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Trayvon Martin Murder

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of April 16, 2012

Mon, 04/16/2012 - 22:44 — Glen Ford

 

Tear Down U.S. Prison Gulag

“It’s a counterinsurgency before there is an insurgency.” That’s how Los Angeles activist Clyde Young views America’s incarceration of 2.4 million people, most of them Black and Latino. The Stop Mass Incarceration Network plans actions in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area on April 19, a National Day of Resistance to Mass Incarceration. Statutes like Florida’s Stand Your Grand Law encourage racist vigilantism, said Young. “They’re nothing but new forms of lynch laws, where any citizen…can shoot a person down on the street, and be exonerated.” In Atlanta, activist Joey Johnson said George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer, was “acting out a larger, racist societal project. It requires a deeper, systemic change if we’re going to get to the root of it, and not constantly be dealing with the phenomenon.”

Occupy Harlem to Rally for “All the Trayvons”

“It’s essential for us to build a united front against racist killings,” said Dr. William Sales, an organizer of Occupy Harlem’s rally and march, April 21. “We have to move against what has emerged as a New Jim Crow. It’s really a form of terrorism that is more associated with the Old Jim Crow than with law enforcement,” said Sales, an associate professor of African Studies at Seton Hall University. For information, call 646.812.5188.

Justice Wanted: Plan Needed

“What appears to be an escalation of terror against Black people, is also routine practice,” said Kali Akuno, of the U.S. Human Rights Network, in Atlanta. Akuno is circulating a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice, which includes a data base on recent racist killings of Blacks. Young people “are being force fed this narrative that we have somehow magically emerged into some kind of post-racial society.” Instead, said Akuno, Blacks must “organize into formations that exercise power to create the kind of society that you want.”

Housing Settlement Almost Worthless to Underwater Homeowners

Activist David Hungerford led angry members of the Coalition to Save Our Homes to New Jersey’s state capital in Trenton, to demand reductions in mortgage principals. The $25 billion settlement between the nation’s state attorney generals and the big banks “broadly speaking, does almost nothing” for homeowners that are “underwater” to the tune of $700 billion. The top state law enforcement officers “talk with the people who perpetrated predatory lending, but they won’t talk to the victims,” said Hungerford.

Black Teachers Pushed Out in Denver

African American teachers are being “pushed, en mass to retirement, fired, put on disciplinary hearing or on leave” in the Denver public schools, because of the Obama administration’s so-called “turnaround” program, said Cozette Hammock-West, a retired teacher with the Alliance of Neighborhood Organizations for Justice for African Americans. Black educators are replaced by “young white teachers, most of them from the Teach for America program, where they are not even trained to teach.”

A U.S. Chapter for ILPS

On May 19, in Chicago, the International League of People’s Struggle, representing 200 organizations, worldwide, will welcome its newly organized U.S. chapter. “It’s not only people in those countries that are being invaded and bombed by the United States” that need solidarity, said Bill Doar, a vice-chairman of ILPS. “We, too, need international solidarity to fight against the power of Wall Street and U.S. corporations.” ILPS delegates will also take part in mass demonstrations against the NATO summit meeting in the city.

A Real Socialist for President

Stephan Durham, who’s seeking the presidential nomination on the Peace and Freedom Party line, says he is THE socialist candidate in the race. “Capitalism is addicted to war,” said the Freedom Socialist Party member. “Fundamental change” is needed in the U.S., “so that the world will have a chance to breathe.”

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Economic Boycotts Over Trayvon Martin Are Cynical Misdirections of a Potential Movement

Tue, 04/10/2012 - 23:40 — Bruce A. Dixon

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Some so-called civil rights leaders talk up economic boycotts over Trayvon Martin, the same way some of them did over Troy Davis a few months ago, and the state of Ariizona before that. But what if economic boycotts really don't work for stuff like that? What are these so-called leaders really doing, and why?

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After Troy Davis, After Trayvon Martin: What A Real Justice Movement Will Look Like

Wed, 04/04/2012 - 15:45 — Bruce A. Dixon

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

What would a real movement for justice in the wake of Troy Davis and Trayvon Martin look like? How can we actually engage the authorities, and the Obama administration with concrete demands to prevent the next Trayvon Martins? Our friends at the US Human Rights Network have a suggestion worth listening to....

Justice for Trayvon Martin Also Means Joining the International Struggle Against U.S. Lawlessness

Wed, 04/04/2012 - 00:16 — Cynthia McKinney

by Cynthia McKinney

“If the number of persons murdered by the police were included in the sum of executions, America would rank third in executions globally – just behind Iran.” The Trayvon Martin horror reminds us that U.S. foreign policy mirrors its domestic behavior towards Blacks and browns. “If leadership inside the U.S. will do this to their own citizens, what is done to others outside the U.S. should come as no surprise.”

