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After decades of lobbying, supporters say they have the votes in the House to pass a reparations bill

February 26, 2022 Shawn Bell News and Highlights

H.R. 40 would create a commission on reparations for Black Americans modeled on the process Japanese Americans went through to receive reparations for being imprisoned in internment camps during World War II.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), right, speaks during a hearing about reparations for the descendants of enslaved people before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in 2019. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

By Emmanuel Felton , The Washington Post

More than three decades after it was first introduced, a House bill that would create a commission to study reparations for Black Americans has the votes to pass, its key champions say.

That broad support, they contend, shows that the idea of reparations has gone from the fringes to the mainstream of American politics.

“This has been a 30-plus year journey,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). “We had to take a different approach. We had to go one by one to members explaining this does not generate a check.”

The commission would hold hearings with testimony from those who support and oppose the idea. Jackson Lee said the country would end up better from the process. “Reparations is about repair and when you repair the damage that has been done, you do so much to move a society forward. This commission can be a healing process — telling the truth can heal America,” she said.

While supporters are confident they have the votes to gain approval in the Democratic-controlled House, they are less optimistic about the bill’s fate in the Senate. Instead, they intend to push President Biden to sign an executive order that would create the commission. The bill, H.R. 40, call for a months-long study of reparations so supporters say they need Biden to act now so his administration could implement the commission’s recommendations before the end of his term.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the legislation or whether Biden would consider an executive order.

During the 2020 Democratic primary election, The Washington Post asked candidates if they thought the federal government should pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people. Nearly all of the leading contenders, including Biden, said that they supported an in-depth study of the issue. Their answers represented a significant shift compared to President Barack Obama’s rejection of the idea during his 2008 campaign. Revisiting the issue in an interview last year, Obama said that reparations are “justified” but the “politics of white resistance and resentment” made the issue a “non-starter” during his presidency.

Supporters say that the conversations that started after George Floyd’s murder changed the political calculus of reparations. Floyd’s death in May 2020 sparked worldwide protests and a national reckoning on race and the criminal justice system. For many, watching the viral video of Floyd crying for his mother while struggling to breathe pinned beneath the knee of a White Minneapolis police officer was proof of what Black Americans have said for years — that their lives aren’t valued.

“I started fighting for reparations at a time when it didn’t pass the laugh test, when I spent most of my time just trying to get people in power just to utter the word reparations,” said Nkechi Taifa, director of the Reparation Education Project. “That changed with George Floyd. He was like the Emmett Till of the 21st century. It was something about his murder that captured the attention of the world just like Emmett Till’s murder did 70 years ago, and it started a new movement that has led to this mainstream conversation about reparations. But people need to know that this conversation didn’t just pop up overnight on the Internet, people have been fighting for reparations for a long time.”

This push for a federal commission comes a cities and localities across the country undertake their own efforts to account for their racist pasts.

In September 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed AB 3121, which created a task force to study and recommend reparations for Black Californians. In March, the panel will take a final vote on the question of who should be eligible for those reparations. With the vote, the group hopes to set a historic precedent for reparations eligibility for other states and the federal government. Thus far, the California effort represents the largest Black reparations project in the nation’s history, but supporters say they expect similar efforts soon in other Democratic-strongholds like New York, New Jersey and Maryland.

The federal legislation was first introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) in 1989. The “40” in H.R. 40 is a reference to an order signed in the waning days of the Civil War aimed at helping newly-freed Black people survive and make a fresh start after 200 years in bondage. The government would take land that had been confiscated from Confederates and redistribute it, with each Black family receiving 40 acres. However, after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the order was rescinded and the land was returned to White Confederate landowners.

Conyers proposed the legislation in the wake of President Reagan signing The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned by the U.S. government during World War II.

Conyers went on to introduce the bill 20 times, once during every Legislative session from 1989 to 2017. After Conyers resigned from Congress in 2017 in the wake of sexual harassment allegations, Rep. Jackson Lee became the bill’s primary champion. After 30 years on the Hill, the bill made it out of committee for the first time last April. It was approved by the House Judiciary Committee in a 25-17 party-line vote. Earlier this month, nearly every major civil rights organization and a host of celebrities, including Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, signed a letter urging congressional leaders to bring H.R. 40 to the floor for a vote.

Jackson Lee said she and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who introduced the bill in the Senate, have secured 260 sponsors and “yes” votes for the measure across both chambers of Congress, though none from any Republicans.

“This groundswell of support sends a clear message to President Biden,” said Kennis Henry of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations. “We are ready for the opportunity to have this racial reckoning. And if not now, when?,” said Henry.

“We have seen other groups get reparations from the Japanese to the families of 9/11 victims. In those cases and others, our government said we must do something,” Henry said. “So why is this country unwilling to discuss reparations for people of African descent? The only difference between those who have gotten reparations and those who have not gotten compensation is the color of my skin.”

The commission, which would receive $12 million in funding, would be composed of 13 members. The President and the Speaker of the House would each appoint three members, while the President pro tempore of the Senate would appoint a single member. The other six seats would be filled with representatives from civil rights organizations that have championed the cause of reparations. Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, a senior campaign director at Color of Change, hopes the work of commission could help undo what she calls the misinformation of the anti-Critical Race Theory movement.

“At the heart of what the critical race theory fight is about is the refusal to educate young people and by proxy their families about the harm America has done to Black people,” she said. “And so you have people asking: ‘Why should a Black person today receive reparations, none of you experienced slavery?’ And this is why I think H.R. 40 is so, so important because it’s going to explain and show the ways that slavery, the Jim Crow era and Reconstruction materially impacted Black communities and their legacies.”

