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Tag: racism

  • University of Denver creates professorship in Holocaust and antisemitism studies

    The University of Denver is aiming to become a global hub for scholarship on the Holocaust, abuses of power, racism, hatred and antisemitism, with a goal of spurring other universities to do the same.

    DU leaders said they’ll announce the school’s first endowed professorship in Holocaust and antisemitism studies at a gathering in the state Capitol with Gov. Jared Polis on Tuesday, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

    The professorship represents “a permanent commitment not only to remembrance but to making Denver a global hub for thoughtful Holocaust education and applied scholarship that helps future generations foster social change,” DU Provost Elizabeth Loboa said in a statement.

    Polis and survivors of the Holocaust — Colorado residents Osi Sladek and Barbara Steinmetz — will commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp.

    At the noon event, Sladek is expected to read from his memoir, which recounts his escape from persecution into the Tatra mountains along Slovakia’s border with Poland. He later served in the Israeli Army and became a folk singer in California before settling in Denver. The Denver Young Artists Orchestra and DeVotchKa’sTom Hagerman will perform music by Sladek’s father using his violin.

    Steinmetz fled Europe on a boat that carried her to the Dominican Republic, where she found refuge. She’ll share a “Letter to the Future.”

    DU officials over the past two years have been working on this project, said Adam Rovner, an English professor who directs DU’s Center for Judaic Studies, within the College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

    “We just think it is simply important that we remain vigilant in our society to guard against abuses of power and racism, hatred, and antisemitism,” Rovner said. “We think this position is much-needed at DU and in higher education.”

    One purpose of studying manifestations of antisemitism in the 20th century “is so that people can consider the contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, and decide based on scholarly rigor whether there are threats to Jewish people and other groups,” Rovner said.

    Bruce Finley

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  • Trump administration social posts amid Minnesota immigration tensions seen as appealing to far right

    As its immigration crackdown in Minneapolis intensifies, the Trump administration is leaning into messaging that borrows from phrases, images and music about national identity that have become popular among right-wing groups.

    On Jan. 9, two days after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s shooting of Renee Good sent tensions in Minneapolis to a fever pitch, the Department of Homeland Security posted to social media an image of a man on a horse riding through a snowy, mountainous landscape with the words “We’ll have our home again.” That’s the chorus to a song about ousting a foreign presence by a self-described “folk-punk” band that the Proud Boys and other far-right and white supremacist groups have used.

    The next day, the Department of Labor posted on X: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” Several Trump critics on the social media site drew a parallel to a notorious Nazi slogan, “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”

    And this past week, as President Donald Trump stepped up his pressure campaign to claim Greenland, the White House posted an image on X that showed a dog sled facing a fork in the trail, one that leads to an American flag and the White House and another that leads to the Russian and Chinese flags. Above the image was the phrase, “Which way, Greenland Man?”

    The post refers to a meme that riffs off the title of a notorious white supremacist book titled “Which Way Western Man?” The administration had already used the framing in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruiting post last year, which asked, “Which way, American Man?”

    The flurry of posts has renewed criticism about a recurring pattern in Trump’s second term — the sometimes cryptic use of imagery popular with the far right and white supremacists in the administration’s campaign to rally the nation behind its immigration crackdown, which it frames as a battle to preserve Western civilization.

    The administration says it’s tired of criticism that its messaging is framed around white supremacy or Nazi slogans.

    “It seems that the mainstream media has become a meme of their own: The deranged leftist who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “This line of attack is boring and tired. Get a grip.”

    Referring to the “We’ll Have Our Home Again” post, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said it “was a reference to 20-plus million illegal aliens invading the country.”

    “I don’t know where you guys are getting this stuff,” she added, “but it is absurd.”

    César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, said the administration’s references are a choice.

    “You don’t have to dip into white supremacist sloganeering to promote immigration regulation,” he said, noting that former President Bill Clinton signed two bills toughening penalties on immigrants who were in the country illegally in the 1990s without doing so.

    He added that the administration seems to calibrate its references.

    “The imagery is not simply a reproduction of common white supremacist imagery or text, but a play on that imagery — and that gives them the breathing room they want,” Garcia Hernández said.

    Trump won his second term with robust support from Latino voters and increased his backing among both Black and Asian voters, all while running on pledges of tough border enforcement and mass deportations.

    Still, Trump for years has created enthusiasm among white supremacist groups, who see his nationalist and anti-immigrant stance as validating their own.

    The president has complained that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and spoken favorably about white immigrants compared to other immigrants. In his first term, he bemoaned the number of immigrants coming from what he called “shithole countries” such as Haiti or ones in Africa, while wondering why the U.S. doesn’t draw more people from Norway. Last month, he called Somali immigrants “garbage.”

    Trump changed immigration policy to favor whites in one area by shutting down the admission of refugees except for white South Africans, whom he contends, against evidence, are being discriminated against in their home country.

    Some of Trump’s most prominent supporters have openly embraced the cause of white nationalists.

    Elon Musk, who was Trump’s biggest donor during the 2024 presidential campaign and ran the president’s Department of Government Efficiency for the first part of last year, recirculated a user post on X, the social platform he owns, that called for “white solidarity” to prevent the mass murder of white men and added a “100” emoji indicating agreement.

    The administration’s history has led to claims that it’s using white supremacist language even when there is no evidence for it.

    In the aftermath of the Good shooting in Minnesota, a sign that appeared on Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s lectern during a news conference — reading “One Of Ours, All Of Yours” — drew widespread attention on social media, with many commentators suggesting it was a Nazi phrase. The Southern Poverty Law Center, however, could not trace the words to any Nazi slogan.

    McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, said it was a reference to the subject of the press conference: “a CBP officer who was shot — he was one of our officers and all of the country’s federal law enforcement officer,” she wrote in an email.

    Hannah Gais, a senior researcher with the SPLC, has long tracked white supremacist groups and said she thinks the administration knows what it’s doing with its messaging slogans.

    “They know their base is this overly online right-winger who they know will go nuts if they say ‘Which Way, Western Man?’” Gais said. “I don’t think it’s a tenable strategy for the long term because the stuff is incomprehensible to most people. And if it is comprehensible, people don’t like it.”

    CBS Minnesota

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  • ‘The Most Dangerous Negro’: 3 Essential Reads on the FBI’s Assessment of MLK’s Radical Views and Allies

    Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. relaxes at home in May 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

    Howard Manly, The Conversation

    Left out of GOP debates about “the weaponization” of the federal government is the use of the FBI to spy on civil rights leaders for most of the 20th century.

    Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the targets.

    As secret FBI documents became declassified, The Conversation U.S. published several articles looking at the details that emerged about King’s personal life and how he was considered in 1963 by the FBI as “the most dangerous Negro.”

    1. The radicalism of MLK

    As a historian of religion and civil rights, University of Colorado Colorado Springs Professor Paul Harvey writes that while King has come to be revered as a hero who led a nonviolent struggle to build a color blind society, the true radicalism of MLK’s beliefs remain underappreciated.

