Dec. 28, 2015

Janice Mathis Leaving Rainbow/PUSH to lead National Council of Negro Women 
By Maynard Eaton

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - She’s been Atlanta’s premier female civil rights activist since the late Jondelle Johnson, the fervent and forceful former executive director of Atlanta’s NAACP who was known as “Mrs. NAACP” for her leadership in the 1970’s and 1960’s.

Now attorney Janice Mathis, the vibrant vice president of Rainbow/PUSH has been named executive director of the National Council of Negro Women [NCNW], a powerful 80-year-old civil rights organization focused on women and families.

“Jondelle is my role model. I never met her but I read about her,” says Mathis, who has also served as Rev. Jesse Jackson’s general counsel, chief of staff and closest confidant at Rainbow/PUSH for the past 16 years. “She was tough and demanding and effective and fair. You can’t be in Atlanta around civil rights work and not know about and respect Jondelle Johnson.”

Mathis, 61, is also the current Vice President of the Citizenship Education Fund (a charitable research educational organization based in Chicago), where she directs the CEF’s Southern Region office and is responsible for legal affairs and programs. She is about to fill some iconic shoes.

“I admit to having a little bit of ambition and a little bit of ego so this is a chance to lead something that has an 80 year history that was founded by Mary McCloud Bethune and carried out by Dorothy Height," she says. “To be considered in the same sentence with them is the opportunity of a lifetime for a Black female.”

The National Council of Negro Women is a Washington, D.C.-based international non-profit organization that was founded on Dec. 5, 1935 by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, the famed African American educator. Women and civil rights icon Dr. Dorothy Irene Height, president emeritus, led the organization for more than 50 years before her death in 2010.

“It’s tough to leave,” Mathis admits during an exclusive interview. “Atlanta is an amazing place with so much going on and so much potential. People don’t flock here for no reason. What’s not to love about Atlanta? And, just when you think you are beginning to understand it and figure it out, you get the offer of a lifetime for somebody like me.”

“Janis is very unique, very smart and very hard working,” opines Joe Beasley, the Rainbow/PUSH Southern Regional Director. “Jesse relied heavily on her. She will really be missed. Janice really is in that tradition Mary McCloud Bethune and Dorothy Height. She is filling some big shoes. But had she stayed with us, I suspect she would have soon succeeded Jesse. She’s that good.”

Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking to this reporter from the Republic of Guinea where he is attending the inauguration of President Alpha Conde, calls Mathis a “brilliant lawyer and social activist.”

He calls her his top aide and one of his closest friends, who will focus like a laser on economics in the Black community. “If anybody can re-tool NCNW, it is Janice Mathis,” says Rev. Jackson.

Mathis sees herself making inroads in corporate America through the buying clout and cash of African-American women. She says NCNW is poised and politically positioned for the new and next phase of the civil rights movement.

"You might call it Black dollars matter! The thing I will take from Rainbow/PUSH and will transfer is my focus on economics,” she says. “Obviously there is a symbiotic relationship between politics and economics. You can’t have one without the other. They are like black eye peas and corn bread, they go together. We need more economic strength and we need more focus on how we direct our dollars. You see a lot of studies now about how much money we control, but how many institutions do we control with that money. Black women wear these Saint John suits and they spend billions of dollars on makeup and hair products, but how [much] influence do we have with those organizations? So you will see a little bit of PUSH in my leadership style. Black women have a lot of buying power, a lot of financial decision making, a lot of banking, a lot of automotive, a lot of insurance, on and on and on. Suppose there as an NCNW seal of approval for various products that were sensitive to our concerns like Good Housekeeping?”

Mathis was named an Outstanding Georgian by former Secretary of State Cathy Cox and one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Georgia by the Georgia Informer. She has been named for several years in both Most Influential African Americans in Atlanta and 100 Most Influential Women in Atlanta by the Atlanta Business League. She was named one of One Hundred Women of Promise by Good Housekeeping Magazine.

But she has been at or near the forefront of the civil rights movement with Rev. Jackson, Asked, how that is different than being the leader, she said, “Then it’s your vision. Succeed or fail it will be on your watch. Right now people don’t really know NCNW. What do they do? Negro women; has time passed? But in two years from now if they know a little bit more about it, you can say cool—Janice made her mark.”

Mathis sees her role as “re-engineering and re-tooling” the venerable organization. “They don’t need reviving,” she says, “They are very much alive. Any organization that has 245 active chapters and more than 200 thousand members doesn’t need revitalization. They are alive and thanks to Ingrid Jones they are well. Coca Cola made that monumental million dollar gift in her honor when she retired. She made sure the taxes, the infrastructure, the audits were all in place, so I’m just going in to put a little icing on the cake.”

