Too Late for Prayin’
June 29, 2023Subscribe to continue reading
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Dr. King Led SCLC, Not the NAACP
Recently, Senator Ted Cruz (Republican), Texas, decided to chime in on the travel advisory issued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He did so in a tweet that read in part:
“This is bizarre. And utterly dishonest. In the 1950s & 1960s, the NAACP did extraordinarily well in helping lead the civil rights movement. Today, Dr. King would be ashamed of how profoundly they’ve lost their way.”
Like fellow Georgian, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson was a peacemaker. Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, on January 31, 1919, nearly 13 months before Andrew Foster organized the United States Baseball League, a league for Negro players, designed to compete with the White major league for the heart of baseball fans in America. The organizational meeting took place at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City, Missouri.
Kasim Reed, the son of a courageous civil rights worker, has a strong chin and a personality to match. People either love his matter of fact-ness, or they loath it. With Kasim, you know on which side of the issue he stands. He is for an idea, or he is against it. One thing is sure, his steadfastness, once locked in, is unmovable.
Bridging the Gap From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter
In 1967, Rev. Hosea Williams, a trusted aide of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., introduced his 21-year-old protégé, Tyrone Brooks, to Dr. King, hoping to get King’s approval to hire the young man whom Williams was grooming for civil rights work. King told Williams that he did not do the hiring and firing at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The organization’s Vice President, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, discharged those duties.
Last week President Joe Biden hosted an impressive list of civil rights leaders at the White House. They came to discuss national efforts by Republican officials to restrict voting rights and criminal justice reform considering an alarming uptick in police killing of Black people since the 2008 election of Barack Obama.
When I was a high schooler in Macon, Georgia, I dreamed of playing collegiate baseball at Georgia Tech in Atlanta during the early days of school desegregation. In 1969, the year I graduated from the majority white high school that I had integrated four years earlier, there were no Black American baseball players on the Georgia Tech baseball team.
I’ve lived through three encounters with the police that could easily have ended in my death. Each time I see another Black man lose his life to a trigger-happy cop; it brings back that same dread I had on those three occasions.
In the mid-1970s, I was a young reporter covering the city hall beat for a Black-owned weekly tabloid. One day I went home for lunch with a couple of girls who worked in the newsroom. They were curious to know how I prepared a vegetarian hamburger. This was decades before the meat alternatives we have on the market today and a lot less appetizing.
Two months after a stunned, pandemic world watched the killing of George Floyd at the corner of 8th Street East and Chicago Avenue, a battery of civil rights attorneys filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the three cops who participated in Floyd’s death. The lawyers’ chief spokesperson is Benjamin Crump, who has built a cottage industry in police misconduct cases following the Trayvon Martin family’s representation nine years ago.
New Time Period Suggests Civil Case Settled Too Soon and For Too Little Money
Four early take-aways are evident after the first three days of testimony in the Derek Chauvin trial for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
First, there is no doubt that Chauvin used excessive force from the get-go on Memorial Day 2020. After banging on the driver-side door of an SUV driven by Floyd, Chauvin immediately drew his firearm and pointed it at Floyd. The officer’s approach caused Floyd to cringe and beg for his life. He asked Chauvin to not shot him. Floyd never physically attacked Chauvin or any other police officer on the scene. He initially gripped onto the steering wheel of his SUV as he asked the officers why they were bothering him.