    “The civil saint portrayed nowadays was,” Harvey writes, “by the end of his life, a social and economic radical, who argued forcefully for the necessity of economic justice in the pursuit of racial equality.”

    2. The threat of being called a communist

    Jason Miller, a North Carolina State University English professor, details the delicate balance that King was forced to strike between some of his radical allies and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

    As the leading figure in the civil rights movement, Miller explains, King could not be perceived as a communist in order to maintain his national popularity.

    As a result, King did not overtly invoke the name of one of the Harlem Renaissance’s leading poets, Langston Hughes, a man the FBI suspected of being a communist sympathizer.

    But Miller’s research reveals the shrewdness with which King still managed to use Hughes’ poetry in his speeches and sermons, most notably in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech which echoes Hughes’ poem “I Dream a World.”

    “By channeling Hughes’ voice, King was able to elevate the subversive words of a poet that the powerful thought they had silenced,” Miller writes.

    3. ‘We must mark him now’

    As a historian who has done substantial research regarding FBI files on the Black freedom movement, UCLA labor studies lecturer Trevor Griffey points out that from 1910 to the 1970s, the FBI treated civil rights activists as either disloyal “subversives” or “dupes” of foreign agents.

    Screenshot from a 1966 FBI memo regarding the surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. National Archives via Trevor Griffey photo

    As King ascended in prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was inevitable that the FBI would investigate him.

    In fact, two days after King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, William Sullivan, the FBI’s director of intelligence, wrote: “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”

    Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

    Howard Manly, Outreach Editor, The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    The Conversation

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  • NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani Defends Tenant Official Facing Backlash for ‘White Supremacy’ Posts

    NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is standing behind a newly-appointed housing official as she faces backlash for years-old social media posts, including messages that called for the seizure of private property and linked homeownership to white supremacy.

    Cea Weaver, a longtime tenant activist, was tapped by the Democrat last week to serve as executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. The mayor has vowed to expand and empower the office to take “unprecedented” steps against negligent landlords.

    The posts, which were circulated on social media in recent days by critics of Mamdani, included calls to treat private property as a “collective good” and to “impoverish the (asterisk)white(asterisk) middle class.” A tweet sent in 2017 described homeownership as “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building public policy.’”

    Eric Adams, the city’s former mayor and a fellow Democrat, said the remarks showed “extreme privilege and total detachment from reality.”

    Asked about the controversy on Wednesday, Mamdani did not address the substance of Weaver’s posts but defended her record of “standing up for tenants across the city and state.”

    Weaver said in an interview with a local TV station that some of the messages were “regretful” and “not something I would say today.”

    “I want to make sure that everybody has a safe and affordable place to live, whether they rent or own, and that is something I’m laser-focused on in this new role,” she added.

    The discussion comes after Mamdani last month accepted the resignation of another official, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, after the Anti-Defamation League shared social media posts she made over a decade ago that featured antisemitic tropes.

    While Mamdani had said he was unaware of Da Costa’s messages, Weaver’s past social media posts were known to the administration, according to a mayoral spokesperson, Dora Pekec.

    As leader of the city’s tenant protection office, she would play a key role in achieving one of Mamdani’s most polarizing campaign pledges: identifying negligent landlords and forcing them to negotiate the sale of their properties to the city if they are unable to pay fines for violations.

    The “public stewardship” proposal has drawn consternation from landlord groups and skepticism from others in city government.

    But the early days of his administration have brought signs that the new mayor is not backing off on the idea.

    In a press conference immediately following his inauguration last week, Mamdani said the city would take “precedent-setting” action against the owner of a Brooklyn apartment building that owed the city money and was currently in bankruptcy proceedings.

    He then announced Weaver’s appointment, drawing loud cheers from the members of a tenants union gathered in the building’s lobby.

    “It is going to be challenging,” Weaver acknowledged. “New York is home to some of the most valuable real estate in the world. Everything about New York politics is about that fact.”

    Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – December 2025

    Associated Press

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  • Northern California city to reform police after racist texts scandal

    SAN FRANCISCO — A Northern California city whose police department came under national scrutiny after it was revealed that some officers shared racist and sexist texts, used excessive force and falsified records has reached a settlement agreement to implement a series of reforms, officials announced Friday.

    The City of Antioch, in the San Francisco Bay Area, will enhance police training programs, establish an independent review board to handle complaints and implement a warning system to identify problem officers, according to an agreement that settles a civil rights lawsuit filed in 2023.

    “This agreement allows the Antioch Police Department to start with a clean slate and oversee officers’ conduct and make sure they are compliant with new standards,” said John Burris, who filed the complaint in federal court on behalf of residents who said they were targeted by Antioch police officers.

    Earlier this year, 23 people who were part of the lawsuit reached a $4.6 million settlement with Antioch for monetary damages, Burris said. The city in January announced it would hire a consultant to update its policies, procedures and training on various topics as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.

    “A lot of the bad apples are gone, in jail, retired or left on their own, and there is a new command staff that seems committed to bring about change,” Burris said.

    Antioch City Manager Bessie Marie Scott said in a statement that the settlement agreement reinforces work already underway and “ensures sustainable transparency measures and updates core policies to modernize how APD continues to provide constitutional policing services to the residents of Antioch.”

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation and county prosecutors in March 2022 launched an investigation into police officers in Antioch and Pittsburg, a neighboring city, over a broad range of offenses. As part of the investigation, officials released racist and obscenity-laden text messages shared by 45 Antioch police officers that shocked the community.

    Officers referred to some suspects as “gorillas.” They also laughed and joked about harming people who apparently had surrendered or appeared to be asleep by setting a police dog on them or shooting them with a 40 mm “less-lethal” projectile launcher, according to a federal indictment against three former Antioch police officers.

    Federal prosecutors charged Morteza Amiri, Eric Rombough and Devon Christopher Wenger, saying the three former Antioch police officers conspired between February 2019 and March 2022 “to injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate residents of Antioch, California” and later falsified reports about the encounters.

    Wenger was sentenced earlier this month to seven years and six months in federal prison for conspiring to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate residents of Antioch using unreasonable force, conspiring to distribute anabolic steroids, and obstructing justice, federal prosecutors said.

    Amiri, a former Antioch K9 officer, was sentenced in June to seven years in prison for maiming someone with his police dog, falsifying reports on that case and being part of a scheme to obtain pay raises from the Antioch Police Department for a university degree he paid someone else to obtain.

    Rombough, accused of illegally shooting people with his launcher, pleaded guilty and became a government’s witness. He testified against both Amiri and Wenger in their separate trials, the East Bay Times reported. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 13.

    Antioch, a city of 115,000 residents about 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of San Francisco, was once predominantly white but has diversified in the last 30 years.

