Newspapers / The Carolina Times (Durham, … / Jan. 13, 2018, edition 1 / Page 1
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( "I.H,., Hour 7 1 fNr~ CH novjq J 15/01/^7 ' H HI..,|| - nFDG p n Roy ^^Y r^ 7 r^^ aasa **CHTI 1 OPTMFM7 CHopfi mi 1. Nr. ^^-a^i VOLUME 97 - NUMBER 2 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA - SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 2018 TELEPHONE (919) 682-2913 PRICE: 50 CENTS Lawyers try to shape judges” decision on North Carolina maps By Gary D. Robertson GREENSBORO (AP) - Lawyers for Republican legislative leaders and for voters tried Jan. 5 shape an upcoming decision by three federal judges about whether North Carolina legislative districts redrawn by a court-appointed expert should be used in this year”s elections. The attorneys and the judges heard a presentation from a Stanford University law professor whom the judicial panel hired after expressing concerns that the House and Senate maps approved by the GOP- controlled legislature last summer failed to remove unlawful racial bias from four districts. The judges also pointed to other House districts in and around Raleigh and Charlotte that they said may have been needlessly altered, in violation of the state constitution. GOP legislators first approved redrawn lines in 2011, which was when Democratic activists and others first challenged them in state court for relying too heavily on race. Other voters sued in federal court in 2015. Lawyers representing voters urged the judges on Jan. 5 to accept the changes made by Persily, who redrew lines for roughly two dozen of the 170 General Assembly districts. Mainstream media often ignores Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s fight for economic justice and his strong relationship with the Black Press. (Wikimedia Commons) MLK’s Unheralded Victories Recorded in the Black Press King’s Fight for Economic Justice Was Largely Ignored by Mainstream Media This Sept. 1955 photo provided by the Roland Giduz Photographic Collection/The Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, shows from left, LeRoy Frasier, John Lewis Brandon and Ralph Frasier on the steps of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C. LeRoy Frasier, who along with his brother and another high school student was among the first African-American undergraduate students to successfully challenge racial segregation at North Carolina’s flagship public university, has died at the age of 80. Fraser died of heart failure on Dec. 29, 2017, in New York City. (Roland Giduz Photographic Collection/The Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill via AP) Black student who helped desegregate university dies at 80 By Martha Waggoner RALEIGH (AP) - LeRoy Frasier, who along with his brother and another high school student was among the first African-American undergraduate students to successfully challenge racial segregation at North Carolina’s flagship public university, has died at the age of 80. Family members said Jan. 2 that Frasier, a long-time English teacher, suffered heart failure and died Dec. 29 at a hospital in New York City. Frasier; his brother, Ralph; and John Lewis Brandon were students at Hillside High School in Durham when they applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1955. They were rejected until a federal court judge ordered UNC-Chapel Hill to admit them. Although UNC-Chapel Hill officially opened its doors to the three young men, they weren’t welcomed everywhere. Ralph Frasier, 79, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, recalled Jan. 2 that the golf course and the university-owned restaurant and hotel known as the Carolina Inn were off-limits. At football games, they were seated in a section with custodial workers, who were black. And the three lived on their own floor of a section of a dormitory. They also had to get a special dispensation to use the swimming pool. “There were pockets of hostility among students primarily,” said Ralph Frasier, a retired attorney. “But some of the administrators were less than welcoming. Some faculty were less than welcoming.” The Frasier brothers completed three years at Chapel Hill before Ralph left for the Army and LeRoy for the Peace Corps. Their harsh treatment at UNC-Chapel Hill was one of the reasons they left the school, Ralph Frasier said. Both later graduated from what’s now North Carolina Central University, a historically black school in Durham. The brothers were 14 months apart in age but Ralph Frasier started his education early. The two went through their school years in the same grade and attended UNC-Chapel Hill at the same time. They spoke by phone almost every day and had last talked Christmas Day. “We were best friends for life,” Ralph Frasier said. While four black students had been admitted to the law school when the Frasiers and Brandon applied, no black undergraduates had been accepted. Some UNC-Chapel Hill students came to the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs to find students to challenge the school’s racial recalcitrance, Ralph Frasier said. They met with the principal of Hillside High School, a black school, to find the right families. They found families whose jobs couldn’t be threatened, and the Frasier brothers’ parents worked for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co., which was owned by blacks. Their uncle was the chief executive officer so “it was felt their employment was pretty secure,” Frasier said. In the decade since the Frasiers and Brandon attended UNC-Chapel Hill, the school has taken steps to make amends by inviting them to speak and naming scholarships after them. School Chancellor Carol Folt said in an email Jan. 2 that LeRoy Frasier “was a true pioneer and historic figure in Carolina’s history and his legacy of leadership, courage and self-sacrifice made a lasting impact on our university community. LeRoy’s contributions to Carolina will live on through our students who receive scholarships bearing his name.” The school has changed, Ralph Frasier said, although he noted that the statue of a Confederate soldier called Silent Sam remains on campus. “There’s still some distance to go,” he said. By Stacy M. Brown (NNPA Newswire Contributor) Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will always be remembered as a social activist and