August 27, 2020

By Aaron Morrison

Associated Press

 

The Rev. Al Sharpton sat quietly in his office in late July, watching the final funeral service for Rep. John Lewis on a wall-mounted television.

Instead of flying down to the memorial in Atlanta, Sharpton had remained in New York; he had work to do. Preaching at the funeral of a year-old boy who was shot in the stomach at a Brooklyn cookout -- a boy not much younger than his first and only grandson -- Sharpton demanded gun control, an issue close to Lewis’ heart.

He also was embroiled in putting together this week’s commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This protest will focus on police violence, and its ever-expanding roll call of victims: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rashard Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Jacob Blake, among others.

But Sharpton knows he will also encounter the ghosts of another era on the steps of the Lincoln Monument, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed that he had a dream.

Sharpton said he had always felt a kinship with people like Lewis, who had been the last surviving speaker from the original march; the late former NAACP chairman Julian Bond; his own mentor, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. All, he said, had instilled in him the value of discipline and reverence of principles of nonviolent resistance espoused by King.

Lewis, Bond and so many others are dead; at 78, Jackson clearly is not the lion he once was.

 

But Sharpton -- once dismissed by some as a fraud, a jester -- is still standing. He reaches multitudes on television and on radio. The man who helped popularize the 1980s cry, “No justice, no peace,” is putting himself at the center of a new wave of activism, in a new millennium.

“I want to be able to show that the movement is not dead,” said the Rev. Al.

For more than three decades, Sharpton, 65, has been a go-to advocate for Black American families seeking justice and peace in the wake of violence and countless incidents that highlight systemic racism. He has a penchant for seizing the national spotlight and focusing the public on police brutality and acts of hatred against Black people, particularly at moments of heightened tensions and grief.

But Sharpton now contends with a new question: In what shape will he leave the world for Marcus Al Sharpton Bright, the only male heir to the family legacy?

“I never thought I’d live to see my grandchild,” Sharpton said recently in an interview at the midtown Manhattan offices of National Action Network, the civil rights organization he founded in 1991.

“In many ways, every time I see him, I know it’s a blessing God gave me that he didn’t give some of the civil rights leaders before me,” Sharpton said. “I’m hopeful and I’m challenged ... What kind of society am I leaving him where you can get shot by the cops and the robbers?”

Sharpton has embraced the resonance of Black Lives Matter -- it’s now said to be the largest protest movement in U.S. history.

But he takes issue with people who claim that the leaderless, decentralized nature of the emerging movement is an entirely new phenomenon.

“One of the follies of youth, including me when I was young, is you think you’re the first one to do what you do,” Sharpton said. “There ain’t nothing new. If you don’t have that kind of back and forward (over tactics), which Dr. King used to call creative tension, then you ain’t got no movement.”

“I expect there’s going to be alternatives to me,” he added. “And it’s good, because it’ll bring a synthesis and because nobody’s got all the answers.”

Born in 1954 in Brooklyn, Sharpton quickly showed promise as a preacher. At age 4, he delivered his first sermon; he was an ordained minister by age 10.

When he was just 13, Jesse Jackson appointed Sharpton youth director of New York’s Operation Breadbasket, an anti-poverty project of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

 

 

The Al Sharpton who grabbed the spotlight in the 1980s was a rotund young man in a track suit, his neck garlanded by a chain and medallion and his hair in a pompadour -- a remnant of his days as James Brown’s tour manager.

Sharpton constantly courted controversy for using inflammatory language against his opponents. He reserved his most fiery rhetoric for elected officials and attorneys representing police officers and alleged assailants in case after case of racial violence.

In 1989, Sharpton’s attention was drawn to the death of Yusuf Hawkins, a Black teenager fatally shot after being confronted by a mob of white youths in Bensonhurst, a historically Italian-American neighborhood of Brooklyn.

As explored in the recent HBO documentary, “Storm Over Brooklyn,” Sharpton’s work on the Hawkins case was widely seen as the main cause of flared tensions between Black and white communities in New York City. In 1991, as he prepared to lead a march through Bensonhurst with the Hawkins family, a white man stabbed Sharpton in the chest.

But many people, particularly those turned off by Sharpton’s brash tactics, know him for his role in publicizing the case of Tawana Brawley, 15-year-old Black girl who in 1987 accused six white men, including police officers, of assault and rape in upstate New York. A grand jury later found evidence that Brawley had fabricated the story, after which Sharpton and two attorneys who joined in the case were ordered to pay damages to the prosecutor who sued for over defamatory statements.

Sharpton was hardly the only prominent New York figure who believed Brawley’s story. But even today, some of Sharpton’s critics will bring up the case to discredit him.

