DC is under attack, from the White Klan House
Commentary from Black Kos Editor, Denise Oliver-Velez
While the nation watches this latest atrocity generated by the Orange resident of the White House, and DC residents respond, I dumped what I had planned to write today, and am scouring the news and reports on social media for reactions and responses.
I lived in DC, aka “Chocolate City” for quite a few years, and have family that was born there and still lives in the District. I went to Howard University there. I went through fighting for DC to finally get Home Rule and the right to elect its own Mayor, rather than Congress appointing one.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the history of Home rule, the District of Columbia ACLU has an excellent and extensive article, “D.C. Home Rule: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters”
What is D.C. home rule?
D.C. home rule is shorthand for the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, which allowed D.C. residents to elect the mayor, D.C. Councilmembers, and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners who run day-to-day affairs in the District.
Before Congress passed and President Nixon signed the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 into law, federally-appointed commissioners and members of Congress—never elected by D.C. residents—shared the responsibility of running the District's local laws and budget. Congressional offices fielded calls about D.C.’s potholes, trash pickup, schools, and crime, in addition to all the calls they were getting from their constituents in their home states.
History from before the home rule era suggests that Congress struggled to manage D.C. and that members of Congress were regularly reminded of their responsibility by D.C. residents who demanded improvements. By 1973, after nearly 100 years of trying to manage local affairs, many members of Congress were quite eager to give up the responsibility—even those who had wanted to maintain power over the majority-Black District.
For example, Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia had once opposed D.C. home rule, but changed his mind in 1971, telling the Washington Post that under such a law, “Congress can no longer be made the whipping boy” and “There would be no more passing of the buck to Congress.” In the same Washington Post article, Representative Thomas Abernathy of Mississippi said that managing the District made him “sick and tired of people saying Congress won’t give us this and Congress won’t give us that.”
The D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 ultimately passed as a compromise between D.C. residents who wanted full democratic rights and members of Congress who wanted to maintain power over D.C. and its majority Black population. The law allowed D.C. residents to elect a local government that would oversee the day-to-day functioning of the District, while Congress maintained power over local laws, the local budget, and other matters.
This compromise bill passed, in part, because members of Congress wanted to stop having to manage the District’s day-to-day affairs. The D.C. Home Rule Act itself explains that the “intent of Congress is to delegate certain legislative powers to the government of the District of Columbia” to “relieve Congress of the burden of legislating upon essentially local District matters.”
The D.C. Home Rule Act also passed because of relative bipartisan respect for local government. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, many federal leaders accepted the general principle that D.C. should have some form of local control and democracy, even as they debated the extent of local democracy. When President Nixon signed the D.C. Home Rule Act into law, he called himself “a longtime supporter of self-government for the District of Columbia.”
The law also passed in large part thanks to the civil rights movement and the growing political power of Black Americans. In 1957, D.C. became the first majority-Black major city, and the broader civil rights movement supported D.C. democracy. For example, immediately after attending the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. attended a march for D.C. home rule. And local civil rights leader and D.C. Delegate to Congress Walter Fauntroy directly helped register voters in Congressional districts where Black voters could swing elections. Thanks to Fauntroy, D.C. democracy became a central issue for Black voters around the country. This organizing strategy eventually ousted segregationist Representative John McMillan of South Carolina, who had long blocked D.C. democracy on the House District Committee. With McMillan gone, Representative Charles Diggs, a civil rights advocate and Michigan’s first Black member of Congress, became chairman of this committee in 1973. That year, the D.C. Home Rule Act passed.
I hope you will read the rest of it.
While DC is no longer the “Chocolate city with the vanilla suburbs” of my younger days, Black Americans are still its largest demographic:
Hmm.
Another hmm.
DC, like other U.S colonies has a non-voting Representative to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is a Democrat.
x
The president’s unprecedented decision to federalize MPD and activate the DC National Guard is a counterproductive use of DC's resources to use for his own purposes.
It's not justified by the facts, which show that DC crime is at a generational low.
