Support Our Journalism

Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Politics National News World Economy Lifestyle Store

Start your day with The National Memo Newsletter

Tag: black americans

Under Court Dictum, Harvard Law School Steps Back In Time

According to figures released last month, there are a grand total of 19 Black students in the first-year class at Harvard Law School, down from 43 in last year's entering class. You have to go back to the 1960s to find so few Black students in the entering class.

In the years since 1970, the number of first years, or 1Ls, who were Black has ranged from 50 to 70. Professor David Wilkins, a brilliant Black professor at Harvard and the faculty director of the school's Center on the Legal Profession, noted that "this is the lowest number of Black entering first-year students since 1965" and that "this obviously has a lot to do with the chilling effect created by that decision" — that is, the decision last year by the United States Supreme Court, in a case where Harvard College was a defendant, barring affirmative action in university admissions.

It is a major step backward for a school that has produced some of the leading Black lawyers in America, a step backward that dramatically affects not only Black students, but the quality of education for all students at HLS. Diversity makes a huge difference in what happens in a law school classroom. And a Harvard degree opens doors to a career in law that, fairly or not, are just not the same for graduates of lower-tier law schools.

I spent three years as a student at Harvard Law, and another 10 as a member of the faculty. The Black students in my time at Harvard included everyone from future civil rights leaders like Charles Ogletree and John Payton and Christopher Edley Jr. to political leaders like Barack and Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. They made a difference — in the classroom, on the Law Review, and in American life and law.

The number of Hispanic students also dropped sharply, from 63 students, or 11 percent of the total last year, to 39 students, or 6.9 percent of the total this year. The number of white and Asian students obviously increased.

I always used to ask my criminal law students who had ever been stopped by the police. A pretty big smattering of hands, young women included, which usually reduced to a handful when I asked students who talked their way out of it or got away with a warning to put their hands down. How big a handful depending on how many Black men I had in the class. Many of my white students expressed surprise that it was so obvious. I was a better teacher when I had a diverse class. There are a total of six Black men in the entering class at Harvard Law, according to Wilkins.

Richard Sander, a professor at UCLA Law and a critic of affirmative action, dismissed the latest reports from Harvard, telling The New York Times that it might actually be beneficial: "because those students are going to go to another school where they're better matched and they're poised to succeed. ... Students prefer going to a school where they are not going to get a preference, because they think they'll be more competitive there, which I think is true."

My experience, and that of my classmates and students over the years, is that a degree from Harvard Law School opens doors for all of its students, as it did for me, to a Supreme Court clerkship, to a job on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to a professorship at Harvard, to places where it was my calling card. Those were not places where someone who was bartending her way through law school had any connections. The "network" you join in those three years turns out to include some of the most prominent leaders in politics, business and law. I have never in all my years in academia run into a student who told me they turned down Harvard for a second-tier law school to be a better match, and I would certainly never advise a college student to do that.

In a statement, Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal said that the law school continued "to believe that a student body composed of persons with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences is a vital component of legal education. ... Harvard Law School remains committed both to following the law and to fostering an on-campus community and a legal profession that reflect numerous dimensions of human experience."

It has its work cut out for it. Six black men in a class of 560 students is just not enough.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

What Does Daniel Penny's Acquittal Mean? Not What You May Think

Is Daniel Penny a Republican, a Democrat or something else? As of this writing, his political leanings remain a mystery. Republicans clearly want to adopt the white Marine veteran who strangled a threatening Black passenger on a New York City subway car. They may deny it, but the racial dynamics created a desired optic for their warm support.

And the racial dynamics surely played a part in protests by Jordan Neely's supporters — that this was a case of a white person killing a Black man who had already been subdued. After a jury dismissed manslaughter charges against Penny, they argued that had he been Black and the man kept in a long chokehold been white, the outcome would have been different.

They were wrong. We would have had a Black hero who protected a subway car of passengers from harm.

Had I been on the jury, I would have sided with the others and released Penny.

I've shared New York subway cars with hollering homeless men. The spectacle of these mentally ill individuals was always jarring, and I'd keep a watch out of the corner of my eye. At times, I considered changing cars.

