Graeme Phillip Harris pled guilty to placing a noose on the neck of a statue of James Meredith, the first African-American student at Ole Miss.
(Photo: Google Images)
Graeme Phillip Harris pled guilty to placing a noose on the neck of a statue of James Meredith, the first African-American student at Ole Miss. (Photo: Google Images)
Jeff Amy of the Associated Press is reporting Graeme Phillip Harris has pleaded guilty to hanging a noose on a campus statue of James Meredith, the first black student at Ole Miss. Amy writes:
Harris, who is white, pleaded guilty Thursday to a misdemeanor charge of threatening force to intimidate African-American students and employees at the university. Prosecutors agreed to drop a stiffer felony charge in exchange for the plea arising from the incident last year.
The 20-year-old Harris faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $100,000. U.S. District Judge Michael Mills said sentencing will be within 60 to 90 days, and he allowed Harris to remain free on a $10,000 bond.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Norman told Mills that Harris, who had a history of using racist language and saying African Americans were inferior to whites, proposed the plan to two fellow freshmen while at the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house on the night of Feb 15, 2014.
That led to the plan to hang the noose and a former Georgia state flag that features the Confederate battle flag on the statue of Meredith, in a jab at Ole Miss’ thorny racial history.
Harris and two others was identified from a videotape shot by an Ole Miss student. Harris and the other students have withdrawn. Harris has returned home and is enrolling in school in Georgia, which suggests that he has a deal in place and will not serve jail time.
Felicia Adams, the United States Attorney for Northern Mississippi, who is African-American, handled the case. Harris won’t be prosecuted for the second charge in his March indictment — conspiracy to violate civil rights — a felony which could carry up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
President Barack Obama discusses the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, WV.
(Photo Credit: AP)
President Barack Obama discusses the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, WV. (Photo Credit: AP)
CNN is reporting President Barack Obama called the nine deaths in the Charleston, South Carolina church shooting “senseless murders” Thursday, and suggested more gun control was needed in the wake of the incident.
“Any death of this sort is a tragedy. Any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy,” said Obama, as Vice President Joe Biden stood alongside him. “There is something particularly heartbreaking about death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace.”
Obama spoke of the personal connections he and first lady Michelle Obama had to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where they knew several members.
“We knew their pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who, along with eight others gathered in prayer and fellowship, was murdered last night,” Obama said. “And to say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and their community doesn’t say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel.”
Obama declined to comment on specific details of the investigation, which currently centers on 21-year-old suspect Dylann Roof, a white man who was taken into custody late Thursday morning in Shelby, North Carolina, authorities have said.
But the President said the shooting should refocus attention on preventing potential killers from getting their hands on guns.
The historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
(Photo Credit: Google Image)
The historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. (Photo Credit: Google Image)
A white man walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic African-American church in Charleston, and opened fire during a Bible study class, killing nine people Wednesday evening. The shooter was there for about an hour, attending a meeting with the eventual victims, before he began shooting, Charleston police Chief Greg Mullen said Thursday morning.
The gunman is still at large today. The shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest AME church in the South, is being investigated as a hate crime.
“The only reason someone would walk into a church and shoot people that were praying is hate,” Charleston Mayor Joe Riley said.
Shooting suspect in the killing of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. (Photo: Charleston Police Department)
Eight churchgoers died at the scene; a ninth at a hospital, police said. Among them is the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, according to CNN affiliate WCSC.
Officials wouldn’t say how many people were at the Bible study during the shooting. There were survivors, said Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen, but he didn’t elaborate.
Pastor and state senator Clementa Pinckney was killed in the massacre. (Photo: Google Images)
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has been a presence in Charleston since 1816, when African-American members of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church formed their own congregation after a dispute over burial grounds.
It was burned to the ground at one point, but rebuilt. Throughout its history, it overcame obstacle after obstacle — destroyed by an earthquake, banned by the state. But its church members persevered, making it the largest African-American church in terms of seating space in Charleston today.
