An appreciation for Dr. Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress
Commentary by Chitown Kev
One of the most terrifying things that I have ever read was a paragraph by Alice Walker in her 2013 book of essays, The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm’s Way
The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my hometown. I had had no idea that such a place existed— so kept from black people it had been. To this day, knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child, I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.
I was born in the summer of 1967 in Detroit, Michigan, three years after the passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964. I have never seen a Jim Crow sign (other than in a museum) nor have I ever been denied entrance into a public establishment on account of my race (I have been denied entrance on account of my age but...I digress).
For a bookworm like myself, the library has always represented more than a place to read and borrow books; libraries have also been a place of refuge and sanctuary, if need be.
I’ve read of the horrors of Jim Crow and even heard a few stories of the horrors of Jim Crow from my ancestors.
The terror of being denied entry into a library or even feeling so “uncomfortable” in a place that I consider to be a “home,” of sorts, underscores the sheer terror of living under Jim Crow in a way that few other descriptions can. For a bookworm like me.
There have been a few diaries here at Daily Kos about Dr. Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress and the first African American and the first woman to hold the position.
As Miss Denise pointed out in her front page diary this past Sunday, Dr. Hayden extended an invitation to pop superstar Lizzo to play several of the flutes in the Library of Congress’s flute collection, including the crystal flute of slaveowner and fourth President of the United States, James Madison.
The manufactured drama of the racist right-wing (I refuse to call it a “controversy”) about The Adventure of the Crystal Flute is only the latest action in the career of a career librarian whose explicit mission has been to open up the bookstacks and archives for all American citizens and other library patrons to what philosopher Michel Foucault rightly called the “fantasia of the library.”
I refuse to call The Adventure of the Crystal Flute a “controversy” simply because Dr. Hayden has been at the center of real political controversies such as her vocal opposition to the Patriot Act during her term as the President of the American Library Association in 2003:
"The American Library Association affirms the responsibility of the leaders of the United States to protect and preserve the freedoms that are the foundation of our democracy, and we are committed to ensuring that our country is safe and secure," said Dr. Hayden. "We believe, and we practice the belief, that the free flow of information and ideas are at the core of what we seek to protect, of what makes our country strong. Vibrant discussion and expression and the ability to research both broadly and deeply are what have made the United States a beacon of freedom and they are what keep us strong."
Dr. Hayden continues, "The ALA has long opposed efforts to censure, control, or to oversee the information sought by the public, particularly in libraries. Privacy is essential to the exercise of free speech, free thought, and free association and lack of privacy and confidentiality chills users' choices, and can have the same effect as the suppression of ideas. The possibility of surveillance, whether direct or through access to records of speech, research and exploration, undermines a democratic society. Libraries are a critical force for promoting the free flow and unimpeded distribution of knowledge and information for individuals, institutions, and communities.
Dr. Hayden won one of Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year award in 2003 for “standing her ground.”
“Libraries are a cornerstone of democracy—where information is free and equally available to everyone. People tend to take that for granted,” says Hayden. “And they don’t realize what is at stake when that is put at risk.”
During the 2015 Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore, Dr. Hayden, then the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, made sure that a branch of the library was open. In 2016, she was asked by Sarah Begley of Time magazine about keeping that branch of the library open.
BEGLEY: During the Freddie Gray protests, you kept a branch of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, where you were CEO, open in the middle of rioting. What happened?
HAYDEN: The community protected the library that Monday night, and we knew that they would look for that place of refuge and relief and opportunity. We opened [in the morning] and there were people there including a young man to get on the computer to file job applications, and he came back that Thursday and said he had three nibbles. The kids were there. Whole Foods started bringing in food and, by the end of the week, diapers, because the stores were closed. The media was there because there was no other place open. So it was like a command center.
Command center. A place for community. Refuge. And, as Dr. Hayden says later in the Begley interview:
BEGLEY: What have libraries meant to you throughout your life?
HAYDEN: They’ve been sanctuaries, a place I can go to discover.
In an era where libraries (of all places!) are under constant attack by Trumpists, Dr. Carla Hayden continues to fight for libraries and for the free and effective flow of information to all of us.
And for that, I think Dr. Hayden and the librarians all around the country for striving to make the nation’s libraries places of refuge, sanctuary, meditation and...”home.”
For all of us.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Chavis knew he was a marked man. Protests had erupted over North Carolina’s decision to dump 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals in a poor Black farming community in Warren County, and Chavis was a leader of the revolt. The trooper pulled him over.
“What did I do, officer?” Chavis asked that day in 1982. The answer shocked him.
“He told me that I was driving too slow.”
