(Some) white folks haven't changed in over 40 years.* (Image courtesy of The Center of the Study of Political Graphics. Cartoonist is possibly Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party)
A Decent Proposal
by Chitown Kev
Few things have disturbed me more about the Baltimore Uprising of 2015 than the reaction to it.
For one, I am sick and tired of people droning on and on and on about that burnt-out CVS. Yes, it will make it more difficult for those in the Penn North neighborhood to get life-saving medications (the Penn North CVS drugstore is being rebuilt). But I also wondered, offhand, whether "pharmacy deserts" are a thing like "food deserts."
And, indeed,"pharmacy deserts" do exist.
Heck, even "hospital deserts" are a growing issue for poor urban and rural communities.
The other thing that has wrecked my nerves is the tendency for non-blacks to call for blacks to be "nonviolent" as (most) of the protestors were during the Southern-based black civil rights movements of the 1950's and early 1960's. I wrote a late morning rant to which I have little more to add.
Everyone should read HamdenRice's classic post Most of You Have No Idea what Martin Luther King Actually Did. In that diary, I took particular note of this statement:
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."
In HR's diary, I commented on that very quote
yep. It needs to reemphasized, mallyroyal (7+ / 0-)
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."
I'm actually more inclined to agree with Hamden's father.
I say that because most of the civil rights battles that took place in the 1950's and 1960's in the South were actually preceded by the civil rights battles and victories that took place in the North in the 1930's and the 1940's (there's actually a book that extensively documents the civil rights battles in the North, can't remember the name of it offhand, but it was very well documented).
And those battles had nothing to do with King.
And much of King's opposition within the national black community did come from the north. And people do forget King's recption in the North after Selma (esp. in Chicago) was quite cold at times, even among the black community.
by Chitown Kev on Mon Aug 29, 2011 at 12:27:51 PM PDT
The book I was referring to in that comment is Thomas J. Sugrue's
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. I ran across a copy of the book in a used book store last weekend (for less than $3.00!). This second, far more intensive reading of
Sweet Land of Liberty reaffirms my opinion that far too many critical elements of any discussion of black civil rights movements of the 20th century are not discussed, have been forgotten, and are rarely taught.
Sugrue notes the ambivalent and occasionally "scathing" reactions of some black people to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For example, syndicated columnist (and former Tuskegee Airman)
Chuck Stone wrote, "If there's anything the Senate-passed civil rights bill does for Negroes in the North, it's cocooned in one simple word: nothing." New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. stated that as far as the North was concerned "the anti-poverty bill is more important than the Civil Rights Act" (an opinion also held by Dr. King himself). (Sugrue p.361)
It now seems impossible to have any sort of coherent conversation about food/pharmacy/hospital deserts in urban America without reference to Sugrue's discussion of black activists century-long efforts to overturn housing discrimination.
And don't think that discussions of housing discrimination merely refer to the redlining practices and restrictive covenants in big cities like Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. Miss Denise already broached the subject of Levittown in her FP story on Sunday. Sugrue extensively documents and discusses similar struggles that occurred in northeastern and midwestern white wealthy and upper middle-class cities like Deerfield, IL, Dearborn, MI, New Rochelle, NY, and Englewood, NJ.
And I haven't even scratched the surface of the material covered in this book. For example, black churches do play a significant role in Sweet Land of Liberty as a vehicle for organizing but there are some differences and variations as regards to liberation ideology and strategies. Yes, there's Dr. King and the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Aretha's father) but there's also black nationalist firebrands like the Rev. Albert Cleage (father of noted black playwright Pearl Cleage).
A flier for a proposed WWII era March on Washington. The March on Washington was
a movement and not a singular event. Also note the call to "ponder the question of Non-Violent Civil Disobedience." We've been doing this non-violence thing for a looooooong time.
My "decent proposal" is simple.
