Posts Tagged ‘African American’

Morgan Freeman and Black Racism

Monday, March 5th, 2012

For some strange reason, after having read and memorized dozens of scripts and parroted them on-camera as if the thoughts were coming right from their hearts, some Hollywood actors eventually utter a line truly coming from their minds. Inevitably, most of what they say is garbage of the worst kind. This was the case of Morgan Freeman.

A few days ago, the noted actor claimed that all of the dissatisfaction Tea Party members feel for Obama is because they are racists.[1] Apparently he didn’t know that, if one is to believe what recent opinion polls indicate, this dissatisfaction is exactly what a currently growing percent of the American population currently feel.

Proof that Mr. Freeman is nothing more than a high valued iPod, repeating over and over the tunes somebody implanted in his silicon memory, is that he didn’t realized that his assertion is an obvious manifestation of racism. This is particularly dishonest, because nobody has heard a Tea Party member calling other members “brothers” and “sisters.”

I understand that in some fraternal societies and religions members call themselves brothers and sisters. This is perfectly justified, because their fraternity is based on shared ideas or beliefs. But calling somebody you don’t know “brother” or “sister” just because he shares the same skin color as you, even if he/she is part of a flash mob targeting white people,[2] is racism of the worst type.

Evidently, it never crossed Freeman’s mind that, even though a minority of the people who hate Obama are white racists — racism is not a privilege of blacks, browns, yellows or greens — most of them do not like the guy in the White House because of the good job he is doing on behalf of his true masters: Wall Street bankers, oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations — also known as the military-industrial complex. Moreover, apparently Mr. Freeman is oblivious to the fact that some white Americans don’t like Obama for the same reason many black Americans don’t like Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas,[3] Bill Cosby, Thomas Sowell or Herman Cain: not because of the color of their skins but because of the content of their character.

But this is not the only reason why Mr. Freeman needs to hire a good scriptwriter as soon as possible. His assertion is a contradiction in terms, because contrary to the claims of many confused or brainwashed people, Mr. Obama is not black, much less African American.

If one is to believe the sycophantic mainstream press, we now have in the White House the first black president in the history of the United States. But this claim is highly disingenuous. Aside from the fact that Bill Clinton claimed that honor many years ago, and most African-American leaders accepted it at face value, Mr. Obama is not black.

Let me repeat it for the sake of clarity: Barack Hussein Obama (a.k.a. Barry Soetoro) is not black!

Though his father was black, his mother was Caucasian. Therefore, he is actually a mulatto. And I would bet that, at the bottom of his heart, he is not too happy about being called black. In most countries mulattos feel highly offended when somebody calls them blacks.

Actually, the U.S. is the only country in the world where a person who carries a single black gene in his body is called black. You don’t need to be a genius to realize that this is a racist concept created and used in a pejorative way by white racists. Unfortunately, most black Americans have made it theirs.

By the way, I am not the only one who affirms that Obama is not black. During his campaign some blacks criticized him for not being an “authentic” black, calling him “Barack the Magic Negro.” Another critic even questioned his right to run as a black candidate.[4]

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, Mr. Obama is not African-American.

The qualification of African-American is applied to citizens of the United States who have origins in the black peoples of Africa. But not all American blacks feel comfortable with the name, among other things because, as black American scholar Nathan Huggins has pointed out,[5] the “identity” of black Africans is a fiction created by European whites. Actually, most so called “Africans” don’t feel themselves as belonging to a particular geographic area, mush less a continent, but to a particular tribe, like Ashanti, Watussi, Bambara, Dogon, Efik, etc. That perhaps explains why the Black Panthers rightly refused the denomination “African-American,” and preferred to call themselves blacks, as evidenced in their assertion “black is beautiful.”

