Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Sunday, January 1, 2023
They Won't Be Home for The Holidays! Remembering Unheralded Police Violence Victims in New Jersey! by bro Zayid Muhammad
They won’t be home for the holidays!
Remembering Unheralded Police Violence Victims in
New Jersey
by Zayid Muhammad
One of the aspects of police
violence taking innocent Black and Brown lives is how its trauma rips through
the families of those left behind, even in those rare moments when
accountability actually happens.
Take for example, from among the
more well known cases, such as the Eric Garner case. His mother, the amazing
Gwen Carr, has become an incredible beacon of strength for Black and Brown
mothers all over the country, but not without paying another price along the
way. Her granddaughter, Eric’s daughter, Erica Garner, who was becoming a very
vocal presence against police brutality in her own right, died suddenly from a
cardiac episode just months after detailing on Democracy Now, an important
social justice national news source, how the trauma of her father’s death was
affecting her health.
She was only 27 years old...27 years
old...And had just given birth to her second child, a son, whom she named after
her father, Eric, just a few months before.
That interview has bone chilling, near
prophetic dimensions.
Not to be missed is that she suffered
her episode on Christmas Eve and passed on December 30th, 2017, in
the heart of an already painful ‘holiday’ season.
The Earl Faison case, the most noted
case in New Jersey where some measure of accountability took place, saw his fiancée
also die not long after his death. She too was quite young.
Earl’s sister, Taaj Williams, in a
20 year retrospective on her brother’s death said very pointedly “that our
family goes through this every time another one of these cases happens.”
“Every time”...I restate here with
emphasis, because of the continuing litany of police brutality cases that they
have been tormented by for over 20 years now. And her brother’s killers, five
Orange police officers, did federal time in that case.
More recently in New Jersey, we have
the Jerome Reid case...
December 30th, again in
the heart of the holiday season, 2014, Jerome is shot and killed with his hands
up on videotape by Bridgeton police officer, Braheme Davis, at point blank
range in his chest and head. As if that was not enough, we would soon learn
that Davis, not only held a grudge against Reid from a past police encounter he
had as a teenager, but who also had a competing personal interest in Reid’s
former girlfriend. Yet no Jersey prosecutor, in that case from Cumberland
County, nor from the federal government later for that matter, saw fit to
charge Davis.
Jerome’s mother, Sheila Reid, who
already had some health challenges, valiantly became a strong voice against
police brutality. She became the ‘soul’ of the Justice Monday protest of the
People’s Organization for Progress, a weekly protest that was launched in
February 2016, to lift up the cases of Jersey police victims that have not been
lifted up in national media, much like this article attempts to do. The Justice
Monday protests went on without interruption for nearly 300 Mondays until the
Covid Pandemic. Courageous though she be, her health too failed and she passed
just away recently without the officer who killed her son on videotape being
held accountable.
Other continual instances that
sharpen the traumatic dimensions of this kind of loss are the victims’ birth
anniversaries, the anniversaries of their tragic deaths, and the point of this
article, the holidays when families come together across generations and long
distances.
Several New Jersey cases merit
spotlighting. In this wave, however, New Jersey has a tool of accountability
that it is simply not employing with integrity...It’s Independent Prosecutor’s
Bill, signed into law by a nervous Governor Phil Murphy in 2018, a law that
puts the investigation of any deaths in police custody in the hands of the
Attorney General’s office and takes them out of the hands of the former
county-based prosecutorial framework. Murphy was scared to death to sign this
bill until a young man named Jameek Lowery was viciously beaten to death in the
custody of Paterson police while in a mental health crisis, and the streets of
Paterson got hot with protests, even though the bill had already passed both
the New Jersey Assembly and Senate.
The bill was stewarded through the New
Jersey Legislature by a brave, and at the time, brand new assemblywoman
Brittany Timberlake, who explained why she was so determined to get it done in a
very pointed way, ‘I’m pushing this bill for my son.’
Unfortunately, since the inception
of the bill, the Attorney General has hardly been transparent at all with his investigations
and how that office has been dismissing claims against police officers in some cases
that scream for something else!
