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Criminal Justice

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Baltimore Author Discusses ‘Living (And Dying) While Black’

2015/10/5-Growing up during the crack era in East Baltimore, author D. Watkins saw firsthand how the drug destroyed communities. “It trashed my neighborhood,” Watkins tellsFresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “I’m old enough to remember before crack really hit, and once it did hit, it changed a whole dynamic of how drug culture worked.”

Suddenly, Watkins says, teenage kids — himself included — were selling crack on street corners. But the drug wasn’t leaving the neighborhood with each sale. “Everybody’s parents were junkies,” he says. “And all the kids were selling or using.”

Then there was the gun violence, which often sprang from disputes over control of particular street corners. Watkins escaped getting shot more than once. His older brother was shot to death during the period he was selling crack.

Other friends died or were sent to prison. Finally, Watkins says, “I was the last guy left. … I went from not really caring if I lived or died to caring — and I knew if I wanted to live, I had to stop.”

Watkins gave up dealing drugs, returned to college and now has three degrees, including a master of education from Johns Hopkins University and a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Baltimore Sun and Salon, and he has taught in literacy programs in Baltimore. His new book is The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America.

Interview Highlights

On deciding to go to college and then drop out of college

The type of neighborhood where I lived in, Baltimore City, is very segregated, so my whole neighborhood was black. Everyone I played basketball [with] was black. If the people who used to go to church and all that, they were all black churches. The only white people you would actually come across is housing police or a teacher or something like that, but, for the most part, everybody else is a black person.

For the most part, I was encouraged to not go to HBCU [a historically black college or university]; some of my teachers and some of the people who I knew who was helping me out through this whole process was saying that you should go to a PWI [predominantly white institution] because America doesn’t look like [that]. … I was taught that the world is diverse and you need to go to a place where you can interact with different types of people and things like that.

When I got there it was culture shock. It was my first time meeting what we would call, like, a “frat boy.” It was my first time meeting elite people, people who came from not the type of money I was coming from, but from real money, and it was my first time meeting black people who looked down on other types of black [people]. …

It was a different world for me. … I met a couple of people, but it didn’t really work and I dropped out. I just felt more at home in the street and around street people, so that’s [when] I decided to go ahead and live out what I felt like my destiny was.

On why he stopped dealing

Most of the reasons revolve around my friends and the situations that they were in. They were being locked up, some of them indicted, some for nonviolent crimes, and they weren’t getting like three years and all that, they were getting 20 years. … If they wasn’t going to jail, they was dying.

It’s just that whole idea of always being alone and knowing that selling drugs is not a team game. You don’t link up with some childhood friends and build an empire; that’s television and the movies. Selling drugs is one on one. You’re always going to be alone because at the end of the day, the business, it trumps all of these relationships and it happens over and over again.

On his relationship with guns

When you live in Baltimore City, especially coming up in the crack era, people dying is not a strange thing. Witnessing murders is not a strange thing, or being in a situation where you’re on a basketball court and somebody starts shooting is not a strange thing. …

I carried a gun as a teenager … but I never ever, ever, ever, ever used it against another person — I might’ve flashed it a couple times to get myself out of a sticky situation, but guns [have] never been my thing. Some people are shooters and some people aren’t. I’m not. I never faked that life. I never tried to pretend to be about that life. I was never into it, but when I was growing up in that crack era … you needed it.

On the crack epidemic

Back when it was just cocaine, powder cocaine, and heroin there was, like, a couple of dudes, older guys, that used to run whole regions, so they would control, like, four or five ZIP codes, and you had to buy from them, and then you would make your little money, and it was more of a peaceful type of situation. But when crack came, any and everybody had the opportunity to be a boss, a kingpin. There were, like, 15- and 16-year-old kids on every corner making, like, $10,000-plus a week. It was a brand-new crew on every corner, and then when the crew on one corner felt like another crew was doing better that’s when gun play started. …

My friends and I, we joke about this sometimes, but … we were hard-pressed to find somebody who didn’t have a father on drugs, a mother on drugs, both or at least a father and mother who were strung out for a while before getting themselves together. … It was like a super-escape. It was an escape for the person that was putting into their body, and it was an escape for a person who was selling and making money off it. We don’t talk about this, but we’re still recovering from the crack epidemic now.

