Monthly Archives: June 2021

To the Editor:

This Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of the infamous burning of Black Wall Street, one of the worst unrecorded tragedies of the 20th century.

Bustling with shoppers, visitors, tourists, and even investors, Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was busied by banks, restaurants, hotels, mutual aid societies, insurance companies, law firms, all razed. At least 300 people were killed in the attack, yet the mainstream media rarely mentions the tragedy.

The Democratic Party of the 19th and early 20th century advertised itself as "protecting the white working class," openly promoting policies to keep American business from hiring Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and American Indians, ranging from occupational licensing to the minimum wage, intended to keep "unemployables" from filling lower wage jobs. The business-oriented Whigs and the abolitionist Liberty Party (where my family came from) merged with the anti-slavery Free Soil Party and American Republican Party at Exeter Town Hall in 1853 to end slavery, but also to open up the labor market, increase tariffs, limit immigration, and pay for infrastructure projects in the new western states. The Republican coalition of that time introduced the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1875, 1957, 1960, and 1964, as well as much needed 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Times and issues have changed, and that's why I introduced the Civil Rights Act of 2019 last session and intend to again.

Other successful Black Wall Streets, such as those in Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, proved to be examples of the success of hard work, perseverance, and the success of the American system and American spirit. Little Rock, Jackson, Chicago, and Atlanta also sported lively development of these affluent neighborhoods and helped prove that Americans of all colors and backgrounds could make it. Former slave Maggie Lena Walker became the first Black woman to be a bank president, running both the St. Luke Savings Bank and an insurance company, among others.

I'm writing this letter to the editor to ensure that this piece of our history is not lost. We'd even tried to set up a candlelit vigil at the State House but couldn't get the paperwork processed in time. All of these prosperous Chinatowns, Little Saigons, Greek towns, and Little Italies have shown the hard work and indelible spirit of the American character and the need to preserve these values.

Rep. Max Abramson

Seabrook

Originally posted here:

Opinion/Letter: 100th anniversary of the burning of Black Wall Street - Seacoastonline.com

Sunday, May 30, 2021 | 2 a.m.

A year after the murder of George Floyd, America remains a nation torn by bigotry.

We find ourselves facing withering street-level attacks on Jews and Asians. Police killings of Black Americans continue unabated. Extremist political leaders on the right wage war on being Black in America, including with amplified assaults on voting rights for people of color across the country. Common-sense police reform remains lacking at the federal level. Now comes an angry effort by conservatives to prevent even teaching about race issues and racism in schools.

We have even witnessed some elected officials downplaying slavery itself, trying to convince Americans that the forced bondage of millions of Blacks and the unspeakable horrors they faced werent really as bad as history tells us it was.

The unifying thread to these problems? The Republican Party, Fox News and other right-wing media, and state-sponsored agitators from Russia continue to promote any issue that will further divide Americans, frighten white voters and encourage hatred of other Americans right down to the neighborhood level.

For profiteers in extremist media Fox News Rupert Murdoch and his ilk division is big business. And now it has become apparent that social medias business model is fueled on hate and conflict as well. These platforms trade in audience engagement, and for thousands of years few things get humans more engaged than ethnic and religious animus.

Meanwhile, right-wing media and social media work hand-in-hand to pump a steady stream of misinformation through the media ecosphere, where its shared in echo chambers that encourage Americans to disbelieve legitimate media and make the lies essentially impervious to fact-checking. These forces of propaganda and misinformation have not only driven the nation apart, theyve separated the right into camps that believe a badly distorted version of reality.

As social media morphs into a 24/7 engine of hate, one must ask when we as a culture say weve had enough of all this.

Enough with the conspiracies. Enough with lies. Enough with detached billionaires profiting from racism. Enough dancing slavishly at the end of a hate-filled, Russian-spawned meme.

With the anniversary of Floyds killing this past week, we owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, our nation and our planet to resolve to put in the hard work necessary to heal our country, value truth and honestly address the ills of our racial and ethnic divisions.

