I grew up on watching my San Francisco 49ers win. We had a pedigree. I am at a loss for words as to how good it feels to have some semblance of that back. I love the Giants, loved watching them win the pennant, but football is football and the city needed this. I get tears just watching that catch.
“My hair is so nappy right now” People say that to me all the time. I always wonder if they know that I am dreaded and by definition, nappy as hell. Hilarious.
Changing the world usually is left for super heros. We get caught up in the name “the world” and think its far too vast for us to change. In reality, changing the world is more about changing one person at a time, then everyone at once. Stories like Julio Diaz’s are monumental because he changed this teenager’s world. That teen might still be a derelict, but he did what he could to put out good into the world and if he reaches one person, he is a super hero.
From npr.com:
March 28, 2008
Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.
But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.
He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.
“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.
As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”
The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, “like what’s going on here?” Diaz says. “He asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’”
Diaz replied: “If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me … hey, you’re more than welcome.
“You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help,” Diaz says.
Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.
“The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi,” Diaz says. “The kid was like, ‘You know everybody here. Do you own this place?’”
“No, I just eat here a lot,” Diaz says he told the teen. “He says, ‘But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.’”
Diaz replied, “Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”
“Yea, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way,” the teen said.
Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. “He just had almost a sad face,” Diaz says.
The teen couldn’t answer Diaz — or he didn’t want to.
When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, “Look, I guess you’re going to have to pay for this bill ’cause you have my money and I can’t pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I’ll gladly treat you.”
The teen “didn’t even think about it” and returned the wallet, Diaz says. “I gave him $20 … I figure maybe it’ll help him. I don’t know.”
Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen’s knife — “and he gave it to me.”
Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, “You’re the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch.”
“I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.”
Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.
Granted I do not usually approve of these types of protests, not protest in general but I usually feel that protests like these are saved for ppl with the luxury to protest and those looking for any cause they can jump on, I realize that in this lies an integral message and a platform for the voicing of the popular opinion. America is a backwards place, going all the way back to its inception, when pilgrims recreated the same dynamics here that caused them to flee persecution in Europe, where they built walls around their villages to protect themselves from the natives, instead of converting the unknown into friends with an open hand. We live in a society built on gain for one’s self, maybe sharing with one or two individuals, but certainly not even one’s entire family. dont mention all americans, or all humans. This is an unnatural society that will fall as nature runs its course. I appreciate those with the time to say the things that Dr. West has said, the things that people in the trenches cant stop and say, because they need to eat and therefore need to work and need to continue their positions as cogs in this huge system.
Take the time, Watch the Video of Cornell West here
As I listened, I teared up and laughed at the same time. The platform is silly but the words could never be truer. . I sit in such a privileged position, faced with the daily dilemma, the only I have inked on my body, “Am I my brother’ keeper?” Which brothers do I choose? I feel, as my sibling’s sheppard, that I must put them first, and thus, must win in this fucked up system, get the money needed to make sure I can take care of them and the rest of my family. But on the other hand, I realize there is a greater struggle out there, the struggle for humanity. I do not mean to sound holey or lofty but this is the truth. We need a revolution. One that changes the way we consume, the way we kill our planet, the way we kill each other, both physically and emotionally. My life is a fight everyday with a society built to hold me down. That is not to say I have it worst, or even bad. I’m good, but I feel the sandpaper of America rubbing at my face. Do I put aside my personal story for that of all black people, all jews, all minorities, all women, all americans? If you do not understand what I am saying, open your eyes. Take the LEAP.
Great story about how people can change. And Bread, organic at that. Worth the 10 mins at least.
PS: the news clip in the middle is pretty telling about how the media works. This is also an example of some terrible naming that somehow didnt kill a business. I blame the target market, if you are buying organic bread, I guess you are open minded enough to look past the “killer” felon. haa
He was 14 yrs. 6mos. and 5 days old — and the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th Century
George Junius Stinney, Jr.,
[b. 1929 - d. 1944]
All I can do is post this, so more ppl know and can understand why some of us Americans have a chip on our collective shoulder.
In a South Carolina prison sixty-six years ago, guards walked a 14-year-old boy, bible tucked under his arm, to the electric chair. At 5′ 1″ and 95 pounds, the straps didn’t fit, and an electrode was too big for his leg.
The switch was pulled and the adult sized death mask fell from George Stinney’s face. Tears streamed from his eyes. Witnesses recoiled in horror as they watched the youngest person executed in the United States in the past century die.