Chavis was arrested and thrown in jail. When the cell door slammed shut, he gripped the metal bars and declared: “This is racism. This is environmental racism.”
The term stuck, and now — nearly 40 years after Chavis spoke the words that have come to define decisions by governments and corporations to place toxic pollution in communities of color — the issue has risen from the fringes of the American conservation movement to the heart of President Biden’s environmental agenda.
One week after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order vowing to steer clean energy investments to minority communities battling pollution, placing environmental justice at the core of his plan to fight climate change. He named a Native American and African Americans to powerful environmental posts.
And last week, he tapped more than two dozen advocates from around the country to counsel his administration — “for the first time ever, bringing the voices, perspectives, and expertise of environmental justice communities into a formal advisory role at the White House,” said Cecilia Martinez, a Biden appointee on the issue.
Systemic racism has long influenced where major sources of pollution are located within communities. Beginning in the early 20th century, White government planners in many municipalities drew redlining maps that identified Black and Latino neighborhoods as undesirable and unworthy of housing loans. Heavy industry was permitted to cluster in those places, adding a toxic dimension that persists today.
Given little support by White philanthropists, environmental justice groups run by Black, Latino, Native American and Alaskan Native advocates historically have been as impoverished as the communities they represent. While White environmental groups tended to focus on wilderness and wildlife, activists fighting everything from toxic dumps in Alabama to massive oil and gas refineries in California have largely worked in the shadows.
Ben Chavis
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Republican Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock are facing off in November. Both men are Black. This does not mean—contra New York Times pundit Frank Bruni—that race isn’t a factor. The New Republic: The Georgia Senate Contest Is All About Race, Actually
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Herschel Walker, Georgia’s Republican nominee for Senate, has confessed what some of the American electorate knows to be true: He is dumb. When reporters asked the former football star about an upcoming debate with incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, Walker tempered expectations: “I’m a country boy. I’m not that smart. He’s a preacher. Warnock is smart and wears these nice suits. So, he is going to show up and embarrass me at the debate October 14, and I’m just waiting to show up and I will do my best.”
Warnock made history in 2020 when he defeated Kelly Loeffler to become the first Black senator to represent Georgia. His reelection fight, which polls show is a dead heat, is also historic: It’s the first time two Black men have faced off in a general election for a Senate seat in the state. The outcome will have major racial and political implications. A Warnock victory may help preserve Democrats’ control of the Senate, while a victory by Walker could have the opposite result—and add a second Black senator, alongside South Carolina’s Tim Scott, to Trump’s anti-democracy brigade.
Yet some have argued that race is not a factor in the contest because both candidates are Black. “Race doesn’t come into this race: Both Walker and Warnock are Black,” The New York Times’ Frank Bruni opined recently. What distinguishes them, he argues, is their quality as candidates: “The unbridgeable divide is between the two candidates’ credibility and coherence.… If Walker ekes out a victory in Georgia in November, it will suggest how very little candidate quality matters anymore. And it will have implications far beyond the Peach State.”
Bruni’s reasoning is anchored in a common misconception—among white observers, anyway—that race is only a factor in elections if one candidate is white and the other is Black. But race can indeed be a critical factor in elections between two Black candidates, as anyone who has truly paid attention to the Georgia battle would know: Walker was backed by the Republican Party to give cover for their anti-Black agenda, and he’s rewarded their support by running an anti-Black campaign.
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The beginning of the end for the Voting Rights Act started more than 30 years ago. On Oct. 4, the end of the end is likely to begin.
This term, the Supreme Court is hearing a case about whether Alabama’s newly drawn congressional maps violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race. In a seven-district state, the new maps included only one majority-Black district even though the state has a population that is more than one-quarter Black. The groups challenging the maps say that because it would be relatively easy to draw a map with two majority-Black districts, the state is legally obligated to do so. But Alabama Republicans countered by arguing they don’t have a requirement to use the plaintiffs’ maps, because creating a second majority-Black district would violate other race-neutral criteria used in redistricting.
The justices’ ruling could have implications that go far beyond Alabama, potentially neutering what remains of the Voting Rights Act — a seminal piece of legislation that is ostensibly permanent yet constantly imperiled.
The current Supreme Court justices, under Chief Justice John Roberts, might strike the final blow against the Voting Rights Act, whether it’s in this case or a future one. But they didn’t strike the first blow. According to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of Supreme Court cases involving the Voting Rights Act, most of the first 20 years of decisions interpreting the law went in a liberal direction.1 That changed in the late 1980s, when more right-leaning justices joined the bench and, not coincidentally, more and more of decisions overall started to go in a conservative direction. Of the seven Voting Rights Act cases that the court has heard in the Roberts era, only one had a liberal outcome. “Starting in the 1990s as the court’s composition changed, the court has been cutting back or refusing to expand Section 2 in virtually every case it’s had,” said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University.
