Race Equity / Social Justice

Viola Ford Fletcher is also still waiting for justice. By TONY NORMAN • Pittsburgh Post-Gazette America has been telling Viola Ford Fletcher to wait for justice ever since she was 7 years old. Now a spry 107, Fletcher is running out of patience with America. Delivered by midwife on a farm in Lawton, Okla., on May 10, 1914, Fletcher was born 138 years after the American experiment commenced in 1776. As a Black daughter of Oklahoma, she had no more reason to believe in America’s promises than...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee lawmakers have passed a bill that would withhold funding from schools teaching about systemic racism and white privilege. HB 0580/SB 0623 officially cleared the General Assembly Wednesday, one of several to pass on the day lawmakers adjourned for the year . The bill centers on restricting what concepts on institutional racism can be taught in school, and attracted some of the most impassioned debates. While most of the majority-white GOP caucuses in the House and...

Federal environmental officials reached a $21 million settlement late Monday with Ford Motor Co. and Ringwood on a controversial cleanup of the borough's sprawling Superfund site that will leave tons of polluted soil in place under a barrier. The agreement filed in U.S. District Court is another step toward affirming a plan that would keep 166,000 tons of contaminated soil at the O'Connor Disposal Area despite the objections of residents who live nearby, including many members of the...

NEW JERSEY – Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal issued a statewide directive to law enforcement Monday, instructing prosecutors to waive mandatory parole disqualifiers—commonly known as mandatory minimum prison terms—for non-violent drug offenses. "We cannot stand by and ignore the unjust and racially disparate impact of these mandatory minimum terms on non-violent drug offenders—primarily young persons of color," Governor Phil Murphy said. "It's been well over a year since the Criminal...

By Mike Catalni, Miami Herald, April 8,, 2021 Ebele Azikiwe was in the sixth grade last year when February came and it was time to learn about Black history again. She was, by then, familiar with the curriculum: Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a discussion on slavery. Just like the year before, she said, and the year before that. Then came George Floyd's death in May, and she wrote to the administration at her school in Cherry Hill, in New Jersey's Philadelphia suburbs, to...

BY NATHANIEL WEIXEL | The Hill The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday declared racism a "serious public health threat," becoming the largest federal agency to do so. "A growing body of research shows that centuries of racism in this country has had a profound and negative impact on communities of color," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement published on the agency's website. Walensky noted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been felt most severely...

ANDREW S. LEWIS | NJ Spotlight When Veronica Grant reflects on growing up in the Venice Park section of Atlantic City in the 1970s, regular nuisance flooding isn’t a memory that comes to mind. Yet these days, high tides spill across the neighborhood’s streets and yards so frequently that Grant can’t keep count. Flooding has been a reality in Atlantic City since its founding a century-and-a-half ago, but it has never been as frequent as it is today. Since 1911, the city’s tide station has...

Great documentary. Please watch, share your thoughts, reactions and ways we can build healing communities here in NJ. This video shows in detail how we infuse language, pedagogy and praxis to move individuals and community healing. We Came to Heal” follows H.O.L.L.A!’s Healing Justice Movement - over a three years period capturing Healing Justice circles, the Healing Justice Summits and H.O.L.L.A!’ s human healing-centered praxis led by The Youth Organizing Collective (Y.O.C). We believe to...

Congress has a chance to make an overdue statement It’s been 129 years since three Black men — Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart — were brutally murdered by a white mob. The three were the well-regarded owners of a thriving grocery store in a section of Memphis, Tenn., known as the Curve. The journalist Ida B. Wells, at risk to her own life and at the price of her ability to remain in Memphis, chronicled the killings that white newspapers covered over. She noted in her biography...

A Conversation on Race and Privilege with Angela Davis and Jane Elliott is the latest installment of the student-led Social Justice Solutions series. Each year, we invite activists, thought leaders, and the community to explore action-oriented strategies to affect social change. This year we are honored to host two luminaries who have long been on the front lines of pushing the national conversation on race and racial justice forward.

Before Breonna Taylor's name became synonymous with police violence against Black Americans, she was an emergency medical technician in Louisville, Ky. The 26-year-old Black woman's friends and family say she was beloved, and relished the opportunity to brighten someone else's day. Exactly one year ago, Louisville police gunned her down in her home. Now, her name is a ubiquitous rallying cry at protests calling for police reforms, and many social justice advocates point to her story as an...

Born in New York City to Haitian immigrants and raised in Brooklyn and Irvington, Pierre-Louis graduated from Rutgers University and earned her law degree at Rutgers University Law School. After law school she clerked for associate Justice John Wallace, the last African - American to serve on the court and whose who's seat she'll fill (Timpone replaced Wallace). She spent nine years as a prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, where she was where was...