60 years later- A Human Tragedy-The Life of Emmett Till

 Sixty Years Later....
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an Black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14, after reportedly flirting with a 21 year old white woman.

The facts of what took place in the store are still disputed but according to several versions, including allegations from some of the kids standing outside the store when Till walked in,^[22] Till may have wolf-whistled at Bryant.^[23] A newspaper account following his disappearance stated that Till sometimes whistled to alleviate his stuttering.^[24] His speech was sometimes unclear; his mother said he had particular difficulty with pronouncing "b" sounds, and may have whistled to overcome problems asking for bubble gum.^[25] According to other stories, Till may have grabbed Bryant's hand and asked her for a date, or said "Bye, baby" as he left the store,^[12] or "You needn't be afraid of me, baby, I've been with white women before."^[26]

Bryant testified during the murder trial that Till had made sexual advances and asked her for a date.^[27] In her testimony, Bryant alleged that Till grabbed her hand while she was stocking candy and said, "How about a date, baby?"^[27] She said that after she freed herself from his grasp, the young man followed her to the cash register,^[27] grabbed her waist and said, "What's the matter baby, can't you take it?"^[27] Bryant then allegedly freed herself, and Till told her, "You needn't be afraid of me, baby,"^[27] used "one 'unprintable' word"^[27] and said "I've been with white women before."^[27] Bryant also alleged that one of Till's companions came into the store, grabbed him by the arm and ordered him to leave.^[27]


The 21 year old white woman

Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, writing about the incident decades later, challenged Carolyn Bryant's account.^[28] Entering the store "less than a minute" after Till was left inside alone with Bryant,^[28] Wright saw no inappropriate behavior and heard "no lecherous conversation."^[28] Wright said Till "paid for his items and we left the store together."^[28] The FBI also noted in their 2006 investigation of the incident that a second anonymous source, who was confirmed to have been in the store at the same time as Till and his cousin, backed this claim as well.^[21]


The 14 year old Black Youth


The killers

 

The results

In The Words of Marvin Gaye: What's Going On!

In this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that slaves were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the Federal Government or the courts. The opinion also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a Federal territory.

Activist jailed and beaten

Hamer became a SNCC field secretary in early 1963. A few months later, she attended a citizenship training school sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Charleston, South Carolina, to learn how to teach her neighbors about the benefits of citizenship. On the bus trip home in June, the bus made a rest stop in Winona, Mississippi. Annelle Ponder of SCLC, who was traveling with the group, said that three or four of the people went in to the café to be served. They sat at the counter but the waitress refused to serve them. A highway patrolman came from the rear of the café and tapped some of the group on the shoulder with his billy club, saying, “Y’all get out — get out.” Ponder reminded him it was against the law to refuse them service but he said, “Ain’t no damn law, you just get out of here!”
On the way back to the bus, Ponder wrote down the license number of the patrol car and at that, the patrolman and police chief came out of the restaurant and put the cafe group under arrest. As that was occurring, Hamer got off the bus to see whether the rest of the group should go on to Greenwood. The police chief arrested her as well. Later the police had two other black prisoners beat Hamer and 15-year-old June Johnson, who would not say “sir” to the men. In a trial later that year, an all-white jury acquitted the law officers. Hamer recalled, “After I got out of jail, half dead, I found that Medgar Evers had been shot down in his own yard.”

A Nassau Bay police officer has been suspended with pay after former astronaut Mae Jemison accused him of twisting her wrist and slamming her to the ground during a traffic stop.
The Chicago native, who in 1992 became the first black woman to fly in space, complained to Police Chief Robert Holden that Officer Henry Hughes III physically and emotionally mistreated her when she was arrested on a speeding warrant Saturday. 
The department said Hughes has been suspended with pay pending an investigation by the department's internal affairs division.
According to Jemison's complaint, Hughes stopped her for an illegal turn. After learning of an outstanding warrant for failing to pay a speeding ticket, the officer told Jemison she was under arrest.
Her attorney, Rusty Hardin, said Jemison threw down her car keys in disbelief. When the officer started to handcuff her, she reached down to pick up the keys.
"When she does that, he grabs her left hand, knocking her wallet and paper out of it, twists her wrist and throws her arms up behind her back" before throwing her down on the road, Hardin said.

On Tuesday, the arrest warrant for the incident was released, detailing state trooper Brian Encinia’s version of events.
According to the officer, Sandra  Bland — a 28-year old African American woman — was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change and he “had Bland exit the vehicle to further conduct a safe traffic investigation.”
“Force was used to subdue Sandra  Bland to the ground to which Bland continued to fight back,” he added.
Sandra Bland was charged with assault on a public servant then booked in the Waller County Jail, where she later died.

 

50 years later...is voting still a right?

