Watts is a historic place. It’s where oppressed people from the Deep South and, more recently, from around the world, have come to start a new life in fabled California. They fled the remnants of slavery, Jim Crow, the Klu Klux Klan, lynchings, and corrupt political and legal systems. They fled oppression and political exclusion and came with great hope in search of a new life.
This subject of land restrictions is of special interest to me. My husband, Clark Parker, Sr., tells a fascinating account of our own property ownership. We can therefore easily relate to covenants, deeds and restrictions research project, especially since he is an accomplished real estate expert and builder of multimillion homes, condominiums, schools and other real estate structures.
“Some had to pay fees. Some were tested. Many people died for that right. It is too important for us not to vote, and if we want to have a democracy, we need to participate in it. We can’t hope that situations will change. We have to be active in helping candidates get elected who will create that change,” said Lex Scott, the president of the Black Lives Matter Utah Chapter.
Councilman Joe Buscaino recently replied to a series of articles by the undersigned setting forth facts demonstrating that Watts is and has been a politically neglected appendage of Los Angeles. Mr. Buscaino takes issue with that contention and responds that Watts has not been neglected and cites several recent projects to support his argument. At the outset, we need to express appreciation for Mr. Buscaino’s efforts for the people of his district and his willingness to debate the larger political issues relating to Watts in particular, and the city generally. Healthy debate always leads to positive results. That said, let us take a closer look at Watts.
“We have COVID, we have anti-Black, we have the very tenuous economy and we have the climate catastrophe,” said Dr. Ladson-Billings.
The civil rights leaders led his life my example that fighting for justice is the only option.
As state and federal lawmakers grapple with whether or not the State of California — and the United States as a whole — should take a closer look at what it owes the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States, a group of Black California activists are getting ahead of the conversation. They are distilling the case for reparations down to why African Americans deserve to get paid for centuries of free labor and the Jim Crow laws and other forms of state-enforced discriminatory practices that followed. They are also specifying which segment of Black Americans should get those payments.
The house is on fire and it is burning down, and it should burn down.
We must recognize that elected officials in Los Angeles have an awesome power to provide our communities with dignity and lift people from homelessness by sufficiently investing resources into Targeted Local Hire, a proven equitable program.
“I intend to work for @cindyhydesmith as if the fate of America depended on her single election,” Gov. Phil Bryant tweeted on January 2. “If Mike Espy and the liberal Democrats gain the Senate, we will take that first step into a thousand years of darkness.”
The work accomplished in the fight for civil rights justice and equality by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lifts us all. We owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. King for his endeavors and the sacrifices he made in leading the movement that so many have benefitted from over the decades.
California born businessman Clayton Banks was an excited teen going to visit his brother at his UCLA dorm, he says, when he first encountered racism. “I was walking along and a car came by and someone yelled the N-word. I was just so appalled. I freaked out. I mean,” he paused at the memory, “I was really flabbergasted.” After he processed the incident Banks says he realized, “It had nothing to do with me. It was their ignorance.”
Racism and bigotry have existed since the first Africans set foot in English speaking North America 400 years ago. During our long, agonizing trek through the pages of U.S. history, we have suffered enslavement, lynching, Jim Crow laws, red lining, school segregation and employment discrimination, just to name a few of the ways in which our humanity has been violated.
When the emancipation proclamation freed African-American slaves some 32 years later, slave-holding states like North Carolina did not automatically throw out the harsh anti-literacy legislation they had been using to oppress slaves. Those laws, the Jim Crow ones that followed, segregated schools, under-funded school districts – as well as other economic, political and social factors – all played a role in erecting barriers to a quality education for African Americans over the decades that followed.
This is a direct appeal to Governor Newsom, Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez and our entire state legislature. I’m writing this on behalf of the more than 20 African American-owned newspapers that operate in cities and towns across California.