In Possible MLK Day Hate Crime, Civil Rights Family’s Car Burned

Posted on January 23, 2012 by admin

The Hicks family's car. Photo courtesy of The Daily News

Growing up in a civil rights family in Bogalusa, Louisiana, Chuck Hicks remembers the constant threats. “We were a marked family,” he told TheFightBack in an extended interview on the eve of the October dedication of the MLK Memorial. It turns out, Hicks’ use of the past tense may have been wishful thinking.

Around 3 a.m. on Jan. 16, Barbara Hicks Collins, Chuck’s sister, heard a loud knock. She opened the door only to find no one there and her Mercedes Benz in flames. It appears an attempt was also made to burn down the family home, where Collins and her 82-year-old mother, Valeria Hicks, live.

“It’s a suspicious fire,” State Fire Marshall Butch Browning told TheFightBack. “Hate crime is a possible motive,” he said, noting the timing of the fire which occurred on MLK Day. Browning said his office’s investigation of the incident is ongoing and is being done in coordination with the local police and FBI. Continue reading →

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TheFightBack, Jan. 21: Tuskegee Airmen, Gulf Coast Oil Spill, and DCPS Cheating Scandal

Posted on January 22, 2012 by admin

Listen to full show:

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This weekend, a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen is premiering at 2,500 theaters across the country. “Red Tails,” starring Cuba Gooding Jr., highlights the African American pilots who fought in World War II. Tonight, we’ll hear from two Tuskegee Airmen in their own words.

Then we’ll turn to District of Columbia Public Schools budget watchdog Mary Levy, as she discusses DCPS’s de facto segregation, lack of transparency and the cheating scandal.

But first, we hear from legendary activist and comedian Dick Gregory, who this past week had trespassing charges against him dropped. The longtime fighter for human and civil rights was arrested a block away from the White House in September at the office of Kenneth Feinberg, the administrator of the $20 billion Gulf Coast oil spill compensation fund. Continue reading →

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The Tuskegee Airmen In Their Own Words

Posted on January 22, 2012 by TheFightBack

Listen to Lt. Col. William Holloman and Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson:

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“Star Wars” creator George Lucas spent more than twenty years trying to bring the story of the Tuskegee Airmen to the big screen. “Red Tails,” which highlights the African American pilots who flew in World War II, is premiering this weekend in 2,500 theaters across the country.

Appearing on The Daily Show, Lucas told host Jon Stewart that he had to self-finance the film because the big distributors wouldn’t take a chance on “an all-black movie [with] no major white roles in it.” Lucas said he was told by the industry’s powers-that-be (a group which under normal circumstances includes himself), “We don’t know how to market a movie like this.”

The effort to spread the word about the African American pilots and soldiers who fought in World War II was a driving force behind the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen, which “formed in his house in 1972,” Ret. Lt. Col. William Holloman said while sitting beside Ret. Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson.

“[We wanted] to let people know about our participation… because white America did not know that blacks flew in World War II,” Holloman told me after a 2010 talk he and Jefferson gave at an event sponsored by the DC Chapter of the National Association of Black Veterans. Continue reading →

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An Olympic Battle for the Gulf Coast: Dick Gregory vs. BP (and Ken Feinberg)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by admin

"Dick Gregory reading about the BP 2012 Olympics." Credit: photo and text by Art Rocker

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Comedian and activist Dick Gregory wasn’t thrown behind bars this week, but he may be soon, possibly at the Olympics.

The longtime civil and human rights leader is fighting for compensation for victims of the 2010 Gulf Coast oil spill. It’s this effort that led to Gregory’s September arrest one block away from the White House in the office of Kenneth Feinberg, who’s in charge of dispensing (or not) BP’s $20 billion compensation fund.

After top BP executives met with the White House, President Obama announced the creation of the fund in June 2010. “This $20 billion will provide substantial assurance that the claims people and businesses have will be honored,” Obama said.

“All the casinos have been paid. All your multimillion dollar companies have been paid,” Gregory said Tuesday outside D.C. Superior Court after the trespassing charges against him were dropped. But while the rich have been paid, others haven’t, said Gregory. “It just looks like it’s a poor people thing. It’s a minority thing. It’s a women thing.” Continue reading →

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SOPA, PIPA and the Day the Internet Went Black

Posted on January 18, 2012 by TheFightBack

Today, Wikipedia, the world’s sixth most visited site, is blacked out, as are thousands of others, including Reddit and Boing Boing. The reason? “The U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet,” the online encyclopedia is informing visitors today. “For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”

Presently, similar pieces of legislation are being debated in the House and Senate which aim to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material, but may clamp down on internet freedom. As the House debates the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Senate may vote as soon as Tuesday on the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Filmmaker Michael Moore, whose site is blacked out today, questioned the timing of SOPA and PIPA. “I’m sure it’s just an accident that these bills are being proposed after a year where uprisings around the world were literally started on the internet,” Moore wrote in a letter yesterday. Continue reading →

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My Response to Accusation on Kojo

Posted on January 18, 2012 by admin

Pete and Chairman Linton

Listen to Pete’s response to Chairman Linton:

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Tuesday on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU, taxi chair Ron Linton said I’d made “misrepresentations” in my reporting.

