Seeing Black

On July 31, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Jamil Abdulla Al-Amin’s effort to obtain a new trial to establish his innocence in a murder case. Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was convicted in March 2002 of shooting and killing Fulton County Sheriff’s Deputies Ricky Kinchen and wounding Aldranon English. Al-Amin and his supporters insist he did not commit the crimes.

Kinchen and English, both Black officers, had gone to Al-Amin’s Atlanta, Georgia neighborhood on March 16, 2000, with a warrant to arrest him for failure to appear in traffic court on charges of impersonating a police officer and driving a stolen vehicle.

According to an account in an article, “The Unofficial Gag Order of Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), 16 Years in Prison, Still Not Allowed to Speak,” by Obaid H. Siddiqui (The Root, May 30, 2018), the two charges stemmed from a May 1999 incident. Al-Amin, who was driving his new Ford Explorer, was pulled over by a Cobb County, Georgia police officer because the car had a “drive-out tag” on it. Although new car owners in Georgia can drive with a “drive-out tag” for 30 days without registering the car, the police officer ordered Al-Amin out of the car to search him. The police officer claimed he ran a check on the car and that it was stolen, but in searching Al-Amin he found the receipt for the car in Al-Amin’s wallet which confirmed his ownership. He also found an honorary badge which the mayor of White Hall, Alabama had given to Al-Amin. Despite a letter from the mayor to authorities saying that he had given Al-Amin the badge, Al-Amin was still charged with impersonating a police officer and driving a stolen car.

Months later when Kinchen and English came for Al-Amin a gunfight broke out, but Al-Amin says he wasn’t the shooter. There was no blood or gun residue on his clothing. English was recovering from his gunshot wounds in a hospital when he was given some photographs and told to identify the shooter. English, according to the Siddiqui article, said the shooter had gray eyes. Al-Amin’s eyes are brown. A witness to the incident said the shooter was of average height. Al-Amin is 6’5.”

Al-Amin did not testify, in his trial, but the prosecutor continued to direct questions at him during the trial’s closing arguments. The prosecutor’s conduct formed the basis of Al-Amin’s appeal. Al-Amin’s attorneys said the prosecutor’s questions to Al-Amin violated his constitutional right to not testify. Al-Amin was sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2002.

Prior to the 11th Circuit Court appeal, the attorneys for Al-Amin went before the U.S. District Court. In September 2017, District Judge Amy Totenberg ruled that the prosecutor violated Al-Amin’s constitutional right to refrain from testifying during his trial. She also said the trial judge’s statement to the jury, intended to prevent the prosecutor’s behavior from influencing the jury’s verdict, may have done more harm than good. But Judge Totenberg said she found the information presented in the case “weighty” and rejected Al-Amin’s argument against his imprisonment.

The 11th Circuit Court upheld the District Court’s ruling, saying that the prosecutor’s violation of Al-Amin’s right to not testify would probably have no affect on the jury’s verdict.

Al-Amin’s family, meanwhile, is concerned about his health and the quality of medical care he receives in prison. In an August 16 interview with The Real News Network, Kairi Al-Amin, Jamil Abdullah A-Amin’s son, said his father has cancer and recently had a stroke. “He’s a 75-year-old man and he has his health issues that we’re dealing with,” said Kairi. “He’s stronger than most, but Father Time is undefeated. We hope to see him on the other side of the wall before it’s over with.”

Kairi said he believes his father’s imprisonment is part of a decades-long vendetta that the U.S. government has had against him. When he was still H.Rap Brown in the 1960s, he was under constant surveillance by the FBI under then-Director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). Brown was a charismatic leader, speaker, and voting rights organizer in the South. He was the fifth chair of The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. When the organization briefly merged with the Black Panther Party, he was its Minister of Justice. A secret 1967 FBI memo called for Brown to be “neutralized.” For example, he was charged with inciting a riot and carrying a gun across state lines. Neither federal charge was proven.

During the 1970s, he became a Muslim, joined the Darul Islam organization, and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. He became a Muslim minister, or Imam. He moved to Atlanta’s West End, opened a grocery store, and continued his life’s work of community betterment and organizing. He preached against gambling and drug abuse.

