Maryland Gov. Wes Moore

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Walter Washington Convention Center was filled with thousands who came to the nation's capital for the 54th Annual Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference (ALC).

The annual glitzy event with a balance of parties and politics featured dozens of issues forums, brain trusts and receptions crucial to the Black community. At one time, only a dozen Black men and one Black woman had been elected to Congress. But today there are 61 Black lawmakers in Congress, and African-Americans have served as both President and Vice President.

This year is particularly difficult because of President Trump’s heavy-handed style of controlling the Republicans in Congress. Therefore, the ALC featured speakers who seemed especially focused on encouraging politicians and activists to stay focused on justice.

”Today is the day the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!” said Maryland Governor Wes Moore, during his speech at the CBC awards dinner Saturday night. “I know that we are in a challenging moment right now, but I am not interested in talking about them or him. I am interested in talking about how powerful we are.”

As he spoke, Moore, a decorated Army veteran, reflected on the historical roots of the CBC, which began after Rev. Adam Clayton, pastor of the Abyssian Baptist Church in New York, was first elected to Congress in 1961.

“The CBC was built for moments like this. Adam Clayton Powell did not bend a knee, Elijah Cummings did not bend a knee,” Moore said. “History is not likely to remember this administration fondly. And those who capitulate will be remembered even worse. I led soldiers into combat, and I don't bend a knee for anybody.”

From the annual Phoenix Awards dinner to the CBC Day of Healing, the theme of the annual prayer breakfast, there was plenty of tough talk by speakers and lawmakers that was welcomed by participants and lawmakers who have mounted a counter-offensive to President Donald Trump and his right-wing agenda.

“We’ve come to the nation's capital during some dark and tough days,” said Howard John Wesley, the keynote speaker during the prayer breakfast. Pastor of DC’s Alfred Street Baptist Church, Wesley said, ”We have come with the same questions on our minds: What are we going to do?”

Declaring himself to be “a bona fide, born-again child of Hip Hop,” Wesley weaved in popular lyrics as he criticized actions of the Trump Administration.

“They are unfamiliar with the melancholy sounds of masochism. They don't recognize the offbeat bassline of bigotry. You threaten museums in the first place. The chorus of the song is an attack on free speech and a free press,” he said. “You ban reporters from the White House. You try to kick Jimmy Kimmel off the air and in the chorus of the song you create a military pretense of lowering crime in blue cities with Black mayors, ignoring the fact that mass shooters come from red states.” Wesley continued, “You destroy DEI by creating a false narrative that your White average is better than my Black excellence.”

Wesley then shared a story about teaching his son how to play the card game Spades before taking him to an HBCU. “When you have been dealt a bad hand, you don't quit if you know you have a good partner. I thank God that we have a good partner who can bring us through.”

He concluded for the audience, “Don't you leave this place discouraged. Don’t you leave with your head down, he said, quoting Psalm 24:7-10: “Lift your heads, oh ye gates, and the king of glory shall come in. Who is this king of glory? He is the Lord, strong and mighty!“

Former Vice President and Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris also spoke during the Phoenix Awards dinner: “When a President with a fragile ego couldn’t take a joke,” he brought down the weight of the federal government to silence the voice of a citizen, but it didn't work, she said. “Folks spoke with their pocketbook this week, and Jimmy Kemmel is back on the air.”

CBC Chair Yvette Clarke said, despite what is going on in Washington, “History is on our side.” And Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), House Democratic Leader, said, despite the current situation, the motto remains the same: “No permanent friends,[no permanent enemies] just permanent interests.”

• Advised staff that fair housing work was “not a priority” but an “optics problem”; and encouraged reassignment within the agency as fair housing staff was cut by 70 percent.

• Implemented a gag order that prevented its Office of Fair Housing (OFH) from communicating with external parties both within and outside of HUD “without express approval from political leadership.” This single directive resulted in closing over 100 housing discrimination cases.

• Reassigned 75 percent of the OFH staff assigned to its Violence Against Women’s Act, leaving the office unable to serve or support survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual assault. 

 Oct. 4, 2025

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In my house, two legacies face each other.

On one wall hangs a reproduction of The Spirit of ’76, painted by my cousin Archibald M. Willard for the nation’s hundredth birthday. The central drummer in that painting — the older man leading the trio — was modeled after Archibald’s father, my cousin too.

The Spirit of ’76 is America’s most famous Revolutionary painting — the definitive image of independence, instantly recognizable wherever it appears. First displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, it captured the mood of a nation celebrating its hundredth year and looking back on its birth in revolution.

For my family, it is not just symbolic. My father descends from six officers in the Massachusetts Line of the Continental Army — and from a seventh, a 13-year-old fifer who fought at Lexington and Concord. He was the youngest combatant on that battlefield, carrying both a fife and a musket into the first fight of the Revolution. He lived into his 90s, long enough to be photographed — the only person from that battlefield whose face we can still see.

That painting is the definitive picture of 1776: a battered but unbroken march for freedom and equality. My family is literally in the frame — and in the fight.

Across the room sits another inheritance: the desk of my mother’s great-great-grandfather, Peter G. Morgan, born enslaved in Nottoway County, Virginia, in 1817.

