Tragedy on August 9th—past and present.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
A few weeks ago I had planned to write a piece about the upcoming anniversary of a case of police brutality that had a slightly different end to it than we have come to expect from the criminal injustice system in America. The unarmed black man assaulted by police didn't die. Not only did he not die, he went on to sue the NYC and the NYPD and won "the largest police brutality settlement in New York City history". His primary police assailants were put on trial, and the officer responsible for the sodomizing, Justin Volpe is still incarcerated. Sadly, the others involved are not.
That man was Abner Louima, and the anniversary of his brutal attack, beating and sodomizing while in NYPD custody was on August the 9th, 1997.
But August the 9th is now the anniversary of yet another attack, this time ending in death, of an unarmed young black teenager, at the hands of police. Micheal Brown.
Many thanks to Joan Mar for "Attention Racists! Lemme help you with your signs" and to others who have been following both the police murder of Michael Brown, and the racism in the reporting and internet commentary. It was back in 2012 when shanikka wrote "Hey America! Can you please stop killing our (usually) innocent Black male children now?". She is now going to have to do an update—with a few more names.
Some things ain't changing very much in our landscape. History just keeps on repeating itself when you are black.
My hope is that the murder of Brown won't have an unsatisfactory ending in the courtroom like it had for Oscar Grant, or Trayvon Martin. Here's hoping that the entrance into the picture of the the FBI and Justice Department might bring some justice into the equation. It won't bring back young Micheal Brown for his parents, family and friends. But they and the community are seeking justice.
Once again we hear the cries of "No Justice No Peace" echoing through the streets. The same voices that were heard when close to 10 thousand angry New Yorkers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to the courts of lower Manhattan on August the 28th, 1997.
Very little footage from that time is available on the internet. One documentary filmmaker, Seyi did capture many sides of three major tragedies from that time, the beatings of Louima, and the death at the hands of police of Amadou Diallo, and 13 year old Nicholas Naquan Heyward, Jr.
If I Die Tonight Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Nicolas Heyward Documentary
Seyi's documentary presents the complex relationships and perspectives on police brutality from family members, community activists and cops.
He has just released a new film which updates material from the first documentary.
91 Bullets in a Minute Official Trailer
Published on Jun 19, 2014
"No Justice!" "No Peace!" This rising chant from the streets escalated in answer to the seemingly endless incidents of police brutality throughout this great nation. Now 7 years have gone bye and has anything really changed? Following the shooting of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell by members of the NY City Police Department the nation wrestled with this latest incident to rock our nation. Al Sharpton stood outside court demanding action and then Trayvon Martin happened.
We live in a world now, with almost instant communication. Our cell phones take pictures and video. Twitter, facebook and other non-traditional media sources can help us get the word out about atrocities.
Eyewitnesses have already been interviewed.
I found it interesting that yet another element has entered the picture (hat-tip to Onomastic)
Anonymous has issued a statement:
"Anonymous will not be satisfied this time ... with simply obtaining justice for this young man and his family," the voice says. "Anonymous demands that the Congressional Representatives and Senators from Missouri introduce legislation entitled 'Mike Brown's Law,' that will set strict national standards for police conduct and misbehavior in the USA."
The Brown family has hired Benjamin Crump, the attorney for Trayvon Martin's family. Al Sharpton arrived in Missouri today. People in Ferguson continue to protest.
No one is going to let this drop.
No Justice, No Peace.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Police actions have long been the fuel for urban riots. ColorLines: Michael Brown’s Death Didn’t Happen in a Vacuum.
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Michael Brown should be starting freshman orientation at Vatterott College today. Instead, his body is laying in a St. Louis-area morgue pending an investigation into what drove a police officer to shoot and kill the unarmed 18-year-old on Saturday.
Residents of Ferguson, Missouri, the black St. Louis suburb where Brown lived and died, confronted police officers on Sunday in a scene that’s since been described by the national media as one that quickly devolved into “looting.” In photos, black residents stood in front of police with their hands up to show that they were unarmed. They chanted the slogans we’ve all become too used to over the years: “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, carried a message scrawled in sharpie on a piece of cardboard: “Ferguson Police Just Executed My Unarmed Son!!!”
