History was made in the United States on Thursday, April 7^th.….….yea… that num­ber ( 7) is the Biblical num­ber that rep­re­sents com­ple­tion. The full United States Senate con­firmed a Black woman to sit on the Nation’s high­est court.
It is a bit­ter­sweet moment for this writer in that though I am thrilled that final­ly a Black woman has been ele­vat­ed to the court, it is shame­ful that we have to be talk­ing about firsts of this kind in the 21^st century.
The num­ber sev­en is espe­cial­ly promi­nent in Scripture, appear­ing over 700 times. From the sev­en days of Creation to the many “sev­ens” in Revelation, the num­ber sev­en con­notes such con­cepts as com­ple­tion and per­fec­tion, exon­er­a­tion, heal­ing, and the ful­fill­ment of promis­es and oaths.
Whether the April 7^th full Senate con­fir­ma­tion of Ketanji Brown-Jackson is part of that Biblical com­ple­tion is up to the the­olo­gians to deci­pher; notwith­stand­ing, this writer believes the rubi­con has been crossed with her confirmation.

In a 53 to 47vote, Ketanji Brown-Jackson was con­firmed and will take her place on the court at the end of the court’s 2021 – 2022 term. Confirming supreme court jus­tices was not sup­posed to be a polit­i­cal spec­ta­cle; nei­ther was it sup­posed to be a plat­form for over­ly ambi­tious politi­cians to grand­stand and make an ass of them­selves, but over the last sev­er­al years, that is what the process has become.
Mitch McConnell’s dis­hon­esty in block­ing Merrick Garland, President Obama’s choice to replace Antonin Scalia, from enter­ing the high court may have poi­soned the process for decades to come.
Additionally, McConnell’s cor­rupt prac­tices in ram­ming through Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amey Coney-Barrett, three Trump appointees, have poi­soned the well of advice and con­sent nec­es­sary to seat good justices.

Ketanji Brown-Jackson was con­firmed with all (50) Democratic Senators; she would have been con­firmed with a sim­ple Democratic major­i­ty with Vice President Kamala Harris cast­ing the tie-break­ing vote if no Republican vot­ed for her. However, though vice President Kamala Harris was in the Senate cham­bers, three mem­bers of the Republicans placed pol­i­tics aside and cast their votes for the new justice.
Maine’s Susan Collins, Utah’s Mitt Romney & Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski vot­ed to ele­vate judge Brown-Jackson to Justice Brown-Jackson.
After the vote, the white men and women of the Fascist Republican par­ty hur­ried from the Senate cham­ber; Senator Mitt Romney stood his ground and clapped for an extend­ed peri­od along with Senate Democrats as the his­to­ry-mak­ing sig­nif­i­cance of the moment sank into members.

Along with the white men and women who vot­ed against con­firm­ing judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson are the two Republican Hispanics, Marco Rubio of Florida and Raphael Cruz of Texas.
These men are first-gen­er­a­tion Americans of Cuban par­ents; they have tak­en a hard-line stance against immi­grants and have pushed for laws that would have kept their par­ents and them­selves back in Castro’s Cuba.
Additionally, they have aligned them­selves 100 % behind every anti-black leg­is­la­tion and have gone out of their way to present them­selves as white men.
So it was no sur­prise, at least to me, that the two would toe the par­ty line and, worse. Raphael Cruz made a mock­ery of him­self by ask­ing what he thought were tough ‘gotcha’ ques­tions of the nom­i­nee, then imme­di­ate­ly going to his Twitter feed to see if his name was trending.
It is always impor­tant to remem­ber that Raphael Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The new­ly ele­vat­ed Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson is a native-born American.