In addition, the denomination “African-American” is not an ethnographic term but a political one. As many African-American militants have pointed out, it expresses pride in their African origins and solidarity with others of the African Diaspora, particularly the ones brought to America as slaves. As author Debra Dickerson contended, “Black, in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves.”[6]

But Mr. Obama’s ancestors in Kenya were not brought to America as slaves. Actually, there is a remote possibility that some of his ancestors may have been among the blacks in Africa who enriched themselves by making some of their own kin slaves and selling them to the Portuguese and other Europeans. Most of these slaves were acquired through intertribal wars or kidnappings.[7]

It is highly revealing that Jesse Jackson, a secret agent of the Wall Street conspirators, played a key role in introducing the term “African-American”. It was quickly adopted and popularized by the CFR conspirators-controlled mainstream media. Consequently, it is not far-fetched to guess that the term “African-American” is just another divide-and-rule concoction of Wall Street bankers who, I presume, don’t care much for blacks.

By the way, I personally don’t see the point of being proud to be the descendants of slaves, and most blacks in Africa don’t see it either. A friend of mine who lived in Africa for several years told me that “African-Americans” are not welcomed there. The reason for this is because, contrary to American blacks, blacks in Africa see themselves as the proud descendants of free men.

This unconscious love of slavery of many “African-American” leaders perhaps explain their love for the white slave master just 90 miles South of the U.S. border. Year after year, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Barbara Lee, Laura Richardson, Bobby Rush, Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel,[8] Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and other prominent American Uncle Toms, travel to Cuba to show their love and affection for the white slave master. I have not heard, however, that any of them has asked to visit in their jails people like Dr. José Elías Bisset, who have been in and out of prison for many years just because he peacefully opposes the government, nor that they visited the grave of Orlando Zapata, who died in his prison cell after a long hunger strike in protest against a tyrannical government.

Apparently, these “African Americans” ignore that currently a great majority of dissidents in Cuba are black, and many of them are in Castro’s jails. Also, it seems that the American Uncle Toms never have tried to talk to many black Cubans in exile in the U.S. and ask them the reason why they risked their lives escaping from their country in an inner tube or makeshift raft. It is difficult to explain why, if Cuba is a paradise of racial equality, as some claim, almost 40 percent of the Cubans who escaped during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 were black. Even more difficult to explain is why the few “african Americans” who moved to Cuba in the 1960s to enjoy the marvels of a race-free society, soon after changed their minds and quietly moved back to the U.S.

Nevertheless, some prominent American blacks still continue giving their support to the Cuban white slave master, notable among them are Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton. As their support for Castro in the Elián González[9] case demonstrated, by helping Castro to enforce his non-written fugitive slave clause these people were actually backing an Underground Railroad in reverse. The fact indicates that their distaste for slavery is not ethically, but politically motivated. [10]

In conclusion, claiming that somebody is a racist because do not agree with the policies of Mr. Obama, as Morgan Freeman stated, is as nonsensical as claiming that somebody was homophobic because he disagreed with the policies of Mr. Bush.[11] In both cases, what really mattered was not skin color or sexual preferences, but policies, and the policies Obama has implemented and is trying to implement are a continuation on steroids of the warmongering, anti-Constitutional policies of the CFR-controlled Bush and his neocon friends.

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Confrontation at White Unity Rally

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

Duluth, MN (Northland’s NewsCenter) – According to witnesses on scene around five members of the Supreme White Alliance arrived at the city civic center and were immediately swarmed by around 70 anit-rally protesters.

As SWA members tried to speak, witnesses say they were met with yells and were unable to give their planned speech.

Witnesses say verbal and physcial altercations were prompted by both sides.

Two people were escorted away by officers.

Witnesses say members of the Supreme White Alliance have since gone inside the city hall.

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Mixed message’ graffiti sprayed on car, police say

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

A vandal who seemed a bit conflicted over what message to convey painted both racist and African-American messages on a car on the  north side, Madison police reported.

Police said in a news release that the vandalism was reported early Tuesday morning by a 32-year-old African-American woman who lives near Portage Avenue.

“The vandal left behind words (on the car) that were seemingly conflicting,” police spokesman Joel DeSpain said in the release. “Some represented sentiments of white supremacists, while others were more symbolic of an African-American gang.”

The victim told police she didn’t know of anyone who might have targeted her.

“The responding officer helped her wash the water-based paint from the car,” DeSpain said.

Police said they have no suspects.

