A Real Memorial to Jim Crow

In tiny Russellville, Kentucky, where 110 years ago four African-American men were lynched by a cheering mob.  Today, a gut-wrenching exhibit ensures they are not forgotten.

From Wes Swietek at the Bowling Green Daily News:

"It was as easy to raise a (lynch) mob in Logan County in those days as to drop a hat ... ."

That was the observation of Bowling Green lawyer John Rhodes in 1944. Rhodes was looking back three decades on the power of mob violence he saw firsthand as one of the lawyers in a 1908 shooting case in Russellville involving an African-American named Rufus Browder.

Extraordinary steps were taken to protect Browder from lynch mobs — including having a jailer hide him overnight in a cemetery — but four other African-American men were not so fortunate.

 They were hanged one by one from a cedar tree on a small rise in Russellville on the morning of Aug. 1, 1908, in a lynching case that would go on to have national repercussions, but remain largely forgotten for a century. An effort is now underway, however, to erect a historic marker for the quadruple murder and other racial killings in the county.

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article217361810.html#storylink=cpy

 SNIP

Logan County is also unusual in that it houses a powerful memorial to the legacy of lynchings.
. . .
The West Kentucky African American Heritage Center in Russellville stretches across several buildings that chronicle the experiences of African-Americans in the region.

Perhaps the most powerful exhibit fills a small room. At the center is the work of folk artist Willie Rascoe — a small tree with nooses dangling from the branches. The surrounding exhibits tell the story of numerous Logan County lynchings, with an emphasis on the quadruple 1908 lynching.

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article217361810.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/article217361810.html#storylink=cpy

A Southern Tradition: Lynching Black Veterans

Erik Loomis:

Veterans Day: A perfect time to remember one of our national legacies, white people lynching black soldiers and recently returned veterans.

SNIP

A month after World War I ended, Private Charles Lewis returned home to Tyler Station, Kentucky, where a mob of masked men lynched him on December 16, 1918. Private Lewis was wearing his uniform when he encountered Deputy Sheriff Al Thomas, who attempted to arrest him for robbery. Private Lewis denied guilt and pointed to his uniform, declaring that he had been honorably discharged and had never committed a crime. The two men argued and Private Lewis was charged with assault and resisting arrest. Private Lewis was awaiting transfer to the Fulton County Jail in Hickman, Kentucky, as news of his challenge to white authority spread and a mob of 75 to 100 people formed. At midnight, masked men stormed the jail, smashed the locks with a sledgehammer, pulled Private Lewis out of his cell, tied a rope around his neck, and hanged him from a tree. The next day, hundreds of white spectators viewed Private Lewis’s dead, hanging body, still in uniform. At least 10 more black veterans were lynched in 1919 alone.

But Colin Kaepernick is the traitor.

 

Tyler Station doesn't exist on state maps any more, but Fulton County is in the far southwestern corner of the state, on the Mississippi River.

 

According to this archive, 142 black people were lynched in Kentucky, along with 63 white people.  That puts us ahead of West Virginia, Virginia, even South fucking Carolina.  Kentucky lynched more black people than North Carolina.  More than Oklahoma. More than Missouri. More than Indiana.

Only eight states lynched more black people than Kentucky did, and they are all of course deep-south shitholes.

While Kentucky doesn’t have quite as many lynchings on record as other states in the South, it does have some of the most gruesome and heinous accounts of lynchings that took place during this time. Reports indicate that 205 people were lynched in the state during this time frame and 142 of them were Black. They all met with unbelievably inhumane deaths. A glimpse of just how much terrorism Blacks faced in Kentucky can be found in the March 25, 1871 letter sent to the U.S. Congress asking for protection from the Ku Klux Klan for the newly-freed African Americans in Kentucky. In the book Racial violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940 Dr. George C. Wright says “the letter was from Colored citizens of Frankfort & vicinity, signed by Henry Marrs, a teacher; Henry Lynn, a livery stable keeper; N. N. Trumbo, a grocer; Samuel Damsey; B. Smith, a blacksmith; and B. T. Crampton, a barber.” The document contained a list of 116 incidents of beatings, shootings, hangings, tarring and feathering, and other violence that had taken place around the state.

No of course we didn't learn about this in school, or even college. The civil war was about industrialization and states rights. Lee was a hero, Gone with the Wind was nonfiction, Jim Crow who?.  There were whispers, but only about the heinous rapes of white women that those men must have committed to earn lynching.

