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Tag: Political movements

  • Alabama’s capital removes Confederate names from 2 schools

    Alabama’s capital removes Confederate names from 2 schools

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    MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Two high schools in Alabama’s capital, a hub of the civil rights movement, will no longer bear the names of Confederate leaders.

    The Montgomery County Board of Education on Thursday voted for new names for Jefferson Davis High School and Robert E Lee High School, news outlets reported.

    Lee will become Dr. Percy Julian High School. Davis will become JAG High School, representing three figures of the civil rights movement: Judge Frank Johnson, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Rev. Robert Graetz.

    The schools opened in the 1950s and 1960s as all or mostly white but now serve student populations that are more than 85% African American.

    “Our job is to make our spaces comfortable for our kids. Bottom line is we’re going to make decisions based on what our kids needs may be, not necessarily on sentiment around whatever nostalgia may exist,” Superintendent Melvin Brown said, as reported by WSFA-TV.

    Julian was a chemist and teacher who was born in Montgomery. Johnson was a federal judge whose rulings helped end segregation and enforce voting rights. Abernathy was a pastor and leader in the civil rights movement. Graetz was the only white pastor who openly supported the Montgomery bus boycott and became the target of scorn and bombings for doing so.

    The new school names were given two years after education officials vowed to strip the Confederate namesakes. A debate over the school names began amid protests over racial inequality following the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. Someone ripped down a statue of Lee outside his namesake school during the demonstrations.

    Like many other Confederate-named schools, Lee — named for the Confederate Army general — opened as an all-white school in 1955 as the South was actively fighting integration. Davis, named for the Confederate president, opened in 1968. But white flight after integration orders and shifting demographics meant the schools became heavily African American.

    The Montgomery City Council last year voted to rename Jeff Davis Avenue for attorney Fred D. Gray. Gray grew up on the street during the Jim Crow era and went on to represent clients including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.

    After the street name change, the Alabama attorney general’s office told city officials to pay a $25,000 fine or face a lawsuit for violating a state law protecting Confederate monuments and other longstanding memorials. The city paid the fine in order to remove the Confederate reference.

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  • Walker, Warnock offer clashing religious messages in Georgia

    Walker, Warnock offer clashing religious messages in Georgia

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    ATLANTA — One candidate in Georgia’s Senate contest warns that “spiritual warfare” has entangled America and offers himself to voters as a “warrior for God.” But it isn’t the ordained Baptist minister who leads the church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

    It’s Republican Herschel Walker, the sports icon who openly questions the religious practices of Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who calls himself “a pastor in the Senate” and declares voting the civil equivalent of prayer.

    Both men feature faith as part of their public identities in a state where religion has always been a dominant cultural influence. But they do it in distinct ways, jousting in moral terms on matters from abortion, race and criminal justice to each other’s personal lives and behavior.

    Their approaches offer a striking contrast between political opponents who were raised in the Black church in the Deep South in the wake of the civil rights movement.

    “It’s two completely different visions of the world and what our biggest problems actually are,” said the Rev. Ray Waters, a white evangelical pastor in metro Atlanta who backs Warnock in Tuesday’s election.

    How religious voters align could help decide what polls suggest is a narrow race that will help settle which party controls the Senate the next two years. According to Pew Research, about 2 out of 3 adults in Georgia consider themselves “highly religious.”

    Warnock, 53, preaches a kind of social justice Christianity that echoes King, the slain civil rights leader who also led Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

    The senator embraces the Black church’s roots in chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation. From the pulpit, he acknowledges institutional racism and calls for collective government action that addresses inequities and other social ills. He often notes his arrests as a citizen protester advocating for health insurance expansion in the same Capitol where he now works as a senator.

    “I stand up for health care because it’s a human right,” Warnock said. “Dr. King said that of all the injustices, health care inequality is the most shocking and the most inhumane.”

