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Clyburn Wants to Amplify ‘Lift Every Voice’

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Challenges Journos of Color in ‘Sound Bite’ Culture

Capehart Succeeds Mark Shields on ‘NewsHour’

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“That’s why you’re going to be so important,” Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., told the Journal-isms Roundtable on Sunday. Journalists of color have “had the life experiences” to know when certain assumptions don’t pass the smell test. (Credit: Deborah Barfield Berry)

Challenges Journos of Color in ‘Sound Bite’ Culture

House Majority Whip James Clyburn told journalists Sunday that he plans to introduce legislation to make “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “national hymn.” He also said that journalists of color have an especially challenging mission in the era of “sound bite” culture and apprehension in communities of color about the new COVID-19 vaccines.

Clyburn, D-S.C., provided the key Democratic primary endorsement that propelled Joe Biden into the presidency and now chairs the Biden inaugural committee, among his other duties.

He said he did not expect President Trump to attend the Jan. 20 inaugural ceremony. And Clyburn said he was not surprised when told of Sunday’s Washington Post report that Trump “urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that legal scholars described as a flagrant abuse of power and a potential criminal act.”

“In a one-hour phone call on Saturday with Georgia election officials, President Trump threatened vague legal consequences if the officials did not act (obtained by The Post). President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat.” (Credit: Washington Post)

“We can expect almost anything from this president,” Clyburn said. The swearing-in of Kamala Harris as the nation’s first vice president of color has added to security concerns, he said.

The majority whip said that Democrats had “an even chance” to win two U.S. Senate seats in the special Georgia election Tuesday that will decide which party controls the Senate. The Democrats, he said, will avoid the mistakes made in November in South Carolina, when Democrat Jaimie Harrison failed to unseat Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.  

“I do believe we can win in Georgia,” Clyburn said. “And I do believe the only difference they need to make in Georgia and South Carolina is to win on Election Day. Jamie went into Nov. 3 leading by 150,000 votes. We have a way of calculating and we were in the lead big time. On Election Day, we got outvoted. We did not do the groundwork that was necessary to win on Election Day.”

Clyburn, whom the Guardian last week called “the most important politician of 2020,” gave a ringing endorsement for Harrison — whom Clyburn said he has known since Harrison was an 11th grader — to become chair of the Democratic National Committee. He said Harrison was advising Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock in their Senate runoff races against incumbent Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

Clyburn was introduced by his daughter, Mignon Clyburn, formerly acting chair and member of the Federal Communications Commission and who serves on the FCC transition team. Her father said he had secured agreement from Biden to back universal internet access, an issue in which the FCC also has jurisdiction.

“The greatest thing that we can do in the 21st century for rural America, for what I would call low-income communities, is to have internet in every home,” Clyburn said.

“One of the things I sat down and discussed with Joe Biden the Sunday night before my endorsement was what we need to do to make sure that health care is efficiently and effectively delivered to everybody. It cannot happen unless we have telehealth and telemedicine, to make sure that we have education adequately applied to every community. Cannot happen without online learning. We’re not going to have developments in rural communities of businesses and entrepreneurs without the internet.”

Further, Clyburn warned about infiltration of the Black Lives Matter movement, pointing to vandalism targeting the leaders of the U.S. House and Senate over the holiday weekend. The attackers blighted “their homes with graffiti and in one case a pig’s head as Congress failed to approve an increase in the amount of money being sent to individuals to help cope with the coronavirus pandemic,” as the Associated Press reported.

Mignon Clyburn, former FCC member and acting chair, top row, center, introduced her father, House Majority Whip James Clyburn. D-S.C., second row, at left. The two once started a weekly newspaper in Charleston, S.C. (Credit: Deborah Barfield Berry)

“How sophisticated it was, that’s somebody trying to start something,” Clyburn said of the vandalism. “That’s what that is.

“We have to be careful that we do not allow an infiltration of this movement. Ask the attorney general of Minnesota what they found out . . . in Minneapolis when people started breaking out windows and breaking down buildings. It was an infiltration there.

“In Columbia, S.C., we had a very peaceful march in Columbia in support of Black Lives Matter. Their timing was wrong, and when the folks got there to infiltrate the movement, we had terminated the march, had come to an end, but they still went around Columbia, breaking out windows. And we did an investigation and it had nothing to do with the movement. I wonder where they came from. I don’t know why they came, but we knew that they went to work and arrested them for having done it.  

“So all I’m saying to you is, just because it’s being done in the name of the movement doesn’t mean it’s a part of the movement. That’s a part of what your job is going to be going forward.

“That’s why you’re going to be so important.” Journalists of color have “had the life experiences” to know when certain assumptions don’t pass the smell test.

At one point in his talk, Clyburn referred to what he called the “kicking out” of the late Rep. John Lewis from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee “because he refused to adhere to a philosophy in the soundbite of “Burn, Baby Burn.” Clyburn was making a point about the dangers of a “sound bite culture.”

