By Tamara Shiloh

Throughout Selma, Ala., there are streets named Frederick D. Reese Parkway and F.D. Reese. In March of each year, the city hosts F.D. Reese Day. Yet the name Frederick Douglas Reese (1929 – 2018) is not widely known and doesn’t have its own chapter in history books.

Reese was born in Selma and rose to national prominence as a civil rights leader after the city’s Bloody Sunday, the 1965 march during which 600 people were attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by club-wielding state troopers wearing gas masks.

Later that day, marchers gathered at Brown Chapel AME Church. Reese recalled: “I had prayer. I had scripture. While in the sanctuary, the telephone rang … it was Dr. King … he said that he would invite ministers to Selma who would come to lend their assistance to the people of Selma.”

While in the sanctuary, Reese continued, “a group had chartered a plane from New Jersey, had flown to Montgomery and got a bus, came to Selma, walked in that church that night, and said ‘we have seen on the television screen what happened across that bridge today, and we have come to lend our bodies and our assistance to the people of Selma.”

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“That was one of the most exhilarating and inspiring moments of that day,” he said. And those moments would change Reese’s life.

On March 21 of that same year, Reese would embark on a 50-mile march, from Selma to Montgomery, hand in hand with King. His front-row presence made him a symbol of the civil rights movement, and his impact reached beyond Selma.

Reese was determined to see that all people would have the right to vote. This led him to inspiring teachers from Selma’s Clark Elementary School to stand on the steps of the Dallas County Courthouse. No teachers were allowed to register to vote that day, but the involvement of more than 100 Black teachers “ignited a spark” in the movement.

“The teachers’ march really excited other people who had taken somewhat of a backseat so to speak,” Reese, in 2015, told The Selma Times-Journal.

Reese’s work throughout the movement was not without accomplishment. It led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and later catapulted his leadership role in Selma, where he served on the city council for a dozen years. He also ran for mayor.

Alabama State University President Quinton T. Ross Jr. described Reese as “a giant of a man” and a “man of great courage who dared to take a stand against institutionalized racism and segregation in Selma, and by so doing, helped win the right to vote for all of the nation’s African American citizens.”

Learn more about Reese’s front-row presence and how he became a symbol of and leader in the civil rights movement in Kathy M. Walters and Frederick D. Reese’s “Selma’s Self-Sacrifice.” This reading reaches beyond Selma, offering a true testimony of how the movement was affected by history, culture, and society

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

California could pay more than $800 billion in reparations to Black residents for generations of housing discrimination, disproportionate incarceration and over-policing, economists told a state panel on Wednesday, March 29.

The preliminary estimate reportedly is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span.

Additionally, the figure doesn’t count compensating individuals for property taken from them by the government or Black businesses being devalued, two other things the taskforce said the state did.

Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the economists’ calculations.

The proposed number comes from a consulting team of five economists and policy experts.

“We’ve got to go in with an open mind and come up with some creative ways to deal with this,” Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is on the taskforce, said, according to The Guardian.

Before any reparations could become a reality, the taskforce must get support from state legislators and the California governor.

Before the meeting, The Guardian reported that Jones-Sawyer said he needed to talk to other legislators, budget analysts and the governor’s office before he could decide how much money should be spent.

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The taskforce must now settle on a cash amount as it nears a July deadline to recommend to lawmakers how California can atone for its role in perpetuating racist systems that continue to undermine Black people.

Economists’ estimates underscore the long-lasting harm Black Americans have endured, even in a state that never officially endorsed slavery.

Critics argue that California never participated in the slave trade, so current taxpayers should not be responsible for damage linked to slavery.

Taskforce recommendations are just the start because ultimate authority rests with the state assembly, senate and the governor.

“That’s going to be the real hurdle,” said California senator Steven Bradford, who sits on the panel, told The Guardian.

“How do you compensate for hundreds of years of harm, even 150 years post-slavery?”

Separately, an advisory committee in San Francisco has recommended $5 million payouts, as well as guaranteed income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness for qualifying individuals.

Supervisors expressed general support and will take up the issue later this year.

The statewide estimate includes $246 billion to compensate eligible Black Californians from 1970 to 2020 whose neighborhoods were subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution of Black people.

That would translate to nearly $125,000 for every person who qualifies.

The economists also included $569 billion to make up for the discriminatory practice of redlining in housing loans.

Such compensation would amount to about $223,000 per eligible resident who lived in California from 1933 to 1977. The aggregate is considered a maximum and assumes all 2.5 million people who identify as Black in California would be eligible.

Redlining officially began in the 1930s. At that time, the federal government gave mortgages to help people buy houses, but some neighborhoods were marked red on government maps.

On the federal level, Texas Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has continued to push H.R. 40, a bill that’s intended to continue the national conversation about how to confront the brutal mistreatment of African Americans during chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the enduring structural racism that remains endemic in American society.

While a specific monetary value on reparations isn’t outlined in the bill, it would fund a commission to study and develop proposals for providing reparations to African Americans.

The commission’s mission includes identifying the role of federal and state governments in supporting the institution of slavery, forms of discrimination in public and private sectors against freed slaves and their descendants, and lingering adverse effects of slavery on living African Americans and on society.