And that was Kentucky public education in the 1970s.

The New War on Drugs is the Old Terror: Legal Lynching

Jeff Sessions doesn't give a flying fuck how many drugs people do; all he cares about is how the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some Classes of) Drugs (tm LGM) gives him an excuse to throw millions of ni**ers in prison for life. Or just mow them down in the streets. The latter saves money, while the former puts money in the pockets of his private prison corporate friends.

The world he intends to re-create is the one depicted in the movie Rosewood: successful blacks lynched and burned out by drunk, stupid, violent whites.

Charlie Pierce:

It is now conventional wisdom that one of the worst mistakes the country ever made was launching its idiotic, wasteful "war"on drugs. In the three decades in which this "war" has been waged, we have lost two generations of African-Americans to the prison system, shaved the Bill of Rights down to a nub, tied the hands of the judiciary, and, finally, made not an appreciable dent in the problem of drug use and drug addiction. We have blessed ourselves with private prisons and militarized police forces, so there is that.

Prior to the ascension of President* Trump, there was a strong, evolving, and bipartisan consensus that it was time to call a truce on the "war" we were making on our own citizens. The country was getting sensible about marijuana and mandatory minimum sentences at the same time; conservatives abandoned simplistic law 'n order coding and hopped on the bandwagon of criminal justice reform; in many cases, they took the wheel on it. And, at least rhetorically, the response to the opioid crisis was more reasoned and measured than the response to the crisis of crack cocaine was—and the reasons for that are worth exploring. But nobody wants to, least of all JeffBo. Over the weekend, we learned that this brief, fragile truce had ended.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

I’d like to remind you of that day when Trump’s OMB Director Mike Mulvaney told us that the reason this administration’s budget cut funding to programs like Meals on Wheels and after-school initiatives for kids was because they could no longer defend spending tax dollars on programs that don’t work.

Let’s put aside the fact that feeding seniors and children is a self-defined success: hungry people are no longer hungry. It’s really that simple.

My reaction to Mulvaney was that if we’re going to defund programs that don’t work, then the best place to start is by ending the so-called “war on drugs.”

But of course if your goal is to kill and imprison as many ni**ers as possible, then the failed War on Drugs is a brilliant success.

Apparently AG Sessions and his top lieutenant Steven Cook think that we can arrest and incarcerate our way out of the drug problem, even though both science and recent history tell us that is nonsense. It is worth asking why this administration would cling to one failed federal initiative while proposing to eliminate so many others. Ava DuVernay answered that question with a documentary titled simply: “13th.”

Whether it is Sessions’ move to pull away from police reform, his history of opposition to voting rights, or his plans to ramp up the war on drugs, there is one key element that binds his approach on all of these issues: racism. While we’re in the business of breaking taboos, let’s get rid of the one that keeps us from naming exactly what’s going on here.

What's going on here is what's been going on in this country for 400 years. Vicious, cowardly whites terrified of having to compete on a level field enslaving and killing with impunity.

Lynchings Are Starting With Medicare

The lynchings are definitely coming.

A number of black freshman and other people affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania were added to GroupMe chat rooms in which anonymous posters published racist messages and graphic images.

The group, called “Mud Men” by its creator, included an event titled “Daily lynching,” racial slurs and images of lynchings, according to Philadelphia Magazine. A statement from the university said the group appeared to be based in Oklahoma.

Another seemingly related chat room to which a number of black students were added, according to the student-run Daily Pennsylvanian, was called “Trump is love” and included images of lynchings, racist messages and a picture of a red hat which read "GRAB THEM BY THE P***Y."

Students at the university gathered in the vice provost of university life's office to discuss the attack and voice concerns about a surge in hate speech over the past week, according to the same report.

“I spent my morning running to the Vice Provost office of my university in the middle of class because my freshmen brothers and sisters got added to a group called ‘Nigger Lynching,’” wrote law student Calvary Rogers on Facebook, according to Metro Philly. “Literally, every single black freshmen was added. I stared an administrator in the eye and literally lost it. And quite honestly I just can't stop crying. I feel sick to my stomach. I don't feel safe.”

But Medicare will be the first to die.

It is a repug and its lips are moving, therefore it is lying.

Ryan went on to say that, “Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.” That is a lie.

Health reform, along with other factors, has significantly improved Medicare’s financial outlook, boosting revenues and making the program more efficient. The HI trust fund is now projected to remain solvent 11 years longer than before the Affordable Care Act was enacted.