Reparations could be a step toward closing the racial wealth gap that was created in part by Black families historically not having land and property to pass on to their descendants due to slavery and later, racist government policies, supporters say.

“There are so many White families who may not be wealthy, but they have a home that they inherited from their grandparents who bought the home with federal funds when they returned from World War II,” Ogunnaike said. “So few Black people have that ability, and that’s a direct harm at the hands of the federal government. It’s time for them to repair it. Black organizers, the Black movement has done an incredible job of making this a centerpiece of conversation, now we need to figure out the how of how we move people to action.”

A 2021 Washington Post-ABC News pollfound that 65 percent of Americans opposed paying cash reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black people. While a small plurality of Democrats — 46 percent — favored the idea, 92 percent of Republicans opposed it. Two-thirds of Black people supported the idea, but only 18 percent of White Americans did. However, while a majority still oppose reparations, the ranks of those who support the idea is up markedly from past surveys. A 1999 ABC News poll found just 19 percent of Americans approved of reparations for Black Americans. Supporters of H.R. 40. said they expect support for reparations to increase with a federal commission and its public findings.

“The idea of H.R. 40 is to respond to those who say my family didn’t have enslaved people, it’s not my fault,” Jackson Lee said. “What I say to them is be very assured, we will not be knocking on individual White people’s doors demanding money for African Americans. But for slavery, for the hanging of thousands of Black people, for Jim Crow laws, for the horrible segregation laws of the 20th century, for the segregation of the United States military, for redlining, your government has a responsibility because it was all government-sanctioned. Your government has a debt.”

Said Ron Daniels, president of the National African American Reparations Commission, “I firmly believe if White Americans knew better, they’d do better.”

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Reject ‘rule of law’ hypocrisy and demand reparatory justice

February 10, 2022 Shawn Bell Proctor in Action

On Jan. 8, 2022, the Mail & Guardian (whose masthead asserts that it is “Africa’s Best Read” newspaper) published an opinion column by Lindiwe Sisulu titled “Whose Law Is It Anyway?” that has sparked a deep conversation in South Africa.

I learned of it from my friend Allan Boesak during one of our weekly conversations about faith and justice. After I read Sisulu’s piece, I shared it with other justice-minded public theologians in the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference with this statement: “This is a must read!”

Sisulu’s parents, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, were leading figures with Nelson Mandela in the African National Congress movement that resisted the racist apartheid regime of South Africa. Their daughter’s opinion column shows she inherited her parents’ zeal for justice.

A dose of truth

“Whose Law Is It Anyway?” bristles with truth about economic reparation, a subject the beneficiaries of colonization always try to avoid. Consider the following excerpt:

Let’s not fool ourselves and one another: the primary motivation for the evils of colonialism was and still is economic. It is organized crime; the robbery of other people’s land and resources; the exploitation and despiteful use of their labor. It is also about the reduction of these people to mass consumers and exclusion from the ownership of the factors of production and wealth creation.

But it seems today we have legitimized wrongdoing under the umbrella of the rule of law. Many years down the line Africans manage poverty while others manage wealth. When we talk about transformation, it is just a buzzword? When we talk about reconciliation, what we don’t hear is economic reconciliation.

Lindiwe Sisulu

Sisulu is unapologetically critical of colonized-thinking Black judges, other politicians and business leaders for their collective failure to demand economic reparation for centuries of legalized land theft and wage theft in South Africa.

Because she is a member of the ANC’s executive committee, has been a member of the South African Parliament since 1994, and currently serves as minister of tourism for South Africa, her objections to the failure by Black judges, other politicians and business leaders to demand economic reparation have drawn criticism from some in South Africa, including some supporters of the current political administration. However, her critique of the so-called “reconciliation process” is praised by other people in South Africa who realize that the 1994 Constitution that purported to end apartheid was woefully flawed.

Her critique of the well-worn phrase “rule of law” is correct. Like Martin Luther King Jr. did in his Letter from Birmingham Jail written to white religious leaders who criticized King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for its role in supporting nonviolent civil disobedience to Jim Crow laws, Sisulu correctly declares that there is a difference between legality and justice.

Slavery was practiced, supported and defended under “the rule of law.”

Robbery of land and labor of indigenous people was upheld under “the rule of law.”

Women were denied the right to vote under “the rule of law.”

Minister Sisulu and other people who insist that descendants of indigenous and enslaved people whose land and labor were stolen by colonizers deserve economic reparation are vilified as opponents of “the rule of law” by white defenders of manifest destiny, self-proclaimed religious conservatives and colonized-minded Black and indigenous leaders.

They are vilified because colonizers and their lackeys always have referred to “the rule of law” to avoid demands for economic reparations as part of the overall claim for racial justice. However, Minister Sisulu’s views are in line with those of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Kimberle Crenshaw, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, Palestinians, and other Black and indigenous people around the world who have demanded economic reparations for legalized robbery, fraud and other oppression.

