Janell Ross2013-05-21T16:46:30-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=janell-rossCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Janell RossGood old fashioned elbow grease.Marco McMillian's Life And Death A Test For Civil Rights In The Mississippi Deltatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-04-02T18:27:41-04:002013-04-08T13:00:58-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
The sight of the occasional working plow or murky bayou would seem about right for this Delta town best known as the spot where, as music legend has it, blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for supernatural musical skills. But to see the remnants and replicas of the downtown juke joints and other haunts where women and men first gave life to the blues, visitors must travel a route that offers a sobering reminder of just how long subjugation, secrecy and strictly enforced codes of human behavior have been part of life here in the Mississippi Delta.
Exit on New Africa Road.
What comes into view is Clarksdale, an 18,000-person town where the descendants of African slaves make up nearly 80 percent of the population. More than 40 percent of Clarksdale's residents live on incomes below the poverty line, and were it not for the proliferation of dollar stores, churches would nearly outnumber functioning businesses.
Before his mysterious death in late February, Marco McMillian had hoped to lead this community, running for mayor with a reform-minded agenda. McMillian, 33, was black, and the first openly gay person to vie for public office in Mississippi.
The nation’s first black president may have put gay rights squarely in the center of righteous and patriotic American struggles for equality during his second inaugural speech in January. And the Supreme Court is currently considering two of the most important gay rights cases in U.S. history. But the way McMillian’s life is understood, and his death investigated, is also a barometer of sorts on the state of American equality.
“There is some complicated, heartbreaking, truly tragic and important stuff going on in Clarksdale,” said Omowale Akintunde, a University of Nebraska professor and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Akintunde came to town in early March to chronicle what he says is a story that America needs to see.
“What it tells us are some ugly truths about remaining bigotry and bias," he said, "even among those who have themselves been terrorized, exploited, excluded and demeaned.”
A GRAND PLAN
The circumstances of McMillian’s death remain unclear. But this much is known and undisputed.
On Feb. 27, Coahoma County sheriff’s deputies found McMillian’s naked, beaten and partially burned body at the bottom of a steep and muddy embankment beside a chain metal fence, not far from one of the area’s Mississippi River levees. McMillian was found lying almost exactly where Lawrence Reed, a black 22-year-old Domino’s Pizza employee from nearby rural Shelby, had told officers he left McMillian’s body. Reed was charged with McMillian's murder the next day, and remains in sheriff’s custody.
McMillian was what law enforcement officials might consider an unlikely murder victim in this stretch of the country just over two hours south of Memphis, Tenn. He wasn’t known to be involved in illegal activity. A classic small-town overachiever, McMillian only returned to Clarksdale a few months before his death.
McMillian had built a rich resume. By 33, he had already earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree, spent time as an administrator at two universities – Jackson State and Alabama A&M – worked for a Memphis company training teachers in some of the nation’s most challenging schools and founded his own consulting business.
In between, McMillian was elected for a stint as Phi Beta Sigma’s international executive director, an important and six-figure Washington, D.C.-based position inside the historically African-American fraternity to which McMillian and many of the most accomplished, well-educated African-American men from the Delta region belong.
In late 2012, McMillian began sharing with friends and family a grand plan to run for mayor, expressing his hope to bring Clarksdale better jobs, education and healthcare. In late 2012, he even spent time at The Victory Fund’s California training sessions for LGBT candidates and elected officials.
The plan would make him a brave trailblazer to people watching the race from afar. But to locals and those close to him, McMillian proved himself a true Bible Belt native, talking the talk about fighting for equality while avoiding conversations about his sexuality. Just 21 days before he died, McMillian posted this online:
“The work that is before us is important to Clarksdale, Mississippi, our nation and world. More than 40% of the people who live in Clarksdale battle with poverty every day. We can eradicate poverty and move people toward prosperity.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT!”
In February, McMillian also tapped the 2005 Clarksdale Citizen of the Year, Bertha Blackburn, to host an event that his campaign had dubbed “The Talk.” It was a frank conversation about just why tiny Clarksdale’s crime rate sits two times higher than the national average while the city has the lowest number of police officers per capita of any city in the state, Blackburn said.
McMillian told the people who gathered that night that the city needed a mayor “who is unafraid to talk about Clarksdale and face the stuff under all the half-way pretty paper,” Blackburn said.
Blackburn, who had known McMillian since he was a child, so believed in his campaign that the day after McMillian’s funeral on March 9, most of the flat surfaces in her living room continued to play host to McMillian campaign materials and promotional swag. She was so distraught and exhausted after McMillian’s funeral that she had to see a doctor.
“What sort of man was he?” said Blackburn, who is 91 and hard of hearing. “He was just a lovely type of Christian young man. A hard worker. Always so polite. Full of ideas. A quality sort of human being …. Gay? Was he gay? No, no I don’t know anything about that kind of business. That’s not who he was, not with me.”
Given what is known about the circumstances of his death, McMillian almost certainly died of unnatural causes (his autopsy and cause of death have not yet been released). He was also running for office in a state with one of the country’s bleakest racial justice histories and weakest civil rights infrastructures.
In 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, Mississippi law enforcement agencies collectively reported just one of the nation’s 6,222 hate crimes to the FBI. This year, Mississippi legislators decided against expanding the state’s hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by anti-gay bias. The state also has no laws prohibiting discrimination against anyone in housing, the workplace or other key functions of life.
“Does that strike you as a place where an honest and thorough examination of hate crime is really happening?” said Mark Potok, a hate crimes and hate group expert with the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “If anti-gay bias crimes are happening, where would law enforcement find the motivation, the time, the investigative skills needed to give that possibility a serious look?”
In Mississippi, just about any effort to defend the constitutional rights of often mistreated or excluded groups still requires federal intervention or federal resources, Potok said. At prime commuting times in Clarksdale, public service announcements imploring listeners to report housing discrimination to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and employment issues to the nation’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, take up a substantial share of the commercial airtime on the area's radio stations.
Strains of blues music and the smell of slow-smoked pork ribs coated in the Delta's brown sugar and tomato sauce help belie a palpable tension in the air in Clarksdale.
WHERE IS THE OUTCRY?
Rumors are flying. Depending on whom you ask, McMillian died at the command of an organized local cabal intent on maintaining Clarksdale’s barely post civil rights-era social order. Or, Reed allegedly killed McMillian alone after some sort of personal, possibly sexual, conflict. Another rumor still: the city’s long-serving retiring mayor, the father of one of the men running against McMillian and a brother of former congressman and Clinton administration Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, has been asked by the sheriff’s office to sit for a lie detector test.
Neither Clarksdale Mayor Henry Espy, nor his son, Chuck Espy, responded to requests for comment. The sheriff's office also declined to comment on the lie detector test rumors.
Will Rooker, a spokesman for the Coahoma County’s Sheriff’s Department, declined to answer most questions about the investigation into McMillian’s death because it remains ongoing.
“What I can say is this is a case where we are looking at a number of options,” Rooker said.
Rooker later said in a statement sent to The Huffington Post that he had not been asked about a lie detector test for any individual.
"The Coahoma County Sheriff’s Office at no time has made the request for a lie detector test be given to Mr. Espy," Rooker said.
The FBI, which rarely confirms its involvement in cases, said in a statement issued to The Huffington Post that it is following the local investigation closely.
Despite the number of large questions with potentially disturbing answers that remain in this case, hardly a fraction of the public outrage, protests and vitriol that surrounded incidents such as the death of Trayvon Martin has materialized in the weeks since McMillian’s death, said Sharon J. Lettman-Hicks, executive director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition. The NBJC is a black lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.
When a young, black, straight Trayvon Martin is killed by a 28-year-old, white George Zimmerman, the black community knows how to respond. But more complicated victims and perpetrators prompt more ambiguous responses.
“Here we have a young man who by all accounts was a rising star,” Lettman-Hicks said. “But the minute society learns that he’s gay it is almost as if we, particularly in black America, are absolved from public outcry and support.”
Now, the NBJC; the state chapter of the NAACP; Democratic Reps. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and John Lewis, a civil rights lion from Georgia; and McMillian's family and friends have together called for an FBI investigation. But the national NAACP and other organizations and individuals known for their social activism have -- at least publicly -- stayed out of the fray, waiting for the investigation to run its course.
Outside demands for justice might be helpful, said McMillian’s godfather Carter Womack, who leads a nonprofit in Ohio. At McMillian’s funeral, Womack roused the crowd to an interlude of amens and applause with his call for justice. Now, he’s hoping that the people who reacted during the service will do so again.
“We seem to have descended into a black hole, an information-free zone,” Womack said. “We are earnestly doing everything we can as a family to make sure that justice for Marco is not forgotten.”
CAULDRON OF STRUGGLE
One of the largely unspoken but real barriers to that outcry may be the difficulty that Clarksdale -- an overwhelmingly black, deeply religious Delta town -- may have integrating all aspects of McMillian’s life into its notions of what it means to be upstanding, said Ricky L. Jones, a political scientist at the University of Louisville who is also black.
“You are talking about a group historically and even contemporarily, to a certain degree, who have been incredibly marginalized,” Jones said. “But when you look closely you will find a significant degree who are also willing to marginalize others.”
For at least the last seven decades, African Americans have been reliably Democratic voters. But religious fervor and the socially conservative streak that often comes with it have also inspired what Jones called “weird things,” such as the gains that President George W. Bush made with black voters between his 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
“That second time, George Bush ran on abortion and gay marriage,” Jones said.
In 2001, about a third of both black and white Americans expressed support for gay marriage, according to an analysis released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in March. Today, 49 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks support gay marriage.
In the intervening years, prominent black ministers have repeatedly described gay relationships as a sin. And even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, Bernice King, has marched against gay marriage with the once respected, now scandal-plagued Atlanta mega-church minister Bishop Eddie Long. King appears to have since reversed her stance on the issue.
McMillian, a man with multiple degrees and an avid church attendance record, was also a member of the nearly 100-year-old Phi Beta Sigma. That’s the trifecta of respectability and something that made him rare in his small hometown, said Jones, author of the book Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities.
In black America, the Sigmas’ reach -- like that of the Alphas, the Omegas and other black fraternities -- extends far beyond the nation’s college campuses. Together they are functional arbiters of a certain brand of black middle-class masculinity, economic mobility, respectability and moral rectitude. Members see themselves as a sort of elite among the black elite, Jones said.
At McMillian’s funeral service -- a gathering that drew nearly 700 people -- the Sigmas bid farewell to their fallen brother, with their distinct mourning songs and rituals. Then, at his gravesite, they stood in a circle with linked arms, singing and swaying just before McMillian was lowered into the ground around 2 p.m.
“You have to understand that oppressed people across lines of race tend to be more religious,” Jones said. “If life on earth is a cauldron of depression and struggle, you have got to have something to get you though … So in Marco McMillian’s story, you are asking people to deal with tiers of secrecy, discomfort and taboo.”
BLOW THE LID OFF SOME THINGS IN TOWN
To those who knew and loved him, McMillian’s death marked a tragic loss, not just for a family but a struggling community.
Last summer, McMillian took a short trip home to visit family and decided to take an afternoon walk. He saw a woman, who appeared to be at least 80, sitting on her front porch fanning and sweating away time. McMillian turned on his best Southern manners, used the honorific for unfamiliar elderly women and asked her what was going on.
