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According to a story published by Yahoo News, federal law enforcement has documented discussions among white supremacists where they talked about using coronavirus as a bioweapon.
According to the documented discussions, any white supremacists who contact the coronavirus is duty-bound to spread the virus among law enforcement officers and “nonwhite” people.
Is he is or is he ain’t a racist. Some say that he is, others say that no, he can’t be. He concedes that he “is the least racist person” on the planet. This admission is significant merely because it is the single thing that he boasts about where he is not number one.
Whether he is or is not a racist is debatable. There is a strong case for attaching the racist label to the 45th US President. His supporters refute this argument. They explain he is talking about the harmful elements of the groups he targets with harsh words. Albeit, those words get projected on the law-abiding people as well.
Albert Murray coined the phase Omniamerican as a way to explain the cultural conundrum that the American melting pot is and always has been. He did not like the expression Black American or German American. Murray began with the “basic assumption that the United States is a mulatto culture.”
There was no better way to explain the bastardization of American culture than through the gutteral sounds of jazz music, which he loved and appreciated along with the blues and the classics.
In 1971, I was a college student at Tuskegee University. Two of my classmates and I decided to drive down to Ozark, Alabama to attend George Wallace’s kick-off run for President. Although, the crowd was not dressed in the garb of the KKK, they might very well have been.
Women carrying six-week-old babies, some younger, some slightly older, dressed in diapers with a Wallace bumper sticker draped around their bodies filled the campaign rally. In smaller print were the words: “Segregation Today, Segregation Tomorrow.”
The wholesale killing of unarmed Black men must stop. Enough cop killings are enough! Stop this police brutality now!
It never ceases to amaze me that a white gunman can kill a large number of people and they can be captured alive. For instance, the young white boy that killed Black Christians at their weekly prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina.
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.
Especially given the fact arrangements had been made for her to bond out. It was only a matter of time before she would have been set free to wage war against Brian Encinia, the Texas State Patrol officer who pulled her out of her automobile, slammed her to the ground and filed questionable charges against her for assaulting a public officer.
Sandra Bland’s arrest and subsequent death leaves more questions than answers.
What type of contact did she have with her jailers that would push her to hang herself, if indeed, she hung herself? Why were the instrumentalities ( a plastic bag and trash can) for a death by hanging so readily available in her jail cell? If she smoked a large quantity of marijuana in jail where did it come from and how was she able to conceal the smell of marijuana from the jailers?
At what point was Sandra Bland made aware she was under arrest? It is not clear in my mind and I have watched the video of the stop several times. It is not likely that Sandra Bland in real time was aware that Encinia had placed her under arrest until he threathened to “light [her] up” with his taser. At that point she seemed to comply with the orders given by Encinia.
The manner in which Encinia spoke to Bland is reprehensible and an object lesson in how not to talk to any American citizen clothed with the presumption of innocence until such time as a court, if it can, can determine otherwise.
If she did, then why was she placed in a situation where she might become depressed and hang herself? There are more questions than answers. We may never know the truth, as my granddad often said in the 1950s, “A dead man [woman] can’t talk.”
But even, if she did the unthinkable, it does not let the State of Texas or Brian Encinia off the hook. Sandy Bland should never have been placed under arrest. She should never have been found dead in a jail cell. And Brian Encinia should never be allowed to be a public officer again. It’s time to light him up.
SOURCES:
http://news.yahoo.com/sheriff-inmate-told-texas-jailer-prior-suicide-attempt-065533175.html
http://newsone.com/3157451/brian-encinia-texas-trooper-who-arrested-sandra-bland/
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/07/how-many-sandra-blands-are-never-caught-on-video/399173/
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.
Today’s news out of South Carolina causes me to reflect upon two events in my life.
First, the day in 1971 when I drove down to Ozark, Alabama with two of my classmates at Tuskegee Institute for the kick-off rally of George Wallace’s second run for President.
We were the only black people at this campaign rally, except the black Secret Service agent who appeared out of thin air, just in time to protect us from mob violence at the hands of Wallace’s male supporters.
