Should we accept murder? (A critique of the Nashville NAACP).

Should we accept murder? One of the things that really bothers me about the black community in Nashville, is that they meekly accept the murder of persons in custody so easily. Not only has Estelle Richardson been murdered by jailers in 2004, and none of the civil rights groups said virtually a peep , but two children have been killed during their "restraint" at the Chad Youth Enhancement Center in 2005 and 2007, and again nothing said from the so-called civil rights groups. We should be concerned about mistreatment of children, even those in the custody of juvenile authorities, not just whether they can go to school with whites.

It seems that the only thing the local NAACP (the largest of the local groups) gets "worked up" about is the management of the school system, that is whether they are "re-segregating", and while this is no doubt a serious issue, and it definitely seems that the Nashville NAACP is way too one-dimensional. They give the local law enforcement establishment a free pass when they clearly should be confronting them. Some of this may just be class snobbery (victims not "prominent" enough, and they have a conservative political agenda locally), whatever the reason for this inaction, it must be questioned. Issues about the school board to the exclusion of virtually everything else is a conservative, middle-class approach. The prison system, especially the mass imprisonment of Black people, [children and adults], whether in facilities run by the state or a private company like CCA, has to be one of the mass issues that all real leadership would involve itself in.

We believe that murder by agents of the state (via a private prison company) trumps any other social issue. If our so-called leaders will allow the police or jail guards to murder Black people with impunity, then that leadership has to be called to account. In our estimation, these are just new cases of lynching, where poor and working class Black people can be murdered, and no one speaks up for them in their own community. It's a disgrace, and must be corrected.

You can look at this situation, and easily understand why there were thousands of lynchings in this country, and yet there was no sustained Black-led mass movement against it during the 1900's, which forced the hand of the government until the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Of course, the NAACP came into existence in 1911 as a movement opposed to lynchings, (which are not just hangings alone, but the denial of human rights and collusion by authorities), but it appears that the group (locally at least) no longer sees this as a serious issue, or the lives of these people worthy of any protest. No question that they led many protests and filed lawsuits over lynching in the early days, but something has happened to stifle these protests. Maybe they have changed their agenda entirely to that of education issues. It happens that groups become more conservative over time. We do not know, we just know they are not helping organize something now.

That is why it is so important for some of the rest of us who do care to come to the Estelle Richardson demonstration of September 6th at the Metro Courthouse, to speak out against the murder and cover-up of mother of two, and demand that justice be done in this case: prosecute the jail guards, and those who helped cover this case up.

Justice for Estelle Richardson!