Urban News Features

HBCUs: Much Greater Than a Brief Photo Opportunity by Andrew R. Hairston

April 9, 2017

HBCUs: Much Greater Than a Brief Photo Opportunity
By Andrew R. Hairston

PHOTO: Courtesy/Washington Informer

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - I love historically Black colleges and universities, commonly referred to as HBCUs. I’m certainly biased, as I’m a graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., but my admiration for these institutions extends across my lifespan and the generations that preceded me.

A host of my friends, family members and colleagues are HBCU alumni, and these institutions continue to contribute a great deal of vibrancy to American life and our system of democracy. My first major case as a lawyer centered around the desegregation of Maryland’s four HBCUs, and I recently wrote two pieces dedicated to the significance and personal history of HBCUs.

I am particularly proud of these institutions for what they have managed to do despite the perennial challenges of systemic racism and inadequate investment.With all of this in mind, I find myself troubled by the news that broke on Monday, February 27, 2017. A number of articles on various news outlets, as well as posts on social media, quickly made it known that the Trump Administration, ostensibly under the direction of President Trump’s assistant, Omarosa Manigault, had organized a meeting with numerous HBCU leaders. A photo opportunity emerged, and a peculiar picture, with President Trump, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway and the HBCU presidents & chancellors, soon made its rounds on the Internet.

To conclude the day’s events, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a statement asserting that HBCUs are ‘real pioneers of school choice.’ As a young civil rights attorney and HBCU graduate, I do recognize the validity of some assertions made by the Trump Administration in reporting what transpired during the listening session. For instance, enhancing the infrastructure of a number of HBCUs could certainly play a role in increasing the competitiveness of these institutions in the twenty-first century. However, a brief photo opportunity and press release associating HBCUs with school choice both severely mischaracterize the history and promise of these 105 colleges and universities throughout the United States.

At their founding, many HBCUs opened their doors to students who had been previously denied an opportunity to access a postsecondary education. As they have evolved, these institutions have fortified themselves as supportive spaces for students to refine their commitment to social justice and learn of the significant contributions of members of the black diaspora to the world. When I think of my experience at Howard, I recall marching to the White House in 2011 to protest the execution of Troy Davis, traveling to Annapolis to call for an end for the death penalty in Maryland and partnering with grassroots community organizations to canvas in Baltimore as a part of the University’s Alternative Spring Break initiative.

Yes, increased funding, stronger programmatic offerings and better facilities would all undoubtedly assist HBCUs in reaching their full potential in the current global landscape. What the new administration must also understand is that HBCU graduates often leave their campuses with both degrees and a mission to achieve racial & social justice.

For many HBCU alumni, myself included, that photo opportunity does little to mitigate the damage already done by the Trump Administration’s policies to these principles, including the travel ban, the rescission of the Obama Administration’s Title IX guidance for transgender students, and the Department of Justice’s decision to remove itself from a crucial challenge to a discriminatory voter ID law in Texas.Additionally, the dark picture painted by President Trump in his inaugural address, which placed emphasis on American carnage and a need to restore law and order in this nation, contradicts the rhetoric released by the Administration concerning HBCUs.

As communities of color continue to mobilize against militarized schools and police shootings of unarmed black people, among other issues, the missions of HBCUs and these activists find themselves inextricably linked. Harmful policies advocated by the Trump Administration, including widespread availability of school vouchers and increasing funding to local law enforcement officers, stand only to exacerbate the push-out of children of color and limit their access to a quality public education.

The school-to-prison pipeline already hinders the promise of many young children of color by replacing school resources with those of the juvenile justice system; these practices indirectly result in a diminished applicant pool for HBCUs and make it that much harder for these institutions to fulfill their missions grounded in justice and equality. HBCUs constitute strong and powerful portions of the American story. To demonstrate an earnest interest in these institutions, President Trump and his administration must remain cognizant of the historic and current purpose of HBCUs. Increasing the available resources for these colleges and universities is one part of the process, but another part, arguably of more importance, is implementing policies across the executive branch that honor and support the goal of HBCUs to achieve a society free of discrimination and bigotry.

Andrew Hairston, J.D., is the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s George N. Lindsay Fellow and Associate Counsel with the organization’s Educational Opportunities Project.

Roger Wilkins' Life Story is the Story of Civil Rights By Marc H. Morial

April 9, 2017

To Be Equal

Roger Wilkins' Life Story is the Story of Civil Rights

By Marc H. Morial

rogerwilkins

Roger Wilkins

marcmorial

Marc Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “We have no hope of solving our problems without harnessing the diversity, the energy, and the creativity of all our people.” – Roger Wilkins

For Roger Wood Wilkins, the Civil Rights Movement was the family business. When Wilkins was born in 1932 in segregated Kansas City, Missouri, his uncle Roy Wilkins already was a well-known journalist and activist serving as assistant NAACP secretary, and later would serve as executive director. His mother, Helen J. Claytor, was Secretary of Interracial Education for the National YWCA and later would oversee the organization’s integration.