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AFRIKAIDENTITY Vrs AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

As two poles apart, AfrikaIdentity is the opposite of White/Western identity expressed as and Championed by USA, France, Britain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Greece as the world’s foremost invisible White Supremacist Countries and Govts whose invisible Goals in life are the Invisible promotion and guarantee of the Invisible White Supremacist Power in the World and Total Invisible Western Domination, Control, Influence and Exploitation of the Non-Western Worlds, People and their Riches .

And as the oldest human identity on earth and mother of all today’s human identities in the world including American/Western/White identity, your AfrikaIdentity is historically the original human identity as the world first human identity on earth while American/USA identity as the child, product or extension of Western/White identity in America is nothing more than AfrikaIdentity turned upside down in the same way as USA/American identity being nothing more than a British/Western identity turned upside down.

This is so because AfrikaIdentity is 3 million years old in Ancient term and 10, 000 years old in modern term White USA/American identity is less than 400 years.

While AfrikaIdentity as the world’s first humanity’s identity is the only identity on earth which is about ten thousand year old in modern Term and three million year old in Ancient Term

But we know from experience that USA/American identity cannot last more than 500 years as did its preceding expressions of Western/White identity starting from Greece identity, Roman identity, British identity, French identity, Spanish identity, Portuguese identity, German identity, Italian identity.

In other words, AfrikaIdentity as the mother and elder of the USA/Western/White/identity is too Ancient and too wise to be rejected, spat on, ridiculed, and preferred to USA/Western identity.

Leaders and scholars or USA/Western identity know this secret which they make sure it is kept away from ninety-nine percent of today’s Afrikans on the continent and its Diaspora as a way of making them to blindly and readily accept, love and adore everything Western, Arab, Jewish or Foreign and to readily doubt, question, dismiss , reject and shun away from everything Afrikan they have been programmed to consider as “ anti-progress or anti-change or anti-modernization “

This does not, however, mean AfrikaIdentity is superior to and better than Western/USA identity.

But it only means, it is different from and is not the same as American/USA/Western/White/Arab/Jewish/Foreign identities .

For any Today’s Continental/Diaspora Afrikan to continue preferring USA/Western/White/Arab/Jewish identity to his/her own AfrikaIdentity is to prefer hell to heaven.
All because, USA/America identity as Western/White identity is good and excellent for all today’s various Western/White identity blocks that constitute it.

It brings them together as one Western/White people.

It empowers, strengthens, enriches, protects, and defends them as one people no matter where they are.

It promotes throughout the world USA/American/Western/White Supremacist cause, interests and needs at the expense of all non-Western causes, interests and needs they consider less important .

As far as they are concerned, the only human identity that matters on earth is their American/Western identity.

All other human identities including AfrikaIdentity that gave birth to them, were and are still rejected and considered inferior, barbaric, archaic, anti modern, anti-civilization, and anti-fashion.

That is why you, my Afrikan Brothers and Sisters in America, are programmed for the past 400 years to accept, love, and adore USA/American/Western identity as your own and to prefer it to your AfrikaIdentity you have been uprooted from and kept ignorant of .

But the time has come for you to know once and for all that your present identity if not your identity but slave identity that exists to rob you of the limitless power and benefit of your one and only AfrikaIdentity that is forgotten but not gone or lost but awaits patiently your claim and use anytime your mental chains are gone and allow you to do so.

All because your today’s African American identity cannot save you from the hell of your USA/American/Western identity.

It is simply death, suicide, holocaust and genocide for you my lost Afrikan sisters and brothers in USA and Europe but as Afrikan and American identity for the living can never be called progress, change, civilization, development or success in life but death, in the same way claiming African American identity which is nothing but photocopy of Western/White identity can only mean your suicide.
That is not all, defining yourself by slave identity of African American means you are not human enough, intelligent enough, and brave enough to distinguish between your authentic AfrikaIdentity which you are whether you know it or not from slave/colonial Western world-based and oriented identities that exist to transform you into photocopies and slaves of those transform whose identities you zealously honor to death.

Alien or slave identities for you my Afrikan Brothers and Sisters in USA and Europe can only rob you of the limitless power of self-knowledge, self-love, self-acceptance, self-determine nation, self-mastery and self-fulfillment which only your urgent recovery and practice of AfrikaIdentity can confer on you.

