In the weeks following the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, more and more influencers, like Solange and Killer Mike, have started to #BankBlack and have transferred their money into black-owned banks.
Now, a historic black bank in Atlanta has seen a spike in business. In just five days, 8,000 people have submitted applications to join Citizen’s Trust Bank, according to 11 Alive.
“I’ve been telling people that it’s time to come home,” the bank’s Next Generation Advisory Board chairman said. “Rallies are great and they’re necessary. Protesting is great and it’s necessary but what will sustain and grow from here is our dollar and galvanizing our dollar.”
Montrell Jackson, one of the police officers slain in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday morning, penned an emotional Facebook post just two weeks before he was killed.
“I’m tired physically and emotionally,” Jackson, 32, wrote on July 8, after Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police outside a Baton Rouge convenience store and five officers were gunned down in Dallas, Texas. “I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.”
In his earlier Facebook message, Jackson wrote that in such “trying times” society must band together “because hate takes too much energy.”
Tensions in Louisiana’s state capital go back years. For many residents, the police force has been viewed as overly aggressive and unrepresentative of a city where over half the 230,000 residents are black and where racial problems date back decades.
Minorities are “very wary of police and often afraid of them,” says Michele Fournet, a veteran Baton Rouge criminal defense lawyer.
Calls for community policing have been growing across the country since the 2014 police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
A wave of anti-police protests has spread, fueled by a series of fatal encounters between police and members of minority groups.
A Maryland judge on Monday acquitted Baltimore police Lieutenant Brian Rice of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office for the April 2015 death of black detainee Freddie Gray.
Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams handed down his verdict after a bench trial. Rice, 42, is the highest-ranking officer charged in Gray’s death from a broken neck suffered in a police transport van.
Monday’s verdict is the latest setback for prosecutors, who have failed to secure a conviction in the trials of four officers thus far.
In the days after Micah Xavier Johnson’s mass shooting in Dallas, The Drudge Report took to calling him simply, and in outsized font, Micah X. Though it was the most transparent of the attempts to tie Johnson to black militancy and/or the Black Lives Matter movement, it was only the most extreme expression of a widespread phenomenon.
It was also dead wrong.
While he looked different, both politically and physically, from most well-known assassins, in the pantheon of American assassins, there was nothing unusual about Micah Xavier Johnson.
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