Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
In the month we celebrate the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr on January 15, 1929, we also must honor and celebrate the lives of both his wife, and son who have joined the ancestors; Coretta Scott on January 30, 2006, and their son Dexter who passed last week, on January 22, 2024.
The famous African-Americans website, has Mrs. Kings extensive bio:
Born and raised on a farm in Perry County, Alabama, Coretta Scott (1927-2006) was introduced to the segregated society at an early age and lived a discriminated life for many years. Even though she attended a one-room school for low-income blacks in her neighbourhood, Scott excelled in her studies, especially music, and rose as a singer. Graduating from Lincoln High School, Scott was chosen as its valedictorian in 1945 followed by a scholarship from Antioch College, Ohio.
Graduating as a Bachelor of Arts with a degree in music and education, Scott proceeded to her next institute, New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with a fellowship awarded to her name. In the early 1950s, the talented individual earned her second collegiate degree in voice and violin.
Moving to Montgomery in 1953 with her husband who she met in her former institute, Scott began to get involved in the Civil Rights Movement while simultaneously working alongside her husband in the Baptist Church throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As an active member, Scott took part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, attended Ghana’s Independence Day in 1957 and traveled on a pilgrimage to India in 1959. She was also one of the civil rights workers to contribute towards the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Here’s a seven minute video version of her life story:
Mrs. King talks about her singing career in this clip from a series of interviews with The Visionary Project:
The King’s son Dexter, born January 30, 1961, died of prostate cancer on January 22, 2024. From Medium, Mazeshirt Clothing
“Dexter Scott King, Son of MLK Jr., Remembered at 62”
Dexter Scott King was the fourth and youngest child of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Growing up, Dexter was surrounded by the teachings and activism of his parents, who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement. He attended Morehouse College, where his father and grandfather had also studied, and graduated with a degree in business administration.
After his father’s assassination in 1968, Dexter and his siblings, Yolanda, Martin III, and Bernice, continued to carry on their father’s legacy through their involvement in social justice causes. However, it was Dexter who took on the responsibility of preserving his father’s work and intellectual property.
Dexter King served as both chairman of the King Center and president of the King Estate. He carried the weight of continuing his father’s precedent and played a crucial role in protecting his father’s work and intellectual property. Under his leadership, the King Center became a global destination for education, training, and research on nonviolent social change.
One of Dexter King’s notable achievements was the establishment of the King Center Imaging Project, which digitized over one million documents from his father’s personal papers and made them accessible to the public. This project ensured that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy would be preserved for future generations.
The King Family speaks following Dexter King, son of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death:
We must never forget those who have contributed to moving us forward towards a time, somewhere in the future, when we will have justice, equality and peace.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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President Joe Biden on Saturday returned to the state that sparked his 2020 comeback, where he’s all but certain to win the first sanctioned Democratic primary next week.
Biden headlined the South Carolina Democratic Party’s “First-in-the-Nation” celebration dinner, delivering an amped-up message to Black voters, a key part of the state’s Democratic coalition and a constituency vital to Biden’s success in November.
Biden leaned into what his administration has accomplished for Black Americans while highlighting his choice to elevate South Carolina to the first-in-the-nation slot. He also dug into former President Donald Trump, ramping up his attacks on the heavy favorite for the GOP nomination.
“The truth is, I wouldn’t be here without the Democratic voters of South Carolina, and that’s a fact,” Biden said. “You’re the reason I am president. You’re the reason Kamala Harris is a historic vice president. And you’re the reason Donald Trump is a defeated former president. You’re the reason Donald Trump is a loser, and you’re the reason we’re gonna win and beat him again.”
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A Black man who was detained by police during an early morning walk in a quiet community northwest of Detroit says the white officer who threw him against a squad car, cuffed him and accused him of planning to break into a car also told a significant lie.
Brian Chaney says he asked for a supervisor during his arrest in Keego Harbor, Michigan, and Police Officer Richard Lindquist told him that another officer present was in charge. The problem: That second officer was not a supervisor or even a member of the Keego Harbor Police Department.
Lindquist was never disciplined and his chief says that while a suspect has the right to request a supervisor, what the officer did was OK.
“An officer can lie in the field when he’s not under oath,” Keego Harbor Police Chief John Fitzgerald said in a deposition in Chaney’s $10 million wrongful detention lawsuit.