“My uncle lived in a building on Sugar Hill [in New York City],” Wilkins told NPR in 2011. “W.E.B. Du Bois lived there. And Kenneth Clark lived there. And Thurgood Marshall lived there. So when Roy would invite me to dinner, you know, these giants were in the room.”

Wilkins interned for Marshall while a law student at the University of Michigan.

As a newly-minted in 1957, Roger Wilkins was facing a prosperous career in the private sector in New York. But the Little Rock Nine – the first Black students to desegregate an all-white high school in Arkansas after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision – changed his plans.

“And so you couldn't say to yourself, well, let those kids do it,” he said. “If you were alive, you had to say, I want to do something. I want to become involved.”

He worked for a few years as welfare caseworker in Cleveland before joining the Kennedy Administration in 1962 as a special assistant to the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Under President Johnson, he led the newly-created Community Relations Service, which describes itself as the U.S. Justice Department’s "peacemaker for community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and disability.”

“The racial upheavals in this country in the '60s came loaded with a heavy history,” Wilkins wrote in 2005 upon the 40th anniversary of the Watts riots. “Many of the participants had lived through it; others had absorbed knowledge carried by their parents and grandparents of the soul-shriveling cruelty of the post-bellum rural South, of the northward migration during World War II when defense jobs opened up, of the physical brutality and guile southerners used to keep their labor force submissive and cheap. They remembered the promised cities full of good jobs, and how many of them just missed out as America passed its industrial peak. Finally, they surely understood the grim and fetid realities of the northern ghettos to which they were consigned.”

At the end of the Johnson Administration, Wilkins accepted a position with the Ford Foundation. There he worked closely with the National Urban League and then-President Whitney M. Young, funding a program Young created called New Thrust, which developed the leadership skills of urban Black youth.

In 1972 he began writing editorials for Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on Watergate, and spent the rest of his career as a journalist, author and educator.

As is the case for many of our parents and grandparents, Wilkins’ life story is the story of civil rights in the 20th and 21st centuries. Born into Jim Crow, he initially thought Barack Obama had no chance of being elected President. Yet he urged his daughter, Elizabeth, to work on his campaign, telling her, "this is your generation's Selma, and you dare not miss it."

Dr. Bernice King Tells Gathering to “Rise Above” Anger and Animus by Barrington M. Salmon

April 4, 2017

Dr. Bernice King Tells Gathering to “Rise Above” Anger and Animus
By Barrington M. Salmon

Dr. Bernice King addresses the Stateswomen for Justice Luncheon and Issues Forum. PHOTO: Roy Lewis/Trice Edney News Wire

Women and men applaud as Dr. Barbara Reynolds expresses disdain at the way Black women are treated. PHOTO: Roy Lewis/Trice Edney News Wire

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King, at the close of Women’s History Month, electrified an audience of men and women at the National Press Club, challenging them to rise above bickering with people with whom they may have political and cultural disagreements and find common ground – including with President Donald Trump.

In a speech she called, “What Does the Black Lives Matter Movement and Trump Have in Common?” she focused on the reality of the anger and animus on one side and the disgust, concern and fear of Trump on the other. She said the way to move forward from to the vilification hurled from both sides is to find common ground.

“We need people to rise above it and engage in conversation, real conversation,” she advised. “We’re not hearing each other right now because we’re not listening. We’re trying to react to what is said. We have to realize that that individual (with whom we disagree) is still of value. We have to win over people. The next generation is watching us for cues.

“We must listen and hear even though we don’t want to,” she continued. “We should not be drawing the line, unfriending people on Facebook, disconnecting links on LinkedIn or dragging them on Twitter. We must resist separation in the face of difference. We must love unconditionally …”

Chief executive officer at the King Center in Atlanta, Dr. King was keynote speaker at the 7^th annual Stateswoman for Justice Luncheon and Issues Forum, sponsored by the Trice Edney News Wire. The event, also in celebration of the 190^th anniversary of the Black Press, drew about 200 men and women to the Press Club even in chilly, rainy weather.

The youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King caused a stir and murmurs in the crowd as she prefaced her remarks by warning the packed ballroom that her comments about Black Lives Matter and Trump might cause some discomfort.

“Now I’m going to say some things that might be a little different and controversial,” she said with a wry smile. “I’m pushing the envelope. What do they have in common? They have awakened in us deep down divisions that in many respects we have tried to avoid, ignore, deny. I don’t know about you, but I’m very concerned about that.”