Writing over the years has taught me a lot I have become more rea­soned and more reflec­tive. In the decade-long process, I have also learned that some men(gender-neutral) were born to be mere foot­notes in history.
You know.…… Rosa Parks, relevant.….Bull O’Connor, footnote.
Martin Luther King, rel­e­vant, J Edgar Hoover, footnote.
And now Ketanji Brown-Jackson, rel­e­vant, Tim Scott, irrel­e­vant footnote.
Tim Scott is the junior US Republican Senator from South Carolina; he is one of only three African-American United States Senators in the sen­ate; the oth­ers are Corey Booker (D) New Jersey and Raphael Warnock of Georgia.
Nothing pre­vent­ed Tim Scott from choos­ing the right side of his­to­ry and cast­ing a vote to ele­vate the first Black woman to the US Supreme court; Scott chose not to.
By decid­ing to oppose Brown-Jackson, Tim Scott cement­ed his entire career as a US Senator as incon­se­quen­tial, one void of any per­son­al beliefs, mak­ing him­self a sheep and a dis­grace to his race like Clarence Thomas.
Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski had a tough fight last time she was elect­ed, she will have a thought time this go around, but she was not swayed by pol­i­tics or race.…she car­ried out her duties as was demand­ed of her by the constitution.
So did Senators Mitt Romney and Susan Collins.
In typ­i­cal fash­ion, Tim Scott cement­ed him­self as an irrel­e­vant tool, an emp­ty suit, a foot­ball to be kicked around, a shame­less house slave.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, a free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

New body­cam video shows the final moments of life for Antwon Cooper, 34 after he was shot in the head by police min­utes after he was pulled over for a traf­fic stop. The Miami man’s fam­i­ly says the new­ly released video shows he wasn’t armed. Miami police released a body­cam and near­by sur­veil­lance video of the dead­ly shoot­ing of the Black man on March 8. Cooper was pulled over by a Miami police officer

“They still haven’t been able to tell us what the stop was about; they just say it was some­thing with a paper tag,” said Rawsi Williams, an attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing Cooper’s family.

The inves­ti­ga­tion is still ongo­ing, but the new video shows an offi­cer approach­ing Cooper ask­ing for his license and reg­is­tra­tion. Cooper was dri­ving a friend’s car, accord­ing to Williams — although the body­cam video shows Cooper say­ing the car is his. When Cooper failed to pro­duce a license, the offi­cer asked him out of the car, but once he exit­ed the red Nissan Altima and the offi­cer began pat­ting him down, Cooper tried to run away. Bodycam video shows Cooper and the offi­cer tus­sling before the body cam­era falls off on the ground. That’s when a Miami police sergeant arrived on the scene sec­onds lat­er and opens fire, killing Cooper instantly.

Williams says the body­cam video helps counter a nar­ra­tive Cooper was armed, some­thing the fam­i­ly has always denied. “The release of the video by the Miami PD was a vin­di­ca­tion of us and a cor­rob­o­ra­tion of the facts we’ve already put out there,” Williams said.

While a gun did appear at the scene, exact­ly who it belonged to and how it got there is still unclear. Miami police have not respond­ed to request for more infor­ma­tion, but on the day of the shoot­ing, police said, “One of the two sub­jects was armed with a handgun…a hand­gun has since been recov­ered on scene.” Police ref­er­enced a pas­sen­ger in the car at the time of the traf­fic stop, who was not arrested.

As the inves­ti­ga­tion con­tin­ues into Cooper’s death, his fam­i­ly has been anguished. “It’s tear­ing me and my wife apart,” Melvin Bryant, Cooper’s grand­fa­ther, said.

“It hurts; a death is a death, but this kind of death, you can’t accept that I can’t accept that, not at all,” said Helen Bryant, Cooper’s grandmother.

Amid their grief, the Bryants say they’ve also been faced with coun­ter­ing anoth­er nar­ra­tive about their grandson’s crim­i­nal past, say­ing he’d turned his life around and had a reg­u­lar job, and his record had no bear­ing on what ulti­mate­ly took his life.

“They just want­ed to smear him like he was such a bad guy, and he wasn’t,” Helen Bryant said of her grandson’s character.

Attorney Frank Allen says Cooper’s crim­i­nal past wouldn’t mat­ter in their fight for jus­tice because the crimes com­mit­ted occurred more than a decade ago.

