Police Killings and Racial Profiling Updates

PROFILED a ﬁlm by Kathleen Foster

Discussion Guide

PROFILED knits the stories of the families and supporters of black and Latino youth murdered by the police into a powerful indictment of racial proﬁling and police brutality, and places them within the context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Table of Contents 01. About the Discussion Guide ...... 3 02. About the Film ...... 3 03. Filmmaker’s Statement ...... 4 04. Questions Before Viewing ...... 4 05. Discussion Questions After Viewing ...... 5 06. Additional Information That Expands Issues and Themes in the Film ...... 6 A. Police Killings and Racial Profiling Updates ...... 6 B. Race: A Deliberate Invention ...... 7 C. Race: A Form of Social Control from Colonial Times to the Present ...... 8 D. Race: A Product of Racism, Not a Biological Fact ...... 9 07. Four Centuries of Resistance...... 10 08. Selected Sources...... 20 09. Links to Organizations That Are Engaged in Struggles for Racial, Social, and Economic Justice...... 25 2 01. About the Discussion Guide

This Discussion Guide was developed as a tool for organizations, community groups, and educators who want to use PROFILED to stimulate discussion and involvement of their audiences at community events and in the classroom. Its aim, like that of the film, is to encourage discussion on the critical issues of race and racism in the U.S. today. It also serves as a call to action, encouraging viewers to join with others in multiracial unity to fight racism.

The Guide includes questions to be asked before the screening to encourage viewers to reflect on what they know or may not know about police killings and racial profiling.

The Guide suggests questions to discuss after the screening with the aim of stimulating further reflection on the connections between racial profiling, race, and racism.

The Guide contains excerpts from historical and contemporary readings on race and racism that instructors or facilitators may use to help audience members expand and build on their knowledge of the issues.

The Guide also provides resource materials, including books, articles, films, and Internet links that explore the themes raised by the film.

For those wanting to get involved, the Guide provides links to organizations that are engaged in struggles for racial, social, and economic justice. 02. About the Film

PROFILED knits the stories of mothers of black and Latino youth murdered by the New York Police Department (NYPD) into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within the historical context of racism in the U.S. Some of the victims—Eric Garner, Michael Brown— are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods.

PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for black and Latino people in this country, ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood to the killings and protests in Staten Island, New York, and Ferguson, Missouri. Moving interviews with victims’ family members are juxtaposed with sharply etched analyses by evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves, Jr. (The Race Myth) who debunks claims of genetic differences based on race, and civil rights lawyer, Chauniqua D. Young, who was part of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) legal team that filed the successful federal class action lawsuit against the NYPD’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policies. PROFILED gives viewers a window on one of the burning issues of our time. 3 03. Filmmaker’s Statement

Since PROFILED was released in July 2016, the violence has continued. According to the Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database, the police have killed 862 people so far this year (as of November 14, 2017). A disproportionate number of these victims have been black and Latino men.

Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act that outlawed racial segregation, vast racial disparities still exist between white Americans and Americans of color, especially African Americans and Latinos. Changes in both the criminal justice system and social welfare programs have led us to a society closely resembling the racially segregated society of the past. As Michelle Alexander writes in her book The New Jim Crow, “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

In PROFILED, viewers witness the growth of a grassroots movement as the families of victims of police shootings and their supporters lead a struggle for justice and an end to police violence and racial profiling. They organize community vigils, educational events, protests and legal challenges.

At PROFILED’s many screenings at colleges, community centers, museums, and film festivals around the country, audiences have been inspired by the strength and courage of the families and friends of victims. The film has generated thought-provoking discussions about the roots and consequences of racial discrimination in the U.S., especially in the law enforcement system. Multiracial audiences have been motivated to find ways to work for change.

The audience response to PROFILED has inspired this Guide. The aim is to continue to bring communities together, and to facilitate discussions and organizing efforts around the issues the film explores. 04. Questions Before Viewing

Video footage of Eric Garner being killed in a police chokehold, and protests like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown, brought the issue of police killings and racial profiling to national attention. Numerous deaths since then, and lack of accountability for the shootings—like the acquittal in September 2017 of a former police officer in the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith in Saint Louis, Missouri—reveal that the issues are not going away.

A. What are some of the instances of police killings you remember from media coverage?

B. How were these events covered? Who were the main voices telling the story—news reporters, political leaders, police officials, or family members of victims?

C. What images and words were most frequent, especially in repeated coverage?

D. How were the victims characterized? The police?

E. Do you know people who have been racially profiled or have you ever been profiled by the police?

4 05. Discussion Questions After Viewing

A. What, in your opinion, is the main message of the film?

B. What are one or two scenes or sequences in the film that helped you reach this conclusion?

C. Who is telling the story and how is it being told?

D. Family, friends, and members of the community speak about the victims of police killings in ways that differ markedly from media portrayals of those victims. Has the film changed the way you think about media coverage of police killings?

E. Were you surprised by the statistics in the documentary, like the number of stop and frisks, or the number of people killed? Or any other data?

F. Evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves Jr. argues that as a classification of the world’s people, race has no true basis in science or biology. In the late 1600s Southern plantation owners used the spurious notion of “racial” distinctions as a means of dividing their multiracial workforce and justifying slavery. Does the race myth have currency today, and if so, what are its consequences?

