Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 4 June 1994 — Page 4

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THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

SATURDAY, JUNE 4,1994

EDITORIALS

The Indiana Pacers bring back the fun The good old days of the ABA have been the best thing the Pacers have had to offer. Up to now. It is true that there was an incredible excitement in the air at the fairgrounds coliseum when the Pacers won titles and played with a red, white and blue basketball. Many people thought that was the heyday of the franchise and that those days were to never return. The current team has made believers out of many fans who had written them off. There have been times over the past few years when Pacer fans have seemed to attend games so that they could get a little sleep. This of course was not the way nature intended for basketball to be watched in Indiana. The current bunch has changed all that. Now it’s fun. It’s just like the old ABA days, maybe better. So now all the way from the youth leagues, to the high schools, to the colleges and universities, to The Indiana Pacers, basketball is being played and appreciated the way it was meant to be. Thanks to the Indiana Pacers organization for bringing back the fun. Maybe the Colts are watching. We hope so. IPS School 69 starts the peace Thestudentsat IPS school number69startedamovenient recently pledging collectively and individually to stop violence in their school. These young people are going to have to fight a trend that is being fueled by adults of every description from coaches to rap stars to politicians to media moguls to hockey players to the National Rifle Association. The N.R A of course tells us that guns don’t cause violence it’s just all the stupid persons whom accidentally or intentionally fire the guns who are to blame.They toldusthisagain as we debated the Brady Bill. Well, maybe these five- to 10-year-old children can lead us in a better direction than some of our wise, old leaders and lobbyists. Pictures and posters adorn the halls of school 69 and in scores of ways these students demonstrate the arguments for reason and sanity in a world too quick to pick up the sword. Hitting and kicking are put down, as are the mean words that can often lead to fights. In America, where children are taught to be entertained by images of death, mayhem and destruction, here are a group of children whom make persuasive and informed arguments against the violence they see, hear and experience. A walk through the halls of this school shows us these young people know the world that we adults have fashioned is generally flawed and it is specifically flawed by our relationship with violence. Their drawings against the use of guns and other weapons shows with perfect clarity how well adults have immersed them in a culture of violence they instinctively recognize as bad. They call for a better way to live. They know that the way we’re gping about it now is hurting us all. They seem to know more and be wiser than the people in the think tanks, in the government, in the media and the people in the N.RA. We wish these young people well as they try to start a small revolution. If we listen to them we might be able to slowly withdraw from the habit of violence. We also applaud the teachers and administrators who gave these youngsters the opportunity to try to change the world. The world has been changed before and with these wise young people coming along there may be hope for us as we struggle to tame the raging beast of violence that springs from America’s troubled soul daily.

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Clinton “policy reversal” still in limbo

We shall see within a few months that the most important thing President Clinton did w'' regard to Haiti was to name William H. Gray III as his special advisor and envoy to this pathetic island nation. It is Gray, the immensely talented former congressman from Pennsylvania, who eventually will tell the president and the nation whether the Haiti tragedy can be ended short of a U.S. military invasion. Much is made now over Clinton’s reversal of a policy under which U.S. Coast Guard cutters have been picking up Haitians at sea, assuming they were rushing toward the economic good life of the U.S., and returning them to Haiti, where many have been tortured

and killed.

The asylum hearings could become a farce. United States Deputy National Security Advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger

The Rowan Report By CARL ROWAN

said on “Meet the Press” that 95 percent of the boat people probably still would be sent back to Haiti to face bloodshed that Clinton says is of “alarming proportions.” That would mean that the “policy reversal” achieved nothing more than the muting of cries that the Clinton policy was “racist,” and giving TransAfrica leader Randall Robinson a reason to end his hunger strike protesting Clinton’s policy. But Gray’s presence as key advisor gives assurances that: 1. This man, now head of the

United Negro College Fund, is not going to serve as cover for a fraud in which the U.S. goes on consigning Black, ill-educated political refugees to death in

Haiti.

2. Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras and his cronies, who in 1991 overthrew Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, are going to listen seriously to Gray. The Haitian dictators laugh when President Clinton mentions “the military option” because they see Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress, including the Black Caucus, and the editorial writers of most American newspapers, opposing an invasion. Haitians heard former vice president Dan Quayle on the “Today Show” dismissing Aristide as “a man who was democratically elected who doesn’t practice democracy.” Most Americans remember, or

have been told, that U.S. military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 was an abomination for both countries. Black Americans, like Latinos, frown on gunboat diplomacy and the assumption that the U.S. has a right to dictate the politics and internal life of neighboring countries. If anyone can bring the Congress to the belief that the U.S. must invade Haiti, it would be Gray, because he is highly respected by his former colleagues, because he will have been fiercely independent as an unpaid adviser to the president, and because he is Black and carries a mother’s milk dislike for on-a-whim, colonial-type invasions. I expect that shortly we’ll get signals from Gray as to whether there is a bloodless way out of this Haiti mess, or if things must first get a lot worse.

