Richmond Free Press
Jonquils in the West End
Editorial Page
A6
February 16-18, 2017
No integrity We are starting to see what grows from the seeds of dishonesty and deceit sown by the Trump campaign and subsequent administration. Less than a month after President Trump was sworn into office, his administration has become engulfed in a Russianinfluence scandal that forced the resignation Monday of national security adviser Michael Flynn. The former lieutenant general stepped down just 24 days after taking office when news reports surfaced that he misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about secret conversations he had with Russian officials about sanctions placed on the Russian government before President Trump’s inauguration. The sanctions were imposed in late December by former President Obama after U.S. intelligence officials announced that Moscow had used cyber attacks to try to influence the November presidential election in President Trump’s favor. A New York Times report on Tuesday cited charges by four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials that several Trump campaign aides and other associates had frequent contact with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the Nov. 8 election. One, Paul Manafort, who was Trump campaign manager, left last August after allegations first surfaced about his activities in the Ukraine. He previously worked as an adviser to a former Ukrainian president who was backed by Moscow. The campaign also distanced itself from businessman Carter Page, a Trump adviser, after it was reported that Mr. Page had contact with top lieutenants of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Manafort, like Mr. Flynn, denied having any contact with Russian officials. But the truth has come out — just like Watergate, the 1970s break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. All of this points back to President Trump, who reportedly was informed by the Justice Department in late January about Mr. Flynn’s secret conversations with the Russians — a potentially illegal act — his lies to Vice President Pence and the potential for Mr. Flynn to be blackmailed and national security compromised. What did President Trump do? Nothing. During the campaign, he called for the Russians to hack the emails of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and has since cozied up to Mr. Putin. We are gravely concerned about the entire episode and the troubling questions it raises. Among them: Did President Trump order Mr. Flynn and his campaign aides to engage in the discussions with the Russians? Did they report back to President Trump afterward? Did President Trump work with the Russians to influence the outcome of the presidential campaign? President Trump must explain his ties with Russia now. Throughout the campaign, he refused to release his tax returns. But now that he is president, the American people deserve transparency from the president and a clear understanding of his financial, personal and political connections to Mr. Putin and the Russian government. We call on members of Congress, including the House and Senate intelligence committees, to conduct full investigations into Russian influence on the Trump administration before, during and after the election. Our entire democratic process may have been undermined by Russian hacking in the president election. Our nation may be on the verge of being bought and sold by a U.S. president who has an undefined affinity or financial ties to a foreign government. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat who has represented Virginia in Washington for eight years, is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “I don’t think there is anything I have been involved in in my tenure in the Senate that is as important as this,” Sen. Warner told the New York Times about an aggressive inquiry into Russian interference. “This is about our basic democratic processes.” These are dangerous times, made even more alarming because the president has shown he has little integrity. Let the members of Congress who truly love this country step up to the plate and get to the bottom of this.
Our children, our future We welcome to Richmond the scores of educators from as far away as New Jersey and Ohio who are expected for the Teachers of Color Summit that is underway through Saturday in Downtown. Their workshops and panels during the three-day event will focus on the needs of students of color, including such justice issues as equitable learning environments and school policies and practices. Their discussions during this event, sponsored by the Virginia Education Association and the Virginia Department of Education, are both timely and relevant. Public school districts across the nation, including Richmond, expect to be confronted by mounting pressure from a federal administration that seems poised to pull funding from public school systems to finance private or parochial schools. We, in Virginia, are not strangers to educational inequality. It is an old theme that goes back long before the history of Jim Crow. Unequal funding, unequal facilities, unequal programs and unequal pay for African-American teachers are just a few of the issues targeted by civil rights litigation within the last 60 years. The challenges continue today, with students and studies showing a learning gap and graduation disparities between students of color and all others. Anecdotal and other evidence also show unequal discipline being meted out to students of color and students with disabilities. All of these problems impact the lives, futures and expectations of the young people who trust us to guide their education. We applaud the efforts of educators gathered here this weekend to confront head on these education issues. We hope your discussions will lead to positive changes that raise the prospects for success for our students, our future.
