April/May 2019


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The HBCU Advocate 13


Your Opinion Matters We Can’t Let This Giant Die Toward a Living Wage


BY REVEREND JESSE JACKSON, SR.


BY DR. JULIANNE MALVEAUX It is unfathomable that the federal


minimum wage has not been increased in more than a decade, since 2007, that the wage, at $7.25 per hour has remained flat through recession and recovery, through extremely


high


unemployment rates and much lower ones. Republicans have absolutely refused to consider minimum wage increases, and in early March rejected a bill that would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024.


majority in Congress, the bill came out of committee on a 28-20 party line vote.


While the federal government


drags its feet, six states, the District of Columbia and several other cities now have a minimum wage that will rise


to $15 in In late the next few years. March, Maryland joined


California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Illinois in increasing the minimum wage, even though Republican governor Larry Hogan vetoed the legislation. Both houses of the Maryland legislature overrode his veto, even though he melodramatically noted that a higher minimum wage would "devastate" the Maryland economy.


Unions, McDonald's workers, and


the Fight for Fifteen have fueled the national push to raise the minimum wage, especially as people have noted that wage stagnation has resulted in an extremely uneven economic recovery.


While those at the top are


celebrating economic growth, those at the bottom have barely experienced it. And the current minimum wage of $7.25 produces annual pay of $15,080, assuming that someone works a full 40 hours a week all 52 weeks of the year, which is often unlikely because many minimum wage jobs are part-time jobs.


The poverty


of three (a working mom and two children)


is $16,910.


line for a family A woman


working full time at the minimum wage is living below the poverty line. She qualifies for SNAP (food stamps), and possibly for federal housing aid if she can get it. All too often, the list for housing subsidies is full, as is public housing, so assistance is not an option. What is a woman earning such a low wage to do, then, living at the economic periphery? She house-shares lives with family or endures homelessness. She lines up to get food at food banks or from


other charities. She struggles to make ends meet, while her Congressional Representative earns $174,000 a year whether they produce or not.


(I'd


suspend Congressional pay when they choose to shut down the government).


earn the minimum wage, mostly women, are caretakers.


Still, with the Democratic


Too many of the people who They mind


our children and our elders, as nannies and home health workers. While we say that our children and elders are precious, we don't pay the folks who care for them as if they are.


Parking


lot attendants, who care for our automobiles, often earn more than the people who care for our children, mothers, and grandmothers. And yet the economy depends on them! How many working women would be hard pressed to work if their nannies or home health workers stayed home? And how would the economy adjust to the absence of nearly half of the labor force?


Ai-jen Poo, the Alliance,


Director of the National Domestic Worker's


recently of these


Executive spoke


about workers in the care industry, how poorly they are paid, and how essential they are. percent


increased births to


Eighty-eight workers are


women, mostly women of color, and while demand for their services is increasing (with an aging baby boom, and


women), pay is not. Poo and millennial All don't make


the minimum wage, but far too many do, and their efforts, though essential, are all too often invisible.


her organization are working to raise the visibility of these workers, not just so we can see them, but so we can ensure that they are adequately paid. Most Americans will have to interact with the care industry at some point in their life, arranging help for elderly relatives or for children. The movement toward a living wage must include these workers.


Kudos to Maryland for taking a


step in the right direction. Shame on House Republicans who are enjoying economic recovery, but denying its benefits to those at the bottom. The Fight for Fifteen has momentum now. This is a great time to keep up the pressure on the states and on the federal government.


Increasing the


minimum wage lifts people out of poverty.


support that? Shouldn't we all be able to


For me, the news that Johnson Publishing, a great


American


institution, has declared bankruptcy and closed its doors is deeply personal and profoundly painful. In a word, it is heartbreaking. I grew up with Ebony. The magazine was born in 1942, the year after my own birth, on the struggling side of town, in Greenville, South Carolina.


Everything in the life of black boys and girls growing up in the Jim Crow south of the 40’s, 50’s and well


into the 60’s was constricted


and restricted by the lies and laws of white supremacy. We were confined to the back of the bus, the balcony of the movie theater, the overcrowded classrooms of crumbling school houses.


The white press treated us


like we were invisible – except on the police blotter. The births of our children were never reported, the deaths of our parents never noted, the accomplishments of our best and brightest were always ignored.


Ebony and Jet were bright lights


in the darkness. John H. Johnson, the founder and publisher, was a visionary, a pioneer of possibility and pride. Everything the white culture said we could not do, Ebony said we could– and often better. Look magazine would have Frank Sinatra on the cover.


Then Ebony would have a


six-page spread of Nat King Cole or Lena Horne. They had an all-white professional basketball league. We had the Harlem Globetrotters.


We could play ball and entertain at the same time. Ebony showcased our scientists


and movie stars, our business leaders and theologians. Many of our teachers used Ebony to teach black history,


because black history did not exist in textbooks.


Ebony and Jet were also on the frontlines of the freedom struggle. It was Jet that published the shocking photos of the lynched and mangled body of 14-year-old Emmett Till, lying in his open casket in Chicago, in 1955. That photograph sparked the modern-day civil rights movement.


I once asked Rosa Parks why


she didn’t just get up go to the back of the bus and not put her life and her livelihood at such great risk. She said it was the image of Emmett Till that kept her in her seat.


The first African American awarded the Pulitzer


Prize for


photography, Moneta Sleet, worked for Ebony. He won journalism’s top honor for a soul-searing photograph of Coretta Scott King, consoling her daughter, Bernice, at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in 1968.


Shortly before the photograph


was taken, Mrs. King discovered that the pool of journalists did not include a


black photographer. Mrs. King said if Sleet were not allowed in, no photographers would be allowed in.


Ebony didn’t just nourish my soul. It put food on my family’s table. When I first moved to Chicago in 1964 to attend seminary, I had a young family and no money. When no one else would hire me, John Johnson did. He gave me a job, selling Ebony and Jet.


Johnson Publishing has meant


so much to so many for so long. We cannot let this giant die. We must find a way to save it.


Racism and segregation tried


to rob black people of our hopes and dreams.


Ebony and Jet gave them back.


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