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Dedication to Human Rights and Human
Kindness
Message from Troy
Anthony Davis
10 September 2011
To All:
I want to thank all
of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights
and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced
such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is
because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look
at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has
for me and of course I worry about her and her health,
but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not
back down from this fight to save my life and prove to
the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.
As I look at my
mail from across the globe, from places I have never
ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking
languages and expressing cultures and religions I could
only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the
emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming,
overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of
emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw
from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet
again that this is not a case about the death penalty,
this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case
about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice
prevail.
I cannot answer all
of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you
all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you
speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the
world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your
warmth everyday I exist.
So Thank you and
remember I am in a place where execution can only
destroy your physical form but because of my faith in
God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually
free for some time and no matter what happens in the
days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death
penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that
fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There
are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the
death penalty is not won or lost through me but through
our strength to move forward and save every innocent
person in captivity around the globe. We need to
dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by
state and country by country.
I can’t wait to
Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or
spiritual form, I will one day be announcing, “I AM TROY
DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”
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* * * *
Troy was found
guilty of murdering a police officer 19 years ago, based
upon the testimony of 9 witnesses. Today, 7 of those 9
have recanted their testimony entirely, and there are
enormous problems with the testimony of the remaining 2
witness accounts. There is NO OTHER EVIDENCE. The murder
weapon was never found. There is no DNA to test. Troy is
scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 21,
2011.
Source:
RedAntliberationArmy
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* * * *
Why Are We Killing Troy Davis?
By Kevin Powell
To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not
justice.—Desmond Tutu
Unless something God-like and miraculous happens, Troy
Davis, 42, is going to be executed tomorrow, Wednesday,
September 21, 2011, at 7pm, by lethal injection at a
state prison in Jackson, Georgia.
Let me say up front I feel great sorrow for the family
of Mark MacPhail, the police officer who was shot and
murdered on August 19, 1989. I cannot imagine the
profound pain they've shouldered for 22 angst-filled
years, hoping, waiting, and praying for some semblance
of justice. Officer MacPhail will never come back to
life, his wife, his two children, and his mother will
never see him again. Under that sort of emotional and
spiritual duress, I can imagine why they are convinced
Troy Davis is the murderer of their beloved son,
husband, and father.
But, likewise, I feel great sorrow for Troy Davis and
his family. I don't know if Mr. Davis murdered Officer
MacPhail or not. What I do know is that there is no DNA
evidence linking him to the crime, that seven of nine
witnesses have either recanted or contradicted their
original testimonies tying him to the act, and that a
gentleman named Sylvester "Redd" Coles is widely
believed to be the actual triggerman. But no real case
against Mr. Coles has ever been pursued.
So a man is going to be executed, murdered, in fact,
under a dark cloud of doubt in a nation, ours, that has
come to practice executions as effortlessly as we
breath.
 |
Be it Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry,
governor of Texas, and the 234 executions that have
occurred under his watch (that fact was cheered loudly
at a recent Republican debate), or the 152 executions
when George W. Bush was governor of that state, we are a
nation of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life
for a life. Spiraling so far out of control that we are
going to execute someone who may actually be innocent
tomorrow.
I say we because the blood of Officer MacPhail and Troy
Davis will be on the hands of us all. We Americans who
fail to use our individual and collective voices to deal
with the ugliness in our society that leads to violence
in the first place, be they for economic crimes or
because some of us have simply been driven mad by the
pressures of trying to exist in a world that often
marginalizes or rejects us. Thus our solution for many
problems often becomes force, or violence. But it has
long since been proven that the death penalty or capital
punishment is not a deterrent, contrary to some folks'
beliefs. Murders continue to happen every single day in
America, as commonplace as apple pie, football, and Ford
trucks.
photo left: Troy Davis
at his high school graduation |
I also say we because it is startling to me that Troy
Davis could be on death row for twenty years, have his
guilt be under tremendous doubt, yet save a few
dedicated souls and organizations, there has not been a
mass movement of support to save his life, to end the
death penalty, not by well-meaning Black folks, not by
well-meaning White folks, not by well-meaning folks of
any stripe, and certainly not by influential Black folks
who represent the corridors of power in places like
Atlanta, with the exception of, say, Congressman John
Lewis.
