An informed Community is a Ready Community! The tragedy in West Virginia and why we didn’t know.

I have been trying to wrap my mind around the attack in West Virginia for a couple of weeks. It was hard to get information on the topic initially because it got very little press in the national media. I didn’t want to write about it until I got all my facts together, and could properly facilitate my opinion on the matter. For six days these people raped and beat a young lady named Megan Williams. When I saw the faces of the people who did this I couldn’t help but think devils. http://blackandmissing.blogspot.com/2007/09/megan-williams-tortured-by-6-people-for.html click link and scroll down to see their pictures.

When I look at these people I see nothing but pure evil. One of the guys looks like Timothy McVeigh, the guy that killed those people out in Oklahoma City. If I had to put a face on the devil, it would be one of these six, and if not one of these six I’m sure he/she would look similar to the bunch. Maybe a little more cleaned up, with a middle name like Walker, I don’t know, just trying to draw a picture here.

They pulled this poor woman’s hair out of her head, sexually assaulted her, made her eat rat dropping, and forced her to drink from the toilet, these are just a few of the horrendous things that made the news. I’m sure the reality of the week long ordeal was much worst than what was reported in the papers. Between the six of them, they have had 108 criminal charges filed against them. That equals about 18 charges a piece, if you do the math. It baffles me how these people where even in the “free” world anyway with that type of history. The most serious of the crimes committed was murder. Frankie Brewster only served five years after pleading guilty to manslaughter. How she pulled that one of is beyond me, but once again only in America, where white power reigns supreme, can white women get of with five years for killing someone with a public defender after 17 other charges.
This story got very little publicity, around the same time Michael Vick and Isaiah Thomas were on the cover of every news paper in New York City. Where are the priorities of the media? I know where the media priorities aren’t, and it’s not with reporting about incidents that affect our community. ( Not that Vick and Thomas don’t affect our community, but I believe their situation got light years more press than this.) We need more and have a few of our own media outlets that cover the news from an angle that affects us.Sites like http://blackelectorate.com/, http://blackamericaweb.com/, and the http://www.colorofchange.org/ (website primarily responsible for getting the information about the Jena Six out to the community) are good examples of media outlets that reflect the well being of the community.
I don’t mention these sites because I agree with all of the politics that are on the sites, often time I disagree. But, the site do serve as a launch pad to deepen my understanding around something I may have heard in the news.

I’m sure if the six faces looked like this http://www.nbc6.net/news/9740757/detail.html

they would have been all over the news. Can you imagine if one of these brothers was dating a white girl, they break up, and weeks later his family kidnaps her? After kidnapping her they pull out her hair, make her eat rat droppings, sexually assaulted her, called her cracka for a whole week, and had been arrested 108 times between them what the media would be saying? I don’t have to draw a clearer picture than that. Meagan Williams is the victim here, but we all should feel violated by the lack of coverage this issue received.
We need to have our own media outlets so that we can stay connected to each other. I need to know about an issue if it happens out in Chicago, St. Louis or Houston. And, you guys need to know if something happens out here in NYC and we shouldn’t have to wait for CNN to report it to figure it out.
The seven gentlemen shown above represent another case that has received absolutely NO media attention. These brothers have become known as the Liberty City Seven (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Methods_questioned_in_investigation_leading_up_0629.html) . These brothers have been charged with trying to blow up the Sears tower and a Federal building in Miami. If you know anything about Miami Florida, you know Liberty City is the poorest section of the town. There’s is no liberty in Liberty City Florida. These men where so poor they couldn’t afford boots, the also where borrowing water from their neighbors. How are they going to blow up the Sears Tower if the don’t have shoes, and can’t afford water. By some standards they may be considered a little extreme in the position they took, but not terrorist. There is tons of evidence that says there was no talk of any senseless behavior like terrorism, until the FBI came around. The story doesn’t make much since, it sounds like the FBI tried to set these brothers up, to make it look like the government is fighting terrorism on all fronts. If these same men that are being charged with a crime as serious as sedition, get no press, but would have been front page material had they done the same thing to a white girl that was done to Meagan Williams, we have a problem. I would say a state of emergency.
How about the young lady in Florida who was got man handled and punched in the face by a police officer. She is fifteen years old and got stopped by the police for being out after curfew and this happened. ( http://www.videonewslive.com/view/123313/police_pepper_spray_teen ) Why is it that most of you haven’t seen or heard about this? Not because you don’t watch enough news, but because the mainstream media doesn’t cover issues like this. We have to keep ourselves informed in order to make informed decisions about the world around us.
These are just two example of information that we as a community need to know about, but most of us don’t. The white power structure tries to disconnect our power by keeping up blind to information that will create movement in the community. The community in which they served is well informed about issues that affect them; we have to continue to build an environment where we do the same. We are headed in that direction, but we need a lot more. West Virginia is not an isolated incident; neither is the Liberty City Seven, Jena, Columbia University, or the other thousand issues that have plagued our community in the last four months. As the winter gets closer the assault keeps coming, we need to be in a position to move when we need to. The rally that went down in Jena was powerful, the immigration rallies that our Latino brothers and sisters put together last year was powerful. We need to support each other and make sure our power is concentrated so when it time to move we move as one.

Marvo