Tag: sexual assault

It is difficult to use the title that this commentary bears, but upon reflection, it must be so, for the truth supports it. For the truth is, this nation was born in rape. The rape of indigenous women (so called “Indians”) was considered but a spoil of war. African women were ravished aboard slave ships, clad in rags and chains. Many women leaped into the dark, roiling sea, preferring death to how they were treated onboard by seamen.

Asked what she wanted her legacy to be, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once said, “I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That’s how I’d like to be remembered.” Like Shirley, I believe that to restore confidence and trust in our institutions and leaders, we need to speak truth. And that means electing more leaders who aren’t afraid to speak up and speak out. And every one of us privileged to serve has to mentor and lift up others.

Clay Cane’s new documentary, “Holler If You Hear Me: Black and Gay in the Church,” is an emotional drive-by shooting. The gut-penetrating personal stories in the hour-long film will leave you ducking for cover to avoid being shot dead through the heart. You will not succeed. The film features nightmarish tales that create a reality for many young African Americans who identify as members of the LGBT community.

Leading Black women across the nation are expressing outrage this week over the videotaped violent incident showing a White police officer in Columbia, S.C., grabbing a Black 16-year-old female high school student around her neck, flipping her desk, then dragging her across the floor and tossing her across the classroom. Many fear the growth of such incidents unless corrective action is taken.

We, the undersigned members of the Black Women’s Roundtable, are writing to request an emergency meeting with you to share our deep concern and outrage about the plethora of domestic violence cases that has been exposed involving current and past players that are a part of the National Football League. In addition, we would like to discuss your recent decision to establish an advisory group of women to assist you in developing new policies to eradicate domestic violence within the NFL and other diversity issues within the NFL.

Not quite a month ago, I wrote that we at Black Agenda Report had received word of a new self-organized hunger strike among prisoners in Georgia’s notorious Diagnostic and Classification Prison at Jackson. A second communication says eight prisoners are still refusing food and are on the receiving end of abuse and threats from correctional officers at Jackson. The note also sheds some chilling light on the reason for the prisoners’ self-organized action.

I am an inmate at Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, California. In April 2013, I and another individual were falsely accused of sexual assault and placed in Administrative Segregation (Ad-Seg) immediately. I was forced to face the loss of my job assignment, property, good living quarters, placement and status in groups and organizations.

The U.S. State Department recently released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012, posing as the world judge of human rights again. As in previous years, the reports are full of carping and irresponsible remarks on the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China. However, the U.S. turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and never said a word about it.

Prison is a lonely, dark, cruel reality where you immediately become trapped in a time warp on one of the many modern day plantations that have sprung up like trees across America. In 2008, shortly after Hurricane Gustav ripped through several of Louisiana’s 64 parishes, a brutal sexual assault was being carried out by a sadistic corrections officer. I will conduct a sit-down with the victim of that violent act.

Wealth and power win every time over poverty and vulnerability. Just look no further than the “sudden turn of events” in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case.

The Omaha Two are Edward Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice). Both men are imprisoned at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, where they are serving life sentences for the Aug. 17, 1970, bombing murder of an Omaha police officer, in which they deny any involvement.

A juvenile counselor in New York rapes a teenaged girl while escorting her from a holding area to the courtroom and receives probation. She serves a year for "filing a false police report," upon telling police she did not know who had jumped and cut her on the way to school.