Making the Links Radio - Email from Burmese Monk: Some Facts from Yangoon

Making the Links Radio - Email from Burmese Monk: Some Facts from Yangoon: "We just got phone call with our sister living in Yangon about a few hours ago. We saw on BBC world, saying that 200 monks were arrested. The true picture is far worse! For one instance, the monastery at an obscure neighborhood of Yangon, called Ngwe Kyar Yan (on Wei-za-yan-tar Road, Yangon) had been raided early this morning. A troop of lone-tein (riot police comprised of paid thugs) protected by the military trucks, raided the monastery with 200 studying monks. They systematically ordered all the monks to line up and banged and crushed each one's head against the brick wall of the monastery. One by one, the peaceful, non resisting monks, fell to the ground, screaming in pain. Then, they tore off the red robes and threw them all in the military trucks (like rice bags) and took the bodies away."

Tamika Huston 1979-2004 - A Tribute

Government crackdown on Bushman hunters | News from Survival International

Government crackdown on Bushman hunters | News from Survival International: "Six Bushmen have been arrested for hunting in New Xade resettlement camp, according to First People of the Kalahari, a Bushman human rights organisation. The latest arrests bring the total number of Bushmen arrested for hunting since last year’s landmark court ruling to at least forty-eight, with most being arrested since June this year."

Latoyia Figueroa - A Philadelphia Tragedy

Missing - Baby Come Home

links for 10-8-2007

Here are a bunch of links for 10-08-2007:

Please read the article via Ann's website regarding the rape and abuse of Congolese women. Click here.

Breaks my heart reading the article. Black women around the world are expendable. Very few people cared in contrast to the buzz given to one missing girl in Portugal. Blatant double standards on the value of womens' lives are fatal!

Ann on John Cougar Mellankamp and the omission of Black women when it comes to tributes.

Terrence Ariel and Friends Memorial Tribute. In memory of the Newark Schoolyard Shooting. Very moving and touching. As always, may they rest in peace.

More on the W.V. Hate Crime:

Rachel's Tavern: What Do I Think About The W.V. Hate Crime Coverage?

Does Domestic Violence Lessens The Severity of Racial/Sexual Violence? From Anxious Black Woman. No Way!

The W.V. Torture victim will always be on my mind and will never be forgotten.

Don’t mention the war

New Zealand, world, sport, business & entertainment news on Stuff.co.nz: "So the war in Iraq is finally over. Thank God for that. I’m sure Iraqis will be delighted. They can emerge from their homes where they have been hiding for four years now from the bombs and the bloodshed. The Americans will be pretty pleased, too, given they’ve sent 768 soldiers home in body bags since February alone. Surprising British Prime Minister Gordon Brown didn’t have anything to say about this momentous day at Number 10 when he thrust Prime Minister Helen Clark out into the rain last night, but perhaps he just didn’t want to share the limelight with a small country that opposed the war in the first place. OK, I’ll release the facetious button on my computer now. I know what National leader John Key meant to say on Morning Report this morning when he explained that the reason National hadn’t mentioned Iraq in its foreign policy discussion document was because “frankly the war in Iraq is over”."

Police: Black student marked with 'KKK' at deaf school - CNN.com

Police: Black student marked with 'KKK' at deaf school - CNN.com: "WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A weekend incident with racial overtones at a high school for deaf students could result in criminal charges with 'enhanced penalties for a hate crime,' Metro Police Chief Cathy Lanier said Wednesday. A black student was held against his will and then released with 'KKK' and swastikas drawn on him in marker at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf on Sunday, she said. No charges have been filed, and no names have been released, Lanier said. The incident began when a group of black students and a group of white students were in a dorm. 'My understanding is the two groups engaged in friendly horseplay,' she said. But, she said, the groups got 'angry with each other.' The two groups separated, she said, but later, six white students and one black student -- all between the ages of 15 and 19 -- took one of the black students into a dorm room and 'held him there against his will.' 'They used markers to write 'KKK' and draw swastikas on the student,' Lanier said. The student was released after about 45 minutes. He notified dorm and school authorities, who called police. Lanier said police have identified and interviewed the students involved and the 'investigation is ongoing.'"

Anita Hill Stands By Her 1991 Accusations

Anita Hill Defends Herself Against Clarence Thomas Smears Against Her

Anita Hill Stands By Accusations

Here's Clarence Thomas, who smeared so many Black women on his ascent to the Supreme Court, voted against the interests of the people in general, women in general, people of Color, especially Black women and children, all to satisfy a conservative, corporate segment of society.

Chicago cop in murder-for-hire case will remain in custody -- chicagotribune.com

Chicago cop in murder-for-hire case will remain in custody -- chicagotribune.com: "The Chicago police officer charged last week in a murder-for-hire plot will remain in custody after his lawyers chose not to challenge his detention at a bail hearing this morning. Suspended officer Jerome Finnigan, 44—already at the center of a widening probe of corruption, kidnapping and robbery in the Police Department's Special Operations Section—appeared briefly at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, shackled and in an orange jumpsuit. Assistant U.S. Atty. John Blakey told U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Cole that the government and Finnigan's lawyers had agreed on Finnigan's detention."

Compiler - Wired Blogs

Compiler - Wired Blogs: "Early this week we told you about a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw in GMail that would allow attackers to create a filter in your account — possibly forwarding copies of your mail to themselves. This morning I received an e-mail from a spokesperson at Google who said that the GMail team rolled out a patch last night which fixes the problem. “Google takes the security of our users’ information very seriously,” the e-mail says, “We worked quickly to address the recently reported vulnerability, and we rolled out a fix. We have not received any reports of this vulnerability being exploited.”"

Sad News: Nailah Franklin's body has been found

May the prayers be with Miss Franklin's family.

O’Reilly Shocked to Find Restaurants Owned and Frequented by Black People Are Actually Restaurants

O’Reilly Shocked to Find Restaurants Owned and Frequented by Black People Are Actually Restaurants: "It’s always fascinating to hear racist white people try to “compliment” minorities. On the September 19, 2007 edition of Bill O’Reilly’s radio show, BOR recounted a dinner he had with Al Sharpton at Sylvia’s, a famous restaurant in Harlem: I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship [sic]. -snip- There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' -snip- You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all. BOR also expressed amazement at the absence of both spear chucking and 360-degree basketball dunking."

Video: Bill O'Reilly Discovers Black Culture

Video: Bill O'Reilly Discovers Black Culture: "How old is Bill O'Reilly again? If he is older than 10 years old, he must have interacted with blaks in his neighborhood, at his workplace or any where. So, what i don't understand is that he CANNOT get over the fact that blacks are able of civility and going and eating in normal restaurants and talking normally. This is the most racists remark that i have heard and i am 55 years old. This is worst than the N-words. 'The blacks were dressed...' says O'Reilly...why are you saying that? Are they usually to go around naked?"

Missing Women Alert: Atoi Watson

May she be found safe and sound.

Little Rock: 50 Years Later

Central High Marks 50 Years of Desegregation
by Juan Williams

Morning Edition, September 24, 2007 · Fifty years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed the nation from his desk in the Oval Office. A mob — backed by the Arkansas National Guard — had blocked nine black students from entering an all-white high school in Little Rock. President Eisenhower decided that he had to act.
"The responsibility is inescapable. In accordance with that responsibility, I have today issued an executive order directing the use of troops under federal authority to aid in the execution of federal law at Little Rock, Arkansas," he said.
And so, some 1,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division deployed to Little Rock. President Eisenhower said they would escort the teenagers to school.
Segregation Showdown at Little Rock
Little Rock Remembers Troops' Arrival
by Alex Chadwick


Enlarge
Francis Miller

Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus displays the front page of the Manchester, N.H. Union Leader to illustrate what "northern papers" are saying about President Eisenhower's use of federal troops to enforce integration in Little Rock. He charged the president with using unprecedented "police state methods." Bettmann/Corbis


Fifty years ago this month, Little Rock began to desegregate its public schools. Nine black students were assigned to attend the city's Central High. But when the school opened right after Labor Day, white segregationists gathered in a mob. Gov. Orval Faubus defied a federal judge and called in the National Guard to keep the black students out.
The mob won that first day; the mob and the governor, who sensed their power and passion.
The NAACP kept the nine students home for three weeks out of fear for their safety.
A court ordered Faubus to withdraw the Guard, and he did. The Little Rock Nine returned to school on Sept. 23. Outside the building, local police tried to control at least a thousand angry segregationists. When they threatened to storm the school, the police got the children out a back door.

The mob beat several black journalists, one a World War II combat veteran. The pictures were broadcast on television.
'Occupied Territory'
That night, the president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, took control.
"An extreme situation has been created in Little Rock," he said. "This challenge must be met, and with such measures as will preserve to the people as a whole their lawfully protected rights."

He ordered units from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. They were there by dawn on Sept. 24, 1957. The next day, soldiers escorted the nine students through the front door and into their classrooms.

There was no real trouble on that day. But more was coming.

"My fellow citizens, we are now an occupied territory," responded Gov. Orval Faubus, appealing to generations-old fears.

"In the name of God, whom we all revere," Faubus continued, "in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish, what is happening in America?"