    Walker talks, too, of society’s shortcomings, but the 60-year-old points to the expansion of LGBTQ rights, renewed focus on racism and “weak” politicians, who, he says, “don’t love this country.” He has called for a national ban on abortions but has faced accusations from two former girlfriends who said he pressured them into terminating pregnancies and paid for their procedures. He has said the claims are lies.

    It’s a culturally conservative pitch tied to individual morals rather than collective responsibility and effectively holds that the United States is a Christian country. That aligns Walker with the mostly white evangelical movement that has shaped the modern Republican Party.

    Those approaches, varied in substance and style, are traced through the two rivals’ biographies.

    Warnock, the son of Pentecostal ministers, pursued a similar educational path as King. Both attended Morehouse College, a historically Black campus in Atlanta. Warnock followed that with Union Theological Seminary in New York, a center of progressive Christian theology. Now with more than a decade in one of the nation’s most famous pulpits, he sometimes quotes Scripture at length and peppers his arguments with Latin references.

    “I believe a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire … and that democracy is the political enactment of the spiritual idea that each of us was created, as the scriptures tell us, in the ‘Imago Dei’ — the image of God,” Warnock told a group of Jewish supporters last month.

    At the same event, during observances of the Jewish New Year, Warnock noted a passage often used as part of Rosh Hashanah fasting. “Is this the fast that the Lord is looking for,” he said, “that you would loose the chains of injustice and you would set the oppressed free, that you would feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger.” Offering the citation — Isaiah 58:6 — he called it “a favorite of mine.”

    Walker also is a Pentecostal pastor’s son and now attends nondenominational Bible churches. A star high school athlete in rural Georgia, his football prowess took him in 1980 to the University of Georgia, a secular public campus that was then overwhelmingly white. Walker never graduated, though he claims otherwise.

    He talks often of Jesus, typically as a figure of “redemption” rather than a guide for public policy.

    “Let me acknowledge my Lord and savior Jesus Christ, because it’s said if you don’t acknowledge him, he won’t acknowledge you,” Walker said at his lone debate with Warnock. “When I come knocking, I want him to let me in.”

    Many Walker events open with prayers, some led by other Black conservative evangelicals. Yet Walker’s scriptural and theological references are scattershot, usually nonspecific allusions as part of broadsides against Warnock and “wokeness.”

    On transgender rights, Walker has said: “I can’t believe we’re discussing what is a woman. That’s written in the Bible. … We got to not let them fool us with all those lies.”

    At a “Women for Herschel” event in August, Walker suggested Warnock is anti-American, and he alluded to the biblical story of the Hebrew God expelling dissident angels from heaven. “It’s time for us to kick those people who don’t like America, kick ‘em out of office,” he said, concluding to his largely white audience: “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re racist.”

    On abortion, he said directly to Warnock on the debate stage: “Instead of aborting those babies, why are you not baptizing those babies?”

    It’s a compelling argument for voters such as Wylene Hayes, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher in Cumming. “You can just tell Herschel is a man of strong faith, and just humble,” she said. “I don’t have anything against Sen. Warnock, but I do question how he can be a pastor and support abortion.”

    Warnock counters that he supports abortion access because “even God gives us a choice,” while Walker’s position would grant “to politicians more power than God has.”

    Waters said Walker’s collective argument is targeted squarely at white suburban Christians like those he led for decades before moving closer to the Atlanta city center, where he saw more problems to fix and people to help. “It seems to me the central issues in wokeness are … compassionate habits that are a lot of what Jesus said to do,” Waters said.

    Warnock largely sidesteps Walker’s attacks. He has recently begun framing Walker as “not fit” for the Senate because of Walker’s “lies” about his business record and allegations of violence against his ex-wife. The closest Warnock comes to questioning Walker’s faith is to say redemption requires that a person “confess … and be honest about the problem.”

    “I will let him speak for himself,” Warnock said. “I am engaged in the work I’ve been doing my whole life.”

