Tag Archives: Tamir Rice

The Legacy Of MLK — 55 Years Later

Posted on by under education, History, Law and justice, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary, voting rights

Sunday would have marked the 94th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, had he not been gunned down at the age of 39.  He was alive fewer years than he’s been dead, but his name and his work have not been forgotten.  Even young people who were not born until long after his murder know the legacy of Dr. King.

Yes, his legacy lives on, and yet …

  • Duante Wright, age 20
  • George Floyd, age 46
  • Breonna Taylor, age 26
  • Atatiana Jefferson, age 28
  • Botham Jean, age 26
  • Philando Castile, age 32
  • Alton Sterling, age 37
  • Freddie Gray, age 25
  • Tamir Rice, age 12
  • Michael Brown, age 18

SAY THEIR NAMES!!!

These are but a few of the Black Americans who were killed by police, some while sleeping in their own beds, others playing in a park or stopped for a routine traffic violation.  Killed for the crime of being Black. All were unarmed.  Many of them I have written about previously.  Today … we are no better as a nation than we were on April 4th, 1968, the day that Dr. King was gunned down by a white ‘man’, James Earl Ray, at 6:01 p.m. on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

Even today, we have lawmakers doing everything in their power to disenfranchise Black people.  Even today, there are ever-growing groups in this nation who believe, or claim to believe, that the only “true Americans” are white Christians.  Even today, Black people are shunned by some, are considered to be of lesser intelligence.  Here’s a video clip from a 1964 CBS News program Face the Nation where Dan Rather asks Dr. King a question … and the answer is prophetic.

And as Mr. Rather says in a portion of his latest newsletter …

The record shows that in the decades that followed, the grim scenario Dr. King lamented in our exchange largely came to pass. In 1968, Richard Nixon used dog whistle appeals to racism in his euphemistic “Southern Strategy” to win the White House. In the ensuing years, what had been a “Solid South” for Democrats tracing back to the Civil War became a wall of red states that helped propel Republicans to power. From Ronald Reagan’s demonizing “welfare queens” to George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad, Republicans had concocted a playbook of racist appeals in order to win the white vote. With Trump, dog whistles became bullhorns.

Make no mistake, if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he would be stigmatized as ‘woke’ and attacked accordingly.

Everything Dr. King stood for is under attack in America today. You can see it in efforts to disenfranchise voters. You can find it in the whitewashing of history and the demonization of so-called “critical race theory.” Whether it’s the banning of books, attacks on labor rights, or the death knell of affirmative action, an America of ideas, engagement, and reckoning with our past is under siege. In the sneers at “wokeness,” one finds an effort by the privileged to hold onto the positions of power they feel they are owed. It is an insult to everything Dr. King hoped to achieve.

A significant proportion of today’s Republican Party has been taken over by performative hatred, lies, and reactionary attempts to undermine American democracy. This dynamic presents new and unique challenges to our journey toward justice. Dr. King would have been fearless in denouncing these forces of hatred and autocracy.

Yesterday I posted my annual tribute to Dr. King, including a portion of his “I Have a Dream” speech.  Given the lack of true progress in the 55 years since his assassination, I sadly predict that his dream will never be realized in this country.  You can legislate equality and justice for all, but you cannot control how people think, and laws are only as good as the ability and willingness to enforce them.

Today there is a growing movement to stop teaching about Dr. Martin Luther King in the schools, to stop teaching about the racism that led to his works, his activism.  Will people in 50 more years even know who he was, let alone what he stood for, what he did?  Not if some of the current politicians have their way — they would sooner erase his name from the history books.  Dr. King spent and ultimately gave his life trying to bring the people of this nation out of the darkness, but today there are those who prefer that darkness, who prefer to live in a privileged white world, who have no humanity.

Welcome To 21st Century America

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Law and justice, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Take a look at this picture …

cop-boy

Touching, isn’t it?  Well, before you get all teary-eyed, you should know what really happened.  The boy was not wandering around Philadelphia during the protests — protests of the shooting death of Walter Wallace Jr. by Philadelphia police.  This young boy was, in fact, riding in a car driven by his mother, Rickia Young, when she was confronted by Philadelphia police officers. Her ‘crime’?  She was trying to make a U-turn to get away from the area where the violence between protestors and police was occurring.

According to CBS News …

A video of the incident appears to show the boy and his mother being pulled from their vehicle and being separated. The clip then appears to show the woman being assaulted by officers.

Attorneys Riley H. Ross III and Thomas O. Fitzpatrick, who are representing Young in a civil case, both called out the union. Ross tweeted the photo is “a lie.”

“The only thing that could make what they did out there on that night any more reprehensible than what it already was, was how they followed it up by attempting to use it as some type of propaganda and spin it in through some type of positive thing for the police department,” Fitzpatrick told CBS News.

A short clip taken from a nearby building showed officers swarming an SUV and hitting it with weapons. The video shows officers dragging the driver, who Fitzpatrick identified as Young, out of the vehicle and beating her. The boy is also seen carried out of the vehicle.

Young was detained, released without charges, and reunited with her son that same night. According to Fitzpatrick, both Young and her son suffered physical injuries from the attack, though he said the “emotional trauma of it all” would be “a much longer process.”

The Philadelphia Police Department told CBS News in a statement that the incident is currently being investigated by the Internal Affairs Unit.  Don’t hold your breath for justice …

You may remember reading about Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Black boy who was shot and killed by Cleveland police on a playground in 2014.

tamir-riceOn November 22, 2014, Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann shot Rice within two seconds of arriving at a park where Rice was playing with a toy gun. When Tamir’s 14-year-old sister rushed to her brother’s side, Loehmann and his partner, Frank Garmback tackled her to the ground, handcuffed her and put her in their cruiser. Tamir Rice died the next day. Neither officer was indicted or fired over the killing.

Loehmann, who had only been with the department for 8 months at the time of the murder, in his previous job as a police officer in the Cleveland suburb of Independence, had been deemed an emotionally unstable recruit and unfit for duty.  He resigned in 2012, knowing that his termination was imminent.  Garmback had been credibly accused of using excessive force against a local woman earlier in 2014 when he “placed her in a chokehold, tackled her to the ground, twisted her wrist and began hitting her body.”  The woman’s crime?  She had called police to report a car blocking her driveway.  Neither of these officers were fit to be law enforcement officers.  And yet, neither one has paid a price for killing a child.

Now, six years later, we find out via a whistleblower that last year the Justice Department led by William Barr quietly rejected career prosecutors’ bid to use a grand jury to investigate the murder.

Although, technically, the civil rights investigation remains open, the decision to forgo a grand jury to compel witness testimony or take other investigative steps essentially puts paid to the case, and with the statute of limitations on one of the charges prosecutors considered most seriously set to run out later this year, there is little, if any, hope that the officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, who murdered young Tamir, will ever be punished.

Justice is a funny thing in this country.  The two above situations are not anomalies, not stand-alone events … they are everyday occurrences here.  If you are white, middle-income or better yet, wealthy, you probably won’t be killed by police … you probably won’t even ever be thrown to the ground or placed in a chokehold by police.  If you happen to be Black, or poor … all bets are off.  If you are white and are seen by police driving a brand-new Cadillac, nothing will happen, but if you are Black and are spotted by police driving a brand-new Cadillac, you will be pulled over, and the first question will be, “Where’d you get the car, boy?”

Justice depends on the colour of your skin and it depends on how much money you have.  Plain and simple.  There is a line in the pledge of allegiance that school children are forced to recite that says, “With liberty and justice for all”.  It’s a lie.