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Will the outcomes prove similar as well?

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As the preliminary hearing gets underway in Georgia for Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael and William Bryan in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, it has not gone unnoticed that the fatal shooting of Arbery, an unarmed Black jogger in February by two White men, bears a striking resemblance to another slaying eight years agothat of Trayvon Martin.

Both the 17-year-old Martin and the 25-year-old Arbery were accosted by self-appointed White vigilantes who shot them at point-blank range after a scuffle. In both cases, prosecutors initially declined to prosecute and charges were filed only after weeks of sustained pressure from the Black communities in both Deep South states.

In the Arbery case, charges were brought against the McMichaels only following protests and the release of a gruesome cellphone video that depicts a clearly unarmed Arbery merely jogging down a neighborhood street in the city of Brunswick in the southeastern part of the state.

No attorney wouldve called the States case against George Zimmerman for murdering an unarmed teenager airtight. But prosecutors were so ineffective in the 2013 trial that it left more than a few trial lawyers and legal scholars wondering aloud whether the prosecution didnt intentionally lose the case.

In a 2016 law review article, Boston College law professor Mark Brodin wrote that prosecutors in Florida bungled the Trayvon Martin case by committing the most inexplicable strategic and evidentiary blunders of a type that experienced prosecutors would very likely not commit in a more earnest effort to convict.

Of the prosecutions many missteps, Brodin wrote that the most damning mightve been the failure to to convey to the trial jury this simple narrative of racial profiling and stalking by a vigilante not acting under color of law.

Calling the trial an homage to racial vigilantism, Mark K. Spencer, a former deputy states attorney in the Washington D.C. suburbs, concurred with Brodins assessment of the prosecutions failure. The Trayvon Martin case represented one of the gravest miscarriages of justice Ive ever seen, he said.

The default position of the criminal justice system, according to Brodin and many other attorneys, is to reflexively protect the killers of Black males, particularly if they are law enforcement officers or their surrogates. This raises a profound question as the state of Georgia prepares to try the McMichaels: Are prosecutors in it to win?

In an email to the Spokesman-Recorder, Brodin wrote: This playing to lose strategy is a theme that runs through many prosecutions of White police or vigilantes who have killed Black men. As you know, there are structural and institutional barriers that interfere when police officers commit crimes, as they are viewed as part of the law enforcement team by prosecutors.

And then systemic racism (tainting judge and jurors) often raises its ugly face at the trial when its a White cop and Black victim. Thankfully we have a few progressive prosecutors (Philadelphia, Boston, Brooklyn) who are starting to fight the influence of race and class in our criminal justice system, but they are clearly the exceptions.

The result has been a greenlighting of gross police misconduct across the nation.

Zimmerman was, of course, only a police wannabe although he was friendly with patrol officers in the community. The elder McMichael, on the other hand, was a retired officer who had worked as an investigator with the local prosecutors office.

The Thin Blue Line

The video of the assault on Arbery is damning but it is not, in and of itself, enough to win a conviction, explained Spencer, who presently serves as inspector general for the Prince Georges County Sheriffs Department. The often cozy relationship between prosecutors and police tilts the playing field in favor of law enforcement, he said.

During his early days as a prosecutor nearly 30 years ago, he saidit was not uncommon for the prosecutors to encourage defendants to sign a waiver absolving police officers of any liability for the use of excessive force or other misconduct.

The challenges with accountability for potential acts of police misconduct were, are, and will always be problematic because of the structure of our justice system, Spencer said. In my experience most prosecutors avoid being assigned police accountability cases becausethere has been little reward in pursuing them. The cases are always difficult to assess and present because each of the working parts involves many sometimes interlocking relationships.

He continued, Imagine prosecuting a case where the police are the principle or only source of evidence. The police were the first responders to a crime scene or complaint. The police control the crime scene and the quality and quantity of evidence that is collected.

And the police are potentially the principal witnesses or sole witnesses to an event that may have included police misconduct. Trying to pierce the Thin Blue Line is mostly a daunting task.

