Opinion / Editorial (34)
Artist Frank Smith first told me about the amazing faith tradition practiced every Memorial Day weekend by the United House of Prayer for All People 10 years ago. On the Saturday before Memorial Day members of the church from all up and down the East Coast come to Washington for a parade past the home of church founder – Bishop Charles Manuel Grace, "Sweet Daddy" Grace.
As the host of a Jazz radio program for nearly 35 years now, I rush to witness this musical part of the church's worship. Like a joyful "Second Line" at a New Orleans funeral, the brass bands –
tubas, trombones, trumpets – literally blow me away each time I hear them. Like a tight high-school drumline, the snares, the bass, the cymbals, keep my head bobbing and my feet tapping. They bring the swing.
They make a Joyful Noise. Praise the Lord.
I also appreciate the accessibility of this part of their worship services, not to mention the unity they practice all year round, the juvenile delinquency prevention that membership in the marching bands affords the boys and girls who grow up in the church; and of course the generous spirit taught by Sweet Daddy Grace, who was known for spending a good portion of his income on his congregations, supplying apartments, pension funds, burial plans, and free food to the faithful. The first Black "Mega Church" was born nearly 100 years ago, and it's called the United House of Prayer [UHOP].
Bishop Grace – Sweet Daddy Grace – founded his first church in West Waltham, Mass., around 1919. By the mid-1920s he had moved South, and was holding large, popular revivals and tent-meetings around Charlotte, N.C. In 1927, with an estimated 13,000 followers, Bishop Grace incorporated The United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith. The church grew rapidly and soon included branches all along the eastern seaboard, claiming some 500,000 people in 100 congregations in 67 cities.
Charles Manuel Grace was of mixed African and Portuguese descent, born in the Cape Verde Islands around 1882. His family came to the United States during the first decade of the 20th century. In the Cape Verdean communities of New Bedford and Cape Cod, Mass., the young Charles Grace worked as a short-order cook, a cranberry picker, and a sewing machine and patent medicine salesman, before giving his life completely to his ministry.
Bishop Grace was said to have been a showman, but he was always a generous benefactor. He sponsored bands and parades, and tossed candy to his followers – that's how he became known as "Sweet Daddy" Grace – and to this day UHOP marching bands and steppers travel up and down the East Coast in bright, shiny, dream-mobile-looking buses where they perform at various congregation meetings and rallies.
Daddy Grace dazzled with his long hair, multicolored robes, and colored fingernails. His followers believed he had the power to bless such ordinary items as soap, coffee, and eggs, and many believed that buttered toast from his plate had the power to heal. Although Bishop Grace did not claim the divinity that his followers assigned to him, neither did he deny it. "I never said I was God," Bishop Grace once clarified, "but you cannot prove to me I'm not."
I was first acquainted with the church when I attended the funeral of Bishop Grace's successor, Bishop Walter McCullough. It was as joyful and raucous a home-going service as I have ever seen. Sharon Pratt, then mayor of Washington even delivered a eulogy.
I am also glad that the church stood firm against maybe the most persuasive force of gentrification and urban renewal ever faced by any inner-city church leader, the encroachment into the church's residential neighborhood by the construction of the new Walter E. Washington Convention Center. To his eternal credit, then presiding Bishop S.C. Madison did not yield an inch to the developers, not one apartment given up at Canaanland Apartments at 6th & M streets in Northwest. God Bless his soul!
The Rev. Willie Wilson, pastor of Washington's Union Temple Baptist Church and a co-chairman with the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Million Man March, said of Bishop Madison: "He was a supreme example that churches can play a role in the housing and economic development needs of our community. He as well as the United House of Prayer, continued the historic position of setting up hospitals, banks and stores for the community, and it came out of the Black church. We need to emulate more of what he did," the Rev. Wilson told James Wright of the Afro-American newspaper.
Long live that great tradition and that Great Black Ministry.
The historic Memorial Day Parade by members of the United House of Prayer for All People will long be remembered like the Marcus Garvey Day parades nearly a century ago, as a special moment in Black History.
Endurance is not the same as acceptance. When an injustice historically and contemporarily happens to Black Americans or to any group of human beings in the context of racial oppression, it is always a matter of struggle to resist the pain and agony of the injustice by the sheer endurance of the will to be free.
For the past 40 years, the members of the Wilmington Ten and our families have struggled for justice, sacrificed by serving long prison sentences unjustly, and endured irreparable physical and monetary injuries. Yet, for the seven members of the 10 who are still alive, faith in God and a commitment to freedom, justice and equality for all remain intact.
