Full Employment for All: The Social and Economic Benefits of Race and Gender Equity in Employment
How much stronger could the economy be if everyone who wanted a job could find one—regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender?
To inform the Fed UP campaign, PolicyLink and the...
How much stronger could the economy be if everyone who wanted a job could find one—regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender?
To inform the Fed UP campaign, PolicyLink and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) estimated the potential economic gains of full employment for all. The following 13fact sheets illustrate what the United States economy—and the economies of the metropolitan regions where each Federal Reserve office is located—could look like with true full employment for all.
For additional information about Fed Up: The National Campaign for a Strong Economy, visit http://whatrecovery.org.
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Milwaukee faces historic opportunity to transform schools. Here’s how.
Milwaukee faces historic opportunity to transform schools. Here’s how.
Milwaukee spends a greater fraction of its general fund on policing than many other major cities. A 2017 report from the Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives, and Black Youth Project...
Milwaukee spends a greater fraction of its general fund on policing than many other major cities. A 2017 report from the Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives, and Black Youth Project 100, compared 11 other cities and found they devoted 25 to 40 percent of their general fund expenditures to policing — Milwaukee spent 47 percent, or nearly $300 million.
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How to Help Residents of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Recover After Hurricane Maria
How to Help Residents of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Recover After Hurricane Maria
These organizations are helping with immediate needs—like food—and long-term efforts, including rebuilding...
...
These organizations are helping with immediate needs—like food—and long-term efforts, including rebuilding...
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Main Street Takes on Monetary Policy, Round 2
Washington Post - November 14, by Ylan Mui - Main Street plans to take on the maestros of monetary policy today, armed with a list of demands aimed at prolonging central bank stimulus and...
Washington Post - November 14, by Ylan Mui - Main Street plans to take on the maestros of monetary policy today, armed with a list of demands aimed at prolonging central bank stimulus and increasing public input.
The campaign has been dubbed “Fed Up” and is made up of 20 community and labor groups, ranging from the Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment to the behemoth AFL-CIO. The groups plans to demonstrate in front of the Federal Reserve’s august headquarters on Constitution Avenue on Friday morning. They are slated to present their proposals to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in a meeting scheduled for this afternoon.
“The point is to start a public conversation and include more voices in it,” said Ady Barkan, staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the groups leading the effort.
Still, debates over macroeconomics can qickly turn wonky. Among the campaign’s requests are for the Fed to reconsider its 2 percent target for inflation and for the central bank to start purchasing municipal bonds to jumpstart local infrastructure projects -- issues that typically don’t come up at the water cooler.
But several other proposals strike a more populist note. The groups says the Fed should wait until there is a significant reduction in the gap in unemployment rate of black and white workers, as well as an increase in the number of women in the force, before it decides to raise interest rates. The coalition also wants the Fed to conduct research on the impact of progressive economic policy proposals -- namely raising the minimum wage and requiring paid sick leave.
Finally, it is seeking time for public comment during the central bank’s policy meetings and a more inclusive process for appointing officials at the Fed’s regional banks.
In some ways, the campaign’s effort coincides with the central bank’s goals. Under former Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed dramatically increased transparency. It now holds regular press conferences, publishes detailed economic forecasts and attempts to communicate its policy positions.
Current Fed Chair Janet Yellen has made a particular effort to connect monetary policy to Main Street. She recounted the personal stories of struggling workers during a speech in Chicago early this year and visited a jobs training center in Boston last month. She has cited the elevated unemployment rate for African Americans several times as evidence that the nation’s broader economic recovery may not be deeply rooted.
“The recovery still feels like a recession to many Americans, and it also looks that way in some economic statistics,” Yellen said in her Chicago speech.
The Fed also already produces a vast array of research on domestic policy issues. In fact, progressive groups - including at least one involved in the campaign -- frequently cite a study by the Chicago Fed as evidence that raising the minimum wage can boost incomes and spur consumer spending.
Barkan said the campaign is intended to be a counterpoint to the vocal minority of Fed officials who have been calling for the central bank to raise rates soon in response to the improving economy. But even officials counseling patience are not going far enough, Barkan said.
