News — Black Lives Matters

Clive Mensah died at the hands of police in his own back yard in Mississauga, Ontario, a city west of Toronto, on Nov. 20, 2019. In March 2021, the Ontario police watchdog unit ruled there would be no criminal charges against the officers involved in his death. The unit’s report concluded that, while the officers applied “significant force” against the unarmed, mentally ill Black man, it was “not unlawful.” That force included hitting him with six electric shocks from Tasers and spraying him with pepper spray, after he had obeyed their orders to lie face down.

Mensah was born in Scarborough, Ontario, in 1989, but spent much of his childhood in his parents’ home country of Ghana, where he pursued interests in music and basketball. Returning to Canada at age 18, he worked at grocery stores and as a warehouse forklift driver. In 2014 Mensah experienced several psychotic episodes and a psychiatrist diagnosed him with possible schizophrenia.

Drawing on an interview with the Peel Regional Police officer who arrived first the night Mensah died, the postmortem report indicates Mensah was walking on a sidewalk by his home in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2019. The officer, responding to calls by neighbors about a man causing a disturbance, found Mensah “flailing his arms and making unintelligible noises.” The officer had thought it was clear from Mensah’s behavior that he needed help but did not summon a 24-hour crisis response team; such teams pair a plainclothes officer with a mental health official. Two other police officers arrived, and the three followed Mensah into his backyard.

Mensah complied with their orders to lie down but after his arms flailed when told to put them behind his back, one officer fired a Taser at him. The report said Mensah got up and advanced toward them. Again an officer fired a Taser at him, after which Mensah fell face down to the ground and went rigid but was still “aggressive and combative.” The officers moved to restrain him, again fired a Taser at him, sprayed pepper spray toward the back of his head, and handcuffed him. He became unresponsive. By the time another officer arrived, he found Mensah face down with foam coming from his mouth and no pulse, and the officer began life-saving measures until paramedics arrived, at which point a fifth officer arrived and removed his handcuffs. During this time, Mensah never spoke. A hospital report noted that paramedics were delayed in reaching the stricken man because police cruisers blocked the roadway. Less than an hour passed from the time police were first called at 3:15 a.m. and when Mensah was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly after 4 a.m.

Two of the three officers involved in Mensah’s death refused to speak with investigators from the Ontario Special Investigations Unit (SIU), whose role is to determine whether there has been police wrongdoing. SIU cannot legally compel officers to speak to investigators or turn over their notes.

Mensah’s only family in Canada, his uncles William Owusu and Stephen Boakye, said they’ve never heard from Peel police about Mensah’s death and never received an apology. They waited nearly 18 months for the SIU’s report and “now, we see no one will be held accountable.”

Tiffany Cartwright was an assistant attorney general and administrative law judge for the State of Michigan but she was laid off due to budget cuts in 2012. Cartwright returned to the bench in 2015 but released again in 2016. “I went from University of Michigan Law School, Assistant Attorney General and Administrative Law Judge to unemployed, no health insurance, no money, and a bridge card. I lost everything!,” Cartwright told The Bobby Pen.

For the next weeks and months, she went job-hunting but was unsuccessful. Many jobs felt uncomfortable hiring a former judge while others felt she was overqualified for the job she was applying for. As a result of her unemployment status, Cartwright decided to venture into entrepreneurship. She often created her own body scrubs to clear her daughter’s eczema and even gifted some to her neighbors and other family members. She turned her homemade remedy into her own line of body scrubs.

She founded Amarra Beauty Products and launched her G.L.A.M. body scrubs. The former judge took her product to Shark Tank, made it past auditions, and moved to the next round to pitch Amarra products to the Sharks. After pitching her product on Shark Tank, her business started recording success. She also took advantage of an initiative targeting Black businesses in the U.S. and successfully pitched her products at a 2018 Walmart Open Call.

She got a deal to get her product tested and that was how she landed a move to have her product on the shelves of Walmart. Her G.L.A.M. body scrubs sold out in stores. “When my buyer said yes, I literally cried. They had no idea what I went through just to get there,” Cartwright shared.

Aside from starting a business, Cartwright is also a certified minority and woman-owned small business. She is an author with three books to her credit. She is also a proud mother of two children.

Asked by the website Women Owned what she loved about being a business owner, she responded: “I love the freedom and flexibility afforded and the opportunity to work harder for yourself than any employer, as well as being in a position to bring real change.”

She also advised aspiring entrepreneurs to “never give up on your business, your dreams, your purpose or your vision.”

