Here is a sto­ry from NBC news that speaks for itself. It is just anoth­er iter­a­tion of the pat­terns and prac­tices that con­tin­ue to go on unabat­ed across the length and breadth of America as peo­ple who are sworn to pro­tect demon­strate that when they took the oath all they want­ed was the gun and pow­er but none of the respon­si­bil­i­ties that come with being a respectable police office, which is a noble profession.
They are race sol­diers and gang­sters in uni­form with full pow­ers to take life and that is what makes police vio­lence in America so dangerous.
“THIS IS NOT POLICE WORK,” said the Aurora Police chief. I con­cur, this is what I have said for a decade-plus as a for­mer police offi­cer, “this is not police work”.

Two Colorado officers arrested after arrest in which man was struck with gun, choked

A Colorado police offi­cer has been arrest­ed after video showed him using his pis­tol to beat a man he was try­ing to take into cus­tody, chok­ing him and threat­en­ing to kill him, police said Tuesday. Another offi­cer was accused of fail­ing to stop her col­league as required by a new police account­abil­i­ty law passed dur­ing racial injus­tice protests last year.

In a vio­lent and dis­turb­ing body-worn cam­era clip released Tuesday by the Aurora Police Department, Officer John Haubert is seen pis­tol-whip­ping and chok­ing the man.

“We’re dis­gust­ed. We’re angry. This is not police work,” Aurora Police Chief Vanessa Wilson said Tuesday at a news con­fer­ence announc­ing the charges. “We don’t train this. It is not acceptable.”

Haubert was charged with attempt­ed first-degree assault, sec­ond-degree assault, oppres­sion, felony men­ac­ing and first-degree offi­cial mis­con­duct, police said. He post­ed bail and was released after he turned him­self in Monday.

Officer Francine Martinez is accused of fail­ing to inter­vene and report use of force by a peace officer.

Police pub­lic infor­ma­tion offi­cer Chris Amsler said Martinez turned her­self in Tuesday morn­ing to the Glendale, Colorado, Police Department, post­ed a $1,000 bond and was released.

Attempts to reach Haubert at phone num­bers list­ed in pub­lic records that may be linked to him weren’t suc­cess­ful Tuesday evening. His attor­ney, Reid Elkus, said he could­n’t com­ment because it is ear­ly in the case. He said, “We will be zeal­ous­ly defend­ing Officer Haubert.”

Attempts to reach Martinez at phone num­bers list­ed in pub­lic records that may be linked to her weren’t suc­cess­ful Tuesday evening. It was­n’t clear whether she has an attorney.

Haubert and Martinez were sent to inves­ti­gate a tres­pass­ing report Thursday when they encoun­tered three peo­ple who had out­stand­ing felony war­rants and tried to arrest them, accord­ing to offi­cial doc­u­ments. Two ran away and haven’t been arrest­ed, Wilson said.

The vic­tim, Kyle Vinson, did­n’t suf­fer seri­ous injury in the inci­dent but was tak­en to a hos­pi­tal for welts and a cut on his head that required six stitch­es, police said. Authorities did­n’t say whether he will face charges for an out­stand­ing war­rant on a pro­ba­tion violation.

“We don’t believe he knew that he actu­al­ly had an exist­ing war­rant,” Wilson said.

Haubert used his “duty pis­tol to strike Mr. Vinson,” the affi­davit stat­ed, and Martinez was “involved in the use of force, but there was no knowl­edge of her using any weapons.”

“It does not appear … that Mr. Vinson had used any force against Officer Haubert or Officer Martinez,” an inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cer wrote in the affi­davit, adding that “Mr. Vinson com­plied with Officer Haubert’s orders.”

During the attempt­ed arrest, Haubert “pressed the muz­zle of his gun” into Vinson’s head and right neck area before pis­tol-whip­ping him mul­ti­ple times, the affi­davit says.

In the video, blood can be seen run­ning down Vinson’s face while he cries out and tells the offi­cer “you’re killing me” and tries to swat the gun away from his face.

Haubert’s body cam­era “was dis­lodged in the process” of the offi­cer’s grab­bing Vinson “by the neck” and forc­ing him “back­ward to the ground,” the affi­davit says

“If you move I will shoot you,” Haubert can be heard say­ing in the video as he begins to squeeze his hands around Vinson’s throat.

“Mr. Vinson appeared to be los­ing con­scious­ness. His mouth was open, and his eyes began to close,” the inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cer wrote in the affidavit,

About 39 sec­onds lat­er, Haubert “began to remove his hand from Mr. Vinson’s throat/​neck area” and anoth­er scuf­fle ensues, in which, the inves­ti­ga­tor said, author­i­ties “did not observe any punch­es, kicks or strikes being made by anyone.”

Vinson was thrown back onto the ground by Haubert and Martinez, and anoth­er arriv­ing offi­cer used a Taser on the man, who was then final­ly handcuffed.

“I did­n’t even run,” Vinson said as he “made a labored groan­ing sound,” the affi­davit states.

The Aurora Police Association did­n’t imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment Tuesday evening.

