“I Know It When I See It.”
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Today, March 7th, is the 52nd anniversary of "Bloody Sunday."
During January and February, 1965, King and SCLC led a series of demonstrations to the Dallas County Courthouse. On February 17, protester Jimmy Lee Jackson was fatally shot by an Alabama state trooper. In response, a protest march from Selma to Montgomery was scheduled for March 7.
Six hundred marchers assembled in Selma on Sunday, March 7, and, led by John Lewis and other SNCC and SCLC activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River en route to Montgomery. Just short of the bridge, they found their way blocked by Alabama State troopers and local police who ordered them to turn around. When the protesters refused, the officers shot teargas and waded into the crowd, beating the nonviolent protesters with billy clubs and ultimately hospitalizing over fifty people.
“Bloody Sunday” was televised around the world. Martin Luther King called for civil rights supporters to come to Selma for a second march. When members of Congress pressured him to restrain the march until a court could rule on whether the protesters deserved federal protection, King found himself torn between their requests for patience and demands of the movement activists pouring into Selma. King, still conflicted, led the second protest on March 9 but turned it around at the same bridge. King’s actions exacerbated the tension between SCLC and the more militant SNCC, who were pushing for more radical tactics that would move from nonviolent protest to win reforms to active opposition to racist institutions.
This past Sunday, a church service was held at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” and...well, I have few or no words.
Esme Cribb at Talking Points Memo:
The service at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Alabama was held to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" march that erupted in police violence on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, according to a video posted to Rev. William Barber's Facebook page.
Barber, who is president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, and church-goers walked out after Merrill spoke in support of Alabama's voter ID law, according to the video's caption.
"We can't be polite about this. We can't be casual or cavalier," Barber told a reporter. "We have more voter suppression in recent years than we've seen since Jim Crow."
He said that Merrill's promotion of the voter ID law was "another lie."
"I don't care if you came as secretary of state, to stand up and tell another lie, to push the lie of voter ID and confuse people, normalize it, on a day when the nation is watching," Barber said. "You cannot come and stand in that pulpit and promote a voter suppression tactic and then we just sit there."
He said that "democracy is at stake."
"You cannot have a democracy where voter suppression is normalized, where people will politely let people say to them what they're doing, in their face and in their church, and it's okay," Barber said. "To respect injustice is to be a part of it."
Mr. Merrill’s speech was beyond inappropriate, disrespectful, and reprehensible (though it was all of those things), especially considering the space in which he uttered those words.
Mr. Merrill’s words in Brown A.M.E. Church this past Sunday were obscene.
As Esquire’s Charles Pierce notes, this is far from a first for the Alabama Secretary of State.
Equally as obscene were the words of Dr. Ben Carson.
My initial reaction to Dr. Carson’s comments was to wonder what the fu*k this co...uh, clown was talking about (tossing a couple of sawbucks in The Porch cussjar). .
And then I wondered: What type of audience could possibly be receptive to comments like these?
I suspect that even the most conservative of white evangelical Christians that would prefer to adhere as closely to what Frederick Douglass called “slaveholder Christianity”) can acknowledge the empirical fact of he slave trade of Africans to the United States (even if they still may think that black people deserved (and still deserve) to be slaves.
Eh...better to call Dr. Carson’s comments out for the obscenities that they are and be done with it, for now.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The case of Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado began when Miguel Angel Peña-Rodriguez, a Hispanic man, was accused of sexual assault by two teenage girls. A jury convicted Peña-Rodriguez of this crime based exclusively on the girls’ own testimony; no physical evidence linked him to the assault, and he claimed he had been misidentified. After trial, a conscientious juror came forward to inform Peña-Rodriguez that another juror, a former police officer, had tainted deliberations with blatant bias. The racist juror allegedly declared that, based on his professional experience, he knew that “Mexican men” have “a sense of entitlement” and a “bravado” that makes them think they can “do whatever they want” with women. In his own experience, “nine times out of 10” Mexican men were guilty of “being aggressive toward women and young girls.”
Peña-Rodriguez asked the court to grant him a new trial. The court refused, citing a Colorado “no-impeachment” rule that prevents jurors from testifying about statements made during deliberations. Peña-Rodriguez ultimately appealed his case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Sixth Amendment—which guarantees the right to trial “by an impartial jury”—must supersede the no-impeachment rule in instances of racial bias.