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.^[7][8] It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the American Civil Rights Movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections.^[7] Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act allowed for a mass enfranchisement of racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country.^[9]

The Act contains numerous provisions that regulate the administration of elections. The Act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2, for instance, prohibits any state or local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Additionally, the Act specifically outlaws literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities.

The Act also contains "special provisions" that apply to only certain jurisdictions. A core special provision is the Section 5 preclearance requirement, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing any change affecting voting without receiving preapproval from the U.S. Attorney General or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the change does not discriminate against protected minorities.^[10] Another special provision requires jurisdictions containing significant language minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and other election materials.

Section 5 and most other special provisions apply to jurisdictions encompassed by the "coverage formula" prescribed in Section 4(b). The coverage formula was originally designed to encompass jurisdictions that engaged in the most egregious voting discrimination in 1965, and Congress updated the formula in 1970 and 1975. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions.^[11] The Court did not strike down Section 5, but without a coverage formula, Section 5 is unenforceable.^[12

 

Fifty years ago, Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old anthropology major at Queens College, went down to Mississippi for Freedom Summer. His first stop was Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he and Mickey Schwerner, a 24-year-old graduate student in social work at Columbia University and James Chaney, a 21-year-old volunteer with the Congress for Racial Equality from Meridian, Mississippi, were sent to investigate a church burning. Schwerner and Chaney had spoken at Mount Zion Methodist Church over Memorial Day, urging local blacks to register to vote.

In 1964, only 6.7 percent of African-Americans were registered in Mississippi and not a single one in Philadelphia’s Neshoba County. The fight for voting rights was the reason Goodman traveled to Mississippi. “He just thought it was unfair that an American citizen of voting age was restrained and stopped from voting,” said his older brother, David.

After its enactment in 1965, the law immediately decreased racial discrimination in voting. The suspension of literacy tests and assignments of federal examiners and observers allowed for high numbers of racial minorities to register to vote.^[56]:702 Nearly 250,000 African Americans registered to vote in 1965, one-third of whom were registered by federal examiners.^[114] In covered jurisdictions, less than a third (29.3%) of the African American population was registered in 1965; by 1967, this number increased to more than half (52.1%),^[56]:702 and a majority of African American residents became registered to vote in 9 of the 13 Southern states.^[114] Similar increases were seen in the number of African American elected officials: between 1965 and 1985, African Americans elected as state legislators in the 11 former Confederate states increased from 3 to 176.^[115]:112 Nationwide, the number of African American elected officials increased from 1,469 in 1970 to 4,912 in 1980.^[82]:919 By 2011, the number was approximately 10,500.^[116] Similarly, registration rates for language minority groups increased after Congress enacted the bilingual election requirements in 1975 and enhanced them in 1992. In 1973, the percent of Hispanics registered to vote was 34.9%; by 2006, that amount nearly doubled. The number of Asian Americans registered to vote in 1996 increased 58% by 2006.^{[41]:233–235}

After the Act's initial success in combating tactics designed to deny minorities access to the polls, the Act became predominately used as a tool to challenge racial vote dilution.^[56]:691 Starting in the 1970s, the Attorney General commonly raised Section 5 objections to dilutive voting changes, including discriminatory annexations, redistricting plans, and election methods such as at-large election systems, runoff election requirements, and prohibitions on bullet voting.^{[100]:105–106} In total, 81% (2,541) of preclearance objections made between 1965 and 2006 were based on vote dilution.^[100]:102 Claims brought under Section 2 have also predominately concerned vote dilution.^{[56]:708–709} Between the 1982 creation of the Section 2 results test and 2006, at least 331 Section 2 lawsuits resulted in published judicial opinions. In the 1980s, 60% of Section 2 lawsuits challenged at-large election systems; in the 1990s, 37.2% challenged at-large election systems and 38.5% challenged redistricting plans. Overall, plaintiffs succeeded in 37.2% of the 331 lawsuits, and they were more likely to succeed in lawsuits brought against covered jurisdictions.^{[117]:654–656}

By enfranchising racial minorities, the Act facilitated a political realignment of the Democratic and Republican parties. Between 1890 and 1965, minority disenfranchisement allowed conservative Southern Democrats to dominate Southern politics. After Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Act into law, newly enfranchised racial minorities began to vote for liberal Democratic candidates throughout the South, and Southern white conservatives began to switch their party registration from Democrat to Republican en masse.^[118]:290 These dual trends caused the two parties to ideologically polarize, with the Democratic Party becoming more liberal and the Republican Party becoming more conservative. The trends also created competition between the two parties,^[118]:290 which Republicans capitalized on by implementing the Southern strategy.^[119] Over the subsequent decades, the creation of majority-minority districts to remedy racial vote dilution claims also contributed to these developments. By packing liberal-leaning racial minorities into small numbers of majority-minority districts, large numbers of surrounding districts became more solidly white, conservative, and Republican. While this increased the elected representation of racial minorities as intended, it also decreased white Democratic representation and increased the representation of Republicans overall.^[118]:292 By the mid-1990s, these trends culminated in a political realignment: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party became more ideologically polarized and defined as liberal and conservative parties, respectively; and both parties came to compete for electoral success in the South,^[118]:294 with the Republican Party controlling most of Southern politics.^[

