Dec. 4, 2018

More Than 60 National Civil Rights Organizations and Stakeholders Call on Congress to Diversify Top Staff

Spencer Overton

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, along with more than 60 national civil and human rights organizations and stakeholders, has sent a letter calling on members of Congress to prioritize diversity in hiring top staff.  

"The next two months provide an amazing opportunity to address the lack of diversity among top congressional staff, as it is a time of great staff transition when new and returning Members will fill hundreds of staff openings," said Spencer Overton, President, Joint Center. "This is especially true for newly elected Members who are building an entire personal office staff, House committee Ranking Members who are transitioning to Chairs and doubling their committee staff, and new committee Chairs and Ranking Members in both chambers who are building their committee staff. New and returning Members of Congress must seize this window of opportunity to increase diversity among top and mid-level staff before it closes. Doing so will increase the ability of their offices to most effectively understand and represent their constituents back home."  

In addition to calling on Members of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate to prioritize diversity in hiring their top staff, the groups called on members to focus on diversity among their key mid-level staff openings that are "feeder" positions to the top staff positions. 

The groups also called on members to adopt practices that will increase diversity among top staff, such as the Rooney Rule (interviewing at least one person of color for every opening), creating a long term diversity plan with clear goals, and unconscious bias training for staff. The groups also pressed Members to support chamber-wide efforts to improve staff diversity, such as the establishment of an independent and bipartisan diversity office and disclosure of demographic data of staff.  

A total of 67 national organizations and diversity stakeholders signed on to the letter, including the Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, the Human Rights Campaign, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Action Network, the NAACP, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), the National Organization of Women (NOW), the National Urban League, and UnidosUS.

"This historic incoming Congress, with more Latinos, African Americans, and women representatives than ever before, has an opportunity to build a new generation of diverse government leadership. With recent votes signaling a new Speaker of the House and the election of a new Minority Leader, we urge Democratic and Republican members alike to reflect on the mandate for diversity that voters expressed in November’s election," stated Arturo Vargas, Chief Executive Officer, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund. "Through Staff Up Congress, a national initiative we launched to build a representative congressional workforce, we have seen the incredible talent waiting to be tapped firsthand. We will continue working with members and leadership on both sides of the aisle to help strengthen our democracy through diversity."  

"Diversity and inclusion is a key pillar of National Action Network's activism. From our pensions diversity campaign to our Madison Avenue Initiative, we know that representation matters," said Ebonie Riley, Washington, DC Bureau Chief, National Action Network. "We know that embracing the rich diversity of our nation and employing people of color results in better outcomes for all. With the 116th Congress being the most racially diverse in U.S. history, we urge House Leadership to hold Members of Congress accountable to hire senior staff that reflects the diversity of our nation." 

"The tapestry of America is woven from the fabric of many diverse cultures, and as the nation’s lawmaking body, it is up to Congress to not only recognize this country’s diversity but to also embrace it in the people it hires. Better governance will only come from involving diverse perspectives in decision-making," said John C. Yang, President and Executive Director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC. "Our organization represents Asian Americans who have often been marginalized when it comes to representation in government. Increased diversity in Hill staff would mean that our communities will be better represented, not only in the elected officials we vote for, but in the day-to-day work of congressional staff who help craft the critical policies that impact our communities." 

"Despite the fact that the next Congress will be the most diverse ever, African Americans and other minorities still find it very difficult to work on Capitol Hill. It is even more difficult for staffers of color to rise to senior staff positions," said Donald Cravins, Jr. Esq., Washington, DC Bureau Executive Director, National Urban League, and a former chief of staff in the U.S. Senate. "Members of Congress, especially those who represent diverse districts and states, must be called upon to recruit and promote staffers of color. Such efforts will better serve their constituents and the nation." 

The national letter comes on the heels of groundbreaking Joint Center research on the lack of diversity in Congress. In a September report, the Joint Center found that while people of color account for 38 percent of the U.S. population, they make up only 13.7 percent of all top House staff. In 2015, the Joint Center issued a similar report, Racial Diversity Among Top Senate Staff, which found that people of color accounted for only 7.1 percent of top Senate staffers.

