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Monday, April 7, 2025
Maryland Fair Housing Month Free Activities & Trainings
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Marian Turski, Holocaust Survivor Who Warned Against Silence, 98
Marian Turski was a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz and two death marches as a teenager and later became a resolute memory-keeper, civil rights advocate. and journalist, gathering testimony from other Holocaust survivors while warning younger generations against silence and indifference. For decades, Turski was among Poland’s most prominent living Holocaust survivors, recounting his story - and those of other Polish Jews he interviewed - while speaking out against hate and reminding the world of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. He battled against historical amnesia.
Turski studied history at the University of Wroclaw and later traveled to the U.S. on a scholarship, joining the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists in Alabama for the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery.
Turski and his parents were incarcerated in the Lodz Ghetto, an open-air prison and forced-labor site that eventually had 210,000 people, before being sent to the camps in 1944. Separated from his family, Turski was selected for forced labor at Auschwitz, the concentration and death camp complex in the south of German-occupied Poland. In January 1945, in what would be the waning months of the war in Europe, he and other prisoners were forcibly evacuated ahead of approaching Soviet forces, ordered on a death march toward the German interior.
Turski went on a second death march, this time to Theresienstadt, also known as Terezín, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. When liberated by the Allies, he had contracted typhus and was near death, weighing 70 pounds. Unlike other survivors who immigrated to the U.S. or the British Mandate of Palestine, soon to become Israel, Turski stayed in Poland, where an estimated 90% of the country’s Jewish population had perished in the Holocaust. Among the dead were several dozen of his relatives, including his brother and father, who had both been killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “I wanted to build a new society, to rebuild the country,” Turski recalled.
He became a member of the Polish Workers’ Party and served as an organizer, recruiting young people to the communist cause. While working as an editor at Polityka, a popular center-left newsmagazine, he grew disillusioned by the communist regime, accelerated when government officials waged an antisemitic campaign in 1968 and when Polish forces participated in a Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia later.
Turski published testimony from Holocaust survivors and worked with groups including the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland. To fill a “vacuum” of Jewish life in the country, he helped spearhead the creation of the POLIN Museum, showcasing 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland.
Into his 90s, Turski served as a member of the International Auschwitz Council, which advises the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and as president of the International Auschwitz Committee, a survivor-led advocacy and education group that promotes awareness of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1 million people were murdered, including nearly 1 million Jews.
“Marian dedicated his life to ensuring that the world never forgets the horrors of the past,” Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics heir and president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a tribute. Turski, he added, “was a man who led by example, choosing good over evil, dialogue over conflict, and understanding over hostility.”
At a ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, he urged the gathered dignitaries to remember that “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky” but “began with small forms of persecution.” He went on to cite what he called “the 11th Commandment”: “Don’t be indifferent.” “Do not be indifferent when you hear lies, historical lies,” he said. “Do not be indifferent when you see the past is stretched to fit the current political needs. Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against.”
Read the February 20, 2025 Washington Post article.
(Photograph courtesy of the POLIN Museum.)
Friday, April 4, 2025
State Legislature Creates a Maryland Reparations Commission, One of Few States with a Statewide Panel
The House of Delegates has given final approval on April 2nd to a bill that would create a Maryland Reparations Commission, sending the measure to the governor for his signature. The 101-36 party-line vote would make Maryland one of the few states in the nation with a statewide body to study the inequality endured by African descendants. California became the first state in 2020 to pass legislation; then Illinois in 2021 and New York in 2023. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges' Center for Health Justice (ACHJ), as of March 6, 2024, 22 localities (including Washington, D.C.) have approved a reparations commission or task force and 11 states have introduced legislation to create one.
If approved, the Maryland commission would assess specific federal, state and local policies from 1877 to 1965, the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Those years “have led to economic disparities based on race, including housing segregation and discrimination, redlining, restrictive covenants, and tax policies,” according to the bill. The commission would also examine how public and private institutions may have benefited from those policies, and would recommend appropriate reparations, which could include statements of apology, monetary compensation, social service assistance, business incentives and child care costs. The all-volunteer commission would consist of 23 people, including two employees from the state’s four historically Black colleges and universities with expertise in the history of slavery; a representative from the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and the state archivist or a designee from that office.
A hearing on the Maryland Senate version was first held on February 27th and then approved by the full chamber on March 14th. The bill would go into effect July 1st and remain in effect until June 30, 2028.