Jones also recommended Mathis for the job, who then came out on top for the position after an exhaustive nationwide search that netted five finalists. “I have always been impressed with her leadership,” says Jones. “And, she is extraordinarily smart, but all smart people can’t lead. Janice does that and much more.”

Mathis’ new professional promotion comes at a tragic personal time for her unfortunately. The same day it was announced she would be the new NCNW leader, her husband of 24 years, Harry Johnson, died of a sudden heart attack. The 62-year-old Johnson was the first Black new car salesman in Athens, Ga.While this has been the worst of times and the best of times for the grieving Mathis, she believes much is the same for Atlanta.

“To understand Atlanta you really have to understand how all the parts work together, I tell people you don’t understand Atlanta until you understand MARTA, Grady and the airport,” she says. “What I have learned about Atlanta is to look holistically at how African Americans are doing, not just in education but in economics and criminal justice and look across the spectrum. The thing that worries me about Atlanta is the income divide and the inequality gap. It exists between Blacks and Whites, but it also exists among Blacks. And, I worry that the better off and the least well off are insufficiently connected to each other. That was the key to our progress. There was this ethic, this moral code that you had a responsibility to bring somebody along with you, and if we lose that I think we are in trouble.”

Dec. 27, 2015

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The fight over a tree in the immediate vicinity of a planned Maggie L. Walker plaza is raging in Richmond, Va.

Gary L. Flowers, a Richmond native and national political and civil rights operative living in Jackson Ward, has jumped into the fray with a petition drive opposing the live oak that now dominates the gateway into Jackson Ward where the monument to the great lady is to stand. 

Flowers said his goal is to “galvanize support to honor Mrs. Walker in her full glory unencumbered” by the trunk and branches of the tree in the triangular Downtown park at the intersection of Broad and Adams streets and Brook Road. 

Chief among Mr. Flowers’ reasons: The tree would be a symbolic affront to Mrs. Walker, a business leader whose contributions are legion in the African-American community and nationally at a time when the government was imposing racial segregation. 

Mrs. Walker is best known as the first African-American woman to found and operate a bank — a huge accomplishment in 1903. 
“Placing the statue of Mrs. Walker under a tree hearkens back to the bloody period of history when our heroes swung, in the words of Billie Holiday, like ‘strange fruit,’” Flowers said.

He stamps that point into his petition with this strong statement: “Don’t lynch the legacy of Maggie Walker under a tree!” 

Besides avoiding painful symbolism, he said clearing the tree from the plaza also would give artist Antonio Tobias “Toby” Mendez “the free space to fully celebrate the life and work of Mrs. Walker.”

Flowers and his allies, including retired businessman J. Maurice Hopkins, are throwing down the gauntlet to tree supporters, including Mayor Dwight C. Jones, who see the oak as adding an additional dimension to the plaza project that is projected to cost around $600,000 for the art and other elements. 

With Mendez still mulling a design, both sides in the tree fight are gearing up to express their views to the Richmond Public Art Commission and the city Planning Commission, which will have the final say.

The first community hearing for people to voice their views is set for Tuesday, Jan. 12. 

Supporters of the tree were first to push the issue. Appalled that the statue might displace the tree, Jackson Ward resident Mariah Robinson rallied support with an online petition to save the tree she regards as “irreplaceable.” 

More than 800 people signed, including Mayor Jones, who announced Dec. 3 that he was joining the “effort to preserve the special oak tree” that he said would add a symbol of strength to the monument. Flowers is now seeking to get another perspective heard in one of his first efforts to affect policy in his hometown after years of being involved in national civil rights affairs. Most recently, he was executive director and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Black Leadership Forum, a coalition of 51 black political, civic and economic development groups. 
Earlier, Mr. Flowers was based out of Chicago as vice president and national organizer for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition. 

“When I returned to Richmond 18 months ago, I was euphoric when I heard about the plan to place Mrs. Walker’s statue at this intersection,” said Flowers, who has a consulting firm. 
The euphoria quickly faded, he said, after he learned about Robinson’s petition to maintain the tree. He said that pushed him to take action “to bring together a coalition of conscience, regardless of race and gender, to prevent the legacy of Maggie Walker from being lynched. 

“It would be wrong to have an enormous live oak tree literally cast a shadow over this tribute to her life and work,” he said. If the statue is to succeed, it needs to get the same treatment as the other major statues in Richmond, none of which are stuck under trees, said Hopkins, a member of the Maggie L. Walker High School Class of 1965. 

