As a grandparent, I am acutely aware of what is riding on my shoulders. We need you to step up for the future of our Kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. We need your help at the NAACP to foster a “Kids First” agenda focused on what Byron Allen has tried to tell us.

Byron Allen at the Grio talking about closing the achievement gap

Join us at the NAACP to demand canceling student loans and closing the Achievement GAP. pdxnaacp.org

IT’S  MY BIRTHDAY

I woke up this morning the sun was shining knowing that today was my birthday. I was thinking if anyone wanted to give me a gift, I would ask them to JOIN our Portland Branch of the NAACP 1120-B (pdxnaacp.org). This is not too much to ask because God knows the fight against racism, discrimination, and hate is a battle we cannot afford to lose.  I am reminded that at 78 we need every weapon on the battlefield including us old folks.

Check out our Mission:

https://studio.youtube.com/video/5bwCfhLCS14/edit

Beatrice Morrow Cannady

I know this is Black History Month but I am still surprised that very few people, blacks in particular know about this great black woman and the contribution she made to blacks in Oregon and across the USA.

Beatrice Morrow Cannady-Portland NAACP Black History

Black men are less than animals

My wife and I just went to see the movie “The Color Purple”   Although the movie was a tear-jerker, I did not like the depiction of black men as animals. I hope someone will come out with a balanced view of who black men were during that period and tell the whole story.

Columbia Sportswear Chair, President and CEO Tim Boyle’s unhealthy obsession with the garbage on the highways is not his alone. (comments at the 2023 Oregon Business Leadership Summit) Most of us hate it, too. But most don’t have the collective wherewithal to do much about it. However, I would like to suggest that while the trash on streets is a physically visible problem we can all see and commiserate about, we have deeper problems with how our most vulnerable citizens, especially Black people, are treated.

That is, the city of Portland continues to treat its Black citizens like trash. For example, how is it that the city continues to accept a 50% educational achievement gap between Black and white students? And as if we didn’t already know it, a recent State disparity study graphically shows that Blacks are continually being economically discriminated against in acquiring government contracts.

As sure as the neck bone is connected to the shoulder bone and the shoulder bone is connected to the backbone, likewise we can see why Black unemployment numbers continue to be triple that of whites. Furthermore, Black folks similarly disproportionately populate our prisons and the criminal justice system. And it is straight up ugly to realize that Blacks have the lowest home ownership rate of any ethnic group.

If you want to see some garbage, these are only a few devastating indicators of the real trash problem in Portland. Perhaps we can enlist Tim Boyle and many other successful private sector capitalists here to be more pissed off and obsessed enough to help clean up this mess.

Why??????

On this veteran’s day, I want to remember my only brother who caught a bullet in the back in Vietnam. His wounds never healed and he died just a few years ago in a VA hospital with lingering pain and suffering.

Like a lot of young black men who went to war to serve our country, we find ourselves wondering why. So that half the country could eventually elect a clown scum bag like Donald Trump.

And they tell us he has a good chance of being elected again in 2024.  God help us.