#Selma.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I’ve been sitting here thinking back to 1965. Events that young people read about in history books, or see re-enacted in movies like “Selma,” are a part of my life that shaped it to become who I am today — and this is true for many people of my generation.
March 7th marks the date of the “Bloody Sunday” 1965 march in Selma, Alabama which was headed to Montgomery —600 marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80 and at the Edmund Pettus Bridge they were brutally attacked with billy clubs and tear gas.
John Lewis shares his memories of that day.
The second march, called "Turnaround Tuesday," took place on March 9, and that evening white supremacists brutally beat Rev. James Reeb, who died of his wounds on the 11th. March number three, began on Sunday, March 21st.
I was glad to see a fair amount of media coverage of the anniversary events taking place in Selma — which was driven in part by the appearance of Democratic Party politicians and aspiring Presidential candidates. Among them was Cory Booker.
I was not satisfied by short clips on twitter — and found Cory Booker’s full keynote address — for which I have not yet found a transcript.
It was well worth listening to.
Senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker speaks from the annual “Bloody Sunday” commemorative service at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The third time will certainly not be the charm for the Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill was introduced Tuesday in the House by Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama and in the Senate by Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and it seeks to restore and extend key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that have been neutralized. Sewell has championed the bill and introduced it in 2015 and 2017, but with a Republican-controlled Senate and President Donald Trump in the White House, the 2019 version also has no chance of becoming law.
But that doesn’t mean that this time around is purely symbolic, either. This incarnation of the VRAA comes during a time when voter suppression against black, Latino, and indigenous populations has substantially altered elections and politics since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which defanged key portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The bill’s introduction also comes shortly after an election cycle in which Democrats fared well by championing voting rights and mobilizing unlikely voters. And, as big, new progressive ideas like the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and reparations permeate the 2020 presidential-primary conversation, the reality for Democrats is that voting rights could be the only thing everyone agrees on—and the thing necessary for all of the other potential policies to ever become reality.
The Voting Rights Advancement Act is written to “restore and bolster the Voting Rights Act, and undo the damage done by the Shelby County decision,” Sewell said in a press release. In that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts invalidated the Voting Rights Act’s “coverage formula,” a list of jurisdictions that had to seek federal preclearance for any changes to elections laws. In Roberts’s reckoning, racism in the country had been pared back, and continuing to require special scrutiny of those jurisdictions—despite the numerous laws they proposed over the years that failed preclearance tests and resulted in litigation—was unconstitutional.
Since then, voting-rights advocates and several Democrats argue that the country has been mired in a new—and predictable—age of accelerated voter suppression and restrictive voting laws. “We’ve just seen since Shelby an onslaught of more restrictive voting laws,” Sewell told me a few weeks ago in her office.
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Virginia lawmakers came together this past weekend to pass—by overwhelming, bipartisan margins—a proposed constitutional amendment to overhaul how political lines are drawn in the commonwealth.
The proposal has generally been received as an imperfect but significant compromise that injects transparency and citizen input into the redistricting process for the first time in the Old Dominion’s history.
Some lawmakers, though, see no cause for celebration. Members of the Legislative Black Caucus have argued that the proposed amendment will enshrine in the commonwealth’s constitution a redistricting process that treats race as an afterthought.
Their concerns go to the heart of a decades-long debate over how to deploy redistricting to ensure that minority candidates get elected to office, and also that there is fair, meaningful representation of minority voters in statehouses and on Capitol Hill. This conversation is particularly freighted in southern states like Virginia, which has a bitter history of state-sponsored racism and just saw its two top white Democrats consumed by controversies over dressing up in blackface.
“To think that in the middle of the political climate that we are in and all the racial equity talk that we have heard, we’d move forward with a proposed constitutional amendment with language that does not protect the voters who clearly need to be protected,” Democratic Delegate Marcia “Cia” Price, who is black, told TPM in a phone interview. “I think is a major overstep and a major misstep.”
The vast majority of lawmakers signed off the proposal, which would take map-drawing authority away from the Senate leader, House speaker and governor and turn it over to a 16-person bipartisan commission equally composed of lawmakers and citizens. Under Virginia law, the proposed redistricting constitutional amendments must now be passed by the General Assembly a second time next year, and then approved by voters at the polls in November
2020. That makes the pending amendment the last best chance to change the state’s redistricting process before the next redistricting cycle begins in 2021, advocates say. Once the redistricting amendment is enshrined in the constitution, it will be very difficult to change.
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The 12 Years a Slave actor on writing and directing his first feature film, about a Malawian boy’s innovation in the face of famine: “There is no generic African space.” The Atlantic: Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Expansive Vision of Africa
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In his latest film, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, the actor Chiwetel Ejiofor toils with purpose. He tills flooded, and then barren, soil. The camera hovers above him as he stumbles, his knees slipping into the mire. In the Netflix production, which is also screening in select theaters, Ejiofor stars as the lead character’s father, the hardworking farmer Trywell Kamkwamba, who wrestles with both the land and with government authorities who have turned a blind eye to his village’s suffering.
