Urban News Features

On Her Birthday: Remembering Coretta Scott King Among Those Who Moved US Forward By Barbara Reynolds

Jan. 29, 2017

On Her Birthday: Remembering Coretta Scott King Among Those Who Moved US Forward
By Barbara Reynolds

(TriceEdneywire.com) - Coretta Scott King died on January 30, 2006. Yet her legacy is very much alive as a coalition builder, a strategist and a moral voice that confronted detractors but insisted upon non-violent approaches, such as dialogue, protests and economic boycotts with the end goal of peaceful reconciliation.

In their own analysis 60-era civil rights leaders used to refer to a Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, which divine dimension that summons leaders exactly when needed most. That certainly describes the timing of human rights activist Coretta Scott King who is experiencing a resurgence as people take a fresh look at those who successfully moved themselves and others forward through the heavy thicket of discrimination such as the leading ladies in the wonderful new film, Hidden Figures.

A second look at King’s legacy should focus on but go beyond her well known decades ordeal of successfully lobbying to make King’s birthday a national holiday and building the Dr. Martin Luther King Center for Social Change in Atlanta. Tourists from around the role visit this site, where her crypt and that of Dr. King are located near Ebenezer Baptist church where Dr. King preached and was funeralized.

Coretta King certainly should come to mind as millions gathered in Washington and in sister cities around the world last week to mount an overwhelming rebuke to President Donald Trump’s anti-human rights campaign and his denigration of women, minorities, immigrants and the physically challenged. Her name was scrawled on home-made signs scattered throughout.

It is appropriate that we remember her appeal to women and her global human rights efforts. That was the capstone of King’s 38 year mission as she shifted from civil rights to a more global inclusive human rights agenda after the assassination of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. A favorite slogan was: “Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.”

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed her a nonvoting delegate to the 32nd General Assembly of the United Nations, where she advocated for more international focus on the human rights of women. That same year in Houston, she served as Commissioner on the International Women’s Year Conference where she created quite a stir over her support for gay rights, an unpopular issue at the time.

In her memoir she tells how she opposed the various women’s groups at the Conference who were advocating a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. “I feel that gay and lesbian people have families and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. I believe unequivocally that discrimination because of sexual orientation is wrong and unacceptable in a democracy that protects the human rights of all its citizens.”

In the historic 1963 March on Washington—which catapulted Dr. King to fame--women, however, were not allowed to march with the leaders or give a major address. But without a doubt King, would have played a supportive role in the Women’s march as did her daughter, Bernice King.

King was a spokeswoman for social justice causes, both large and small, writing a syndicated news column on issues from gun violence, to environmental racism, to apartheid in South Africa. She was rarely missing in action. “Sometimes you win, just by showing up,” she said, often referring to her role as a ministry of presence.

King believed that it is citizen action that is crucial to the making of a president. She often said that Ronald Reagan did not warm to the idea of a Dr. King holiday until the movement created a groundswell for it with three million signatures, marches and years of lobbying Congress. He signed it on November 20, 1983.

In recent weeks several black leaders have been publicly scourged for meeting with President Trump through his transition stage. King, however, would have been knocking on his door, as she did with all the other presidents in her heyday. And she would not have been there for photo-ops or “selfies.” As a seasoned coalition building she would have prepared a well- crafted agenda, which called upon Trump to govern as president of all Americans.

In past years, King’s influence was mammoth in the shaping of the political landscape. She successfully campaigned to elect scores of liberals to political office, worked with Carter in the selection of federal judges and threw her weight against those who stood in the way of voting rights.

Typical of her role is how she confronted and helped block Alabama U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions who in 1985 was vying for a federal judgeship. Sessions, who was called “brilliant,” by Trump is his choice for U.S. Attorney General. In a recently surfaced 10-page letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, King had called him “lacking in judgement and temperament who would irreparably harm the work the movement had done to seize a slice of democracy for disenfranchised blacks.”

