Editorial: How They Stole an Election
Written by admin on July 2, 2010 – 9:30 am -
by Anthony Witherspoon
Mississippi Tribune
June 25, 2010
Where can anyone get justice in McComb or Pike County Mississippi? The Mississippi-Tribune covered the trial of Mayor Zach Patterson versus the Selectmen of the City of McComb back in May, and to this date, Judge Michael Taylor has not rendered a decision. It is pretty obvious at this point that the justice, or should I say “just-us”, system is definitely a part of this good-ole-boy network.
Both circuit court judges David Strong and Taylor were chastising the mayor prior to hearing the facts of the case before them. Simply put, even Stevie Wonder could see what was about to happen. Before you write me off as being wrong about these two judges, ask some of the folks from the black community about the way they’ve been treated when standing before these two.
They have allowed all sorts of slanderous testimony to enter into the courtroom under the guise of the “clean hands doctrine”, in order to feed the Enterprise-Journal’s smear campaign. Remember Judge Strong first ordered the mayor to answer questions about his alleged “baby mommas”, then later changed his decision? He changed his decision because he knew it was a bad decision from the outset. Too late, “damage done”  to the mayors image in the minds of some folks (who don’t know any better). But this is only one example of how the courts conspire with the Enterprise-Journal to sway the public opinion and intimidate others about taking a stance against injustice.
Judge Strong even refused to recuse himself from presiding over the trial after the mayor’s attorney pointed to the conflict of interest that he posed by practicing law with Wayne Dowdy prior to becoming a judge.
The truth of the matter is we have black mayors and majority black boards in the cities of McComb, Summit and Magnolia, and it’s still business as usual. The white power structure is still in place because black elected officials are afraid to take charge.
It’s absolutely ridiculous to see Wayne Dowdy as the board attorney for the Town of Summit, the City of McComb, the Town of Magnolia and the Pike County Board of Supervisors. When I meet with other elected officials from around the state (black or white) and tell them of how Dowdy has monopolized the legal seats of the entire county, they marvel in disbelief.
But we, the black community, must own up to our share of the blame here. We have sat back in silence as a small group of white elitist have hijacked an election. Those of the civil rights movement who invested so much of their lives into the political advancement of black people are no doubt turning in their graves when looking at how we’ve wasted so much opportunity.
Black elected officials are sitting around the board room table, but lack the ability and the courage to govern; Dowdy’s monopoly and control is proof of that. This is no coincidence, this was done by design. The only way that the black elected officials will be able to govern the city of McComb is by the changing of the special charter to a state annotated code form of government. Anyone who knows the notorious history of Mississippi’s political “Reconstruction Period” understands how the institution of the Black Codes, Jim Crow laws and the granting of special charters to local cities were policies put in place to put black people in their place.
The mayor’s attorney Carroll Rhodes was one of the NAACP attorneys that sued segregated school districts across the state, forcing them to comply with federal desegregation laws. Shortly after private white academies were created and white flight into the out-skirts of Mississippi cities and towns occurred — whites started building their own subdivisions?
You ask why? Well, the first reason is obvious; it’s called the “Browning of America”. Census reports and other enumerating data showed a trend in blacks increasingly becoming a majority within towns and cities across America. And simply put, a lot of whites did not want to live next door to blacks who were moving into their community and attending the same schools with their children. People let’s get real, don’t get mad with me because I’m not afraid to tell the truth about it. Today we are still just as segregated as we were in the 1960’s.
The second reason for white flight was due to the fact that nearly 60% of property taxes is used to fund the public school system. White flight sent the message that whites refused to pay taxes into a school system that they did not plan to have their children attending.
White flight turned out to be a political miscalculation, especially for white elitist such as Norman Gillis, Wayne Dowdy and others businessmen who’s commercial property taxes were soon to be under the control of black elected officials. So, in the late 1980’s a decision was made to amend the charter to create a city administrator position and transfer a great deal of power and control into the hands of this individual who will be appointed by the board.  In other words the white elites had come to terms with the fact that black people, because of white flight, would now be able to elect a black mayor and predominately black board members.
The idea of the white elites was to stop spending money on election campaigns, and start using their money and influence in the boardroom to get their people into appointed positions of power: thereby maintaining control over of the city’s tax collections and distributions.
