Citizen Suburban Times Weekly 6-12-2019

Citizen Week of June 12, 2019

| Vol. 2 | No. 44 | www.thechicagocitizen.com

SUBURBAN TIMES WEEKLY

Illinois Representative Robert Rita (pictured) recently led the passage of legislation that will expand gambling and gaming in Illinois. Photo Credit: Representative Robert Rita

GAMBLING EXPANSION PASSED, WILL ALLOW FOR SPORTS BETTING AND NEW CASINOS IN ILLINOIS For about six years, State Representative Robert Rita has been working on passing legislation that would expand the gaming industry in Illinois. Just recently, the Illinois House and Senate finally passed Senate Bill 690 which will allow for new casinos, sports betting, racetrack casinos, and an increased number of video gaming machines in the state. SEE PAGE 2

POLITISCOPE

The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops PAGE 2

U.S. Measles Cases In First Five Months of 2019 Surpass Total Cases Per Year For Past 25 Years PAGE 5

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Gloria Ray Karlmark, one of Little Rock Nine, receives an honorary degree from Illinois Institute of Technology PAGE 5

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NAREB Takes Fight for Black Homeownership to Congressional Hearing PAGE 4

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2 | CITIZEN | Suburban Times Weekly | Week of June 12, 2019

COMMUNITY

Gambling Expansion Passed, Will Allow For Sports Betting and New Casinos in Illinois Continued from page 1

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

For about six years, State Representative Robert Rita has been working on passing legislation that would expand the gaming industry in Illinois. Just recently, the Illinois House and Senate finally passed Senate Bill 690 which will allow for new casinos, sports betting, racetrack casinos, and an increased number of video gaming machines in the state.

The bill was passed in the House with a vote of 87 to 27 and the Senate approved the legislation with a vote of 46 in favor and 10 opposed. The bill is now awaiting approval from Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

This legislation legalizes sports gambling

in the state and makes way for new casinos to open in six communities, including one in the City of Chicago. During his presentation of the bill, Rita said that this legislation is more than just gambling expansion, it’s about creating jobs and generating new revenue in Illinois.

“Senate Bill 690 is a jobs bill. It’s going to create jobs, it’s going to create economic development,” said Rita while presenting the bill on the House floor. “Let’s vote yes and let’s put people to work.”

Revenue from the gaming expansion will be used to create consistent funding for repairing and maintaining state buildings, according to Illinois Representative Margo McDermed (R-Mokena) who spoke about the legislation

prior to the recent vote.

The bill is anticipated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, which will be used to support the construction of schools, hospitals, social services buildings, and other vertical projects, according to information from Rep. Rita.

“One thing that we saw happen in the State of Illinois was that sources for funding were dried up and sucked up by our day to day operations so we have a situation where many of our state buildings are in a poor state of repair that needs to be remedied,” said McDermed.

“These new revenue sources have been hotly negotiated and many of them are quite complicated. I appreciate Representative Rita for leading everything with respect to gaming

because that was not easy.”

Rita gave credit to Senators Terry Link and Tony Munoz, Representative Mike Zalewski and all other legislative leaders for working together to negotiate and pass the gaming expansion legislation.

“While not everyone can agree on all of these revenue sources, everyone can agree on two things. One, these revenue sources were negotiated in good faith by both sides. Number two, our responsibilities for our buildings must be met now,” said McDermed.

In addition to the new casinos, racetracks in Illinois will add casinos and a racetrack with a casino is expected to be built near Tinley Park, according to information from Rep. Rita.

POLITISCOPE

The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops

BY CONNIE HASSETT-WALKER

Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.

But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.

There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.

The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.

I’m a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing – first planted centuries ago – have not yet been fully purged.

Connie Hassett-Walker

Slave patrols There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.

Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules.

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s.

As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone’s home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

The first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.

As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to control a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor. Through the early 20th century, there were few standards for hiring or training officers.

Police corruption and violence – particularly against vulnerable people – were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors – controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers www.thechicagocitizen.com

and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow laws Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.

The ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 quickly made the Black Codes illegal by giving formerly enslaved blacks equal protection of laws through the Constitution. But within two decades, Jim Crow laws aimed at subjugating African Americans and denying their civil rights were enacted across southern and some northern states, replacing the Black Codes.

For about 80 years, Jim Crow laws mandated separate public spaces for blacks and whites, such as schools, libraries, water fountains and restaurants – and enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke

laws or violated social norms often endured police brutality.

Meanwhile, the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African Americans were lynched.

Nor did the judicial system hold the police accountable for failing to intervene when black people were being murdered by mobs.

Reverberating today For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper’s database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could.

