The earliest known public use of this proverb or adage was on March 22, 1862, in The Christian Recorder newspaper.

The Christian Recorder is the oldest existing periodical published by Blacks in the United States.  It had its genesis in The Christian Herald, which was established by the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s (AME) General Conference that was held in Philadelphia in 1848. Founded by Rev. Augustus R. Green in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Christian Herald was published weekly with subscribers paying one dollar and fifty cents a year.

The Recorder is a publication of the AME Church.  The AME Church was founded by Richard Allen who also served as its first bishop.

The name of The Christian Herald was changed to The Christian Recorder at the Ninth Quadrennial Session of the General Conference held in 1852 in New York City. The first issue was published and disseminated on July 1, 1852. The first editor of The Christian Recorder was the Reverend M. M. Clark, who was one of the first college graduates in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Clark was a graduate of Jefferson College and was considered to be one of the best-educated men in the A.M.E. Church. He wrote that the Recorder’s focus would be religion, morality, science and literature and it was to treat all geographical areas of the A.M.E. Church equally.

With the rise of social media and the insatiable demand by many people to have their “fifteen minutes of fame,” otherwise masculine men have been reduced to the most feminine of traits that are stereotypically reserved for women; that is being chatty, katty and batty (crazy)!

What am I talking about?

Let me give you a few examples.

Earlier this month, ESPN personality, Stephen Smith interrupted his vacation to find a studio so he could respond to what he perceived as negative comments made about him from four-time NBA champion for the Golden State Warriors, Draymond Green and radical liberal Democrat activist Jemele Hill.

Yes, you heard me correctly.  A grown man interrupted his vacation because his feelings were hurt.

There is definitely nothing masculine about this type of immature behavior.

He sought out a makeshift studio he could use to put out his response almost in real time.  This was something I would have thought a woman would have done simply because they tend to be more emotional than men, er “real men.”

This was the reaction of a grown man who is supposed to be educated and sophisticated, but because of the sticks and stones syndrome he was reduced to a very feminine reaction.

Smith is fifty-eight years old; Green is thirty-six years old and Hill is fifty years old.  This is how the internet has made grown folks act like little children and these two men in particular come across as very effeminate.

To watch the video of Smith’s cringeworthy response to Green and Hill on his podcast, Straight Shooter, click on the link.  Make sure you have your popcorn in hand!

Remember, this man interrupted his vacation to respond to this juvenile banter!

This is beyond sad on so many levels!

Another example that proves my point is the asinine beef between former NFLer and Hall of Famer, Shannon Sharpe and comedian Mike Epps.

Sharpe is fifty-eight years old and Epps is fifty-five years old.  What led to the beef?  Hold on to your hat for this one.

During one of his comedy shows, Epps insinuated that Sharpe was gay.  Sharpe in turn threatened to reveal private text exchanges between the two of them, implying the release would embarrass Epps.

This turned into a series of negative, vitriolic social media posts going back and forth culminating in Epps appearing on Sharpe’s podcast to squash the beef.

Where is the masculinity in this type of he said she said behavior?

This is the behavior of little kids in primary school.  But you have fifty-year-olds who have massive platforms publicly behaving in such a juvenile, effeminate manner.

There are a plethora of other examples involving rappers, actors, politicians, and yes, even preachers.

In my day, rarely would one fight someone over words, unless you invoked the word “yo mama.”  Mothers were totally off limits, they were sacred.

You could talk about someone’s father, but not their mother.  That was a bright red line that was never to be crossed.

In my day, confrontation, verbal or physical, was used as a last resort; when everything else had failed.  You were viewed as a man when you could avoid or deescalate conflict.

Now everyone is performing for the cameras, i.e. social media in order to collect likes, shares, and followers.

I am still mystified by the fact that adults today are so quick to engage in arguments with people on social media that they have never met and do not have any relationship with.

Whenever someone states that, “I am a man, I am a real man;” then they are not a man.  Manhood is not spoken, it is displayed.  You do not have to scream about your manhood, it just goes without saying.

Denzel Washington once told me, “The loudest one in the room is the weakest.”

If you have ever been around Denzel, you know he never “enters” a room; he walks into a room.  I will let you marinate on that one for a while.

Influence and fame are like soap, the more you use them the less you have.

So, to all these supposed alpha males with their faux hypermasculinity, STOP IT!!!!

No one takes you seriously, let alone anyone in a position of power or influence.

Have you noticed that most, if not all, of the people involved in these internet beefs have few if any corporate endorsement deals?

With a few exceptions, corporate America does not reward masculinity anymore; they reward Blacks who are very effeminate.  Think about it.

Their goal is to continue to weaken the family unit.  What better way to accomplish this than by emasculating the Black male.

Once that happens, the takeover of our community is complete.

Black men cannot continue to succumb to the radical liberal feminist agenda from the seventies.  This was the beginning of the destruction of the Black family and the total emasculation of the Black male.

Even Black women are describing masculine males as toxic.

Most of the males you see in all these internet beefs are single/divorced; have tenuous relationships with their children and are more accepted by the white community than by the Black community.

Now let that sink in!

Until Black men regain their masculinity, the Black community will continue this downward spiral into destruction and irrelevance.  Black masculine males have become an endangered species.

You cannot show me one thriving community without a strong, masculine male present.

God put man at the center of a functioning society and this radical liberal feminist push to marginalize the role of the male only assures continued upheaval; especially within the Black community.

