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      Biden Underestimates How Much Black Americans Care About This Issue

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      Black voters will not only be a driving force in the 2024 elections; they will most likely be the driving force. Recent polls showed that roughly 20 percent of Black voters said they would probably vote for Donald Trump if the election were held today — the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights era. An additional 8 percent said they wouldn’t vote at all.Democratic campaign officials are rightly worried, but there’s still time for President Biden to make up the ground he has lost. One way he could do it is by talking to Black America, especially young Black voters, about a sleeper issue: the climate crisis.As an environment and climate researcher, I have found that despite the growing threat posed by climate change, politicians often seem to downplay the crisis when courting Black communities. Democratic strategists seem to see climate change as a key political issue only for white liberal elites and assume that other groups, like Black voters, are either unaware of or apathetic about it.In reality, Black Americans are growing increasingly concerned about climate change.An April poll from CBS News showed that 88 percent of Black adults said it was “somewhat” or “very important.” That makes sense: The most severe harms from climate change, from heat waves to extreme flooding, are already falling disproportionately on their communities. And it’s starting to be reflected in their political priorities. A poll conducted by the Brookings Institution last September showed that climate change is now a greater political concern for Black Americans than abortion or the state of democracy.If Democrats are serious about making inroads with some of the people they have lost in these communities, they should begin by talking to voters about what the climate crisis looks like for them. In major Democratic strongholds such as Cleveland, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, heat waves and flooding are driving up electricity bills and destroying homes. If Mr. Biden were to routinely speak about these challenges and commit to creating forums for Black Americans to discuss climate concerns with government officials, his administration could earn back some of the faith it has squandered.As a start, Mr. Biden could focus more intently on young Black people, a group passionate about climate change. Until May 19, when he gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, the president had largely refrained from direct engagement with young Black audiences on the campaign trail. When he speaks to Black voters, climate often is a footnote, or it’s mentioned in a policy buffet along with the economy, abortion and voting rights. During his speech at Morehouse, he mentioned the climate crisis explicitly only in a stray line about “heeding your generation’s call to a community free of gun violence and a planet free of climate crisis and showing your power to change the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court Sides With Republicans Over South Carolina Voting Map

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      The case concerned a constitutional puzzle: how to distinguish the roles of race and partisanship in drawing voting maps when Black voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats.The Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that a lower court had deemed an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that resulted in the “bleaching of African American voters” from a district.The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in early 2023 that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.The panel put its decision on hold while Republican lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court, and the parties asked the justices to render a decision by Jan. 1. After that deadline passed, the panel said in March that the 2024 election would have to take place under the map it had rejected as unconstitutional.“With the primary election procedures rapidly approaching, the appeal before the Supreme Court still pending and no remedial plan in place,” the panel wrote, “the ideal must bend to the practical.”In effect, the Supreme Court’s inaction had decided the case for the current election cycle.The contested district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Black Teenager Was Wrongfully Executed in 1931. Now His Family Is Suing.

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      Alexander McClay Williams was 16 when he was executed in Pennsylvania for the murder of a 34-year-old white woman. His conviction was overturned in 2022.On June 8, 1931, Alexander McClay Williams, a 16-year-old Black student, was executed by electric chair, the youngest person to be put to death in Pennsylvania history.Months earlier, Alexander had been convicted of murdering a 34-year-old white woman, Vida Robare, a matron at the reform school outside Philadelphia that Williams attended.There were no witnesses to the murder, and evidence that might have cleared Alexander was kept from the jury by prosecutors. For almost four decades, Sam Lemon, a great-grandson of William Ridley, Alexander’s lawyer, worked to reveal that Williams had not committed the crime, and was the victim of gross prosecutorial misconduct by Delaware County, Pa.A judge overturned the conviction in 2022 and granted a motion for a retrial. Jack Stollsteimer, the Delaware County district attorney, moved to dismiss the charges posthumously, acknowledging yet another example of a Black person being wrongfully convicted of a crime they hadn’t committed.On Friday, Alexander’s family filed a federal lawsuit in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against Delaware County, as well as the estates of the detectives and prosecutors on the case, calling their conduct “outrageous, malicious, wanton, willful, reckless and intentionally designed to inflict harm.”“They murdered my brother. That’s what they did,” Susie Carter, Alexander’s 94-year-old sister, said in an interview on Monday. Ms. Carter, along with two of Alexander’s nieces, Osceola Carter and Osceola Perdue, are listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Atlanta, Biden Warms Up His Pitch to Black Voters

