Unemployment For Milwaukee’s Black Men Must Be Addressed. This Is A Criminal State Of Affairs.

Wednesday, October 6,2010

More Bad Job Numbers for Milwaukee’s Black Men

UWM study confirms persistent racial gap, despite diplomas

By Lisa Kaiser

How bad is Milwaukee’s employment picture?

It’s so bad that the average black man in Milwaukee is more likely to be jobless than employed, according to new data from UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development.

Professor Marc Levine’s study shows that in 2009, 53% of Milwaukee’s black men were jobless, up from 47% in 2008 and the highest level recorded in the city since these statistics started being kept in 1970.

The “jobless rate” is a measurement that includes men who are officially unemployed as well as those who are disabled, incarcerated, voluntarily unemployed or retired and discouraged workers who have given up looking for work. This more-inclusive measurement is higher than the official unemployment rate.

The high level of joblessness is not the only bad news for Milwaukee’s black men. According to Levine’s study:

Joblessness among black men in their prime working years, between 25 and 54, jumped from 36% to 44% from 2008 to 2009.

• Improved high-school graduation rates aren’t holding down black male unemployment. The number of high-school graduates for those over the age of 25 has increased from 34% in 1970 to 75% in 2009. But the jobless rate for black men in their prime earning years has tripled during the same period.

• The racial gap in joblessness has tripled since 1970, from an 11% gap to a 31% gap in joblessness between white men and black men.

• The Great Recession has hit Milwaukee’s black men harder than white men. While Milwaukee lost almost 20,000 jobs, white males are faring better in Milwaukee than those in “thriving” cities around the country. Black men, on the other hand, are doing better elsewhere than in Milwaukee.

Suburban Segregation and Incarceration Policies

In an interview with the Shepherd, Levine said the greatest factor in the persistent racial gap is “entrenched segregation,” as he put it.

As of 2008, 38% of the city of Milwaukee’s population is African American, while 25% of Milwaukee County is African American.

Compare that to the 2000 U.S. Census figures for Waukesha County, which is 96% white and 0.73% African American; Ozaukee County, which is 97% white and 0.2% African American; and Washington County, which is 98% white and 0.4% African American.

“We have the lowest rate of black suburbanization of any large metropolitan area in the country,” Levine said. “Since job growth has been a bit better in suburban areas than in central cities, the fact that we have so few African-American males living in the suburbs means that blacks don’t have ready access to where the jobs are.”

David Pate, an assistant professor at UWM’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare, said the jobless black men he’s been studying say that they feel uncomfortable when they apply for jobs in all-white suburbs.

“They feel that they’re under a microscope,” Pate said. “They’ve told me, ‘I’m not wanted there. Why should I keep bothering to apply for a job there?’”

Levine also pointed to the high incarceration rate for black men in Milwaukee.

“We have a criminal justice policy for young black men, not an employment policy,” Levine said.

Levine suggested that improved regional transit, job training and a “Marshall Plan” for public works jobs would help to boost black men’s job prospects.

Local businesses and governments should have a “buy locally, hire locally” policy, Levine added.

In 2009, the Milwaukee Common Council passed the MORE Ordinance, which had been spearheaded by the Good Jobs and Livable Neighborhoods Coalition.

The ordinance requires all private development projects seeking more than $1 million in public assistance to prioritize the hiring of workers from the city who are unemployed or underemployed and to seek contracts from emerging or local businesses before contracting with other vendors.

Not waiting for Superman Web site launched

Not waiting for Superman Web site launched at:

http://www.NOTWaitingforSuperman.org

Following is a letter from Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp explaining why this Web site has been created.

Dear Friends,

On Sept. 24, a new film, “Waiting for Superman,” will draw media attention to public education across the country. Unfortunately, most of it will be negative. So we’ve started a project to talk back to the film and the message it promotes. We hope you will join us at NOTwaitingforsuperman.org.

The message of the film is that public schools are failing because of bad teachers and their unions. The film’s “solution,” to the minimal extent it suggests one, is to replace them with “great” charter schools and teachers who have less power over their schools and classrooms.

This message is not just wrong. In the current political climate, it’s toxic.

