Monday, April 14

Journalism

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Journalism

Charlottesville: Four white supremacists charged over 2017 rally

Four men linked to far-right Rise Above Movement accused of intent to incite a riot at deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, KKK and members of the 'alt-right' march in Charlottesville in 2017 [File: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP] Four men linked to a white supremacist group were arrested on Tuesday in connection with the far-right rally that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, authorities said. Benjamin Drake Daley, 25, Michael Paul Miselis, 29, Thomas Walter Gillen, 34, and Cole Evan White, 24, were arrested in California and were to be transported to Charlottesville after making initial appearances in federal courts in California on Tuesday, US Attorney Thomas Cullen said at a news conference. The...
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US civil rights icon Rosa Parks’ home is up for auction
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Journalism, VIDEO REELS

US civil rights icon Rosa Parks’ home is up for auction

Other rare historic African-American artefacts up for auction include Jackson 5's original recording contract, and several chapters of original typed manuscript for Malcolm X's biography. Guernsey's in New York is auctioning off "African American Historic & Cultural Treasures", and included in the auction will be civil rights activist Rosa Parks' Detroit home, along with dozens of other African American rarities. by Gabriel Elizondo Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo reports from New York.
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Memorial for Lynching Victims a First Step Toward Reconciliation
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Memorial for Lynching Victims a First Step Toward Reconciliation

It offers a place of reckoning for generations of racial trauma. When she saw the name Ed Bracy on a placard in the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, 68-year-old Sophia Bracy Harris felt goosebumps. “I just went frozen for a moment,” she recalls. This was the relative she remembers hearing about as a child growing up in Elmore County, just north of Montgomery, Alabama. The story goes, Ed Bracy was hanged for his work organizing tenant farmers in the mid-1930s. “In that moment, I was aware that this was a family member, that this was a direct connection to me,” she says. More than 4,000 African Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950, giving rise to The Great Migration—as over 6 million African Americans left the South to resettle in the North and West. African America...
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How the Ultra-Rich Can Help Fix the Affordable Housing Crisis
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Journalism

How the Ultra-Rich Can Help Fix the Affordable Housing Crisis

A growing number of people invest in real estate they never intend to occupy and push up prices for the rest of us. Cities should make them pay. Down the street from my office, a luxury residential tower is rising, the fifth such project in Boston in the last decade. The 61-story “One Dalton Place” is being marketed as “New England’s tallest and most luxurious residential building.” Across the coastal cities of North America, cranes are rising to construct similar stunning new glass towers of both residential and commercial properties. Real estate in existing neighborhoods is being bid up by investors and wealthy buyers, pushing up the cost of land and housing for everyone else. A high percentage of these housing units will sit empty or rarely occupied. In Boston’s ...
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US reopens investigation into Emmett Till murder case from 1955
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Journalism

US reopens investigation into Emmett Till murder case from 1955

Two men, who later admitted to the civil rights-era murder that had become a symbol of racial oppression and violence, were found not guilty by an all-white jury in Mississippi. One of the most notorious cases of racial violence in US history will be reopened by federal investigators. The lynching of black teenage boy Emmett Till in 1955 shocked the nation and spurred the growing civil rights movement. by Rob Reynolds Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds reports.
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Black Entrepreneurs Lead the Charge in Baltimore’s Economic Renewal
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Black Entrepreneurs Lead the Charge in Baltimore’s Economic Renewal

Rasheed Aziz remembers visiting Baltimore in 2006. The empty, hollow buildings sprawled the entire block, he says. Buildings lacked roofs, doorways were boarded up, and tree limbs grew into missing windows. Aziz is the founder of CityWide Youth Development, which he began in central Florida to bring economic development to impoverished neighborhoods using manufacturing and entrepreneurship. In 2006, he decided to move himself—and his nonprofit—to Baltimore after his trip there. During that trip, he says, he saw a need for sustainable employment opportunities in underinvested areas in that city. “I’ve never looked through a window of a building and saw tree limbs before,” says Aziz, remembering his first visit and the “culture shock” he experienced. “That means there’s no roof. It’s a hol...
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After Centuries of Housing Racism, a Southern City Gets Innovative
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Journalism

After Centuries of Housing Racism, a Southern City Gets Innovative

Denise Fitzgerald’s property abuts the string of quiet, empty lots that line Ewing Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Recently she was leaf-blowing detritus shed by the enormous sycamore tree dominating the yard of her tidy Habitat for Humanity home. She says she’d cut the tree down herself but knows it’s big enough to take out both her house and the house beside her if she dare try it. Fitzgerald is familiar with the empty lots of Ewing Street, just a few blocks from Jackson State University. She’s lived here since 2008, and she remembers when Ewing was a series of derelict buildings smeared across the neighborhood. Only two empty houses remain. The rest is a collection of oak and hackberry trees, with some untamed vines. There is some human intervention, however. Every other week ...
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The Shooting Statistics Are Clear: It’s Not Schools That Are Dangerous
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Journalism

The Shooting Statistics Are Clear: It’s Not Schools That Are Dangerous

Every day, 42 Americans die in gun homicides, the grim backdrop against which to talk about school shootings. In the three months between the 10 shot dead in Santa Fe, Texas, on Friday, and the 17 in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, around 4,000 Americans lost their lives in firearms homicides. In the initial horror following a school shooting, we witness the “thoughts and prayers,” finger-wagging from politicians not wanting to “politicize” the shooting, and promises to “do something.” Then, just as predictably, nothing happens. Or, worse, bad things are done. The survivors of the February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida, took center stage to argue passionately for action, and adults initially appeared to be listening. Gov. Rick Scott signed a reform bill into la...
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Marines Open Investigation into Active-Duty White Supremacist
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Journalism

Marines Open Investigation into Active-Duty White Supremacist

The inquiry begins after a ProPublica and Frontline investigation and as a congressman calls on Department of Defense to better police its ranks. The U.S. Marine Corps said it has opened a criminal investigation into the activities of Lance Corporal Vasillios Pistolis, 19, identified as a violent white supremacist in a recent report by ProPublica and Frontline. Stationed at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune and assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, Pistolis has associated with an array of neo-Nazi organizations, including the National Socialist Movement, the Traditionalist Worker Party, and Atomwaffen Division, a clandestine group that aims to incite a race war, according to interviews and an analysis of video and online postings. Pistolis is under investigation by the Naval Criminal In...
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Loneliness increasing in the US and young people suffer the most
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Journalism

Loneliness increasing in the US and young people suffer the most

A study by healthcare giant Cigna suggests Americans are alarmingly lonely and that can carry significant health risks. A new study in the US suggests Americans are growing increasingly lonely. Nearly half of the participants said they feel alone, isolated or left out at least some of the time. Young people between 18 and 22 years old were the loneliest group surveyed in the study. Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo reports. by Gabriel Elizondo
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