“There’s a lot in there that the Fed has yet to do,” he said. “We want them to be bold and ambitious in their effort to improve the economy.”
Friday will mark the second time demonstrators have confronted Fed officials. This summer, the group traveled to the Kansas City Fed’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., an invite-only affair that draws some of the world’s most powerful economic policymakers. The protest was the first time since the 1980s that there has been a grassroots response to monetary policy decisions.
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Demonstrators Hold 'Die-In' To Protest Sackler Family’s Ties to Harvard Art Museums
Demonstrators Hold 'Die-In' To Protest Sackler Family’s Ties to Harvard Art Museums
Medical School students and the Center for Popular Democracy’s Opioid Network—a band of more than 45 grassroots organizations that have formed in response to the opioid crisis—organized the...
Medical School students and the Center for Popular Democracy’s Opioid Network—a band of more than 45 grassroots organizations that have formed in response to the opioid crisis—organized the demonstration.
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New York Questions Big Retailers Over 'On-Call' Staffing
Reuters - April 13, 2015 - New York's attorney general has sent letters to 13 national retailers, including Gap Inc, Target Corp and JC Penney Co Inc, about "on-call shifts" in which workers are...
Reuters - April 13, 2015 - New York's attorney general has sent letters to 13 national retailers, including Gap Inc, Target Corp and JC Penney Co Inc, about "on-call shifts" in which workers are told whether to report to work a day or less before a scheduled shift.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's letters, sent on Friday, say on-call systems leave "too little time to make arrangements for family needs, let alone to find an alternative source of income to compensate for the lost pay" on days the employees are not called in to work.
A number of companies with stores in New York are requiring employees to check in by telephone, text message or email before a planned shift to see if their services are needed, Schneiderman wrote in the letters.
The system allows retailers to adjust staffing based on store traffic forecasts made by scheduling software. The companies can then reduce over-staffing and under-staffing.
His requests come as workers' advocates claim success in efforts to increase pay and benefits at fast food companies and national retailers, including recent raises of minimum wages by McDonald's Corp and Wal Mart Stores Inc.
Schneiderman said the "on-call" practice might violate the law in New York, where employers are subject to a rule that says employees who report for a scheduled shift on any day have to be paid for at least four hours at the basic minimum hourly wage.
Target said workers are informed of their schedules 10 days before the start of a work week and it does not employ "on-call" shifts. JC Penney said it has a policy against on-call scheduling. The Gap said it is committed to "sustainable scheduling practices" and is conducting research on the matter.
Worker advocates say unpredictable scheduling is one of the key challenges facing low-wage workers.
"One of reasons it is coming to light now is that people are organizing around it," said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, senior attorney at the National Employment Law Project.
He noted that a 2011 union-backed study of New York retail workers showed a fifth surveyed were required to always or frequently be available for on-call shifts.
Bills addressing on-call scheduling are currently being considered in the state legislatures of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon and California, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, a worker advocacy group.
The U.S. Labor Department said it is aware of the on-call scheduling concerns and is looking into the matter.
"This is an important issue for workers struggling with work-life balance, especially for women," spokeswoman Tania Mejia said.
Schneiderman asked the retailers to provide details on the processes they follow to schedule on-call shifts, such as whether they use computerized systems and penalize employees who do not follow on-call procedures.
He also asked the companies for any analysis they might have conducted on cost savings associated with on-call shifts and the impact on workers' wellbeing. The companies have until May 4 to send in their responses.
The Gap said it was engaged in a research project with the UC Hastings College of Worklife Law to examine scheduling and productivity, and expects to receive some data in the fall of 2015.
"In the meantime, each of our brands also has been working to evaluate and refine their practices to make improvements," a spokeswoman for the retailer said.
Letters were also sent to Abercrombie & Fitch Co, J. Crew, L Brands Inc, Burlington Coat Factory, TJX Cos Inc , Urban Outfitters Inc, Crocs Inc, Ann Inc, Sears Holdings Corp and Williams-Sonoma Inc.
