News — being black

The Perspective is back with a slight twist. We are joined by influential community leaders to discuss and breakdown concerning topics within the black community. This Episodes Topic: Does God Exist? Discussion held by Sister Mut + Shackema Brown + Charlotte Crowl - Filmed by @Thinkweike + @mrghostrain6 + Photography: Derek Amal

 A white woman observes a Black man sitting with two white children and thinks they’re in danger. She takes their picture and threatens to call 9-1-1. Will other people think that’s a good idea?

China has a social credit system that tracks peoples’ activities and allocates scores. The government uses this score to measure the level of trustworthiness, which then determines what you’re allowed to do. Purchases like diapers and food increase the score, while items like alcohol and video games reduce the score. Those with low social credit are publicly shamed. There’s even an app that shows who around you has low social credit. In China, being monitored is not new. However, the social credit system uses algorithmic surveillance for social control. In a world where there is much concern over data privacy, this is somehow scary. What do you think of this system?

Westerners get to work in developing countries without little experience and no one to hold them accountable. This seems to have been the case with Renee Bach, who started Serving His Children (SHC) in Uganda at 18 years old. The organization has been linked to several children's deaths. Bach's case has again highlighted the issue of medical "voluntourism" while raising questions of whether some charities in the developing world have a "white savior problem." In response, Uganda-based social workers Olivia Also and Kelsey Nielsen began the No White Saviors campaign to educate and advocate for better mission and development work practices. What do you think?

Hundreds gathered in Toronto for the first annual Regis Korchinski-Paquet Memorial Walk for Justice, organized by Black Lives Matter on July 25, 2020, to honor the life of a young African-Canadian woman who fell 24 floors to her death during an encounter with police.

Regis Korchinski-Paquet, the daughter of Claudette Beals-Clayton and Peter Korchinski, was deeply proud of her Black Nova Scotia roots and Ukrainian heritage. She was a talented gymnast and dancer during her school years, and held a variety of jobs after high school, including working for a computer security company and at a deli counter.

Korchinski-Paquet was diagnosed with epilepsy five years before her death and found it increasingly difficult to maintain a job because of her seizures and the effects of epileptic postictal phenomena, a condition occurring after seizures that is marked by drowsiness, confusion, migraine, and other disorienting symptoms. On several occasions Regis experienced psychiatric crises that required hospital visits.

On the morning of May 27, 2020, during a heat wave and under COVID restrictions, Korchinski-Paquet had a seizure in the family apartment at 100 High Park Avenue in Toronto. Her mother called 911 and requested assistance in de-escalating a family conflict and getting Korchinski-Paquet safely to a hospital. At least five officers responded and met Korchinski-Paquet, her mother, and brother, in the hallway outside their apartment.

When Korchinski-Paquet asked to use the washroom, the officers followed her into the apartment but barred her mother and brother from entering. What happened next is unclear. From outside in the hallway, Korchinski-Paquet’s mother and brother heard a commotion, the words, “Mom, help,” and then silence. Officers emerged to announce that Korchinski-Paquet was dead. She fell 24 floors and her body remained on the ground outside the apartment for the next five hours.

The family believes that the integrity of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) investigation was compromised by intentional leaks to news outlets to sway public opinion. The SIU denied that it leaked information.

The family’s lawyer said the SIU has a history of pro-police bias and a high rate of clearing police officers of wrongdoing. With the help of their legal team and Howard Morton, a former head of the SIU in the 1990s, the family carried out an investigation of their own. They found a new witness and succeeded in having a second autopsy performed in Newfoundland. In a statement made July 15, 2020, lawyers for the family suggested that there might be grounds for criminal charges against the officers who were in the apartment at the time of Korchinski-Paquet’s death.

In August 2020, the SIU cleared five officers in the death of Korchinski-Paquet. The family then filed a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, claiming misconduct and neglect of duty. They claim that officers did not follow de-escalating procedures and that the SIU report is inconsistent and missing crucial information. The family’s complaint process is ongoing.

Sundown Towns are all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Blacks and other minorities through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Blacks that although they might be allowed to work or travel in a community during the daytime, they must leave by sundown. Although the term most often refers to the forced exclusion of Blacks, the history of sundown towns also includes prohibitions against Jews, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and other minority groups.

Although it is difficult to make an accurate count, historians estimate there were up to 10,000 sundown towns in the United States between 1890 and 1960, mostly in the Mid-West and West. They began to proliferate during the Great Migration, starting in about 1910, when large numbers of African Americans left the South to escape racism and poverty. As Blacks began to migrate to other regions of the country, many predominantly white communities actively discouraged them from settling there.