After Floyds killing, millions of Americans across the ethnic spectrum flooded the streets to say Enough to systematic racism and police abuses. Their historic demonstrations prompted forward motion on addressing inequalities, including at the federal level with the House-approved George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and in some state legislatures, including Nevadas. Case in point: Gov. Steve Sisolaks signing of two bills this past week to limit no-knock warrants and empower the state attorney generals office to investigate police departments over patterns of civil rights violations.

But as were all too well aware, the steps toward progress created panic and terror among the right-wing forces defending the white power structure. The George Floyd Act became mired in the Senate amid Republican opposition. Republican-dominated legislatures in some states passed laws making it a crime to criticize or insult a law enforcement officer, or decreasing protections for the type of social-justice demonstrators we saw last year. Then, of course, was the state-by-state campaign to suppress the vote among Blacks and other Americans of color.

Through it all, right-wing media and social media poisoned minds in support of these hateful actions, and Russian operatives took advantage of the situation to sow discord.

Americans must commit to overcoming these dark forces and putting the nation on a trajectory to fairness and equality.

Meanwhile, its essential that any candidate who dreams of running for office in 2022 resolve to stand for the best of American values: truth, open-heartedness, tolerance and inclusivity.

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Truth, tolerance, compassion are what's needed to heal this nation - Las Vegas Sun

WASHINGTON When the signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor, they were describing precisely why we set aside Memorial Day to honor all who have died in service to our nation.

We often declare, rightly I think, that those who gave their lives for our country were fighting for freedom. But after a year marked by a searing confrontation with racial injustice, in the present and in our history, we would do well to ponder the military sacrifice of Black Americans from the Civil War forward. In World War II alone, 1.2 million Black Americans served in the military. What did freedom mean for those who faced racial oppression?

Black men have fought in every single war for the United States, most of them at times when they werent even considered first-class citizens, says Christopher S. Parker, author of Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South.

In his interviews with Black veterans, Parker, a political science professor at the University of Washington, found a patriotism rooted not in the reality of their moment but in aspirations for the future hope that America would recognize its founding values. Its the thing that kept them going, he told me.

Black Americans military service has been key to later advances in equal rights from the time of the Civil War, when formerly enslaved people signed up to fight for the Union. Their units, Parker notes, were separately designated as United States Colored Troops.

President Lincoln, a late convert to allowing Black men to fight in the war, himself declared that without the role of the Black soldiers, the war would not have been won, says Henry Louis Gates Jr., university professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.

Black military service had a direct relationship to the achievement of the rights of citizenship, Gates told me. In Lincolns final speech, he tentatively floated the idea of Black male suffrage for the men who had played such a decisive role in the Unions victory and for a small group of very intelligent Black men. Some scholars argue that this statement led to Lincolns assassination, since John Wilkes Booth was in the audience and essentially said that this was the last straw.

Gates, whose books include Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy and the Rise of Jim Crow, noted that Lincolns mostly southern black warriors (as he called the Black soldiers in 1864) would, along with northern Black abolitionists, ministers, and free Black men in the South, go on to play key roles in Reconstruction.

If the Civil War was unquestionably a battle for freedom, so was World War II. It led, as Gates noted, to the Double V campaign in the Black community, victory over fascism abroad, and simultaneously victory over anti-Black racism at home.

In his magisterial book From Slavery to Freedom, the late historian John Hope Franklin showed how racial subjugation stood in direct contradiction to the war aims President Franklin Roosevelt outlined in his Four Freedoms speech.

The experience of living in two worlds had prepared Negroes to wage two fights simultaneously, Franklin wrote. They felt compelled to carry on the fight for better treatment at home so as to give real meaning to the ideal of the Four Freedoms.

Franklin cited the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, who advocated for civil rights far more forcefully than her husband. The nation cannot expect colored people to feel that the United States is worth defending, she said early in the war, if the Negro continues to be treated as he is now.

Service in World War II and later in Korea were crucibles for future civil rights leaders. Parker noted that Hosea Williams served in an all-Black unit under Gen. George Patton. In 1965, with a young John Lewis, Williams would lead voting-rights marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Jackie Robinson, who would integrate Major League Baseball, was an Army lieutenant. In 1944, he refused to move to the back of an Army bus. He was court-martialed but acquitted.