Kairi noted in The Real News Network interview that his father had been placed in federal penitentiaries not long after his conviction, as Georgia considered him too high a security risk for a state prison. He was sent to the ADX supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado. When he was found to have multiple myeloma (cancer), he was transferred to the Butner Federal Medical Center in North Carolina. He is currently incarcerated in a Tuscon, Arizona federal prison.

Kairi’s family and supporters have created a website,whathappened2rap.com, where updates on Al-Amin and his situation will be posted.They are working on a television series about Al-Amin with the goal of having it aired on ABC News 20/20. They are also urging people to write their Senators and Members of Congress, urging them to join the campaign for Al-Amin’s release from prison.

“My father is innocent!” said Kairi. “Be as upset as we are when our rappers get locked up, even if it’s for lawful reasons. . .When our heroes and the people we say we love are under the thumb of the people they’ve been fighting, we can’t forget about them or throw them by the wayside.”

“Show me someone not full of herself and I’ll show you a hungry person.”

Nikki Giovanni,  poet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Up-pi-ty. Meaning: Arrogant. Self-important. Presumptuous. The word comes from the late 19th Century, right after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction period and the beginning of the rigid Jim Crow racial segregation laws in the Deeper South.

It began as a description Black people used for other Black people they perceived as acting snobbishly towards them, as if they thought they were better than the rest of the race. Then white people started using the word to connote Black people who “didn’t know their place,” who refused to be subservient to whites, who, in fact, behaved as equals.

Seemingly, the 21st Century version of “uppity” is people of color who talk back to the un-president; who defy his cruel executive orders on immigration, social safety net programs, the LGBTQ community, and just about anything else he supports. Apparently the un-president considers  the four most outspoken Congresswomen of color — Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn,), Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Presley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — as the most “uppity” of all of his critics, and he can’t STAND them. How dare these women of color in Congress say anything against HIM! Who do they think they are?

And so the un-president began a prolonged attack on the women via his  tweets. He accused, or implied, that the women were unpatriotic, un-American, and (GASP!) SOCIALIST!  And not only that, THEY AREN’T EVEN WHITE!!!

Meanwhile, Repugnantthugs and their various spokespeople are tying themselves up in knots trying to explain on the public affairs talking heads TV shows how the un-president’s tweets were NOT racist. What he was attacking, they’ve said, was the women’s supposed far left, extremist political views, lack of patriotism, and, tacked on as a last minute charge, anti-semitic (that one was mostly directed at Rep. Omar because she’s a Muslim).

But People of color, especially Black people, see through the un-president’s lies. We know his history of bad-mouthing people of color and women he can’t control. Before the “Squad,” he called out Rep. Omar for her statements which allegedly backed Islamic terrorist groups (which she didn’t). Before that he went after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for claiming to have some degree of Native American ancestry (she does, according to her DNA test results), and he derisively called her “Pocahontas” after the 17th Century Native American princess. Before and during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, he slandered former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton,  calling her a “crook” (with no evidence of such).

Elections are part of the reason for the un-president’s lies, verbal and written attacks against the four female, politically progressive U.S. Representatives of color. He’s running for re-election, and he knows that his voting base is just as racist as he is, as well as frightened of intelligent, articulate, highly educated people of color — especially women of color with those characteristics.  Women like that will not stand for his bullying and name-calling, his deliberate misinterpretation of their political views.

Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar and Tlaib are doing their level best to draft and pass legislation for which their respective constituents elected them. The un-president’s antics are like an annoying housefly, making a lot of buzzing sounds and flying around but creating nothing. These Representatives will serve their voters, and all Americans, regardless. It’s what “uppity” people do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Newsweek photo.

I’ve gone for months without writing anything in this blog. So much has happened, and much of what has happened is so horrible that it’s hard to find the words to describe it. And most of the horrible things that are happening are happening to people of color.

