February 19, 2015
By Marc H. Morial
NNPA Columnist
“You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it.” – Malcolm X, Letter from Mecca, April 1964
There is perhaps no American civil rights leader who generated as many divergent opinions as Malcolm X. As we near the 50th anniversary of his assassination of February 21, 1965, our nation will inevitably scrutinize his life, his work and his lasting impact on our country and our continuous struggle to address racial inequality and its heinous consequences.
Depending on one’s perspective or politics, Malcolm X was a hatemonger filled with a blind, race-based rage. Another view paints him as an inspiring figure, pulling himself up from a life of crime to become a leading human rights figure. I would put forth the view that Malcolm X was much more than any one-dimensional interpretation of his life or its seminal moments and that he was a man who literally and figuratively journeyed far in his short 39 years – reinventing himself countless times along the way.
Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 to a Grenadian mother and African American father – also a well-known activist – Malcolm became accustomed to the cruelties of racism at an early age, losing his father in a suspected attack by white supremacists. His early life was a blur of broken homes, petty crime and incarceration. Introduced to the teachings of the Nation of Islam during his time in jail, Malcolm X traded prison for a pursuit of racial justice and equality for Blacks in America.
While his initial approach may not have always been championed by or aligned with other civil rights leaders of the time, Malcolm X’s later life transition and his embrace of multiculturalism is an important story to be acknowledged and retold. But often, supporters and critics alike attempt to isolate the “by any means necessary” civil rights leader to one part of his journey. For example, and ironically, many gun advocates invoke Malcolm X’s own words as they seek to reinforce their arguments and support for their professed right to almost unfettered access to firearms.
In his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, Malcolm X said, “I must say this concerning the great controversy over rifles and shotguns. The only thing that I’ve ever said is that in areas where the government has proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes, it’s time for Negroes to defend themselves. Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”
However, Malcolm X’s call to bear arms was no call to forego background checks. It was no call to sell guns anonymously on the Internet. It was no call to supply ordinary citizens with military-style weaponry. It was, and remains, a clear-cut indictment of race-based, systemic inequality and violence. He added, “If the white man doesn’t want the black man buying rifles and shotguns, then let the government do its job.” The ballot was always the immediate option.
Ten days after that speech, Malcolm X left the United States on April 13, 1964 for a life-altering trip through the Middle East and Africa, including a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the holiest city in Islam. It was during his experience of the pilgrimage that his next transformation would occur. In letters from his trip, he described scenes of unimagined interracial harmony among “tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans.” As he began to see that unity and brotherhood were not impossible realities between “the white and the non-white,” his fight for equality never changed. It only became more inclusive.
In a letter to then Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) President James Farmer, Malcolm, now El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, wrote, “I am still traveling, trying to broaden my mind, for I’ve seen too much of the damage narrow-mindedness can make of things, and when I return home to America, I will devote what energies I have to repairing the damage.”
Unfortunately, Malcolm X’s newfound approach to the pursuit of racial equality was cut short less than a year later under a fatal hail of bullets in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. But rather than end his journey to mend our wounded nation, we can each walk a few steps in his remaining miles to ensure equality and justice for all.
Marc H. Morial, former mayor of New Orleans, is president and CEO of the National Urban League.
February 12, 2015
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
The racial differential in the poverty rate is staggering. Last time I checked, about 12 percent people in the United States, one in eight people are poor. Depending on race and ethnicity, however, poverty is differently experienced. Fewer than one in 10 Whites are poor; more than one in four African Americans and Latinos are poor.
Differences in occupation, income, employment and education are considered the main reasons for poverty, with current and past discrimination playing a role in educational, employment and occupational attainment. We see the discrimination when we consider that African American women with a doctoral degree have median earnings of about $1,000 a week, compared to about $1,200 a week for Black men and White women, and $1,600 a week for White men. White men earn 60 percent more than African American women, and a third more than Black men and White women.