You wonder what the outcome of the parole board decision
would have been if Black churches in Atlanta and other
parts of Georgia, for example, had joined this cause to
end the death penalty in America years back, if Black
leaders had launched a sustained action much in the way
their religious and spiritual foremothers and
forefathers had done two generations before?
What could have been different if more Georgia ministers
had the courage of Atlanta's Rev. Dr. Raphael Gamaliel
Warnock, pastor of the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church
once helmed by Dr. King? Dr. Warnock has been steadfast
and outspoken, yet seemingly out there alone in his
support of Troy Davis. I mean if there is ever a time
for Black churches to practice a relevant ministry, as
Dr. King once urged, is it not when a seeming injustice
like the Troy Davis matter is right in front of our
faces? When so many Black males are locked up in
America's prisons? What is the point, really, of having
a "men's ministry" at your church if it is not
addressing one of the major problems of the 21st
century, that of the Black male behind bars? Especially
in a society, America, that incarcerates more people
than any other nation on earth.
And you wonder how the five-person Georgia State Board
of Pardons and Parole that, paradoxically, includes two
Black males, including the head of the board, must feel.
Had it not been for past legal injustices, like the
Scottsboro Boys case of the 1930s or the vicious
killing of Emmett Till in
the 1950s, there would not have been a Civil Rights
Movement, nor the placement of Blacks in places to
balance the scales of justice, like that Georgia Parole
Board. While I certainly do not think any Black person
should get a pass just because they are Black, I do
think, if you are an aware Black man, somewhere in your
psyche has to be some residual memory of Black males
being lynched in America, of Black male after Black male
being sent to jail, or given the death penalty, under
often flimsy charges and evidence. If there is a
reasonable doubt, keep the case open until there is
ultimate certainty-
Finally, incredibly ironic and tragic that this is
happening while our first Black president is sitting in
the White House. We, America, like to pat ourselves on
the back and say job well done whenever there is a shred
of racial or social progress in our fair nation. But
then we habitually figure out ways to take one, two,
several steps back, with this Troy Davis execution, with
the rise of the Tea Party and its thinly-veiled racial
paranoia politics, to push America right back to the
good old says of segregation, Jim Crow, brute hatred of
those who are different, while social inequalities run
rampant like rats in the night.
And if you think Troy Davis' cause celebre has nothing
to do with Jim Crow, then either you've not been to an
American prison lately, or you simply are blind. I've
been to many, across our country, and they are filled to
the brim with mostly Black and Latino males (and some
poor White males), including the majority of folks
sitting on death row.
For sure, given my background of poverty, a single
mother, an absent father, and violence and great
economic despair in my childhood and teen years, but for
the grace of God I could be one of those young Black or
Latino males languishing in jail at this very moment. I
could be, indeed, Troy Davis.
So I cannot simply view the Troy Davis case and
execution as solely about the killing of Officer
MacPhail. Yes, an injustice was done, a killing
occurred, and I pray the truth really comes out one day.
But I am just as concerned about America's soul, of the
morality tales we are text-messaging to ourselves, to
the world, as we move Troy Davis from his cell one last
time, to that room where a needle will blast death into
his veins, suck the air from his throat, snatch life
from his eyes.
While the family of Mr. Davis and the family of Officer
MacPhail converge, one final time, to witness a death in
progress. Now two men will be dead, Officer MacPhail and
Troy Davis, linked, forever, by the misfortune of our
confusion, stereotypes, finger-pointing, and history of
passing judgment without having every shred of the
facts. I am Officer MacPhail, I am Troy Davis, and so
are you. And you. And you, too.
And as my mother would say, have mercy on us all, Lawd,
for we know not what we do.
Kevin Powell is an activist and public speaker
based in Brooklyn, New York. A nationally acclaimed
writer,
Kevin is also the author or editor of 10 books.
His 11th, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and The Ghost of
Dr. King: And Other Blogs and Essays, will be published
January 2012. Email him at kevin_powell, or follow him
on Twitter @kevin_powell
Source:
NewBlackMan
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Other Responses
Last night, the
state of Georgia put to death an innocent man--Troy
Anthony Davis. I agree with Ben Jealous of the NAACP
that "In death he will live on as a symbol of a broken
justice system that kills an innocent man while a
murderer walks free." Hopefully, his death with lead to
the end of the barbaric death penalty in this county.—
Miriam Decosta-Willis
Troy Anthony Davis
was killed by lethal injection by the state of Georgia
last night. But people around the U.S. and the world are
outraged that the execution took place, despite
widespread doubts about Davis’ guilt. We were the only
news outlet continuously broadcasting live from the
prison grounds yesterday where hundreds of people held
an all-day vigil. Today, we hear their voices and ask:
did Georgia kill an innocent man?—Democracy
Now!
