Featured
Beyond Jan. 6: Trump’s mob violence is now the standard GOP model. By Heather Digby Parton / Salon
Trump encouraged his followers to use threats and intimidation to force political acquiescence over democracy
There is so much evidence emerging from the January 6th hearings that it’s sometimes hard to wrap your arms around what it all means. They are making a strong case that Donald Trump knew the election was legitimate yet spread the Big Lie that it was stolen anyway. He was also told that his scheme to have his vice president, Mike Pence, overturn the election was illegal and unconstitutional. The committee on Tuesday, during its fourth hearing, laid out how Trump was intimately involved in the pressure campaign to persuade Republican state officials to illegally change the legitimate results and “decertify” the will of the people. Future hearings will discuss the plot to corrupt the Department of Justice(DOJ) and incite the mob to intimidate the joint session of Congress and the vice president into overturning the election. Read more
Political / Social
Abrams tries to flip script on guns and crime in Georgia. By Jeff Amy and Russ Bynum / ABC News
As Republicans nationwide gear up to attack Democrats with tough-on-crime platforms this fall, Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams is making guns a central focus of her race for governor
Abrams made tightening Georgia’s gun laws a big part of a public safety plan she released Thursday, proposing to reverse multiple laws that Georgia Republicans have enacted since 2014 loosening restrictions on who can carry a gun and where. The Democrat is also trying to exploit divides on how government should fight crime, arguing Kemp and Republicans have reverted to a failed lock-’em-up approach, abandoning a previous bipartisan push to focus on less punitive approaches. Read more
Andrew Gillum, DeSantis’ 2018 opponent, indicted for wire fraud, false statements. By Marc Caputo / NBC News
Gillum, once a rising Democratic star in Florida, and his mentor are accused of fraudulent fundraising. He says he’s innocent.
Andrew Gillum, the once-rising Florida Democratic star who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race to Ron DeSantis, was hit with a 21-count federal indictment Wednesday alleging wire fraud, related conspiracy charges and making false statements. Gillum, the former mayor of Tallahassee, was charged along with his mentor, Sharon Lettman-Hicks, with fraudulently fundraising from “various entities” from 2016 to 2019, the Justice Department said in a news release. Read more
Biden Names Mohegan Tribe Member To Be First Native American U.S. Treasurer. Jonathan Nicholson / HuffPost
Lynn Malerba, the first woman to be named ceremonial chief of the Mohegan Tribe, will have her name on currency and head up a new Treasury Department tribal affairs office.
Move over, Andrew Jackson — you’re going to have to share the face of the $20 bill with a Native American woman soon. The Treasury Department announced Tuesday that President Biden had picked Lynn Malerba, lifetime chief of the Connecticut-based Mohegan Tribe, to be the next U.S. Treasurer. The position oversees the U.S. Mint, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the U.S. Bullion Depository, better known as Ft. Knox. Read more
Illinois city issues reparations in hopes to close wealth gap. By Adriana Diaz / CBS News
An Illinois city chose 16 residents to receive $25,000 each in reparations in a first-in-the-nation program to address harms from slavery to discriminatory housing policies. The money from the fund, which was created back in 2019, can only go toward a home down payment, mortgages or repairing homes in an effort to increase minority property value. Ramona Burton is one of the eligible residents of Evanston picked in a lottery to receive the reparations. “It’s a start, but I don’t think it’s enough for all minorities have been put through,” Burton told CBS News when asked if the reparations are enough. Read more
Bill Cosby Loses Sex Assault Lawsuit and Must Pay Damages. Graham Bowley, Lauren Herstik and
A jury on Tuesday found that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted Judy Huth in 1975, when as a 16-year-old girl she accepted his invitation to join him at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. The decision by the jury once again tarnished the reputation of a man whose standing as one of America’s most beloved entertainers dissolved as dozens of women came forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct. As part of its decision, the jury awarded Ms. Huth $500,000 in compensatory damages, but declined to award punitive damages. Read more
101 HBCUs get nearly 7 times less money than 1 other school. That must change. By Tony Allen and Glenda Glover / Wash Post
Consider these disparities: Of $42 billion in federal research and development funds awarded in fiscal 2018, only $400 million — less than 1 percent — went to HBCUs, according to research done by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), and that figure declined by 13 percent the following year. TMCF Chief of Staff David Sheppard notes that one predominantly White institution, Johns Hopkins University, received nearly seven times more research funding than all 101 HBCUs combined. Read more
Black Liberation Figure Mutulu Shakur Seeks Prison Release. By Natasha Lennard / The Intercept
A judge told Mutulu Shakur two years ago that his cancer wasn’t bad enough yet and to come back when he was on his deathbed. Now he is.
