Black Agenda Radio for Week of June 5, 2017
ACLU Sues “Constitution-Free Zone” Mississippi County
The sheriff in Madison County, Mississippi, runs the jurisdiction like a “Constitution-free zone,” stopping people “on the streets, asking them for IDs, searching them, asking them to take off their shoes, cuffing them,” based solely on the color of their skin, according to a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Staff attorney Joshua Tom said the ACLU hopes the suit will lead to establishment of “national standards” for police behavior.
National Black Leadership is Largely Absent or Incoherent
In the current political climate, Black and progressive activists should focus on locally-based efforts, said author and veteran organizer Kevin Alexander Gray. “We don’t have anybody on the national scene that’s saying anything coherent,” said Gray, speaking from his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina. “They’re saying those sound bites to stay on TV, and smiling and skinnin’ and grinnin’,” but “they’re disconnected from the struggle, disconnected from their history. People see them as frauds, and that’s a good thing, as we organize at the local level.”
Media Interest in Police Brutality Waning
“In terms of the front pages of major newspapers in this country, police brutality has not been covered to the degree it was in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and others,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), in Newark, New Jersey. POP, which was founded 37 years ago, last week held its 70th weekly protest against police brutality. “We have to keep demonstrating, we have to keep fighting, in order to keep public attention on the issue,” said Hamm.
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, notes that even trailblazing prison abolition scholar Angela Davis, herself a former political prisoner, underestimated
The fight for a Green New Deal is bringing together a “multiracial, multiclass coalition” that is meeting their environmental, economic and psychological needs “in a far more efficient and better w
Blacks and Native Americans continue to pose a threat to the “conquistador white settler nation,” agues Tiffany King, author of “The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black
If the Democrats continue to behave as if the working class is white, they won’t be able to count on huge Black turnouts at the polls, said activist and public interest attorney Malaik
John Conyers’ long career is a window on the decline of Black politics in the two generations since the demise of the mass Black movement.