“Some of the stuff they’re try­ing to pig­gy­back off of in lit­i­ga­tion, that stuff isn’t even going to be admis­si­ble, so a judge isn’t going to admit it, and a judge is not going to con­sid­er it, and a jury isn’t even going to hear it,” Allen said, one of the Cooper fam­i­ly attor­neys, said.

Although the family’s attor­neys have filed a pre-suit for a wrong­ful death fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit, claim­ing Cooper was a vic­tim of exces­sive police force, right now, the fam­i­ly says they aren’t con­cerned about lit­i­ga­tion but would rather exhaust their efforts on more imme­di­ate jus­tice against the Miami police sergeant who fired the fatal shot.

The fam­i­ly has start­ed an online peti­tion call­ing for the arrest of the sergeant.

“Our grand­son got mur­dered in the street by a cop who shot him in the head, and he laid under­neath a cov­er for sev­en hours, we’re not think­ing about a law­suit, we want jus­tice for our grand­son,” Melvin Bryant said.

“Can they give Antwon back to us? They can’t give him back to us, all the law­suits in the world can’t give him back to us,” Helen Bryant asked while lament­ing the loss of Cooper.

“He’ll nev­er be able to get mar­ried, there will be no Antwon junior, he’ll nev­er be able to have chil­dren,” Williams said of the long-last­ing impacts of the shooting.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is still inves­ti­gat­ing the case.
This sto­ry was first report­ed by Atlanta Black Star.

A fam­i­ly is left dev­as­tat­ed after a rou­tine traf­fic stop turned dead­ly for Antwon Cooper, 35, of Miami who was shot by a Miami police offi­cer at point-blank range on March 8. Police claimed Cooper had a gun, but the fam­i­ly says sur­veil­lance video from a near­by school tells a dif­fer­ent story.

Attorneys for Cooper’s fam­i­ly, Rawsi Williams and Frank Allen, say Cooper was dri­ving a red Nissan Altima that belonged to a friend, but when police ran the license plate that prompt­ed a traf­fic stop. Cooper pre­sent­ed an ID but not a driver’s license, which led to the offi­cer ask­ing Cooper to step out of the car.

“Once Mr. Cooper exits the vehi­cle, the offi­cer starts a pat-down on one side of Mr. Cooper. He reach­es out to pat down the left side, and Mr. Cooper turns to run away, but the offi­cer grabs Mr. Cooper by the shirt. He doesn’t even make it any­where,” Williams said.

As Cooper was try­ing to run away, a strug­gle ensued between hIm and the offi­cer until anoth­er sergeant arrived at the scene.

“[The sergeant] walks up to the scene, says ‘get down, get down,’ and just shoots Mr. Cooper in the head,” Williams said of the moments when the sergeant arrived.

“[The sergeant yelled] ‘Get down, get down,’ bam, at a pret­ty close prox­im­i­ty. The kid didn’t have a chance to respond,” attor­ney Frank Allen added of Cooper’s final moments.

Williams says police framed the inci­dent as if Cooper had a gun and threat­ened the offi­cers. She says she does not know who the gun belonged to but reit­er­ates that Cooper nev­er bran­dished a gun through­out the encounter.

“They put out a nar­ra­tive as if the offi­cer was forced to fire because of some kind of lethal threat by bring­ing in the word gun,” Williams said.

“Mr. Cooper was not swing­ing at this offi­cer, he was not punch­ing this offi­cer, he wasn’t kick­ing this offi­cer, he wasn’t bran­dish­ing any weapons at this offi­cer, he wasn’t point­ing a weapon at this offi­cer,” Allen said of the dead­ly police encounter.

Williams says sur­veil­lance video from a near­by school will help prove police should not have shot Cooper. “The sergeant wasn’t wear­ing a body­cam, but thank­ful­ly this occurred right out­side a school and they also had video sur­veil­lance on the out­side their school that points direct­ly at the scene where this occurred so we’ve seen that footage as well,” Williams said.

