Jan. 18, 2023
By Hamil R. Harris


The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson speaking to Dr. King. Jackson said he continues to work to keep King’s legacy alive. (Courtesy photo)

Virginia Ali (center), owner of Ben’s Chili Bowl and widow of the restaurant’s namesake founder, served free lunches to D.C. schoolteachers for Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 16. The late civil rights icon often ate at the renowned establishment while planning the March on Washington. (Hamil R. Harris/The Washington Informer)

SPECIAL TO THE TRICE EDNEY NEWS WIRE FROM THE WASHINGTON INFORMER

Virginia Ali

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had just met with President John F. Kennedy to discuss his plans to convene the 1963 March on Washington, and JFK was concerned.

“Dr. King and organizers of the March often came into Ben’s because their office was on 14th and U,” said Virginia Ali, who co-founded Ben’s Chili Bowl with her husband Ben Ali in August 1958. “That was a real privilege meeting with Kennedy, but he was concerned that a large protest would provoke injustice.
Despite the President’s concerns, more than 250,000 people converged on the grounds between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, and Mrs. Ali said, “Ben and I were there.”

Had King lived, he would have been 94 on Jan. 15, and in observance of the occasion on Monday, Ben’s Chili Bowl will serve free meals to school teachers who visit the restaurant.

“I am very concerned about our young people,” said Ali, 89, who will celebrate the 65th anniversary of the popular restaurant for civil rights activists and families at the height of segregation.

Ali, who turns 90 this year, said the secret to her vitality is “staying busy and treating people like you want to be treated.”

Fred Gray

As he planned to fly to the Midwest to speak during a King holiday program, Fred Gray, the lawyer for King and Rosa Parks, spends his time these days continuing to keep King’s legacy alive.

“I am speaking in Lansing, Michigan, Sunday, and Monday, I will be at Emory University on Wednesday, and next week, I have to go down to Miami to speak to a group of lawyers,” said Gray, who, at 92,  said. “I’m delighted to talk about Dr. King for several reasons.”

“I was one of two persons who recommended Dr. King at the Montgomery bus boycott, and the other person was Joanne Robinson,” he said. “We made that recommendation after Mrs. Park’s arrest.”

“It means a great deal to me personally because some years later when I was in the Alabama state legislature, between 1971 and 1972, I introduced (legislation that) the third Monday in January be a holiday after Dr. King,” Gray said, even though his bill never made it out of committee, he is glad King’s birthday became a national holiday.

Rev. Jesse Jackson

Rev. Jesse Jackson, 82, had plenty to say about what he is focused on this King holiday.

“When we register to vote, we change the composition of America,” Jackson. Referring to his two bids for president, Jackson said much has changed in the U.S. since the 1980s. “We won in 84; we won 88, and now so many people are running for everything.”

Jackson, who has slowed down a bit as he battles Parkinson’s disease, also said he was happy that his son Jonathan Jackson was elected to Congress to represent the citizens in Illinois’ 1st Congressional District.

Rev. Grainger Browning

Rev. Grainger Browning, the pastor of Ebenezer A.M.E. in Fort Washington, said, “Dr. King would have been 94, and everything that we fought for 60 years ago we are fighting for today: jobs, police brutality, issues of race discrimination, but Dr. King would also be concerned with the role of technology and how it is dehumanizing personal relationships.

”It is no longer what’s important but what gets the most views,” Browning added. “What gets the most views can be the most outlandish, the craziest. It’s no longer world poverty, world hunger because these issues are no longer popular.”

Browning talked about when King came out against the war in Vietnam, “I don’t remember anyone who was spoken of as negatively at that time.”

Jane Johnson

Jane Johnson, a retired educator who grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, said, “Dr. King was one of the most hated men in America.”
Johnson, who later moved to the District, was part of the individuals driving King, and explained that there were unusual steps taken for the leader’s protection, such as staying in rooms and boarding in private homes.

Jan. 16, 2023
By Rev. Jesse Jackson

NEWS ANALYSIS

 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday generally focuses on his “dream” of an America in which children will “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

In celebrating King’s dream, we should remember the challenge he put before the country. In many ways, Dr. King saw the civil rights movement as a symphony with three movements.

The first featured the struggle for equal opportunity, for ending segregation and providing equal access to schools, jobs, housing, health care, finance and more. This was a battle waged at lunch counters, in bus boycotts, in the courts and in the streets.

