Education

Mfume, Cummings Testify For JHU Police

THE AFRO — Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, delivered powerful personal “surprise” testimony before the Maryland House of Delegates.

Published

6 years ago

March 17, 2019

Oakland Post

By J. K. Schmid

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, delivered powerful personal “surprise” testimony before the Maryland House of Delegates, March 12..

“I am not telling you do to it,” Cummings told the legislative panel led by Del. Cheryl D. Glenn. “That’s none of my business. But…I have come here begging you to do something.”

Cummings plea is that the Maryland general assembly do something about violence on Baltimore City streets. He recounted a time when he himself was robbed at gunpoint and the shooting death of his 20-year-old nephew.

“I literally saw his brains splattered on the wall,” Cummings testified. “Why am I telling you this? This is one of those situations where I believe we have to do something.”

While recommending no particular policy, Cummings’s remarks came during the debate over Johns Hopkins University’s (JHU) request for a 100-officer private police force to secure its campus. Generally, such forces are forbidden by Maryland statute JHU is looking for an exception to be made similar to Coppin State University, Morgan State University and University of Baltimore.

JHU currently relies on a police force of off-duty officers of the Baltimore Sheriff’s Department and Baltimore Police Department (BPD) that the JHU administration has characterized as unreliable.

Cummings 7th District predecessor, Kweisi Mfume, the Chair of Morgan State’s Board of Regents, and JHU graduate, has unequivocally come out for, Senate Bill 793 and House Bill 1094.

“We face a challenge that demands a new level of cooperation and investment from all of us who call Baltimore home,” Mfume wrote in a letter to committee members. “Violent crime in our city has risen to staggering heights. Too many citizens know the tragedy of losing a loved one to violence, or the daily worry of being out at night. This situation demands new solutions like the comprehensive approach proposed.“

JHU officials have described Morgan State’s police force as a model for what students and community members can expect when it comes to how JHU will be policing.

“I know firsthand the painful history of abuse of power by law enforcement that has overwhelmingly impacted people of color,” Mfume wrote.”Yet it is precisely that raw and real history that gives me hope about the draft legislation you are considering.”

JHU touts the endorsement of former Baltimore Mayor and University of Baltimore President, Kurt Schmoke. The new force will be accountable to Baltimore Office of Civil Rights and Wage Enforcements Civilian Review Board as well as further accountable to boards on JHU and the administration itself.

“I don’t see this as exceptional,” JHU President Ronald J. Daniels told the AFRO. “I see this as very much on par with what the other institutions in Baltimore currently enjoy. I think the percentage is 70 percent of universities in the United States, both public and private, that have an excess of 2,500 students, have sworn police forces,” Daniels added. “So, again what we’re talking about here, is not the exception, but in fact what seems to be the best practices standard for how one ensures the safety and security of a university community.”

Daniels referred to page 35 of it’s Interim Study Report, and recommendation from the committee last year, when similar bills failed to pass. Daniels and the administration infer that JHU’s rising crime rate across three campuses is best explained by the absence of a police force similar to campuses like Morgan, Coppin and University of Maryland.

However, the figures don’t seem to explain why crime is stable or in decline on other Baltimore campuses when they have the exact same force JHU has envisioned.

Daniels referred the AFRO to a study of police force at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. As further evidence of how JHU’s police force could and should work.

However, this study indicates that there is no longitudinal data to determine the long term impact of focused policing by committing more officers to restricted locations. The study could not determine if crime was eliminated to simply pushed outside the force’s area of operation and could not determine whether crime would resurge in the new established order.

“We cannot police our way out of poverty, economic stratification or any of the other ills that fuel violent crime in our city or our country,” Mfume’s letter reads.

“a lively, dynamic street life is the best way that one can deter violent crime,” Daniels told the AFRO. “In that respect, we have first and foremost, spent considerable time, effort and money over the last decade that I’ve been at Johns Hopkins, investing in and around our two major university campuses in Baltimore.”

JHU is a lead investor in the $2 billion East Baltimore Development Initiative (EBDI). EBDI characterizes itself as a rejuvenation project, the project overlaps with JHU campuses. JHU’s reports its endowment at $4.3 billion.

This article originally appeared in The Afro.

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Activism

LIVE! — TOWN HALL ON RACISM AND ITS IMPACT — THURS. 11.14.24 5PM PST

Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST

Published

1 week ago

November 12, 2024

Oakland Post

Discussion Topics:
• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
• What trends are you seeing concerning Racism? Is it more covert or overt?
• What are the top 5 issues resulting from racism in our communities?
• How do racial and other types of discrimination impact local communities?
• What are the most effective ways our community can combat racism and hate?

Your questions and comments will be shared LIVE with the moderators and viewers during the broadcast.

STREAMED LIVE!
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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them 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 third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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California Black Media

On Your November Ballot: Prop 2 Seeks to Modernize Public Education Facilities

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities. If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (Courtesy Photo)

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities.

If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Supporters argue that the money is critical for making safety improvements in schools, as well as modernizing science labs, performing arts spaces and kindergarten classrooms. School districts in lower-income areas have no other way to pay for these improvements.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38% of students attend schools that don’t meet the state’s minimum safety standards. The research shows that schools with sub-standard facilities tend to have students with lower attendance rates, lower morale and lower overall academic performance.

California Black Media spoke with a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson on why she believes it should be a YES vote on Prop 2.

“Measure US, Los Angeles Unified’s Local Public Schools Safety and Upgrades Measure on the November ballot would provide $9 billion to upgrade Los Angeles public schools for safety and 21st century student learning and college and career preparedness. The average annual cost to property owners is estimated at 2.5 cents per $100 of assessed (not market) property value. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education adopted a Resolution on October 22 to support Los Angeles Unified’s Measure US, and State Propositions 2 and 4,” the spokesperson said.

Opponents argue that the state should include school repairs in its regular budget instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. Opponents also argue that the proposition would not directly impact students. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is on record as one of the organizations opposing the proposition.

“Proposition 2 is $10 billion of bonds, new state debt, to pay for school facilities. It is almost certain to result in higher property tax bills, because school districts must provide a ‘local match’ of funds in order to receive money from the Prop. 2 state bonds. That will lead to districts issuing new local school bonds, which are paid for by adding new charges to property tax bills,” said Jarvis.

Opponents also have voiced concerns about what they view as an inequitable distribution of funds. They believe that lower-income school districts should receive a greater share of the state’s sliding scale for matching funds.

“Enrollment is declining in both K-12 district schools and community colleges and the declines are projected to continue. But Proposition 2 commits California to pay an estimated $18 billion, including interest, for school buildings that may not even be necessary. Vote no on proposition 2.”

A “yes” vote gives approval to the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

A “no” vote will prohibit the state from issuing $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.