Hungry Blues

Marian has several excellent posts, as well as an archival newspaper piece, on or relating to Fox's remarks. As always, she writes about international race issues in ways that bring them home and give them personal dimensions.

In one of her posts, Marian talks about the small population of black Mexicans and suggests that everyone read and link to Bobby Vaughan's site on Black Mexico. On that subject I would also like to refer people to this info on a documentary video about the Underground Railroad in Mexico. Curtis Muhammad, who produced the film, is a former member of SNCC and a longtime community organizer and freedom fighter. I haven't seen the video, but it looks very worthwhile. Ask your public or school library to order it.

Today Professor Kim wrote a personal and historical post on the 20th anniversary of the police bombing of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia. If you don't know the story, go read her post: you might learn something. If you already know the story, go read her post: you might learn something.

History happens to individual people and lives inside them. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have writers who can communicate this. I really don't know what part to excerpt. Just go read the whole thing.

Well the part about the article is true, anyway. This morning I noticed a hit to HungryBlues off of a comment on Alas, A Blog, in a discussion of the new public health obsession with obesity:

You have probably said this already somewhere on your blog, Amp, so let me be the second to say: why is this our #1 public health agenda? Why aren’t our federal public health officials working on the issue of infant mortality, for example? We have one of the highest rates of infant mortality of any industrialized country. Why does fat come first? How about the lower life expectancy rates for African Americans, something that Bush has publically acknowledged? You know, it’s not like we don’t know why that is, we know very well that African Americans do not get fair medical treatment. Take a look at this article, Equality in the 1990s would have saved 900 000 black Americans. I think this all fits in with the Republican idoelogy of making all social problems the responsibility of individuals. That way, if you are sick, we can blame you for it. Gross.

I am in total agreement with the comment. But I just came across an article via The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog that presents some related statistics that are utterly chilling. The two quotes of note:

There are nearly two million more black adult women than men in America, stark testimony to how often black men die before their time. With nearly another million black men in prison or the military, the real imbalance is even greater -- a gap of 2.8 million, according to U.S. Census data for 2002. On average, then, there are 26 percent more black women than black men; among whites, women outnumber men by just 8 percent.

And:

"If white men were falling off the grid as rapidly as black men, it would be considered a national crisis," says Raymond Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore and author of "The Warrior Method: A Program for Rearing Black Boys."

"It would be leading all the network news shows," says Jeffries, the spokesman for East Orange and formerly a writer and producer with NBC News in New York. "It would be full-court, around-the- clock coverage on 'the gap' and all its ramifications."

WAKE UP AMERICA!

More excerpts (emphasis added):

Where have all the black men gone?
The Star Ledger
Sunday, May 08, 2005
BY JONATHAN TILOVE

Darryl Jeffries, the spokesman for East Orange, calls his city "the most densely populated community of color in the United States." The Essex County city covers less than four square miles, but it is home to more than 70,000 people. Mostly black. Some Hispanics. A few whites.

But the most salient statistic about East Orange is the number of black men who are not there. Under the age of 18, there are more black boys than girls. Among the adult population, however, there are 37 percent more women than men.

Where are these missing men? Most are dead. Many others are locked up. Some are in the military.

Worse yet, the gender imbalance in East Orange is not some grotesque anomaly. It's a vivid snapshot of a very troubling reality in black America.

There are nearly two million more black adult women than men in America, stark testimony to how often black men die before their time. With nearly another million black men in prison or the military, the real imbalance is even greater -- a gap of 2.8 million, according to U.S. Census data for 2002. On average, then, there are 26 percent more black women than black men; among whites, women outnumber men by just 8 percent.

Perhaps no single statistic so precisely measures the fateful, often fatal, price of being a black man in America, or so powerfully conveys how beset black communities are by the violence and disease that leaves them bereft of brothers, fathers, husbands and sons, and leaves whole communities reeling.

"It just distorts the fabric of African-American life," says Roland Anglin, executive director of the New Jersey Public Policy Research Institute, whose mission is research to improve the quality of life in communities of color. "It's scandalous for us as a society."

In the March/April issue of Health Affairs, Dr. David Satcher, surgeon general under former President Bill Clinton and now the interim president of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, exposes the core of the problem: Between 1960 and 2000, the disparity between mortality rates for black and white women narrowed while the disparity between the rates for black and white men grew wider.

Exponentially higher homicide and AIDS rates play their part, especially among younger black men. Even more deadly through middle age and beyond are higher rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer.

"The degree of loss and death that people in those communities are experiencing at a young age is just unfathomable," says Arline T. Geronimus of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. A few years ago Geronimus led a team of researchers who calculated that in Harlem and Chicago's South Side, two- thirds of black boys and one-third of black girls who reach their 15th birthday would not make 65. . . .

