HIV rates remain high in the black community

Feb. 18, 2018

New Study: U. S. Schools are Failing to Teach the Hard History of American Slavery
Educators not prepared to teach it. Textbooks have insufficient information about it.

By Maureen Costello

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from SPLCenter.org

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Even during Black History Month, U. S. schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery, educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it, and textbooks do not have enough material about it. As a result – students lack a basic knowledge of the important role that slavery played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America, according to a recent study by the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project.

The report, Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, traces racial tensions and even debates about what, exactly, racism is in America to the failure of schools to teach the full impact that slavery has had on all Americans. The report examines the lack of coverage that U.S. classrooms provide about American slavery through a survey of high school seniors and U.S. social studies teachers. It also offers an in-depth analysis of 15 state standards and 10 popular U.S. history textbooks, including two that specifically teach Alabama and Texas history.

The investigation – conducted over the course of one year by the Teaching Tolerance project – revealed the need for far better and much more comprehensive classroom instruction across the board.

“If we are to move past our racial differences, schools must do a better job of teaching American slavery and all the ways it continues to impact American society, including poverty rates, mass incarceration and education,” said Maureen Costello, a former history teacher who is director of Teaching Tolerance. “This report places an urgent call on educators, curriculum writers and policy makers to confront the harsh realities of slavery and racial injustice. Learning about slavery is essential for us to bridge the racial differences that continue to divide our nation.”

Only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Most didn’t know an amendment to the U.S. Constitution formally ended slavery. Fewer than half (44 percent) correctly answered that slavery was legal in all colonies during the American Revolution.

While nearly all teachers (97 percent) surveyed agreed that teaching and learning about slavery are essential to understanding American history, there was a lack of deep coverage of the subject in the classroom, according to the report. More than half (58 percent) reported that they were dissatisfied with their textbooks, and 39 percent reported that their state offered little or no support for teaching about slavery.

Teaching Hard History: American Slavery relies on noted historian Ira Berlin’s 10 essential elements for teaching American slavery, articulated in the foreword to Understanding and Teaching American Slavery,as a framework for analysis.

Teaching Tolerance worked with the book’s editors, Bethany Jay, Ph.D., an associate professor of history at Salem State University; and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Ph.D., an associate professor of history at Boston College; to convert these elements into 10 key concepts of what students should know.

Teaching Tolerance also assembled an advisory board of distinguished scholars, and partnered with teachers and institutions of higher education, to develop a framework and offer a set of recommendations for teaching about American slavery.

The recommendations include fully integrating American slavery into lessons about U.S. history, expanding the use of original historical documents, improving textbooks, and strengthening the curriculum on topics involving slavery.

“It is of crucial importance for every American to understand the role that slavery played in the formation of this country,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard University professor and adviser for the report. “And that lesson must begin with the teaching of the history of slavery in our schools. It is impossible to understand the state of race relations in American society today without understanding the roots of racial inequality – and its long-term effects – which trace back to the ‘peculiar institution.’ I hope that publishers, curriculum writers, legislators and our fellow American citizens on school boards who make choices about what kids learn embrace the thoughtful framework developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., also praised the report and the resources being made available to teachers through the Teaching Tolerance program.

“As the first national museum dedicated to telling the African-American story, we strongly support and encourage Teaching Tolerance’s efforts to unpack the reality of what our education system teaches about slavery and what students are learning about slavery,” the museum wrote in a statement. “The information and the resources that Teaching Tolerance has developed will have a significant impact on the realm of history education.

“The NMAAHC looks forward to being a collaborator in championing the key components laid out in the Teaching Tolerance report, especially the need for schools, educators, students and families to become more savvy about talking about race and white supremacy as it relates to the founding of the U.S. and the legacy of slavery.”

The study follows Teaching Tolerance’s widely cited Teaching the Movement reports that evaluated state standards for teaching the civil rights movement. At the time, researchers suspected that states did a poor job of teaching the civil rights movement, in part because they failed to adequately teach about its historical roots in slavery.

Teachers can access resources on teaching American slavery at: www.tolerance.org/hardhistory. The resources are offered to educators at no cost.