Last year, the Colorado attor­ney gen­er­al opened an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the Aurora Police Department per­mits “pat­terns and prac­tices … that might deprive indi­vid­u­als of their con­sti­tu­tion­al rights” after Elijah McClain, a young Black man, died in offi­cers’ custody.

Officers on Aug. 24, 2019, placed him in a choke­hold and para­medics inject­ed him with a large dose of ket­a­mine, a pow­er­ful seda­tive. McClain, 23, died days later.

A year lat­er, the police depart­ment drew addi­tion­al scruti­ny after a viral video showed offi­cers with guns drawn on a group of Black women and girls who had been ordered to lie face down in a park­ing lot while some of them were hand­cuffed. The group cried and screamed, with one young girl yelling, “I want my mother!”

The offi­cers had stopped their car on the belief that it was stolen because it shared the plate num­ber of a stolen motor­cy­cle, a police spokes­woman said. But after they deter­mined that the car had­n’t been stolen, police “unhand­cuffed every­one involved, made efforts to explain what hap­pened, and apol­o­gized,” offi­cials said.

Last year, Colorado leg­is­la­tors passed a bill that, among oth­er things, requires all offi­cers to use body cam­eras by July 2023, bans choke­holds, lim­its poten­tial­ly lethal uses of force, and removes qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty from police, poten­tial­ly expos­ing offi­cers to law­suits for their actions in use-of-force cases.

The law also requires offi­cers to inter­vene when they see col­leagues use exces­sive force and to report it to superiors.

Legislators strength­ened the law this year to encour­age more offi­cers to use their body cam­eras and pro­mote “de-esca­la­tion tech­niques” in police encounters.(Watch cop beat nbc news)

It is remark­able what peo­ple will do for mon­ey these days. Judas Iscariot saw Jesus heal the sick, raise the dead, and fed a mul­ti­tude with five loaves and two fish, and yet, he still sold him away to be crucified.
Some argue that Judas thought that Jesus would have saved him­self from his cap­tors. The tragedy inher­ent in that pre­sump­tion is that even if Jesus had saved him­self from being cru­ci­fied, Judas would still have com­mit­ted one of the most mon­u­men­tal acts of treach­ery ever.
So, where am I going with this? Well, to tell the truth, I am not writ­ing a reli­gious piece; it is sad to say that some of my read­ers are turned off by reli­gious writ­ings, and I get that, but I would rather please God than man, but with that said I would still like to bring my unsaved broth­ers and sis­ters along with me. What do you have to lose?
Anyway, as I said, this is not about reli­gion; I mere­ly broached the Judas sit­u­a­tion to reg­is­ter my dis­gust with what I see hap­pen­ing today in America. Some say it is because of social media, but I’m afraid I have to dis­agree. There were no social media when some black peo­ple sold out our Marcus Garvey. There were no social media when they spied on Dr. King for J Edgar Hoover. There were no social media when they assas­si­nat­ed Malcolm X on behalf of his white ene­mies. And there were no social media when they spied on set-up and lied on the host of oth­er black intel­lec­tu­als and activists on behalf of the ene­mies of Blackness.

Some black peo­ple have a cer­tain lev­el of coon­ery that goes way back, long before the black man was brought here. Let us be real about it; from as ear­ly as the first European from Portugal set foot on the African con­ti­nent, it was irre­versible that the con­ti­nent would be con­quered by force, dom­i­nat­ed, pil­laged, raped, and exploit­ed before they were done with it.
But it would have been a hell of a lot hard­er if African peo­ple were unit­ed against what they clear­ly must have known was a com­mon ene­my of the African continent.
If Africans were orga­nized and unit­ed, those ships bear­ing men with mus­kets would have been stopped, and not a sin­gle white man would have set foot on African soil. So it was the dis­uni­ty of the African peo­ple and the incom­pre­hen­si­ble naïveté of our ances­tors that allowed the rav­ages and the geno­cide that was vis­it­ed on our peo­ple not only to begin but thrive.
In addi­tion to that, African dis­uni­ty and trib­al­ism allowed for over five hun­dred years of the most bru­tal and bar­bar­ic geno­ci­dal actions ever to be imposed on one race of peo­ple by anoth­er in record­ed history.
Fast for­ward to 2021, and maybe you have missed it, but some black peo­ple in America would lay on their backs and allow white peo­ple to defe­cate in their mouths if they were guar­an­teed a pat on the back.
No, I will not name names; doing so ele­vates them; nam­ing them does exact­ly what they seek. I will not dig­ni­fy their exis­tence by nam­ing them, suf­fic­ing to say that I fun­da­men­tal­ly believe in the pow­er of the uni­verse tonex­act jus­tice; maybe what I want for those sell­outs is vengeance, but the Lord said that we should leave all vengeance to him.
Do they make a few bucks when they dis­re­spect and degrade black peo­ple? Sure they do; most clout-chasers on social media who do and say out­ra­geous things to make mon­ey do make a few coins. However it seems to me that what they are real­ly after is clout. To be laud­ed by a bunch of white peo­ple, to get on FOX noise, and by say­ing the most out­ra­geous things about the black com­mu­ni­ty while liv­ing in black skin seems to be a thing that is on the rise.