On enabling people’s addictions

I used to have these thoughts to myself about how this is what these people want. I’m not putting a gun to their head. I wasn’t out there making them do it. Yeah, I saw those effects and they hit me in different ways, but I felt like we were all just part of this whole big piece of nothingness and I had to pick my role. I knew I wasn’t going to be a person using it.

 

Source: NPR

Fresh Air

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Speaker Gunn to Exclude Black Lawmakers

2015/9/22-Mississippi House Speaker Phillip Gunn sent a strong message to voters who will not vote Republican.  The message: You’re Out.

“When it comes to leadership positions (in the Mississippi Legislature), who do we pick?  We’ll be picking people who share our values, who want to move to the same direction we want to go, so we pull out the roster from our team and we pick leaders from that list,” Gunn told a crowd at the Neshoba County fair in July.  “Your man, because he’s a Democrat, is not on that list, so your district has no influence in the direction of this state.  Your district has no influence in shaping policy.  Your district has no leadership role because you have chosen to send a Democrat.”

Gunn’s statement takes on a racial component in Mississippi where the population votes heavily based upon race.  While there are many white Democrats in the state, almost all blacks vote exclusively Democratic.  Critics say his announcement is a proclamation to rob blacks of a voice in a manner comparable to the Jim Crow years.

“I can’t say I haven’t heard worse, but it reminds me of what I’m used to,” said Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood.  “He’s talking about locking out the most loyal people in the U.S.  In a state with 3 million people and one-third being black, you paint yourself into a corner with statements like this.  We need to be open-minded to accept people.”

Gunn, at the time, was being confronted by a crowd of angry white voters hostile to the idea of removing the Confederate battle emblem from the canton corner of the Mississippi flag.  Critics called for state leaders to remove the Southern Cross — long a symbol of segregation and apartheid in Mississippi — in the aftermath of the horrific massacre of nine black church patrons in South Carolina by a white supremacist.

The Republican speaker, who had stated earlier that he supported updating the flag, drummed up his segregationist credentials by promising to remove Democrats — and therefore black politicians — from positions of power in the upcoming legislative session.

“If you want your district to be in the game, if you want to have influence on shaping policy in this state, if you want to have a role in the leadership of this state, then you need to vote Republican. … if you don’t have a Republican as your representative right now, you need to get one as fast as you can and send him to Jackson,” Gunn said.

However, critics say blacks will not easily vote Republican just to get a black face at Gunn’s table because state Republicans traditionally stand against many of the progressive ideas that make up the foundation of black ideals, including a higher minimum wage, strong health-care laws, reliable childcare and safe family planning.

Aside from the countless political differences, many Mississippi blacks also can’t bear to vote for a political party that has become the new home for segregationist Dixiecrats — as demonstrated by the historic party switch of infamous segregationist South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, who switched parties in 1964 because of his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Segregationists continued to hijack the Republican Party throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, to the point where today the GOP is the only major political party running candidates willing to repeal 14th Amendment citizenship status to people born in the U.S.

Rep. Earle Banks, who is a member of the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, said Gunn’s statements sound revoltingly familiar.

“It’s the same exclusionary tactics of the Jim Crow years, except now it’s couched in partisan politics to keep it legal,” Banks said.  “It was the most horrible speech I’ve ever heard.  He’s essentially announced that he’s locking out the Delta and all the black representatives coming from there.  I mean, what was he thinking?  I’ve never heard any of those speeches from (former speakers) Tim Ford or Billy McCoy.  It’s not all about the benefit of Mississippi anymore.  He’s all about the benefit of Republicans now.”

Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, director of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Southern Regional Office, said she was not surprised by Gunn’s promise, and said she believed he knew his exclusionary tactic would overtly jettison black legislators.

“It is their nature to keep a certain people down, and that certain people happen to be the base of the Democratic Party,” Fitzgerald said.  “When Gunn says he’s not allowing us at the table, he definitely knows he’s pointing his finger at me and my children.”

Fitzgerald said the Mississippi GOP was insulated enough now by a significant majority of white votes to divulge its true nature.

“That’s what the Republican Party has been stacking itself up to do ever since reapportionment, and now I think that they have gotten so emboldened that they can say what’s in their DNA, and their DNA is all about exclusion,” Fitzgerald said.

 

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Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.  For more information about the Mississippi NAACP or news stories, call 601-353-8452 or log on to www.naacpms.org.  Like us on Facebook by searching Mississippi NAACP and follow us on Twitter @MSNAACP.