G. In what way, if any, did the film change or challenge any of your assumptions about the practices of racial profiling or stop-and-frisk policies? About the victims of police shootings? About the extent of the problem and what can be done about it?

H. The protests that followed the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, seemed to mark the beginning of a renewed struggle for civil rights in the U.S. Are the resistance movements of today similar to or different from those of the civil rights era of the 1950s to the 1970s?

I. Jacob Lawrence, whose painting Taboo we see in the film, understood that art has transformative powers. Indeed, it can awaken us to our humanity. In The Challenge of Blackness the scholar Lerone Bennett tells us,

The image sees . . . the image feels . . . the image acts . . . [To] change a situation you have to change the image men have of themselves and of their situation.

Do you agree that art, including documentary films, can successfully address social issues and serve as a tool for change?

5 06. Additional Information That Expands Issues and Themes in the Film

A. Police Killings and Racial Profiling Updates

Police Killings

The shooting of college-bound teenager Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police on August 9, 2014—along with the video-recorded death less than a month earlier of Staten Islander Eric Garner in a police chokehold—brought national attention to the frequency with which police kill unarmed black and Latino men in the United States and the rarity with which police officers are held accountable or brought to justice.

Public outrage drew attention to the fact that no official government records of these killings were kept, and as a result, the Washington Post, among others, began compiling a national database. The Post found that, as of November 14, 2017, 862 people had been shot and killed by police nationwide. In 2016, 963 people were shot and killed, and in 2015, 991.

The data showed that blacks and Latinos are victims of police killings at highly disproportionate rates relative to their percentage in the U.S. population.

Stop and Frisk and Racial Profiling

Stop and frisk is the police practice of temporarily detaining civilians on the street, questioning them, and at times searching them for weapons or other contraband. By law, the police officers must have reasonable suspicion that the person stopped has engaged in, or is about to engage in, a criminal activity.

Each year hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are illegally profiled and subjected to humiliating experiences at the hands of the NYPD—improper arrests, inappropriate touching, sexual harassment and violence.

In January 2008, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a federal class action lawsuit against the City of New York to challenge the NYPD’s practices of racial profiling and unconstitutional stop and frisks of New York City residents. Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al. focused not only on the lack of any reasonable suspicion to make these stops, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, but also on the obvious racial disparities—approximately 85 percent of those stopped are black and Latino, even though these two groups make up only 52 percent of the city’s population.

6 In a ruling on August 12, 2013, following a nine-week trial, a federal judge found the NYPD liable for a pattern and practice of racial profiling and unconstitutional stops, and the City began the joint remedial course of action ordered by the court, in which all stakeholders—from community groups to the NYPD—came together to agree on solutions. But the community complained of continuing harassment, and in June 2017 the CCR found it necessary to submit a court filing highlighting the ongoing racial disparities in the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices.

The Effects of Racial Profiling on Communities

A broad range of communities have learned to live in fear of police, including a generation of children of color and some entire neighborhoods; they expect to be mistreated by police.

The widespread use of stop and frisk in New York City has been part of a larger trend of ever- increasing criminalization and mass incarceration in the U.S. The U.S. has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.2 million Americans behind bars, or 756 per 100,000 people.

Women of color and members of the LGBTQ community are routinely subjected to racial profiling, targeted for sexual assault, and killed by police, yet their stories are rarely reported in the mainstream media. In her book Invisible No More, attorney and activist Andrea J. Ritchie sets the record straight by presenting personal narratives of women affected by police violence, including the Sioux women protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline; Sandra Bland, whose family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the Waller County, Texas, jail and police department after she died in her jail cell following a traffic stop; and Kayla Moore, a black transgender woman who died at the hands of police officers in Berkeley, California. Ritchie places the aggressive policing of women squarely within the framework of structural racism, dating from the time of slavery to the present era of police violence and mass incarceration. In addition, Invisible No More documents an important social development— the growth of a women’s movement for racial justice that is now an influential voice in the fight against racist violence.

B. Race: A Deliberate Invention

In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money. —Lerone Bennett Jr., The Shaping of Black America

In his seminal essay “The Road Not Taken,” the scholar, author, and social historian Lerone Bennett wrote of early America as a land where European immigrants had an opportunity to take the “road of fraternal cooperation” with the indigenous population—in his words, “a program of free and creative development of the immense resources of the American continent.” Diplomacy and abandonment of

7 any notion of white supremacy or a God-given right to appropriate resources and alter the institutions of the indigenous Americans would be required if Europeans chose this transformative path—which Bennett called “the only road to justice.”

But that road was not taken.

America or, to be more precise, the men who spoke in the name of America decided that it was going to be a white place defined negatively by the bodies and the blood of the reds and the blacks. And that decision, which was made in the 1660s and elaborated over a two-hundred-year period, foreclosed certain possibilities in America—perhaps forever—and set off depth charges that are still echoing and re- echoing in the commonwealth. What makes this all the more mournful is that it didn’t have to happen that way.

C. Race: A Form of Social Control from Colonial Times to the Present

In The Whiting of Euro-Americans, Thandeka, a theologian, journalist, and scholar, documents how the early tobacco planters and ruling elite of Virginia, in response to rebellions on their plantations by a united workforce of European and African indentured servants and enslaved Africans, devised a “race strategy” to sow divisions between them.