I am proposing a Black Kos study group modeled along the lines of the excellent series by DoReMi and the Motor City Kossacks study group on Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
It's not that I think Sugrue's book is perfect; for example, I think he wildly overstates the case for Richard Nixon's "embrace of black enterprise." (pp. 442-45) I understand Sugrue's need to focus on "whites and African Americans" but it comes with the cost of eliminating entire regions (there's very little coverage of The West Coast) and intersectional civil rights alliances.
But the sheer magnitude and detail of Sweet Land of Liberty (with over 110 pages of footnotes) plus the enormous gap in my education (and possibly yours) on black civil rights history makes this a book well worth studying here at Daily Kos.
I would go so far to say that it's a necessity.
*The gist of the "joke" are the somewhat illegible captions of the white man depicted. He says “Beautiful, beautiful! (sniff)” on the left and “My God! Anarchy!” on the right.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The title may seem counterintuitive, but it actually is a fact of American life. FiveThirtyEight: The Most Diverse Cities Are Often The Most Segregated.
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When I was a freshman at the University of Chicago in 1996, I heard the same thing again and again: Do not leave the boundaries of Hyde Park. Do not go north of 47th Street. Do not go south of 61st Street. Do not go west of Cottage Grove Avenue.
These boundaries were fairly explicit, almost to the point of being an official university policy. The campus police department was not committed to protecting students beyond the area,2 and the campus safety brochure advised students not to use the “El” train stops just a couple of blocks beyond them unless “traveling in groups and during the daytime.”
What usually wasn’t said — on a campus that brags about the diversity of its urban setting but where only about 5 percent of students are black — was that the neighborhoods beyond these boundaries were overwhelmingly black and poor. The U. of C. has, for many decades, treated Hyde Park as its “fortress on the South Side,” and its legacy of trying to keep its students within the neighborhood — and the black residents of surrounding communities out — has left its mark on Chicago.
On Dustin Cable’s interactive “Dot Map” of racial residency patterns, Hyde Park appears as an island of blue and red dots — meaning, mostly white and Asian students and residents — in contrast to Chicago’s almost uniformly black South Side, designated in green dots. Washington Park, the neighborhood just to Hyde Park’s west, is 97 percent black3. Woodlawn — the neighborhood on the other side of 60th Street — is 87 percent black.
Chicago deserves its reputation as a segregated city. But it is also an extremely diverse city. And the difference between those terms — which are often misused and misunderstood — says a lot about how millions of American city dwellers live.
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The difference between protests and a movement. MiamiHerald: It takes more than street protests to produce change.
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Rev. Tony Lee is the 46-year-old pastor of Community of Hope, an AME church housed in a shopping mall in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, just minutes from the D.C. line. Under the auspices of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, a Washington-based advocacy group, he led a delegation of 200 African-American men to Capitol Hill. They went to their capital to talk to their legislators about issues that impact their lives: racially stratified policing, education reform, voting rights and more.
It was not about protest. It was about policy.
“Protests,” Lee told me in a telephone interview, “are one way that pushes people’s feet to the fire. Whatever the issue is, it’s brought to the forefront. But...there’s still need for people to do legislative advocacy, dealing with policy, whether it’s from the national to the local, showing people how to be engaged and [affecting] the policies that have such direct impact.”
Too often, said Lee, African Americans have focused solely on protest — an important element of social change, but not the only one. He used the analogy of weightlifters who focus solely on building upper-body mass while “their legs are toothpicks...In many ways, our policy legs are like toothpicks. Most people don’t know how to engage that. What you find in the policy area is more the politicos, more the people who have been doing this stuff a while. But we want just everyday brothers — and sisters — to see how they can get engaged in policy and to make sure that their legislators, whether it’s federal, or...local, city, state, know who they are, hear their voices...”
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How we got to a place where so few young black males get STEM jobs. The New Republic: Why Black Students Struggle in STEM Subjects: Low Expectations.
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Dressed in a black hoodie and sagging jeans, DeAndre (name changed) swaggers down the street, singing loudly the gritty lyrics of a gangsta rap.