Retired NFL player Brett Favre recently weighed in on the circumstances surrounding the death of George Floyd, saying he finds it “hard to believe” former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin meant to kill Floyd.

Floyd, 46, passed away after Chauvin knelt on his neck for over nine minutes despite repeatedly telling him he couldn’t breathe. The incident also happened in the full glare of bystanders who could be heard pleading with Chauvin to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck and also offer him some medical assistance. However, Chauvin and his other colleague officers did not budge.

“I find it hard to believe, and I’m not defending Derek Chauvin in any way, I find it hard to believe, first of all, that he intentionally meant to kill George Floyd,” Favre said on the Bolling with Favre podcast on Wednesday, according to New York Post.

“That being said, his actions were uncalled for. I don’t care what color the person is on the street. I don’t know what led to that video that we saw where his knee is on his neck, but the man had thrown in the towel.”

On Tuesday, a jury found Chauvin guilty of murder and manslaughter in the May 25 death of the African-American father. Favre’s recent comment comes after he was criticized last week for saying athletes who kneel during the national anthem to protest against racial injustice have “created more turmoil than good.”

“It’s really a shame that we’ve come to this,” the retired quarterback said on The Andrew Klavan Show on April 11, USA Today reported. “Something has to unify us, and I felt like the flag, standing patriotically — because Blacks and whites and Hispanics have fought for this country and died for this country. It’s too bad.”

The 51-year-old doubled down on his sentiments and responded to the criticism on Wednesday’s podcast, saying: “I just gave my opinion. I’m certainly not a racist in spite of what some people might think, and you know, I’m for unity and I just feel like there’s a better way to unify our country. That being said, there’s a lot of things that need to stop.”

For the first time in the history of the High School NCA National Championship, an all-Black cheerleading squad has won the title.

“We are literally Black girl magic in the making,” Coach Naomi Jenkins said of her team, Impact Xtreme.

The team runs as a non-profit organization and all funds to support in terms of competitions, travel, and outfits are done through fundraising activities by the squad, coaches, and families. “It’s like a big deal to win this year, also because we’re a fully Black team,” 9-year-old cheerleader Monica Sherrod said.

These girls are the epitome of hard work and resilience, having won the largest competition held for high school nationals. They come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and their love for cheer unites them. According to coach Jenkins, there is more to these girls than cheer.

Their academic records are stellar as their cheer community ensures they do not ignore their academic works in pursuit of breaking cheer records. “They’re going to do well on their state testing and make sure that if they are applying for different scholarships, getting ready for the PSAT,” Jenkins said, adding that the team is making strides “from biology to back handsprings.”

Jenkins herself is an example of how cheerleading can open doors for you. Her law degree was sponsored by her cheer scholarship and she knows cheerleading is one sure way for the girls to go out and experience the world outside their hometown of Oklahoma City. “I want to give these girls the same opportunity that I had when I grew up cheerleading,” Jenkins said. “It is our way for them to get out and to see other things besides the little radius of the east side of Oklahoma City,” she added.

Black girls have the potential to excel, especially when they see others who like them excelling as well. That is the power of representation, according to Sherrod. “It means to them like that they can do it, too, and they can get in my team. They want to succeed and do whatever they want and that they have a chance to be great.”

“You can’t be who you can’t see, so they can see it … that means they can do it just as well,” Jenkins said. Black people must work twice as hard as their white counterparts and to win the national title validates all the hard work they put in during practice.

“We pretty much have to practice, like, over and over and over again what we have to do before we can go full out,” Sherrod said. Their win is all the sweeter because they have formed true friendships.

Black businesses remain largely unattractive to venture capitalists. As such, many Black entrepreneurs source funds through family and friends to launch or expand their business. Although the Black Lives Matter movement has shed some light on the challenges Black businesses experience, not much has changed.

Some social entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to highlight Black businesses through informal meetings and other formal events. Some social media influencers and Black media personnel are also playing their part by bringing to the fore Black-led businesses.

A Sacramento entrepreneur, Chris Lodgson, is also highlighting Black businesses in his region. He is the founder of Facebook pages Sac Black Biz Community, Sac Black Biz United, and Sac Black Biz Market, which are dedicated to Black businesses.

The purpose of these platforms is to bring Sacramento business owners, who are mostly African-American, Caribbean, and people of African descent, together to support one another. Also, Sac Black Biz United has become the first and only online source to finding Black Business and Event information throughout Sacramento.

In all, his group pages feature over 500 businesses and a membership of more than 10,000 people. Lodgson believes the creation of the Facebook business page, Sac Black Biz Community, is his contribution towards supporting Black enterprises.