"It's a very strong strain in southern thought to be independent, and to act independently and not to be forced, especially not by the Yankee enforcer," says Betsy Jacoway, an independent scholar and author of a recent book about the crisis, Turn Away Thy Son.

Jacoway was a child in Little Rock then, not yet in high school. Her uncle was the school superintendent, who had a "go-very-slow" integration plan. President Eisenhower's decision to send troops actually worked for Gov. Faubus, she says. It pushed the issue beyond race, and actually revived painful old memories. Many whites were reminded of the years after the Civil War.

"We hadn't had troops in the streets here since 1865," Jacoway says, "and that was so horrifying to us that we thought 'Well, Faubus is the only leader we have right now, so maybe we should follow him.'"

So why did Faubus prevent the black students from attending Central High? The governor died more than a dozen years ago, but to the end, he denied charges of political opportunism. He had ordered the National Guard around Central High for one reason, he said: to keep the peace.

"I do not mean and had no intention of challenging the federal union," Faubus said later. "But the maintenance of the peace and order of a community is paramount to other considerations. And I found it necessary in order to preserve the peace and order in the community, and to protect the lives, even of the negro students and the negro people, to take the actions which I did."

Race and Sexuality

"Faubus wanted to be governor for life, bless his heart," said Jim Johnson. Johnson ran for governor as an ardent segregationist in 1956 — and lost to the far more moderate Faubus. But, he said, Gov. Faubus soon began to see civil rights stirring an ever angrier white reaction — and a kind of opportunity. In an interview, Johnson said the mob at the school was there after the governor called and asked him to make trouble.

"It was an orchestrated show," he said. Faubus "got the word out to all of us to get our friends to come out. If the people were assembled, he didn't have any doubt that he could get a 'rah rah' going. That would appear to be a mob, to the point that it could cause damage."

In the turmoil that followed, Faubus would lead white resistance to integration — in Arkansas and the South. It made him governor three more times. And he rewarded his main segregationist ally, Jim Johnson, by helping him to a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court.
Now retired from the court, Justice Johnson has changed his views very little, if at all, in 50 years. For "integration", he still prefers the term "forced race mixing." It conjures up undertones.

"That is emotional, when you're talking about the forced race mixing," Johnson said. "The emotion of, as a friend of mine used to say, 'the integration of the bedroom,' gets the attention of people quicker than if you're talking about the A-B-C's being taught in school."

And that finally explains so much of what happened, according to historian Betsy Jacoway. Whites feared exactly that desegregation would lead to race mixing, she said. "And it's so fascinating, because when I talk to Southerners about this, they say, 'duh!'"

Basically, Betsy Jacoway said, it's about sex:

"When I talk to anybody else about this, they say, 'You've got to be kidding. Really, is that what this is about?' she said. "But yes. Southern concerns and … I think, largely American concerns, about integration stemmed from sexual fears, fears of black male aggressiveness and potency."

The Crisis Continues

With the Army's help, the nine black students did start classes that fall. For awhile, things seemed to settle down a little, and the story fell off newspaper front pages across the country. But in Little Rock, anger and fear lingered, and so did the crisis — personally and painfully for those who were there.
"You're being hit and kicked, so our legs were always bruised," remembered Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the nine black students.

"Stepping on heels is particularly horrible," she continued, "because it's something that only you know is happening. Spit I didn't like at all. It makes me nauseous thinking about it."
The crisis continued to grow. Gov. Faubus wasn't done with history and he knew it. A few years later, he was asked, "What if you had just stood aside and let those kids into the school?"

"Well, I might have survived to the end of my term," the governor answered, "but that would have been the last you would have heard of me."

Related NPR Stories
Sep. 24, 2007Central High Marks 50 Years of Desegregation
Sep. 21, 2007Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine
Sep. 19, 2007Fifty Years Later, 'Little Rock Nine' Stories Resonate
Sep. 5, 2007School Desegregation: At What Price?
Sep. 4, 2007One of the 'Little Rock Nine' Looks Back
Aug. 31, 2007Recalling Little Rock's Segregation Battle
Aug. 31, 2007The Legacy of the Little Rock Nine
Feb. 24, 2007Federal Oversight of Little Rock Schools Ends

Updates on the WV Torture Victim

I'm not suprised at all by media and society's smearing of the Black victim of the WV hate crime. Those people need to show a little more compassion instead of judging her like she deserved it. May God watch over her and her family and to receive the justice she so deserved.

West Virginia torture and rape victim arrested for writing bad checks at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture

West Virginia torture and rape victim arrested for writing bad checks at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture: "The victim in an alleged weeklong torture in Logan County was arraigned in Kanawha County Magistrate Court on multiple counts of writing bad checks. Megan Williams is charged with offenses in Summers, Raleigh and Greenbrier counties. There are 11 misdemeanor counts of writing worthless checks, one misdemeanor count of obtaining under false pretenses and one felony count of failure to appear in circuit court in Summers County, according to documents provided by Kanawha County Magistrate Ward Harshbarger. …Megan Williams is charged with obtaining under false pretenses and writing a worthless check in Raleigh County, according to the Raleigh County warrant. The false check charge is for a $32.21 check to Dominos Pizza. The false pretenses charge is for $96.40 to the Kiddie Junction Consignment Shop in Beaver. In Greenbrier County, Williams is wanted for eight worthless checks, according to the warrant for her arrest filed in Greenbrier County. One of the checks was for $173.79 to BSR Auto Supply."

Democracy Now! | Harlem Residents Head to Jena Louisiana for Rally to Free the Jena Six

Democracy Now! | Harlem Residents Head to Jena Louisiana for Rally to Free the Jena Six: "Activists from across the country are heading to Jena, Louisiana for a major demonstration on Thursday to protest the treatment of six African American high school students who were jailed and faced attempted murder charges for taking part in a fight after nooses were hung from a tree in the schoolyard. Last night we interviewed activists in Harlem as they boarded buses bound for Jena. [includes rush transcript] Last week, ten months after the initial charges, a state court in Louisiana overturned District Attorney Reed Walters's first conviction in the Jena Six case. An all-white jury had convicted seventeen-year-old Mychal Bell but the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that he should not have been tried as an adult. Walters says he plans to appeal Bell’s overturned conviction and also pursue the other five prosecutions. But that's only making people across the country even more determined to fight for justice for the Jena Six. Tomorrow Jena's population of 3,000 could swell to several times its size. Thousands of people are expected to pour into town in solidarity with the six teenagers."

YouTube - Jena 6 update

YouTube - Jena 6 update: "A movement is growing in support of the Jena Six -- the black Louisana high school students charged with attempted murder for a school fight in which a white student was beaten up. The fight broke out after white students hung three nooses from a tree where the black students had sat. School board officials cut down the tree last week. Hundreds of people from all over the country gathered Tuesday for a march through Jena's streets. Independent reporter Jordan Flaherty reports."

2theadvocate.com | News | Jena getting ready for massive crowd expected at march — Baton Rouge, LA

2theadvocate.com | News | Jena getting ready for massive crowd expected at march — Baton Rouge, LA: "NEW ORLEANS — With tens of thousands of protesters expected to march through a tiny central Louisiana town Thursday in defense of six black teenagers, Jena police and residents were busy Tuesday making plans. Estimates range as high as 60,000 marchers for the two-mile trek, which originally was to protest the conviction of Mychal Bell on second-degree battery charges. Bell could have been sent to prison for 15 years on that charge, but the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal said Bell, who was 16 at the time of the alleged December 2006 beating of a Jena High school mate, should not have been tried as an adult. Bell is one of six black Jena High students charged in an attack on Justin Barker, who is white. Bell and four others were originally charged as adults with attempted second-degree murder. The charges were widely criticized as overly harsh. A sixth person was charged in the alleged assault as a juvenile. The group has become known as the “Jena 6.” Schools in Jena will close Thursday and many businesses in the town of 2,900 also say they will shut down, concerned about whether the march will remain peaceful."

Congo-Kinshasa: Fighting Exposes Children to Forced Recruitment, Exploitation - UN (Page 1 of 1)

allAfrica.com: Congo-Kinshasa: Fighting Exposes Children to Forced Recruitment, Exploitation - UN (Page 1 of 1): "The situation of children in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has gone from bad to worse, with 60,000 people newly driven from their homes by fighting in North Kivu province, exposing youngsters to the dangers of forced recruitment and sexual exploitation, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). 'Separation of children from the parents always puts children at risk,' UNICEF's Chief of Field Operations for the DRC Julien Harneis said. 'Then you've got the creation of spontaneous camps, which leads to measles, cholera and the recruitment of children into armed groups.' The challenges posed by forced child recruitment are vast, UNICEF said. 'Children are taken by militias against their will and used as porters and fighters or, in the case of girls, for sexual exploitation. There is also great risk, of course, of injury and death from violence and battle,' it added."

Tanzania: Health Authorities Issue Ebola Alert (Page 1 of 1)

allAfrica.com: Tanzania: Health Authorities Issue Ebola Alert (Page 1 of 1): "Tanzanian health authorities have cautioned people living in regions neighbouring the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following the outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in the central African country. Western Tanzanian regions bordering DRC include Mbeya, Rukwa, Kigoma and Kagera. 'All regional medical officers have been instructed to keep on alert because people from eastern parts of DRC enter into Tanzania through the four regions,' Wilson Mukama, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, said in a statement."

