To ensure that no other prisoner kills themselves like teen Kalief Browder, the New York legislature recently passed a bill known as “Kalief’s Law,” to ensure that persons arrested receive a speedy trial, the Amsterdam News reported.
“For too long, the constitutionally guaranteed right to a speedy trial has been denied in New York. Our broken Rockefeller-era law does nothing to guarantee to a speedy trial for the accused,” stated New York State Senator Daniel Squadron, who cosponsored the bill with Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry.
“In fact, it does the exact opposite, protecting a system that too often delays justice at the cost of defendants, victims and the taxpayers,” he added.
Browder was accused of stealing a backpack and spent more than 1,000 days in Rikers Island’s pretrial detention center, which included approximately 700 days in solitary confinement, the newspaper reported. Even though Browder was released, his depression from his experiences in Rikers prompted his 2015 suicide.
Activists are praising this new legislation as a progressive step forward.
“The bill’s passage in the Assembly by the overwhelming margin of 138-2 shows that our lawmakers are finally hearing the voices of the many organizations and thousands of activists who have been fighting for a more just criminal justice system,” said Glenn Martin, president and founder of JustLeadership USA. “We call on the Senate to take up and pass S.5998-A as soon as possible and make the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution’s promise of a speedy trial a reality in New York.”
Sacramento – To celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Buffalo Soldiers, an historic group of African American service members, California State Senator Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia) and State Senator Isadore Hall III (D–Compton), Chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, hosted a reception on June 6th in the State Capitol and presented Senate Concurrent Resolution 128, which recognizes the Soldiers for their unique contributions to the United States and its military.
“I am honored to recognize the great accomplishments and service of the Buffalo Soldiers. These men made history by breaking barriers and serving our country with honor and distinction during war and peacetime under tremendously challenging circumstances,” said Senator Tony Mendoza.
The Buffalo Soldiers were established on July 28, 1866 by an Act of Congress. It was officially known as the 9th and 10th Calvary regiment and was comprised of former slaves, free men, and black Civil War soldiers. The Buffalo Soldiers were the first African Americans to serve in the United States Army during peacetime.
Oprah Winfrey makes $1 million donation to help DC homeless women at N Street Village (photo via fox5dc.com) article by Matt Ackland and staff viafox5dc.com
The gift was unexpected, but so welcomed. It happened on Thursday at N Street Village’s Empowerment Luncheon. The organization helps women in need through housing and employment as well as helping those battling drug addiction or are encountering health issues.
They only wanted to hear Oprah Winfrey’s inspirational words, but they got so much more.
“I thank you N Street for seeing, hearing and knowing that every life matters, every woman matters,” Winfrey said.
Linda Rush introduced Winfrey at the luncheon. For years, Rush was addicted to crack and involved in prostitution. “My mom dropped me off. She walked me in here,” said Rush.
At one time before finding N Street Village, Rush wanted to reach out to Winfrey. “Twenty years ago, I wanted to write her a letter and ask her to help me into a program,” Rush told FOX 5. “The people I was getting high with, they were like, ‘Oh, she don’t have time for you.’”
Two decades later, Rush told Winfrey that story and how N Street Village helped turn her life around.
“Before I introduced her, I said that now she can see for herself how things turned out,” Rush said. “She said, ‘I see.’ And that felt – I can’t even describe that feeling.”
“N Street Village has been a vital part of Washington D.C. for over 40 years now,” said Schroeder Stribling, executive director for N Street Village.
It has four locations across the city helping homeless women get their lives back on track. Stribling said Winfrey’s gift brought her to tears. “I went up and I kind of couldn’t help myself, but hang on her for a while and cry,” Stribling said.
Muhammad Ali (photo via express.co.uk) article by Patrick Hipes via deadline.com ESPN will provide live coverage of Muhammad Ali’s memorial service Friday in his hometown of Louisville, KY. As a result, the network is shifting its coverage of the opening match of the European soccer championships between host France and Romania to ESPN2. Coverage for both events begin at 2 PM ET. Ali died Friday in Arizona after suffering for years with Parkinson’s disease. The three-time heavyweight champ and worldwide sports icon was 74.
Former President Bill Clinton,Billy Crystal and Bryant Gumbel are among those scheduled to give eulogies at the service, to be held as the 22,000-seat KFC Yum! Center. That comes after a funeral procession travels along Muhammad Ali Boulevard and past his boyhood home on its way to Cave Hill Cemetery. The pallbearers include Will Smith, who played the champ in 2001’s Ali. To read more, go to: http://deadline.com/2016/06/muhammad-ali-funeral-tv-coverage-espn-1201769223/
Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris greets supporters in Sacramento on Tuesday, June 7. (Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press) article by John Myers via latimes.com
California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris was declared the top vote-getter Tuesday night in the state’s open race for the U.S. Senate, as a bevy of primary candidates competed for the other spot on the fall ballot.