“He told me he just walked up and asked her, ‘Mother, it's Mississippi in the summertime. What on earth are you doing out here?’" said Chikita Sanders, a biologist who lives in Atlanta who is McMillian’s first cousin and was one of his closest confidants. “It wasn’t long before Marco, being Marco, got to the bottom of things.”
The woman told McMillian she could not afford to run the air conditioner during the daytime or buy food. So sitting on her front porch offered her access to the free, circulating air, even if it meant baking in triple-digit heat.
Clarksdale has no public or free senior center, few food-assistance programs that can be accessed without a car and hundreds, if not thousands, of residents in the same situation as that woman, Sanders says McMillian told her.
“He was living in Memphis at the time, and I know really enjoying his work,” Sanders said about McMillian’s time with a West Tennessee education consulting firm that trains teachers, particularly those working in high-poverty schools. “But he said, ‘Kita, I’m running for mayor.’ And I said, ‘Really? Are you sure?’”
The mayor’s race wasn’t McMillian’s first attempt to fix local things he saw as broken.
Pauline Rhodes worked as a teacher at Clarksdale High School for a decade. In 1997, her last year in the classroom, McMillian was assigned to one of her classes.
In a town where most guys were athletes or took music and performance seriously enough to play in the high school’s competitive and hard-charging marching band, McMillian was student council president.
So, when Rhodes decided that Clarksdale’s public schools were long overdue for a racially integrated prom and senior-class trip – the first since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. the Board of Education to desegregate public education – she turned to McMillian for help.
White parents have, since integration, sponsored a prom for their children at a private Clarksdale social club, Rhodes explained. The arrangement rendered the school’s official prom the de facto black dance and a joint overnight class trip simply had not happened in decades. McMillian, a core group of students and Rhodes sold the candy needed to finance the trip and started promoting the idea of a racially integrated prom. McMillian even made a speech about the trip in front of the school board.
In the end, two to three white couples attended the school’s prom. All but one of the 15 white students backed out of the senior trip to Washington, D.C. And, the private, white prom continues to this day.
McMillian had only begun referring to Rhodes by what he saw as the more peer-like, informal but always conjoined, “Lina Rhodes,” this year. The two never talked about the fact that McMillian was gay.
“I just never ever heard anybody speak of him as being gay or openly gay,” said Rhodes, who is black. “I can only speak for myself. It would not have mattered. To be honest, I don’t know why the media has jumped all over that. It seems to me it’s to sell papers, dig up his dirt and turn the story into a soap opera.”
Chris Rey, a longtime friend and fraternity brother, agrees.
It was no secret to Rey, a straight and married father of two, that McMillian was attracted to men. But, that aspect of McMillian’s life wasn’t something the two talked about, said Rey, a lawyer and former Army captain. McMillian was simply bound and determined to make significant changes in Clarksdale, Rey said.
“With Marco, knowing the way that he researched things, I wasn’t surprised when he told me he had found something that was going to blow the lid off some things in town,” Rey said. “What that was, I don’t know because, unfortunately, we didn’t get another chance to talk before events transpired and he was killed.”
A few days before his death, McMillian told Sanders, his cousin, that he was determined do what was needed in his struggling hometown, “even if it cost me my life,” he said. At the time, Sanders thought McMillian was just being dramatic.
“I just don’t believe that Marco’s death had anything to do with his lifestyle choice,” Sanders said. “Marco was just Marco, always digging and doing and getting involved.
“That’s why I think our family is sort of bothered by about all the openly gay politician stuff,” she continued. “Marco wasn’t like that. He told the people who were closest to him who he was. He met you where you were and he let you have your own process.”
Ravi Perry, a political scientist at Mississippi State University in Jackson, about two hours southeast of Clarksdale, often talked with McMillian about his campaign and the challenges that came with it. Perry had served as the first openly gay NAACP chapter president while living in Massachusetts. In late February, Perry saw McMillian for the first time -- in his casket.
Some ideas about McMillian’s death may be more palatable than others, Perry said. But brushing aside the possibility that McMillian was the victim of an anti-gay hate crime, Clarksdale may do itself and McMillian a disservice at a critical time.
“This is the time to ask questions, to get the whole truth,” Perry said. “What has to be recognized and understood is tolerance is not the same as real acceptance. And acceptance is just not quite as good as real equality.”
GAY PANIC?
Inside Coahoma County, it’s not hard to understand why McMillian’s family and friends are concerned about McMillian’s reputation and the depth and scope of the investigation.
In early stories that appeared in Jackson, Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger just after Reed’s arrest, Coahoma County enforcement officers and the county coroner made statements indicating Reed and McMillian had fought as part of a possible lover’s quarrel.
County Coroner Scotty Meredith told The Huffington Post that there was far more to the conflict between Reed and McMillian. He directed HuffPost to find Reed’s girlfriend, with whom he said Reed spoke of McMillian at least twice around the time that McMillian was killed.
Meredith also said that the family’s claims that McMillian was beaten, burned and dragged overstated the situation. But he later confirmed that McMillian was dragged from a vehicle to the muddy location where his body was found.
At McMillian’s funeral, his head appeared swollen and misshapen by dents and bulges. The left side of his face had been charred. And before giving friends and family one last opportunity to view the body, undertakers stretched a gauzy white veil over the open portion of McMillian’s casket.
A pair of sisters who live just outside Clarksdale who declined to be identified by name told The Huffington Post that Reed came to their door around midnight the day McMillian’s body was found, shaking and battered. The women -- one of whom said she had been dating Reed -- recounted him telling them he had done something awful. They said Reed confessed to killing McMillian with his wallet chain to get away from him after he made sexual advances toward Reed. According to the women, Reed said the two had been alone in McMillian’s car on a dark country road.
Reed, who remains in the Coahoma County jail without bond, could not be reached for comment. Rooker, the sheriff’s spokesman, told The Huffington Post that Reed had been assigned a lawyer but could not provide a name.
Like many small communities, Clarksdale sends bodies in need of autopsy such as McMillian’s to the state medical examiner’s office in Jackson and depends on this office to run tests in order to determine a cause of death; what, if any, substances the dead person had in his or her system; and sometimes, when the person died. Almost none of this information has been made public in McMillian’s case. The Coahoma County District Attorney’s office will convene its next grand jury in late May and may bring information about the McMillian case at that time.
By the time the state’s medical examiner released McMillian’s body to his family for burial on March 9, the Clarion Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper, had published a series of stories describing some combination of the claims from Scotty Meredith and the sister who said she was dating Reed (which gay rights groups described as the troubling foundation for an attempted "gay panic" defense), or dismissing outright the idea that McMillian had been the victim of any sort of hate crime.
Clarksdale was getting an unfair turn in the national spotlight, an audience unable to appreciate just how much the community has changed since the dark days of Jim Crow and rampant domestic terrorism, the stories claimed.
And in Mississippi, anti-gay hate crimes don’t exist under state law.
'WE’VE BEEN ROBBED'
Akintunde, the filmmaker, had made the 15-hour mad dash from Omaha to Clarksdale, having only about 48 hours in the Mississippi Delta. Like McMillian, Akintunde is black, gay and a Sigma who spent considerable portions of his life in the Bible-thumping South.
Akintunde interviewed McMillian’s former co-workers and pastors in Memphis and Jackson. In Clarksdale after the funeral, he talked with Lewis, McMillian’s half-brother, a few cousins and his godfather in the Clarksdale High School library, a building where McMillian’s senior picture still hangs above the cafeteria door.
The next day, he asked one of McMillian’s cousins to show him the remote place where his body had been found. When they arrived, the woman began to shiver, he said. What happened seems to highlight just why many African Americans who profess an interest in fighting for and defending civil rights, equality and justice need to expand their support to include gay rights, Akintunde said.
“At one point I asked her, 'Do you think Marco is in heaven?'” Akintunde recalls. "After a long pause, and this 10-pound sigh, she said, ‘Well the bible says homosexuality is an abomination.’ This is what she said about someone she loved and was so very proud of. Then, when we were leaving she was so quiet. Tears were streaming down her face. So, I asked her what she was thinking. She said, ‘I think, I think we have been robbed.’”
This piece has been updated with comment from the Coahoma County Sheriff's Office.]]>Black Unemployment Driven By White America's Favors For Friendstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-29T08:26:29-04:002013-03-29T08:19:29-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
The reality: racism and racial inequality aren't just supported by old ideas, unfounded group esteem or intentional efforts to mistreat others, said Nancy DiTomaso, author of the new book, The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism. They're also based on privilege, she said -- how it is shared, how opportunities are hoarded and how most white Americans think their career and economic advantages have been entirely earned, not passed down or parceled out.
The way that whites, often unconsciously, hoard and distribute advantage inside their almost all white networks of family and friends is one of the driving reasons that in February just 6.8 percent of white workers remained unemployed while 13.8 percent of black workers and 9.6 percent of Hispanic workers were unable to find jobs, DiTomaso said.
This week, the professor of organization management at Rutgers University and her ideas have captured the attention of the business press. There was a blog about her book in The Wall Street Journal and a story in Bloomberg Businessweek. DiTomaso, who is white, has gathered evidence that racism and inequality actively shape the labor market and make it far harder for black workers to find jobs.
"Across all three states where I did my research, I heard over and over again [white] people admitting that they don't interact very often with nonwhites, not at work, not at home or otherwise," said DiTomaso about the 246 interviews with working-class and middle-class whites she did over the course of about a decade in Tennessee, Ohio and New Jersey. Her research included detailed job histories and information about the way her study participants obtained jobs over the course of their careers.
"That was true for just about everybody unless they were still in college," DiTomaso continued. "Others would allude to some college friend or experience. But since then, they had not had much contact with blacks. So how would they pass opportunities and information across race lines?"
DiTomaso concludes, based on her research, that most white Americans engage, at least a few times per year, in the activities that foster inequality. While they may not deliberately discriminate against black and other non-white job seekers, they take actions that make it more likely that white people will be employed -- without thinking that what they're doing amounts to discrimination.
"The vast majority assumed everyone has the same opportunities, and they just somehow tried harder, were smarter," DiTomaso said of those she interviewed. "Not seeing how whites help other whites as the primary way that inequality gets reproduced today is very helpful. It's easy on the mind."
So white Americans tell a neighbor's son about a job, hire a friend's daughter, carry the resume of a friend (or, for that matter, a friend's boyfriend's sister) into the boss's office, recommend an old school mate or co-worker for an unadvertised opening, or just say great things about that job applicant whom they happen to know. But since most Americans, white and black, live virtually segregated lives, and since advantages, privileges and economic progress have already accrued in favor of whites, the additional advantages that flow from this help go almost exclusively to whites, DiTomaso said.
DiTomaso's findings aren't exactly new, said Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington-based think tank.
"Listen, I think it's an important piece of work to reiterate and clarify the ways in which blacks are disadvantaged in the labor market," Austin said. "Of course, part of the appeal of this is that there's no malice. You can say no one is to blame. The Businessweek piece says, well, people just like helping out their friends, which is perfectly natural and normal."