Staff Writer; Raynard Jackson

This talented brother is a Pulitzer Award nominated columnist and founder and chairman of Black Americans for a Better Future (BAFBF), a federally registered 527 Super PAC established to get more Blacks involved in the Republican Party. BAFBF focuses on the Black entrepreneur. For more information about BAFBF, visit www.bafbf.org. You can follow Raynard on Twitter; RealRaynardJ; on Gettr: RaynardJackson.

Can also drop him an email at; RaynardJ@ThyBlackMan.com.

]]> https://thyblackman.com/2026/07/25/black-masculinity-lost-age-internet-beefs/feed/ 0 https://thyblackman.com/2026/07/24/lebron-james-philadelphia-76ers-final-championship-run/ https://thyblackman.com/2026/07/24/lebron-james-philadelphia-76ers-final-championship-run/#respond Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:49:11 +0000 https://thyblackman.com/?p=141570 (ThyBlackMan.com) The Philadelphia 76ers have assembled one of the most aggressive roster overhauls of this NBA offseason, and the biggest piece arrived Friday morning when a 41 year old free agent decided where he would continue playing.

Man, listen. I have been watching this brother play professional ball since my knees still bent without complaint. My oldest was in diapers back when he was throwing lobs to Tristan Thompson in Cleveland. Now here I sit with gray creeping through my beard and a blood pressure pill waiting on the kitchen counter, and LeBron James is out here agreeing to contracts and changing expectations for an entire conference. None of that is normal. Twenty four seasons is the kind of longevity you expect from kickers and knuckleball pitchers, not from somebody who spent two decades absorbing contact from the largest human beings walking the planet.

What caught me sideways was the money. Two years, eight million dollars, with a player option attached, Rich Paul told ESPN. Read that figure again slowly. Eight million total. Bron collected close to fifty three million from the Lakers last season and just accepted what amounts to a rounding error by comparison. Bench guys who cannot crack a rotation clear more than that. Whatever else you want to say about him, and there is always something worth debating with him, he left serious paper on the table chasing one more parade.

Where he chose to chase it is what has me pacing around my living room.

South Beach forgives. Hollywood forgets. Philly does neither. That town will love you like blood on Tuesday and question your entire family tree by Thursday, and both reactions will be completely sincere. These are folks who booed Santa Claus and never once apologized for it. At no point in his professional life has the King answered to a crowd wired like that. Cleveland worshipped him from the jump. Miami barely paid attention until the playoffs arrived. Los Angeles handed him sunshine, a media empire, and enough distraction to soften any bad stretch. North Broad Street operates on a different frequency entirely, and honestly, that is the part I cannot wait to watch.

Now let me put my critic hat on, because the fan in me will absolutely lie to you if I let him talk first.

On paper this roster is scary. Joel Embiid owns one of the meanest scoring arsenals ever assembled in a big man. Tyrese Maxey finished fifth in the league in points per contest last go round and plays with his hair on fire. Jaylen Brown arrived from Boston in that stunner of a swap involving Paul George and four draft selections, which means Philadelphia is not pretending to rebuild anymore. VJ Edgecombe looks like a real one. Add a four time champion who averaged 20.9 points, 7.2 assists, and 6.1 rebounds while shooting 51.5 percent from the floor, and yeah, Nick Nurse got a beautiful birthday present.

Paper does not play defense in April, though.

Everything in that building runs through Embiid’s availability, and that has been a coin flip for a while now. Fifty seven appearances across two campaigns tells you everything. When he is upright, that squad can beat anybody breathing. When he is in a suit courtside, all those title odds turn into pumpkin. Nobody in that organization can control it, nobody can predict it, and every optimistic projection you read this summer quietly depends on it.

Then comes the touch problem, which nobody wants to discuss during honeymoon week. Maxey needs the rock. Brown has spent his whole career hearing people question whether he can lead an offense, and Philadelphia did not bring him in to stand in a corner. Bron has never been primarily a spot up shooter, no matter how many times commentators claim he has evolved into one. Somebody’s usage has to shrink. Somebody’s ego has to bend. Nurse has to draw up an arrangement where grown men with All Star credentials all feel fed, and he has to do it while managing a center whose minutes require careful rationing. That is not coaching. That is diplomacy.

Defensively, I need to be honest with y’all. At 41 the King picks his spots. He gambles in passing lanes, he saves his legs, and he shows up for the moments that matter while cruising through the ones that do not. Against New York in a seven game war, that math gets uncomfortable. The Knicks are the defending champions and they are not intimidated by anybody’s résumé.

Still, I understand why he did it.

No player in the history of this league has ever won a title with four different franchises. Not Kareem. Not Kobe, who never left. Not Jordan, obviously. Nobody. That record is sitting there unclaimed, and if there is one thing two decades of watching this man has taught me, it is that he keeps a running ledger of every argument ever made against him. Folks spent years saying he needed superteams. Folks said he ran from Cleveland, then said he ran back for the storyline, then said the Lakers ring came with an asterisk stapled to it. Winning one in Philadelphia at 42, on a contract worth less than what some backup guards make, would silence a whole lot of talk radio.

Do I believe it happens? I lean no, if I am being straight with you. Health, age, and a loaded conference are heavy opponents. But I have watched this brother make me look stupid too many times to bet against him with any real confidence.

One thing did make me chuckle. He dropped the phrase “trust the process” at Fanatics Fest a week earlier, and Philadelphia heads immediately started squinting sideways at their timelines. Bron quickly insisted he had been using that phrase since 2003, but sixteen years after that infamous television special, homie is still leaving breadcrumbs for us to argue over. Some habits never die.

