GM – FBF – This one case after the Dread Scott decesion will legally let Jim Crow stand for decades. Enyoy!

Remember – “But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.” ― John Marshall Harlan

Today in our History – May Plessy v. Ferguson a Supreme Court Case that will legaly keep people of color back for decades.

Plessy v. Ferguson, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 18, 1896, by a seven-to-one majority (one justice did not participate), advanced the controversial “separate but equal” doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Plessy v. Ferguson was the first major inquiry into the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s (1868) equal-protection clause, which prohibits the states from denying “equal protection of the laws” to any person within their jurisdictions. Although the majority opinion did not contain the phrase “separate but equal,” it gave constitutional sanction to laws designed to achieve racial segregation by means of separate and supposedly equal public facilities and services for African Americans and whites. It served as a controlling judicial precedent until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954).

The case originated in 1892 as a challenge to Louisiana’s Separate Car Act (1890). The law required that all railroads operating in the state provide “equal but separate accommodations” for white and African American passengers and prohibited passengers from entering accommodations other than those to which they had been assigned on the basis of their race. In 1891 a group of Creole professionals in New Orleans formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. They hired Albion Tourgée, a Reconstruction-era judge and social reformer, as their legal counsel. As plaintiff in the test case the committee chose a person of mixed race in order to support its contention that the law could not be consistently applied, because it failed to define the white and “coloured” races. Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth African American, purchased a rail ticket for travel within Louisiana and took a seat in a car reserved for white passengers. (The state Supreme Court had ruled earlier that the law could not be applied to interstate travel.) After refusing to move to a car for African Americans, he was arrested and charged with violating the Separate Car Act. At Plessy’s trial in U.S. District Court, Judge John H. Ferguson dismissed his contention that the act was unconstitutional. After the state Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari, and oral arguments were heard on April 13, 1896. The court rendered its decision one month later, on May 18.

Majority Opinion
Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown rejected Plessy’s arguments that the act violated the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted full and equal rights of citizenship to African Americans. The Separate Car Act did not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, according to Brown, because it did not reestablish slavery or constitute a “badge” of slavery or servitude. In reaching this conclusion he relied on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), which found that racial discrimination against African Americans in inns, public conveyances, and places of public amusement “imposes no badge of slavery or involuntary servitude…but at most, infringes rights which are protected from State aggression by the XIVth Amendment.”

Yet the act did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment either, Brown argued, because that amendment was intended to secure only the legal equality of African Americans and whites, not their social equality. Legal equality was adequately respected in the act because the accommodations provided for each race were required to be equal and because the racial segregation of passengers did not by itself imply the legal inferiority of either race—a conclusion supported, he reasoned, by numerous state-court decisions that had affirmed the constitutionality of laws establishing separate public schools for white and African American children. In contrast, social equality, which would entail the “commingling” of the races in public conveyances and elsewhere, did not then exist and could not be legally created: “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” In response to Plessy’s comparison of the Separate Car Act to hypothetical statutes requiring African Americans and whites to walk on different sides of the street or to live in differently coloured houses, Brown responded that the Separate Car Act was intended to preserve “public peace and good order” and was therefore a “reasonable” exercise of the legislature’s police power.

Dissenting Opinion
In his lone dissenting opinion, which would become a classic of American civil rights jurisprudence, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan insisted that the court had ignored the obvious purpose of the Separate Car Act, which was, “under the guise of giving equal accommodation for whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while traveling in railroad passenger coaches.” Because it presupposed—and was universally understood to presuppose—the inferiority of African Americans, the act imposed a badge of servitude upon them in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, according to Harlan. The effect of the law, he argued, was to interfere with the personal liberty and freedom of movement of both African Americans and whites. Because it thus attempted to regulate the civil rights of citizens on the arbitrary basis of their race, the act was repugnant to the principle of legal equality underlying the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote,

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

He concluded that “in my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case” (1857), which had declared (in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney) that African Americans were not entitled to the rights of U.S. citizenship. Research more about the courts and people of color in the Country and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – With Mother’s Day over I can now run what happened yesterday in the city of brotherly love back in 1985.