The means to announce and enforce racial restrictions varied across the country. In its most blatant form, signs were posted at the city limits. One in Alix, Arkansas, in the 1930s, for instance, read, “N—-r, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On You In Alix.” Others stated, “Whites Only After Dark.” Many sundown towns used discriminatory housing covenants to ensure no non-white person would be allowed to purchase or rent a home. In the 1940s, Edmond, Oklahoma promoted itself on postcards with the slogan, “A Good Place to Live…No Negroes.” The town of Mena, Arkansas advertised its many charms: “Cool Summers, Mild Winters, No Blizzards, No Negroes.” In other cases, the policy was enforced through less formal norms and sanctions. Businesses that served Black customers or hired Black employees would be boycotted by the white townspeople, ensuring that Blacks had few, if any, job opportunities in those communities.

Racial exclusion in sundown towns was also achieved with violence. African Americans who lingered in sundown towns even during the daytime experienced harassment, threats, arrest, and beatings. It was not uncommon for Black motorists passing through these communities to be followed by police or local residents to the city limits. In extreme cases, hostility toward African Americans resulted in extrajudicial killing. The lynching of two Black teenagers in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, for instance, resulted in the town’s 200 Black residents moving away never to return.

The rise of sundown towns made it difficult and dangerous for Blacks to travel long distances by car. In 1930, for instance, 44 of the 89 counties along the famed Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles featured no motels or restaurants and prohibited Blacks from entering after dark. In response, Victor H. Green, a postal worker from Harlem, compiled the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to accommodations that served Black travelers. The guide was published from 1936 to 1966, and at its height of popularity was used by two million people.

Historians have found that most sundown towns deliberately hid the means by which they became and remained all-white. Apart from oral histories, there are often few archival records that describe precisely how sundown towns excluded Blacks. Laws and policies that enforced racial exclusion have largely disappeared, but de facto sundown towns existed into the 1980s, and some may still be in evidence today.

Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro Basilica is located in Yamoussoukro, which since March 1983 been the capital of Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast). It is the largest Christian church in the world, according to Guinness World Records. The basilica is not to be confused with a cathedral, which is the principal place of worship and where the ruling bishop is seated. It was constructed between 1985 and 1989 and is locally known by its French name, Basilique Notre-Dame de la Paix.

Former President Felix Houphouët-Boigny chose the location as part of a plan to transform his hometown of Yamoussoukro into the country’s administrative capital. Although funding for the construction came directly from the President Houphouët-Boigny’s personal funds, the cost of the basilica generated controversy as Côte d’Ivoire was going through a financial and economic crisis at the time of construction. Residents of many of the nation’s major cities were without access to running water, trash was piling up everywhere, and diseases were spreading.

The actual cost of construction is not publicly known but estimates are that it took from $400 to $600 million in US dollars to complete the edifice. The latter figure was more than double the country’s entire national debt. On September 10, 1990, Pope John Paul II traveled to Yamoussoukro, on behalf of the Catholic church, to accept the basilica as a gift. The Pope consecrated the church with the condition that a hospital be built nearby. Construction of the hospital was halted during the Ivorian Civil War and other political and military crises from 2002 to 2011, but was completed in 2014.

Lebanese architect Pierre Fakhoury, designed the basilica in the fashion of the Basilica of St. Peter in Vatican City in Italy. He made the dome slightly lower in deference to the Basilica of St. Peter but added a cross that gives it a taller overall height. The structure can accommodate 18,000, including some 7,000 seated and 11,000 standing, and the esplanade in front of the Basilica can accommodate 300,000 people.

The building was constructed from imported Italian marble, and contains twenty-four stained glass windows, including one with the likeness of President Houphouët-Boigny alongside Jesus and his Apostles. West African Iroko wood was used for the 7,000 pews. Two identical villas sit in front of the structure. One houses clergymen who operate the basilica and the other is reserved for papal visits. The basilica’s circular colonnade is made up of 272 Doric columns.

Regular services are usually only attended by a few hundred people. The only time the basilica was filled to capacity was on February 7, 1994, for President Houphouët-Boigny’s funeral. Only 17 percent of Ivorians identify as Catholic, while Islam remains the major religion of the nation.

In the early 16th century, around 1511, Spain colonized Cuba. Cuba produced almost a third of the world’s sugar supply by 1860 through the work of enslaved Africans and other island natives stolen from their land. By the year 1895, Cubans revolted against the Spanish colonial rule on their land, beginning the Cuban War of Independence, fought between 1895 to 1898. At first, the United States stayed neutral, but that changed on February 15, 1898.