The subject that provoked this response was a DC cabbie’s fare increase petition. While the petition was supposed to be independent of the D.C. Taxicab Commission, the driver, Nicholas Maxwell, told me in an interview last month, “Linton and [DCTC paralegal specialist] David Person sat me down and they were like, ‘Oh, no, no, don’t use our numbers. Take that out. Don’t make it look to the people that we’re the ones that are pushing this out there.'”
Continue reading →

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TheFightBack, Jan. 14: An MLK Holiday Special

Posted on January 15, 2012 by admin

Mark Taylor, TheFightBack's engineer, gets some assistance at the We Act Radio studio.

Listen to TheFightBack here:

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This holiday weekend, as we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we hear from D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray on how the civil rights leader impacted his life. We’ll also hear from Free Press’s Joseph Torres on how Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement benefitted from minority media ownership, which remains a critical and largely overlooked issue.

This past week marked the tenth anniversary of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Daniel Lakemacher, a soldier-turned-conscientious objector, discusses his six months at Gitmo, which he has described as “the most hate-filled place I have ever experienced.”  Continue reading →

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MLK and The Fight for a Democratic Media

Posted on January 14, 2012 by admin

With broom in hand, Dr. Martin Luther King used to bang on the ceiling of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Directly above SCLC’s Atlanta office was WERD, the country’s first black owned station. Upon hearing the knock from below, WERD’s DJ would lower a microphone outside the window and tell listeners to stay tuned for an important announcement. Standing one floor below by the window, Dr. King would grab the mic and deliver his message.

“That’s how closely they worked together, the black community and black radio,” Joseph Torres of Free Press said this week at a discussion on “Civil Rights on the Airwaves” at New America Foundation.

Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement benefitted from having access to the broader community via WERD’s airwaves, but this opportunity likely wouldn’t have been available if Jesse Blayton hadn’t become the first African American to purchase a radio station.

“Ownership is critically important because who owns [the] media outlet determines who gets to speak and who has a right to be heard,” said Torres, co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. “We all know the harm caused when we cannot tell our own stories.”

Today, people of color own just 7 percent of the country’s radio stations and 3 percent of TV stations. Yet, the FCC is considering allowing further consolidation by lifting a rule that prevents newspapers from owning TV stations in the same market. Continue reading →

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Mayor Gray Discusses MLK’s Impact On Him

Posted on January 12, 2012 by admin

Mayor Gray's April 11, 2011 arrest for protesting DC's lack of budget autonomy. Photo courtesy of msnbc.msn.com.

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“As a result of Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, we have opportunities that were literally unimaginable by earlier generations of African Americans and, for that matter, other minorities as well,” D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray said last night in a lecture entitled “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Impact on My Life.”

Speaking to audience members at Capitol View Public Library in Southeast, D.C., Gray continued, “While we’re by no means done with the work of the Civil Rights movement, it is truly remarkable to think about just how far we have come in the last fifty years.”

And he would know. As a college student in the early ’60s, Gray attempted to participate in George Washington University’s Greek life. “I was pretty much shut out of every fraternity,” he said. One fraternity brother informed the future mayor that he wasn’t eligible because the “national charter didn’t permit ‘Negroes and Orientals’ to be admitted,” Gray recalled. Continue reading →

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Guantanamo Bay Turns Ten: Former Soldier Discusses the “Detention Camps”

Posted on January 11, 2012 by admin

Listen to Daniel Lakemacher here:

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Today marks the tenth anniversary of foreign nationals being held at Guantanamo Bay, the US military base in Cuba. Activists are gathering outside the White House in Lafayette Park at noon to mark the occasion and to bring attention to Guantanamo’s “human rights violations… including torture, detention without charge, unfair trials, Islamophobia, and impunity for crimes by US government officials,” notes Witness Against Torture, which is helping organize the action.

Daniel Lakemacher spent six months at Guantanamo as a psychiatric technician with the Navy. “I was very excited about being in the Navy initially,” he told me in a 2010 interview that aired on Pacifica Radio’s DC station, WPFW. But his time at Guantanamo caused him to become a conscientious objector. “I can easily say that Gitmo is the most hate-filled place I have ever experienced,” Lakemacher wrote at his site,WarIsImmoral.com.

Lakemacher discussed the forced feedings, Forced Cell Extractions, as well as the great extent the military goes to dehumanize the detainees at Guantanamo, which he referred to as “detention camps”: Continue reading →

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