Like many (if not most) Americans, I’ve gone through periods of fascination with the Kennedy assassination (and all of the conspiracy theories surrounding it) and it was through that fascination that I first came acroos this infamous JFK “Wanted for Treason” poster in high school.
Item #4 in this crazy list of supposed reasons that President Kennedy committed “treason” has always fascinated me. It reads:
4. He has given support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.
That very statement always seemed like sheer lunacy to me. After all, black people rioted and resisted against their treatment and situation in this country long before Karl Marx (never mind “Communism”) was even born.
Long before the Uniited States even became the United States, in fact.
Not that I want to even think about what goes on in the racist imagination, but are there whites that really believe that black people are (or should be) so satisfied with conditions in this country that they would not want to riot or otherwise protest those conditions?
I’m not saying that individual Communists or even the Soviet Union were never above using American race relations as a wedge to sow division in America...the historical record is pretty clear on that...just as the American government wasn’t above using the fear of such propaganda to sow propaganda and division within civil rights movements.
Miss Denise and I Kos-mailed and Twittered back and forth a little bit on her views about the origins of the ADOS movement and I have seen some of her Twitter activism on the subject.
Now for a complex set of reasons (having to do with my own personal philosophy of life more than anything else; after all, ADOS eschews pan-Africanism whereas I am pretty much a pan-everything “citizen of the world” type) I could never join something like the ADOS movement but I certainly understand where some of the philosophy and positions behind the movement comes from. If it were more of an organic grassroots effort as opposed to a right wing effort that possibly involves the Russian Federation, I might have a little more respect for it in spite of my disagreements
I certainly understand where some of their POVs come from (although the eschewing of pan-Africanism and the anti-immigrant messaging is anathema to someone like myself).
Let’s be very clear: there would be little or no wedge to exploit if this country simply worked to eradicate racism.
But, in many ways, that work seems more difficult now than it was when this poster...and 5,000 more like it...was passed around Dallas, Texas in November of 1963...and things continue to deteriorate.
That’s not Vladimir Putin’s fault, that’s ours.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Sixty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, representing plaintiffs, argued that segregated schools violated the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The justices agreed. The unanimous 9-0 decision declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and ordered school districts to desegregate. Civil rights activists celebrated this decision.
But for many students today, Brown represents the unfulfilled promise of equal educational opportunities.
Although school integration reached its peak in the 1970s, it began to decline in the early-1990s, when districts were released from court oversight. Today, school segregation levels have returned to those of the 1960s.
But desegregation was never the end goal. Robert L. Carter, a leading NAACP attorney on the case, wrote in Derrick Bell’s “Shades of Brown: New Perspectives on School Desegregation”: “the fundamental vice was not legally enforced racial segregation itself; this was a mere by-product, a symptom of the greater and more pernicious disease—White supremacy.”
Civil rights lawyers continue to advance racial equality in education, but now through other means: school funding. While few school segregation lawsuits exist today, school finance cases have been filed in 46 out of 50 states since 1973, with active lawsuits in 14 states.
Instead of claiming that “separate is inherently unequal,” school funding lawyers are now fighting for “separate but truly equal.”
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Robert Fredrick Smith, the founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, pledged to eliminate the student loan debt for the entire graduating class of Morehouse College on Sunday.
The technology investor was the 2019 commencement speaker at the all-male college and promised his family would clear the debt during his speech.
“On behalf of the eight generations of my family that have been in this country, we’re gonna put a little fuel in your bus. This is my class, 2019. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans,” Smith said to the more than 400 graduates. “I know my class will make sure they pay this forward … and let’s make sure every class has the same opportunity going forward because we are enough to take care of our own community.”
According to 11Alive, before the ceremony, the billionaire announced a gift of $1.5 million to the historically Black college. The student loan repayment is valued at another $40 million.
The 2017 EBONY Power 100 honoree and inaugural recipient of the John H. Johnson Award, of is a graduate of Cornell University and Columbia Business School. Smith, psychologist Edmund W. Gordon and actress Angela Bassett received honorary degrees from Morehouse during the commencement.
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Residents of the majority-white southeast corner of Baton Rouge want to make their own city, complete with its own schools, breaking away from the majority-black parts of town. The Atlantic: The New Secession
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The fight began with little subtlety. White, wealthy parents in the southeastern corner of East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, an area known as St. George, wanted their own school district. They argued that the schools in East Baton Rouge were routinely named as among the lowest performing in the state, and were unlikely to improve any time soon. So, in 2012, some of those parents went to the state legislature with a proposal: Create what would be called the Southeast Community School District.
The legislature shot it down. The parents needed a two-thirds majority for the creation of a school district, and they couldn’t martial the votes. A similar push in 2013 was rebuffed as well.