Trayvon Martin and Crime in the Suites

Wed, 04/04/2012 - 00:14 — Werner Lange

by Werner Lange

Florida State Prosecutor Norman R. Wolfinger, who was forced to recuse himself from the Trayvon Martin case after trying to derail it, has shown a “disturbing pattern of selective prosecution and institutionalized racism” over two decades. Among many intrigues involving race and power, “Wolfinger also failed to file any charges against two White security guards who shot and killed a 16-year old Black boy on July 16, 2005.”

Trayvon Martin’s Moment Should Spark a Movement

Wed, 04/04/2012 - 00:11 — Wilmer J. Leon III

 

by Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III

For Trayvon Martin’s death to lead to social transformation, decisive leadership is required. Not only can boycotts of Florida’s tourist industry be organized, but “human and civil rights organizations should be meeting and strategizing with the Occupy Movements as they plan for their spring offensives, tying Trayvon’s moment to their movements.”

Trayvon Martin and the Need for an Independent Human Rights Movement

Wed, 04/04/2012 - 00:08 — Ajamu Baraka

 

by Ajamu Baraka

The author calls for a “National Alliance for Racial Justice and Human Rights” to escape the constraining web of “liberal” cause funders that lack “any connection to grassroots organizations or popular social change networks, alliances or coalitions.” Genuine human rights defenders realize that comprehensive demands can “only be realized when there is a shift in power away from the capitalist state and the white supremacist Republican and Democratic parties.”

The Idiocy that Executed Trayvon Martin: Marian Hammer of the NRA

Tue, 04/03/2012 - 23:59 — michael hureaux...

Eshu’s blues by michael hureaux perez

The National Rifle Association is a vector of violent death, and “white Amurrikin cowboy fantasies will not be satisfied until this land is mindlessly purged with blood, to paraphrase John Brown.” The nation was far safer 40-something years ago, when the right to bear arms “was defended by such stalwarts of the 2nd Amendment as the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and the American Indian Movement.

Trayvon Martin, Troy Davis and the 2012 Election

Wed, 03/28/2012 - 15:31 — Bruce A. Dixon

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

When Obama likened Trayvon Martin to his imaginary son, and that there ought to be a national debate about something or other, what did that mean? It might mean that he wants the votes of those outraged by the murder, but Obama isn't prepared do do much of anything to deserve them beyond claiming to feel our pain.

Freedom Rider: Obama and Trayvon Martin

Tue, 03/27/2012 - 22:32 — Margaret Kimberley

 

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The “master of marketing and fakery” was compelled by circumstances to appear concerned about his least favored people: young Black males and their families. President Obama’s most loyal constituents, who usually ask nothing of him, were demanding both an emotional and a substantive response to the Trayvon Martin killing. This was “all very problematic for the president, whose political success is the result of distancing himself from black people at best, and vilifying them at his worst moments.”

White Picket Fences, White Innocence

Tue, 03/27/2012 - 22:32 — Sikivu Hutchinson

 

by Sikivu Hutchinson

The whole country was taught the intrinsic goodness of Dick and Jane, the freckled young picture book stars of the American dream. A more ancient social primer informed us of the inherent criminality of kids with names like Trayvon. George Zimmerman, the watchdog of a gated community, “was upholding the time-honored tradition of white homeowners’ associations that protected white communities from dark interlopers.” His “lesser white status” as a person of partial Latino ancestry, “is part of what legitimized Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.”

What About Trayvon's Right to Self-Defense?

Tue, 03/27/2012 - 22:31 — Wilmer J. Leon III

 

by Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III

Whose right to self-defense trumps in the Trayvon Martin case – the unarmed Black teenager or his killer? The killer who stalked Martin claims he got the worst of a fight, and then fired his weapon. But, “to accept Zimmerman’s version of events and relieve him of any culpability is to ignore Trayvon Martin’s right to walk from the 7-11 back to his place of residence unthreatened.”

America: A Global Serial Killer

Tue, 03/27/2012 - 22:31 — Solomon Comissiong

 

by Solomon Comissiong

The United States is a bizarre and dangerous country, a nation with “sociopathic tendencies riddled throughout its institutionally racist society.” Like a psychopath unfazed by other people’s pain, the general American (white) population appears “completely desensitized to what should be seen as a massive, one sided, blood bath” committed in their name.

Assassinations at Home and Abroad

Wed, 03/21/2012 - 11:06 — Jemima Pierre

 

by BAR editor and columnist Jemima Pierre

The rule of law is everywhere in retreat. Racist vigilante justice trumps Blacks’ right to life in Florida and a growing number of “shoot first” states, while the U.S. president claims the right to kill at will, internationally. “The Florida laws are the local articulation of a US foreign policy that deploys murder and mayhem at any sign of a threat.” Eric Holder, the nation’s top lawman, condones assassination without trial, yet “is now tasked to investigate Trayvon Martin’s murder.”

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