ABDUL-JALIL RECEIVES “Certificate of Recognition” from CALIFORNIA SATE ASSEMBLY for 2021-22 HUMANITARIAN, CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS ACHIEVEMENTS!

I pray to God you and your Families are well, your health is robust, business is thriving, everything is perfect and stay in God’s Love, Grace, Guidance and Mercy.

“In another religion they honor people who serve like you with Sainthood!”” – Economics Professor Adeel Malik,Oxford University, England and World Renowned News Expert Commentator, speaking about Abdul-Jalil and the Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation.

“GOD sent me an ANGEL!”” – Hammer, speaking about Abdul-Jalil.

 
“Jalil, YOU ARE A TZADIK (SAINT)!”– Barry Barkan, Live Oak Institute and
  Ashoka Fellow at Ashoka Foundation:Innovators for the Public

“I thank God for you and for bringing you into my life and for the ministry you have been given to help the people of God!”– Pastor L. J. Jennings, Kingdom Builders Christian Fellowship, speaking about Abdul-Jalil and AMWF

“Certificate of Recognition” from CALIFORNIA SATE ASSEMBLY

In 1971, I had the DISTINCT HONOR of having my Portrait painted by Beauford Delaney-  “Portraitist of the Famous”, the most important African-American artists of the 20th century! He has painted portraits of Emperor Halle Selassie of Ethiopia, W.E.B. Du Bois, John F. Kennedy, Salvadore Dalí, James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker,  Langston Hughes, Robert Kennedy, Marian Anderson, Jacob Lawrence, Ella Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Charlie Parker, James Jones, Jean Genet, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, W.C. Handy, Countee Cullen, Henry Miller, Jean-Claude Killy, Herb Gentry, Alain Locke, Cy Twombly, Sterling Brown, Georgia O’Keeffe, Augusta Savage, Stuart Davis, Richard A. Long, John Koenig, Jackson Pollock, Vassili Pikoula, Henri Chahine, Lawrence Calcagno, Elaine DeKooning, Palmer C. Hayden, Darthea Speyer, Herbert Gentry, Ed Clark, James Jones. Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Jacob Lawrence, to name a few!

As CEO and President of the Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation (AMWF), I want to sincerely “THANK” ALL my/our supporters and I am thankful of the recognition for the work done as a Humanitarian for societal change/advancement with the establishment of real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines, in Civil Rights and Social Services addressing: Homelessness; Constitutional Reform; Social Justice Reform; Hunger and Food Insecurity; Police Reform; Climate Justice Reform; Criminal Justice Reform; Gun Violence; Religious Hate, Bias, Islamophobia, Xenaphobia and Bigotry; Immigration/Refugee Crisis; Healthcare; Education Equality; School-to-Prison Pipeline; Wealth Inequality/Poverty and Basic Needs; Voter Rights; COVID-19 Pandemic Relief Response; Sport and Athletes Human Rights and the fight for Judicial Reform to END Grand Systemic and Endemic Corruption, that includes Judicial/Legal Systemic Racism, Bigotry, Persecution, as a subset, that provides for the unlawful, and unconstitutional acts of The “COURTEL”COURT CORRUPTION CARTEL, the Corruptocrats and Kleptocrat politicians.

I, Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, as a Muslim litigant, in 2005 filed a Federal Corruption Complaint with the United States Attorney General, Department of Justice, of a Hate Crime of Islamophobia, Xenophobia, Bigotry, Racism  and Civil/Human Rights Violations committed against him through State sponsored persecutory terror and civil conspiracy by Federal, Sate, County and Local Judicial, Law enforcement, Governmental and Legal entities and agencies!

Federal Corruption Complaint with the United States Attorney General, Department of Justice, also brought charges of criminal extrinsic fraud upon the court of the State of California, spoliation of evidence, and fraud against defendants/hostile intervener AAA Insurance; Ron Cook and the law firm of WILLOUGHBY, STUART & BENING; defense counsel Steve Barber and the law firm of Ropers Majeski; and others. The complaint, drafted and filed by al-Hakim, has broad based support from Democrats and Republicans, was submitted by Congresswoman Barbara Lee with the offices of Congressmen John Conyers, and Charles Rangel, has been review by several legal experts, with advocacy by former Republican Representative J. C. Watts, a client of al-Hakim’s.

The complaint addresses the concern that a Superior Court Judges’ conduct rose to the level of consideration for a Federal Crime and a Civil Rights violation because the bench upon which the judge rules is “under the color of law” and certainly the violation of anyone’s civil rights is a federal crime. “Muslims, just as any other group, can not be afraid to speak up when their rights have been abridged. If one does not speak up, then the transgressions goes unreported and the perpetrator goes on to harm again unchecked, it does not matter whom the transgressor is” said al-Hakim. The complaint, perhaps even more importantly, not only requested Merrily Friedlander, Chief of the Civil Rights Division, to make an investigation of a judicial hate crime, but also the many other civil rights and due process violations of judicial misconduct, and attorney extrinsic fraud upon the court and law that are themselves directly the matters complained. J. C. Watts in asking “What does a supposed terrorist act in Russia have to do with the negligent contamination of a home in America?” posed the argument that there must be consideration of and a response to the many issues in the complaint.

Abdul-Jalil was Honored in June 2011 in Port Au-Prince, Haiti and Miami, Fla. for 2010 Relief Missions to Haiti by The World Conference of Mayors (WCM) and The National Conference of Black Mayors (NCBM); and 1997 Awarded national recognition as “Muslim of the Year” from Imam W. D. Mohammed Community.

He has negotiated a series of contracts that included many unprecedented benefits to the individual clients, one of which was interest-free loans that could be forgiven. Upon review by the Internal Revenue Service, the contracts and  returns where thrown out and challenged by the IRS as the IRS filed suit. After an 8 year legal battle, he prevailed in Federal Tax Court and established that Interest free Loans where in fact legal. This unprecedented legal ruling was established as a standard in the Tax Laws and was written in several National Law Journals. Cite:  “IRS vs Al-Hakim” published by Commerce Clearing House(CCH) Tax Court Memorandum Cases editions KF 6234A 505 and Maxwell McMillian (Prentice Hall) Federal Tax Cases edition KF 6234A 512 Tax Court Memorandum Decisions. Articles and citations available upon request….

The Historic “al-Hakim” Tax Code §7872 [692] Ruling
After al-Hakim’s victory in the Federal Tax Courts against the Tax Commissioner, in December 2000 the IRS moved to change the Tax Codes with the historic “al-Hakim” Tax Code §7872 [692] Ruling. The IRS changed the Federal Tax Codes such that it now “prevents no-interest loans” and was instituted to eliminate and close the Federal Income Tax loop-hole created with al-Hakim’s use of interest free loans in sports and entertainment financial transactions.
CITE: Tax Notes, Dec. 4, 2000, p. 1311; 89 Tax Notes 1311 (Dec. 4, 2000) “al-Hakim Tax Code” Ruling.

al-Hakim’s victory in the Federal Tax Court over the U. S. Tax Commissioner has the nations foremost academic institutions and academians in the study of Law and Business teaching al-Hakim’s use of interest free loans in Tax Free financial transactions as part of the Law and Business ciriculum in such hallowed halls as Harvard University, Yale University,Washington University, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and Wake Forest University Schools of Law Federal Tax Courses, among others.

Washington University School of Law Federal Tax Course,
Professor: Bixby;

Yale University School of Law Federal Tax Course,
Professor: Eric M. Zolt
Text Authors: William A. Klein, Joseph Bankman, Daniel N. Shaviro;

University of Virginia School of Law Federal Tax Course,
Professor: M. Robinson * Federal Income Taxation * L. Dominick
Text Authors: William A. Klein, Joseph Bankman, Daniel N. Shaviro;

Washington & Lee University School of Law Federal Tax Course,

Harvard University School of Law Federal Income Taxation Course Outline,
Professor: Flusche

al-Hakim’s victory in the Federal Tax Court over the U. S. Tax Commissioner has academians teaching al-Hakim’s use of interest free loans in Tax Free financial transactions as part of a Wake Forest University School of Law Federal Tax Course on “ISLAMIC AND JEWISH PERSPECTIVES ON INTEREST” and al-Hakim’s historic impact on Shariah-Riba Complaint financial transactions in the business world.

Wake Forest University School of Law Tax Course on “ISLAMIC & JEWISH PERSPECTIVES ON INTEREST”,

Author/Professor: Newman, Joel S.
al-Hakim’s victory in the Federal Tax Court over the U. S. Tax Commissioner has academians teaching al-Hakim’s use of interest free loans in Tax Free financial transactions as part of the Wake Forest University School of Law Federal Tax Course on “ISLAMIC AND JEWISH PERSPECTIVES ON INTEREST” and al-Hakim’s historic impact on Shariah-Riba Complaint financial transactions in the business world.
Joel S. Newman is a professor at Wake Forest Law School, Winston Salem, North Carolina.
In this report, Newman discusses financial transactions that allow devout Muslims and Jews to obey religious prohibitions against interest, while giving investors a return on their investments. The tax treatment of these transactions is considered. An integral part is al-Hakim’s case.

ASSOCIATION MEMBERSHIPS:

~ National Lawyers Guild, ~ Muslim Bar Association of New York, ~ Houston Muslim Lawyers , ~ National Muslim Law Students Association, ~ Association of Muslim-American Lawyers, ~ Associate Board Member- University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business East Bay Alumni Network

LECTURER AND PRESENTOR IN THE FIELDS OF:

*HIP HOP AND THE SPREAD OF ISLAM*

*ISLAM AND MUSIC*

~Music in Islam, University of California, Berkeley, CA 2003~ National Islamic Convention, Seacaucus., NJ 1997,~ Host Evening of Elegance, National Arabic Conference, Oakland, CA. 1997,~ National Islamic Convention, N.Y.C, N.Y. 1996,~ International Islamic Conference, Los Angeles, CA. 1996,~ Oaktown Music Conference, Oakland, CA 1996,~ National Society of Black Engineers Conference-Region 6, San Luis Obispo, CA.  1992,~ CAREER FEST, Oakland, CA. 1986, ~ California State University, Hayward, CA.  1985,~ United States Coast Guard, Oakland, CA.  1982,~ National BALSA Law Conference, Houston, TX 1981,~ National BALSA Law Conference, Philadelphia, PA. 1982,~ National BALSA Law Conference, Oakland, CA. 1979,~ National BALSA Law Conference, N.Y.C., N.Y. 1980,~ Mountain Regional Law Convention, Oklahoma City, OK. 1980,~ College of Alameda, Alameda, CA.  1981,~ Eastern Regional Law Conference, Washington D.C. 1980,~ National Black Media Convention, Oakland, CA. 1972,~ National BALSA Law Conference, Washington D.C. 1976,~ Pacific Coast Law Conference, San Francisco, CA. 1976,~ Stanford Law Society, Palo Alto, CA. 1976,~ National Black History Week Awards, San Francisco, CA, 1974, ~ Golden State Warriors Adonal Foyle’s “Athletics and Academics” Basketball Camp, Oakland, CA. 2006, 

March 1979- The Historic BALSA 1979 National Law Convention
The historic Black American Law Students Association, 11th Annual National Convention, March 28-April 1, 1979, Hyatt, Oakland, was themed: “The Reconstruction of Black Civilizations.” Dedicated to- Rev. Ben Chavis of the Wilmington Ten, Introduction- Mayor Lionel Wilson, Keynote Speaker- Min. Louis Farrakhan, with veritable “Who’s Who” of nations leading Black presenters: Junius Williams-Pres. NBA, Hon. Ben Travis, Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, Don Warden (Khalid al-Mansour), Dave Wilmont-Georgetown Law Center; Howard Moore, Alfred Slocum- Rutgers School of Law, Angela Davis, Victor Goode- Ex. Dir. NCBL, Hon. Judith Ford, Herb Reed- Howard School of Law, Asa Hilliard, Nathan Hare, Ron Baily- Northwestern University, Michael Ashburne, David Hall- FTC, Denice Carty Bernia- North Eastern University; Moot Court Judges: Hon. Wiley Manuel, Hon. Clinton White, Hon. David Cunningham, Hon. Allen Broussard, with “Thanks” to -John Burris, Peter Cohen, Claude Ames, Robert Harris, Eva Patterson, George Holland.

