May 1, 2023

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from BlackManStreet.Today

Carol Bryant Donham

Emmett Till after he had been beaten and thrown into the Tallahatchie River by J.W. Milan and Roy Bryant, the two killers. Mamie Bradley looks at her son.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When Carolyn Bryant Donham accused 14-year Emmett Till of making eye contact with her in segregated Money, Mississippi, she called her husband. Bryant called Roy Bryant, her husband, and J.W. Milam with his half-brother, to beat the young boy to death.

Years later, Donham later said it was an overaction, which she sparked and remained silent since 1955. He was beaten bloody and died. Carolyn Bryant Donham set this terrible event in motion and died Tuesday in Westlake, Louisiana. 

In 2017, Tim Tyson, author of the book The Blood of Emmett Till, revealed that Carolyn Bryant (later known as Carolyn Bryant Donham after several divorces) recanted her testimony, admitting that Till had never touched, threatened, or harassed her. "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him," she just had to power to kill a young boy.

Bryant and Milam, the killers made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes.

The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. 

An all-white male jury said they would have acquitted Bryant and Milam quicker, but had to finish drinking  Coca-Cola. Bryant and Milam sold their stories to Look Magazine.

Three days later, his corpse was recovered but was so disfigured that Moses Wright, a cousin, could only identify it by an initialed ring. Authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, had his body back in Chicago. 

Till’s mother had her son’s body shipped back to Illinois where Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender photographed Till’s grotesque body. More than 50,000 people viewed Till’s body at Roberts Temple in Chicago.

Till’s murder even sparked resistance in Money, Mississippi, and elsewhere.

On December 5, 100 days after Till was murdered, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. As Parks later said of her actions that day, “I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn’t move.” 

Her arrest, of course, sparked the now-famous Montgomery bus boycott that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement led by a then-26-year-old minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Sparked by the arrest of Parks on December 1, 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional.

After the acquittal, the black sharecroppers that once kept Bryant’s Grocery in business refused their patronage, and the store was put up for sale less than a month after the trial. For the next three decades, different owners maintained the building as a country grocery—first as Wolfe’s and then as Young’s Grocery and Market.

In March of 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, making lynching a federal hate crime. 

May 1, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Every year, the American Library Association unveils its list of the top ten most-challenged books for the previous year. And this year, Number One is the same as last year’s Number One: the book “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe. Other books that achieved this distinction were Toni Morrison’s classic “The Bluest Eye,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson, and other titles dealing with race, gender identity, sexuality and coming of age – in other words, real life.

This year’s list also follows the Association’s announcement that demands to censor library books reached 1,269 last year – nearly doubling demands from the previous year. That’s a record high in all the years since ALA began compiling data more than 20 years ago. And because censorship demands now often include numerous books, a record-high number of individual titles made the list of targeted books last year: 2,571. The ALA says of those, the vast majority were written by or about people of color or the LGBTQ community. 

This is a tragedy for students, and not just students who come from the communities the censors want to silence. Those students lose the sometimes life-saving experience of seeing themselves in a story and knowing they are neither abnormal nor alone. Meanwhile all students grow up knowing less about the world. Censorship stunts their intellectual growth.    

Art Spiegelman is the creator of “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel that depicts his family’s experience of the Holocaust – and is frequently targeted by censors. His experience as a target of censors has made him a leading activist against book banning, and he believes the answer to the book-banning craze is to get involved in local politics – including school board elections, where the battles over censorship are waged. Spiegelman made it clear in a recent CBS News interview that he recognizes the right of a parent to say their own child can or can’t read a book, but to make that decision for other parents’ kids is “suppression and authoritarianism.”

Spiegelman’s position seems entirely reasonable to me. We can honor the rights of individual parents to make decisions about their kids’ exposure to books, art and other cultural materials without mandating decisions for everybody else. That seems like rational ground we should all be able to occupy.