If you can learn and master alien/slave/Western identities in all their manifestation and expression, you can also recover, re-claim, re-learn, know, master and use daily the limitless power and glory of your forgotten AfrikaIdentity.

To do so, is to regain your sense of pride and dignity on earth as the cradle of humanity and mother of today’s world civilizations.

For, to reclaim the heaven of your AfrikaIdentity for good is to be forever free from the hell of alien/Western identities.

Your AfrikaIdentity is the key to the knowledge of yourself as Afrikan in USA. And to know yourself as Afrikan is to know others of whom you are part and parcel of your AfrikaIdentity is also the key to knowing you are not a minority in USA/America but a majority in the world.

Your AfrikaIdentity connects you automatically and naturally back to the rest of your one billion continental and Diaspora Afrikan brothers and sisters as full-fledged and full-blooded continental Afrikans at home and abroad.
In other words, while you today’s alien/slave/colonial identities uproot you from the power and dignity of your AfrikaIdentity , your AfrikaIdentity reconnects you to the glory and pride of forgotten AfrikaSelf.

While your present slave identities can only make you ignorant of yourself as Afrikan, your AfrikaIdentity offers you a guaranteed Self-Knowledge as the suggested way of knowing the rest of your Afrikan brothers and sisters from whom you have been separated and isolated for far too long.

While your present Western/White identities can only teach how best to reject and hate yourself as Afrikan in USA, your recovered AfrikaIdentity will confer on you the right to accept and love yourself as Afrikan in USA.

Likewise, while your present day slave/Western/White identities can only make you trust, love, adore, have faith, belief and pride for everything that you are to truly are, your recovered AfrikaIdentity will once again, bring you together to work in love, peace, harmony, trust, and respect for one another for the satisfaction and promotion of your Afrikan cause, interest and needs at home and abroad as Reborn, Awakened, Free, Powerful, Prosperous, Happy, Proud Afrikacentric Continental Afrikans at Home and Abroad and the Owners and Beneficiaries of the Richest Continent on Earth as your One and Only Indivisible Continental Afrikan Home and Motherland to recover, unify, empower, liberate, develop, protect , defend and promote for your Benefit in dignity , justice, freedom, love and harmony for life.
In other word, rather than continue to destroy, kill, uproot, divide, fragmentize yourself as Afrikan in USA and Europe in the invisible prison of alien/Western/slave identities, the time has come for you my Afrikan sister and brother in USA and Europe to face and embrace, once and for all, the Afrikacentric TRUTH you fear so much in life, that , whether you know it or not or like or not, you are Afrikan in USA and Europe and not African and American at the same time and only your urgent recovery, knowledge, mastery and daily attunement to the limitless power and benefit of your forgotten Afrikan Identity, can save you in life and get you free from the shame and disgraces of turning yourself into a slave and photocopy of alien/Western/slave/Colonial identities that are and can never replace the pride, the respect and the dignity of any human group defining itself by its own ancestral identity rather than by someone’s else identities.

The Truth of your AfrikaIdentity at home and abroad is therefore the only Afrikacentric Truth of all truths that can set you free from the disrespect of those whose slave and photocopy you have become.

Even though you came a long way in recognizing and claiming your right to be called African American compared to going by the previous slave identities of Nigger, Negro, Afro, Colored etc, your today’s African American Identity is still a slave-based and oriented identity which is still crying to be free and liberated from the confusion of trying to be Afrikan and American at the same time .

Deny it. Reject it. Dismiss it. Ignore it. Push it aside. Pretend it does not exist. Proclaim yourself forever free from the issue of who and what you are not and who and what you truly are in USA/White.

But whether you like it or not, it is time to face and end the lies of your today’s slave/colonial identities for the limitless power of your suppressed, forgotten and ignored AfrikaIdentity to resurface and reign once again as your supreme AfrikaSun of your reborn, awakened, prosperous , happy, proud and free AfrikaLife no matter where you find yourself in life.