Hundreds of Dominicans of Haitian origin protest to reclaim their right to their Dominican nationality and to denounce their situation after a 2013 verdict by the Constitutional Tribunal outside the National Congress in Santo Domingo, March 12, 2014. A September 2013 court ruling retroactively denies the Dominican nationality to anyone born after 1929 who does not have at least one parent of Dominican blood, under a constitutional clause declaring all others to be either in the country illegally or "in transit". The decision will effectively strip families of Haitian immigrants of their Dominican nationality. The sign reads " I'm Dominican, and I have rights". REUTERS/Ricardo Rojas (DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - Tags: POLITICS SOCIETY IMMIGRATION CIVIL UNREST) - RTR3GTXA
Hundreds of Dominicans of Haitian origin protest to reclaim their right to their Dominican nationality and to denounce their situation after a 2013 verdict by the Constitutional Tribunal outside the National Congress in Santo Domingo, March 12, 2014. PHOTO: REUTERS/Ricardo Rojas
Tensions are high in the Dominican Republic, and communities around the world are watching. The deadline for Dominicans of Haitian descent to produce paperwork to apply for legal residency has passed, and many are worried about when the government will begin deporting them to Haiti. More than 200,000 undocumented immigrants living in the Dominican Republic have registered for citizenship, but that means another 200,000 will not meet the deadline. Stories have been circulating about the difficulty in filing paperwork.
For decades, the country granted automatic citizenship to anyone born in the Dominican Republic, but in 2013 the law was revised, limiting citizenship to those with at least one parent with Dominican blood or who had already been declared legal residents.
Many Haitians came to the Dominican Republic as laborers. Their children were delivered by midwives, many of whom did not keep official records. Thus, it is difficult for many Dominicans of Haitian descent to produce the required paperwork even for consideration to stay in the country. Ironically, employers can provide undocumented workers with a certificate that will enable them to stay in the country, but many employers are refusing to supply the certificates. Of those who applied for legalization by the deadline, 96 percent did not have the required documentation needed to qualify for legalization.
Andrés Navarro, the Dominican Republic’s foreign minister, who had previously stated that those who did not have their paperwork by the June 17 deadline would be deported, is now saying this isn’t the case. Reports are surfacing that Navarro has now pushed back the date for deportations by 45 days in order to ensure a “credible process” by processing the paperwork, creating a database that will be shared with the Haitian government and minimizing errors.
However, Greg Grandi of The Nation is reporting the following:
Gen. Rubén Darío Paulino Sem, the army official in charge of the deportation, says the expulsion will start this Thursday, June 18. Sem has been overseeing the construction of seven concentration camps—which he calls “shelters,” or “centros de acogida”—where Dominicans suspected of being of Haitian descent will be housed until a “final evaluation” can be made.
These two positions aren’t necessarily incompatible. Navarro could be talking about the final deportation to Haiti—which leaves room for the roundup to start next week, with the detained placed in Sem’s camps.
To read this article in its entirety, visit The Root.
Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D., is editor-at-large at The Root and founder of the award-winning news blog the Burton Wire. Follow her on Twitter.
Transgender inmate Miss Foxy of A&E TV's 'Scared Straight,' series.
(Photo: Google Images)
Transgender inmate Miss Foxy of A&E TV’s ‘Scared Straight,’ series. (Photo: Google Images)
The Internet has been ablaze ever since an inmate featured on A&E TV’s ‘Beyond Scared Straight,” uttered her now trademark line “I was waiting for you at the Doe,” during a visit with a gay teen who was in trouble for fighting at school. “Beyond Scared Straight,” places at-risk teens in a program to steer them away from a life of crime. On the show, real convicts confront juvenile offenders with the horrors of life behind bars. Miss Foxy talked to the teen, who was angry that a girl accused him of “having” all of the boys in the school, which led to a fight.
After the episode, the memes, videos, and constant re-quoting of Miss Foxy’s legendary line were everywhere. While entertaining, it would appear that many who took in the line “I was waiting for you at the doe,” missed the good work that Miss Foxy was attempting to do. Instead of walking through the “doe”, the mediasphere is standing on the threshold, quite unable to grasp Miss Foxy’s broader message of love and self-acceptance.
While the phrase may seem as if Foxy was “waiting at the doe” to unleash harm on the teen, that would be furthest thing from the truth. Instead, Miss Foxy was “waiting at the doe” with welcoming arms and words of advice for a gay African American teen who has lashed out due to bullying caused by knowledge of his sexual preferences. Miss Foxy was there to provide encouragement to an at-risk youth, who needed guidance and understanding. Aside from her now iconic phrase Miss Foxi also stated:
“I’m gonna talk to you. She [the young lady spreading rumors] was probably jealous of you. And I guarantee you are going to go through that the rest of your life. As long as you are gay you are gay, you are going to have haters…
There is nothing wrong with being gay and don’t let anybody tell you that it is. You can be anything that you want to be, just have your own because we are in a cruel world. I don’t think anyone wants to walk out there and say I’m gay with a sign on them, but it’s not what you do, its how you do it.”