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  • Campbell’s fires executive who was recorded saying company’s products are for ‘poor people’

    The Campbell’s Co. said Wednesday it has fired an executive who was recorded making racist comments and mocking the company’s products and customers.

    Martin Bally, a vice president in Campbell’s information security department, was named in a lawsuit filed last week by Robert Garza, a former Campbell’s employee who said he was fired Jan. 30 after he reported Bally’s comments to a supervisor.

    The lawsuit was filed in Michigan, where both Garza and Bally live. Campbell’s is based in Camden, New Jersey.

    In the lawsuit, Garza claimed he met with Bally in November 2024 to discuss his salary. During the meeting, which Garza allegedly recorded, Bally described Campbell’s as “highly process(ed) food” and said it was for “poor people.”

    Garza claimed in the lawsuit that Bally made racist remarks about Indian workers, whom he called “idiots.” Garza said Bally also told him that he often went to work high after consuming marijuana edibles.

    Campbell’s said Wednesday it first learned of Garza’s lawsuit last week. After listening to portions of the recording, Campbell’s said it believed the voice was Bally’s. Bally was fired Tuesday.

    “The comments were vulgar, offensive and false, and we apologize for the hurt they have caused,” the company said in a statement. “This behavior does not reflect our values and the culture of our company, and we will not tolerate that kind of language under any circumstances.”

    Garza’s attorney didn’t respond when The Associated Press asked for a copy of the audio recording.

    But according to Local 4 news in Detroit, which interviewed Garza and played a portion of the recording on air, Bally said Campbell’s products were unhealthy during his expletive-filled rant.

    “Bioengineered meat. I don’t want to eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer,” Bally said.

    Campbell’s defended its chicken Wednesday, saying it comes from long-trusted U.S. suppliers, is raised without antibiotics and meets high quality standards.

    “The comments heard on the recording about our food are not only inaccurate, they are patently absurd,” Campbell’s said.

    Larry Kopp, the chairman and founder of The TASC Group, a strategic communications and public relations company, said Campbell’s should have fired Bally and reached a settlement with Garza as soon as it learned of the incident.

    “If they had settled they would not be in this mess,” Kopp said. “Recordings like these are devastating and should never see the light of day.”

    Garza is seeking monetary damages from Campbell’s, Bally and from his former manager, J.D. Aupperle. Garza said he told Aupperle about the conversation with Bally shortly before he was fired.

    Campbell’s said Wednesday that Aupperle remains employed by the company.

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  • Campbell’s IT chief on leave after lawsuit claims he said company’s food is for ‘poor people’

    The Campbell’s Co. said Tuesday it has placed one of its executives on leave while it investigates claims that he made racist comments and mocked the company’s products and customers in an audio recording.

    Martin Bally, Campbell’s vice president of information technology, was named in a lawsuit filed last week by Robert Garza, a former Campbell’s employee. The lawsuit was filed in Michigan, where both men live. Campbell’s is headquartered in New Jersey.

    In the lawsuit, Garza claimed he met with Bally in November 2024 to discuss his salary. During the meeting, which Garza allegedly recorded, Bally described Campbell’s as “highly process(ed) food” and said it was for “poor people.”

    Garza claimed that Bally made racist remarks about Indian workers, whom he called “idiots,” according to the lawsuit. Garza said Bally also told him that he often went to work high after consuming marijuana edibles.

    Garza said he told his manager, J.D. Aupperle, on Jan. 10 that he wanted to report Bally’s comments to Campbell’s human resources department. Garza said Aupperle didn’t encourage him to report the comments but also gave him no advice on how to proceed.

    On Jan. 30, Garza was terminated from Campbell’s. He is seeking monetary damages from Campbell’s. He also names Bally and Aupperle in the lawsuit, saying they were responsible for his termination.

    In its statement Tuesday, Campbell’s said that if the comments on the audio recording were in fact made by Bally, they are unacceptable.

    “Such language does not reflect our values and the culture of our company,” the company said. “We do not tolerate that kind of language under any circumstances.”

    Campbell’s added that the comments were allegedly made by someone in IT “who has nothing to do with how we make our food.”

    “We are proud of the food we make, the people who make it and the high-quality ingredients we use to provide consumers with good food at a good value,” Campbell’s said. “The comments heard on the recording about our food are not only inaccurate — they are patently absurd.”

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  • Australian Senator Pauline Hanson banned from parliament for 7 days for wearing burqa to demand they be banned

    An Australian senator who has long campaigned for the Islamic women’s garment known as the burqa to be banned in the country has been suspended from parliament for a week for her protest on Monday in which she wore the full body covering into the chamber and refused to remove it.

    Pauline Hanson of the anti-immigration One Nation party was accused of racism by fellow lawmakers when she walked into the parliament wearing a burqa on Monday. Hanson called the move — which she has now done twice in a decade — a protest against her colleagues’ refusal to allow her to introduce a bill that would ban burqas and other face coverings in public.

    Once inside, Hanson refused to remove the burqa, leading the Senate to be suspended for the remainder of that day.

    The protest was met by outrage by some of her fellow senators, with Australian Greens leader Larissa Waters calling it a “middle finger to people of faith.”

    “It is extremely racist and unsafe,” Waters added.

    Independent Senator Fatima Payman looks on as One Nation party leader Pauline Hanson wears a burqa in the Senate chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, Nov. 24, 2025.

    AAP/Mick Tsikas/REUTERS


    On Tuesday, the Senate voted 55 to five on a motion that condemned Hanson’s actions as being “intended to vilify and mock people on the basis of their religion” and calling them “disrespectful to Muslim Australians.”

    Following the motion, Hanson was barred for seven consecutive Senate sitting days, which will mean her suspension will continue when parliament comes back into session in February of next year after its holiday break.

    Speaking to Sky News Australia, Hanson rejected accusations that her protest had vilified or mocked Muslims.

    “At the end of the day this is Australia. It is not the Australian cultural way of life. I just want equality for all Australians and I don’t want to see the suppression or oppression of women in this country,” she told the news channel.

    Hanson previously wore a burqa to Parliament in 2017, but this week was the first time she was punished for it. When she did it in 2017, she said it was to highlight what she called security issues posed by the garment, which she linked to terrorism.

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  • Tulsa Race Massacre survivor dies at 111

    DALLAS — Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma spent her later years seeking justice for the deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving Black community where she lived as a child, has died. She was 111.

    Her grandson Ike Howard said Monday that she died surrounded by family at a Tulsa hospital. Sustained by a strong faith, she raised three children, worked as a welder in a shipyard during World War II and spent decades caring for families as a housekeeper.

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    By JAMIE STENGLE – Associated Press

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  • Viola Ford Fletcher, one of the last 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre survivors, dies age 111

    DALLAS — Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma spent her later years seeking justice for the deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving Black community where she lived as a child, has died. She was 111.

    Her grandson Ike Howard said Monday that she died surrounded by family at a Tulsa hospital. Sustained by a strong faith, she raised three children, worked as a welder in a shipyard during World War II and spent decades caring for families as a housekeeper.

    Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols said the city was mourning her loss. “Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” he said in a statement.

    She was 7 years old when the two-day attack began on Tulsa’s Greenwood district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensationalized report about a Black man accused of assaulting a white woman. As a white mob grew outside the courthouse, Black Tulsans with guns who hoped to prevent the man’s lynching began showing up. White residents responded with overwhelming force. Hundreds of people were killed and homes were burned and looted, leaving over 30 city blocks decimated in the prosperous community known as Black Wall Street.

    “I could never forget the charred remains of our once-thriving community, the smoke billowing in the air, and the terror-stricken faces of my neighbors,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”

    As her family left in a horse-drawn buggy, her eyes burned from the smoke and ash, she wrote. She described seeing piles of bodies in the streets and watching as a white man shot a Black man in the head, then fired toward her family.

    She told The Associated Press in an interview the year her memoir was published that fear of reprisals influenced her years of near-silence about the massacre. She wrote the book with Howard, her grandson, who said he had to persuade her to tell her story.

    “We don’t want history to repeat itself so we do need to educate people about what happened and try to get people to understand why you need to be made whole, why you need to be repaired,” Howard told the AP in 2024. “The generational wealth that was lost, the home, all the belongings, everything was lost in one night.”

    The attack went largely unremembered for decades. In Oklahoma, wider discussions began when the state formed a commission in 1997 to investigate the violence.

    Fletcher, who in 2021 testified before Congress about what she went through, joined her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and another massacre survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a lawsuit seeking reparations. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed it in June 2024, saying their grievances did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.

    “For as long as we remain in this lifetime, we will continue to shine a light on one of the darkest days in American history,” Fletcher and Randle said in a statement at the time. Van Ellis had died a year earlier, at the age of 102.

    A Justice Department review, launched under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act and released in January 2024, outlined the massacre’s scope and impact. It concluded that federal prosecution may have been possible a century ago, but there was no longer an avenue to bring a criminal case.

    The city has been looking for ways to help descendants of the massacre’s victims without giving direct cash payments. Some of the last living survivors, including Fletcher, received donations from groups but have not received any payments from the city or state.

    Fletcher, born in Oklahoma on May 10, 1914, spent most of her early years in Greenwood. It was an oasis for Black people during segregation, she wrote in her memoir. Her family had a nice home, she said, and the community had everything from doctors to grocery stores to restaurants and banks.

    Forced to flee during the massacre, her family became nomadic, living out of a tent as they worked in the fields as sharecroppers. She didn’t finish school beyond the fourth grade.

    At the age of 16, she returned to Tulsa, where she got a job cleaning and creating window displays in a department store, she wrote in her memoir. She then met Robert Fletcher, and they married and moved to California. During World War II, she worked in a Los Angeles shipyard as a welder, she wrote.

    She eventually left her husband, who was physically abusive, and gave birth to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher, she wrote. Longing to be closer to her family, she returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville.

    Fletcher wrote that her faith and the close-knit Black community gave her the support she needed to raise her children. She had another son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from other relationships.

    She worked for decades as a housekeeper, doing everything in those homes from cooking to cleaning to caring for children, Howard said. She worked until she was 85.

    She eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard said his grandmother hoped the move would help in her fight for justice.

    Howard said the reaction his grandmother got when she started speaking out was therapeutic for her.

    “This whole process has been helpful,” Howard said.

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  • One of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre’s Last Survivors, Viola Ford Fletcher, Dies Age 111

    DALLAS (AP) — Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma spent her later years seeking justice for the deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving Black community where she lived as a child, has died. She was 111.

    Her grandson Ike Howard said Monday that she died surrounded by family at a Tulsa hospital. Sustained by a strong faith, she raised three children, worked as a welder in a shipyard during World War II and spent decades caring for families as a housekeeper.

    Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols said the city was mourning her loss. “Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” he said in a statement.

    She was 7 years old when the two-day attack began on Tulsa’s Greenwood district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensationalized report about a Black man accused of assaulting a white woman. As a white mob grew outside the courthouse, Black Tulsans with guns who hoped to prevent the man’s lynching began showing up. White residents responded with overwhelming force. Hundreds of people were killed and homes were burned and looted, leaving over 30 city blocks decimated in the prosperous community known as Black Wall Street.

    “I could never forget the charred remains of our once-thriving community, the smoke billowing in the air, and the terror-stricken faces of my neighbors,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”

    As her family left in a horse-drawn buggy, her eyes burned from the smoke and ash, she wrote. She described seeing piles of bodies in the streets and watching as a white man shot a Black man in the head, then fired toward her family.

    She told The Associated Press in an interview the year her memoir was published that fear of reprisals influenced her years of near-silence about the massacre. She wrote the book with Howard, her grandson, who said he had to persuade her to tell her story.

    “We don’t want history to repeat itself so we do need to educate people about what happened and try to get people to understand why you need to be made whole, why you need to be repaired,” Howard told the AP in 2024. “The generational wealth that was lost, the home, all the belongings, everything was lost in one night.”

    “For as long as we remain in this lifetime, we will continue to shine a light on one of the darkest days in American history,” Fletcher and Randle said in a statement at the time. Van Ellis had died a year earlier, at the age of 102.

    The city has been looking for ways to help descendants of the massacre’s victims without giving direct cash payments. Some of the last living survivors, including Fletcher, received donations from groups but have not received any payments from the city or state.

    Fletcher, born in Oklahoma on May 10, 1914, spent most of her early years in Greenwood. It was an oasis for Black people during segregation, she wrote in her memoir. Her family had a nice home, she said, and the community had everything from doctors to grocery stores to restaurants and banks.

    Forced to flee during the massacre, her family became nomadic, living out of a tent as they worked in the fields as sharecroppers. She didn’t finish school beyond the fourth grade.

    At the age of 16, she returned to Tulsa, where she got a job cleaning and creating window displays in a department store, she wrote in her memoir. She then met Robert Fletcher, and they married and moved to California. During World War II, she worked in a Los Angeles shipyard as a welder, she wrote.

    She eventually left her husband, who was physically abusive, and gave birth to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher, she wrote. Longing to be closer to her family, she returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville.

    Fletcher wrote that her faith and the close-knit Black community gave her the support she needed to raise her children. She had another son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from other relationships.

    She worked for decades as a housekeeper, doing everything in those homes from cooking to cleaning to caring for children, Howard said. She worked until she was 85.

    She eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard said his grandmother hoped the move would help in her fight for justice.

    Howard said the reaction his grandmother got when she started speaking out was therapeutic for her.

    “This whole process has been helpful,” Howard said.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Nov. 2025

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  • Trump’s DOJ eyes Dearborn’s Muslims, not the racist insurrectionist who terrorized them – Detroit Metro Times

    Just two days after a violent Jan. 6 defendant marched into Dearborn with a bulletproof vest to taunt Muslims by yelling racial slurs and slapping a Quran with a bag of bacon, a top Trump administration official is now suggesting the U.S. Department of Justice may investigate the people he provoked.

