Tag: politics

Did You Know That Lynching Was Not a Crime?

It’s hard to believe, but that’s true! The legislation passed the Senate last Monday, and I can’t believe that it took so long!

Below is the text of the article from the Chicago Tribune March 8 2022 by Darcel Rockett.

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Legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime and prevent racist killers from evading justice was introduced more than 200 times but never once passed into law, according to Illinois U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush.

That path is clearer now that the Senate unanimously passed a bill Monday that criminalizes lynching and makes it punishable by up to 30 years in prison. The measure passed the House last month and now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk.

“Who would have imagined that lynching, that was visited upon literally over 6,000 citizens of our nation, that lynching was not a federal crime until our present day,” Rush told the Tribune on Tuesday. “We’re looking forward to a more perfect union.”

The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, named for the Chicago teen and authored by Rush, states a crime can be prosecuted as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury. Emmett Till, the 14-year-old son of Mamie Till-Mobley, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. The act first passed the House of Representatives in February 2020, but was blocked when Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., objected to clearing it by unanimous consent in the Senate.

Rush reintroduced the act on the first day of the 117th Congress in January 2022. The previous text of the legislation set the maximum sentence at 10 years and made lynching a crime that could only be prosecuted under specific circumstances, such as if it took place while the victim was engaging in a federally protected activity such as voting.

Now, the act amends the United States Code to include a maximum sentence of 30 years for a perpetrator convicted under the anti-lynching act, in addition to any other federal criminal charges the perpetrators may face, and the legislation applies to a broader range of circumstances.

Thousands of Americans were lynched between 1865 and 1950, according to a 2020 report from the Equal Justice Initiative.

Rush, who is in communication with Till’s remaining relatives, said they were very determined that the bill was going to pass and they did all they could, including praying that President Biden would be able to sign it.

Rush said the prayers have been answered. He wants to see if a formal ceremony can take place to honor the measure. Rush, who will leave his office after this term, doesn’t see this as a feather in his cap, but he does see it as a victory for the American people — for Black Americans specifically.

When the Till act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020, a boyhood friend of Till’s said the law refreshed our memory of what our history looks like, placing value on history, so we don’t repeat it.

That was before the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Mississippi closed their investigation of the Till case in December 2020 after Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Donham, the wife of one of the confessed murderers and a witness to events leading up to Till’s murder, alleged recantation of events in a 2017 book by Timothy Tyson titled “The Blood of Emmett Till.”

Per a DOJ statement, the government’s re-investigation found no new evidence suggesting any living person was involved in Till’s abduction and murder. Till’s remaining relatives said the “findings came as no surprise.”

Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Till was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. The trial is the basis of a recent immersive stage adaptation of the 1955 trial transcript performed by Collaboraction, “Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till.”

WMAQ-Ch. 5. news anchor Marion Brooks found the transcript in her research on Till and wanted to get the information out. The play will also live on screen as part two of Brooks’ documentary on Till, “The Lost Story of Emmett Till: The Universal Child.”

Days after Till was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman, his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where it was tossed after being weighed down with a cotton gin fan. Months later, Bryant and Milam confessed to the killing in a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant and Milam were not brought to trial again, and they are now both dead. Donham has been living in Raleigh, North Carolina.

G. Riley Mills and Willie Round, co-creators of the play, said the bill was a long time coming.

“While we’re glad it was finally passed by Congress, it’s hard not to feel anger and disappointment at how long it took,” Mills said. “We salute Congressman Rush for his tireless efforts championing the cause for Emmett and Mamie.”

Christopher Benson, an attorney, Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism associate professor, and co-author with Mamie Till-Mobley of “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America,” said people have to take encouragement from the new legislation.

“One hundred years and there never was agreement on a way forward to address this horror of racial violence,” he said. “It’s a good start, but now we have to enforce it.”

For the past four years, Benson has worked with the Till family. He said Till’s family is highly supportive.

“Whether this compensates for the lack of justice in Till’s case is another matter,” he said. “We have to ask, what does justice require? Justice would have meant that Emmett Till came home alive. So we can never truly experience justice in this case. We have sought some level of accountability from his killers and the government structure that enabled that lynching. Because the killers of Emmett Till believed that they could get away with the destruction of a Black body, because of the horrible system that exists in this country, particularly in Mississippi at the time.”

Rush shares similar sentiments.

“It’s a victory for Emmett Till, his legacy, his family and the over 6,000 people who were lynched in our nation, all the way up to this moment,” he said. “This is really an intergenerational, historical victory.”

Before The Rally

The last two days were packed with events and emotions, and it feels crucial for me to record as much as I can, just for myself, to remember these days.