 

Source: NAACP Staff

670 474 Deante Morgan

I Could Have Been Sandra Bland: Black America’s Terrifying Truth

2015/07/23 – 

At age sixteen, I went to a high school dance with a white male friend. When we pulled up to the gym, music blaring loudly out the windows, a police officer came over as we got out of the truck, and began shining his flashlight around the cab, questioning what we teenagers were doing there — at a high school dance. I immediately apprised the officer of the fact that he had no right to conduct a search of my friend’s vehicle without probable cause. Our music had not been loud enough for a noise violation, and we had turned it off, as soon as my friend parked the car.

The officer continued to saunter around the vehicle shining his flashlight, asking us questions, throwing his weight around to let us know he was the one with power. But I had questioned him instinctively. I didn’t think about it, about the consequences, about the ways in which my questions might be perceived as resistance or threat. I saw a police officer improperly enforcing the law, and I was just arrogant and naïve enough to think that the principles we had learned in Civics and American History actually mattered. He was on a power trip, and people on power trips irritate me.

“You seem irritated,” a police officer said to Sandra Bland when he pulled her over two Fridays ago for failure to signal. “I am. I really am,” she told him.

Apparently she had been attempting to explain that she pulled over to get out of the officer’s way, and she didn’t understand why he had stopped her. He demanded that she put out her cigarette, which she is legally allowed to smoke in her own car. When she didn’t, he demanded she get out of the car. She refused, telling him clearly that she didn’t have to get out of the car if she wasn’t under arrest. So then, after opening her door, reaching into her car and grabbing her, he yelled that she was under arrest. He didn’t say what the charges were.

Off camera, Sandra narrates for the video, which she knows is recording exactly what is being done to her, that her wrist is being grabbed and twisted, her head being slammed into the ground. When she informs the officer that she has epilepsy, he replies: “Good. Good.” And because she refused to go willingly into an unjust arrest for charges that remained unnamed, she was then arrested for resisting arrest.

On three occasions I have given “attitude” to police, asked questions about unfair harassment and citations, and let the officers know that I didn’t agree with how they were doing their jobs. I have never threatened an officer or refused an order. But I have vigorously exercised my right to ask questions and to challenge improper shows of force.

I have had the police threaten to billyclub me, write unfair tickets, and otherwise make public spaces less safe, rather than more safe, for me to inhabit, all out of a clear lust for power. On the wrong day, I could have been Sandra Bland. And if a police officer pulled me over for a bullshit-ass reason, I absolutely would have given him the business on the side of the highway. By this, I don’t mean I would have made threats. I mean I would have asked questions.

All Sandra Bland did was ask questions. Now she is dead. Supposedly after hanging herself in a jail cell. Just a few hours before her sister was coming to bail her out. None of that makes sense. What does make sense are the words of her mother, Geneva Reed-Veal. She said,

“Once I put this baby in the ground, I’m ready. This means war.”

The American public is comfortable with Black mothers who are charitable in their grief, Black mothers who declare that this isn’t “a race issue, but a right and wrong issue,” mothers who forgive, mothers who become silent, stoic, and elegant. But it is time that Black mothers who keep burying children because of poor policing begin to fight back.

Nothing about this officer’s actions were legal. It is the evidence of Sandra Bland’s irritation that caused this officer to escalate. He firmly expected to be able to harass a citizen going about her business and have her be okay with it. He expected that she wouldn’t question him. He wanted her submission. Her deference. Her fear.

White power. Black submission. It’s the oldest trick in the white supremacist handbook. The officer might think he wanted Sandra Bland’s respect. But what he really wanted was her fear. And the fact is: He is entitled to neither. She did not owe him either her respect or her fear. When his white maleness and his badge didn’t elicit the first, he used the power of that badge to compel the second.

Now Sandra Bland is dead. She isn’t dead because of suicide. No matter what they say, justice, reason, fairness and good damn sense compel us to believe differently. She is dead because she wouldn’t go quietly. She is dead because she asked questions. Dead because she knew her rights. Dead because she demanded to be treated with dignity. Dead because she wouldn’t submit. Dead because she wouldn’t shut up.

Black people, of every station, live everyday just one police encounter from the grave. Looking back over my encounters with police, it’s truly a wonder that I’m still in the land of the living.

Am I supposed to be grateful for that? Are we supposed to be grateful each and every time the police don’t kill us?