It would not take much to recite the differences, by race, or education, unemployment, earnings and occupation. The recurrent question in reviewing the data is: What are we going to do? It makes no sense to just recite the data and then wring our hands as if nothing can be done. The three steps in social change are organization (especially protest), which leads to legislation (with pressure) and litigation (when legislation is not implemented).
Often laws preventing discrimination have been passed but not adhered to, forcing litigation to get offenders to do the right thing. Of course, it takes more than a minute. It takes people who are committed for the long run. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Dr. Martin Luther King said in 1964.
Carter Godwin Woodson understood the long arc when he founded the Journal of Negro History and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. The organization and the journal have changed their names to reflect the nomenclature of these times, and they are now called The Journal of African American History and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Both the organization and the journal have now existed for 100 years which is perhaps why ASALH chose “A Century of Black Lives, History and Culture” as its 2015 theme. (ASALH choose a Black History Month theme each year). This year, their focus on the long arc of African American life in our nation and asserts that “this transformation is the result of effort, not chance.”
Carter G. Woodson made many choices that led to his education and to the creativity and brilliance that motivated him to uplift Black History through Negro History Week, now Black History Month. Woodson was the son of former slaves, and a family that was large and poor. He worked as a miner in West Virginia, and attended school just a few months a year. At 20, he started high school and by 28 he had earned his bachelor’s degree. He was only the second African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard(W.E.B DuBois was the first in 1895). He was a member of the Howard University faculty and was later a dean.
He wrote, “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
In other words, poverty can be the reality of living, but it doesn’t have to be a state of mind. Many are trapped in poverty because that may be all they know, and because protest, legislation, and litigation have not provided a passage out of poverty. No one provided a passage out of poverty for Woodson. He worked as a miner to earn a living, and he transcended his status as a miner to make a life of embracing his people and our history. He wrote about the ways that our thinking could oppress us as much as living conditions can. He is a role model and example for African Americans today because, motivated by a desire to be educated, he fought his way out of poverty. There is a difference between thinking you can live like Carter G. Woodson, and thinking that you can’t. (CHECK OUT www.ASALH.org for more information on Carter G. Woodson and his organization.)
Julianne Malveaux is a Washington, D.C.-based economist and writer. She is President Emerita of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, N.C.
January 29, 2015
By Jesse Jackson
The stirring film Selma ends with Dr. King leading civil rights marchers across the bridge and to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It will help a new generation of Americans appreciate that historic accomplishment.
But what should not be forgotten is that the passage of the Voting Rights Act wasn’t the end of the battle. The effort to suppress the rights of African Americans to vote continued. Southern states and localities invented a range of techniques – from making voting and registration difficult to gerrymandering districts to get the right results. African Americans made progress, but not without a fight.
Vital to the continuing fight was the Voting Rights Act, particularly section 5 which gave the Department of Justice the right of pre-clearance of any substantial change in voting procedures or laws in states that had a history of racial suppression of the vote. But in the 2013 Supreme Court case of Shelby County vs. Holder, the five person right-wing majority of the Court ruled, in an opinion written Chief Justice John Roberts, that Section 5 was outmoded and unnecessary, and thus a violation of the Constitution. This breathtaking leap of judicial activism disabled the key enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Immediately, Republicans across the country began to pass laws designed to constrict the vote, as well as elaborate gerrymanders designed to magnify the effect of white votes. New laws in 21 states made it harder to vote. New forms of government ID were required – in effect a tax on those – largely elderly people of color – without them. Restrictions were passed to make registration and voting harder, to cut off student participation. Voting hours were reduced; voting booths cut and made less accessible, and more. Republicans claimed that there were measures to cut down on voter fraud but were unable to demonstrate that there was any voter fraud to worry about.
As President Obama said in April, ““The stark and simple truth is this — the right to vote is threatened today — in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,”
And these laws are having the effect intended. In North Carolina’s tight Senate race in 2014, Republican Tom Tillis beat incumbent Kay Hagen by about 43,000 votes (1.7% of the vote). Tillis had ushered through the state legislature one of the harshest voter suppression laws, eliminating seven days of early voting (and at least one Sunday of “get your souls to the polls” rallies at African American churches), eliminating same day registration, forcing voters to vote in their own precinct and more. 700,000 voters had voted in the now eliminated early seven-day window in 2012, 200,000 in the 2012 bi-election. 100,000 largely African American voters took advantage of same day registration in 2012. The voters eliminated may well have exceeded the vote margin.
