At the focal point of a shooting scandal: a mild-mannered neighbor who fixated on crime and focused on young, black males.

Black people serve 60% longer sentences than whites who commit the same crime #racism

My @colorlines coverage: #Alabama House Approves Apology for #RecyTaylor #rape #racism

My latest RT @Colorlines: #RecyTaylor Gets a Personal Sorry, But No Apology From Alabama #racism #rape

At 91, Recy Taylor May Finally See #Alabama Acknowledge Her 1944 #Rape <my latest at Colorlines #racism

Taylor was one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation. Their pain galvanized an anti-rape crusade that ultimately took a back seat to the push to dismantle officially sanctioned separation of the races, and slowly faded from the headlines.

Many of these rape victims never got justice and the desire for closure is still there, more than 60 years later — leaving some to wonder what, if anything, can be done to address the wrongs done to them.

“I didn’t get nothing, ain’t nothing been done about it,’’ Taylor, now 90, said in a telephone interview from her central Florida home. The AP is revealing Taylor’s identity because she has publicly identified herself as a victim of sexual assault.

The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) conducts research and supports policy initiatives on anti-civil rights violence in the United States and other miscarriages of justice of that period. CRRJ serves as a resource for scholars, policymakers, and organizers involved in various initiatives seeking justice for crimes of the civil rights era.

Jerry Mitchell reports Medgar Evers’ assassin may still be at larger #coldcase #mississippigoddamn #racism

Frank Morris Murder Suspect Confronted by Local Reporter and #ColdCase Film Crew #murder #racism

The Takeaway: 46 Years Later: Justice for a #CivilRights #Murder Victim #frankmorris #coldcase #racism

Telegraph: #SarahPalin blamed by US Secret Service over death threats against Pres Obama #racism #extermism

oops that’s cc: @digby56 Haley Barbour’s Raid on Historical Memory / #racism #mississippi

David Dante Troutt is a native New Yorker, raised on the border of Sugar Hill, Harlem and Washington Heights and currently living in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. Troutt has been writing creatively most of his life, authoring a few unpublished volumes of poetry, three unpublished novels and a variety of non-fiction and journalistic works. A proud father, husband, writer, scholar and activist on a range of issues, Troutt’s work often embodies themes involving cities, racial identity, the quest for equity and the redemptive psychology of everyday life.

A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Troutt pursued various law and advocacy-related efforts in both inner-city poverty as well as intellectual property before joining the Rutgers Law School (Newark) faculty in 1995. In 1998, he joined his literary identity with his legal and political interests in the publication of a thematic collection of short stories, The Monkey Suit – and other short fiction on African Americans and justice (The New Press). In 2006, he edited the collection of essays entitled, After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (The New Press) and authored the lead essay, “Many Thousands Gone, Again.” The next year, he published his first novel, The Importance of Being Dangerous, a literary thriller. Meanwhile, Troutt actively writes political essays and analysis for a variety of national periodicals and websites, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, the Crisis, the DailyVoice.com and the Washington Independent.com. He is currently professor of law and Justice John J. Francis Scholar at Rutgers Law School-Newark.

Jerry Mitchell reports: 1960s KKK leader Sam Bowers started new white supremacist group in 1990s #racism

Appalling! RT @randomdeanna: ***Must-read:*** Hours before #Rally4Sanity, @djmaynard kicked out of DC hotel: #racism

Dumbshittery Stops Right Here (Vote!) - courtesy of Mr. @elonjames

As a matter of long-term politics, though, I worry about this categorical support for Democratic candidates; the longer Democrats don't have to worry about losing African American voters, the longer Democratic representatives can take advantage of their black support. Unfortunately, there's not much of an alternative. Republicans don't need black votes to win, and as such, have no real stake in advancing African American interests. The only conceivable strategy is for black voters to sit out an election, but that's just as likely to inspire enmity as it is to force engagement with their interests. African American voters are in a tough spot, to say the least.

For Buford Posey, a white man raised in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the Second World War had a civilizing influence. "When I was coming up in Mississippi I never knew it was against the law to kill a black man," he says. "I learned that when I went in the Army. I was 17 years old. When they told me, I thought they were joking."

