“The initial police account included no details about how or why Anderson fell limp on the sidewalk.”

“According to the lawsuit, Anderson’s family members said that one of the officers grabbed her, “slammed her to the sidewalk, and pushed her face into the pavement.””

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Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.motherjones.com

#TanishaAnderson #SayHerName 

By his 70th birthday in 2013, Russell Maroon Shoatz had spent nearly 30 years in extreme solitary confinement. A prisoner in Pennsylvania’s Restricted Housing Unit (RHU), Shoatz spent 23 hours each day confined to a 7-by-12-foot cell. He ate all his meals alone inside that cell. He slept under lights that were never turned off. He was not allowed any educational, vocational, or group programming. Five days a week, he was permitted to spend one hour in a fenced-in exercise cage. Each time he left his cell, he was strip-searched and placed in shackles. When his family came to visit, he was placed in a booth and made to communicate with them from behind plexiglass. He could not hug his children or hold his grandchildren. Shoatz remained in handcuffs and leg irons during visits.

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Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.thenation.com

North Carolina’s “contorted and contrived … serpentine” Congressional District 12

By Moses Frenck

North Carolina’s most recent attempt to prevent Black voters from influencing elections received a setback late Friday night after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay, or stop, a ruling by a lower court forcing the state’s Republican-led legislature to redraw its electoral maps because they amounted to racial gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering, which is legal, allows state legislatures to manipulate the boundaries of congressional districts to favor a particular party. However, it is not legal to do so on the basis of race. In the case of North Carolina, by packing more Blacks into districts that already voted for Black representatives, it reduced the number of Blacks in other districts.

The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina on Feb. 5 ruled that the state’s congressional redistricting maps were unconstitutional because lawmakers used race to determine the districts’ shape and voting populations. The court had given North Carolina until Friday, Feb. 19 to redraw the maps.

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Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.diversityinc.com

“… thanks to an inventive journalist at The Intercept, Josh Begley, there is an app anyone can download to their smartphone that will alert them every time police kill someone.

The app, called Archives and Absences, sends the name of the person who was killed and where they were killed to your phone.

Counting killer cops just went mobile.”

Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/app-sends-push-notification-time-police-kill/#0TlHZokGHIpqIkXx.99

Sourced through Scoop.it from: thefreethoughtproject.com

Exclusive: in his first interview as a free man, the last of the Angola Three tells Ed Pilkington how he followed the news, including the ‘racism’ of Donald Trump, to keep himself sane

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theguardian.com