Tens-of-thousands protest in San Francisco June 3, 2020
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BLACK LIVES MATTER
Ultimately the majority of human suffering is caused by a system that places the value of material wealth over the value of
life. End the profit motive, end the suffering.
George Floyd's Last Words
"It's my face man
I didn't do nothing serious man
please
please
please I can't breathe
please man
please somebody
please man
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please
(inaudible)
man can't breathe, my face
just get up
I can't breathe
please (inaudible)
I can't breathe sh*t
I will
I can't move
mama
mama
I can't
my knee
my nuts
I'm through
I'm through
I'm claustrophobic
my stomach hurt
my neck hurts
everything hurts
some water or something
please
please
I can't breathe officer
don't kill me
they gon' kill me man
come on man
I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe
they gon' kill me
they gon' kill me
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can't breathe"
I didn't do nothing serious man
please
please
please I can't breathe
please man
please somebody
please man
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please
(inaudible)
man can't breathe, my face
just get up
I can't breathe
please (inaudible)
I can't breathe sh*t
I will
I can't move
mama
mama
I can't
my knee
my nuts
I'm through
I'm through
I'm claustrophobic
my stomach hurt
my neck hurts
everything hurts
some water or something
please
please
I can't breathe officer
don't kill me
they gon' kill me man
come on man
I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe
they gon' kill me
they gon' kill me
I can't breathe
I can't breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can't breathe"
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Still photo from Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove"released January 29, 1964
Enough is Enough: Global Nuclear Weapons
Spending 2020
In its report "Enough is Enough: Global Nuclear Weapons Spending 2020" the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has produced the first estimate in nearly a decade of global nuclear weapon spending, taking into account costs to maintain and build new nuclear weapons. ICAN estimates that the nine nuclear-armed countries spent $72.9 billion on their 13,000-plus nuclear weapons in 2019, equaling $138,699 every minute of 2019 on nuclear weapons, and a $7.1 billion increase from 2018.
These estimates (rounded to one decimal point) include nuclear warhead and nuclear-capable delivery systems operating costs and development where these expenditures are publicly available and are based on a reasonable percentage of total military spending on nuclear weapons when more detailed budget data is not available. ICAN urges all nuclear-armed states to be transparent about nuclear weapons expenditures to allow for more accurate reporting on global nuclear expenditures and better government accountability.
ICAN, May 2020
https://www.icanw.org/global_nuclear_weapons_spending_2020
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Shooting and looting started: 400 years ago
Shooting, looting, scalping, lynching,
Raping, torturing their way across
the continent—400 years ago—
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide rolling down on
Today…
Raping, torturing their way across
the continent—400 years ago—
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide rolling down on
Today…
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide leaving in-
visible yellow crime
scene tape crisscrossing Tallahassee
to Seattle; San Diego to Bangor…
endless crimson tide leaving in-
visible yellow crime
scene tape crisscrossing Tallahassee
to Seattle; San Diego to Bangor…
Shooting Seneca, Seminole, Creek,
Choctaw, Mohawk, Cayuga, Blackfeet,
Shooting Sioux, Shawnee, Chickasaw,
Chippewa before
Looting Lakota land; Looting Ohlone
Land—
Looting Ashanti, Fulani, Huasa, Wolof,
Yoruba, Ibo, Kongo, Mongo, Hutu, Zulu…
Labor.
Choctaw, Mohawk, Cayuga, Blackfeet,
Shooting Sioux, Shawnee, Chickasaw,
Chippewa before
Looting Lakota land; Looting Ohlone
Land—
Looting Ashanti, Fulani, Huasa, Wolof,
Yoruba, Ibo, Kongo, Mongo, Hutu, Zulu…
Labor.
Colonial settler thugs launched this
endless crimson tide—hot lead storms—
Shooting, looting Mexico for half of New
Mexico; a quarter of Colorado; some of
Wyoming and most of Arizona; Looting
Mexico for Utah, Nevada and California
endless crimson tide—hot lead storms—
Shooting, looting Mexico for half of New
Mexico; a quarter of Colorado; some of
Wyoming and most of Arizona; Looting
Mexico for Utah, Nevada and California
So, next time Orange Mobutu, Boss Tweet,
is dirty like Duterte—howling for shooting;
Next time demented minions raise rifles to
shoot; Remind them that
Real looters wear Brooks Brothers suits;
Or gold braid and junk medals ‘cross their
chests. Real looters—with Capitalist Hill
Accomplices—
Steal trillions
Not FOX-boxes, silly sneakers, cheap clothes…
is dirty like Duterte—howling for shooting;
Next time demented minions raise rifles to
shoot; Remind them that
Real looters wear Brooks Brothers suits;
Or gold braid and junk medals ‘cross their
chests. Real looters—with Capitalist Hill
Accomplices—
Steal trillions
Not FOX-boxes, silly sneakers, cheap clothes…
© 2020. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
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Respected Elder Jalil Muntaqim
Hospitalized with COVID-19
Hospitalized with COVID-19
Widely respected elder Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom), who in his teens joined the Black Panther Party, and who was convicted at 19 and has been incarcerated for 49 years in NYS prisons on a 25-year minimum sentence, became ill last week, and has tested positive for COVID-19. His health deteriorated over the weekend and he has been hospitalized since Monday.
For months, public health experts, faith leaders, Congress members, and hundreds of others have warned NYS officials that the prisons are potential death traps in the COVID-19 pandemic. Recognizing this, a New York State judge on April 27th ordered Jalil's temporary release from Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, NY, based on his extreme vulnerability to the virus. Jalil is 68 years old and suffers from serious chronic health conditions that can make COVID-19 deadly.
However, NYS Attorney General Letitia James, acting on behalf of NYS DOCCS Commissioner Anthony Annucci, appealed the ruling, blocking Jalil's release and forcing him to remain in prison. Just as we feared, Jalil, who was ordered released a month ago, eventually contracted COVID-19.
Tomorrow, May 28th, a NYS Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments from Jalil's attorney and the DOCCS attorney. We ask you to call and tweet the AG and DOCCS commissioner today and tomorrow urging them to withdraw the appeal so that Jalil can be released from the hospital to the community, where he has medical and other support awaiting him, rather than be returned to the prison where his recovery will be impeded, and where he will again be vulnerable to contracting another COVID-19 infection.
Here's what you can do:
TWEET!
@TishJames @NewYorkStateAG Withdraw your appeal of Judge Shick's 4/27 order releasing Anthony Bottom. If you had not appealed/blocked his release, Mr. Bottom wouldn't have contracted COVID & wouldn't be seriously ill now. Withdraw the appeal so he can go home, recover & stay safe
@NYSDOCCS Cmr. Annucci should withdraw his appeal of the release of Anthony Bottom. On 4/27, Judge Stephan Schick ordered Mr. Bottom's release to protect him from COVID-19, but DOCCS appealed, blocking release. Now he is ill. Withdraw appeal so he can go home, recover & stay safe
CALL the Attorney General and Commissioner
Attorney General Letitia James - (718) 560-2040
Sample Script For AG:
My name is [X]. I am calling to urge the AG to withdraw her appeal of the release of Anthony Bottom, DIN# 77A4283, which was ordered by Sullivan County Supreme Court Judge Stephan G. Schick on April 27. Had the AG not originally appealed that decision, Mr. Bottom would not have contracted COVID-19, as he recently did, and would not be seriously ill and in the hospital now. The AG's appeal was responsible for his current life-threatening illness. She must now withdraw her appeal so that Mr. Bottom can return to his community after he recovers from COVID-19 and avoid being re-infected. The communities that elected her, and whom she claims to represent, demand this of her.
Commissioner Annucci - (518) 457-8126
Sample Script For Commissioner:
My name is [X]. I am calling to urge Commissioner Annucci to withdraw his opposition to the release of Anthony Bottom, DIN#77A4283. On April 27, Sullivan County Supreme Court Judge Stephan G. Schick ordered Mr. Bottom's release to protect him from COVID-19, but DOCCS appealed and he was not released. Predictably, Mr. Bottom contracted the virus and now he is hospitalized with COVID-19. If DOCCS had not appealed this decision, Mr. Bottom would not have contracted COVID-19, as he recently did, and would not be in the hospital now. DOCCS should withdraw the appeal so that Mr. Bottom can return to his community after he recovers from COVID-19 and avoid being re-infected. Alternatively, the Commissioner should expedite and ensure approval of Mr. Bottom's supplemented request for medical parole.
Pack the Virtual Courtroom - Thursday, May 28 at 1:00 pm Eastern - 10:00 am Pacific
Oral arguments on the appeal of the decision to release Jalil will be streamed live.
Link to hearing on Thursday, May 28 at 1:00 pm Eastern, 10:00 am Pacific
*click the box at the bottom that says "Court Session Webcast" - or try the direct link: http://wowza.nycourts.gov/ad3/ad3.php
Read more about the case (with additional articles coming soon):
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Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin
https://www.change.org/p/fulton-county-district-attorney-paul-howard-new-trial-for-imam-jamil-al-amin-fka-h-rap-brown/u/26712236?cs_tk=Agfqa4Sr0n9NAEiczV4AAXicyyvNyQEABF8BvL2nnqaMAc2Bt2LUieefEjI%3D&utm_campaign=db01b165ea374b29a7db3cf3d605952a&utm_content=initial_v0_4_0&utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_update&utm_term=cs
Application for retrial has been submitted to the
conviction integrity unit—confession and all
Petition update - Please sign at the link above!
May 23, 2020 —
We have submitted our application to the @FultonCountyDA #ConvictionIntegrityUnit demanding a retrial for Imam Jamil Al-Amin FKA H. Rap Brown.
We must now show the establishment that we care more about justice than they do about corruption and injustice.
The proof of misdeeds is clear, the proof of innocence is clear, a retrial or release are the only acceptable options.
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.orgWe make the news so let our voices once again be heard loudly and in unison…we demand a retrial…we demand justice! #FreeImamJamil
To unsubscribe contact: http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/options/ppnews_freedomarchives.org
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| American Friends Service Committee 1501 Cherry Street Philadelphia, PA 19102 United States | |||
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Resolution for Funding for the Undocumented
Whereas, Governor Newsom recently announced the creation of a $125 million emergency relief fund for undocumented workers, none of whom are eligible for the federal stimulus, the centerpiece being a one-time payment of $500 to 150,000 individuals;
Whereas, the undocumented pay $3 billion in state and local taxes every year;[1]
Whereas, California's cost-of-living is extraordinarily high;[2]
Resolved: Adult School Teachers United considers the one-time $500 grant to undocumented workers at best, token. It is barely 25 percent of the weekly wage or six percent of the monthly wage the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considers necessary to lift a family of four in the Bay Area above the poverty line. This is approximately $47.50-an-hour total per household before taxes extrapolating from figures provided by HUD.
As the fifth largest economy in the world, and with Silicon Valley, agribusiness, defense contractors and Hollywood sitting on huge capital reserves, California must provide a living wage to all. Instead it has failed to even match the $600 a week Unemployment Insurance (UI) boost provided by the federal government which itself is grossly inadequate.
We will attempt to circulate our position widely in the labor movement and in the immigrants' rights community, and we call for united labor actions to fight for the necessary level of financial support.”
Contact:
Kristen Pursley, President,
Adult School Teachers United (ASTU)
(510)-741-8359
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Sign the petition
Mayor Breed:
City of SF Essential Workers Deserve Safety!
San Francisco is being touted as a leader in the fight to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Yet, San Francisco Water Department employees’ concerns about their safety are minimized, or worse, ignored. They are expected to work as if this pandemic is not even happening. They serve the residents of San Francisco with pride, but are being asked to put routine and non-essential work before their health and well-being.Elected officials and health experts have repeatedly underscored that social distancing is the best weapon we have to protect ourselves from contracting – or unwittingly spreading – the coronavirus. However, it is not possible to maintain social distancing for a crew of several people installing a water service or carrying out strenuous physical work in various Water Department shops.SFWD, a revenue-generating department, has not scaled back work. Mayor Breed has ordered virtually all construction within San Francisco to be stopped, with those crews sent home to shelter in place. But Water Department employees are still out in public, installing water services for these same buildings that have been shut down due to COVID-19. On the other hand, employees in SF’s Sewer Department have been working one week on, two weeks off, with no reduction in pay, in order to reduce their exposure.Another issue is the lack of sufficient personal protective equipment.Workers are allotted one face mask per day which becomes unusable early in their shifts. There has not been training or guidance, nor physical tools, for employees to do their work safely, although much of the work they are doing simply cannot be done safely during these times.Additionally, there is the issue of vulnerability for at-will (known as Category-18) and “as needed” staff, who can be laid off at any time with no reason. They work side by side with permanent employees, but are often prevented from speaking out because they have to weigh their own lives against the potential repercussions of speaking up when they are instructed to put themselves in jeopardy.We cannot help but wonder if the reason SFWD workers feel disposable, rather than “essential,” is because the City is putting Water Department revenue above the very life and health of its workforce. In spite of government leaders’ claims to the contrary, this does not seem like “we are all in this together.” We, the undersigned SFWD (City Distribution Division) employees, their families, ratepayers and concerned community members call on City and PUC leaders to meet the following demands.1. Reduce the scope of SFWD operations to truly essential work.Institute a one week on/two weeks off schedule with no loss of pay, similar to staff in the Sewer Department. Social distancing is at the very heart of the strategy to combat the virus so minimizing the number of people reporting to work decreases their exposure rate.2. Provide sufficient personal protective equipment in order to do every job safely, whether in the field, shops or offices. If such PPE is not available, SFWD employees should not be asked to compromise their lives and the health and safety of their families, especially for routine work. Enhanced training to address these unprecedented working conditions, backed up by the supplies and infrastructure to carry it out, is necessary for the most vulnerable workers. If personal vehicles are used to get to job sites and maintain social distancing, the City should assume the related liability.3. Provide equal and safe working conditions for every employee.Eliminate Category-18 and other vulnerable hiring statuses, and make these workers permanent employees. San Francisco should be leading the way on equality for all, not promoting second class citizenship for some. No retaliation against any employee.We call on City and PUC leaders to take these necessary measures to protect City workers, their families, and their communities!
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Veterans Join Call for a Global Ceasefire, The Lasting Effects of War Book Discussion, Sir, No Sir Viewing, VFP's Online Convention, Workshop Proposals, Convention FAQ, No More COVID-19 Money For the Pentagon, Repeal the AUMF, Community Conversation on Hybrid Warfare, St Louis VFP Delivers VA Lunch, In the News and Calendar
Veterans Join Call for a Global Ceasefire
Veterans For Peace, as a United Nations Department of Global Communication affiliated NGO, is most gratified to see UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres make his plea for a worldwide ceasefire during this global pandemic.
The first line of the Preamble of the UN's Charter says that they originated to save “succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. But sadly, because the UN was created by the victors of WW2 who remain the powers of the world, and because the UN depends for funding on those same militarily and economically dominant nation-states, primarily the U.S., much more often than not the UN is very quiet on war.
Please join Veterans For Peace in appealing to U.S. Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft to support the Secretary General's call for a GLOBAL CEASEFIRE!
For more information about events go to:
https://www.veteransforpeace.org/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=fa5082af-9325-47a7-901c-710e85091ee1
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Courage to Resist Newsletter
 Podcast: Congress leaning towards drafting women for next war
Rivera Sun and Edward Hasbrouck on upcoming changes to military draft registration laws, and the history of resistance by men and women. Listen to Rivera and Edward's update
Update from Chelsea Manning
"Thank you, truly, for your unwavering love and support during this entire ordeal. You enabled Chelsea to maintain her principled stance," shared Team Chelsea. "Chelsea was released on March 12, 2020. She has been resting and trying to recover from being held in jail for almost a full year for resisting a grand jury subpoena ... [Chelsea] is staying indoors and safe and is hoping you do the same." Read more
Podcast: "That's me -- I AM the enemy" - Howard Morland
Air force pilot Howard Morland's exposure to the atrocities in Vietnam and extreme military training led him to question what the war was really about. Listen to Howard's story
The above Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — “Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam.” This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured. If you believe this history is important, please ...
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COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
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From Business Insider 2018
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"The biggest block from having society in harmony with the universe is the belief in a lie that says it’s not realistic or humanly possible."
"If Obama taught me anything it’s that it don’t matter who you vote for in this system. There’s nothing a politician can do that the next one can’t undo. You can’t vote away the ills of society people have to put our differences aside ban together and fight for the greater good, not vote for the lesser evil."
