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  • Black Success, White Backlash

    Black Success, White Backlash

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    For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for overstepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the consequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal.

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    For the past 16 years, I have been on the faculty of the sociology department at Yale, and in 2018 I was granted a Sterling Professorship, the highest academic rank the university bestows. I say this not to boast, but to illustrate that I have made my way from the bottom of American society to the top, from a sharecropper’s cabin to the pinnacle of the ivory tower. One might think that, as a decorated professor at an Ivy League university, I would have escaped the various indignities that being Black in traditionally white spaces exposes you to. And to be sure, I enjoy many of the privileges my white professional-class peers do. But the Black ghetto—a destitute and fearsome place in the popular imagination, though in reality it is home to legions of decent, hardworking families—remains so powerful that it attaches to all Black Americans, no matter where and how they live. Regardless of their wealth or professional status or years of law-abiding bourgeois decency, Black people simply cannot escape what I call the “iconic ghetto.”

    I know I haven’t. Some years ago, I spent two weeks in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a pleasant Cape Cod town full of upper-middle-class white vacationers and working-class white year-rounders. On my daily jog one morning, a white man in a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road, yelling and gesticulating. “Go home!” he shouted.

    Who was this man? Did he assume, because of my Black skin, that I was from the ghetto? Is that where he wanted me to “go home” to?

    From the May 1994 issue: Elijah Anderson on the code of the streets

    This was not an isolated incident. When I jog through upscale white neighborhoods near my home in Connecticut, white people tense up—unless I wear my Yale or University of Pennsylvania sweatshirts. When my jogging outfit associates me with an Ivy League university, it identifies me as a certain kind of Black person: a less scary one who has passed inspection under the “white gaze.” Strangers with dark skin are suspect until they can prove their trustworthiness, which is hard to do in fleeting public interactions. For this reason, Black students attending universities near inner cities know to wear college apparel, in hopes of avoiding racial profiling by the police or others.

    I once accidentally ran a small social experiment about this. When I joined the Yale faculty in 2007, I bought about 20 university baseball caps to give to the young people at my family reunion that year. Later, my nieces and nephews reported to me that wearing the Yale insignia had transformed their casual interactions with white strangers: White people would now approach them to engage in friendly small talk.

    But sometimes these signifiers of professional status and educated-class propriety are not enough. This can be true even in the most rarefied spaces. When I was hired at Yale, the chair of the sociology department invited me for dinner at the Yale Club of New York City. Clad in a blue blazer, I got to the club early and decided to go up to the fourth-floor library to read The New York Times. When the elevator arrived, a crush of people was waiting to get on it, so I entered and moved to the back to make room for others. Everyone except me was white.

    As the car filled up, I politely asked a man of about 35, standing by the controls, to push the button for the library floor. He looked at me and—emboldened, I have to imagine, by drinks in the bar downstairs—said, “You can read?” The car fell silent. After a few tense moments, another man, seeking to defuse the tension, blurted, “I’ve never met a Yalie who couldn’t read.” All eyes turned to me. The car reached the fourth floor. I stepped off, held the door open, and turned back to the people in the elevator. “I’m not a Yalie,” I said. “I’m a new Yale professor.” And I went into the library to read the paper.

    I tell these stories—and I’ve told them before—not to fault any particular institution (I’ve treasured my time at Yale), but to illustrate my personal experience of a recurring cultural phenomenon: Throughout American history, every moment of significant Black advancement has been met by a white backlash. After the Civil War, under the aegis of Reconstruction, Black people for a time became professionals and congressmen. But when federal troops left the former Confederate states in 1877, white politicians in the South tried to reconstitute slavery with the long rule of Jim Crow. Even the Black people who migrated north to escape this new servitude found themselves relegated to shantytowns on the edges of cities, precursors to the modern Black ghetto.

    All of this reinforced what slavery had originally established: the Black body’s place at the bottom of the social order. This racist positioning became institutionalized in innumerable ways, and it persists today.

    I want to emphasize that across the decades, many white Americans have encouraged racial equality, albeit sometimes under duress. In response to the riots of the 1960s, the federal government—led by the former segregationist Lyndon B. Johnson—passed far-reaching legislation that finally extended the full rights of citizenship to Black people, while targeting segregation. These legislative reforms—and, especially, affirmative action, which was implemented via LBJ’s executive order in 1965—combined with years of economic expansion to produce a long period of what I call “racial incorporation,” which substantially elevated the income of many Black people and brought them into previously white spaces. Yes, a lot of affirmative-action efforts stopped at mere tokenism. Even so, many of these “tokens” managed to succeed, and the result is the largest Black middle class in American history.

    Over the past 50 years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Black people who are low-income (less than $52,000 a year for a household of three) has fallen seven points, from 48 to 41 percent. The proportion who are middle-income ($52,000 to $156,000 a year) has risen by one point, to 47 percent. The proportion who are high-income (more than $156,000 a year) has risen the most dramatically, from 5 to 12 percent. Overall, Black poverty remains egregiously disproportionate to that of white and Asian Americans. But fewer Black Americans are poor than 50 years ago, and more than twice as many are rich. Substantial numbers now attend the best schools, pursue professions of their choosing, and occupy positions of power and prestige. Affirmative action worked.

    But that very success has inflamed the inevitable white backlash. Notably, the only racial group more likely to be low-income now than 50 years ago is whites—and the only group less likely to be low-income is Blacks.

    Read: Five decades of white backlash

    For some white people displaced from their jobs by globalization and deindustrialization, the successful Black person with a good job is the embodiment of what’s wrong with America. The spectacle of Black doctors, CEOs, and college professors “out of their place” creates an uncomfortable dissonance, which white people deal with by mentally relegating successful Black people to the ghetto. That Black man who drives a new Lexus and sends his children to private school—he must be a drug kingpin, right?

    In predominantly white professional spaces, this racial anxiety appears in subtler ways. Black people are all too familiar with a particular kind of interaction, in the guise of a casual watercooler conversation, the gist of which is a sort of interrogation: “Where did you come from?”; “How did you get here?”; and “Are you qualified to be here?” (The presumptive answer to the last question is clearly no; Black skin, evoking for white people the iconic ghetto, confers an automatic deficit of credibility.)

    Black newcomers must signal quickly and clearly that they belong. Sometimes this requires something as simple as showing a company ID that white people are not asked for. Other times, a more elaborate dance is required, a performance in which the worker must demonstrate their propriety, their distance from the ghetto. This can involve dressing more formally than the job requires, speaking in a self-consciously educated way, and evincing a placid demeanor, especially in moments of disagreement.

    From the November 2018 issue: The personal cost of Black success

    As part of my ethnographic research, I once embedded in a major financial-services corporation in Philadelphia, where I spent six months observing and interviewing workers. One Black employee I spoke with, a senior vice president, said that people of color who wanted to climb the management ladder must wear the right “uniform” and work hard to perform respectability. “They’re never going to envision you as being a white male,” he told me, “but if you can dress the same and look a certain way and drive a conservative car and whatever else, they’ll say, ‘This guy has a similar attitude, similar values [to we white people]. He’s a team player.’ If you don’t dress with the uniform, obviously you’re on the wrong team.”

    This need to constantly perform respectability for white people is a psychological drain, leaving Black people spent and demoralized. They typically keep this demoralization hidden from their white co-workers because they feel that they need to show they are not whiners. Having to pay a “Black tax” as they move through white areas deepens this demoralization. This tax is levied on people of color in nice restaurants and other public places, or simply while driving, when the fear of a lethal encounter with the police must always be in mind. The existential danger this kind of encounter poses is what necessitates “The Talk” that Black parents—fearful every time their kids go out the door that they might not come back alive—give to their children. The psychological effects of all of this accumulate gradually, sapping the spirit and engendering cynicism.

    Even the most exalted members of the Black elite must live in two worlds. They understand the white elite’s mores and values, and embody them to a substantial extent—but they typically remain keenly conscious of their Blackness. They socialize with both white and Black people of their own professional standing, but also members of the Black middle and working classes with whom they feel more kinship, meeting them at the barbershop, in church, or at gatherings of long-standing friendship groups. The two worlds seldom overlap. This calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness”—a term he used for the first time in this publication, in 1897—referring to the dual cultural mindsets that successful African Americans must simultaneously inhabit.

    From the August 1897 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois’ “Strivings of the Negro People”

    For middle-class Black people, a certain fluidity—abetted by family connections—enables them to feel a connection with those at the lower reaches of society. But that connection comes with a risk of contagion; they fear that, meritocratic status notwithstanding, they may be dragged down by their association with the hood.

    When I worked at the University of Pennsylvania, some friends of mine and I mentored at-risk youth in West Philadelphia.

    One of these kids, Kevin Robinson, who goes by KAYR (pronounced “K.R.”), grew up with six siblings in a single-parent household on public assistance. Two of his sisters got pregnant as teenagers, and for a while the whole family was homeless. But he did well in high school and was accepted to Bowdoin College, where he was one of five African Americans in a class of 440. He was then accepted to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he was one of 10 or so African Americans in an M.B.A. class of roughly 180. He got into the analyst-training program at Goldman Sachs, where his cohort of 300 had five African Americans. And from there he ended up at a hedge fund, where he was the lone Black employee.

    What’s striking about Robinson’s accomplishments is not just the steepness of his rise or the scantness of Black peers as he climbed, but the extent of cultural assimilation he felt he needed to achieve in order to fit in. He trimmed his Afro. He did a pre-college program before starting Bowdoin, where he had sushi for the first time and learned how to play tennis and golf. “Let me look at how these people live; let me see how they operate,” he recalls saying to himself. He decided to start reading The New Yorker and Time magazine, as they did, and to watch 60 Minutes. “I wanted people to see me more as their peer versus … someone from the hood. I wanted them to see me as, like, ‘Hey, look, he’s just another middle-class Black kid.’ ” When he was about to start at Goldman Sachs, a Latina woman who was mentoring him there told him not to wear a silver watch or prominent jewelry: “ ‘KAYR, go get a Timex with a black leather band. Keep it very simple … Fit in.’ ” My friends and I had given him similar advice earlier on.

    All of this worked; he thrived professionally. Yet even as he occupied elite precincts of wealth and achievement, he was continually getting pulled back to support family in the ghetto, where he felt the need to code-switch, speaking and eating the ways his family did so as not to insult them.

    The year he entered Bowdoin, one of his younger brothers was sent to prison for attempted murder, and a sister who had four children was shot in the face and died. Over the years he would pay for school supplies for his nieces and nephews, and for multiple family funerals—all while keeping his family background a secret from his professional colleagues. Even so, he would get subjected to the standard indignities—being asked to show ID when his white peers were not; enduring the (sometimes obliviously) racist comments from colleagues (“You don’t act like a regular Black”). He would report egregious offenses to HR but would usually just let things go, for fear that developing a reputation as a “race guy” would restrict his professional advancement.

    Robinson’s is a remarkable success story. He is 40 now; he owns a property-management company and is a multimillionaire. But his experience makes clear that no matter what professional or financial heights you ascend to, if you are Black, you can never escape the iconic ghetto, and sometimes not even the actual one.

    The most egregious intrusion of a Black person into white space was the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama as president. A Black man in the White House! For some white people, this was intolerable. Birthers, led by Donald Trump, said he was ineligible for the presidency, claiming falsely that he had been born in Kenya. The white backlash intensified; Republicans opposed Obama with more than the standard amount of partisan vigor. In 2013, at the beginning of Obama’s second term, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had protected the franchise for 50 years. Encouraged by this opening, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas moved forward with voter-suppression laws, setting a course that other states are now following. And this year, the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions. I want to tell a story that illustrates the social gains this puts at risk.

    Many years ago, when I was a professor at Penn, my father came to visit me. Walking around campus, we bumped into various colleagues and students of mine, most of them white, who greeted us warmly. He watched me interact with my secretary and other department administrators. Afterward, Dad and I went back to my house to drink beer and listen to Muddy Waters.