He also called this his last decision. I have heard variations of that speech before, from him and from plenty of others, so forgive me if I hold the retirement talk loosely. Athletes rarely know when the end arrives until it has already passed them.

Here is where I land, sitting in my recliner with my own body reminding me daily that time collects every debt eventually. Watching somebody my kids grew up with still competing at this level does something to a middle-aged man. It is not really the rings anymore. It is the refusal. It is somebody looking at the calendar, understanding exactly what it says, and choosing to keep swinging anyway.

Philly is about to get the last chapter, whatever it ends up looking like.

That city deserves a wild one. Something tells me they are going to get exactly that.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

            When Israel facilitated the attack by “Hamas” on October 7, an attack which the Zionists referred to as “their 9-11”; which was ironic because the US 9-11 was at the very least was allowed to happen, then just like the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel unleashed a savage genocidal assault on Gaza; Trump said he would use his influence to bring about a negotiated peace settlement.  He didn’t.

Again, Trump failed to keep his word and Israel has viciously bombed civilian infrastructure, hospitals, schools, mosques and indiscriminately murdered innocent men, women and children in their quest to steal land and annex territory, yet Trump has not been successful in stopping the carnage and slaughter by the Israelis. The killing continues as we speak.

Then in June of 2025 Trump and Israel launched and unprovoked attack on Iran, a nation that posed no threat to the US, Israel or their neighbors; he did it under the flag of “peace talks”, not once but twice. Meanwhile the lying US media depicts the Iranians as the bad guys and threats to world peace!

Most Americans don’t know the US has been bombing Somalia since 2007 and Donald Trump has continued this ongoing war of aggression even in his second term! This is all part and parcel of an unending legacy of war and aggression the United States has conducted since its official inception in 1783. American leaders, like their European cousins, love war.

What are you an ordinary “citizen” getting out of all this war? What benefits have you accrued from the American Empire’s sordid history and tradition of predation, plunder and war?!   How much say do you as a citizen have in US foreign policy? How is it the wars keep going on and on no matter which party is in control of the Congress or the White House?  How is it the Congress critters get richer and we get poorer?

How is it you tolerate the prioritizing of conflict and war profiteering at the expense of much needed infrastructural improvements, peaceful technological innovation, a peace driven economy and over the moral and ethical wrongness of war? Are you so brainwashed and comatose you can’t see what is going on? The warmongers are spending more and more of your tax dollars on war and you are getting nothing out of it! Now more and more US body bags are starting to return home, are you okay with this?

Are you satisfied with the way things are going? Do you like being forced to pay exorbitant prices at: the food store, for energy, higher interest payments for loans and credit card usage and consumer goods? Do you like being in a situation where things become more and more unaffordable and beyond your accessibility? You can thank Donald Trump and his predecessors including Barack Obama for this. All Trump is doing is putting petal to the metal on an already existing multi-generational imperialist war machine!

Now Trump has escalated the war against Iran and Iran’s allies are intensifying their responses. Ansar Allah (the Houthis) is blocking the Bab el-Mandab Strait effectively cutting off the Red Sea, blocking trade and commerce in a vital transit way for oil.  Saudia Arabia is going to pay a heavy price.

This action is literally choaking Saudia Arabia’s import and export lifeline. As payback for US bombings in Somalia al-Shabaab is collaborating with the Houthis to disrupt traffic in the Bab al-Mandab Strait and Iran is supplying them both with drone technology! How do you think this will impact Wall Street and Main Street USA?!

The closure of the Straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandab will cripple global trade and commerce. This is a huge development Trump cannot counter with more bombs, in fact bombing will worsen the situation. These closures will cause major price increases on consumer goods due to longer transit times, higher insurance rates and major supply chain disruptions and scarcity. You can thank Donald Trump for this. Meanwhile Trump and Congress are spending money they don’t have on more wars. Who bebefits?!

When you add the negative consequences of the war in Ukraine, no fertilizer, disrupted supply lines for goods like wheat and oil due to Ukraine striking Russian energy infrastructure, the ongoing global fall out from these wars is going to be horrific. Buckle up it’s going to get rough.

Written by Junious Ricardo Stanton

Official website; http://fromtheramparts.blogspot.com

I came up hearing two versions of Booker T. Washington, and neither one sounded like a human being. In my grandmother’s front room, his portrait hung near the mantel like a distant uncle who had done well for himself. Over at my cousin’s place, the college students had another name for him, and it was not affectionate. Sellout. Handkerchief head. The man who swapped a ballot for a bricklaying certificate.

Both houses argued over the same photograph and saw entirely different faces.

Here is the part nobody enjoys sitting with. He entered this world as property, in Virginia, back in 1856. Freedom arrived while he was still small, and by the time he reached manhood the nation had already started clawing back what it briefly extended. Reconstruction fell apart. Federal troops packed up. Men who lost the war were rewriting the peace with rope and legislation, and they were winning that fight. That was his room. Not a lecture hall. No courtroom up in the capital either. Alabama in the 1880s, where a colored fellow who spoke out of turn might be found swinging from a limb before Sunday service.

Start there, or do not bother starting.

What he assembled in that environment deserves plain description. His school opened in 1881 inside a one-room shanty provided near Butler Chapel AME Zion Church, with about thirty pupils and no campus of its own. In the years that followed, students dug the clay, fired their own bricks, raised campus buildings, then sold surplus bricks to white neighbors who needed building material. Nobody handed that operation a finished campus. It got put up by hand, in a county where the sheriff was nobody’s friend.

