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  • Cornel West selects L.A. professor and activist Melina Abdullah as presidential running mate

    Cornel West selects L.A. professor and activist Melina Abdullah as presidential running mate

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    Independent presidential candidate Cornel West named Cal State Los Angeles professor Melina Abdullah as his running mate on Wednesday, saying that her commitment to social justice and to prioritizing the needs of poor Americans embodied the values of his candidacy.

    “I wanted to to run with someone who would put a smile on the face of [civil rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. from the grave,” West said on Tavis Smiley’s Los Angeles radio program.

    Abdullah is well-known figure in local political circles: She co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and has been a fixture in recent years at protests and acts of civil disobedience on issues including police funding and the war in the Gaza Strip.

    West’s choice means at least three women from California are running for vice president — Abdullah, Vice President Kamala Harris and Nicole Shanahan, selected by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Former President Trump has not announced his choice for running mate.) The three candidates reflect the wide spectrum of backgrounds the state has to offer, with Harris coming up in the rough-and-tumble of Bay Area politics, Shanahan steeped in the Silicon Valley and Abdullah representing leftist and progressive grassroots activism.

    “It’s striking. But that’s about all that we have in common,” Abdullah said when Smiley noted that she and Harris had Bay Area roots and both attended Howard University.

    During the broadcast, Abdullah recalled first meeting West when she was as an undergraduate student at Howard, and said she revered his influence on American political thought.

    “It felt as though God was speaking to me, and I said ‘yes,‘” she said of receiving his call last week.

    She noted that theirs was the first presidential ticket in the U.S. to include a Muslim, and Smiley pointed out that it was the first all-Black ticket.

    “Both of us want to disrupt the narrative that you have only two choices,” said Abdullah, 52, referring to Trump and President Biden, the presumptive major-party nominees. “The world tries to tell us that we’re tethered to certain ideas that we don’t have to be tethered to. We can be expansive, and imaginative.”

    West, an academic, author and activist, said alternative voices are needed to represent the anger of Americans frustrated by wars abroad and a lack of investment in communities at home. Lacking the infrastructure of a mainstream political party, West is collecting signatures to appear on ballots across the country. According to his website, he is now on the ballot only in Alaska, Oregon, South Carolina and Utah.

    Selecting a vice presidential candidate is a key part of the process of making the ballot in many states.

    “Trump is leading the country toward a second Civil War. Biden is leading the world toward World War III,” West told Smiley, with whom he co-hosted a radio program a decade ago. “That’s the choice you have if you only are tied to the duopoly. That’s what it comes down to. We are providing an alternative. … We ain’t on nobody’s plantation.”

    Cal State L.A. campus police remove Melina Abdullah, who is known for her activism, from a protest during a 2022 Los Angeles mayoral debate.

    (Ringo Chiu / For The Times)

    In recent years, Abdullah has spoken out against police shootings and increases in the Los Angeles Police Department budget. She has regularly appeared at Police Commission meetings, and as The Times wrote in 2015, has turned “normally dry public hearings into hours-long confrontations that frequently devolve into officers clearing demonstrators from the room.”

    She has long pushed for abolishing the police and prisons, and in 2020 was a forceful opponent of then-Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey’s reelection campaign, and a supporter of current Dist. Atty. George Gascón.

    During that race, Lacey’s husband, David, was charged with assault after he was accused of waving a gun at Abdullah and other protesters when they appeared outside the couple’s Granada Hills home early one morning. (The case was dismissed after he finished a diversion program.)

    In 2022, Abdullah was forcibly removed from a mayoral debate on Cal State L.A.’s campus. She and Karen Bass, who has been mayor of Los Angeles since that election, have a decades-long relationship.

    In 2020, after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Abdullah was a central figure in organizing large rallies in Los Angeles. More than a decade ago, along with Patrisse Cullors and others, she built what would grow to become the Black Lives Matter movement and later the nonprofit Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

    Abdullah also is the founder of Black Lives Matter Grassroots Inc., which made waves in 2022 by accusing the foundation and one of its executives, Shalomyah Bowers, of “fraudulently [raising] money from unsuspecting donors” and diverting it to benefit Bowers and his consulting firm.

    Bowers and the foundation vigorously denied the allegations and sought the dismissal of a lawsuit that asked for $10 million in damages. L.A. Superior Court Judge Stephanie Bowick agreed to toss out the lawsuit in June 2023.

    In her ruling, Bowick wrote that part of the lawsuit’s “allegations are so confusing and unintelligible it cannot even be determined what” was being alleged.

    The judge earlier this year ordered Abdullah’s group to pay more than $374,000 in legal fees and costs to the foundation, Bowers and his consulting group.

    Smiley asked about these legal fights, and Abdullah said that as nonprofits, the various chapters that belong to Black Lives Matter Grassroots wouldn’t be endorsing anyone in the 2024 race.

    “Some people might see it as baggage, but I actually see the work and experience of organizing and the kind of authenticity of our work as being something that actually fuels this campaign,” she said. “I know that as we move forward, organizing is essential.”

