Every ten years in the United States, new political lines are drawn to create “more equitable districts” at every level of government. In 2020 – 2021, for the first time a Citizens Redistricting Commission is drawing lines for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
: Council Districts (CDs) 8, 9 and 10 saw minimal changes in the final draft map to be submitted to the Los Angeles City Council by the Redistricting Commission. The adopted draft map, which passed by a 15-6 vote, featured adjustments to the three CDs with the city’s highest numbers of voting age African Americans. Most notably, Exposition Park is now located in CD 8.
The so-called “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court are rewriting the laws passed by Congress to serve their own partisan purposes. Now the excuse is to limit voter fraud, even though there is no evidence of such fraud other than in the ravings of partisan politicians. This struggle will continue.
Last week, Majority Whip Clyburn, Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, made the observation that the “Filibuster” currently being used in the
U.S. Senate to block the Voting Rights Bill as well as the George Floyd Bill, is a matter of tradition and not a part of the U.S. Constitution.
Now that the Fourth of July is over and we have all been reminded of what Frederick Douglas said and did, the cookouts are behind us, but so is the memory of the White Nationalists marching in the streets of Philadelphia with flags and faces covered. Let us now come off of recess and dig in for the battle ahead. Let us not be like the Summer Patriot and Sunshine Soldier that Thomas Payne wrote about during the Revolutionary War. In his publication, “The Crisis”, he said that such would soon vanish from the battle, but those that endured until
The Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU and NAACP, acting on behalf of religious, student and ethnic minority-serving organizations, allege the new regulations are unconstitutional and violate the federal Voting Rights Act.
While some of us are spending our time watching the news or wondering how we are going to survive the pandemic, now is the time to understand the battles we are in and determine what we must do individually and collectively.
Good evening! Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you, thank you. Good evening. So, thank you, good evening. So, Congressman John Lewis, Congressman John Lewis before his passing wrote “Democracy is not a state, it is an act.” And what he meant was that America’s democracy is not guaranteed.
Even in the darkest of times, we can hear our friend and mentor John Lewis: “Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.”
August 6 was the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. If the constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War — the 13, 14 and 15th Amendments — were the “second founding” of democracy in America, the Voting Rights Act, which after nearly a century of segregation gave legal effect to the 15th Amendment that outlawed discrimination in the right to vote, should be considered the “third founding.”
The Rev. C.T. Vivian, an early and key adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who organized pivotal civil rights campaigns and spent decades advocating for justice and equality, died Friday at the age of 95.
SCLC is planning a new Poor People’s Campaign focused on empowerment, education and food for those in poverty.
Following the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court case, which gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, 14 states had new voting restrictions in place before the 2016 Presidential election, and there were 868 fewer polling places across the country, according to the Poor Peoples Campaign.
“We may debate over the origin of evil, but only the person victimized with a superficial optimism will debate over its reality. Evil is with us as a stark, grim, and colossal reality.”
In 1965, Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led what was planned as a peaceful 54-mile march through Alabama from Selma to Montgomery. The march, a protest of the discriminatory practices and Jim Crow laws that prevented African Americans from voting, would be remembered in history as “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most dramatic and violent incidents of the American Civil Rights Movement.