What began in 1676 as a dispute over Native American lands between the upper-class plantation owners and poorer white planters led by Nathaniel Bacon, became a civil war, with plantation workers joining the uprising to fight for their freedom from bondage. The rebels seized control of the colony, burning the colonial capital, Jamestown, to the ground, compelling the governor and his forces to flee. Although Bacon’s rebellion failed, it exposed the growing power of the colony’s interracial working class and triggered a conscious attempt by the leaders of Virginia and other colonies to drive a wedge between black and white workers.

The Virginia Assembly became the first in the colonies to introduce laws that divided workers by the color of their skin. From 1680 to 1705, laws reflected racism, the deliberate attempt to separate blacks and whites and the rigid policing of slave conduct. “The [Virginia] legislators,” Thandeka writes, “also raised the status of white servants, workers, and the white poor in relation to their masters and other white superiors.” The result: “Racial contempt would function as a wall between poor whites and blacks, protecting masters and their slave-produced wealth from both lower-class whites and slaves.”

But any belief on the part of poor whites that they now shared “status and dignity with their social betters” was largely illusory, Thandeka observes. White racism, as A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. has noted, “was from the start a vehicle for classism; its primary goal was not to elevate a race but to denigrate a class [and] was thus a means to an end, and the end was the defense of Virginia’s class structure and the further subjugation of the poor of all ‘racial’ colors.” 8 In the South after the Civil War ended in 1865, newly freed black and white tenant farmers, laborers, sharecroppers, and small independent farmers, who faced worsening economic conditions, joined forces to wage a struggle against the white ruling class they held responsible for their plight. To weaken the multiracial forces opposing them, the plantation owners, bankers, corporations, and politicians in league with them passed laws dividing white and black workers and introduced a legal system of segregation known as Jim Crow. They rallied support among poor whites by appealing to ideas of white supremacy. With segregation firmly in place, and the founding of the violent white supremacist militia known as the Ku Klux Klan in 1866, the ruling elite held on to its power.

Martin Luther King Jr. called the segregation of the races a political strategy employed by the emerging business interests in the South during the Reconstruction era to eliminate the gains made by former slaves and “to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.” In his speech at the March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, King outlined this history:

It may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow.

The Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, a massive struggle spearheaded by blacks, pressed for political action to remedy racial inequality. Congress responded with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation in public places and discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, national origin, and gender. Other legislation would follow, but anti-black racism persists in all aspects of U.S. society today—in education, in health care, in housing, in the criminal justice system, and on the job. The U.S. remains two societies, separate and unequal.

Richard Rothstein, in his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, lays the blame for residential segregation on laws and policy decisions passed at the local, state, and federal levels. Intentionally discriminatory zoning regulations, taxation, subsidies, and redlining, targeted against black families, have promoted and enforced patterns of discrimination and racial inequality that persist to this day.

D. Race: A Product of Racism, Not a Biological Fact

In his book The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, preeminent evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves proves once and for all that it doesn’t. Through accessible and compelling language, he makes the provocative argument that science cannot account for the radical categories used to classify people, and debunks ancient race-related fallacies that are still held as fact, from damaging medical profiles to

9 misconceptions about sports. He explains why defining race according to skin tone or eye shape is woefully inaccurate, and how making assumptions based on these false categories regarding IQ, behavior, or predisposition to disease has devastating effects. Demonstrating that racial distinctions are in fact social inventions, not a biological truth, The Race Myth brings much-needed, sound science to one of America’s most emotionally charged debates. —Publishers’ statement, The Race Myth

Human difference, generally—and erroneously, as Graves tells us—perceived as “race,” is not the root cause of racism. The sociologist Karen E. Fields and the historian Barbara J. Fields argue that “the practice of racism produces the illusion of race,” through what they call “racecraft,” a “phenomenon . . . intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life.”

So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed. That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions. —Publishers’ statement, Racecraft 07. Four Centuries of Resistance: 1600s to the Present In the late sixteenth century European nations, locked in battle for economic and military dominance, took their struggle to the Americas.

English royalty and merchant bankers financed voyages that led to the founding of the first English colony in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Land grants allowed early settlers to establish lucrative plantations with a labor force of indentured servants—impoverished English men and women, freed Africans, Native Americans, Irish, and enslaved Africans. Forty years later England had conquered more Native American land and was the dominant European presence on the Atlantic coast, and wealthy planters were turning to Africa for a cheaper, more plentiful source of labor for their growing plantations.

By the end of the seventeenth century all African workers were legally defined as chattel slaves, and for the next two hundred years Africans were captured and brought to work on the plantations.

Resistance started from the moment of enslavement. Some shipboard insurrections, like the revolt in 1839 by captured Africans on the slave ship Amistad, and the rebellion of slaves led by Nat Turner in 1831 on a plantation in Virginia have been the subjects of Hollywood movies. Little known are numerous earlier insurrections that prevented thousands of slave ships from ever reaching U.S. shores; the African and Indian slaves who escaped, and formed outlaw communities on uninhabited land; the countless slave rebellions; and the fightback against exploitation by the “Atlantic proletariat,” 10 the new multiracial, multiethnic class of workers brought together by colonial expansion.