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    Benjamin Oreskes, Matt Hamilton

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  • On this MLK Day, why the fight for environmental justice is the fight that matters

    On this MLK Day, why the fight for environmental justice is the fight that matters

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    Ben Jealous, the first Black executive director of the Sierra Club, couldn’t make it to a recent news conference in South L.A., held in the shadow of the monument to Martin Luther King Jr. at Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area.

    But if he had, I suspect he would’ve told the same story he told me.

    “You know the great actor Louis Gossett Jr.?” he asked. “My last year at the NAACP, at the 2013 Image Awards, he said to me, ‘You know, Ben, I’ve been in this racial justice movement my whole life, but you know, sometimes, brother, I feel like we’re fighting over who’s in first class. What we should be doing is looking out the window, because the plane has fallen like 20,000 feet in the last two minutes.’”

    Jealous recalled being confused.

    “He said, ‘The planet is dying. It doesn’t matter who’s in first class on a dead planet.’ And that phrase, it’s stuck with me for the last decade, and I just keep coming back to it.”

    This, Jealous explained, is why he decided that his venerable environmental organization would be among the first to support an upstart AM talk radio station in Los Angeles in its campaign to elevate climate change and environmental justice as priorities for people of color.

    Other backers of the $2-million campaign include the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Metro, CalTrans, the California Endowment and the California Community Foundation.

    But really, it’s the vision of Tavis Smiley, the longtime radio host and founder of KBLA 1580, that could help bring the voices of Black and Latino Americans, who are harmed most often by the climate crisis, more fully into policy discussions about how to solve it.

    At that news conference Jealous couldn’t attend, Smiley went so far as to connect the fight MLK waged for racial equality to the current fight for the future health of the planet.

    “Climate is king,” Smiley declared with a grin. “You see what I did there?”

    While amusing, I can understand why some people might see this as a stretch. After all, Martin Luther King Jr. Day has always been a holiday dominated by discussions of fairness and freedom, and the barriers to both. Barriers of systemic racism that have left Black people on the worst rungs of the socioeconomic ladder and, as such, with little energy to deal with existential crises, because there are so many immediate ones, like housing discrimination and police brutality.

    But like Gossett Jr., I’m starting to get the sinking feeling that just fighting all of these immediate racial justice fights is ultimately a little like — to extend a bad analogy even further — rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

    Sure, it’s important to fight the good fight against efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs, for example, and against banning books on Black history in public schools. But it’s reasonable to wonder what good winning those fights will do if we fail to mitigate the upheaval of a rapidly changing climate that can deliver misery to all of humankind.

    We’ve all seen the troubling surge of extreme weather and the way it has crippled or, in some cases, decimated entire communities. Just this month, climate scientists with the European Union announced that 2023 was officially Earth’s hottest year on record, and, as my Times colleague Hayley Smith reported, this year is likely to be even hotter.

    “Our cities, our roads, our monuments, our farms — in practice, all human activities — never had to cope with a climate this warm,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told reporters. “There were simply no cities, no books, agriculture or domesticated animals on this planet last time the temperature was so high.”

    On top of that, there are man-made environmental disasters, from the tainted drinking water in Flint, Mich., and right here in Compton to the poorly maintained levees that allowed massive flooding in the Monterey County town of Pajaro.

    As Mayor Karen Bass put it at the news conference: “We know that low-income neighborhoods of color are disproportionately harmed by air and toxic pollution. A few years ago, the leading cause of death of Black babies was asthma that was directly related to freeways and air pollution. So when we say disproportionately impacted, that’s not just rhetoric.”

    And yet, politicians rarely bring up climate change or environmental justice as a true priority when they are talking to people of color.

    Take, for example, the speech President Biden gave earlier this month at Mother Emanuel AME Church, billed as an attempt to repair his relationship with Black voters amid flagging poll numbers. He spent 35 lackluster minutes at the pulpit of the historic church in Charleston, S.C.

    Priority topics included Donald Trump, the Civil War, white supremacy, the Jan. 6 insurrection, high-speed internet access, prescription drug prices, housing and student loan debt. Finally, Biden got around to some vague and uninspiring statement about how his administration is “producing clean energy” so people can “finally breathe clean air without leaving home.”

    He talked about spending a childhood surrounded by air-polluting oil refineries in Claymont, Del.

    “I grew up with asthma, and most of us did, because of the prevailing winds,” Biden said. “We’d go — my mom would drive us to school in the morning … there would be an oil slick on the wiper. Because, guess what? It’s all the fence-line communities who get hurt.”

    Surely, the president can do better than this with his messaging.

    Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to cut $2.9 billion from California’s climate programs to help close a massive budget deficit. Notably on the chopping block are several zero-emission vehicle programs, including delayed funding for the Clean Cars 4 All program that helps low-income residents.

    Getting people of color to care about such things, and demand more from Biden or Newsom, is sure to be a challenge. Many people can’t afford to think about problems beyond next week, much less next year or in the next several decades.

    But it’s not impossible. Because with every passing year, every extreme weather event that devastates an already vulnerable community of color and every generation that becomes more aware of the pollution that is ruining their quality of life, it becomes clearer that environmental justice is racial justice.

    “Poll after poll shows upward of three-quarters of us consider ourselves to be environmentalists,” Jealous said of Black people. “What we’ve been doing wrong as a movement is failing to meet people where they are.”

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    Erika D. Smith

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