Salon.com > Civil Rights

Lil Wayne responds to family of Emmett Till over offensive lyric

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:29:00 +0000

Although Epic Records apologized for an offensive Lil Wayne rap lyric back in February, the rapper did not issue a formal statement until this week.

In the Future remix called "Karate Chop," Wayne compared the 14-year-old civil rights icon Emmett Till, murdered in 1955, to a sex act.

Wayne sent a letter to Till's family recently, saying he "acknowledged" the hurt caused by the lyrics:

Dear Till Family:

As a recording artist, I have always been interested in word play. My lyrics often reference people, places and events in my music, as well as the music that I create for or alongside other artists.

It has come to my attention that lyrics from my contribution to a fellow artist’s song has deeply offended your family. As a father myself, I cannot imagine the pain that your family has had to endure. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge your hurt, as well as the letter you sent to me via your attorneys.

Moving forward, I will not use or reference Emmett Till or the Till family in my music, especially in an inappropriate manner. I fully support Epic Record’s decision to take down the unauthorized version of the song and to not include the reference in the version that went to retail. I will not be performing the lyrics that contain that reference live and have removed them from my catalogue.

I have tremendous respect for those who paved the way for the liberty and opportunities that African-Americans currently enjoy. As a business owner who employs several African-American employees and gives philanthropically to organizations that help youth to pursue their dreams my ultimate intention is to uplift rather than degrade our community.

Best,

Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr.
Lil Wayne

How conservatives invented “voter fraud” to attack civil rights

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Just when it seemed that the democratic process had reached its apotheosis with the election of America’s first black president, a political earthquake occurred in 2010 that threatened all that had been accomplished since 1965. Two years after Obama’s election, the midterm elections saw a conservative backlash that swept Republicans back into office in droves. As the media focused on the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and increases in the Senate, more important developments were occurring closer to home. Republicans now controlled both legislative bodies in 26 states, and 23 won the trifecta, controlling the governorships as well as both statehouses. What happened next was so swift that it caught most observers off guard — and began surreptitiously to reverse the last half-century of voting rights reforms.

Rand Paul to speak at black university

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:06:00 +0000

Republican Sen. Rand Paul will make a pitch to minority voters this week at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, D.C. The potential 2016 hopeful's message Wednesday will focus on inclusion, according to a press release from the school:

Sen. Paul’s speech will focus on the importance of outreach to younger voters, as well as minority groups. He will also discuss the history of the African-American community’s roots in the Republican Party and current issues, such as school choice and civil liberties

It will be interesting to see what the audience at the school, which is still overwhelmingly African-American, makes of the speech from a senator who once said he didn't support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that it impinged on business owners' rights (he later walked back the remark).

Google celebrates Cesar Chavez, not Easter

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

If you used Google on Sunday, March 31, 2013, you may have noticed the above Google Doodle, a type of drawing Google uses frequently to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, or historically relevant days. On any other day, the above doodle celebrating the birthday of American labor rights activist Cesar Chavez, who would have been 86 today, may have gone unnoticed.

However, for millions of people, that date celebrates something else: Easter Sunday. Several conservatives and Christians alike took issue with Google's decision to honor the rights icon over their holiday:

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Rosa Parks’ activism wasn’t limited to a Montgomery bus

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:57:00 +0000

Black History Month just ended, which means grade schools nationwide recently celebrated how the Civil War abolished slavery, that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter, and, of course, how the Civil Rights Movement ended segregation and disfranchisement. Children everywhere rehearsed familiar narratives about how after enduring years of racist oppression, valiant African-American women and men like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. peacefully demanded and secured equal rights.

And in a bizarre reminder of the political significance the struggle for civil rights still carries, Barack Obama and John Boehner capped the month with a rare joint appearance to unveil a statue of Parks in the Capitol building on the same day that the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We can expect a ruling a few months before we celebrate the 50^thanniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where, on August 28, 1963, King delivered his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech.

NYPD make 5 millionth stop-and-frisk under Bloomberg

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:50:00 +0000

According to an NYCLU announcement Thursday, the NYPD have now carried out over 5 million stop-and-frisks under Mayor Bloomberg, over 86 percent of which on black or Latino individuals. The analysis of police data also revealed that 88 percent of the stops did not result in an arrest or summons (and of course an even smaller proportion ever lead to a conviction).