In other words, repealing Obamacare would mean that Medicare would become insolvent 11 years earlier than is currently projected by those who manage the Medicare trust fund (here is a link to their latest report). In terms of timing, it is important to note that right now the trust fund projects that Medicare will remain solvent until 2028. If Obamacare is repealed, that happens in 2017. So the plan is to roll back the savings that extended its solvency and simultaneously generate fear that the program needs to either be privatized or begin reducing benefits to current seniors.

Kentucky: The Lynching State

Contrary to the fantasies of KKKers and their apologists here in the Bluegrass State, Kentucky did not secede from the union before or during the Civil War. Like Missouri and Maryland, Kentucky was a slave state that declined to practice treason in defense of slavery.

But the confusion is understandable.  An ugly history is often short-handed this way:  Kentucky is the only state that joined the Confederacy AFTER the Civil War.

And boy did it ever.

I want to flag your attention to a new study that has just been released by the Equal Justice Initiative which appears to be the most comprehensive examination to date of the history of lynchings of African-Americans in the South between 1877 and 1950, which the report correctly defines as 'terror lynchings.'

SNIP

Note that Kentucky is the ONLY non-Confederacy state to make the list of terror lynchings.  Fulton County, Kentucky on the Tennessee/Missouri border, is tied for 25th among counties with the highest concentration of lynchings.

Nope, no racism here.  Today we just get cops to shoot 'em down in the streets.

Post-Racial America in Kentucky

TPM:

A pretty disturbing incident from Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

What was purportedly a Halloween display on the front lawn of a residence at Fort Campbell was not surprisingly deemed "offensive in nature" by base officials who requested that the resident remove the display. As you can see in the picture, the display appears to depict an African-American family, with each member being hanged from a tree. The child in the display has a knife in its back.

Fort Campbell Public Affairs officer Brendalyn Carpenter said that it was "her understanding that the display was not intended to be offensive, but authorities deemed it could be interpreted as such. She said the occupant did extend an apology about the decorations."

Fort Campbell, of course, is the home of the storied 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles.  Many of them are now on deployment to West Africa to help set up hospitals and other logistics for the doctors and nurses fighting the Ebola epidemic.  Have to wonder if this well-meaning resident has a problem with the color of the people the 101st is helping.

Still the Klan with Badges

Still letting an unarmed black body rot in the street.

And still being defended with the self-righteous lies of the Plantation Crowd.

Steve M:

In America, right-wingers always get to position the Overton window, on every subject of debate. Right now, they're positioning it between Douthat/Jacoby and Medved. The "left" and "right" in this debate will be: do we get rid of the MRAPs and BearCats and keep the rest of our usual tactics? Or do we keep it all?

It would be lovely to think that Rand Paul, by joining liberals in condemning the racial inequities of our justice system, has helped move the discussion to the left. But as I told you on Thursday, even Paul stressed the military hardware rather than the racism in his Time op-ed. And now those of his conservative brethren who are willing to acknowledge any problems whatsoever in how we deal out criminal justice are going to limit themselves to talking about tanks. So, outside MSNBC, that's all we're going to talk about.

They don't need no military equipment, sah; why, back in the day billy clubs and hemp rope worked just fine, not to mention castrating knives and kerosene.

Zandar:

And now the National Guard will show up.  Will they bring actual tanks, I wonder?

All to protect a cop who executed an unarmed man.

America.  

It's the fucking Klan.  Always been the fucking Klan. Always will be the fucking Klan.

Juanita Jean:

True story:  the first time a met a Texas Ranger, the legendary Texas lawmen not the baseball team, I was wearing a gorgeous hand loomed sarape from interior Mexico.  It was one of my prize possessions because of its beauty and utility in Houston winters.  The Ranger, meeting me for the first time, said to me, “Don’t you know not to wear a poncho around a Texas Ranger?”  I asked why.  

 “Because that’s what we take target practice on. Har. Har. Har.”  My stomach turned.  It was a life-altering moment.

That’s not funny.  Not at all.  And the reason it’s not funny is that there is too much truth in it.

Twenty-five years later, I met the first black female Texas Ranger.  I asked her if I could hug her.  I didn’t tell her why but I think she saw it in my eyes.  She hugged me.

I am in pain over Ferguson.  We’ve fought this crap for my entire life and we still haven’t won.

I still have some fight left in me.  I do.

If you think you don't have any fight left in you, look at these pictures.