Dec. 2, 2018

Give Us All of the Bush Record
By Richard Prince

NEWS ANALYSIS

Clarence Thomas, left, and George H.W. Bush

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Journal-isms

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The death of almost any president is an occasion for glowing tributes, the challenge being to tell the truth without offending sensibilities. And including the sensibilities of readers and viewers of color, whose recollections might not match those of the “mainstream.”

The passing of George H.W. Bush, 41st president, provides another test.

While Bush, who died Friday Nov. 30, is rightly being praised for his demeanor and character (especially in comparison to the 45th president) and such accomplishments as passage of the Americans for Disabilities Act, he is also the president who gave us Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; promoted Lee Atwater, who gave the nation the Willie Horton bogeyman; and had subordinates lure an African-American teenager to the park across from the White House to buy crack.

One-dimensional portraits do not serve the quest for truth very well; we all have our pluses and minuses. Understanding them adds to our appreciation of the human condition.

The lured teenager was Keith Jackson, who told the agents who enticed him that he didn’t even know where the White House was.

“He was the 18-year-old who was charged with (but acquitted of) selling the bag of crack that President Bush held up during a nationally televised speech on the nation’s drug problems in September 1989,” Jefferson Morley wrote in 1993 for the Washington Post.

“The idea of holding up a bag of crack had been dreamed up in the summer of 1989 by a clever speechwriter from Yale. Bush liked the idea. Phone calls went from the White House to the attorney general’s office to the Drug Enforcement Administration to the local police. The request-cum-order: Lure somebody — anybody — to Lafayette Park and buy crack cocaine from him.

“Keith Jackson, at the time, was a suspected entry-level dealer who was just starting his senior year at Spingarn High School. He lived with his mother, younger brother and grandfather on M Street NE. His friends described him as loyal, easy-going and popular with girls.

“His teachers found him pleasant and consistently gave him D’s. Keith said he wanted to be a barber. He had also sold cocaine on four occasions to undercover government agents. All the president’s men set him up as their sucker. . . .”

“Agents had been cultivating him in the hope that he could lead them to bigger players in the distribution network of Rayful Edmonds, one of the biggest drug dealers in Washington. They didn’t arrest him after the undercover buy because they really wanted a bigger dealer.

“After Bush’s speech, the agents had to abandon that plan. They feared that Jackson or somebody close to him might have seen the president talking about crack purchased in Lafayette Park and realize he had been set up. Jackson was arrested.

“Shortly thereafter, The Washington Post revealed how the crack sale had been arranged. When reporters badgered Bush about the propriety of the set-up, the president responded angrily, ‘You don’t have any sympathy for this drug guy, do you?’

“Not really. When Keith Jackson went on trial in December 1989 on five counts of selling drugs, there was not much media attention. The jury could not reach a verdict, and a mistrial was declared. He was retried in January 1990 and convicted for two of the cocaine sales to the undercover agents.

“Under the provisions of a tougher anti-drug law passed (with the vocal support of George Bush) in 1987, Judge Stanley Sporkin had no choice but to sentence Jackson to a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. Jackson is now serving his time in a federal prison in Petersburg, Va. . . .”

Thomas was chosen for the high court after Bush, a moderate-turned-conservative, was faced with a vacancy after the venerated Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice and a civil rights hero, decided for health reasons that he could no longer hold on to his seat.

“Now his worst fear was that a Republican White House, in a political move designed to disarm its liberal opponents, would replace him with a black nominee who shunned the very civil rights agenda for which Marshall had spent his life fighting,” Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson write in their 1994 book, “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.”

“Marshall had often ridiculed Clarence Thomas and his fellow conservatives as ‘the goddamn black sellouts’ who directly benefited from legal remedies such as affirmative action and then denounced them.

” ‘Marshall would shake his head in wonderment that a black man who grew up in Jim Crow Georgia, and who had benefited from a thousand affirmative actions by nuns and others, and who had attended Yale Law School on a racial quota, could suddenly find affirmative action so destructive of the character of black people,’ observed Carl Rowan, one of the few journalists to whom Marshall granted interviews. . . .”

The nomination divided African-Americans, many of whose leaders opposed Thomas but heard many in their rank-and-file urging, “give him a chance.”
Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher added in their “Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas,” published in 2007, that Republicans saw what seemed like a contradiction. “On the one hand, Bush was adamantly opposed to racial preferences.

