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colin kaepernick
Kaepernick to Fund Independent Autopsy for Atlanta Inmate Found Dead in Insect-Infested Cell
"We want to thank Colin Kaepernick for helping this family get to the truth and soon," said civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump, who is representing relatives of Lashawn Thompson.
Apr 21, 2023
Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump on Thursday said that former NFL quarterback and racial justice activist Colin Kaepernick will pay for an independent autopsy for Lashawn Thompson, a mentally ill man who died last September in a filthy, insect-infested cell in an overcrowded Atlanta jail.
Crump spoke at a rally and news conference outside the Fulton County Jail, where Thompson, who was arrested last June for alleged misdemeanor simple battery, was held for three months before his death.
"We want to thank Colin Kaepernick for helping this family get to the truth and soon," Crump said, flanked by Thompson's relatives.
"What happened to Lashawn Thompson is a human rights violation," the attorney added. "If we don't ask the questions and we don't get the answers and we don't get to the truth, then next time it could be your loved one. This isn't just about Lashawn Thompson. This is about every citizen in Fulton County, Georgia."
Thompson, who suffered from mental health issues, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and transferred to the jail's psychiatric wing. According to jail records, on September 13 an officer saw Thompson slumped over in his cell, which was so dirty that a staff member who entered it wore protective gear. Inside, Thompson lay dead with his eyes open, his body covered with what Crump said were over 1,000 insect bites. Thompson was 35 years old.
\u201cThese are the DEPLORABLE and inhumane conditions Lashawn Thompson had to endure during his stay in the psychiatric wing of the Fulton County (GA) Jail. After his death, he was found with insect bites all over his body. We cannot look away, we must demand justice!\u201d— Ben Crump (@Ben Crump) 1682020687
Jail records show that medical and correctional staff repeatedly noted—and voiced concerns about—Thompson's deteriorating health but did not help him.
"They literally watched his health decline until he died," Michael Harper, another attorney representing Thompson's family, said in a statement.
Harper asserted that Thompson "was found dead in a filthy jail cell after being eaten alive by insects and bed bugs."
An official autopsy could not determine the cause of Thompson's death but noted an "extremely severe" insect infestation on his body.
"Can you imagine him screaming and him hollering, saying 'They biting, they biting' and nobody come," Thompson's aunt, Mamie Norman, said at Thursday's rally. "Nobody. Nobody. I still have no understanding until y'all find out what happened to him."
\u201cBrad McCray \u2014 #LashawnThompson\u2019s brother \u2014 speaking TRUTH to power about the bug-infested conditions Lashawn was forced to live in at the Fulton County Jail. #JusticeForLashawnThompson\u201d— Ben Crump (@Ben Crump) 1682035943
A report obtained last year from NaphCare—an institutional healthcare services contractor repeatedly accused of neglect—revealed widespread medical negligence in Fulton County Jail's mental health unit, where more than 90% of inmates were so severely malnourished that they developed cachexia, a wasting syndrome often associated with diseases like advanced cancer or AIDS.
Additionally, "100% of inmates" in the unit "had either lice, scabies, or both."
Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat—who called Thompson's death "absolutely unconscionable"—earlier this week asked for and received the resignation of three top jail officials, including Chief Jailer John Jackson.
"It's clear to me that it's time, past time, to clean house," Labat said in a statement on Monday.
An October 2022 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that a record number of inmates are dying in Georgia's five largest county jails, and that Fulton County Jail has led the state in such deaths since 2009.
Overcrowding and understaffing plague the facility, where around half of the more than 3,000 inmates have not been charged with any crime. Labat admitted that more than 400 inmates were sleeping on the floor because of overcrowding.
"The type of infestations that contributed to Mr. Thompson's death are going to be a recurring problem in a jail where hundreds of detainees do not have cells and have to sleep on the floor," the sheriff said on Thursday.
\u201cAlmost half of the 3,000 people held at the Fulton County jail have not been formally charged with a crime. There is no amount of money in the world for new jails that can redeem this. Let people go home. \n\n@elizabethweill \n\nhttps://t.co/7cNT2VTjqk\u201d— Clara T Green (@Clara T Green) 1681419515
Sakira Cook, vice president of campaigns, policy, and government at the racial justice group Color of Change, said Thursday in a statement that "like Lashawn Thompson, countless individuals are currently enduring completely inhumane conditions at the severely overcrowded Fulton County Jail—often waiting for months at a time for frequently minor offenses and small amounts of cash bail."
