Civil Rights Work
Common Ground contributed to the civil rights work that took place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The organization provided civil rights workers to take depositions from internally displaced evacuees of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Partnership between Tulane University, the Advancement Project, and Common Ground Collective provided an opportunity to protect the civil rights of Americans still struggling to recover from the storm.
They participated in the Anderson v. Jackson case, a class action lawsuit brought by displaced New Orleans public housing residents against the Bush Administration, alleging violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the Fair Housing Act), the U.S. Housing Act of 1937, the 5th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, and International Law. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson sought to demolish housing units and to replace the existing units with fewer mixed units. Common Ground, the Advancement Project and Tulane advanced the argument that race-based discrimination was taking place, injuriously affecting the working class African American community populating the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. The 5th and 14th Amendments were allegedly violated when the United States deprived community members of their right to due process, and it allegedly violated treaties to which it is a signatory by depriving Americans of the right to return to their homes.
Read more about this topic: Common Ground Collective
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights and/or work:
“What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death.”
—Otilia De Koster, Panamanian civil rights monitor. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (December 19, 1988)
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist.... We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”
—Tristan Tzara (1896–1963)