Black Lives Matter: The Civil Rights Movement
Kenard Dansbury
Social Justice is the fair and proper administration of laws conforming to the natural law that all persons, irrespective of ethnic origin, gender, possessions, race, religion, etc., are to be treated equally and without prejudice. An example of social justice with African American's is the black lives matter movement. In the summer of 2013, three community organizers Alicia Garza, a domestic worker rights organizer in Oakland, California; Patrisse Cullors, an anti-police violence organizer in Los Angeles, California; and Opal Tometi, an immigration rights organizer in Phoenix, Arizona, founded the Black Lives Matter movement in cyberspace as a sociopolitical media forum, giving it the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The idea came …show more content…
when the three, who became aware of each other through Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity (BOLD), a national organization that trains community organizers, all responded similarly to the July 2013 acquittal of neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman by a Sanford, Florida, jury for the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Angered and deeply burdened by the verdict, members in BOLD social forums began asking the organization's leaders how they were going respond to the assault on and devaluation of black lives. Garza wrote a Facebook post which she titled "A Love Note to Black People" calling on them to "get active," "get organized," and "fight back." For Garza, the injustice targeting black people was a disease called institutional racism that could not be defeated by just voting, being educated, and pulling oneself up with strapless boots. She ended by telling her readers that she loves them and that "Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter." Cullors responded to the post with the hashtag "#BlackLivesMatter." Tometi added her support and a new organization was born.
While Black Lives Matter drew inspiration from the 1960s civil rights/black power movement, the 1980s black feminist/womanist movement, the 1980s anti-apartheid/Pan African movement, the late-1980s political hip-hop movement, the 2000s LGBT movement, and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, they used newly developed social media to reach thousands of like minded people across the nation quickly to create a black social justice movement that rejected the charismatic male-centered, top-down movement structure that had been the model for most previous efforts.
Instead, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, Black Lives Matter engaged in collective planning for their campaigns. Unlike SNCC, but similar to Black Youth Project 100 in Chicago, Illinois, Black Lives Matter incorporated those on margins of traditional black freedom movements, including women, the working poor, the disabled, undocumented immigrants, atheists and agnostics, and those who identify as queer …show more content…
and
, transgender. These marginalized black people played visible and central roles in the formation of Black Lives Matter and in their ongoing community organizing and protests.
Like other protesters, Black Lives Matter members were angered not simply by the shooting of an unarmed African American but also because his body was allowed to lie in the street for four hours before it was eventually taken to the city morgue, an event that was well documented by bystanders with cell phones and distributed within minutes around the world via Twitter and Facebook. This instant exposure generated months of sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent protests which involved Ferguson residents at first but eventually drew tens of thousands of people from across the United States. The exposure of the protests and the police reaction to their chant, "Hands up! Don't Shoot!" was literally broadcasted by thousands of on-the-scene protesters as well as by the traditional media, ensuring as never before, that the centuries-old issue of police brutality would now be addressed on the national and international stage.
While Black Lives Matter was initially one of hundreds of organizations protesting in Ferguson, they eventually emerged as the one of the best organized and visible groups with their slogan "Black Lives Matter." By autumn, that slogan had become the call for action against what many saw as the unjustifiable killing not just of Michael Brown but of dozens of other African American men and women whose deaths occurred away from the view of cell phone cameras.
Moreover, with the creation of a webpage independent of corporate media control, their use of Twitter and Facebook to organize, and online conference calls to plan strategy, Black Lives Matter became a model for how black liberations groups in the twenty-first century can organize an effective freedom rights campaign.
The movement's success also resulted from their inculcation of the feminist political mantra, the "personal is political." That concept meant that each member's personal experience is informed and molded by the various campaigns against systemic oppression that are inescapably political and collectively connected to the well-being of others. This framework has been used to transform Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message, "None of us are free until all of us are free," from a concept centered primarily on the freedom dreams of black heterosexual men to a campaign that equally addresses the freedom struggles of all people but is explicitly centered on black liberation. Dr. King's message was central in the Black Lives Matter "State of the Black
[SHORTENED TITLE UP TO 50 CHARACTERS]
9
, Union" statement released on January 22, 2015.