    “So you’re teaching at that white school?” he said.

    “Yeah.”

    “You work with white people. And you teach white students.”

    “Yeah, but they actually come in all colors,” I responded. I got his point, though.

    “Well, let me ask you one thing,” he said, furrowing his brow.

    “What’s that, Dad?”

    “Do they respect you?”

    After thinking about his question a bit, I said, “Well, some do. And some don’t. But you know, Dad, it is hard to tell which is which sometimes.”

    “Oh, I see,” he said.

    He didn’t disbelieve me; it was just that what he’d witnessed on campus was at odds with his experience of the typical Black-white interaction, where the subordinate status of the Black person was automatically assumed by the white one. Growing up in the South, my dad understood that white people simply did not respect Black people. Observing the respectful treatment I received from my students and colleagues, my father had a hard time believing his own eyes. Could race relations have changed so much, so fast?

    Read: A 1999 interview with Elijah Anderson on his book Code of the Street

    They had—in large part because of what affirmative action, and the general processes of racial incorporation and Black economic improvement, had wrought. In the 1960s, the only Black people at the financial-services firm I studied would have been janitors, night watchmen, elevator operators, or secretaries; 30 years later, affirmative action had helped populate the firm with Black executives. Each beneficiary of affirmative action, each member of the growing Black middle class, helped normalize the presence of Black people in professional and other historically white spaces. All of this diminished, in some incremental way, the power of the symbolic ghetto to hold back people of color.

    Too many people forget, if ever they knew it, what a profound cultural shift affirmative action effected. And they overlook affirmative action’s crucial role in forestalling social unrest.

    Some years ago, I was invited to the College of the Atlantic, a small school in Maine, to give the commencement address. As I stood at the sink in the men’s room before the event, checking the mirror to make sure all my academic regalia was properly arrayed, an older white man came up to me and said, with no preamble, “What do you think of affirmative action?”

    “I think it’s a form of reparations,” I said.

    “Well, I think they need to be educated first,” he said, and then walked out.

    I was so provoked by this that I scrambled back to my hotel room and rewrote my speech. I’d already been planning to talk about the benefits of affirmative action, but I sharpened and expanded my case, explaining that it not only had lifted many Black people out of the ghetto, but had been a weapon in the Cold War, when unaligned countries and former colonies were trying to decide which superpower to follow. Back then, Democrats and some Republicans were united in believing that affirmative action, by demonstrating the country’s commitment to racial justice and equality, helped project American greatness to the world.

    Beyond that, I said to this almost entirely white audience, affirmative action had helped keep the racial unrest of the ’60s from flaring up again. When the kin—the mothers, fathers, cousins, nephews, sons, daughters, baby mamas, uncles, aunts—of ghetto residents secure middle-class livelihoods, those ghetto relatives hear about it. This gives the young people who live there a modicum of hope that they might do the same. Hope takes the edge off distress and desperation; it lessens the incentives for people to loot and burn. What opponents of affirmative action fail to understand is that without a ladder of upward mobility for Black Americans, and a general sense that justice will prevail, a powerful nurturer of social concord gets lost.

    Yes, continuing to expand the Black professional and middle classes will lead to more instances of “the dance,” and the loaded interrogations, and the other awkward moments and indignities that people of color experience in white spaces. But the greater the number of affluent, successful Black people in such places, the faster this awkwardness will diminish, and the less power the recurrent waves of white reaction will have to set people of color back. I would like to believe that future generations of Black Americans will someday find themselves as pleasantly surprised as my dad once was by the new levels of racial respect and equality they discover.

    This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Black Success, White Backlash.”

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    Elijah Anderson

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  • Misty Copeland’s dedication to inclusion spans many projects — and her push for new dance emojis

    Misty Copeland’s dedication to inclusion spans many projects — and her push for new dance emojis

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    NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Misty Copeland has her hands (and feet!) in many different projects simultaneously, but all are motivated by her passion to use her platform to promote diversity in all the spaces she inhabits.

    The first Black woman to be promoted to principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre in 2015, Copeland says she never takes that opportunity for granted. Beyond performing, she says she feels a responsibility to show the importance of representation, and work on projects that are an extension of who she is as a dancer.

    Her influence has transcended the stage to author, head of her own production company and charitable foundation, and now co-founder and designer of a new athletic wear brand, Greatness Wins, that focuses on clothing for women of all ages and body types.

    Copeland also likes to try new things that scare her so she’s taken on the role of interviewer on a new show called “PBS Arts Talk,” where she recently interviewed painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn and dancer and choreographer Twlya Tharp.

    Copeland spoke with The Associated Press about her new focus, fighting for more inclusive emojis, and staying in shape.

    Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.

    COPELAND: Twyla it ended up being more nerve wracking once I got into it with her because — I mean, I should have known — I’ve been working with her since I was 6 years old. I’m 41 now— she’s a ball buster. She wants to push the boundaries and it didn’t matter what question I asked her, she was going to push me (laughs) in every way.

    But also, we’ve had an amazing relationship and she’s been a mentor to me my whole career. I was nervous being on this side of things. And, you know, whenever we would cut, she would just say, “Misty, just be you. You’ve done so much, there’s nothing you have to prove. Let’s just talk.”

    COPELAND: It was so emotional just hearing his story and the way that he tells it. And to see it so vividly reflected in his work is inspiring as an artist. I asked him about what it was to be a Black artist and has it been a struggle and he just looks at things in a very different lens, at least from what my experience has been as a Black artist. And I think those two different stories are so important to tell. He kind of uses these things that he’s gone through as a launching pad. And he’s like “I’m an artist. I make work that I hope will speak to all people. Of course I’m thinking about my community, but it’s for everyone.”

    COPELAND: It follows a handful of young people and really watching how LIFT has provided tools to be better human beings to evolve and to kind of make choices in a positive way. But it’s just showing the power of the arts. That to me is like the grand scheme theme is that art saves lives, and dance and ballet can be inclusive. It’s about who’s teaching it. It’s about getting rid of all of the trauma and things you’ve dealt with and coming into the room and bringing ballet at its core to these young people. It’s just a beautiful documentary.

    COPELAND: I’ve always felt so privileged to be in the position that I’m in. I’ve watched generations and generations and I have relationships with a lot of these dancers, Black and brown, who weren’t given an opportunity like I have. So I feel a responsibility being in this position that it’s not just about going on stage and performing, though that’s extremely important to have representation in that space. But for me to do everything I can to show what I’ve gained by being a part of this art form and the importance of diversity, the importance of having representation.

    It’s amazing to have these things that are an extension of who I am as a ballerina.

    COPELAND: Dance should be inclusive, it should be uniting. It’s a universal language. It should be for everyone. These may seem like small, insignificant things to a lot of people, but there’s a much bigger meaning and deeper meaning behind it. You know, going back to the history of the pink tight and the pink ballet slipper — yes, there were white European people doing it in that time, so they made these things to reflect them in their skin color. But now that’s not all who’s dancing and who’s being exposed to it. So we should see that representation through and through.

    I look at these young people who are influenced by these things like emojis. They’re on Tik Tok, they’re texting, they’re on Twitter and Instagram. It may seem like an insignificant thing to maybe someone my age, but these young people want to see themselves represented and reflected in these spaces.

    COPELAND: I was up at 5 a.m. this morning on the treadmill (laughs.) I’m not actively on stage right now because I really felt like it’s kind of now or never. I’ve had an incredible career so far with ABT, and I’ve done everything and more than I imagined.

    I’m now in a position where I’ve founded this athletic wear line with Derek Jeter and Wayne Gretzky, Greatness Wins. I’m the president and founder of the Misty Copeland Foundation. I sit on the board of Lincoln Center and The Shed. All of these things that I think are such an incredible evolution of where I’ve come from as an artist and as a Black artist. And I now am in these spaces where I can have impact and I have a voice and I have power and I want to take advantage of this time.

    But yes, I still have to take care of myself. I have to put myself first and make sure I’m healthy so that I can take care of my 18-month-old and do all these other things.

    COPELAND: 100%! He came out of the womb with quads and calves and he’s like this little muscle man. And he’s obsessed with ballet, which I did not try and do! He didn’t see ballet until about a month ago, just on the screen. And he dances. It’s unbelievable. I can’t wait to actually get him in a formal dance class.

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  • Black voting power gets boost in Alabama as new US House districts chosen by federal judges

    Black voting power gets boost in Alabama as new US House districts chosen by federal judges

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    MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Federal judges on Thursday selected new congressional lines for Alabama to give the Deep South state a second district where Black voters comprise a substantial portion of the electorate.

    The new map sets the stage for potentially flipping one U.S. House of Representatives seat from Republican to Democratic control and could lead to the election of two Black Congressional representatives to the state’s delegation for the first time. The judges stepped in to pick a new congressional map after ruling that Alabama illegally diluted the voting power of Black residents, and that the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature failed to fix the Voting Rights Act violation when they adopted new lines this summer.

    “It’s a historic day for Alabama. It will be the first time in which Black voters will have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice in two congressional districts,” said Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who represented plaintiffs in the case.

    Black voters in 2021 filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s existing plan as an illegal racial gerrymander. The U.S. Supreme Court in June upheld the three-judge panel’s finding that Alabama’s prior map — with one majority-Black district out of seven in a state that is 27% Black — likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act. The three-judge panel said the state should have two districts where Black voters are the majority or close to it.

    The panel selected one of three plans proposed by a court-appointed expert that alters the bounds of Congressional District 2, now represented by Republican Rep. Barry Moore, who is white. The southeast Alabama district will stretch westward across the state to the Mississippi border. Black residents will go from comprising less than one-third of the district’s voting-age population to 48.7%.

    “We’re glad to see that process result in a federal court selecting a map that allows all, all the people of Alabama to have their voices heard,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday.

    The decision was a loss for Alabama Republicans, who were reluctant to create a Democratic-leaning district, and approved a map with a 39.9% Black voting age population in Congressional District 2. The three-judge panel said last month that they were “deeply troubled” that Alabama lawmakers flouted their instruction, and plaintiffs made unflattering comparisons to segregationist Gov. George Wallace’s efforts in 1963 to fight court desegregation orders.

    The judges adopted the new lines after issuing a preliminary injunction that blocked use of the latest state-drawn plan. The judges said the new map must be used in upcoming elections, noting Alabama residents in 2022 voted under a map they had ruled illegal after the Supreme Court put their order on hold to hear the state’s appeal.

    Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said while the map will be used in 2024, the state will continue the legal fight to restore the state-drawn lines for future elections. The case is expected to go to trial before the same three-judge panel next year. Alabama has argued that the three-judge panel. which includes two Trump appointees, is seeking changes that go beyond what the June Supreme Court decision required.

    Marshall criticized the court-adopted map for connecting cities on opposite ends of the state.

    “The Voting Rights Act was enacted to undo gerrymanders, not create them … Anyone who looks at the state’s map next to the map now imposed on the state can tell which is the racial gerrymander,” Marshall said in a statement.

    Plaintiffs in the case on Thursday called the decision an “unequivocal win that will translate to increased opportunities for those who have too long been denied the fair representation they deserve.”

    Evan Milligan, the lead plaintiff in the case, said many Black voters in the area had grown accustomed to being ignored. He said the new map should remedy that. “It’s the beginning of another chapter,” Milligan said.

    It is Alabama’s first significant revamp of its congressional districts since 1992, when Alabama was ordered by the courts to create a majority-Black district, Congressional District 7, now represented by Rep. Terri Sewell, a Black Democrat.

    The new map could pit two current Republican congressmen against each other in 2024, and also draw a crowded field vying for the revamped District 2. Moore’s home is now in District 1, currently represented by Republican Rep. Jerry Carl. Moore said Thursday that he is “prayerfully” weighing what to do in 2024.