King opposed Sessions for his 1985 attempt to prosecute three civil rights activists from Marion, Alabama for voter fraud― accusations that were later proved unmerited. Her opposition to Sessions ran deep because she grew up right outside of Marion which before the movement launched its successful voter rights drive were unable to counter terrorizing attacks om their lives and property. Civil rights activists fear that Sessions will not hold law enforcement officials accountable for the episodic incidents of unarmed black men being murdered, as was done under the Obama administration.

In the battle to stop Sessions and others who seemed primed to push back advances in human rights, Coretta would not have panicked. In her memoir, she said, “Struggle is a never-ending process and freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”

And so it goes.

Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds is the author of seven books. Her latest is the Life, the Love and the Legacy of Coretta Scott King.

U.S. Rep., Civil Rights Leaders Dismiss Trump’s Claims of Voter Fraud

Jan. 29, 2017

U.S. Rep., Civil Rights Leaders Dismiss Trump’s Claims of Voter Fraud

Sees it as a strategic ploy to limit easy access to voting

U. S. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.)

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Still angry that he lost the popular vote on the way to winning the White House, President Donald Trump claims millions of undocumented aliens illegally voted for Hillary Clinton, and he has called for an investigation. U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), and civil rights leaders say, however, the claims of voter fraud gives Republicans and others another reason to deny people the right to vote.

“The president can join me and my staff, and we will show him that there is no voter fraud,” said Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Trump on Wednesday tweeted for an investigation into voter fraud and voting irregularities, two days after he repeated his claim, without evidence, that he lost the popular vote because millions of people illegally voted for Clinton.

Among civil rights leaders dismissing Trump's unwarranted claim is NAACP President/CEO Cornell William Brooks.

“President Donald Trump called for the federal government to spend resources investigating alleged ‘voter fraud’ in the 2016 elections. Unable to accept the fact that he lost the popular vote by some 2.8 million votes, President Trump has repeated his naked and reckless claim that 3 to 5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election by 'illegal immigrants'. However, this notion of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election, or any other American election cycle for that matter, is false and dangerous," Brooks wrote in a statement. “Voter Fraud has been proven virtually non-existent through studies conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, Arizona State University, and the Washington Post, among others. The Washington Post’s 2015 study showed that between 2000 and 2014 there were only 31 alleged cases of in-person voter fraud among the over 1 billion votes cast in the United States during that time period. Yet, this supposed widespread voter fraud is consistently used as justification for voting restrictions that suppress the votes of African-Americans and Latinos.

Brooks continued, “In stark contrast to the myth of widespread voter fraud is the proven reality of voter suppression. A number of federal courts across the country have determined that certain states enacted voting restrictions that discriminated against Black and Latino Americans, as in Texas, or, worse yet, were written with the specific intent to suppress the Black vote, as in North Carolina. In fact, a federal appellate court held that North Carolina’s law targeted African-American voters with 'almost surgical precision.' Voting restrictions such as those recently struck down in Texas, North Carolina and elsewhere weaken our democracy and themselves cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of our electoral processes."

Sustained Persistence By James Clingman

Blackonomics

Sustained Persistence
By James Clingman

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Listening to all the Black chatter about the post-Obama era, all the indignation, the whining, and the lamenting about Trump, makes me think about the Standing Rock protest and standoff in North Dakota. In April 2016, Standing Rock Sioux elder, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, began a resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline that soon grew to thousands of people. The protesters refused to leave even under orders from government powers and in the face of armed national guardsmen, pepper spray, attack dogs, and police in riot gear.

They set up a small village, lived in tents and trailers, and hunkered down for the long haul. Then the cold weather came, and boy was it cold! To add to the protesters’ misery, police used water cannons on them in the freezing cold. Temperatures dropped to twenty below, not to mention the wind chill, and in November two feet of snow fell in the area. Yet the protesters said they will not leave until the pipeline is rerouted away from their sacred land and the water sources they depend upon. You reading this, Flint residents?

Despite 141 protesters being arrested, bringing the total number of arrests since the protests began to more than 400, Chairman Dave Archambault said, “The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is not backing down from this fight…We are guided by prayer, and we will continue to fight for our people. We will not rest until our lands, people, waters and sacred places are permanently protected from this destructive pipeline."

