June 4, 2017

Civil Rights Under Seige
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When he was running for President, 45 asked African Americans what we had to lose by electing him.  Embracing the most dystopian view of the African American community, he attacked our schools, our streets, crime rates, and unemployment and suggested that we were so far down that electing him could only improve things.  Curiously, he never talked about racism when he talked about the status of African Americans.  He never spoke of hate crimes, police killings, or racist symbols like Confederate flags and Confederate statues.   He never denounced some of his most racist supporters, including Klucker David Duke and alt-right leader Richard Spencer.  He just asked what Black folks had to lose by electing him!

We’ve been learning what we have to lose in these nearly five months of 45’s “leadership”.  He cynically used HBCU Presidents in a photo op, while cutting education funds that help HBCUs.  He has been silent or slow in denouncing racist incidents that have occurred on his watch, including the lynching of Second Lt. Richard Collins III, and the murder of heroes Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, who stood up to the rabid racist Jeremy Joseph Christian, who was harassing two young women on a train in Portland (it took him three days to respond tepidly to that incident).  As of this writing, two days after a noose was hung in the Smithsonian Museum for African American History and Culture, he has not uttered a syllable of condemnation.   These issues don’t appear to be important to him.

Are we surprised, then, that the budget he has submitted to Congress, would eviscerate civil rights protections in literally every area of our lives.  Already, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has moved back toward draconian jail sentences for minor crimes, reviewed consent decrees with police departments, looking to loosen them, and suggested that the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department can be smaller.  The budget reflects that so clearly that Venita Gupta, who led the Civil Rights Division under President Obama and now leads the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, says she sees this budget as a “setback” for civil rights.

The new budget calls for folding the Department of Labor Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP) with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, although the two agencies do distinctly different work.  EEOC investigates civil rights complaints, while OFCCP audits contracts to ensure that employees have equal opportunity in terms of both promotions and pay.  The proposed budget cuts OFCCP by 16 percent and eliminates 130 full time employees.  When the other 470 employees are absorbed into the EEOC, that agency will not get an increased budget despite its expanded mission.

Both agencies have been important in ensuring that civil rights violations are rectified.  In 2010, EEOC had more than 20 active cases that involved nooses.  Even as nooses continue to be hung as symbols of intimidation and hate, such as the noose hung at the African American Museum (the second hung at a Smithsonian museum in a week), the agency charged with investigating these complaints would have fewer resources to do so.

Similarly OFCCP has won money settlements for thousands of employees, and changed employment requirements when those requirements have a discriminatory impact.   Women employees at Home Depot were among those receiving monetary settlements because of OFCCP investigations.

At the Department of Education (surprise, surprise), a woman who opposes affirmative action leads the Office of Civil Rights.  That office will be cut significantly, limiting its ability to investigate discrimination complaints in school systems.  At the Environmental Protection Agency, efforts to look at environmental justice have been eliminated.

From the noose hung at the African American Museum to the defacing of LeBron James’ home with a racial slur, there is continuing evidence of the persistence of racism in our nation.  This racism is emboldened by a national leadership that is silent despite its manifestations.  We cannot be surprised.  Our 45^th President, after all, once said he did not trust African Americans to work on his accounting.  He probably would have failed any OFCCP audit, and certainly attracted several housing discrimination lawsuits decades ago.

Julianne Malveaux is an economist, author, and Founder of Economic Education. Her podcast, “It’s Personal with Dr. J” is available on iTunes. Her latest book “Are We Better Off: Race, Obama and public policy is available via amazon.com

Blackonomics

We Have Food Deserts Because We've Deserted Our Own Stores          
By James Clingman

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Why do we have Food Deserts?  One reason is that we have deserted our own stores.  Instead of taking care of ourselves, we complain about stores owned by someone else.  We petition our politicians for a grocery store or seek private companies to open stores where we live, but seldom do we open stores ourselves.  Even when Blacks do open new supermarkets we do not support them, and they eventually are forced to close.  Think I’m wrong? Keep reading.

At the turn of the last century (1900) Black people began to form food co-ops and other collective purchasing programs to feed themselves and to leverage lower prices for Black consumers. Two of the first grocery co-ops were started in St. Louis and Chicago by B. G. Shaw and Robert Jackson, respectively, in 1919.

