Nov. 23, 2014

New Leader, Old Policies
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander will likely become chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Though he has yet to be elected by his Republican peers, he has given several interviews that indicate ways he would change the way educational services are delivered in our country. For all his bluster, though, his approach is essentially to privatize and push states rights.

For example, while President Obama has proposed spending $75 billion for universal and mandated preschool education, Senator Alexander would take the $22 billion of federal funds for preschool education and send it back to the states.  While the President’s proposal would include guidelines on teacher qualification, class size, and other matters, Alexander would have the states make those decisions.  Alexander suggests that his approach is “innovative”, but this is more of the same old stuff.

There has been some controversy about “Common Core” requirements that would somewhat standardized high school education, indicating what students should know when they graduate from high school.  Alexander says the states, not the federal government, should make these decisions, but the unwillingness to look at national educational standards is a step backward, not a step forward.

In the several interviews Alexander has given since the Republicans won the Senate, he has not mentioned the words “achievement gap”, although African Americans and Latinos trail behind whites in both mathematics and English proficiency.  While Alexander’s silence on this issue is disturbing, equally disturbing is the fact that Democrats have not put enough effort in dealing the achievement gap.  Thus, while President Obama says he wants the United States to lead the world in college graduation rates, little has been done to make sure this can happen, especially for African Americans and Latinos.

There seems to be a collective decision to ignore the achievement gap, and a lack of passion about closing it.  To be sure, many African American educational leaders have focused on the achievement gap, especially among black boys (black girls need attention, too).  Their work does not often result in headlines.  Again, there is little collective will to deal with the implications of achievement gaps in the long run.

While neither Democrats nor Republicans are blameless in this matter, it is Republicans who continually talk about reaching out to the African American community.  Senator Lamar Alexander could have made some progress with African Americans, especially educators, if he had spent jut a few seconds of his media rounds talking about race and the achievement gap.

Education ought to be one of our nation’s highest priorities.  It ought to have been so for the past several decades.  President Obama came into office saying that education is a high priority, but the economy and international issues have seemed to move education issues from a high priority to an afterthought.

What does it take to make education a higher priority?  What does it take to close the race gap in achievement?  Given our nation’s shifting demographics, there should be some passion about reforming our education system so that more young people (and those not so young) are able to achieve their highest and best.  The best-educated workforce is the more productive one, so failing to focus on education means failing to focus on the future of our nation’s economy.

We ignore these education challenges at our own peril.  Senator Lamar Alexander could make a difference if he got off his privatization, state’s rights hobbyhorse and talked about embracing ways our entire nation can improve educational attainment.  The states rights’ approach leads to a real unevenness in educational quality – some states will choose to prioritize education and others will not.  Yet, our entire nation will shoulder the impact of uneven education, and our entire nation will pay.

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is an author & economist based in Washington, D.C.

Nov.  17, 2014

Bernice King, Other Black Leaders Appeal for Peace as Nation Awaits Grand Jury Decision in Ferguson
Nonviolence Training May Be Tested as Missouri Governor Declares State of Emergency

By Hazel Trice Edney

Dr. Bernice King comforts a young woman during nonviolence training in Ferguson, Mo.
PHOTO: Courtesy/The King Center in Atlanta, GA.  ©2014 All Rights Reserved

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Dr. Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who has led several nonviolence workshops in Ferguson, Mo., said this week that – despite the efforts of nonviolence trainers - she has deep concerns about what could happen once a grand jury decision is announced in the police killing of Michael Brown.

“We have done our best to say to especially the young people that it’s very important that you remember the commitment that you made here today to nonviolence. And that you not get pulled into anything because once the feds get involved, it goes to a whole other level,” said King in an interview with the Trice Edney News Wire. “It’s probably going to be less quote/unquote ‘destroying of another Black man’s life’ through a bullet, but it’s going to be the ruining of his life. Because once you get federal charges on you, they’re hard to shake.”

