March is Women’s History Month. The Bible says a woman’s hair is her crown and glory. But for Black women, their natural hair is vilified. The current debate over natural hair has its roots in slavery. First enacted in 1786, Tignon laws forced free and enslaved Black women to cover their hair.
Fast forward to today, Black hair is still policed. Black people face discrimination and micro-aggressions because of the hair that grows naturally from their head and how they choose to style it.
One of the earliest challenges to modern Tignon customs happened in 1987. Cheryl Tatum was a cashier at Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Virginia. The personnel director, Betty McDermott, told Tatum to unbraid her hair because company policy banned “extreme and unusual hair styles.” McDermott said:
I can't understand why you would want to wear your hair like that anyway. What would the guests think if we allowed you all to wear your hair like that?
Afros are protected under the Civil Rights Act. But if a Black woman wore a regal updo, she could face hair discrimination in all but eight states.
Viewed through the white gaze, natural hair is considered “unkempt” and “unprofessional.” But it’s not just Black women. Black men and Black children also face hair discrimination. A Black teenager was told to cut his dreadlocks or forfeit a wrestling match.
Beyoncé won 2021 Grammy for Best R&B Performance for “Black Parade.” A Black woman or girl could face hair discrimination for wearing the natural hair styles depicted in her music video.
Black voters delivered the White House and the Senate majority to Democrats. They should deliver for Black people and end hair discrimination by passing the CROWN Act, Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.
For more information, visit The Crown Act.
I am a longtime voting rights advocate. Under the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy, I monitored elections in Ethiopia and Nigeria, and led voter education workshops in Angola and Kazakhstan. The American democracy is the gold standard for free and fair elections. As votes are counted in the 2020 presidential election, it feels like déjà vu.
When the polls closed in the 2000 presidential election, the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush was too close to call. The winner would be determined by Florida’s electoral votes. For 36 days, the streets were filled with protesters chanting “Count Every Vote” and “Stop the Count.” At the same time in the suites, partisans on both sides were filing lawsuits. Gore asked for hand recounts in Democratic-leaning counties only. Bush took his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court stopped the recounts on the grounds they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With that decision, Bush won Florida by a margin of 537 votes out of six million cast.
Punch card voting machines have since been replaced by electronic voting machines. But then as now, the perceived loser is cherry-picking election results. President Donald Trump is challenging the vote count in selected states. Then as now Roger Stone is engaged in dirty tricks. Also then as now, partisans are spreading conspiracy theories. As in 2000, the absence of evidence of a conspiracy to “steal the election” is evidence of the conspiracy.
Trump’s baseless claims of “vote tabulation irregularities” undermine confidence in the integrity of the election. The machinery of our democracy has changed over the years. For instance, in 2000 I cast my vote on an 800-pound lever voting machine in Brooklyn. Now living in Philadelphia, I voted by mail and tracked my ballot status online. What remains unchanged is that public trust in the electoral process separates the American republic from, say, a banana republic.
Since 1989, The Carter Center, founded by former president Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter, has monitored more than 110 elections in Africa, Latin America and Asia. For the first time, the Carter Center will monitor a U.S. election. CEO Paige Alexander said in a statement:
What we’re monitoring is what many people have been calling the hand recount. Because the margin in the presidential race is so close, this sort of audit essentially requires review of every ballot by hand. This is unusual, but it provides an opportunity to build trust in the electoral system prior to the state’s certification of results.
Voter trust is the bedrock of our democracy. The 2020 presidential election is yet another reminder that the right to vote and to have that vote counted cannot be taken for granted. As Pennsylvania and other states certify the election results, the whole world will be watching.
Joe Biden is the projected winner of the 2020 presidential election after winning Pennsylvania and securing its 20 electoral votes.
Voters sent Donald Trump a clear message: You’re fired!
Cue the theme to “The Apprentice,” the reality show that propelled the grifter into the White House.
On January 20, 2021, it will be time for the worst president in modern American history to exit, stage right.
When I moved to Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, a former mayor and police commissioner, had been dead for nearly two decades. Still, Philadelphians spoke about him with a passion and anger that was visceral. Rizzo’s legacy includes the untreated trauma that he inflicted on the African American community.
As I researched Philadelphia’s jazz history, I heard stories about how Rizzo harassed jazz musicians and club owners. So it is shocking that a monument of a man who was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for a pattern of police brutality that “shocks the conscience” is at the gateway to municipal services.
I looked at the story behind the story and learned the Rizzo monument was financed by his family. The public was never asked whether the vanity project was an appropriate monument for the City of Philadelphia. Not only was the public not asked, the vanity project was unveiled on January 1, 1999 after the Mummers Parade, an event that for decades featured marchers in blackface.
On the day Mayor Jim Kenney announced his endorsement of Sen. Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic presidential nomination, it was reported Kenney has no plan to remove the Rizzo monument from Thomas Paine Plaza. Warren supports removal of Confederate monuments and the Confederate battle emblem from the Mississippi state flag.
I join Pennsylvania State Chapter National Action Network in calling on Warren to support removal of the monument of Frank Rizzo, a racist cop who trampled on civil rights, urged supporters to “vote white” and traumatized the African American community. You can read the press release here.
On Saturday, Joe Biden kicked off his third presidential campaign. Biden said he chose Philadelphia for his campaign launch and headquarters because “this was the birthplace of our democracy”:
So why do we begin this journey in this place – Philadelphia? Because this was the birthplace of our democracy. It was here that two of the most important documents in the world’s history were written.
In 1776, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Those words formed the American creed. Equality. Equity. Fairness. America didn’t live up to that promise for most of its people, for people of color, for women.
It is self-evident blacks were not included in the nation’s founding documents. The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner. Biden said, “Just look at the facts, not the alternative facts.” Fact is, African Americans were stripped of their humanity and deemed the property of “We the people.” Chattel slavery was not a broken promise. It was foundational to the nation’s economy and political representation.
In 1787, slaveholders and their sympathizers were holed up in Independence Hall fixing the Constitution to preserve African Americans as their property. Slavery is enshrined in the third clause of Article IV, Section 2:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
At the same time, others were fighting to end slavery.
Biden’s campaign kickoff was held on the anniversary of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of segregated public accommodations if they were “separate but equal.”
The Jim Crow regime was not dismantled until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Biden’s assertion about “One America” begs the question: When have we ever been “One America?”
Fact is, Biden’s revisionist history is not novel. Brushing aside slavery, America’s original sin, is the “American creed.” As the nation commemorates 400 years of African American history, we must continue to fight to ensure our story is told and preserved in public memory. Does that make us angry? Novelist and cultural critic James Baldwin observed:
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Stay woke.
