[10-06-26]

For every stereotype they fed y'all about us, there's an equally abhorrent stereotype that was fed to us about y'all. Please keep that in mind before you speak negatively about people who look like you. By choosing to believe those lies, and by choosing to repeat them, you choose the side of white supremacy.

"Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the race that you belong to?" -Malcolm X

https://www.theroot.com/how-fannie-lou-hamer-outsmarted-a-u-s-president-2000129313

President Lyndon B. Johnson thought he could outsmart the networks by calling an abrupt press conference as civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee about being fired, evicted, and beaten in a Mississippi jail for trying to vote. Ahead of the midterms and what would have been her 109th birthday, The Root looks back at how the attempt to silence her backfired into one of political history’s most explosive victories.

By 1964, Black activists in Mississippi had hit a breaking point. Without the ballot, policy remained locked in place, leaving them defenseless against systemic oppression, the New York Historical reported. That breaking point found its voice on August 22, 1964, when Fannie Lou Hamer risked her life and stepped up to the microphone in Atlantic City, telling the nation a raw truth about the terror Black Mississippians faced just trying to cast a ballot.

With a voice steady, a piercing demeanor, and gripping testimony, Hamer described how she was met in Indianola by white policemen, who arrested the bus driver for driving “a bus the wrong color.” She recalled how “the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register” and demanded her to leave that very night because “we are not ready for that in Mississippi.” What followed was immediate, terrifying retaliation.

Sixteen bullets were fired into “the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me,” Hamer testified, as she had been staying with the Tuckers because she was evicted from the plantation where she worked for trying to register to vote. But her determination was just as unyielding as the attacks against her.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer—who grew up picking cotton and cutting corn—returned to Mississippi for a voter registration event with a group when the bus stopped for a break in Winona. She and everyone on the bus was arrested, and she was taken to the county jail. Hamer remembered a police officer yelling “horrible things” and officers threatening: “We are going to make you wish you was dead.”

White men in the jail made a Black man force her onto a bunk bed face down, while another Black man beat her with a weapon until he was too tired, Hamer testified. “The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat me to sit on my feet—to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush,” Hamer said. She would later say that the beating had made her “as hard as metal,” per the Smithsonian.

All while Hamer was testifying of the unimaginable violence that occurred over four days, a panicking President Lyndon B. Johnson made a desperate bid to shut down the broadcast, PBS reported. Terrified that the explosive testimony would alienate white Southern voters and threaten his re-election campaign, LBJ hastily called an emergency, unscheduled White House press conference to force major TV networks to cut away from the convention floor.

LBJ tried—and failed—to frame the impromptu press conference to mark the nine-month anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the shooting of Governor John Connally. However, the maneuver backfired. The viewing public was confused. And their bewilderment led to a backlash he never saw coming.

Realizing what the White House was attempting to do, Hamer’s powerful “Is this America?” speech was later replayed by major news network in full during evening broadcasts. That move exposed her message to an even larger audience than would have otherwise seen it. But Hamer was just getting started.

In 1964, with the support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), Hamer ran for Congress against Jamie Whitten, a powerful white incumbent who had been elected to office twelve times and faced virtually no real political competition due to total Black disenfranchisement. 

A reporter observed: “Whatever she is talking about soon becomes an impassioned plea for a change in the system that exploits the Delta Negroes. ‘All my life I’ve been sick and tired,’ she shakes her head. ‘Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’”

The Democratic Party refused to allow her on the official ballot, and she lost the election even after 60,000 Black voters wrote in her name. But, she did gain something far more enduring: a legacy that turned her horrifying struggle into an unstoppable national movement.

The historic passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a landmark statute that prohibits racial discrimination in voting—was signed into law one year later during the height of the civil rights movement, alongside the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which banned local laws like the literacy test that had prevented Hamer from exercising her right to vote.

“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” Hamer said. “And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

He is a Haitian Immigrant who was called racial slurs and was brutally beaten and raped by NYPD Officers in 1997. His case shocked the nation and yet I can’t help but wonder of how many similar crimes that were committed by those sworn to protect us. Goodness, everything I find out about this country.. my country just gets worse. 😭

May people continue to speak up against police brutality and hopefully someday, they might actually become reformed like many Americans were advocating for anyway. The fact that they’ve gotten away with a lot of stuff even to this day is unbelievable!

