Justice Deferred What has changed?
By Al McFarlane Editor-in-Chief Insight News
Insight News and our broadcast and digital platform, The Conversation with Al McFarlane, May 19-23 presented a week of live radio, television and internet programming from George Floyd Square, at Worldwide Outreach for Christ Church, 3808 Chicago Av. S. in Minneapolis. Stories of residents, activists, lawmakers, and business leaders will be reported here over the next several weeks.
Former state representative Ruth Richardson, who served District 52B from 2019 to 2023., is now the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood for North Central States.
“When I got the news of George Floyd’s murder, I was actually at my house. I was sitting on my couch. And I was on social media when I saw the video. In that moment, it was trauma on trauma. I know that the murder of George Floyd caught the nation’s attention, but I was sitting and reflecting on all the names of people who came before George Floyd that didn’t catch national attention,” Richardson said on the broadcast live from George Floyd Square.
cousin, who was shot in the back by law enforcement in front of my mother. There was no video of that encounter,” she said.
“My cousin was 19 years old. And my mom was actually at his grandmother’s house at the time, at their apartment over on the Eastside. She was coming out of the apartment because she was heading from her sister’s house to her vehicle when she saw my cousin, who was running for his life prior to being shot in the back. After he was shot, people were told to get back into their apartments and not to come out,“ Richardson said.
“He ended up being carried to an ambulance by his hands and feet and ultimately died at Regions Hospital. When we went down to Regions, the reception that we received was not one that you would expect for a grieving family to receive. And we were ultimately told to leave.”
Richardson said the event took place on St. Paul’s Eastside in the 90’s
“So there was a heaviness that was coming into this moment. For a lot of people, (George Floyd’s murder) was eye opening. But for people who had been living with and understanding this trauma, this was nothing new,” she said.
The former legislator said her experiences affected her decision to move into the arena of policymaking and lawmaking.
“The trauma is still there. But what I would say is that I’m an accidental politician. I’m not a person who was said one day I’m going to run for office. My approach to legislating was probably different than people who wanted this as a goal,” she said.
“What it meant was oftentimes I was writing my
own bills with community as opposed to relying on lobbyists to write bills, bringing voices to the Capitol that had not previously been elevated at the Capitol.”
Richardson said,
“The morning I heard about George Floyd, it was during COVID. Everything at the Capitol had stopped because of COVID. When the first two people died, there was an emergency situation. And I remember very clearly that in a divided legislature there was agreement that the only bills that we were going to work on were going to be related to COVID.”
“It was a public health crisis and two people had died. And I was reflecting on the fact that people who look like me have been dying for centuries in this nation and never at a legislature have we stopped and said ‘people are dying. This is a public health crisis.’”
“We need to do something,’ she said. “And it was in that moment that I decided to draft House Resolution Number 1 declaring racism a public health crisis.”
Haley Taylor Schlitz is an assistant attorney general for the state of Minnesota. She’s also a columnist for Insight News. Now 22 years old, she is the youngest Black woman to ever receive a law degree.
“I was 17 and in law school when I heard about the murder of George
Floyd,” Taylor Schlitz said. “And it really hit close to home because this was weeks after the anniversary of Rodney King’s beating at the hands of Los Angeles police.”
“My mother’s father was the second person murdered in the civil unrest that followed. She was just 18,” Taylor Schlitz said, noting that for her, George Floyd’s murder was a heavy reminder and trauma on trauma.
“His case is still unsolved. My grandfather’s murder was 33 years ago.”
Taylor Schlitz said her grandfather was on his way to the grocery store getting groceries for his family. Her mother, his daughter, was 18, a high school senior.
“Little did my mother know that her father was not coming home that
evening. And that the last time she saw him was the last time that she had seen him. He wasn’t there for her high school graduation, for her college graduation, her medical school graduation.,” she said. “I never met him.”
“So things like that have really made a lasting impact on my mother and me and our entire family. It was 33 years ago. But there has not been 33 years of progress,” Taylor Schlitz said.
George Floyd’s murder and the worldwide protest it sparked resonated with all people of color and all people who need and seek human rights and justice, she said. It was felt worldwide.
The conversation reminded Richardson of how far we really have to go in this state, in this country, to live up to the promise of this country. She said in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, there were a lot of promises made. “There were corporate promises that were made that we see are rolling back right now.”
She said, “one bill, or even a collection of bills, will not completely change the trajectory, but they are steps forward. Even the bills that included a police reform package that passed in July of 2020 were important first steps. But that’s what they were. They were first
steps.”
Richardson said important legislation included bans on chokeholds, banning of warrior training, autism and mental health training. She questioned discussions about residency requirements for law enforcement officers “when I recognized that George Floyd also knew Derek Chauvin. I asked, will a residency requirement really change anything? Because they worked at the same bar.”
With the passing of House Resolution No. 1, declaring racism a public health crisis, Minnesota created the House Select Committee on Racial Justice. “As a freshman legislator, I cochaired that committee. We went out to community and we asked what does community need as opposed to saying here, community, take this thing that we’re offering you. There were 83 community-driven recommendations that came forward as a result of that work,” Richardson said.
“But I think how much farther along would we have been if when hHaley’s grandfather lost his life, there was this commitment. And we can go even further back, you know, because what is old is new again,” Richardson said.
“And I was thinking of my own family member, my
Flickr/Lorie Shaull
You Changed The World, George mural on Chicago Ave S in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Photo: Aymann Ismail George Floyd Square
Ruth Richardson
Haley Taylor Schlitz
5
On the evening of May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police outside a grocery store in Minneapolis.
From the outset, the incident became a battle of narratives. The local police initially reported Floyd was experiencing “distress” and died from a medical incident. A day later, bystander Darnella Frazier uploaded a video that showed the graphic details, including the
By Deyanira Nevárez
In cities across the U.S., the housing crisis has reached a breaking point. Rents are skyrocketing, homelessness is rising and working-class neighborhoods are threatened by displacement.
These challenges might feel unprecedented. But they echo a moment more than half a century ago.
In the 1950s and 1960s, housing and urban inequality were at the center of national politics. American cit-
By Lauren Burke Black Press USA
Charlie Rangel, the long-term Congressman and a heavyweight in New York politics as a member of Harlem’s “Gang of Four”, has died at 94. His colorful and charismatic personality, bowties, and raspy voice made him a character on Capitol Hill who was impossible to forget. Rangel was simultaneously larger than life but also approachable and engaging. Rangel was the last living member of the “Gang of Four” made up of powerful African American leaders in New York: David Dinkins (1927-2020), Basil Paterson (1946-2014), and Percy Sutton (1920-2009). The four
police’s excessive use of force leading up to Floyd’s death. Floyd’s murder, and Frazier’s documentation of it, spawned what by some measures was the largest protest movement in American history. And that, too, became a contest of narratives, this time in the media. A focus on the aftermath of the events in Minneapolis, and elsewhere, were quickly supplanted by stories of lawlessness and violence by protesters.
