Actor Martinez

 
DVD Review by Kam Williams

"Is It Real or Is It Mockumentary?" Headscratcher Comes to DVD

Did you see I'm Still Here (2010), the mockumentary chronicling Joaquin Phoenix's supposed retirement from acting to try his hand at rap music? Well, what made that movie fascinating was how it was edited in such a way as to make it impossible to tell whether the Oscar-nominated thespian was faking his conversion to hip-hop artist. Eventually, Joaquin did return to making movies, exposing the inscrutable biopic directed by Casey Affleck as just an elaborate hoax.

Actor Martinez is another headscratcher apt to keep you guessing whether what you're watching is real or simply staged, as it walks a fine line between fact and fiction. However, this flick also flips the script in that Arthur Martinez is a gainfully-employed computer repairman now seeking to make it as an actor.

The story unfolds in Denver where we find co-directors Mike Ott and Nathan Silver following their subject around with a camera. Unfortunately, the underwhelming Martinez is not exactly a charismatic figure. Consequently, the only thing compelling about the picture is the answer to the pressing question of whether you're watching a drama or a doc.

Mildly amusing, but nothing to write home about.

Good (2 stars)
Unrated
Running time: 76 minutes
Distributor: Break Glass Pictures
DVD Extras: Deleted scenes; Riot (a short film); and Q&A panels from the Denver and TriBeCa Film Festivals. 
 
To see a trailer for Actor Martinez, visit: https://vimeo.com/155408406


To order a copy of Actor Martinez on DVD, visit:

Top Ten DVD Releases for 4-9-13

This Week’s DVD Releases

by Kam Williams

Top Ten DVD List for April 9, 2013                       

Erroll Garner: No One Can Hear You Read

Orchestra of Exiles

In Another Country

The Last Flight of Peter Ginz

Maigret – Set Seven

Sexcula

Hyde Park on Hudson

 

Planet Ocean

Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War

Wubbzy: Best of Walden

Honorary Mention

The Sweeney

 

Wild Kratts: Rainforest Rescue

Population 2

 

LUV

Maigret - Set Eight

 

Deadball

The Four

Day of the Falcon

Obama’s State of the Union Speech: An Oscar-Worthy Performance

by Kam Williams

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
--George Orwell, Animal Farm


The novel Animal Farm was crafted by George Orwell as a dire warning about the potential abuse of power through the manipulation of language as a subtle means of mind control. The cautionary tale’s prophetic message was that the masses might be very gullible to the seductive rhetoric of a charismatic visionary capable of masking more Machiavellian intentions. Listening to President Obama’s soporific double-speak during his State of the Union address the other night reminded me of the climax of Orwell’s chilling morality play, when the animals belatedly wised up too late to differentiate between their newly-elected leaders and the evil exploiters they had sought to replace.
In the case of Obama, there had been many telling signs from the very beginning that he was a conservative in progressive’s clothing. When he praised Ronald Reagan and criticized Affirmative Action in his best-seller…When he said he could no more disown Reverend Wright than his racist grandmother only to distance himself from the controversial minister a month later when it became politically expedient to do so... When he opted out of the public campaign finance system after pledging to abide by the federal spending limits...
The worst was when, shortly before the Presidential election, he supported the billion-dollar bank bailout based on outgoing Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson still unsubstantiated claim that otherwise Western Civilization would collapse. There was never really a question of liquidity but one of greed, entitlement, and a lack of faith in the free market.
Nonetheless, Obama’s yea vote rewarding failure and subsidizing mistakes exposed him as a useful idiot, a corporate tool more concerned about the plight of Wall St. than Main Street, his stern talk about passing stricter banking regulations notwithstanding. (Where are they?) Since his supposedly heartfelt determination to come to the rescue of working-class people was never accompanied by his taking steps to implement any tangible relief measures, then his true intention ostensibly was never to do so. After all, he had no problem handing the banking, automotive and insurance industries additional taxpayer funds as his first order of business as Chief Executive.
Thus, the actual Obama economic philosophy can best be described as the privatizing of profit and the socializing of risk. Yet, with his approval rating sinking to a new low, the black community remains his most staunchly loyal constituency. Can anyone explain to me why, when this is the demographic he takes most for granted?
We urgently need help from the White House, not another speech from a smooth-talking snake-oil salesman, a year after Wall St. got theirs. I suspect that African-Americans continue to sit patiently because he’s black and can mimic Martin Luther King’s incantation when delivering false assurances that health care, education, housing and jobs are high on his agenda.
There is little hope, if we are so naïve as to allow Obama’s ethnicity to trump the cold, hard truth that he’s simply decided to throw the poor under the bus. What is the purpose of authentic human interaction if we are willing to reinforce the color line even to our own detriment?
What’s the State of the Union? It’s in the hands of an unprincipled, drive-by president who’s playing the black community so well that he deserves an Oscar, not a Nobel Peace Prize.

Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic, and a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

Obama’s Fierce Urgency of Now Revisited: The Trouble with Auto-Hypnotic Slogans

by Kam Williams

“Standing in the ruins of another black man’s life
Flying through the valley separating day from night”
‘I am death’ cried the vulture ‘for the people of the light.’
Charon brought his raft and came from the sea that sails on souls
And saw the scavenger departing, taking warm hearts to the cold.
He knew the ghetto was a haven for the meanest creature ever known.”
--Gil Scott-Heron “The Vulture”

In 2006, I named “The Audacity of Hope” the worst book of the year, indicting it as “the transparent game plan of a guileful politician” trying “to be all things to all people.“ See http://aalbc.com/books/best_worst_nonfiction_2006.htm
However, soon thereafter Barack Obama declared his candidacy for the presidency, and like virtually all other African-American and leftist pundits, I drank the Kool-Aid and never again questioned his dedication to progressive political ideals. Until now.
The few who did, like Tavis Smiley and Reverend Wright, paid a steep price, finding themselves ostracized by the black community as traitors, as though Obama couldn’t be held accountable by his most loyal constituency. Consequently, after the election, the pressing African-American agenda has remained on the back burner while the President approved instant billion-dollar bailouts of Wall Street and the auto industry, pork-filled stimulus packages, and an escalation of the Afghan War.
Doesn’t Obama know that the Taliban (which means students, by the way) originally rose to power only because the CIA funneled 65,000 tons of weapons per year to it back in the Eighties. How do you spell war profiteering? Anybody with a brain knows that the enemy is Al-Qaeda, not the Taliban, and that all the 9-11 terrorists entered the U.S. through Saudi Arabia.
So, what are we still doing in Afghanistan? Maybe the answer has to do with the fact that the brother of puppet President Hamid Karzai is the country’s biggest opium dealer and has been business partners with CIA for the past eight years. I am not making this up.
Whatever happened to the Barack Obama we saw on the stump, a seemingly fearless firebrand who routinely repeated “I am running because of what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now,’” before listing a litany of concerns he would start addressing on day one, including rising unemployment, homelessness, bankruptcies and healthcare costs?
Curiously, after promising to raise the taxes of everyone with an income over a quarter million dollars, instead Obama’s first order of business was a big bailout benefiting the rich at the expense of working-class taxpayers. And his healthcare initiative, if passed, won’t even be implemented for anther four years. And without a public option, former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean concedes that the plan amounts to little more than a windfall for the insurance lobby.
Despite the early warning signs, I kept my mouth shut about Obama, primarily because of his roots as a community organizer. But enough is enough. He handed Wall St. billions to save the financial industry. He gave the military billions more to continue looking for Osama bin Laden who’s proving harder to find than Waldo. He could just as easily have designated billions for urban renewal to flatten and rebuild the ghettos of America, godforsaken dens of iniquity which he knows from his tenure as a community organizer to be “a haven for the meanest creature ever known.”

Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic, and a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

Hillary Clinton Revisited and Reviled: A Racist? A Manipulative Machiavellian Monster? Or Both?

by Lloyd Williams

"She is a monster… she is stooping to anything.”
-- Pulitzer Prize-winner Samantha Power on Hillary Clinton

There’s a reason why, over the course of this long Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has gone from the presumptive Democratic nominee to a much-reviled figure very capable of selfishly sabotaging her party’s chances of prevailing in the general election come November. And that reason, quite simply, is that she no longer looks like a leader but more like a sleazy race-baiter intent on securing the White House by any means necessary, even if that might leave the U.S. bitterly divided and Balkanized along ethnic lines.
By repeatedly resorting to disgustingly underhanded tactics, she has revealed herself to be incapable of rallying the country around her in the way that Barack Obama has captured the imagination of the younger generation. Thus, she pales, pardon the expression, in comparison to her relatively-elegant opponent, a solid statesman who has studiously avoided stooping to her offensive approach of making skin color an issue.
Ever since she lost the Iowa caucuses, Hillary’s henchmen’s shenanigans have been shameless. Let’s review a few. In the first of several kamikaze-style self-sacrifices, her national co-chairman Jack Shaheen, just before the New Hampshire primary, insinuated that Senator Obama was a former drug dealer. Those words carried considerable weight because Shaheen’s wife, Jeanne, is the state’s ex-governor. Yes, he later resigned from the Clinton campaign, but only after the damage was already done.
Next, another big Hillary supporter, former Senator Bob Kerrey, tried to scare voters by resurrecting the lie that Obama was a Muslim who had been brainwashed as a child at a radical madrassah. Kerrey even went so far as to suggest that Barack might be an “Islamic Manchurian Candidate” pre-programmed to hide his true anti-American agenda until after becoming President. Ultimately, Kerrey recanted his bigoted comments, too, but not before they had served their strategic purpose.
Black billionaire and BET founder Bob Johnson was the pawn asked to fall on his own sword prior to the contest in South Carolina. At a rally in Columbia, he insinuated that Obama had been selling drugs while a community organizer in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton, seeing that his wife was well behind in the prediction polls, went out of his way to downplay her impending loss by pointing out that South Carolina‘s population was predominantly African-American, as if Barack’s only support came from the black community. That insensitive remark was still fresh in the collective memory of Obama’s omni-colored coalition of supporters who brought tears to my eyes when they started chanting, “Race doesn’t matter!” in unison as their candidate concluded his victory speech on election night.
Former Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro is the latest foot soldier to make a fool of herself in the Clinton cause, this by speculating, “If Obama was [sic] a white man he would not be in this position.” Ferraro has proven to be not only perhaps the least articulate but undoubtedly the most inveterately-racist Hillary advocate to date, refusing to retract her words even after being repudiated by her queen.
Personally, I’m fed up with the Clintons. I’m taking Bill’s blackness back. As for his wife, she’s been exposed as the Machiavellian monster Samantha Power pegged her for. What else would you call a cold, calculating witch who would ask friend after friend to ruin their reputations by making racist statements on her behalf knowing full well she was just going to stab them in the back?
I suppose I should’ve given more credence to the words of New York Times’ Magazine Editor Edward Klein who, in his book “The Truth about Hillary” warned us a few years ago that she “is more frightening than you can imagine” because she’s “willing to lie, bully, cheat, and manipulate people in her quest for power.” Now, I wouldn’t put any dirty tricks past her in the fight for delegates en route to what will undoubtedly be an ugly Democratic convention.

Lloyd Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic and a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

