Murder Most Foul [DOT 21/2/21]

Truth does not change, only our awareness of it.

21/2/21 Hannibal 55

Good morning, Deadsplinters. Being Sunday I had planned on posting a light DOT with only a passing reference to the anniversary of the murder of Malcolm X. Then I caught some breaking news.

Malcolm X was assassinated on Feb 21, 1965, in front of a crowd at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Three members of the Nation of Islam: Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas 15X Johnson, were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the crime. Hayer confessed to being one of the shooters but claimed that Butler and Thomas were not involved. He continued to maintain their innocence, eventually implicating four different Nation members. Last year Netflix began airing a six-part docuseries Who Killed Malcolm X detailing the investigation into the murder by activist and historian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad. Questions raised by new information, including the possibility of law enforcement involvement, led NY DA Cyrus Vance to agree to a review of the case.

And Friday, this was announced.

I’m sure this doesn’t shock anyone, particularly if you’ve seen Judas and the Black Messiah, the account of the extrajudicial killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the FBI. What is surprising is that as of this writing, only a few Black news sites, including News One, are even reporting this story. The full news conference embedded below runs for almost 45 minutes. Full disclosure, I haven’t finished watching the entire video yet. But with so little information out there I thought it was important to include for anyone interested.

In other news, it’s National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. This year’s theme is Every Body Has A Seat At The Table. Long associated with upper-middle-class white girls eating disorders, in truth, do not discriminate. NEDA is seeking to educate and offer resources to those in marginalized communities where symptoms have often been ignored through misunderstanding and stigma.

https://powerpoetry.org/poems/eating-disorder-doesnt-fit-black-girls-agenda

In Myanmar, two protesters have been killed and several others were wounded. Malaysia is deporting refugees and asylum seekers despite the danger. Throughout it all, Rebel Riot, a Myanmar punk collective, continues to make music and address societal issues on the streets. Punk AF.

I’ve taken up enough of your time, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

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55 Comments

  1. the metal has taken me
    last nite i still apreciated some melodic death
    but today i woke…and realized…i need purity
    straight death (mmm i love the smell of burning tanks in the morning….smells like burning tanks!)
    death is nice and death is fun…death is good for everyone

    • this video was sposed to be attached to the previous message


      anyhoo.;…having paid attention to politwats…..i know it was not me what fucked up
      it was yous.

  2. The Audubon Ballroom is a really wonderful building, designed and built by Thomas Lamb, who was the pre-eminent theater designer of his era, the dawn of movie theaters. It was financed by William Fox, a Hungarian immigrant film producer who went on to found the Fox Film Corporation, which in 1935 was merged with 20th Century Pictures to become something you might have heard of, 20th Century Fox. Who needs Hollywood when Hollywood history pops up in places like the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights (and not Harlem, as is commonly believed.) At the time of the Audubon’s construction the area was home to many German and Central European Jews and Fox, who was Jewish himself, fit right in. Now it is largely Spanish speaking (a large, thriving Dominican community) and the land was redeveloped to be a Columbia University facility, but a deal was struck to preserve the Audubon structure and it now houses the Dr. Betty Shabazz (Malcolm X’s widow) Research Center. Malcolm X was only 39 when he was killed and Betty Shabazz, mother of six, didn’t live all that long herself, dying at 63. 

      • They were all so young. MLK Jr. was 39 when he was killed. Medgar Evers was 37 when he was killed. There is a photo of Jesse Jackson (who’s still alive) holding MLK, Jr. when he was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel. Jackson was 27 at the time. Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panthers, was 47 when he was killed. 
         
