Civil Rights

‘Remy’ From ‘House of Cards’ Is Real

June 6, 2014 Pascal Robert, www.blackagendareport.com Create! Civil Rights, Congress, Corporatism

The idea of a Black lobbyist working with such merciless dedication to a corporate paymaster like the socially repugnant energy conglomerate “Sandcorp” might seem far fetched to some. But thanks to the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), its former staffers have entered into the world of K street lobbying. These Black lobbyists leverage not only the “moral authority” of the CBC, but the historical weight of its perceived ties to Civil Rights Movement to protect the interests of those same financial institutions and corporations that caused the Black community to be targeted during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. We can’t imagine the other pernicious corporate forces these Black lobbyists might take on. Such clients surely do untold damage not only to people of color, but all Americans. What makes these characters troubling is not so much their race – deviousness and greed aren’t limited by skin color – it’s their ability to pimp out the Civil Rights Movement through its perceived connection to the CBC.

The Case For Reparations

June 6, 2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates, www.theatlantic.com Educate! Civil Rights, History, Reparations, Slavery

Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law. In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

Commentary: Why I Marched On McDonald’s

June 5, 2014 William J. Barber, www.washingtonpost.com Resist! Civil Rights, McDonald's, Moral Mondays, Protest, Religion

Recently, I marched with McDonald’s workers from three dozen cities to the company’s corporate headquarters outside of Chicago. After they refused to leave the corporate campus of the fast-food giant with its $5.6 billion in profits last year, 101 workers were arrested. I knew I had to come when the workers invited me to share some of the lessons we have been learning in North Carolina about civil disobedience — and moral support. I watched my new friends sit down. I watched the police gather. I prayed with the McDonald’s workers as the police looked on and then slapped plastic handcuffs on more than 100 of the workers and arrested them. I could not help but think of the historic arc of the civil rights movement. For all the gains we have been making, the treatment of low-paid workers by some of the most profitable corporations in the world ranks high in the more significant causes of the growing inequalities in the U.S. I have helped lead the fight against backward laws passed by an extremist group of legislators that, three years ago, took power in North Carolina. Last year, national media discovered us, calling us the Moral Monday protesters.

Activists Oppose Separate Justice For Muslims

June 4, 2014 Aviva Stahl, www.thenation.com Resist! Civil Rights, Criminal Justice and Prisons, LGBTQ, Muslim, Terrorism

On a miserable Monday evening in early April, when most people were scuttling for the nearest subway, a motley group was huddled before an unremarkable grey building in lower Manhattan, declaiming into the rain. “[In 2006] we fought for Shifa’s safety, we fought for the Sadequee family’s safety, we fought for all of our safety,” said a woman standing in front of the crowd. “[Today] we must still come together across religious and spiritual traditions, across race and nations, across sexuality, across our beliefs, for our collective safety and livelihood.” The woman was Cara Page, executive director of the Audre Lorde Project and a prominent black queer activist; “Shifa” was Ehsanul “Shifa” Sadequee, a young man convicted of terrorism-related charges five years ago. The two had little obvious in common, but Page had been in Atlanta at the time of his trial and a member of the Free Shifa campaign, a coalition of supporters who argued that his prosecution and detention were unjust. It was proof, they said, that the inhumane detention of “War on Terror” suspects has occurred on American soil, too. Years later, most of the world had moved on from Sadequee’s story, but Page, like the others bundled around her, had not.

50th Anniversary Of Freedom Summer

May 26, 2014 Portside, www.portside.org Educate! Civil Rights, Conference, Mississippi

Freedom Summer 50th is a five-day convening to learn from the past, evaluate our present, and strategize for the future. The international conference and youth congress will be held June 25th - 29th, 2014 in Jackson, Mississippi on the campus of Tougaloo College. Work sessions will examine each issue area and explore its context in the present-day struggle for justice not only in Mississippi, but globally. In the summer of 1964, hundreds of summer volunteers from across America convened in Mississippi to put an end to the system of rigid segregation. The civil rights workers and the summer volunteers successfully challenged the denial by the state of Mississippi to keep Blacks from voting, getting a decent education, and holding elected offices. As a result of the Freedom Summer of 1964, some of the barriers to voting have been eliminated and Mississippi has close to 1000 Black state and local elected officials. In fact, Mississippi has more Black elected officials than any other state in the union. While the Freedom Summer of '64 made profound changes in the state of Mississippi and the country, much remains to be accomplished.