The Martin case is by no means unique. When the Bronx district attorney in 2000 failed to procure a conviction against four New York City police officers for the fusillade of gunfire that killed an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, some immediately questioned whether the State intentionally undermined its case to shore up support for the Citys aggressive police tactics.

One African American juror, Lavette Freeman, told reporters at the time that she understood the protests that followed the verdict, but jurors felt they had no choice but to acquit. I have to take it back to the district attorneys office. They didnt give me anything. Nothing.

Another complication in the case against the McMichaels will undoubtedly be the states Stand Your Ground statute, which was cited by the original prosecutor in the case, George Barnhill, in declining to pursue charges.

Stand Your Ground effectively overturns a legal principle dating back to 17th century British common law requiring that a claimant demonstrate a defensive posture before using lethal force. The Castle Doctrine, however a mans home is his castle provides an exemption in the case of an intruder or burglar.

Stand Your Ground laws expand the legal justification for lethal self-defense and give prosecutors broad discretion to apply the law. While Zimmermans lawyers did not rely on Floridas Stand Your Ground law in their defense, jurors in Martins murder trial were instructed to consider the law in their deliberations. Trayvon Martin was betrayed by the entire American legal community, decried Spencer.

Jon Jeter welcomes reader responses to jjeter@spokesman-recorder.com.

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Killings of Arbery and Martin tragically similar - MSR News Online

IOWA CITY Hundreds of protesters gathered in downtown Iowa City Saturday in solidarity for a black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer pinned his knee on the mans neck, resulting in his death.

Rally organizers as well as a number of black elected officials from Johnson County and Iowa City raised their voices condemning police brutality and calling on their white peers to do more in support of people of color.

Eighteen-year-old Lujayn Hamad and her sister, 20-year-old Raneem Hamad, organized Saturdays rally. Both sisters grew up in Iowa City but now attend college at New York University in New York City.

Even with the risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus, organizers estimated at least 750 protesters filled the Pentacrest lawn and on Clinton Street and Iowa Avenue, which were blocked off by city officials in anticipation of large crowds.

Throughout the event, the crowds chants of black lives matter and hands up, dont shoot echoed throughout downtown.

On Monday, George Floyd died in police custody after officer Derek Chauvin pinned his knee to Floyds neck for at least eight minutes, despite the mans pleas of I cant breathe. Chauvin was arrested this week and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.

Despite the arrest, the violent unrest in Minneapolis continued for a fourth night Friday and into Saturday as rioters continued to loot and vandalize businesses and set fires throughout the city.

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Throughout the speeches at the Iowa City rally, a common thread was the belief that sometimes violence is needed to inspire change.

Im not encouraging the violence, but Im not necessarily discouraging it, either, Lujayn Hamad told The Gazette.

She recounted hearing about the death of Trayvon Martin while a student in Iowa City. Despite his death happening more than a decade ago, nothing has changed, Lujayn Hamad said.

Martin, a black, 17-year-old high school student, was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, who is white, in Sanford, Fla., in 2012. Zimmerman later was acquitted of all charges.

You cannot place blame on the protesters, she said. You cannot blame others for the way they grieve because its been years of silence and years of peace.

Johnson County Supervisor Royceann Porter, the first black county elected official, said the rioters in Minneapolis got to that point because theyre tired.

People are not being heard, she told reporters after the rally. It should not have to move to lead to looting and rioting and go on and on, but if thats the way that the people are going to hear us, thats the only way that people know to do it. Thats why they do it, so that we can get the message across.

She added, We had a murderer at home free, and he needed to be arrested. And if thats what they had to do to get the attention of the people, so then thats what they did.

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On Friday, a peaceful protest in Des Moines attended by hundreds escalated into a violent melee, with the crowd throwing items and jumping on patrol cars. Officers in riot gear responded, using pepper spray on the crowd and arresting more than a dozen protesters, according to reports.

Gov. Kim Reynolds released a statement Saturday afternoon condemning the protest, saying it is never right to react with violence.

The violence that happened last night in Des Moines undermines the message of change and hope that so many seek, Reynolds wrote. A thousand people gathered to exercise their right to protest and to speak their mind. It was a powerful message. But the lawless actions of a few drowned out that message.

