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What have the protests accomplished?

5/26 4 officers fired for murdering George Floyd 5/27 Charges dropped for Kenneth Walker (Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend, who police accused of killing her) 5/28 University of Minnesota cancels contract with police 5/28 3rd precinct police station neutralized by protesters 5/28 Minneapolis transit union refuses to bring police officers to protests or transport arrested protesters 5/29 Activists commandeer Minneapolis hotel to provide shelter to homeless 5/29 Former officer Chauvin arrested and charged with murder 5/29 Louisville Mayor suspends “no-knock” warrants 5/30 US Embassies across Africa condemn police murder of George Floyd 5/30 Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison takes over prosecution of the murdering officer 5/30 Transport Workers Union refuses to help NYPD transport arrests protesters 5/30 Maryland lawmakers forming work group on police reform, accountability 5/31 2 abusive officers fired for pulling a couple out of their car and tasing them - Atlanta, GA 6/1 Minneapolis public schools end contract with police 6/1 Confederate monument removed after being toppled by protesters - Birmingham, AL 6/1 CA prosecutors launch campaign to stop DAs from accepting police union money 6/1 Tulsa Mayor agrees to not renew Live PD contract 6/1 Louisville police chief fired after shooting of David Mcatee 6/1 Congress begins bipartisan push to cut off police access to military gear 6/1 Atlanta announces plans to create a task force and public database to track police brutality in metro Atlanta area 6/2 Minneapolis AFL-CIO calls for resignation of police union president Bob Kroll, a vocal white supremest 6/2 Pittsburgh transit union announces refusal to transport police officers or arrest protesters 6/2 Racist ex-mayor Frank Rizzo statue removed in Philadelphia 6/2 6 abusive officers charged for violence against residents and protesters - Atlanta, GA 6/2 Civil rights investigation of Minneapolis Police Dept launched 6/2 San Francisco resolution to prevent law enforcement from hiring officers with history of misconduct 6/2 Survey indicates that 64% of those polled are sympathetic to protesters, 47% disapprove of police handling of the protests, and 54% think the burning down of the Minneapolis police precinct was fully or partially justified 6/2 Trenton NJ announces policing reforms 6/2 Minneapolis City Council members consider disbanding the police 6/2 Confederate statue removed from Alexandria, VA 6/3 Officer fired for tweets promoting violence against protesters - Denver, CO 6/3 Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art cut ties with the MPD 6/3 Chauvin charges upgraded to second degree murder, remaining 3 officers also charged and taken into custody 6/3 Richmond VA Mayor Stoney announces RPD reform measures: establish “Marcus” alert for folks experiencing mental health crises, establish independent Citizen Review Board, an ordinance to remove Confederate monuments, and implement racial equity study 6/3 County commissioners deny proposal for $23 million expansion of Fulton County jail 6/3 Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board unanimously votes to sever ties with MPD 6/3 Seattle withdraws request to end federal oversight/consent decree of police department 6/3 Breonna Taylor’s case reopened 6/3 Louisville police department (Breonna Taylor’s murderers) will now be under review from an outside agency, which will include review on training, bias-free policing and accountability 6/3 Colorado lawmakers introduce a police reform bill that includes body cam laws, repealing the “fleeing felon” statute, and banning chokeholds 6/3 Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announces plans to reduce funding to police department by $150M and instead invest in minority communities 6/4 Virginia governor announces plans to remove Robert E. Lee statue from Richmond 6/4 Portland schools superintendent discontinues presence of armed police officers in schools 6/4 MBTA (Metro Boston) board orders that buses wont transport police to protests, or protesters to police 6/4 King County Labor Federation issues ultimatum to police unions: admit to and address racism in Seattle PD, or be removed 6/5 City of Minneapolis bans all chokeholds by police 6/5 Racist ex-mayor Hubbard statue removed - Dearborn, MI 6/5 NFL condemns racism and admits it should have listened to players’ protests 6/5 California Governor Gavin Newsom calls for statewide use-of-force standard made along with community leaders and ban on carotid holds 6/5 2 Buffalo officers suspended within a day of pushing 75 year old protester to the ground, and lying about it 6/5 2 NYPD officers suspended after videos of violence to protesters 6/5 The US Marines bans display of the Confederate flag 6/5 Dallas adopts a “duty to intervene” rule that requires officers to stop other cops who are engaging in excessive use of force 6/5 Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax releases an 11-point action plan for immediate police reforms 6/6 Statue of Confederate general Williams Carter Wickham torn down - Richmond, VA 6/6 2 Buffalo officers charged with second-degree assault for shoving elderly man 6/6 San Francisco Mayor London Breed announces effort to defund police and redirect funds to Black community 6/7 Frank Rizzo mural removed, to be replaced with new artwork - Philadelphia, PA 6/7 Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband the police department, invest in proven community-led public safety 6/7 Protesters in Bristol topple statue of slave trader Edward Colston, throw it in the river 6/7 NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio vows for the first time to cut funding for NYPD, redirect to social services 6/7 A Virginia police officer faces charges after using a stun gun on a black man 6/8 NY State Assembly passes the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act 6/8 Democrats in Congress unveil a bill to rein in bias and excessive force in policing 6/8 Black lawmakers block a legislative session in Pennsylvania to demand action on police reform 6/8 France bans police use of chokeholds 6/8 Seattle council members join calls to defund police department 6/8 Boston reevaluates how it funds police department 6/8 Honolulu Police Commission nominees voice support for more transparency, reforms 6/8 Rights groups and Floyd’s family call for a UN inquiry into American policing and help with systemic police reform