        A little remembered fact about MLK Jr. was when he led the March on Washington he was all of 34 when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech and the March was officially called “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” It was called that because King’s focus was not only on civil rights but for economic justice. When he was killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis he was there leading protests with the predominantly black membership of Memphis’s sanitation workers, who were treated horribly by the white “leadership” and regularly passed over for raises and promotions. He felt there could be no freedom unless everyone was paid a living wage, everyone, blacks, whites, Native Americans, immigrant Americans. The civil rights activism was considered bad enough by many white Americans but it was the economic justice aspects that really set off the FBI and he was hounded throughout his life as little more than a philandering Communist agitator. Meanwhile, in the Civil Rights movement many thought King was too go-slow, too accommodating, too non-violent, which gave rise to the Black Panthers and other groups. It’s an absolutely fascinating, if extremely painful, chapter in American history and one that isn’t, to my mind, understood enough outside of academia and in some but not all Black communities. I was born in the 1960s and to imagine the world I was born into would be almost impossible today. I was the tail end of the Baby Boom and in my graduating high school class of 630 (!) there was precisely one Black student, and she was adopted by white parents. I’ve never really researched this but I would guess that the two had restricted covenants. For that matter there were very few Jewish kids despite the fact that the town to the south of us had a large Jewish population. I wonder why that was? One of my best friends grew up two towns over from me and she once showed me her high school yearbook. Her town was considered better than my town, and my town was considered better than the four towns that surrounded it, and her yearbook would have made the upper echelons of the Third Reich swell with pride, filled as it was with promising, surprisingly Aryan-ish youth. 

        • This has always fascinated me. You and I are the same ages — I was born in the 60s, too, but in Florida. Segregation was outlawed. In the South, I’ve never attended a school without Black kids. And when I was in second grade, busing was outlawed, too, which meant I couldn’t attend the elementary school my parents taught at but had to go to the one I was zoned for. My parents tried to explain it to me, but there were Black kids at both schools and all I understood was that I wouldn’t see my friends any more. (Not true, because we all then went to junior high together and I’m still in touch with some of them to this day.)
           
          Anyway, in the South, I’ve always had Black kids in my classes sitting right next to me. In the Honors program, in AP classes, in college, Black kids were always there. My first “kiss” was a Black girl, and the first time I got beat up was by a Black girl (two different girls and the events were unrelated plus it was all elementary school and that second girl was mean).
           
          But I digress — eventually (I think I’ve told this before) I met someone who grew up in Michigan and who never even met a Black person until he went to college. I was utterly dumbfounded. I couldn’t understand how such a thing was even possible. He was also a racist and had a lot of misinformation about Black people to spout. Since then, I’ve met others. Still amazes me. 
           
          It’s just weird to me that whole towns in the North were completely segregated. We definitely had segregated neighborhoods (most Southern towns still have a Division Street running through them, which meant exactly that — Blacks on one side, whites on the other — but that was abandoned long ago). But by the 60s we were ALL going to school together. If you wanted white-only, you had to go to a private school (which meant Catholic back then and only rich people could afford that, and even then it didn’t go through high school where I was). 
           
          I always thought it strange that the South was considered the most racist. It is racist, but it’s far more overt and obvious than what seems to me to happen up North. That’s just more subtle and, I think, still somewhat institutionalized. 

            • It REALLY is.
               
              So goddamn sneaky, in fact, that I just learned *TODAY,* that not only do we up here in MN own the terribleness that was the Dred Scott abomination of a USSC decision–something Minnesota children were most assuredly NOT informed of, growing up in “post Civil Rights era” MN🤨🤨🤨
               
              But, apparently, because of the Dred Scott Decision, we became the place where slaveholders vacationed during the hot southern summers, and there was ALSO a group of slaveowners who decided to settle down, up in St. Cloud…
               
              45 minutes, maybe an hour away from the town where I was born….
              https://www.mprnews.org/story/2010/05/07/upper-mississippi-slavery
               
               
              And I literally just learned the St. Cloud info TODAY, y’all!!!!! (although, I DID wonder, a couple hours earlier, about the origin of the name of St. Cloud’s “Division Street”–their main street,  after reading that comment by @Bryanlsplinter, up above!)
              I went 45 YEARS, on this planet (45 and about 15 hours, to be exact!🤨😡🤬), never even having an *inkling* of the fact that slavery was AN ACTUAL THING in the county seat, of the county next to mine🤯🤯🤯… in the CENTER of the most northern state in the lower 48…
              Home of Humphrey, the First Minnesota, and countless others who “fought for racial justice”🙃
               
               
              Because it is simply NOT talked about or taught.
               