Troy Davis wasn’t the only prisoner executed in the
United States tonight, White supremacist Lawrence
Russell was also put to death.Texas officials executed
Russell using lethal injection following his conviction
for brutally killing James Byrd Jr in 1998. Unlike Davis
who received various requests for a reprieve there was
no doubt that Russell was involved in his victims
murder. Russell and two other white supremacists tied
James Byrd Jr. to the back of a pickup truck and dragged
him down an asphalt road for nearly three miles,
swerving the entire time until he was dead.—Inquisitr
the purpose of
public lynchings of black people were: to punish us
(oftentimes for no wrongdoing), to terrorize us, to send
a clear message to black witnesses that this is what
happens if you "act out of place," and to make us shrink
in fear. Sometimes lynchers made black people help carry
out lynchings. It was also an opportunity for the
lynchers and lynch mob to bond, celebrate, and reassure
themselves of their white superiority. We cannot allow
anyone make us a fearful people, nor cower to white
supremacy, nor acquiesce to their deep-seeded
insecurities.—Byron
Hurt
World shocked by
U.S. execution of Troy Davis—Troy Davis may be dead, but
his execution Thursday in the American state of Georgia
has made him the poster boy for the global movement to
end the death penalty.—CNN
Thank God, I don't
have to teach today. I woke up feeling bereaved, as if
one of my blood brothers had been publicly murdered by
everyone. I had to tell myself not to be angry, not to
cry, not to worry because despite the horribly organized
murder yesterday, somehow, we won. We told Georgia and
all those judges who refused to listen to reason that it
is still wrong to kill another human being even if it is
a state organized killing. I am down, but the sun is
rising. I believe in the future.—Patricia
Jabbeh Wesley
"After halting his
execution in a last minute reprieve on Wednesday night,
the Supreme Court of the United States refused to
consider Troy Davis's request for a stay of execution."
He was murdered by the state of Georgia, a little after
11 pm, Wednesday night.—Jean
Blount
America Prison System is a 37 Billion Dollar
Business. The United States has 5 percent of the world's
population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated
population. We rank first in the world in locking up our
fellow citizens.—Amie
Ayira
|We press ahead on
opposition to the death penalty and our culture of
revenge and killing. Troy’s death is tragic. But this
country, not just its individual states, kills every
day: In Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places around
the world. We grieve for Troy as we grieve for the
anonymous souls killed by drones or U.S. and NATO bombs
or assassination teams. We have to find a way to stop
all this killing.—Kevin
Gray
It is important to
contextualize the state of Georgia’s execution of Troy
Davis within a history of southern racism where for more
than four hundred years White men used vigilante and
state violence to execute or lynch Black men. Southern
Whites have worked overtime for 40 years through the
legal system and ideological lies about Black men to
cover the truth of murder as means of
social control that breaks our spirits and our will to
resist.—Ruby
Sales
Next time you hear
Obama or this Govt. talk about human rights, remind them
of the barbarity of what happened yesterday to Lawrence
Brewer and Troy Davis. How they were strapped down and
given lethal doses, an outrage many complain about for
lab rats. The slow torture of the death penalty meets
the test of cruel and unusual. If we kill captured
enemies on the battle field that's an international
crime.—
Kenneth Carroll
Someone asked- What
do we tell our sons? I was optimistically enthused when
I was preparing for bed and said to my son- Troy Davis
is still alive! He shook his head and said it's just a
joke. When I went to chastise him for his cynical
attitude he spoke to me in a very strong, matter of fact
way. He said it is a joke and he did not believe Davis
would survive and if he did he would probably have to
remain in prison. When I pointed out the world coming
together to protest this injustice- he said ma, I am
only 23 years old and have witnessed a president steal
an election and run this country into the ground and now
determined to lay it all on Obama and make sure he loses
the next one no matter what it will cost the country. I
have personally witnessed black men shot, killed,
arrested, brutalized by the police in our neighborhood,
so today it's Davis, yesterday it was Diallo,a man at
his bachelor party, another on on his way to deliver his
unborn child, who or what will it be tomorrow? I tried
to assure him the world knowig the circumstances was a
good thing. He repeated ma this country does what it
wants no matter whose watching. I tried to assure him
again as I went to bed knowing Davis was alive. When I
woke to the news of Davis's death. All I could do was
hug my son and cry. What do We tell our sons
indeed!!!!!!—Omilana
Horge
Jimmy Carter on Troy Davis' execution: "...if one of our
fellow citizens can be executed with so much doubt
surrounding his guilt, then the death penalty system in
our country is unjust and outdated."—Patricia
Jabbeh Wesley
Thought for the
Day. 11.08pm Eastern Standard Time. September 21st.
