Human Rights

The Columbus Coalition for Rent Control (“the Coalition”), a local nonprofit organization advocating a citizen ballot initiative, filed more than 4,200 petition signatures with the Columbus City Clerk at 11am on Tuesday, October 3, seeking a vote on a legislative proposal designed to empower citizens and encourage property owners and residential landlords to moderate rental price increases.

The group has determined that it will cease collection of petition signatures and will withdraw the petition, instead asking the City Council and council candidates for election to enact the legislation, which the Council could do on any Monday. Members of the Coalition released the following statement:

In 1946 the Supreme Court ruled in Morgan v. Virginia that segregated travel on interstate buses was unconstitutional, thus sending the separate-but-equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) teetering.

In spite of the ruling, the states of the Old Confederacy refused to comply. In 1955 the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ruled in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company formerly overturned the practice, but did nothing to enforce the decision. Finally, in Boynton v Virginia (1960) the Supreme Court outlawed segregated waiting rooms and restaurants in terminals that served buses that crossed state lines. Taken together, these three rulings clearly overturned the Plessy case. Some places in the upper south complied with the rulings, but for the most part the south thumbed its noses at the Supreme Court as it had been doing since 1887, the end of Reconstruction.

An interracial group of men and women, who came to be known as the Freedom Riders, challenged that lawlessness with a campaign that sent teams of activists on buses throughout the south to highlight the intransigence of the region and force compliance with the ruling.          

Press release from Joe Motil 

Rumors have swirled for some time that the City’s Development Department is preparing another bulldozing of an encampment near Williams Road on the city’s far southside.

The City of Columbus has spent more than $200,000 this year to bulldoze more than a dozen encampments. I was recently informed by a homeless advocate that a couple of months ago, city hired contractors struck a tent with a front loader while the tent was occupied by an unhoused citizen who could have been seriously injured or killed. This incident occurred at Wilson Park.  

Columbus’ shelters are understaffed and far over capacity. The waiting list for those in need of temporary shelter numbers is in the hundreds. With winter approaching, where are our warming centers?

After last year’s failure by Ginther to provide properly staffed and adequate warming centers, I proposed that the city begin constructing its own warming and cooling centers instead of addressing the issue with knee jerk solutions at the last minute while trying to find suitable temporary warming centers.  

Late last year, two groups of Columbus immigrants sat down with researchers from the Children Thrive Action Network (CTAN) and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) for private “listening sessions.” Ohio was one of seven states chosen by these national organizations.

Listening to immigrants, who are the real experts in immigration law and policy, themes emerged. Research findings are presented in a new report, “If The Parents Are Okay, The Children Are OK.” Next, CTAN and CLASP will move from listening and analyzing into action, incorporating parents’ recommendations into their advocacy plans.

In Columbus, parents said they were terrified about their kids’ safety going to and from school, and inside the classroom. On top of gun violence, stranger danger, and drugs that look like candy, they are contending with bullying, verbal attacks, and even ethnicity-based hate crimes.

Staff at the Pickerington Public Library are organizing to form a union. If successful, they would become the third library system in Central Ohio to unionize through the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT). In 2021 and 2022, library workers at Worthington Libraries and Grandview Heights Public Library formed unions in affiliation with OFT. Fairfield County Library workers are also organized through the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

On August 10, the Pickerington Public Library staff formally asked the library’s Director and Board of Trustees to voluntarily recognize their union. Signed union cards were presented to the State Employee Relations Board (SERB) as well, the office which will count the vote. At least 73 percent of staff in the library system, spanning two locations, had signed cards indicating their support for the unionization effort.

Earlier this year, at a Kroger on the far Southside, a store manager was undercover. And a customer, a middle-aged white woman wearing a pant suit, a COVID mask and a floppy hat, was about to the leave the store.

Suddenly the undercover store manager yelled “Drop It!” The white woman, who looked more Dublin than Southside, scoffed at first. But then spilled her plastic grocery bags’ contents onto the floor. Out came organic juices, dog bones, and makeup. Caught red-handed. She was marched by the manager to the customer service desk.

There, a security guard made her raise her right hand and sign a document. She said she would never shop in that store again and walked out a free woman. A Free Press reporter witnessed all of this firsthand.

Corporate America continues to claim shoplifting post pandemic is ruining their bottom line, but Kroger during this time has also become one of the world’s top five largest and most profitable grocery chains. In 2020, Kroger’s sales surged over 8 percent, to $132 billion, posting a $2.6 billion profit for the year.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

From the 78th Commemoration of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Columbus Campaign For Arms Control Peace Concert
August 13th, 2023

For far too many, the names “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” have been relegated, diminished, beatified, and locked away into the ever palatable and thus, readily ignorable conceptual box known as history. History with a capital H. Tragic history, yes, but past history: something that “happened.”

Jadarrius Rose’s semi was traveling through the middle of Ohio near Circleville on July 4th when a state trooper tried to pull him over for missing a mud flap on one of his tires on a perfectly sunny day.

State troopers often pull over semis for safety reasons, mostly to check if their load is under the legal weight limit. Yet whether 23-year-old Rose, an African American, was profiled may never be revealed.

Why Rose did not at once pull over is a good question. But being profiled causes some to panic. Rose eventually did stop, got out of his truck where state troopers urged him to surrender. Instead, a Circleville police officer and his confused dog showed up – the German Shepard first looked to attack a state trooper, but then mauled Rose. The Circleville officer was fired pending his union’s appeal. Yet Rose, after first going to the hospital, was the individual who ended up behind bars that day.

Opens August 11
https://gatewayfilmcenter.org/movies/lakota-nation-vs-united-states-2023/

It's the most sacred place on earth, the birthplace of the Lakota that has shaped thought, identity and philosophy for the Očéti Šakówiŋ since time immemorial, the life-giving land known as the Black Hills. Yet with the arrival of the first Europeans in 1492, the sacred land has been the site of conflict between the people it has nurtured, and the settler state seeking to exploit and redefine it in its own image. This documentary is a searing testament to the strength of the Oyate and a visually stunning rejoinder to the distorted image of a people long shaped by Hollywood. "Lakota Nation vs. United States" is a lyrical and provocative testament to a land and a people who've survived removal, exploitation and genocide, and whose best days are yet to come.