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NewsUnderground Railroad Celebration The Underground Railroad, the organization which helped escaped African slaves from the South on their journey to freedom in the North and Canada, begun in 1787, is celebrated on this date. It is believed that it started and got its name when Isaac T. Hopper, a Quaker, organized a system for hiding and aiding escaped slaves. Opponents of slavery, abolitionist, allowed their homes, called stations, to be used as places where escaped slaves were provided with food, shelter, and money. The various routes went through 14 northern states and Canada. It is estimated that by 1850, around 3,000 people worked on the Underground Railroad. Some of the best known people who provided help on the route included William Still, Gerrit Smith, Salmon Chase, David Ruggle, Thomas Garrett, William Purvis, Jane Grey Swisshelm, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Lucretia Mott, Charles Langston, Levi Coffin, and Susan B. Anthony. The Underground Railroad also had used volunteers known as conductors who went to the south and helped guide slaves to safety. One of the most important of these was a former slave, Harriet Tubman. She made 19 secret trips to the South, during which she led more than 300 slaves to freedom. Tubman was considered such a threat to the slave system that plantation owners offered a $40,000 reward for her capture. Underground Railroad Stations were usually about 20 miles apart. Conductors used covered wagons or carts with false bottoms to carry slaves from one station to another. Runaway slaves usually hid during the day and traveled at night. Some of those involved notified runaways of their stations by brightly lit candles in a window or by lanterns positioned in the front yard. By the middle of the 19th century, it was estimated that over 50,000 slaves had escaped from the South using the Underground Railroad. Reference:
Dem seeking to be first black Ala. gov loses June 2, 2010 · A congressman seeking to become Alabama’s first black governor lost Tuesday to a white Democratic primary opponent who had garnered support from the state’s four major black political groups. Primaries were also held in Mississippi and New Mexico, where Susana Martinez, a prosecutor from southern New Mexico, won the GOP nomination for governor and will face Democrat Diane Denish in a general election race deciding who becomes New Mexico’s first woman governor. With 58 percent of the precincts reporting, Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks won the Democratic primary for Alabama governor with 65 percent of the vote to U.S. Rep. Artur Davis’s 35 percent. The state’s traditional civil rights organizations backed Sparks after Davis voted against Obama’s federal health care overhaul. But Davis, a Harvard lawyer who led President Barack Obama’s campaign here in 2008, had endorsements from Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights pioneer from Alabama, and Mobile’s first black mayor, Sam Jones. Voter Ben Ray picked Sparks, who has taken positions popular with Democrats, calling for an expansion of gambling, including a lottery, and supporting the federal health care plan. “I just like his position on the education lottery,” Ray said. “I think we need that here. The chairman of the black Alabama Democratic Conference, Joe Reed, said Davis was hurt by refusing to seek the endorsements of African-American groups and by voting against the federal health care plan. Sparks said he went after every vote, and his call for an education lottery proved popular with primary voters. Davis conceded in Birmingham, where he said he would support Sparks in the general election. Seven GOP candidates for governor were competing in their party’s primary Tuesday, and the top vote-getters were expected to go to a runoff on July 13. The health care overhaul was also an issue in Alabama’s other big race, where GOP voters in the 5th Congressional district were deciding the fate of U.S. Rep. Parker Griffith, a former Democrat who switched to the Republican Party in December. Griffith, a first-term congressman, lagged in early returns behind Madison County Commissioner Mo Brooks, who had the backing of local GOP leaders still bitter over losing to Griffith in 2008, when he was still a Democrat. The north Alabama district traditionally has been Democratic, but has leaned Republican in recent years. Four Democrats were competing for their party’s nomination for the seat. Meanwhile, four-term Alabama Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby easily beat his primary challenger, tea party activist N.C. “Clint” Moser. Shelby was drawing more than 80 percent of the votes in the unofficial count Tuesday evening. Shelby, 76, is favored to beat Democratic nominee Bill Barnes, a Birmingham lawyer. Turnout across Alabama was light to moderate. In New Mexico, the state’s governor’s race will be the third woman against woman gubernatorial general election matchup in U.S. history. Martinez, the Dona Ana County district attorney, beat her four GOP opponents with 51 percent of the vote in unofficial returns and nearly half of precincts reporting. Former state GOP chairman Allen Weh had 29 percent. The primary produced a political first for New Mexico because neither Democrats nor Republicans had ever selected a woman as their gubernatorial nominee. Denish didn’t have a primary opponent. The Republicans are hoping to win the governorship after eight years of Democratic control under Gov. Bill Richardson, who is term-limited and cannot seek re-election. Denish was Richardson’s running mate in 2002 and 2006. In Mississippi, no incumbents faced primary challenges. Alan Nunnelee won the Republican nomination for a north Mississippi congressional seat. Unofficial results from the three-person GOP primary in the 1st District showed Nunnelee, a state senator from Tupelo, defeated former Eupora Mayor Henry Ross and Fox News analyst Angela McGlowan of Oxford. PHILLIP RAWLS, AP GM Bankruptcy Hurts People of Color Hardest. Workers Desperately Need EFCA. When General Motors filed for bankruptcy on Monday, it left behind a long trail of grievers — twenty-one thousand of them. The loss of these good, union jobs and the many more that will be shed when related businesses close are devastating families and communities. For black workers, who are highly concentrated in the auto industry, these have long been some of the few reliable jobs that pay living wages, supplying families of color the with the possibility of entering the middle class.
