Civil Rights Leaders Lament ‘Unfinished Business’ on MLK Holiday
By Hazel Trice Edney

Barbara Arnwine, president, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

Lorraine Miller, president, NAACP

U. S. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), chair, Congressional Black Caucus

Robert Trumka, president, AFL-CIO

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – As millions of people around the nation enjoyed the day off on Monday - many volunteering or commemorating the Martin Luther King birthday holiday with educational activities - civil rights leaders issued clarion calls that America faces “substantial unfinished business.”

“Without a doubt, there’s substantial unfinished business ahead of us as a nation, particularly on issues like voting rights and political empowerment, health inequities, employment, and asset-building,” said a statement from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “Regrettably, some 45 years since his assassination, there’s clear evidence that many of Dr. King’s goals have yet to be achieved.”

The Joint Center, a think tank for national Black politics and economics, recently issued a report declaring “there is strong statistical evidence that politics is re-segregating, with African Americans once again excluded from power and representation. Black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the Civil Rights era.”

The extent of the outcries from rights leaders seem to have reached epic proportions. Barbara Arnwine, president/CEO of The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, issued a two- page essay on Monday, the first of what she said would be a series of statements in response to the King Holiday this week. She pointed to the 50^th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s vision for a “Great Society” and among the greatest indicators of unfinished business.

“This vision of a ‘Great Society’ reflected Dr. King’s dream of economic prosperity, and established many programs that have significantly reduced poverty, including the Social Security Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the nation’s first food stamp program to combat hunger, notably African American poverty dropped from a height of 56 percent in the 1960s to approximately 31 percent today,” Arnwine pointed out. “However, 50 years later, these very programs that resulted in profound improvements in quality of life for the needy are being declared failures to be terminated, despite their gains. In President Johnson’s 1965 speech on passage of the Voting Rights Act, he made clear that ending poverty is part of the campaign for human rights…We have made great strides in reducing abject poverty, but too many families remain unable to make ends meet.”

Civil rights leaders, who specialize on various issues, point to vast inequalities indicating the need for multiple strategies.

“Sadly in 2014 the ugly specter of racial injustice still haunts every aspect of American society,” Arnwine continued. “Fifty years later, the inequality Johnson described has persisted in unemployment and increased through homelessness in communities of color, communities both urban and rural, and for too many children and seniors. We have dismantled formal school segregation, but continue to struggle with providing a quality education to all. Informal segregation in housing further impacts our ability to provide educational opportunities. There are no longer poll taxes or literacy tests, but in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, jurisdictions have enacted new discriminatory barriers to voting. We must honor Dr. King’s vision of a society free of racial discrimination and poverty by examining how efforts to solve those problems must be improved.”

The strategies are as vast as the problems themselves.

“We'll march for it.  We'll sing for it.  We'll shout for it and stand for it, when it's easy and when it's hard, and the harder it is, the louder we'll sing, and the longer we'll stand!” proclaimed AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, speaking in San Antonio, Texas on Monday.

Reflecting on the words of the civil rights anthem, “We shall overcome someday,” Trumka thundered to the crowd, “The 99 percent need that new day now - the 10 million jobless workers.  College graduates loaded with debt, and their parents, who want to retire but can’t. We need that day now - because too many people who work for a living are pursuing dreams that just keep getting farther away!  And so we are here to celebrate the dream of Dr. King, on a day when the dreams of too many of us are slipping from our fingers!

Meanwhile, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio) released a statement in which she questioned how Dr. King would respond to the conditions of today.

“I believe Dr. King would applaud the progress we have made toward racial and social equity, but he would strongly caution us about the shrinking equality of opportunity currently plaguing our world,” Fudge said. “He would question our nation’s persistently high unemployment rate, particularly for African- Americans. He would ask why Congress couldn’t agree on extending unemployment insurance to the long-term unemployed - the people who need it the most. Dr. King would ask why millions of Americans continue to live in poverty and seek work while corporations post billions in record profits. He would call for individuals to be paid wages that would prevent them from falling below the poverty line.”

She concluded, “If he were alive today, Dr. King would certainly be proud of who we are, but he would also say that we must commit to move forward together as one nation, we must not rest on our progress, there is still much work to be done.”

Regardless of the strategies it will take to move forward, NAACP Interim President/CEO Lorraine C. Miller says it must include Americans from all niches of society – following King’s example - in order to make serious progress.

“Of the chance to serve, Dr. King once said: Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve,” Miller said. “You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And serve, he did. Dr. King was a leader in service to others, to the causes of civil and human rights, and to making the United States a great nation—for all.”

Jan. 19, 2014

As We Commemorate Dr. King, Remember, It’s Up To Us!  
By Dr. Wilmer J. Leon, III

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “…and I come here tonight and plead with you…nobody else can do this for us; no document can do this for us; no lincolnian emancipation proclamation can do this for us; no kennesonian or johnsonian civil rights bill can do this for us; if the negro is to be free, he must move down into the inner resources of his own soul and sign with a pen and ink of self-asserted manhood his own emancipation proclamation.” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As we commemorate the birth of Dr. King and honor the passing of Mr. Nelson Mandela in the shadow of mass incarceration, Stop and Frisk, driving while black, or in the context of Trayvon Martin, walking while black, disproportionately high rates of high school drop outs, record home foreclosures, and so many other maladies in our community we have to come to the realization that it’s up to us.

When you walk outside of your house, or drive your kids to school, or yourself to work, and you see the human decay and suffering around you, the question has got to be what are we going to do?  It’s up to us.

Are you ready to move down into the inner resources of your own soul and sign with a pen and ink of self-asserted personhood your own emancipation proclamation and proclaim, not on my watch, not in my house, not in my child’s school, not in my neighborhood?  It’s up to you!