Between August 2014 and August 2015, Black Lives Matter chapters around the world have organized more than nine hundred and fifty protest demonstrations. Their call for social justice has ranged from targeting well-known police-involved deaths such as the Eric Garner strangulation in Staten Island, New York, on July 17, 2014, and lesser known cases involving the killing of homosexual and heterosexual black women and children such as twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland on November 22, 2014. Partly as a result of the public outcry organized and promoted by Black Lives Matter, the U.S. Department of Justice has investigated police misconduct in several cities, including Albuquerque (New Mexico), Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Ferguson, Newark (New Jersey), New Orleans (Louisiana), Portland, New York, North Charleston, Seattle, and St. Louis. On December 18, 2014, the U.S. Congress enacted the Death and Custody Reporting Act which now requires states receiving federal funds to document and report all deaths at the hands of police in local jurisdictions "that occur in the process of
arrest."
Despite these efforts, in the United States more black deaths directly or indirectly because of police violence ensured that the Black Lives Matter movement would continue to grow. On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was shot in the back while fleeing from Officer Michael T. Slager, a policeman from North Charleston, South Carolina. On July 13, 2015, Sandra Bland was taken into custody near Prairie View University near Houston, Texas, after she was stopped by Brian Encinia, a Texas State trooper. She later died under mysterious circumstances in the Waller County Jail. On July 19, 2015, Samuel DuBose of Cincinnati, Ohio, was killed by Ray Tensing, a University of Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop. Besides the race of each victim, all these incidents shared the rapid dissemination of video at the time of their encounters with law enforcement officers which led many viewers to question the tactics and in some cases the legality of police action. Black Lives Matter played a major role in alerting people about these incidents and spurring them to take action. As a consequence, millions of people are now aware of the ongoing impact of police brutality on black lives.
The Black Lives Matter Movement has been successful in creating a new mechanism for non violently addressing racial inequality in twenty-first century America. Its organizational structure builds' on the legacy of earlier reform campaigns, including the civil rights/black power
, movement, Pan Africanism, Africana womanism, the LGBT movement, and the Occupy Wall Street movement while using cyber activism to promote its agenda. Specifically, Black Lives Matter puts the feminist theory of "intersectionality" into action by calling for a united focus on issues ofrace, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, disability, and state-sponsored violence. It argues that to prioritize one social issue over another issue will ultimately lead to failure in the global struggle for civil and human rights.
I believe we have not achieved equality in America because we still are being oppressed and denied opportunities because the color of our skin or the way our hair is or just the city we come from. We deserve the equality 100%. We have fought for everything that we have now. For example schools are no longer segregated because it was unconstitutional. There was a court case about it called Brown vs, The Board of Education. On May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Court's unanimous decision overturned provisions of the 1896 Plessy v.
Ferguson decision, which had allowed for "separate but equal" public facilities, including public schools in the United States. Declaring that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," the Brown v. Board decision helped break the back of state-sponsored segregation, and provided a spark to the American civil rights movement. This unanimous decision handed down by the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, ended federal tolerance of racial segregation. In Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896) the Court had ruled that "separate but equal" accommodations on railroad cars conformed to the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. That decision was used to justify segregating all public facilities, including schools. In addition, most school districts, ignoring Plessy's "equal" requirement, neglected their black schools. In the mid-1930s, however, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) challenged school segregation in a series of court cases. In these the Court required "tangible" aspects of segregated schools to be equivalent. The rulings prompted several school districts to improve their black students' schools. Then the naacp contested the constitutionality of segregation in four regions. Each of the school districts involved had improved the tangible aspects of its black schools, but Brown brought segregation, per se, squarely before the Court. In the unanimous decision Chief Justice Earl Warren rejected the Plessy doctrine, declaring that "separate educational facilities" were "inherently unequal" because the intangible inequalities of segregation deprived black students of equal protection under the law. A year later, the Court
·. published implementation guidelines requiring federal district courts to supervise school desegregation "on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed." The plessy vs. Ferguson case is another one. This 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law. Rejecting Plessy's argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Court ruled that a state law that "implies merely a legal distinction" between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th and 14th Amendments. Restrictive legislation based on race continued following the Plessy decision, its reasoning not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. The case came from Louisiana, which in 1890 adopted a law providing for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" on its railroads. In 1892, passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car. He was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court for New Orleans, who upheld the state law. The law was challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that it conflicted with the 13th and 14th Amendments.
By a 7-1 vote, the Court said that a state law that "implies merely a legal distinction" between the two races did not conflict with the 13th Amendment forbidding involuntary servitude, nor did it tend to reestablish such a condition.
