—in an October 1999 AFRO article, “O’Malley under fire over zero tolerance strategy.”

“It’s not a suspension of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It’s not police brutality or encouraging police to be more aggressive,” said O’Malley at the time. “It is directing and supporting the police to be more assertive about improving the quality of life on corners throughout the city. Not just downtown or parts of the city where we would never tolerate the 24-7 open-air drug-markets we so readily ride by in other neighborhoods.”

Voters seemed to believe him. And, despite a tough primary, in which he was the only Caucasian among the field of candidates, O’Malley earned the endorsement of State Delegate Howard Pete Rawlings, State Senator Joan Carter Conway among other notable African-American lawmakers, pastors and other community leaders (including this newspaper), resulting in his victory in the September primary (with 53 percent of the votes) and the General Election.

In an Oct. 22, 1999 article referencing continuing concern with the policy, AFRO writer Vicki T. Lee interviewed New York management consultant Jack Maple, who along with former New York cop Edward Norris were considered architects of the “zero tolerance” policing strategy.

By April 2000, AFRO journalist Sean Yoes was reporting that Maple and his fellow law enforcement consultant John Linder had authored Mayor O’Malley’s “much-maligned” crime-fighting plan titled, “Dramatically Reducing Crime in Baltimore.” He also reported that Norris, formerly the deputy police commissioner, had been elevated to acting police commissioner after the unceremonious ouster of Baltimore City Police Commissioner Ron Daniel—who reportedly did not support the plan—after a mere 57 days on the job. Yoes, reflecting the conspiracy theories and doubts that abounded in Baltimore’s Black community, questioned whether Norris’ elevation to the top post was “inevitable,” and whether Daniel’s initial appointment was meant to “put a ‘Black face’ on zero tolerance.”

“…It was widely speculated that a White mayor of a predominantly Black city could not put another White man in charge of Baltimore’s Police Department, especially if that candidate had to implement so-called zero tolerance, a strategy widely viewed as hostile to people of color,” the author wrote.

As the years went by, complaints among Baltimore’s Black community increased, including the belief that O’Malley’s police plan was not addressing the real source of crime—the drug trade. That belief was brought into stark reality with the October 2002 murder of the Dawson family, whose home was firebombed after the mother, Angela Dawson complained about the activities of drug dealers near her home. Many residents expressed frustration that officials knew about the escalating threats against the family but did not do enough to protect the family.

“There’s too much focus today on petty crime, somebody drinking in the park, instead of marshaling our forces against drug dealers,” former cop, Bennie Nealey, a 27-year veteran, told AFRO reporter Earl Byrd.

People like then-state Sen. Clarence Mitchell IV disputed that zero tolerance was even working, saying in an April 2002 article that when Norris first came on board, a report came out of the New York attorney general’s office as to whether zero tolerance was good for their city.

“We said let’s wait and look at the report. They went ahead and voted him in, 19-0. But the report concluded that zero tolerance did not decrease crime.

“Now, two years later, we’re going to show that shootings are up [in Baltimore], murder is up, crime is up, so why should Norris be confirmed”?

By 2005, the clamoring of voices decrying the explosion of “illegal arrests” under O’Malley’s zero tolerance plan—and an alleged police department quota program that rewarded and punished officers based on the volume of arrests—had grown louder.

“Unfortunately, it creates a mentality that we really can’t be safe in the streets from either the thugs or the police,” said noted Baltimore defense attorney Warren A. Brown, who handled several high profile illegal arrest cases in 2005. “And for those of us who live in the community that’s a helluva’ situation to be in when you can’t trust either.”

In an August 2005 article titled, “Baltimore City On Lockdown,” AFRO reporter Sean Yoes told the story of Derrick Jessup, who was held for nine days in the bowels of Baltimore Central Booking without an explanation for his detainment.

“Nine days later,” Jessup is quoted as saying, “I’m just getting to see somebody for them to say, ‘You need to take a paternity test.’ Nine days of just suffering down there. I could have lost my job.”

The story went on to point out the disparate arrest rates between Baltimore and other Maryland jurisdictions.

Jessup was one of the 95,907 people booked in Baltimore City between April 2004 and March 2005, compared to 45,168 arrests combined in eight other counties, according to Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services statistics cited in the story. More disturbing, however, was the fact that 21,721 of those booked in Baltimore were not charged, compared to 179 persons in the eight other jurisdictions.

“We’re talking about unlawful, illegal arrests where there is no probable cause. We’re talking about minor, petty offenses that are so insignificant that the state’s attorney’s office is deciding that even if it happens … we’re not even going to waste our time charging this,” said then-state Del. Jill Carter, D-Dist. 41, who spent years fighting the measure.