Strange fruit. Time stood still as the United States of
Lethal Injections, injected injustice into the bones of
a man whose case revealed the flaws of a system whose
back was turned despite the evidence that screamed
reasonable doubt. What will you say when they ask you
what were you doing 11.08pm Eastern standard time,
Wednesday September 21st?—Esther
Armah
* *
* * *
Do Many
Possibly-Innocent Men Await Davis' Fate?—September
22, 2011—African-Americans account for 40 percent of the
people who have been executed this year by state
governments, though they represent only about 12 percent
of the total U.S. population . . . The death of Troy
Davis, the Georgia man who was executed by lethal
injection late Wednesday following three stays of
execution, marked the 14th time this year a black man
has been put to death in America by a state government.
In that same time, 19 whites have been executed,
including Lawrence Brewer, who died earlier Wednesday
for dragging a black man, James Byrd Jr., to his death
in 1998. . . .
According to the
New York-based Innocence Project, which works to free
convicts who are unjustly imprisoned, there have been
273 post-conviction exonerations from death sentences or
life without parole. In the state of Texas alone, 12
people have been exonerated from death row. Gov. Rick
Perry has authorized 234 executions during his tenure.
The state has the second highest death row population,
surpassed only by California.
A closer look at
the numbers show deep disparity in death row
demographics. In Louisiana, for example, a state where
only 31 percent of the residents are black, blacks
account for 65 percent of the death row population. And
in Georgia, the place where Troy Davis was killed on
Wednesday, blacks make up 30 percent of the state
population and 67 percent of the population on death
row.—BlackAmericaWeb
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Death Penalty
and Race—Race of Homicide Victims in Cases Resulting in
an Execution since 1976—A report sponsored by the
American Bar Association in 2007 concluded that
one-third of African-American death row inmates in
Philadelphia would have received sentences of life
imprisonment if they had not been African-American.—A
January 2003 study released by the University of
Maryland concluded that race and geography are major
factors in death penalty decisions. Specifically,
prosecutors are more likely to seek a death sentence
when the race of the victim is white and are less likely
to seek a death sentence when the victim is
African-American.—A 2007 study of death sentences in
Connecticut conducted by Yale University School of Law
revealed that African-American defendants receive the
death penalty at three times the rate of white
defendants in cases where the victims are white. In
addition, killers of white victims are treated more
severely than people who kill minorities, when it comes
to deciding what charges to bring.—AmnestyUSA
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The Killing of
Troy Davis—For years Democratic politicians, whose
party once opposed the death penalty, have embraced it
as a suitable punishment for the “worst of the worst.”
President Bill Clinton, who famously attended the
execution of a mentally disabled man while on the
campaign trail in 1992, went on to sign the
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act,
which greased the wheels of this death machinery by
curtailing prisoners’ rights to appeal their sentences.
Former Georgia Republican
Bob Barr,
who helped write that law ostensibly to curb “abusive
delays in capital cases,” has since decried its
effect—specifically that it has prevented “claims of
actual innocence like Troy Davis’s” from being heard in
court.
In practice, any
support for the death penalty (or attempts to perfect
it) amount to an acceptance of a vicious system that
cannot be separated from Rick Perry’s Texas—and which
is, in fact, exemplified by it. It’s a system that
thrives on racism, that condemns the innocent to die.
