Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, facing heavy criticism for defending “anti-woke” teaching in Florida, this week teed up an unusual proposal to the nation’s first Black vice president: Come debate the merits of the state’s new curriculum on African American history.
San Francisco resident Pia Harris hopes for reparations in her lifetime. But the nonprofit program director is not confident that California lawmakers will turn the recommendations of a first-in-the-nation task force into concrete legislation given pushback from opponents who say slavery was a thing of the past.
The Lula Washington Dance Theatre presents “Dances For The Soul” on Saturday, April 29, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, April 30, at 3 p.m., at Lula Washington Dance Theatre, 3773 Crenshaw Blvd. In Los Angeles.
Nearly two years into the California reparations task force’s work, the group still has yet to make key decisions that will be at the heart of its final report recommending how the state should apologize and compensate Black residents for the harms caused by slavery and discrimination.
More than 150 years after slaves were freed in the U.S., voters in five states will soon decide whether to close loopholes that led to the proliferation of a different form of slavery — forced labor by people convicted of certain crimes.
For three centuries lynching was a standard practice in the cruel treatment of Black men, women, and children in America. Even after slavery, Blacks from 1882 – 1959 were lynched on average every six days, totaling at least 4,733 brutal deaths, according to researchers at the Tuskegee Institute.
Rochester school officials are investigating allegations that a white teacher told his class of mostly Black students to pick seeds out of cotton and put on handcuffs during lessons on slavery in a seventh-grade social studies class.
“This has been a 30-plus year journey,” Congresswoman Jackson Lee declared. “We had to take a different approach. We had to go one by one to members explaining this does not generate a check.” Congresswoman Jackson Lee said this week that there’s now enough votes in the House for passage of the historic piece of legislation.
“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”― Frederick Douglass
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.
In June, California launched the nation’s first Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans this year. The nine-member committee was established to meet the requirements of Assembly Bill (AB) 3121, which California Secretary of State Shirley Weber authored and introduced in 2020 when she served in the Legislature. Gov. Newsom signed it into law in September 2020. “This is a debt that is owed, just because it hasn’t been paid doesn’t mean it goes away,” said the newly elected chair of the California reparations task force Kamilah V. Moore. At the task force’s first meeting on June
During and exclusive interview with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Senior Advisor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, Cedric Richmond, says that the deliberate misinformation published by news outlets and posted on social media is meant to undermine the President and Democrats. Notably, the dubious accounts aim to suppress the Black vote further, Richmond declared.
During its third meeting, California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans looked at reasons formerly enslaved Black people migrated to the Golden State — and detailed setbacks they faced after arriving.
During the period historians dub the “Great Migration”– which lasted from the early 1900s through the 1970s – approximately six million Black Americans relocated from Deep South states to Northern, Midwestern, Eastern and Western states. Significant numbers ended up in California, escaping Jim Crow laws and racial violence and seeking economic opportunity.
April Grayson, a policy associate for the Young Women’s Freedom Center and a formerly incarcerated Black woman, who spent 17 years behind bars, said she can’t wait to see the day when the language in Article 1, Section 6 of California’s Constitution is off the books.
These conversations about resurgent racism bring to mind the Greek mythological many-headed snake-like monster that, if you cut off one of its heads, would grow back two more in its place. And only the god-like superhero, Hercules, could kill it. But racism is real, not a myth, in spite of fervent and faithful denials by its most devout, delusional and passionate practitioners.