Maureen Costello is Teaching Tolerance director at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Feb. 12, 2018

New Poor People’s March Kicks Off This Spring 
By Barrington M. Salmon

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For more than a year, the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, former North Carolina NAACP president, has been crisscrossing the country issuing a clarion call of resistance against arch-conservative forces that attack civil rights and economic justice gains.

He has sought to unify activists, social justice soldiers, concerned citizens, the oppressed and marginalized. He has spoken unrelentingly about the grave twin dangers posed by a hostile Trump administration and a reemerging White nationalism – both of which have targeted African Americans, poor whites, Latinos, Muslims, immigrants, members of the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups.

What America is witnessing, Rev. Barber has explained, is a modern-day incarnation and the product of more than a century of concerted efforts by White extremists to erase any progress made by African- Americans, women and progressives in America.

“We’re witnessing a fundamental changing of our demographics around the world,” said Barber, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach. “We see extremist policies in America today and it’s driven by the growing blackening and browning of America and a fusion of every creed, color and class.”

He continues, “Those who embrace the Make America Great Again slogan are willing to work hard and cheat to undermine what is evolving in America,” said Barber, a prominent national activist and an unapologetic voice of resistance to the Trump administration’s hard move to the right. “This is White hegemony and White nationalism strengthened by enormous wealth.”

Trump, he asserts, isn’t the problem, but merely a symptom of America’s moral sickness. He told an audience of several hundred people at the “Real State of Our Union” panel discussion on Jan. 30 that America is in the midst of a Third Reconstruction.

We live in a season of moral crisis, Rev. Barber said. He says that one effective way to fight the greed, racism, poverty, denial of health care, xenophobia, voter suppression, warmongering and other ills is the formation of a New Poor People’s Campaign - a revival of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign that began 50 years ago in the spring of 1968, but was eclipsed by his assassination on April 4 that year.

Rev. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Network are co-chairs of the New Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Coalition organizers, including the Fight for $15 movement, said they plan to kick off rallies in cities around the mid-South beginning this spring to raise people’s consciousness about the plight of the nation's poor.

In 2016, the federal government invested $183 billion in social programs but shuttled $630 billion dollars to the Department of Defense to pay for wars and maintenance of the country’s war machine. In contrast, Rev. Barber told the audience of several hundred at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, DC, that more than 140 million Americans – including 31 million children – are poor or near-poor. Tens of millions of adults are mired in poverty despite holding jobs, suffering food and housing insecurity and facing uncertainty because they don’t make enough to afford rent, food, medications or have the ability to care for themselves and their children.

Organizers of the anti-low wage organization, Fight for $15, had planned to join thousands of cooks and cashiers as they walked off their jobs Feb. 12 and marched in two dozen cities. Feb. 12 is the 50th anniversary of the historic Memphis sanitation strike.

Coalition members say they’re carrying on the fight for higher wages and union rights led by hundreds of Black municipal workers, whose 1968 walkout became a rallying cry of the Poor People’s Campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After the march, workers and their allies will participate in six weeks of direct action and non-violent civil disobedience beginning May 13, Mother’s Day.

The new campaign unites two of the nation’s most powerful social movements in a common fight for strong unions to lift people of all races out of poverty, organizers said. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the nation’s largest unions, is powering the new campaign. The union has been instrumental in helping organize fast-food workers across the nation; persuaded states and cities to raise their minimum wage; and has provided much of money and organizational muscle and money behind the Fight for $15 campaign.

The new campaign will follow part of the blueprint of Dr. King's old campaign, Barber said, by building a movement across racial lines and across an array of issues. In his travels, he said, he has spoken to Native Americans, working class and poor White, immigrants, gay, bisexual and straight people, all of whom have committed to the campaign and also to upending the oppression in the current system.

“These policies have hurt the worst of these,” said Rev. Barber. “In the Bible, there’s a greater adultery: whoring after other gods. They are against justice and they use their power to inflict pain on the poor and vulnerable. Congress allows him to be a distraction while he undermines the deconstruction of the American Experiment.”

Reminding the audience of the perils of American history, Barber said, “We act as though there’s no past. But this is the call and response of American history, the iconography of the American stream of history.”