This section highlights some of the significant acts of resistance, from the early days of ship insurrections to the mid-twentieth century’s Civil Rights Movement as well as key incidents of racism and police brutality that have sparked today’s resurgence of a civil rights struggle, notably the killing of Michael Brown in 2014.

1600s

Plantation workers rebel Individual escapes, group uprisings; accounts of resistance abound.

1676—Bacon’s Rebellion The most significant of many uprisings by armed plantation workers, this rebellion marks the time when plantation owners began increasingly to turn to racism to divide a multiracial workforce and to the enslavement of more Africans to work on their plantations.

1700s

1712—Enslaved Africans rebel In an uprising in New York, enslaved Africans took up arms against their captors.

1741—The New York Conspiracy Enslaved Africans and white workers supposedly planned a revolt where the city would be leveled by fires.

Struggles against impressment and enslavement English sailors, who had been kidnapped and forced to work on English navy vessels, and abducted Africans led struggles against impressment and enslavement.

1775-1783—The War of Independence The thirteen American colonies defeated the British and became the United States of America. Enslaved Africans who had fought on the side of the rebels believed winning would bring them freedom, but as the war drew to a close, they discovered that a central tenet of the Declaration of Independence, which held that “all men are created equal,” did not apply to them. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other Founding Fathers were slaveholders; their racist ideology prevailed. Returning soldiers were forced back into slavery.

1789-1803—The Haitian Revolution The only successful slave revolt in history ended slavery in Haiti and French control over the island. Fear of slave revolts inspired by the Haitian example led to harsher treatment and control of slaves among planters in the American South.

11 1800s

1830—Rise of the Abolitionist Movement The Abolitionist Movement, which sought to emancipate all slaves and end racial discrimination and segregation, began to gain traction among Northerners. Its proponents included former slaves, free blacks, and white supporters like William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

1835-1842—The Second Seminole War Native Americans, with the support of fugitive slaves and some whites, gained a treaty allowing them to settle on land in the West.

1839—The Amistad revolt Fifty-three kidnapped Africans revolted on the Amistad, a Spanish slave ship, killing most of the crew. The rebels eventually returned to Africa.

1849—Harriet Tubman escapes Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery in Maryland, escaped to the North and immediately returned to the South to rescue her family.

There are two things I’ve got a right to and these are death or liberty . . . one or the other I mean to have. No one will ever take me back alive; I shall fight for my liberty.

She went on to lead other slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad—a network of African Americans and white sympathizers who offered shelter and aid to escaped slaves. Traveling by foot and by wagon, by boxcar and by riverboat, the fugitives headed north and west.

Tubman became a leading abolitionist, a fighter for women’s rights, and an armed scout and spy for the U.S. Army during the Civil War.

1857—The Panic of 1857 The economic downturn of 1857 was capitalism’s first worldwide crisis. In the U.S. the panic led to widespread business failings, loss of jobs, and a drop in agricultural prices, which in turn heightened protests among unemployed workers in the North and fomented rebellions on the plantations. Against this backdrop, tension built up between the Northern industrialists and Southern plantation owners over who would control the country’s economic and political direction.

1859—John Brown raids Harpers Ferry Armory The abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His intention was to seize guns and arm slaves with the weapons they would use in the struggle for their liberation. The action failed, but it became the catalyst for the American Civil War (1861-1865).

1866—Rise of the Ku Klux Klan Founded in the Reconstruction Era, the white supremacist group known as the Ku Klux Klan sought to maintain economic and political

12 dominance for Southern whites, most notoriously by terrorizing black people. Lynchings, torchings, and other acts of brutality instigated by the Klan became the order of the day.

1892—Ida B. Wells launches anti-lynching campaign Born in Mississippi at the start of the Reconstruction Era, Ida B. Wells was a fearless journalist and civil rights activist who battled racism, sexism, and economic injustice. A co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Wells launched an anti- lynching crusade in the pages of Free Speech, the Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper she edited. Angered by those articles, whites destroyed the newspaper’s offices and made threats on her life. But, undeterred, Wells carried on her crusade. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”

Wells presented extensive statistical data, based on her own meticulous research, which refuted the claims that black men were being lynched because they were guilty of committing crimes, including the sexual assault of white women. She showed how, in the years after the Civil War, lynching was a tool used in the South to prevent the social advancement of free black people, especially those who successfully competed with whites in business or politics.

Lynching culture continues today As Keisha N. Blain has noted, police killings, and the seeming impossibility of securing a conviction of officers responsible for the unlawful deaths, today represent the continuation of the lynching culture that Wells’s data quantified.

Wells followed up her research with bold actions and called for a collective effort reaching across gender, race, and nationality, both in the U.S. and Britain. She was instrumental in getting the anti- lynching agenda into the international spotlight.

1900s

1909—The NAACP The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded partly in response to the lynching of black people. Its mission: to secure the rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution—abolition of slavery, citizens rights and equal protection of the law, and voting rights.

1910—The National Urban League Black and white activists established the National Urban League (originally called the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes) to improve urban conditions among black people.

1931—Worldwide protests over the arrest of the Scottsboro Boys Thousands took part in protests to free the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers wrongly arrested and sentenced to death for raping two white women—so-called nomads of the Depression, like the accused—on a freight train traveling between Chattanooga and Memphis.

