Feb. 21, 2016

Minority Voters Must Focus on What, Not Who

Feb. 20, 2016

The Death of a Conservative
By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq. 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) — Like most Americans, I was shocked to learn that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died. His decisions and many of his remarks showed us to be polar opposites in political and social thinking.  The nature and substance of the controversy and debate between Justice Scalia and his detractors are a fundamental part of our political system.  In his own way, for over thirty years, Justice Scalia served his country as he believed he should.

Not surprisingly, the controversy for which he was known in life follows Justice Scalia into his death.  The question that looms over the nation is whether it is right for President Barack Obama to exercise his Constitutional responsibility and send a nominee to the Senate for the Supreme Court vacancy or whether he should defer that duty to the next President, causing the Supreme Court to function without a full Court.  President Obama is unequivocal and steadfast in his commitment to the responsibilities of his job for the FULL duration of his term which does not end until January 20, 2017.

The dis-loyal opposition (Conservative Republicans) has made it quite clear that they want the President to abrogate his responsibilities for one, or several, specious and illogical reasons.  Within moments of the announcement of Justice Scalia's death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that the Senate would not consider a nominee submitted by President Obama.  Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley stated that a committee hearing would not be held for a nominee submitted by President Obama.  What their reasoning really demonstrates is the continuance of the same animus with which they began on the first day of his administration.  Their rationale and hollow justification in opposition to President Obama doing his job translates to ABO - Anybody but Obama.

Now is the time in this article that I digress and issue an "I told you so!"  During the 2014 election cycle I was adamant about the need for our community to visit the polling places in record numbers.  I admonished every voter I knew and most that I didn't to consider the problem of a Republican controlled Senate.  As Malcolm X and later Jeremiah Reverend Wright said so eloquently, "The chickens have come home to roost."  The failure of the collective Progressive voter turnout is now evident in this process of selecting a new Supreme Court Justice.

Traditionally and historically, minorities and Progressives have fared much better under moderate or liberal courts.  More importantly, the shift in power that would accompany a successful nomination by President Obama would, optimistically, impact on Supreme Court decisions for the next two generations or more.

What would that mean for the average citizen?

A moderate/liberal Court would be more likely to protect the ACA guaranteeing affordable healthcare for most American citizens.

A moderate/liberal Court would be more likely to render decisions that assure the restoration and protection of voting rights.  The current "blind-eye" approach of the House, Senate and Supreme Court would be over-turned to broaden voter participation instead of the current trend to disenfranchise as many voters as possible.

Such a Court would be more likely to protect a woman's right to choose and exercise self-determination in medical decisions; and equal pay for equal work would become a reality.

It’s likely we’d see the end of the Citizens United v. FEC case where the Court held that the First Amendment  prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation. The principles articulated by the Supreme Court in the case have also been extended to for-profit corporations, labor unions and other associations.  

We, the people, must take back our Supreme Court. Tell your Senator to let the President do his job so they can do theirs.

(Dr. E. Faye Williams is President of the National Congress of Black Women, Inc.  www.nationalcongressbw.org.  202/678-6788)

February 17, 2016

To Be Equal
Ending a Lifetime Sentence: Maryland Restores Voting Rights to Ex-Offenders 
Marc H. Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Apart from being a fundamental democratic right, voting is essential to a formerly incarcerated citizen’s rehabilitation. Ex-felons who have been released from prison, and are living in our neighborhoods, are a part of our community.  These individuals who have paid their societal debts are unduly barred from being fully re-integrated back into society by being denied the right to vote.  These restrictions serve only to further alienate and isolate millions of Americans as they work to regain normality in their lives.” – Rep. John Conyers, April 10, 2014

A wrong has been made right in the state of Maryland.

In a long overdue reversal led by the state’s legislature, ex-offenders in Maryland—citizens who have done the proscribed time for their crime—will automatically regain the right to vote once they have been released from jail. Prior to this vote, Maryland required all individuals with past felony convictions to complete all terms of their probation and parole before their access to the polls could be restored through what many described as a lengthy and confusing process. The previous policy—which disproportionately impacted communities of color—was unduly punitive; delaying and denying men and women who paid their debt to society and completed their prison sentences the quintessential right of any citizen who lives in a democracy. Such tactics of voter disenfranchisement must not be tolerated or become an acceptable policy option in a nation that professes to be governed by democratic tenets.