“We need a 360-degree panoramic view of the statue, and that will not be possible if the tree stays,” he said. 

The anti-tree petition is now online at GoPetition.com/petitions/support-Maggie-Walker-without-a-tree.html. For additional details, contact Flowers, (773) 230-3554, or Hopkins at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Dec. 27, 2015

New Orleans to Remove Confederate Monuments

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, surrounded by six of the seven N.O. councilmembers, signs ordinance calling for the relocation of four Confederate monuments from prominent locations in New Orleans on Thursday, December 17. Photo courtesy of the Mayor’s Office of New OrleansNew Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, surrounded by six of the seven N.O. councilmembers, signs ordinance calling for the relocation of fourConfederate monuments from prominent locations in New Orleans onThursday, December 17. PHOTO: Courtesy/Mayor’s Office of New Orleans

 Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Louisiana Weekly

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - After several hours of heated debate, the New Orleans City Council has voted 6-1 to declare four Confederate-era monuments a nuisance, paving the way for their removal from prominent locations around the city.

 
The lone dissenting vote Dec. 17 was cast by Councilwoman Stacy Head.

No timetable has been set for the removal of what many Black residents have called offensive monuments, and some anticipate that the effort to remove these monuments is far from over with legal challenges to block the majority-Black Council from moving forward with its efforts.

Before the council voted in a chamber that was filled beyond capacity, Mayor Mitch Landrieu told the council that the monuments should be relocated to a Civil War museum and Councilwoman Stacy Head proposed that the Liberty Monument and Jefferson Davis statue be removed while the P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee monuments be allowed to remain where they are.

WWL reported that Head’s amendment failed to get any support from the council and led to a heated exchange between the councilwoman and the mayor.

“I offered a compromise,” said Head. “Those who oppose the removal of the monuments have feelings too. We know exactly what’s going to happen today. This will not bring healing, only division.”

Head suggested that the call to remove the monuments came from remove the monuments came from the top down to which Landrieu replied, “I didn’t create this tension. You may be knowledgeable that slavery did and the Civil War did.”
Before Thursday’s vote, National Urban League president and former New Orleans Mayor Marc H. Morial urged the City Council to vote unanimously remove the Confederate monuments. 

“The Confederate States of America waged war against the United States of America,” Morial said. “Its leaders were enemies of the United States, and its symbols are symbols of treason. A patriotic society should have no interest in revering its enemies or honoring acts of treason. I urge New Orleans City Council cleanse the city of the detritus of an inhumane institution.”

The former mayor said a unanimous vote would send a powerful message.

“There are those who say there are more important concerns facing the city right now,” Morial said. “I submit that there is nothing more important to a community than racial reconciliation.”
The issue is a deeply personal one, Morial said.

“As a boy at Christian Brothers School, I often walked past the P.G.T. Beauregard statues while I was learning in school about the Civil War,” he said. “I remember wondering, ‘Why is that statue still there?’ It seemed to fly in the face of everything we were being taught about the monstrousness of slavery and the staggering toll in blood and treasure that was squandered to keep it alive. That such a thing should be celebrated in the 20th Century bewildered and disgusted me.”

Morial previously has called for Lee Circle, named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee, to be renamed Tricentennial Circle in honor of the city’s 300th anniversary. 

“Confederate monuments are part of our history and should be discussed and analyzed in schools and museums,” Morial said. “But places of honor in out beautiful city should be reserved for those who have enriched and enhanced its beauty and vitality.”

“Those structures are monuments that glorify people that were the terrorists and traitors of a terrible time in our country’s history,” attorney Danatus King, former president of the New Orleans Branch of the NAACP, said in an opinion piece dated Dec. 10. 

“Contrary to recent arguments regarding heritage, those monuments were erected to honor those people that owned other human beings; that fought to preserve a way of life that allowed human beings to be owned like animals. That allowed women to be raped in front of their mates and children. Allowed human beings to be beaten, tortured and killed for not obeying their masters. Those structures were erected to honor ideas and ideals that I do not honor, that should not be honored. Allowing those structures to remain shows that those despicable people and what they stood for and fought for is still honored. Those structures must come down.

“The movement to take down the offensive structures is not a top down movement,” King added. “It did not start with Mayor Landrieu. To say it did is a slap in the face to those untold number of everyday men and women that have marched and rallied for years for those structures to be taken down. Remember the marches and rallies that resulted in the Monument to Insurrectionists being moved to its current location?”