But I'd never encountered a deranged passenger yelling "I'm ready to die" and "someone is going to die today" as Neely had done — and who lunged and threw garbage at riders. I was never in a situation where several people on the car simultaneously dialed 911. Two passengers joined Penny in holding Neely down, and others held the car door open at a station to await arrival of the police.

It's true that Penny could have released his chokehold once Neely seemed subdued. It's also true that in the heat of the moment, Penny may not have realized that Neely was no longer a combatant. He says he didn't intend to kill Neely, and police confirm that when they reached him, Neely still had a pulse.

One thing was obvious to all: Neely had no business being on the streets. He had been arrested dozens of times. After breaking a woman's nose in a random attack, he was offered 15 months of supportive housing and intense outpatient psychiatric treatment. After 13 days, he left the program, but the city never went after him.

Donald Trump put Penny on display at the Army-Navy Football Game, having him join the retinue of his uniquely unqualified Cabinet picks. J.D. Vance wrote on X that "New York's mob district attorney tried to ruin his (Penny's) life for having a backbone."

I'm glad Alvin Bragg followed through on a second-degree manslaughter charge after the medical examiner declared the death to be a homicide. That gave a New York jury the opportunity to look at the facts and, in this case, clear the defendant's name.

It is notable that when past Manhattan juries ruled against Trump, MAGA accused New York of being a venue hopelessly biased against the ex-president. Penny's acquitters came from the same jury pool.

Penny's lawyer said his client was not making a political statement by joining Trump and company at the football game. "If it were a president in office who was a Democrat, who invited him to the Army-Navy game as a way to show support to the military and for his country," Steven Raiser said, "he would have gladly accepted that as well."

The subway confrontation underscores the failure to separate the dangerously mentally ill from the general public. Solving the problem requires social spending, which Trump World seems determined to cut.

A New Yorker, Penny may have felt more a quandary than a lust for vigilantism. He could serve his community well by being a Democrat and running for office.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

For Republicans, Turning History Upside Down Is The Point

It turns out Nikki Haley stumbling over the cause of the Civil War was not a one-off.

The topsy-turvy twisting of American history, as it applies to Black Americans — their resilience and contributions despite injustice — is a tactic, a well-planned cynical one. And recent perpetrators don’t even have the decency to make a half-hearted attempt at backtracking, as Haley eventually and reluctantly managed to do after being called out on her amnesia about slavery.

Now politicians are standing proudly as they try to co-opt the language and history of the Civil Rights movement, which fought for equal rights for all and forced America to take a step toward living up to its ideals.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is a master, presenting himself as a billionaire victim and inviting his supporters to follow. But dishonest is too mild a word for politicians when they do everything but break into a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” to sideline the legacy of Americans who truly had to.

In the Florida of Gov. Ron DeSantis, it was not a surprise when the state’s Transportation Department told cities that if they chose to light up their bridges at night, the only acceptable colors would be red, white and blue. The prohibition, set to last between Memorial Day and Labor Day, was widely seen as using an aura of patriotism to preempt the tradition of displaying rainbow colors during June for Pride Month.

But did DeSantis have to label it a part of the state’s “Freedom Summer,” a name that powerfully resonates in American history?

Freedom Summer, also known as the Mississippi Summer Project, was a 1964 voter registration drive — the brainchild of Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — that brought hundreds of white volunteers to join with African Americans to register Black voters in the state. The intimidation and violence they faced led to international attention, outrage and the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

For DeSantis — who has gerrymandered Black voters out of representation, thwarted voters’ efforts to restore voting rights to former felons and fought against having just such history taught in Florida schools — his version of “Freedom Summer” was no doubt intentional.

Staying in Florida, Republican U.S. House member Byron Donalds has been making the rounds defending statements he made at a Philadelphia event designed to attract Black voters to the GOP.

“You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,” he said, as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rather than explain away his comments, Donalds should travel to Mims, Fla., for a lesson in Jim Crow’s effect on Black families in his own state. A cultural center tells of Harry T. and Harriette Moore, teachers whose Civil Rights activism cost them first their jobs, and then their lives, when a bomb exploded under their bedroom. It was Christmas night 1951 and the couple’s 25th anniversary.

