Kennedy Maps Game Plan for African American Communities

By Dick Russell, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

On the first day of Black History Month, an audience of several hundred gathered inside Los Angeles’s Artlounge Collective, where TeamKennedy24 was to host an all-star panel on “The Present State of Black America.” For more than two hours, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. listened attentively as activists from the political and entertainment world outlined problems in health care, pollution, economics, education, and drugs that continue to plague their communities. And the aspiring independent presidential candidate seized the opportunity to offer innovative solutions beyond what any of his rivals have put forward. 

Health

Last October, Kennedy had gone to Atlanta to visit Auntie Angie’s House, a nonprofit for underserved pregnant mothers created by panel moderator Angela Stanton-King. Now the evening began with a discussion of the health disparities affecting black Americans. Particularly poignant was radio personality Dr. Eddie Long Jr. describing pregnant women often being forced into Caesarean births against their will. 

Kennedy followed with some chilling statistics: a black woman with a college education is three times as likely to die in childbirth as a white woman who’d dropped out of high school. During COVID-19, African Americans experienced the highest death rate of any demographic – over 3,000 fatalities per million population, compared to Haiti and Nigeria which saw only 14 deaths per million. 

“Why is nobody explaining to us that disparity?” Kennedy demanded. “I would venture a couple of reasons. One is the closure that took place around 2008 of community hospitals in this country, targeting black neighborhoods. If you got sick during COVID, you went to hospitals almost all owned by hedge funds. Virtually every death took place in a hospital, almost zero in homes.” No longer was someone suffering surrounded by relatives who could ask questions about the treatment. “If you got put on a respirator or ventilator and Remdesivir [which was toxic], you were surrounded by strangers.” 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America had the highest body count of any nation at 16%, with only 4.2% of the global population. This is also due to the chronic disease burden – especially diabetes, obesity, and asthma – within black communities. These are being slowly poisoned by a processed food industry that now dominates American food production. “We need to reorient our medical care system to local clinics and hospitals,” Kennedy said, “and make it difficult through the Securities Exchange Commission for big hedge funds to buy up these hospital systems.”

Asked how he would address the issue of environmental justice, Kennedy ticked off more grim facts: one out of every five toxic waste dumps being sited in black neighborhoods, the highest concentration on the South Side of Chicago. Forty-four percent of black children in our cities contain dangerous amounts of lead in their bodies, causing IQ loss and behavioral disintegration. Not to mention Navajo youth with a thousand times the rate of sexual organ cancer as other Americans, due to toxic uranium tailings on their reservation. And the 76,000 farmworkers being poisoned by pesticides every year. 

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Community

Telling the story of his experience in forging New York’s landmark watershed protection effort during the 1990s, Kennedy recalled suing the city and discovering how communities of color received untreated sewage water from the Croton reservoir while special pipes dispatched good water from the upstate Catskills to the NYC mayor’s mansion. He intended to make sure that wealthy white people bear an equal burden as those who are poor and powerless – and that a revitalized EPA will close the revolving door between its employees and the industries the agency is supposed to regulate. 

Kennedy was then asked to talk about his idea of “targeted community repair” to address economic issues. He began with the appalling history of how Black Wall Street’s booming community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had been in 1921 the first of many methodically destroyed by white racial violence. “I grew up in Virginia at a time of Jim Crow laws specifically targeted to make sure black businesses didn’t thrive,” Kennedy recalled. 

Today, equity has been systematically stripped away. Only some 20 black-owned banks remain, all undercapitalized and denied further assistance from the Federal Reserve. During the pandemic, thousands of small businesses closed “with no due process, no just compensation”; 41% of black-owned businesses, many with three generations of equity, will likely never reopen. Kennedy had recently traveled to Cleveland, where a thriving sausage plant in operation for 80 years is shutting down because it can’t get a loan for needed new machinery. 

