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.

 

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.