For almost a decade, I’ve researched the media’s coverage of protests, focusing
ies were grappling with rapid urban decline, segregated and substandard housing, and the fallout of highway construction and urban renewal projects that displaced hundreds of thousands of disproportionately low-income and Black residents.
The federal government decided to try to do something about it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson launched one of the most ambitious experiments in urban policy: the Model Cities Program.
As a scholar of housing justice and urban planning, I’ve studied how this shortlived initiative aimed to move beyond patchwork fixes to poverty and instead tackle its struc-
extensively on the reporting of modern-day uprisings against police brutality.
Time and time again, colleagues and I have found that the bulk of news coverage of protests against police brutality tends to focus on protesters’ violence, disruption or sensational actions.
Yet in reading some of the coverage ahead of the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s death, I have observed a different media trend. With the benefit of time, what was once a news media frenzy focusing on the violence after Floyd’s killing has yielded
space for reflection and coverage that legitimizes those who took to the streets.
In so doing, these narrative changes provide essential opportunities to understand the complexity of journalism and social movements seen from different moments in time.
Following flames Quickly after Floyd’s murder in 2020, it became clear that subjects such as the role of state violence, the sophistication of demands for change and community grief were less like-
causes by empowering communities to shape their own futures. Building a great society The Model Cities Program emerged in 1966 as
dealmakers were powerbrokers at a time when political decisions were made in smoke-filled rooms over poker games. In 2010, President
Obama suggested that Rangel resign from Congress “with dignity” after he was targeted by an ethics investigation that would eventually mean he had
“I am shook, saddened, and sickened to my core,” responds India Rose, owner/founder of the Martha’s Vineyard BlackOwned Business Directory, in response to ICE raids in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The round-up of illegal migrants has produced arrests, according to reports. Authorities were wearing vests that also read DEA, FBI, and police. The policing units used unmarked cars ferried to the island to locate migrants.
This is the prime time workers from other countries begin checking in for work at the vacation spots starting the 2025 vacation season, which is highly supported by those on foreign work visas. All employees are said to usually be in place entirely by June 15 of each vacation season that ends in October. Many migrant workers are from Brazil, Jamaica, and Eastern European countries like Serbia, Romania, Georgia, and Yugoslavia. Rose also told Black Press USA, “As a business owner and year-round
The Trump administration is preparing to terminate AmeriCorps, eliminating $400 million in grants and cutting off critical services for tens of thousands, while continuing to advance policies that benefit Donald Trump, his family, and wealthy allies at the expense of low-income Americans. Final layoffs of AmeriCorps staff will take effect on June 24. Under orders from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, the administration is dismantling the country’s only federal agency for national service and volunteerism—without public input or congressional authorization. The decision ends funding for 1,031 organizations and displaces more than 32,000 AmeriCorps members and senior volunteers. The move is part of a broader campaign to punish the poor. Since returning to office,
to give up the Chairmanship of the Ways & Means Committee.
“This guy from Lenox Avenue is retiring with dignity,” Rangel would later tell reporters as he departed Congress on his terms and at the time of his choosing. Rangel ignored Obama and remained in Congress for another six years with an aura that made many forget about the ethics investigation. Before serving Congress, Rangel did about every job in politics that existed. In 1961, Rangel was appointed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to be an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Rangel was also a legal counsel for the New
More than any president in modern history, Donald Trump has turned the White House into a source of personal wealth, with a scale of profiteering that experts say eclipses previous administrations—and with little political consequence. “I’ve been watching and writing about corruption for 50 years, and my head is still spinning,” said Michael Johnston, professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of several books on corruption. Investigations by multiple news outlets, including the New York Times, Bloomberg News, PBS, and
Trump has aggressively pushed cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and housing assistance while pursuing massive tax breaks for the rich. Now, the administration is erasing programs that served veterans, students, the elderly, and communities devastated by natural disasters.
“These actions are heartless, cruel, and unlawful,” said Joel Berg of Hunger Free America, one of many groups impacted. “AmeriCorps isn’t wasteful spending—it’s a lifeline.” A coalition of nonprofits and service organizations from across the country has filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland, accusing the Trump administration of violating federal law by gutting AmeriCorps without legal authority or due process. Plaintiffs include Elev8 Baltimore, Red Cloud Indian School, the AmeriCorps Employees Union, and over a dozen others. The lawsuit states that the cuts violate the Administrative Pro-
to foreign gifts and real estate ventures, the Trump family has raked in hundreds of millions. Since his reelection, Trump has reportedly doubled his net worth. The Trump name has driven more than $10 billion in real estate transactions
Open Secrets, reveal that since returning to power, Trump and his family have significantly pire, using the presidency as leverage to capitalize on a level of influence and impunity that has redrawn the boundaries of ington. From cryptocurrency schemes and high-dollar memberships
Commentary
Breathe
Saw the news this afternoon that the federal court judge approved lifting the consent decree. So I updated the column and it is below.
Thank you!
“I can’t breathe.”
They were George Floyd’s last words. A plea. A protest. A prophecy.
Five years later, we are still trying to breathe. Still suffocating under systems that refuse to release their grip. And now, with a federal judge granting the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the federal consent decree with the City of Minneapolis, the message is loud and clear: in this country, even the freedom to breathe remains conditional.
The consent decree wasn’t just a policy agreement,
it was a breath of truth in a country that too often pretends not to see what is killing us. It was a recognition, backed by a two-year Department of Justice investigation, that George Floyd’s murder was not an isolated event, it was part of a pattern. A pattern of excessive force. A pattern of racial discrimination. A pattern of abuse disguised as protection. With one filing, they want to take that breath back. They are trying to make the truth disappear, like it never existed.
Breathe. And in doing so, it feels like Lady Justice herself is gasping for air, choked by political convenience and a willful retreat from accountability. This isn’t about ending oversight. It’s about suffocating a reckoning.
I was 17 when George Floyd was murdered. A firstyear law student. Still a teenager, still learning to believe in the promise of justice. My generation came of age in the glow of President Obama’s election. We were told we could be anything. That we belonged, that we were
the future. We breathed that in. Breathe.
But it didn’t take long for the air to change. Trayvon. Sandra. Atatiana. Breonna. Tyre. George. We learned that Black excellence is not armor. That no matter how hard we work or how much we achieve, we are still seen as threats in a system that was never built for our safety. We learned that the sanctity of even a single breath is not guaranteed. Not in America.
