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NAACP-LDF Leader Calls for Civil Rights Focus on ‘New Economy’ by Hazel Trice Edney

March 10, 2013

NAACP-LDF Leader Calls for Civil Rights Focus on ‘New Economy’
By Hazel Trice Edney

ifill

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – America’s continuous struggle with economic woes that have disparately impacted African-Americans and other people of color must signal to the civil rights community a need to not only expand its focus – but change its strategy.

This according to Sherrilyn Ifill, the new director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who received rousing applause during a welcoming reception late last month.

“And so we have to figure out how we’re going to deal with this issue of the new economy. Where do we fall in that? Where do the people that we represent fall in the new credit realm, in the new mortgage lending realm? How are we going to deal with the loss of African-American wealth by the foreclosure crisis that has really decimated the Black middle class?” Ifill grilled an audience of hundreds of lawyers, civil rights activists and leaders of non-profits. “So, we’ve got to step out and begin to take on those issues for our future and that’s my desire as I take up this position at the Legal Defense Fund.”

Ifill started at the New York office of the LDF in 1988 as a voting rights lawyer before leaving to teach at the University of Maryland School of Law five years later. After more than 20 years of teaching, legal consulting and continuing to litigate, the veteran lawyer has returned to her first love.

As her civil rights colleagues listened intently during the Downtown D.C. reception, she reminded them of the “Educational Fund” part of the LDF, which too often gets lost in the name. That is one part that strategically must now become a priority, she said.

“Part of our charge is to engage in a conversation with the American public about what’s really happening to African-Americans. We love that they’re able to see a president and his wife get off Marine One with their kids. Without question, that’s a tremendous success, due in some part to LDF. But there is another America - another African-America,” she stressed. “And our job is to make sure that the picture of that African-America stays at the forefront of the vision of people in this country. And we only do that by committing to show them that African-America and that Latino America and that Asian America and that elderly America and that poor America and all of the people who are living under the margin and behind the veil of American success and prosperity.”

Reaction to her 20-minute talk ranged from energetic applause to hearty chuckles. Perhaps the most humorous line was her use of the Super Bowl to make her point about the need for a greater offense.

“I’m from Baltimore, home of the Super Bowl champions and we’re known for our defense … I had to get that in,” she said to laughter from the audience. “But the lessons of the Ravens is that although we’re known for a great defense we did recognize that we had to lift our offense…We recognized that we had to have a quarter back who could throw, that we had to have people who could block, that we needed a runner that we needed what we call depth on our offense…And I’ve come back to the Legal Defense Fund in pursuit of depth on our offense.”

Though she encouraged her colleagues to “defend the wins” that have been made, such as the then pending arguments in the Shelby vs. Holder voting rights case, she stressed that there must now come a shift in the strategy.

“I’m not interested in just defending what we have already been able to establish. I’m really interested in our pushing ourselves forward to try and realize an America that does not yet exist,” she said, continuing the football analogy. “It’s the perfect time for me because I feel so powerfully and so passionately about the issue of voting rights; because I believe that we really have to be on the offense on this issue…We have to continue to advance the ball.”

The wins have been many, she pointed out. As the seventh in a line of NAACP-LDF director-counsels, she praised the work of her predecessors. In the audience were former director-counsels Ted Shaw and Elaine Jones. Ifill succeeds John Payton who died suddenly last year. Preceding them were founder Thurgood Marshall in 1940, Jack Greenberg and Julius Chambers consecutively.

“They created this world in which we have statutes that theoretically protect us from employment discrimination and protect us in the voting realm and protect us from educational segregation and so forth. And we have to defend those winds and the Supreme Court now has put us in the position where we are pretty regularly defending them. Even after they’ve been upheld, we’re back defending them again. But we cannot allow ourselves to only play a defense game,” she said.

She named a string of economics-related issues plaguing Black America that must be studied and must be documented in order to educate America. Those issues include the school to prison pipeline, the impact of the “new economy” on people of color, the housing crisis and safe quality education.

Though she described herself as energetic, she stressed the need for the civil rights community to pull together as a united front because no one person can do it alone.

“The job is enormous, the work is huge and I am mortal,” she said. “It only happens when we are linked together and when we’re working in partnership. All of the gains of the civil rights legal community have been rendered by us standing close together, communicating with each other, determining what we want and going for it with tenacity. And that’s why I’m happy to see so many of you here tonight because it’s an expression of your commitment to continue doing that.”

