american black

Is Baltimore’s Central Booking our Abu Ghraib?

Over the past two years approximately 1.2 prisoners have died every month at Baltimore’s Central Booking, the city’s intake jail.

Prisoners have been denied medical care.

Cells designed for seven to eight prisoners are holding 17 to 18.

Conditions are so overcrowded that those jailed have been forced to lie in vomit.

The Baltimore City Police Department’s policy of “zero tolerance” has compounded the problems with neighborhood sweeps and indiscriminate arrests. There is now a police quota of arrests per officer and per district, which encourages harassment and arrest.

Some 100,000 people have been arrested out of a population of approximately 650,000. Thirty-three percent of those arrested have never been charged with a crime.

2 corrupt cops were arrested last month for using their police powers to detain drug dealers. They would take drugs and cash then let the dealers go without filing any charges.

Black Bike Week 2005

In case you didn't know it, it was Black Bike Week in South Carolina last weekend. Of course the city decided to change the rules and add race to the matter. They also bought out the National Guard and Federal Agents. But at least the folks from Christian High School had a good time

Got back safely from our senior trip to Myrtle Beach, S.C. and let's just say it was eventful. Mary Ann tried to warn me, and well, she was right. It was Black Bike Week 2005, that means we shared the area w/ 260,000 african american bikers. Our hotel had private security, cops on every floor 24/7, the National Guard had a presence and Federal Agents on the main blvd. It was pretty wild. Nothing like bringing the graduating class of Cincinnati Christian High School right in the middle of modern day Sodom....

The End Of Civil Rights?

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is closing offices around the country.

The commission will shutter the Denver office and another in Kansas City, Kan., in October, laying off six people.

The move will force anyone with a federal civil rights complaint in those districts to seek help in the commission's Chicago office. The Denver office covers Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, while the Kansas City office oversees complaints in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri.

Some say the office closings are a harbinger of the slow death of the civil rights agency, which, riven by partisan politics, long ago strayed from being the "conscience of the federal government," as President Dwight D. Eisenhower intended when he created it as part of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

The commission has been plagued by political power struggles and by fighting among its Republican and Democratic members.

Cheap labor conservatives in Congress kept its budget at $9 million for most of the 12-year term of

liberal Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry, who left the commission in December. That is $3 million less than its budget during the Reagan administration. The new Staff director is Kenneth Marcus.

Firefighter to stand trial on hate crime charge

The guy pictured on your right, Mark Weber, was ordered to stand trial Thursday on a hate crime charge accusing him of using a handgun to threaten a Black man from Milwaukee during an encounter in April.

Mark J. Weber was ordered to stand trial after a preliminary hearing in which the Milwaukee man broke down in tears while recounting the incident April 19 in the Town of Merton.

Mark Bratton told Waukesha County Court Commissioner Thomas Pieper that he feared for his life when Weber pointed a handgun in his direction after encountering Bratton, who was fishing at a roadside pond on Highway E, south of Monches. Bratton said he did nothing to provoke the incident and was merely fishing with his family.

The defense?

Weber's attorney, Franklyn M. Gimbel, said he intends to challenge the constitutionality of the state's hate crime law now that the case has advanced to trial court.

Who's That Girl?

A North Texas school district has apologized to a student who was listed under the name "Black Girl" in a high school yearbook photo of the school's National Honor Society.

All white students are identified by name in the photograph in the Waxahachie High School yearbook, which was distributed Friday. The teen identified as "Black Girl" is the only black student in the photo. Her name is       Shadoyia Jones.

The label apparently was meant to be a placeholder until the yearbook staff could track down the student's name, district spokeswoman Candace Ahlfinger said in today's edition of the Waxahachie Daily Light.

Problems In Peoria

It's hard to be in the media these days. Just how much information should you print?

A popular blogger in Peoria was a bit upset about how the local newspaper described Peoria's ninth murder of the year.

Sarah Okeson is a fine writer, and filled the story was wonderful imagery:

The smell of bleach that firefighters sprayed on the bloodstained concrete permeated the air. An almost empty Budweiser bottle lay against a nearby curb. The yellow crime tape had been taken down. All the police had left, and a light rain began to fall.

How sad. But add in some details -- supplied by a faithful reader -- and the image one gets is a hardcore banger who died the way he lived. A drug arrest, unlawful use of a weapon, charges of possessing a controlled substance, possessing it with the intent to deliver, resisting arrest, obstructing police, aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and unlawful possession of a controlled substance, possession of less than 2.5 grams of marijuana

A third brother, Gemil Murdock, is serving 24 years after a murder conviction. He's now being housed at Stateville.

All three are poor little misunderstood darlings.

As readers starting posting comments accusations of racism began to fly. Nothing new about that.

It's hard to post the truth about minorities without arguments happening. But what actually gets people upset is the fact that the whole story isn't printed. The good things this particular hell-raser may have done. But there is never enough room for that.

