Taking Back Martin Luther King Jr's Legacy

Every time January 18th comes around, I often wonder what kind of Black shaming articles will surface, and to what degree will they be spread throughout the internet.

Now to the majority, this will be another year where we endure the money draped gossip spread against us through a person many of us have revered.
This year is different. I am compelled to discuss how we were effective in taking back his legacy.

During the aftermath surrounding Mike Brown's shooting in Ferguson, we endured people using MLK's legacy from people trying to shame us into behaving how they thought we should behave. If a person wasn't careful in recognizing this pattern, one would believe that would have been the point of celebrating Martin Luther King's legacy to the point where white nationalists have gone so far as to buy a domain geared solely for the demonization of Martin Luther King and his legacy.  Even after the website in question had been outed as an illegitimate source, they will still take their time trying to defame him.  But not anymore. During the unrest in Ferguson,  so many people clapped back with his quote "A riot is the language of the unheard" to the point where articles like this one was created, claiming that his image has been corrupted by social media.

Even though his legacy is still undergoing attempts at being tarnished by those who are anti Black, it has become evident that people are still neglecting the reasons why he had to protest in the first place. 

This lead me to believe the same people who decry the corruption of his legacy by social media are the same ones who failed to recognize the cause of the violence in Ferguson. 

These are the same people who believe the turbulence happened out of the clear blue. These are the same people who thought everything was fine until "they" brought up race. 

These are the same people who view themselves and people who look like them as innocent and could do no wrong.  

These are the same people who glossed over the violence of White people during Martin Luther King's peaceful protests.  

Long story short, if the documented violence of the state and the violence of White people past and present didn't exist, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and many other noted Black activists would not have needed to protest because the issues would have been non existent. 

And the Ferguson unrest would have not happened because the environment there, and many other places in the United States would not have taken place. 

And that is what Martin Luther King really meant when he said that non violence would be the greatest weapon of the Negro. Because all of the violence that White people had inflicted upon them past and present would be glaringly strong. And it is strong, but many of us haven't been looking at it from a different angle due to justified anger and frustration of the whole thing.  (Please remember I'm not saying roll over and take that violence that has been given to us.I'm just saying they'll never be able to use his legacy against us again because the evidence regarding White violence is all there.)

After seeing this and making all of the pieces of the past fit with the present, I came to this conclusion:

Martin Luther King to anti Black people is like Jesus for conservative politicians. They like the idea of him, but don't actually advocate for the things he actually said or taught and would more than likely hate the actual person.

That being said, Happy Martin Luther King day. Take this time to celebrate any way you see fit. And also, please remember to financially boycott that day, and re-divert your dollars to Black owned businesses. 

And remember. Watch this video and pay special attention to what Martin Luther King says at the 3:15 mark. Aside from Martin Luther King dressing 'properly' and being non violent, this is why it won't keep you from getting arrested or murdered. I see you, RZA.

Ferguson Timeline and the politician's role in the current police brutality mess. Part 3

Recap:

In the previous blog, I took the time to focus on the timeline of the politicians and the death of the Missouri Auditor.

Since then, more and more people have stepped down, have successfully attempted suicide (according to police officer accounts), or attempted to do so:


March 11, 2015
According to The Guardian, Ferguson Missouri's Mayor, James Knowles said, once the former police chief steps down,"Jackson would receive a year’s salary in severance pay. The chief was paid $95,512 (£64,000) a year, according to figures previously released by the city. Knowles also said the city manager, John Shaw, whose departure was announced on Tuesday, would receive his full $120,000 salary as severance."

June 27, 2015

Enter the former Missouri House Member Rep. Genise Montecillo, who had attempted suicide according to officers of the St. Louis County Police Department. She had been found in her apartment in south St. Louis County at 9:51am. She served her third term and had been on the House Budget Committee. She had been raising funds for her 2016 reelection after serving her third term, and she taught in the Special School District for 24 years, according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch. No further details regarding her suicide attempt had been released at that moment in time.

Former Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson stepped down, and is still angry over it. According to the STL Today, "To keep his mind off of Ferguson, he said he has done private security consulting for a Colorado-based company. Otherwise, he tries to fly his plane, a Cessna 175, and ride his motorcycle.
"I'm still really down," he said. "I have a lot of anger over all of this, and I don't get angry."

According to the DOJ Report, Jackson was the one that reported the following revenue increases for the years 2011-2013:




Jackson was able to afford a Cessna 175 and maintain a pilot's license on the same salary mentioned in the previous Guardian article.   (archived)

August 08, 2015

Mary Ann Twitty was rehired as a county clerk in nearby Vinta Park after originally being fired for racist e-mails, and fixing ticket amounts for people.

