The racial divide that exists in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, and the effect it has on the lived experience of white and black people, reminded us of a conversation from last week’s show in which poet Maya Angelou remembers how, as a little girl, she hated going to the white neighborhood in her hometown of Stamps, Arkansas, because she felt unsafe and unprotected there.
Continue reading Maya Angelou: “Because if You Were Black You Never Felt Really Safe” | BillMoyers
August 17, 2014
Jesse Williams’ very eloquent thoughts on Mike Brown’s depiction in cable news shows:
I was irritated and distracted as I watched a panel discussion on CNN yesterday. What was the source of my irritation? Continue reading Cable News’ Depiction of Mike Brown | MSM and Ferguson
Reverend William Barber visited Netroots Nation and provided an inspirational speech that electrified the entire room. Most importantly, Rev. Barber gave a history lesson on moral fusion movements. Rev. Barber described the moral fusion movement in the context of the first and second reconstruction. He is imploring the effecting of the third reconstruction.
Continue reading Rev. William Barber’s electrifying speech at Netroots Nation 2014
Senator Rand Paul published an op-ed in Time Magazine and gave a speech this week about Ferguson Missouri and Civil Rights. Given Senator Paul’s long-held views on civil rights, how should we interpret this latest effort? Is it opportunism or a genuine attempt at curing a longstanding social wrong? Let’s examine the record: Continue reading Rand Paul: Opportunist or Ferguson’s Libertarian Civil Rights Hope?
Congressman John Lewis – a recognized leader of the Civil Rights Movement – spoke out Thursdayon the police violence in Ferguson, Missouri, during an msnbc interview saying President Obama should use the authority of his office to declare martial law to “federalize the Missouri national guard to protect people as they protest.”
Continue reading @RepJohn Lewis Calls For #MartialLaw in #Ferguson | MSNBC
NEENAH, Wis. — Inside the municipal garage of this small lakefront city, parked next to the hefty orange snowplow, sits an even larger truck, this one painted in desert khaki. Weighing 30 tons and built to withstand land mines, the armored combat vehicle is one of hundreds showing up across the country, in police departments big and small.
Continue reading War Gear Flows to Police Departments | NYTimes
Sometimes a single story has a way of standing in for everything you need to know. In the case of the up-arming, up-armoring and militarization of police forces across the country, there is such a story. Not the police, mind you, but the campus cops at Ohio State University now possess an MRAP; that is, a $500,000, 18-ton, mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle of a sort used in the war in Afghanistan and, as Hunter Stuart of the Huffington Post reported, built to withstand “ballistic arms fire, mine fields, IEDs and nuclear, biological and chemical environments.” Sounds like just the thing for bouts of binge drinking and post-football-game shenanigans.
Continue reading The Criminalization of Everyday Life | BillMoyers
President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict—the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”