But rationality left the room a while ago when it comes to the Far Right’s attacks on the freedom to learn. The main group leading the charge on banning books, Moms for Liberty, has become something akin to a terrorist organization. Reports now abound of group members carrying out harassment campaigns in their communities, calling for librarians to be shot and making unfounded public accusations of child abuse and pedophilia against their perceived “enemies.” The group has also become a significant force in Republican politics. And it’s growing.

All of which makes it intimidating to think about getting involved in school board politics if you want to fight censorship. And that’s exactly the point.

What we need now are not just brave and principled people on school boards, but also bigger, more powerful organizations that are willing to support them. The organization I lead, People For the American Way, has a cadre of school board members in our Young Elected Officials network. We are engaged in outreach to these folks, especially in states that are hotbeds for book banning like Florida and Virginia. We’re asking them what they need, including on the security front. We want to empower them to stay in their roles because we need them more than ever to stand up to the onslaught of groups like Moms for Liberty.

If the American Library Association’s findings are any indication, this is just the start of a new struggle for the freedom to learn, one that hasn’t yet reached its peak. We owe it to the next generation not to stand on the sidelines; please think about how you can help.    

Svante Myrick is President of People For the American Way. Previously, he served as executive director of People For and led campaigns focused on transforming public safety, racial equity, voting rights, and empowering young elected officials. Myrick garnered national attention as the youngest-ever mayor in New York State history.   

April 25, 2023

More than 100 protestors stood in front of the Federal Communications Commission on April 20 to show support for the Standard General-TEGNA merger and to encourage the FCC to vote on it. PHOTO CREDIT: Arc of Justice

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - For well over a year, a vote on the proposed $8.6 billion deal between TEGNA and Standard General by the Federal Communications Commission has been delayed because the transaction is under scrutiny.

At an open meeting late last week, the issue took centerstage although it was not among those topics commissioners considered. Protestors inside the meeting auditorium and outside in front of the FCC were out in numbers trying to coax and cajole commissioners to schedule a simple up-and-down vote.

That didn’t happen. However, protestors were not shy about their desire and intentions.

“I came to support the deal because it would be good for us. (A vote) is of great and historic significance. It is an opportunity to shatter the glass ceiling,” said The Rev. Kirsten John Foy, president and founder of Arc of Justice, a New York-based civil rights organization. “We have few minority owners at the top. We are locked out and a number of barriers are placed in front of us. We need adequate and appropriate representation of women and people of color...If we’re at the table, we can influence the narrative, not one imposed on us that’s not true to us.”

Foy was one of more than 100 protestors who lined the sidewalk in front of the FCC in downtown Washington. He and other supporters argue that allowing Standard General and TEGNA to become one entity could be a game changer in terms of minority ownership in America’s current white, male-dominated media environment.

Foy emphasized Kim’s commitment to equity, inclusion, and diversity to a reporter and said so in a letter of support he drafted on behalf of his organization last year in which he expressed confidence in the deal and Soo Kim, Standard General’s CEO.

“Our confidence in Standard General and Tegna is founded not in future promise but on past record and a corporate culture that reflects the American ideals of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” the letter said. “It is founded on Soo Kim’s personal and professional commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and his vision to enlarge the footprint of people of color in broadcast media.”

No community has a greater interest in the diversification of America’s broadcast media than African Americans, Foy added.

“We have long sought and fought for expanded access to ownership, administration, operational, programmatic opportunities within the television broadcast industry,” he said. [Kim’s] new company will operationalize a robust and rigorous vision of inclusion and industrial scale access for Communities of Color, writ large, but specifically to the Black community which through long suffering and moral fortitude has long sought and fought for.”

But there is substantial and significant opposition from critics ranging from other media entities and unions such as the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET)-CWA and The NewsGuild-CWA which filed a petition to dismiss or deny the deal with the FCC  last year. Union officials contend that an “unprecedented array of sequenced transactions and swaps” — are actually an attempt to “game the Commission’s ownership and retransmission consent rules in ways that contravene the Commission’s public interest standard,” according to a June 22, 2022, Broadcasting and Cable story.