DiTomaso's work does confirm that networks -- not just the kind you build over awkward conversations, finger foods and watered-down cocktails but the kind you're born into -- matter, Austin said. It also points to just how different forms of inequality feed one another. Family-and-friends segregation feeds job and income inequality. That in turn feeds neighborhood and school segregation. That then leaves some kids less likely to receive a quality education and escape from the cycle, he said.
Austin thinks that increased public awareness of opportunity hoarding, as well as public policies that enhance options for blacks and Hispanics, could make a difference. Bringing more blacks into the labor force would have the immediate effect of reducing black poverty, and quality early-childhood education has been proven to blunt some of the short- and long-term effects of childhood poverty, he said.
"To President Obama's credit, he's certainly focused on early childhood education," Austin said.
It's not that black workers don't attempt the same sort of job assists within their own networks, said Deirdre Royster, an economic sociologist at New York University and author of Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men From Blue Collar Jobs.
African Americans ask neighbors, significant others, the significant others of neighbors, relatives and friends about open jobs, too. But since black unemployment rates were far higher than white rates before, during and after the recession, the number of people in a typical black social network who are in a position to help is far more limited.
According to Royster, there's an additional twist: When blacks are aware of a job, they describe the job, the boss, the company and its preferences and needs. Then they follow up with a warning.
"They give the person looking for a job all sorts of information and then they say, 'But don't tell them I sent you,'" said Royster.
Black workers are aware of something that researchers are still trying to explain: White bosses often worry, lack of statistical evidence aside, that black workers are more likely to sue them or band together in the workplace and try to change things, Royster said. That seems all the more likely if the black workers already know one another, she said. And many white hiring managers still assume, consciously or unconsciously, that black workers bring undesirable workplace habits and qualities, Royster said.
Indeed, a 2003 study by Devah Pager, now a Princeton University sociologist, found that white men with criminal records were more likely to get callbacks for job interviews than black men with the same qualifications and no criminal history.
]]>Stop-And-Frisk Secret Recording May Play Key Role in Court Casetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-27T17:22:58-04:002013-03-27T17:23:28-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/federal class-action suit brought against the New York Police Department and the practice known as stop and frisk are expected to introduce over the next month one of the few known recordings of "Stop, Question and Frisk" in action, community activists say.
The recording, made secretly by a 15-year-old Latino boy who was stopped and frisked on an East Harlem Street in 2011, according to activists, has the potential to become a key piece of evidence in the proceedings that began last week to determine whether the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy relies on racial profiling.
As the trial continues, a litany of audio records have been played in court. Plaintiffs' lawyers with The Center for Constitutional Rights have offered another secret recording, made by a Bronx police officer, which reveals NYPD Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack talking about reducing robberies by targeting black teens for stop and frisk. Lawyers defending the NYPD and representing New York City have also played a recording of police radio traffic in which officers indicate the description of a wanted man fits that of a man they stopped and frisked.
Yet in an era when judges sometimes have to include a ban of Facebook and Twitter contact in orders of protection and text messages have helped to send politicians to jail, it is not far-fetched that the teenager's stop-and-frisk cell phone recording could impact the ongoing federal class-action suit.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, the left-leaning non-profit legal organization that brought the class-action suit, would not confirm or refute what its legal team plans to introduce into evidence Wednesday. The center never speaks about evidence before it is introduced or speculates about the timing because plans can and often do shift based on courtroom events and schedules, said Jen Nessel, a spokeswoman for the organization.
Anti-stop-and-frisk activist Jose LaSalle brought the recording to the attention of The Huffington Post, after it was given to him. A longtime activist opposing stop and frisk, LaSalle says he is familiar with the details of the pending case and plans to introduce the recording in court this month. The recording, he says, captures just one experience of the millions of mostly black and Latino men and boys who have been subjected to the stop-and-frisk program after its introduction in the 1990s.
“The good thing about a [recording] is you can prove if it’s been edited or altered. If it hasn’t you really can’t deny what is said,” LaSalle said. "And what these officers say to this kid, it's shameful."
(Click here or scroll down to listen to the recording first made public by The Nation magazine.)
The recording captures police telling the 15-year-old that he was stopped by police two times while walking three East Harlem blocks because he was wearing a hoodie and glancing over his shoulder suspiciously. Officers can be heard yelling, cursing and possibly pushing the boy. One officer even refers to the boy as a “mut,” and a “wise ass,” and threatens to break the boy’s arm.
LaSalle described the use of the term “mut” as a sort of ethnic epithet aimed at disparaging the mestizo (mixed racial) heritage of Latinos.
Just on Wednesday, an officer under questioning by the center's lawyers said that his decision to tell a 13-year-old boy he stopped and frisked to "stop crying like a little girl" was not appropriate.
These kinds of exchanges between NYPD and minorities are what activists like LaSalle hope to highlight.
Of the 4.4 million people stopped and frisked by NYPD officers since the
program began in the 1990s, 86 percent were black or Latino, according to a New York Civil Liberties Union analysis released this month. And of these, 88 percent of stops did not lead to an arrest or even a citation requiring a court appearance.
Defenders of the program – including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and some crime control advocates – say that Stop, Question and Frisk has helped push New York’s crime rate to record lows. Other cities experienced a dip in crime but none have watched crime numbers slide as long and as low as New York, advocates of the policy say.
Any concentration of stops involving blacks or Latinos is really a reflection of the fact that the city’s highest crime and most heavily policed neighborhoods also happen to be home to mostly people of color, said Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank. In fact, minorities may be “understopped,” because 98 percent of shootings last year occurred when a black or Latino perpetrator fired a gun, MacDonald said.
Those claims and figures inspired a stop-and-frisk-like program in Los Angeles, not long after former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton took the Los Angeles Police Department’s top job in 2002. Bratton has since retired. New York also inspired a frequent traffic-stop and warrant-search program in Nashville and later, New Orleans, where former Nashville police chief Ronal W. Serpas, a New Orleans native, took over that city’s top cop job in 2010. (The New Orleans Police Department became subject to a four-year federal monitoring plan last year, due in part to accusations of rampant racial profiling and police brutality).
When Bratton, the former police chief in New York and Los Angeles, was hired to advise the Oakland, Calif. police department and said that cities without stop-and-frisk are “doomed,” large crowds appeared at city meetings to protest. Bratton’s firm also has consulting contracts with Detroit and Baltimore.
Watch this 13-minute documentary about stop-and-frisk produced by The Nation magazine to see the teenager describe his experience: ]]>Kimani Gray Funeral Highlights Human Cost of Stop and Frisktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-23T21:24:20-04:002013-03-25T11:30:29-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
NEW YORK -- On Saturday, inside the mahogany wood and white stone sanctuary at St. Catherine of Genoa Catholic Church, no one spoke openly about the New York Police Department’s impact on the church's East Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn.
No one mentioned the controversial tactic, formally called "stop-question-and-frisk," and its possible impact on police community relations in the neighborhood.
No one talked about what it has done to alter the lives of the nearly 5 million people -- the overwhelming majority of whom are black or Latino -- citywide who have been stopped and frisked.
No one had to.
At the church’s altar, Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old known by the nickname "Kiki" whose favorite subject in school was English because he “loved the power of words,” lay silent and still inside a coffin, beneath a bone and gold embroidered pall.
To the right of the casket, sat Gray’s parents, family and friends, as well as the emergency medical crew called when Gray’s mother fainted and nearly fell to the church floor. Later, one of Gray’s brothers had to be restrained inside the sanctuary when he said loudly that an unidentified man should not have been there because the man did not know who Kiki was.
Gray’s eulogy reminded those inside the sanctuary that in the days leading up to his death Gray, a self-described writer, was busy working on a dramatic piece. On weekdays, he traveled more than an hour each way to his Manhattan high school. His affection for Chinese food, the television show “Supernatural,” and the music of teenage rapper Chief Keef were so well known that their mention Saturday moved most of the nearly 200 people gathered inside St. Catherine’s to laugh.
Two weeks after Gray’s shooting death, exactly what happened remains the subject of an NYPD internal investigation. Police say that when plain-clothes officers jumped out of a car, and ordered Gray and a group of teenagers on their way to a Sweet 16 party to stop for questioning, Gray pointed a weapon at the officers. Police fired, killing Gray. Witnesses say that Gray was unarmed, and attempting to adjust his baggy pants and possibly flee when he was shot. An autopsy found that some of the seven bullets that pierced Gray entered the back of his body.
The March 9 shooting seems to have drawn new national attention to a collection of police tactics used nationwide, including stop and frisk, and random traffic stops to initiate vehicle searches or warrant checks. Proponents insist the tactics are proactive policing tools that help identify criminals and stop crime before it occurs. Opponents insist they provide legal cover for racial profiling and abuses of authority that turn minority neighborhoods into police states.
Gray’s death also ignited a series of clashes with police that New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has said were prematurely and inaccurately reported as riots. The confrontations led to a series of arrests and a make-shift sidewalk memorial for Gray near the spot where he was shot.
Neither Kelly nor New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a proponent of stop and frisk, attended the funeral.
On Saturday, the NYPD stationed police cruisers with flashing lights along streets near St. Catherine’s. At least 35 police officers stood behind stacks of portable metal barricades at the church or were aboard scooters scattered between the church and the site of the shooting less than a mile away.
For Jose LaSalle, an activist who is among a small group keeping vigil at the spot where Gray was shot, the service made him think of his own teenage son.
In 2011, when LaSalle’s son was 15, he was stopped and frisked in East Harlem. A radio recording of one of the officers involved is expected to be introduced into evidence this month in a federal case evaluating the constitutionality of stop and frisk, said LaSalle. The boy was too afraid to testify, his father said, but the recording captured one of the officers who frisked him calling the boy “a mutt.”
"A mutt, like a mixed breed dog," said LaSalle. "He said that like Spanish people, you know because of our mixed heritage, are not even full human beings. That's what boys like my son, parents like me face if we are lucky. My son is alive."]]>Immigration Reform Boosts Republican Appeal To Latino Voters, Poll Showstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-21T18:56:54-04:002013-03-23T09:48:47-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/face losing the White House and down-ballot races for decades.
In a hypothetical election match-up between a Republican candidate who supports a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants against a Democrat who opposes citizenship, 61 percent of Latinos who voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 said they would would choose the Republican, according to the poll. Another 43 percent of Latino Obama supporters said they would become more likely to consider or vote for a Republican if the party plays a major role in comprehensive immigration reform. In fact, 41 percent of Obama’s Latino voters have already cast a ballot in favor of a down-ticket Republican seeking federal, state or local office, the poll found.
The possible good news for Democrats and undocumented immigrants is that even Latinos who identify as Republicans seem prepared to insist on comprehensive immigration reform. About 64 percent of Latino Republicans described comprehensive immigration reform as “very” or “extremely” important, according to the Latino Decisions analysis. And nearly 70 percent of Latino Republicans said they wanted an immigration plan with a clear pathway to citizenship.
Bipartisan groups of senators and House members are working on comprehensive immigration reform. This week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), kind of, sort ofendorsed immigration reform.
Latino Decisions interviewed 800 Latino registered voters via landline and mobile phone in every state from Feb. 15 to Feb. 26. The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percent.