The second movement – one that suffered some of the worst murders and beatings – was the fight for the right to vote. It was waged in dangerous voter registration efforts, like that which witnessed the Freedom Summer murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney near Philadelphia, Mississippi. And in marches and demonstrations like the march over the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, that was met with a police riot. It culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act, after Lyndon Johnson pledged that “we shall overcome.”

The third movement, which King knew would be the most difficult, was the push for equality, for basic human rights for all people. “What good is the right to sit at a lunch counter,” Dr. King asked, “if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger.”

Equal justice required the eradication of poverty for people of all races, a transformation of a system that has left us, as Dr. King wrote, with “a gap of superfluous wealth and abject poverty,” and has “created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.”

Economic and racial equality, Dr. King understood, could not be achieved unless America curbed its growing and costly military adventures. So, Dr. King courageously spoke out against the Vietnam War, warning that the war on poverty was being lost in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

On his final birthday, Dr. King worked on putting together a Poor People’s Campaign, a multiracial coalition of working and poor people to march on Washington to demand equal justice.

He understood that justice required fundamental reforms – the right to a job or a guaranteed income, a living wage, universal health care, the right to affordable housing, equal access to the courts. His assassination took him from us when his leadership was most needed.

The civil rights movement transformed America and helped to further its ideals. We have come a long way. But Dr. King surely would be dismayed by how far we have yet to go. Today, legal segregation of schools has ended, but our schools are more segregated than ever. The right to vote has been extended, but conservative judges have gutted the Voting Rights Act, and voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering and dark money undermine our democracy. Inequality has reached new and obscene extremes. America has been enmeshed in endless wars throughout this century. The Pentagon consumes more than half of the annual spending Congress votes on. Gun violence, mass incarceration and police brutality still rob too many of life and liberty. Now catastrophic climate change poses a rising and deadly threat.

Lasting change is hard. Every reconstruction gets met with a reaction. Cynical politicians stoke racial and national fears. Economic insecurities make us more likely to turn on each other than to each other. Dr. King’s example calls upon us not to adjust to these realities nor to accept them, but to act boldly to change them. “There is no gain without struggle,” he taught.

Dr. King held no public office, he amassed no personal fortune, he commanded no military forces – yet he led a movement that transformed the country. Politicians, he understood, adjust to prevailing winds. It is people in motion that generate the wind and set the direction. True leaders do not echo popular opinion, they mold opinion. Let us celebrate his birthday by following his example and mobilizing to fulfill the dream.

Nov. 28, 2022
By Dr. Wilmer Leon

NEWS ANALYSIS

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), chair, Congressional Black Caucus

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Even though we think first of those we were directly elected to serve, we cannot, in good conscience, think only of them—for what affects one black community, one poor community, one urban community, affects all…,” Letter from Congressional Black Caucus to President Nixon in 1971.

In the 1960s, Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.) established the Democracy Select Committee (DSC) to bring the nine elected African American House members together. They were organized in order to help them strategize around their common issues and develop policy initiatives that would address the problems facing their African American constituents. “The sooner we get organized for group action, the more effective we can become,” Diggs said. The operative words in Diggs’ statement are “group”, “action” and “effective”. Is the current iteration of the CBC as a group taking effective action?

By the beginning of the 92nd Congress, (1971-1973) the number of African American Representatives had risen from nine to 13. Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) said, “In addition to representing our individual districts, we had to assume the onerous burden of acting as congressman-at-large for unrepresented people around America.” Those 13 African American members founded The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 1971. It was from that above referenced 1971 letter to Nixon that the CBC became known as The  Conscience  of the Congress .

Ossie Davis was the keynote speaker at the first CBC fundraising dinner in 1971. The title of his address was, It’s Not The Man, It’s The Plan. In this address he challenged the members of the CBC by stating, “…the time has…come when rhetoric will begin to take a back seat…Give to us a “Ten Black Commandments,” simple and strong…” He closed by saying, “Let us stop making history by ad hoc methods and impromptu improvisations. Let us plan the whole thing out…” He directed the CBC members to give people their assignments and hold them strictly responsible if they don’t carry them out.

Now is the time for the African American community to take stock, not of the original 13 members of the CBC, but of the current 58. Are they in fact addressing the problems facing the African American community? Are they taking effective “group-action”? Has the “conscience of the Congress” become unconscious? Have they devolved     into a comprador class of relatively privileged, wealthy and educated natives of a colonized land that have been "bought" by the colonizers? More simply put by the late Glen Ford, have they become “the Black Misleadership Class”?