Sears and Ann Inc both said they do not use on-call scheduling. Representatives of the other retailers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Reporting by Supriya Kurane and Siddharth Cavale in Bengaluru, Karen Freifeld and David Morgan in New York, Nathan Layne in Chicago, and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles. Editing by Anupama Dwivedi, Dan Grebler and Andre Grenon)
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Protesters Converge On Stephen Schwarzman's Water Mill Home
Protesters Converge On Stephen Schwarzman's Water Mill Home
About 35 protesters from various political organizations—the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, and Strong for All Economy Coalition—converged...
About 35 protesters from various political organizations—the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, and Strong for All Economy Coalition—converged on the Water Mill Home of Stephen Schwarzman on Friday afternoon.
Mr. Schwarzman is the chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group and an adviser to President Donald Trump.
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Congress to Consider Bill to Help Part-Timers
New York Post - July 22, 2014, by James Covert - Part-timers with increasingly unpredictable work schedules are taking their beef to Washington.
A congressional bill is slated for...
New York Post - July 22, 2014, by James Covert - Part-timers with increasingly unpredictable work schedules are taking their beef to Washington.
A congressional bill is slated for introduction Tuesday that would give workers more control over their hourly schedules at big retailers like Walmart, Home Depot and JCPenney.
Led by Walmart, major chains increasingly are switching around workers’ shifts on short notice, making it difficult and often impossible for part-timers to work second jobs.
The practice — common in retail, restaurant, janitorial and housekeeping jobs — has hit working mothers especially hard, according to critics.
Unpredictable work hours make it difficult to schedule everything from babysitters to doctor’s appointments.
“I think it’s gotten to a crisis point,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, a new campaign by the Center for Popular Democracy, adding workers need “some amount of predictability and stability in our work hours so we can live and manage our lives.”
The bill, sponsored by US Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), would require employers to give an extra hour of pay to workers summoned less than 24 hours in advance.
The bill would also guarantee a minimum of four hours’ pay if an employee is sent home early — a frequent occurrence at restaurants.
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Turning a Moment into a Movement after the Deaths of Unarmed Black Men
Washington Post - February 19, 2015, by Marc Fisher, Sandya Somashekhar, and Wesley Lowery - In the months following...
Washington Post - February 19, 2015, by Marc Fisher, Sandya Somashekhar, and Wesley Lowery - In the months following the shooting death of Michael Brown, Tony Rice quit his job to lead nightly protests in Ferguson, Mo. But after a grand jury decided in November not to indict the officer who shot Brown, Rice said, “we just woke up one morning and no one was out there protesting.”
That hasn’t deterred Rice. As the nation’s attention has turned elsewhere, he and fellow activists have switched up their tactics, slowing down and digging in, trying to nurture a nascent civil rights movement by shifting to local issues and a broader critique of American society.
The deadly confrontations in Ferguson; in Cleveland, where police shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who was playing with a pellet gun; and in New York, where police choked and killed a man who was selling loose cigarettes on the sidewalk, prompted young people to take to social media and the streets to express outrage and demand change.
The unrest generated by the deaths of Brown in Ferguson, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Eric Garner in Staten Island may eventually become the first scene in a stirring saga of how a moment builds into a movement. Or it could end up as a cautionary tale about how a righteous activism born of traumatic incidents fizzles, the energy of dozens of new activist groups sapped by quotidian realities and the shortened attention spans of a society that expresses its political passions in Likes and tweets.
“To go from protesting to power, you need demonstrations, legislation and litigation,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil rights leader who has acted in recent months as an informal adviser and cheerleader for several new groups. “Sprinters burn out real fast. These young people need to be in it for the long run. And it must be an intergenerational coalition. A movement that’s mature requires clergy and lawyers and legislators. The struggle is never a one-string guitar.”
The new activists are still trying to tune their instrument. They are still figuring out whether to hew to local issues or go national. For the most part, the young protesters haven’t connected with elders such as Jackson or the Rev. Al Sharpton. They have uneasy relationships not only with civil rights fighters of generations past, but also with the black mayors and police chiefs who owe their own positions to the successes of that earlier activism.
