DONATE

NEWS TODAY

920 613 admin5

Did the Media Cover Only the Violent Protests in Baltimore?

2015/5/13-The night that violence erupted in the Baltimore protests, Leah Eliza Balter, who had marched in the protests earlier that day, was crushed by the media coverage that emphasized burning flags and looting. “This is a skewed portrayal of the protests; it is what the media chose to portray — the media that consumers bewilderingly seem to want,” Balter declared.

Similarly, in a tweet that was retweeted over 10,000 times, the musician Propaganda observed that “Citizens of Baltimore been peacefully protesting for WEEKS. Not one news camera came till somethin was on fire. What u think that teaches?”

Indeed, Comedy Central host Jon Stewart noted that, rather than covering the peaceful protests in Baltimore, on April 25 CNN elected to cover the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “CNN got shamed by Twitter…Shamed about their editorial priorities by the same folks who spent a week violently clashing over the blue/black-white/gold question,” Stewart wryly remarked.

But is this true? Did national news outlets pay attention to the peaceful Baltimore protests over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody that began on April 18, or were those rallies ignored until the violence erupted? And was the attention on Twitter any different?

First, consider cable news in the graph below. Coverage on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News increased substantially on April 27, the night violence erupted in Baltimore. The following day, coverage on cable news peaked at 59 stories. During these two days of violent incidents, coverage increased by a substantial 162 percent, compared with the two days prior, April 25 and 26, when the protests were peaceful.


Source: the archive.org’s TV News Archive. News stories mentioning both “Baltimore” and “protest” on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News are included. (Graph by Alex T. Williams)

Second, consider newspaper coverage — specifically 23 of the top 25 newspapers (data from the Wall Street Journal and the Las Vegas Review-Journal were not available). Here, the coverage increased during the violence but actually peaked on April 30. Coverage during the violence also spiked but by a lesser extent than cable news (a 58 percent increase over the two days prior).


Source: Data is from LexisNexis and is based on news articles containing “Baltimore” and “protest” in 23 of the top 25 newspapers by circulation according to the September 2014 circulation figures by the Alliance for Audited Media. (Graph by Alex T. Williams)

That cable news and newspaper coverage had different peaks is not surprising, as cable news focuses more on real-time coverage, whereas newspapers have a publishing time lag. However, the peak on April 30 — when two men in the police van with Gray gave their accounts of what happened and the police investigation of Gray’s death was about to be given to the state’s attorney — suggests that newspapers may have been most focused on the legalities surrounding Gray’s death.

How does this compare with conversation on Twitter, specifically tweets mentioning Baltimore from Twitter’s public stream (which is approximately one percent of all tweets)? Similar to cable news coverage, discussion on Twitter peaked on April 28. For the two days before the violence, there were 4,106 tweets about Baltimore; during the violence, there were 56,522 tweets, an increase of over 1,200 percent.


Source: The Twitter public stream that contains approximately one percent of all tweets. Tweets mentioning Baltimore anywhere in the tweet are included. (Graph by Alex T. Williams)

Of course, Twitter is partly dependent on the national media to raise awareness. It is possible that increased media attention allowed the peaceful protesters to mobilize more people online. Or, increased media attention may have led to more sensationalist tweets.

To explore these possibilities, in the table below I compared the most popular hashtags before, during and after the violence erupted. Before the violence, there was limited discussion on Twitter about the protests, although FreddieGray and Baltimore were still dominant hashtags.


Source: The Twitter public stream that contains approximately one percent of all tweets. The hashtags of any tweet mentioning Baltimore anywhere in the tweet are included.

During the violence, BaltimoreRiots was the top hashtag — by far — while Baltimore and Freddie Gray were still prominent. Several new hashtags were introduced, including BaltimoreUprising (the preferred hashtags of protest supporters), PrayForBaltimore, TCOT (a hashtag affiliated with political conservatives) and Chi2Baltimore.

After the violence, as cable news attention was waning, the hashtag BaltimoreRiots was overtaken by the hashtag BaltimoreUprising. This suggests, in accordance with previous academic studies, that Twitter discussion followed other media: When the media stopped focusing on the riots, so did Twitter users.

However, the increased prominence of the BlackLivesMatter hashtag and the creation of the hashtags NYC2Baltimore and PhillyIsBaltimore suggest that Twitter users may have also used this opening to reframe the conversation.

Not surprisingly, both national media attention and online attention increased dramatically when the protests turned violent. However, it is noteworthy that coverage of the Baltimore protests on cable news increased much more than newspapers, whose coverage peaked a few days after the violence. Attention on Twitter was limited before the violence occurred — and it increased the most during the violence — mainly under the hashtag BalimoreRiots, which waned as the violence subsided.

Given this data, it is difficult to conclude that the media “only” covered the Baltimore protests after they turned violent. Nevertheless, it is clear that the violence was deemed newsworthy.

But before we blame the news media, we should ask: Did this coverage only reflect the interests of viewers? According to the Nielsen ratings, on the night of the violent protests on April 28 the ratings of all three channels surged in the key news demo of adults ages 25 to 54. Compared with the previous Monday, CNN experienced a 574 percent increase, Fox News a 121 percent increase and MSNBC a 77 percent increase.

At least in the case of cable news, if Americans wanted coverage to focus on peaceful protests and not incidents of violence, we did a poor job of showing it.

 

Source: The Washington Post

Alex T. Williams

620 413 admin5

171 Days After Tamir Rice Shooting, Sheriff Says Investigation Almost Done

2015/5/13-About a week after Tamir Rice’s mother and her legal team publicly asked how long it would take to finish the investigation into her son’s death, the Cuyahoga County sheriff said Tuesday — 171 days after the 12-year-old was shot — that his department is almost there.

Sheriff Clifford Pinkney provided what he said was a timeline of the investigation, which his department took over in December before beginning its investigation “in earnest” in mid-February. He told reporters that he and his investigators had resolved to leave “zero stones unturned” when the investigation is handed to prosecutors.

The Gray family’s legal team criticized what it said was the torpid pace of the investigation and said the drawn-out process is fueling suspicions that a coverup is in the works.