A lot of people talk about patriotism these days, Parker told me. But what is patriotism? Its a commitment to a set of founding values so complete that one is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.

This can be said of all we honor on Memorial Day. But Parker and Gates, like Franklin before them, are right to call our attention to Black Americans who served and sacrificed on the basis of what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called a promissory note, written in our founding documents one that still awaits full payment. Its hard to imagine a more sweeping sense of faith and hope.

E.J. Dionne is on Twitter: @EJDionne.

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From the desk of Service, patriotism and the promise of black liberation - Ukiah Daily Journal

COLUMBUS, Ohio Prior to the pandemic, Stevi Knighton had found a rhythm, juggling single parenthood, work and her passion for poetry and performance.

But by the summer of 2020, shed been laid off from her job as a grants and services coordinator. The gig she lined up on the main stage at the Columbus Arts Festival was canceled. To earn income, she delivered groceries, sold custom T-shirts and performed virtually all while caring for her two sons, 10 and 12, who were forced to attend school online.

Knighton collected unemployment, but shes still trying to track down a much-needed stimulus payment. She has a new job working from home for an education solutions company but it pays a low wage.

My T-shirts say, Hope is powerful, said Knighton, 37, of the Near East Side. Its the thing that keeps you going. I have a lot of hope that everything will work out. But, full disclosure, Im definitely nervous.

One year after the pandemic, studies show that women particularly mothers and people of color have an uphill battle to economic recovery. The higher rates at which they were pushed out of the labor market exposed longstanding systemic inequalities.

Disproportionate impact for mothers

In January, about 10 million, or a third, of women living with their school-age children, were not working, according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau. This was 1.4 million more than January 2020.

By contrast, the number of fathers of school-age children who were not working was 3.8 million.

Not only are women more likely to work in service positions or other jobs impacted by pandemic closures, but they are also responsible for a larger share of childcare and unpaid domestic laborincluding managing their childrens schooling according to a report by The Hamilton Project economic policy initiative.

While all single mothers had greater declines in active work, women of color suffered the most. For example, the rate at which Black, non-Hispanic single mothers lost jobs was 7.5 percentage points higher in January 2021 than in January 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. For white, non-Hispanic single mothers the increase was 5 percentage points.

The bureau also reported the percentage of unemployed single mothers by race, showing Asian, non-Hispanic women at 9.5%, followed by Black, non-Hispanic women at 9.3%, Hispanic women at 8.8% and white, non-Hispanic women at 5%.

In Columbus, the nonprofit organization Motherful focuses on providing resources, community and education to single mothers. Executive Director Heidi Howes said the pandemic highlighted just how much care work mothers do at home, now compounded by schooling and the increased risk of burnout.

This is the invisible work of women and moms that we dont pay for and we dont acknowledge, said Howes, who co-founded Motherful in 2018 with Lisa Woodward. For some of the moms weve been in contact with, it has been disastrous.

Responding to reports of food insecurity, Motherful supplements groceries for up to 30 families per week, due in part to a collaboration with Trader Joes.

South Side mom Ciera Shanks takes advantage of this service, which is helping her save money to improve life for her 10-year-old daughter.

I only make $15 an hour, and I still dont have food assistance, said Shanks, who is 30. I make too much. Its only because of (Motherful) that Im able to follow this financial plan.

Last year, Shanks was making ends meet by working part-time at the YMCA, studying early childhood education at Columbus State Community College and driving for Uber. She was laid off amid the pandemic and stopped working for Uber to avoid exposure to the virus.

She eventually found a job working from home for an addiction and behavioral health facility, but the stress of the new position, along with managing her daughters education, took a toll. She decided to take a break from school.

I got depressed and had to go into counseling for myself and have my daughter go into counseling when COVID first hit, because it was a really hard transition, she said. I felt like I had finally gotten on my feet emotionally doing what I love, and it was taken away.

'Motherhood is a very difficult job'

According to survey data analyzed by The Hamilton Project, women with a lower rating on the mental health index are associated with poor economic outcomes. And multiple women benefitting from Motherfuls resources have reported some mental health struggles.