People this fight is not about the mayor. This fight is about disempowering the office of mayor now that black people have the power to elect a mayor from their own community. In spite of the attempts to disempower the mayor that we elected, Mayor Patterson has fought hard and has made tremendous accomplishments.
The Mississippi-Tribune believes in truth-telling, and that’s what we’ll be doing every week with a series of editorials about the politics of McComb during this election year. You will know the truth, and the truth will make us free.
We’ll continue this discussion next week.
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Progress in McComb stifled by ‘Old South’ Opposition
Written by admin on December 18, 2009 – 11:18 pm -(click arrow, right corner, to enlarge)
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Mississippi 2nd Corrupt State
Written by admin on October 27, 2009 – 5:42 pm -What’s the most politically corrupt state in the country?
When it comes to politicians getting busted for crooked deeds, three Deep South states and Kentucky have Chicago beat.
Lee Sigelman and John Sides have created a graph plotting the “total number of public corruption convictions from 1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents.” Here’s the graph:
As we can see here clearly, Illinois, though more corrupt than average, isn’t close to the top. Louisiana is a lot more corrupt than Mississippi which is a lot more corrupt than Kentucky which is substantially more corrupt than Alabama. After Alabama things get closer packed.
We should also point out that the entire South doesn’t fare poorly: Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina acquit themselves well — at least in terms of their politicians not getting caught.
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The Black Power Defined
Written by admin on October 17, 2009 – 10:23 pm -The Black Power Defined
Martin Luther King Jr.
June 11, 1967
Excerpt from article)
The final major area of untapped power for the Negro is the political arena. Higher Negro birth rates and increasing Negro migration, along with the exodus of the white population to the suburbs, are producing the fast-gathering Negro majorities in the large cities. This changing composition of the cities has political significance. Particularly in the North, the large cities substantially determine the political destiny of the state. These states, in turn, hold the dominating electoral votes in presidential contests. The future of the Democratic Party, which rests so heavily on its coalition of urban minorities, cannot be assessed without taking into account which way the Negro vote turns. The wistful hopes of the Republican Party for large-city influence will also be decided not in the boardrooms of great corporations but in the teeming ghettos.
The growing Negro vote in the South is another source of power. As it weakens and enfeebles the dixiecrats, by concentrating its blows against them, it undermines the congressional coalition of southern reactionaries and their northern Republican colleagues. That coalition, which has always exercised a disproportionate power in Congress by controlling its major committees, will lose its ability to frustrate measures of social advancement and to impose its perverted definition of democracy on the political thought of the nation.
The Negro vote a present is only a partially realized strength. It can still be doubled in the South. In the North even where Negroes are registered in equal proportion to whites, they do not vote in the same proportions. Assailed by a sense of futility, Negroes resist participating in empty ritual. However, when the Negro citizen learns that united and organized pressure can achieve measurable results, he will make his influence felt. Out of this conscious act, the political power of the aroused minority will be enhanced and consolidated.
We have many assets to facilitate organization. Negroes are almost instinctively cohesive. We band together readily, and against white hostility we have an intense and wholesome loyalty to each other. We are acutely conscious of the need, and sharply sensitive to the importance, of defending our own. Solidarity is a reality in Negro life, as it always has been among the oppressed.
On the other hand, Negroes are capable of becoming competitive, carping and, in an expression of self-hate, suspicious and intolerant of each other. A glaring weakness in Negro life is lack of sufficient mutual confidence and trust.
Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative of the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.
I learned a lesson many years ago from a report of two men who flew to Atlanta to confer with a Negro civil rights leader at the airport. Before they could begin to talk, the porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter that troubled him. After fifteen minutes has passed, one of the visitors said bitterly to his companion, “I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I haven’t come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter.”
The other replied “When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on that day I will not have the time to come one mile to see him.”
We need organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and militancy. Without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero. We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert. We lack experience because ours is a history of disorganization. But we will prevail because our need for progress is stronger than the ignorance force upon us. If we realize how indispensable is responsible militant organization to our struggle, we will create it as we managed to crate underground railroads, protest groups, self-help societies and the churches that have always been our refuge, our source of hope and our source of action.
Negroes have been slow to organize because they have been traditionally manipulated. The political powers take advantage of three major weaknesses: the manner in which our political leaders emerge; our failure so far to achieve effective political alliances; and the Negro’s general reluctances to participate fully in political life.
The majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, most are still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of Negroes nurtures a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader, who spends little time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and ability and offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many respects not a fighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one. Hence, very few Negro political leaders are impressive or illustrious to their constituents. They enjoy only limited loyalty and qualified support.
This relationship in turn hampers the Negro leader in bargaining with genuine strength and independent firmness with white party leaders. The whites are all too well aware of his impotence and his remoteness from his constituents, and they deal with him as a powerless subordinate. He is accorded a measure of dignity and personal respect but not political power.
The Negro politician therefore fines himself in a vacuum. He has no base in either direction on which to build influence and attain leverage.
In two national polls among Negroes to name their most respected leaders, out of the highest fifteen, only a single politician figure, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, was included and he was in the lower half of both lists. This is in marked contrast to polls in which white people choose their most popular leaders; political personalities are always high on the lists and are represented in goodly numbers. There is no Negro personality evoking affection, respect and emulation to correspond to John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, Earl Warren, and Adlai Stevenson, to name but a few.
The circumstances in which Congressman Powell emerged into leadership and the experiences of his career are unique. It would not shed light on the larger picture to attempt to study the very individual factors that apply to him. It is fair to say no other Negro political leader is similar, either in the strengths he possesses, the power he attained or the errors he has committed.
And so we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with an enthusiasm that enables us to rally support for them based on confidence and trust. We will have to demand high standards and give consistent, loyal support to those who merit it. We will have to be a reliable constituency for those who merit it. We will have to be a reliable constituency for those who prove themselves to be committed political warriors in our behalf. When our movement has partisan political personalities whose unity with their people is unshakable and whose independence is genuine, they will be treated in white political councils with the respect those who embody such power deserve.
In addition to the development of genuinely independent and representative political leaders, we shall have to master the art of political alliances. Negroes should be natural allies of many white reform and independent political groups, yet they are more commonly organized by the old-line machine politicians. We will have to learn to refuse crumbs from the big-city machines and steadfastly demand a fair share of the loaf. When the machine politicians demur, we must be prepared to act in unity and throw our support to such independent parties or reform wings of the major parties as are prepared to take our demands seriously and fight for them vigorously.
The art of alliance politics is more complex and more intricate than it is generally pictured. It is easy to put exciting combinations on paper. It evokes happy memories to recall that our victories in the past decade were won with a broad collation of organizations representing a wide variety of interests. But we deceive ourselves if we envision the same combination backing structural changes in the society. It did not come together for such a program and will not reassemble for it.
A true alliance is based upon some self-interest of each component group and a common interest into which they merge. For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others.
If we employ the principle of selectivity along these lines, we will find millions of allies who in serving themselves also support us, and on such sound foundations unity and mutual trust and tangible accomplishment will flourish.
In the changing conditions of the South, we will find alliances increasingly instrumental in political progress. For a number of years there were de facto alliances in some states in which Negroes voted to a moderate position, even though he did not articulate an appeal for Negro votes. In recent years the transformation has accelerated, and many white candidates have entered alliances publicly. As they perceived that the Negro vote was becoming a substantial and permanent factor, they could not remain aloof from it. More and more, competition will develop among white political forces for such a significant bloc of votes, and a monolithic white unity based on racism will no longer be possible.
Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged whites are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregation and economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs. They will not go hungry or forgo the affluent society to remain racially ascendant.
Governors Wallace and Maddox whose credentials as racists are impeccable, understand this, and for that reason they represent themselves as liberal populists as well. Temporarily they can carry water on both shoulders, but the ground is becoming unsteady beneath their feet. Each of them was faced in the primary last year with a new breed of white southerner who for the first time in history met with Negro organizations to solicit support and championed economic reform without racial demagogy. These new figures won significant numbers of white votes, insufficient for victory but sufficient to point the future directions of the South.
It is true that the Negro vote has not transformed the North; but the fact that northern alliances and political action generally have been poorly executed is no reason to predict that the negative experiences will be automatically extended in the North or duplicated in the South. The northern Negro has never used direct action on a mass scale for reforms, and anyone who predicted ten years ago that the southern Negro would also neglect it would have dramatically been proved in error.
Everything Negroes need will not like magic materialize from the use of the ballot. Yet as a lever of power, if it is given studious attention and employed with the creativity we have proved through our protest activities we possess, it will help to achieve many far-reaching changes during our lifetimes.