However, leaders of SNCC disputed this account. Courtland Cox, president of the SNCC Legacy Project, messaged Journal-isms, “Jim Clyburn has NO knowledge of what and why anything happened in SNCC.” 

Clyburn was speaking before 63 participants on a Zoom call of the Journal-isms Roundtable, a monthly gathering of journalists discussing race, journalism and current events, with more watching on Facebook Live. The video can be viewed here. 

It was the day that members of the House of Representatives were sworn in. Clyburn joined the Zoom shortly after the noon ceremony.

After a year of a national racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the NFL decided that during its opening week, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” would be performed before each game, ahead of “The Star Spangled Banner,” as Andrew R. Chow reported in July for Time magazine.


“Lift Every Voice and Sing” – often attributed as the Black national anthem – is a hymn penned as a poem by James Weldon Johnson, right, in 1900 and set to music composed by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in 1905.

“I’ve been toying around with an idea now for two or three decades, ever since I’ve been in the Congress,” Clyburn said. “I’ve been trying to build up enough nerve to introduce a national hymn.

“I instructed my staff two weeks ago to prepare legislation to for me to apply this week to make ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ our national hymn. We have a national anthem, we don’t have a national hymn. I would love to see that become our national hymn, and being sung at events, not as the Negro National Anthem, but as the United States of America’s national hymn.

“We are putting that legislation in this week. I hope I can survive and see [that] it passes.”

Clyburn is also chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. In that capacity he invoked the power of journalists to get beyond sound bites about the COVID vaccines.

“When it comes to COVID, my big job now, we’ve got two vaccines out there — There’s a third and fourth on the horizon — I do believe there’ll be six or seven.” he said. “Vaccines available in the not-too-distant future. My job is to make sure that these vaccines are distributed in an efficient manner, in an effective manner, and in an equitable manner.

“Those are the three E’s that I’m going to be working with. I tell people all the time that I remember the polio vaccine. There were two polio vaccines. One was a shot in the arm, and one was a drop of serum on a lump of sugar. Can I tell you which communities got the shots, and who got the lump of sugar? That’s going to be our job.

“That you make sure that this vaccine is equitably distributed when it’s made available. I’m going in to get my second shot on Friday, and that’s going to be another problem.

“And that’s why I say that you all are so important! ‘Cause I do believe . . . I know about the Tuskegee experiment. And I’ve lived a lot of inequities. I know what it is to have appendicitis, and then have to go through the back door of a doctor’s office to go through a segregated wing of a hospital. They have your appendix removed. . . .

“But you’re going to be an integral part of educating the public on this vaccine. Because we are not going to get rid of this pandemic until we get beyond it, which we cannot get beyond until we have organized and scientifically imposed herd immunity. Not Trump’s herd immunity, but the herd immunity that comes with sufficient distribution and utilization of the vaccine.

“If you don’t do the vaccine, we’re not going to get to where we need to be, and we’re not going to get there until the public is sufficiently educated on the fact that this is not an experiment. This — this time — is real, and you got to have faith and confidence in the process.”

Clyburn was preceded by a celebration of the appointment of James F. Blue III (pictured), “PBS NewsHour” producer, who has been named senior vice president and head of the Smithsonian cable channel, as well as vice president for news and documentaries of the MTV channels, including Comedy Central, MTV, VH1 and Logo TV. All are part of Viacom/CBS..

He was introduced by veteran journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. They first met in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1992 when Blue was 22. They worked together on the “NewsHour.”

Blue said he has an opportunity to highlight arts coverage, and to induce cross-pollination among other Viacom/CBS channels, including BET, or such innovations as having Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah do documentary work.

Blue also said, “You can’t look at anything I’ve done and not see the diversity that is inherent in it.”

 

From left: Talkers Jonathan Capehart; White House correspondent April Ryan and Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, at New York University in 2017. (Credit: Washington Square News)

Capehart Succeeds Mark Shields on ‘NewsHour’

“Jonathan Capehart, a Washington Post opinion writer and anchor of MSNBC’s The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart, was today named a regular contributor to the PBS NewsHour,” PBS announced Monday.

“As part of this role, Capehart will provide political analysis and commentary alongside New York Times columnist David Brooks for the Friday discussion segment Brooks & Capehart, regularly moderated by anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff, in addition to PBS NewsHour political specials. Capehart, who has served as an occasional PBS NewsHour contributor since 2018, succeeds syndicated columnist Mark Shields, who was a PBS NewsHour regular for more than 33 years before stepping down in December 2020. . . .”

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Richard Prince’s Journal-isms originates from Washington. It began in print before most of us knew what the internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a “column.” Any views expressed in the column are those of the person or organization quoted and not those of any other entity. Send tips, comments and concerns to Richard Prince at journal-isms+owner@groups.io

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