    The court-ordered lines in Alabama come as redistricting cases are pending in Louisiana, Georgia and elsewhere.

    Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said other states should view the Alabama decision as an example of “basic fairness” and a “warning that denying equal representation to Black voters, violating the Voting Rights Act, and defying federal court orders is a direct tie to an odious past and will no longer be tolerated.”

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  • San Francisco will say goodbye to Dianne Feinstein as her body lies in state at City Hall

    San Francisco will say goodbye to Dianne Feinstein as her body lies in state at City Hall

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    SAN FRANCISCO — Mourners will pay their respects Wednesday to the late U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein in San Francisco City Hall, where she launched her groundbreaking political career and where she spent a decade as the city’s first female mayor.

    Feinstein’s body will lie in state in the City Hall rotunda, with everyone from elected leaders to city residents expected to say goodbye. She died Thursday at her Washington, D.C., home after a series of illnesses.

    Feinstein was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 and was board president in November 1978 when a former supervisor assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay supervisor, at City Hall. Feinstein became acting mayor, and she went on to serve as mayor until 1988.

    San Francisco would not be San Francisco without her. She steered the city through the HIV and AIDS crisis, bringing attention to an epidemic ignored by President Ronald Reagan. She also secured federal and private funding to save the city’s iconic cable cars from death by deterioration.

    Feinstein led the city as it played host to the Democratic National Convention in 1984. Another San Francisco tradition — “Fleet Week” — was started by Feinstein in 1981, and this year’s annual celebration of air shows, naval ships and military bands is dedicated to her.

    Beyond serving as San Francisco’s first female mayor, she joined Barbara Boxer as the first women to represent California in the U.S. Senate. They both won election in 1992, dubbed the “ Year of the Woman. ”

    Feinstein inspired countless girls and women, including current San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who is the first Black woman and only the second woman to lead the city. Breed recalled looking up to Feinstein when Feinstein was mayor and Breed played the French horn in the middle school band that played regularly at mayoral events.

    “She was so proud of us and she said so, and she took the time to talk to us, express how amazing we were and to remind us that we were her band,” Breed said at a press conference the day after the senator’s death.

    San Francisco resident Terrence Riley recalled Feinstein as mayor bringing food from McDonald’s and toys to children in the public housing projects where he lived. News of her death “made me feel real bad, real sad, because she is San Francisco. She really is,” said Riley, who signed a condolence book for the late senator at City Hall Friday.

    Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, a friend who also lives in San Francisco, called Feinstein the city’s “forever mayor.”

    While Feinstein’s career sent her to Washington, she remained deeply involved in the affairs of San Francisco, the city where she was born and raised. She often called her successors — including Gov. Gavin Newsom — to complain about potholes or trash and to offer advice and encouragement.

    John Konstin Sr., owner of John’s Grill, a favorite downtown tourist destination and watering hole for city politicians, recalled Feinstein ordering potholes filled, trees trimmed and ugly scaffolding brought down before San Francisco hosted the 1984 Democratic convention.

    “She asked, ‘How long has this scaffolding been up?’ And my dad said maybe 10 years and the next day it came down,” said Konstin, 59. “It was half a block of scaffolding.”

    Feinstein’s favorite dish was the Petrale sole, he said. The restaurant, which celebrates its 115th anniversary Wednesday with a free lunch and appearances by Breed and other politicians, will have flowers by Feinstein’s portrait.

    Her casket is expected to arrive at City Hall around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Mourners can pay their respects from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

    A memorial service will be held Thursday outside City Hall. Speakers will include Pelosi, Breed, Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. President Joe Biden will deliver remarks by recorded video.

    —-

    Associated Press journalist Haven Daley in San Francisco and researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

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  • New Baltimore police commissioner confirmed by City Council despite recent challenges

    New Baltimore police commissioner confirmed by City Council despite recent challenges

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    BALTIMORE — The Baltimore City Council on Monday confirmed Richard Worley as the city’s new police commissioner, a leadership change that comes amid an ongoing push for reform of the embattled agency that began after Freddie Gray’s 2015 death.

    Mayor Brandon Scott nominated Worley to replace Michael Harrison, who announced his resignation earlier this summer, several months before his five-year contract was set to expire. Harrison led the New Orleans Police Department through a similar reform process before moving to Baltimore.

    While Harrison brought an outsider’s perspective to the job, Worley is a Baltimore native and a longtime department veteran. But critics have questioned whether he is too much of an insider, having served in supervisory positions during problematic periods in the department’s history.

    They have also expressed concern over two recent high-profile tragedies that unfolded since Worley took over as acting commissioner when Harrison left — including a block party mass shooting in July and, most recently, the brutal murder last week of a local tech entrepreneur whose alleged killer remained at large despite being firmly on the police’s radar.

    Since being nominated, Worley has admitted mistakes and repeatedly cited his passion for community policing, which prioritizes building relationships with residents.

    “I’ve dedicated my life to serving the Baltimore City Police Department,” he said during a confirmation hearing last month. “I’ve seen the strategies that have worked to help communities thrive and become safer. But I’ve also seen the policies and mandates that have hurt communities.”

    The agency was placed under a federal consent decree in 2017 after Justice Department investigators found a pattern of unconstitutional policing, especially targeting Black residents. The decree, which mandates a series of reforms, remains in effect. And Worley has promised to continue prioritizing that reform process.

    Less than a month after Harrison stepped down, Baltimore experienced one of the largest mass shootings in its history when gunfire turned an annual neighborhood block party into a scene of terror and bloodshed. Worley has since faced a litany of questions about how his officers failed to respond to south Baltimore’s Brooklyn Homes public housing development in the hours leading up to the shooting, which claimed two lives and left 28 people injured, mostly teens and young adults.

    During the hearing last month, council members once again criticized the department’s lackluster response. Worley acknowledged mistakes by some supervisors and reiterated his commitment to ensuring that all of Baltimore’s neighborhoods receive adequate police services, especially overlooked communities suffering from decades of poverty and disinvestment.

    Worley served as deputy commissioner under Harrison, a position he achieved after rising through the department’s ranks over the past 25 years. He pursued a law enforcement career after playing baseball in college and the minor leagues.

    After the recent killing of Pava LaPere, a 26-year-old tech CEO whose body was found on the roof of her downtown apartment building, Worley defended the department’s actions in the weeks leading up to her death. Police had been actively searching for her alleged killer, Jason Billingsley, since he was identified as a suspect in a Sept. 19 rape and arson. But they released few details about the crime, which left a woman and man hospitalized with serious burns, and they didn’t alert the community that Billingsley posed a potential public safety risk.

    That is because they didn’t believe he was committing “random acts” of violence at the time, Worley told reporters last week, while also admitting that “hindsight’s 20/20.”

    The killing marked an exceedingly rare random homicide in a city that has made notable progress in reversing its murder rate over the past several months. So far in 2023, Baltimore homicides are down about 16% compared with this time last year.

    While only one council member voted against confirming Worley at a meeting Monday night, several members described their reservations, pledging to hold him accountable moving forward. After the vote, a small group of activists erupted in angry chants. They were escorted out of council chambers screaming.

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  • Grant program for Black women entrepreneurs blocked by federal appeals court

    Grant program for Black women entrepreneurs blocked by federal appeals court

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    NEW YORK — A grant program for businesses run by Black women was temporarily blocked by a federal appeals court in a case epitomizing the escalating battle over corporate diversity policies.

    The 2-1 decision by the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily prevents the Fearless Fund from running the Strivers Grant Contest, which awards $20,000 to businesses that are at least 51% owned by Black women, among other requirements.

    In a statement Sunday, the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund said it would comply with the order but remained confident of ultimately prevailing in the lawsuit. The case was brought by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, a group run by conservative activist Edward Blum, who argues that the fund violates a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination in contracts. “We strongly disagree with the decision and remain resolute in our mission and commitment to address the unacceptable disparities that exist for Black women and other women of color in the venture capital space,” the Fearless Fund said.

    The order, issued Saturday, reversed a ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash which denied the American Alliance’s request to halt the program. The majority on the three-judge panel wrote that the Fearless Fund’s program’s is “racially exclusionary” and that Blum’s group is likely to prevail.

    “The members of the American Alliance for Equal Rights are gratified that the 11th Circuit has recognized the likelihood that the Fearless Strivers Grant Contest is illegal,” Blum said in a statement. “We look forward to the final resolution of this lawsuit.”

    In his dissent, Judge Charles R. Wilson said it was a “perversion of Congressional intent” to use the 1866 act against the Fearless Fund’s program, given that the Reconstruction-era law was intended to protect Black people from economic exclusion. Wilson said the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.

    The case has become a test case as the battle over racial considerations shifts to the workplace following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling ending affirmative action in college admissions.

    The grant contest is among several programs run by the Fearless Fund, which was established to bridge the gap in funding access for Black female entrepreneurs, who receive less than 1% of venture capital funding. To be eligible for the grants, a business must be at least 51% owned by a Black woman, among other qualifications.

    The Fearless Fund has enlisted prominent civil rights lawyers, including Ben Crump, to defend against the lawsuit. The attorneys have argued that the grants are not contracts, but donations protected by the First Amendment.

    In its majority opinion, the appellate panel disagreed, writing that the First Amendment “does not give the defendants the right to exclude persons from a contractual regime based on their race.”

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  • Jimmy Carter turns 99 at home with Rosalynn and other family as tributes come from around the world

    Jimmy Carter turns 99 at home with Rosalynn and other family as tributes come from around the world

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    ATLANTA — Jimmy Carter has always been a man of discipline and habit. But the former president will break routine Sunday, putting off his practice of quietly watching church services online to instead celebrate his 99th birthday with his wife, Rosalynn, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Plains.

    The gathering will take place in the same one-story structure where the Carters lived before he was first elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962. It comes amid tributes from around the world. But for Carter’s family, it’s an opportunity to honor a personal legacy.

    “The remarkable piece to me and I think to my family is that while my grandparents have accomplished so much, they have really remained the same sort of South Georgia couple that lives in a 600-person village where they were born,” said grandson Jason Carter, who chairs the board at The Carter Center, which his grandparents founded in 1982 after leaving the White House a year earlier.

    Despite being global figures, the younger Carter said his grandparents have always “made it easy for us, as a family, to be as normal as we can be.”

    Celebrating the longest-lived U.S. president this way was inconceivable not long ago. The Carters announced in February that their patriarch was forgoing further medical treatments and entering home hospice care after a series of hospitalizations. Yet Carter, who overcame cancer diagnosed at age 90 and learned to walk after having his hip replaced at age 94, defied all odds again.

    “If Jimmy Carter were a tree, he’d be an towering, old Southern oak,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic national chairperson and presidential campaign manager who got her start on Carter’s campaigns. “He’s as good as they come and tough as they come.”

    Jill Stuckey, a longtime Plains resident who visits the former first couple regularly, cautioned to “never underestimate Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.”

    His latest resilience has allowed Carter a rare privilege even for presidents: He’s been able to enjoy months of accolades typically reserved for when a former White House resident dies. The latest round includes a flood of messages from world leaders and pop culture figures donning “Jimmy Carter 99” hats, with many of them focusing on Carter’s four decades of global humanitarian work after leaving the Oval Office.

    Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor a U.S. television network’s evening news broadcast, praised Carter in a social media video for his “relentless effort every day to make the world a better place.”

    She pointed to Carter’s work to eradicate Guinea worm disease and river blindness, while advocating for peace and democracy in scores of countries. She noted he has written 32 books and worked for decades with Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income people.

    “Oh, yeah, and you were governor of Georgia. And did I mention president of the United States?” she joked. “When are you going to stop slacking off?”

    Bill Clinton, the 42nd president and first Democratic president after Carter’s landslide defeat, showed no signs of the chilly relationship the two fellow Southerners once had.

    “Jimmy! Happy birthday,” Clinton said. “You only get to be 99 once. It’s been a long, good ride, and we thank you for your service and your friendship and the enduring embodiment of the American dream.”