"This must end. Despite years of scrutiny, the neglect and inhumane conditions within the jail have persisted, with little to no meaningful changes in prosecutorial practices or conditions," Cook added. "The current dark reality of mass incarceration is not accidental, but rather the consequence of intentional policies crafted by a dominant white culture that perpetuates and profits from the suppression of Black individuals through the jailing system."
On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who chairs the Senate Human Rights Subcommittee, announced the launch of an inquiry into conditions of incarceration in Georgia and nationwide. Previous Ossoff-led probes of U.S. carceral conditions revealed nearly 1,000 uncounted deaths, widespread sexual crimes, corruption, abuse, and misconduct at prisons and jails across the nation.
According to the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, there are nearly 2 million people locked up in U.S. prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the past 40 years and more than any other country in the world, by far.
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How Dare They Show Up All Black and Excellent: Lift Every Voice
Feb 14, 2023
Boasting the usual hype, glitz, plugs and some football, Sunday also showcased what was arguably "the Blackest, most woke Super Bowl ever": Black History Month, two first-ever black quarterbacks, black performers, and sweet white Jesus a soaring Black National Anthem?! MAGA-land heads exploded: Satan, racism, divisiveness, leaving "NOTHING for the White People of our land!" "Hateful gargoyle" MTG: The white singer was good but "we could have gone without the wokeness." America: "You mean the blackness."
Given a relative universe and the ugly paradoxes of the NFL - two of three players are black in a gilded, long-segregated league where owners are so right-wing they blackballed Colin Kaepernick for putting his knee on the ground to protest cops daily killing innocent black people - it's understandable Americans hungry for a hopeful glimpse of progress could declare of this weekend's game, "This wasn’t the Super Bowl. This was Wakanda." Well, not quite. There was also Elon Musk sitting with Rupert Murdoch and a deluge of mostly mediocre $7-million-ads - Walter and Jesse, really? - including two unholy ones for Jesus ("He gets us") from supporters of a nationwide ban on abortion medication. AOC: "Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign." But in this year's improbable "mirror for us all," a gaudy intermingling of capitalism, jingoism, sport and spectacle, there were signs corporate America is grudgingly realizing there are more people of conscience who support diversity and equity than MAGA hateful gargoyles, and there's money in it. Thus, two starting black quarterbacks, an end-zone that read, "End Racism," a traditional flyover by the first all-women pilot team, and a bounty of Black musical talent, from Babyface to Rihanna and her fabulous dancers.
And for the third year there was, Lord give us strength, a soaring rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by Sheryl Lee Ralph, star of the TV comedy "Abbott Elementary." A hymn written originally as a poem by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900 - his brother composed the music - it was first performed by a choir of 500 black schoolchildren at the Florida school where Johnson was principal to mark Abraham Lincoln's birthday on that date in 1809. 100 years later, with black Americans suffering widespread discrimination and brutalities by whites outraged they'd "forgotten their place," a group of progressives, black and white, met to create a new civil rights organization to "eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States." Sorrowfully noting, “If Mr. Lincoln could revisit this country in the flesh he would be disheartened and discouraged," they chose the anniversary of his birth as the start of the NAACP. For years, W.E.B. DuBois edited its flagship journal The Crisis, calling out the "shame of America" that was its systemic racial inequality and arguing, "Silence under these conditions means tacit approval." The hymn became the official song of the NAACP in 1919, a rallying cry for civil rights activists, children of the segregated South, in the 1950s and 60s and, over time, an unofficial Black National Anthem.
Notwithstanding its rich history and Ralph's dazzling performance, bigots across America - who believe storming the capitol to overturn an election is a tourist visit but a song before a football game is treason - went berserk, raging about "their little stunt called the Black National Anthem." They went vicious, frenzied, petty, malevolent, delusional, feral: "All Blacks is what they are catering to, NOTHING for the White People of our land!" "There is only 1 National Anthem. Don't watch the game. Make it hurt." "ITS NO LONGER GOING TO BE THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER. ITS GOING TO BE THE RAINBOW BANNER WITH THE HOST SATAN." "You don't win by ceding ground to the woke...We must stand up and defend sports from those who want to destroy it." From a "huge NFL fan until the Chinese and woke corporations ruined it for me: Boycott the Super Bowl and watch the Puppy Bowl, with puppies rescued from Dr. Death Fauci's cruel lab." Bigly loser Kari Lake stayed pointedly, sullenly seated - white people taking a knee? - and posted, "I'm just here for THE National Anthem." (The game was in Arizona, so they probably wouldn't accept the result anyway.) "America has ONE NATIONAL ANTHEM. Why is the NFL trying to divide us?" bleated Lauren Boebert. "Do football, not wokeness."