Given the plain text of the Sixth Amendment—“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed”—you might expect this case to be very easy. A jury tainted by racist comments cannot seriously be considered “impartial,” after all, so the Constitution would seem to safeguard Peña-Rodriguez’s right to a new trial. But there is a wrinkle here: The no-impeachment rule has a historical pedigree that predates the Sixth Amendment. From the nation’s founding, courts have forbidden, or strictly limited, jurors’ ability to testify about deliberations following a verdict. These rules emerged out of a legitimate concern that jurors feel they can engage in robust and honest deliberations without having their verdict later called into question because of a stray comment made in the jury room.
But, as Kennedy explained, the 14th Amendment—which extended the Sixth Amendment’s protections against states—somewhat changed this calculus. The “central purpose” of the 14th Amendment, Kennedy noted, “was to eliminate racial discrimination emanating from official sources in the States.” Indeed, the 14th Amendment was designed, in part, to remedy “racial discrimination in the jury system,” which was rampant in the South. “To take one example,” Kennedy wrote, “just in the years 1865 and 1866, all-white juries in Texas decided a total of 500 prosecutions of white defendants charged with killing African-Americans. All 500 were acquitted.”
States.” Indeed, the 14th Amendment was designed, in part, to remedy “racial discrimination in the jury system,” which was rampant in the South. “To take one example,” Kennedy wrote, “just in the years 1865 and 1866, all-white juries in Texas decided a total of 500 prosecutions of white defendants charged with killing African-Americans. All 500 were acquitted.”
“It must become the heritage of our Nation,” Kennedy insisted, “to rise above racial classifications that are so inconsistent with our commitment to the equal dignity of all persons. This imperative to purge racial prejudice from the administration of justice was given new force and direction” by the 14thAmendment. Racial bias in jury deliberations presents “a familiar and recurring evil that, if left unaddressed, would risk systemic injury to the administration of justice”:
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Danny Glover, Bernie Sanders and NAACP president Cornell Brooks will participate in a massive march with Canton, Mississippi, Nissan factory workers trying to unionize. Glover sat down with Colorlines to talk about the Nissan issue. colorlines: Actor and Activist Danny Glover on Why He's Marching With Black Nissan Workers Tomorrow.
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Over the past five years, the United Auto Workers union has been trying to organize a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, with little success. A rally tomorrow (March 4) featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt..), NAACP president Cornell M. Brooks and the actor/activist Danny Glover may help turn the tide.
Dubbed the March on Mississippi, tomorrow's action was organized by a coalition of civil rights leaders, ministers and labor activists called the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan. After rallying at the city's sports arena, workers and supporters will march two miles to the Japanese automaker's production plant and deliver dozens of letters about allegedly unsafe working conditions and retaliation against workers trying to unionize. Of roughly 5,000 workers at the plant, which opened in 2003, 80 percent are Black.
In February, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) charged the plant with a “serious” violation in response to an incident last December when a technician's hand was caught in conveyor belt. Mississippi Today reports that the company must install audible alarms and lights to let workers know when a conveyor is about to start moving. OSHA also said employees weren't adequately trained in shutting down machines in an emergency. In 2015, the National Labor Relations (NLR) board charged Nissan and a temp agency it works with of illegally denying workers' rights to wear pro- or anti-union clothing and threatening to fire employees or close the plant in retaliation for union organizing.
We spoke with March on Mississippi principal Danny Glover earlier this week. In this edited and condensed interview, he talks about why he is involved in the Nissan fight, his alliance with Bernie Sanders and why we need to "mature our thinking" about class issues.
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If you wanted to make a pilgrimage to the childhood home of W.E.B. Du Bois in Massachusetts or Malcolm X in Nebraska, you’d have to settle for a historical marker: The houses of those civil rights activists were lost before preservationists could save them, as many important African-American historical sites have been.
It’s a fate that easily could have met a humble three-room clapboard perched on a rise in this tiny, pretty town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, unknown even to many residents until a few years ago. For those who knew that 30 East Livingston Street was the birthplace of Tryon’s most famous resident — the singer, soul legend and civil rights icon Nina Simone — the house’s appearance on the market late last year crystallized fears that its existence, as stubborn as that of Simone herself, might be coming to an end.
