By Benjamin Todd Jealous

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to share the stage with America’s legendary television dad, Bill Cosby. In a town hall forum titled “About Our Children,” Cosby and I, along with comedian Paul Rodriguez and University of Wisconsin Professor Maria Cancian, discussed poverty, parenting and the American dream in front of a national audience, broadcast live on MSNBC.

I spoke about my childhood education, as a kid growing up in California. I explained that my county had multiple schools. One, across the county, had resources I needed, while the school closer to my home did not. Because of local zoning law I was assigned to the school closer to home. Even as a child, I knew that I needed to be at the better school. I put up such a fight about it that my parents simply found a way to put me on the bus to the other school. They bent the rules so that I could have a better education.

I shared this story because it is an important example of my family taking responsibility for my education. It is a lesson that I will never forget, and it most certainly put me on the path to where I am today. But the other reason that I chose this anecdote is that it underscores another important reality, one often lost in these discussions of individual responsibility. In order to take control of my education, my family actually had to defy the law. Families often face enormous structural barriers to success, barriers that can impede even the most conscientious, tenacious and, yes, responsible parents.

Here is one example: today black teen unemployment sits at a staggering 35 percent. Think about that figure for a minute. We are not talking about a “jobless” rate here - unemployment figures count only the number of African-American teenagers actively looking for work. In other words, when an involved, responsible parent pushes Junior to go out and find a job, more than one third of the time there is simply no job to be found. This situation is not only discouraging - not to mention financially problematic - but it can actually undermine the parents’ authority in the home, because they are promoting a path that doesn’t exist. Personal responsibility alone cannot overcome structural impediments.

For a century, the NAACP has promoted individual responsibility to build strong black families and healthy communities, but to stop there would have been to ignore the gaping political obstacles to achieving our goals. Much of the public discourse continues to be dominated by the responsibility frame, but mere complaining about “those parents” or “the kids today” will not completely solve this nation’s problems. We need to address structural inequalities as well.

It was not lack of personal responsibility that caused Joseph Harris, a dedicated single father in DC, to be homeless. He was in a car accident and couldn’t work. Although he’s looking for work and working odd jobs, he can’t make ends meet. It’s just not enough.

It was not a dearth of family values that caused Milwaukee grandmother Amira Weaver to almost lose her home after she decided to help clean up her community by purchasing the crack house next door for her son. Mrs. Weaver had good credit, a 6 percent loan on her own home but was steered by an unscrupulous broker into a loan that, when she read the fine print, revealed she was paying 11 percent.

Similarly, it is not the absence of responsibility that caused Robert Floyd to get kidney cancer. He has lost sight in one eye, and is having problems in his other eye. His health insurance policy said they wouldn’t cover his eye or kidney problems, and now he may die while they wait, leaving behind his wife and a child.

Family values are important, but we must also have policies in place that value families. President Obama got it exactly right when he told the NAACP this summer that government had a responsibility to “overcome the inequities, the injustices, the barriers that still exist in our country.” He cited the high dropout rates in some black communities and the “crumbling schools and overcrowded classrooms, and corridors of shame in America filled with poor children,” noting that they are not just an African-American problem but an American problem that government needs to address.

* Cross Posted at The Grio

By Benjamin Todd Jealous

When I met Troy Davis earlier this year, I was convinced of his innocence. Why did it take the American justice system so long to act?

After years of heartbreak and disappointment, Troy Davis is finally getting a chance to have evidence heard in his case after being denied a fair trial since he was arrested almost two decades ago.

It should never have taken the American justice system this long to act.

Troy Davis was unjustly convicted and sentenced to die in 1991 for the murder of Mark Allen MacPhail, an off-duty policeman who was shot while working a second job as a security guard at a Burger King in Savannah, Ga.

There was no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime and seven of the nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony, citing police coercion. One witness, a 16-year-old, said police threatened to hold him as an accessory to murder, warning that he would “go to jail for a long time and I would be lucky if I ever got out because a police officer got killed.”

