black community

As President Trump declared Washington, D.C., a crime-ridden wasteland in need of federal intervention last week and threatened similar actions in other Black-led cities, several mayors compared notes.

The president’s characterization of their cities contradicts what they began noticing last year: that they were seeing a drop in violent crime after a pandemic-era spike. In some cases the declines were monumental, due in large part to more youth engagement, gun buyback programs and community partnerships.

Now members of the African American Mayors Assn. are determined to stop Trump from burying accomplishments that they already believed were overlooked. And they’re using the administration’s unprecedented law enforcement takeover in the nation’s capital as an opportunity to disprove his narrative about some of the country’s greatest urban enclaves.

“It gives us an opportunity to say we need to amplify our voices to confront the rhetoric that crime is just running rampant around major U.S. cities. It’s just not true,” said Van Johnson, mayor of Savannah, Ga., and president of the African American Mayors Assn. “It’s not supported by any evidence or statistics whatsoever.”

Trump has deployed the first of 800 National Guard members to the nation’s capital, and at his request, the Republican governors of three states pledged hundreds more Saturday. West Virginia said it was sending 300 to 400 Guard troops, South Carolina pledged 200, and Ohio said it would send 150 in the coming days, marking a significant escalation of the federal intervention.

Beyond Washington, the Republican president is setting his sights on other cities including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Oakland, calling them crime-ridden and “horribly run.” One thing they all have in common: They’re led by Black mayors.

“It was not lost on any member of our organization that the mayors either were Black or perceived to be Democrats,” Johnson said. “And that’s unfortunate. For mayors, we play with whoever’s on the field.”

The federal government’s actions have heightened some of the mayors’ desires to champion the strategies used to help make their cities safer.

Some places are seeing dramatic drops in crime rates

Trump argued that federal law enforcement had to step in after a prominent employee of his White House advisory team known as the Department of Government Efficiency was attacked in an attempted carjacking. He also pointed to homeless encampments, graffiti and potholes as evidence of Washington “getting worse.”

But statistics published by Washington’s Metropolitan Police contradict the president and show violent crime has dropped there since a post-pandemic-emergency peak in 2023.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson scoffed at Trump’s remarks, hailing the city’s “historic progress driving down homicides by more than 30% and shootings by almost 40% in the last year alone.”

Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, where homicides fell 14% from 2023 to 2024, called the federal takeover in District of Columbia a performative “power grab.”

In Baltimore, officials say they have seen historic decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings this year, and those have been on the decline since 2022, according to the city’s public safety data dashboard. Carjackings were down 20% in 2023, and other major crimes fell in 2024. Only burglaries have climbed slightly.

The lower crime rates are attributed to tackling violence with a “public health” approach, city officials say. In 2021, under Mayor Brandon Scott, Baltimore created a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan that called for more investment in community violence intervention, more services for crime victims and other initiatives.

Scott accused Trump of exploiting crime as a “wedge issue and dog whistle” rather than caring about curbing violence.

“He has actively undermined efforts that are making a difference saving lives in cities across the country in favor of militarized policing of Black communities,” Scott said via email.

The Democratic mayor pointed out that the Justice Department has slashed more than $1 million in funding this year that would have gone toward community anti-violence measures. He vowed to keep on making headway regardless.

“We will continue to closely work with our regional federal law enforcement agencies, who have been great partners, and will do everything in our power to continue the progress despite the roadblocks this administration attempts to implement,” Scott said.

Oakland officials this month touted significant decreases in crime in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2024, including a 21% drop in homicides and a 29% decrease in all violent crime, according to the midyear report by the Major Cities Chiefs Assn. Officials credited collaborations with community organizations and crisis response services through the city’s Department of Violence Prevention, established in 2017.

“These results show that we’re on the right track,” Mayor Barbara Lee said at a news conference. “We’re going to keep building on this progress with the same comprehensive approach that got us here.”

After the president gave his assessment of Oakland last week, Lee, a steadfast Trump antagonist during her years in Congress, rejected it as “fearmongering.”

