Ferguson, Mo. Police Chief Thomas Jackson (Photo: Scott Olson, Getty Images)
ST. LOUIS — As the parents of Michael Brown appeared Thursday in the nation’s capital to call on the Justice Department to take over the case of their 18-year-old son whom police shot in August, the chief in the St. Louis suburb where he was killed apologized to the Brown family. Police Chief Thomas Jackson in Ferguson, Mo., issued a video apology Thursday to Brown’s parents and peaceful protesters, according to a St. Louis public-relations firm’s video.
“I’m truly sorry for the loss of your son. I’m also sorry that it took so long to remove Michael from the street,” said Jackson, dressed casually in a red polo shirt. “You have every right to be angry and upset. The time that it took involved the completion of the work of the investigators to preserve physical evidence and determine the facts, but 4½ hours was simply too long.”
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – In an effort to combat police brutality in the Black community, the National Bar Association (NBA) recently announced plans to file open records requests in 25 cities to study allegations of police misconduct. National Bar Association President Pamela J. Meanes Pamela Meanes, president of the Black lawyers and judges group, said the NBA had already been making plans for a nationwide campaign to fight police brutality when Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a White police officer following a controversial midday confrontation in a Ferguson, Mo.
Meanes called police brutality the new civil rights issue of this era, an issue that disproportionately impacts the Black community.
“If we don’t see this issue and if we don’t at the National Bar Association do the legal things that are necessary to bring this issue to the forefront, then we are not carrying out our mission, which is to protect the civil and political entities of all,” said Meanes.
The NBA, which describes itself as “the nation’s oldest and largest national network of predominantly African-American attorneys and judges,” selected the 25 cities based on their African-American populations and reported incidents of police brutality.
The lawyers group will file open records requests in Birmingham, Ala.; Little Rock, Ark.; Phoenix; Los Angeles; San Jose, Calif., Washington, D.C.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Miami; Atlanta; Chicago; Louisville, Ky.; Baltimore, Md.; Detroit; Mich.; Kansas City, Mo.; St. Louis, Mo.; Charlotte, N.C.; Las Vegas, Nev.; New York City; Cleveland, Ohio; Memphis, Tenn., Philadelphia; Dallas; Houston; San Antonio, Texas, and Milwaukee, Wis.
In a press release about the open records requests, the group said it will not only seek information about “the number of individuals who have been killed, racially profiled, wrongfully arrested and/or injured while pursued or in police custody, but also comprehensive data from crime scenes, including “video and photographic evidence related to any alleged and/or proven misconduct by current or former employees,” as well as background information on officers involved in the incidents.
Not only will the NBA present their findings to the public, but the group also plans to compile its research and forward the data over to the attorney general’s office.
Meanes said the group’s ultimate goal is to have a conversation with Attorney General Eric Holder and to ask, and in some cases, demand he seize police departments or take over or run concurrent investigations.
Meanes said federal law prohibits the Justice Department from going into a police department unless a pattern or history of abuse has been identified.
“The problem is that the information needed for that action is not readily available in a comprehensive way on a consistent basis with the goal of eradicating that abuse,” said Meanes, adding that the open records request is the best way to get that information.
Meanes said that the NBA was concerned that the trust had already brrn broken between the police force and the residents of Ferguson and that the rebellion and the protests would continue.
“We don’t think St. Louis County should investigate this. We don’t think the prosecutor should investigate this. There should be an independent third-party investigating this and that is the federal government,” said Meanes.
Phillip Agnew, executive director of the Dream Defenders, a civil rights group established by young people of color in the aftermath of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager in Sanford, Fla., said law enforcement officials taunted, antagonized and disrespected peaceful protesters who took to the streets of Ferguson and at times incited the violence they attempted to stamp out in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown.
“An occupying force came into the community, they killed someone from the community, and instead of being transparent and doing everything they could do to make sure the community felt whole again, they brought in more police to suppress folks who were exercising their constitutional rights,” said Agnew.“If your protocol results in greater violence, greater anger, and greater disenchantment of the people, you have to chart a different course.”