My family knows this deeply. In 1992, during the Rodney King unrest in Los Angeles, my grandfather Dwight Taylor
was shot and murdered. My mother was 18. There has been no accountability. No breath of justice. Just a silence we were expected to live with.
Breathe. That’s why this moment feels so heavy. Because it’s not just a rollback of reform. It’s a smothering of memory. A choking of public truth. We see it clearly. In
Minneapolis. In Louisville. In city after city where the federal government is loudly retreating, not because the need for oversight has ended, but because the politics have shifted. The same administration that calls investigating police “federal overreach” is handing out multimillion-dollar payouts to families of January 6 rioters.
One breath is criminalized.The other is rewarded. This is not a misunderstanding. It is design.
But here’s what they didn’t count on: we are still breathing. We are still here. We are still fighting to expand the space for truth and accountability. And we are not doing it alone.
Here in Minnesota, the state consent decree remains in effect. Court-enforceable, community-driven, and born
out of the organizing and voting power of the people. We remember that it was local leadership, backed by civic engagement, that made even partial justice possible. That George Floyd’s killers were held accountable not because the system wanted to, but because people demanded it.
That is the breath we must protect.
Breathe.
Black Gen Z must understand this: breathing is not just survival, it is strategy. Protest is a breath. Voting is a breath. Running for office, writing laws, becoming judges, lawyers, teachers, journalists, that’s how we breathe new life into the future.
Because we are living in a time when even the memory of justice is under attack. When truth is being suffocated. When Black breath is still seen as expendable.
Breathe.
We cannot forget. We cannot give in to the slow suffocation of delay and denial. We must keep breathing, for ourselves, for our ancestors, for those whose last breath was stolen in silence.
Because every breath we take is an act of resistance. Every breath we take is legacy. Every
“The president’s been very clear he has no intentions of pardoning Derek Chauvin, and it’s not a request that we’re looking at,” confirms a senior staffer at the Trump White House. That White House response results from public hope, including from a close Trump ally, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The timing of Greene’s hopes coincides with the Justice Department’s recent decision to end oversight of local police accused of abuse. It also falls on the fifth anniversary of the police-involved death of George Floyd on May 25th. The death sparked national and worldwide outrage and became
a transitional moment politically and culturally, although the outcry for laws on police accountability failed. The death forced then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to focus on deadly police force and accountability. His efforts while president to pass the George Floyd Justice in policing act failed. The death of George Floyd also put a spotlight on the Black community, forcing then-candidate Biden to choose a Black woman running mate. Kamala Harris ultimately became vice president of the United States alongside Joe Biden. Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison prosecuted the cases against the officers involved in the death of Floyd. He remembers,” Trump was in office when George Floyd was killed, and I would blame Trump for creating a negative
environment for police-community relations. Remember, it was
by the Obama administration.” In 2025, Police-involved civilian deaths are up by “about 100 to about 11 hundred,” according to Ellison. Ellison acknowledges that the Floyd case five years ago involved a situation in which due process was denied, and five years later, the president is currently dismissing “due process.
“The Minnesota Atty General also says, “Trump is trying to attack constitutional rule, attacking congressional authority and judicial decision-making.” George Floyd was an African-American man killed by police who knocked on his neck and on his back, preventing him from breathing. During those minutes on the ground, Floyd cried out for his late mother several times. Police subdued Floyd for an alleged counterfeit $20 bill.
Joanne M. Pierce
When Pope Leo XIV was elected pope, the assembled crowd reacted with joy but also with surprise: He was the first pope from the United States, and North America more broadly. Moreover, he was the first member of the Order of St. Augustine to be elected to the papacy. Out of all 267 popes, only 51 have been members of religious orders. Pope Francis was elected in 2013 as the first member of the Jesuit order, the Society of Jesus; he was also the first member of any religious order to be chosen in over 150 years. As a specialist in medieval Christianity, I am familiar with the origins of many Catholic religious orders, and I was intrigued by the choice of a member of the Order of St. Augustine to follow a Jesuit as pope. So, who are the Augustinians?
Early monks and concern for community In antiquity, some Christians chose to lead a more perfect religious life by leaving ordinary society and living together in groups, in the wilderness. They would be led by an older, more experienced person – an abbot. As monks, they fol-
lowed a set of regulations and guidelines called a “monastic rule.”
The earliest of these rules, composed about the year 400, is attributed to an influential theologian, later a bishop in North Africa, called St. Augustine of Hippo. The Rule of St. Augustine is a short text that offered monks a firm structure for their daily lives of work and prayer, as well as guidelines on how these rules could be implemented by the abbot in different situations. The rule is both firm and flexible. Our mission is to share knowledge and inform decisions. The first chapter stresses the importance of “common life”: It instructs monks to love God and one’s
neighbor by living “together in oneness of mind and heart, mutually honoring God in yourselves, whose temples you have become.”
This is the overriding principle that shapes all later instructions in Augustinian rule. For example, Chapter III deals with how the monks should behave when out in public. They should not go alone, but in a group, and not engage in scandalous behavior – specifically, staring at women. If one monk starts staring at a woman, one of the other monks with him should “admonish” him. If he does it
again, his companion should tell the abbot first, before any other witnesses are notified, so that the monk can try to change his behavior on his own first, so as not to cause disruption in the community. Because of this clarity and flexibility, its concern for both the community and the individual members, many early religious communities in the early Middle Ages adopted the Rule of St. Augustine; formal papal approval was not required at this time. Mendicant friars in
him who said when the looting starts, the shooting starts, it was him who got rid of all the consent decrees that were in place
Columnist
By Haley Taylor Schlitz, Esq.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Mural showing the portrait of George Floyd in Mauerpark in Berlin. To the left of the portrait the lettering
(facebook name) / Eme Free Thinker (signature)
My grandfather Dwight Taylor
My grandfather Dwight Taylor when he played for Long Beach State University under Jerry Tarkanian
My grandfather Dwight Taylor and grandmother Carolyn Bartlett in their high school prom
My mother with her father on Christmas day
(AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)
Pope Leo XIV leaves the Augustinian General House in Rome after a visit on May 13, 2025.
At City Hall
Rise and Remember: 5th Anniversary
Summary: In response to my legislative directive, MPD conducted a fee study and determined the appropriate hourly rates that will recoup about $1.4 million that taxpayers are currently subsidizing for MPD officers’ personal side gigs.
