Sept. 3, 2019

Surviving the journey: Thousands Gather in a Weekend of Reflection and Healing to Remember, Honor the First Africans Brought as Captives to English North America 400 Years Ago

By Brian Palmer

Queen mothers from the Institute of Whole Life Healing in Kentucky anoint participants at a sunrise cleansing and healing ceremony at Buckroe Beach in Hampton as part of the 400th anniversary commemoration of the first Africans landing in English North America. PHOTO: Brian Palmer

Lariah Harris, 2, of Hampton walks with confidence Saturday along Fort Monroe’s waterfront, where the first “20 and odd Negroes” came ashore as captives at Point Comfort in 1619. The youngster was following her grandmother, Dee Wesley, a resident on the Fort Monroe property, which is now a part of the National Park Service. PHOTO: Regina H. Boone/Richmond Free Press)

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

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As day broke last Saturday, August 24, tides of people of all ages and colors flowed down the promenade at Hampton’s Buckroe Beach.

Some were dressed for a day at the shore in shorts and T-shirts, with windbreakers or sweats. Others, all of them Black people, were clad in White — gowns over skirts and dresses for many of the women; shirts and loose pants for the men.

The line of people gave their names to two Black women sitting at a table, the last step before they would begin the African cleansing ritual and name ceremony for which they had registered long before this day.

A few yards away, three Black men in colorful ceremonial robes stood silently on the beach, something they and every Black person gathered there would not have been able to do a little more than 50 years ago because Buckroe was, by law, for Whites only.

Another robed man, Ancestral Master Drummer Joseph Ngwa from the central African nation of Cameroon, beat his drum to bring together the milling crowd, now in the hundreds. He then blew a horn to signal the pouring of a libation that would summon the ancestors.

Professional photographers and videographers jockeyed for position with observers wielding their cellphone cameras. Then everyone settled in place, encircling the robed chiefs.

Chief Asam Asam Eyong of Cameroon’s Bamoun people led the ritual, pouring liquid from a cow horn onto the sand, then bowing deeply onto a tortoise shell and animal pelt he laid on the ground.

Chief Eyong and the other chiefs then led the assembly in a call and response:

“Africa must rise! Africa must rise again!”

With Mr. Ngwa beating his drum, women dressed in white robes and head wraps, known as the African-American queen mothers from the Institute of Whole Life Healing in Lexington, Ky., led the crowd to the water’s edge.

There, with water from a calabash, pairs of queen mothers anointed the heads of the white-clad men and women who came to them one at a time. One of the queen mothers would gesture, pulling apart her fists as if ripping a cloth.

She was breaking the chains of slavery.

The solemn, yet emotional ceremony at Buckroe Beach was among the most powerful events of the “First African Landing Commemorative Weekend,” four days of speeches, panel discussions, ceremonies and performances marking the 400th anniversary of the 1619 arrival of the first captive Africans in English-occupied North America.

With the exception of Saturday’s daybreak cleansing ceremony at Buckroe Beach and a few others, most events took place at Fort Monroe in Hampton, where “20 and odd Negroes” aboard an English pirate ship, the White Lion, were traded in 1619 for food and provisions at what was then known as Point Comfort.

It, essentially, was the beginning of the slave trade in English North America, a barbaric inhumane practice that would last for centuries, its evil legacy persisting today. By the mid-1800s, more than 12 million Africans had been captured, sold and transported across the Atlantic to the Americas and the Caribbean.

Some who participated in Saturday’s beach ritual beamed, while others stood silent and reflective.

Wendell Shannon of Baltimore sighed and paused when asked about the ceremony’s significance.

“It connects me to the painful experience of the trans-Atlantic slave trade — the bowels of the ships, the jumping off the ships and suicides. Now it’s time for liberation and reconnection to our mother Africa,” Shannon said.

Jermaine Nelson, a young man also from Maryland, said he was looking for his roots and for a more profound connection to Africa. As part of the ceremony that accompanied the anointing, he received a new name, “Guiawang,” drawn from the Tikar people of Cameroon.

“I’m looking for home,” he said.