What I remember most about that night was the large number of newborn babies wrapped in Wallace bumper stickers which read, “WALLACE! SEGREGATION FOREVER!” It was a very frightening experience. We were fortunate to get out of town with our lives.
What disheartened me the most was the fact that white people in attendance at this rally seemed to be breeding hatred from the cradle. I wrote about this night in my new book Justice in the Round.
A few weeks ago, when the white supremacist Dylann Roof, massacred nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, it caused me to realize my fears that night had come true: In 20 years, South Carolina white supremacists had successfully raised a progeny from the cradle into young adulthood who hated black people so much, that after getting to know their humanity for an hour, he resorted to the racist propaganda taught through his heritage about black people, then pulled out his gun and opened fire on people far superior than himself.
The second event that the flag removal brings to the forefront of my mind is my active participation in 1994-95 as one of the counsels of record in Coleman v. Miller, 885 F. Supp. 1561. In this case James Andrews Coleman brought suit against Georgia Governor Zell Miller “seeking the removal of the Georgia flag from all state office buildings.”
Coleman grew up in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. When he moved to Georgia and encountered the “Stars and Bars,” in the Georgia flag, he felt that the state of Georgia was requiring him to advance a political philosophy he found repugnant.
His suit advanced the argument that “the [Georgia] legislation establishing the flag and the flag’s design are discriminatory and racist in nature.”
Coleman filed the suit pro se. The case was assigned to District Judge Orinda D. Evans. She believed that this case was too important to get bounced out of court because the plaintiff was a non lawyer and not familiar with the federal rules of procedure, so she appointed Bruce Harvey, no relation, and myself to assist Coleman in the prosecution of his claim for removal of the Confederate battle flag in Georgia.
What stands out in my mind about this legal challenge to the Confederate flag in Georgia is that shortly after receiving my appointment, I ran into Congressman John Lewis at a Neighborhood Planning Unit meeting. After Lewis addressed the gathering, I stood up and asked him if he would support the lawsuit to remove this flag in Georgia. I was stunned by Lewis’ reply: “No, I certainly will not.”
I sat down.
After the meeting, I drove back to my office in downtown Atlanta, where I received a late night telephone call from a racist who threatened to string me up by Bruce Harvey’s ponytail if I did not get off that case. I was as fearless in ’95 as Lewis had been in ’65. I pressed on.
Coleman’s suit failed on several technical grounds, but I can not help but think that if members of Atlanta’s civil rights community had been courageous enough to support the suit, Bruce Harvey and I would have brought that flag down five years before Governor Roy Barnes pushed through legislation that caused it to be replaced.
No, bringing that flag down will not stop “chickens from laying eggs,” or the Klan from recruiting other white domestic terrorists, but it will severely limit the genetic pool of race haters in years to come.
Harold Michael Harvey, is the author of the legal thriller “Paper Puzzle,” and “Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System,” available at Amazon and at haroldmichaelharvey.com. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com
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?”
The question was not designed for a response. I wanted the community to stop and reflect on issues of grave concern. Nevertheless, it produced 46 comments.
One commentator, similar to the “dashiki wearing brother” I referenced in Justice in the Round, my new book on race and justice in America, took offense to the question. He intimated that the mere asking of the question was an insult to black people.
“This is great. Black people get killed. And we attack black people. Way to go, brave souls,” an old friend whom I have not seen in two decades, weighed in 15 minutes after the query went live.
Billy Pearson said, “W can expect people to become distracted when the “new Air Jordan or smart phone rolls out.”
“Black people can’t wait to jump on somebody else’s bandwagon,” Jarvis Jones opined. She added, “rather than rolling up our sleeves and getting busy.”
“Harold, both of us have been in this a long time and we know in a few weeks this will have all died down in the minds of African Americans,” Faye Coffield said.
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.
It is time southern pride get over the fact that those men fighting on the side of the confederacy did not have the will or superior force to vanquish a union “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Some white citizens say that removing the flag will not stop racists from hating and haters from acting out their racism. They are probably correct, as some beliefs die in the grave.