I will not lie, when I see black men say that America is not a racist coun­try, that cops are not racist, that black peo­ple com­mit a large per­cent­age of crimes with­out under­stand­ing the dynam­ics behind the data, I do wish that they have a vio­lent and fatal encounter with police. Judge me all you want, I feel it, and I said it, I am not a hypocrite.
But we live in an age of sound­bites, not facts. We are now in an age when melanat­ed skin-folk can get their face on social media and even on tele­vi­sion by say­ing out­ra­geous­ly igno­rant things, and that is all the haters and prop­a­ga­tors of lies want, they grab those sound bites and says, look, here is what real black peo­ple are saying.
Oh, I read some­where that Harriet Tubman car­ried a pis­tol for these kinds of coons who were always ready to run back to tell Massa where she was hid­ing, try­ing to get a pat on the back, or maybe to have mas­sa defe­cate in their mouths.
Nope, it has noth­ing to do with mon­ey, it may be called clout-chas­ing, but it is deep­er than that. It goes way , way back. I mean, how else could the last race that became civ­i­lized be giv­en such lever­age to do as it pleas­es to the point that they mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed every­thing from us then called us niggers?
Yup, they must have expe­ri­enced the same unin­tel­li­gent coon­ery from back then, which allowed them to go all-in in try­ing to exter­mi­nate us.

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

In 2013 the Supreme Court led by John Roberts destroyed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, effec­tive­ly set­ting in motion the raft of anti-vot­ing laws being enact­ed across the coun­try by Republican State Legislators.
In that infa­mous egre­gious rul­ing, the Roberts court argued that the vot­ing rights act was no longer nec­es­sary because the racism which exist­ed in the 1960s is a thing of the past.
Many may think that Roberts and the rest of his Republican cronies mere­ly live in a bub­ble, out of touch with reality.
Not so, John Roberts, a for­mer Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer, is a life­long oppo­nent of the right of all Americans(people of col­or) to vote.
But as most peo­ple know, American Racism is so deeply entrenched and an inher­ent part of the DNA of some who nev­er left where they were born that it is going nowhere.
John Roberts’s life­long goal has been to destroy the law, and he has done just with the oth­er right-wing ide­olo­gies on the court.
Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the dis­sent­ing opin­ion for the minor­i­ty;Throwing out pre­clear­ance when it has worked and is con­tin­u­ing to work to stop dis­crim­i­na­to­ry changes is like throw­ing away your umbrel­la in a rain­storm because you are not get­ting wet.

Roberts, Kennedy, Alito, Scalia, and Uncle Tom-ass all knew that racism was alive and well in America much like it has always been; they mere­ly want­ed to make it eas­i­er to stop black and naïve peo­ple from voting.
Please do not ask me to explain uncle tom-ass; a gar­den­er does what his mas­ter tells him to do.
The fol­low­ing sto­ry is a real eye-open­er to those who are delu­sion­al about where America is today.
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Ade Onibada

When 30-year-old hik­er Marco Williams jour­neyed from his home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to vis­it Devil’s Bathtub in deep Virginia in June of last year, the out­door enthu­si­ast nev­er imag­ined that a stop for gas would present him with a warn­ing that poten­tial­ly saved his life. In a TikTok that has now been viewed 2.5 mil­lion times, Williams told his fol­low­ers that on his return home, trav­el­ing along Route 119, he vis­it­ed a small ser­vice sta­tion in Kentucky to refu­el and grab some snacks.

“The cashier was like, ‘You best not be around here after dark. This is a sun­down town,’” he said.

A sun­down town as explained by James W. Loewen, a for­mer soci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at the University of Vermont and author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, refers to a town, neigh­bor­hood, or com­mu­ni­ty with a whol­ly white pop­u­la­tion, cre­at­ed inten­tion­al­ly by sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly keep­ing out eth­nic minorities.

“You best not be around here after dark. This is a sun­down town.”

“A lot of African Americans don’t real­ly trav­el to cer­tain parts of the coun­try. I did not know this. I’m being naïve, trav­el­ing, but they don’t trav­el to cer­tain parts of the coun­try because cer­tain peo­ple have those mind­sets,” Williams told BuzzFeed News. “The racism and prej­u­dice is still in those towns, the mind­set from the Jim Crow era is passed down, and these peo­ple have no expo­sure because they don’t get out.”

According to Loewen’s rolling data­base, at least 60 of Kentucky’s 782 towns are believed to be or pre­vi­ous­ly have been con­sid­ered sun­down towns. But these towns aren’t just in the South. They are all over the US and con­cen­trat­ed par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Midwest, he says.

Despite the phe­nom­e­non, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences to sun­down towns are few and often wrapped into tales of the expul­sion of Black com­mu­ni­ties in places like Forsyth Countyand Anna, Illinois, which is alleged­ly known col­lo­qui­al­ly to be an acronym for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.”

In her 1969 mem­oir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the late poet Maya Angelou describes Mississippi with the phrase, “Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi.” The same sen­ti­ment would appear on sig­nage post­ed at city bound­aries of sun­down towns, mak­ing clear that Black peo­ple were not wel­come and risked their lives if they dared to defy the decree. Last year the con­cept was por­trayed on the pre­mière episode of HBO’s Lovecraft Country in which the three pro­tag­o­nists are forced to flee a town while being stalked by a police officer.

