In Kenosha, an overwhelmingly white jury decided that a seventeen year old white male, Kyle Rittenhouse, who brought an illegal AR-15 style submachine gun from Illinois to Wisconsin to protect property against Black Lives Mater protesters and ended up killing two of the protesters was not guilty because he thought he was defending himself from attack by his unarmed victims. Rittenhouse, his friend who purchased the gun for him, and his friend’s step-father claimed the gun was already in Wisconsin so it did not cross state lines. The judge contributed to the miscarriage of justice by preventing prosecutors from presenting evidence that would have more strongly established his guilt and by throwing out gun possession charges on technicality that many observers did not see. If the gun possession charges had remained in effect, Rittenhouse would have committed murder while engaged in criminal activity and his self-defense claims would have negated. President Joseph Biden told the country that he accepted the not-guilty verdict because “The jury system works, and we have to abide by it." In this case, I respectfully disagree.
Five days later, another almost all-white jury, this time in Brunswick, Georgia, found three white men guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, an African American man who they thought was suspicious because he was jogging on a rural road. The jury rejected claims that they were engaged in a “citizens arrest” and killed Arbery in “self-defense.”
This time President Biden acknowledged, “While the guilty verdicts reflect our justice system doing its job, that alone is not enough. Instead, we must recommit ourselves to building a future of unity and shared strength, where no one fears violence because of the color of their skin." In a more forceful statement, Vice-President Kamala Harris declared, “These verdicts send an important message, but the fact remains that we still have work to do. The defense counsel chose to set a tone that cast the attendance of ministers at the trial as intimidation and dehumanized a young Black man with racist tropes. The jury arrived at its verdicts despite these tactics.” Harris stressed that “Ahmaud Arbery should be alive” and that “We honor him best by continuing the fight for justice.”
A 1943 poem by Langston Hughes on race in America still rings true today. In “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943,” Langston Hughes called out the United States for its treatment of Black citizens at a time during World War II when the nation and over a million African American soldiers and sailors were fighting to defend democracy against European fascist dictators. The poem was originally published in the Autumn 1943 issue of the magazine Common Ground.
In June 1943, thousands of whites stormed, looted, and terrorized Black neighborhoods in Beaumont, Texas. Stores were pillaged, buildings were burned, and over 100 Black homes were ransacked. The Klan was active in the area protesting against Blacks moving into Beaumont as part of the war effort and had scheduled at mass rally for the end of June. The riot was set off by false charges that Black men had assaulted white girls. In response to the riot, Juneteenth celebrations were canceled and Black residents were not permitted to go to work at the town’s shipyards and factories. The rioting lasted for five days. Twenty-one people were killed and 206 were arrested, but only 29 were charged with crimes and the rest were released. No one was ever charged with the deaths during the riot. View a Youtube video.
As wartime production peaked in Detroit, a city known as the Arsenal of Democracy, the city’s 200,000 Black residents were crowded into tiny subdivided substandard apartments in a racially segregated sixty square block area. When the municipal government tried to construct a housing development in a white neighborhood, a white mob lit a cross in protest and armed vigilantes tried to prevent African Americans from moving into the housing. White workers, spurred on by local Klan activity, went on strike or launched slowdowns when Black workers received promotions. In June 1943, white and Black mobs faced off in a series of violent encounters. Nine whites and 25 Blacks died during the rioting. Suspiciously, no white rioters, but 17 African Americans were killed by Detroit police. In a Youtube interview, an African American woman who survived the riot described what happened.
“Beaumont to Detroit: 1943”
Source: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Youtube Reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiZPn8B384I
Looky here, America
What you done done –
Let things drift
Until the riots come.
Now your policemen
Let your mobs run free.
I reckon you don’t care
Nothing about me.
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
From the ku klux klan.
You tell me mussolini’s
Got an evil heart
Well, it mus-a-been in Beaumont
That he had his start –
Cause everything that hitler
And Mussolini do,
Negroes get the same
Treatment from you.
You jim crowed me
Before hitler rose to power –
And you’re STILL jim crowing me
Right now, this very hour.
Yet you say we’re fighting
For democracy
The why don’t democracy
Include me?
I ask this question
Cause I want to know
How long I got to fight
BOTH HITLER – AND JIM CROW.
With deepest apologizes to Langston Hughes, I rewrote “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943” as “Kenosha to Brunswick: 2021” and performed it on Youtube as my alter-ego, the rapper Reeces Pieces.
“Kenosha to Brunswick: 2021”
Looky here, America
What you done done –
With unchallenged racism
Injustice does come.
In some courtrooms
White murders go free.
You don’t care to let
Black lives be.
You tell us CRT
Is a mighty bad thing.
And Black Lives Matter
Trouble gonna bring.
You tell us America’s
Got a good heart
Jury in Kenosha
Just played it smart –
We saw a white boy
With a AR 1-5,
And now two protesters
Are no longer alive.
At his trial
Your white boy cried
We’re supposed to forgive him
For those who died.
You tell us America’s
Got a good heart
White jurists in Georgia
Just did their part –
Good Old Boys claimed,
They meant no harm
Killed a Black jogger
To sound the alarm.
Defended themselves
Against an unarmed man.
Their actions recall
The Ku Klux Klan.
The guilty verdict
Was a good blow.
But America has
A long way to go.
We have to question
Cause we want to know
How long people got to fight
RACIST JIM CROW?
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Media Watch with Hosts Bob Anthony and Eric Tait – November 29, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtlJ_GWhj2o
Alan Singer guests as we do a Thanksgiving Report Card on the state of the USA today through the lens of a) the verdicts in the murder trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia (Guilty!) and Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin (Not Guilty); b) Political figures and certain media reactions to those verdicts; c) Eric Garner’s son calling out NY Black Lives Matter leader for “blood in the streets” and similar comments about Mayor-elect Eric Adams plans for resurrecting a revamped plainclothes unit; d) Rep.Lauren Boebert’s outrageous defense of Rep. Paul Gosar as he was censured by the House of Rep gets savaged by local Denver TV News Anchor in an amazing “Standup” Commentary. Worth noting; e) Why/how Bill Maher’s b.s.-take on Critical Race Theory “being taught in schools” got a total “pass” on Chris Cuomo’s CNN’s show and what that says about piss-poor journalism “passing” for real journalism today, and f) How this “CRT obsession” relates to the current national trend in Book-Banning.