Asked if he had any regrets about that period of his life, Sharpton said he “would have looked into situations more deeply before getting involved.”

“Sometimes your vanity outruns your sanity, and you do things for posture. But it’s all part of growing up.”

Sharpton came to be known as a political strategist skilled at staging direct-action protests, while adhering to King’s principles of nonviolence. Although few of his critics would classify his tactics and rhetoric as entirely civil or peaceful, Sharpton is the reason why Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and Sean Bell, Black men killed or brutalized by police in New York City, became household names long before the advent of social media and hashtags.

“I had core beliefs and I could work with different eras” of the movement, Sharpton said. “I was always free enough -- never took government funds, never held office -- I was free enough to flow. I think being willing to adopt everything, but my core beliefs, is the strength of my longevity.”

Today, the track suits and chains are long gone, replaced by tailored suits over a frame less than half the size of what it once was. But the fire is still there.

Sharpton was among the civil rights leaders who flew into Minneapolis for the first of the memorial services for Floyd, who died May 25 after a white police officer held his knee to the man’s neck for nearly eight minutes even after he was unresponsive. It was at that service, amid Hollywood celebrities, federal lawmakers and activists, that Sharpton both announced and found the theme to Friday’s march commemoration.

“George Floyd’s story has been the story of Black folks,” he said. “Because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed to be is you kept your knee on our neck.”

“It’s time for us to stand up in George’s name and say, ‘Get your knee off our necks!’”

The refrain resounded, as protests and civil unrest gripped the nation that seemed to be awakening to issues Sharpton had preached about for decades.

Sharpton has been an activist long enough to have inspired acolytes. National civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who has represented the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and dozens of other victims of police brutality and vigilante violence, credits Sharpton with charting a path that made it easier for up-and-coming activists and lawyers to be heard.

“Rev. Al has been a mentor to me for many years,” Crump said in a phone interview. “Long before there was Black Lives Matter, you had Rev. Al Sharpton out there saying this life mattered, when everybody else was trying to marginalize it and sweep it under the rug.”

“He’s a teacher and he made some of the mistakes that we don’t have to make,” said Lee Merritt, another prominent civil rights attorney who has represented the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson, among others.

“A lot of people feel like (the work) is about public outcry, but if you don’t get to the root of the issue, if you don’t go after the systemic racism and the policies that allow this to happen over and over again, then you’re going to be disappointed when it’s all said and done,” Merritt added.

Twenty-three-year-old Tylik McMillan first started working for the National Action Network 10 years ago. Now the group’s national director of youth and college, McMillan said Sharpton prepared him to act as a field organizer for Friday’s March on Washington.

“He has always been such a compassionate leader, a hard leader that builds character,” McMillan said. “He’s giving me an understanding of what it means to move from demonstration to legislation.”

Which is the point of the march on Washington: Sharpton has made passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act a central demand.

In June, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Floyd act, which would ban police use of stranglehold maneuvers and end qualified immunity for officers, among other reforms. In July, following Lewis’ death, Democratic senators reintroduced legislation that would restore a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requiring states with a record of voter suppression to seek federal clearance before changing voter regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court gutted the provision in 2013.

The march, Sharpton said, isn’t simply for the cameras.

“If you’ve got a march without an objective, then you’ve got an exercise class going on,” Sharpton says.

The House of Justice, Sharpton’s storefront auditorium and headquarters off of Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, buzzed with activity on Saturday morning in late August. There is a rally each week; afterward, Sharpton personally hands out bagged meals to a line of people that stretches up 145th Street, part of an ongoing coronavirus pandemic relief effort.

Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, a Black man whose chokehold death by NYPD in 2014 fueled Black Lives Matter protests in New York and across the country, is a regular at the rallies. She said Sharpton stuck close to her family, particularly when the cameras and probing reporters went away, through the years it took local and federal law enforcement agencies to conduct investigations that eventually led to an officer’s firing.

“A lot of people listen to the controversy about Rev. Al, and they don’t know him as a person,” Carr said. “They just listen to what other people are saying about him, and I think that’s very wrong.”

“He does a lot for families that’s not in the public eye,” she added. “Some people think it’s just about police brutality, but it could be housing injustice. It could be a crisis because a family’s lights are getting cut off.”

Still, Sharpton’s daughters, Ashley Sharpton, 32, and Dominique Sharpton Bright, 34, said their father’s public image isn’t much different than the one they’d experienced over the dinner table.

“As I grew up, I realized this is not a persona,” said Ashley Sharpton, who founded the National Action Network’s Youth Move Huddle initiative that engages young adults who aspire to be community leaders.