“It’s been now spanning three seasons, going up on 6 months, and sometimes justice requires just a little more diligence,” family attorney Walter Madison said. “What can be taking so long when you have the entire event there on video? A crime fighter’s dream.”

Pinkney said his investigative team has reviewed thousands of pages of documents, interviewed numerous witnesses and watched “any and all” surveillance video of the November 22 incident in which Cleveland police Officer Timothy Loehmann fatally shot the boy in front of a recreation center.

Still, there are witnesses to be interviewed and forensic evidence to be collected, Pinkney said.

“The majority of our work is complete,” he said. “We have been tirelessly working on this investigation.”

He did not set a deadline for completing the inquiry, but said it shouldn’t “drag out beyond what is reasonable.”

Mother ‘struggling’

While noting that the case is far different from Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore, Madison applauded Baltimore officials for charging the officers involved and “getting out ahead of it and being swift and diligent about justice.”

A charge isn’t a conviction, he said, “but it’s a step in the right direction. What we do not have here is the same, and it makes people wonder and it allows suspicion of a coverup.”

On May 4, Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, appeared with her legal team on the steps of the Cuyahoga County Justice Center complex to question the amount of time that has passed since the investigation began, CNN affiliate WJW reported.

“Less than a second and my son is gone, and I want to know how long I got to wait for justice?” she asked.

Mayor sorry for “insensitivity” in response to lawsuit

Tamir was cremated last week, Madison said, explaining that police held the boy’s body for almost six months for investigative purposes.

Samaria Rice recently found a new home after moving to a homeless shelter following Tamir’s death, he said. She moved out of her old residence because she couldn’t bear living across the street from the rec center where her son died, Madison said.

“She’s struggling. No parent hopes or wishes or can even think about burying their 12-year-old child,” the lawyer said. “But that is her reality, and she’s just a person, a mother — a vulnerable person who is now in this national spotlight, part of a movement and she’s barely equipped to get through life on a day-to-day basis.”

Officers issue statement

Cuyahoga County’s medical examiner has ruled Tamir’s death a homicide but has issued no determination as to whether the events that caused the boy’s death constitute a crime.

Cleveland authorities have repeatedly said Loehmann mistook Tamir’s pellet gun for a real firearm.

A witness called 911 on November 22 to say there was “a guy with a pistol” and that although the weapon was “probably” fake, Tamir was scaring people. It doesn’t appear the dispatcher relayed the information to Loehmann and Officer Frank Garmback. Video of the incident shows the two pull up on the snowy grass near a gazebo where Tamir is standing. Within two seconds of exiting the police car, Loehmann shoots the 12-year-old.

The boy died the next day of injuries to “a major vessel, intestines and pelvis.”

In the video, neither Loehmann nor Garmback appears to provide medical assistance to the boy, and Police Chief Calvin Williams has said that Tamir did not receive first aid until an FBI agent arrived on the scene four minutes later.

On Tuesday, attorneys for Loehmann and Garmback released a statement, saying they respect the investigation.

“It is of the highest priority that this investigation protects the due process rights of all parties involved. This investigation must not be influenced by outside commentary or news conferences. For these reasons, we will continue to remain silent as to the facts of this case, until the investigation is concluded,” they said on behalf of their clients.

Officers’ statements incriminating?

A source familiar with the situation provided a clue as to why the investigation is taking so long.

In compliance with court rulings, administrative statements made by Cleveland police officers about the circumstances surrounding Tamir’s death were redacted or purged of information that could have been construed as self-incriminating, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mom: Tamir’s teen sister ‘tackled’ after shooting

In December, the U.S. Justice Department released the results of a two-year investigation that found Cleveland officers use guns, Tasers, pepper spray and their fists excessively, unnecessarily or in retaliation. The police force has used unnecessary and unreasonable force at a “significant rate,” employing “dangerous tactics” that put the community at risk, the investigation stated.

It was also reported in December that Loehmann’s previous employer, the Independence Police Department in a Cleveland suburb, had numerous complaints about the officer, including that he was “distracted and weepy” and “emotionally immature” and had demonstrated “a pattern of lack of maturity, indiscretion and not following instructions.”

He also showed “dangerous loss of composure during live range training” and an “inability to manage personal stress,” the department said.

 

Source: CNN

Eliott C. McLaughlin

675 450 admin5

Voters in Arkansas Tourist Town Uphold Anti-Discrimination Law

Residents in the small Arkansas tourist town Eureka Springs voted Tuesday to uphold an ordinance to prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, rejecting an argument by opponents that the measure could harm tourism and force churches to host same-sex weddings and receptions.

Jamie Correia, the Carroll County clerk, said 579 people voted to uphold the law and 231 voted to strike it down, according to an unofficial tally.

The result in Eureka Springs, a city considered a liberal outlier in the Ozarks region, is a small but welcome one for gay rights activists in Arkansas, and reflects the complicated push and pull that has characterized broader gay rights issues in the state over a tumultuous year.

Last May, Judge Chris Piazza, of Arkansas’s Sixth Judicial Circuit, invalidated the state ban on same-sex marriage, and the unions were allowed for seven days, until the ruling was stayed by the Arkansas Supreme Court.

On April 1, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, declined to sign legislation billed as a religious freedom measure that had been opposed by gay rights advocates and businesses including Walmart, the state’s largest employer.

Mr. Hutchinson later signed a version of the bill that was altered to closely mirror a federal law approved in 1993.

The Eureka Springs City Council unanimously approved its anti-discrimination ordinance in February. Members said they were reacting to the Republican-dominated state legislature, and a law it eventually passed prohibiting local governments from enforcing their own anti-discrimination laws.

That law will take effect later this summer and Mayor Robert Berry of Eureka Springs has said that it will probably render the local ordinance unenforceable. But advocates said they hoped it could be used as a basis to challenge the state law in court.

“Where leadership has failed Arkansas on the state level, local municipalities like Eureka Springs have taken the initiative to ensure that all their residents are rightfully protected from all forms of discrimination,” Kendra R. Johnson, Arkansas state director of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group, said in a prepared statement released late Tuesday.

