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Even more than Romney, Trump’s violence driven, race-baiting crusade that nakedly appeals to largely white lower-income, less educated, rural and strongly male crowds drive the point home that blacks are not even an after-thought in his drive to snare the White House. But there’s more to the picture about Trump and black voters as the punches that the black assailant delivered to the Trump protester showed.
In “World Report 2016: Events of 2015,” experts criticize U.S. police practices and become yet another international body bringing the plight of Blacks in America onto the international stage. Once again, high-profile police killings of unarmed African Americans gained media attention in 2015, including the deaths of Freddy Gray in Baltimore and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina,” the report said.
With the recession now in the rearview mirror, black people want to be part of the nation’s economic recovery. Hillary Clinton proposes a menu of solutions to raise incomes for struggling families. They range from tax cuts for child care to encouraging corporations to share their rising profits with workers. In an interview with The Root, Clinton’s senior policy adviser, Maya Harris, underscored the candidate’s plan to “unleash small-business growth.” Harris says black women, who represent the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs, would benefit.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” That’s from Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. This is the King whose bust is in Obama’s Oval Office. This is the King the president paraphrases after bombing seven countries in as many years, which he did after a 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in which he said as head of state, he could not follow King or Mahatma Gandhi alone.
For years, civil rights groups have blamed the gaping disparities in school discipline on racism and said that they would challenge school officials nationally to find better ways to discipline black students instead of shoving them out of their school doors. Many education officials counter that factors other than race explain the disparities in suspensions. Though they don't spell out what those factors are, the disturbing implication is that black students are more prone to carry knives and guns, pick more fights, act unruly and engage in illicit conduct than whites at schools.
Ebony Magazine stirred a mini-firestorm of rage when it dredged up an old photo shot of the TV Cosby show family, plopped it on its November cover, and then fractured the picture. The obvious point being that embattled comedian Bill Cosby not only disgraced his legacy but disgraced the hitherto near sacrosanct image and legacy of the celebrated Cosby TV show family, the Huxtables. The premise of the show was that there is fully intact, respectable, high-achieving, prim and proper black middle-class families.
City, state and federal agencies have been stepping up efforts to stamp out fraudulent mortgage practices that target communities of color, pricing discrimination and redlining among them. Redlining, the practice of denying credit to qualified applicants who seek loans for homes in specific neighborhoods, is illegal under the 1968 Fair Housing Act. However, a Buffalo-area bank on September 10 agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle a lawsuit that alleges it redlined a large, predominantly black community in that city.
For African Americans, the passage of the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, represented the culmination of a centuries-long struggle for citizenship. President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the legislation, designed to end a century of voter disfranchisement in the South and other parts of the nation, was inspired by grassroots protests and organizing that gripped the nation. Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts in Selma, Ala., linked a local campaign for voting rights to a national movement to redefine American democracy.