Volume 133 No. 50
THE BLACK MEDIA AUTHORITY • AFRO.COM
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JULY 12, 2025 - JULY 18, 2025
Credit: AFRO Archives
The AFRO is happy to shine a light on our future with a photo from the past featuring the children of the AFRO Clean Block Campaign. This program was started in 1934 by Ms. Francis Louise Murphy (front, right), daughter of AFRO Founder John H. Murphy. The effort continued for decades after she went home to glory. She left a legacy of inspiring the young both as a teacher and a community advocate. Today the AFRO asks you what are you pouring into your future? What are you teaching your children? Who will they become as a result of your effort or complacency? This week in the B Section, the AFRO addresses issues facing our youth and offers tips to enable our young people to be the best versions of themselves.
The Republican spending bill is bad for climate justice too By Willy Blackmore Word In Black
Meta (Facebook)/ National Urban League
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Protesters with the Moral Mondays movement placed 51 caskets on Capitol Hill, each representing 1,000 lives estimated to be lost if the GOP’s budget bill passes.
51 caskets drive home the impact of GOP budget bill By Rev. Dorothy Boulware Word In Black Moral Mondays is not a new form of protest, but the one in Washington, D.C. on June 30 was particularly poignant with its display of 51 caskets, each representing a thousand who will die in the coming year with the passing of the current White House administration’s spending and tax bill — which threatens the health coverage and healthcare of people on Medicare and Medicaid, among other dangers. The multicultural group that shows up on Capitol Hill
or in front of the Supreme Court, continues to make the point that the rights and needs of poor people are inadequately represented by those elected to do so. The largest ever cuts to America’s safety net were pushed through the House and the Senate without a single hearing for the people whose lives depend on these programs to testify. But Repairers of the Breach held a public hearing on the steps of the Supreme Court to hear the testimonies of those who Continued on A2
Among the many, many provisions in the White House-sponsored budget bill that was signed into law on the Fourth of July are a host of environmental measures that continue the Trump administration’s work to undo any and all progress on climate change. “It is not an overstatement to say this is the most anti-environment bill in history,” Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy for the Sierra Club, said in a statement. And as the Biden administration was very focused on environmental and climate justice in particular, the new bill targets many of those programs, too, and rescinds the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program entirely. Environmental activist Mustafa Ali put it plainly: “The bill greenlights pollution — literally. It weakens the Clean Air Act, disables the EPA’s ability to regulate toxic emissions, and rolls back protections for drinking water. It tells corporations they can dump, poison, and profit without consequence. And who suffers? The same people who always suffer.” Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income Americans.
Billions in promised grants now in jeopardy
Established through the Inflation Reduction Act, the program earmarked $2.8 billion in grants, and $200 million in
AP Photo/George Walker IV, File
Marquetta Wheeler, right, with Samaria Williams and Jemaria Shaw, walk through flood waters as they leave their home on Marietta Drive in Hopkinsville, Ky., April 4, 2025. Environmental justice advocates say the rollback of EPA programs under the new budget bill disproportionately harms underserved communities already burdened by pollution. technical assistance to invest in underserved communities —“80 times more than any federal investment in environmental justice in history,” Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Rolling Stone last year. While many grants have already been paid out (which hasn’t stopped the EPA from attempting to take that money back), a significant amount of funding through the program remains unawarded. In February, a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that over $1 billion in IRA environmental justice funding has not yet been obligated. The funding was supposed to remain available through Sep. 30, 2026.
Lawsuits push back against EPA’s rollbacks
Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, which was named
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by the Biden administration as a regional grantmakers for the Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program, one of a number of ways that the EPA’s IRA funds were being distributed, was one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the EPA filed earlier this year after the agency tried to unilaterally cancel its block grant. The nonprofits won that suit last month. “In the bill that went through the House and Senate, the Senate amended to not repeal obligated funds, but only rescind non-obligated funds,” explains Ruth Ann Norton, president of Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI). “Our funds are obligated, as our fourth-circuit ruling deemed. The cancellation of those grants was unlawful, in the words of the judge.” This article was originally published by Word In Black