Statement: bit.ly/45JmnBL
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— Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) (@eleanornorton.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 1:23 PM
The Free DC movement held a protest, on Monday:
Let’s look at some history:
A History of Free DC
“Free DC in the 1960s and 1970s”
The denial of full statehood to DC is deeply rooted in racism.
Citizens of the District have had the right to vote beginning in 1867. But in 1874, as DC’s majority-Black population gained political influence, Congress dismantled the city’s elected local government, replacing it with federally appointed commissioners. For the next 80 years, DC residents lacked even the right to vote for president, a restriction that remained in place until the passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1960.
In the mid-1960s This milestone toward self-governance was driven by the efforts of the Free DC movement, co-founded by Marion Barry, the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Free DC mobilized students and organized acts of civil disobedience to protest the lack of representation for D.C. residents. Although the Act paved the way for the election of Walter Washington and later Barry himself as DC’s first Black mayors, it fell short of granting full rights to the city's residents.
“In 1874, as DC’s majority-Black population gained political influence, Congress dismantled the city’s elected local government, replacing it with federally appointed commissioners.”
Since the 1980s, statehood advocates have persisted in their efforts to Free DC, despite mounting opposition from the Republican Party. Over the years, organizations like the DC Statehood Party (founded in 1970), Stand Up! for Democracy in DC (founded in 1997), and DC Vote (founded in 1998) have led the fight for equal representation for District residents.
Comment on media coverage:
Project 2025 is part of the conversation:
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It’s all also listed in Project 2025 and is being tracked as they hit their targets.
Also, every targeted talked about city (LA, Chicago, DC, Baltimore, Oakland, NYC) all
Black mayors. The justice.gov site even has a 2025 page about DC 30 year crime low.
www.project2025.observer/en
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— MelBee (@melissafisherbrown.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 1:16 PM
This is clearly a major ongoing story — that we can’t and shouldn’t ignore.
Thoughts? Comments?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In the United States, our ability to vote is supposed to be protected by law. But on the Voting Rights Act’s 60th anniversary, that law is being eviscerated to stop voters and their lawyers from defending that freedom in court.
Our courts are a modern-day public square, where anyone is supposedly able to confront injustice, hold the powerful accountable, and defend their rights. For generations, courts helped ensure equal access to the ballot, striking down racial gerrymanders and discriminatory voting laws.
But now, that public square is being fenced off—and in some places, it feels like a permanent wall is going up.
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As Washington, D.C., grapples with President Donald Trump‘s federal takeover, the U.S. capital’s neighboring Baltimore City mayor is calling out what he sees as a clear racial lens in how the White House and the Republican Party view predominantly Black and brown cities.
“It’s very notable that each and every one of the cities called out by the president has a Black mayor,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott told CNN’s Laura Coates Monday night.
Earlier that day, Trump held a press conference at the White House to announce that he was deploying the D.C. National Guard to the streets of D.C. to reduce incidents of crime.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, globing mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore,” said Trump.
The president also mentioned other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Baltimore, that he claimed were experiencing high rates of crime. “They’re so far gone,” he said.
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Black men and boys in the U.S. face persistent disparities in education, healthcare, employment, and criminal justice, but they are also driving solutions rooted in community, culture, and resilience. The Wellness in Black Life (WIBL) project, led by the Brookings Institution’s Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative, seeks to center the voices of Black men and boys in defining what true well-being looks like—on their terms.
The WIBL project is taking a community-driven approach to examining the factors that may help Black men and boys elevate their health and well-being through an in-depth research study and a two-panel discussion titled, What does well-being mean for Black men and boys in the US?
Set for Aug. 20 at the Brookings Institution Saul Room in Washington, D.C., the panel will feature representatives from local partner organizations and community members who took part in the conversations across three cities. The panels will explore the engagement process, share firsthand participant stories, and present findings from the project’s research, offering a clearer picture of how Black men envision thriving communities and what policies could help bring those visions to life. Attendees can also sign up to watch this impactful panel online.