    The Rev. Charles Goodman, an Augusta pastor and friend of Warnock, said it’s not new for outspoken Black pastors, especially those with a more liberal theology, to be tarred as dangerous and anti-American.

    “They called Dr. King a ‘communist,’ and now it’s ‘radical’ and ‘socialist,’” Goodman said. “Dr. Warnock loves this country. There will always be tensions between our aspirational views of the country versus our struggle trying to get to that place. He’s a very hopeful minister, and he’s always going to speak truth to power and live in that tension.”

    ———

    Learn more about the issues and factors at play in the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/explaining-the-elections. And follow the AP’s election coverage of the 2022 elections at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections.

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  • Community with Confederate monument gets Emmett Till statue

    Community with Confederate monument gets Emmett Till statue

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    JACKSON, Miss. — A Mississippi community with an elaborate Confederate monument plans to unveil a larger-than-life statue of Emmett Till on Friday, decades after white men kidnapped and killed the Black teenager for whistling at a white woman in a country store.

    The 1955 lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement after Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so the world could see the horrors inflicted on her 14-year-old son. Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body, which had been pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi.

    The 9-foot (2.7-meter) bronze statue in Greenwood is a jaunty depiction of the living Till in slacks, a dress shirt and a tie with one hand on the brim of a hat.

    The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to the kidnapping of his cousin Till from a family home, said he won’t be able to travel from Illinois to attend Friday’s dedication ceremony. But he told The Associated Press on Wednesday: “We just thank God someone is keeping his name out there.”

    The Till statue at Greenwood’s Rail Spike Park is a short drive from an elaborate Confederate monument outside the Leflore County Courthouse and about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the crumbling remains of the store, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in the hamlet of Money.

    The unveiling of the statue coincides with the release this month of “Till,” a movie focusing on Till-Mobley’s private trauma over her son’s death and her development into a civil rights activist.

    A life-sized bronze statue of Till-Mobley is planned in the Chicago suburb of Summit. An Oct. 28 groundbreaking is set for a plaza outside Argo Community High School, where she was an honor student. The statue is scheduled to be in place by late April.

    Some wrongly thought Till got what he deserved for breaking the taboo of flirting with a white woman and many people didn’t want to talk about the case for decades, Parker said.

    “Now there’s interest in it, and that’s a godsend,” Parker said. “You know what his mother said: ‘I hope he didn’t die in vain.’”

    Greenwood and Leflore County are both more than 70% Black and officials have worked for years to bring the Till statue to reality. Democratic state Sen. David Jordan of Greenwood secured $150,000 in state funding and the community commissioned a Utah artist, Matt Glenn, to create the statue.

    Jordan said he hopes it will entice tourists to visit Greenwood and learn more about the history of the area.

    “So much has been said about this case,” Jordan said this week. “Hopefully, it will bring all of us together.”

    Till and Parker had traveled from Chicago to spend the summer of 1955 with relatives in the deeply segregated Mississippi Delta. On Aug. 24, the two teens joined other young people in a short trip to the store in Money. Parker said he heard Till whistle at shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant.

    Four days later, Till was abducted in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home. The kidnappers tortured and shot him, weighted his body down with a cotton gin fan and dumped him into the river.

    Jordan, who is Black, was a college student in September 1955 when he drove to the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner to watch the murder trial of two white men charged with killing Till — Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam.

    An all-white, all-male jury acquitted the two men, who later confessed to Look magazine that they had killed Till.

    Nobody has ever been convicted in the lynching. The U.S. Justice Department has opened multiple investigations starting in 2004 after receiving inquiries about whether charges could be brought against anyone still living.

    In 2007, a Mississippi prosecutor presented evidence to a grand jury of Black and white Leflore County residents after investigators spent three years re-examining the killing. The FBI exhumed Till’s body to prove he, and not someone else, was buried at his gravesite in the Chicago suburb of Alsip. The grand jury declined to issue indictments.