Please don’t think that I’m some ultra-conservative, some libertarian saying that there’s no place in this process for the government. We need the government both state and national to pass the legislation and provide the resources to assist our communities in solving these problems.  The reality is that their not coming.  The cavalry is not coming; we are going to have to circle the wagons and save ourselves.

Look at what’s happening in Congress right now, 8% unemployment and 16% in the African American community – worst national depression since the Great Depression and Congress has allowed the unemployment benefits of the long-term unemployed to lapse.  They have gone into recess failing to reinstate expired jobless benefits for more than 1.3 unemployed Americans.  Too many Conservatives just don’t care.

As they debate the Farm Bill the Republican led Congress is looking to cut Food Stamps or what is now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP by $40B over the next decade.  According to Mother Jones, these efforts by Conservatives would “...boot 2.8 million people off the program next year. That includes 170,000 veterans, who would be removed through a provision in the bill that would eliminate food stamps eligibility for non-elderly jobless adults who can't find work or an opening in a job training program.”

Doctors warn that cuts in food stamps could have tremendous longer term heath implications.  Over time poorer Americans will experience spikes in the rates of diabetes and developmental problems in poorer children.  Conservatives rather transfer public dollars into private hands; save banks and corporations with poor taxpayer’s dollars.

The African American community has been in this struggle, this war for equality for a long time. I think too many of us have forgotten what for us has been at the crux of the issue.  Many believe it’s economic, others believe it’s civil rights or legal.  Both of these are important and play a role in improving our circumstance but what we’ve been struggling for all of this time is our humanity!  Since those first 20 and some odd “African indentured servants” disembarked from that Dutch Man O’ War off the shores of Jamestown, VA in 1619 (395 years ago) we’ve been struggling to be considered human.

Examine the founding documents of this country and trace the development of our laws.  From the act addressing the causal killing of slaves from 1669 that stated “if any slave resists his master and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die…the master should be acquitted from the molestation, since it cannot be presumed that prepense malice should induce any man to destroy his own estate.” – We were property, not human – part of the estate. Look at the Three-Fifths Compromise, Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution or the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857). Chief Justice Taney wrote, Negros were considered at the time the Constitution was drafted as a “subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”

With the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 African Americans put their trust in the franchise and the political process. Then the very entity charged with protecting our rights diluted them with the 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito. They determined that “things have changed dramatically” in the South in the nearly 50 years since the Voting Rights Act was signed in 1965.  Have they really? Maybe they have for Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas but not for most of us.  I wonder if Justice Thomas’ people in Pin Point Georgia would agree with his assessment that things have changed dramatically?

We have been and continue to be struggling for our humanity. We need the government to assist us in solving these problems.  The problem is their not coming.  The cavalry is not coming; we are going to have to circle the wagons and save ourselves.  Our politics are going to have to mature.  We have to move away from the politics of pigment and personality to the politics of policy.

As we commemorate the birth of Dr. King we are going to have to awaken from what mainstream American media has convinced us was Dr. King’s “Dream” and stay focused on solving the realities of our nightmare.  We are going to have to circle the wagons and save ourselves.

In his last book “Where Do We go From Here; Chaos or Community?” Dr. King the realist wrote, “The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap.  The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates.  There are no expenses, and no taxes are required for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites…The real cost lies ahead.  The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact (the Tea Party)…Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls.  The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.”

That’s the Dr. King that mainstream America won’t celebrate on Monday!  It’s up to us!

Dr. Wilmer Leon is the Producer/ Host of the Sirius/XM Satellite radio channel 110 call-in talk radio program “Inside the Issues with Leon” Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. www.twitter.com/drwleon and Dr. Leon’s Prescription at Facebook.com

Jan. 19, 2014

Man Ordered to Stand Trial in Killing of Black Motorist Seeking Help
By Frederick H. Lowe

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from TheNorthStarNews.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Theodore Wafer, a Dearborn Heights, Mich., man on Wednesday was ordered held over for trial on second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the deadly shooting of an African-American motorist who knocked on his door seeking help, following an automobile accident.

Wafer, who has admitted to killing Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old Detroit woman, was arraigned before Wayne County, Mich., Court Judge Qiana Lillard. His jury trial is scheduled to begin June 2, 2014.

The 54-year-old Wafer shot his gun through a locked screen door, wounding Hunt in the head after she pounded on his door seeking help on November 2. Police responding to a 911 call found her body on Wafer's front porch.

Wafer said through his attorney he believed Hunt was attempting to break into the home, where he lived with his elderly mother, but Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said there were no signs of attempted forced entry. Wafer  has pled not guilty to the charges.

He remains free on bond.

McBride was the second Black motorist shot to death iin 2013 while seeking help following an automobile accident.

In September, Randall Kerrick, a cop with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC) Police Department, shot to death Jonathan Ferrell, who was seeking help after he had been in a traffic accident.

Ferrell, 24, knocked on the door of a woman homeowner. She panicked, fearing he was a burglar. She called the police. When Kerrick and two other police officers arrived, Ferrell ran toward them his arms outstretched, apparently thinking they were there to help him.

They weren’t.

Kerrick fired his pistol 12 times, wounding Ferrell 10 times, killing him instantly. 

On Monday, Christopher Chestnutt, the attorney for Ferrell's family, sued Kerrick, Police Chief Rodney Monroe, the county and city of Charlotte over Ferrell's death. Police charged Kerrick with voluntary manslaughter.

Roy Cooper, North Carolina's Attorney General, issued a statement on Monday in which he said he would seek an indictment of voluntary manslaughter against Kerrick before the Mecklenburg Grand Jury.

Jan. 19, 2014

Congressional Black Caucus Faces Tough Battles in 113th Congress

By Zenitha Prince

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