On the heels of the NBA announcement, Attorney General Holder launched two initiatives designed to calm anxiety and frustration expressed by Ferguson’s Black residents towards the local police department over allegations of misconduct, harassment and discrimination.
The Justice Department also introduced a “Collaborative Reform Initiative” to tackle similar concerns with the St. Louis County Police Department and to improve the relationship between police officers and the communities they serve.
Five-O App Inventors Caleb, Ima, Joshua, and Asha Christian (Pine Tart)
Like everyone else in America, Ima Christian has been nervously watching the news unfold in Ferguson, Missouri. The 16-year-old resident of Stone Mountain, Georgia, says that she and her siblings have been in constant conversation with their parents about the recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (who died last month in Staten Island) at the hands of police.
“Our parents try to put everything in context for us,” Christian says. “They try to tell us to focus on solutions.”
So they decided to build their own answer to police abuse. On Monday, Ima Christian (pictured, second from left) and her siblings—principally Caleb, 14, and Asha, 15, with the support of Joshua, 10—are launching a beta version of Five-O, an app that will enable users to rate their interactions with police and view aggregate scores for how law-enforcement agencies fare.
“As soon as we decided that we wanted to make an app, we threw the idea on the white board,” she says.
Ima Christian and her siblings decided to build their own answer to police abuse.
Here’s how Five-O works: Users log in to a dashboard, where they have several options. A Five-O user can create a detailed incident report and rate the professionalism and courtesy of the officer, using an A-F scale. Or they can view police stations by county or state to see how various departments rate. (Those A-F officer interaction scores are averaged out on a 4.0 scale—like a GPA for the fuzz.)
The app also allows people to post messages to a community board. There’s another function called “Know Your Rights,” a Q&A-formatted feature, “so you have your rights at your fingertips at any moment,” Christian says. The family drew the information from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Christian, a senior at Parkview High School, credits her brother Caleb for the idea to create an app for rating police interactions. They decided early on in the project planning stages that Five-O would focus on the good as well as the bad.
“I haven’t really heard of issues happening in Stone Mountain of the scale of what’s in the news,” she says. “I do have relatives who have had negative interactions with police.” She says that friends of the family include police officers, who offer a friendlier model for police interactions. “This is an app to offer up positive experiences. They can be an example.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-Veei0jQM&w=560&h=315]
This is the Christian family’s first app release, but it’s unlikely to be their last. Ima and her siblings are aggressive students of programming, especially for a mobile environment. She and her siblings Asha and Caleb have participated in programs such as MIT’s +K12, Scratch, and App Inventor programs. Ima and Asha Christian are both executive team members in the ProjectCSGirls computer science competition. And they were both 2014 #Include Fellows in the She++ program. Ima is a Codecademy alum as well, and has done coding programs through Stanford.Stanford, incidentally, is Ima’s reach school—she’s also got her sights set onWashington University in St. Louis, Brown, and Columbia—and the graduating senior has also done work at her top in-state choice, the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Ima’s siblings could not be reached for comment, as they were not yet home from school.)
Following Monday’s beta launch for Five-O, the Christian siblings are continuing work on two more projects: Coily, a review app for hair-care products for black girls and women, and Froshly, an app to facilitate meetings for in-bound college pre-freshmen, “so they can greet each other before they meet each other in school.” The Christian siblings started a company, Pine Tart, Inc., to advance their work.
“We don’t have any institutional support right now,” Ima Christian says. “It’s just us. We’re our own team.” article by Kriston Capps via citylab.com
Christina Bijou holds a sign during a rally outside the Department of Justice, August 27, 2014, in Washington, to call on the Attorney General Eric Holder to help secure justice for Michael Brown and the people of Ferguson. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
On August 22, almost two weeks after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Columbia University professor Fredrick Harris titled “Will Ferguson be a moment or a movement?”
I started working on my piece about the new era of black activism (which you can read here) months ago, and so I read Harris’s op-ed with the same level of irritation that made me want to write that piece in the first place. Not that there isn’t any value in what Harris wrote, because there certainly is. But if you’re asking the question “Where is the movement?” you simply haven’t been paying attention.
