Monroe Anderson

TBT--The Black Art Market

Monroe Anderson's Common Ground_ Black Art from Monroe Andeson on Vimeo.

 

Throw Back Thursday

May 1991

 

The week before the South Side Community Art Center's annual auction, I did this Common Ground show on black art suddenly become collectible. My guests were Philip Schiller, an art collector, Joe Clark, a gallery owner, Marva Pitchford Jolly, an artist and Herbert Nipson, the president of the South Side Community Art Center.

btw, Nipson was also the Executive Editor of Ebony Magazine and my old boss from 1972-74.

 

 

Snakes eyes sure bet for poor at Chicago casino

 

 

 

 

    Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to build a gambling casino in Chicago to help offset the monstrous city's employees pension debt. Not only is that comparable to bailing out the Titanic with a water bucket, but it also will be yet another gambit at balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column this week.

 

 

Gambling casino quite a crap shoot for Chicago’s poor

by Monroe Anderson

 

 

  I’ve got to admit that I wasn’t convinced when Mayor Rahm Emanuel pinky swore that he was going to listen to Chicago’s everyday people, then act on their best interests--his corporate running buddies and the Loop dwellers be damned.

So as I watched Monday’s news clips on the mayor being sworn in for his second term, I was doggedly determined to stick with my resolve to give the man a second chance. He said that he was going to listen to the people. I’m all eyes.

One of the things I hope the people who claim they care for the people, like those Black men of faith who threw their full support behind Emanuel, tell him to fold ‘em when it comes to his plan to bring a gambling casino to Chicago. I hope they quit winking and nodding long enough to tell Mayor Emanuel the truth: a Chicago casino will do more evil than good to the city’s poor.

If these mayoral supporters have trouble manning up to tell Emanuel like it will be, I suggest they take note of the alarming conclusion business writer, Derek Thompson, came to last week in his report, titled “Lotteries: America's $70 Billion Shame,” on the Atlantic.com website.

“States are making their most hopeless citizens addicted to gambling to pay for government services,” he concluded, after referring to a Duke University study that found that the poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets.

For those of us lucky enough to have money in the bank, it’s recreational gambling and a voluntary payment of just one more hidden tax. But, for the poor, the lottery is virtually the first and last hope of attaining disposable income.  

 I can remember when Blacks played the policy game for nickels and dimes before the state took it over, renamed it the lottery and jacked up the cost of a bet to a buck. It was okie dokie back then because all the money gambled away was going to pay for state and local schooling.

That promise lasted about as long as topless bars in the 1970s remained tourist attractions. Then the Illinois State Legislature pulled a three-card Monte, moving the take from education to general revenue. Over the years, the state legislators, fearful that the voter’s might wise up and throw the bums out, never got around to raising taxes to cover the pension pool for state employees. Now the Baby Boomers among the state workers want to go home to roost. They’re retiring in hoards as soon as they can. The same holds true for Chicago’s Baby Boomers who were police and fire and education employees. Their promissory notes keep on coming, stamped "due."

The state has an estimated $6 billion deficit and over $110 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Chicago has a $30 billion pension crisis. It’s easy to see the wall at the end of the road. It has a big flashing neon sign that says “raise property and income taxes right now.”

              All that debt with no easy way out leaves Mayor Emanuel and his city waist-deep in junk bond ratings. When he was in full-attack mode during the mayoral campaign, Emanuel pointed to Springfield and hinted at Washington as he pretended that the posse was coming. Although a Republican, Gov. Bruce Rauner is Mayor Emanuel’s pal. The two men have shared vacations and pricey bottles of wine together. It was easy to assume that Rauner would give a fellow one-percenter a hand. If not, Emanuel’s old boss, President Barack Obama, would have his back.

It’s obvious now that the only thing either the governor or the president can do is wish the mayor the best of luck. Emanuel is now pretending that a casino will come to the rescue because unlike Gov. Pat Quinn, who vetoed a measure that would have allowed a Chicago casino, Gov. Rauner has said he’s open.

Mayor Emanuel would have us believe that the outflow of money to suburban casinos could end up in the coffers of a Chicago casino, bringing in more than $450 million a year in revenue.