The Court avoided discussion of the protection granted by the clause in the 14th Amendment that forbids the states to make laws depriving citizens of their "privileges or immunities," but instead cited such laws in other states as a "reasonable" exercise of their authority under the police power. The purpose of the 14th Amendment, the Court said, was "to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law.... Laws ... requiring their separation ... do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race." The argument against segregation laws was false because of the "assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is ... solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."
The lone dissenter, Kentuckian and former slave owner Justice John Marshall Harlan, denied that a legislature could differentiate on the basis of race with regard to civil rights. He wrote: "The white race deems itself to be the dominant race," but the Constitution recognizes "no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens." Harlan continued: "Our Constitution is color-
, blind.... In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law." The Court's majority opinion, he pointed out, gave power to the states "to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens."
I think we do need affirmative action because some ofus can not be not civil. Everytime we get a chance to show that we can do something great a small portion comes and mess it up for the ones that was actually for the objective at hand. For example the freddie grey situation. On April 25, 2015, protests were organized in downtown Baltimore. Protesters marched from the Baltimore City Hall to Inner Harbor. After the final stage of the official protest event, some people became violent, damaging at least five police vehicles and pelting police with rocks.llil Near Oriole Park at Camden Yards, some groups of violent protesters also smashed storefronts and fought with baseball fans arriving at the stadium for a scheduled game between the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox. As a result of the violence, those attending the baseball game were forcedilll to remain inside the stadium for their safety. At least 34 people were arrested during the riots, and six police officers were injured.
J.M. Giordano, a photographer for Baltimore City Paper, was taking pictures of the protest when he was "swarmed" and beaten by two police officers in riot gear. Sait Serkan Gurbuz, a Reuters photographer with visible press credentials, who photographed the scuffle from a public sidewalk, was tackled, handcuffed and walked to the Western District station. He was cited for failure to obey and later released. Subsequently, City Paper published a video on its website documenting the violence.
During a press conference, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said most protesters were respectful but a "small group of agitators intervened". She also stated that "It's a very delicate balancing act. Because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate."illl The phrase "we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well" was interpreted by some conservative-leaning news sources as an indication that the mayor was giving permission to protesters to destroy property, while some others, including Breitbart News Network, pointed out that "when you look at the full context, it's clear the Mayor meant something different (though it's also true she didn't say it very clearly)."
Two days later, the mayor's Director of Strategic Planning and Policy, Howard Libit, released a statement clarifying the mayor's remarks:
What she is saying within this statement was that there was an effort to give the peaceful demonstrators room to conduct their peaceful protests on Saturday. Unfortunately, as a result of providing the peaceful demonstrators with the space to share their message, that also meant that those seeking to incite violence also had the space to operate. The police sought to balance the rights of the peaceful demonstrators against the need to step in against those who were seeking to create violence.
The mayor is not saying that she asked police to give space to people who sought to create violence. Any suggestion otherwise would be a misinterpretation of her statement. There has been times where us as black people did have one objective and we achieved the objective. For example the million man march. The Million Man March was a gathering en masse of African-American men in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. Called by Louis Farrakhan, it was held on and around the National Mall. The National African American Leadership Summit, a leading group of civil rights activists and the Nation of Islam working with scores of civil rights organizations, including many local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (but not the national NAACP) formed the Million Man March Organizing Committee. The founder of the National African American Leadership Summit, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. served as National Director of the Million Man March.
The committee invited many prominent speakers to address the audience, and African American men from across the United States converged in Washington to "convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male"ill and to unite in self-help and self-defense against economic and social ills plaguing the African American community.
The march took place in the context of a larger grassroots movement that set out to win politicians' attention for urban and minority issues through widespread voter registration campaigns.ill On the same day, there was a parallel event called the Day of Absence, organized by female leaders in conjunction with the March leadership, which was intended to engage the large population of black Americans who would not be able to attend the demonstration in Washington. On this date, all blacks were encouraged to stay home from their usual school, work, and social engagements, in favor of attending teach-ins, and worship services, focusing on
. the struggle for a healthy and self-sufficient black community. Further, organizers of the Day of Absence hoped to use the occasion to make great headway on their voter registration drive.ill
Although the march won support and participation from a number of prominent African American leaders, its legacy is marred by controversy over several issues. The leader of the march, Louis Farrakhan, is a controversial figure whose commentary on race in America has led some to wonder whether the message of the march can be disentangled from that of its organizer_l±l Two years after the march, the Million Woman March was held in response to fears that the Million Man March had focused on black men to the exclusion of black women.ill Finally, within 24 hours after the March, there arose a conflict about crowd size estimates between March organizers and Park Service officials. The National Park Service issued an estimate of about 400,000 attendees,ill a number significantly lower than March organizers had hoped for.ill After a heated exchange between leaders of the march and Park Service, ABC-TV funded researchers at Boston University estimated the crowd size to be about 837,000 members, with a 20% margin of error.