Wilmington, N.C. four decades ago was still confronting the issues on public school desegregation. Black American children in particular were facing institutionalized racism as was the case in many school districts across the nation.
But the battleground over equal education and civil rights in general for Black Americans in the port city of Wilmington in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 took a turn beyond the violence in the aftermath of King's death and nonviolent marches for equality. What happened in Wilmington in 1971 would set the violent stage once again in American history when people of African descent would be indiscriminately targeted for vicious and brutal reprisals for daring to seek voting rights and a quality education as the federal government headed by President Richard M. Nixon looked the other way.
The Wilmington Ten were falsely accused, framed-up, arrested, tried and sentenced to a combined 282 years in prison in 1972 for daring to stand up for the rights of black school children. Now, thanks to the leadership of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a national and global campaign has been launched to encourage North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue to issue a "Pardon of Innocence" to the Wilmington Ten. A formal petition was just submitted to the governor's office for her consideration.
Justice for the Wilmington Ten will benefit more than 10 people or 10 families. Justice in this case would mean rejecting racially-motivated prosecutorial misconduct and purging racial injustice from the so-called "criminal justice system." That will benefit all Americans and as well others throughout the world who cry out for freedom and equality.
It is important for young people today to know more about the Wilmington Ten and other political prisoner cases. Too often our youth take too much for granted. They have not been adequately educated about the price that has been paid by prior generations of Black Americans. We have made progress, but we still have so much more to achieve and accomplish.
From the Trayvon Martin's case back to the Wilmington Ten, we know that we have to be vigilant. But most of all, we cannot afford to let anything or anyone break our spirit no matter what the difficulties, pains or hardships that are placed in our path. Justice is the consistent pursuit of what is right and fair.
Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., the leader of the Wilmington Ten, is president of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and Education Online Services Corporation. He also serves as senior adviser for the Diamond Empowerment Fund and National Director of Occupy the Dream and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
White people in America have a real penchant for transferring their guilty behavior onto other people. What's more they are constantly getting away with it. It's called blaming the victims for the crimes.
In the realm of electoral politics they say that the only reason Black people support President Barack Obama is because he's Black. While in fact they've already run the numbers to figure out what percentage of the White vote former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will have to get in order to offset Obama's 96 percent approval from Blacks.
So there may be more than a kernel of truth in that supposition, because the President has done much more to help all people in this society than he has to help the neediest. And wouldn't you know it; Black people are disproportionately represented at the bottom of this country's food chain, and are therefore suffering disproportionately. But there is no special relief coming for them, not from this White House. And Black people still support him overwhelmingly.
If White folks said Bill Clinton was the first "Black President," then they've said that Barack Obama is the first Jewish President, and now he's the first "Gay President."
Black people still support President Obama, even though he hasn't thrown them a special lifeline, for one thing because he hasn't messed up (yet), horrendously betraying the public trust with a young intern, or by launching an unjust and un-winnable war.
Maybe it's the "coolness factor." When Obama did the "brush-off" thing like entertainer Jay-Z in a video, the President won the hearts of all Black folks younger than 35. When he turned around and crooned a few bars of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," he permanently won the hearts of all Black folks older than 45. Had he done his version of Michael Jackson's "Moonwalk" when he was giving the Barnard College commencement address he would have gotten more views on YouTube than Kony.
The fact of the matter is that "a new large-scale study shows that racial attitudes have already played a substantial role in 2012, during the Republican primaries. They may play an even larger role in this year's presidential election," Molly McElroy wrote for the University of Washington, according to Richard Prince's online column "Journal-isms." The notion that Obama's election ushered in the "post-racial" age is just a myth to lull Black people to sleep about ongoing racism in this country.
"The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks – either consciously or unconsciously – also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama," according to McElroy.
White folks might say they don't like Obama because of the economy, or because of this, that, or the other, but the real deal is their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes influencing the way they'll vote.
"In the study, a majority of White eligible voters showed a pattern labeled 'automatic white preference' on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias," Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University and one of the study's collaborators wrote.
So the President – like all Democratic presidential candidates since 1972 – lost the "White vote" in 2008. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) carried the White vote by a margin of 55 percent to 43 percent over then Sen. Obama. An analysis in the Daily Kos has done the math. Gov. Romney will have to keep the President from winning more than 38 percent of the White vote in order for him to win.