Every day one sees on the news that yet another unarmed Black person has been shot and killed by police. Or there are stories about Native American and Black women all over the country who have gone missing, and nobody’s asking why.

White hate groups are increasing their presence in the U.S. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights and watchdog organization, says such groups grew by 30% in the last four years. There are 1,000 hate groups.

And now within this atmosphere of escalating racism and hate, is a U.S. immigration policy that takes migrants fleeing gang and government violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to obtain asylum in here, and confines them in detention camps’ wire cages. The migrants are denied basic amenities like healthy food, soap, tooth brushes and toothpaste. Toddlers are going for days without a diaper change. Some of the children are reportedly being, or have been,  sexually assaulted by the immigration guards at the camps. Children who have been forcibly separated from their parents are trying to play the role of parents and look after their younger brothers and sisters. There have been deaths among the migrants, some of whom had chronic conditions and were prevented from obtaining their medication which could have kept them alive.

Where is OUR outrage? We who are Black know what it’s like to be treated like less than animals. Why aren’t WE in the streets? How can those of us who are parents look at the face of the child in the photograph and not feel anger and compassion?

And more immigrants are coming from African countries, desperate to escape political violence in Cameroon, The Republic of Congo, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola. They travel to Central America and wait at the U.S.-Mexico border in the hope that they will obtain an asylum hearing.

What can WE do about this? Maybe it’s time to take a page from protests past. In the early 1980s, The Free South Africa Movement in Washington, D.C., which was led by Black folks, set up a picket line very close to the South African Embassy every day, rain or shine, to protest the South African system of apartheid, or forced separation of the races. A designated number of demonstrators would walk up the front steps of the South African Embassy and stand in front of its door, where they were promptly arrested. The process was repeated every day, and each day the kinds of groups picketing and being arrested differed. Teachers. Doctors. Lawyers. Students. Mothers. Fathers. Unions. Local government workers.

The demonstrators demanded that the U.S. change its policy on South Africa, and impose economic sanctions in an effort to force it to end apartheid and institute all-races elections in which everyone there could vote in national and local elections, whatever their race.  The protests worked, the U.S. imposed economic sanctions, and not long after that apartheid ended.

Maybe something similar could be undertaken here to radically change the U.S. immigration system. The reason it might work is that in #45 we have an un-president who hates bad, unfavorable, unflattering publicity. HATES it. What if daily and nightly protests generated so much negative local, national and international publicity that even his own party would plead with him to hire more immigration judges to eliminate the backlog of immigration and asylum cases, increase and expedite immigration and asylum hearings, and in the meantime provide shelter for the immigrants that didn’t involve cages and filth?

If anyone has a better idea, please come on with it. All I know is that we can’t sit and watch what’s happening from the sidelines anymore.  ESPECIALLY not US.The face of that child behind the wire tells me, and one hopes, you, that simply watching what’s happening is not an option.

 

 

 

 

 

March is Women’s History Month. It also happens to be National Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Month. The coincidence places a spotlight on a profession that people with intellectual disabilities depend on to help them obtain a better quality of life.  It’s a profession dominated by women, and as such it is taken for granted. It’s the field of Direct Support Professionals, the DSPs.

They may be known by other titles, but the work that DSPs do is the same: It includes everything from assisting  intellectually disabled individuals with personal care (bathing, toileting, dressing, grooming, eating) to finding and taking them to social and recreational activities that they might never experience otherwise.   They help those who want employment find work and job training. They sometimes serve as counselors to those clients who feel they have no one else with which to discuss their problems or concerns, not even friends or family. Many DSPs have been trained in first aid and CPR, what to do when a client has a seizure, how to calm down a client who has a temper tantrum , becomes hysterical, or behaves in a manner that could endanger the client and other people in the vicinity.

Eighty-nine percent of the DSP workforce is composed of women. Forty percent of the women are white, 30 percent are Black, 16 percent are Latinx, and seven percent are”Other.” Their average age is 42.  Approximately 880,000 full time DSPs serve roughly 1.4 million people with intellectual disabilities. Thirty percent of the DSP workforce is part time, or 1,276,000 employees.

