Riot erupts following shooting death of unarmed black teen in Missouri

[size=14pt]larger perspective on the issue[/size]

http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14363

Quote:by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“The legacy can only be left behind if white Americans commit themselves to deep introspection and a pledge to leave supremacy behind.”

Can America ever overcome its terrible history of conquest, genocide and enslavement? Those horrors are deeply embedded in the American psyche and legal system, and allow for repeated aggressions at home and abroad. This columnist was reminded of the roots of this never ending terror during a recent trip to Alabama.

Every region of the United States shares in the history of displacement and murder of indigenous peoples. Alabama differs from New England only in that Indians there were brutally attacked and forcibly removed 200 years after the interlopers called pilgrims committed their crimes. In the early 1800s white settlers from the Carolinas and Georgia happily suffered from what was called “Alabama fever.” They knew that the lands recently wrested from the Creek, Choctaw and Cherokee would be theirs for the taking.

Alabama was called the Cotton State with good reason. It owes its very existence to the global demand for cotton, the theft of Indian land and the domestic trade in enslaved people. At the start of the Civil War nearly half of the population was comprised of enslaved people. The wealth generated by king cotton made Montgomery one of the largest slave trading cities in the South, as rivers and rails were used to bring the product and the people who produced it to pens and auction blocks on Market Street, later re-named Dexter Avenue

Quote:The damage done didn’t stay in South and it wasn’t frozen in time. The legacy can only be left behind if white Americans commit themselves to deep introspection and a pledge to leave supremacy behind. That is a tall order for a country which claims to be exceptionally virtuous yet also makes every effort to maintain the racial status quo.
“Enslavement ended only to be replaced by a convict labor system and lynch law terrorism.”

The slave patrols that prevented escape and freedom are still present in the 21st century. The extra judicial killings of Eric Garner in New York City, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and John Crawford in Beavercreek, Ohio, are but three of the most recent. The brutal beating of Marlene Pinnock by a California highway patrol officer wreaked of this awful legacy, when a white policeman had complete confidence that he could punch a black woman in the face at least ten times and rip off her clothes in broad daylight while hundreds of potential witnesses drove by. If that isn’t a legacy of the slave system, nothing else is.

The open carry of firearms and stand your ground legislation are but the latest symptoms of an old illness. The disease is called white supremacy and there has never been a serious desire by the controlling race to be free of it. It is frankly ridiculousness to ask why black people are victimized by extra judicial killings, high rates of incarceration and anything else which keeps them at the bottom of the social, political and economic totem pole.

Quote:In the absence of any desire to leave the past behind, police brutality is inevitable. The history of black people in America is like a horror movie with many sequels. Enslavement ended only to be replaced by a convict labor system and lynch law terrorism. The brief American spring of the civil rights mass movement was quickly followed by mass incarceration which is fed by the extreme police surveillance of black communities. Eric Garner broke up a fight on a New York City street and ended up dead in a police choke hold. John Crawford was holding a toy gun in a Walmart when he was shot down. Michael Brown was stopped by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, because he walked in the street instead of on the sidewalk. Their deaths should go under the category “things that happen only to black people.”
“The brief American spring of the civil rights mass movement was quickly followed by mass incarceration.”

While Americans ponder whether or not Germans feel guilt because of Adolf Hitler’s atrocities they ought to ask the same of themselves. How do white people in the 21st century benefit from the crimes of the past and what will they do as individuals to give up the entitlements they have long held? There are too few people willing to contemplate these questions. Instead they see the protest unfold in Ferguson, Missouri, and conclude that it has nothing to do with them. All the while they support stop and frisk and any other avenue which allows for the literal and very physical control of black people.

Wearing hoodies for Trayvon Martin or shouting, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” in memory of Michael Brown may galvanize popular anger but they aren’t substitutes for revolutionary change. That is the only way to undo centuries of injustice. Anything else is piecemeal and doomed to fail. The continuing protest in Ferguson, Missouri, shows that thousands of people are prepared to do something radically different. The question is whether they will again be disappointed or whether they will be joined by others in a much larger struggle.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

If Margaret Kimberly and others are right then Brother Nathaniel is a liar and a racist

and I was wrong to have given Brother Nathaniel's video any credibility at all

No he's not, he's just another murdered minority member, by the hands of overy aggressive and possibly racist white Police officers.

FERGUSON, Mo. — Each night on the streets of this city, the nation's latest symbol of racial unrest, there are two waves of protesters. Call them the A team and the B team.

The A team comes out in the early evening, and its demonstrations are largely peaceful. These are people committed to the idea of non-violent protest. They are usually done by about 11 p.m. Many of them have jobs, and they have to work the next day.

These are people like Cynthia Favored, a St. Louis community activist who says she has joined the Ferguson demonstrations every night since they started Aug. 10. She says she goes home by about 10:30 each night. "I go out there to show my support for our young people and for the Brown family," she says.

They are people like Bishop Edwin Bass, who runs a St. Louis program for the Church of God in Christ that works to improve the quality of life in American cities. He's been at the protests every night. "The vast majority of the people out there are quite sincere protesters," he says. "But there's a small percentage of people out there who have a totally different agenda that has nothing to do with Michael Brown.

"They're kind of out there stoking the crowd," Bass says. "Some of these anarchists have provided the young men with Molotov cocktails and encouraged them to throw them."
Those are the B-team protesters, the people referred to by Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson as "a dangerous dynamic in the night" and "agitators and criminals."  He told CNN on Thursday: "There are some outsiders. There's a lot of people who live here … We can't just blame it on outside instigators."
Of 75 protesters arrested Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, none was from Ferguson, but 60 were from Missouri, including 12 from the adjacent city of St. Louis, according to jail records. The others were from such places as Des Moines, Austin, Chicago, Cincinnati,  Brooklyn and the Bronx, N.Y., and Mount Vernon, Ill.

Working class people such as myself, come home from work. Then we would walk about protesting for one to two hours. Then we would go home no later than 9:00 pm because we have to get up in the mornings to go to work.

Its the idle young adults and teenagers who have nothing to do who come out at 11:00 at night and commit the mischief and looting.

Quote:Every week at least 2 black people are killed by policemen in America.

why the wide gap May ::confused::

its like every 28 hours or so..

but we have company now!  the police now  kill a white male every 42 hours.