With 13% of precincts reporting, the Associated Press called the race for Harris, 51, who was long seen as the front-runner in a crowded field of 34 candidates.
The most prominent challenger, Rep. Loretta Sanchez of Orange, is a Democrat like Harris. Should they finish in the top two spots once all the votes are counted, it would mark the first time in a statewide election in which a Republican failed to make the November ballot.
Sanchez was second in early returns, followed by a trio of Republicans: former state GOP chairman Duf Sundheim, attorney Phil Wyman, and former GOP chairman Tom Del Beccaro. To read more, go to: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-primary-kamala-harris-declared-the-winner-of-1465359023-htmlstory.html
Ms. Barber took a stand for women’s rights last night.
Admittedly, I’ve never been a watcher of beauty pageants. I respect the women. I understand that there is an incredible amount of work that goes into preparing for this annual event, it’s just never been my thing. Not to mention, Black girls aren’t often chosen as the winner. But last night, not only did Deshauna Barber, a 26-year-old Black woman from the District of Columbia, emerge victorious, she did so with a narrative that defied many of the stereotypes associated with pageant girls.
Barber is a commander in the United States army, who, in her profile video, filmed by the people of Miss USA, says that she is trying to dispel stereotypes of women in the military as well as women in the pageant world. Source: Deshauna Barber Crowned Miss USA 2016 | MadameNoire
Prince (photo via eurweb.com) article via eurweb.com
Move over Beyonce. Minnesota’s Governor Mark Dayton has officially declared Tuesday June 7, 2016 “Prince Day.” The move comes just weeks after the governor angered Prince fans by giving Beyonce, a Texas native, her own day in Minnesota before giving one to the state’s most famous musician.
Prince was born on June 7, 1958 in Minneapolis and passed away on April 21, 2016 at his Paisley Park home in Chanhassen, Minn. He would have been 58 tomorrow.
The governor encouraged all Minnesotans to wear purple in honor of Prince’s “enduring legacy,” in his proclamation. See below: Prince Day Proclamation WHEREAS: Prince (Rogers Nelson) was born on June 7, 1958 in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and WHEREAS: Prince’s artistry, music, and brand showcase his outstanding contributions to music and the arts and entertainment industry; and WHEREAS: Prince was one of the best-selling recording artists of all-time; a prominent singer, writer and multi-instrumentalist, he went on to create revolutionary music and an iconic identity, which later inspired a movie, known as Purple Rain; and WHEREAS: Prince was a seven-time Grammy Award winner and the winner of a Golden Globe, an Oscar, and multiple American Music Awards and Minnesota Black Music Awards, ultimately securing himself a spot in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Prince was considered a music industry innovator, a mentor, and a humble philanthropist; and WHEREAS: Prince was the creator of uThe Minneapolis Sound,” a contribution not only to the global catalogue of music genres, but to Minnesota’s worldwide prominence and its economic growth; and WHEREAS: The untimely passing of Prince on April 21, 2016 impacted millions and has been marked with tributes and celebrations of his life and music across the world; and WHEREAS: Prince Day will be celebrated in Minnesota on June 7, 2016, Prince’s birthday; and WHEREAS: Minnesotans are encouraged to wear purple on Prince Day in honor of The Purple One’s enduring legacy. NOW, THEREFORE, I, MARK DAYTON, Governor of Minnesota, do hereby proclaim Tuesday, June 7, 2016, as: PRINCE DAY
View the actual Prince Day proclamation here.
“Untitled” (Harlem, New York), 1952 (THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION) article by Tamara Best via nytimes.com
Masters of their fields, the photographer Gordon Parks and the writer Ralph Ellison bonded over a shared vision of using their creative talents to address racial injustice. That commitment led to the powerful, enduring 1952 photo essay“A Man Becomes Invisible.”
But that Life magazine project was not their only collaboration. A new exhibition, “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” for the first time shows images from a lesser-known 1948 project of theirs, “Harlem Is Nowhere.” On view through Aug. 28 at the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition offers the two men’s counternarrative (the reality, that is) of the living conditions of black Americans during that time. Among the show’s more than 50 objects — the known surviving material belonging to both “A Man Becomes Invisible” and “Harlem Is Nowhere” — are newly discovered images, photographs that have never been exhibited and items that had not been definitely identified as belonging to either project.
The black-and-white photographs are vignettes of life in Harlem: street scenes of adults and children; political advocacy in real time; and imagined scenes from “Invisible Man,” Ellison’s watershed 1952 novel. The photographs are placed next to the passages that correspond with them, giving a sense of the tight collaborative process. Among the other highlights are drafts of captions for “Harlem Is Nowhere,” and images include a man in an alleyway; Harlem in literal ruin with a clinic building acting as a bright light; and a patient waiting to be seen, sitting in solitude, head in his hands.
