Victoria Gray and Unita Blackwell fought so that we could register and vote. Honor their struggle. Vote!
Commentary by Black Kos Editor, Denise Oliver-Velez
The following two recently published public service announcements —urging people to vote, need to be shared widely.
Too many young people (and some older folks too) don’t know the names and the faces linked to the life and death battles we’ve had to fight just to register and vote. This is not ancient history, and it’s clearly linked to all the racist voter suppression efforts we see today.
Please go to youtube, like, favorite and share these via your social networks:
Victoria Gray saw the all-white politics of 1964 Mississippi, and refused to accept that it was impossible to change it. So she helped start a new political party, The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And she ran for the Senate under its banner, challenging one of the most powerful politicians in America, Senator John Stennis. She lost that election. But she forced a change in the nation’s politics and four years later, her new political party became the official Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Some background: Victoria Gray was a field secretary in Mississippi for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was one of the most important figures in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and played a key role in the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Along with Annie Devine and Fannie Lou Hamer she was one of the “Big Three” of the Mississippi Movement. All three went to Washington in 1965 to challenge the seating in Congress of the politicians who opposed them, since black voters had been barred from the polls. This was known as “The Congressional Challenge”. The Congress seated the white politicians, but also warned them to stop the all-white primaries that prohibited participation by black voters. Together with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, this Congressional Challenge was a key factor in forcing Mississippi to open its political system to all its citizens, regardless of color.
Unita Blackwell joined the Civil Rights movement when she realized that her poverty was connected to the laws that prevented her from voting, because she was black. She talks here about the importance of taking that first step in voting – registration. In 1960s Mississippi, voter registration was both difficult and dangerous if you were black.The interview with Ms. Blackwell is from 1997. But the struggle for fair voting laws and procedures continues today. Many states are again making it difficult to register and vote. Unita Blackwell explains that if someone is trying to take away your right to vote, it's because that vote means something important, and rather than giving up, you should fight for your right to share in the political power and the rights of citizenship that comes from your vote.Unita Blackwell became an organizer for SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. And in the 1976 she became Mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi. Despite being the County Seat for Issaquena County, there were no paved road, sewage or water systems. Residents also had no good housing. Mayor Blackwell changed all that, incorporating the town for the first time, which qualified it for Federal grants. She then paved the roads, named the streets, put in sewage and water systems, built new housing and created a city park where cotton fields once stood. She demonstrated the power of the vote.
Kudos to the producer.
This Public Service Announcement was produced by Passage Film, Inc. The 1997 interview made with Ms. Blackwell by Passage Film’s owner, Kent Moorhead. This PSA is copyrighted to protect the interview with Unita Blackwell from being used in another context. But if you are an individual or group promoting voting rights, Passage Film, inc. encourages you to share or embed this video, free of charge.
For more history read, “How black women helped shape history and today's Democratic Party”
GOTV. GOTV. GOTV.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Archivists from the National Museum of African American History and Culture joined The Great Migration Home Movie Digitization Project participants to showcase archival footage from Black communities. Color Lines: Smithsonian Film Fest Unveils Moving Images of Everyday Black Joy
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The Smithsonian African American Film Festival features a full schedule of high-profile screenings—from “Take This Hammer” to “If Beale Street Could Talk”—that speak to the the breadth of Black cinematic excellence. But on the first day of the festival (October 24), host institution National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) took time to highlight a lesser-known component of Black film: analog home movies.
NMAAHC archivists and collaborating families showcased several amateur videos acquired through The Great Migration Home Movie Digitzation Project during a special session at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler galleries in Washington D.C. The project allows Black families to submit home movies for digitization and archiving in the museum’s records. Media conservation and digitization assistant A.J. Lawrence explained during the session that this process both helps participants move personal memories off obsolete formats and allows filmmakers to use their footage—but only with each family’s consent and input.
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America’s policies to redress these economic injustices have been largely insufficient. The Fair Housing Act—passed in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968—provided crucial legal protections against racial discrimination in housing, including the kinds of discriminatory practices that steered blacks away from high-amenity white neighborhoods toward high-poverty segregated ones—a common tactic of Northern segregationists. To promote desegregation, the bill gave the Department of Housing and Urban Development a strong mandate to “affirmatively further” the inclusion of black Americans in fair housing. But the bill failed to commit financial resources or drive capital into black neighborhoods to enable them to buy homes and close the gap from white communities who had enjoyed government support for decades.