Background: Minneapolis Police officers are able to work “off-duty,” meaning that they use City cars, weapons and uniforms while working unregulated private security jobs for personal gain. This system has been identified as extremely problematic and detrimental to citywide safety and equity. While many Council Members and the Mayor have talked about their concerns with
Summary: The Climate and Infrastructure voted to add Dinkytown Marcy Holmes to the Pedestrian Street Lighting Corridor map, making it eligible for improved pedestrian level lighting.
Background:
off-duty over the years, there has been a lack of political will to actually implement any regulations.
Regulating off-duty has been a priority for me, and I have taken numerous legislative actions over several years to advance off-duty fees. Under State statute, the City is allowed to charge fees to recoup the costs associated with programs and services. Currently, MPD officers do about 86,000 hours of off-duty work per year, but there are not fees associated with this service. This means taxpayers are essentially subsidizing MPD officers’ side gigs.
Earlier this year, I led Council to pass an ordinance
allowing the City to put fees on off-duty. Then, I authored a legislative directive asking the Mayor’s administration to calculate fee rates that align with State statute and municipal financial policies.
The fee study found that fees of $6.99/hour without a squad car and $27.58/hour with a squad car would recoup the administrative and resource costs associated with MPD’s off-duty work. This is expected to recoup about $1.4 million in existing costs that are currently being subsidized by taxpayers, as well as about $300,000 in new revenue that is needed to improve tracking and administration.
As we go into the budget season, it’s incredibly important that the city is ensur-
ing we are being prudent in how resources are being distributed. It’s also just as important we are recouping all costs that we can relate to services. When these fees are implemented, the City’s current $1.4 million off-duty program will now be covered by those who are contracting these services directly instead of being subsidized by taxpayers. The secondary impact of this new fee will also be increased transparency and accountability to the off-duty system. Early in my time on Council, residents reached out frustrated and confused to see the amount of officers parked on Lake Street working off-duty for construction companies, while simultaneously hearing City leaders talk about their extreme staffing shortage of po-
lice. I am hopeful that these fees will lead to more transparency about how off-duty fits into the larger picture of staffing. This fee does not address all the concerns that are continuously raised about our off-duty system, such as the fact that officers can charge small business owners any rate without reason. That said, it’s a step in the right direction and would be the largest step the City has taken to regulate off-duty in decades. I am committed to using all tools available to continue reforming the off-duty system and I look forward to further conversations on this issue.
I also want to note that during the process around this fee study, I learned that members of MPD leadership were not aware that the City
does not cover liability for actions committed by an MPD officer that occur while the officer is working off-duty for personal gain. The
Floyd From 3
ly to make headlines than things such as rioting and lawlessness.
This pattern is part of what scholars call a “protest paradigm” that explores the relationship between protests, media and the public.
The paradigm holds that journalism often works against protest movements hoping to change the status quo.
The news media’s tendency to emphasize the frivolous, violent or annoying actions of protests rather than the depth of protesters’ demands, grievances and agendas negatively shapes public opinion and affects the public’s willingness to support the movements behind them.
After Floyd’s death, those closely following the coverage of conservative media were more likely to be exposed to stories that depicted protests as “criminal mobs.”
But it wasn’t just con-
Experiment
cial injustice and expand social welfare programs in the United States.
Earlier urban renewal programs had been roundly criticized for displacing communities of color. Much of this displacement occurred through federally funded highway and slum clearance projects that demolished entire neighborhoods and often left residents without decent options for new housing.
So the Johnson administration sought a more holistic approach. The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act established a federal framework for cities to coordinate housing, education, employment, health care and social services at the neighborhood level.
servative media. On May 31, 2020, the local paper, the Star Tribune, described the governor’s “show of strength” – a term used to describe the massive deployment of the Minnesota National Guard to help quell the “days of lawless rampage.”
Most coverage at the time fit a familiar pattern of delegitimizing the protest movement.
With time and space, the pattern breaks
With time and space, the pattern breaks
Five years later, some delegitimizing news coverage continues to headline. The New York Post, for example, recently published a 13-minute documentary that suggests Minneapolis is still on fire.
But a good portion of today’s news also presents a different framing. In one five-year anniversary piece, The New York Times described George Floyd Square, the murder-siteturned-place-of-reverance for many activists and local residents, as a “site of protest, art,
To qualify for the program, cities had to apply for planning grants by submitting a detailed proposal that included an analysis of neighborhood conditions, long-term goals and strategies for addressing problems.
Federal funds went directly to city governments, which then distributed them to local agencies and community organizations through contracts. These funds were relatively flexible but had to be tied to locally tailored plans. For example, Kansas City, Missouri, used Model Cities funding to support a loan program that expanded access to capital for local small businesses, helping them secure financing that might otherwise have been out of reach.
Unlike previous programs, Model Cities emphasized what Johnson described as “comprehensive” and “concentrated” efforts. It wasn’t just
grief and remembrance.” Another article in The Minnesota Star Tribune describes preservation efforts of street art and murals made by activists after the murder. Other coverage described the complicated process of demanding change and the path that remains ahead.
Of course, these are selective snapshots of the coverage. And some media may shy away from covering the anniversary at all.
But from my standpoint as a media scholar, the coverage that does exist has gone from being dominated by an initial focus on the violent aspects of protest to, in the main, a more reflective look at the meaning — rather than the spectacle — of the unrest. That legitimizing trend over time isn’t an isolated phenomenon. My colleagues Rachel Mourão and George Sylvie and I found something similar in previous research looking at the protests that followed the killings of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,
about rebuilding streets or erecting public housing. It was about creating new ways for government to work in partnership with the people most affected by poverty and racism.
A revolutionary approach to poverty
What made Model Cities unique wasn’t just its scale but its philosophy. At the heart of the program was an insistence on “widespread citizen participation,” which required cities that received funding to include residents in the planning and oversight of local programs.
The program also drew inspiration from civil rights leaders. One of its early architects, Whitney M. Young Jr., had called for a “Domestic Marshall Plan” – a reference to the federal government’s efforts to rebuild Europe after World War II – to redress centuries of racial inequality.
Young’s vision helped
in 2014. In our analysis of the protests following Brown’s death, we observed that the first weeks of coverage focused more on protesters, delegitimizing frames and episodic news – that is, the disruption, destruction and arrests.
But we saw a dramatic change by the third and fourth weeks of coverage. With the passing of time, more legitimizing frames emerged, describing the protest’s substance and demands, and more thematic and in-depth reporting became apparent.
