Christian artist Tauren Wells won four awards including new artist and contemporary Christian artist of the year at the 49th annual Gospel Music Association’s Dove Awards.
Wells, who was the former lead singer for Christian rock group Royal Tailor, performed “Known” from his solo debut album, “Hills and Valleys,” during Thursday’s award show from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wells also won awards for pop/contemporary album of the year and also got an award for being a featured artist on the rap/hip hop recorded song of the year with Social Club Misfits.
Wells accepted new artist of the year slightly out of breath, explaining that he had been backstage changing clothes when the award was announced and rushed to get to the stage without even knowing what award he had won.
“I am so grateful – what award is this?” Wells said. “New artist of the year?! Woah!”
Backstage after the show, Wells said that “Known” was about one of the God’s lessons for him about image.
“While it’s great to pose for all these pictures and getting to hold all these trophies, this doesn’t matter as much as what is happening inside our hearts,” Wells said.
Cory Asbury, a worship pastor in Kalamazoo, Michigan, rode the success of his No. 1 Christian single “Reckless Love” to three awards for song of the year, worship song of the year and worship album of the year. He said the song has connected to a lot of people through church services and on the radio.
“I’ve been hearing crazy testimonies of people that say ‘I was suicidal and I was going to take my own life, and I heard this song and I felt the love of God for the first time,'” Asbury said. “Stories like that are why any of us do this.”
Songwriter Colby Wedgeworth also won three awards, including songwriter of the year, non-artist, for working with Wells on the “Hills and Valleys” record and for co-writing the pop/contemporary recorded song of the year, “Old Church Choir.”
Zach Williams won artist of the year and pop/contemporary recorded song of the year for his song “Old Church Choir,” and Tasha Cobb Leonard won gospel artist of the year and urban worship album.
Rap duo Social Club Misfits from Florida won rap/hip hop recorded song of the year for their song “War Cry,” a song they wrote after the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
“We feel like anything that happens to our generation, we take it personally, so this song came from a place of just wanting to rally a generation,” said Martin Lorenzo Santiago, who goes by the stage name Marty, in the duo.
The show featured a couple of cross genre collaborations, including pop singer Tori Kelly singing with Kirk Franklin and country group Rascal Flatts singing with Jason Crabb. The show will air October 21 on TBN.
Civil rights organizations have filed a federal lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, accusing his office of preventing minority voters from registering ahead of next month’s closely watched race.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Atlanta, targets Georgia’s “exact match” verification process, which requires that information on voter applications precisely match information already on file with the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration.
The lawsuit comes days after an analysis by The Associated Press found over 53,000 voter registration applications sitting in pending status. Georgia’s population is approximately 32 percent black, according to the U.S. Census, but the list of voter registrations on hold with Kemp’s office is nearly 70 percent black.
Kemp, who is in charge of elections and voter registration in Georgia, is facing Democrat Stacey Abrams, who is vying to become the nation’s black female governor. Recent public polling indicates the race is a dead heat.
Abrams’ campaign has called on Kemp to step down as Secretary of State, saying his run for governor creates a conflict of interest with his role overseeing elections.
Kemp’s office has blamed the racial disparity on the New Georgia Project, a voter registration group founded by Abrams in 2013. It says the organization was sloppy in registering voters, and says they submitted inadequate forms for a batch of applicants that was predominantly black.
An entry error or a dropped hyphen in a last name can cause an application to be placed on hold.
The lawsuit said the “exact-match” policy “disproportionately and negatively impact the ability of voting-eligible African-American, Latino and Asian-American applicants to register to vote.”
Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for Kemp’s office, called the lawsuit “bogus” and “a complete waste of our time and taxpayer dollars.”
Kemp’s office said that voters whose applications are held in pending status can go to the polls with a photo ID that matches information on their registration application — rectifying the match issue in person — and cast a regular ballot.
Voters whose applications are frozen in “pending” status have 26 months to fix any issues before their application is canceled. They can still cast a provisional ballot.
The lawsuit was brought by several groups including the Georgia state chapter of the NAACP, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta and the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.
BENNINGTON, Vt. — Voters in this very liberal, very white state made Kiah Morris a pioneer when in 2014 they elected her as its first black female legislator. Two years later, another Vermont surfaced: racist threats that eventually forced her to leave office in fear and frustration.
After she won the Democratic primary for re-election to the state legislature in 2016, someone tweeted a cartoon caricature of a black person at her, along with a vulgar phrase rendered in ebonics. The tweeter threatened to come to rallies and stalk her, Morris said. She won a protective order against him but once that expired, the harassment continued, she said.
The harassment escalated into a break-in while the family was home, vandalism and death threats seen by her young son. Even after she announced she wouldn’t seek re-election, despite running unopposed, a group of youths pounded on her windows and doors at night, forcing her and her husband, convalescing after heart surgery, to leave town.
Finally, in late September, she resigned.
“There’s obviously online harassment that can happen, and that’s a part of our social media world right now, but then when things started happening in everyday life, that’s when it becomes really worrisome and terrifying,” she said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Amid the racial and ideological polarization consuming the country, the Morris case highlights the dangers politicians of color face. And it reinforces that even liberal bubbles like Vermont shouldn’t get too confident or comfortable in their cloaks of inclusivity.
No one should have to endure what Morris did, said Vermont House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, a white Democrat.