I do believe we need reparations. If there was no reparations there wouldn't be any jails. I believe when you break the law you must own up to what you have done and suffer the consequences. The way people act today reparations is necessary. For example there is a guy right now who has been on a so called" killing spree" on facebook live in cleveland. Accused Facebook killer Steve Stephens faced numerous evictions in Ohio and bankruptcy prior to allegedly filming the murder of an elderly man and posting the video onto the social media website.
Stephens was recently evicted from an apartment in Euclid and faced another eviction at a separate apartment in Warrensville Heights five months prior, according to court records obtained by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer on Monday. The documents shed light on Stephens' massive financial troubles.
According to the records, the Warrensville Heights complex successfully sued Stephens for $1,800 in back rent and started to garnish his wages last month. Stephens also was saddled with a ton of debt, the paper reported. He declared more than $35,000 in debts, including
$21,000 owed on a loan for a 2007 Dodge Charger and more than $5,300 on student loans. He was sued in Euclid Municipal Court in 2012.
Stephens said in a court filing that he owned about $1,500 in household possessions and had more than $350 in his bank account. The Plain-Dealer reported he was discharged from bankruptcy in August 2015.
In another Facebook posting Sunday, Stephens said he gambled his money away at Jack Cleveland Casino and said he "lost everything" and that he was "out of options."
The casino told Fox 8 Cleveland that security was increased as a result of the manhunt for Stephens.
Cleveland police announced a $50,000 reward was posted by Crimestoppers for information leading to the capture of Stephens. Police also issued a nationwide search for him and asked residents of Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana and Michigan to be on alert.
Police Chief Calvin Williams said officers searched dozens of locations for Stephens with no success, while the department was working with federal, state and other local agencies to find him.
"As far as we know right now, we don't know where he's at," Williams said. "The last location we had him at was the homicide." Another example is 3 guys shot up a school bus.Three men have been charged with driving through Jones County shooting at vehicles, one of those was a school activity bus with children on board.
Quinton Mceachin of Pollocksivlle, Azario Frost of Maysville, and Cordero Foy, of Maysville, are facing numerous charges after their arrest on Sunday.
Jones County deputies say Mceachin was driving the vehicle that was eventually stopped after a chase by Maysville police and deputies.
The activity bus was from Pamlico County and was hit by the gunfire, but no children were hurt.
It happened on U.S. 17 around 5:30 p.m. Detectives say there were 13 students and two adults on the bus. They say the bullet disabled the bus when it struck the radiator.
Mceachin is facing charges of driving while impaired, felony conspiracy, discharge a barreled weapon, flee/elude arrest with a motor vehicle, reckless driving, felony hit and run with personal injury, felony discharging weapon into a moving vehicle, and several traffic violations. His bond was set at $250,000.
Frost was charged with discharging weapon into occupied property, felony conspiracy, discharge a barreled weapon, felony discharge a weapon into a moving vehicle, and felony possession of a firearm by felon. The man's bond was $125,000.
Foy is facing charges of discharging a weapon into occupied property, possession of a firearm by felon, discharge a barreled weapon, assault with a deadly weapon and felony discharge of a weapon into occupied dwelling/moving vehicle. A magistrate set Foy's bond at
$100,000.