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Drug laws not racist ploy; Republican screening extreme; Big money college sports

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Drug laws not racist ploy

The Leonard Pitts‘ editorial “The New Jim Crow” was an amazing piece of fantasy that submits that the “War on Drugs” is a conspiracy to arrest black Americans under the guise of committing criminal acts.

The column would have you to believe that 49 years after Martin Luther King‘s “I have a dream” speech that America has gone full circle to an outright oppression and prosecution of the black man.

To compare the Jim Crow era of abuse towards black Americans from over 50 years ago to the current efforts to combat crime and control the sell of drugs on our streets is a “slap in the face” to the many black Americans that go to work every day to earn an honest living and educate their children.

The American dream can belong to anyone willing to work hard and forego the latest edition of Air Jordan shoes to put money in the bank.

Mr. Pitts does not offer solutions to reduce the arrest of black Americans but is content to place the blame on our society. While our nation may face a difficult path ahead, we still provide an excellent opportunity for education, food stamps and unemployment benefits for those in need. If anything, our government has gone too far and does not hold personal accountability as a true measure of a person in a democratic society.

William D. Folk

Huntsville, 35806

Republican screening extreme

To me there is something horribly unsettling about recent decisions from the local Republican Executive Committee not to accept candidates who don’t meet unspecified litmus tests of purity.

It reminds me of the Soviet Union, Nazi German, or any number of other countries who claim democracy but restrict participation.

Who comprises the GOP Executive Committee? I don’t remember their names on a ballot on any election I voted. What are they afraid of ? That their own Republican constituency will select someone the committee doesn’t like? Wonder if Romney, Reagan, Eisenhower, or Theodore Roosevelt would make it by the local screeners?

 


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Interracial Rape Statistics

Sunday, January 1st, 2012
When whites do violence — rape, murder, assault — how often do they choose black victims? Shouldn’t a nation of bigots target blacks most of the time? At least half of the time? Of course, it does not. When whites commit violence, they to it to blacks 2.4 percent of the time. Blacks, on the other hand, choose white victims more than half the time. [317]In those cases in which the race of the killer is known, blacks kill twice as many whites as whites kill blacks. Black-on-white robberies and gang assaults are twenty-one times more common than white on black. In the case of gang robbery, blacks victimize whites fifty-two times more often than whites do blacks. [318]

The contrasts are even more stark in the case of interracial rape. Studies from the late 1950s showed that the vast majority of rapes were same-race offenses. Research in Philadelphia carried out in 1958 and 1960 indicated that of all rapes, only 3.2 percent were black-on-white assaults and 3.6 percent were white-on-black. Since that time, the proportion of black-on-white rapes has soared. In a 1974 study in Denver, 40 percent of all rapes were of whites by blacks, and not one case of white-on-black rape was found. In general, through the 1970s, black-on-white rape was at least ten times more common that white-on-black rape. [319]

Because interracial rape is now overwhelmingly black on white, it has become difficult to do research on it or to find relevant statistics. The FBI keeps very detailed national records on crime, but the way it presents rape data obscures the racial element rather than clarifies it. Dr. William Wilbanks, a criminologist at Florida International University, had to sift carefully through the data to find that in 1988 there were 9,406 cases of black-on-white rape and fewer than ten cases of white-on-black rape. [320] Another researcher concludes that in 1989, blacks were three or four times more likely to commit rape than whites, and that black men raped white women thirty times as often as white men raped black women. [321]

Interracial crime figures are even worse than they sound. Since there are more than six times as many whites as blacks in America, it means that any given black person is vastly more likely to commit a crime against a white than vice versa.


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Ex-skinhead seen as stereotype victim by his black lawyer

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Black lawyer says his ex-skinhead client is being prosecuted for resisting arrest without regard for his acknowledged schizophrenic and bipolar disorders.

  • Civil rights attorney Milton Grimes' latest case is to defend a mentally ill former skinhead against felony resisting arrest charges.
Civil rights attorney Milton Grimes’ latest case is to defend a mentally… (Genaro Molina, Los Angeles Times)
August 01, 2011|By Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times

When the family of Chad Brian Scott, a heavily tattooed former white supremacist, contacted Milton Grimes seeking legal representation, the veteran black attorney had one initial question: “Do you happen to know my race?”

