August 18, 2013
Mandela Still a Fighter
Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - World hero Nelson Mandela’shealth is slowly recovering buthe remains in critical condition,South Africa’s government statedSunday in its first update on hishealth in nearly two weeks.
The 95-year-old anti-apartheid leader and former South Africa president has been in a Pretoria hospital for two months for treatment of a recurrent lung infection.
“The former president is making a slow but steady improvement,” South Africa’s President said in a statement, adding Mandela still remained in a critical condition. Mandela’s youngest daughter told state broadcaster SABC that her father’s health was improving daily and he was able to sit up for minutes at a time.
Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in all-race elections in 1994 that marked the end of the apartheid system.He spent 27 years in prison under white minority rule, including18 years at the notorious Robben Island penal colony. His lung infection dates back to his time on the winds wept island, where he and other prisoners were forced to work in a limestone quarry.
All Roads Leading to D.C.: March on Washington This Weekend Reminiscent of 1963 by Hazel Trice Edney
August 19, 2013
All Roads Leading to D.C.
March on Washington This Weekend Reminiscent of 1963
By Hazel Trice Edney
(TriceEdneyWire.com) – When more than 250,000 people convened on the Washington Mall on August 28, 1963, six million people were unemployed, 22 million Americans living in poverty, voting rights for Blacks were barely-existent and the profiling of African-Americans, still dealing with vestiges of Jim Crow, was rampant.
In comparison, 50 years later, 12 million people are unemployed; 60 million Americans live in poverty, voting rights gained as a result of the march are now under attack, and the Trayvon Martin case has once again highlighted the stereotyping and profiling of African-Americans who are often labeled suspicious or otherwise just because of the color of their skin.
Therefore, as thousands reconvene this Saturday, August 24, for the 50th anniversary commemoration, called the "National Action to Realize the Dream" is expected to outline an agenda for a 21st century civil rights movement. Despite clear gains, overwhelming statistics conclude that the famous “content of their character” instead of the “color of their skin” hope expressed in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech remains elusive at best. This is the reason that the string of anniversary activities are focused on what some posters are calling “unfinished business”.
“The exact quote from A. Philip Randolph was that America could not work if six million Americans are unemployed. Okay, well, we’ve got twelve million Americans unemployed – and that’s the official number,” says economist Bill Spriggs, of the AFL-CIO. “If six million people are unemployed and 250,000 people show up when the public policy statement and the position of [President John F. Kennedy] was I am going to stimulate the economy to do whatever it takes to get the unemployment rate down to 4 percent and you currently have a President who hasn’t said anything close to that, then how many people are supposed to be in the street?”
That remains to be seen on Saturday as the vast majority of those 12 million unemployed people are African-Americans, whose 12.5 percent unemployment rate appears to be dropping; yet remains consistently twice that of Whites.
Labor leader A.Philip Randolph alongside chief organizer Bayard Rustin, was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. His exact quote in context was “We have no future in a society in which six million Black and White people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty. Nor is the goal of our civil rights revolution merely the passage of civil rights legislation. Yes, we want all public accommodations open to all citizens, but those accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them.”
That sentiment nearly mirrors the message coming from modern day civil rights leaders who have spent months tuning up their speeches for Saturday.
“Like what Dr. King, Roy Wilkins, A. Phillip Randolph and Dr. [Dorothy] Height did in 1963 led to the ‘64 Civil Rights Act and the ‘65 Voting Rights Act, what we do in this August we intend to help shape and change legislation and the body politic and the spirit of this country going forward…And we intend to address the powers in the kingdom and make change happen,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton in a June press conference announcing the march. Sharpton is considered the key organizer of Saturday’s march alongside Martin Luther King III.
“This is almost like a campaign,” Martin Luther King III has described Saturday’s march. “It is truly a continuation of being in the struggle of organizing communities around this nation – again, not just for this day…We know that in 1963 there were 22 million people living in poverty, roughly and today there are nearly 60 million - unacceptable in a nation with so much wealth and so many resources and so much ingenuity. And the only way that we can change this is creating the right climate.”
