Over the next couple of weeks, you are invited to participate in a series of events that are centered on the case of Marissa Alexander.

In 2012, Marissa Alexander, a mother of three, was sentenced to twenty years in the Florida criminal correctional system for defending herself from her abusive estranged husband. Nine days after giving birth to a premature daughter, she fired a single warning shot upwards into a wall to halt her abusive partner during a life-threatening beating. Despite the fact that Marissa caused no injuries and has no previous criminal record, and despite the fact that Florida’s self-defense law includes the right to “Stand Your Ground,” she was arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated. Her sentence was set at 20 years in part due to the state’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Marissa successfully appealed the trial, overturning the guilty verdict on 9/26/13. On 11/26/13, Marissa was finally released on bond and is currently under house arrest. Her new trial is scheduled for 12/8/14. Prosecutor Angela Corey will seek a 60-year sentence if Marissa is found guilty.

The Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander (CAFMA) and The Free Marissa Now Mobilization Campaign have been working diligently to educate the public about Marissa’s case and also to raise money for her legal defense.  Though her legal team is working pro bono, Marissa faces $250,000 in legal expense, including court fees, expert witnesses and processing evidence to insure an excellent defense for her retrial. Additionally, Marissa pays $500 every two weeks for bond payments and $105 each week for ankle monitoring. She is prohibited from working while under house arrest.

Please join CAFMA for a series of events to raise awareness about Marissa’s case, to learn about the historical context of the case, and to take action.

July 18, 6 to 9 p.m. – Opening Reception for No Selves To Defend Exhibition at Art in These Times, 2nd floor of 2040 N Milwaukee Ave. Chicago, IL 60647 USA. Details are HERE. Facebook event page here.

July 18 through September 21 – at Art in These Times – No Selves To Defend: An Exhibition about the Criminalization of Women of Color

July 19, 1 to 4:30 p.m. Free Screening of Crime After Crime – Join us for a screening and discussion of the film Crime After Crime. Roosevelt University, 425 S. Wabash Ave, Room 418. RSVP to [email protected]. – Facebook event page here.

July 25, 5:30 p.m.: Sticks and Stones and Stories – Storytelling for Self and Survival. Storytelling to fight back. Storytelling in Solidarity
The more we are injured by oppressive institutions and trauma in our lives, the more we are identified by the stories told about us, and not the stories we share about ourselves. This event is about sharing personal experiences of forcible displacement. That can happen through incarceration, deportation, detention, eviction, or other systems that exist to confine us to a single identity: criminal, unfit, illegal, homeless, invisible. We can fight that violence against us. We can share something about our lives and how we see ourselves, and find love and support in the process. That solidarity makes us infinitely more powerful, unstoppable, and ready to fight back! Join us.

What: Story Sharing Event plus Dinner
Where: 114 N Aberdeen, Chicago
When: Friday, July 25, 5:30 pm

This event is co-organized by Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, Black on Both Sides, Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration. Contact Holly for more info: 630-258-8552, [email protected]

July 26, 2 p.m.: A Community Gathering and Rally in Support of Marissa in solidarity with Stand Our Ground Week of Action. We invite all community members to join us in song, performance, poetry and more. This is a family-friendly event. More details to come.

Find all upcoming events here.

This was written fast as I am rushed today and buried under a ton of work. I will revise it over time but I wanted to put my thoughts down while they were still fresh. Also, I am officially retired from commenting on this crap after today.

It’s summer in Chicago and our ‘friends’ are once again calling for military occupation of our city from the comfort of their air-conditioned condos in cities that are not our own. These calls are purportedly offered out of deep concern and love because the military is needed to save us from ourselves. In this case, the “us” is black people living (mostly) on the South & West sides of Chicago.

It’s become routine. Every summer, it’s the obligatory WTF!!!!!????? is going on in Chicago??? All of us who live here are familiar with the ritual. The press reports on shootings and homicides with almost no context (historical or otherwise). Faceless and sometimes nameless numbers are tallied like baseball box scores. And this is fitting in its own way. The prurient voyeuristic coverage is its own sport. The politicians periodically call for the National Guard to be deployed and martial law imposed. Everyone shakes their head while thinking ‘Tut, tut, what’s WRONG with those savages killing each other?’ Then folks are off to the beach or to resume watching Netflix.

When 80 people are shot over a long weekend, pointing out that homicides are actually down makes one seem callous and out-of-touch. It engenders ironic social media hashtags like #crimeisdown. It’s understandable why it’s cold comfort to many that homicides are actually at their lowest rate in decades. This means nothing to those who are most impacted by the shooting and the interpersonal violence. These are real people whose lives have been shattered. So these facts are meaningless to those folks and this is of course as it should be. However, these facts should NOT be meaningless to policymakers and to those more removed from the daily interpersonal violence. Because those are unfortunately the people who drive and set the policy responses. So the information and analysis that they use to craft those “solutions” should be accurate. And they should not have the effect of further destroying, criminalizing, and destabilizing impacted communities.