Take most recently their dismissal
of the case of Hasani Best, for instance. Best was killed in August 2020, a day
after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka’s
groundbreaking Civilian Complaint Review Board ordinance, one that give that
city a CCRB with Subpoena Power, the Authority to do Independent and Concurrent
Investigations, one that had a social justice based community character and a
Disciplinary Matrix police leadership had to abide by.
Best was in a mental health crisis,
one in which his situation was actually contained by several Asbury Park police
officers, including one who already knew him. He had nothing on him but a
butter knife and the authorities had supports better suited to address that
kind of crisis en route when the officer who actually knew Hasani, Sargeant
Sean DeShader, went ahead and shot him to death anyway.
Jersey’s Attorney General, with a
new tool of ‘public integrity and accountability’ in hand, the Independent’s
Prosecutor’s Bill, let it slide!
Hasani’s former wife, a valiant young
Kay White, who organized a number of meaningful rallies in Asbury Park all the
way from New York City where she resides, is now enduring a torturous pain
management challenge that is defying any health challenge she has actually been
diagnosed for!
That is unresolved ongoing Trauma!
New Year’s Day, January 1st,
2021, Carl Dorsey finds himself suddenly swarmed by undercover Newark police
officers and is shot to death by Detective Rod Simpkins. Simpkins get lauded as
‘heroic’ in its aftermath by the Newark’s Fraternal Order of Police, but he is actually
shown to have an abusive history, one partially documented by the epic ACLU
Petition to the Justice Department that would culminate in the Federal Consent
Decree now overseeing a court mandated set of reforms over the Newark Police.
Clearly those mandated reforms were not enough to have made a difference here. Simpkins should have been made gone long ago, but he wasn’t, and it cost an innocent Carl Dorsey his life...On New Year’s Day!...Not to mention that he was born on Xmas eve. Tell me, someone please, tell me how is the family of this senselessly slain father of four going to have a happy holiday season???
His family is still reeling in
grief, shock and disbelief.
On the 4th of July, 2021,
retired major Gulia Dale III, besieged by the cacophony of local holiday
fireworks in his suburban home in Newton, goes into a mental health crisis.
His wife, worried that her husband
may harm himself, calls the police for help. Twelve seconds upon their arrival
and encounter with Dale, he is dead as they fired on him immediately,...a
decorated career vet who gave his entire adult life to the US Army killed like
that on the 4th of July of all days!
His sister, Valerie, and his niece,
Boshia, courageously pursue justice for him with great dignity and resolve, but
are clearly unnerved when they have to recount his horrific ordeal in public.
Incredibly, not much earlier and
worsening their pain, a white vet, Edwin Greene, in a similar mental health
crisis, in the same town, his situation was properly contained and he was taken
into custody alive, even though he actually fired on the officers who first
encountered him!
So much for ‘Thank you for your
service’!
Just in September, Bernard Placide
Jr. of Englewood, is killed on the back end of a mental health crisis, one in
which the worst aspects of it was over, one in which his family only needed the
police, so they thought, to take him to the hospital to get help. He wound up getting
shot to death while in the agonizing, but non- threatening, throes of being
tasered!
He was only 22...Only 22!
While his mother, Myrlene Hilaire, a
brave proud Haitian immigrant, is trying to be strong in pursuing justice for
her son, the Thanksgiving holiday ripped through her family and home, painfully
recalling her son’s central presence. With culinary gifts, Bernard was not only
a presence at their family table, he was the family cook who prepared their epic
annual holiday feast. That and other dimensions of his humanity will only get
marginally lifted up in Jersey press rooms as will what that family now has to
go through in the aftermath of his death.
Bernard’s death, incredibly, comes
on the heels of an MSNBC Four Part Documentary Series ‘Model America’ which documented
how the local authorities in the Englewood-Teaneck area of Bergen County
refused to acknowledge what was wrong with the police killing of 16 year old
Phillip Pannell, who was shot in the back with his hands up by officer Gary
Spath back in 1990. The incident ignited an uprising that totally shattered
that suburban community’s treasured ‘Model City’ reputation. From the looks of
what just happened to Bernard, and its continued denial of what happened to
Phillip, that Bergen county community has learned nothing at all from all that
was wrong from Phillip’s still haunting case.