]]>Stop-And-Frisk Costs In New York Questioned Anew With Trial, Teen Killingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-20T20:09:01-04:002013-03-27T13:28:02-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week described the tactic, formally called "stop, question and frisk," as a key crime-reduction tool that no “rational” person would oppose. But the federal trial and the March 9 killing of 16-year-old Kimani Gray when officers tried to stop and question him have sparked fresh debate about the true cost of stop-and-frisk, a strategy police officers use to reduce crime by stopping, questioning and searching people they consider suspicious. The tactic has led to mass demonstrations, City Council hearings and mayoral candidates calling for change. The lawsuit seeks a court-appointed monitor to oversee changes to how the police make stops.
The $185.6 million the city spent in fiscal 2011 to settle legal claims against the police department marked a 35 percent increase from the year before, according to a report by New York City Comptroller John Liu in December. At least some part of that is attributable to stop-and-frisk, Liu has said. The precise legal cost of stop-and-frisk lawsuits is difficult to determine, because the suits make a variety of claims, including civil rights violations, excessive force and unlawful arrest, Liu said.
“Stop-and-frisk has driven a deep chasm between communities and police, which makes everyone less safe,” said Liu, who this week announced his candidacy for mayor. “As stop-and-frisk has increased, we have also seen a marked increase in lawsuits and claims against the NYPD -- bills that taxpayers are on the hook for.”
Court records show five legal settlements paid by the city to people who claimed their civil rights were violated by Sgt. Mourad Mourad and Officer Jovaniel Cordova -- the cops involved in Gray's killing. The settlements cost taxpayers about $215,000, according to the records. Mourad has served as a police officer for eight years and Cordova for two.
Both men have been placed on administrative leave while Gray’s death is investigated. Both also have received commendations for work confronting suspects. Neither responded to a request for comment.
Bloomberg’s claim that stop-and-frisk has helped reverse New York crime trends -- a boast echoed by city lawyers in the federal trial this week -- fails to recognize the human toll of the tactic,said City Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, who represents portions of Brooklyn.
“Mayor Bloomberg has failed to show any correlation between his use of stop, question and frisk and the rates of weapons recovery, shootings or murders,” Williams said. “He is wedded to a failed policy and has shown a unique obstinacy in defending it against an overwhelming mountain of evidence...The cost of stop, question and frisk in money, lives and overall community health is immeasurable.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union said last week that the police department is nearing 5 million stop and frisks. Of the 4.4 million stops already recorded, more than 86 percent of the people involved were black or Latino, and 88 percent of these interactions did not lead to an arrest or citation requiring a court appearance, NYCLU said.
No one denies stop-and-frisk brings intense policing to high-crime neighborhoods, said Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute who studies cities and crime. Crime rates in New York have fallen further and continued to decline over a longer period of time than any other major U.S. city, Mac Donald said.
“All of the liberal root causes for crime, like poverty, inequality … stayed the same,” Mac Donald said. “Conservative causes like out-of-wedlock birthrates, that stayed the same, too. The only thing that changed in New York in the 1990s was the style of policing.”
Mac Donald, who is observing the federal stop-and-frisk trial this week, said opponents of the tactic, in New York and elsewhere, often try to depict it as discriminatory or unfair because the number of blacks and Latinos stopped and frisked far outpaces their presence in the population.
“But that’s not how policing is determined, nor should it be,” Mac Donald said. “Policing goes where victimization is happening. The police are trying to bring the same level of safety to every community in New York.”
The reality is that high-crime neighborhoods are home to mostly black and Latino residents, and 98 percent of shootings occurred after a black or Latino perpetrator fired a gun, Mac Donald said. More frequent stops in these neighborhoods and interactions with minority individuals makes legal sense and helps improve overall public safety, she said.
“You cannot protect the victims of crime without generating racially disparate police statistics,” said Mac Donald. She added, “I would say that stop, question and frisk is the lesser of two evils. Is there a cost? Yes, there is a cost to some people. But I would say crime is a higher cost.”
Khalil Muhammad, director of New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, said New York’s homicide rate has declined precipitously since the 1990s, but it did so in most U.S. cities. Almost every city in the country –- small, medium and large -– experienced the same trend, he said.
Bloomberg and other proponents of Stop and Frisk want New Yorkers to leap to the conclusion that stop-and-frisk drove this trend in New York without clear evidence that it did so, said Muhammad, a historian who studies the history of U.S. law enforcement and race.
Bloomberg and others have said that while the number of people stopped and ultimately arrested or ticketed is small, stop-and-frisk helps to keep people who might cause trouble from carrying guns or engaging in crime because they know they are likely to be caught.
“Massive crime and killing -- or the wholesale and regular violation of black and brown people’s rights,” said Muhammad. “That’s the false dichotomy they have set up when we know there are other methods that have worked and do work in other cities that do not ... revolve around increased incarceration.”
When Muhammad hears Bloomberg talk about stop-and-frisk as the reason for falling crime, Muhammad said he hears echoes of an earlier and ugly time in American history. In the Jim Crow South, white community leaders often expressed a need to contain and monitor black populations, to suppress perceived criminal impulses and maintain public safety. Now, New York is practicing what Muhammad called a “Jim Crow” form of justice in its high-crime neighborhoods. ]]>After Kimani Gray Shooting, Brooklyn Community Reels, Raises Questions About Race And Crimetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-17T11:36:28-04:002013-03-17T12:01:15-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
Priestly stopped and stared at the door. His sister had already gone inside. Even though it was snowing, he frittered with his iPhone, then put it away and took to rubbing his almost coal-colored hands in front of his mouth for heat. Priestly, 16, was trying to decide whether to go inside and do what he called “the good-kid” thing -- talk about the shooting death of another black 16-year-old, Kimani Gray, at the hands of two plain clothes New York City police officers this month. Then listen to impromptu sermons thinly disguised as questions about “youth” and the three nights of protest following the shooting that ended in clashes with police. Or, Priestly could go home, watch cartoons and brood.
“My sister wanted to come up here,” said Priestly, who did not know Gray personally but often saw Gray around the neighborhood and even shared some of the same friends. “But I’m kind of like wondering, what good is any of it going to do? I might get stopped, frisked, maybe shot next week.”
Young men like Priestly and, before his sudden death, Gray, often live in communities where police and many residents say crime and gangs warrant intense police patrols, scrutiny and the use of confrontational police techniques such as the New York Police Department’s Stop and Frisk program (officially known as Stop, Question and Frisk).
Stop and Frisk aims to identify people with illegal guns and those engaged in other criminal activity and take them off the street with a program of surprise contact with those who look suspicious. This contact can involve pat downs, and, when warranted, arrests, according to police. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has repeatedly described the program as a key crime prevention and reduction tool, and said that the program will, at minimum, remain in place through the remainder of his term, which ends at the end of this year. Gray was stopped as a part of the Stop and Frisk program, his family says.
Public opinion polls have repeatedly demonstrated a sharp racial divide in the way that the program is viewed. An August 2012 New York Times poll found that 55 percent of whites surveyed about the program describe it as perfectly acceptable while 56 percent of blacks and 44 percent of Latinos described it as excessive.
East Flatbush is a community that in some ways exemplifies the kind of neighborhood that is most often heavily policed. In the mostly black neighborhood, unemployment and poverty sit above average. No publicly-financed community centers sit within a 3 mile radius, and many schools in the area rank among the city’s struggling institutions.
Gangs, or loosely organized crews, have a real foothold in the area, as do some of their criminal enterprises. In the last two years alone, Gilford Monrose, pastor of Brooklyn’s Mt Zion Church of God 7th Day and president of the 67th police precinct clergy council, has overseen funeral services for 10 people under the age of 25.
It is also a community where most of its residents are first, second and third generation Caribbean immigrants, and long-time residents say it is the sort of place they don’t plan to leave.
“In East Flatbush, of course, we recognize that we have a gun problem a gang problem," Monrose said. "But we also have honest, hard working citizens who want to be policed in a different way. The perception is they are being targeted unfairly.”
Gray was shot and killed March 9 in an incident that has been described in different ways by police and witnesses. Major facts related to the shooting -- whether Gray was carrying a gun at the time of his death or attempting to use it when shot -- remain unclear.
The NYPD did not respond to a Huffington Post request for information, but told The New York Times that plain clothes police approached Gray and a group of "men" around 11:30 p.m., identified themselves as police and ordered them to stop.
Mr. Gray turned and pointed a .38-caliber Rohm revolver at them, the police said; two officers fired, hitting the teenager. He was pronounced dead a short time later at Kings County Hospital Center.
Mr. Gray did not fire the handgun, which was recovered at the scene.
The group of “men,” was actually a collection of mostly teenaged boys including Gray and his twin best friends, said Kenneth Montgomery, a lawyer representing Gray’s family and a one-time New York City prosecutor who worked closely with police on gang crimes. The group was headed to a Sweet 16 party. Not far from the twins’ home, police spotted the group, circled the block and then jumped out of their vehicle issuing orders to stop amid a barrage of curse words. Frightened, Gray attempted to flee but also needed to adjust his sagging pants. As he fiddled with his pants or belt, police officers shot the boy, Montgomery said. Witnesses told Montgomery that Gray was not armed.
At a press conference last week, Kimani Gray’s mother Carol described her son as a victim of a police slaughter, but nobody’s perfect angel since the sudden death of his brother in a car accident two years ago. He had a short record consisting of a joy riding charge, Montgomery said. But Kimani Gray was not in a gang, and to her knowledge, did not own or have access to a gun, Carol Gray said.
“I want to know why,” she said of her son’s death. Kimani, a boy know to his family as Kiki, was the son of a Jamaican immigrant mother and a Guyanese migrant father. "I don't condone any riots, any looting, any shooting, anything against any police officers ... I only want justice for two police officers to be off the street before they hurt another young kid.”
The NYPD has initiated an internal affairs investigation, which is standard procedure after a shooting. Montgomery and Gray’s family plan to meet with the District Attorney’s office this week. Court records do indicate that the two officers involved in the shooting have been accused of using excessive or inappropriate levels of force and violating the rights of people with whom they have come in contact on at least five occasions, leading to more than $100,000 in settlement payouts.
On Thursday, the New York Civil Liberties Union announced that the city’s police department is well on its way to initiating 5 million stop and frisks. Of the 4.4 million stops that have already been recorded, just over 86 percent of those stopped and frisked were black or Latino and 88 percent of these interactions did not lead to an arrest or citation requiring a court appearance.
“These paramilitary police tactics, the over policing of communities that in city after city just happen to be black ad brown,” Montgomery said. “They distort the experience of growing up, walking down the street and even the most basic interactions with the police. And it's not just Brooklyn. That's what's happening in almost every city in this country.”
Back outside the Tilden building Saturday, Priestly decided to send his sister a text message. It read, “Can't handle it. Going home.”
]]>Sequestration Set To Deepen Racial Inequality In U.S., Experts Saytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-13T11:56:22-04:002013-03-13T12:51:03-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
But a growing chorus of researchers, political analysts and economists say that the cuts are poised to inflict particularly intense pain on people of color and impede the country’s ability to prosper as these populations grow.
“What you will keep hearing is that it is a little to early to know exactly what is going to happen. And I agree. But I think there are certainly a number of areas where you can expect a disproportionate impact on black and Latino families," said Margaret C. Simms, a fellow at the Urban Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., and director of its Low-Income Working Families Project. "What we are talking about is taking the existing inequalities this country has and really making them worse, much worse.”
