WASHINGTON — The Justice Department won’t prosecute a former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in the shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old, but in a scathing report released Wednesday faulted the city and its law enforcement for racial bias. Federal officials concluded there was no evidence to disprove former officer Darren Wilson’s testimony that he […]
civil rights
Posted inLewiston-Auburn
Martin Luther King Jr. legacy misinterpreted, speaker says
Joseph was the keynote speaker at Bates’ MLK Jr. Day: “From Selma to Ferguson: 50 Years of Nonviolent Dissent.” An author, national civil rights commentator and Tufts University history professor, Joseph introduced himself as a native New Yorker. Growing up, his mother was a trade union worker. “My first picket line was in New York […]
advertisement
Posted inLewiston-Auburn
Bates College offering MLK events Sunday, Monday
LEWISTON — Peniel Joseph, author, historian and founder of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Boston’s Tufts University, will be the keynote speaker at Bates College on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday. Joseph’s talk is titled “Reimagining Martin Luther King Jr. in the Age of Obama and the Age […]
Posted inOp-Eds
Rich Lowry: Leftists misrepresent reality of civil rights progress
It is not 1965. That is the implicit message of the new movie “Selma,” a stirring depiction of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights march told from the perspective of Martin Luther King Jr. The story is a familiar one, but never loses its power. King and his forces descend on a rural Alabama where it takes an […]
Posted inFranklin, sj-web
Farmington denies allegations in wrongful death lawsuit
FARMINGTON (AP) — The town has filed its response to a wrongful death lawsuit stemming from the fatal police shooting of a U.S. Army veteran. Authorities say 28-year-old Justin Crowley-Smilek was fatally shot outside Town Hall in November 2011 after threatening an officer with a knife. Crowley-Smilek had served in Afghanistan. His parents, in a […]
Posted inLetters
N. Willard: Still much to be done
I was appalled by Rich Lowry’s column, “Civil-rights movement in disgrace” (Sept. 2). According to him, all the problems of being black in America are solved; blacks now exist on imagined slights, etc. By contrast, Leonard Pitts Jr., a black man, in his column Sept. 1 titled “Where do we go from here? We go […]