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Black Politics After George Floyd
The last decade’s cycle of uprisings and protests has demonstrated more than a confrontation with white supremacy; it has been the most explosive articulation of a crisis in Black politics.
Illustration by Matt Williams
One night last summer, I saw a police van go up in flames, and I allowed myself to feel hope, something that had become quite foreign to me after the year’s many stupefying months. For a number of us who went out in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the sacking of the third precinct in Minneapolis, it was the first time we had encountered our friends with bigger fears than our breath. “When someone put their arms around me to pull me out of the way of a swinging baton, that still counts as an embrace,” I joked at the beginning of June. The speed and force with which the rebellions multiplied across the country triggered, surprisingly, an outpouring of support. Faced with a recurring display of police repression
Bird’s death was given a one-sentence mention in the August 23 issue of
Time magazine: “At Wytheville, Va., last week gentry stormed the county jail; shot Raymond Bird, 31, Negro; hanged his black body to a tree.” The reporting glossed over the grisly specifics of the case, however. Bird was being held in jail accused of assaulting the two white daughters of his employer, and while local officials knew a mob had formed, they did little to protect the prisoner. According to an Associated Press report, the mob shot Bird and beat his head “into a pulp.” They then tied a rope around his neck, attached his corpse to a waiting automobile, and dragged his body nine miles to the scene of his alleged assaults. There, they strung his body to a tree and filled it with more bullets.
How can maps fight racism and inequality?
The work of the Black Panther Party, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a new movie and a documentary, helps illustrate how cartography – the practice of making and using maps – can illuminate injustice.
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As these films show, the Black Panthers focused on African American empowerment and community survival, running a diverse array of programming that ranged from free school breakfasts to armed self-defense.
In 1971 the Panthers collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to create new police districts in Berkeley, California – districts that would be governed by local citizen commissions and require officers to live in the neighborhoods they served. The proposal made it onto the ballot but was defeated.