    Shortly before midnight Thursday, Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, responded to a tweet by Jake Lang, the convicted rioter who assaulted police at the U.S. Capitol and called Muslims in Dearborn the n-word, “chimps,” “pedophiles,” and “invaders.” He’s an avowed racist, and at a Dearborn City Council meeting after the march, Lang told Muslims to “get the fuck out,” saying, “You will never look like us. You will never eat like us. You won’t build buildings like us. You are nothing.”

    Dhillon, a loyal Trump supporter who has a history of defending far-right provocateurs and peddling conspiracy theories, encouraged Lang in a tweet to “reach out to us please with the information needed to start an investigation.” 

    Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. Credit: DOJ

    Dhillon was responding to a nine-minute video that Lang posted of conservative culture-war pundit Matt Walsh selectively highlighting brief moments when counter-protesters reacted to hours of racial slurs, taunting, and harassment.

    Walsh, a Daily Wire commentator known for targeting LGBTQ+ people, attacking Muslims, and mobilizing his followers against marginalized communities, called Lang a victim of “violent Muslims,” omitting that Lang spent the day calling people the n-word, mocking them with monkey noises, waving bacon in their faces, and threatening to burn the Quran.

    Lang’s tweet racked up more than 360,000 views in 16 hours, fueling islamophobic outrage from X users who only saw the carefully clipped moments designed to make Muslims look like out-of-control, intolerant aggressors. By replying, Dhillon poured gas on a manufactured fire and could put Dearborn in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. 

    Her response quickly drew a wide range of reactions, including from Trump supporters who warned she was being duped.

    “Don’t fall for this. Lang is a provocateur who went looking for trouble. Did you see the video of him yelling the N word at people?” one outspoken MAGA supporter from Detroit wrote.

    Another user asked, “Defending instigators trying to spark a holy war. Why?”

    Others cheered Dhillon on and demanded immigration sweeps. 

    “Make ICE set up shop in Dearborn,” one X user wrote.

    Some responses were openly racist toward Dhillon, with users insisting, “You won’t do crap, you hate White people” and “Not sure if a person named Harmeet is gonna protect the constitution but good luck.”

    Dhillon said nothing about Lang’s harassment, bigotry, or the multiple instances of ethnic intimidation he engaged in Tuesday as he marched through a diverse city in a bulletproof vest and antagonized residents.

    She said nothing about the slurs that Lang hurled at teenagers. Nothing about him calling non-white people the n-word. Nothing about him telling Muslims they were “chimping out,” making monkey noises at them, or calling them “violent, disgusting people.”

    Nor did she say anything about the fact that Lang is a Jan. 6 rioter who repeatedly assaulted police with a bat and riot shield, or that a federal judge found he “remains willing to engage in additional acts of violence.”

    Instead, the first instinct of Trump’s DOJ was to consider investigating the handful of Muslims and allies who responded physically, including one person who punched Lang and ran and another who pepper-sprayed him.

    Dhillon’s willingness to take cues from far-right influencers follows the Trump administration’s pattern of targeting Black and brown people while ignoring white supremacists, including those with violent records.

    On the first day of his second term on Jan. 20, Trump granted blanket clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged or convicted in the Jan. 6 attack, including Lang, giving most full pardons and commuting the sentences of 14 Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. The group included more than 600 rioters convicted of assaulting or obstructing police and 170 who used deadly weapons.

    To be clear, Tuesday’s incident in Dearborn was not a spontaneous “clash,” as depicted by some local and national media. It was the culmination of Lang’s years-long attempt to portray Muslim Americans as violent, hateful, and intolerant of other religions. And it worked for many conservatives. His footage was spun by right-wing commentators to claim Dearborn was a “Muslim stronghold” attacking Christians.

    But as documented on hours of live streams, Lang and a small crew went to a peaceful city to manufacture chaos, terrorize residents, and film their reactions. 

    Now the nation’s top law enforcement agency may be preparing to act on the propaganda. While Dhillon’s statement does not guarantee an investigation, her willingness to entertain Lang’s claims raises the risks that right-wingers will increasingly target and surveil Muslims in Dearborn and neighboring cities. 

    Dearborn’s 106,000 residents include Christians, Muslims, and non-religious people. About half the city’s residents aren’t Muslim. 

    This isn’t just a political stunt executed by right-wing racists and agitators. If the Trump administration starts investigating communities targeted by white extremists, it sets a dangerous precedent that won’t stop with Dearborn or Muslims.


    Steve Neavling

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  • How racist provocateur Jake Lang tried to manufacture chaos in Dearborn – Detroit Metro Times

    Right-wing provocateur and avowed racist Jake Lang arrived in Dearborn on Tuesday with a bulletproof vest, a Quran he threatened to burn, and a bag of bacon he shoved into people’s faces. 

    The Florida man also brought a criminal history: The Jan. 6 rioter was charged with repeatedly beating police officers with a baseball bat and riot shield, and a federal judge found that he “remains willing to engage in additional acts of violence.” President Donald Trump pardoned him and the other insurrectionists.

    That’s who marched into a peaceful, largely Arab American city and tried to start a fight.

    Lang, a Jewish Christian who openly calls himself a racist, came to Dearborn with a small crew of followers and a camera. His goal wasn’t dialogue or protest. It was provocation, panic, and propaganda. And when Muslims and their supporters shouted back after he spent hours taunting them, he plastered social media with videos claiming he’d uncovered a “violent Muslim stronghold.” His livestreams racked up more than 200,000 views in half a day, with many sympathizing with him.

    It was a textbook use of DARVO, a manipulation tactic defined as “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” First, the aggressor provokes and antagonizes. Then he denies wrongdoing, attacks those who push back, and reframes himself as the persecuted victim. Lang executed it step by step.

    Lang and his handful of supporters began congregating early in the afternoon, schlepping a banner reading, “Americans Against Islamification” and large, wooden crosses. He mocked the Arabic language. He told Muslims they were “violent, disgusting people,” waved bacon in their faces, and repeatedly used the n-word. He told one group they were “chimping out” and made monkey noises at teenagers.

    He threatened to burn a Quran.

    He prayed for God to “remove Muslims.”

    He declared Dearborn a “Christian country.”

    He called white people who supported their neighbors “white traitors.”

    He wasn’t hiding who he was. At one point he said outright: “I am a racist because I don’t want other races taking over my country.” He then launched into a white nationalist rant about whites having “conquered” America.

    As the march moved toward Dearborn City Hall, Lang ranted that “this is not America,” that Muslims “want us all dead,” and that the city was an “insurgency.” Despite all the taunting, he put on a performance of contrived innocence for the camera, repeatedly insisting he was shocked by how he was being treated.

