historium:

“Capitalism Plus Racism Breeds Fascism” (Black Panther newspaper, 1969)

(via berniesrevolution)

xelamanrique318:

smartassjen:

In case you missed it, here’s the moment when three trans women, played by three out trans actresses, casually chatting over lunch, appeared on a prime-time drama on the single biggest television network in the U.S.

Doubt (CBS) was revolutionary in having a trans lead, played by Laverne Cox, but they also had a trans woman in the writer’s room (Imogen Binnie), and trans actors, like myself and Angelica Ross in the scene above, and Alexandra Grey in the following episode (who gives a devastating and powerful must-see performance).

This level of attentiveness was largely due to the creators/showrunners, Joan Rater & Tony Phelan, having a trans son, the actor Tom Phelan. For Joan & Tony, trans people weren’t “other”, they weren’t punchlines, they didn’t exist just as metaphors, or props to trigger male anxieties. They’re real people, whole and complicated people with rich lives that can’t be reduced to the single facet “trans”.

Three friends having lunch and talking over boy trouble, in public, in daylight. This is how we come out of the shadows.

RIP Doubt; long live the team behind it.

cis straights cancelled it after only TWO EPISODES… never forget it

CIS STRAIGHTS DID WHAT?!

THAT ACTING WAS FLAWLESS! I WANNA SEE MORE!

(via chescaleigh)

I have no idea who this is, but I love his style

Also he has a cat, and a cute grin

(Source: fuckyeahgorgeousguys, via theloverofthepoor)

jumpingjacktrash:

profeminist:

profeminist:

Source

Reblogging ICYMI 

The Nazi and Klan stans called off their rallies because they WERE OUTNUMBERED and the numbers showed how pathetically small their hate movement is compared to loving people with a conscience. 

If you were at the Boston march to counter the racists, YOU DID THAT.

@ people who say nonviolence doesn’t work: well actually

You guys are amazing!

Missouri plans to execute Marcellus Williams as his attorneys say DNA evidence exonerates him →

tpfnewslive:

Missouri on Tuesday plans to execute Marcellus Williams, a death-row inmate convicted in 2001 of killing a former newspaper reporter. But with Williams’s lethal injection looming, his attorneys have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay, arguing that Missouri may be on the verge of executing the wrong person.

Williams, 48, was convicted of brutally killing Felicia “Lisha” Gayle, who had been a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 1998, Gayle was in her home when she was stabbed 43 times with a butcher knife, according to court records. Williams was scheduled to be executed in 2015 for the high-profile killing, but the state Supreme Court stayed his lethal injection, allowing him time to obtain new DNA testing.

Attorneys for Williams argue that he is innocent, pointing to DNA tests they say produced “conclusive scientific evidence that another man committed this crime.” They say this evidence shows that DNA belonging to someone else was found on the murder weapon, exonerating Williams.

“They’re never going to ever confront an actual innocence cause more persuading than this involving exonerating DNA evidence,” said Kent Gipson, one of Williams’s attorneys. “I’ve seen a lot of miscarriages of justice, but this one would take the cake.”

[Arkansas executed four inmates in eight days. The last execution prompted some questions.]

State officials, though, said they still believe Williams is guilty because of other “compelling non-DNA evidence.”

In court filings, the office of Joshua D. Hawley, Missouri’s attorney general, lists some of these other factors, describing two people — a man who served time with Williams and Williams’s girlfriend — who both told police that he confessed to the killing. Williams had also sold a laptop stolen from Gayle’s home, Hawley’s office wrote in the filings, and items belonging to Gayle were found in a car Williams drove the day she was killed.

“Based on the other, non-DNA, evidence in this case, our office is confident in Marcellus Williams’ guilt and plans to move forward,” Loree Anne Paradise, Hawley’s deputy chief of staff, wrote in an email Tuesday.

Both sides have made their arguments to Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who is assigned cases from the federal circuit covering Missouri. If Gorsuch does not stay the execution, or if he refers the case to the full court and the justices let it proceed, Missouri intends to execute Williams at 6 p.m. local time.

The last-ditch legal wrangling surrounds what would be a relatively rare execution in the United States, where the death penalty has been declining for years. Williams would be the 17th person executed nationwide in 2017 and the second inmate put to death in Missouri, one of a handful of states still regularly executing inmates. Last year, there were 20 executions in the United States, the fewest in 25 years. That number is expected to increase slightly this year, but 2017 will still see one of the lowest annual number of executions than most years since 1990.

[Why the U.S. could see more executions this year]

Death sentences have become less common nationwide, dropping from 315 such sentences in 1996 to 31 last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based group that tracks capital punishment. Public support for the death penalty has also fallen over the same period. In a Pew Research Center survey last year, American support for capital punishment fell below 50 percent for the first time since Richard Nixon was president. A Gallup poll, also conducted last year, found support remained at 60 percent. In both cases, the numbers represented a sharp drop from the mid-1990s, when 4 in 5 Americans backed the death penalty.

