Texas Civil Rights Review

Author: mopress

  • Christmas Greetings from Irma and Ramsey Muniz

    Dear Friends:

    On this beautiful Christmas day I share a most profound message from my husband, Ramsey Muniz. I have just returned from El Reno, Oklahoma where Ramsey and I exchanged sentiments of love and thanksgiving for the Savior sent to us for the sake of all humanity.

    Ramsey writes as follows:

    Even though I feel the heavy weight of time lost in this confinement, the agony of being alive in this mode of darkness, Irma, my wife, and I share with you the true meaning of the glorious spiritual celebration, for it is the birth of the Light of this world. With love and strength in our hearts we will not walk in darkness, but with the Light of life and freedom.

    Merry Christmas to our families, friends, and supporters, to those who seek justice, and to all who carry the love of Christ in their hearts.

    Con amor,
    Ramsey & Irma Muniz

    “My incarceration, my innocence and cruel suffering have transformed me into the most profound and powerful symbol of human salvation.”

    www.freeramsey.com

  • Bhutto: We Feel Her Loss

    More and more we find our local stories caught up in global struggles, whether our refugees come from Mexico, Guatemala, Palestine, or Albania. Today, we find that our tears come from Pakistan, where another struggle for democracy has been violently purged through assassination.

    We all cry the same tears against the same violence when we cry for Benazir Bhutto. Oh, Pakistan! “My God, they Killed Her.”

  • Denzel Washington’s ''The Great Debaters''

    Beauty from the Heart of Texas

    By Greg Moses

    CounterPunch

    Over at the Internet Movie Database, redneck trolls are saddling up their cyber posse to go night riding on the message boards against Denzel Washington and “The Great Debaters.” All of which is a good thing if you like to see relevance in contemporary art. Because deep down, “The Great Debaters” is a film about how to grow yourself into a real person despite the needlers, taunters, and brutes who dominate the space around you — and who dominate it, still.

    Passion, poetry, learning, and love. These are the things you must keep working at. “The Great Debaters” is about never being deterred. In art, thank goodness, we are graced to craft images of humanity into beauties that last. And the beauty of Professor Melvin B. Tolson in “The Great Debaters” is heroic as it should be.

    Okay, so the actual Wiley College debate team from Marshall, Texas didn’t actually debate the actual Harvard College debate team in or about the actual year of 1935, as the actual movie shows. But what Tolson and his students did achieve was just as beautiful as the film portrays. The students and scholars of the most unlikely little community in NorthEast Texas embodied the Harlem Renaissance. They breathed in the mighty poetry and aspirations that had converged upon Lenox Avenue, and they gave back to the world tiny seedlings of a civil rights movement that would make history, yes, upon brand new roots. And they were great debaters.

    If “The Great Debaters” has not been able to satisfy internet demand for documentary accuracy, that’s a good thing again; because now there is opportunity to nourish that appetite. The more you get to know the actual beauties of these folk and their work, the less the film will appear like exaggeration. The more you’ll see that the film did the best it could do in two hours’ time to share with you the force of spirit that was distilled among the children and grandchildren of slaves.

    Pecking through the internet, I’m locating a handful of seeds to get you started on your East Texas victory garden. The University of Illinois has a good starter page on Melvin B. Tolson. There you will notice that many of Tolson’s poems did not make it into print during his lifetime.

    The Center for East Texas Studies has a good starter collection of materials about James Leonard Farmer, Sr. I have linked to the “historical marker” page, but if you navigate to the Farmer root directory, you’ll find a nice collection of texts and pictures. For example, I like what the Bostonia file says about the sermons of Farmer Senior:

    “No printed copies of those sermons have been uncovered, but poet Melvin Tolson, on the Wiley faculty during the 1930’s, offered another glimpse in his Washington Tribune column, ‘Caviar and Cabbage,’ describing Farmer’s Mother’s Day 1938 sermon: ‘I was thrilled,’ Tolson wrote, ‘by this vivid picture of Jesus the young rebel,’ who dearly loved his mother while battling the convention of his time.”

    Notice on the big screen how much smiling goes on between Tolson and Farmer Senior when the subject of Jesus comes up. Glimpse the game they play within a close intellectual relationship. In fact, Farmer Senior was a great scholar of the Gospels, which is another story altogether. A clip of the film scene, featuring the two academy award winning actors Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker, is widely available on the internet.