Now, about the caution.

Critics then and since have described his public posture as bowing. Consider the physics of his position instead. He ran a Negro institution in the heart of the Black Belt, increasingly financed by Northern philanthropists and still dependent on an Alabama political order that could cut support, obstruct its work, or turn the state against it. One inflammatory sentence from him could threaten funding, invite political retaliation, or endanger the people working and studying there. Teachers were run off, schools were attacked, and Black education was routinely treated as a challenge to white authority. His caution was not a personality defect. It amounted to insurance on a property full of somebody’s children.

None of which excuses September 1895 in Atlanta.

Frederick Douglass had died that February, leaving a vacancy at the top of colored leadership that everybody felt. Before a largely white, racially segregated audience at the Cotton States Exposition, he told the country that agitating over social equality was foolishness, that in purely social matters we could be as separate as fingers on a hand. Cast down your bucket where you are. White newspapers crowned him spokesman for Black America practically overnight, and he wore that crown for twenty years without much complaint.

Understand what actually happened in those minutes. He did not merely make private peace with segregation. What he handed segregation was an endorsement, delivered by the most prominent Black spokesman in the country, quotable forever afterward by every governor and editor hunting for justification while the door swung shut.

Celebrity of that grade converts into resources, and he spent his shrewdly. The National Negro Business League followed in 1900, knitting grocers and barbers and undertakers into something resembling a bloc. Money arrived from industrialists who would never have written a check to an agitator.

Notice, though, that the care he took bought him no safety at all. October 1901, he ate supper at the executive mansion with Theodore Roosevelt, and Southern editors lost their minds for weeks over a shared plate of food. Politeness protects nobody. Several who had applauded Atlanta now wanted him horsewhipped.

Du Bois named the trade correctly in 1903. Swapping political power, civil rights, and higher learning for vocational training, economic advancement, and white goodwill could only pay off if white America honored its end, and white America never had the slightest intention. Lynching remained endemic. Voting collapsed throughout the South. Talented youngsters got steered toward the anvil and the plow while medicine, law, and politics stayed locked. Northern philanthropists and Southern politicians found something to agree on for once, which should have been the warning nobody heeded.

Then came the machinery, which did its own damage. Friendly newspapers received subsidies and returned the favor in print. Presidents consulted him about federal appointments, meaning ambitious men learned that his blessing could help open a door and his opposition could close one. When William Monroe Trotter heckled him in Boston that same summer, the meeting descended into chaos, Trotter was arrested, and he later served thirty days for disturbing the peace. Washington’s network monitored his opponents, subsidized friendly newspapers, invested in publications willing to attack his critics, and sometimes pressured publishers or printers to deny those critics a platform. A leader who deserved honest disagreement had constructed a system where disagreement carried a price, and that is no longer strategy. That is a boss guarding territory.

Even so, he kept a second set of books. Working through intermediaries and confidential correspondence, he bankrolled legal challenges he could never claim publicly. He secretly supported voting rights litigation, attacks on the exclusion of Black citizens from juries, and the broader legal campaign against Alabama’s system of coerced labor. That campaign culminated in decisions including Bailey v. Alabama, the 1911 Supreme Court ruling that struck down Alabama’s peonage law under the Thirteenth Amendment. Historians pulled that paper trail out of his files decades after the funeral. So the great accommodationist was quietly paying attorneys to sue the very people he flattered from a stage.

His final stretch produced the largest thing he ever touched. Around 1912 he talked Julius Rosenwald into a partnership that began with six Alabama schools. It eventually helped build nearly five thousand schoolhouses across the South, most of them completed after his death. Black communities supplied much of the money, land, materials, and labor themselves. Generations of children learned their letters because of it, including plenty who later marched.

By the time they lowered him into the ground in 1915, his campus held about a hundred structures and fifteen hundred enrolled students. Roughly two hundred faculty members drew a salary there, and the endowment approached two million dollars, making Tuskegee one of the largest and best funded Black educational institutions in the country.

Still, I notice something about the gentlemen who wrote the indictment. Some of his most prominent critics composed it from Boston, from Atlanta’s university district, and from New York. Distance from Macon County is not a moral failing. It remains worth remembering when we sit down to grade the courage of somebody teaching inside it.

So where does the ledger land? He was a survivor who confused survival with philosophy. His method fit one decade and one latitude, and he kept applying it long after conditions shifted and younger folks had earned the right to try something louder. Refusing to step aside was his genuine failure, larger than any single speech. Older leaders rarely surrender the microphone gracefully.

We repeat this argument every generation, only the names rotate. Somebody works inside the institution while somebody else hammers on it from outside, and pretty soon we are questioning each other’s souls instead of debating tactics. Our people needed both hands working then. We need both hands working now. That man was not a traitor and he was not a deliverer. He was gifted, ambitious, frightened, and calculating, doing arithmetic under conditions I would not wish on my worst enemy, and he got several of the sums wrong. Such a verdict is harder to chant at a rally. It happens to be accurate, though, and accuracy has always served us better than comfort.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

Sure, there’s a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum allegedly said. But now we have a federal government that’s gone backward in providing protection from predators just as they adopt sophisticated technology to ply their craft.

Criminals now use AI to generate fake images and scrub their pitches of misspellings and odd English usage that would give away their origins in Africa and Southeast Asia. They set up slick websites with glib text hawking their investment swindles. Amazingly, they convince Americans, especially older ones, to wire their life savings to someone they’ve never met.