Of the 1.4 million people with intellectual disabilities that DSPs serve, one in five are white, one in four are Black, three in ten are Native American.

Given all that they do, one would think that DSPs would be amply compensated for their work in the form of livable incomes. But the average DSP wage is $11.76 an hour, an amount which has not kept pace with rising food and housing costs. Many DSPs are on public assistance just to make ends meet, or they’re working two or more jobs. According to  the spring 2019 edition of Impact, the newsletter of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration, DSPs earn less than a family of four living below the federally defined poverty level.

So they leave their jobs in droves. The annual turnover rate is 46%. Thirty eight percent leave after less than six months on the job; 21 percent leave between six and 12 months. DSP vacancy rates are high, which means adults with intellectual disabilities, their families or guardians, wait months for more to be hired and trained to provide them with desperately needed assistance.

In many states, advocates for DSPs and the disability community have demonstrated and lobbied their governors and legislatures to increase DSP wages. Maryland’s state Senate Finance Committee recently passed a bill that would gradually increase DSP wages over six fiscal years, beginning with FY21 at five percent; FY 22 at five percent; FY23 at 4.5 percent; FY24 at 4 percent; FY25 at 4 percent, and FY26 at 3 percent.   The bill heads to the full Senate for a final vote.

There’s a saying among DSPs that everyone is only one stroke away from being disabled. And that’s when DSPs would finally be appreciated. Don’t wait for the unthinkable to happen. Call on your states’ legislators and tell them that those women who work to enable intellectually disabled individuals to live lives of dignity, relative independence and respect, deserve some dignity and respect themselves. Their work needs to be recognized through wages they can actually live on.

 

By now, most people have heard about what happened to actor-singer Jussie Smollett, who is Black, gay, and a featured actor on the Fox TV network drama series, “Empire.” For anyone who hasn’t: In Chicago on  January 29 at 2 a.m., as he was walking home from a sandwich shop, Smollett says he was accosted by two white men who called him the n-word as well as a slur meaning homosexual, beat him, poured something liquid on him, and tied a rope or clothesline around his neck arranged to resemble a noose.

As soon as the news got out, Black Hollywood rushed to his support, tweeting encouragement and calling for his alleged attackers to be brought to justice. But where were the non-celebrity Black folks? Silence. Crickets.

The Black community has always been a little ambivalent about LGBTQ people. The Black Christian church, where a majority of the congregants are Baptist, has gradually accepted Black LGBTQ. For instance, Black Protestants’ support of same sex marriage rose from 23% to 38% between 2003 and 2014. But on any Sunday, especially in fundamentalist churches, one can still hear that LGBTQ sexual orientation is a “sin” and an “abomination,” the work of the devil.

I’m most concerned about the “woke” Black folks who identify with Africa politically and culturally. Unfortunately, there are some who are spreading the misinformation that LGBTQ is an invention of white evil scientists who created Black LGBTQ people to destroy the Black community from within, and emasculate Black males. They claim that LGBTQ people were never tolerated in the mother continent of Africa.

Not so.  “The idea that homosexuality is ‘Western’ is based on another import – Christianity,” wrote Bisi Alimi, a gay Nigerian man, in the September 9, 2015 edition of The Guardian. “True African culture celebrates diversity and promotes acceptance.”

Alimi wrote that homosexuality existed in the Yoruba and Hausa cultures in Nigeria. In Uganda, he wrote, there was even an openly gay king of the Buganda Kingdom, King Mwanga II.  Homosexuality wasn’t an issue, Alimi wrote, until the Christian colonizers invaded African countries, and imposed their conservative views on the African people.

Many of today’s African leaders are outdoing each other in who can out-homophobe whom. Former and current heads of Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Uganda have signed anti-LGBTQ legislation, and hate crimes in those and other African countries have increased. Similar to the political situation in the U.S., Alimi wrote, “.  .  . populist homophobia has kept many politicians in power. Across Africa, if you hate gay people, you get votes.”

Which is what the U.S. un-president has done. It’s no accident that the two men who Smollett says attacked him, yelled “You’re in MAGA (Make America Great Again) country!”