"All to protect a cop who executed an unarmed man." Don't let anybody forget that.

Every Month is Stop-and-Shoot-Blacks Month

February's over but the celebration never ends.

Gary Younge at The Nation:

The verdicts matter. Zimmerman’s acquittal lent legal imprimatur to the understanding that it is open season on young black men; Dunn’s mistrial on the key charge of murder did nothing to discredit that. But these tales go beyond the legal arena: they reflect a violent, racist culture in which the black body, particularly when it is young and male, is considered fair game. One can list only so many isolated incidents before it becomes impossible to deny a pattern.

When it comes to “stand your ground” laws, it appears there is no ground that free black men are entitled to that cannot be violated by a skittish, trigger-happy white male. Add this freelance stop-and-shoot to the official stop-and-frisk, and you have a large portion of the nation living in a state of terror rooted in policy, practice and culture. It is depressingly emblematic of how little black people feel their lives are valued that Darrin Manning’s mother said, after his police encounter, “I’m just grateful that they didn’t just kill him.”

According to a 2013 report by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a black person is killed by police, security guards or vigilantes every twenty-eight hours. Add to that the fact that one in ten young black men is behind bars and one in two has been arrested, and America starts to look more and more like a huge penal colony, even as the challenge to the black community shifts from the discriminatory to the existential.

This is not just a problem for black people any more than the NSA’s intrusions are just a problem for Muslims. In a world where some need papers to prove their freedom, nobody is truly free. “As citizens, we must prevent wrong-doing,” argued Hannah Arendt. “Because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong-sufferer, and spectator, is at stake.”

Younge never uses the word, but the unpunished murders of innocent African-Americans is plain and simple lynching.

Somebody check - are there even anti-lynching laws on the books?

Tennessee Cop Celebrates Black History Month: I Have A Strip of Skin From a Man My Family Lynched

Not in shame. Not in sorrow. But in pride. And threat.

The only surprise here is that the state of Tennessee actually fired him.

Crooks and Liars:

The state of Tennessee has fired a veteran investigator because officials believed that he attempted to use violent stories about how his relatives participated in a lynching to intimidate African-Americans who were trying to file claims against emergency responders.

WTVF reported that William Sewell, a medical service investigator who had been with the state for more than 40 years, told the graphic story to Shun Mullins last summer.

Mullins had filed a complaint claiming that his mother had died when the Algood's deputy fire chief refused to perform CPR because she was black. The complaint stated that the fire chief covered it up by falsifying medical reports.

Sewell had started the meeting by asking Mullins if he had ever been to prison.

"His very first question was, 'Mr. Mullins have you ever been to the penitentiary?" Mullins recalled. "That was more than insulting to me."

Before concluding the meeting, Sewell decided to tell a shocking personal story about his family's history with racism.

"Mr. Sewell goes into a story about a hanging, that he had been told, about the hanging of a black man," Mullins explained.

Nashville NAACP member Sheryl Allen and an acquaintance, Judy Mainord, were also present in the room. Mullins, Allen and Mainord all remembered the story the same way in affidavits.

Sewell said that a black man had been lynched in Baxter, Mullins' hometown.

"They hung him, and they started carving his skin out of his back," Allen said. "It was like he got excited telling this story."

"They lowered the body, and all the white men standing around took turns removing the skin from the black man's back," Mainord recalled Sewell saying.

In conclusion, Sewell said that he still owned a "strap" of the black man's skin that had been given to him by his grandfather.

"They made a strap out of his skin, and they used that strap as a knife sharpener," Allen remarked.

Equal Opportunity Lynching

Erik Loomis, who has a photograph:

Black History Month isn’t just about MLK and the civil rights movement. It’s about remembering the horrible things that white people did to black people through American history. Here’s a good post detailing the lynching of black women. Some examples for your Thursday:

Laura Nelson

Laura Nelson was lynched on May 23, 1911 In Okemah, Okluskee, Oklahoma. Her fifteen year old son was also lynched at the same time but I could not find a photo of her son. The photograph of Nelson was drawn from a postcard. Authorities accused her of killing a deputy sheriff who supposedly stumbled on some stolen goods in her house. Why they lynched her child is a mystery. The mob raped and dragged Nelson six miles to the Canadian River and hanged her from a bridge.(NAACP: One Hundred Years of Lynching in the US 1889-1918 )

There are more. Lots more.

Texas Celebrates Black History Month

by lynching a black man who dared to marry and sire children with a white woman.