And to top off the cruelty, they follow up with “recovery scams,” portraying themselves as lawyers or even FBI agents able to get the money back. The dupes then wire money to the recovery scammers promising to recover the money they foolishly wired to the original crooks.

Lonely women lured online by potential romantic partners count among the saddest marks. Some stories are shocking: Women send thousands of dollars to help their phantom mates get out of legal trouble, pay for childcare or travel expenses — all sold as a means of furthering a meeting with the nonexistent lover. You know the end.

And we now have a Trump administration that’s actually grooming suckers to fall for the president’s investment offers. Shortly after leaving office in June 2021, Donald Trump was asked about Bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency, on Fox Business Network.

“Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam,” he responded.

Complaining about a “scam” seemed a good tactic for later getting elected to a second term. Trump cleverly tacked on a patriotic message: “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar,” he said. The U.S. dollar should remain “the currency of the world” and Bitcoin should be regulated “very, very high.”

As a master scammer himself — recall Trump University and his saddling fans with stock in bankrupt casinos — you wonder how the voice in his head might have shifted at the thought of crypto as a scam. Was it “this must be stopped” or “hmmm”? We now know the answer.

Five years later, Trump is back in office, and guess what? He promises to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” And his family is up to their eyeballs in crypto while as president, he influences how it is regulated.

The latest reports have Trump vacuuming up $1.4 billion in crypto deals. His buyers are not doing so well. About two-thirds of the investors in his meme coins, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, have basically lost their shirts.

World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company tied to the Trumps, was launched in 2024. One analysis found that 85% of investors who bought World Liberty’s $WLFI token after it began trading publicly are underwater. Trump-controlled interests, however, made $520 million last year from token sales.

It would be inaccurate to call his crypto deals “scams.” His lawyers’ fine print protects him from suits. For example, the website for the $TRUMP token specifically calls it an expression of support “not intended to be … an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created in 2010 to protect ordinary folk from unfair, deceptive and abusive practices in the financial industry. Trump in his second term has been shrinking the agency to mouse size, dramatically cutting the watchdog agency’s power.

Americans, you’re on your own. Our freedom to be scammed has never been greater.

Written by Froma Harrop

Official website; https://twitter.com/FromaHarrop

According to the complaint filed in federal court, the plaintiffs did not seek monetary damages. Instead, they wanted officials to clear sidewalks of illegal drug dealers and fentanyl users, violent behavior, and tent encampments and to treat the troubled Tenderloin area as it would any other neighborhood where crime is not tolerated. “They demand an end to the rampant illegal street vending and from the squalor and misery that exists throughout their neighborhood because the city has decided that people in the throes of addiction can live and die on the Tenderloin streets,” said Matt Davis, one of the attorneys, in a prepared statement.

In downtown Los Angeles, Central City East, also known as Skid Row, remains a critical humanitarian and public safety crisis characterized by a massive concentration of 4,000 to 5,000 unsheltered homeless individuals across a 50-block area. Similar to the troubled Tenderloin section of San Francisco, Skid Row struggles with severe open-air drug markets, violent crime, daily emergency calls connected to drug overdoses, and untreated mental illness, leading to dangerous and unpredictable conditions, particularly after dark.

There have always been various degrees of poverty and poor people in our nation, but we didn’t always have large-scale and visible homelessness on the streets of our cities across America. While conservatives revere Ronald Reagan for how he transformed the conservative movement, the modern mass homelessness crisis in the U.S. emerged in the early 1980s and is tightly linked to policy and ideological shifts under President Reagan — especially cuts to affordable housing, social safety-net programs, and mental health services, combined with “Reaganomics” and deregulation that increased economic insecurity for low-income residents.

Before the early 1980s, older “skid row” districts comprised a relatively small homeless population–often single men in transient hotels or missions–rather than families, women, and children in large numbers. The rise in homelessness coincided with the election of Reagan and a conservative movement to roll back federal responsibility for social welfare. The Reagan administration advanced an individualist, anti- “big government” ideology that framed poverty and homelessness as personal failure rather than structural injustice. It aimed to cut domestic social spending, deregulate markets, and shift responsibility to states, cities, and private charity.

One of the most direct targets was the sharp reduction in federal funding for low-income housing. Federal housing assistance (construction and support for low-income housing) was cut by roughly 70 percent to 80 percent over the decade: funding fell from around $30 to $32 billion in 1981 to about $7 to $9 billion by the late 1980s, drastically shrinking new affordable housing production and subsidies. As older units aged or were demolished and with no comparable new stock being provided, poor households were pushed into an increasingly tight private rental market, with more people ending up in shelters or on the streets.

The policy of “Reaganomics” did not help people who were already living on the margins. It combined tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and a tight monetary policy that contributed to high unemployment in the early ‘80s, particularly in industrial and urban areas where many low-income people lived. At a time when wages stagnated or declined for low-wage workers, rent rose faster than incomes in many cities, creating an affordability gap that left more households one crisis away from losing the roof over their heads. The Reagan administration’s budget severely reduced funding for key safety-net and social services programs that were in place to guard poor households from homelessness. Programs affecting income support, health, and human services, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food assistance, and other social programs—faced tighter eligibility requirements, making it harder for vulnerable families to stay housed. Local governments, also squeezed by federal cuts, struggled to expand shelters and services fast enough, leading to overcrowded emergency systems and more people left outside.