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard as America awaits the decision of the grand jury on whether White police officer Darren Wilson will be charged in the Aug. 9 shooting death of the unarmed Black teenager. Nixon said he is not expecting violence, but the National Guard would assist state and local police if there is civil unrest.

Violent behavior by citizens and police that resulted in arrests and fires initially after the shooting is the reason that both citizens and police are tense. Citizens say the overly aggressive, militarized response by police could cause clashes with peaceful protestors; especially since there has been no protest violence in the streets of Ferguson over the past 90 days – only peaceful protests.

This is the reason that NAACP President Cornell William Brooks opposes Nixon’s decision to declare a state of emergency. “A state of emergency without evidence of violence or danger only threatens to stir up tensions and denigrate the peaceful efforts of countless non-violent activists,” he said in a statement this week. “We at the NAACP will work tirelessly to ensure that the civil rights of the demonstrators are upheld. And finally, we commend as well as stand with those practitioners of democracy who have stood strong for over 100 days.”

King, in her role as chief executive officer of The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, hopes that regardless of the jury’s decision, the peace will prevail. The key she said, is for the residents to focus on long term change rather than momentary rage and short-term reaction – regardless of the jury’s decision.

“You’ve got to have your mind set on a goal. If everybody is stuck on justice coming in the form that they want it because they’re angry and enraged then they haven’t allowed themselves to look at a broader picture beyond this moment,” King said. “People think nonviolence is just a physical thing. It’s really a whole approach to life.”

King led a team of 10 nonviolence educators from the King Center for several meetings and workshops in Ferguson over the past several months. The team included retired St. Louis Police Department captain, Charles Alphin Sr. and the Rev. Willie M. Bolden, a former staffer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s.

Dr. Bernice King said the King Center will continue to work with the National Urban League among other groups. They aim to establish jobs and address some of the dire socio-economic needs in Ferguson, what she described as the “great economic divide.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. agrees. “There’s a military plan for violence, but not an economic plan for fairness, jobs and contracts,” he said this week. “There’s a military plan but not an education plan or justice plan. And they’re planning to crack down with federal government subsidized equipment.”

Jackson says the people must realize that the violence against them does not come with a bullet alone.

“The segregation is violence; the unequal access to police and fire jobs is violence,” Jackson said. “The disproportionate arrest of Blacks is violence. One of the practical reasons that people should hot engage in violence is because violence becomes the subject. And the subject is really injustice, the subject is inequality, the subject is racial injustice.”

Police forces around the country are bracing for the jury’s decision which could be announced any day now. That’s because similar violence against unarmed Black men has become epidemic nationwide.

“Ferguson is just a metaphor for neglect in urban America,” Jackson says. “There’s a Ferguson in every town. We shouldn’t be waiting on the grand jury decision. We should be dealing with issues of fundamental injustice. If he’s indicted, we’ve gotten the mailman, but missed the post office. The protests must lead to national legislation and plans.”

But the lack of plans is what King says she has observed among stratified community groups in Ferguson.

“If you already believe there is not going to be [an indictment], why not spend the energy putting together a plan that takes you beyond that moment? What is the next step?: ‘This is where we’re going. This is what’s next. This is what we need you to do’,” King says. “That’s what’s not happening as a whole. And so you just have people in different pockets doing differing things and the right and left hands are just not synchronizing together.”

In the King Center's nonviolence teachings, King says they use lessons and examples from the civil rights movement.

In her father’s final manuscript, “Where Do We Go from Here, Chaos or Community?”, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “The nettlesome task of Negros today is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.”

She explains, “That means looking at where the strength lies in our community - organization-wise. That means deciding upon the true expertise of particular organizations. That means coming together and synchronizing the strengths of each organization into a master plan. The problem is we are duplicating efforts; therefore we’re diluting our strengths.”

As America awaits the decision, King says she believes the nonviolence training has caught hold in key pockets of the Ferguson community. She recalls a pivotal moment during the workshops after showing a video about “Bloody Sunday”, the 1965 incident during which peaceful marchers were attacked by Alabama State Police as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a march from Selma to Montgomery.