    The Justice Department reopened an investigation in 2018 after a 2017 book quoted Carolyn Bryant — now remarried and named Carolyn Bryant Donham — saying she lied when she claimed Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances. Relatives have publicly denied Donham, who is in her 80s, recanted her allegations. The department closed that investigation in late 2021 without bringing charges.

    This year, a group searching the Leflore County Courthouse basement found an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for “Mrs. Roy Bryant.” In August, another Mississippi grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict Donham, causing consternation for Till relatives and activists.

    Although Mississippi has dozens of Confederate monuments, some have been moved in recent years, including one that was relocated in 2020 from a prominent spot on the University of Mississippi campus to a cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried.

    The state has a few monuments to Black historical figures, including one honoring civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.

    A historical marker outside Bryant’s Grocery has been knocked down and vandalized. Another marker near the site where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River has been vandalized and shot. The Till statue in Greenwood will be watched by security cameras.

    “Anytime they take it down,” Jordan said, “we’ll just place it back up.”

    ———

    Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus.

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  • Community with Confederate monument gets Emmett Till statue

    Community with Confederate monument gets Emmett Till statue

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    JACKSON, Miss. — A Mississippi community with an elaborate Confederate monument plans to unveil a larger-than-life statue of Emmett Till on Friday, decades after white men kidnapped and killed the Black teenager for whistling at a white woman in a country store.

    The 1955 lynching became a catalyst for the civil rights movement after Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so the world could see the horrors inflicted on her 14-year-old son. Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body, which had been pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi.

    The 9-foot (2.7-meter) bronze statue in Greenwood is a jaunty depiction of the living Till in slacks, a dress shirt and a tie with one hand on the brim of a hat.

    The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to the kidnapping of his cousin Till from a family home, said he won’t be able to travel from Illinois to attend Friday’s dedication ceremony. But he told The Associated Press on Wednesday: “We just thank God someone is keeping his name out there.”

    The Till statue at Greenwood’s Rail Spike Park is a short drive from an elaborate Confederate monument outside the Leflore County Courthouse and about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the crumbling remains of the store, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in the hamlet of Money.

    The unveiling of the statue coincides with the release this month of “Till,” a movie focusing on Till-Mobley’s private trauma over her son’s death and her development into a civil rights activist.

    A life-sized bronze statue of Till-Mobley is planned in the Chicago suburb of Summit. An Oct. 28 groundbreaking is set for a plaza outside Argo Community High School, where she was an honor student. The statue is scheduled to be in place by late April.

    Some wrongly thought Till got what he deserved for breaking the taboo of flirting with a white woman and many people didn’t want to talk about the case for decades, Parker said.

    “Now there’s interest in it, and that’s a godsend,” Parker said. “You know what his mother said: ‘I hope he didn’t die in vain.’”

    Greenwood and Leflore County are both more than 70% Black and officials have worked for years to bring the Till statue to reality. Democratic state Sen. David Jordan of Greenwood secured $150,000 in state funding and the community commissioned a Utah artist, Matt Glenn, to create the statue.

    Jordan said he hopes it will entice tourists to visit Greenwood and learn more about the history of the area.

    “So much has been said about this case,” Jordan said this week. “Hopefully, it will bring all of us together.”

    Till and Parker had traveled from Chicago to spend the summer of 1955 with relatives in the deeply segregated Mississippi Delta. On Aug. 24, the two teens joined other young people in a short trip to the store in Money. Parker said he heard Till whistle at shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant.

    Four days later, Till was abducted in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home. The kidnappers tortured and shot him, weighted his body down with a cotton gin fan and dumped him into the river.

    Jordan, who is Black, was a college student in September 1955 when he drove to the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner to watch the murder trial of two white men charged with killing Till — Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam.

    An all-white, all-male jury acquitted the two men, who later confessed to Look magazine that they had killed Till.

    Nobody has ever been convicted in the lynching. The U.S. Justice Department has opened multiple investigations starting in 2004 after receiving inquiries about whether charges could be brought against anyone still living.