Her frenemy MTG tried to compare and contrast. "Chris Stapleton just sang the most beautiful National Anthem," she wrote of the (white) country singer. "But we could have gone without the rest of the wokeness." Many noted the ignorance tacked onto the racism. In a famousinterview after George Floyd's murder, Stapleton cited a "broad awakening" and declared himself a BLM supporter: "It's time for me to listen...The country I thought we were living in was a myth." Twitter helped translate the rest of MTG: "She means the Black man and woman who sang just before him, and the ASL interpreters." And "a bunch of scary black people singing, dancing, playing football and sitting in Fox sportscaster chairs." And “Please say what you mean: You could’ve done without the black people." "Neanderthals are gonna Neanderthal," wrote Yvette Nicole Brown. "The #Wokeness this shitgibbon is referring to is (Ralph) and (Babyface) performing. How DARE they show up all black and excellent?" Desperate MAGA-ites also trashed Rihanna as "Satanic" (she wore red) and not as good as Ted Nugent; the Big Maggot himself chimed in with, "Epic fail," adding she'd also insulted "far more than half our nation (with) her foul and insulting language" (in a video a while back where she sprayed "Fuck Trump" on a car). And he congratulated "the great state of Kansas" for their win. The team's from Missouri. (Person, woman, man, camera, TV.)
Many were appalled by so much deep, raw, jagged hate: "In other words, white is good and black is bad...When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression....You people got issues and prolly all look the same...Woke up to MORE messages of people telling me that their children are 'traumatized' by Rihanna (and) I need to seek forgiveness in Christ because I’m not outraged about the performance. Some of you need to get a grip and learn to change the channel...Just say you're racists." Most tragically, all (or most) of the spewing was in the mindless service of
deriding a righteous, stirring, time-honored hymn to celebrate a people's freedom from slavery, and the courage of one white American president to work towards that. Scholars often pay tribute to the song's complex make-up, its "intimately held knowledge” not only of Black history, but of Black pride, resilience and resistance as it makes its poignant way from past to future, through stanzas moving from praise (“rejoicing,” “faith” “victory”) to lament ("the chastening rod,” “blood of the slaughtered”) to faith: "Keep us forever in the path, we pray." Above all, they cite a noble "anthem of universal uplift" that, in its careful use of only first-person plural pronouns, excludes no one and "speaks to every group that struggles." But only if you can hear it.
"Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us..."
\u201c.@thesherylralph with an incredible rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing". #SBLVII\u201d— NFL (@NFL) 1676243707
\u201cJust say you\u2019re racist @KariLake @mtgreenee @laurenboebert\u201d— DutchessPrim\ud83d\udc99 (@DutchessPrim\ud83d\udc99) 1676298459
Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
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Taking the Next Knee
Is this athletic revolt for real and is it a danger to Donald Trump?
Sep 17, 2020
Last year, when LeBron James described some of President Trump's public statements as "laughable and scary," Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham ordered the basketball superstar to "shut up and dribble."
LeBron responded thoughtfully by saying that her comment "resonated with me, but I think it resonated with a lot of people to be able to feel like they can be more."
Those "people" have come to include most of the National Basketball Association and hundreds of other athletes in professional baseball, hockey, football, women's basketball, and the top tiers of college sports. As for that "more" they have become? They are now active participants in the most significant and inclusive wave of the often crushed or coopted yet ever breathing "athletic revolution" that first took shape in the 1960s.
Thanks to the pandemically isolated "bubbles" in which some teams are now living and playing, and driven by Donald Trump's continuing racially based attacks on various sports, some athletes are now communing with each other ever more regularly and making collective decisions as never before--decisions often supported by their teams and even leagues. In the process, many of their protests against systemic racism and specific acts of police brutality have gone from messages at their usual social media outlets to acts like forcing games to be postponed via wildcat strikes.
As baseball and basketball, battered by the Covid-19 pandemic, cautiously continue their delayed and shortened seasons and the National Football League and some college football conferences finally launch their own belated starts, more and more questions arise: Will such physically dangerous playing conditions be sustainable? (Is there even such a thing as a socially distanced tackle?) Will fans accept rule changes meant to take the coronavirus into account and still keep watching (while their own lives threaten to go down the tubes)? Will former San Francisco 49er Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sparked the current sports revolt by kneeling to the national anthem four years ago and was subsequently abused by the president and functionally banished from football, ever get to play again? And above all, what effect will the various protests of such athletes have, if any, on the election?