Beside it rests the courting set he bought so his three daughters, once freed, could welcome suitors in dignity.

My family isn’t just in the picture of 1776. We live the unfinished fight of 1876.

A wager for freedom and equality

In 1864, while Petersburg was under Confederate siege, Morgan walked into a Confederate court and freed his wife and daughters.

Virginia law was brutal: any Black person gaining freedom — and their family — had 12 months to leave the state. Fail to leave, and you could be seized and enslaved again.

So Morgan wagered exile — or even re-enslavement — if Confederate authorities got to them before the Union did. Still, he took the risk. He bet everything on freedom and equality.

He was right on the first count. And for a time, right on the second.

Reconstruction’s promise

After the war, Morgan served in Virginia’s House of Delegates from 1869 to 1871. He sat on Petersburg’s city council and school board.

He helped build schools, relief associations, and even a bank. He believed that Reconstruction — America’s “second founding” — could finally make freedom and equality real.

But he also lived to see those hopes collapse.

The collapse came just after the hopeful celebration of 1876, with the Compromise of 1877 — a backroom deal to resolve the contested race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford Hayes. Republicans kept the White House by giving in to Democratic demands to pull federal troops from the South.

With the old Union soldiers gone, white supremacists unleashed murderous violence to retake power. Reconstruction ended not with a bang but a betrayal — and lynch mobs burning human flesh.

Twin revolutions, both unfinished

That is America in a nutshell: twin spirits, twin moments, both unfinished.

1776 was for freedom.

1876 was for equality.

Yet neither dream dies.

The fire passes from Harriet Tubman to Ella Baker. From Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. From Chicago’s Jacqueline Jackson to Chicago’s Michelle Obama. And it burns on in young organizers today.

The warning is clear: freedom and equality are fragile, and gains can be rolled back. Today, both are under attack again — with democracy itself on the line, racial equality undermined, and immigrants targeted with open hostility.

The charge is clearer still: if my great-great-great-grandfather could bet on freedom and equality in 1864 while Petersburg burned — and my father’s young ancestor could join his father and brothers in arms at Lexington — surely we can fight for freedom and equality in our own time.

Ben Jealous is a former national president of the NAACP and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

Oct. 4, 2025

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Who could have imagined hundreds of our top military personnel  being ordered to the United States to hear Donald Trump (multi-times draft dodger) and Pete Hegseth rap about their personal grievances, and how they’re working toward putting even more people who proudly serve  in the military in jeopardy because of their weight, personal grooming, denying women and gay people to serve in combat—except Trump and his sons who served nowhere! It seems the Secretary of War and the President think their kind are the only ones truly capable of serving.  

They’ve decided cities they don’t like (meaning those with a lot of Black people, Democrats and Progressives) can expect to be military training grounds!  Looks like they’ve already started doing that. Look at Los Angeles; Washington, DC; Chicago, Memphis, Portland and others threatened. One assumes they’ll use the same tactics as those used outside the country on the real enemy. 

Those leading our nation now are embarrassing, and all of us should apologize to friends in other nations. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to work or travel abroad and meet people, I know you hang your head in shame as you listened to the absolutely horrible nonsense our high ranking officials had to endure while sitting in that disgusting meeting in which Hegseth and Trump put on at millions of dollars in costs to our taxpayers. The real tragedy is their performance has leaders in other nations laughing at what happened.

We’re not perfect here in this nation and never lived up to its promise for people of color (especially African Americans), Hispanics, Native Americans—and now Immigrants. Trump’s family came here as immigrants. He’s married at least two women from other nations, and all of them were given every benefit Americans who came here from somewhere else.  Those of us who were born here, work hard every day to perfect our union, but have never fully enjoyed the benefits.  Yet, we persist in hope, and work to build this nation to what it professes to be.

While we obey the Constitution, we’re not benefiting from doing so while Trump and his crowd ignore the rules and still prosper. Trump and his friends continue to discriminate against us and try to erase our history. They’re trying to keep others in the dark about all we have given to the prosperity of this nation while they continue to drain our coffers with foolishness, fire hard working people and deny the evil they continue to protect such as what Trump’s buddy, Epstein, did to ruin the lives of so many young white women.

 I’m a peace activist and appreciate the loyalty of protectors of this nation. I don’t like their being summoned here to sit stone-faced to listen to the disrespect they faced in that meeting. Along with the Generals and Admirals, we were served up complaints about women not being worthy of combat roles, about men (meaning Black men) who for medical reasons, can’t do the clean shaving, and about their expressions that women and minorities are incapable of rising to the top without “special treatment”.

The meeting of those men and women ordered here was evidence of disrespect for them, implying they don’t know how to do their jobs without the garbage spewed to them by a draft dodger and a man who didn’t know how to control his drinking and other bad behavior. Now they’re ordering highly experienced men and women who’ve learned from training and experience to do the real work of keeping America safe. 

Trump says we’re under invasion from within as citizens peacefully protest the wrongdoing of our so-called leaders; hazeltherefore, he has to send men who slam men and women roughly to the ground, take frightened children from parents and more. We can’t be too afraid to at least speak out!