Featured
Jim Crow’s Forgotten History of Homicides. By Jennifer Szalai / NYT
“By Hands Now Known,” by Margaret A. Burnham, examines the chronic, quotidian violence faced by Black citizens in the American South — and the law’s failure to address it.
Even as more attention finally gets paid to the kind of brazen mob violence that included the lynching of Black people and the burning of entire neighborhoods to the ground, “By Hands Now Known” draws on the research of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project to do something else. What Burnham seeks to show is the “chronic, unpredictable violence” that shaped daily life in the South — “how lethal, for women and for men, the most commonplace encounters under Jim Crow could be.” Read more
Political / Social
Ex-Texas police officer acquitted of murder in fatal shooting of man at gas station. By Tim Stelloh / NBC News
Shaun Lucas fatally shot Jonathan Price in Wolfe City in October 2020.
Lucas tried to detain Price, who “resisted in a non-threatening posture” and walked away, Haschel said. He used a Taser, then fired his service weapon — actions Haschel described as “not objectively reasonable.” Lucas, a former jail employee who had been with the Wolfe City Police Department for less than six months, was arrested two days after the shooting and booked on suspicion of murder. The Texas Rangers were investigating the shooting. Read more
Related: Ex-Illinois Cop Charged In 2020 Fatal Shooting Of Black Man. By Ap and HuffPost
Related: Elijah McClain’s amended autopsy released three years after his death. By CBS News
Trump’s potential 2024 plans hit complication in NY fraud lawsuit. By David Jackson / USA Today
New York AG Letitia James’ suit – while a civil matter rather than a criminal one – is the most definitive sign yet that Donald Trump will likely be pulled into court while running for president.
Maybe several courts of law. The long-running panoply of investigations into Trump – over his business practices, his handling of classified information, his efforts to overturn his election loss in 2020, and his role in the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021 – will burden any 2024 presidential run by the former chief executive, analysts said. Read more
Related: The two Howard University women on Trump’s trail. By Colbert I. King / Wash Post
Related: Hillary Clinton Compares Trump To Hitler In Disturbing Interview. By Mary Papenfuss / HuffPost
Black voters could push Stacey Abrams to victory in Georgia. Will they? By Lalee Ibssa / ABC News
Ahead of a Brian Kemp rematch, Abrams focuses on persuasion and mobilization.
Democrat Stacey Abrams knows by exactly how many votes she narrowly lost to Republican Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor’s race four years ago — and, to hear her tell it, she knows exactly who can help her win in their rematch this fall. “One-point-six million new voters are added to the rolls after 2018. The margin in the 2018 election was … 54,723 votes. We’ve got 1.6 million opportunities to cover a 54,000 vote spread,” Abrams told reporters at a campaign stop in Athens on Saturday. Read more
Related: The Black Silent Majority. By Theodore R. Johnson / The Bulwark
GOP strategy elevates clashes over crime, race in midterm battlegrounds. By Annie Linskey and Colby Itkowitz / Wash Post
Republicans are increasingly centering their pitch to voters in the midterms on crime, prompting growing accusations of racism from some Democrats, but also worries that the attacks could resonate
One Republican commercial casts Mandela Barnes as a “different” Democrat, and points out his push to end cash bail. Another shows his face on a wall with his last name sprayed in graffiti-style script and highlights a comment he made about reallocating police funds. A third labels him “dangerously liberal on crime.” Read more
Let’s Talk About the Economic Roots of White Supremacy. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Shown are Credit…Bettmann/Getty Images
Most Americans tend to think of Jim Crow almost exclusively in terms of racist oppression of Black Americans, but the Jim Crow system was as much about the preservation of a particular economic order as it was about the racist subjugation of Black people. In fact, the two were intertwined. By disenfranchising, segregating and terrorizing Black people, Southern elites could fragment and segment the entire working class as well as maintain a large pool of exploited, low-wage labor. Read more
The Latinx Future Will Not Look Like the Latinx Past. By Luis Manuel Diaz / The Nation
My generation is more outspoken—about inequality, assimilation, racism, and more—than those that came before.