March to Protect Vote: Challenge to Preserve Section 5 of Voting Rights Act

March 10, 2013

March to Protect Vote:
Challenge to Preserve Section 5 of Voting Rights Act

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “We will never give up or give in.”

Congressman John Lewis made that vow as he and Vice President Joe Biden led 5,000 people across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to re-enact “Bloody Sunday,” the heroic, historymaking voting rights march that the Georgia Democrat headed 48 years ago.

In March 1965, the youthful John Lewis and others were nearly beaten to death when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked peaceful freedom marchers as they crossed the bridge on the way to the state capital in Montgomery.

That attack galvanized the Civil Rights Movement and pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act the same year, finally opening Southern polling places to millions of African-Americans and bringing an end to all-white rule.

Congressman Lewis used Sunday’s pilgrimage across the bridge to call for new determination to uphold the hard-won law. Biden, the first sitting vice president to participate in the annual re-enactment, joined in that call. He said nothing shaped his consciousness in 1965 more than watching TV footage of the police assault on Congressman Lewis and the other marchers for daring to seek the right to vote.

“We saw in stark relief the rank hatred, discrimination and violence that still existed in large parts of the nation,” he said in recalling the horror he watched.

While those 1965 marchers “broke the back of the forces of evil,” the vice president said that challenges to voting rights continue in the largely Republican-backed push to restrict early voting and voter registration drives and the enactment of voter ID laws where no voter fraud has been shown.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Sunday’s event had a sense of urgency because the U.S. Supreme Court had just heard a request from a mostly white Alabama county to strike down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.

“We’ve had the right to vote 48 years, but they’ve never stopped trying to diminish the impact of the votes,” said Rev. Jackson before taking part in the march. Referring to the Voting Rights Act, another veteran civil rights leader, the Rev. Al Sharpton, said: “We are not here for a commemoration. We are here for a continuation.”

One surprising participant in the march was archconservative House Majority Leader Eric I. Cantor, R-Henrico, who said he was “proud to march alongside Congressman Lewis, who courageously paved the way for a better life for future generations.”

A supporter of many of the new restrictions such as voter ID, Congressman Cantor also has been a supporter of the Voting Rights Act. He joined Congressman Lewis in voting to renew the act in 2006, and last year Congressman Cantor pushed to have the House historian collect video testimony from Congressman Lewis and other congressional participants in the voting march to create a record of their experiences.

The march was held just four days after the Voting Rights Act came under scrutiny from the Supreme Court. Alabama’s Shelby County is asking the court to throw out Section 5 of the act, the requirement that federal approval be sought for election law changes in Alabama and Virginia and seven other states

with histories of suppressing the African-American vote.

Attorney General Eric Holder, the defendant in Shelby County’s suit, told marchers that the South is far different than it was in 1965 but is not yet at the point where the most important part of the Voting Rights Act can be dismissed as unnecessary. Rev. Jackson decried the attempt to throw out Section 5, which he called the key enforcement mechanism to protect voting rights.

“An unenforced law is no law,” the Rev. Jackson said in expressing concern that the Supreme Court could do “something terribly damaging to democracy” when it decides the case.

He predicted that if Section 5 is lost, the South would employ more gerrymandering and at-large voting to dilute the African-American vote.

Deltas Honor Founders in Historic March

March 4, 2013

Deltas Honor Founders in Historic March

deltasmarch

PHOTO: Roy Lewis

Thousands of members of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. took to the streets of Washington, D.C. on Sunday commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage March in which the Delta’s 22 founders participated. Delta Sigma Theta is now the single largest predominantlyAfrican-American women's organization in the country.

Led by a banner with the theme, “Tracing the Footsteps of Our Founders,” the women in red gathered on the west front of the Capitol and braved cold temperatures marching the 3.1 miles past the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue and concluding on the grounds of the Washington Monument.

Some honored the 22 founders by dressing in the fashions of 1913. The 1913 march sought to draw public attention and support for the suffragists’cause seven years before the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. 

