June 6, 2023

(TriceEdneyWire.com) -  President Joe Biden and members of Congress signed a bill into law last week that lifted the ceiling in the federal debt that will keep the government running.

The debt ceiling deal with the Republicans in Congress was seen as a major victory for the President that came the same week the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Employers posted 339,000 new jobs for May.

But, while unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 percent across the US, the unemployment rate for African-Americans rose to a new high of 5.6 percent in May.

One of the reasons why the Urban League and African American economist aren't sounding big alarms is because the unemployment rate for people of color looks like a heart monitor at times.

In April, the unemployment rate for Black Americans fell below 5 percent for the first time ever.  Four years ago, May of 2020, the rate peaked at 16.8 percent.

"The decline in the unemployment rate among Blacks in April was short-lived. As the overall unemployment rose, we see, yet again, the black population become disproportionately impacted,” said LaTanya Brown-Robertson, Professor of Economics at Howard University.

“As many labor economists have pointed out in the past, this increase in the black unemployment rate is based upon structural factors that have continuously plagued the black community, which are connected to lower levels of education and systemic racism,” Brown-Robertson added.

But President Biden remains optimistic.

“The American people got what they needed… We averted an economic crisis and an economic collapse,” said Biden during his address from the Oval Office last week.

The bill passed the Senate by a 63-36 margin Thursday evening, winning enough support to avoid a filibuster. On Wednesday, the bill passed the House , 314-117.

Dr. Bernard Anderson, Senior Economic Adviser for the National Urban League said last week, “The Black-white employment disparity remained close to the persistent 2-1 ratio, with the Black unemployment rate at 6.2 percent and the white rate at 3.2 percent.

In a report, released by the National Urban League on June 2nd, Anderson said “In order to reduce racial disparities in employment and income, it’s necessary to increase funding for post-secondary education and workforce development that will help unlock job opportunities for Black and Latino workers in higher skilled, higher paid, less cyclical occupations.”

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.