Mississippi Goddam!

————————————————————————-

For White Supremacists, is Mississippi the Diehard Confederacy or Anchor of the Ongoing Confederacy?

Mississippi declares April Confederate Heritage Month

Jacob Threadgill, The Clarion-Ledger, February 25, 2016

(Photo: Special to the Clarion-Ledger)

A proclamation from Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant declaring April as “Confederate Heritage Month,” is one that has appeared online in previous years, and similar to ones issued by previous administrations, a spokesman said.

Bryant’s proclamation appears on the website for the Mississippi division of the Sons of the Confederacy, but not on the governor’s official proclamation page, as reported by the Jackson Free Press Wednesday. The governor’s site allows users the ability to request proclamations.

In 2015, US Police Killed 300 Black People

300 black people killed by US police at highest rate in year of 1,134 deaths total

Final total of people killed by US police officers in 2015 shows rate of death for young black men was five times higher than white men of the same age

Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, Jamiles Lartey and Ciara McCarthy | The Guardian | Thursday 31 December 2015

Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year.

The Guardian view on killings by US police: why we must keep counting
The Counted has made up for the Obama administration’s failings, but the lack of oversight remains. So we will restart our count of people killed by police until the government does its job

Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.

Not Just in America: French Authorities Cover for Abusive Police Too

Tue, 10/06/2015

thiscantbehappening.net Editor’s Note:

This article from Ferguson In Paris, an anti-police brutality group in France, does not contain a byline. The reason for this is because members of that group say they must maintain anonymity as much as possible remain to avoid abusive retaliation from authorities and others in France. “We publish under the name of the organization because of fierce repression regarding activists dealing with police brutality,” explained a Ferguson In Paris member during a recent email exchange with ThisCan’tBeHappening.net. The claimed support by French government authorities and other for freedom of speech following the fatal shootings at the Charlie Hebdo magazine office last January 2015 apparently do not extend to French activists opposed to brutality by French police. (Ferguson In Paris, an organization that fights against police brutality and racism/discrimination in France, works in solidarity with anti-brutality groups in the United States.)
AN UGLY UNDERSIDE OF FRANCE: RAMPANT POLICE BRUTALITY
In 2005, the human rights monitoring organization Amnesty International published a report titled: “France: The search for justice.” That Amnesty report examined allegations of serious human rights violations by law enforcement officials across France between 1991 and 2005. Those human rights violations by law enforcers included unlawful killings, excessive use of force, torture, and other mistreatment. Racist abuse was reported in many cases examined by Amnesty and racist motivation appeared to be a factor in many more. As that report noted, the persistent targets of police abuse in France are “foreign nationals or French nationals of foreign origin.”

On the basis of the evidence examined, Amnesty International concluded that a pattern of de facto impunity existed with regard to police and other law enforcement officials in France. Failures by French officials “to address” police abuses have created a “climate of effective impunity for law enforcement officers,” the report stated.

US: Most Police Killings are Not Counted or Reported

Eric Garner and Tamir Rice among those missing from FBI record of police killings

Only 224 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies reported fatal shootings in 2014

Previously unpublished FBI data sheds new light on flawed voluntary system

Emerald Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, right, cries while standing next to Esaw Garner, Eric Garner’s wife, center, and Lesley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown, in April. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP

Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland in New York, The Guardian

Thursday 15 October 2015

Killings by police that unleashed a new protest movement around the US in 2014, including those of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford, are missing from the federal government’s official record of homicides by officers because most departments refuse to submit data.
Analysis The tracking of police violence in the US may have reached a turning point
The past week has seen a series of comments regarding the state of documenting US police killings – and some clarity on how the government plans to do so

Only 224 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the US reported a fatal shooting by their officers to the FBI last year, according to previously unpublished data obtained by the Guardian, which sheds new light on flaws in official systems for counting the use of deadly force by police.