The first target of the Reagan administration was housing. The second was the safety-net programs, and the third was mental health policy. The shift away from large state psychiatric hospitals had begun earlier, but Reagan’s administration reduced federal support for community mental health centers and shifted responsibilities to states without providing sufficient resources. These unfunded mandates resulted in many people with serious mental health and substance-use challenges ending up homeless or cycling between streets, shelters, and jails rather than receiving stable treatment and housing. We cannot forget how the specific cuts and policy shifts under Reagan established a long-lasting affordable housing deficit and weakened the safety net that subsequent administrations have not fully reversed.

The current homelessness is not only a humanitarian and public safety crisis, but it is also threatening local tourism. Homeless encampments destroy tourism, warns George Lence of Nicholas & Lence Communications. When referring to New York, he stated that the city and state stand to lose $7.5 billion in tourism tax revenue.

Many people can easily forget how the Reagan administration brought us to this point. Now we are faced with the human fallout from Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Band-Aid solutions don’t work. The encampment policy of removing tents from sidewalks is only optics when the tents return, or they show up one block away. Jurisdictions must decide whether they will continue to manage visible suffering through sweeps, temporary housing through hotels and fragmented service, or seriously reverse Reaganomics by accepting the political cost of building large-scale permanent housing along with expanding mental health and addiction treatment.

Written by David W. Marshall

Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/

One may purchase his book, which is titled; God Bless Our Divided America: Unity, Politics and History from a Biblical Perspective.

I have been voting since Carter, and I have watched this cycle spin around more times than I care to admit. Somebody rises. Cameras find him. He can preach, he can quote scripture and Baldwin in the same breath, and when he speaks at a funeral the whole country stops chewing for a minute. We gather up all our grief and hand it to him like a collection plate. Then we wait.

What exactly do we expect that man to do? Explain every crisis on Sunday morning television. Show up in whatever town the latest tragedy happened. Defend more than fifty million of us against whatever slander is trending. Sit across from senators and governors and somehow negotiate with a system that took three hundred years to build its defenses. A single human being. One phone, one calendar, twenty four hours.

Nobody survives that job description. Dr. King was thirty nine and exhausted and under federal surveillance the day they killed him. Jesse could not carry it in his prime either, and none of the ones who came after have managed the trick. Some get bought. Others turn bitter. A few get caught with their hand somewhere it should not have been, and cable news runs the footage for a week straight. Plenty simply burn down to the wick doing work that ten thousand hands should have been sharing.

Here is the part that stings. When our chosen figure stumbles, the whole thing goes quiet. Problems did not solve themselves; we simply never built anything underneath him. Rallies stop. Listservs go cold. Folks who drove four hours to hear him speak cannot name a single person on their county commission. We invested everything in a personality and got no equity in an institution.

Go back and read the history honestly. Montgomery did not happen because a young pastor gave a good speech. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had leaflets running off a mimeograph machine before most people knew what had happened to Rosa Parks. E.D. Nixon had been building labor and civil rights networks through the Pullman porters for nearly three decades. There were carpools, dispatch stations, insurance workarounds after the companies canceled policies on the cars. That boycott ran three hundred eighty one days on logistics, not eloquence. Preaching helped. Logistics won it.

Ella Baker understood this better than anybody, and she said it plain: strong people do not need strong leaders. Her organizing philosophy often pushed her to the margins, because the men around her were building a pulpit model in a moment that called for a network. Young folks in SNCC listened to her, though. They went into Mississippi with no cameras and no charisma to speak of, and they registered voters in counties where doing so could get you shot before supper.

Television changed our appetite. A movement of ten thousand quiet organizers will never be booked for a four minute hit, but one man in a good suit can. Social media took that appetite and put it on steroids. Now we measure influence in followers, and we mistake a viral thread for a base. A hundred thousand likes will not stop a school closing. Forty parents in a boardroom, showing up every month for a year, might.

Politicians love our arrangement, and you should understand exactly why. When a mayor wants cover, he does not have to answer to a thousand organized constituents with a written list of demands. He calls three reverends and a state representative, takes a photograph, and reports that he consulted the community. Consultation with a handful of individuals runs cheap. Accountability to an organized body costs something. Guess which one they prefer.

Political maturity begins the day a community stops confusing inspiration with organization. That confusion is comfortable. Inspiration feels like progress. You leave the auditorium with your chest full, you tell your cousin about it, you post the clip. Organization feels like nothing at all for a long time. It looks like a Tuesday night meeting with eleven people and bad coffee, arguing over whether to endorse in the district attorney race.

Yet the district attorney’s office has broad discretion over which cases get prosecuted and what charges are pursued in your county. School boards decide which buildings get renovated and which get shuttered. Local governing bodies and utility commissions approve water rates. Zoning boards and elected councils decide whether the warehouse goes up next to the elementary school. Far too many sheriff’s races across the South run unopposed. Those seats get filled by whoever bothers to show up, and for decades that has not been us in the numbers it could have been.

I am not dismissing the young folks doing mutual aid and bail funds and tenant work. Much of it is sharper than what my generation built. My caution is different. Horizontal structure without durable infrastructure has its own failure mode. Everybody talks, nobody decides, the group exhausts itself in eighteen months and the landlord is still the landlord. Distributed never meant unorganized. Somebody has to keep the membership list, file the paperwork, and answer the phone in year four when nobody is watching.

Churches carried this load for generations, and some still do. But a congregation of two hundred with a food pantry and a van is doing charity, which is holy work and still a far cry from power. Charity feeds a family this month. Power changes who writes the budget that made the family hungry.

