Leid Stories – 07.01.15

A Burning Faith: Black Churches, White Supremacy

Hillary Clinton’s Storied “Struggle to Fit In” with Obama

Federal investigators probing a fire that destroyed Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, S.C., last night reportedly believe arson was not the cause. The church was burned 20 years ago by Klansmen, and Mount Zion AME’s razing, the seventh Black church in the South to be destroyed by fire in recent weeks, has revived a history of white-supremacist terrorism against African Americans.

Leid Stories discusses the history of white-supremacist attacks on Black churches.

The ongoing sanitization by the media of the political history of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton continues. A Reuters story today reports that the presumptive Democratic nominee “struggled to fit in with Obama’s White House” as secretary of state. The story, typical of major-media coverage of Clinton and her campaign, deliberately omits historical perspective on how she got the Cabinet position in the first place, which might have had something to do with her storied “struggle to fit in.” Leid Stories explains.

Black Agenda Radio – 06.22.15

Charleston Massacre: Vintage Americana

Activist and writer Kevin Alexander Gray lives in Columbia, South Carolina, not far from the Charleston church shooter’s home town, where “a Confederate flag on the bumper of a car is just as common as a stop sign.” It’s also where Dylann Roof learned that Blacks are constantly raping white women and trying to take over the nation, said Gray. “That kind of racist talk is as old as the relationship between Black folk and white folk in America.”

Black Church Needs to Beef Up Security

“This is an assault against the Black church and its members,” said Rev. Anthony Evans, executive director of the Washington-based National Black Church Initiative, a multidenominational coalition of Black churches across the country. Rev. Evans has gone South to advise coalition congregations “how to harden their church in terms of the safety of men, women and children. They don’t have to worry about this in a white church,” he said. “We only have to worry about this in the Black church.”

Leid Stories – 06.23.15

Diversion and Distraction: Flagging Down ‘Progress’ in South Carolina

And now the nation is embroiled in a debate over whether the Confederate flag should be removed from the grounds of South Carolina’s statehouse and other governmental buildings and properties.

It’s a diversion and distraction from the matter that America for centuries has refused to address, says Leid Stories: white supremacy.

It was what informed the design of the “battle flag” in 1863 to galvanize the 13-state Confederacy’s fight “to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race,” as the flag’s designer, William T. Thompson, explained. It was the motivation for Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old gunman who massacred nine people attending a prayer and bible-study meeting last Wednesday at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

Leid Stories discusses the intentional effort to avoid the reality America has known and lived for hundreds of years.