What to Do When Officer Frankenstein Just Can’t Stop Killing Us

[The major media, led by CNN, works to turn attention away from the epoch of police killing blacks, and focus instead on keeping protesters non-violent in their appeals to the system.  This article, from the left-liberal The Nation, considers the effectiveness of non-violence vs the effectiveness of breaking glass, in winning attention and reforms from the system.  The article does not address the more substantial issue, of breaking from the system and building permanent community-based collective self-defense networks, which is a course many are beginning to consider.  —  Frontlines ed.]

On the Baltimore Uprising: Toward a New “Broken Windows” Theory

Tuesday, 28 April 2015

By Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation | Op-Ed

Volunteers working to clean debris around a burned out CVS store are reflected off a smashed window the morning after the uprising in west Baltimore, April 28, 2015. (Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / The New York Times)

 

Whenever there is an uprising in an American city, as we’ve seen in Baltimore over the past few days in response to the police-involved death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, there always emerges a chorus of elected officials, pundits, and other public figures that forcefully condemn “violent protests.” They offer their unconditional support for “legitimate” or “peaceful” protests, but describe those who break windows and set fires as thugs, criminals, or animals. And eventually someone invokes the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, reminding us that non-violence brought down Jim Crow segregation and won voting rights.

There’s something that needs to be cleared up: the Civil Rights movement was not successful because the quiet dignity of non-violent protests appealed to the morality of the white public. Non-violent direct action, a staple employed by many organizations during the Civil Rights movement, was and is a much more sophisticated tactic. Organizers found success when non-violent protests were able to provoke white violence, either by ordinary citizens or police, and images of that brutality were transmitted across the country and the rest of the world. The pictures of bloodied bodies standing in non-violent defiance of the law horrified people at home and proved embarrassing for the country in a global context.

So anyone who calls for protestors to remain “peaceful,” like the Civil Rights activists of old, must answer this question: what actions should be taken when America refuses to be ashamed? Images of black death are proliferating beyond our capacity to tell each story, yet there remains no tipping point in sight—no moment when white people in America will say, “Enough.” And no amount of international outrage diminishes the US’s reputation to the point of challenging its status as a hegemonic superpower.

What change will a “peaceful” protest spark if a “peaceful” protest is so easy to ignore?

May Day 2015 — Dock Workers Walk Out to Protest Police Killings

Workers of All Colors Unite!

International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 in the Bay area will use its monthly stop-work meeting on Friday to idle the ports of Oakland and San Francisco to protest recent police killings of African Americans. The executive board and membership of Local 10 aligned its “Union Action to Stop Police Killings of Black and Brown People” with International Workers’ Day, which is celebrated on May 1 in many countries.

May Day in Oakland: ILWU March and Rally Against Police Terror!

STATEMENT TO THE BAY AREA LABOR MOVEMENT

A CALL TO ACTION!

April 22, 2015

The membership of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 has voted at its meeting on April 16, 2015 to call for a stopwork meeting on May 1^st. It is fitting that on May Day, International Workers Day, Bay Area ports will be shut down to protest the racist police killing of mainly black and brown people. This is the first U.S. union to take such action. Local 10 took similar action on May Day 2008 to close Pacific Coast ports stopping all work to demand an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first such anti-war union action in American labor history.

ILWU Local 10 dock workers march in San Francisco on May Day 2008 in the first-ever strike action by U.S. workers against U.S. imperialist war. The work stoppage shut down all 29 West Coast ports demanding an end to the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as support for immigrant rights.

No Justice in Baltimore – No peace in Baltimore

[The Maryland officials blame the riot on “outside agitators” and on “groups of thugs roaming the streets attacking innocent people” — a description which many have applied to the Baltimore police in their recent murder of the innocent black man Freddie Gray — the most recent of a repeated chain of events across the country. — Frontlines ed.]

Baltimore erupts in riots after funeral of man who died in police custody

A man walks past a burning police vehicle, Monday during unrest following the funeral of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Ian Simpson, Reuters, April 27, 2015

BALTIMORE – Rioters hurled bricks, looted businesses and set fires in Baltimore on Monday in violence that injured at least seven police officers following the funeral of a 25-year-old black man who died after he was injured in police custody.

