Good morning all. Today’s going to be a busy one around the city as thousands come downtown to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Here are some of the things going on throughout the day.
The Cincinnati MLK Coalition will hold a series of marches and events themed around King’s more radical messages of economic and social justice.
“Given the tumultuous climate surrounding all of the social issues that we have and just the general exasperation felt across the board following the election, we thought it was important to revisit King’s more radical ideology,” organizer Christina Brown told WVXU.
Here’s the schedule:
• 8 am: Sold-out King Legacy Awards breakfast at the Freedom Center
• 10:30 am: Speeches and commemorative Civil Rights march beginning outside the Freedom Center to Fountain Square
• 11 am: Interfaith prayer service at Fountain Square followed by a march to Taft Theatre.
• 11:30 am: “Unequal, Unfair, Unacceptable” commemorative program begins at Taft Theatre. Dr. Adam Clark, associate professor of theology at Xavier University, will explore an oft-overlooked side of King — his radical message of economic justice and unrelenting insistence on change, themes that are still incredibly resonant in 2017.
“Dream but Stay Woke” Black Lives Matter Cincinnati MLK event: Noon at Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County in the Tower Room. The event will also explore the connection between King and movements for black liberation and economic justice. BLM will also participating in the 10:30 march from the Freedom Center.
• New prosecutors have been assigned in the retrial of Ray Tensing, the former University of Cincinnati police officer who shot and killed unarmed black motorist Samuel DuBose in Mount Auburn in July of 2015. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters has handed off the case, which he and assistant prosecutor Mark Piepmeier and Rick Gibson tried last year. Tensing’s first trial ended in a mistrial after the jury couldn’t agree on a verdict. Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutors Seth Tieger and Stacey DeGraffenreid will now take the case, which is scheduled for retrial in May. Deters says he’ll be tied up with a resentencing trial for convicted serial killer Anthony Kirkland during that time.
• More than 200 people rallied downtown yesterday in a cold, persistent rain to tell Congress not to eliminate the Affordable Care Act. The event was one of 40 in cities around the country, including one in Boston led by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Last week, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives began passing legislation that will eventually allow them to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, which expanded Medicaid to millions, extended the amount of time young people can stay on their parents’ insurance, prohibited insurance companies from turning people down for pre-existing conditions and other measures. Republicans say the law has made insurance premiums rise and that they’re working on a replacement plan. President-elect Donald Trump this weekend said in an interview with the Washington Post that his plan is almost finished, though no details have been released about it.
• Former Cincinnati politician Phil Heimlich has some interesting things to say about politics, even though he’s been out of the fray for a decade. Heimlich, a conservative Hamilton County Commissioner and Cincinnati City Councilman back in the day, now has a podcast where he dishes on local issues. He also made some provocative observations in a recent interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer, bemoaning some of his more conservative moves while in public service between 1993 and 2006 and offering his take on recent events at City Hall. One of his most pointed observations came about Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley’s controversial move giving raises to city employee unions outside the city’s normal collective bargaining process. “I found Cranley’s pandering to the unions as being the worst kind of self-serving politics,” Heimlich said. The former councilman then reflected that he made some of the same self-serving moves himself while he was in City Hall, but now says he’s interested in what he calls “the radical middle,” or groups who act on their values without political pandering or polarizing invective.
• Two Cincinnati natives are starting stints on the highest court in the state, both of them are Republican and both are named Pat somehow. Pats DeWine and Fischer both won election to the Ohio Supreme Court in November and started their tenures last week. Cincinnati hasn’t had a justice on the state’s highest court in 45 years, and hasn’t had two since the 1800s. There’s been some controversy about DeWine’s stint on the bench already, however, as opponents question whether he can stay untangled from conflicts of interest arising from his father Mike DeWine’s position as Ohio’s attorney general. The younger DeWine says he’ll recuse himself from cases where such a conflict might arise.
• Finally, Ohio keeps falling behind other parts of the country when it comes to population growth — a dynamic that has some pretty direct political implications. The state gained about 7,000 residents last year, almost all due to births. That’s less than 38 other states. What’s more, about 27,500 more people left the state than moved in last year. Experts say they expect that Ohio won’t gain many more people unless there is dramatic job growth in the state. That could continue a trend that has seen Ohio lose electoral college votes, diminishing its role as a vital swing state in national elections. Ohio currently has 18 electoral votes, the fewest it’s had since 1828 and down from a peak of 26 that it had in the middle of the 20th Century.
This article appears in Jan 11-18, 2017.