August 10,2015
 
Darren Wilson surfaces and shows the country what kind of man he really is.

That being said, a lot of what he says stands all the way out in this New York Times article and will be commented on in bold print:
"In 2009, Wilson got a job in Jennings, a town on Ferguson’s southeastern border, where ninety per cent of the residents are black and a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. “I’d never been in an area where there was that much poverty,” Wilson said. Interacting with residents, he felt intimidated and unprepared.

A field-training officer named Mike McCarthy, who had been a cop for ten years, displayed no such discomfort. McCarthy, a thirty-nine-year-old Irish-American with short brown hair and a square chin, is a third-generation policeman who grew up in North County. Most of his childhood friends were African-American. “If you just talk to him on the phone, you’d think you’re talking to a black guy,” Wilson said. “He was able to relate to everyone up there.”

Wilson said that he approached McCarthy for help: “Mike, I don’t know what I’m doing. This is a culture shock. Would you help me? Because you obviously have that connection, and you can relate to them. You may be white, but they still respect you. So why can they respect you and not me?”

McCarthy had never heard another officer make such an honest admission of his own limitations. At the same time, he sensed a fierce determination: “Darren was probably the best officer that I’ve ever trained—just by his willingness to learn.”

McCarthy wasn’t surprised that Wilson had difficulty interacting with residents. Police officers are rigorously trained in firing weapons and apprehending suspects but not in establishing common ground with people who have had different experiences. “If you go to an academy, how much is on that?” he asked me. “Basically, nothing.” A recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum revealed that cadets usually receive fifty-eight hours of training in firearms, forty-nine in defensive tactics, ten in communication skills, and eight in de-escalation tactics."
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 So Wilson didn't know how to talk to or act around Black people, so he trained with a guy that was described as having the ability to speak in a Black vernacular over the phone, and "relate to everyone up there"?
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For several months, McCarthy taught Wilson how to walk the beat—coaching him to loosen up, joke, and curse occasionally. He should avoid “sounding like a Webster’s Dictionary,” never condescend, and never expect people to rat. At first, Wilson says, residents laughed at him, but he followed McCarthy’s advice to “just keep going.” By the end of the training, Wilson said, he “was more comfortable” on the streets. McCarthy told me, “There is so much distrust in the African-American community toward the police.” The only way to overcome it was by establishing bonds with people. McCarthy, who is gay, said that he understood what it meant to be marginalized. “In the United States, where everybody is supposed to be equal, I’m not. So that’s a major thing.”

McCarthy helped Wilson, in part, by letting him make mistakes. One night, they were patrolling a neighborhood where burglary was common. Wilson saw a car idling on the side of the street, and McCarthy didn’t object when Wilson pulled over and asked the driver to show I.D. Wilson ran a check on the man’s name; nothing came up, so he let him go. Later, McCarthy asked, “What would’ve happened if you’d found a gun?” Wilson said that he would have arrested the man. McCarthy asked him what his case for probable cause would have been, and Wilson couldn’t answer. “You’d be screwed,” McCarthy said.
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So the mistake was letting the man go after running his ID and finding nothing? It sounds like McCarthy told Wilson to escalate situations based on "probable cause". Now what would that probable cause be?
----

"Wilson recalls hearing “old-timers” talk about racism in Jennings’s past, but their stories didn’t make a vivid impression on him. McCarthy, however, said that in the seventies and eighties the Jennings police “did not play.” He added, “Basically, they’d beat you.” During that period, many blacks from St. Louis moved to North County. Numerous towns there went from being majority white to being majority black. The police forces remained almost completely white.

McCarthy showed me several police logs from those decades, and many entries documented bigotry on the part of Jennings authorities. In April, 1973, a lieutenant described a holdup that had occurred near the police station. The suspects were two black males. At the bottom of the entry, someone had written, “Men, you better leave your wallets at home. Niggers are going to come in the police station next and rob us.” An entry from December, 1979, described an eighteen-year-old black male who was believed to have been involved in the shooting of a police officer but was then released, “due to his lack of mental capacity.” Below this, someone had scrawled, “Kill the Fucker.”
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That was in the Jennings Police department's records. Apparently they thought it was okay to include racism in the records, as well as threaten to kill people. That being said, how many people have officers actually killed after the people get released?
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McCarthy said that police officers resist discussing racism, past or present. “If an officer speaks out, they are ostracized,” he said. “They don’t want anything negative to be out there. But we’re humans—there’s gonna be negative. Be honest about it. If you acknowledge it, that’s the first step.”