Miss Foxi’s words were meant to soothe and strengthen a broken teen who will have to always battle the stigmas associated with being African American and gay.
Miss Foxi set out to break through to the teen and give him a boost of confidence. Instead of fighting all his life, as he will always be gay, Miss Foxi advised him to love himself and win over those who begrudged him of his truth by living well.
Miss Foxi’s stance and words are reminiscent of the powerful scene of The Color Purple where Sofia begs Celie not to trade places with what she herself has been through. The dominant culture’s appropriation of a phrase, at the expense of the context in which it was used, in order to possibly poke fun at Ms. Foxy, while erasing this young man’s plight, speaks volumes about how far we have to go as a society in supporting our LGBT teens and community.
Ms. Foxy should be lauded not only for “I was waiting for you at the doe,” but also for the rest of her words and her attempt to help push a young boy through the “doe” of life.
This post was written by Reginald Calhoun. He is a junior Mass Media Arts major at Clark Atlanta University. Follow him on Twitter @IRMarsean and on Instagram @Les_geaux_jawn.
Kenson Timothee was profiled in a NYT article about the Bahamian government's immigration laws that negatively impact Haitians.
(Photo: NYT)
Kenson Timothee was profiled in a NYT article about the Bahamian government’s immigration laws that negatively impact Haitians. (Photo: NYT)
The Dominican diaspora is responding to the news that the Dominican Republic (DR) is deporting Haitians born in the DR by protesting against the measure. In 2013, the Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic summarily “stripped” Dominicans born to Haitian parents of citizenship rights. Some argue that the court was reinforcing a law already on the books, while others argued that if they had spent their entire lives in the DR, how are they still considered Haitian? Now, the government is preparing to deport those without proper documentation to Haiti. Many are now eligible for detainment and deportation, and the Dominican government has been conducting “sweeps” to identify those who will be deported, mainly by skin color and physical features. The Dominican Republic is not the only country with human rights abuses against Haitian migrants.
On January 30, 2015, In an article entitled, “Immigration Rules in Bahamas Sweep Up Haitians,” Frances Robles of the New York Times reported on a new immigration policy in the Bahamas requiring everyone to hold a passport, a rule that human rights groups say unfairly targets people of Haitian descent. They discussed the case of Kenson Timothee, who was born in the Bahamas to Haitian parents, who were there illegally. Robles writes:
“Mr. Timothee, who was born in the Bahamas to illegal Haitian immigrants, wound up jailed in immigration detention for six weeks. He is one of hundreds of people swept up in a fiercely debated new immigration policy in the Bahamas requiring everyone to hold a passport, a rule that human rights groups say unfairly targets people of Haitian descent.
Mr. Timothee had proof that he was born in the Bahamas, but because he had trouble obtaining his absentee father’s birth certificate, his application for Bahamian citizenship was never completed.
‘I showed them that I had applied for citizenship, but they said that wasn’t good enough; as far as they are concerned, you are not Bahamian, you are Haitian, and you need to get deported,”’Mr. Timothee said. ‘I don’t know anything about Haiti.’”
The policy went further by requiring student residency permits as a requirement for children to attend school. The permits are $125 and students without them, are pulled out of class and identified as eligible for deportation by Bahamian authorities. Even Bahamians with “Haitian sounding names” are being targeted.
In addition, the article highlighted other countries that also discriminated against Haitians. Robles reports:
“In Turks and Caicos, a top immigration official vowed early in 2013 to hunt down and capture Haitians illegally in the country, promising to make their lives ‘unbearable.’ The country had already changed its immigration policies in 2012, making it harder for children of immigrants to obtain residency. Last year, Turks and Caicos said it would deploy drones to stop Haitian migration.
In Brazil, politicians considered closing a border with Peru last year to stem the tide of Haitians, and last month, Canada announced that it would resume deporting Haitians.”
While many are saying that racism is driving the desire to deport Haitians, authorities insist it is because the nation’s can no longer afford to absorb the number of Haitians seeking refuge in their countries.
Read more about this article at the New York Times. Read more about the DR’s deportation of Haitians at the Burton Wire.
This post was written by Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D., founder & editor-in-chief of the award-winning news site, the Burton Wire. Follow her on Twitter @Ntellectual.