—Johnny Gould (Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)
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COVID-19 PRISON UPDATEBy: Shakaboona, Wednesday, April 29, 2020
I just heard on the prison grapevine that PA prisons SCI-Huntingdon and SCI-Houtzdale has coronavirus infections. SCI-Huntingdon is suppose to have 12 incarcerated persons infected and SCI-Houtzdale suppose to have 3 incarcerated persons infected. This information has not been confirmed by reliable & legitimate sources, but I'm placing this info on the wire for folks to look into and confirm themselves. Ask questions people. Don't depend on government officials to tell u the truth; they hardly ever do, and when they do manage to tell what may appear to be some truth it is always mixed with a lie, which is still falsehood. They r media "Spin Artists", and poor ones at that. Investigate things for yourselves.More on Secret Mass Prison Transfers @ SCI-Rockview - Beginning on Sunday (4-26-2020) incarcerated persons had there personal property packed up in preparation for transfer from SCI-Rockview to other far away prisons across the state. From Monday to Friday, SCI-Rockview has shipped out for transfer about 60 incarcerated persons per day. Rumors by Prison Officials are saying they must transfer 250 prisoners from SCI-Rockview to thin down this prison's population in case the coronavirus hits here. Secretary Wetzel and PADOC Central Office Officials has absolutely no concern, consideration, or respect for the Families of incarcerated people, b/c they didn't tell families about it to give them any input on the matter whatsoever. Families of prisoners get No R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Don't the Families of incarcerated people want that for themselves? The only way for Families to get respect, is to get power (People Power!), and the only way to get both is to form into a UNION of Family members. Well, that is but one reason why we founded the HUMAN RIGHTS COALITION (HRC). So come join the HRC that we may become such a force, that in unity (as a Families of Prisoners UNION), we can fight back. Take care & be safe.
Write to Shakaboona:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Kerry Shakaboona Marshall #BE7826
SCI Rockview
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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Mumia Abu-Jamal Update
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mobilization4Mumia
215-724-1618
mobilization4mumia@gmail.com
PRESS ALERT
Contact: Sophia Williams 917-806-0521, Pam Africa 267-760-7344 or Joe Piette 610-931-2615
PA DOC cruel hoax
that Abu-Jamal was ill with COVID19
Breaking News: At 5:04pm on Wednesday, April 15th, a prison official inside the SCI Mahanoy Superintendents’ Office told a concerned advocate for Mumia on an official DOC phone that Mumia was being transported by ambulance for evaluation of COVID 19 symptoms and had trouble breathing. After hours of supporters repeatedly calling prison officials to demand an opportunity to speak with Mumia, they allowed him a call at almost 9PM. Mumia confirmed that the official report was false. “I am fine,” he said, “What I need is freedom.”
This is of grave concern because the COVID-19 pandemic imposes a death sentence on the incarcerated, including 66 year-old Mumia, who already suffers from cirrhosis of the liver. More striking is this whole incident points to how the Pennsylvania DOC response to the COVID 19 pandemic is doomed to failure. As of April 15th there have been a total of 53 tests out of 45,000 inmates with a 17% positivity rate and already we have seen one death. There simply are not enough tests to understand the full transmission of the virus. The prison reduction mitigation efforts are not at all commensurate with the epidemic. In the last month there has only been a reduction of 474 out of 45,000 prisoners.
It is time to release thousands of prisoners, especially the elderly and immunocompromised, like respected journalist and internationally recognized political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, that have homes, and caring families and are no risk to the community.
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org
To unsubscribe contact: http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/options/ppnews_freedomarchives.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal: New Chance for Freedom
Police and State Frame-Up Must Be Fully Exposed!
Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. Courts have ignored and suppressed evidence of his innocence for decades.... But now, one court has thrown out all the decisions of the PA Supreme Court that denied Mumia's appeals against his unjust conviction during the years of 1998 to 2012!
This ruling, by Judge Leon Tucker, was made because one judge on the PA Supreme Court during those years, Ronald Castille, was lacking the "appearance of impartiality." In plain English, he was clearly biased against Mumia. Before sitting on the PA Supreme Court, Castille had been District Attorney (or assistant DA) during the time of Mumia's frame-up and conviction, and had used his office to express a special interest in pursuing the death penalty for "cop-killers." Mumia was in the cross-hairs. Soon he was wrongly convicted and sent to death row for killing a police officer.....
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning and intrepid journalist, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter, and a critic of police brutality and murder. Mumia was framed by police, prosecutors, and leading elements of both Democratic and Republican parties, for the shooting of a police officer.. The US Justice Department targeted him as well... A racist judge helped convict him, and corrupt courts have kept him locked up despite much evidence that should have freed him. He continues his commentary and journalism from behind bars. As of 2019, he has been imprisoned for 37 years for a crime he did not commit.
Time is up! FREE MUMIA NOW!
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DA's Hidden Files Show Frame-Up of Mumia
In the midst of Mumia's fight for his right to challenge the state Supreme Court's negative rulings, a new twist was revealed: six boxes of files on Mumia's case--with many more still hidden--were surreptitiously concealed for decades in a back room at the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia. The very fact that these files on Mumia's case were hidden away for decades is damning in the extreme, and their revelations confirm what we have known for decades: Mumia was framed for a crime he did not commit!
So far, the newly revealed evidence confirms that, at the time of Mumia's 1982 trial, chief prosecutor Joe McGill illegally removed black jurors from the jury, violating the Batson decision. Also revealed: The prosecution bribed witnesses into testifying that they saw Mumia shoot the slain police officer when they hadn't seen any such thing.... Taxi driver Robert Chobert, who was on probation for fire-bombing a school yard at the time, had sent a letter demanding his money for lying on the stand....... Very important, but the newly revealed evidence is just the tip of the iceberg!
All Evidence of Mumia's Innocence Must Be Brought Forward Now!
Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner was rigged against him from beginning to end........ All of the evidence of Mumia's innocence--which was earlier suppressed or rejected--must now be heard:
• Mumia was framed - The judge at Mumia's trial, Albert Sabo, was overheard to say, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n____r." And he proceeded to do just that.... Mumia was thrown out of his own trial for defending himself! Prosecution "witnesses" were coerced or bribed at trial to lie against Mumia.. In addition to Chobert, this included key witness Cynthia White, a prostitute who testified that she saw Mumia shoot Faulkner... White's statements had to be rewritten under intense pressure from the cops, because she was around the corner and out of sight of the shooting at the time! Police bribed her with promises of being allowed to work her corner, and not sent to state prison for her many prostitution charges.
• Mumia only arrived on the scene after Officer Faulkner was shot - William Singletary, a tow-truck business owner who had no reason to lie against the police, said he had been on the scene the whole time, that Mumia was not the shooter, and that Mumia had arrived only after the shooting of Faulkner. Singletary's statements were torn up, his business was wrecked, and he was threatened by police to be out of town for the trial (which, unfortunately, he was)...
• There is no evidence that Mumia fired a gun - Mumia was shot on the scene by an arriving police officer and arrested. But the cops did not test his hands for gun-powder residue--a standard procedure in shootings! They also did not test Faulkner's hands. The prosecution nevertheless claimed Mumia was the shooter, and that he was shot by Faulkner as the officer fell to the ground. Ballistics evidence was corrupted to falsely show that Mumia's gun was the murder weapon, when his gun was reportedly still in his taxi cab, which was in police custody days after the shooting!
• The real shooter fled the scene and was never charged - Veronica Jones was a witness who said that after hearing the shots from a block away, she had seen two people fleeing the scene of the shooting.... This could not have included Mumia, who had been shot and almost killed at the scene. Jones was threatened by the police with arrest and loss of custody of her children. She then lied on the stand at trial to say she had seen no one running away.
• Abu-Jamal never made a confession - Mumia has always maintained his innocence. But police twice concocted confessions that Mumia never made. Inspector Alfonso Giordano, the senior officer at the crime scene, made up a confession for Mumia. But Giordano was not allowed to testify at trial, because he was top on the FBI's list of corrupt cops in the Philadelphia police force... At the DA's request, another cop handily provided a second "confession," allegedly heard by a security guard in the hospital......... But at neither time was Mumia--almost fatally shot--able to speak.. And an earlier police report by cops in the hospital said that, referring to Mumia: "the negro male made no comment"!
• The crime scene was tampered with by police - Police officers at the scene rearranged some evidence, and handled what was alleged to be Mumia's gun with their bare hands... A journalist's photos revealed this misconduct. The cops then left the scene unattended for hours.. All of this indicates a frame-up in progress....
• The real shooter confessed, and revealed the reason for the crime - Arnold Beverly came forward in the 1990s. He said in a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury, that he, not Mumia, had been the actual shooter. He said that he, along with "another guy," had been hired to do the hit, because Faulkner was "a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area"! (affidavit of Arnold Beverly).
• The corruption of Philadelphia police is documented and well known - This includes that of Giordano, who was the first cop to manufacture a "confession" by Mumia... Meanwhile, Faulkner's cooperation with the federal anti-corruption investigations of Philadelphia police is strongly suggested by his lengthy and heavily redacted FBI file......
• Do cops kill other cops? There are other cases in Philadelphia that look that way. Frank Serpico, an NYC cop who investigated and reported on police corruption, was abandoned by fellow cops after being shot in a drug bust. Mumia was clearly made a scape-goat for the crimes of corrupt Philadelphia cops who were protecting their ill-gotten gains.
• Politicians and US DOJ helped the frame-up - Ed Rendell, former DA, PA governor, and head of the Democratic National Committee--and now a senior advisor to crime-bill author Joe Biden--is complicit in the frame-up of Mumia. The US Justice Department targeted Mumia for his anti-racist activities when he was a teenager, and later secretly warned then-prosecutor Rendell not to use Giordano as a witness against Mumia because he was an FBI target for corruption..
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All this should lead to an immediate freeing of Mumia! But we are still a ways away from that, and we have no confidence in the capitalist courts to finish the job. We must act! This victory in local court allowing new appeals must now lead to a full-court press on all the rejected and suppressed evidence of Mumia's innocence!
Mass Movement Needed To Free Mumia!
Mumia's persecution by local, state and federal authorities of both political parties has been on-going, and has generated a world-wide movement in his defense... This movement has seen that Mumia, as a radio journalist who exposed the brutal attacks on the black community by the police in Philadelphia, has spoken out as a defender of working people of all colors and all nationalities in his ongoing commentaries (now on KPFA/Pacifica radio), despite being on death row, and now while serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP)...
In 1999, Oakland Teachers for Mumia held unauthorized teach-ins in Oakland schools on Mumia and the death penalty, despite the rabid hysteria in the bourgeois media. Teachers in Rio de Janeiro held similar actions. Letters of support came in from maritime workers and trade unions around the world.. Later in 1999, longshore workers shut down all the ports on the West Coast to free Mumia, and led a mass march of 25,000 Mumia supporters in San Francisco................
A year later, a federal court lifted Mumia's death sentence, based on improper instructions to the jury by trial judge Albert Sabo.. The federal court ordered the local court to hold a new sentencing hearing... Fearing their frame-up of Mumia could be revealed in any new hearing, even if only on sentencing, state officials passed. Much to the chagrin of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP)--which still seeks Mumia's death--this left Mumia with LWOP, death by life in prison..
Mumia supporters waged a struggle to get him the cure for the deadly Hepatitis-C virus, which he had likely contracted through a blood transfusion in hospital after he was shot by a cop at the 1981 crime scene. The Labor Action Committee conducted demonstrations against Gilead Sciences, the Foster City CA corporation that owns the cure, and charged $1,000 per pill! The Metalworkers Union of South Africa wrote a letter excoriating Governor Wolf for allowing untreated sick freedom fighters to die in prison as the apartheid government had done. Finally, Mumia did get the cure.. Now, more than ever, struggle is needed to free Mumia!
Now is the Time: Mobilize Again for Mumia's Freedom!
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.laboractionmumia...........org
Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal | Mumia Abu-Jamal is an I.....
November 2019
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Message to the People
A voice from inside Pennsylvania’s gulag
I trust everyone is well, healthy, and safe. I just got news that the federal judge denied my appeal to modify my federal sentence. I don’t classify the news of denial as either good or bad; it simply is what it is, a denial. It neither sets me back or pushes me forward. I am at the same spot that I’ve been at before that federal appeal, and that is, very close to being released from prison. Remember, we were simply trying to “expedite” release from prison. And that hasn’t change not one bit. The judge’s denial of my appeal is just a reminder of how most of the status quo view us—as less than—less than human, less than citizens, less than themselves, less than...you can fill in the rest.
People may be wondering how I’m feeling, so let me tell you all how I pretty much always feel and view situations like this one. I always have momentary mixed feelings of disappointment, anger, and sadness, but as quick as it comes it goes. Because my view in life is 1) they can’t keep a good person down for long, 2) be thankful for what you have, 3) always look at the positive in things that appear bad and take that positive position, and 4) have faith in the universal laws at play in the world. So, the way I see this situation is that I’m a good brother; I’m thankful for being near release from prison and for even getting the opportunity to have my federal appeal heard before a court because that rarely happens. I see the positives as being heard, meeting new friends, bringing family closer to me, and new paths revealing themselves to me; and I have unwavering faith in the law of cause and effect—that what we put into the world is what we get out of the world. Well I put in good works.
So, keep your eyes on the prize and fight like hell to get it! I know I will. And know of a surety, that in the end, we will win freedom, justice, equality, peace, happiness, family, good homes, health, and heaven on earth while we live. Stay safe.
Write to Shakaboona:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Kerry Shakaboona Marshall #BE7826
SCI Rockview
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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You can watch the film here:
iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/we-are-many/id1118498978
Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/We-Are-Many-Damon-Albarn/dp/B01IFW0WX4
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LETTERS NEEDED FOR
LEONARD PELTIER
Dear Friends, Supporters, and Family,
In light of the provisions of the CARES Act meant to decrease the risk to prisoner heath, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Attorney General has delegated to the Director of the Bureau of Prisons the authority to release certain vulnerable prisoners to home confinement. Currently, the process for identifying appropriate candidates for home confinement have not been solidified but we believe it may help to write to the BOP Director and Southeast Regional Director and ask that Leonard be immediately considered and transitioned to his home on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.Your letters should be addressed to:
Michael CarvajalDirector320 First Street NWWashington, DC 20534
J.A. KellerSoutheast Regional DirectorFederal Bureau of3800 Camp Crk Prk SW, Building 2000Atlanta, GA 30331
We have not drafted a form letter or correspondence. Your pleas should come from your heart as an individual who has supported Leonard for so many years. Say what you would like but we have put together some talking points that will assist you in your letter writing. Below are some helpful guidelines so your letter touches on the requirements of the Attorney General’s criteria for releasing inmates like Leonard to home confinement
OPENING:• Point out that Leonard is an elder and is at risk for example.” Mr. Peltier is 75 years old and in very poor health; his only desire is to go home to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation and live out the remainder of his years surrounded by his family.”
MEDICAL:The AG and CDC guidelines for releasing inmates requires the health concerns cause greater risk of getting the virus. Leonard has the following conditions you can list in your letter• Diabetes• Spots on lung• Heart Condition (has had triple by-pass surgery)• Leonard Peltier suffers from a kidney disease that cannot be treated at the Coleman1facility and impacts as an underlying condition if contracting the virus.
RISK TO COMMUNITY:To qualify for release to home confinement we must show that Leonard poses no risk to the community.
COMMUNITY SUPPORT/RENTRY PLAN:To qualify for release to home confinement we must show that Leonard has a reentry plan. Leonard has support from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band and has family land on the reservation where he can live.
RISK OF COVID 19:To qualify for the release to home confinement must show that Leonard is at reduced risk to exposure of COVID 19 by release than he is at Coleman 1. Currently Rolette County, ND has no cases of COVID 19, Sumter County has at least 33 cases.
Questions and comments may be sent to info@freedomarchives.org
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Support Major Tillery, Friend of Mumia, Innocent, Framed, Now Ill
Major Tillery (with hat) and family
Dear Friends of the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia,
Major Tillery, a prisoner at SCI Chester and a friend of Mumia, may have caught the coronavirus. Major is currently under lockdown at SCI Chester, where a coronavirus outbreak is currently taking place. Along with the other prisoners at SCI Chester, he urgently needs your help.
Major Tillery, a prisoner at SCI Chester and a friend of Mumia, may have caught the coronavirus. Major is currently under lockdown at SCI Chester, where a coronavirus outbreak is currently taking place. Along with the other prisoners at SCI Chester, he urgently needs your help.
Major was framed by the Pennsylvania District Attorney and police for a murder which took place in 1976. He has maintained his innocence throughout the 37 years he has been incarcerated, of which approximately 20 were spent in solitary confinement. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture has said that 15 days of solitary confinement constitutes torture.