I’m no mathematician but with the help of my cell phone calculator I know the numbers don’t add up. Let’s see, $30 billion minus $450 million, leaves the city’s pension crisis at a paltry $29 billion, $550 million.

On the upside, those Chicagoans with the least to lose, won’t have to cross state lines or trek out to Joliet or Elgin to pursue their dreams while blowing the rent and grocery money.

              Should Chicago open a gambling casino--near McCormick Place, right where the new Marriott Hotel and DePaul University basketball stadium are to be built--luck won’t be a lady that night or any other night to follow. At least not for the vast majority who can’t afford to blow the little money they have on a dream where the house always wins.

 

Black teen unemployment is the real crime

 

America's treatment of its urban Black youth has been anything but benign. Far too many of them have no jobs, no future and little to lose. Here's my take in the Chicago Defender.

 

Black teen unemployment comes with a price

By Monroe Anderson

 

This summer threatens to be long and hot. Not climate change hot but heated and angry, Baltimore Spring hot.

             Three days ago, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that 96 percent of us believe that there will be more racial disturbances as seen on TV.

             After we see more episodes of police routinely showing up on the nightly news after they’ve killed yet another Black male, there will be more repeats of Black teens with little more than time on their hands and outrage on their minds acting out their frustration. We’ll see more squad cars stomped to death. More buildings going up in smoke. More stores ransacked and looted.

“A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems,” the Journal reported.

            That’s the Fourth Estate’s way of saying poor Black people are about to behave poorly and that while everybody knows it, not everybody knows why. So the opinions are about as racially divided as the nation. Sixty percent of Blacks saw the urban uprising as “long-standing frustrations about police mistreatment of African Americans,” while 58 percent of whites said the riots were "an excuse to engage in looting and violence.”

            There are all sorts of evidence and reasons that underscore the Black interpretation while undermining the white one. There are also studies and events to inform us that the frustrations go far beyond the wanton and routine police killing of unarmed Black males to these core problems: No jobs, no hope.

There’s this year’s annual report released jointly by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network in January titled, “A Frayed Connection: Joblessness among Teens in Chicago,” revealed that In 2012-13, just one in ten of Chicago’s Black teens had a job--nine out of 10 did not.  

“One half of 20-to 24-year old black male residents of the city are not working and not enrolled in school,” the report warned, adding that “Black teen employment rates in Chicago have reached historically low levels.”

A Kids Count policy report that was a dead ringer to the one in Chicago told the same sad story about young Black males in Baltimore in 2012, “unemployment among those ages 16 to 24 is the highest in the country since World War II.”

            The Supreme Commander of the Allies during WWII, Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address as POTUS warned Americans about the future dangers of massive military spending, especially deficit spending and government contracts to private military manufacturers. The unemployed Black males are getting short-changed by the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about.

Less than two years after President Lyndon Johnson launched his ambitious War on Poverty in 1964, those resources were shifted to the war in Vietnam. A generation later, President Bill Clinton managed to downsize the military but Republicans later took their pound of flesh, forcing him to end the Summer Youth Employment and Training Program as a stand-alone initiative which resulted in 600,000 kids being laid off.

The bulk of today’s economic challenges in our urban areas can be traced directly back to President George W. Bush. The 43rd president’s surplus-busting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were never in his administration’s budget, sucked up much of the tax dollars that had been returning to the cities and states.

Depending on who’s calculating those two wars have cost America between four and six trillion dollars. American commanders handed out $3.5 billion with next-to-nothing oversight to purportedly to rebuild the country we illegally invaded.

Meanwhile, back at home, our pavements feel like something out of a war zone. Our outdated bridges are in danger of collapsing. Our transportation system is last millennium. And, of course, our urban areas are teeming with Black men who want and need jobs that they can’t get.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is making jobs available for 24,000 Chicago teens through his One Summer Chicago initiative. In the scheme of things, that’s not a big number.

Maybe all those other unemployed teens, will understand it’s the thought that counts. We’ll see soon enough. Summer is just around the corner.

Rahm's second term, second chance

    Mayor Rahm Emanuel reeled in the Black vote, assuring that he'd get a second term. We delivered. This next term this is what I think he should do for us--as I discuss in my Chicago Defender column.