Wilson strongly disagreed with McCarthy about this. He granted that, in North County, the overt racism of past decades affected “elders” who lived through that time. “People who experienced that, and were mistreated, have a legitimate claim,” he told me. “Other people don’t.” I asked him if he thought that young people in North County and elsewhere used this legacy as an excuse. “I think so,” he replied.
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 So after reading a sample of the records in Jennings that read "Kill The Fucker" after releasing person who was deemed mentally unable to commit said crime, Wilson STILL eschewed past racism and called the legacy an "excuse" for the young people in North County and anywhere else to feel the way they currently feel regarding police? ? Hmmm.
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“I am really simple in the way that I look at life,” Wilson said. “What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him.” Wilson said that police officers didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the past. “We can’t fix in thirty minutes what happened thirty years ago,” he said. “We have to fix what’s happening now. That’s my job as a police officer. I’m not going to delve into people’s life-long history and figure out why they’re feeling a certain way, in a certain moment.” He added, “I’m not a psychologist.”
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So an officer has to remove themselves from the people they serve in order to do a "good job"? Hmm.
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Wilson said that, despite what he’d said about experiencing “culture shock,” race hadn’t affected the way he did police work: “I never looked at it like ‘I’m the only white guy here.’ I just looked at it as ‘This isn’t where I grew up.’ ” He said, “When a cop shows up, it’s, like, ‘The cops are here!’ There’s no ‘Oh, shit, the white cops are here!’ ” He added, “If you live in a high-crime area, with a lot of poverty, there’s going to be a large police presence. You’re going to piss people off. If police show up, it’s because it’s something bad, and whoever’s involved can’t figure out the problem for themselves.”
---- 

More distancing himself from the community he serves. It's all high crime, poverty and not much else I guess.
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"When Wilson was thirteen, he stopped trusting his mother altogether, because she stole funds that she had helped raise for his Boy Scout troop. He worried that she would steal what little money he made working summer jobs, so he opened two bank accounts. The first, which had almost no money in it, was a decoy. He put his real earnings in the second, secret account. Wilson also tried to preempt his mother’s stealing. Once, he warned a friend’s parents not to let her inside their house, because she would surely find a way to steal their identities and max out their credit cards."

Followed up with this:

Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. She had several teen-age children, who “ran wild,” shooting guns, dealing drugs, and breaking into cars.

Several times, Wilson recalled, he responded to calls about gunfire in the woman’s neighborhood and saw “people running either from or to that house.” Wilson would give chase. “It’s midnight, and you’re running through back yards.” If he caught the kids, he checked them for weapons, then questioned them. He recounted a typical exchange: “ ‘Why you running?’ ‘Because I’m afraid of getting caught.’ ‘Well, what are you afraid of getting caught for?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, there’s a reason you ran, and there’s a reason you don’t want to get caught. What’s going on?’ ” Wilson said that he rarely got answers—and that any contraband had already been thrown away. Once, he arrested some of the woman’s kids, for damaging property, but usually he let them go. In his telling, there was no reaching the blind woman’s kids: “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?” He added, “They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than—what I’m trying to say is, the right culture, the better one to pick from.”

And this. The interviewer called him out. but check out his reply:

"This sounded like racial code language. I pressed him: what did he mean by “a different culture”? Wilson struggled to respond. He said that he meant “pre-gang culture, where you are just running in the streets—not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” He added, “It is the same younger culture that is everywhere in the inner cities.”
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I guess the "right culture" is the one he grew up in. With his non working immediate gratification seeking, gold digging, con artist, mother that he couldn't even trust with his own money.
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"Most of Wilson’s calls were routine—traffic stops, house alarms—but some were deeply distressing. At one crime scene, he discovered the mangled bodies of two dead women. A two-year-old, “covered in blood,” was crawling between them. I asked him if such incidents made it hard to sleep. “No,” he replied. “I’ve never brought my work home.” This was partly a matter of disposition, but Wilson noted that, while he and Barb were on the force, they lived twenty miles outside Ferguson. They needed “that buffer”—a “chance to get out of that element.”"
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So. He could not live in the community he served. He thinks the better community is outside of Ferguson, despite the low crime rate they enjoyed before Mike Brown was killed? Hmm.
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"Wilson’s home life wasn’t entirely peaceful, however. In May, 2013, Barb’s ex-boyfriend John—the father of her younger son, who was then four—assaulted her, and also attacked Wilson. According to court papers, Barb said that John drank, and had beaten her in the past. (Barb asked me to omit John’s surname, to protect her son’s identity.) Barb testified in court that John “pulled my hair,” “choked me,” and “punched me in the face.” "
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So he lived 20 miles outside of Ferguson and was dealing with this kind of stuff? Where's that "buffer" at?
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Now he breaks out the tears because nobody will hire him. Seems legit.
Since the anniversary of Michael Brown's death, and the scores of people who have been killed, teargassed, brutalized, since. I have learned one thing and one thing only:

We can't allow people like these to have control over our lives.
How can we trust a system to serve and protect the same people they despise to the point of rejoicing  in their ability to extort, demean, dehumanize and kill. at. will. in order to justify their revenue retrieval disguised under a fraudulent meritocracy narrated by the media under the guise of fairness?

I've been thinking about this for a long time now. And I have a solution.

To be continued...

Ferguson Timeline and the politician's role in the current police brutality mess. Part 2

Recap:

We went over who was involved in the racist e-mails, who was fired because of it, the conflicts of interest, who redacted info pertaining to racist material in the e-mails before handing them over to an archiving company, who was involved in the sifting, the search terms used to find the questionable material,the officer's roles in this, and how they all connect to the sources of funding.  Now we're focusing on what happened to the Missouri auditor:

We already know how the media was pushing for the "I committed suicide because I was being bullied for being Jewish angle, right?  Then it changed to, "He could have died because of interactions with medication".  But what mainstream media didn't account for was that the Missouri Auditor found several discrepancies in the budgets of several towns all across the state.

One of his findings was twenty eight city officials were caught embezzling money in Jefferson City, MO. He found that one tax collector stole $568,000 and a sheriff’s deputy took $18,000 from inmates accounts. Another person stole $568,000 from farmers paying off their taxes. This theft caused the farmers accounts to go delinquent, but the person who stole the money was giving them receipts saying their taxes were paid. According to the article, the state was only able to get half of the funds back to their perspective accounts, but only fifteen people have been charged with theft and only nine have been convicted.

The auditor found many many errors in budgeting all across the state, including the following cities and circumstances:

01/26/14 Audit shows that Missouri has excessive state planes." The auditor’s office says 19 is at least one plane too many. It found that only on 51 days out of those two years was the state’s passenger fleet used to capacity. On 459 days three or more of the six passenger planes sat idle, and all of them went unused on 69 days."

06/10/14-Webster County clerk, Billy H Breitenstein stole $17,677 by using a company credit card.

09/08/14- Governor Nixon's budget cuts were questioned, saying Nixon extended his powers by balancing the budget by barring $161 million in spending. He also said Nixon's budgeting process was inaccurate, and said the holding of said funds was illegal under the Missouri State constitution. The article also states:

Schweich contends Nixon violated that second constitutional prong, because he continued to freeze spending despite the fact that state general revenues slightly exceeded the revised estimate for the 2012 fiscal year.

The governor’s written response contends the “consensus revenue estimate” - agreed to by executive and legislative budget officials - is not legally binding and that governors must also consider other things impacting state revenues when making budget decisions.

Schweich countered that Nixon’s administration was “contorting and distorting the constitutional authority to allow them to do what they want to do.”

09/17/14-Neosho Mo mayor Jimmi Brown of Reddings Mill Mo, wrote checks for over $9000 in personal expenses.

09/30/14- FBI audit of St. Louis County Health department shows 3.4 million dollars being embezzled. The funds were used for child care, dog kennel services, landscaping, fast food, among other things.  However, it had been discovered that Edward Meuth, a Senior manager for the St. Louis County Health Department bilked millions of dollars from the budget over several years. He used the funds to create a company and he billed the county for services and goods it never received. He also lived in a 1.5 million dollar mansion and had an airplane while only making $86,000 a year from St. Louis County. He also procured four machine guns, luxury cars a motorcycle and used the funds for $200,000 in landscaping. It had been said that he committed suicide once he was caught.

The actual FBI audit had not been disclosed to the public. According to insurancenewsnet.com, "As of today, however, neither an explanation of how the $3.4 million fraud went undetected for so long nor the findings of an FBI audit completed for the county in January have been made public -- not even to members of the St. Louis County Council or the county's own prosecutor.

Only a handful of Dooley's closest advisers have seen any details about the embezzlement or January's audit.

One of those is Garry Earls, the county's chief operating officer."

However, there are questions as to who has seen the report, who has custody of it and whether or not the information could be released.