The disturbances broke out just a few blocks from the funeral of Freddie Gray and then spread through parts of Baltimore in the most violent U.S. demonstrations since looting in Ferguson, Missouri, last year.

Exposed: Eric Holder’s DOJ Backs Police Killings

[Reformists like Al Sharpton and Van Jones have continually appealed to activists to appeal to the Obama Administration and to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, to get justice and relief and an end to routine police abuses and unending bloody killings (against black and brown people in large part ) from coast to coast.  But this article reveals that such reformist appeals are deceptive and mis-directive.  As people learn more about the systemic cause of ongoing police terror, many turn away from electoral solutions, and toward community-based  self-defense organizing. —  Frontlines ed.]

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. at a cabinet meeting at the White House in February. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Teresa Sheehan, shown in 2013, was shot and wounded by San Francisco police officers at a mental health center in 2008. Ms. Sheehan’s civil rights lawsuit was argued at the Supreme Court in March. Credit Patricia C. Sheehan, via Associated Press

At Supreme Court, Eric Holder’s Justice Dept. Routinely Backs Officers’ Use of Force

By MATT APUZZO and ADAM LIPTAK

New York Times, APRIL 21, 2015WASHINGTON — Teresa Sheehan was alone in her apartment at a mental health center, clutching what her lawyers said was a small bread knife and demanding to be left alone. San Francisco police officers, responding to a call from a social worker, forced open the door, blinded her with pepper spray and shot her.

It was the kind of violent police confrontation that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has frequently criticized in Cleveland, Albuquerque, Ferguson, Mo., and beyond. But last month, when Ms. Sheehan’s civil rights lawsuit reached the Supreme Court, the Justice Department backed the police, saying that a lower court should have given more weight to the risks that the officers faced.

“Encounter”: a staged gun battle, where cops kill unarmed people

India:  Two Encounters and a Democracy

Countercurrents.org, April 8, 2015

The world’s largest democracy witnessed its police force killing 25 of its citizens in two encounters in Andhra Pradesh. “Encounters”, for the uninitiated, are a euphemism for killing unarmed civilians in staged gun battles. The police version of both the alleged encounters is such that it could be laughed-off had they not been about the deaths of civilians.

The police version of the first encounter is that newly formed Red-sanders Anti-Smuggling Task Force spotted footprints of the “smugglers” and came across around 100 of them felling trees in the Seshachalam Forest at the foot of the Tirumala Hills.

What Would Malcolm X Think?

An Opinion column in the New York Times, February 21, 2015

By ILYASAH SHABAZZ

Malcolm X — Credit: Associated Press

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. — FIFTY years ago today my father, Malcolm X, was assassinated while speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. I think about him every day, but even more in the last year, with the renewed spirit of civil rights activism after the tragic events in Ferguson, Mo., on Staten Island and in countless other parts of the country. What would he have to say about it?

People still look to Malcolm as a model for strident activism. They lament the lack of such a prominent, resonant voice in the modern dialogue about race. But they might not like some of the critical things he would have to say about the strategies of today’s activists.

Of course, my father would be heartened by the youth-led movement taking place across the nation, and abroad, in response to institutional brutality. And he would appreciate the protesters’ fervor and skillful use of social media to rapidly organize, galvanize and educate. In a sense, his ability to boil down hard truths into strong statements and catchy phrases presaged our era of hashtag activism.

Death by Police in America

Sky Valley Chronicle, December 7, 2014

(MONROE, WA.) — Five days ago Op-Ed writer Eugene Robinson wrote a piece for the Washington Post called, “What America’s police departments don’t want you to know.”

In that piece he provided information that many Americans may never have been exposed to — data relating to police shootings of civilians across the country.

Robinson came to the conclusion the death of unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri at the hands of a white police officer was not an isolated incident.

It was part of what Robinson called, “A tragic and unacceptable pattern: Police officers in the United States shoot and kill civilians in shockingly high numbers.”