A legal battle to appeal the convictions, initiated by the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal advocacy section of the Communist Party USA, and later joined by the NAACP, drew worldwide attention.

13 It was a time of unrest; revolutionary struggles were taking place everywhere. German Nazism, with its belief in the existence of a master race, echoed the racism endemic to the U.S., and the legal and political battle to free the teenagers caught the mood of anti- Fascists abroad who rallied in their defense throughout Europe.

The Scottsboro Boys campaign became the central motivating force of an unspoken war waged across the U.S. where the working class was suffering the hardships of the Great Depression. Scottsboro came to symbolize the fight for civil rights and against racial and class injustice.

In the South, with its own history of working-class radicalism, the Scottsboro case galvanized many black workers and some whites to join the ILD. Some of the most militant struggles in the next few years took place around Scottsboro.

1932—Mass rally in Alabama for the jobless Five to seven thousand people took part in a mass rally outside the Jefferson County courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, to demand that the government provide direct and substantive aid to the jobless.

1934—Wave of strikes among Southern industrial workers Industrial workers in Alabama’s coal, iron, and steel industries—dependent on a workforce that was in many cases predominantly black—staged strikes demanding equal pay, wage increases, and union recognition.

1935—Plantation workers strike In the spring, the Alabama Sharecroppers’ Union (SCU), representing 1,500 cotton choppers working on 35 plantations, went on strike for better wages. In areas where the union was strong, the workers won wage increases, but in others the plantation owners reacted with violence, hiring vigilantes to beat up strikers and calling on police officers to arrest them. But the action of the cotton choppers emboldened others. By summer, membership of the SCU—now including dairy workers, plowmen, and farmworkers—grew to almost 10,000, and walkouts demanding ten-hour days and higher wages spread across the South.

1937—Youth protests anticipate the civil rights struggle of the 1960s Black high school and college students joined with rural and working-class youth and teachers in civil rights protests and campaigns to promote workers’ rights, voting rights, and anti-lynching legislation, These actions were initiated by the newly formed Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). With a membership drawn from historically black colleges and universities, the Scouts, the steel industry workforce, and other groups, SNYC, in its brief history (1937-1949), was a strong voice on issues of citizenship, education, jobs, and health throughout the South. Its activism laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

1955—Rosa Parks refuses to surrender her seat In Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, Rosa Parks refused to comply with a bus driver’s demand that she give up her seat in the “colored section” to a white passenger. Parks was arrested

14 and jailed for violating the state’s segregation laws. The city’s black population came out in her support and launched a bus boycott which lasted for 381 days before the bus company agreed to desegregate the buses. For black people throughout the South, mired in a harshly unequal world of racial segregation and repression, the boycott was a call to action. For people throughout the nation, it was the opening salvo in the fight for civil rights.

1961—Freedom Rides Busloads of black and white activists, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) traveled through the South, in open defiance of local ordinances calling for segregated seating on public transportation.

1963—Peaceful protests met with violence Protesters at marches and sit-ins at lunch counters to desegregate public facilities were attacked by police with clubs, fire hoses, and dogs. Hundreds were arrested, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Birmingham church bombed Four young black girls were killed when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

The March on Washington An estimated 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., on August 28 to march for jobs and freedom.

1965—Bloody Sunday On what became known as Bloody Sunday, hundreds of demonstrators—among them, Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams, and John Lewis—set off on a march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, as part of a campaign to register black voters. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge the marchers were beaten back by state troopers in gas masks and wielding nightsticks—a scene of shocking brutality broadcast throughout the nation and around the world.

1966—The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense In a clear break with the tradition of passive resistance in the struggle for civil rights—in essence, a nod to the militant black nationalism of Malcolm X and his call to build a “better world . . . with extreme methods”—the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense organized armed patrols to monitor the behavior of police in the black neighborhood of Oakland, California. The party demanded an end to police brutality and organized programs that addressed issues affecting the community— most prominently, health and nutrition. The Panthers went on to establish chapters in major cities across the country.

1967—“Long hot summer” protests In the “long hot summer” of 1967, in cities across the country, thousands of protesters took to the streets. The most intense of the year’s 159 rebellions was in Detroit.

At 3:35 a.m. on a Sunday in late July, officers of the city’s police—an overwhelmingly white force, routinely accused of racial profiling and brutality—raided an unlicensed after-hours bar in a predominantly black neighborhood. The confrontation that erupted, as the police escorted the black patrons to the waiting paddy wagons, turned into one of the biggest urban rebellions the country had witnessed. City blocks were torched; scores of businesses were looted and burned.

15 After five days of turmoil, during which the National Guard, U.S. Army troops and tanks, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions (diverted from Vietnam) were sent in to patrol the streets alongside the entire Detroit police force, 43 people had been killed, hundreds injured, and more than 7,000 arrested—almost all were African Americans. To critics of the rebellion, Martin Luther King Jr. had this to say: “A riot is the language of the unheard . . . .Large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

1968—Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement Four thousand workers, the majority of them black, went on strike at the Detroit Dodge auto plant. Emboldened by gains made in the aftermath of the rebellions—thousands of new jobs had been created—they now made militant demands for better conditions on the shop floor.