N’Djamena, the capital city of The Republic of Chad. (Photo: Google Images)
David Blair of The Telegraph is reporting that Boko Haram is being blamed for the a suicide bombing that left at least 23 people dead in N’Djamena, the capital city of The Republic of Chad (Chad). Blair writes:
“Two bombers riding motorcycles blew themselves up outside the national police academy in N’Djamena; another two attacked the office of the police chief. The explosions killed passers-by as well as people inside the targeted buildings.
The government issued a statement blaming Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist movement, adding: ‘These lawless and faithless terrorists will be flushed out and neutralised wherever they are.’”
If Boko Haram was responsible, these would be the first suicide bombings organized by the movement in an African capital outside Nigeria.
Chad has deployed thousands of troops across the border in Nigeria to fight Boko Haram. The country’s 20,000-strong army, battle-hardened by years of civil war, has been the backbone of an offensive which has successfully broken the terrorist movement’s control of thousands of square miles of north-eastern Nigeria.”
President Idriss Déby Itno has been focused on projecting an image of Chad as a regional power broker and valuable counterterrorism player. Chad’s support of Nigeria and previous success against Boko Haram has made them targets for retaliation.
Ivy Taylor has been elected the first African-American mayor of San Antonio, TX.
(Photo Credit: Google Images)
Ivy Taylor has been elected the first African-American mayor of San Antonio, TX. (Photo Credit: Google Images)
Nigel Roberts of The Root is reporting the city of San Antonio, TX has elected Ivy Taylor as its first African American mayor. Taylor won a close runoff election against a Hispanic opponent, Letitia Van de Putte, in a Hispanic-majority city. Taylor, who was serving as interim mayor, won Saturday’s runoff with 52 percent of the vote, Reuters reports. Van de Putte would have been the city’s first Hispanic woman elected to the mayoral position had she won the run-off election.
Taylor won with an “unlikely coalition” of African-American and conservative white voters. They represent the largest minority voting groups in the city.
Roberts writes:
Taylor was serving on the San Antonio City Council last year when the council voted to appoint her to replace Mayor Julián Castro, who’s now secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic has stripped citizens born in the DR to Haitian parents of citizenship. They are scheduled for detainment and deportation tomorrow.
(Photo Credit: Google Images)
The Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic has stripped citizens born in the DR to Haitian parents of citizenship. They are scheduled for detainment and deportation tomorrow. (Photo Credit: Google Images)
The Nation is reporting that the Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic has summarily “stripped” Dominicans born to Haitian parents of their citizenship. Some argue that they are not being “stripped” of anything because they were born to Haitians who were not here legally and the Dominican Republic does not award anyone born in the country automatic citizenship, regardless of parentage. Now, it looks like those “stripped” of their citizenship will also be deported to Haiti in a matter of days. Initial reports suggested that the deadline for deportation would be delayed, but according to the Nation‘s Greg Grandin, it looks like the government will be moving forward with the deportation on June 16.
Grandin writes that there has been little to no coverage in the United States media. Nearly 1.5 million people of Dominican Republican descent live in the United States. Equally as silent are human rights groups. The Pope has said that Dominican Bishops cannot ignore the needs of immigrants, but the Haitians being expelled were actually born in the Dominican Republic with family, friends and property and work in the Dominican Republic. Grandin reports that many of them have never been to Haiti or know anyone in Haiti.
Grandin writes:
“How many are vulnerable? The common reference is over 100,000. Rachel Nolan, who reported on the impending deportation in Harper’s, writes 210,000. I’ve also heard between 300,000 and 500,000. But who knows? And what will be the criteria to decide once the expulsions get underway and achieve self-propulsion? Already in poor neighborhoods they are sweeping up ‘dark-skinned Dominicans with Haitian facial features.’
The Dominican government has set up a number of centers where Dominicans of Haitian descent can try to ‘regularize’ their status, and thus avoid being expelled. It’s a charade. The offices are overcrowded, understaffed, and the needed paperwork doesn’t exist (many Dominicans of Haitian descent were born in rural areas, since their parents came to work the sugar fields, with midwives and not in hospitals, and were therefore never issued birth certificates).
The Dominican Republic and Haiti ‘share’ an island. (Photo: Google Images))
An aid worker based in the poorer barrios of Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata (the two primary hubs of Haitian immigrants in the DR), who doesn’t want to be named, writes that three days ago, on June 9, local Dominican television media reported that the government solicited transportation companies for up to three dozen large passenger buses to be available on a rotating basis, with an implicit understanding that these would be used for pending deportation trips. ‘This he said, ‘is an extremely ominous sign.'”
