Civil Unrest Expected this Summer Due to Same Dynamics as 50 Years Ago by Richard Cohen

May 25, 2015

Civil Unrest Expected this Summer Due to Same Dynamics as 50 Years Ago
By Richard Cohen

NEWS ANALYSIS

Protestor shouts at Baltimore police officers in riot gear after the death of Freddie Gray. PHOTO: Hazel Trice Edney/Trice Edney News Wire

Richard Cohen

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

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The indictment of six Baltimore police officers in connection with the death of Freddie Gray was greeted with cheers from many in Baltimore and a collective sigh of relief from much of the country. At the same time, fully 96 percent of Americans expect additional racial disturbances this summer, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll.

For better or worse, the polls are probably right. Although the indictments may quell the anger in Baltimore, the underlying dynamics that fuel the cycle of police violence and community outrage in so many American cities will not change in the absence of deep reforms. Neither indictments nor body cameras will be enough.

What are those underlying dynamics?

They’re the same as those identified nearly 50 years ago by the Kerner Commission following the deadly urban riots that rocked Detroit, Newark and other cities in the summer of 1967. As in Baltimore and Ferguson, many of the riots examined in 1967 were triggered by aggressive policing in African-American neighborhoods shaped by racism, extreme poverty and deprivation. Faced with demands for increased protection in areas struggling with crime, police had adopted tactics that created tension and hostility.

The same dynamic exists today. As FBI Director James B. Comey acknowledged in February, many police officers, whether white or black, develop biases about African Americans when working in Black communities with high crime rates. Law enforcement, at times during our history, he said, has been “brutally unfair to disfavored groups.”

Spurred by the outcry over the events in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere, we’re seeing momentum for change. Policing practices are being scrutinized as they haven’t been for at least two decades. The New York Times recently reported that a “small but vocal set of law enforcement officials,” as well as several big city police departments, are beginning to rethink long-held ideas about when to use force and when to avoid it. Baltimore’s mayor has asked the Justice Department to help the city reform its police practices.

Obviously, these are encouraging developments that need to be supported and amplified. But, by themselves, the reforms that are on the table probably will do little to break the cycle of hopelessness, despair and anger that lead to social disorder and, in turn, more racial polarization and repression.

Economic opportunity in areas isolated by racism is at the heart of the issue. “Pervasive unemployment and underemployment are the most persistent and serious grievances in minority areas,” the Kerner Commission wrote. “They are inextricably linked to the problem of civil disorder.”

Again, little has changed in the decades since. In his 1997 book When Work Disappears, the highly respected sociologist William Julius Wilson pointed out the corrosive impact of increased globalization and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs that previously anchored many minority communities. “For the first time in the 20th century, most adults in many inner-city ghetto neighborhoods are not working in a typical week,” Wilson wrote. The consequences are devastating, according to Wilson: higher levels not simply of poverty but also of social disorganization, family dissolution, and crime.

Wilson could have been talking about the West Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray grew up – a place where 97 percent of residents are black and the unemployment rate is 52 percent. Only one in four adults there has a high school diploma, according to The Los Angeles Times, and young African-Americans are “nearly as likely to be arrested as they are to finish high school.” As in so many other cities, the country’s addiction to mass incarceration has taken a heavy toll.

The neighborhood’s homicide rate is nearly double the rate of Baltimore, which has one of the country’s highest. Given this combustible cocktail of structural racism and social ills, it should surprise no one that abrasive police tactics, related in no small measure to the drug war, once again have ignited an explosion of rage.

We all seem to recognize the problem. According to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, for example, an overwhelming majority of Americans said job creation should be a top political priority this year. Most of us know that we need to build schools, not prisons – bridges, not walls.

But the question is whether our political system can overcome deep ideological divisions to deliver solutions. It’s a matter of whether we have the collective will to do what is needed. In its most famous passage, the Kerner Commission report said, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

To continue on the present course – to ignore the voices of despair – will, as the Commission also warned, “involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.”

Richard Cohen is president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Nation's Capital is also Capital of Black Unemployment

May 25, 2015

Nation's Capital is also Capital of Black Unemployment

U. S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The nation’s capital is the capital of unemployment for Black men and Black women, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank reported recently.

The Black jobless rate in March in the District of Columbia was 15.8 percent, 6.1 percentage points higher than prior to the Great Recession.

Before the recession from 2007 to 2009, D.C.’s Black unemployment rate was 9.7 percent. Black joblessness was 5.4 times higher than white unemployment, EPI said in report published May 6.

During the economic crash, which was caused by the failure of subprime lending and the U.S. financial crisis, African Americans and Hispanics lost an estimated 600,000 state and federal jobs.

Washington D.C.’s black unemployment rate surpassed Michigan’s, which reported the highest black jobless rate in 2014’s fourth quarter.

On the other hand, Virginia had the lowest black unemployment rate at 7.4 percent. The Black jobless rate in the Old Dominion State, however, was one percentage point higher than the highest white unemployment rate which was reported in Tennessee.