Remember – The Philadelphia police have declared war on it’s own people – Osage Ave. Resident

Today in our History – May14, 1985 –

The Day after a City Bombed Its Own People – It was 33 years ago yesterday that Philadelphia earned the sorry distinction of being the first U.S. city government to bomb its own people. More than three decades ago, Philadelphia police, after surrounding and engaging in a shootout with a group of mostly black members of the communalist group MOVE who were holed up in their row house on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, dropped two “satchel bombs” containing powerful C-4 explosive (provided by the FBI) onto the building’s roof. As firefighters, ordered not to take any action to put out the spreading flames from the explosions, stood by and watched, the MOVE house burned to the ground, killing 11 of the 13 people in the building, including five children and MOVE’s founder, John Africa. The inferno also destroyed 65 adjacent buildings, decimating two blocks of the mostly black lower-middle-class neighborhood.

At a federal trial a year later, a jury found that the city of Philadelphia had used “excessive force” and had violated the constitutional rights of lone adult survivor Ramona Africa and the dead victims. It awarded $1.5 million to her and the families of two of the victims.

In 1986, the city’s then mayor, W. Wilson Goode, impanelled a body, known as the MOVE Commission, to investigate the atrocity. Its conclusion, announced in 1986: “Dropping a bomb on an occupied row house was unconscionable.” It also found that “Police gunfire prevented some occupants of 6221 Osage Ave. from escaping from the burning house to the rear alley.” It is worth remembering this slaughter of innocents by uniformed personnel whose official duty was supposedly to “protect and serve” their community, at a time when the European Union is seeking the UN Security Council’s approval to begin bombing Libyan ports and ships to prevent African and Middle Eastern refugees from fleeing to Italy and Europe. It is worth remembering this slaughter when the U.S. is using remotely piloted missile-equipped drones to blow up homes and vehicle convoys in the hope of killing alleged terrorists, killing numerous innocent civilians in the process. And it is worth remembering this slaughter when a growing movement is developing to protest the murders of unarmed Americans, mostly people of color, by the nation’s increasingly militarized police.

Nobody in the city leadership of Philadelphia was ever prosecuted for the killing of the people in the MOVE house on Osage Avenue, though the incident was wholly instigated and orchestrated by city police. (The city paid to have the destroyed homes rebuilt, but they then had to be rebuilt again because of substandard construction.) This lack of accountability for a city’s murder, by bombing, of 11 of its residents, including children, is truly shocking. But it is perhaps less surprising when one sees that nobody has been called to account either for the officially sanctioned murder of hundreds of innocents by the U.S. targeted-killing drone campaigns in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Syria, and other countries, and when one recalls that only a few indictments have been handed down against any of the police officers who have been killing hundreds of unarmed people across the country every year. It’s ironic that the national media remain obsessed with the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the young man whose fate is being determined by a jury after his recent conviction for the Boston Marathon bombing, an act of terrorism that killed three people, while the 33th anniversary of the MOVE bombing—an event that was orchestrated by the police, and where the deaths were deliberate and intentional since the victims were not permitted to flee the burning building—goes largely unmarked. Meanwhile, one journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has not remained silent, and who has regularly memorialized that terrible event, writing from a prison cell or recording reports by phone for Prison Radio, is currently in grave danger.

Prison medical staff failed to notice that Abu-Jamal, currently serving a life sentence without chance of parole after a 1982 conviction for the killing of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981, had lost some 60 pounds between January and March of this year. They took no action at all until he collapsed on the floor from sugar shock in late March. Rushed to a hospital with his blood-glucose level at a point where he was at risk of going into a diabetic coma and suffering renal failure, he was finally given insulin. But he was then returned to the prison—where he was immediately offered a meal of prison pasta. Prison officials have rebuffed efforts by Abu-Jamal’s family and supporters to have him treated by expert physicians knowledgeable about diabetes as well as about the serious skin eruptions that have been plaguing him. Yet Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections in the past allowed millionaire convicted murderer John Eleuthere du Pont to be treated by his own private physician in the prison.

Abu-Jamal’s supporters fear the state’s law-enforcement and prison system may be trying to accomplish what the federal courts, by overturning his death sentence as unconstitutional, prevented them from doing: silencing this voice of truth, but by medical neglect and malpractice instead of with a lethal injection. Meanwhile, here’s what Abu-Jamal had to say five years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the MOVE bombing: “May 13th, 1985 is more than a day of infamy, when a city waged war on its own alleged citizens, but also when the city committed massacre and did so with perfect impunity, when babies were shot and burned alive with their mothers and fathers, and the killers rewarded with honors and pensions, while politicians talked and the media mediated mass murder.” Research more about MOVE and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – “The Souls of Poor Folk: Auditing America 50 Years After the Poor People’s Campaign Challenged Racism, Poverty, the War Economy/Militarism and Our National Morality.” – I ask has there been any change for the poor in America?