According to the CBC website, “…the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has been committed to using the full Constitutional power, statutory authority, and financial resources of the federal government to ensure that African Americans and other marginalized communities in the United States have the opportunity to achieve the American Dream.” Ossie Davis said in his address, “…the name of the game is power-and if you ain’t playing power, you’re in the wrong place.” Is the CBC using its     power as a 53 - member potential voting bloc to demand substantive change, or are they a rubber stamp for the interests of the American elite? They appear to be less effective now than they were 51 years ago.

Before examining domestic policy, take a look at some foreign policy blunders. This past April the House passed the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act. Using pages from the Cold War playbook, the US is once again invoking the threat of a Russian boogeyman to justify American imperialism in Africa. The bill passed the House on a 415-9 vote. All of the so-called “progressive” members of the House, the Squad, and the CBC supported this legislation.

The Act sanctions African nations that fail to follow the American lead and choose to exercise their sovereignty by ignoring American dictates not to do business with Russia. SADIC, the 16-member regional bloc of Southern African countries, said in a joint statement that the United States is “bullying” African nations and punishing them for not following the “failing US sanctions regime” that has made the African continent “the target of unilateral and punitive measures”.

The U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) is another unfortunate example of the US using militarism as an offset to diplomacy and the basis of American interventionism in African countries. The CBC direct and tacit support of AFRICOM is a travesty. There has been a significant increase in coups 0ver the last 18 months, with African military leadership, many of them AFRICOM trained, carrying out takeovers or attempted takeovers in Burkina Faso, Sudan, Guinea, Chad, Mali, Niger and Guinea-Bissau. The Black Alliance for Peace calls for the CBC to support opposition to AFRICOM and demands the CBC’s commitment to holding hearings about the military program’s negative impact on the African continent. To date the CBC is conspicuously silent on these demands.

On another front, in response to the rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Haiti, the Biden administration is at the UN seeking support for “the immediate deployment of a multinational rapid action force” to go into Haiti. The problem is, most of the problems in Haiti are a result of US interventionist and hegemonic imperial policies towards the island nation. President Biden is now hoping to use the Trump era Global Fragility Act (GFA) as its cover for US military intervention.

The GFA is being heralded as an enlightened new approach to diplomacy when in fact it’s old wine in new bottles. President Biden said the GFA “…provides a roadmap: a 10-year effort to strengthen the security and prosperity of people everywhere by helping to fortify the footing of parts of the world that continue to grapple with challenges that can lead to destabilizing conflict and violence.” The problem with this so-called logic is, when you look at the counties targeted; Haiti, Libya, Ghana, Guinea, and others; the US and it Western allies have been largely responsible for their instability by assassinating their leaders and fomenting coups. Simply put, the US is implementing a “new” strategy (of which military intervention is an important element) to “solve” the problems that US intervention has caused. The CBC has gone right along with these imperialists, hegemonic and interventionist policies instead of standing up for the victims and speaking up against these racist policies. If the CBC were in the Black Panther movies, they would be called “colonizers” by the Wakandans.

Here's how the US Government uses domestic policy to aid foreign nations that are not occupied by peoples of color. President Biden signed the FY 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law. As a part of this, the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative was extended through 2022 and its funding was increased from $250 million to $300 million per year. On March 16, 2022, President Biden announced an additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, bringing the total U.S. security assistance committed to Ukraine to $1 billion in just the previous week, and a total of $2 billion since the start of the Biden Administration.

On May 21, President Biden signed into law the Additional Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act, a law that provides nearly $40 billion in additional military, economic and humanitarian aid. These US taxpayer dollars provide housing, education, medical, and other types of assistance for those in Ukraine. For those Ukrainian’s who have made it to the US, “refugees and parolees”, they will receive support through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI); health insurance through Medicaid; and food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

In a time when Americans are facing extreme unemployment, foreclosures and evictions, energy poverty and homelessness, they are in great need of social safety net programs. Yet, the CBC voted unanimously to fund the NDAA and pour hard-earned taxpayer dollars into supporting the military industrial complex and boondoggles like the war in Ukraine. The CBC was established to help African American members of Congress strategize around their common issues and develop policy initiatives that would address the problems facing their African American constituents. They are supposed to be the “conscience of the Congress”; unfortunately for us, they are unconscious.