              I ran across it in that article, because I was trying to find this story, but accidentally typed “racist” instead of “antisemitic” in my Google search🙃;
              https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/10/18/anti-semitism-in-minneapolis-history
               
              Here in MN, most folks are raised hearing what I did growing up… 
              That racism & antisemitism happened “in the south”(racism), and “other places” (specifically Germany, with the antisemitism).
              And we hear ALL the time growing up, how “The First Minnesota saved the Union Army at Gettysburg!” (True fact, yes), and how we had so many good young men & women who served *against* evil in WW2 (we did)…
               
              But we were NEVER told as kids, that Dred Scott and his wife lived at Fort Snelling for years, and that *those years, in the “free territory of Minnesota” are why he filed suit in the first place!!!🙃
               
              We were never told about the 38 Native men slaughtered in Mankato… the largest mass-hanging in American history.
              We’re also never taught about the red-lining that pushed Jewish and Non-white homeowners into North Minneapolis and St. Louis Park.
              This MN Realtor’s article gets into the history of racial covenants & reclining in Minneapolis;
              https://www.mnrealtor.com/blogs/mnr-news1/2020/10/01/mapping-the-legacy-of-racism-in-twin-cities-real-e
               
              I learned about ☝☝☝those, in my 30’s, because I listen to MPR…
               
              The same place I’ve learned SO MANY other things about the history of our state….
               
              Because those “unsavory” things sure as SHIT aren’t spoken of, in public…
               
              They WEREN’T taught in my schools, or talked about, by the grownups I knew growing up.
               
              Much like Lindbergh’s support of Nazism & the Eugenics Movement are simply *ignored* by the folks up Home, who love to talk about how that region is where “Lindbergh the Great Aviator!” was born & raised.🙃
               
               
              https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/minnesota-race-inequality-philando-castile-214053
               
               
               

              • @EmmerdoesNotrepresentme People still believe racism is a southern problem. I used to see comments on Jezebel and even GT all the damn time tut tutting about racist southerners. Too often I pissed people off by pointing out the hate groups in their northern states on the SPLC map. And those were liberal white people! Remember the woman from the Bay area who was terrified that BLM protesters were coming to her neighborhood. And she was offended because she and her neighbors donated money to Black causes and didn’t deserve to be targeted. That was her last comment, lol! The problem will never be solved until we white people can face our ugly national history against of racism. 

          • I read something once that I thought was very perceptive that explained northern and southern racism. In the north you wouldn’t mind working for a Black person but you wouldn’t want to live next to one. In the south just the opposite, there could be Black people in your town but you’d never accept one as a boss.

        • MPR ran some really great (hard, but informative) stories about the Sanitization Workers’ Strike (SWS), a few years back (before and around the time of the 50th anniversary).
          This one is short, by Debbie Elliott, and it gets into the background of the SWS–that it wasn’t just about the money or the disrespect–it was also because two of the workers died on the job, because of the way things were;
          https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597308044/the-memphis-sanitation-workers-strike-kings-last-cause-for-economic-justice
           
          I remember hearing both of these, I think on “MPR Presents”– a local mid-day & 9 pm broadcast, where they do a deep-dive into topics, these sroties, iirc, were ones that were mentioned/covered/rolled into the APM Reports documentary that aired there, called King’s Last March.
          https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/04/04/npr-books-king
          https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/04/02/witnesses-remember-day-mlk-was-shot
          That whole doc was EXCELLENT, informative, and also heartbreaking;
          https://features.apmreports.org/arw/king/
           

      • And that was *exactly* why all those brilliant young men were murdered.
         
        It’s inspiring, and simultaneously heartbreaking, to think where we might be as a society and a world, had they not been seen as such threats, who “needed” to be destroyed at all costs.💔💔💔

          • Yep😕
            And yet, SO many folks are out here claiming that “institutional racism is not a thing!!!!” And “institutional racism doesn’t exist!!!!”
            🙄🙄🙄😒🤬

  3. il can tell the neighbours are cleaning…..coz everything in my house vibrates now
    kinda sounds like this


    im okay with that btw…….really…i swear the bass helps my headaches

    *bounces around the living room*
     

  8. Last night I watched the Social Dilemma.  It was a very enlightening movie, much of it I suspected or knew but a few things really make me think about how evil Facebook and some other sites are and how they have destroyed people.  One thing I didn’t know before, in places like Myanmar,  when you buy a cell phone, they preload Facebook and open an account for you on it.  This gives the government direct access to bombard you with propaganda and shape your opinions.  The algorithms they use to target and influence users is pretty damn scary.  Definitely worth a watch…
     
     


     

  9. @Hannibal, I too am always taken aback by the young ages if these leaders. Youth and bravery seem to walk together. The country seems ripe for new, young, strong populous leaders to arise outside of government (with the pandemic and unequal vaccination availability serving as this era’s Vietnam war).

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