No, it’s not enough, but this is only the beginning. Keep fighting!!!

(This list comes from Mara Ahmed’s blog post and was compiled by Fahd Ahmed; I added sources and new entries. Please reblog with further additions.)

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A whiskey vending machine shown at the Second Automatic Vending Exhibition in London, 1960. .

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Spotlight on James Baldwin

Over the course of the 1960s, the FBI amassed almost two thousand documents in an investigation into one of America’s most celebrated minds. The subject of this inquiry was a writer named James Baldwin. At the time, the FBI investigated many artists and thinkers, but most of their files were a fraction the size of Baldwin’s. During the years when the FBI hounded him, he became one of the best-selling Black authors in the world. So what made James Baldwin loom so large in the imaginations of both the public and the authorities?

Born in Harlem in 1924, he was the oldest of nine children. At age fourteen, he began to work as a preacher. By delivering sermons, he developed his voice as a writer, but also grew conflicted about the Church’s stance on racial inequality and homosexuality.

After high school, he began writing novels and essays while taking a series of odd jobs. But the issues that had driven him away from the Church were still inescapable in his daily life. Constantly confronted with racism and homophobia, he was angry and disillusioned, and yearned for a less restricted life. So in 1948, at the age of 24, he moved to Paris on a writing fellowship.

From France, he published his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, in 1953. Set in Harlem, the book explores the Church as a source of both repression and hope. It was popular with both black and white readers. As he earned acclaim for his fiction, Baldwin gathered his thoughts on race, class, culture and exile in his 1955 extended essay, Notes of a Native Son.

Meanwhile, the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum in America. Black Americans were making incremental gains at registering to vote and voting, but were still denied basic dignities in schools, on buses, in the work force, and in the armed services. Though he lived primarily in France for the rest of his life, Baldwin was deeply invested in the movement, and keenly aware of his country’s unfulfilled promise. 