When their daughter Evangeline Moore died in 2015 at the age of 85, her Washington Post obituary recounted a last message. “My mother told me from her deathbed that she never wanted me to ever think about hating white people — or anybody else,” Ms. Moore told the Orlando Sentinel in 2009, “because it would make me ugly, and she didn’t want me to be an ugly woman.”

That Donalds is a Black man doesn’t excuse his message. Considering that he owes the possibility of his rise to activists like the Moores, it might make it worse.

Then there’s a North Carolina GOP congressman’s rush to the bottom. Rep. Dan Bishop is making a bid to be his state’s attorney general, running against Jeff Jackson, a Democratic congressman gerrymandered out of any chance to be reelected to his own House seat.

Though he aspires to be the state’s top legal adviser, Bishop has joined fellow Republicans’ disdain for the country’s justice system after it held Donald Trump to account in a New York courtroom, with a jury convicting the former president on 34 felony counts.

Bishop did not stop there, though. “When I say it’s rigged, they don’t go into it as a fair fight,” he said in an interview on Charlotte radio station WBT. “They go into a place where they know the fight is unfair. It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950 if a person happened to be Black in order to get justice. That’s what they did in New York,” he said.

Bishop actually compared a man with a high-priced defense who helped pick a jury in the jurisdiction in which the crimes were charged to a Black man in Alabama in 1950.

There was not much justice for the victim or perpetrator in Alabama in 1950 for Hilliard Brooks Jr.,a 22-year-old Black man murdered on Aug. 13 of that year in Montgomery, after he was accused by a white bus driver of “creating a disturbance” for refusing to enter through the back door. He was shot by a white police officer, though no one was ever charged, and left behind a wife and two children.

His story and thousands of others are told at the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, a museum and memorial complex that’s an essential visit for any American, particularly one who would ask the diverse citizens of a Southern state to trust him to interpret and enforce the law fairly.

Now, laws that prohibit the teaching of African American history make sense. It’s so much easier to sell lies if the next generations don’t know the truth.

Bishop and Donalds, DeSantis and Trump know what they’re doing, as do all the politicians who would erase and replace in their bid to divide and conquer. In fact, Bishop was defiant, saying “the people who attack me for saying so can attack all they want.”

Sadly, those attacks he knew were coming might actually help him ingratiate himself, not only with his party’s leader but also with voters who find comfort in playing victim, too.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

A Shameful Tradition: Republicans Erect New Hurdles To Voting

After the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution — abolishing enslavement, awarding citizenship to Black Americans and guaranteeing their right to vote (Black men, anyway) — it was a time of progress and celebration.

African Americans were elevated to positions in cities, states and at the federal level, including American heroes such as Robert Smalls of South Carolina, first elected in 1874, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was well known by then, though. His sailing skills were crucial in a dramatic escape from enslavement that saw him hijack a Confederate ship he would turn over to the U.S. Navy.

But not everyone viewed the success of Smalls and so many like him as triumphs, proof of the “all men are created equal” doctrine in the Declaration of Independence. For some whites, steeped in the tangled myth of white supremacy and superiority and shocked by the rise of those they considered beneath them, the only answer was repression and violence, often meted out at polling places and the ballot box.

It didn’t matter that these newly elected legislators, when given power, promoted policies that benefited everyone, such as universal public schooling.

In incidents throughout the South, the White League and the Klan killed Black men who had the audacity to exercise their right to vote, intimidating and silencing those who considered doing the same. In the Colfax Massacre in April 1873, an armed group set fire to the Colfax, Louisiana, courthouse, where Republicans and freed people had gathered; between 70 and 150 African Americans were killed by gunfire or in the flames. In Wilmington, North Carolina., white vigilantes intimidated Black voters at the polls, and in 1898, in a bloody coup, overthrew the duly elected, biracial “Fusion” government.

Reconstruction gave way to “Redemption,” couching a return to white domination in the pious language of religion, not the first or last time God was used so shamelessly as cover.

The perpetrators then were Democrats, allied against Lincoln’s Republican Party.

Today, it’s most often Republicans — afraid they can’t convince a majority with ideas alone — who engage in tactics to shrink the electorate to one more amenable to a “Make America Great Again” promise, one that harks back to a time that was not so great for everyone.