For several decades Posey's assumption about the relative value of black life was effectively borne out by the state's judiciary. Among others, the murders of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, in Money in 1955; the state's NAACP chairman Medgar Evers, in Jackson in 1963; the three young civil rights workers--James Chaney (21), Andrew Goodman (20) and Michael Schwerner (24)--in Philadelphia in 1964; and civil rights supporter Vernon Dahmer, in Hattiesburg in 1966 all went unpunished.

Over the past several years private-prison companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the Geo Group, through their work as members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and through their ties to the Arizona Legislature and the office of Gov. Jan Brewer, have had ample opportunity—and obvious intent—to ensure the passage of S.B. 1070.

Resounding documentary proof that the original reasoning behind secession and subsequent myth-making was in defense of slavery and white supremacy

Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two-thirds of Americans--including most history teachers--think the Confederate States seceded for "states' rights." This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy.

The 150th anniversary of secession and civil war provides a moment for all Americans to read these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and coeditor Edward H. Sebesta, to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.

NATCHEZ — Denise Ford and Wharlest Jackson Jr. say they will never forget their father’s ultimate sacrifice, and the Miss-Lou community shouldn’t either.

Wharlest Jackson Sr., 36, died on Feb. 27, 1967, when a planted bomb exploded in his Chevy pickup. Jackson, a black man, had recently been promoted at the Armstrong Tire Factory to a job that had been traditionally done by whites.

Jackson’s killers were never found.

Forty-three years later, Jackson is hailed as a civil rights hero who pushed for economic equality through faith and hard work. Ford and Wharlest Jr. want to honor their father’s legacy by placing a marker at the site of bombing on Minor Street, and are soliciting donations from the community.

We find it ironic that in the one hundred years of USDA’s history of discrimination, not a single white person has been dismissed for discrimination, however, a Black women who is doing her job well is falsely accused of discrimination in an altered video and you decide that she can no longer do a credible and nondiscriminatory job of dispensing USDA rural development programs and must resign.

Facing South: The real story of #racism at the #USDA

The prosecution was never able to convince the jury of intent, which is a requirement for convicting a defendant of second-degree murder. The jury's instructions stipulated that second-degree murder occurred if, "When the defendant acted, he had a state of mind called malice aforethought." Malice aforethought was defined for jurors as "a mental state that must be formed before the act that causes death is committed."

Of course, this understates the case a wee bit. Mehserle, along with several others BART cops, had Grant pinned face first on the ground when he very deliberately pulled out his gun and shot Grant in the back. Mehserle's defense is that he meant to pull out his taser but mistakenly pulled out his gun instead. This is, needless to say, pretty hard to accept, and there's little question that there's a jury anywhere in the country that would have bought this story from anyone who wasn't a police officer. You can judge for yourself in the cell phone video taken by a witness (the clearest view starts around the 1:45 mark).

SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights division will investigate a white former transit officer who was convicted in state court of killing an unarmed black man - a verdict that touched off angry protests and more than 80 arrests in Oakland.

In a move reminiscent of the Rodney King beating case in Los Angeles, the federal government said it intends to investigate Johannes Mehserle, who was found guilty Thursday in state court of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant.

The Root spoke to the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton about what it takes to defuse the ongoing tension between the police and the black community.

Taser International Inc. is no stranger to lawsuits, but it got zapped with a zinger this time. According to the Las Vegas Sun, the Scottsdale, Arizona manufacturer is getting sued in a taser lawsuit by the family of a Las Vegas doctor who died in 2008. A Nevada Highway Patrol officer allegedly tasered him when he got pulled over on his way to work in Interstate 15 which allegedly caused him to turn blue at the scene and die. He was only 33 years old. The lawsuit serves as another example of what some see as a risk of death posed by taser use in certain situations.

Like so many other Oakland residents, I've waited anxiously all week to hear whether justice would be served for Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old black youth who was shot by a BART officer last year. And now our answer's arrived. The verdict for Johannes Mehserle — the officer who shot him — is in: involuntary manslaughter. Crowds are gathering downtown to protest the outcome, and Bob Marley is getting wafted over speakers to try and keep folks calm.