The American Battleship USS Maine, docked off the coast of Cuba, exploded and sank, killing over 250 American sailors and soldiers. Spain was blamed for the incident, and the US government declared war against that nation, creating the Spanish-American War, in April 1898.

The U.S. military objective was to defeat Spanish colonial forces and take control of its major colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Major General William Shaftner, the former Commander of the 25th Infantry Regiment, one of the four Buffalo Soldier units in the U.S. Army, was now in charge of U.S. forces in Cuba. He led an expeditionary force of approximately 17,000 men, including nearly 3,000 black soldiers to the island from Tampa, Florida. The expeditionary force also included white soldiers from the 14th Infantry Regiment and a battalion of the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment all of whom arrived in Cuba between June 7 and June 14, 1898.

On July 1, Buffalo Soldiers would engage in their first major conflict in Cuba, the Battle of El Caney. The battle was fought for the control of the Cuban town of El Caney. U.S. forces were advancing toward the Cuban city of Santiago, and a group of Spanish soldiers decided to take defensive positions at a blockhouse near El Caney to stop them. The 25th Infantry received orders to support forces advancing on Santiago by attacking El Caney. In all 6,653 American soldiers faced approximately 3,000 Spanish colonial troops and their Cuban allies.

The Battle of El Caney had begun before the Buffalo Soldiers arrived. When they did arrive, they found the 2nd Massachusetts were retreating. Someone gave a yell, and the members of the 25th and all-white 12th Infantry Regiments began heading up the hill to capture the blockhouse Spanish forces were defending. The Spanish successfully resisted the American advance for hours before their officers ordered some of them to surrender and others to retreat. Finally, Private Thomas C. Butler, Company H, 25th Infantry was first to enter the blockhouse and immediately took possession of the Spanish flag for his regiment. He was ordered by a white officer of the 12th Infantry to give it to him. Butler tore off a piece of the flag to show his superiors that he had in fact captured the flag. The soldiers of the 25th Infantry quickly regrouped to support the Battle of San Juan Hill which was going on almost simultaneously.

The Ocoee Massacre, which occurred in the town of Ocoee, Florida on November 2-3, 1920, was the largest election-related massacre in the 20th Century. Approximately 50 Blacks and two whites died in the violence and the entire Black community of Ocoee was forced to flee the town.

Ocoee, Florida, in Orange County, approximately 12 miles northwest of Orlando, had been politically dominated by conservative Democrats since the end of Reconstruction. They prided themselves on keeping Blacks, then mostly Republican, from the polls. In 1920, a number of Black organizations across Florida began conducting voter registration campaigns. Partly because of their efforts, a prosperous Black farmer, Mose Norman, who had been part of the voter registration drive in Orange County, decided to vote in the national election on November 2. When he attempted to do so, twice, he was turned away from the polls.

When Norman was driven away the second time, a white mob, then numbering over 100 men, decided to hunt him down. Concluding he had taken refuge in the home of another local Black resident, Julius “July” Perry, they rushed Perry’s home hoping to capture both men there. Norman escaped and was never found while Perry defended his home, killing two white men, Elmer McDaniels and Leo Borgard, who tried to enter through the back door. The mob called for reinforcements from Orlando and surrounding Orange County. Eventually they caught and killed Perry and hung his dead body from a telephone post by the highway from Ocoee to Orlando to intimidate other potential Black voters. Perry’s wife, Estelle Perry, and their daughter were wounded during the attack on the Perry home. They were sent to Tampa by local law enforcement officers.

The mob then turned on the Black community of Ocoee. They burned down homes and businesses and demanded that the Black residents leave Ocoee. In the face of this threatened violence, the entire African American population fled the town. Some African Americans speculated that the rioting may have been planned so that some whites could seize the property of the wealthiest Blacks in the town.

The NAACP investigated the massacre, sending Walter White, the organization’s executive director. White—who passed as a Caucasian during his visit—reported that some local whites were “still giddy with victory” when he arrived. He also said that locals reported 56 Blacks killed but he claimed 30 deaths in his official report. In 1921 the NAACP and other civil rights organizations called on the House Election Committee of the U.S. Congress to investigate the massacre and Black voter suppression in Florida, but it failed to act.

A former St. Paul police officer who assaulted a Black grandfather and allowed a service dog to also maul him during a 2016 arrest was on Friday sentenced to six years in prison after he was found guilty of using excessive force. Colleagues of former officer Brett Palkowitsch took the stand to testify against him during his 2019 trial.

