Anti-Latino Laws Ignite The South

Anti-Latino Laws Ignite The South

by Lamont Lilly | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

In its original format, Alabama’s Beason-Hammon Act granted school resource officers the right to badger 5^th graders on the basis of their immigration status. The state of Alabama, which passed the Beason-Hammon Act (or HB 56) in June of 2011, was the only state in the country requiring public school administrators to verify immigration data for new K-12 students. However, just two months ago in August of this year, the 11^thCircuit Court of Appeals struck down the student provision of HB 56, declaring it unconstitutional and a legal breach of Plyer vs. Doe, which mandates that states provide an education to all children, regardless of their immigration status. The 11^th Circuit also struck down Georgia’s HB 87, a state proposal to criminalize the “transporting and harboring of illegal immigrants,” a statute with anti-Latino written all over it, a proposal with no parallel within the U.S. system of federal law.

These recent rulings were key in dispelling the notion that individual states can create their own immigration regulations, bypassing federal authority. When initially proposed, Alabama’s HB 56 along with Georgia’s HB 87, were sold as valuable pieces of legislation that would boost local economies – laws that would crack down on the presence of those entering the U.S. illegally. Conservatives billed such bigotry as a quick fix to unemployment and poorly performing schools.  Instead, such rogue policies were a complete setback to Civil Rights and due process.  In Alabama, children of all ages were deterred from attending school and pursuing their education.  Many withdrew out of fear that their families could be deported if questioned about their immigration status. According to the U.S. Justice Department, over 13% of Latino children withdrew over the one year HB 56 operated before federal intervention. Instead of teaching Geometry, classroom instructors were fishing for birth certificates.

As for those local economies and decreasing unemployment rates, Alabama’s number one industry, Agriculture, was damn near decimated. We’re talking an agricultural sector accustomed to generating over $5.5 billion per year. Industries dependent upon migrant labor, like Alabama’s poultry operations, were devastated. Small farming operations were brought to a halt, as valuable workers were scared indoors. Others simply migrated for the purpose of mere safety. Such complications have also been used as justification for not paying temporary workers – hired and fired a month later, and with no pay to show for it.  Many Latinos have refused to report crimes, whether legal or undocumented, any potential scrutiny by local law enforcement could initiate an ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) investigation.

Though portions of these bills were repealed, human rights supporters have continued to sound the alarm, for this branding of social control affects all poor and oppressed people – creating fear and frustration through alienation. Recently, the state of Alabama has challenged the ruling of the 11^th Circuit’s three-judge panel and has asked for a new hearing. Though particular provisions were found to be outright unconstitutional, a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^thAmendment, state officials are arguing that federal courts overstepped state jurisdiction. Unfortunately, it seems that like Arizona, Alabama is positioning itself to take its immigration law all the way to the Supreme Court. For those of us who are U.S. History buffs, one can’t help but draw a direct correlation to Governor George Wallace’s stand against federal authorities in the 1960’s. His hard-line for segregation against the U.S. Supreme Court aroused racists nationwide.

In addition to federal judges, HB 56 has also caught the attention of President Obama. Even Barack has gone on record stating that “it’s a bad law.” But then again, the Obama Administration deported 396,000 immigrants last year.

While members of congress, federal judges and state legislators continue to debate, human rights defenders applaud what little progress has been made. We know damn well however, that those of us who despise such racist bigotry must continue to raise our voices. Deleting a few provisions isn’t going to be enough here, not while racial profiling still runs rampant. When traffic stops and roadblocks become immigrant obstacle courses, ethics become a serious matter of legal concern. If justice fails to prevail in this case, such structural hate could begin to blanket the entire southern Black Belt, setting new precedents for states like South Carolina, Georgia and Arkansas.