“Since its introduction in 1989 by the late Chairman John Conyers, and now through its continued introduction, H.R. 40 has galvanized governmental acknowledgment of the crime of slavery and its continuing societal impact,” Jackson Lee remarked.

“The markup of H.R. 40 by the Judiciary Committee is a major step toward the creation of a long-overdue national commission to study and develop reparation proposals.”

She continued:

“Through this legislation, we will finally be able to confront the stark societal disparities occurring in the African American community today and provide solutions.

“By passing H.R. 40, Congress can also start a movement toward the national reckoning we need to bridge racial divides. Reparations are ultimately about respect and reconciliation — and the hope that one day, all Americans can walk together toward a more just future.”

By Emil Guillermo

After the Oscars, when Asian Americans were everywhere on the winners list, from actors, writers, directors, but also makeup artists, and not just in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but also in movies like “The Whale,” I turn to the Oakland playwright Ishmael Reed who must be wondering will Asian Americans now go for the Whiteness Prize?

(I consider Asian American to be a generic term, indicating people of Asian descent either living or working not necessarily indicative of their citizenship status.)

I’m in New York as an actor in “The Conductor,” the latest Reed production now off-Broadway (get your in-person or live-streamed tickets here: https://theaterforthenewcity.net/shows/the-conductor-2023/).

I play a brown-skinned Tucker Carlson-type on a faux Fox, and very conservative news network.

That’s how good an actor I am!

As an Asian American sometime-actor, I’m gratified to see Asian American creatives take their historic star turn at the Oscars. Asians have won the Academy Award for best supporting actor before, but never has there been a best actor/actress winner until the Malaysia-born, Hollywood-based Michelle Yeoh last weekend.

There’s something about being a “first.” A “never before.”

But what’s next?

And that’s where Reed’s play got me thinking.

In Reed’s “The Conductor,” Blacks start a new underground railroad to help Indian Americans — not American Indians, but those from the continent of India — escape a wave of xenophobia that is forcing them to flee to Canada.

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The main character, columnist Warren Chipp is Reed’s alter ego. When a conservative Indian seeks refuge and asks Chipp why the liberal Chipp is being so nice to him, Chipp reveals his grasp of irony.

“Minorities make alliances with us (Blacks) until their admission to the white club is accepted. This happened to the Jews, the Japanese, the Irish, the Italians and now you guys (Asian Indians).”

It’s just one of the provocative asides in the play, but the historical examples are there.

Says Chipp/Reed: “These groups come running to us when the white man decides to sic mobs on them because of some geopolitical conflict or culture war. Begging us to hide them and save them. And then, when they get an ‘all-clear’ sign, they return to auditioning for whiteness again. Lining up and trampling over each other, asking white people to ‘choose me!’ Some of them even change their names to go Anglo.”

Reed says it’s the root of “Afro-Pessimism.”

What’s that?

It’s a term by Frank Wilderson, as Reed explains, that means Blacks can’t depend upon Blacks’ “junior allies.” Wilderson calls B.S. on intersectionality and says that Blacks “must go it alone.”

After rehearsals and the first four performances, the passages from the play haunt me.

Especially last Sunday. When the Asian Americans were preparing for their Oscar turn, I was off-Broadway living Reed’s play.

Is the Model Minority now back to auditioning for whiteness again?

I hope not. I get what Reed’s saying in his play. But I see the Oscar victory as a win for not just Asian Americans but all BIPOC communities in all their unique narratives.

AAPI stories have a kind of heat now. An independent film about a family with a laundromat dealing with the IRS and the multiverse where people have hotdogs as fingers puts us in a whole new ballgame.

We aren’t so weird after all. We’re of immigrant descent, sure. We’re different, yes. But we’re of the modern world and our stories deal in universal truths.

People flocked to “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which gave it some cache as an indie project that was making money. Not like “Top Gun” money, but enough to satisfy Hollywood accountants. Once it caught the attention of the Academy looking for diversity, the film was simply recognized for its off-beat ingenuity and its creative weirdness.

I was having lunch in New York’s Chinatown with a lawyer friend of mine, a Chinese American immigrant and also a triple Harvard (College, Law School, and MBA) graduate. My friend surprised me when he said he couldn’t understand the hype about “Everything, Everywhere…”

He called it unwatchable. He liked the movie “Tar.”

I told him maybe it was generational. Just goes to show you that not everyone, not even Asian Americans are on board with “Everything, Everywhere…”

But the huge victory on Sunday makes the film like a Golden Spike in Hollywood. The track is finally connected and open for AAPI creatives bound for glory.

“Everything, Everywhere…” has put everyone in the equation on notice. We have stories to tell that sell, and that people want to see.

Stories that win Oscars.

I see the phenomenon as a rising Asian American film lifts all boats. And with AAPI at just over 6% of the population, I don’t buy the “Afro-Pessimism” idea in his play.

We can’t go it alone. We don’t have the numbers. We need each other.

Like anything worthwhile, it’s going to have to be done together.

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. See his vlog on www.amok.com And see “The Conductor” in person or live-streamed tickets here: https://theaterforthenewcity.net/shows/the-conductor-2023/