There is a way that white people in particular treat Black people, as though we should be grateful to them — grateful for jobs in their institutions, grateful to live in their neighborhoods, grateful that they aren’t as racist as their parents and grandparents, grateful that they pay us any attention, grateful that they acknowledge our humanity (on the rare occasions when they do), grateful that they don’t use their formidable power to take our lives.

When we refuse gratitude, they enact every violence — they take our jobs, our homes, refuse us respect, and kill us. And then they demand that we be gracious in the face of it.

Black gratitude is the prerequisite for white folks to treat us like human beings. But in my faith tradition, we define grace as “unmerited favor,” as undeserved, unearned. And it is God’s grace toward us that compels our gratitude toward God. Not so in a culture of white Supremacy. In a culture of White Supremacy, White people get to be God without grace. Black people must give all the grace and act grateful for opportunities to do so. If we stumble on the wrong day with the wrong white person, we pay for it with our lives.

Now here’s what I know. White people don’t like to be lumped in with each other. They don’t like racial generalizations. But in Sandra I see myself, and every interaction I’ve ever had with the police, both good and bad. Black communities are weeping and mourning with her mother, friends, and four sisters, because we know that at any time, she could be any of us. Black people don’t have the luxury of refusing identification and commonality.

This is why some Black people are asking themselves, “Why didn’t she just put out the cigarette, shut up and get through it?” Because she loved herself. Because she was on her way to fulfill her dream. Because she knew she was somebody and that she didn’t deserve to be mistreated. Because the demand for dignity always asserts itself at the height of an assault. Because the choice never should have been between her life or her dignity. Neither her life nor her dignity should be a casualty of an encounter with police. But there is what-should-be and what-is. Sandra Blandshould be starting the second week of her job at Prairie View A &M University. Instead her mother is preparing to put her “baby in the ground.”

White people resist seeing themselves in the face of the oppressor. That mirror reflection is almost too much to bear. I get it. So then they resent the person that holds up the mirror. But let me just say as directly as I can: White people must begin to see themselves in the faces of the mostly white police officers who keep committing these atrocities against Black and Brown people. This will not stop until you recognize that you are them. These officers are your brothers and sisters and aunts and cousins, and sons and daughters and nieces and nephews, and friends, and church members. You are them. And they are you.

It’s a hard truth. It’s a truth that will infuriate each and every white person that floats through life on the cloud of individuality, fooling themselves into thinking that the assumptions, presumptions and privileges of growing up white in a white supremacist society somehow missed them, while touching an alarmingly large number of people who look just like them.

Today is not the day for such fantasies. Sandra Bland is dead for — I don’t know — failing to signal properly, failing to stop smoking a cigarette, failing to fear the police. She’s dead for some reason. Or more likely she’s dead for no reason at all.

But she’s dead. And somebody is to blame. And it isn’t her.

Who do we blame? How do we make it stop? How shall we now live?

Like Sandra, I have questions.

 

Source: Brittney Cooper

Salon

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MS NAACP Joins Stonewall Community in Call for Justice in Jonathan Sanders Killing

2015/07/22 – 

Again, we face another questionable traffic stop. Again, we suffer another African American male losing his life at the hands of law enforcement. Again, a man has died while uttering the words ‘I can’t breathe’.

The Mississippi State Conference NAACP is saddened and angered at the recent death of Jonathan ‘Mop Top’ Sanders in Stonewall, MS at the hands of part time officer Kevin Herrington.  Herrington allegedly held Sanders in a chokehold for about thirty minutes during a traffic stop, according to witness accounts.  The reason for the traffic stop remains unknown, as Sanders was riding a horse-drawn buggy down a main road in Stonewall.

The NAACP supports the efforts of the Sanders family and the Lumumba and Associates Law Firm to seek justice in this tragedy.  The sheer gravity of yet another callous death at the hands of law enforcement demands a full and independent investigation at the local, state and possibly federal levels.

The NAACP demands an outside authority address accusations of tension between Stonewall’s largely white police force and it’s minority population, which complains of frequent and unnecessary police traffic stops.  Our concern is buttressed by the absence of a clear and obvious reason why an officer would intercept a horse and buggy driven by a man with no outstanding warrants.

This investigation should include a thorough investigation of Officer Kevin Herrington, including a background check, a mental health evaluation and drug testing.  The sheer brutality of the killing of an unarmed horse-driver begs the question of whether or not the officer’s aggression was driven by medical factors, such as steroid abuse, or other chemical sources.  A growing number of police brutality cases involve steroid abuse among officers, and the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) has reported high steroid usage levels among police officers, resembling the usage in pro sports.