    The media treated the debacle like a debate instead of an ambush, calling the rally “dueling demonstrations” and a “debate over religion.” One headline attempted to summarize the day as putting “focus on the Muslim community,” as if a racist agitator threatening to burn a Quran is a legitimate point of civic discussion.

    This is the problem with both-sides framing: It pretends the issue is religious disagreement rather than a violent Jan. 6 defendant traveling to a diverse city to harass residents and film their reactions. Dearborn’s 106,000 residents include Christians, Muslims, and non-religious people. Sharia law has never been practiced there, nor could it be, legally. About half the city’s residents aren’t Muslim. But Lang’s stunt relied on Americans who don’t know that.

    The performance worked on many viewers, who appeared convinced they were watching an Islamic uprising. 

    Among the responses:

    “Islam is robbing our country of unity.”

    “They are a disgrace.”

    “God asks us to stand up and fight against people who are his enemies.”

    “Jesus said to the bad people like these ‘You vipers, you son of snakes.’”

    This is all a bastardization of Christianity. It’s weaponized faith used as a racial weapon, not unlike American southerners who justified slavery by citing the Bible. 

    Later, as some young Muslims shouted back after two hours of taunts, insults, and monkey noises, Lang grinned at the camera. This was the moment he came for.

    “The Muslim community is looking to drag us back,” he said. “They’re looking to destroy everything that makes America great.”

    Outside City Hall as the sky grew dark, white police officers offered Lang’s group a protected space cordoned off by metal barriers. Lang scanned the crowd and said, “If they’re white and dressed normally, they’re allowed in.”

    During a public comment period at the council meeting, Lang whined that the white population is “on the decline.”

    He told the council and other Muslims, “You will never look like us. You will never eat like us. You won’t build buildings like us. You are nothing. You can build nothing. Just like President Trump’s great American friends have said: You guys are not us and get the fuck out.” 

    Then he raised his fist and said, “America first, America only, God bless America, Jesus is king.”

    In a triumphant tweet afterward, he wrote: “Today we showed THE WORLD just how VIOLENT and disgusting the Muslim Stronghold of Dearborn TRULY IS!! I was assaulted dozens of times by little twig Pedolphile worshipping Muslims.”

    Lang’s behavior in Dearborn wasn’t unlike some of the conduct that landed him in federal custody. Prosecutors say he played a front-line role in the Jan. 6 attack, hitting officers with a bat and riot shield. He publicly declared that the Capitol riot was justified and said the “next step” was “guns.”

    A federal judge found “overwhelming evidence” that he remains willing to commit violence, yet he continues to cast himself as a political prisoner. And now he’s acting like the victim of a city he visited to antagonize.

    Can you imagine if a group of Muslims showed up in a small Christian town to scream racial slurs, taunt teenagers, threaten to burn Bibles, and declare the area “Islam?” You can bet the reaction wouldn’t be peaceful. 

    Dearborn residents saw what Lang was doing. The cameras saw what he wanted them to see.

    And the rest of us should see it for what it is. It was not a protest, not a clash of cultures, but a racist agitator manufacturing chaos to feed his movement and his ego.


    Steve Neavling

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  • US appeals court upholds hate crime convictions of white men in Ahmaud Arbery killing

    SAVANNAH, Ga. — A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the hate crime convictions of three white men who chased Ahmaud Arbery through their Georgia subdivision with pickup trucks before one of them killed the running Black man with a shotgun.

    A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took well over a year to rule after attorneys for the defendants urged the judges in March 2024 to overturn the case, arguing the men’s history of racist text messages and social media posts failed to prove they targeted Arbery because of his race.

    Federal prosecutors used those posts and messages in 2022 to persuade a jury that Arbery’s killing was motivated by “pent-up racial anger.”

    Even if the appeals judges had thrown out their hate-crime convictions, the trio faced no immediate reprieve from prison. That’s because they’re also serving life terms for murder after being convicted in a Georgia state court.

    Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves and used a pickup truck to pursue 25-year-old Arbery after spotting him running in their neighborhood just outside the port city of Brunswick on Feb. 23, 2020. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the chase and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery at close range.

    More than two months passed without arrests, until Bryan’s graphic video of the killing leaked online. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local police as outrage over Arbery’s death became part of a national outcry over racial injustice. Charges soon followed.

    All three men were convicted of murder by a state court in late 2021. After a second trial in U.S. District Court in early 2022, a jury found the trio guilty of hate crimes and attempted kidnapping.

    Greg McMichael’s attorney, A.J. Balbo, declined to comment on the appellate ruling. Attorneys for Bryan and Travis McMichael did not immediately return phone and email messages.

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  • Opinion | What Does ‘White Guilt’ Mean in 2025?

    Victim politics gave us pro-Hamas activism and a powerful reaction in the form of Donald Trump, argue Shelby Steele and his son, Eli.

    Tunku Varadarajan

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  • States Are Pushing for More Scrutiny of Antisemitism in Schools

    In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas two years ago, high school teacher Josh Hirsch posted comments on social media in support of Israel. It was unrealistic for Hamas to expect a ceasefire, he wrote, as long as they were holding hostages.

    Soon afterward, a former student called for his firing. A note taped outside the door of his Adams County, Colorado, classroom contained his wife’s name and their home address. And a sticker that appeared on his chair read: “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

    The reaction startled Hirsch, the only Jewish teacher in his school building. For the first time in his 14-year career, he considered quitting. He stayed and joined an educators’ advocacy network created by the Anti-Defamation League, a way he saw to make schools more inclusive of diverse viewpoints.

    “I’ve been a teacher and tried to keep my focus on being the best teacher I could,” he said.

    Tensions over the Israel-Hamas war have spilled into schools around the U.S., with advocates reporting a rise in antisemitic harassment since the 2023 surprise attack on Israel. While some argue school leaders have failed to take the threat seriously, others warn criticism of Israel and the military campaign in Gaza are interpreted too often as hate speech.

    The Trump administration has not punished school systems the way it has hit colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism, but schools are still facing pressure to respond more aggressively. Several states have pressed for new vigilance, including legislation that critics say would stifle free speech.


    Both conservative and liberal states apply more scrutiny

    Lawmakers in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee have passed measures to increase school accountability for complaints of antisemitism, and a law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, will provide training to identify and prevent antisemitism in schools. In Arizona, the Democratic governor vetoed a bill on how to deal with reports of antisemitism in schools, calling it an attack on educators.

    Many of the measures, including one signed by Oklahoma’s Republican governor, call for adoption of a definition of antisemitism that casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech.

    “These bills make it clear that Oklahoma stands with our Jewish communities and will not tolerate hatred disguised as political discourse,” said Kristen Thompson, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma who authored the legislation.

    Dozens of states have adopted the definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is also recognized by the U.S. State Department. It lists 11 examples of antisemitic conduct, such as applying “double standards” to Israel or comparing the country’s policies to Nazism.