Like many other young immigrants and first-generation Americans, young Latinxs have seen and experienced what the pursuit of the American Dream can do to a body. Seeing our parents overworked, mistreated, and ridiculed while they are simultaneously expected to remain grateful for the scraps this country offers them has for decades shaped how our communities live in this country. There has been Latinx activism and organizing in this country for as long as the United States has existed, but for my generation of Latinx youth, things seem different: As a group, we seem to be throwing off the heavy burden this places on our shoulders and are confronting head-on the oppressive systems that shape our lives. Read more
Related: Latinos are ‘vastly’ underrepresented on corporate boards. By Carmen Sesin / NBC News
Mississippi Welfare Scandal Spreads Well Beyond Brett Favre. / NYT
Millions earmarked for the needy in the nation’s poorest state instead went to projects that benefited the well-to-do, the state alleges, including a volleyball stadium at Mr. Favre’s alma mater.
Far more than that payment has been exposed in a billowing scandal that has stretched considerably beyond Mr. Favre. A motley assortment of political appointees, former football stars, onetime professional wrestlers, business figures and various friends of the state’s former Republican governor all stand accused of pocketing or misusing money earmarked for needy families. Read more
Related: An ex-director of Mississippi’s welfare agency pleads guilty over misspent money. By AP and NPR
Related: In Jackson, the tap water is back, but the crisis remains. By Renuka Rayasam / PBS
Once nicknamed “Murderapolis,” the city that made itself the center of the “Defund the Police” movement is grappling with heightened violent crime. By Bob Kuznia / CNN
After the police murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, Minneapolis became a worldwide symbol of the police brutality long endured disproportionately by Black people.
In a kind of Newtonian response, the city became the epicenter of the culturally seismic “Defund the Police” movement. But that progressive local effort fizzled with a decisive referendum last November. Now, with its police department under investigation by the Department of Justice, the city of 425,000 is trying to find a way forward amid a period of heightened crime that began shortly after Floyd’s death. Read more
Following A Forbes Investigation, Florida A&M Students Sue Florida Over $1.3 Billion In Underfunding. By Hank Tucker / Forbes
Six Florida A&M University students filed a class action lawsuit Thursday against the state of Florida and the board of governors of the State University System, alleging that decades of underfunding have sustained a segregated environment with inferior resources and facilities compared with the state’s predominantly white public schools.
The lawsuit seeks to make FAMU whole and for FAMU to achieve “complete parity” with Florida’s majority white institutions within the next five years. FAMU’s $123 million in state appropriations in 2020 amounted to about $13,000 per student for its enrollment of 9,400, lagging behind the University of Florida’s $15,600 in state funding per student, when both schools are land-grant research institutions. Read more
The Cherokee Nation is renewing its push for a nonvoting delegate in Congress. By Joe Hernandez / NPR
Kimberly Teehee, right, and Cherokee Nation principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. speak to the media in 2019 after Hoskin nominated Teehee to be the Cherokee Nation’s first delegate to Congress.
In 1835, U.S government officials and members of the Cherokee Nation signed the Treaty of New Echota, which led to the expulsion of Cherokees from their territory east of the Mississippi River in a mass exodus known as the Trail of Tears. A lesser-known provision of the same treaty also granted the Cherokee Nation a delegate in the House of Representatives “whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.” Now, the tribal government is calling on congressional leadership to finally make good on the pledge of its predecessors. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
“You are going to hear our voices”: Rev. William J. Barber on the midterms and the road ahead. By Bob Hennelly / Salon
Don’t fear the word “poor,” Barber says: If poor people voted in large numbers, that would change everything
I recently spoke to the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, on the campus of Princeton University, where he delivered the keynote address for the U.S. chapter of the World Student Christian Federation, a global network of more than 100 progressive Christian student movements around the world. After Barber’s keynote address, I sat down with him to discuss the coming midterm elections and the larger choices facing American society. Read more
The American right’s future involves waging a ‘religious battle’ against the left, leaders say at a conservative conference. By Allan Smith / NBC News
“Insofar as conservatism as a movement has a future, it is a future that is going to be increasingly tied to explicit theological claims,” one speaker said in closing the National Conservatism Conference.