We observed a similar trend when we looked out even further from the triggering events. After the trial of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch leader charged and then acquitted over the deaths of Martin, and the grand jury verdict not to indict police officer Darren Wilson over the death of Brown, news coverage of protests was more contextual and thematic. The coverage provided more space and voice to “nonofficial” sources such as
shape the Model Cities framework, which proposed targeted systemic investments in housing, health, education, employment and civic leadership in minority communities. In Atlanta, for example, the Model Cities Program helped fund neighborhood health clinics and job training programs. But the program also funded leadership councils that for the first time gave local low-income residents a direct voice in how city funds were spent.
From 3 Rangel
In other words, neighborhood residents weren’t just beneficiaries. They were planners, advisers and, in some cases, staffers. This commitment to community participation gave rise to a new kind of public servant – what sociologists Martin and Carolyn Needleman famously called “guerrillas in the bureaucracy.”
These were radical planners – often young, idealistic and deeply embedded in the neighborhoods they served. Many were recruited and hired through new Model Cities funding that allowed local governments to expand their staff with community workers aligned with the program’s goals.
Working from within city agencies, these new planners used their positions to challenge top-down decision-making and push for community-driven planning. Their work was revolutionary not because they dismantled institutions but because they reimagined how institutions could function, prioritizing the voices of residents long excluded from power.
Strengthening community ties In cities across the country, planners fought to redirect public resources toward locally defined priorities.
In some cities, such as Tucson, the program funded education initiatives such as bilingual cultural programming and college scholarships for local students. In Baltimore, it funded mobile health services and youth sports programs.
In New York City, the program supported new kinds of housing projects called
protesters and family members. A question of journalism
The protest paradigm’s persistence may be a function of journalistic bias
− the adage of “if it bleeds, it leads” talks to the immediate reporting imperative of prioritizing violence and spectacle over issues and meaning. But it can also be a consequence of how journalism operates to inform the public.
When uprisings against police brutality first begin, everything is new to the journalist and the public. The initial coverage tends to reflect this newsness and emphasizes breaking news and official narratives − which are often easier to obtain than the statements of protest groups. Police departments, for example, have well-established media relations departments with preexisting relationships with journalists.
These initial reports also tend to feature information that would have the biggest impact on wider communities − such as blocked highways and potential property destruction
vest-pocket developments, which got their name from their smaller scale: midsize buildings or complexes built on vacant lots or underutilized land. New housing such as the Betances Houses in the South Bronx were designed to add density without major redevelopment taking place – a direct response to midcentury urban renewal projects, which had destroyed and displaced entire neighborhoods populated by the city’s poorest residents. Meanwhile, cities such as Seattle used the funds to renovate older apartment buildings instead of tearing them down, which helped preserve the character of local neighborhoods.
The goal was to create affordable housing while keeping communities intact. What went wrong?
Despite its ambitious vision, Model Cities faced resistance almost from the start. The program was underfunded and politically fragile. While some officials had hoped for US$2 billion in annual funding, the actual allocation was closer to $500 million to $600 million, spread across more than 60 cities.
Then the political winds shifted. Though designed during the optimism of the mid-1960s, the program started being implemented under President Richard Nixon in 1969. His administration pivoted away from “people programs” and toward capital investment and physical development. Requirements for resident participation were weakened, and local officials often maintained control over the process, effectively marginalizing the everyday citizens the program was meant to empower.
In cities such as San Francisco and Chicago, residents clashed with bureaucrats over control, transparency and decision-making. In some places, participation was reduced to token advisory roles. In others, internal conflict and political pressure made sustained community governance nearly impossible.
− than just the aggrieved community. This translates to more coverage generally in the aftermath of a big event − and that reporting is more likely to delegitimize protests.
These are the first drafts of history, and they are typically incomplete. But five years later in the case of George Floyd and protests of his death, coverage looks more complete and complex. That complexity brings more balance, from my perspective.
What journalists write years later are no longer the first drafts of history reported with limited perspectives. In these subsequent drafts, journalists have a little more time to think, learn and breathe. Immediacy takes a back burner, and journalists have had more time to collect information. And it is in these collections of subsequent drafts that the protesters and social movements get a fairer shake.
York Housing and Redevelopment Board.
Charlie Rangel was born in Harlem in 1930. He would go on to represent one of the most storied parts of Manhattan for 46 years in the U.S. Congress. Along with the late John Conyers, Rangel was also a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “We all have a large stake in preserving our democracy, but I maintain that those without power in our society, the black, the brown, the poor of all colors, have the largest stake not because we have the most to lose, but because we have worked the hardest, and given the most, for what we have achieved,” Rangel once said. Rangel was the first African American to serve as Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. As chair and as a member of
the Committee, Rangel played a central role in shaping U.S. tax legislation. He advocated for progressive tax reform, closing corporate loopholes, and increasing tax equity. Rangel was also a strong supporter of Social Security and Medicare and defended and expanded programs aimed at reducing poverty and supporting working-class families. The legendary Harlem Congressman also championed federal investment in affordable housing and urban infrastructure, especially for Harlem and other underserved communities.
In a noteworthy policy move, Rangel also pushed to reinstate the military draft during the Iraq War—not to promote it, but to spark debate on the fairness of who bears the burden of war. Rangel earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in the Army during Korea.
Rangel served as a member of the New York State Assembly from 1967 to 1971 and went on to defeat another
A legacy worth revisiting Although the program was phased out by 1974, its legacy lived on. In cities across the country, Model Cities trained a generation of Black and brown civic leaders in what community development leaders and policy advocates John A. Sasso and Priscilla Foley called “a little noticed revolution.” In their book of the same name, they describe how those involved in the program went on to serve in local government, start nonprofits and advocate for community development.
It also left an imprint on later policies. Efforts such as participatory budgeting, community land trusts and neighborhood planning initiatives owe a debt to Model Cities’ insistence that residents should help shape the future of their communities. And even as some criticized the program for failing to meet its lofty goals, others saw its value in creating space for democratic experimentation.
Today’s housing crisis demands structural solutions to structural problems. The affordable housing crisis is deeply connected to other intersecting crises, such as climate change, environmental injustice and health disparities, creating compounding risks for the most vulnerable communities. Addressing these issues through a fragmented social safety net – whether through housing vouchers or narrowly targeted benefit programs – has proven ineffective. Today, as policymakers once again debate how to respond to deepening inequality and a lack of affordable housing, the lost promise of Model Cities offers vital lessons. Model Cities was far from perfect. But it offered a vision of how democratic, local planning could promote health, security and community.
Critics, including Black community workers and civil rights activists, warned that the program risked becoming a new form of “neocolonialism,” one that used the language of empowerment while concentrating control in the hands of white elected officials and federal administrators.
New York political legend — Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in a primary, before winning in the general election in 1970. Rangel retired from Congress in 2016 at 86 years old.
At a time when many are discussing the age of members of Congress and the many who have died in office over the past two years, Rangel was an exception who departed on his terms.
