By Grassroots DC, on July 2nd, 2015 
Our history books tell us that the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. And it did… more or less. But no one can possibly claim that the Thirteenth Amendment abolished peonage (see: Slavery by Another Name), convict leasing, Jim Crow and all the written and unwritten codes that went with it, or even the New Jim Crow of Mass incarceration. The Thirteenth Amendment has a lot to answer for. As such, the following speech still has resonance today.
“What To The American Slave Is Your ‘4th of July?’” FREDERICK DOUGLASS SPEECH July 5, 1852
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, “may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth”! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave’s point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than . . . → Read More: What to the American Slave Is Your 4th of July?
By Grassroots DC, on June 23rd, 2015 
When our elected officials ask for our input, we should give it to them. So if you have time, please join Councilmember Grosso for community town hall events between June 16 and July 11, 2015. The Councilmember will hold a meeting in each Ward to hear from residents, parents, students, and education stakeholders about public education in the District of Columbia. Below is the schedule for the upcoming town hall events:
Ward 1 Town Hall Tuesday, June 16, 2015 6:30-8:30 PM Frank D. Reeves Center 1401 U St. NW 2nd Floor Community Room
Ward 8 Town Hall Tuesday, June 23, 2015 6:30-8:30 PM William O. Lockridge/Bellevue Library 115 Atlantic St. SW Main Meeting Room
Ward 4 Town Hall Monday, June 29, 2015 6:30-8:30 PM Petworth Library 4200 Kansas Ave. NW Meeting Room
Ward 2 Town Hall Wednesday, July 8, 2015 6:30-8:30 PM The Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives 1201 17th St NW Richard L. Hurlbut Memorial Hall
Ward 5 Town Hall Thursday, June 18, 2015 6:30-8:30 PM Lamond-Riggs Library 5401 South Dakota Ave. NE Meeting Room 1
Ward 6 Town Hall Wednesday, June 24, 2015 6:30-8:30 PM Southwest Library 900 Wesley Place SW Meeting Room
Ward 3 Town Hall Tuesday, June 30, 2015 6:30-8:30 PM Tenley-Friendship Library 4450 Wisconsin Ave. NW Large Meeting Room
Ward 7 Town Hall Saturday, July 11, 2015 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Francis A. Gregory Library 3660 Alabama Ave. SE Meeting Room
In order to best prepare for the community meetings, we are asking that participants sign up and let us know your concerns. The Councilmember is looking forward to hearing from the community and engaging in these discussions on education issues throughout the District of Columbia.
By Grassroots DC, on June 19th, 2015 
Cross-Posted from DC Independent Media Center Written by Luke
On the 16th of June, DC Ferguson returned to the streets and shut down Chinatown, demanding not only that Police Chief Lanier keep the de facto promise she just made to end jump-outs, but also an end to gentrifcation and homelessness. The 16th of June was the 39th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising a crucial event in the movement that ultimately ended Apartheid in South Africa.
A few days earlier, DC Police Chief Lanier said that the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) would be switching focus from “low-level drug dealers” to major suppliers. According to the Washington Post report, the city’s vice squads are to be finally eliminated. Not once was the word “jump-out” used in any mainstream media story, but it is clear this is in response to growing pressure to end this tactic. When DC Ferguson began organizing against jump-outs, MPD first claimed to have discontinued the tactic during the 1990’s, then claimed only vice squads did anything like this. Now they say they will abolish the vice squads, but will the jump-outs really end or some other or renamed part of MPD continue business as usual?
Jump-outs are essentially when undercover cops swarm onto a block and attempt to intimidate every young Black male into submitting to an illegal search. Presumably MPD hopes to catch street corner drug dealers by searching everyone on the corner in this way. Jump-outs are seen in gentrification front-line areas and in Wards 7 and 8, which are African-American majority neighborhoods. Police deny they do this, yet everyone on some blocks I know well knows exactly what a jump-out is.
Since Lanier’s statement, FAUX (known by most as Fox) News has been running nonstop crime stories, along with interviews with masked cops complaining about the shift of focus. Faux is yakking every day about overdoses of a bad batch of “synthetic pot”-just after real pot has been legalized. Most likely FAUX has another agenda behind supporting jump-outs, a pro-gentrification one. This is in itself evidence that as protesters charge, jump-outs are about social control and racism, not about drugs at all.
By Grassroots DC, on June 15th, 2015 
Posted on Behalf of DCFerguson
On June 16th 1976 twenty-thousand Black students took to the streets of South Africa to protest the imposition of the racist language Afrikaans in their schools. The event is remembered as the Soweto Student Uprising. Their protests were met with bullets by the Apartheid government killing hundreds of youth. Oppression, however, breeds resistance. The murders of those students jump-started the movement against Apartheid as thousands upon thousands of Black (and white) South Africans actively joined the struggle, swelling the ranks of the Liberation Movement.
Here in the United States we are in the midst of our own Youth uprising, from Ferguson to Baltimore Black youth have led the way and kicked off a powerful movement against racism, police murders and poverty.
