Zimmerman Release Called 'Absolute Mockery'

By George Barnette

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

George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - After walking free for two months before he was charged, George Zimmerman's release on bond for murder charges has many people questioning the judicial system.

April 22, 2012

Black Women and the Mommy Wars

By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdeyWire.com) - When Democratic commentator Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life”, Ann Romney behaved as if she had just hit the lottery.  She smugly made the media rounds talking about how hard it was for her to raise her five sons.  And she’s right.  Stay at home moms work extremely hard to cook, clean, run a shuttle for their children and their various activities, participate in school activities like “Room Mom” and “Cookie Mom”.  How do I know, having never had chick or child?  A very dear friend, a Harvard-educated lawyer, has been mostly home with her children, one of whom is my godson, for the past decade or so, and it shows.

I digress.  Hilary Rosen misspoke when she said Ann Romney had never worked.  What she, perhaps, might have said is that Ann Romney never needed to work in the paid labor market.  Even when Mitt Romney was in graduate school, they survived by living on the returns from their investments, according to them.   So it isn’t that Ann Romney never worked, it is simply that she was never forced to.

This entire conversation is a blast from the past, reminiscent of articles that I wrote in the 1980s.  Even then this was a mostly white women’s’ conversation since few black women have or are married to the kind of wealth that would allow them to stay home.  Conservative stay home moms often say that people have to make sacrifices to stay at home, perhaps cutting out luxuries like restaurant meals and extra clothing.  But unless food is a luxury, there are black women who are in the labor market simply because they have no choice.

The official unemployment rate among African Americans is 14 percent.  The unofficial rate is more like 26 percent, and in many inner cities the black male unemployment rate is nearly 50 percent.  This is a burden to African American women who often don’t have the economic assistance they need to raise a family.  As a result of this burden, nearly 40 percent of African American children live in poverty, too often supported by a single mom (more than 40 percent of African American households are headed by women)

While there is a group of African American stay-at-home moms called Mocha Moms, and there is little data to suggest the size of the African American stay-at-home mom population, it is clear that historically, African American women had no choice but work.  I am not invoking ancient history when I reference the women who, as maids, were paid to take better care of their employer’s children than they could possibly take of their own.  And then they often paid fairly, with used clothes and leftover food substituting for cash.  Patriarchal tradition kept white women home, while white men were paid a “family wage” that was enough to support a whole family.  Such patriarchal tradition was not economically present in the African American community.  Few African American men were paid a family wage, but instead something like a subsistence wage.  Women needed to work to help keep the family together.

Until the late 1980s, the labor force participation of African American women exceeded that of white women, which means that proportionately more of us were working.   African American women’s earnings often make the difference between poverty and comfort for their families.  Mommy wars?  Give me a break.  Let’s talk about survival wars.

Even those African American families who have been blessed with higher education and “good jobs” are well aware that African Americans are “last hired, first fired”.  Too many so-called middle class families are a paycheck or two away from poverty.  Last time I checked, African American households had only 2 percent of our nation’s wealth, hardly a cushion to “fall back on”, with few investment returns to life on when no one is working.

This Tuesday was Equal Pay Day, which counts the extra days women have to work to earn as much as a man did last year.  This hits women of all races, but it may hit African American women harder.  Indeed, if African American women had an Equal Pay Day comparing their wages to those of white men, we might have to work until June 30.

We can only laugh and shake our heads at Hilary Rosen’s faux pas and Ann Romney’s smugness.  We working African American women, stay at home or in the paid labor force understand that “life for us ain’t been no crystal stair”.  Educated or uneducated, middle class or working class, the labor market has never been a level playing field for us, and our salaries show it.  Mommy wars?  We fight survival wars in the workplace and in this economy.

April 29, 2012

NC Judge: Racial Bias Influenced Death Sentence

Special to the Triice Edney News Wire from The Wilmington Journal

Judge Gregory A. Weeks

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In an historic decision, a North Carolina judge has reduced an inmate's death sentence to life without the possibility of parole because the prosecutor deliberately excluded Black potential jurors during the jury-selection phase of the inmate's trial.

Judge Gregory A. Weeks, of Cumberland County Superior Court, said in his April 20 decision that race played a ''persistent, pervasive and distorting role'' in the selection of the jury that in 1994 convicted Marcus Robinson, who is African-American, of murder and that it was clear ''prosecutors have intentionally discriminated'' against defendants in capital murder trials across the state by purposely limiting the number of blacks chosen to serve on juries.

The judge heard the case without a jury.

The decision in the closely-watched case, which prosecutors said will be appealed, is the first under the state's controversial Racial Justice Act.