Once the Maryland bill becomes law, an estimated 40,000 men and women currently on felony probation or parole will have their right to vote restored—many of them in time to vote for their local and national leaders, including our nation’s new president. While there is much to applaud, we must recognize that this victory is a drop in the proverbial bucket. Today, in the United States of America, almost six million citizens are effectively locked out of the democratic process because of laws that disenfranchise citizens convicted of felony offenses. Maryland now joins 13 other states, plus the District of Columbia, in immediately restoring the voting rights of ex-offenders upon their release. There are nine states that permanently bar certain ex-offenders from voting at all. Two states, Maine and Vermont, do not restrict voting rights to any citizen with a criminal conviction, even those still in prison, but this is a battle that must continue to be fought around our nation.

Among other benefits, voting promotes public safety. When we allow citizens to fully re-integrate back into society that must include more than securing employment or housing. While those pursuits and others are important, civic engagement can establish a vested interest in the well being of the communities where ex-offenders make their homes, work and pay taxes.

Because of the enduring tangle of race and the criminal justice in our nation, the majority of convicted felons disproportionately come from racial and ethnic communities, effectively disenfranchising not only individuals but entire communities. The restoration movement is therefore a movement to confront racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. Throughout our nation, nearly one in 13 African-American adults are banned from voting because of these laws. And it should come as no surprise that the states that have the harshest policies just happen to be those states with legacies of slavery, segregation, discrimination, voter suppression and the denial of the right to vote. Felon disenfranchisement is a tactic to suppress the vote, as much as voter id laws, and it must be stopped.

America should not be in the business of denying individuals the right the vote. We are a stronger and truer democracy when we offer all citizens this fundamental right. Denying an ex-offender the right to vote serves no real purpose other than to undermine the democratic principals on which our nation is founded.

Feb. 15, 2016

Editors and publishers: The following are four Black History Month articles produced by AARP that can be used in a series or as individual stories. Please keep tagline and consider for your publication or website. Thank you.

 

Young People Can Impact the World by 'Standing on the Shoulders' of Mentors
 By Edna Kane-Williams

Morehouse College student Jajuan Chain and Georgia State University student Samaria Muhammad listen as civil rights veteran Lonnie King explain principles of leadership and organization. Photo Credit: Sheila Pree Bright

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from AARP

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When Jajuan Chain, a history major at Morehouse College in Atlanta, needed to interview someone for a class assignment, he reached out to 1960s civil rights icon Lonnie C. King Jr., a founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and founding chairman of The Committee on Appeal for Human Rights.

After their first encounter, neither King, 79, nor Chain, 22, ever expected that within weeks they would become mentor and protégé working on an organizational project involving Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other universities in Atlanta that Chain believes will impact the rest of his life.

Chain says that King is taking the time to share his experience to train him as a young leader. And their collaboration is working. "We want more than a movement," Chain says. "We want something that's going to last for generations, something that's going to have substance that will not only have a national impact, but an international impact."

Unlike King and Chain, clarity and understanding between young and older generations has not always been the case during recent uprisings against police killings of unarmed African Americans over the past several years. Photographer Sheila Pree Bright, who documented recent demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, has been an eyewitness to the friction.

"Based on my experience from being on the ground, a lot of young people are angry at the elders from the civil rights movement," she says. "They said that it seems that after Dr. King got assassinated they dropped the ball and they feel like they are fighting the same fight that their parents and grandparents were fighting."

Bright recently organized a forum featuring young activists on a panel and elders in the audience. She discovered that the youth needed to be heard. But when young people also listen, they are sometimes "lost for words when asked how they are going to do certain things...We don't know how powerful we are together."

That's where the wisdom of the elders come in, Chain says. "If you want to go far, you really have to learn from someone who's done it before you. They may not be caught up in the same social evolution as you with technology and other things. But they understand the principles, and that's something that I've been adopting in my life."

So far, King says he has taught Chain and his co-leaders key battle strategies and how to organize people to make lasting change. "Marches and rallies don't solve problems, but basically raise people's awareness of what's going on," King says. "You've got to have that backdrop of organization if you're talking about institutional change." 

Following King's advice, Chain is organizing a multiracial student group consisting of blacks, Latinos and forward-thinking white students who may have different perspectives on the same problem. Seeing his vision coming together, Chain says he is amazed at what he is achieving by listening to King.