All that adds up to a fractured puzzle composed of idealistic young activists who believe ordinary people can band together to make black lives matter more, but who haven’t yet figured out how to boost their generation into action.
In Ferguson, some activists moved from street actions to events such as “Books and Breakfast,” a giveaway featuring books such as “The New Jim Crow” and “I Love My Hair!” and free yogurt parfaits. One recent day, only a few dozen people stopped by, mostly familiar faces of hard-core activists.
Nonetheless, they talked about marching at a local high school where white students had said disparaging things about black protesters. The meeting ended with pleas from organizers to hug someone in the room and take another look at the books, half of which were left unclaimed.
Two days before the book event in Ferguson, the roads were slick in Cleveland, with heavy snow falling, as about a dozen activists gathered at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Cleveland Heights — a racially and economically mixed suburb up the hill from downtown.
The meeting, called by a local activist group called Puncture the Silence, was an effort to press beyond the squabbles and rivalries that have plagued the protest groups that emerged after the Rice shooting. Although protests have continued almost weekly in Cleveland through a harsh winter, the wait to hear whether the officers involved in the shooting will face criminal charges has left many activists frustrated, splintered by arguments over strategy, objectives and media posture.
Some want more marches, sit-ins and disruptive protests. Others propose to stage a tribunal, rendering an extrajudicial verdict in several cases of police use of force. Still others want a focus on policy, but what should they demand? Body cameras? Special prosecutors? Police training? Collective bargaining?
“We need to keep the direct pressure on elected officials, but we also need to stay active in the streets,” Rachelle Smith, 31, who has been a key player among Cleveland’s young protest groups since the Rice shooting, told the group.
The next move after expressing anger in the street is often the hard part for new civil rights groups. Do they seek changes in the law? Push to elect sympathetic candidates? Focus on winning over those who aren’t yet on their side? Or pull back from the moment and get radical, pressing for wholesale social change?
In Ferguson, many of the more than a dozen organizations that formed in the tear-gas clouds of August fragmented over the course of the fall. Conflicts flared over organizers who spent much of their time honing their profile on Twitter and attending an endless series of conferences on activism. Members of some new groups grumbled about leaders who seemed more interested in scoring airtime with Don Lemon on CNN or winning donations from wealthy celebrities than about recruiting poor people to their cause.
On the night of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the Brown shooting, Tory Russell and other members of a new civil rights group called Hands Up United knew one thing they had to do: Race to their office to fend off vandals and prevent violence.
Today, six buildings across from the group’s original office remain boarded up. The Metro PCS shop is a blackened heap; a steel bar bears a slogan written in rust: “America Wake Up!”
Hands Up United has moved to a new location but isn’t going away, said Russell, a burly man with a thick beard who wears his devotion to the movement on a T-shirt emblazoned with the first names of young African Americans whose deaths have fueled this fight — Trayvon, Mike, Eric . . .
By the time Brown was killed, Russell, 30, had already dropped his plan to become a teacher — a dream he traces to his days in the library at Sumner High School in St. Louis, alma mater of Chuck Berry and Tina Turner. Today, Russell views his old school as dominated more by in-school suspension than reading books, so he has focused his political work on distributing books on black history and radical politics.
He sees a surer path to change at the neighborhood level than in any effort to win nationwide notice. “And now the real work begins,” Russell said. “You can complain about the system being bad and how it affects the community. But if your room is dirty, you’re going to have to pick up the clothes and wash the dishes. And that’s what we’re doing.”
Hands Up’s leaders haven’t lost sight of the issue of police brutality: “We still believe the ultimate piece of the narrative is that unarmed people are being killed by police,” said Tef Poe, 27, a rapper from St. Louis who started the group with Russell.
But since the TV cameras left town, the heady camaraderie of those first weeks has given way to infighting and a struggle for attention.
Poe joined other organizers on a trip to the Palestinian territories last year and he recently returned from the Sundance Film Festival — decisions that have raised questions among some activists about how groups are spending the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have come in from foundations and ordinary people who hit “donate” buttons online.
Poe and Russell said they are not getting paid by Hands Up. Neither was sure of the exact size of the organization’s budget. Hands Up United — which like many of the new groups has not established nonprofit status of its own — has received organizational help from a group connected with the California antiwar nonprofit known as Code Pink.