Similarly in Florida, Governor Rick Scott reversed his predecessor’s reforms that allowed former convicts who had served their time to regain the right to vote. That disenfranchised far more than Scott’s margin over his Democratic opponent. In Florida, an ugly one in three African American men is permanently disenfranchised. This is the new Jim Crow on the march.
Making registration and voting easy and accessible to minorities, students, the elderly, the disabled, the working class isn’t hard. We know what works.
What we witness is simply a continuation of the battle that reached one of its turning points on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The Voting Rights Act was passed, but the opponents of equal rights never surrendered. They have continued to resist and obstruct. What the film Selma depicts is history, but it is also a call to action – for the struggle for even the basic right to vote in America is still not secure.
Jesse L. Jackson is founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
February 05, 2015
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
I like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Her progressive ideas are just what we need while Hilary Clinton is straddling the fence, and still cozying up with bankers. Warren says she isn’t running for president, but there are quite a few political action committees urging her to run.
Like President Barack Obama, she released a biography (A Fighting Chance) just two years before the 2016 election. It provides details of her hardscrabble childhood, her early pregnancy and marriage, and her struggles combining work and family when she had a small child. Men and women can relate to her story, as well as at the way she became the guru for consumer rights and financial literacy. When senators would not confirm her for the permanent position in the Department of Treasury, she ran for the Senate. It was her first time running for office and she won.
Warren has consistently articulated a progressive agenda focused on those at the bottom. As progressive as she is, she has consistently ignored race matters. Perhaps this is because progressive politicians feel they will alienate part of their base if they talk about race. This makes Warren and the others not much different that conventional politicians, ignoring the economic differences between African Americans and others.
How would Elizabeth Warren deal with declining revenues for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)? Would she step in to close the unemployment rate gap or the achievement gap? Would she deal with the housing discrimination that too many African Americans face? Or, would she hide behind the common progressive refrain that when challenges at the bottom are addressed? That is: African Americans are lifted up and their circumstance will change as the plight of everyone else improves.
Another impressive Senator, Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), has articulated a progressive agenda in the Senate for more than a decade. He hails from the swing state of Ohio, and many are wondering why he doesn’t command the same kind of attention that Elizabeth Warren does. While his ideas are solid he, too, has pretty much ignored the issue of race.
At the same time that progressives have been ignoring race, we have been barraged with proof that race matters. Whether we are talking about those in kindergarten or in high schools, African American students face stricter discipline (with some of them, regardless of age, handcuffed and expelled from school), while teachers rely on their sociology classes to justify keeping White kids in school for the same infractions. Conversations about disproportionate rates of incarceration, and racial disparities in the application of the death penalty are rarely raised in Congress unless members of the Congressional Black Caucus bring it up.
Progressives should not talk about race matters exclusively, but they exhibit a pathetic myopia when they fail to talk about race at all.
African American Democrats will hold their noses and vote for Elizabeth Warren, or if they are Clinton loyalists, they will vote her instead. Indeed, Elizabeth Warren has as much a change of winning a presidential contest as I do, but her committees will challenge the Clinton positions on domestic public policy. If she is able to get Senator Clinton to alter her positions on just a few matters, she will have done her job.
Still, like President Obama, the matter of race is off the table. The president addresses race gingerly, mainly because as an African American president he must debunk the myth that he is racially biased. I don’t agree with position, or the way he dealt with it in the State of the Union address when he had nothing to lose by dealing with race or simply saying the words “African American” or “Black.” Race still matters in our nation. What national leader has the courage to say it? Warren, Clinton and Brown have more leeway than President Obama, but they have as much fear as President Obama does for addressing a key national issue.
