Month: August 2020

In 2016, I was sitting on my couch watching a BLM documentary as the narrator began to unfold the story of the 1955 murder of Emmett Louis Till. I was stunned as the shocking photos of Till’s brutalized body crossed the screen, just as they did when his mother Mamie demanded the media show the graphic images because she “wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” I turned to my partner, barely able to speak, tears welling up in my eyes. “How could I have not known about this?” My heart was broken wide open. I experienced the immediate and universal horror and anguish any mother would feel at the sight of such cruelty to her child. The pictures of Till’s brutalized body did to me what the 1963 smiling school photos of the four black girls murdered at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham had not. I looked directly, as a mother, into the face of a child brutalized beyond recognition. It could have been any mother’s child. It could have been my child. As my response moved from my head directly to my heart, I felt the reality and depth of my previous complacency.

At that moment, the realization began to dawn on me; the murder of Till is not an African American story, it is an American story that belongs to all of us. Way beyond the squeamish embarrassment of my ignorance of the event, I was sickened, horrified. The phrase “I’m free, white, and twenty-one” came back to me. The image of Emmett Till’s disfigured face showed me what this casually accepted white supremacy really meant. Participating in the extraordinary benefits of white privilege also means participating in the legacy of violence, theft, and oppression of others that created it. When Mamie Till-Mobley made me look directly at the face of race hate, I felt a loss within my humanity.

In my segregated white childhood, intellectual assent was given to the idea that racism existed in some places in America, and it was very wrong. In Sunday school, I sang the song, “Jesus loves the little children, all little children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” That I was unaware of the murder of Emmett Till showed me how the dominant white paradigm shaped brotherly love, mainly within its community.

Emmett Till is the representation of all that has not changed. He and his family still have not received justice for his murder. A bill to make lynching a federal hate crime is still stalled in the Senate. Take action and write your representatives demanding its passage. The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation is asking supporters to hold law enforcement accountable to move his reopened case forward and to demand justice for Emmett Till while the case is active with the Department of Justice. The last known accomplice is alive. Contact District Attorney DeWayne Richardson ,dewayne@msdeltada.com 662.378.2105 to demand #JusticeforEmmettTill. Sign the petition to demand long-overdue justice for Emmett Till 65 years after his brutal murder: ,tinyurl.com/y3v5dauk

@EmmettTill #EmmettTill #EmmettTillLegacyFoundation #BlackLivesMatter

Amendment XIX:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or any State, on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

One hundred years ago today, the Tennessee Legislature ratified the 19th Amendment, adding women’s right to vote to the U.S. Constitution. White women, that is. Women of color still had to fight for several more decades to advance policies and laws that would give them access to the ballot box. And even then the tools of intimidation, poll taxes, roll purges, cutting back on early voting, and unnecessarily restrictive voter registration requirements suppressed the votes of people of color.

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was enacted to help secure the right to vote for millions of Americans. And it was repeatedly renewed, by wide bipartisan majorities in Congress, to make sure voting is fair especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent. Then in 2013, a Supreme Court decision struck down one of its core provisions – preclearance. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a wide-ranging dissent on behalf of herself and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, justifying the continued vitality of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provision. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the Voting Rights Amendment has proven effective,” Ginsburg wrote. “The Court appears to believe that the Voting Rights Amendment’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclear­ance is no longer needed.”

“The Supreme Court has effectively gutted one of the nation’s most important and effective civil rights laws,” Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement. “Minority voters in places with a record of discrimination are now at greater risk of being disenfranchised than they have been in decades. Today’s decision is a blow to democracy. Jurisdictions will be able to enact policies that prevent minorities from voting, and the only recourse these citizens will have will be expensive and time-consuming litigation.”

“Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision erases fundamental protections against racial discrimination in voting that have been effective for more than 40 years,” Elisabeth MacNamara, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, said in a statement. “Congress must act quickly to restore the Voting Rights Act.”

“Today will be remembered as a step backward in the march towards equal rights,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “We must ensure that this day is just a page in our nation’s history, rather than the return to a dark chapter.”