Williams says the video sur­veil­lance has not been made pub­lic yet, but a pho­to shows the end result, Cooper left lying in the street.

Atlanta Black Star sought more details from Miami police on the inci­dent, but a spokes­woman says because the case is under inves­ti­ga­tion by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and inter­nal affairs, they can­not release any information.

Cooper’s fam­i­ly just held his funer­al over the week­end. The fam­i­ly intends to file a wrong­ful death fed­er­al civ­il rights law­suit under sec­tion 1983 claim­ing Cooper was a vic­tim of exces­sive police force.

“They want the offi­cer ter­mi­nat­ed, they want the offi­cer arrest­ed and con­vict­ed for the killing of Mr. Antwon Cooper,” Williams said the fam­i­ly hopes to get out of the pend­ing lawsuit.

Cooper has a crim­i­nal record dat­ing back to 2006 which include armed bur­glary, home inva­sion, and gun charges result­ing in him serv­ing prison time. Williams says he had a job and was work­ing on turn­ing his life around before his run-in with police on March 8.

Is any­one sur­prised by these racist clowns?

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has made it known that he will vote against con­firm­ing President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nom­i­nee Ketanji Brown Jackson to become the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s high­est judi­cial bench.
As GOP leader in the U.S. Senate, McConnell’s announce­ment was not a sur­prise to many, although Jackson most like­ly will not need his vote. McConnell claimed on Twitter on March 24 that his deci­sion was non­par­ti­san. Some say it may be because of anoth­er bias.

I went into the Senate’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Judge Jackson’s nom­i­na­tion with an open mind,” McConnell said in a March 24 tweet. “But after study­ing the nominee’s record and watch­ing her per­for­mance this week, I can­not and will not sup­port Judge Jackson for a life­time appoint­ment to our high­est Court.” Jackson was ques­tioned about her vot­ing record and sen­tenc­ing prac­tices dur­ing three days of con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz drilled Jackson about crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, which Jackson point­ed out does not relate to her work as a judge.
Cruz used the children’s book “Antiracist Baby” to ask Jackson if she thinks babies are racist. New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker applaud­ed Jackson for her resilience and grace dur­ing the ques­tion­ing and her accom­plish­ments. He brought the judge to tears as he high­light­ed the his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of her nomination.

“I see my ances­tors and yours,” Booker said. “You have earned this spot. You are wor­thy. You are a great American.”
McConnell also voiced his oppo­si­tion on the Senate floor on the last day of the con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings, cit­ing Jackson’s non­com­mit­tal replies about whether she would sup­port a plan to add four seats to the bench. There are cur­rent­ly nine Supreme Court jus­tices. Jackson said the ques­tion is beyond “the prop­er role of a judge.”
“I assumed this would be an easy soft­ball for Judge Jackson, but it wasn’t,” McConnell said. “The nom­i­nee sug­gest­ed there are two legit­i­mate sides to the issue. She tes­ti­fied she has a view on the mat­ter but would not share it.”
Only Congress can expand the court through leg­is­la­tion. Some Democrats have pushed for the change.
McConnell also took issue with Jackson’s lack of pub­lished low­er court opin­ions in the last year. Jackson, who has been on an appeals court for only a year, report­ed­ly had pub­lished two, while oth­er recent nom­i­nees pub­lished hun­dreds lead­ing up to their nominations.

Nearly 6,000 peo­ple respond­ed to McConnell’s tweet. It was also liked by more than 45,000 peo­ple. A num­ber of peo­ple who respond­ed accused the Republican of lying about his impar­tial­i­ty. Several said they were not shocked about his deci­sion. When con­ser­v­a­tive Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell led Senate Republicans to block President Barrack Obama’s pick Merrick Garland from the bench with­out first hold­ing hearings.
McConnell argued that it was too close to the November 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion to con­tin­ue the process. Pundits believe McConnell did not want the Democratic pres­i­dent to nom­i­nate a liberal.
McConnell, how­ev­er, speed­ed the con­fir­ma­tion of for­mer President Donald Trump’s pick Justice Amy Coney Barrett less than two months before the 2020 pres­i­den­tial election. 
Many sug­gest­ed racism was a fac­tor. More than a dozen Twitter users respond­ed to McConnell’s tweet with a pic­ture of him accept­ing a plac­ard in front of a Confederate flag. The pho­to was alleged­ly tak­en at a Sons of Confederate Veterans event in the ear­ly ’90s.