Organizer Ada Adagho Brown of the African heritage group Roots to Glory said afterward that it was important the morning was planned and executed by Africans and African-Americans. So much of the schedule didn’t appear to be geared to either group, ostensibly the focus of the weekend.

“I didn’t feel us in here,” Brown said. “I actually felt that there were two different events. One for them”— white people — “what they want the world to know, what they want the world to see. And one for us.”

The weekend was organized under the flag “American Evolution” by state and federal commemoration commissions, the Fort Monroe Authority, the National Park Service, the City of Hampton and Project 1619, a Black-led nonprofit.

But at times, it seemed politicians — many of whom were White people — sought to hijack the big events attended by several thousand people that also featured African drumming and dancing, spoken word and other presentations by youths, a long line of educational exhibits and vendors along the Fort Monroe waterfront and a ceremony where flower petals were dropped into the Chesapeake Bay in remembrance of the first Africans and other ancestors.

Saturday’s main event, the “2019 African Landing Commemorative Ceremony,” featured 17 speakers, while Sunday’s ceremony, “Healing Day,” featured 11 speakers, including Gov. Ralph S. Northam, who used the podium on both days to continue his post-blackface rehabilitation.

Gov. Northam announced Saturday that he has set up a commission to study how the African-American experience is taught in Virginia and a separate commission to examine racial inequity in law. He also announced that sculptor-painter Brian R. Owens, an award-winning artist based in Florida, has been selected after a national search to lead the $500,000 First African Landing public art project at Fort Monroe. Owens is African-American.

In his address on Saturday, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine spoke about Oliver W. Hill Sr., the pioneering civil rights attorney from Richmond, who was pivotal in the lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing the “separate but equal” doctrine in public education.

Sen. Kaine, an attorney, said before his speech that he was well aware that slavery in the “New World” didn’t begin in 1619. It started long before in Spanish-occupied North America. But what the English gave the young colony of Virginia, he said, was its legal system — a framework that white male colonists tailored to construct the brutal system of American chattel slavery.

“It wasn’t destined by God. It wasn’t destined by the crown. We had to create it,” Kaine said.

He then spoke about the Declaration of Independence, which Virginians helped to write. “What does it say about Virginians — Americans — all are created equal? This is like Virginia’s greatest gift to the world, and at the same time the people who were signing that document were creating the architecture of slavery and secession and then Massive Resistance.”

Lt. Gov. Justin E. Fairfax spoke during Saturday’s and Sunday’s ceremony about his family history and the manumission of his great-great- great grandfather, Simon Fairfax, in 1798.

He also recounted the story of 1619 African captives Anthony and Isabella, who gave birth to William Tucker in 1624, the first documented African-American child born in English North America. Many of the Tucker descendants participated in the weekend’s events and also hosted a reflection and commemoration ceremony on Friday morning at the Tucker Family Cemetery, tucked in a residential area of Hampton.

Former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves and the nation’s first African-American elected governor, was noticeably absent from Saturday’s and Sunday’s events at Fort Monroe. He had been invited to serve as an honorary chair of the commemoration, but was openly critical last month, saying his invitation “was only a polite inclusion.”

“I learned that it was more ceremonial than actual in terms of what I was asked to do,” he told the audience on Friday, where he was the main attraction at a luncheon panel at the Hampton Convention Center. The luncheon, “African-American Political Pioneers,” also featured Congressman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott of Newport News and other politicians whose elections were “firsts” in their communities.

Rep. Scott is the first African-American to be elected to Congress from Virginia since the post-Reconstruction-era election of John Mercer Langston. Before his election in 1888, Mr. Langston, an attorney, educator and diplomat, helped create Howard University’s law school and became its first dean. He also had served as the first president of what became Virginia State University.

Although politicians dominated the weekend program, they did not have the last word.

“I came here today to honor you and all of those warriors that came before you, who have literally made the way for all of us,” Chief G. Anne Richardson, a Rappahannock woman and the first woman to lead a Native American tribe in Virginia since the 18th century, said to the largely African-American crowd of several thousand on Sunday, the final day of the commemoration.