One thing it will do is to raise up a generation of white children whose minds will not be polluted by the wounded feelings of a hate filled heritage. It is too late for many in my generation, who will be unable to accept the drumbeat of change from a system that protected the interests of the working white poor over coloreds of any economic strata in a scheme designed to keep the races divided, while the rich get richer, the powerful more powerful and freedom seekers are left in a quagmire of hopelessness.
Many of them will not be able to heal their wounded feelings over losing a sense of privilege, a sense of superiority over colored citizens. Many will close their eyes for the final time holding onto the fantasy that the South will rise again in all of its white dominance glory. The reality is, it will not. If ever that tragedy repeats itself , it will be a cold day in hell.
Far too many African Americans think that it is a distraction to discuss the removal of southern icons steeped in the blood of racial hatred and divisiveness in the face of the Charleston Massacre. As sad as these days are, it is time to chip away at the hate that has been destroying America from the day the first African was brought ashore in chains, captive to greed and the whip.
“Seize the times,” as Bobby Seales, Chairman of Information for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, often said back in the 1960s.
If not today, when? Will there ever be a better time to remove these symbols?
To my countrymen who say the flap over the flag is a distraction away from a much needed discussion on race, I say that removal of the Confederate flag is part and parcel of the discussion on race.
Some of my black friends argue that the flag should continue to fly because to take them down is to rewrite history. They contend that the Confederate Flag should remain as a reminder of the pain and suffering endured by African Americans.
I say to them, the act of flying the Stars and Bars is an effort by my white southern friends to rewrite history. It is an act of white southerners to project that in spite of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, they like native Americans, are an independent nation within the United States of America. It is time that this foolish revision of history comes to an end.
Equally, it is time that African Americans revel in the fact that freedom was won at Appomattox when the Union Army aided by a host of black soldiers surrounded Lee at the courthouse. This triumphant story has been overshadowed by the South’s rewrite of history, which makes it appear, that the southern confederacy still stands and it is only a matter of time before it will have subdued the Africans underfoot again.
Take that fly down!
Harold Michael Harvey, is the author of the legal thriller “Paper Puzzle,” and “Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System,” available at Amazon and at haroldmichaelharvey.com. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com
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.”
I just be damned.
Obama said that we have to realize that racism is more than calling someone “Nigger.”
You know what?
Obama is right. He should know.
I am sure growing up with white people he, like every black American I know in his age range, was called a “Nigger” multiple times by people wanting to impress their superior status over him. For a guy with half white DNA, that really has to sting.
When I was in junior high school, I had a white teacher who called me “Nigger” everyday. I knew with a certainty that she was belittling me and my parentage. Although she has long since rotted in her grave, I rather still dislike her today for the sting that word produced in my soul each day she pronounced to the world that I was a “Nigger. ”
Then there were the times when my black classmates and I walked from football practice through a white neighborhood and encountered a group of white men, probably in their mid-twenties, drinking beer under a tree.
As my group passed them, someone often yell out, “Nigger.” Looking over our shoulders we could see the group with their menacing stare daring us to turn and fight. Fighting would be futile. If we managed to beat them out of their drunken racist minds, they would lie and say we were trying to break into a home in the area.
I know the sting of the word “Nigger.” The manner in which President Obama said “Nigger” the other day does not carry the same sting, nor did he intend it too. This is the crux of the matter. Racism, Obama properly opined, is more than a word.
While we are on the subject of words with sharp meanings, I like soup. I like to have saltine crackers with my soup. Then one day my doctor took me off crackers. I now hate crackers. I won’t touch a cracker and I won’t go near a cracker. The only thing a cracker can do for me is point me in the direction of some sweet potato chips.
I just be damned, I just said crackers. I just said I hate crackers.
I just be damned.
Oh my gosh, there is that word again, damn. Damn becomes profane when you say “damn you,” or worst when one damns God. Otherwise it is just a word that denotes a doomed state.
Political correctness, I just be damned.
Harold Michael Harvey, is the author of the legal thriller “Paper Puzzle,” and “Justice in the Round: Essays on the American Jury System,” available at Amazon and at haroldmichaelharvey.com. He can be contacted at hmharvey@haroldmichaelharvey.com
