Volume 26 Issue 38

October 10, 2021

GREATER HOUSTON EDITION

Vol. 26, Issue 38

BLACK

VOTERS MATTER

“Addressing Current & Historical Realties Affecting Our Community”

LET HIM REST IN PEACE!

By: N.L. Preston

TEXAS GOP USES GERRYMANDERING TACTICS IN PROPOSED REDISTRICTING MAP By: Roy Malonson

and Dallas.

Minority Democrats The redistricting proare fighting mad after cess happens every 10 Texas lawmakers re- years after the release cently released a draft of the Census results. of the new congressio- For the first time in nal map that threatens decades, federal law minority voters and allows Texas to draw their current leaders. political maps without Is it racism? Is it a ploy federal approval to ento protect Republicans sure they don’t violate under a loophole? Or the rights of people of is it both? The changes color. Since the enactare affecting commu- ment of the Voting nities of color in cities Rights Act in 1965, like Houston, Austin Texas has not made it

through a single decade without a federal court admonishing it for violating federal protections for voters of color.

State Senator Joan Huffman (R-Houston) leads the chamber’s redistricting committee and authored Senate Bill 6, which contains the proposed Congressional maps. She said the maps comply with the Voting Rights

Act. So, did she use this loophole to edge out minorities?

Census data shows Black, Hispanic, and Asian residents made up 95% of Texas’ population growth since the last time maps were drawn in 2011.

After Black and Hispanic Texans voted in record numbers during the 2020 presi-

GOP cont’d page 4

My grandmother always said, when a man closes his eyes, his debts are paid. And in the case of George Floyd, his death was the ultimate price paid for the advancement of African Americans for years to come. Now, as repayment – even though there could never really be one – the world owes him the honor of allowing him to rest in peace.

Unfortunately, certain people still living in their version of a racist AmeriKKKa are adamant on trying to dishonor his legacy.

First, the family has to rely on Gov. Greg Abbott to grant Floyd clemency on what could possibly be a bogus drug conviction initiated by a crooked cop.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended Monday that Floyd receive a posthumous full pardon for a 2004 drug charge he received in Houston.

The 7-0 decision comes five months after Houston public defender Allison Mathis sent in an application for George Floyd clemency for Floyd, whose 2020 cont’d page 3

“OUR VOTE AND OUR MONEY ARE THE TWO MOST POWERFUL THINGS WE HAVE. BE CAREFUL WHO YOU GIVE THEM TO.” - ROY DOUGLAS MALONSON

2 AFRAMNEWS.COM

October 10, 2021

EDITORIAL

President/Chief Editor

Tristar

Griselda Ramirez: Production

News:

A Revival of God

Consciousness Bobby E. Mills, PhD

Office: (713) 692-1892 Wednesday – Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

GREATER HOUSTON EDITION

Useful Idiots For ungodly reasons too many Americans are losing their ability to critically think and analyze. Consequently, these individuals are becoming useful idiots who allow others to do their thinking, and that’s a dangerous proposition.

God has spiritually admonished all individuals to not allow confused-sinful minds to make you a Useful Idiot, because: “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The loss of critical thinking skills engenders emotional-irrationality as well as the desire to possess undeserved external power. Question: is this why the GOP has lost its way (moral compass)?

Power for the sake of power is insanity to the nth degree! Historically, there have been numerous religious useful idiots. For example, Adam and

Eve’s disobedience of God’s spiritual command. Cain’s killing of his brother Abel: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ with an ungodly kiss on the cheek for thirty pieces of silver.

Delilah’s betrayal of Sampson for money and power by opening up a barbershop, and giving Sampson an ungodly haircut, and of course, Sampson’s betrayal of God and himself by walking by sight, and not FAITH. Modern day Useful Idiots: (a) Benedict Arnold who betrayed America during the Revolutionary War, (b) General Michael Flynn who betrayed America for a Russian Oligarch, power, money and misguided loyalty to a want-to-bedictator (POTUS #45).

And, POTUS #45 who sought to destroy American democracy for power and selfaggrandizement on January 6.