Remembering Vincent Harding, An Enduring Veteran Of Hope

May 23, 2014 Ken Butigan, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Civil Rights, History, Nonviolence

Historian by profession and relentless nonviolent advocate by calling, Vincent Gordon Harding died on Monday, May 19, at the age of 83. The author of a series of books on the civil rights movement — which he called the Southern Freedom movement — he not only wrote history, but also played an active part in the struggle to make and remake it. Harding worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Mennonite House in Atlanta, an interracial voluntary service. As part of the Albany, Ga., movement, he was arrested for leading a demonstration at the city hall in 1962. He became a strategist for the movement, and drafted Martin Luther King’s historic 1967 anti-war speech “Beyond Vietnam,” which King delivered at Riverside Church in New York City one year to the day before his assassination. Harding completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago in 1965 and accepted a teaching position at Spelman College in Atlanta. In 1990 he published Hope and History, a text that stressed the importance of telling and teaching the story of the freedom struggle. Later he became professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where he founded Veterans of Hope, a project focused on documenting and learning from struggles for nonviolent change, healing and reconciliation.

The Girl Who Sparked Brown v. Board Of Education

May 17, 2014 Nadine Bloch, www.wagingnonviolence.org Resist! Civil Rights, Organizing

Sixty years ago on May 17, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson and declared separate was not equal for public schools and was therefore unconstitutional. While the decision in this case, Brown v. Board of Education, has received the most ink over the last six decades, the stories and people behind the landmark decision are even more vividly compelling and inspiring than the sea-changing unanimous ruling itself. The five cases that composed this hearing came from four states and a district — Virginia, Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina and the District of Columbia — and were all sponsored by the NAACP. The Delaware case was the only one in which the lower courts actually found discrimination unlawful; the other four cases ruled against the parents and students who were suing for equality and desegregation. Although the Supreme Court case is named after the suit from Kansas, it is the Virginia fight that stands out. It was the only case sparked by the students themselves, which opened up space for their parents and NAACP elders to fall in behind. History books, if they mention this backstory at all, talk about the student walk out at R.R. Moton High School led by 16-year-old junior Barbara Rose Johns on April 23, 1951. While that fact alone is impressive, the planning and organization that went into pulling off the action is pure inspiration.

Should Women Apologize for Abortion?

May 15, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Abortion, abortion on demand, Abortion services, Acronym TV, Birth control, Civil Rights, Conservative, Dennis Trainor Jr, Katie Klabusich, Kelly Carlin, pregnancy, Pregnancy test, Pregnant, pro life, Rape, Republican, Restrictions on Abortion, Women’s health

It’s been over 40 years since the Supreme Court decided, in Roe v Wade, that women have a constitutional right to abortion. The legal argument was based around the concept that women had a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14^th Amendment, and that right extended to their right to have an abortion. Perhaps no time in the 40 years since Roe v Wade have female reproductive rights been so under attack. From Texas to Alabama to Congressmen saying that women can’t get pregnant when raped because their bodies have a way of shutting that sh*t down, men (usually white conservative men with ties to patriarchal religious institutions) are working their balls off trying to control women; specifically a woman access to birth control and abortion. In the United Sates, one out of every three women has had an abortion. If you are a women living in Texas, and a growing number of states, access to this basic, simple, and safe procedure has been severely restricted with the passage of hundreds of new laws in the last several years that strip a women's right to privacy, limit access to abortion, and shame women into thinking that their choice about what to do with their bodies is wrong.

FCC’s New Net Neutrality Rules Could Disempower Communities of Color

May 6, 2014 Jorge Rivas, www.fusion.net Educate! Civil Rights, Net Neutrality

Out of 1.2 trillion Google searches in 2012, Trayvon Martin was the ninth most searched event. But the unarmed black teen who was fatally shot in Florida may have never become a household name if it wasn’t for Twitter, Facebook and the blogs that kept his story in the news until it reached a national level. Now black and Latino net neutrality advocates say it will be much harder, and maybe even impossible, to catapult stories like Martin’s to a national level if new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ‘fast lane’ rules are implemented. Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012. It wasn’t until March 16 that national coverage of Martin’s death intensified. But in those three weeks, small local news sites, blogs and black news sites continued reporting on the story until it was one that national broadcast networks could no longer ignore. Internet neutrality advocates (or activists who believe that all Internet traffic should be treated equally) say a similar media experience like Trayvon Martin’s would be harder to replicate if the FCC’s new rules are implemented.