But with American trust in police plummeting, buttressed by cellphone and bodycam videos that can expose untruths, a profession once broadly considered above reproach has seen its reputation suffer.
“It’s well accepted that the weakest and most vulnerable members of society are the biggest victims of coercive practices, like police being dishonest and deceptive practices in interrogations,” said James Craven, a legal associate with Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and a former criminal defense attorney.
Brian Chaney stands near the area, Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024, in Keego Harbor, Mich., where he was arrested. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
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An attorney for Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles leader Melina Abdullah is demanding that the Los Angeles Police Department return or destroy any privileged attorney-client records officers may have photographed while searching his Hollywood home this week. He is also demanding answers about the reason for the search, which he says was unjustified.
A police spokeswoman said the search is now the subject of an internal affairs investigation.
Dermot Givens, 67, represents Abdullah in a lawsuit in which she accuses the LAPD of badly mishandling a 2020 “swatting” incident, when heavily armed officers in tactical gear surrounded her home based on a false report of an emergency there.
Givens said his first thought when he saw similarly armed LAPD officers swarming his townhome Tuesday was that he was being “swatted” himself.
“I go, ‘Are you all swatting me?’” Givens said in an interview Friday with The Times. “And they said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I live here!’
Givens said armed LAPD officers showed him a warrant that listed his address but not his name, then “ransacked” his home. He said officers left without finding whom and what they told him they were looking for: a much younger Black man and an Apple AirTag they said was pinging in the vicinity of the home, among other items.
What the officers did take, Givens said, were photographs of documents from Abdullah’s case that happened to be on his kitchen table. He was initially escorted outside but walked in on officers photographing the documents, he said.
“I had everything out,” he said of the documents.
By Friday, the matter was before a judge in Los Angeles Superior Court, where Erin Darling — another attorney for Abdullah — filed for an emergency order requiring the LAPD to return or destroy any “attorney work product” they’d taken or captured in the pictures, as well as provide a copy of records supporting the search warrant.
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Conservatives are perfecting a totally new strategy for their anti-DEI efforts—inventing problems wholesale. Slate: Forget the Art of Scapegoating
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These types of news cycles move fast, but if you take a look into the internet circus right now, you might find conservative discourse dominated by the most out-there question that the ecosphere has homed in on in a long time: Are Black people to blame for America’s aviation safety crisis?
Charlie Kirk, a good barometer for what conservative influencers are focused on at any given moment, told his listeners on Wednesday: “I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’ ” Rob Schneider, a good barometer for what internet-addled conservative adults think, said on Sunday that a United Airlines crew responsible for his flight had been “incompetent” in diagnosing a flap issue. Presumably, at least one person on said flight deck was Black or a woman or looked gay to Schneider, because Schneider blamed “diversity” in hiring for the incident. In the letter he posted to United’s CEO, Schneider wrote that once United’s board of directors fired him, he could “get back to your true passion, your Drag Queen performances.” The fixation, in other words, is not limited to those who actually fly the planes. Conservative critics are obsessed with trawling the identities of anyone in any position of power, or even employment, in the airline industry right now. A benign Southwest Airlines tweet about an all-female flight crew, attendants and all, prompted a conservative harassment beacon to post, “They’re openly mocking us. They know what they’re doing.”
At first glance, all of this amounts to a car wash running as intended. Conservative media needs to cycle through different artifacts of cultural grievance to keep business booming. Today it’s the airline industry paying lip service and even instituting some recruiting changes to increase the pool of candidates who are not white men. Tomorrow it could be immigrants infecting the country with a drug problem. The next day it could be a social studies teacher trying to turn children into queens. Par for the course, right?
Not exactly. What is happening with the conservative freakout over diversity in aviation is different from the normal outrage cycle in an echo chamber. Conservative commentators, politicians, and the followers who take cues from them have a long-established pattern of how they do business. The first step is what happens: Crime goes up, maybe, or at least a spate of high-profile crimes gets a lot of attention. Conservatives then funnel that into racist resentment, maybe with loosely coded language, or maybe without even needing that. Or the national deficit exists, and Republican political campaigns blame it on the “welfare state,” fully aware that their voters think that means “Black people.” Or a large number of Americans succumb to drug addiction and overdoses, and conservatives make it into a rallying cry about the danger of immigrants, as if they’re the ones introducing heroin into our communities. They’re always deploying barely disguised racism to ensure anger, right?