Why I carry a gun; because I have the right

I am an African-American man who lives in South Central Los Angeles and I carry a Smith-n-Wesson 38 caliber revolver. Why? Because the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says that I have every right to. No, I am not a member of a street gang. For the sake of reference I was a pilot in the elite Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. I am a brigadier general in the California State Military. I have operated a successful bail bond agency in South Central Los Angeles for more than 40 years. Most importantly, however, I am past president of the Los Angeles Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and for the past 10 years 1 have been the California state chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. In December, 1993,1 became one of the first African-American civilians and only one of 13 residents of any hue in LA to be granted a license to carry a concealed firearm in more than 15 years. The awarding of these 13 gun permits, however, was not an act of charity by the city’s fathers. It only happened because CORE and a number of other organizations filed suit challenging the city’s right to waive its obligation to uphold the Constitution. The other organizations may have had other reasons for joining in the suit, but for CORE, the issue was very clear. We had learned from past history. “The history of gun control in America,” Malcolm X often said, “is the history of racial and class suppression.” Malcolm X was talking about the strict interpretation of the Second Amendment. People have the right to protect themselves. During slavery, Blacks were prohibited from owning firearms. And, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney put an exclamation point on that practice when he wrote, in Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) that “the Negro had no rights which the white man was bound to respect...” Following the Civil War, it took the Freedman’s Bureau Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the first portion of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to nullify Jim Crow laws passed to keep Blacks from owning or carrying guns. Blacks had good reasons for wanting that right regained. The Ku

KJux Klan and many redneck sheriff’s deputies were killing unarmed Blacks as if

they were skeet.

Writer Dan Gifford tells the story of how in Blacks in Monroe, NC armed themselves to ward off the Klan on October 5,1957. Eighty carloads of Klansmen rode into town to

harass Dr. Albert Perry, a local civil rights leader. What greeted them were several hundred rounds of ammunition the Blacks acquired free

1

CORE Report

By CUES KING III

of charge from the US Army, through their National Rifle Association chapter. Certainly the call for getting guns out of the hands of criminals is warranted. But I am not a criminal, however. Now, I carry a gun — legally. The courts said it is my constitutional right due to certain reasonable

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The New River has old problems— PCBs and DDT

The Imperial Valley is a lush agricultural center located about an hour and a half east of San Diego. Running through this valley is the New River. Some say it’s a new river because it was created in the early days of this century when the Colorado River changed its course, miming from the Rocky Mountains into Mexico and then northward where it emptied into the Salton Sea instead of the Gulf of California. Others say that the river changed its course when farmers started the massive irrigation farming which makes the land lush and green today. Whatever its true history, today the New River is one of the most contaminated rivers in the world. The New River is polluted with chemicals from 200 plants (often called maquiladoras) located in Mexico. These plants, owned by American, Mexican and Japanese companies, include printing plants, auto repair shops, agricultural, chemical and petroleum products manufacturers, food and beverage processing companies, transportation equipment manufacturers-; textile, clothing and metal products industries. These firms dump so much discharge from their plants into the water that at times the New River has had a foul smelling foam on the top of it, extending as far away as the U.S.Mexican border.

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The New River is polluted with raw sewage and animal excrement dumped in the big city of Mexicali, through which it passes. Mexicali is a city of between 600,000 and a million persons, with a sewage system built for no more than 300,000. Its sewage lines rupture often and when they do, they drain into the lowest available channel, the New River. As the river winds its way north through California’s Imperial Valley, it goes past parks and new housing subdivisions inhabited primarily by poor Hispanic Americans with little political clout. Children often play only a few yards from this polluted river, whose fumes and foam are thought to be dangerous even to inhale. In the 1980’s a child became comatose after playing in the foam of the river. Through the years the California Regional Water Quality Control Board’s inspectors have spotted

considerable debris in the river, including vegetables, shoes, greasy globules, bottles, animal carcasses and even a dead human body floating by. The state has also found many invisible pollutants in the river, most notably viruses carrying polio, encephalitis, hepatitis and bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli. But the incredible and deadly pollution of the New River is not new. Fifty years ago the state noticed the pollution of the New River. Yet, despite many meetings and discussions since then with both the U.S. and Mexican governments, nothing significant has occurred. Since the Mexican government pleads lack of funds and the U.S. government has claimed lack of authority, even comprehensive monitoring data and risk assessments have not been done. Since only very limited testing has been done of the toxic pollutants in the water, the only firm data available is that fish from the New River contain high levels of PCBs, DDT and Toxaphene, all known to cause cancer. Some say the only concrete thing which has occurred is a proposed design for a water treatment plant which many feel is wholly inadequate. But now two new developments have brought hope to the residents who live near the New River and to the state of California. President

Clinton has signed a bill and a treaty which might provide some relief. Under the Environmental Justice Act, the government is required to show remedies for sites where environmental racism can be proven. And under the new North American Fair Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the government has committed itself to negotiate with the Mexican government around environmental pollution problems. Clearly, both of these apply to the New River. Imperial County officials are hoping that the Environmental Protection Agency will agree that it has the authority to take action in Mexico. And that it will then issue subpoenas to the maquiladoras and order the Mexican plant manufacturers to pay for the muchneeded study of the New River pollution. The Commission for Racial Justice has been working on issues of environmental racism for the past twelve years. Our expertise tells us that the U.S.-Mexico border region is one integral eco-system which stretches across man-made political boundaries. Our commitment to justice tells us that the people who live near the New River deserve to live in a safe, clean environment and that their voices must be heard by their governments on both sides of the border. The New River must be cleaned up. Justice demands no less.