I am a Black judge and pastor who was born, reared and educated in the American South during the final years of the Jim Crow era. I have lived most of my life in the American South since that time. The American South is where I obtained my law degree, my law license, practiced law, was licensed and ordained as a minister in the religion of Jesus, and where my wife and I raised our sons. My personal and professional experience and knowledge of history lead me to agree with what Minister Sisulu has observed about “the rule of law.”Most Americans are in denial about white supremacy, racism and their pervasive influence on the legal system, society, economics, notions of government, religion and understanding of culture. Michael Eric Dyson described this denial tendency and its effect on racial equity in his introduction to Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad, by William Owens, as follows:

Wendell Griffen

It is not overstating the case to suggest that, when it comes to race, we are living in the United States of Amnesia. America cannot solve its race problem because it cannot afford to remember what it has been through, or more accurately, what it has made its Black citizens endure: the horrible, cowardly, vicious legacy of racial domination stoked by religious belief and judicial mandate. The willed forgetfulness of our racial past continues to trap us. … It appears easier for most whites, and for many Blacks, to reenact a pantomime of social civility through comfortable gestures of racial reconciliation than it is to tell each other the truth of the colossal breach of humane behavior and democratic practice that slavery represented.

Derrick Bell,

Derrick Bell, one of the first legal scholars associated with Critical Race Theory, was equally honest in his contribution to the Introduction to Black Mutiny.

The distinctions between slavery, segregation and current era of quasi-opportunity are real, but the paradoxes built on white dominance and Black subordination are recognizable in each era.

 Those Blacks and whites who challenge the racial status quo are seldom hailed as heroes in their own time. Their words and actions are too threatening to what is to allow either those they oppose or those they would help to comprehend when those bold individuals proclaim what might be.

In all times, the law is the handmaiden of those in power. Only in extraordinary circumstances will courts and legislatures break with this traditional role and reach out to the dispossessed, usually in ways that benefit those without power in small ways and in the short run. In large ways and in the long run, the seemingly remedial actions of law stabilize and legitimate even when, as is often the case, the powerful are most active in their opposition to these modest reforms.

‘Willed forgetfulness’

Michael Eric Dyson’s observation about the “willed forgetfulness of our racial past” that enables most white people and many Black people” to “reenact a pantomime of social civility through comfortable gestures of racial reconciliation,” and Derrick Bell’s observation that “Blacks and whites who challenge the racial status quo are seldom hailed as heroes in their own time,” are as true now as when they were made in 1997.

Michael Eric Dyson

That explains why right-wing politicians, religious figures, journalists, neo-fundamental capitalist colonizers and imperialists, and white supremacists are trying to stop teaching, learning, writing and discourse about the history of racial injustice, including Critical Race Theory, in colleges, universities and otherwise.

On another level, “willed forgetfulness” and outright hostility to truthful observations about the economic debt owed to descendants of indigenous and formerly enslaved Africans are at the heart of recent attacks on historically Black colleges and universities throughout the United States, including bomb threats made to three such institutions in Arkansas where I live.

Black people in the United States and indigenous people in South Africa and elsewhere always have known that the long pattern of domestic terrorism against our communities, places of learning and worship, our burial places and our historical sites is a basic aspect of white supremacy and domination. The Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol showed the world the ugly truth about white hypocrisy concerning “the rule of law” that Black people, including those who study, teach and work in HCBUs, have known for generations.

Agents of pacification

At the same time, the descendants of indigenous and formerly enslaved Africans who asserted our inherent rights of dignity, equality and freedom from oppression always have recognized how white colonizers and their descendants used Black lackeys as agents of pacification. In the early years of the last century, Booker T. Washington served that purpose. At the end of the last century and currently, judges such as Justice Clarence Thomas and religious figures such as Tony Evans serve that purpose.

“No provision was made in the U.S. Constitution — or in any other law — to repay the formerly enslaved persons or any of their descendants for 246 years of forced labor carried out under ‘the rule of law.’”

However, no provision was made in the U.S. Constitution — or in any other law — to repay the formerly enslaved persons or any of their descendants for 246 years of forced labor carried out under “the rule of law.” The formerly enslaved population was given no land, no property, no money and nothing else as restitution for deprivations they had been forced to endure under the “rule of law.” The nation that enacted a Homestead Act in 1862 and settled white farmers on free frontier land taken from indigenous people gave no land to formerly enslaved Black people.

Abraham Lincoln’s role

The “rule of law” hypocrisy goes further.

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, a law that called for $1 million in reparations to be paid for emancipated Africans who had been enslaved in the District of Columbia — but the money was to go to the white people who enslaved them, worked them without pay and kept the proceeds from their work. I have found no proof that the emancipated Africans received a penny. The District of Columbia Emancipation Act also included up to $100,000 to resettle formerly enslaved persons — but the resettlement was to be in Haiti and Liberia, not in the United States.

Under “the rule of law,” millions of formerly enslaved people were left homeless, landless and penniless by the society that sanctioned their enslavement for 246 years. As if that plight were not sufficiently woeful, the people who enslaved them were restored to land on which the formerly enslaved had toiled and produced wealth.

The voting rights guaranteed to formerly enslaved Black men became worthless when state after state passed laws that mocked their emancipation. One day after the 13th Amendment was ratified — which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime — South Carolina enacted a law that required Black “servants” to enter into labor contracts with white “masters,” to work from dawn to dusk and to maintain a “polite” demeanor. Violation of that law — by failing to enter into such a “contract” or by failure to maintain the required demeanor — subjected the “servants” to criminal sanctions that could result, upon conviction, in the loss of voting rights and return to involuntary servitude. The “rule of law” made a mockery of the 13th Amendment.

This history is a fraction of the harms, injuries and indignities inflicted upon formerly enslaved Black people according to “the rule of law” in the United States. Perversely, it is never mentioned when economists, politicians, lawyers, judges and religious leaders discuss wealth inequity in my country. Instead, white capitalists and their Black sycophants blatantly question the industry and innovativeness of people whose marginalized ancestors designed cities, revolutionized the arts, developed life-saving medical procedures and invented machines that transformed life in countless ways.