At the Dodge auto plant workers formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), inspiring fellow workers in other plants, the postal service, the health industry, and factories, as well as students at Wayne State University and members of grassroots organizations. A centralized organization, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), was set up to provide leadership to the movement.

DRUM’s official newspaper, the Inner City Voice, was written by people who had participated in the major militant struggles of the preceding years, and reflected their revolutionary ideas. Reaching a wide audience—monthly circulation was reportedly 10,000 copies—the paper published exposés of local conditions, like the substandard health care provided in city hospitals, and covered national and international struggles and affairs as well.

Scott Kurashige’s The Fifty-Year Rebellion describes the half century since the Detroit uprising as a long rebellion with underlying tensions that continue to haunt the city and the nation today.

1969—Hundreds of thousands protest Vietnam War There was massive black participation in one of the largest anti-war demonstrations in American history. An estimated 500,000 people marched in Washington, D.C., to call for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.

Vietnam is like Mississippi. If they won’t obey the law, send in the troops. —Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan, 1965

1971—Attica On September 9, 1971, 1,500 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Negotiations between prisoners and state officials on improving living conditions ended abruptly after four days when Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller sent in heavily armed state troopers, National Guardsmen, and local police. Forty-three people, including ten hostages, were killed and eighty wounded during the assault, which was followed by beatings and torture that led to decades of lawsuits.

Heather Ann Thompson in “Remembering Attica” said about the retaking of the prison:

It is one of the most horrific assaults in US history. The doctors that go in later liken it to My Lai, to a Civil War painting, to Vietnam writ large, because it is nothing but carnage. This is 16 about putting down black civil rights, it is about having no regard whatsoever for black life.

1991—Rodney King Los Angeles Police Department officers are caught on tape brutally beating a black man, Rodney King. One year later, the acquittal of four white LAPD officers charged in the case triggered five days of civil unrest in South Los Angeles, which left more than 50 people dead and 2,000 injured.

1995—Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega Margarita Rosario’s son, Anthony, and her nephew, Hilton Vega, were killed by NYPD officers. For over two decades since their deaths, Margarita has been an active protester against police violence.

1997—Abner Louima Seven thousand New Yorkers marched to City Hall to demand the arrest of NYPD officers who had brutally assaulted Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, after they Margarita Rosario’s house with mural of her son and nephew arrested him outside a Brooklyn nightclub.

1999—Amadou Diallo Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, was fatally shot 41 times by four NYPD plainclothes officers. A rally in Midtown Manhattan to protest the officers’ acquittal turned into a march down Fifth Avenue, with more than 2,000 protesters joining in. One large group marched 4 miles, all the way to City Hall.

2000s

2001—Timothy Thomas The fatal shooting of Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old black male, by a white police officer in Cincinnati, Ohio, sets off the largest rebellion since the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

2010—Michelle Alexander on the New Jim Crow With the publication of her book The New Jim Crow, legal scholar and civil rights litigator Michelle Alexander identifies the root of today’s racial inequality as the criminal justice system and its practice of discriminatory arrests and sentencing. In what she has tellingly termed the “New Jim Crow” era, millions of black men have been locked up and labeled as criminals, with “scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.”

2012 February—Trayvon Martin Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old, unarmed, high school student was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch coordinator for his gated community. Zimmerman’s acquittal sparked demonstrations across the country. More than 2.2 million people signed a

17 petition calling for Zimmerman’s arrest for murder. Students staged walkouts. Thousands of people attended rallies nationwide.

February—Ramarley Graham Ramarley Graham, an unarmed black teenager, was killed by police in his home in the Bronx, New York.

June—Thousands protest NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies New Yorkers came out in their thousands to march from Harlem to then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse to protest the stop-and-frisk policies of the NYPD.

As the killings of unarmed young men continued, Kathie Cheng of the Stolen Lives Project, a database that documents killings by law enforcement nationwide, declared: “Stop and frisk has led to an epidemic of murders by the NYPD. At least 325 people have been killed by police officers since Amadou Diallo’s death in 1999.”

October—Shantel Davis In Brooklyn, New York, a plainclothes officer shot and killed Natasha Duncan’s unarmed sister, Shantel Davis, through the window of a crashed car.

2013 March—Kimani Gray Carol Gray’s unarmed 16-year-old son, Kimani Gray, was killed by six bullets fired by NYPD officers in East Flatbush, New York.

July—Protests erupt after Zimmerman acquittal Protests spread through more than 100 cities across the country after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of Trayvon Martin’s murder.

Black Lives Matter Movement After the acquittal, the Black Lives Matter Movement began on social media with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. It gained recognition for its street protests following the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014 and has since grown into a national and international movement that campaigns against police violence, racial profiling, and systemic racism.

July—Tyrone West Tawanda Jones’s unarmed brother, Tyrone West—a 44-year-old African American—died of asphyxiation while being restrained by Baltimore police after a traffic stop. Tawanda, along with family and other supporters, has held weekly vigils ever since—“West Wednesdays”—in front of Baltimore City Hall to help raise awareness about West’s case as well as police violence in general. December 6, 2017, marked 228 straight weeks of protest.

18 2014 July—Eric Garner Eric Garner died after an NYPD officer put him in a chokehold while arresting him on suspicion of selling “loosies” (single cigarettes) on the streets of Staten Island. A video of the event was recorded on a friend’s cell phone. Its release on social media prompted hundreds of protests and rallies nationwide and abroad. Eric Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe”—clearly heard on the video—were taken up as a chant against his death and police brutality.

