Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
While Donnie Dump’s trial in Manhattan has sucked up all the mainstream media coverage, let us not forget that Fulton County DA Fani Willis is still living with right-wing threats of violence, and is running for re-election — primary voting is today, in Georgia.
In case you missed it, she did a one-on-one interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in which she talked frankly about her situation, and her determination to keep on keepin’ on — as DA, and to continue to bring the former President to justice.
The Daily Beast reported on the interview:
Fani Willis Tells Maddow: ‘Should Feel Sorry’ for Those Attacking Her
Amid death threats and Republicans at the state and federal level throwing sand in the gears of her Trump prosecution, the Fulton County DA said she would not be deterred.
“It’s been happening since about a month after I took office—I began to get threats,” said Willis, whose term began in January 2021. Eventually, she said, the threats forced her to move out of her home. Willis explained that many of the threats “are racial in nature” due to “some recent cases”–a likely allusion to last summer’s RICO indictment of Trump and 18 of his allies.
“It’s a very interesting way to live, but it’s well worth it to have the honor of being the first female district attorney in Fulton County,” Willis said. “It pales in comparison to what my victims are going through.”
“And the reality is, one of the reasons we are upsetting people is we’re so successful here in Fulton County. I have the third largest crime drop in America. We have it because we’re taking a balanced approach; both unapologetically going after gangs and violent criminals and anyone who should violate the law in my county,” said Willis, who is campaigning for re-election and faces a Democratic primary on Tuesday. “And we’re also doing programs. It has been a huge sacrifice, but it’s well worth it for my community,” she added.
Maddow spent part of her opening monologue not only on threats against Willis, but on how Georgia Republicans are suddenly passing legislation to make it easier to remove prosecutors like Willis from cases. Maddow was also skeptical of special prosecutor Nathan Wade stepping down from the case because he and Fallis had dated, citing how the Georgia Supreme Court has ruled that not even having married lawyers on opposing sides of litigation constituted a conflict of interest.
The Willis campaign has been running this powerful ad. Please share it with your networks:
At WaPo Holly Bailey wrote “ Fani Willis campaigns to keep her job — and continue prosecuting Trump”
Appearing last week at a function honoring the work of the police department in South Fulton, Ga., the Atlanta suburb where she has lived for more than a decade, Willis spoke of how local officers had stepped up to protect her, her family and her home amid threats on her life stemming from the cases she has taken on.
“The last couple of years have been really hard for me,” Willis said, her voice thick with emotion. “But what has kept me safe is this police department.”
From her front-row seat, Willis watched local officers take the stage with their bomb-sniffing dogs. She knew them well, she explained, because they had regularly been at her home in response to bomb threats that had come in since she first launched her investigation into Trump and his allies.
Wiping tears away, Willis recounted one of the more harrowing incidents: she received a phone call on Christmas last year from the South Fulton police chief saying there had been a 911 call reporting that a woman had been shot and killed at her home.
Willis had moved out of her home more than a year earlier because of the ongoing threats, but her daughters sometimes visited the house — and she worried one of them had been murdered. Police quickly discovered it was a hoax swatting call — but the incident left Willis shaken.
Willis is running in the primary against fellow Democrat Wise Smith. There has only been one poll conducted on the race, reported here by Newsweek:
The poll, which surveyed 1,000 likely Democratic voters from April 20 to 23, found that 79 percent of respondents plan to back Willis in the primary, while 9 percent said they are voting for Wise Smith.
The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points
Rep. Jasmine Crockett weighed in:
Support our Sister.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Inmates do billions of dollars of work for companies and governments each year. A landmark lawsuit alleges many are being kept in prison because the business is just too good. Bloomberg: Cheap Prison Labor Is Keeping People Locked Up Longer, Suit Alleges
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Lakiera Walker was lying in her bunk bed a year ago, sick with flu and too weak to stand, when a prison supervisor came in to chastise her for missing the afternoon van to work. Walker’s job was on an assembly line at Southeastern Meats Inc., a supermarket supplier. The 12-hour shifts on her feet in 30-some-degree cold made her body ache and turned her fingers a deep red. Southeastern Meats paid about $13 an hour for Walker’s work packaging its frozen peas and corn, but the state pocketed most of that, including two-fifths for the Alabama Department of Corrections to “assist in defraying the cost” of her incarceration.
That afternoon, a fellow inmate would need to carry Walker to a medical ward. But when the ADOC officer found her in her room, she says, her health wasn’t his concern.
“I am so sick,” she told him.
“Get up and go make us our 40%,” he replied.
“It made me feel,” Walker recalls, “like he was a pimp.”