“This is deep racism coming out, and there are Vermonters hunting down other Vermonters here. This is awful for our state,” she said. “Rather than shake our heads and say, ‘Oh, what a shame,’ we all need to buckle down and figure out what steps we can take, what steps each of us can take, however large or small, to erode some of the system that allow racism to continue.”
The sheriff of New Jersey’s most populous county resigned last month after a recording surfaced in which he made derogatory remarks about blacks and the state’s first Sikh attorney general. In August, a Georgia man was sentenced to prison for racist threats against two U.S. senators, including black South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.
“Racism and racial animus is a chronic illness of this country. It’s not something that just comes in waves in certain places. It’s always there simmering,” said Gloria Browne-Marshall, a professor of constitutional law at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of the book “Race, Law and American Society: 1607 to Present.”
Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery and in 2000 became the first to legally recognize same-sex civil unions, a precursor to gay marriage. It has elected Green Party and Socialist candidates. Even its Republican governor would be considered left of center in a conservative state.
But Vermont is also 94.4 percent white, according to census statistics. The black population is just 1.4 percent, or about 8,700 people.
In recent years, like elsewhere in the country, racism has bubbled up, including white supremacist flyers posted this year on college campuses.
“In a state that wants to promote itself as this liberal bastion, the majority of people outraged should have been there protecting” Morris, Browne-Marshall said.
Morris said she was dissatisfied with the response by Bennington police when she reported the acts against her and her family; the police chief has defended his department’s handling of the complaints.
She’s grateful that the attorney general’s office and Vermont State Police are now investigating.
When independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who despite a liberal pedigree has struggled to connect with black voters, learned that Morris was not seeking re-election because of the threats, he called the situation outrageous and, in a statement to The Burlington Free Press, said it is “not what Vermont is about.”
“In the state of Vermont, no elected official, candidate or person should be fearful of their safety because of the color of their skin or their point of view,” he wrote. “This corrosion of political discourse is destructive to our democracy, and we cannot let it take hold.”
Morris said that she has received other support from Vermonters, but said the hard part is learning the system is not set up to protect her.
“I cannot be the legislator that I want to be. I cannot speak my truth in the way that needs to have been said,” she said. “I cannot do those things and be secure and be assured of the safety for myself and my family. And that is really unfortunate.”
Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and comedian Dave Chappelle are among eight people being saluted by Harvard University for their contributions to black history and culture.
All eight recipients of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal will be honored Thursday afternoon by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard.
Kaepernick, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers, created a firestorm when he began kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality and social injustice.
The other honorees are Kenneth Chenault, chairman and a managing director of General Catalyst; Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Pamela Joyner, founder of Avid Partners, LLC; psychologist and author Florence Ladd; Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative; and artist Kehinde Wiley.
After a Facebook post by a prominent University of Mississippi donor was denounced as racist, some professors say the university should rename its journalism school for an African-American journalist who crusaded against lynching.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born a slave in Mississippi in 1862. She went on to become an investigative reporter in nearby Memphis, Tennessee, and denounced racial violence. She helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and pushed for women’s right to vote. Wells-Barnett died in 1931 in Chicago.
Ole Miss donor Ed Meek, for whom the Meek School of Journalism and New Media is named, has asked that his name be removed from the school after he posted photos of two black women on Facebook on Sept. 19 and wrote: “A 3 percent decline in enrollment is nothing compared to what we will see if this continues … and real estate values will plummet as will tax revenues. We all share in the responsibility to protect the values we hold dear that have made Oxford and Ole Miss known nationally.”
Meek apologized for the post after receiving sharp criticism. The women were University of Mississippi students who said they had simply gone out after a football game to have fun with friends. Both denounced Meek’s post as demeaning.
A letter from 62 Ole Miss professors and several instructors and graduate students was published Friday in the student newspaper, The Daily Mississippian , suggesting the journalism school be named for Wells-Barnett. They also suggest that the university start journalism scholarships for black women and that it start a Reparative Justice Committee that would work toward removing a Confederate soldier statue that has stood for generations in a prominent place on campus.
“Removing Ed Meek’s name from the School is a necessary, but basic, step in a much longer process of reparative justice,” the letter said. “Our university must firmly stand for its stated values of intellectual excellence, non-discrimination and inclusion and support for all its students.”
The ultimate decision about whether to remove Meek’s name from the journalism school would belong to the state College Board. Meek led Ole Miss public relations for 37 years, starting in 1964, and has had other publishing businesses. The journalism school was named for him after he and his wife donated $5.3 million in 2009.
The university has struggled for decades to deal with its history of troubled race relations. White mobs rioted on campus in the autumn of 1962 as James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss; military troops were called in and Meredith was escorted by federal marshals.
Mississippi’s population is about 38 percent black, and black students made up 12.7 percent of the Ole Miss enrollment in 2017.
In an effort to promote racial diversity in recent years, Ole Miss renamed a street that had been called Confederate Drive and installed plaques to provide historical background, including on the Confederate soldier statue.
In July 2017, the university announced it would put up signs acknowledging that some buildings on campus were built with slave labor. The university also announced then that it would remove the name of James K. Vardaman from a building. Vardaman, a white supremacist, was Mississippi’s governor from 1904 to 1908 and a U.S. senator from 1913 to 1919.