It’s not a coincidence that those most amenable to the leader of that movement are white Christian nationalists, eager to align a flawed messenger with a higher power, in order to gain more power on earth.

But the tools are subtle in 2024.

In Republican-led states, with like-minded legislatures, a proliferation of laws has erected hurdles to voting, ones that opponents say disproportionately hit minorities, the poor and the elderly. This week, a federal court in North Carolina is hearing a case brought by the NAACP that is fighting voter ID requirements that Republicans in the state say are not tough enough.

Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have announced an effort to recruit 100,000 poll watchers in battleground states. You don’t have to be a mind reader to imagine where they could be stationed — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee — the places where minority voters are concentrated and where Trump insists fraud is going on.

From the 1980s until a few years ago, the RNC was hampered by a consent decree after complaints that posting armed, off-duty law enforcement officers at polls in minority neighborhoods just might intimidate voters. You have to wonder if they’ve learned anything.

America has seen it all before.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, laws that simply sought to balance the scales, right wrongs and achieve some semblance of justice, were all greeted with pushback that the government was going too far, too fast — that whites were losing something when minorities gained long-denied rights.

Some in the crowd in America’s 21st-century attempted coup, on Jan, 6, 2021, toted Confederate flags and signs demanding a violent take back of a country they don’t recognize and don’t want to accept.

Trump in Time magazine echoes the grievances that have never faded away, as he lays out his plans if elected in November. He promises policies to address what he calls a “definite anti-white feeling” in America.

“If you look at the Biden administration, they’re sort of against anybody depending on certain views,” Trump told Time. “They’re against Catholics. They’re against a lot of different people. … I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed either.”

No proof, of course, that Mass-attending President Joe Biden is anti-Catholic, or that African Americans, with disproportionate outcomes on everything from maternal health to housing, are cruising along. But division and victimhood are all Trump knows. He supports his followers’ views, all FBI evidence to the contrary, that discrimination and hate crimes against whites are bigger problems than discrimination and violence against African Americans.

Trump and Republicans have already succeeded in states across the country, outlawing the teaching of basic history like the facts at the top of this column, for fear the truth about hard-fought gains, often accompanied by bloody sacrifice, might hurt someone’s feelings or perhaps provoke empathy and understanding for the “other.”

Ignorance of history makes it much easier to sell the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and that byzantine rules and poll watchers are needed to prevent the same in 2024.

Trump’s antics in a Manhattan courtroom have drawn all the attention, understandable with headlines about adult film stars, tabloids and the like. Trump won, in part, in 2016 because he knew how to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

But it’s important to pay attention to the words and actions of those who only love an America that excludes rather than includes the voices and votes of all its citizens, those who look back and like the view.

We’ve seen that America — throughout history and as recently as January 2021. It wasn’t pretty.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

World

        About The National Memo
    
The National Memo is a political newsletter and website that combines the spirit of investigative journalism with new technology and ideas. We cover campaigns, elections, the White House, Congress, and the world with a fresh outlook. Our own journalism — as well as our selections of the smartest stories available every day — reflects a clear and strong perspective, without the kind of propaganda, ultra-partisanship and overwrought ideology that burden so much of our political discourse.
TAGS

Created By

RebelMouse

About Masthead Terms of Service Privacy Statement Advertise Contact

Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Start your day with The National Memo Newsletter

Under Court Dictum, Harvard Law School Steps Back In Time

What Does Daniel Penny's Acquittal Mean? Not What You May Think

For Republicans, Turning History Upside Down Is The Point

A Shameful Tradition: Republicans Erect New Hurdles To Voting

Shop our Store

Constitution Cork Coaster

Bill of Rights Mug

Make America Think Again Hat

Constitution Rocks Glass

Headlines

Right-Wing Media Insist It's "DEI" -- Not Climate Change -- Behind LA Wildfires

Is Los Angeles As Toxic As Manhattan After 9/11?

Editor's Blog

Stoking Division Amid Disaster, Trump And His Minions Betray America

In Belligerence Toward Our Neighbors, The Real Trump Emerges

Tesla Workers Say Musk Used H1B Visas To Replace Americans He Laid Off

Corona Virus