September 21, 2013 - September 27, 2013, The Afro-American
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OPINION
1963 was the Pivotal Year for Civil Rights
In the modern civil rights era, no year stands out in my memory more than 1963. I was a sophomore at Druid High School in Tuscaloosa, Ala. and living in McKenzie Court, the all-Black housing project on the west side of town. After a life of second-class citizenship, I finally saw the walls of segregation crumbling. Tuscaloosa provided me with a front-row seat. My stepfather, William H. George E. Curry Polk, drove a dump truck at NNPA Columnist the University of Alabama. Although our taxes went to support what was even then a football factory, African Americans were barred from attending the state-supported school. On Feb. 3, 1956, Autherine Lucy gained admission to the University of Alabama under a U.S. Supreme Court order. But a mob gathered on campus three days later. Instead defending the Black graduate student, the university suspended Lucy, saying officials could not protect her. When she sued to gain readmission, Alabama officials used that suit to claim she had slandered the university and therefore could not continue as a student. But things would be different on June 11, 1963, which is not to say there wouldn’t be resistance. Vivian Malone and James Hood, armed with a federal court order that the university admit them and segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace not interfere, sought to enter Foster Auditorium on campus to register for classes. They were accompanied by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Instead of complying with the federal order, Gov. Wallace, who had pledged “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his inaugural address, staged his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” to block the two students from entering. Katzenbach left with the students and placed a call to
President John F. Kennedy. The president nationalized the Alabama National Guard. When Malone, Hood and Katzenbach returned to Foster Auditorium that afternoon, Gen. Henry Graham told Wallace, “Sir, it is my sad duty to ask you to step aside under orders of the president of the United States.” After uttering a few words, Wallace stepped to the side and Malone and Hood walked inside and registered. It was exciting to see the drama being played out on our black and white TV. At last, I thought, the walls of segregation would be forever shattered. President Kennedy gave an eloquent televised speech to the nation that night. He said, “Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Viet Nam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.” The euphoria of a victory in my hometown was short lived. Within hours of Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers, who headed NAACP field operations in Mississippi, was shot to death in Jackson, Miss. after parking his car in his driveway and exiting to enter his home. Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for the crime. However, he was acquitted by an all-White, all male jury. It wasn’t until 30 years later, when new evidence surfaced, that Beckwith was finally convicted for murdering Evers. Of course, 250,000 gathered Aug. 28, 1963 for the March on Washington. Much has been written about the march, so I won’t devote much space here except to note that the news media was fixated on the possibility of the March turning violent. But, as the Baltimore Sun noted, only three people were arrested that day and “not one was a Negro.” Like the desegregation of the University of Alabama, White racists were eager to “send a message” that the March on Washington would not change their world. In the wee hours of Sunday, Sept. 15, four Klansmen – Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton, Herman Frank and Robert Chambliss, planted a box of dynamite with a time
delay under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., a rallying point in the city for civil rights activities. At 10:22 a.m., the bomb went off, killing four young girls – Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair – and injuring 22 others. Although the violent message was supposed to remind Blacks that there were no safe places for them, not even church, Blacks sent a more lasting message by continuing to desegregate public facilities in Birmingham and across the South. The enormous sacrifices of 1963 were not in vain. They provided the groundwork for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It was a year worth remembering. George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine, is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service (NNPA.)
New Fed Chair Needs to Back Main Street “The Federal Reserve Chairman is not only one of the most important economic policymakers in America, he or she is one of the most important policymakers in the world.” —President Barack Obama
Welcome to the season of big decisions in Washington. In the coming days, President Obama will have to decide whether Marc H. Morial to order a military strike NNPA Columnist against the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons against its own people. Time is also running out for Congress and the administration to agree on a budget to avoid an Oct. 1 government shutdown, and lawmakers are on the line to raise the debt ceiling to keep the nation from defaulting on its financial obligations. In the midst of all of this, the president must decide whom to pick for one of the most important jobs in the world – Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
“The Fed,” as it is commonly called, is the central bank of the United States, responsible for setting monetary policy and credit conditions in support of full employment and stable prices. The Fed also supervises and regulates banks to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation’s banking and financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers. Ben Bernanke has held this job since 2006, one year before the start of the Great Recession. While Bernanke is not without his critics, many believe his policies helped prevent another Great Depression and put the nation on the road to a steady, albeit much too sluggish, recovery. The August jobs report shows the economy created 169,000 jobs last month, with overall unemployment now down to 7.3 percent. This translates into 42 straight months of private sector job creation and a total of 7.5 million new jobs. The economy is moving in the right direction. But the 13 percent unemployment rate for African Americans and the 9.3 percent rate for Hispanics make it clear that even as the recovery inches forward, communities of color are still being left behind. With Ben Bernanke’s term as Federal Reserve Chairman set to expire on Jan. 31, 2014, President Obama must choose a successor who is committed to ending these inequalities while being acceptable to Main Street, Wall Street, and Capitol Hill – an almost irreconcilable team of rivals.