    In 2007, a Mississippi prosecutor presented evidence to a grand jury of Black and white Leflore County residents after investigators spent three years re-examining the killing. The FBI exhumed Till’s body to prove he, and not someone else, was buried at his gravesite in the Chicago suburb of Alsip. The grand jury declined to issue indictments.

    The Justice Department reopened an investigation in 2018 after a 2017 book quoted Carolyn Bryant — now remarried and named Carolyn Bryant Donham — saying she lied when she claimed Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances. Relatives have publicly denied Donham, who is in her 80s, recanted her allegations. The department closed that investigation in late 2021 without bringing charges.

    This year, a group searching the Leflore County Courthouse basement found an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for “Mrs. Roy Bryant.” In August, another Mississippi grand jury found insufficient evidence to indict Donham, causing consternation for Till relatives and activists.

    Although Mississippi has dozens of Confederate monuments, some have been moved in recent years, including one that was relocated in 2020 from a prominent spot on the University of Mississippi campus to a cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried.

    The state has a few monuments to Black historical figures, including one honoring civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.

    A historical marker outside Bryant’s Grocery has been knocked down and vandalized. Another marker near the site where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River has been vandalized and shot. The Till statue in Greenwood will be watched by security cameras.

    “Anytime they take it down,” Jordan said, “we’ll just place it back up.”

    ———

    Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus.

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  • Apple workers in Oklahoma vote to unionize in 2nd labor win

    Apple workers in Oklahoma vote to unionize in 2nd labor win

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    NEW YORK — Workers at an Apple store in Oklahoma City voted to unionize, marking the second unionized Apple store in the U.S. in a matter of months, according to the federal labor board.

    The vote on Friday signaled another win for the labor movement, which has been gaining momentum since the pandemic.

    Fifty-six workers at the store, located at Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall, voted to be represented by The Communications Workers of America, while 32 voted against it, according to a preliminary tally by National Labor Relations Board. The approximate number of eligible voters was 95, the board said.

    The labor board said Friday that both parties have five business days to file objections to the election. If no objections are filed, the results will be certified, and the employer must begin bargaining in good faith with the union.

    The union victory follows a vote to unionize an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, in June. That effort was spearheaded by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Maryland, which is preparing to begin formal negotiations.

    In a statement emailed to The Associated Press on Saturday, Apple said, “We believe the open, direct and collaborative relationship we have with our valued team members is the best way to provide an excellent experience for our customers, and for our teams.”

    Apple also cited “strong compensation and exceptional benefits,” and noted that since 2018, it has increased starting rates in the U.S. by 45% and made significant improvements in other benefits, including new educational and family support programs.

    The Communications Workers of America could not be immediately reached for comment.

    Worker discontent has invigorated the labor movements at several major companies in the U.S. in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered tensions over sick leave policies, scheduling, and other issues.

    In a surprise victory, Amazon workers at a Staten Island warehouse voted in favor of unionizing in April, though similar efforts at other warehouses so far have been unsuccessful. Voting for an Amazon facility near Albany, New York, began on Wednesday and is expected go through Monday. Well over 200 U.S. Starbucks stores have voted to unionize over the past year, according to the NLRB.

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  • Apple workers in Oklahoma vote to unionize in 2nd labor win

    Apple workers in Oklahoma vote to unionize in 2nd labor win

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    NEW YORK — Workers at an Apple store in Oklahoma City voted to unionize, marking the second unionized Apple store in the U.S. in a matter of months, according to the federal labor board.

    The vote on Friday signaled another win for the labor movement, which has been gaining momentum since the pandemic.

    Fifty-six workers at the store, located at Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall, voted to be represented by The Communications Workers of America, while 32 voted against it, according to a preliminary tally by National Labor Relations Board. The approximate number of eligible voters was 95, the board said.

    The labor board said Friday that both parties have five business days to file objections to the election. If no objections are filed, the results will be certified, and the employer must begin bargaining in good faith with the union.