If the Obama administration and Congress fail to reach an agreement to modify the slate of automatic spending cuts, as much as $900 million could be cut from Head Start, a federal early education program aimed at helping low-income children keep pace with their peers in school, according to a February analysis by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Losing those funds means that as many as 700,000 children in need of Head Start services may not be able to enroll. A full 60 percent of children enrolled in Head Start are black, Latino or Asian.
Young students would not be the only ones to suffer. The analysis found that the sequester would also lead to about $3 billion in cuts to other areas of education, including college financial aid, funding for students who are enrolled in programs to learn English, and funding for schools that serve a large number of low-income students.
All told, the Center for American Progress estimates that 9.3 million students would have access to less funding or fewer educational services needed to complete their education. This could lead to an ever higher rate of student debt among African Americans and Latinos -- in the 2007-'08 academic year, 81 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of Latinos with a bachelor’s degree graduated with student debt, compared to 64 percent of their white peers, according to a 2012 study by the center.
Another $543 million would be cut from the Women Infant and Children Program, a nutrition assistance program that helps low-income mothers with children under the age of 5 pay for healthy food, juices, milk and other vitamin-rich items thought to be essential for early-life development, the analysis found.
As the sequester forces agencies to trim their payrolls, black workers also stand likely to lose a critical source of jobs, income and health insurance, said Steven Pitts, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education. In 2011, the most recent year for which detailed federal data is available, 20 percent of employed black adults worked for federal, state or local government agencies.
The cuts will also trim long-term unemployment benefits, which could disproportionately affect blacks and Latinos. Thirty-eight percent of unemployed blacks and 28 percent of Latinos have been out of work for a year or more, according to federal data.
“If you look at the programs that are going to be cut, people of color disproportionately use them,” said Daniella Gibbs Leger, senior vice president for American Values and New Communities at The Center for American Progress. “Inside the beltway and in the upper middle class sections of America we may not see them or feel them, but there will be real people who experience the sequester in some very real ways.”
Gibbs Leger dismissed the argument that the cuts show people of color are overdependent on the social safety net. Instead, she said, the country needs to focus on why race and ethnicity remain so closely linked with poverty and how that can be changed with public policy.
The sequester is also slated to cut funding for medical research, community health centers that provide care to low-income and uninsured individuals and programs that cover the costs of child vaccinations. These cuts will disproportionately affect people of color, said Brian D. Smedley, vice president and director of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Health Policy Institute.
"Sequestration results in significant cuts to very important programs that again, in my view, are likely to widen the health gaps rather than close our fiscal hole," Smedley said.
Simms took that one step further, saying that sequestration's effects on people of color will negatively affect the entire nation.
"The absolute bottom line is this: because half of the children born in this country in 2010 were minorities, children are increasingly coming from less advantaged families. In the absence of public investment, they will likely not achieve their potential," she said. "And, given what's happening with our population, that’s not important just to them and their families, but to the country as a whole."]]>Marco McMillian Funeral: Silence Speaks Volumestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-10T11:27:42-04:002013-03-13T17:33:30-04:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
At the end of a long center aisle sat a slate blue casket. The swollen, partially charred body of her only son, Marco McMillian, lay inside, obscured by a gauzy white veil. She nearly fainted and did not speak.
Instead, between a gospel choir’s offerings, national and local dignitaries drew attention to McMillian’s drive, talent and intellect. McMillian’s own family, friends and fraternity returned again and again to McMillian’s decision to move back to his small Mississippi hometown and run for mayor, his high-wattage smile, his fondness for debate and habit of referring to family and friends as “my love.” But not one person spoke into a microphone Saturday about the precedent McMillian had already set before he died.
McMillian-- a 33-year-old black man who died Feb. 26 and was believed to be the first openly gay politician to ever run for office in Mississippi -- came to national attention late last month after his body was discovered beside a levee. The brutal and mysterious death of the political trailblazer has set off so many questions that at least two members of Congress and a black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization has asked federal hate crimes investigators to intervene.
“We must ask ourselves some hard questions as a nation, as a region. We need to ask not just what has happened here but why,” said Congressman John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia who is a member of the same fraternity to which McMillan belonged and who attended the funeral. Lewis said Saturday that he supports calls from Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, to bring federal investigators and resources into the McMillian death investigation.
Lewis described McMillian as a “kindred spirit,” because much like Lewis, a man known for the violent beatings, arrests and other challenges he endured while engaged in civil rights protests, McMillian was prepared to “get into trouble, good trouble, the kind required to hold the nation to its ideals.”
It’s difficult to parse what portion of the silence around the precedent-setting nature of McMillian’s campaign or even the much-debated cause of his death should be attributed to homophobia in Clarksdale, an overwhelmingly black Delta community of 18,000. In much of the Deep South, mores limit public discussions of sex and sexuality. And almost nowhere in the country would a collection of bereaved family and friends deviate from the standard script of life accomplishments, endearing quirks and good deeds at a funeral.
Marcus Chaney, another one of McMillian's fraternity brothers and an administrator at Jackson State University who had known McMillian since the politician was in high school, said in African-American communities and certainly the Deep South, gay men like McMillian don't face constant discrimination because they simply don't talk about their sexuality.
"Being number 50, the bottom of the list in almost everything in Mississippi, I think there are just so many other things to fight -- namely poverty," he said.
On Saturday, what was clear was just how much McMillian will be missed. Unger had spent the last week crafting a nearly 15-minute slideshow that played while a trio sang.
When it began, an orange-tinted late 1970s, early 1980s-era family photo complete with a smiling baby and parents in wide-collared shirts filled a large screen in the reconfigured community college gymnasium where McMillian’s funeral was held. In another photo, McMillian appeared with an eager smile and in a white cap and gown at his kindergarten graduation.
Later, a teenage McMillian, with an angled box-top haircut and an anxious smile, college pictures with some of the men who would become his fraternity brothers and McMillian’s mother beaming beside her adult son filled the screen. Then came the pictures of McMillian receiving professional commendations, shaking hands with men like former Sen. Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, and Democrats such as President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Clinton grasped McMillian’s hand in one of his famous double grips.
Around the gymnasium, the pictures elicited laughter and, from others, tears. McMillian's godfather, Carter Womack, told the at least 700 people inside the gym that McMillian was a civil rights leader for a "new era," and then offered some emotional guidance:
“Although we are dealing with the tragic loss of a young and great man,” said Womack, “it was a life filled with great accomplishment and contributions … So we celebrate him.”
Around town, some are gossiping, offering unproven theories as fact and even coming to the funeral to gawk, McMillian’s former pastor said during his time at the microphone.
"It don't matter what they say about Marco because ... none of us have a heaven or a hell to put him in," said the Rev. Edward Thomas, pastor of Kings Temple Missionary Baptist Church.
Reporters in Mississippi have published stories indicating that Lawrence Reed, a 22-year-old black man, may have killed the politician in a panic, ignited when McMillian allegedly showed romantic interest in Reed. Reed has been charged with McMillian’s murder. But several Clarksdale residents and friends of McMillian's who live in Memphis, Atlanta, Jackson, Miss., and other nearby cities told The Huffington Post on Saturday that McMillian told family and friends in the days leading up to his death that he feared for his life and had been warned to drop out of the mayor’s race.
As the service ended, Womack said, "The charge for this community ... is to demand justice, demand justice, demand justice."
Then, Womack and Unger followed McMillian’s casket back down the long aisle.
CORRECTION: This article has been changed to attribute comments made the Rev. Edward Thomas to the correct pastor. Thomas was one of several ministers who spoke during the funeral service.]]>Hugo Chavez Legacy Debate Continues About Who He Was, What He Did, What's Nexttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-06T18:59:16-05:002013-03-06T19:00:03-05:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/socialism wept openly. Chavistas, as they are called, benefitted from subsidies that radically altered the lives of the country’s poor.
Venezuelans across the globe have spent two days discussing Chavez, his legacy and the future. They wondered what form of cancer killed him, when and where he died, and what will become of Venezuela now that one of the world’s leading Latin American leftists is gone. The competing faces of Chavez -- socialist reformer who gave voice and opportunity to the poor, and charismatic strongman who used democracy as a disguise -- have been consistent themes of the debate.
“In many ways, both versions of the Chavez story are true,” said Susan Kaufman Purcell, director of the University of Miami’s Center for Hemispheric Policy. “He was a very mercurial personality. At various points, people have implied part of that may have been madness. But there is no question that Chavez’s impact will survive beyond his death.
“You have got a sort of genie that has been let out of the bottle -- a mobilization of the lower class in Venezuela, people who felt that earlier governments ignored them," Purcell continued. "I don’t think that can be contained again.”
Venezuela’s constitution calls for national elections within 30 days.
Vice President Nicolás Maduro, Chavez’s handpicked successor, is expected to be the Chavismo candidate. Latin American analysts said they expect the opposition will back Henrique Capriles Radonski, who ran against Chavez in October and lost by 11 percentage points. Maduro is favored to win.
“I find it almost impossible to imagine that it won’t be Nicolás Maduro,” said Cynthia Arnson, director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program. “He is the only person who has officially been given the blessing of Chavez to carry on his legacy.
“Chavismo is very much going to continue without Chavez, but it will never be the same," Arnson continued. “Chavez had a singular ability to keep the movement unified, to keep a direct connection with his mass base and to make decisions. There’s really no known leader in Venezuela who has all of those qualities.”
Even in the U.S., Chavez came in for some praise. Former Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) told the Associated Press that he is mourning Chavez's death. Chavez and Venezuela's national oil company, Citgo, donated heating oil that helped the U.S. poor. Kennedy told AP that Chavez helped more than 2 million Americans.
Now, Chavez’s successor must contend with a deeply disgruntled upper class, including expatriates in the United States, and an emboldened poor, said Purcell. The first group is concerned about security and crime, escalating inflation and shortages of goods. The second expects government help ranging from free refrigerators to health care, she said.
The country’s next president also will have to contend with debt racked up by Chavez and with global oil prices that may fall. Venezuela ranks among the world’s largest oil exporters, but imports almost everything else, Arnson said.
"The running joke in Venezuela is it's easier to get whiskey than milk,” Arnson said.
Poverty in Venezuela declined during Chavez' 14 years in office, dropping from nearly 50 percent in 1999 to about 27 percent in 2011, according to the CIA World Factbook. At the same time, an estimated 1 million Venezuelans, mostly from the middle and upper class, left the country. Chavez's social investments have led to better living standards, including increased school enrollment, a substantial reduction in infant and child mortality, and greater access to potable water and sanitation. Some experts, however, question how much of a role government spending played in the improvements.
]]>Marco McMillian Family, Gay Rights Advocates Call For Hate Crime Investigationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-06T10:39:35-05:002013-03-06T10:44:34-05:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/black openly-gay mayoral candidate found dead in Mississippi last week, family members, friends and civil-rights advocates say that the crime does not appear to be a random act of violence. They're calling on officials to mount a full investigation that includes the possibility the crime was motivated by hate.
Over the weekend, McMillian's family released a statement indicating that the 33-year-old politician's body was found after having been beaten, dragged and burned. Local officials have released few details about the crime or the condition of McMillian's body when it was found, but have indicated that they have not ruled out the possibility of a hate crime, despite the fact that Mississippi law includes no specific or additional punishments for crimes motivated by anti-gay bias.