The new conservative outrage machine is different because it skips a step. It used to be that first, something had to happen. Sure, instigators might exaggerate about that thing. They might spin it to sound like more than it was. But something happened somewhere, and the race to pin it on a group they didn’t like could commence. In 2024 nothing even has to happen.
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When enslaved Africans escaped the Surinamese plantations overseen by Dutch colonists from the 17th to the 19th century, several women ingeniously hid rice grains in their hair to grow when they found refuge deep in the Amazon rainforest. Now, centuries later, a gene bank is working to save Suriname’s rare rice species while also preparing communities to be more resilient to the climate crisis.
In Suriname’s hinterlands, near the town of Brokopondo, Albertina Adjako, a descendant of those Africans – who became known as Maroons – carefully walks in her flip-flops through her rice seedlings. “We are worried because we had a long period of drought,” she says, inspecting her plants.
As the impacts of the climate crisis are felt globally, rural farming communities are exceptionally vulnerable to extreme climate events, such as dry spells and heavy rainfall.
A 2021 World Bank study found that Suriname was “particularly prone to major threats posed by flooding, drought and high winds during extreme weather events”. Maintaining a variety of crop species and seeds can assist these communities in meeting their food needs.
Some rice species are known to Adjako as “sun-lovers”, while others are “water-lovers”. Nicholaas Pinas, a Surinamese expert in rice species, says: “There are varieties that thrive in dry weather, requiring less water than some others. In a year with little rainfall, they naturally produce much more than the varieties that need more water.”
Cultivating a rich diversity of species spreads risk and helps resilience in the face of external shocks, such as climate-related events. “You’d always have something to eat,” says Pinas, a PhD researcher at the Netherlands’ Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and Wageningen University.
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Voices & Soul
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
When the Goddess Diana strode the celestial streets of her Mediterranean Home all those celestial eons ago, little did she know how the vestiges of her marble colonnaded myth would be embodied later by the Greeks, then the Romans, and even now in some ways, by Americans themselves.
But Diana manifests differently for each epoch, as the Gods know and do. When an epoch of vile greed is supplanted and enhanced by a carnivalesque resignation, penitents to Diana are left to run through the streets like there’s a bouquet of swords in one fist and balloons in the other, with a noon moon night guiding the way from Motown to Greektown, from Kalamazoo to muddy Montecito, buried by a Vesuvian explosion of denuded hillsides carrying BMW’s, washing machines, dead dogs and gardeners, cooks and servant girls, iron lawn art, side by side freezers and a baby doll holding a flower.
But maybe Diana sang rounds of “Ain’t no Mountain High Enough” with Dorothy Dandridge and Nina Simone before buying that colonnaded suburban manse with the wolves and woods and the stilleto-beaked ravens gliding low in the valley. Or maybe she sang in a Supreme syncopated rhythm with horns, a heavy bass and a Hitsville chorus on backing vocals. Or maybe she sits forlorn, a wry smile still, as she taps her foot to the beat.
What will you be like when the daylight comes? I’m glad you’re Diana Ross, today. What is she scraping off her face? Two strobing flashlights at the apex of the cheekbones, one on the tip of the nose. I’m so glad you’re Dorothy. Nineties depression chic nirvana flannel and hobo overalls accented with stilettos are back falling through lawn chairs as Rodney King. Your dog ran away in the night and I’m celebrating. Caleb caught a case and I’m running through the streets like there’s a bouquet of swords in one fist and balloons in the other, dissembling my distress. In high school we read Camus’s Rebel but stayed up till midnight to catch the second airing of Jerry Springer on three way. I mostly remember the brawls and such earnest DNA testing, such universal are you my daddy tales. We’d stay on the phone and wait for the results. The audience hated reconciliation and everyone was someone’s mom outrunning the weightless claymation noonnight. Praying for patient doom. Tasting like Cool Ranch Doritos and a room of one’s own. Sullen minstrel cuddling the spotlight won’t you put down your phone and tell me what’s really the matter. Why won’t they call security before she hurls another chair. Their spectacle protects them from sorrow and all sorts of water rots in Chicago and no one seems outraged when the mother’s boyfriend is her daughter’s babyfather no one turns down the complimentary coffee and hamburgers or stabs him in the groin. By default, by heroic shamelessness. Did you spend at least eight and a half minutes in daylight. Did you radiate like starch in the Paleolithic age, get so thin it aches. Is the rebel wanted dead or alive? I had asked Diana. She had gone into hiding by then.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.