Repeatedly, speakers here framed the ongoing fight against the American left in biblical terms — a “religious battle” in which Republicans must be unafraid to use state power to thwart progressive goals not just in government, but the private sphere, too. Those at the gathering often argued both the culture wars and a changing economy are a battle of Christian ideals vs. a new age secularism. Read more
Trump’s Embrace of QAnon Realizes the Dream of the Religious Right. By Chris Lehmann / The Nation
For evangelicals and conservative Christians, the former president’s cult-like rallies have placed their ritualized militancy at the center of American politics.
The proceedings turned solemn as Trump struck a calculatedly sorrowful vocal cadence, so as to play up the rally’s plaint of white nationalist cultural confrontation, delivered in the apocalyptic key of QAnon. Trump delivered a litany of telltale signs of runaway American decline under the Democratic rule of Washington, from inflation to foreign-policy cock-ups to the tragedy of green energy funding, all to the swelling, kitschy accompaniment of a bona fide QAnon theme song, “WWG1WGA,” titled with the acronym for the movement’s slogan, “Where We Go One, We Go All.” The crowd recognized the import of the moment, and began raising fingers in the air in what is apparently a QAnon salute, likewise symbolizing movement unity. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Imani Perry’s Capacious History of the South. By Robert Greene II / The Nation
For many Black Americans, the South was an ancestral home as well as a place of present warning and future promise. It was where the historic struggles against inequality and discrimination had taken place, but it was also a region that had cast an ominous shadow over the rest of the country.
The different Souths that many Black Americans carry with them is the central theme of a new book by Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. With it, Perry enters a long tradition of considering Southern identity—the South of Black freedom and of Black oppression. Read more
Historians call DeSantis’ views on American slavery “ignorance”. By Meghan Ellis / Alternet
According to a new analysis from Newsweek, DeSantis’ seemingly controversial remarks were made on Tuesday, September 20. At the time, he argued that it was the “American revolution that caused people to question slavery.”
He added, “Nobody had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowered by our creator with inalienable rights and that we are all created equal. Then that birthed abolition movements.” Professor Karin Wulf, who focuses on the study of eighteenth-century British American history at Brown University, said, “On at least three levels this is wrong. The idea of natural rights didn’t originate with the American revolutionaries; they were reflecting ideas that were widespread among political thinkers, perhaps most obviously the 17th-century English political philosopher John Locke. Read more
The forgotten history of what California stole from Black families. by Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil / The Guardian
A multigenerational fight for reparations is underway from Palm Springs to Gold Rush country
Despite California’s founding in 1850 as a free state, it has been marked by “atrocities in nearly every sector” of society over the past 172 years, according to a recent taskforce report, including land confiscation and housing discrimination. Although the form of any reparations has yet to be determined, and will be limited to those who can trace their ancestry to slavery, the work of the taskforce – which began a new round of public hearings on 23 September – has set off a wider reckoning over California’s racist past. Read more
The Missing Black Women in Denmark Vesey’s Conspiracy. By Karen Cook Bell / AAIHS
The Denmark Vesey conspiracy transformed how enslavers viewed free and unfree men who labored in the cities and countryside of Charleston, South Carolina.