    Musician Peter Gabriel led concertgoers at Madison Square Garden in a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” as did the Indigo Girls at a recent concert.

    In Atlanta, the Carter Library & Museum and adjacent The Carter Center was holding a weekend of events, including a naturalization ceremony for 99 new citizens on Sunday. Festivities at the museum, which offered 99-cent admission Saturday, were slated to continue Sunday after Congress came to an agreement to avoid a partial government shutdown at the start of the federal fiscal year, which coincides with Carter’s birthday.

    Jason Carter said his grandfather has found it “gratifying” to see reassessments of his presidency. Carter’s term often has been broad-brushed as a failure because of inflation, global fuel shortages and the holding of American hostages in Iran, a confluence that led to Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 romp.

    Yet Carter’s focus on diplomacy, his emphasis on the environment before the climate crisis was widely acknowledged and his focus on efficient government — his presidency added a relative pittance to the national debt — have garnered second looks from historians.

    Indeed, Carter’s longevity offers a frame to illuminate both how much the world has changed over his lifetime while still recognizing that certain political and societal challenges endure.

    The Carter Center’s disease-eradication work occurs mostly in developing countries. But Jimmy and Roslaynn Carter were first exposed to river blindness growing up surrounded by the crushing poverty of the rural Deep South during the Great Depression.

    The Center’s global democracy advocacy has reached countries that were still part of various European empires when Carter was born in 1924 or were under heavy American influence in the decades after World War II. Yet in recent years, Carter has declared his own country to be more of an “oligarchy” than a well-functioning democracy. And the Center has since become involved in monitoring and tracking U.S. elections.

    Carter has lived long enough finally to have a genuine friend in the Oval Office again. President Joe Biden was a young Delaware politician in 1976 and became the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s campaign against better-known Washington figures. Now, as Biden seeks reelection in 2024, he faces the headwinds of inflation that Republicans openly compare to Carter’s economy. Biden had a wooden birthday cake display placed on the White House front law to honor Carter.

    The year Carter was born, Congress passed sweeping immigration restrictions, sharply curtailing Ellis Island as a portal to the nation. Now, the naturalization ceremony to mark Carter’s 99th birthday comes as Washington continues a decades-long fight over immigration policy. Republicans, especially, have moved well to the right of Reagan, who in 1986 signed a sweeping amnesty policy for millions of immigrants who were in the country illegally or had no sure legal path to citizenship.

    Carter also was born into Jim Crow segregation, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan marched openly on state capitols and in Washington. As governor and president, Carter set new marks for appointing Black Americans to top government posts. At 99, Carter’s Sunday online church circuit includes watching Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Yet, at the same time, some white state lawmakers in Carter’s native region are defying the U.S. Supreme Court in an effort to curtail Black voters’ strength at the ballot box.

    Jason Carter said understanding his grandfather’s impact means resisting the urge to assess whether he solved every problem he confronted or won every election. Instead, he said, the takeaway is to recognize a sweeping impact rooted in respecting other people on an individual level and trying to help them.

    “You don’t get more out of a life than he got, right?” the younger Carter said. “It is a incredible, full rich life with a long marriage, a wonderful partnership with my grandmother, and the ability to see the world and interact with the world in ways that almost nobody else has ever been able to do.”

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  • Mississippi activists ask to join water lawsuit and criticize Black judge’s comments on race

    Mississippi activists ask to join water lawsuit and criticize Black judge’s comments on race

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    JACKSON, Miss. — Activists in Mississippi’s majority-Black capital city are trying to join a federal lawsuit against the city for violating standards for clean drinking water, even as they say the Black judge presiding over the case is stirring racial division.

    The activists from the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign and People’s Advocacy Institute filed court papers Wednesday asking to intervene in the federal government’s lawsuit against Jackson. During a news conference Wednesday, activists said they spoke for residents in the 80% Black city who want more say over reforms to the water system.

    “We feel like our lives are on the chopping block here in the city of Jackson,” said Danyelle Holmes, an organizer with the Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign. “We could no longer sit by idly as government agencies allow residents to be told that it’s OK to drink unclean water.”

    The federal government has taken legal steps to scrutinize Jackson’s water quality for over a decade. But in November, the Justice Department accelerated its involvement after breakdowns in Jackson caused many in the city of about 150,000 residents to go days and weeks without safe running water. Last August and September, people waited in lines for water to drink, bathe, flush toilets and cook.

    U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate appointed Ted Henifin, who had decades of experience running water systems in other states, to help fix Jackson’s long-troubled water system. Henifin began working on several projects to improve the water infrastructure, such as repairing broken water lines and a plan to improve the city’s ability to collect water bills.

    Henifin said in June that he was not aware of any health risk in drinking Jackson water. In a statement to The Associated Press on Wednesday, Henifin said his team “is committed to public education that focuses on the people of Jackson and helping them understand what is happening with their water and the engineering science, not through the interpretive lens of activists, special interests or agendas.”

    “We have been completely open and transparent with our water quality testing data and are in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Henifin said.

    He also pointed to water quality reports and the Mississippi Department of Health water testing data that are available online.

    At a multi-day federal court hearing in July, activists said they had received mixed messages about whether Jackson’s water was safe to drink. Some residents reported discolored water flowing from their pipes even after public health orders were lifted. Activists also said they were being kept in the dark about the status of reforms.

    After Congress awarded Jackson $600 million for water repairs, some city leaders and activists also said they wanted Henifin to look for minority-owned firms when awarding contracts for infrastructure projects.

    Henifin, who is white, said he had been transparent about the quality of Jackson’s water and his work as the interim manager. He also mentioned plans to launch a minority contracting program that would employ Black-owned firms whenever possible, WLBT-TV reported.

    In a July 21 ruling, Wingate, who is Black, said many of the concerns raised by the Black activists were without merit.

    “They have no experience in water management, and no logical rationale why an African American would be better suited to fix a lingering problem which has gone unsolved for decades by past African American leadership,” Wingate wrote.

    During Wednesday’s news conference, activists lambasted the judge for his comments.

    “When the judge made his statement that we just want someone Black to fix our water, that is very disingenuous. That’s a disgrace,” Holmes said. “You have a judge who is pitting Black against white, poor against the wealthy, and it’s totally unfair. Whether you’re Black, white or brown, we’re all consuming the same water unless you’re wealthy and have purchased a filtration system, which many of the residents who are predominantly Black cannot afford.”

    Brooke Floyd, co-director of the Jackson People’s Assembly, said even those without expertise in water management should be able to voice concerns.

    “I think it’s just unconscionable that it was even brought up,” Floyd said. “The race stuff was ridiculous, and it’s also ridiculous to say that because we are upset our water is not safe to drink, that we should just go sit down and be quiet and take what is given to us.”

    If they are allowed to join the federal lawsuit, Jackson community groups would have an “institutionalized role in settlement negotiations,” the activists said. They are asking for the installation of water filters in homes, more open meetings convened by the Environmental Protection Agency and a range of other demands.

    Henifin had hoped to complete his work as Jackson’s interim water manager in one year or less. Rukia Lumumba, executive director of the People’s Advocacy Institute and sister of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, said she wants the city to work cordially with Henifin while he is still in Jackson.

    “As it relates to long-term, we want to see someone in Jackson that lives here,” Rukia Lumumba said. “We want to see the city have the resources to fully operate the water system itself where we don’t have to have another third-party operator.”

    ___

    Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him at @mikergoldberg.

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  • California education chief Tony Thurmond says he’s running for governor in 2026

    California education chief Tony Thurmond says he’s running for governor in 2026

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s top education official, Tony Thurmond, on Tuesday announced his bid for governor in 2026, a move that comes amid debates about the rights of students and parents, and what role the state should play as school boards approve class materials.

    If elected, Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, would be the first Black person to become California’s governor. He says he wants to address income inequality, ensure schools are better funded and speed up the state’s transition to renewable energy.

    “Our campaign isn’t about any one person. It’s about people who are struggling across our state,” the Democrat said in an advertisement announcing his campaign. “California should be a place where everyone has a chance to succeed.”

    He joins an already crowded race for governor, though the election is more than three years away. California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis and former state Controller Betty Yee, both Democrats, also announced their 2026 bids for governor. Democratic State Treasurer Fiona Ma, who previously said she would run for governor, announced earlier this year that she is running for lieutenant governor.

    Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom cannot seek a third term.

    Before Thurmond became the state’s superintendent in 2019, he served on the West Contra Costa School Board, on the Richmond City Council and in the state Assembly. In 2021, he came under criticism after helping to hire his friend, a psychologist who lived in Philadelphia, as the state’s first superintendent of equity, Politico reported. The official later resigned.

    Thurmond has gotten involved recently in several debates over school board policies and he was kicked out of a Southern California school board meeting over the summer for opposing a policy to require school staff to notify parents if their child changes their pronouns or gender identity. California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Chino Valley district over the policy, saying it discriminated against students. A judge then halted the policy while the litigation plays out.

    Thurmond supported a bill Newsom signed into law Monday to ban school boards from rejecting textbooks because they teach about the contributions of people from different racial backgrounds, sexual orientations or gender identities.

    The legislation garnered more attention this summer when a Southern California school board rejected a social studies curriculum for elementary students with supplemental material mentioning Harvey Milk, who was a San Francisco politician and gay rights advocate. Newsom threatened the board with a $1.5 million fine. The school board later reversed course.

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  • Hollis Watkins, who was jailed multiple times for challenging segregation in Mississippi, dies at 82

    Hollis Watkins, who was jailed multiple times for challenging segregation in Mississippi, dies at 82

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    JACKSON, Miss. — Hollis Watkins, who started challenging segregation and racial oppression in his native Mississippi when he was a teenager and toiled alongside civil rights icons including Medgar Evers and Bob Moses, has died. He was 82.

    Watkins — who also sometimes went by Hollis Watkins Muhammad — died Wednesday at his home in the Jackson suburb of Clinton, Mississippi, according to the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, a group for which he was chairman.

    “I’m just extremely heartbroken over his passing,” Cynthia Goodloe Palmer, the group’s executive director, said Friday. “He was a tremendous friend, leader, co-worker and someone that everyone looked up to, someone who sacrificed tremendously.”

    Michael Morris, director of the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, said Watkins “dedicated his entire life to improving the lives of Black Mississippians.”

    Watkins was born July 29, 1941 — the youngest of 12 children whose parents were sharecroppers in the rural Chisholm Mission community in southwest Mississippi’s Lincoln County. Watkins said he was 4 years old when he started carrying water to his parents and siblings as they worked in the fields. As he got older, he helped pick cotton, uproot corn and dig up stumps.

    He would walk to school through the woods, even as white children rode buses to their segregated and better-equipped school. Questioning inequality that shaped his family’s life, Watkins joined a youth chapter of the NAACP.

    He said he was in California in 1961 when he saw news coverage of integrated buses full of Freedom Riders arriving in Mississippi, and he knew he wanted to return home and meet them to try to find answers to questions that had been bothering him — why Black people were expected to step aside and avert their eyes while passing white people on sidewalks in Mississippi, for example.

    “I was just on a quest to find the answers to why white people could get away with all of this, and we had to treat white people this way, and they could go here, and we couldn’t go there, and all of us are supposed to be treated equal,” Watkins said in a 2010 interview with a crew from the University of North Carolina Greensboro for a series on “Unsung Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.”

    Watkins attended Tougaloo College, a historically Black school in Jackson that was a safe haven for civil rights workers.

    In 1961, Watkins became one of the first Mississippi residents to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, after he met Moses, an SNCC coordinator, in McComb, Mississippi, and Moses showed him how to fill out a voter registration form.

    Watkins also got to know Evers, leader of the Mississippi NAACP.

    “Even though I was a SNCC staff person, Medgar and I had a close relationship. We worked together all across the state,” Watkins told The Associated Press in a 2013 interview.