Special Report: Hate Groups Remain at Record High for Modern Day Racism by Mark Potok

March 10, 2013
Special Report:
Hate Groups Remain at Record High for Modern Day Racism
By Mark Potok
hategroups2012

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Southern Poverty Law Center

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Capping four years of explosive growth sparked by the election of America’s first Black president and anger over the economy, the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012, while the number of hard-core hate groups remained above 1,000. As President Obama enters his second term with an agenda of gun control and immigration reform, the rage on the right is likely to intensify.

The furious reaction to the Obama administration’s gun control proposals is reminiscent of the anger that greeted the passage of the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 ban on assault weapons supported by another relatively liberal Democrat — Bill Clinton. The passage of those bills, along with what was seen by the right as the federal government’s violent suppression of political dissidents at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in the early 1990s, led to the first wave of the Patriot movement that burst into public consciousness with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The number of Patriot groups in that era peaked in 1996 at 858, more than 500 groups fewer than the number active in 2012.

For many, the election of America’s first Black president symbolizes the country’s changing demographics, with the loss of its White majority predicted by 2043. In 2011, for the first time, non-White births outnumbered the births of White children. But the backlash to that trend predates Obama’s presidency by many years. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of hate groups rose from 602 to more than 1,000, where the count remains today. Now that comprehensive immigration reform is poised to legitimize and potentially accelerate the country’s demographic change, the backlash to that change may accelerate as well.

While the number of hate groups remained essentially unchanged last year — going from 1,018 in 2011 to 1,007 in 2012 — the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) count of 1,360 Patriot groups in 2012 was up about 7 percent from the 1,274 active in 2011. And that was only the latest growth spurt in the Patriot movement, which generally believes that the federal government is conspiring to take Americans’ guns and destroy their liberties as it paves the way for a global “one-world government.” From a mere 149 organizations in 2008, the number of Patriot groups shot up to 512 in 2009, jumped again to 824 in 2010, and then skyrocketed to 1,274 in 2011 before hitting their all-time high last year.

Now, in the wake of the mass murder of 26 children and adults at a Connecticut school and the Obama-led gun control efforts that followed, it seems likely that that growth will pick up speed once again.

The Hysteria Mounts
Even before the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, gun and ammunition sales shot up in the wake of the re-election of the country’s first black president, the result of shrill conspiracy theories about Obama’s secret plans to confiscate Americans’ guns. When the killings actually did spark gun control efforts that clearly had not been in the Obama administration’s plans, the reaction on the political right was so harsh that it seemed to border on hysteria.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) proposed a law that would nullify any executive gun control actions by Obama, accusing the president of having a “king complex.” U.S. Rep. Trey Radel (R-Fla.) said the president could be impeached for those actions. State lawmakers in Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee proposed laws that sought to prevent federal gun control from applying to their states.

Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who sued the Clinton administration over the Brady Bill’s imposition of background checks on gun buyers, claimed that of 200 sheriffs he’d met with, most “have said they would lay down their lives first rather than allow any more federal control.” Matt Barber of the anti-gay Liberty Counsel said he feared that the nation, which he described as already on the brink of civil unrest, was headed for “a second civil war.” “Freedom ends. Tyranny begins,” tweeted Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes. “Get ready,” TeaParty.org said. “Right now government gun grabbing plans are being covertly organized.”

“MARTIAL LAW IN THE UNITED STATES IS NOW A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY!” added the ConservativeDaily.com’s Tony Adkins, responding to Obama’s use of executive orders to further gun control with a doomsday prediction that could have come straight from the Patriot movement. “SUSPENSION OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION IS A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY!” The Conservative Monster, a similar website, concluded that the president was conspiring with a variety of foreign enemies “to force Socialism on the American people.”

Even further to the right, the reaction was more intense yet. Chuck Baldwin, a Montana-based Patriot leader long associated with the Constitution Party, made the unusual claim that Christ had ordered his disciples to carry “their own personal arms” and vowed to refuse to register or surrender his firearms. The Oath Keepers, a conspiracy-oriented Patriot group of current and former military and law enforcement officials, issued a threat — “MESSAGE TO THE OATH BREAKERS AND TRAITORS: We will never disarm” — and added that gun control plans were “unconstitutional filth.” Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman called the proposals “a declaration of war against the American people” and demanded “liberation” from the “evil clutches” of proponents.

The one sector of the radical right that shrank dramatically last year was the “nativist extremist” groups that go beyond advocating for immigration reduction and confront or physically harass suspected unauthorized immigrants. From a 2010 high of 319 groups, they fell over the following two years by about 90 percent, to 38 groups. The collapse was due to criminal scandals, internecine sniping within the movement, and the co-opting of their issue by state legislatures.