There will not be justice for Troy Davis. But his case
has reawakened Americans to a relic of injustice that
must be abolished once and for all.—TheNation
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 |
Killer spared from
death hours before execution—May 22,
2008—The parole board in the state of
Georgia spared a convicted killer from
execution hours before he was due to die by
lethal injection on Thursday and commuted
his sentence to life in prison. The Georgia
Board of Pardons and Paroles made its
decision less than three hours before Samuel
David Crowe, 47, was to be executed,
according to a spokeswoman for the state's
prisons. "After careful and exhaustive
consideration of the requests, the board
voted to grant clemency. The board voted to
commute the sentence to life without
parole," the parole board said. Crowe's
death would have marked the third execution
since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an
unofficial moratorium on the death penalty
last month. . . . In March 1988, Crowe
killed store manager Joseph Pala during a
robbery at the lumber company in Douglas
County, west of Atlanta. Crowe, who had
previously worked at the store, shot Pala
three times with a pistol, beat him with a
crowbar and a pot of paint. Crowe pleaded
guilty to armed robbery and murder and was
sentenced to death the following year.—Reuters |
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World Shocked by U.S. Execution
of Troy Davis—by Peter Wilkinson— September 22,
2011—The execution sparked angry reactions and protests
in European capitals -- as well as outrage on social
media. "We strongly deplore that the numerous appeals
for clemency were not heeded," the French foreign
ministry said.
"There are still
serious doubts about his guilt," said Germany's junior
minister for human rights Markus Loening. "An execution
is irreversible—a judicial error can never be repaired."
The European Union expressed "deep regret" over the
execution and repeated its call for a universal
moratorium on capital punishment. EU foreign policy
chief Catherine Ashton said the bloc had learnt "with
deep regret that Mr Troy Davis was executed," her
spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic told Agence-France Presse.
|
'"The
EU opposes the use of capital punishment in
all circumstances and calls for a universal
moratorium," she said. "The abolition of
that penalty is essential to protect human
dignity."
Amnesty
International condemned the execution in a
statement. "The U.S. justice system was
shaken to its core as Georgia executed a
person who may well be innocent. Killing a
man under this enormous cloud of doubt is
horrific and amounts to a catastrophic
failure of the justice system," Amnesty
said. In Britain's Guardian newspaper, Ed
Jackson, reporting from Jackson, Georgia,
before the execution took place, gave 10
reasons why he believed the death sentence
for "a man who is very possibly innocent"
should be commuted.—CommonDreams
|
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The Night They
Killed Troy Davis—by
William Jelani Cobb—Sep 22 2011—The feeling, as I
stood in front of the truck stop in the middle of the
night, was that we were witness to a great evil—not
solely the taking of what may well have been an innocent
life, but also in the false certainty that sought to
sell this killing as justice. When word came at 11:08
p.m. that Troy Davis was no more, women began wailing;
several of them fell to the ground heaving inconsolably.
A few men offered stumbling, meandering prayers that
some good might come of this, that it would inspire some
greater reckoning with the arbitrary, corrupted
realities of capital punishment in this country.
And I, at that
point, thought about my father, a native of Hazlehurst,
Georgia who had abandoned his home state for New York in
1941. He lived the remainder of his life there, firm in
his belief that a black man's life was seen as worthless
in Georgia. I grew up hearing the stories of the
sadistic violence that was commonplace there, about a
black woman he'd known growing up who was raped and
tortured by white men who went unpunished. I moved to
Georgia in 2001, secure in my belief that the place had
changed, that our efforts had yielded success and the
stories my father told me were now consigned to the
horror closets of history. But last night, progress,
hopes and a black presidency be damned, the state of
Georgia had the last word. And they were determined to
prove the old man right.—TheAtlantic
* *
* * *
In Europe, a
Chorus of Outrage Over a U.S. Execution—By Scott
Sayare—September 22, 2011—Hundreds of protesters had
gathered outside the American Embassies in London and
Paris on Wednesday to call for a stay of execution. The
European Union had repeatedly urged the same, given
what Catherine Ashton, the bloc’s foreign policy chief,
called the “serious and compelling doubts” about Mr.
Davis’s guilt.
“The E.U. opposes
the use of capital punishment in all cases and under all
circumstances, and calls for a global moratorium as a
first step towards its universal abolition,”
Ms. Ashton said in a statement. In Germany,
Claudia Roth, a leader of the Green Party, said Mr.
Davis’s death was “a cynical and inhumane spectacle that
occasions mourning and horror.” Tom Chivers, an editor
at The Daily Telegraph in Britain, called capital
punishment a
“barbaric hangover from an Old Testament morality.”
