Friday, August 9, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Supporting Black Americans


Politics As Usual Has Failed the Black Community

For too long the levers of power in Washington have changed hands between Republicans and Democrats without meaningful change coming to the black community.  Things will be different with Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has spent forty years fiercely protecting minority communities. 

In Kennedy’s first case as an environmental attorney, he represented the NAACP in its fight to stop a garbage station in Ossining, NY. He has always been there for vulnerable communities, from the Bronx to indigenous people in North and South America.

OPERATION PHOENIX

Black businesses are the lifeblood of their community, and Kennedy knows it. He served on the board of Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy for 35 years. Ending redlining and releasing investment capital turned Restoration Plaza into a thriving business community.  Kennedy will replicate this success across the country. Rather than the hundred billion dollar bank bailouts, Kennedy will invest in urban and struggling communities. They will rise and thrive through Operation Phoenix.

TANGIBLES:

  • Increased access to investment capital for a robust, self-sustaining Black business infrastructure.
  • Institute Black Business Development Agency to build and support African-American companies.
  • Web courses taught by respected Black entrepreneurs on starting a business as qualifiers for small business grants. 
  • Low interest microloans to invest in approved business plans with flexible repayment terms.
  • Millions of new, full-time jobs for the Black community.
  • Immigration policy that protects local resources, ending the migrant encampments in urban areas.
  • Increased trade school and college prep opportunities for our youth.

JUSTICE

Police Reform

  • Recruit police from the neighborhoods they serve.
  • Don’t make police do jobs they aren’t trained for..Increased funding for mental health professionals accompanying police to help de-escalate citizens in nonviolent mental health crises.
  • Commission to root out systemic bias from the federal to the local levels.
  • Ending civil forfeiture by making seizing assets from citizens illegal without due process. 

Justice for Black Farmers

Robert Kennedy Jr. will end USDA discrimination against Black farmers, and protect current landowners from further land loss.

Prison Reform

Expand reintroduction to the community for non-violent offenders and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline by ending suspensions being added to criminal records.

Environmental Justice

Penalize environmental pollution caused by corporations dumping toxic waste in Black communities.

AN AMERICAN DREAM FOR ALL

Americorps and a New GI Bill for Community Service

Just as the GI Bill built the middle class after WWII, Kennedy’s expansion of service award benefits in Americorps, our domestic Peace Corps, will put the next generation on a path towards the American Dream. Cleaning up parks, caring for the elderly, building infrastructure and working on organic, healing farms will unlock significant assets to pay your way through college or learn a trade, start a small business or put a down payment on a home.  With nearly 60% of minority households liquid asset poor, Kennedy’s plan will help end the racial wealth gap.

Student Debt Relief

As President, RFK Jr. will push to make student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and move to cancel student debt.

Home Ownership

First time home buyers should not have to compete with private equity firms and billionaires to buy a home. Kennedy will fight to keep Wall Street out of the single family home market and  institute 3% government-backed mortgage bonds to make home ownership more affordable for families. It’s like having a rich uncle - Uncle Sam - who is willing to cosign your mortgage.

Homelessness

There’s no American Dream for those living the nightmare of homelessness which disproportionately affects the Black Community.  Kennedy will push to address root causes of homelessness and expand wrap around services.

Addressing the Black Maternal Healthcare Crisis

Implicit bias and discrimination in healthcare is a serious issue affecting the Black community.  The history of this extends centuries back into the American experiment.  It has resulted in Black women receiving lower quality care. Studies indicate that Black women are less likely to be heard by healthcare providers. 

Higher rates of poverty and limited access to quality healthcare contribute to poorer health outcomes. Black women are more likely to live in areas with fewer healthcare facilities and providers.  Additionally, Black women experience higher rates of conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and obesity, which can complicate pregnancy and childbirth.

Limited access to prenatal care, often due to lack of insurance or transportation, can lead to undiagnosed and untreated complications. Chronic stress from facing racial discrimination and economic instability can negatively impact pregnancy outcomes.  Many Black women live in areas with limited or no maternity care services, which can delay or prevent access to necessary care.

