A two-tiered justice system is nothing new — and certainly not what Trump says it is

Featured at Roll Call

It may come as a surprise to hear that I actually agree with Donald Trump on something: America does have a two-tiered system of justice. In fact, you could say I beat him to it since I reached that conclusion long before the former president adopted it as his mantra.

I was not even in grade school when my older brother was arrested. While I didn’t know much about the world, I always thought that you had to do something terrible for law enforcement to haul you away. I also knew my brother Tony. And, though he teased me in the annoying way big brothers do, I valued him not only as a brother and friend, but as a pretty cool dude. So, I knew he couldn’t be the bad guy.

I still remember that night.

My mom and dad, fresh off the joy of a church dance, were confronted with the crisis when they hit the front door, and they scrambled to find the deed to the house in case they needed it to bail their son out (because if my father had anything to say about it, Tony was not going to spend a night in jail).

I was more confused when I discovered his “crime,” sitting down in a diner and ordering a burger.

That was it?

It really was the “system,” I realized, not my brother. Maryland law, at a time not that long ago, allowed business owners to bar Black people from their establishments. What the state did was technically legal — but wrong. I was sure of it.

An unjust law allowed the police whose salary my parents paid with their taxes to handcuff, fingerprint and jail my big brother because people who looked like my family were not included in an oath to “protect and serve.”

It was definitely a two-tiered system of justice, one that folks like my three eldest siblings and civil rights lawyer Juanita Jackson Mitchell — whose expertise brought my brother home — worked to correct with activism and courage, an adjective that definitely does not apply to Trump’s Jan. 6 army of lawbreakers.

That the activists’ job is not done is clear when poor folks and minorities, often represented by overworked public defenders, languish in jails when they haven’t been tried or convicted of anything.

It’s why my solidarity with Trump ends when you dive into the actual details.

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Mar212024 TAGS: , ,

For history-challenged candidates, Civil War source material is nearby

Featured at Roll Call

Who would have thought so many of those competing to be president of the United States would have slept through American History 101? And I wonder why, if a working-class student at a modest Catholic school in Baltimore managed bus trips to museums in that city and neighboring Washington, D.C., folks who grew up with far more resources than I ever dreamed of never found the time to learn from the treasures such institutions contain?

Welcome to campaign 2024, when it seems each day’s headlines include at least one fractured history lesson, revealing just how much our leaders don’t know or don’t want to know about America’s past, and why that matters for our present and future.

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Jan112024 TAGS: , , , , , , , ,

A summer of reflection — and fears of history repeating itself

Featured at Roll Call

It is a striking image, a fearless visage staring at the camera while holding a sign with booking number “7053” chest high. “Beautiful rebel” are the words used to describe Rosa Parks on the coaster that I’ve decided will never cushion a bottle or glass.

Another mugshot has made the news this summer though I don’t think even his supporters would label the subject “beautiful.” “Defiant” is the better adjective for the Donald Trump that looks out from the photo taken when he was booked in Fulton County, Ga., the first mug shot of an American president. Controversial? Yes. But after being charged with a litany of felonies that stem from his and his allies’ alleged efforts to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, was there a choice?

While it has been impossible to escape the image now gracing X, formerly known as Twitter, T-shirts and more, the first — the quiet, determined woman — has been stripped of its radical origins, if it’s remembered at all by those who praise the former president’s close-up.

When and if children learn about Rosa Parks and her role in the civil rights movement, the lesson is usually recounted through a gauzy lens that portrays her as a respectable seamstress who just got tired one day instead of the tireless NAACP activist whose refusal to move to the back of the bus was an inevitable and deliberate part of a movement, the continuing fight against the social order of segregation, white supremacy and police brutality that ruled the day.

It wasn’t only Parks in the fight. She has been elevated because of America’s tendency to flatten and simplify, to spoon-feed harsh historical truths in a narrative of happily-ever-afters. In fact, the famous Parks mugshot was taken, not in 1955 during her initial arrest, but in February 1956, when Parks and many other activists were targeted by the city in an attempt to break the back of a boycott that was getting results and making Montgomery leaders “uncomfortable.”

Discomfort, though, was part of the rebellion — the only way to change the status quo.

The ceramic square is a souvenir collected during my visit to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, one stop in my summer of visits to civil rights museums, the chance to broaden my own education about American history.

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Sep062023 TAGS: , , , , , , ,

Can the U.S. military still lead the way on civil rights?

Featured at Roll Call

Executive Order 9981. President Harry Truman signed it on July 26, 1948, mandating the desegregation of the U.S. military. As the Truman Library Institute in Washington hosts a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the landmark decision with a civil rights symposium, there are questions, as well.

Some of today’s elected officials have even derided the merit of diversity in the military and as an American value, making it a part of the so-called “culture war.” Yet the order changed the country — and lives.

In a groundbreaking 35-year-career, retired Adm. Michelle Howard was the first woman to become a four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy, the first Black woman to captain a U.S. naval ship and the first woman graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy to become an admiral. In this episode of “Equal Time,” she speaks with host Mary C. Curtis about not only history and her story, but also the importance of diversity in building today’s military — and the way forward.