In response to this year long battle, Immigrants Rights activists have stayed the course. Protestors have deployed an array of tactics such as rallies and community forums, teach-ins and street blockades. DREAM activists and immigrant youth have conducted walk-outs. Workers and adult cooperatives have organized major strikes. Latino customers have chosen to boycott local businesses, while tens of thousands have convened in solidarity. Organizations as the United Steelworkers Union, ACLU and Immigrant Justice League have joined forces. The NAACP and Southern Poverty Law Center are also on board. Ironically, Birmingham’s 16^th Street Baptist Church has served as a rest haven and planning headquarters, the same church bombed by racists in 1963.

The bottom line is that HB 56 is a law that continues to ostracize and divide, conjuring fear, heightening the level of innocent victims and false arrests – perpetuating a complete violation of civil liberties. These anti-Hispanic acts aren’t merely a matter of disenfranchisement. Latino immigrants are being denied the right to even exist in some states, to barely breathe without some “officer of the law” riding their backs with an iron boot. True, the recent rulings by the 11^thCircuit Court of Appeals are great, but there should be no compromise with laws that encourage hate. For those of us who are abreast of such racist regulations, let us spread the word and continue to organize. For those of you who are learning of such injustice for the first time, join the movement’s noble cause. We the People say, “freedom for all,” and down with HB 56!

***

Lamont Lilly is a contributing editor with the Triangle Free Press, Human Rights Delegate with Witness for Peace and organizer with Workers World Socialist Party.  He resides in Durham, N.C.  Follow on him Twitter @LamontLilly

We’ve Been Here Before: Notes on The Colored Waiting Room

We’ve Been Here Before: Notes on The Colored Waiting Room  
(for Arthur Cleveland Neal, Jr.)

by Mark Anthony Neal

I love trains. In another life, I might have been a Pullman porter or a big band musician, who had the opportunity to travel the country, albeit in segregated coach cars—like the one Homer A. Plessy helped transform into the legal precedent that we were forced to live with for more than half-a-century, creating the conditions for what we called the Chitlin’ Circuit.

One of my most precious childhood memories is of traveling back down south to my father’s home state of Georgia.  This was 1970, riding the old Pennsylvania Central trains, a year before the government subsidized Amtrak was created. A literal child of the Civil Rights Movement, I was oblivious to about  segregation and colored waiting rooms. This was a brave new world for my parents, who both had vivid memories of colored waiting rooms and colored coach cars and,  I suspect that part of the interests in the trip was the chance for them to see just how much things might have changed.

At four, I was not that much attuned to my father’s gestures, but looking back some forty years later, I imagine it was quite a different experience for my dad, who had migrated to New York City only a decade earlier.  Indeed this was one of  my father’s first trips back to Georgia since he had left, and save his father’s death two years later, it was his last trip back down South.  I recall this trip so many years later, because it was the only trip I ever took with my father to the South; I’ve spent much of the past few years since his death, wishing I had had that opportunity to return with him to the land that birthed him.

As Guthrie Ramsey well understands, those colored waiting rooms, that necessary evil of interstate travel for far too many Black folks in the years before desegregation, were a source of shame, frustration, pain and trauma, yet as a broad metaphor for the private life of Blackness—a Blackness that was underneath the veil, underground, behind closed doors; a Blackness that still gives us the tools and the resources to dream a world that some once tried to deny us and others, including ourselves, still try to get us to forget.  Community. Family.

And it is in this will to forget that Dr. MusiQology Presents the Colored Waiting Room stands its ground in this remembering of remembering, this remembering of the forgetting, this remembering of the dreams, too countless to really remember, but that gets evoked with every bent note, every soulful gesture, every moan half-past the minute of midnight.  A seamless travel, buttressed by clickety-clack of those trains, through a history of our emotions, where terms like Soul, Jazz, Classical, Neo-Soul, Hip-Hop, R&B, are really just names on a page, and woefully inadequate to describe the that that we feel.

This breathlessness of Blackness, where the stank air of the status quo and the suffocating stench of “all deliberate speed” gets transformed to give us the air of life, liberty and the pursuit of justice.   This is what freedom sounds like.  This is what freedom smells like.  This is what freedom feels like.  A freedom that Little London, Guthrie’s grand-daughter, intuitively understands is hers, as it was her mother’s and her grandfather’s. Yes, we’ve been here before.