That’s what we call “sustained persistence,” which obviously is a redundant term, and we need “sacrificial resistance.” It reminds me of those who withstood the fire hoses and dogs during the civil and voting rights battles. It also brings attention to the importance of maintaining, supporting, and sustaining our protests over the long haul rather than simply a day or two. Not since the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted for 381 days, have Black folks demonstrated the will and commitment to sacrifice for long periods of time for our causes.

Today we have protests that last for a few hours; we hear a couple of speeches and return home to await the next call to do the same thing. Think about how many protests Black people have called over just the last five years. Think about our tepid responses to the police killings of Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and many others. We get “fired up” but we are not really “ready to go” because we end up going nowhere, and we fail to resolve the problems we are protesting.

The recent march led by Al Sharpton was called, “We shall not be moved.” Well, the title was certainly correct; we have not moved since that one-day march, and I have not seen any positive results that came from that protest against Donald Trump. Have we simply become professional marchers, complainers, and paper tigers?

Unlike the folks at Standing Rock, our leaders do not appear willing to live in tents in the freezing cold and stay in protest mode no matter what. We call for “boycotts” of a certain mall or a certain store, and sustain it for a day (Black Friday). We say, “Boycott Christmas,” only to catch the after Christmas sales, the MLK Day sales, the Black History sales, and the tax refund sales that come in the ensuing months. Maybe our protest leaders have grown weary of marching and doing anything over a sustained period of time. Maybe they just want to impress us with their bombastic, threatening, and angry rhetoric. They want to get us fired up and ready to go, but they don’t want to go with us.

Speaking of rhetoric, if Black folks would simply put as much energy into appropriate action as we expend on discussing issues that will not advance us one iota, or complaining about Trump, or lamenting about Obama leaving, we would move far beyond our present state. Trump is large and in charge; Obama is playing golf in Palm Springs. They are doing just fine. What about us though?

We must revisit the days of Montgomery, the days of sacrifice, and the days of sustained persistence and resolute resistance. Expend our energy doing things that will result in progress, on some level, for our own people. Find something that really matters not only to you but to your children’s future, like the Standing Rock protesters, and plan to see it through for the long term. Temporary protests bring temporary fixes, if they bring about any change at all.

Take a lesson from this country. When another nation does something we don’t like, the first response is economic sanctions that last for years if we don’t get what we want. We should be so smart.

Black Immigration Group Ready to Battle Trump By Frederick H. Lowe

Jan. 29, 2017

Black Immigration Group Ready to Battle Trump
By Frederick H. Lowe

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Black Alliance for Just Immigration, a national network that advocates for black immigrants, announced that it will fight President Donald Trump’s plans to restrict immigration of Africans to the United States from countries with large Muslim populations. Although most Americans think of immigrants as being from Mexico or South America, a growing number of immigrants are Black and are from Africa and the Caribbean. In 2015, a record 3.8 million Black immigrants now live in the United States, more than four times the number who lived here in 1980. Not everyone, however, is from a mostly Muslim country.

President Trump has issued an order barring citizens from seven countries with Muslim majorities from entering the U. S. for the next 90 days. It also suspends the entry of refugees for 120 days. Those countries are Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia.

As protestors demonstrate at major airports around the nation, legal actions have already begun. U. S. District Judge Ann Donnelly Saturday night blocked the affects of the executive order on anyone who was stranded in U. S. airports because of it. "The petitioners have a strong likelihood of success in establishing that the removal of the petitioner and other similarly situated violates their due process and equal protection guaranteed by the United States Constitution," Donnelly wrote i her decision, according to widespread news reports.

“The Black Alliance for Just Immigration is committed to preparing Black communities to defend against their harmful policies, to building power amongst Black immigrant organizations nationwide and to working with our partners to fight back against this administration’s racist and xenophobic agenda,” said Tia Oso, National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, which has offices in Los Angeles, Oakland, Calif.; Atlanta and Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Alliance also said it would also fight President Trump’s attacks on sanctuary cities. A sanctuary city is a city that has adopted a policy of protecting illegal immigrants by not prosecuting them for violating federal immigration laws in the country in which they are now living illegally. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretary of Homeland Security and the U.S. Attorney General to defund sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to comply with federal immigration law. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to begin issuing weekly public reports that include “a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.”