“On the other hand, he was seeking to replace a legendary black Supreme Court justice with another African-American judge who seemed relatively junior for the job. Thomas had been on the appeals court bench, his only judicial appointment, for just fifteen months.”

Bush insisted, “The fact that he is black and a minority had nothing to do with this in the sense that he is the best qualified at this time.”

Thomas’ nomination is best known for the contentious hearings after Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Thomas and his responses that he was being subjected to “a high-tech lynching.” The White House worked to discredit Hill. He was confirmed.

In a 1992 editorial, the New York Times called Thomas the “youngest, cruelest justice.”

Lee Atwater, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, was a major architect of Bush’s presidential election victory in 1988. He died at 40 in 1991, losing a battle with a brain tumor. He was only 37 when Bush named him chairman of the Republican National Committee as a reward for managing the 1988 campaign.

In an obituary credited to “Michael Oreskes and special to the New York Times,” the Times wrote:

“Friends said Mr. Atwater spent his final months searching for spiritual peace. The man renowned for the politics of attack turned to apologies, including one to Michael S. Dukakis, the Massachusetts Governor who was the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominee.

“Mr. Dukakis was the target of a campaign advertisement about Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who escaped from the Massachusetts prison system while on a weekend furlough and raped a white woman and stabbed her husband. The advertisement became a central focus of the 1988 campaign.

” ‘In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I “would strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate,” ‘ Mr. Atwater said in the Life article.

” ‘I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not.’

“Asked today about Mr. Atwater’s apology, Mr. Bush replied: ‘I found that very interesting and very enlarging. I think as he took stock of his life, he wanted to make things right and heal some wounds, and that was a very noble thing.’ . . .”

Some are starting to call out the effusive coverage. “In this historian’s reckoning, self-interest prevailed too often over principle,” David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, wrote in an assessment Saturday for Politico Magazine.

Others will have noticed a little-publicized report from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Bush was asked to and did intercede in an attempt to shut down a federal investigation into Vice President Spiro Agnew in the Baltimore US Attorney’s office.

To others, Bush’s 1988 comment about the “little brown ones,” referring to three children of Bush’s son, Jeb, and his Mexican-born wife, Columba, resonates.
Still others recall that Condoleezza Rice, later secretary of state, arguably first became nationally known under Bush 41, when she was Soviet and Eastern Europe affairs adviser on the National Security Council. Or they recall the 1989 invasion of Panama.

Being selective in our memory is only human. As Greenberg wrote, “The urge to prettify a politician’s legacy upon his demise is understandable and in some ways reflects our finer selves. Bush’s family, friends and admirers deserve comfort in their grief.”

However, he added, “But when it comes to presidents and historical actors of consequence, we also need critical dissent. . . .”

Dec. 4, 2018

Prospective Entrepreneurs Undergo Boot Camp Training at Howard University
By Hamil Harris

Entrepreneurship students compete to answer questions during the CERRC Boot Camp at Howard. PHOTO: Katherine Gilyard/Trice Edney News Wire

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A line of prospective business leaders had only 30 seconds to make their best “elevator pitch.”

“How can you tell someone in 30 seconds or even 60 seconds or less who you are and what you do?” quizzed D. Yvonne Rivers of the American Dream Business Institute, the drill sergeant for the exercise. ‘How will they remember you?”

The CERRC Entrepreneurship Boot Camp, themed “This is How We Do It! The Nuts and Bolts of Business Ownership," was sponsored by the Cathy Hughes School of Communications (SOC) at Howard University.

“The recent Boot Camp was a phenomenal experience for students, panelists, and everyone involved in hearing directly the successes and lessons learned from a number of successful entrepreneurs,” said Dr. Gracie Lawson-Borders, dean of the SOC.

CERRC (Communications Entrepreneurship Research and Resource Center), nearly 10 years old, offers resources to support prospective entrepreneurs from all genres, but especially encourages those in communications careers to own businesses.

“The School is committed to keeping the work of the CERRC program viable, visible, and focused on supporting students,” Lawson-Borders continues. “The fruits of our efforts are shown in the ongoing support the School receives.”