Ted Cruz Loves Arch-Racist Jesse Helms In office just nine months, Ted Cruz, the NNPA Columnist junior Republican Senator from Texas, has already established himself as that body’s most divisive force since the witch-hunting, 1950s demagogue, Joe McCarthy. A darling of the most extreme factions of the conservative movement, Cruz exemplifies what was obvious about the GOP’s fortunes since the Tea Party emerged on its right flank two months after President Obama took office in 2009: That it would have to destroy the GOP’s establishment – that is, those Republican officeholders who, though rock-ribbed conservatives, actually believed in the old American winsome-lose-some tradition of political accommodation and pragmatism. And last week, speaking at an event meant to honor the late Jesse Helms, the longtime segregationist senator from North Carolina, Cruz, Texas’ first Hispanic senator, revealed again for all to see how unbreakable is the connection between conservatism and White racism. Cruz, who was born in 1970, first briefly spun a tale of how he had idolized Helms, who served in the Senate from 1972 to 2001, since he was 10 – when he had sent Helms a $10 campaign contribution “’cause they were beating up on him, they were coming after him hard and I thought it wasn’t right …” Then, after a moment, Cruz added, “The willingness [of Helms] to say all those crazy things is a rare, rare characteristic in this town, and you know what? It’s every bit as true now as it
Lee A. Daniels
was then. We need a hundred more like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.” The bulk of Cruz’s remarks laid out his analysis of Helms’ positions on foreign affairs (an analysis that in fact was laughably wrong). But Cruz’s gushing, thankfully, did remind us that for nearly two centuries, the United States Senate was comprised of a substantial number of senators like Jesse Helms. That bloc, along with their confederates in the House of Representatives, was responsible for establishing and maintaining Negro slavery and its successor, racial apartheid, in the South into the latter third of the 20th century. By the time Helms reached the Senate, the legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement – which Helms staunchly opposed and continued to denigrate throughout his political life – had pared those politicians’ numbers sharply. But Jesse Helms, provincial and mean-spirited, continued to fight on. In 1983, he was the only Senator to vote against approving Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a federal holiday. In 1990, he waged what many called the most racist political campaign since the civil rights years to fend off a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African American Democrat and former mayor of Charlotte. In 1993, he tried to taunt Illinois’ Carol Moseley-Braun, newly-elected as the nation’s first Black female senator, by singing “Dixie” as they rode the Senate elevator one day in order, as he said, to try to make her cry. Moseley-Braun did not cry. A few weeks earlier, she had led a successful charge against Helms’ trying to guide a renewal of a federal patent on the Confederate flag for the
The president’s choices had been former Treasury Secretary and Obama economic adviser, Larry Summers, who was favored over Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen. Opposition to Summers was so intense, broad, and diverse that he withdrew his name from consideration on Sept. 15. Everyone, from Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to the National Organization of Women to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and a growing list of members of Congress, had urged the President to pick Yellen over Summers. As a leading architect of Wall Street deregulation during the 1990’s, Summer’s policies have been viewed as helping to pave the way to the Great Recession. A recent New York Times editorial concludes that “Mr. Summers has also shown an indifference to the effects of economic decisions on ordinary people.” We urge the president to consider appointing someone who is more of a friend to Main Street than to Wall Street. This includes, the highly-qualified Janet Yellen, who would be the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve. It should also include other women, African American and minority economists who could bring both excellence and diversity to the Fed. Marc H. Morial, former mayor of New Orleans, is president and CEO of the National Urban League.
United Daughters of the Confederacy. She won the substantive political battle; his response was a juvenile gesture. In 2001, when Helms announced he would retire from the Senate, the columnist David S. Broder, a widely-respected political centrist, wrote a column in the Aug. 29 editions of the Washington Post that appeared under a headline that was simple and stunning: “Jesse Helms, White Racist.” In the column, Broder declared “What really sets Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country … [and] the squeamishness of much of the press in characterizing Helms for what he is suggests an unwillingness to confront the reality of race in our national life.” Broder continued that “What is unique about Helms – and from my viewpoint, unforgivable – is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.” Finally, after setting Helms in the context of the modernday segregationist politicians who fought the Civil Rights Movement, Broder concluded: “That is not a history to be sanitized.” Ted Cruz tells us Jesse Helms is his political idol. What does that say about Ted Cruz? Lee A. Daniels is a longtime journalist based in New York City. His latest book is ‘Last Chance: The Political Threat to Black America.’