Before the world collapsed into the war, we made plans with Lena for her to visit this weekend and see this Orchid show in the Botanic Garden. On Thursday, Lena called me in tears, telling me about her relatives in the city of Sumy on the Russian/Ukrainian border. The city was shelled, explicitly targeting the infrastructure, the heating system, electric stations, and the railway station. She said she did not want to come. I told her that I understood, but if she changed her mind, we could also go to the rally on Sunday. On Friday, she texted me that she would come.
Saturday was a mixture of enjoying the Botanic Garden and the nice weather, listening to the horror stories from Sumy, laughing at the gypsies who stole a tank from the Russian Army, exchanging ideas about Lena’s own family’s potential escape from Russia, and making posters for the rally.

I still can’t understand what should have been done to people for them to be able to drop the bombs on their neighbors, and I can’t stand that there is absolutely nothing I can do. Lena and I talked about Russians who somehow still believe that “only Russia is right and the rest of the world is not.” Lena could not understand how anybody seeing that literally, the whole world is saying one thing, and Russia is saying something else, won’t have doubts. And then, I saw a blog post on Russian social media, which explained it to me as clear as possible. It went something like that:

When it all started, I was worried and concerned and felt shame and everything, but it started to change. Look, how come all these Western countries united their forces and issued all these sanctions so fast and in unison? That means that they planned it! And now all these sanctions, which target the ordinary people, as if we could have a voice in anything! That means that the West is indeed at war with Russia, which means that we had to fight this war! And because of this war, Russians are united more than ever!

I can’t even count the number of wrongs here, but this helps explain “how could they.”
Seeing Lena not crying, but being angry and energetic, was one relief. Another big one was that Boris finally got out of Russia back to Finland. After weeks of hesitation, he finally decided to make “a big leap,” but the timing was not the best, and then I spent days worrying that he won’t be able to return before Russia closed its borders entirely. Everybody is trying to escape as it was after the October Revolution. The trains are full, the airline tickets are impossible to get, and whatever is left costs twenty times more than a week ago. On top of it, these are the last couple of days of Russian credits cards being serviced.

For me, it meant that I had to execute some surgical operations with mom’s finances and then run around the city getting as much cash as I could get.

And then, there was a rally. I will try to write a separate post about it tomorrow because it is getting late, and I need to start sleeping again.

I will just say one thing here. Never before did I attend a rally with so much grief being in the air. My sorrow for the suffering people grew even more, and so did a feeling of helplessness. This feeling became more specific: whatever I could do to help should have been done earlier. And whatever I am trying to do now looks at most like the attempts of the whites to join the BML rallies – whites were firmly and politely or not – being ushered out.

More tomorrow.

Scenes from last Sunday’s anti-war protest in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village

When the Russian-Ukrainian War broke out, my mom and I knew that there are going to be rallies and protests in support of Ukraine and against the war – and we wanted to be a part of it. But my usual sources within the Russian-speaking communities, and the general activist chatter on Twitter, kept failing me. I kept finding out that event after event already happened from new stories and live-tweets covering them. So when, last Thursday, I found out there was going to be a rally on Sunday in front of Chicago’s Ukrainian Village’s iconic Saints Volodymyr & Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church, I figured I was going to try to make it, and encouraged my mom to do the same.

As the name suggests, Ukrainian Village is a neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side originally settled by Ukrainians from what was then the Russian Empire. While Ukrainian Village isn’t as Ukrainian as it used to be in its heyday, it still has a number of Ukrainian churches, cultural institutions and even some stores and restaurants.

Continue reading “Scenes from last Sunday’s anti-war protest in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village” →

Being In Control Of My Life

Last Saturday, I planned to go to Milwaukee to spend a day with my girls, finally exploring Milwaukee Downtown. But Anna texted me on Friday morning that all three of them had a cold. She said: and I blame Putin for that! As funny as it sounds, being under stress can indeed lessen your natural immunity. And actually, I also got a non-COVID cold by Saturday morning. We both checked the new feed constantly and could not switch to anything productive; I could not tell where my days were going – it looked like I was busy all the time but still didn’t accomplish anything.

Two major “highlights” of the first two days included knocking off the kitchen counter a percolator just after the brewing process was over. I thought the lid was tight, but not enough: almost all the coffee was spilled all over the countertops and the floor.

The next day, I accidentally put both of my contacts in the same eye!!! And it took me at least fifteen minutes to figure out what was going wrong!

After that second accident, I decided that enough was enough. And as one of my friends set, we should not let Putin rob us of our entire lives.

Doing nothing but refreshing the news feed all day long does not benefit anybody and does not help anybody. Since then, I have been trying to do as many normal activities as possible, including going to concerts and exhibits. And keep looking for ways to be helpful.