The group noted that both Little Rock and Hot Springs, Ark., had passed anti-discrimination ordinances. But those protect only employees and city contractors, the group said, while the Eureka Springs law covers all citizens.

The debate in Eureka Springs over the ordinance had become intensely personal, with strong religious overtones. Supporters and opponents made phone calls and knocked on doors in an effort to persuade friends and neighbors to vote. “The Great Passion Play,” a dramatic retelling of the story of Jesus Christ, and one of the region’s most notable tourist attractions, is just outside the city limits. Opponents of the ordinance said the measure and a more gay-tolerant atmosphere were making Christians think twice about visiting.

Travis Story, a Fayetteville, Ark., lawyer who acted as lead legal counsel for the group that opposed the ordinance, said he and his allies were now considering challenging it in a state or federal court.

“Now is the time to look at the constitutionality of the actual ordinance, because I think there are issues with the way it is written,” Mr. Story said.

Voters recently rejected similar anti-discrimination ordinances in nearby Fayetteville and Springfield, Mo.

Source: New York  Times

 RICHARD FAUSSET

800 560 admin5

I’m From Philly. 30 Years Later, I’m Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing

2015/5/13-Talk to some of the folks who lived through the bombing of 62nd and Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia 30 years ago, and you’ll notice that they refer to the event by its full date. May 13, 1985.

That’s how Gerald Renfrow refers to it when we talk about the inferno. His house is about 30 yards from the compound on which the bomb was dropped — practically ground zero. He’d been living there since long before the bombing, and now he’s the block captain, trying to hold on to the home where he grew up and raised his own family.

That’s how Perry Moody refers to it, too. His house is on the north side of Pine Street. On that day three decades ago, he had been evacuated from the block but watched as the houses on the other side of the street were swallowed up by flames.

Perry Moody outside his home at 6225 Pine Street in Philadelphia.
Perry Moody outside his home at 6225 Pine Street in Philadelphia.
April Saul for NPR

So does Ramona Africa. She was actually inside the targeted house at 6221 Osage as it was battered by police bullets and deluge guns and, eventually, brought down by a makeshift bomb dropped from a police helicopter. She managed to escape the burning building. Her fellow members of MOVE, the radical organization to which she belonged that was standing off against the City of Philadelphia, were not as lucky.

The MOVE bombing was a cataclysm for my hometown, a part of the collective memories of Philadelphians of a certain age. I grew up in South Philly, about a 20-minute drive from ground zero, but I was just 4 when it happened, too young to remember the actual day. But as I got older, I would learn in bits and pieces about it, and the central role it played in the history of policing in my hometown.

Map of Philadelphia
Source: Open Street Map
Credit: Alyson Hurt/NPR

I started revisiting the story of MOVE in earnest again last fall, when the issue of race and policing had started to become a regular feature of the news. Almost every chord from that larger metastory — the mutual distrust between the police and black communities, the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, incidents of police brutality — seemed to resonate in the particular story of the bombing. But in the case of MOVE, the volume was turned way up. City police had killed nearly a dozen people and, in the process, leveled an entire swath of a neighborhood full of middle-class black homeowners. Neither the mayor who approved the bombing nor the officers who carried it out faced any official repercussions.

Today, the narrow block sits eerily quiet; most of the houses that were built to replace the ones destroyed by the fire are now vacant, boarded up and padlocked. The remaining residents, like Renfrow, are in limbo. Maybe the city will rehabilitate them. Maybe it will raze them. But since most of the people responsible for the tragedy and the city have moved on to grappling with new dilemmas, it’s been pretty easy to forget 62nd and Osage altogether.

But a few residents never left the 6200 block of Osage Avenue, and they’re quick to recall what their neighborhood was like before the spring of 1985: a nice block right by the Cobbs Creek Park, part of a safe, close-knit community where folks barbecued together while their kids played in the narrow street. I wanted to talk to them and others who lived through that day in Philadelphia, about what they remembered.

May 13, 1985: The Bombing

Here’s what my mother remembers about the bombing. It was the Monday after Mother’s Day, and three days after her birthday. She took my twin sister and me to school before heading back to our South Philly apartment. She was taking a personal day from work — a day of peace and quiet that was meant to be a belated birthday gift to herself. But when she got home and turned on the TV, she saw that Philly was not going to oblige her.

All of the local stations were reporting from a standoff in West Philly between the police and MOVE, a radical group that had turned a row house at 6221 Osage Ave. into a fortified compound. She wasn’t exactly surprised by what she saw on the grainy live feed; everyone had known that day was coming for a while, as tensions between MOVE and the police — and between MOVE and their neighbors on that block — had been rising for years.

Photo showing the neighborhood where the compound of the radical group MOVE was located.
Photo showing the neighborhood where the compound of the radical group MOVE was located.
Peter Morgan/AP

As the residents were evacuated from their homes ahead of the showdown, the police told them to take some clothes and toothbrushes; they should be back in their homes by the next day, the police said.

There were nearly 500 police officers gathered at the scene, ludicrously, ferociously well-armed — flak jackets, tear gas, SWAT gear, .50- and .60-caliber machine guns, and an anti-tank machine gun for good measure. Deluge guns were pointed from firetrucks. The state police had sent a helicopter. The city had shut off the water and electricity for the entire block. And, we’d come to learn, there were explosives on hand.

No one knew how many weapons the MOVE folks had, or even how many people were in the compound — the police guessed that there were six adults and possibly as many as 12 children inside. The MOVE members had built a bunker on the roof of the house, giving them a clear view of the police positions below.

The final warnings from the police started that morning, a little after 5:30. “Attention, MOVE … This is America,” Gregore Sambor, the police commissioner, yelled into his megaphone to the people in the compound. “You have to abide by the laws of the United States.”

The police had come with warrants for several people they believed to be in the compound at 6221. Around 6 a.m., they told members they had 15 minutes to come out. Instead, someone from the MOVE house began shooting at the police. The police returned fire in kind — over and over and over. According to the official report on the event, the police fired 10,000 rounds of ammunition at the MOVE compound over the next 90 minutes; they eventually had to ask the police academy to send more bullets.