The time for true compassion — or anything close to justice — has long passed for Shakur, well-known as rapper Tupac’s stepfather and celebrated for bringing holistic health care and self-determination to the Bronx’s Black community in the 1970s. Like most Black liberation elders, the circumstances of Shakur’s conviction were colored by the government’s decadeslong, all-out war on the movement. This should not be forgotten, but it is also not relevant to the current grounds for Shakur’s long overdue release. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
You Will Know Them By Their Fruits: Black Pastor at Southern Baptist Convention Slams White Preachers Who’ve Become ‘Whores’ for Trump. By Nicole Duncan-Smith / Atlanta Black Star
A collection of clergy gathered to talk about the state of their denomination during their annual religious convention. The conversation of race came up in one session, exposing large wedges within congregations about Black members not feeling fully “embraced.” Rev. Kevin Smith, the pastor of Family Church in West Palm Beach, walked up to the Q&A mic in the aisle to ask the panel, consisting of Mark Dever, Danny Akin, Aron Menikoff, Jonathan Leeman, and Matt Chandler, to further look over the last decade and positions the church has taken. He said, “I think some Southern Baptists lost their minds when a Black man was elected president — not all, but some.” Read more
Building Beloved Communities: The Life and Work of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith: By Hildi Hendrickson / Amazon Books
Building Beloved Communities traces the life of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith (b. 1935), an iconoclastic black minister who has channeled his civil rights work into establishing multi-racial churches in four cities―Buffalo, NY; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; Brooklyn, NY―over a six-decade career. Following the lead of his mentor, Dr. Howard Thurman (who was also a key influence on Martin Luther King Jr.), Smith has concentrated on building thriving multicultural congregations to create the sorts of communities envisioned by King and others. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too. By Kris Manjapra / The Conversation
As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936. There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South. In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did. Read more
The Spanish Slave Ship Carlotta “Denounced” By a Shark (1894). By Aderivaldo Ramos de Santana / AAIHS
In the history of the slave trade and its repression, sharks have played a large part in the narratives which detail the Atlantic crossing. Also in painting, artists such as Winslow Homer and Joseph M. W. Turner have realistically represented these voracious predators who would follow slave ships from purchase to sale spot, eager to shatter, in a few seconds, the bodies of the enslaved men and women who would fall ill and also those of the insurgents, leaving a striking trail of blood. A brutal instrument of control, terror of the sailors and of the enslaved, one can estimate that, in three hundred years, sharks have devoured more than 1.8 million bodies that were thrown into the Atlantic. As part of the slave trade, they would always parade around the ships, and have also swallowed documentation on the infamous trade – evidence that was found, perchance, by the British. Read more
When a ‘Diverse’ Book Ban Goes Awry. By Bill Lueders / The Bulwark
A Wisconsin school board rejects an award-winning novel for being too one-sided about Japanese American internment during WWII.
Parents and community members in the deeply conservative city of Muskego, Wisconsin, are up in arms about a book recommended for use in a 10th-grade accelerated English class. The 2002 novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, is about a Japanese-American family during World War II, when some of its members were uprooted from their home in Berkeley, California, and sent to an internment camp in Utah. Read more
Dave Chappelle’s Not Kidding. By David Frum / The Atlantic
The comedian’s proposal to defer having his name on his high school’s theater might seem conciliatory. But it’s a big bet on what he believes.