Via the NYCLU:

“This disturbing milestone is a slap in the face to New Yorkers who cherish the right to walk down the street without being interrogated or even thrown up against the wall by the police,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. “The NYPD’s routine abuse of stop-and-frisks is a tremendous waste of police resources, it sows mistrust between officers and the communities they serve, and it routinely violates fundamental rights. A walk to the subway, corner deli or school should not carry the assumption that you will be confronted by police, but that’s the disturbing reality for young men of color in New York City.”

To stop a person lawfully, a police officer must have reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime.

This year the racist stop-and-frisk practices have come under increasing scrutiny. Monday will see the beginning of a landmark trial -- a federal class-action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights challenging the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk practices. As HuffPo's Matt Sledge noted, the lawyers bringing the suit against the police believe it will be the "trial of the century."

In defense of open borders

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Eric Hobsbawm called the 19^th century “a gigantic machine for uprooting countrymen.” He believed that the reason for mass migrations of people was straightforward. For the immigrants of the 1800s, the United States “was not a society but a means of making money,” often in the hope of “returning home, rich and respected, to their native villages.”

Those immigrants began their American lives by and large doing low-wage, back-breaking, monotonous manual labor and domestic work, which was still better than what was available from in their homelands. In the old country, they’d starved; in the new one, they’d strive. The United States was to forge a national identity out of the collective national identities of millions of foreigners.

In the age of globalization, however, the nation state has retreated as the locus of world power. Multinational free trade agreements, supranational financial institutions, and transnational corporations ensure that capital can float between nations with all the ease of a monarch butterfly. Labor, on the other hand, remains under the jurisdiction of border-obsessed states.

Justice Dept. probes Denver for violating deaf prisoner rights

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:06:00 +0000

This story was originally published by TAI affiliate The Colorado Independent.

The federal Justice Department is investigating Denver for failing to provide sign-language interpreters for deaf prisoners. Investigators are seeking to determine whether Denver – which touts itself as “one of America’s most accessible cities” — is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In a November 20, 2012, letter obtained by The Colorado Independent, the Justice Department threatened legal action and noted that any violation of the Act might jeopardize federal funding for the city’s police and sheriff departments.

“We would like to resolve this matter expeditiously,” wrote Mary Lou Mobley, a Justice Department lawyer.

The investigation stems from a lawsuit filed by Major Jon Michael Scott, who was booked into the Denver County Jail seven times between 2006 and 2012 on burglary charges, on warrants from other jurisdictions and for several parole violations. Scott’s guilt isn’t in question. He’s now serving time at Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility based on a probation violation related to a burglary charge.

Is Scalia the most vile person in Washington?

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 13:29:00 +0000

A day after Justice Antonin Scalia caused gasps in the Supreme Court gallery by saying the 1965 Voting Rights Act had become a “racial entitlement” no congressperson could vote against, Rachel Maddow told The Daily Show she was in the courtroom and Scalia clearly enjoyed tormenting people. “I think he does know how that sounds,” she said. “He’s a troll. He’s saying this for effect. He knows it’s offensive.”

There’s no shortage of badly behaving Republicans in Washington. There’s the take-or-leave-it congressional leadership, who constantly show they value rightwing ideology more than its impact on people. There are intransigent obstructionists, like the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, who believes the answer to gun violence is more guns. But Scalia isn’t simply another Republican bully; he may be the most venal and fascist Republican of all.

What does a police state look like?

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:29:00 +0000

What does a police state really look like in practice in America? Is it the cartoonish dystopia of sci-fi books? Is it like 1998's "The Siege," which predicted a wholesale instatement of martial law? Or in the age of the drone-wielding police department, is it something more mundane and subtle yet nonetheless pernicious? From this city in the middle of Middle America, it looks like the latter.

When people think of Denver, many think of skiing and, since the last election, marijuana. But from here in the Mile High City, things seem a bit different. In the day to day operation of the city, we aren't as much defined by snow and pot as we are by the fact that we live under the rule of an increasingly brutal police force. It is a police force that our political leaders are more than happy to deploy to punish undesirables, and worse, that the most powerful media organ is more than happy to defend.

We have become, in short, a national cautionary tale -- one that no doubt epitomizes similar trends throughout the country.

The white South’s last defeat

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:30:00 +0000

In understanding the polarization and paralysis that afflict national politics in the United States, it is a mistake to think in terms of left and right. The appropriate directions are North and South. To be specific, the long, drawn-out, agonizing identity crisis of white Southerners is having effects that reverberate throughout our federal union. The transmission mechanism is the Republican Party, an originally Northern party that has now replaced the Southern wing of the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the dwindling white Southern tribe.