 

On June 21, 1964, the young civil rights activists were arrested by the Neshoba County police and then abducted by the Klan. Their bodies were found 44 days later in an earthen dam. Goodman and Schwerner, both white, had been shot once. Chaney, who was African-American, had been mutilated beyond recognition. Martin Popper, the attorney for the Goodman family, called it “the first interracial lynching in the history of the United States.”

The murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were the starkest example of the brutality the Freedom Summer volunteers encountered from local whites. Freedom Summer “produced almost as many acts of violence by local whites as it did black voters,” wrote historian David Garrow. Mississippi didn’t change until Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. “A lot of people lost their lives getting that Voting Rights Act into place.

The legislation eliminated the literacy tests and poll taxes that for so long prevented blacks from registering to vote in Mississippi and other Southern states and made sure those states didn’t adopt new voter suppression tactics in the future. The VRA transformed Mississippi and the rest of the country. Today, the Magnolia State has more black elected officials than any other state.

The 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer happens to coincide with the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v Holder, where the Supreme Court’s conservative majority invalidated Section 4 of the VRA on June 25, 2013. As a result, states like Mississippi, with the worst history of voting discrimination, no longer have to clear their voting changes with the federal government.

Section 4 provided the formula for covering states that had to submit their voting changes under Section 5 of the VRA (known as “preclearance”). Chief Justice John Roberts struck down Section 4 for two reasons: it was based on outdated data from the 1960s and 1970s, he argued and violated what he called the “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty” among states. Though Roberts conceded “voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that,” he stated that the “extraordinary measures” of the VRA were no longer justified.

50 Years Later..".I Can't Breathe?"

A moment to Reflect: The Murder of Dr. King

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old. In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People's Campaign to focus on the issue, including an interracial poor people's march on Washington, and in March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers' protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration. On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop...And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land." One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On April 9, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King's casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules. The evening of King's murder, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was relatively easy. On June 8, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King's murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King's assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named "Raoul" had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray's motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years. During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S. government and military. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists' minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist influence. For the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by U.S. military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967. Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new friends in the Cold War-era U.S. government.

I too, am an American

There's evidence that just being black in the United States is often all it takes to arouse suspicion. Here are 21 examples from the last five years of some of the things black people can't do without others thinking they're up to no good. 1. Listen to loud music at a gas station. 2. Walk home from a snack run to 7-11. 3. Wear a hoodie. 4. Drive after swimming. 5. Drive in a car with a white girl. 6. Appear in public in New York City. 7. Walk on the wrong side of the street. 8. Wait for a school bus to take you to your high school basketball game. 9. Drink iced tea in a parking lot. 10. Seek help after a car accident. 11. Inspect your own property. 12. Show up at your job. 13. Talk trash after an NFL game. 14. Throw a temper tantrum in kindergarten. 15. Buy designer accessories at Barney’s. 16. Buy designer accessories at Macy’s. 17. Be a 13-year-old boy. 18. Enter your own home. 19. Botch a science experiment. 20. Be a tourist. 21. Lay face down in handcuffs.

Free Breakfast for School Children and Fred Hampton- (an overview)