Read more »

The wonderful Jenna Peters Golden contributed to the terrific Radicalphabet poster project.

Image by Jenna Peters-Golden

A classic…

“He basically got on top of her … it’s basically a UFC ground-and-pound move … full force, punching her in the head … in the head,” Diaz said.

I saw the video and wondered who she was. Who was the woman whose head was being pounded, pummeled by a man wearing a uniform that made him THE LAW? She was black, that much I could tell. But WHO was she? Someone’s grandmother, sister, daughter, friend? And where is she? Is she in the hospital? Just what has happened to this woman?

The woman on the ground using her forearms to block the blows is so familiar to me. I know that she is invisible to others but I ‘recognize’ her. I wonder if she will speak and tell of her torment. I hope so. I hope that she will in Audre’s words “forgo the vanities of silence” and speak her pain. Because in the end, as black women, our voices are too often all we have. We are punished for speaking and yet we must.

The Law keeps punching her in the face and head. Eleven times at least in the video. He doesn’t want her to speak. So many people want us to die silently and to be buried in unmarked graves. I feel this acutely and so I raise my voice in public even though I’m actually a private & quiet person. Those who know me best recognize this description, those who don’t cannot, will not. I’ve learned to raise my voice as an act of resistance against the constant attacks and the acts of intentional obliteration. Muriel Rukeseyer asked that question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” The answer: “The world would split open.” But what of black women? What would happen if all of us told the truth about our lives? Maybe we would save the world.

The currently anonymous no name black woman whose head was pounded and pummeled by The Law is of course not the first to be so victimized. Assata Shakur has told her story of police torture in her autobiography and in interviews. Below she recounts her brutal treatment at the hand of The Law in 1973:

On the night of May 2, I was shot twice by the New Jersey State Police. I was kept on the floor, kicked, pulled, dragged along by my hair. Finally, I was put into an ambulance, but the police would not let the ambulance leave. They kept asking the ambulance attendant: “Is she dead yet? Is she dead yet?” Finally, when it was clear that I wasn’t going to die in the next five or ten minutes, they took me to the hospital. The police were jumping on me, beating me, choking me, doing everything that they could possibly do as soon as the doctors or the nurses would go outside. I was half dead – hospital authorities had brought in a priest to give me the last rites – but the police would not stop torturing me. That went on until the next morning, when I was taken to the intensive care unit. They had to calm down a little while I was there. Then they moved me to another room, which was the Johnson Suite, and they closed off the exit from the hallway. So they could virtually control all traffic in and out. It was just open season on me for about three or four days. They’d turned up the air conditioning so that I was freezing to death. My lungs were threatening to collapse. They were doing everything so that I would get pneumonia.

It isn’t hard to imagine The Law thinking “Is she dead yet?” as his fists landed consecutive blows across the head and face of the currently anonymous no name black woman lying on the side of the 10 Freeway.

In 1979, Eula Love, a black woman trying to support her 3 daughters on social security payments, let her $22 gas bill lapse. The Southern California Gas Company sent out a meter man to shut off the gas in the dead of January. Eula threw him out of her house. The Gas Company called the LAPD which dispatched two officers to Ms. Love’s home. She had a knife in her hand when they arrived. They clubbed her to the ground and emptied their .38 caliber revolvers into her as she lay on the floor. I’m glad there was no video of that clubbing. What if Ms. Love had been able to tell the truth about her life? Instead The Law killed her dead.

And so it is against this backdrop of constant, consistent, fear-inducing, paralyzing, galvanizing, obliterating violence that we stand our ground. Always exhausted yet unwilling to be destroyed, resisting, we speak our pain and refuse to be silent. We stay for the dead and we fight for the living. We raise our forearms to protect against the blows (even from those who sometimes claim to love us) preparing for the moment when we can strike a collective blow for our freedom and self-determination.

In the meantime, we call the names of our sisters Assata, Eula, Ersula, Rekia, and the currently anonymous no name black woman who was pummeled by The Law on the side of the 10 Freeway… We call your names and make you visible.

We tell our truth to save the world.

Update: An LA Times article published Saturday evening offers more information on the anonymous woman pummeled by the cop in LA. She is a great-grandmother!!

Update #2 (12/3/15) – No criminal charges

Read about Samuel Green’s case here.

Samuel Green sentenced to the penitentiary for ten years for having a copy of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in his house. (1872)
Source: The underground railroad: A record of facts, authentic narratives, letters, & c., narrating the hardships, hair-breadth escapes, and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom, as related by themselves and others or witnessed by the author : together with sketches of some of the largest stockholders and most liberal aiders and advisers of the road.