“We want to make sure that this officer wasn’t under the influence of drugs that might have caused him to engage in ‘hyper-aggressive’ behavior’ that could have led to Jonathan Sander’s death,” says Derrick Johnson, President, MS State Conference NAACP.   “The NAACP urges all law enforcement officials to make sure that officers are not using anabolic steroids or other potentially mood-altering medications or substances while on the job.  The safety of citizens must be a priority.”

Again, the Mississippi State Conference NAACP offers our sincere condolences to the family of Jonathan Sanders and we will remain side by side with you in your fight for justice.

 

Source: MS State Conference NAACP

902 960 Deante Morgan

Tensions and Voices Rise in Stonewall

2015/07/22 – 

Cries of protest rang through the usually quiet streets of the small Mississippi community of Stonewall this month, as organizers marched on the town’s police station, demanding the removal of who residents believe to be “killer cops.”

Angry voices raised in unison alternated between chants of “Hey, Hey, Hey Ho, these killing cops have got to go” and “No peace. No justice,” as they marched from a local ballpark to the town’s police/fire station.

The crowd gathered July 19 in support of friends and family of 39-year-old Jonathan Sanders, killed by part-time police officer Kevin Herrington, after the cop held him in a 30-minute choke-hold, according to witnesses.

“He was a good man.  He never hurt nobody,” one resident shouted in support from her front yard as the members of the Sanders family and about 400 determined and frustrated people marched past her home.

The incident happened between 10:30 and 11 p.m. on July 8, as Sanders was riding his horse-drawn buggy down a main road.  Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the attorney representing Sanders’ family, says witnesses report Herrington rode up behind Sanders’ buggy and turned on his lights, startling the horse and throwing Sanders from the buggy.  Sanders ran to reclaim and settle the horse, when Herrington allegedly grabbed Sanders around his neck and would not release him, despite claims from Sanders that he could not breathe.

One of the three witnesses, unnamed by Lumumba, but identified by local Sheriff Todd Kemp as Rachel Williams, is a jail guard from the neighboring county of Lauderdale. Williams says she actually ran up to the struggling men near the driveway and offered assistance.  Williams claims she heard Sanders’ plea for breath, but Herrington refused to release him.

Herrington’s attorney, Bill Ready, Jr., claimed Sanders “fought back and actually grabbed the officer’s gun,” while Williams insists the gun remained firmly in its holster.  Williams goes on to claim that Herrington instructed his wife, Kasey Herrington — who was riding with him in his patrol vehicle while he was on duty — to remove his gun from the holster and put it in the car.

“My witness said his wife didn’t even know how to remove the weapon from her husband’s holster, so my witness, who happens to work in law enforcement, had to tell her how to take it out,” Lumumba said.  “Herrington claims they were fighting over his gun and had it out of his holster.  So you’re trying to tell me that this policeman manages to reclaim his gun from a combatant, and then — instead of using it to subdue his opponent — he just puts it back in his holster?  And then he has second thoughts and tells his wife to come get it?”

Sanders, known in the close-knit community as “Mop-Top,” struggled with addiction.  He had a 2003 cocaine-related conviction and an April arrest for possession. Supporters at the rally lambasted the media for demonizing an obvious addict in an attempt to save a killer cop’s reputation.

“We had a meeting last Tuesday.  I asked the district attorney why they stopped Mop-Top,” Clarke County NAACP President Lawrence Kirksey announced to the crowd in the minutes leading up to Saturday’s march.  “They couldn’t tell us why he went after Mop-Top.  Then, all of a sudden, his history came out in the newspaper.  They had to plant the story in the minds of the individuals that now he’s just another black man with drugs.  But why would he be riding down the road doing a drug deal with a horse?”

Kirksey suggested outraged supporters should take their money outside of the municipality and boycott local businesses until businesses pressure the police department for a resolution.

Minister Abram Muhammad, state representative of the Nation of Islam, warned the crowd that blacks “have to stop taking the blows.”

“I am not coming here to tell you to grab hands and pray for your enemy.  That’s not nature.  That ain’t even natural law,” Muhammad said.  “… As long as all we do is come together, say some chants, say a few words and then go home, another black life will be lost, and we owe our beautiful babies more than that.”

 

Source: NAACP Writers