voice of experience
Sunday, December 31, 2023
Monday, January 2, 2023
Good-Bye to 2022!
Looking
back over the highlights of 2022 (some of which are captured in this
video) we now realize that, although we may have spent our time a little
differently, we never really slowed down. We are thankful for the
opportunity to keep up the pace. Here's wishing everyone the best in
2023!
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
After a Lifetime Together, Coronavirus Takes Them Both
Excerpted from an article published in The New York Times
Dr.
King died in early April at the age of 96 and was buried on April 10.
An hour after the graveside service, the couple’s son, Ron Loving, heard
his phone ring.
The call came from Arbor Terrace at Cascade,
the assisted living residence facility in Atlanta that Mr. Loving, 77,
had moved his parents into last summer: His mother had died, too.
“For
her to pass the day we lay my granddaddy to rest,” said their
granddaughter, Kristie Taylor, “it was like, ‘Wow, you two really were
inseparable.’”
The Kings both tested positive for Covid-19.
Lois
and Dee, as Dr. King was known to friends, met in 1960 at a cocktail
party in Chicago. She was 36, a dental hygienist and divorced mother
raised on a corn and tobacco farm in Ahoskie, N.C. He was a World War II
veteran who attended college and medical school after the war, and had
just completed a residency in surgical urology at Howard University
College of Medicine in Washington.
They were married within six months, and he quickly became a surrogate father, and then just a father, to Mr. Loving.
The
family moved to Tuskegee, Ala., where Dr. King worked at a V.A.
hospital, and then to Atlanta, where Dr. King began building a medical
practice in 1966.
Mrs.
King delighted in being a doctor’s wife, having supper on the table
when he arrived home, playing bridge and raising money for organizations
they both cared about, like the Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia,
which Dr. King helped found.
At
night they would watch “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,”
sitting in the built-in recliners at either end of their couch and
reaching their arms toward the middle, over the newspapers they had been
reading, to hold hands.
They
visited Barbados and Venezuela, traveled through the Panama Canal, and
took a cruise through Europe with their best friends, Dr. Clinton
E. Warner Jr. and Sally Warner. In the mid-90s, after Nelson Mandela
was elected president of South Africa, the two couples traveled there to
take part in the historic moment. The trip ended with a safari.
Dee,
who had majored in zoology as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve
University, loved the excursion. Lois, who longed for air-conditioning,
tolerated it.
“She
was very opinionated,” said Mrs. Warner, 73. “If Lois thought
something, she would say it. If Dee thought something, he would think
about it long and hard.”
The
Kings were part of Atlanta’s African-American professional elite. Their
social circle included Andrew Young, the former mayor and ambassador to
the United Nations. They celebrated the new year at the home of Billye and Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player and executive, who helped Dr. King raise money to fight sickle-cell anemia.
The
Kings’ son, Mr. Loving, an Army veteran and former Atlanta police
officer who had a long second career as a news cameraman for WXIA in
Atlanta, revered his parents.
His
wife, Freda Loving, remembers that when she and Ron began to date
seriously in 2012, he told her, “I want us to be like my mom and dad.”
As
the Kings slipped into old age, Lois developed dementia and Dee had
Parkinson’s disease. Their son visited them daily and arranged for
visiting nursing aides, so that his parents could keep living in their
house for as long as possible.
But
by last year, it was clear that it was no longer safe for them to live
independently. That’s when they moved into Arbor Terrace. “They were
still going to be together, that was the important thing.” Mr. Loving
said.
When
you are 77 and your parents are 96, Mr. Loving said, you know that
their deaths will come. But to lose them in such rapid succession, and
have the virus deny him the chance to comfort them at the end or give
them proper funerals to celebrate their lives, particularly his father’s career and civil rights achievements — he found that hard to cope with.
“This has been devastating,” Mr. Loving said.
Saturday, February 2, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
Bar Leaders Work for a More Representative and Accountable Judiciary.