They did. And it didn’t matter. What they were looking for was a good lawyer, recalled Scott’s cousin Leah Jensen.

Scott, a former skinhead who suffers from schizophrenic and bipolar disorders, was forcibly restrained by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies after he tried to resist arrest, authorities said. A multiple offender, Scott faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted, according to the district attorney’s office.

Grimes found Scott at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles. The two instantly felt at ease, Grimes said. After they chatted for 45 minutes, he decided to take Scott’s case.

“This young man was not trying to break the law, he just needed medical attention,” Grimes concluded.

But there was more. Grimes, a 65-year-old South Carolina native, studied law because he “wanted to represent black people during the civil rights movement.” He later represented Rodney King in federal court, and two black O.J. Simpson jurors who had been dismissed. But Grimes said he saw parallels between the mistreatment of African Americans and the way authorities were handling Scott’s case.

“This young man reminds me of so many young minority men whose freedoms are arbitrarily taken away because of the color of their skin,” Grimes said.

In this case however, it was not Scott’s color but his tattoos and white supremacist affiliations that had stereotyped him, the attorney said. Grimes said that for him, the principle of fairly applying the law had always outweighed his clients’ color, gender, sexual preference or beliefs.

“It’s not difficult for me to represent a person who is a former, or current, skinhead,” said the attorney, who has practiced law for almost four decades. “I will fight for him as I will fight for a black man.”

Grimes views Scott’s case as an example of prosecutors putting the “status of an individual”— appearance and criminal history — over whether a crime was actually committed.

Scott had been out on parole for just three weeks, having served four years for evading a law enforcement officer. According to Grimes, shortly after being released Scott told his parole officer that he had run out of his psychiatric medication and was beginning “to feel weird.”

He had an appointment to see a doctor April 7. But on April 6, managers at the Lancaster motel where Scott was housed said he appeared to be sick. They called paramedics. When Scott refused to cooperate with them, sheriff’s deputies were summoned.

According to the incident report filed by deputies from the Lancaster sheriff’s station, Scott was “uncooperative and appeared to be under the influence of an unknown drug.” He was talking incoherently, flailing his arms and lashing out at deputies as they tried to cuff him. Deputies struck Scott with a baton and Tasered him, according to the report.

Scott stopped breathing and didn’t regain consciousness until he was at Antelope Valley Hospital, the police report said. Grimes said his client actually died and had to be revived.

Scott was charged with felony resisting arrest. Bail, originally set at $1 million, was reduced to $250,000.

Scott’s parole officer and the investigating sheriff’s detective in the case have both indicated they would not oppose dropping all charges against Scott, according to a July 7 internal memo by Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Ipsen in which he said he conducted interviews with both men.

Ipsen, a deputy D.A. for about 25 years, got the case when it was first sent for trial. After interviewing the parole officer and the detective, Ipsen decided there was no case and asked that it be dismissed.

“Given the defendant’s documented mental illness, his repeated requests for assistance in getting medication, and the objective behavior of the defendant consistent with his paranoia, there is a reasonable doubt as to any actual criminality,” Ipsen wrote in the memo sent to Steve Frankland, head deputy district attorney in the D.A.’s Antelope Valley Branch Office.

But Ipsen said he was taken off the case, and the D.A.’s office has decided to proceed with it.

“Given the facts of the case and the defendant’s criminal history, he is clearly a danger,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Sherwood wrote in a motion opposing the reduction of Scott’s bail.

“The defendant … is accused of attacking sheriff’s deputies who were trying to restrain him,” said D.A. spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons.

Scott was never charged for a drug offense. Ipsen’s investigation found that he hadn’t struck any deputies during the arrest.

But he has a troubled past. His previous offenses include attempted murder, a crime he committed as a juvenile, and making a criminal threat.

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City’s black residents now top all groups

Monday, April 25th, 2011
Official seal of City of Philadelphia

Image via Wikipedia

Their numbers dropped, but other changes put them first. Population rose for the first time in 50 years.