“The Evening of Elegance” Oakland, CA, 1997-Host with M. C. Hammer;

“1995 Sports Image Awards” Honoring Mohammed Ali

National Footbal League Super Bowl

In 1994 Awarded Silver Cross Pen and Pencil Set for “Distinguished Marketing and Promotional Services” to National Footbal League Super Bowl and “NFL Experience” by NFL Properties.

July 1996-  “Community Movement Toward Improvement” Music Conference at Clara Muhammed School & Masjidul Waritheen
“Community Movement Toward Improvement” Music Conference at Clara Muhammed School & Masjidul Warithdeen in Oakland, California featuring MC Hammer, Martin Wyatt-KGO TV, Mohammed (MTV Real World-SF),Sway, Imani, Davey D, Raphael Saadiq- Tony Toni Tone, Greg Khalid Peck- Warner Bros,Karen Lee- Warner Bros Music, Eric B, Rico Cassanova, Abdul-Jalil,Tony Collins- Giant Records, Anita Greathouse-Knight, Gene Shelton, Lenny Williams,Thembisa Mshaka, Roy Tesfaye-Death Row Records shown in ABC-TV news clip.

But the REAL recognition comes from the count of the Angels on judgment day!

We’ve ALL been watching the news, horrified, for the last years as the COVID-19 pandemic, political unrest, police brutality, violence, housing crisis, voter rights violations, food and essentials shortages, wild fires, and unemployment runs rampant, uncontrolled through every state, it’s clear that this is what the NEW racism looks like in America TODAY.

  AMWF has taken the lead in servicing and protecting the poor, homeless, immigrants, refugees and senoir shut-in residents from COVID-19 extending these various services and programs to the economically, mentally, and physically challenged; the needy; the undereducated and undeserved; people living with symptomatic HIV and AIDS; substance abuse; seniors 55 years and older; prenatal women; at risk youth; and homebound people living with serious illness!

 We are and have been heavily involved in the servicing of these communities since the 1970’s that now suddenly the government needs to address as this Deadly agent of the spread of the virus. Providing food IS AN ESSENTIAL service, so we are used for that purpose, we added new food resource donors, we MUST be out to serve and our work has TRIPLED!

  We provide FREE groceries, clothing, shoes, hygiene kits, sleeping bags, blankets, medicine, and hot chef’s prepared gourmet meals to the homeless and homeless encampments and habitations of ALL kinds, from the streets to parks, from trees and bushes to alleys, from corners to ditches, from hand built shanties to tents under freeway overpasses!

  We provide FREE groceries, bagged and hot chef’s prepared gourmet meals, plus the above, to the Safe Parking Programs, among others, at local senior and community centers, and faith based organizations in an effort to provide families and/or individuals who have been displaced and are temporarily homeless, living in their vehicles and need a safe place to park and sleep overnight, with restrooms and an attendant present throughout the night at all of the locations.

  We also provide food to those that had previously obtained necessary items at their Senior Center. But now that they’re closed are vital to the wellness of the community and senior population with our Food Bank program and Free Farmers Market Food Give-Aways.

  One Blessing of the pandemic is we have added MORE retail grocery stores pick ups and arranged several other groups programs with the young adults and kids to participate in servicing the poor, homeless, and senoir shut-in’s, since they are out of school and need something to do, AHDL!! This will stick with them for LIFE!

 We also recently handed out over 400 Eid gifts/toys to the youth.

  The Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation (AMWF), a public services organization based on GIVING AND SHARING, is non-denominational, Multi-Cultural, 100% volunteer financed and operated relief organization that provides FREE charitable assistance to the general public with food, medicine, clothing, educational and employment opportunities, mental and physical health referrals, legal aid, shelter and other necessities to individuals, children, families, and organizations who lack these essentials for any reason. We provide private school and college admissions educational opportunities; assists with referrals for job training and placement; rental assistance; social services assistance; homelessness assistance; mental and physical health assistance; medical assistance and legal aid assistance referrals FREE for ANYONE whom has the need.

AMWF serves and provides more direct and meaningful essential sustenance in the form of food, clothing, educational opportunities, medical and legal aid, social services, housing aid, to Muslims in America, per Allah (SWT), then ALL the Islamic charity groups COMBINED in the United States including Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Circle of North America ICNA, Islamic Society of North America ISNA, Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), Muslim American Society (MAS), Muslim Community Association, MCA-SFBA, American Muslim Alliance (AMA), Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP), Muslim American Leadership Alliance (MALA), the Muslim Reform Movement (MRM), Muslims Facing Tomorrow (MFT), the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), The Mosque Cares, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA), American Muslim Alliance (AMA), The Mosque Foundation, American Muslim Task Force (AMTF), American Muslims for Civic Engagement (AMCE), The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), United Muslim Americans Association (UMAA), United Muslims of America (UMA), the UMMA, Inner-City Muslim Action Network, Muslim Advocates, Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD), United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), MuslimARC, and Zaytuna College!!

We serve the indigent, homeless, needy, under privileged, disadvantaged, disabled persons, underserved, children, many in the Autism Spectrum and other afflictions. We conduct outreach to those living on the streets and offer benefits such as medical and mental health services, substance abuse treatment, social and psychological services, educational support to facilitate homeless student’s transition to school, transitional housing opportunities, and, eventually, permanent housing.  We are serving our clients with mobile hot spot access to complete the necessary forms for service to those chronic homeless and those that do not have internet access to get them off the streets and rally support and create stabilized, lasting solutions.

 We have massive list of clients that we communicate with daily through the same means that we now provide referrals, mail, email, phone, text and voice mail message service with and for our clients.

By way of our global accessible services, we have pioneered new, disruptive healing solutions that take advantage of each of our unique assets to rally our clients in support of our donors charitable causes.

We have hundreds of daily uniquely distinctive, necessitous, and discrete web visitors to video chat, online chat, text, phone, email, and voice mail messages, to obtain precise information designed to relieve their concerns with confidential information and real help with specific performance in the form of any type of the most effective remedy in protecting the expectation interest of the clients. We are able to notice and communicate with 1,000’s via text message at a moments notice!

Our members, and the people we serve are of different race, faith, culture, age, gender, sexual orientation and income levels. AMWF by providing direct services, including providing nutritious food; edvocating for and participating in many relevant social service programs that promote the self-sufficiency of people in need; educating the general public about these issues, their causes and this partial solution while inspiring a consummate social conscience and honoring the dignity of every person. As part of that principal mission, AMWF works for basic economic survival security for all and the elimination of poverty by providing these services thus effecting societal and governmental policies that regulate the less fortunate to the bottom of the economic, social, health, and opportunity pyramid, with full understanding that any policy which affects the poorest of us affects all of us.

We provide essential services to many inter-faith based organizations with the aim of bettering the condition of the less fortunate. In that spirit of outreach, we have supplied many Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Disabled, Unabled, multi-cultural, inter-faith based businesses and organizations with staples that are in turn distributed to the public, and these events are NOT only fundraisers, BUT MOST are totally free to the public, there is no charge for anything to anyone.

AMWF features high-performing results in the invaluable areas of: youth development; elementary, secondary and college education; poverty alleviation; mental and physical health medical services; social services, as well as other economic-empowerment programs for individuals, families; and small businesses. 

AMWF has forged an awareness and sustained an effort to connect those in dire need with service providers, donors, volunteers and nonprofit groups with these causes. We have taken community foundations and moved into social networking, reaching beyond static “bricks and mortar” to interactive Web sites to serve as a “dynamic virtual clearinghouses or town square” that holds conversations between those in NEED and their local charities, citizens, donors, and volunteers.

While hunger in the land of plenty is not a new phenomenon, the last few years of international economic turmoil have worsened matters for the poor in this country. As unemployment has soared, bankruptcies and foreclosures have increased, little to NO opportunities exist for ANY subsistence, with the disappearance of ANY possible pursuit of happiness, the ranks of the poor have swelled in alarming proportions. So we find ourselves in the anomalous situation that one out of every six people in the richest nation on earth, is today living below the poverty line. Prophet Mohammad, Sallalalahu Alayhi wa Sallam, is reported to have said, “He is not a Muslim who goes to bed satiated while his neighbor goes hungry”. So how can YOU sleep contentedly while the person praying next to you, in your own neighborhoods, in your own backyards, in your own towns, counties, state, country, your neighbors go hungry? And if YOU do so, then in light of the above Hadith, can you call yourselves Muslim?

AMWF serve’s over 30,000 people a month from many Religeous Communities and 20 other locations and provide for thousands with the special events we support that are totally free to the public.AMWF expanded last year to accommodate more people at the Masajids, over 300 families weekly per location giveaway, with twice the quantity, a higher quality, much healthier, more expensive and fresher product that was purely the blessings of GOD.

Our annual accounting reveals that AMWF donated over $400,000 worth of food on just the 21 “Jumaah Free Farmers Market Food” Giveaways at the Berkeley Masajid alone in 2019-20!! Mind you this total DOES NOT include the nights of Ramadan, Eid, and every other weekly giveaways that we have had there, AHDL!

Thanks again

Jalil

103 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

Corinne Shutack

Corinne Shutack, Aug 13, 2017

art: A Small Matter of Engineering, Part II by Kara Springer

Note 1: This article was last updated on September 21, 2020.
Note 2: Our work to fix what we broke and left broken. The work isn’t done until Black folks tell us it’s done.