As someone whose white Southern ancestors go back to the 17th century in the Chesapeake Bay region, I have some insight into the psychology of the tribe. The salient fact to bear in mind is that the historical experience of the white South in many ways is the opposite of the experience of the rest of the country.

Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of military successes. The British are defeated, ensuring national independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world.

Rosa Parks: “I had been pushed as far as I could stand”

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000

“Whites would accuse you of causing trouble when all you were doing was acting like a normal human being instead of cringing,” Rosa Parks explained. “You didn’t have to wait for a lynching.” Such were the assumptions of black deference that pervaded mid-20th century Montgomery, Ala. The bus with its visible arbitrariness and expected servility stood as one of the most visceral experiences of segregation. “You died a little each time you found yourself face to face with this kind of discrimination,” she noted.

Blacks constituted the majority of bus riders, paid the same fare, yet received inferior and disrespectful service — often right in front of and in direct contrast to white riders. “I had so much trouble with so many bus drivers,” Parks recalled. That black people comprised the majority of riders made for even more galling situations on the bus. Some routes had very few white passengers yet the first 10 seats on every bus were always reserved for whites. Thus, on many bus routes, black riders would literally stand next to empty seats. Those blacks able to avoid the bus did so, and those who had the means drove cars. Black maids and nurses, however, were allowed to sit in the white section with their young or sick white charges, further underscoring the ways that bus segregation marked status and the convenience of white needs, and did not simply regulate proximity.

Virginia GOP sneaks through gerrymandering bill on MLK Day

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:02:00 +0000

While a Democratic legislator and civil rights lawyer was in Washington, D.C. celebrating inauguration day, Virginia's state Republican party quietly pushed through a redistricting bill that Democrats say will help the GOP gain the majority in the state Senate in 2015.

Evan McMorris-Santoro of TPM reports:

With [state Sen. Henry] Marsh’s absence, Senate Republicans in Richmond had one more vote than Senate Democrats and could push the measure through. The new redistricting map revises the districts created under the 2011 map and would take effect before the next state Senate elections in Virginia and would redraw district lines to maximize the number of safe GOP seats.

Currently, the state Senate is split evenly, 20-20, between Democrats and Republicans. But in the event of a tie, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a Republican, gets a vote, and Republicans were not sure he would have gone their way (a spokesman for Bolling told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the Republicans' move “is not something that he supported.”)

Judge clears DoJ over post-9/11 confinement of Muslims

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:45:00 +0000

A federal judge ruled Thursday that a lawsuit against Department of Justice officials brought by men detained for immigration violations in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 cannot proceed.

The men, whose complaints were brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, are immigrants in the U.S. who hail from from Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria and Turkey, as well as natives of India and Nepal. "In the weeks following the attacks, they said they were held in federal custody on the pretext of minor immigration violations while the FBI investigated them for potential links to terrorism," Reuters reported.

The dismissed complaint claimed that former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller and former Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner James Ziglar oversaw federal policies which led to the men's harsh detention. However, on Thursday the judge ruled that although the men were certainly detained on the basis of "race, religion and national origin," the federal officials named in the suit did not intend to discriminate.

Court upholds right to give police the finger

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:50:00 +0000

You cannot be arrested for giving the finger to police, according to a Thursday ruling in a federal appeals court.

A New York man, John Swartz, was followed by police, arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in 2006 when, according to court filings, he saw police officers with a radar detector at an intersection and "expressed his displeasure ... by reaching his right arm outside the passenger side window and extending his middle finger over the car’s roof."

The charges against Swartz were dismissed on speedy trial grounds, but he then brought a damages claim against the police -- a claim that was tossed out in a lower Albany court when the judge sided with the police's account that they had followed the man believing his hand gesture to be some sort of distress signal. On Thursday, however, the appeals court ruled against this conclusion, noting "the nearly universal recognition that this gesture is an insult." (The ruling highlights the ancient history of the insult in its footnotes, pointing out that Aristophanes wrote of Strepsiades flipping off Aristotle).