Alfred Wright was a 28-year-old physical therapist, a “man of great faith,” and father of three sons. He grew up in Jasper, Texas along with four siblings, and a father who was both the town’s pastor and gym teacher. Friends described him as ambitious, clean-living, hard-working, fun-loving, brilliant and a wonderful father. He went missing for 18 days. He was found by volunteers and his father, stripped down to his shorts and one sock, with his throat cleanly slit and one ear missing.

The police recorded the cause of death as “accidental drug overdose.”

Alfred Wright was also a black man married to a pretty white woman…in small-town Texas.

But the real racists are liberals who accuse cry "racism" every time some ni**er dies of an overdose.

Those drugs that slit your throat are real killers, man.

The Sexualized Racism Rosa Parks Fought Is Alive and Well in Houston

Read At the Dark End of the Street. Long before Martin Luther King Jr. started preaching, black women in the South were fighting the true source of American racism: the white sexual terror that gave white men freedom to rape black women without consequence while lynching every black man who dared share a sidewalk with a white woman.

Crooks and Liars:

Houston Police have refused to explain why they took a 13-year-old white girl from her two black guardians over the weekend and placed her in the custody of Child Protective Services.

Landry Thompson's mother had signed notarized papers giving dance instructor Emmanuel Hurd full guardianship over her during a trip from Oklahoma to Houston for training, according to KHOU.

Thompson, Hurd and another dance instructor had stopped at a gas station in Houston on Saturday night when they were surrounded by police cars.

Thompson is a 13-year-old blonde white girl and both dance instructors are young African-American men.

"We were on the GPS trying to figure out where the hotel was," Hurd recalled. "They just pulled us out of the car and put our hands behind our backs like we were criminals."

"The officer asked me 'who’s the girl?' and I said 'she’s my student,'" Hurd continued. “I told him I had a notarized letter from her parents stating that we have full guardianship over her while we’re here.”

All three told the police the same story, but the officers apparently weren't buying it.

“They still put handcuffs on me and it really scared me,” the 13-year-old said. “And they put me in the back of a cop car and I was terrified.”

Thompson's mother, Destiny, was shocked when she found out that her daughter had been placed in the care of Child Protective Services.

“She was with the people I wanted her to be with," the mother remarked. "She was with people I trusted. And now she was taken away from those people and in a shelter with people I didn’t know.”

At first officials reportedly demanded that the mother fly to Houston to get her daughter, but 11 hours later, the girl was released back into the custody of Hurd.

Destiny Thompson insisted that the police owed her and her daughter an apology. However, the department refused to comment for KHOU's report.

 Nothing's fucking changed.

How the Criminal Justice System Lynched Trayvon Martin

In a grotesque mangling of justice, Trayvon was found guilty of forcing that nice white man to kill him. It was a deliberate, premeditated, cold-blooded crime by the defense, aided and abetted by a prosecution who cared little more about Martin than did the cops who destroyed evidence and let Zimmerman walk

Patricia Williams in The Nation:

Much of it comes down to an all-too-familiar double standard. Sociologist Troy Duster recently summarized the difficulty confronted by prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda when he asked the jury to reverse the circumstances and imagine that an armed 28-year-old black man followed an unarmed 17-year-old white teenager, shot him dead and then pleaded self-defense: “The problem with this invitation to speculate,” he said, “is that it asks that we break frame with ‘common sense.’” For all the legal language of the courtroom, racialized narratives will emerge and form along the very same lines that Gordon Allport and Leo Postman identified in their research more than sixty years ago: in the “retelling,” a razor will leap “from the white man’s hand to… a colored man’s hand.”

And so, by the end of the trial, the 200-pound Zimmerman, despite martial arts training and a history of assaulting others, was transformed into a “soft,” retiring marshmallow of a weakling. The 158-pound Martin had been reimagined as an immense, athletically endowed, drug-addled “thug.”

Consider, by way of inverted contrast, the 2007 conviction of John White, a black man who shot an unarmed white teenager in New York in 2006. According to The New York Times, the victim, Daniel Cicciaro, “showed up at Mr. White’s house just after 11:00 p.m. to challenge his son Aaron, then 19, to a fight.” Waking up to “threats, profanities and racial epithets,” Mr. White “grabbed a loaded Beretta he kept in the garage of his house in Miller Place, a predominantly white hamlet on Long Island.” At the trial, which the Times described as “racially charged,” the prosecution successfully argued that the case “did not hinge on race but the rash actions of a quick-tempered man who kept an arsenal in his house in preparation for such a situation.” White, unlike Zimmerman, was convicted of manslaughter.

