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OPINION/ FORUM CHRONICLE Ernest H. Pitt Publisher/Co-Founder Elaine Pitt Buaness Manager T. Kevin Walker Managing Editor A < s The AKAs Are Here Downtown Winston-Salem is awash in pink and green. The ladies of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. are in town for their 60th Annual Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference. The four day gathering, April 4-7, is expected to attract more than 2,700 sorors from chap ters throughout North Carolina and Virginia. Attendees are expected to pump about $1.3 million into the local economy, but their impact here can't just dc measured in dollars ana cents. The women of Alpha Kappa Alpha have long been trailblaz ers, the movers and shakers of their various communities. These women are our elected officials, educators, corporate executives, our doctors and lawyers. They set examples of excellence for our young girls. The sorority encourages its members to reach back and give wholeheartedly to their commu Dr. Phillips nities. Alpha Kappa Alpha's dedication to community service will be evident this week. An educational youth summit and a college prep seminar will be held during the conference for local students. Attendees are also donating gift cards and school supplies to Family Services, Inc. "It is business, not as usual, but to a higher degree," Dr. Linda Gilliam, regional director of the Mid-Atlantic Region, told The Chronicle last month. "We are always ensuring that we are living out our mission, and that is service." Of course we are perhaps a bit biased, but we feel Winston-Salem is the perfect place for such a grand gathering of esteemed women. This city, after all. has produced some of the most loyal and devoted AKAs that this world has known. Foremost among them is the late, great Dr. Barbara K. Phillips, who became the sorority's International President in the late 1970s. Phillips took Alpha Kappa Alpha to new heights and she would be so proud of the work her sisters do each day to better the lives of others. Welcome to Winston-Salem, ladies, and thank you for all that you do! All White Federal Courts It's 2013, not 1950, but someone forgot to tell our federal court system that. The N.C NAACP is again voicing its concern about the lack of racial diversity on the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of N.C. bench'. The judges who preside over the district, which includes more than 40 counties, are all white, even though blacks and other minorities make up more than 25 per cent of the District's population. The federal District Court has never been black friendly in North Carolina, thanks, in no small part, to Jesse Helms, the racist who represented the state in the Senate for a number of decades. Winston-Salem's own James A. Beaty was nominated to the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of N.C. in the 1990s by President Clinton, but the state's Eastern and Western districts have never had a black judge. Washington protocol dictates that a state's two U.S. Senators forward the names of judges for consideration to the federal bench to the president, who then forwards his nomina tion for Senate approval. With a Democratic president (who also happens to be the nation's first black leader) and senator (Kay Hagan), this process should be seamless, yet there has been a vacancy on the Eastern District of N.C. bench since the begin ning of 2006. Reaty N.C. NAACP President William Barber indicated to the Raleigh-based News and Observer that U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican and Winston-Salem resident, may be the problem. Burr's reps say the sen ator submitted a list of possible nominees, including minorities, to President Obama in 2009, but they won't divulge the names of the candidates. Hagan has been more forthcoming. Her list of three possible nominees includes two African Americans. This apparent stalemate may be indicative of why so little gets done in Washington. There is this politi cal dance that must be performed, and dancers on both sides of the political aisle must be careful not to step on toes. While we are fans of bipartisanship, we don't believe that political niceties should trump progress. Surely if President Clinton could sneak in Beaty at a time when Helms was still in the Senate, President Obama can maneuver around any objections that Burr may have. It may cause a mini political battle, but it would be well worth it. As Barber told the News and Observer, if now isn't the time to diversify the Eastern District of N.C., when is? "Race has been a factor for more than 200 years," Barber said. "This should be a unique and historic opportunity to bring diversity." y* ^ ' Mm f f&pvmtANs A FKflfflgnHac 45 years after King Jesse Jackson Guest Columnist Today (April 4) marks the 45th year since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Dr. King, 39, at the time, has now been gone from us longer than he was with us. A monument celebrates his life on the mall in Washington. He is remem bered as the man with a dream at the March on Washington. In 1968, however. Dr. King was far from the favored celebrity he is today. He was under fierce criticism for opposing the war in Vietnam. Former colleagues were scorning his commitment to nonvio lence. When he went to Memphis, headlines called him "Chicken a la King." The St. Louis Globe Democrat termed him "one of the most menacing men in America today." The FBI was planning COINTEL PRO operations to spread rumors about him and dis credit him. The civil rights move ment had succeeded in end ing legal segregation. The Voting Rights Act had been passed. But Dr. King knew that his greatest challenges were still ahead as he turned his focus to poverty and equal opportunity. The war on poverty was being lost in the jungles of Vietnam as war consumed the resources needed. Dr. King went to Memphis to support f\ i r 1 g a n - American sani tation workers who were strik ing for equal pay and for a union. His first . nonviolent I march there I was disrupted I when some of I the marchers started breaking into and looting i/: j Mures iving uetiueu 10 return to Memphis because he believed that nonvio lence was now on trial. Dr. King was focused on organizing a Poor People's Campaign to march on Washington, reaching out to impover ished white miners, Hispanic farmworkers. Native Americans, the urban poor. Injustice any where. Dr. King preached, was