“We sacrificed our dad to the movement,” she added. “That was heavy for me to understand. That took a while for me to accept.”

But something has softened in their dad since he became a grandfather, said Bright, Marcus Al’s mom and national membership director for the National Action Network.

“It’s so weird to see it because he kind of steps out of who he is to relate to Marcus Al,” she said.

“I remember when he was 4 months old and dad was like, ‘Is he talking yet? Is he walking?’” Ashley Sharpton said. Her dad “has been preaching since he was 4. So, I’m sure it’s an eagerness to see if any of that translated.”

There are many things that still keep the reverend away from home -- he’s organizing, preaching, consoling. He hosts “PoliticsNation” on MSNBC, which reaches about 2 million viewers every weekend, and he has a nationally syndicated daily radio show, “Keepin’ It Real,” that broadcasts on dozens of Sirius XM stations. The reverend remains a busy man.

“I do not feel that the people that poured into me would expect me to do anything less,” the Rev. Al said. “And that’s who I am. I’m going to do this until I die. Put your ear down to the casket, and I’ll be saying ‘no justice, no peace’ as they lower me all the way down.”

August 27, 2020

By City News Service   

 

A Black woman is suing El Segundo and the parent company of Anthropologie stores, alleging she was arrested and falsely accused of shoplifting last summer because of the color of her skin.

Sheronda M. Bonner's Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, filed Friday, alleges civil rights violations, false arrest and imprisonment, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress and negligent supervision. She seeks unspecified damages.

Urban Outfitters issued a statement regarding the lawsuit.

“Anthropologie explicitly prohibits profiling based on race or other invidious discrimination,'' the statement read. “In furtherance of fostering a welcoming environment for all our customers, we have instituted diversity, inclusion and implicit bias training for all employees. Many training sessions have been completed over the summer with additional trainings planned.

“Anthropologie is in the process of investigating the allegations contained in the lawsuit, which has not been served yet, and will determine how to respond following the conclusion of its investigation.''

El Segundo also released a statement, saying the city “takes all allegations of racial discrimination very seriously and will be reviewing the details of the lawsuit.''

According to the lawsuit, the case “arises from employees of an Anthropologie store who see an entitlement that says only certain people belong in the store, their unfounded and false report to the El Segundo Police Department that accused plaintiff of grand theft and the El Segundo Police Department's false arrest of Sheronda M. Bonner, an older Black woman.''

El Segundo police handcuffed the 53-year-old plaintiff and put her in jail, according to her court papers.

“They required her to remove her bra and she spent numerous hours in jail until she posted bond -- all because of the color of her skin,'' the suit alleges.

Bonner went to Anthropologie on Sepulveda Boulevard with a male companion on Aug. 24, 2019, and looked at a romper and a long dress, but she did not buy anything because the prices were too high, the suit states.

She had a bag that measured eight inches by five inches and held her cellphone, credit cards and car keys, but neither she nor her companion, who is not a plaintiff, had a shopping bag, according to the suit.    After leaving the store, El Segundo police officers detained Bonner

and her companion, told them that “cameras were rolling'' and that they were the subject of an investigation because the store manager identified them as shoplifters, the suit states.

“Employees of Anthopologie stores have confirmed that they were told to watch people of color closely and would refer to them as `nicks' to other employees,'' the complaint alleges.

Until recently, Anthropologie sold a candlestick that resembled an Aunt Jemima figure, the suit states. In 2003, the stores sold a Monopoly knockoff, ``Ghettopoly,'' that featured properties with names such as “Cheap Trick Avenue'' and “Smitty's XXX Peep,'' according to the suit, which says the NAACP “called for the end to the production and sale of the racist board game.''

Both Bonner and her companion were arrested, although he was cited and released after about four hours, the suit says. She was not let out until she posted $2,000 bail, and was placed on leave from her job at Los Angeles International Airport pending the resolution of the case, which ended with no charges filed, according to the suit.

Based on the allegedly false shoplifting report by the Anthropologie manager and lack of probable cause by El Segundo police to arrest Bonner, the plaintiff suffered economic damages and emotional distress, the suit states.

August 27, 2020

By Mike Householder and Scott Bauer

Associated Press

 

A white, 17-year-old police admirer was arrested Wednesday after two people were shot to death during a third straight night of protests in Kenosha over the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake.

Kyle Rittenhouse, of Antioch, Illinois, about 15 miles (24.14 kilometers) from Kenosha, was taken into custody in Illinois on suspicion of first-degree intentional homicide in the attack Tuesday that was largely captured on cellphone video. The shooting left a third person wounded.