Opal Tometi, executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and co-founder of #Black Lives Matter, called Trump’s actions troubling. “Punishing cities for offering protection betrays the humanitarian value of offering a safe haven for the oppressed,” Tometi said. Some mayors of sanctuary cities said they will fight Trump’s order.

“We are going to fight this and cities and states around the country are going to fight this,” Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York City, said at a news conference. If sanctuary cities comply with Trump’s order, African immigrants and others who run afoul of the law can be handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE enforces federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration to promote homeland security. Those arrested can be held in a prolonged state of displacement because many of the refugees here illegally are no longer welcome in their home countries.

American Democracy Depends Upon Full Investigation of Foreign Influence By Marc H. Morial

Jan. 29, 2017

To Be Equal

American Democracy Depends Upon Full Investigation of Foreign Influence

By Marc H. Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Foreign powers also will not be idle spectators. They will interpose, the confusion will increase, and dissolution of the Union ensue. – Alexander Hamilton, 1787

The first few days Donald Trump’s presidency have seen what may be the beginning of the end of the Affordable Care Act, an average annual hike of $500 for middle-class homeowners’ mortgage insurance premiums, a hint at a re-invasion of Iraq and a shift in the Department of Justice’s effort to protect voting rights.

Yet, the overwhelming cloud that hangs over the Trump Administration is the suggestion of Russian interference in the election. Investigators from six different US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been examining possible links between Russian officials and Trump’s presidential campaign.

This cloud hangs not only over Trump’s presidency, but over American democracy itself. Preservation of the integrity of our democratic process depends upon the aggressive pursuit of the truth – and the full cooperation of President Trump and his advisors in that pursuit.

Media reports indicate that investigations into Trump’s Russian ties began as far back as last spring –before the FBI received the notorious dossier alleging that Russian operatives held compromising information about Trump, and that there was a continuing exchange of information between the Russian Government and Trump associates.

Any concrete evidence in support of these allegations would be damaging to Trump’s presidency. And failure to investigate them would be even more damaging to the nation itself.

Democracy, while a founding principle of the United States, has been a work in progress from the days when only white, male – and in some states, Protestant Christian – property owners were permitted to vote. Gradually, over two centuries, the franchise was extended to non-landowners, Native Americans, women, and people of color.

We still are engaged in the business of expanding and protecting our democracy, fighting back racially-motivated voter suppression laws and contending with the anti-democratic effects of the Electoral College. Our goal must be a full and true democracy, where every citizen has an equal opportunity to be heard, without the corrupting influence of foreign agents working against American interests.

If a foreign government interfered to boost one candidate chances, it’s not merely an affront to the losing candidate; it’s an affront to every single honest, voting citizen. It’s an affront to American democracy.

Because President Trump was elevated to office by the anachronistic Electoral College, counter to the choice of a majority of voters, he owes the American people an exceptional level of deference. He should go to every length to demonstrate that his own conduct, at least, was above-board and beyond reproach. Any attempt to stonewall an investigation should be viewed with the utmost skepticism.

His public statements on Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, have been contradictory at the very least. In 2013, 2014 and 2015, he said he had a relationship with Putin, had spoken with him and had gotten to know him. In the third Presidential debate, he said he’d never met him. In the second debate he said he has no dealings with Russia and no businesses there. But his son, Donald Trump Jr., said in 2008 that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” This confusion should raise serious questions.

President Trump appears to be engaged in a campaign of disinformation about his election – claiming without evidence that he was denied a popular victory by millions of illegal votes. His apparent obsession extends to making repeated false statements about attendance at his inauguration. His preoccupation could complicate our intelligence agencies’ attempts to ferret out the truth. It’s our hope that he will see that any failure to cooperate or to encourage a full investigation would be crippling to the nation.

During the Inauguration Ceremony on Jan. 20, much was made about the “peaceful transfer of power” that is and should be an example for the world. But that peaceful transition depends upon the strict balance of powers as outlined in the Constitution. It’s up to our legislative and judicial branches to serve as a check on the executive, beginning with the investigation into foreign influence.