 

The Mayor's to-do list for his second term

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

Thanks to Black Chicagoans voting against their our own interests, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with a double-digit lead, will have four more years to oversee who gets the wheat and who gets the chaff. In his first four years, the mayor put a lot of time and energy into taking care of the Loop and those who either did business or resided there.

Now that he’s got that tied down, I suggest the mayor slip outside the Loop and attend to the rest of Chicago. I’ll even try to give him some of those specifics that Emanuel’s attack ads and debate talking points demanded from challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

To be exact, I’d like to talk about Bronzeville.

Back when candidate Rahm Emanuel was one of many hopefuls during the mayoral debate sponsored by the Chicago Defender, I asked him if, as mayor, he would use Tax Increment Financing, or TIFs, as they were intended to be used--as a means to kick start economic development in neighborhoods that could use it the most--or if he’d use them as Mayor Richard M. Daley had used them--as his handy slush fund.

Candidate Emanuel gave the right answer, promising he’d use them for the good of all Chicago. Mayor Emanuel, like the mayor before him, uses TIFs to take care of those communities and businesses that hardly need a helping hand.

There’s the $500,000 TIF that’s been set aside to rescue that economically distressed neighborhood surrounding McCormick Place. Using funds that could have travelled a mile or so further south along the lakefront, the mayor could have spurred development Black businesses that would not only have provided Bronzeville with much-needed good and services but would have seeded Black entrepreneurship in the process.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the money is going to the economically-disadvantage Marriott Corporation so that it can build a 1,200-room hotel right next door to a DePaul University basketball stadium. This plan was hatched even as the mayor was closing down 50 public schools in Black and brown neighborhoods because, he assured us, the city couldn’t afford to keep them up. The scheme was so outrageous that even students on DePaul’s Lincoln Park canvas protested to no avail.

Other dollars directed by the mayor has been better targeted to Black communities where they can make a difference. Mount Sinai Hospital on the city’s West Side is getting $31 million in TIF money. Whole Foods, the grocery chain frequently referred to as Whole Paycheck because it costs more to have organic foods, is getting $10.7 million in TIFs to build a new store in Englewood. A. Finkl & Sons, a specialty metal producer which was formerly in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood before moving to a 44-acre site on 93rd street, received $22.5 million in TIFs to help finance the move.

In all three of these deals, Mayor Emanuel’s use of TIFs undoubtedly will result in more jobs for some in the Black community. But all three business enterprises are white-owned and operated, guaranteeing that when it comes to commerce in Chicago, while folks will still remain ahead.

There are ways that the mayor can pay back all the Black Chicagoans who so slavishly gave him their votes: Invest in the Bronzeville, assuring that Black entrepreneurs are seeded so that they can grow thriving Black businesses. Rather than spoon feed the Black community with penny-ante social services and welfare deals, Mayor Emanuel can use TIF funds and his one percent pals to develop business partnerships where Black businessmen can eventually take over.

Here’s one specific example for the mayor. Since he took office, Rahm has pushed tourism as a major source of business development for the city. Right at 35th Street, in the landmark Supreme Liberty Life Building that was the longtime headquarters of the first African-American owned and operated insurance company in the northern United States, sits The Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism Council.

For $500,000, a mere fraction of what he’s given to Whole Foods to move into Englewood, Mayor Emanuel can help fund an organization, which doesn’t need to move anywhere, in taking visitors on tours that teach them about the history of Bronzeville.

There are other investments I’ll pull the mayor’s coattails to in the future. Four years from now, should he decide he’d like to another term, he should know and Chicago’s Black voters should know, what he’s done for them and what he’s been doing to them.

 

Rahm takes a licking and keeps on ticking

 

 

    This is my commentary on the second Chicago mayoral debate which took place a week ago. This ran on The Root website Tuesday morning. The third and last mayoral debate took place that night.

 

Chicago Mayor’s Race: Rahm Emanuel Takes a

Few Jabs, but He’s Still Standing

By Monroe Anderson

 

Incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel sat through the second of Chicago’s three runoff debates looking as if he needed to pinch himself while trying not to look as if he wanted to punch his opponent’s lights out.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. All bets were on Emanuel brushing aside his four much lesser-known challengers in one fell swoop during the Feb. 24 general election.

Why wouldn’t he?

