Big Turnout Last Night For Trayvon Martin March
Last night’s ‘ReBoot approved’ event started with a rally at the Harry Kizirian Elementary School with three or four speakers, marched over to Chad Brown, and then directed attendees to Kobi Dennis’ regular Tuesday night community meeting. Turnout was awesome, probably about 250 folks there: lots of kids, lots of teenagers, lots of parents. This [...]
Don’t Fear the Hoodie
So, when the Trayvon Martin slaying entered the national consciousness, it became clear to most that a single person acting alone had killed a harmless youth and not faced any penalties for it. The youth’s crime? Being black, mainly; although his killer, George Zimmerman, claims he looked drunk. Obviously, this set-off a whole host of [...]
RI Called ‘Hostile’ on Pro-Choice Issues
If it’s true, as Nancy Pelosi said recently when she was here in Rhode Island, that the recent dust-up over reproductive freedom for women is an election year tactic, it might just prove to be a successful one in Rhode Island. While we may like to fancy ourselves a left-leaning state, such is not the [...]
Community Forum on Trayvon Martin Murder
Due to the egregious inaction by local, state and even federal authorities in Florida regarding the non-arrest of GEORGE ZIMMERMAN, the killer of TRAYVON MARTIN, and given the complex racial dynamics and their implications for Black males nationally, the Providence Africana Reading Collective (PARC) will host a community action forum. We will discuss/plan how we might [...]
Bishop Tobin on Gay Marriage: Not Christ Like
In a not-very-Christ-like op-ed piece titled “Five Problems With Homosexual Marriage,” the leader of the Catholic Church in Rhode Island reaffirmed his objections to same sex relationship equality. “It’s a sure sign of spring, as predictable as the Red Sox at spring training, the swallows returning to Capistrano, and the flowing of green beer on [...]
Error Makes Projo Explain Doonesbury Decision
Thanks to a “production error,” the Providence Journal ended up giving us an explanation for why it didn’t run Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoon that deals with the Texas abortion law. This item was in today’s Corrections: “The distributor of Doonesbury this week offered to newspapers nationwide a choice of two comic story lines. The creator, [...]
Projo Pulls Controversial Doonesbury Cartoon
The Providence Journal not only won’t publish a controversial Doonesbury cartoon that is running this week, its editors won’t even talk about it. When I called for a comment on why Garry Trudeau’s latest cartoons, which deal with Texas’ new abortion law, wasn’t in the paper yesterday two different editors hung up on me. First [...]
Rep Medina Says He Was Profiled by Police
At a hearing on a bill that would protect people from being profiled by police based on their race, Rep. Leo Medina, D- Providence, no stranger to law enforcement, told the story of the time he was pulled over late at night and essentially harassed by an East Providence police officer. Then Chairman of the [...]
Racial Profiling, Vehicle Checkpoints Bills Heard Today
Last week here on RI Future, I shared a short podcast about Racial Profiling in RI from the perspective of youth and community organizers working with Providence Youth Student Movement. Here is an extended series of excerpts from my conversation on Sonic Watermelons with Sangress Xiong and Yonara Alvarado, and Franny Choi. Xiong, Alvarado, and Choi [...]
Rest in Peace Milt Stanzler, Founder of RI ACLU
Rhode Island mourns the death of Milton Stanzler, a lawyer who founded the local affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1959. He was 92 years old. Current RI ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown said of Stanzler’s passing: “With courage, wisdom and foresight, Milton Stanzler founded the Rhode Island ACLU in 1959. It was [...]
Advocating to End Racial Profiling in RI
PROVIDENCE, RI – On Wednesday, March 7 at 4:30 PM, community members and advocates are expected to show up en masse to share their views on racial profiling in RI at a hearing at the State House before the House Committee on Judiciary. But folks have been speaking out on the topic for years, including [...]
OP protests Pfizer, ALEC joining 7 N.E. Occupies
Despite the cold rainy weather, about a half a dozen Occupy Providence members took part in the #F29 Shut Down the Corporations at Pfizer in Groton, CT. The national action was called by Occupy Portland to protest members of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a front group that writes model pro-corporate legislation. The coordinated [...]
Cannabis compassion centers could get green light
Medical marijuana compassion centers may be able to open soon thanks to a compromise deal between legislators and Governor Chafee that would limit the amount of marijuana a compassion center could on its premises. “Basically the compromise sets out stricter guidelines for the compassion centers,” said Rep. Scott Slater, D- Providence, the sponsor of the [...]
My Pre-Existing Condition: The Price of Being Female
Will I get pregnant one day? I don’t know for sure, but you know who thinks they do . . . health insurance companies? I didn’t think it possible for an insurer to know whether I was going to get pregnant before I did, but remarkably, insurance companies seem to believe they know best. And [...]
Lecture on new era of ‘Jim Crow’ at Brown tonight
Author and civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander will be giving a lecture at Brown University tonight at 6 p.m. in the Martinos Auditorium on her new book. The book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness,” is about the disproportionately high number of young black people who turn to crime [...]
MERI testifies at Board of Elections Hearings about Voter ID
Rhode Island’s controversial new voter identification law goes into effect with this year’s election, and MERI has been actively working to make the process less challenging to our community, particularly transgendered individuals who could face unnecessary hinderances and potential disenfranchisement. This afternoon, MERI appeared in front of the Rhode Island Board of Elections and presented [...]
Surprising Occupy Surprises Even Cynical Me
From the very beginning, the Occupy movement has been one surprise after another. The scale of the turnout in lower Manhattan is said to have stunned the AdBusters crew. The scale of peripheral support that came to the major protests surprised the activist core. The scale of the police response surprised the major media that [...]
Racial profiling in Rhode Island
According to a study by Northeastern University, African American and Latino motorists were more than twice as likely to be searched after being pulled over for a traffic stop in Rhode Island. Think there’s racial profiling in Rhode Island? The study certainly seems to suggest as much, and a number of state legislators and the [...]
Ahlquist wins; Cranston School Committee declines appeal
The Cranston School Committee voted 5 to 2 last night not to appeal a judge’s ruling that a prayer banner doesn’t belong in a public school. While it’s pretty obviously a violation of the Establishment Clause (separation of church and state) of the Constitution to hang a prayer banner in a public high school, two [...]
Let school prayer banner issue go away, Cranston
The Cranston School Committee will decide tonight whether or not it wants to continue embarrassing the state in voting if it wants to appeal the school prayer banner case. Here’s hoping they decide to do the right thing and not fight the ruling, won by high school junior Jessica Ahlquist, that the prayer banner must [...]
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