Solutions to Reduce the Crisis

  1. Address Systemic Racism: Implement training programs for healthcare providers to recognize and counteract implicit biases. Encourage diversity in the medical workforce.
  2. Expand Access to Healthcare: Increase funding for Medicaid and other programs that provide healthcare to low-income individuals. Ensure that all women have access to comprehensive prenatal care.
  3. Community-Based Support: Develop community health programs that provide support to pregnant women. This includes doulas and midwives who can offer personalized care and advocacy.
  4. Improve Data Collection and Research: Collect better data on maternal health outcomes to identify and address disparities. Fund research focused on understanding and reducing these disparities.
  5. Policy Changes: Advocate for policies that support maternal health, such as paid family leave, affordable childcare, and access to reproductive health services.
  6. Education and Awareness: Increase awareness about the importance of prenatal care and the signs of pregnancy complications. Provide education on healthy lifestyle choices.
  7. Support Pregnancy Resource Centers: Support and expand pregnancy resource centers like Auntie Angie's House, which provide essential services and support to pregnant women, particularly those from marginalized communities. These centers offer a safe space, resources, and personalized care, helping to bridge the gap in healthcare access.

RFK Jr.: Healing Minds and Spirits in the Black Community



Black Mothers



RFK Jr's father, Bobby Kennedy Sr., was a strong influence on him as a humanitarian and civil rights activist. It's helpful to see the tremendous impact Robert Kennedy Jr's father had on black Americans, because he listened to them and supported them. 

Many people appreciated his call for peace in Indianapolis, after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It's been said his speech was able to prevent rioting in the city, while there were widespread protests across the country, resulting in many injuries and deaths. 

Kennedy acknowledged that many in the audience would be filled with anger, especially since the assassin was believed to be a white man. He empathized with the audience by referring to the assassination of his brother, United States President John F. Kennedy, by a white man. The remarks surprised Kennedy aides, who had never heard him speak of his brother's death in public.[16] Quoting the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus,[Note 1] with whom he had become acquainted through his brother's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy,[16] Kennedy said, "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."[15]

Kennedy then delivered one of his best-remembered remarks: "What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."[15] To conclude, Kennedy reiterated his belief that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites and encouraged the country to "dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world."[15] He finished by asking the audience members to pray "for our country and for our people."[15] Rather than exploding in anger at the tragic news of King's death, the crowd exploded in applause and enthusiasm for a second time, before dispersing quietly.[19]

Indianapolis remained calm that night, which is believed to have been in part because of the speech.[10][21] In stark contrast to Indianapolis, riots erupted in more than one hundred U.S. cities including Chicago, New York City, Boston, Detroit, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, killing 35 and injuring more than 2,500. Across the country, approximately 70,000 army and National Guard troops were called out to restore order.[19][22] William Crawford, a member of the Black Radical Action Project who had stood about 20 feet from Kennedy, credited Kennedy's speech for not resulting in riots.[20] Crawford claimed to the Indianapolis Star in 2015 "Look at all those other cities" and "I believe it would have gone that way (in Indianapolis) had not Bobby Kennedy given those remarks."[20]


Indianapolis, 1968: Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and a historic call for peace


When he died, and his coffin was transported by train from New York to Washington DC, so many lined up along the train tracks (estimated to be up to 2 million people), it took 5 hours longer for the train to reach its destination, than was originally expected. But he was so well-loved, people still remained at the tracks, despite the long wait, so they could say their final goodbyes. 




RFK took all the heat on a drug bust in school to spare his classmates

I transcribed this story below, from the audiobook version of The Real RFK by Dick Russell.  Hopefully you'll see why I thought this was a story worth telling. It's not a story you'll likely hear RFK tell himself on camera, but the people closest to him in his youth would know about it.  

I want to point out that RFK Jr. was a rebellious kid who got into trouble and had to go to a few different high schools. He says he wasn't a great student, and these days, a kid like him would likely be diagnosed with ADHD. He preferred to stare out the window and watch the hawks flying through the sky, rather than listening to teachers. Part of the reason he got addicted to drugs is because they helped him to concentrate in school. He was clearly self medicating, as his grades went way up after he started taking heroin - something he'd been offered the year after his Dad was killed. You can learn more about how he overcame drug addiction, over 30 years ago, by clicking HERE). It seems that this experience helped him to learn a lot about himself, and he makes an extra effort to be a good person, and stay sober, because of it. 

From the Real RFK book:

Bobby had transferred to the Pomfret School, a private boarding school in rural Connecticut in September 1970. Pomfret seemed a hopeful choice for Bobby's 11th grade year. Notable alumni included Edward Stentenius FDR's last Secretary of State.
 
Bobby joined the football squad. Most of the team consisted of African American teens from broken families in the New Haven projects, recruited under a program called ABC, A Better Chance. Bobby immediately gravitated toward them, recalling that "Those were my friends there. You got to choose your dorm, and I was the only white person. He sat with his black teammates in the back of the bus going to the games.
 