Since the economic recovery, the African-American unemployment rate is at or even below pre-recession levels in Connecticut, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee, EPI disclosed in a report, titled “So Far, the Black Unemployment Rate Has Only Recovered in States Where It Was Highest Before the Great Recession.”

B.B. King: Why I Sing the Blues by Marc H. Morial

May 24, 2015

To Be Equal

B.B. King: Why I Sing the Blues

By Marc H. Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “The blues has lost its king, and America has lost a legend…B.B. may be gone, but that thrill will be with us forever.” – President Barack Obama, Statement on the Passing of B.B. King, 2015

As a young boy in 1920s Mississippi, Riley B. King—who would one day come to be known as legendary blues icon B.B. King—was introduced to the electric guitar at Rev. Archie Fair’s church. The introduction soon turned into infatuation, with King deciding he would learn to play a guitar. As soon as King got old enough, he ordered a guitar playbook from a Sears and Roebuck mail catalog. The first tune he learned to play was “You Are My Sunshine.” Fortunately for us, it would not be the last tune he would coax from his yielding guitar strings.

King was born in 1925 on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. The future King of the Blues—the son of sharecroppers and the great-grandson of a slave—worked the fields, first as a picker at the age of seven and then a mule driver. He aspired to be a gospel singer like his mentor, Rev. Archie, but fate had other plans. In a 1993 interview, King admitted to leaving Mississippi in the early 1940s because of the racial violence, lynchings and hangings that were becoming all too commonplace. King moved to Memphis, Tennessee, playing small gigs and working as a disc jockey at WDIA, the local blues station. The station manager dubbed King the “Beale Street Blues Boy,” which was shortened to “Blues Boy,” and then to B.B.—and it stuck. It was at this time that King made another momentous introduction, this time to T-Bone Walker singing “Stormy Monday.” King said it was the first time he had ever heard blues on an electric guitar and he was determined to get one. He got that electric guitar in 1946.

What followed was an enduring, influential career that defined and redefined the blues—a quintessentially American art form with roots in African-American slave songs, field hollers and spirituals—King carried its moans and mourning to the four corners of the earth. The blues, set loose on the guitar strings and growl of one of America’s greatest musicians, spoke of our universal experience of pain and perseverance, tribulations and triumphs. King once remarked that, “Blues music actually did start because of pain.” A pain he experienced at an early age, and like so many influential and groundbreaking figures that had come before him, King used his talent to rise out of the dirt of his humble beginnings to live a life as industrious as it was incredible.

A 15-time Grammy Award winner—the most Grammys ever received by a blues singer—King was also awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987. In 1998, his most acclaimed song "The Thrill Is Gone" was awarded the Grammy Hall of Fame Award. King also received a National Medal of the Arts award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and has been inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame. King seemed to always be performing somewhere, playing an average of over 200 concert dates a year well into his seventies. In 1956, King and his band played an astonishing 342 concerts. He never stopped doing what he loved most: playing the music, which he said “was bleeding the same blood as me.”

King passed away peacefully in his sleep at his Las Vegas home, and yet, the thrill is far from gone. His notes and innovative sound gave birth to countless blues and rock players, including Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and Keith Richards, to name a few. His contribution to the blues can be heard, and will continue to be heard, in jazz and rock. King’s outsized influence on blues—on American music—cannot be overstated. B.B. King is to blues what Louis Armstrong is to jazz, Elvis is to rock, James Brown is to funk and Michael Jackson is to pop. Like King, you cannot mention these musical genres without prominently mentioning their names and substantial contributions.

Today I join the chorus of those celebrating King and his iconic career. He sang his way out of Mississippi’s cotton fields to touch each of us—Black or White, American or not—with his talent and insight into our shared human experience. And it is, perhaps, from his brand of soul music that we can learn what found him in that recording studio or night-club almost every day of his life: “Everybody wants to know why I sing the blues. Yes, I say everybody wanna know why I sing the blues. Well, I've been around a long time. I really have paid my dues.”

I couldn’t agree more. Rest in peace, B.B.

Obama Bans Distribution of Military Equipment to Local Police By Zenitha Prince

May 24, 2015

Obama Bans Distribution of Military Equipment to Local Police

By Zenitha Prince

St. Louis County Police during protests in Ferguson November 2014. Photo Courtesy: St. Louis American

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

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - President Obama this week announced steps to demilitarize local police, limiting and outright banning access to certain weapons. The President made the announcement in Camden, N.J., May 18 during remarks about the administration’s broader efforts on law enforcement reform.

“We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like there’s an occupying force, as opposed to a force that’s part of the community that’s protecting them and serving them. It can alienate and intimidate local residents, and send the wrong message. So we’re going to prohibit some equipment made for the battlefield that is not appropriate for local police departments,” he said.