“The Roberts Court proved again that it will not be deterred by Supreme Court precedent, the realities on the ground in our nation; nor will it defer to Congress even when the legislative branch is granted clear authority by the Constitution to remedy our nation’s long history of discrimination against racial and language minorities,” said J. Gerald Hebert of the Campaign Legal Center. “The Court today declared racism dead in this country despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.”

So a century after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, let’s talk about the unfinished business behind the anniversary. “What we are seeing is systematic voter suppression around the country,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, the Georgia organization building on former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ work mobilizing and protecting the rights of voters. In announcing the initiative aimed at mobilizing voters and countering voter suppression in 2020 Abrams said, “We’re going to have a fair fight in 2020 because my mission is to make certain that no one has to go through in 2020 what we went through in 2018.”

Concerns about voting accessibility ahead of the November election, are concerns for all citizens, regardless of party affiliation. Guaranteeing fair, free, and secure elections is about doing what’s right for every citizen, as human beings. Here are important actions to take between now and Nov 3rd to ensure democracy for all:

Check your voter registration early and often to make sure it’s up to date https://mvp.sos.ga.gov and make sure family and friends also check;

Volunteer to be a poll worker;

Counter misinformation and disinformation by knowing getting credible sources for voting information such as https://fairfight.com, https://NBCNews.com/PlanYourVote and https://19thnews.org; and

Share these tips!

#VoterSuppression #voters #Allinforvoting #vote #fairfight #UnintentionalAccomplice #19thnews #PlanYourVote

Back in early May, the LA Times Opinion section asked readers to envision life in California after the pandemic and share their thoughts on what COVID-19 health and economic crisis reveals about us as a society, and what transformations may be necessary to the heal the trauma. More than 3700 readers responded, myself included. My response was included in the July 26, 2020, LA Times Sunday Edition:

“Carolyn L. Baker was among a handful of readers who wrote before George Floyd died to identify racism as causing many of the problems exacerbated by COVID-19:

Back in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned a “Great Society” and declared a “War on Poverty”, the centerpiece of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based anti-poverty programs. Yet at the same time, the regulatory practices, labor and wage policies, and tax structure ensured the distinct winners and losers would remain perpetually the same.

The irony of this was best described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he said ‘Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.’

Policy changes over the past 50-plus years have continually whittled away the social safety net. Racism and classism have broken the country’s social compact and stunted the development of nearly every institution crucial for a healthy society. This includes organized labor, public education, wage and hour standards, job-based health and retirement security. Racist power and racist policies must be confronted, named, and dismantled.”

#reimaginecalifornia #LATimesOpinion #COVID19 #GeorgeFloyd #Racism #Classism #Philanthropy #LATimes #AnUnintentionalAccomplice #CarolynLBaker

Black August is a call for reflection, study, and action to promote Black liberation. Its roots go back to California prisons in the 1970s, during a period of sustained struggle and resistance against racialized violence against Black imprisoned people, especially those calling for Black liberation and challenging state power. Ignited by the deaths of Jonathan and George Jackson in August 1970 and August 1971, and honoring others who gave their lives including Khatari Gualden, William Christmas, and James McClain, a group of imprisoned people came together to develop a means of honoring that sacrifice and promoting Black liberation.

While August is significant because of the deaths of the Jackson brothers, it is also a month with many other significant moments in Black history in the United States including the formation of the Underground Railroad, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the March on Washington, the Haitian Revolution, the Fugitive Slave Law Convention, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the births of Marcus Garvey, Russell Maroon Shoatz, and Fred Hampton to the death of W.E.B du Bois.

So there was an idea that this could be a time that imprisoned people in the California prison system could use for reflection, study, and to think about how to strengthen their struggles. During the month, people wouldn’t use radios or television, would fast between sun up and sundown, and practice other measures of self-discipline.

Excerpt from

Black Liberation and the Abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex: An Interview with Rachel Herzing

#BlackAugust #prisonindustrialcomplex #blacklivesmatter #Abolishprisons #10daysofabolition #abolishyouthprisons #defundthepolice #whitesupremacy #massincarceration