So now it's all starting to make sense. Voter suppression efforts have gone from individual voting precincts to statewide legislative campaigns in at least 20 states where so-called Voter ID laws have been put into place. So now, Black people who were "American enough" to chop and pick cotton for generations, and to perform every other kind of undesirable task for little or no pay, are now all of a sudden ineligible to vote because they don't have some state issued driver's license or other ID card? Right!
And now, all of Gov. Romney's code-switching, dog-whistle, race-based campaign jingles, which resonate in the bosom of all true genetically-recessive White folks make sense. White voters get it all right. Those Black voters are only going to vote for President Obama because he's Black, and if we leave it to those Muslim-Communist, Black voters, they'll put Kenya-born Obama back into the White House, and he'll just ruin this country that was getting along just fine when White people were solidly in charge and Black people knew that their place was behind Whites, and they politely stayed there, thank you.
Of the seven years I was editor of Emerge: Black America's Newsmagazine in the 1990s, I am proudest of our national campaign to win the release of Kemba Smith, a 24-year-old former Hampton University student who was sentenced to a mandatory 24 ½ years in prison for her minor role in a drug ring.
Our first story, written by Reginald Stuart in May 1996, featured a high school graduation photo of Kemba, decked in cap and gown, with the words: "Kemba's Nighmare: A Model Student Becomes Prisoner #26370-083." We published two additional stories on Kemba, both written by Stuart.
The original Emerge story caught the attention of Elaine Jones, then director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She began representing Kemba in court and eventually filed a petition for clemency. In late 2000, President Bill Clinton granted LDF's request and Kemba was released after serving 7 ½ years in federal prison.
I've said all along that Kemba wasn't the only victim of our criminal injustice system. Add the Wilmington Ten to that list.
Most Black newspapers are carrying a NNPA News Service story this week by Cash Michaels of the Wilmington Journal describing a national campaign to win pardons for the Wilmington Ten – nine African-Americans and a White female – unfairly convicted in connection with urban unrest. The NNPA is helping spearhead this movement.
In a nutshell, racial strife accompanied the desegregation of New Hanover County, N.C. schools. The all-Black high school was closed under the desegregation plan and its students were transferred to the previously all-White high school, where they received a hostile reception.
In February 1971, the United Church of Christ assigned Benjamin Chavis Jr., a native of Oxford, N.C., to help students organize a school boycott.
Amid the racial turmoil, someone firebombed Mike's Grocery, a White-owned business located a block away from Gregory Congregational Church, where Chavis had set up headquarters. When fire fighters and police officers arrived on the scene, they were attacked by snipers stationed on the roof of the church. At the time, Chavis and other activists had barricaded themselves inside the building. A riot erupted the next day that resulted in two deaths and six injuries.
Chavis and nine others were charged and convicted of arson and conspiracy in connection with the firebombing incident. Most of the defendants received a sentence of 29 years, with Ann Shepard, the White woman from Auburn, N.Y., receiving the lightest sentence of 15 years and 24-year-old Chavis getting the longest sentence, 34 years.
All nine maintained that they were innocent. In 1980, a federal appeals court overturned their convictions, noting that the trial judge restricted defense attorneys from cross-examining witnesses who had received special treatment in exchange for their testimony against the Wilmington Ten.
Defense attorneys, in their petition to reverse the convictions, noted that the prosecutor failed to disclose "inducement for testimony and special favorable treatment offered to each of three important witnesses including leniency, accommodations at a beach hotel and beach cottage paid for by the prosecution, an expense-paid trip for the girlfriend of the chief witness, and the gift of a mini-bike made after the trial."
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that the prosecution violated due process rights by failing to turn over evidence that was favorable to the defense, including information that would have impeached the testimony of its chief witness, Allen Hall. It was Hall who had leveled the most serious charges against Chavis, depicting him as the chief architect of the violence and claiming that he taught others to assemble firebombs and use firearms.
However, despite more than a half-dozen requests from defense attorneys, the prosecutor refused to turn over a second statement made by Allen that directly contradicted at least 15 of his earlier charges.
The prosecutor also failed to turn over a mental evaluation of Hall.
"Significant to this case are the statements in the report that 'psychological tests reveal an IQ of 82 placing him in the range of borderline defective,'" the appeals court judges wrote. They said Hall's limited intelligence raised questions about Hall's "ability to recall in minute detail events that occurred at least one and one-half years prior to the time he was testifying."
This was the criminal justice system at its worse. The least North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue should do is issue a long overdue pardon and heartfelt apology to the Wilmington Ten.
George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service (NNPA) and editorial director of Heart & Soul magazine. Curry can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com. You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge.
