Free Republic

This not a hard one to answer. Once again we have lost another young, black man at the hands of a police officer. I really tried to find the best way to write this without seeming so over-the-top, emotional or making it an issue of race. Well as you can see that was not possible. Yes it’s probably over-the-top, but so are the numbers of our black men dying at the hands of police officers. Yes I am emotional because when I see the Michael Brown and the Trayvon Martin I also see my own 14 year old son. I...

Everyone’s praising the attorney general's response to the Ferguson crisis—and rightly so. But before ripping the president's response, it's worth noting that Holder's there because the president put him there.After saying, two Fridays ago, that “President Obama failed in his leadership to say what he really knows and has lived as a black man in America”; then saying, a week ago on Face The Nation, that the president “needs to step up to the plate and be responsible”; and writing, Friday, in the Washington Post, that Obama is “a sometimes unreliable and distant narrator of black life,” Georgetown University’s Michael...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)TOURE: I don't know what exactly happened when Michael Brown and Darren Wilson collided but I know too well the heart ache it has caused a nation where many feel that black life is worth less. This sign saying black lives matter is so simple and so powerful and so insane that we still feel the need to say it. In the 50s, blacks march with a sign saying 'I Am A Man.' The difference between those sentiments is paper thin. Blacks are still trying to get America to see and treat black people as if black and white lives...

In one of the most famous passages of the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes to the Christians of Corinth, employing a complicated series of metaphors on the theme of transformation: from childhood to adulthood, from ignorance to knowledge, from sinfulness to a state of grace. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,” the epistle runs, in the memorable rhythms of the King James Version. “But when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face...

ISTANBUL — For the last 12 days, the predominantly black St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri has been the site of racially charged civil unrest that came after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot to death by a white police officer. Another unarmed black man named Kajieme Powell was also shot by a white police officer a total of 12 times and killed. These two police shootings point to the issue of racial injustice in America. It has also exposed the reality of an American society sharply divided over race. It is possible that if Michael Brown had...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) From questions about democracy to positives coming from conflict, social scientists offer different takes. The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, have been described as a mirror into contemporary America, but they are also something else: A crystal ball. Look past the headlines -- the debates over race and police militarization that have surfaced after the killing of an unarmed black youth by a white police officer -- and one can glimpse America's future, some historians and political scientists say. No one is talking about an impending race war or a police state, but something more subtle. Unless Americans re-examine some...

When does a moment become a movement? Events such as the killing of unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., can provide the moral shock that political movements need to build their ranks and bring attention to a community’s afflictions. They can be like the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 or the beating death of Matthew Shepard in 1998 — transformative episodes that remake perceptions and force a society to abandon abhorrent practices. Or they can be like the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers: a horrific moment that failed to create a sustained...

Only the courts can judge Michael Brown’s killer – but this is the system that let George Zimmerman walk free.Just outside a mall in Ferguson, Missouri, shortly after 10 o’clock on Wednesday, a black man in his 30s was stopped and frisked by around eight white policemen. As he gingerly emptied his pockets, careful not to move too quickly, he yelled at them. It was a soliloquy of pure rage; a fluent, apparently unstoppable oration against not just the men who had apprehended him but the system they represented. “Yes I’m angry,” he shouted. “Four hundred years we been here....

Ferguson, Mo. "I JUST SAW SOMEONE DIE OMFG,” wrote Emanuel Freeman, a teenage rap aficionado who lives in the Canfield Green housing project in Ferguson, Missouri. It was about noon on Saturday, August 9, when Michael Brown, a hulking 18-year-old recently graduated from a failing high school and 10 minutes removed from committing a strong-arm robbery, was shot dead by Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson in the street outside Freeman’s window. Freeman appears not to have seen the fusillade that killed Brown, and no uncontested account of it has emerged. But we can see from the tweets Freeman posted in the...

The ghost of Dred Scott haunts the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. Thousands have been protesting the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. He was due to start college just days after he was shot dead in broad daylight. Police left his bleeding corpse in the middle of the street for over four hours, behind police tape, as neighbors gathered and looked on in horror. Outraged citizens protested, and police brutally cracked down on them. Clad in paramilitary gear and using armored vehicles, they shot tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and...

It has been a difficult month for the victims of state violence, as well as their families, friends, and those in solidarity. The month-long Israeli assault on Gaza involved a litany of war crimes, including the killing of trapped civilians, multiple bombings of hospitals, and the destruction of Gaza’s only power plant — all with critical U.S. support. And after the U.S. population reeled in shock from the NYPD murder of unarmed black man Eric Garner in broad daylight, Ferguson, Mo., was the site of another police murder — this time of unarmed, black 18-year-old Michael Brown, who, according to...