 

Blacks outsed from local committee chairmanships

Two Black school board members in Jersey City cried foul last week after they were stripped of committee chairmanships.

The two members - the Rev. Ronnie-Calvin Clark and Jeffrey Dublin - went public with their outrage at Thursday night's board meeting, charging board chair William DeRosa with leaving just one of the board's eight standing committees chaired by an African-American.

Celebrating Malcolm X

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

This year marks both the 80th anniversary of Malcolm X's birth on May 19, 1925 and the 40th anniversary of his assassination on Feb. 21, 1965. Commemorations took place last week around the country. Oakland celebrated with a jazz festival Saturday. In New York City, a major exhibit at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem opened Thursday.

Only in Berkeley does Malcolm X get the same treatment as MLK, Washington and Lincoln: City government offices were closed for business Friday. The Berkeley school district also formally recognized his birthday by closing for business last Friday.

Even cities with large and powerful black communities such as Oakland, Richmond, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago haven't followed Berkeley, where whites are 55 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent. In fact, news that Berkeley has had a Malcolm X holiday since 1979
came as a surprise to officials elsewhere.

Deborah Bolling, spokeswoman for the mayor's office in Philadelphia, applauded Berkeley when she heard about the holiday. But she added that even though city workers there might welcome another paid holiday, she didn't think the City of Brotherly Love would follow Berkeley.

"We just named our first street in Philadelphia after Martin Luther King, and he's not nearly as controversial," she said of her predominantly black city. "So it will be a long time before we celebrate Malcolm X Day."

Official Malcolm X Website

Free downloadable Audio Of Malcolm's speeches

Malcolm Quotes

Black Folks And Everyday Low Prices

A lot of folks have problems with Wal-Mart. Local retailers. Unions. The list goes on.

But Wal-Mart has come up with a plan which is working. New stores are going up in poorer neighborhoods.

The pitch goes like this: Wal-mart is good for poor people of color because they get jobs and also get to buy cheap goods.

Of course executives don't mention the jobs come with notoriously low wages and that the company has cracked down on union organizing. But  Black cheap labor conservatives don't care.

Wal-Mart executives know that poor people of color are in no position to be picky about who brings what jobs to the community. Wal-Mart is the leading employer of Black and Latino workers.

But just how bad is Wal-Mart?

Wal-Mart has a health plan. But because few workers can afford it on the wages Wal-Mart pays, the company instead encourages its workers to apply for public assistance. So many of Wal-Mart employees are on welfare that some states want to tax them to offset some of their costs. 

Pitching proposals to poor communities who are desperate for jobs, private developers are able to exploit the failure of public policy to create jobs in these communities. New York City Coucilman Charles Barron had this to say in a recent Alternet article.

"There are plenty of other ways to create jobs," says Councilman Barron, who argues for increased investment in public infrastructure such as hospitals and schools to revitalize poor areas like his Brooklyn district. "Private developers," he continues, "manipulate the race question for their financial gain."

Like everyone else, I wanna save a few a few dollars. I shop at Wal-Mart. And I'm all for poor communities getting much needed jobs. But we need to distinguish between economic development and economic exploitation. And Wal-Mart smells a bit like explotation to me.

Cincinnati Politics Heats Up

If all the action is in local politics then what's going on in Cincinnati right now is another Passenger 57.

At the Cincinnati Democratic Caucus meeting a few days ago  David Crowley and John Cranley started the fight to have Damon Lynch taken off the ticket. Damon Lynch is a Black pastor who's famous for saying the following about Cincinnati:

"Police are killing, raping, planting false evidence, and along with the Prosecutor and courts are destroying the general sense of self-respect for black citizens"

I have never been to Cincy so I don't know if the above statement is true, but Lynch's past bothered Crowley and Cranley enough to try to have him taken off the Democratic ticket. For the most part, white Democrats jumped in line with Crowley and Cranley and took turns denouncing Damon. Blacks defended him. In the end, Damon barely won, but he did win and is now an officially endorsed Democratic candidate.

But you know that's not the end of the story. Despite promising to work with and support all candidates, John Cranley got on 55krc and blasted Damon Lynch, demeaned the Democratic Party's precinct executives, emphasizing his disapproval of Lynch's endorsement, and making clear his belief that a Party endorsement doesn't impact a political campaign.

Even the local bloggers are slinging mud about Lynch as Brian Griffin  (who writes a Cincy blog) wonders out loud if Nate Livingston (who writes a Black-centric Cincy blog) is "just circling the race-based wagons" by supporting Lynch. Joe Hansbauer just wants Lynch to say "he was sorry" for his " 'Outlandish' comments".

From the outside it seems like the Cincinnati City Council races will be fun to watch. I suggest the following  blogs if you want to keep up with it.

Cincinnati Black Blog
Cincinnati Blog
The Nati