Emanuel had promise that turned into a portfolio. He was the finance director for mayoral candidate Richard M. Daley in 1989 and presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. He became a multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker before returning to Chicago to win Rod Blagojevich’s U.S. House seat. In 2009 he resigned his congressional post to become President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff.

Five days before last month’s general election, Obama returned the favor by cutting a radio ad endorsing Emanuel and flying into Chicago to stump for his former badass buffer while designating the city’s Pullman Historic District a national monument. Mayoral candidate Emanuel also had a campaign war chest that was in the double-digit millions.

None of that was quite enough. Emanuel was too much the unlikable mayor, so the city’s voters didn’t like him back. He fell 4.4 points short of the 50 percent-plus-one votes needed to avoid a runoff.

So there Emanuel sat at Thursday night’s debate, side by side with challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, taking incoming flak from the man he’d bested in the first match 10 days earlier. There he sat, in this second debate, watching Garcia make a comeback by interrupting him, deriding his first four years as the city’s chief executive and even laughing at his carefully crafted mayoral message.

Garcia’s credentials were not nearly as impressive as Emanuel’s. Garcia was not even a millionaire and had no prospect of becoming one. He was a mere Cook County commissioner, a former Illinois state senator and city alderman. He was basically a community organizer daring to challenge the up-and-comer who had definitely become ... da mayor.

In the run up to last month’s general election, the Emanuel campaign spent nearly $7 million on 4,600 TV attack ads defining Garcia as the not-ready-for-the-big-time candidate. The heavy barrage has continued with TV spots attacking Garcia’s nonspecific solutions to Chicago’s $20 billion in unfunded pension debt. The mayor’s positive TV ads presented Emanuel all dressed down, wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater while admitting that sometimes he’s been a jerk but that he’s been a jerk for the good of Chicago.

The TV ads were worth every million. Polls indicate that Emanuel has shifted from a too-close-to-call status to a double-digit lead.

And yet the mayor still had to debate this interloper. Garcia, who comes off like the guy you give a big hug to right before he asks you to all hold hands and sway as you sing “Kumbaya,” was being annoyingly on the offense. The commissioner stuck with his populist rallying points, insisting that he would be a mayor who listened to the people, while Emanuel hadn’t a clue what the voters wanted or needed. Garcia charged that Emanuel wasn’t nearly as good a financial manager as his campaign claimed: If so, why was Chicago’s bond rating downgraded last month to two notches above junk status?

Emanuel still possesses all the no-nonsense, show-me-the-money charm of the Wall Street banker he once was; therefore, he is nothing if not disciplined. So he sat there, attentively listening as Garcia charged that his allowing movie mogul George Lucas to build an interactive museum on 17 valuable acres of free lakefront land was a “monument to Darth Vader.”

It had to bug Emanuel, framing a smile and acting civil throughout much of the debate, that like Garcia, the progressives in his political party were characterizing him as a mayor who could not care less for the little people, simply because he quid-pro-quoed his corporate contributors big privatization contracts. Too many in Chicago were beginning to refer to him as Mayor 1%, just like the book with the same title.

Rahm sat during the hour long debate, methodically sticking to his script. Sure, he closed 50 schools in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, but “our kids have a full school day of kindergarten,” he said. Sure, he closed half the city’s mental clinics, but “we added more spaces through federally qualified entities.”

Between the school and health-clinic closings, Chicago’s black voters aren’t as crazy about Emanuel as they were four years ago. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and many of the city’s other black leaders are going with Garcia. Fortunately, Emanuel invested wisely in some key black ministers, politicians and businessmen. They may well balance out the decisive black vote that will determine the winner.

When the debate ended, it was two down and one to go. The last one is tomorrow. The election is April 7. After that, the mayor can wave goodbye and become himself again.

 

Cybercolumnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Mayor 1% takes on a community organizer

 

 The first of three Chicago runoff mayoral election debates took place Monday night. Rahm Emanuel outperformed his challenger, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. But there are two debates in a little over two weeks before we'll know who's the last man standing. Here's my Chicago Defender column.

 

Chuy win over Rahm still debatable

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

Jesus “Chuy” Garcia had to do just one thing during Monday night’s first mayoral debate: Channel his inner Harold Washington to show Rahm Emanuel and the rest of Chicago who was the boss.