But many who attended Saturdays rally in Iowa City seemed to disagree. The first speaker at Iowa Citys rally, who stated individuals should not answer violence with violence during his speech, was met with a chorus of boos and chants from the crowd.

At the same time, Porter said the rally was not calling for similar events to take place in Iowa City.

We dont want it to be violent, were not trying to be violent, she said. We can get our message our without being violent, so thats what (this rally) was all about.

Instead, Porter said she and others are having conversations with other Iowa City leaders to address issues facing people of color in the community, including about affordable housing and meeting the needs of students in local schools.

Lujayn and Raneem Hamad, along with 13 other individuals, left immediately after the rally for Minneapolis, where they plan to join the protests there.

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A GoFundMe page created by the pair for water bottles, masks, gloves and other items they plan to take to protesters reached more than $3,000 by Saturday afternoon. Lujayn Hamad said they plan to donate excess funds to George Floyds family and to the Minnesota Freedom Fund.

Other rallies were scheduled over the weekend for Cedar Rapids and Waterloo. Another rally is planned for 4 to 7 p.m., June 6 at 450 Fifth Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids.

Comments: (319) 398-8469; michaela.ramm@thegazette.com

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Iowa City rally in response to George Floyd death draws hundreds to downtown Iowa City - The Gazette

In the wake of George Floyds murder by Minneapolis police officers, a call to defund police departments has gained traction across the U.S. More people than ever are embracing the idea that the time for police reform has passed.

As an anti-police brutality organizer, Kandace Montgomery has observed the Minneapolis Police Department undergo years of reform efforts. After 24-year-old Jamar Clark was killed by police in 2015, she helped organize a Black Lives Matter chapter in the city. By 2018, it was clear to her and other organizers in the city that only a plan to take money away from police and give it to other community-led safety initiatives would protect black and brown people. The organization she directs, Black Visions Collective, campaigned alongside its counterpart Reclaim the Block to defund the Minneapolis police, yet the mayor still raised the police budget more than $8 million this year.

In the immediate aftermath of Floyds murder, the organizers brought their demands backto city council members that members never increase the police budget again, that they cut the polices budget by $45 million to help manage Covid-19 shortfalls, expand investment in community-led health and safety strategies, and compel the police to cease violence against community members.

The Intercept spoke to Montgomery about the movement to defund police in Minneapolis.This interview has been edited for clarity.

Paint for me a world without police. Where would all that money go instead?

A world without police would look like safety that is controlled and is led by our community, that focuses on transformation and transformative justice. A world without police means that everybody has what they need to survive and what they need to live healthy lives. It means we have the money that we need for education, health care, housing, workers rights. It is a total transformation away from a racist and violent system into one that truly fosters our safety and well-being. When we are talking about police reform, what were not talking about is the fact that black communities actually need resources to keep ourselves safe. We make the choice to resource punitive systems instead of stabilizing and nourishing ones that make communities safer.

How did you get involved in this movement?

My experience as a young black queer person just called me to it. Honestly, I think I didnt really have any other option. Especially the experience of my family, of most of the men and the women experiencing incarceration and police violence directly, called me to want to fight up against that. And over the last few years, after the murder of Trayvon Martin and theacquittal of George Zimmerman, and then the murder of Mike Brown and the nonindictment of Darren Wilson, I have specifically committed my time and my energy and my future to fighting for black liberation for all black lives.

In 2015, I think that we were very righteously angry, and we were clear about the problem. Now, we are clear about the solution.

What did the anti-police brutality movement in the city look like at the time Jamar Clark was killed by police in Minneapolis in 2015? Whats different now?

In 2015, I think that we were very righteously angry, and we were clear about the problem. Now, we are clear about the solution. I think thats the distinction. Now in 2020, we know that justice is not just arresting the officers. Justice goes so much further, because we are interested in not having to be out in the streets anymore, grieving and angry, protesting that another life has been lost. We know that we cannot continue to invest in strategies that call for police reform. The only path forward is transitioning completely away from the Minneapolis Police Department and policing across the country and across the globe really.

