But, this Sunday morning was different.

"There was an eerie type of feeling in the air. It wasn't the same," recalled Ed Norwood, who was then only about 7 years old. "It was very dark. It wasn't as vibrant. It wasn't as joyous. And shortly after, some of the members began to create a boxing ring in the pulpit."

He recalls how they then "placed a 5-year-old boy in one corner with boxing gloves. And they placed an 8-year-old boy in another corner. And I guess the 5-year-old was a bit mischievous and by accident had caused a young girl's leg to be broken at school."

Norwood continued, "Jim, he was a punisher and an inflictor of fear. In this particular scenario, he allowed this 8-year-old to pound this 5-year-old boy for about three rounds until he was unconscious. That's probably one of the most vivid memories that I actually have in terms of what took place at Jonestown."

The fear mongering, manipulation and seduction would gradually grow far worse at the People's Temple, the name of the church, eventually permeating the atmosphere. Ed's mother, Jynona Norwood, had begun to have bad dreams, night mares and visions about a massacre for years. A traveling evangelist, she warned people - including her family - about the impending tragedy that she is convinced - even today - that God showed her before it happened.

"There were times Jynona would awake screaming in the night from the force of terrifying visions of danger that lie ahead for those planning to follow Jones," wrote noted journalist and author Dr. Barbara Reynolds. "The visions of death were made even more awful because of in reality, there were so many people telling her to stay silent and not come against such a powerful man, as Jim Jones, the pastor.

Ed Norwood, then 8 years old, had been rescued and hidden by his mother, who was convinced of the impending massacre. "I remember her coming and pulling me out of the Temple. She had one arm pulling and my family and the members of the Jones congregation are just pulling. This tug of war, this kid. She finally takes me. We go around the corner to get a sweet potato pie to go home, but all I can remember is the struggle - one side trying to keep me in. The other side trying to pull me out."

Forty years later, Ed, now 48 and also an ordained minister, vividly recalls yet another physical struggle as his mother tried to stop her mother, his grandmother, from leaving. "I remember her walking painfully to her room, following her close behind while hugging her tightly. She pulls a suitcase out and she begins to pack it to leave to a place she thought was better than America. And I never saw her again."

In a little more than a year after the child's beating in the boxing ring, the world would witness the full result of the seduction by Jim Jones. On news broadcasts around the world on November 18, 1978, people saw the horrific mounds of more than 900 bloated dead bodies of men, women and children in the deep jungle of Jonestown, Guyana, where Jim Jones had seduced and led much of his congregation to what they thought would be a utopia. The dead included 27 of Norwood's relatives, including her mother and at least 17 children. Ed never learned the fate of either boy in the boxing ring.

These children, some of whom Ed remembers as playmates - are among those to be honored on Sunday, Nov. 18, the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. The dedication will be held at 11:00 AM (PST) at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, Calif.
After years of fundraising and working to build a wall to memorialize the innocent child victims of the Jonestown massacre, Dr. Norwood has finally achieved her dream. "I've had every opposition in the world on this wall - and finally we got it done," she says.

But the moment is only bittersweet for it is just a partial victory. In that same cemetery, Jim Jones' name is listed alongside the victims on top of the mass grave in which 305 children are buried. Therefore, after the ceremony at Evergreen Cemetery is over on Sunday, the wall will be removed.

"It's a portable wall. We can't even leave it there because Jim Jones is honored there," Dr. Norwood describes. "Those children's sacred final resting place is no longer sacred as long as Jim Jones' name is there."

Her son puts it this way: "The memorial that's there now, it currently carries the name of Jim Jones. For us, we've always felt that was a dishonor to the people who died in Jonestown."

The late civil rights icon Dick Gregory was among the high profiled advocates who were outraged by the Jonestown victims sharing the memorial space with Jim Jones.
While the deaths were widely reported as a mass suicide from cyanide-laced Flavor Aide, many of the factual details remain mysteries. Many were reportedly forced to drink the punch at gunpoint. Dr. Leslie Mootoo, Guyana's chief pathologist, said the majority of the bodies had puncture wounds between their shoulder blades from the needles. U. S. Rep. Leo Ryan, the only congressman believed to be assassinated in the line of duty, was among five who were shot and killed at the Port Kaituma airstrip as they tried to leave Guyana after checking on reports that people were being held against their will.

The messages of those preparing to speak at the 40th Anniversary Memorial Service will no doubt carry visionary force.