As we now know, high levels of unionization equate with smaller income gaps between people of color and whites. But in the economy we’ve inherited from the last three decades of deregulation and declining union density, people of color are increasingly relegated to low-wage, precarious work that pays too little to support a family. Unless Congress acts now to ensure that work actually pays, these workers will have few options and we’ll only deepen the racial income and wealth divides. A few months ago, I traveled to Michigan to interview dozens of people for “Race and Recession,” a new report released by the Applied Research Center. I met Leo Shipman, a 24-year-old Black man, who had recently lost his job in an auto parts factory in Detroit. “My biggest worry is my son,” he said about his 3-year-old. “You don’t know how you’re going to feed them. He doesn’t know the bills are running up, but I do.” When I met Shipman, he was on the edge of being evicted from his apartment. With only a high school education — Shipman’s been trying to enroll in a technical college — securing a living-wage job proves elusive if not impossible. Because he had been underemployed, Shipman had no unemployment check coming in. It’s growing more likely that his only option will be to work a job that makes feeding his son a daily struggle. As one of the last strongholds of union jobs shrinks, and people like Shipman are cast out, it’s time to confront some tough truths about work in our country. Black workers like Shipman have been hit especially hard by layoffs and closures because their concentration in the auto industry is higher than their overall share of the state’s labor market. In fact, across the labor market, workers of color are overrepresented in occupations with high unemployment rates. These include jobs in the service sector, as well as construction and transportation occupations. The loss of these auto industry jobs strikes a massive blow to the ability of workers, especially Black workers, to earn middle-class incomes, to save enough to pass on to their children and to achieve some financial stability. Indeed, the UAW was one of the first unions to organize Black workers and the implosion of GM further dismantles one of the mainstays of the Black middle class. The collateral damage of job loss are taking their toll. Sandra Hines, a 55 year old Detroit native who I wrote about last week, lost the home her family owned for 40 years after her sister was laid off from GM and was forced to refinance. The family was sold a predatory loan with an adjustable rate and was evicted after payments skyrocketed. As more people lose their jobs, more families will find themselves unable to pay their mortgages and more wealth will be drained. It is now clear that the perils of this situation go beyond these communities. Indeed, as we find in “Race and Recession,” the racially discriminatory predatory lending and foreclosure crisis was a central factor in pushing the economy into this recession. As a country, we’re reckoning with the fall-out from decades of putting profit above people. As precious union jobs disappear, the time has come to ensure that those who are unemployed — disproportionately people of color — are able to enter employment that actually pays. Congress should immediately pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) so that workers can demand fair pay without intimidation. Since UAW now has a major ownership stake in the company, the workers who remain there will be taken care of, but the 21,000 workers who are getting pushed out will be less likely to find jobs with sufficient salaries and benefits, especially as the federal minimum wage increase to $7.25 next month still does not approximate a living wage. Ultimately, as we recover from this recession, we need to make sure that the jobs we create and the economy we build help those who have been most hurt by the recession, which have disproportionately been families of color. Ensuring that good, sustainable jobs go to communities of color across the country is an essential part of building an inclusive and working economy. First Black Female Rabbi to Take N.C. Pulpit Black Students Still Protesting Fox News
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SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — The first African-American female rabbi will take up a new pulpit in North Carolina in August. Alysa Stanton, who will be ordained June 6 at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, has been hired as the spiritual leader of Congregation Bayt Shalom in Greenville. Bayt Shalom is a small Conservative congregation that two years ago also affiliated with the Reform movement. Stanton, a convert and mother to an adopted 14-year-old daughter, is a trained psychotherapist who specializes in trauma and grief. She will be the first African-American rabbi to lead a majority white congregation, despite the fact that about 20 percent of the American Jewish community is ethnically and racially diverse, according to the San Francisco-based Institute for Jewish and Community Research. Stanton’s ordination will provide young black Jewish Americans “with an important role model,” says Diane Tobin, associate director of the institute. “Hopefully over time they will see themselves reflected in the community.”
