On August 16 in Amherst, more than 100 people attended a rally to call for accountability for the white policeman who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, 18-year-old African American in Missouri one week earlier. Witnesses say Brown was standing with his hands raised above his head when Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed him.
The Amherst rally was organized by the Amherst chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The chapter has a web site with e-mail and postal mail addresses at:
The leaders of the chapter can be reached by phone via:
A petition calling on the attorneys general of the USA and of Missouri to prosecute Wilson is at:
http://act.credoaction.com/sign/mike_brown_justice?t=1&akid=11406.163146...
As of 1865, Missouri was a slave state bordered by the free states of Iowa and Illinois, and by the slave states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas.
As of 2003, an African American man in the USA had a one in three chance of spending part of his life in prison. The same year, a white man in the USA had a one in 17 chance of spending part of his life in prison. That's according to:
www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=122
The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond explains why the average black person is much poorer than the average white person. Rich people can afford better lawyers.
No other nation on earth incarcerates such a high percentage of its people. As of 2008, the USA had about 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. "England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63." That's according to "U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations," an article by Adam Liptak that appeared in the New York Times on 4/23/2008.
According to the New York Review of Books, "Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policymakers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don’t know how to face. 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness' by Michelle Alexander [published in 2010] is such a work."
On the book’s web site, she lists groups that work to reduce the number of prisoners in the USA:
Thanks for this article. It
Thanks for this article. It is so heartening to hear of peaceful, supportive demonstrations in other cities. It shows we all realize change is necessary.
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