According to a press release, Sharpton and King III, will be joined by Congressman John Lewis, who spoke at the 1963 march; Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, the families of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin among others on the list of who’s who among leaders of civil rights, church, labor, women, immigration advocates and LGBT rights movements.
According to detailed information at www.nationalactionnetwork.net, the rally will begin at the Lincoln Memorial at 8 a.m., following by the march to the King Memorial.
Saturday’s events are not to be confused with a second commemorative event on Wednesday, August 28, sponsored by the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King Foundation. The Rev. Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has announced a “Let Freedom Ring Global Commemoration Celebration Call to Action” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at 1 p.m. That event will include tributes and entertainment from leaders; culminating with a “Let Freedom Ring” bell ringing at 3 p.m., she said.
The White House has announced that President Barack Obama will be speaking at the “Let Freedom Ring” ceremony on August 28, but no specific time for his appearance had been released on Monday, August 19 other than the 3 p.m. starting time.
The August 28 events are also forward-looking and underscoring the need for a continued movement.
In a press conference announcing the event, Rev. King said states are being asked to participate in the bell-ringing, “recommitting ourselves” to continue the work of freedom. “Struggle is a never-ending process,” she quoted her mother, Coretta Scott King. “We are still fighting for freedom. This is a continuation of the freedom struggle.”
It is unclear whether President Obama will respond to the specific issues that will be discussed at Saturday’s march. However, because of the looming issues of jobs and economics, the topics are in sync with the President’s current focus. He has toured the country for the past month, vision-casting on the economy.
Meanwhile leaders of the commemorative activities are seeing Saturday’s march and Wednesday’s ceremonies as only a beginning.
“It is our responsibility to challenge this nation,” said King III. “And again, that’s why we will come together in large numbers on August 24. But we will be going around to communities all over this nation over the next 24 months, mobilizing at every level bringing business leaders, community leaders, religious leaders and elected officials together to determine how we’re going to define a strategic plan that brings about that freedom, justice and equality for our communities and ultimately for our nation.”
A Dedicated Life:
Shirley Sherrod's Ongoing Battle for Racial Cooperation in Georgia
By Ryan Cooper
Shirley Sherrod
Ryan Cooper
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Almost three years ago, in late March 2010, Shirley Sherrod, who was then the USDA state director of rural development for Georgia, gave a forthright speech about her life story at an NAACP banquet. She told of how a White sheriff had lynched her cousin in 1943, how her father was killed by a White neighbor who went uncharged despite three witnesses, and how after her father's death she dedicated herself to staying in Georgia to work for change. Initially, she said, her commitment was limited to the Black community, but in 1985, her mind was changed.
That year, while Sherrod was working for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit helping Black farmers hang on to their land, Roger Spooner, a White farmer in danger of foreclosure, approached her for help. She took Spooner to a White lawyer, assuming that one of his "own kind would take care of him." But when she discovered that the lawyer would do nothing for him, she did what she could instead. Eventually, she helped Spooner to keep his farm. This was a lesson from God, Sherrod said during her NAACP speech, to teach her that it's not all about Black and White, but about poverty also. "Working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't," she said.
Andrew Breitbart, the late conservative provocateur, published a video of that speech several months later. His version had been heavily edited to remove the context and ending, making Sherrod sound as if she were baldly discriminating against a White man because of his race. Although Breitbart's reputation as a dissembler was well known, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack panicked after the video went viral. Sherrod's supervisor called her later that day while she was driving home and asked her to pull over and type her resignation on her BlackBerry. Even the NAACP denounced her without watching the tape of its own event.
The next day, the truth came out. Spooner's wife defended Sherrod on CNN, launching a full media firestorm. Vilsack called Sherrod to apologize and later offered her a high-level advocacy job in the USDA. Sherrod felt this was a "backhanded apology" and refused the new post. The president himself called as well to smooth things over.
To Sherrod, all that's old news. These days, she has returned to the work she was doing before all the publicity. She still lives with her husband, Charles, in Albany, Ga., where they raised their children and where she still spends her days working with poor and minority farmers. At the USDA, she oversaw development programs for poor rural communities, and before that she worked on the other side of the fence, for several private organizations advocating for poor and minority farmers. Now, as she explained in an interview with the Washington Monthly and in her recent autobiography, The Courage to Hope, she and her husband run two nonprofits.