To make matters even worse, we have just
learned that the Englewood Police Department intends to promote the officer who
killed Bernard, Luana Sharpe, to detective with absolutely no regard for an
investigation of the incident that is supposed to be in motion by the New
Jersey Attorney General’s office in accord with Independent Prosecutor’s law
just after New Year’s!
Damn the law, this police force is
saying, damn the hurt to his family, damn public trust, we’re going move this
one up now!
So none of these men will be home
for the holidays! And as long as the State of New Jersey and the Federal
Government refuse to demonstrate the will to implement real change in police
accountability, those holidays will continue to be tortuous tormenting times
for their families with dimensions of anguish that may never see the light of
day and that so painfully deserves real support.
We need to fix that.
Make
the NJ Attorney General do Transparent
Investigations of police involved killings.
Strengthen
Federal Consent Decrees with strong discipline for officers and police
leadership who refuse to comply with mandated reforms and with civilian
oversight that includes specific enforcement and accountability measures for
abusive officers.
Pass
into law with the fierce urgency of
now strong police reform bills such as the CCRB Bill, Ban No Knock Raid
Bill, the Police Transparency Bill and more.
Legislators, how about daring to lead
from a place of principle and courage; not a place of fear, expediency,
privilege and non-transparency, as is Jersey’s ‘gangster’ political tradition...
We say this, not just in the name of
Minneapolis’ George Floyd, but in the name of Jerome Reid, Hasani Best, Carl
Dorsey, Major Gulia Dale III, Bernard Placide Jr., Maurice Gordon and
Thelonious McKnight...New Jersey’s George Floyds!
The time has come...
Zayid
Muhammad is the organizer of Newark
Communities for Accountable Policing, (NCAP) and the Newark strategist for Equal Justice USA. A veteran activist with a social
justice profile of more than 40 years, he is the founding press officer of
Malcolm X Commemoration Committee-NYC, now marking its 30th anniversary and was recently spotlighted in the
critically acclaimed Netflix docuseries Who Killed Malcolm X. He is a
contributor to the recently released ‘The Trials of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A
Biography in 25 Voices’, edited by Todd Steven Burroughs, Diasporic Africa
Press...
©2022
#
Saturday, November 26, 2022
HASN'T SHARIF BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH!
Hasn’t Sharif Been Through Enough!
A BlackEyed Cloud Over Newark’s Holiday
by Zayid
Muhammad
On Wednesday, November 23rd,
on the eve of Thanksgiving, legendary street peacemaker Sharif Amenhotep found
himself surrounded by legions of Newark police officers as they sought to
affect the confiscation and removal of his Red, Black and Green Mini Bus from
his vending area on Branford and Broad Street.
As the police sought to affect the
removal of Sharif’s bus, they placed him under arrest for protesting its
removal. The incident got particularly dicey when officers appeared to be
cutting or doing something to the underside of the vehicle, according to
observers. Amenhotep, upset about what was happening, got under the vehicle to
see what was being done to it. The furor of the incident would see Sharif
getting his foot broken in two places and put in handcuffs.
The community, outraged by what they
were witnessing, angrily challenged the police officers. It was only a
consequence of Deputy Mayor Rahman Muhammad, a labor organizing veteran, and former
Newark AntiViolence Coalition member Tyrone ‘Street Counsel’ Barnes, pleading
with both the police and an angry public, that averted an insurrection that
could have potentially led to numerous people getting hurt and harming the re
emerging image of the city immeasurably.
Most infuriating about the whole
incident were a number of things...
1.
Was the vehicle being illegally being removed?...Anecdotally it was said that a
city ordinance dictated that the vehicle, or any such vehicle, be removed in the
evening after the business day ends. Amenhotep had been in compliance with the
ordinance. Why then were police were trying to effectuate its removal during
the day when it was lawfully parked is a key issue. That’s what drove the
incident; Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the order to remove the vehicle
was given by the city business administrator even though such an order appears
to be in total violation of local law;
2.