10
[SHORTENED TITLE UP TO 50 CHARACTERS]
Sources:
· http://www.weaselzippers.us/242407-three-young-black-men-shoot up-school-bus-with-children-inside/
· http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/04/18/accused-facebook-killer- steve-stephens-faced-multiple-evictions-financial-trouble.html
· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million Man March
· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015 Baltimore protests
· http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson
· http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/brown-v-board-of education-of-topeka
· http://www.cpusa.org/article/the-struggle-for-african-american eguality-todays-challenges/
· http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-lives-matter-growth new-social-justice-movement
Social Justice is the fair and proper administration of laws conforming to the natural law that all persons, irrespective of ethnic origin, gender, possessions, race, religion, etc., are to be treated equally and without prejudice. An example of social justice with African American's is the black lives matter movement. In the summer of 2013, three community organizers Alicia Garza, a domestic worker rights organizer in Oakland, California; Patrisse Cullors, an anti-police violence organizer in Los Angeles, California; and Opal Tometi, an immigration rights organizer in Phoenix, Arizona, founded the Black Lives Matter movement in cyberspace as a sociopolitical media forum, giving it the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The idea came …show more content…
when the three, who became aware of each other through Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity (BOLD), a national organization that trains community organizers, all responded similarly to the July 2013 acquittal of neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman by a Sanford, Florida, jury for the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Angered and deeply burdened by the verdict, members in BOLD social forums began asking the organization's leaders how they were going respond to the assault on and devaluation of black lives. Garza wrote a Facebook post which she titled "A Love Note to Black People" calling on them to "get active," "get organized," and "fight back." For Garza, the injustice targeting black people was a disease called institutional racism that could not be defeated by just voting, being educated, and pulling oneself up with strapless boots. She ended by telling her readers that she loves them and that "Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter." Cullors responded to the post with the hashtag "#BlackLivesMatter." Tometi added her support and a new organization was born.
While Black Lives Matter drew inspiration from the 1960s civil rights/black power movement, the 1980s black feminist/womanist movement, the 1980s anti-apartheid/Pan African movement, the late-1980s political hip-hop movement, the 2000s LGBT movement, and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, they used newly developed social media to reach thousands of like minded people across the nation quickly to create a black social justice movement that rejected the charismatic male-centered, top-down movement structure that had been the model for most previous efforts.
Instead, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, Black Lives Matter engaged in collective planning for their campaigns. Unlike SNCC, but similar to Black Youth Project 100 in Chicago, Illinois, Black Lives Matter incorporated those on margins of traditional black freedom movements, including women, the working poor, the disabled, undocumented immigrants, atheists and agnostics, and those who identify as queer …show more content…
and
, transgender. These marginalized black people played visible and central roles in the formation of Black Lives Matter and in their ongoing community organizing and protests.
Like other protesters, Black Lives Matter members were angered not simply by the shooting of an unarmed African American but also because his body was allowed to lie in the street for four hours before it was eventually taken to the city morgue, an event that was well documented by bystanders with cell phones and distributed within minutes around the world via Twitter and Facebook. This instant exposure generated months of sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent protests which involved Ferguson residents at first but eventually drew tens of thousands of people from across the United States. The exposure of the protests and the police reaction to their chant, "Hands up! Don't Shoot!" was literally broadcasted by thousands of on-the-scene protesters as well as by the traditional media, ensuring as never before, that the centuries-old issue of police brutality would now be addressed on the national and international stage.
While Black Lives Matter was initially one of hundreds of organizations protesting in Ferguson, they eventually emerged as the one of the best organized and visible groups with their slogan "Black Lives Matter." By autumn, that slogan had become the call for action against what many saw as the unjustifiable killing not just of Michael Brown but of dozens of other African American men and women whose deaths occurred away from the view of cell phone cameras.
Moreover, with the creation of a webpage independent of corporate media control, their use of Twitter and Facebook to organize, and online conference calls to plan strategy, Black Lives Matter became a model for how black liberations groups in the twenty-first century can organize an effective freedom rights campaign.
The movement's success also resulted from their inculcation of the feminist political mantra, the "personal is political." That concept meant that each member's personal experience is informed and molded by the various campaigns against systemic oppression that are inescapably political and collectively connected to the well-being of others. This framework has been used to transform Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s message, "None of us are free until all of us are free," from a concept centered primarily on the freedom dreams of black heterosexual men to a campaign that equally addresses the freedom struggles of all people but is explicitly centered on black liberation. Dr. King's message was central in the Black Lives Matter "State of the Black
[SHORTENED TITLE UP TO 50 CHARACTERS]
9
, Union" statement released on January 22, 2015.
