Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Book Review: JOHN LEWIS: A Life, by David Greenberg

 

Simon & Schuster, 2024. $35.00 hardcover. 704 pages.

David Greenberg’s “authoritative…definitive biography” (David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author) follows Lewis’ life through documents from numerous archives, interviews with 275 people who knew him, and rare footage of Lewis speaking from his hospital bed after Selma. The author relates his history beyond the civil rights era, highlighting his leadership in the Voter Education Project, where he helped enroll millions of African American voters across the South. The book also covers Lewis' ascent in politics, first locally in Atlanta and then as a respected member of Congress. As part of the Democratic leadership, Lewis was admired on both sides of the aisle for his unwavering dedication to nonviolent integration and justice. Recommended.

Friday, February 21, 2025

Support Needed for Fair Housing Bill HB1239 in the Current Maryland Session!

 

The Fair Housing and Housing Discrimination - Regulations, Intent, and Discriminatory Effect Bill is sponsored by Delegates Deni Taveras (D-47B), Mary A. Lehman (D-21), Joe Vogel (D-17), Nick Allen (D-8), Julian Ivey (D-47A), Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk (D-21), and Jamila J. Woods (D-26). Go to https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/HB1239?ys=2025RS to read the Official Document.

The bill was originally assigned to the House Environment and Transportation Committee. Its effective date would be October 1, 2025. It currently is in the House of Delegates, and a House Environment and Transportation Committee hearing about the bill is scheduled for February 28th at 1:00 p.m.

HB1239 authorizes the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development to adopt certain regulations related to affirmatively furthering fair housing; providing that certain discriminatory housing practices may be committed without intent; prohibiting a person from acting in a certain manner that has a discriminatory effect against a person related to the sale or rental of a dwelling; and providing that certain conduct does not constitute a certain violation.

This bill enhances fair housing protections in the state of Maryland by expanding the Department of Housing and Community Development's responsibilities and clarifying housing discrimination regulations. The bill requires the Department to administer housing programs in a way that "affirmatively furthers fair housing" and to collaborate with nonprofit and governmental entities committed to fair housing goals. Most importantly, the legislation introduces a new legal standard that allows claims of housing discrimination to be proven even without demonstrating intentional discrimination, meaning that practices with a discriminatory effect can be challenged regardless of the actor's intent. This statement refers to the legal concept of "disparate impact" in housing discrimination.

Disparate impact theory is a key legal principle in fair housing enforcement, ensuring  that policies or practices that disproportionately harm protected groups - regardless of intent - can be challenged under the law. Unlike cases of overt discrimination, disparate impact cases address systemic inequities that come from seemingly neutral policies. This doctrine is crucial for addressing racial disparities in housing, zoning laws that disproportionately exclude certain populations, and lending practices that result in unequal mortgage approvals. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of disparate impact claims in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project (2015), affirming that policies with discriminatory effects can violate the Fair Housing Act, even in the absence of intentional discrimination. California, New York, and Illinois have state-level disparate impact protections similar to what this bill proposes.

The bill specifically prohibits various discriminatory practices in housing, such as refusing to rent or sell, making discriminatory statements, or providing unequal services based on characteristics like race, color, religion, sex, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, source of income, or military status. 

The bill also provides a defense for actions that meet three conditions: the action was without discriminatory intent, was justified by legitimate business necessity, and could not have been accomplished through less discriminatory means. 

The legislation empowers aggrieved persons to file civil actions and allows for remedies including damages and injunctive relief, with the Attorney General granted broad investigative and prosecutorial powers to address civil rights violations in housing.

Read the BillTrack50 summary.

Read the proposed bill.

Anne Arundel County Hate Bias Reporting Forum is March 29th at Anne Arundel Community College

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Saturday, March 29 · 9:30 a.m. - 4 p.m. EDT

Anne Arundel Community College, 101 College Parkway Arnold, Maryland 21012


This forum is being presented by the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General, and the Anne Arundel County Office of Equity and Human Rights. The Hate Bias Reporting Forum will provide community members and law enforcement with information related to the 2023 Hate Bias Report

   

The forum will engage local law enforcement, elected officials, and community leaders in discussions and information sharing on methods to facilitate more effective reporting as well as responding to bias incidents and hate crimes.

Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/anne-arundel-county-hate-bias-forum-tickets-1248414414119?aff=oddtdtcreator

There is a large parking lot in front of the Cade building, so parking should be easy to find: https://www.aacc.edu/media/college/images/maps/Campus-Map_WEB_09052024.jpg.

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Johnston Square Being Redeveloped Without Displacement

 

In 2013, Regina Hammond has been leader in community development in Johnston Square, a neighborhood historically plagued by racist lending practices and disinvestment for generations. She established the Rebuild Johnston Square Neighborhood Organization (RJSNO) and started listening to the needs of her neighbors. Conducting a survey, RJSNO made plans that would eventually become part of the Johnston Square 2020 Vision Plan. The plans were made alongside nonprofit ReBUILD Metro and Baltimore’s Department of Housing and Community Development.

Hammond and RJSNO’s plans for Johnston Square involve both refurbishing homes and creating a holistic and health environment that benefits the community. RJSNO has planted gardens and trees in Johnston Square, and their collaborators at ReBUILD Metro are currently spearheading the construction of Greenmount Park for the local schools, Saint Frances Academy and Johnston Square Elementary. RJSNO's bee symbol, started with a mural on the corner of Wilcox and Biddle streets, represents the organization’s grit and stands as a unifying sign for the neighborhood’s identity.

The city agency gains ownership of vacant houses to be refurbished and approves their community projects. Aside from Greenmount Park, ReBUILD Metro and RJSNO have also begun building a new Enoch Pratt Free Library branch. The library will provide a productive  space for learning and socializing. They are both scheduled to open in August 2025

Preventing displacement of current residents is a top concern for RJSNO and ReBUILD Metro as revitalization proceeds. A 2019 study conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) found that Baltimore had the fifth-highest rate of gentrification from 2000 to 2013, with five neighborhoods displacing an average of 673 Black residents.

“The biggest way in which [displacement] happens is largely through property taxes,” said Andrew Samuel, an economics professor at Loyola University Maryland “And when the properties get reappraised at a higher value, even if the property tax rate doesn’t change, the liability that people are expected to bear now goes up. And that’s usually the most frequent way in which people find that they are unable to continue to afford to live in the neighborhood.”

Hammond and Closkey believe the path to revitalization without gentrification starts with community involvement. Lowering Johnston Square’s vacancy rates requires more than home repair. Examining how houses end up vacant and preventing future vacancies is just as important. For example, the city housing department collaborates with companies like LifeBridge Health and Meals on Wheels to help with the health of underserved senior citizens. “All of those components and helping our older adults age in place actually are preventing vacant properties,” said Alice Kennedy, commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development “We can’t demolish our way out of this, and we also have a focus on preventing the vacants as well.”

Rising from decades of disinvestment also must include building generational wealth through homeownership. ReBUILD Metro established a free program called Path to Own to help renters in Johnston Square take the necessary steps to buy a home, so residents can benefit from predictable mortgage payments and rising equity. Residents are urged to apply for the Maryland Homestead Tax Credit, a program designed to limit tax increases and assist homeowners experiencing large jumps in property tax that are often plague developing neighborhoods. 

ReBUILD Metro - whose programs serve to cure the root cause of vacant housing, rather than simply eliminate the symptoms - also refurbishes Johnston Square residents’ homes under their Legacy Homeowner Repair program. These renovations serve to improve the living conditions of the residents and assist in building equity in their homes, which keeps the houses occupied and the families content. 

RJSNO’s Johnston Square 2020 Vision Plan details their goals to maintain mixed-income housing within the neighborhood to help prevent displacement.

Read the February 19, 2025 Baltimore Fishbowl article.

Chicago Non-Profit Transforming Vacant Land Stripped by Redlining & Other Discrimination

Chicago's Emerald South is working to reverse the negative effects of historic redlining by revitalizing and transforming 205 acres of vacant land. Ghian Foreman leads the Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative, a nonprofit. Its Terra Firma initiative. begun in 2021, is a multiyear, $50 million land care initiative to beautify, maintain, and activate vacant land in the community. 

