USA

Video Shows Officer Flipping Student in South Carolina, Prompting Inquiry

  • December 10, 2015
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The authorities in South Carolina are investigating an encounter captured on two videos that went viral Monday afternoon that show a white school police officer in a Columbia classroom grabbing an African-American student by the neck, flipping her backward as she sat at her desk, then dragging and throwing her across the floor. The videos, apparently shot by students in the classroom, were picked up by national news outlets and had ricocheted across social media platforms by Monday evening, sparking a new round of angry and anguished debate over how police officers treat African-Americans. Continue reading the main story Related…

The Power of Choice: Chicago’s Black Organizers Refuse a Meeting With Mayor Emanuel

  • November 25, 2015
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As the city of Chicago continued to await the release of a graphic police dashcam video, on Monday, with officials hinting that unprecedented charges against a Chicago police officer might be in the works, a coalition of young Black organizers announced that they were refusing a private meeting with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, scrambling in the face of a PR nightmare, had hoped to discuss the pending release of police dashcam footage of the death of Laquan McDonald with Black youth leaders. A refusal issued Monday morning, in a statement jointly issued by the grassroots groups Black Youth Project…

Say Her Name: What It Means to Center Black Women’s Experiences of Police Violence

  • September 21, 2015
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Early one morning in July 2015, a new hashtag – #WhatHappenedtoSandraBland? – popped up on Twitter. The question pertained to the death in police custody of a 28-year-old Black woman from Naperville, Illinois, shortly after her arrest in Prairie View, Texas, on July 10, 2015. Police claimed she committed suicide; her family is certain she did no such thing. They had spoken to her just hours before she was alleged to have taken her own life, discussing arrangements to post her bail. A few days later, a cop watcher’s video was released by Al Jazeera. You can hear Sandra Bland’s…

“We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” says the report, which is titled “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity.” “But make no mistake: This is about race.”

  • September 14, 2015
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Panel Studying Racial Divide in Missouri Presents a Blunt Picture of Inequity By MONICA DAVEYSEPT. 14, 2015, The New York Times In a 198-page report to be made public in Ferguson, Mo., on Monday afternoon, the commission lays out goals that are ambitious, wide ranging and, in many cases, politically delicate. Among 47 top priorities, the group calls for increasing the minimum wage, expanding eligibility for Medicaid and consolidating the patchwork of 60 police forces and 81 municipal courts that cover St. Louis and its suburbs. The commission offers a blunt, painful picture of racial inequity in the region. Black…

From Black August to Black Lives Matter

  • August 23, 2015
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A year ago this month, the streets of Ferguson, Missouri exploded in the wake of the murder of eighteen-year-old Black teen, Michael Brown, at the hands of white police officer, Darren Wilson. The world watched closely as military Humvees and the national guard armed with tear gas and rubber bullets transformed an otherwise quiet town in the Midwest into a historic battlefront for the Black Lives Matter movement, the present-day Black liberation struggle born after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman over the murder of the Black seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Since the Ferguson riots last August, Black Lives Matter has…

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