Activist orga­ni­za­tions have used the term more recent­ly. In 2017, the NAACP issued a trav­el warn­ing for the entire state of Missouri, a first for the orga­ni­za­tion. The deci­sion was in response to a bill designed to lim­it dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits by mak­ing changes to the Missouri Human Rights Act. Senate Bill No. 43 would require employ­ees prove that their pro­tect­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics were a “moti­vat­ing fac­tor” for being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against when pre­vi­ous­ly the require­ment was that sim­ply showed it was a “con­tribut­ing factor.”

The NAACP also ref­er­enced anec­do­tal exam­ples of hate crimes, and data which showed Black motorists were 75% more like­ly to be pulled over and stopped and searched by police enforce­ment than their white coun­ter­parts. (The state of Missouri offered no pub­lic response to the NAACP but did make a Black woman the face of its tourism cam­paign last year.)

And in 2020, a group called the Defund San Antonio Police Department Coalition issued a trav­el warn­ing for San Antonio, label­ing the city as a sun­down town. “A trav­el advi­so­ry has been issued to warn that any Black peo­ple in or trav­el­ing to San Antonio use increased cau­tion when vis­it­ing the city due to the city’s polic­ing poli­cies that put Black Lives in dan­ger,” wrote orga­niz­ers in a press release.

Today, the lega­cy of sun­down towns con­tin­ues to cast a shad­ow on the tra­di­tion of the great American road trip, cre­at­ing addi­tion­al chal­lenges for Black motorists who dare to jour­ney off the beat­en path.

Williams took up hik­ing as a hob­by in response to the pan­dem­ic. In June 2020, he made the sev­en-hour jour­ney by road with a non-Black friend to vis­it Virginia’s hid­den gem, Devil’s Bathtub.

“When I usu­al­ly trav­el, I’m going to cities like New York, Miami, Atlanta, major pop­u­lat­ed cities. I want­ed to get in touch with my nature side and I want­ed to explore the rur­al American South,” said Williams.

In recent years, the angst of being a Black motorist has been cap­tured with the hash­tag #DrivingWhileBlack. As Americans flock to the open roads in a bid to reclaim their sum­mer after more than a year of restric­tions, the free­dom and excite­ment of the road trip isn’t with­out caveats for minori­ties look­ing to ven­ture to less diverse destinations.

“En route, there were a bunch of Confederate flags, a lot of ‘Make America Great Again’ flags, there’s even a few Klan lounges in South Carolina that we came across,” said Williams. “It’s when you veer off to the back roads that don’t con­nect to the high­way, that’s when you find your­self in trou­ble, and it sucks because the hik­ing spots [are] in these back wood­ed areas like West Virginia and Kentucky.”

Williams said he didn’t believe the cashier who sug­gest­ed he leave town before sun­down did so with mali­cious intent. “I don’t think she was being racist toward me. If any­thing I got the ener­gy that she was look­ing out for me so I believed her and got out of there,” he said.

Rather than chal­lenge the con­ven­tion and try his luck, Williams and his com­pan­ion quick­ly got on with their jour­ney back to Maryland, because “dead men tell no tales.” Despite the expe­ri­ence, he said he would be down to do it all again, but “would def­i­nite­ly be cautious.

Exercising cau­tion and trav­el­ing with inten­tion­al­i­ty is a key fea­ture for Black motorists, and is a phi­los­o­phy that trav­el blog­ger Sojourner White is guid­ed by.

Honoring the ety­mol­o­gy of her name, Sojourner, White dis­cov­ered her love for voy­ages on the road as a child trav­el­ing with her fam­i­ly from their home­town of Milwaukee.

“I trav­eled through­out my child­hood,” White, who runs a blog called Sojournies, told BuzzFeed News. “Milwaukee to Louisiana, St. Louis, Michigan, Atlanta, just because we have fam­i­ly spread out. We were always hop­ping in the van or the truck with me and my four broth­ers, explor­ing the US, and then it just kind of grew from there.”

White is famil­iar with sun­down towns. The lega­cy of fear about where Black trav­el­ers will not be wel­comed is some­thing that fre­quent­ly comes up in her net­work of bloggers.

“That’s the oth­er part of the pan­dem­ic: I have not inter­act­ed with white peo­ple as much, and so I find that I deal with racism less.”

“You hear peo­ple say, ‘My par­ents don’t want me to trav­el.’ They say it’s because of racism, and so it’s also a cul­tur­al thing with sun­down towns,” she said. “The after­ef­fects of it, even though they still do exist. As the younger gen­er­a­tion, I would say mil­len­ni­als, we’re the ones who are like, No, we’re gonna explore. We’re gonna kind of go out here. But it took a lot for peo­ple to get there.”

White, who is also a social work­er, said that when trav­el­ing on American roads, details like plan­ning where to stop made all the dif­fer­ence lest Black dri­vers unknow­ing­ly find them­selves “in the wrong spot.”

