February 26, 2019 -- Honorable Member of the Senate Banking Committee: As President and CEO of the National Urban League, and on behalf of its 90 affiliates in 36 states and the District of Columbia, I write to express my concerns about Dr. Mark Calabria’s recent statements about the affordable housing goals (the goals). Dr. Calabria believes that the goals played an outsized role in the financial crisis, and that the goals are inherently risky.1 His and other’s assertations scapegoating the goals are “weapons of mass deception”, as I described in my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in 2008.2  Accordingly, if confirmed as the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), I fear Dr. Calabria would unnecessarily lower the benchmarks for the goals, based on unfounded assumptions. 

On February 27, the Managers Affinity Group at the National Urban League headquarters in New York City, hosted a special Black History Month program to engage and empower high school students from the region. A group of students and their chaperones from the Richmond Hill High School in Queens visited the National Urban League office for a morning of learning and conversation. Managers kicked off the event with welcome remarks from Senior Vice Presidents Wanda Jackson and Herman Lessard, followed by an interactive and informative session on the Urban League’s history by Renita Carter, Senior Manager of Education & Youth Development. She asked the students questions, made them laugh, and imparted important knowledge about the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality.

Marc Morial challenges students to understand and embrace their history.  When a black history exhibit was defaced at his overwhelmingly white high school, Marc Morial was surprised not only by the vandalism but also by a question it prompted from his principal.  The principal was getting questions from white students about having a white history celebration, and asked Morial and two of his friends how he should respond.

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“Despite the positive changes we have made throughout history, there is a persistent trend of bad actors playing politics with the survey in order to disenfranchise racial minorities. We see a present-day example of this type of bad faith provision in the 2018 announcement that the Department of Commerce planned to add a citizenship question to the census. There was no valid reason for this proposal other than a concerted effort to suppress the response rate of minorities and new immigrants.” – Congressman William Lacy Clay

A leadership gap, inadequate funding and staffing and a deliberate campaign to intimidate immigrants and communities of color all make the 2020 Census among the most challenging in American history.