Meanwhile, SWAT teams tried to blast holes into the side of the compound via the adjoining row houses. It didn’t work. On TV, reporters at the scene ducked for cover while filing their dispatches. Spectators and residents gathered at the barricades nearby to watch. Over the next few hours, police set off more explosions to try to gain access to the building. The cops couldn’t get inside, and the MOVE folks weren’t coming out.

It was chaos, and it went on like that all day — gunshots and explosions and well-tended homes nearby being shot up and blown apart. In the afternoon, Mayor Wilson Goode held a press conference and told reporters that he wanted to “seize control of the house … by any means possible.”

In the afternoon, Goode made his fateful decision: The police got the go-ahead to drop a makeshift bomb on the MOVE compound in an attempt to destroy the bunker on its roof.

Here’s how Linn Washington, a journalism professor at Temple University who was covering the siege that day as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, remembers what happened next. He was standing at a police command post nearby, flipping through his notes. There was a helicopter in the parking lot, he said. “I see these three guys come out [of the building] — all of them with 9 millimeters [pistols] on; one of them had a submachine gun and one of them had a satchel,” he said. “And they said, ‘Hey, you gotta get outta here!’ ”

“So the helicopter took off, made a circle, came back and then the whole neighborhood shook,” Washington told me. “It sounded like a gas main had exploded — but some of the media members knew it was a bomb. And things just went down from there.”

Flames shoot up skyward at the MOVE compound in West Philadelphia on May 13, 1985.
Flames shoot up skyward at the MOVE compound in West Philadelphia on May 13, 1985.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Everyone on the scene heard the explosion. Television viewers at home saw the moment of impact on TV, and they also saw that the rooftop bunker — the target the bomb was apparently meant to neutralize — was still standing.

But the roof had caught fire, and smoke began billowing over the tops of the row houses. The fire seemed to be getting bigger, but the firefighters were ordered by police Commissioner Sambore to stand down. (“I communicated … that I would like to let the fire burn,” he later told the city commission.)

Within 45 minutes, three more homes on the block were on fire, too. Then the roof of the MOVE house buckled under the flames and collapsed. By the time the firefighters finally began fighting the fire in earnest, it was too late. Within 90 minutes, the entire north side of Osage Avenue was on fire.

Philadelphia’s streets are famously narrow, making it easy for the fire to leap from burning trees on the north side to more homes on the south side. Then the flames spilled over to the homes behind 6221 Osage, to Pine Street. By evening, three rows of homes were completely on fire, a conflagration so large that the flames could be seen from landing planes at Philadelphia International Airport, more than 6 miles away. Smoke could be seen from across the city.

“Drop a bomb on a residential area? I never in my life heard of that,” a neighborhood resident told a reporter that night. “It’s like Vietnam.”

By the time the fire was finally under control, a little before midnight, 61 houses on that tidy block had been completely destroyed. Two hundred fifty people were suddenly, shockingly, without homes. It was the worst residential fire in the city’s history.

In the end, 11 people died in the fire. Five of them were children. It took weeks before the police were able to identify their remains.

MOVE member Ramona Africa is led out of Philadelphia City Hall on Feb. 9, 1986 after a jury found her guilty of two charges and acquitted her of 10 others in a case stemming from the fatal confrontation in May 1985 between police and the radical group. The jury found Africa guilty of riot and conspiracy.
Amy Sancetta/AP

How MOVE Landed On Osage Avenue

Only two people managed to make it out of the MOVE compound alive: a woman named Ramona Africa and a young boy named Birdie Africa.

I’d seen Ramona Africa a few times on television growing up, being interviewed by reporters during her civil suit against the city. I remembered her as a sleepy-eyed woman with locs. In 1996, a jury ordered the city to pay her $500,000, ruling that the siege on the MOVE compound violated her constitutional rights.

I met Ramona Africa last week, in a Philly park near where she’d lived since she was released from prison in 1992. (She was the only person involved in the MOVE bombing to serve any time.) She wore a peach shirt, shorts and sandals. Her signature dreadlocks were now flecked with gray. Her arms and legs were covered in burns.

She’s close to 60 now, but she was still on message. “What makes Nathan Hale a freedom fighter and Delbert Africa an urban terrorist?” she asked me, rhetorically. “Either resisting wrong, resisting oppression [and] injustice despite legality is to be commended and celebrated, or it is to be penalized and never accepted. Can’t have it both ways.”

For some reason, I’d always remembered her from her TV interviews as erratic and raving. But as we talked in the park, I couldn’t figure out where or how I’d formed that impression. Aside from the specifics of what she was saying, she seemed like the kind of person who might go to church with my mom and aunt — full of conviction, sure, but amiable and chatty.

As we sat in the park, she retraced her own story and told me how she linked up with MOVE. Ramona grew up in West Philly in a middle-class family, went to West Catholic High School, later to Temple University. She wanted to be a lawyer, she said, until she started working on community housing issues. “You cannot be a housing worker and not become an activist,” she said. It was around this time, in the mid-1970s, when she started meeting members of MOVE, whom she would see in court. They were righteous, she thought.

I learned from other folks, though, that in those years, the MOVE organization enjoyed a weird reputation in the city, in part because no one could quite figure it out. The group was formed by a man who went by the name of John Africa; all of his followers dropped their surnames and adopted “Africa” instead. Members of MOVE would protest outside the city zoo for animal rights. They ate raw food. They were against technology.

MOVE members holding sawed off shotguns and automatic weapons as they stand in front of their barricaded headquarters Friday night, in Philadelphia, May 21, 1977.
MOVE members holding sawed off shotguns and automatic weapons as they stand in front of their barricaded headquarters Friday night, in Philadelphia, May 21, 1977.
AP

“You had the vegetarianism and some aspects of Rastafarianism,” Robin Wagner-Pacifici, an author who has written about MOVE, told me. “I think they had their own conscious desire to be uncategorizable.”