“When we showed just that two-minute clip, there was a gentleman there. He was one of the gang members, this thing just fired him up. He was like, ‘I’m telling you all. You need to trust me. We need to go through this nonviolence thing…It was like it was here, like right down there on West Florissant man - the tanks and the tear gas and stuff I’m telling you it was real man,’” King recalls the young man’s excitement. West Florissant is the strip of highway where most of the Ferguson protests take place – about three blocks from Canfield Drive where Michael Brown lay dead for four hours before his body was removed.

The nonviolence trainers have influenced the mindsets of hundreds of prospective protestors. But that doesn’t mean all will be peaceful, King warns.

“I don’t know how this is going to go, what the lay of the land is going to be. It can get real ugly or it can be a quick situation,” she concludes. “There’s going to be a contingency of provocateurs that nobody’s going to be able to do anything about. There are instigators that nobody’s going to be able to do anything about. If something occurs, it’s going to be because of that; not because people have not been prepared, exposed, educated and trained.”

Nov. 23, 2014

Immigration Reform - Finally!
By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Immigration reform has finally arrived!  How is it that people who stole this land from another group can now think no one else is worthy of living here?  I’m not naïve enough to think President Obama’s Executive action is the end of it because nothing is ever resolved with the current GOP, but President Obama sure did make a great start on bringing about much needed changes to our immigration laws.

The GOP talks a great game about family values, then proceeds to do everything they can to keep families apart.  I can’t help but wonder what is taught in some of these churches they attend. Some of them will tell you that America is a Christian nation, then proceed to violate every tenet of Christianity!

In the President’s address to the nation, he detailed the action he is taking to help fix our broken immigration system by increasing accountability and ensuring everyone plays by the same rules.

Republicans agitate for a secured southern border.  The President’s plan meets that while giving the undocumented an opportunity to achieve a legal status. Although they must pass a criminal background check and pay a fine, his plan will allow the undocumented to "come out of the shadows," work, and pay their fair share of taxes.

The President waited for Congress to act. He has assured Congress he will continue to work with them on a comprehensive, bipartisan bill like the one passed by the Senate over a year ago.  He’s not trying to make his Executive actions permanent.  The House could have avoided his action by bringing the bill already passed by the Senate to a vote

We have so many things to think about in our community just to keep our heads above water, so many of us have not paid attention to the issue of immigration reform and how it impacts our lives.  Well, it does.  It’s not just a Latino issue as is often portrayed on the news, but it also impacts our brothers and sisters of Caribbean and African descent.

Additionally, businesses will lose the benefit of hiring cheap labor using undocumented workers, making it easier for our community to compete for jobs that currently only accept undocumented workers who have no choice but to take the low pay that’s offered them.

All of the lawyers and legal scholars I know agree that President Obama has broad discretion to use his Executive privilege to do what Speaker John Boehner has refused to do.  Action by the House could have stopped mass deportations and breaking up of families, but Boehner chose to just block President Obama from signing a comprehensive immigration reform bill into law.

For more than half a century, Presidents have used their legal authority to act on immigration.  President Obama has now taken another common sense step.  What he's done is fundamental to real accountability. We shouldn’t breakup families and send innocent children back across a border that only promises dangers and no quick return for them.

The President wants a permanent solution and has pledged to work with the GOP to find it.  They need to do their job and pass the bipartisan Senate bill to provide a permanent fix—at which point the President can move on to fixing other problems.

The people want action on this issue.  We’re sick and tired of hearing threats of suing the President for doing his job, of defunding programs, of shutting down the government and of impeaching the President.   The Senate passed a bipartisan bill more than 500 days ago, and while the country waits for the House to vote, the President rightly has acted-- like Presidents before him -- to fix our immigration system by the authority invested in him.

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

November 17, 2014

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is Without a Clue
By Jesse Jackson