BENTON HARBOR, MI — I’m trying to get Marcus Muhammad elected as mayor in the August election in Benton Harbor. After examining everything we have gone through over the last five years with democracy under attack here in Michigan, of the three mayoral candidates, he is the best. Democracy is everything that America stands for yet we were thrown a dictator under the Emergency Manager law. Marcus is the only candidate who stood up against the injustice of stripping elected officials of their decision-making rights in Benton Harbor. The other two candidates, who are pastors, stood against us. They never speak about the poverty and haven’t done anything about it.
We’ve been working on the poverty, working with HUD to bring in more moderate to low-income housing. I am the Vice Chair of the Department of Economic Development. We’re working on ways to recycle items used daily to keep them from going to the landfill, and we’re also working on more demolitions of some structures that need to come down through the city’s Brownfield redevelopment. We constantly enter into new development agreements to spur more job growth and new businesses. We are trying to align some prominent older gentlemen that already are working with minority men in the community, trying to connect them with the My Brother’s Keepers initiative. We hope that we can keep these men out of the judicial system by getting them some job training. Until we can do that, they can’t even work a job. We are also responsible for the $500 million development going on in Benton Harbor, although the current mayor would love to take the glory for it.
We need to get Rev. Pinkney out of jail. This is America. There’s freedom of speech, and no one has the right to take that. Who in America ever heard of a man thrown in to jail for quoting the scripture? And I saw firsthand at his trial that all of the “reasonable doubt” in the courtroom was rotten. I pray that the whole judicial system is investigated, turned inside out and restructured to work for all, fairly and justly.
MaryAlice Adams is running for re-election for Commissioner-at-Large in Benton Harbor in the November election.
