by Carla Murphy 

Not many people know the modern history in the video above. Head into the weekend with actor Jeremy Renner on “The Daily Show” discussing “Kill the Messenger,”the new film about the CIA’s role in bringing crack-cocaine to urban America. The opening clip about which kids America cares about is particularly prescient given the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations’ War on Drugs policies, in particular harsh sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders, of course.

But this week also saw St. Louis’ third deadly police shooting of a young black man in two months. As Ferguson’s Weekend of Resistance gets underway, a related selection of reads all in the vein of #BlackLivesMatter:

Faith leaders are among those most capable of bridging stark racial divides in St. Louis. Ahead of an interfaith dialogue this Sunday at St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena, evangelical Christian and founding editor of Sojourners magazine, Jim Wallis, touched on the most segregated spaces in America in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 

…I think white Christians and white churches have to pay attention here. There shouldn’t be some terribly different conversation going on in our white churches and black churches. So, this is a challenge to the white churches to pay attention, to listen to our brothers and sisters, to care as much about our brothers and sisters who are black, as much as we care about our own kids who are white…. [When] we divide along racial lines — that’s a denial of the Gospel.

“[A] path can be traced from slavery to the killing of Michael Brown,” Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts writes in “The Worth of Black Men, From Slavery to Ferguson.”

Just out today, ProPublica’s analysis of 32 years of “[more than 12,000] killings by police shows outsize risk for young black males.” Note: That number is a “minimum count” of police homicides as violence researchers have long complained that the FBI’s database of police shootings “is terribly incomplete.” Read ProPublica to learn how.

And ahead of the midterms (and in the long lead-up to 2016), labor leader Richard Trumka continues to speak up about racial justice. He talked about race and Mike Brown in St. Louis last month and today, in California, he discussed drawing down mass incarceration. On the state ballot this November will be Proposition 47, which reduces harsh penalties for simple drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor.

 

>via: http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/10/weekend_reads_ferguson_young_black_men_and_resistance.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28Colorlines.com%29

by Carla Murphy

I came of age in New York City overhearing older folks who’d lived through the crack era, ask a series of open-ended questions that began like this: “We didn’t own no planes. How you think crack got here?” How, indeed. That’s the subject of a new film opening tonight called “Kill The Messenger.” Actor Jeremy Renner plays investigative journalist Gary Webb whose controversial 1996 three-part newspaper series opens like this:

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury New investigation has found. 

The drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of hte world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

The series rocked the country. One 1997 article described it as, “the most talked-about piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famous—some would say infamous—set of articles of the decade.” 

So what happened after? Three major newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times—some in collaboration with the CIA, The Intercept reports—set out to discredit Webb. They did. In December 2004, Webb, an award-winning investigative journalist and 49-year-old father of three who reportedly suffered bouts of clinical depression, took his own life.

“Kill the Messenger,” largely viewed as a vindication of Gary Webb, opens nationwide tonight. It’s sure to stir memories for familes displaced by civil war in Nicaragua and those in the U.S. who not only came of age under crack-cocaine but, who also sought to rebuild their communities in the decades after.

As for the truth of Webb’s claims, from Nick Schou, author of the biography on which the movie is based, in The Intercept:

“I think it’s fair to take a look at the story objectively and say that it could have been better edited, it could have been packaged better, it would have been less inflammatory. … But these are all kind of minor things compared to the bigger picture, which is that he documented for the first time in the history of U.S. media how CIA complicity with Central American drug traffickers had actually impacted the sale of drugs north of the border in a very detailed, accurate story. And that’s, I think, the take-away here.”