Politics

HOLLYWOOD STARS URGE BLACK AMERICA TO VOTE EARLY

Angela Bassett, Kevin Eubanks, Brandy, and  LisaRaye among the cast of NCBCP/AURN PSA’s urging African Americans  to be first to vote in the upcoming election

Los Angeles, CA – In an effort to circumvent voter suppression tactics and confusion at the polls, award winning actress, Angela Bassett; Tonight Show bandleader, Kevin Eubanks; actress, LisaRaye McCoy Misick; and singer/actress, Brandy Norwood; are among the list of celebrities voicing public service announcements urging people to vote early or be first in line on Election Day. The joint initiative between American Urban Radio Networks  (AURN) and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) marks the second phase of their nonpartisan radio campaign aimed at ensuring African Americans cast a ballot that counts on Election Day.

“We’ve already received numerous reports of possible voter suppression. It’s essential to get the word out to vote early or be first in line to avoid the drama on November 4th,” said Melanie L. Campbell, executive director and CEO, NCBCP. “AURN is the largest African American owned radio network company reaching 20 million listeners weekly. We appreciate AURN and all of the celebrities involved, their help ensures that the critical message to vote early will reach our target audience.”

Jerry Lopes, president of program operations and affiliations for AURN adds, “I am pleased to join hands with Unity ‘08, a group of prestigious organizations working to protect the rights that our ancestor’s fought and died for. It was also a great opportunity to engage these celebrities and refreshing to see so many who wanted to help in the effort to protect our right to vote. I thank and applaud all of them for donating their time to this vital effort.”

Tanya Hart, host of AURN’s “Hollywood Live” coordinated the Los Angeles effort. Other celebrities participating in the campaign include: recording artists,  James Ingram, Earth, Wind and Fire’s, Verdine White, Siedah Garrett,  Doc Powell and Take 6’s, David Thomas.   From the big and little screens: Obba Babatunde, Ernest Harden Jr., Reginald Dorsey, Regina Taylor, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Rolanda Watts, Hattie Winston, LaTonya Richardson Jackson, TV game show host, Mark Walberg and from BET’s “Sunday Best,” Beth Payne.   Ambassador Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, Susan L. Taylor, editor-in-chief emeritus of Essence magazine, and political comedian, Shang, also participated in the campaign.

In addition to making an appeal for African Americans to be first to vote in this historic election, phase two of the PSA campaign encourages people to call  the NCBCP’s Unity ‘08 voter assistance hotline, 866-MYVOTE 1, to locate their polling place in advance. On the ground, NCBCP state coordinators are hosting get-out-the-vote rallies, monitoring the polls, and mobilizing voters in states where early voting has already started.

During the initial phase of the campaign AURN produced and distributed voter education PSA’s, while NCBCP representatives were on the ground in 18 states registering voters, hosting education forums, and making sure eligible voters verified their registration.

For more information about the NCBCP’s Unity ‘08 campaign visit www.blackcampaign.org. To receive a copy of the PSA’s contact Lenore Williams at AURN at 412-456-4098 or via email lwilliams@aurn.com.

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About the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation
Founded in 1976, the NCBCP (www.ncbcp.org) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to increasing African American participation in civil society.  Current initiatives include Operation Big Vote, Black Youth Vote!, Black Women’s Roundtable, and Voices of the Electorate and Unity ‘08: The Black Campaign, a non-partisan civic engagement initiative designed to inoculate, motivate, and mobilize Black voters to participate in the 2008 election.

About American Urban Radio Networks
American Urban Radio Networks (www.aurn.com ) is the only African-American owned radio network company in the United States.  It’s the largest network reaching Urban American with more than 20 million listeners each week.  Through three programming networks and its marketing division, American Urban Radio Networks reach more African-Americans than any other medium in America and produce more programming than all other broadcasting companies combined.

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Is Riding the Bus a Ticket to Jail?

Is Riding the Bus a Ticket to Jail?

By Caroline Kim and Jenna Loyd

In December 2007, Artemio and two of his friends were traveling by bus through Syracuse, New York on their way to their homes in Mexico. Rather than celebrating Christmas with their families, however, the three men were arrested by immigration agents at a bus station. They were then detained at a county jail before being transferred to the ICE facility in Batavia, New York, and eventually deported to Mexico.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, also known as the Border Patrol, confirms that its agents in Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo check the citizenship status of travelers passing through by bus and train every day. These three cities are within 100 miles of the US-Canadian border. But more important than the border zone is the location of these cities on a major transportation corridor linking the Northeast (New York City and Boston) with the Midwest (Cleveland and Chicago). Border Patrol agents use Syracuse’s location as the functional equivalent of the border to police people traveling within the interior of the country.

Agents check for citizenship in the bus and train station—often waiting at the Greyhound ticket counter, or watching people as they disembark for food—and onboard buses and trains already filled with passengers. People who have witnessed or been subject to Border Patrol agents questioning describe two practices: agents explicitly target a group of people or ask everyone on board about their citizenship status.

According to reports from the Detainment Task Force, a Northern New York group, people routinely singled out for questioning include those who appear to be Mexican, Central American, South Asian, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, or Middle Eastern.  Border Patrol officials deny that the agency racially profiles, insisting that they look for suspicious behaviors and, “question people with blond hair and blue eyes as much as anyone else.” But common understandings of race in the U.S. fuse nationality and ethnicity so that some groups are permanently deemed to be “foreign.”

* * *

The story of Tomas, who is from Guatemala, illustrates the ways in which law enforcement’s use of racial profiling—and the collaboration of local law enforcement with Border Patrol agents—impedes people’s ability to travel.