June 16 is the date of deportation. Police have already been conducting sweeps in the barrios, in preparation for the mass deportations this week.
As of June 17, hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians will be rendered stateless and eligible for summary detention and deportation. The Dominican government maintains that they will not delay implementation of the law, despite pressure from the US, the UN, the OAS.
This post was written by Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D., founder & editor-in-chief of the award-winning news blog, the Burton Wire. Follow her on Twitter @Ntellectual.
NPR Music's Microphone Check hosts Frannie Kelley (l.) and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (far right) interviews songwriting/production team Organized Noize at Terminal West in Atlanta. (Photo Credit: Amanda Greene/NPR)
NPR Music’s “Microphone Check” hosts Frannie Kelley (l.) and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (far right) interviews songwriting/production team Organized Noize at Terminal West in Atlanta. (Photo Credit: Amanda Greene/NPR)
NPR Music’s Microphone Check is the information hub’s premier podcast for conversing about Hip-Hop culture. The show features hosts Frannie Kelley and Ali Shaheed Muhammad sitting with recording artists, producers, managers, executives, scholars and attorneys to have what essentially is a meeting of the minds.
They might chat about laws, the creative process, history or new releases. The dialogue is sometimes funny but always informative, unfiltered, nostalgic and quite interesting.
She believes touring allows Microphone Check to further brand itself as an online destination that takes black cultural production seriously. “To be perfectly honest, it’s really about being in the studio,” says Kelley, “just the three or four of us, and it ends up being us listening to each other.”
“We’re demonstrating a lot of things to a lot of people,” adds Kelley. “There’s a really engaged audience around Hip-Hop culture. They don’t have to be scared. It’s people talking to each other about popular music.”
The concept for Microphone Check came from Kelley receiving an email from one of her readers around 2010. The reader noted that Muhammad, a member of both legendary hip hop trio, A Tribe Called Quest, and supergroup, Lucy Pearl, found an article she edited as problematic as he did.
The lackluster piece’s subject matter contained reprinted poorly transcribed lyrics. Kelley had no choice but to own up to her editorial faux pas. “Someone had reread a rap anthology without having listened to the songs,” recalls Kelley. “I wrote back and said, ‘Yes, I fucked up.’” That erroneous moment prompted Kelley, who joined NPR in 2007, to invite Muhammad in to possibly talk partnership.
They came up with Microphone Check around 2012, a program Kelley says could “talk about pop music for real and stop explaining it to people.” The program’s subject matter comes off equally as personable as it is informative. “We thought this was the best way,” says Kelley, who studied music criticism at NYU, shortly before an extremely cordial Muhammad arrived. “I’d rather talk to a lot of different people about it.”
Organized Noize’s town hall-style taping at Terminal West was nothing short of nuggets of wisdom, down home jokes and recollections about what it took to craft their musical sound and become instrumental in the process in shaping the city’s musical identity. The trio who also spearheaded the hip hop syndicate, the Dungeon Family, reflected on their two-decade career penning and producing hit singles for Outkast, TLC, Goodie, Mob, Brandy, Ludacris, Curtis Mayfield and En Vogue.
Their conversation had its share of surprises. Murray had to make an early exit, so Dungeon Family’s resident spoken word artist, Ruben “Big Rube” Bailey, stepped in. Big Boi, one half of groundbreaking Grammy-winning duo, Outkast, made a few comments from the audience. Wade, Brown and Murray each talked about how they met each other, dealt with success and their relationships with record label executives and even shared details about their upcoming documentary chronicling their story.
Muhammad and Kelley both agree that Microphone Check’s sole purpose is to have genuine talks about music and culture with the people who make it happen. For Kelley though, the greatest reward for being on Microphone Check for three years now is sitting next to Muhammad.
The Grammy-nominated producer, musician, songwriter and former A&R executive, she says, helped her to overcome her nervousness and take her appreciation for Hip-Hop and journalism more seriously.
“[Ali Shaheed] is a completely legendary human being,” proclaims Kelley. What he’s given me is a way to do the real work that I love to do. I’m the luckiest girl in the world.”
This post was written by Christopher A. Daniel, pop cultural critic and music editor for the Burton Wire. He is also contributing writer for Urban Lux Magazine and Blues & Soul Magazine. Follow Christopher @Journalistorian on Twitter.