Now, a community activist is fighting to clear Stinney’s name, saying the young boy couldn’t have killed two girls. George Frierson, a school board member and textile inspector, believes Stinney’s confession was coerced, and that his execution was just another injustice blacks suffered in Southern courtrooms in the first half of the 1900s.
In a couple of cases like Stinney’s, petitions are being made before parole boards and courts are being asked to overturn decisions made when society’s thumb was weighing the scales of justice against blacks. These requests are buoyed for the first time in generations by money, college degrees and sometimes clout.
“I hope we see more cases like this because it help brings a sense of closure. It’s symbolic,” said Howard University law professor Frank Wu. “It’s not just important for the individuals and their families. It’s important for the entire community. Not just for African Americans, but for whites and for our democracy as a whole. What these cases show is that it is possible to achieve justice.”
Some have already achieved justice. Earlier this year, syndicated radio host Tom Joyner successfully won a posthumous pardon for two great uncles who were executed in South Carolina.
A few years ago Lena Baker, a black Georgia maid sent to the electric chair for killing a white man, received a pardon after her family pointed out she likely killed the man because he was holding her against her will.
In the Stinney case, supporters want the state to admit that officials executed the wrong person in June 1944.
Stinney was accused of killing two white girls, 11 year old Betty June Binnicker and 8 year old
Mary Emma Thames, by beating them with a railroad spike then dragging their bodies to a ditch near Acolu, about five miles from Manning in central South Carolina. The girls were found a day after they disappeared following a massive manhunt. Stinney was arrested a few hours later, white men in suits taking him away. Because of the risk of a lynching, Stinney was kept at a jail 50 miles away in Columbia.
Stinney’s father, who had helped look for the girls, was fired immediately and ordered to leave his home and the sawmill where he worked. His family was told to leave town prior to the trial to avoid further retribution. An atmosphere of lynch mob hysteria hung over the courthouse. Without family visits, the 14 year old had to endure the trial and death alone.
Frierson hasn’t been able to get the case out of his head since, carrying around a thick binder of old newspaper stories and documents, including an account from an execution witness.
The sheriff at the time said Stinney admitted to the killings, but there is only his word — no written record of the confession has been found. A lawyer helping Frierson with the case figures threats of mob violence and not being able to see his parents rattled the seventh- grader.
Attorney Steve McKenzie said he has even heard one account that says detectives offered the boy ice cream once they were done.
“You’ve got to know he was going to say whatever they wanted him to say,” McKenzie said.
The court appointed Stinney an attorney — a tax commissioner preparing for a Statehouse run. In all, the trial — from jury selection to a sentence of death — lasted one day. Records indicate 1,000 people crammed the courthouse. Blacks weren’t allowed inside.
The defense called no witnesses and never filed an appeal. No one challenged the sheriff’s recollection of the confession.
“As an attorney, it just kind of haunted me, just the way the judicial system worked to this boy’s disadvantage or disfavor. It did not protect him,” said McKenzie, who is preparing court papers to ask a judge to reopen the case.
Stinney’s official court record contains less than two dozen pages, several of them arrest warrants. There is no transcript of the trial.
The lack of records, while not unusual, makes it harder for people trying to get these old convictions overturned, Wu said.
But these old cases also can have a common thread.
“Some of these cases are so egregious, so extreme that when you look at it, the prosecution really has no case either,” Wu said. “It’s apparent from what you can see that someone was railroaded.”
And sometimes, police under pressure by frightened citizens jumped to conclusions rather than conducting a thorough investigation, Wu said.
Bluffton Today – ‘Crusaders look to right Jim Crow justice wrongs’ by Jeffrey Collins
Photo: South Carolina Department of Archives and History
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22067139@N05/5251556905/
This is the very the ugly under belly of America, the things that lie below the Dream, the freedom and the pursuit of happiness*. This is the essence of the asterisk, the wait a min I hope you didnt think all these lofty ideals were for everybody cause they sure as hell arent for you. This article from Colorlines breaks down the North Carolina portion of the nationwide Eugenics program that started in the early 1900′s. For the record Eugenics is “the study and practice of attempting to improve the genetic features of human populations through selective breeding and sterilization” (via wiki) aka denying certain people their human right to reproduce because they are deemed less fit than others or because their offspring are destined to be a burden on society.
“It is better for all the world, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in the 1927 ruling that upheld the legality of compulsory sterilization. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The 1927 ruling was never overturned. However, in 1942, the Supreme Court ruled against punitive sterilization.
Obviously, we easily condem the practices of eugenics that Hitler and the Nazi used in the Holocaust. But, we still let these practices continue on our own soil, even increasing after WWII in places like North Carolina. Langston Hughes said it best “let America be America again–The land that never has been yet–”.