    While supporters of this definition of antisemitism say it is necessary to combat evolving forms of Jewish hate, civil liberties groups warn it suppresses pro-Palestinian speech.


    Trump administration approach contrasts with attacks on colleges

    The Trump administration has leveraged antisemitism investigations in its efforts to reshape higher education, suspending billions of dollars in federal funding to Harvard, Columbia and other universities over allegations they tolerated hate speech, especially during protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

    The White House has not gotten as involved at the K-12 level. At congressional hearings, House Republicans have taken some large school systems to task over their handling of antisemitism, but the administration largely has left it to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to address complaints.

    In one of the cases under investigation, a complaint described students at the Berkeley Unified School District in California asking Jewish classmates what “their number is,” referring to numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust. It also said teachers made antisemitic comments and led walkouts that praised Hamas.

    The district did not respond to a request for comment.

    In another California case, the family of a 14-year-old girl filed a federal lawsuit last year alleging she had to leave University Preparatory Academy, a charter school in San Jose, in 2023 because of antisemitic bullying. After the Hamas attack, she said students called her names, including “terrorist.” The California Department of Education and the school said they could not comment on pending litigation.

    Nationwide, the ADL recorded 860 antisemitic incidents in non-Jewish schools last year, ranging from name-calling and swastikas etched on lockers to antisemitic materials being taught in classrooms. The number was down from over 1,100 recorded in 2023, but well above numbers in prior years, according to the ADL.

    A Massachusetts state commission formed last year to combat antisemitism found it was a “pervasive and escalating problem” in schools.

    At one meeting, a commission co-chair, Democratic state Rep. Simon Cataldo, said the Massachusetts Teachers Association was sharing antisemitic resources with teachers, including a kindergarten workbook that describes Zionists as “bullies” and an image of a Star of David made of dollar bills. The union said those were singled out among hundreds of images in art and posters about Palestinians, and links to those materials were removed.

    The union said it has engaged in efforts to confront increases in both antisemitism and Islamophobia and accused the commission of “offensive political theater.”

    “Those who manipulate antisemitism to achieve political objectives — such as undermining labor unions and public educators — are following the lead of the Trump administration,” the union said in a statement.

    Margaret Litvin, an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University, said the commission was “deliberately conflating criticism of Israel with prejudice against Jews and bias against Jews.” That approach will be used to justify “heavy-handed” interference by the state in school district affairs, said Litvin, co-founder of the Boston-area Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff group.


    Controversy reaches the biggest teachers union

    The tension reached the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, which this summer weighed a proposal to drop ADL classroom materials that educators use to teach about the Holocaust and bias. Backers said the ADL had an outsize influence on school curricula and policy, with an underlying pro-Israel viewpoint.

    Delegates at the union’s representative assembly narrowly voted to approve the proposal, but they were overruled by the NEA board of directors. Union President Becky Pringle said the proposal “would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.”

    In the aftermath, the ADL invited K-12 educators to join a new network called BEACON: Building Educator Allies for Change, Openness, and Networks, which it said is intended to help educators learn from each other how to address and combat antisemitism and other forms of hate.

    Hirsch, the teacher in Colorado, was among hundreds who expressed interest.

    Some of the blowback he faced stemmed from his online commentary about local activist organizations. After donating money to Black Lives Matter groups and supporting them with a sign in his yard, he expressed feelings of betrayal to see the groups expressing support for Palestinians and not Israel.

    He said he was surprised by the reaction to the posts in his predominantly Hispanic school community. A former debate coach, he aims through his work with the ADL network to help students share their opinions in constructive ways.

    “If we’re giving them the opportunity to hate and we’re giving them the opportunity to make enemies of someone, it really is counterproductive to what we’re trying to do as a society,” he said.

    The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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  • Zohran Mamdani and London’s Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, have much in common, but also key differences

    LONDON (AP) — He’s the left-leaning Muslim mayor of the country’s biggest city, and U.S. President Donald Trump is one of his biggest critics.

    London’s Sadiq Khan has a lot in common with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — but also many differences.

    Khan, who has been mayor of Britain’s capital since 2016, welcomed Mamdani’s victory, saying New Yorkers had “chosen hope over fear, unity over division.”

    Khan’s experience holds positive and negative lessons for Mamdani, the 34-year-old Democrat who beat former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in Tuesday’s election.

    Khan has won three consecutive elections but routinely receives abuse for his faith and race, as well as criticism from conservative and far-right commentators who depict London as a crime-plagued dystopia.

    Trump has been among his harshest critics for years, calling Khan a “stone cold loser,” a “nasty person” and a “terrible mayor,” and claiming the mayor wants to bring Sharia, or Islamic law, to London.

    Khan, a keen amateur boxer, has hit back, saying in September that Trump is “racist, he is sexist, he is misogynistic and he is Islamophobic.”

    Khan told The Associated Press during a global mayors’ summit in Brazil on Wednesday that it’s “heartbreaking” but not surprising to see Mamdani receiving the same sort of abuse he gets.

    “London is liberal, progressive, multicultural, but also successful — as indeed is New York,” he said. “If you’re a nativist, populist politician, we are the antithesis of all you stand for. ”

    Attacked for their religion

    Mamdani and Khan regularly receive abuse and threats because of their Muslim faith, and London’s mayor has significantly tighter security protection than his predecessors.

    Both have tried to build bridges with the Jewish community after being criticized by opponents for their pro-Palestinian stances during the Israel-Hamas war.

    Both say their political opponents have leaned into Islamophobia. In 2016, Khan’s Conservative opponent, Zac Goldsmith, was accused of anti-Muslim prejudice for suggesting that Khan had links to Islamic extremists.

    Cuomo laughed along with a radio host who suggested Mamdani would “be cheering” another 9/11 attack. Mamdani’s Republican critics frequently, falsely call him a “jihadist” and a Hamas supporter.

    Mamdani vowed during the campaign that he would “not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I’m proud to call my own.”

    Khan has said he feels a responsibility to dispel myths about Muslims, and answers questions about his faith with weary good grace. He calls himself “a proud Brit, a proud Englishman, a proud Londoner and a proud Muslim.”

    Very different politicians

    Mamdani is an outsider on the left of his party, a democratic socialist whose buzzy, digital-savvy campaign energized young New Yorkers and drove the city’s biggest election turnout in a mayoral election in decades.

    Khan, 55, is a more of an establishment politician who sits in the broad middle of the center-left Labour Party.

    The son of a bus driver and a seamstress from Pakistan, Khan grew up with seven siblings in a three-bedroom public housing apartment in south London.

    He studied law, became a human rights attorney and spent a decade as a Labour Party lawmaker in the House of Commons, representing the area where he grew up, before being elected in 2016 as the first Muslim leader of a major Western capital city.

    Mamdani comes from a more privileged background as the son of an India-born Ugandan anthropologist, Mahmood Mamdani, and award-winning Indian filmmaker Mira Nair. Born in Uganda and raised from the age of 7 in New York, he worked as an adviser for tenants facing eviction before being elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020.