This routine typifies DeAndre’s journey to and from school. Many of those watching DeAndre’s behavior during his school commute could assume him to be a thug and a gangster.
Such a narrative, a result of the racialized and gendered narratives that black male adolescents live with in urban areas, is part of DeAndre’s schooling as well as out-of-school experiences.
Black males are presumed to lack intelligence when it comes to academics, particularly mathematics.
For more than ten years, I have been researching the lives and experiences of black STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) high school students all the way up the pipeline to black STEM faculty. I have looked at the achievements of black students in mathematics within their first eight or nine years of schooling.
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The tide is turning. The Nigerian military says its troops have rescued 234 captives, some of whom are pregnant, as part of assault on rebel stronghold that has already liberated 500The Guardian: Nigerian army frees hundreds more women and girls from Boko Haram.
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Nigerian troops have freed another 234 women and children from Boko Haram’s stronghold in the Sambisa forest, the military said. The defence headquarters said the hostages were rescued on Thursday through the Kawuri and Konduga end of the forest.
About 500 women and children have already been rescued in the past few days. “They have been evacuated to join others at the place of ongoing screening,” the military said on Friday.
It said: “the assault on the forest is continuing from various fronts and efforts are concentrated on rescuing hostages of civilians and destroying all terrorist camps and facilities in the forest”.
The military had pledged to free more hostages from the Islamists after hundreds were rescued this week. The military announced on Thursday about 160 hostages had been rescued from Sambisa in addition to 200 girls and 93 women freed on Tuesday.
A military medic attends to a freed hostage in Sambisa forest, northeastern Nigeria, after rescue operations earlier this week. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock
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Tensions boil over in central Tel Aviv on Sunday after footage emerged last week of an Ethiopian Israeli in an army uniform being beaten by police. The Guardian: Ethiopian Israelis clash with police as anti-racism rally turns violent.
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Police on horseback charged at hundreds of ethnic Ethiopian citizens in central Tel Aviv on Sunday as an anti-racism protest descended into one of the most violent demonstrations in Israel’s commercial capital in years.
The protesters, who included several thousand people from Israel’s Jewish Ethiopian minority, were demonstrating against what they say is police brutality after the emergence last week of a video clip that showed policemen shoving and punching a black soldier.
Demonstrators overturned a police car, smashed shop windows, destroyed property and threw bottles and stones at officers in riot gear at Rabin Square in the heart of the city.
Tensions subsided after midnight and police said they would be far less accommodating of similar demonstrations.
At least 56 officers and 12 protesters were injured, some requiring hospital treatment, police and an ambulance service official said. Forty-three people were arrested.
Police used water cannons and stun grenades to try to clear the crowds. Israeli television stations said teargas was also used, something the police declined to confirm.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
We are not born American, anymore than we are born Christian, Muslim or Jew. We are not born a Hindu or a Jain, a Sikh or an Atheist. We are not born French, Ugandan, Chinese or Uzbek. We may become those things in time, but at birth, we are from Dust. When we die, we become Dust. Can anyone really, with the naked eye, divide one particle of Dust from another? Can our differences be so great that those differences are easily made out in a maelstrom of particles dusted across the Universe?
What does it mean then, to be American? To be French or Ugandan? To be Chinese or Uzbek? What does it mean to be a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew? A Hindu or a Jain? A Sikh or an Atheist? Human ego, small-minded bigotry or national identity might demand that we are special; the few among the many. But as it was in the Beginning, so it shall be in the End.
We are nothing more than...
Common Dust
And who shall separate the dust
What later we shall be:
Whose keen discerning eye will scan
And solve the mystery?
The high, the low, the rich, the poor,
The black, the white, the red,
And all the chromatique between,
Of whom shall it be said:
Here lies the dust of Africa;
Here are the sons of Rome;
Here lies the one unlabelled,
The world at large his home!
Can one then separate the dust?
Will mankind lie apart,
When life has settled back again
The same as from the start?
-- Georgia Douglas Johnson
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Pull up a chair and sit down a while and enjoy the company.