A White man who murdered an unarmed Black teenager in Florida was permitted to walk the streets for two months, with his gun. Meanwhile, a Black woman, the mother of three children was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Florida for firing a warning shot at her husband who beat and strangled her. How is that "equal justice under law?"
George Zimmerman is the White man who shot Trayvon Martin to death after stalking him while he claimed he was on a neighborhood watch patrol. Marissa Alexander is the Black woman who says she was defending herself when she fired a gun into a wall near Rico Gray, her ex-husband, who had had a history of physical abuse.
Martin is dead. Zimmerman was released on bail that was lower than the amount of money he had raised in an online "cookie jar," to support his defense.
Gray is very much alive, and free to abuse the next woman who falls into his web. The victim of the spousal abuse in this case is now facing 20 years in jail.
Alexander said that in August 2010, her ex-husband read messages on her cell phone, became enraged, strangled her and threatened her life. When Alexander broke free, she tried to run out of the house but couldn't get out of the garage; so she grabbed a gun from the garage and fired it into the air to attempt to scare Gray off.
No one was injured in that instance when Alexander attempted to "stand her ground," but her warning shot hit a wall near where his two children were standing. As such, she was charged and found guilty by a jury of three counts of aggravated assault with a firearm, which carries a mandatory 20-year sentence.
Alexander said that Gray repeatedly punched and choked her over the previous year and she truly felt he could kill her. It happens all the time, men killing their wives, girlfriends, "baby mamas." Alexander's lawyers tried to protect her with Florida's "stand your ground" law that has been claimed by Zimmerman who did not fire a warning shot, but rather a fatal shot which took the life of an unarmed child.
"I believe when he threatened to kill me, that's what he was absolutely going to do," Alexander told CNN. "That's what he intended to do. Had I not discharged my weapon at that point, I would not be here."
A police dispatcher warned Zimmerman not to continue following Martin prior to the incident in which he took the young man's life. He stalked him like a hunter anyway, and eventually bagged his prey, claiming self-defense.
Alexander rejected a judge's plea bargain offer of a three-year sentence, opting instead for a jury trial. But the same "stand your ground" law that protected the man who took an innocent life did not sway the jury that found Alexander guilty in March. The jury was apparently swayed by the fact that Alexander ran out of the house, and then came back into the house because the garage door was locked. She testified she had left her keys inside. The jury said returning to the house was wrong for someone claiming her life was at risk and that she fired the gun in anger, rather than in self-defense.
Well, I join with civil rights activists and domestic abuse victim's advocates who say Alexander, who had no prior criminal record, was treated extra harshly because of her race, while Zimmerman got a pass for six weeks because he's White and because his father is a magistrate judge.
Ironically, the case was prosecuted by State Attorney Angela Corey, the same prosecutor who is handling the Martin-Zimmerman case.
After the sentencing, Congressional Black Caucus member Rep. Corrine Brown confronted Corey in the hallway, accusing her of being overzealous, according to video from CNN affiliate WJXT. "There is no justification for 20 years," Brown told Corey during an exchange that was frequently interrupted by onlookers. "All the community was asking for was mercy and justice," Brown said. I agree.
The judge handed down the sentence after an emotional sentencing hearing during which Alexander's parents, her 11-year-old daughter and her pastor spoke on her behalf. Several people had to be escorted from the courtroom after breaking out singing and chanting about a lack of justice in the case, but the judge made a point to say that he had no choice under state law.
If there was any justice in the state of Florida, the governor would immediately issue a pardon, or at least commute Alexander's sentence.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter knows what he is talking about when he describes the first meal of the day for millions of America's children – a grape soda and a bag of chips. It is the sad reality that is also the focus of the new HBO special Weight of the Nation which was screened on Tuesday May 15 at Prince George's Community College before an audience of adults and young people concerned about the obesity epidemic in America. In Prince George's County 34 percent of the population is considered obese, up from 32 percent a year ago. Prince George's health officials acknowledge that the number is going in the wrong direction and that more needs to be done to increase physical activity and other initiatives currently being developed by the Prince George's County Healthcare Coalition. A broad-based community awareness campaign is needed to overcome a wide-range of variables that contribute to obesity including impact of fast food restaurants that make up 71 percent of all food establishments in the county. The high incidence of obesity in this country begs the question of who is responsible for fixing it. We suggest everyone is – government, schools, elected officials, the medical community retail food stores, individuals and parents – it's everyone's role to take control of their weight and get healthy.
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