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VOLUME 98 - NUMBER 29
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA - SATURDAY, JULY 27, 2019
TELEPHONE 919-682-2913
PRICE 50 CENTS
Trump’s Latest Racist Attack Hits
Baltimore as He Continues to
Build Steady Narrative of Hate
By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Contributor
Recently, President Trump launched another racist attack on an African American member of Congress and the
people he represents.
“Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol
about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous,”
Trump wrote on Twitter. “His district is considered the Worst in the USA.”
“As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded.
Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could
help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place,” Trump continued, spelling Rep. Cummings’ name incorrectly.
Reports, video and still photography from the Mexican border focused on conditions for those detained by U.S.
authorities, verify President that Trump is lying. Conditions on our southern border have been described as unsanitary
and inhuman. A visit by Vice President Pence on July 12 showed video confirming earlier reports of bad conditions
for those detained.
Trump’s latest attack on a Black lawmaker and his majority Black constituency is nothing new. Rep. Cummings
represents Baltimore, which is 60 percent Black and 34 percent white. CNN anchor Victor Blackwell, who hails from
Baltimore, took notice of Trump’s habit of using the words “infested” or “infestation” when referring to people of
color.
“That’s usually reserved for references to rodents and insects, but we’ve seen the president invoke infestation to
criticize lawmakers before,’ Blackwell stated on the air recently.
“You see a pattern here? Just two weeks ago President Trump attacked four minority congresswomen. ‘Why don’t
they go back to the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.’ Reminder, three of them were
born here; all of them are American. Infested he says,” the African American CNN anchor added.
Trump also used the word “infestation” in 2017 when he attacked civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis,
who represents parts of Atlanta.
“Mr. President, I go home to my district daily,” Rep. Cummings responded to Trump on Twitter. “Each morning,
I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the Executive
Branch. But, it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents,” Cummings said.
Cummings told ABC News that Trump’s “go back” remarks aimed at the four congresswomen, Reps. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Illan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), brought back
memories of the racism he faced growing up in Baltimore in the 1960s.
Reaction to Trump’s latest racist tirade was swift.
Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. Jack Young wrote that Trump’s statement was, “completely unacceptable for the
political leader of our country to denigrate a vibrant American City like Baltimore, and to viciously attack U.S. Rep
resentative Elijah Cummings, a patriot and a hero.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), whose father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was the 39th Mayor of Baltimore
from 1947 to 1959, and brother, Thomas D’Alesandro III, was Mayor of Baltimore from 1967 to 1971, defended Rep.
Cummings and condemned Trump as racist.
“@RepCummings is a champion in the Congress and the country for civil rights and economic justice, a beloved
leader in Baltimore, and deeply valued colleague. We all reject racist attacks against him and support his steadfast
leadership. #ElijahCummingsIsAPatriot,” wrote Speaker Pelosi.
After a torrent of recent racial invective by the .current President, commentators on both sides of the political isle
are routinely referring to the President’s statements as the most racist they have seen in a lifetime. Few can find a
President of the United States whose racist beliefs were so public.
Writing recently in The Atlantic on Trump’s attacks on Rep. Illan Omar, Adam Serwer pointed out, “To attack
Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the de
fense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose.”
“This is not about Omar anymore... It is about defending the idea that America should be a country for all its
people. If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere. What Americans
do now, in the face of this, will define us forever,” Serwer concluded.
Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent journalist and writer for NNPA as well as a political analyst and strategist
as Principal of Win Digital Media LLC. She may be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke
REP. ELIJAH CUMMINGS
Durham Branch
NAACP) to Meet
The Durham Branch of the NAACP will
meet Sunday, July 28 at 4 p.m. at First
Presbyterian Church, 305 E Main Street.
The public is invited to attend.
Rev. Rachel Green, president.
Register to
Vote
Review: Looking back at Mike Wallace, who made ‘em
By JOCELYN NOVECK
AP National Writer
Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ku Klux Klan leader Eldon Edwards.
Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand, Shirley MacLaine, Eleanor Roosevelt.
If they were famous or infamous _ they likely sat across from newsman Mike Wal
lace at some point during his seven-decade career. And he made 'em all squirm, as film-
maker Avi Belkin shows in his absorbing new documentary, “Mike Wallace Is Here.”
Belkin had crucial access to CBS archives, including those of "60 Minutes,” the
show that made Wallace famous. And watching all this footage, the undercurrent is
unspoken but obvious: How would Wallace, with his famous take-no-prisoners style,
handle President Donald Trump?
Alas, Wallace died in 2012, so we must make do with a brief few moments of the
newsman with Trump in his late 30s, a brash young tycoon who suggests _ surprise! _
that he’d be better at negotiating arms control agreements than diplomats in Washing
ton.
"There’s a new billionaire in town _ Trump’s the name,” Wallace begins. He asks the
young magnate what he plans to do with the next 40 years. "There are so many things
to do,” Trump says. "Politics?” asks Wallace.
"No, not politics,” Trump replies. (It’s worth noting that Wallace’s son Chris, of the
Fox News Channel, has irked Trump enough to earn a recent tweet from the president:
"I like Mike Wallace better.”)
Iso included are some prickly conversations between Wallace and his "60 Minutes”
colleagues, as he approached retirement. One gets the sense Wallace wasn’t thrilled
about having the tables turned with questions about his own life.
That’s probably why the film focuses almost exclusively on Wallace’s work, not his
personal life, including his multiple marriages or his struggles with depression. It’s also
why it’s shocking when he tells colleague Morley Safer what he has until then denied:
that during a bout of depression, he once swallowed pills in a suicide attempt.
A quick look at Wallace’s early life begins in Brookline, Massachusetts, where as an
adolescent he was so ashamed of his pockmarked face that he yearned for gray days,
not sunny ones.
In his early TV years, he was a pitchman, for everything from cigarettes to shortening
(“Man, that’s some apple pie.”)
In his first interview show, "Night Beat,” which premiered in 1956, he sat close to
his subjects, smoke billowing from his ubiquitous cigarette. Here was launched his
confrontational style: he asks Eleanor Roosevelt why people hate her and her husband.
The show moved to ABC, then was canceled in 1958. A few years later in 1962,
he experienced tragedy: his older son, Peter, died in a mountain-climbing accident in
Greece. Wallace resolved himself to commit to hard-edged journalism.
He arrived at CBS, where he was seen by some as an overly slick interloper. Success
came, though, with "60 Minutes,” which premiered in 1968 and became an unexpected
hit, launching a dynasty and a new genre, the TV newsmagazine.
One of the most compelling clips in Belkin’s film is a Wallace interview with Pu
tin, which starts out in an almost folksy way, but soon gets uncomfortable as Wallace
quizzes the Russian leader about his treatment of journalists, about corruption, about
whether Russia is a democracy. You can see Putin’s eyes narrow and harden in anger.
Then there’s Wallace’s interview with Khomeini in Tehran in 1979, in which he goes
beyond the expected topics _ to the consternation of the official translator. He tells the
Iranian leader that President Anwar Sadat of Egypt "calls you _ forgive me, his words,
not mine _ a, lunatic.” But he gets his response: a harsh criticism of Sadat.
Perhaps the most chilling moment in the film is Wallace’s famous interview with Paul
Meadlo, a U.S. soldier involved in the massacre of more than 100 villagers, including
children, at My Lai in Vietnam.
"How do you shoot babies?” Wallace asks.
Meadlo squirms, and talks about orders. There is, of course, no decent answer, and
Meadlo said later he regretted going on TV.
Like so many of Wallace’s subjects, he didn’t quite know what he was getting into.
"Mike Wallace Is Here,” a Magnolia Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion
Picture Association of America "for thematic material, some violent images, language
and smoking.” Running time: 90 minutes. Three stars out of four.
MPAA definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inap-
oronriate for children under 13.