Kevin Alexander Gray on State Violence and the Murder of Troy Anthony Davis

Kevin Alexander Gray, author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics, spoke to Dennis Bernstein of KPFA Flashpoints Radio about state violence and the Georgia State murder of Troy Anthony Davis.

Kevin Powell: "Why Are We Killing Troy Davis"

Why Are We Killing Troy Davis?
by Kevin Powell | special to NewBlackMan

"To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice."-DESMOND TUTU

Unless something God-like and miraculous happens, Troy Davis, 42, is going to be executed tomorrow, Wednesday, September 21, 2011, at 7pm, by lethal injection at a state prison in Jackson, Georgia.

Let me say up front I feel great sorrow for the family of Mark MacPhail, the police officer who was shot and murdered on August 19, 1989. I cannot imagine the profound pain they've shouldered for 22 angst-filled years, hoping, waiting, and praying for some semblance of justice. Officer MacPhail will never come back to life, his wife, his two children, and his mother will never see him again. Under that sort of emotional and spiritual duress, I can imagine why they are convinced Troy Davis is the murderer of their beloved son, husband, and father.

But, likewise, I feel great sorrow for Troy Davis and his family. I don't know if Mr. Davis murdered Officer MacPhail or not. What I do know is that there is no DNA evidence linking him to the crime, that seven of nine witnesses have either recanted or contradicted their original testimonies tying him to the act, and that a gentleman named Sylvester "Redd" Coles is widely believed to be the actual triggerman. But no real case against Mr. Coles has ever been pursued.

So a man is going to be executed, murdered, in fact, under a dark cloud of doubt in a nation, ours, that has come to practice executions as effortlessly as we breath.

Be it Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, governor of Texas, and the 234 executions that have occurred under his watch (that fact was cheered loudly at a recent Republican debate), or the 152 executions when George W. Bush was governor of that state, we are a nation of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. Spiraling so far out of control that we are going to execute someone who may actually be innocent tomorrow.

I say we because the blood of Officer MacPhail and Troy Davis will be on the hands of us all. We Americans who fail to use our individual and collective voices to deal with the ugliness in our society that leads to violence in the first place, be they for economic crimes or because some of us have simply been driven mad by the pressures of trying to exist in a world that often marginalizes or rejects us. Thus our solution for many problems often becomes force, or violence. But it has long since been proven that the death penalty or capital punishment is not a deterrent, contrary to some folks' beliefs. Murders continue to happen every single day in America, as commonplace as apple pie, football, and Ford trucks.

I also say we because it is startling to me that Troy Davis could be on death row for twenty years, have his guilt be under tremendous doubt, yet save a few dedicated souls and organizations, there has not been a mass movement of support to save his life, to end the death penalty, not by well-meaning Black folks, not by well-meaning White folks, not by well-meaning folks of any stripe, and certainly not by influential Black folks who represent the corridors of power in places like Atlanta, with the exception of, say, Congressman John Lewis.

You wonder what the outcome of the parole board decision would have been if Black churches in Atlanta and other parts of Georgia, for example, had joined this cause to end the death penalty in America years back, if Black leaders had launched a sustained action much in the way their religious and spiritual foremothers and forefathers had done two generations before?

What could have been different if more Georgia ministers had the courage of Atlanta's Rev. Dr. Raphael Gamaliel Warnock, pastor of the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church once helmed by Dr. King? Dr. Warnock has been steadfast and outspoken, yet seemingly out there alone in his support of Troy Davis. I mean if there is ever a time for Black churches to practice a relevant ministry, as Dr. King once urged, is it not when a seeming injustice like the Troy Davis matter is right in front of our faces? When so many Black males are locked up in America's prisons? What is the point, really, of having a "men's ministry" at your church if it is not addressing one of the major problems of the 21st century, that of the Black male behind bars? Especially in a society, America, that incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth.

