Liveblogging the Texas Legislative Black Caucus 2011 African American Legislative Summit

Monday, Feb. 28, 2011
9:00 AM - Opening Remarks on the Floor of the House Chamber

Words of greeting from numerous members of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus. The high point came in the form of an energetic address from Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who exhorted those in attendance to channel their energies into advocacy on behalf of the disadvantaged.

11:00 AM - Legislative Initiatives Panel Discussion

Representatives Harold Dutton (D-Houston), Sylvester Turner (D-Houston) and Yvonne Davis (D-Dallas) conducted a wide-ranging discussion of a variety of issues of interest to African-Americans in Texas. Of particular concern was the state budget crisis. A note of emergency was sounded due to the fact that the steepest budget cuts that are being proposed by Republicans are in the areas of public education, higher education, and Medicaid. There were exhortations from all who took the microphone that the state Rainy Day Fund, of about $9 billion, be drawn down to help close the deficit. The point was repeatedly made that closing tax loopholes, reconsidering tax breaks and abatements for well-heeled companies--i.e. "spreading the pain around," in the words of Rep. Dutton--should be part of the budget discussion but hasn't been. Citizens were repeatedly urged to pressure their representatives, even if they were of the opposing party.

Dallas Examiner, 2/24/11 - "Schools may suffer most from budget cuts"

With the Senate version of the state budget already being picked apart in hearings, House members have only recently been given their committee assignments. But it was HB 1, the House preliminary budget released at the start of the session, that kicked off the earliest wave of denunciations from Democrats who feel that the proposed budget cuts are too draconian, and disproportionately target the most vulnerable Texans.

“We are here to champion the dreams and opportunities of Texas families, of our children, of our seniors, and we feel that these dreams and opportunities are now threatened by the budget that has been laid out today,” said Rep. Jessica Ferrar (D-Houston) at the Jan. 19 press conference that served as the Democrats’ opening salvo in a budget battle that for some boils down to a simple question: Who should bear the burden?

Dallas Examiner, 2/17/11 - "State of the State"

Gov. Rick Perry delivered his State of the State address last Monday, making it clear to lawmakers and the public that he envisions a balanced budget that preserves essential services without requiring raising taxes, and that the final result of the budget crucible will be a streamlined state government and a Texas that continues to be a national economic leader.

"As leaders, we must continue to be fiscally responsible with taxpayer dollars and truly reform our approach to governance," Gov. Perry said. "Our discussions about streamlining state government must be followed by a willingness to act, including consolidating or suspending non-mission-critical entities until the economy improves."

Despite widespread fears among many, especially educators and HHS (health and human services) providers, that the state budget crisis will necessitate steep and painful cuts that aren’t likely to be reversed any time soon, Perry sounded an optimistic note about the state’s economic future.

"As this thing gets rolling, some folks are painting a pretty grim picture of our situation. So I think we need to balance their pessimism with some good news that continues to flow from our comparatively strong economy. Have the doomsayers forgotten that Texas added more jobs in 2010 than any other state? Last year the growth rate of Texas jobs was nearly double the growth rate of any other state."

Dallas Examiner, 1/27/11 - "DISD Task Force Faces Challenges"

Plagued by high drop-out rates and low test scores, Black male students have long been a particular object of concern for education reformers. Devising solutions which take into account the special challenges faced by Black males while also taking for granted their innate ability to achieve is another matter.

DISD’s newest attempt at a solution, the African American Male Task Force, hopes to chart new paths. The task force’s mission statement: To eliminate the achievement gap of African American male students by ensuring that their academic, social, cultural and emotional needs are being met as they engage in rigorous and relevant instruction, while striving to become college and workforce ready. As part of DISD’s larger African American Student Success Initiative, the task force’s overarching aim, according to Task  Force chair Robert Edison, is to deploy data-driven interventions at the academic, psychosocial, and institutional level in order to improve educational outcomes for Black males.

With the blessing of Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, Edison and the rest of the task force are trying to formulate new approaches to the problem of Black male underachievement without restigmatizing a group already stereotyped as being perpetually in crisis. The group held its first meeting last September, and received input from students during a “Speak Out” event held on Dec. 3. Edison envisions a menagerie of pilot projects that will hopefully evolve into tomorrow’s conventional wisdom for dealing with the unique challenges faced by Black male students.

The Examiner caught up with Edison to ask him some questions about the task force.

Dallas Examiner, 1/20/11 - "Texas legislative session highlights budget, redistricting"

The 82^nd session of the Texas Legislature promises to be an eventful one for African-Americans. Upcoming battles over the budget and redistricting are expected to dominate the headlines. Black lawmakers are fully aware that the widespread alarm over the state’s fiscal position—a $25 billion deficit—will bear mightily on any new programs they wish to create.

“The biggest issue is going to be the budget,” said Sen. Royce West, “to make certain that we’re not playing defense but offense, to make certain there are no onerous cuts that will severely impact the constituents in the district.”

Still, that hasn’t stopped Sen. West from pledging to spur the legislature to action on issues such as homeowners’ association abuses, expunging the records of the wrongfully convicted and curbing abuses in the payday lending industry.