       Mission unaccomplished.

       Garcia came off as the man who would be mayor. Emanuel came off as the mayor.

      In a testy verbal battle between Commissioner Congeniality and Mayor Meany, both men made valiant efforts to go against type. It was obvious that Emanuel was working hard at being more likeable. It was just as apparent that Garcia was attempting to be No Mas Mr. Nice Guy.  At the same time, each man was out to typecast the other.

Without name calling, Garcia, the community organizer, reminded voters why there is a book out there entitled, Mayor 1%.

“Chicagoans need to know that this mayor has provided corporate welfare to his cronies, millionaires and billionaires, in Illinois in terms of tax increment financing and that he promised four years ago to put Chicago’s fiscal house in order,” Garcia said.  “We’re in a financial free fall. The city has been downgraded, three of its agencies over the past two weeks, to near junk bond status.”

Cook County Commissioner Garcia charged that while “trying to talk in a sophisticated way,” the mayor wasn’t saying anything that would help any Chicagoan who wasn’t physically or professionally in the Loop.

Mayor Emanuel, chum to the corporations, was far smoother than Garcia but just as combative while sticking to the story in his TV attack ads charging that his runoff challenger is all Windy City planner with no specifics on how he intended to get things done.          

The mayor even threw in a short lecture. “The difference between being a legislator,” said Rahm, once a Congressman, to Chuy, once a state senator, is “you pass a bill. When you’re the mayor, you have to pay the bills.”

Throughout the hour-long debate the mayor stuck it to Garcia for not being specific while glued to talking points that sounded more specific than they actually were.  Neither candidate has presented a scenario that would hoist Chicago out of the deep financial hole that 20 plus years of Mayor Richard M. Daley dug for the city. Garcia wouldn’t say whether he will or will not raise property taxes. Emanuel who once said that property taxes were the last resort, now says they’re off the table.

The mayor has let his $15 million war chest do the talking. A constant barrage of TV ads telling Chicagoans that Garcia hasn’t a clue and others, with the mayor in a Mr. Rogers sweater explaining that while he may be a jerk, he’s our jerk appear to be working. An Ogden and Fry poll Saturday showed Emanuel at 47.1 percent, compared to Garcia’s 37.6 percent. A Chicago Tribune poll released the day before reported Emanuel at 51 percent and Garcia at 37 percent with 11 percent undecided.

In order for the mayor to win another term all that may be required for the next 20 days is for him to keep up the attack ads while playing nice. Saturday’s endorsement by the powerful Service Employees International Union should deliver Garcia more money and an army of campaign workers but he’ll still have to throw more elbows.

The mayoral challenger needs to rally the old Harold Washington coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and progressive whites. But more than anything else, Garcia will need to get out the Black vote.

To do that, he needs to hold news conferences in front of one or two of the 50 closed neighborhood schools. While at one of them he needs to point out that Emanuel’s closing of the six mental health clinics was just one more blow to the same low-income neighborhoods impacted by the school closings. He needs to talk about how, as with the parking meters under Daley, Emanuel has privatize the CTA fare system, thus killing another of the city’s geese that should lay the taxpayers golden eggs.

Garcia needs to emphasize and re-emphasize that unlike Mayor Washington, Mayor Emanuel has not been not fairer than fair while waving the Chicago Sun-Times report that whites continue to dominate the city’s highest paying jobs at City Hall and throughout city government. Among Chicago’s 32,500 city employees, 46 percent are white, 31.8 percent are Black, 18 percent Hispanic and fewer than three percent Asian.

      These are the specifics Garcia should be addressing, not suggesting improbable fixes to what is nearly an impossible problem--pulling a $9 billion rabbit out of the hat.     He’ll get a second chance next Thursday at the second mayoral runoff debate.

  

 

A Black mayor for Chicago is not in the air

 

 

 

 

 

 This column on the Chicago mayor's race is my second of the weekly columns I'm writing for the Chicago Defender.

 

 

White, Brown or Black?

                By Monroe Anderson

                     Defender Columnist

 

 

When the last vote is counted after next month’s mayoral election, no one is going to be surprised that, once again, Chicago’s next occupant on City Hall’s fifth floor will not be black.