“It’s like, OK, we can stop in St. Louis, inten­tion­al­ly stop­ping in the big­ger cities to avoid any type of con­flict, grant­ed that even the cities have their issues, but it’s not like going to a space and being the only Black per­son for thou­sands of miles,” said White.

Like many trav­el con­tent cre­ators, the pan­dem­ic lim­it­ed her abil­i­ty to trav­el inter­na­tion­al­ly, so she focused on local excursions.

Because there were few­er trav­el­ers dur­ing the pan­dem­ic last sum­mer, White said she was able to indulge in the road trip expe­ri­ences she wouldn’t have oth­er­wise considered.

She drove to Oshkosh, a town in north­ern Wisconsin. “I’ve been doing a lot around Wisconsin recent­ly with the pan­dem­ic, and see­ing things I didn’t know were tourist attrac­tions. But the oth­er side of that is I didn’t real­ly explore Wisconsin a whole lot because of what I heard about being Black in oth­er areas,” said the 26-year-old.

“That’s the oth­er part of the pan­dem­ic: I have not inter­act­ed with white peo­ple as much, and so I find that I deal with racism less,” she said.

“When I was going up there last fall, all you saw was Trump signs, ‘All Lives Matter’ type of things, or ‘Blue Lives Matter.’ It wasn’t every­where, but that’s part of the rea­son why I don’t have a lot of road trips around the US to go see sights.”

In his book about sun­down towns, Loewen writes about how the social fab­ric of these towns remains very much steeped in the white suprema­cist val­ues they were found­ed on even if their pop­u­la­tions have become more diverse over time and sug­gests that res­i­dents are like­ly to hold a reverse atti­tude to travel.

“There’s all kinds of peo­ple who live in sun­down towns who do not want to, for exam­ple, go to Washington, DC, and vis­it the Smithsonian muse­ums and see the Capitol and do all the things that you do in Washington DC, because it’s too Black,” he told BuzzFeed News. “And the same thing, they real­ly don’t want to go to Atlanta, an actu­al tourist des­ti­na­tion, they don’t go. Chicago is also a prob­lem, all them Black folks.”

Loewen said the num­ber of sun­down towns is much high­er than the gen­er­al pub­lic would guess. But despite their preva­lence, lit­tle work has been done to inter­ro­gate the his­to­ry of these com­mu­ni­ties to rec­on­cile with the lega­cy of racism and the sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion sun­down issues that can present them­selves even where the pol­i­cy is no longer for­mal­ly enforced.

His web­site hosts a data­base and allows user-sub­mit­ted infor­ma­tion for bet­ter ver­i­fi­ca­tion. The project, he says, is the world’s “only reg­istry of sun­down towns,” and he hopes will dis­pel what he describes as the Hollywood myth that these towns exist almost exclu­sive­ly in the South.

“There are five Hollywood movies about sun­down towns and all of them are set in Mississippi, except one that’s out in Georgia. It sets us back in race rela­tions because the whole rest of the coun­try is like, Yeah, we’re all right. This is a good coun­try. Everything’s fine except those nasty white Southerners with all them sun­down towns, and they used to have slav­ery and all that. It’s a nation­al prob­lem. It’s more a Midwest prob­lem than it is a Southern prob­lem,” said Loewen.

The con­tentious mat­ter of where to stop and what areas are acces­si­ble for Black motorists is embod­ied by The Negro Motorist Green Book, writ­ten by postal work­er Victor Hugo Green and first pub­lished in 1936.

It was hailed as the Black trav­el bible and was con­sid­ered a quin­tes­sen­tial aid for Black peo­ple trav­el­ing across the US. The book would let motorists know what estab­lish­ments they could expect to receive ser­vice and also issued warn­ings about the towns where it was dan­ger­ous for Black peo­ple to stay after sunset.

In his pho­to book A Parallel Road, Boston author and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Amani Willett exam­ines the Black American road trip over the past 85 years and bor­rows from pages of The Green Book in telling that story.

“The Green Book is an amaz­ing cul­tur­al arti­fact that oper­ates both as a con­dem­na­tion of the his­to­ry of America and its hor­rif­ic lega­cy of racial oppres­sion while at the same time being a pow­er­ful doc­u­ment illus­trat­ing the cre­ativ­i­ty and resilience of Black Americans,” said

Willett. “The guide shows how we as a peo­ple have always found ways to nav­i­gate a sys­tem and coun­try that is an oppres­sive force.”

The pho­tog­ra­phy pro­fes­sor told BuzzFeed News how ideas around free­dom and trav­el­ing had long been assumed by Americans as rights, rather than priv­i­leges, but that’s not the case for Black people.

“The Black American expe­ri­ence on American road­ways has negat­ed the myth of trav­el as an American free­dom avail­able to all. At best, Black Americans have expe­ri­enced less mobil­i­ty than White Americans and at worst they have been met with intim­i­da­tion, fear, pro­fil­ing, and phys­i­cal harm or death,” said Willett.

Beyond the obser­va­tions detailed in his pho­to­book and his own research into sun­down towns, Willett is cau­tious about divid­ing the coun­try into areas where Black peo­ple can and can’t go when recent events have high­light­ed that racism can be found every­where, mak­ing the real­i­ty much more sinister.