So what would it look like to grow up? Stop asking who the next great figure will be. Start asking what your organization can survive. Can it lose its founder and still function? Does it have money that does not come from one foundation with opinions? Are there folks under forty being trained to run it? Do you have a written agenda that a candidate can be measured against, so that endorsement means something more than fondness?

Build a bench, not a throne. Twenty capable heads in a county with real assignments will outlast any single voice, however golden. And when that voice inevitably says something foolish, gets indicted, or just gets tired, the work keeps moving because the work never belonged to him.

No savior is coming down that road. Never has been one. Everybody we canonized was a mortal doing their part inside a machine that thousands of anonymous hands were feeding every single day, and those folks are the reason anything changed at all.

We should stop looking for someone to follow, and get busy being somebody worth joining.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

Resisting the separation and parceling out of her sisters and brothers, she decided, against all odds and advice, to quit school, get a job and take care of them. It was a sign of the commitment, courage and will that would carry her through and beyond the many difficulties and fierce opposition she would face. And she rose in the ranks of African American leadership through an extraordinary combination of intellect, strategic planning, insightful writing, hard work in critical areas, audacious self-assertion, admirable resiliency and an iron and resistant will.

Certainly, she lived in a critical period in Black history, the reversal of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, Caveman Charlie and “Beast-Lady Lynch,” savage White terrorism and the brutal burning of Black towns, and racist mob murder as a way of life. It is her work in the muck and mire of this racist South and compliant North that Ida B. Wells came into her own and taught us audacious African ways to walk, work, struggle and stand tall in the world.

Nana Ida was a tireless journalist, organizer, lecturer, teacher and activist in numerous organizations and had collaborated with the major leaders of her time. Her ideas foreshadowed and prefigured womanist, Black Power, armed self-defense, civil and human rights, and related discourse and initiatives in our contemporary conversations. In fact, she made a major contribution to Africana womanism which is clear in her commitment to self-definition, ethical grounding, male/female partnership in equality, family, community and social action. It is obvious also in her refusal to place in conflict the liberation of Black people and the liberation of Black women. Indeed, she insisted on joining the two in a total liberation of all, as exemplified in her work with her husband and partner in struggle, Ferdinand Barnett.

Embodying the self-defining womanist, she asked in an article on the mission and meaning of women, “What is or should be woman?” And she answered: “Not merely a bundle of flesh and bones, nor a fashion plate, a frivolous inanity, a boundless doll, a heartless coquette – but a strong, bright presence, thoroughly imbued with a sense of her mission on earth and a desire to fill it; an earnest, soulful being, laboring to fit herself for life’s duties and burdens, and bearing them faithfully when they come; but a womanly woman for all that …”

It is this stance as an aware, socially active, self-assertive, and “womanly woman,” willingly bearing the burdens and obligations at hand, that was a source of the inner strength that gave her courage to struggle for both racial and gender justice. These struggles were pursued in her work as an organizer, institution-builder, anti-lynching, civil rights and human rights advocate and in her collaborating with other leaders whose names we know and also honor – Nanas Douglass, DuBois, Garvey, Bethune, Terrell, Randolph.

Nana Ida was a “race woman,” uncompromisingly committed to the freedom and well-being of her people. Like Nana Marcus Garvey, whom she admired and who admired her, she was for “race first.” She argued there was no substitute for unity, self-help, self-reliance, and constant struggle. And she stressed strong community institutions, the essentiality of education and economic strength, constant vigilance and ceaseless struggle.

In an article, “Freedom of Political Action,” she criticized African Americans for being too tied to one party or the other without critical assessment. Prefiguring a similar position of Nana Malcolm X, she declared she was neither a Democrat nor Republican, but an African American seeking justice and freedom for her people.

Wells-Barnett also argued against uncritical allegiance to leaders and for critical assessment of leadership in terms of how it furthered the objective desired above all others: “the well-being of (Black people) as a race, morally, socially and intellectually.” And in another article on “Functions of Leadership,” she asked of leaders “how many of them are exerting their talents and wealth for the benefit or amelioration of the conditions of the masses?” Moreover, she asked “What material benefit is a ‘leader’, if he does not, to some extent, devote his time, talent and wealth to the alleviation of the poverty, and misery and elevation of his people?”

It is Nana Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s courageous, constant and uncompromising struggle against lynching which brought forth the best of her virtues and values, and reaffirmed her role as a leader of great merit and meaning. Clearly, she played a crucial and vanguard role in exposing the racist terrorism and savagery of lynching, traveling widely in the U.S. and speaking internationally. Her anti-lynching lectures and writings were vital witness against this brutal and barbaric practice. She defined lynching as a “national crime,” “a color-line murder,” and “the cold-blooded savagery of White devils under lynch law.”

Also, Wells-Barnett raised the issue of armed self-defense and argued that in other places lynching had been prevented by this strategy. She stated that “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” Thus, long before Nanas Robert Williams and Malcolm X had argued the right to armed self-defense against murderous mobs in face of the failure of law, she had raised the option publicly.

Nana Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a towering woman and leader of her time, an extraordinary person which, as her Memphis Diary shows, was self-questioning, self-critical and caught up also in the ordinariness of life and living. And yet, she had a historic sense of herself and the moral meaning of the freedom struggle of her people. Her commitment, she said, was to constantly “trouble the waters” and transform the status quo. Indeed, an oppressor has no right to peace, if he dares to deny a people’s right to freedom and justice. And when we are attacked by the oppressor in our fight for freedom and justice, we are to remember her defiant words of wisdom: “with me it is not myself nor my reputation, but the life of my people which is at stake.”