STARTLING STATISTICS
The imbalance between the numbers of black men and women does not exist everywhere. There is no gap to speak of in places with relatively small black populations like Minneapolis, Minn.; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco and San Diego. And Seattle actually has more black men than women.

But it is the rule in communities with large concentrated black populations. There are, for instance, more than 30 percent more black women than men in Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago and Cleveland, and in smaller cities like Harrisburg, Pa. There are 36 percent more black women than men in New York City, and 37 percent more in Saginaw, Mich., and Philadelphia. In Newark, the figure is 26 percent.

In East Orange, there were more black males under 18 than females in 2000. And yet, there were 29 percent more black women than men in their 20s.

WHAT LIES BENEATH
Still, there are glimmers of hope. The gender gap is in part a reflection of the improved lot of black women, as a consequence of a long-term national commitment to maternal and women's health and a Medicaid program that provided access to care for poor women and children -- access still denied to many poor men. And despite today's bleak realities, mortality rates for black men were actually worse in 1990, at the height of the crack-and-homicide epidemic in America's cities.

The enormous growth of the prison population, meanwhile, is largely the result of recent mandatory sentencing laws -- laws that could be reformed or reversed. And communities like East Orange seem astir with mentorship programs and a new conviction that self-destructive behavior will not be tolerated.

What's missing, many observers believe, is a national will to confront the problem in all its difficult dimensions.

"If white men were falling off the grid as rapidly as black men, it would be considered a national crisis," says Raymond Winbush, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore and author of "The Warrior Method: A Program for Rearing Black Boys."

"It would be leading all the network news shows," says Jeffries, the spokesman for East Orange and formerly a writer and producer with NBC News in New York. "It would be full-court, around-the- clock coverage on 'the gap' and all its ramifications."

(READ THE WHOLE THING.)

Saturday, May 21
7:30 p.m.
Friends Meeting House,
5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge

Bev is a foremost leader in the movement to uncover and expose the dangers of electronic voting.

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting -- Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, is founder of Black Box Voting http://www.blackboxvoting.org/, the national consumer protection group for elections. Long before the 2004 Presidential election, Bev demonstrated how almost anyone with a PC can break into the Diebold GEMS software that is used to tabulate over 50% of America's votes -- and change the results.

Her ongoing and extensive research into the electronic voting industry has led her to discover: a small number of companies owned by partisans are recording and counting a majority of America's votes; a remarkable lack of security; a very lax certification process; huge numbers of uncertified systems; an easily hackable central tabulator; and source code ripe for 'outside' persons to access and alter election results.

An entertaining, informative, and stimulating speaker, Bev will offer an overview of what is needed for true election reform, and how we can take action to get accountability back into our voting systems. This will be followed by a question and answer period and then a training workshop in which she will teach us specific techniques for our being able to audit elections. This event is for the believer and the doubter.

Bev Harris is making history in America and she is not to be missed!

Saturday, May 21
7:30 p.m. Friends Meeting House, 5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge. Accessible. Childcare available.
(off Brattle St., easy walking distance from Harvard Square T)
$10 / person -- more if you can, less if you can't

Presented by:

Coalition Against Election Fraud (CAEF)
http://www.caef.us/

National Ballot Integrity Project (NBIP)
http://www.ballotintegrity.org/

New Hampshire Ballot Integrity Task Force (DFNH-FEC)
http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/922

For more information, call (617) 524-2223 or email: may21@caef.us

PLEASE FORWARD TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED!

Many of the best activists on voting technology issues use the words "integrity" and "security" in their language of reform. In a historical vacuum, there is every reason to be concerned about the "integrity" of our elections and the "security" of our ballot casting. It is clear, however, that many e-voting activists are not well enough aware of the the political history of voting rights in America. I got into a discussion about this with Sheila Parks, who cofounded Coalition Against Election Fraud, in which I am active. Sheila asked me to write something that could be forwarded to other activists. What follows is a slightly edited version of what I wrote for her earlier today.

Long before electronic voting activists started alerting us to the unregulated, error prone, unverifiable voting systems that are being put into place all over the country, the words "integrity" and "security" were right wing code words for keeping people of color and low income people and students out of the voting booth. The connotations are that some folks do not have enough "integrity" to vote and therefore we must "secure" the voting process from the participation of such dark skinned, low-income, former felon (etc.) fraudulent voters.