Between August 2014 and August 2015, Black Lives Matter chapters around the world have organized more than nine hundred and fifty protest demonstrations. Their call for social justice has ranged from targeting well-known police-involved deaths such as the Eric Garner strangulation in Staten Island, New York, on July 17, 2014, and lesser known cases involving the killing of homosexual and heterosexual black women and children such as twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland on November 22, 2014. Partly as a result of the public outcry organized and promoted by Black Lives Matter, the U.S. Department of Justice has investigated police misconduct in several cities, including Albuquerque (New Mexico), Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Ferguson, Newark (New Jersey), New Orleans (Louisiana), Portland, New York, North Charleston, Seattle, and St. Louis. On December 18, 2014, the U.S. Congress enacted the Death and Custody Reporting Act which now requires states receiving federal funds to document and report all deaths at the hands of police in local jurisdictions "that occur in the process of
arrest."
Despite these efforts, in the United States more black deaths directly or indirectly because of police violence ensured that the Black Lives Matter movement would continue to grow. On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was shot in the back while fleeing from Officer Michael T. Slager, a policeman from North Charleston, South Carolina. On July 13, 2015, Sandra Bland was taken into custody near Prairie View University near Houston, Texas, after she was stopped by Brian Encinia, a Texas State trooper. She later died under mysterious circumstances in the Waller County Jail. On July 19, 2015, Samuel DuBose of Cincinnati, Ohio, was killed by Ray Tensing, a University of Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop. Besides the race of each victim, all these incidents shared the rapid dissemination of video at the time of their encounters with law enforcement officers which led many viewers to question the tactics and in some cases the legality of police action. Black Lives Matter played a major role in alerting people about these incidents and spurring them to take action. As a consequence, millions of people are now aware of the ongoing impact of police brutality on black lives.
The Black Lives Matter Movement has been successful in creating a new mechanism for non violently addressing racial inequality in twenty-first century America. Its organizational structure builds' on the legacy of earlier reform campaigns, including the civil rights/black power
, movement, Pan Africanism, Africana womanism, the LGBT movement, and the Occupy Wall Street movement while using cyber activism to promote its agenda. Specifically, Black Lives Matter puts the feminist theory of "intersectionality" into action by calling for a united focus on issues ofrace, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, disability, and state-sponsored violence. It argues that to prioritize one social issue over another issue will ultimately lead to failure in the global struggle for civil and human rights.
I believe we have not achieved equality in America because we still are being oppressed and denied opportunities because the color of our skin or the way our hair is or just the city we come from. We deserve the equality 100%. We have fought for everything that we have now. For example schools are no longer segregated because it was unconstitutional. There was a court case about it called Brown vs, The Board of Education. On May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Court's unanimous decision overturned provisions of the 1896 Plessy v.
Ferguson decision, which had allowed for "separate but equal" public facilities, including public schools in the United States. Declaring that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," the Brown v. Board decision helped break the back of state-sponsored segregation, and provided a spark to the American civil rights movement. This unanimous decision handed down by the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, ended federal tolerance of racial segregation. In Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896) the Court had ruled that "separate but equal" accommodations on railroad cars conformed to the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. That decision was used to justify segregating all public facilities, including schools. In addition, most school districts, ignoring Plessy's "equal" requirement, neglected their black schools. In the mid-1930s, however, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) challenged school segregation in a series of court cases. In these the Court required "tangible" aspects of segregated schools to be equivalent. The rulings prompted several school districts to improve their black students' schools. Then the naacp contested the constitutionality of segregation in four regions. Each of the school districts involved had improved the tangible aspects of its black schools, but Brown brought segregation, per se, squarely before the Court. In the unanimous decision Chief Justice Earl Warren rejected the Plessy doctrine, declaring that "separate educational facilities" were "inherently unequal" because the intangible inequalities of segregation deprived black students of equal protection under the law. A year later, the Court
·. published implementation guidelines requiring federal district courts to supervise school desegregation "on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed." The plessy vs. Ferguson case is another one. This 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law. Rejecting Plessy's argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Court ruled that a state law that "implies merely a legal distinction" between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th and 14th Amendments. Restrictive legislation based on race continued following the Plessy decision, its reasoning not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. The case came from Louisiana, which in 1890 adopted a law providing for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" on its railroads. In 1892, passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car. He was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court for New Orleans, who upheld the state law. The law was challenged in the Supreme Court on grounds that it conflicted with the 13th and 14th Amendments.
By a 7-1 vote, the Court said that a state law that "implies merely a legal distinction" between the two races did not conflict with the 13th Amendment forbidding involuntary servitude, nor did it tend to reestablish such a condition.