The most notable co-op was the Colored Merchants’ Association (CMA), founded by A.C. Brown in Montgomery, Alabama in 1923.  With assistance from the National Negro Business League, under the leadership of Albon Holsey, the CMA became a national organization that encouraged Black grocers to unite.  In 1936, Holsey stated, “…the CMA began to lose the confidence of the Black consumer.”  Black Economist, Abram Harris, said, “Members always found it difficult to sell CMA brands.  The Negro, like the White consumer, is habituated to the popular brands carried by the chains.”  Source:  Dr. Juliet E.K. Walker.

Desertion of Black stores by Black consumers led to market opportunities for outsiders to take full advantage of the Black food dollar.  We became dependent upon others, and now we even request their presence in our neighborhoods.  No better picture of that reality than Singletary’s Supermarket in Columbus, Ohio in the mid-1980’s.  I wrote many articles about Singletary’s and even spent time there doing a product sampling program.  Singletary’s was a brand new business at that time, clean, well-stocked, and more convenient to Blacks in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood than other grocery stores.

Author of “Tribes,” Joel Kotkin, wrote:  “In Columbus, Ohio…Singletary Plaza Mart, the nation's largest Black-owned ‘superstore,’ went out of business…due to a lack of community patronage. Although Blacks in Columbus spend $2.5 million each week on food, they couldn't be convinced to spend less than a tenth of it, or $200,000, to keep Singletary afloat.”   The Reluctant Entrepreneurs, INC Magazine, 1986.  Desertion.

In 1995, in Lakeland, Florida, an interdenominational group of Black ministers took their church members shopping.  A two month-old Black-owned grocery store was not doing very well in the community, so the ministers got together to help.  The ministers took 150 people to the store, called Fresh Supermarket Foods.  After two hours, the shoppers had spent $4,000.00, according to the owner, Mr. Frank Jackson.  Paul Sanders, pastor of Greater St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church, said, "At stake is getting more Blacks to support [one another].  We talk about power.  But if we don't have some businesses or some money, we can talk about power all we want and it won't come."  Sanders continued, "If the store does not succeed, it will be because of a lack of community support.”  Desertion.

Three other recent examples include Fresh Market supermarket in nearly 100 percent Black, Southside Chicago.  Owner, Karriem Beyah, whose store was included in Maggie and John Anderson’s "Empowerment Experiment," agreed that the awareness and enthusiasm the Andersons created was important, but Beyah added that his business may have suffered from being highlighted as an enterprise owned by an African-American.  (He closed the store in August 2009)  "If you're under the radar, then maybe you won't get that belief from customers that the other guy's ice is colder than yours," he said. But, "I'm not giving up."  (Beyah plans to open a new store this year, 2017.

Second is the 2014 closing on the last Calhoun’s Supermarket in Montgomery, AL., after losing money for “three or four years,” according to owner, Greg Calhoun, who made history as the first African American in the South to own a supermarket.  At one point, Calhoun had seven stores in Montgomery alone, a majority Black city.  ShaKenya Calhoun cried as she closed the doors one final time. "The market has just been oversaturated with grocery stores...With the lack of sales, there's not an economic impact for us to be in business."

Third, there’s the much ballyhooed Sterling Farms’ grocery store in New Orleans, co-owned by actor, Wendell Pierce, who wanted to bring healthy food to underserved communities.  That store closed one year after opening.  It drew national media attention when it opened, including a visit from Michelle Obama who was touting her Fresh Food Initiative to bring healthy grocery options to so-called “food deserts.”

What will it take for us to feed ourselves?  We have the money; we just lack the mindset.  History will not treat us kindly if we fail to act appropriately.

May 30, 2017

By Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Former NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, also former Black press executive, is launching a political career.

Perhaps recently best known as a surrogate for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, Jealous confirmed this week that he is running for governor of Maryland. He cited his long record of civil rights and the diversity of the state of Maryland as being to his favor.

“When I was president of the NAACP I learned just how quickly my neighbors here were prepared to move forward on civil rights. In one year, we abolished the death penalty, we passed marriage equality, we passed the Dream Act. I’m running for governor because I believe we’re prepared to move just as quickly in moving forward on our education, on employment, on the environment while continuing to protect civil rights,” Jealous said this week in an interview with the Trice Edney News Wire. “I’m running for governor because I believe we can do much better by our kids right now.”

Jealous is entering a crowded field of seven other candidates for the Democratic primary to be held June 26, 2018. He believes disaffection for the scandal-laden Trump administration may cause voters to lean back toward Democratic leadership after electing Republican Gov. Larry Hogan in November 2014. Hogan is eligible to run for re-election.