"Yet, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Richard Callahan, informed the county earlier this month that the FBI had closed its investigation. The inquiry had not found "anyone, other than Mr. Mueth, who was involved in that criminal enterprise," he wrote in a June 2 letter to County Counselor Patricia Redington.

County officials insist they still are bound by federal authorities' request from January not to disclose the findings even though the federal investigation is over.

"The letter is self-explanatory," Redington said last week, referring to the Jan. 31 correspondence. "It has always been our policy to cooperate and follow the instructions of the FBI in any matter."

However, Rebecca Wu, spokeswoman for the FBI's St. Louis office, made clear Friday that it was now in the hands of the county, not the FBI, to release the audit information.

"The FBI conducted the forensic audit at the request of the St. Louis County Police Department. It is up to St. Louis County Police Department to release its investigation, not the FBI," she said."

County Police Chief Jon Belmar said last week that his department was about to wrap up a final aspect of its own investigation -- an examination of the texts and emails on Mueth's smartphone, desktop computer and laptops.

"We're waiting on the forensic analysis of the electronic equipment that might show if anyone else was involved in a conspiracy with Mr. Mueth or who might have benefited from the stolen assets," the chief said.

Belmar said the department expects to release its findings early next month."

(The article was written in June 30, 2014, and the findings have yet to be released)

Meanwhile, members of the County Council are questioning why Dooley's administration* has not disclosed information about January's FBI audit, which has been in the possession of top administration officials since February.

"They keep us out of the loop on everything," Councilman Pat Dolan, D-5th Distric, said. "We represent the people of the county, and we should know what's going on. We shouldn't have to hear it from a media outlet."

Council member Greg Quinn, R-7th District, said the lack of transparency was particularly troubling in light of the ongoing effort by Dooley to gain council approval for a $94,000 independent "forensic assessment" to help the county avoid a repeat of the scheme that permitted the fraud to go undetected for six years.

Even County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch -- who would have tried the case if the health department scandal had gone to trial -- says he did not learn of the audit until this month.

"I had no idea it existed," McCulloch said.

 *County Executive Charlie Dooley

10-09-2014 - An audit was launched for Ferguson and several other counties, highlighting excessive ticketing fees.  Mayor Knowles responded: “No matter what we did, he’s going to have to look at us. I understand that,” Knowles said. “Because we were the focal point. But we’ve got a good finance staff. And that’s something we’ve been cognizant of for years making sure we don’t have our fines and forfeitures get too high – especially not nearly high enough to be snared by the state law.

“And we’re making a commitment to go much further now even still,” 

10/10/14- Tom S. wanted to audit municipal city courts. They were expected to be audited in 2015. The point was to put a cap on ticket fees. Ferguson was on that list.

12/14/14- Ferguson increased ticketing in order to close the budget gap. Jeffrey Blume, Ferguson’s finance director says, "Even with the increased ticketing, a $4.09 million revenue shortfall will remain for fiscal 2015. The city will bridge that gap by drawing on its $10.3 million unassigned reserve, the last of its reserve funds. "

12/16/14- Dallas County Sheriff found using company car, violating the time off policy and handling evidence.

02/19/2015 A criminal investigation was launched on the St. Joseph School District based on the auditor's findings. 

Tom S was found dead on February 27, 2015

03/03/15 - The death of Tom S was said to be related to anti Semetic bullying

03/30/15- The Missouri auditor's spokesperson Robert "Spence" Jackson. found dead.

A suicide note dated March 27 had been claimed to be found at the spokesperson's home.  However, something doesn't add up. Here's the video of Captain Doug Shoemaker

04/16/15- Speculation of prednisone use was cause of the auditor's death

While listening to the video, Captain Shoemaker of the Jefferson City Missouri Police Department said, "I will not provide copies of the note, photographs of the note, I will read"... (then he stammers and says,) "I've written what it says and I will provide it verbally to you." at the 2 minute and 16 second mark.

According the note, it says, "I'm so sorry I just can't take being unemployed again". 

That's it. 

Now if my memory serves me correct, the spokesperson could be employed anywhere in the country. He would have no trouble obtaining employment. Why would he say he can't take being unemployed? That doesn't make sense. I suspect there is a cover up because the auditor was outspoken, and he did his job very well to the point where he found issues all across the entire state. As long as the auditor can not speak up, then his spokesperson could. And so the spokesperson had to be killed as well.

Not only that, Chief Jon Belmar, Robert McCulloch, and the County Executive Charles Dooley are involved withholding the FBI's findings, and the FBI's spokesperson said it should be available. Chief Belmar said it should have been available July of 2014.

It's still unavailable a year later.