Even Americans who support it, he wrote, must “want it
to be credible—a terrible judgment passed down upon the
guilty, not a savage lottery of murder.”
With passage in
2000 of the
Charter of Fundamental Rights, capital punishment
was abolished across the European Union. Germany had
ended the practice in 1949, Britain in 1969 and France
in 1981. Those decisions were far from universally
popular at the time, but a wide-ranging consensus has
since emerged that capital punishment is a backward and
unjust practice, analysts say. Still, a handful of
politicians on the fringes of the right still call for a
debate over executions.
Doing away with the
death penalty is “seen as an established norm of modern
society,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French historian and
political scientist at the Institute for Political
Studies in Paris. Most of the French have come to
consider capital punishment as a moral question, Ms.
Bacharan said—and one with an unequivocal answer.—NYTimes
* *
* * *
The Execution of
Troy Davis—September 22, 2011—Troy Davis supporters
Mercedes Binns and Vizion Jones mourn at the terrible
news of his execution. The death of Davis was ensured
after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute
appeal for a stay at about 10:20 p.m. At 10:53, a
sedative was injected into his veins, rendering him
unconscious. A second injection paralyzed all muscles,
causing suffocation. The final injection induced a
massive heart attack, causing death at 11:08 p.m. . . .
The barbarism of
the process reached its epitome Wednesday night. In the
hours before the lethal concoction was delivered,
originally scheduled for 7:00 p.m., Davis remained
strapped to the gurney while the high court deliberated.
Family members and supporters stood in agony outside
prison walls, waiting for news. The ruling came in the
form of a one-line denial, without explanation or
dissent.
It would have taken
only five justices’ votes to stop the killing going
forward. In the end, even this temporary measure was
rejected by the black-robed executioners. Peaceful
protesters outside the prison, at one point numbering in
the thousands, were surrounded by hundreds of police
officers, some decked out in riot gear, while
helicopters circled overhead. Earlier in the evening
several demonstrators who crossed the road running past
the prison were arrested and taken away.—SFBayview
* *
* * *
Troy Davis about to be killed by the state of Georgia
/
Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
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 |
Race, Incarceration, and American Values
By
Glenn C. Loury
In this
pithy discussion, renowned scholars debate
the American penal system through the
lens—and as a legacy—of an ugly and violent
racial past. Economist Loury argues that
incarceration rises even as crime rates fall
because we have become increasingly
punitive. According to Loury, the
disproportionately black and brown prison
populations are the victims of civil rights
opponents who successfully moved the
country's race dialogue to a seemingly
race-neutral concern over crime. Loury's
claims are well-supported with genuinely
shocking statistics, and his argument is
compelling that even if the racial argument
about causes is inconclusive, the racial
consequences are clear.
Three
shorter essays respond: Stanford law
professor Karlan examines prisoners as an
inert ballast in redistricting and voting
practices; French sociologist Wacquant
argues that the focus on race has ignored
the fact that inmates are first and foremost
poor people; and Harvard philosophy
professor |
Shelby urges citizens to break with Washington's
political outlook on race. The group's respectful
sparring results in an insightful look at the
conflicting theories of race and incarceration, and the
slim volume keeps up the pace of the argument without
being overwhelming.—Publishers
Weekly
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Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
/
Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This war has
been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses,
like marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white communities.
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In 2005, for
example, 4 out 5 drug arrests were for possession and
only 1 out of 5 were for sales. Most people in state
prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or
significant selling activity. Nearly 80 percent of the
increase in drug arrests in the 1990s—the period of
the most dramatic expansion of the drug war—was for
marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol
or tobacco. In some states, though, African Americans
have comprised 80 to 90 percent of all drug convictions.
* *
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In the Matter of Color
Race and the American Legal Process:
The Colonial Period
By A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.
Chronicles in
unrelenting detail the role of the law
in the enslavement and subjugation of
black Americans during the colonial
period. No attempt to summarize the
colonial experience could convey the
rich and comprehensive detail which is
the major strength of Judge
Higginbotham's work.—Harvard
Law Review
A definitive study
of racism, slavery, and the law in early
America.—American
Historical Review
Founded on
comprehensive research, thoroughly
documented, and well-written, In the
Matter of Color is a contribution of the
first importance to the study of racial
issues in America, invaluable alike to
students of American history, law, or
society.—History
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* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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