Rev. Dr. William Barber on the Fight for Voting, Civil Rights in North Carolina

Democracy Now 

Early voting begins in North Carolina on Thursday nearly two months before Election Day. Once again, the state is seen as a key battleground state. In 2008, President Obama won the state becoming the first Democrat to do so since Jimmy Carter in 1976. We're joined by Rev. Dr. William Barber, a grassroots leader deeply involved in the fight to preserve voting rights in North Carolina and to mobilize unregistered voters. Barber is president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and serves as pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church Disciples of Christ in Goldsboro. He successfully campaigned for Same Day Registration and Early Voting in North Carolina and helped win passage of the state's Racial Justice Act, which allows North Carolina death row inmates to reduce their sentences to life in prison without parole in certain circumstances when race played a factor in their trial or sentencing.

Home of Barbara Arnwine, Civil Rights Lawyer, Raided By Police

Barbara Arnwine, Civil Rights Lawyer, Has Home Raided By Police | HuffPost BlackVoices

A civil rights lawyer said she is outraged and is sharing her story with the media, after her Maryland home was raided by police shortly before Thanksgiving. 

Barbara Arnwine, the executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said her Prince George County home was raided by a SWAT team and other law enforcement the morning of Nov. 21, Politic365.com reports. 

"They held us at gunpoint for three hours," Arnwine told Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr. on Sharpton's radio show "Keepin' It Real." "There is no justification for them operating like this. It's totally unprofessional and unjustified."

Arnwine is a well known attorney, and one of the leaders of groups in opposition of Voter ID laws. On Nov. 14, she spoke out about the effects of voter suppression laws on the minority community along with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union. 

The SWAT team arrived at her home at 5:30 a.m., disturbing the attorney and her family members, including an 80-year-old relative, Arnwine said. They also did not seem to have a warrant and asked for the name of the homeowner and how to spell that name. 

"If they had a warrant and were targeting any of us then how could they not know our names and know how to spell them," Arnwine said to D.C radio station's WPFW news anchor Askia Muhammad. "It looks like they were randomly looking, like they were on a fishing expedition. I honestly think they were looking for someone else. I honestly think they had the wrong address. I don't think they had the right house but I'll never know because I never saw a warrant." 

She told Muhammad that the president was aware of the incident, and that a press conference is being planned, according to Politic365.com.

"President Obama has heard about it and has e-mailed people asking 'What in the world is this?'" 

About Barbara Arnwine

Barbara R. Arnwine, Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law since 1989, is internationally renowned for contributions on critical justice issues including the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1991.  A graduate of Scripps College and Duke University School of Law, she continues to champion civil rights issues nationally and internationally in the areas of housing, fair lending, community development, employment, voting, education, environmental justice and more.  A prominent leader in the civil rights community, Ms. Arnwine also continues to fight for the preservation of affirmative action and diversity programs.

Martha Southgate on 'The Help'

The Truth about the Civil Rights Era

by Martha Southgate | Entertainment Weekly

I resisted the fictional and soon-to-be cinematic juggernaut that is The Help for quite some time. In an otherwise extremely positive review in 2009, EW summed up my feelings quite well: ''The backstory is cringeworthy: A young, white first-time author — inspired by her own childhood relationship with her family maid in Jackson, Miss. — sets out to write a novel from the point of view of black maids in the midst of the civil rights era.'' Cringeworthy indeed. Further, the plot of the book itself — young white woman encourages black housekeepers to tell their truth through the vehicle of a book the white woman writes — I found both implausible and condescending to those maids. An oral history of black maids published in 1962? I don't think so. I'm acquainted with intelligent readers — both black and white — who enjoyed the book. I also greatly respect the talented actresses in the film who have proclaimed their affection for it. But I still couldn't get on board. When I took a closer look at what Kathryn Stockett hath wrought, I didn't much like what I saw — but The Help is only a symptom, not the disease.

There have been thousands of words written about Stockett's skills, her portrayal of the black women versus the white women, her right to tell this story at all. I won't rehash those arguments, except to say that I found the novel fast-paced but highly problematic. Even more troubling, though, is how the structure of narratives like The Help underscores the failure of pop culture to acknowledge a central truth: Within the civil rights movement, white people were the help.

The architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American. Many white Americans stood beside them, and some even died beside them, but it was not their fight — and more important, it was not their idea.

Implicit in The Help and a number of other popular works that deal with the civil rights era is the notion that a white character is somehow crucial or even necessary to tell this particular tale of black liberation. What's more, to imply that what the maids Aibileen and Minny are working against is simply a refusal on everyone's part to believe that ''we're all the same underneath'' is to simplify the horrors of Jim Crow to a truly damaging degree.

This isn't the first time the civil rights movement has been framed this way fictionally, especially on film. Most Hollywood civil rights movies feature white characters in central, sometimes nearly solo, roles. My favorite (not!) is Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, which gives us two white FBI agents as heroes of the movement. FBI agents! Given that J. Edgar Hoover did everything short of shoot Martin Luther King Jr. himself in order to damage or discredit the movement, that goes from troubling to appalling.

Why is it ever thus? Suffice it to say that these stories are more likely to get the green light and to have more popular appeal (and often acclaim) if they have white characters up front. That's a shame. The continued impulse to reduce the black women and men of the civil rights movement to bit players in the most extraordinary step toward justice that this nation has ever known is infuriating, to say the least. Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn't need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them.

***

Martha Southgate's fourth novel, The Taste of Salt, will be published in September.

Echoes of Feliciano: Carlos Santana Booed at Civil Rights Games

Santana is Booed for Using Baseball's Civil Rights Game to Speak Out for Civil Rights

by Dave Zirin | The Nation

Major League Baseball’s annual Civil Rights Game was poised to be a migraine-inducing exercise in Orwellian irony. Forget about the fact that Civil Rights was to be honored in Atlanta, where fans root for a team called the Braves and cheer in unison with the ubiquitous "tomahawk chop.

Forget about the fact that the Braves have been embroiled in controversy since pitching coach Roger McDowell aimed violent, homophobic threats at several fans. Forget that this is a team that has done events with Focus on the Family, an organization that is to Civil Rights what Newt Gingrich is to marital fidelity.

The reason Atlanta was such a brutally awkward setting for a Sunday Civil Rights setting, was because Friday saw the Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, sign HR 87, a law that shreds the Civil Rights of the state’s Latino population. Modeled after Arizona’s horrific and unconstitutional SB 1070, HR 87 authorizes state and local police the federal powers to demand immigration papers from people they suspect to be undocumented. Those without papers on request will find themselves behind bars. Civil rights hero, Atlanta’s John Lewis has spoken out forcefully against the legislation saying “This is a recipe for discrimination. We’ve come too far to return to the dark past."

But there was Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, celebrating civil rights in the Georgia, and chortling excitedly about the 2011 All-Star game in Arizona. In the hands of Selig, irony becomes arsenic. Thank God that Commisioner Selig was stupid enough to choose the Civil Rights Game to honor, among others, the great musician Carlos Santana. Santana was supposed to be the Latino stand-in, a smiling symbol of baseball’s diversity. And maybe, he would even play a song!

But Bud picked the wrong Latino. Carlos Santana took the microphone and said that he was representing all immigrants. Then Santana added, "The people of Arizona, and the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves." In a perfect display of Gov. Nathan Deal’s Georgia, the cheers quickly turned to boos. Yes, Carlos Santana was booed on Civil Rights Day in Atlanta for talking about Civil Rights.

Read the Full Essay @ The Nation