As part of its Program 1033, the Department of Defense was authorized to transfer defense material to federal and state agencies for use in law enforcement, particularly those associated with counter-drug and counterterrorism activities. Under the new rules, law enforcement departments are prohibited from acquiring tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers and large-caliber weapons and ammunition. Access to explosives, riot equipment and wheeled armored or tactical vehicles will also be limited. And, if departments seek access to any of these controlled equipment, they would need to provide detailed justification and officers would have to be properly trained in their use.

Problems plaguing policing in the United States was highlighted in stark relief last fall when demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo., took to the streets after 18-year-old African-American teen Michael Brown was gunned down by a police officer. Protestors were met by officers clad in in bulletproof vests and armed with military-grade rifles and armored vehicles, some of whom launched tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds and called demonstrators “animals.”

The situation prompted calls for reform from civil rights groups, who also shared recommendations which were reflected in the reports from the White House’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

“We are grateful that President Obama and the Policing Task Force he appointed listened to the calls for reform made by civil rights groups and activists. We also owe a debt of gratitude to those in Ferguson who used their activism to expose the shocking truth about local law enforcement reliance on this type of equipment,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, in a statement.

Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., who co-sponsored the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, also hailed the president’s announcement.

“Last June, I was only one of 62 House members (43 Democrats) to support an amendment that would have prevented the Department of Defense from distributing heavy weapons and vehicles to local police forces. While I applaud the efforts and courage our police departments continue to show each and every day, I feel that militarizing them will not solve the unrest that continues among our communities,” Edwards said. “I thank the President for leading on this ongoing issue of building strong relationships between law enforcement officers and those who they serve and protect.”

A Right Cross and a Left Hook by James Clingman

Blackonomics

A Right Cross and a Left Hook
By James Clingman

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For the past 50 years most of our conversation and efforts have been centered on politics. Reminiscent of Reconstruction, when Blacks occupied political offices for the first time, many of our politicians are just figureheads, toothless tigers, and lackeys for the establishment. Many of them are simply “employed” and are only concerned about keeping their “jobs.” Many Black politicians actually work harder on behalf of others than they do for their own brothers and sisters. We must change our conversation from politics to economics.

Before you political hacks get angry, let me say that we must continue to be involved in politics. We must run for office and we must leverage our votes, by all means. But we cannot afford to stop there. We saw what happened in 2008 and 2012; both times Black folks were told to “go out and vote.” We were told we must vote in even greater numbers in 2012 than we did in 2008. We did it, and we still cannot even get a hearing on reparations. A few years ago, P Diddy told the young people to, “Vote or die.” They voted and yet, when it comes to economic empowerment, they, and we, are nearly dead. Like I said in a previous article, where is the “Start a business or die” campaign, the “Pool our money or die” campaign?

Black people must realize that while our relatives fought and died for voting rights, those folks didn’t die so we could spend the majority of our time “playing” politics. They wanted us to take our participation to the next level. Similarly, Black folks, your relatives and mine, also lost their lives because they chose to go into business; where is the rallying cry for entrepreneurship?

Black politicians that do absolutely nothing for Black folks, come out every couple of years to tell us how good they have been and what they stand for on our behalf. What a load of fertilizer that is! Even stranger is the fact that Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives do the same things. We may duck the “right” cross, but we still get hit by the “left” hook. In other words, we have nothing coming from either political party, and they have proven that to us time and time again.

Since our vaunted voting “power” is so important to the two political parties, we should be using it in ways that support the most important political principle: Quid pro quo. We should be leveraging our votes; otherwise, why participate at all? It really doesn’t matter what color the politician is. What matters most is what Black folks are getting from the system, and Black folks are getting the shaft from most of our politicians. You know it, I know it, and they know it. It’s bad enough that the leadership in the two major parties really doesn’t care about us. One is throwing Mike Tyson right crosses and the other is throwing Joe Frazier left hooks at us, causing us to be off-balance, out of sync, and off-kilter, as we try to avoid their vicious haymakers.

The political “leaders” who continue to tell us that all we have to do is vote to change things should be voted out of office. This voting for all democrats or all republicans by Black folks is nothing short of political suicide. Carter G. Woodson said, “Any people who would vote the same way for three generations without thereby obtaining results ought to be ignored and disenfranchised.”

The old game of Black folks being all or nothing to either party has proven to be our political demise. We give our all and get nothing in return. Eighty years ago nearly all Blacks voted republican; now it’s just the opposite. Neither scenario has worked, so why do we continue that insanity? Black folks have been getting hit with right crosses and left hooks since we got into this political game, and now we need to start throwing some punches of our own.

The hardest punches we can throw are economic punches. We must be willing to take off the gloves and go with bare-knuckles into the marketplace and let our presence be known by withholding and redirecting our dollars. We must put our money where our mouth is and contribute to politicians who speak and act on our behalf. The only things that count with politicians are dollars and votes – in that order. We must leverage both to get what we need from either the “Demopublicans” or the “Republicrats.”

As the right crosses and left hooks continue to be thrown by crooked, immoral, and unethical politicians, both White and Black, let’s get busy economically and start punching back, before we get knocked out.