The Collaborative's mission is "to attract and coordinate investment through community convening and collaborative partnerships that increase local ownership and prosperity." It was started in 2017 with a $250,000 grant from the Chicago Community Trust and funding from the Polk Bros. Foundation. The goal is to create ways for local businesses and residents to benefit from the tourists expected to come to the area once the Obama Presidential Center is built in Jackson Park.

The project focuses on revitalizing neighborhoods across what the organization calls the Mid South Side: from Bronzeville to the north, down to South Chicago, to the south. According to housing policy experts, many of these areas were shaped by discriminatory housing practices. "There were policies that were put in place - redlining, restrictive covenants, urban renewal - where a lot of these buildings that sat here were actually torn down," said Foreman.

According to the Cook County Assessor, there are over 30,000 vacant lots in Cook County, both city- and privately-owned. The vast majority, 93%, are in communities of color, while only 7% are in majority-white neighborhoods. On Chicago's South Side, vacant lots account for 67% of the total, compared to just 4% on the North Side.

Emerald South is still in phase one of its ambitious plan. So far, the organization has cleaned and beautified over 100 acres. That land is marked by its signature split-rail fencing, a symbol of what's to come. "First, it's just clean and green, no trash, a fence, a sign that this land is cared for," explained Foreman. "Then, we activate spaces with murals and community art. And after that, we start imagining- What if we owned the land? What if we built on it?"

Read the February 19, 2025 ABC7-TV article.

Read the 2018 Chicago Tribune article.

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Obituary: Thomas Gaither, Who Chose Jail After Civil Rights Sit-ins, 86

 

One year after the sit-in movement that began at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960 and spread to other cities, stimulating the nation’s conscience over racial segregation, was in danger of losing momentum. In Rock Hill, S.C., local businesses still refused to integrate, despite the sit-ins, and local news no longer covered them. Then, in 1961, a 22-year-old organizer, Thomas Gaither, introduced a new tactic. In the next sit-in, at the lunch counter of a McCrory’s dime store in Rock Hill, Black students led by Gaither were dragged off counter stools by police officers. But this time, instead of paying a $100 trespassing fine as earlier protesters did, they chose to serve 30-day sentences on the county chain gang. Their “jail no bail” tactic dramatized their moral commitment and changed the direction of the civil rights movement. Within days, protesters in other cities followed suit, their imprisoning drawing more attention and protests. The choice of jail, historian Taylor Branch wrote in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (1988), was “an emotional breakthrough for the civil rights movement” because it dramatized protesters’ willingness to pay a real price for their convictions.

A little-sung catalyst of the civil rights protests of the 1960s, Gaither was one of the activists who, driven by high moral purpose, peacefully put their bodies on the line to fight racial discrimination. Those actions helped bring about historic federal laws to end legal segregation and ensure voting rights.

At Claflin College, an all-Black institution in Orangeburg, S.C., he was president of the youth chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In March 1960, he was co-leader of a march of 1,000 students protesting segregated businesses. The peaceful Orangeburg marchers were attacked with fire hoses and tear gas, leading to 388 arrests. Many were held in a stockade meant for cattle, where they sang “God Bless America.”

As a field secretary by the Congress of Racial Equality, which used nonviolent direct action to fight segregation, Gaither was sent to organize in Kentucky, California, and Arizona. Ahead of the “jail no bail” sit-in in Rock Hill, on January 31, 1961, he helped train the protesters, eight students from Friendship Junior College. He and the students were known as the Friendship Nine after choosing to serve jail sentences. “The amazing thing about the Friendship Nine,” he added, “was that we took essentially a group of college students who had no knowledge at all of tactical nonviolence and we pulled off one of the most important protest events of the movement.”

Several months later, Gaither and fellow CORE organizer Gordon Carey both read a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent protest, and developed the idea for the first Freedom Ride: an integrated group of activists who would take a bus trip from Washington through the Deep South. The idea was to dramatize the refusal of Southern states to comply with US Supreme Court rulings that segregated interstate buses and terminals were unconstitutional. In May 1961, CORE national director James Farmer led the first Freedom Ride, with 13 white and Black passengers, including the future congressman and civil rights advocate John Lewis.