Rap artists arrested for video that threatens police | ajc.com

Rap artists arrested for video that threatens police | ajc.com: "SAVANNAH, Mo. — Two men were arrested and face a series of felony charges over a homemade rap video that threatened to kill police officers, harm a judge and rape a female police officer. Police said the profanity-laced video was initially posted on YouTube, but has since been pulled from the Internet site. The two men, Kenneth Darrell Black Jr., 20, and Benjamin D. Stevens, 20, face felony charges of making a terroristic threat, conspiring to commit second-degree assault with a gun against law enforcement officers, conspiracy to commit rape and tampering with a judicial officer. It was not immediately clear Wednesday morning if they had lawyers. According to a probable-cause statement, the men outlined plans in the video to kill Savannah Police Chief David Vincent, Andrew County Sheriff Gary Howard and several police officers and deputies. In all, at least 22 law enforcement officers were threatened in the video, according to documents."

The Raw Story | Isiah Thomas: Only black men allowed to call women the 'b word'

The Raw Story | Isiah Thomas: Only black men allowed to call women the 'b word': "A bizarre deposition given by the coach of The New York Knicks in a sexual harassment suit has attracted much attention in the media. During the testimony, former Detroit Pistons legend Isiah Thomas suggested that when a black man refers to a woman as a 'bitch' it's less offensive than when a white man does the same. 'White men better not call a black woman 'bitch' around Knicks coach Isiah Thomas, but if black men do it - well, that's fair game,' Kati Cornell writes in Tuesday's New York Post."

Musharraf agrees to relinquish military role - Times Online

Musharraf agrees to relinquish military role - Times Online: "President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan announced today that he would step down as army chief by November 15, ending eight years of military rule in the face of escalating political opposition. General Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, is planning to be re-elected as president in an election due by October 15 before calling parliamentary elections due by mid-January."

Panama's Manuel Noriega | French leave | Economist.com

Panama's Manuel Noriega | French leave | Economist.com: "THE deposing of Manuel Noriega by American forces nearly two decades ago was an affair to remember. Paratroopers seized Panama's airfields. Mr Noriega holed up in the Vatican embassy. He eventually surrendered on January 3rd 1990. The invasion had been triggered by his indictment for drug trafficking, for which he was duly convicted by American courts."

Simpson Friend: It Seemed Like a Setup | ajc.com

Simpson Friend: It Seemed Like a Setup | ajc.com: "LOS ANGELES — If the Goldman family has its way, it may soon own the sports memorabilia O.J. Simpson is accused of committing armed robbery to recover for himself. One man charged along with the former football star said Tuesday that the Las Vegas hotel room dispute seemed like a setup. Walter Alexander, 46, said Simpson may have been tricked because the memorabilia dealer who tipped him off also recorded everything on tape."

OJ Simpson arrested for armed robbery in hotel | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

OJ Simpson arrested for armed robbery in hotel | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited: "OJ Simpson faces a lengthy prison term if he is convicted after his arrest yesterday for allegedly being involved in an armed robbery to retrieve what he claims were his personal belongings from a sports memorabilia seller. The former American football star and actor, who was controversially acquitted of the murder of his ex-wife and her friend in 1994, faces two charges of robbery with the use of a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit robbery, burglary with a deadly weapon, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and coercion. If he is found guilty, each charge of robbery with a deadly weapon carries a jail sentence of between three and 35 years."

O.J. Simpson arrested in Vegas robbery - Yahoo! News

O.J. Simpson arrested in Vegas robbery - Yahoo! News: "LAS VEGAS - O.J. Simpson was arrested Sunday and faces multiple felony charges in an alleged armed robbery of collectors involving the former football great's sports memorabilia, authorities said."

allAfrica.com: Congo-Kinshasa: Ebola Outbreak "Contained" - Kabila (Page 1 of 1)

allAfrica.com: Congo-Kinshasa: Ebola Outbreak "Contained" - Kabila (Page 1 of 1): "Measures have been taken to prevent the spread of Ebola following the deaths of at least 160 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo's southern province of Kasai Occidental during the past two months, President Joseph Kabila said. 'The village of Kampungu [the worst affected] has been quarantined to prevent population movement towards Kananga,' Kabila told reporters on 13 September. Kananga is the main town in the province."

O.J. Simpson a suspect in casino hotel theft - Los Angeles Times

Police questioned O. J. Simpson about a break-in at the property Thursday night. Simpson was released and is believed to be in Las Vegas, police spokesman Jose Montoya said.
O.J. Simpson a suspect in casino hotel theft - Los Angeles Times: "O.J. Simpson is a suspect in a theft of sports memorabilia from a hotel room at the Palace Station Casino, police in Las Vegas said today. 'The investigation is ongoing, and O.J. Simpson is alleged to be the suspect,' Las Vegas Police Sgt. John Loretto said by telephone. The former football star was questioned and released, Loretto said. He was not arrested. The memorabilia were in a hotel room in the casino Thursday night, police spokesman Jose Montoya said. Loretto would not describe the memorabilia, including what sport was involved."

RIGHTS: African Maids Face Abuse in Lebanon

RIGHTS: African Maids Face Abuse in Lebanon: "BEIRUT, Sep 13 (IPS) - Driven by poverty and conflict in their home countries, women from Africa travel to Lebanon only to find themselves hungry, abused, raped and subjected to conditions akin to slavery. Amira is 25 years old. She comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. 'One time, Madame found dust on the furniture. She told me that the house was dirty like my skin.' For four years Amira has been confined to the apartment of her employers -- only leaving to take out the trash. She came to Lebanon as a domestic worker on a six-year contract due to ongoing conflict in her country. Awakened daily at 5.30 am, she is subjected to 18 hours of back-breaking labour without time off. 'Even the dogs are allowed to go out, but we're stuck,' she says from across the balcony. 'We're like slaves here.'"

Throwing the Book at O.J. Simpson - washingtonpost.com

Throwing the Book at O.J. Simpson - washingtonpost.com PHOENIX -- Fred Goldman is 66 years old now. He lives in the Arizona desert a good five miles of barbed wire and cactus from the nearest sunblasted shopping center. His son, Ron, is buried back in California, but do not think that this geographical distance means that he has put his son's slaying behind him.

Goldman has never let the most notorious murder case in modern American history, the O.J. Simpson trial, move "more than a centimeter from the surface of the brain," and today he launches a bizarre offensive against Simpson, the man whom a civil court -- and many Americans -- consider to be someone who got away with murder.


"To let it go would be tantamount to saying, 'It doesn't matter anymore,' " Goldman says of his continued pursuit of O.J. Simpson.

"I made a promise to Ron," Goldman says in a long, late-afternoon interview in his modest home, "that I would pursue this bastard. That we would never let this go."

Improvisations: Arab Woman Progressive Voice: Ambassador of the Poor

Improvisations: Arab Woman Progressive Voice: Ambassador of the Poor: "The Egyptian poet Ahmad Fou'ad Negm (Nejem/Nejm) has been named, along with Nelson Mandela, international ambassador of the poor. He will advocate on behave of poor Arabs in the international arena. Nagm is a leftist poet who writes in the Egyptian dialect. Many of his poems were sung in the 1960s and 1970s by his long-time friend Sheikh Imam (they had a falling out at some point). He writes about the poor, corrupt leaders and regimes, fat cats, neo-colonialism, and revolution."

A Vicious Hate Crime In WV

I got the story through Ann via Rachel's Tavern regarding the racist hate crime in WV:


http://kathmanduk2.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/and-will-she-get-justice/

Also, What About Our Daughters is covering this horrific and near-fatal hate crime:

http://whataboutourdaughters.blogspot.com/2007/09/black-woman-tortured-and-raped-for-week.html


More news on this horrific crime:

W.VA. MULLS HATE CRIME PROBE

SIX CHARGED IN TORTURE

TORTURE COULD BE HATE CRIME



May God watch us all. These are perilous times for Black women in America today. When will it ever end? Probably never as long as people in general believe the hateful lies on Black women generated for centuries by the powers that be. I hope she gets justice and not have white supremacist media, so-called Black media, and the general society attack her the way they attacked Crystal Gail Mangum and the victims of Dunbar Village in Florida. My prayers go out to her and her family.

Latoyia Figueroa's Father Is Starting His Support Group

This is similiar to the organization started by Shawna Hawk's mother Dee Sumpter when her daughter was murdered in February 1993. I hope his group be successful in bringing to the public's attention concerning murders of young people in the Philadelphia metro area as well as the nation.

Who'll mourn La'Toyia? Her father has a dream
By Annette John-Hall,Inquirer Columnist


Melvin Figueroa hopes to start a foundation to help find missing people like his murdered daughter, whose picture he holds. Melvin Figueroa suffered a stroke a couple of months ago. He was diagnosed with diabetes. He's now on a half-dozen medications.
Stress will do that to you.

Figueroa is only 47. But he sounds old and tired, like a man who's survived unspeakable tragedy.

Like so many other parents during a blood-drenched summer in the city, Figueroa endured the worst - in his case, the disappearance and murder of his daughter, La'Toyia.