"It's important that we never, ever forget and learn how to arm ourselves with that which is truth, justice and good," said Martin Luther King III, the keynote speaker for the event. "This memorial creates the consciousness so that we never ever forget about those - in particular the innocent children - who had no choice."

Dr. E. Faye Williams, national chair of the National Congress of Black Women, another speaker at the event, also reflects on the tragedy of the dead children. "The job of adults is to protect our children. Since that did not happen with these children, the least we can do is memorialize them in the hope that such a thing could never happen again. The lesson learned from the Jonestown tragedy is to be careful of who you follow no matter what they promise."

Even as she continues to advocate for a permanent memorial, Dr. Norwood says she will advocate for Jim Jones name to be removed from Evergreen Cemetery even as she continues to seek a location for a permanent memorial.

She also wants to raise public awareness about the depth of deception by Jim Jones. "The public at large believes that these were a bunch of dumb people who followed Jim Jones and willfully murdered their children. Firstly, they did not know they were in a cult. Nobody gets up and says, 'Today I'm going to join a cult.' They joined a church that ended up being a cult."

She continued, "The survivors that I spoke to that escaped said they could hear the gunshots as they were running through the jungle. I think it's important that we never forget the innocent children who lost their lives at Jonestown. But even the adults were only there because they believed the lies of Jim Jones."

Nov. 12, 2018

Democrats Need a Plan That Goes Beyond Responding to Trump’s Outrage of the Day
By Jesse Jackson

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - With majority control in the House of Representatives, Democrats have an enormous opportunity — and face a distinct peril. The opportunity is to lay out in hearings and in legislation a long-overdue change agenda for America. The peril is they’ll get caught responding to President Trump’s outrage a day, focus on pursuing his corruption, his taxes, his payoffs, his fulminations and unending lies. The latter fixates the media. The former serves the American people.

No doubt, Democrats have to defend the democracy, ensure that Trump is not able to obstruct the investigation of Russian interference. Democrats, however, have to walk and chew gum at the same time, and that requires laying down a clear agenda for change.

The needs for reform are apparent. Democrats gained popular favor running on extending and defending health care and on democracy reform, including reviving the Voting Rights Act, curbing big money in politics, automatic voter registration, ending gerrymandering and a rollback of the voter suppression techniques that have spread across the country.

The reform manifesto is far broader than that. Democrats should stand for raising worker wages — a $15 minimum wage, mandatory overtime for those earning $70,000 or less, labor law reform to protect workers right to organize. A major investment in a Green New Deal, generating good jobs while moving rapidly to meet the threat posed by catastrophic climate change and modernizing our decrepit infrastructure, needs to be detailed and pushed. Student loan debt continues to hit new records, even though enrollment in colleges has dropped.

A good public education from pre-K through college or advanced training should be available to every child in America. Democrats need a plan for reviving the impoverished ghettos and barrios of urban America and the devastated small towns and red-lined regions of rural America. Simple steps for building equal justice for all are also needed.

Trump campaigned by rousing fears of a fake “invasion” of immigrants, yet most Americans continue to believe immigrants are more beneficial to America than costly. Comprehensive immigration reform should be on the table, with the first easy steps to protect the DACA children — the children of undocumented workers raised here who know no other country — and to end the grotesque policy of putting babies in cages separated from their parents. Criminal justice reform — there was once a bipartisan accord on ending imprisonment of non-violent offenders and on reforming discriminatory police practices — is long overdue.

The repeated mass shootings should, at the very least, allow the revival of the ban on the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons that were designed for military use. Americans elected Trump to shake things up, after he promised that he would be the champion of working people. Then he larded tax cuts on the rich, creating deficits that Republicans use to justify cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

He turned his administration over to Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists. They did not deregulate, then re-rigged the rules to favor their entrenched interests. With fires and floods wracking America, Trump cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans. With mass shootings horrifying the nation, Trump sided with the gun lobby to block reforms.

With wages still stagnant, Trump opposed lifting the minimum wage and his Supreme Court nominee provided the deciding vote to gut unions for teachers, nurses, police officers and other public employees. Americans did not elect Democrats to harass Donald Trump personally. They elected them to hold his administration accountable to law and to push for reforms that will address the challenges they face in their lives.

Yes, Democratic reforms will likely be blocked by a Republican Senate or vetoed by the president. But they can show Americans that there is an alternative, if only Trump and the Republican Senate would get out of the way.