And that, unexpectedly, is where the New York art world entered the picture.
Over the last month, four prominent African-American artists — the conceptualist Adam Pendleton, the sculptor and painter Rashid Johnson, the collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher and the abstract painter Julie Mehretu — quietly got together, pooled their money and bested competing bids to snatch the house up for $95,000. They describe the purchase as an act of art but also of politics, a gratifying chance to respond to what they see as a deepening racial divide in America, when Simone’s fiery example of culture warrior seems more potent than ever.
“It wasn’t long after the election that this all began to happen, and I was desperate like a lot of people to be engaged, and this felt like exactly the right way,” said Mr. Johnson, 39, whose work, like that of Ms. Gallagher and Mr. Pendleton, often directly engages issues of race and political power. (Mr. Johnson recently signed on to direct a feature film based on “Native Son,” Richard Wright’s classic novel of racial oppression.) “My feeling when I learned that this house existed was just an incredible urgency to make sure it didn’t go away.”
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At any time around a third of the water infrastructure in rural sub-Saharan Africa, from hand pumps to solar-powered systems, is broken. Even after spending billions of dollars, most donors still cannot ensure the pumps they pay for are maintained (just 5% of rural Africans have access to piped water). Many of the village committees responsible for collecting the fees that should cover repairs are corrupt.
More often, though, villagers simply struggle to gather money, find a mechanic and obtain spare parts, says Johanna Koehler of Oxford University. Kerr Lien, a village in central Gambia, reverted to using a manual well for nine years after the inhabitants were unable to fix a fault in their solar-powered pump. There are “lots of white elephants everywhere”, says Alison Wedgwood, a founder of eWATER, a British startup that aims to solve many of these problems. Its solar-powered taps, 110 of which have been installed in Kerr Lien and six other Gambian villages, dispense water in response to electronic tags. The tags are topped up by shopkeepers using smartphones; 20 litres of water cost 0.50 dalasi (1 cent), and 85% of the payment is set aside to cover future repairs. The taps are connected to the mobile network, so they can transmit usage data to alert mechanics to problems. eWATER hopes to have 500 taps serving 50,000 people in Gambia and Tanzania by the end of 2017.
Since they are paying for it, the women and girls who collect the water also take more care now not to spill any, leaving fewer puddles in which mosquitos can breed. Most important, though, is to fix broken pumps quickly. In Kenya Ms Koehler found villagers were prepared to pay five times as much for water so long as their pumps were fixed within three days, compared with the previous average of 27.
Startups like these could transform rural water provision in Africa, just as they are doing with solar-powered electricity. Twelve-year-old Isatou Jallow will still wash her family’s clothes with well water every week. But there will soon be a drinking tap just outside her house. That means more time studying, instead of spending afternoons laboriously fetching water from far away. It also means loftier ambitions. “I want to be a government minister,” she says.
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British armed forces offered to attempt to rescue nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, but were rebuffed by Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s president at the time, the Observer has learned.
In a mission named Operation Turus, the RAF conducted air reconnaissance over northern Nigeria for several months, following the kidnapping of 276 girls from the town of Chibok in April 2014. “The girls were located in the first few weeks of the RAF mission,” a source involved in Operation Turus told the Observer. “We offered to rescue them, but the Nigerian government declined.”
The girls were then tracked by the aircraft as they were dispersed into progressively smaller groups over the following months, the source added.
Chibok is located in Nigeria’s north-eastern Borno state. Today 195 of the girls are still missing. Those who have managed to escape from their kidnappers have told of a life of torture, enslavement, rape, and forced marriages in captivity.
Notes from meetings between UK and Nigerian officials, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, also suggest that Nigeria shunned international offers to rescue the girls. While Nigeria welcomed an aid package and assistance from the US, the UK and France in looking for the girls, it viewed any action to be taken against kidnapping as a “national issue”.
“Nigeria’s intelligence and military services must solve the ultimate problem,” said Jonathan in a meeting with the UK’s then Africa minister, Mark Simmonds, on 15 May 2014.
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