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JANUARY 11, 2017 Portland and Seattle Volume XXXIX No. 15 CHALLENGING PEOPLE TO SHAPE A BETTER FUTURE NOW Opinion ..........................2 Calendars .................. 4-5 A & E ............................6-7 Bids/Classifieds ...........11 25 CENTS INSIDE: Martin Luther King, Jr. SPECIAL EDITION PHOTO COURTESY OF JANELLE BYNUM SPORTS AND RACE Janelle Bynum, shown here at a Jan. 9 swearing- in, is the first African American representative to serve District 51 in the Oregon legislature. Bynum Breaks Barriers By Melanie Sevcenko Of The Skanner News L ast November, Democrat candidate Janelle Bynum made history when she took a seat in the Oregon House of Representatives as the first Afri- can American to represent House Dis- trict 51. In a narrow race that broke records as Oregon’s most expensive House campaign, Bynum defeated Happy Valley mayor, Republican Lori Chavez- DeRemer. Originally from Washington D.C., Bynum attended the historically Black Florida A&M University, where she See BYNUM on page 3 PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED District 51’s first Black representative talks about her plans Sportswriter and social commentator Dave Zirin talks with Seahawk defensive end Michael Bennett about San Francisco Quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to protest the treatment of Black people in America by refusing to stand for the national anthem and the Seahawks’ decision to link arms together as a team instead of taking a knee. Michael Bennett described how the Seahawks discussed the issue for hours and decided as a team to join arms so everyone could be included. At one point in the conversation, Michael Bennett said that the meeting he had with his teammate to discuss how to fight racism was better than winning the Super Bowl. Jobs, Automation to Highlight Breakfast Talk Howard Moore will speak at The Skanner Foundation’s Monday event By Christen McCurdy For The Skanner News C AP PHOTO/AZEEZ AKUNLEYAN, FILE ivil rights attorney Howard Moore will speak at The Skanner Foundation’s 31st an- nual Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast Jan. 16. He told The Skanner he intends to talk about the as- pects of like Martin Luther King, Jr. predicted in his writings that have become relevant in recent years. For instance, he said, King wrote about the rise of automation and the threat it imposed on regu- lar jobs. Moore noted the hollowing of the middle class has been enabled by automation, and the ad- vent of self-driving trucks and cars could make it worse: 3.5 million people drive trucks for a living, and Uber — which already relied on a freelance driv- ers rather than a tradition- al employment contract with a guaranteed wage -- is experimenting with a fleet of self-driving cars. The future could be very grim if nothing replaces the current economic mod- el, which is quickly being eroded, he said. “Dr. King talked about having a guaranteed an- nual wage. No one has dis- cussed that in recent mem- ory. Jobs, as we know jobs, don’t exist in the way they once did,” he said. Moore was born in Atlan- ta in 1932, and as a young man worked as a sports- writer for the Atlanta Dai- ly World. When he attend- ed Morehouse College, an interest in journalism evolved into an interest in politics. He earned a bach- elor’s degree in political science in 1954 and an LL.B degree (bachelor’s degree See BREAKFAST on page 3 Everybody Reads 2017 Highlights ‘Evicted’ ‘Freed’ Boko Sociologist Matthew Desmond’s book focuses on the Haram Girls Held consequences of eviction, poverty in Milwaukee by Intelligence Agency page 10 M The ‘La La Land’ Interview page 7 ultnomah County Library’s 15th annual community reading proj- ect, Everybody Reads 2017, kicked off a new year with the distribu- tion of thousands of free copies of “Evict- ed: Poverty and Profit in the American City” by Harvard associate professor and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond. “Evicted” was included in the Ten Best Books of 2016 by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. The non-fiction work examines low-income households and the consequences of evic- tion through the personal stories of eight struggling families in Milwaukee, Wisc. “What the reader takes away from this book is the complexity of eviction, through the eyes of not just the tenants, but also the landlords, and the whole range of pressures and conditions in- volved with evictions,” Shawn Cunning- ham, director of communications at Mult- nomah County Library, told The Skanner. While Portland’s housing crisis – culmi- nating in a lack of affording housing, rent increases, no-cause lease terminations and homelessness — persists, Everybody Reads 2017 is using “Evicted” to initiate a community dialogue in addressing these See EVICTION on page 3 “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” by Harvard associate professor Matthew Desmond