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Jul192023 TAGS: , , ,

Yesterday’s march, with lessons for today

Featured at Roll Call

March 7, 1965, is a day to remember.

That was never a problem for 90-year-old Ora Bell Shannon of Selma, Ala., then a young mother who ran with her children from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, or for Betty Boynton, who could see the tear gas rising and baton-wielding state troopers beating peaceful marchers.

Civil rights activists — among them Amelia Boynton, Betty Boynton’s mother-in-law, and a young John Lewis — put their bodies on the line to create the headlines and the international shock that forced action from Washington. In truth, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 simply put teeth into the enforcement of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, ignored by state and local governments intent on blocking African Americans from the ballot box.

Back then, it was about the right to vote, and in 2022, it is still about the right to vote, reinforced by the hard-won Voting Rights Act of 1965 but increasingly under attack by state laws placing obstacles in the way of those least able to overcome them.

As many, including Vice President Kamala Harris, traveled to Selma this past Sunday to commemorate what has become known as “Bloody Sunday,” the landscape has changed in a country where many have lost the ability to be shocked or to find common cause with citizens different from themselves.

 It is a world where, as Senate Democrats hold their annual issues conference at Howard University in Washington, elevating the excellence of that institution, students seeking an education at historically Black colleges and universities face bomb threats.

It’s easy to forget that in the not-that-distant past, the annual ceremony in Selma, including a symbolic march across the bridge named for a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, had been bipartisan. In 2015, a chastened Kevin McCarthy, then House majority leader, attended the 50th anniversary of the historic march in Selma after initial reports that no GOP congressional leaders would be there.

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Mar102022 TAGS: , , , ,

When eminently qualified Black women get smeared (or every day that ends in ‘y’)

Featured at Roll Call

She has been endorsed by many law enforcement agencies, including the National Association of Police Organizations, yet she was accused of being anti-police. Baseless innuendo thrown her way has been refuted by support from the National Council of Jewish Women, the Anti-Defamation League and dozens of other local, state and national Jewish organizations. She’s been tagged as “extreme,” which only makes sense if being an advocate for an equitable society qualifies.

The nomination of Kristen Clarke, President Joe Biden’s choice to serve as assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, barely made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Panelists split 11-11 along party lines, and then on Tuesday, the full Senate voted 50-48 to discharge the nomination from the committee, setting up a final floor vote.

Is anyone surprised at the roadblocks this nomination has faced?

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May202021 TAGS: , , , , , , , ,

To remember John Lewis, remember the real John Lewis — and his righteous fight

Featured at Roll Call

Many Americans, when they remember the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, reflexively turn to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, quoting selective passages about content of character. But my sister Joan, who stood under a shaded tent that day, making signs with freedom slogans for out-of-towners to raise high, had a different answer when I asked for her thoughts. Not to take anything away from King, she told me, “It wasn’t just that speech. It was all the speeches.” And what impressed her teenage self most were the words of a man who was just 23, a few years older than she was.

On that day, John Lewis was already stirring up the “good trouble” he favored when he said: “To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now!”

It was a speech that, in an early draft, was a tad fiery for some elders in the movement for equality and justice. Lewis did tone it down — but not enough to lose its urgency.

Some of the tributes to Lewis, who died last week at the age of 80, emphasized his generosity of spirit, evident in his ability to forgive and embrace those who beat him into unconsciousness. But the picture is incomplete without acknowledging the impatience, the fury to make it right, that saw him through more than three dozen arrests, five after he was elected to Congress. Just as those who would have been or probably were in that majority of Americans who considered King a rabble-rouser then and revere him now, many are all too eager to recast Lewis as a secular saint who just wanted everyone to get along.

Of course, they would. It would let them off the hook.

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Jul232020 TAGS: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tribute to John Lewis on Sree Sreenivasan’s call-in show

Featured at WBAI

Coping with COVID-19, Sree Sreenivasan’s call-in show on WBAI in New York City: featuring a tribute to civil rights icon John Lewis

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Jul182020 TAGS: , ,

Mary C. Curtis: Confederate Monument Controversy

Featured at WCCB Rising

CHARLOTTE, NC — Over the last few weeks we’ve seen the removal of confederate monuments across the United States.

Here in North Carolina, the controversial “fame’ statue was removed from downtown Salisbury.

In Gaston county, a panel is having talks this week to decide the future of a confederate statue outside the courthouse.

Here’s WCCB Political contributor Mary C. Curtis with more on the debate.

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Jul082020 TAGS: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Opinion: Did Everyone in the White House Take a Nap During History Class?

Featured at Roll Call

In forward-looking America, history is sometimes regarded as a roadblock to progress, a nuisance. And that, as has been repeatedly proven, is a mistake.

Why look back when the future is so important? Well, because failure to do exactly that has consequences.

The latest to get caught up in “he must have dozed through class that day” is White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who has been criticized for his reading of the Civil War.

 

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Nov022017 TAGS: , , , , ,
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