    The union victory follows a vote to unionize an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, in June. That effort was spearheaded by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Maryland, which is preparing to begin formal negotiations.

    In a statement emailed to The Associated Press on Saturday, Apple said, “We believe the open, direct and collaborative relationship we have with our valued team members is the best way to provide an excellent experience for our customers, and for our teams.”

    Apple also cited “strong compensation and exceptional benefits,” and noted that since 2018, it has increased starting rates in the U.S. by 45% and made significant improvements in other benefits, including new educational and family support programs.

    The Communications Workers of America could not be immediately reached for comment.

    Worker discontent has invigorated the labor movements at several major companies in the U.S. in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered tensions over sick leave policies, scheduling, and other issues.

    In a surprise victory, Amazon workers at a Staten Island warehouse voted in favor of unionizing in April, though similar efforts at other warehouses so far have been unsuccessful. Voting for an Amazon facility near Albany, New York, began on Wednesday and is expected go through Monday. Well over 200 U.S. Starbucks stores have voted to unionize over the past year, according to the NLRB.

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  • NFL keeping watch on return of HBCUs to national prominence

    NFL keeping watch on return of HBCUs to national prominence

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    KANSAS CITY, Mo. — During their original heyday in the 1960s, when much of the nation was still coming to grips with the end of Jim Crow, the Kansas City Chiefs and their visionary coach, Hank Stram, realized more quickly than perhaps any team in the AFL or NFL that players from historically Black colleges and universities were good.

    Really good.

    They were fast and strong and talented, just like the players produced by Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma or Bear Bryant at Alabama. So the Chiefs drafted them, and Buck Buchanan and Willie Lanier and Otis Taylor went on to form the backbone of powerful teams that reached two Super Bowls and beat the Vikings for their first championship.

    So it made poetic sense in April when the Chiefs, on the clock in the fourth round of the draft and trying to revamp their aging secondary, turned in a card with Joshua Williams’ name on it. The cornerback from Fayetteville State was the first of four HBCU players chosen this year after none were selected in 2021 and just one went off the board in 2020.

    “I’m very proud of where I came from,” said Williams, who went seven spots before the Los Angeles Rams picked South Carolina State defensive back Decobie Durant. “It just speaks to the exposure we’ve been getting and also to the hard work that I’ve been putting in. I’m glad it all paid off. I’m glad all of these things are coming to fruition.”

    It might not be a one-year fluke, either. The talent level at HBCUs has improved recently, one of many byproducts of widespread societal changes. There is more exposure through television and streaming services. New bowls and showcase games are giving HBCU players an opportunity to earn coveted invitations to the scouting combine.

    As a result, NFL teams are once more mining those small colleges for hidden gems. When training camps opened this fall, 33 players from HBCUs were on rosters for 17 teams.

    “Having opportunities to go to bowl games, the (NFL) combine — now you’re getting kids motivated,” Prairie View A&M coach Bubba McDowell said. “They’re seeing kids prior to them leaving and going to the combine and all the all-star games, now you’re just increasing their ability (to say), ‘It can really happen in the SWAC.’”

    There are 33 players from HBCUs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but many of the biggest stars played during the 1960s and ‘70s. That’s when Eddie Robinson’s Grambling State juggernaut produced future Packers star Willie Davis, Bears offensive tackle Ernie Ladd and Buchanan, whom the Chiefs picked first overall in the 1963 AFL draft. And when rivals such as Southern, Tennessee State and Texas Southern had players capable of playing anywhere.

    The biggest reason many of them chose to play at HBCUs: It was one of their few options, and often the best.

    Sure, some progressive colleges had been fielding Black athletes for years. But others were painfully slow to integrate — the Crimson Tide didn’t have their first Black scholarship football player until Wilbur Jackson in 1969. And with racism still running rampant on many college campuses, talented recruits — particularly those in the Deep South — simply felt safer and more comfortable attending historically Black colleges and universities.