I went into the Senate’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Judge Jackson’s nom­i­na­tion with an open mind. But after study­ing the nominee’s record and watch­ing her per­for­mance this week, I can­not and will not sup­port Judge Jackson for a life­time appoint­ment to our high­est Court.
Senate Democrats are report­ed­ly hop­ing for a full vote for Jackson’s con­fir­ma­tion next month. She needs 51 out of 100 votes to be approved for the bench. There are 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate, and as a wild card, Vice President Kamala Harris has the tiebreak­er vote. Although it is not clear if Jackson will gar­ner any sup­port from Republicans, West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin, a key swing vote in the Senate, announced on March 25 his inten­tions to vote for Jackson, which polit­i­cal pun­dits said is a strong indi­ca­tion that she will get all of the Democrat votes.
This sto­ry first appeared @Yahoonews.com

I don’t under­stand you. You sound like my par­ents. You sound like the peo­ple I grew up with.’ But the lessons he tend­ed to draw from the expe­ri­ences of the seg­re­gat­ed South seemed to be dif­fer­ent than those of every­body I know,” Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson report­ed­ly thought while hav­ing lunch with the jus­tice Clarence TomAss as a law clerk.

Ketanji Brown Jackson was nom­i­nat­ed to fill the seat made vacant by the retire­ment of Justice Stephen Breyer. President Biden has cho­sen Breyer’s suc­ces­sor as he is oblig­at­ed to do constitutionally.
Biden pledged if elect­ed, he would appoint a Black woman to the court if a vacan­cy came up. A vacan­cy came up, and the pres­i­dent kept his word in the per­son of Ketanji Brown-Jackson.
Everyone who pays atten­tion to the racial car­ni­vores must know they would come for Jackson to eat her flesh, and so they have. There are those scat­tered across the soci­ety like the racist right-wing groups that have tak­en out adver­tise­ments prais­ing Clarence TomAss, a Black skinned sell­out who vot­ed against every issue that would uplift Black Americans from the despair and degra­da­tion of hun­dreds of years of white oppression.
For them, Clarence TomAss is a hero, but the mod­ern-day sell­out is that slave who runs and tells Massa which enslaved per­son ran away. The one who asks Massa, ” we sick Massa’?
But there are the clowns in the US Senate, begin­ning with Raphael Cruz, who hates him­self for being born Hispanic rather than a European Caucasian, Josh Hawley, who gave aid, com­fort, and suc­cor to insur­rec­tion­ists try­ing to over­throw the duly con­sti­tu­tion­al order of the United States, and should be in prison, Lindsay Graham, [trump’s] errand boy and the oth­er tad­poles like Marsh Blackburn, and Mike Braun.