When Mumia had Hepatitis C and was left to die by the prison administration at SCI Mahanoy, Major Tillery was the prisoner who confronted the prison superintendent and demanded that they treat Mumia. (see https://www.justiceformajortillery.org/messing-with-major.html). Although Mumia received medical treatment, the prison retaliated against Major for standing up to the prison administration. He was transferred to another facility, his cell was searched and turned inside out repeatedly, and he lost his job in the prison as a Peer Facilitator.
SCI Chester, where Major is currently incarcerated, has been closed to visitors since mid-March. Fourteen guards and one prisoner are currently reported to be infected with the coronavirus. Because the prison has not tested all the inmates, there is no way to know how many more inmates have coronavirus. Major has had a fever, chills and a sore throat for several nights. Although Major has demanded testing for himself and all prisoners, the prison administration has not complied.
For the past ten days, there has been no cleaning of the cell block. It has been weeks since prisoners have been allowed into the yard to exercise. The food trays are simply being left on the floor. There have been no walk-throughs by prison administrators. The prisoners are not allowed to have showers; they are not allowed to have phone calls; and they are not permitted any computer access.
This coronavirus outbreak at SCI Chester is the same situation which is playing out in California prisons right now, about which the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia, along with other groups, organized a car caravan protest at San Quentin last week. Prisons are enclosed indoor spaces and are already an epicenter of the coronavirus, like meatpacking plants and cruise ships. If large numbers of prisoners are not released, the coronavirus will infect the prisons, as well as surrounding communities, and many prisoners will die. Failing to release large numbers of prisoners at this point is the same as executing them. We call for "No Execution by COVID-19"!
Major is close to 70 years old, and has a compromised liver and immune system, as well as heart problems. He desperately needs your help.
Please write and call Acting Superintendent Kenneth Eason at:
Kenneth Eason, Acting Superintendent
SCI Chester
500 E. 4th St.
Chester, PA 19013
Telephone: (610) 490-5412
Email: keason@pa.gov (Prison Superintendent). maquinn@pa.gov (Superintendent's Assistant)Please also call the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections at:Department of Corrections
1920 Technology Parkway
Mechanicsburg, PA 17050
Telephone: (717) 737-4531
This telephone number is for SCI Camp Hill, which is the current number for DOC.
Reference Major's inmate number: AM 9786
Email: ra-contactdoc@pa.govDemand that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections immediately:
SCI Chester
500 E. 4th St.
Chester, PA 19013
Telephone: (610) 490-5412
Email: keason@pa.gov (Prison Superintendent). maquinn@pa.gov (Superintendent's Assistant)Please also call the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections at:Department of Corrections
1920 Technology Parkway
Mechanicsburg, PA 17050
Telephone: (717) 737-4531
This telephone number is for SCI Camp Hill, which is the current number for DOC.
Reference Major's inmate number: AM 9786
Email: ra-contactdoc@pa.govDemand that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections immediately:
1) Provide testing for all inmates and staff at SCI Chester;
2) Disinfect all cells and common areas at SCI Chester, including sinks, toilets, eating areas and showers;
3) Provide PPE (personal protective equipment) for all inmates at SCI Chester;
4) Provide access to showers for all prisoners at SCI Chester, as a basic hygiene measure;
5) Provide yard access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
6) Provide phone and internet access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
7) Immediately release prisoners from SCI Chester, including Major Tillery, who already suffers from a compromised immune system, in order to save their lives from execution by COVID-19.
It has been reported that prisoners are now receiving shower access. However, please insist that prisoners be given shower access and that all common areas are disinfected.
In solidarity,
The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
2) Disinfect all cells and common areas at SCI Chester, including sinks, toilets, eating areas and showers;
3) Provide PPE (personal protective equipment) for all inmates at SCI Chester;
4) Provide access to showers for all prisoners at SCI Chester, as a basic hygiene measure;
5) Provide yard access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
6) Provide phone and internet access to all prisoners at SCI Chester;
7) Immediately release prisoners from SCI Chester, including Major Tillery, who already suffers from a compromised immune system, in order to save their lives from execution by COVID-19.
It has been reported that prisoners are now receiving shower access. However, please insist that prisoners be given shower access and that all common areas are disinfected.
In solidarity,
The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Friday post
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The American way of life was designed by white supremacists in favor patriarchal white supremacy, who have had at least a 400 year head start accumulating wealth, out of generations filled with blood sweat and tears of oppressed people. The same people who are still on the front lines and in the crosshairs of patriarchal white-supremacist capitalism today. There's no such thing as equality without a united revolutionary front to dismantle capitalism and design a worldwide socialist society.
—Johnny Gould
(Follow @tandino415 on Instagram)
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
National Solidarity Events to Amplify Prisoners Human Rights
AUGUST 21 - SEPTEMBER 9th
To all in solidarity with the Prisoners Human Rights Movement:
We are reaching out to those that have been amplifying our voices in these state, federal, or immigration jails and prisons, and to allies that uplifted the national prison strike demands in 2018. We call on you again to organize the communities from August 21st - September 9th, 2020, by hosting actions, events, and demonstrations that call for prisoner human rights and the end to prison slavery.
We must remind the people and legal powers in this nation that prisoners' human rights are a priority. If we aren't moving forward, we're moving backward. For those of us in chains, backward is not an option. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Some people claim that prisoners' human rights have advanced since the last national prison strike in 2018. We strongly disagree. But due to prisoners organizing inside and allies organizing beyond the walls, solidarity with our movement has increased. The only reason we hear conversations referencing prison reforms in every political campaign today is because of the work of prison organizers and our allies! But as organizers in prisons, we understand this is not enough. Just as quickly as we've gained ground, others are already funding projects and talking points to set back those advances. Our only way to hold our ground while moving forward is to remind people where we are and where we are headed.
On August 21 - September 9, we call on everyone in solidarity with us to organize an action, a panel discussion, a rally, an art event, a film screening, or another kind of demonstration to promote prisoners' human rights. Whatever is within your ability, we ask that you shake the nation out of any fog they may be in about prisoners' human rights and the criminal legal system (legalized enslavement).
During these solidarity events, we request that organizers amplify immediate issues prisoners in your state face, the demands from the National Prison Strike of 2018, and uplift Jailhouse Lawyers Speak new International Law Project.
We've started the International Law Project to engage the international community with a formal complaint about human rights abuses in U.S. prisons. This project will seek prisoners' testimonials from across the country to establish a case against the United States Prison Industrial Slave Complex on international human rights grounds.
Presently working on this legally is the National Lawyers Guild's Prisoners Rights Committee, and another attorney, Anne Labarbera. Members of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP), and I am We Prisoners Advocacy Network/Millions For Prisoners are also working to support these efforts. The National Lawyers Guild Prisoners' Rights Committee (Jenipher R. Jones, Esq. and Audrey Bomse) will be taking the lead on this project.
The National Prison Strike Demands of 2018 have not changed.. As reflected publicly by the recent deaths of Mississippi prisoners, the crisis in this nation's prisons persist. Mississippi prisons are on national display at the moment of this writing, and we know shortly afterward there will be another Parchman in another state with the same issues. The U.S. has demonstrated a reckless disregard for human lives in cages.
The prison strike demands were drafted as a path to alleviate the dehumanizing process and conditions people are subjected to while going through this nation's judicial system. Following up on these demands communicates to the world that prisoners are heard and that prisoners' human rights are a priority.
In the spirit of Attica, will you be in the fight to dismantle the prison industrial slave complex by pushing agendas that will shut down jails and prisons like Rikers Island or Attica? Read the Attica Rebellion demands and read the National Prison Strike 2018 demands. Ask yourself what can you do to see the 2018 National Prison Strike demands through.
SHARE THIS RELEASE FAR AND WIDE WITH ALL YOUR CONTACTS!
We rage with George Jackson's "Blood in my eyes" and move in the spirit of the Attica Rebellion!
August 21st - September 9th, 2020
AGITATE, EDUCATE, ORGANIZE
Dare to struggle, Dare to win!
We are--
"Jailhouse Lawyers Speak"
NLG EMAIL CONTACT FOR LAWYERS AND LAW STUDENTS INTERESTED IN JOINING THE INTERNATIONAL LAW PROJECT: micjlsnlg@gmail.com
PRISON STRIKE DEMANDS: https://jailhouselawyerspeak.wordpress.com/2020/02/11/prisoners-national-demands-for-human-rights/
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Stop Kevin Cooper's Abuse by San Quentin Prison Guards!
https://www.change.org/p/san-quentin-warden-ronald-davis-stop-kevin-cooper-s-abuse-by-san-quentin-prison-guards-2ace89a7-a13e-44ab-b70c-c18acbbfeb59?recruiter=747387046&recruited_by_id=3ea6ecd0-69ba-11e7-b7ef-51d8e2da53ef&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard&use_react=false 
On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young. The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates.. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned: "This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. .... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .... .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!" A bucket was eventually brought over and: "I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush." Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!" A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A... Young. Kevin has never met Officer A...... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse... Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration. No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect................. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young.. Please: 1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.. 2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated........ 3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037 4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at: Main Street San Quentin, CA 94964 5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.......................ca.gov
On Wednesday, September 25, Kevin Cooper's cell at San Quentin Prison was thrown into disarray and his personal food dumped into the toilet by a prison guard, A. Young. The cells on East Block Bayside, where Kevin's cell is, were all searched on September 25 during Mandatory Yard. Kevin spent the day out in the yard with other inmates.. In a letter, Kevin described what he found when he returned: "This cage was hit hard, like a hurricane was in here .. .... . little by little I started to clean up and put my personal items back inside the boxes that were not taken .... .. .. I go over to the toilet, lift up the seatcover and to my surprise and shock the toilet was completely filled up with my refried beans, and my brown rice. Both were in two separate cereal bags and both cereal bags were full. The raisin bran cereal bags were gone, and my food was in the toilet!" A bucket was eventually brought over and: "I had to get down on my knees and dig my food out of the toilet with my hands so that I could flush the toilet. The food, which was dried refried beans and dried brown rice had absorbed the water in the toilet and had become cement hard. It took me about 45 minutes to get enough of my food out of the toilet before it would flush." Even the guard working the tier at the time told Kevin, "K.C.., that is f_cked up!" A receipt was left in Kevin's cell identifying the guard who did this as A... Young. Kevin has never met Officer A...... Young, and has had no contact with him besides Officer Young's unprovoked act of harassment and psychological abuse... Kevin Cooper has served over 34 years at San Quentin, fighting for exoneration from the conviction for murders he did not commit. It is unconscionable for him to be treated so disrespectfully by prison staff on top of the years of his incarceration. No guard should work at San Quentin if they cannot treat prisoners and their personal belongings with basic courtesy and respect................. Kevin has filed a grievance against A. Young.. Please: 1) Sign this petition calling on San Quentin Warden Ronald Davis to grant Kevin's grievance and discipline "Officer" A. Young.. 2) Call Warden Ronald Davis at: (415) 454-1460 Ext. 5000. Tell him that Officer Young's behaviour was inexcusable, and should not be tolerated........ 3) Call Yasir Samar, Associate Warden of Specialized Housing, at (415) 455-5037 4) Write Warden Davis and Lt. Sam Robinson (separately) at: Main Street San Quentin, CA 94964 5) Email Lt. Sam Robinson at: samuel.robinson2@cdcr.......................ca.gov*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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Letters of support for clemency needed for Reality Winner
Reality Winner, a whistleblower who helped expose foreign hacking of US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election, has been behind bars since June 2017. Supporters are preparing to file a petition of clemency in hopes of an early release... Reality's five year prison sentence is by far the longest ever given for leaking information to the media about a matter of public interest.............. Stand with Reality shirts, stickers, and more available. Please take a moment to sign the letter SIGN THE LETTER Support Reality Podcast: "Veterans need to tell their stories" – Dan Shea Vietnam War combat veteran Daniel Shea on his time in Vietnam and the impact that Agent Orange and post traumatic stress had on him and his family since... Listen now This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace — "Towards an honest commemoration of the American war in Vietnam." This year marks 50 years of GI resistance, in and out of uniform, for many of the courageous individuals featured.. If you believe this history is important, please ... DONATE NOW to support these podcasts |
COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT! 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559 www.....................couragetoresist..org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Board Game
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/race-for-solidarity
Solidarity against racism has existed from the 1600's and continues until today
An exciting board game of chance, empathy and wisdom, that entertains and educates as it builds solidarity through learning about the destructive history of American racism and those who always fought back. Appreciate the anti-racist solidarity of working people, who built and are still building, the great progressive movements of history.. There are over 200 questions, with answers and references.
Spread the word!!
By Dr.... Nayvin Gordon
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50 years in prison: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!! FREE Chip Fitzgerald Grandfather, Father, Elder, Friend former Black Panther
Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald has been in prison since he was locked up 50 years ago...... A former member of the Black Panther Party, Chip is now 70 years old, and suffering the consequences of a serious stroke. He depends on a wheelchair for his mobility. He has appeared before the parole board 17 times, but they refuse to release him.. NOW is the time for Chip to come home! In September 1969, Chip and two other Panthers were stopped by a highway patrolman..... During the traffic stop, a shooting broke out, leaving Chip and a police officer both wounded. Chip was arrested a month later and charged with attempted murder of the police and an unrelated murder of a security guard. Though the evidence against him was weak and Chip denied any involvement, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1972, the California Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.......... Chip and others on Death Row had their sentences commuted to Life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. All of them became eligible for parole after serving 7 more years...... But Chip was rejected for parole, as he has been ever since. Parole for Lifers basically stopped under Governors Deukmajian, Wilson, and Davis (1983-2003), resulting in increasing numbers of people in prison and 23 new prisons. People in prison filed lawsuits in federal courts: people were dying as a result of the overcrowding.. To rapidly reduce the number of people in prison, the court mandated new parole hearings: · for anyone 60 years or older who had served 25 years or more; · for anyone convicted before they were 23 years old; · for anyone with disabilities Chip qualified for a new parole hearing by meeting all three criteria. But the California Board of Parole Hearings has used other methods to keep Chip locked up. Although the courts ordered that prison rule infractions should not be used in parole considerations, Chip has been denied parole because he had a cellphone.......... Throughout his 50 years in prison, Chip has been denied his right to due process – a new parole hearing as ordered by Federal courts. He is now 70, and addressing the challenges of a stroke victim. His recent rules violation of cellphone possession were non-violent and posed no threat to anyone. He has never been found likely to commit any crimes if released to the community – a community of his children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues who are ready to support him and welcome him home. The California Board of Parole Hearings is holding Chip hostage..... We call on Governor Newsom to release Chip immediately. What YOU can do to support this campaign to FREE CHIP: 1) Sign and circulate the petition to FREE Chip. Download it at https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald Print out the petition and get signatures at your workplace, community meeting, or next social gathering. 2) Write an email to Governor Newsom's office (sample message at:https://docs..google.com/document/d/1iwbP_eQEg2J1T2h-tLKE-Dn2ZfpuLx9MuNv2z605DMc/edit?usp=sharing 3) Write to Chip: Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald #B27527, CSP-LAC P.O. Box 4490 B-4-150 Lancaster, CA 93539 -- Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863...................9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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On Abortion: From Facebook
Best explanation I've heard so far......., Copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied..................., "Last night, I was in a debate about these new abortion laws being passed in red states. My son stepped in with this comment which was a show stopper. One of the best explanations I have read:, , 'Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question.... However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not..., , Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v.. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973).. Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you.. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent..... It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional.... This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or how many lives they would save...., , That's the law.., , Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily.............. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong............ That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees....... But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy..., , She may choose to carry the baby to term..... She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between... But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side... Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means....", , Feel free to copy/paste and re-post., y Sent from my iPhone
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Celebrating the release of Janet and Janine Africa 
Take action now to support Jalil A. Muntaqim's release
Jalil A...... Muntaqim was a member of the Black Panther Party and has been a political prisoner for 48 years since he was arrested at the age of 19 in 1971. He has been denied parole 11 times since he was first eligible in 2002, and is now scheduled for his 12th parole hearing... Additionally, Jalil has filed to have his sentence commuted to time served by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Visit Jalil's support page, check out his writing and poetry, and Join Critical Resistance in supporting a vibrant intergenerational movement of freedom fighters in demanding his release. 48 years is enough. Write, email, call, and tweet at Governor Cuomo in support of Jalil's commutation and sign this petition demanding his release. http://freedomarchives.org/Support...Jalil/Campaign.html
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
https://www.gofundme.....com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108 For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.. Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here ..... In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov..... Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.. The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings ......... Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls........ Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
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Don't extradite Assange!
To the government of the UK Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state.......... Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority... We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested. Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning... The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West..... Sign now! The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible... They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him........... Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger... The world is still watching. Sign now! [1] https://www..nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.....html [2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/ Sign this petition: https://internal.diem25.....org/en/petitions/1
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Words of Wisdom 
Louis Robinson Jr., 77 Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.
