By Ben Jealous At the heart of the story that President Biden preserved last week by creating our newest national monument are a mother and son, Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till. That’s especially moving for me because so much of my understanding of what the Tills endured and why their story remains essential today comes from my own mom’s experiences. Like Emmett, she was in her early teens in 1955 and growing up in West Baltimore. The ritual he was taking part in by traveling from Chicago to Mississippi that summer was a universal one for Black kids living in…
Author: Ben Jealous
A growing chorus in Washington equates weaning our country off energy from killer fossil fuels to relying more heavily on new nuclear power plants. The same debates are happening in state capitals from Richmond to Raleigh, Springfield to Sacramento. This chorus distracts from the real work ahead of ensuring clean, renewable, affordable energy for every community. The risk of nuclear energy is an easy dividing line. To opponents, names like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are all the evidence we need that a catastrophic event is unavoidable and unacceptable. For supporters, those events are a sign that disasters are…
Tatum is an East Texas town of about 1,300 people, closer to Shreveport than Dallas. It’s on the north shore of Martin Lake. Across the water sits a coal-fired power plant named after the lake that happens to be the single largest sulfur dioxide polluter in the United States. Paulette Goree, who has lived in the area her entire life, gets a daily reminder of the Martin Lake Power Plant. “I use a personal air monitor every day to figure out if I should spend much time outdoors.” She thinks the air pollution contributed to the deaths of family members…
Thirty years ago, my university suspended me for leading a protest against a research lab that the school wanted to put in the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated. The plans ignored both that history and the neighbors in Harlem who would be exposed to risks from biomedical and environmental waste. I spent months crisscrossing the country speaking out against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for the Student Environmental Action Coalition. Our message was simple – killing jobs and the environment were far too high a price to pay to boost regional trade. They called us Chicken…
How long do you think it would take to overlook the worst offshore oil spill in history, one that lasted 87 days during which 4 million barrels spewed into the Gulf of Mexico? Recent moves by the federal government point to the answer being 13 years. On April 20, two days before Earth Day, we’ll mark the 13th anniversary of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off the coast of Louisiana that killed 11 workers and started an ecological disaster that lasted longer than the nearly three months as oil poured into the sea. Despite billions directed at…
By Benjamin Jealous Vice President Kamala Harris is sure to be remembered every March in Women’s History Month as the first woman and the first person of color to serve our nation in that position. As notable as those two facts are, she may grow to be known just as much for a single vote in the Senate that helped save the planet. Last August, she broke the 50-50 deadlock between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. That historic package, along with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Harris had crisscrossed the country…
By Ben Jealous People around East Palestine, Ohio, have been warned not to run their vacuum cleaners. That was the reality two weeks after a train derailment in the village of about 4,700 people near the border with Pennsylvania that damaged public health and the environment in ways that still aren’t fully known. Pennsylvania’s health department has told residents that data from its air quality monitoring “do not indicate a potential for long-term health effects,” but if people choose to vacuum after their evacuation they should do so “small amounts at a time and take frequent breaks by walking outdoors.”…
By Ben Jealous Back in August, I wrote that getting “back-to-school” this year would also mean getting back to fighting far-right attacks on education. The threats included a rising number of efforts to ban books, and the Right’s efforts to take over local school boards. So how did the Right do in this fall’s school board elections? Well, as in Congress, there was no conservative “Red Wave.” However, the Right did score just enough wins to keep coming back. And the groups behind those wins are promising to do just that. According to news reports, about half the candidates endorsed…
By Ben Jealous When Charles Diggs, Jr., won election to Congress in Michigan’s 13th District in 1954, he launched nearly seven decades in which the city of Detroit had at least one Black member of Congress. That’s likely to change this year. Because of redistricting, Detroit no longer has majority-Black congressional districts. And in the first primary election with newly drawn district lines, a Black candidate did not win the Democratic contest in the heavily Democratic 13th. That means the city is likely to lack Black representation in Congress for the first time in decades. Redistricting is robbing Black candidates and…
By Ben Jealous Did you ever wonder whether elections really matter? Well, the Trump Supreme Court majority has answered that question for good. Or, more accurately, they have answered it for bad. In the term that has just ended, the new far right-wing majority on the Supreme Court went on a rampage. They have torn up decades of legal precedent to diminish Americans’ rights and legal protections. To justify the results they wanted, they lied in their rulings the way some of them lied to get on the court. It has been a shameful display of power politics disguised as judging.…