Remember – “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing‐oriented” society to a “person‐oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today in oue History – May 12, 1968 – Poor People’s Campaign: A Dream Unfulfilled (50 Years Later) – In early 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders planned a Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., for the spring. The group planned to demand that President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, health care and decent homes.

Campaign organizers intended the campaign to be a peaceful gathering of poor people from communities across the nation. They would march through the capital and visit various federal agencies in hopes of getting Congress to pass substantial anti-poverty legislation. They planned to stay until some action was taken.

But weeks before the march was to take place, King was assassinated. His widow, Coretta, and a cadre of black ministers, including the Revs. Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, decided they would pick up where King had left off and that the Poor People’s March on Washington would go forward.

Thousands of people participated in the march on May 12, 1968.

A week later, protestors erected a settlement of tents and shacks on the National Mall where they camped out for six weeks. Jackson became mayor of the encampment, which was called Resurrection City. Conditions were miserable.

Although as many as 50,000 people ended up marching, the Poor People’s Campaign was considered a failure by people who had grown weary of protesting and did not see immediate changes.

The closing was sort of unceremonious. When the demonstrators’ permit expired on June 23, some [members of the House of] Representatives, mostly white Southerners, called for immediate removal. So the next day, about 1,000 police officers arrived to clear the camp up of its last few residents. Ultimately, they arrested 288 people, including [civil rights leader and minister Ralph] Abernathy.

Although not much has changed for many poor Americans, the role of religion in the black community has changed greatly since the days when King and others wielded such power.

Over the years, megachurches have become more popular in black communities, just as they have in white communities. These megachurches have amassed influence and wealth partly because of their sheer number of parishioners. Some have created satellite churches and broadcast their gospel on television.

Research more about The Poor People’s Struggle in America by watching a video or reading books to your babies and make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today we look bsch on our, Greek lettered fraternities and sororities. Coming together to create a union. Enjoy!

Remember – “It’s all about love. We’re either in love, dreaming about love, recovering from it, wish for it or reflecting on it.” – Unknown

Todat in our History – May 10, 1930 –

The National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) is a collaborative organization of nine historically African American, international Greek lettered fraternities and sororities. The nine NPHC organizations are sometimes collectively referred to as the “Divine Nine”. The member/partner organizations have not formally adopted nor recommended the use of this term to describe their collaborative grouping. The NPHC was formed as a permanent organization on May 10, 1930 on the campus of Howard University, in Washington, D.C. with Matthew W. Bullock as the active Chairman and B. Beatrix Scott as Vice-Chairman. NPHC was incorporated under the laws of the State of Illinois in 1937.

The council promotes interaction through forums, meetings and other mediums for the exchange of information and engages in cooperative programming and initiatives through various activities and functions.

Each constituent member organization determines its own strategic direction and program agenda. Today, the primary purpose and focus of member organizations remains camaraderie and academic excellence for its members and service to the communities they serve. Each promotes community awareness and action through educational, economic, and cultural service activities.

The National Pan-Hellenic Council was established in an age when racial segregation and disenfranchisement plagued African Americans, the rise of each of the black fraternities and sororities that make up the NPHC bore witness to the fact that despite hardships African Americans refused to accede to a status of inferiority.

The organization’s stated purpose and mission in 1930:

Unanimity of thought and action as far as possible in the conduct of Greek letter collegiate fraternities and sororities, and to consider problems of mutual interest to its member organizations.

The founding members of the NPHC were Kappa Alpha Psi, Omega Psi Phi, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, and Zeta Phi Beta. The council’s membership expanded as Alpha Phi Alpha (1931), Phi Beta Sigma (1931), Sigma Gamma Rho (1937), and Iota Phi Theta (1996) joined this coalition of Black Greek letter organizations (BGLOs). In his book on BGLOs, Lawrence Ross coined the phrase “The Divine Nine” when referring to the coalition.

As required by various campus recognition policies, neither the NPHC, nor its member national or chapter organizations discriminate on the basis of race or religion.

In 1992, the first permanent national office for NPHC was established in Bloomington, Indiana on the campus of Indiana University through the joint cooperation of Indiana University and the National Board of Directors of NPHC. Research more about this time honored Tridition and share with your babies. Make it a champion day!