All posts tagged "Civil Rights"

A Trump cabinet secretary is breaking from the White House on proposed budget cuts, according to reporting by the New York Times.

"The White House is asking Congress to cut the number of lawyers enforcing civil rights in schools," the Times reported on Friday. "Education Secretary Linda McMahon has told Congress she wants money to hire more."

McMahon told House lawmakers last week that the proposed cuts are a "floor for hiring," the report noted. Two anonymous White House officials said McMahon is contradicting their position by framing the proposed cuts as a starting point for negotiations. ...

Advocates for civil and constitutional rights were sounding the alarm on a Trump official's plan to combat groups deemed far-left extremists by the administration.

"A lot of people are very shocked by the language about left-wing extremists, anarchist extremists," said Chip Gibbons, the policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, in a Saturday article by the Guardian.

Gibbons was reacting to a memo by President Donald Trump's counter-terrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, that called for labeling millions of Americans as terrorists, including groups that identify as left-wing, anti-Fascist and Anarchist. ...

Labor leader Dolores Huerta spoke out on Wednesday with allegations that civil rights and labor icon César Chávez had abused and raped her decades ago, leading to two pregnancies and children she gave up for adoption.

Huerta broke her silence after an explosive New York Times report revealed civil rights and labor icon César Chávez had sexually abused girls and women, Axios reported.

"I have encouraged people to always use their voice. Following the New York Times’ multi-year investigation into sexual misconduct by César Chávez, I can no longer stay silent and must share my own experiences," Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers union with Chávez, wrote in a statement shared on her social media and published on Medium....

If the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in a high-profile redistricting case within the next few weeks — likely weakening the Voting Rights Act, as experts anticipate — Republicans are poised to gerrymander as many as eight House seats in their favor ahead of November’s midterms, a nonpartisan political reform group warns in a new report.

Long-term effects could be more drastic, resulting in 15 or more districts gerrymandered to benefit the GOP in 2028, if the Supreme Court weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, according to Issue One.

The Court heard oral arguments in the case involving racial gerrymandering in Louisiana late last year and could issue a decision anytime between now and June. ...

Several civil rights groups on Tuesday sued to try and prevent the Department of Justice from closing an office dedicated to preventing "unrest and violence" in U.S. communities, according to a new report.

The organizations are suing to stop the closure of the Community Relations Service — first created in 1964 to prevent rioting and racial tensions in American cities — and seeking a preliminary injunction to keep the office known as "America's Peacemaker," according to CBS News report.

The Trump administration had planned to close it, and in the lawsuit filed by multiple branches of the NAACP and the Baptist Convention of Missouri, the groups argue that the Justice Department is violating the law by shuttering it....

Editor’s note: To commemorate Juneteenth, we share excerpts of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Stanford University in April 1967. We hear in this speech many of the themes that would animate King’s career but are too often forgotten: Economic equality and justice, the historical context of white backlash, and optimism as an ethos. The speech has been edited for length.

I’d like to use as a subject from which to speak this afternoon, the other America. And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for our situation. And in a sense, this America is overflowing with the miracle of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies and culture and education for their minds, and freedom and human dignity for their spirit. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America, millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.

But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America, millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America, millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America, people are poor by the millions. And they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. ...