This June brought some extraordinary stories in the news about new victories to correct very old injustices. On June 21, many of us rejoiced when we heard there was finally a conviction of former KKK member Edgar Ray Killen for manslaughter in the deaths of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. It came 41 years to the day after those murders took place on a dark, awful night in Neshoba County, Miss.
That same week, Virginia announced the names of the first 60 recipients of its Brown vs. Board of Education Scholarships, designated for people who had been victimized as children by the state’s “massive resistance” campaign against desegregation between 1954 and 1964. The state of Virginia simply shut down the public schools in four districts rather than integrate. Many white students in those districts went to newly-formed private schools while many black and less privileged white students were forced to stop their educations when the schools closed. Through the new scholarship program, students who moved or dropped out of school because of those closings are receiving grants to help them return to school for a high school or college diploma.
The United States Senate also recently passed a resolution apologizing for its failure to pass an anti-lynching bill 105 years after an anti-lynching bill was first proposed. During that 100 years, the House of Representatives had passed legislation three separate times to make lynching a federal crime only to have it struck down in the Senate each time from powerful Southern senators. Some of those Jim Crow Senators actually argued on the Senate floor that lynching helped keep law and order in their states. Law and order for whites meant death and devastation for blacks. Between 1882 and 1968, more than 4,700 Americans – mostly black men – were lynched. Many family members of lynching victims were invited to witness the Senate’s apology, including Simeon Wright, Emmett Till’s cousin.
This summer, our nation is standing on the precipice of a new injustice for which we could be apologizing to our children for years to come. In April, Congress passed a budget resolution to cut critical services for vulnerable children while giving extravagant irresponsible tax benefits to the wealthiest Americans. Over the past four years Congress has bestowed $5.1 trillion in tax cuts that mostly benefit the top 2 percent of Americans. Now Congress wants to provide $106 billion more in tax cuts that will go mostly to the wealthy. While the rich are getting huge tax breaks, children are threatened with budget cuts, caps, and freezes on health care, child care, Head Start, food stamps, and more. Millions of our children will suffer twice if unjust administration and Congressional proposals are enacted: they’ll be denied vital investments they need to stay healthy and get educated, and they’ll be saddled as adults with a crushing debt. Denying hope and opportunity to children will result in too many more Black and Latino children getting sucked into a Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crisis.
Tell your members of Congress to stop tax cuts for the wealthy and protect funding to critical programs for children. As Congress deliberates on final decisions between now and September, your outraged voices must be heard saying it is plain wrong to rob children to pamper millionaires. Let’s not find ourselves apologizing and repairing damage again in forty or fifty or one hundred years. It is time to say no to the criminalization of children at younger ages and building a booming prison industry on the backs of those least able to bear such an inhumane burden.