"He's showing us how to create a mass organization and how to organize people. And he's shaping me on how to be a more profound leader and how to develop well thought-out ideas," Chain says. "He's actually molding me to become a leader. And I'm truly grateful for that."

Edna Kane-Williams is senior vice president for multicultural leadership at AARP.


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From Slave Ships to 'Black Lives Matter':  Nation's Newest Smithsonian to Tell Story of African Americans
By Edna Kane-Williams

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Among the exhibits in the new National Museum of African American History and Culture is a collection of glass shards and a shotgun shell collected from the gutter outside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., after the 1963 bombing that killed four young girls. PHOTO: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from AARP 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In 1955, Mamie Till, the grieving mother of Emmett Till, said she wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. Sixty years later, the glass-topped coffin that displayed the mutilated body of the 14-year-old victim of racial hatred is among thousands of compelling artifacts slated for display in the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. 

Anticipation builds as the museum, opening in September 2016, prepares to receive visitors from around the world. It will tell the story of American history like never before - from an African-American perspective. 

When the doors open, the three-floor, 400,000-square-foot facility will not only display ancient artifacts but also showcase more current events and how they fit into the continuum of American history. 

"We want to be the place where people come and say, 'OK, this just happened. What's the background to this? What preceded this?'" says John Franklin, a museum director.

So items from recent occurrences such as the Black Lives Matter campaign and the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March will be included.
The five-acre museum site, located on Constitution Avenue, between the Washington Monument and the National Museum of American History, will be the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African-American life, art, history and culture. Among the exhibits:

• An underground gallery tracing artifacts from a sunken slave ship from the 1500s to the administration of President Barack Obama, America's first African-American president. 
• Slave artifacts, including items that belonged to Harriet Tubman.
• Segregation artifacts, including a railroad car showing Colored-only and White-only quarters.
• Black incarceration, illustrated by a guard tower and a cell from Louisiana's Angola Prison, formerly a slave facility named for the African country.
• A section called the power of place, illustrating the unique experiences of African Americans in the United States. 
• Two performance spaces, including the Oprah Winfrey Theatre, named for the media mogul who gave $21 million to the museum.

"Military history, sports history, the history of African-American organizations and institutions - from schools that our ancestors built to colleges and universities that our religious organizations constructed - to the political and social and economic organizations that we've created from slavery right up to today" will have their place among the exhibits, Franklin says. "It's just been very exciting working on this project and seeing a very diverse team come together with all kinds of skills."
 

For more than 164 years, people of all ages have traveled to Washington to explore the Smithsonian's 19 museums, plus the National Zoo. But the new museum will have something for everyone.

In the words of the museum's founding director Lonnie Bunch, "I want people to realize this is who we are as Americans. I'm not creating an African-American museum just for African Americans."

Edna Kane-Williams is senior vice president for multicultural leadership at AARP.
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Economic Justice Still Elusive Long After King's 'I Have a Dream' 
By Edna Kane-Williams

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a team of activists and aides leave the West Wing after meeting with President Johnson on Aug. 5, 1965, the day before Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. After that victory, the movement turned toward economic justice, but assassination took King's life.   PHOTO: National Archive and Records Administration /WhiteHouse.gov  

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from AARP

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - On April 3, 1968, nearly five years after his famous "I Have a Dream Speech," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told a gathering of preachers at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn., that it was time to deal with poverty in America.

"It's all right to talk about long white robes over yonder, in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here! It's all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day," he told them. 

Less than 24 hours later, King was killed by an assassin's bullet in Memphis. He had been preparing to escalate his new agenda - the "Poor People's Campaign," launched five months earlier in partnership with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Unlike the hard-won Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the struggle for economic parity never came to fruition. Now, nearly a half century later, leading economic justice advocates say King's unfulfilled agenda has laid dormant far too long. 

"He knew that without wealth, we would still be segregated," says Ronald Cooper, president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB). "He felt that black people not only needed social justice, but we needed economic justice to allow us to move into the middle class, to move into neighborhoods of our choosing." 

According to statistics, that equality is quite a ways off. The Pew Research Center reported last year that "the wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010." 

The Pew study, based on analysis of data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, states, "The current gap between blacks and whites has reached its highest point since 1989, when whites had 17 times the wealth of black households."