How many civilians are shot to death every year by police? Nobody really knows, says Robinson because “police departments don’t want us to know.”

The Black Panthers Had the Right Idea

December 11, 2014

Who will Protect and Defend Black Life?

by THANDISIZWE CHIMURENGA, Counterpunch

It’s kind of fitting that police officers Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo, murderers of Mike Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York, were cleared of criminal wrong-doing in the last several weeks. The eruption of protest, activism and organizing in response to the (bad) decisions of legal bodies to not hold these officers accountable for their crimes has occurred at a time of special significance for the legacy of the Black Panther Party (BPP).

October 15th saw the 48th anniversary of the birth of the BPP in Oakland, CA.  Originally named the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the BPP had a self-defense strategy against the brutal terror of the police. The strategy unashamedly and unapologetically maintained that Black people have human rights that are to be respected, including the right of armed self-defense, and BPP members had a right to intervene with those arms if necessary when law enforcement – those touted as the ones whose job was allegedly to protect and serve – violated those rights. In Los Angeles, the month of October also saw the deaths of Ronald and Roland Freeman, brothers who were co-founders and leading members of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party.  Ronald and Roland, who were born one year apart and died one week apart, were also survivors of the Dec. 8, 1969 shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team on 41st Street and Central Avenue. The pre-dawn attack, the SWAT team’s first major engagement, lasted 5 hours and saw 13 members of the BPP stand trial for attempted murder of police officers. All 13 of the Panthers would eventually be acquitted of all charges in December, 1971 due to the illegal actions of the LAPD.

Resisting the War Against the Black and Brown Underclass

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect. — WEB Dubois

November 25, 2014

Why We Won’t Wait

by ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

Wait. Patience. Stay Calm. “This is a country that allows everybody to express their views,” said the first Black president, “allows them to peacefully assemble, to protest actions that they think are unjust.” Don’t disrupt, express. Justice will be served. We respect the rule of law. This is America.

We’ve all been waiting for the grand jury’s decision, not because most of us expected an indictment. District Attorney Robert P. McCulloch’s convoluted statement explaining—or rather, defending—how the grand jury came to its decision resembled a victory speech. For a grand jury to find no probable cause even on the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter is a stunning achievement in a police shooting of an unarmed teenager with his hands raised, several yards away. Distilling 4,799 pages of grand jury proceedings to less than twenty minutes, he managed to question the integrity of eyewitnesses, accuse the 24-hour news cycle and social media for disrupting the investigation, and blame alleged neighborhood violence for why the removal of Mike Brown’s body from the pavement had to wait until morning. McCulloch never indicted a cop in his life, so why expect anything different now?

How Ferguson Showed Us the Truth About Police

[Making it plain and unavoidable — an artist sketches reality. — Frontlines ed.]

Published on YouTube on November 18, 2014

On August 9th, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot a black teenager named Mike Brown. Since then, the city has been protesting.

When Art Speaks Truth about the Police State, It Is Criminalized and Destroyed

 [Whether banning or burning books, or destroying truth-telling murals, repressive systems reveal their fear of informed people.  —  Frontlines ed.]

Ferguson-inspired ‘Sagging pants is not probable cause’ mural in Trenton removed after police request

t

A mural depicting Ferguson teen Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by police earlier this year, was removed from a gate on the corner of North Broad and Hanover Streets on Monday Oct. 20, 2014 after concerns from police. (Jenna Pizzi / Times of Trenton)

By Jenna Pizzi | Times of Trentoon October 20, 2014

TRENTON – A mural was painted over Monday afternoon after Trenton police expressed concern that the painting, depicting Michael Brown, a Ferguson, Mo., teen who was fatally shot by police in August, sent the wrong message about community and police relations.

The painting depicted Brown’s face with the caption “Sagging pants … is not probable cause.” Will “Kasso” Condry, the artist behind the mural, said he wanted to start a conversation about racial profiling.

The Trenton Downtown Association elected to remove the image after hearing concern from police officers that the mural sends a negative message about the relationship between police and the community.