The Southern Christian Leadership Conference — the 50-year-old civil rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and others — is seeking to remove the president of its Los Angeles chapter in response to his support of same-sex marriage in California.
The effort by the Atlanta-based organization is meeting stiff resistance in Los Angeles from both the board of the local chapter, whose chairman is secretary of the state Democratic Party, and the City Council president.
During the battle last fall over Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution that banned same-sex marriage, the chapter’s president, Eric P. Lee, was more than a tangential figure for the opposition. He was front and center at an opposition group’s large rally at City Hall and marched in the blazing sun for 24km in Fresno. Many other local African-American pastors prepared mailings featuring church leaders in support of the proposition and linking their views to US President Barack Obama, then the Democratic nominee for president.
Lee “was very helpful to us,” said Rick Jacobs, head of the Courage Campaign, a left-leaning political action group in Los Angeles that fought to the initiative.
While the Mormon church raised a great deal of the money in support of the proposition, the role of African-American churches, and their voting parishioners, was not insignificant. Exit polls in California found that 70 percent of black voters backed the ban, which passed with 52 percent of the vote.
Lee’s opposition to Proposition 8 “created tension in my life I had never experienced with black clergy,” he said. “But it was clear to me that any time you deny one group of people the same right that other groups have that is a clear violation of civil rights and I have to speak up on that.”
In April, Lee attended a board meeting of the civil rights organization in Kansas City, Missouri, and found himself once again in the minority position among his colleagues on the issue of same-sex marriage, but was told, he said, by the interim president of the civil rights organization, Byron Clay, that the group publicly had a neutral position on the issue.
So a month later, Lee said, he was surprised to receive a call from the National Board of Directors summoning him immediately to Atlanta to explain why he had taken a position on the same-sex marriage issue without the authority of the national board.
Explaining that he was unable to come to Atlanta on such short notice, Lee then received two letters from the organization’s lawyer, Dexter M. Wimbish, threatening him with suspension or removal as president of the Los Angeles chapter if he did not come soon to explain himself.
Wimbish did not return calls to his office, nor did Raleigh Trammell, chairman of the organization’s national board. A woman who identified herself as Renee Richardson left a voice mail message for a reporter, saying the organization did not “discuss internal matters.” She did not return follow-up calls.
The issue attracted the attention of the president of the Los Angeles City Council, Eric Garcetti, who wrote to the board in support of Lee.
Because chapters of the leadership conference operate autonomously and presidents are picked by local boards, it is not clear that the national organization has the authority to remove Lee from his post, which he has held for two years.
“It’s been our position that the local board hired him,” said Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer, chairman of the local board and secretary of the state’s Democratic Party. “And, in fact, we are also the ones that approved his stance on the position of marriage equality. We have asked the national board if we have violated any procedures, and we have not gotten an answer.”
Lee, the former pastor of In His Steps, an African-American Wesleyan Church in Los Angeles that he described as “very conservative,” said he saw failures both in the leadership of the conference (“Dr King would be turning over in his grave right now,” he said) and the largely white anti-Proposition 8 movement that did not more actively seek the support of church-going African-Americans.
“The black church played a significant role in Proposition 8 passing,” he said. “The failure of the campaign was to presume that African-Americans would see this as a civil rights issue.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would