The shameless “rule of law” hypocrisy goes still further. Formerly enslaved Africans in the United States were defrauded of voting rights by various devices. I cherish to this day the 1963 receipt for poll taxes paid by my parents and recall the names and faces of Black people in my rural southwest Arkansas community who picked cotton to make enough money to pay the taxes so our elders could vote. Now, the descendants of those elders are openly disenfranchised by voter suppression schemes.

Red Summer of 1919

Three generations after the U.S. Civil War ended, a season of racial violence occurred in the United States that historians term the Red Summer of 1919. White mobs terrorized and murdered Black neighborhoods at will and without fear of prosecution. The Red Summer concluded in Arkansas, my home state, near the rural community of Elaine in southeast Arkansas, when hundreds of Black men, women and children were massacred by a white mob and federal troops (who traveled from Little Rock aboard a troop train accompanied by Gov. Charles Brough) over the course of several days beginning on Oct. 1, 1919.

No white person was arrested for or charged with committing any of the murders, planning the massacre or participating in it. Land, livestock and farm implements that belonged to the massacred people and their terrorized survivors were not restored to their descendants.

The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 transformed a community of industrious, enterprising and upwardly mobile Black people who owned some of the most fertile land in Arkansas into some of most impoverished people in the United States. This happened in my home state under “the rule of law.”

To this day, the descendants of the massacred, plundered and terrorized people have not received restitution or reparation. It speaks volumes about the moral and cultural competence of “rule of law” cheerleaders when a travesty of this magnitude has not been addressed by white lawyers, judges, legal scholars, legislators, prosecutors, governors, religious leaders, columnists or other influential leaders from Arkansas (including former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton).

It’s hard to see progress

That is why Minister Sisulu’s opinion column resonated with me. In the same way the 1994 South African Constitution did not provide for reparations or restitution for woes suffered by Black South Africans because of apartheid, the U.S. Constitution, which deliberately gave a bonus representation to slaveholding states equal to three-fifths of the number of their disenfranchised enslaved Africans, never has contained a provision for reparations or restitution to descendants of enslaved Africans.

Instead, descendants of enslaved Africans are accused of being “unqualified” affirmative action contenders for public office and private enterprise. Notice how President Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to fill the pending vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court caused by the upcoming retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer is criticized by people who are beneficiaries of centuries of white male privilege concerning judicial service.

A generation ago, Randall Robinson wrote about what the United States owes Africans and African Americans for the damage Black people suffered and continue to suffer because of centuries of slavery, segregation and discrimination perpetrated under “the rule of law.” After quoting the long-settled legal principle that a party wronged by unjust acts is entitled to recompense so the wrongdoer is not unjustly enriched, Robinson wrote:

Only in the case of Black people have the claims, the claimants, the crime, the law, the precedents, the awful contemporary social consequences all been roundly ignored. The thinking must be that the case that cannot be substantively answered is best not acknowledged at all. Hence, the United States government and white society generally have opted to deal with this debt by forgetting that it is owed. The crime — 246 years of an enterprise murderous both of a people and their culture — is so unprecedentedly massive that it would require some form of collective insanity not to see it and its living victims.

But still many, if not most, whites cannot or will not see it (a behavior that is accommodated by all too many uncomplaining Blacks). … America accepts responsibility for little that goes wrong in the world, least of all the contemporary plight of Black Americans. And until America can be made to do so, it is hard to see how we can progress significantly in our race relations.

Thank God for these voices

I thank God for Randall Robinson, Derrick Bell, Michael Eric Dyson, Nicole Hannah Jones, Kimberle Crenshaw, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and others who refuse to allow the massive debt owed Africans and African Americans to be disregarded and disallowed by the “willed forgetfulness” and “collective insanity” rationalized by reliance on “the rule of law.”

I thank God that Lindiwe Sisulu refuses to allow reliance on “the rule of law” to silence the rightful claim of South Africans to the reparation owed for the land, labor and other wealth stolen from them for centuries.

And I thank God for Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Cone, Jeremiah Wright Jr., Allan Boesak and other prophetic religious and secular leaders who proclaim a festering inconvenient truth.

Without reparations for racial injustice, there is no reason to talk about racial reconciliation, let alone imagine that it is likely to happen. Reconciliation talk only serves the status quo interests of people who now benefit from centuries of white supremacy, domination and land theft, labor theft and state sanctioned thuggery, and who shamelessly assert the right to continue doing so.

“Without reparations for racial injustice, there is no reason to talk about racial reconciliation, let alone imagine that it is likely to happen.”

The “rule of law” is a white supremacist sham. Victims of the colossal crimes committed with impunity in South Africa, the U.S. and elsewhere thanks to that sham should reject “reconciliation” appeals manufactured to enable, protect and continue that criminality in perpetuity.

We should demand reparatory justice. Shame on us if we won’t and don’t.

Wendell Griffen is an Arkansas circuit judge and pastor of New Millennium Church in Little Rock, Ark.

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America’s Conscience: Moral Bankruptcy and Communal Decay

January 27, 2022 Shawn Bell Current Events, Feature, Proctor in Action

America’s Conscience: Moral Bankruptcy and Communal Decay

By Jamar Boyd

For if the disinherited get such a new center as patriotism, for instance — liberty within the framework of a sense of country or nation, ­then the aim of not being killed is swallowed up by a larger and more transcendent goal. Above all else the disinherited must not have any stake in the social order; they must be made to feel that they are alien, that it is a great boon to be allowed to remain alive, not be exterminated. This was the psychology of the Nazis; it grew out of their theory of the state and the place given the Hebrew people in their ideology. Such is also the attitude of the Ku Klux Klan towards Negroes. — Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

The poignant and timeless words of Howard Thurman seamlessly speak to the present dilemma of the disinherited within America who sit in the tension, terror and tragedy of a nation that consistently fails the “folk.”