Those of us who care about voting rights should be emphasizing "access," not "integrity." I understand why e-voting activists want to talk about security and integrity vis à vis machines, but voting rights and reliable voting systems are much too interrelated to allow the rubrics to get so confused and muddied. I would suggest words like "transparency," "accountability," "verifiable," "auditable," "fair," "accurate," etc.—always making sure to specify we are talking about elections, elections officials and voting equipment.

"Ballot security programs" are what the Republican Party has called its disenfranchisement strategies since the late 50s/early 60s: you can
read a good overview of the history of ballot security programs here:

http://www.votelaw.com/blog/blogdocs/GOP_Ballot_Security_Programs.pdf

Directly related is the so-called "ballot integrity movement." Here's
something I posted to an email list back in the fall:

The word "integrity" has a very specific meaning within the Civil Rights
Division of the DOJ. The simplest explanation might be this bit from
Jeffrey Toobin's recent New Yorker article, "Poll Position,"

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040920fa_fact.

The Attorney General had come forward [in 2002] to launch the Voting
Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is
the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement,
which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in
the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft's proposal favored the "integrity" side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would "deter and detect discrimination prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice."

The word "integrity" has a very specific meaning within the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. The simplest explanation might be this bit from Jeffrey Toobin's recent New Yorker article, "Poll Position,"
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040920fa_fact.

The Attorney General had come forward [in 2002] to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft's proposal favored the "integrity" side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district.

These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would "deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice." Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions
the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving
federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access.

I'm pretty sure we can expect the DOJ and the Republican party to betalking increasingly about "voting integrity" in the coming months and years. Using the same or similar language may confuse things for anyone who isn't following the goings on in federal law enforcement.

In addition, the current staff attorney for the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, "is a former board member of the Voting Integrity Project, which ran the disputed purging of alleged felons from Florida voter rolls during the 2000 election. Von Spakovsky was the director of the Center for Technology and E-commerce at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank based in Atlanta." (People for the American Way)

The same New Yorker article notes:

In a recent speech at Georgetown University, von Spakovsky suggested that voting integrity will remain a focus for the Justice Department, and that voter access might best be left to volunteers."

Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights
advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access.

We can expect the DOJ and the Republican party to be
talking increasingly about "voting integrity" in the coming months and years. Using the same or similar language may confuse things for anyone who isn't following the goings on in federal law enforcement.

In addition, the current staff attorney for the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, "is a former board member of the Voting Integrity Project, which ran the disputed purging of alleged felons from Florida voter rolls during the 2000 election. Von Spakovsky was the director of the Center for Technology and E-commerce at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank based in Atlanta." (People for the American Way)

The same New Yorker article notes:

In a recent speech at Georgetown University, von Spakovsky suggested that voting integrity will remain a focus for the Justice Department, and that voter access might best be left to volunteers.

There's much more in the New Yorker article about von Spakovsky and his "voting integrity" agenda and his right wing background.

Listen carefully when right wingers talk about "voting rights" and "election reform." You will almost always hear the words "secure," "security," "integrity," and "fraud."

Ben

--
Benjamin Greenberg
web <http://minorjive.typepad.com/hungryblues>
email <minorjive at gmail dot com>
fax 815-550-8891

There's much more in the New Yorker article about von Spakovsky and his "voting integrity" agenda and his right wing background.

Listen carefully when right wingers talk about "voting rights" and
"election reform." You will almost always hear the words "secure,"
"security," "integrity," and "fraud."

Speaking of children, my two year old has been doing wonderful things with blocks.

While I'm touching upon issues relating to children in foster care, I should mention Yvette's recent post at Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Yvette is a doctoral student in Family Social Science, who researches adoptive parenting. In her post, Yvette analyzes the ethical issues surrounding the testing of AIDS drugs on foster children, recently in the news. The children who have been subjects for the drug tests are disproportionately African American.

There has been a lot written recently about the role of race in decision making and actions regarding the remocal of children from their homes and termination of these children's parents' parental rights. One voice in this discussion has been that of Dorothy Roberts, for example in this essay in response to a Frontline program about the child welface system:

White children are the least likely of any group to be supervised by child protective services. Black children make up more than two-fifths of the foster care population, though they represent less than one-fifth of the nation's children. Latino and Native American children are also in the system in disproportionate numbers. The system's racial imbalance is most apparent in big cities where there are sizeable minority and foster care populations.

However, according to Roberts this disparity is likely not just about poverty:

Even though black children are more likely to be poor than white children, racial differences in child poverty rates don't fully explain why black children are placed in foster care at higher rates. Race also influences child welfare decision-making through powerful, deeply embedded stereotypes about black family dysfunction. Black families diverge the most from the parenting ideal embodied in the white, middle-class model composed of married parents and their children. Black mothers are assumed to be irresponsible and difficult to rehabilitate. A number of studies demonstrate that caseworkers, judges, and doctors are more suspicious of non-white parents.

