Social Justice

Ronn Jordan

Ronn Jordan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:38:54 -0700

A proud Akwesasne Mohawk, Ronn is a lifelong Bronx resident who is a product of NYC Public Schools and knows the importance of community involvement. Since his son Christopher was a kindergarten student Ronn has been in the spotlight of both political and educational issues in the NW Bronx, a leader in a school construction campaign that won 6 new schools and provided 3000 much needed seats through a NYC Capital Budget Amendment. Ronn has been appointed to Mayor Bloomberg’s task force to develop the Kingsbridge Armory, a 565,000 square foot Armory that has been left almost empty for 15 years into a $350 million dollar multi-use facility to provide much needed economic development and 4 schools in one of the most overcrowded school districts in the state. Ronn serves on the Board of the Alliance for Quality Education, a statewide coalition of education advocates to bring about fair and equitable funding for public schools. Ronn also serves as both a mentor and colleague to the youth affiliate of the NWBCCC, Sistas & Brothas United (SBU).While serving on the design team of Leadership Institute, Ronn worked tirelessly with youth leaders and parents to design the first small HS in the country that was designed by youth for youth. Leadership Institute is a NYC public school whose 3 themes are Leadership Development, Community Action and Education for Social Justice. Ronn has been dubbed “The Man, The Myth, The Legend” by the youth of SBU a title that he accepts with hard work and blushing cheeks. Ronn is currently leading the fight for schools to be built throughout NYC with a campaign title that he came up with NY S.E.A.T.S. (Schools Exploding At The Seams) that seeks to build over 26,000 new seats citywide with 10,000 of them going towards Bronx High Schools. Ronn is also the host of a weekly internet radio show called “Ronnagade Radio ~Warrior for Justice~” that discusses Social Justice issues that affect our country.

Chris Lowe

Chris Lowe — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:05:29 -0700

Kate Thomas

Kate Thomas2 — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:45:05 -0700

Kari Fulton

Kari Fulton — Wed, 20 May 2009 07:49:48 -0700

Featured as a young leader to watch by both Elle and Glamour Margazine, Kari Fulton is a noted activist in the Environmental Justice and Youth Climate Movement. Currently she is the National Campus Campaign Coordinator for the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative. Through EJCC Fulton works to mobilize young people of color around environmental justice and campus sustainability. Recently Fulton was awarded the Brower New Leaders Award (Earth Island Institute) and the Damu Smith Power of One Young Professional Award (Deep South Center For Environmental Justice at Dillard University). Currently, Fulton acts as a spokesperson for the Energy Action Coalition is a senior fellow with Young People For the American Way (YP4) and a member of the YP4 Leadership Academy. She is also a graduate of the John H. Johnson School of Communications at Howard University. In her spare time Fulton is a blogger on checktheweather.net a member of the board of directors for the Lets Raise A Million Project and Dreaming Out Loud, an after-school program in DC.

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asddf asdfgfd — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:21:26 -0800

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bachelor winner

Martha Warner

martawarner — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:02:46 -0800

Born in Kansas City, KS during the Great Depression. Father a truck driver, mother a stay-at-home Mom, who was
disabled. Both parents worked incredibly hard but never moved out of the lower class. I won scholarships to college, and also worked part-time to achieve a Bachelors, then an MA in Sociology, complete with Phi Beta Kappa membership.

My husband became a college prof of political science at the U. of Vermont, and died at age 40, leaving me with
four children to finish rearing. I taught Social Studies in High School for 30 years, in Vermont. My son Rick has a PhD in history from U. CA and teaches history at a small liberal arts college. My daughter Marianne teaches in a middle school in Maine and is completing her Master's Degree, during the summer. My daughter Suzanne has a Master's Degree and works for the state of DE. My son John is ill.

I traveled a bit after retirement and have now settled in the "Triangle" area of N.C. I found my home via research; I was looking for a mild climate area populated by a diverse population, with Progressive policies and ideas. It's here. My little town of Carrboro is a very friendly town, an interesting and satisfying place to retire.

I am a Progressive. I participated in the Civil Rights movement in DC and Selma, AL, and my name is on the
WALL of TOLERANCE, honoring Rosa Parks, in Montgomery, AL and I am one of the founding members of the Memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., being constructed in DC. I belong to the ACLU, Amnesty, SPLCenter, the Humanist society, and other progressive groups. I like to quilt, write, cook, workout and travel, in addition to
keeping up with happenings in my town, nation, and around the world. PEACE to each and all.

Richard Maguire

Richard Maguire — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:46:16 -0700

Garth Schumacher

Garth Schumacher — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:52:27 -0700

I've spent 35 years as a professional actor and 5 years as an ordained United Church of Christ Pastor with a focus on Christian/Religious Education. Primary focus for the past 10 years has been large event planning for youth ministry.

Forty Years Later, Still Far From the Mountaintop

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:14:38 -0700

“You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to hell because he didn't see the poor. … And I come by here to say that America, too, is going to hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.”

You might think those words were recently uttered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's controversial former pastor, hurled in the latest guilt-by-association attack against the presidential candidate. In fact, that was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addressing sanitation workers in Memphis just a little more than two weeks before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

This is the Dr. King that the nation tends not to commemorate when we honor his birthday in January, the man who 40 years ago this week was at the side of workers fighting for fair wages and preparing to take his case for economic justice to Washington. Since that battle, his message has too often been scrubbed clean of anything that would hold the nation accountable for making racial equality an economic fact of life.