The St. Louis Post Dispatch’s editorial board unearthed some of the embers that lit Sunday’s fire. “Michael Brown didn’t get due process,” they wrote. “The still unnamed police officer who shot the 18-year-old black teenager dead in Ferguson will get plenty of it.”
And you can quantify that anger. Here’s more from the editorial board:
Last year, for the 11th time in the 14 years that data has been collected, the disparity index that measures potential racial profiling by law enforcement in the state got worse. Black Missourians were 66 percent more likely in 2013 to be stopped by police, and blacks and Hispanics were both more likely to be searched, even though the likelihood of finding contraband was higher among whites.
Every year these numbers come out to little fanfare, in part because there isn’t enough political will to do the further study to break them down by precincts and individual officers to determine whether there is a cultural or training problem in entire departments or just a few rogue, racist cops who need to find another line of work.
[snip]
…In Ferguson, the city where Michael died, the police in 2013 pulled over blacks at a 37 percent higher rate than whites compared to their relative populations. Black drivers were twice as likely to be searched and twice as likely to be arrested compared to white drivers
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This will be a lawsuit to keep an eye on. CNBC: 'Aunt Jemima' heirs file $2 billion lawsuit seeking royalties.
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The great grandson of Anna Short Harrington, the woman who became "Aunt Jemima," has filed a class action lawsuit against PepsiCo, The Quaker Oats Co., Pinnacle Foods Group, and The Hillshire Brands Co. on behalf of her great grandchildren, according to a report by The Wrap.
The suit further alleges a racial element to the exploitation of Harrington and the other women who portrayed Aunt Jemima, going so far as to accuse the company of theft in procuring 64 original formulas and 22 menus from Harrington. It further alleges that Harrington was dissuaded from using a lawyer, exploiting her lack of education and age, so that thecompany could not pay her a percentage of sales from her recipes.
D.W. Hunter alleges that the companies conspired to deny that Harrington had been an employee of Quaker Oats and exploiting her image and recipes for profit, but have refused to pay an "equitable fair share of royalties" to her heirs, the Wrap reported.
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Peggy Noonan doesn’t think Obama should be dropping his g’s. But in our swaggery age, even a president has to be able to get down. Daily Beast: For a President Today, Talkin' Down Is Speaking American.
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No, Ms. Noonan. You and the rest -- and some of you are black -- need to realize that when Obama does things like “dropping his g’s,” he is enhancing the dignity of his office and helping bring the country together.
First, let’s get the “fake” part out of the way.
I have encountered more than a few who seem honestly to think that when Obama, who generally speaks in a vanilla standard way, uses some black inflection or slang with black audiences, he is being fake. They assume that someone who can sound like Bryant Gumbel could not mean it when he mixes in a little Dave Chappelle. He must be pretending to be something, striking some kind of clumsy tribal note.
Wrong. Obama is doing something most black Americans do: using a special repertoire that has a function, to connote warmth and connection. Linguists call it Black English. If Obama is phony in switching into it to strike a certain note, then millions of black people are spending their entire lives being linguistically inauthentic. Doubtful.
And -- we must be under no impression that Black English is simply the things generally thought of as slang (or, with less scientific justification, errors) such as ain’t and good old aks for ask. Black English is a whole spice rack beyond this.
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Why black political power in the South is at its lowest point in decades even though the number of African-American elected officials is near an all-time high. The New Republic: The New Racism, This is how the civil rights movement ends.
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Sanders went from being an eager student—the kind who devoured, cover-to-cover, the two encyclopedias that comprised his school’s entire library—to a determined one. By graduation, he had high marks, but not enough money to go to college. He spent the next three years working in a sawmill and then as a janitor and an elevator operator, squirreling away as much as he could. When he finally enrolled at Talladega College, a historically black school in central Alabama, it was 1963, and he threw himself into the civil rights movement. He joined the Selma-to-Montgomery march that led to the Voting Rights Act, and he did the dangerous work of registering black people to vote in Lowndes County, a part of Alabama so plagued by racial violence it was known as “Bloody Lowndes.”