    The autobiography of civil rights activist James Farmer, Jr. is rich with early memories of black college campuses, not only in Marshall, Texas. Here’s a link to the publisher’s page for “Lay Bare the Heart.”

    During the 1930s, a federal work program collected slave narratives in Texas, which have been typed up and stored at the Library of Congress. Here’s a link to the index of that collection. Could it be the case that so many former slaves of Harrison County Texas actually had the failing memories they reported to federal writers?

    And Salatheia Bryant of the Houston Chronicle offers a fine writeup on the “real” woman debater of Wiley College, Henrietta Bell Wells. Of the film says Ms. Wells: “I hope I live up to the ideals in it.”

    So please don’t bother believing what the bigots tell you about this film, not even the trolls who claim to have Harvard degrees. You don’t have to be Black to feel beautifully about Denzel Washington’s fine new film, “The Great Debaters.” The “message” of this film is for anyone who still desires the capacity to dream higher than what you already are.

    See Also: Philadelphia television reporter Tamala Edwards presents a more personal report on “Ma Wells.”

  • Homeland Security Funding: Deporting Prisoners

    By Rep. David Price (D-NC)
    Congressional Record
    June 6, 2007 (H6268)

    [The DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008] addresses a major immigration vulnerability that exists today. It requires that ICE contact correctional facilities throughout the U.S. on a monthly basis to identify incarcerated immigrants who are subject to deportation. Although ICE deports some number of these individuals now, it is not systematically identifying and deporting them. There is simply no excuse for failing to identify every deportable alien and deporting them immediately upon their release from prison.

    These are undocumented individuals who have served time in jail for committing crimes, and we are now, unfortunately, releasing them all too often back into the population. So asking prisons for information about these individuals so they can be deported should be among the first priorities in our illegal immigration enforcement strategy. This bill provides the direction and the funding to ICE to make this happen.

    The bill funds the Secure Border Initiative at the requested level of $1 billion, while requiring the Department to clearly justify how it plans to use these funds to achieve operational control of our borders. For each border segment, the Department will have to produce an analysis comparing its selected approach to alternatives based on total cost, on level of control achieved, impact on affected communities, and other factors.

    We are also requiring the Department to seek the advice and support of each local community affected by a border infrastructure project. I want to be clear that this does not give border communities a veto on border projects and it will not result in any project delays if the Department efficiently carries out its responsibilities. The provision simply requires the Department to actively and faithfully consult affected communities to ensure that our border security efforts minimize adverse community impacts. That is reasonable to ask of the Department, and the Department agrees that such consultation is appropriate.

    We are also directing the Department to increase by over 40 percent the number of Border Patrol agents on the northern border to comply with the levels called for in the Intelligence Reform Act. In addition, the bill addresses a Customs and Border Protection staffing problem that we heard about on a February congressional delegation to the southwest border.

    Because CBP officers are not considered law enforcement officers, despite the increasing role of law enforcement in their duties, they don’t receive the same benefits as DHS personnel who are considered law enforcement officers. This has made it extremely difficult to hold on to CBP officers. In a nutshell, the bill would allow eligible CBP officers to transition to law enforcement status beginning in fiscal 2008.

    The Transportation Security Administration’s loss of the personal data of thousands of its employees is only the most recent example of the privacy problems plaguing the Department. The bill withholds funding for certain DHS programs until the proper privacy protections are in place because security and privacy can and should go hand in hand.

    In conclusion, let me mention a few other provisions, Mr. Chairman. First, the bill includes language mandating that stricter State and local chemical security laws and regulations cannot be preempted by the Federal Government. Secondly, the bill mandates that all grant and contract funds comply with Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements. Thirdly, the $101 million in the bill for the new DHS campus facility at St. Elizabeth’s will not be available until the Department submits an explosive detection equipment spending plan and promulgates long overdue regulations on U-Visas for victims of domestic violence, rape, and involuntary servitude.

    This withholding of funds should not be interpreted as a signal of lukewarm support for the development of the St. Elizabeth’s campus. On the contrary, the Department and the country would be better served by colocating most of its headquarters components onto this single campus. This is simply our way of signaling that any further delay on an explosive detection plan or on the overdue U-Visa rule is completely unacceptable.