According to MPR News, the brutal incident Palkowitsch has been convicted for, left the victim, Frank Baker, with several broken ribs as well as collapsed lungs. During the arrest, Palkowitsch, who had responded to a 911 report of a fight and robbery, allegedly kicked Baker and set the police dog on him. Baker was perceived to be a suspect but it later turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

During the sentencing hearing, a reportedly tearful Palkowitsch rendered an apology to Baker and his former colleagues. “I hope that today gives you a little bit of closure, but I know for the rest of your life it’s something you’re going to have to deal with. For the rest of my life, it’s something that I’m going to have to live with as well. But from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry,” he told the victim.

But though Baker said he has forgiven him, he cast doubts over Palkowitsch’s apology, saying it wasn’t genuine. “His family and friends, his mother, his wife, his kids, got to see that he has a dark side to him. He made my life a living hell,” Baker said.

The 2016 incident occurred when Baker had arrived home and was making a phone call in his car. While in his vehicle, he was confronted by officers who established he fit the description of a Black suspect a dispatcher had told them was allegedly involved in a fight. During his arrest, Baker said he obeyed orders from the officers but that did not help his case, MPR News reported.

“When the officer said ‘get out of the car and put your hands up,’ I put my hands up,” Baker  recollected. “I didn’t even have time to take two steps. He let the dog out. I’m looking like it’s in slow motion. No you didn’t!”

In the aftermath of the incident, Palkowitsch was terminated from the force and the city reached a $2 million settlement with Baker. Palkowitsch was later reinstated after the St. Paul Police Federation appealed his dismissal. He was, however, fired once again after he was found guilty in 2019. Though his prison sentence was expected to be between four and five years after striking an agreement with prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright dismissed it. Per the agreement, Palkowitsch wouldn’t have been able to appeal his conviction. But the judge handing him a longer sentence means he can now appeal. And his lawyer told the news outlet they’ll pursue that.

“You get more good policemen than bad policemen”

Though Baker is still reeling from the effects of the attack, he said he harbors no ill will towards law enforcement officers and he even wanted to become a detective during his teenage years. “One thing I want people to know is that I love the law. I really do. You get more good policemen than bad policemen,” he said.

Thirty-four victims of racial lynching in Maryland dating between 1854 and 1933 were granted posthumous pardons by Gov. Larry Hogan on Saturday. Hogan signed the order during an event to memorialize Howard Cooper, a 15-year-old boy who was hanged outside the Towson jailhouse by a White mob in 1885.

“In the interest of equal justice under law, I have made the decision to grant a posthumous pardon today for Howard Cooper,” Hogan said during the outdoor ceremony in Towson. “And studying this case led me to dig deeper,” Hogan continued. “Today I am also granting pardons to all the 34 victims of racial lynchings in the state of Maryland which occurred between 1854 and 1933.”

This is a first-of-its-kind pardon by a governor of a U.S. state, the Associated Press reported. Hogan said the victims were denied legal due process.

Cooper was dragged from the Baltimore County Jail and hanged from a tree by a mob of White men in 1885. This was after an all-White jury had concluded within minutes that he was guilty of raping Katie Gray, a white teenager in Baltimore County. According to The Baltimore Sun, neither Gray nor Cooper testified that Gray was raped. Cooper was sentenced to death by hanging. And even before his attorneys could appeal his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was lynched in the early hours of July 13, 1885.

Students at the state’s Loch Raven Technical Academy and the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project had earlier this year petitioned the governor to pardon Cooper. Hogan, a Republican, then asked his staff to search for all of the available accounts of racial lynching in Maryland.

“My hope is that this action will at least in some way help to right these horrific wrongs and perhaps bring a measure of peace to the memories of these individuals and to their descendants and their loved ones,” Hogan said.

The governor on Saturday read the names of Cooper and the 33 others pardoned: David Thomas, Jim Wilson, Isaac Moore, Jim Quinn, Thomas Jurick, John Jones, John Henry Scott, John Simms, Michael Green, James Carroll, George Peck, John Diggs, George Briscoe, Townsend Cook, Charles Whitley, Benjamin Hance, John Biggus, Asbury Green, James Taylor, Isaac Kemp, Stephen Williams, Jacob Henson, James Bowens, Sidney Randolph, William Andrews, Garfield King, Wright Smith, Lewis Harris, Henry Davis, William Burns, King Johnson and George Armwood.

Frederick, a 13-year-old boy, is the final victim. His full name “was lost to history,” the governor said.