Amenhotep is arguably one of the best known anti-violence activist in the city,
known as ‘The Soul of the Newark AntiViolence Coalition once upon a time and
who tragically made national news when he sojourned to South Carolina to shake
up several communities there when his daughter Sanaa disappeared and ultimately
was found dead only as a consequence of his pressuring law enforcement in those
communities to do more! Given Amenhotep’s profile, why then was the area
swarmed with police, and why was there NOT anyone in police leadership on hand
who could have addressed the situation and properly de-escalated it?;
3.
It is just as important to appreciate that not only was Amenhotep wrongly
arrested and injured in the incident, but the police leadership that was on
hand would not even acknowledge the presence of Deputy Mayor Rahman Muhammad,
who sought to de escalate the situation, and who sought to identify Amenhotep
as a respected community activist and get him the medical attention he
obviously needed once he got hurt. Many are grateful that irate community
members ready to take on the police did
acknowledge Muhammad and Barnes and how that prevented a bad incident from
becoming exponentially worse!
All of this begs more important
questions.
Isn’t Newark going through a
historic police reform effort?
Hasn’t its community based Violence
Intervention efforts brought down violence in the community by 50%?
Haven’t these efforts garnered
national attention as a number of cities are now examining how they can employ
similar strategies to combat violence in their respective cities?
Hasn’t this new ‘eco-system’ showed
Violence interventionists actually working well with the police in the face of
critical challenges like the averting an attempt to ‘riot’ at the old first
precinct in the Summer of 2020 and most recently when two police officers were
wounded by a man with a rifle in a mental health crisis, where the violence
interventionists not only assisted with critical crowd control efforts and
follow up services, but who also helped move people from the building where the
shots were coming from to a nearby school and attending the anxieties of those
shaken residents there...something I would much rather be writing about to be
sure?
With that kind of well established
‘eco system’ in place, how does what happened to Amenhotep even take place?
It shouldn’t have!....At all!
If there is to be a protest
condemning what happened, it should be a ‘united front’ of those organizations
in that ‘eco system’ uniting for the
respect of their work and presence in the community.
The nuances of the incident should
be taken up in an investigation by the new Civilian Complaint Review Board
examining just how that how incident was wrongly handled. This incident and
other incidents of inappropriate police behavior should also regularly inform
the groundbreaking Trauma To Trust program of Equal Justice USA with a regular
updating of that program’s ongoing trainings to help Newark police officers
address contemporary problems within its own police department honestly. Police
officers should also know who their elected and community leadership is. The
disrespect of Deputy Mayor Muhammad must certainly be addressed. And if it
proves to be so that the incident was driven by an overreaching city Business
Adminstrator, then he needs to also be held accountable, and important checks
on the authority of that office need to be put in place immediately to prevent
another incident like this from happening again. Community folks who were on
hand angry about what they saw, especially those who may have videotaped the
incident, should come forward and work with the Brick City Peace Collective and
the CCRB and getting their footage and testimony in the proper hands.
Hands off Sharif Amenhotep!
Salute to Deputy Mayor Rahman
Muhammad and Tyrone ‘Street Counsel’ Barnes.
Shoutout to Mayor Baraka and Public
Safety chief Frage for facilitating the release of Amenhotep.
Stop Police Brutality! Peace in the
Streets!...
‘Baba’ Zayid Muhammad is an elder
activist in the greater Newark-New York area. (‘Baba’ is Yoruba for ‘father’).
He is the founding press officer for NY’s Malcolm X Commemoration Committee. He
is a well known cub of the Black Panther Party. He is a founding elder member
of the Newark AntiViolence Coalition and its outgoing media advocate. He is the
lead organizer for Newark Communities for Accountable Policing (NCAP) and the
Newark Strategist for Equal Justice USA...