Before the vote, a local Republican group proposed allowing the Confederate monuments to remain in their current locations but erecting monuments to Black historical figures.

During a spring gathering that was part of the city’s Welcome Table race relations initiative, Mayor Mitch Landrieu called for the removal of Confederate monuments honoring Robert. E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis and another commemorating the Battle of Liberty Place and the Reconstruction-era Crescent City White League.

Although a number of grassroots Black groups have been calling for the removal of the aforementioned monuments and others for years, the mayor’s proposal re-ignited the debate and prompted criticism from both La. Governor Bobby Jindal and U.S. Sen. David Vitter, who said the mayor should focus instead on lowering the city’s rising murder rate.

Some Black leaders, including the Rev. Tom Watson, accused the mayor of using the debate about the removal of the monuments to distract voters from more pressing issues like violent crime, chronic unemployment among Black men and unconstitutional policing by the New Orleans Police Department which is in the midst of a federally mandated consent decree aimed at overhauling the department.
In September the Vieux Carre Commission voted to have the 35-foot-tall obelisk removed.

“It seems apparent now that the Liberty Monument is going to go. What happens beyond that is generally up for discussion,” WWL political analyst Clancy DuBos said.

The Orleans Parish Republican Executive Committee, along with its chairman and former councilman, Jay Batt, also agree the Liberty Place Monument should go but said it opposed the removal of the three Confederate monuments. It presented an alternative to the proposal to remove the Confederate monuments. 

“What we’re proposing is that we address the issues,” Batt told WWL before Thursday’s vote. “I know it’s been very divisive. The mayor claims they’re a nuisance. Well, they haven’t been a nuisance for as long as I’ve been alive.”
The GOP Committee said the city should keep the Confederate monuments in their current locations but add plaques to describe their historical context and erect new monuments to honor African-American heroes and trailblazers like Louisiana’s first Black Governor P.B.S Pinchback.

“Instead of tearing down history, which to me is tantamount of burning books, that we augment the landscape with other monuments to great Americans who were African-American as well,” said Batt.

Some Blacks were skeptical about the willingness of the city to honor Black historical figures and luminaries.

“This is a city that refuses to acknowledge the freedom struggle exemplified by the 1811 slave revolt, the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in U.S. history,” Ramessu Merriamen Aha, a New Orleans businessman and former congressional candidate, told The Louisiana Weekly. “It didn’t say a single word about the 200th anniversary of the revolt four years ago — it was like it never happened.

Before the meeting started, monument supporter Doug Roome, 67, told Nola.com/The Times Picayune that he believed the council would fall inline with the mayor’s efforts to remove the monuments and called Landrieu a “petty dictator.”

“It’s obscene that under Mitch Landrieu New Orleans has become the most dangerous city in America, and what we’re doing here is talking about Civil War monuments,” Roome said. He added that the debate over the monuments is widening a racial divide in the city.

“I’m not buying that,” resident Darryl Alexander told The Louisiana Weekly. “What’s causing the divide is income inequality, educational apartheid, economic apartheid, environmental racism and the absence of equal protection under the law.”
At times, the tone was decidedly ugly at the council meeting.

“Arrest me,” community activist Jerome Brown said at Thursday’s council meeting. “When I saw ‘Whites Only’ signs when I was younger, I didn’t see any of these people wanting to put up and keep those monuments come to my defense and say ‘Let this boy eat.’”

“We cannot hit a delete button on the messy parts of our history,” a resident who opposed the removal of the monuments told the council. 

“There may be people who only see their ancestors fighting nobly in wars,” a resident who supported the removal of the monuments countered. “There are others who see their ancestors shackled in chains and hanging from trees.”
Members of the council also were passionate in delivering their thoughts about the Confederate-era monuments.

“We are a great city. If we are mad about taking down monuments to rapists and murderers, that’s up to you,” said Councilman James Gray.

“Many of the people I was elected to serve are justifiably offended by these symbols, as am I,” said Councilwoman Susan Guidry.

“Removal doesn’t have to mean destroy,” said Councilman Jared Brossett. “They can be moved to a museum.”

Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who initially said she would not support efforts to remove the monuments, said she was upset by the behavior of the mayor.

“This process began with a man of privilege apologizing for slavery and moving to remove four monuments decided upon by him. I felt disrespected,” Cantrell said. 

“Most of these monuments don’t honor New Orleanians,” said Council President Jason Williams. “In fact, they disrespect them. Lee’s statue atop Lee Circle is an umbilical cord tying New Orleans to the Confederacy. It is time to cut that cord.”

