Samuel L. Jackson has been trying to get us to wake up since he played the DJ in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Twenty-three years later, he’s back at it. This time his call is grounded in a real life battle.
With 39 days till the election on Nov. 6, we all need to do our part to ensure a free and fair outcome. There are forces out there that are using every means at their disposal to suppress the vote. We must use every means necessary to make sure they don’t prevail.
Jackson makes the case as only he can. As Sam might say, let’s keep the %^&* snakes out of the *&^% White House.
Whenever I think about making a major purchase – anything that might require a credit check, I brace myself for responding to rumors that I am dead.
Eleven years ago after my sister Ellen-Marie died, I wrote letters to all of her creditors informing them of the sad news. Things seemed to be going smoothly until I got a very sympathetic note from American Express expressing their condolences that Elaine Ray had died.
No, no, no, no, I wrote them back. I am very much alive. Although my own card, and card activity, have ever lapsed, I am periodically asked to prove that I indeed am still among the living.
It’s a good thing I don’t live in Texas.
Two weeks ago a federal court struck down a law requiring voters in Texas to have a government issued ID in order to vote. Texas was among several states, including my home state of Pennsylvania, that have passed voter ID laws in the name of stamping out fraud, even though they have come up short when it comes to providing data that significant voter fraud exists.
The real reason for these laws is as cynical as the Jim Crow era tests that required blacks who dared to show up at the polls to “count” the jelly beans in a jar before they could vote. It’s about power. Power in the hands of black people, Latinos, young people — anyone likely to vote to reelect President Barack Obama.
Pennsylvania’s Republican House majority leader said it best when he ran down a list of his party’s accomplishments: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to Win the state of Pennsylvania. Done.”
But back to dead people. Texas’ voter ID law may have been struck down, but its efforts to suppress the vote appear alive and well. With just weeks before the presidential election, they are purging their rolls of dead voters. No problem with that, except that many of the people who’ve been purged are not dead.
Terry Collins, a high school nurse in Houston, told National Public Radio that she received a letter indicating that she was dead and noted that other blacks she knew who also weren’t dead had received letters too. When she tried for three days to call to correct the information, she was left on hold for an hour each time.
“We’re required by law to maintain a clean and accurate voter registration list, and we’re attempting to comply with that mandate,” Rich Parsons, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state, told NPR. He added that people who got the letter who are not dead should just show up at the polls and they will be allowed to vote.
If you believe that, I have a jar of jelly beans that will test your math skills.
Still, we didn’t let the forces of disenfranchisement win then, and we can’t let them win now.
I’ve seen this before, I’ve lived this before. Too many people struggled, suffered and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote,” Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) said at the Democratic National Convention. “And we have come too far together to ever turn back. We must march to the polls like never ever before.”
“He went to my high school!” I gestured excitedly in the movie theater last night. It was during the preview of “Won’t Back Down,” a film scheduled for release in late September. The cast includes Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter. And it also features Bill Nunn, whose father and grandfather worked with my father at the Pittsburgh Courier. Bill, well, we called him “Bubby,” also is a Morehouse grad.
Bill Nunn with Elizabeth Banks in Spider-man. Source: The Pittsburgh Courier
What I hadn’t noticed until I got home to read up on the film, is that it was shot in Pittsburgh.
And it’s about parents who take a stand to make sure their kids get the quality education they are entitled to. Gotta love that.
I haven’t seen the movie yet. I’ll try not to judge it based on the trailer, which seems pretty high on cheese.
I’ll go see it, though, just to see Bubby, who plays the school principal, and the Pittsburgh skyline, which makes my heart flutter.
This video, made in 2005, features my mother’s “baby” cousin Irving Williams and the work he and his wife, Elvira Fenton Williams, have done with the people of Tanzania, the Gambia and other developing countries.
He’s a devoted husband to Elvira, and a loving father to his four accomplished children: Irving, Donna, Andrea and Michael. He’s a super grandfather, brother, uncle and cousin.
He is funny and infectiously positive, a joy to be around.
Irving spent his early career in pediatric and adolescent medicine in Milwaukee and Boston. Then in 1974 the family went to Tanzania to help establish a pediatric sickle cell clinic for the Ministry of Health there. Inspired by that experience, he and Elvira ultimately founded Adventures in Health Education and Agricultural Development (AHEAD), Inc..
Founded in 1981, AHEAD works to reduce and eliminate disease and premature death, cultivate and advance healthy living and to foster sustainable environmental activity. The organization’s programs have helped more than 1.5 million children.
Cousin Irving celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this week, and even though the video is seven years old, it remains a fitting tribute. Thank you, Cousin Irving, and many happy returns.
“When the griot dies, it is as if the library has burned to the ground,” Alex Haley wrote in the acknowledgments to his groundbreaking book Roots.
I thought the quote made for a perfect lede to the editorial tribute I wrote in the Boston Globe when Haley died in 1992.
My editor saw it differently. He had never heard of the word “griot,” which refers to the person in the African village who keeps the oral history alive, whether through stories or music. At that time, the word was not in the dictionary.
Cut.
The lead I ended up with was another quote from Haley:
“‘For the last decade. I haven’t been a writer. I’ve been the author of Roots. I’ve got to write,’ Alex Haley lamented in an interview that appears in this month’s issue of Essence magazine. Haley had just begun to do that when his life was cut short by a heart attack.”
That I managed to get Essence magazine in the lead of a Globe editorial is pretty impressive. Nevertheless, 20 years later, I still bristle at the conversation with my editor.
I also wrote that “Roots inspired persons of all backgrounds throughout the world to research their family trees.”
True.
He also can take some credit for inspiring at least the titles of The Root and The Griot, two major blogs focused on the African American experience.
Haley would have celebrated his 91st birthday this weekend.
Looking for something fresh to write about on Election Day, I searched my father’s columns for wisdom from the past. A footnote in a column published in the New York Age on November 3, 1934, implored readers to elect “Mrs. Eunice Carter” to the New York State Assembly. The name had a familiar ring. Five […]
My barber called Kamala Harris a “ho.” The shop I go to is not the stuff of Black culture lore. It’s not a boisterous place. It doesn’t reek with toxic masculinity. It’s a nice, quiet, family friendly kind of enterprise. The worst I have been subjected to in the nearly three years I’ve gone there […]
On Saturday, Feb. 17, I will be among several individuals inducted into the 2024 Class of the Black Legends of Silicon Valley. This is quite an honor. Previous recipients in the News and Documentary category in which I am being honored include journalists with stellar credentials. Loretta Green, an award-winning reporter for several local papers […]
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