Vote Fraud Costs Obama: New Hampshire Primary a Tale of Two Tallies

by Kam Williams

If the fix is in, it doesn’t matter whether Barack Obama really deserves to be the Democratic nominee, he’ll never get a fair chance to compete for the presidency. Debates about whether the Junior Senator from Illinois is black enough or whether whites will be willing to vote for an African-American are moot so long as the sanctity of the ballot box can’t be guaranteed.
The problem is that the Diebold Corporation is at it again, and the voting machine company appears to be already in the process of quietly perpetrating the mother of all vote frauds. In case you forgot, Diebold is the manufacturer of the electronic tabulator which counted the majority of the votes in the last two U.S. presidential elections.
I first called for the United Nations to monitor polling places all across the country after Diebold’s wholesale disenfranchisement of blacks in Florida decided the controversial 2000 race. And I reiterated that demand in 2004 after irregularities in Ohio put Bush back in office for another four years.
Now, judging by what went down virtually unnoticed in New Hampshire on January 8th, we’re again in dire need of U.N. observers during the 2008 primary season, just to give an the democratic process a chance to unfold untainted by fraud. For, while the punditocracy has been busy dubbing Hillary Clinton the Comeback Kid and attributing her surprise victory to women rallying to her support in the wake of her eyes welling up on camera, no one’s looking for a more plausible explanation than that overly-publicized Muskie moment.
The cold hard truth is that on the night of the New Hampshire primary, all the scientifically-conducted exit polls had predicted an Obama two-digit win. Given the +/-4.5% margin of error, this means it wasn’t a question of whether Barack would win, only by how much. However, everybody forgot that Diebold would be counting the votes electronically in 81% of the state’s precincts, while the other 19% were being tallied by hand.
And wouldn’t you know, when the results were announced, there was a statistically-significant difference between the tallies based on a paper trail and those recorded by Diebold’s machines? As reported by a watchdog organization called CheckTheVotes.com (see below), Obama garnered 38% of the votes counted by hand, followed by Clinton with 34%, Edwards with 17% Richardson with 5% and Kucinich with almost 2%. By contrast, Diebold’s tabulations had Clinton finishing first with a whopping 40%, while every other candidate had lower percentages than in the hand-counted districts. The computers had Obama dropping to 35%, Edwards to 16%, Richardson to 4% and Kucinich to 1%.
Does it seem suspicious to you that all the candidates but Clinton did worse when the votes weren’t verified, especially in the wake of the precedent of the prior Diebold debacles? Unless ab outcry is raised, and steps are taken immediately to monitor the electronic tallies in the upcoming primaries, it is readily apparent that the only Democratic machine Hillary will need to prevail is the one programmed by Diebold.

Lloyd Kam Williams is a film and book critic, and an attorney and a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

See: http://checkthevotes.com/index.php?party=DEMOCRATS#Compare%20All%20Machine%20vs%20Hand%20Counts

The Jena Blowback: Symbolic Use of the Noose as the New N-Word

by Kam Williams

Ominously, there’s been a frightening backlash building in reaction to the
mammoth demonstration in September supporting the Jena 6, those Louisiana teens charged with felonies during a raging local controversy which arose over the use of a noose by white high school students to intimidate their African-American classmates. The fallout started soon after the New York Times (which, by the way, has never considered even one of the dozens of op-eds submitted by me “Fit to Print”) gave D.A. Reed Walters all the space he wanted to spew his racist rationalization for his selective “all-black” prosecution.
Walters only fueled the simmering fires by reiterating his basic contention that “the placing of the nooses on the schoolyard tree… broke no law.” The Times, by giving Walters a forum without allowing equal time to any attorney with a well-reasoned counter-position, effectively decriminalized as just a harmless prank what was in this lawyer’s legal opinion a patently heinous, hateful and illegal act. This coded cultural message has, in turn, only served to embolden bigots with evil in their hearts, leading to an explosion of threatening chatter at white supremacist websites.
One neo-Nazi outfit posted the names and addresses of the Jena 6 on its homepage, exhorting followers to “drag them out of the house,” ostensibly to lynch them. “If these blacks want a race war, they will get one. Bring it on!” warned a poster at Stormfront, an online community catering to Ku Klux Klansmen.
Next, noose incidents started being reported all across the country... hanging on a black professor’s door at Columbia University… at other college campuses… in a black Coast Guard cadet’s bag… in a police station locker room… on a sanitation truck’s rearview mirror… ad infinitum… ad nauseam…
Remembering his utter ineptitude during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I have to wonder why Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is sitting on his hands again. Why hasn’t there been a rush by Federal authorities to arrest the homegrown terrorists behind this rash of hate crimes, and to take down their websites dedicated to inciting violence against blacks? I just pray he acts before the burgeoning Jena tensions metastasize, because if there’s any lesson we learned from New Orleans is how easily official apathy can translate into misery on a mass scale.
Finally, I would be remiss if in my remarks I didn’t take a moment to castigate comedian Katt Williams (no relation) who recently strolled up the red carpet at the BET Awards proudly sporting a noose around his neck. Needless to say, that tasteless display is in no way a fashion statement worthy of emulation, but the shameless, self-hating behavior of an attention-craving media whore who deserves to be shunned before he encourages the substitution of the noose as the symbolic equivalent of the just-buried N-word.