However, pot smoking had reached the Pomfret campus of 250 students. One night in the late spring of 1971, Bobby and his dorm mates barricaded the doors to the hallway and lit up some joints. When one of the administrators came banging, the smell permeated the room. The students relented and let them in. He demanded to know who was smoking. It was clearly an awkward situation.

If the truth were told Bobby and all the black students recruited for Pomfret's experiment would be expelled. So Bobby quickly decided to take the rap. He was the only one smoking, he said. The next day, he alone was expelled. These were tough times for Bobby, but he never lost his courage or his willingness to sacrifice for others. Nor had he lost his early interest in reading, and ideas and philosophy.
---------------------------------------

I wanted to tell that story, because I think it's one that RFK is not likely to tell, publicly, himself. But I think it would help people to see a greater glimpse of the real Bobby Kennedy. The media tries to portray him as some rich, spoiled, privileged white kid, but he hung out with a whole lot of people of color throughout the majority of his youth. He spent a good amount of time in South America and Africa, where he fished and hunted with the locals.

He talked about how he loved going hunting with a handyman who worked for the family. He was a CV in World War II. This was during a time when segregation was still a thing. Black men couldn't even marry white women at that time!

He said that as a kid, he didn't understand why, when they needed to get lunch, he had to go into the store to buy their lunch in a diner, and then they'd eat it in the car. It seems that seeing these injustices really helped shape Kennedy as a person, and he has a deep understanding of the importance of Civil Rights.


How RFK's uncle helped Barack Obama's father come to the U.S.

An excerpt from The Real RFK:

The previous summer, Bobby and Lem had stayed in Nairobi for several days with Tom Mboya, a charismatic Kenyan labor leader who played a key role in the liberation war against British colonial rule. Bobby had first met Mboya when his parents hosted him in Hyannis in 1960. "It was a high point of my young life to meet a real African leader."

"He wore a Tashiki and spoke kindly to us. He was from the Luo tribe, "Bobby recalled. He and the Shrivers had then stayed in Mboya's home on their visit to Kenya in 1964. It seemed fitting he and Lem do the same in 1968 because "Mboya and my father had found kindred spirits in each other, and developed a strong friendship."

Now early in July 1969, an assassin opened fire and escaped in the ensuing confusion as Mboya fell victim to a single bullet outside a Nairobi pharmacy. Only 38, the handsome, articulate Mboya embodied many of the qualities so urgently needed by the fledgling nations of black Africa, Time Magazine reported.

Grieving Kenyans soon gathered in such numbers at the hospital that Baton-wielding police were called out to keep the crowd at Bay.

For Bobby, it must have seemed like a déjà Vu.

"My father had been assassinated and then I spent the summer with Mboya, who was assassinated," he told me in 2022. Yet, there was a mysterious coda. It happened almost precisely 45 years later when Bobby was to give a speech on environmental issues at the 2004 democratic convention.

Waiting in the green room beforehand, he was introduced to a state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

"After I spoke, he went on stage and gave a speech that blew the roof of the convention," Bobby recalled. That night, he happened to be going to Martha's Vineyard, where I was staying with my friend Larry David. So we arranged to meet him for dinner. I sat next to him. I was asking him about his life, and he told me his father was Kenyan. I asked what tribe he was from, and Barack said he was Luo. Then, I asked, had he ever heard of Tom Mboya?

And he said, "Tom Mboya is the reason I'm in this country." Obama's father had come to America in 1961 - the same year, Barrack was born. By a program organized by Mboya that enlisted American colleges, including Harvard, to provide scholarships to gifted Kenyan students.

When the Republican state department wouldn't help with their flights, Martin Luther King suggested to Mboya that he called JFK, who headed up the subcommittee on Africa in the senate. Harry Bellefonte ended up bringing Mboya to meet the family at Hyannis, and then presidential candidate Kennedy was so impressed by the man, that he gave him a private donation of $100,000.

When word leaked out, republicans tried disparaging the Kennedy air lift of all these Africans. But JFK proceeded to win the election, and almost half a century later, the African American baby who followed in its wake became President of the United States.


His Uncle, President Kennedy, also helped to organize the Civil Rights March in 1963, when Dr. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

 

Robert Kennedy's Speech About Martin Luther King's Assassination

 


 

38% OF PEOPLE INCARCERATED ARE BLACK... HOW DO WE FIX THIS?     