In news accounts, they were often described as ideological kin of other black radical groups of the day, but Ramona told me that MOVE wasn’t a black nationalist group, and that it always boasted some nonblack members.

Indeed, their antics and outspokenness often put them on the wrong side of many local and community groups they were lumped in with. Washington, the former Daily News stringer, told me that MOVE members once vocally interrupted and derailed a meeting brokered by community leaders between two local gangs that were set to agree to a truce. “The liberals and progressives and the nationalists in the city were like, ‘Uhhh, what’s up with this crew?’ ” he said.

But Washington said they weren’t exactly outcasts, either. “There was this deference in terms of respecting rights,” he said. “And [other groups] were saying, we may not like them, but if it’s MOVE today, it’s us tomorrow, so we’ve got to stand up … and unpack the stuff they’ve gotten themselves into.”

Over time, though, the group’s reputation grew more menacing. MOVE members began squatting in a home in Powelton Village, a neighborhood in West Philadelphia not far from the University of Pennsylvania. It was an area whose residents were known for being amenable to countercultural, nontraditional family arrangements. But even there, it didn’t take long for MOVE to exhaust the patience of its neighbors. MOVE members would pace the roof of the house they occupied, dressed in fatigues and brandishing weapons. In megaphoned harangues, often issued by a member named Delbert Africa, they would call for the release of imprisoned MOVE members and threaten city officials. Federal agents seized a cache of weapons from MOVE that included dozens of pipe bombs. At one point, the city barricaded several blocks surrounding the MOVE compound for 56 straight days.

In the summer of 1978, MOVE members reached a deal with the city: they would turn over their weapons and leave their building if the city would release several MOVE members from city jails. The city honored the deal, but MOVE didn’t leave. On Aug. 8, 1978, the tension reached what seemed like its peak. Police tried to remove MOVE from the building with water cannons and battering rams and were met with gunfire from the building’s basement. An officer named James Ramp fell to the ground and died. Sixteen other police officers and firefighters were injured.

After several hours of holding out, the MOVE folks finally surrendered and began trickling out of the basement one at a time. But the cops were livid over Ramp’s killing. They went after Delbert Africa — the MOVE member who had been taunting them from the building — grabbed him by his dreadlocks and threw him to the ground. Several officers joined in, kicking and stomping him. That moment was captured on film by a Philadelphia Daily News photographer, and for many people, the police beating an unarmed, half-naked man was the showdown’s lasting image.

Two years later, nine MOVE members were convicted of third-degree murder in Ramp’s death and sentenced to 30 to 100 years in prison — the MOVE 9, they were called.

After MOVE left Powelton Village, it set up a new base on 6221 Osage Ave., where one member’s sister lived. It was a quiet, middle-class block in a black neighborhood. It was around this time that Ramona became MOVE’s “minister of information,” handling most of its interviews with the press, and changed her last name to Africa.

But on Osage Avenue, too, tensions rose: MOVE began boarding up the windows and doors to the home with wood and rail ties, turning the row house on the narrow street into a fortified bunker. The residents continued their diatribes over the loudspeaker.

Their new neighbors pleaded with them. Then the neighbors contacted the city. The police had a detail on MOVE and the new compound. There were warnings from the police, and counterwarnings from MOVE. MOVE responded with more belligerence from the loudspeaker. On and on it went like that, until May 1985, when the city police and MOVE hunkered down for their fiery standoff.

Vote For Rizzo

Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode stands on the roof of a newly constructed home, Sept. 17, 1985 in Philadelphia on the site of the deadly battle with the group MOVE. Homeowners burned out as a result of the police siege of the MOVE headquarters watch the rebuilding process with skepticism.
George Widman/AP

I still vividly remember the first time I heard about MOVE and the bombing. It was 1987, two years after it happened, and my mom was getting my sister and me ready for school in the morning. The morning news was on TV, and a political ad came on during a commercial break. In the ad, a caricature of Mayor Wilson Goode was sporting goggles and one of those leather World War II-era bomber pilot helmets. An ominous voice, the kind you only hear in political ads, intoned: Wilson Goode dropped a bomb on a Philadelphia neighborhood. Do you want him running your city?

Then the ad urged viewers to vote for Goode’s challenger in the race, Frank Rizzo. I was only six years old, but I’d heard of Wilson Goode – he was the city’s first black mayor, and he was on the TV all the time, besides. I’d never heard of this Frank Rizzo, but I knew he wasn’t a bomber.

“Mom, you should vote for Frank Rizzo because the thing on the TV said that he firebombed some people’s houses,” I remember telling my mom.

Mom was not having it. “I’m voting for Wilson Goode.” Her tone signaled that she was not about to entertain any further questions. I got the message.

Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo at a press conference on Sept. 7, 1970.
Warren M. Winterbottom/AP

My mother never talked to me much about the messy politics of the MOVE bombing. I don’t remember hearing about it from any other adults, or teachers I had. Indeed, until college, I’d only heard passing references to the group. But when folks did bring it up, I always remembered them expressing a weird ambivalence — vague sympathy toward MOVE abutting vague disdain.

And every now and then as I was growing up, a MOVE member named Ramona Africa would appear on the local television news, usually because of some legal fight she was engaging in with the city related to the bombing. Sometimes there was B-roll of what seemed like an endless line of rowhouses that looked like ours, going up in flames.

The first time my mom and I really talked about the MOVE bombing and what she remembered was this spring. She didn’t recall me questioning her about Goode or Rizzo all those years ago, but she could imagine rolling her eyes the idea of voting for Rizzo, even if it hadn’t come from a chatty six-year-old.

Back in 1986, Frank Rizzo had been running for mayor again; he’d already served two terms in the 1970s before running up against term limits. He tried to have those term limits overturned, openly appealing to white voters in the city to “vote white” regarding the ballot measure.

For a lot of black Philadelphians of a certain vintage, like my mother, the swaggering, profanity-spewing Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was the face and brains of Philadelphia’s brutal, aggressive police force. My mom recounted to me the time he arrested a group of Black Panthers, strip-searched them in public, and invited the press to come cover the whole ordeal; photos of the naked, humiliated men were splashed across the pages of the local papers the next day.