Lloyd Kam Williams is an attorney and a member of the bar in NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

From D.L. Hughley to BET’s Blasphemous “Read a Book” Campaign: What Hath Imus Wrought?

by Kam Williams

"Read a book! Read a book! Read a muh'f*ckin book!
Read a book! Read a book! Read a muh'f*ckin book!

Not a sports page (what) not a magazine (who)
But a book nigga, a f*ckin book nigga (YEAHHH~!)"
-- Lyrics from “Read a Book” an animated music video by D’Mite

It’s been over five months since Don Imus’ uttered the “nappy-headed hos” comments which cost him his once enviable broadcasting career. On his way out the door, the disgraced shock jock tried to defend himself by suggesting that he had merely been mimicking a vile vernacular very popular with black entertainers.
In the wake of his ouster, there was a call made by responsible members of the African-American community for black performers to clean up their acts by eliminating any self-hating slurs from their lexicon. Regrettably, however, the trend has been the opposite, starting with D.L. Hughley. One of the celebrated Kings of Comedy, he went out of his way on The Tonight Show to embrace Imus by affirming, “There were some nappy-headed women on that team. Shut up, I'm gonna say it. I don't give a damn if you all like it or not. You know it's true. They were some of the ugliest women I've seen in my whole life."
When there was no call for D.L.‘s head after his shocking remarks, other blacks only seem to be following his lead. For example, here’s how another King of Comedy, Bernie Mac’s character addressed his mother in a line likely ad-libbed for the summer blockbuster, Transformers: “If I had a rock, I’d bust your head, bitch.” Yikes.
Equally misogynistic was a straight-to-DVD disaster entitled Confessions of a Call Girl, a practically porno flick which was really little more than a transparent excuse to get Tamala Jones nearly naked in a series of compromising positions. But my problem with picture had less to do with all the gratuitous nudity than with the fact that the film’s dialogue is laced with the n-word and the f-word, and that sisters are routinely referred to as “bitches” and “hos.” And in the film’s pivotal scene, a character portrayed by Clifton Powell boasts euphorically “I’m a mother-f*cking man!” as he is being fellated by a treacherous black woman he has no clue is about to stab him in the chest as she satisfies him.
Then, there was the relentlessly-crass Who's Your Caddy, a degrading minstrel coon show trumpeted as the debut release of the very first black-owned, movie studio, Our Stories Films, a company created by former Black Entertainment Television (BET) Chairman Bob Johnson. In this demeaning bottom-feeder, an African-American female defiantly refers to herself as a “queen beatch,” while the picture’s protagonist, played by gangsta rapper Big Boi, states that he’d prefer dating a stripper to a classy black lawyer he meets.
Speaking of BET, the Network recently debuted a deplorable animated music video called “Read a Book.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN2VqFPNS8w)
Besides incessant profanity and ethnic slurs, the cartoon most prominently features a sister sporting skintight pink pants emblazoned with the word “BOOK” on her protuberant butt shaking her oversized booty right in your face.
Though purportedly a parody, there’s nothing remotely redeeming about the video or likely to inspire the impressionable young black boys tuning in to turn off the TV and aspire to anything higher than seeing African-American women as wanton, waiting and willing objects of their injection.
What hath Imus wrought? Judging from what we’ve witnessed since his dismissal, it sure looks like a lot of black entertainers have decided to declare war on the dignity of the black female.