The Women Led the Way
However it plays out, the most recent victory of National Basketball League players striking during their playoffs over yet another grim death of a black man at the hands of the police was spectacular. The team owners agreed that, in the Covid-19 moment with polling places potentially in short supply on November 3rd, pro basketball arenas would be made available as just such sites. Consider this path breaking: it's the first time a player-owner bargaining agreement has included such a gift to democracy from two of the (previously) most self-centered groups in America.
Before we cry "Bravo!" however, let's cry "Brava!" After all, it was the most marginalized of the professional leagues, the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), that provided the impetus for the current movement and remains its moral center. Keep in mind that, for years now, women pro basketball players have been protesting against gun violence and police brutality, both individually and as teams, while their male equivalents, who earn so much more money and possess so much more security, tended to posture and pontificate while putting themselves at much less risk.
Last month, the women upped their game. The WNBA's Atlanta Dream players donned T-shirts endorsing Dr. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic opponent of Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, who has disparaged Black Lives Matter and, as the New York Times reported, "publicly and frequently derided the league for dedicating its season to the Black Lives Matter movement." Loeffler just happens to be the Dream's co-owner. Other teams in the league followed suit and soon most teams were wearing such "Vote Warnock" T-shirts, while also proclaiming that Black Lives Matter. (BLM, by the way, was a group founded by women.)
Soon after, something stunning happened in the male version of pro basketball with the NBA in the first round of its playoff games in a "bubble" at Florida's Disney World. After a white police officer shot an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, in the back seven times in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take part in their next playoff game. And that protest then produced a cascade of brief strikes by other NBA and WNBA teams and, most surprisingly, by predominantly white Major League Baseball teams.
While the statements of the protesters tended to describe the strikes as a response to recent incidents of police brutality, the underlying cause may have lain elsewhere. Those angry strikes may really have been side effects of the Covid-19 "bubbles" in which they were playing. In them, the usual focus on the game of the moment and the party to follow was replaced by conversations about Donald Trump, racism, and the responsibilities of rich Black sports celebrities to express themselves and act in the interests of their communities.
The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner conducted a revealing interview with Andre Iguodala, a Miami Heat forward and the first vice-president of the NBA players' union, who said:
African-Americans are trying to search for ourselves and ask where we stand in the world and where we stand in America. And we don't know. We shoulder a lot of the burdens of our community, but I think a lot of that responsibility should fall on the majority, and those who are the lawmakers and who are supposed to insure that every man and woman is treated as an equal. But we still haven't seen that. So we are still searching for our place.
Take the Money or March?
One of the most poignant expressions of that search came from the coach of the Los Angeles Clippers, Doc Rivers, whose father had been a police officer. "It's amazing," he commented, "why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back. It's really so sad... I'm so often reminded of my color... We got to do better. But we got to demand better."
What exactly does "demand better" mean and what could it achieve? In the sports world, at least, with the possible exception of those still-must-be-seen-to-be-believed arena voting sites, the sporadic protests of various players over the years for equality and social justice have usually resulted, at best, in yet more discussion about the issues they were raising rather than actual solutions, however provisional. Although over the decades, the integration of baseball, the introduction of free agency, and the emergence of the Black quarterback could all certainly be viewed as progress in the sports world itself.
Today, however, it remains a question whether players will continue pushing for social reform or, as so often in the past, settle for better salaries and pensions. As Iguodala put it:
"Historically, money determines a lot of our actions. Do we stand up for something or take the money? We will always get caught in those crosshairs. But I think players are smartening up, and I think that will come into play with a lot of guys."
Similar optimism has been expressed recently by a number of sporting icons including Hall of Fame basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar who began his career with the Milwaukee Bucks. He found hope in "the instantaneous support of other sports teams and athletes," especially ones from Major League Soccer (only 26% black), Major League Baseball (8%), and overwhelmingly white pro tennis.
Times, Jabbar believes, may indeed be changing. After all, he remembers that "when I boycotted the 1968 Olympics because of the gross racial inequities, I was met with a vicious backlash criticizing my lack of gratitude for being invited into the air-conditioned Big House where I could comfortably watch my community swelter and suffer."
Another long-time sports activist, retired sociology professor Harry Edwards who was instrumental in inspiring the memorable Black power salute given from the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico Olympics by American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos, is similarly hopeful. An adviser to Kaepernick, Edwards sees an opening for genuine change in this moment because, he says, it's no longer just about the acts of individual sports figures. This wave of protest, he adds, "is distinctively different from the single athletes who were involved. These are entire teams that are reacting to this situation and leveraging their power to demand change. It's not just a Colin Kaepernick or Eric Reid or Michael Bennett or Maya Moore. This one is about an entire organization and I could see this coming from the time the University of Missouri football team protested."
