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…
Talking to the people in Youngstown, Ohio, that the national media usually ignores. By Henry Graber, The Slate — YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—In 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Monday—when Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant…
By William K. Alcorn, The Vindicator — Ron Daniels, former Youngstown community activist and television personality, introduced as one of the founders of Youngstown Kwanzaa 50 years ago, paid a surprise visit to the first day of this year’s weeklong event that celebrates African heritage in African-American culture. “When we started Kwanzaa here in the former West Federal Street YMCA, we were among the first in the United States to celebrate…
By Neil J. Young, HuffPost — It was his first day on the job. A 12-year-old kid with a newspaper route, that rite of passage for so many American boys and girls. Uriah Sharp gathered the pile of newspapers he was to deliver and set out with his mother and older brother to their assigned neighborhood of Upper Arlington, Ohio, an affluent Columbus suburb. That’s where Sharp, a young African-American boy…
Anti-fascist volunteer Canute Frankson explained his motivation in a letter home in 1937: “We will build us a new society—a society of peace and plenty. There will be no color line, no jim crow trains, no lynching. That is why, my dear, I’m here in Spain.” By Peter Carroll, BlackPast.org — Approximately 90 African Americans fought in Spain during the civil war that engulfed that nation between 1936 and 1939.…