And you wonder how the five-person Georgia State Board of Pardons and Parole that, paradoxically, includes two Black males, including the head of the board, must feel. Had it not been for past legal injustices, like the Scottsboro Boys case of the 1930s or the vicious killing of Emmett Till in the 1950s, there would not have been a Civil Rights Movement, nor the placement of Blacks in places to balance the scales of justice, like that Georgia Parole Board. While I certainly do not think any Black person should get a pass just because they are Black, I do think, if you are an aware Black man, somewhere in your psyche has to be some residual memory of Black males being lynched in America, of Black male after Black male being sent to jail, or given the death penalty, under often flimsy charges and evidence. If there is a reasonable doubt, keep the case open until there is ultimate certainty-

Finally, incredibly ironic and tragic that this is happening while our first Black president is sitting in the White House. We, America, like to pat ourselves on the back and say job well done whenever there is a shred of racial or social progress in our fair nation. But then we habitually figure out ways to take one, two, several steps back, with this Troy Davis execution, with the rise of the Tea Party and its thinly-veiled racial paranoia politics, to push America right back to the good old says of segregation, Jim Crow, brute hatred of those who are different, while social inequalities run rampant like rats in the night.

And if you think Troy Davis' cause celebre has nothing to do with Jim Crow, then either you've not been to an American prison lately, or you simply are blind. I've been to many, across our country, and they are filled to the brim with mostly Black and Latino males (and some poor White males), including the majority of folks sitting on death row.

For sure, given my background of poverty, a single mother, an absent father, and violence and great economic despair in my childhood and teen years, but for the grace of God I could be one of those young Black or Latino males languishing in jail at this very moment. I could be, indeed, Troy Davis.

So I cannot simply view the Troy Davis case and execution as solely about the killing of Officer MacPhail. Yes, an injustice was done, a killing occurred, and I pray the truth really comes out one day.

But I am just as concerned about America's soul, of the morality tales we are text-messaging to ourselves, to the world, as we move Troy Davis from his cell one last time, to that room where a needle will blast death into his veins, suck the air from his throat, snatch life from his eyes.

While the family of Mr. Davis and the family of Officer MacPhail converge, one final time, to witness a death in progress-

Now two men will be dead, Officer MacPhail and Troy Davis, linked, forever, by the misfortune of our confusion, stereotypes, finger-pointing, and history of passing judgment without having every shred of the facts. I am Officer MacPhail, I am Troy Davis, and so are you. And you. And you, too.

And as my mother would say, have mercy on us all, Lawd, for we know not what we do-

 ***

Kevin Powell is an activist and public speaker based in Brooklyn, New York. A nationally acclaimed writer, Kevin is also the author or editor of 10 books. His 11th, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and The Ghost of Dr. King: And Other Blogs and Essays, will be published January 2012. Email him at kevin_powell, or follow him on Twitter @kevin_powell

"I Am Troy Davis" (video)

Grassroots International Rally to Stop the Execution of Troy Davis September 20th!!!

We are calling on All Activists, Artists, Grassroots, Secular, Non-secular and Every Day People to Organize and Take to Streets in Solidarity to Stop the scheduled execution of Troy Anthony Davis AN INNOCENT MAN who is scheduled to die on September 21st at 7pm in the State of Georgia!

STOP THE EXECUTION! FREE TROY DAVIS!

On March 28, 2011, the US Supreme Court failed to take up the appeal of Troy Anthony Davis, the Savannah, Ga. man whose scheduled execution has been halted three times in the past because of the growing evidence and public belief in his innocence.

Chatham County Superior Court Judge Penny Freesemann signed the death warrant for Davis on Tuesday Sept. 6th, marking the fourth time since 2007 that the state has a scheduled an execution for Davis. The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution in March by rejecting an appeal by Davis.

Department of Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens has set 7 p.m. at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson to carry out the sentence.