Progress and Backlashes
Even before serious talk of gun control began in Washington, the far right was already in something of a meltdown in the immediate aftermath of Obama’s re-election, which came to many who got their campaign news from right-wing sources as a jarring shock. Hundreds of thousands of Americans signed petitions seeking the secession of each of the 50 states. Right-wing outfits like TeaParty.org said a “Communist coup” was under way. The anti-gay Family Research Council charged Obama with “dismantling” the country.

Polling after the election showed how broad antipathy toward President Obama remained in a deeply polarized America. A Public Policy Poll survey found that 49 percent of all Republicans believed that ACORN — a community organizing group that went belly up in 2010 after attacks from the far right — had stolen the election from Mitt Romney. A quarter of GOP members in the same poll favored secession. A January 2013 poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind project found that 36 percent of all Americans still don’t believe Obama is a citizen, despite the 2011 release of the president’s “long-form” birth certificate.

As they did in 2008 and 2009, groups on the radical right clearly benefited from that antipathy. “Since Obama’s first term, our numbers have doubled and now we’re headed to a second term, it’s going to triple,” one Virginia Klansman told WTVR-TV in Richmond. Daniel Miller, president of the secessionist Texas National Movement, said that his membership shot up 400 percent after Obama’s re-election. White News Now, a website run by white supremacist Jamie Kelso, said that it had had “an incredible year” in the run-up to the vote, reaching more people than ever.

To the surprise of many prognosticators, anti-black racism in America — not just that limited to the far right — actually rose over the four years of Obama’s first term, according to a 2012 Associated Press poll. The poll found 51 percent of Americans expressed explicitly anti-black attitudes, compared to 48 percent in 2008, while 56 percent showed implicitly anti-black attitudes, up from 49 percent four years earlier. Another AP poll, in 2011, found that 52 percent of non-Latino whites expressed explicitly anti-Latino attitudes, a figure that rose to 59 percent when measured by an implicit attitudes test.

“We have this false idea that there is uniformity in progress and that things change in one big step. That is not the way history has worked,” Jelani Cobb, a history professor and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, told the Huffington Post with regard to the AP poll findings. “When we’ve seen progress, we’ve also seen backlash.”

Some broad social progress that did occur last year — the rapidly increasing acceptance of LGBT people and same-sex marriage — fueled just such a backlash among anti-gay religious groups that saw themselves beginning to lose the issue. (A December USA Today poll found that 53 percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage, up dramatically from 1996, when 27 percent supported such unions.)

The American Family Association issued predictions for the future that included the claims that conservative Christians will be treated like African Americans before the civil rights movement, that the state will take charge of children at birth, and that cities with names like St. Petersburg will be forced to change their names. Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality said the 2012 election of openly gay Tammy Baldwin to a Senate seat representing Wisconsin signaled that America is “falling apart.” The volume of these kinds of comments seemed higher than ever before.

Conspiracies and Terror
Another factor driving the expansion of the radical right over the last decade or so has been the mainstreaming of formerly marginal conspiracy theories. The latest and most dramatic example of that may be the completely baseless claim that Agenda 21 — a United Nations sustainability plan that was signed by President George H.W. Bush but has no mandatory provisions whatsoever — is part of a plan to impose socialism on America and strip away private property rights.

That claim has been pushed heavily by, among others, the John Birch Society, a conspiracist Patriot organization that was exiled from the conservative movement a half century ago after claiming President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Communist agent.

"Last year, the Republican National Committee passed a plank opposing Agenda 21 and describing it as a “destructive and insidious scheme” to impose “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.” The state of Alabama passed a law barring any policies traceable to Agenda 21 without “due process.”

The radical right last year produced more than its fair share of political violence. Most dramatically, a neo-Nazi gunman stormed into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, murdering six people before killing himself. In Georgia, meanwhile, officials arrested 10 people, most of them active-duty military, who were allegedly part of a plot to take over the Army’s Fort Stewart, among many other things. The group is accused of murdering two former members suspected of talking.

Then, this January, an Alabama high school student was arrested for allegedly plotting to attack his black and gay classmates and bomb his school. Former friends of the student said he and a group of up to 11 other students regularly shouted “White power” and gave stiff-arm Nazi salutes in the halls of their Seale, Ala., school but were ignored by school officials and security officers.