So forgive him if he hasn't been glued to the TV lately. The nonstop coverage of Jessie Davis - the nine-months-pregnant Ohio mother who went missing before authorities charged her cop boyfriend with her murder - reminds him too much of the ordeal he went through trying to find La'Toyia.

Not that he could ever forget.

Next month, it will be two years since 24-year-old La'Toyia disappeared and was found murdered, her body left in a vacant lot with the trash, her 5-month-old fetus dead inside her.

Her boyfriend, Stephen Poaches, was charged with her murder and eventually sentenced to life in prison. Life - at least he has his.

There are many similarities between Davis' and La'Toyia's cases.

Both were young and pregnant. Both went missing. Both were found murdered, the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the United States. Both met their fates at the hands of men they thought loved them. And both left behind children, for La'Toyia, a daughter, now 9.


The value of life
But there's one big difference: Davis was pretty and white; La'Toyia, pretty and Latina.
Which meant that Davis' story and all of its titillating elements - an interracial coupling, love triangles, bad-cop drama - warranted the CNN crawl, 24/7, interview after interview, and the usual pundit parade.

La'Toyia? It was almost two weeks until the local papers even picked up her story. Only a few months before, the national media fixated on the sentencing of Scott Peterson, whose murder of his pretty pregnant wife, Laci, was played out over and over for three years.

It was only after a local blogger contacted CNN about La'Toyia's case - and the inequity of her coverage - that her story got heavily publicized, which finally brought out search parties and pressured authorities to prioritize her case.

For a minute, the stations took a break from blanket coverage of Natalee Hollaway, the missing teen in Aruba. Suddenly, La'Toyia was not just a missing pregnant woman but the face of the forgotten minority.


'I have to humble myself'
Figueroa is painfully aware of the racial inequities and class distinctions that dictate which stories the media decide to cover. Paris Hilton, anyone?

Seems the media declare that bad things are not supposed to happen to white women. With poor women of color, they're expected.

"As a father, I felt some kind of way about [Laci Peterson] being white and my daughter being Hispanic," Figueroa says. "Now there's a book and a movie going to be made about [Peterson] and nothing about my daughter . . .

"I get angry about it but I have to humble myself."

Because the truth is, Figueroa doesn't wish what happened to La'Toyia on any family, no matter what color. The loss of a child feels the same to every parent.

"If I had money in my pocket, I would go out to Ohio and support [Jessie Davis'] family. It's a blessing that they had people to help them search for her, because I had to go out there by myself every day to search for my daughter [until her disappearance was publicized]."

In all of these cases, the obvious question looms: What in the name of an unborn child would possess a man to kill the mother of his baby?

Figueroa thinks he knows. "Sometimes men don't want to raise their children but they don't want no other man to raise them, either," he explains. "That's the motive for all this."

So murder makes their lives easier?

"If you don't want to be a father, it don't cost nothing to be a deadbeat dad," Figueroa continues. "If you're not happy with a young lady, that don't give you the right to take her life and the life of a child."

As unbearably heartbreaking as La'Toyia's death was, Figueroa came out of it a changed man. He's more spirit-filled, more committed to helping folks who have lost loved ones to violence as he has.

And there are plenty of them. Here, in a city with a murder rate that just hit 200, Figueroa's work never ends. Despite his weariness, he organizes candlelight vigils, visits families, even pays his respects at visitations and funerals.

His dream is to open the La'Toyia Figueroa Foundation, which would assist relatives in finding missing loved ones.

In the meantime, he knows the perfect person to play La'Toyia in a film: newly crowned American Idol Jordin Sparks.

"She has her eyes, her smile," Figueroa says. "I hope God will open the door and let that movie be made."

Because there's more to La'Toyia's life than we will ever know.

reappropriate » Blog Archive » Hate Crime at the University of Maryland?

reappropriate » Blog Archive » Hate Crime at the University of Maryland?: "Earlier this week, reports surfaced of a possible hate crime on the University of Maryland campus. A noose was reported hanging outside of one of the dorms, possibly intended to target — and terrorize — African American students living within."

Jefferson claims racial motive in bribery case - Politics - MSNBC.com

Jefferson claims racial motive in bribery case - Politics - MSNBC.com: "WASHINGTON - Rep. William Jefferson accused the Justice Department of bringing corruption charges against him in Virginia to reduce the chance of drawing black jurors. Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat who has been charged in an international bribery case, made the argument Friday in federal court documents seeking to move the case to Washington. 'The court has an obligation to ensure that the forum selection in this case was not tainted by racially discriminatory motive,' Jefferson's attorney, Robert P. Trout wrote."

Very Touching Video of Latoyia Figueroa

To all of my cyberfriends and concerned citizens,

Here's a very touching tribute to Latoyia at YouTube:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=E8fTZpg0Yac

Watch it, then weep!

Brawl Over Islam on Facebook - New York Times

Brawl Over Islam on Facebook - New York Times: "The social networking site Facebook from afar can look a lot like college, with cliques and the familiar range of personalities. In another imitation of college life, the Facebook campus is wrestling with the contentious issue of speech codes. The latest concern centers on a group with a crude title denouncing Islam that had more than 750 members at last count. While the group takes pains to say it has nothing against Muslims, who “can be and usually are peaceful and respectful,” it asserts at the start: “The Quran contains many lies and threats. Islam is false, no god exists, and someone should say that loud and clear.” In the month or so since the group was created, the reaction has been building across Facebook. As of the weekend, more than 58,000 Facebook members had joined a group that said that unless the anti-Islam group was removed, “we r quitting Facebook.” Facebook declined to comment on Friday on the subject of hate speech or on what steps had been taken."

Jena Six in national spotlight « Vox ex Machina

Jena Six in national spotlight « Vox ex Machina: "Over the past couple of days, a few important things have happened re: the Jena Six. Most importantly, due to pressure, Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. threw out Mychal Bell’s conspiracy conviction, leaving him with only an aggravated second-degree battery conviction, which carries up to 15 years. Not great, but much better than the 100 years he originally faced with the conspiracy and attempted murder charges, and even the 22 he faced before the conspiracy conviction was dropped."

David Horowitz, Racist

YouTube - David Horowitz, Racist: "FOX News bigotry: It's not just for Sean Hannity any more."

Transracial Adoptees, Permanent Homes, Forever Families, and Their Home They Are Forced to Leave « The Blog and the Bullet

Transracial Adoptees, Permanent Homes, Forever Families, and Their Home They Are Forced to Leave « The Blog and the Bullet: "Sume blogs about the intracacies of what is really home and family while being a transracial adoptee: In the case of domestic adoption, can more be done to keep families in tact? What roles do racism and class play in creating and perpetuating environments that feed children into system? Have we as a society become too reliant upon adoption as a solution because of lack of a better one? And let us not forget that adoption is an industry regardless of it’s mutually beneficial appearance. As an industry, adoption has created as many or more problems as it has presumably solved. On one hand, it gives children to parents who want them, but on another, it feeds and sustains a voracious baby market. As potential adoptive parents seek cheaper, quicker ways to acquire children those only too willing to provide that without much thought to ethics will appear. Adoption as an industry will do what’s necessary to stay alive."

Evangelist plans to be anti-violence advocate | ajc.com

Evangelist plans to be anti-violence advocate | ajc.com: "The tough-talking pastor, who has survived a divorce, a nervous breakdown and life on welfare, broke her silence two weeks after her second husband, Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III, allegedly beat, stomped and choked her in a hotel parking lot. Bynum appeared Tuesday night as a special guest on TBN's 'Praise The Lord' program, a Christian talk show featuring ministers, gospel artists and other newsmakers. On the show, Bynum said she had no bitterness toward her husband. She would not say anything negative about Weeks. 'Nobody could give me enough money,' she said. 'As long as he's my husband I won't break that covenant.' Also on the show, she said the church would help people by preaching more about personal experiences such as her own. While interviews other guests, an emotional Bynum said, 'I came here tonight to declare that I can bear it, I can bear it, I can bear it.'"

Fatima : I Do Not Support the Troops

Fatima A few weeks ago I watched Oprah stage her input into the plight of the American soldier in Iraq and Afghansitan. She assembled the families of returning troops in her studio without them knowing that the actual soldiers were there too. Classic set-up emotionalism so typical of Oprah, and American television in general.

Somewhere in between watching emotional scenes of reunions, children hanging onto fathers and mothers who have been away, and loving embraces between loved ones, I felt a certain resentment.

My resentment was first directed at Oprah. I thought "damn why is she making a nationalistic statement about troops and their families?"

Well I knew the answer almost immediately. It sells. And Oprah is a salesperson first. She is playing to the glossed-over majority mindset in America that mostly excuses the troops from their vicious role. The "I Support our Troops" and their families so bring them home from that war 'over there' mentality is profitable in these terms.

The troops in this sense are not held responsible for their actions. They are rather seen as victims of what is now an unpopular war. If there is brutality to be recognized, well then the excuse is that they are merely carrying out orders.

It is here that my greater sense of resentment was directed. I could barely watch the service men and women embrace their families without thinking about the mass terror and murders their voluntary service has enabled.

Brown, Black, and white troops. Poor and patriotic. I needed to be careful about throwing all these into one bucket of resentment. But I found myself not caring anyway. Who speaks for the suffering of Iraqi's and Afghans? The senseless murder of innocents. The rape and prostitution forced on a people in the name of democracy.