“Folk,” those who are at the margins, exist in the gaps, are discarded in the valleys and left to survive on their own methods absent of communal or governmental intervention. Those bearing ailments, disabilities, possessing financial lack and material insufficiency, yet clinging to an internal disposition of survival while all the world around them decays. Those who sense there is no righteous indignation for their sustainability and progression.

This is the dilemma presently intensified within a United States Senate unable, and unwilling, to pass voter rights protections amid democratic decay as morale continues to decrease. Such is the state of America’s conscience marred in moral bankruptcy and communal decay.

This nation’s foundation, one claimed to be built upon communal concepts of justice and liberty for all, has long needed deconstructing and reconstitution. Institutional apathy, capitalistic abuse and white hegemonic fear exuded in displacement tactics have caused us to arrive at this present hour. An hour that is witnessing the American project hang in the balance as the folk are seen as disposable commodities and viewed as replaceable — irredeemable — cattle on the farm of American disenfranchisement and plains of fertile white fragility.

This is the same fragility that would lead the Senate to pass a bill granting the Congressional Gold Medal to Emmett Till and Mamie Till yet possessing no gumption to deem the acts of Jan. 6, 2021, as domestic terrorism.

This is the same fragility that sees no issue changing the filibuster rules under a Republican president to secure Supreme Court judges yet exasperates claims of “process” when the people are centered.

This is the same fragility that claimed sorrow and grief at the passing of Congressmen Elijah Cummings and John R. Lewis yet lacks the gall to ensure folks, Black folks, are seen as equal.

This is the same fragility evidenced in the words of Mitch McConnell from the Senate floor declaring, “If my colleague tries to break the Senate to silence those millions of Americans, we will make their voices heard in this chamber in ways that are more inconvenient for the majority and this White House than what anybody has seen in living memory.”

McConnell’s statement is a clear commitment to block the rights of some for the sake of retaining power. This is not an American anomaly, instead it’s the honest state of American consciousness.

There was living, and evidenced, angst and anger with the Trump administration coupled with undeniable agony toward our democratic affairs and nation’s republic. Manifested through a summer, in 2020, where Black bodies hung and lay in the streets as strange fruit only for thoughts and prayers to be uttered. All while a pandemic ravaged the homes, communities and lives of the disinherited whose existence is viewed no different than Henrietta Lacks. Black and brown bodies were deemed absent of patriotism and only worthy of death.

“This is the same fragility that sees no issue changing the filibuster rules under a Republican president to secure Supreme Court judges yet exasperates claims of ‘process’ when the people are centered.”

There was living, and evidenced, angst and anger with the Trump administration coupled with undeniable agony toward our democratic affairs and nation’s republic. Manifested through a summer, in 2020, where Black bodies hung and lay in the streets as strange fruit only for thoughts and prayers to be uttered. All while a pandemic ravaged the homes, communities and lives of the disinherited whose existence is viewed no different than Henrietta Lacks. Black and brown bodies were deemed absent of patriotism and only worthy of death.

Consequently, we arrive at this point of apathy as the minority struggles to find hope and help amid a government that has failed collectively. Jeremiah Wright Jr. in his 2003 sermon “Confusing God and Government,” highlighted such: “And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed.

Denial, deception and delusion enable a state of ill existence to become, and remain, normative. These practices must be replaced with a communal and reconstituted democracy built by and for the people, where the folks are not discarded. Where the aim of not being killed is swallowed up by a larger and more transcendent goal.

However, if this nation is to change for the good of the folk, a larger and more transcendent goal must be imagined, sketched and actualized. This goal must not center on American exceptionalism, imperialism, militarism, supremacy or xenophobia but be directly confronted by the truthfulness of its failures.

We must be honest about this nation’s failures, commitment to abandon the vulnerable and unwillingness to reconstitute for the sake of all, forcing the folks to erect a more divine goal. We need a goal larger than amplifying American wins and losses, addressing white hegemonic fear amid massive demographic shifts, and skating the surface of inter-generational terror.

If America’s consciousness is to contain a morality of righteous indignation and communal ingenuity, the attitude of Congress and the nation toward and commitment to the disenfranchised must change — or the country we’ve known will be no more. Without such, the disinherited remain external to this nation’s construct and priorities and alien to the prospect of life.

Jamar A. Boyd II serves as senior manager for organizational impact with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference.
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United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem

January 14, 2022 Shawn Bell Resources

United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem

The scourge of the drug trade contributes to untold human rights violations, massive corruption and violence that perpetuate brokenness and suffering on a worldwide scale. In 2009, the United Nations put forth a multilateral response to the global drug problems. The Political Declaration and Plan of Action on International Cooperation Toward an Integrated and Balanced strategy to Counter the World Drug Problem identified two foundational solutions. There needs to be more development assistance to reduce supply and focus more attention on health to lower the demand. The Plan had broad support by Member States and engendered great hope for progress in this area.

The Plan suggested “framing collective responses against drugs less like a war and more like an effort to cure a social disease.” It encouraged a middle ground approach between criminalization and legalization. The Plan was laudable, but in its application, supply and use of some substances decreased, while supply and use of other substances increased. Now, seven years later, there is growing awareness that the implementation of the strategies related to the original plan, particularly in the United States, included widespread criminalization of addicts. And as a result of the drug trade and such failed strategies, many are still trapped in a life-time cycle of criminalization, greater drug dependency and violence linked to the drug trade. 