He had seen family, friends, and neighbors spiral into addiction, incarceration and suicide.He believed their fates originated from the constraints of a segregated society.In 1963, he published The Fire Next Time, an arresting portrait of racial strife in which he held white America accountable, but he also went further, arguing that racism hurt white people too.In his view, everyone was inextricably enmeshed in the same social fabric. He had long believedthat “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

Baldwin’s role in the Civil Rights movement went beyond observing and reporting. He also traveled through the American South attending rallies giving lectures of his own.   He debated both white politicians and black activists, including Malcolm X, and served as a liaison between black activists and intellectuals and white establishment leaders like Robert Kennedy. 

Because of Baldwin’s unique ability to articulate the causes of social turbulence in a way that white audiences were willing to hear, Kennedy and others tended to see him as an ambassador for black Americans—a label Baldwin rejected. And at the same time, his faculty with words led the FBI to view him as a threat. Even within the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin could sometimes feel like an outsider for his choice to live abroadas well as his sexuality, which he explored openly in his writing at a time when homophobia ran rampant.

Throughout his life, Baldwin considered it his role to bear witness. Unlike many of his peers, he lived to see some of the victories of the Civil Rights movement, but the continuing racial inequalities in the United States weighed heavily on him. 

Though he may have felt trapped in his moment in history, his words have made generations of people feel known, while guiding them toward a more nuanced understanding of society’s most complex issues.

From the TED-Ed Lesson Notes of a native son: the world according to James Baldwin - Christina Greer

Animation by Gibbons Studio

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The art Of Troy Guia

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In going through the photographs in the Beinecke digital library at Yale, I came across a series of letters, papers, and manuscripts of the artists photographed in Carl Van Vechten’s studio.

My heart lingered with Zora Neale Hurston and settled on Harlem Slanguage. It made its first appearance in 1942 in the American Mercury. Using my phone, I took some visual notes, here’s a few.

instagram.com/blvckvrchives

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“The Great Migration” makes it sound like a bunch of people just packed up their bags headed for better jobs and homes—no different than the recent trend of Amazon-ian and Apple-American tech nerds moving in droves from Silicon Valley to greener, more affordable pastures in the former Rust Belt. In reality, the stakes for African Americans in the 20th century were much grimmer and urgent—they were moving to save their lives, as Bryan Stevenson, the racial justice advocate behind the lynching memorial and museum, regularly emphasizes. It probably should be called The Great Massive Forced Exodus.

It’s Time to Stop Calling it ‘The Great Migration’ -- my latest at Citylab

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They were a bunch of Lara Crofts and Indiana Joneses invading otherwise off-limits terrains in fashion districts from Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue to Detroit’s Livernois Ave, seeking exotic items like Fendi sunglasses, to swipe off counters, and then, taking off through an obstacle course of security detectors and mall cops.

Once they made it back to their home bases, they told the stories to their peers of how they claimed their prizes, flaunting their unpaid-for wares all the while. They were called “boosters,” and perhaps understandably, mainstream society has never had much nice to say about them. Yet, they are as integral to the urban landscape as are grafitti artists, DJs, and skateboarders, but with far less representation in pop culture celebrating their existence.

The artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards—named in 2013 as one of Huffington Post’s 30 black artists under the age of 40 to know—is hoping to change that. Her new exhibit, “Fly Girl Fly,” which opened last month at the Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York, is an ode to the boosters she grew up with in Detroit. It’s a series of collages crafted from acrylics, spray paint, glitter, tulle, lace, and watercolors, showcasing dark-skinned girls in cornrowed hair draped in and surrounded by presumably stolen threads. Richmond-Edwards says her exhibit honors “the complex relationship between black women and luxury clothing.” The exhibit runs through April 28, 2018.

Read more at Citylab: The Art of Boostin’

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For “Sanctuary,” an exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York City, artist Derrick Adams created pieces based on the Negro Motorist Green Book to examine travel through the lenses of history, fashion, and architecture. The Green Book, as it is otherwise known, was a compilation of businesses—gas stations, restaurants, motels, clubs—across the country that were willing to serve African Americans in the mid-20th century.