And she told me about the time the police shot and killed her friend, Ricky, who was a bystander during a shootout and had hidden beneath a nearby car for cover. There was the stuff she didn’t witness: the melée that ensued after Rizzo sent hundreds of nightstick-wielding police officers to break up a peaceful demonstration of black high school and junior students who were protesting at the Board of Education building. (“Get their black asses!” he was widely quoted as saying during the fracas.) Or the fact that Philly cops were infamous for “turf drops” — instead of taking black folks they’d arrested to jail, they’d leave them in hostile, white ethnic neighborhoods across town.

The enmity that black folks in Philly had for the police department was deep-rooted, and Rizzo had helped sow the seeds. And during his mayoralty, he became even more emboldened. (“I’m gonna be so tough as mayor, I gonna make Attila the Hun look like a f****t,” Rizzo was famously quoted as saying.) He was the city’s mayor during the first MOVE siege in 1978; during his tenure, the Justice Department would file a lawsuit against the city’s police department for brutality.

My mother had grown up in Rizzo’s Philadelphia, and when we talked this spring she told me that he was essentially the reason I got The Talk when I was growing up, why she always freaked out during my teenage years if I was out late at night and hadn’t called to check in. That’s why she could never have considered voting for Rizzo, even if it meant supporting the incumbent mayor who’d firebombed a black neighborhood.

Goode won in 1986, but by the slimmest of margins: 51 percent for him, and 49 percent for Rizzo. Clearly, my mom wasn’t the only black Philadelphian with a weird ambivalence toward MOVE. I remember picking up on that sentiment from other adults as a kid: on the one hand, there were the older folks who outright called the group dirty and weird. But then you’d also see signs reading “Free The Move 9” at any big-enough black cultural festival in the city.

Some of that ambivalence was certainly due to MOVE’s own slow rebranding in the years after the bombing, an attempt to make the organization seem less antagonistic. But I suspect it also stemmed from a feeling held by a lot of black folks in Philly, then and now: while MOVE folks were crazy troublemakers who they wouldn’t want as neighbors, the police could be much, much worse.

In Philadelphia's Clark Park, MOVE members Pam Africa (left) and Ramona Africa.
In Philadelphia’s Clark Park, MOVE members Pam Africa (left) and Ramona Africa.
April Saul for NPR

“Why Would I Want To Go Back There?”

Here’s how Ramona Africa, the only adult survivor of the bombing, remembered that day from inside the MOVE house. She and the other MOVE members inside the house were listening to the events as they unfolded on the radio — events that they, of course, were at the center of.

“We finally got the impression that they had their plans all laid out and they were ready to attack us — and kill us,” she said.

They decided to hunker down in the basement, which they thought was the safest part of the house. There was gunfire during the day and smoke from tear gas. Then, in the afternoon, the house rocked. “Initially we didn’t know that they had dropped a bomb,” she said. “I mean, why would it even enter our minds that they had dropped a bomb on our home?”

Over the years, Africa has maintained that when MOVE members tried to escape the burning building to surrender, the police opened fire on them, and they were forced back inside. The police have steadfastly denied this.

After the bombing, Birdie Africa, the 13-year-old boy who escaped with her, was taken into his father’s custody. He later changed his name back to Michael Moses Ward. The night of the bombing would be the last time either he or Ramona ever saw or spoke to each other. (Ward died suddenly at the age of 41 in 2013.)

I told Ramona I was going to talk to the folks over on 62nd and Osage, and asked her about the last time she’d been there. She told me she had never been back, not since that day.

“Why would I want to go back there?” she asked. “I don’t need to go there to remember and I don’t want to go back there. I have feelings. What John Africa taught MOVE is that we are living beings. We are alive. We have feelings….I see no reason to put myself in a position to be hurt.”

She said that MOVE is still around today, although she declined to say how many members they had. As we said goodbye, Ramona motioned to a young woman who looked to be in her 20s who was coming to meet her. Ramon said the woman, who was with several small children, was a MOVE member. As they chatted, a tall young man jogged by where we were standing, with some younger kids trailing him. “On the move!” the man said, raising his fist in the air to Ramona as he ran. The little boys did the same.

Ramona and the young woman wrapped up their conversation, and said goodbye. “On the move,” she said to Ramona as she turned away.

“On the move,” Ramona replied.

 

Source: NPR

Gene Demby

670 390 admin2

Getting to Graduation: Mississippi’s Statewide Push to Keep Kids in School

2015/05/13 – Coahoma County, Miss.— A few months back, DeAngelo Bryant, a 19-year-old senior at Coahoma Agricultural High School, was in danger of not graduating. He had failed the state subject-area test in U.S. History, which is required for graduation. And he wasn’t entirely clear on the point of getting a diploma. Most of the people he grew up with in Jonestown, a small outpost outside Clarksdale, don’t have high school degrees. Even the ones with diplomas usually can’t find good jobs.

But a series of events recently changed Bryant’s outlook.

One afternoon during football practice this fall, he noticed some men working near the field. They were welding, a teammate told him. Bryant watched the men at work and was intrigued. A few weeks later he told Angela Jones, an administrator at the high school, that he wanted to become a welder.

Jones recognized Bryant’s interest as an opportunity to explain what can be a foreign concept in this poor region with scant job opportunities: School can actually lead to well-paying work.

“I told him it’s a very lucrative field,” said Jones, who showed Bryant a path that began with graduating from high school and ended with a stable career in welding. “I told him to get his certificate so he could become a journeyman and move on and make the top dollar with the union.”

Bryant, who is already a father and has seen his parents struggle to support 10 children, took note—especially when Jones explained that the certificate could help him land a job that pays $25 an hour.

Jones also made sure that Bryant had multiple opportunities to score well on his ACT test, which, due to recent changes in graduation requirements, improved his chances of getting a diploma.