That law, passed by the state legislature in 2009, allows death-row inmates or defendants facing a sentence of death to contest their sentence by using statistics and other evidence to show that racism influenced prosecutorial actions in selecting the jury or deciding to seek the death penalty.
More than 150 other inmates on North Carolina's death row have declared their intent to challenge their sentences as well.

Robinson was convicted at age 18 of the murder of a 17-year-old white youth he knew from high school. The jury in his trial was made up of nine whites, two African Americans and one American Indian. His attorneys asserted that prosecutors excluded half of the qualified black jurors compared to just 15 percent of those who were not black.

John Dickson, now a judge on the North Carolina District Court, was the lead prosecutor in the Robinson trial. During the hearings on the case in February and March he sharply denied that racial bias played any role in his conduct of the case.

The state's prosecutors have bitterly opposed the racial justice law from its inception, claiming that most often there are a complex combination of reasons why prosecutors exclude prospective jurors.

Judge Weeks' ruling was grounded in a study of prosecutorial actions in the death-penalty proceedings of all 160 of the state's death-row inmates that was released in December. The study, done by two members of the Michigan State University law school, found that over the last two decades North Carolina state prosecutors have excluded black potential jurors from capital murder juries more than twice as often as they did non-blacks. Prosecutors excluded nearly 53 percent of the black potential jurors they questioned compared to about 26 percent of the non-black ones.

The disparities persist, the report states, even when other factors that might lead to a potential juror not being considered - such as being ambivalent about the death penalty, or having been previously accused of a crime - are taken into account. Further, the disparities ''were even greater in cases involving black defendants.''

The NC Racial Justice Act was passed in August 2009 along party lines, An attempt by Republican legislators earlier this year to repeal it failed to overcome Gov. Beverly Perdue's veto.

Kentucky is the only other state with such a law, but it apparently has been used only one, during the jury selection stage of a 2003 murder trail. The defendant in that case was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

April 22, 2012

Not So Secretly Serviced!

By Dr. E. Faye Williams

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – This has been a week that embarrassed our President and our country around the world--not to mention the embarrassment and insult brought to the 32 heads of state gathered for a Summit where they had traveled to discuss business of importance to their countries. The monstrous shocker was the story of certain members who were the elite of our elite Secret Service Agency going abroad to insure the safety of President Barack Obama at the Summit. Instead of servicing the security needs for our President, they were distracted by having their own needs serviced.

Now, I know there are numerous Secret Service agents who understand what their job is, but with such discipline as we have been told agents are trained to have, one cannot help but wonder how so many went so far off the track on such a high level assignment. I believe the disrespect they have seen from certain Members of Congress, from some of the 2012 Presidential candidates, from certain talk show hosts and from so many leaders in our country who are charged with knowing better, have something to do with the shockingly reckless behavior of the agents involved in the Columbia fiasco? At no time can I understand such an elite group going rogue; yet, to date we are told over twenty agents and military personnel participated in this shameful, disgraceful act when they should have been preparing for the President’s arrival and safety. This sounds more like a plan of the many than it does an accident on the part of a few.

For men who deal with top level secrets daily, I find it impossible to believe that so many could abandon all reason and succumb to such outrageous behavior. We are told that every one of them had highly sensitive information, and could have easily been compromised while acting under the influence of alcohol or while sleeping with unknown partners. These are our elite protectors of the leader of the free world. What must the President think now when his life is in the hands of the Secret Service? What must he think about those charged with protecting his family or his Cabinet?

Homeland Security spends trillions of dollars to secure our homeland because of our concern with terrorist activity. Men, women and little children go through security searches every day. Some are even stripped searched, but most Americans tolerate it in the name of keeping America safe. Yet, our elite protective forces went to another country and abandoned all reason.

As horrifying as their collective acts of disobedience and disloyalty were, the men causing all of this embarrassment and concern would have gone unnoticed had it not been for someone among them who cared more about a $50.00 payment dispute after being personally serviced by his overnight guest, than he cared about his honor, the honor of his agency, the honor of his country—and the safety of his President. That takes my breath away!

I am not just calling for an investigation, but calling for an independent investigation because the Secret Service should not be allowed to investigate its own agency. The President of the United States deserves better than he has seen this past week. All of us should -- and as a Black American woman who has been in the struggle for years-- I feel hurt, ashamed, and outraged that the President of all America could have had his life endangered by the neglect of those he has to depend upon for his safety. Their behavior would shatter the trust level of any ordinary person. If no laws were broken, then laws must be put in place to see that this never happens again.

(Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq. is National Chair of the National Congress of Black Women. www.nationalcongressbw.org. 202/678-6788)