"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill...... All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No.... We aren't going for this......... Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did.. It happened... It doesn't feel good..." [On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019.........] https://www.......nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant...html
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1) The Real Looters
By Gerren Keith Gaynor
The Grio, May 30, 2020
https://thegrio.com/2020/05/30/tamika-mallory-george-floyd-speech/
Activist Tamika Mallory (Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/Getty Images)
Activist Tamika Mallory‘s speech during a rally in Minneapolis protesting the death of George Floyd has gone viral.
The former Women’s March co-chair said Black America was in a “state of emergency” at the Friday demonstration, where she was joined by community leaders including Jamie Foxx, Floyd’s close friend, former NBA star Stephen Jackson, and others.
“This is a coordinated activity happening across this nation, and so we are in a state of emergency. Black people are dying in a state of emergency,” said Mallory, 39, who formerly worked with Al Sharpton‘s National Action Network in New York City.
Mallory addressed the burning of buildings and looting of businesses in Minneapolis during a week of high-pitched protests in the city and others throughout the country, in which demonstrators took to the streets to speak out against a history of racial violence in the United States.
“We cannot look at this as an isolated incident. The reason buildings are burning are not just for our brother George Floyd,” she said. “They’re burning down because people here in Minnesota are saying to people in New York, to people in California, to people in Memphis, to people across this nation, enough is enough.”
“We are not responsible for the mental illness that has been afflicted upon our people by the American government, institutions, and those people who are in positions of power.
“I don’t give a damn if they burn down,” Mallory added. “I don’t give a damn if they burn down Target, because Target should be on the streets with us, calling for the justice that our people deserve. Where was AutoZone at the time when Philando Castile was shot in a car, which is what they actually represent?”
Referring to law enforcement officers who are paid by U.S. citizens’ tax dollars, Mallory argued that companies and individuals who are silent against the brutality of Black Americans are just as responsible for the violence happening on the streets.
“So, if you are not coming to the people’s defense then do not challenge us when young people and other people who are frustrated and instigated by the people you pay. You are paying instigators to be among our people out there throwing rocks, breaking windows and burning down buildings,” she said.
“And so young people are responding to that. They are enraged. And there’s an easy way to stop it. Arrest the cops. Charge the cops. Charge all the cops. Not just some of them. Not just here in Minneapolis. Charge them in every city across America where our people are being murdered.”
Mallory demanded that elected officials and leaders to do their jobs to ensure that America is the free country it espouses to be for all Americans and not just an exclusive few.
“It has not been free for Black people and we are tired. Don’t talk to us about looting. Ya’ll are the looters!” Mallory shouted.
“America has looted Black people! America looted the Native Americans when they first came here, so looting is what you do. We learned it from you.
“We learned violence from you! So if you want us to do better, then damn it, you do better!”
Video of Mallory’s speech has been widely shared online and has garnered more than three million views on Twitter alone.
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2) Remember, No One Is Coming to Save Us
Eventually doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait for a cure for racism.
By Roxane Gay, May 30, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/opinion/sunday/trump-george-floyd-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare
Carlos Barria/Reuters
After Donald Trump maligned the developing world in 2018, with the dismissive phrase “shithole countries,” I wrote that no one was coming to save us from the president. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, we see exactly what that means.
The economy is shattered. Unemployment continues to climb, steeply. There is no coherent federal leadership. The president mocks any attempts at modeling precautionary behaviors that might save American lives. More than 100,000 Americans have died from Covid-19.
Many of us have been in some form of self-isolation for more than two months. The less fortunate continue to risk their lives because they cannot afford to shelter from the virus. People who were already living on the margins are dealing with financial stresses that the government’s $1,200 “stimulus” payment cannot begin to relieve. A housing crisis is imminent. Many parts of the country are reopening prematurely. Protesters have stormed state capitals, demanding that businesses reopen. The country is starkly dividing between those who believe in science and those who don’t.
Quickly produced commercials assure us that we are all in this together. Carefully curated images, scored by treacly music, say nothing of substance. Companies spend a fortune on airtime to assure consumers that they care, while they refuse to pay their employees a living wage.
Commercials celebrate essential workers and medical professionals. Commercials show how corporations have adapted to “the way we live now,” with curbside pickup and drive-through service and contact-free delivery. We can spend our way to normalcy, and capitalism will hold us close, these ads would have us believe.
Some people are trying to provide the salvation the government will not. There are community-led initiatives for everything from grocery deliveries for the elderly and immunocompromised to sewing face masks for essential workers. There are online pleas for fund-raising. Buy from your independent bookstore. Get takeout or delivery from your favorite restaurant. Keep your favorite bookstore open. Buy gift cards. Pay the people who work for you, even if they can’t come to work. Do as much as you can, and then do more.
These are all lovely ideas and they demonstrate good intentions, but we can only do so much. The disparities that normally fracture our culture are becoming even more pronounced as we decide, collectively, what we choose to save — what deserves to be saved.
And even during a pandemic, racism is as pernicious as ever. Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting the black community, but we can hardly take the time to sit with that horror as we are reminded, every single day, that there is no context in which black lives matter.
Breonna Taylor was killed in her Louisville, Ky., home by police officers looking for a man who did not even live in her building. She was 26 years old. When demonstrations erupted, seven people were shot.
Ahmaud Arbery was jogging in South Georgia when he was chased down by two armed white men who suspected him of robbery and claimed they were trying perform a citizen’s arrest. One shot and killed Mr. Arbery while a third person videotaped the encounter. No charges were filed until the video was leaked and public outrage demanded action. Mr. Arbery was 25 years old.
In Minneapolis, George Floyd was held to the ground by a police officer kneeling on his neck during an arrest. He begged for the officer to stop torturing him. Like Eric Garner, he said he couldn’t breathe. Three other police officers watched and did not intervene. Mr. Floyd was 46 years old.
These black lives mattered. These black people were loved. Their losses to their friends, family, and communities, are incalculable.
Demonstrators in Minneapolis took to the street for several days, to protest the killing of Mr. Floyd. Mr. Trump — who in 2017 told police officers to be rough on people during arrests, imploring them to “please, don’t be too nice” — wrote in a tweet, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The official White House Twitter feed reposted the president’s comments. There is no rock bottom.
Christian Cooper, an avid birder, was in Central Park’s Ramble when he asked a white woman, Amy Cooper, to comply with the law and leash her dog. He began filming, which only enraged Ms. Cooper further. She pulled out her phone and said she was going to call the police to tell them an African-American man was threatening her.
She called the police. She knew what she was doing. She weaponized her whiteness and fragility like so many white women before her. She began to sound more and more hysterical, even though she had to have known she was potentially sentencing a black man to death for expecting her to follow rules she did not think applied to her. It is a stroke of luck that Mr. Cooper did not become another unbearable statistic.
An unfortunate percentage of my cultural criticism over the past 11 or 12 years has focused on the senseless loss of black life. Mike Brown. Trayvon Martin. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Tamir Rice. Jordan Davis. Atatiana Jefferson. The Charleston Nine.
These names are the worst kind of refrain, an inescapable burden. These names are hashtags, elegies, battle cries. Still nothing changes. Racism is litigated over and over again when another video depicting another atrocity comes to light. Black people share the truth of their lives, and white people treat those truths as intellectual exercises.
They put energy into being outraged about the name “Karen,” as shorthand for entitled white women rather than doing the difficult, self-reflective work of examining their own prejudices. They speculate about what murdered black people might have done that we don’t know about to beget their fates, as if alleged crimes are punishable by death without a trial by jury. They demand perfection as the price for black existence while harboring no such standards for anyone else.
Some white people act as if there are two sides to racism, as if racists are people we need to reason with. They fret over the destruction of property and want everyone to just get along. They struggle to understand why black people are rioting but offer no alternatives about what a people should do about a lifetime of rage, disempowerment and injustice.
When I warned in 2018 that no one was coming to save us, I wrote that I was tired of comfortable lies. I’m even more exhausted now. Like many black people, I am furious and fed up, but that doesn’t matter at all.
I write similar things about different black lives lost over and over and over. I tell myself I am done with this subject. Then something so horrific happens that I know I must say something, even though I know that the people who truly need to be moved are immovable. They don’t care about black lives. They don’t care about anyone’s lives. They won’t even wear masks to mitigate a virus for which there is no cure.
Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism. We will live with the knowledge that a hashtag is not a vaccine for white supremacy. We live with the knowledge that, still, no one is coming to save us. The rest of the world yearns to get back to normal. For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.
Roxane Gay (@rgay) is a contributing opinion writer.
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3) Live Updates on George Floyd Protests: Overnight Mayhem Follows Peaceful Rallies
There were widespread reports of looting and confrontations with the police in cities across the United States. The White House went dark as fires burned outside its gates.
RIGHT NOWA man was killed in Louisville, Ky., when the National Guard and the police were shot at and returned fire.
June 1, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/george-floyd-protests-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage#link-6210ef60
A sixth day of protest gives way to a night of unrest.
Fires burned outside the White House, the streets of New York City were gripped by mayhem and stores in Santa Monica, Calif., were looted after another day of peaceful protests descended into lawlessness in major cities across the United States.
On the sixth day of unrest since the death of George Floyd last week in Minneapolis, hundreds were arrested as streets seethed with unrest. Even as businesses braced for looting, stores were ransacked. In Manhattan, the owners of the upscale Chanel store had boarded up its windows, only to wake on Monday to find that thieves had found their way inside.
The National Guard was deployed in more than two dozen states to assist overwhelmed police departments, and dozens of mayors extended curfews.
The chaos overshadowed what had been a largely peaceful day, with hundreds of thousands across the country joining together in expressions of heartbreak and frustration. From police officers kneeling with protesters to communities coming together to stop looters, many expressed a determination not to let the violence define the narrative.
As the smoke cleared on Monday morning, here is where things stand.
In Minneapolis, the epicenter of the demonstrations, about 200 protesters were arrested after trying to march along an interstate after a curfew began at 8 p.m. The arrests capped a relatively quiet night compared with the chaos of the past several days.
In Louisville, Ky., one man was killed when shots broke out as the authorities cleared a large crowd. The Louisville police chief said that law enforcement was fired upon, and both the police and the National Guard returned fire. Gov. Andy Beshear instructed the Kentucky State Police to investigate.
In California, all state buildings “with offices in downtown city areas” were ordered to close on Monday. There were widespread reports of looting in Santa Monica and Long Beach. One police officer suffered a gunshot wound while on duty in Venice. A news helicopter in Los Angeles recorded a police S.U.V. driving into a group of protesters, knocking two people to the ground.
In Birmingham, Ala., protesters started to tear down a Confederate monument that the city had covered with a tarp amid a lawsuit between the state attorney general and the city.
In Boston, a police S.U.V. was set ablaze near the State House. As reports of more lawlessness came in overnight, Mayor Marty Walsh said he was angered “by the people who came into our city and chose to engage in acts of destruction and violence.” He added, “If we are to achieve change and if we are to lead the change, our efforts must be rooted in peace and regard for our community.”
In Philadelphia, police officers in riot gear and an armored vehicle used pepper spray to repel rioters and looters. A wall of officers blocked an entrance ramp to Interstate 676 in the city, where public transit was suspended starting at 6 p.m. as part of a curfew. In the morning, many business owners were sifting through ransacked stores.
In New York, demonstrators marched across the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges. The Manhattan Bridge was briefly shut down to car traffic. Sporadic looting was reported across Lower Manhattan. The night before in Union Square, the mayor’s daughter, Chiara de Blasio, 25, was among the protesters arrested, according to a police official.
In Chicago, the police superintendent, David Brown, excoriated looters on Sunday. Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he had called up the National Guard after a request from Mayor Lori Lightfoot. “I want to be clear and emphasize: The Guard is here to support our Police Department,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “They will not be actively involved in policing and patrolling.” Public transit to downtown has been suspended indefinitely.
In Portland, Ore., the police clashed with protesters who smashed windows at the federal courthouse. The police deployed tear gas while demonstrators hurled fireworks at officers.
In Iowa, the police said riots had broken out in Davenport, and at least two people were killed and one police officer injured in a series of shootings. The city’s police chief, Paul Sikorski, told a news conference on Monday that dozens of shootings had been reported overnight. He said that around 3 a.m., officers were “ambushed” and one was shot, and that several suspects were in custody.
The National Guard was involved in a fatal shooting in Louisville.
A man was killed early Monday in Louisville, Ky., when police officers and National Guard troops were breaking up a group of protesters. Someone in the crowd fired at them, and the troops and officers fired back, the authorities said.
The shooting happened just after midnight, the authorities said, when officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department and the National Guard soldiers were enforcing the city’s curfew. The group of protesters had gathered outside a market in a neighborhood west of downtown.
Police officials said it was unclear whether the man, whose name has not been released, had fired a weapon.
Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said on Monday that he was starting an investigation into the fatal encounter. “Given the seriousness of the situation, I have authorized the Kentucky State Police to independently investigate the event,” Mr. Beshear, a Democrat, said in a statement.
As anger and anguish over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis boiled over into unrest in cities across the country last week, the tense demonstrations in Louisville were also fueled by a local death — that of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American woman who was killed March 13. Police officers executing a search warrant crashed into her apartment with a battering ram and shot her at least eight times.
According to The Louisville Courier Journal, the police were investigating two men who they believed were selling drugs out of a house that was far from Ms. Taylor’s home. A judge had signed a search warrant for her residence because the police said they believed that one of the two men had used the apartment to receive packages. The judge’s order was a so-called “no-knock” warrant, authorizing the police to enter without warning and without identifying themselves as law enforcement officers.
Clashes with the police and looting in New York after tens of thousands protest peacefully.
Flames nearly two stories high leapt from trash cans and piles of street debris, sending acrid smoke into the air around Union Square in New York City. Stores in the trendy SoHo neighborhood were targeted for the second night in a row. And across the city, the police clashed with protesters in a city on edge.
More than two months of social distancing and lockdowns amid the coronavirus pandemic ended for many with defiant protests. And in what has become a pattern across the nation, peaceful demonstrations gave way to destruction.
On Sunday night, thousands of demonstrators fanned across the city. One group crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and another briefly shut down the Manhattan Bridge.
In Union Square, protesters threw bottles and other objects at police officers armed with batons who pushed into crowds on Broadway and nearby side streets.
“You are creating a disturbance,” an officer said over a megaphone as protesters shouted and sirens blared nearby. “If you do not disperse, you will be subject to arrest.”
And all night, sirens screamed across the city, with multiple reports of lootings in Lower Manhattan.
“Unemployment is gasoline, and then abuse of power is the match,” one protester said after looters smashed the windows of a Duane Reade drugstore in Lower Manhattan.
“In the right circumstances, ka-boom. People don’t have anything to lose,” he said. “‘If a guy can get away with murdering a guy, I’m pretty sure I can get away with stealing an iPhone’ is the attitude.”
The White House goes dark, and Trump blames antifa for violence.
Tweeting from a White House that had been darkened amid protests in the nation’s capital the evening before, President Trump emerged on Monday morning to blame the anti-fascist movement antifa for protests across the country and urged his supporters to look forward to the November election.
On Sunday night, the police fired tear gas and unleashed flash grenades near the White House to disperse protesters who had smashed the windows of prominent buildings, overturned cars and set fires, with smoke seen rising from close to the Washington Monument.
The White House went dark, turning off almost all of its external lights, as protesters seethed outside.
A curfew, intended to last from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m., did little to dissuade the crowds from clashing violently with riot police officers in Lafayette Square, a small park beside the White House. In addition to a car fire, another blaze occurred in the basement of St. John’s Church, known as the “church of presidents,” where every chief executive going back to James Madison has worshiped.
The darkened White House added to an image of a president under siege. On Friday, Secret Service agents rushed President Trump to an underground bunker that has previously been used during terrorist attacks.
“Sleepy Joe Biden’s people are so Radical Left that they are working to get the Anarchists out of jail, and probably more,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, referring to reports that members of Mr. Biden’s staff had donated money to an organization that pays bail fees in Minneapolis.
In Washington, Mr. Trump, who has not listed a public event on his schedule in two days, spent his time glued to television news reports as protests roiled across the country, including one just beyond his front lawn.
He tweeted a quote from Brian Kilmeade, a host on “Fox & Friends,” that immediately ruled out the role of white supremacy groups in the protests, leveling blame against groups like antifa, an organization that reporters on the ground have said does not have a formalized presence.
The president also said his administration would “be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” employing a shorthand for “anti-fascist.” But antifa is a movement of activists who share a philosophy and tactics, not an organization with a clear structure that can be penalized under law. Moreover, U.S. law applies terrorist designations to foreign entities, not domestic groups.