August—Michael Brown A police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, fired six bullets, killing Michael Brown instantly. The death of the black teenager set off protests on the streets of Ferguson for more than a week. Locals were joined by activists from all around the country.

November—Tamir Rice Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy carrying a toy gun, was shot and killed by a Cleveland, Ohio, police officer. National and international outrage followed the release of a surveillance video of the incident.

2015 April—Freddie Gray Protesters took to the streets of Baltimore in response to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray from injuries to his spine and neck while in police custody. Throughout the month protests against the police escalated, with looting, rock throwing, and burning of cars and building, culminating in a declaration of a state of emergency.

July—Sandra Bland Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman, was found hanged in a Texas county jail cell three days after her arrest for a minor traffic violation. The arresting officer, a white state trooper, had threatened her with a stun gun.

2016 September—Prisoners resist “prison slavery” On the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison rebellion, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a prisoner-led section of the Industrial Workers of the World, launched the largest, and arguably least known, prison strike in U.S. history. Their goal: to protest “prison slavery” through work stoppages, hunger strikes, and other acts of resistance.

2017 August—Charlottesville Protesters clashed with white supremacists, Klansmen, and neo-Nazis holding a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some were carrying semiautomatic rifles and Confederate flags and chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans. Fourteen people were injured and one woman was killed when a man linked to a white supremacist group rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.

19 October—Acquittal sparks protest in Saint Louis Demonstrators in Saint Louis, Missouri, protested the acquittal of a former police officer in the shooting death of motorist Anthony Lamar Smith in December 2011. In 18 days of unrest more than 300 protesters were arrested. 08. Selected Sources

SECTION 5

Lerone Bennett quoted in Chinweizu, Decolonizing the African Mind, London: Pero Press, 1987, p. 211. “‘I Can’t Breathe’: Eric Garner Put in Chokehold by NYPD Officer.” Guardian.com, video, December 5, 2014. “Armed with Military-Grade Weapons, Missouri Police Crack Down on Protests over Michael Brown Shooting.” Democracy Now!, video, August 14, 2014.

SECTION 6A

Washington Post, “Fatal Force 825: Police Shootings 2017 Database.” Retrieved November 14, 2017. Center for Constitutional Rights, “First-quarter Stop-and-Frisk Data Sets Yet Another Shameful Record.” Press release, May 2012. Center for Constitutional Rights, “Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al.” Filed January 2008 (ongoing). Center for Constitutional Rights, “Stop and Frisk, The Human Impact: The Stories Behind the Numbers, The Effects on Our Communities.” New York: Center for Constitutional Rights, July 2012. Christopher Mathias, “NYPD Stop and Frisks: 15 Shocking Facts About a Controversial Program.” Huffington Post, May 13, 2012. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010. Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. Bryan Stevenson, “A Presumption of Guilt.” New York Review of Books, July 13, 2017. George Joseph, “Anti-police Brutality Activists: Body Camera Guidelines No Panacea—and Might Make Things Worse.” The Intercept, May 2015.

SECTION 6B

Lerone Bennett, The Shaping of Black America. Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1975. Originally published in Ebony, vol. 25 (August 1970), pp. 71-77.

SECTION 6C

Thandeka, “The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy.” Reproduced from World: The Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Vol. 12, no. 4 (July/August 1998), pp. 14–20.

20 Martin Luther King Jr., “Our God Is Marching On (How Long, Not Long).” Speech at March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 25, 1965. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017.

SECTION 6D

Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Joseph L. Graves Jr., “Science and Healthy Democracy.” Speech, March for Science, Greensboro, North Carolina, April 2017. Barbara J. Fields and Karen Elise Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. New York: Verso Books, 2014. Jason Farbman interview with Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields, “How Race Is Conjured.” Jacobin, June 2015. Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Harper, 1942.

SECTION 7

1600-1700 Sukhdev Sandhu, “Revolution at the Docks.” Guardian, January 2001. Review of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2013. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso Books, 1993. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Edward Rhymes, “Losing What We Never Had: White Privilege and the Deferred Dreams of Black America.” Black Agenda Report, June 2007. 1700 Mavis Christine Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal. Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988. 1775-1783 Justin du Rivage, Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence. The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Adam Gopnik, “We Could Have Been Canada: Was the American Revolution Such a Good Idea?” New Yorker, May 15, 2017. 1789-1803 Claudia E. Sutherland, “Haitian Revolution (1791-1804).” BlackPast.org. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Penguin Books, 2001 (first published 1938).

