By Rosetta Miller-Perry The current Tennessee state legislature, with its white GOP racist supermajorities in both houses, continues through its actions and attitudes to demonstrate contempt for Black voters and their elected representatives. Last week they introduced three resolutions to formally expel Reps. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville, Justin Jones of Nashville, and Justin Pearson of Memphis. They claimed these three legislators were leading “an insurrection,” and that they were more interested in getting arrested and making a spectacle than in conducting legislative business. But the racist legislators in question did nothing more than aid demonstrators in protesting the lack of action…
Author: Rosetta Miller Perry
By Rosetta Miller-Perry The horrendous mass shooting Monday at the Covenant Church and private school made Nashville the latest city to suffer the worse nightmare of innocent children and adults being brutally murdered by an armed killer and shockingly a female. But what too many people in this nation, Tennessee and Nashville do not want to admit or acknowledge, is that pro-gun policies are responsible for all these tragedies. These policies kill our children and adults. Remember, 348,000 students have experienced gun violence in school in this nation since Columbine. Republican legislators not only in Tennessee but nearly half of…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry In another blatant vicious act of racism and cowardice, some white Tennessee Republicans are considering leaving federal dollars meant for Tennessee students on the table all because these children are not white. Remember there are 50 states and the District of Columbia and Tennessee ranks shamefully #48! The Volunteer State is one of 15 states with the lowest graduation rates at 87%, again we rank shamefully 48 out of 50. Why do some Republicans hate Tennessee students of color so much that they would reject federal dollars? Do they not have children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren who…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry “Man, I was hitting him with straight haymakers, dog,” a cop can be heard saying as his bodycam footage rolled. It went on that way for about twenty minutes, with multiple officers milling around and discussing their beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, who was then laying on the ground against a car. The usual narratives are in play: he should have complied (he did), he shouldn’t have run (it didn’t justify being beaten anyway), the officers feared for their lives. But it was Tyre Nichols’s life that was truly in danger. Upon viewing bodycam…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry Unless you are old enough to remember the 50s and 60s, then such names as George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Ross Barnett, Richard Russell, or Strom Thurmond (before he switched parties) won’t mean anything. But to those of us who are veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and those of us who were living in that time, these people were the embodiment of legislative racism. They were governors and/or legislators who actively aided, endorsed and were advocates of Jim Crow laws, preventing Blacks from voting, protecting criminals including people who participated in murder and lynching, and being both…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry If he had not been struck down by a racist assassin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 94 this year, born January 15, 1929. But as the nation begins its annual celebration of his birthday which became a national holiday in 1993, the Tennessee Tribune feels it is more than appropriate to ask this simple question: what would Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. think if he were alive today? I think he’d be happy at the incremental progress that Black Americans have made in the decades since his death. There are more Black…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry Looking back on 2022, it was a year marked by both triumph and heartbreak for Black Americans, as well as all people of color and poor folks. This nation makes glacial progress in the areas of social justice and economic opportunity, while constantly being negatively affected by those in power who continually seek to turn back the clock, most notably led by the Tennessee Congressional delegation in Washington. This group remains determined to make Tennessee the new Mississippi, championing ideas and measures that are repressive, backward, and hate-filled, while also consistently displaying in their public discourse an…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry NASHVILLE, TN — Through politics, some citizens make decisions but there are far too many white men who have political and personal power and control the lives of many US citizens as they gain the ability to influence people so that they will have more material wealth. Politics is supposed to be about public service, yet far too many politicians serve in their own narrow ideologies to increase their bank accounts. We have a group of elected officials in Washington, as well as our governor, who believe that they were elected to be acolytes and…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry Black voters in Georgia, along with young people and some enlightened whites, prevented a disaster from happening last week in Atlanta. The Republican Party had enlisted the services of a former football hero turned disgraced front man in Herschel Walker to run for the Senate against the imminently more qualified Rev. Raphael Warnock. The GOP knew that no white man or woman was going to beat Warnock, so they decided to pick a totally inexperienced and unqualified Black front man to serve the same purpose: get Warnock out of office and put another Donald Trump sycophant in…
By Rosetta Miller Perry The calendar may say it’s 2022, but in the minds of some Tennessee Republican legislators it might as well be 1852 or 1962 in terms of how little regard they have for Black institutions and officials. A few days ago the state legislature held what amounted to the ugliest combination of a Salem witch trial and a kangaroo court in a situation where an HBCU that has historically been denied its rightful funding was now seeking legislative help for a crisis no one in or out of the state anticipated. Across the nation HBCU attendance is…