On Jan. 5, 2006, public outrage over the overcriminalization of Baltimore’s poor and minority residents exploded at a public hearing on law enforcement policy at the War Memorial Building in downtown Baltimore. Officials, particularly Mayor O’Malley—who left right after his testimony—were jeered and booed; and residents left with heavy doubts that anything would be done. None of the officials admitted that people were being arrested without reasonable cause.

“This community is a powder keg; this thing is going to explode and it’s going to be ugly. … History tells us that,” Dr. Tyrone Powers, a WEAA-FM host and director of the Institute for Criminal Justice, Legal Studies and Public Service at Anne Arundel Community College, told AFRO reporter Zenitha Prince at the meeting. “All the ingredients are there, and if we don’t do something to defuse this bomb, there is going to be an explosion.”

In June of that year, the AFRO reported that the ACLU of Maryland had filed a lawsuit on behalf of the NAACP and several residents decrying the allegedly illegal arrests. Along with the Police Department, the suit named as defendants O’Malley, then-Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services Secretary Mary Ann Saar, then-Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm, and former Police Commissioners Edward T. Norris and Kevin P. Clark.

“Despite the patently unconstitutional and illegal nature of this conduct and its detrimental effects on the Baltimore residents whom the laws are supposed to protect, city officials have refused to end this practice, and the rights violations are continuing in the state’s central booking facility,” Deborah Jeon, ACLU’s legal director, said at the time. “The time has come to rein in this abuse of power and stop these unconstitutional and illegal acts.”

Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the Baltimore NAACP at the time, told the AFRO that many of the persons who were arrested on frivolous charges and later released face a lifetime of repercussions.

“Innocent people are getting caught in the dragnet and their arrest record will follow them for the rest of their lives,” he said. “An arrest record seriously affects your ability to get jobs and housing, which already is a big challenge for so many people here in the city of Baltimore.”

In June 2010, a report was released indicating that Baltimore locks up a higher percentage of its population than any major metropolitan area in the nation. That same month, the AFRO reported that the city agreed to pay $870,000 to the victims of the so-called illegal arrests.

According to Del. Carter, at least 750,000 persons were illegally arrested from 1999-2006.

The settlement also called for officer retraining, an independent auditor and for an official rejection of the zero-tolerance policing policy championed by O’Malley.

Still, O’Malley—by then the governor of Maryland—said the settlement was hardly a rebuke of his mayoral administration’s marquee policy. “There was never, ever a policy that asked officers to go beyond the Constitution,” O’Malley said during a press conference June 23, 2010, the AFRO reported.

In 2015, the explosion Powers predicted back in 2006 occurred, ignited by the death of Freddie Gray. Now the city is trying to pick up the pieces, and dealing with the lingering impact of zero tolerance policing will undoubtedly be part of Baltimore’s recovery.

Unemployment Gets Worse for Black Men by Frederick H. Lowe

June 15, 2015

Unemployment Gets Worse for Black Men
By Frederick H. Lowe

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Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Lester Nute didn’t have to wait for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to tell him black men have a hard time finding work.

Nute, a 57 year-old Vietnam-era Army veteran, has not held a full-time job in 12 years. That doesn’t mean he’s discouraged and stopped looking.

He was standing with 10 other African-American men, across the street from a U-Haul truck rental facility, on Chicago’s North Side, hoping to find work for a couple of hours or even a day.

When a customer loaded his or her car with boxes in the U-Haul parking lot, Nute and the other men raised their arms and yelled, “We can help you move.”

I interviewed him on Saturday, and it was a slow. “People don’t have money so they use their friends so it’s been slow for a while,” Nute said. “I try to find work here because I need money to eat.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its monthly jobs report on Friday, and it’s not clear if Nute was even counted because he has been out of work so long.

BLS said the jobless rate for black men 20 years old and older was 10.2 percent in May, up from 9.2 percent in April, and this occurred even though U.S. companies added 280,000 jobs last month. BLS noted that 8.7 million remain unemployed.

As the economy has improved, finding work has actually gotten more difficult for black men to find. There could be many reasons for this situation. Companies don’t like to hire black men. At the U-Haul, the day I went there, only Hispanics and whites were working.

It is not known what job skills Nute and the others have. He also said he suffers from mental illness.

LoyDell Roberson was standing next to Nute. Roberson, who is 61, said he spent 18 years in Statesville Prison after being convicted of rape.