    They were coming of age during the Civil Rights Movement, and it became a point of pride to play for such schools.

    “I was determined,” Buchanan said years later, “to prove that players from small schools could play in the big leagues.”

    Indeed, during a five-year period in the late ‘60s, about 70 players from HBCUs were drafted each year, though that figure is somewhat inflated compared to today’s standard by the dueling AFL and NFL drafts and the fact that each had more rounds than today.

    As major Division I colleges integrated, though, Black players inevitably signed on with traditional powers such as Alabama and Texas. There were still outliers, of course — Walter Payton was a Mississippi prep legend who received no SEC offers and wound up at Jackson State, playing alongside another future NFL star, Jackie Slater. But by the mid-1980s, HBCUs were producing fewer than 20 draft picks in an average year, a third of the total a decade earlier.

    Every once in a while, generational talents would capture NFL attention, such as Jerry Rice (Mississippi Valley State) and Michael Strahan (Texas Southern). But for the most part, HBCUs became an afterthought for professional scouts.

    Until recently, that is.

    The Black Lives Matter movement coupled with a national reckoning in terms of social injustice, one largely led by young people, appears to have sparked renewed interest in HBCUs, just like the Civil Rights Movement a generation earlier.

    And when it came to the gridiron, the decision by Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders to coach Jackson State in the fall of 2020 gave the longtime SWAC powerhouse — and other HBCU programs — a certain “cool factor” among recruits. That was evident last December, when five-star prospect Travis Hunter switched his commitment from mighty Florida State to the Tigers; other talented Division I prospects have followed suit and signed with HBCUs.

    “He’s changing the landscape of not only SWAC football but FCS football,” Florida A&M coach Willie Simmons said.

    That includes the MEAC, the other HBCU conference in the Football Championship Subdivision, but also smaller leagues such as the CIAA. That’s the Division II conference where Fayetteville State plays, and where Williams — the Chiefs’ draft pick this past April — did enough to warrant an invitation to the Senior Bowl.

    It was there that Williams shined against players from powerhouses such as Texas A&M and Michigan, putting him on NFL radars and earning him a spot at the draft combine, where his workout sent him climbing up draft boards.

    Including the one in Kansas City, where players from HBCUs flourished decades ago.

    “We’re just looking for football players, and it doesn’t matter where you come from, what your story is,” Chiefs general manager Brett Veach said. “If you can help us win games, and be a positive influence in the community, you know, we’re going to find a way to make you a part of this roster. Josh was the same. He falls into that category.”

    Williams and Durant were joined by fellow draft picks James Houston, the Jackson State linebacker who went in the sixth round to Detroit, and Southern offensive lineman Ja’Tyre Carter, who went in the seventh to Chicago.

    “If I see the burst and the acceleration, I see the change in direction, that translates if you’re at Alabama or if you’re at Fayetteville State,” explained David Hinson, the Chiefs’ co-director of college scouting. “If he’s got quick feet, if he has good hips and can change direction, if he can track the ball, that doesn’t change no matter the field you’re playing on.”

    Turns out there’s quite a few draft prospects playing on HBCU fields this season.

    Florida A&M pass rusher Isaiah Land is a potential Day 2 pick. Wide receiver Shaquan Davis could be the next star out of South Carolina State, which in recent years produced Shaq Leonard and Javon Hargrave. Bethune-Cookman tight end Kemari Averett, who began his career with Lamar Jackson at Louisville, could soon join the Ravens quarterback in the NFL, and wide receivers Abdul-Fatai Ibrahim of Alabama A&M and Hampton’s Jadakis Bonds also could get a shot.

    Where they’re coming from? That doesn’t matter anymore.

    The only thing that matters is what they can do.

    “I’m a firm believer what you put in you’re going to get out of it,” said Ibrahim, who would be the first Alabama A&M draft pick since Frank Kearse in 2011. “If I put in hard work day-in, day-out, the results are going to show eventually.”