    By Rep. Harold “Hal” Rogers (R-KY)
    Congressional Record
    June 12, 2007 (H6269-H6270)

    [DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008] includes a bold mandate for ICE to contact every correctional facility in the country, over 5,000 of them, at least once a month to identify incarcerated aliens and initiate deportation proceedings against them. That is a laudable goal, and I support the policy and the goal. But, Mr. Chairman, it is going to be very, very difficult to do mechanically and it is unfunded.

    We are going to be asking the States and localities to pay, assumedly, for the review of who is in their jails.

    Number two, they don’t have the authority nor the capability to determine whether or not Joe Blow in cell 18 is an undocumented alien or not. It’s not their job, and they don’t have the capability to do that. So I don’t know what will be the result of this mandate. It is unfunded, and it is going to be very difficult to put in practice. The Department already surveys routinely the most probable jails where the most probable criminal aliens are being held anyway.

    Despite the requirement for ICE to report on the resources needed to carry out this unfunded mandate, I am concerned that the bill presupposes ICE can simply transfer or reprioritize monies from other sources within their budget, for example, the fugitive apprehension program. They are out there trying to catch the criminals on the streets that are loose. It seems to me they are a bigger danger than those incarcerated in the jails.

    These enforcement activities involve many duties, duties that include tracking down at-large criminals, investigating smuggling networks, preventing child pornography, preventing the exploit of sensitive national security technology, and taking down employers who are exploiting illegal immigrants to the point of abuse.

    From which of these critical missions should ICE take monies in order to comb the Nation’s jails and correctional facilities, most of which never have any criminal aliens in them anyway? So to suggest that ICE should refocus its resources almost exclusively on jailed illegal aliens at the expense of trying to catch fugitives on the street who are raping and plundering seems to me as short-sighted as it is potentially very dangerous.

    There must be a balance among ICE’s many critical missions. And I am concerned this bill falls short in that regard. I am hopeful the Chairman will work with me and others to develop a more realistic implementation of this policy as we move forward.

    I have other concerns as well. Any immigration policy starts out with securing the border. If we can’t control who crosses our Nation’s borders, all other possible immigration initiatives will fail. To address this critical issue, Congress has authorized and appropriated for substantial infrastructure on the southwest border. But the bill contains a number of onerous restrictions on funding for fencing and other tactical infrastructure along our borders until the Department performs certain actions.

    At first glance, these individual fencing and tactical infrastructure requirements appear to be based upon sound policy. However, added together, they are a series of obstacles that can potentially impede installation of critical border security systems. I fear that securing the border will be greatly deterred.

    By Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA)
    Congres
    sion
    al Record
    June 12, 2007 (H6272)

    One of the things Mr. Rogers mentioned that I would like to just disagree with, all of our local law enforcement say that the biggest problem they are having is they arrest people who don’t have papers and then they release them because nobody from INS will come around and check it out. Everybody on the committee was concerned about the fact that there wasn’t enough effort put into what they call “jail checks,” and this committee bill addresses that.

  • Put DHS Bridge Money into Sunshine

    By Rep. John Carter (R-TX)
    Congressional Record
    June 12, 2007 (H6271)

    I am concerned, and I wish to express the concern that in the appropriations process this year there is a lot that is going to be done in the dark. In this particular bill, it is a very small item as compared to what is coming down the road at us, but there is $16 million for bridges which we won’t know exactly how that is going to be spent for this House to examine it, but it will be “air dropped” in in the conference committee. That is an indicator of what we are looking at as we deal with Member-initiated spending with the nickname of “earmarks” in the future.

    At present, the plan is to set aside the money but not tell us how to spend it, and, oh, by the way vote for it. But I think in the last election the American people told us that they wanted sunlight on this process. They wanted to be able to see how we spend our money, including they wanted our names put on the things that were individually requested. In fact, the Republican House passed such a rule, to put the names on every earmark.

    Yet we see in a very small part in this bill, and much expanded in the bills to follow, that there is going to be no sunshine on this process. In fact, it is going to be inside closed doors in the conference committee where there is really not a whole lot this House can do about it.

    With increased nonemergency spending of $81.4 billion, these are issues that American people want to know about it. They want their elected Representatives to take a look at it and be able to figure out how the money is being spent. We debated this process the last session of Congress. We made it important to us as individual Members. We talked about it and discussed it and voted on it.

    Now, all of a sudden, we have a process that has gone behind closed doors in secrecy, and as we vote these things out, as Members of Congress we are voting a bill which has a fund set-aside which we are not told how that fund is going to be spent. We are told it could be published over the break. This is inexcusable.