    Watkins organized Black voter registration drives in McComb and Pike County, near where he had grown up. He and another SNCC activist, Curtis Hayes, were arrested after they conducted a sit-in to try to integrate the Woolworth’s lunch counter in McComb, on Aug. 26, 1961.

    Watkins was arrested and jailed multiple times, including in 1962, when he and other activists were sent to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman after registering Black people to vote in Greenwood.

    Also in 1962, Watkins and Hayes went to south Mississippi’s Forrest County at the invitation of local NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer to work on Black voter registration. Dahmer was killed in January 1966 when Ku Klux Klansmen firebombed his family’s home.

    In June 1963, Watkins was attending a mass meeting in Greenwood, Mississippi, when news came that Evers had been assassinated in Jackson.

    “We turned that mass meeting into a prayer service, and then we turned the prayer service into a motivational piece to get people, more people, to become registered to vote,” Watkins said in the 2013 AP interview.

    “We realized that Medgar was gone, but we would not receive a defeat in Medgar having been assassinated,” he said. “And to prove we did not see it as a defeat, we decided and became more determined that we would get more people registered to vote in the name of Medgar.”

    In 1964, Watkins was a county organizer for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, as college students traveled from other parts of the U.S. to work on Black voter registration. He was also part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated group that challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party delegation at the party’s 1964 national convention in Atlantic City.

    Watkins in 1989 founded Southern Echo, a group that worked in community organizing, politics, education and agriculture.

    “This is an idea that came to fruition as a result of me realizing that I was not getting any younger, and people from all across the state and even other states had began to call on me to work with them and provide them certain kinds of training and technical assistance,” Watkins said in the interview with UNC Greensboro.

    Watkins received the Fannie Lou Hamer Humanitarian Award from Jackson State University in 2011 and an honorary doctorate from Tougaloo College in 2015.

    Watkins was a frequent presence at the two Mississippi history museums after they opened in downtown Jackson in 2017, speaking to school groups and teaching freedom songs that he and others sang as they challenged inequality in the Deep South.

    In 2013, before the 50th anniversary of Evers’ assassination, Watkins said he was proud that Mississippi had large numbers of Black elected officials and Black attorneys.

    “But even though we’re proud of that, we know that racism still exists here in Mississippi,” he told the AP. “So we still have to continue to work today.”

    Watkins said he would continue doing civil rights work to honor Evers’ memory.

    “That’s how I see it, and that’s one of the motivations that keep me going today,” Watkins said. “And I intend to continue to go as long as I am blessed with life and strength.”

    ____

    Former AP journalist Stacey Plaisance contributed to this report.

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  • US breaking pros want to preserve Black roots, original style of hip-hop dance form at Olympics

    US breaking pros want to preserve Black roots, original style of hip-hop dance form at Olympics

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    As ambassadors of the country where breakdancing originated 50 years ago, members of Team USA have something to prove — and potentially to lose — when the hip-hop dance form makes its official debut at the Paris Games in 2024.

    That’s because for U.S. breakers like Carmarry Hall, Victor Montalvo and Jeffrey Mike Louis, it’s more than just nailing the right moves; it’s about preserving breaking’s soul.

    “When I started breaking, it wasn’t about competition; it was about culture, it was about Black dance,” said Hall, an African American Team USA member. “The Olympic platform is not going to appreciate the understanding. It’s structured in a certain way, and in that structure, you lose a little bit of the heart.”

    But it is precisely that structure that international competitors to the U.S. have zoned in on while battling for a shot at Olympic gold in head-to-head contests over the past year. And at the moment, Team USA’s squad of b-boys and b-girls, the term for male and female breakers, is trailing in rankings tabulated by the World DanceSport Federation, the International Olympic Committee-approved body that administers breaking battles.

    As of Friday, the top three b-boys in the world are Canada’s Philip Kim, known as B-Boy Phil Wizard; Japan’s Shigeyuki Nakarai, known as B-Boy Shigekix; and France’s Danis Civil, known as B-Boy Dany. The top three b-girls in the world are Japan’s Ami Yuasa, known as B-Girl Ami; China’s Qingyi Liu, known as B-Girl 671; and Lithuania’s Dominika Banevič, known as B-Girl Nicka.

    “Everybody else has surpassed the United States, so we better go out and do some workout camps,” said Chuck D of the iconic hip-hop group Public Enemy. “The United States probably ain’t going to gold, silver or bronze. … Other places, they’ve been training for years. It’s like martial arts.”

    Dancers need to win or perform well at WDSF-sanctioned events to earn the points that will eventually qualify them for the Paris Games. The next World Breaking Championship is taking place this weekend in Leuven, Belgium, just outside of Brussels.

    The top b-boy and the top b-girl from the championship will automatically gain spots in the Olympics. After the Belgium event, Olympic-qualifying competitions are scheduled in China and Chile, through mid-December. Additional Olympic trials will be held in the early part of next year and run through June 2024. At the end of the process, 16 b-boys and 16 b-girls will be allowed to compete over two days at Paris’ iconic Place de la Concorde.

    Montalvo, a 29-year-old from Kissimmee, Florida, who also goes by B-Boy Victor, is not discouraged.

    “We have a big chance, a really big chance,” he said. “We always make the podium.”

    Montalvo, who is ranked No. 5 in the world among competitive breakers, and nine others have already been named to Team USA, even though they haven’t yet qualified for the Paris Games. Competing alongside Montalvo this weekend in Leuven will be No. 7-ranked Team USA member Sunny Choi, aka B-Girl Sunny; Team USA member and No. 40-ranked Morris Isby, aka B-Boy Morris; and Logan Edra, aka B-Girl Logistx, a native of San Diego, California, who is ranked No. 13 in the world but is not a member of Team USA.

    It’s widely understood in the competitive breaking community that judges favor dancers who master the foundations of breaking: “toprock” moves, footwork, “downrock” moves done closer to the floor, “power” moves showing acrobatics and strength, along with the classic “headspins,” “windmills” and “freeze” poses.

    In the past, judging in hip-hop breaking competitions has always been very subjective. But that won’t be the case with the Paris Olympics, where officials will use a newly developed system to decide which b-boy or b-girl has bested their opponent in one-on-one battles.

    The Trivium judging system, created for the debut of breaking at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, is a digital scoring platform that allows judges to react in real time to breakers’ physical, artistic and interpretative qualities — their “body, mind and soul.” A panel of five judges scores each breaker on creativity, personality, technique, variety, performativity and musicality. The scores can adjust throughout the battle, based on how breakers respond to their opponents.

    Scores can be lowered if a breaker “bites,” or copies, a set of moves from their opponent. Misbehavior, such as deliberate physical contact with an opponent, and other unsportsmanlike conduct can also lower a breaker’s score.

    The scoring system could not have been developed without the input of the breaking community, said Alexander Diaz, a Boston-based member of Team USA.

    “It’s hard to get all the dancers, all the breakers on the same page,” said Diaz, who is also known as B-Boy El Niño.

    “Part of it was getting the older generation, the guys that started this in the mid- to late ’70s, and then the second generation from the early ’80s, to respect the route,” he said. “And then the new generation, they were just ready. A lot of us feel like we’re just as talented as Olympic basketball players or as gymnasts. We feel like what we do is just as hard and deserves to be on that platform.”

    The International Olympic Committee’s announcement three years ago that breaking would become an official Olympic sport divided the breaking community between those excited for the larger platform and those concerned about the dance form’s purity.

    Hall found the changes brought by breaking’s entry into the Olympics challenging to deal with.

    “It wasn’t helping me to express the loudness, to be the funkiest, to embody the story,” she said.

    Louis, a Houston-based dancer also known as B-Boy Jeffro, said the U.S. competitors want to be seen as innovators at the Olympics.

    “I think the reason why we’re different from a lot of the countries is because we carry a lot of the essence of breaking in hip-hop, as far as being your own individual, having a lot of personal style, having flavor,” Louis told The Associated Press earlier this year.

    “The goal is to have your own image,” he continued. “If you can’t see my face, and it’s just a silhouette of me, you should be able to say, ‘Hey, that’s Jeffro.’ But in a lot of places, it’s just about replicating: Learn this, learn that.”

    Montalvo hopes to be able to compete with the technical expertise honed by his international competitors while also teaching them the original nature of breaking.

    “I hope they see the essence, the style that I bring,” he said. “I want them to understand I learned from the roots, from the originals, and it’s important for all of us to learn from them.”

    ___

    Aaron Morrison is Race and Ethnicity news editor for The Associated Press. Follow him on social media: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

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  • A small venture capital player becomes a symbol in the fight over corporate diversity policies

    A small venture capital player becomes a symbol in the fight over corporate diversity policies

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    NEW YORK — A venture capital firm that has backed buzzy new companies like restaurant chain Slutty Vegan and beauty brand Live Tinted has become symbolic of the fight over corporate diversity policies since becoming a target of a lawsuit over a grant program for Black women.

    But the Fearless Fund is a tiny player in the approximately $200 billion global venture capital market.

    The Atlanta-based firm has invested nearly $27 million in some 40 businesses led by women of color since launching in 2019, and awarded another $3.7 million in grants. Collectively, those businesses employ about 540 people, up from 250 at the time of investment, according to the Fearless Fund’s “impact report,” released Wednesday.

    While the money has made a big difference to those businesses, Fearless Fund co-founder Arian Simone said it’s a drop in the bucket compared to systemic changes needed to close the racial and gender gap in venture capital funding.

    Less than 1% of venture capital funding goes to businesses owned by Black and Hispanic women, according to the nonprofit advocacy group Digitalundivided. Just to get that number over 2% would take billions of dollars, Simone said.

    “It takes trillions of dollars to really move the needle,” Simone said in an interview with The Associated Press, “which is why I think that policy changes need to take place in order to collectively get us up to speed.”

    Simone said she would like to see pension funds and other institutional investors, for example, enact mandates for venture capital firms to fund a certain number of minority-owned companies.

    It’s those sort of intentional policies that are under attack from conservative activist groups waging a legal battle against corporate diversity initiatives, an effort that has intensified since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions.

    The lawsuit against the Fearless Fund was filed by Edward Blum, the conservative activist who filed the affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court. It targets the fund’s Strivers Grant Contest, which awards $20,000 to Black women who run businesses, arguing it violates a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibiting racial discrimination in contracts.

    Blum’s organization, American Alliance For Equal Rights, has also filed lawsuits against two law firms in Texas and Florida over fellowship programs for diverse candidates, accusing them of being discriminatory.

    In an interview with The AP, Blum said his organization brought the case against the Fearless Fund after another woman-owned business brought the grant contest to their attention.

    “A useful way of determining the fairness and ultimately the legality of a policy is to apply the shoe on the other foot test,” Blum said, asking whether “a different venture capital fund’s requirement that only white men are eligible for its funding and support” would be considered legal.

    The Fearless Fund enlisted prominent civil rights lawyers, including Ben Crump, to defend against the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta. In court filings, the attorneys have argued that Blum’s group has no standing because it represents three anonymous women who never applied for funding from the Fearless Fund. They also argue that the grants are not contracts but donations protected by the First Amendment.

    Meanwhile, Simone said the Fearless Fund continues to get thousands of applications for its programs each week, illustrating the untapped potential of investing in women of color.

    The companies in its portfolio have found success in mainstream retail companies seeking to reach younger and more diverse customers.

    JCPenney CEO Marc Rosen said its partnership with Thirteen Lune, an e-commerce platform that promotes beauty brands created by people of color, is a cornerstone of its strategy revive its beauty business, which suffered a blow after Sephora left the chain to rival Kohl’s three years ago. Rosen said people of color account for a third of JCPenny’s customer base.

    “They’re going for products and brands that resonate with them and make them feel at home that are designed for them,” Rosen in a recent interview with The AP.