    ———

    More AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl and https://twitter.com/AP—NFL

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  • Pay bumps coming for more farmworkers, long denied overtime

    Pay bumps coming for more farmworkers, long denied overtime

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    STUYVESANT, N.Y. — Harvest season means long days for U.S. farmworkers — but usually no overtime pay. Federal law exempts farms from rules entitling most workers to 1.5 times their regular wage when they work more than 40 hours in a week.

    New York is now joining several states that have begun to change the rule.

    The state’s labor commissioner on Friday approved a recommendation to phase in a 40-hour threshold for farmworker overtime over the next decade. Right now, farmworkers in New York qualify for overtime pay only after they have worked 60 hours in a week.

    Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon called the plan “the best path forward” for farmworker equity and success for agricultural businesses.

    Washington, Minnesota, Hawaii and Maryland have also granted forms of overtime entitlements to agricultural workers. California, an agricultural giant, this year began requiring farms to pay overtime to employees who work more than 40 hours in a week.

    The changes have excited workers, who say they sorely need the extra money, but alarmed some farm owners, who say extra labor costs could wipe out thin profits.

    Some labor movement advocates fear workers’ hours will be capped.

    That’s what Elisabeth Morales says happened at the grape vineyard where she works in California’s Central Valley. After the state’s overtime rules changed, the vineyard cut her hours to no more than 40 per week, and hired more laborers so it could get needed work done without having to pay overtime.

    Morales, a mother of four, said she had to take on a second job at McDonald’s to supplement her wages at the vineyard, which are $15 per hour for tasks like weeding plus 40 cents for every box of grapes she picks.

    “I would prefer to work the extra hours even though they don’t pay us overtime,” Morales, 43, said in Spanish.

    There isn’t much national data yet to say for sure whether lowering the overtime threshold will be as bad for farms’ bottom line as agribusiness predicts, or as good for workers as the labor movement hopes.

    Farm workers were excluded from overtime pay in the federal 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, and some labor advocates say its a legacy of Jim Crow.

    The overtime rule change is aimed at people like Doroteo, a farmhand at a Long Island vineyard who works almost 60 hours a week during harvest season, supplementing his pay with landscaping jobs on the side.

    Doroteo prunes and weeds crops for $15 an hour. His pay peaks at $800 a week in the summer, when the most work needs to be done. He makes less in the fall, making it tougher to send money to his three children in Guatemala. He asked that his last name not be published because of worries he might be fired for talking about his job.

    But farm owners say agriculture has been exempt from overtime rules for a reason.

    “There has to be some common sense about what people expect when they go to work on a farm, and that it’s quite unique from other areas of work. It’s not something that can be done 40 hours a week and have weekends off,” said Nate Chittenden, the owner of a midsize dairy farm in Stuyvesant, New York.

    Besides members of his family, his farm has 10 full-time employees.

    “No farm wants to see people taken advantage of. We value people working on our farms. We want to provide for them a living while they work on our farm,” said Chittenden.

    New York state government created a tax credit intended to defray the cost of overtime for farm employers, which Chittenden said would help somewhat.

    In Washington state, this year saw the first harvest where farm workers could qualify for overtime pay after 55 hours worked. That threshold will drop in a phase-in that will make workers eligible for overtime after 40 hours worked by 2024.

    In California, as more workers became eligible for overtime, some farms have switched to less labor-intensive crops like walnuts and almonds, which can be harvested efficiently using man-operated equipment, said Brian Little, the director of employment policy at the California Farm Bureau, which represents farmers.

    He also said some growers are moving towards machines, rather than people, to do things like prune trees.

    “It can run for hours. It doesn’t care if it’s 95 degrees outside. It doesn’t take a lunch break, and it doesn’t care if it’s working nine and a half hours in a workday,” Little said.

    ———

    Maysoon Khan 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 Maysoon Khan on Twitter.

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