What are the biggest wins and the biggest failures youve seen since 2015 that laid the groundwork for this moment?

When George Floyd was killed, the Minneapolis Police Department had plenty of reforms in place. Theyre ineffective and insufficient. It is putting a police officer in a T-shirt instead of a uniform. Its still the same thing.

Reclaim the Block began in 2018. Organizing has always been the thing behind transformative change. MLK didnt march alone. He actually was part of an entire organization that was in it for the long term. Having an organization allows us to collectively raise the resources necessary to fight for our rights and move a long-term agenda, because this work isnt free.

In 2018, we engaged our community and articulated a story about whats possible if we divest from the Minneapolis Police Department and invest in community-led safety. That work resulted in $1.1 million moving away from the police department and into opening the Office of Violence Prevention, which does street-level violence intervention that prioritizes not involving police. The money also was rerouted to supporting other organizations that were doing community-level intervention and safety work.

But the year after that, we saw a really huge pushback. What we didnt fully anticipate was the mayor and the police department working together to create a smear campaign and create a false narrative that crime in our city was increasing. We saw about six months of article after article about this.

The mayor ended up increasing the 2020 police budget byover $8 million. So, what we know is that when you push really hard for transformative change, we will get even harder pushback. And so we have to be really strategic and smart. This moment we have been building for it.

How has Black Visions Collective responded to George Floyds murder? How did your organizing contribute to the actions in the streets?

People took to the streets organically. That was not us. Without any organization, without any nudging, people decided that it was necessary to protest, and it was necessary to ignite an uprising across the country and the globe. As an organization, what we did immediately was called for the defunding of the police. Because we had been calling for that beforehand, we were able to quickly pivot and make it really clear to our city council members that our community was no longer going to be OK with settling with maybe an arrest that doesnt actually result in a conviction that we want a total transformation, and we had been waiting too long. The national attention creates an opportunity. Georges spirit as an ancestor has allowed us to have a much larger conversation across the country about what justice actually looks like in these situations.

Most importantly, we are grieving the loss of a black community member. Were doing that again. Many of us helped found Black Lives Matter and Black Visions Collective for Jamar. Its incredibly unfair, especially for young black people, that we have to be out here in these streets, putting our lives at risk during the pandemic to fight for justice.

Its incredibly unfair, especially for young black people, that we have to be out here in these streets, putting our lives at risk during the pandemic to fight for justice.

Some of our organizers have been out there nightly, just helping to hold down the space at the different occupations in the city, grilling food, doing things like that. Weve been offering community trainings around direct action and how to stay safe while protesting. We planned a direct action ourselves in which we left art in memory of George Floyd at each of the city council members homes, calling on them to defund the police.

Much of our work has been organizing with other black Minnesotans. We have a call every single day with about 70 different black organizers who are trying to coordinate how to get supplies to our folks, how to get donations to our folks, how to train people to be medics, so that we can provide medical support on the ground at protests, who are thinking about art and how we can tap into artists to create expressions of what we are talking about that are accessible to our community members, as well as organizing healers to provide healing for organizers on the front line and community members who are involved.

How do you think about the property destruction that took place in the city?

I honor and respect the ways in which my community has decided to grieve, even if its not how I personally choose to grieve. I want to make sure that all of the small businesses of color are able to redevelop and rebuild and continue to provide necessary services to our community. And Im calling on our elected officials to ensure that developers do not come in and take away all of those businesses from black and brown people.

What do you think about the reactions of public officials in the city? How have they responded to your demands, and what has gone unanswered?

Im deeply disappointed in Mayor Jacob Frey. He has not reached out to our group, has not reached out to several groups, actually, to talk about what is the solution forward. It is time for him to get out. He is not the visionary leader that Minneapolis needs and deserves.

For our city council members, they have been much more responsive, and many of them have actually committed to us to really disband the Minneapolis Police Department and transition over the next few years away from having policing in Minneapolis. Theres still work to do with some city council members who just arent able to truly imagine what the future could look like.

Minneapolis Public Schools ending its contract with the police is a watershed moment. I know many of the young people who have been calling for school resource officers out of their schools for the last five years or more. Folks who are able to take bold steps are doing it quickly, because they know we dont have time to wait.

