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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.
White men are on the ropes in America. This week the female Governor of South Carolina came out for the removal of the flag of the Confederate States of America from state property. Her decision created a tidal wave throughout the South as Alabama and other states began the process to remove the confederate battle emblem from their state property.
Mr. and Mrs. Southern, take that flag down. Take that flag down everywhere it flies today. It should have come down 150 years ago this past April. The flag of the rebels belong to a vanquished foe.
I hate to tell you 150 years later, but the cause for which southern Americans died under that flag was a lost cause.
ATLANTA, GA (CASCADE PRESS) President Barack Obama said “Nigger” the other day.
I just be damn.
Like everything he eats, drinks, wears, thinks and does, it is causing quite a controversy.
What’s new about that?
I just be damned.
It is not like the President called anybody a “Nigger.” It is not that he denigrated anyone with the use of the word “Nigger.” He did not use the term to prove he was superior to a so-called “Nigger.” He did not say “Nigger” in such a way that you knew with a degree of specificity that Obama hated “Niggers.”
ATLANTA, GA. (CASCADE PRESS) Nation of Islam leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan is calling for an economic boycott of Christmas as a response to the wholesale killing of black people in America. Farrakhan made the announcement during a speaking engagement in Atlanta, Georgia today. He was in town to drum up support for the 20th Anniversary Million Man March and spoke to a packed house at the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta’s West End community.