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..".I Can't Breathe?"

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.

Oprah Winfrey - Who were the Scottsboro Boys?

Oprah Winfrey says that President Barack Obama has been the victim of racism and that the ongoing issue of prejudice is a generational one.
“There is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs,” Winfrey said Friday in an interview with the BBC. "And that occurs in some cases and maybe even in many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that, and it’s the kind of thing that nobody ever says but everybody is thinking it.”
Winfrey pointed to Republican Congressman Joe Wilson yelling "liar" during a 2009 speech Obama was giving to Congress.

The interview was part of a promotional tour for the film “The Butler,” which tells the story of Cecil Gaines, an African American man who served as a White House butler for eight different presidents.

Winfrey took her comments one step further, saying that the issue of racism is largely generational. Specifically, she said that cultural prejudice in the U.S. will largely recede after the last generation of individuals have died off.

“I said this, you know, for apartheid South Africa, I said this for my own, you know, community in the South — there are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die," Winfrey said.

However, Winfrey also made a point to note that there has been progress in race relations.
"It would be foolish to not recognize that we have evolved in that we’re not still facing the same kind of terrorism against black people en masse as was displayed with the Scottsboro boys. It’s gotten better," she said. "… There are laws that have allowed us to progress beyond what we saw in the Scottsboro boys and beyond even the prejudice we see in 'The Butler.' "
Nonetheless, Winfrey’s comments have been heavily criticized by the conservative media.

Noel Sheppard, who is white, writes at the conservative media watchdog site NewsBusters: “Why do folks such as her only see racism through the prism of how blacks are treated? By looking at the problem so narrowly, doesn't it make matters worse?”

And the website Right Scoop added, "Oprah Winfrey is going around the world telling everyone that Americans are racist."

In August, Winfrey made headlines when she told Larry King she encounters racism, citing an incident at a store in Switzerland where a shop clerk refused to show her a purse that cost $38,000.

"I'm in a store, and the person doesn't obviously know that I carry the black card and so they make an assessment based upon the way I look and who I am," later explained. "I didn't have anything that said, 'I have money.' I wasn't wearing a diamond stud. I didn't have a pocketbook. I didn't wear Louboutin shoes. I didn't have anything. ... You should be able to go in a store looking like whatever you look like and say, 'I'd like to see this.' That didn't happen."