“Larry Hogan is governor of Maryland because in 2014, we had a high tide of Republican turnout and an ebb tide of Democratic turnout,” Jealous said. He pointed out that Hogan won by 60,000 votes after 125,000 Democrats who had voted in 2010 didn’t show up to vote in 2014.

“In this era of President Trump, they can only remember having a president that is competent to serve. And now they see the impact of having a president that is quite the opposite,” Jealous said. “So long as we turn out Democratic voters who are used to voting in gubernatorial elections, there’s almost no way that he can win.”

The election will be held Nov. 6, 2018. But first Jealous must distinguish himself among the crowded Democratic field. In that regard, he may just have a not-so-secret weapon. If he can win an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, it may bolster his chances significantly.

“Let’s just see,” was Jealous’ only response when asked whether he expects to receive Sanders’ endorsement.

Sanders won 36 percent of the vote in Maryland’s Democratic presidential primary. If Jealous can win a majority of those voters; plus a significant portion of Maryland’s 45 percent Black vote, he is a strong contender to win the Democratic nomination.

But the key will be to excite the Democratic base to the polls. Jealous believes he has the record to do just that. Maryland has a 45 percent White constituency and 10 percent that encompasses other races. Jealous believes his background and civil rights record could attract a following similar to the “Rainbow Coalition” that was amassed during the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, for which Jealous also worked in 1988.

Jealous was born in Pacific Grove, Calif. But his parents, a mixed-race couple, had met in Baltimore. His father, Fred Jealous, who was White, helped integrate lunch counters in the South. His mother, Ann Jealous, worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. As a teenager, Jealous became steeped in civil and voting rights work and spent summers in Baltimore with his maternal grandparents.

“The combination of an activist rooted in the tradition of the NAACP and the civil rights movement and an activist rooted in the Bernie camp, gives us a broad base that looks like Maryland similar to what you saw of Doug Wilder in Virginia after the Jesse Jackson campaign,” Jealous said.

Jealous’ career has been woven with civil rights and politics. Between 2000-2004 he served as executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). Earlier in his career, he’d worked as an editor for the historic Jackson Advocate newspaper in Mississippi.

After NNPA, he became founding director of Amnesty International’s U. S. Human Rights Program. In 2008, he became the historically youngest NAACP president at the age of 35, an office he held until 2012. He later became a venture capitalist with the Oakland, Calif.-based Kapor Center for Social Impact. He also played integral rolls in the presidential races of President Barack Obama.

“I’m blessed to have lived my life as a progressive in the Black community who is committed to fighting for a better life for everyone in our community and ultimately for everyone in every community…It’s that life, that path that starts with Jesse Jackson ’88 and goes all the way through Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign,” he recounts. “It’s that life that started with my parents and my grandparents rooted in the NAACP, raised in the NAACP; ultimately leads into the labor movement and the environmentalist movement and the LGBT movement and the women’s rights movement. That’s me, that’s where I’m rooted and where this campaign is rooted.”

If he wins, Jealous would become the nation’s fourth Black governor in modern history. The others were Virginia’s Gov.  L. Douglas Wilder, elected in 1989; Massachusetts’ Gov. Deval Patrick, elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2010; and New York’s Gov.  David Paterson who served two years after the resignation of Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2008.

Jealous, 44, has two young children to whom he often refers when expressing concerns about the future of Maryland. Reflecting on the economic deprivation that became a national spotlight during the Freddie Gray case, he accuses Hogan of having ignored Baltimore during his tenure.

“This is a governor who has shifted millions of dollars away from public education and into voucher programs and who has toured the state with [Trump-appointed Education Secretary] Betsy Devos and has embraced Attorney General Sessions’ foolishness of trying to revive the failed war on drugs by also investing millions of dollars in building up law enforcement to go after heroin addicts as law breakers rather than as people who need to be sent to rehabilitation,” he says. “The only way to create a better future for Baltimore and its residents is to have a governor who is always for all of its residents; including Baltimore. Right now it feels too often that we have a governor who is always for all of Maryland except for Baltimore…You simply cannot starve a city that’s supposed to be the economic epicenter of the state and have the state prosper.”

Ultimately, the voters of Maryland must be inspired enough to believe the election even matters.

“It’s going to take us deciding that our children’s future, that our family’s economic future is important enough for us to turn out,” Jealous says. “And so, at the end of the day, we will do what it takes to turn out voters. Donald Trump will make that easier and Larry Hogan will make that easier still.”