Now Walker, a 37-year-old recently paroled after 15 years in prison, has teamed up with nine still-incarcerated fellow plaintiffs, as well as some prominent labor lawyers and unions, to file a class action. They’re suing Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, the state’s attorney general, the prisons commissioner, parole board leaders, and a slew of cities, along with companies they claim rely on forced labor, including Hyundai supplier Ju-Young, beer distributor Bama Budweiser of Montgomery, and franchisees of KFC, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s. The workers suing are all Black. Their class action accuses the defendants of human trafficking, racketeering and violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, which targets conspiracies to deprive people of their constitutional rights. They argue that the government officials colluded to keep Black people imprisoned and available as cheap labor and that the companies conspired to profit from the coerced work. The suit, filed right before Christmas, says it seeks “to abolish a modern-day form of slavery.”
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President Joe Biden gave a high-stakes commencement speech to hundreds of young Black men at Morehouse College on Sunday, delivering a direct address to the constituency his campaign worries is shifting against him as he runs for reelection against former President Donald Trump.
The Democrat focused parts of his speech laying out the stakes of the 2024 campaign to the graduates of the all-male historically Black college, saying he was determined to “root out systemic racism” while fighting the “extremist forces aligned against the meaning and message” of the school.
And Biden spoke broadly about his handling of the Israel-Hamas war that led to threats of boycotts and protests of his speech, revealing that his own family is upset by the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza that worsened after Israel launched its military campaign following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
“It’s one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world. There’s nothing easy about it,” the president said, nodding to the 414 graduating seniors arrayed before him. “I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine.”
The 27-minute speech was Biden’s most significant public remarks to students since protests over the war in Gaza broke out in campuses around the nation last month. It was relatively well received at Morehouse, where some students and faculty had urged administrators to rescind the president’s invitation to speak.
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On the campaign trail, Brandon Johnson often talked about the asthma he suffered growing up just west of Chicago, connecting it to industrial pollution.
“For too long our communities have been seen as dumping grounds for waste and materials that no one seems to know what to do with,” the then mayoral candidate said at an event in the majority-Hispanic neighborhood of Pilsen.
When Johnson was sworn in last May, he inherited a city grappling with a host of environmental challenges.
In one of the nation’s most segregated cities, communities of color face disproportionate exposure to air pollution, lead and climate risks such as flooding. In 2022, federal investigators found Chicago violated residents’ civil rights by moving polluting industries into communities of color.
These disparities take a toll: residents of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods can expect to live 30 years longer than Chicagoans a few miles away.
Johnson, a progressive former public school teacher and union organizer ,ran on a platform of increasing funding for education and taking a mental-health approach to the city’s high rates of violence. But he also promised to tackle the city’s legacy of environmental racism, winning key endorsements from climate groups in the process.
Now, a year into Johnson’s term, those groups are holding Johnson to his word.
“We feel happy that somebody coming from the ‘movement’ space [was] elected to office,” said Oscar Sanchez, a community organizer. Now, he said community organizations “have to do twice the work, and [demand] transparency” to make the most of this political moment.
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In the shadow of El Llagal, a tailings dam that holds waste from one of the world’s largest goldmines in the Dominican Republic, sits the home of Casilda Lima. The roof is corrugated iron and the walls are wood, painted pink and yellow. A sign reads “God bless this home”.
Outside,the 114-metre-tall grey wall of the dam looms large. Behind it lies a lake of waste from the mining process, where machinery and chemicals, along with a huge volume of water, are used to grind up rock to extract gold and silver. Many substances found in tailings are lethal, others are radioactive.
In 2014, Lima, 47, says she was told she had high lead and heavy metal levels in her blood. She says she has developed heart problems, and lives with headaches, nausea and fevers. She alleges it is because of the pollution from the Pueblo Viejo goldmine and the dam.
Pueblo Viejo, about 60 miles north-west of the capital Santo Domingo, lies within Sánchez Ramírez, a farming province that faces significant challenges in terms of poverty. The mine has had a number of different owners but became a 60/40 joint venture between the Canada-based Barrick Gold, the operator, and Newmont, a US corporation, in 2006. Barrick’s mining operations started in 2013.
“I never suffered from anything before Barrick came,” says Lima. “Now I have a lot of headaches and kidney problems. I find it hard to breathe and get very dizzy.”
Lima’s house is in Las Lagunas. She lives with her five children and two nephews who also have health problems. “My 23-year-son doesn’t stop getting headaches and feeling dizzy,” she says.
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A guideline for U.S. doctors to ignore race in assessing lung health will likely have profound effects beyond the intended improvements in medical care, such as increasing disability payments and disease diagnoses for Black patients while boosting their job disqualifications, a study found on Sunday.