    Similar big-city problems

    Khan and Mamdani govern huge cities with vastly diverse populations of more than 8 million. Voters in both places have similar worries about crime and the high cost of living – big issues that many mayors struggle to address.

    Khan was won three straight elections, but he’s not an overwhelmingly popular mayor. As Mamdani may also find, the mayor gets blamed for a lot of problems, from high rents to violent crime, regardless of whether they are in his control, though Mamdani made freezing rents a pillar of his campaign.

    Mamdani campaigned on ambitious promises, including free child care, free buses, new affordable housing and city-run grocery stores.

    “Winning an election is one thing, delivering on promises is another,” said Darren Reid, an expert on U.S. politics at Coventry University. “The mayor of New York definitely does not have unlimited power, and he is going to have a very powerful enemy in the current president.”

    The mayor of London controls public transit and the police, but doesn’t have the authority of New York’s leader because power is shared with the city’s 32 boroughs, which are responsible for schools, social services and public housing in their areas.

    Khan can point to relatively modest achievements, including free school meals for all primary school pupils and a freeze on transit fares. But he has failed to meet other goals, such as ambitious house-building targets.

    Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics who specializes in local government, said one lesson Mamdani might take from Khan is to pick “a limited number of fights that you can win.”

    Khan, who is asthmatic, has made it one of his main missions to clean up London’s air — once so filthy the city was nicknamed the Big Smoke. He expanded London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, which charges the drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily fee to drive in the city.

    The measure became a lightning rod for criticism of Khan, spurring noisy protests and vandalism of enforcement cameras. Khan staunchly defended the zone, which research suggests has made London’s air cleaner. His big victory in last year’s mayoral election appeared to vindicate Khan’s stance on the issue.

    Travers said that beyond their shared religion and being the targets of racism, both mayors face the conundrum of leading dynamic, diverse metropolises that are “surprisingly peaceful and almost embarrassingly successful” — and resented by the rest of their countries for their wealth and the attention they receive.

    He said London is “locked in this strange alternative universe where it is simultaneously described by a number of commentators as sort of a hellhole … and yet on the other hand it’s so embarrassingly rich that British governments spend their lives trying to level up the rest of the country to it. You can’t win.”

    ___

    Associated Press writer Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this story.

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  • Opinion | A German Lesson for the Heritage Foundation

    In the 1980s, the CDU kept neo-Nazis down by accepting all legitimate conservative views.

    Joseph C. Sternberg

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  • Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell Faces a Hard Reelection Fight Against Progressive Activist Katie Wilson

    SEATTLE (AP) — Democratic Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell faces a tough reelection fight against progressive activist Katie Wilson as voters in the liberal city recoil from President Donald Trump’s second term and question whether the incumbent has done enough to address public safety, homelessness and affordability.

    Harrell, an attorney who previously served three terms on the City Council, was elected mayor in 2021 following the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice protests over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police.

    With crime falling, more police being hired, less visible drug use and many homeless encampments removed from city parks, the business-backed Harrell seemed likely to cruise to re-election at this time last year. He’s been endorsed by Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown and former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

    But Trump’s return to office has helped reawaken Seattle’s progressive voters. The lesser-known Wilson, a democratic socialist running a campaign that echoes some of the themes of progressive mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York, trounced Harrell by nearly 10 percentage points in the August primary.

    “Voters in places like Seattle are frustrated with the status quo, particularly in the context of Trump’s attacks on blue cities,” said Sandeep Kaushik, a Seattle political consultant who is not involved in the race. “They’re kind of moving back into their progressive bunker and are much more inclined to say, ‘Yeah, we should go our own way with our own bold progressive solutions.’ That all that plays into Katie’s hands.”

    Wilson, 43, studied at Oxford College but did not graduate. She founded the small nonprofit Transit Riders Union in 2011 and has led campaigns for better public transportation, higher minimum wages, stronger renter protections and more affordable housing. She herself is a renter, living in a one-bedroom apartment in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and says that has shaped her understanding of Seattle’s affordability crisis.

    Wilson has criticized Harrell as doing too little to provide more shelter and said his encampment sweeps have been cosmetic, merely pushing unhoused people around the city. Wilson also paints him as a city hall fixture who bears responsibility for the status quo.

    She has been endorsed by several Democratic organizations as well as by U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

    Harrell, 67, played on the Rose Bowl champion University of Washington football team in 1978 before going to law school. His father, who was Black, came to Seattle from the segregated Jim Crow South, and his mother, a Japanese American, was incarcerated at an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, during World War II after officials seized her family’s Seattle flower shop — experiences that fostered his understanding of the importance of civil rights and inclusivity.

    Harrell has said Wilson, who has no traditional management experience, isn’t ready to lead a city with more than 13,000 employees and a budget of nearly $9 billion. He also has criticized her for supporting efforts to slash the city’s police budget amid the 2020 racial justice protests.

    Wilson has said that proposal was based on some fundamental misunderstandings and that she since has learned a lot about how the police department works. She says she supports having a department that is adequately staffed, responsive and accountable to the community.

    Both Harrell and Wilson have touted plans for affordable housing, combatting crime and attempting to Trump-proof the city, which receives about $150 million a year in federal funding. Both want to protect Seattle’s sanctuary city status.

    Wilson has proposed a city-level capital gains tax to help offset federal funding the city might lose and to pay for housing; Harrell says that’s ineffective because a city capital gains tax could easily be avoided by those who would be required to pay it.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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  • Opinion | Hamas, Free Speech and Arizona University

    The anti-Israel encampments on the quad are mostly gone, but we’re starting to learn what happened behind the scenes when universities let antisemitism run rampant on campus. Records recently obtained from the University of Arizona show the school’s faculty threw in with pro-Palestinian protesters in the months after Oct. 7, 2023.

    Arizona-based researcher Brian Anderson issued the Freedom of Information Act request in May 2024 for university communications on such keywords as “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Gaza,” “Hamas,” “Anti-Semitism” and “Jewish.” Mr. Anderson says the school refused the request until his lawyer sent a demand letter. It later produced nearly 1,000 documents with many names redacted. The university didn’t respond to our request for comment.

    The emails reveal that on Oct. 11, 2023, then-Arizona President Robert Robbins issued an unequivocal statement addressing “the horrendous acts of terrorism by Hamas in Israel.” Mr. Robbins called the massacre “antisemitic hatred, murder, and a complete atrocity” and called out Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for “endorsing the actions of Hamas.”

    For that moment of principled clarity, Mr. Robbins was criticized by the faculty. On Oct. 12, faculty chair Leila Hudson received an email from a professor (name redacted) who expressed “concern” that “President Robbins email and others’ smears are chilling SJP dissent.” (Mr. Robbins had noted that while SJP didn’t speak for the university, the group has “the constitutional right to hold their views and to express them in a safe environment.”)

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