Hogan announced the pardons while at the location near where Cooper was lynched. He unveiled a new historical plaque at the event that says that Cooper’s body was left hanging from a sycamore tree “so angry white residents and local train passengers could see his corpse.”

“Howard’s mother, Henrietta, collected her child’s remains and buried him in an unmarked grave in Ruxton,” the plaque reads. “No one was ever held accountable for her son’s lynching.”

In the late 19th century, lynchings were the only latest form of racial terrorism against Black Americans after White plantation owners had used various forms of violence against the enslaved.

According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), tension had begun brewing throughout the late 19th century in the U.S., and this was mostly felt in the south, where people blamed their financial woes on the newly freed slaves that lived among them.

Whites resorted to lynching as a form of retaliation towards the freed Blacks. What mostly triggered these lynchings were claims of petty crime, rape, or any alleged sexual contact between black men and white women. Whites started lynching because they felt it was crucial to protect White women.

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Of these people that were lynched, 3,446 were black. The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched, according to the NAACP, which was quick to add that not all of the lynchings were ever recorded.

Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched, that is, 27.3%. These whites were lynched for domestic crimes, helping the black or being against lynching.

“A typical lynching would involve criminal accusations, often dubious, against a black American, an arrest, and the assembly of a “lynch mob” intent on subverting the normal constitutional judicial process,” a report by The Guardian said.

It added that victims were seized and tortured, with many being hung from a tree and set on fire. Some were dismembered and their pieces of flesh and bone were taken by mob members as souvenirs.

June 18th, 1964, was a powerful yet little talked about moment in the history of the United States, and an especially important one in civil rights movement. 

On this day, a white hotel manager was photographed as he poured acid into a pool where white and black activists had integrated to protest segregation.

Together with the other protests and demonstrations in the summer of 1964  known as the St. Augustine Movement, this event at the pool in St. Augustine, Florida was so powerful that it changed the course of history, bringing more resolute action towards the plight of black people.

On June 11, 1964, a week before the event, civil rights icon, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested for trespassing at the Monson Motor Lodge after being asked to leave its segregated restaurant. According to historians, King used the “confrontation as an opportunity to publicize both the non-violent approach used by civil rights activists and the desperate discrimination against black people that persisted across the city”.

King’s arrest, his only time in the state of Florida, spurred a series of protests and confrontations between activists, police, and segregationists, one of which was a ‘swim-in’ demonstration. King and his two associated planned the ‘swim-in’ at the same lodge that refused to admit him at its restaurant. 

White activists paid for motel rooms and invited black people to join them as their guests in the “whites only” pool. The motel manager, Jimmy Brock, allegedly furious with King’s earlier protest and now the ‘swim-in’, poured a bottle of muriatic acid, an undiluted hydrochloric acid used to clean pools, into the pool, hoping the swimmers would become scared and leave.

Brock apparently exclaimed, “I’m cleaning [the] pool!” as he poured the acid, a move captured by journalists and photographers who had gotten word of the demonstration and were onsite.

NPR interviewed two of the “swim-in” protesters, J.T. Johnson and Al Lingo, when they were 76 and 78, respectively. The two recalled that the hotel manager, Brock had ‘lost it”.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” J.T. said.

“The girls, they were most frightened, and we moved to the center of the pool,” Al added.

“I tried to calm the gang down. I knew that there was too much water for that acid to do anything,” J.T. said.

Historians say that one swimmer, who knew that the ratio of acid to pool water was too little to be a threat drank some of the pool water to calm the other swimmers’ fears. Though some of them were scared, they did not back out of their demonstration. In fact, a cop had to jump in to arrest the protesters.

“When they [dragged] us out in bathing suits and carried us out to the jail, they wouldn’t feed me because they said I didn’t have on any clothes. I said, ‘Well, that’s the way you locked me up!’,” J.T. explained.

The Aftermath Of The Swim-In

Historians say, “the aftermath of Dr. King’s arrest and the swim-in demonstration was both swift and powerful”. Once lawmakers and public officials saw images from the “swim-in” among other protest activities in the St. Augustine Movement, public outcry for action intensified and officials could no longer feign ignorance.

In fact, on the following day, the Civil Rights Act was approved, after an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate.

“That had not happened before in this country, that some man is pouring acid on people in the swimming pool,” J.T. said. “I’m not so sure the Civil Rights Act would have been passed had [there] not been a St. Augustine. It was a milestone. We was young, and we thought we’d done something — and we had.”

On July 1, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, effectively making “discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” unlawful.