Social justice advocates agree that crime has gone down and say Trump is perpetuating exaggerated perceptions that have long plagued Oakland.

Nicole Lee, executive director of Urban Peace Movement, an Oakland-based organization that focuses on empowering communities of color and young people through initiatives such as leadership training and assistance to victims of gun violence, said much credit for the gains on lower crime rates is due to community groups.

“We really want to acknowledge all of the hard work that our network of community partners and community organizations have been doing over the past couple of years coming out of the pandemic to really create real community safety,” Lee said. “The things we are doing are working.”

She worries that an intervention by military troops would undermine that progress.

“It creates kind of an environment of fear in our community,” she said.

Patrols and youth curfews

In Washington, agents from multiple federal agencies, National Guard members and even the United States Park Police have been seen performing law enforcement duties including patrolling the National Mall and questioning people parked illegally.

Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said the National Guard troops will not be armed, but he declined to elaborate on their assignments to safety patrols and beautification efforts.

Savannah’s Johnson said he is all for partnering with the federal government, but troops on city streets is not what he envisioned. Instead, he said, cities need federal assistance for things like multistate investigation and fighting problems such as gun trafficking and cybercrime.

“I’m a former law enforcement officer. There is a different skill set that is used for municipal law enforcement agencies than the military,” Johnson said.

There has also been speculation that federal intervention could entail curfews for young people.

But that would do more harm, Lee said, disproportionately affecting young people of color and wrongfully assuming that youths are the main instigators of violence.

“If you’re a young person, basically you can be cited, criminalized, simply for being outside after certain hours,” she said. “Not only does that not solve anything in regard to violence and crime, it puts young people in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.”

A game of wait-and-see

For now, Johnson said, the mayors are closely watching their counterpart in Washington, Muriel Bowser, to see how she navigates the unprecedented federal intervention. She has been walking a fine line between critiquing and cooperating since Trump’s takeover, but things ramped up Friday when officials sued to block the administration’s naming its Drug Enforcement Administration chief as an “emergency” head of the police force. The administration soon backed away from that move.

Johnson praised Bowser for carrying on with dignity and grace.

“Black mayors are resilient. We are intrinsically children of struggle,” Johnson said. “We learn to adapt quickly, and I believe that we will and we are.”

Tang writes for the Associated Press.

There were three television characters who really mattered to me as a kid: Michael, Leroy and Theo.

In elementary school, “Good Times” was the television show that most closely resembled my family. And seeing reruns of Ralph David Carter’s portrayal of a precocious young boy learning what it means to be poor, gifted and Black is what moved his Michael from fiction to family for me.

By middle school, I was no longer wearing cornrows like Gene Anthony Ray, but I tried everything else to be like his character Leroy from the television show “Fame.” For some of my classmates, the performing arts were a fun way to express themselves, and the show was inspirational. For me, it was my way out of the hood, and Leroy was the blueprint. Through the Detroit-Windsor Dance Academy, I was able to take professional dance lessons for free and ultimately earned a dance scholarship for college.

But it wasn’t a linear journey. Despite being gifted, I struggled academically and required summer classes to graduate from high school. That’s why I connected with Theo, whose challenges in the classroom were one of the running jokes on “The Cosby Show.” The family never gave up on him, and more importantly, he didn’t stop trying.

Through the jokes about his intelligence, the coming-of-age miscues (and the dyslexia diagnosis), the storylines of Theo — like those of Leroy and Michael — often reflected struggles I foolishly thought no one else was experiencing when I was growing up. It is only through distance and time are we able to see moments like those more clearly. In retrospect, the three of them were like knots I held onto on a rope I had no idea I was climbing.

This is why the Black community’s response to the death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner this week isn’t solely rooted in nostalgia but also in gratitude. We recognize the burden he’s been carrying, so that others could climb.