These were only the latest incidents of just over 100 domestic radical-right plots, conspiracies and racist rampages that the SPLC has counted since the Oklahoma City bombing left 168 men, women and children dead in 1995.

Now, it seems likely that the radical right’s growth will continue. In 2012, before Obama’s re-election and the Newtown, Conn., massacre, the rate of Patriot growth had slackened somewhat, although it remained significant. Anger over the idea of four more years under a black, Democratic president — and, even more explosively, the same kinds of gun control efforts that fueled the militia movement of the 1990s — seems already to be fomenting another Patriot spurt.

Even before the election last year, self-described Patriots sounded ready for action. “Our Federal Government is just a tool of International Socialism now, operating under UN Agendas not our American agenda,” the United States Patriots Union wrote last year in a letter “sent to ALL conservative state legislators, all states.” “This means that freedom and liberty must be defended by the states under their Constitutional Balance of Power, or we are headed to Civil War wherein the people will have no choice but to take matters into their own hands.”

Mark Potok is senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Alarming Hunger and Poverty Among African-American Children

March 3, 2013

Alarming Hunger and Poverty Among African-American Children

breadfortheworld

File Photo: Bread for the World

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Bread for the World

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Agriculture has released new data revealing that hunger and poverty in America remain high, especially among Black children.

The African-American and African-American child hunger and poverty rates are even greater than the national averages—sometimes nearly twice as high, states Bread for the World (BFTW), a D.C.-based organization specializing in hunger in America. BFTW has issued a special report on the numbers. According to the analysis more than one in seven Americans, or 15 percent of the entire population, live below the poverty line ($22,811 for a family of four with two children), according to the Census stats released in late 2012.

Hunger closely mirrors the poverty figures: 14.9 percent of households in the United States (50.1 million Americans, or one in six) are food insecure—meaning that the people in the household are unsure of how they will provide for their next meal at some point during the year.

Households with children are more likely to experience food insecurity. Around the country, nearly one in four children—16.7 million—lives in a food insecure family. More than a quarter of all children under age 5 lived in poverty in 2011.

The most recent food insecurity data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal that 25.1 percent of African-American households are food insecure. Among African-American households with children, 29.2 percent are food insecure, compared to 20.6 percent of all U.S. households with children.

Similarly, 27.6 percent of African-Americans live in poverty. The African-American child poverty figures are particularly disturbing: 38.8 percent of children under age 18 and 42.7 percent of children under age 5 live below the poverty line.

A specific 20 states have the highest African-American child poverty rates in the country. Those states and the rate of African-America child poverty are: Iowa 55.7; Ohio 50.5; Michigan 50.0; Mississippi 49.6; Wisconsin 49.1; Indiana 48.7; Louisiana 48.3; Kansas 46.2; Alabama 45.8;Minnesota 45.8; Kentucky 45.7; Arkansas 45.4; Illinois 44.8; Oklahoma 44.8; South Carolina 44.4; Tennessee 43.6; Washington, D.C. 43.2; Missouri 41.7; Florida 41.2; and Pennsylvania 40.8.

In Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, African-American child poverty rates are double the overall child poverty rates. In Iowa, the poverty rate for African-American children is more than triple the overall child poverty rate, states the Bread for the World analysis.

As the economy continues to rebound, federal initiatives play a tremendous role in protecting African-American children and families from falling into hunger and poverty. These initiatives include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

During the recession of 2008, poverty and unemployment skyrocketed while the number of hungry people held relatively steady, due largely to programs like SNAP. In 2011, more than 3.9 million

African-American families received SNAP benefits.

Likewise, the health and potential of some of our most vulnerable community members are safeguarded through monthly packages of food that supply important nutrients to mothers and their infants and children under age 5. WIC served nearly 9 million women and children in 2012. The most recent racial and ethnic data, published in February 2012, found that 20 percent of women and children enrolled in WIC are African-American.

“In a land of plenty, it is unacceptable that so many of our children go hungry,” said Bishop Don Dixon Williams, associate for racial-ethnic outreach at Bread for the World. “With figures this alarming, we must ask ourselves why people of color tend to suffer more than others. And we must tell lawmakers to take actions that do not hold hungry black and brown children responsible for the nation’s financial gaps.”

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