By Katheryn Hayes Tucker
Daily Report
November 9, 2016
As leaders of the state's largest
African-American lawyers' groups, Holland & Knight partner Charles Johnson
III and AT&T in-house counsel Suzanne Ockleberry have been working for
decades to increase diversity in judicial elections and appointments. But a few
years ago, they began to see crucial gains being lost. African-American judges
in Atlanta and other cities were retiring and being replaced with whites. Some
cities had never had an African-American judge.
They started Advocacy for Action in 2013. This
year, they've begun to reverse the trend with elections and appointments of
diverse judges in different courts around the state.
Johnson, former president of the Gate City Bar
Association, and Ockleberry, former president of the Georgia Association of
Black Women Attorneys, brought luminaries from both groups together to take
action. Their first step was to talk.
They put their concerns and their case into a
letter—four pages single spaced—which the Daily Report published in 2012. They
gave it the headline: "Will the last African-American judge please turn
out the lights?"
They called it a crisis that fed on silence and
apathy. "The idea that the judiciary should reflect the best and brightest
legal minds, regardless of race, will be a quaint bygone idea," they
wrote. They quoted Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a
demand."
They issued a call to action. "The question
we must ask is what can we do, personally and as a community. The answer is we
must speak."
And speak they did—to community groups,
continuing legal education events, panel discussions and on social media. They
made their research and statistics available on their own website. They began a
targeted campaign to make people aware of the importance of electing
representative judges. They recorded videos and posted them on YouTube. They
encouraged sitting judges to stay in office long enough to open their seats in
an election, rather than allowing a governor to appoint a replacement. In some
instances, they targeted incumbents with opposition for re-election. They
helped fund campaigns through a political action committee and a private
corporation that could accept anonymous donations. They learned that plenty of
lawyers would gladly give up the tax deduction in exchange for not having to
publicly oppose a sitting judge. They recruited qualified minority lawyers to
seek judicial office either through election or appointment. And they
communicated with decision-makers to ensure that qualified diverse candidates
were included in consideration for appointments.
The process has not been easy. Last year, lawyers
involved with the group sued Gov. Nathan Deal to block his naming of three
white judges to fill three new positions on the Georgia Court of Appeals. They
lost. But they made their point nonetheless. This year, the governor named an
African-American judge to that court.
Last year, the group successfully lobbied the
Cobb County Superior Court for the appointment of an African-American woman as
chief magistrate judge. They backed an African-American woman appointed by the
governor to fill an open seat in Macon. And in this year's elections, Fulton
County Superior Court gained its first new African-American judges in many
years.
They measure their success in tiny increments.
"Every once in a while, I think we are
heard," said Johnson. "There is some heightened awareness of the
importance of voting, and of becoming informed about candidates. There is less
of a tendency to ignore these races. We've had something to do with that."
This work is not part of their day jobs,
Ockleberry noted. "We do this because we believe in our heart of hearts in
the mission of this organization," she said. "A more representative
and accountable judiciary is what we're seeking."
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Georgia Can Honor Dr. King's Legacy with a Simple Change to its Tax Code
By Charles S. Johnson
Originally Published March 31, 2018
Much attention is currently focused on the events which occurred fifty years ago, the last year in the life of Dr. of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the course of this year’s many commemorations, too little attention is focused on the causes to which he devoted his final year. There is a tendency to forget that, at the end of his life, Dr. King’s central message concerned the need for economic justice.
The rapid economic expansion which the United States experienced in the 1960s was not shared by all Americans. Throughout that decade, despite the gains brought about by the Civil Rights Movement, the rate of poverty among African-Americans remained at three times the rate experienced by white Americans.
By 1967, Dr. King had concluded that the Movement’s focus should expand from an emphasis on civil rights to a broader emphasis on human rights: that African Americans and other disinherited citizens would never achieve full citizenship until they attained economic security and, accordingly, that something must be done to focus the nation’s attention on the problems of poverty and economic inequality.