Most of us understand that yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is not a valid exercise of free speech. Why, then, do we permit the irresponsible, agenda-driven media, the race-baiters and poverty pimps to do so? Black America has plenty of problems, and not all of them are of their own making. But a significant portion are. In theory, black families should be doing well. We’ve had how many generations of affirmative action? For some families this has worked well. But for a lot of them it hasn’t. Why? We can start with the phrase “black family.” In a lot...

A lot of racism exists in the United States, but not what you think: it's anti-white racism among a great number of blacks, and among Leftist media and politicians of every colour. What on 9 August happened in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, where black delinquent Michael Brown was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson, is like a rerun of the Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman case of 2012. What the Left, the media and the race industry - the people that author Tammy Bruce calls "Misery Merchants", as they have made a career out of...

Funny thing about facts, they are what they are-always have been, always will be. Fact. On August 9, 2014 Officer Darren Wilson-a six year veteran of the Fergusoin Police Department-shot and killed 18 year old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Fact. Michael Brown was unarmed at the time of his death. Fact. There are at least two (TWO!!!) eye witnesses, Dorian Johnson-Michael Brown’s friend that was with Brown at the time of the shooting-and Piaget Crenshaw-happened to video record from her apartment window Darren Wilson shooting Brown dead. Fact. Both witnesses have gone on national news networks to tell their...

Race Manners: Michael Brown’s death didn’t cause a divide between you and the people in your social networks. It simply revealed one. Use the information you’re getting to decide which relationships you value. Dear Race Manners: I have been so offended and angered by what some of my friends on Facebook have said about Michael Brown and the situation in Ferguson (he was a thug, he deserved it, black people destroy their own communities, blacks are criminals, all the police officers in Ferguson should quit because blacks don’t appreciate them and more). I feel as though I don’t know some...

Pictured Above: Howard University students pose for a powerful photo by student Leighton Watson, who shared it on Twitter before it went viral. Since then, similar photos and the phrase, 'Hands up, Don't Shoot,' have cropped up around the country.Several national LGBT advocacy organizations have signed onto a national statement calling for new federal legislation to put an end to discriminatory police profiling. The statement comes in response to ongoing strife in Ferguson, Mo., following the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. “Last week’s shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the military-style response by the local...

The corporate media, reflecting their owners’ anxiety at the failure of Black people to revert to a state of passivity in Ferguson, Missouri, have arrived at a general consensus on two counts: the need to “demilitarize” the police (fewer bullets, smaller armored vehicles?) and, more immediately, to re-establish some semblance of “calm” (as in comatose) in the neighborhood and beyond. Corporate-attuned Black powerbrokers and politicians deliver essentially the same message, counseling (quiet) introspection and a search for “solutions” (diversions) to the historical oppression in which they are deeply complicit. But first, tensions must be reduced, to diffuse the confrontation –...

A prominent Philadelphia union official said that police officers should “suffer” in the wake of the Ferguson riots. Stewart Acuff, organizing director of the National Union of Hospital and Healthcare Employees local 1199, says police should “suffer” in order to win justice for Mike Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed man shot dead in a small Missouri city. Stewart Acuff @stewartacuff The cops are pawns who should suffer for what they did. #TrayvonMartin #MikeBrown #EricGarner #inequality 9:53 AM - 18 Aug 2014 In addition to his current local organizing role, Acuff is a former organizing director for the AFL-CIO, according to the...

You can understand if President Obama would rather talk about the fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq, where he has scored some victories, than talk about the unholy mess in Ferguson, Mo. Surprisingly, though, ISIS militants are following developments in the St. Louis suburb, and some of them would rather focus on that. According to interviews and social media, members of the group and sympathizers with its jihadist ideology are closely tracking the events in the St. Louis suburb, where protesters and police have clashed. In it, they see opportunity. Partly, the focus is strategic: Officers in Ferguson have...

On Tuesday, Mikki Kendall was in her Chicago home, watching live streams on her laptop as protesters and the police played out a 10th straight day of confrontation in the streets of Ferguson, Mo. On Wednesday, she was on the road, headed 300 miles to offer demonstrators her services as a former Army medic. “I don’t want to take up space or be in the way,” she said. “It’s about making sure people have a steady supply of what they need. I can’t watch this happen night after night and not want to help.” Ms. Kendall, 37, a writer, a...