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Cases alleging racial gerrymandering are notoriously difficult to litigate, much less to win. And the path that brought Merrill v. Milligan to the Supreme Court — the justices will hear the case on Tuesday — shows why.
The lawsuit deals with Alabama’s congressional maps, which would give only one of the state’s seven congressional districts — 14 percent of the state’s total population — a real chance of electing a Black representative, even though African Americans make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population.
In a decision handed down in January, a panel of three federal judges spent 225 pages walking through the nauseatingly complex legal test for identifying such gerrymanders laid out by the Supreme Court’s decision in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). Ultimately, that panel — which includes two judges appointed by then-President Donald Trump — concluded that Alabama must draw new maps that would effectively double the number of Black US House members from Alabama.
Indeed, this panel, despite being dominated by Trump appointees, wrote that they did not view the question of whether Alabama violated the federal Voting Rights Act to be “a close one.”
Just a couple of weeks after the lower court ruled, however, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to reinstate the challenged maps for the 2022 midterms. The Court will now hear arguments about whether to reinstate those maps permanently. Given the Court’s earlier decision in this case, and most of the justices’ record of hostility toward Voting Rights Act claims, there isn’t much doubt who will prevail in this case.
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It is September and the beginning of the rainy season in Uganda, when roads become flooded with clay waters. Everyone is slowed down by the incessant downpours. In spite of these conditions, 21-year old Florence Nakaggwa is out training in the outskirts of Masaka, a town 80 miles south-west of the Ugandan capital, Kampala.
She cycles between 30-60 miles (50-100km) each day, switching from tarmac to the red soil of village roads.
Earlier this year, Nakaggwa became Uganda’s first female rider to receive a professional cycling contract, signing with Team Amani, a racing collective fiercely pushing for inclusivity for riders across east Africa. Based in the Netherlands it has sister clubs in Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda.
The team provides her with 900,000 Ugandan shillings (about £200) a month, equipment, clothing and representation at races around the globe.
Her signing came as a surprise to her home village of Kalagala, where neighbours had derided her ambitions. “People, young and old, called out insults like ‘leave cycling for boys or you will turn into a man.’ I tend to ignore them. This is my chosen career – not working in a hair salon, as many in my culture would expect.”
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Democracy is famously described as one person, one vote, and the final part of the electoral equation is so obvious it does not need saying: one winner.
But that formula is being challenged in Brazil this year, where a new wave of what are called collective candidacies are shaking up the traditional way of doing politics.
Collective candidacies involve several people with a common platform running for office together with a promise to share the duties of office. Many of them feature minorities, and almost all boast participants who bring vastly different skills to a ticket.
In Santa Catarina state, 10 young activists have formed a group they call Lula Youth, in tribute to the leftist former president. The Pedro Ivo Collective in Brasília has eight members seeking a senate seat, including a psychology student, a journalist and a member of the Tukano Indigenous tribe. And in São Paulo, five Afro-Brazilian feminists are campaigning for state legislature under the slogan, “Cast One Vote, Get Five Black Women”.
“It is a way of hacking the political system,” said Evorah Cardoso, a researcher for the campaigning NGO VoteLGBT. “According to Brazilian law, only one person can occupy the elected seat. But promise of the campaign is that it will be a collective mandate.”
In practice, that means participants share campaign duties and costs, and salaries and benefits if they win. They must also decide how to divide administrative and legislative work, outreach and media appearances.
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Said to have been a shy but intelligent boy in school, Burkina Faso's Capt Ibrahim Traoré has become the latest military officer to seize power in a coup in one of France's former colonies in West Africa. BBC: Capt Ibrahim Traoré: Burkina Faso's new military ruler
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He overthrew his former comrade, Lt Col Paul-Henri Damiba on 30 September, after accusing him of failing to fulfil his promise of quelling the Islamist insurgency that has gripped Burkina Faso since 2015.
Born in 1988, this makes the 34-year-old captain the youngest head of state in Africa, joining the ranks of two other coup leaders - Guinea's charismatic Col Mamady Doumbouya, born in 1981, and Mali's bearded Col Assimi Goïta, born in 1983.
"I know I'm younger than most of you here. We didn't want what happened but we didn't have a choice," Capt Traoré told government officials.
With a lack of strong democratic institutions in a country where the military has long been dominant, Capt Traoré seized power with a pledge to improve security in a nation living in fear of the militants.
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