Sanders’s professors at Talladega quickly identified him as a “poor young man of great promise,” in the parlance of the times, and they urged him to pursue his boyhood dream of becoming a lawyer. In 1967, he was admitted to Harvard Law School. In Cambridge, Sanders stayed involved in the civil rights movement, and it was through his activism that he became close to another black Harvard Law student from the South. Her name was Rose Gaines. She was an itinerant preacher’s daughter who possessed the self-confidence and moxie that Sanders was still developing for himself. Before he graduated, they were married. After Harvard, the newlyweds could have followed their classmates to lucrative law firm jobs in New York or Washington. But they knew how much work remained to be done in the South. So they moved to Selma, the spiritual home of the movement, determined to advance the cause.
It was hard, dispiriting work. The couple didn’t take the Alabama bar exam together because they doubted that two black lawyers would be admitted to practice law in the state at the same time. More than once, Sanders had a gun drawn on him by white business owners whom he was suing on behalf of black clients. But soon he and Rose were filing the lawsuits necessary for blacks in rural Alabama to become sheriffs, school board members, and city councilmen—translating the right to vote into actual political power. In 1983, Sanders ran for office himself in a newly created black-majority Senate district.
Over the next three decades, Sanders became a fixture in the statehouse, ascending to the chairmanship of the Senate’s Finance and Taxation Education Committee. From his expansive office just off the Senate floor, he controlled Alabama’s Education Trust Fund, the largest operating budget in state government. Sanders tried to exercise his power to represent people who were unaccustomed to having a voice in Montgomery—namely poor, black Alabamans. He helped bring more money to their schools and their hospitals, better infrastructure to their neighborhoods, and greater fairness to their tax bills. Thanks to Sanders and a growing caucus of African American legislators, many of whom also chaired crucial committees, it was a period during which black people in Alabama enjoyed their most substantive political representation since Reconstruction. And Sanders, an exceptionally large man who suffered from severe obesity and whose supporters called him “The Rock,” was the cornerstone of the black political power structure in the state. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton faced off in Alabama’s 2008 Democratic primary, both candidates sought the endorsement of Sanders’s political organization; it went to Obama, and Obama won.
Sanders told me the story of his remarkable rise to power earlier this year, but his tone was more wistful than triumphant. For so long, his life had been an uplifting tale of slow but seemingly inexorable progress—not just for himself, but for African Americans throughout the South. In recent years, however, the trajectory of Sanders’s story has been abruptly—and just as inexorably—reversed. In 2010, Republicans took over the Alabama Senate and Sanders lost his chairmanship; in the four years since, he’s watched as the new GOP majority has systematically dismantled much of his life’s work.
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The Internet has allowed an underserved community to unite, but no amount of magic or fantasy erases the racism and sexism they face in the pursuit of their unconventional passions. The Root: The Secret Fight of the Black-Girl NerdsBlackGirlNerds, an online community described as “a place for women of color with various eccentricities to express themselves freely and embrace who they are.”
Jamie Broadnax (right) at Tidewater Comic Con 2014
COURTESY OF JAMIE BROADNAX
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Pushing back against media imagery of young black males. New York Times: After Shooting, a Twitter Hashtag Questions Portrayal of Blacks.
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When Tyler Atkins heard about the shooting of Michael Brown, 18, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., he posted on Twitter a picture of himself in a tuxedo, with a saxophone around his neck, next to a photograph of himself dressed in a black T-shirt with a blue bandanna tied around his head and his finger pointed at the camera.
Like hundreds of young African-Americans, he placed his pictures under the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, protesting Mr. Brown’s killing by a police officer and the way young black men are depicted in the news media. He said Mr. Brown’s identity was distorted and filtered through negative stereotypes, and that the same would have been done to him with the bandanna image if he found himself the victim of a similar tragedy. The first picture was taken after a jazz concert at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Tex., where Mr. Atkins, a senior, studies music. The other was taken during a recording for a rap video he made with friends for a school math project.