And, for the first time, Ejiofor also directs. In his feature-writing and directorial debut, Ejiofor has achieved a rare cinematic feat. He’s made a widely accessible, masterfully shot film about a specific group of Africans that treats the struggles and triumphs of its characters as meaningful stories worth exploring with respectful pathos and narrative fidelity.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind follows Trywell’s family, and the community around them, as they grapple with the devastating effects of a famine that struck Malawi in the early Aughts. The price of grain grows more and more untenable amid political turmoil, driving the residents of Wimbe, Trywell’s agriculture-dependent town in central Malawi, into abject poverty. The titular boy, named William and played gracefully by the Kenyan newcomer Maxwell Simba, devises a method for restoring water to the barren landscape through a makeshift turbine. But his technological efforts are thwarted initially by the intractability of his material conditions and the desperation that this climate engenders, even within his own family. As Trywell, Ejiofor plays a man of conviction and duty whose anger at the conditions of the famine only surfaces later in the film.
The 41-year-old Ejiofor first encountered William Kamkwamba’s story 10 years ago, after a friend recommended the book to him. At the time, he’d been writing recreationally, but nothing had struck the actor as the kind of achingly human story he’d want to dedicate time and resources to developing. That changed when he read William’s memoir, which was co-written with the journalist Bryan Mealer. “It doesn't shy away from any of the challenges or the struggles or the difficulties, and it doesn't re-characterize any of that; it shows it very rawly, but it's so beautifully optimistic and hopeful,” Ejiofor said of the book when we spoke in New York recently. “And William Kamkwamba is a person who, even at that age, [had] made a decision to live in the solution to the problems.”
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Never to be outdone by its own bigotry, the GOP went peak GOP again.
NBC News reports that chaos ensued upon the discovery of an anti-Muslim poster disparaging Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar in the West Virginia statehouse on Friday.
While chairs reportedly weren’t thrown and assess deservedly weren’t whooped, a rash of arguments did occur, as did a reported physical injury (does this qualify as White-on-White violence?). Oh, and an official resigned after being accused of making anti-Muslim comments.
But as far as the poster in question? Welllllllll...
The display featured a picture of the World Trade Center in New York City as a fireball exploded from the one of the Twin Towers, set above a picture of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim.
“’Never forget’ - you said. . .” read a caption on the first picture. “I am the proof - you have forgotten,” read the caption under the picture of Omar, who is wearing a hijab.
And if you guessed that the GOP were the masterminds behind the poster, welllllll…
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Among the exhibits that Cohen submitted along with his written testimony was a news article (Exhibit 7) reflecting Trump’s years of championing the “birther” claim against President Barack Obama. Trump repeatedly hawked the lies that Obama was born in Kenya, had hidden his real birth certificate, and had manufactured the one he publicly presented. And if there was any chance that this was not true—and Trump left little room for that possibility—he questioned whether Obama had traded on his race to gain admission to elite educational institutions. With this one, ugly political stunt, Trump managed to display both of the ugly character traits that his former lawyer singled out for the House: the conning (i.e., chronic lying) and the racism.
This was not dog-whistle racism; Trump was shouting it out. As The New York Times argued, Trump was waging nothing less than a “campaign” around these lies, and it was impossible to imagine that this line of attack on Obama “as the insidious ‘other’ would have been conducted against a white president.” And because Trump was getting the attention he wanted, he kept going. He was able to command a national audience, and the press he craved, for a barefaced lie encoding a racist message.
Trump did so well that in April 2011, the White House obtained and released additional documentation: the “long-form” birth certificate. At the time, I was serving as White House counsel and was charged with coordinating the acquisition of the form. It was not the “official” birth certificate the Obama campaign had publicly posted years before. Long forms contain more information, such as the ages and birthplaces of the parents and the name of the hospital, but they are not more authoritative than the official certificate in confirming the date and location of birth.
By acquiring and releasing this document, the White House might have been taken to be conceding that what it had previously put out was not adequate or reliable. It was not conceding anything of the sort. But it faced a problem: Reporters had begun pressing for the White House to find and produce the long form, as if this were the response that the president reasonably owed his accuser.
Somehow it was thought foolish to ignore the lies and the message they conveyed. No responsible observer or member of the press doubted the official birth certificate, and there were other pieces of corroborating evidence, such as the birth notice that had appeared in the Hawaiian press. This was, perversely, deemed insufficient. President Obama supposedly needed to do more to quiet the birthers and their most vocal national spokesperson, Donald Trump.
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Justice Putnam
Where we come from, and who we are, prove to be powerful forces pushing us along on this stream of conscious existence. A grand gesture or a small slight can last a lifetime and damage a soul if one is not careful. We might be lucky enough to one day converse about the great minds of our history counted on a monument of trees, and we might one day sing the praises of melodies harmonized with a rhythm and a beat and a slide across a marble stage, but never mention the small beauty of the moon as she transits to western climes behind a wet neon mist, and just over the rainbow, when the rainbow is enuf.
my grandpa waz a doughboy from carolina
the other a garveyite from lakewood
i got talked to abt the race & achievement
bout color & propriety/
nobody spoke to me about the moon
daddy talked abt music & mama bout christians
my sisters/ we
always talked & talked
there waz never quiet
trees were status symbols
i’ve taken to fog/
the moon still surprisin me
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