For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

Continued on page 5

CITIZEN | Suburban Times Weekly | Week of June 12, 2019

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NEWS

NAREB Takes Fight for Black Homeownership to Congressional Hearing

BY HAZEL TRICE EDNEY

TriceEdneyWire.com - The rate of Black homeownership in America - now at 41.1 percent, according to 2019 U. S. Census numbers - is even lower than it was when the U. S. Fair Housing Act was signed into law 51 years ago on April 11, 1968.

This means Black homeownership is 32.1 percentage points lower than that of Whites, which stands at 73.2 percent. It also means Black homeownership is 6.3 percentage points lower than that of Latino-Americans, which stands at 47.4 percent.

These are just a few of the facts presented to a recent U. S. Congressional hearing by homeownership advocates. The hearing, held by the House Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development and Insurance, was the first modern day hearing of its kind - intended to discover the barriers to homeownership for people of color.

“Federal housing regulators and

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agencies have aggressively pursued lending practices and policies that make access to homeownership more challenging for Black Americans. It is against this backdrop that I give my testimony,” Jeff Hicks, president/ chief executive officer of the National Association of Black Real Estate Brokers (NAREB), testified to lawmakers at the hearing. “Our nation has a very complicated and checkered history with providing equal and equitable access to homeownership to Black Americans.

At the end of World War II, when Black Americans sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom, dignity and human rights, the United States federal government created an economic divide between Blacks and Whites.”

Hicks described how Black veterans and their families were “denied the multigenerational, enriching impact of home ownership and economic security that the G.I. Bill conferred on a majority of White veterans, their children, and their grandchildren.”

He concluded that the “unequal implementation of the G.I. Bill, along with federal government policies and practices at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), including the redlining of Black neighborhoods, were leveled against Black veterans” while at the same time the government financed the construction of suburbs and provided subsidized mortgage financing for Whites-only. This scenario “set the stage for today’s wealth and homeownership gap statistics,” Hicks said.

The hearing, led by Housing Subcommittee Chair Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr. (D-Mo.), marked the anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), signed into law one week after the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. President Lyndon B. Johnson described the road to the 1968 passage as a “long and stormy trip” after it failed three times. Together, the testimony of the 72-year-old NAREB - the oldest organization represented - and the string of witnesses at the 21st Century Congressional hearing, revealed that the storm is not nearly over.

“We have not simply failed to make progress; we are losing ground. And we cannot continue to go backward,” Alanna McCargo, vice president for Housing Finance Policy, Urban Institute, stressed the urgency of the moment.

The Urban Institute was founded

by President Johnson in 1968 to focus on “the problems of America’s cities and their people and to inform social and economic policy interventions that would help fight the War on Poverty,” she described.

The witnesses gave facts and anecdotes describing why new legislation and homeownership policies are needed. Among the proposals: The passage of The American Dream Down Payment Savings Plan, a proposal with bipartisan support, which would allow prospective homebuyers to save money in an authorized account, where the savings could grow and be removed for the specified purpose of a tax-free down payment for purchasing a home.

A fairer mortgage and underwriting process in which borrowers meet a minimum threshold for approval and all interest rates and costs are the same for everyone; regardless of race; including loan level equality, approval rates, pricing and terms for borrowers - without adjustments for neighborhoods, zip codes or census tracts.

Accountability for non-bank financial institutions such as the examination of their lending practices to ensure fair, equitable, and non-discriminatory origination, pricing, and terms. This would also include greater accountability and modernization of the Community Reinvestment Act to eliminate loopholes that limit access to mortgage credit to existing and potential Black homeowners.

Overall promotion of homeownership as a High Priority for Public Policymakers.

Equal and equitable access to mainstream mortgage credit as prospective Black homeowners have been trapped in predatory mortgage schemes or by an absolute denial of access to home loans.

Historically unequal access to credit for people of color was repeated as a key problem during the hearing.

“Wide access to credit is critical for building family wealth, closing the racial wealth gap, and for the housing market overall, which in turn, contributes significantly to our overall economy,” Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending, told the Committee. “Today’s hearing is a good step toward acknowledging this history and presents the potential to create opportunities to address it.”

The other four witnesses were Joseph Nery, president, National Association of Hispanic Real Estate www.thechicagocitizen.com

After hours of testimony before the House Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development and Insurance, witnesses raise their hands in response to a question on whether homeownership discrimination against Blacks continues today. Seated left to right are: Alanna McCargo, vice president for Housing Finance Policy, Urban Institute; Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president, Center for Responsible Lending; Joseph Nery, president, National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals; Jeff Hicks, president/CEO; National Association of Black Real Estate Brokers (NAREB); Carmen Castro, managing housing counselor, Housing Initiative Partnership; Joanne Poole, liaison for the National Association of Realtors; and Joel Griffith, research fellow, Financial Regulations, The Heritage Foundation. PHOTO: Hazel Trice Edney

Professionals; Carmen Castro, managing housing counselor, Housing Initiative Partnership; Joanne Poole, liaison for the National Association of Realtors and Joel Griffith, research fellow, Financial Regulations, The Heritage Foundation.