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the breach: BEARING WITNESS REPORT OF THE KATRINA NATIONAL JUSTICE COMMISSION

January 14, 2022 Shawn Bell Resources

the breach: BEARING WITNESS REPORT OF THE KATRINA NATIONAL JUSTICE COMMISSION

Over a year before Katrina left the shores of Africa, a federal contract was awarded to Innovative Emergency Management, Inc. to coordinate a simulation exercise of a Category Type 4 Hurricane in the New Orleans area. Local, state, federal and volunteer organizational emergency officials collaborated in this simulation and exercise. The Hurricane Pam exercise, as it was tagged, had all the ingredients of a virtual storm with winds of 120 mph and up to 20 inches of rain, topping the levees and flooding the New Orleans area. What was forecasted was that 300,000 people would not evacuate in advance; 1000 shelters would be needed; 97 percent of all communications would be down; boats and helicopters would be needed for thousands 2 of rescues; 175,000 people would be injured; 200,000 would become sick and 60,000 would be killed; over 500,000 buildings would be destroyed. The Delta was on alert – stand-by in New Orleans!

For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard. Acts 4:20

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BEARING WITNESS: A NATION IN CHAINS

January 14, 2022 Shawn Bell Resources

BEARING WITNESS: A NATION IN CHAINS

Across the country, people of faith and conscience are waking up to the magnitude of the harm that has been inflicted by the War on Drugs and the “get tough” movement. We are beginning to acknowledge that our collective silence about the moral dimension of this crisis has made us complicit. Study groups, action committees, and coalitions are forming from coast-to-coast led by people of faith and conscience who are raising their prophetic voices and acting with courage, emboldened by the conviction that anything less threatens the future of generations to come.

Among the brightest lights in this emerging movement is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference. Bearing Witness is an excellent resource for faith communities, advocacy groups, and all those who are willing to speak with courage and work for justice. As this report makes obvious, the truth about mass incarceration is ugly and inconvenient. But if we turn away imagine this is not our concern, millions more will be lost to this system on our watch.

Michelle Alexander

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Awakening Sacred Memories: A Resource Guide for Healing, Restoration and Justice

January 14, 2022 Shawn Bell Resources

Awakening Sacred Memories: A Resource Guide for Healing, Restoration and Justice

Introduction

“We begin with ourselves. Each of us must answer the question: What will we do with the fullness and incompleteness of who we are as we stare down the interior material life of the cultural production of evil?”

Emilie M. Townes

Beloved,

I am pleased to share this educational resource which supports the sacred memory agenda of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference (SDPC). Our sacred memory agenda is an acknowledgement that we live in a world in which narratives and stories, images and social media are all a part of the cultural production of evil; they can likewise be part of the cultural production of good. Our sacred memory agenda is an affirmation that the responsibility and charge to keep our true narrative alive is ultimately ours. Our sacred memory agenda can serve to be a force for global good. Th e United Nations (UN) declared 2015 – 2024, the International Decade of People of African Descent and the Permanent Memorial to Honor the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade at the United Nations, entitled ‘Th e Ark of Return,’ has been established at its New York headquarters. As a UN, non-governmental organization (NGO), SDPC’s sacred memory agenda will contribute to the international collective impact of documentation, remembrance and celebration initiatives being undertaken by people of African descent throughout the world, under the rubric of the UN’s declaration.

Most of all, however, our sacred memory agenda is an expression of our faith by deed. Th e Word declares:

“Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.” Deuteronomy 4:9 (NIV)

For centuries, we, people of African descent, in the Diaspora (and on the continent), have been living in a crucible of transgenerational enslavement and trauma borne out of the cultural production of evil. We have resisted, navigated, died and survived debilitating and destructive legacies in its many forms of systemic racism, sexual abuse and economic exploitation. We, all the people of the United States of America, have been living in a crucible of transgenerational myth-making and reinvention of narratives that support what Townes refers to as the “cultural production of evil.” Most especially these myths and their legacies, psychosocial and structural, are rooted in a refusal to admit or address the consequences of a proclaimed democracy that was in fact founded upon native genocide and African enslavement. With each generation, the unhealed wounds and chasms of material disparities present in this crucible undermine the possibilities for living in the fullness of one’s humanity.

Borne in the suffering of enslaved persons in the midst of a declared democracy, the prophetic tradition of the African American church and SDPC has been unwavering in its role and efforts to be a healing balm of hope and help while speaking truth to power about injustices. It is abundantly clear, that for such a time as this, Black church leadership must carry the mantle of “Servants as Wounded Healers and Warrior Healers.” And, as Healers, we must lead the people in acts of remembrance, lamentation and celebration of our journey.

SDPC’s sacred memory agenda is an extension of our past truth-telling educational, advocacy and activism initiatives. These initiatives include our “bearing witness” methodologies related to Katrina and mass incarceration and resulting in a documentary, commissions and hearings processes. By extension, this work has led to current projects that elevate truth telling, justice, racial healing and transformation ministry; thus, a sacred memory agenda. For us to be our best selves as “Wounded Healers” and “Warrior Healers,” more attention must be given to what Howard Thurman calls the “Inward Journey.”

We beseech and need you to continue the journey. We pray this guide will help us collectively to achieve that goal. May this guide prick your soul, your theological imagination and ministry gifts to unleash a bountiful blessing of healing and health, compassion and love, strength and creativity to the people you serve.