“We measure ourselves by how well the businesses that we serve are doing and how well those businesses are serving their clients (and customers),” Lodgson tells Sacbee.

Aside from the business pages, the New Yorker has also raised thousands of dollars to support business activities for Black people in Sacramento.

Lodgson first migrated to Sacramento in 2015. “When I got here, I noticed that a lot of the same problems we were having in New York, in terms of Black folks, poverty, unemployment, our economic condition and our social condition too. A lot of the same problems that were in New York were happening here” said Lodgson. These factors pushed him to create his Facebook business pages.

In addition, he has announced a partnership with the app “Local Black Info.” The app enables users to find and support local Black-owned businesses, professionals, and events, according to news. Also, the partnership allows Sac Black Biz to market Black businesses in Sacramento and the U.S.

In the wake of protests against racial injustice and police brutality sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, there was a renewed support for local Black-owned businesses. Lodgson said he did not only help in highlighting Black businesses through his group page Sac Black Biz Community, but he was also able to provide a complete Sac Black Biz digital database of Black-owned businesses in the county.

“The database became a valuable resource for the community that was easily accessible and allowed people to find everything from Black-owned bakeries, barbershops, restaurants, floral arrangements, home maintenance and repair, plumbers and more,” he said.

Whilst a handful of Oklahomans were probably sleeping in the early hours of Wednesday, Republican lawmakers in the state’s House passed a bill that would protect drivers who knock down protesters.

Per House Bill 1674, drivers in the state who hurt or kill protesters without malice while “fleeing from a riot” are immune from both civil and criminal prosecution, The Oklahoman reported. This bill reportedly adds to other Republican-backed legislations that are tailored at clamping down on protests in the state.

The legislation, which was reportedly approved after midnight, comes in the wake of the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in the United States over the summer following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. During that period, there were a number of reports of people plowing their cars into crowds of protesters who had taken over the streets.

In the city of Tulsa, a man drove his pickup into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters who had gathered on a street, seriously injuring multiple people. The driver in question was not charged by the Tulsa County district attorney as the former claimed his vehicle was attacked, The Oklahoman reported.

The recent bill was, however, criticized by legislative Democrats who accused their Republican counterparts of unfairly targeting protesters instead of rather addressing their grievances in what has been a period of racial reckoning in the United States. Rep. John Waldron, D-Tulsa, also called out the Republican majority for deliberately passing the bill in the wee hours of the day to ward off public opinion.

Another lawmaker, Rep. Monroe Nichols, told the house the bill rather missed the bigger picture – that is introducing reform to address what the protests have been about, The Oklahoman reported. “Maybe the way to prevent something like this [the Tulsa incident] from ever happening again is to make reforms on the broader systemic issue,” Nichols said, adding that he’ll have a hard time having to tell his pre-teen son that the Oklahoma House “made it so that folks who may advocate for people who look like him can be run over with immunity.”

The approved legislation by the house will subsequently be tabled before the Senate – which is also Republican-majority. Besides the immunity to drivers, the bill also proposes misdemeanor charges for protesters who “unlawfully obstruct” vehicular traffic.

The family of George Floyd, the African-American man who was slain by police on a street in Minneapolis in May 2020, will now be paid $27 million in compensation by the city after a civil lawsuit was settled on Friday, March 12.

The settlement is different from the criminal proceedings that are ongoing against former officer Derek Chauvin and others charged with the eventual demise of the man they accosted for allegedly trying to use counterfeit money. For eight minutes and forty-six seconds that have since been immortalized by the Black Lives Matter movement, Chauvin pinned a knee to the back of Floyd’s head while Floyd pleaded for his life.

Announcing the settlement between Floyd’s family and the city of Minneapolis, family attorney Ben Crump said the settlement “sends a powerful message that Black lives do matter and police brutality against people of color must end.” The lawyer who also represents the families of Jacob Blake and Breonna Taylor, victims of police brutality, said the payment to Floyd’s family is the biggest pre-trial settlement ever in a case of wrongful death.

On his part, the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fray, tweeted “Our settlement with George Floyd’s family reflects a shared commitment to advancing racial justice and a sustained push for progress”. The community where Floyd met his fate will be given $500,000 from the settlement.

Meanwhile, jury selection is ongoing in the trial of Chauvin as well as the other officers. At the announcement of the settlement with Floyd’s family, some seven jurors, including one Black man, had already been confirmed. It is expected that the trial will begin on March 29.

Chauvin has been charged with second-degree unintentional murder, second-degree manslaughter, and third-degree murder. But he has pled not guilty on all counts. If convicted, his sentence could range between 25 and 40 years.

