When I was told that Councilmember Kevin de León was involved with the square dedication for Willis O. Tyler, the Black attorney who won the landmark case that made adding racial covenants to block Black people from living in white neighborhoods in California illegal, the irony wasn’t lost on me.
I’ve been watching a scary phenomenon sweep across America where if enough of us don’t like something from our past and take to social media to bitch and complain about it, we can simply erase and revise it under the guise of anti-racism and reconciliation.
Malcolm X said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman,” he said. “The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom is no great friend to Black people in his state. He made it clear how he felt about us when he ignored the calls for him to keep a Black woman in the U.S. Senate by replacing outgoing Senator Kamala Harris with another Black woman. So the point at which Newsom and the Democratic Party establishment should really be worried about the efforts to recall him is if Black women decide to send a reminder to them both that they still need us.
It took almost three years, but Ed Buck is finally sitting in a jail charged with nine federal counts–including that he supplied the crystal meth that caused two overdose deaths and that he engaged in a pattern of soliciting Black men to consume drugs that he provided.
In 2017, 26-year-old Gemmel Moore was found dead of a meth overdose in the West Hollywood home of Democratic donor Ed Buck. Buck, was 63 and White, a longtime political donor, a one-time West Hollywood City Council candidate and a well-known figure in LGBTQ political circles. Moore was Black and gay and had worked as an escort.
When 22-year-old Los Angeles rapper Blueface posted a video of himself on Christmas Eve standing on a car parked on a street in the middle of the homeless capital of America throwing money with the caption “season of giving”–I thought good for him.
Jackie Lacey’s failure to charge Ed Buck for the deaths of Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean was not because of a lack of evidence or probable cause. Her failure was a direct result of a lack of interest and political will. All of which was the reason that the sheriff’s department sought outside help from their federal counterparts to finally bring Buck to justice.
A lot of things have changed in Los Angeles over the past two decades but one thing that’s been constant is the presence of street gangs and the violence they inflict. Shootings take place pretty much every day in Los Angeles. They’ve never stopped. People get shot–some live, some don’t. What stopped was the local news reporting on them.
A lot of things have changed in Los Angeles over the past two decades but one thing that’s been constant is the presence of street gangs and the violence they inflict. Shootings take place pretty much every day in Los Angeles. They’ve never stopped. People get shot–some live, some don’t. What stopped was the local news reporting on them.
So I was not surprised that there had been a shooting Thursday evening in South L.A.–not Watts–near the intersection of 103rd and Main streets that left four Black people shot and one dead. I was more surprised to actually hear about on the news.
Six years ago, I found my best friend in the hospital. We hadn’t seen each other in a while–which isn’t uncommon for us. We’d kept in touch through text and phone calls. I didn’t know my friend was sick until I walked into her hospital room and hardly recognized the person before me. My friend eventually confided in me that she had HIV and AIDS.
Black Pride mural on Crenshaw and 50th defaced with Swastikas. Developing story…..
While the media made much of the fact that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reopened Moore’s death as a homicide investigation, had they followed up they would have learned that it was mostly to save face after Moore’s journal had been published and made national news. The “investigation” consisted of the Sheriff’s Department relying on me and Gemmel Moore’s family attorney Nana Gyamfi to provide them with evidence, witnesses they could interview–witnesses that we fought and won immunity for in order for them to give statements to police that they didn’t trust in the first place—oh–and one flyer asking for more information about the death of Gemmel posted at Buck’s frequented haunts in West Hollywood.
Like with anything Black people do that receives too much high praise and critical acclaim, there’s always at least one descendant of a colonizer at the ready to make sure that we don’t get too big for our britches. This time around its criticism of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther film for their so-called “lack of LGBT representation.”