Dr. Wilmer Leon is the author of Politics Another Perspective and a nationally broadcast talk radio program host. Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. www.twitter.com/drwleon and Dr. Leon’s Prescription at Facebook.com

Oct. 11, 2022

 

Capitol Hill Committee Questions Bank Branch Closures in Black America

 

By Charlene Crowell

 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In recent weeks, key Capitol Hill committees held hearings with CEOs of some of the nation’s largest commercial banks. At issue for both California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, and Ohio’s Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of Senate Banking, are disturbing industry trends like growing mergers, closing bank branches, and a push towards online services that together create ‘banking deserts’ in already underserved communities.

 

Although bank mergers create institutions with larger assets, for consumers and small businesses alike, these industry moves change where and how communities can access full-service banking.

 

In opening remarks at a September 16 House Financial Services Committee hearing, Chairwoman Maxine Waters made clear what she hoped the bank CEOs would address. 

 

“Over the past several years, we’ve seen the system of banking in this country take a dramatic shift,” stated Waters. “Our nation’s biggest banks have gotten even bigger during the pandemic, in part, through mergers. Regulators have rubberstamped these merger applications for far too long, and it’s past time we get to the bottom of who these mergers are actually benefiting.”

 

“I remain concerned,” continued Waters, “that branch closures across the country, which are often a consequence of mergers, are expanding banking deserts and harming communities that rely on branches for basic banking services.”

 

In response to Chairwoman Waters, Andy Cecere, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Bancorp, offered a different perspective on industry trends, one that embraces innovation as time-saving, competitive, and convenient tools.

 

“By using our branch network in combination with digital tools, we enable our customers to be more connected to their financial future,” testified Cecere. “Last quarter, 82 percent of our consumer transactions were enabled by our digital capabilities, with 64 percent of loan sales executed digitally. Digital advancements that differentiate us from the market add to the customer experience.”

 

Jane Fraser, Chief Executive Officer, Citi shared testimony that seemed to confirm many of the issues raised by Chairwoman Waters.

 

“Our retail bank serves roughly 70 million customers in the U.S., where we operate 651 retail branches concentrated in the six metropolitan areas of New York, Washington, D.C., Miami, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles,” noted Fraser. “We have fewer than the approximately 1,000 branches we had 10 years ago, but more than the 450 branches we operated at the turn of the millennium. Roughly 29 percent of our branches are in low- and moderate-income census tracts.”

 

Days later on September 22, the Senate Banking Committee held its own hearing with bank CEOs. And like Waters, Brown’s opening remarks echoed many of the same concerns.

 

“Together, you have over $13 trillion in assets – that’s half the nation’s GDP,” said Brown. “You have hundreds of millions of customers. You also have the benefit of a federal backstop – a safety net – something that your customers don’t have.”

 

“And you profit from all those transactions – to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. With those profits – and with the taxpayer support you get – come a responsibility to actually serve your customers and the larger economy,” Brown added.

 

William H. Rogers, Jr., CEO of a recent bank merger that created Truist, was one of the Senate hearing’s witnesses.

 

“Over the past ten years, Truist closed an average of 193 branches annually,” said Rogers. “Many of these closures occurred following the merger of BB&T and SunTrust, because the two heritage banks, in many instances, maintained separate branches in the same neighborhoods and even on the same street corners. These closure plans were reviewed as part of the merger approval process and had virtually no long-term impact on branch availability or convenience for clients.”

 

Research by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) documents how still shrinking numbers of bank branches in Black and other communities of color diminish the economic futures of communities already reeling from a lack of sustained investment and redevelopment in its reported titled, The Great Consolidation of Banks and Acceleration of Bank Closures Across America.

 

From 1984 to 2021, the nation’s number of banks shrank from nearly 18,000 to fewer than 5,000, according to NCRC. More than 4,000 of these closures occurred since March 2020, coinciding with the onset of the pandemic. Further, one-third of bank branch closures occurred in majority-minority neighborhoods and/or low-to-moderate income areas, where convenient bank access is often viewed as central to ending inequities in financial services.

 

“The presence of local branch offices provides an opportunity for face-to-face interactions that build both trust and financial literacy for individual borrowers and small businesses…Today’s larger, less-local banks are still charged with serving the credit needs of the entire community they serve,” the report continues. “Changes in how the public interacts with their bank do not create an exemption to the law.”

 

Summarizing his committee’s concerns, Chairman Brown underscored to the CEOs what might have been overlooked.

 

“It’s past time for the financial industry to be as good to the American people as the country has been to you,” concluded Brown. “We will continue to hold you to the highest standards, so that Americans can keep more of their hard-earned money.”

Charlene Crowell is a senior fellow with the Center for Responsible Lending. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.