Whats next?

This is going to be a transition and not a transition thats going to take 20, 30 years. It needs to happen within five or less. But we do have to be patient with ourselves that we dont know all of the answers. Right now, we are stepping up and figuring them out as we provide the support to our community.

The mutual aid groups that have been created over the past week are super critical. Theyre literally feeding people who would not be able to eat, would not have diapers for their babies. Theyre essential, and theyre allowing community members to sustain their needs. They are building in real time models of community safety.

Thinking about a transition plan away from the Minneapolis Police Department is going to be critical. Whats next is continuing to engage our city council, but I think even more so engaging our community to continue to bring this demand to their doorstep. We cant allow this energy to die down. Minneapolis is going to be watched all across the country.

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Minneapolis Organizer Kandace Montgomery on Defunding Police - The Intercept

Basketball has never felt less essential. Worldwide protests against racial injustice and police brutality have pushed a global pandemic below the fold, and yet the NBA is moving toward resuming its 2019-20 season.

There was a time we hoped the league could provide a welcome distraction for Americans quarantined and isolated because of the coronavirus. That time has passed. We should no longer welcome any distraction from the movement currently spreading across the country. All eyes should be focused on a broken system.

Everything going on right now, basketball is not important, Los Angeles Clippers guard Patrick Beverley tweeted on Wednesday, surely echoing the thoughts of many of his colleagues who have joined protests and spoken out in the wake of George Floyds homicide in custody of the Minneapolis Police Department.

I had my reservations about the NBA returning in the midst of a pandemic, so sports seem even sillier now, but basketball is coming back, and I am trying to reconcile with that, because I write about basketball. Here is where I have landed: The league has a chance to dominate this conversation in the next five months, and seizing that opportunity could carry the current movement forward in a way that creates a lasting impact.

Former NBA player Stephen Jackson (right), a friend of George Floyd's, poses for a photograph at a memorial for Floyd on Wednesday. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

When the NBA returns at the Walt Disney World Resort next month, players and coaches will have a massive audience as the faces of the most popular North American sport resuming games this summer. Among the four major North American sports leagues, the NBA has the highest percentage of African-Americans at every level of its organizations from players to coaching staffs to executives to the league office by a wide margin.

Three quarters of NBA players are black, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, and many have been among the most vocal social justice advocates. Malcolm Brogdon of the Indiana Pacers joined a peaceful protest in Atlanta partially organized by Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics on Saturday, and the two rising stars made public pleas to a crowd of thousands in their hometown, a few hundred miles from where a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, was gunned down while jogging last month.

This is a moment, Brogdon told protesters. We have leverage right now. We have a moment in time. People are going to look back, our kids are going to look back at this and say, You were part of that. Ive got a grandfather that marched next to Dr. King in the sixties, and he was amazing. He would be proud to see us all here. We got to keep pushing forward. Jaylen has led this charge, man, and Im proud of him. We need more leaders.

Former NBA player turned popular broadcaster Stephen Jackson was a close friend of Floyds. He was seen in recent days holding Floyds young daughter on his shoulders as she told onlookers, Daddy changed the world. Flanked by All-Star center Karl-Anthony Towns and other Minnesota Timberwolves, Jackson spoke passionately from a justice rally in Minneapolis Government Center Plaza last week.

When was murder ever worth it? he said, referencing Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer since charged with Floyds murder. But if its a black man, its approved. You cant tell me when that man had his knee on my brothers neck, taking his life away with his hand in his pocket, that that smirk on his face didnt say, Im protecting.

NBA players have been increasingly vocal about racial injustice in the years since LeBron James tweeted a photo of his Miami Heat donning hooded sweatshirts in honor of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student who was shot and killed by Orlando-area neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in 2012. James was also among dozens of players to sport I Cant Breathe T-shirts in protest of a grand jury opting not to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choking death of Eric Garner in 2014.

