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One year after Ferguson, Missouri there is a powder keg in Cincinnati, Ohio waiting to explode. This powder keg does not have anything to do with the “Big Red Machine.” The iconic 1970s baseball team that was showcased during Major League Baseball’s All Star game held in Cincinnati two weeks ago.
So what if Sandra Bland did it? So what if she hanged herself? What in the world was she doing in a jail cell in the first place?
I am not saying Sandra Bland took her own life. I do not have enough information to make that determination. On the surface it appears to me that she was not in sufficient trouble to be concerned about getting out of jail.
Did Sandra Bland die in vain?
Did she?
On first blush this may appear to be a rhetorical question. It is not.
This question after careful thought and contemplation about the brief life and times of 28 year-old Sandra Bland demands a retort.
While you are thinking, put this one in your pipe and smoke it too: Black men in America, when will we stop white boys from abusing our women?
Dear Bill Cosby:
I trust this letter finds you in good health and in the best of spirits. I know that things are very difficult for you these days. I am not certain if this letter will find its way to you or if it will be read by anyone, but I felt you could probably use an encouraging word. How could I not offer Bill Cosby an encouraging word after all of the inspiration that you have given me over the years.
It won’t stop racists from hating. I am sure we all can agree the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol in South Carolina will not, as Nikki Giovanni rapped in the 1960s, “stop chickens from laying eggs or Crackers from hating.”
However, it will usher in a new day in 20 years, when babies born today, will have reached adulthood, without a daily reminder of a painful period in southern history.
There is an art to BlackLivesMatter. Anyone who has read my new book, Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System, knows that it is dedicated to eight young black men, whose lives were prematurely interrupted either by vigilante justice or at the hands of the police executioner.
Readers are quick to discern that Justice in the Round is a plea for the survival of black millennials and vicariously the survival of black people in America. As a “Baby Boomer,” I get it that this is a new day and the old stratagems do not fit the complexities of 21st century paradigms.
Black Lives Matter, not Cosby’s follies. A few days after Dylann Roof sat in an African Methodist Episcopal Church and gunned down nine African Americans in cold blood, I posited this rhetorical question on my Facebook Timeline:
“How long will it take for black people to become distracted again and what will distract them?”
Black churches are on fire throughout the south since the white terrorist Daylann Roof fired upon an unarmed group of black church worshippers two weeks ago in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof said in no uncertain terms that he slaughtered nine black people because he was tired of sitting around listening to his white compatriots talking about a race war and not doing anything to get it started.