LETS TALK REPARATIONS - RFK JR DEBATES THE ON THIS UNSPOKEN TOPIC 

RFK Talks about Reparations.....


WHY SHOULD WE CARE WHAT OTHER RACES THINK??? RFK JR CONTINUES  REPARATIONS DEBATE!!!

 

RFK Jr.: What About Reparations?

RFK Jr. + 19Keys (trailer)


Robert F Kennedy Jr reveals how he feels about a Black Hate bill & what he'd do if he were President


RFK Jr. Door Knocking With Angela Stanton King


RFK Jr. Talks Donald Trump Call, Kamala Harris, Project 2025, Black Voters, RFK Sr. & JFK's Deaths

  

RFK Jr.: What About Reparations?

 


There's a good article about RFK Sr. and Civil Rights activist John Lewis, that you may want to read. You can see it HERE.

'I loved John Lewis': how he and Robert Kennedy forged an iron bond

This article is more than 4 years old

Kerry Kennedy on the civil rights leader she knew – and why the bridge at the heart of Bloody Sunday should be renamed

John Lewis’s office on Capitol Hill resembled a civil rights museum, with monochrome photos in neat white borders and black frames and a TV for visitors to watch a documentary. Prominent in the room was both a campaign poster and bust of Robert Kennedy, one of Lewis’s closest friends and allies.

As America prepares to mourn the civil rights hero who died last week aged 80 with a series of events, Kennedy’s daughter, Kerry, has spoken of her family’s deep sense of loss and joined calls for the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to be renamed for Lewis.

“I loved John,” Kennedy, a member of one of America’s most prominent political dynasties, told the Guardian. “I’ll always miss him and so will my whole family. He means – he meant so much to all of us. The swirl of text messages and emails and phone calls with my whole family when he died was beautiful: ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Can I help you?’ ‘Want to take a walk, be together?’ It was really like somebody in our family had died.”

Kennedy, 60, is president of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, an advocacy organisation Lewis served as a board member. She adds: “He is my hero, not only in the history, but also his demeanour, his love, his style, his peacefulness, his humility. Just somebody who we all want to emulate in every way. Nobody that I know of in the civil rights movement took more knocks to the head and then got up and organised the next protest and did it all over and over and over and over again.”

Lewis, who grew up on a farm in the Jim Crow south, and Robert Kennedy, born into east coast political aristocracy and white privilege-plus, were an unlikely pair. As attorney general under his brother, President John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy approved the wiretapping and surveillance of Martin Luther King. But in May 1963 he hosted a group of black artists and intellectuals, including James Baldwin, and received a humbling lesson in how the administration needed to more ambitious on civil rights.

‘He is my hero, not only in the history, but also his demeanour, his love, his style, his peacefulness, his humility.’ Photograph: Afro Newspaper/Courtesy RFK Human Rights

His commitment deepened as he proved willing to travel, engage and grow. That summer he listened to students who endured arrests and beatings in their efforts to desegregate Cambridge, Maryland. Lewis later recalled that during a break in the meetings, Robert Kennedy told him: “John, now I understand. The young people, the students have educated me. You have changed me.”

He formed a special bond with Lewis, a Freedom Rider (riding commercial interstate buses across the south to protest segregation), firebrand organiser of the March on Washington and apostle of nonviolent protest he famously called “good trouble”. In Selma in 1965, Lewis suffered a skull fracture when Alabama state troopers unleashed tear gas, whips and batons on marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, on what became known as “Bloody Sunday”.

Speaking from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she is helping keep her 92-year-old mother, Ethel, isolated from the coronavirus, Kennedy reflects: “I think the value my father admired most after love was courage and there was no group that he admired more during the civil rights era than the Freedom Riders. He was was awed by their courage and wanted to understand and John’s conversations with him were about getting to yes.

“They weren’t about anger slogans or the outrage that, of course, John totally deserved to feel. It was about how do we get the Voting Rights Act passed and how do we resolve this crisis in Maryland and how do we find a bus driver to bring the Freedom Riders from Birmingham to Montgomery and protect them along the way?”

When Robert Kennedy launched his own bid for the presidency in 1968, he requested that Lewis help organise the black community in Indiana, including a rally in the biggest black neighbourhood of Indianapolis. But when Robert Kennedy flew in, the city’s white mayor, Richard Lugar, called him to say King had been assassinated in Memphis and the event would have to be cancelled.

Kennedy continues: “Lugar said to him, Martin Luther King has been killed by a white man, there are cities burning, protests and looting in cities across the country, you cannot go to that rally. There is no way to provide your safety if you go. I will not allow the police to go with you.