Nov. 13, 2018

NAACP: Mississippi Candidate’s 'Public Hanging' Remark is Sick, Shameful
By Hazel Trice Edney

Republican Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith

Democratic U. S. Senatorial Candidate Mike Espy

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The NAACP has issued a stinging rebuke to Republican Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who recently invoked a reference to a “public hanging” amidst her campaign against African-American Democratic candidate Mike Espy.

Referring to a glowing endorsement from Mississippi cattle rancher Colin Hutchinson, Hyde-Smith said, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” The remarks drew laughter and applause, but she apparently did not know the comments were being videotaped by journalist Lamar White Jr.

After public release of the video, Hyde-Smith issued a statement saying, "In a comment on Nov. 2, I referred to accepting an invitation to a speaking engagement. In referencing the one who invited me, I used an exaggerated expression of regard, and any attempt to turn this into a negative connotation is ridiculous."

She has refused to make any further comment or apologize for the remark, which clearly invokes painful images of thousands of Black people who were lynched or killed by White supremacists in the Deep South with Mississippi being a leading offender.

The highest number of lynchings in the U. S. took place in Mississippi from 1882-1968 with 581, according to the NAACP. “Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493,” says a report by the civil rights organization, adding that 79 percent of lynching happened in the South.

Among the best known killings of Black people by White supremacists, Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, occurred in Money and Jackson, Mississippi respectively.

Further exacerbating the impact of Hyde-Smith’s remark is the fact that she has been endorsed by President Donald Trump, who has made no public comment on the issue.

“Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s shameful remarks prove once again how Trump has created a social and political climate that normalizes hateful and racist rhetoric. We’ve seen this in Florida from Ron DeSantis and others during this election season and denounce it,” said NAACP President Johnson in a statement.

Ron DeSantis, Republican nominee for Flordia governor, also drew a fire storm of criticism when he said in a television interview that Florida voters should not “monkey this up” by electing Andrew Gillum, his opponent, who would be the state’s first black governor. That campaign is amidst a recount.

“Hyde-Smith’s decision to joke about ‘hanging,’ in a state known for its violent and terroristic history toward African Americans is sick. To envision this brutal and degenerate type of frame during a time when Black people, Jewish People and immigrants are still being targeted for violence by White nationalists and racists is hateful and hurtful,” Johnson said. “Any politician seeking to serve as the national voice of the people of Mississippi should know better. Her choice of words serves as an indictment of not only her lack of judgement, but her lack of empathy, and most of all lack of character.”

Espy himself has released a statement calling Hyde-Smith’s comments “reprehensible” and saying, “They have no place in our political discourse, in Mississippi, or our country. We need leaders, not dividers, and her words show that she lacks the understanding and judgment to represent the people of our state.”

Joining the rebuke of Hyde-Smith, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson described her comments as “beyond disrespectful and offensive.” He pointed out that Mississippi has “one of the highest numbers of public lynching, that we know of, than any other state in this country.”

Hyde-Smith has refused to speak further on the issue, saying, “I put out a statement yesterday, and that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

It is not clear how or whether this new controversy will affect her Nov. 27^th run-off against Espy. They both received about 41 percent of the vote in a four-way race Nov. 6. Espy, a former member of the U. S. Congress who served from 1987 to 1993, would become the first black senator to represent Mississippi since Reconstruction.

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States.  Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were Black.  The Blacks lynched accounted for 72.7 percent of the people lynched. These numbers seem large, but it is known that not all of the lynchings were ever recorded. Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 White people were lynched. That is only 27.3 percent. Many of the Whites lynched were lynched for helping the Black or being anti-lynching and even for domestic crimes.

Nov. 12, 2018

 

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Neglects Duty to Enforce Military Lending Act

By Charlene Crowell

 

Ricky Griffin, Louisiana American Veteran's Association

 

Melissa Bryant, veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan 

 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Although predatory lending often conjures up images of an economically blighted Urban America, seldom does the image of an enlisted man or woman come to mind. But just as check cashing stores, along payday and auto title loan shops focus on communities of color, America’s military is also a frequent target.

 

For years and near military installations across the country, a profusion of predatory lenders plied their wares, capturing our service men and women into the same web of debt trap loans that ensnared Black and Latino civilians.

 

By 2006, a Department of Defense (DoD) report that delved into predatory lending practices against the nation’s armed services shared how the financial stress wrought affected military readiness. The report shared how predatory lending resulted in multiple negative effects. From “undermining troop readiness” and morale, to even the revocation of security clearances essential to military operations.