Occupy isn’t over

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:22:00 +0000

Occupy is now a year old. A year is an almost ridiculous measure of time for much of what matters: at one year old, Georgia O’Keeffe was not a great painter, and Bessie Smith wasn’t much of a singer. One year into the Civil Rights Movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was still in progress, catalyzed by the unknown secretary of the local NAACP chapter and a preacher from Atlanta -- by, that is, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Occupy, our bouncing baby, was born with such struggle and joy a year ago, and here we are, 12 long months later.

Occupy didn’t seem remarkable on September 17, 2011, and not a lot of people were looking at it when it was mostly young people heading for Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. But its most remarkable aspect turned out to be its staying power: it didn’t declare victory or defeat and go home. It decided it was home and settled in for two catalytic months.

Tents and general assemblies and the acts, tools, and ideas of Occupy exploded across the nation and the western world from Alaska to New Zealand, and some parts of the eastern world -- Occupy Hong Kong was going strong until last week. For a while, it was easy to see that this baby was something big, but then most, though not all, of the urban encampments were busted, and the movement became something subtler. But don’t let them tell you it went away.

Is the NYPD watching you?

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 12:06:00 +0000

On the eve of Occupy's anniversary festivities, freelance journalist and occasional Salon contributor Michael Tracey tweeted this poster from a phone bank in New York City:

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In an unsigned email to Salon, an NYPD spokesman said, "I do not believe it is" a product of the police department. Indeed, the prankster seems to give himself away; an all-seeing surveillance state would probably have access to spell-check.

DoJ to monitor elections in Arizona

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:18:00 +0000

The U.S. Justice Department has announced that it will monitor primary elections in Arizona's Maricopa County.

The department said Monday that federal observers will be dispatched Tuesday to make sure that Maricopa County follows the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law prohibits discrimination in the election process on the basis of race, color or membership in a minority language group.

Observers will watch and record activities during voting hours at polling locations.

Maricopa County officials, especially Sheriff Joe Arpaio, have come under fire for the treatment of Latino residents.

Arpaio is accused in federal court of ordering some patrols not based on reports of crime but rather on letters from people who complained about people with dark skin congregating in an area or speaking Spanish.

Church denies black couple

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:52:00 +0000

It’s been more than 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called Sunday morning at 11 “the most segregated hour of Christian America.” Although many congregations have since integrated – or at least no longer actively oppose the idea – some still haven’t gotten the message.

Just ask Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson of Jackson, Miss. They say a predominantly white church refused to marry them on Saturday because of their race.

The couple had sent out invitations and printed programs announcing that the ceremony would be held at First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs. But the church’s pastor, Rev. Stan Weatherford, called them on Friday to say that wouldn’t be possible.

“He had people in the sanctuary that were pitching a fit about us being a black couple,” Te’Andrea told the Jackson-area NBC affiliate. The Wilsons were not members of the congregation but had regularly attended services there.

Congregants threatened the pastor that if he married the couple “they would vote him out the church,” Charles Wilson said.

Weatherford decided it would be best for everyone if he performed the ceremony at a different church nearby in Crystal Springs, a small town of 5,000 residents a half-hour outside of Jackson.

“I didn’t want to have a controversy within the church and I didn’t want a controversy to affect the wedding of Charles and Te’Andrea,” Weatherford said.

Weatherford said he was surprised by the opposition voiced by what he termed a small minority of the congregation. No African-American had ever been married at the church, which was established in 1883, “so it was setting a new precedent and there are those who reacted to that,” he said.

Church officials now say they welcome any race into their congregation and will hold internal discussions on how to respond should this particular issue reoccur.

To Charles Wilson, the First Baptist Church’s behavior flies in the face of true Christian values. “I blame those members who knew and call themselves Christian and didn’t stand up,” he said.

His wife agreed. She was “brought up in the church to love and care for everybody,” regardless of race.

This isn’t the first time racial strife has struck Crystal Springs.

In 1966, Eddie James Stewart was reportedly the victim of a racially motivated killing while in the custody of the town’s police. They claimed he was shot during an escape attempt.

In 1999, Dan M. Gibson, then-mayor of Crystal Springs, spoke at a gathering of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) during a failed run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. The CCC, at the time seeking a “mainstream” image, is directly descended from the White Citizens Councils that bitterly resisted integration in the 1950s and 1960s.

Nor is the First Baptist Church the only Deep South congregation recently caught keeping Jim Crow on life support.

Earlier this month, a Winfield, Ala., church courted controversy by advertising an “Annual Pastors Conference” with “all white Christians invited.” Rev. William C. Collier defended his event’s racial exclusivity to the Birmingham-area TV station. “We don’t have the facilities to accommodate other people. We haven’t got any invitations to black, Muslim events. Of course we are not invited to Jewish events and stuff.”