In Alabama, the CORE activists were arrested and beaten by white mobs led by the Ku Klux Klan. The commercial buses they rode in were firebombed. The police abetted the violence, and hospitals refused to treat bloodied victims. National publicity drew hundreds more activists, who made dozens of Freedom Rides crisscrossing the South through 1961. The violence shocked the nation, no less because of the complicity of the Southern authorities in allowing it to happen in defense of Jim Crow laws.

Gaither was not on the original Freedom Ride in May 1961; he was scouting the route and contacting local supporters to house the riders. He was staying at the home of the civil rights leader the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 20 when riders arriving at the Greyhound station there were beaten with baseball bats and iron pipes. The next night, more than 1,500 people went to Abernathy’s church to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak as a rock-throwing white mob surrounded the building. Dr. King called on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to send federal protection.

He later became a professor of biology in 1968 at Slippery Rock University (Pennsylvania), and taught there for 38 years before retiring in 2007.

In his later years, Gaither felt that the civil rights movement had profoundly changed America, but also that the structures of racism had remained in his native South. “No question, the South has changed tremendously,” he said in 2011. “But the fundamental infrastructure of racism and segregation that called the shots in the South in 1960 are still in place. They have slightly different labels, they accomplish their goals by slightly different means, but there has been no real fundamental shift in who really calls the signals.”

Read the January 24, 2025 New York Times obituary.

Listen to a 2011 Library of Congress Oral History Interview with Thomas Gaither.

Obituary: Henry Marsh, Civil Rights Lawyer and First Black Mayor of Richmond, 91

 

Marsh became prominent as a young lawyer during the civil rights movement and helped mount the legal challenge to “Massive Resistance,” the concerted effort to subvert the integration of public school as mandated by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

“My heart is heavy with grief and full of gratitude that I had the chance to know Henry Marsh—a truly exceptional person,” U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) said in a statement Friday. “Any single one of Henry’s accomplishments would be enough cause to be proud, but he never stopped looking for new opportunities to serve. I’m honored to have called him a friend and mentor.”

While he was growing up in Virginia, the “daily affronts to my dignity" (such as being denied a seat at a lunch counter or forced to sit in the back of a bus because of the color of his skin),” he wrote in a memoir, “also motivated me to do something constructive.” Marsh entered politics and won a seat on the Richmond City Council in 1966. 

His Council service coincided with a shift in the politics of the state capital, once the seat of power in the slaveholding South and, a century after the end of the Civil War, remained dominated by a conservative White business class. At the time, Richmond’s mayor was selected by a city council of nine members elected at large. Following the city’s controversial annexation of White suburbs and a court challenge under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Richmond began a ward system that in 1977 produced the first Black majority on the city council. Marsh then was selected as mayor.

As mayor during 1977-1982, Marsh worked to improve the city’s housing; helped spearhead a partnership with the White business community to revitalize the city’s downtown; pushed to bring African Americans into key municipal positions and into civil service; and helped transform the city from a bastion of White power to one that really represented more equitably the population.

In 1991 he was elected to the state senate, serving until 2014. He was among those who pushed the legislature to reckon with Virginia’s role in slavery and segregation. In 2007, the General Assembly passed a resolution stating “profound regret” for Virginia’s slaveholding past.

As a member of a leading Black law firm in Richmond, with partners including the civil rights lawyers Oliver W. Hill, Sr. and Samuel Tucker, Marsh helped argue cases related to voting rights, school desegregation, and discrimination in employment. “We were constantly fighting against race prejudice,” he recalled. “For instance, in the case of Franklin v. Giles County, a local official fired all of the black public school teachers. We sued and got the (that) decision overruled.” The firm also worked on a variety of other fronts, ranging from housing and voting rights to employment issues.

Marsh's memoir The Memoirs of Hon. Henry L. Marsh, III: Civil Rights Champion, Public Servant, Lawyer was published in 2018 by GrantHouse Publishers (232 pages). It was edited by Jonathan K. Stubbs and Danielle Wingfield-Smith.

Read the January 28, 2025 Washington Post obituary.

Read the January 25, 2025 VPM article.

Read the March 22, 2018 Richmond Free Press article.