The film was made by the Academy-Award winning director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary that helped awaken millions to the dangers of global warming. But this film misses the mark by light years. Instead of helping people understand the many problems schools face and what it will take to address them, it presents misleading information and simplistic “solutions” that will make it harder for those of us working to improve public education to succeed. We know first hand how urgently change is needed. But by siding with a corporate reform agenda of teacher bashing, union busting, test-based “accountability” and highly selective, privatized charters, the film pours gasoline on the public education bonfire started by No Child Left Behind and Race To the Top.

Rethinking Schools has never hesitated to criticize public schools. We do it in every issue. We’ve been working for over 25 years to bring social justice and racial equality to our classrooms, our schools, our districts—and our unions. We know many of you have been doing the same. But this film does not contain a single positive image of a non-charter public school or a teacher. Despite a lot of empty rhetoric about the importance of “great teachers,” the disrespect the film displays to real teachers working on the ground in public schools today is stunning. Not one has a voice in the film. There are no public school parents working together to improve the schools their children attend. There are no engaged communities. There is no serious discussion of funding, poverty, race, testing or the long and sorry history of top-down bureaucratic reform failure.

It’s as if someone made a film about global warming and did not mention cars, oil companies, or carbon dioxide.

The film has an undeniably powerful emotional impact, and the stories of the children and families it highlights are compelling to all of us. But the film uses these stories to promote an agenda that will hurt public schools and the communities that depend on them. It’s time to speak up for ourselves, our students, and our schools.

Please join us at NOTwaitingforsuperman.org or email us at notwaiting@rethinkingschools.org and let’s get to work.

[Right now, the link will take you to a Facebook book page that anyone can view, though only those with a FB account can post. In a few days, the same link, NOTwaitingforsuperman.org, will take you to a brand new NOT Waiting for Superman website that's almost ready to launch. Both sites will remain active for the duration of this campaign.]

Stan Karp
for the editors of Rethinking Schools

Support October 2nd March On Washington To “Demand The Change We Voted For!”

NAACP president announces Oct. 2 march on Washington

By MEREDITH RODRIGUEZ  The Kansas City Star

NAACP members will march in Washington, D.C., in October to draw attention to social problems that have intensified during the recession, the organization’s president said Monday night.

At the NAACP’s 101st annual convention at Bartle Hall, Benjamin Todd Jealous asked the country to join the NAACP on Oct. 2 to rebut division that he said the tea party has created and to fight together against ills such as foreclosures, joblessness, failed schools, urban violence and racism.

“Fire up the troops of hope, unity and justice in this nation,” Jealous said. “This fall, we are going to lead a great and mighty army that looks like America.”

Audience members held signs with the title of the movement, “One Nation,” along with “Revive,” “Organize” and “10-2-10.”

A resolution will be proposed this week condemning racism within the tea party movement.

Tea party leaders, however, deny that the movement is racist and said the resolution is unfair. Brendan Steinhauser, director of campaigns for FreedomWorks, which organizes tea party groups, said that “racism is something we’re absolutely opposed to.”

A month before the November election, marchers will demand the change they voted for when Barack Obama was elected, Jealous said. They will keep their senators accountable to regulate lenders, create jobs and stop moving money out of education and into wars and prisons.

He praised comprehensive health care reform and called for comprehensive immigration reform.

“We are descendants of slaves, native Americans and immigrants,” Jealous said. “We believe in the values represented by the Statue of Liberty. And that faith commands us to fix our broken immigration system in a way that respects basic human rights, universal human dignity and the sanctity of families.”

The One Nation movement will march on Washington to show “that the majority of this nation is ready and willing to fight back and ensure that all of the change we voted for is a reality for all of our children,” he said.
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/07/12/2079440/naacp-president-announces-oct.html#ixzz0unXRVZeg

High Tech Lynching of Shirley Sherrod

The racist Tea Party is trying to recover from the hits it has taken in the past week. But any group that aligns with white supremacists, charlatans and opportunists will not be allowed to go unchallenged.

Thank you Shirley Sherrod for standing up to the enemies of justice and freedom!

(Following are excerpts from an op-ed by Frank Rich in the New York Times that sets the record straight on a number of issues.)