The final reason for our dearth of political strength, particularly in the North, arises from the grip of an old tradition on many individual Negroes. They tend to hold themselves aloof from politics as a serious concern. They sense that they are manipulated, and their defense is a cynical disinterest. To safeguard themselves on this front from the exploitation that torments them in so many areas, they shut the door to political activity and retreat into the dark shadows of passivity. Their sense of futility is deep and in terms of their bitter experiences it is justified. They cannot perceive political action as a source of power. It will take patient and persistent effort to eradicate this mood, but the new consciousness of strength developed in a decade of stirring agitation can be utilized to channel constructive Negro activity into political life and eliminate the stagnation produced by an outdated and defensive paralysis.
In the future we must become intensive political activists. We must be guided in this direction because we need political strength, more desperately than any other group in American society. Most of us are too poor to have adequate economic power, and many of us are too rejected by the culture to be part of any tradition of power. Necessity will draw us toward the power inherent in the creative uses of politics.
Negroes nurture a persisting myth that the Jews of America attained social mobility and status solely because they had money. It is unwise to ignore the error for many reasons. In a negative sense it encourages anti-Semitism and overestimates money as a value. In a positive sense, the full truth reveals a useful lesson.
Jews progressed because they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political action. The Jewish family enthroned education and sacrificed to get it. The result was far more than abstract learning. Uniting social action with educational competences, Jews became enormously effective in political life. Those Jews who became lawyers, businessmen, writers, entertainers, union leaders and medical men did not vanish into the pursuits of their trade exclusively. They lived an active life in political circles, learning the techniques and arts of politics.
Nor was it only the rich who were involved in social and political action. Millions of Jews for half a century remained relatively poor, but they were far from passive in social and political areas. They lived in homes in which politics was a household word. They were deeply involved in radical parties, liberal parties, and conservative parties — they formed many of the. Very few Jews sank into despair and escapism even when discrimination assailed the spirit and corroded initiative. Their life raft in the sea of discouragement was social action.
Without overlooking the towering differences between the Negro and Jewish experiences, the lesson of Jewish mass involvement in social and political action and education is worthy of emulation. Negroes have already started on this road in creating the protest movement, but this is only a beginning. We must involve everyone we can reach, even those with inadequate education, and together acquire political sophistication by discussion, practice, and reading.
The many thousands of Negroes who have already found intellectual growth and spiritual fulfillment on this path know its creative possibilities. They are not among the legions of the lost, they are not crushed by the weight of centuries. Most heartening, among the young the spirit of challenge and determination for change is becoming an unquenchable force.
But the scope of struggle is still too narrow and too restricted. We must turn more of our energies and focus our creativity on the useful things that translate into power. We in this generation must do the work and in doing it stimulate our children to learn and acquire higher levels of skill and technique.
It must become a crusade so vital that civil rights organizers do not repeatedly have to make personal calls to summon support. There must be a climate of social pressure in the Negro community that scorns the Negro who will not pick up his citizenship rights and add his strength enthusiastically and voluntarily to the accumulation of power for himself and his people. The past years have blown fresh winds through ghetto stagnation, but we are on the threshold of a significant change that demands a hundredfold acceleration. By 1970 then of our larger cities will have Negro majorities if present trends continue. We can shrug off this opportunity or use it for a new vitality to deepen and enrich our family and community life.
We must utilize the community action groups and training centers no proliferating in some slum areas to crate not merely an electorate, but a conscious, alert and informed people who know their direction and whose collective wisdom and vitality commands respect. The slave heritage can be cast into the dim past by our consciousness of our strengths and a resolute determination to use them in our daily experiences.
Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is social force any group can utilize by accumulation its elements in a planned deliberate campaign to organized it under its own control.
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Mayor-Adams Letters
Written by admin on September 25, 2009 – 10:06 am -Should a judge decide?
It was wrong to take mayor’s powers
Special Editorial: Who is the mayor of McComb?
Does racism exist in McComb?
Anderson Notice of Claim
Motion Denied
Is E.C. Nobles a Sellout?
The Saga Continues Part II
Youth Wins Skateboard Sports Camp Scholarship
Wyatt Emmerich Hates to talk Race, but if He Has to
When are we going to get over it?
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