The percentage of students who graduate from Mississippi within four years—74.5 percent for the 2013-2014 school year according to statistics from the Mississippi Department of Education—isn’t too far below the national rate of 81 percent. (The national number is for the 2012-13 school year.) But in some poorer districts, those numbers are far lower. Before the curriculum was revamped, the graduation rate at Coahoma Agricultural High School, or Aggie as locals know it, had dropped as low as 46 percent. And about three miles down the road from Aggie, the Coahoma County School District has a four-year graduation rate of 52 percent—up from just 45 percent the year before, according to state data.

The Legislature’s goal to increase the statewide graduation rate to 85 percent by the 2018-2019 school year has, in part, fueled Mississippi to work hard to keep students in school. In 2006, the state created an office of dropout prevention. And two years ago, the Legislature required the 109 districts that had graduation rates below 80 percent to come up with a plan for restructuring their dropout prevention effort. Since then, districts have responded with everything from training to help teachers engage with disaffected students to updated curricula designed for today’s job market.

Although the dropout rate is a state-wide issue, the problem is particularly acute in Mississippi’s poorest areas, including the Delta, where graduation rates sometimes dip below 50 percent and educators face huge barriers—among them, an entrenched mindset that school simply doesn’t matter.

Grim Prospects

The prospects are grim for students who don’t make it to graduation. Some 68 percent of state inmates are high-school dropouts, according to a 2003 nationwide estimate. Dropping out costs students an additional $260,000 in lost earnings, taxes and productivity over their lifetimes when compared to high-school graduates, according to 2008 estimates from the Alliance for Excellent Education. In Mississippi, dropping out further narrows already slim employment options. The consequences of not graduating are particularly harsh for black males. According to a 2014 study that the Brookings Institution conducted, black male dropouts born in 1970 had an almost 70 percent chance of winding up in prison by their mid-30s—a rate that’s three times that of white dropouts. By the time they were 30, black dropouts were more likely to be in prison than to be employed.

Two years ago, Aggie was on the brink of failure. The school, one of only two agricultural high schools remaining in the state, had begun to seem like a holdover from another era. The Legislature planned to close it last July, and even the district’s superintendent, Valmadge Towner, understood why.

“We just knew that the kids were not interested in school,” said Towner, who is also the president of Coahoma Community College, which shares a campus with the high school. “We had low community engagement (and) low staff engagement.”

Towner helped design a program that would make school more relevant to students in this poor, rural area. Set amidst vast fields, Aggie would return to its roots and teach about agriculture, which had long since faded from its curriculum. But this time, with classes such as agribusiness and agri-mechanics, students would be prepared for work in 21st-century agriculture. The idea was to make schoolwork more hands-on and more fun while preparing students for a range of jobs.

Thus, on a recent Thursday, students in a food-science class that local chef Lee Craven taught were painting a banner they would hang at a local health fair behind food they had prepared. Students in the agri-science class learned about the economics of farming and planted a garden this year. Craven’s students recently used those turnips and other veggies to prepare a restaurant-worthy meal. Through its partnership with the community college, Aggie students can take other career-oriented courses, such as auto mechanics, medical billing and welding.

Daunting Budgets

The reinvention of Aggie is just one of the efforts the Department of Education is undertaking to boost graduation rates. The task is a daunting one, in part because, elsewhere in Mississippi, budget woes constrain efforts. Last year the Legislature provided the Office of Dropout Prevention only $800,000 to pay for programs that keep kids in school—programs that can be expensive.

Many districts have struck up arrangements with local businesses to pay for some programs. At the comparatively wealthy Gulfport High School, for instance, NASA helps pay for a state-of-the art robotics lab where, on a recent Monday afternoon, members of the robotics team were excitedly inspecting bi-directional wheels for their new robot. And local hospitals team up with the school for a program in medical careers. In several coastal communities, including Pascagoula and Ocean Springs, Chevron funds Project Lead the Way, a science, technology, engineering and mathematics program that helps boost math test scores and post-high school outcomes.

Unfortunately, poorer regions, which tend to have both higher drop-out rates and less local industry, often have difficulty finding private money to support programs that help engage and retain students. Jean Massey, associate state superintendent at the Mississippi Department of Education, said the private funding in wealthier areas thankfully allows the state to allocate more of its public dollars to poorer regions.

“We may never get the Chevron that the coast has in the Delta,” Massey said. “But if Chevron can support the coast, then we have additional dollars to support the Delta.”

Compounded Circumstances

The scarcity of resources, including the lack of potential corporate sponsors, is just one reason it’s harder to prevent students from dropping out in less densely populated areas. “A compounded set of circumstances make it very difficult to do dropout prevention” in rural areas, said Sandy Addis, interim director of the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network and a participant in a U.S. Department of Education project on dropout prevention in rural states, including Mississippi. Finding support for programs to help keep kids in school is “very different if I have a chamber of commerce … two blocks down,” he said.

National research shows that risk factors for dropping out include living in areas in which unemployment is high and the percentage of adults who hold high school diplomas is low, and living in low-income, single-parent households. All are common situations in Mississippi—and throughout the country. Students in rural areas struggle with additional burdens, including attendance.

“People are so far out, if it’s poor weather or bad weather, they don’t want to put their children on buses,” Debbie Harrell, superintendent in the Southeastern rural district of George County, said.

A combination of these issues led Shanika Lewis of Clarksdale to drop out. “It’s because my household is all…” Lewis said, her voice trailing off when she tried to explain why she left school in the seventh grade. After a pause, the former dropout, now 19, settled on the phrase “just not right.” Lewis’ uneven school attendance ended altogether after her grandmother, who had been caring for Lewis’ younger siblings, had a stroke. While Lewis’ mother worked, the 12-year-old stayed home to care for her partially paralyzed grandmother and six younger siblings for the better part of two years. Though she never returned to traditional school, Lewis is now enrolled in Ombudsman, an alternative program offered through the Clarksdale district. Seated in a large room alongside other former dropouts, Lewis has her own laptop and individualized lesson plan, which allow her to work at her own pace and help ease any embarrassment she might feel about being an older student. While she continues to shoulder much of the responsibility for caring for her grandmother and still struggles with absenteeism, Lewis is on track to earn a degree through the program. If she graduates, Lewis’ success will not impact her district’s graduation rate: The Mississippi Department of Education will count her as a “completer,” a special category for students who are neither traditional graduates nor dropouts.