Asian and Black patients will move forward on U.S. lung transplant waiting lists, with 4.3 fewer days of expected wait time, while Hispanic and white candidates will move back, having to wait 1.1 days longer on average, according to a
report, opens new tab of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
U.S. diagnoses of nonobstructive lung disorders, such as chronic bronchitis, will likely jump 141% for Black patients and fall 69% for white patients, the researchers found in the report presented at the annual meeting in San Diego of the American Thoracic Society, the premier society for lung doctors.
Annual disability payments for Black military veterans will likely rise by more than $1 billion and fall by $500 million for white veterans, the researchers estimated.
Black people had been assumed for hundreds of years to naturally have smaller lungs than white people, meaning a given amount of air going into and out of the lungs could appear to show impaired lung function in white patients and normal function in Black patients.
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Seventy years after Brown v. Board, Black and white residents, in Camden, Alabama, say they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to make it happen. ProPublica: Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South. One Town Grapples With It
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A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.
Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.
The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a “segregation academy” due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.
Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.
Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.
Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.
But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.
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Ed Dwight, America’s first Black astronaut candidate, finally rocketed into space 60 years later, flying with Jeff Bezos’ rocket company on Sunday.
Dwight was an Air Force pilot when President John F. Kennedy championed him as a candidate for NASA’s early astronaut corps. But he wasn’t picked for the 1963 class.
Dwight, now 90, went through a few minutes of weightlessness with five other passengers aboard the Blue Origin capsule as it skimmed space on a roughly 10-minute flight. He called it “a life-changing experience.”
“I thought I really didn’t need this in my life,” Dwight said shortly after exiting the capsule. ”But, now, I need it in my life .... I am ecstatic.”
The brief flight from West Texas made Dwight the new record-holder for oldest person in space — nearly two months older than “Star Trek” actor William Shatner was when he went up in 2021.
It was Blue Origin’s first crew launch in nearly two years. The company was grounded following a 2022 accident in which the booster came crashing down but the capsule full of experiments safely parachuted to the ground. Flights resumed last December, but with no one aboard. This was Blue Origin’s seventh time flying space tourists.
Dwight, a sculptor from Denver, was joined by four business entrepreneurs from the U.S. and France and a retired accountant. Their ticket prices were not disclosed; Dwight’s seat was sponsored in part by the nonprofit Space for Humanity.
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Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Editor
I’ve been caring for my Mother these last ten years, and she’d been in and out of the hospital quite a bit for the last few. She passed on the twenty-seventh of April and it happened fast. I was convinced she’d bounce back like she always did, but it was not to be. She was a tough gal from a family with a history of tough gals, but the end comes for the quick, the tough and the good. When my son died six years ago, I was in a primal scream rage. For months. It was so hard. No family is exempt from sickness and loss. When it comes, especially when it is expected, there is still an unending fall into sadness. It spirals and spins and the world is a blur. But there is still so much to do and there is no time to be disoriented, for long. Each day is a list of tasks and each week is a tally. And in the midst of it, memories of green, a lesson learned, the recollection of a lemonade summer, are enough to make the journey into the next month and the years to be a little less sad, with a little less of the dizzying spin. And maybe, in just a little time, the remembrances might even conjure a little smile.
Whatever city or country road
you two are on
there are nettles,
and the dark invisible
elements cling to your skin
though you do not cry
and you do not scratch
your arms at forty-five degree angles
as the landing point of a swan
in the Ohio, the Detroit River;
at the Paradise Theatre
you named the cellist
with the fanatical fingers
of the plumber, the exorcist,
and though the gimmicky at wrist
and kneecaps could lift the seance
table, your voice was real
in the gait and laughter of Uncle
Henry, who could dance on either
leg, wooden or real, to the sound
of the troop train, megaphone,
catching the fine pitch of a singer
on the athletic fields of Virginia.
At the Radisson Hotel,
we once took a fine angel
of the law to the convention center,
and put her down as an egret
in the subzero platform of a friend—
this is Minneapolis, the movies
are all of strangers, holding themselves
in the delicacy of treading water,
while they wait for the trumpet
of the 20th Century Limited
over the bluff or cranny.
You two men like to confront.
the craters of history and spillage,
our natural infections of you
innoculating blankets and fur,
ethos of cadaver and sunflower.
I hold the dogwood blossom,
eat the pear, and watch the nettle
swim up in the pools
of the completed song
of Leadbelly and Little Crow
crooning the buffalo and horse
to the changes and the bridge
of a twelve-string guitar,
the melody of “Irene”;
this is really goodbye—
I can see the precious stones
of embolism and consumption
on the platinum wires of the mouth:
in the flowing rivers, in the public baths
of Ohio and Michigan.
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