There is significant excitement about the role Senator Elizabeth Warren will play in the 2016 election. Maybe she will garner enough delegates to force a roll call, or at least the opportunity to nominate Senator Clinton. Maybe she will have a chance to address the nation in one of the prime-time spots during the convention, just as President Obama did in 2000. Certainly, her name will be whispered or even shouted as she gains popular support. But if she is unwilling to talk about race, she will not have met the expectations of some in the African American community.
Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist based in Washington, D.C.
January 22, 2015
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
One could not help but be impressed by the millions that turned out in Paris to stand against the Islamist terrorists who killed workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and four others at a kosher grocery store. Two law enforcement officers were also killed, bringing the total to 17.
About 40 heads of state and more than a million others crowded into Republique Square; even more rallied around France. In total, it is estimated that 3.7 rallied for freedom. They wore shirts and carried signs that said, “I am Charlie.” Some said, “I am Muslim and Charlie” or “I am Jewish and Charlie.” Those crowds transcended race, religious and political lines.
President Obama got mixed reaction to his not attending the solidarity rally. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, someone with much less status, represented the United States. Critics said the president could at least have sent Vice President Joe Biden; Attorney General Eric H. Holder was in Paris and could have attended. The president may be doing something much more substantive by convening a summit on world terrorism at the White House in February.
I wonder if these gatherings will address terror in Nigeria, where the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram abducted 276 girls, and still holds 219. A hashtag campaign, #BringBackOurGirls was joined by First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, British Prime Minister David Cameron and others. Few of the 40 who rallied in Paris have ever mentioned the abducted girls and those terrorists who took them. Indeed, the abducted girls have all but disappeared from the headlines and from the public consciousness.
The girls were abducted on April 14, 2014. Since then, our attention has been riveted by other news from the African continent, as the Ebola virus killed thousands (we in the U.S. were mostly focused on our handful of casualties), and as ISIS has escalated its activity around the globe. While some have forgotten about the Nigerian girls, many have not. Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian government official who is now vice president of the World Bank’s Africa Division, has been among those continuing to focus attention on the girls.
People fear that Boko Haram may have sold the schoolgirls into slavery, forced some into marriage, or killed others. Given the fact that Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the UN Security Council have decried the Islamist militant terrorist group, it is alarming that the world community has been so indifferent to the plight of the abducted young girls. Some of the indifference does not start with the world, but in Nigeria. Will Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian president who is running for reelection, mention the girls at all before February, when voting takes place? Or, has the fate of 219 kidnapped girls been forgotten?
Demonstrations have taken place daily in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, despite the fact that the police have ordered these demonstrations to stop. Meanwhile, Boko Haram continues its terrorist plundering in Nigeria, destroying villages and towns in the northeast part of the country and killing thousands. It is estimated that they have destroyed more than 3,700 structures – homes, churches, and public spaces. Tens of thousands of Nigerians have fled to bordering Chad because they fear for their lives.
I don’t know if it would be effective for world leaders to rally in Abuja to pressure Boko Haram to return the girls. I don’t know if T-shirts or signs saying, “We Are the Nigerian Girls” would do much more than direct attention back to these young students whose hopes and dreams have been stomped on by irrational terrorists. I don’t know if it would make a difference if Nigerians all over the world came together to demand return of the girls. I don’t know the efforts of feminists around the world would make a difference.
I do know that about 219 Nigerian girls are gone, and a terrorist group is responsible for taking them. I know that they are reputed to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda and with ISIS. I know that while the world has rallied to show solidarity in the fight against terrorism in France, there has been no such gathering to show solidarity in the fight against terrorism in Nigeria. I don’t know (and I might be misinformed) if offers to help contain or eliminate Boko Haram have been made by the world community.
The war against terrorism has been embraced in Paris, with millions there, and thousands in the rest of the world, taking it to the streets to express their outrage. Where is the outrage for the more than 200 Nigerian girls? Nine months after they have been snatched from their school, who remembers? Who cares?
Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist in Washington, DC