Dr. Iva E. Carruthers

General Secretary

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Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference Assails Decision of Arkansas Martin Luther King Commission to name Mike Huckabee Keynote Speaker

January 14, 2022 Shawn Bell Current Events, Feature, News and Highlights, Proctor in Action

Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference Assails Decision of Arkansas Martin Luther King Commission to name Mike Huckabee Keynote Speaker

Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference Assails Decision of Arkansas Martin Luther King Commission to name Mike Huckabee Keynote Speaker The General Secretary and the Board of Trustees of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc, an organization that resources over 2,000 African American congregations across the country, today assailed the decision of the Arkansas Martin Luther King Commission to name former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as the keynote speaker for the King birthday observance. (Read full article) Huckabee is slated to give his remarks at an invitation-only event at the Governor’s Mansion on January 17. “This decision shows a flagrant disregard for Dr. King’s values and total disrespect of the work that Dr. King did in the name of civil and human rights for African Americans in this country and the world,” said the Rev. Dr. Iva E. Carruthers, the General Secretary. “Only those whose interests it serves to misappropriate Dr. King’s message and engage in revisionist history at this time in U.S. history, would favor this type of event with Mike Huckabee as the speaker. It is a further insult to the demand for justice that one that calls itself the “King Commission” would endorse and allow this,” she continued. “The event is being paid for by taxpayers, which makes the affront even more egregious,” said the Honorable Rev. Wendell Griffen, of Little Rock, AK and SDPC trustee who recently wrote that the policies being passed and carried out represent a “re-assassination” of Dr. King.

“Sooner or later, those who feed a death wish find a way to destroy themselves. Over the course of the past three generations, we have watched and heard the death rattle of the society that rejected Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime, killed him, and has re-assassinated him since the day he died.,” Griffen wrote. “Now that the State of Arkansas has proudly announced its intention to “re-assassinate King” by having an un-reconstructed Southern Baptist preacher and right-wing politician named Mike Huckabee deliver a “keynote address” on the King holiday at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion at the invitation of the state agency that bears King’s name, we should be clear what its conduct means,” he said. “A society that behaves this way has gone beyond a death rattle. It is already morally and ethically dead,” Griffen concluded. Mike Huckabee has a history of speaking and working against the gains made by African Americans and others in this country. The former governor has

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Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. Trustees Join Hunger Strike for Voting Rights

January 14, 2022 Shawn Bell Current Events, Feature, News and Highlights, Proctor in Action

Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. Trustees

Join Hunger Strike for Voting Rights  

Members of the Board of Trustees of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. (SDPC) have joined with other faith leaders on a hunger strike to advocate for the passage of voting rights legislation on a Federal level to mitigate new, oppressive legislation in several states. 

The hunger strike was organized and launched by the Rev. Stephen Green, chair of Faith for Black Lives. 

SDPC trustees, Rev. Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III, pastor of Friendship West Baptist Church in Dallas; Rev. Traci Blackmon, associate general minister, Justice and Local Church Ministries of the United Church of Christ; and the Rev. Willie Francois III, pastor of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Pleasantville, New Jersey, have joined the protest which began January 6, 2022, the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Insurrection, and which is to end January 17, 2022, the day the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is to be celebrated across the country. Read full article

 

Rev. Francois said, in a local news article, “We put our bodies on the line for this nation. It’s a way of waging a nonviolent love revolution,” he said.

Read full article  

Dr. Haynes, one of the co-chairs of the SDPC Board of Trustees, stated, “We have those in leadership  – in Texas government – who have in their ideological DNA the same mindset of those slave masters who denied the humanity of Black people. The same mindset of those individuals who upheld Jim and Jane Crow segregation. …Gov. (Greg) Abbot and his Republican cronies have decided to dress up Jim and Jane Crow in a tuxedo of what they call voter integrity, but it’s still Jim and Jane Crow. … You are simply trying to create a problem for voters you don’t want to vote.” Read full article  

Rev. Blackmon shared that she has been very introspective about the hunger strike and what it signifies for her. “I’ve joined the hunger strike because I believe escalation is necessary as the voice of my kindred and my descendants is threatened. For me, fasting is a natural escalation and is spiritual warfare. It is once again midnight in the nation, and I actually believe what I preach: something can only be cast out by fasting and prayer.” 

Rev. Dr. Iva Carruthers, general secretary of SDPC, said that the actions of the trustees do not surprise her, “We have a group of trustees who are so deeply committed to the cause of justice that they are willing to experience physical discomfort for the good of all people. They are standing on the wall and in the breach. It is what our trustees do.” 

Carruthers remarked that the country is in a precarious place right now, as the future of voting rights for all people – most importantly Black people – hangs in the balance. 

“We have all worked too hard, for too long to just sit by,” she commented. “I applaud the trustees for their courage and conviction.”

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The Gifted Seer and The American Heart

January 6, 2022 Shawn Bell Current Events, Feature, News and Highlights, Proctor in Action

The Gifted Seer and The American Heart

By Joseph Evans, Ph.D.

“…[B]orn with a veil and gifted with second-sight in this American world – a world…which only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn under.” 
W.E.B. DU BOIS “OF OUR SPIRITUAL STRIVINGS”

Howard Thurman remains among the celebrated and elite preachers of twentieth-century renown (1899-1981). Thurman, a prophetic thinker and a self-described mystic, was gifted with second sight; a phenomenon that W.E.B. Dubois once described on the pages of “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folk.