I know of a case of a small pediatric group practice headed by two African American physicians serving a largely Black and low-income client population. These two experienced doctors had become so fed up with emergency room personnel automatically calling social services on their patients that they requested that one of them be called before any hospital staff takes such action in order to provide input, context--even advocacy.

What an unenviable position to find yourself in as a physician: treating your patients by, in part, protecting them from the actions of other physicians.

Read the whole thing.

Dahveed's blog is an interesting and useful site that focuses on advocacy issues for children, children of color and foster children in particular. Dhaveed aggregates news items in this area and has a good set of links for information and advocacy resources. Dahveed also has a related website, with the same name as his blog, which has more informational resources about children of color in the American foster care system.

22: The number of times the phrase "voter identification" or "voter ID" was said at the first Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform hearing on April 18, 2005. The mantra of Republicans is that dogs, dead people, and cartoon characters are allowed to cast fraudulent votes. Republicans are advancing that strict voter identification requirements are the means to eliminate such voter fraud and state legislators are passing voter identification legislation as fast as they can with little debate or delay. In recent months, Indiana and Georgia have enacted voter identification requirements that have been characterized as some of the most severe and unreasonable voter identification requirements in the country. Several other state legislatures have similar legislation pending. At this first Carter-Baker Commission hearing, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Barbara Arnwine told of the real-world consequences of these measures: More than 10 percent of eligible voters currently lack government-issued photo ID, and would be arbitrarily disenfranchised.

6: The number of days the American Center for Voting Rights, a new, "non-partisan," "voting rights" organization, had been in existence before it was called to testify by Republican members of Congress before a House Administration Committee hearing on March 22. The American Center for Voting Rights was formed by a lawyer for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the notoriously anti-voting rights Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, who described the group as a non-partisan, voting rights advocacy group. He testified and submitted a report on Ohio election irregularities, which highlighted the Mary Poppins Conspiracy in this country. If you haven't heard about it, the Mary Poppins Conspiracy consists of many, many ineligible voters—using the names Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive F. Turkey—fraudulently voting in elections.

Unfortunately for advocates of this conspiracy theory, a precinct has yet to report that a citizen by the name of Mary Poppins showed up on Election Day and voted. Searches for Dick Tracy votes and Jive F. Turkey votes have also come up empty.

598: The number of days left in the 109th Congress to pass election reform legislation. The debate over whether voting machines were hacked or there was deliberate suppression of minority votes will continue. We should all agree—given the shoddy, unaccountable and unverifiable state of our election machinery and procedures—that, unless we act, the next close election will prompt the same debates and public confidence in our democracy will suffer a potentially fatal blow. Of even more importance, we must be vigilant as Republicans try to roll our voting rights backwards.

Read the rest of "The GOP's Attack On Voting Rights," by Rep. John Conyers, Jr.

Earlier tonight, I was at the Cambridge (MA) City-wide Holocaust Commemoration. One of the musical interludes at the event was performed by my friend Dana Kletter. She did Chava Alberstein's musical setting of Zelda's Hebrew poem, Each Of Us Has A Name.

Dana is best known as a critically acclaimed musician, but she is also a talented writer. You can find some of her publications in alternative newspapers from the cities she's lived in over the years.

Dana is the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors: both her mother and her grandmother survived Auschwitz. Around this time of year in 2000, Dana published an amazing article about her visit to the death camp in the winter of 1999. Here's one passage:

"I was not prepared for the birch trees ... " begins a poem by Daniel Paley Ellison, who was also on the retreat. And neither was I. They were too beautiful. Beauty and humor were odd and incongruent in that place, but they happened.

On the third day, a group planning to hold a prayer vigil in one of the gas chambers assembled. A tiny, white-haired, very birdlike woman came rushing toward me, pointing at a bus and saying, "Oh my, I hope this is the bus to the gas chamber." I was shocked and just nodded. She began climbing the steps, then turned back to me and said, "Coming?" No, I thought, not getting on the bus to the gas chamber, no thank you, no. I just waved to her and she waved back, going to find her seat.

As the group began to draw together, I met other children of concentration camp survivors, among them my Polish counterpart, Dorata. Polish and Catholic, her father had been a Nazi prisoner, and most of her family had died in Auschwitz. Dorata was one of a group of girls I thought of as "the weeping Polish beauties." She was, for me, an unforeseen circumstance. She was there to bear witness to the suffering of the Poles in the face of the silence, occupation and subjugation. In her, I was forced to meet my anger and intolerance, finding my place in a kind of competition--the hierarchy of suffering--in this terrible place where intolerance had caused the death of millions.