  1. There are varied approaches to ending police violence. The best thing to do is to follow your local Black Lives Matter chapter or other local Black-led organization to find out the proposed policy and funding changes in your city or town. Donate to your local BLM chapter, sign up for updates, volunteer, and take action when asked.
  2. Campaign Zero has ten evidence-based solutions to address police violence. Contact your city or town government representative(s) and police chief to advocate for these policies.
  3. Within the evidence-based solutions in #2, Campaign Zero has a project called 8Can’tWait, with eight specific policies to be prioritized to end police violence. The website has a fantastic tool wherein you can see which of the policies your city or town have been enacted. Contact your city or town government representative(s) and police chief to advocate for the policies that have not yet been enacted.
  4. Find out your city or town’s policy on no-knock warrants (the policy that led to Breonna Taylor’s murder). Contact your city or town government representative(s) and police chief to ban no-knock warrants.
  5. Write to your state representative and senator to end qualified immunity like Colorado recently didQualified immunity permits government officials performing discretionary functions to be immune from civil suits unless the official violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” In recent years, qualified immunity has been successfully used to defend the use of excessive or deadly force by police, like in this case. Thank you to Claudia S. Murray for the suggestion.
  6. Support a project facilitated by Leap, the Law Enforcement Accountability Project, a fund that empowers activists to change the narrative around the police abuse of Black People. Leap is founded by Ava DuVernay.
  7. Understand and share what “defund the police” really means. It’s about a new, smarter approach to public safety, wherein we demilitarize the police and allocate resources into education, social services, and other root causes of crimes. What we’re doing now isn’t working — There are so many innocent people who have been harassed or killed by the police unjustly, and nearly every Black American has experienced some form of harassment by the police. Some good resources for this are this video by BLM , this Washington Post article and this Facebook post.
  8. More and more stories of Black folks encountering racism are being documented and shared through social media — whether it’s at a hotel, with the police, in a coffee shop, at a school, etc. When you see such a post, call the organization, company, or institution involved to tell them how upset you are. Then share the post along with the institution’s contact information, spreading the word about what happened and encouraging others to contact the institution as well. Whether the company initiated the event or failed to protect a POC during an onslaught by a third party, they need to hear from us.
  9. If you or a friend is an educator, buy said friend books that feature POC as protagonists and heroes, no matter the racial make-up of the class. A few good lists are hereherehereherehereherehere, and here. bell hooks, one of the heroes of our time, has authored five children’s books. You can purchase educational toys that feature POC, such as finger puppetsBlack History Flashcards, etc for their classroom. Use these items year-round, not just in February. The racial make-up of students doesn’t matter — kids of every race need to know American history and be exposed to people from different races, religions, and countries. If the friend is interested, buy them for your pal’s classroom. Don’t be shy to ask Facebook friends that you haven’t actually talked to in ten years.
  10. If you or a friend or family member is an educator, watch or share this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson speaking about his experience as a Black student telling people he wanted to be a scientist and astrophysicist. Tyson’s experience reminds me of a Black friend whose high school teachers tried to dissuade her from taking AP classes, because, with the best of intentions, they thought the AP classes would be “too much” for her. Be an educator who supports and encourages, not one who dissuades. Talk to educators you know about being educators who support and encourage, not educators who dissuade.
  11. Work on ensuring that Black educators are hired where Black children are being taught. If you want to know more about why and how this makes a difference for Black children, check out this episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast. There are some really good nuggets in there about how schools can support the achievement of Black students — from ensuring Black students aren’t closed out of gifted programs by using test results instead of white teachers’ recommendations to the influence that having a Black teacher has on a Black student’s education to the importance to fostering a school ethos wherein Black students think, “This school is here for me.”
  12. Many companies have recruiting channels that are predominantly white. Work with your HR department to recruit Americans who are descendants of enslaved Africans. Recruiting from HBCUs is a good start. Work to put descendants of enslaved Africans already hired under supportive managers.
  13. Donate to anti-white supremacy work such as your local Black Lives Matter Chapter, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, the NAACPSouthern Poverty Law CenterUnited Negro College FundBlack Youth Project 100Color of ChangeThe Sentencing ProjectFamilies against Mandatory MinimumsA New Way of LifeEqual Justice Initiative, and Dream Defenders. Join some of these list-serves and take action as their emails dictate.
  14. Support Black businesses, as advocated by Killer Mike among countless others. Find them on WeBuyBlackThe Black WalletOfficial Black Wall Street, and Post 21. Another good list is here. Find Black-owned bookstoresflorists, and restaurants. Yelp now has a feature to search for Black-owned businesses, and Etsy features Black-owned businesses here. Thank you Corinna Tricaricofor the info on Etsy.
  15. Bank Black, as advocated by Killer Mike. It doesn’t have to be all of your checking or savings. Opening up an account with some money is better than no account at all. You can use the link from #14 (type “banking” in the Category field) or Blackout to find a bank. At the very least, move some or all of your checking, savings, mortgage, etc out of Wells Fargo as a part of the divestment movement to protect Standing Rock.
  16. Get your company, place of worship, condo building, gym, etc to move some or all of its money to Black-owned banks, like Netflix is doing.
  17. Don’t buy from companies that use prison labor. Find a good list here. While Whole Foods is on that list, but pledged to stop using prison labor in 2016, they haven’t made amends for that abuse. You can’t pour gas on a burning building, decide to stop pouring the gas, then walk away like everything is fine. Until Whole Foods pays reparations, they stay on the boycott list.
  18. Stand outside of the stores from #17 with a sign that reads “[Company] uses prison labor” even if for 30 mins a few times a month.
  19. Read up about mandatory minimum sentences and watch videos about this on Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM’s) website. FAMM’s website includes work being done at the federal level and state level. Call or write to your state legislators and governor about reducing mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes.
  20. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write to your federal legislators in support of the bipartisan (sponsored by Sen Lee (R-UT)) Smarter Sentencing Act (S. 2850) which reduces the length of federal mandatory minimum drug sentences by half, makes the Fair Sentencing Act’s crack sentencing reforms retroactive, and expands the “safety valve” exception to mandatory drug sentences.
  21. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write to your federal legislators in support of the bipartisan (sponsored by Sen Paul (R-KY)) Justice Safety Valve Act (S. 399, H.R. 1097), which would allow judges to give sentences other than the mandatory minimum sentence for any federal crime.
  22. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write your federal legislators in support of another great criminal justice reform bill, the Second Look Act, which would make reduced sentences for crack convictions from the previously passed Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, reduce mandatory minimums for people convicted more than three times for drug crimes from life without parole after the third offense to 25 years, reduce mandatory sentences for drug crimes from 15 to 10 years, limit the use of solitary confinement on juvenile prisoners, etc.
  23. Call or write to your state legislators and governor to support state-wide criminal justice reform including reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing sentences for non-violent drug crimes, passing “safety valve” law to allow judges to depart below a mandatory minimum sentence under certain conditions, passing alternatives to incarceration, etc. Study after study shows that racism fuels racial disparities in imprisonment, and about 90% of the US prison population are at the state and local level.
  24. Call or write to state legislators, federal legislators, and your governor to decriminalize weed. No, not because Black folks use weed more frequently than white folks. Because Black Americans are arrested for marijuana possession far more frequently than whites.
  25. Call or write to state legislators to require racial impact statements be required for all criminal justice bills. Most states already require fiscal and environmental impact statements for certain legislation. Racial impact statements evaluate if a bill may create or exacerbate racial disparities should the bill become law. Check out the status of your state’s legislation surrounding these statements here.
  26. Find and join a local “white space” to learn more about and talk out the conscious and unconscious biases us white folks have. If there’s not a group in your area, start one.
  27. Join or start a Daughters of Abraham book club in your Church, mosque, or synagogue.
  28. Join your local Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) group. There is a lot of awesome work going on locally — Get involved in the projects that speak to you.
  29. Do deep canvassing about race and racial justice. Many SURJ groups are organizing them, so many people can do it through your local SURJ group. If they’re not already doing it, start it.
  30. Research your local prosecutors. Prosecutors have a lot of power to give fair sentences or Draconian ones, influence a judge’s decision to set bail or not, etc. In the past election, a slew of fair-minded prosecutors were elected. We need more.
  31. Call or write to state legislators, federal legislators, and your governor to end solitary confinement in excess of 15 days. It is considered torture by the UN, and it is used more frequently on Black and Hispanic prisoners. For more information on solitary, two good overviews can be found here and here.
  32. Watch 13th. Better yet, get a group of friends together and watch 13th.
  33. Watch The House I Live In. Or get a group of friends together and watch it.
  34. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article The Case for Reparations and From Here to Equality by William A. Darity Jr. andA. Kirsten Mullen. The US has already participated in reparations four times. Thank you to Clyanna Blyannafor suggesting this addition.
  35. Participate in reparations. One way is through this Facebook group. Remember reparations isn’t just monetary — share your time, skills, knowledge, connections, etc. Thank you to Clyanna Blyannafor suggesting this addition.
  36. Read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Better yet, get a group of friends together to read it like a book club would — read, then discuss. Buy it from one of these Black-owned bookstores.
  37. Read Caught by Marie Gottschalk. Better yet, get a group of friends together to read it like a book club would — read, then discuss. Buy it from one of these Black-owned bookstores.
  38. Read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Yep, get a group of friends together to read it like a book club would — read, then discuss. Buy it from one of these Black-owned bookstores.
  39. Read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Thank you to Steve Senatorifor this suggestion. Buy the book from one of these Black-owned bookstores.
  40. Read Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman. The information the author shares about the ease with which one can be charged with “conspiracy” to sell drugs, the damage done from long sentences that don’t fit the crime due to mandatory minimum sentencing, the ever-present threat of solitary confinement at a Correction Officer’s whim, and other specific harmful practices in the prison system are well done. Get a group of friends together to read it like a book club would — read, then discuss. Buy the book from one of these Black-owned bookstores.
  41. Read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. Get your friends on board reading it, too. Buy it from one of these Black-owned bookstores.
  42. Especially if you or a friend is an educator, read or share bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. Buy it from one of these Black-owned bookstores.
  43. Read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project.
  44. Buy books, choose TV shows and movies, and opt for toys for your kids, nieces, nephews, etc that show people from different races, religions, countries and that teach real American history. A few ideas: the books, toys, and flashcards from #9.
  45. Decolonize your bookshelf.
  46. Listen without ego and defensiveness to people of color. Truly listen. Don’t scroll past articles written by people of color — Read them.
  47. Don’t be silent about that racist joke. Silence is support.
  48. Follow Patrisse CullorsOpal TometiAlicia Garziabell hooksLuvvie AjayiMelissa Harris-PerryVan JonesAva DuVernaythenewjimcrowLaverne CoxDeRay MckessonRev. Dr. William J. Barber IIIbram X. Kendi, and Killer Mike. Follow them with the intention of listening and learning only.
  49. Read Awesomely LuvvieBlavityMadame NoirThe RootThe Grio, and Jamelle Bouie’s opinion pieces with a desire to learn and understand better the lives of Black Americans.
  50. Find out how the near-eradication of indigenous people, slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow are taught in your local school. Advocate that history is taught correctly and certain parts are not skipped over or barely mentioned. Ensure the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus is taught correctly by using the booklet Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years by Bill Bigelow & Bob Peterson. Use this toolkit to ensure Thanksgiving is taught correctly. Advocate that many voices be used in the study of history. Is the school teaching about post-Civil War convict leasing, the parent to our current mass incarceration system? Talking about slavery alone, is your high school showing images such as Gordon’s scourged backa slave ship hold, and an enslaved nurse holding her young master? Does the school teach about scientists, inventors, politicians, etc who are POC? Do reading lists include male and female authors who are POC? In my mostly white high school, reading books like Having Our Say, To Be a Slave, The Bluest Eye, and Their Eyes Were Watching God was very important. A great starting list of such books is here. Are Japanese internment camps being discussed? Is history explained correctly in history books? As an example of a severe failure to teach the reality of slavery and its ramifications, check out image 1 and image 2 . There are a lot of great resources out there with a little googling, like PBS’s resources for teaching slaverythis POC Online Classroom blogTeaching for ChangeThe Zinn Project’s This Day in HistoryTeaching Tolerance at the Southern Poverty Law Center (thank you Adajhand), and The National Association for Multicultural Education.
  51. Arrange for cultural exchanges and cultural ambassadors in your local school’s classrooms. The International Classroom program at UPenn and People to People International are options. The Dept of Education has a good list. Cultural exchanges via the interwebs are very valuable. Actual human interaction between people from different races, religions, and countries (ie: cultural ambassadors) and students in the physical classroom is ideal.
  52. Seek out a diverse group of friends for your kids.
  53. Seek out a diverse group of friends for you. Practice real friendship and intimacy by listening when POC talk about their experiences and their perspectives. They’re speaking about their pain.
  54. Watch these videos to hear first hand accounts of what our Black brothers and sisters live. Then read everyday people’s experiences through the hashtag #realizediwasblack. Watch the rules Tik Tok user @skoodupcam’s mother makes him follow just so he comes home each night. Read You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism by Lacey Lamar and Amber Ruffin. Share with others.
  55. If there are Black and/or indigenous children/teens in your life, contribute to their college savings plans. You can also contribute to an HBCU, the United Negro College Fund, the American Indian College Fund, or individual college savings plans. Thank you to Rev Dr Pollard for this contribution. Consider making HBCUs and the American Indian College Fund beneficiaries through your will or living trusts. Thank youJanice Crawfordfor this contribution.
  56. Call or write to your national legislators, state legislators, and governor in favor of affirmative action. Encourage friends to do the same.
  57. Write to your college/university about implementing all or some of these diversity strategies that effectively promote racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity on campus. Write to the public universities your tax payer dollars support about implementing these diversity strategies.
  58. Recognize that in the same way saying “slavery is a necessary evil” (Thomas Jefferson’s words) was acceptable by many in 1820, the same way saying “separate but equal” was acceptable by many in 1940, choosing to not condemn white nationalism, the fact that Black people are 2.7 times as likely to be killed by police than white people, the fact that unarmed Black Americans are roughly five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer, that the fact the Black imprisonment rate for drug offenses is about 5.8 times higher than it is for whites, etc are acts of overt racism in 2020.
  59. Write to the US Sentencing Commission (PubAffairs@ussc.gov) and ask them to:
    — reform the career offender guideline to lessen the length of
    sentences
    — change the guidelines so that more people get probation
    — change the criminal history guidelines so that a person’s
    criminal record counts against them less
    — change guidelines to reduce mandatory minimum
    sentences for non-violent crimes
    — conduct a study to review the impact of parental incarceration on minor children. With more data, the Commission could modify the Sentencing Guidelines and allow judges to take this factor into account when sentencing individuals for non-violent crimes.
    — conduct a study to review whether the Bureau of Prisons is following the Commission’s encouragement to file a motion for compassionate release whenever “extraordinary and compelling reasons” exist. 
    — consider amending the guidelines to reduce sentences for first offenders.
  60. Read Van Jones’ short and to-the-point article about the racial biases of reporters. More examples are here and here. Check out this article discussing how media coverage of the opioid epidemic — which largely affects suburban and rural whites — portrays it as an outside threat and focuses on treatment and recovery, while stories of heroin in the 1970s, crack-cocaine in the 1980s, and other drug problems that impact urban people of color today have focused on the drug user’s morality. Keep an eye out for such biases, and use social media and direct communication to the media outlet to call them out when they occur.
  61. Donate to groups that are working to put women of color into elected office, to get out the vote, and to restore voting rights to disenfranchised voters.
  62. Know our American history. Watch Roots, 12 Years a Slave, and Selma, to name a few.
  63. Check out Black movies, TV, and other media that show POC as lead characters and in their full humanity. Queen Sugar, Insecure, Dear White People, The Carmichael Show, Blackish, Grownish, Atlanta, 2 Dope Queens, Black Panther, A Wrinkle in Time, Get Out, Girls Trip, Sorry to Bother You, United Shades of America, Mudbound, How to Get Away with Murder, Scandal, The Cloverfield Paradox, Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting, BlacKkKlansman, Little, If Beale Street Could Talk, Queen and Slim, A Black Lady Sketch Show, PBS’ Great Performance of Much Ado about NothingThe Amber Ruffin Show, Pose, and any movies released by Array are a few. Share them with friends. In addition, if you can’t watch the whole video, watch 13:12 to 15:17 of this discussion about working in Hollywood when you’re not white.
  64. Know what indigenous land you’re living on by looking that this map and research the groups that occupied that land before you did. Find out what local activism those groups are doing and give your money and time to those efforts.
  65. When people say that Black Lives Matter is a violent/terrorist group, explain to them that there are fringe groups that are being misrepresented as part of BLM. If conservatives don’t want to be lumped in with the KKK, they can’t lump violent protesters in with BLM.
  66. When people ask, “Why aren’t you talking about ‘black-on-black crime’?” and other myths about BLM, let Francesca Ramsey help you with those talking points.
  67. Stop shopping at Amazon and Whole Foods. They advertise on -that’s to say fund- white supremacist media. An easy alternative to Amazon is buying from Black-owned businesses through webuyblack.com, featured in #14. Also check out this “How to Stop Using Amazon” Facebook post.
  68. Be honest about our history. One genocide, another genocide, then apartheid. It sucks, but it’s true. We’ll never be free from our history unless we’re honest about it. Denial is our pathology, but the truth will set us free.
  69. If you have a close relationship with a young person of color, make sure he/she knows how much you love them. Love and affirm that child. Thank you to Rev Dr Pollard for this contribution.
  70. Write to your city or town government representative to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day like these cities did.
  71. Donate to Standing Rock through the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
  72. Write to your city or town government representative to divest from banks that are financing the Dakota Access Pipeline, private prisons, and detention centers. Seattle, Davis, CA, and Los Angeles divested from banks that are funding the Dakota Access Pipeline, and there are campaigns going on in many cities to divest. Cities like New York and Cincinnati have divested from private prisons. Start here: http://howtodivest.org/
  73. Personally divest your investments in private prisons and detention centers. Start here. Many people are divesting from Wells Fargo for their substantial role in Standing Rock and from private prison companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), GEO Group, CoreCivic, and G4S.
  74. Get your company, place of worship, etc to divest from private prisons and detention centers. Since the start of a national prison divestment campaignhigher ed institutionschurches, and corporations have divested.
  75. Write to your state legislators to end cash bail. It means that a someone who is legally innocent is put in jail because they can’t afford bail. It means that a defendant can be released pre-trial because of their wealth, not how much of a flight risk they are. It puts more people in detention (which tax payers pay for) and affects a defendants’ ability to maintain employment, access mental and physical healthcare, and be in communication with their family and friends, etc. Housing the approximately 500,000 people in jail in the US awaiting trial who cannot afford bail costs US taxpayers $9 billion a year. Thank you to Elizabeth B.and Cynthia Astlefor suggesting this addition.
  76. Support organized efforts to end of cash bail by donating to The Bail Project. Bail out a Black mother through The National Bail Out. Thank you to Elizabeth B.and Cynthia Astlefor suggesting this addition.
  77. Attend town halls, candidate meet-and-greets, etc for political candidates and ask about ending mass incarceration, reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing or ending solitary confinement, decriminalizing weed, ending cash bail, divesting from private prisons, divesting from banks, divesting from banks that finance the Dakota Access Pipeline, etc.
  78. Read this article about an overt white supremacist’s son’s journey to relinquish white supremacy and watch this video about Daryl Davis, a Black man who gets KKK members to disavow by befriending them. For those you know who are overtly racist (see #58), think about ways you can create exposure for them to people who don’t look like them, share their religion, etc. Jane Elliott says, “People who are racist aren’t stupid, they’re ignorant. And the answer to ignorance is education.” Frederick Douglass notes, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” It may be best to focus on children, adolescents, and young adults currently being raised by overtly racist parents. Maybe it’s tutoring them so they could get on a college track, encouraging them to study abroad, or turning them on to colleges where not everyone looks like them and shares their religion, etc. Maybe it’s spending time with them on some regularity and showing them the achievements and beauty of non-white cultures. Be creative.
  79. Talk to the white people you know who aren’t clearly upset by white supremacy. Use “I” statements, “I care” messages (“I feel [feeling] when you [behavior]”), and non-violent communication. They need to know you see a problem. Call them out, and call them in. As a start, ask them to watch the videos in #54. For people you know who’ve been radicalized by FOX News and other nationalist (not conservative) media, who’ve been so pummeled with fear and hatred of “the other” that they’ve become ISIS-like towards others, how can you and other family and friends guide them through conversation to show them that their actions are now in direct contrast with the values they feign to purport?
  80. A wise former teacher once said, “The question isn’t: Was the act racist or not? The question is: How much racism was in play?” So maybe racism was 3% of the motivation or 30% or 95%. Interrogate the question “How much racism was in play?” as you think about an incident. Share this idea with the people in your life when they ask, “Was that racist?”
  81. Credit Black men and women. Kara Springer, a Black woman artist, created the image/public art that begins this piece. It’s called A Small Matter of Engineering, Part IIChristian Campbelltweeted to ensure the art was attributed appropriately and correctly.
  82. Watch Jane Elliot’s blue eyes/brown eyes racism experiment here. Watch Jane Elliot’s a follow-up on the blue eyes/brown eyes racism experiment on Oprah here, and watch Jane Elliot and Roland Martin’s conversation at the University of Michigan’s Women of Color Task Force here. Thank you to Jourdain Blair for this suggestion.
  83. Anti-racism is a global fight. Don’t buy electronics or jewelry made from conflict minerals. Find an overview and rankings of electronics and jewelry companies’ efforts to source conflict-free minerals here. At your place of work, establish a policy that your company or organization will only purchase electronics from companies that are top-rated. Write to companies on the list and ask them to improve their rank.
  84. Read this article by educator and activity Bettina L. Love about the harm done by schools to their Black students. Ensure your local school/School Board has a clear and strong policy of zero tolerance for racial slurs, physically touching a child to discipline them, invasions of privacy like strip searches, hair discrimination, etc. “Zero tolerance” means loss of a job, loss of a pension, and mandatory reporting to state Department of Education. If and when school officials don’t comply with their own policies, or when a school refuses to create these policies altogether, use resources at your disposal like social media, local news media, connections to the School Board, etc to hold them accountable.
  85. Visit sites of American concentration camps, memorials, and museums dedicated to teaching about the genocide and apartheid, past and present. Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston; The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery; the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, NC; the Whitney Plantationnear New Orleans, the quarters of enslaved people at Monticello in Charlottesville, VA; a tour discussing the lives of enslaved people at Mount Vernon, VA, Underground Railroad locations, etc. Google sites, museums, etc where you can learn about Black history and current life near you or at your next travel destination. Thank you to Charles Chukwuemeka Ekeke for this addition.
  86. We need to raise children who understand race and are comfortable talking about it. A few resources for that: the book Raising White Kids by Jennifer Harvey, the NPR podcast Talking Race With Young Childrenthese children’s books, and these resources compiled by the Children’s Community School in Philadelphia.
  87. Write to your state representative and senator to ban voter ID laws, ease the voter registration process, implement early voting, and implement voting-by-mail. The unfortunate reality of efforts to “fight against voter fraud” is that voter fraud isn’t statistically a problem in this country. Even The Heritage Foundation counts only 1,285 cases of voter fraud… since 1998. Just like poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were “race-neutral” policies that inhibited Black Americans from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, voter ID laws, cuts to voting registration processes, and cuts to early voting are efforts to inhibit Black Americans from voting today. A well-off white person in my life lamented that their children could easily get their ID, so why couldn’t anyone else? This person neglected to recognize that her children had cars to get them to the DMV, lived relatively close to the DMV, had the time to go, etc. This excerpt from the previous link is quite striking: “In the 1930s one Georgia man described the situation this way: ‘Do you know I’ve never voted in my life, never been able to exercise my right as a citizen because of the poll tax? … I can’t pay a poll tax, can’t have a voice in my own government.’ ” Saying, “Just get your ID!” today is the equivalent of saying “Just pay the poll tax!” in 1964. Remember that the restrictive voting laws passed since 2013 have been considered legal only because the Supreme Court gutted the most powerful protections of the Voting Rights Act. Thank you Alice Smithand Sarah Weissfor this suggestion.
  88. Ibram X Kendi says we need to move beyond saying “racist” and “not racist.” Instead, some white people are practicing anti-racism by (1) divesting themselves of white fragility and defensiveness and choosing to continue to learn and listen to Black folks and (2) dismantling white supremacy in the institutions around them. White supremacy is not just targeted murder of Black men by police. White supremacy pervades every institution — places of work, education, criminal justice, healthcare, government, banks, places of worship, etc. It is our work to dismantle white supremacy in all of these institutions, not just the police. Those who are not practicing anti-racism are perpetuating white supremacy. And we cannot do the external work without doing the internal work.
  89. Contact your high school and college/university to create a class that teaches white privilege, the subconscious nature of racism in every US institution (schools, offices, etc), use of racial stereotypes by individuals and the media, etc. This class should be mandatory for all students. One such class is CFE 444 — Schooling & Diversity at Syracuse University.
  90. When people lament that the policing problem is just “a few bad apples,” share the following evidence that it is not: comedian Amber Ruffin discussing her police encounters, the Buffalo cop who intervened on a chokehold and lost her job and pension, the Minneapolis police union chief who used his powerful position to try to justify George Floyd’s torture and death, and the Philadelphia Police Union President who, in his position of authority, called Black Lives Matter protestors ‘rabid animals.’ Remember that the fourth stage of genocide is “dehumanization, wherein members of a particular group “are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases.”
  91. Check out this Anti-Racist/Anti-Fascist Education playlist.
  92. Don’t gentrify neighborhoods.
  93. Support that new apartment building proposed to be built in your neighborhood. Don’t participate in “snob zoning,” which is opposing new builds of apartments because wealthy white folks are afraid the apartment building will “change the character of a community.” For more infromation on this, see #41.
  94. If you or a friend or family member is an educator, ensure anti-racism is in your teaching practice. Some resources for this are the books We Want to do More than Survive by Bettina L. Love, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, and Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. Other resources are the Abolitionist Teaching NetworkAmerican University’s Summer Institute on Education, Equity, and JusticeTeaching ToleranceThe National Seed ProjectThe NAIS People of Color ConferenceThe Race Institute for K-12 Educators, the book The Guide for White Women Who Teach Black BoysTeaching While White, the White Privilege Conference, and specifically for white teachers of middle school students, the website The Collaborative. Another resource: Each link on this page is a montage of video clips related videos of teachers and students talking about teaching Black boys.
  95. Array is an independent film distribution and resource collective founded by Ava DuVernay. For students of all ages, Array is creating learning companions for the works they produce and distribute, starting with When They See Us. Check out the learning companion for it here.
  96. Work on this excellent document of scaffolding anti-racism resources.
  97. Check out the White Ally Toolkit, which helps white folks become more persuasive in conversations with racism skeptics by empowering and equipping us with best practice communications skills based on listening, storytelling, and compassion.
  98. Check out the White People Confronting Racism workshop.
  99. Have an idea to fight white supremacy or sexism or homophobia, etc? Do the research to see if someone who’s Black is already doing it. A Black friend was contacted by a white woman who wanted to organize a BLM protest in her town — my Black friend’s first response was, “Do you know if any Black leaders are already doing it?” The white woman wasn’t sure. Similarly, if Alyssa Milano had checked for #metoo on Twitter before her tweet, she may have found Tarana Burke’s original #metoo tweet from 2006 — and could have rightly attributed the idea from the start and amplified a Black woman’s voice.
  100. When you see someone who is Black stopped by the police, stop and watch the encounter. Listen to Twitter user @kingkeraun discuss his experience seeing a white woman record an encounter he had with the police.
  101. Write to your federal legislators in support of The Breathe Act, which Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza calls “our generation’s version of the Civil Rights Act.” An overview of The Breathe Act can be found here, and a more in-depth summary can be found here. You can become a community co-sponsor of the bill here.
  102. Write to your federal legislators in support of the Rebuild America’s Schools Act of 2019, which will invest $100 billion over 10 years in fixing America’s public schools. Investing less in incarceration and more in education will go a long way. Because of limited education funding, schools desperately in need of renovations need to compete against each other to be next on the list for the reno. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), a part of the Department of Education, reports that in 2012–2013, “21 percent of schools were in fair condition, and 3 percent were in poor condition.” 3 percent of schools is millions of American children. Millions. The NCES also reports that “the building systems/features were rated as being in fair or poor condition in their permanent buildings in 14 to 32 percent of the schools.” This article gives examples of school facilities in poor condition across the country. Our kids deserve so much better.
  103. Remember the wise words of Twitter user @itsjacksonbbz: You will continue to mess up racism. So continue to be teachable, open to correction from POC, and vigilantly monitor yourself for defensiveness and white fragility. You never “arrive” as an ally, you must continually *practice* allyship.