The president, who has not formally addressed the nation’s protests, also encouraged his supporters to look forward to the presidential election, which is five months away. “NOVEMBER 3RD,” he wrote just before 9 a.m. on Monday.
A new morning ritual: Cleaning up after a night of turbulence.
Days of protest and nights of unrest are giving way each dawn to a new ritual in America, as residents of the nation’s biggest cities awake to assess the damage and begin the sometimes heartbreaking and healing work of cleaning up.
Business owners in Minneapolis began a new week sifting through the remnants of their livelihoods, disintegrated in flames. Philadelphians turned out to sweep and scrub the previous night’s damage away. And in Boston, where commercial districts were peppered with shattered glass on Monday morning, a radio announcer’s voice echoed out like a collective sigh of relief and exhaustion: “It’s June 1st, and Boston made it through the night.”
On Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, looters had circled retail areas in cars until about 5 a.m., according to José Penaranda, a building manager who tried to protect merchandise from being stolen from the Back Bay Bicycles store. By the time the sun rose, the store’s door had been smashed and looters had left bicycles scattered in the street.
“I talked to the police — they said, ‘We can’t even keep up with the calls,’” Mr. Penaranda said. “They couldn’t do much.”
Not far away, Bryan Ramey, a manager at a Diesel store, was sweeping up broken glass Monday morning. He said the looters had been selective and methodical in their choice of targets: A driver would remain in a vehicle outside while others brought out “armfuls of stuff.” They returned late at night and cleared the office of equipment, including a modem, a safe and a security system, in an act of looting that he said seemed unrelated to the protests.
“I’m all for protesting, even rioting when you feel you should fight the power,” he said. “But theft for theft’s sake is just taking advantage of a situation that’s already bad.”
Anita Harrison, who is from the predominantly black neighborhood of Roxbury, went to an upscale commercial strip on Newbury Street in Boston on Monday, offering to clean up. Standing in front of a shattered North Face store, she said she felt sad.
“This is not the answer,” she said. “It’s just people coming out looking for trouble. Like we’re not in enough trouble already.”
The Times has reporters in dozens of U.S. cities. Here’s some of what they are witnessing.
Jack Healy in Denver
The bearded young man was standing amid a sea of protesters on Colfax Avenue, a long gritty commercial strip in central Denver, when the police opened fire. A less-lethal round designed for crowd control hit the side of his face, and he crumpled to the ground.
He was carried to a liquor store’s parking lot, where he lay grimacing in pain. As other protesters wrapped his head in gauze, blood pooled on the asphalt.
The demonstrators weren't able to carry him back through the front lines, where protesters were hurling fireworks and police were firing off tear gas, and he couldn’t walk. A dozen people crowded around him, calling for help, shouting suggestions, talking past one another.
“We got to get him out of here!”
“They aren’t going to let us bring an ambulance over here.”
After 15 minutes, an ambulance pulled up and loaded the man inside. Police officers stood beside its doors, yelling at protesters to get away as it receded into the night.
Jack Nicas in Oakland, Calif.
Close to downtown, a few hundred protesters peacefully marched through the streets, chanting and carrying signs.
Behind the diverse crowd, Donavon Butler, 33, drove a minivan with his wife and four children inside. His 5-year-old son, Chase, hung out the back window with his right fist raised and his left hand holding a cardboard sign that said, “Mama! I can’t breathe. Don’t shoot.”
“The world we live in is not equal. People look at us different,” Mr. Butler said he had told his son.
Mike Baker in Seattle
For an hour, hundreds of demonstrators marching through Seattle streets had been stuck at an intersection in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, unable to pass a line of police officers who were telling them to comply with a curfew already three hours old.
The day before, protests had spun into mayhem, with dozens of downtown storefronts smashed and many looted. But on Sunday, protesters moved through streets with little issue, at times kneeling before police blockades to show that the chanting crowds were not there to engage in conflict.
At 8:10 p.m., the officers and a protest leader had an announcement: Things had gone so peacefully that the police were willing to let them back to the epicenter of Saturday’s chaos. The protesters cheered and marched onward.
“See how much easier this is,” one person shouted at the officers.
Rashyla Levitt addressed the crowd through a megaphone, telling them the group had made history. “We marched for justice. We marched for peace,” she said. “We marched for each other. We marched for our streets.”
Others weren’t ready to end the night. They approached a line of officers in riot gear, shouting and cursing. Some protesters — including Elijah Alter, 24 — rushed to intervene, pushing them away from the line of officers.
“Because of our solidarity, we made them change their mind,” he said. “Do not ruin it on a violent end.”
Richard Fausset in Atlanta
The demonstrators stopped — hundreds of them, black and white — and sat. A self-appointed leader among them, an entrepreneur named John Wade, praised them for their nonviolence. But he warned them not to keep marching up the hill. The police were up there fighting it out, he said, with “noncompliant people.”
Organizers told everyone to turn off Centennial Olympic Park Drive and veer away from the trouble. A police officer told them not to walk forward.
Then the tear gas started.
People chanted the way they do at Atlanta ball games, riffing on the song “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).”
“We ready, we ready, we ready, for y’all,” they sang.
Officer charged in Floyd’s death is moved to a secure prison while awaiting arraignment.
Derek Chauvin, the fired police officer charged with murdering George Floyd, was transferred on Sunday to Minnesota’s most secure prison, where he is expected to await his arraignment in a 7-by 10-foot concrete cell and be under near constant surveillance.
Mr. Chauvin, a veteran officer of the Minneapolis City Police, was seen on video pressing his knee to Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes during an arrest on Memorial Day.
Mr. Floyd’s death has set off a week of protests over police brutality across the country. Mr. Chauvin was charged on Friday with third-degree murder, a crime that carries a penalty of up to 25 years in prison.
Mr. Chauvin is s scheduled to appear in court for a hearing on June 8, according to the Hennepin County website.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, would take the lead in prosecuting Mr. Chauvin.
Chief Medaria Arradondo of the Minneapolis Police Department said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that the three other former officers who were present when Mr. Chauvin kneeled on Mr. Floyd’s neck — and did not intervene — were complicit in his death. He said if any one of them had intervened, Mr. Floyd may not have died.
“Mr. Floyd died in our hands and I see that as being complicit,” he said.
He said that decisions on charges for those officers would be made by the county attorney.
Minneapolis residents band together to keep the peace.
At 12:36 a.m. as Monday broke, Andy Horng was clutching a samurai sword outside the Lake & Park corner grocery store, writes Dionne Searcey in Minneapolis.
Across the street, smoke billowed from a Mexican restaurant that had been set aflame during protests on Friday. On Sunday around 10:30 p.m. the building’s basement had somehow reignited.
After several calls to 911 were met with busy signals, he and several others rushed inside to tackle the fire, rigging hoses from the truck of a nearby contractor until the fire department arrived.
“I live next door,” Mr. Horng said of the grocery store, which he and two other men were guarding. “I have to protect it.”
Elsewhere in the city, at 11:22 p.m. three people stood behind their bicycles near a memorial to George Floyd at the site where he died last week. Their aim, they said, was to keep troublemakers away as protesters milled and occasionally chanted nearby.
A man with a protest sign under his arm approached. “Friend of Floyd’s?” a self-appointed guard asked him. “Yes, yes,” he said, and was allowed to pass. Next, two women came forward. “Are there medics here?” they asked. “By the snack table,” the guard said as he allowed them to pass.
Not long before, near the site where Mr. Floyd died, the smell of lilac bushes was replaced with cigarette smoke near makeshift memorials where protesters mingled. Red stoplights were blinking on each corner of an intersection.
A man grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed it as he shooed people from walking on the names of black victims of police misconduct that someone had written in huge chalk letters on the street. Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and a dozen others.
Earlier in the night, at 9:23 p.m. protesters seemed weary at the site where Mr. Floyd died. Several wandered through the crowd with selfie sticks, filming themselves describing what they saw.
As a helicopter circled, a man looked up and yelled, “No justice, no peace!”
Dalfanzo Credit, 31, stood smoking a cigarillo. “It could have been me,” he said.
Who’s behind the violence breaking out at protests?
Amid the rush to assign blame for the violence and vandalism breaking out in U.S. cities, accusations that extremists or other outside agitators are behind the destruction continue to ricochet online and on the airwaves.
Political leaders including President Trump have accused various groups, saying that a radical agenda is transforming once peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
“We have reason to believe that bad actors continue to infiltrate the rightful protests of George Floyd’s murder, which is why we are extending the curfew by one day,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota tweeted on Sunday, after previously suggesting that white supremacists or people from outside the state were fomenting the unrest.
In New York City, a senior police official said anarchists had planned to cause mayhem in the city even before the protests started, using encrypted communication to raise bail money and recruit medics.
Still, few of those pointing the finger at extremists presented much detailed evidence to support the accusations, and some officials conceded the lack of solid information.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general and a former Democratic congressman from Minneapolis, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it would all have to be investigated.
“The truth is, nobody really knows,” he said.
Protests are staged around the world, and U.S. rivals seek to capitalize on the unrest.
In many parts of the world, the death of yet another black man at the hands of the police in the United States is setting off protests against police brutality and reviving concerns that America is abandoning its traditional role as a defender of human rights.
And for America’s rivals, the tensions have provided an opportunity to deflect attention from their own problems.
In China, the state-run news media heavily featured reports about Mr. Floyd’s death and portrayed the protests as another sign of America’s decline. When a U.S. official on Saturday attacked the ruling Communist Party on Twitter for moving to impose national security legislation to quash dissent in Hong Kong, a spokeswoman for the Chinese government fired back with a popular refrain among protesters in the United States.
“‘I can’t breathe,’” the spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, wrote on Twitter.
In Iran, Javad Zarif, the foreign minister, accused America of hypocrisy. He posted a doctored screenshot of a 2018 statement by U.S. officials condemning Iran for corruption and injustice.
In his version, the references to Iran were replaced with America.
“Some don’t think #BlackLivesMatter,” Mr. Zarif wrote on Twitter.
8 minutes and 46 seconds. Here’s how George Floyd died in police custody.
The Times has reconstructed the death of George Floyd on May 25. Security footage, witness videos and official documents show how a series of actions by police officers turned fatal.
Reporting was contributed by Ellen Barry, John Eligon, Richard Fausset, Tess Felder, Matt Furber, Russell Goldman, Jack Healy, Javier C. Hernández, Neil MacFarquhar, Sarah Mervosh, Benjamin Mueller, Jack Nicas, Elian Peltier, Katie Rogers, Rick Rojas, Marc Santora, Dionne Searcey and Mihir Zaveri.
[This reconstructed video by the NYTs at the url above shows how George was murdered. Clearly it was first degree murder by all officers on the scene. with multiple witnesses to prove it! —Bonnie Weinstein]
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4) Facing Protests Over Use of Force, Police Respond With More Force
Videos showed officers using batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on protesters and bystanders.
By Shaila Dewan and Mike Baker, May 31, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/police-tactics-floyd-protests.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press
Demonstrations continued across the United States on Sunday as the nation braced for another grueling night of unrest over police shootings and the death of George Floyd, amid growing concern that aggressive law enforcement tactics intended to impose order were instead inflaming tensions.
Videos showed police officers in recent nights using batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on protesters, bystanders and journalists, often without warning or seemingly unprovoked. The footage, which has been shared widely online, highlighted the very complaints over police behavior that have drawn protests in at least 75 cities across the United States.
In Salt Lake City, officers in riot gear shoved a man with a cane to the ground.
In Brooklyn, two police S.U.V.s plowed into a crowd of protesters.
In Atlanta, police officers enforcing a curfew stopped two college students in a car, fired Tasers on them and dragged them out of the vehicle.
And in Minneapolis, where there have been six consecutive nights of protests and clashes, a video appeared to show officers yelling at people on their porches to get inside and then firing paint canisters at them. “Light them up,” one officer said.
As crowds began gathering again in cities on Sunday, President Trump resisted calls to address the tensions roiling the country. Instead he used Twitter to criticize local Democratic leaders for not doing more to control the protests.
Mayors and police chiefs spent the day explaining, defending and promising full investigations into the actions of officers seen on the disturbing videos.
“I didn’t like what I saw one bit. I did not want to ever see something like that,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, who also complimented the city’s police officers for generally showing a “tremendous amount of restraint.”
Military vehicles in recent nights have moved down city streets as phalanxes of officers in full riot gear fired clouds of noxious gas. Yet the show of force showed little sign that it would bring calm.
Instead, some people said, it was escalating tensions and serving as a reminder of the regular use of military equipment and tactics by local police forces.
Mass demonstrations are among the most difficult situations that the police have to manage. They must balance constitutional liberties with the safety of officers and the public. Crowds are unpredictable and, in recent days, sometimes hostile. Too much force can escalate the situation — but so can too little.
Not all protests have erupted in violence, with some police forces showing a more positive relationship with their communities. In Petersburg, Va., Chief Kenneth Miller and a handful of police officers appeared alongside protesters to show solidarity. In Newark, a city where half the population is black, protests were angry but nonviolent.
And in Oklahoma City on Sunday, as a crowd of marchers seemed to grow tense, officers with the sheriff’s department’s tactical team took a knee in a pose popularized by the former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The protesters cheered.
In other places, there was open hostility, with chaotic scenes and constant videotaping among protesters increasing the scrutiny on the tactics used by the police.
In Seattle, a video taken on Friday showed officers detaining someone on the ground and repeatedly punching the person.
Dae Shik Kim Jr., who was in the area and shared the video on behalf of a friend who wanted to remain anonymous, said it was just one in a series of tactics that troubled him during the protests.
“The tone that we felt from the police is: This is their rally,” Mr. Kim said. “They are going to control it from the beginning. They are going to dictate what happens. It’s a very offensive type of approach.”
In one arrest, captured on video after a group of people had gone into a damaged retail store, one officer put a knee on the back of the arrestee’s neck. Mr. Floyd, the man whose death on May 25 inspired protests in Minneapolis that have spread across the country, died after an officer kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for close to nine minutes.
As onlookers in Seattle shouted at the officer to remove his knee, his partner reached over and pulled it away.
The Seattle Police Department has said that officers that day took action after being assaulted with rocks, bottles and other projectiles, and that all uses of force would undergo a high level of scrutiny.
Chief Erika Shields of the Atlanta Police Department condemned the actions of the officers who fired upon the college students with a Taser, saying the episode had only underscored the fear and wariness that people of color have of the police. The officers involved were fired.
“I know that we caused further fear to you in a space that’s already so fearful for so many African-Americans, and I am genuinely sorry,” Chief Shields said in a news conference on Sunday. “This is not who we are. This is not what we’re about.”
In Minneapolis, businesses have been burned and looted and the National Guard has been called in to help restore order. But a member of the City Council, Jeremiah Ellison, summed up the situation this way: The police started it.
“No one was looting anything in the first night of this protest, no one was lighting anything on fire on the first night of this protest, and yet the response from the police was incredibly brutal,” he said. “The original provocation to street violence was from our officers.”
On the day after Mr. Floyd died, Mr. Ellison gathered with others at the site where Mr. Floyd was detained and walked with them to a nearby police precinct, he said. The crowd was relatively peaceful, he said, but the officers sprayed tear gas. Once the marchers reached the precinct, tensions grew, but in Mr. Ellison’s view the police overreacted.
“One of the city’s employees has just murdered someone in the most brutal fashion,” he said, “and for you to then pretend like you’re the victim and you’re under siege, to fire mace and tear gas and rubber bullets in response to water bottles being thrown — you have at that point 100 percent antagonized the situation.”
Mr. Ellison said the decision could have been made at that point to allow the precinct to be vandalized — a practice known as “negotiated management,” allowing some illegal activity like blocking a highway or damaging property in order to prevent worse events like arson or physical attacks.
Instead, when the police abandoned the precinct two days later, allowing protesters to set it afire, it was too late, Mr. Ellison said: “What could have been a strategic containment of destruction on Day 1 became a victory on the battlefield by Day 3.”
Many people complained that police officers across the country treated the crowds protesting racist policing with far less respect than they did the right-wing demonstrations in recent weeks against public health lockdown orders.
Experts agreed, saying research shows that the police are more likely to respond with force when they are the subject of protest, and that they respond more aggressively toward younger crowds and people of color than they do toward white and older people.
“There’s deep resentment on the part of the police that so many people are angry at them, and they’re lashing out,” said Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College who studies the police response to protest and coordinates the Policing and Social Justice Project. “Look at what we saw — people sitting on their own stoops getting hit with pepper balls. Anyone who looks at them funny, they’re attacking them.”
Paul Schnell, the Minnesota Department of Corrections commissioner, who was assisting in the official response, later apologized for that incident, which actually involved paint canisters. “We do not want there to be collateral harm,” he said.
