Tag: Black residents
America Needs a New Way to Measure Poverty
When President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in 1964, the nation didn’t have any method of counting the poor, or even a firm notion of how poverty should be defined. His administration scrambled to come up with a measure to chart progress. The gauge, it was later decided, would be the minimum income needed for a family of three or more to put food on the table multiplied by three (at the time, food constituted
The Ripple Effects of Japanese American Reparations
In 1990, the U.S. government began mailing out envelopes, each containing a presidential letter of apology and a $20,000 check from the Treasury, to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who, during World War II, were robbed of their homes, jobs, and rights, and incarcerated in camps. This effort, which took a decade to complete, remains a rare attempt to make reparations to a group of Americans harmed by force of law. We know how some recipients used their
Tyre Nichols’s Death: Can Memphis Change Its Police Culture?
On Sunday morning, the Reverend Earle Fisher was trying to keep his sermon toned down. He’s the pastor at Abyssinian Baptist, but he was guest-preaching at the more buttoned-down Trinity Christian Methodist Episcopal. The thing is that low-energy Earle Fisher still outpaces most ministers at their most fervid, and this was no typical Sunday.
Fisher, one of Memphis’s most prominent criminal-justice activists, was preaching just two days after the release of video footage of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols
The Legacy of a Forgotten Killing in Mississippi
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It is late evening on Tuesday, May 25, 1971, in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the small Delta town of Drew. A young Black woman stands on Union Street in a yellow dress. She is a teenager, thin, pretty, and dark-skinned, with straight black hair and thick bangs. At
Eric Adams’s Decades-Long Fight to Fix Policing
More than 20 years ago, I sat down to talk with a Black cop from New York City. He had a weightlifter’s powerful hands, a quick-trigger tongue, and a scar on the back of his shaved head from his days in a youth gang.
At the time, the relationship between police officers and Black residents was raw. This was Rudy Giuliani’s New York, where a white New York cop sodomized a suspect with his baton and police killed