Key areas of focus have included social connection, economic opportunity, family structure, and mental health, a critical issue for Black men. According to research obtained by Columbia University, Black men are 20% more likely to experience serious psychological distress than white men, but are far less likely to receive treatment. Black men experience disproportionately higher rates of mental health challenges, including anxiety and depression. Suicide rates in the community are especially alarming.
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Salmata Ouattara remembers 2023 as the turning point for her rice farm.
June is usually the peak of the rainy season in Ivory Coast, but in the preceding years she and other farmers in M’Be on the outskirts of Bouaké, the country’s second biggest city, would wait weeks for rainfall. Then in September, they would watch helplessly as their farmlands were flooded. Some abandoned their farms, frustrated by fluctuating crop yields.
For Ouattara, that was not an option. As her family’s breadwinner, proceeds from the farm catered to the needs of her three children as well as requests from other relatives. Then another farmer mentioned a concept called Smart Valleys that had helped solve similar issues and double his income.
“Before, I made 2 tone a year [and] earned at least 400,000CFA [west African francs, equivalent to $720],” said Ouattara, who has since added maize, tomatoes and cucumbers to her portfolio. “But as soon as we put Smart Valleys into practice, I made 4.5 tons, which makes me 900,000CFA ($1597)).”
Smart Valleys is a low-cost initiative by the nonprofit organization Africa Rice that aims to help farmers get better control over the water on their land, for example by using channels, in order to reduce flooding and increase yields. It also helps farmers diversify crop production.
The program – backed primarily by Japan’s agriculture ministry – focuses on inland valleys, low-lying areas between hills with fertile soils that are ideal for agriculture but rarely cultivated due to poor water control. Its head, Elliott Dossou-Yovo, said the valleys cover 190m hectares in sub-Saharan Africa, of which only 10% is cultivated.
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The late-career essay collection can serve multiple purposes, none of which are mutually exclusive: It is a point of introduction to a new readership, one that may know the writer’s name but may be intimidated by their output, or simply want an easy place to start; it gives longtime readers a chance to encounter things they may have missed, little jewels for the completionists among us; and it may attempt to burnish the legacy of a writer in their twilight years who aims for one more chance at self-definition before their work is taken apart, posthumously, by literary wolves.
Not that Jamaica Kincaid’s legacy needs much burnishing—the Antigua-born novelist and essayist’s five-decade-long career is one that few writers would turn down. “In 1966, at the age of 17, with no money, no connections and no practical training, Elaine Potter Richardson left the West Indian island of Antigua, bound for New York and a job as an au pair,” a New York Times profile on Kincaid from 1990 reads. “She did not return until she was 36. By then she was Jamaica Kincaid, a respected author of fiction and a staff writer for The New Yorker, whose prose is studied in universities and widely anthologized.” In the 35 years since, her stature has only grown. I’ve assigned her work myself, though I first read A Small Place, her book-length essay published in 1988, only around 10 years ago. I imagine it has similarly served as an introduction to Kincaid for many people of my political persuasion—as searing an indictment of postcolonial politics as anything offered by Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka, and with the nerve to be funny, too. It’s the kind of essay that remains torturously relevant through the years; such trenchant critiques and general superlative skill with the written word (the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, from that same Times profile: “The simplicity of her sentences is astounding. As she writes a sentence, the temperature of it psychologically is that it heads toward its own contradiction. It’s as if the sentence is discovering itself, discovering how it feels”) ensure that she will always find a place among the syllabi, the anthologies, the general regard of who is considered a “must read” among modern writers.
Kincaid’s new collection, Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– is not charged so much with cementing any legacy (since that is well taken care of), though perhaps it will serve as a reminder of her stature. It isn’t a compendium of the greatest hits; this collection feels more like a fan service, bringing forth the work one might not have read unless you were there in the moment. Her time as a New Yorker staff writer contributing to its Talk of the Town column (previously collected in 2002’s Talk Stories) is well-documented lore, but Putting Myself Together reaches back to some of her lesser-known bylines (in The Village Voice, Ms., Rolling Stone), swerves into some lesser-known outlets (Transition, a magazine run out of Harvard about the culture and politics of Africa and the diaspora), and then situates them alongside her work for all the august names (Architectural Digest, Paris Review, Vogue, The New Yorker, of course) in a wide-ranging, panoramic view of the varied paths her career has taken, telling its own story of Kincaid’s evolution.