“I just killed somebody,” the gunman, carrying a semi-automatic rifle, could be heard saying at one point during the rampage that erupted just before midnight in the city of 100,000 people midway between Milwaukee and Chicago.

In the wake of the killings, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers authorized the deployment of 500 members of the National Guard to Kenosha, doubling the number of troops. The governor’s office said he is working with other states to bring in additional National Guard members and law officers. Authorities also announced a 7 p.m. curfew, an hour earlier than the night before. Even so, protesters were out Wednesday night after the curfew.

“A senseless tragedy like this cannot happen again,” the governor, a Democrat, said in a statement. “I again ask those who choose to exercise their First Amendment rights please do so peacefully and safely, as so many did last night. I also ask the individuals who are not there to exercise those rights to please stay home and let local first responders, law enforcement and members of the Wisconsin National Guard do their jobs.”

In Washington, the Justice Department said it is sending in more than 200 federal agents from the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in response to the unrest. The White House said up to 2,000 National Guard troops would be made available.

And in Orlando, Florida, the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks didn’t take the floor for their playoff game against the Magic. It was later announced that all three NBA playoff games scheduled for Wednesday were postponed, with players around the league choosing to boycott in their strongest statement yet against racial injustice.

The dead were identified only as a 26-year-old Silver Lake, Wisconsin, resident and a 36-year-old from Kenosha. The wounded person, a 36-year-old from West Allis, Wisconsin, was expected to survive, police said.

“We were all chanting ‘Black lives matter’ at the gas station and then we heard, boom, boom, and I told my friend, “That’s not fireworks,’” 19-year-old protester Devin Scott told the Chicago Tribune. “And then this guy with this huge gun runs by us in the middle of the street and people are yelling, ‘He shot someone! He shot someone!’ And everyone is trying to fight the guy, chasing him, and then he started shooting again.”

Scott said he cradled a victim in his arms, and a woman started performing CPR, but “I don’t think he made it.”

According to witness accounts and video footage, police apparently let the gunman walk past them and leave the scene with a rifle over his shoulder and his hands in the air as members of the crowd were yelling for him to be arrested because he had shot people.

As for how the gunman managed to slip away, Sheriff David Beth described a chaotic, high-stress scene, with lots of radio traffic and people screaming, chanting and running — conditions he said can cause “tunnel vision” among law officers.

Rittenhouse was assigned a public defender in Illinois for a hearing Friday on his transfer to Wisconsin. The public defender’s office had no comment. Under Wisconsin law, anyone 17 or older is treated as an adult in the criminal justice system.

Much of Rittenhouse’s Facebook page is devoted to praising law enforcement, with references to Blue Lives Matter, a movement that supports police. He also can be seen holding an assault rifle.

Other photographs include those of badges of various law enforcement agencies, including the Chicago Police Department. All of the badges have a black line across them — something police officers typically do with black tape when an officer is killed in the line of duty.

In a photograph posted by his mother, he is wearing what appears to be a blue law enforcement uniform as well as the kind of brimmed hat that state troopers wear.

The sheriff told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that militia members or armed vigilantes had been patrolling Kenosha’s streets in recent nights, but he did not know if the gunman was among them. However, video taken before the shooting shows police tossing bottled water from an armored vehicle to what appear to be armed civilians walking the streets. And one of them appears to be the gunman.

“We appreciate you being here,” an officer is heard saying to the group over a loudspeaker.

Before the shooting, the conservative website The Daily Caller conducted a video interview with the suspected gunman in front of a boarded-up business.

“So people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business,” the young man said. “And part of my job is to also help people. If there is somebody hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle -- because I can protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”

Sam Dirks, 22, from Milwaukee, said he had seen the gunman earlier in the evening, and he was yelling at some of the protesters. “He was definitely very agitated. He was pacing around, just pointing his gun in general. Not necessarily at anyone specifically,” Dirks said.

Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is Black, said in an interview with the news program “Democracy Now!” that the shootings were not surprising and that white militias have been ignored for too long.

“How many times across this country do you see armed gunmen, protesting, walking into state Capitols, and everybody just thinks it’s OK?” Barnes said. “People treat that like it’s some kind of normal activity that people are walking around with assault rifles.”

In Wisconsin, it is legal for people 18 and over to openly carry a gun, with no license required.

Witness accounts and video indicate the shootings took place in two stages: The gunman first shot someone at a car lot, then jogged away, fell in the street, and opened fire again as members of the crowd closed in on him.

A witness, Julio Rosas, 24, said that when the gunman stumbled, “two people jumped onto him and there was a struggle for control of his rifle. At that point during the struggle, he just began to fire multiple rounds, and that dispersed people near him.”