 

In part the report stated, “Most of the predatory business models take advantage of borrower’s inability to pay the loan in full when due and encourage extensions through refinancing and loan flipping. These refinances often include additional high fees and little or no payment of principal.”

 

In reaction, to the DoD report, Congress enacted with bipartisan support the Military Lending Act (MLA). Drawing from the report’s recommendations, new military protections assured: a 36 percent interest cap for all costs associated with lending; included both military members and their families; and banned extensions of payday and auto title loans, or other types of predatory credit.

 

By 2010 the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) gave the nation for the first time, a full-time consumer cop on the block, dedicated to financial fairness over a wide range of services and products. In 2012, the National Defense Authorization Act authorized the CFPB to enforce the MLA.  That legislative move enabled CFPB to use its authority to protect servicemembers.

 

Soon thereafter, veterans, military members, and their families took more than 72,000 lending complaints to the direct attention of the CFPB.  Under the leadership of the Bureau’s first director, CFPB returned more than $130 million to the military community.

 

For several years, the CFPB conducted proactive supervision to verify that financial companies were honoring their obligations under the MLA – to not rip off our troops. Furthermore, the MLA itself was strengthened by DoD policy, which closed loopholes that lenders had been exploiting to rip off our servicemembers.

 

Despite this multi-year drumbeat of consumer concern at the federal level, this year the current Acting Director of the CFPB recoiled from Dodd-Frank’s statutory duty to veterans. Instead of continuing its inclusion of MLA in CFPB supervisory examinations, earlier this year Mick Mulvaney, CFPB’s Acting Director claimed that the agency has no such legal authority.

 

In reaction, a bipartisan contingent of 33 state attorneys general (AGs) directly expressed their concerns regarding CFPB’s abdication of duty to the armed services. Representing coast-to-coast diversity in geography as well as economies were AGs who wrote on behalf of consumers from New England’s Vermont, to the mid-Atlantic’s North Carolina, the Midwest heartland of Illinois and Ohio, the Deep South’s Mississippi, westward to Colorado’s Rocky Mountain, and the most populous state, California.

 

“[W]e are perplexed by reports indicating that the CFPB has determined that it needs further statutory authority in order to conduct examinations for MLA violations,” wrote the AGs. “We are also disappointed to learn that CFPB did not consult the Defense Department in developing its new examination policy, even though Congress specified that the Defense Department – not the CFPB – is the primary federal agency responsible for interpreting the MLA.”

 

“By eliminating the proactive examination of compliance to correct problems before they affect servicemembers, however, your proposal will limit the CFPB’s protection of servicemembers to reactive enforcement when servicemembers submit complaints,” added the AGs.

 

Nor were governmental officials the only ones to speak up in defense of the MLA.

 

The Consumer Federation of America (CFA), an association of nonprofit interests that together have used a combination of education, research and advocacy to protect consumers since 1968, released a report that challenges CFPB to “Protect Those Who Protect America”. Written by Christopher L. Peterson, CFA’s Director of Financial Services, it rejects Mulvaney’s interpretation, and itemizes specific directives and requirements that together pose a legal argument that would be difficult to deny or disprove.

 

“For some inexplicable reason, the Trump Administration is directing the CFPB to overlook illegal, usurious lending to our troops within supervisory exams,” said Peterson. “America’s military families deserve the protection from predatory lending offered by the Military Landing Act – not to be abandoned by the CFPB.”

 

Veterans are also expressing their own heartfelt concerns about the unexpected reversal of consumer protection.

 

In a recent blog, Melissa Bryant, a member of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans also spoke up.

 

“We know that servicemembers are four times more likely to be targeted by predatory lenders and are in desperate need of stringent oversight and protection measures from fraud,” said Bryant. “If you need further proof, just look down the main drag of any street leading into a military post, full of payday lenders and car dealerships who prey upon young troops with little or no credit, but a steady paycheck to spend.”

 

And in a recent town hall convened by CFPB in Baton Rouge, a Commander with the state’s branch of the American Legion faced off with Mulvaney.

 

Speaking on behalf of veterans, Ricky Griffin told the Acting Director, “Both the Pentagon and the American Legion are extremely worried about your proposal to pull back on enforcing the Military Lending Act. . . With the military currently unable to make its recruitment numbers this year, I think it is wrong for your agents to back off of any enforcement of the Military Lending Act…Why single out military service members?”

 

Mr. Griffin and all of America’s military deserves an answer.

 

Charlene Crowell is the Center for Responsible Lending’s Communications Deputy Director. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..