In many places, the police defended their tactics as necessary to deter crime. In Dallas, Chief U. Reneé Hall said pepper spray and tear gas were needed to disperse demonstrators who were vandalizing property. “We will not tolerate tearing up our cities, our communities,” she said, according to The Dallas Morning News.
But critics said the protest was “a simple march” and the response was unwarranted.
The militarization of the nation’s police departments in recent decades has been on full display. But such equipment and training, including armored personnel carriers and SWAT team training, have been heavily criticized for warping the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.
Jennifer Cobbina, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University, has researched the response to the protests in Ferguson, Mo., after the death of Michael Brown at the hands of the police in 2014, and in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.
In Baltimore, she said, the police gave people more space to protest for longer before cracking down on unrest, resulting in a more favorable view of the police and a better understanding of the challenges they face. But Ferguson, where the unrest refused to die down, was heavily militarized.
“It makes a lot of the residents feel like the police are coming in as an occupying force,” she said. “This only creates a greater divide. The harder the state comes at them, the harder they’ll come back.”
Ben Fenwick and Rick Rojas contributed reporting.
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5) The Nation’s Largest Police Force Is Treating Us as an Enemy
The N.Y.P.D. strikes back harshly at demonstrators in a weekend of protests over the death of another black American at the hands of police.
Text by Mara GayPhotographs by Jordan GaleMs. Gay is a member of the editorial board. Mr. Gale is a freelance photographer based in New York., May 31, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/opinion/george-floyd-new-york-protests.html?referringSource=articleShare
Milk was used to counter the effect of pepper spray.
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After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, New York Mayor John Lindsay walked the city streets alongside residents, a sign of respect that helped heal and cool the city.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat elected on a promise to improve the way black and Hispanic New Yorkers were policed, has played a far less visible role. The lack of moral leadership from the mayor over the weekend was devastating. On Sunday he praised the “restraint” of most officers but said he will appoint a special civilian panel to identify any abusive or illegal acts by the police during the protests.
Fixing all that is broken here will require accountability and leadership. The city should move swiftly to discipline officers who violate the public trust. The State Legislature can do its part, by moving quickly to repeal Section 50-A of the Civil Rights Law that prevents the release of officers’ disciplinary records, a major barrier to police reform in New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday he would sign a law repealing the measure.
An army of public servants entrusted to protect Americans treated them as an enemy instead. In the coming weeks and months, New Yorkers deserve a full and independent accounting of what went wrong, and what will be done to bring actual reform to a police department that has largely managed to resist true oversight from City Hall for generations. Mr. Cuomo said Saturday he would ask State Attorney General Letitia James to undertake such a review.
New Yorkers need a police department that respects them as citizens and human beings. Until then, this city that has suffered so much will suffer more.
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6) ‘In Every City, There’s a George Floyd’: Portraits of Protest
The people giving voice to their anger are individual pieces of a movement, like drops of water to a wave.
By John Branch, June 2, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/protester-profiles-floyd-minneapolis.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
For a week, cities across America have been theaters of dissent. The protesters are in the torched neighborhoods of Minneapolis. They are banging the barricades outside the White House, surging through New York’s Union Square, smashing shop windows in Beverly Hills.
The people giving voice to their anger are individual pieces of a movement, like drops of water to a wave. Their strength is in cohesiveness. Yet they are strangers, divided by geography, age, color and experience.
A 65-year-old black woman in Boston. The teenage daughter of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles. A white stay-at-home mother from Austin, Texas.
They have all had enough.
“I can’t breathe,” read the signs carried by many protesters, echoing some of the last words of George Floyd, whose death in the custody of the Minneapolis police — his neck rammed under an officer’s knee — ignited a sudden, collective fury.
“It was a powder keg,” said Michael Sampson II, who was on the streets over the weekend in Jacksonville, Fla. “George Floyd was the last straw.”
“I am heartbroken and outraged every day,” said Candice Elder, who was marching in Oakland, Calif. “I’m tired of being sick and tired.”
Maybe at another time, in another year, Mr. Floyd’s death would have ended in a vigil, a few local marches, promises of reform.
But America was not prepared to accept the usual responses to this death, at this time. Not in the middle of a pandemic that has taken more than 100,000 lives, many of them black. Not in a country where unemployment, which has also hit African-Americans with disproportionate effect, is at its highest point in a century.
Fear. Anxiety. Anger. Desperation.
These are the moods of the moment. They have driven people to the streets, bound into a movement, draped in hopelessness.
Or is it hope?
A protest is an act of desperation and defiance. But why do it if not for the belief, however modest, that the voices in the street will be heard?
MINNEAPOLIS
Don Hubbard, 44
Don Hubbard said he had no choice but to come to Cup Foods, the store where a store clerk reported that Mr. Floyd had tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill, leading to the call to the police.
A Minneapolis native, Mr. Hubbard said 90 percent of his interactions with the police were negative, even though he has been a local government employee for years.
About 10 years ago, Mr. Hubbard said, the police stopped him as he came out of a store, saying that he “fit the description” of a man accused in a domestic dispute.
“I fit the description because I was black,” he said.
Mr. Hubbard said his co-worker, who was white, sat in the truck and looked the other way instead of vouching for him.
“I haven’t talked to that man since this day,” Mr. Hubbard said. “I think he’s a coward.”
Now working for the county, Mr. Hubbard said he was the only black construction employee in a staff of about 90. He drives a BMW and owns a house with a pool in suburban Brooklyn Park. But he still feels like the police define him by the color of his skin, and worries about his two sons and two daughters, ages 4 to 24.
“I come out here today on a nice day like this because I feel like if I don’t come out here, and we don’t all show up, then what are we doing?” Mr. Hubbard said. “We’re letting this man die in vain.”
— Kim Barker
LOS ANGELES
Beatriz Lopez, 19
At Hollywood High, Beatriz Lopez was one of two nonblack students performing with the hip-hop majorette dance team.
“Every single year there was an African-American assembly for students organized by the black student union,” Ms. Lopez said. “It was very emotional. They would read poems about police brutality. They would make slide shows remembering people who had passed away from police brutality that year. That resonated with me.”
The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Ms. Lopez identified with the way black people were treated by the police because she grew up worrying about how officers might interact with her parents.
“We always had something to be scared of because my parents are undocumented,” she said. “Every time I would see police, even now, I get some kind of anxiety. I feel like they will always have the upper hand. I feel that with a uniform and badge, they are in control of everyone around them. That infuriates me.”
The death of Mr. Floyd opened the doors.
“When my friend sent me that flyer about the protest, I felt I had to go,” she said. “I had been asking, ‘What can I do?’ ”
Ms. Lopez marched down Third Street with her three friends and thousands more people chanting for George Floyd and justice. When they arrived at the intersection of Third and La Cienega, they knelt.
“We felt the ground so hot and rough, and how he must have felt in that moment.”
— Miriam Jordan
ST. LOUIS
Chad Bennett, 22
Chad Bennett and his father, wearing matching face masks, stood back in a parking lot as they watched protesters march past the Police Department in Ferguson, Mo., the site of numerous protests since Michael Brown, a black teenager, was killed by a white police officer there in 2014.
“When Ferguson happened, the whole world descended on us,” said Mr. Bennett, a graduate of Columbia College Chicago who works as an animator. “This time, it was like bam, bam, bam, city after city. I knew I had to be a part of it.”
Seeing the video of what happened to Mr. Floyd left him “numb,” he said. “It’s a silent rage, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m sad anymore. I’m just angry.”
— Whitney Curtis
JACKSONVILLE, FLA.
Michael Sampson II, 30
Michael Sampson is a community organizer who works with families whose sons were killed by the police.
“In every city, there’s a George Floyd,” he said.
Mr. Sampson is half Filipino and half African-American. His mother works two jobs, at a convenience store and as a housekeeper.
“Police brutality and Covid was the gasoline,” Mr. Sampson said of the protests. “Those videos sparked the fire. That’s why the country is on fire at this point. People are already suspicious of the criminal justice system, of white supremacy and how it affects people.”
— Frances Robles
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Beth Muffett, 36
Beth Muffett is a white stay-at-home mother and massage therapist. When officers outside City Hall used their bicycles to push back a crowd of protesters, she screamed and noted their badge numbers.
She ended up bruised, pepper-sprayed and outraged.
“I think there’s a real turn right now among moms who want to educate their kids to be post-racial,” said Ms. Muffett, whose daughter is nearly 4. “And so that’s led to a lot of moms on Facebook being like, ‘Your white silence is deafening.’”
“If you’re not standing up for George Floyd,” she said, “who’s going to stand up for you? It’s just a level of wrongness, that I couldn’t say no to going out to try to do something.”
For most of her life, Ms. Muffett had positive interactions with law enforcement — until Sunday.
After she and her friends left the protest, Ms. Muffett had bruises on her stomach and knee from where one officer struck her with his bicycle, and another bruise on her arm after she fell back onto another protester.
“I’m sorry, this is the first time as a white lady I’ve gone through this,” Ms. Muffett said. “There’s a lot of privileged white women, and I’m one of them,” she said. “I’ve never had a cop treat me like that.”
— Manny Fernandez and David Montgomery
MINNEAPOLIS
Erika Zdon, 48
“George Floyd, George Floyd,” rang the staccato chant from protesters ringing a memorial of flowers at the spot where Mr. Floyd died.
Erika Zdon had never joined a protest, but on Sunday, she drove her five children from Isanti, Minn., an hour away, so they could witness this moment.
“I said this could be in the history books and this could be something that changes the world,” Ms. Zdon said, “and you should smell it, and see it and hear it and feel what’s happening in our community.”
Ms. Zdon knew the violence of Mr. Floyd’s death was a difficult thing to share with her children, but their day-to-day life is full of white people. Before she and her family stood at the site where Mr. Floyd lost his life, she took them to a looted Target.
“I talked to the kids a lot about this is what hate is,” Ms. Zdon said. “This is what bound-up feelings look like.”
— Dionne Searcey
MINNEAPOLIS
Kennetta Hollivay, 49
Kennetta Hollivay stood outside her store, the Dollar & Up market, a block-and-a-half from the spot where Mr. Floyd died.
She and her husband bought the store in September. It has been a rough few months. The store remained open through the pandemic but business was slow.
Ms. Hollivay has lived in the neighborhood her whole life, and said she felt compelled to join the protests, at first at least.
“When I first heard about it, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, the police have killed somebody else,’” Ms. Hollivay said. “And I was hurt. But once I saw video, it was like — that man died right before our eyes. I’ve never seen nothing like that before. Ever. Ever. I told my husband yesterday I’ve been having these dreams every night of this. Nightmares.”
— Dionne Searcey
OAKLAND, CALIF.
Candice Elder, 36
Candice Elder runs an organization that has been trying to protect the homeless from the coronavirus. On Sunday, she pivoted to protecting protesters from clashes with the police. She distributed goggles, masks, first-aid supplies and milk of magnesia, which is diluted with water to ease the sting of tear gas.
Ms. Elder said she saw the death of Mr. Floyd in the context of the constant sting of racism in her work with homeless people. One quarter of Oakland’s population is black. Yet 70 percent of the homeless people are African-American.
An episode in April shook her up to the point of needing counseling. Two volunteers, both of them black, were on their way to meet with her when they were pulled from their car by police officers. The arrest, which took place in the parking lot of Ms. Elder’s nonprofit group, was captured on video. One of the workers was pinned to the ground next to his car, a scene that resembled the later arrest of Mr. Floyd.
The worker was taken to jail but released the next day. The police apologized, Ms. Elder said, saying it had been a case of mistaken identity.
“I’m tired of being sick and tired.”
— Thomas Fuller
COLUMBUS, OHIO
Ben Willis, 28
Ben Willis grew up in a part of the city where he learned from a young age that African-Americans routinely experienced police harassment.
“I know what the police can do,” Mr. Willis said.
Those episodes helped propel him to the front lines of demonstrations in his hometown, where he has played a role in keeping protesters calm, focused and supported.
There are guidelines that Mr. Willis encourages fellow demonstrators to follow. Keep peaceful. Take steps not to hurt one another.
— Julie Bosman
BROOKLYN
Sydney Driver, 37
As a child, Sydney Driver’s family warned him to avoid white neighborhoods and the police. His aunt would tell him not to ride his bike over there because he and his friends would be beaten up — if not by residents, then by officers.
“We always had these restrictions since I was a little boy,” Mr. Driver said. “And now I’m married with four kids, and I don’t want to leave them in this world like it is when I go.”
On Sunday afternoon outside Barclays Center, he cheered and raised his fist in solidarity with the messages being yelled over a megaphone.
Mr. Driver said he felt the destruction of property and looting had been given outsized attention by people who refused to acknowledge that previous generations’ efforts to march peacefully against racism had never come close to succeeding.
“The police had dogs at your great-grandfather’s legs when he was trying to do it peacefully,” he said. “He got spit on.”
Mr. Driver said he and his wife had cried together watching the video of Mr. Floyd’s fatal encounter with the police. “If I have to die out here,” he said, he did not care. “I don’t. I just don’t.”
— Caitlin Dickerson
LOS ANGELES
Liz Culley, 34
Liz Culley and her wife joined neighbors who protested at Pan Pacific Park.
“It was beautiful,” she said. “Some young kids gave me an extra sign because I didn’t have one.”
It was after she got home that much more chaotic protests moved onto her street. She coughed on the tear gas that reached her home as protesters sought refuge.
“I grabbed whatever I could — bottles of water and paper towels — and ran downstairs,” Ms. Culley said. “Other neighbors came out, it was all of us, the whole building as a unit. I was spraying people’s eyes, wiping their eyes, we had a little station set up.”
The street became a hot zone for several hours.
“People grabbed metal trash bins and barricaded the street so cops couldn’t drive through,” Ms. Culley said. “A girl came up with blood all over her face. We cleaned her up and told her she had to go to the hospital. ”
As the confrontations dissipated, other kinds of protesters moved in. “Opportunists,” she called them.
She felt disappointed. “There were people who wanted to be a part of a political statement, a movement, a march,” she said. “But burning the city, I don’t think that has anything to do with the people we interacted with yesterday. It’s just sad.”
— Adam Popescu
MINNEAPOLIS
Rashaad Dinkins, 18
Rashaad Dinkins was 12 when unrest broke out in Ferguson. He remembers watching the news, knowing that black people were being killed.
“I just understood that my skin could get me in trouble, and I need to be careful about how I represent myself and how I act around certain groups,” Mr. Dinkins said.
When he worked at the Mall of America, a security guard followed him while he was on break. Mr. Dinkins became an actor and would become deflated when he sometimes was passed up for roles.
“Going into auditions and being told you weren’t good enough from a panel of white people, it was kind of demeaning and challenging,” Mr. Dinkins said. “That’s when I realized I have a voice and I have to speak up because I can’t feel like this anymore.”
When Mr. Floyd was killed just a few blocks from where Mr. Dinkins lives, he knew he had to be a part of the moment.
“I think it was the realization that it could have been me because I go to that store, and I grew up going to that store all the time,” Mr. Dinkins said. “It could have easily been my body under that police officer.”
— John Eligon
OAKLAND, CALIF.
Qiana Walker, 40
Qiana Walker and her two daughters were finishing breakfast on Sunday morning when they decided they would scrap their plans for a hike, the beach and baby back ribs and instead join their first protest together.
To Ms. Walker, an out-of-work saleswoman who is having trouble paying her bills, the decision was not easy. She had not attended a protest in more than a decade, and never with her daughters, ages 16 and 22, largely because of the fear of what could happen if things turned violent.
“I can’t teach them fear,” she said through a black scarf, held over her mouth by a black hood pulled tight. “I have to teach them to fight, to stand up for yourself, to know to protect yourself.”
— Jack Nicas
MINNEAPOLIS
Damarra Atkins, 31
Damarra Atkins, who is part black but was raised by her white mother in a predominantly white culture, said that the protests made her aware of her black identity more than ever.
“I think what hit me about this in particular is how incredibly blatant it was.”
She had been sitting alone, on the ground, on Sunday in front of the Fifth Police Precinct, waiting to speak to an official. Ms. Atkins, who works as an administrative assistant in a hospital and is trained in C.P.R., had helped set up a pop-up medical tent for injured protesters at a vacant parking lot. She was looking to negotiate with the police so that they could agree on who not to target during protests, including medical volunteers.
As National Guard troops and state patrols stormed the area, she said, the medical volunteers put their hands up and had visible signs identifying themselves.
Still, she said, they were pelted with flash grenades and rubber bullets.
“I suppose it could have been coincidental,” she said, “but it felt very coordinated and very tactical.”
She waited for an hour to speak to a police official about keeping medical volunteers safe. No one came. She eventually left.
Like the protesters, she had waited long enough.
— Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura
John Branch is a sports reporter. He won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for “Snow Fall,” a story about a deadly avalanche in Washington State, and was also a finalist for the prize in 2012. @JohnBranchNYT
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7) The American Military’s Newest Target: American Protesters
Military helicopters sought to discourage protesters, and retired senior military leaders condemned their successors for deploying such tactics.
By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Jennifer Steinhauer, June 2, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/military-national-guard-trump-protests.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Erin Schaff/The New York Times
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WASHINGTON — Retired senior military leaders condemned their successors in the Trump administration for ordering active-duty units on Monday to rout those peacefully protesting police violence near the White House.
As military helicopters flew low over the nation’s capital and National Guard units moved into many cities, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood beside President Trump as he took the unusual step of pressing the American military into a domestic confrontation.
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote on Twitter that “America is not a battleground. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy.”
And Gen. Tony Thomas, the former head of the Special Operations Command, tweeted: “The ‘battle space’ of America??? Not what America needs to hear … ever, unless we are invaded by an adversary or experience a constitutional failure … ie a Civil War.”
For the past three years, American military officials have expressed private concerns that Mr. Trump does not understand either his role as commander in chief or the role of the military that is sworn to protect the Constitution from all enemies.
Television networks broadcast images of General Milley, in combat fatigues, and Mr. Esper, in a suit — walking behind Mr. Trump as he crossed Lafayette Square Monday evening to a photo opportunity in front of St. John’s church. Earlier in the day, Mr. Esper joined the president’s call with governors and said, “We need to dominate the battlespace” — a comment that set off a torrent of criticism.
More than 40 percent of the two million active-duty and reserve personnel are people of color, and orders to confront protesters demonstrating against a criminal justice system that targets black men troubled many.
The Air Force’s top enlisted airman took to Twitter to express his anger.
“Just like most of the Black Airmen and so many others in our ranks … I am outraged at watching another Black man die on television before our very eyes,” Kaleth O. Wright, the chief master sergeant of the Air Force, said in a Twitter thread, citing the names of black men who died in police custody or in police shootings. “I am George Floyd … I am Philando Castile, I am Michael Brown, I am Alton Sterling, I am Tamir Rice.”
The Pentagon has yet to say how many soldiers it is deploying to Washington, per Mr. Trump’s order. Defense Department officials have given varying numbers, from 500 to “thousands.”
One Pentagon official said that the troops deploying to the capital might not be limited to the military police. The official, who said that decisions were still being made, added that the troops were coming from Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, Ft. Drum in New York and might also, surprisingly, include the so-called Old Guard ceremonial unit. The Old Guard provides security for Washington and escort to the president.
The deployment of active-duty troops to confront protesters and looters prompted one military official to liken the order to Mr. Trump requesting his own “palace guard.”
This week, Mr. Trump said, without elaborating, that General Milley was in charge of the effort to confront the protesters and looters.
At the Pentagon, officials expressed surprise at the president’s comments, and referred questions to the White House. But officials noted that all National Guard members now deployed in the United States are under the authorities of the state governors. Defense Department officials said that if those troops are federalized — that is, put under the power of the president rather than governors — that would normally be done under the auspices of United States Northern Command, which oversees military units on American territory, and not the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff.
In his current role, General Milley does not command troops; he serves as the top military adviser to the president and the defense secretary. It would be very unusual for a chairman of the Joint Chiefs to take control over missions in the country, Defense Department officials said.
As soldiers arrived on Monday, clad in camouflage uniforms and clutching riot shields labeled “military police” to reinforce the line of crowd control officers guarding Lafayette Square yards from the White House, the crowd of about 400 protesters responded with verbal taunts. “Fascists!” some yelled. Others booed. A few shouted expletives.
As the hours stretched on, a pair of armored Humvees from the 273rd Military Police Company, painted tan for their once inevitable deployments to the Middle East, sat idling in an intersection near a Metro stop. Protesters snapped pictures in front of them. Others quietly walked by shaking their heads.
Around 10 p.m., the military stepped up its attempts to suppress the protesters. A crowd making its way through the Chinatown area of Washington had gone relatively unbothered by law enforcement, having snaked across town, blocking roads and chanting “We can’t Breathe,” “George Floyd” and “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The group, for the most part, was peaceful.
A Black Hawk helicopter, followed by a smaller medical evacuation helicopter, dropped to rooftop level with their search lights aimed at the crowd. Tree limbs snapped, nearly hitting several people. Signs were torn from the sides of buildings. Some protesters looked up, while others ran into doorways. The downward force of air from the rotors was deafening.
The helicopters were performing a “show of force” — a standard tactic used by military aircraft in combat zones to scatter insurgents. The maneuvers were personally directed by the highest echelons of the Washington National Guard, according to a military official with direct knowledge of the situation. The Guard did not respond to a request for comment.
Parts of the crowd dispersed before continuing on. The helicopters circled for another pass. Afterward, protesters were no longer cursing only the police, the focus of unrest from the start, but the military, too.
The deployment is also challenging for National Guard units, who are inheritors of a legacy from the Revolutionary War militia, the citizen-soldiers who were ready to put down their plows and pick up weapons to defend their country. Today, when the National Guard can be dispatched for an array of missions — like combat duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, helping with flood relief or providing assistance to coronavirus victims — that balance is more complicated.
Members of the Guard generally report to the governor of their state, but when units come under the command of the president, federal law prohibits them from being used domestically except under some very limited circumstances.
In the current unrest, military personnel specialists say, the Guard is caught between expressing anguish over the killing of a black man, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and supporting civilian authorities in quelling the violent protests and looting that followed.
“Most of the soldiers will have sympathy for the peaceful protesters and be angry about Floyd’s death, but they’re probably angry at the violence as well,” said Peter D. Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University who has studied the military for decades. “It puts them in a fraught position.”
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8) As Protests Spur Posts From Athletes, N.B.A. Players Take to the Streets
The season has been suspended. And the issue of police brutality toward African-Americans has long been a visceral one in a predominantly black league.
By Sopan Deb, June 2, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/sports/basketball/george-floyd-nba-protests.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
A broad range of athletes and sports figures have issued statements on social media condemning the killing of George Floyd and other police violence against African-Americans.
But several N.B.A. players have gone even further. They’ve jumped off the sidelines to join the sprawling protests that have leapt up all over the country, which lines up with an image the N.B.A. has gone to great lengths to cultivate for itself in recent years: that of a socially conscious league that has fought against injustice for decades stretching back to the days of Bill Russell.
This comes with risk for the players: Some of the protests have turned violent and many demonstrators are not wearing masks or maintaining social distancing in accordance with coronavirus pandemic precautions.
Yet very few issues have sparked the outrage of figures in and around the N.B.A. like that of police brutality and the killing of black people, an issue that has touched many black communities in the United States and one that N.B.A. stars, who play in a predominantly black league, have been keen to speak on for several years.
Jaylen Brown, the 23-year-old rising star for the Celtics, said it took him 15 hours to drive from Boston to Atlanta to take part in protests. Brown, who went to high school in Georgia, invited others to join him over the weekend, posting a message on Twitter that said, “Atlanta don’t meet me there beat me there come walk with me bring your own signs.” He added in an Instagram story, “First and foremost, I’m a black man and I’m a member of this community … We’re raising awareness for some of the injustices that we’ve been seeing.”
Malcolm Brogdon, a 27-year-old guard for the Indiana Pacers, also demonstrated in Atlanta this weekend.
“I’ve got a grandfather that marched next to Dr. King in the ’60s, and he was amazing,” Brogdon said to a crowd through a bullhorn. “He would be proud to see us all here.”
And Enes Kanter, the outspoken Celtics center, woke up on Saturday at his manager’s home in Chicago — where he stays during the summer — and made a 20-hour, cross-country drive to join a protest in Boston.
Kanter, while wearing his jersey, appeared with throngs of Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Boston Common, chanting “I can’t breathe.” His teammate, Marcus Smart, was nearby protesting as well.
“It was a crazy drive,” Kanter said Monday. “It felt terrible. My back was hurting. My shoulder was hurting. But you know what? The results were something good so it was worth going.”
The league’s activism has been selective, the N.B.A.’s critics note. It began the season in October with an international incident after a Houston Rockets executive expressed support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, causing a protracted debate over whether league executives and players caved to China’s anger over it.
The N.B.A. also has a rule requiring that players stand during the national anthem, effectively banning them from kneeling, the very issue that has been a headache for the N.F.L. because of Colin Kaepernick. That dispute resurfaced after the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, issued a statement on Saturday that some players on social media found lacking self-awareness.
But on the subject of the relationship between African-American communities and law enforcement, N.B.A. figures have been much more eager to weigh in and do more — some even feeling a sense of profound obligation to express what they see as grievous injustice.
In response to Floyd’s death, coaches and players have lined up to provide statements, as have teams, some in blunt terms. The Washington Wizards released a statement from its players that said — in capital letters — “WE WILL NO LONGER TOLERATE THE ASSASSINATION OF PEOPLE OF COLOR IN THIS COUNTRY,” adding, “WE WILL NO LONGER ACCEPT THE ABUSE OF POWER FROM LAW ENFORCEMENT.”
In a message to league employees on Sunday, Commissioner Adam Silver said, “Racism, police brutality and racial injustice remain part of everyday life in America and cannot be ignored,” adding, “We will work hand-in-hand to create programs and build partnerships in every N.B.A. community that address racial inequity and bring people together.”
These statements were notable because specific mentions of law enforcement were conspicuously missing from many corporate statements released last week.
In a typical season, N.B.A. players would be able to express themselves at actual games, like in 2014, when many players wore “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts during warm-ups, a reference to Eric Garner, a black man who died in Staten Island after an officer used a chokehold. Or in 2012, when members of the Miami Heat posted pictures of the team wearing hoodies in response to the death of Trayvon Martin.
But N.B.A. teams are not together currently. The league is aiming to make a return to play in late July. In the meantime, many in the basketball community, like LeBron James, have responded by either spotlighting the protests or gone even further by joining them.
The scale at which the deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor — a black emergency room technician who was shot in her own apartment by the Louisville police following the execution of a “no knock warrant” in March — and Ahmaud Arbery — a 25-year-old black man who was pursued by armed white residents in February before being killed — touched a nerve among players and some team executives was on display this weekend.
On Sunday, Maxi Kleber, Dwight Powell, Justin Jackson and Jalen Brunson of the Dallas Mavericks, as well as team owner Mark Cuban, attended a vigil at the Dallas Police Headquarters.
“This is our community. Our country. Both are hurting. I wanted to be there to listen,” Cuban said in an email. “To understand better the pain the African-American community is going through.”
Lonzo Ball, a New Orleans Pelicans guard, posted a picture on Instagram on Sunday of himself attending a protest in Chino Hills, Calif. Jordan Clarkson, a guard for the Utah Jazz, attended one in Los Angeles. Tobias Harris, a Philadelphia 76ers forward, marched in Philadelphia on Saturday. One franchise, the Minnesota Timberwolves, posted a video showing its players, including Karl-Anthony Towns and Josh Okogie, attending a demonstration.
The N.B.A. has sometimes gone farther on issues surrounding violence. In 2015, the league partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety, a group founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, to have players tape messages about the effects of gun violence.
The activism in response to Floyd’s death has not just been limited to N.B.A. players and owners.
Several W.N.B.A. teams have released statements as well. Natasha Cloud, the Washington Mystics guard, posted an op-ed for the Players Tribune on Saturday titled, “Your Silence Is a Knee on My Neck.” Karima Christmas-Kelly, a forward for the Minnesota Lynx, posted an Instagram video on Monday from a demonstration at the intersection where Floyd was killed.
Much of the response has still been from a distance. Multiple N.B.A. coaches announced a committee to combat racism, and all the league’s coaches issued a statement Monday condemning Floyd’s killing, adding, that “the reality is that African-Americans are targeted and victimized on a daily basis.” One of those coaches, Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, a frequent critic of President Trump, gave a scathing interview to The Nation on Sunday, blasting Trump’ and his response to the protests.
“We need a president to come out and say simply that ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Just say those three words. But he won’t and he can’t,” Popovich said. “He can’t because it’s more important to him to mollify the small group of followers who validate his insanity. But it’s more than just Trump. The system has to change. I’ll do whatever I can do to help because that’s what leaders do.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
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9) Live Updates on George Floyd Protests: Democrats Slam Trump’s Response
Six officers in Atlanta face arrest, as some authorities seek to address police misbehavior.
June 2, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/george-floyd-video-autopsy-protests.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press
Arrest warrants have been issued for six Atlanta police officers, after video footage from Saturday night showed officers stopping two college students in a car while enforcing a curfew, firing Tasers at them and dragging them out of their vehicle.
The six officers are accused of a series of crimes, including aggravated assault, illegally pointing a Taser and criminal damage to property. Video of the encounter sparked widespread outrage, and two of the officers have been fired. The Atlanta Police Department did not immediately respond to a question about the status of the other four officers.
“The conduct involved in this incident is not indicative of the way that we treat people in the City of Atlanta,” Paul L. Howard, Jr., the district attorney, said in a news conference on Tuesday announcing the arrest warrants.
The college students, Taniyah Pilgrim, 20, and Messiah Young, 22, appeared at the news conference alongside Mr. Howard.
“I hope every police officer who thinks it’s O.K. to drag someone, beat someone, do all this stuff because they are cops — I hope they are all going to be held accountable as well,” Ms. Pilgrim said.
Videos posted on social media have captured scene after scene of police aggression and even violence since the protests began. The arrest warrants in Atlanta reflected how, in some cases, the authorities have moved swiftly to crack down on misbehavior. In Richmond, Va., the police department apologized and said it would discipline officers who used tear gas on protesters on Monday.
Some law enforcement agencies have taken a more conciliatory approach. In Michigan, Sheriff Christopher R. Swanson of Genesee County marched with demonstrators.
The encounter in Atlanta happened around 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, about 30 minutes after a curfew went into effect to quell demonstrations in the city. Video captured by a local television station showed officers stopping the car. Prosecutors said they were still investigating why the car was stopped.
The video footage shows officers aiming stun guns at the car from both sides, and one officer reaching into the passenger side of the car and pulling Ms. Pilgrim out. She is hit by a Taser, thrown to the ground, and her hands are zip tied; then she is put in a police vehicle, Mr. Howard said. Mr. Young was also hit with a Taser and pulled out of the vehicle and he fractured his wrist, Mr. Howard said.
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10) Witness Who Was in Floyd’s Car Says His Friend Did Not Resist Arrest
Maurice Lester Hall, who fled Minneapolis after witnessing George Floyd’s death, was arrested Monday in Houston and interviewed by a Minnesota investigator.
By Erica L. Green and Katie Benner, June 4, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/us/politics/george-floyd-witness-maurice-lester-hall.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Caroline Yang for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A longtime friend of George Floyd’s who was in the passenger seat of Mr. Floyd’s car during his fatal encounter with a Minneapolis police officer said on Wednesday night that Mr. Floyd tried to defuse the tensions with the police and in no way resisted arrest.
“He was, from the beginning, trying in his humblest form to show he was not resisting in no form or way,” said the friend, Maurice Lester Hall, 42, who was tracked down on Monday in Houston, arrested on outstanding warrants and interviewed by Minnesota state investigators.
“I could hear him pleading, ‘Please, officer, what’s all this for?’” Mr. Hall said in an interview on Wednesday night with The New York Times.
Mr. Hall recounted the last moments with Mr. Floyd on Memorial Day, May 25, after they had spent part of the day together.
“He was just crying out at that time for anyone to help because he was dying,” Mr. Hall said. “I’m going to always remember seeing the fear in Floyd’s face because he’s such a king. That’s what sticks with me, seeing a grown man cry, before seeing a grown man die.”
Mr. Hall is a key witness in the state’s investigation into the four officers who apprehended Mr. Floyd, including Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, even after he became unresponsive.
But Mr. Hall — who had outstanding warrants for his arrest on felony possession of a firearm, felony domestic assault and felony drug possession — provided a false name to officers at the scene of Mr. Floyd’s arrest, according to a Minnesota official.
Mr. Hall left Minneapolis and hitchhiked to Houston two days later, after visiting a memorial at the site of the police encounter.
“When the whole world was finding out that they murdered George Floyd,” he said, “I went and said a prayer where I witnessed him take his last breath, and I left.”
Mr. Hall said he had left dinner with his family late this Monday evening when their car was surrounded by at least a dozen law enforcement officers. After his arrest, he was questioned for hours by a Minnesota state investigator about Mr. Floyd’s death — not about his warrants. Mr. Hall was then transferred to the Harris County Jail in Houston, and on Tuesday, he returned to his home in the city, after his lawyers fought for his release.
