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:
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning. Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one’s lost vision nowhere.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
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—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)