“Of course,” indeed. Rev. Collier’s Church of God’s Chosen is affiliated with the racist, anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement, which claims Jews are “the devil’s spawn,” and whites the true biblical chosen people.

The civil rights battle ignored by the U.S. media

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

It was tough enough to track the social and political upheaval of the 1960s through domestic news coverage, let alone to pay attention to what the rest of the world was reporting. But journalists from abroad were fascinated by the roiling changes -- and often saw it quite differently.

Though U.S. network coverage of civil rights cruelties helped rally the country against the worst offenders in the South, coverage of revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party more often took J. Edgar Hoover’s extremist stance that it was the most dangerous internal threat to the U.S. Rarely did it look at the accomplishments of its free breakfast programs, community organizing and determination to stand up to police harassment and brutality.

Swedish newsmen and filmmakers who didn’t follow the FBI line came to America to learn what they could, looking at life in largely segregated black America, talking frankly and seriously with black leaders and closely following their trials.

Footage of the era, said to have been sitting in a Swedish basement for three decades, became the eye-opening documentary “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” making its U.S. television debut on PBS’ “Independent Lens” Thursday night as part of its Black History Month series.

The modernist title owes in part to filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson using modern-day commentary, from musicians in many cases, to accompany the found footage. Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Roots add their contemporary revolutionary musing among commentaries by professors and historians.

The wealth of Swedish footage owes in part to the Panthers’ desire to see their movement as an international one, or one that certainly relied on support from outside the U.S.

It is the Panthers’ Embassy in Algeria where Eldridge Cleaver holds court, for example, far from the threat of FBI invasions. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visits to Stockholm to meet King Gustaf VI Adolf that are well preserved, and King’s traveling partner Harry Belafonte recalls the meeting.

Some of the earliest footage in the film shows a young Stokely Carmichael speaking in Stockholm in 1967, stating in the simplest terms the recent history of black movement in the U.S., carefully stepping beyond the nonviolent action approach by King.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience,” he points out coolly. “The United States has none.”

In some ways, it is the footage of Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and honorary “prime minister” for the Panthers, that is the revelation of “The Black Power Mixtape.” How suppressed has his voice been over the years, even at a time of black history mining?

It’s certainly eye-opening for modern-day commentator Kweli, who exclaims, “He has so much passion and fire inside of him,” yet remains quite cool. “He seemed like a regular dude.”

After telling reporters in Stockholm, “I’m not as patient as Dr. King,” Carmichael takes over a Swedish interview of his own mother in Chicago to get to the point: The family’s struggles and limited opportunities can be boiled down to the fact that they are black.

One gets the sense that Swedish journalists enjoyed visiting black ghettos, where they tried to get a taste of life as they paused for interviews with Huey P. Newton and Kathleen Cleaver.

The coverage was noted in the U.S. as well, when TV Guide in a cover story complained about its negativity. Swedish reporters interviewed the story’s writer, balancing it with the view of director Emile de Antonio, who dismisses TV Guide as “an absolute nothing magazine.”

Officially, Sweden had been so critical of America’s role in Vietnam that the U.S. pulled its ambassador from Stockholm in 1968 and ended diplomatic relations with the country altogether for a time in 1972, after Prime Minister Olof Palme compared the bombings of Hanoi with the worst atrocities of Nazis.

Whatever the diplomatic relations, Swedish journalists certainly took the black revolutionaries more seriously and were plainly excited to be the first TV reporters to talk to an imprisoned Angela Davis. Still, because they worked from the same script, the question soon boiled down to: Do you have to use violence to reach your goals? Davis, receiving her first media visitor, was plainly annoyed by this, in just about the only footage that’s in color rather than black-and-white.

“When somebody asks me abut violence, I just find it incredible,” she says. “What it means is that the people who ask have no idea what people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

The revolutionary tone of the film may provide grist for those on the right who erroneously see PBS as some kind of government-funded left-wing propaganda machine. When was the last time Louis Farrakhan was given a forum to talk about white devils?

But “The Black Power Mixtape” qualifies as a social history of a revolutionary movement, one quashed by a mid-1970s drug infusion to black neighborhoods that film participants are quite sure was caused by the government.

More than that, the modern voices in the film are resolute that lessons of the past need to be learned as the struggle goes on.