It is bad enough when some­one like Clarence TomAss is ele­vat­ed to a posi­tion of pow­er, and he does every­thing with­in that pow­er to abuse any­one, much less one of the most dis­ad­van­taged com­mu­ni­ties in the coun­try, the black com­mu­ni­ty from which he came.
But it is ten times worse when some­one of TomAss’s char­ac­ter would be held up as a mod­el for Black people.
It is insult­ing to me as a Black man that I share skin col­or with some­one like Clarence TomAss. that is how much I am offend­ed by him.
The insult­ing thing to me is that any­one would dare advance Clarence TomAss as any­thing but a mod­ern Benedict Arnold, unde­serv­ing of the black skin he lives in.
Make no mis­take; I do not dis­like TomAss because his views run con­trary to mine; I detest him because he is an oppor­tunis­tic racial sell­out who has cap­i­tal­ized on the pain of his race to cur­ry favor with his oppressors.
That makes him the low­est life­form in my view.
During slav­ery, the likes of TomAss would get a few scraps of food thrown their way or may have even been allowed into the house. Harriet Tubman was afraid his type would run back to the slave-own­ers and reveal her routes and sup­port struc­ture. His type was the rea­son she report­ed­ly car­ried a pistol.
If we real­ly want to admit the truth, the likes of Clarence TomAss exist­ed on the shores of Africa, and it was his type that made the North Atlantic Slave trade a possibility.
I am not qual­i­fied to explain the psy­cho­log­i­cal dys­func­tion that goes into the char­ac­ter of some­one like that, so I leave it up to the experts to fig­ure that out. Sufficing to say that it is not an admirable trait, at least not from the per­spec­tive of pro­gres­sive Black peo­ple who val­ue their auton­o­my, agency, and freedoms.

The real­ly pathet­ic thing for white men is that with four months shy of 246 years of American nation­hood dur­ing which they slant­ed things their way, they are scared shit­less that the wall of lies they cre­at­ed are tum­bling down.
No longer does any­one buy into the pro­pa­gan­da that they alone can do it; because as long as they can­not stop us from enter­ing the pool, we will show them that we are just as good a swim­mer or bet­ter than they are.
Whether it’s med­i­cine, art, sports, law, sci­ence, or what­ev­er, they dom­i­nat­ed only because they were allowed to play alone.
One of the things I hard­ly hear any longer is the need for Black peo­ple to be patient. Dr. Martin Luther King warned about ‘the tran­quil drug of grad­u­al­ism’ before being mur­dered by them 54 years ago.
Anyone who believed that the sons and daugh­ters of rapists and mur­der­ers were going to be bet­ter human beings sim­ply because some water had flown under the bridge was grave­ly mistaken.

These are irre­deemable kinds of humans who do not pos­sess the capac­i­ty to co-exist with oth­ers or com­pete on an equal and lev­el play­ing field.
They see the winds of change, and as I said before, they are scared shit­less. If they can turn the clock back on race, you know, stop the teach­ings of their crimes against Black and Native peo­ples, burn the his­to­ry books, ban future ones on the sub­ject, stop black and brown peo­ple from enter­ing the coun­try and force white women to have more babies they see that as a solu­tion to their deplet­ing numbers.
The sad real­i­ty for them is that no sin­gle one of those things will stop the inevitable brown­ing of America, nei­ther will all of those mea­sures combined.
But if all else fails, they are pre­pared to storm the con­gress, over­throw the 246 years of estab­lished order, and insti­tute a white minor­i­ty gov­ern­ment like the one that exist­ed in South Africa.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, a writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.

The U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to legal­ize inter­ra­cial mar­riage, Indiana Sen. Mike Braun, a Republican, argued on Tuesday. Suggesting the his­toric Loving v. Virginia rul­ing by the Supreme Court decades ago was a case of improp­er judi­cial activism, Braun said the court should have left that deci­sion to the indi­vid­ual states, includ­ing those which had already out­lawed inter­ra­cial marriage. 
“When you want that diver­si­ty to shine with­in our fed­er­al sys­tem, there are going to be rules and pro­ceed­ings, they’re going to be out of sync with maybe what oth­er states would do,” Braun told reporters. “It’s the beau­ty of the sys­tem, and that’s where the dif­fer­ences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves.”
The Republican’s larg­er point was to pub­licly dis­suade President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nom­i­nee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, away from what he described as “activist” behav­ior from the bench.
https://​www​.salon​.com/​2​0​2​2​/​0​3​/​2​2​/​s​e​n​-​m​i​k​e​-​b​r​a​u​n​-​s​a​y​s​-​w​a​s​-​t​o​-​l​e​g​a​l​i​z​e​-​i​n​t​e​r​r​a​c​i​a​l​-​m​a​r​r​i​a​ge/