But regardless of local law enforcement's insistence that they will pursue all possible avenues, legal experts say that McMillian's death and the ongoing investigation highlight the difficulty and complexity of life for openly gay black men in Mississippi, the extremely limited legal protections the state offers its minority residents and the state's own record of identifying and reporting hate crimes.
"For it not to be even investigated as a hate crime is a slap into the face of all civil rights change agents through generations," said Ravi Perry, a black political science professor at Mississippi State University who served, while living in Massachusetts, as one of the first openly gay heads of an NAACP chapter. Perry first spoke to McMillian last fall, when the young politician was starting to organize his mayoral campaign. McMillian had recently returned to his small hometown of Clarksdale, Miss. after leaving behind a leadership post at his historically African-American fraternity and the thriving black gay scene in Washington, D.C.
While Perry spoke to McMillian regularly, he never got to meet him. This weekend he will attend McMillian's wake and funeral. Perry understood why some in the town would be anxious to avoid the question of whether this was a hate crime or draw attention to McMillian's openly gay identity, which had never been mentioned during his campaign. However, Perry is urging the federal government to intervene and open a full-scale hate crime investigation.
"I will say this," Perry continued. "In order to investigate it as a hate crime, you have to talk more openly about his sexuality, and that would validate for everyone that he was in fact gay, and I understand that people may not want that, his family may not want that, his community members may not want that. In death we want the story to be a certain way. But I firmly believe that Marco would absolutely want that. We cannot take away from that. He has touched thousands of lives throughout his career, but he did so as an openly gay man."
As early as this weekend, local reporters began pushing back against the idea that this was yet another saga of prejudice in the Mississippi Delta. Instead, area newspapers and television stations ran stories indicating that the death was the result of a personal disagreement between McMillian and Christopher Reed, an African-American man arrested and charged with McMillian's murder. They suggested that Reed, a man described as straight, may have “snapped,” killing McMillian in an emotion-fueled panic after the politician made a pass at Reed.
"What needs to be debated, Clarksdale residents say, isn’t how to stop intolerance but how to stop crime," an article in the Clarion-Ledger, the state’s largest daily newspaper, stated.
Since both men were black, some observers also left comments on news sites and in local chat rooms declaring that McMillian's death could not be the result of a hate crime. Some county officials have implied the same. The local sheriff's office, however, insists that no motives for the crime have been ruled out and reporters have jumped to premature conclusions.
A second Clarion-Ledger story stated that police were not investigating the matter as a hate crime. A spokesman for the sheriff's department refuted that claim Tuesday.
"As this is an ongoing investigation, every possibility is being examined at this time," Will Rooker, the spokesman said.
It isn't just the press promoting the idea that McMillian isn't a victim of a hate crime. In an interview with The Huffington Post this week, Coahoma County Coronor Scotty Meredith cast doubts on a passage of the family’s statement that suggested McMillian may have been tortured. Meredith also suggested that a reporter speak with Reed’s girlfriend, whose name he could not supply, about just what happened between McMillian and Reed.
“She could shed a lot of light on this story that can move Mr. McMillian from the victim to the suspect in this story,” Meredith said.
Reed’s girlfriend could not be identified by deadline.
Hayley Gorenberg, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, an organization dedicated to LGBT rights, said she couldn't comment on the underlying facts of the case, but she described aspects of the coverage as outrageous.
"The idea that anybody could look at reports of burning somebody to death or dragging somebody to death and say we dismiss the idea that there could be a hate crime, because this may have resulted from a misunderstanding between a gay man and a straight man, completely fails to recognize what a hate crime at its core is," said Gorenberg, who is white.
She brought up the Matthew Shepard case, where lawyers tried to argue that the killers were enraged to the point of the murder because the victim hit on them. "That's the case that birthed the Hate Crimes act," she noted.
On Tuesday, Sharon Lettman-Hicks, head of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), a black LGBT civil-rights group based in Washington, D.C., sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder calling for the federal government to step into the investigation.
"After speaking extensively with the family, community and anti-violence coalition members like the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), NBJC feels the perpetuation and validation of the 'gay panic' defense is irresponsible," wrote Lettman-Hicks, who is black. "The conflicting reports as well as the current racial and anti-LGBT climate in Mississippi is justification enough for a federal investigation.
"NBJC is standing firmly with Marco McMillian’s family so that their concerns do not fall on deaf ears," Lettman-Hicks added. "The details of this case just aren’t adding up. Whether on the basis of race or sexual orientation, hate is hate. If there is the possibility that McMillian was murdered because of who he is, that warrants the Department of Justice’s involvement."
McMillian’s murder has drawn the national spotlight to Clarksdale, a Mississippi Delta town of about 18,000, mostly black residents perhaps best known as the birthplace of the blues. Clarksdale is also a place where 40 percent of residents live on incomes that fall below the poverty line.
A graduate of both Jackson State and Saint Mary’s universities who operated his own consulting firm, McMillian has been described by people who knew him as a standout, a bright and promising young star. He was part of the only 17 percent of area residents with a college degree, charismatic and willing to commit to his hometown.
Before his death, McMillian was one of seven Democrats vying to lead the community. Over the course of his campaign, McMillian vowed to boost college graduation rates, believing that income and employment rates would soon follow and crime would slide. He was also openly gay but did not discuss the issue during his campaign, making him a sort of cautious trailblazer.
Right now, there isn’t enough information available about McMillian’s death to reach a clear conclusion, said Bear Atwood, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, who is white. But, it does seem that prevailing social mores, the frequency with which gay individuals lead closeted lives and concerns about the area’s reputation have begun to shape the way that people view the investigation and the crime, she said.
Across the country, experts say that more than half of all hate crimes go unreported to police. In Mississippi it seems many of those which are investigated are never classified as hate crimes. In 2011, the most recent year for which hate crime data is available, Mississippi law enforcement agencies collectively reported one hate crime.
Investigators who are part of the communities they serve have to be willing and able to explore the motivations for potential hate crimes before the difficult work of documenting them can begin, Atwood said. And, there are other problems. Mississippi has no laws -- not in housing, employment or any other facet of life -- outlawing discrimination against women, minorities or gays. The state’s hate crime statute also does not cover gay individuals.
Federal laws preventing discrimination and mandating enhanced sentences for hate crimes of any kind do apply, but require Justice Department intervention, she said.
In January a bill was introduced in the Mississippi legislature that would have added lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals to the list of groups protected by the states hate crimes law. The bill died quickly but represents the kind of incremental transition happening in Mississippi right now, Atwood said.
“It’s a complicated place,” she said. “Do gay people in Mississippi, a gay black man like Marco McMillian, feel particularly vulnerable? Definitely. But, I don’t think that’s just because the hate crimes law doesn’t include them. I think that’s the reality of life in Mississippi.” ]]>Southern Poverty Law Center Report Finds 'Patriot' Groups Surge As Anti-Obama Fervor Growstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-05T21:29:46-05:002013-03-08T16:05:00-05:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/report issued Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Patriot groups -- those dedicated to federal government overthrow in the belief it will confiscate weapons and impose socialism -- expanded in number and size for the fourth consecutive year, the law center said. The groups' recruiting was fueled by the sluggish economy, anxieties about the country’s shifting demographics and their ability to push their ideas and conspiracy theories into the mainstream, the report said. The growth intensified at the end of 2012 with the election and the school massacre.
“As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” wrote Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and a member of the Department of Homeland Security working group on violent extremism.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based nonprofit that monitors hate groups and crimes, said in a letter to U.S. Attorney Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that patriot groups now hold the potential for a wave of domestic terrorism. The groups overshadow the danger posed by more traditional hate groups -- neo-Nazis and others dedicated against blacks, Latinos, Catholics and Muslims, for example, the report found. The group's letter urged federal officials to create a new task force to assess federal resources devoted to the threat.
In October 1994, the law center wrote to then-Attorney General Janet Reno about the growing threat of domestic extremism. The Oklahoma City federal building was bombed six months later.
Patriot groups have been classified by the law center as hate organizations because their anti-government sentiment is almost always paired with racism, ranging from fear of everyday crime to a looming race war, said Mark Potok, the law center's chief hate group and hate crime investigator.
The law center found 1,360 patriot groups in 2012 -– an 813 percent rise since 2008, the year before Obama took office. Of those groups, 321 constitute militias. The law center also found a near-record 1,007 hate groups with animus directed at minorities, gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals in 2012. That's a slight decline from the 1,018 groups counted in 2011.
Potok said law enforcement authorities in 2011 intercepted one patriot group member headed towards El Paso, Texas, where he planned to equip patriot groups near the U.S.-Mexico border with devices from his arsenal of homemade explosive devices.
That same year, the most recent for which detailed federal hate crime data is available, law enforcement agencies in the U.S. reported a total of 6,222 hate crime incidents. Of these, about 46.9 percent were racially motivated crimes and about 12 percent centered around the victim’s actual or presumed ethnic or national identity. Nearly 21 percent stemmed from sexual-orientation bias and 20 percent by religious bigotry. About one percent of the nation’s hate crime stemmed from bias against the disabled.
]]>Marco McMillian's Death Highlights Mississippi's Slow And Inconsistent Evolutiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-03-01T11:07:15-05:002013-03-01T17:03:10-05:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/Marco McMillian’s body was recovered near a Mississippi Delta levee, people around the state and the world have begun to wonder if the openly gay, African American mayoral candidate was killed because of his sexuality, his political ambitions or none of the above.
McMillian did not live, run for office or die in the Mississippi of 1964, where three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered by white supremacists opposed to the trio’s plans to register African American voters. But the Mississippi of 2013 is a state where where gay Americans still can't marry their partners or count on legal protections from hate crimes and discrimination. By all accounts, being out in Mississippi isn't easy.
Whatever the motive for McMillian's murder, his campaign for mayor of Clarksdale offers a glimpse at the sometimes slow, often complicated nature of social change. Mississippi politicos and gay activists described McMillian as a “trailblazer.” But he didn't talk about his sexual orientation on the campaign trail, according to his family and a campaign spokesman.
"I think that is the way you have to run it," said Renick Taylor, an openly gay, sixth-generation white Mississippian who lives in Biloxi, a Gulf Coast gambling town about five and a half hours south of Clarksdale. "You can't run as a gay person. You run as a Mississippian who wants to make things better and you just happen to be gay."
For the gay people in Mississippi who were closely following McMillian's campaign long before the world learned of his death, the news came as a shock and a blow.
"The main thing it would have done is given everyone else hope: things are changing here, you can be out and you can be open and you can be OK," Taylor said about the now lost possibility of a McMillian victory. "If this turns out to be a hate crime, it is going to have the exact opposite effect."
Taylor, who in 2012 served as the first of two openly gay Mississippi delegates at the Democratic National Convention, spoke about the delicate balance gays must strike in modern Mississippi.
It took three presidential elections and more than a decade before Democrats in Biloxi agreed to let Taylor represent them at the party’s gathering. Just after Taylor threw his hat into the ring, an anonymous caller contacted the Chicago-based information technologies company for which Taylor works remotely. The caller asked if the company was "aware they employed an open homosexual."
Recounting the story this week, Taylor laughed. He said his company asked him why he continued to live in Mississippi.