Dallas Examiner, 1/13/11 - “General Motors vice president offers Blacks hand up”

As General Motors’ new Vice President of Diversity, what makes Eric Peterson unique is not that he’s an African-American who has managed to climb the corporate ladder, although he is certainly that. Rather, what stands out instantly is the manner in which Peterson has used his all-too-rare achievement as a platform for community-minded interventions. As director of industry dealer affairs, a job he continues to hold, Peterson was already a point man for GM’s relationships with minority- and women-owned dealerships. In his new post, he becomes the public face of an iconic manufacturer’s efforts at strengthening its ties to minority communities nationwide.

Examiner: In your time at GM, have you had many opportunities to provide mentoring to up-and-coming African-American managers or aspiring executives?

Peterson: My whole approach when I move to an area is, one, to have an open-door policy to support people, but more specifically with African-American employees because I want to try and help others in that aspect. When I go into an area I will determine who the high-potential folks are, who are people who have an interest in moving up within the company and have the skills and such and reaching out to them. But in many instances once people get to know me and realize I’m there they reach out to me. But I specifically try to reach out to African-American employees and assist them with their careers whether they’re executive potential, manager potential or just administrative assistants. I mean I just try to help people when I can and have been pretty successful from that aspect.

Examiner: Is there anyone you would credit with helping you on your way up the corporate ladder?

Peterson: One person that really was influential for me was Roy Roberts, who was VP for Pontiac and GMC. I worked really closely with Roy when I was heading up the minority dealer program. He was over our area and he was very helpful in helping me navigate the board presentations that we had to make and working with the corporate world because being relatively new to that level of the business you needed someone and Roy was very instrumental. I stay in touch with him today even though he’s retired.

Dallas Examiner, 11/11/10 - “Crisis in Dallas plagues youth, young adults”

Because it has been almost three decades since the AIDS pandemic first exploded into public consciousness, it may be hard for some to believe that there are still vast pockets of the country in which un- and under-treated people continue to suffer, and where public health experts and AIDS activists are not much closer to getting a handle on the problem than they were three decades ago.

Within Black communities, this doleful reality is becoming increasingly apparent, as people are alarmed to discover that Black women are the fastest-growing group of AIDS sufferers, representing 67 percent of all new HIV infections in the U.S. among women. Within Dallas County, there are currently 14,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, more than a third of whom are Black. Blacks are 48 percent of the newly-diagnosed (compared with 28 percent for whites and 23 percent for non-white Hispanics). 1 in 89 Black individuals in Dallas County are living with HIV/AIDS. *

And Dallas is no anomaly. Despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population, African-Americans are 50 percent of all of those living with HIV.

Given the ways that the socioeconomic profile of the “typical” AIDS patient has evolved over time, experts everywhere are insisting on the need for new paradigms and, for Black communities especially, new urgency.

Dallas Examiner, 10/28/10 - “Dallas wet or dry: proposition 1 and 2 on the ballot”

Proposition 1, a controversial ballot initiative that, if passed, would open all of Dallas to retail beer and wine sales, couldn’t help laying bare some of the fault lines that have long defined political life in the city ‒ wet vs. 

dry, suburban vs. urban, Black vs. White, religious temperance vs. a secular commitment to the bottom line.

Both sides of the fight draw their ranks from concerned members of the community as well as more self-interested elements. Some city council members, such as Steve Salazar, worry that opening the dry areas of their districts to alcohol sales will lead them to resemble those portions that are already wet, complete with beer barns, higher crime, prostitution and blight. Others question the motives of those sponsoring the move, which include major retailers such as Costco and Kroger.

An organization called Keep the Dollars in Dallas is spearheading the initiative. According to its spokesman, Gary Huddleston, Dallas is losing sales tax revenue to the suburbs where buying alcohol is a less complicated ‒ and confusing ‒ undertaking. With its patchwork of wet and dry boundaries that overlay neighborhoods, people have to cross arbitrary boundaries in order to make purchases.

Dallas Examiner, 10/7/10 - “Working together to promote jobs, diversity”

It is relatively late in the game for both Democrats and the “professional left” who are trying to jolt the party into moving decisively on their central concerns. With many experts predicting the loss of one or both houses of Congress in the upcoming mid-term elections, Democratic strategists may be more preoccupied with minimizing losses than with charting bold new paths.

Opposed to this hunker-down mentality, and partly as a response to the high visibility of the “Tea Party” phenomenon over the past year, a number of progressive organizations joined forces to hold the “One Nation Working Together” march last Saturday  at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Billed by its organizers as a counterpoint to the anti-government pitch of the Tea Partiers, its line-up of speakers included a number of liberal stalwarts who argued forcefully for government intervention to create jobs, protect civil rights and promote fairness and justice.

“This march is very much in the tradition of the 1960’s marches,” said NAACP National President Benjamin T. Jealous. “It’s a march for jobs and justice. It’s a march that’s been organized by the civil rights community in concert with a broader range of faith, labor and student organizations. In that respect it’s really wider than the 1963 march or the 1995 (Million Man) march.”