Rangel’s seat in Congress would go to Dominican-born Adriano Espaillat. The moment represented a shift in Harlem’s demographics and the power of the Latino community in the Bronx.
Rangel’s wife Alma Carter, passed away last year. The two met in the 1950s at the famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. They married in 1964 and have two children.
Insight 2 Health
Questions and answers for parents of children with disabilities
By Maureen SammsVaughan
As a parent, what can I do to support my child with a disability? Why is it important to focus on a child’s abilities?
Every child with a disability has strengths. These may be in doing artwork, in their personality, or in their motor skills. Every child has strength. It’s more important for us to focus on what children can do, and their abilities, rather than their disability. We can use children’s abilities to assist the areas that they have most challenges with right now.
How can I communicate with my child with a disability and how do I know when he/she wants to communicate with me?
Some children with disabilities will be able to speak with you. Others will not be able to speak. But they do communicate, even though they don’t speak. For example, when a newborn baby comes into a family that baby communicates without speaking. You learn the baby’s likes and dislikes by whether they smile, laugh, or whether they cry. The same occurs with children with disabilities who can’t speak. They tell you what they like by smiling or laughing, and they tell you what they don’t like by crying or making an upset face.
What can I do in my day-to-day to make sure I’m stimulating my child and his/ her brain development?
Children are stimu-
lated by everything in their environment: by the sounds, by the interactions, by your smile. So, if your child with a disability is around you, you should make sure that you spend time talking with them, explaining in simple language what it is you’re doing, smiling with them, telling them all about their environment, making noises around them so they can respond to noises. Everything that you do, as you are moving about the house, as you are doing your housework, involve and include your child in it. Move your child into the room in which you are working. Tell them what you are doing: you are washing the dishes, you’re dipping the dishes in the water. Tell them exactly what you are doing. All of that will stimulate them. You can also stimulate them by directly playing with them, by making little toys in the home, putting stones in a bottle and shaking it, by waving ribbons in front of their eyes, different colored ribbons. There are many things that you can do with just things around your house.
Can I breastfeed my child if he/she has a disability?
Breastfeeding is important for all children but is especially important for children with disabilities. Breastfeeding is important for children’s growth, nutrition, and brain development. Many children with disabilities can breastfeed, but only a few are not able to breastfeed. And those who can’t and can be fed expressed breastmilk, because breastmilk is the best.
Why are the early
An H-1B Visa is a nonimmigrant visa that temporarily allows US companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations.
years of every child’s life so critical?
The early years of every child, whether they have a disability or not, are critical because when we stimulate the brain during these early years we are ensuring that the brain develops to its full potential. We are making sure that children have the best development that they can have and this happens for children with disabilities and children without disabilities. How do I play with my child with a disability?
Children with disabilities enjoy being played with just like any other child. They enjoy you reading to them,
has garnered much attention in shows and movies, like the most recent film, Forever’ on Netflix and Bravo’s Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard.
showing them pictures, tickling them, hugging them, cuddling them. They respond to you with laughter and smiles. If they don’t like a particular play that you are doing, they will tell you. They will stop laughing, they’ll stop smiling. Try something else. You will find something because you know them best. If I don’t have time to play or money to afford toys, what can I do?
If you don’t have a lot of time to play with your child, there may be other family members in your home who will be able to play with your child with a disability. Brothers and sisters are great around children
with disabilities. They stimulate them because they talk to them a lot and they play with them. They don’t seem to be concerned about whether a sibling has a disability. They play with them just like anyone else. What is your advice to parents who suspect that their child has a disability?
If you have a concern that your child has a disability, go to your nearest health provider and let them know your concerns. Some concerns may turn out not to be a problem at all, but some may, and your child may be identified as having a disability. It’s just as important to provide children with
es closed today out of the fear that this federal presence has instilled is frightening.” Regarding the impact on island sustainability amid these raids, Rose affirms, “This affects families, our local economy, and tourism here as a whole, which small businesses here fully depend on. These are scary times we are living in.”
In December of 2024, then-President-elect Donald Trump supported the H-1B visa program, stating, “I’ve always liked the visas. I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them.”
However, other work visas are prevalent on the island. Jamaicans are also provided with H-2B work visas for temporary or seasonal non-agricultural work. Martha’s Vineyard also offers J-1 Work Visas to Serbians, Georgians, Romanians, and Eastern Europeans. The J-1 visa is a non-immigrant visa for foreign nationals participating in exchange visitor programs in the United States, including those for work and study.
Martha’s Vineyard has been a Black destination spot, particularly in August. It
mediate administrative leave, and 85% were issued layoff notices effective June 24.
cedure Act and federal budget law. On April 15, AmeriCorps participants were abruptly told to cease work and return home. Four regional National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) campuses were closed, and the entire corps disbanded. Most agency staff were placed on im-
and generated over $500 million from a single cryptocurrency venture. His newly formed $TRUMP coin was launched just before taking office in January, with access to private investor dinners sold based on personal investment—not campaign contributions.
Bloomberg News reported that Trump’s ventures now span financial services, gun sales, and drone part manufacturing. His family members have secured corporate appointments, including at least seven executive roles for Donald Trump Jr. The brazenness has raised alarm among longtime observers. “By conventional Washington standards, the stillyoung Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in
Programs supporting Native American education in South Dakota, school tutoring in Baltimore, housing counseling in North Carolina, and civic engagement in Maine have all been defunded. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), an AmeriCorps alum, called the shutdown a betrayal. “AmeriCorps costs pennies to the dollar and
American history,” wrote Peter Baker of the New York Times, citing the potential to eclipse even Watergate and the Teapot Dome scandal. One of the more glaring examples occurred recently when Jeff Bezos reportedly agreed to finance a promotional film for Melania Trump following a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The $28 million deal—280 times the amount Hillary Clinton once earned from a 1980s cattle futures investment that sparked weeks of scandal—has gone largely unnoticed in Washington.
In another instance, Qatar handed over a luxury aircraft valued at $200 million, officially donated to the Air Force but intended for Trump’s use, including his future presidential library. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has refused to divest or establish a blind trust for his business interests. Instead, he retains control of a
The irony of this raid is that on September 14, 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent 50 Venezuelan migrants from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. It was part of a relocation program to ”sanctuary destinations.”
Shortly after the Vineyard drop-off, migrants were also left in front of thenVice President Kamala Harris’ home at the Naval Observatory to bring attention to the illegal migrant issue and sanctuary cities.
delivers enormous value. This decision will hurt communities that can least afford it.”