Russell said Hands Up United, unlike other groups that flared on TV and Twitter and then disappeared, is in it for the long run. “For some people, when it wasn’t sexy anymore, when CNN left, it died down for them,” he said. “What we’re doing is not hashtag activism, this is actually community organizing. I’ve never seen hashtags change my community.”
Athousand miles away, Hands Up United’s shift in focus from civil disobedience to community development — from leading rallies to giving out books — sounds familiar to Phillip Agnew.
The group he founded in 2012 — after a former neighborhood watch volunteer shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old in Sanford, Fla. — had a two-year head start on those that have emerged in Ferguson and Cleveland. Agnew’s Dream Defenders have been through it all: the rush of the marches, a 31-day sit-in in the state capitol, confrontations with the powerful, promises that they would be listened to, frustration when nothing changed.
Now, on the same day that Hands Up United gives out books in Ferguson, Agnew’s Dream Defenders stage a multicultural festival in front of a sprawling, brightly colored mural of Haitian village life in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. The attractions includesalsa dancing and African drumming; speeches in English, Spanish and Creole; testimonials from farmworkers and college students — all spiced with gentle reminders of the need to do something about the number of young people from Miami’s crazy quilt of impoverished communities who drop out of school, land in prison, or subsist without career or much hope of one.
The Dream Defenders — the name refers to the effort to build on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy — started out demanding the repeal of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which allows people to use deadly force if they feel threatened by another person. But after their sit-in failed to persuade Gov. Rick Scott (R) to call a special session of the legislature to reconsider the law, Agnew and his fellow Defenders concluded that they needed to move on to “the next phase.”
What that would look like took many months to decide. Agnew — at 29, he is thoughtful yet blunt, insisting on talking about fomenting revolution even when his older advisers counsel more moderate rhetoric — said he was initially distracted by the celebrity that came with being a prominent activist.
“It was very easy to accept invitations all over the country,” he said. “It’s very, very, very alluring and seductive to have folks know you and to go to conferences and workshops every week. I was in Time magazine, on television all the time — it does begin to create some kind of friction within the organization. And then you look up and feel like we haven’t gotten anywhere. We had to pump the brakes.”
Some other groups that formed after Martin was killed have left Florida and are trying to find traction on a nationwide scale. The Million Hoodies Movement for Justice was started by a young Floridian, but its leaders are now spread around the country, active mainly through video and social media.
“Nobody’s going to have their political beliefs changed on Facebook, but it is a way for us to connect,” said Peter Haviland-Eduah, the group’s spokesman, who lives in Michigan, where he is in graduate school. “We want to build coalitions across the country, and we have to find small, tangible wins. The civil rights movement in the ’60s was about changing laws and they had tangible goals, like getting more folks to register to vote. We’re about changing the consensus, changing beliefs, and that’s much more difficult.”
The Dream Defenders concluded that the only way forward is to embed themselves in local issues. “It’s a big mistake for these groups in Ferguson and other places to go national,” said Sherika Shaw, 26, the group’s South Florida coordinator, who left a graduate program in art education after learning about Dream Defenders on Instagram. “The people are here, where you are. It’s not about changing policy; you can’t use the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house. We don’t want to be the people the TV networks call; we want to be who the people call instead of the police when there’s a domestic dispute.”
Shaw spends her days trying to establish Dream Defenders groups in local high schools, appealing to teens to speak out against having uniformed security officers on their campuses.
The group’s core members lived for a time in a borrowed house in the lush suburb of Miami Lakes — the dream house, they called it — allowing them to talk and plan around the clock. They lived on Agnew’s credit card and his savings from four years he spent selling erectile-dysfunction and anti-depression drugs for a pharmaceutical company in North Carolina.
They studied past movements, read history and made two defining decisions: Unlike many other new groups, they would stay local, rooting themselves in Florida’s problems and people. And they would get radical, spurning elective politics and emphasizing their belief that the persistent poverty and social immobility in many black communities result not from specific policies but from the very nature of capitalism and racism.