There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’

Op-Ed Columnist By FRANK RICH Published: July 24, 2010

This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.

Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod’s 43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its validity. That the speech had been given at an N.A.A.C.P. event, with N.A.A.C.P. officials as witnesses, did not prevent even the N.A.A.C.P. from immediately condemning Sherrod for “shameful” actions. As the world knows now, her talk (flogged by Fox as “what racism looks like”) was an uplifting parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural development.

The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn’t look like a Norman Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife’s testimony to her good deeds on CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture who fired Sherrod without questioning the video’s patently spurious provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn’t a failure of due diligence — there was no diligence.

Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the Sherrod smear — including some in the news business who reported on the video without vetting it — have watched her entire speech. What’s important is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What matters is Sherrod’s own story.

She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th anniversary of her father’s funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17, leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth. Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed “Gator” for a reason. Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father’s murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.

Sherrod had long thought she’d flee the South, but had an epiphany on the night of her father’s death. “I couldn’t just let his death go without doing something in answer to what happened,” she said. So she made the commitment to stay and devote her life to “working for change.” She later married Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation, including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the civil rights movement.

None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea Party to expel “racist elements” in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a “parody” on the Web — a letter from “colored people” to Abraham Lincoln berating him as “the greatest racist ever” and complaining about “that whole emancipation thing” because “freedom means having to work for real.”

Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P. had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party’s racist elements, he was belatedly excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth, it’s not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.

The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle, Harry Reid’s Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under their tent. “I am not interested in getting into that debate,” said Mitch McConnell last week.

Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus Sherrod video as revenge under the headline “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism.” To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.”

Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes. Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod’s father was murdered 200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis with lying — never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses — and tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn’t push it. But he wasn’t deterred then, and he and others like him won’t be deterred by the Sherrod saga’s “happy ending” as long as the McConnells of the conservative establishment look the other way and Fox pumps racial rage into the media bloodstream 24/7.

“You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards,” Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.

Shorewood Student Going To Trial Over Cafeteria Chicken Nugget Incident

Rally of Support for Adam!

When: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at 4:30pm

Where: Shorewood Village Hall, 3930 N. Murray Ave in Shorewood

On March 30th, Adam, a freshman at Shorewood High School, was given chicken nuggets by another student who was fasting and did not want them. Adam went to the lunch line to get sauce for the nuggets and was accused of stealing them. The assistant principal, Mark Harris, was notified of the “theft” of the chicken nuggets. Before approaching Adam to “investigate,” Harris informed the Shorewood police officer stationed at the school, who requested another police squad to intervene. Adam, who has no prior criminal history or Shorewood School District disciplinary history, was handcuffed and arrested at school during lunch. He was booked, fingerprinted and issued a citation for theft which states “defendant took and consumed a school lunch without paying and without consent.”

Though Shorewood High School assistant principal Mark Harris notified the police about the “theft of Shorewood school lunch,” the police are pressing the charges and not the school. Shorewood High School administrators and Shorewood superintendent McCann have stated that this matter does not involve the school and they will NOT be making any recommendation for dismissal of the charges. Despite Shorewood School District’s ostensibly “hands-off approach,” Shorewood High School assistant principal Mark Harris attended Adam’s pre-trial hearing, spoke with the prosecutor and allegedly insisted that Adam is guilty, resulting in the continued prosecution of Adam for theft of school lunch chicken nuggets valued at $2.60.

Adam will stand trial for theft charges next Tuesday, July 20th at the Shorewood Village Hall, 3930 N. Murray Ave.

A rally of support for Adam will occur before the trial on Tuesday, July 20th. The rally begins at 4:30pm and the trial begins at 5:30pm. Please join Adam’s family and community members to voice support for Adam and to encourage the Shorewood School District not to abandon its children by pipelining them into the criminal justice system. The school to prison pipeline must be broken.

The rally is co-sponsored by Educators’ Network for Social Justice and Urban Underground.

Rally Against Teacher Layoffs: Coverage by Milwaukee Courier and Speech by Bob Peterson

Speech by Bob Peterson at the Step Up for Children Rally

June 21, 2010 Milwaukee, WI

On behalf of Educators Network for Social Justice, I thank you for attending today’s rally.

