Michelle Obama Announces Her Commencement Address Schedule

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

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A Black university in North Carolina whose students played a key role in the civil rights movement is part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s scheduled stops for graduation addresses, the White House announced this week.

She is to deliver the commencement address at North Carolina A &

University May 12 in Greensboro, N.C., in an appearance that recognizes the “rich legacy of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that have been instrumental in educating generations of African Americans,” a White House spokesman said.

A&T students were among the first college students to stage sit-in demonstrations in the early moments of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The day before the first lady is to speak to the 1,000 A&T graduates, she will deliver the commencement remarks May 11 at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., where 5,000 degree-earners are to be recognized.

The White House said the first lady is “inspired by the resilience of the student body and community coming together to support each other in difficult times,” referring to the way the institution has recovered from the April 2007 massacre in which 33 students were shot to death by a deranged student.

Her third stop is June 17 at Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, Ore., where the first lady’s brother, Craig Robinson, is basketball head coach. An estimated 3,000 students are to be awarded degrees.

OSU has been recognized for its efforts to address childhood obesity. University researchers have worked to identify factors that lead to childhood obesity and are developing prevention programs for school districts, parents and health care providers to help improve children’s’ health.

April 1, 2012

From Martin to Martin

By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) -- As we approach April 4^th, the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, we’re looking at the murder of Trayvon Martin. We’re as outraged now as we were over the murder of Dr. King. We’d begun to think racial hatred had subsided a bit.  We weren’t naive enough to believe it had ended, but 2008 raised our hope that things were slowly getting better.

Two years later, racial hatred blew in from nowhere!  The Tea Party made no secret about its intention to set us back to the bleakest days when African Americans were unwelcome after slavery and sharecropping.  An often heard phrase is, “We’re taking back our country”.  It is clear to us what that means.  As hatred escalated, not only were African Americans targeted, but so were Hispanics and women. The hatred has come to a boiling point.

When Trayvon was murdered, rallies around the country seem to indicate that some have decided not to take it anymore.  I’ve attended rallies and witnessed others around the country. I see a new determination on the part of people to speak out against the evil that’s been lurking around us for a very long time. People appear to be ready to stand up and fight back.

Knowing he’d be criticized by the lunatics promoting all this hatred, President Barack Obama, spoke out regarding the murder of Trayvon. True to form, Rush Limbaugh blasted him for saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”.  Rush missed the fact that thousands of Americans were saying the same thing and thought of their own children when Trayvon, walking home from the store with Skittles and iced tea, was presumed to be a criminal because of the color of his skin.  It was easy for Rush to say, “It is the least important thing, what the kid looks like” because he never had to leave home and have his mother fear he might not return. Yet, so many African mothers still know that fear, and were right to worry because many of their sons, like Trayvon, never returned.

Racial profiling is real.  Both Martins were murdered as a result of racial profiling. There’s no other explanation.  The explanation given by the police department has astounded us.  Every piece of evidence leaked out or publically supplied confirms what we already knew.  Trayvon was racially profiled and there’ve been a lot of attempts to cover up the crime.

There are more questions than answers.  Why was Trayvon’s body kept for 3 days without notifying his family he had been killed?  Did it take the police that long to manufacture a self defense claim for Zimmerman?  So much evidence is available to prove that Zimmerman pursued Trayvon.  Zimmerman had the gun and had a problem with a young Black man being in the neighborhood. 

Trayvon was unarmed.  The “Stand Your Ground” defense belonged to Trayvon.  The police never did a thorough search of Zimmerman, never tested him for drugs or alcohol, or kept his jacket or gun for evidence.  They allowed him to walk away, pretending no crime had been committed.  Why was the state’s attorney in the Sanford police station that night? Was he there to help with the cover-up?  If it were raining that night, why would water on Zimmerman’s jacket be significant to prove he’d been pushed to the ground?  Are we asked to believe a big man like Zimmerman could be wrestled to and held on the ground by the much smaller Trayvon? 

We’ve never learned who murdered Dr. King.  Here we are many years later, knowing who murdered Trayvon, but no arrest.  Has anything really changed regarding murdering Black men from Martin in 1968 to Martin in 2012?

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

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As the 2012 presidential election campaign begins to take shape, it is way past time for we African Americans to carefully scrutinize the very influential Conservative Movement in this country. It is probably the nation’s single most powerful political force, one that has nearly taken complete control of political discourse.

The best way to begin this scrutiny is to pay close attention to observations made by European American William F. Buckley, Jr. and African American George Schuyler, both of whom had dismissive attitudes toward us as a people.