I am clear that Mehserle must be held accountable. But that alone is not justice. Locking him up won't give Oscar Grant's daughter her father back. It won't give his mother the chance to see her son continue to grow. And it won't take away the terror in the hearts of black and brown boys when they are stopped by police officers this summer. A guilty verdict for Mehserle won't make up for decades of police brutality, racism, unequal justice, exploitation, racial profiling, or socio-economic systems that are rigged against the poor.

I'll be ducking in and out of the Oscar Grant-shooting trial in Los Angeles as it unfolds over the next few weeks. Yesterday was day four, and it was dominated by testimony from law enforcement training and weapons experts as the prosecution tried to chip away at the idea that Johannes Mehserle's shooting of Grant was an understandable mistake.

After a swift but dramatic three week trial, a Los Angeles jury will likely begin deliberating today in the trial of ex-BART cop Johannes Mehserle, who has been charged with murder for shooting the unarmed Oscar Grant in the back on New Year's Day 2009. The jury will now decide whether the shooting was a tragic accident, as Mehserle argues, willful murder or something in between.

Cheryl Contee

David Zirin: Boycott the Arizona Diamondbacks #racism #immigrants #humanrights #baseball

In February 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enacted an initiative to identify and closely examine all unsolved hate crimes resulting in death that occurred prior to 1970. A review of cold case civil rights matters that met the above criteria was conducted and, with the help of our federal, state and local law enforcement partners, as well as community leaders and civic organizations, numerous cases of unsolved violent crimes from the Civil Rights era are now being thoroughly examined and reinvestigated.
 
The Jackson Division of the FBI, which covers the state of Mississippi, was assigned 43 such cases. We are actively assessing each one to determine whether any new information can be developed which will help resolve these matters or lead to the identification and prosecution of responsible individuals if evidence indicates a crime was committed. While it is realized not every case will be resolved and, in some cases, the perpetrators may no longer be alive or there may be no federal prosecutorial jurisdiction, the Jackson Division is aggressively moving forward in investigating these cases while utilizing the updated analytical and forensic tools available to law enforcement today.
 
The names of the following deceased individuals represent the possible unsolved hate crime casesoccurring during the Civil Rights era which were received by the FBI’s Jackson Division:
 

The brutal assassination of Medgar Evers, the Field Secretary of the NAACP in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12, 1963, revealed to the entire nation the great difficulty of bringing multicultural democracy to the brutal Deep South. Several months after Evers's death, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi Delta, Charles Cobb, came up with an idea that might concentrate media and political attention on the state's mistreatment of Blacks. Cobb proposed that SNCC create a mass mobilization, “Mississippi Summer,” that would recruit about one thousand mostly white college students and volunteers into the state to assist in desegregation and voter registration organizing. A central task for these volunteers would be the construction and operation of “Freedom Schools,” that teach African-American history of the Black Freedom Movement, as well as mathematics, English, and other academic disciplines. Bob Moses, the director of SNCC's Mississippi Project, liked the proposal and when Northern students began to volunteer to do organizing in Mississippi during the spring 1964, many were informed that they should be prepared to teach. Others were to work on the ongoing voter registration efforts.

America's police force is killing people on a weekly basis with taser guns. There are not many states in the nation who have not been involved in a taser-related death this year. Tasers are now deployed in law enforcement agencies in 29 of the 33 largest U.S. cities.

On February 23, 2009, veteran Black Freedom movement leader Ruby Sales had a conversation with Vera Leone, SOA Watch organizer, about state violence and white violence against people of color in the United States, and the implications of that historical and present context for our continuing organizing to close the School of the Americas and dismantle the racist system of violence and domination which it represents.You can listen to the audio file here .

These are the names of 74 men and women who died between 1952 and 1968 under circumstances suggesting they were the victims of racially motivated violence. The information below was gathered by the Southern Poverty Law Center as it planned a timeline of killings and other civil rights era events for the Civil Rights Memorial. The Memorial, dedicated in 1989, includes the names of 40 civil rights martyrs who were slain during that era. The names below were not inscribed on the Memorial because there was insufficient information about their deaths at the time the Memorial was created. They are, however, identified in a display at the Civil Rights Memorial Center as "The Forgotten."

