Politics

Aspiring Attorney General Ken Hodges served as special prosecutor in the 2003 shooting death of a Muscogee County black man, Kenneth Walker, by a white sheriff’s deputy, David Glisson. Read the rest of this entry »

Is the Obama administration failing to adequately address the BP oil field breach in the gulf? James Carville says YES, BIG TIME! What do YOU think?
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April 19^th marked the 15^th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh. While many gathered on that day to commemorate that tragic event, the act and others like it, continue to shed light on a fundamental hypocrisy in American society. The hypocrisy in question is the refusal of the American public to apply the term “terrorist” to anyone other than Black or Middle Eastern, Islamic radicals.

The lack of application of the term “terrorist” to Americans or Christians is certainly not due to a lack of evidence. For example, it would not be hard to recognize the brutal and destructive nature of slavery in America as institutionalized terrorism.  Just as easy would be a recognition that groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other Christian-based, White supremacist organizations have repeatedly engaged in terrorist acts. Add to this list the lynching of Black people and the genocide of Native Americans and we soon realize that domestic terrorism in the United States is as American as apple pie.

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Calling it a momentous week for America, President Obama touted the health care bill passed into law this week during his weekly address. He also highlighted student loan reforms that passed in the reconciliation bill on Thursday.

President Obama calls on supporters to help finish the fight for health reform.

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Tavis Smiley: We need to have a conversation on whether or not Black Leaders are giving President Obama a pass on the Black agenda. This president needs to be asked to focus on issues dealing with Black folks.

Al Sharpton: I spend 18 hours a day dealing with Black Folks’ agenda. I think the president is smart for not becoming a Black exponent on Black views to feed into Glenn Beck and all of them; So they can have an easy way to stop legislation to help Black people. Read the rest of this entry »

Following the inauguration of America’s first African-American president, a backlash is brewing against a critical stronghold of his black Southern support base: historically black colleges and universities.

HBCUs occupied a prominent place in President Barack Obama’s election strategy. Back when many wealthy political donors considered his candidacy a long shot, he raised sizable contributions from his appearances at HBCUs such as Howard, Florida A&M, Hampton and Xavier.

Obama also led rallies at North Carolina Central, South Carolina State and Mississippi’s Jackson State ahead of his Democratic primary wins in those states.

In the general election, three Southern states with vigorous HBCU “get-out-the-vote” initiatives — Virginia, North Carolina and Florida — went from red to blue.

Even in the southern states that Obama lost to GOP nominee John McCain, the rise in black turnout — widely mobilized from HBCU campuses — presented a serious problem for many Republicans locked in tight legislative and congressional elections.

Recently, two powerful GOP officeholders in Georgia and Mississippi (states Obama picked up in the primary) introduced proposals to weaken their states’ public HBCUs. Georgia state Sen. Seth Harp wanted to merge two HBCUs, Albany State and Savannah State, with nearby predominantly white schools. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the politically ambitious chairman of the Republican Governors Association, asked his state’s lawmakers to strip Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State of their autonomy and make them extension campuses of Jackson State.

The timing of these propositions was no coincidence. Another huge black voter turnout for Obama in 2012, coupled with the reapportionment processes driven by the 2010 Census, could trigger shake-ups in numerous Southern legislatures and congressional districts.

To rally support for HBCU mergers, proponents such as Harp have described their proposals as a step forward for integration. This argument, however, stands at odds with Martin Luther King Jr.’s stance on the role HBCUs should play in post-Jim Crow America. King repeatedly said integration in higher education was not about getting rid of HBCUs. Instead, he advocated investing more financial resources into HBCUs as a means of strengthening them and making them more attractive to people of all races.

Further, King identified “shared power” as an integral part of integration. Speaking against efforts to use integration as a ploy for reducing black political, economic and social leverage, he stated: “We don’t want to be integrated out of power; we want to be integrated into power.”

The HBCU merger proposals clearly fail King’s test for legitimate integration. If adopted, they would have a disparate and negative impact upon black political participation in those two states. The mergers would decimate the black-voter-mobilization networks centered at those HBCUs. They would also shrink the black middle class by paring down the number of black professors and administrators in the affected locales, curtailing black political-giving levels.

Although neither Harp’s nor Barbour’s merger plans has made significant headway toward becoming law, the attacks against public HBCUs will likely intensify as these institutions exert greater influence over future state and national election outcomes.

Despite being thinly disguised as “budget cutbacks” and “integration efforts,” today’s HBCU merger campaigns prove that even in the age of Obama, the legacy of backlash politics against black voters endures.

Instead of taking on hard fights such as restructuring their state tax codes to increase revenue, individuals like Harp and Barbour have chosen the easy path of racially divisive political opportunism.

The President talks about his first year fighting against special interests and barring lobbyists from his Administration, as well as the fight to come in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision. January 23, 2009. Read the rest of this entry »