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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (March 27, 2013)
Opinion March on Washington vs King, Inc. “Challenging People to Shape a Better Future Now” B ERNIE F OSTER Founder/Publisher B OBBIE D ORE F OSTER Executive Editor T ED B ANKS Advertising Manager J ERRY F OSTER Account Executive L ISA L OVING News Editor H ELEN S ILVIS Multimedia Editor B RUCE P OINSETTE Reporter D AVID K IDD Graphic Designer M ONICA J. F OSTER Seattle Office Coordinator J ULIE K EEFE S USAN F RIED Photographers g o g r m t d s - n e The Skanner Newspaper, established in October 1975, is a weekly publica- tion, published each Wednesday by IMM Publications Inc., I n five months, we will cele- brate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. In 1963, the March was jointly called by the Civil Rights Movement’s “Big Six” – A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, James Farmer and John Lewis. At this point, it is unclear whether today’s leaders will come together and rally around the theme of jobs and justice as lead- ers did on Aug. 28, 1963. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King, III are planning a march in Washington. Bernice King has announced a commemoration of the “I Have a Dream” speech at the King Center in Atlanta to observe the 50th anniversary. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Dr. King’s old organization, will be holding its annual convention in the nation’s capital the week of the anniversary and is considering holding an activity. The foundation that raised more than $100 million to erect the MLK monument on the National Mall – and was forced by King’s children to drop the reference to Dr. King in its name – is still hop- ing it can participate in a joint celebration by all of the civil rights groups. Interestingly, the Big Six man- aged to come together when the Black unemployment rate was 6.7 percent, compared to 3.2 percent for Whites. The unemployment rate for Blacks 20 and older in February was 12.7 percent – near- ly double what it was at the time of 415 N. Killingsworth St., T HE C URRY R EPORT George E. Curry the March on Washington. Of course, any discussion about the preservation of Dr. King’s legacy invariably involves his three remaining children – Martin III, Bernice and Dexter. While change its name (it is now The Memorial Foundation) and limit the scope of the monument-con- nected activities it had planned to advance Dr. King’s legacy. Roland Martin and Joe Williams have an interesting article on rolandmartinreports.com about the controversy. We had a heated discussion Sun- day on “Washington Watch with Roland Martin” about the King children’s interaction with Harry Johnson and the group that raised the money for King monument on the Mall, the first to honor an The foundation that raised more than $100 million to erect the MLK monument on the National Mall was forced by King’s children to drop the reference to Dr. King in its name appreciating the King family’s desire to protect intellectual prop- erty left to them by their father, including his “I Have a Dream” speech, I have been critical of their decision to charge what had been known as the Martin Luther King National Memorial Project Foun- dation, Inc. a licensing fee of nearly $3 million to use his name, likeness and quotes in conjunction with a monument erected to him on the National Mall. I also upbraided them for, after making the decision to charge a licensing fee, refusing to extend the agree- ment, forcing the foundation to African American. In response to my earlier column on the subject, Armstrong Williams wrote a col- umn claiming I had slandered the King family and “For Mr. Curry to spread the falsehood that the King family is charging schools for the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is not only wrong, but embarrassing to these good people.” After schooling Armstrong Sun- day on the difference between “slander,” defamation that is spo- ken, and “libel,” which is written, I told him I couldn’t have possibly made that charge because I never used the word “school” anywhere in my column. He waited four months to reply and still didn’t get it right. To his credit, Armstrong acknowledged his error on-air and apologized. During the program Sunday, Roland said he had spoken with Tricia Harris, a King representa- tive, who said the money paid to the Kings was for corporations that exploited Dr. King’s image and they had not received money from the foundation for using quotes and the likeness of Dr. King. I said, “She’s lying.” Harris sent me a note taking exception to my comment and said, “It’s a great American tragedy when influential African Americans attack the King family for protecting and benefiting from Dr. King’s work when he set it up that way.” Actually, King, Inc. was created after Dr. King’s assassination. Therefore, he did not “set it up that way.” Second, the licensing agree- ment does in fact extract a fee from the mall foundation in exchange for using his likeness on materials and quotes at the memo- rial. Let’s be clear: No one is object- ing to the King siblings profiting from their father’s intellectual properties. The issue is, unlike the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, they are trying to person- ally profit from a national monument that honors their father and the struggle he led. Read the rest online