“A moment of trauma can oftentimes present you with an opportunity to do something about the situation to prevent that trauma from happening again,” Charlene Carruthers, national coordinator for Black Youth Project 100, told me in an interview for that piece, and the millennial generation has been presented with trauma after trauma. The killing of Sean Bell, the over-prosecution of the Jena Six, the killing of Oscar Grant, the killing of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, the killing of Trayvon Martin and so many more moments that may not have captured the national media attention but those events have defined the late adolescence and early adulthood of black folks of the millennial generation. As part of that demographic, let me say: the trauma has been fucking exhausting.
So, too, has been the haranguing from older generations that we have been too apathetic, that we have been too “post-racial,” that we have not done our part in upholding the legacy of the civil-rights movement. And so I wanted to write a corrective to that narrative, as I’ve seen my generation take up the fight and organize and begin along the hard road to movement building. It’s happening at this very moment. It was happening before Michael Brown was killed.
Harris writes: “What may keep Ferguson from becoming a national transformative event is if “justice” is narrowly confined to seeking relief for Brown and his family. If the focus is solely on the need for formal charges against Wilson, a fair trial, a conviction, a wrongful-death lawsuit—rather than seeing those things as part of a broader movement that tackles stand-your-ground laws, the militarization of local police, a requirement that cameras be worn by police on duty and the need for a comprehensive federal racial-profiling law. If justice remains solely personal, rather than universal.”
But that work had already begun before Ferguson erupted. The Dream Defenders traveled to the United Nations to present a case against “stand-your-ground” laws, and BYP100 recently organized an action at the Chicago Police Department headquarters to address discrepancies in marijuana arrests. The movement is here. The pictures are not as arresting as what comes from a moment like Ferguson, and therefore aren’t as compelling to media outlets only interested in the sensational. But the criminalization of black youth has emerged as the central focus of organizing efforts for the millennial generation and the work is being done.
On Twitter, filmmaker/writer/activist dream hampton called millennials the “Movement Generation.” It fits. article by Mychal Denzel Smith via thenation.com
Although the U.S. Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in the battle for racial equality, recent decisions by the high court undermine its role in solving a “real racial problem” in America, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in an interview with The National Law Journal last Wednesday.
Citing recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and racially biased stop-and-frisk policies, Ginsburg reflected on the perpetuation of racial segregation in America, comparing the challenges with those of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
“Once [gay] people began to say who they were, you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired,” she said. “That understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will remain that way for a long time as long as where we live remains divided.”
But instead of upholding the court’s history as a powerful stalwart against racial discrimination, the Roberts court’s recent decisions upholding affirmative action bans and restricting voting rights have not “helped” the country advance, Ginsburg explained.
“What’s amazing is how things have changed,” Ginsburg said, recalling the landmark 1971 decision of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that employer policies that look neutral on paper can still constitute discrimination if they disproportionately harm minorities in practice. “It was a very influential decision and it was picked up in England. That’s where the court was heading in the ’70s.”
Singling out the Voting Rights Act as the most powerful law “in terms of making people count in a democracy,” Ginsburg reiterated her opposition to the court’s majority 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision that helped safeguard against racial discrimination in voting laws.
Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, at his funeral in St. Louis. (RICHARD PERRY / THE NEW YORK TIMES)
ST. LOUIS — They came by the thousands to pay their respects. Among them were the parents and extended family — some 500 strong — of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed more than two weeks ago by a Ferguson police officer.
But the crowd of mourners also included the Rev. Jesse Jackson; film director Spike Lee; T. D. Jakes, the bishop of The Potter’s House, an African-American megachurch; several members of Congress; representatives from the White House; and two children of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
During a deeply religious service here on Monday at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, several speakers exhorted mourners to work for justice, not just for Mr. Brown but for others, long after the funeral was over.
“There is a cry being made from the ground, not just for Michael Brown, but for the Trayvon Martins, for those children in Sandy Hook Elementary School, for the Columbine massacre, for black-on-black crime,” the Rev. Charles Ewing, Mr. Brown’s uncle, said.