The greatest power in the world is the power that exists within individuals (GOD/ TRUTH), and their ability to resist the ungodly impulses of becoming a Useful Idiot. America, if we can truthfully and honestly talk about Biblical characters who were

Useful Idiots, because of lies and sin why then can’t we study and spiritually understand the original sin of America (Critical Race Theory)?

Christian Right Evangelicals have become Useful Idiots for the promotion of White Privilege for other Useful Idiots who substitute one sin for another sin across Christian Pulpits. Sin is sin, and God hates sin.

There is no competition between God and individuals. How and why did the GOP allow themselves to become Useful Idiots for White Privilege: PMS (Power, Money and Sex)? White Nationalists are simply Useful Idiots who are “looking for something for nothing”, and we all know, that work is a spiritual commandment from GOD; by the sweat of your brow, not through the barrel of guns. Black individuals who seek power and money by betraying God, self and community are the most ungodly/despicable Useful Idiots, because they are willing to be used by powerful Whites to promote White Privilege (exclusion) against themselves.

For more visit aframnews.com

Partin’ the Waters

By Omowale Luthuli-Allen

We are Better Than This Isabelle Allende tells the story of the fight against dehumanization and enslavement in one of the greatest books of our time, “Island beneath the Sea.” The setting is Saint Domingue-18th century, now known as Haiti.

At one time Haiti was the richest colony on the planet, primarily because of the brutal theft of the labor of the black enslaved people. Haiti and the islands of the Caribbean were part of the dreaded “middle passage”. 20 million or more black people were exploited in this holocaust.

Those that did not perish on the journey ended up producing sugar cane, rum, cotton and tobacco.

France, the mother country felt that God had given Frenchmen the right to be masters and God had ordained the “children of Cain” to be enslaved.

Haitians

broke this curse by launching a bloody revolution that led to the total elimination of slavery and rule by blacks and non-whites. It was the largest slave revolt since Spartacus’s unsuccessful revolt against the Roman republic.

Furthermore, if the Haitians had not defeated Napoleon and his goons, we would probably be speaking French rather than English from the Mississippi to the Pacific. We remember this from our American History class.

Two weeks ago, we were distressed by witnessing the border agent on horseback using a whip to drive the Haitians back across the Rio Grande. After a two thousand mild journey mostly on foot, pregnant women, families and children braving venomous snakes and bandits, the Haitians are turned away.

They fled a country that sat on a major earthquake fault line and political instability as evidenced by a recent presidential assassination and calamitous earthquakes in 2010 and 2021.

For more visit aframnews.com

GREATER HOUSTON EDITION George Floyd cont’d death during an arrest in Minneapolis set off national protests about police violence.

Mathis claims that the officer who arrested Floyd in 2004 fabricated evidence in the case.

Now here’s the bizarre backstory...

In 2004, Floyd was arrested by former Houston police officer Gerald Goines for selling $10 worth of crack cocaine.

Officer Goines has since been indicted for murder and other misconduct charges after he led a “noknock” raid in 2019 that resulted in the death of Houston couple Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas.

Prosecu-

tors have accused Goines of lying to obtain the warrant for the raid.

As a result of the criminal investigation into Goines, his arrest cases were reviewed, and more than 160 of his convictions have been dismissed.

If anyone has been following the Goines case, you will remember that he and his partner are labeled in the streets as the

October 10, 2021 “crooked cop duo” called “Batman and Robin.” A social media search will pull up a laundry list of accusations and stories from people who claimed to have encountered them.

As for Floyd, Gov. Abbott must either approve or reject the state board’s decision.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg released a statement saying her of-

fice “laments the loss of former Houstonian George Floyd and hope that his family finds comfort in Monday’s decision.... and the DA is urging Governor Abbott to follow the Board’s recommendation and grant clemency.”

Adding more insult to Floyd’s legacy.

This week, a 10-foottall bronze sculpture of Floyd stood prominently in New York City’s Union Square for just two days before a vandal splattered grayish-blue paint down the bust.

This is the second time the artwork has been defaced. On June 24, five days after it was displayed in

AFRAMNEWS.COM 3 Brooklyn, the sculpture was vandalized with black paint and tagged with an alleged logo for a White supremacist group.