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Voices & Soul
“… it gets bad to see them clean up the mess,
carry the blue cold body out under sheets,
and then retake their places in guard cages… “
- Jimmy Santiago Baca
"There Are Black"
by Black Kos Editor, Justice Putnam
Margaret Cho told the low rent pudgy Superman, whose Japanese ancestors were incarcerated in WWII internment camps, he’d never be white, no matter how much he cosplayed an ICE Agent in this teutonic Stanford Experiment, complete with for-profit gulags, SA Stormtroopers and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich accounts that went on for months and months.
When I dabbled in my little quest to be the Great American Novelist when being the Great American Novelist actually meant something more than a novel pursuit, I imagined dystopian American landscapes of wheat and mountains and sea that I juxtaposed with Carnivalesque suburbs, strip mall Prosperity Gospel three ring televangelist training storefronts and KKK raw milk distributors in the hot sun. There were tanned, young Florida girls on Miami beaches and lecherous NY billionaires in hot pursuit. There were crows in spectacles, there were stray cats roaming the landfill cafes and there were dancing damsel flies juggling praying mantis lovers while Everglade pythons spoke in tongues. Martin Luther King was there, so was Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver made a cameo with Cesar Chavez while Shirley Chisholm and Mary McCloud Bethune reminded everybody in the boxcar the journey is never more important than the destination when you’re being blitzkrieged to hell and back.
I woke in a cold sweat late one early morning way back when, just like in the noir films I was so fond of, I shuddered at the speculation that what if, rather than just being clever and edgy, I was prophesying a terrible future? What if I was trapped in a Twilight Zone night gallery of my own making? But I calmed myself with the calming lie that it can’t happen here. Even though it was happening in plain sight the whole time. And now, I truly realize I was not writing fiction, I was reporting the facts and the facts don’t lie. And we all know who can, and who cannot, handle the truth.
There are black guards slamming cell gates
on black men,
And brown guards saying hello to brown men
with numbers on their backs,
And white guards laughing with white cons,
and red guards, few, say nothing
to red inmates as they walk by to chow and cells.
There you have it, the little antpile . . .
convicts marching in straight lines, guards flying
on badged wings, permits to sting, to glut themselves
at the cost of secluding themselves from their people . .
Turning off their minds like watertaps
wrapped in gunnysacks that insulate the pipes
carrying the pale weak water to their hearts.
It gets bad when you see these same guards
carrying buckets of blood out of cells,
see them puking at the smell, the people,
their own people slashing their wrists,
hanging themselves with belts from light outlets;
it gets bad to see them clean up the mess,
carry the blue cold body out under sheets,
and then retake their places in guard cages,
watching their people maul and mangle themselves,
And over this blood-rutted land,
the sun shines, the guards talk of horses and guns,
go to the store and buy new boots,
and the longer they work here the more powerful they become,
taking on the presence of some ancient mummy,
down in the dungeons of prison, a mummy
that will not listen, but has a strange power
in this dark world, to be so utterly disgusting in ignorance,
and yet so proudly command so many men. . . .
And the convicts themselves, at the mummy’s
feet, blood-splattered leather, at this one’s feet,
they become cobras sucking life out of their brothers,
they fight for rings and money and drugs,
in this pit of pain their teeth bare fangs,
to fight for what morsels they can. . . .
And the other convicts, guilty
of nothing but their born color, guilty of being innocent,
they slowly turn to dust in the nightly winds here,
flying in the wind back to their farms and cities.
From the gash in their hearts, sand flies up spraying
over houses and through trees,
look at the sand blow over this deserted place,
you are looking at them
- Jimmy Santiago Baca
"There Are Black"
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