Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton Are Right About the Census

It's kind of strange when the first person who calls you on the morning of New Year's Day is Rev. Jesse Jackson. I don't care what anyone says, Rev. Jackson is a civil rights pioneer who always deserves our respect. He has seen the inside of jail cells and had his life threatened far more times than you can imagine. It is for that reason that I listen to Rev. Jackson's words in an attempt to understand how young African Americans might pursue the next generation of leadership. It doesn't mean that we emulate Rev. Jackson, but we should learn from the wisdom of your predecessors.

I say the same thing about Rev. Al Sharpton, who I spoke with the next day. For all of those who critique Sharpton and Jackson, you have to stop for a second and think about this carefully: How many progressive black leaders do you know about who have not been ridiculed by mainstream media? From Louis Farrakhan across the board, black leadership is typically humiliated, demonized and labeled in a negative way. It's time for us to see beyond the lies and respect men and women for what they've brought to the table.

With that said, Revs. Jackson and Sharpton are pushing hard on the census and making sure that people of color are counted appropriately. The census takes place every 10 years, with the next census being done this year.

Both pastors are arguing that the census is not devoting enough resources toward counting those who are hard-to-reach, including minorities and immigrants. Sharpton, Jackson and other leaders recently held meetings with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, who is responsible for the census.

Appropriate counts of the census are critically important in light of the fact that these numbers are used to set up congressional and state legislative districts. They are also used to allocate federal funding, which impacts inner city schools among other things.

"Say you have a child 2 years old or 3 years old -- if you don't get that child counted, it impacts the education system by the time that child gets to school," said Melanie Campbell, director of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and the Unity Diaspora Coalition.

Rev. Jackson made the valid point to Locke that individuals serving time in prison should be counted in the neighborhoods from which they came, rather than those in which they are incarcerated. The fact that many African Americans in prison are counted in counties where they cannot vote leads to an undercount in the neighborhoods where their families live. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, there are 528,300 black inmates in prison, compared with 591,900 white inmates. Effectively, black men are 7 times more likely to go to prison than white men. I have consistently called for President Obama to deal with this problem.

"The undercount in places like Mississippi becomes the partner to the underservicing, the lack of resources. People want (African-Americans) to be undercounted so they can justify not sending money to those areas of Mississippi, because they say there are not enough people going to be served by that money," said Rev. Al Sharpton.

The Revs. Sharpton and Jackson deserve our support in calling for an accurate count in the Census. Underfunding of public schools remains a serious problem in black communities, contributing to massive unemployment, excess incarceration and the break down of the African-American family. So ultimately, political issues such as these affect all of us. We must all find a way to get involved.