He called cast-off Americans – criminalized children, the working poor, those whose medical care has been snatched by greedy politicians, and maligned immigrants – dry bones which will become the army of morality and justice to confront and defeat America’s dishonest and immoral politicians and moribund system.

“God told Ezekiel, ‘that’s your Army,” said Rev. Barber. “Preach to the dry bones and they’ll come together. I met a young woman in Seattle who said she’s the White trash they forgot to burn. I went to the Apache nations and sat in the circle with them, I met with national welfare rights people who said they’re ready for one more fight.”

He conclude, “We’re going to make a Third Reconstruction. We’re not going to give up on the American Project. Too many tears have been cried, too much blood has been shed, and there’s an army rising. We’ll be able to break every chain. They shouldn’t have called us ‘sh­_t’. We know how to take that stuff, make it fertilizer and build a new movement.”

Feb. 18, 2018

To Be Equal 
Black Panther is the Superhero – and Heroines – We Deserve
Marc H. Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “The film serves as a breath of fresh intellectual air, especially amid today’s sociopolitical climate. It is the power of representation in its best form. It is empowerment on a higher level. It is inspiration to a different degree. It is black excellence exemplified that will leave audiences yearning to inhabit Wakanda forever.” - Film critic Tonja Renee Stidhum

As long as there have been movies, there have been movie heroes.

From Douglas Fairbanks’ swashbuckling heroes like Zorro and Robin Hood in the 1920s, to Luke Skywalker in the 1970s to Harry Potter in the 2000s, the movies have always provided inspiration and role models for young people and a source for fantasy and imagination.

Most of these figures, as one might expect, have been white and male.

That is why the blockbuster superhero film Black Panther, which opened this week, is such a significant milestone.

Few films have been more joyously anticipated, with advance ticket sales breaking records. The character, created for Marvel Comics by Stan Lee in 1966, already had generations of fans. Its A-list cast and crew include a number of Academy Award and Golden Globe winners and nominees. Setting aside its cultural impact, Black Panther has been hailed as one of the best-acted, best-directed, best-created superhero movies of all time.

But let us not set aside its cultural impact. Representation of women and people of color in film also has been an issue as long as there have been films.  Actor and playwright Dylan Marron a few years ago introduced a web series entitled “Every Single Word,” which highlights the shockingly small amount of dialogue spoken by actors of color in mainstream films.  The entire  Harry Potter series – more than 1,200 minutes of film – includes precisely 5 minutes and 40 seconds of what Marron calls “POC talk time.”  In 2015 and 2016, we took the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to task for the woeful lack of diversity among Oscar nominees.

Too often, even when women and people of color do have significant roles in film, negative stereotypes are reinforced. The Bechdel Test, named for cartoonist Allison Bechdel who popularized it, determines whether a work of fiction features at least two women characters who speak to each other about something other than a man.

Only half of all films pass this test. Screenwriter and novelist Nikesh Shukla proposed the Shukla Test, which determines "two ethnic minorities talk to each other for more than five minutes about something other than race," and New York Times critic Manola Dargis devised a variation, the DuVernay test -- named for African-American film director Ava DuVernay -- asks whether "African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.”

Black Panther doesn’t just pass these tests, it shatters the very precepts on which they rest. The significance of a powerful, intelligent, wealthy and resourceful Black hero cannot be overstated. The women of Wakanda, Black Panther’s fictional African kingdom, are the true force behind the throne, and are as complex, varied and layered as white male characters usually are given the freedom to be.

When the first Black actress to win an Academy Award, Hattie McDaniel, faced criticism in the 1940s for accepting roles that reinforced negative stereotypes, she retorted, “"Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one."  Thankfully, the world of Wakanda is light-years from the plantations where McDaniels’ “Mammy” character bowed and scraped to Scarlett O’Hara.  I’m thankful that our children have the opportunity to see themselves on screen as kings and queens, warriors, scientists, artists and most importantly, the heroes of their own stories.

Marc Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League.