Dallas Examiner, 9/23/10 - “City council votes to increase taxes”

The battle over the city budget came to a head over the past two weeks as city officials crossed swords over one big question: to tax or not to tax? Rejecting a tax hike would leave the city council with no choice but to cut funding to various programs in order to balance the budget.

The Sep. 15 straw vote on the budget saw the momentum swing away from Mayor Tom Leppert’s vow not to raise taxes to a modest tax increase designed to save essential city services from the budget ax. Then yesterday, in an 8 to 7 vote, the council finally decided on a budget that would raise property taxes by 4.91 cents per $100 of property value.

Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway, who delivered an impassioned speech during the Sep. 15 meeting in which he summoned images of the pot-holed streets that mark South Dallas, sees the shift as a win for the underserved neighborhoods of South Dallas, who tend to be most dependent on well-funded public services.

“I think that the [council members] who represent primarily the southern sector made a determination that raising taxes was the best thing for the folks that we represent,” said Caraway. “Who should be happy are the people who voted us to go down and speak on their behalf.”

Dallas Examiner, 9/9/10 - “Airport contracts divide city council”

The arcane world of airport concessions contracts has been laid bare, and for some what they see isn’t pretty.

After hours of sometimes heated discussion, a racially divided city council voted 8-7 against a proposal that would have given more than half of the concessions space in a renovated Love Field terminal to the airport's current vendors—without a competitive bid— for a term of up to 18 years.

To the surprise of some long-time council observers, the council overruled a recommendation by city staff to extend the contracts of Star Concessions and Hudson Retail Sales—two firms with ties to prominent Democrats, including State Rep. Helen Giddings and Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson—without a competitive bid.

The essence of the city staff recommendation, that the no-bid contracts would be appropriate given the incumbents’ experience, the desirability of minimizing disruptions during the renovation, and the business risks taken by the incumbents—which included significant capital investments—during a period of uncertainty following the 9/11 terror attacks, ultimately failed to carry the argument.

Dallas Examiner, 8/19/10 - “President speaks on a brighter future”

Before a mostly adoring crowd of about 3500 at the University of Texas at Austin, President Barack Obama gave a short, spirited address that touted his administration’s commitment to education and to addressing the most common travails faced by college students. Burnt orange festooned the auditorium at Gregory Gym as the President took the opportunity to show off his unique touch with one of his core constituencies—young people.

“When I look at the faces of America’s young men and women, I see America’s future,” the President said at one point during the speech. “And it reaffirms my sense my hope, it reaffirms my sense of possibility, it reaffirms my belief that we will emerge from this storm, and we will find brighter days ahead.”

The President opened with a friendly anecdote about a stop in Austin during the ’08 Presidential campaign, then dropped the names of a number of local luminaries, including Congressman Lloyd Doggett, state senator Kirk Watson, and Mayor Lee Leffingwell, who were among the attendees.

Dallas Examiner, 8/12/10 - “Marcus Graham project bridges corporate gap”

The Marcus Graham Project hopes to kill two birds with one stone. First, it hopes to connect promising young African-Americans with opportunities in the fields of advertising and marketing that would otherwise be out of reach. Second, the organization, through its partnerships with major corporations such as AT&T, tries to function as a bridge between corporate America and underserved communities.

Named for the ultra-suave advertising exec portrayed by Eddie Murphy in the 1992 film Boomerang, Marcus Graham is the brainchild of Lincoln Stephens, a former employee of TracyLocke, a Dallas ad agency. Stephens credits a former professor with implanting the idea for an organization that works to foster networks of diverse professionals.

“I noticed that there was an underrepresentation of African-Americans at [my] agency, and specifically African-American males, working in roles outside of the mailroom and accounting and that type of thing,” Stephens said. “As I progressed further in my career, and started reading more about the inner-workings of the industry and so forth, I recognized that diversity was a problem.”

“When I got here, I didn’t really know what to expect,” said intern Chike Onourah of his summer with the Marcus Graham Project. “I think the main difference here is that it’s a very sink-or-swim environment—you basically have to learn a lot of things through trial and error, and honestly that’s a good way to learn for me because it teaches you to think on your feet.”

Dallas Examiner, 7/15/10 - “TSU Academy gives students second chance”

“These young people need an opportunity to become educated and earn their degrees,” says Dr. Betty Cox, tenured professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas Southern University, reflecting upon her inaugural year as director of TSU’s newly-launched Summer Academy program for high school students.

The program is one university’s answer to the challenge presented by underprepared yet eager students, and it’s also one veteran teacher’s platform for putting into practice everything she’s learned about getting through to young minds.

 “As I told [the students] this morning, ‘We don’t want you to stay here for six years. We want you to get your work and get out of school in four years, not longer than five years’,” said Dr. Cox.

Divided into two sessions, Academy I and Academy II, students are immersed in a rigorous five weeks of academic and social preparation for life at TSU. Academy I was completed last week. Academy II has just begun and will run to mid-August.