    Fearless Fund has invested more than $2 million in Thirteen Lune, founded by Nyako Griego.

    But overall funding for businesses owned by women of color has declined after experiencing a surge in the months after the racial protest that followed the 2020 police killing of George Floyd.

    The combined share of venture capital funding received by Black and Latina founders briefly surpassed 1% in 2021 before dipping back below that threshold in 2022, according to Digitalundivided.

    After Floyd’s killing, Simone said the Fearless Fund, whose backers include J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America and Mastercard, began receiving unsolicited investor interest for the first time. But that trend has since largely reversed.

    “That was a small window of time,” Simone said. “Everybody was looking for the Fearless Fund.”

    _____

    Associated Press Retail Writers Anne D’Innocenzio and Haleluya Hadero contributed to this story.

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  • Temple University says acting president JoAnne A. Epps has died after collapsing on stage

    Temple University says acting president JoAnne A. Epps has died after collapsing on stage

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    Temple University says acting president JoAnne A

    ByThe Associated Press

    September 19, 2023, 4:22 PM

    PHILADELPHIA — Temple University acting president JoAnne A. Epps has died after collapsing at a memorial service Tuesday afternoon, the university said.

    Epps was transported to Temple University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead around 3:15 p.m. Tuesday, the university said. She was 72.

    “There are no words that can describe the gravity and sadness of this loss,” board chairman Mitchell Morgan said in a statement. “President Epps was a devoted servant and friend who represented the best parts of Temple. She spent nearly 40 years of her life serving this university, and it goes without saying her loss will reverberate through the community for years to come.”

    Epps, Temple’s former law school dean and provost, was named to the post in April following the resignation of Jason Wingard, Temple’s first Black president. Wingard resigned in March after leading the 33,600-student university since July 2021.

    Epps had vowed to focus on enrollment and safety due to spiraling crime near the north Philadelphia campus and other issues during her predecessor’s tumultuous tenure. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer, which reported enrollment was down 14% since 2019, that she believed she was selected in part for her “ability to sort of calm waters.”

    “I am obviously humbled and excited and really looking forward to being able to make a contribution to the university that I so love,” Epps told the newspaper. She said she would not be a candidate for the permanent position.

    “JoAnne Epps was a powerful force and constant ambassador for Temple University for nearly four decades. Losing her is heartbreaking for Philadelphia,” Gov. Josh Shapiro said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Lori and I are holding JoAnne’s loved ones in our hearts right now. May her memory be a blessing.”

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  • A Supreme Court redistricting ruling gave hope to Black voters. They’re still waiting for new maps

    A Supreme Court redistricting ruling gave hope to Black voters. They’re still waiting for new maps

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    WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s decision siding with Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case gave Democrats and voting rights activists a surprising opportunity before the 2024 elections.

    New congressional maps would have to include more districts in Alabama and potentially other states where Black voters would have a better chance of electing someone of their choice, a decision widely seen as benefiting Democrats.

    It’s been more than three months since the justice’s 5-4 ruling, and maps that could produce more districts represented by Black lawmakers still do not exist.

    Alabama Republicans are hoping to get a fresh hearing on the issue before the Supreme Court. Republican lawmakers in Louisiana never even bothered to draw a new map.

    Khadidah Stone, a plaintiff in the Alabama case, said the continuing opposition was “appalling” but “not surprising.” She noted that Alabama is where then-Gov. George Wallace blocked Black students from integrating the University of Alabama in 1963.

    “There is a long history there of disobeying court orders to deny Black people our rights,” she said.

    A similar dynamic is playing out in Florida, where Republicans are appealing a ruling favorable to Black voters to the Republican-majority state Supreme Court.

    Lawsuits over racially gerrymandered congressional maps in several other states, including Georgia, South Carolina and Texas, quickly followed the Supreme Court’s landmark Voting Rights Act decision in June. But the continued pushback from Republican legislatures in control of redistricting means there is great uncertainty about whether –- or how soon -– new maps offering equal representation for Black voters will be drawn.

    Whether the Republican strategy proves to be a defiance of court orders that the Supreme Court will shoot down or a deft political move will be become clearer over the next month.

    Shawn Donahue of the State University of New York at Buffalo, an expert on voting rights and redistricting, said the Supreme Court could put a quick end to the delays and “summarily affirm” the decision of a lower court panel that rejected the latest Alabama congressional map. That map continued to provide just one majority Black district out of seven in a state where Black residents comprise 27% of the population.

    “You could have some of (the justices) just kind of say — ‘You know what, I didn’t agree, but that’s what the ruling was,’” Donahue said.

    The Supreme Court also could agree to hear Alabama’s challenge, bringing the state’s redistricting plans back to the court less than a year after it rendered its opinion in the previous case.

    Republicans want to keep their map in place as the state continues to fight the lower court ruling ordering them to create a second district where Black voters constitute a majority or close to it. The state contends the Supreme Court set no such remedy and that the new map complies with the court’s decision by fixing the problems it identified — such as how the state’s Black Belt region was split into multiple districts.

    “A stay is warranted before voters are sorted into racially gerrymandered districts that are by their very nature odious,’ the state attorney general’s office wrote in the stay request.

    The stakes are high. With Republicans holding a slim majority in the U.S. House, the redistricting cases have the potential to switch control of the chamber next year.

    Shortly after its decision in the Alabama case, the Supreme Court lifted its hold on a similar case from Louisiana, raising hopes among Democrats that the state would be forced to draw another Black majority congressional district.

    But even if the court rejects Alabama’s latest plan, it would not necessarily bring an instant end to the case in Louisiana, where U.S. District Court Judge Shelly Dick has ruled that a second majority-Black district must be drawn.

    Dick has three days of hearings scheduled to begin Oct. 3. But her initial order blocking the 2022 congressional map drawn by Louisiana’s GOP-controlled Legislature — which maintains white majorities in five of six districts in a state where about one-third of voters are Black — remains on appeal. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is to hear arguments Oct. 6.

    Louisiana’s lawyers argue that the Black communities the plaintiffs and the district court seek to include in a second majority Black district are too far-flung, even under the Alabama precedent.

    The high court’s decision in the Alabama case “did not present a free pass to future plaintiffs to establish (Voting Rights Act) liability without proving that the relevant minority population is itself compact,” Louisiana said in its argument.

    The voting rights advocates suing the state argue that the plans they have suggested so far are “on average more compact” than the plan the state is trying to preserve.

    Stuart Naifeh, who is a plaintiff as part of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in Louisiana that the court is considering the maps drawn by only the plaintiffs because the Legislature chose not to draw any. Louisiana state Rep. Sam Jenkins Jr., a Democrat, said he is optimistic now that the matter is in the courts.

    “We had the opportunity to do the right thing, which would have been fair for all the people of Louisiana,” he said. “I am disappointed that the court still has to come in and make our state do what is right.”

    Louisiana’s argument against a second district has less merit than Alabama’s, said state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat. Louisiana has just one majority Black congressional district out of six even though Black residents account for one-third of the state’s population. That lone district encompasses both New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

    “These are two distinct cities, two distinct regions, two distinct interests and needs, and it only makes sense to have these two large communities to anchor individual congressional districts,” Duplessis said. “We have shown that there is a multitude of ways to draw a map that has two majority Black districts that meet all the criteria for fair redistricting.”

    A similar case is playing out in Florida, though not in federal court.

    A state judge ruled earlier this month that a redistricting plan pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a GOP presidential contender, should be redrawn because it diminishes the ability of Black voters in north Florida to pick a representative of their choice.

    The state is appealing that ruling, and the case might be fast-tracked to the Florida Supreme Court, where five of the seven justices were appointed by DeSantis. Both sides are requesting a quick resolution before the next legislative session in case districts need to be redrawn for the 2024 elections.

    The new map essentially drew Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, who is Black, out of office by carving up his district and dividing a large number of Black voters into conservative districts represented by white Republicans. DeSantis contended the previous district extended 200 miles just to link Black communities, violating the constitutional standards for compactness.

    Angie Nixon, a Black state representative from Jacksonville, was one of the Democratic lawmakers who led a protest against the DeSantis map. She said she is still hopeful the state’s high court will ultimately deliver the outcome wanted by voting rights groups.

    Nixon said groups have been organizing to get more people engaged.

    “We are going to use this as an opportunity to serve as a catalyst to get people moving and get people out to vote,” she said.

    ___

    Gomez Licon reported from Miami. Associated Press writers Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, and Kevin McGill in New Orleans contributed to this report.

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  • A judge must now decide if Georgia voting districts are racially discriminatory after a trial ended

    A judge must now decide if Georgia voting districts are racially discriminatory after a trial ended

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    ATLANTA — A trial challenging voting district maps in Georgia concluded Thursday with the state arguing that court intervention on behalf of Black voters isn’t needed, while the plaintiffs argued that Black voters are still fighting opposition from white voters and need federal help to get a fair shot.

    If U.S. District Judge Steve Jones rules for the challengers, one of Georgia’s 14 U.S. House seats, plus multiple state Senate and state House seats, could be redrawn to contain majorities of Black residents. That could shift control of those seats to Democrats from Republicans.

    The closing arguments focused on the question of how far Georgia has come since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, whether more intervention is needed and whether proposals brought forward by the plaintiffs are so race-conscious as to be unconstitutional. Section 2 of that law says voting district lines can’t result in discriminatory effects against minority voters.

    The plaintiffs acknowledged that Black voters in Georgia have seen some success, but say the maps drawn by the Republican-controlled General Assembly still illegally suppress Black voting power.

    “Minority vote dilution does not need to be accompanied by pitchforks and burning crosses and literacy tests for it to result in minority vote dilution,” plaintifss’ lawyer Abha Khanna said.

    But the state countered that lawmakers have provided Black people with equal political opportunities and that when Black-preferred candidates lose, it’s because of partisan preferences or flawed candidates.

    “Once you get to a point where participation is equally open, then it’s just party politics, everyone making their best case to the voters,” lawyer Bryan Tyson said.

    The Georgia case is part of a wave of litigation after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year stood behind its interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, rejecting a challenge to the law by Alabama.

    Courts in Alabama and Florida ruled recently that Republican-led legislatures had unfairly diluted the voting power of Black residents. Legal challenges to congressional districts are also ongoing in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

    “My decision is going to affect a whole lot of people,” Jones said after closing arguments. The judge, who is deciding the case without a jury, said he will issue a ruling as soon as possible. Jones made a preliminary ruling in 2022 that some parts of Georgia’s redistricting plans probably violate federal law

    Speed is important because if Jones rules for the plaintiffs, he would order the General Assembly to redraw maps before the 2024 elections. With appeals likely, time is already growing short before the March 2024 qualifying deadline for May primaries when all congressional and state legislative seats will be on the ballot.

    The plaintiffs argued Thursday that Georgia’s failure is clear after the state added nearly 500,000 Black residents between 2010 and 2020 but drew no new Black-majority state Senate districts and only two additional Black-majority state House districts. They also say Georgia should have another Black majority congressional district.

    “What they want is what they’re entitled to, which is a fair chance,” said Khanna, who added that the trial showed how Georgia “dodges and weaves” to avoid its legal obligations.

    But Tyson pointed to the election of Democrat Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate as proof that candidates favored by Black voters can win.

    “What is the end point of what Section 2 requires of Georgia?” Tyson asked. He said that while the General Assembly’s enacted plans were conscious of race, the plaintiffs’ plans crossed the line to illegally drawing maps mostly based on race.

    “The goal is to get to a point where we’re a society that’s no longer largely fixated on race,” Tyson said.

    Ari Savitzky, another lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the evidence presented showed that at least in the parts of Georgia that plaintiffs focused on, racially polarized voting shows intervention under the law is still needed.

    “When racial division no longer structures our politics, that’s when it ends,” Savitzky said.

