EducationIn major cities across the country, including Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia, school districts are shuttering public schools in mostly African-American communities. Thousands of black and Latino youth are being forced from their neighborhood schools, often into unfamiliar or unwelcoming neighborhoods. Chicago closed 50 schools this year and 88% of the affected students were black. In Philadelphia, 23 schools were closed and 81% of those students affected were black. In both cities, 93% or more of the young people affected were low-income students. Opponents of the closures believe the school closings are an attack on public education, teachers unions and minority students. What ever happened to Obama’s Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans?
8 issues Obama should address at the Congressional Black Caucus conference
7:15 PM on 09/20/2013
Women speak with an employment recruiter at the “Beyond the Dream” job fair at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn on August 28, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
President Barack Obama will join members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other political heavyweights at the group’s annual Phoenix Awards Dinner during its legislative conference in Washington, DC on Saturday. Obama, the dinner’s keynote speaker, made waves during the same event in 2011 at the height of the CBC’s demands that Obama do more about the economic woes of African-Americans, when he told the group to “stop complaining” and get to work with him.
But those were the bad old days of Obama’s first term, when black members of Congress echoed the frustration and disappointment of their constituents, in districts that bore the brunt of the economic crisis. Obama’s second term has offered an opportunity for the president and the CBC to get back on the good foot.
The president’s responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman–his articulation of African-Americans’ pain–recast the community’s perception of Obama as tone-deaf and absent on black cultural issues.
Still, the economic forecast for blacks remains dismal. And a range of other issues affecting