The Spelman College graduate who has a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology and a Masters of Divinity and Doctorate of Law from Emory University, went on to say that “there’s a deep polarization that exists in our nation and in fact, it’s potentially getting worse…Dr. King tried to teach us how to live in a world and co-exist with all of these different ideologies. What he left is an important blueprint that we cannot escape if you’re going to create a just, equitable world. He gave us plans and a strategy: chaos or community.”

She offered Black Americans four policy and moral prescriptions they should pursue if they hope to achieve the justice and equality for which her father fought and died:

She said the Black community must be willing to value and embrace all of the community and all aspects of justice.
She said they and others must realize that we’re all on the same boat – that justice can’t be narrow and one-sided.
She said there is a great need for people who’re working to forge an agency for justice and who value long-term strategic planning in that area.
Lastly, she said the community needs people who value building the “beloved community.”

King’s remarks magnified the growing racial, social and cultural divide that has been exacerbated by a vitriolic presidential campaign, Trump’s naked appeals to race and his masterful stoking of racial fears. Sensing the anxiety and feeling of disenfranchisement White voters carried, he spoke to their anger and their belief that Washington, African Americans, Latinos and immigrants had conspired against their interests.

Hazel Trice Edney, president/CEO of Trice Edney Communications and Trice Edney News Wire - convener of the luncheon and forum – also assembled a distinguished panel of Black leaders to discuss the topic, “Listen Up America: Forging Our Agenda for Justice.” Panelists were Washington Informer Publisher Denise Rolark Barnes, chair of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA); former Bennet College President Dr. Julianne Malveaux, a noted economist, businesswoman, author, and commentator; Dr. Lezli Baskerville, Esq., president/CEO of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO); Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; and Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, an award-winning journalist, minister and author of the autobiography of Coretta Scott King, “My Life, My Love, My Legacy.”

Howard University’s Yanick Rice Lamb, journalist, author and chair of the Radio, TV and Film Department, moderated the lively panel discussion. During her remarks, Malveaux drew laughter when she told King that she had to part ways with the reconciliation aspects of her keynote speech.

“My sister, I’m a Baby Panther and a cynic. Even though my doctor said fisticuffs isn’t good for my health and my girlfriend said she’s going to let me stay in jail for 24 hours,” said Malveaux, who leaned forward and gestured with her hands to accentuate her comments. “I’m resisting. I am a fighter because in every good we saw in Dr. King, we’ve seen an erosion. As Rev. Willie Barrow said, ‘We’re not as divided as disconnected.’”

Clarke expressed her deep concern about the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the US Supreme Court, who she described as an extremist who is wholly unsuited to be elevated to the High Court.

“This Supreme Court nomination has tremendous implications for us as black people in Voting Rights, healthcare and the death penalty,” Clarke said. “We deserve a justice who will fairly interpret civil rights and Constitutional laws.”

She also condemned Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying he didn’t have to character or compassion to properly serve the people, especially African-Americans.

“The US Department of Justice is led by a man who couldn’t bring a more hostile attitude. He voted against hate crimes as a senator and he is pro-police,” Clarke continued. “We need to bring pressure to let him know that he must put aside his personal and political views. Mass incarceration is an issue we cannot turn a blind eye to. He has supported the return to the use of private prison and he has abandoned police reforms.”

During an audience question and answer session, women and men touched on multiple topics such as the disrespect meted out to women. A specific reference was to Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer, whose exchanges with White House Correspondent April Ryan have recently been criticized as disrespectful. In a condescending way, he once told her to stop shaking her head. Concerns about missing Black and Brown girls and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly’s disparaging remark about Rep. Maxine Waters wig were also discussed.

“I’m furious and angry up here and I’m still not gracious,” Rev. Reynolds said forcefully as dozens in the audience stood and applauded. “I’m angry at how Rep. Waters was disrespected. He didn’t look at her record. We can take it off and pull it off because it’s ours! April Ryan was disrespected and she’s a grown woman. She can shake her hair, her finger, any part of her! We need to shake it up!”

The March Unemployment Report is Mixed News By Julianne Malveaux

April 9, 2017

The March Unemployment Report is Mixed News
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com)- Our 45^th President has had no trouble claiming the good employment news reported for January and February of this year. In those jobs reports, released on the first Friday of the month, we saw unemployment rates of 4.8 and 4.7 percent. In both of those months, more than 200,000 jobs were created. 45 crowed that this data showed how successful his Presidency had been, even though he had barely kept his seat in the Oval Office warm, and oven though he had done nothing, from a policy perspective, to stake his claim on progress that could only have come from the economic recovery engineered by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

Now, we have the report from March, with an unemployment rate, at 4.5 percent, that is at its lowest level in a decade (since May 2007). We also have a sluggish report on job creation – with just 98,000 new jobs, less than half as many jobs that were created in each of the last two months. Is the 45th President going to claim that his actions have caused a slowing in job creation? Since he was so quick to claim credit when the numbers looked good, what will he say now?