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  • For HBCUs, the bands are about much more than the show to the Black community: ‘This is family’

    For HBCUs, the bands are about much more than the show to the Black community: ‘This is family’

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    HOUSTON — It’s almost 10 p.m. and still a sweltering, sticky 95 degrees when Texas Southern’s Ocean of Soul band marches onto the top of a parking garage a stone’s throw from downtown Houston.

    The glittering skyline is close enough to provide some illumination to the dimly lit structure. It reveals beads of sweat dripping off many faces as the students near the end of a 10-hour rehearsal day. One of the three drum majors, Dominique Conner, speeds through his bandmates, handing out kudos when earned and criticism when needed.

    Band director Brian Simmons climbs to the top of a nearby ladder and lifts a bullhorn.

    “Everything you do matters,” he barks.

    Just why more than 100 student musicians are honing their routines on a giant slab of concrete in the brutal August heat of a Houston summer is a microcosm, in many ways, of life at a historically Black college or university like Texas Southern. They are here because it’s the best available option at a school where resources are rarely plentiful. They are here because they need the practice for a showcase against seven other HBCU marching bands that is coming up fast.

    They are also here because playing in bands like the Ocean of Soul isn’t about school participation and it’s not about knocking out an extracurricular activity. By joining, just like their brethren in HBCU bands at Southern and Howard and Florida A&M and all the others, they become part of a treasured hallmark of the Black community, which is eager to love them like family and celebrate with them step by choreographed step. It has been this way for decades, but in the age of social media and online streaming, the bands are enjoying fresh attention.

    “HBCU bands, it represents a lot of things,” said Simmons, who at 31 is the youngest band director ever at Texas Southern and is decades younger than most everyone else in his position at an HBCU. Simmons performed in Southern’s Human Jukebox band as a student and spent eight years as assistant director there before coming to Texas Southern in 2021.

    “It’s competition. It’s discipline. It’s tradition. It’s all those things,” Simmons explained. “Marching band for HBCUs, it’s almost a cornerstone.”

    Somewhat quiet by nature, the importance of his role has forced Conner to be more outspoken, even commanding. Being a part of something that means so much to the Black community fills the junior with pride.

    “It just gives minorities the chance and opportunity to show their passion and their craft and their culture,” he says. “People have the chance to just show their creativity.”

    THE RIGHT NOTES

    Competition and showmanship are at the heart of all HBCU bands, which number approximiately 40 across the country. They have been ever since William Foster at Florida A&M formed the Marching 100 band in 1946, launching a high-stepping style and thrilling blend of music and dance that can border on gymnastics. It is unique and it has been emulated at thousands of high schools and colleges ever since.

    For Christy A. Walker, HBCU bands are “literally in my blood” and she has spent her life around them. Her parents met while both were in the North Carolina A&T band and she followed in their footsteps playing clarinet in the Blue and Gold Marching Machine.

    Walker has written three books about HBCU bands, helped found a website about them and hosts a podcast called “The HBCU Band Experience.” She called the bands a vital part of Black culture that deseve more reverence than they get.

    “We do it different and honestly we are, I would say, tastemakers for the entire band culture, including non HBCUs,” she said. “Because we are the ones that will play Top 40 songs that are out now. If a song comes out on Monday, by the time Saturday rolls around a band will perform it.”

    At HBCUs, Tennessee State band director Reginald McDonald says, the bands are often “the window to the school” that influences opinions about the institution.

    “It basically puts a spotlight on each one of our programs and allows people to understand and know that in terms of music education at each one of these schools they’re very viable programs,” he says. “And we do some unique things with very little funding often and we make magic, in a sense, happen.”

    The Aristocrat of Bands he runs is one of the best in the country. Founded the same year as the Marching 100, it began performing at professional football games in 1956 and became the first HBCU band to perform in a presidential inaugural parade when it marched for John F. Kennedy’s ceremony in 1961.

    It also has a title no other HBCU band can claim: Grammy winner. The band beat Willie Nelson, among others, in February for the Best Roots Gospel album honor for “The Urban Hymnal.”

    THE SHOWCASE

    More than 2,200 band members and dozens of directors and staff from around the country have arrived for the chance to show their skills in front of a crowd of more than 50,000 at NRG Stadium, home of the NFL’s Houston Texans.

    Derek Webber, a graduate of Hampton University, created the National Battle of the Bands to increase exposure of HBCUs and their bands and to help them educate aspiring musicians. He is proud that the event has raised more than $1 million in scholarships for participating schools, which are often underfunded and lack resources.

    “For an HBCU, the bands are part of the culture, they’re part of the lifestyle,” Webber said. “And in some cases, they’re more important than the athletic team.”

    Webber proudly noted the size of the crowd the bands would draw on the final Saturday before college football began.

    “Here we are on a Saturday and there’s no football going on and we’re going to get 50,000 folks,” he said. “The fans really enjoy what they see. The bands put in a tremendous amount of work to put on a great show. And this is energetic. This is entertaining. This is family. This is lifestyle.”

    Nerves were high as Saturday night arrived with the promise of 3 1/2 hours of music, with all eight bands performing and rap artists such as Doug E. Fresh, Outkast’s Big Boi and Slim Thug taking a stage in between.

    Draped in a sparkling gold cape, with a feathered Corinthian helmet on his head, Yohance Goodrich II high-stepped onto the field as Mr. Spartan with Norfolk State’s Spartan Legion band trailing behind.

    Tall and regal, Goodrich commanded the band with an easy confidence. Every move he made was precise and crisp, whether leading the band through traditional songs or dancing to a hip-hop medley highlighted by T.I. and Missy Elliott songs. Mr. Spartan is the band’s head drum major and, as Goodrich noted as he cited his responsibility for the success of the band, “enthusiasm is the key and discipline is the legacy.”

    “It’s the highest position on the student level … it’s an honor to earn that position,” he beamed. “It’s a lot of work that goes into it and most importantly it’s one of the biggest positions on campus in terms of our culture and how important band is to our university.”

    THE PAYOFF

    Virginia State’s Myiles Spann began twirling “behind the scenes” in ninth grade, dreaming that one day he would have a shot to perform in a marching band. After two seasons in Virginia State’s Trojan Explosion, he finally got a chance to join the auxiliary line and was the only male twirler in the Battle of the Bands.

    Wearing black slacks and a sequined royal blue shirt, Spann dazzled with a flawless performance, a huge smile never leaving his face. When the crowd showered the band with applause, it was better than anything Spann could have imagined.

    “It felt so amazing,” he said. “It felt like I was in a dream.”

    All those nights the Texas Southern band rehearsed atop that parking garage it was the thought of this event that kept the students focused. With the showcase taking place in their city, they had no choice but to bring it.

    “You have to represent your city,” Simmons said. “You have to make people proud that they share a ZIP code with you, that they share a city with you.”

    On a night that was also a celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip hop, the Ocean of Soul wove that connection into its show. The band brought down the house when Simmons handed a microphone and a bucket hat to a band member, and he rapped Run DMC’s hit “It’s Tricky” while the band performed the song.

    Conner, fellow drum major Kevin Smith and head drum major KamRon Hadnot wowed the crowd with a choreographed dance during the piece. It included the Kid ’n Play dance from the 1990 movie House Party and the Druski dance, which went viral in 2021.

    “We brought them on that emotional ride with us,” Simmons said. “So, in the end when you turn around and you get to see that standing ovation, it means job well done.”

    Anyone not in Houston missed quite a show. But college football has begun and basketball is not far away, which means every week there will be HBCU bands around the country entertaining crowds and showcasing Black excellence.

    ___

    AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/college-football

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  • No longer stranded, tens of thousands clean up and head home after Burning Man floods

    No longer stranded, tens of thousands clean up and head home after Burning Man floods

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    RENO, Nev. — The traffic jam leaving the Burning Man festival eased up considerably Tuesday as the exodus from the mud-caked Nevada desert entered a second day following massive rain that left tens of thousands of partygoers stranded there for days.

    A pair of brothers from Arizona who took their 67-year-old mother with them to Burning Man for the first time spent 11 hours into early Tuesday morning just getting out of the festival site about 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of Reno.

    “It was a perfect, typical Burning Man weather until Friday — then the rain started coming down hard,” said Phillip Martin, 47. “Then it turned into Mud Fest.”

    Event organizers began letting traffic flow out on the main road around 2 p.m. local time Monday — even as they urged attendees to delay their exit to help ease traffic.

    By Tuesday morning, wait times had dropped from roughly five hours to two to three hours, according to the official Burning Man account on X, formerly known as Twitter.

    The annual celebration in one of the most remote places in America launched on a San Francisco beach in 1986 and has since grown. Nearly 80,000 artists, musicians and activists visit the Black Rock Desert every year for a weeklong mix of wilderness camping in a makeshift city of camps built virtually overnight and music and avant-garde performances leading up to the ceremonial burnings of a towering, faceless effigy and a temple dedicated to the dead.

    Most attendees travel to the stark desert to express themselves with music and art, commune with nature or “find themselves.″ Others visit the ancient lake bottom for a psychedelic party full of hallucinogens and nudity before the burning of the wooden effigy.

    The event this year began Aug. 27 and was scheduled to end Monday morning, with attendees breaking down camps and cleaning up — until the rains came.

    After more than a half-inch (1.3 centimeters) of rain fell Friday, flooding turned the playa to foot-deep mud — closing roads and forcing burners to lean on each other for help.

    Burning Man emphasizes self-sufficiency, and many burners arrive in Black Rock Desert with limited supplies, expecting to face challenges in the form of brutal heat, dust storms — or torrential rains.

    Disruptions are part of the event’s recent history: Dust storms forced organizers to temporarily close entrances to the festival in 2018, and the event was twice canceled altogether during the pandemic.

    Mark Fromson, 54, who goes by the name “Stuffy” on the playa, had been staying in an RV, but the rains forced him to find shelter at another camp, where fellow burners provided him food and cover. Another principle of Burning Man, he said, centers on the unconditional giving of gifts with no expectation of receiving one.

    After sunset Friday, Fromson set off barefoot through the muck for a long trek back to his vehicle — the dense playa suddenly a thick clay that clung to his feet and legs. The challenge, he said, was the mark of a “good burn.”

    “Best burn yet,” he said. “The old, crusty burners who have been out there for 40 years would just laugh at us with all the creature comforts we come onto the playa with.”

    The road closures came just before the first of the ceremonial fires were scheduled to begin Saturday night. Shortly thereafter, the fires themselves were postponed as authorities worked to reopen exit routes by the end of the Labor Day weekend.

    “The Man” was torched Monday night, but the temple was set to burn at 8 p.m. Tuesday. By tradition, revelers leave the names of departed loved ones and other remembrances to be burned in the temple. For many, torching the temple has become the centerpiece of the burning — a more intimate, spiritual event than the rave-party-like immolation of the effigy.

    The rain also posed significant challenges for authorities responding to emergency situations — including the death of a man identified as 32-year-old Leon Reece.

    Due to the rain, access to the area where Reece was reported unresponsive was delayed, but authorities said it did not appear weather played a role in his death. A cause of death is pending the results of an autopsy, which can take six to eight weeks, according to the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office.

    Amid the flooding, revelers were urged to conserve their food and water, and most remained hunkered down at the site. Some attendees, however, managed to walk several miles to the nearest town or catch a ride there.

    Many stuck at Burning Man turned to the official Black Rock City radio station — BMIR 94.5 FM — to issue pleas for rides to Reno, San Francisco and other neighboring cities. DJs informed listeners about what the stranded have with them — crates, bicycles, supplies — and offers to split fuel and food costs.

    Alexander Elmendorf braved the harsh weather at a campsite set with trailers, RVs and an aerial rig. On Tuesday afternoon, he was waiting to clean up the debris left behind by the tens of thousands who exited the area.

    “It’s gonna be a lot of work for everyone involved,” said Elmendorf, 36, who planned to stay until Friday to help with cleanup efforts. “And by that, I mean, get everything off the ground.”

