It’s a cliché that Kymyona Burk heard a little too often: “Thank God for Mississippi.” As the state’s literacy director, she knew politicians in other states would say it when their reading test scores were down — because at least they weren’t ranked as low as Mississippi. Or Louisiana. Or Alabama.
The White woman who testified that a Black teenager named Emmett Till had made inappropriate approaches toward her, which led to his lynching and murder in Mississippi in 1955, has died. According to a coroner’s report, Carolyn Bryant Donham, 88, died while receiving hospice care in Louisiana.
Unlike one hundred years ago, we know what’s coming and what we can do to stop such actions. We know that from the increase in hate crimes and racism, much of it fueled by the actions of our former President, that racism on the part of conservative and right-wing whites is fear of the “browning” of America.
During the early 1990s, Ward Connerly, then-President of the California Civil Rights Initiative Campaign, was the leading African American supporting Proposition (Prop) 209, the ballot initiative that outlawed Affirmative Action in California in 1996.
The Rev. Amos C. Brown is vice-chair and the senior member serving on the nine-member California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
As floodwaters and the after-effects of Hurricane Ida ravaged Louisiana, Mississippi, and eventually wreaked havoc in the northeast, FEMA officials announced that there will be significant changes in how they verify the ownership status of disaster relief applicants, noting that the objective in making the changes is to better assist applicants whose property was inherited without a will.
Col. Jerry Carter, a U.S. Army veteran, will oversee the work of 160 officers statewide.
But last week, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) unanimously ruled that the NCAA policy must fall in line with the country’s antitrust laws and that the organization does not have the authority to deny student athletes the right to receive compensation for their athleticism or fame.
Although many officials have called for a ‘return to normal’, millions of small businesses and communities need something new instead. In Black America especially, the ‘old normal’ never delivered equitable access to wealth-building opportunities as those that well-served served much of White America. Instead, a lengthy history of public policies designed to create and sustain a burgeoning middle class systemically excluded Blacks and other people of color.
Fourteen years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center sent the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice a list of 74 cold cases involving African Americans allegedly murdered in racially motivated circumstances by White people between 1952 and 1968.
Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative judge with a stated opposition to the Affordable Care Act and many Civil Rights laws, was confirmed on Monday, October 26, 2020, as the next Supreme Court Justice.
“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.
When you get your California election ballot soon – that’s if you don’t have it already –expect to see Kanye West’s name on it.
The 43-year-old rapper and business mogul is on the California ballot as the candidate for vice president on the American Independent Party (AIP) ticket. The presidential candidate on the AIP ticket is San Diego-based Mexican American businessman Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente Guerra.
“Yet even today, with all those credentials and as one of the leading executives on Wall Street,” wrote Raymond J. McGuire, Citi’s Vice Chairman and Chair of its Global Banking and Capital Markets, “I am still seen first as a six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound Black man wherever I go — even in my own neighborhood. I could have been George Floyd. And my wife and I are constantly aware that our children could have their innocence snatched away from them at any given moment, simply for the perceived threat of their skin color.”
“We have COVID, we have anti-Black, we have the very tenuous economy and we have the climate catastrophe,” said Dr. Ladson-Billings.