©2022
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
places and spaces ( for my niece Ghana Imani Hylton, who rescues culture*)
places and spaces
(
for my niece Ghana Imani Hylton, who rescues culture*)
to
Donald Byrd’s Places And Spaces…
come
let’s
go…
let’s
get away from this…
even
if just for a moment
or
for an hour…
let’s
just get away
away
from this worry
away
from this stress
away
from this madness
away
from this mess…
come
let
us go to that place and space
that
beckons us
over
oceans
over
mountains
over
time…
to
places and spaces
detailed
and precise
like
saturated rhyme…
for
that astral sequined season…
let
us go to that place
hydrating
hopes and dreams
and
cradling long memory…
to
that timetravelling transcending place
to
that braided glorious and seeded place
to
that prayerful candlelit calm place
to
that place
trumping
oppression
alienation and negation
to
that place
of
birth rebirth
life
love and ancient affirmation…
that
electromagnetic place that draws us in
this
witnessing sea of faces place
that
just might inspire us to win!
come
let’s
go even if just for a moment
or
for an hour…
come
let’s
go and be touched by its power
come
let’s
wet our dry and empty eyes
with
this wonderous art
come
let’s
be washed and rinsed
by
this ankh-oiled art
by
this wood warm welcoming art
by
this spheric soulful art
by
this concentric polyrhythmic circular art
by
this temple tight and towering art
by
this Hannibal Barca big and bold art
by
this pyramid prominent poppin art
by
this saxophonic soaring
melting
toxic ice art
by
this kingcrossed simba sure art
this
falcon full flying art
this
hurt hood rescuing art
by
this art beading our sour and sore eyes
back
to great places and spaces
where
we once were
this
art that clothespins our hearts
to
the rhythms of the wind
this
art that put back together
what
oppression took apart…
so
come
let
us take heart
come
let
us take part
come
let
us answer the invitings
of
these ancestral whispers…
these
whispers
chronicling
this wabembe
this
3 eyed medium
this
mathematically precise brushstroker…
come
let
us be held
come
let
us be taken
come
let
us be lifted
come
let
us be reawakened…
come
come come
and
let Wabembe’s
brushes
stroke
our
starving eyes
blue
sky high…
*Jersey based poet Ghana Hylton is the daughter of Newark wordsmith Sandra West and the late master artist Carl ‘Wabembe’ Whiteurs. Upon Wabembe’s untimely recent passing, Ghana was faced with the enormous task of saving her father’s lifetime collection of original works ‘inside a weekend’ from an indifferent California landlord who would have simply trashed them. Somehow Ghana was able to put aside her differences with her father disengagement, sojourn all the way from Jersey, and salvage a collection that will cement a place in their family’s legacy for generations to come…She is also the curator and owner of Akwaaba, a hugely respected showcase for visual and performing art in Montclair NJ...
(c)2017
Monday, April 4, 2022
Musing on Martin...On The 54th Anniversary of his Assassination...
Musing on Martin...On the 54h anniversary of his assassination...
by 'bro. zayid''
The memory of the evening of April 4th, 1968, still weighs heavy on those of us who remember that day, weighs heavy on us in a haunting way...
Upon its 50th anniversary, i came to nervously realize that i belong to the last of us who are old enough to remember that fateful day and to have some memory of Dr King still being very much with us.
With the stalking spectacle of the January 6th Insurrection, with the continued slaughter of Black and Brown innocents by police all over this county, with the failure of this country to do anything meaningful about it and ultimately betraying its 'George Floyd' moment, and with war hawks and oil barons saber rattling in a way that could trigger something that not even they and their priviiledge can comeback from, Dr King's assassination is weighing particularly heavy on me today.
I'm glad for what's left of my beleaguered psyche that i will be in the streets today fully present in a march spearheaded by a beloved comrade Lawrence Hamm and the People's Organization for Progress in Newark.
Yet i am deeply worried that not enough of us are.
April 4th, '68 meant this country going up in smoke. April 4th meant the 3rd and the largest exponential growth spurt of the Black Panther Party, immediately making them "the number one threat to the internal security of the united states," a price too many are still paying for, Sundiata Acoli, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Kamau Sadiki, Veronza Bowers, Mumia AbuJamal, to name few, a distinction no one asked for.