I speak as a classroom teacher for more than 30 years, a union activist, and a founding member of Educators network. In 1982 I was laid off from MPS for a year, so I sympathize with you educators who have been laid off.

My message today is simple: These layoffs in MPS are not inevitable.  There are solutions. And we must fight for these solutions at the local, state and federal level.

At the federal level, there is the “Put our Educators Back to Work” bill introduced by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. In essence, it is a stimulus bill focused on counteracting the estimated 300,000 layoffs in schools across the country. Clearly, this is a national problem that needs a national solution.

Please call Senators Kohl and and Feingold and demand they support the Harkin bill.

If this country has the money to bail out Goldman Sachs and the banks — to say nothing of spending billions of dollars on wars that have no end in sight — it certainly has the money to fund our children’s future.

At the state level, legislators must support the Penny for Kids campaign led by the Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools. And in the long run, we must insist that our policymakers fix what everyone agrees is our broken system of how we fund education.

Finally, we must demand that our locally elected officials support the solutions at hand. Mayor Barrett and County Exec Scott Walker are running for governor on a jobs platform. Well, they must walk their talk. If a Milwaukee factory were eliminating 700 jobs, they would be bending over backwards with financial incentives. Why are they silent about the 700 MPS layoffs?

Remember. There are solutions to not only these layoffs but the larger problem of funding public education.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Rally to support students in face of layoffs

26 June 2010 Milwaukee Courier

Wendell Harris, vice-president of Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP and chair of the NAACP Education Committee stands with students, teachers, parents and other rally organizers with signs in support of laid off MPS staff and 700 pair of shoes, demonstrating the 700 layoff slips sent out. The ‘Step Up for Our Children’ Rally was held on Monday, June 21, 2010 outside of the Federal Building. (Photo by Robert A. Bell)

Teachers and parents held a rally Monday afternoon in support of the hundreds of Milwaukee Public School teachers who are losing their jobs. Organizers want emergency federal funding to keep more teachers in the classroom.

The district mailed out layoff notices to 482 teachers, 600 substitute teachers, and 233 educational assistants. Including Mayor Barrett’s wife Chris, who is a teacher. The teachers union is fighting the cuts.

Organizers of the rally put 700 pairs of shoes on the steps of the federal building to symbolize the number of teachers laid off. “Who will fill my teachers shoes” was the theme.

Wendell Harris, vice-president of the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP and chair of the Education Committee of the NAACP opened the rally, where teachers, parents, students and advocates spoke in support of the students who are losing educators due to these cuts.

“It is unfortunate for everyone involved, my children are in the district as are many other aldermans’ and constituents’ children.” said Alderman and Common Council president Willie Hines, Jr. “We need structural changes within the system and we need to create new business partners.” he continued.

According to MPS, the emergency money that the organizers are asking for will not be enough for any long term solutions, however organizers say that it will keep teachers in for some time, and during that time other solutions could be worked on.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore spoke at the rally as well, and she stated that the rally was an act to exercise emergency democracy. Not only are our children’s futures at risk here, so are the realities and day to day lives of those being threaten with layoffs.

Rally attendees were encouraged to call on Senators Feingold and Kohl to support the ‘Keep Our Educators Working Act’, a bill that would provide $23 billion to financially strapped school districts.

Citizen Action of Wisconsin, one of the sponsors of Monday’s rally released a statement: The economic recession has devastate state and local revenue which provides the vast majority of education funding.

Only the federal government can provide the immediate funding necessary to rehire laid off MPS educators and staff. Without the help of Congress, the cuts in MPS will deeply damage the educational future of our children and the economic future of the City of Milwaukee.

Popular Interests In This Article: Gwen Moore, Herb Kohl, Milwaukee Public Schools, NAACP, Robert Bell Photography, Russ Feingold, Step Up for Our Children Rally, Teacher Layoffs, Wendel Harris, Willie Hines

Photos of MPS Teacher Demonstration Against Lay-offs

For photos of Monday June 21 demo against Milwaukee Public School teacher layoffs go to:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=49645&id=1590202857&l=d33462bb2d