“Had the media gained a hold of this picture, I feel I it would be used to portray that I was in a gang, which is not true at all,” Mr. Atkins, 17, wrote in an email.
The speed with which the shooting of Mr. Brown has resonated on social media has helped propel and transform a local shooting into a national cause, as African-American commenters draw attention to continued incidents of blacks being shot by police and the media portrayals of young black men.
Tyler Atkins posted these pictures on Twitter and suggested that the news media would select the one on the left to depict him.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
In July of 2010, I posted a little seen diary on dKos and also on my blog entitled, On Oscar Grant, Martyrdom and The Digital Age. I juxtaposed the self immolation in 1963 of the Buddhist Monk, Tich Quang Duc with that of the alternative musician in 2006, Malachi Ritscher; and the murders by police of supposed North Viet Namese sympathizer Nguyen Van Lem in 1968 and of Oscar Grant the morning of 1 January 2009.
In the early morning hours of 1 January 2009, Oscar Grant loosely fit the description of a young black man in America; a supposed sympathizer to the Thug Life and a threat to the community, the nation and the world; and so Oscar Grant was shot in the back by Police in those early morning hours, while laying face down on the Fruitvale BART station platform...
I wrote,
... Oscar Grant was murdered by long-held fear and animosity, murdered during a war on brown people domestic and abroad; by a policeman whose only defense was that he meant to torture Grant with 50,000 volts instead. There was no trial for Oscar Grant, only an apprehension and a gunshot in the back.
As I write this, crowds are still gathering in Ferguson, Missouri, mourning the senseless murder of yet another child by yet another trigger-happy steroid addled authoritarian.
In response, a militarized police force is mustered with tanks and gas and dogs.
It is often stated that the US should be renamed, Prison America. I don't disagree with that assessment. It's almost as if we live a daily Stanford Experiment; some of us are guards, most of us are prisoners; but all of us, guards and prisoners alike, are housed within the confines of a concrete block-walled, razor-wired, guard-shack land.
There Are Black
There are black guards slamming cell gates
on black men,
And brown guards saying hello to brown men
with numbers on their backs,
And white guards laughing with white cons,
and red guards, few, say nothing
to red inmates as they walk by to chow and cells.
There you have it, the little antpile . . .
convicts marching in straight lines, guards flying
on badged wings, permits to sting, to glut themselves
at the cost of secluding themselves from their people . .
Turning off their minds like watertaps
wrapped in gunnysacks that insulate the pipes
carrying the pale weak water to their hearts.
It gets bad when you see these same guards
carrying buckets of blood out of cells,
see them puking at the smell, the people,
their own people slashing their wrists,
hanging themselves with belts from light outlets;
it gets bad to see them clean up the mess,
carry the blue cold body out under sheets,
and then retake their places in guard cages,
watching their people maul and mangle themselves,
And over this blood-rutted land,
the sun shines, the guards talk of horses and guns,
go to the store and buy new boots,
and the longer they work here the more powerful they become,
taking on the presence of some ancient mummy,
down in the dungeons of prison, a mummy
that will not listen, but has a strange power
in this dark world, to be so utterly disgusting in ignorance,
and yet so proudly command so many men. . . .
And the convicts themselves, at the mummy’s
feet, blood-splattered leather, at this one’s feet,
they become cobras sucking life out of their brothers,
they fight for rings and money and drugs,
in this pit of pain their teeth bare fangs,
to fight for what morsels they can. . . .
And the other convicts, guilty
of nothing but their born color, guilty of being innocent,
they slowly turn to dust in the nightly winds here,
flying in the wind back to their farms and cities.
From the gash in their hearts, sand flies up spraying
over houses and through trees,
look at the sand blow over this deserted place,
you are looking at them
-- Jimmy Santiago Baca
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