Yet there remains a community development model that Kennedy’s father started after walking through Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1966. The senator realized that “a program for housing, without simultaneous programs for jobs, education, welfare reform, health, and economic development cannot succeed. The whole community must be involved.” One of the city’s poorest neighborhoods eventually found itself transformed, simply by being provided access to capital. After his father died, RFK Jr. had taken his place on the Restoration Corporation board for the next 35 years. As president, he would expand the idea nationally. 

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Education or Prison

Panel member Quawntay “Bosco” Adams, incarcerated for 16 years for possessing marijuana and now a cannabis entrepreneur, spoke of the school-to-prison pipeline that propels our most at-risk children out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. This was elaborated upon by Skipp Townsend, founder/CEO of 2nd Call, a violence reduction and reentry organization. He recalled California’s taking funds out of trade schools while the CIA flooded South-Central L.A. with crack cocaine and then guns during the Reagan era. 

Kennedy was already familiar with what had transpired, as well as the 1986 and 1994 crime bills (the second written by then senator Joe Biden and imposing life sentences under a three-strikes mandate) that “in eight years doubled the number of blacks in American prisons and made our system the largest on earth.” Kennedy saw this as a way to disenfranchise the black population from voting. “A lot of this falls under state law, but I will use my bully pulpit to make sure that those convicted of nonviolent drug crimes not end up in prison. And people sentenced like Bosco should be pardoned.” 

Kennedy also declared himself “a huge supporter of bringing the trades back” while emphasizing the importance of school choice for parents wishing to send their children to charter schools. He pointed to the remarkable success of New York’s Success Academy, a charter that randomly selects kids by lottery from black neighborhoods and whose 20,000-some students have higher graduation and college placement rates than any other school. 

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Mental Health

Finally, Kennedy was asked how he envisions addressing mental health awareness, particularly in terms of challenges faced by black Americans. Again, he had the current dilemma at his fingertips. “During COVID, for the first time suicide became the highest cause of death among black youth. We saw an extraordinary burden of drug addiction, suicide, alcoholism, and mental illness affecting all of our kids – but black kids disproportionately. Large numbers are on mood control drugs, which starts a cycle of addiction. Last year 106,000 kids died of overdoses, twice the number killed in the Vietnam War.” 

Kennedy then turned the lens on himself, revealing how he came out of a similar background – a heroin addict at 15, finally sober at 28, and having spent the last 40 years in recovery, attending regular AA meetings. “So this is a critical issue for me,” he continued. “My Peace Corps or moon-shot program is to make recovery available for free to every kid in our country.” He intends in both urban and rural areas to create “rehab farms, places to go for spiritual renewal – to get off illegal drugs but also SSRIs and psychiatric drugs. Learn how to be part of a community in a place of compassion and kindness, with no screens, computers, or cell phones because that’s part of the addiction. Grow your own organic food and come out with that skill.” 

Kennedy’s model for this, which proved a transformative experience for one of his family members, is San Patrignano in Italy, with a recovery rate of 72% among the 26,000 young people accepted over the past four decades. “I’m going to fund ours by moving marijuana off of Schedule 1,” Kennedy announced. This would make cannabis legal at the federal level, where “we should be taxing the income and using this to provide recovery services to kids everywhere.” 

Unity

Kennedy closed the evening with the story of how his father and uncle “did not grow up with any understanding or exposure to civil rights issues,” which ultimately became the most important in the course of JFK’s presidency. In 1968, his father had recommended what became the Poor People’s Campaign to Martin Luther King, “because they both realized that racism and poverty go hand-in-hand.” And when, a few months later, Robert Kennedy’s coffin was train-bound from Los Angeles to Arlington National Cemetery, RFK Jr. would never forget looking out the window where “black men held hats against their chest and bowed heads eight feet deep.” 

“Let this be a moment of unity to heal the divide,” moderator Stanton-King asked the crowd as it filed out of the auditorium in Los Angeles.

Dick Russell is the award-winning author of 16 nonfiction books, including The Real RFK Jr.