Dec. 31, 2019

Civil Rights Giant Congressman John Lewis Prepares to Fight Pancreatic Cancer
By Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Civil rights giant John Lewis, representing Georgia’s 5^th Congressional District in the U. S. House of Representatives for 32 years, has announced that he has been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and that he is up for the battle.

“I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” stated the storied congressman.

Lewis is perhaps best known for his leadership on “Bloody Sunday”, March 7, 1965, when Georgia state troopers brutally assaulted him and others as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he chaired, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, marching from Selma to Montgomery.

“While I am clear-eyed about the prognosis, doctors have told me that recent medical advances have made this type of cancer treatable in many cases, that treatment options are no longer as debilitating as they once were, and that I have a fighting chance,” he said.

According to the statement, posted on his Congressional website Sunday, doctors gave him the diagnosis following a “routine medical visit, and subsequent tests”. He sought and received reconfirmation.

Congressman Lewis, a man of faith who has faced many battle on behalf of others, says he is prepared to fight for his life through medical science and prayer.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “pancreatic cancer is the fifth leading cause of death from cancer and the 11th most common cancer in the United States.” However, the CDC also reports that “the five-year survival rate” from pancreatic cancer has slightly improved in recent years. Among Whites, the five-year survival rate is at 5.4 percent and among Blacks, the five-year survival rate is at 4.3 percent, according to the CDC.

Nearly - but not all – “patients with the disease die of it, and most die within one year of diagnosis,” the CDC states. The National Institute of Health reports that “no patient has survived longer than 10 years and the longest overall survival is 8.6 years.”

“So I have decided to do what I know to do and do what I have always done: I am going to fight it and keep fighting for the Beloved Community. We still have many bridges to cross,” Lewis states, stressing that he will continue to serve the people of the 5^th Congressional District of Georgia. “To my constituents: being your representative in Congress is the honor of a lifetime. I will return to Washington in coming days to continue our work and begin my treatment plan, which will occur over the next several weeks. I may miss a few votes during this period, but with God’s grace I will be back on the front lines soon. Please keep me in your prayers as I begin this journey.”

Jan. 1, 2019

The Spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation is Under Attack Again Today
By Jesse Jackson

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Wednesday, Jan. 1, began the new year. It also marked the anniversary of a new America. On Jan. 1, 1863, as the Civil War, the bloodiest of America’s wars, approached the end of its second year, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are and henceforward shall be free.” The Proclamation was limited to fit wartime necessities. It applied only to the states that had seceded from and were at war with the United States, leaving slavery untouched in loyal border states. It also exempted the parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. And, of course, the freedom it promised depended on the victory of the North. Yet, the Proclamation’s effect was far more expansive than its terms.

It transformed the war into a war of freedom. As the U.S. Archives summarizes, “Every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom.” And of course, it dramatically aided the Union cause, with nearly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors fighting for the Union. The Proclamation was the beginning. Upon victory, Congress passed three amendments to the Constitution — the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — designed to finish the job of transforming the country that was, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “half slave and half free” to one in which all were guaranteed — under the Constitution — the” blessings of liberty.”

The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude; the 14th began to define the rights of citizens and guaranteed equal protection under the law; the 15th prohibited discrimination in the right to vote on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” (Ironically, the Constitution still does not guarantee the right to vote to all).

The amendments, forced upon the defeated Southern states as a condition for re-entry into the Union, launched the reconstruction that sought for a few short years to bring the country together. Newly empowered blacks joined with progressive whites to build coalitions that transformed state constitutions, guaranteeing the right to education, launching programs to provide more equal justice under the law.

Sadly, Reconstruction met with fierce reaction across the South. Segregation masters succeeded the slave masters. The Ku Klux Klan, formed by the elites of Southern communities, terrorized newly freed blacks. The right to vote was sabotaged by various tricks and traps, from the poll tax to unequally administered tests on the Constitution, to simple threat and terror. In 1896, the Supreme Court to its shame ruled that apartheid — the mythic “separate but equal” standard — was legal in the United States.

By the turn of the century, segregation was the law of the land. It took 100 years and the historic civil rights movement to overturn that reaction, and to begin to reclaim the promise of equal justice under the law and the revive the right to vote. The civil rights struggle, which united the movement of courageous citizens on the ground with the force of Lyndon Johnson in the White House, produced, among other legislation, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act that brought America closer to its promise. Today, we once more see the stirrings of reaction against that reconstruction.