While some states have abandoned capital punishment or been unable to carry out executions amid an ongoing drug shortage, Missouri has been an outlier. Missouri is one of three states, along with Texas and Georgia, to execute at least one inmate each year since 2013.

In 2015, when Missouri last intended to execute Williams, the state’s Supreme Court stayed the execution. A laboratory tested evidence from the scene of Gayle’s killing and a DNA expert determined that Williams “could not have contributed” to the DNA found on the knife that killed the former reporter, Williams’s attorneys said. Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a request to stay Williams’s execution without explanation.

Missouri officials have argued in court that in order to exonerate Williams, “DNA evidence would have to explain how Williams ended up with the victim’s property, and why two witnesses independently said he confessed to them, or at least provide a viable alternate suspect.” They also said that just showing “unknown DNA” on the knife handle does not alone prove Williams’s innocence.

“The item was a kitchen knife with both male and female DNA on the handle,” Hawley’s office argued in a filing to the Supreme Court. “It is reasonable to assume people not involved in the murder handled the knife in the kitchen. And there is no reason to believe Williams would not have worn gloves during a burglary and murder, as he wore a jacket to conceal his bloody shirt after he left the murder scene.”

[Ohio executes Ronald Phillips, resuming lethal injections after three-year break]

Gipson argues that the case against Williams was always weak, consisting primarily of the statements of two jailhouse informants who claimed Williams had confessed to the crime. Gipson also said that bloody footprints at the scene did not match Williams’s shoe size and added that bloody fingerprints were never tested or compared to Williams’s fingerprints because they were lost by police.

The DNA testing, enabled by advances in technology, is the main argument Williams’s attorneys are making in their appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“A DNA profile was developed from the handle of the knife that was found in the victim’s body and that does not match the DNA of Marcellus,” Gipson said Tuesday, adding that three separate experts have concluded that the DNA left on the knife and at the scene was a match for another man and not Williams. “It’s clear that the DNA on the knife is the DNA of the killer. … Each expert has concluded that you can scientifically exclude Marcellus as the contributor of the DNA on the knife.”

Civil rights groups have weighed in on the case, both due to Williams’s claims of innocence as well as racial undertones in the prosecution of a black man charged with killing a white woman.

“The Supreme Court has emphasized over and over that because death is a unique punishment there is need for heightened reliability before it’s imposed,” said Sam Spital, director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is not directly involved in Williams’s case. “One of the really significant questions raised by Mr. Williams’s case is, what does it mean when you have issues of innocence?”

Like Williams’s attorneys, Spital noted the lack of forensic evidence linking Williams to the crime as well as the new DNA evidence. Spital also pointed to another concern, echoing attorneys for Williams, who described the case as racially charged. Spital noted that six of the seven potential black jurors in the case were struck from the jury pool — in one case because the potential juror “looked like” Williams.

“This execution has to be stayed so these substantial questions of innocence can be considered, in addition to some real concerns about race discrimination,” Spital said.

Read more:

• Arkansas planned an unprecedented wave of executions because its lethal drugs were about to expire
  
• The steady decline of America’s death rows
  
• An Arkansas death row inmate took their father’s life. Here’s why they don’t want the killer executed.
  
• Drug companies take aim at executions and demand their drugs back
  
• Ohio’s youngest death row inmate never touched the murder weapon. Why was he sentenced to death?
  

Death even though DNA exonerates him?

What’s bullshit is this

(Source: Washington Post)

micdotcom:

Teen Vogue took on white supremacy over Teen Choice Awards. We spoke to their editor about the decision.

Also, here are the donation links to the medical fund, UVA black student alliance and BLM chapter.

Damn, teen vogue, you are on fire!

(Source: bit.ly, via arrafrost)

shychemist:

geekballin:

shychemist:

ithelpstodream:

Link to @Chloi’s thread on twitter.

This is an amazing thread, and a history not well known. Thank you to @shychemist for posting this.

I didn’t make the original post. I just added credit to the author, above.

The OP posted the photoset without any text, so I can see why it looks like I’m the author.

thesoulfunkybrother:

-Nyaueth .

Ph. Marie Zucker 

Oh this is gorgeous

(via blackfashion)

#NCDEQ protect my drinking water & stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline in NC #DukeEnergy #NoACP sc.org/nc-acp http://thndr.me/gZwybC

mrsklemzak:

antipromia:

Sometimes self care is studying for that test. Sometimes it’s cleaning your room. Sometimes it’s having that conversation you’re afraid of having, confront that person you’re afraid to confront. Sometimes it’s not just wrapping yourself up in a blanket and relaxing. Sometimes instead, it’s taking action against the problem.

Unpopular opinion, but yeah.

Confronting fear is one of the things that needs to happen, but of course with safety in mind 

(via jeneelestrange)