The first organization is called New Communities, which was started in 1969. Back then, it was common for Blacks who participated in the civil rights movement to lose their land on legally dubious grounds. White landlords would arbitrarily evict their activist sharecroppers, and White law enforcement would imprison workers on trumped-up charges. The idea behind New Communities was to form a collective farm for those dispossessed people, modeled on the Israeli kibbutzim, so they could work their own property without interference.
They acquired 5,700 acres, becoming one of the largest Black-owned properties in the nation at the time. It was a success that did not come without caveats. Racist terrorists would occasionally strafe the farm's buildings with gunfire, and local banks still often refused financing to the community. They also faced systematic discrimination from the local and national government, especially the USDA. When drought struck in the early 1980s, the USDA refused New Communities an emergency loan for an irrigation system with no explanation, while giving loans out to white farmers in similar situations. In 1982, when New Communities sold some timber to raise cash, the USDA insisted on taking the profits from the sale before giving another loan. An arbitrator later wrote, "The payment smacks of nothing more than a feudal baron demanding additional crops from his serfs." The following year, when New Communities applied for another loan, the USDA demanded the title to their land as collateral, but then did not disburse the loan. By 1985, New Communities was forced to close its doors.
In 1997, this and other similar cases of discrimination led to an enormous class-action lawsuit against the USDA, Pigford v. Glickman. It resulted in more than $1 billion in payouts-the largest civil rights settlement to date. A 2008 bill, passed over George W. Bush's veto, expanded the criteria of who could apply for the Pigford funds, so in 2009 New Communities finally got restitution. The organization was resurrected after receiving $12.8 million. Sherrod and her husband got $150,000 each for pain and suffering.
With that money, and under Sherrod's leadership, New Communities was able in June 2011 to buy a new piece of property, called Cypress Pond. A 1,638-acre estate, complete with a colossal white-pillared antebellum mansion, it was originally owned by the largest slaveholder and richest man in Georgia. Due to the housing collapse, the price had been marked down from $21 million to $4.5 million. Sherrod plans to establish an agricultural training program there, as well as a program that will bring local Blacks and Whites together in partnership and promote racial healing. The old mansion is currently being renovated to make room for a conference center and additional meeting space. "White and black together in this area, I think it becomes the perfect place for being helpful in getting folks to get beyond race," she says. In the meantime, they're doing some actual farming. Just over the last year, they harvested $50,000 worth of pecans from previously planted trees to help defray maintenance costs.
Sherrod and her husband's second nonprofit is the Southwest Georgia Project, which helps poor farmers sell their food to local schools. While the organization is currently battling bureaucratic snags, the idea is to help local farmers increase revenue by selling to reliable local buyers while simultaneously providing healthy, fresh food to schoolchildren.
In addition to her work on these two organizations, Sherrod also received a grant in April 2011 from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. With that grant, she is working to help improve race relations and foster cooperation and partnership between Blacks and Whites in the often racially divisive region of southwest Georgia. She admits that so far it's been an uphill battle. While things are "probably a little better" than they were in the 1960s, she says, people in southwest Georgia still "kind of know their place, and that's the way it's been through the years." Institutionally, race relations have improved since the Jim Crow era, but in some ways things have gotten worse. "People can still go and sit in a restaurant, and eat. They can go and stay in a hotel somewhere. But when you look at what's happening in the school system, they've almost been re-segregated again," she said. Wilcox County High School, for example, does not have a school-supported prom, so Black students and White students organize their own proms separately. Sherrod and her colleagues are working to change that.
The irony of Shirley Sherrod's burst of fame nearly three years ago is that it had almost nothing to do with her at all. A race baiter thrust her briefly onto the national stage, where she stood accused of doing the exact opposite of what she'd spent her life doing. She has since returned to the grassroots advocacy work to which she has dedicated her life, and it's here, it seems, she'd like to stay.
Ryan Cooper is a Web Editor at the Washington Monthly. This article, the sixth of an 11-part series on race, is sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and was originally published by the Washington Monthly Magazine.