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Eric Garner on left, Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter on the right.

Why Do White Mass Killers Always Seem to Live Another Day?

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — Connor Betts, the mass shooter in Dayton, Ohio is an anomaly. He is an anomaly not because he murdered nine persons less than 24 hours after Patrick Crusius massacred 20 in El Paso. He is different because he was gunned down by Dayton police. That’s not the usual pattern. The pictures of Crusius being gently handcuffed and calmly being talked to by arresting officers after…

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The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after a truck bomb explosion, April, 1995

White Power: At Home and Abroad

By Commentaries/Opinions

Two differently themed books complement each other; one on the rise of white power at home and the other on anti-communist adventures abroad show the domestic scourge nurtured by foreign experiences even as the global Right employed its services. By Thomas Meany, London Review of Books — In the spring of 1975, as America’s war in Vietnam drew to its grim conclusion, a new magazine targeted readers who did not…

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Elijah Cummings

Long Before Trump’s Tweets, Baltimore Had Become a ‘Target.’ Here’s How Segregation Helped Create Its Problems

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Mahita Gajanan, Time — State leaders, city officials and resident and several Democratic presidential candidates have rushed to defend the city of Baltimore after President Donald Trump lobbed an attack against Rep. Elijah Cummings and his Maryland district, which includes much of the city. In tweets over the weekend, Trump claimed that Cummings’ Baltimore-area district is “considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States,” and called it…

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Activists with Black Lives Matter protest in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, Tuesday, July 16, 2019, in the wake of a decision by federal prosecutors who declined to bring civil rights charges against New York City police Officer Daniel Pantaleo, in the 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner.

America’s deadly wealth pyramid: Eric Garner stood his ground and was crushed for it

By Commentaries/Opinions

Garner scratched-out a living in the gray market. “Not today,” he said when cops came for him. Now he’s dead. By Bob Hennelly, Salon — On the fifth anniversary of Eric Garner’s homicide we were flooded with the video images of his takedown by NYPD officers. What’s been lost in this retrospective was Mr. Garner’s defiant stand minutes earlier when he was first confronted by the police for the economic “high…

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From left to right: Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib

Do We Want the America of Frederick Douglass or Donald Trump?

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Walter G. Moss — One version of America is that of President Trump, whose recent tweets led the U. S. House of Representatives to condemn his “comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans.” His slogan “Make America Great Again,” his attempts to limit voting, and his pandering to Christian evangelicals are not-so-subtle signals that he perceives himself as defending the fortress of white, primarily male and Christian, dominance…

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Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage of 1918

No More Mary Turners

By Dr. Julianne Malveaux

By Julianne Malveaux — Mary Turner was lynched on May 19. 1918 because she dared raise her voice. Her husband, Hayes Turner, was among 13 people lynched in two weeks in and around Valdosta, Georgia. The lynchings took place because one brutal white man, who was known to abuse workers so severely that he was only able to attract workers by getting them through the convict labor system, beat the…

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