“There are cer­tain areas of the coun­try where Black peo­ple know they have to be more care­ful than oth­ers but the truth is, as we’ve seen through­out the social media era, injus­tices and racial pro­fil­ing exist in all cor­ners of our coun­try,” he said.

Martinique Lewis, pres­i­dent of the Black Travel Alliance and cre­ator of the new ABC Travel Greenbook, a mod­ern-day inter­pre­ta­tion of The Green Book, with a glob­al focus of con­nect­ing Black trav­el­ers with touch points any­where in the world, agrees.

“Black peo­ple are always alert, and it doesn’t mat­ter if that’s in Miami, Vegas, or if it’s Pigsty, Alabama, you know and feel when some­thing is not right,” she told BuzzFeed News. “The real­i­ty is we deal with racism on a dai­ly basis in America.”

With her pub­li­ca­tion, Lewis revives the Black busi­ness aspect of the orig­i­nal Green Bookwith the inten­tion of direct­ing Black trav­el dol­lars their way. She also pref­aces each des­ti­na­tion with a safe­ty assess­ment and encour­ages explor­ers to enjoy them­selves but to also remain alert.

Lewis’s log­ic is that “if you can find one Black busi­ness, you will find the rest of the Black peo­ple,” and con­nect­ing with peo­ple who look like you can make all the dif­fer­ence to your experience.

Willett agrees that access­ing a Black net­work is “crit­i­cal” for Black trav­el­ers to under­stand the his­tor­i­cal lega­cy of des­ti­na­tions and their routes in prepa­ra­tion for “poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous encounters.”

“I’m very in tune with my ener­gy and sens­ing when I’m not wel­comed in an area or a room, so it’s like cer­tain areas, you do get that vibe and that feel­ing where you’re like, I prob­a­bly shouldn’t be here,” Williams said.

As the Black trav­el blog­ger com­mu­ni­ty begins to trav­el again, White believes that they rep­re­sent the mod­ern-day ambas­sadors for where to go and where to avoid.

A mem­ber of the white suprema­cist group Patriot Front was arrest­ed in Haverhill, Ma., Monday and charged with mul­ti­ple hate crimes relat­ed to prop­er­ty dam­age, harass­ment, armed threats and dis­tri­b­u­tion of white nation­al­ist pro­pa­gan­da. Among oth­er crimes, he’s accused of help­ing to dec­o­rate the city with white suprema­cist “Creativity Movement” stick­ers — which may or may not have been meant as invites to one hell of an arts and KKKrafts event — and tar­get­ing a Black flea mar­ket and a Unitarian Universalist Church.

According to the Eagle-Tribune, Justin Milaszewski, 18, was charged with mis­de­meanor counts of prop­er­ty dam­age for the pur­pose of intim­i­da­tion, destruction/​defacement of a place of wor­ship and defac­ing prop­er­ty. He was also hit with a felony charge of assault with a dan­ger­ous weapon.

Side note: News out­lets keep say­ing Milaszewski is 18 as if we can’t all see with our own eyes a 39-year-old vol­un­teer fire­fight­er from South Boston who recent­ly trimmed his han­dle­bar mus­tache because his now-estranged wife always told him it looked stu­pid. OK fine, he’s 18. I’m just say­ing, racism is like the reverse Lazarus Pit for white people.
Read the full sto­ry here:https://​www​.the​root​.com/​m​a​s​s​a​c​h​u​s​e​t​t​s​-​w​h​i​t​e​-​s​u​p​r​e​m​a​c​i​s​t​-​c​h​a​r​g​e​d​-​w​i​t​h​-​h​a​t​e​-​c​r​i​m​e​-​1​8​4​7​3​3​7​676

By Niara Savag

A fam­i­ly has filed a law­suit against the city of Baton Rouge and the city’s police depart­ment after a 16-year-old with asth­ma was pinned to the ground with an officer’s knee on his neck fol­low­ing a July 2020 traf­fic stop, accord­ing to the legal claim.
Dillion Cannon, ref­er­enced in the suit as “D.C.” was pinned to the ground as an officer’s knee “was press­ing on D.C.’s neck for close to 30 sec­onds, restrict­ing his abil­i­ty to breathe, before the arrest­ing offi­cers col­lec­tive­ly jerked him up off the ground, yank­ing his arms back­ward,” accord­ing to the law­suit obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
But accord­ing to BRPD offi­cials, necks are off-lim­its and the method wasn’t used to restrain the teen.
“A knee on a back is used as a con­trol method,” Sgt. Myron Daniels said at a press con­fer­ence last year, The Advocate report­ed. “But the neck is off-limits.

