By Alan Bean
Senator Dick Durbin wanted to dramatize the need for getting serious about the DREAM act, so he used the story of Friends of Justice intern, Pierre Berastain to add some sizzle to his argument. Pierre, a student at Harvard Divinity School, is a wonderful example of what immigrants, documented and otherwise, can give our nation. Please check this out!
Posted by Pierre Berastain
What if the person crossing the border had been a Latin American? What if the person had not been white? It seems to me that no amount of “God-talk” would let that person cross. Our perspectives and attitudes are colored, and they are often colored with shades of injustice or inequalities in the way we treat others. This is an invitation to examine our prejudices.
By Alan Bean
This article from Colorlines is based on a Department of Justice report on Meridian, Mississippi’s school to prison pipeline released in August. Here’s a brief summary from that report:
The department’s investigation showed that the agencies have helped to operate a school-to-prison pipeline whereby children arrested in local schools become entangled in a cycle of incarceration without substantive and procedural protections required by the U.S. Constitution. The department’s findings show that children in Lauderdale County have been routinely and repeatedly incarcerated for allegedly committing school disciplinary infractions and are punished disproportionately, without constitutionally required procedural safeguards. Children have also been arrested at school for offenses as minor as defiance. Furthermore, children on probation are routinely arrested and incarcerated for allegedly violating their probation by committing minor school infractions, such as dress code violations, which result in suspensions. The department’s investigation showed that students most affected by this system are African-American children and children with disabilities.
The report claims that school officials in Meridian frequently refused to supply the federal investigators with important information (more on that in the article below). (more…)
Radley Balko is one of the few independent journalists in America who will cover egregious cases of injustice the mainstream media ignores. His email introduction to the shocking case of Jeffrey Havard appears below, followed by Balko’s recent article for the Huffington Post. Here’s the really scary thing about this story: an innocent man is poised to die and the mainstream press is taking a powder. AGB
By Alan Bean
I first learned about Lawrence Guyot from reading Taylor Branch’s celebrated Trilogy on the King Years. His name came up again when I researched the background of the Curtis Flowers story. Readers of this blog will know that Guyot, Fannie Lou Hamer and several other civil rights activists were beaten within an inch of their lives by men under the command of Sheriff Earl Wayne Patridge at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Winona, Mississippi in June of 1963. Three decades later, Mr. Flowers was arrested on the basis of fabricated evidence for the 1996 slaying of four people at a Winona furniture store.
A little over a year ago, I had the chance to meet the man in the flesh when he spoke at an event in Cleveland, MS sponsored by the Samuel Procter Oral History Program at the University of Florida. The civil rights icon seemed more interested in telling the students what they needed to do in the present moment than he was in sharing tidbits of civil rights nostalgia. This September, my wife Nancy and I shared our story with the Florida students.
This New York Times story captures the essence of Guyot’s amazing saga. There was nothing unusual about the man. He was not particularly eloquent or brilliant; he just refused to back down in the face of injustice. Without Lawrence Guyot’s brand of anonymous courage, the civil rights movement could not have succeeded. (more…)
By Alan Bean
Stephen Spielberg’s “Lincoln” pulled in $34 million over the Thanksgiving weekend, third best behind the new Twilight and James Bond movies. When I saw the film over the weekend, the audience applauded as the credits rolled–something you don’t see very often.
The film, loosely based on Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, is relentlessly historical. Lincoln is portrayed as a bucolic Christ figure, but Spielberg stops short of turning The Great Emancipator into a comfortable citizen of the 21st Century. Constitutional equality applied to Negroes, said Lincoln; that meant abolishing the slave trade in every corner of the Union and little else. (more…)
Posted by Pierre Berastain
From Colorlines:
Meet Matthew Fogg, a former U.S. Marshal whose exploits led him to be nicknamed “Batman.” When he noticed that all of his team’s drug raids were in black areas, he suggested doing the same in the suburbs.
“If we were locking up everybody, white and black, for doing the same drugs they would’ve done the same thing with prohibition, they would’ve outlawed it,” Fogg says in the video produced by Brave New Films. “If it were an equal enforcement opportunity we wouldn’t be sitting here anyway.”
By Alan Bean
Civil libertarians are expressing grave concerns about central aspects of the unfolding scandal involving General David Petraeus. In particular, the role of FBI agent Frederick Humphries is raising eyebrows.
Consider this excerpt from a recent piece in the New York Times:
By all accounts, Mr. Humphries doggedly pursued Ms. Kelley’s cyberstalking complaint. Though he was not assigned to the case, he was admonished by supervisors who thought he was trying to improperly insert himself into the investigation.
In late October, fearing that the case was being stalled for political reasons, Mr. Humphries contacted Representative Dave Reichert, a Republican from Washington State, where the F.B.I. agent had worked previously, to inform him of the case. Mr. Reichert put him in touch with the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, who passed the message to Mr. Mueller.
Here we have a rouge agent going above the heads of his superiors to pursue an unauthorized investigation. Then, without authorization, Humphries contacts his friends in Republican politics who can be counted on to take the matter directly to the Big Cheese, FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Agent Humphries, it seems, was acting as a friend of Jill Kelley, not in his official capacity. Kelley has been described as a “Tampa socialite”, whatever that means. Like Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell, Kelley appears to be an attractive woman who collected prominent men the way some women collect tea pots. (more…)
Ramsey Muniz is a seventy year-old man who walks painfully with the assistance of a cane. He once ran for Governor of Texas; now he is housed in a federal prison built for gang members. Ramsey has served almost twenty years for his alleged role in an imaginary drug deal that was produced and directed by the federal government. Even if you think he is guilty, compassion and common sense dictate a humanitarian release. But Mr. Muniz and thousands of other applicants for clemency and commutation are routinely rebuffed by the office of the president. As law professor Mark Osler observes, Barack Obama has been far less willing to utilize his pardon pen than was the tough-on-crime Ronald Reagan. Mr. President, how about some change we can believe in.
By Mark Osler
Star Tribune
Under President Obama, the odds of clemency or commutation are shamefully slim.
If President Obama follows tradition and pardons a turkey this week, it will be a ceremony rich in irony. While the president has been a regular dispenser of clemency to fowl, he has not been so generous to humans. It is time for that disjuncture to end. (more…)
Al Mohler is rapidly becoming the voice of conservative evangelicalism, but he doesn’t speak for all evangelicals. Like me, Miguel De La Torre is a guest blogger with the Associated Baptist Press where this piece originally appeared. Miguel provides an alternative evangelical take on the election and its meaning. Miguel De La Torre is professor of social ethics and Latino/a studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver and an ordained Baptist minister. Also like me, Miguel is a graduate of the school of which Al Mohler is currently president, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville KY. AGB
One evangelical voice was conspicuous in the aftermath of President Obama’s re-election Nov. 7, but it isn’t the only one.
By Miguel De La Torre
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., was quoted widely concerning the re-election of President Barack Obama. If afforded equal time, here’s how I would respond to comments attributed to him Nov. 8 on NPR, the New York Times on Nov. 9 and his blog on Nov. 7.
Mohler: “Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in. I think this was an evangelical disaster” (New York Times).
De La Torre: Brother Al, you confuse evangelicalism with white, male America. Continuing to fuse white/right political leaning with the message of Christ does a disservice to the gospel. (more…)
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