You can view a discussion with Dr. Jamal Bryant and the Reverend Dr. Robert Turner, NAARC Commissioner and Pastor of Empowerment Temple, Baltimore, on the “Let’s Be Clear” Podcast. They explore reparations, the intersection of faith and justice, and the significance of the Tulsa race massacre centennial. Dr. Turner recounts his 1,169-mile advocacy journey and highlights the ongoing fight for equity and reparative justice. Source: The Jamal Bryant Podcast “Let’s Be Clear,” YouTube. It was made available by the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC).
Monday, March 31, 2025
Preserve the Payday Lending Rule!
A Blog Post by the Consumer Federation of America
Barring a last-minute action by the CFPB or a court intervention, the payment provision in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) Payday Lending Rule will go into effect on March 30th. The rule has received bipartisan support and will protect people from unfair practices. Borrowers will benefit from the rule’s prohibitions on an unfair debt collection method. Policymakers should not delay, weaken, or suspend the rule from going into effect.
The Payday Lending Rule, proposed in 2016 and completed in October 2017, had two parts. Its “mandatory underwriting provision” (MUP) obligated lenders to document a borrower’s ability to repay the debt, required a 30-day cooling-off period after a borrower’s third consecutive loan, and called for a registry to track an individual’s usage of payday loans. It explicitly stated that lenders should consider a borrower’s expenses and not just their income when assessing an applicant’s creditworthiness.
The second part – the payment provision – banned the practice of debiting a borrower’s account after more than two failed attempts, deeming this unfair and abusive. This provision addressed a widespread problem of payday lending: many payday lenders debit an account repeatedly, knowing that customers would incur overdraft fees, as a means to coerce repayment. Some payday lenders used the threat of overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees as an intimidation tactic to collect outstanding loan balances. In some cases, they even attempted to debit accounts that had been closed. Pew research revealed that more than one in four payday loan customers experienced an overdraft fee due to a lender’s attempt to collect a payment from their bank account. The CFPB identified one lender that debited a borrower’s account 11 times in a single day.
As expected, the high-cost loan industry fought against the rule when it was proposed. Their attacks have never ceased, beginning with a 2018 lawsuit and lasting to this moment. While the rule was not challenged with the Congressional Review Act (CRA), the industry kept up the pressure. When the CPFB’s leadership changed with the transition to the first Trump Administration, payday lenders found a more friendly ear for their concerns. In 2018, Acting Director Mick Mulvaney asked for a delay in the rule’s implementation pending the lawsuit’s outcome. On February 6th, 2019, the CFPB announced it would propose a new rule to rescind the MUPs and, in the interim, would delay their implementation for one year, until November 2020.
In July 2020, the CFPB issued a new final rule revoking the MUPs but left the payment provision intact. The payment provision’s rules apply to lenders that offer short-term loans, loans with balloon payments, and any loan with an interest rate greater than 36 percent and give the lender account access.
In recent weeks, as the compliance date has approached, actions have surfaced that suggest the payment provision will be challenged. The Community Financial Services Association – the trade group that filed the initial lawsuit against the rule – filed a new request to the Supreme Court to drop the payments provision. Separately, a letter from the American Fintech Council asked the new Acting Director to clarify that the payment provisions would not apply to Buy Now Pay Later lenders.
The high-cost non-bank lending sector has changed in the last few years. Today, a much higher share of these loans originate from installment lenders. Although they are not traditional payday loans, their structures mirror some of the most abusive components of payday loans. Many make loans at rates far in excess of high-cost subprime credit cards, for example, and some of the larger companies in the space make loans with rates above 100 percent. Some non-bank installment lenders pack loans with add-on fees, use unusual accounting techniques to delay the crediting of principal repayments, and have high rates of loan renewals.
In recent weeks, Congress has taken up legislation to reverse some of the consumer-friendly junk fee rules to rein in junk fees that were finalized by the Biden Administration CFPB. Medical debt on credit reports, overdraft lending by very large financial institutions, and the payment app larger participant rules have all been subject to CRA resolutions. While none have been finalized, the threats are serious.
Suspending the payment provisions is different, as it was preserved under the leadership of a Director appointed by President Donald Trump. The rule has bipartisan support. Changing the rule now would be disruptive. The industry has had years to prepare. Canceling the rule will help no one except the share of installment lenders who want to use the threat of overdraft fees as a coercive scare tactic and would expose millions of struggling households to more expensive and wealth-draining overdraft and non-sufficient funds penalty fees.
Source: https://consumerfed.org/preserve-the-payday-lending-rule/
April is Fair Housing Month in the State of Maryland: Free Trainings Available!
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Civil Rights Coalition of Maryland Virtual Open House is on April 4th and 17th
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