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      President Biden declared on Saturday that his challenger, former President Donald J. Trump, represented an “unhinged” threat to the future of the country and asked Black voters at two campaign events in Atlanta to see the election as a choice between protecting democracy and letting it backslide.This message was a preview of sorts for a speech he was scheduled to deliver on Sunday at Morehouse College, an all-male, historically Black institution whose students, alumni and faculty had been divided over inviting Mr. Biden as the war in Gaza continues.Mr. Biden laid out his argument to a powerful slice of the electorate that has been drifting away from him during a campaign reception on Saturday afternoon: “We cannot let this man become president. We have to win this race, not for me but for America.”For months, the president has tried to define Mr. Trump as an unstable force whose second term would be about exacting revenge on his enemies. But despite trying to present himself as a guardian of the international order and politics as usual, Mr. Biden has low approval ratings and is trailing Mr. Trump in several battleground states including Georgia, according to recent polls.The strategy in Georgia this weekend seemed to be to take his own political brand out of the equation, asking key voters to instead consider what could happen if Mr. Trump wins.“He’s clearly unhinged,” Mr. Biden said while talking about a recent interview granted by the former president. “Buy Time magazine this week. Take a look at what he has said. He said, ‘A lot of people liked it when I said I would be a dictator on Day 1.’”Earlier in the day, Mr. Biden also took a swipe at the recent polling. “You hear about how, you know, we’re behind in the polls,” he said. “So far the polls haven’t been right once. We’re either tied or slightly ahead or slightly behind, but what I look at is actual election results and election results are in the primaries.”He added that Nikki Haley, who is no longer in the race, peeled away votes from Trump in several primary elections.“It’s not about me,” Mr. Biden told a group of supporters, including several Morehouse graduates, gathered at a popular restaurant in Atlanta. “It’s about the alternative as well.” More

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      J. Gary Cooper, Pathbreaking Marine Leader, Is Dead at 87

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      He was the first Black officer to lead a Marine Corps infantry company into combat. He later became an Alabama state lawmaker and an assistant secretary of the Air Force.J. Gary Cooper, a two-star general and the first African American to lead a Marine infantry company in combat, who later became an Alabama state lawmaker, an assistant secretary of the Air Force and an ambassador to Jamaica, died on April 27 at his home in Mobile, Ala. He was 87.His death was confirmed by his daughter Joli Claire Cooper.Growing up in Alabama in the 1930s and ’40s, General Cooper overcame the harsh segregation of the Deep South to attain leadership roles in the military, corporate America and government, a sweeping arc that paralleled the paths of a generation of African Americans that pushed open doors during a time of profound racial change in the United States.General Cooper was raised in Mobile in a rarefied world: the Black upper class of the pre-civil rights era. His family owned an insurance company and a funeral home. But money did not insulate him from the strictures of Jim Crow and its long racist shadow.When his father tried to send him to an all-white Roman Catholic school, the local bishop barred him. When he returned to Mobile to run the family business after 12 years in the Marines, the Junior Chamber of Commerce rejected him as a member. And in 1973, when General Cooper went to the Mobile County Courthouse to obtain a marriage license, he was humiliated to find that Black couples were made to sign a “colored” register, separate from the one for white couples.His initial escape from the segregated city of his youth came in 1954 when he won a scholarship to Notre Dame, where he was one of only a handful of Black freshmen in a class of 1,500.“On campus there were no ‘colored’ or ‘white’ signs on the drinking fountains or bathroom doors,” General Cooper wrote in a reminiscence published in Notre Dame magazine in 2014. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Angela Alsobrooks Wants to Be Maryland’s First Black Senator