Speaking before the overflowing crowd, the Rev. Al Sharpton criticized the militarization of the police and their treatment of Mr. Brown, while calling on African-Americans to push for change instead of “sitting around having ghetto pity parties.”
On Sunday, relatives of Mr. Brown had asked for quiet during the funeral. The fatal shooting had set off weeks of protests and a severe police reaction in Ferguson. Several speakers echoed pleas from Mr. Brown’s family for people to refrain from protesting on Monday.
“Please don’t exacerbate the almost unbearable pain of this family,” said Bishop Edwin Bass of the Church of God in Christ. “It is imperative that we resist the temptation to react by rioting.”
Many mourners, most of whom were black, wore buttons showing Mr. Brown’s picture, and large photos of Mr. Brown stood at the front of the church. Rousing hymns by the Missouri Jurisdictional Choir repeatedly brought the entire crowd to their feet.
Among the family members who spoke, Cal Brown, Mr. Brown’s stepmother, said that just weeks before he was shot, Mr. Brown had described a dream in which he had seen bloody sheets hanging on a clothes line. “He pretty much prophesied his own death and he didn’t even realize it,” she said, calling him “an awesome man” who wanted to have a family and “be a good father.”
In addition to numerous readings from the Bible, there were readings from Dr. King and references to significant court cases in black history. Referring to the original determination in the Constitution that blacks were counted as three-fifths of a man for the purposes of voting, Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who is representing Mr. Brown’s family, said that the teenager “was not three-fifths of a citizen. He was an American citizen and we will not accept three-fifths justice.”
The photo, and the reaction to it, crystallized Ferguson’s uprising this month in all its anger and strangeness: a demonstrator in an American flag shirt, holding a bag of chips in one hand while hurling a canister of tear gas back at police with the other, leaving an arabesque of smoke in his wake. The image became so well-known that a man who said he was the demonstrator put details for booking requests on his Twitter profile. He got thousands of new Twitter followers.
St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, left, has more than 100,000 new Twitter followers due to his documenting of events since the police shooting of Michael Brown. (Roberto Rodriguez / European Pressphoto)
So too with Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman and budding celebrity, who in the space of 10 days gained more than 100,000 Twitter followers due to his relentless documenting of events good and bad after the police shooting of Michael Brown. People are wondering what higher office French might seek. And they say as much about Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, once a low-profile officer, placed in charge of maintaining security in Ferguson.
It’s become apparent that anyone who has played a contributing role in this city’s unsteady vortex has been reshaped in it. Along with fostering celebrity, events here have taken on a ritualistic quality, with protesters gathering night after night along a small stretch of West Florissant Avenue. “During the day, it’s a spectacle. At night, it’s a war zone,” Wes Suber, a 26-year-old sociology student from Ferguson, said one night this week.
There’s no one guiding events — Ferguson has been like a barreling train without an engineer — and the difficulties in organization were apparent. On Tuesday, community leaders halted a protest march to hold a prayer and lead some chants; they told demonstrators to go home and rest up for a protest outside the county justice building in nearby Clayton the next morning. But the crowd refused to go home. Instead, people milled around until there was another standoff with police.
A police officer who pointed his assault rifle at a demonstrator in Ferguson, Missouri, has been suspended indefinitely, authorities said Wednesday.
The unidentified officer from the St. Ann Police Department pointed his weapon after he became involved in an argument Tuesday night with the protester, according to Officer Brian Schellman, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department.
Schellman said a supervising officer intervened, ordered the officer to lower his weapon and took him away from the area.
“The unified command strongly feel these actions are inappropriate, and not indicative of the officers who have worked daily, to keep the peace,” according to a statement from the County Police department.
Calls to St. Ann police officials seeking comment were not immediately returned. article by James Queally via latimes.com
Protestors autograph a sketch of Michael Brown during a protest, Monday, Aug. 18, 2014, in Atlanta. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in downtown Atlanta to protest the shooting death of Brown, an unarmed man who was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. (AP Photo/David Goldman) | ASSOCIATED PRESS
One organization is working to not only honor the achievements and legacy of the late Michael Brown, but to also help his younger siblings achieve what he didn’t have the chance to.