The Sunday ceremony followed a symbolic four-minute ringing of bells at Fort Monroe and national parks and churches across the country — one minute for each 100 years of African presence in the nation.

Sunday’s keynote speaker, Georgetown University professor, author, preacher and radio host Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, didn’t mince words in a blistering, irreverent and thought-provoking speech about what Black people have faced during the course of 400 years in America.

He started, however, by addressing Gov. Northam’s blackface scandal that rocked Virginia earlier this year.

“I saw the governor. In the back,” Dr. Dyson said with a preacher’s timing. “I wanted to tell him to his face what I had said behind his back. And that is, ‘Ain’t nothing better than a White boy who knows he messed up, who stays in office to fix it up.’ ”

The crowd roared.

He then gave a history lesson, highlighting in 100-year increments the brutalities and injustices inflicted on African-Americans.

“When America says the worst act of terror happened on 9-11, you’re wrong,” he said. It was 1619 and what followed for Black people, he said.

Dr. Dyson took on colorism among Black people, a damaging legacy of enslavement that he said needs to stop.

“We better realize that we’re all in the same boat. I don’t care how light or dark you are, you still a n- - - - r in America.”

He also went after President Trump, calling him “an orange apparition,” “bigot-in-chief,” and a “White supremacist.”

For all the painful truths he told, Dyson ended by calling on Black people to love ourselves — and to vote.

Sept. 1, 2019

Please Bring School Supplies
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The event promised to be one of those last-gasp of summer events that would raise a little money for a good cause. The young woman who called to tell me about it promised that I'd meet interesting people, enjoy excellent wines and that the cost of attending was modest. "We aren't charging anything this year, " she said rather breezily. "But please bring school supplies."

Her call wasn't the first call that I've had asking for school supplies. And whether we are educators, parents of now-adult children, or others, we understand how important it is for young people to approach a new year with "new stuff." They should have pristine notebooks for the new subject matter. A supply of pens, folders, markers, pencils, and more. Some schools actually provide parents with a list of necessary supplies. The lists may include as many as 30 items and cost as much as three hundred dollars. Low-income parents can't even begin to meet the set of needs teachers’ detail, not to mention the things their children clamor for.

Please bring school supplies. That plea speaks to the economic disparity that exists in our country and to the many ways that individuals rush to help, if not close the gap. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute (I serve on the Board), the teacher spends at least $450 per year in school supplies. The overwhelming number of them won't be reimbursed. They pay for some things that school districts should pay for, and they pay for items to support their pupils. Teachers who work in high poverty areas spend about a hundred dollars a year more than those who spend in lower-poverty districts. But they all contribute, and even with their spending, people are asked to "bring school supplies."

Most of us have the heart to help young students, especially those whose families are struggling, especially those who may not have a new notebook but for charity. But we have to connect the heart to serve to activism that ensures that no child is inadequately supplied when she returns to school this fall. As commendable as the please for school supplies, they must be accompanied by please for structural shifts. Why is education the most easily cut item in our federal, state, or local budget? Why are we so satisfied that a plea for donated school supplies will be met? And why are we more confident in well-meaning charity than with an economic structure that would serve every child well.

Teachers are among the least well-compensated, but the hardest working contributors to our society. They earn at least 21 percent less than folks who are similarly qualified as they are, mainly because the public does not value teachers as much as we once did. Last year teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado went on strike, and also garnered national publicity for their plight. Cover stories included accounts of teachers who were working additional jobs to make ends meet. And too may states report teacher shortages because the occupation, with low pay and big hassles, isn't as attractive as it once was.

Collecting school supplies will help some students, but I think it makes teaching challenging and less attractive. While teachers may enjoy the support of the community with donated school supplies, what does this support mean in terms of relationships and realistic pay? Who wants to be associated with an occupation so marginally regarded that supporters have to pan-handle for the tools of their trade?