Moscow Is Not Chicago Sister City Anymore

From Chicago Tribune:

After nearly three dozen aldermen called for Chicago’s Sister Cities relationship with Moscow to be suspended while the Russian war on Ukraine is ongoing, Mayor Lori Lightfoot directed World Business Chicago to do just that.

“While this is not a decision I enter into lightly, we must send an unambiguous message: we strongly condemn all actions by the Putin regime. This suspension will be upheld until the end of hostilities against Ukraine and the Putin regime is held accountable for its crimes,” Lightfoot said. “We must continue to support freedom-loving people everywhere and ordinary Russians in their desire to be free.”

The move is largely symbolic but highlights the ongoing condemnation toward Russia throughout the world after Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine.

On Monday, 33 Chicago City Council members signed onto a proposed order suspending Moscow’s Sister City status.

Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv is among Chicago’s 27 remaining Sister Cities, whose roster also includes Bogotá, Colombia; Accra, Ghana; Osaka, Japan; and Warsaw, Poland. Chicago formalized its Sisters Cities program under former Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1990, the proposed order states.

The document calls for the immediate return of gifts, materials or services provided by a revoked participant and states that it won’t be considered for readmittance “until normal diplomatic relations are reinstated.”

Protest Against Invasion Of Ukraine

Today’s rally attendance was great, but I am still resentful that 1) it was in the Ukrainian Village, which is not easy to reach, and 2) there were still way more Ukrainians than everybody else combined. I am still disappointed in Chicagoans remaining indifferent to what’s happening.
To be fair, I was very happy with all the officials being there. The crowd gasped when it was announced that Governor Pritzker was in attendance. Mayor Lory, our favorite Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Danny Davis, who represents the Ukrainian Village in the US Congress, all attended the rally.

Igor was able to stay for the whole duration of the event, and I hope he took better pictures than I did. I just saw that Tribune posted an article about the rally, so I will steal a couple of pictures from there.

And below are some of my pictures:

Continue reading “Protest Against Invasion Of Ukraine” →

And In Case You Haven’t Seen It..

There are English captions

This Long Day

Today, I tried not to be hysterical but to focus and do something. I only succeeded partially, but I at least crossed a couple of items off my list in the past two hours.

We had a Wellness Friday today, an extra day off, which we have once a month. I still had to do some work because I started to help on one project, and the customer wanted the case closed today. So I helped last night, even though I took a half-day off to go to Palatine, and also for several hours today.

Work needs to be done; both work as what I am paid for and all my professional work outside the place of employment. I am a leader, and people look out for me. Repeating to myself, “there is nothing I can help with” does not provide any extra opportunities for help and produces no positive outcome. I can be aware of the biggest injustice in today’s world, but keep doing things instead of sitting paralyzed.

Multiple commentators on the radio said that sanctions wouldn’t help. I am very well aware of that. In fact, I always explained to others why sanctions never work like planned, and never in history would sanctions make dictators, oppressors, and intruders change their ways. Never.
However, today I thought that although sanctions won’t help, we owe them to the people of Ukraine. That’s the way of showing our support.

If the reports are accurate, and the UK was indeed able to freeze Putin’s accounts specifically, that sounds great. Although again, it would be a red cape shown to the bull.
To recap this day, I will do my best to do work, be productive, help those whom I can help, and keep looking for ways to change the world.

I Hope Chicago Will Respond

I hope even though it hardly matters. And “so that I could feel better” is a lame excuse for wanting something. Total helplessness. Two comments I left on other social media.

I am contemplating renouncing my Russian citizenship (I am a dual citizen). The only thing which stops me is that the total cost of the formal process is about $1K, and I do not want to give it to the Russian government

In addition to $1K, there are several pieces of documentation that are close to impossible to obtain, so this cry is unfortunately only wishful thinking.

And another on the Instagram:

It was sad to observe yesterday that only the Ukrainian community rallied against the aggression, but I hope that it will change today, and a whole city will rise to condemn the invasion 

There were two horrible comments which I removed and blocked the author. I do not want to write anything on Russian social media.

This Morning

I woke up this morning, and the first thing I saw on my phone was a red dot from the BBC app. By the way, I do not know why it is considered so bad to have a phone by your bed and check it the first thing you wake up. I need to know what happened in the world while I was asleep and what happened with my loved ones. So I saw it right away and called Boris immediately. Regardless of what problems might happen to us (visa renewal, etc.) – these problems are minor and unimportant compared to the horrific situation in general. There are no words to describe it. Boris is saying it’s NATO’s fault – they should have let Ukraine in a week ago, but the process was not even initiated… Everybody’s fault… and mine as well.