In the decades before the Civil Rights Act, businesses could discriminate along racial lines with impunity. African Americans relocating, traveling for business, or simply vacationing with their families could find themselves stranded in a sea of establishments that were whites-only. Along the storied Route 66, six out of the eight states that housed the road had official segregation laws on the books. There were also “sundown towns” scattered all across the country, which had explicit or implicit rules about non-whites leaving city borders before the sun set.

When creating the show, Adams says, “The very first thing I thought about was access and boundaries. The way the exhibit was constructed, I want to have this fence going through the space to automatically stop the viewer and make them realize it’s something they have to go through to get to somewhere else.”

An Art Show Inspired by The Green Book

[Photos: Terrence Jennings and Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and Design]

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The Lumpen, the Black Panthers’ singing group, performing at the Boycott of Bill’s Liquors in Oakland. Clark Bailey, also known as Santa Rita, was dancing. Michael Torrence, front right, and James Mott were drumming. Photograph by Stephen Shames (1971)

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I don’t ever wanna hear a trump supporter say that kneeling during the national anthem is “disrespecting our troops” ever again. 

YOUR president just told a pregnant widow of a fallen soldier that her loved one “knew what he signed up for”. this is honestly the worst it can get as far as “disrespecting our troops”……… this is fucking repulsive. 

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“We can’t educate people out of this problem.”--UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/education-and-economic-mobility/541041/

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DACA activists erect, then tear down, confederate statue of Jeff Sessions

On Wednesday, activists with the Latinx-rights group Mijente marched to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., where they first erected, and then tore down a statue of Attorney General Jeff Sessions in confederate garb.“Jeff Sessions is a living monument to the Confederacy,” Mijente director Marisa Franco said in a statement announcing the action.The protest took place in response to the administration’s decision to endthe Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program which protected hundreds of thousands of young undocumented people who arrived in the U.S. as children. The president had Sessions make the official announcement on behalf of the Department of Justice. Read more.

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BERKELEY, CA—Vowing to derail whichever event it is by any means necessary, local Antifa organizers announced plans Monday to disrupt an upcoming neo-Nazi rally or whatever else is going on that day. “We will stop at nothing to prevent these vile fucking neo-Nazi hatemongers from gathering, or, if not them, someone else,” said Sarah Jackson, 26, adding that the only way to end the spread of fascism is to physically confront Nazis, peaceful right-wing protesters, or just random people going about their daily lives. “We need to tell these Hitler-loving fucks or whoever else is standing there, ‘Get out of our city!’ Remember, we’re talking about white supremacist terrorists, people running errands on their lunch breaks, or a group of tourists, so if we have to throw a punch or two, then so fucking be it.” At press time, black-clad Antifa demonstrators screaming “Fascists, go home!” had swarmed a Scandinavian street festival.

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WASHINGTON—Beseeching them to pursue a less destructive path with their lives, the nation begged disaffected youth gravitating towards neo-Nazism to get high and play Xbox instead, sources reported Friday. “We don’t really care if you get blazed and play video games, sit home and jerk off, or shoplift a bunch of shit at a convenience store as long as you don’t march down the street waving swastikas,” said Holyoke, CO, resident Gregory Stamp, echoing the sentiments of the entire American populace in urging restless and angry young people who find themselves tempted by fascist ideology to try stuffing their faces with as many Cheetos as they want or playing the drums as hard as they can at literally any hour of the day. “Go ahead and sleep until four in the afternoon, then do whippets until you pass out. You want beer and cigarettes? We’re buying. Please just stay away from the white supremacy shit and definitely do not shoot anybody.” At press time, the nation was reminding sullen adolescents who were starting to read about white genocide on neo-Nazi websites that they could just as easily use that time to view disturbing hardcore pornography.

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Teen Vogue for the win again

Teen Vogue took on white supremacy over Teen Choice Awards. We spoke to their editor about the decision.

Also, here are the donation links to the medical fund, UVA black student alliance and BLM chapter.