Building off the core values of community and resilience last week, the Coalition to Advance Public Safety (CAPS) kicked off its groundbreaking initiative to reduce gun homicides and non-fatal shootings by 20 percent over the next five years in Newark, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Indianapolis – the first four of an expected 12 cities where CAPS- – will work with mayors, community based organizations and communities to scale up, unite and bring greater cohesion and funding to cities community violence intervention (CVI) ecosystems.
Browsing: Opinions
As a lifelong organizer, I know that you grow movements by listening first, so that’s how I’ve spent the last month. As I started a new job as executive director of the Sierra Club. I’ve traveled more than 15,000 miles, crisscrossing the country from the Deep South to New England to the Pacific Northwest to listen.
Unfortunately, mass murder in America has reached a level such that it’s classified as both an epidemic and a National crisis. No longer can we only label Middle Eastern countries as uncivilized because of their use of radicalized suicide bombers as weapons. Our own escalating murders could lead one to conclude that we’re also uncivilized and facing a “Mass Murder Syndrome.”
It’s been a few weeks since a mess started boiling over in Florida with the rollout of the new AP African American Studies course, and no one involved is looking good: not the state Department of Education, not the College Board, and definitely not Gov. Ron DeSantis, who blasted the course publicly and pressured the College Board to water it down. Now DeSantis, pumped up by what he thinks is his victory over educators, is making noise about going after all AP courses in the state.
It is no surprise Georgia State Senator Emmanuel Jones (D) was able to call Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an Uncle Tom. Like the expression, “It takes one to know one,” It took an Uncle Tom to know an Uncle Tom.
What We Need is Love
February is Black History Month and we must acknowledge that many of our young Black men and women are making monumental achievements. Many in America would make many think Black people are lazy, take drugs, and make babies with different women every night. Based on this thinking, Black men and women don’t work, the ladies are on welfare, and men are uneducated, and in jail.
Five of the derailed cars contained nearly 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride, a toxic flammable liquid; other cars carried butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and isobutylene. The spills from the wreck have left a long chemical plume moving down the Ohio River at about a mile an hour. The result has been at least 3,500 fish killed. The train’s owner Norfolk Southern said it is removing contaminated soil at the crash site, which can leach toxic chemicals into the water and air, after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised questions.
The lies, misrepresentations, and half-truths Gov. DeSantis is regurgitating about Black History is nothing short of a calculated strategy to destroy the truth of who we are and what we have accomplished. And what has been done to us by those who enslaved us.
Even the most uninvolved persons in our community know it is time to draw up plans that everyone can at least know or discover. It is time for our leaders to call us together, not to march, not to sing, but to confer with each other and make plans to organize a better life without fear and violence. Plans must include jobs, housing, economic development, and education about our history.