Of the two eyewitnesses who stuck to their stories, Sylvester “Redd” Coles was himself considered a suspect in the killing. The other initially told police he could not identify the shooter.

Brenda Forrest, one of the jurors, summed it up: “If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would be not guilty.”

Yet the courts stubbornly refused to hear Davis’ claims of innocence. After numerous legal rounds, the U.S. Supreme Court on Aug. 17, in a 3-2 decision, finally took the extraordinary step of ordering the U.S. District Court in Georgia to consider and rule on Davis’ claim of innocence—a directive the high court hasn’t issued in almost 50 years. But it’s not justice yet. The standard of proof in the evidentiary hearing turns our criminal justice system on its head. Davis will be expected to prove his innocence rather than for the state to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. We hope that this unfair burden of proof does not once again deny Davis the fair hearing all Americans deserve.

Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied to Davis’ cause—former President Jimmy Carter, actor Danny Glover, former FBI director William Sessions and conservative Congressman Bob Barr, to name a few. And there were the people all over the world galvanized by organizations like the NAACP and Amnesty International who signed petitions and raised the visibility of the injustice of Troy Davis. Our Georgia branch tirelessly fought in the trenches, knocking on doors, holding marches, preaching in Georgia’s churches to bring the travesty to the light.

Earlier this year, I met Troy. I left the meeting convinced of his innocence. During my visit, I couldn’t help but notice the faces of several of the guards who for noticeable moments dropped their stony countenance, clearly moved by Davis’ plight. Later, as I was leaving, I encountered a woman in the prison parking lot who told me that a neighbor, a former Georgia prison guard, quit rather than be forced to march Davis to the death chamber.

This victory is a testimony to the best of our country: Davis’ individual perseverance and humble courage through an excruciating ordeal, the selfless dedication of his sister who despite having breast cancer waged a relentless struggle to save her brother and the grassroots activism and the voices of hundreds of thousands of people who lifted up his cause. Finally it was the Supreme Court where enough justices decided to step back from the brink of insanity and say no to executing a man who is probably innocent despite Justice Scalia and Thomas’s insistence to the contrary. It’s almost as if there was a realization that the very soul of America is at stake when we have a criminal justice system where innocence is irrelevant even when a man’s life is at stake. It was also an implicit rebuke to the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 that has deleteriously cut back on the rights of death row inmates to challenge their execution despite new evidence of innocence.

More than 3,300 people continue to wither on our nation’s death rows, men and women who are almost universally poor, disproportionately African-American and frequently innocent.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1973, 135 people in 26 states have been released from death row based on claims of innocence. And there simply is no way to discern how many of the more than 1,100 inmates executed since 1977 were not guilty of the crimes they were accused of committing.

The Death Penalty Information Center lists several reasons for the appallingly large number of innocents on death row—eyewitness error, government misconduct by both the police and prosecution and the eliciting of false confessions, often from suspects with mental disabilities, sometimes resulting from police torture.

It should come as no surprise to those familiar with the American justice system that a significant percentage of those languishing on death row are, like Troy, African-American—41.7 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Black folks make up less than 14 percent of the population.

It is a national disgrace. And it’s a reminder of the cruel consequences of racism.

There is a victory to celebrate in the Troy Davis case. After years of anguish, he will have an opportunity to convince the courts of his innocence.

But other men and women who are equally innocent are being robbed of any chance. Many of them will be executed by the state in our names. Our nation must be better than that. Let’s hope that the Supreme Court decision augurs a growing realization that we have to change.

*Cross-posted on The Root

Last December, the nation’s largest civil rights organizations, along with several community-based and consumer advocacy groups, came together for the “Save Our Homes: Restructure Loans, Not Repossess Homes” rally held in New York’s Financial District (Wall Street). The alliance offered strategies to end the mortgage crisis as well as predatory, discriminatory practices that plague the lending industry and have resulted in a record number of home foreclosures. Read More…