Significantly, enslaved and free Black women who labored as domestics, worked in the fields, and cooked for the men who were tried and convicted for conspiracy avoided suspicion in the conspiracy and were overlooked as co-conspirators. Artisans and laborers in the slave and free Black community of Charleston played a central role in planning the insurrection. Interrogating the role of enslaved and free Black women in Charleston and the surrounding areas underscores the ways by which Black women aided and abetted slave conspiracies and revolts. Read more
15 Beloved Black Banned Books You Must Read Now. By Angela Johnson / The Root
This month we celebrate banned books, so we picked black books beloved by readers everywhere, but they’re also heavily targeted by conservatives
This September 18 – 24 is Banned Books Week , an annual celebration of the freedom to read, which began in 1982. Across the country, there have been continuous efforts to ban books from libraries and schools that deal with issues of race and sexuality. And it’s no coincidence that many of those books were written by LGBTQ or authors of color. But as conservatives push to keep people from reading these books, it’s important that we push just as hard on the other side to keep them in circulation. Read more
Pharoah Sanders, giant of spirit-driven jazz, dies at 81. By Andrew Flanagan and Nate Chinen / NPR
Pharoah Sanders, the revered and influential tenor saxophonist who explored and extended the boundaries of his instrument, notably alongside John Coltrane in the 1960s, died on Saturday morning in Los Angeles. His death was announced in a post on social media by the record label Luaka Bop, which had released his celebrated 2021 album Promises and confirmed by a publicist who worked on the release. Sanders was 81 years old. Read more
Sports
Boston Celtics suspend coach Ime Udoka for 2022-23 season, effective immediately. By ESPN
The Celtics cited violations of team policies in their announcement. Sources previously told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that Udoka had an intimate relationship with a female member of the franchise’s staff.
The suspension is effective immediately, and a decision about Udoka’s future with the organization will be made later, the team said. “I want to apologize to our players, fans, the entire Celtics organization, and my family for letting them down,” Udoka said in a statement to ESPN’s Malika Andrews. “I am sorry for putting the team in this difficult situation, and I accept the team’s decision. Out of respect for everyone involved, I will have no further comment.” Read more
At Home With LeBron James and His Family. By Dan Adler / Vanity Fair
The Jameses—LeBron, Savannah, Bronny, Bryce, and Zhuri—pose for a first-ever family photo extravaganza.
Lebron James and Savannah Brinson met in 2002, when they were students at nearby high schools in Ohio and just as LeBron became a national phenomenon. The promise of his early expectations was staggering, but he went on to outstrip it. At 37, he’s not so much an elder statesman of the NBA as he is the engine of its contemporary business, politics, and presentation. He’s also vocal about being a family man. He and Savannah married in 2013, and they have three children, Bronny, Bryce, and Zhuri. Read more
Yankees’ Aaron Judge Hits 60th Home Run of Season. By James Wagner / NYT
Judge, the Yankees’ superstar outfielder, became the sixth player to reach the milestone and is one short of tying Roger Maris’s American League record of 61.
In baseball’s long history, only five players had hit that many home runs in a season. Whether or not they were aided by performance enhancers, they are among the greatest hitters of all time: Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Maris and Babe Ruth. On Tuesday, for the first time in over two decades, a new name joined that list. Read more
Related: Albert Pujols hits his 700th home run, becoming the 4th player to reach the mark. By AP and NPR
Tampa Bay Rays’ all-Latino starting lineup makes MLB history. By Sophie Reardon / CBS News
The Tampa Bay Rays made history on Thursday afternoon when all of its starting hitters were Latino, the team said. To make matters sweeter, the lineup took the field on Roberto Clemente Day, all wearing the number 21 as a tribute to the star right fielder and Puerto Rico native. The starting lineup was: Yandy Díaz and Randy Arozarena from Cuba; Wander Franco, Manuel Margot and Jose Siri from the Dominican Republic; Harold Ramírez from Colombia; David Peralta and René Pinto from Venezuela; and Isaac Paredes from Mexico, according to MLB.com. Read more
For Dreadlocked N.F.L. Players, Hair Is a Point of Pride. / NYT
About 18 percent of players on active N.F.L. rosters — or nearly one in five players on every club — wear their hair dreadlocked or braided, according to an informal tally compiled from roster headshots from all 32 teams.
It wasn’t until his junior year of college, in 2015, that Aaron Jones decided to rebel and form his hair into dreadlocks. He said his parents, Alvin and Vurgess Jones, had warned him that Black people had long been targeted for discrimination, ostracism or punishment in school and the workplace for wearing their natural hair texture. But as Jones matured, his parents’ stance softened, and Jones, the star running back for the Green Bay Packers, has now grown his dreadlocks for eight years so that they reach his collarbone, the tips of the barreling twists dyed a dark blond. Read more
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