What Critical Race Theory Is — and Isn’t

By Faith Karimi, CNN

(CNN)Critical race theory. You may be hearing those three words a lot these days. Lawmakers in Tennessee and Idaho have banned its teaching from their public schools’ curriculum, while parents in Texas are opposing a school district‘s efforts to combat racism with lessons in “cultural awareness” — seen by some as critical race theory.It’s a concept that’s been around for decades and that seeks to understand and address inequality and racism in the US. The term also has become politicized and been attacked by its critics as a Marxist ideology that’s a threat to the American way of life. To get a deeper understanding of what critical race theory is — and isn’t — we talked to one of the scholars behind it.

What’s critical race theory?

Critical race theory recognizes that systemic racism is part of American society and challenges the beliefs that allow it to flourish. 

“Critical race theory is a practice. It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor who teaches at UCLA and Columbia University.A young boy drinks from the "colored" water fountain on the county courthouse lawn in Halifax, North Carolina, in 1938. A young boy drinks from the “colored” water fountain on the county courthouse lawn in Halifax, North Carolina, in 1938. Critical race theorists believe that racism is an everyday experience for most people of color, and that a large part of society has no interest in doing away with it because it benefits White elites. Many also believe that American institutions are racist and that people are privileged or oppressed because of their race. While the theory was started as a way to examine how laws and systems promote inequality, it has since expanded. “Critical race theory attends not only to law’s transformative role which is often celebrated, but also to its role in establishing the very rights and privileges that legal reform was set to dismantle,” Crenshaw told CNN. “Like American history itself, a proper understanding of the ground upon which we stand requires a balanced assessment, not a simplistic commitment to jingoistic accounts of our nation’s past and current dynamics.”

Who came up with the idea?

Crenshaw is one of its founding scholars and hosted a workshop on the critical race theory movement in 1989. But the idea behind it goes back much further, to the work of civil rights activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Fannie Lou Hamer and Pauli Murray. “Everything builds on what came before,” Crenshaw said, adding that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.”Crenshaw said she and others “took up the task of exploring the role that law played in establishing the very practices of exclusion and disadvantage.”

“Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment,” a book by several legal scholars.

Some of the theory’s earliest origins can be traced back to the 1970s, when lawyers, activists and legal scholars realized the advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled, according to the book, “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.” Crenshaw was among a group of intellectuals, along with Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman and Richard Delgado, who attended a 1989 conference in Wisconsin that focused on new strategies to combat racism. In 1993, Delgado, Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda and Charles R. Lawrence wrote the book, “Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment.”Some critical race theorists also believe notions of race are products of social thought and relations, not biology. “They correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient,” Delgado and Jean Stefancic wrote in “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.”

How has it evolved over the years?

The theory has a passionate group of followers who are mostly academics. It has inspired at least a dozen books, more than 250 law review articles and several conferences. “At this point, it is wider than any specific discipline or school of thought. It isn’t even exclusively American,” Crenshaw said.The concept has taken on new urgency since the killings last year of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other African Americans by police officers led to a national reckoning on race. Demonstrators hold signs honoring George Floyd and other victims of police violence during a protest on March 28, 2021, in Minneapolis. Demonstrators hold signs honoring George Floyd and other victims of police violence during a protest on March 28, 2021, in Minneapolis. Over the past year many Americans have called for for an examination of systemic racism — in part through education such as the teaching of The New York Times’ 1619 Project in schools. That Pulitzer Prize-winning project reframes American history around the date of August 1619, when the first slave ship arrived on America’s shores. 

Where is it taught?

Cornell and Harvard universities have conducted research on it. So have the National Institutes of Health. The theory has also led to similar groups focused on Asian American, Latino and Indian racial experiences.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had scheduled training on critical race theory last fall before the program was canceled by President Trump’s White House. So far, President Biden has been more receptive to critical race theory. His administration is promoting education programs — opposed by many conservatives — that address systemic racism in the US and the country’s legacy of slavery.

Why is there so much resistance to it? 

Critics have slammed the theory, with conservatives accusing it of poisoning discussions on racism. President Trump opposed the teaching of the 1619 Project in schools and banned federal agencies from conducting racial sensitivity training related to critical race theory. His administration called it “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”Former President Trump: "Critical race theory is being forced into our children's schools."Former President Trump: “Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools.””Students in our universities are inundated with critical race theory. This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed,” Trump said. “Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors and families.”Tennessee state Sen. Brian Kelsey, a Republican, argued last week on Twitter that critical race theory is harmful to students because it “teaches that American democracy is a lie. It teaches that the rule of law does not exist & is instead a series of power struggles among racial groups.”But Crenshaw notes that merely acknowledging the nation’s history of racism has long been vilified as unpatriotic and anti-American. “It bears acknowledging that we’ve been here before: For his non-violent agitation for civil rights, MLK was targeted by the FBI as the most dangerous man in America,” she said. “The civil rights and Black freedom movements were targeted, surveilled and disrupted by the FBI. Black Lives Matter has been framed by some in law enforcement as a terrorist organization. So racial justice work … has always had an uneasy relationship with the federal government.”

The People James Baldwin Knew

The celebrated writer moved between many worlds, becoming close friends with major figures — from Marlon Brando to Toni Morrison — in art, activism and beyond.

Cinemagraph

By Nancy HassPublished Dec. 11, 2020Updated Dec. 17, 2020

This story is part of T’s Book Club, a series of articles and events dedicated to classic works of American literature. Click here to R.S.V.P. to a virtual conversation, led by Ayana Mathis, about “Go Tell It on the Mountain” on Dec. 17.

It is impossible to read the work of James Baldwin — who often wove memorable details from his life into his fiction, plays and essays — and not want to learn more about the man. Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin reached the height of literary success soon after the publication of his first few books, while also becoming a vocal and visible advocate for the civil rights movement beginning in the late 1950s. Known for being a magnetic speaker, with his wide eyes and mercurial temperament, Baldwin was also an irresistible presence and very clearly an intellectual star few could rival. Throughout the decades, he became friendly with a dazzling array of different writers, artists, activists, actors, musicians and more — all people whose lives he touched and who, in turn, helped to shape his own. Below, a primer on 10 individuals Baldwin encountered and, in his way, kept close until his death in 1987.SIGN UP FOR THE T LIST NEWSLETTER: A weekly roundup of what the editors of T Magazine are noticing and coveting right now.Sign Up

While Baldwin lived in Harlem in the late 1930s with his mother, stepfather and eight younger siblings, one of his teachers at the local junior high school was the Harvard-educated Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, who likely influenced the budding writer to attend his alma mater, DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. A prestigious all-boys public institution at the time, it counts among its alumni dozens of 20th century luminaries, including the painters Barnett Newman and Romare Bearden, the electronics pioneer Avery Fisher and the literary critic Lionel Trilling. It was there that Baldwin found succor amid a fierce coterie of intellectually fecund, largely working-class Jews. Much of his energy was channeled into the school literary magazine, The Magpie, where one of its editors was Richard Avedon, the son of a Jewish Belarusian immigrant, who would become one of the dominant fashion photographers and portraitists of the 20th century. A year older than Baldwin, Avedon was not only visually gifted — he started taking pictures at age 12, using his father’s Brownie box camera — but an accomplished poet; as a senior, he took first prize in a citywide high school poetry contest. The two boys, both sensitive, came from high-tension homes. The Depression had cost Avedon’s father his retail dress business, and the photographer’s beloved sister, Louise, would soon begin a descent into mental illness. Baldwin’s preacher stepfather was perpetually angry, overwhelmed by his large family, and en route to madness, as well. But in high school the boys blossomed, collaborating on a magazine that showcased stylish Art Deco-inflected graphics and modernist verse. After high school, Avedon joined the merchant marine, Baldwin decamped to Greenwich Village, and they largely fell out of touch.