But, really, you should read the whole thing.

---
Photo: Dana Kletter at her mother's barrack, 17C Furnicht (Peter Cunningham).

I sent one of my posts on Ja'eisha Scott to the Civil Rights Movement veterans list-serve that I'm on, and Sam Friedman wrote back with the following:

I think that it might be useful to tell a story here from my life. Shortly after I began kindergarden in 1947 in school-segregated Washington, DC, as a white boy in a middle class school, something upset me and I became hysterical and stayed hysterical.

I was more than the teacher could deal with, so after some minutes they called a policeman to deal with me. It was pretty impressive to confront a cop as a 5 year old. BUT, instead of handcuffs, police cars, and all that, he soothed me and spoke to me in a very friendly fashion. Within a few minutes, I was back in control and back in the class room.

The contrast to this case is obvious. It is also worth realizing that, even though I was treated wonderfully by the policeman, I STILL REMEMBER THE INCIDENT almost 60 years later.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like, and will continue to be like, for the many Black kids who get handcuffed, put in cop cars, and the like.

Sam Friedman was a civil rights activist starting with his attendance at the Second Youth March for Integrated Schools in early 1959. He also was active in the Woolworth protests in 1960 in Washington DC, and in the Glen Echo protests and sit-in in Montgomery County Maryland in the summer of 1960. Thereafter, he was very involved in the movement for years.

Now, he is an AIDS researcher who is an author on over 300 publications in many journals (including Nature, Science, New England J of Medicine, etc.).

You know, when they start saying knee-jerk stuff about how the problem is Inga Akins' parenting of Ja'eisha.

Tying such dire predictions of social decay to divorce and single motherhood seemed credible in the 1970s and 1980s. But a funny thing happened in the 1990s: Almost every negative social trend tracked by the census, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Justice declined.

Teen birthrates fell by 30% between 1991 and 2002. The number of violent crimes in schools was halved between 1992 and 2002. Teen homicide rates dropped to their lowest level since 1966. Teen suicides decreased by 25%, and drug abuse, binge drinking and smoking all fell.

Yet the number of couples living together unmarried increased by more than 70% over the decade; the population at large increased by only 13% during this period. Gay and lesbian parenting became more common. The number of families headed by single mothers rose five times faster than the number of married-couple families.

Obviously, attributing the improvements of the 1990s to the continued increases in families headed by single moms is as absurd as blaming all the social ills of the 1980s on divorce.

Single parenthood does increase the risk that teens will get into trouble. But so do poverty, parental conflict, frequent school relocation, parental substance abuse and even an emotionally distant relationship with married parents.

Studies show that the majority of teens who exhibit serious behavior problems have five or more separate risk factors in their lives.

From an op-ed by Stephanie Coontz in the LA Times: OurKids Are Not Doomed (via Alas, A Blog).

DTWOF: The Blog

That's right , Alison Bechdel, the brilliant cartoonist of Dykes To Watch Out For.

I'm not up on the whole web comics and print comics scene (though Ruth is big time... hmm maybe I can get a guest post out of her on web comics, since I'm mentioning them... no pressure Ruth)—but I love DTWOF.

The only reason I found out about the blog is because I was looking around at Professor B's blogroll and noticed it there.

(For those following the little blogospheric controversy about blogrolls, this is also a mini plug for why y'all should keep 'em. For the first time since I read him ten years ago, I'm actually tempted to quote Pierre Bourdieu: on how people who have power can shuck convention as a means of displaying their power. Fortunately I'm not sure where my copy of the right book is. If I dig it up, maybe I'll copy out the paragraph.)

When I saw that opening sentence I thought, could Killen's attorneys really be arguing that it isn't fair to prosecute Killen, alone, when there are at least nine other living suspects?

Alas, the moral ground of the defense attorneys' argument for dismissal is somewhat more dubious.

Neshoba County 05/10/05
Attorney Files For Dismissal In Civil Rights Murder Case

In a motion filed Tuesday, Killen's attorney argued that with crime increasing across Mississippi, the state arbitrarily and capriciously set its sights on Killen. James Mcintyre, Killen's attorney said the process by which the case was selected denied his client equal protection under the constitution.

I'd say he's been pretty well protected for forty years now. Every murderer should be so lucky...

The last line of the article is the kicker:

Killen is charged with arranging the murders of three Neshoba County civil rights workers in 1964.

I'm sure everyone knows they're talking about Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, but there's something just a wee bit hostile about not deigning to name them.