National
About 100 Set Out to Retrace Selma-to-Montgomery March
KIM CHANDLER, Associated Press
SELMA, Ala. (AP) — Dozens of marchers set out across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge Monday with plans to walk to the Alabama Capitol, saying the voting rights won by blood in Selma 50 years ago are now under threat.
The marchers are recreating the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March of 1965. The 54-mile trek is recreated every five years, but organizers say this year is particularly important.
Marchers called for the restoration of the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act. The U.S Supreme Court in 2013, in a case also arising out of Alabama, struck down the formula that determined which states had to get permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws.
“The heart of it has been taken out,” Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Charles Steele, 68, said. Steele said about 50 people will try to make the full walk to Montgomery.
Here are some stories from the current march:
A NEW MOVEMENT
Bernard Lafayette, 74, was just 20-years-old when he joined the Freedom Riders to challenge segregation across the American South. He suffered three cracked ribs when he was beaten by a mob outside a bus station in Montgomery.
Selma was considered even more dangerous, he said.
Lafayette in 1962 volunteered to come to the city as a voter registration director with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
He was beaten by an unknown assailant in 1963, the same night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi.
A black and white photo stored on the smartphone stashed in his jacket pocket shows him at the front of the march in 1965, alongside Andrew Young and other fresh-faced civil rights workers.
Lafayette smiled at the children, some as young as 11, walking ahead. That makes him optimistic about the future.
“Look at those young people up there. They are middle school, high school. We were the young people in our day. Now we see ourselves,” Lafayette said.
Behind him, young marchers sang a song with lyrics about Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner — who died after being placed in a choke hold by a police officer in New York. ”
“That’s a new song. That’s how you can tell you’ve got a movement, when you’ve got new songs,” Lafayette said.
THEN AND NOW
John Rankin, 68, wearing an orange reflective vest and an “I love Jesus” button, walked past the charred and abandoned shells of homes on the now-closed Craig Air Force base on the outskirts of Selma.
The homes were turned into a low-rent housing development, but many are uninhabitable after being burned, vandalized or looted. The region remains swathed in poverty, he said, noting that the lock manufacturer where he worked as a lead man closed more than a decade ago.
“We have a long way to go. People need good jobs,” Rankin said.
Rankin was just a teen when he was cracked on the head by a club during Bloody Sunday.
“We were just expecting to go to jail we weren’t expecting to get beat up,” Rankin said.
Fifty years later, there is an African-American president and Jim Crow laws are long eradicated, but in some ways Selma is “not that much” different.
The schools are segregated again, he said, as white families pay for private school and the public schools are almost entirely black students or other minorities.
YOUNG MARCHER
Eleven-year-old Desiree Robertson carried an American flag helping lead the group of marchers down a rolling stretch of highway.
Does she think she’s up for the entire 54-mile walk? Well, yeah.
“I did it when I was 8. It was fun,” Robertson said.
Her uncles marched in 1965 and her grandmother is involved in the civil rights commemorations in Selma.
Robertson said she is missing school for the march, but learning history.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Activism
U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club
Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”
By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”
Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.
Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”
Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.
“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”
On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”
He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.
Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”
With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”
He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”
Activism
MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System
Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.
Special to The Post
When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.
Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.
A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.
Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.
Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.
This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.
After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.
Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.
CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.
In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.
These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.
She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.
Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.
Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.
By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 18 – 24, 2024
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