Clarksdale, a town of about 18,000 two hours north of Jackson, may be best known as the place where the famed bluesman Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his uncanny prowess on the guitar. Once home to several large plantations, the median household income today sits just under $25,000. Seventy-nine percent of the town's population is black, nearly 9 percent is white and just under 1 percent Latino.
McMillian spoke openly about the roughly 40 percent of Clarksdale residents living in poverty. He shared ideas on how Clarksdale might boost the share of adults with college degrees above the current 17 percent and reduce crime.
Despite his sexuality, McMillian was regarded as a more-than-viable contender in what remains a crowded field of Democrats. He ran against a state senator, a man who is the son of the town’s current mayor and nephew of Clinton-era Secretary of Agriculture Michael Espy, and five others.
Democrats willing to talk about the area’s socioeconomic challenges often fare well, a state party official said. But Republicans dominate the state.
In 2004, the same year that gay couples in Massachussetts began to get married, 86 percent of Mississippi voters backed a measure banning gay marriage in their state.
And right now, the state’s legal code also includes one of the nation's most limited slates of legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. Gay couples are not allowed to form civil unions or adopt children together, and while the state's hate crime statute covers crimes that target victims based on their race, color, ancestry, ethnicity, religion, national origin or gender, it does not extend to cover victims of anti-gay crimes.
“Marco was aware that he was going to make history if he won,” said Jarod Keith, McMillian’s campaign spokesman. “That was definitely on his radar, but that certainly wasn't the focus."
McMillian’s family declined to comment on his death when contacted Thursday.
Rickey Cole likes to joke that he is serving his second sentence as the state’s Democratic Party chair, a position from which he will be paroled in 2016. Being a Democrat in Mississippi also isn’t easy. But the party’s voters aren’t powerless or silent, he said. They helped to defeat a 2011 measure to ban abortion under all circumstances by a 16-point margin, and voters in areas such as Clarksdale played a big role in the effort.
“You have to understand, in the Delta, there’s less of the fundamentalist morality that you may find in East Mississippi,” Cole said. “It’s just a pretty laid-back place. [McMillian’s] sexual orientation really wasn’t much of an issue.”
On Saturday, Cole met McMillian for what turned out to be the first and last time. He watched McMillian work the room at a Coahoma County Democratic Party dinner. Conversation seemed to come easy as the 34-year-old stumped for votes and shook the hands of most of the 120 to 150 people in the room. McMillian was one of those young, driven and gregarious politicians who seemed to actually enjoy campaigning, Cole said.
By Tuesday night, just hours after McMillian’s disappearance became publicly known, the news caused such concern in Clarksdale that a planned black history month service at the New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church morphed into a tearful event with the “feel of a memorial service” for the missing politician, according to the local paper.
As news of McMillian's death spread Wednesday, prominent organizations from the gay and black communities reacted publicly.
The Gay And Lesbian Victory Fund, an organization that supports what its website describes as “viable” gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender political candidates, had not formally endorsed McMillian. But after officials recovered his body Wednesday, the group tweeted a condolence message: "Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Marco McMillian, one of the 1st viable openly #LGBT candidates in Mississippi."
McMillian served as African American fraternity Phi Beta Sigma's international executive director, the organization's youngest ever, between 2007 and 2011. He secured the fraternity's first federal contract to help raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in communities of color, prompting Ebony magazine to include him in its 2004 list of 30 up-and-coming African Americans under 30. In response to his death, Phi Beta Sigma issued a statement describing him as a man who “made an incredible difference.”
Oxford, Miss., an hour and half northeast of Clarksdale, is the city where President John F. Kennedy deployed federal troops to restore order in 1962, when a young black man integrated the University of Mississippi and angry whites rioted. It’s also a community where Gail Stratton has spent the last few days locked in conversations about McMillian’s death and what it may signal.
"My personal reaction is, oh my God, this is very chilling,” said Stratton, a white, lesbian organizer of the Oxford chapter of the group Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays. “It’s one step forward and two steps back."
Taylor sees what happened this week in Mississippi in much the same way, and he’s prepared for a continued struggle. He drafted marriage equality and anti-bullying planks that were eventually added to Mississippi Democrats' 2012 platform. But getting the language included sparked an inner-party battle, he said.
"I both love Mississippi, and I could tear it to shreds."]]>Supreme Court Hears Voting Rights Act Challenge Brought By Shelby County, Alabamatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-02-27T11:12:51-05:002013-02-27T14:40:55-05:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
After all, Stevenson notes, Shelby County and its network of small towns -- burgeoning suburban bedroom communities with names like Columbiana, Calera, Chelsea and Indian Springs Village -- may owe the construction of their major roadways, bridges and industries to the free, all-black prison labor system that operated in the area well into the 1950s. But neither Shelby County’s new communities nor its history-seeped towns had the kind of violent civil rights struggles that helped Birmingham earn its notorious nickname, “Bombingham.” Much of Shelby County may have grown through waves of white flight from Birmingham’s integrated schools and neighborhoods and growing poverty, but there’s little public talk today of racism or efforts to keep neighborhoods segregated, Stevenson said. People live in places as integrated as their pocketbooks and personal preferences allow.
But the tree-lined drive from Birmingham to Shelby County is still a part of a much longer road, one that has brought the Alabama community to the Supreme Court today and to the center what civil rights advocates say is one of the most important legal battles over minority voting rights in decades.
On Wednesday, Shelby County will ask the Supreme Court to overturn Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, a measure that civil rights advocates have called the “hammer” and “heart” of federal efforts to protect minority voting rights from a constantly-evolving series of suppressive tactics. The Project on Fair Representation, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based legal organization, state officials and other right-leaning think tanks and respected legal observers are assisting in Shelby County's suit.
In some ways the dispute that the Supreme Court will hear today is a bigger and much more consequential version of related disagreements that play out across the country every day and in nearly every public opinion poll, said Kareem Crayton, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s School of Law who studies race, voting and the policy. There are at least two, if not more, widely divergent views of American race relations, the state of equality and opportunity in the United States, Crayton said.
“It would not be an overstatement to say that in this particular dispute, the health and legitimacy of our democracy are on the line,” Crayton said.
Section Five of the Voting Rights Act gives the federal government the authority to pre-approve any changes to voting policy or procedure in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. It also covers certain counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and some communities in Michigan and New Hampshire.
The law was first passed in 1965. And since that time, those areas of the United States with a documented history of discriminatory election practices -- such as administering literacy and civics tests to people attempting to register to vote, refusing to offer multilingual ballots or translators or redrawing district lines in ways that reduce the influence of minority voters -- have received the legal equivalent of reminder notices that these activities are illegal. In some cases, the federal government has even issued all-out stop orders. Under Section Five, communities and states where less than half of the eligible minority populations are registered to vote or participate in elections have operated under a sort of federal special watch program. (A program's whose list of locations has expanded over time.)
In these places, if election officials want to do something as small as move a polling location or change its hours, or as large as require voters to provide specific forms of identification, they must first run the plan by federal officials inside the Department of Justice or a federal three-judge panel.
“Just like a lot of places in this country, people haven’t really understood the ongoing legacy of Jim Crow or how it compromised the opportunities of African-Americans to grasp political, social or economic opportunities," said Stevenson, director of Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, a private, nonprofit legal organization that assists the state’s poor, incarcerated and condemned.
“Now, that failure lies at the heart of Shelby County’s pretty outrageous case,” he said.
To be clear, Shelby County officials and the team of ideologically driven legal advisors behind them say they have no interest in curtailing the ability of the state’s growing black and Latino populations to vote. Shelby is a modern, right-leaning place. In Shelby County, the median income sits around $69,000, $20,000 more than the rest of the state. Some of its communities rank among the 100 most affluent in the United States. Many Shelby County residents work in the area’s growing biomedical, aeronautical and other tech and scientific research industries. But, the plaintiffs argue, when Congress renewed Section Five of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 for 25 years, they failed to account for current conditions.
Edward Blum, a visiting fellow at the conservative Washington, D.C.-based American Enterprise Institute and director of The Project on Fair Representation, is arguing the case on behalf of Shelby County before the Supreme Court. Blum has been central to efforts to overturn Section Five, with his project also bringing a Texas case attempting to limit federal election oversight to the Supreme Court in 2009. The court decided not to rule on the larger constitutional questions in that case and issued a more limited decree.
The court affirmed that states and communities that can prove no history of discriminatory election activity in the last 10 years can apply for a “bail-out” from the program. In fact, the Austin, Texas utility district at the center of Blum’s 2009 case, and many other areas, have been approved and removed from the federal oversight program carved out in Section Five. Shelby County and all of Alabama, for that matter, have never applied.
But, Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s only African-American member, Justice Clarence Thomas, have both expressed open concerns about whether states covered by Section Five were being treated fairly and the scope of racial progress in these areas really considered.
In 2009, while Blum was still working on the Texas case, he read a story about voting matters in Shelby County. He contacted the long-serving Shelby County attorney, Butch Ellis, and found an open ear. Later, when Blum was looking for another case to take to the Supreme Court, Shelby County agreed.
Ellis didn’t quantify those costs or describe what efforts the county will make to ensure that any changes to voting policies or procedures in the future do not negatively affect minority voters if Section 5 is overturned.
One could argue that Ellis is simply a proponent of states’ rights. So is Blum. And Blum plans to argue that since the share of black Shelby County residents registered to vote and who regularly do so sit at or near parity with the area’s black population, the rationale behind Section Five no longer holds. There is no reason to treat Alabama any different than Ohio or Pennsylvania, he’ll argue.
With African-Americans holding a proportional share of the Alabama legislature’s seats and a black president serving his second term in the White House, America’s problems with race and elections have been resolved, Blum appears to believe, based on his past record and statements. So, as he will likely contend, there is no basis for Section Five to apply anywhere.
That argument is akin to claiming that a needed medication has produced some healing so all patients should discontinue all treatment, said Ryan Haygood, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The fund is the leading civil rights legal-action agency behind such landmark cases as Brown v. Board of Education, which ultimately lead to school integration. Haygood is also part of the team that will face Blum in court Wednesday. Haygood and other civil rights lawyers will try to defend Section Five from what he says is a serious, but likely unsuccessful, attack.
What the Supreme Court will consider when oral arguments begin Wednesday is whether state sovereignty should be given greater legal weight than the right of individuals to vote, said Haygood.
Both Shelby County and Alabama were the subject of a federal block on voting-related changes and named parties in a federal civil rights suit in 2008, when 180 of the state’s counties and municipalities refused to alter their at-large election districts. The absence of distinct geographic districts –- which often cluster voters by both race and class –- made it virtually impossible for the state’s growing black and Latino populations to ever win city-wide elections for seats on hundreds of county commissions and city councils, school boards and water districts, Haygood said.
“Shelby County was and is the very kind of place for which the Voting Rights Act was written,” he said. “So, it’s pretty unbelievable that this case has come from this community.”
Of course, Shelby County is not alone.
In the last 10 years, Alaska officials have been forced to back away from a plan to relocate a polling site serving an overwhelmingly Native American group of voters. The proposed voting site sat 70 miles from the original location and was accessible only by boat and airplane. And when Congress gathered information and testimony on efforts to limit the influence of minority voters in 2006, they found so many similar cases in Alaska and across the country that these examples made up most of the 16,000-page record that was later compiled.