Well not Oprah, of course. Not one word was spoken, not one tear was shed, for the millions who cannot reunite with their families or loved ones on Oprah's stage.

A Day of Outrage for decency

A Day of Outrage for decency CHICAGO (FinalCall.com) - Corporate media conglomerates were issued a direct challenge on Aug. 7 as the Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) coordinated simultaneous protests themed “A Day of Outrage” in 20 cities across the United States. The protests were primarily aimed at record companies and industry executives in a high stakes battle against those corporate interests profiting from the sale of records with degrading lyrics.

The “Day of Outrage” is an outgrowth of the “Decency Initiative,” which is planning to target legislation in state senates to bar any tax dollars or pension funds for any corporate entity promoting or producing lyrics using the ‘n’ word, the ‘h’ word or ‘b’ word. This is the first time legislation has been proposed targeting the record companies themselves as opposed to previously attacking the artists and those stores who sell their records.

“We cannot continue to allow our brothers and sisters to be called out of their names, while others are being protected from name calling,” Rev. Sharpton told The Final Call. “There are lyrics committees in record companies that if lyrics come out against police, or gays or Jews, they stop the records—and they should. Yet they can call us the ‘n’ word, call our women the ‘h’ word and the ‘b’ word.”

Crimes Against Black Women: Four Cases

Regarding the missing/murdered Black women/girls in the past, here are four profiles of the cases that didn't get much attention from mainstream media:

The Boston Murders

After 12 black women are murdered in Boston, a public outcry about the lack of media attention to violence against women of color leads to the formation of the Combahee River Collective.
The following paragraphs regarding the killings of 12 Black women in Boston in 1978-79 is from the Combahee River Collective Papers at Womanist Theory and Research at
http://www.uga.edu/~womanist/harris3.1.htm :

” Nevertheless, when twelve Black women were murdered in Boston in 1979, the Black feminist agenda went into full effect.

Theory, Practice, and Action: Twelve Murders –The Final Act

The only research that has been done to date about the activism of the Combahee River Collective in response to the time when twelve Black women were murdered in Boston in 1979 is Jamie Grant’s unpublished article, “Who Is Killing Us?” According to Grant, between 28 January and 30 May 1979, thirteen women, twelve Black and one white, were murdered within a two-mile radius in the city of Boston. All but one of the victims were found in predominately Black neighborhoods in the contiguous districts of Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End.25 Many of the women were strangled, with bare hands or a scarf or cord, and some were stabbed; two were buried after they were killed, and two were dismembered. Several of the women had been raped.26

Notorious at the time for its poor treatment of Blacks with the busing situation, the Black attorney who had been stabbed with an American flag, and for an attack on a Black high school football player, Boston reflected this social climate in its major newspaper, the Globe. The 30 January 1979 edition noted the discovery of the bodies of the first two murder victims, then unidentified, beside the racing forms on page thirty, in a four-paragraph description headlined, “Two bodies found in a trash bag.” On 31 January, the murder of Gwendolyn Yvette Stinson was noted on page thirteen under the head, “Dorchester girl found dead.” Caren Prater’s death, on 6 February, finally warranted a small block on the front page, followed by a confusing article about community outrage and police resources. On 7 February, on the eighth page of its Metro report, the Globe covered a community meeting with Mayor White at the Lee School in Dorchester, which more than 700 people attended.

The Globe took no responsibility for its complicity in the lack of public attention to the murders. When it did focus attention on the crimes, it was to attack the Black community’s response. Except for a small 17 February article on the murders, the Globe remained silent about the crisis until 21 February, when Daryl Ann Hargett was found in her apartment. Then, inside a small box in the lower left-hand corner of the front page, the Globe reported the death of the fifth Black woman in thirty days, misspelling Hargett’s first name.27 In contrast to the Globe, the Bay State Banner, the Black community weekly, ran full-blown coverage of the situation from 1 February, and reported on the Black community’s response. The Banner continued detailed, front-page coverage throughout the year.27

On 1 April, following the deaths of six Black women, fifteen hundred people took to the streets to mourn the losses of their sisters, daughters, mothers, friends. The memorial march commenced in Boston’s South End at the Harriet Tubman House, and paused first at the Wellington Street apartment of Daryl Ann Hargett, the fifth victim, who was found strangled on the floor of her bedroom:
By that time in April, six women had been murdered and there was a memorial march in the south end about the murders. It was a protest march. It was also trying to commemorate them, and there was a rally at the Stride-Rite factory field, and you heard things that had already been said, but the message came across — loud and clear from the almost entirely Black male speakers — that what Black women needed to do was stay in the house. That’s the way you saved yourself from being murdered. You stayed in the house and/or you found a man to protect you. If you were going to leave the house, you had to find a man to go with you to take care of you. And also, the murders were being viewed at time as being completely racial murders. It was all women, and some of the women had been sexually assaulted, but they were still seen as racial murders. There were a lot of feminist lesbians at that rally; so, there were at least some people there that, when they heard this message that these were just racial murders, our ears perked up, stood up, whatever, and we were thinking, “No, no, I don’t think so,” because there was something called violence against women that we were all too familiar with; and we just felt so — it was just such a difficult afternoon because at one level, we were grieving because Black women were being killed; we felt like we were at risk. We knew we were, in fact. We were scared. It was a very frightening time to be a Black woman in Boston. So, there was that kind of collective shared grieving, and then there was this real feeling of real fury. It was just infuriating, because we knew that it was not a coincidence that everybody who had been murdered was female, and as it turned out, by the time it was over, twelve Black women had been murdered. When the marchers reached the Stride Rite factory on Lenox Street in Roxbury, where the bodies of the first two women were found, Lorraine Bethel, who eventually co-edited Conditions Five with Barbara Smith, was there. Smith remembers Lorraine saying, “This is just horrible; we’ve got to do something.”28

Smith’s anger and frustration at the rally speakers’ failure to acknowledge sexism as a factor in the deaths of the women propelled her into action. She returned to her apartment in Roxbury and began developing a pamphlet that would speak to the fears of Black women in Boston:
I said, “I think we really need to do a pamphlet. We need to do something.” So, I started writing a pamphlet that night and I thought of the title — “Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?” — and I wrote it up. I always write everything longhand to begin with, and then I typed it. I had a little Smith ­Corona electric portable at that time. And by the next morning, it was basically done. I called other people in the Collective. The Collective was never huge, so I am not talking about called twenty people. But I called other people in the group and I read it to them. This was before faxes and all that madness. I read it to them and then I also called up Urban Planning Aid in Boston and went down there and got assistance with laying out the pamphlet, using my actual typing from my own typewriter at home.

Basically, what we wanted to say — and did say — in the pamphlet is that we had to look at these murders as both racist and sexist crimes and that we really needed to talk about violence against women in the Black community. We needed to talk about those women who did not have men as a buffer. Almost no woman has a man as a buffer between them and violence, because it doesn’t make any difference if you are married or heterosexual, whatever, all kinds of women are at risk for attack in different kinds of circumstances. And, in fact, most women are attacked by the men they know. So, obviously, having a man isn’t going to protect you from violence. But we really wanted to, first of all, get out that sexual political analysis about these murders. We wanted to do some consciousness-raising about what the murders meant. We also wanted to give women hope. So, the pamphlet had the statement, the analysis, the political analysis, and it said that it had been prepared by the Combahee River Collective. That was a big risk for us, a big leap to identify ourselves in something that we knew was going to be widely distributed. It also had a list of things that you can do to protect yourself. In other words, self-defense methods. I remember consulting with people, like some of the violence- against-women organizations, to really check out to make sure that the things that we were suggesting were usable and good and then, also, we had a list of organizations that were doing work on violence against women in Boston.

We got great support from the community churches. We got a lot of support from very diverse groups of people, but I must say, the larger white feminist community was incredibly supportive. It was a real opportunity to do some coalition-building, and we were able to mobilize hundreds and hundreds of people to come out and to speak out, to talk about the issue. We were able to bring together very diverse groups of people around the issue of violence against women. And we never felt that it had lost the focus on the fact that the women were Black. One thing we did say, though, is that “These are Black women who were being murdered. They could have been you.” It could have been any of us.29
″

Those killings took place in Boston, a city notoriously for its racial polarization. The police there didn’t give two cents about the murdered Black women since they labeled them as “runaways”, “drug addicts”, and “prostitutes.”

***

The Eleanor Bumpers Case

http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/jwb/Collab/CivRts/BumpersRslt.htm

Eleanor Bumpurs was an African American 300-pound woman in her late sixties. She was 5’8 and she was suffering from arthritis and diabetes. She also had children and grandchildren.
Eleanor lived in the Sedgwick houses in the Highbridge section the Bronx at 1551 University Avenue West 174th street. Her monthly rent was $89.44. She had failed to pay her rent for 5 months and now owed $387.40. The incident took place on Monday October 29, 1984 at 9:00 a.m.