On July 6 last year, Cannon was a pas­sen­ger in a vehi­cle that failed to stop when an offi­cer attempt­ed to pull the car over for a seat belt vio­la­tion. About 50 min­utes into the pur­suit, and after the dri­ver ignored mul­ti­ple traf­fic lights and stop signs, the vehi­cle came to a stop. The legal claim says the dri­ver and pas­sen­ger both exit­ed next to the car and held their hands above their heads. The dri­ver was arrest­ed with­out inci­dent by one set of three offi­cers. According to the suit filed by Tenesha Cannon, the teen’s moth­er, even though Cannon was kneel­ing and com­plied with com­mands from anoth­er set of three offi­cers, he was held at gun­point and “force­ful­ly handcuffed.”
The family’s attor­ney Ron Haley agreed that the lev­el of force wasn’t nec­es­sary con­sid­er­ing the teen com­plied after exit­ing the vehi­cle. “Our client, her son, was a pas­sen­ger. He doesn’t con­trol the car.. he doesn’t dri­ve it, on his knees, in a sub­mis­sive posi­tion and yet he was han­dled as if he was a threat,” said Haley at a press con­fer­ence out­side of the police depart­ment days after the inci­dent. “When you are on your knees with your hands up, you don’t get much more sub­mis­sive than that. Why was he han­dled in such a rough man­ner? He was not armed. He was not pos­ing a threat to any­one for him to be treat­ed that way.”

The suit iden­ti­fies the offi­cers who drew their weapons on Cannon as Lorenzo Coleman, Travis Williams, and Douglas Schutz. Despite the fact that Cannon, who was prone on the ground, “did not resist at any time,” accord­ing to the suit, offi­cer Alvaro Alvarez “placed his left knee on the back of D.C.’s neck as he grabbed and pulled D.C.’s left wrist behind his back.”
According to the suit, Cannon told offi­cers he suf­fered from asth­ma, and an offi­cer respond­ed, “I don’t give a damn.” The knee remained on Canon’s neck for 30 sec­onds, the suit says. In addi­tion, while BRPD offi­cials claim Alvarez’s knee was on Cannon’s back, “the body cam­era footage, and the cell­phone videos tak­en by bystanders, clear­ly indi­cates that the knee was square­ly on D.C.’s neck and back,” the suit says.

The inci­dent hap­pened just six weeks after the high­ly pub­li­cized death of George Floyd, who was killed after for­mer Minneapolis offi­cer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, the suit notes.
The suit also says that no oth­er offi­cers inter­vened as Alvarez kneeled on Cannon and that the teen had to wear a neck brace after the inci­dent “It is uncon­scionable and rep­re­hen­si­ble that less than two months after George Floyd was mur­dered by an ille­gal police tac­tic, the Baton Rouge Police would use that maneu­ver against a child,” Christoper Murrell, an attor­ney rep­re­sent­ing the Cannon fam­i­ly, told VICE News.

The fam­i­ly is seek­ing dam­ages for injuries sus­tained as a result of the defendant’s actions, as well as attor­neys’ fees.

Whether it is Critical Race the­o­ry today or pre­vent­ing Enslaved African People brought to the Americas in chains from learn­ing to read, the objec­tive has always been the same.
Look, Black peo­ple, your future rests with you and no one else; under­stand that they are try­ing to stop you from vot­ing because vot­ing is pow­er, a pow­er that was hard-earned but many of you who are cit­i­zens of this great coun­try fail to appreciate.
Whatever you are going to have or get will be giv­en to you by you .…… not by any­one else. There is no they.…. only you.
At the pin­na­cle of the Federal Judiciary sits a man who was vehe­ment­ly opposed to the idea of one man one vote as a young Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer.
Today the John Roberts Supreme court has all but destroyed the 1965 Voting Rights Law set­ting in motion the slate of anti-vot­ing laws that have been tabled across the coun­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Republican Run states and in states in which they hold pow­er in the legislature.
There is no appeal­ing to this Supreme court for Justice with its 6 – 3 Republican major­i­ty. Truth be told, the Supreme court has nev­er been a friend of Black peo­ple. It thought Slavery was Constitutional. It thought that African peo­ple were ³⁄₅ human beings. It thought Segregation was constitutional.
The Klan does not need to wear sheets any­more; they are wear­ing black robes on high courts, pros­e­cu­tors’ suits, and stilet­to heels, and they are damn sure wear­ing police uniforms.

If you are opposed to crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, it is because you know that what you did was not just shame­ful; you know that it is rep­re­hen­si­ble. You know that it was heinous; you know that your actions were not only inhu­mane, you know they made you sub-human.
Modern-day Racist want to keep you from learn­ing the truth; Arkansas Tom cot­ton, the wannabe cau­casian US Senator from Texas-no, not the corny one, I am refer­ring to Raphael Cruz, and oth­ers want you to for­get because igno­rance is bliss for them.
They would love for you to shut up, and they use all kinds of means to try to shut you up. ‘shut up and drib­ble’ by threat­en­ing to pull fund­ing from the University Of North Carolina.
Big shout out to the bril­liant Nikole Hanna-Jones, for telling UNC where to stick their tenure.
They tried lynch­ings as a means of ter­ror, arson, intim­i­da­tion, and the omnipresent shame­ful and cow­ard­ly hid­ing behind badges as police officers.

Real badass!!!