The organizers were discouraged, but undeterred. They needed a new strategy—and they didn’t have to look far. In 2005, a nearby community, Central, was unable to gather support for a school district from the legislature, so it incorporated as a new city. That helped it gain legislative approval to create its own school district, Central Community Schools, which opened its doors in 2007. The St. George supporters launched a petition drive and, in August 2013, registered a new website: StGeorgeLouisiana.com. They would try to create their own city.
A pattern has emerged over the past two decades: White, wealthy communities have been separating from their city’s school districts to form their own. According to a recent report from EdBuild, a nonprofit focused on public-school funding, 73 communities have split to form their own school districts since 2000, and the rate of places doing so has rapidly accelerated in the past two years. St. George, which activists seek to incorporate as a city, is a textbook example.
Oftentimes, in these instances, predominantly white parents are trying to break away from a majority-minority school district, which in turn isolates their property-tax dollars in a new district. (Many public schools rely heavily on property taxes.) The argument, then, is that the parents can better dictate how their money is being spent.
St. George is no different. The proposed area is more than 70 percent white and fewer than 15 percent black, while East Baton Rouge Parish is roughly 46.5 percent black. St. George supporters decry the violence and poor conditions of the public schools in Baton Rouge. Their tax dollars, they have argued, aren’t being put to good use. (Representatives for the St. George campaign’s organizers did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article, including several emails, phone calls, and Facebook and LinkedIn messages.)
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If you’ve been to an event with a Democrat running for president this year, there's a good chance you’ve heard about it: the racial wealth gap.
Candidates are regularly bringing up the fact that the typical black family has only one-tenth the assets of the typical white family — a divide that has grown larger than it was 35 years ago.
Far from a niche concern, candidates have incorporated it into their signature proposals. They've addressed it in speeches not just to black churches in South Carolina, but also to mostly white town hall crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In many ways, it's a defining issue of the 2020 cycle so far, one that brings together multiple trends that are transforming the party: the rising clout of nonwhite voters, a rush to embrace more ambitious policy, and heightened concerns about both racism and inequality under President Donald Trump.
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Director Stefon Bristol recently sat down with EBONY to discuss his Netflix film, See You Yesterday, and how Black women inspired critical parts of the storyline.
The film is the first feature to be directed by Bristol, a protégé of Spike Lee. It takes places in his hometown of Brooklyn and involves best friends and science prodigies Claudette Josephine Walker (Eden Duncan-Smith) and Sebastian (Brian Crichlow), and how they use their time-traveling backpacks to try to undo the police killing of the teen girl’s older brother.
According to Diverse magazine’s website, Black students are severely underrepresented in STEM-related fields, making up only 6 percent of the population of engineers in the United States. Bristol made a deliberate choice to make his lead characters Black teens and arguably the greatest scientists of modern time.
“When I was thinking of ideas of time travel, I was like, ‘Well, how are they going to do it?’ I didn’t want to have them go through a portal or have someone else build the time machine for them,” he said. “[I thought] it would be amazing if they invented it for themselves so young Black kids could see that they can be brilliant, too.”
Bristol continued that train of thought when he decided to name the lead character in honor of Madam C.J. Walker, the historic entrepreneur, philanthropist and activist, and the first self-made Black female millionaire. He hoped to inspire viewers to think “if this one character is really good at science and entrepreneurship, what other Black inventors and scientists in our recent history are?”
Most sci-film films rarely have people of color as leads or women in lead roles. The director decided to have C.J. be both. He said it was a “powerful” choice because he’s “never seen a character like [C.J.] before, [one who is] a Black woman in STEM trying to be a superhero.”
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Last week, a car rolled through the town of Gedeb in southern Ethiopia, flanked by federal police. A local official made an announcement to roughly 150,000 people who, displaced from their homes, have sought sanctuary in makeshift camps in the town and across the surrounding farmland.
In two days’ time, they were told through a loudspeaker, their shelters – mostly built of firewood, banana leaves and the odd tarpaulin sheet – would be demolished. Food aid, medical treatment and other humanitarian assistance would soon stop.
The announcement marked the start of the Ethiopian government’s latest effort to bring an end to a displacement crisis caused by ethnic violence that last year left about 2.9 million people homeless, according to new estimates. The figure, the highest recorded anywhere in the world, seriously mars the record of Abiy Ahmed, the reformist prime minister who took office in April 2018.
In the south, the worst affected area, an estimated 800,000 mostly ethnic Gedeos fled the district of West Guji in Oromia, the country’s largest region, between April and June. The International Organization for Migration calculated that nearly 700,000 of these people were still displaced as of 17 March this year.
According to a “strategic plan” seen by the Guardian, the government intends to return at least 800,000 people displaced around the country to their original homes by June. This includes all those sheltering in Gedeb and other parts of Gedeo zone, the vast majority of whom have repeatedly told aid workers and officials they are too afraid to go back.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH
If you are new to the Black Kos Community, grab a seat, some cyber eats, relax, and introduce yourself.