Chappelle is a graduate of—and generous donor to—Washington’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts. In 2017, the school completed an ambitious renovation. To express recognition and thanks to Chappelle, the school proposed to name its theater for him. Chappelle proposed that the theater be named the Theater for Artistic Freedom and Expression, and then said that his name would be added later, only when and if the school community was ready. Read more
Beyoncé’s new song is an anthem for the Great Resignation. By Lucy Bayly / CNN
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell wants to increase joblessness in the US in order to save the economy. But Beyoncé may beat him to it. The multi-hyphenate artist’s latest single, “Break My Soul,” which dropped late Monday, begs listeners to “release” themselves from their 9-5, saying “I just quit my job, I’m gonna find new drive, damn, they work me so damn hard.” Immediately dubbed an “anthem for the Great Resignation” on social media, fans didn’t skip a beat, posting memes and all-cap tweets aligning themselves with Queen Bey’s motivational message to ditch hustle culture and get back to “sleeping real good at night.” Read more
Related: Beyoncé announces new album ‘Renaissance’ to drop July 29. By AP and ABC News
Sports
How Brothers With No Acting Experience Landed Leading Roles In Disney+ Movie On Antetokounmpo Brothers. By Tim Casey / Forbes
In October 2020, Uche Agada was laying in his bed in New Jersey and scrolling through Instagram when he saw a screenshot of a Tweet that Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo had sent. The Tweet had mentioned Disney was producing a movie on Antetokounmpo and his family’s background and looking for people to portray Giannis and his brother, Thanasis, his Bucks’ teammate. Agada, who had graduated from high school that spring, was a big Giannis fan, but he had never acted before. Still, the message noted no experience was necessary, so Agada thought he might as well give it a try. Read more
Before Jackie Robinson made history, he went 7 for 7 in his D.C. debut. By Frederic J. Frommer / Wash Post
The doubleheader, staged in the waning days of World War II, pitted the defending Negro national champion Grays against the star-studded Monarchs. With the Senators out of town on a 19-game road trip, 18,000 came out to see the twin bill, The Post reported. The Grays were stacked with four future Hall of Famers: Gibson, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell and 49-year-old Jud Wilson. The Monarchs had three Cooperstown-bound players: Robinson, Paige and Hilton Smith. Robinson exceeded even the most bullish predictions. Batting third, he went 7 for 7 in the two games with a pair of doubles, although he did commit a costly error as the Grays swept the doubleheader. Read more
Arthur Ashe: US sport’s greatest Black icon? By Paul Gittings / CNN
The new CNN Film “Citizen Ashe” explores the enduring legacy of tennis legend and humanitarian Arthur Ashe. It airs Sunday, June 26, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. This article has been updated to mark the debut of the film.
Tennis hero, inspiring role model for African Americans, social activist and high-profile campaigner for the HIV and AIDS communities, Arthur Ashe died in 1993, but it is a measure of his influence that, decades later, he shines as brightly as ever. The main stadium court at Flushing Meadows, where the US Open is staged, is named in his honor, a striking statue of Ashe adorns the grounds, while the Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day is a glittering annual bash that kick starts the fortnight for the final grand slam of the season. Read more
“He went against all odds”: Cycling superstar Major Taylor was first Black American to win world championship. By Elise Preston / CBS News
As Americans celebrate Juneteenth, hundreds of cyclists traveled to Indianapolis to honor its hometown hero. Major Taylor was a superstar in the world of cycling and broke barriers and records nearly a half-century before Jackie Robinson. Riders hit the streets in Taylor’s name. Marshall “Major” Taylor became the first Black American to win a sports world championship in 1899. He was born in Indianapolis shortly after the end of slavery and was forced by racism to compete overseas. “He went against all odds during a time where he wasn’t supposed to do that as a Black man,” said Damia Thomas of Velo City Riders in Baltimore. Read more
LeBron James and Naomi Osaka team up to launch media company. By Adela Suliman / Wash Post
Japanese tennis champion Naomi Osaka and American basketball superstar LeBron James are joining forces to launch a media production company that aims to give a bigger platform to “culturally specific” stories on “important social issues.” Osaka, 24, said the new venture will be called Hana Kuma, which translates as “flower bear” from Japanese. Osaka was born in Japan to a Haitian father and Japanese mother and moved to the United States at age 3. She is now based in Los Angeles. Read more
The NBA has never seen a draft prospect quite like Chet Holmgren. By Jerry Brewer / Wash Post
In the modern and democratized NBA, skill matters most. That’s the appeal, this intriguing new reality that anyone, at any size, can play anywhere on the floor as long as his game matches his aspiration.
Holmgren, at 7 feet and 195 pounds, doubles as intriguing and frightening to NBA talent evaluators. For several years, he has been on the draft radar as a certain top-five pick. On Thursday, there’s no question he will be selected in the top three. He’s one of the most preposterously skilled 7-footers to enter the league, but even in an open-minded and positionless NBA, there is concern about how his thin frame will hold up. Read more
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