Black “woke” people in the U.S. should know better than to write off more than one million Black people who are LGBTQ. We shouldn’t be mirroring the homophobia and racism of whites, or of suspect “leaders” in African countries. We are all in the struggle for justice and freedom together, and to win that struggle, we’re going to need every Black man, woman and child working together to bring about that victory. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with that.

Smollett is Black AND gay, and he shouldn’t have to choose between the two. He’s both, and he has advocated for, and championed, both. Stop being silent, “woke” Black people. Show Smollett some love, and stand with him against racial AND homophobic hate.

 

 

 

 

 

“You’ve taken my blues and gone — 

You sing ’em on Broadway

And you sing ’em in (the) Hollywood Bowl,

And you mixed ’em up with symphonies

And you fixed ’em 

So they don’t sound like me.

Yep, you done taken my blues and gone .  .  . “

From Langston Hughes’ poem,  Note on Commercial Theatre

When is an authentic blues man not an authentic blues man? When the Recording Academy says he isn’t, and rejects his submission for a blues Grammy Award as not “authentic” enough!

That’s what’s happened to Chris Thomas King, a Louisiana blues man who is the son of a Louisiana blues man. Those of you who saw the 2000 film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” might remember him as the blues singer who joins George Clooney, who plays one of three escapees from a Mississippi prison, on a search for buried treasure. King was also a featured participant in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 seven-part PBS documentary on the history of the blues.

In short, King knows his stuff.  He grew up in his father’s juke joint, where he was surrounded by blues music 24-7. His father played it and sang it. King was even “discovered” by a Smithsonian folklorist. Being “discovered” by white musicologists or folklorists was one of the ways that Black Southern blues men like Huddie Ledbetter  (Leadbelly) and others were first “found,” and their music recorded and distributed in the early part of the 20th Century.

What made King’s newest release Hotel Voodoo “inauthentic”? Some of its songs included a musician playing a clarinet! Apparently, that simply isn’t done on an “authentic” blues album.

What constitutes an “authentic” blues musician in the eyes of the Recording Academy’s blues music Grammy nominating committee? First you have to understand that the blues music category is a subcategory under the overall heading of “American Roots Music.” “Roots music” is defined by the Academy as “Americana, bluegrass, blues, folk, or regional roots.”

Once you weed through all that, there are two blues categories, “Best Traditional Blues Album” and “Best Contemporary Blues Album.” In the traditional blues category, three of the five nominees are Black: blues guitarist Buddy Guy (whose playing influenced Jimi Hendrix), drummer, guitarist and singer Cedric Burnside, and singer guitarist Ben Harper, whose album “No Mercy In This Land” was recorded with longtime blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite, who’s white.

Of the Grammy nominees for best contemporary blues album, only one — ONE! — is Black: singer and guitarist Fantastic Negrito.

King has written an op-ed about what happened to him in the online Spectator USA .  He was also interviewed recently on a podcast.  From what King is saying, he’s not seeking white acceptance by winning a Grammy.  The fame and recognition that comes with the award, he said, means getting better jobs at better venues.

Blues already has a wealth of white fans, but they tend to be fans of white “blues” groups or individuals playing and singing Black “blues” music, or an approximation of same. Meanwhile, Black blues musicians go unrecognized, unappreciated, unhired and unpaid. Even sadder is that Black people have left blues by the wayside, like jazz, another musical form created by Black people. Go to any blues or jazz club where the performer is Black. You can count Black people in the audience on one hand. Maybe one finger.

King has said he was told to sing and perform like The Rolling Stones or other white American and British groups who made their musical reputation by imitating Black blues singers and re-recording their blues classics. He shouldn’t have to do that, or prove his “authenticity” as a blues artist to anybody.

King is currently touring the U.S. I hope Black folks turn out in droves to see him, and show the brother some love.