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LeBron James was among the NBA players who wore "I Can't Breathe" T-shirts in protest of police brutality in 2014. (Rich Kane/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

James has criticized Donald Trump for furthering the racial divide on a number of occasions, notably after the president referred to Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players protesting police brutality as sons of bitches and also after he defended very fine people on both sides of a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a neo-Nazi drove into a crowd of anti-racism protesters, killing Heather Heyer.

Over the past week, James has pledged support for protests to tens of millions of social media followers.

I wont stop until I see change, James wrote on Thursday.

The audience for James and other NBA players will only increase when they convene to resume the 2019-20 season in Orlando next month, when the league will take center stage on national television. The most predominantly black sports league in America, a league that empowers its players to voice their opinions, will have one of the most powerful voices in the world in the months leading up to the presidential election.

Racism and social justice are not inherently political issues, but they become more so when the president of the United States responds to protests not with a consistent unifying message but by calling Minneapolis protesters thugs in a Twitter rant that also suggested, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, when he called on the nations governors to dominate protesters or risk looking like a bunch of jerks, and when he promoted the use of tear gas on peaceful protesters to clear his path for a photo opportunity.

In one breath Trump once suggested Kaepernick and other NFL players peacefully protesting racial injustice during the national anthem should be deported, and in another he said this week, I am ... an ally of all peaceful protesters. It is clear why Stephen Curry, Steve Kerr and members of the Golden State Warriors repeatedly clashed with Trump over his divisive remarks and why Trump rescinded an offer to visit the White House that was never extended to the champions of the blackest sports league in America.

The NBA also features a number of white men who have pledged their support for social justice and anti-racism efforts and put their face to white privilege. Kyle Korver, a senior member of the Eastern Conference-leading Milwaukee Bucks, penned an essay on the subject for The Players Tribune. Kerr and former Detroit Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy joined the Players Coalition in endorsing a letter to Attorney General William Barr last month that called for the arrest of the men who killed Arbery.

Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich, coaches together on the U.S. men's national team, have been vocal critics of President Donald Trump. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

I've never met a single black parent that doesn't have to sit their kids down and talk to them very directly about how you deal with the police if you're stopped, Van Gundy told Yahoo Sports in late May. You do this, this and this, so you come home alive. I started getting more of that in my career. I'm like holy [expletive]. I've never once talked to my kids about that or felt the need to. If my kid got pulled over, it was because they deserved to get pulled over. Even if they mouthed off, nobody was gonna shoot them.

Kerr hosted San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich this week on his Flying Coach podcast with Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll for a conversation about how they, as privileged white men, can engage players of all backgrounds in meaningful conversations and assist the effort to bring about systemic change. Popovich has long been one of the NBAs most vocal critics of Trumps leadership.

The thing that strikes me is that we all see this police violence and racism and weve seen it all before but nothing changes, Popovich told The Nations Dave Zirin in a conversation prompted by the oft-private coach. Thats why these protests have been so explosive. But without leadership and an understanding of what the problem is, there will never be change. And white Americans have avoided reckoning with this problem forever because its been our privilege to be able to avoid it. That also has to change.

Popovich went so far as to call the president a deranged idiot. Kerr has called Trump a blowhard. Curry called him an asset, if you remove the et. James called him a bum. The NBAs voice on this is glaring.

Players and coaches have two months before the season resumes to craft a more effective message to the American public, one that elevates the national conversation from name-calling and attempts by detractors to conflate peaceful protests with looting and the excessive use of force by police with assaults against police officers. There is an opportunity to further a sports activism cause once carried by their predecessors at the 1967 Cleveland Summit, including Bill Russell, who also had a front-row seat as a guest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington and for whom the NBAs Finals MVP trophy is named.

The National Basketball Coaches Association recently condemned police brutality, racial profiling and the weaponization of racism as shameful, inhumane and intolerable, forming a committee to combat social injustices with tangible reform in NBA cities. That is a start. There is a long way to go, but coaches and players can undoubtedly serve as leaders in carrying the momentum of this movement into the most consequential election of many of their lifetimes.

The best reason to welcome the NBAs return in the face of a pandemic is what might unfold off the court in Orlando during the months before another champion refuses to accept a White House invitation. In that way, basketball might just be essential again.

Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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The NBA's return brings with it a leadership opportunity in the social justice movement - Yahoo Sports

Written by Devyani Onial | New Delhi | Updated: June 5, 2020 7:39:49 am Martin Luther King Jr leads a march in Alabama on March 9, 1965.

On March 7, 1965, civil rights activists, in response to the police killing of fellow-activist Jimmie Lee Jackson the previous month, were marching from Selma in Alabama to state capital Montgomery when they were attacked by state troopers. The crackdown came to be famously known as Bloody Sunday in US civil rights annals.

Undeterred, two days later, Martin Luther King Jr led another march along the same path. This time, when they encountered state troopers, the marchers took a knee. They knelt and prayed before turning back.

Fifty-five years later, as a new set of American marchers common people, students, occasional policemen even take a knee following the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer that was caught on camera, could this mark the beginning of something new?

In the days that followed Bloody Sunday, King spoke stirringly of their aim to achieve a society that can live with its conscience because, he believed, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Today, as protestors across American cities march in protest over Floyds death, they are willing the arc to bend towards justice.

The road to Floyds murder has been littered by incidences of violence against African Americans, many becoming catalysts in the countrys civil rights movement and turning points in its knotted history. Martin Luther Kings memorable observation that a riot is the language of the unheard applies as much today as it did back then, said Daniel Letwin, associate professor of history at the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts, and author of The Challenge of Interracial Unionism.

This is certainly a historic moment, he adds, Not since the 1960s have we seen black street protests of such scope and magnitude, across the country. In essential ways, the dynamics are familiar Now, as then, black unrest also drew upon a variety of underlying causes from a persisting culture of white racism, to the disproportionate experience of run-down urban conditions, inadequate schools, poor healthcare, low pay, unemployment, unresponsive government, mass incarceration, and the like.

Data by statista.com reveals a skewed pattern of African American killings by police. Of 1,000 fatal shootings by police in 2019, more than 23 per cent of the victims were blacks, a high proportion given that they made up less than 14 per cent of the population.

Connie Hasset-Walker, assistant professor of Justice Studies and Sociology at Norwich University, believes that the roots of racism in American policing, planted centuries ago, still stand strong. I personally see the US history of slavery (about 250 years long) and then Jim Crow laws (about 80 years long) as very connected to whats happening now. To my knowledge, there has never been a reckoning for policings slave-patrol origins. When an institution starts off with systematic racism and violence as part of its core mission, how far can it evolve from that if there is never a reckoning/commitment to change? she said.

At the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), said Hasset-Walker, of the 34 states then, 15 were slave states, which created patrols to nip slave revolts and escapes. The state of South Carolina was the first to create slave patrols in 1704. By the end of the 1700s, every American slave state had slave patrols. They lasted for about 150 years, ending with the Souths loss in the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery. After that, the former southern slave patrols morphed into police departments that technically were different from slave patrols, but were basically still charged with controlling the freed former slaves, she said.

About 20 years after the end of the Civil War, America saw the passage of the Jim Crow laws, which dictated a policy of segregation, enforced by police, and which persisted as recently as 1964. It was during this period of segregation that in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till from Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi, was accused of making a flirtatious remark to a white woman at a grocery store. Three days later, Till was kidnapped and killed, his body thrown in the river. The accused the womans husband and his half-brother were later acquitted by an all-white jury.

The civil rights movement gathered steam after this. Montgomery saw a city-wide bus boycott when, on December 1, an African American woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat for a white man and was arrested for it. The Montgomery Improvement Association, led by a young Luther King Jr, called a boycott of the citys municipal bus company. It was eventually called off on December 20, 1956, after the segregation seating policy was held unconstitutional.

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The years that followed were a time of great turbulence in America, as riots swept city after city. The Watts riots in 1965 in Los Angeles (that started after Marquette Frye, an African American, was pulled over for suspected drunk-driving and roughed up by the police), the Detroit and Newark riots the same year and the unrest in a number of cities following Kings assassination in 1968, were all fuelled in large part by economic and social disparity, prejudiced policing and general disaffection, that continues today.