Sandra Sellars/Richmond Free Press
American justice defiled
President Trump’s first three weeks in office have left Americans reeling from what Republican speech writer Peggy Noonan called his “cloud of crazy.” His cabinet nominees seem intentionally perverse: An education secretary who has no clue about public schools; an energy secretary who wanted to eliminate the department; a treasury secretary from Goldman Sachs who ran a home foreclosure factory. So when a white nationalist sympathizer, U.S. Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama, was confirmed last week to be attorney general, it passed by as just another absurdity. The coverage of the confirmation battle focused primarily on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s outrageous muzzling of Sen. Elizabeth Warren as she tried to read a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King criticizing Sen. Sessions. The muzzling was an unforgivable indignity. Lost in the furor was the thrust of Mrs. King’s letter. She was writing to urge the Republican-led Senate of the time to reject President
Reagan’s nomination of Sen. Sessions to the federal bench because he had “used the power of his office as U.S. attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot.” Sen. Sessions had opposed the federal Voting Rights Act, made racist statements and falsely prosecuted black civil rights leaders seeking to register
Jesse L. Jackson Sr. people to vote in Alabama. He was an ardent and unrelenting opponent of civil rights. The Republican Senate rejected his nomination. Sen. Sessions’ views have not changed. He opposed U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down laws banning same-sex marriage. He voted against equal pay for women and against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, and he argued that it would be a “stretch” to call grabbing a woman’s genitals — as President Trump boasted of doing — assault. He also supported President Trump’s travel ban on Muslims. On civil rights, he learned, as Strom Thurmond’s late operative Lee Atwater put it, that “you can’t say ‘n—–.’ That hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like … states’ rights and all that
stuff.” Sen. Sessions remains a fierce advocate of states’ rights over civil rights. Even as he joined 97 senators in voting to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, he gave a speech declaring its enforcement sections unconstitutional. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative gang of five gutted the law, he praised their decision, saying preposterously, “If you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the vote because of the color of their skin.” Even as he was saying that, states across the South were preparing a raft of laws to make voting more difficult for AfricanAmericans and the young. Striking down the voter ID law in North Carolina, a federal appeals court found that the new provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” while providing “inept remedies” for an alleged problem of voter fraud that is nonexistent. Now Sen. Sessions will take his states’ rights views to the U.S. Justice Department. He will have more power than the late George Wallace ever had. Mr. Wallace, a former Alabama governor, had state power. Sen. Sessions has national power with a state agenda, with thousands of lawyers under his command. He will help shape the U.S. Supreme
Permanent interests
A man of vision, strength and determination who practiced what he preached, Floyd McKissick succeeded James Farmer as national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, in 1966. And under Mr. McKissick’s leadership, CORE was transformed from an interracial, nonviolent, civil rights organization into a group that promoted Black Power. In this contemporary era of black folks complaining about gentrification, my memory of Mr. McKissick and how he would respond to this issue stands out. He graphically illustrated the sacrifice, the will and the “can-do” attitude we must have in order to stop the economic and political assaults against us. I attended North Carolina College, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham, N.C., in the mid-1960s. Mr. McKissick’s name and his legal services were never far from the mouths of students who marched downtown to participate in the restaurant sit-ins. With what were then called “National Defense Highways” coming through Durham’s Hayti District and other black enclaves under the guise of “urban renewal,” Mr. McKissick’s answer to gentrification was Soul City, N.C., developed by black folks,
where black people could feel the pride of ownership and control of their community. I remember driving to Soul City to take a look. Homes were still being built and businesses had not moved in yet, but I really