The Court avoided discussion of the protection granted by the clause in the 14th Amendment that forbids the states to make laws depriving citizens of their "privileges or immunities," but instead cited such laws in other states as a "reasonable" exercise of their authority under the police power. The purpose of the 14th Amendment, the Court said, was "to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law.... Laws ... requiring their separation ... do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race." The argument against segregation laws was false because of the "assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is ... solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."
The lone dissenter, Kentuckian and former slave owner Justice John Marshall Harlan, denied that a legislature could differentiate on the basis of race with regard to civil rights. He wrote: "The white race deems itself to be the dominant race," but the Constitution recognizes "no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens." Harlan continued: "Our Constitution is color-
, blind.... In respect of civil rights all citizens are equal before the law." The Court's majority opinion, he pointed out, gave power to the states "to place in a condition of legal inferiority a large body of American citizens."
I think we do need affirmative action because some ofus can not be not civil. Everytime we get a chance to show that we can do something great a small portion comes and mess it up for the ones that was actually for the objective at hand. For example the freddie grey situation. On April 25, 2015, protests were organized in downtown Baltimore. Protesters marched from the Baltimore City Hall to Inner Harbor. After the final stage of the official protest event, some people became violent, damaging at least five police vehicles and pelting police with rocks.llil Near Oriole Park at Camden Yards, some groups of violent protesters also smashed storefronts and fought with baseball fans arriving at the stadium for a scheduled game between the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox. As a result of the violence, those attending the baseball game were forcedilll to remain inside the stadium for their safety. At least 34 people were arrested during the riots, and six police officers were injured.
J.M. Giordano, a photographer for Baltimore City Paper, was taking pictures of the protest when he was "swarmed" and beaten by two police officers in riot gear. Sait Serkan Gurbuz, a Reuters photographer with visible press credentials, who photographed the scuffle from a public sidewalk, was tackled, handcuffed and walked to the Western District station. He was cited for failure to obey and later released. Subsequently, City Paper published a video on its website documenting the violence.
During a press conference, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said most protesters were respectful but a "small group of agitators intervened". She also stated that "It's a very delicate balancing act. Because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate."illl The phrase "we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well" was interpreted by some conservative-leaning news sources as an indication that the mayor was giving permission to protesters to destroy property, while some others, including Breitbart News Network, pointed out that "when you look at the full context, it's clear the Mayor meant something different (though it's also true she didn't say it very clearly)."
Two days later, the mayor's Director of Strategic Planning and Policy, Howard Libit, released a statement clarifying the mayor's remarks:
What she is saying within this statement was that there was an effort to give the peaceful demonstrators room to conduct their peaceful protests on Saturday. Unfortunately, as a result of providing the peaceful demonstrators with the space to share their message, that also meant that those seeking to incite violence also had the space to operate. The police sought to balance the rights of the peaceful demonstrators against the need to step in against those who were seeking to create violence.
The mayor is not saying that she asked police to give space to people who sought to create violence. Any suggestion otherwise would be a misinterpretation of her statement. There has been times where us as black people did have one objective and we achieved the objective. For example the million man march. The Million Man March was a gathering en masse of African-American men in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. Called by Louis Farrakhan, it was held on and around the National Mall. The National African American Leadership Summit, a leading group of civil rights activists and the Nation of Islam working with scores of civil rights organizations, including many local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (but not the national NAACP) formed the Million Man March Organizing Committee. The founder of the National African American Leadership Summit, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. served as National Director of the Million Man March.
The committee invited many prominent speakers to address the audience, and African American men from across the United States converged in Washington to "convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male"ill and to unite in self-help and self-defense against economic and social ills plaguing the African American community.
The march took place in the context of a larger grassroots movement that set out to win politicians' attention for urban and minority issues through widespread voter registration campaigns.ill On the same day, there was a parallel event called the Day of Absence, organized by female leaders in conjunction with the March leadership, which was intended to engage the large population of black Americans who would not be able to attend the demonstration in Washington. On this date, all blacks were encouraged to stay home from their usual school, work, and social engagements, in favor of attending teach-ins, and worship services, focusing on
. the struggle for a healthy and self-sufficient black community. Further, organizers of the Day of Absence hoped to use the occasion to make great headway on their voter registration drive.ill
Although the march won support and participation from a number of prominent African American leaders, its legacy is marred by controversy over several issues. The leader of the march, Louis Farrakhan, is a controversial figure whose commentary on race in America has led some to wonder whether the message of the march can be disentangled from that of its organizer_l±l Two years after the march, the Million Woman March was held in response to fears that the Million Man March had focused on black men to the exclusion of black women.ill Finally, within 24 hours after the March, there arose a conflict about crowd size estimates between March organizers and Park Service officials. The National Park Service issued an estimate of about 400,000 attendees,ill a number significantly lower than March organizers had hoped for.ill After a heated exchange between leaders of the march and Park Service, ABC-TV funded researchers at Boston University estimated the crowd size to be about 837,000 members, with a 20% margin of error.