Chris Carnabuci, the artist, said the latest malicious act, while upsetting and disappointing, “didn’t come as a complete surprise.”

As outlined in the Washington Post, security footage shows a man holding a skateboard and loitering behind the statue last Sunday. At about 10:15 a.m., the man is seen mixing paint behind the bust, getting on his skateboard and throwing it onto the structure as he skates

away. Bystanders immediately jumped into action. By the time Confront Art co-founder Andrew Cohen arrived, five people were already restoring it.

Several other Floyd murals and tributes have been vandalized since the 46-year-old Black man was killed.

Murals in Rochester, Minn.; Minneapolis; Houston; and Portland, Ore., as well as several other cities, have been defaced.

At Duke University in March, someone printed out the toxicology report from Floyd’s autopsy and posted it next to a mural on campus. - AANI

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4 AFRAMNEWS.COM GOP cont’d dential election, the new congressional map gives the Texas GOP a way to give Republicans the upper hand.

The proposal was approved late Monday by a vote of 2011 and would draw safe districts for GOP incumbents who were facing competitive races as their districts diversified in recent years and started voting for more Democrats.

Under the current congressional map: - 22 districts have white majorities - 8 districts have Hispanic majorities - 1 district has a Black majority - 5 districts have no majority Under the proposed congressional map: - 23 districts have a white majority - 7 districts have a Hispanic majority - 0 districts have a Black majority - 8 districts have no majority The current 36-seat congressional delegation is made up of 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats. According to the Texas Tribune, 22 seats voted for Trump while 14 voted for President Biden during the 2020 presidential election.

Under the new congressional map, two new districts were made in Houston and Austin, bringing the total amount of districts to 38.

The two largest Texas cities have the most diverse population and have contributed to the majority of the state’s population growth.

October 10, 2021 The growth in diverse populations threatened to tilt the historically red state to blue.

The new congressional map places Houston incumbents into districts that overlap each other, such as Houston Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw against Democrat Rep. Sylvia Garcia.

Democrat Reps. Al Green and Sheila Jackson Lee are the most negatively impacted as the new lines will have them overlapping the same district.

Jackson Lee represents District 18, once represented by Barbara Jordan, who in 1972 became the first Black Texan elected to Congress after Reconstruction. The current proposal moves downtown Houston, the Third Ward, Texas Southern University, the University of Houston and Jackson Lee’s own home out of the 18th District.

“The 18th [District] has been surgically, erroneously and unconstitutionally, under federal law, been drawn incorrectly,” Jackson Lee said.

Green noted that the proposed plan would put his

office in the 29th Congressional District, his home in the 9th and a “good deal” of his constituents divided between the two.

“It doesn’t look right for the only two persons in the state of Texas to be running against each other in a congressional district from the same party to be of African ancestry,” said Rep. Green.

Huffman feels the redrawing was fair.

“As proposed, both CD 9 and CD 18 comply with the Voting Rights Act,” said Sen. Huffman. “In fact, Black citizen voting age population increases and continues to give Black voters the opportunity to elect the candidates of their choice.”

Disagreeing, Jackson Lee and Green released the following joint statement.

“The extreme racial gerrymandering that the Senate is proposing makes it clear that

GREATER HOUSTON EDITION they have no desire to follow the basic tenets of map drawing by ensuring our maps illustrate one person, one vote and do not discriminate. In this map, white voters are given all of the power. The plan submitted for the 9th and the 18th by this Texas Senate conspicuously undermines those constitutional premises of anti-discrimination.

It denies our constituents their right to vote for a person of their choosing.

In fact, it technically eliminates both of our districts, violating traditional redistricting principles by changing the core of our districts and dividing important communities of in-

terest…This map takes aim at Black voters and seeks to minimize their voting strength. Though we don’t have a viable section 5 at this time, it is our firm belief that these actions are not only prohibited by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act but also Section 2 as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is further clear that this action shows us why we must pass legislation immediately to restore Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act so that anti-Black official actions

GOP cont’d page 5

GREATER HOUSTON EDITION GOP cont’d cannot continue to run rampant around us. We will go to court, engage in direct action or take any and all available legal avenues to ensure that the people of the 9th and 18th are restored their full citizenship rights.