Baptist minister whose role was integral in the Civil Rights Movement. Publicly and privately. King fought for equality, justice and human rights for African Americans and others who suffered from racism, segregation and other injustices. His sermons, including the “Drum Major Instinct,” and his speeches like, “I Have a Dream,” are as important as they are legendary. But, those closest to King recalled some of his more unheralded feats. They also recalled the importance of the Black Press during the movement. “I would say King’s abiding commitment to focus on poverty and to deal with the wealth and equity gaps, and particularly the conditions of the poor, has been less heralded than his other accomplishments,” said Dr. Clarence Jones, a visiting professor at the University of San Francisco and a scholar and writer-in-residence at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Institute. Jones met King in 1960 when he was 29 and King was 31. Jones served on King’s legal team and help draft many ofhis most important speeches, including the 1963 “I Have a Dream” masterpiece. But, it was a speech that King delivered just five days before his April 4, 1968 assassination that Jones remembers most. “I’ve said so often that the sermon he gave at the National Cathedral in Washington was most important,” Jones said. “He captioned the speech, ‘Sleeping Through a Revolution,’ and that’s exactly what he’d say today, if he were here.” Many of King’s accomplishments were aided by his relationship with newspapers like the Atlanta Daily World, the Pittsburgh Courier and other Black-owned newspapers, Jones said. “The two essential pillars of support of the Civil Rights Movement were the Black Church and the Black Press,” he said. “The Black Press was critically important, and King had a healthy appreciation for the Black Press.” Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., another close confidant of King, agreed. “The kinship King had with [former EBONY and Jet owner] John Johnson, [National Newspaper Publishers Association founder] John Sengstacke and others was apparent, and he realized their value and they recognized his value,” Jackson said. Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., the president and CEO of the NNPA, said he will always cherish the days that he worked with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “I witnessed, first-hand, the fearless courage of Dr. King as he spoke out against global racial injustice and war when it was not popular to do so,” Chavis said. Chavis continued: “The mainstream press routinely mischaracterized Dr. King as a principle- less agitator. But, it was only the Black-owned newspapers during the 1960s that would, without apology, tell the truth that Dr. King was both a theological and intellectual genius whose worldwide vision, activism and principles demanded a public stance against the unjust Vietnam War, and against the duel racist Apartheid in America and South Africa.” Chavis recalled one of King’s most famous quotes: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Dr. Wornie Reed, the director of the Race and Social Policy Center at Virginia Tech, who marched alongside King in the 1960s, said too few people knew about King’s major project when he was assassinated, “The Poor People’s Campaign.” “The Memphis garbage workers strike was a side issue, the kind he was frequently involved in. He was putting in long days and nights across the country, calling on all of us who cared to come to Washington to help him to put maximum pressure on the federal government to come forth with concrete plans to reduce poverty in this rich country,” Reed said. “King was promoting a level of pressure that the federal government had never faced before. And many of us were organizing groups to do just that.” Reed continued: “When King vowed to stop commerce in Washington, to stop planes, buses, and trains, in other words, to close Washington down, he gained the support of all the radical Black groups who had abandoned King and the SCLC. These groups had tired of the ‘soft’ approach of the Civil Rights Movement. Many readily agreed to go to D.C. and help him do just that.” Sadly, the childhood poverty rate is higher now than it was in 1968 when King was assassinated— then, it was between 15 and 16 percent, Reed said. Now, the national child poverty rate was 18 percent in 2016, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. The poverty rate for Black children under 18 years old is 30.9 percent. Also, Reed said, the Black Press was more important to King and the Civil Rights Movement early on during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the early days of the sit-in movement. The Black Press provided vital coverage of the activities and the leading personalities in the movement, he said. “Often the major press was concerned with the disruptions of the movement while the Black Press tended to provide more information about what the activities meant on the ground in Black communities,” Reed said. National Urban League President Marc Morial said King’s profoundly important, but less heralded work on economic justice, particularly toward the end of his life, left a legacy that the Urban League champions today. “In his final speeches and his plans to launch a ‘Poor People’s Campaign,’ Dr. King laid out his extraordinary vision for a country that provides equal access to economic opportunity and prosperity to all, no matter their color or creed—a dream that organizations like the National Urban League are still fighting for,” Morial said. NAACP Calls H&M Ad Racist and Unacceptable BALTIMORE—The NAACP issued the following statement Jan. 9 regarding H&M’s recent advertisement: The NAACP condemns the recent advertisement by H&M, which pictured a young Black child wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the label “the coolest monkey in the jungle,” as an unacceptable racist and derogatory action. “H&M’s decision to use this ad is appalling and evidence of a lack of racial sensitivity within their corporate culture. We asked the ad be removed immediately,” said NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson.”
The Carolina Times (Durham, N.C.)
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Jan. 13, 2018, edition 1
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