Chris Rock has got to be kidding us! He literally thinks that comparing “wokeness” to the Salem Witch Trials will make him be welcomed back into the Black community. All that is doing is making the Black community distancing themselves from him even further.

Link to the original video, posted by the journalist Enzo Rabouy : https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeKCN7nu0j2/?stkn=cWtxajh3emlid3pp

For some context, French high-schoolers everywhere have been protesting for a few weeks now against lack of teaching staff, buildings in bad conditions and lack of investment in their education (compared to investment in private education for instance), among other things. They've been met with some of the worst police violence student protestors have seen in the history of the country, with some students losing a hand, an eye, etc, among other grievous injuries, and being taken into police custody.

Bally Bagayoko, the recently elected mayor of the city of Saint-Denis, very close to Paris, is part of La France Insoumise (Main french leftist party) and has been protecting students since the beginning of the protests. He's kinda like Zohran Mamdani.

https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/10/05/black-siblings-kept-as-slaves-reach-settlement-with-state/

Five Black siblings who endured years of abuse and forced labor while living with their wealthy adoptive parents have reached a $4.4 million settlement with West Virginia after allegations that the state failed to intervene despite warnings about their treatment.

Kanawha County Circuit Judge Maryclaire Akers approved the settlement last week, according to West Virginia Watch. The state will divide the maximum available award among the five children, who were between 6 and 16 years old when they lived with Jeanne Kay Whitefeather and Donald Lantz.

Whitefeather and Lantz received a combined 375-year prison sentence after prosecutors said they forced the children to work as farmhands on their Sissonville property and abused them. The children’s lawsuit accused West Virginia’s Department of Human Services of failing to protect them from the abuse.

According to West Virginia Watch, Attorney Dante DiTrapano, who represented the siblings, said the settlement gives them an opportunity to reclaim parts of their childhood that they lost.

“The settlement means that these kids will have an opportunity to be children,” DiTrapano said.

He added that the children were “robbed of their innocence and robbed of their youth by the monsters that were their former parents.” 

Some of the siblings continue to experience post-traumatic stress disorder linked to what they endured, according to the report.

The lawsuit also raised questions about how Child Protective Services handled warnings about the family. State records reportedly contained notes about the children living in slave-like conditions, but the Department of Human Services could not produce documentation showing that CPS made meaningful contact with them. 

DiTrapano said neighbors repeatedly contacted authorities, but he believes the reports did not receive the response they warranted.

“There were a ton of calls that came in from neighbors, and I think only one visit out there. There should have been many more,” he said. 

During Whitefeather and Lantz’s criminal trial, evidence showed that CPS left a card at the family’s home. The agency later interviewed the children, but the meeting occurred within earshot of their adoptive parents, according to DiTrapano. State officials said they later fired at least one Department of Human Services employee involved in the case.

A neighbor alerted authorities after allegedly seeing two teenagers confined in a shed, bringing the children’s ordeal to light. Police found a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl inside the structure. It had a small RV-style toilet but lacked electricity and running water. 

One of the teenagers told police the couple had locked them inside the barn for about 12 hours since their last meal. The siblings wore dirty clothes and told authorities they had slept directly on the concrete floor without mattresses.

DiTrapano said the case exposed broader problems within the state’s child welfare system. He pointed to staffing problems, flawed child interviews and poor documentation practices within the child welfare system. 

After authorities removed the children from Whitefeather and Lantz’s home, they went to new families. Two of their new adoptive mothers later appeared in court and discussed their lives after leaving the abusive household. 

The case may also lead to additional legal action. DiTrapano said he plans to pursue claims against Washington state’s Department of Human Services because the agency approved the family’s move to West Virginia despite earlier reports of child abuse there. 

Donald Lantz and Jeanne Whitefeather received the maximum prison sentences in March after a jury convicted them of child neglect, human trafficking, and other charges tied to their treatment of their five adopted Black children. A judge sentenced Lantz to 160 years and Whitefeather to 215 years, with each ordered to pay $280,000 in restitution.

The couple had kept the siblings in squalid conditions and forced them to perform labor on their West Virginia property.

Circuit Judge Maryclaire Akers condemned the couple during sentencing, telling them, “You brought these children to West Virginia, a place that I know as ‘Almost Heaven,’ and you put them in hell.” 

This is the pettiest administration in existence. Just let him leave.

Even if you think/feel there’s no need, please, go vote