James Clingman liked what I saw. It was proof that, despite resistance even from black folks, Mr. McKissick persisted not only with an economic strategy but also with a political strategy. In April 1991, New York Times writer Glenn Fowler wrote an article about Mr. McKissick’s death at age 69, in which he stated, “Before the 1972 presidential election, Mr. McKissick angered many blacks by switching from the Democratic Party to the Republicans and supporting Mr. Nixon’s re-election campaign. He argued that blacks were illadvised to put all their hopes in the Democratic Party.” Mr. McKissick’s political admonition and his economic plan still ring true today. How can we use Brother McKissick’s work to make black history today? First, we must understand that, politically, we have no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. Then, we must pool and leverage our dollars to gain a significant piece of this rock called the United States, starting with the neighborhoods in which we live. Buy the property, the vacant
lots and the abandoned storefronts, rather than complain about them. Open and support neighborhood black-owned businesses, and grow those businesses to the point of being able to hire black youths. Real estate development is essential for the economic empowerment of black people. And we have many architects, CPAs, construction management professionals and construction firms that could form strategic alliances to develop large tracts of land. They could transform our neighborhoods into viable communities in a couple of decades. They could get the tax credits and abatements and take advantage of Tax Increment Financing that other developers use to gain ownership and control of various sections of cities. To make black history, we must use the patterns left by Mr. McKissick, Phillip Payton of Harlem, Herman Perry in Atlanta, Annie Minerva TurnboMalone in Chicago, George Tyson in Atlantic Beach, S.C., and Joe Dudley of Dudley Products in Kernersville, N.C. Own the real estate, control it and develop it. If we develop land, we are being true to what Dr. Amos Wilson suggested. We will be building and celebrating our own pyramids in addition to annually celebrating the pyramids built by our ancestors. The writer is founder of the Greater Cincinnati AfricanAmerican Chamber of Commerce.
The Free Press welcomes letters The Richmond Free Press respects the opinions of its readers. We want to hear from you. We invite you to write the editor. All letters will be considered for publication. Concise, typewritten letters related to public matters are preferred. Also include your telephone number(s). Letters should be addressed to: Letters to the Editor, Richmond Free Press, P.O. Box 27709, 422 East Franklin Street, Richmond, VA 23261, or faxed to: (804) 643-7519 or e-mail: letters@richmondfreepress.com.
Court. And simply by inaction — by refusing to enforce the Voting Rights Act as states act to restrict voting — he can do more to undermine civil rights than Mr. Wallace could by standing in the schoolhouse door. On the campaign trail, President Trump wooed AfricanAmerican voters, saying given disproportionate unemployment and poverty, they should vote for him. “What have you got to lose?” he asked. By making Sen. Sessions attorney general, President Trump has shown us what we have lost: A U.S. Department of Justice committed to equal rights, ready to defend the right to vote. People of color, immigrants, the LGBT community and women are likely to experience justice denied directly, and the country as a whole will suffer as justice is defiled. The writer is founder and president of the national Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
Richmond Free Press 422 East Franklin Street Richmond, VA 23219 Telephone (804) 644-0496 FAX (804) 643-7519 Mailing Address: P.O. Box 27709 Richmond, VA 23261 ______________
Founder Raymond H. Boone President – Publisher Jean P. Boone Managing Editor Bonnie V. Winston bonniewinston@richmondfreepress.com
Vice President – New Business Development Raymond H. Boone Jr.
jrboone@richmondfreepress.com
Vice President – News Enhancement Jeremy M. Lazarus Vice President – Production April A. Coleman Staff Writers Fred Jeter, Frances Crutchfield Hazel Trice Edney Photographers Sandra Sellars James Haskins, Rudolph Powell and Clinton A. Strane ______________
Vice President – Administration Tracey L. Oliver Advertising Traffic Coordinator Cynthia Downing Advertising Fax: (804) 643-5436 e-mail: advertising@richmondfreepress.com classifieds@richmondfreepress.com
National Advertising Representative EPMG ______________
Distribution Reed Marshall LLC ______________
Richmond Free Press is published weekly by Paradigm Communications, Inc. Copies of the Richmond Free Press (one copy per person) are free of charge at outlets in the Richmond area. Back copies are available at the Free Press office at $3 per copy. Bulk orders can be made prior to any upcoming edition at special rates.
A Publication of PARADIGM COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
422 East Franklin Street Richmond, VA 23219 Telephone (804) 644-0496