Smiley and West Take Obama Critique on the Road (Poverty Tour)
AP via CBS News ^ | Friday, July 22, 2011 | Jesse Washington
Posted on July 24, 2011 11:12:09 AM EDT by kristinn
Black activists Cornel West and Tavis Smiley are planning a 15-city "Poverty Tour" to bring attention to the needy and to what they say are the failings of President Barack Obama.
West, a Princeton University professor, and Smiley, host of a PBS talk show, expect to begin the bus trip Aug. 5 at a Native American reservation in Wisconsin. With visits to soup kitchens, housing projects, farms, families and low-wage workers, they say they hope to create momentum for large-scale job creation programs and put poverty on the 2012 election agenda.
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Although their tour does not have a specific racial focus, "you can't ignore that black people are catching the most hell in this recession," Smiley said.
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Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said she has noticed more black frustration with Obama "in the barbershop, on the street with people. And among my own relatives."
"Everybody likes Obama in the African-American community," Berry said. "But when they see the unemployment numbers, they have friends and relatives getting put out in the street, they don't have jobs and can't find jobs, everyone starts trying to make excuses — Obama can't do anything by himself, he can't get Congress to go along."
"But after they say that over and over again and it gets worse — and it is getting worse — you get some mumblings and grumblings."
On their bus trip, Smiley and West will travel through Hayward, Eau Claire and Madison, Wis.; Milwaukee; Chicago's South Side; Joliet and Pembroke, Ill.; Lima, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Columbus and Clarksdale, Miss.; and finish in Memphis.
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