Lloyd Kam Williams is a syndicated film critic, attorney, and a member of the bar in NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

Michael Vick Finds Jesus: Disgraced QB Still Needs Serious Help

Op-Ed by Kam Williams

"This is going to be a hard-fought trial… Michael Vick is innocent."
Attorney Billy Martin, July 26th

“He would not have been persecuted that much if he had killed somebody… Yes, there are any dog lovers...but there are also many, many other people who just love Mike Vick and these people, too, are significant in numbers."
Atlanta NAACP President R.L. White, August 22nd

“I’ve found Jesus and asked him for forgiveness and turned my life over to God, and I think that's the right thing to do as of right now."
Michael Vick after entering a guilty plea

After he was named in a very-detailed, 84-count Federal indictment for hosting dogfights in his home, for funding the entire operation, and for executing losing pit bulls by means of lynching, drowning, electrocution and body slams, MichaeI Vick retained a Dream Team of five, very high-priced attorneys, masterminded by Billy Martin, the same hired gun who recently represented former Dick Cheney hatchet man Scooter Libby.
What else would you expect the highest paid football player in the NFL to do, other than mount a million-dollar defense with his liberty, his reputation, his assets, his job and his endorsement deals on the line? And not until after all his co-defendants had already cooperated with the prosecutor and agreed to testify against him, did Vick even consider copping a plea himself.
Then, immediately after admitting to just one count of gambling on dogfights, he staged a well-orchestrated press conference to announce that he’d asked Jesus for forgiveness. Anybody buying this? I hope not. Just as Libby successfully lobbied his Republican base to pressure the President to have his sentence commuted, Michael’s Born-Again gambit is clearly designed to appeal to the African-American soft spot for spirituality.
Personally, I resent the suggestion being circulated by the mainstream press that the black and white communities are monolithic entities which feel very differently about this case. The subtle implication, here, is that African-Americans are feeble-minded and inclined to forgive the mistreatment of man’s best friend, since that’s supposedly not as bad as harming humans.
But it’s obvious that Michael Vick is a very mentally disturbed sadist who got his kicks from killing completely defenseless creatures unable to reason with their master and too innocent to comprehend the reason for his sudden inexplicable cruelty. The only people I can think of who share this kinky inclination are on the long list of serial killers who started out torturing animals, psychopaths with names like Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz and John Wayne Gacy.
Now that the disgraced Atlanta Falcon QB has confessed, the focus has erroneously shifted to how soon he ought to be allowed to return to the league after paying his debt to society. Maybe we all instead ought to pause for a moment of sanity, because the sobering truth is that Michael Vick is still sorely in need of some serious counseling and rehabilitation, not a slick PR campaign selling the notion that his shedding crocodile tears and converting to Christianity on the courthouse steps means that his high crimes and misdemeanors are already behind him.
Forget football and fame, Mike, just focus on trying to save your soul before it’s too late.

Lloyd Kam Williams is an animal lover, syndicated film critic, attorney, and a member of the bar in NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

Strange Fruit in Jena: Louisiana Case Looks a Lot Like Duke Lacrosse Frame-Up

by Kam Williams

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”
-- Strange Fruit lyrics by Lewis Allen