On one morning in early February, Agnew arrived at work angry because he woke up to a flat tire on his car. “This system of capitalism creates a lot of stress around money,” he said. He put on his black “People Over Money” T-shirt and began another day of trying to convince blacks and Hispanics that the problem they see as police brutality is really far deeper.
“A community that just lost someone to a police shooting may not be ready to hear that,” he said. “They may not have that language. But if we talk to them about what they experience — being ignored, being invisible, the contempt for black people, the contempt for poor people — they begin to see that this is much larger.”
At the street festival, which draws about 150 people over the course of the afternoon, Shamile Louis, the 23-year-old daughter of Haitian immigrants, tries to get that message across. Louis, who has worked with Dream Defenders since her junior year in college, recalls watching George Zimmerman’s trial in Martin’s shooting on TV every day; when he was acquitted, “my soul was shattered,” she said. She spent 27 days at the sit-in at the capitol in Tallahassee. But although she’s still committed to the cause, the realities of surviving are pulling her away from full-time activism.
“I’m going to have to find work,” she said. “The movement is really struggling. We were really amped up at the capitol. The reality now is people have real lives and have to work.”
She spent part of the afternoon at the Dream Defenders table in the center of the courtyard. By day’s end, only six people have signed cards expressing interest in the group’s work.
Jesse Jackson came to Tallahassee to join the Dream Defenders in their sit-in. Sharpton shuttled into Ferguson to lead marches and rustle up media attention. Black clergy and leaders of traditional civil rights groups reached out to the new groups, offering advice and organizational support.
And in December, Agnew and six other leaders of new groups met at the White House with President Obama, who told them he would set up a task force to address the “simmering distrust” between police and African Americans. Agnew came away from the meeting convinced that protest groups must become more radical because change will not come from those already in power.
“The concessions won by the civil rights movement in the ’60s are our biggest obstacle,” he said. “We have black Fortune 500 CEOs, an African American president, African American mayors and chiefs of police, and still the lot of black people, Latino people, has not risen.”
Dream Defenders, which has a minimally paid staff of seven, works largely off a $200,000 grant from the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based foundation that supports groups seeking social change. Agnew said he expects the Tides money to dry up eventually “because in the end, we’re going to be too radical for them.”
In Cleveland, the mayor, police chief and much of the City Council are black, as are many influential pastors. But some young black activists say their fight puts them squarely at odds with the city’s black power structure.
“As an African American guy trying to make a difference, I am fighting the white establishment, and I’m also fighting the black establishment,” said Alonzo Mitchell, an organizer who hosts a local radio show and is a regular at council meetings.
When Mitchell, 33, approached a city official to seek backing for a mentorship program for future political leaders, he says he was told: “No one is going to teach you. Power is never given, it’s taken.”
On the city’s west side, below the modest Guide to Kulchur bookstore, an expansive basement meeting room has become the headquarters of an activist collective determined to change how Cleveland police operate.
In the basement one recent afternoon, activists peppered half a dozen council members with demands, insisting that each official complete a report card, answering yes or no to statements such as “The officer who killed Rice should be immediately indicted.” All but one of the council members in attendance said they favored an indictment.
When protesters planned a march after the Rice shooting, Police Chief Calvin Williams volunteered to shut down parts of a highway. Commuters griped about the protests impeding traffic, but Mayor Frank Jackson said “that’s the inconvenience of freedom.” Cleveland police officers working at demonstrations conversed and joked with protesters, a strikingly different approach from officers in St. Louis, who met similar protests with riot gear, tear gas and rubber-coated bullets.
Despite such efforts at cooperation, pressing for change is harder in cities with black elected officials, some veteran civil rights leaders say.
“It is more difficult to organize against a black power structure,” said Lawrence Hamm, 61, who formed the People’s Organization for Progress in Newark in 1983 after a police shooting of an unarmed black man. “You might be marching against a popular black mayor, and it’s going to be harder for you to get people to join you.”
The new groups need help from the old-line black civil rights groups they sometimes view as having sold out, Hamm said: “The black radical organizations — the people who want more fundamental change — are not going to be strong enough to get there on their own.”