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

The selections are entirely based on performance on a 4-hour test in English and math, for which these incoming freshmen literally study for years. Proponents of the testing regime argue that it is entirely merit-based; opponents point to the results and argue that there is more to future success than can be measured by a 4-hour test, and that the test itself is racially discriminatory.

I’ve always been a great fan of tests and merit systems, as I was a kid from a middle-class background with no special connections who was very good at taking tests and writing papers. Let the preppies inhabit their elites; I had better grades. My mother was a secretary, but I got into Harvard. I bartended my way through law school, but I made Law Review president. Merit, or what passed for that, got me the scholarships I desperately needed. They opened doors that otherwise would have been closed to me.

Asians make up 19% of all public-school students and 69% of those offered places at Stuyvesant. I celebrate those Asian families, many with first-generation children who study long hours to take their places at schools, which will open more doors to them. I don’t want to take away a system that rewards their incredible accomplishments and drive.

But I do want to spread it around, and that’s the problem. Are New York’s leaders of tomorrow really going to learn what they need to in classes with — at most — three blacks in them? Won’t their educations be poorer as a result? And what of the opportunities these schools provide, not only for college, but for future success? Can anyone really be comfortable with the disproportionate denial of those opportunities based on numbers that correlate with race? We need more Blacks and Hispanics moving up the ladder, and so do they.

Mayor Mamdani, a graduate of one of those schools, Bronx Science, who at one point before he ran for Mayor said the test should be abolished, now says the issue is a “struggle” for him. Mamdani’s two predecessors both condemned the test — Bill de Blasio called it a “monumental injustice,” and Eric Adams called it “a Jim Crow school system — it’s the state legislature that would have to change it. The alumni groups are reportedly fierce in their opposition and have spent millions on lobbying efforts. They are full of people like me, and who am I to tell them they’re wrong?

And yet there’s something very wrong with the result — some things rather — and if we don’t dare talk about them, they will never change.

Written by Susan Estrich

Ten years ago, the Treasury Department announced that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. After years of delays, the Trump administration has now put the Tubman redesign on ice. At the same time, Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials are promoting a new $250 bill bearing Donald Trump’s likeness. Congress has not authorized the denomination, and current federal law permits only deceased people to appear on American currency.

The contrast could hardly be more offensive.

Harriet Tubman was born enslaved and escaped to freedom, then repeatedly risked her life to return south and lead others out of bondage. She served the Union as a nurse, scout and spy. In 1863, she helped lead the Combahee River Raid, which liberated hundreds of enslaved people. Later, she advocated for women’s suffrage. She gave her life to the proposition that freedom was worth fighting for, even when the fight brought her neither wealth nor comfort.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is a billionaire president who has repeatedly blurred the line between public power and private enrichment. He has put his name on buildings, products and public institutions. Now his image is being proposed for a new denomination meant to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.

This is more than vanity. It is the currency of oligarchy.

Oligarchy is what happens when wealth buys political power, political power protects and multiplies wealth, and public institutions are bent toward the glorification of people who already possess both. In a democracy, money is a public instrument. In an oligarchy, even public money becomes another surface on which the ruler may write his own name.

The Tubman $20 would tell a different story.

A $20 bill is not a rare commemorative object locked in a collector’s case. It is ordinary money. It passes across grocery counters and restaurant tables. It is slipped into church collection plates and handed to grandchildren. It pays for haircuts, prescriptions, school supplies and rides home. It is folded into a child’s birthday card by an auntie who wants the child to have “a little something.”

Imagine Harriet Tubman making those journeys.

Imagine a child opening that birthday card and asking who the woman on the bill is. Imagine generations of Americans encountering Tubman not only during Black History Month, but every day—at the ATM, the corner store and the kitchen table.

That is why representation on currency matters. It is history placed into circulation.

Andrew Jackson, whose portrait remains on the $20 bill, was an enslaver whose policies drove Native people from their lands. Tubman, who liberated enslaved people and served this nation, was supposed to take his place on the front. Earlier plans even retained Jackson on the reverse. Yet even that modest adjustment to our national memory has proved too much for those determined to preserve the old racial hierarchy.

Tubman was not merely an inspirational figure. She challenged an economic system. Enslavement was not only racial terrorism; it was coerced labor that created enormous wealth for white people while treating Black people as property. Each time Tubman led another person to freedom, she stole labor away from enslavers and disrupted the economics of bondage.

That makes her especially appropriate for American currency.

She also understood that freedom without economic power is fragile. After the Civil War, despite her service to the Union, she struggled for years to receive adequate compensation and a pension. The nation benefited from her courage more readily than it paid its debt to her.

That pattern is painfully familiar. Black people build, serve, sacrifice and create. The country applauds us symbolically while withholding material justice. Tubman is praised in speeches while being kept off the money. Meanwhile, a president who converts attention, office and access into personal advantage may receive a denomination designed around his image.

The issue is not merely whether one likes Donald Trump. It is a question of ownership. Does American currency belong to the American people? Does it reflect a shared history, including the people who expanded the boundaries of freedom? Or is it another possession of a president who treats public institutions as extensions of his personal brand?

Harriet Tubman belongs on the $20 bill because she represents the best of this nation—not the nation as it was, but the nation generations have struggled to make it become. She chose liberation over submission, collective freedom over personal safety and service over self-enrichment.

Donald Trump does not need another monument to himself. The man who lives in the house that enslaved people built has already had far too much access to the nation’s power, attention and money.

The last thing we need is his face on it.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

Official website; https://www.juliannemalveaux.com