Civil rights activist Gloria Richardson, whose fear­less­ness was famous­ly immor­tal­ized in a pho­to of her push­ing away a National Guardsman’s bay­o­net dur­ing a 1963 protest, has died at age 99.
Tya Young, her grand­daugh­ter, told the Associated Press that Richardson died in her sleep Thursday. She was one of the few women with lead­er­ship roles dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment, and as The Root report­ed back in 2015, her actions con­tin­ue to inspire var­i­ous Black activists to this day.
Richardson was born in Baltimore. Her fam­i­ly lat­er moved to Cambridge, Md., when she was six. She attend­ed Howard University at 16 and grad­u­at­ed with a soci­ol­o­gy degree in 1942. In the ear­ly 1960s, Richardson joined the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee and lat­er worked with oth­er com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers to start the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee in 1962.
This orga­ni­za­tion focused on pub­lic-hous­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion health care access.

“Cambridge was built on the SNCC mod­el,” Richardson says. “It may have been 400 – 500 peo­ple who helped with the movement.”
But CNAC did dif­fer from SNCC in one key area: “We weren’t non­vi­o­lent,” Richardson says. “White folks would come there shoot­ing at your hous­es, and peo­ple responded.”
As the black com­mu­ni­ty became more vocal in demand­ing equal rights, ten­sion began to esca­late. In June 1963, busi­ness­es went up in flames as both blacks and whites took up arms, Richardson says. “It was like a lit­tle war, real­ly,” she says. “In a cer­tain peri­od of time, it was almost every night.”

The National Guard was even­tu­al­ly called in as a result of the vio­lence. Richardson met with then‑U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and oth­er lead­ers to bro­ker the “Treaty of Cambridge” in July 1963, which ordered equal access to pub­lic facil­i­ties in the city. Richardson signed it but nev­er agreed to end the protests in Cambridge. The treaty ulti­mate­ly failed after the local gov­ern­ment demand­ed that a local ref­er­en­dum pass it.
That same year, Richardson was also on stage at the March on Washington as one of six women list­ed on the pro­gram. She was not allowed to speak.
The pas­sage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 slowed down the Cambridge move­ments, and even­tu­al­ly, the National Guard left the city. Richardson resigned from the CNAC in 1964, mar­ried her sec­ond hus­band, and moved to New York City – where she con­tin­ued to work out of the spotlight.

Richardson’s grand­daugh­ter Young told the AP that she didn’t seek recog­ni­tion for her actions in Cambridge.
This sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed @ the root.

Among the most heart­break­ing exam­ples of struc­tur­al racism’s sub­tle effects are accounts shared by black chil­dren. In the late 1970s, when Lebert F. Lester II was 8 or 9 years old, he start­ed build­ing a sand­cas­tle dur­ing a trip to the Connecticut shore. A young white girl joined him but was quick­ly tak­en away by her father. Lester recalled the girl return­ing, only to ask him, “Why don’t [you] just go in the water and wash it off?” Lester says., “I was so con­fused — I only fig­ured out lat­er she meant my com­plex­ion.” Two decades ear­li­er, in 1957, 15-year-old Minnijean Brown had arrived at Little Rock Central High School with high hopes of “mak­ing friends, going to dances and singing in the cho­rus.” Instead, she and the rest of the Little Rock Nine—a group of black stu­dents select­ed to attend the for­mer­ly all-white acad­e­my after Brown v. Board of Education deseg­re­gat­ed pub­lic schools — were sub­ject­ed to dai­ly ver­bal and phys­i­cal assaults. Around the same time, pho­tog­ra­ph­er John G. Zimmerman cap­tured snap­shots of racial pol­i­tics in the South that includ­ed com­par­isons of black fam­i­lies wait­ing in long lines for polio inoc­u­la­tions as white chil­dren received speedy treat­ment. This infor­ma­tion orig­i­nat­ed from @the Smithsonian.

Over half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, not only has American Police con­tin­ued to be the sin­gle great­est organ of oppres­sion of African-Americans and Native peo­ple, but they are also worse than what they were then.
Today Police are mil­i­ta­rized, ful­ly out­fit­ted with the lat­est state-of-the-art weapons of sur­veil­lance and warfare.
It is instruc­tive to under­stand that police are local mili­tias that oper­ate out­side the bound­aries of the laws and, in worse cas­es, are a law unto themselves.
Despite their abil­i­ties to kill and com­mit all kinds of atroc­i­ties, cit­i­zens in the Black and Native American com­mu­ni­ties have no say in how their tax dol­lars are dis­persed to pay for these ele­ments of oppres­sion that oper­ate in their com­mu­ni­ties against them…

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

How is sur­prised by the result of this study? One does not need stud­ies to bear out these facts that we have long been privy to. They do not tell us any­thing new, they val­i­date what we know to those who are wil­ful­ly blind.
If I have writ­ten one I must have writ­ten a dozen arti­cles in which I stat­ed that the prob­lems in America between Black cit­i­zens and Police stems from one issue and one issue only.
That issue is the lack of respect that Police have for Black Americans. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly because of any­thing Black Americans did to deserve this dis­re­spect, it derives from white police offi­cers and their bias­es that have been passed down to them for generations…
Here is the result of a study done by The American Psychological Association, pub­lished days ago.