The boot camp, an annual event of the CERRC program, took place in a building that was once a Wonder Bread factory filled with laborers. The newly renovated IN3 Inclusive Innovation Incubator at 2301 Georgia Ave. in NW DC, has for the past two years served as the site for the CERRC boot camp. Among other services, the Incubator – a partnership between DC Government and Howard - dedicates office, meeting and event space to growing companies and budding entrepreneurs.

The event featured successful business leaders in order to show the students and general public that they can in fact achieve their dreams of ownership. In addition to pitching their businesses, speakers presented on various aspects of business success.

North Carolina business owners Charles Hands and Marcus Howard of Engage Millennials discussed the essentials of selecting the best business partners.

“If people simply talk the talk and don’t walk the walk they are wasting your time or draining you emotionally,” said Hands. He described the productive people he looks for as “Level 3’s,” because Level 1 people are those who only talk and Level 2 associates want to do well but lack the adequate skills to do the job.

Hands, who is a lawyer, and Howard, a doctoral candidate at N.C. State University, pushed participants to be their best. Their sentiments were mirrored by other business leaders who offered their own anecdotes and models for success.

SOC alum, Shelia Eldridge, president/CEO of Miles Ahead Entertainment, the keynote speaker for the boot camp, offered three keys for a person to be successful in business: “Do not chase the money, chase your passion; Research and find a niche,” and lastly remember that “You have a partner in the government.”

Carl Brown, director of the DC Small Business Development Center (SBDC), was also among the speakers, inviting the audience to take advantage of the SBDC programs, located in the Howard University School of Business.

April Richardson, a lawyer and owner of DC Sweet Potato Cake, told people during the forum that they can engage in multiple careers. “I am always looking to maximize everything that I do,” she said, noting that the reason she became a lawyer was because “the law touches everything.”

Most outstanding during the event was that the participants obviously believed in each other and were willing to support each other. As she offered a prayer over the lunch and networking reception that followed, Hazel Trice Edney, who teaches the CERRC class, gave thanks for having an event where people poured into each other for the purpose of building businesses.

Tiffany Balmer, owner of DCEventPlanner.com, said “The biggest takeaway from the conference is that being an entrepreneur is not cute, it’s not glamorous, it’s a lot of hard work and you have to love it because it costs a lot - not just financially - but personally, you will not be able to go to all of the social activities that your friends go to but it’s worth it, if indeed this is your passion.”

Other speakers at the annual boot camp were Ron Busby, president/CEO of the U. S. Black Chamber Inc.; SOC alum Ashley Nicole Johnson of A&J PR/Consulting; Howard Jean of the Black Male Entrepreneurship Institute; and Tremain Davis of Davis Solutions Group, who focused on the “value proposition” of a business, which, in a nutshell, means what a business offers that people want enough to pay for.

Dean Lawson-Borders said the CERRC program is not only successful because of volunteers who contribute their time and talents to the students, but it has received generous financial contributions from business and community leaders.

The students of the Cathy Hughes School of Communications, which is named for the national radio and television mogul, also an SOC alum, will now have an opportunity to compete with their business plans.

“We will receive a $5,000 Dorothy Brunson award to support the first place award in our business plan competition…at the PRT (President’s Roundtable) award dinner in Baltimore,” Lawson-Borders said. She said $2,500 has been contributed from Eldridge for the second place award, and Edney of Trice Edney Communications and News Wire will sponsor the $1,000 third place award.

"Overall, the 'This is How We Do it! The Nuts and Bolts of Business Ownership' entrepreneur expo provided me with self-confidence in opening my eventual business and provided me with tips and notions to follow in order to have a successful business," wrote DeAndra Powell, a graduating senior, in an essay reflecting on the boot camp. "You should always take a risk with something you consider your dream even though you feel you might fail. In the end, it is all about having a sharp elevator pitch, knowing what your intended audience wants to receive with your business and having a solution to their problems."

Dec. 3, 2018

Two Armed Black Men, Protecting Others, Shot and Killed by Police

Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, 21, of Hoover, Ala. was shot while shielding people from a fight during which a man had been shot.

Jemel Roberson, 26, a Chicago security guard, was killed by police as he captured and subdued an active shooter.