This is one of the songs that got King disqualified due to the presence of a clarinet:

 

 

 

 

It’s fashionable these days to blame us Baby Boomers (yeah, I’m almost at the middle of the “Boom”) for anything and everything from the state of the economy to the high costs of housing, maybe even for global warming. This is despite the fact that we were responsible for advancing the civil, women’s and LGBTQ rights movements, came up with p.c.s (Steve Jobs was one of us, y’all), and all kinds of advances in art, science, politics. The un-president is a Boomer, but I don’t claim him as such.  I like to think of him as an aberration.

Among the many things that parents of Boomers got right, and from which we benefited, was immunizing us with vaccines to prevent us from getting childhood diseases, all of which were highly communicable and could be fatal if left untreated.

Vaccinations have been very helpful in keeping Black children and adults from being victims of mumps, measles, chicken pox, yellow fever, tuberculosis, polio, and other infectious illnesses. I remember hearing about life before vaccines. I have an aunt who contracted tuberculosis in her youth and had to spend time laid up in an “iron lung”, a case fitted over her body that pumped air into her so she could breathe. Then she was sent to a “sunshine camp” way out in the country somewhere,  quarantined and isolated from family and friends until she recovered.

Another friend of mine contracted polio back in the day, before polio vaccines all but eradicated it. She has walked on crutches all of her life.

Ignoring such immunization benefits are the “anti-vaxxers,” parents who, in the last 30 years or so, have been opting out of vaccinating their children for “religious reasons” or because they think vaccines cause illness. Then there are those parents who believe in a long discredited connection between the measles vaccine and autism. That myth originated in Britain by Andrew Wakefield, a former researcher and doctor. When it was found that his so-called autism study was funded by people who were suing vaccine manufacturers, he was removed from the United Kingdom Medical Registry, which prevented him from practicing medicine ever again.

These beliefs in false information and research have resulted in an increase of children being exposed to, and catching, what should have been preventable childhood illnesses across the U.S., according to a study by the Public Library of Science journal Medicine.

Repugnantthugs are also in part responsible for spreading misinformation about vaccinations.  Various G.O.P. candidates have supported parents “opting out” of mandatory vaccinations for their children because it’s another instance of “big government telling us what to do.” Some have also supported an end to mandatory vaccinations.

What anti-vaxxers and Repugnantthugs are missing is that not vaccinating children leaves all children who haven’t been vaccinated susceptible to childhood illnesses. Especially babies. The immunization schedule for children starts at birth with the Hepatitis B vaccination. If it isn’t given at birth, it can be given at any age.  Without it, and the other vaccines babies and children are to be given, they can become very sick. What parents want that for their children?

I’m aware that in the Black community, many of us are highly suspicious of “white medicine” because of the infamous Tuskegee Experiment of the 1930s and ’40s.  A group of Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama was injected with the bacterial infection syphilis without their knowledge or consent and left untreated, while another group of Black men received experimental-stage vaccinations  that cured them.The results were compared, but meanwhile, the men in the untreated group became blind, mentally ill, and died before their time.

I get it. But not all science and medicine is evil, or a plot to destroy the race. What will destroy the race is standing by while our children die off from preventable illnesses.  Anti-vaxxers are pressing their luck if they think they can get through life without being immunized. Want proof? Bre Payton, a writer for conservative news site The Federalist and a Fox News commentator, died last month at age 26. The causes of death: H1N1 flu and  meningitis, for which there are vaccines. I don’t know if she or her parents were against vaccinations, but she might have still been alive today if she had been immunized.

Want further proof? My daughter and I are of different generations, but we both had all of our vaccinations, as well as the flu shot every year. We’re both alive, and neither of us is autistic.

Fellow parents, this is a new century and a new year. We should know more, not less, about vaccinations than in previous years and centuries. If you have not yet done so, PLEASE vaccinate your children! Help prevent national health crises, and keep your, and our, children alive and healthy.

My mother taught me not to speak ill of the dead or wish anyone dead. However, it’s not always acceptable to beatify someone just because they died, especially an elected official, a public figure, such as former President George H.W. Bush, who passed on Saturday, December 1.

Various pundits, observers, friends and those who worked for Bush remember him as a dedicated public servant who had the best interests of his country at heart, and someone who was devoted to his family.