On the one hand, then, I applaud Courtney Jones, the elementary school teacher from Tyler, Texas who launched a #clearthelists campaign to encourage people to help teacher pay for school supplies. On the other hand, I'd be much more enthusiastic about a #educationfirst campaign that urged legislators to prioritize education in budgets.

Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist. Her latest project MALVEAUX! On UDCTV is available on youtube.com. For booking, wholesale inquiries or for more info visit www.juliannemalveaux.com

Sept. 1, 2019

 

102 House Members Rebuke Delay of Payday Loan Rule

Waters Led Effort Supported by Many CBC Members

By Charlene Crowell

 

Waters

 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Anyone who struggles with the rising costs of living knows all too well how hard it is to try stretching dollars when there’s more month than money in the household. Predatory lending, like payday and car-title loans, worsen financial stress with triple-digit interest rates that deepen the debt owed with each renewal.

 

The irony is that many payday loan borrowers who needed just a few hundred dollars wind up owing thousands. And any loan whose accrued interest exceeds the principal borrowed, is truly predatory.

 

In recent days, more than 100 Members of Congress stood in support of consumer protections against these debt trap loans. The effort, led by House Financial Services Chairwoman and California Representative Maxine Waters, called upon the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to do two things: stop delaying the current rule from taking effect, and preserve the existing rule’s requirement that lenders only make loans to consumers whom could afford repayment.

 

The August 23 letter to CFPB minced no words.

 

“Experts have noted that payday loans often target communities of color, military servicemembers, and seniors,” wrote the Members, “charging billions of dollars a year in unaffordable loans to borrowers with an average annual income of $25,000 to $30,000.”

 

“The Consumer Bureau’s proposal represents a betrayal of its statutory purpose and objectives to put consumers, rather than lenders, first,” continued the Members. “Moreover, the Bureau has offered no new evidence and no rational basis to remove the ability to repay provisions. We think you should immediately rescind the harmful proposal to roll back the 2017 payday rule.”

 

These direct rebukes were reactions to CFPB’s 15-month delay of a long-awaited consumer-friendly rule that was scheduled to take effect on August 19.

 

In today’s contentious Washington, getting strong support for any pro-consumer issue seems particularly difficult. Even so, the August letter to CFPB Director Kathleen Kraninger included Representatives from 31 states, including those with some of the highest annual percentage rates found across the country. For example, the typical payday loan in California comes with 460 percent interest and the largest number of state signatories also came from California: 15.

 

Although no other state’s signatories were that numerous, the clear expression of genuine consumer protection against this heinous predatory loan in other areas with rates near or exceeding 400 percent is noteworthy: Texas (661 percent), Wisconsin (574 percent), Missouri (462 percent), and Illinois (404 percent).

 

Yet a closer examination of the signatories reveals that despite sizeable support expressed in the letter, there are still 435 officials in the House of Representatives. The recent letter represents about 23 percent of the entire House. That small percentage signals that many more Members of Congress need to make clear that they stand on the side of the people – and not with payday lenders’ 400% interest rates.

 

Across the country, communities of color are where payday and car-title loan stores are the most prevalent. Among Congressional Black Caucus members serving in the House, 58 percent added their names and support to this important letter.

 

New research on the nation’s wealth gap by McKinsey & Company found that 65 percent of Black America lives in one of 16 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

 

Among these 16 states, only Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina have enacted 36 percent or less payday loan rate caps. The remaining 13 states have typical triple-digit payday loan interest rates that range from a low of 304% in Florida to a high of 521 percent in Mississippi. Multiple CBC members also represent districts in these states.

 

Speaking at a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing held on April 30, Diane Standaert, an EVP and Director of State Policy with the Center for Responsible Lending testified of the rippling reasons that payday loans need regulation.

 

“Allowing the 2017 rule to go into effect as planned is the bare minimum that the CFPB should do,” said Standaert. “It is absurd that we should even have to make such a straightforward request of an agency whose charge is to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, and abusive financial practices.”

 

Rev. Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes, III, Senior Pastor of Dallas’s Friendship West Baptist Church also testified at the April hearing.