Anyone willing to look will see there is plenty of reason to be concerned about Shelby County and every community that is currently covered by Section Five, said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political scientist.
Barreto is also part of the group of academics who compiled a range of federal data on Section Five and non-Section Five communities in 2008, 2010 and, where available, 2012. They submitted a document to the Supreme Court to share their findings: multiple indicators of vast socioeconomic disparities and racially polarized voting in communities covered by Section Five. In most cases, those disparities have shrunk since 1965, but they remain far larger than they do in other states and communities, according to their report. The same can be said about employment discrimination claims and attitudes about immigration and race.
When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, many of the voters who were plainly excluded and faced danger if they tried to vote were African-American. A smaller number were Mexican Americans living in Southwestern states. Today, the country’s population is changing, and so too are the tactics used to limit the influence of minority voters, Barreto said.
Just last year, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) won a legal dispute with the state of Texas over proposed election districts. Texas won four new Congressional seats, almost entirely due to growth in its Latino population. State officials working to draw new district lines complied with the letter of the Voting Rights Act by creating new districts, including at least one where Latinos would make up the majority of voters and therefore stand a better chance of being able to elect and send their candidate of choice to Congress. But, in a series of emails between state staff working to draw new district lines, it became clear that the new districts were actually designed to violate the spirit of the Voting Rights Act.
State officials drew a new “minority majority” district in such a way that voters with Spanish surnames who do not often vote were concentrated in one district and those with Spanish surnames who have a record of voting frequently were pushed into predominantly white and Republican voting zones.
Section Five and other sections of the Voting Rights Act helped federal officials and MALDEF to halt the plan.
When the two sides line up in front of the Supreme Court this morning, Jerome Gray, 74, likely won’t have a seat inside. Most of the tickets for a dedicated seat in the courtroom’s gallery have been claimed. But, he will be outside talking and listening, if a feed can be found, with other people who know what it means to live in an Alabama where the Voting Rights Act, and in particular Section Five, remain needed, he said.
Gray was born and raised in Alabama and spent 27 years serving as the field director of the Alabama Democratic Conference, an independent political organization affiliated with the Democratic Party. (Gray also served as a state campaign official for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.)
Gray’s work put him in close contact with election officials, politicians and minority voters around the state. And, in these last six years since he retired, the action has not stopped, he said.
In 2008, Gray was involved in the suit against 180 Alabama counties. Last year, the problem came even closer to home. Gray, a long-time active voter, discovered that a new county election official had removed his name and about 500 others from the voter rolls in Evergreen, Ala., the small 4,000-person town and boyhood home to which Gray retired. The most recent census found that the city is 63 percent black, but the majority of the city council’s seats are held by white politicians who live in largely white sections of town.
“Listen, it’s plain to see that when Shelby County decided to take up this fight, they didn’t ask anybody who would be in a position to know if there are still real problems,” he said.
When the Justice Department became aware of Evergreen’s changed voter rolls and new district lines, which the city council had also failed to submit for approval, it used Section Five to stop the town’s planned August 2012 county elections. Federal officials asked the town for more information.
Elections have not been held.]]>In New York Mayor Race, Democrats Court Immigrants' Votestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-02-21T19:07:29-05:002013-02-21T19:07:32-05:00Janell Rosshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/janell-ross/
So it’s no wonder that the Democrats vying to become the city’s next mayor lean heavily on a well-known set of bromides about international migrants, the immigrant experience and their influence on New York. At least two of those running or considered likely to run are themselves immigrants. Immigrants are “woven into the fabric of New York City,” an “essential source of labor,” “innovation,” and amount to the city’s “lifeblood,” candidates contacted by The Huffington Post said.
They are also a substantial voting block living in a diverse array of socioeconomic conditions.
Jackie Vimo, the director of advocacy at The New York Immigrant Coalition, describes what unites those from Eastern Europe living in Brooklyn with those from Southeast Asia who have relocated to Queens: the struggles to find economic opportunity, suitable work and pay and places to live and educate themselves and their children.
“It’s all the stuff that lies in the gap between the lovely things that people say about immigrants in New York City and their lived experiences,” Vimo said.
Christine Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council who also represents a Manhattan district, has not officially declared her candidacy but is widely considered the race’s front runner. Quinn, a white, American-born woman who is both the first female and openly gay individual to serve as the council’s speaker, had about $6.19 million in her campaign coffers as of January, according to New York City Campaign Finance Board records.
As speaker, Quinn controls which bills come to the full council for a vote. Quinn’s support for a streamlined permit and inspection process for small business owners -- many of them immigrants -- is well known. The council is also considering legislation that could lower some vendor fines, an issue of huge importance in the city's immigrant communities where many work as vendors or own and operate small stores.
“As Speaker I have made it a priority to lessen the burden on New Yorkers who are trying to open and run small businesses,” Quinn wrote The Huffington Post.
Quinn has also sponsored a council proposal to fund English-language learning courses for nearly half of the estimated 33,000 young undocumented immigrants living in New York who are eligible for temporary, renewable work permits and visas under the Obama administration’s deferred action program.
“This will guide immigrants into safer, higher-earning jobs and career paths and will give students an incentive to stay in school,” Quinn said.
Demand for these courses is expected to grow if federal immigration reform includes an English-language proficiency mandate.
Critics say that Quinn has blocked votes on a mandatory paid sick-time bill for workers living in the city, and has also courted the endorsement of outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent billionaire intent on creating a business-friendly city. Immigrant workers are clustered in the often low-wage and hourly-pay industries that do not offer paid sick time to their workers, Vimo said.
Quinn described the idea of mandating paid sick leave as, “a worthy and admirable goal, one I would like to make available for all,” but said the economy remains too fragile to implement such a requirement for employers at this time. As the economy continues to “evolve,” she plans to discuss the idea with proponents, she siad.
John Liu, New York’s Comptroller, a former Queens city councilman and the first Asian-American elected to city-wide office, ranks among the list of undeclared but not exactly cash-poor candidates. Liu, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan with his parents as a young child, had roughly $3.12 million in his campaign war chest in January, according to public records. (Lui’s campaign fundraising has also been mired in controversy and the subject of at least two investigations. One campaign aid was arrested in November and a second campaign staffer taken into custody this month.)
Liu said he was shaped by the experience –- coming to a new country, learning a new language, and watching his father accept a bank teller job far less complicated and prestigious than the work he performed for the Bank of Taiwan, and his mother labor in what he called a sweatshop.
He ranks providing quality education to New York City’s children -- particularly those of immigrants –- among his priorities. He also wants to limit the fines and fees assessed against small business owners and ensure that city policy aims to do more than help immigrants, he said.
“A lot of times, people will talk about immigrants as an important community that needs services, that needs resources, and that is all true,” Liu said. “But immigrant communities need opportunities, immigrant workers need better wages and sick time. The small businesses they open with their blood, sweat and tears on every block of New York need tax relief.”
He believes that the city could use its potentially lucrative contracts with builders, suppliers and service providers to mandate paid-sick time for the low wage, often immigrant workers on their payrolls and create pressure on other business to voluntarily do the same.
Liu also wants to see the city carefully examine tax abatements offered to large businesses and the tax rate paid by smaller business, as he believes the latter -- often owned by immigrants –- are helping to subsidize the former. Liu said that 85 percent of the city’s small businesses would owe no corporation taxes under his plan.
De Blasio also responded to The Huffington Post’s questions with written statements and references to previous media reports. His staff described de Blasio as a “staunch supporter,” of mandatory, paid sick leave; a man who has focused on efforts to reduce the burden of “excessive fees on small businesses;” and one who has worked to enhance city supports such as technical advice and access to capital that would help immigrant-owned businesses grow.
This month, the small-business resource provider ACCION USA and the Fund for Public Advocacy, a nonprofit that is a part of de Blasio’s public advocate office, released a survey of 625 immigrant business owners in all five boroughs. Researchers found that 92 percent started and sustained their businesses without outside help on financing, counseling, marketing or applying for licenses and permits. And nearly four in five business owners said they needed one or more permits or licenses.
“This is one of the most dynamic and resilient parts of our economy,” said de Blasio in a statement issued after the survey results were made public. “If they actually received help from the City commensurate with their weight in the economy, they could add thousands more jobs right in their own neighborhoods.”
Sal Albanese, another mayoral candidate, is a Democrat, former city schoolteacher and council member who represented a district in Brooklyn. When his campaign reported its fundraising activities in January, Albanese had drawn in $134,615.
And, like Liu, Albanese is an immigrant. Born in Italy, Albanese also arrived in the United States with his parents as a young child. His disabled father struggled for nearly two years to find an Italian speaking doctor. His mother labored as a piece worker and sample maker in the city’s once-thriving garment district.
Albanese wants to see expanded city spending on ESL courses. Demand is not only likely to increase if Congress makes language proficiency a requirement of immigration reform, but the courses will also help to serve a large backlog of people in need of nighttime and weekend help to learn the English language, according to Albanese.
“Obviously language is very, very important,” he said. “I remember where I came here from Italy walking in to a classroom. I couldn’t even tell them where I lived and it was pretty traumatic.”
Albanese is also in favor of reducing the fines and fees that can be levied against small businesses, describing these costs as the city’s, "current cash cow.” Albanese wants to put in place a system of fine-free warnings and gradually increasing fines for businesses that fail to comply with city requirements.
As a former teacher, Albanese would ideally like to see the city’s college system return to a tuition-free enrollment plan, but said that such a step may not be financially feasible at this time. Instead, he said, other cuts -- such as tax abatements for corporations -- should be eliminated and the savings used to cut tuition prices in half.
In the 1990s, while on the city council, Albanese sponsored one of the country’s first living wage bills. A city analysis later found that 70,000 people –- many of them low-wage immigrants -- saw pay increases when the bill became law, he said.
Kevin Coenen Jr., a white, American-born retired New York City firefighter who divides his time between a home in Long Island and an apartment in Manhattan, has raised little for the mayoral race. Coenen had $1,600 in his campaign coffers last month, according to public records.
Representing several of the city's boroughs -- Coenen was born on Staten Island and raised primarily on Long Island -- his primary concerns include the city’s elevated and rising rents, the continued need for federal immigration reform and the exploitation that the failure to create new policy facilitates. Go into any restaurant in the city and everyone –- the customers, the managers, the staff –- know that the majority of the people working behind the scenes are immigrants, many of them undocumented, he said. And, he noted, the vast majority of these workers make less than minimum wage.
Like other Democrats vying for the mayor’s chair, Coenen would like to see limits on the fines levied against vendors and other small business and a clearer, easier appeals process put in place. Business owners should be able to work their way through it without the help of a costly lawyer, he said.
“This may sound simple, but I’m really about everybody’s well being,” Coenen said. “Right now in this city, it doesn’t seem as if people are given proper opportunities, the rents are very high, the taxes are very high and too many people are just struggling.”
Democrat William “Bill” Thompson Jr., a former New York City Comptroller and the only African-American who has formally declared himself a candidate in the race, and former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, who has been rumored to be considering a run, did not respond to requests for comment.
The city’s mayoral primary is currently set for September but may be moved up to June, according to the New York Daily News.]]>