at www.theskanner.com P.O. Box 5455, Portland, OR 97228. Telephone (503) 285-5555. E-mail: info@theskanner.com World Wide Web site: http://www.theskanner.com Fax: (503) 285-2900 The Skanner is a member of the National Newspaper Pub lishers Associ- ation and West Coast Black Pub lishers Association. All photos submitted become the property of The Skanner. We are not re - spon sible for lost or damaged photos either solicited or unsolicited. © 2013 The Skanner. ALL RIGHTS RE SERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION PROHIBITED. To see The Skanner News on your smart phone go to theskannermobile.com or scan this QR code with your app. • • • • • • • • Local news Opinions Jobs, Bids Sports Entertainment Music reviews Bulletin board RSS feeds Stopped and Frisked – and Innocent E very year for the past decade, under the agency’s “stop-and-frisk” program, New York City police officers have stopped 500,000 to nearly 700,000 citizens on the city’s streets. Nearly 90 percent of those stopped are Black and Hispanic men, women and children. The department’s own data show that at most only 12 to 14 percent of these stops result in an actual arrest – and only about half of those arrested are ultimately con- victed of some transgression. Is that the definition, as the city administration and police depart- ment claim, of an effective crime-fighting program? Or is the program a cynical cover for police “make-work:” harassing innocent civilians in order to churn statistics of an oper- ation that has virtually no effect on reducing crime – and burnish the department’s reputation and that of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as effective crime-fighters? Those are the questions behind the central constitutional issue at the heart of a class-action lawsuit challenging New York’s contro- versial stop-and-frisk program now being heard in a federal dis- trict court in Manhattan. The suit, brought by the New York City-based Center for Con- stitutional Rights, reaches the court after years of complaints from the city’s Black and Hispan- ic communities, and civil rights Page 4 The Portland Skanner March 27, 2013 NNPA C OLUMNIST Lee A. Daniels and civil liberties advocates against both the Bloomberg stop- and-frisk program and earlier, similar police department pro- grams. That long record has produced legislation from the New York City Council that would establish an office of inspector general for the police department, which similar police department program in which landlords of thousands of private buildings in The Bronx gave the department permission to patrol their buildings and arrest trespassers. The judge in that case found that the police searches of individuals routinely violated citi- zens’ 4th Amendment rights and said it needed to be modified if it is to continue. The Supreme Court has long upheld the right of police officers to stop and question civilians on the street; but they must have rea- Is the program a cynical cover for police ‘make-work’? would have subpoena power to investigate police actions. The leg- islation, bitterly opposed by Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, is inextricably enmeshed in this year’s mayoral campaign. Bloomberg cannot run again; and does not want Christine Quinn, the Council’s Speaker, to be his suc- cessor. She is a chief sponsor of the legislation, and also said there’s enough support for it on the Council to override Bloomberg’s promised veto. The street-stops case is also being heard in the wake of a Janu- ary federal court decision on a sonable cause – not just a hunch – to search individual’s belongings or person. Bloomberg and Kelly have repeatedly declared the stop-and- frisk program integral to the police department’s success in reducing crime. But critics assert that the city has never presented any statistics or other data establishing a direct connection between the program and the fact that the city’s crime rate has declined during the past decade. Donna Lieberman, execu- tive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times last month that “A gun — the ostensible reason behind the stop-and-frisk regime — was found in 0.1 percent of stops,” she added. “That is an unbelievably poor yield rate for such an intru- sive, wasteful and humiliating police action.” The street-stops trial opened last week with the wrenching testimo- ny of three Black men who told of being stopped and frisked, and in one instance, momentarily hand- cuffed. “To be treated like that, by someone who works for New York City, I felt degraded and helpless,” said Nicholas K. Peart, 24, who is the legal guardian of his two young brothers and 20-year-old disabled sister. In December 2011, Peart, a college student, wrote a widely-discussed op-ed article in the New York Times about the five times police have stopped and frisked him in the last decade. Witnesses for the plaintiffs also included two police officers who testified that patrol officers in their precincts were told they must meet a departmental monthly quota of 20 summonses and at least one arrest, or else they would be pun- ished. Such a police practice is illegal, and the two officers’ claims were vigorously denied by the city’s lawyers in court and the police department’s chief spokesman. But both officers sup- plied tape-recordings they secretly made of precinct-station conversa- tions that seem to support their claims.