After getting out of prison, Roberson

said he loaded newspapers for the Chicago Sun-Times, a major Chicago newspaper, and sold Streetwise, a newspaper sold by Chicago’s homeless. Now he is standing across the street from U-Haul hoping to find work.

“I stand here and wait for work. Not every Saturday. I am by myself so it is tough,” he said.

The unemployment rate for black men 20 years old and older is always the highest compared to other racial, ethnic and groups.

The jobless rate for black women 20 and over in May was 8.8 percent, the same as April.  The jobless rate for Hispanic men 20 years older and was 6.0 percent in May,  the same as April. For Hispanic women, the jobless rate in May was 6.5 percent, down from 6.9 percent.

The unemployment rate for white men was 4.2 percent in May, down from 4.4 percent in April. The jobless rate for white women was 4.3 percent in May, actually up from 4.2 percent in April.

Asians reported the lowest unemployment rate of 4.1 percent in May, down from 4.4 percent in April.

As I slowly drove by U-Haul, some of the men approached the car to learn how many men I needed and when. I stopped the car, and I told them I didn’t have any work today but I would check back with them later to hire them. I hire white and Hispanic workers. I told my wife we need to hire black men for jobs around the house we can’t do without help

Clinton Taps Drane for Black Outreach by James Wright

June 14, 2015

Clinton Taps Drane for Black Outreach
By James Wright
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LaDavia Drane is D.C.’s director of Federal  Regional Affairs.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Afro American Newspaper

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton knows that she will need strong Black support to win the White House in 2016. So she has hired a former Congressional Black Caucus executive director to help her do that.

Clinton has hired LaDavia Drane, who works for D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) as the director of federal-regional affairs, as her campaign’s director of African-American Outreach. Drane, who will formally join the campaign at the end of this month, is excited about the opportunity.

“I cannot talk about what my role in the campaign will be because I am not working with it yet,” Drane said to two dozen professional Black women at the LEAP Luncheon Series on June 3. “But I love working on campaigns and I live and thrive on them. It was hard for me to sit on the sidelines for the first African-American president and it would have been hard for me to sit on the sidelines for possibly the first female president.”

Drane served as the executive director of the CBC from 2013-2015 under the tutelage of her political mentor, U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), who served as chairman of the organization during that time. She had worked with Fudge in various staff capacities before becoming the administrative leader of the CBC.

Drane holds a bachelor’s degree from Miami University and a law degree from Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, and has worked in the legal field before joining the Obama campaign in 2008.

Fudge said that she knows her protégé will make a difference for the Clinton campaign. “LaDavia was instrumental to the work and successes of the CBC during her time with us, and her hire guarantees that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is committed to working to earn every vote in our community,” Fudge said. “Whether it is criminal justice, education or healthcare, LaDavia understands the issues and how they impact our community.”

While her duties have not been defined at this point, it is clear that Drane will supervise the Black vote turning out for Clinton next year. The Black vote has played a crucial role in the election of presidents, starting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) winning Illinois in 1940 to win that year’s election over Republican Wendell Willkie; President Harry S. Truman’s (D) upset victory over Republican New York Gov. Thomas Dewey in 1948; Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy’s win over Republican Richard M. Nixon in 1960; and Democrat Jimmy Carter’s victory over President Gerald Ford (R) in 1976.

In 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton defeated Republican President George H.W. Bush with the support of Blacks in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and even Georgia, in which Bill Clinton won only by 0.59 percent or about 9,000 votes.

Paul Brathwaite has served as executive director of the CBC and presently works as a principal for The Podesta Group, a lobbying and public affairs firm in the District. Brathwaite said that “LaDavia will do a fantastic job as Secretary Clinton’s African-American outreach director.

“However, LaDavia will need the organizational infrastructure and funding for her operation to be successful,” he said. “It’s just can’t be her. LaDavia needs African-American outreach regional directors, African-American outreach state directors, and in some cases, African-American outreach city directors.”

Brathwaite said that Drane will need to have people who understand their cities and states well and the Clinton campaign needs to provide her the resources to work with in order to be successful. “In order for Hillary Clinton to win in 2016, she will need the turnout among Blacks that Obama had in 2008 and 2012,” he said.

Bowser knows that Drane is up to the challenge. “I am very excited for her,” the mayor said. “It is an awesome opportunity. LaDavia Drane is a consummate professional and she will do a great job for the Clinton campaign.”

- See more at: http://www.afro.com/clinton-taps-drane-for-black-outreach/?utm_source=AFRO+Weekly+News+E-Blast+June+11%2C+2015&utm_campaign=weekly+eblast&utm_medium=email#sthash.qjKwcZjs.dpuf
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