A report released today by the Service Employees International Union seeks to undo that travesty.The economic implications of King’s movement and message are explored in “Beyond the Mountaintop: King’s Prescription for Poverty,” prepared by the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center and the Howard University Department of Economics.

Podcast

Listen to William Spriggs, Howard University economics department chairman, discuss what he calls the illusion of progress for African Americans 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and what a progressive economic policy true to King's vision would look like.

That report concludes that 40 years after King spoke of a promised land of social and economic justice, “we seem to be paralyzed outside the gates of the city.” It is true that African Americans “have made amazing progress to get where we are. Black educational attainment is three times higher than in 1968, for example. Our out-of-wedlock birthrate has fallen in half. And countless positions of authority—from school boards to political offices to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 corporations—are now filled with black women and men.”

And yet, today African Americans still face what the report calls “a two-dimensional job crisis: high unemployment and low wages.” Four out of 10 black people over the age of 16 were jobless in 2006, the report notes, and 31 percent of black full-time workers earned less than $25,000. Thus, even as the education gap between black people and white people has narrowed dramatically in the past 40 years, the racial economic disparities have not.

The unemployment rate among African Americans today, 7.9 percent, is higher than it was in 1969, when it was 5.3 percent, and in 1999, when it was 6.3 percent. The median income for black men actually fell between 2001 and 2006 in inflation-adjusted terms, from $23,673 to $22,609. Childhood poverty, after being cut in half during the Great Society years of the late 1960s, is now at 32.6 percent, only slightly lower than it was in 1969 and higher than it was in 2000.

The report authors point to three factors: the erosion of civil rights enforcement under the Bush administrations, the decline in the value of the federal minimum wage as it was held to $5.15 an hour through the 1990s until it was finally increased last year (in effect, imposing a one-third cut in the bottom rung of the wage ladder from its value in 1969), and the decline in union representation from 28 percent of the workforce in 1969 to just 12 percent today.

“With weak anti-discrimination enforcement, a declining real minimum wage and falling unionization rates, Dr. King would not find it surprising that poverty rates are stubbornly high even in the face of a growing economy,” the report said.

An economic justice agenda that would address the continued economic crisis in African-American communities and would be true to the spirit of King, the report concludes, would generate full employment, fight discrimination, protect workers’ freedom of association and right to join a union, and raise the minimum wage so that it keeps pace with prices.

William E. Spriggs, chairman of the economics department at Howard University, said that the focus on pathologies in the African-American community, while it has its place, must not be allowed to distract from structural problems in the economy, such as the fact that minimum wage workers today, who make $5.85 an hour, earn a wage that would have been illegal in 1968, when it was, in 2006 dollars, $7.71.

The parable that King referenced in his speech in Memphis was of a beggar named Lazarus who did not receive help from a rich man who passed him every day. The point of the parable, in King’s mind, goes beyond the superficial message that the rich man should have shown kindness to his fellow man in need. “We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace,” King said in a 1967 speech. “But one day we must come to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring."

When the current economic policy debate is placed under the light of that statement, it is clearly found wanting. What we are getting from the major parties is constrained financially by the war in Iraq, which presents the same diversion of resources to an unjust war that Vietnam was for King in 1968, and constrained ideologically by fear of the conservative political machine, which has in many cases worsened America’s race and class disparities but has succeeded in deflecting blame.

Echoing King, Spriggs said that the nation needs an economic plan that doesn’t just give a few coins to beggars along the side of the road but addresses “our responsibility to build a society that would not create beggars along the side of the road.”

An America that commits itself to that ideal is an America worthy of blessing.

Pat Buchanan's Racist Rant

Isaiah J. Poole — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:07:55 -0700

MSNBC has another Imus problem, and his name is Pat Buchanan.

In fact, the racist drivel that Buchanan has recently penned (posted on Human Events, among other places) is arguably more offensive than the insult Don Imus thoughtlessly tossed at the Rutgers University women's basketball team, which eventually led to the simulcast of his syndicated radio show being pulled from MSNBC. Imus, after all, conceded his off-the-cuff comment about "nappy-headed 'hos" was a tasteless joke and profusely apologized. Buchanan's comments are not the fruit of rapid-fire talk show banter but are deliberately chosen written words that read as if they were copied from a white supremacist polemic.

While it is not breaking news that Buchanan is trafficking in KKK talking points, his latest column ought to have rational people on both the left and the right saying enough is enough.

Buchanan writes in response to Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race last week that in the conversation about race, "White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to."

And what does "white America" have to say? According to Buchanan:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

... Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

He wraps up his column with a set of jaw-droppingly misleading statements about black-on-white crime and "hoaxes" perpetrated by a "Rev. Al" — presumably the Rev. Al Sharpton, who apparently no more merits the courtesy of having his full name published than Sen. Barack Obama, who Buchanan referred to as "Barack."

In Buchanan's world, being an elected United States senator and a presidential candidate does not entitle you the basic courtesy of being called by your first and last name if you fall under the one-drop rule.

AgentX on the African American Opinion blog wrote that "I don't have all night to debunk this entire sack of crap" but his blog has made a start at it. But, more importantly, he publishes the e-mail address of the president of NBC News, State Capus: steve.capus@nbc.com.

"Here's hoping this dinosaur gets put out to pasture," Agent X writes.

In fact, we need to do more than hope for it. We need to insist on it.

Hat tip to Monroe Anderson for his alert on this.