Buckley, who is considered the Godfather of modern American conservatism, made the following observation in a December 30, 1991 issue of his publication, National Review: “Now ethnic sensitivities vary. It doesn’t matter what John Cheever or John O’Hara or John Updike or anybody else writes about them – you cannot really succeed, in America, in riling the WASPs. Their sense of security is as solid as Plymouth Rock, and incidentally as insensate. Blacks, yes, are sensitive, but black lobbies are not powerful enough to punish nonpolitical transgressors against such taboos. (A black book-buyers’ boycott against a novelist would not impoverish.) If the spoken or written offense is egregious enough, as in the case of the joke told [in 1975] to John Dean by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, a Cabinet officer gets fired. If a district attorney is named to a federal judgeship and it is revealed that he once made a pot-valiantly genial reference to the Ku Klux Klan, he can be defeated on the floor of the Senate. And no one running for office in a state in which the black population is significant would consider, post 1965, violating the taboo. On the other hand, there is discussion of such questions as relative black intelligence, sexual promiscuity, and upward mobility that still gets a sober hearing in sober surroundings. About the American Indians one can say most things with impunity; about gays, progressively less as, emerging from the closet, they consolidate and give strength to their retaliatory powers.”

The statement was made in a long article, “In search of Anti-Semitism,” in which Buckley responded to criticism of his publication for publishing an article regarded by many as anti-Semitic written by one of his writers. Considering Buckley’s above statement, it’s for certain he would not have felt the need to respond to an anti-black article by one of his writers.

Schuyler a journalist and author who is often cited as the Godfather of Black Conservatism made his observation in his book, Black and Conservative. The first three sentences in the book state that “A black person learns very early that his color is a disadvantage in a world of white folks. This being an unalterable circumstance, one also learns very early to make the most of it. So the lifetime endeavor of the intelligent Negro is how to be reasonably happy though colored….”

Further expressions of Schuyler’s sentiments are reflected by quotes attributed to black conservatives, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (If I ever went to work for the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) or did anything directly connected with blacks, my career would be on irreparably ruined. The monkey would be on my back because I’m black. People meeting me for the first time would automatically dismiss my thinking as second rate.) and economist, Thomas Sowell (Black Students with SAT scores of 1000 should not consider going to any black college because they will be educationally mis-matched).

Fortunately for us, the self-defeating sentiments of Schuyler, Thomas and Sowell were not shared by our 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century ancestors who fought heroically against the proponents of white supremacist/racist terrorism.

Journalist/Lecturer A. Peter Bailey, a former associate editor of Ebony, is currently editor of Vital Issues: The Journal of African American Speeches. He can be reached at 202-716-4560.

April 1, 2012

Renew the Movement to Fight for Civil Rights
By Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - We mourn Trayvon Martin, the young African-American who, armed only with candy and a soft drink, was shot dead for the offense of “walking while black.”

George Zimmerman, the vigilante who shot him, has not been arrested, apparently protected by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which “authorizes” anyone to shoot someone whom he or she feels is threatening.

This surely is a test of our faith. Faith, the Bible tells us, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For decades, African Americans risked their lives if they walked in certain neighborhoods. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., however, had a different dream. And he helped build a movement to achieve the “substance of things hoped for.”

Now we must choose: We will decide if Trayvon Martin’s death is a moment, or becomes the spark for a movement. We can’t bring him back. But we can make his voice louder in death than it could be in his short life.

Emmett Till’s murder sparked a movement. After he was brutally beaten, his mother put him in an open casket to show the horror that he had endured. Although he was crucified as a warning to others who might demand freedom, his murder gave some the courage to join the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks remembered. When I asked her why she decided to risk being beaten, jailed or worse by refusing to move to the back of the bus, she said, “I thought about Emmett Till and couldn’t go back.”

When King was assassinated in Memphis, it triggered a 40-year journey of progress, culminating in the election of an African American to the presidency.

Yet, that achievement is misleading. Athletes are cheered by fans of all races. Oprah Winfrey is trusted by viewers across lines of race. In a shining moment, Barack Obama is elected. But behind the klieg lights, we have a long way to go. The action in the spotlights has blinded us to the realities Trayvon Martin’s tragic death exposes.

African-Americans are still too often victims of vigilante justice. African-Americans are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be charged, more likely to be jailed for a nonviolent offense. A private, profit-making prison-industrial complex now lobbies for harsher sentences — and minorities are disproportionately the victims.

African Americans were more likely to be steered to risky subprime loans, more likely to pay high interest on auto loans, more likely to find it hard to get financing for businesses.

Over the past 30 years, opportunity has narrowed. Incomes for non-college-educated men fell, as labor unions were crushed and the exporting of good jobs undermined wages. More young people, disproportionately minorities, found themselves priced out of college or forced to go deeply in debt to gain the education they earned.

We must go from moment to movement and struggle to gain the substance of things hoped for. What do we hope for? A fair and healthy start for every child. An end to Stand Your Ground laws and vigilantes. Quality public education for everyone. Full employment and an end to discrimination that results in an African-American jobless rate twice that of whites.

Given the realities beneath the klieg lights, we need a new Kerner Commission to report on the status of race and discrimination in 21st century America. We need a renewed Civil Rights Commission that issues an annual report detailing our progress — or our regression — in racial relations.

We have to decide. Let us take a moment to grieve for Trayvon Martin, whose life was so brutally taken from him. Then let us move from moment to movement, and revive the struggle for a more perfect Union.