When “The Cosby Show” debuted in 1984, there were no other examples of a successful two-parent Black family on air. We were on television but often trauma and struggle — not love and support — were at the center of the narratives. So even though Black women had been earning law degrees since the 1800s — beginning with Charlotte E. Ray in 1872 — and Black men were becoming doctors before that, the initial response from critics was that the show’s premise of a doctor-and-lawyer Black couple was not authentically Black.

That narrow-minded worldview continued to hang over Hollywood despite the show’s success. In 1992, after nearly 10 years of “The Cosby Show” being No. 1 — and after the success of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Coming to America” — the Eddie Murphy-led project “Boomerang” was panned as unrealistic because the main characters were all Black and successful. The great Murphy took on the Los Angeles Times directly in a letter for its critique on what Black excellence should look like.

However, Black characters like Michael, Leroy and Theo had been taking on the media since the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” painted all of us as threats in 1915. It could not have been easy for Warner, being the face of so much for so many at an age when a person is trying to figure out who he is. And because he was able to do so with such grace, Warner’s Theo defined Blackness simply by being what the world said we were not. This sentiment is embodied in his last interview, when he answered the question of his legacy by saying: “I will be able to leave this Earth knowing and people knowing that I was a good person.”

In the end, that is ultimately what made his character, along with Leroy and Michael, so important to the Black community. It wasn’t the economic circumstances or family structure of the sitcoms that they all had in common. It was their refusal to allow the ugliness of this world to tear them down. To change their hearts or turn their light into darkness. They maintained their humanity and in the process gave so many of us a foothold to keep climbing higher.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The NAACP filed an intent to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI on Tuesday over concerns about air pollution generated by a supercomputer near predominantly Black communities in Memphis.

The xAI data center began operating last year, powered by pollution-emitting gas turbines, without first applying for a permit. Officials have said an exemption allowed them to operate for up to 364 days without a permit, but Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Patrick Anderson said at a news conference that there is no such exemption for turbines — and that regardless, it has now been more than 364 days.

The SELC is representing the NAACP in its legal challenge against xAI and its permit application, now being considered by the Shelby County Health Department.

Musk’s xAI said the turbines will be equipped with technology to reduce emissions — and that it’s already boosting the city’s economy by investing billions of dollars in the supercomputer facility, paying millions in local taxes and creating hundreds of jobs. The company also is spending $35 million to build a power substation and $80 million to build a water recycling plant to the support Memphis Light, Gas and Water, the local utility.

Opponents say the supercomputing center is stressing the power grid, and that the turbines emit smog and carbon dioxide, pollutants that cause lung irritation such as nitrogen oxides, and the carcinogen formaldehyde, experts say.

The chamber of commerce in Memphis made a surprise announcement in June 2024 that xAI planned to build a supercomputer in the city. The data center quickly set up shop in an industrial park south of Memphis, near factories and a gas-powered plant operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The SELC has claimed the use of the turbines violates the Clean Air Act, and that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks at four times the national average. The group also has sent a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Critics say xAI installed the turbines without any oversight or notice to the community. The SELC also hired a firm to fly over the site and saw that 35 turbines — not 15 as the company requests in its permit — are located there.

The permit itself says emissions from the site “will be an area source for hazardous air pollutants.” A permit would allow the health department, which has received 1,700 public comments about the permit, to monitor air quality near the facility.

At a community gathering hosted by the county health department in April, many of the people speaking in opposition cited the additional pollution burden in a city that already received an “F” grade for ozone pollution from the American Lung Association.

A statement read by xAI’s Brent Mayo at the meeting said the company wants to “strengthen the fabric of the community,” and estimated that tax revenues from the data center are likely to exceed $100 million by next year.

“This tax revenue will support vital programs like public safety, health and human services, education, firefighters, police, parks and so much more,” said the statement, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press.

The company also apparently wants to expand: The chamber of commerce said in March that xAI had purchased a 1-million-square-foot property at a second location, not far from the current facility.

One nearby neighborhood dealing with decades of industrial pollution is Boxtown, a tight-knit community founded by freed slaves in the 1860s. It was named Boxtown after residents used material dumped from railroad boxcars to fortify their homes. The area features houses, wooded areas and wetlands, and its inhabitants are mostly working-class residents.