Ellison and Parks “lived parallel lives, and they intersect in a creative splendor,” Adam Bradley, an associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has written about Ellison’s work, said in a telephone interview. “They both understood the capacity of dark and light, light and shadow, black and white.”
These artists were compelled to focus on Harlem, their adopted home, which despite being the center of a cultural revival during the Harlem Renaissance, suffered a great economic toll tied to the Depression. They also witnessed the mounting postwar frustrations among their neighbors, black men who had been enlisted to fight but whose freedoms remained limited upon their return home.
Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who helped define his turbulent times as the most charismatic and controversial sports figure of the 20th century, died on Friday. He was 74.
His death was confirmed by Bob Gunnell, a family spokesman.
Ali was the most thrilling if not the best heavyweight ever, carrying into the ring a physically lyrical, unorthodox boxing style that fused speed, agility and power more seamlessly than that of any fighter before him.
But he was more than the sum of his athletic gifts. An agile mind, a buoyant personality, a brash self-confidence and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not contain.
Ali was as polarizing a superstar as the sports world has ever produced — both admired and vilified in the 1960s and ’70s for his religious, political and social stances. His refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War, his rejection of racial integration at the height of the civil rights movement, his conversion from Christianity to Islam and the changing of his “slave” name, Cassius Clay, to one bestowed by the Nation of Islam, were perceived as serious threats by the conservative establishment and noble acts of defiance by the liberal opposition.
Loved or hated, he remained for 50 years one of the most recognizable people on the planet.
In later life Ali became something of a secular saint, a legend in soft focus. He was respected for having sacrificed more than three years of his boxing prime and untold millions of dollars for his antiwar principles after being banished from the ring; he was extolled for his un-self-conscious gallantry in the face of incurable illness, and he was beloved for his accommodating sweetness in public.
That passive image was far removed from the exuberant, talkative, vainglorious 22-year-old who bounded out of Louisville, Ky., and onto the world stage in 1964 with an upset victory over Sonny Liston to become the world champion. The press called him the Louisville Lip. He called himself the Greatest.
Ali also proved to be a shape-shifter — a public figure who kept reinventing his persona.
As a bubbly teenage gold medalist at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, he parroted America’s Cold War line, lecturing a Soviet reporter about the superiority of the United States. But he became a critic of his country and a government target in 1966 with his declaration “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong.”
“He lived a lot of lives for a lot of people,” said the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory. “He was able to tell white folks for us to go to hell.”
If there was a supertitle to Ali’s operatic life, it was this: “I don’t have to be who you want me to be; I’m free to be who I want.” He made that statement the morning after he won his first heavyweight title. It informed every aspect of his life, including the way he boxed.
The traditionalist fight crowd was appalled by his style; he kept his hands too low, the critics said, and instead of allowing punches to “slip” past his head by bobbing and weaving, he leaned back from them.
Eventually his approach prevailed. Over 21 years, he won 56 fights and lost five. His Ali Shuffle may have been pure showboating, but the “rope-a-dope” — in which he rested on the ring’s ropes and let an opponent punch himself out — was the stratagem that won the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in 1974, the fight in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in which he regained his title.
Arnold Black was awarded $22 million after cops wrongfully detained him, beat him and locked him in a closet for four days. (FOX8 CLEVELAND) article by Meg Wagner via nydailynews.com
An Ohio man who was beaten by a drunk cop and left locked in a closet for four days without food, water or access to a bathroom was awarded $22 million in court. Arnold Black sued East Cleveland police over his 2012 detainment, saying a pair of officers mixed up his car with that of a suspected drug dealer and wrongfully took him into custody. One of the cops reeked of alcohol — and punched Black for “messing up” his night at the bar, according to the lawsuit.
“The officer … grabbed me like this,” Black told Fox 8 while motioning with his hands. “And he held me up, and — Boom! — I just remember getting hit.”
Black said he was driving through the city in his green pickup truck in April 2012 when officers Jonathan O’Leary and Randy Hicks pulled him over and asked him where they could find drug dealers in East Cleveland. The pair said they were hunting for a green truck carrying a load of cocaine — and Hicks, who was slurring his speech and reeked of booze, seemed upset that Black wasn’t the suspected drug dealer, the lawsuit alleged. “I was at a bar with friends. You messed up my night,” Hicks told the driver.
The cop with the blood-shot eyes and cloudy coordination punched Black in the head, handcuffed him and then punched him again, the lawsuit alleged. O’Leary, who did not appear to be drunk, stood back and did nothing to atop the attack.
The duo carted Black off to jail, but instead of sticking him in a cell, they locked him in a storage closet, Black said.
