That's John Lewis getting the billy-club treatment in Selma, Alabama, March 1965.
His skull was fractured when police went berserk.
At
The Atlantic, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a veteran and icon of the 1960s civil rights struggle, writes
Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the 'Other America':
At its best, non-violent protest is a strategically engineered crisis designed to wake up a sleeping nation, to educate and sensitize those who become awakened, and to ignite a sense of righteous indignation in people of goodwill to press for transformation. That's what the protests galvanized by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others are trying to accomplish.
Many Americans find themselves at a loss to understand the depth of the anger and frustration of the protestors. It might be worthwhile for them to read a speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on April 14, 1967, at Stanford University. A colleague of mine in Congress reminded me of his words, and I find they ring as true today as they did almost 50 years ago.
In the speech, King describes what he calls the "other America," one of two starkly different American experiences that exist side-by-side. One people "experience the opportunity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all its dimensions," and the other a "daily ugliness" that spoils the purest hopes of the young and old, leaving only "the fatigue of despair." The Brown and Garner cases themselves are not the only focus of the protestors' grievances, but they represent a glimpse of a different America most Americans have found it inconvenient to confront.
One group of people in this country can expect the institutions of government to bend in their favor, no matter that they are supposedly regulated by impartial law. In the other, children, fathers, mothers, uncles, grandfathers, whole families, and many generations are swept up like rubbish by the hard, unforgiving hand of the law.
They are offered no lenience, even for petty offenses, in a system that seems hell-bent on warehousing them by the millions of people, while others escape the consequences of pervasive malfeasance scot-free. Some people rationalize that it was unfortunate, but not altogether disturbing, that Michael Brown was put to death without due process because, after all, he allegedly took some cigarillos from a corner store. But who went to jail for the mortgage fraud that robbed his community and other black communities around the country of 50 percent of their wealth?
Should people accused of stealing be held accountable? Definitely. But the justice system entangles the most vulnerable so effectively that even the innocent often find it easier to just plead guilty. Meanwhile the capable, and sometimes the stealthiest and most damaging, are slapped on the wrist and given a pass.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Millions live on $2 a day in America. The problem isn't just the safety net, it's the whole economy:
Millions of Americans are living in the kind of poverty you generally associate with those "you can save a child for the price of a cup of coffee a day" ads. Deep poverty, defined as 50 percent or less of the official poverty level, hit a new high in 2010, with 20.5 million people—6.7 percent of the population—in deep poverty. But sociologist Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, a social work professor, are looking at a level below deep poverty, occupied by nearly 1.4 million households […]
How does this happen? It happens when there's no work for millions of people, where there are 3.3 job-seekers for every job. It happens when unemployment insurance benefits expire, as they are about to do for two million people. It happens when single mothers don't have child care and don't want to leave their kids alone, making work outside the home impossible—they don't get Ann Romney's choices. It happens when the jobs people do find are just a few hours a week, at or below minimum wage.
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, Peshwar demands our attention, right out of the box. We have our own shooting problems, as usual. Speaking of which,
Greg Dworkin notes that Newtown families file suit against the maker of Bushmaster rifles, and the amazing Australian response to the Sydney attack. Also: the ruble collapse; oil prices drop, airlines
pass the savings on keep the $, and; the latest poll to ask the wrong questions about torture. Torture isn't new, and neither are anti-vaccine beliefs. The mechanics & dynamics of how the derivatives rule rollback got into the CRapnibus.
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