    President Barack Obama’s radio endorsement of incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Monday was one serious predictor. But the city’s history during the past quarter century is even better.

         For a few in-vain months, it looked like things might be different this year. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle was an odds -on favorite to get in the mayoral game and return the throne to Chicago’s largest ethnic bloc. An Illinois Observer poll in March had Preckwinkle leading Mayor Emanuel, by eight percentage points, 40-32.  But just before hopes got too high, President Preckwinkle announced in July that she would stay put right where she was. Days after she dropped out, a Sun-Times poll had Karen Lewis, who was President of the Chicago Teacher’s Union and a queen-size thorn in Emanuel’s side, with a nine- percentage point lead over the mayor, 45 to 36. In October it was announced that Lewis had a cancerous brain tumor and she, too, would not be a candidate.

That leaves those who would like to see a third African American mayor in Chicago with two choices, perennial candidate William Dock Walls or self-made multimillionaire Willie Wilson. Neither of the two black men is The One.

William “Dock” Walls, whose false claim to fame is that he was Mayor Harold Washington’s closest confidant, has run and lost races for city clerk, mayor, Congress and governor for pretty much the same reasons--he has no money, no managerial experience and has never held a political office. Willie Wilson, who is a real pro in the business world, has run campaign ads and taken policy positions--such as pledging to reopen Meigs Field and to save city funds by forcing uniformed police to abandon their squad cars for public transportation when coming to work--that expose him as a pure political rookie.

    Right after Washington won the primary in 1982, the Rev. Jesse Jackson commandeered Harold’s microphone at the victory celebration to inform friend and foe that “now it’s our turn, it’s our turn, it’s our turn.”  

That was then. Now it’s clear that for black Chicago, our turn has come and gone.

History has been repeating itself since Aldermen Tim Evans, Dorothy Tillman and Bobby Rush constructed the mythology following Washington’s sudden death that Evans was the late mayor’s heir apparent. Since then, the list of black wanna-be mayors intent on succeeding Washington and Eugene Sawyer goes from the ridiculous to the sublime--Sheila Jones, a disciple of the political quack, Lyndon LaRouche; the late Joe E. Gardner, who was a commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District; Congressman Danny Davis; Roland Burris, who was then the former Illinois attorney general who ran as an independent candidate; Jesse Jackson Jr., who was the second congressional district representative, former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun; and the late Appellate Court Judge R. Eugene Pincham.

Then, as now, any talk of having a black mayor is merely magical thinking. Unlike in the short-lived era of the Evans urban legend, there is no pretense of an heir apparent, not even a great black hope in the air.

It all went poof in the spring of 1988 when political allies of Evans, the Coalition to Let the People Decide in 1989, filed a lawsuit to force a special election. Wanting time to heal the schism in our base, Mayor Sawyer approached Evans calling for his support, promising that after two terms, he’d stepped down allowing the 4th Ward alderman to become a real heir apparent.

Evans’ refusal to play nice, and therefore assure that it would be our turn, turned out okay for him. He was awarded a judgeship and has gone on to become the first black judge of the Cook County Circuit Court. It didn’t quite work out as well for Chicago’s African Americans as an ethnic group.

We could have been like Atlanta.

Since Maynard Jackson was first elected in 1974, every one of the city’s succeeding mayors has been African American--Andrew Young, Jackson for a third term, Bill Campbell, Shirley Franklin and now Kasim Reed.

Rather than whining about not being respected and treated fairly while protesting about and begging for an equitable share of city contracts and jobs, we could have had men and women in the mayor’s seat that treated us like we should be treating us. Rather than being upset about our schools being closed and our teachers taking the biggest hit in layoffs, we could have been the masters of our own fate.

Instead, come February 24, we can only hope for a mayoral run-off. If Jesus “Chuy” Garcia wins in the run-off, we can hope that he’ll treat us like he’ll treat the city’s Hispanics. If Ald. Bob Fioretti wins, we can hope that he’ll treat us like he treats Chicago’s Italians. We can hope that either man, like Washington, will be fairer than fair.

And we can continue to recall the good ol’ days when Harold was mayor and it was our turn.

.