Cooperative Economics and Civil Rights

April 14, 2014 Jessica Gordon Nembhard, www.grittv.org Create! Civil Rights, Cooperatives

Cooperative economics and civil rights don't often appear together in our history books, but they should! From the mutual aid societies that bought enslaved people's freedom to the underground railroad network that brought endangered blacks to the north, cooperative structures were key to evading the repression of white supremacy. And they was a vicious backlash when Black co-ops threatened the status quo. "The white economic structure depended on all of these blacks having to buy from the white store, rent from the white landowner. They were going to lose out if you did something alternatively," Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African-American Economic Thought and Practice tells GRITtv's Laura Flanders this week.

Paul Robeson: A Life

April 14, 2014 Paul Von Blum, www.truthdig.com Educate! Civil Rights, Racism

“Paul Robeson,” historian Joseph Dorinson ruefully wrote in the 2002 introduction to his co-edited collection of essays about him, “is the greatest legend nobody knows.” When the man who was one of the most striking Renaissance people in American history died in 1976, in loneliness and obscurity, his magnificent athletic, scholarly, artistic and political accomplishments were largely erased from national consciousness, stricken from the media and from history books. This tragic void, eerily reminiscent of Stalin-era removal of enemies from photographs and other Soviet documents, was a deep stain on American history, resulting from the worst excesses of McCarthyism from the late 1940s through much of the 1960s. The long overdue restoration of Robeson’s stellar reputation, fortunately, began shortly after his death, slowly propelling him back to some public recognition.

The Case Against Bill Bratton

March 12, 2014 Josmar Trujillo, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Civil Rights, NYPD, Police abuse

If Bill de Blasio is really a progressive, why did he bring back the architect of Stop-and-Frisk as his police commissioner? When it comes to aggressive policing gospel Bratton is the “pastor of the flock.” Bratton seems the least qualified to make the changes that are “desperately needed to relieve communities of color living in what many see as a racialized police state.”

How Co-ops Helped Produce Foot Soldiers for Civil Rights

March 11, 2014 Carla Murphy www.colorlines.com Educate! Civil Rights

I’ve been wondering about that, too. And in fact one of the things I found is that there’s more of a connection between black cooperatives and civil rights than there is between black cooperatives and capitalism. I think there’re a couple of reasons. In the U.S. co-ops are often linked with hippies, communism or socialism and back in the 1950s, just after the McCarthy era, black leaders knew they couldn’t talk about either and be listened to. So there was an official avoidance of the subject of co-ops. Second, there was a lot of resistance from capitalists. White unions in the late 1800s were being sabotaged and certainly blacks got the same resistance as well because co-ops gave them more economic control and power. So by necessity, even if you were involved in co-ops it had to be as clandestine as possible. And third, people, including many blacks, just wouldn’t accept civil rights if it included language about economic rights.

Civil Rights Groups Launch Campaign to ‘Encrypt All Things’

March 7, 2014 Dave Neal, www.theenquirer.net Educate! Civil Rights, NSA

Civil Rights Groups and information technology firms have joined together in a campaign to improve data security over the next three years. Human rights groups Access, Fight for the Future and the Electronic Frontier Foundation joined Twitter and eight other outfits to launch the Encrypt all the Things campaign this week with the Data Security Action Plan of 2014. Encrypt all the Things has a catchy name and a compelling proposition. It wants to improve the security landscape and foster personal data protection in the technology industry. You should expect to see a mix of campaigning and events over the next three years. If you want in, you should refer to the Encrypt all the Things website.

The Civil Rights of Children

February 14, 2014 Andrew Cohen, www.theatlantic.com Educate! Civil Rights, Youth

On December 5, 2013, Plaintiff A.J. and her mother walked about a mile to reach the court because the family does not have a car and public transportation is not available. When they reached the court, Plaintiff A.J. learned that her case was continued for another week because all of the public defenders were in Crisp County Superior Court handling cases. No one from the Cordele Circuit Public Defender’s Office notified Plaintiff A.J. or her mother in advance to inform them of the Public Defender’s planned absence or of the continuance. On December 13, 2013, Plaintiff A.J. appeared in Ben Hill County Juvenile Court again; this time, a public defender was present. This was Plaintiff A.J.’s first time seeing a public defender since her arraignment on October 24, 2013. Minutes before court began, the public defender informed Plaintiff A.J. that the prosecutor was seeking detention time. Plaintiff A.J. planned to deny all of the charges against her, but decided to admit to all of the charges because she had not talked to her public defender before that day in court and she did not believe he was prepared to mount a defense.

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