As a result of this history, our nation still lives in the shadow of those fateful New Deal policies that were discriminatory in application. In America today, black children still suffer due to past segregation promoting housing policies that have confined blacks to low wealth and low asset appreciating ZIP codes. According to a recent report, 74 percent of neighborhoods that were redlined are still low income, and 64 percent are still minority neighborhoods.
Warren’s bill is a monumental step forward that acknowledges injustice of the past and invests real money to redress it. Her bill would seek to address the racial wealth gap by establishing a down payment assistance program designed to support families who were historically excluded from government programs. The bill directs HUD to provide a grant that would be equivalent to an FHA loan down payment to all low- and middle-income first-time homebuyers who live in formerly redlined communities that are still low income. While many first-time homebuyers have help from family in putting together a down payment, government discrimination robbed most families in redlined neighborhoods of that opportunity. And so this provision has the potential to facilitate homeownership for hundreds of thousands of black families.
The bill also toughens the Community Reinvestment Act to force financial institutions to serve creditworthy families in communities they’ve ignored for decades. The bill expands the CRA to include nonbank mortgage lenders and credit unions who now provide more than half of mortgages; clarifies the law’s requirement that institutions “serve” their communities, which have been subject to gaming by financial institutions; gives community groups more opportunities for input into regulators’ evaluations of financial institutions; and requires regulators to disclose more of the data that informs their evaluations so that communities can assess whether investments that are supposed to support the community fulfill that promise. The bill encourages local jurisdictions to shed unnecessary laws—some of which were enacted shortly after the Fair Housing Act banned explicit exclusion of black families—that have made housing more expensive and prevented new residents from moving in. And it expands the Fair Housing Act itself to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or marital status, and source of income, including government benefits.
The American Housing and Economic Mobility Act also addresses the poverty caused by generations of housing discrimination. Black families are more likely to rent their homes because of historic exclusion from the housing market and restriction from accumulating and passing down wealth in general. In recent years, a severe shortage of affordable housing affecting every county in America has caused rents to spike for low- and middle-income renters, stretching their budgets and putting them at risk of eviction. The bill would invest $45 billion a year for 10 years in proven federal programs that use public capital to subsidize the construction and preservation of housing that’s affordable to working families. An independent analysis by Moody’s Analytics suggests this investment will produce more than 3 million new units and that new supply will pull down rents by 10 percent and create 1.5 million new jobs. In addition, the bill provides $2 billion in new grants to states to help homeowners and communities targeted with the most abusive loans before the financial crisis—often communities of color—where many homeowners still owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth. These grants could be used for loan modifications that include principal reduction, purchasing or rehabilitation of vacant lots to increase neighborhood property values, or providing loans to negative equity borrowers to allow them to maintain or rehabilitate their homes.
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History was made in Ethiopia on Thursday when former United Nations official Sahle-Work Zewde became the nation’s first woman to be elected president. The appointment of the veteran diplomat comes amidst a “pink wave” in Africa’s second-most populated country, with the full support of Ethiopia’s progressive new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who was elected in April.
Since that time, there have been significant shifts in the government, with half of Ethiopia’s cabinet posts now held by women, including the Ministry of Peace, which controls the country’s intelligence agency and security forces.
As reported by the Washington Post, while accepting her position as Ethiopia’s first female head of state, Sahle-Work, 68, promised to work towards peace and unity, as well as a “society that rejects the oppression of women.”
In addition to becoming Ethiopia’s first woman president, which some note has historically been a mostly ceremonial role, Sahle-Work is also currently Africa’s only female head of state.
In a series of tweets, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Fitsum Arega, lauded Sahle-Work’s appointment and experience, writing, in part: “In a patriarchal society such as ours, the appointment of a female head of state not only sets the standard for the future but also normalizes women as decision-makers in public life.”
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In 2014, the #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign transfixed people around the world concerned about the plight of 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram.