 

Obama's straight walking, double talking Urban League speech

The Root called me last night to ask if I could do a quick turnaround commentary on the president's speech at the National Urban League. The is what I wrote.

Obama's Careful Urban League Speech

The president kept his message all-inclusive at the civil rights group's annual convention.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: July 26, 2012 at 12:06 AM



(The Root) -- President Barack Obama walked a narrow line in his speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans Wednesday night, attempting to fire up his most enthusiastic base while giving his most rabid enemies as little ammo as possible to fire back at him.

It was no easy task. There has been some grumbling in the black community that the first African-American president was taking the last-hired and first-fired community for granted. That sentiment grew stronger this summer after Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to address the National Association of Black Journalists and the NAACP. So Obama arrived in New Orleans for the annual Urban League meetup possibly fearing that African Americans might not show up in large enough numbers at the polling booths in November.

The president's speech to the venerable civil rights organization hit on the three most critical challenges in the black community -- violence, education and jobs -- while deftly managing to broaden the scope enough so that conservatives wouldn't have an easy shot at labeling his remarks as for blacks only.



 

With the exception of announcing that, by executive order, he was establishing "the first ever White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, so that every child has greater access to a complete and competitive education," the president's speech was pretty much all-American for all Americans.

The POTUS ticked off measures his administration has done to help black students, such as increasing Pell Grants and pushing colleges and universities to cut their costs. But imbedded in those boasts was an unspoken truth: This is good for the rest of our fellow citizens, too.

The same tactic was employed for jobs. "We don't believe government should be in the business of helping people that refuse to help themselves, and we recognize that not every government program works," Obama said. "But we do expect hard work to pay off. We do expect responsibility to be rewarded. We do expect that if you put in enough effort you should be able to find a job that pays off."

Obama also deftly merged the Urban League's mission of equal opportunity into values of the middle class, where prosperity should be broad-based. But in speaking about the tragedies brought on by the senseless deaths from gun violence Obama really integrated his message. "Violence plagues the biggest cities but it also plagues the smallest town," he said. "It claims the lives of Americans of different ages and different races, and it's tied together by the fact that these young people had dreams and had futures that were cut tragically short."

The president spoke of praying for the victims of the massacre in Aurora, Colo.: "We also pray for those who succumb to less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities in so many cities across the country every day. We can't forget about that." Obama's sleight of hand was not just a black-and-white narrative. He delicately drilled deeper into the gun-violence plague without once mentioning gun control.

"I also believe, like other Americans, that AK-47s belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities," he said. Then he went on to say he was going to talk to members of the House and Senate to seek "a consensus around violence reduction." That was another hidden message. I read it as this: "We all know all this gun violence is insane, but I can't afford to rile up the gun nuts right now. I've got an election to win."

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Daddy Fearest

 

    As far as I’m concerned, James Jones should be a candidate for Father of the Year. Instead, the Central Florida father is just one more mug shot of just one more black man who had a run-in with the law.

Jones was arrested Thursday in Lake Mary, Fla. and charged with disorderly conduct and disturbing a school bus for this crime: Protecting his 13-year-old daughter.

Jones’ daughter, a transfer student, had been bullied time and time again by some of her fellow students. Deciding that he was mad as hell as wasn’t going to take it anymore, Jones boarded his daughter’s school bus and threatened to open up a can of whup ass on the students who had been bullying her and the bus driver for allowing them to do it.

According to an ABC News account, Jones boarded his daughter’s school bus, obviously angry. "Everybody sit down. Everybody sit down," Jones said, not caring that the bus’ surveillance camera was recording him. He then ordered his daughter to point out the bullies. "Show me which one. Show me which one," he demanded.

Jones confronted the middle school students he says have been bullying his daughter, who has cerebral palsy. He charges that they had taunted, hit and even thrown condoms at her, ABC News reported. "I'm gonna (expletive) you up.…this is my daughter, and I will kill the (expletive) who fought her," Jones said.

He also had a few choice words for the bus driver: "If anything happens to my daughter I'm going to (expletive) you up and everybody on this (expletive)," he said.

As a father myself, I understand his anger. In fact, I resembled his remarks.