Toward the end of 1967, Dr. King announced his intention to lead a Poor People’s Campaign the following year. His plan was for thousands of poor people of all races and backgrounds to descend on the nation’s capital, to demand that government officials address the needs of the nation’s poor.
Dr.
King spent the early months of 1968 traveling around the country, generating
support for the Poor People’s Campaign. To illustrate the plight of the working
poor, he embraced the struggle of the sanitation workers in the City of Memphis
who were currently striking to demand better pay and working conditions.
The central demands of the Poor People’s Campaign were summarized in an “Economic Bill of Rights,” notably including the right to a meaningful job with a livable wage. In this most prosperous nation on earth, participants in the Poor People’s Campaign called on the nation to embrace a guaranteed annual income.
In the weeks following Dr. King’s death, a Committee of 100 began meeting with members of Congress and leaders of executive agencies to lobby for the Campaign’s demands. By May, thousands of the nation’s poor had begun to assemble in an encampment on the National Mall referred to as Resurrection City, and they began a series of demonstrations in support of the Economic Bill of Rights.
By the end of June, the inhabitants of Resurrection City had been evicted. Many of them continued to lobby for changes in federal policy, with modest results. Others went on to demonstrate at the Democratic and Republican conventions later that summer.
But the idea of supplementing the income of the nation’s poor, so prominently featured in the Economic Bill of Rights, did not die with the evacuation of Resurrection City. In one form or another, the idea continued to be discussed among policymakers at the highest level.
The year 1968 culminated with the election of President Richard Nixon and a renewed emphasis on economic approaches that were seen as conservative. While many conservative leaders recoiled at the idea of subsidizing the idle poor, many of them began to embrace the idea of finding a way to assist the working poor. A major concern arose as to the best way to encourage poor people to enter and remain in the workforce and thus reduce the number of families needing what was then referred to as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (“AFDC”). Some policymakers began to entertain the idea of a negative income tax, under which people with low incomes would receive money back from the government instead of paying taxes to the government.
Conservative economist Milton Friedman had proposed a negative income tax as a replacement for traditional welfare: giving to poor people cash which they could use as they saw fit, rather than giving them an array of welfare benefits. Friedman believed that such an approach would introduce a new level of simplicity, since it would be administered centrally by the IRS instead of many different organizations. Friedman’s approach included the introduction of new lower but graduated tax rates, such that taxpayers would lose benefits as their income rose, but they would always come out ahead with a higher earned income.
In 1971 President Nixon proposed a “Family Assistance Plan” welfare reform program including a negative income tax, guaranteeing money to families with children, with assistance payments declining as a function of earnings. Although Congress declined to adopt this measure, policymakers continued to experiment with a variety of tax-driven approaches to income maintenance. Senator Russell Long proposed a “work bonus” plan to supplement the wages of poor workers.
The Tax Reduction Act of 1975 introduced a “work bonus” plan but renamed it the Earned Income Tax Credit (“EITC), a temporary refundable tax credit for lower-income workers to offset the Social Security payroll tax and rising food costs. The EITC was made permanent in the Revenue Act of 1978.
The EITC is now seen by many as both an anti-poverty program and an alternative to welfare, because it incentivizes work. President Reagan described it as “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”
Recognizing that state and local taxes continue to disproportionately burden individuals with low and moderate income, twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have adopted some form of EITC, generally by matching the federal credit. These state credits provide a modest yet critical boost for taxpayers who already receive the federal EITC. State EITCs are typically claimed as a percentage of the federal credit’s value, ranging from a low of 3 percent in Montana to a high of 40 percent in Washington, D.C. Hawaii, Montana and South Carolina each enacted new EITCs in 2017.
The concept of an EITC has much in common with the proposals advanced by Dr. King in the last year of his life. In fact, the EITC improves on Dr. King’s proposal of a guaranteed annual income by directly encouraging workforce participation. Georgia, the home of Martin Luther King, is among the states that do not provide a state match to the federal EITC. By enacting its own EITC, Georgia can provide much-needed support for working families while honoring the legacy of one its prominent native sons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)