SNIP

It helped that the stage was set for this from the start. On February 26, 2012, when Zimmerman killed Martin, the Sanford Police Department quickly and all too casually concluded, after a halfhearted investigation, that they were “prohibited” from arresting him. Martin’s body was shoved in the morgue with little effort to identify it until his parents filed a missing-persons report; his wet clothing was tossed carelessly in a plastic bag to rot, possibly degrading key evidence. Zimmerman was lightly interrogated, then released without charge. No drug or alcohol testing was performed on him.

It would take more than a month of increasing public pressure for the case to be re-examined by a special prosecutor, and for the State of Florida to press for second-degree murder—arguably a curious bit of overcharging, since it imposes a burden as high (depraved or intentional disregard for human life) as the burden in a “stand your ground” defense  (a mere preponderance of the evidence) is low. Also surprising, the prosecution brought forth the charge of manslaughter (reckless disregard for human life) only at the end of the trial, almost as an afterthought.

Tasked with proving that Zimmerman was unreasonable to kill Martin, the prosecution was dismally scattered as a whole. Even the evidence it entered to illuminate the time sequence—a grainy tape of Martin shopping at a 7-Eleven—was freighted with unaddressed innuendo. No one looks innocent on a store’s security camera. Nor did it help that the store clerk was brought in to say he didn’t remember Martin—testimony of so little relevance, it seemed only posited to reassure us that he didn’t rob the place.

Worse, the prosecution repeatedly failed to object at terribly crucial moments, allowing the jury to hear irrelevant rumor, damaging insinuation and general spuriousness. Defense attorneys Mark O’Mara and Don West built their case around profiling Martin: grilling witnesses about other burglaries in the neighborhood, speculating about crime, even hypothesizing about a piece of broken window awning found five days after Martin was killed, in the bushes directly beneath the awning to which it belonged. Could it not be used as what’s called a “slim jim” for break-ins? Could it not have been part of a plot planned by Martin? Wasn’t Zimmerman’s fear about crime in the neighborhood a reasonable one? Wasn’t it true that a young man named Emmanuel Burgess had been prowling around the neighborhood only weeks before? Tall, skinny black guy? Serving five years for burglary now? Hadn’t there been a spree of burglaries? A rash of crime? The defense posited the entire annals of Sanford, Florida, crime into the record, drawing out the details of backpacks and bikes stolen by persons who just happened not to be Trayvon Martin.

And that's not the half of it.  Read the whole thinig.

Don't Let This Murderer Get Away

This is as blatant a racist killing as any lynching from 100 years ago. It's been covered by many, but for my money @PZMeyers says it best:

Trayvon Martin went to a convenience store in his family’s neighborhood to buy some candy. He was 17. He was unarmed. He was black.

George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch leader”, called the police to report a “suspicious person”; he was told not to confront him, but somehow in the next few minutes Zimmerman got out there and shot and murdered Trayvon Martin. The puffed-up coward Zimmerman grabbed his gun, confronted a teenager carrying nothing but a bag of Skittles, and murdered him. There is no possible excuse, no way that there could be some exculpatory fact to justify his actions: Zimmerman was carrying a loaded gun and on a mission of self-inflated importance to defend his neighborhood (which was also Martin’s neighborhood) from suspicious young black men.

What do you think happened next, when the police arrived on the scene and found Zimmerman with a smoking gun, who immediately admitted to gunning Trayvon Martin down?

Nothing.

Zimmerman is still free. It’s been two weeks; no action is being taken. The Florida district attorney is even dragging his heels about deciding to investigate the murder, and claiming that Zimmerman was a pillar of the community.

Sign the petition. Tell racist goddamned Florida they can’t just ignore a vigilante who murders young black people.

It gets worse. Recordings of 911 calls on the night of the murder are available: Martin was screaming for help and begging for his life when Zimmerman gunned him down. And apparently what sent Zimmerman on his macho crusade to stop a suspicious suspect was that Martin was running away.

Why hasn’t he been arrested?

No, that's not a rhetorical question, even though we all know the answer. Keep asking, though. Make that craven, racist attorney general stand up in front of cameras and say in so many words of one syllable that when a mouthbreathing teabagging cracker shoots an unarmed, innocent black kid in cold blood, the state of Florida is just fucking fine with it.