So today, we come to this haunting anniversary with this country truly at a crossroads for its very future.
The forces or reaction who killed our beloved 'Drum Major for Justice'' have reorganized and are fully mobilized in ways we have not seen in a long time. How is it that this country can pass an AntiLynching Bill 140 years after its first call, 140 years later, but would not touch Voting Rights legislation to protect the ultimate reason lynching was once an recreationally accepted part of the american social landscape, fear of a mobilized and organzed Black vote, one that made a real difference in that short refrain of history that once was Reconstruction?
"Democracy is nothing but hypocrisy," i hear Malcolm in my head unapologetically. "I don't see any American dream; I only see an American nightmare," so he asserted in the epic presentation that he gave us that made the case for a fully mobilized and organized ballot...His searing 'The Ballot Or The Bullet'...
I mean what happens if we lose the congress this year and the white house again '24 to 'them'...
The architects, the participants, the cheerleaders of January 6th?...Those strapped with so much hate and the most toxic vitriol?
There are a lot of them. More than many of us care to know or see.
They appear to be more passionate and organized about their privilege, falsehood, racist and sexist hate, than those of us who are about hope, healing, reconciliation and restoration.
Do we realize that so much of this enormously fulfilling work that we are doing...this wonderful healing, paradigm shifting work that we are doing...will be targeted for elimination by 'defunding' or worse by targeting us and what we are doing as being unAmerican, or unPatriotic?
Some of us may even become new targets for repression as others of us become renewed targets of repression.
It's a dark, dangerous space.
It absolutely can happen!
Be clear about this also...They are sabre rattling because what we are doing is correct and the more we continue to break ground, the more that backwards violent place of privilege becomes isolated and put on the path to being defeated by our mutual 'love for the people'' using some Panther language.
So to my daughters and sons, my granddaughters and grandsons heartily riding yr precious waves of this transformative work that u are all doing and becoming, keep coming, keep doing it, but be clear, we all may have to fight for our right to do so and at times and places, maybe even for our very right to exist and to do so.
So train up. Use us battleborne ol' heads to the fullest to help u get ready.
Esu (eshoo) a spiritual force of our Ancestors' spiritual tradition is indeed telling us that we are at the crossroads. The question before is which way to do we go...On the shoulders of our Ancestors, and in the language of one in particular Kwame Ture,"Forward is the Motion"!
It is time for Violence Reduction and Social Justice to intersect, to connect like the healing hug and kiss of our grandmothers!
i so cherish u all!
Come 'Beloved Community'!
Come!
(c)2022
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
In America...They Kill Innocent People...Free Julius Jones!
In America...They Kill
Innocent People...Free Julius Jones!
by Zayid Muhammad
In America...
They kill innocent people.
I pen this wincing with worry because a young innocent Black man who has spent
his entire adult life in an Oklahoma prison for a crime he did not commit can
be dead tomorrow.
Julius Jones.
19 years old when he was wrongly convicted of murdering a white Oklahoma
business man in 1999.
Recent days have shown him being approved for Clemency, not once, but
twice!...Not for being a model prisoner, but because of the clear evidence of
innocence in his case!
His case has quietly and in a beautiful testimony to humanity garnered mass
attention...Some 6m petition signatures have called for his release. A noted
number of celebrities and a heartwarming gelling of young AfricanAmerican
clergy and activists in Oklahoma gracefully taking the point...All have made it
clear to the world that Julius Jones is innocent and should not die on November
18th, but who should instead be granted Clemency for all of the
right reasons and released on the basis of the time he has served.
That notwithstanding, Trump Republican Governor Kevin Stitt has not budged on
his case.
Others have been granted clemency before.*
So why not Clemency for Julius?
Perhaps it is this post election post
January 6th white riot backlash driving America’s ‘angry white
men’ that appears to be choosing this young man to be sacrificed to meet the
sadistic needs of racists to ‘prove’ their authority, authority that they
believed should absolutely not be checked by non white people.