    By Tuesday afternoon the ground had lost most of its moisture, which at one point you could build a mud-based snowman in, he said. The mist tent his crew set-up had once been the “driest spot in camp” after the rain.

    Elmendorf guessed that about 15,000 people remained on the playa Tuesday afternoon, though his friends said it was closer to 20,000. Elmendorf, who has been to Burning Man three other times, said staff had essentially kicked the last burners out each year.

    “No one’s rushing anyone out this year,” he said. “I think more so people are rushing themselves off.”

    ___

    Associated Press reporters Rio Yamat in Las Vegas, Michael Casey in Boston, R.J. Rico in Atlanta, Lea Skene in Baltimore, Juan Lozano in Houston and Julie Walker in New York contributed.

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  • Wait times to exit Burning Man drop after flooding left tens of thousands stranded in Nevada desert

    Wait times to exit Burning Man drop after flooding left tens of thousands stranded in Nevada desert

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    RENO, Nev. — The traffic jam leaving the Burning Man festival eased up considerably Tuesday as the exodus from the mud-caked Nevada desert entered a second day following massive rain that left tens of thousands of partygoers stranded there for days.

    A pair of brothers from Arizona who took their 67-year-old mother with them to Burning Man for the first time spent 11 hours into early Tuesday morning just getting out of the festival site, which is 15 miles (1.6 kilometers) from the nearest city of Gerlach, Nevada.

    “It was a perfect, typical Burning Man weather until Friday — then the rain started coming down hard,” said Phillip Martin, 47. “Then it turned into Mud Fest.”

    Event organizers began letting traffic flow out on the main road around 2 p.m. local time Monday — even as they urged attendees to delay their exit to help ease traffic. About two hours after the mass departure began, organizers estimated a wait time of about five hours.

    By Tuesday morning, wait times had dropped to between two and three hours, according to the official Burning Man account on the social network X, formerly known as Twitter.

    The annual gathering, which launched on a San Francisco beach in 1986, attracts nearly 80,000 artists, musicians and activists for a week-long mix of wilderness camping and avant-garde performances.

    The festival had been closed to vehicles after more than a half-inch (1.3 centimeters) of rain fell Friday, causing flooding and foot-deep mud.

    The road closures came just before the first of two ceremonial fires signaling an end to the festival was scheduled to begin Saturday night. The event traditionally culminates with the burning of a large wooden effigy shaped like a man and a wood temple structure during the final two nights, but the fires were postponed as authorities worked to reopen exit routes by the end of the Labor Day weekend.

    Organizers had also asked attendees not to walk out of the Black Rock Desert about 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of Reno during that time as others had done throughout the weekend, including DJ Diplo and comedian Chris Rock.

    “The Man” was torched Monday night while the temple is set to go up in flames 8 p.m. Tuesday.

    The National Weather Service in Reno said some light rain showers could pass through Tuesday morning.

    The event began Aug. 27 and had been scheduled to end Monday morning, with attendees packing up and cleaning up after themselves.

    “We are a little bit dirty and muddy, but spirits are high. The party still going,” said Scott London, a Southern California photographer, adding that the travel limitations offered “a view of Burning Man that a lot of us don’t get to see.”

    Disruptions are part of the event’s recent history: Dust storms forced organizers to temporarily close entrances to the festival in 2018, and the event was twice canceled altogether during the pandemic.

    At least one fatality has been reported, but organizers said the death of a man in his 40s wasn’t weather-related. The sheriff of nearby Pershing County said he was investigating but has not identified the man or a cause of death.

    President Joe Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday that he was aware of the situation at Burning Man, including the death, and the White House was in touch with local authorities.

    The event is remote on the best of days and emphasizes self-sufficiency. Amid the flooding, revelers were urged to conserve their food and water, and most remained hunkered down at the site.

    Some attendees, however, managed to walk several miles to the nearest town or catch a ride there.

    Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, posted a video to Instagram on Saturday evening showing him and Rock riding in the back of a fan’s pickup truck. He said they had walked 6 miles through the mud before hitching a ride.

    “I legit walked the side of the road for hours with my thumb out,” Diplo wrote.

    Cindy Bishop and three of her friends managed to drive their rented RV out of the festival at dawn on Monday when, Bishop said, the main road wasn’t being guarded.

    She said they were happy to make it out after driving toward the exit — and getting stuck several times — over the course of two days.

    But Bishop, who traveled from Boston for her second Burning Man, said spirits were still high at the festival when they had left. Most people she spoke with said they planned to stay for the ceremonial burns.

    “The spirit in there,” she said, “was really like, ‘We’re going to take care of each other and make the best of it.’”

    Rebecca Barger, a photographer from Philadelphia, arrived at her first Burning Man on Aug. 26 and was determined to stick it out through the end.

    “Everyone has just adapted, sharing RVs for sleeping, offering food and coffee,” Barger said. “I danced in foot-deep clay for hours to incredible DJs.”

    ___

    Associated Press reporters Rio Yamat in Las Vegas, Michael Casey in Boston, R.J. Rico in Atlanta, Lea Skene in Baltimore, Juan Lozano in Houston and Julie Walker in New York contributed.

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  • Philadelphia police commissioner resigns, months before end of mayor’s second term

    Philadelphia police commissioner resigns, months before end of mayor’s second term

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    PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will step down this month, the mayor said Tuesday, ending a turbulent three years at the helm of one of the country’s largest police forces that spanned the pandemic lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests to take a leadership position with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

    Outlaw, the first Black woman to run the 6,000-member department, came aboard just before the pandemic shutdown and quickly had to oversee the city’s safety as intense protests broke out in Philadelphia and across the country in the summer of 2020 over the police killing of Black people.

    Her resignation comes just a few months before the end of Mayor Jim Kenney’s tenure and as the rates of homicides and other crimes have become a major issue in the race to replace him.

    Tensions between Philadelphia police and the public escalated after Floyd’s killing in May 2020, when mostly peaceful protesters who shut down a major city expressway were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. The city council issued a statement calling the police response “brutal,” “excessive” and “unacceptable,” but Outlaw initially defended the strategy. The city later paid a $9.25 million settlement to hundreds of protesters.

    Later that year, police came under rebuke again when a young Black man named Walter Wallace Jr., who had a history of mental illness and was brandishing a knife outside his home, was shot and killed within seconds of police arriving to the scene. Outlaw bemoaned the lack of mental health services while pledging the department would do better.

    And they came to a head again just last month, when the department had to backtrack to say that a man who was killed by an officer who had stopped him for erratic driving had neither lunged at police with a knife nor exited the car, as police officials initially claimed. Outlaw moved to fire the officer for insubordination and other alleged policy violations in the Aug. 14 death of Eddie Irizarry.

    “Commissioner Outlaw has worked relentlessly for three and a half years during an unprecedented era in our city and a number of crisis situations, and she deserves praise for her commitment to bring long-overdue reform to the Department after years of racism and gender discrimination prior to her appointment,” Kenney said in a statement.

    He has named First Deputy John M. Stanford Jr. as interim police commissioner. While campaigning, Democratic mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker has skirted questions over her plans for leadership at the police department.

    Over the last few years, Philadelphia has seen a sharp increase in homicides, setting a modern-day record in 2021 with 562 homicides that year. Homicides declined slightly in 2022 and advocates have said they are on track to decrease further this year.

    But even though Philadelphia was hardly alone among U.S. cities in experiencing a rise in homicides over that time, it has had a hard time combatting a Republican narrative of being a Democratic city with a progressive district attorney that is overrun with violence and danger.

    Meanwhile, Outlaw faced a gender bias lawsuit from within the department that yielded a $1 million federal verdict to two female officers who said they endured a hostile work environment that included being put in undesirable jobs after they lodged sexual harassment complaints.

    Outlaw came to Philadelphia from Portland, Oregon, where her handling of protests had also raised concerns.

    At the port authority, Outlaw will be the deputy chief security officer. The agency also announced the creation of a new security and technology department that will oversee safety at facilities throughout the agency.

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  • Burning Man revelers begin exodus after flooding left tens of thousands stranded in Nevada desert

    Burning Man revelers begin exodus after flooding left tens of thousands stranded in Nevada desert

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    BLACK ROCK DESERT, Nev. — Muddy roads flooded by a summer storm that left tens of thousands of partygoers stranded for days at the Burning Man counterculture festival had dried up enough by Monday afternoon to allow them to begin their exodus from the northern Nevada desert.

    Event organizers said they started to let traffic flow out of the main road around 2 p.m. local time — even as they continued urging attendees to delay their exit to help ease traffic on Monday. About two hours after the mass departure began, organizers estimated a wait time of about five hours.

    Organizers also asked attendees not to walk out of the Black Rock Desert about 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of Reno as others had done throughout the weekend, including celebrity DJ Diplo and comedian Chris Rock. They didn’t specify why.

    The festival had been closed to vehicles after more than a half-inch (1.3 centimeters) of rain fell Friday, causing flooding and foot-deep mud.

    The road closures came just before the first of two ceremonial fires signaling an end to the festival was scheduled to begin Saturday night. The event traditionally culminates with the burning of a large wooden effigy shaped like a man and a wood temple structure during the final two nights, but the fires were postponed as authorities worked to reopen exit routes by the end of the Labor Day weekend.

    Weather permitting, “the Man” is scheduled to be torched 9 p.m. Monday while the temple is set to go up in flames 8 p.m. Tuesday.

    The National Weather Service in Reno said it should stay mostly clear and dry at the festival site Monday, although some light rain showers could pass through Tuesday morning. The event began Aug. 27 and had been scheduled to end Monday morning, with attendees packing up and cleaning up after themselves.

    “We are a little bit dirty and muddy, but spirits are high. The party still going,” said Scott London, a Southern California photographer, adding that the travel limitations offered “a view of Burning Man that a lot of us don’t get to see.”

    The annual gathering, which launched on a San Francisco beach in 1986, attracts nearly 80,000 artists, musicians and activists for a mix of wilderness camping and avant-garde performances. Disruptions are part of the event’s recent history: Dust storms forced organizers to temporarily close entrances to the festival in 2018, and the event was twice canceled altogether during the pandemic.

    At least one fatality has been reported, but organizers said the death of a man in his 40s wasn’t weather-related. The sheriff of nearby Pershing County said he was investigating but has not identified the man or a cause of death.

    President Joe Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday that he was aware of the situation at Burning Man, including the death, and the White House was in touch with local authorities.

    The event is remote on the best of days and emphasizes self-sufficiency. Amid the flooding, revelers were urged to conserve their food and water, and most remained hunkered down at the site.

    Some attendees, however, managed to walk several miles to the nearest town or catch a ride there.

    Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz, posted a video to Instagram on Saturday evening showing him and Rock riding in the back of a fan’s pickup truck. He said they had walked six miles through the mud before hitching a ride.

    “I legit walked the side of the road for hours with my thumb out,” Diplo wrote.

    Cindy Bishop and three of her friends managed to drive their rented RV out of the festival at dawn on Monday when, Bishop said, the main road wasn’t being guarded.

    She said they were happy to make it out after driving toward the exit — and getting stuck several times — over the course of two days.

    But Bishop, who traveled from Boston for her second Burning Man, said spirits were still high at the festival when they had left. Most people she spoke with said they planned to stay for the ceremonial burns.

    “The spirit in there,” she said, “was really like, ‘We’re going to take care of each other and make the best of it.’”

    Rebecca Barger, a photographer from Philadelphia, arrived at her first Burning Man on Aug. 26 and was determined to stick it out through the end.

    “Everyone has just adapted, sharing RVs for sleeping, offering food and coffee,” Barger said. “I danced in foot-deep clay for hours to incredible DJs.”

    ___

    Associated Press reporters Rio Yamat in Las Vegas, Michael Casey in Boston, R.J. Rico in Atlanta, Lea Skene in Baltimore, Juan Lozano in Houston and Julie Walker in New York contributed.

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