Just hours after the council vote, four organizations filed a federal lawsuit against the City of New Orleans in an effort to block the removal of the Confederate-era monuments from their current public spaces. The lawsuit, filed by the Louisiana Landmark Society, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, the Monumental Task Committee and Beauregard Camp No. 130, contends that removing the monuments would violate several federal and state laws, including Louisiana’s constitution.
The case will be handled by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier.

The mayor, who said he plans to remove the monuments sooner rather than later and has already identified a contractor to carry out the work, did not seem all that concerned about the legal challenges to Thursday’s vote.

“I want to thank the New Orleans City Council for their courageous decision to turn a page on our divisive past and chart the course for a more inclusive future,” Landrieu said. “Symbols matter and should reflect who we are as a people. These monuments do not now, nor have they ever reflected the history, the strength, the richness, the diversity or the soul of who we are as a people and a city. 

“This is the right thing to do and now is the time to do it. Moving the location of these monuments — from prominent public places in our city where they are revered to a place where they can be remembered — changes only their geography, not our history. These monuments will be preserved until an appropriate place to permanently display them, such as a museum or a park, is determined.” 

“The statues, of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, Confederacy President Jefferson Davis, and the statue honoring the so-called ‘Battle of Liberty Place,’ have stood for more than a century as statements of white supremacy and the oppression of African-American people,” the ACLU said Thursday. “We applaud the council for recognizing the urgent need to remove these symbols from the city’s public spaces, and for their pledge to continue their work toward racial healing in New Orleans.”

Long before the vote on the future of the monuments, Black grassroots leaders had talked about other relics of the city’s shameful racist past that need to be removed including street names, Confederate symbols outside the entrance to City Hall and the statue of former President Andrew Jackson at Jackson Square.

Jackson famously proposed giving Native Americans blankets once used by smallpox patients to decimate the indigenous population. Jackson Square is also the site where the heads of enslaved Africans were placed on spikes after they were captured by whites during the 1811 slave revolt.

“There is a lot of work to be done,” the Rev. Raymond Brown, a community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly. “The residents of this majority-Black city should not have to pay for the upkeep of these racist monuments and street names that remind us every day how those in power feel about Black people.

“The reaction by Whites to efforts to move this city forward by doing away with these racist symbols shows how little progress has been made in New Orleans since the Civil War. In the job market, in the school system and in politics, we still see the same master-slave relationship that was present when this city was founded almost 300 years ago.”

Dec. 21, 2015

By Zenitha Prince 

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Afro American Newspaper

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Christmas came early to 97 felons granted commutations and pardons by President Barack Obama Dec. 18.

Most of the prisoners were behind bars for non-violent drug-related offenses: at least 74 of the 95 commutations involved possession or distribution of either crack or cocaine, nine involved only methamphetamine, five involved only marijuana, and five others involved unspecified drugs.

Another two of the commutations were for non-drug-associated crimes: one involving armed bank robbery and another involving possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

The president also used his constitutional power to grant pardons to an Ohio physician convicted of counterfeiting in 2002 and a New Kent, Va., woman convicted of aiding and abetting bank fraud.

The commutations were the third set Obama has given this year and the most awarded at one time. In all, this administration has granted 184 commutations, which exceeds the total grants by the previous six presidents combined.

The commutations are part of the White House’s clemency initiative – launched in 2014 – which reflects Obama’s commitment to criminal justice reform, including parity in sentencing.

Civil and human rights groups hailed the move.

“American presidents have had the power to show mercy since the founding of our Republic. President Obama is the first president in decades to use it as the founders intended,” said Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, in a statement. “For that reason, we commend him for showing more mercy than his predecessors. But his work is not done…. Far too many others are still serving excessively long sentences that should be commuted as well.”

Under the clemency initiative, qualified federal prisoners were encouraged to apply to have their sentences commuted. But of the 36,000 offenders that have applied, fewer than 200 have received clemency in the past two years, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which helped coordinate the efforts of attorneys who have been working pro bono to assist those prisoners.

The group is calling on the administration to intensify its efforts and is also charging Congress to play its part in reforming the nation’s racially unjust criminal justice system, including its archaic, counterproductive sentencing laws.

“Legislation to reform these laws have drawn unprecedented bipartisan support, such as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, S. 2123, passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October,” said Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee, in a statement. “The House Judiciary Committee passed a similar bill reforming federal sentencing laws in November. Both chambers need to bring these bills to the floor as soon as possible in 2016.”