George Junius Stinney (ca. 1944),14 years old.
The youngest person to be executed in the United States.
George was completely alone and helpless throughout the 81 day confinement, “trial” and execution as his family were forced to flee their home and child to avoid being lynched.
On the day of his killing, Stinney carried a Bible under his arm as he walked in to the execution chamber. He was later forced to sit upon this Bible so as to fit properly in the electric chair.
Neither did the state’s face-mask fit George, so, as he was hit with the first 2,400 volt surge of electricity, the masked slipped off, and witnesses could look into his eyes: wide open, tear filled; his mouth: open, salivating.
After two more jolts of electricity he was dead.
Oh, those eyes.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
— Frederick Douglass (excerpt from July 5, 1852 speech)
“How many lynchings this year? We have to name it for what it is; we cannot chase down fragments of this police event or that one, with a confusion of details, narrated like a flurry of bullets, there to obfuscate what just happened, again. We must take on the whole for what it is. Slave code laws, black laws, jim crow. racist brutality and murder. Capitalism is in crisis, violence against black people is the spectacle the society is provided, to make us fear, to make us hate, to make us feel impotent, to derange. It is time to put the beast out of its misery.”
-Charles Frederick, activist and author
Shantel Davis, a 23yrs old, unarmed ‘black’ woman was shot in the chest and killed on Thursday, June 14, 2012 at approximately 5:40pm in East Flatbush Brooklyn by Police Officer Atkins from The 67th Precint on Church Ave.