But, beyond just threatening, I took action. A taxi cab driver nearly hit my then pre-teen sons, Scott and Kyle, while we were out riding our bicycles. The cabbie cruised through an intersection, ignoring them, although they were already in the street.  Luckily, they stopped in time, since he had only bothered to slow down before blowing his stop sign. Although he cleared the intersection, there were too many cars stuck in traffic ahead for him to go anywhere. Thinking of what almost happened, my rage, like Jones’, got the better of me.

“You almost hit my kids,” I yelled as I rode my bike next to the side of his cab. I dismounted and kicked his taxi as hard as I could startling his passengers in the back seat. 

Later, after I’d cooled off, I thought about what I’d done. I realized then, what Jones realizes now, that I may have over-reacted. 

On the other hand, to this day, I can’t help for hoping that the cabbie’s passengers gave him this tip in lieu of money: Watch out for children.

 

Everlasting memories of a great father

 

I've spent the last 25 Fathers Days without. By now, I thought I'd be over my father's death. I'm not. It's no longer the ever present pain as it was back then but every now and then, his lost haunts me. And always on Fathers Day I remember and wonder what it would be like if he was still here. I've written about him more than once, I posted a Chicago Tribune column last year that I wrote shortly after his death.

  This Fathers Day, I'm posting a Chicago Sun-Times column I wrote three years ago. 

What happens to children without father's example?

Chicago Sun-Times

June 18, 2006

BY MONROE ANDERSON

My earliest memory of my father, Monroe Anderson, dates back to when I was three. On a pre-dawn winter morning, I stood in my flannel pajamas, watching him stoke the coals in our apartment’s pot belly stove until there was a golden glow bathing the room. My last memory of my father, alive, was in1984 at a New Year’s Day family dinner in the Gary house where I grew up. Dishes were being cleared from the table when my father vanished, returning with a vintage shotgun cradled in his arms

      “I want you to have this,” he said, handing it over, barrels up.

      The shotgun meant a lot to him. When he was a boy living down South, his maternal granddaddy used it while teaching him to hunt for supper. Thinking it was a strange gesture, I thanked him, as I took the 12 gauge.

      Eight days later, my father was dead at 61, the victim of a massive heart attack. To this day, those first and last images remain burned into my mind’s eye, capturing the core of what my father meant to me. He was light and warmth and protector and provider.

      He made it all so easy for me, while it hadn’t been easy at all for him.

      My father’s father, yet another Monroe Anderson, was a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta.  About eight decades ago, a tornado uprooted my father’s family’s tenant shanty. The bodies of his father, his mother and his six-year-old sister were found in the storm-ravaged fields my grandparents had worked. As the rescue and recovery team plowed through the fields, heaping one corpse after the other on its horse-drawn cart, my father, then a one-year-old baby, was found lying face down in a furrow. Just as they were about to stack his tiny body with the others, he shuddered. He was raised by his grandmother and two young aunts, always wanting and always missing the family he never knew.

      By the time he was 16, armed with just an eight-grade education, he was on his own. He migrated North, first to Chicago, then to Gary, to improve his lot. Shortly after he was drafted into the army during World War II, he and my mother, Norma, would elope; their marriage would last for 42 years, ‘til death they did part. The war ended and  I was born a year after my father was honorably discharged.  My sister followed five years later and my brother came six years after her.

      While my father worked in the steel mills for most of his life, his real job was family man. He was the house handyman and the family chauffeur.  He was a man with traditional values who cherished his position as head of household, but also a man ahead of his time. He routinely relieved my homemaker mother from the daily drudgery of cooking and house cleaning. 

      From time to time, I think about my father, wondering how different I’d have been had he not always been there, showing me how to be a man, demonstrating how to be a father. I wonder what his reaction would be to this “my baby’s daddy” era when too many fathers are casual acquaintances to their children when not absent or non-existent.  In our modern times, one third of our children are raised without the biological father present. In African American households, it’s twice as bad because the percentage is twice as high. How much better would life be for these children if they had  fathers present and committed?

      When my father died, I thought of myself as having lost a best friend, mentor and role model but as time has passed and I’ve raised two sons of my own, I’ve come to realize that my loss was theirs as well. My father as their grandfather would have made my sons’ lives that much richer. 

      A great father is hard to forget. So I know how lucky I am that he was there for me to remember this father’s day and every other day.