On August 31st of last year, a small group of black freshman at Jena High School approached the assistant principal to ask whether it was okay for them to enjoy the shade under a big tree located in what had come to be considered the “white only” section of the schoolyard. His response was that they could “sit wherever they wanted.” Relying on those words, they did just that, trusting that, should any controversy arise, the administration would support their effort to eradicate this offensive vestige of de facto segregation.
But Jena, population 3,000, is a backwards, backwoods Louisiana town, and when three nooses were found swaying from the tree the very next day, the African-American community complained to anybody who would listen that the hanging ropes amounted to a hate crime given The South’s sinful legacy of lynching. And although the culprits were caught, the city’s school superintendent excused the racist attempt at intimidation by saying “Adolescents play pranks. I don’t think it was a threat against anybody.”
So, on September 5th, the black students organized a peaceful sit-in under the “white tree” in protest of the slap on the wrist doled out to the perpetrators. The next morning, an impromptu school assembly was convened during which District Attorney Reed Walters icily stared in the direction of the African-Americans, all sitting together, warning them not to stage any further demonstrations. Furthermore, he concluded by leveling this thinly-veiled threat, “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen.”
Starting on September 7th, the halls of Jena High were patrolled by the police, and on the 8th the school was placed under complete lockdown. Several dozen black parents attempted to address the next meeting of the school board, on the 10th, but all were refused an opportunity to speak because the board considered “the noose issue” to have been addressed satisfactorily and fully resolved.
Nevertheless, over the Fall, confrontations continued to escalate, mostly a reign of terror on the part of white vigilantes, including an incident in which black students had to wrestle a white adult wielding a shotgun to the ground. But rather than arrest the assailant, the prosecutor reportedly winked and returned the weapon to the latter-day Klansman. In fact, the officer of the law saw no reason to intervene until December 4th when he charged a half-dozen African-American students dubbed the Jena 6 with attempted murder after they allegedly got the better of some whites in a fight in the school cafeteria.
Mychal Bell, 17, the first of the classmates to go on trial, was quickly convicted in a kangaroo court by an all-white jury presided over by a white judge in less than three hours. Now, he’s facing 22 years in prison. Before DA Walters follows through on his promise to ruin the lives of his co-defendants, too, let’s just pray that CBS’ 60 Minutes and the rest of the mainstream media intervene to question Walters’ motivations and embark on as earnest an effort to make mincemeat of his career as they did to disgraced Durham DA Mike Nufong for his overzealous prosecution of the Duke Lacrosse case.
Stay tuned, for a showdown that is shaping up as a landmark decision on whether justice in America can be colorblind or if Southern trees will continue to bear strange fruit.
Lloyd Kam Williams is a film and book critic, and an attorney and a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.

What's Going On? Black-on-Black Homicide Hits Home

by Kam Williams

“Mother, mother, there's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother, there's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way, to bring some lovin' here today
Hey, what's going on?”
-- What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye

I last spoke to Chauncey Bailey just a couple of days before he was assassinated on the streets of downtown Oakland on the morning of August 2nd. He was murdered in broad daylight on his way to his office by a thug in a ski mask who pumped three rounds from a shotgun directly into his chest before jumping into a waiting getaway van.
I wish that I could say that Chauncey and I had shared some deeply meaningful exchange during that last chat, but it merely addressed a mundane concern of mine in my capacity as a syndicated contributor to the Oakland Post. In fact, since he took the job as the paper’s editor-in-chief this past June, all of our conversations had been brief and of a professional nature.
Still, I was very impressed with his work ethic and publishing acumen, and was quite confident that the Post would be in good hands during his tenure. Now, upon his passing, I have come to have my suspicions about the man confirmed by all the glowing tributes and testimonials about him by those who knew him well, both as a dedicated journalist and as a loving father.
The police already have a suspect in custody, Devaughndre Broussard, a 19 year-old ex-con who has reportedly confessed that he committed the crime in response to Bailey’s having written an unfavorable review of the Black Muslim Bakery where he was employed as a handyman. Quite frankly, this tragedy wouldn’t have registered more than a blip on the radar, if it weren’t for the victim’s esteemed status in the African-American community.
For seven more black folks were shot dead in the City of Oakland in the 48 hours immediately following the slaying of Bailey. Among those being treated like statistics was Byron Mitchell, 29, who was fatally wounded while being robbed. Jacqueline Venable, 40, was gunned down while eating cake at friend’s house. Khatari Gant, 25, perished after his car was peppered with bullets from an assault rifle. His brother and an acquaintance were also shot, but survived. Kevin Sharp, 20, was home watching TV when he answered a knock at the door only to have his head blown off. And three others.
Meanwhile, here in New Jersey, the hip-hop Holocaust exacted an equally-shocking toll in Newark last Saturday night, when three Delaware State University college students, Terrance Aerial, 18, Iofemi Hightower, 20, and Dashon Harvey, 20, none of whom had any police records, were lined up against a wall, forced to their knees, robbed and executed by bullets to the brain by a gang of gangstas. A fourth student, Natasha Aerial, 19, miraculously survived somehow, and is in stable condition in the hospital.
This skyrocketing black-on-black homicide rate is a shame which suggests that African-Americans’ sense of self-worth has plunged to an all-time low. And now that it has hit home, it makes me wanna holler “What’s going on?”

Lloyd Kam Williams is an attorney and a member of the bar in NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.