The lawsuit demands a halt to the shutdown and calls on the courts to block what plaintiffs describe as an “unprecedented and unlawful dismantling” of a vital public institution. “Congress created AmeriCorps to serve the vulnerable,” the suit reads. “This administration has chosen to destroy it instead.”
family-run trust that allows him to profit directly from decisions made in office. According to Open Secrets, special interests have adapted accordingly— hosting fundraisers and galas at Trump-owned properties, effectively turning campaignwevents into revenue streams for the president. What once would have prompted congressional hearings and federal investigations now barely moves the political needle. Trump has replaced watchdogs and ethics officials with loyalists and ensured that allies lead the Justice Department, the FBI, and other key agencies. With a Republican-controlled Congress declining to investigate, Democrats and watchdog groups have found it nearly impossible to hold Trump accountable.
“There will be no official investigations because Mr. Trump has made sure of it,” Baker wrote.
(Photo by Courtney Hale)
Little boy with Down Syndrome with his parents and sisters
The why and how of deadheading
By Melinda Myers
Keep your flowers blooming longer and your garden a bit tidier with deadheading. Removing faded flowers can promote repeat bloom on some plants, encourage fuller, more compact growth, and tidy up the garden.
Use a bypass hand pruner, garden snips or other dead-heading tool to remove faded flowers. Bypass tools have two sharp blades like scissors, resulting in a clean cut that closes quickly, leaving your plant looking its best. Corona Tool’s Ergocut dead header (coronatools.com) has a finger loop that provides better control and an ergonomic design for less stress on your hands and wrist.
The type of flower
will influence how and where to make the cut. In general, remove the stem of faded blooms back to the first set of healthy leaves or nearby flower buds. Remove the flower stem of salvias, speedwells (Veronicas), and snapdragons as the blooms begin to fade. Cut below the spike of flowers just above the first set of leaves or the side shoots where the new flower buds are forming. Encourage additional blossoms and improve Shasta daisy’s appearance by removing faded flowers. Prune back just above a set of healthy leaves. Cut the flowers of plants like Armeria and coral bells back to the base of the flower stems that arise from the foliage. This improves the appearance and encourages more blooms on some of this type of flowering perennial. Plants like daylilies
and balloon flowers require a bit different care. Remove the individual blooms as they fade if you don’t like looking at the faded flowers. Once all the individual flowers have bloomed out, you can cut the flower stem back at the base.
Removing fading flowers of fuchsia and lantana will prevent the plants from going to seed and encourage more blooms. Remove any berries that do form to keep these plants flowering throughout the growing season.
Deadheading peonies is strictly for aesthetics and won’t extend the bloom time. Remove the faded flowers or seedpods as they form. Cut just above a healthy set of leaves to keep the stems more upright and create a tidier appearance in your garden.
Prevent some flowers, like columbine, Amsonia,
and Alliums from reseeding and spreading throughout the garden by removing the faded flowers. Even though it won’t promote additional blooms, it will help eliminate unwanted seedlings in next year’s garden. Remove flowers as they appear on coleus, grown for its colorful foliage, to promote more compact growth. Late blooming, flowerless varieties and self-branching coleus hybrids reduce or eliminate time spent on this task.
Reduce time spent deadheading by including some self-cleaning, also called free-flowering plants, like impatiens, fibrous begonias, Calibrachoa, and moss rose. Lobelia, many of the newer petunias, and verbenas are also self-cleaning but may benefit from a bit of grooming. Prune back heatstressed lobelia and verbena that get leggy and petunia stems that
need to be kept in bounds. Allow seedheads to develop on coneflowers, rudbeckias, and other plants that provide winter interest and food for the birds. And consider skipping the deadheading of late blooming perennials. This allows them to prepare for winter and form seedpods for additional winter interest.
And while you are out in the garden deadheading, pick a few flowers at their peak to enjoy in a summer bouquet indoors.
Melinda Myers has
to Grow Anything” instant video series and the nationally syndicated Melinda’s Garden Moment radio program. Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine and was commissioned by Corona Tools for her expertise to write this article. Myers’
Brooklyn Park Mayor and Council Members schedule Town Hall Forums
Tuesday, June 17 |
5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Hennepin Technical College, Auditorium (9000 Brooklyn Boulevard) Central District: Thursday, July 17 | 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
City Hall Council Chambers (5200 85th Avenue)
East District: Wednesday, July 23 | 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Edinburgh USA (8700 Edinbrook Crossing)
Get to know your Council Members better, ask questions, and meet your fellow residents over light refreshments. This is an excellent op-
portunity to strengthen the sense of community in Brooklyn Park and participate in shaping its bright future. Residents of all ages are welcome and light snacks will be provided.
Questions?Chris Xiong chris.xiong@brooklynpark. org763-315-8466
From 4
medieval Europe the Franciscans and Dominicans, received papal approval in the early 13th century. Others were organized later. A few decades later, several hermits living in the
Western Europe, becoming involved in preaching and other kinds of pastoral work in several countries. Early missionaries to modern times
places – for example, in North America and Australasia, comprising Australia and parts of South Asia. Based on his years as Pope
There, they not only ministered to the European crews and colonists, but they also evangelized – preached the Christian gospel – to the native inhabitants of the country. Villanova University in Pennsylvania and other ministries in New York and Massachusetts. Except for two 17th-century missionaries, Augustinian friars didn’t arrive in Canada until the
Tim Walz Governor of Minnesota Spike Moss Freedom Fighter Medaria Arradondo Former Minneapolis Police Chief
Andrea Jenkins City Council Member (Ward 8) Haley Taylor Schlitz, Assistant Attorney General
Anderson Unity Community Mediation Team
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scores 34 as Thunder top Timberwolves 12494 to advance to NBA Finals Sports
By Cliff Brunt, Ap Sports Writer
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) —
The Oklahoma City Thunder tried their best to balance the euphoria of the moment with the fact that they haven’t completed their mission.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 34 points, and the Thunder routed the Minnesota Timberwolves 124-94 on Wednesday night to win the Western Conference finals series 4-1 and advance to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2012.
After the win, the league MVP was measured in his excitement. Oklahoma City will play the Indiana Pacers or New York Knicks in the finals. Indiana leads the Eastern Conference finals series 3-1 with Game 5 to be played in New York City on Thursday.
“We’ve got a lot of growing to do,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to get to our ultimate goal, and this is not it, so that’s all that I’m focused on.”
Still, the young Thunder players had some of their usual fun. During a postgame in-
terview, coach Mark Daigneault began complimenting his young squad.
“These guys are uncommon. They do everything right. They’re high character.”
Then, several players started draping towels over Daigneault, as they often do to local sideline reporter Nick Gallo during postgame interview sessions.
