On February 5, 1946, in Long Island, New York, Private First Class Charles Ferguson and his brother Alfonso were murdered by patrolman Joseph Romeika for protesting segregation at a local café. 276 Their brother, Seaman Third Class James Ferguson, was wounded. The three brothers had gathered to wish farewell to Charles, who was about to deploy to Europe.277 As they walked from the café to the bus stop, they ran into Romeika, who pulled his gun and ordered them to stand against the wall with their hands up. 278 The brothers complied, but Romeika kicked Charles in the groin and then shot him in the head. Romeika then “just fired again for no good reason,” killing Alfonso.279 An investigation revealed that none of the brothers was armed. A Nassau County jury refused to indict Romeika, and instead accepted his claim that the shooting was in self-defense.
Equal Justice Initiative

An 1887 report by the Hinds County, Mississippi grand jury recorded that, six months after 204 convicts were leased to a man named McDonald, twenty were dead, nineteen had escaped, and twenty-three had been returned to the penitentiary disabled, ill, and near death. The penitentiary hospital was filled with sick and dying Black men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment . . . so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.”100 Under this grotesquely cruel system that lasted decades, countless Black men, women, and children lost their freedom—and often their lives. “Before convict leasing officially ended,” writes historian David Oshinsky, “a generation of Black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions far worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves.” Convict leasing demonstrated the way in which the criminal justice system would become the central institution for sustaining racial domination and hierarchy in America. It legitimized excessive punishment and abuse of African Americans and terrorized people of color.
Equal Justice Initiative

Yesterday, the prime example that our black communities shouldn't be looking to our black athletes or black entertainers to be the bellwethers for any positive change occurred in a virtual presentation regarding the BILL HR40 occurred, when Hershel Walker went off the rails intellectually to discuss his opposition to the payment of reparations to the descendants of the African Americans who were terrorized in this nation from let's say August 20, 1619 to the signing of the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. I am going to leave out the periods of mass incarcerations that followed as well the purposeful destruction by the United States of the voices of uplift that spoke of lifting Black Americans out of the depths of despair from 1966 until let's say 2008 with the election of Barack Obama, who was the first multiracial individual to hold the highest elective office in the land. I believe Walker said that "atonement would not help Black people". Malcolm X felt that Black celebrities who have a proximity to capital, fame, and fortune couldn't be aligned or reconciled with the "Black masses". The words that Walker spoke yesterday reinforced that very thought yesterday. Walker's ill informed talk was completely devoid of any specifics that addressed the historic harms that not only enslavement caused or the century of harm that was caused after the supposed elimination of that murderous institution. It seems Walker didn't mention all the crimes of economic deprivation caused by sharecropping, convict leasing, outright white mob driven terror that drove Black Americans to give up land ownership, the perils of blackness that lead to lynching and atrocious acts of terror into the 1950s' and 1960s'. That wasn't 130 years ago Mr. Walker it was not even one ring around the oak trees in the southern states that held strange fruits. Today I posted on my blog the terror driven murder and lynching of John Griggs, a black man who simply was targeted by the white mob for associating with a white woman. Guess Mr. Walker didn't want to acknowledge any atonement was needed for this murder. You see Mr. Walker if you were in Mr. Griggs position in that your former wife was white. You, Mr. Walker could've been hanging from tree as well. Today, I simply say if any House of Representative committee wants to hear points of views regarding reparation's pro and cons. You don't have to go to a washed up professional football player like Hershel Walker. You need to go to our HBCU's history departments talk real facts not conjectures. You see we don't need a Commission To Study Reparations. What we need is a Commission To Study and Determine Payment Schedules. Who pays America for John Griggs's final terror filled moments of life? Who pays for those of our ancestors whose lives were forever changed who witnessed and heard about this act of white mob violence?

In 1906, Edward Johnson, a Black man, was convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His attorneys appealed the case and won a rare stay of execution from the United States Supreme Court. In response, a white mob seized Mr. Johnson from the jail, which had been vacated by the sheriff and his staff, dragged him through the streets, hanged him from the second span of the Walnut Street Bridge, and shot him hundreds of times. The mob left a note pinned on the corpse that read: “To Justice Harlan. Come get your nigger now.” Mr. Johnson used his last words to declare his innocence. Nearly a century later, he was cleared of the rape.