“The rifle was being jerked around in all directions while it was being fired,” Rosas said.

Blake, 29, was shot in the back seven times on Sunday as he leaned into his SUV, three of his children seated inside. Kenosha police have said little about what happened other than that they were responding to a domestic dispute.

On Wednesday, three days after the shooting, state authorities identified the officer who shot Blake as Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha Police Department. Sheskey shot Blake while holding onto his shirt after officers first unsuccessfully used a Taser, the Wisconsin Justice Department said.

State agents later recovered a knife from the driver’s side floorboard of the vehicle, authorities said.

No charges were announced, and state officials continue to investigate.

On Tuesday, Ben Crump, the lawyer for Blake’s family, said it would “take a miracle” for Blake to walk again.

He called for the officer who opened fire to be arrested and for the others involved to lose their jobs.

The shooting was captured on cellphone video and ignited new protests in the U.S. three months after the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer touched off a nationwide reckoning over racial injustice.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden posted a video saying he had spoken with Blake’s parents and other family members.

“What I saw on that video makes me sick,” Biden said. “Once again, a Black man, Jacob Blake, has been shot by the police in broad daylight, with the whole world watching.”

August 27, 2020

By Lauren Victoria Burke

NNPA Newswire Contributor

 

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who is the Chairwoman of the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, is sounding the alarm on what she says will be an eviction crisis in the U.S. after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the U.S. in the middle of March, has resulted in over 177,000 deaths and counting. It has also resulted in state and local governments mandating that people stay home and not go to work. As a result of those directives, businesses remained closed for three months with states currently still attempting to re-open in stages.

Some cities are estimating that thousands will face eviction and/or foreclosure as local governments re-open, unfreezing moratoriums on rents and mortgages and enabling landlord and tenant disputes for non-payment of rent to move forward. Though some Governors have put in place or extended eviction moratoriums others have not, exacerbating outcomes for the millions of Americans facing unemployment.

The U.S. is currently experiencing record days of both new positive coronavirus tests and spikes in cases in Texas, Florida, Georgia and California. As a result, Texas, Florida and California have either delayed planned re-openings or made modifications to their planned staged rollouts. 

According to the most recent reporting from the U.S. Department of Labor, the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 10.2 percent for the week ending August 8, a decrease of 0.4 percentage point from the previous week's unrevised rate. The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending August 8 was 14,844,000, a decrease of 636,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised down by 6,000 from 15,486,000 to 15,480,000. The 4-week moving average was 15,841,250, a decrease of 326,750 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised down by 1,500 from 16,169,500 to 16,168,000.

But the resulting economic shutdown has led to over 40 million people filing for unemployment — over 20 percent of the U.S. labor force. On June 29, nearly 60 days ago, Rep. Waters introduced H.R. 7301, the Emergency Housing Protections and Relief Act of 2020. However, typical of the state of play with a U.S. House run by Democrats and a U.S. Senate run by Republicans, Waters’ legislation remains stalled by Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Speaking on the House floor, Waters said, “this bill includes several provisions that were included in the Heroes Act and independently led by a number of Members of the Financial Services Committee. Some people hearing about this bill won’t understand what we are trying to do in this bill today. As I said, this was part of the Heroes Act that passed this House, but we have been waiting on the Senate to take up the Heroes Act. They are not taking it up, they don’t seem to care, they don’t seem to understand that there are people out there who are going to be evicted, and so we have pulled it out of the Heroes Act and we are taking it up independently so that we can send a message to the Senate that we want this measure heard and so we have a number of Members who participated in putting this legislation together and who had independent bills to do so.”

“We can’t wait any longer we got to move. The CARES Act was an important step towards providing relief, but more help is needed. We knew, for example, that an eviction moratorium without the provision of rental assistance would only delay disastrous outcomes as families would have to pay, more than they could afford, a lump sum of three to four months of unpaid rent at the expiration of the moratorium,” said Waters.

The Washington Post reports that despite President Trump’s repeated claims that his administration and executive order would protect people from losing their homes, evictions have continued across the country. “It risks doing more harm than good by giving people a false impression that Trump is doing something to prevent evictions,” said National Low Income Housing Coalition President and CEO Diane Yentel about the president’s executive order.

A push led by Democrats is expected for a second stimulus is underway with bi-partsan agreement to assist small businesses in particular.

Representatives Lacy Clay, Denny Heck, David Scott, Chuy Garcia, Cindy Axne, Nydia Velazquez, Ayanna Pressley, Katie Porter, and Al Green.