“Daddy called John Lewis, who said: ‘Come, these are your people, they’ve been waiting for hours. The people in the front of the crowd had, in fact, been waiting for hours and they hadn’t heard the news but people in the back of the crowd had heard the news and a bunch of them came with bicycle chains and chair legs and molotov cocktails, and they were ready to riot.

“My father said to Richard Lugar, ‘You might want not to go there but I could go there tonight with my 10 children and my pregnant wife and sleep on the street and we’d be perfectly safe.’ He said that not out of bravado but because he had worked for so long and so intimately with John Lewis and the other community organisers there, so he had credibility. This was not like walking into some foreign country for him. It was like walking home for him.”

‘Who knows what would have happened in 1968.’ Photograph: Courtesy RFK Human Rights

Robert Kennedy did attend the rally and, with rare eloquence that caught the mood of the nation, broke the news of King’s death to those who did not know. His daughter says: “He could give that speech, and it had the impact it had, because of the depth of that relationship and trust and also because John Lewis had so much credibility.”

The next day, at Kennedy’s request, Lewis went to Memphis to help organise for King’s body to be returned to Atlanta. Lewis also arranged for Kennedy to meet King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, the night before the funeral.

The election continued. In California, Lewis was in charge of organising the black vote while the labour leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organised the Latinx vote. Chavez and Lewis would sometimes canvass together. Kennedy continues: “Oh, my gosh, imagine opening your door and finding Cesar Chavez and John Lewis.

“They went to the Ambassador hotel [in Los Angeles] that night and Daddy said to John: ‘I’m very disappointed in you because a higher Latinx vote came out than black.’ So they were joking around and he said: ‘I’ll see you in a few minutes. I just have to go give this speech.’”

Shortly after giving a victory speech in the hotel, Robert Kennedy made his way through the kitchen to avoid the surging crowd. Shot at close range, he died aged 42.

His daughter recalls: “John was in the hotel room and he said that he just fell to the floor and cried. He cried the whole way back from LA to Atlanta. It was so moving hearing him say: ‘We were flying over the hills and the mountains, and you could still see snow, even though it was June.’”

Half a century later, Lewis would later tell Kerry Kennedy in an interview for her book Ripples of Hope: “If it hadn’t been for Bobby, I wouldn’t be involved in American politics … I truly believe something died in all of us. I know something died in me.”

‘More than a mentor’

If Robert Kennedy had won the White House instead of Richard Nixon, Lewis’s career would surely have been different. Kennedy, the ex-wife of New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, speculates: “One hundred per cent John would have been involved with the administration. I don’t know at what level he would have been.

“I think the first couple of weeks my father was in the justice department he said: ‘There’s no black lawyers here, what are we doing? We have to recruit from traditionally black colleges and universities and we have to change this and we need more diversity.’ So that was certainly a priority, but who knows what would have happened in 1968.”

Instead Lewis represented a Georgia district in the House of Representatives for 33 years, earning a reputation as “the conscience of Congress”, and continued his efforts for social and economic justice.

Kennedy says: “I felt like he was always there for me personally. I know he was always there for many people personally but I just felt here’s somebody who’s on your side, who feels your pain when something goes wrong and just wants whatever you’re doing to be good.

“It’s very loving: more than a mentor, really kind of a father figure in a lot of ways. I asked him to do things all the time. He never said no, whatever march we were asking to him get in or whatever letter we wanted him to sign or piece of legislation we asked him to co-sign or event we asked him to show up for. It was a drumbeat of yes.”

Lewis also helped keep the memory of Robert Kennedy alive.

“The thing that he also did is he talked to me and my brothers and sisters and my children and my nieces and nephews about my father in a very personal way. There’s a lot of history so you understand the actions but it’s different to have somebody like John Lewis say this is what he was like, these are our conversations, this is how he treated me.”

After Lewis succumbed to pancreatic cancer, he received tributes from Barack Obama and people around the world. On Sunday his casket will make a final crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma before lying in state at the US Capitol in Washington. Kennedy endorses the movement to have the bridge renamed after him instead of Pettus, a lawyer and Confederate general who became a US senator and leader in the Ku Klux Klan.

“I think it would be great because Edmund Pettus was a terrible white supremacist and there should not be anything named after him,” she says.

“It would be a symbol to Selma and to our country and to the world that we recognise the violence of the past and we are going to atone for it and we are on our way to becoming a more perfect union – one where all people are respected and where every person is treated with dignity.”





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