By E. Faye Williams
When one of the things you don’t have to do is go out to the office belonging to somebody else, you get a chance to be more observant of what’s going on around the world. One of the things I’ve noticed is the great effort to insult, discourage, even destroy Black women who’ve been most successful among us at doing their jobs! Though I’m not nearly as successful as some of them, I count myself among them; however, this article is not about me because I’m a Dick Gregory disciple. In my life, I’ve fought a lot of battles, some regretfully brought on by our own community, and while those can kill your spirit for a while, we have to continue fighting the most damaging challenges for our people who run into even bigger problems.
If you haven’t noticed, some of our best and brightest are under attack, and some of our own don’t understand what’s happening. There’s an organized effort to tear down so many Black women after the power we have shown so that we don’t just talk about making a difference, we do it!
In the last presidential election, we let it be known that we have power and we used it, making it clear Black women, with the help of a few others, intended to have a Black woman for our vice president, and through the collective power we have, Kamala Harris is our vice president. We then said — not we want, but we shall have a Black woman on the Supreme Court. Soon thereafter, Supreme Court Judge Katanji Brown Jackson became a member of the Supreme Court. We continued supporting Black women for high-level positions in many places and we got them. It didn’t go unnoticed that when we work together, we make things we want to happen.
Since our successes, the enemy noticed and began figuring out how to put an end to the power we exercised to get so many Black women in the high places they deserved to be. Dr. Claudine Gay became president of Harvard University. No Black woman had ever done that before — but as soon as she arrived there, some folk realized she was BLACK so she had to go! Fulton County, Ga., elected as their District Attorney Fani Willis. That was OK until she was in charge of trying the Orange Man for attempting to collect votes that were not rightly his! In D.C., the Orange Man came up against Judge Tanya Chutkan and she became the Orange Man’s enemy. Along came New York state Attorney General Letitia James. You know the story. He called her everything but a child of God, but she won the case against him!
Let’s go to a case in Baltimore, regarding former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. Her case involves the great work on her successfully making Baltimore police pay for the death of a young man named Freddie Gray while he was in police custody. I don’t have enough space to give you the full story, so I want to direct you to www.baltimore4homes.org to get the full story of why Marilyn was prosecuted. It was for doing her job too well!
We have an urgent need for you to go to the site, listen to Angela Rye, Tiffany Cross, et al., and sign the petition we need for an immediate pardon. She’s guilty of nothing more than having been a Black woman in a powerful position. The powers that be didn’t want her there. She’s scheduled to be punished with draconian years of imprisonment on May 23, 2024, for what is basically nothing. The Orange Man has over 90 charges, and he’s still walking free for years. Let’s use the power we have to free Marilyn and allow her to go on doing the great work she was doing.
Williams is president of The Dick Gregory Society (www.thedickgregorysociety.org).