Meanwhile, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles has scheduled a 9 a.m. Sept. 19 clemency hearing to allow Davis' attorneys one final attempt to delay or commute the sentence, board spokesman Steven Hayes said Wednesday.

Troy Davis is an African American on death row in Georgia. Davis was convicted in the 1989 killing of a police officer despite what Amnesty International calls "overwhelming doubts about his guilt." No physical forensic evidence was presented at Davis' trial, and 7 of the 9 non-police witnesses have recanted their testimony, with at least two saying they were pressured by police to finger Davis as the killer.


WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1. Organize Rallies in you area

2. Set up teach-ins

3. Sign the Amnesty USA petition, asking the GA Board of Pardons & Parole to grant Troy clemency, and forward it to others :

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=6oJCLQPA...

4. Set up vigils
5. Call Georgia Governor Nathan Deal's office and ask him to grant Troy Clemency (404)656-1776
6. Call Georgia Board of Pardon and Paroles ask them to grant Troy Clemency (404) 656-5651


Who are some of the supporters:

Well known individual such as Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond
Tutu,singer Harry Belafonte, actress Susan Sarandon, Congressman John Lewis, and author and activist Angela Davis, to name a few—have voiced support for Troy.

For more info on the case of Troy Anthony Davis go to http://troyanthonydavis.org/

“Our Justice System at Its Worst”: Date Set for Troy Davis Execution

“Our Justice System at Its Worst”: Date Set for Troy Davis Execution

by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (#TooMuchDoubt)

This week, Georgia announced its plans to carry out the execution of Troy Davis. While there remains time to thwart this miscarrying of justice, the planned execution should give pause to us all.

In absence of forensic evidence or a murder weapon, an all-white jury convicted Davis of the 1989 murder of a police officer in Savannah.  The basis of the conviction was the witness testimony of nine individuals (7 eyewitnesses and 2 “jailhouse snitches”), many of who have subsequently spoken about police pressure.  In fact, since his conviction, all but two of the prosecution’s non-police witnesses have recanted or contradicted their own testimonies, leaving the conviction in doubt.  At the same time, 9 individuals have signed affidavits implicating another individual who happens to be one of the two witnesses who have not reversed on original testimony.  Notwithstanding these significant doubts raised during the appeals process, one that has never allowed for his defense team to fully explore the recanting witness testimony, Davis’ conviction has remained, resulting in the issuing of his death warrant yesterday.  

As part of its announced plan to stop the execution of Davis, the NAACP described the injustice in the following way: “This is our justice system at its very worst, and we are alive to witness it. There is just too much doubt.”  Calling for people to take action to save Troy Davis’ life, his case points to larger racial issues that demand action as well.

His conviction and the decision to proceed with his execution should give pause given the research on race and witness identification.  According to the Innocence Project, 75% of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA were the result of witness misidentification.  “While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, 30 years of strong social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable” reports the Innocence Project. “Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated.” 

One of the sources of contamination is clearly race and the myriad of assumptions that result from an institutionalized system of stereotyping.   In “Cross-Racial Identification Errors in Criminal Cases,” Sheri Lynn Johnson highlights the unreliable nature of  “eye-witness” testimony, a fact that is exacerbated in cross-racial situations.  Evidence from actual cases and in research studies elucidate the ways in which race and the larger social meanings attached to blackness play a significant role within the process of witness identification.  In a study conducted with white students at University of Illinois and black students at Howard University, researchers showed them pictures of 10 white and 10 black individuals for a second and half; then, they were are asked to recall the pictures from a series of other photos.  According to Elizabeth F. Loftus, in Eyewitness Testimony:

[T] he subjects were clearly better able to identify members of their own race. This study was later duplicated with the addition of Asian students. Again [African Americans] had greater difficulty recognizing faces of whites and Asians. Interestingly, however, whites and Asians had relatively little problem in identifying members of each other’s race – though both had trouble identifying [African Americans]. (from review of book)

The psychological obstacles facing witnesses along with the ways in which race further complicates the process is well documented.  Yet, we continue to rely on witness testimony within the criminal justice system.  The power of the white racial frame illustrates the reasonable doubt inherent in eyewitness testimony.  In a society where black is akin to criminal, so much so that within the dominant imagination there exist a distinct category, the “criminalblackman” (Russell, 1998, p. 3), it is crucial to reflect on what is at stake with Troy Davis: his life and so many others.