Bi-partisan lawmakers on the subcommittee listened intently then fired questions and remarks.

When U. S. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) asked the witnesses to raise their hands if they “believe that invidious discrimination has been a significant reason for the inability for African-Americans to achieve wealth in this country...to this very day”, all seven witnesses extended their hands into the air.

“I’m grateful that you’ve done this because we’ve been trying to build a record to let the world know that we still have discrimination,” Green said. “Our original sin was discrimination. To be more specific racism... institutionalized racism.”

Chairman Clay saw eye to eye with the witnesses. “It is clear by the evidence in front of us that 51 years later, there is still much work to be done to promote and assure fair housing in America,” he said.

He said Congress must bear the responsibility to end the discrimination largely because of its failure to continue to make and maintain fair housing policies.

Clay concluded, “Although many private actors were complicit, research has shown that the government played a significant role.”

U. S. Rep. Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees the Housing Subcommittee, pressed the lawmakers, saying many of the oppressive

policies are still used by banks and are “taken for granted.”

Waters described interest rates that are so high that homeowners paying both interest and principal have faced foreclosure because they can no longer afford the loan. She also described banks that won’t do loan modifications until two payments are missed making it difficult to catch up on the payments.

“We need to scrub this market and all the rules and practices and come up with a laundry list of what we think needs to be taken out of the way,” Waters said.

The Congressional hearing was held on launch day for NAREB’s 2019 Spring Policy Conference in May. NAREB, founded to fight for civil rights in order to win economic justice for its members and the people they serve, has set a goal of at least two million new Black homeowners within five years. They view working with Congress as their next best hope.

“Together with Congress, we must overcome the discrimination that continues to limit Black homeownership,” Hicks said. “The reason for this “dismal reality,” as stated in NAREB’s most recent SHIBA (State of Housing in Black America) report, is “that Blacks have never enjoyed equal and equitable access to mainstream mortgage credit.

Rather, Black families attempting to become homeowners have largely been trapped in a vicious cycle of predatory mortgage schemes or by an absolute denial of access to home loans...We need to vigorously renew the importance of homeownership to all families, regardless of their race or ethnicity.”

CITIZEN | Suburban Times Weekly | Week of June 12, 2019

NEWS U.S. Measles Cases In First Five Months of 2019 Surpass Total Cases Per Year For Past 25 Years As of May 30, 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 971 cases of measles in the United States, the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1994, when 963 cases were reported for the entire year.

If outbreaks continue through summer and fall, the United States may lose its measles elimination status,

erasing the hard work done by all levels of public health.

“Measles is preventable and the way to end this outbreak is to ensure that all children and adults who can get vaccinated, do get vaccinated. Again, I want to reassure parents that vaccines are safe, they do not cause autism. The greater danger is the disease the vaccination prevents,” said CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, M.D.

Gloria Ray Karlmark, one of Little Rock Nine, receives an honorary degree from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)

Need A Lawyer?

The Chicago Bar Association Can Help!

Gloria Ray Karlmark, who was one of 9 African American students who ignited controversy when they enrolled at the all-white Central High School in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, received an honorary degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) during its May commencement ceremony held recently.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1965,

Attorneys with the Chicago Bar Association’s Call-A-Lawyer Program will be available to take calls from the public and offer brief legal advice on Saturday, June 15, as part of an ongoing legal public service program offered by the CBA. When contacting the CBA Lawyer Referral Service during normal business hours Monday through Friday, callers can be referred to attorneys practicing in numerous areas of law. Calls will be accepted June 15 from 9 a.m. to noon at (312) 554-2001. For more information, call 312-554-2012.

Karlmark worked as a school teacher, laboratory assistant, programmer, and mathematician. She later moved to Sweden and joined IBM’s Nordic Laboratory. Karlmark worked for IBM’s International Patent Operations for 11 years and received an honorary doctor of science, honoris causa at IIT for outstanding contributions to the development of a more inclusive society.

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POLITISCOPE The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops Continued from page 2 In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.

When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver’s complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.

There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.

What’s more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take “diver-

sity in criminal justice” courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others.

In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.

In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognize and minimize their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past.

This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.

Connie Hassett-Walker is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Kean University.

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