I do believe we need reparations. If there was no reparations there wouldn't be any jails. I believe when you break the law you must own up to what you have done and suffer the consequences. The way people act today reparations is necessary. For example there is a guy right now who has been on a so called" killing spree" on facebook live in cleveland. Accused Facebook killer Steve Stephens faced numerous evictions in Ohio and bankruptcy prior to allegedly filming the murder of an elderly man and posting the video onto the social media website.
Stephens was recently evicted from an apartment in Euclid and faced another eviction at a separate apartment in Warrensville Heights five months prior, according to court records obtained by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer on Monday. The documents shed light on Stephens' massive financial troubles.
According to the records, the Warrensville Heights complex successfully sued Stephens for $1,800 in back rent and started to garnish his wages last month. Stephens also was saddled with a ton of debt, the paper reported. He declared more than $35,000 in debts, including
$21,000 owed on a loan for a 2007 Dodge Charger and more than $5,300 on student loans. He was sued in Euclid Municipal Court in 2012.
Stephens said in a court filing that he owned about $1,500 in household possessions and had more than $350 in his bank account. The Plain-Dealer reported he was discharged from bankruptcy in August 2015.
In another Facebook posting Sunday, Stephens said he gambled his money away at Jack Cleveland Casino and said he "lost everything" and that he was "out of options."
The casino told Fox 8 Cleveland that security was increased as a result of the manhunt for Stephens.
Cleveland police announced a $50,000 reward was posted by Crimestoppers for information leading to the capture of Stephens. Police also issued a nationwide search for him and asked residents of Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana and Michigan to be on alert.
Police Chief Calvin Williams said officers searched dozens of locations for Stephens with no success, while the department was working with federal, state and other local agencies to find him.
"As far as we know right now, we don't know where he's at," Williams said. "The last location we had him at was the homicide." Another example is 3 guys shot up a school bus.Three men have been charged with driving through Jones County shooting at vehicles, one of those was a school activity bus with children on board.
Quinton Mceachin of Pollocksivlle, Azario Frost of Maysville, and Cordero Foy, of Maysville, are facing numerous charges after their arrest on Sunday.
Jones County deputies say Mceachin was driving the vehicle that was eventually stopped after a chase by Maysville police and deputies.
The activity bus was from Pamlico County and was hit by the gunfire, but no children were hurt.
It happened on U.S. 17 around 5:30 p.m. Detectives say there were 13 students and two adults on the bus. They say the bullet disabled the bus when it struck the radiator.
Mceachin is facing charges of driving while impaired, felony conspiracy, discharge a barreled weapon, flee/elude arrest with a motor vehicle, reckless driving, felony hit and run with personal injury, felony discharging weapon into a moving vehicle, and several traffic violations. His bond was set at $250,000.
Frost was charged with discharging weapon into occupied property, felony conspiracy, discharge a barreled weapon, felony discharge a weapon into a moving vehicle, and felony possession of a firearm by felon. The man's bond was $125,000.
Foy is facing charges of discharging a weapon into occupied property, possession of a firearm by felon, discharge a barreled weapon, assault with a deadly weapon and felony discharge of a weapon into occupied dwelling/moving vehicle. A magistrate set Foy's bond at
$100,000.
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Sources:
· http://www.weaselzippers.us/242407-three-young-black-men-shoot up-school-bus-with-children-inside/
· http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/04/18/accused-facebook-killer- steve-stephens-faced-multiple-evictions-financial-trouble.html
· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million Man March
· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015 Baltimore protests
· http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson
· http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/brown-v-board-of education-of-topeka
· http://www.cpusa.org/article/the-struggle-for-african-american eguality-todays-challenges/
· http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-lives-matter-growth new-social-justice-movement