JULIUS JONES
For those of u who do not believe that they will do this, some recent history
is in order.
I am planning a longer piece on the Black Panther Party’s dangerous dance with
the death penalty. Of course, when one thinks of the Party and the capital
punishment, we all think of the incredible mobilization of the Party to save
its legendary cofounder Huey P Newton. We also think of the recent effort to
free Mumia Abu Jamal who survived two execution warrants by Republican hitmen
for national white supremacy and who is still being ‘sickened’ in prison and
can still die there if we do not continue to turn it up for him.
Lesser known Panther death penalty survivors are from my neck of the woods.
Safiya Bukhari, whom i had the honor of serving under in her later marching for
freedom, and Lawrence ‘Ghana’ Hayes, both were NY Panthers.
‘Ghana’ survived his ordeal in America’s most
‘liberal’ state. Safiya survived it in Virginia.
PANTHERS RALLY FOR HUEY NEWTON
But in America, not only do they kill innocent people, they have killed
Panthers.
Many may not know it, but the state of Indiana executed two Panthers...Ajamu
Nasser in 1994 and his codefendant Ziyon Yisrayal in 1996. Ajamu and Ziyon
survived a deadly botched no knock raid in which one of the raiding officers
was killed in what genuinely appears to have been friendly fire...sounds eerily
familiar as in the recently released Move 9 survivors.
So be clear, these ‘angry’ white men are very capable of putting an innocent
man to death.
Not safisfied?
Have we forgotten how 'Dubya'...ie George W Bush...casually killed Shaka
Sankofa back in 2000 on his way to stealing the White House...He did steal
the election thru Florida Voter Suppression, by the way, with the help of
racist CubanAmericans, in case u have forgotten that too.
Perhaps the most chilling of the recent horrific judicial killings was the
killing of Troy Davis in 2011 in the heyday of the Obama Era. By the way,
cordial and efficient servant of the empire that he was, Obama neither lifted
his loaded pen or voice to block that young brother from being killed by the
state of Georgia. It was a haunting moment of racial and class reckoning for a
new generation of activists, like the hundreds of Howard University students
who did a sit in in front of the White House knowing, so they thought, that
they would be heard, and that the first Black president was definitely going to
do something to stop it.
They were wrong. He
didn’t.
He would go on apply the backwards imperialist doctrine of ‘Regime Change’ to
take down Africa’s most generous and most PanAfricanist leader Muammar
Ghadafi as a ‘gimme’ to his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to pave
the road for her to claim the White House behind him. Chickens Came Home
to Roost for her in her loss. They came home to roost for a naïve African world
as Black Libyans are now being butchered, tortured and SOLD in what was just a
few moments ago one of the healthiest and most peaceful places on the
continent!
So sacrificing Black men...knocking off ‘Black pawns’ is not something
exclusive to angry ‘white men’ in America.
The time has come for more good people like the legions who are following those
young clergy and activists in Oklahoma...i see u CeCe Jones-Davis, who screamed
to the world about being ‘invited’ to witness the execution...i see u Tiffany
Crutcher, the accomplished twin sister of Terence Crutcher, Tulsa’s ‘hands up
don’t shoot’ case...New voices in struggle who are pointedly standing on the
shoulders of their Black Wall Street ancestors, i am very proud to follow your
lead!
But be clear...In America, they do kill innocent people.
So please, please, and please is the nicest word i know, make the call!
405 521 2342...Be ready to press 0. They may make u wait to answer. Our
Ancestors waited several hundred years for our freedom...several hundred
years...so wait...with your audacious multitasking selves.
Free Julius Jones!
Death to the Death Penalty!...
BAKER NEWFIELD OF THE CLEVELAND BROWNS
CAME OUT FOR JULIUS JONES
*In the first version of this blog, we incorrectly said that Governor Stitt has granted Clemency to others. That was incorrect...
(c)2021
Veteran
activist and poet Zayid Muhammad of NY’s Malcolm X Commemoration
Committee and proud cub of the NY chapter of the Black Panther Party...He can
be reached at babazayid@gmail.com...
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