Eleanor was assumed to be mentally ill by the housing commission and the police. On the day of the incident, she was found naked and hysterical in a room the size of a closet. On the morning of October 29th, an article in the New York Times on October 30th, 1984, stated that first Emergency service officers were alerted to the scene by the housing police. They approached her and saw that she had a 10-inch butchers knife. She lunged at one of the police officers (John Elter) but his partner, Stephen Sullivan, shot her in the chest with a shotgun. A second article in the New York Times on November 1st, 1984, states that after Miss Bumpurs being told by her daughter not to open her door for anyone, she was frightened and grabbed a knife in defense when her door was broken down. After an incident in 1979 where a man had been shot 21 times, the police’s new procedure was to send in men with restraining orders and plastic shield to deal with mentally ill people. After they cornered her and she swiftly dodged their shields and restraining prods, she hit one of the shields and attempted to stab an officer. She was then shot with a shotgun rather than a revolver because it was found to be more certain to stop the attacker. In yet another report in the New York Times on December 29th, 1984, a strong racial activist wrote in a semi-editorial that a SWAT team of 6 officers wearing bulletproof vests and carrying shields, clubs, and shotguns arrived at Eleanor Bumpurs apartment. When they broke through her door they found her naked and hysterical, in a small room the size of a closet. The report says they shot her hand, nearly amputating it. The loss of her right hand could be considered as payment for her debts. The officer could have let it go after that while she continuously apologized but instead he shot her in the chest.

OUR INTERPRETATION: We interpret all of this information to lead to an old obese woman who was always slow to pay her rent, was confronted by police officers with an unreasonable amount of equipment for just one old woman. She was terrified after her daughter warned her not to open the door so she grabbed a butcher’s knife when the men entered her apartment. After being restrained with metal prods, she used self-defense and tried to slash the men with her knife but missed, and was shot in the chest. She died soon after in the hospital.

Many people were astonished and outraged that 6 police officers were needed to restrain a woman in her late sixties and that there was a need for her to be killed over rent payments. Many journalists wrote articles toward the police questioning the New York Police Department's procedures and their brutality. So many people felt strongly in outrage about the incident that it lead the mayor to organize a committee to question police procedures.

Results

Stephen Sullivan, the 19-year veteran officer who killed Eleanor, was dismissed from manslaughter charges during his grand jury trial. Sullivan’s defense was that he shot in order to protect a fallen comrade who was in the path of Eleanor’s kitchen knife. Even though Eleanor was unnecessarily shot, instances such as this have been repeated many times since her death, even in neighborhoods very close to hers. In 1985, after her death, the mayor ordered a commission to redefine police procedures. But this attempt was lost because two years later, it was concluded that the police officer’s decisions were not based on race and very little in the procedure was changed in the future. Eleanor is still thought of as a symbol of police brutality. In my opinion, the police officers should have been convicted, and still to this day, police got away with murder.

***
The South Side Murders


Silent Wraith: Chester Turner By slaying troubled black women, LA’s worst serial killer operated invisibly for years

By CHRISTINE PELISEK
Wednesday, May 2, 2007 - 6:00 pmUPDATE:

On May 15, 2007 Chester Turner was sentenced to death.

One Spring day in 1993, Jerri Johnson held a “repast dinner” for her 29-year-old murdered daughter, Andrea Tripplett. It was the end of a day marked by two burials: Andrea’s, and that of her 5-and-a-half-month-old fetus, poignantly laid to rest at her mother’s feet.
Close by — filling her home and backyard, bringing food and eating together — were family and friends, including a quiet and familiar neighborhood man, Chester Turner.
Turner joined other mourners “in the backyard, eating my food,” Johnson says. Widely known for his violent temper, he hung around the nearby liquor store on Figueroa and 76th streets and earned the nickname “Cisco” for a wine cooler he favored. Standing around, says Johnson — “that is what [Turner] was known for.”

He also used to walk the streets near his home with a buddy named Elliott, hang out with the local prostitutes on Figueroa, and get in brawls with neighborhood kids. “He was known in the neighborhood as someone who was off his rocker when he got mad,” says a close friend who has always known Turner — but refused to be identified.

As Turner awaits sentencing on 11 murder convictions for slaying one fetus and 10 young and middle-aged women in downtown and South L.A. over an incredible 11 years, a tale has emerged of a silent wraith who lived where he killed — and killed with impunity.
Police believe Turner, an often unemployed father of four with a history of violent relationships, so seamlessly fit into the troubled streets of L.A. that he even killed while he worked “security” at the old Midnight Mission, where he lived for a time. So brazen was he that he showed up — and chowed down — at the funeral dinner held for his pregnant victim Andrea Tripplett.
Said by police to be the most prolific serial killer in Los Angeles city history, with 13 dead women and two fetuses linked to his DNA, Turner was charged with killing 10 of those women and one fetus, all found within 20 blocks of his various homes and flophouses. The murder sites create a horrific map of sorts — with Turner’s address always close to the mayhem.
He was such a successful chameleon that the cops spent years looking for entirely different suspects. Harriet Evans, a friend of victims Tripplett and Desarae Jones, tells L.A. Weekly that Turner “didn’t look suspicious because we saw him all the time. . . . He played us — he knew that area.” Police blamed big, brooding Chester’s murders on a composite dubbed the South Side Slayer, possibly with a Caribbean accent, possibly a pockmarked face. Those dozens of murders turned out to be the work of several men, including Turner.

TV and print media barely noticed his killings of mostly black women such as Tripplett with promiscuous lives, “strawberries” who traded casual sex for drugs — who nevertheless didn’t deserve to die. But there’s little argument that those 15 deaths would have been global news had the women been from Santa Monica or Silver Lake.

Dr. Jeff Victoroff, associate professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry at the University of Southern California, says, “Society tends to focus on dramatic explosions of violence against people with whom they identify,” so when drug-using minority women die, “it usually fails to stimulate much public outrage… There might even be in some people’s minds some kind of moral difference drawn.”

Turner seemed to mine this truism about the mean streets. Truc Do, one of two prosecutors during Turner’s five-week trial, says, “Their addiction made them an invisible class… On the fringes of society.” In the end, it took an extremely unusual act by a troubled victim, who broke through her own indifference bred of street life and drugs, to report Turner’s brutal rape to police. Thanks to the guts of Maria Martinez, Turner is widely expected to get the death penalty.

“I never thought that he was that kind of person,” says the longtime friend who never suspected a thing. While Turner’s mother could be too tough on him as a teen, “locking the food up” and making him wait outside until she got home from work, “You have to deal with those things. I knew he had problems — but I never thought he would go out and kill people.”

Read more of this at:
http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/silent-wraith-chester-turner/16276/

Here’s a quote from the article regarding the murdered Black women:

“In some ways, Chester Turner is still, despite his ghoulish new place in city history, an invisible ghost. One recent day during his trial in the Criminal Courts Building downtown, no crowds pressed forward to catch a glimpse of him. The area around the courthouse was crowded — but the media and onlookers were there to see music legend Phil Spector, on trial in the murder of a beautiful blond actress — the kind of story the media can get behind.
How did Chester Turner, who the relatives of one victim say was dubbed by his classmates in school “Chester the Molester,” fall so utterly through the cracks? Looking back, it seems obvious.

The 1980s were a violent time, with a crack epidemic, a PCP epidemic — and the city still reeling from mass murders and serial killings that began in 1969 when Charles Manson and his followers committed the sensational Tate-LaBianca murders.

The “Skid Row Slasher,” Vaughn Greenwood, terrorized transients, cutting their throats as they slept. The “Freeway Killer,” William Bonin, an unemployed Downey truck driver, was convicted of murdering and raping 14 boys and men in Orange and Los Angeles counties in 1979 and 1980. Then came “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, convicted in 1989 of 13 horrific torture-murders.
Beyond those ghastly cases, Southside cops had their hands full when the bodies of victims started to pile up along the Figueroa Corridor, a 30-block-long area known for its prostitution, drugs and desperation.

“We were averaging 25 to 30 murders a year, with two detectives,” recalls Detective Victor Pietrantoni, who worked the Southeast Division. “When I left Southeast after three years I had just shy of 100 murder investigations.”

Yet even against all that background noise, in April 1985, authorities began to suspect that a serial killer was afoot, when the bodies of mostly black prostitutes were found dumped in parks, alleys, along unpaved roadsides and even in a schoolyard.

USC’s Victoroff tells the Weekly that despite the belief of police that Turner could be the most prolific killer in city history, his trial is relegated to the inside local pages of the Los Angeles Times and rates only passing mention in other media outlets because the victims “aren’t beautiful young starlets.”

Awaiting his guilty verdict on Monday, Jerri Johnson, the mother of victim Andrea Tripplett, snapped at a Times reporter for describing most of the slain women as “prostitutes,” saying, “My daughter wasn’t a prostitute!” She later wept openly, tears streaming down her face.