In January, 1969, the Free Breakfast for School Children Program was initiated at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland by the Black Panther Party. The Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area. Initially run out of a St. Augustine's Church in Oakland, the Program became so popular that by the end of the year, the Panthers set up kitchens in cities across the nation, feeding over 10,000 children every day before they went to school.In the mid 1960s, Black Panther Party chapters developed a series of social programs to provide needed services to black and poor people. Their intent was to promote "a model for an alternative, more humane social scheme." These programs, of which there came to be more than 60,[2] were eventually referred to as Survival Programs, and were operated by Party members under the slogan "survival pending revolution." One such program was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which began in January 1969 [3] at one small Catholic church in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, and spread to many cities in America where there were Party chapters. Thousands of poor and hungry children were fed free breakfasts every day by the Party under this program. The Panthers believed that "Children cannot reach their full academic potential if they have empty stomachs." The magnitude and powerful impact of this program was such that the federal government adopted a similar program for public schools across the country. The FBI assailed the free breakfast program as nothing more than a propaganda tool used by the Party to carry out its communist agenda. More insidiously, the FBI denounced the Party itself as a group of communist outlaws bent on overthrowing the U.S. government. In Chicago, the leader of the Panthers local, Fred Hampton, led five different breakfast programs on the West Side, helped create a free medical center, and initiated a door to door program of health services which test for sickle cell anemia, and encourage blood drives for the Cook County Hospital. The Chicago party also reached out to local gangs to clean up their acts, get them away from crime and bring them into the class war. The Party's efforts met wide success, and Hampton's audiences and organized contingent grew by the day.On the evening of December 3, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, which was attended by most members. Afterwards, as was typical, several Panthers retired to the Monroe Street apartment to spend the night, including Hampton and Deborah Johnson, Blair Anderson, Doc Satchell, Harold Bell, Verlina Brewer, Louis Truelock, Brenda Harris, and Mark Clark. Upon arrival, they were met by O'Neal, who had prepared a late dinner which was eaten by the group around midnight. O'Neal had slipped the powerful barbiturate sleep agent, secobarbitol into a drink that was consumed by Hampton during the dinner in order to sedate Hampton so that he would not awaken during the subsequent raid. O'Neal left at this point, and, at about 1:30 a.m., Hampton fell asleep in mid-sentence talking to his mother on the telephone. Although Hampton was not known to take drugs, Cook County chemist Eleanor Berman would report that she ran two separate tests which each showed a powerful barbiturate had been introduced into Hampton's blood. An FBI chemist would later fail to find similar traces, but Berman stood by her findings. At 4:00 a.m., the heavily armed police team arrived at the site, dividing into two teams, eight for the front of the building and six for the rear. At 4:45, they stormed in the apartment.Hampton's body was dragged into the doorway of the bedroom and left in a pool of blood. The officers then directed their gunfire towards the remaining Panthers, who were hiding in another bedroom. They were wounded, then beaten and dragged into the street, where they were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder of the officers. They were each held on US$100,000 bail.A public pool has been named in his honor in his home town of Maywood, Illinois. On Saturday September 7, 2007, a bust of Hampton was erected outside the Fred Hampton Family Aquatic Center.A public pool has been named in his honor in his home town of Maywood, Illinois On Saturday September 7, 2007, a bust of Hampton was erected outside the Fred Hampton Family Aquatic Center. In March 2006, supporters of Hampton's charity work proposed the naming of a Chicago street in honor of the former Black Panther leader. Chicago's chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police opposed this effort.

All This was the Same Season of Struggle

The dream was to end the humiliation. The next dream, Ed, was the public accommodations bill to make it illegal in 1964. Then the dream in '65 was the right to vote. Let us not forget that blacks could not vote but until '67 most white women in the South could not serve on juries and 18-year-olds could not vote. You couldn't vote on college campuses, you could not vote bilingual. So all of that came out of that season of struggle and while the dream speech was a big deal, I think Medgar Evers' assassination on June the 12th was a big motivating factor for action and of course the Birmingham bombing on Sept. 15th after the speech and then President Kennedy being killed Nov. 22nd. All that was the same season of struggle.

9 more Black pearls: 4 Little Black Pearls-four little Black girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church...

9 black pearls scattered on the Black Church floor:   Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC....
In addition to Mr. Pinckney, 41 year old pastor and state senator, the victims were Cynthia Hurd, 54, who served as the regional manager of the St. Andrews branch of the county library; the Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, the mother of four daughters — the youngest is in junior high school and the oldest is in college; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a coach of the girls’ track and field team and a speech therapist at Goose Creek High School; Tywanza Sanders, 26, who had graduated from Allen University as a business administration major last year and was looking for a job; Ethel Lee Lance, 70, who had worked at the church for more than three decades; the Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr., a retired pastor from another church in Charleston; Myra Thompson, 59; and Susie Jackson, 87.

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was used as a meeting-place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shutterworth. Tensions became high when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) became involved in a campaign to register African American to vote in Birmingham.
On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church. Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.

Addie Mae Collins

Denise McNair

Carole Robertson

Cynthia Wesley

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals."
A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested and charged with murder and possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On 8th October, 1963, Chambliss was found not guilty of murder and received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.
The case was unsolved until Bill Baxley was elected attorney general of Alabama. He requested the original Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the case and discovered that the organization had accumulated a great deal of evidence against Chambliss that had not been used in the original trial.
In November, 1977 Chambliss was tried once again for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. Now aged 73, Chambliss was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Chambliss died in an Alabama prison on 29th October, 1985.
On 17th May, 2000, the FBI announced that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan splinter group, the Cahaba Boys. It was claimed that four men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had been responsible for the crime. Cash was dead but Blanton and Cherry were arrested.
In May 2002 the 71 year old Bobby Cherry was convicted of the murder of Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley and was sentenced to life in prison.