North Carolina Confronts the Ugly Past of Its Eugenics Law
A North Carolina state task force is holding a public listening session later this month for victims of the state’s now defunct eugenics law to come forward and share their stories. The session is part of an effort to compensate those who were forcibly sterilized decades ago. The majority of victims were poor black women, and many were minors or the victims of rape or incest.
“The fewer black babies we have the better, that’s what some people said,” Professor Paul Lombardo told the BBC about the program. “They’re just going to end up on welfare.”
North Carolina is one of 32 states that passed laws that allowed the sterilization of people deemed “unfit to breed,” and ultimately took away the reproductive rights of more than 60,000 people nationwide. The programs targeted people deemed to be criminals, juvenile delinquents, the mentally ill, women considered to be “sexual deviants,” gay men, and people suffering from epilepsy. Those on welfare were targeted as well, especially African Americans after welfare became available to them in the 1960s, because they were seen as a drain on the system.
Operations were often done without the victim’s knowledge. Sterilization was also sometimes used as a condition for release from prison or a hospital, or as an ultimatum to cutting off benefits.
In 1968, 13-year-old Elaine Riddick was raped by a neighbor. After giving birth in a hospital, a social worker deemed her “feeble minded” and officials coerced her illiterate grandmother to sign an “X” on an authorization form to have her sterilized.
“My grandmother was afraid that if she didn’t sign the paper, they would cut off her benefits, like the canned food she got every week,” Riddick said. “So she signed, without understanding what sterilization or tubal ligation really meant.” Riddick, now 57, plans to testify at the session.
Eugenics enjoyed wide support among progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Alexander Graham Bell, and from members of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Medical Association. “It is better for all the world, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in the 1927 ruling that upheld the legality of compulsory sterilization. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The 1927 ruling was never overturned. However, in 1942, the Supreme Court ruled against punitive sterilization.
Many states began abandoning their eugenics programs after World War II, fearing comparisons to Nazis’ eugenics practices in Germany. But North Carolina’s program actually grew stronger after the 1940s, bolstered by financial support from some of the state’s wealthiest residents. That is why the state is believed to have more surviving victims, almost 40 percent of the over 7,500 sterilized, even though it is behind Virginia and California as the states with the highest numbers of sterilizations. North Carolina was also unique in that it was the only state that used social workers to urge sterilization, and allowed people to petition the state to have someone sterilized. The program lasted until the late 1970s and the state’s eugenics law was removed from the books in 2003.
After collecting testimonies in Raleigh on June 22, the state task force will make a recommendation to the governor on how to compensate surviving victims. North Carolina congressman Larry Womble is pushing for monetary compensation. $20,000 has been suggested, a figure that could amount to up to $58 million in reparations for the estimated 2,900 surviving victims, although many victims are expected to not come forward out of shame. Reparations of any amount are sure to face stiff opposition, as the state is facing a $2.5 billion budget hole this year.
To learn more about North Carolina’s Eugenics program, visit the Winston-Salem Journal’s special report, “Against Their Will.”
by Asraa Mustufa for Colorlines
We finally got a mural up! This was a process several years in the making. We started in the summer of 2009, with failed attempts at finding a location, a person signing off on a house he didnt own, you name it. It took the benevolence of a full loving group of girls on the verge of graduating from college, a noteworthy feat in and of itself, to get this mural up and get the message out.
If you dont know the Girl=Boy Project is about jumping into your life’s time machine and travel back to your childhood…
In the end, we put the mural on plywood, giving it the opportunity for multiple homes. Keep your eyes peeled around the pioneer valley for a G=B mural at your local elementary…
S/O to Renee and all the folks out in Amherst that supported me in getting this mural up. Also thanks to Haz for some work behind the lens. The goal is simple, to propagate this message and to let girls and boys believe they can be whatever they can dream.
In essence, the video speaks for itself. It is a 6 course, fine dining luncheon, hosted on the L-train as it rides through to Canarsie. The food looked pretty amazing (with the only issue being that I dont eat half of “fine dining” so I would have had to be sidelined a bit). I think what struck me the most was the behind the scenes. This was a precisely timed orchestra. They knew the times, when the train was coming, when they had to fire up the food in order for it to be cooked right when it hit the train, all of that. Hats off, because being caught up in the the idea, the bowties and the sparkling water makes you lose sight of the actual brilliance that went into the planning.
S/O to http://www.arazorashinyknife.com/ for inspiring.
415.355.4AtG