The families of the dead wonder what kind of horrible fame Chester Turner would have earned in Los Angeles had he murdered downtown secretaries or well-to-do tourists. But even worse are the questions that haunt those who were close to Turner — and never suspected anything.
Today, an elderly woman in South Los Angeles who knew Turner all his life says he could at times be like Jekyll and Hyde, but ‘I never would have thought nothing like that.’ ”

***
The Henry Louis Wallace Case

Although Mr. Wallace as eventually arrested, tried and convicted to death in 1997, many people in Charlotte’s Black community felt that they didn’t do enough to solve the murders of pretty young Black women between 1992 and 1994, the year of his arrest. Here’s the article from Wikipedia below:

Henry Louis Wallace (November 4, 1965 - ) is an American serial killer who killed 10 young attractive Black women in Charlotte, N.C. from May 1992 until March 12, 1994.
Mr. Wallace behaviour toward women was chivalrous in public. However, he had another side to him when he killed his victims, usually at night and alone. The murdered young women knew and trusted him well enough to let him into their homes. He filed a missing person report on Caroline Love the day after she was missing, accompanying Love’s sister and Sadie McKnight to the police station in June 1992. Other victims were strangled or stabbed during his two-year reign of terror that wrecked East Charlotte.

He was arrested on March 13, 1994 after the bodies of three young women were found in East Charlotte. A crack addict, Wallace confessed to murdering 10 young Black women in Charlotte, N.C. between 1992 and 1994. He was arraigned on March 16, 1994. Some community leaders and activists as well as victims’ rights groups such as Mothers of Murdered Offspring complained to the press that Charlotte Police Department didn’t do much to solve the murders because the women were African American.
He was tried for the murders of nine women in 1996. Mr. Wallace was convicted and sentenced to death on January 29, 1997. He’s currently on death row at Central Prison.

Biography

Henry Louis Wallace was born in Barnwell, S.C., on November 4, 1965, son of Lottie Mae Wallace and a married school teacher who walked out on Lottie while pregnant with Henry and who never acknowledged his son. Mr. Wallace grew up in extreme poverty, with Lottie Mae working long hours as a textile worker. His mother was a harsh disciplinarian, constantly criticizing Henry for even the smallest mistakes. In spite of all this, he was a very popular high school student, having been elected to student council and an extremely popular male cheerleader at Barnwell High School in Barnwell, S.C. Mr. Wallace graduated from that school in 1983. He became a deejay for a local radio station in Barnwell. His smooth, sexy voice swayed women so much that earned him the nickname “The Night Rider.” He went to several colleges before joining the U.S. Navy in 1985. Wallace married his high school sweetheart, the former Maretta Brabham in 1987. In 1988, Wallace was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy.

His Crimes

His criminal activities began while being stationed in the U.S. Navy . This is the time when he started experimenting with various drugs. In Washington State, he was served warrants for several burglaries in and around Seattle metro area. In January 1988, Mr. Wallace got into his first real trouble with police. He broke into a Bremerton garden and hardware store, and as he carted away a TV, videocassette recorder and microwave, police arrested him.
In June 1988, Wallace pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary. A judge sentenced him to two years of supervised probation. According to Probation officer Patrick Seaburg, Wallace didn’t show up for most mandatory meetings.

In early 1990, he met an 18-year old high school student Tashanda Bethea. He dated her for a while. In March 1990, Henry murdered Tashonda Bethea, then dumped her in a lake in Barnwell, S.C., his hometown. It wasn’t until weeks later that her body was discovered. He was questioned by the police regarding her disappearance and death. He was never formally charged in her murder. He was also questioned in connection with the attempted rape of a 16-year old Barnwell girl. She accuse Wallace of attempting to rape her at a local motel. However, his mother told the girl’s family to dropped the charges. He was never charged. By that time, his marriage to Maretta fell apart due to emotional and psychological toll. It was around that period that he was fired from his job as Chemical Operator for for Sandoz Chemical Co.
Things have gone from bad to worse for Mr. Wallace. In February 1991, he broke into his old high school and the radio station where he once worked. He stole video and recording equipment and was caught trying to pawn them.

In November 1991, he relocated to Charlotte, N. C. He found jobs at several fast-food restaurants in East Charlotte. Around the same time, he met various attractive young Black women whom he dated, one of them is Sadie McKnight. In May 1992, he picked up Sharon Nance, a convicted drug dealer and prostitute. When she demanded payment for her services, Henry mercilessly beat her to death, then dropped her body by the railroad tracks. She was found few days later. Then he sets his evil designs upon the lovely Caroline Love. He brutally strangled her at her apartment, then dumped her body in a wooded area. After he killed her, he and Caroline’s sisters filed a missing person’s report at the police station. It would be almost two years later (March 1994) before the police find her body. It would be nine months later before he killed again, this time setting his deadly designs at this beautiful princess.

Mr. Wallace went looking for Shawna Denise Hawk in February 1993. He murdered her after visiting her at her home on February 19, 1993. Ms. Hawk was a college student studying to become a paralegal at the time of her death. He was once her boss at Taco Bell in East Charlotte. In January 1993, a month before Shawna was murdered, Mr. Wallace went to the wrong house looking for Ms. Hawk, but found a then 10-year old girl home alone. He ran around the back of her house and jumped over the fence. The girl feared for her safety. Shawna came to the girl’s rescue and offer to babysit for her until her parents came home. Ms. Hawk did this until two weeks before her untimely death. Mr. Wallace may have been stalking Shawna since January 1993. He came to Shawna’s funeral in late February. He offered his sympathy to her mother. A month later, March 1993, Shawna’s mother, Dee Sumpter and her godmother Judy Williams founded Mothers of Murder Offspring, a Charlotte-based support group for parents who lost their children to murder.

Three months has passed and this time he claimed another victim he knew. This time he targeted his friend and co-worker Audrey Spain. He killed her on June 22. Her friends were looking for her when she didn’t show up for work at Taco Bell. Her body was found two days later.

A little over a month later, on August 10, 1993, Mr. Wallace strikes again, this time taking young, ambitious, and very popular college student Valencia M. Jumper. She was the sister of Vanessa Jumper and was a good friend of Henry’s sister, Yvonne. He came over to her house that night because of difficulties with his girlfriend. He wanted to be consoled that night. Instead, he strangled Valencia, then set her on fire to cover up his crime. A few days after the murder, he and his sister went to Valencia’s funeral.

A month later, in September 1993, he went to the apartment of Michelle Stinson, a struggling college student and single mother of two sons. He strangled and stabbed her in front of her oldest son. She was his last victim of 1993.

As community pressure mounted in the wake of Charlotte’s high crime rate, Mr. Wallace took a break from criminal activity. One reason is the birth of his only child in October. Another is that community activists were protesting the lack of concern regarding Black crime victims in Northern and Eastern Charlotte neighborhoods. They contended that the police didn’t solve the murders of Blacks aggressively as they have done with White victims in South Charlotte and that the police and the general community didn’t care for the safety of residents who had to live in such crime-ridden areas.

On February 20, the day after the anniversary of Shawna Hawk’s death and Dee Sumpter’s pleas to the media to help solve her daughter’s murder, Mr. Wallace killed Vanessa Little Mack in her apartment. His crack habit was very strong at the time and he was on the lookout for money to support the habit. He targeted Ms. Mack because she had a good job and income. Her mother-in-law, Barbara Rippy found her dead. Her four-month old daughter was alright. Ms. Mack had two daughters, aged seven and four months at the time of her death.
On March 8, 1994, Mr. Wallace went to the apartment of his longtime friend Vernon Lamar Woods, with the intention of robbing, raping and murdering Woods’s girlfriend, Brandi Henderson. Brandi was the mother of 10-month old Tareese Woods. Brandi, Vernon, and Mr. Wallace once worked at the Golden Corral and have been good friends since. Brandi’s boyfriend was home, foiling his motive in coming over there in the first place. He realized he knew someone else that lived in the apartment complex: His girlfriend’s best friend.

Betty Jean Baucom, who worked with his girlfriend Sadie McKnight at Bojangles. Betty was the assistant manager. When Betty Jean Baucom answered the door on that same day, Wallace told her he needed to use her phone. She was more than glad to help her friend, Sadie McKnight who was Henry’s boyfriend. He demanded keys, the safe, and the alarm code for Bojangles in order to rob the place to support his drug addiction. Baucom resisted, refusing to give them to him. Finally, she surrendered. According to Wallace’s confession, Baucom stood up and told him that she forgave him. Wallace strangled her to death. Afterward, he took valuables from the house. Then he left the apartment with her car. He pawned everything except the car, which he left at a shopping center.

Mr. Wallace went back to the same apartment complex on the night of March 8,1994, knowing that Vernon Woods would be at work so he could murder his girlfriend Brandi June Henderson. Earlier in the day he came to the couple’s house admiring the new entertainment center the couple bought with their income tax refund money. Wallace strangled Henderson that night. Tarresse cried loudly. That startled Mr. Wallace. He then went to the couple’s bathroom to get a towel. He tied it tightly around the Tarreese’s neck. Then he took the valuables inside the apartment and left afterward.

The police beefed up patrols in east Charlotte after two bodies of young Black women were found in the same apartment complex. While the police patrolling the neighborhood, Mr. Wallace stopped by at an apartment of a woman he knew before.

It was Deborah Ann Slaughter. Ms. Slaughter, who relocated from Atlanta the year before and a mother of an 18-year-old son. She used to worked at Bojangles, where his girlfriend worked. He came to her house asking for money for drugs. He stabbed and strangled her. Then he stole a few things upon leaving the apartment. Her body was found March 12, 1994.
Wallace was arrested on March 13, 1994. For 12 hours, he confessed to the murders of 10 Black women in Charlotte. He described the womens’ appearances, how he raped, robbed and killed the women in detailed descriptions, and of his crack habit.