Racial division, stoked cynically from the highest offices in the land, once more is on the rise. African Americans, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, gays, women — all once more feel the rise of resentment and often of hate. The Supreme Court has gutted a critical part of the Voting Rights Act. States under reactionary governors are inventing new ways to restrict access to the vote. Will this reaction be as successful as that which undermined the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation? America, I believe, is better than that. Our democracy is stronger than it was then. We can mobilize and vote in large numbers to keep expanding the domain of freedom.

On this Jan. 1 and beyond, let us remember the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by the greatest of our presidents, a Republican, and devote ourselves to redeeming its promise.

Dec. 28, 2019

Two Members of Congress Call for Replacement of Lee Statue in U.S. Capitol
By Ronald E. Carrington

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

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Two Virginia congressional representatives are calling for the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee to be replaced in the U.S. Capitol by a Virginian of color who has dedicated his or her life to fighting for equality.

The statue of Gen. Lee, who is dressed in a Confederate uniform, is viewed by almost every tour group to the U.S. Capitol and serves “as a prevalent reminder of Virginia’s disturbing racial legacy,” Rep. A. Donald McEachin of Richmond and Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Northern Virginia wrote in a letter this week to Gov. Ralph S. Northam.

“There are countless commendable Virginians who would better represent our Commonwealth in the U.S. Capitol than a Confederate general,” they wrote.

They asked Gov. Northam to start the replacement process during the Virginia General Assembly session that starts next month.

According to the official guidelines for replacing statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the Capitol, legislation authorizing the change must be approved by a state’s legislature and signed into law by the governor. The request then would be sent to the U.S. Capitol architect.

Each state has two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol that honor notable people in the state’s history.

Virginia currently is represented by statues of George Washington, a Virginia native and the first U.S. president, and Gen. Lee, a slave owner who, after Virginia’s secession from the United States, served as commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

The Lee statue, which depicts him in a Confederate uniform, was donated by the state for the Capitol collection sometime between 1900 and the 1930s, according to the letter, when dozens of Confederate monuments were erected across the country.

“These statues aimed to rewrite Lee’s reputation from that of a cruel slave owner and Confederate general to portraying him as a kind man and reluctant war hero who selflessly served his home state of Virginia,” Reps. McEachin and Wexton stated.

“As Virginians, we have a responsibility to not only learn from but also confront our history,” they wrote to the governor. “As part of this responsibility, we must strive for a more complete telling of history by raising up the voices, stories and memories of minorities and people of color. In doing so, we should consider what monuments we can add to acknowledge the horrors of slavery, expose the injustices of institutional racism and honor those who dedicated their lives to fighting for equality.”

In a brief interview with the Richmond Free Press, Rep. McEachin said the Virginia General Assembly decided on what statues would represent the Commonwealth in the National Statuary Hall Collection.

“I think it is appropriate in a multiethnic state like Virginia that we have some African-Americans representing the Commonwealth,” he said.

In their letter, Reps. McEachin and Wexton mentioned the names of several well-known African-Americans in Virginia history “who bravely chose to fight for justice and equality” and would be possibilities to replace Lee in the Capitol.

Among them: Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in Southampton County in 1831; Booker T. Washington, who was born enslaved in Franklin County, Va., and later founded Tuskegee Institute, now University, and served as an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft; renowned businesswoman and civil rights advocate Maggie L. Walker of Richmond, the first African-American woman to charter a bank in the United States; Barbara Johns, who as a 16-year-old, led a student walk-out at the all-Black school in Prince Edward County to protest unequal and deplorable conditions; and Oliver W. Hill Sr., the renowned civil rights attorney in Richmond who filed suit against the Prince Edward County schools in a case that would become part of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine that kept schools segregated.

Asked about Gov. Northam’s response to the letter, the governor’s office said via email that he and his team have been working on the issue for several months and have requested that legislation be drafted to address it.

Several Southern states have voted to replace their state’s statues in the Capitol.

In March 2018, Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation replacing a statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith with that of noted educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune.

In April 2019, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed legislation putting statues of civil rights icon and newspaperwoman Daisy G. Bates, who helped organize the Little Rock Nine in the famed Central High School integration effort in Arkansas in 1957, and musician Johnny Cash in the Statuary Hall collection, replacing attorney Uriah Milton Rose and statesman James Paul Clarke, political figures in Arkansas during secession and the Civil War.