Although Hamm’s group still agitates for police overhauls, its founder long ago realized he needed to work both with elected officials and with older, mainstream organizations.
“We formed our group because we felt the traditional civil rights groups were not aggressive enough,” said Hamm. “But now, I belong to three branches of the NAACP.”
Three decades after Hamm set out to be more in-your-face than the black organizations of his parents’ generation, Ciara Taylor, the 25-year-old political director of Dream Defenders, found her way to a more radical path by volunteering in Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Knocking on doors in Vero Beach, Fla., she was called the n-word and confronted with the reality that a black senator’s candidacy for president “does not make race go away,” she said. “There was a great hope within my generation and within me that we could be free of racial identification, but we realized that race does not go away.”
But it took a one-two punch three years later to propel her into full-time activism: In her senior year at Florida A&M University, the school proposed to eliminate her major, Spanish language; she switched her concentration to political science and joined a campaign to reverse the cutbacks. A few months after that, when Martin was killed, Taylor, daughter of a corporate manager and a career Navy officer, felt jolted from her middle-class trajectory.
“Being a young person, you’re impatient,” she said. “You see these trigger moments happen and you automatically want to fight the big beast that our parents tried to protect us from.”
Now, two years into her life as an organizer, Taylor bristles at the notion, expressed by some veterans of the 1960s movement, that the new activism is dissipating. “A lot of the older generation looks at movement work as physically being at a protest,” she said. “That’s important, but a more radical expression of social engagement is simply choosing to love yourself in a society that tells you you look like a thug or your nose is too big.”
When Taylor sees new groups fading away, she doesn’t take that as a defeat, but as a sign that people are “caring for themselves. The fact that a lot of movements are disintegrating comes from the inability to care for oneself, especially mothers with families.”
Ferguson remains a hive of activism. For the first time, the Organization for Black Struggle, which grew out of the Black Power movement of the 1970s and ’80s, has enough money to pay six staff members, thanks to support from individuals and progressive groups such as the Center for Popular Democracy, Color of Change and the Open Society Foundations, which was founded by liberal billionaire investor George Soros.
Seven months ago, Charles Wade was adjusting scarves and trimming hems for Hollywood stars. Now he’s in St. Louis, where the former image consultant to Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s sister, is alone, in black sweats, scrubbing the floor of a townhouse that is part of a transitional housing program he has set up through his new organization, Operation Help or Hush.
It’s been a trying few days. His asthma was acting up. A protester he’s been housing lost Wade’s credit card while out buying supplies. And on Twitter, he’s dealing with a protester who questioned his funding, his newfound fame as an activist and his devotion to the cause.
“It’s really demoralizing that you have to fight so hard just to do something decent for people,” Wade said.
Immediately after the Brown shooting, Wade, a native of Bowie, Md., started raising money on Twitter to provide food, housing and even expense money for protesters who paused their lives to go into the streets. He raised $25,000 in one week. On one occasion, after putting out a call on Twitter for help for protesters who needed gas money, Wade stood in the parking lot of Andy Wurm Tire & Wheel handing out $20 bills.
Since grand jurors decided not to indict Wilson, many activists have scattered. Wade stayed. He still expects to house 27 new activists by April, and he’s raising money through Twitter and from friends and family.
He’s determined to keep going, he said; there’s so much more to do: “There’s very little we’ve actually gotten for Ferguson except for it to be known nationally.”
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Organize Florida activists protest Trump infrastructure plan
Organize Florida activists protest Trump infrastructure plan
Progressive activists gathered on the shores of Lake Parker on Thursday to air their discontent with the Trump administration’s outline for a nationwide infrastructure improvement plan.
The...
Progressive activists gathered on the shores of Lake Parker on Thursday to air their discontent with the Trump administration’s outline for a nationwide infrastructure improvement plan.
The plan, outlined broadly in a six-page memo released last month, amounts to placing heavy burdens on the poor through flat user fees like tolls, subsidizing private companies and ignoring public transportation, school facilities and clean energy, said activists with Organize Florida, a project of the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning political advocacy group.
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7 days ago
7 days ago