Free Republic

Starting in late summer 2014, a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter convulsed the country. Triggered by the fatal police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement claimed that blacks are still oppressed by widespread racism, especially within law enforcement. The police subject black communities to a gratuitous regime of stops and arrests, resulting in the frequent use of lethal force against black men, according to the activists and their media and academic allies. Indeed, America’s police are the greatest threat facing young black men today, the protesters charged. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced...

“The violence in this country, especially as it effects African-American men and boys, is not a problem,” Mayor Michael Nutter said last night at a screening of the new film, Fruitvale Station. “It is an epidemic, it is a disease…. We need to do something about it.” Standing before a packed theater of invited guests from Philadelphia youth groups, including the Mayor’s Violence Prevention Workshop, the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership and other city and community initiatives, the Mayor introduced the film – a wrenching dramatizion of the events leading up to the New Year’s Day, 2009, shooting death of Oscar...

Harvey Weinstein’s big Oscar hopeful this summer is “Fruitvale Station,” a true story about the fatal Oakland shooting of an unarmed young black man that arrived with almost miraculous timing. Hitting theaters just as the jurors in the George Zimmerman trial were deliberating. the film won the two top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival and has become a cause celebre among critics. Activists are seizing the opportunity to promote the movie, which calls for justice and implies that nothing like it has occurred yet, though the man who shot and killed Oscar Grant has already served time in prison...

<p>I’m a 10-year regular at BART’s Fruitvale Station, and this morning noticed a movie poster for “Fruitvale Station” near the turnstiles inside the station — not far from the tragic events that inspired the film.</p> <p>“Fruitvale Station” was written and directed by Oakland’s Ryan Coogler, and covers the last day of Oscar Grant’s life before he was fatally shot by a BART police officer on New Year’s Day 2009. It won the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, and is set for wide release this Friday.</p>