“Thurman the gifted seer prophetically forewarned us about fascism’s content located in the American heart.” Joseph Evans, Ph.D. 

Thurman was born within the veil of American oppression which may have been the source of his gift of second sight. The gift for Thurman is like an Old Testament Seer. “I am the seer,” Samuel replied. “Go up ahead of me to the high place, for today you are to eat with me, and in the morning, I will send you on your way and will tell you all that is in your heart” (1 Samuel 9:19). Thurman the gifted seer prophetically forewarned us about fascism’s content located in the American heart: 

These [Fascist] organizations exploit the active and latent prejudices that the average American has against the non-white races on the one hand and against the Jewish people on the other. They make it possible for a creative rationalization to provide a cloak for group hatreds which can be objectified as true Christianity or true Americanism. 

In other words, they provide for a legitimizing of sadistic and demonical impulses of which under normal circumstances they might be ashamed. To appeal to anti-Negro sentiment in many sections, communities and among many groups is a “natural” for the would-be demagogue. It is sure-fire. 

The above words are Thurman’s and are included in Peter Eisenstadt’s “Howard Thurman’s ‘Fascist Masquerade’: The Black thinker who saw this coming 75 years ago.” Eisenstadt, also the author of Against The Hounds Of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman, points toward the seer of Thurman’s second sight and how Thurman employed his gift to peer into the American heart. 

What Thurman saw was a nation leaning toward, and eventually accepting, anti-democratic norms, its embrace of fascism and its sycophantic disciple’s unbridled and unadulterated lust for authoritarianism. Eisenstadt’s article on Thurman is subtitled “At the end of World War II, pioneering religious thinker Howard Thurman saw fascism coming to Christian America.” 

“In Peter Eisenstadt’s “Howard Thurman’s ‘Fascist Masquerade’: The Black thinker who saw this coming 75 years ago.” Eisenstadt, also the author of Against The Hounds Of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman, points toward the seer of Thurman’s second sight and how Thurman employed his gift to peer into the American heart.” Joseph Evans, Ph.D.

“In this new year, we approach the first anniversary of the infamous January 6 terrorist attack on the symbols of democracy.” Joseph Evans, Ph.D.

The subtitle underscores what I believe. That is, throughout his career, Thurman performed a spiritual examination of the American Heart:” His examination’s results were accurate. It pointed toward the looming, immoral, and political American dysfunction. Readers, we need only to remember the American terrorist demonstrative act on its symbols of American democratic institutions. 

Nearly a year ago, January 6, 2021, the world witnessed the apocalyptic fulfillment of the prophetic Thurman’s warning. The attack on the United States Capitol, the symbol of America’s commitment to democracy and its norms, the symbol of the citadel and fortress that represents America’s commitment to the rule of law was compromised by treasonous confederates, which previously recited, “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands one Nation under God indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” 

“There is no Martin Luther King, Jr.’s urgency of now.” Joseph Evans analyzes how the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s preaching brought the “living word” and various rhetorical techniques together in ways that helped people understand, and be given hope by, his messages. The author observes that James Baldwin – himself a gifted writer and provocative thinker – considered King to be an “Polished Preacher.”

This can no longer be believed about American Christianity as it has been defined by whites’ protestant traditions. Why? Because there is no outrage against our existential threat to democracy. There has been minimal public resistance from white mainline citizen Christians for justice, a reckoning, and an examination of the American heart.  

Plainly stated, many so-called Christians as I have described have failed to demand an exacting justice against American fascism and its fascist acolytes who by blind rote pledge allegiance to a former rogue president who, like Nero, fiddled while Rome burned. This country’s and the world’s citizens wait to see if American jurisprudence will prevail, or will it succumb to what is now obviously an uncourageous American political and moral stalemate.

This book weaves Baldwin’s poetic and fiery words, passion for justice, and admiration of King’s oration into a detailed, thought-provoking examination of the rhythm of determination and transformative power in King’s speaking, writing, and faith. Click below to watch Joseph Evans talk about why he wrote “The Polished King” 

It is the stalemate that underscores the straying democracy. 

In the meantime, in horror, the world’s citizens, friends and foes watch the hypnotic looping cable news videos that endlessly continue. Among the world’s citizens, we wait for justice and reckoning. There is no Martin Luther King, Jr.’s urgency of now. Therefore, we wait with and as global citizens; we wait to exhale; we wait to breathe. We wait nervously and many prayerfully for justice and at the same time, we continue to witness America’s growing and unimpeded fascist leanings that are spreading and mutating like our strains of COVID viruses. 

In this new year, we approach the first anniversary of the infamous January 6 terrorist attack on the symbols of democracy. As a response to newness, perhaps, someone will take notice of Thurman’s gift of second sight and have an urge to be gifted similarly. Still, the seer Thurman forewarned the nation and now the world over 75 years ago that this fascist deluge would soon emerge. 

Well, it’s here and we must deal with it straight away and head-on. We must come to terms with the condition of the American heart, like Thurman, and like those before him, and those after him. And we are those after Thurman. We must protest by demanding that action be taken before it’s too late. The assignment is before us: we must spiritually examine the American heart.

Dr. Joseph Evans is the Dean of Morehouse School of Religion. Dr. Evans is the author of “Reconciliation and Reparation Preaching Economic Justice, and The Art of Eloquence: The Sacred Rhetoric of Gardner C. Taylor. (Published in 2021) The Polished King: Living Words of Martin Luther King Jr. is Dr. Evans current title; published by Judson Press January 3, 2022. Dr. Evans contributes ecumenical and social perspectives at ReelUrbanNews.com.

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