As in other districts, a considerable number of Clarksdale seniors dropped out because they repeatedly failed state subject-area tests that, until recently, were a hard-and-fast graduation requirement.

“They try and try, and eventually, they give up,” Dennis Dupree, the district superintendent, said. Dupree estimates about 35 students this year may not get their diplomas because of the tests. Statewide, 3,856 of 28,797 seniors—about 13 percent—are at risk of not graduating because they failed at least one of four tests, according to Department of Education data.

But recent changes in graduation requirements are expected to reduce the number of students who don’t graduate due to state tests. In late March, the Department of Education announced it would no longer require seniors to pass all four subject-area tests in order to graduate. Starting next school year, a combined minimum test score will be sufficient, even if students fail one or more of the individual tests. And by the following school year—2016-2017—scores on standardized tests in algebra, biology, English and U.S. history will constitute only one quarter of a student’s final grade.

This year, for the first time, students who don’t pass the subject-area tests may be allowed to graduate based on a combination of their overall course grades in these subjects with their test scores. In Coahoma County, this means 10 of about 60 seniors who were at risk of failure may graduate, according to Coahoma County School District Superintendent Pauline Rhodes. Last year, the decision to allow ACT scores to be factored into graduation requirements, which paved the way for Aggie’s DeAngelo Bryant to get his diploma, helped boost Coahoma County’s graduation rate from 45 to 51 percent.

Between the district’s own efforts, which include putting a school counselor in charge of dropout prevention, and the changes in graduation requirements, Rhodes is hopeful Coahoma County’s graduation rate for this school year may climb as high as 61 percent.

Getting on Track

While the new testing policy is designed to help seniors, some districts focus on reaching children at risk of dropping out much earlier. Such students can be reliably identified, based on academic performance, as early as eighth grade. According to 2006 research on dropout trends in Philadelphia that Robert Balfanz, a researcher based at Johns Hopkins University, conducted, more than three-quarters of eighth graders who either fail math or English or miss more than five weeks of school go on to drop out.

The Star Academy, a program offered in George County and Lynchburg, just south of Memphis, is designed to catch such lagging students. This school year, Star, which the for-profit company Pitsco operates, enrolled 150 students entering eighth grade who had been held back at least once and gave them the opportunity to do the condensed coursework of eighth and ninth grades in a single year. So far, most Star students in both districts are expected to enter their traditional high schools as 10th graders. In the coming school year, two additional districts will likely create Star academies.

But, to make a substantial increase in the graduation rate, change will have to start earlier than eighth grade, Massey said.

“They need to start in elementary school getting kids thinking about what they want to do and why they should stay in school,” she said. “It’s not just learning about careers. It’s learning why they’re necessary. It’s, ‘If my buddies are dropping out of school, how do I stay on track?'”

If Massey’s prescribed solution amounts to cultural change, that fits with experts’ understanding that in order to get at the roots of the dropout problem, change must extend far beyond schools. About two-thirds of the risk factors for dropping out of high school are related to individual students, their families and their communities, according to Addis of the National Dropout Prevention Center and Network. “The school systems can’t do this alone,” he said.

Some Mississippi schools are attempting to address the more nebulous social issues that underlie school failure. Capturing Kids’ Hearts, for instance, a training program that includes an intense three-day workshop for school staff, is designed to strengthen the student/teacher bond, a connection that has been shown to help keep students in school. The program, which the for-profit group Flippen Education offers, encourages staff to engage students through such basic social niceties as eye contact, handshakes, and pre-class fist bumps.

“It (has) connected teachers to kids in a more civilized, caring, empathetic way,” Perry Swindall said of the program. Swindall, who teaches physical education and coaches at Oxford Middle School, feels the more respectful relationships the program has fostered benefit students and teachers alike.

“That teacher has a harder time raising her voice or losing her temper with someone that there’s a connection to,” Swindall said. “And students have a harder time misbehaving when there’s a personal connection with that teacher.”

Oxford, a university town with a higher than average graduation rate of 88 percent, is one of the luckier districts when it comes to a critical resource for dropout prevention: role models—lots of parents who not only graduated high school, but went on to college and a career. In many parts of the state, adults who can demonstrate and speak firsthand to the benefits of a high-school diploma are in short supply. In Coahoma County, for instance, where per capita income is less than $16,000 a year, many students who drop out have parents who didn’t graduate—and thus haven’t experienced the value of education.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Devona Jones, the dropout-prevention coordinator for the Coahoma County school district, said. “We have parents who don’t have the capacity to help the kids. They don’t see the necessity of going.”

A few miles away in Clarksdale, School Resource Officer Earnest Moore sees such families every day. Moore, one of five school officers that the district employs, visits the homes of students who are absent for more than five days without an explanation. In his daily rounds, he has heard just about every excuse for not making it to school, from parents not having a babysitter (and thus calling an older sibling into service) to oversleeping.

Moore reminds parents that the failure to send their children to school could—at least technically—result in the suspension of their public benefits. A few years back, authorities here withheld checks from parents whose children were truant, and Clarksdale’s school district office was soon “flooded” with parents who wanted to re-enroll children who had dropped out, according to Dupree.

But that provision of the law is no longer enforced. So Moore goes to great lengths to help keep kids in school, supplying rides to school, alarm clocks, clean clothes and plenty of encouragement—even to those who can no longer attend traditional high school.

“We don’t turn our backs because you’re 19 or 20 years old,” Moore said. “I’ll go to their house and say, ‘If you’re not coming back to school, enroll in GED.'” The important thing, he said, is not to give up.

Back at Aggie, DeAngelo Bryant is seeing his persistence pay off. Bryant recently scored a 30 on the ACT reading test, which, through the state’s recently amended requirements, secured his graduation. Now, he said, he’s excited not just “to walk,” but to start preparing for his career. He’ll begin welding classes at Coahoma Community College this summer.

 

Source: The Hechinger Report 

Sharon Lerner