a threat to justice everywhere. Dr. King decried the unemployment that was so crippling to the black com munity. But he also knew, even then, that a job no longer guaranteed a way out of poverty. "Most of the poverty-stricken people of America," he said, "are per sons who are working every day and they end up getting part-time wages for full-time work." So Dr. King went to Mempnis 10 march with sani tation workers ? and there his life was taken from him. Now, 45 years later, his last mission is still unfulfilled. One in five chil dren in America are at risk of going without ? y-v _ auequate nutrition, one in three African-American children. Forty-six million Americans are in poverty. More than 20 million peo ple are in need of full-time work. African-American unemployment remains twice the rate of whites. Dr. King knew that these conditions would not change unless working people and the poor joined across lines of race and religion and region to demand justice. Nothing would change unless peo pie disrupted business as usual, with nonviolent protest, expressing their own humanity while expos ing the inhumanity of the current arrangements. On April 4, many will remember Dr. King. The news programs will rebroadcast parts of his ser mon the night before he was shot when he promised those gathered that they would "get to the promised land" although "I might not get there with you." The way to remember Dr. King is to pick up the struggle. Poverty and inequality, he taught us, are a threat to democracy and to fieedom. And only non violent engagement by people of good conscience joining with those who are afflicted can possibly drive the change we need. Today, inequality has reached even greater extremes. Wages are sink ing. poverty is spreading In this rich nation, poor children go hungry. The Poor People's Campaign that was lost in the wake of war and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy is needed now more than ever. Rev. Jesse Jackson heads the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, wwwjrainbow push.org. King ! J. J * _ _ J . Trayvon Martin: One Year Later Ben Jealous Guest Columnist One year later, the Trayvon Martin tragedy still stings - and some peo ple are still throwing salt on the open wound. Recently, George Zimmerman's brother, Robert Zimmerman, post ed a tweet comparing Trayvon Martin to De'Marquis Elkins, a 17 year-old black teenager charged with fatally shoot ing a one-year-old baby. The tweet showed a photo of Elkins side by side with a photo of Martin, both making inap propriate gestures, with the caption "A picture speaks a thousand words. Any questions?" Zimmerman's follow up tweet read "Lib(eral) media [should] ask if what these [two] black teens did [to] a [woman and her baby] is the reason [peo ple] think blacks might [be] risky". The implica tion was that Trayvon Martin's actions on the night he was murdered were equivalent to the killing of an innocent child. This would be worri some enough if it were just the opportunistic cry of a family embroiled in racial controversy. But this belief - that male "black Trayvon Martin teens" are inherently more likely to be criminals - is ingrained in our society. It has seeped into our institu tions in the form of racial profiling, and too often it poisons the judgment of those who are supposed to protect us. Last year, I visited Sanford, Florida in the wake of the Tray von Martin case. The NAACP hosted a forum where res idents could report inci dents of police abuse. A number of African American mothers alleged that their teenage sons had been profiled, abused or even assaulted by the police. 1 found that the attitude of the local police department toward "black teens" was uncomfortably similar to that of Robert Zimmerman. But the fact is that fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, racial bias still runs rampant among law enforcement in this coun try. And Zimmerman's attitude infects an institu tion much more influential than the Sanford Police Department: the NYPD. The New York Police Department is currently fighting a class-action lawsuit against their racially biased practice of "stop-and-frisk" policing. Stop-and-frisk allows offi cers to stop, question and physically search any indi vidual they consider suspi cious. In 2011, NYPD officers stopped nearly 800,000 people for alleged "suspicious activity." Nine out of ten were innocent. 99 percent did not have a gun - and nine out of ten were black or Latino. The most revealing tid bit to come ouf of the class-action trial is a secretly recorded conver sation between a deputy inspector and a police offi cer. The inspector is dis cussing a high-crime neighborhood, and he can be heard telling his patrol man: "The problem was, what, male blacks... And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, male blacks 14 to 20, 21." In other words: stop more young black boys. Other evidence indi cates that patrolmen may be encouraged to meet arrest quotas. A tape played at the trial reveals a supervising officer asking for "more 250s" - or more stop-and-frisk forms. One plaintiff, a police officer, testified about the pressure he felt from supervisors - "they were very clear, it's non-negotiable. you're gonna do it. or you're gonna become a Pizza Hut delivery man." A picture may speak a thousand words, but leaked recordings speak volumes about an institu tion's priorities. These tapes reveal that the NYPD has effectively placed a bounty on "black teens." By profiling young teens of color, they are using the same grisly logic as Robert Zimmerman And the result is apparent: in 2011, black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 made up 42 per cent of those targeted by stop-and-frisk. That group makes up less than 5 per cent of the city's popula tion. The crime attributed to De'Marquis Elkins' was truly horrific and despica ble. But Elkins does not represent an entire demo graphic, just like Adam Lanza did not act on behalf of all young white men. Racial profiling pun ishes innocent individuals for the past actions of those who look and sound like them. It misdirects crucial resources and undercuts the trust needed between law enforcement and the communities they serve. It has no place in our national discourse, and no place in our nation's police depart ments. Ben Jealous is President/CEO of the NAACP.
Winston-Salem Chronicle (Winston-Salem, N.C.)
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