In July 2007, Tomas and his friend Salvador were driving to a doctor’s appointment. As they pulled out of the toll plaza from the I-90 throughway in Syracuse, a state trooper stopped them. Tomas has a valid U.S. driver’s license and a properly registered vehicle. The state trooper gave no indication of why he had stopped the vehicle, but he did ask Tomas and Salvador about their immigration status and then called Border Patrol agents. “The police officer stopped us because we have Hispanic faces,” Tomas said.

Tomas has had the same experience traveling by bus. Last October he was traveling to Syracuse on Greyhound when Border Patrol agents boarded the bus at the Rochester bus station. “The Border Patrol agents questioned all the Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Asian passengers,” he recalled. “They did not question any of the white passengers except some women who were wearing veils. Border Patrol had dogs with them and checked the whole bus. They even looked in the bathroom.”

A separate incident occurred in December when Tomas was at the Syracuse bus station with another friend. They were speaking to each other in Spanish as they approached the ticket counter where a Border Patrol agent was stationed. “As soon as the Border Patrol agent heard us speaking Spanish, he asked me for my papers,” he said.

Even when Latino travelers produce documents proving their legal status, they are not safe from harassment.

When Tomas finally boarded the bus and arrived in Rochester, Border Patrol was there as well. “I saw them [Border Patrol] on the platform questioning two Hispanic men. The men gave them permanent resident cards. The Border Patrol agent didn’t believe them. He took the cards and called somewhere else. The men had to wait for twenty minutes.” The two men were eventually released.

Tomas’s testimony is not unique. A professor at Syracuse University who is a naturalized citizen originally from the Dominican Republic has been questioned multiple times in his travels and a Syracuse University student who is a U.S. citizen of South Asian descent was separated from his wife, a legal permanent resident, and both interrogated about their status.

* * *

This video filmed by Andrew Burton, a Syracuse University junior journalism student and winner of a 2008 Hearst Journalism Award, documents an actual raid on a Greyhound bus. If you can’t view the video below, please click here:

http://cmr.syr.edu/nhinteractive/story.cfm?storyid=64

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How Black is New Orleans?

How Black is New Orleans?

By Alex Jung

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE ACCURATE of Mayor Ray Nagin had he declared New Orleans a milk chocolate city rather than a chocolate one. The U.S. Census Bureau finally released numbers confirming what many people have already seen for themselves: the devastation begun by Hurricane Katrina and continued by inept and/or racist politicians and policies has displaced more Black citizens than white ones, resulting in a noticeable shift in the racial status quo. New Orleans, much to the glee of developers, is now a whiter, older and better-educated city with more pocket change after the hurricane than before.

The data, compiled and analyzed in a new report entitled “Resettling New Orleans” released by the Brookings Institution, provides a snapshot of the city in 2005 before the hurricane hit and then a year later in 2006. The numbers are as follows: in the city of New Orleans, the Black population dropped from 67 percent to 58 percent while the white composition of the city jumped from 26 percent to 34 percent. These figures mean that Blacks suffered a 57-percent population loss, whereas whites experienced a 36-percent decline.

“What happened is that people who had more money and more resources—both financial and social—who could have gotten out before the storm, did,” said Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at Brookings and co-author of the report. For poorer, Black residents, the “choice” to stay was hampered by means as well as actual places where they could go, because most of their kin were in a similar situation. “People’s networks didn’t allow them to make a move [in or near New Orleans],” Singer added.

Disparities also exist in the destinations of the displaced New Orleanians. Black citizens were most likely to be moved (by the government or of their own volition) to the Houston metro area, or other faraway urban centers like Dallas or Atlanta. Dislocated white residents could stay closer to home—moving to the suburban parishes near the city or to Baton Rouge.

But it wasn’t just that Blacks from New Orleans couldn’t move in with their relatives nearby. The Gulf Coast’s hostility towards Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina was evident and was perhaps crystallized the moment that St. Bernard Parish passed a law decreeing that only “blood relatives” of the predominantly white town could move into the city (the law was later struck down). These hostilities fall outside of the scope of the Brookings report, which declines to identify the root causes of the racial disparities.

Another new report by the Institute for Southern Studies entitled, “Hurricane Katrina and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement” delves into the systemic racism that occurred before, during and after the storm to explain why the racial balance in New Orleans has shifted. It documents how Black families from New Orleans were met with gunfire in the majority-white suburb of Gretna; how they have been housed in trailers with high levels of formaldehyde; and how Black homeowners have had their homes gutted without notice.

New Orleans’ future remains uncertain, at best. “The longer you’ve been gone, the less likely you are to return,” Singer said. “As New Orleans struggles to recapture some of its past, including some of its past population, it’s going to become harder and harder because New Orleans is no longer the same place that it was.”

—Alex Jung

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10th Anniversary of Jasper Lynching

Relatives, Residents Mark 10th Anniversary of Jasper Lynching

In Texas, dozens of people gathered in Jasper on Sunday to mark the tenth anniversary of the dragging murder of James Byrd, J. An African American, Byrd was chained to a pickup truck by white assailants and dragged along a rural road, his body badly dismembered.

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Obama’s Oil Windfall Tax Call

Obama Calls for Oil Windfall Tax

On the campaign trail, Democratic Senator Barack Obama kicked off his presidential campaign Monday as the presumptive Democratic nominee with a call for a new tax on windfall oil profits. Obama addressed supporters in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Senator Barack Obama: “I’ll shut down the corporate loopholes and tax havens, and I’ll use the money to help pay for a middle-class tax cut that will proved $1,000 of relief—$1,000 of relief—to 95 percent of workers and their families. I’ll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we’ll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills.”

Obama’s pledge came as the price for gas reached a record-high $4 a gallon.

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