Obama lauds governors for helping ‘right the ship’
February 21, 2010
President Barack Obama is thanking governors for “helping to right the ship” during the economic crisis that hammered the United States over the last couple of years.
The state leaders are gathering at the White House for their annual Governors Ball following weekend meetings of the National Governors Association.
Obama praised them for their “ability to work across state lines and party lines.” He said Washington politicians could learn from them.
The president said governors couldn’t afford to be overly ideological because “the rubber hits the road with you.”
Governors saw firsthand how “brutal” the economic crisis was, Obama said, and deserve “extraordinary credit” for leading their states through it.
AP
Obama, black leaders focus on economic hard times
February 11, 2010
President Barack Obama and three prominent African-American leaders grappled Wednesday with how to improve economic opportunities for blacks, whose joblessness looms well above the national average and is nearly twice that of whites.
On a day of treacherous weather in Washington, Obama kept his scheduled meeting with Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP; Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League; and the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network. Dorothy Height, chairwoman of the National Council of Negro Women, could not make it to the White House because of the pounding snow and winds that kept most of the nation’s capital shut down.
The meeting did not yield immediate announcements or initiatives.
Obama and the other leaders focused on targeting aid to regions to help black people and other groups that have been hit disproportionately hard by the recession, Jealous told The Associated Press.
“When you try to focus on how to lift all those boats, what you come back to are places—geographic areas, urban and rural, where assistance should be located,” he said. “That approach can work if Congress lets it work.”
He added: “This is about place. It’s not about race.”
Obama, the nation’s first black president, has consistently held that he cannot adopt employment strategies that are designed to solely help blacks. But he supports targeting help to regions most in need, which in turn, he says, would lift the African-American community.
There is a push among some black advocates for Obama’s administration to target black joblessness with training programs and direct job creation. The unemployment rate for blacks was 16.5 percent in January, compared to 9.7 percent overall and 8.7 percent for whites.
“What’s clear is that we have a president who gets it,” Jealous said. He accused Republican lawmakers and governors of obstructing Obama on initiatives like stimulus spending and a push to overhaul health insurance. Those efforts would help minorities, he said.
The Oval Office meeting ran almost an hour. The next steps will likely be meetings with Cabinet members and leaders of both parties to keep the effort moving, Jealous said.
BEN FELLER, AP
Haiti’s revolt inspired U.S. black activists
January 27, 2010
Peniel E. Joseph, Special to CNN
- Haiti’s poverty has been much discussed since its massive earthquake, but little has been said of its rich, and equally fraught, history.
For African-Americans, Haiti’s tragedy hits close to home. For more than two centuries the tiny, at times fragile, republic has inspired black political activism in the United States.
Born of the influence of the French and American revolutions, Haiti, once prized as the jewel of the French Empire, changed the course of its history by engineering a revolution that startled the world.
Once a colony of slaves under French rule in the 18th century, Haiti transformed itself into the first black republic and one of the first nations in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery.
Are We Overlooking The Black Power Behind Obama?
January 17, 2010
NPR
- A year ago this week, Barack Obama stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to take the presidential oath of office.
That moment was described throughout the media as the climax of a journey that began 46 years earlier, at the other end of the National Mall, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
But Peniel Joseph, a historian at Tufts University, says not enough attention has been paid to the other main line of succession in African-American leadership — the one that leads from Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and the black power movement.
Race barriers remain in post-Obama South
December 10, 2009
NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON & JONATHAN MARTIN, Politico
- After last year’s historic presidential campaign, a new season of opportunity seemed at hand for African-American candidates in the South. Not only had a black man been elected president, he had carried Virginia and North Carolina along the way.
But Dixie is slow to yield its traditions and paradoxes, as Rep. Artur Davis is finding as he tries to fashion an Obama-style cross-racial coalition in his bid to become Alabama’s first black governor.
If anything, Davis, a Democrat, is finding it may be more complicated than ever for African-Americans to win statewide races in the Deep South. In today’s complicated political landscape, it’s not just old-style prejudice that must be overcome but also a more complicated stew of long-simmering personal grievances, generational tensions and intraracial rivalries.
Never a favorite of the state’s Democratic establishment, Davis has come under fierce attack from Joe Reed — for years the most influential African-American in Alabama politics — for being the only black House member to oppose health care legislation. Reed savaged Davis as a political opportunist who opposed the bill to curry favor with the state’s conservative-leaning white majority.
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