The planned execution of Troy Davis also points to a larger question of the racial application of the death penalty within the United States.  According to David Dow, 35 years into the return of the death penalty “It remains as racist and as random as ever.”  Referencing the often-cited Baldus Study, which “found that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants and that murderers of white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks,” Dow highlights the racist application of the death penalty.  Cases involving an alleged black perpetrator and a white victim are far more likely to result in the death penalty.  Although, “nationwide, blacks and whites are victims of homicide in roughly equal numbers . . . 80 percent of those executed had murdered white people.”  

The issues evident here point to the ways in which race impacts the death penalty at every level of the process.  For example, prosecutors“used peremptory strikes to remove 80%” of qualified African American jurors” in death penalty cases in Houston County, Alabama from 2005 to 2009.  In this jurisdiction, over half of all juries were all-white with the rest having a lone African American member even though the the county was 27% of African American. 

Likewise, Angela J. Davis notes that “of 381 defendants” whose murder charges were dismissed “because prosecutors either concealed exculpatory information or presented false evidence…67 had been sentenced to death.” These studies, along with Baldus, all point to the ways in which race and racism operates within the Jim Crow application of the death penalty, further demonstrating the issues at stake with Troy Davis.

In 2010, Dave Zirin and Etan Thomas highlighted the Davis case, reminding readers, “We cannot give up on Troy Davis. Every life is precious. He has already been incarcerated since 1991 – we think it's past time that justice finally prevails.”  Given the announcement of the impending execution, the importance of not giving up on Troy Davis and justice are that much more important.  The circumstances for Davis and our entire criminal “justice” system are dire. Do we really need more evidence about everything that is wrong with the death penalty?  One more mistake?  One more lost life?  As a precious life is in jeopardy, let our voices be heard!

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.

Medical Neglect in Georgia Prisons?

Medical Neglect Stalks Georgia Prisons
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Arnold Porter was serious, and seriously worried. He was dizzy and short of breath, he told Dr. William Sightler, with a crushing, tightening sensation in his chest with pain shooting up once side of his neck. “Maybe I have a clogged artery. This is not my normal health,” he told Dr. Sightler. “Please help. I need something fast done.”

Slow motion heart attacks, in which symptoms leading up to full cardiac arrest build and worsen gradually over weeks or months are quite common. Porter should have been a lucky man, being able to bring his heart attack symptoms into in a physician's office, except for one thing. Porter was a prisoner at Georgia's Wheeler Correctional facility, operated by the notorious Corrections Corporation of America. And William Slighter was their doctor, not his.

According to a complaint filed in US District Court in Dublin Ga, Porter repeatedly and insistently sought medical aid throughout the month of December 2006, informing Dr. Sightler and a prison nurse of his symptoms, and urgently requesting some kind, any kind of diagnostic treatment for his chest pain, shortness of breath, profuse sweating and the other classic markers of cardiac disease. By December 29, the complaint states, Porter's symptoms were well documented in his file, but the first appointment with Dr. Sightler was delayed a full 35 days. It was at this appointment that Porter stated he thought he might have a clogged artery, and asked for help.

Dr. Sightler, Nurse Newcurt, and the prison's Director of Nursing Carolyn White, the complaint alleges, did nothing. Wheeler is a privatized prison, run by a highly profitable corporation. Private prisons, as well as publicly-run prisons with privatized medical care have built-in reasons to skimp on diagnostic testing and all kinds of care. Medical care costs money, and they're in business to make it, not to spend it.

Read the Full Essay @ Black Agenda Report