Charlie Braico, head of NABET-CWA, presented his concerns and opposition in a guest column in Broadcasting and Cable. FCC scrutiny, he said, is necessary to safeguard local news coverage in an era when TV and radio stations, as well as newspapers, are being snapped up by hedge funds and other news outlets are being shuttered at an alarming rate.

“We have already seen the detrimental effects that Wall Street control of local journalism produces — news deserts for local communities created by consolidation and even increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals,” Braico said. “Now, Wall Street funds like Apollo Global Management have turned their attention to broadcast TV, and it is crucial to determine if the Standard General-Tegna megamerger will serve the public interest, and not reduce coverage of local issues, impose viewpoints that are out of step with the community, or put jobs in local newsrooms at risk.”

More than 80 percent of Americans say they find local news coverage on television and radio to be most trustworthy, Braico added.

“We must not violate that trust by ceding control of local news to a handful of hedge funds,” he asserted.

In February last year, Tegna, which owns 64 television stations in 51 US markets, agreed to be acquired by Standard General for $8.6 billion, including debt. Supporters point to the potential benefits including a 300 percent increase of minority-owned or controlled commercial full-power television stations; expansion of the number of minority-owned commercial full-power television stations in the US from 24 to 85; and a surge in the number of Asian-American-owned or controlled stations from 4 to 65.

Outside the Federal Communications Commission building, Korean and African-American protestors wearing black T-shirts with white lettering saying, “HOLD A VOTE,” stood resolutely in the cool morning. Charles Yoon walked down the line shaking each demonstrators’ hand while bowing deeply.

“Soo Kim has been a leader in the Korean community for a long time. He is an expert in diversity. This expansion is very important for the community at large,” said Yoon, president of the Korean American Association of Greater New York. “I came to support the deal because it would be very important to increase diversity.”

Yoon, an attorney who traveled with protestors on a bus from New York, said he understood that the proposed merger has not been voted on and that its fate is in the hands of an administrative judge.

“I hope we show the FCC how much we care,” he said.

Inside the meeting, four FCC commissioners – closely watched by almost a dozen protestors – went through a five-item agenda. At the end of the hearing, in a Q&A with the media, Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworchel tried to explain why the Standard General-TEGNA question had not yet been put to a vote.

She said the transaction is currently the subject of litigation and is before an administrative law judge and therefore she’s prohibited from talking about it. But Rosenworchel did say that she firmly believes “that diversity of the media needs to reflect the diversity of this country.”

When asked, Commissioner Brendan Carr said Rosenworchel, as the chair, has the prerogative to bring the issue to a vote, and even though at least two commissioners desire a vote, whether that happens is out of their hands. Meanwhile, the FCC has come under intense criticism for seeming to be going against its declared support for diversity.

Carr, for his part, said he’s concerned about the delay because of the message it sends.

“I believe the application deserves a straight up-and-down vote. Diversity is important. The FCC should remove any impediments,” said Carr, the senior Republican on the FCC who once served as the agency’s general counsel. “It’s been a year-long process. Local news is sputtering by the moment.”

With that reality, Carr said, the FCC needs to create incentives and inducements, adding that this deal – if approved – would represent “a really break-glass moment.”

“Hundreds of local newspapers have shut down over the last few years alone. This trend is part of a broader decline in the investments necessary to sustain the journalists and reporters that are vital to communities across the country,” he said in a Feb 24, 2023, joint statement with Commissioner Nathan Simington after the public review. “Many of the nation’s local TV stations are trying to step up and expand their news gathering operations. At this moment, the FCC should be working to encourage more of the investment necessary for these local broadcasters to innovate and thrive. It does the opposite today. After a protracted, nearly yearlong review, the commission should be providing the parties with a decision on the merits – not an uncertain future.”