CMicheals at TL Nov.22, 2006: -excerpts-
No less than the Durham NAACP just had Duke Pres. Dick Brodhead keynote their Freedom Fund Banquet last Saturday. Clearly it wasn't done in an effort to divide, but unite the African-American and white communities in a time of stress.
In my story hitting stands today I quote Brodhead as saying:
"...it seems to me that everyone who is a party to this issue, in this community or elsewhere, has got to understand that our collective community faith requires us to stand together for truth and justice, even in the face of difficult situations, and emotions.”
“The world of due process and the world of justice based on evidence is a world we all need,” the Duke president continued. “We need the benefit of presumption of innocence. We need the benefit of waiting until the facts are in before judgment is rendered. We all need that, though I must say, people who have not had the whole benefit of the law know that they have as much or more to lose than anybody from the opposite world, a world where prejudice is allowed to make decisions.”
“A world in which you can decide whether someone’s guilty by deciding what category of humanity they belong to, or a world in which people feel free to reach conclusions without taking the trouble to establish the facts.”
“That is a dangerous world to live in,” Brodhead declared. “That’s not dangerous for some people; that’s dangerous for all people, and that itself is one of the lessons of the civil rights movement.”
Now this may come as a shock to you, and you'll have to read the whole exclusive story (I was the only working reporter there) to see it in context, but Brodhead was pushing hard to a predominately Black audience during his remarks for the Duke Three to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise in court.
http://forums.talkleft.com/index.php/topic,784.0.html
[For the record]- An official transcript of this speech might be a good thing.
http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/hsletters/
Laughing at Durham
Durham is the laughing stock of the country, you have an extremely, dishonest district attorney in Mike Nifong, a police force out of control, and an attorney general who doesn't care about justice.
The Duke rape hoax is just that, a hoax. I am a rape survivor and I can tell you that a true victim will never change her story that many times. No DNA, accuser files false charges in the past, she goes back to pole dancing within days of this so-called rape and she is a drug seeker.
I have been saying this from day one: the NAACP and the ACLU are killing race relations in this country. Durham wake up. These young men did nothing to this girl. It takes a real victim to know a victim, and she is not a victim.
KERRI PARADISE
Springfield, Mass.
November 24, 2006