 

Said Rev. Dr. Haynes, “Payday predators hijack the hopes of the vulnerable and re-victimize them by baiting them into a debt trap…It is reprehensible that there may be a plan to open the way for old bank payday loans to re-enter the marketplace, as well as predatory high-cost bank installment loans.” 

 

Charlene Crowell is the Center for Responsible Lending’s Communications Deputy Director. She can be reached atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

August 27, 2019

Violent White Supremacists Continue to Threaten Basic Civil Rights — and Our Lives
By Jesse Jackson

NEWS ANALYSIS

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Every right we have fought for and won since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his monumental “I Have a Dream”speech 56 years ago this Wednesday is under unrelenting attack and in grave peril — from the right to drink fresh water and breathe clear air, to the right of workers to organize for better wages and safer conditions to the right to vote without interference from “enemies foreign and domestic” to the rights of women, children, the LGBTQ community and immigrants.

But it’s not just our rights that are in danger. It is our very lives. Today, when demagogues like Trump fan the fears of an “invasion” of Latinos and Blacks that he believes will erode White dominance, White supremacist violence is once more on the rise. After the horrendous mass shooting in El Paso, Texas by a White supremacist — who drove more than 600 miles to the city with the explicit purpose of slaughtering Latinos in response to the mythical “invasion” President Donald Trump and the right ranted about — new attention has been paid to the growing violence of White supremacists. In the few weeks since El Paso, six White supremacists have been arrested for plotting violent attacks.

The Anti-Defamation League reports that White extremists killed 50 people last year — people of all races.Some compare the threat posed by White supremacists here at home to the terrorist threat posed by ISIS or al-Qaida. What too often is overlooked, as MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes noted in his show last Friday, is that White terrorist violence has been part of the American experience from the beginning. Hayes notes that the first real terrorist cells in the U.S. arose after the Civil War as a response by White southerners to the freeing of slaves. When slaves became free men, the power of the White establishment in the South was threatened.The reaction was violent — with community leaders joining to create terrorist cells — most of which became known as the Ku Klux Klan.

To preserve White dominance, the Klan launched a wave of terror against Blacks and their White allies across the South, including lynching, murder,abduction and rape. Hayes cites the 2,000 murders in the state of Kansas in the lead-up to the 1868 election,designed to terrorize potential Black voters, with the explicit aim of sustaining White power.

When Ulysses S. Grant became president, Congress passed legislation in 1870 — theEnforcement Acts — that empowered the federal government to respond to the wave of terror. For the first time, the newly created Department of Justice began prosecuting the Klan in federal courts, backed by federal troops on the ground in the South. They made great progress against the Klan until a political compromise that led to the withdrawal of federal troops and the reassertion of“states’ rights.” That opened the floodgates to a wave of terrorist attacks launched by the Klan and others against Blacks that enforced apartheid across the South.

White terrorism goes hand in hand with slavery. White slave owners were in constant fear of slave revolts and on constant guard against slaves running away to seek their freedom. Slave patrol militias — made up of volunteers from the leading slave-owning families of the South — were created to police the plantations, to track down runaway slaves and to put down any insurrection. Again, violence — from whipping to murder — was employed routinely by the slave patrols.

The Second Amendment — the right of people to join militias and bear arms — was added to the Constitution in large part to protect the right of slave owners to sustain the slave patrol militias.In 1788, when Virginia met to consider ratification of the Constitution, slave owners attacked the Constitution for giving the federal government the right to organize militias.

At the time, slaves outnumbered the White population in much of eastern Virginia. James Madison wrote the Second Amendment largely to protect the rights of slave owners to enforce the reign of terror against slaves in the South. It had nothing to do with the right of individuals to bear arms, because Blacks — free or enslaved — were prohibited from owning and bearing arms across the South.

As Hayes argues, when the federal government acts to condemn and to prosecute this domestic terrorism, it can largely stamp it out. But when it fans the flames or turns its back or leaves it to the states, that terrorism can easily get out of control.Today, America is still wrestling with how and whether it will grow out of its racial divides. By fanning the flames of those divides, Trump is dangerously choosing to feed an increasingly violent White supremacist reaction.