The family of a Black deceased Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office deputy were left astonished when an employee at a Louisiana cemetery told them they couldn’t be allocated burial space because it’s a Whites-only cemetery.

According to KPLC, the Oaklin Springs Cemetery had a 1950s Jim Crow-era by-laws that prohibited non-Whites from being buried there. The by-laws in question have since been amended by the cemetery’s board members to make it all-inclusive following the incident.

“It was in their by-laws that the cemetery was ‘whites only,’” Deputy Darrell Semien’s widow, Karla, told the news outlet. “I just kinda looked at her and she said ‘There’s no coloreds allowed.’”

Deputy Semien passed away last week after suffering from cancer. Prior to his death, he told his family he wanted to be buried at the cemetery as it was near their home. That wish, however, could not come to pass.

“Just blatantly, with no remorse: ‘I can’t sell you a plot for your husband,’” Kimberly Curly, Semien’s daughter recalled.

In the aftermath of the incident, the president of the Oaklin Springs Cemetery Association, Creig Vizena, issued an apology to the family, although he admitted their initial cemetery contract permitted only “white human beings” to be buried there. He said he was unaware of that clause.

“It never came up,” he said. “I take full responsibility for that. I’ve been the president of this board for several years now. I take full responsibility for not reading the by-laws.”

The deceased’s family told KPLC the incident exacerbated their grief and left them disappointed as Semien selflessly served the community as a law enforcement officer. “There was nothing none of us could do, but we did it,” Karla said. “And to be told this is like we were nothing. He was nothing? He put his life on the line for them.”

Curly added: “Everybody dies. They bleed the same. You die. You’re the same color. Death has no color, so why should he be refused?”

Vizena tried making amends by offering the family a plot at the cemetery for his burial but they declined. “I even offered them, I can’t sell you one, but I can give you one of mine,” he said. “That’s how strongly I feel about fixing it.”

Semien was rather buried at the Sonnier Cemetery in Oberlin on Saturday, January 30, according to NBC News.

Just about the time her state was about legalizing the commercialization of marijuana, Hope Wiseman quit her career as an investment banker to venture into cannabis cultivation, making her the youngest African-American woman to own a marijuana dispensary in the state of Maryland.

Her decision to go into cannabis cultivation was backed by research. As a finance person, Wiseman would monitor the markets and trends and foreshadowed that cannabis was going to be the next big thing in the U.S. and across the globe in the next few years.

According to a Marijuana Business Daily report in 2017, only four percent of African Americans were business owners and founders of cannabis dispensaries with women of color occupying a little over five percent of senior roles in the industry.

Through a series of research, she uncovered the lack of research on how African Americans and other minority groups have been disproportionately affected by the war on drugs. Also, not only did she see the economic potential of cannabis cultivation but also how she was going to profit from something people who look like her have been arrested for.

As if by divine design, she founded Mary and Main and was licensed to grow marijuana about five minutes down the street where she went to High School. “It’s our community that we’re really a part of. I think that’s exciting, to be able to serve the patients that are going to be coming into our store are going to be people that I know. So, I think that’s really exciting to be able to directly serve the community that I grew up in,” she told Essence.

Wiseman is seeking to establish her firm as the premier dispensary in Maryland and to make sure that her firm is known in the state for great customer service, and for amazing varieties. “We also have some ideas for some proprietary products that we would like to create, and maybe partner with some of the manufacturers here in Maryland, to make them.”

Wiseman comes from a family of matriarchs. Her grandmother was an entrepreneur and her mom, Dr. Octavia Simkins-Wiseman, is also an entrepreneur and a dentist. Entrepreneurship runs in their family, according to her.

The 28-year-old paid a glowing tribute to her mom, who she convinced to join her business as a co-founder. “My mother and I have always had a very healthy mother-daughter relationship. I always say I think my mother has been grooming me for this my whole life, and we just didn’t know,” she says.

“Even when I was a very young girl… she started her dental practice the year I was born. I used to go to work with my mother when she [began] her entrepreneurial journey. We’ve always kind of worked together in our own little way and it’s very natural. My mother is the brains behind everything…She’s still teaching me every little thing that I need to know.”

Wiseman attended Spelman College in Atlanta after High School, majoring in economics. She worked for SunTrust Robinson Humphrey after completion, where she sold stock research to fund managers. However, she lost her job after nine months.

Wiseman’s decision to open a cannabis dispensary means she is playing a pioneering role for other African-American women to venture into an industry that’s traditionally dominated by men and comes with its own prejudice.