21 1830 History.com, Frederick Douglass. Lesley Walker, Dale Banham, and Del White, The Abolition Project, 2009. 1835 James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press, 1995. 1839 “The First Amistad Case: A Struggle for Freedom: United States v. The Amistad, 1841.” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. 1849 Biography.com, Harriet Tubman—Union Spy. Biography.com, Harriet Tubman—Mini Biography. Fergus Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Kathryn Schulz, “The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad.” New Yorker, August 22, 2016. 1857 Andrew Glass, “The Panic of 1857 Is Triggered in New York, Aug. 24, 1857.” Politico, August 2015. Lynn Shakinovsky, “The 1857 Financial Crisis and the Suspension of the 1844 Bank Act.“ BRANCH, 2017. 1859 Fergus M. Bordewich, “John Brown’s Day of Reckoning.” Smithsonian, October 2009. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935. 1892 Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law.” Historyisaweapon.com. Originally written in 1893. Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases.” New York Age, June 25, 1892. Ida B. Wells, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895. Reproduced in The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Red Record, Archive.org., February 2005. Keisha N. Blain, “Ida B. Wells Offered the Solution to Police Violence More Than 100 Years Ago.” Washington Post, July 11, 2017. Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933, 2003. 1931 Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez, Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story In Linoleum Cuts. New York: NYU Press, 2003. 1932-1937 Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990, 2015. Margaret Stevens, Red International and Black Caribbean Communists in New York City, Mexico and

22 the West Indies, 1919-1939. London: Pluto Press, 2017. 1954-1966 Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. Created and produced by Henry Hampton, Blackside, Inc.; first shown on PBS in 1987. DVD. Avalon Zoppo, “From Selma to Montgomery: 5 Things You May Not Know About ‘Bloody Sunday.’” Nbcnews.com, March 2017. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Anchor Books, 1993. Lilly Workneh and Taryn Finley, “27 Important Facts Everyone Should Know About the Black Panthers,” Black Voices, Huffington Post, February 2, 2016. PBS Interview with Angela Davis, “Marxist History: USA: Black Panther Party.” Frontline, February 1998. Wendell Hassan Marsh, “It Is Better to Fight: On Martin and Malcolm.” Viewpoint, January 16, 2012 Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. 1967, 1968 David Goldberg, “Detroit’s Radical.” Jacobin, May 2014. Heather Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, with Manning Marable, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, A Study in Urban Revolution. Revised edition. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Scott Kurashige, The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Herb Boyd, Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2017. Scott Kurashige, “1967 Detroit Riots: ‘Resistance’ Then and Now.” Al Jazeera, July 23, 2017. Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman, and Peter Gessner, Finally Got the News. Documentary film produced in association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1970. DVD, 55 min. 1971 Heather Ann Thompson, “Remembering Attica.” Jacobin, September 2016. Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016. 2010 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010. James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 2012 The Stolen Lives Project documents cases of killings by law enforcement nationwide and is a joint project of the Anthony Baez Foundation, the National Lawyers Guild, and the October 22 Coalition to

23 Stop Police Brutality. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. 2014 “‘I Can’t Breathe’: Eric Garner Put in Chokehold by NYPD Officer.” Guardian.com, video, December 5, 2014. Michael Harriot, “How Ferguson, Mo., Changed America ... and Me.” The Root, August 9, 2017. Glen Ford, “Ferguson Struggle Has Already Altered Black Politics.” Black Agenda Report, November 20, 2014. “Armed with Military-Grade Weapons, Missouri Police Crack Down on Protests over Michael Brown Shooting.” Democracy Now!, video, August 14, 2014. Jordan T. Camp, “Black Liberation and Left Renewal.” Jacobin, March 2017. Adolph Reed Jr., “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence.” Nonsite.org, September 16, 2016. 2016 Chloe Kimball, “The Anniversary of Attica: Prison Strikes, Penal Labor, and the New Jim Crow.” The Politic, October 1, 2016. Heather Ann Thompson, “Remembering Attica.” Jacobin, September 2016. Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010. James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. 2017 Sarah Posner, “After Charlottesville Rally Ends in Violence, Alt-Right Vows to Return.” Rolling Stone, August 13, 2017. Patrick Strickland, “St Louis Protests: ‘The New Selma.’” Al Jazeera, November 3, 2017.

Further Readings Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017. David Roediger, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. New York: Verso Books, 2010. Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: From Civil Rights to Barack Obama. New York: Verso Books, 2016.

24 09. Links to Organizations That Are Engaged in Anti-Racist Struggles

Copwatch Patrol Unit (CPU) Justice League NYC Stolen Lives Project Zero Tolerance for Racism Campaign Audre Lorde Project Justice Committee ACLU Justice for Shantel Davis Southern Poverty Law Center Poor People’s Campaign The Equal Justice Initiative Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)

Featured Characters Margarita Rosario Margarita’s son, Anthony Rosario, as well as her nephew, Hilton Vega, were killed in 1995. Natasha Duncan Natasha’s sister, Shantel Davis, was killed in 2012. Carol Gray Carol’s son Kimani Gray was killed in 2013. Joseph L. Graves Jr., Ph.D. Evolutionary biologist and author of The Race Myth. Chauniqua D. Young Civil rights lawyer; member of the Center for Constitutional Rights legal team that successfully challenged the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk practices. Stephanie Foard Teacher-activist; eyewitness to the militarization of Ferguson. Fay Chiang Director of programs for Project Reach, activist, poet, and artist. Kristine Anderson Welsh Social worker; supporter of East Flatbush families of victims killed by the NYPD.

Acknowledgments Developed by: Photos: Kathleen Foster PROFILED Patricia Keeton, Ph.D. Block prints: Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez, Scottsboro, Rose-Ann Mitchell Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts, edited by Andrew Sarah Fronhofer Kim W. Lee [New York: NYU Press, 2003]. Design by: Ekaterina Savina