Brown, the unarmed black teen who was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, earlier this month, was a recent high school graduate. He was scheduled to start classes at Vatterott College on Aug. 11, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but was killed two days prior. The Wisconsin Hope Lab — a program that researches ways to minimize barriers for students of all backgrounds to attain a post-secondary education — is working in conjunction with the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County to create the “Mike Brown College Scholarship,” which will help Brown’s three siblings attend college.
“Mike’s mom deserves to see her other children cross the finish line and receive their diplomas — I want to support her doing that,” Sara Goldrick-Rab, Wisconsin Hope Lab director, told WISC-TV.
Though one university president, who has chosen to remain anonymous, has offered a debt-free education at his institution for Brown’s siblings, the scholarship fund, which has been raising money through a crowd funded campaign, will offer support for Brown’s two sisters and brother, regardless of where they choose to pursue their higher education.
While the fund will provide the late teen’s family with financial support, the founders of the scholarship say they also aim to honor and remember Brown, a young man who family and friends say was excited to start his new life as a college student. “He looked forward to it so much. You didn’t have to tell him, ‘Make sure you get to school.’ He was ready,” Lesley McSpadden, Brown’s mom, told CNN.
The fund was created five days ago, and, as of Wednesday afternoon, donors have raised almost half of the fund’s goal of $50,000.
To donate to the scholarship fund or to learn more about it, visit the GoFundMe page here. article by Kimberly Yam via huffingtonpost.com
Carissa McGraw and other protesters raised their hands and turned their backs to law enforcement officials after a vigil for Michael Brown (Whitney Curtis/New York Times)
As everyone knows, the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the unrest, protests and investigations that continue to unfold in the wake of this tragedy are mightily affecting (and hopefully redefining) the national conversation on racism, abuses of power and overbearing, militarized police action against citizens.
As the editor of a website dedicated solely to providing and promoting Good Black News, it has been admittedly hard in the past week to bring myself to post what were starting to seem like frivolous accomplishments and events in the wake of a soul-stirring grass roots movement against tyranny and injustice. This unrest in particular feels like it has the makings of a sea change from the status quo into a new era of human rights, where systemic and commonplace brutality is voted down and rooted out of any and all policing bodies that are meant to Protect and Serve, not Terrify and Dehumanize. Michael Brown Sr., second from left, the Rev. Al Sharpton, center, and Lesley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown, at a news conference at the Old Courthouse in St. Louis. (Whitney Curtis / New York Times)
But, even though the eventual outcome could lead to something positive, how can any of what is happening day-to-day (tear gassing, unprovoked arrests, pockets of protester violence, autopsy results) qualify as Good Black News? But not posting anything about Ferguson did not feel right, either. Thus, aside from a few tweets, GBN has been silent for days.
Upon serious thought and reflection, I’ve come to believe that publishing Good Black News is more important and necessary than ever. The achievements of people of color are still woefully under-publicized and reported, and the only way to change minds or inspire pride in those who internalize the “less than” narrative, is to keep putting as much GBN out there as possible.
Thus, going forward, in addition to our regular mix of GBN, we will also post items, tweets, stories and pictures that cover the Ferguson story — the GBN philosophy will still be in place and nothing will be incendiary or negative — in fact, non-violent protest, speaking out, photos, tweets and the like that continue to highlight the injustices still prevalent in this country ARE, in my opinion, Good Black News. Granted, nothing will bring back Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant or countless others who have suffered the same unjust fate, but positive, insistent protests and actions do have the power to prevent the next young man or woman of color from being victimized, and that we uncategorically and unreservedly support.
Onward and upward — Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN Founder and Editor-In-Chief
Although the U.S. Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in the battle for racial equality, recent decisions by the high court undermine its role in solving a “real racial problem” in America, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in an interview with The National Law Journal last Wednesday.