In King's final years, there is no question that economic equality was foremost on his mind. His numerous speeches often focused on it, including "Transforming a Neighborhood Into a Brotherhood," an August 1967 speech to a NAREB convention in San Francisco.

Now, in 2016, economics is increasingly on the agendas of social justice leaders, including Cooper and National Urban League President Marc Morial. Morial recently published a column asking, "What Will 2016 Bring for Economic and Political Opportunity and Social Justice?"

He suggests that a national minimum wage hike "would be a significant step toward reducing poverty." 

With black joblessness twice the rate of that for white people, he also suggests that Congress "create thousands of jobs and revitalize the national economy by enacting a surface transportation bill that guarantees employment for workers in low- and moderate-income communities and ensures access to contracts for minority businesses."

On the other hand, Cooper says homeownership is the key to growing wealth and that closing the 30 percent home ownership gap between African Americans and white Americans is crucial. He suggests pushing for policies that end lending discrimination and educates African Americans and other minorities on how to become homeowners. 

Advocates acknowledge that economic issues may sound complex to communities that have struggled for years. But in a March 1968 meeting with the SCLC, King made the vision clear and simple.

''This is a highly significant event,'' he said in the meeting, documented by Stanford University. He described the Poor People's Campaign as ''the beginning of a new cooperation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.''

Edna Kane-Williams is senior vice president for multicultural leadership at AARP.

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Riled by Glass Ceilings: Perseverance, Skill Credited for Historic Growth in Black Female Entrepreneurship
By Edna Kane-Williams

Advertisement showing images of cold cream and hair and complexion products manufactured by Madam C.J. Walker. Photo: Library of Congress

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from AARP

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Given the pioneering success of Madam C. J. Walker, America's first self-made black woman millionaire, people wanted to know how she got started in business ownership only decades after the end of slavery in America. Her answer was short and simple: "I got my start by giving myself a start." 
As for her astronomical success as owner of an Indianapolis-based hair and skin care factory, Walker had yet another pithy saying: "Perseverance is my motto."

More than a century later, these morsels of wisdom still work - at least according to economic experts and advocates who have observed the historic rise of black women entrepreneurs over the past 18 years. According to an American Express Open study released in 2015, there's been a 322 percent growth in black female-owned businesses since 1997, making black women the fastest growing entrepreneurial group in America. The same self-start, perseverance and faith employed by Walker is still motivating Black women in 2016, says Julianne Malveaux, an economist and former president of Bennett College for Women.

"African-American women have earned degrees, have moved up the ladder, and have found corporate America sometimes wanting and have found the mainstream difficult," Malveaux says. "Therefore, the 322 percent increase is a function of people being very skilled and talented and not finding space for themselves in the traditional pipelines. And so they are going into creating their own."

Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce, agrees. "Women of color, when you look at the statistics, are impacted more significantly by all of the negative factors that women face. It's not surprising that they have chosen to invest in themselves," Dorfman told Fortune magazine. 

Yet, Malveaux points out, it is crucial to note that despite the growth of black women entrepreneurs due to their talent and tenacity, they are still a huge minority when compared to white women.

BlackEnterprise.com reports that women in general now own 30 percent of all businesses in the United States, accounting for some 9.4 million firms. African-American women control 14 percent of these companies, or an estimated 1.3 million businesses. In contrast, white women own 6.1 million, the lion's share of the women-owned firms, according to the National Women's Business Council. 

Generally, black businesses - owned by men and women - still lag grossly behind those owned by whites, says Malveaux. "The issue is that African Americans are less likely to have access to capital and African-American women are even less likely than that. In terms of access to capital, no African American has a level playing field."

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that black-owned businesses, which once received 8.2 percent of all loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, had dropped to only 2.3 percent.

From a black man's perspective, it has been inspiring to observe the growth of entrepreneurship among determined black women, says Howard R. Jean, co-founder of the Black Male Entrepreneurship Institute. He concludes the growth is spurred, in part, by black women increasingly realizing their worth. 

"It comes to a point when women have stopped begging for a seat in the boardroom and began creating their own," Jean says. "Realizing their value on the open market and capitalizing on the certification pools that increase their opportunities for success in business, women are now in a position of influence in the business community."

Edna Kane-Williams is senior vice president for multicultural leadership at AARP.