Feb. 11, 2018

Access to Safe, Decent and Affordable Housing Threatened Across the Nation

 Civil Rights Advocates Unite in Opposition to Rollbacks

By Charlene Crowell

Derrick Johnson is president of the NAACP, which is among a coalition of civil rights organizations that reject new Senate proposal to overhaul Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In recent days, threats to the nation’s housing finance system have emerged. At the center of the controversy are two key issues: the obligation of mortgage lenders to ensure broad mortgage credit for all credit-worthy borrowers, and secondly, whether the nation will enforce its own laws banning unlawful discrimination.

On February 2, a leaked Senate proposal to overhaul the secondary mortgage market’s government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would drop important access and affordability provisions that now govern the system. For example, the GSEs now are required to always serve all markets, as well as have in place affordable housing goals.

The proposal from U.S. Senators Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Mark Warner (D- Va.) was quickly and unanimously rejected by a broad coalition of civil rights and housing advocates that included the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, NAACP, UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza), National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development, National Fair Housing Alliance, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, National Urban League, and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL).

“Ten years after the 2008 Housing Crisis, it is disheartening to turn the secondary mortgage market back over to Wall Street,” wrote the coalition. “Who can forget the 7.8 million completed home foreclosures and trillions of dollars in lost family wealth?”

“Many American still face immense housing challenges,” the leaders continued. “This ill-conceived approach places the risk on the backs of hardworking families who already rescued the big banks.”

The draft legislation also fell short for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

“I appreciate the dedication Senators Warner and Corker have shown to address this critical issue, but this draft isn’t even close to a solution that works for families who hope to buy homes, said Warren. “This bill would end up creating more problems than it solves.”

As early as 2008, Congress moved swiftly to enact the Housing and Economic Recovery Act. This bipartisan legislation provided strong regulatory oversight of the housing finance system and brought forward important affordable housing goals to ensure that hard-working families would be able to access mortgage loans.  But with the housing market’s lengthy path to recovery, many have renewed calls for legislative reform of Fannie and Freddie.  And just as the GSEs are now pledged to serve the entire market, some want to take way to take away the system’s access and affordability requirements. That kind of change would harm Black families and communities, as well as other low-wealth families.

“The big-ticket items that we are looking for is the national duty-to-serve and affordable housing goals that have a regulator able to enforce those,” said Scott Astrada, CRL’s Director of Federal Advocacy.

Days later, on February 5, Mick Mulvaney, the White House hand-picked Acting Director for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced he would move the Bureau’s staff for its Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity (OFLEO) directly under his control.

The Dodd-Frank Act mandates that OFLEO perform “oversight and enforcement of federal laws to ensure the fair, equitable, and nondiscriminatory access to credit”

By moving fair lending experts to the CFPB’s Director’s office, to focus instead on consumer education and coordination, there are real concerns that the OFLEO will be unable to perform its enforcement and oversight mission.

“This action could open up the floodgates on lending discrimination, which would damage the ability for people of color to build wealth,” noted Debbie Goldstein, CRL’s Executive Vice President. “One of the reasons the CFPB was established was because lending discrimination targeted people of color with predatory, high-cost loans that led to foreclosures.”

Mulvaney’s personnel shift is yet another consistent sign that the nation’s financial cop-on-the-beat is walking a new patrol.

Since assuming unlawful leadership at CFPB, Mulvaney has also dropped a lawsuit against predatory payday lenders, supported repeal of the Bureau’s auto lending guidance that took direct aim at pervasive and discriminatory practices.  He has also made clear his plans to reopen rulemaking under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA).

HMDA is a federal law that requires most financial institutions to provide mortgage data to the public. It ensures that mortgage lenders are serving the credit needs of communities in which they are located. The annual HMDA report is the only comprehensive one that enables a comparison of private mortgage lending compared to that of government-backed mortgages like FHA, VA and USDA. This report is also unique for its tracking of mortgage lending and denials by race and ethnicity. This unique feature enables policymakers to discern discriminatory trends.

As 2018 commemorates the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, we must remain vigilant in the fight for access to safe and affordable mortgage loans – for many consumers, the single, largest investment of their lifetimes.

With hard-fought anti-discrimination laws now under assault, this generation has a duty to protect and defend all civil rights laws. Failure to do so would be to forget that the nation enacted the 1968 Fair Housing Act for this very purpose.

Charlene Crowell is the deputy communications director with the Center for Responsible Lending. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..