Son of Cape Verde

Have you heard about the Grandmother of Juneteenth, Ms. Opal Lee? We're kicking our week-long Freedom Day celebrations by honoring the woman who fought to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.

Ms. Lee walked 2.5 miles every day to symbolize the two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation that enslaved people in Texas finally learned they had been freed. And in 2021, she finally watched as President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth Independence Day Act, making it a federal holiday in the U.S.

Ronnell Tobias Stallworth (June 18, 1953) was the first African American police officer and detective hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department. He holds the distinction of being the only African American “member” of the kkk.

He was born in Chicago but was raised in El Paso. He became a cadet with the Fort Carson Police Department on November 13, 1972. He became the first African-American member of the Colorado Springs police department and was sworn in on June 18, 1974.

He spent two years in uniform before becoming the youngest undercover agent in the department. He received his first assignment in April 1975 when former Black Panther Party leader Stokely Carmichael came to speak at a local nightclub. He worked in the intelligence department and the narcotics division as a detective.

In October of 1978, he saw an ad in the local Colorado Springs newspaper stating that the kkk was starting a new chapter and looking for members. He sent a letter to the PO Box listed and included his office telephone number. He received a call and was invited to join the kkk. He used a white undercover officer to take his place. He contacted a regional kkk office and spoke with David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the kkk.

He was assigned to protect David Duke during his visit to Colorado Springs. The investigation kkk lasted nine months and identified many local Klansmen as soldiers, including two who were stationed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the central facility near Colorado Springs, as well as high-ranking government officials.

He transferred to the Utah Department of Public Safety, where he worked as an investigator. He retired in 2005 and gave his first interview about infiltrating the kkk. He had kept the story a secret for twenty-seven years. He wrote Black Klansman about his experience as an undercover agent. The film adaptation was called BlacKkKlansman. It debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in France and won the prestigious Grand Prix Award. The film won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Somehow, this animation is both rotating so quickly you can’t miss it and so slowly you barely notice.

literally yesterday. all because someone called the police about DIAPERS being shoplifted.

Black children deserve to live and be safe around ALL people, around the world but something so simple is routinely denied to us on the daily by people more concerned with making sure their group doesn’t become the next underclass in which the entire modern world operates on its dehumanization.

im so sorry to this baby, their family, and every Black family dealing with the horrors of antiblackness, having our freedom or lives stolen from us every day.

meanwhile, LAPD shot and killed a Black woman’s dog after being called by her neighbor for being “too loud” during the Knick’s game, one of the biggest basketball event in years.

i seen more comments by nonblack ppl showing sympathy for the dog than the Black woman in the video literally hugging her beloved pet’s dead body in tears while a mob of LAPD officers stand around and watch her dispassionately.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 16, 1944—

In March of 1944, in the small town of Alcolu, South Carolina, two young white girls were found brutally murdered. Their names were Betty June Binniker, age eleven, and Mary Emma Thames, age seven. Alcolu was a working-class mill town, with racial segregation marked by a set of railroad tracks. There was little interaction between Black and white.

The girls had been riding their bicycles, seeking flowers to pick. As they passed by the Stinney house, they asked fourteen-year-old George and his little sister Aimé where they could find maypops. The girls were later found dead in a ditch from blunt-force trauma to their heads. Aimé said George was with her at the time of the murders, but police were looking for someone to pin them on.

The police showed up to the Stinney house while the parents weren’t home. Sister Aimé hid in the chicken coop as both George and his older brother Johnnie were hauled away in handcuffs.

Johnnie was later released, but George was questioned alone in a small room, without his parents or an attorney. Police claimed he confessed to the murders, but no evidence of a confession exists. He was kept prisoner for weeks without being permitted to see his parents. On April 24 there was a two-hour trial. George’s court-appointed attorney had political ambitions and did not question the police, who proclaimed that George had confessed. Neither did he call George’s sister as an alibi. After ten minutes of deliberation by an all-white jury, George Stinney was found guilty. George’s piece-of-shit attorney didn’t even bother to appeal.

On June 16, 1944, George Stinney was murdered by the state of South Carolina. The weapon used was the electric chair. He was only five feet tall and under a hundred pounds; the straps on the chair were too large for his small body, and prison officials used the Bible he was carrying as a booster seat. During electrocution, his bodily convulsions caused the mask to fall from his face, revealing a burned scalp and tears streaming from his eyes. Two additional jolts and eight minutes later, his teeth smoking, and one eye boiled away, he was finally pronounced dead. He wasn’t just murdered; he was tortured to death.

Seventy years later a circuit court judge proclaimed that George Stinney had not received a fair trial and vacated his conviction.

An Israeli firm has interfered in elections in Scotland, New York, France, Angola and Togo, using large numbers of fake social media accounts to target politicians who have criticised Israel’s genocide in Gaza, French authorities have found.

France’s disinformation watchdog, Viginum, said a private, Israel-based company named BlackCore had coordinated hundreds of accounts to post negative comments about Scottish first minister John Swinney in the run-up to the Scottish parliament elections in May.

Swinney is one of the few UK politicians to have described Israel’s mass killings in Gaza as a genocide, saying last year that “it can’t be disputed”. He also led a ban on arms companies receiving financial aid if they supply Israel's military.

Viginum said Swinney, the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) and the devolved government in Edinburgh were targeted between 6 January and 8 May, with BlackCore using at least 256 coordinated accounts to post around 1,400 comments.

Swinney was targeted 652 times, the SNP 338 and the Scottish government 112.

An SNP spokesperson said: “Over the course of the Scottish election campaign, the SNP observed that posts across our social media platforms were subject to an unprecedented level of negative reactions and comments from accounts which appeared to be AI-generated bots.”

“Any interference in our democratic process must be thoroughly investigated,” they added.

Ross Greer, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, called on foreign secretary Yvette Cooper to summon the Israeli ambassador over the scandal. “Or will she continue Labour's tradition of letting them [Israel] away with absolutely anything?” he wrote on X.

BlackCore has described itself as “an elite influence, cyber and technology company built for the modern era of information warfare” that has worked with governments and political campaigns on “cutting-edge strategies, advanced tools and robust security to shape narratives”.

Viginum chief Marc-Antoine Brillant said last week that BlackCore had meddled in French municipal elections but its activities were “not limited” to France.