But there were things that Bush was involved in that were far from saintly or in the best interests of the U.S. They include:

• The Willie Horton presidential campaign strategy of 1988. To defeat Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who was Bush’s Democratic opponent in the presidential race, Bush campaign director Lee Atwater came up with the case of Willie Horton, a Black prisoner in the state who was serving a life sentence for murder. While on a weekend furlough, he fled to Maryland, where he raped a white woman. The case was magnified and repeated ad nauseum in a Bush campaign ad,  terrifying people into thinking that as President, Dukakis would be “soft on crime.” which really meant soft on Black criminals. Bush took advantage of white voters’ unfounded fears, and  won on the strength of that ad.
• The faked “drug buy” in Lafayette Park across from the White House.                During a live speech to the nation on drug crimes in September 1989, Bush held up a plastic bag of crack cocaine to indicate that drug abuse was so widespread and uncontrollable  that drugs were being bought and sold across the street from the White House in Lafayette Park. Turns out that government agents got the bag under false pretenses. Pretending to be drug users, and bought the bag from a dealer who they then arrested. Bush used the bag as justification for harsher sentences and building  more prisons. Today, prison inmates, who are disproportionately Black men, are serving inordinately long sentences for drug sales and possession, while whites serve much shorter sentences for the same crimes, if they serve at all.
• Bush participated in the Iran-Contra cover-up. Begun under President Reagan, the U.S. secretly sold arms to Iran — which the U.S.  and the world was supposed to be barred by law from doing — and used the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan “contras” or counter-revolutionaries, attempting to overthrow the country’s popularly elected government. That government happened to be left of center. The Reagan/Bush Cold War mentality claimed that if Nicaragua became Communist, so would the rest of Central America, and the region would provide a home to Soviet and Cuban weapons of war. The Sandinista government wasn’t interested in doing any of that, and found itself struggling to feed and educate its people — many of whom are Black and indigenous or “Indian” — while fighting in a war. The arms sales and the cover-up continued when Bush became President. He refused to turn over any information or documents to an Iran-Contra investigation, and even pardoned some defendants involved in Iran-Contra, among them, Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger.

Among the worst “hits” was the assassination of former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier, and his assistant, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, in Washington, D.C. on what’s called “Embassy Row,” a section of the city where many nations operate their U.S. embassies.

Leterlier was a very active and vocal opponent of Chile’s ruling dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, who led the 1973 military coup overthrowing the elected, leftist government of Salvadore Allende. Again, fearing a “Communist takeover” of the country, which would do business with Cuba, the Soviet Union, and other left governments  — countries that the U.S. couldn’t control — the CIA played a role in Allende’s overthrow and Pinochet’s becoming Chile’s leader.  Bush was the CIA’s director at the time.

Pinochet was incensed that Letelier was thriving in the U.S. and increasing opposition to his regime. He contacted an American expatriate who was working with DINA, Pinochet’s secret police, to stop Letelier. The American DINA operative formed a group of assassins with three Cuban Americans, and two other men, who planted a bomb on the underside of Letelier’s car, which could be detonated by remote control. And it was — on September 21, 1976, as Letelier was driving to his job at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank. What was left of the car is depicted in the above photo. The impact of the bomb was said to have severed Letelier’s legs, and blown off his torso. Moffitt’s larynx and carotid artery were severed by a bomb fragment. She choked to death on her own blood.  Letlier also died from his injuries. Moffitt’s husband Michael, who was sitting in the car’s back seat, sustained minor injuries.

After the assassinations, the CIA, under Bush, leaked false information to Newsweek magazine that DINA was not involved in the assassination. But the CIA knew beforehand that something was about to happen when it found that Chilean operatives were headed to the U.S. Those involved in the assassinations were tried and given short prison sentences in exchange for information.  All were eventually acquitted.

As a Black woman I am also outraged that Bush was silent during his presidency about the brutal, white, apartheid regime in South Africa — supposedly to give South African President DeKlerk the space he needed to “reform” apartheid before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and his election as South Africa’s first Black President.