Shanks is not the only one experiencing a detour in her education and career paths. Mothers often experience V-shaped employment patterns, or up-and-down work cycles. Brought on pay disparity and unequal access to promotions and advancement, this trend may be prolonged by the pandemic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau report.

As a result, women could see a decrease in total lifetime earnings.

Access to affordable childcare could help mothers return to the labor force, but some still fear their children will be exposed to the coronavirus.

At the onset of the pandemic, Nyshia Gentry put her 3-year-old son in daycare, but had to pull him out and get him tested when one of the teachers came down with COVID-19. Additionally, her 7-year-old had to transition to virtual learning following an outbreak in his classroom.

Gentry, who has since been laid off from her job at a warehouse, is looking for work-from-home opportunities.

I'm scared if anything happens at school again, Id have to quit, said Gentry, 26, of the South Side. (But work-from-home employers) expect you to be a lot more flexible. Its like, No, I have kids. They think because you're at home, you should be able to work any time.

Gentry said she is often frustrated by the strong single woman stereotype, which can be harmful.

We need help, too, she said. We need a break, too.

In Howes opinion, that help should come in the form of a mothering wage.

Motherhood is a very difficult job, she said. We dont recognize or value mothering skills. We think about it as a personal choice, but were raising workers to be part of this capitalistic society. Its all on mothers who dont get paid to raise them.

When it comes to race, the coronavirus pandemic has shed light on major economic and health disparities.

There was already a large racial wealth gap brought about by the legacy of slavery, segregation and housing discrimination. For instance, in 2019, the median Black household wealth in the country was 13 cents for every $1 of wealth for median white households, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research organization.

Given the correlation between poor living conditions and poor health, people of color had the highest COVID-19 mortality rates. More likely to be employed in frontline positions, they had greater exposure, and were forced to take more time away from work due to coronavirus symptoms, as outlined in a report by the National Partnership for Women & Families.

However, there were many people of color who could not afford to take time off during the pandemic. For shorter leaves (10 days or less), half of Latino workers and one third of Black workers had no form of paid time off, according to the report. And compared to white workers, Black workers were 83% more likely to be unable to take unpaid leave.

(The percentages for Latino and Native American, Pacific Islander and multiracial workers were 66% and 100%, respectively.)

To meet FMLA requirements for unpaid leave, employees have to be on the job for a certain period of time. Research shows that people of color have less access to full-time work, and are more likely to experience discrimination in the labor market. Furthermore, if they do have access to paid leave, they are less likely to have enough savings or resources to make ends meet.

'Everything came to a halt'

Keisha Riley knows some of the economic struggles all too well. Prior to the pandemic, the South Side mother of four was making money by cooking, cleaning, selling items at flea markets and working as an independent home health aide.

For several years, she was providing building maintenance for a community center, but chose to leave.

I had an issue with some of the treatment there and the pay, said Riley, 48, of the South Side. I just didnt feel like they were in my corner as an employee.

She also began caring for her 79-year-old mother, who struggled with rheumatoid arthritis. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic made matters worse.

Everything came to a halt, she said.

Riley said she has been frustrated by the time-consuming application for unemployment and food assistance.

She said she has been grateful for programs that helped her lower utility bills and access internet service at home. But she has seen other people of color struggling even more.

I've known people that have lost people, she said. They don't have access to certain things. Just in general, people are losing their homes.

Riley's mother died in April.

On top of health and economic struggles, Black people have also had to contend with the psychological impact of last years social justice uprising not to mention the everyday fear of police violence in their neighborhoods. Columbus has seen its fair share of high-profile police killings of Black people, including the deaths of Casey Goodson, Jr. and Andre Hill in December alone.

Communities of color may also be waiting a while for true economic recovery. For instance, although the national unemployment rate dropped to 6% in March, it is 13.4% for Black workers and 11.5% for Latino workers.

In the meantime, Riley said she registered her food-delivery business with the state.

My goal is to buy property this year and to get my business off the ground, she said. I definitely don't want to depend on anybody else. And I feel like the pandemic has shown us that you really need something of your own.

___

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'We need help, too. We need a break, too.' Mothers, people of color face unseen challenges - Union Democrat