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King, a black motorist, was beaten by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase. A man called George Holliday, who witnessed the beating from his balcony, videotaped the incident and gave it to a local TV station. From then on, it went, what we would now call, viral. On April 29, 1992, the four LAPD officers were acquitted, sparking outrage and triggering one of the worst race riots in LA, that lasted six days and left over 50 dead, 2,300 injured.

King was certainly not the first black man to be beaten up by the police, but it was the first time that someone video-recorded the beating. That video validated what many African Americans knew at that time that Los Angeles police were very brutal towards black people, said Hasset-Walker.

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More than 15 years after the LA riots, came a moment in American history that many had dreamt of but few had imagined. Barack Obama winning the presidential election in November 2008 was a moment that was both a rupture and a healing. But did it fundamentally change anything for the community? For many, it was the execution of Troy Davis that showed that nothing had changed.

Davis was a black man on death row in Georgia, who many believed had been wrongfully convicted for the murder of a police officer. Wrong convictions havent been rare. In 2002, convictions against the Central Park Five teenagers (four blacks and one Latino), accused of raping and grievously assaulting a jogger in Central Park in 1989 were vacated and the charges withdrawn after over 10 years. The Central Park case many would remember it from the Netflix series When They See Us had made national news with the current President Donald Trump buying full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for the state to bring back the death penalty. Even after they were exonerated, Trump insisted they were guilty.

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For Davis, thousands rallied, appealing to the countrys first Black President to stay the execution. Davis was executed on September 21, 2011, and the night after as protestors filed into Union Square in Manhattan, they merged with another group Occupy Wall Street. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in The Guardian, the convergence of the two groups underlined the economic disparity in America and showed the connections between racism and black poverty.

But it was the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American high-school student in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012 that started another round of conversation around racial profiling, prompting even President Obama to say, If I had a son, hed look like Trayvon. George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer who claimed he had shot Trayvon in self-defence, was acquitted a year later. The prosecution had contended that Zimmermann had followed the hoodie-clad boy because he assumed he was a criminal but the six-women jury rejected it. It was Zimmermans acquittal that gave rise to a hashtag and a movement.

#BlackLivesMatter, started in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, has now grown into a global network whose members organise and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes. The BLM movement has been at the forefront of subsequent street demonstrations, most notably following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson near St Louis and of Eric Garner in New York City.

Cornel West, a public intellectual and a fearless voice in left-wing politics, traces the current unrest to the failures of Obama. West, who had once shared the stage with Obama, is now one of the most vocal critics of many of his policies. In a recent interview to CNN, he said, The Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, black attorney general, and black homeland security and they couldnt deliver. Black faces in high places, he said, succumbed to the capitalist economy and militarised nation-state.

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The shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 by a police officer (Rice was carrying a replica toy Airsoft gun), of Ahmaud Aubrey, who was tagged and killed by armed white residents while jogging in his Georgia neighbourhood and of Breonna Taylor in Louisville this March by plainclothes policemen, who barged into her apartment looking for someone else, all brought about a cycle of debate and protests. Could the current uprising be a crack, however slight, that will let in the light?

In the early days of the Floyd protests, Trump had tweeted in support of using military force to quell the riots. Law-and-order demagogues seek to discredit black rebellion as a mindless orgy of violence committed by thugs and criminals, encouraged by radical agitators and spineless, liberal officials, said Letwin. But there are signs that this time things could be different: For one, street protests appear much more diverse, with a higher participation of whites and Hispanics alongside African Americans. The unrest is no longer so confined as it once was to black neighbourhoods. Certainly, the ease with which acts of police violence can be recorded and publicised has changed the picture as well.

Hasset-Walker, too, pointed at a crucial difference. What is different about the murder of George Floyd is how quickly the police officer, Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on Floyds neck, was charged with third degree murder.

On Wednesday, the former Minneapolis Police officer was charged with a fresh count of second-degree murder, and the three other officers with him were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. Whether he will ultimately be convicted, well see. But the swift arrest and issuing of a charge thats important, and unusual, she said.

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Explained: George Floyds America in black & white - The Indian Express