Boxtown won a victory in 2021 against two corporations that sought to build an oil pipeline through the area. Valero and Plains All American Pipeline canceled the project after protests by residents and activists led by State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who called it a potential danger to the community and an aquifer that provides clean drinking water to Memphis.

Pearson, who represents nearby neighborhoods, said “clean air is a human right” as he called for people in Memphis to unite against xAI.

“There is not a person, no matter how wealthy or how powerful, that can deny the fact that everybody has a right to breathe clean air,” said Pearson, who compared the fight against xAI to David and Goliath.

“We’re all right to be David, because we know how the story ends,” he said.

Sainz writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Travis Loller contributed to this report from Nashville, Tenn.

Heading into the final stretch of the 2024 election, it seemed every cable news program had a segment dedicated to this one question: What will Black men do?

Progressives on the ground were voicing concerns about Black male voter turnout long before the 2022 midterms. But because the overturning of Roe vs. Wade enabled Democrats to avoid a “red wave” then, the urgency regarding Black men was muted. That quickly changed once former Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee and media personalities such as Stephen A. Smith and Charlamagne tha God began questioning her qualifications without a hint of irony.

In the end, nearly 75% of Black men voted for Harris, and all of those cable news segments about the concerns of that voting bloc went away. That’s unfortunate because in many ways the question at the center of it all — “What will Black men do?” — is more relevant today than it was seven months ago. Since President Trump has retaken office, federal civil rights offices have been gutted, grants for minority business programs canceled and the names of enslavers are making a comeback on military bases. Cable news may be waiting until the next election to talk about the concerns of Black men, but the Black community can’t wait that long. Khalil Thompson and Bakari Sellers agree.

The pair are part of the leadership team for Win With Black Men, a political advocacy group that began in 2022. Thompson said he was inspired to start the group by Win With Black Women, which started after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Both organizations were key to jump-starting the enthusiasm for Harris, especially financially, with each raising millions of dollars within days of her campaign’s launch.

Now, with the election behind us and three years of a hostile White House administration ahead of us, Thompson’s group has announced an 18-city listening tour starting in July to strategize about ways to help the community outside of the political system. The goal is to reach 3,500 Black men in person and another 25,000 through a national survey in hopes of building a database to better serve the community. Thompson said it’s particularly important to keep people engaged now that the election is over because of how the White House continues to test the limits of both presidential power and the support from his party.

“There has to be a moment where right is right,” said Thompson, a former operative for President Obama. “We raise our children to understand the basic tenets of being a good person. … We need to build a system that can adequately accommodate and support the vast majority of people in this country who just want to enjoy this small amount of time we have on this planet. I see the protests happening and the raids and I’m reminded of Ruby Bridges or the lunch counter in Greensboro. What is happening now in our cities — ripping parents away from their children — doesn’t speak to our better angels.”

Sellers added: “Democracy is participatory, and a lot of time people forget that. The choices are to be on the sideline or get engaged — either way, you are involved.”

He made that choice at a young age, becoming the youngest Black person in elected state office across the country in 2006, as a 22-year-old state representative in South Carolina. His early social justice work echoes that of his father, Cleveland Sellers, who was part of the leadership for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement.

“I’d rather get in the fight, be knocked around a little bit, face terror head on, knowing I’m doing it for a just and righteous cause,” Sellers said.

Thompson said that in addition to engagement, Win With Black Men is looking to be a vessel for helping people financially with their utility and grocery bills, as the steep federal cuts and job losses threaten to send millions of Americans into poverty. The current fundraising goal is $2.5 million. And while the organization is nonpartisan, Sellers said a prominent Democrat is the unofficial North Star: “We need to get back to the politics of Jesse Jackson. Meet people where they are, focus on the working class and facilitate conversations that uplift people, not demean them.”

Few things are more demeaning than feeling like your voice matters only once every four years. If nothing else, this upcoming listening tour is a reminder to Democrats that Black men are more than a vote.

@LZGranderson