PRST STD U.S.POSTAGE PAID TWIN CITIES MN PERMIT NO. 6391
THE VOICE OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY SINCE 1934 June 10-June 16, 2021, Vol. 87 No. 45
FIND US ONLINE AT WWW.SPOKESMAN-RECORDER.COM
“AS IT WAS SPOKEN ... LET US RECORD.”
Violence flares again in Minneapolis after U.S. Marshals kill man
Winston Smith Girard-and-Lake-shooting
Winston Smith’s family demands justice, answers enue and Lake Street South near where Smith was shot and killed on Thursday, June 3. “We want these cops to go to jail. They shot him execution style. He was on a date, in a public place. I want everybody—the sheriff’s e was trying to live his life,” is how Winton Smith’s brother Kidale Smith described his sibling at a press conference deputies, the U.S. Marshals, everybody that was involved in my on Friday afternoon in the Uptown area near Girard Av- brother’s death—to be prosecuted,” said Smith.
By Mel Reeves Contributing writer
H
Controversy embroils efforts to re-open George Floyd Square intersection to create an autonomous zone and vowed not to remove them until all 24 demands of their Justice Resolution have In the early hours of Thursday, June 3, Minneapolis work- been met by city, state, and feders descended on the intersec- eral leadership. For the past year tion of 38th Street and Chicago the intersection has served as a Ave. and began dismantling the memorial to Floyd and all those barricades. The area had come who have also lost their lives to By Abdi Mohamed Contributing writer
open the intersection has been a point of contention between city leaders and community groups. The City, while attempting to reopen, left the large metal fist that sits in the middle of the intersection. As news of the dismantling of George Floyd Square spread on
Photo by Abdi Mohamed to be known as George Floyd Square (GFS) and is the site of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin. In the days following Floyd’s death, activists erected barriers along all four entrances to the
police violence. After the June 3 effort to reopen was met with opposition and homemade barricades were re-erected, the city again sent workers to reopen the area to traffic on June 8. The effort to re-
social media, hundreds of people arrived to show their support for the square to stay untouched. Shortly afterwards, new barriers were brought in to close the intersection. In the following days, four new wooden fists were ■See AGAPE on page 5
It was rumored and confirmed on a social media platform that Winton Smith had been dining in a restaurant nearby with an unidentified woman only minutes before he was killed. The woman was in the car at the time Smith was shot. She was taken into police custody. ■See SMITH on page 5
St. Louis murder of activist Seals unsolved five years later By Niara Savage Contributing writer Nearly five years after his passing, family and friends question mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of 29-yearold Ferguson activist Darren Seals. Before Seals was brutally killed, he wholly dedicated his life to a single noble objective: uniting and freeing the Black community from racist oppression, especially police violence. “He just reminded a lot of people of Malcolm X,” said Seals’ mother, Mary Otis. “He wasn’t scared to die.” A skilled orator, Seals empowered and mobilized members of the community to organize in the pursuit of justice and accountability. He raised awareness about police violence in the years before he was found shot to death in his vehicle in the Riverview area of St. Louis in 2016. He would have celebrated his 31st birthday on May 15. Even before the death of Michael Brown in 2014 placed Ferguson, Missouri in the spotlight of the then still-emerging Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Seals was already rising as a force against police violence. More
Darren Seals (center) with friends than a year before 18-year-old Brown was fatally shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, a death largely responsible for fueling the movement, 25-year-old college student Cary Ball Jr. was shot 25 times by St. Louis police after crashing his car at the end of a police pursuit. When Ball’s mother, Toni Taylor, first met Seals at a protest for Brown outside of the Ferguson Police Department on August 10, 2014, the day after his death, he was speaking to the
crowd about her son. “He was actually talking about my son, Cary, and that’s what made me walk over to him,” Taylor said. “He was telling the crowd, ‘If ya’ll would have listened to me last year, I was trying to tell ya’ll about Cary Ball Jr.’” Taylor approached Seals and tapped him on the shoulder. When the young activist saw that the poster board she was holding was full of articles about Ball and heard ■See SEALS on page 5
NFL agrees to end ‘race-norming’ The practice disadvantaged Black players seeking injury settlements
started with less cognitive brain function than their White teamLast week the NFL called for mates. In other words, the Black an end to what has been referred players were considered less to as “race-norming” in deter- intelligent. For Black players to mining settlement payments for qualify for settlement relief they players who suffered debilitating must have had an even greater brain injuries as a result of their reduction in cognitive brain functime in the league. The decision came after a mainstream news special, a lawsuit by two Black players, and more than a dozen wives of Black retired players organizing and sending the judge presiding over the settlement a petition with nearly 50,000 sig- tion than their fellow White playnatures calling for an end to race- ers. Race-norming is the practice norming. Doctors had denied Black of adjusting test scores to account players compensation because for the race or ethnicity of the testthey assumed that Black players taker. “It’s morally unconscioBy MSR News Service
“It’s morally unconscionable and legally indefensible.”
nable, most certainly politically unsustainable, and legally indefensible,” said sports sociologist Harry Edwards in an LA Times interview upon hearing the news that the NFL is eliminating racebased norms in their evaluation of players seeking compensation for their injuries sustained while in the league. “You can’t have 74% of the players in the league Black, but when it comes to actually being able to claim access to funds resulting from brain damage, dementia, CTE, other kind of cognitive-deficit-inducing conditions that are directly related to football, all of a sudden there’s a different standard for them. There’s a presumption that they [Blacks] come
Courtesy of MGN in at a cognitively lower ranking.” The NFL in its defense said there was no discrimination and that if there was it had been based on individual doctor’s evaluations of testing scores. “We are committed to eliminating race-based norms in the program and more broadly in the neuropsychological community,”
wrote the NFL in a statement, while maintaining that no such discrimination took place in the administration of the settlement. However, the civil rights suit brought by Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry alleged that they had been denied compensation for their brain injuries because of their race. “When they
use a different scale for African Americans versus any other race, that’s literally the definition of systematic racism,” said Davenport. Cyril Smith, a lawyer for Henry and Davenport, asserted that White players’ dementia claims were being approved at two to three times the rate of those of ■See NFL on page 5