“When Mr. Hall’s family found us, he had been isolated in jail for 10 hours after being interrogated until 3 a.m.,” said Ashlee C. McFarlane, a partner at Gerger Khalil Hennessy & McFarlane, who is representing Mr. Hall. “This is not how you treat a key witness, especially one that had just seen his friend murdered by police. Even with outstanding warrants, this should have been done another way.”
“I knew what was happening, that they were coming. It was inevitable,” Mr. Hall said in the interview with The Times. “I’m a key witness to the cops murdering George Floyd, and they want to know my side. Whatever I’ve been through, it’s all over with now. It’s not about me.”
Mr. Hall and Mr. Floyd, both Houston natives, had connected in Minneapolis through a pastor and had been in touch every day since 2016. Mr. Hall said that he considered Mr. Floyd a confidant and a mentor, like many in the community, and that he went back to Houston because the “only ties I had in Minnesota that had me Houston-rooted was George.”
Agents of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which is building the state’s case against Mr. Chauvin and the three other officers involved in the Floyd case, “attempted to contact Mr. Hall numerous times to no avail,” said Bruce Gordon, a spokesman for the bureau.
Mr. Hall said that he was distraught and working through his trauma with his family, and was not taking phone calls in the days immediately after.
The bureau asked law enforcement agents in Texas to arrest Mr. Hall because it believed he was not cooperating with its investigation. Mr. Hall and Ms. McFarlane, his lawyer, said that he cooperated fully with the Minnesota official’s interview.
“They got a testimony, and that’s what they were after,” Mr. Hall added. “They came and saw, and left me to fighting for my freedom.”
Passengers in the car with Mr. Floyd, a man and a woman, had remained unidentified until Mr. Hall spoke with The Times on Wednesday. Mr. Hall said that he did not know the woman’s name.
Minnesota officials said on Wednesday that the state had upgraded the charges against Mr. Chauvin to second-degree murder from third-degree murder and manslaughter. They also charged the other three officers who took part in the fatal arrest — Thomas Lane, 37, J. Alexander Kueng, 26, and Tou Thao, 34 — with aiding and abetting murder.
All four officers were fired the day after Mr. Floyd died and video of his death went viral online.
“I walk with Floyd,” Mr. Hall said. “I know that I’m going to be his voice.”
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11) Another Man [Manuel Ellis—Say His Name!] Who Said ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Died in Custody. An Autopsy Calls It Homicide.
Manuel Ellis of Tacoma, Wash., died in part as a result of how he was restrained, according to the medical examiner, who concluded that his death was a homicide.
By Mike Baker, June 3, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/manuel-ellis-tacoma-police-homicide.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
SEATTLE — A black man who called out “I can’t breathe” before dying in police custody in Tacoma, Wash., was killed as a result of oxygen deprivation and the physical restraint that was used on him, according to details of a medical examiner’s report released on Wednesday.
The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office concluded that the death of the man, Manuel Ellis, 33, was a homicide. Investigators with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department were in the process of preparing a report about the March death, which occurred shortly after an arrest by officers from the Tacoma Police Department, said the sheriff’s spokesman, Ed Troyer.
“The information is all being put together,” Detective Troyer said. “We expect to present it to the prosecutor at the end of this week or early next week.”
Mr. Ellis’s sister, Monet Carter-Mixon, called for action to bring accountability in the death and further scrutiny of both the Police Department’s practices and how the investigation into his death has been handled.
“There’s a lot of questions that still need to be answered,” Ms. Carter-Mixon said.
Mr. Ellis died from respiratory arrest, hypoxia and physical restraint, according to the medical examiner’s office. The report listed methamphetamine intoxication and heart disease as contributing factors.
Police officers encountered Mr. Ellis, a musician and father of two from Tacoma, on the night of March 3 as they were stopped at an intersection. They saw him banging on the window of another vehicle, Detective Troyer said.
Mr. Ellis approached the officers, Detective Troyer said, and then threw an officer to the ground when the officer got out of the vehicle. The two officers and two backup officers who joined — two of them white, one black and one Asian — handcuffed him.
“Mr. Ellis was physically restrained as he continued to be combative,” the Tacoma Police Department said in a statement on Wednesday.
Detective Troyer said he did not know all the details of the restraint the officers used — they were not wearing body cameras — but said he did not believe they used a chokehold or a knee on Mr. Ellis’s neck. They rolled him on his side after he called out, “I can’t breathe.”
“The main reason why he was restrained was so he wouldn’t hurt himself or them,” Detective Troyer said. “As soon as he said he couldn’t breathe, they requested medical aid.”
Detective Troyer said the call for aid came four minutes after the officers encountered Mr. Ellis.
Mr. Ellis was still breathing when medical personnel arrived, Detective Troyer said. He was removed from handcuffs while personnel worked on him for about 40 minutes, Detective Troyer said. He was then pronounced dead.
Family members said Mr. Ellis was the father of an 11-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter. He was a talented musician at his church. Ms. Carter-Mixon said Mr. Ellis was like a father figure to her boys, coaching them on things like how handle themselves to keep safe in a world of racial injustices.
“My heart literally hurts,” she said. “It’s painful. My brother was my best friend.”
On Wednesday night, she and others held a vigil in Tacoma.
Brian Giordano, a close friend of Mr. Ellis, said that the two usually spoke several times a day and that Mr. Ellis had video-chatted with him two hours before his death. He had been excited about a church service he had attended and proud of how he had played drums during the service, Mr. Giordano recalled.
He said it would be uncharacteristic of Mr. Ellis to act in the violent way described by the police.
He was living in a clean-and-sober house and was getting his life back together, he said. “He was always uplifting,” Mr. Giordano said. “He was always on the up-and-up about taking care of people.”
The death comes as protests have spread around the nation over the case of George Floyd, a black man who died in the custody of Minneapolis police last week. Minnesota officials have charged all four officers in that case, including Derek Chauvin, who kept his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes during the arrest.
Forensics experts who conducted a private autopsy for Mr. Floyd’s family concluded that another officer’s knees on Mr. Floyd’s back contributed to making it impossible for his lungs to take in sufficient air.
Mayor Victoria Woodards of Tacoma said on Wednesday that she would take appropriate steps based on the findings of the sheriff’s investigation.
“We will learn the results of that investigation even as our country reels from the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and too many others,” Ms. Woodards said.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said the issue was a top priority for him.
“We will be pushing to make sure there is a full and complete investigation of that incident,” Mr. Inslee said.
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12) Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness
When black people are killed by the police, “racism” isn’t the right word.
By kihana miraya ross, June 4, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/george-floyd-anti-blackness.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
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The word “racism” is everywhere. It’s used to explain all the things that cause African-Americans’ suffering and death: inadequate access to health care, food, housing and jobs, or a police bullet, baton or knee. But “racism” fails to fully capture what black people in this country are facing.
The right term is “anti-blackness.”
To be clear, “racism” isn’t a meaningless term. But it’s a catch-all that can encapsulate anything from black people being denied fair access to mortgage loans, to Asian students being burdened with a “model minority” label. It’s not specific.
Many Americans, awakened by watching footage of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, are grappling with why we live in a world in which black death loops in a tragic screenplay, scored with the wails of childless mothers and the entitled indifference of our murderers. And an understanding of anti-blackness is the only place to start.
Anti-blackness is one way some black scholars have articulated what it means to be marked as black in an anti-black world. It’s more than just “racism against black people.” That oversimplifies and defangs it. It’s a theoretical framework that illuminates society’s inability to recognize our humanity — the disdain, disregard and disgust for our existence.
The African-American studies professor Frank B.Wilderson, who coined the term “Afro-pessimism,” argues that anti-blackness indexes the structural reality so that in the larger society, blackness is inextricably tied to “slaveness.” While the system of U.S. chattel slavery technically ended over 150 years ago, it continues to mark the ontological position of black people. Thus, in the minds of many, the relation between humanity and blackness is an antagonism, is irreconcilable.
Anti-blackness describes the inability to recognize black humanity. It captures the reality that the kind of violence that saturates black life is not based on any specific thing a black person — better described as “a person who has been racialized black” — did. The violence we experience isn’t tied to any particular transgression. It’s gratuitous and unrelenting.
Anti-blackness covers the fact that society’s hatred of blackness, and also its gratuitous violence against black people, is complicated by its need for our existence. For example, for white people — again, better described as those who have been racialized white — the abject inhumanity of the black reinforces their whiteness, their humanness, their power, and their privilege, whether they’re aware of it or not. Black people are at once despised and also a useful counterpoint for others to measure their humanness against. In other words, while one may experience numerous compounding disadvantages, at least they’re not black.
So when we’re trying to understand how a white police officer could calmly and casually channel the weight of his entire body through his knee on a black man’s neck — a man who begged for his life for over eight full minutes until he had no air left with which to plead — we have to understand that there has never been a moment in this country’s history where this kind of treatment has not been the reality for black people.
From whips to guns, the slave patrols of the 16th century are the ancestors of modern-day police departments. Mr. Floyd’s killer just happened to make the news, happened to have video footage documenting his desperate screams to his deceased mother for help from the other side. Mr. Floyd’s brutal killing is not an exception, but rather, it is the rule in a nation that literally made black people into things.
Black people were rendered as property, built this country, spilled literal blood, sweat and tears into the soil from which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. The thingification of black people is a fundamental component of the identity of this nation.
Reckoning with this reality is significantly more difficult than wrestling with prejudice, racism, and even institutional or structural racism. And it does more than any of these concepts do to help us make sense of over 400 years of black suffering — of our unremitting interminable pain, rage and exhaustion.
Mr. Floyd’s death is the story of our babies, of the numerous black children who grow up literally or metaphorically under the steel heel of a police boot. It is the story of our families, who since the Middle Passage, have had to suffer the unimaginable.
But when they kill our children, our mothers and fathers, we are expected to forgive, to be peaceful in the face of horrific violence. We are asked to respect a law that cannot recognize our humanity — that cannot provide redress. And when time and time again the law demonstrates it will never protect us, that it will never hold those individuals and systems that harm us accountable, we are expected to peddle a narrative that the system works, that justice will prevail.
Mr. Floyd’s brother lamented, “I just don’t understand what more we’ve got to go through in life, man.” People are in the streets today because years ago we marched peacefully and belted Negro spirituals, hoping they would recognize our humanity. We wore Afros like crowns remembering our beauty. We put our fists in the air demonstrating our strength. We declared that our lives matter in every gorgeous dimension, demanding they stop killing us in the streets and in our homes with impunity. People are in the streets today because despite all of the people who lost their lives — literally and figuratively, in this fight for black life, the struggle continues.
So let’s stop saying racism killed George Floyd, or worse yet, that a racist police officer killed George Floyd. George Floyd was killed because anti-blackness is endemic to, and is central to how all of us make sense of the social, economic, historical and cultural dimensions of human life.
kihana miraya ross is an assistant professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University.
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13) Vallejo police officer shoots, kills 22-year-old [Sean Monterrosaon—Say His Name!] his knees after mistaking hammer for gun, chief says
By Melanie Woodrow, June 3, 2020
https://abc7news.com/officer-involved-shooting-vallejo-looting-city-hall/6229758/
Sean Monterrosa is seen in an undated photo posted to a GoFundMe page.
VALLEJO, Calif. (KGO) -- Vallejo Police shot and killed a 22-year-old following a night of looting early Tuesday morning. Today, Chief Shawny Williams said Sean Monterrosa was on his knees and an officer saw what appeared to be a gun in his sweatshirt. It turned out to be a hammer.
Sean Monterrosa was on his knees outside a Walgreens when a Vallejo Police Officer fired at him 5 times through his vehicle's windshield. One of those shots hit and killed the 22-year-old, who police say they believed was armed.
The fatal shooting came after a night of multiple calls for looting including to the Walgreens.
Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams said it appeared Monterrosa was going to get into a getaway vehicle before changing his mind.
"This individual appeared to be running toward the black sedan but suddenly stopped taking a kneeling position and placing his hands above his waist revealing what appeared to be the butt of handgun investigations later revealed that the weapon was a long 15-inch hammer tucked into the pocket of his sweatshirt," said Chief Williams.
Chief Williams says the officer who shot Monterrosa is an 18-year veteran. Chief Williams did not release his name.
Attorney John Burris is representing Monterrosa's family.
"He did not see Mr. Monterrosa put his hands on it in a threatening way. So the question here is what threat if any did he actually present," said Burris.
Of the two getaway vehicles filled with suspected looters that drove off, one rammed a responding police vehicle injuring an officer. Police caught the suspects from one vehicle in Contra Costa County. The suspects in the black sedan got away.
Chief Williams said the department has made many changes since he arrived including to its de-escalation policy.
"How was de-escalation used here," asked ABC7 News I-Team reporter Melanie Woodrow.
"Well I'll say this when they responded to the Walgreens the intent was to stop the looting and to arrest the perpetrators if necessary, the officers reacted to a perceived threat," said Chief Williams.
The department has 45 days to release body-worn camera video but Chief Williams says he plans to do so sooner.
"Based on your experience of 27 years was this excessive force," asked I-TEAM reporter Melanie Woodrow.
"Like I said the District Attorney is going to look at this and our internal affairs will look at it," said Chief Williams as people in the crowd began shouting at Williams who would not answer with his opinion.
The officer who fired the fatal shot has been placed on routine paid administrative leave as have the witness officers.
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14) George Floyd’s smiling daughter, 6, says ‘daddy changed the world’
Dr. Bernice King understands exactly what this young lady is feeling because her daddy's death changed the world too
By Biba Adams, June 3, 2020
https://thegrio.com/2020/06/03/george-floyd-daughter-daddy-changed-world/
Gianna Floyd, 6, on the shoulders of her "uncle" Stephen Jackson, retired NBA star. (Image from Stephen Jackson's Instagram
George Floyd’s daughter, Gianna, sitting atop the shoulders of her “uncle” retired NBA star, Stephen Jackson, said, “Daddy changed the world.”
The endearing moment was captured on video and shared widely across social media including the Twitter of Bernice A. King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In a statement, King, the CEO of The King Center, said she thinks about Gianna. “I was five years old when my father was killed by law enforcement. I know that pain, I know that void, I know the journey of anger. I know what people are feeling. I feel it.”
Yesterday, Gianna’s mother Roxie Washington, spoke during a press conference where she made an emotional plea for people to remember that Floyd was a good father.
“Gianna does not have a father,” she said, “He will never see her grow up, graduate. He will never walk her down the aisle. If there’s a problem she’s having and she needs a dad, she does not have that anymore.”
The Floyd family attorney, Chris Stewart, said that while there has been so much anger and violence in the streets, there is also beauty. “We really wanted the world to see the beauty of their child,” Stewart continued, “The beauty of Roxie who is holding up strong throughout this. And the actual situations in life that these things affect.”
Stewart said, “It’s not just that someone passes and people are angry in the streets,” emphasizing, “It affects people’s actual lives and their futures.”
Washington said that she participated in the press conference because she wants justice for Floyd. “I want justice for him,” she said as she looked at her daughter, “No matter what anybody thinks, he was good. And this is the proof that he was a good man.”
The video was posted in full on Stephen Jackson’s Instagram page. The athlete has really stepped up and has promised to keep Floyd’s life lifted. Clearly, he is starting by lifting up and supporting “GiGi.”
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15) Tennessee National Guardsmen put down their shields during peaceful rally at state capitol
NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) - A peaceful vigil produced a powerful moment between protesters and National Guard members Monday night.
Joseph Wenzel, Digital Content Manager, June 3, 2020
https://www.wsmv.com/news/tennessee-national-guardsmen-put-down-their-shields-during-peaceful-rally-at-state-capitol/article_9b73683c-a46b-11ea-9849-0b6cabfb4105.html
In a powerful moment, The Tennessee National Guard laid down their shields at a protest that has made its way up the steps of the Tennessee Capitol June 1, 2020
Nashville, TN (WSMV)—A peaceful vigil produced a powerful moment between protesters and National Guard members Monday night, June 1, 2020.
The Vigil for Black Lives started at Legislative Plaza at 6:00 P.M. and eventually made its way past the caution tape and up the Tennessee State Capitol steps, where some legislators joined the group.
In a powerful moment, the Tennessee National Guard laid down their shields at the invitation of community activist Justin Jones.
“We want to invite these law enforcement, these troopers, to lay down your swords and shields and join us,” Jones said.
The guards, who were standing in a line in front of the capitol, put their shields on the ground as the crowd cheered.
“The National Guard has shown us with their actions that they know we are not terrorists,” Jones said. “We are the citizens of Tennessee.”
Representative Mike Stewart (D) attended the rally and said he was moved by the National Guard’s actions.
“I don’t think anybody who was standing there when the National Guard laid down their shields could not be completely moved and be proud, as Americans, to see our system working exactly the way it’s supposed to work.”
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