That was back in 2015 when that football team joined a campus-wide demand for the resignation of the university's president for mishandling racial incidents at the school. (He did finally resign.) Such a full-scale involvement of a college sports team in a protest movement was unheard of at the time. It would take another five years and so many more racial nightmares before that spirit of unity with a larger protesting culture in this Black Lives Matter era, not to mention the willingness of athletes to risk their own brief careers, would bloom throughout sports.
"Spoiled Rotten Millionaires"
The current reaction of the Trump administration and its allies to such protests has underlined the threat that they clearly feel from wildcat strikes, bent knees, and other actions disrupting their notions of "normality" in an unnerved and unnerving world. The president, in particular, has been counting on the return of pro sports and college football to help project an image of him being in control in this ongoing pandemic.
Weighing in from the White House, President Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner typically dismissed the recent set of basketball wildcat strikes by saying, "Look, I think that the NBA players are very fortunate that they have the financial position where they're able to take a night off from work without having to have the consequences to themselves financially."
That snide attempt to separate the athletes from their fan base, itself stricken by a weakening economy, the still-spreading coronavirus, and a mounting sense of political anxiety, soon blossomed into something more like a political campaign theme. At the right-wing website Newsmax, for instance, conservative radio host Chris Salcedo attacked "the spoiled rotten millionaires." He then added: "Pro sports is no longer about unifying us but about shoving left-wing politics down our throat and up our nearest orifice. They push social justice, which is the absence of justice."
For all the right-wing outrage over the basketball protests, football is now the true American national pastime and carries the most weight with Trump and gang. Several months ago, I speculated that, "if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual--or, at least, to his twisted version of the same."
Despite the fact that most NFL owners have been Trump donors, the league, which did away with pre-season games, has been bending leftward to avoid a NBA-style set of strikes that could cripple the season just as it's starting. Last month, League Commissioner Roger Goodell professed regret for not paying more attention to Colin Kaepernick's message when he took those knees. Topping that, earlier this month, Goodell announced that "End Racism" and "It Takes All of Us" signs will be stenciled in the end zones of all stadiums this season and the so-called Black national anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," will be sung before each opening game. Political slogans will even be allowed on helmets.
In certain ways, when it comes to the Trump voter in particular, the return of college football--a major multibillion-dollar business that pays most of its "employees" nothing whatsoever--with its own cult-like regional passions is of particular importance. While college football fans tend to lean right and insist on their entertainment, no matter who has to die for it, college players have used the health risks of Covid-19 to ramp up their demands for more control over their lives and a share of the revenue that their schools collect from the sale of jerseys with their names on them.
After two of the five major conferences, the West Coast's Pac-12 and the Midwestern-based Big 10, worrying about the toll that the pandemic might take, called off their fall seasons, the Trump campaign declared: "The Radical Left is trying to CANCEL college football." The electoral implications were obvious: five key swing states--Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota--have Big Ten teams and calling off the season in this fashion does, of course, send a message to future voters about the state of Trumpian America.
In reality, the urge to protest playing football in the midst of a pandemic was spreading (and not just among the usual suspects). Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, a famed book on high school football in Texas, for instance, called on players in the remaining leagues to boycott their games:
[M]any of the states advocating to play are the same states that find wearing protective masks optional, college football a sacred American right. Football is not like other sports. It is blood, snot, sweat and spit, bodily meals the virus craves. How can these schools even be contemplating the risk when several medical advisers to the N.C.A.A. said it was ill advised? Some coaches have suggested that football players alone should return to campus, which provides additional evidence that they are viewed more like employees than traditional students and should be compensated.
Such evidence has, of course, been in plain sight for years, but maybe it takes a plague to see it clearly. College administrators may be no better than Trumpsters in their willingness to sacrifice lives for money and power. They certainly do fit comfortably with the sort of sentiments Donald Trump, Jr., expressed on Chris Salcedo's show: "I can't tell if some of this stuff is politically motivated because not going back to normalcy allows you to instill some fear that can be used as political leverage. Let them play, man."
In other words, the position of the Trump administration as it makes a Covid-19-ignoring scoring drive for November 3rd is distinctly shut up and dribble. However, the question, in this moment from hell, is: Will the players and fans agree?
Who will take the next knee?
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