The Aftermath and Criticism

On March 13,1994, Henry Louis Wallace was arrested for killing 10 young women. Charlotte’s police chief congratulated his arrest, reassuring the community that the women of East Charlotte are safe, now that the killer is behind bars. Many people, especially in the Black community wondered why the murders weren’t solved soon enough and that Charlotte Police didn’t consider the murders of 10 young Black women between 1992 and 1994 high on the priority list. As Shawna Denise Hawk’s mother, Dee Sumpter said concerning police neglect:
the victims “weren’t prominent people with social-economic status. They weren’t special. And they were black. "

Charlotte’s police chief, Rod Steiger was stumped by a serial killer in their midst. He said he wasn’t aware of a killer until early March 1994 when three young Black women were murdered within four days of each other. Charlotte Police Department apologized to its residents for not spotting a link among the murders sooner. However, they said the murder cases varied enough to throw them off Wallace’s trail. Until the Mr. Wallace’s murder pace picked up in the early weeks of March 1994, the deaths were sporadic and not entirely similar. It was only in the week of March 9, 1994 that Charlotte Police warned the people in East Charlotte that there was a serial killer on the loose.

One young lady said that the police didn’t care because the police viewed the young female murder victims as “fast girls who hang out a lot.” The victims were not the type. They were described by both the press and family members as pretty, hardworking, and serious young women. Others said the reason why the police didn’t take the murder cases serious because the women were both working class and Black.

Inside The Trial

After two years of hearing confessions, debates on whether to hold the trial in Charlotte, the DNA evidence from murdered victims, and the jury selection, his trial began in September 1996. In the opening arguments, the prosecutor argues for the death penaly while the defense attorney pleaded for life sentence for Mr. Wallace. The prosecutor told the jurors to sympathize with the victims and that Mr. Wallace’s crimes were heinous and cruel, while the defense urge them to consider Mr. Wallace dire circumstances and his mental illness as mitigating factors in giving him life in prison instead of the death penalty.

In the opening argument, the Assistant District Attorney Marsha Goodenow urge the jury to think about the victims and how they died heinously by Mr. Wallace. She told the jurors that the victims have several things in common:

“They were African American women, all young, all very attractive, she said. “They all knew the defendant and they all died at his hands. "

Public Defender Isabel Day told the victims’ families and jurors that Mr. Wallace was a man driven by hideous fantasies and disabled by mental illness rooted in childhood. Furthermore, Ms. Day said defense evidence will show that the killings were not first-degree murder because they didn’t result from “premeditation and deliberation.

According to FBI serial murder expert Robert Ressler:

“If he elected to become a serial killer, he was going about it in the wrong way,’ said Robert Ressler, one of the “Mr. Wallace always seemed to take one step forward and two steps back,” Ressler testified. ‘He would take items and put them in the stove to destroy them by burning them and then forget to turn the stove on.”

Psychologist Faye Sultan testified during the trial that Mr. Wallace was constant victim of physical and mental abuse from his mother since birth and that he suffered from mental illness at the time of the killings. Ms. Sultan argues for life sentence without parole instead of the death penalty.

Ms. Goodenow argued that Mr. Wallace deserved death because he is a calculating, cold-blooded killer who preyed on friends and co-workers and hid his crimes by cleaning up murder scenes.
Defense attorneys, Day and Cooney, on the other hand, did not dispute the fact that Mr. Wallace killed the nine young Black women. They argued he was mentally ill and drug addicted at the time of the killings, driven by obsessional sexual fantasies that rendered him incapable of forming the intent to kill. Ms. Day and Mr. Cooney wanted a second-degree murder conviction in hopes of avoiding a death sentence.

On January 7, 1997, he was found guilty of nine murders and on January 29, 1997, he was sentenced to nine consecutive death sentences. Mr. Wallace said nothing during his trial for murdering and raping nine women. After being sentenced to death, he broke his silence to apologize to the victims’ families.

“None of these women, none of your daughters, mothers, sisters or family mem
bers in any way deserved what they got. They did nothing to me that warranted their death,”

Wiping tears, Wallace sat down as George Burrell, Brandi June Henderson’s cousin shouted:
“Why did you kill them?”

After The Trial

On June 5, 1998, Henry Louis Wallace, was married to a former prison nurse, Rebecca Torrijas, in a ceremony next to the execution chamber where he has been sentenced to die. Mecklenburg County public defender Isabel Day, served as an official witness and photographer. Also attending was the manager of the death-row unit at the prison.

Since being sentenced to death in 1997, Mr. Wallace has been appealing to the courts to overturn the death sentences, stating that his confessions were coerced and his constitutional rights were violated in the process.

In 2005, Superior Court Judge Charles Lamm rejected Wallace’s latest appeal to overturn his convictions and nine death sentences, moving him another step closer to execution.
The legal battle to save Wallace, now 41, has already been through the state and federal courts. The N.C. Supreme Court upheld the death sentences in 2000. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2001 denied his appeal. Lamm’s rejection is the first in a second round of appeals that will likely wind through state and federal courts again in the next few years.

No execution date is being set for Mr. Wallace to this day.

The Victims

The victims described in news reports and the victims’ families accounts were young, beautiful Black women between the ages of 18 and 35. Majority of Mr. Wallace’s victims were petite as well. Some were mothers of young children, others were pretty young college students.

The victims:

Tashanda Bethea
Sharon Lavette Nance
Caroline Love
Shawna D. Hawk
Audrey Ann Spain
Valencia M. Jumper
Michelle Stinson
Vanessa Little Mack
Betty Jean Baucom
Brandi June Henderson
Deborah Slaughter

Articles Quoted


The Serial Killer the Cops Ignored:The Henry Louis Wallace Murders by Jason Lapeyre1Various Newspaper sources, mainly The Charlotte Observer, The Augusta(GA)Chronicle, New York Times, News and Observer(Raleigh, N.C.), and USA Today.

Links:

“HENRY LOUIS WALLACE: A CALAMITY WAITING TO HAPPEN” By Joseph
Geringer
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/wallace/preface_1.html

The Serial Killer The Cops Ignore by Jason Lepeyre

http://www.crimemagazine.com/henrylouiswallacemurders.htm

Message Board Regarding Henry L. Wallace and His Victims

http://p099.ezboard.com/Brandi-Henderson-and-the-other-victims-of-Henry-Wallace/fangelsresortfrm90


Here’s a correspondence from a former neighbor of Shawna Hawk’s regarding police neglect. Before Ms. Hawk was murdered, Mr. Wallace broke into her home next to Shawna’s. She was 10 years old at the time. She didn’t give out her name when writing to me about the incident. 

Here’s the correspondence:

“Not sure if you’d find this significant enough to add or not but a month before Shawna was killed in January, a man (later identified as Mr. Wallace) kicked open the door to my home. I was Ms. Hawks’ next door neighbor. I was in 5th grade at the time and home alone. The person rang the doorbell and knocked several times. I didn’t answer of course, and he became agitated and kicked the door open. From what I’ve been told, it was later determined that he was looking for Shawna, and came to the wrong home. He ran around the back of my house and jumped over the fence. It was a month later that he returned and killed her. After our home was broken into, Shawna offered to watch me after school, so I wouldn’t be home alone. I stayed with her everyday after school for two weeks. She would watch me until one of my parents got home from work around 5pm.

 In early February I went to her house as usual and she didn’t answer the door. She didn’t watch me anymore after that. There was never an explanation for why she stopped watching me, but she was killed two weeks after. Mr. Wallace came during the time that I would’ve been there with her. I’ve always wondered if she knew he was capable of something and she was concerned for my safety. I ended up staying with a different neighbor, until my family moved in March after she was killed.”

“I agree with you about him getting what he deserves. I will never forget the look on his face when he came to my door, he was cold and he didn’t care. I didn’t attend the funeral. I was only 10 at the time and I went and stayed with my grandmother while my parents packed us up and moved us away. In my opinion the police really bumbled this one. For example, when our home was broken into, I called my mother, and she called 911, it took the police nearly 45 minutes to arrive at our home, and they did NOTHING, no dusting for fingerprints, no nothing. Mr. Wallace wasn’t exactly careful with his crimes, he could’ve been caught sooner, had the police tried harder. So many young women’s lives could’ve been saved. Once again, merely my opinion but they didn’t care because the victims were black and came from poor neighborhoods. 

Our neighborhood, off Camp Greene Street and Freedom Drive, was as poor as they come, but we were tight-knit. Shawna was an angel. She came to me at a time when I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I intentionally wouldn’t get on the bus because I was afraid to go home, and she stepped up to the plate and helped me, and I’ll never forget that. She is greatly missed.”

Dee Sumpter, Shawna’s mother commented regarding the cavalier attitude by Charlotte Police Department when it came to her beloved daughter’s death and the other victims of serial killer Henry Louis Wallace:

“These were common, everyday, hard-working individuals. They weren’t prominent people with social-economic status. They weren’t special.and they were black.”

“Are you going to tell me that if they had done a little digging Henry’s name would not have come up? Are you going to tell me that this doesn’t reek of blatant incompetency and racism?”