[Note: My cohort at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, has been nearly as preoccupied the past couple of weeks in dealing with media requests to discuss the recent spate of domestic terrorism now washing up on our shores. She posted her thoughts about it yesterday, and it was so good, I had to pass it along to our readers here. -- DN]

. Really cogent article about ongoing racism w/r/t "exclusive" neighborhoods & Nat Hist Trust. Ht Orangexw

You may recall that I created the Obama Inauguration cover for The Nation magazine... It's been a while and I've been busy on the poster for that cover. I'm almost finished... (I've added over 30 new figures to the artwork), but I could still use your advice... Updated artwork and more below the fold...

Neither version was correct—and both were. The reality was complex enough that people could assemble a story line, buffet-style, to suit their outlook. The proliferation of media outlets made this even easier. New “facts” popped up everywhere. The N

still black, a feature length documentary, is an experimental portrait of six black transgender men living in Chicago, Mass, Ohio, and Missouri. The black-and-white film shot with multiple cameras and accompanying visual effects, offers viewers a complex

Tensions over race in the Democratic Presidential campaign rose over the weekend, spurred by comments made by Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about who were the dominant role-players in the civil rights movement. Rights' activists offer insight on

abstract paper costs $5

Austin American Statesman - flash presentation

The system, from slavery to violently enforced segregation to today's nuanced discrimination, remains without a national apology, no truth commission, no real sign that the nation is fully ready to understand its past. One Klansman is now behind bars. Ame

Unnoticed by many who live here is a white oval, approximately 6 feet in diameter, high upon the right-hand side wall of the two-story brick building located at 124 W. Washington St. And inside the oval is a red flag with criss-crossed blue bars flying

Retired Navy diver James Bladh testified Wednesday that his team found a human skull, railroad rails and other objects in a Mississippi River backwater in October 1964, nearly six months after two black teenagers disappeared.

Roland Mitchell, a deputy sheriff for Madison Parish, La., at the time of the killings, testified that he was among those who went out on what's known as the old Mississippi River near Tallulah, La., on July 12, 1964, when the lower torso of a human body

Edwards said there was a rumor in the small town of Meadville that Dee was part of a conspiracy to bring weapons into Southwest Mississippi for the beginning of a race riot. At a weekly KKK meeting, or as the Klansmen referred to it as the “Bunkley Hunt

Preserving the Forks-of-the-Roads Enslavement Market Sites in Natchez, Mississippi

A 'zero-tolerance' policy against violent crimes has put more Miami-Dade students in handcuffs--for fighting, graffiti and other minor offenses.

Residents missing loved ones know that there are more dead yet to be uncovered in the debris, whose bodies would be wrongfully buried by demolition. Adding insult to injury, a history of redlining has left the land in the Lower 9th Ward not only low-lying

In response to interest in applying international standards to assess the human rights of Hurricane Katrina victims and make policy recommendations to address their needs, the U.S. Human Rights Network is coordinating a documentation project spearheaded b

Interesting interview with Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor specializing in Florida election law and the author of a new book about the 2000 Florida election.

With a cell phone crooked in her ear and scores of activists cheering her on in the 2000 block of Reynes Street, lawyer Tracie Washington sent a backhoe and its crew packing from the Lower 9th Ward Thursday morning.

Bitter outrage marked a hearing on police arrests and other law enforcement strategies in the city held on Jan. 5 at the War Memorial Building in downtown Baltimore. A thick mantle of anger weighed heavily on the packed room, woven by tales of police brut

In fact, there is an international organization of white supremacist women who devote their energies to holiday activities such as sending Christmas cards to their incarcerated "brothers," and raising money for needy Aryans. This year Women for Aryan Unit

Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina said Tuesday that racism contributed to the slow disaster response, at times likening themselves in emotional congressional testimony to victims of genocide and the Holocaust.

[T]here is strong objective evidence that politics prevailed over the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

One among many unsettling aspects of life in the new New Orleans is the abundance of uniformed and heavily armed men, not all of whom are soldiers or police. In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, the Nation reported on the presence of hundreds of p

Rose Harris was a resident of the Lafitte Housing Projects in the Treme (rhymes nearly with "dismay") neighborhood of New Orleans for 28 years. She lost a brother, a nephew, and a sister-in-law in Hurricane Katrina. The first floor of her home was flooded

aryan brotherhood