pay scale. Advocating equal pay and dealing with issues of poverty, and implementing solutions, improves the material conditions of women at the bottom. The two emotional high points in this speech included the shout out to the 102-year-old woman who waited all day to vote, and the call to gun reform, mentioning victims by name. I was most moved by the family of Hadiya Pendleton, who sat with First Lady Michelle Obama, who had attended their daughter’s funeral. They are not only important as parents of a gun violence victim, but as proxies for the more than 500 people shot in Chicago in the last year or so. It was also
MALVEAUX continued from Page 30 is not an opportunity to drill down on every issue, so I very much understand that President Obama could not offer details to the many proposals he raised in SOTU. Still, it was refreshing to hear the president talk about poverty, about women’s work and wages, and about issues of equality. The first legislation that President Obama signed was the Lily Ledbetter Act, which dealt with equal pay issues, without acknowledging race in any of these conversations or the fact is African American women (and Latinas) are at the bottom of the
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moving to see former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, unable to clap, who brought her hands together. The president’s comments got a standing O, but as soon as the president’s speech was over, thirsty vultures, including Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) ran to the media to voice opposition. The president has offered an ambitious agenda, and one that will improve the lot of all Americans. While I chafe at his failure to mention African Americans, I am excited by proposals to close the wealth gap. His agenda won’t be implemented unless we advocate for it. What will you do to move it forward? wi
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fletcher continued from Page 30 There is one more piece to this whole affair. The conservatives are yelling about the Postal Service not making money. Yet, let’s keep in mind, as the Economic Policy Institute has reminded us, that making money was and is not the main purpose of the Postal Service. Their purpose is to ensure the efficient and speed delivery of the mail to all residents of the United States. Certainly, that does not mean that one should condone www.washingtoninformer.com
backwardness. But it does mean that it is patently unfair and disingenuous to compare the USPS to a private company, such as an auto company. When auto companies are charged with providing all people in the U.S.A. with efficient, low cost, environmentally safe vehicles, we can reopen this discussion. It is now time for the public to respond to this attack. I don’t know about you but I have simply had enough of the attacks on the U.S. Postal Service. To me, there remains a certain lev-
one’s way into the mainstream of American society. Look at Young and think of such leading Black American business figures as Kenneth I. Chenault, head of American Express, or Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., the investment banker and super-lawyer, or Richard D. Parsons, former chairman of Time Warner and Citigroup. Think, too, of the operating style of such Black politicians as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, and, yes, President Obama. This was the point one businessman interviewed in the documentary meant when he said that Young forged a “road map” for Blacks into corporate America – where immense economic and political power resides – where there had been none before. He’s absolutely correct. But I would broaden the point a bit to say that Whitney Young, the powerbroker, did so as part of expanding the road map he was helping Black Americans build for their entire future as Americans. wi
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overdue and right on time. For, even as it strips away more of the gauze that still seems to obscure how difficult the achievement of basic civil rights for Blacks in the 1960s was and how frighteningly turbulent the late 1960s were, “The Powerbroker” implicitly establishes the direct link between the work Young did and sought to do then and the complex place in American society Black Americans occupy now. For one thing, Young’s advocacy in 1963 and 1964 – before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – of a comprehensive $145-billion social and economic plan for Black Americans, which he called a “domestic Marshall Plan,” underscores that he and the rest of the civil rights leadership fully understood the importance of putting African Americans on a solid economic foundation for their, and the nation’s, benefit. Listen to Young’s explanation of the need for it, and then recall President Obama’s discussion of
some of America’s social needs in his State of the Union speech. For another, look here at how easily and confidently Young mixes with some of the leading figures of American business. One can almost feel his own ease and comfort and supreme confidence in his ability to put these men at ease with him. These glimpses of Young at work with corporate titans may seem business-as-usual today, when Black men and women, and other people of color, occupy the top offices of Fortune 500 companies, law firms, and powerful commercial and investment banks. But, until Whitney Young, White Americans had never seen a Black person like him: a Black person who was a civil rights leader but who moved with ease among them and spoke their business-oriented, bottom-line-results lingo as if he were one of them. That’s because Whitney Young was one of them — just as he was a Black and a civil rights leader. Both as a matter of his civil rights work and as a matter of his personal operating style, Young expanded the vision, the model, of how a Black American could navigate
Lee A. Daniels is a longtime journalist and author of His most recent book is Last Chance: The Political Threat to Black America. el of magic in knowing that you can put that letter or package in the mail and, presto, it appears somewhere else in such a relatively short amount of time. I do not want to have to bargain with someone or some company over how quickly and efficiently my mail will be delivered. wi Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. Follow him at www.billfletcherjr.com. The Washington Informer
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