More than four years later, the spotlight shines back on their plight, and that of thousands of women like them, in the documentary Stolen Daughters: Kidnapped by Boko Haram, premiering on HBO.
The wrenching film follows two Chibok girls freed in 2017 and two women who, like thousands of others, were kidnapped but are known as “forgotten girls” because they weren’t captured in a high-profile event.
Karen Edwards, a writer and producer of the documentary, told the Guardian that the Chibok girls were a symbol for a much larger problem in north-east Nigeria.
“Most families have been touched by Boko Haram, nobody is immune from it,” said Edwards. “It’s so widespread, there is fear they’ve [people kidnapped] been radicalized but there is also an element of commonality that if it hasn’t happened to them it is only by the grace of God.”
Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 people and displaced at least 2 million. Mines laid by Boko Haram killed 162 people in two years and wounded 277, according to a report released last month. This week, a Boko Haram faction killed an aid worker. And 112 Chibok girls are still missing.
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For an African-American woman, a study-abroad program led to an eye-opening experience. “Disgusting black women” were the stinging words of one racial encounter. New York Times: My Very Personal Taste of Racism Abroad
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Up until about five years ago, I didn’t have much experience being black outside the United States.
What I mean is, with the exception of a few family vacations in the Caribbean and Mexico, I didn’t know what it might feel like to travel while black abroad.
Then I decided to spend the fall semester of my junior year abroad in Florence, Italy.
My roommates during my sophomore year had both studied in Italy and raved about their time. They gushed about the panini from a little shop around the corner from the picturesque villas that housed their study program, and regaled me with stories of fun parties and their Italian romances.
I was ready for that to be my life: fun, food and a European love story.
But I was so caught up in my excitement that I neglected a crucial difference between me, my roommates and the majority of the other students I was studying with abroad.
They were white. I, on the other hand, am an African-American woman with skin the color of dark chocolate and full lips.
In the United States, I was aware of racism in a broad sense, but perhaps because of my age my eyes weren’t fully open to it. My mother seemed to know better, saying things to me like “take off that hoodie” when we walked into stores. When she muttered, “you don’t see how they’re looking at you,” I assumed she was bothered by my fashion choices.
After my semester in Italy, I realized what she meant.
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Taxes levied on alcohol and soft drinks in Uganda will be used to fund the country’s HIV treatment programmes, in a move designed to make the country less reliant on donors.
The government believes $2.5m a year will be generated from the 2% total tax levies collected from drinks, including beer, spirits and waragi, a local liquor, which will be channelled into a new HIV and Aids trust fund (ATF).
Provision for the fund was included in the HIV Prevention and Control Act, passed in 2014, but the regulations for how it would operate have only recently been passed.
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This won't stop until false calls to the police bring real charges to the liars. A black man started an urban farm in his old neighborhood. Three white women called the police repeatedly, accusing him of threatening them. The case went to court. New York Times: How ‘Gardening While Black’ Almost Landed This Detroit Man in Jail~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For nearly two years, a man tilled an overgrown park in a half-abandoned Detroit neighborhood into a tiny urban farm, filling the earth with the seeds of kale and spinach and radishes. He was black.
For half of that time, the man, Marc Peeples, 32, was the subject of dozens of calls to the police — the allegations growing more serious with each call — by three women who lived on a street facing the park. They were white.
Mr. Peeples said he returned to the neighborhood where he grew up to create a garden that could help feed residents, chip away at food deserts and teach children about urban horticulture — a personal redemptive mission after three years in prison on drug charges.
What happened next was something else: gardening while black, as his lawyer described it, another example of white people calling the police on a black person for everyday activities.
In many of these cases, the caller is mocked with whimsical, alliterative nicknames like BBQ Becky, Cornerstore Caroline and Permit Patty. A cellphone video of the caller goes viral. Sometimes they lose their jobs.
This time was different. Mr. Peeples was arrested and went to trial. But a judge intervened and last week dismissed the case against him.
The women who complained said Mr. Peeples had terrorized the neighborhood, about 20 minutes north of downtown, by repeatedly threatening to burn down their houses and ordering them to leave because they were white.
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