Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was called “an evil, abnormal beast” in an anonymous letter FBI agents sent the civil rights leader in 1964 in an effort to get him to commit suicide, a newly published, unredacted version of the note, shows. Readvthe letter below. Click the letter to enlarge.
According to Sa’uda Dunlap, Assistant Director of Social Work at Kings County Hospital Center, the stigma of mental health in the African- American community is a major deterrent for seeking treatment.
“I’ve been treating people for 6+ years and it is at the top of the list when I explore concerns consumers and families have about treatment. Many African Americans fear that they will be labeled “crazy” or will be “locked up.” As a clinician, I use my initial contacts with consumers and families to address fears of being involuntarily hospitalized by explaining the difference between typical mental health challenges and “being crazy,’ including the role of insight and self-efficacy.”
Family can be a great support system but they can also be judgmental and the reason for the stigma. This largely occurs in the African-American community. With roots grounded in religion, many view it as something that should not be discussed.
A recent podcast on Huffington Post’s website asserts that over 66% of Protestants have never heard a sermon about mental health. The lack of education in the church community and in the African-American community is a key issue for the stigma in mental health.
Read more: What’s At The Root Of Black Mental Health Stigma?
In April, three of Ferguson’s six city council seats are up for grabs and African-Americans have a chance to end decades of white domination. Two-thirds of the town’s 21,000 population is black. But the mayor, more than 90 percent of the police, and all but one of the council members are white -- an imbalance that has stoked racial tensions in Ferguson long before Brown’s shooting in August.
Based on last Tuesday's turnout, winning council seats might difficult: there was little sign of an uptick in interest in local politics. Forty-two percent of registered voters in Ferguson took part in the highest profile race -- the election for St Louis County executive, which was a drop of 10 percentage points from the last such vote in 2010.
That frustrates Patricia Bynes, a local African-American official in the Democratic Party.
"Every time there’s an election we have to show up. I don’t care if we are voting what color the trash cans are, we need to show up," she said.
Putting up good candidates of its own will be crucial for the African-American community, added David Kimball, a political scientist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Read more: Can Ferguson's black leaders gain power next April?
By now we all know that the democrats took a major ass kicking in the 2014 mid-terms. Many have blamed President Obama for this and maybe rightfully so. Many talking heads have said that this election was a referendum on President Obama's policies. As the President of the US, he is the head of the party so some blame goes to him the same way he would have gotten credit if the democrats had held onto the US Senate.
Many democratic candidates have been blamed for running bad campaigns or single issue campaigns. Some kept rambling about women's reproductive rights, another about income inequality, and another about Obamacare. But they didn't seem to focus on the many ongoing issues affecting voters in their states. Now even though all politics is local on a national level the democrats running for Senate, and the House of Representatives seemed to have no one coherent message. The republicans had one, and it was simple, Obama is bad. Yeah, they ran against something instead of for something but it was a simple message that was uniform across the states and worked.
The infuriating part is that the democrats had great things to talk about. Unemployment continues to drop, gas prices continue to drop, and the stock market is booming and the democrats mentioned none of that in a nationwide narrative. There was no one message that resonated across the country as the republicans had.
Democratic candidates in some states ran away from the president's policies, even attacked him on some issues and asked him not to come to their states. This resulted in losses for everyone that tried that strategy of distancing themselves from the president. No one seemed to get the idea that he could ENERGIZE and MOBILIZE the democratic base.
I'm wondering when DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz will get the blame for this? As the chair it was her job to get the message and a strategy out there like her counterpart at the RNC, Reince Priebus did. It was her job to get candidates to but into a comprehensive strategy. In my opinion, she did not, and that led to a huge failure on election night. She deserves a large part of the blame, and I'm wondering why she hasn't stepped down as chair or why President Obama hasn't asked her to step down?
Quite simply she did not get the job done and does not deserve another bite at the apple. I hope we as democrats don't intend to let her led the charge again in 2016 because, in 2014, she led us to republican control of both the House and Senate.
I'm just saying.
George L. Cook III AfricanAmericanReports.com
President Barack Obama on Saturday said he is nominating U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch as the next U.S. attorney general, describing her as a "tough, fair and independent" lawyer. Watch that nomination below:
