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Article about unsolved black murders.

http://pibillwarner.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/brookhaven-mississippi-was-central-to-numerous-unsolved-kkk-murders-during-the-civil-rights-era-of-the-1960s/

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Some people believe the police still judge blacks. This article supports this idea by breaking statistics on traffic stops.

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The protests that have followed the death of Michael Brown are about this teenager, gunned down by a police officer on a suburban St. Louis street. But there is more to the anger that has taken shape in the form of days-long rallies and confrontations, with many residents in the area describing the episode as a breaking point:

Everyone I've talked to locally describes this as a breaking point, years of tension finally boiling over #Ferguson

- Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 12, 2014

This tension can be seen and felt in many ways. Ferguson is a small city with a little more than 21,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census. A little more than two-thirds of its residents are black, giving the city nearly inverted demographics compared with surrounding St. Louis County (where just under a quarter of the residents are black).

Residents have said that the encounter between 18-year-old Michael Brown and an unidentified police officer began when the officer ordered Brown not to walk in the street. That sounds like an unimaginably small thing considering what was to follow, yet that small thing hints at an issue facing black residents of Ferguson and other cities.

While black residents accounted for 67 percent of Ferguson's population, black drivers accounted for more than 86 percent of the traffic stops made last year by the Ferguson Police Department, according to a report produced by the office of Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster.

And the majority of the traffic stops (92 percent) that ended with arrests involved black drivers.

Statewide, black drivers "were 66 percent more likely than white drivers to be stopped" last year, Koster said in a statement in May.

The percentage of black drivers getting pulled over by the Ferguson police is actually higher than it has been in recent years. As recently as 2008, black drivers accounted for 79 percent of traffic stops - still nearly four out of five stops, but not as high as the percentage seen last year.

These numbers were not much better for the St. Louis County Police Department, which is investigating the shooting at the request of the Ferguson police. Last year, 32 percent of the traffic stops made by the county police involved black drivers. Nearly half of the stops ending in arrests (47.9 percent) involved black drivers, while 50 percent involved white drivers, despite white residents making up 70 percent of the county's population.

There has also been a troubling history at play in the county. A former lieutenant with the county police was fired last year after an investigation found that the lieutenant, who was accused of ordering officers to target black people around stores in the county, had made "inappropriate racial references."

In the wake of the allegations against the lieutenant, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley asked the county police board to produce documents and statistics regarding racial profiling.

The county police are participating in a study of the department's protocols conducted by researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles. "We want to make sure we're not stopping people based solely on their race," police chief Jon Belmar told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when researchers visited the department in May.
Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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The protests that have followed the death of Michael Brown are about this teenager, gunned down by a police officer on a suburban St. Louis street.

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"Truly to understand my father's experience, I would had to travel back to Alabama. I had little to go on. No date of the shooting; no location; no names other than Woody's and my fathers. "

This quote is one of many examples of Michele's sheer determination to find out what had happened over 60 years ago and that she would never give up looking for the truth. This also shows that she dives in head first into anything that she wants to know and doesn't care how long it takes especially when her family is involved. You can also sense that she is not afraid to dig into anyone's past to find the truth even if they might be the people who hurt and killed African Americans in the 40's, 50's, and the 60's.

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"I knew the score in Alabama.  I understood that the state had more than its share of people who wanted to keep black people in the there place"

This Quote shows Michele's knowledge that there are still people that wan to keep Blacks in there place and that she is not afraid to question them for answers. It also shows how that Michele now has to look deeper into something she was told the look the other way about her entire life and that she is not afraid to look through any bit of information she can get a hold of to find the truth.

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An article by a psychologist about secrets. Why we keep them, the harm of keeping them from your family, and the harm of telling them to your family. There are many Parallels between the article and Michele's story.

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There's no question that family secrets are destructive. But it matters mightily when and how you reveal them. Resist the temptation to handle them at transition times such as weddings, graduations, and new beginnings.

As a family therapist, I'm a professional secret-keeper. I'm often ~the very first person with whom someone risks telling a longheld secret. Several decades of guiding people struggling with secrets have taught me that they have an awesome if paradoxical power to unite people--and to divide them.

From government conspiracies to couples having affairs, secrets permeate every level of society. Secrets have existed throughout time, but the nature of secrets has recently changed in our society. Today's families face special dilemmas about secrecy, privacy, silence, and openness.

We live in a culture whose messages about secrecy are truly confounding. If cultural norms once made shameful secrets out of too many events in human life, we are now struggling with the reverse: the assumption that telling secrets--no matter how, when, or to whom--is morally superior to keeping them and that it is automatically healing. My own experience, however, has shown me that telling secrets in the wrong way or at the wrong time can be remarkably painful--and destructive.

The questions we need to concern ourselves with are: When should I keep a secret? How do I tell a secret without hurting anyone? How do I know the time is right? I've learned the answers as I've witnessed--sometimes with terror, more often with joy, and always with deep respect--families making the courageous journey from secrecy to openness.

Secrets are kept or opened for many complex motives, from self-serving abuses of power to altruistic protection of others. Understanding the best ways and situations in which to reveal a family secret can help you decide when and how to do so.

HOW SECRETS SABOTAGE

Although we encounter secrets in every area of life, they are perhaps most destructive when kept in the home. Families are support systems; our identity and ability to form close relationships with others depend upon the trust and communication we feel with loved ones. If family members keep secrets from each other--or from the outside world--the emotional fallout can last a lifetime.

There are four main ways that family secrets shape and scar us:

o they can divide family members, permanently estranging them;

o they can discourage individuals from sharing information with anyone outside the family, inhibiting formation of intimate relationships;

o they can freeze development at crucial points in life, preventing the growth of self and identity;

o they can lead to painful miscommunication within a family, causing unnecessary guilt and doubt.

A person who seeks to undo the damage caused by family secrets must accept that revealing a secret is not a betrayal but a necessity Luckily, as you'll see, it's never too late to do so.

SHATTERING THE TRIANGLE

Not all secrets are destructive. Many are essential to establishing bonds between two people. When siblings keep secrets from their parents, for example, they attain a sense of independence and a feeling of closeness. But the creation of any secret between two people in a family actually forms a triangle: it always excludes--and therefore involves--another.

When family members suspect that important information is being withheld from them, they may pursue the content of the secret in ways that violate privacy. A mother reads her daughter's diary. A husband rifles through his wife's purse. Relationships corrode with suspicion. Conversely, family members may respond to a secret with silence and distance, which affect areas of life that have nothing to do with the secret.

Either way, the secret wedges a boulder between those who know it and those who don't. To remove this obstacle, families must break the triangle formation.

Molly Bradley first called me during what should have been a joyous time. She had recently given birth. Her happiness, however, was bittersweet. Molly felt a deep need to surround herself with family but hadn't spoken to her brother, Calvin, in six years. The reason, I discovered, reached back 30 years to a secret made by Molly's mother.

When Molly, Calvin, and their youngest sister, Annie, were teenagers, their grandmother committed suicide. Molly and Annie were told she died from a heart attack. Only Calvin, the eldest, knew the truth. His mother made him promise not to tell. His sisters sensed a mystery, but if they asked about their grandmother, their mother switched topics.

Making secrets soon became the family's modus vivendi. Their aunt committed suicide two years after their grandmother's death. Calvin fathered a child out of wedlock. Each secret was kept from Molly and Annie, amplifying the family pattern of secrecy Calvin grew distant from his sisters, their relationship weakened by mistrust. Eventually, Molly guessed the truth of her grandmother's death but, in her family's style, told only Annie. Secrets between Calvin and his mother were matched by those between Molly and Annie, tightening family alliances.

From the outside, the family looked like two close pairs--Calvin and his mother, Molly and Annie. But the pairs were actually triangles; Calvin and his mother distanced themselves from the girls with their secret, forming one triangle, while Molly and Annie, keeping their own secrets from the rest of the family, formed another.

'DON'T TELL ANYONE OUR BUSINESS'

Molly convinced her two siblings to enter therapy, but each felt that overcoming feelings of alienation was impossible. When I asked Annie if she'd ever considered confiding in Calvin as a child, she told me the thought had never occurred to her. If family members cannot even imagine a different way of interacting, then secrets have truly taken hold of their lives.

In order to bridge the distance between the Bradley children, I asked them to relive their memories of how it felt to keep--and be kept out of---secrets. Molly, Annie, and Calvin each acknowledged that their needs to connect with each other had gone painfully unmet. Calvin explained tearfully that being forced to keep information from his sisters left him unable to relate to them, causing him to withdraw into himself. Molly revealed that watching her infant son each day made her miss Calvin--and the relationship they'd never had more and more.

The siblings finally began to share long-held secrets, realizing that they were bound and supported by their desire for closeness. After the fourth session of therapy, they went to dinner together for the first time in years. "This was so different from any other family event," Annie reported. "Things felt genuine for the first time."

As a lifetime of confessions and hopes emerged into the open, the mangle of secrecy was replaced by one-toone relationships. When everyone in a family knows a secret, triangles cannot create barriers between members.

All families have some secrets from the outside world. Yours, no doubt, has shared jokes and stories told only within the family circle. You also have a zone of privacy that demarcates inside from outside, building your family's sense of identity. But if a dangerous secret--one concerning an individual in immediate physical or emotional jeopardy--is held within your house, the boundaries between family and the rest of the world become rigid and impenetrable. Friends and relatives are not invited in, and family members' forays out are limited. "Don't tell anyone ourbusiness" becomes the family motto.

BREAKING FAMILY RULES

Some families create inviolable rules to keep information hidden, making it impossible for members to ask for assistance or to use needed resources in the outside world. Even problems that do not touch on the secret may go unresolved if resolution requires outside help.

When Sara Tompkins, 37, first came to see me, she spoke with great hesitation. "If my family knew I was speaking to you, they'd be very angry," she confided. She told me about growing up in a family that completely revolved around her mothEr's addiction to tranquilizers. "My father is a physician. To this day, he writes her prescriptions. No one was supposed to know. The worst part was, we were supposed to act like we didn't know. Our family invented 'don't ask, don't tell' long before the government ever thought of it."

Even though Sara hadn't lived with her family for 15 years, this was the first time she had ever broken the family rule against speaking about the secret. When Sara left home for college, she was surrounded with new and exciting faces, each seeking lifelong friends and stimulating late-night discussions. But Sara found herself unable to open up, ultimately finding few friends and fewer lovers. She found it difficult to reveal anything personal about herself to anyone, and even suspected others of withholding from her.

Secrets were how she had learned to process and handle incoming information. Sara finally sought therapy when she realized that she had never been able to sustain a romantic relationship past the second date.

When a family's secret is an ongoing condition--such as drug addiction, physical abuse, an illness--then both family relationships and interactions with the outside world are profoundly affected. In families like Sara's, members must organize their everyday lives around the needs of the secret while performing the breathtaking feat of pretending not to notice anything is out of the ordinary. Conversation is superficial, since what is truly important cannot be discussed. Members become paralyzed, unable to develop relationships with others or to deepen the relationships within the family.

Since individual well-being takes a backseat to group fidelity, being the family member who challenges internal secrets is difficult. Taking the risk of opening a long-held secret to friends and loved ones may seem like an act of betrayal. The anticipated catastrophe of exclusion from the family stops many people--often long after leaving home.

But breaking the rules of family secrecy is necessary to ensure the achievement of freedom and honesty crucial to making and sustaining authentic relation, ships. One of the best ways to ease into revealing long-hidden information is to tell an objective listener, like a therapist.

ROOM FOR REHEARSAL

Only rarely do my clients want their first and final telling to be with me. Making secrets with a professional helper is a double-edged sword. A client's relationship with a therapist, minister, priest, or rabbi can be an excellent arena to dissolve shame, find acceptance and empathy, and seek new resources for support and strength.

At the same time, sharing secrets only with professionals may negatively affect marriage and other relationships. Important issues may be discussed more in therapy, for example, than at home. Instead of being a dress rehearsal for life, therapy becomes the show. Most often, I find that people want a receptive and erapathetic context in which to unpack a secret initially, room to explore the consequences of telling others, then the help to do it well.

Imagine if your sister made a secret with you on the eve of your wedding and told you that you must not tell your husband. Or you are dragged into a secret about your parents just when you are taking tentative steps into the outside world. If a secret is made at a key point in development, the natural unfolding of self and relationships may be frozen. The shifting of boundaries that ordinarily would occur is suspended, creating a developmental deep freeze.

FROZEN FAMILIES

Every family experiences developmental stages. These are most evident when someone enters the family by marriage or other committed relationship, birth, or adoption, and when someone exits the family by leaving home or through separation, divorce, or death. Such entrances and exits require that a family reinvent itself in order to accommodate new roles. The stages of development are not discrete events but rather processes that take place over time. When that process goes well, complex adjustments occur in every corner of the family. When a secret is made in the midst of this process, adjustment screeches to a halt.

Samuel Wheeler tried to leave home when he was 19, but his discovery of a central family secret pulled him back and short-circuited his young adulthood. When Sam came to see me, he was 34 and still struggling with the aftermath. Aimless, jobless, and depressed, Sam wondered why he had never really found his focus. As we explored his past, I realized that Sam's life had frozen when his attempts to assert independence were squelched his first year of college.

Early in his first semester, Sam invited his mother to visit. "I was more than surprised when she arrived with a close friend of the family, Duncan," said Sam. Each morning for three days, Mrs. Wheeler left Sam's apartment at five A.M. and returned to have breakfast at eight o'clock. When Sam finally asked what was going on, his mother admitted that she and Duncan were having an affair. She also revealed that his younger sister had actually been fathered by Duncan.

"My mother had kept this secret for years," Sam mused. "Why did she have: to put it in my face at that moment?" The ill-timed revelation kept Sam from proceeding with his new life and developing his own identity. While very bright, Sam did poorly his first year in college, dropped out, and went back home. He had subconsciously returned to play watchdog for the family's relationships. His sister was only 15, and he was worried that she would discover the secret. He remained home until she left for college.

RESPECTING TRANSITION TIMES

Giving voice to the developmental deep freeze, Sam said, "Knowing these things about my mother's life has kept me from changing my relationship with her and my dad in ways I would like. I wanted to get closer to my dad, but this secret is like a rock between us."

Pulling Sam into a secret just as he and his family were moving apart also kept him from asserting independence. While there is no such thing as the perfect moment to open a secret, there are better occasions than a life-cycle ritual, such as a wedding or graduation. Because family relationships are already shifting, rituals may seem a perfect time to open a secret. The excitement of a major life change, however, will prevent resolution of the secret. Either the importance of the secret will be lost in the event, or the secret will diminish the importance of the ritual.

For family members to have the strength to handle a life-altering secret, it should be told during a normal time in everyday life. Otherwise, development linked to a life passage will stop in its tracks.

When secrets are as much a part of families as birthdays, it may seem impossible to extricate them from the daily routine. But I know it can be done. Each time I meet with a new client, I'm moved by the courage people bring to this endeavor, by the human desire to heal and to connect.

From the book The Secret Life of Families by Evan IrabetBlack, Ph.D. Copyright 1998 by Evan Imber-Black. Reprinted by permission of Bantam Books, New York, New York. All rights reserved.

PHOTO (COLOR): Secrets are kept or opened for many reasons, from self-serving abuses of power to the protection of others.

PHOTOS (COLOR): Family secrets are destructive and all families have some secrets from the outside world. Resist the temptation to handle them at transition times such as weddings, graduations, and new beginnings.

BY EVAN IMBER-BLACK

Photography by Chip Simons

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There's no question that family secrets are destructive. But it matters mightily when and how you reveal them. Resist the temptation to handle them at transition times such as weddings, graduations, and new beginnings. As a family therapist, I'm a professional secret-keeper. I'm often ~the very first person with whom someone risks telling a longheld secret.

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Minorities Sacrifices for their Rights to Vote

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Minorities Sacrifices for their Rights to Vote

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One of Uncle Joe's biggest complaints during his rant was that young black folks don't care about politics and their right to vote and how much has been sacrificed by others to give them that right. Here's a link to more information about his viewpoint.

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"I was furious. Confused. My head hurt, and I wanted to scream... It felt like the room was was starting to spin. Acid rose in my throat... I swallowed hard, trying to repress the one question I really wanted to ask: "Why am I only hearing about this now?" (Norris 65).

This quote captures Michele's powerful and emotional response to hearing about her father's shooting. Fantastic imagery is used to allow you to step into her skin and understand her feelings. Then she ends the quote by asking a question that provokes thought and is a central idea behind the book and it's title, "Why am I only hearing about this now?".

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"Though Dad never told me or Mom or my sisters about the episode, some of his brothers had apparently talked to their children about it." (Norris 70).

Michele's dad never told his wife or daughters of the shooting that occurred. But why? Out of embarrassment? Perhaps pride. Maybe to protect them from the darker realities of being part of a black family? The fact that that Michele's father chose to remain silent on this issue is directly related to the title of the book and provokes thought about why her father chose to remain silent.

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Chapter 6, "A Secret" opens with Michele Norris recalling a time when she was out to breakfast with her Uncle Joe.  During their meal, Uncle Joe ended up spilling a secret about her father. Michele's Father was shot in the leg by a police officer earlier in in life. Uncle Joe was a model citizen. He was the primary caretaker for his sick wife, who had a kidney disease that required frequent dialysis, he had a granddaughter with cerebral palsy. He spent his retirement years taking care of his family and never complained. At one point in his life, he also left a stable job to start a project to read with juvenile inmates in jail. Despite the teaching kids with treacherous rap sheets in a horrific environment, Joe saw his as an opportunity to teach and touch the hearts of young black men. His years teaching the juveniles left Joe with lots of theories about young black men. He was primarily upset about how young black people don't care at all about politics and leadership positions, and how they don't care about their right to voteespite the scarifies that have been made to allow them to vote. Joe was ranting to Michele about this, and that's when he dropped the bomb shell: "Your father was shot". Those few words sent Michele into utter shock. Joe told her the bits of the story he knew, but Michele left breakfast confused, frustrated, and furious all at the same time. She and her emotionally charged brain concluded. That she wants to dig into the incident, to figure out what happened. She tried, and dug, and desperately searched for answers, but ultimately she couldn't find any conclusive evidence. But she didn't give up on looking.

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Chapter 7 "The Docket" starts with Michele Norris recalling the few times she had been to Birmingham after high school mainly to chase down stories when she became a Professional reporter. Now she was there to truly understand her fathers experience when he was shot. Michele did not know when the shooting happened; no location; no name other than her father and woody. She had no idea if the there was more than one department involved. She contacted Jim Baggett, head of the department of Archives and Manuscripts and begged for his help in finding out what had happened. Jim who was patient enough to listen to her rattle on and on about what she wanted to know, he was kind when he explained that it would be almost impossible to find a record due to the fact that events like her fathers shooting was common during that time. Jim goes on to say that Birmingham police records from the era are scarce and that police records from post World War 2 were destroyed. Jim then told her that the only likely way that she would find anything was if the event made the African American papers and that the white papers wouldn't print anything like that because they wouldn't care. He told her that he would try find anything he could to do to help her find documents. A little while later Michele heard back from Jim and shared with her that the her father was shot arrested for "drunken disorderly, robbery, and resisting arrest". She was so shocked that she collapsed to the floor and stayed there for two hours knowing that there was know way her father would do something like that and became determined to find the truth.