We are saddened that the State Senate would choose to so conspicuously racialize the question of representation under the existing Voting Rights Act and under the United States Constitution.

We will continue to stand against such dysfunction. Now we understand what SB7 was all about, denying the right to vote.”

The Senate Redistricting Committee passed the Congressional map on Monday, moving it to the entire Senate for approval.

Mark Jones, a professor at the Rice University Baker Institute for Public Policy, said Huffman made a symbolic misstep.

“I mean, the symbolic aspect is that you should never have a member of Congress be drawn out of their district if you can avoid it. And that was just a lack of care.

Now, while they did draw out some areas, it is important to note that they gave them to Sylvia Garcia, who is the one Latino representative from the

Houston area.

Although I can see why Congressman Green and Congresswoman Jackson Lee really are upset because their districts were shuffled up more than they have been in the past, and areas that they used to represent, they no longer represent.

But especially for two of our only three African American members of Congress can be especially upsetting because of the important role they play in representing African Americans, not just here in the Houston area, but throughout the state,” Jones told TexasStandard.org.

Huffman’s proposal added no additional districts where people of color would represent a majority of the district’s eligible voters, even as Black, Hispanic and Asian Texans drove 95% of the state’s growth since the last census. Hispanics, in particular, were responsible for half of the increase of nearly 4 million people in the state’s population and now nearly match the number of white Texans in the state.

Domingo Garcia, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, disagreed.

“This map is clearly gerrymandered by politicians to protect incumbents and totally discriminate against Hispanic voters,” Garcia said. “LULAC has

October 10, 2021 filed suit against the state of Texas every 10 years since 1970 and we’ve prevailed every 10 years. Unless there’s new maps drawn, we expect we will wind up in federal court again.”

Hispanics, who make up the largest portion of Dallas’ population and are the largest minority group in Tarrant, did not get a majority-Hispanic district in the region.

Instead, their population was split between the 32nd Congressional District represented by Allred, the 30th Congressional District represented

by U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson and the 33rd Congressional District represented by Marc Veasey — solidly Democratic districts.

“That protects the Anglo incumbents like Van Duyne and Kay Granger whose districts were trending Democrat and have been fighting off Latino and Latina challengers,” Garcia explained.

The new 37th Congressional District will consolidate central and west Austin, somewhat resembling a district longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett held until Republicans dismantled it in 2003.

It was not immediately clear whether he would run in that district or continue to serve in the 35th Congressional District, which stretches down to Bexar County. Back then, Republicans aimed to dilute the liberal Austin vote, split up into several congressional districts, several of which had otherwise rural populations.

Republicans sought to bolster nearby Republicans by packing Democratic U.S. Rep. Colin Allred’s district with

AFRAMNEWS.COM 5 Democrats, all but assuring a Democrat will hold his seat for years to come.

To his west, Republican U.S. Rep. Beth Van Duyne’s seat flipped from a district Biden carried by nearly 6 points in 2020 to what would have been a solid 12-point Trump district. In 2020, Democrats heavily targeted Van Duyne and several other Republican seats.

Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas NAACP, called the proposal a major step backward.

“The proposed map vastly diminishes the voting strength of minorities all around the state by either packing them

into districts already electing minority candidates of choice or cracking them by pushing them into districts dominated by conservative white voters,” he said. “As the state has garnered two new congressional seats on the backs of its minority population, it has sought to put forth a proposed congressional map that is clearly retrogressive.

Huffman insisted that she’s drawn the maps “blind to race.”

“I have followed the law, I have drawn blind to race, I believe the maps I’ve drawn are compliant under the Voting Rights Act,” she said.

What do you think?

Have we been set up? - AANI

6 AFRAMNEWS.COM

A/C & HEATING

October 10, 2021

GREATER HOUSTON EDITION

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• CSP # 766 – Roof Replacement North Harris – Applied Technology Center. Bids due 11/5/21 by 11:00 AM. Mandatory Site Visit, 10/19/21 at 10:00 AM, North Harris Campus – Outside ATC Building, 2700 W.W. Thorne, Houston, TX 77073.

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