“They’re idiots,” Daigneault said without breaking focus.
Chet Holmgren had 22 points, seven rebounds and three blocks and Jalen Williams added 19 points and eight rebounds for the Thunder.
A fanbase that had suffered through losing Kevin Durant in free agency in 2016 and a rebuild that had the team near the bottom of the league’s standings just four years ago let loose in the fourth quarter when the Thunder sat their starters with 5:14 remaining and a 10874 lead.
Julius Randle scored 24 points and Anthony Edwards added 19 for the Timberwolves, who shot just 41.2% from the field and committed 21 turnovers.
It was a tough loss for Minnesota point guard Mike
Conley. The 37-year-old point guard said these opportunities are rare.
“It’s going to take a while just to kind of dissect what we just did and what we weren’t able to accomplish,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m proud of my team, proud of these guys, man. They really fought. Not just for me, but for the whole team.” Oklahoma City opened the game on an 11-3 run and extended the advantage throughout the first quarter. Cason Wallace drained a 3-pointer as the first quarter expired to put the Thunder up 26-9 at the end of the period. The game was never close after that.
“We just struggled to find a rhythm,” Minnesota coach Chris Finch said. “Everyone was kind of trying to do it all by themselves. We lost our connectivity. But all credit to the Thunder. They certainly deserve this. They played outstanding. And we came up short in a lot of ways.”
FOR OVER 100 YEARS, URBAN LEAGUE TWIN CITIES HAS STOOD IN SOLIDARITY WITH OUR COMMUNITY FIGHTING TO DISMANTLE THE FORCES THAT LED TO GEORGE FLOYD’S MURDER, AND BUILDING WHAT WAS LONG DENIED: EQUITY, OPPORTUNITY, AND HEALING.
That legacy continues through our free, culturally grounded programs:
• Workforce Solutions – Connecting you to union jobs, training in construction, manufacturing, IT, and career coaching.
• Wealth Development – Supporting credit repair, budgeting, savings, and homeownership goals.
• Education – Helping students and families thrive through culturally responsive support and advocacy.
• Community & Civic Engagement –Influence systems through public policy and civic action.
• Center for the Advancement of the Black Family (CACCFIC) – Support for families with healing-based alternatives to child protection.
• Young Professionals –Black professionals' networks (ages 18–40) focused on leadership and economic empowerment.
…This is how justice carries on.
…This is how healing moves forward.
…This is your first step.
AP Photo/Nate Billings
Minnesota Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards (5) works toward the basket as Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (2) defends during the first half of Game 5 of the Western Conference finals of the NBA basketball playoffs, Wednesday, May 28, 2025, in Oklahoma City.
AP Photo/Nate Billings
Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (2), right, works toward the basket as Minnesota Timberwolves forward Julius Randle (30) defends during the first half of Game 5 of the Western Conference finals of the NBA basketball playoffs, Wednesday, May 28, 2025, in Oklahoma City.
Books, Art & Culture
In Our Words
Sharing Our Stories
By W.D. Foster-Graham Book Review Editor
Queer Stories from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Writers
Selected by Anne Shade
Edited by Victoria Villasenor
The month of June brings us summer, Father’s Day, and Juneteenth. It also brings us Pride Month, a time of celebration for those of us who stand at the intersectionality of BIPOC and LGBTQ, as well as the memory of the acts of resistance that took place on June 27, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. If we don’t share our stories, someone else
Ngugi
will, and it won’t be accurate.
That being said, I bring to you
In Our Words: Queer Stories from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Writers.
This is an anthology of short stories representing the diversity of cultures and ethnicities as they pertain to the intersection of queer and racial identities across the globe. They range from coming-out stories, the supernatural, the paranormal, romance, worldbuilding, and cultural legends/mythologies. Families of origin and found families are represented, as well as shapeshifters and ancient gods among the stories told.
I was treated to stories of familial relationships, “meet-cutes,” loss, redemption, dragons, mermaids, gamers, storytellers, warriors, spirits, and resilience, making this an amazing read.
I give a hat tip to the
contributors who used their creative voices to share their stories and speak their truths: Briana Lawrence, Mason Dixon, LaToya Hankins, Akil Wingate, Celeste Castro, Anne Shade, Brent Lambert, Gracie C. McKeever, Nanisi Barrett D’Arnuk, Yolanda Wallace, Malik Welton, Virginia Black, Namrata Verghese, Reginald T. Jackson, Mayapee Chowdhury, Victoria Villasenor (aka Brey Willows), and Emmalia Harrington.
In Our Words is available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bold Strokes Books.
To the contributors of In Our Words, thank you for your work, and for sharing your experience, strength, hope, and vision as BIPOC/Queer writers. And special thanks and appreciation to Anne Shade and Victoria Villasenor for bringing these stories to us.
wa Thiong’o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
By
NEW YORK (AP) — Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country’s history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87.
Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ’s U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Ngũgĩ’s son Nducu wa Ngugi said he died in Bedford, Georgia. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments.
Whether through novels such as “The Wizard of the Crow” and “Petals of Blood,” memoirs such as “Birth of a Dream Weaver” or the landmark critique “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist’s calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after.
“Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you’re right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.”
He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ’s ability to tell “a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.” Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ’s life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and
eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn’t respond to British soldiers’ demands that he stop moving.
In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, “The Upright Revolution,” updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story “The Ghost of Michael Jackson” features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ’s tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in “The Wizard of the Crow,” in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies.
“Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,” he wrote.
“When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.”
Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country’s divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country’s liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native.
One of five children born to the third of his father’s four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong’o.
A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly.
His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he
encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word.
“It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one’s destiny,” Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. “Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.”
He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel “Things Fall Apart,” had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, “Weep Not, Child” and “The River Between,” both of which were released in the next three years.
Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement.
“He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a whitedominated world,” Ngũgĩ later wrote. “And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens,
D.H. Lawrence.”
By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with “A Grain of Wheat.” Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. “Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, “I Will Marry When I Want,” was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, “Petals of Blood,” the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him.
“The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,” he wrote in “Wrestling With the Devil,” a memoir published in 2018. “It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions
wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.”
He didn’t only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read “I am stupid” or “I am a donkey.” Starting with “Devil On the Cross,” written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past.
Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In “Decolonizing the Mind,” published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors.
“The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to EuroAmerica,” he wrote. “But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neocolonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?”
He would, however, spend much of his latter years in Englishspeaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school’s International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country.
“When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. ‘Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,’” Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. “Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.”
Hillel Italie AP National Writer
In Our Words Book Cover Artwork
(Daniel A. Anderson/UC Irvine via AP)
This 2010 image released by UC Irvine shows Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
