If anyone believes that racism is dead in our country just because Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, let them come to Columbus.
If anyone believes that racism is dead in our country just because Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, let them go to Columbus.
President Obama went to Columbus, Ohio, today, for the graduation ceremony for 25 police cadets whose jobs were saved because of his economic stimulus package. President Obama was proud. The cadets were proud. We all should be proud.
But there was one glaring omission that nobody spoke about. Not President Obama, not the first African American U. S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, not the Chief of the Columbus Police Department, and no one in the media, that I am aware of. Nobody said anything about the fact that of the 25 graduating cadets, only one was African American.
Link to White House photo: http://www.whitehouse.gov/...
Columbus is a city of some 747,000 people, of which roughly 24% are African American. It seems strange that the police department could only find one qualified African American to graduate in a class of 25.
This is the same day where the nation's unemployment figures were released showing that the unemployment rate for African Americans jumped a full percentage point over last month, to 13.4%.
http://thedailyvoice.com/...
This is the same day when a civil rights group asked President Obama to reopen a federal investigation into civil-rights violations by the Columbus Police Department.
"They're congratulating the police department, but they need to know about the other side of the story," said Barry Edney, chairman of the Community Leadership Council for Justice.
http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/...
Attorney General Holder said recently that Americans were essential a nation of cowards when it came to discussing race. Today's ceremony went a long way to proving just how right he was.
As I watched President Obama give his speech today on C-Span, with the 25 cadets behind him, I couldn't help thinking that the image so cleary showed how far our nation has come and just how far we still have to go.