More importantly, the low jobs creation number suggests that the economic recovery we have been experiencing is far from solid. The March number can be a mere hiccup – we did have weather challenges last month that may have slowed some job creation, and may even have been responsible for lower job growth in the retail sector. But it might also suggest that the Fed should not be so quick to raise interest rates. Despite relatively low unemployment rates, there is room for much more job creation before employers will have to compete for workers.

The overall unemployment rate of 4.5 percent would be something to celebrate if it were accompanied with more job creation. It might also be something to celebrate if the Black unemployment rate were not so high – at 8 percent it is more than twice the white rate of 3.9 percent. Furthermore, when those marginally attached to the labor market, discouraged workers, and those working part time because they can’t find full time work, are included, the overall unemployment rate is 8.9 percent. Using the same methodology, this unemployment rate would be 15.8 percent for African Americans.

To be sure, these numbers are a vast improvement on the numbers we saw a year ago, not to mention five years ago. But the impact of these low numbers has bypassed many workers. Too many have still not seen their pay levels increase (wage growth was around .02 percent last month), and too many still fear layoffs or job reorganizations. Equally importantly, the approach this administration has taken to federal employment and to health care have had chilling effects in the labor market. As an example, while employment has been trending up in health care, the health care sector added about 20,000 jobs a month, compared to an average monthly gain of 32,000 jobs in 2016. The baby boom isn’t getting any younger, and Americans sure aren’t getting any healthier. It is plausible that, instead, announcements about health care by this administration, and chicanery by this Congress, may have slowed health care employment when it should be rising.

Except for “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again”, and a whole lot of rhetoric, we have no specifics around this Administration’s economic plan. We do know, however, that freezing or reducing federal employment will have an impact on unemployment rates, and that cutting key departments (Health and Human Services, Labor, Interior) will have an impact on the long-term employment situation. Those who work in the social service areas (social workers, community service workers) are also rightly apprehensive about how their work will be funded and who will pay for it. This unemployment rate report may be as good as it gets if Mr. Trump has his way.

President Obama did his best to create a robust economic recovery. President Trump says he inherited “a mess”. The January and February unemployment numbers disprove that assertion. The March report, however, shows that while 45 did not inherit a mess, he can make one with his draconian budget cuts and other ill-advised economic measure.

Julianne Malveaux is an economist, author, and Founder of Economic Education. Her podcast, “It’s Personal with Dr. J” is available on iTunes (https://tinyurl.com/withDrJ). Her latest book “Are We Better Off: Race, Obama and public policy is available via amazon.com. For more info visit www.juliannemalveaux.com.

Pentagon Gets Green Light to Expand War in Somalia

April 4, 2017

Pentagon Gets Green Light to Expand War in Somalia

Somali war victim.

(TriceEdneyWire.com/GIN) – Clouds are moving across Somalia's drought-wrecked landscape – but not the kind that make grass grow and flowers bloom.

Instead, military aircraft will be raining down “precision fires” after an authorization signed by President Trump that relaxes rules meant to prevent civilian casualties in the region. Military officials are also granted wider authority for conducting airstrikes under the relaxed rules.

The new approach to Somalia is in line with increasingly aggressive policies the administration has already adopted in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

U.S. troops will be working with the Somali National Army and the African Union Mission in Somalia in offensive operations “consistent with our approach of developing capable Somali security forces and supporting regional partners in their efforts to combat al-Shabab,” said Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis.

News of the signed authorization was revealed in national newspapers this week.

Experts fear the so-called Somalia campaign carries enormous risks — including more American casualties, botched airstrikes that kill civilians and the potential for the United States to be drawn further into defending a government that barely controls the lands beyond its capital.

The operations are likely to create a new exodus of desperate refugees fleeing towards Kenya which already houses almost a quarter of a million Somalis escaping war at home.

The war build-up, it must be said, was already underway during the last year of the Obama administration using Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies in an escalating campaign against Islamist militants in the Horn of Africa nation.

Hundreds of American troops now rotate through makeshift bases in Somalia, the largest military presence since the United States pulled out of the country after the “Black Hawk Down” battle in 1993.

"There appears to be a move by the Trump administration to loosen the rules," said Joel Charny, director of the Norwegian Refugee Council's office in Washington. "The theme seems to be more aggressive, and the consequences seem to be a spike in civilian casualties. “

Unnamed defense sources told ABC News that the “southern” portion of Somalia will be considered an “active area of hostilities” for the next six months.

The latest war plans were unveiled as Somalia's government declared the current drought a national disaster, with the U.N. saying roughly half of the country's 12 million people are at risk. A cholera outbreak has also spread.

The country is also one of the seven predominantly Muslim countries included in Trump's recent travel ban that has been suspended by federal courts.

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