By Michael Matza, Kia Gregory, and John Duchneskie

Inquirer Staff Writers

African descendants have called Philadelphia home for centuries, with the first U.S. Census, in 1790, listing 2,099 “free” blacks and 373 slaves.

Today, the city’s black population is 644,287, according to the latest census, and for the first time it clearly outnumbers all other racial or ethnic groups.

This evolution happened even though the number of African Americans in the city, excluding Hispanics, declined about 1,800 over the last decade and their share of the population remained about the same.

Key to the new black plurality: the continued steep decline in the city’s white population. In 2000, each group accounted for about 42 percent of city residents, but the white share is now 37 percent, after a loss of 82,000 people.

Meanwhile, an influx of Hispanics, Asians, and other groups – now 21 percent of the city’s 1.5 million people – boosted Philadelphia’s total for the first time in 50 years.

The black plurality coincides with another trend: More and more middle- and working-class African Americans are leaving the city for suburbia. Since 2000, the black population of the city’s Pennsylvania suburbs jumped 26 percent – by 47,000.

“You need to look at it not only from a racial-ethnic point of view, but also the distribution of incomes,” said Mark Mather, senior demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit in Washington that interprets census data.

Are relatively “higher-income blacks moving away from the city, leaving behind a poorer population without a lot of prospects?” he asked. “That wouldn’t bode well.”

In the last decade, average income in white households in Philadelphia rose 4 percent to $65,100, adjusted for inflation. But black household income fell 10 percent to $40,200. Overall, the average income in the city fell 1 percent.

Neighborhoods with the highest concentration of African Americans – West Oak Lane, Kingsessing, and Nicetown, among others – were slammed twice.

Many who could move out did. Many who remained experienced a significant drop in income. In Tioga-Nicetown, which is 94 percent black, average household income fell 35 percent in the last decade – the city’s biggest drop – to $26,800. That’s half of the citywide average.

As gentrification gathered speed in some predominantly black parts of the city, superheating property values, several things happened. Some homeowners cashed in and bought again, either in suburbia or other parts of Philadelphia. Some renters got squeezed out or were left stranded in pockets of poverty.

“Yes, Philadelphia has 42 percent blacks,” said Voffee Jabateh, director of the African Cultural Alliance of North America, a Southwest Philadelphia advocacy group for African immigrants, but by and large “these are not blacks that have a strong economic voice.”

U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Democrat whose district covers parts of North and West Philadelphia and Montgomery County, said he saw the movement of black residents to better neighborhoods as “identical in many ways to patterns of other demographic groups . . . as people make their way into the middle class.”

 

Migrating to the suburbs

Across Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester Counties, the proportion of black residents grew in 176 of 238 municipalities, mirroring a national trend, though still fewer than 10 percent of Philadelphia-area suburbanites are black.

In the 1950s, said Norristown municipal administrator David Forrest, mortgages “were more available to whites than blacks,” leading to “primarily white suburbanization.”

Black upward mobility and more available credit, particularly in the last decade, he said, spurred movement to inner-ring suburbs, especially in southeastern Delaware County, where better schools, lower housing density, and public transportation lured people from Southwest Philadelphia, including large numbers of African immigrants.

Sharon Hill and East Lansdowne for the first time became majority-black towns, according to the census. They joined Yeadon, Colwyn, Darby Borough, Chester, and Chester Township – already majority black in 2000 – as new pillars in the inner ring of predominantly African American suburbs.

“It’s the upward mobility of people coming out of the city,” said Mary Bell, manager of demographic and economic analysis for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. “The impact is biggest in Delaware County because the houses there are more affordable.”

Unlike Delaware County, where a fifth of the population is black, Bucks and Chester Counties experienced little change. According to the 2010 census, fewer than 6 percent of residents of those counties are black.

In Montgomery County, the number of black residents grew from 55,303 in 2000 to 67,582 in 2010, nudging its percentage of the total population to 8.4 percent.

Suburban diversity also was spurred by the arrival of Latinos, up 105 percent last decade, and Asians, up 72 percent.