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      Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s newly chosen Democratic nominee for Senate, is familiar with firsts.With her election in 2018 as executive of Prince George’s County, a populous suburban area bordering Washington, Ms. Alsobrooks became the first Black woman to hold that role.Now she has the chance to become the first Black senator to represent Maryland, which is more than 30 percent Black. If she wins this fall, she would also become the sole woman in Maryland’s congressional delegation, and the second woman ever to represent it in the Senate.And she would be only the fourth Black woman, after Carol Moseley Braun, Kamala Harris and Laphonza Butler, to serve in the Senate — from any state.In a campaign that became increasingly tense over the past few weeks, Ms. Alsobrooks leaned heavily on the importance of racial and gender representation in government, seemingly in hopes that her historic candidacy would counter the flood of cash being spent by her opponent, Representative David Trone.Mr. Trone put more than $55 million of his own money into the race, making it the most expensive Senate primary ever in Maryland.“As women, we don’t want people talking about us and making decisions about us without us,” Ms. Alsobrooks told The New York Times as Tuesday’s election approached, referring to abortion rights, one of the biggest issues of this year’s campaigns.Before she was elected as the county executive in 2018, she also was the county’s top prosecutor, and before that she was an assistant state’s attorney focused on domestic violence.Race was a major theme in her Senate primary, both because of the potential firsts that Ms. Alsobrooks represented and because Mr. Trone, who is white, was accused of racism after he used a racial slur in a congressional hearing (He apologized and said he had used the word inadvertently).She received the support of most of Maryland’s congressional delegation, as well as Gov. Wes Moore — the state’s first Black governor — and Black women in other states.In the general election, she will face a formidable opponent: Larry Hogan, the state’s popular former Republican governor. More

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      Barbara O. Jones, Actress Who Brought Black Cinema to Life, Dies at 82

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      Her arresting roles in movies like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped shape a generation of independent filmmakers.Barbara O. Jones, an actress whose captivating work in films like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped define the cerebral, experimental and highly influential Black cinema movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, died on April 8 at her home in Dayton, Ohio. She was 82.Her brother Marlon Minor confirmed the death but said the cause had not been determined.Starting in the early 1970s just a few miles from Hollywood, a generation of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, began making films that pushed hard against many of the tropes of commercial moviemaking.Budding filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Haile Gerima eschewed polished scripts and linear narratives in search of an authentic Black cinematic language. They relied on actors like Mrs. Jones, drawn from far outside the mainstream, to bring their work to life.Mrs. Jones was in some ways the typical Los Angeles transplant, having moved from the Midwest in search of a film career. She took acting classes, but, rather than gravitating toward Hollywood, she fell in with the politically charged, aesthetically adventurous scene around the U.C.L.A. film school, a movement that the film scholar Clyde Taylor called the L.A. Rebellion.She appeared in several short student films, including Mr. Gerima’s “Child of Resistance” (1973), in which she played an imprisoned activist loosely based on Angela Davis, and Ms. Dash’s “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a short story by Alice Walker.Mrs. Jones in Ms. Dash’s short film “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a story by Alice Walker.Julie DashWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Widening Racial Disparities Underlie Rise in Child Deaths in the U.S.

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      New research finds that the death rate among Black youths soared by 37 percent, and among Native American youths by 22 percent, between 2014 and 2020, compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.The NewsThanks to advancements in medicine and insurance, mortality rates for children in the United States had been shrinking for decades. But last year, researchers uncovered a worrisome reversal: The child death rate was rising.Now, they have taken their analysis a step further. A new study, published Saturday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed growing disparities in child death rates across racial and ethnic groups. Black and Native American youths ages 1 to 19 died at significantly higher rates than white youths — predominantly from injuries such as car accidents, homicides and suicides.Dr. Coleen Cunningham, chair of pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine, and the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, who was not involved in the study, said the detailed analysis of the disparities documented “a sad and growing American tragedy.”“Almost all are preventable,” she said, “if we make it a priority.”Flowers for Karon Blake, 13, who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in January 2023. Gun-related deaths were two to four times higher among Black and Native American youth than among white youth.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressSome Context: A frightening trend examined more closely.Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Children’s Hospital of Richmond had previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents had risen by 18 percent between 2019 and 2021. Deaths related to injuries had grown so dramatically that they eclipsed all public health gains.The group, seeking to drill deeper into the worrying trend, obtained death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public WONDER database and stratified it by race, ethnicity and cause for children ages 1 to 19. They found that Black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children but that the disparities — which had been improving until 2013 — were widening.The data also revealed that while the mortality rates for children overall took a turn for the worse around 2020, the rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had begun increasing much earlier, around 2014.Between 2014 and 2020, the death rates for Black children and teenagers rose by about 37 percent, and for Native American youths by about by about 22 percent — compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the V.C.U. School of Medicine, who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More