As a Black woman whose ancestors experienced the terrorism of U.S.-style apartheid and enslavement, I am livid that he allowed another country’s murderers to operate in my adopted city. And I hate that Bush would not hesitate to use Black people and other people of color as “monsters” to scare his base into supporting him and his policies.

I cannot forgive or forget these incidents involving Bush. Any tears I shed this week won’t be in mourning for him. They will be for the people he hurt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The above exclamation has been making the rounds of social media following this Tuesday’s runoff election for U.S. Senate in Mississippi. It’s taken from a song written by the late singer-activist Nina Simone. It expresses her frustration with Mississippi in 1960s, a time when Black residents and civil rights workers were terrorized by whites who did not want Black people exercising their constitutional right to register to vote, and to vote in elections. They did not want Black children integrating public schools, Black families buying homes in all-white neighborhoods, or competing on an equal basis for jobs. Segregation ensured that whites would be in power and rule the state forever.

As a result of its rigid racism and its decades-long fight against change, Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the country. It ranks 48th in its economy compared to that of other states. In opportunity and infrastructure it ranks 49th. It ranks 45th in fiscal stability. Only 31 percent of its population has a college education, which underscores its ranking of 46th in education, and 47th in educating children from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade.

So it makes no sense that the majority of the state just elected a Repugnantthug woman, Cindy Hyde-Smith,  to the U.S. Senate, someone who agrees unquestioningly with the un-president’s positions on everything and votes accordingly. Someone who, only days before this week’s runoff election against the Black Democratic opponent Mike Espy, “joked” that if a friend invited her to a public hanging, she would be there in the first row.  For a state known for its violent opposition to racial integration, which often expressed itself in whites hanging Black people, that “joke” was decidedly unfunny.

But the publicity around the her comments did little to stop her from winning the U.S. Senate seat, by a vote of 53 percent to Espy’s 46 percent.

Espy would have been the better choice. The grandson of Thomas J. Huddleston Sr. who founded a Black fraternal society in Mississippi that operated the Afro-American Hospital, Espy earned his undergraduate degree from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C. He received his Juris Doctor from the Santa Clara University School of Law in California. He later worked in the Central Mississippi Legal Services. He served as the Assistant Secretary of State to the Mississippi Legal Services, and the Assistant Secretary of State to the Public Lands Division.

Espy was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi in 1986, the first Black person to represent the state there since Reconstruction. He served three more times. In 1993, Espy was appointed by President Clinton to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he served from 1993 to 1994. During his tenure he was accused of accepting gifts and misusing government “perks.” Although he was charged with receiving improper gifts in 1997, resulting in his resigning from the Department of Agriculture, he was acquitted of all charges in 1998.

Upon returning to the private sector, Espy advocated for poor people in Mississippi, and for Black farmers through his legal representation of the National Black Farmers Association.  He became a staff attorney at the national law firm of Morgan & Morgan.

Given his background, Espy might have brought about some much-needed reforms in Mississippi, which would have benefited all Mississippians, and raised the state’s lower-than-the-bottom status in just about everything. But despite his credentials, Espy still lost to Hyde-Smith, who was educated in the state’s segregated private “academies” rather than attend desegregated public schools with Black students. She, in turn, sent her daughter to such “academies.”

If there’s any remaining doubt that Hyde-Smith is a daughter of the Confederacy, take a look at her photo (above) in which she wears a Confederate soldier cap and proudly displays a rifle.

Then there are the Black Mississippians who voted for Hyde-Smith. One of them was, ironically, Charles Evers, brother of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who in 1963 was shot and killed in front of his own house by a white man,  a member of the White Citizens Council, the suit-and-tie version of the Ku Klux Klan.

Many voters, Black and white, claimed that they voted for Hyde-Smith as the “lesser of two evils.”  What is more “evil” than a U.S. Senator who embraces her Confederate “heritage” and the implied racism that goes with it?  All one can do is is shake one’s head and decide that there are things one can never understand. It’s just the way it  is in  Mississippi. Goddam.