On June 16th DCFerguson seeks to honor those who lost their lives in Soweto township in 1976, who gave everything to be liberated. Our uprising must turn into a liberation movement that uproots racist oppression. We will march to commemorate the lives of the lost martyrs in both struggles and in the memory that through struggle comes sacrifice but also victory. Join us on Tuesday June 16 as we continue to demand an end to racist militarized policing in D.C. and the entire United States!
This morning, Mayor Bowser and Chief Lanier announced that they will be “shifting” the strategies of the Metropolitan Police Department. They are backpedaling because of the pressure DCFerguson and their supporters have been able to bring together.
Her announcement is designed to create the appearance of being responsive to those who have called for changes to policing, without any substantive engagement. The Chief, clearly feeling the pressure from our exposure of the jump-out policy, is attempting to make it appear that jump-outs are ending by closing down the “vice units” that were often most responsible. However, there has been no indication that jump-outs themselves will be completely halted. Further, we have no actual way of knowing or measuring progress on this or other fronts while the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) continues their attempt to sidestep any comprehensive data collection.
The takeaway? That what we are doing is working. Clearly, the administration is looking for a way out. A way of calming down the community and hoping we will relax and stop paying close attention to the actions of police. We will not relax, and we will pay attention. Tomorrow, more than ever, we need to demonstrate to show that this movement isn’t going away until we have changed the racist, militarized policing strategies of the MPD, changed them permanently, and in a way that can be monitored and enforced. Period.
By Liane Scott, on June 11th, 2015 
The National Research Council Makes Its Report, Finally
It feels like forever that DC Public Schools have been known as one of the worst (if not the worst) public school systems in the nation. Low test scores and high dropout rates back up the perception. Twenty years ago, DC School Reform Act of 1995 (a gift from Congress, not a District initiative) gave us charter schools. Many Washingtonians with an investment in the school system (i.e. parents, students, teachers, etc. ) believed that this was the answer. But after ten years, the numbers hadn’t improved—not in the new charters or in the traditional public schools.
In 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty and his supporters put their money on Michelle Rhee and the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA). The law gave control of DC Public Schools to the Mayor and more flexibility to administrators like Chancellor Rhee. To make sure that the changes instituted under PERAA worked, the mayor was required to submit either an independent annual evaluation or a five-year evaluation of the DC public school system. Mayor Fenty chose to go with the five-year assessment, which was due September 15, 2012. The National Research Council—the independent agency that received the contract to do the evaluation in 2009— has finally completed their 300-page report An Evaluation of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia: Reform in a Changing Landscape. On June 3, 2015, the Council of the District of Columbia’s Committee on Education held a public round table to discuss the results.
Surprise! Despite more than eight years of mayoral control, DC’s public schools still have ridiculously low test scores and high dropout rates. The Report states:
“while there have been some improvements in the public schools of the District of Columbia since a 2007 reform law, significant disparities remain in learning opportunities and academic progress across student groups and the city’s wards.”
Retired math teacher and stalwart DCPS advocate Guy Brandenburg is not impressed with the results. According to Brandenburg:
“if you care anything about reducing the gaps between achievement levels of white students and those of color, the poor, special ed students, and English language learners (i.e. immigrants), then mayoral control has been a spectacular failure.”
Brandenburg breaks down the numbers in his blog post A Quick Look at the National Academy Report on Mayoral Control of Schools of Washington, DC: “The gaps between the pass rates on the DC-CAS standardized tests of those groups under mayoral control or the Public Education Reform Amendment Act are enormous and have essentially remained unchanged since 2007, when the law was implemented, according to the data in this report.
Note that the report combines the data for both the DC public schools and charter schools, combined, at all grade levels, in both reading and math. Here are two graphs, made by me from data in the report, which show the lack of change. …. HIGH NUMBERS ARE BAD because they show large gaps in proficiency rates. Low numbers are good. Notice that there has been almost no change since mayoral control; some lines go up a tiny bit, some go down a bit, others waver back and forth a bit. Not a success story.”
To rectify the problem, Chancellor Rhee implemented the DCPS Effectiveness Assessment System for School-Based Personnel otherwise known as IMPACT. Believing that DCPS’ failures rested largely with the teachers, Rhee implemented IMPACT in order to weed out the good from the bad. Once done, she would shuffle the deck and place “highly effective” teachers at more difficult schools. But as Brandenburg points out, “every single teacher remaining in DCPS has been repeatedly measured as effective or better. Yet the ratings for teachers at schools with high poverty rates remains much lower than those at schools with low poverty rates … these low-ranked teachers are not holdovers from the ‘bad old days’ – they are either brand-new hires or have been repeatedly measured as good or excellent under IMPACT.”
The report makes several recommendations, including that the city take a more coordinated approach to monitoring learning conditions in schools, such as school environment, discipline, and academic support, to better understand what progress is being made for students.
Mary Filardo executive director of the 21st Century School Fund was interviewed on the radio program, the Education Town Hall. No doubt, she has some recommendations of her own to share. The episode can be found at this page – http://educationtownhall.org/2015/06/10/mayoral-control/. You must scroll down a little to find it.
. . . → Read More: Evaluating School Reform in the District of Columbia
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