A photo from the June 1941 DeWitt Clinton High School yearbook, the Clintonian, showing students involved in publications, including Richard Avedon (circle left) and James Baldwin (circle right).
A photo from the June 1941 DeWitt Clinton High School yearbook, the Clintonian, showing students involved in publications, including Richard Avedon (circle left) and James Baldwin (circle right).Credit…Via the June 1941 Dewitt Clinton High School yearbook

Then, in 1962, Avedon, by then famous for his work in Harper’s Bazaar and Life, was asked to photograph him. The shoot sparked “Nothing Personal,” a revelatory 1964 monograph in which Avedon’s photographs are accompanied by a 20,000-word essay by Baldwin. The project, as the critic Hilton Als put it, brought together four aspects of contemporary American life: civil rights, mental health, Black nationalism and the transfer of cultural power from Old Hollywood to the rock ’n’ roll generation; portraits of Allen Ginsberg and Marilyn Monroe are juxtaposed with shots of the American Nazi Party and patients in an asylum. Baldwin’s text, which is only loosely connected to the photographs, includes lucid reflections on how television advertising mirrors the zeitgeist, and the ordeal of being stopped and frisked while showing a white European friend around New York City. The book limns how the two men, so different in their origins and art, were remarkably similar in profound ways. As Als points out in his introductory essay to a new edition of the book from 2017: both were perennial outsiders, “menaced, and so, therefore, perceived as menacing despite their commercial and critical success; they knew power could be positive and effective but was ultimately illusory, fake.”

James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney in Paris, circa 1960.
James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney in Paris, circa 1960.Credit…Courtesy of the Estate of Beauford Delaney and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

“I learned about the light from Beauford Delaney,” began Baldwin’s introduction to the catalog for a 1964 exhibition of the work of the Knoxville, Tenn.-born modernist painter at Paris’s Galerie Lambert, “the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face.” Baldwin had been a 16-year-old student at DeWitt Clinton when he first met the 39-year-old Delaney in 1940, introduced by Emile Capouya, a fellow classmate and contributor to The Magpie who would one day publish works by Ezra PoundJames Joyce and Primo Levi. Capouya figured that his friend Baldwin, who was struggling with his identity, would find common ground with the artist, whose studio was located at 181 Greene Street. Delaney, Baldwin would later write, “was the first walking, living proof for me that a Black man could be an artist.” Delaney was a paternal figure who disabused Baldwin of the notion that jazz was sinful, and played Ella FitzgeraldFats Waller and Bessie Smith for the boy on his scratchy record player. Queer and closeted, Delaney lived a complicated, compartmentalized life: in the Village, where he felt freer to be himself than with his more conservative friends in Harlem, he moved in bohemian circles, developing friendships with artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Beauford Delaney’s “Portrait of James Baldwin” (1945) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Beauford Delaney’s “Portrait of James Baldwin” (1945) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.Credit…© Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, court-appointed administrator; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Beauford Delaney’s “Dark Rapture (James Baldwin)” (1941).
Beauford Delaney’s “Dark Rapture (James Baldwin)” (1941).Credit…© Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, court-appointed administrator; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Baldwin remained a constant in the painter’s life, however. In 1948, when Baldwin was 24, he left the United States for Paris, fleeing American racism. Five years later, Delaney joined him there, extending what was to be a vacation into a permanent stay. In 1955, the painter relocated his studio to Clamart, a southwestern suburb, a move thought to support his mental health, which had started to decline. Throughout, Baldwin was loyal to his friend. When Baldwin moved to the South of France, Delaney, who died in 1979, spent weeks sitting at his easel in the writer’s garden. During Delaney’s time in France, his work, once primarily colorful figuration, reflected his deepening interest in abstraction. “In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place,” Baldwin wrote, “[Beauford] would have been recognized as my master and I as his pupil. He became for me an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times, and I lived to see him broken, but I never saw him bow.”

James Baldwin and Marlon Brando at the Lincoln Memorial during the August 1963 March on Washington. Posing with them are Charleton Heston (left) and Harry Belafonte.
James Baldwin and Marlon Brando at the Lincoln Memorial during the August 1963 March on Washington. Posing with them are Charleton Heston (left) and Harry Belafonte.Credit…AP Photos

In 1943, Delaney introduced a 19-year-old James Baldwin to Connie Williams, a Trinidadian restaurateur who had just opened Calypso Restaurant — whose patrons would include Tennessee Williamsand entertainers such as Eartha Kitt and Paul Robeson — in a basement space on Macdougal Street. Hired as a waiter at Calypso, which had live music and dancing, Baldwin mixed with the bohemian clientele. Among the habitués who befriended the erudite young server was the writer Henry Miller. But the occasional customer with whom he may have developed the most enduring friendship was Marlon Brando, who was born the same year as Baldwin and had followed his two older sisters to New York that year and become a student of Stella Adler at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop. The men may have even shared a space together for a brief time. (Brando, who had a lifelong talent for offbeat friendships, would later become roommates with a childhood pal from Evanston, Ill., the proto-nerd character actor Wally Cox).

Brando and Baldwin bonded over a passion for racial and social justice and for the theater, forging a connection that lasted through the decades. It was Brando who, in 1952, fresh off his star-making turn in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” lent Baldwin, who had just finished writing the manuscript for “Go Tell It on the Mountain” in Switzerland, the money to fly to New York to meet the Knopf executives who wanted to publish his semiautobiographical novel. The two men were — along with Charlton Heston — among the most recognized presences on the podium at the 1963 March on Washington and, in 1966, when the actor visited the writer in Istanbul during one of Baldwin’s frequent stints in Turkey, a local friend ferried Brando in his compact car in an unsuccessful attempt to elude photographers. When the author James Grissom interviewed Brando in 1990 for a book about Tennessee Williams (“Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog,” 2015), the conversation veered unexpectedly: “If you wish to ask me what I cared about most now — if you ask me to state what was important or lasting,” he told Grissom, “it would have to be that I walked and sat and dreamed next to a man named James Baldwin. James — or Jimmy — knew how to analyze, place, describe, repair and destroy things — all in the right way and for the right reasons. Baldwin, as I liked to call him, taught me to think in a piercing way about things far more important than scripts or contracts or poems — he taught me to look into and understand people and their motives and their identities. And I didn’t always like what I saw, but it led me toward something that might be called freedom.”

James Baldwin and Medgar Evers read a newspaper together in Mississippi, 1963.
James Baldwin and Medgar Evers read a newspaper together in Mississippi, 1963.Credit…Steve Schapiro/Corbis/Getty Images

Just hours after President John F. Kennedy gave his historic civil rights address in June 1963, a speech that had likely been spurred by the pressure that Baldwin and other leaders had exerted on the administration, the writer’s friend, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the N.A.A.C.P., was shot in the back and killed in his driveway by Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and Klansman. Evers had been the target of several other assassination attempts in the months before. Baldwin observed that Evers seemed resigned to the fact that he would die from his activism. One imagines that Evers might have hoped, at least, that his wife, Myrlie, and children, always nervous for his safety, would not have to witness his death, or that it would take months for his killer to be convicted, rather than 31 years. Although Baldwin was already deeply involved with the movement by then — he had first met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957 while touring the South on assignment for Harper’s and The Partisan Review, and had, over the years, developed a complex relationship with Malcolm X — he had only known Evers for five months. They met that January in Jackson, after the Congress of Racial Equality had sent the writer on a lecture tour of the Deep South. Evers invited him along to interview bystanders to the killing of a Black man by a white shopkeeper — an experience that Baldwin found terrifying; the young civil rights leader also told him of the tree he had walked past daily in his childhood, draped with shreds of clothing from a man who had been lynched there.

A 1964 telegram from Charles Evers to James Baldwin requesting his presence at the trial for the murder of Medgar Evers.
A 1964 telegram from Charles Evers to James Baldwin requesting his presence at the trial for the murder of Medgar Evers.Credit…Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture 

The image, and Evers’s reconciled attitude to the possibility of his own violent and untimely death, had a profound effect. Baldwin’s memory of the last time he saw Evers, at the activist’s small ranch home, where he had gone to sign some books for the family, is among the most transfixing points in Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” premised on “Remember This House,” Baldwin’s unrealized book about King, Malcolm X and Evers, for which only 30 pages of notes exist. Completing the project would have required Baldwin to travel back down to places like Selma, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., to interview the widows and children of slain leaders. The writer, by then suffering from the esophageal cancer that would kill him in 1987 at 63, was not in any shape to do it. He had become increasingly depressed about the state of American race relations. By the 1980s, according to his former literary assistant, David Leeming, who became his biographer, Baldwin’s outlook was one of “general pessimism” about the “unlikelihood of the white world’s changing its ways.”

The trumpeter Miles Davis at the Jazz à Juan Festival, July 1963.
The trumpeter Miles Davis at the Jazz à Juan Festival, July 1963.Credit…Pierre Fournier/Sygma, via Getty Images

Both Baldwin and the epic jazz trumpeter Miles Davis considered themselves to be guarded people, in possession of a kind of “artistic shyness,” as Davis once described it in his 1989 autobiography, wary of other people taking up too much of their time. Davis even thought they resembled each other enough to be brothers. A mutual friend introduced them in the ’60s, and when the musician played gigs in Cap d’Antibes and at the yearly Jazz à Juan festival, he stayed for a couple of days at Baldwin’s farmhouse in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, an idyllic town in Provence. They were in awe of each other at the beginning. (“He was so goddamn heavy, all those great books he was writing, and so I didn’t know what to say to him,” Davis would recall. “Later I found out that he felt the same way about me.”) Baldwin had long been enamored of the musical process. “The man who creates the music,” he wrote in the 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues,” “is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.”

Despite their similar reputations as mercurial, the men, in fact, came from divergent backgrounds: Davis, who had attended Juilliard, was the son of a dentist and grew up in East St. Louis, Ill. But they had each developed elaborate personas that helped them navigate celebrity and a hostile white world. When they were together, however, those boundaries receded. “We would just sit in that great big beautiful house of his telling all kinds of stories,” Davis recalled. “Then we would go out to that wine garden he had and do the same thing.” Baldwin’s death shook the famously unflappable Davis. Quincy Troupe, who helped Davis write his autobiography, recalled the day he told the trumpeter that Baldwin was gone. “He was convinced that among all his friends, Jimmy would outlive him. I thought I saw tears welling in his eyes but, if there were, Miles covered it up well by going to the bathroom. One thing is certain: Miles Davis wasn’t going to let me or anybody else see him cry. But I think on this cold December day in 1987 Miles Davis was crying in the bathroom for his great friend now gone, Jimmy Baldwin.”

Richard Wright at the cafe Le Tournon in Paris, circa 1950s.
Richard Wright at the cafe Le Tournon in Paris, circa 1950s.Credit… Dominique Berretty/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

While Beauford Delaney was Baldwin’s idealized father figure (and the antithesis of his stepfather), the writer had a far more fraught bond with the novelist Richard Wright, his literary father. In 1944, Baldwin was 20 when he knocked on the Brooklyn door of the older writer, then 36. Four years earlier, Wright had become internationally known for “Native Son,” the harrowing tale of a young Black man who accidentally kills a white woman and then, while on the run, rapes and murders his own girlfriend. The novel, which sold 215,000 copies, focused attention on the relentless racism of modern America. Like Baldwin, Wright had a fraught childhood; he was born in a log cabin in Mississippi into a family of sharecroppers, with four grandparents who had been enslaved, and a father who would desert the family when the writer was five. He was bounced around to relatives’ homes throughout the impoverished delta, winding up with his severe Seventh Day Adventist grandmother, who forbade books other than the Gospels. Wright, a precocious student, had to work to support himself instead of attending high school. Eventually, during the Great Migration, he moved to Chicago, where he got deeply involved with the Communist Party and, in 1937, moved to New York. There, he developed a friendship with the writer Ralph Ellison and began successfully publishing short stories, including those in his 1938 collection “Uncle Tom’s Children,” with its harrowing description of lynchings in the Deep South.

The cover of the inaugural Spring 1949 issue of Zero: A Review of Literature and Art, which included Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”
The cover of the inaugural Spring 1949 issue of Zero: A Review of Literature and Art, which included Baldwin’s essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”Credit…Via Amazon

To the young, ambitious Baldwin, he was like a god. Over the course of the early years of their relationship, Wright — who moved to Paris with his wife and child in 1946, soon after the publication of his memoir “Black Boy” — read early drafts of Baldwin’s novel that would eventually become “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and helped Baldwin land a fellowship that launched his writing career. When Baldwin also moved to Paris, Wright introduced him to the influential editors at the new literary magazine Zero. But, in a stunning Oedipal feat, the 24-year-old’s first piece for Zero, published in 1949, was a fierce takedown of “Native Son” titled “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In it, Baldwin skewered race-based political fiction, starting with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852), made limp by the “wet eyes of the sentimentalist,” and lambasted Wright for making his protagonist Bigger Thomas a bookend to that portrayal, a cardboard character who merely reinforced the prejudice and stereotyping of Black people as subhuman, violent and trapped by circumstance. As Als noted in The New Yorker in 1998, the essay was “meant not only to bury the tradition of Black letters which had its roots in a Communism supported by white dilettantes but also to supersede Wright as the one Black writer worth reading in the largely white world of American letters.” Predictably, Wright felt betrayed, and although they stayed connected, they never fully reconciled. (Baldwin would later concede that it had been wrong to hurt Wright.) In “Alas, Poor Richard,” a 1961 essay he wrote after Wright’s death, at age 52 of a heart attack, Baldwin, searching to understand the complex friction between them called him “my ally and my witness, and alas! my father.”

Lorraine Hansberry in her Bleecker Street apartment, April 1959.
Lorraine Hansberry in her Bleecker Street apartment, April 1959.Credit…David Attie/Getty Images

He called her Sweet Lorraine, a likely reference to the Nat King Cole version of the jazz standard, but also a tribute to her particular combination of steely intelligence and gentleness. They met in New York in 1958, when the writer and playwright, whom Baldwin would later refer to as “that small, dark girl, with her wit, her wonder and her eloquent compassion,” came to a theater workshop production of his melancholic gay-themed novel, “Giovanni’s Room” (1956). Baldwin, 34, was already famous, having published “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and his first collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son” (1955); the 28-year-old Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun,” its title derived from “Harlem,” a poem by her mentor Langston Hughes, was about to debut on Broadway, making her the first African-American woman to have her work appear there. While the assembled mandarins attacked “Giovanni’s Room,” Hansberry — petite and relentless, a geyser of well-reasoned passion — defended Baldwin as a meteoric talent and a teller of naked truths. That they were both queer likely strengthened their connection even more. Over the course of his life, Baldwin wrote rhapsodically about many friends, especially those in the civil rights movement, but his recollections of Hansberry, who died in 1965 at 34 of pancreatic cancer, had an unparalleled luminosity and joy.

Their evenings together in her Greenwich Village apartment were full of arguments, booze and humor. Although she was a committed Marxist while he was untethered to a single ideology, together they became the literary conscience of the Black liberation movement. In 1963, in the wake of the publication of Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” she was among the people he took (along with others including Harry Belafonte, the psychologist Kenneth Clark and the singer and actress Lena Horne) to a historic and antagonistic secret meeting requested by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Despite a tsunami of rancor, the gathering, in which an enraged Hansberry suggested there was “no alternative except our going in the streets … and chaos,” contributed a month later to John F. Kennedy’s famed civil rights address. To Baldwin, she possessed a remarkable alchemy of femininity, dagger sharpness and fidelity to uncompromising ideals, which he found irresistible. “I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph,” he recalled in Esquire in 1969, “and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face.” But the pair shared an ineffable isolation as well, born of their acute awareness of the racial oppression that hung like soot in the air, clinging to everything. “Her going,” he wrote, “did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other, which perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the treads of tanks.”

William Styron at home in Roxbury, Conn., 1967.
William Styron at home in Roxbury, Conn., 1967.Credit…© Inge Morath/Magnum Photos

In September 1960, Rose Styron, the forbearing wife of the 35-year-old novelist William Styron, fielded a call to their home in bucolic Litchfield County, Conn., from Robert Silvers, an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Silvers, then 30, who a few years later would co-found The New York Review of Books, was working with Baldwin, 36, on an essay about Martin Luther King Jr. It was slow going; Baldwin, who had come back from France to work on the front lines of the civil rights movement, was feeling burned out in Greenwich Village. Could he come stay in the Styrons’ gracious 19th-century home? William Styron, a Virginian WASP descended from slave owners who had become famous in 1951 for his novel “Lie Down in Darkness, was gestating the 1967 book that would at first gain him outrageous accolades and a Pulitzer Prize, and then bedevil him when critical opinion turned vicious: “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” The story of a violent 1831 slave revolt that resulted in more than 200 deaths and unimaginable carnage, the rarely discussed incident had been an obsession of Styron’s since adolescence.

Styron’s home in Roxbury, 2009.
Styron’s home in Roxbury, 2009.Credit…Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times

Baldwin remained on the couple’s five acres in Roxbury for eight months, taking over the guesthouse that Styron used as a studio. He worked on the novel “Another Country” (1962) and may have even prepared to interview the Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad in Chicago for an essay that would be included in “The Fire Next Time” (1963). At night, after Rose put their young children to bed, the three adults would retreat to the living room, with glass doors that overlooked the property. There was a fire in the hearth and plenty of Jack Daniels. Sometimes other local literary friends would stop by, including Philip Roth and Arthur Miller. Though Baldwin later told The Paris Review, “It was a wonderful time in my life, but not at all literary. We sang songs, drank a little too much and on occasion chatted with the people who were dropping in to see us.” Before he left, Baldwin convinced Styron to take the leap that would eventually put him in the cross hairs of critical opinion: to write Nat Turner in the voice of the slave preacher himself. Upon its publication, everyone from John Cheever and Robert Penn Warren to Carlos Fuentes and Alex Haley breathlessly hailed the achievement but, six months later, the work was bitterly castigated as a racist tract that demeaned the Black folk hero. Styron was devastated at the publication, in 1968, of “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.” That spring, Baldwin, who had declined to contribute to the volume, moderated a debate between Styron and the activist and actor Ossie Davis, who was leading a protest against an upcoming film version of the book, which was never made. Rigorously tactful, Baldwin argued that Styron was well within his rights to enter into a “confrontation with his history.” No one, he told the audience, “can tell a writer what he can write.”

The French writer Marguerite Yourcenar at home on Mount Desert Island, in Maine, 1979.
The French writer Marguerite Yourcenar at home on Mount Desert Island, in Maine, 1979.Credit…© JP Laffont

The Provençal village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, about 10 miles west of Nice, traces its origins back to roughly 1000 A.D. But since the 1920s, the center of cultural life there has been a rustic family-owned inn called La Colombe d’Or. At first, it was the artists who came, in a sun-baked retreat from the dense scene of between-the-wars Paris. The owner, Paul Roux, who lacked much formal education but possessed exquisite taste, would encourage them to pay for meals or lodging with works. Over the years, the place became filled with pieces by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, many of which still hang with an insouciance that belies a top-notch security system, on the scuffed plaster walls. By the 1950s, as the Cannes Film Festival started to take off, the inn would become the magnet for movie stars, rock gods, bon vivants and tourists that it remains today. So enchanted was Baldwin by the little hotel and the town that buzzed around it that, in 1970, he began renting an apartment there, eventually writing his novel “Just Above My Head (1979) at Chez Baldwin. The Colombe d’Or — always more than a just a restaurant with rooms upstairs, the kind of place where you can spend the day by the pool, nibbling on a bouquet de crevettes and ordering another bottle of rosé — became his second living room.

While he often brought along house guests, including the singer Nina Simone and the actor Sidney Poitier, on other days he hung out there with a trio of regulars — the married actors Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, who had first met at the inn in 1949, and the aristocratic Belgian-born writer Marguerite Yourcenar, lionized for her novel “Memoirs of Hadrian” (1951). Montand co-owned Cafe de La Place across the street from the hotel, where there was a designated area for everyone to play pétanque, a lawn bowling game similar to bocce. It made sense that Yourcenar and Baldwin would get on; they were both philosophical writers with a strong moral and historic frame (and a theatrical affect); she, too, toggled between essays, novels and short stories. And, like him, she lived nearly all her life openly queer, mostly in the U.S. with her English translator, Grace Frick, from 1939 until Frick’s 1979 death; their white clapboard house in a tiny Maine village had obvious parallels to Baldwin’s refuge in Saint Paul-de-Vence. After Frick’s demise, Youncenar visited the French town with her traveling companion, a young gay man named Jerry Wilson. In 1983, she translated Baldwin’s play “The Amen Corner” (1954) into French, and when he received the Légion d’Honneur in 1986, a year before her death at 84, she was said to be in Paris, at his side.

Toni Morrison and Baldwin at the Founders Day celebration at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, 1986.
Toni Morrison and Baldwin at the Founders Day celebration at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, 1986.Credit…© Hakim Mutlaq

The novelist and professor Toni Morrison, who died in 2019, was only seven years younger than Baldwin but, as a writer, she belonged to the generation that came after his. Partly that was because while he had started publishing work in his early 20s, Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993, got a later start. Her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” came out in 1970. She was 39 and working at Random House, a job she held for two decades, editing the works of Angela DavisToni Cade Bambara and Muhammad Ali. The two writers met in 1973 to discuss a potential book contract, which never came about. As they aged, their legends were burnished and they were asked about one another by journalists and critics. In 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe, who co-wrote Miles Davis’s autobiography as well as “James Baldwin: The Legacy” (1989), asked the dying Baldwin his thoughts about Morrison: “Toni’s my ally,” he said, “and it’s really probably too complex to get into … Her gift is allegory … in general, she’s taken a myth, or she takes what seems to be a myth, and turns it into something else. I don’t know how to put this. ‘Beloved’ could be the story of truth.”

Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison at James Baldwin’s funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, December 1987.
Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison at James Baldwin’s funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, December 1987.Credit…© Thomas Allen Harris, “Untitled” (Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou & Toni Morrison at James Baldwin’s Funeral at Cathedral of St. John the Divine), (1987)

In the tribute Morrison delivered at Baldwin’s funeral, her debt was clear: “You made American English honest — genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was a truly modern dialogic, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft, plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called ‘exasperating egocentricity,’ you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, ‘robbed it of the jewel of its naïveté,’ and un-gated it for Black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion.” After Baldwin’s death, many considered Morrison an heir to her friend’s vast role in American life. She edited two collections of his writings among her lengthy oeuvre and in 2017 published “The Origin of Others,” a memoir and cultural exploration in the Baldwin mold.


Top photos and videos: Pierre Fournier/Sygma/Getty Images (Davis); © Inge Morath/Magnum Photos (Styron); Pond 5 (Baldwin car video); © Van Vechten Trust/ courtesy of the Beinecke Library (color Baldwin); Steve Schapiro/Corbis/Getty Images (Evers); Getty Images (Brando video) Dominique Beretty/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; David Attie/Getty Images (Hansberry); Photofest (Avedon); © Bob Adelman Estate (Baldwin); © Hakim Mutlaq (Morrison); from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, © Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, court-appointed administrator; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY (Delaney Painting); Courtesy of the Estate of Beauford Delaney and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY (Baldwin/Delaney); Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images (Yourcenar)What the Church Meant for James BaldwinDec. 4, 2020

USDA wants to help farmers feed families, but advocates and lawmakers say it’s not enough

Experts say the country needs a stronger safety net for families in need.ByStephanie EbbsMay 2, 2020, 2:00 AM• 11 min read

Farmworkers face unique risks during coronavirus pandemicFarmworkers in the United States are classified as essential workers. 

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With everyday Americans unable to keep up with demand despite organizing fundraising drives or collections to send trucks of wasted produce or milk where it is needed most, the largest groups representing farmers and food banks are asking for federal help. They have now called on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to scale up efforts to the national level.

Lawmakers called on the USDA to provide “bold and innovative” solutions Friday to address the harm to farmers and the confusion over why food is being discarded while other Americans need help feeding their families.MORE: USDA to try ‘out of the box’ solution to get food from farmers to food banks

No one knows how much food has been lost nationwide since restaurants, schools, hotels and other businesses have closed and stopped buying food in bulk, but farmers have reported dumping milk, plowing under vegetables and facing the possibility of euthanizing livestock if they can’t take animals to meat processing plants.

The USDA wants to address that issue with a new “farmers to families” program that will use federal money to pay farmers to box up and distribute their own product to food banks. Similar to a community-supported agriculture (CSA) box you might pick up from a local farm or farmers market, the donation will include fruits and vegetables, dairy products, cooked poultry or pork, or some combination of the three, and be provided to food banks at no cost.

PHOTO: People collect buckets and truckloads of potatoes Wednesday, April 15, 2020, at Ryan Cranney's farm in Oakley, Idaho.
People collect buckets and truckloads of potatoes

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the program has the potential to address one of the reasons the pandemic has been so disruptive to the food supply chain, that big national producers and distributors can’t easily shift from delivering entire trucks of product to providing food in a way that’s accessible to consumers and doesn’t add work for food banks to repackage it.

“This program will not only provide direct financial relief to our farmers and ranchers,” Perdue told reporters in April. “Mr. President, it will allow for the purchase and distribution of our agricultural abundance in this country to help our fellow Americans in need.”

The USDA is accelerating the process to decide which farmers will get part of the $3 billion available from the program. Submissions for contracts were due Friday and the agency said it would start granting them in time for the first food box deliveries on May 15. A USDA spokesperson said they received “an abundance of interest” in the program.

“Farmers to families” could be an experiment in a new model of agriculture that addresses the disruptions of the current emergency, but lawmakers, experts and advocates also warn that spending federal money to buy and donate food won’t solve all the ripple effects from the pandemic.MORE: Friends come together to get free food across US from farms to those in need

Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, wrote to Perdue on Friday asking that the USDA prioritize options for the program that will reduce food waste and allow producers and food banks to be flexible in adapting contracts to provide a variety of seasonal products.

Elizabeth Balkan, director of the food waste, food and agriculture program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that even though disruptions from the pandemic brought attention to the increased waste of products from farms, it’s a longstanding issue that the current system hasn’t fixed.

“Even in the best of times there’s enormous amounts of food waste happening upstream at the point of production or the farm level,” she said, citing estimates that billions of pounds of produce can go unharvested or unsold every year.

“The reason why we’re in this mess is because there’s so many intermediary points and excess food and it’s hard for excess food to get to the people in need in a straightforward manner,” Balkan said.

Balkan said she’s still concerned prefilled boxes won’t stop all food from being wasted if producers aren’t matched up with organizations to distribute the food or if the contents of the boxes don’t match the foods families need. But she said the pandemic has made people appreciate the people that produce our food and that it could fuel a push for policies that help reduce food waste.

Miguel Gomez, an assistant professor at Cornell University who researches the food supply chain and distribution, said the program could show if our food system can adapt to entirely new ways of packaging and distributing fresh food that’s ready to go to market on a larger scale and address some of the weaknesses the current crisis has highlighted.

“I think these type of programs have the opportunity to develop the business as trustees and the supply chain expertise for businesses to really make good money innovating input distribution. It is a way, also, to diversify our food supply chain structure,” he told ABC News.

Gomez said one of the challenges in the current system is that big farming operations supply large retailers while small local farms can sell directly or via farmers markets, but there are fewer outlets for midsize producers and distributors that could be more flexible, affordable and resilient to change. While the food from this program will go to food banks where there’s the most need, Gomez said it could also change the food market for consumers as more families look for places to buy food directly if they’re scared or unable to go to grocery stores.

“I think it will be very interesting to see the ability or power of our food system to repurpose all that food that is there,” he said.

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A nonprofit, Feeding America, anticipates 17.1 million people could face difficulty affording food as a result of the pandemic, in addition to the 37 million people who were considered food insecure before the crisis.

But advocates, including Feeding America, are concerned that when the national emergency is over, donations and government programs established during the pandemic could slow down even though the economy and families impacted financially will take years to recover.

The Trump administration’s previous policies on food assistance programs and other parts of the social safety net emphasized getting Americans back to work, citing the growing economy and low rate of unemployment. But with the economic downturn from the pandemic expected to last, advocates are pushing the administration and Congress to start expanding the social safety net as part of starting the recovery.

PHOTO: Hank Scott of Long & Scott Farms stands in a field of rotting cucumbers that he was unable to harvest due to lack of demand on April 30, 2020, in Mount Dora, Fla.
Hank Scott of Long & Scott Farms stands in a field of rotting cucumbers

The USDA said it has increased spending on SNAP benefits by 40% during the pandemic through state waivers to allow recipients to be automatically bumped up to the maximum benefit, provide school meals that can be picked up at home and deliver cash assistance to families in need.

Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, said that while food banks need support and are playing a vital role in the pandemic, their role can’t compare to the long-term impact of federal spending.

“The truth is in best of times, they are less than one-tenth of the dollar amount of the federal nutrition assistance safety net,” he told ABC News.

He said the efforts to expand nutrition programs during the emergency might not be helping the people with the most desperate need, the lowest-income households that already receive the maximum amount of benefits or families that can’t get to schools or food banks to collect meals and groceries.

Experts also say that providing families more money through programs like SNAP is better for the local economybecause families spend their benefits at local grocery stores and spend the money they would otherwise use on food for other necessities.

Berg said anti-hunger advocates have been pushing for a 15% increase in SNAP benefits in the next coronavirus response bill. Democrats, like House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro, said they want the USDA to support that increase as well as possible programs to expand food distribution and support organizations like World Central Kitchen, which has been providing money to restaurants to prepare and donate meals using their existing staff.

Katie Fitzgerald, executive vice president and COO of Feeding America, said that while food banks have more stock on hand because of government programs to buy excess food, they can’t sustain the push to help millions of Americans in need on donations alone.

“This is a problem that our food bank system, however strong and capable it is, is not able to solve on its own,” she told ABC News in April.

“It requires a massive government solution, through the various federal nutrition programs, TFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program), other than child nutrition programs, and it has to include a SNAP solution.”

How Farmers are Helping Food Banks Feed America

Credit: Feeding America  

My father spent 30 years in the rice business and I remember driving a “bank out” wagon to transport the grain before I ever drove a car. From those rural roots I came to appreciate that farmers are the foundation of our nation’s food system, providing the nourishing foods we all need to lead healthy, happy lives. Farmers — through advocacy, fundraising and more — are also critical partners in our nation’s fight against hunger, especially now, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Today I’m proud to serve Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization. Working together, in 2020 we provided a record-number of meals to our neighbors in need amid new challenges to putting food on the table: a once-in-a-generation pandemic made going to the grocery store an uncertain experience, food prices reached a 50-year high and unemployment rates rivaled those of the Great Depression.When it comes to making the case for strengthening the nation’s food programs, farmers are some of our most effective supporters.

As Feeding America’s network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs worked on the frontline to stem the rising tide of hunger, farmers were, and continue to be, at the side of food banks to help meet the skyrocketing need.

Even before the spread of COVID-19, food banks and farmers have worked hand-in-hand to keep plates full through programs such as The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Through TEFAP, the Agriculture Department purchases high-quality foods from U.S. farms. Feeding America, and other emergency food providers, then partner with states to provide households in need with nourishing foods

TEFAP is a significant win-win across the board. Farmers generate income from USDA food purchases and food banks receive a steady volume of nutritious food to distribute. Last year, the people we serve took home an astounding 1.7 billion meals from TEFAP purchases of food produced on American farms.

As hunger in the U.S. is magnified during COVID-19, it has become even more clear that the charitable food sector cannot do the work of feeding the nation alone. We also need deep investments in our nation’s federal nutrition programs, from TEFAP to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — a program that provides nine meals for every one our food bank network provides.

Fortunately, when it comes to making the case for strengthening the nation’s food programs, farmers are some of our most effective supporters.

Organizations such as the American Farm Bureau have been critical allies in urging lawmakers to make use of every tool at their disposal to ensure no child goes to bed hungry and fewer families make impossible choices between paying rent and buying groceries. Last year, Farm Bureau and Feeding America teamed up to press USDA to quickly design and implement solutions to address growing hunger while national news programs broadcast images of agricultural goods being destroyed, due to pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions. Ultimately, this led to the introduction of the highly successful Farmers to Families Food Box Program

Beyond advocacy, Farm Bureau used its successful #StillFarming campaign to shed light on how farmers are working overtime to keep our nation fed through uncertain times. AFBF has partnered with Feeding America to raise funds through the sale of campaign-themed merchandise to weather a perfect storm of increased demand, declines in food donations and disruptions to the charitable food system.

In November 2019, before the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, Feeding America Chief Executive Officer Claire Babineaux-Fontenot was a guest on the Farm Food Facts podcast, where she discussed the role of farmers in ending hunger: “Farmers in this country are the bedrock of this country, and so many farmers are doing so much already to help people facing hunger.” Claire’s words were true then and they are especially true today. As our network continues to help families have full lives and full stomachs, the role of farmers in helping us do that work cannot be overstated.

Vince Hall is interim chief government relations officer at Feeding America. Babineaux-Fontenot recently joined AFBF President Zippy Duvall for a FarmSide Chat podcast to discuss how communities have come together over the last year to ensure food is getting from the farm to those who need it most.