 

A tale of two communities

Two swaths of the city that experienced significant population change during the last decade were parts of North Philadelphia – including Tioga-Nicetown, which lost 1,977 people, 10 percent of its population – and the largely white lower Northeast, which grew in numbers and diversity.

Tacony, for instance, was 9 percent minority in 2000; now it is 39 percent minority, including African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.

Louis Iatarola, president of the Tacony Civic Association, attributes that change to the mid-decade real estate boom, which created new homeowners and investors, who sometimes carved houses into affordable apartments.

On the loss side of the ledger, Majeedah A. Rashid, executive vice president of the Nicetown Community Development Corp., said she saw why the population in her part of town had fallen: “In the last 20, 30 years, there was really nothing going on here.”

Rashid cited the “flight of industry,” including the closing of the Budd and Tastykake factories.

“Those things make a big impact,” she said. “People are moving away from the neighborhood to find better housing conditions and more valuable employment.”

Her group is working to retain and attract residents by brokering such things as the construction of Nicetown Court, a mix of commercial business and 34 new affordable-housing units, and the installation of lights in one of the community’s two-acre parks. “That’s a big deal in Nicetown,” Rashid said.

Michael Burch, 51, who grew up in the Parkside section of West Philadelphia, is among those African Americans who picked up and moved.

After Burch earned a master’s degree in science education from Temple University, he left in 1982 for a more affluent city neighborhood – Wynnefield.

“I was slowly making my way out of the city,” he said, jokingly, of his move to near the Montgomery County border. He counts himself as part of a generation whose education and careers afforded it the means to move up and eventually out.

Burch, director of youth programs at the Franklin Institute, later settled in Upper Darby, then in Drexel Hill.

He said his main reason for leaving “was just the congestion of the city.” But after his mother died five years ago, instead of selling his three-story childhood home in Parkside, he moved back in.

“Growing up in that neighborhood as a child,” Burch said, “I had so many good and fond memories of the house and neighborhood and living near Fairmount Park, which was a big part of my life then. I thought I could add something to the neighborhood now.”

 

In Delaware County

In Collingdale, Pat Reilly of Reilly Real Estate said his business formerly had been based in Southwest Philadelphia, “but the area got pretty much sold out” after West African immigrants, especially from Liberia and Ghana, started snapping up houses a decade ago.

Then some of them, along with African Americans, moved into Collingdale, he said. Census figures show the proportion of black residents jumped from 4 percent in 2000 to 35 percent of the 8,786 residents in 2010.

A typical rowhouse that sold for about $105,000 half a decade ago sells for $80,000 to $85,000 today, Reilly said.

Those buying affordable Collingdale houses, he said, are mostly first-time buyers, often single mothers who work as health-care aides and certified nursing assistants.

Houses come on the market because of estate sales, Reilly said, or when elderly retirees move into nursing homes or to live with family.

The Rev. Michael Fitzpatrick of Collingdale’s Grace Reformed Episcopal Church said the arrivals were helping to resuscitate his congregation.

When he arrived at the parish from Havertown in 2003, he said, the church was down to 27 members, all white except for one Liberian woman. Today, thanks largely to the influx of African Americans and West Africans, there are 160 parishioners, including 30 who are white.

Church members have told Fitzpatrick that they moved to Collingdale for the heightened sense of security, better schools, and backyards.

Jacquelynn Puriefoy-Brinkley, a former president of Yeadon Borough Council, is a retiree in her 70s. She recalled moving to Yeadon with her parents in 1947, along with other “mostly upper-middle-class” black residents who lived in an enclave on one side of town.

Puriefoy-Brinkley’s father owned several businesses and was a salesman for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Yeadon was about 10 percent black, she said. Over time, a larger cross section of African Americans from the city moved in.

Today Yeadon is 88 percent black. NAACP membership forms are available at the circulation desk of the public library. A shopping strip includes the Mohammad Ali Variety Store across the street from the Harlem Cafe.

Going from virtually all white to virtually all black is certainly no triumph of coexistence, Puriefoy-Brinkley acknowledged, but she feels the pattern of movement has been basically positive.

“Maybe the upside,” she said, “is that people who didn’t have opportunities to live in decent housing or walkable communities have those opportunities now.”

 

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