RHJrod retweeted
20 years ago today, we lost the Soulful Teddy Bear, Gerald Levert, he was 40 years-old.
(July 13, 1966 β November 10, 2006) ππ #20Years
Murdered for wanting to be treated like a human being #NEVERFORGET
A husband and wife were killed by a bomb placed under their bedroom, on Christmas night, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
They ran the NAACP in their state.
Nobody was ever prosecuted. Guess the year.
1951. Harry T. Moore and Harriette Moore. Mims, Florida.
He had been a schoolteacher. He was dismissed for his civil rights work. He then organised full time β registering tens of thousands of Black voters in Florida, and investigating lynchings and police shootings when nobody else would.
On Christmas night 1951, a bomb detonated beneath the bedroom of their home. It was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
He died on the way to hospital. The nearest hospital that would admit Black patients was over thirty miles away.
She died nine days later.
They are often described as the first martyrs of the modern civil rights movement β killed four years before Emmett Till, thirteen before the Civil Rights Act.
The FBI investigated. Florida reopened it more than once, most recently in the 2000s, and investigators named Klan members long dead as the likely perpetrators.
Nobody was ever prosecuted.
Most people date the civil rights movement from Montgomery in 1955. The Moores were organising, and were killed for it, before that β and the reason the date surprises people is that the story was not taught.
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RHJrod retweeted
The police knocked and she went downstairs and opened the door to let them in.
Bettie Jones was fifty-five. She had five children. It was the day after Christmas.
The officer shot her on her own doorstep.
West Side of Chicago, the morning of 26 December 2015.
The call had nothing to do with her. A man in the building upstairs β Quintonio LeGrier, nineteen, a university student in a mental health crisis β had rung 911 himself. He rang three times. The call taker hung up on him. His father rang too.
Officers arrived. Bettie Jones lived on the ground floor. She heard them and she came down and she opened the front door, because that is what you do.
Officer Robert Rialmo fired up the stairwell.
He hit LeGrier. He also hit Bettie Jones, standing in the doorway she had just opened.
Both of them died.
The Chicago Police Department's statement afterwards described her death as an accident, and the city said she had been struck unintentionally.
The Mayor apologised to her family.
Now, the part that tells you what the rest of it was worth.
A jury in the LeGrier civil case found that Rialmo had not been justified in firing β **and the judge then set that verdict aside**, on the basis that the jury's answers were contradictory. The family got nothing from it.
Bettie Jones's family settled separately with the city.
Rialmo was eventually dismissed from the department years later, after a Police Board process.
She was a mother of five. She worked. By every account from her neighbours she was the person on that street who checked on people.
She did not call the police. The call was not about her. The emergency was not hers. She was not armed and nobody has ever suggested she did anything at all.
She heard the police at the door on Boxing Day morning, and she went down and let them in.
All sorts of wrong!π‘
Glynn Simmons spent 48 YEARS in an Oklahoma prison for a murder he did NOT commit. Exonerated in 2023, he became the longest-imprisoned exoneree in U.S. history. Sadly, Glynn has died of cancer at 73. His story is a heartbreaking reminder of how wrongful convictions can steal DECADES of someone's life. Rest in Power, Glynn.
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This is why OSU is just a contender & not THE dominant team right now. With its resources ($$, talent base, tradition) Ohio State should be looking to 3 peat.
Ryan Day said Ohio State didn't want to use tempo until it had to. He said the Buckeyes did when they trailed by two scores in the fourth quarter.
elevenwarriors.com/ohio-statβ¦
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RHJrod retweeted
Her name is Maletole Thabane.
She is only 4 years old. She is still missing. Please Retweet until she is found.
RHJrod retweeted
Today we honor the life and legacy of Dr. Henrie Monteith Treadwell, one of three students who desegregated the University of South Carolina in 1963. She died Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026.
At just 16, she filed the lawsuit that opened Carolinaβs doors. In 1965, she became the universityβs first Black graduate since Reconstruction. Her courage changed this university forever, and every Gamecock since walks in her footsteps.
Thank you, Dr. Treadwell. Forever to thee.
Story: sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2026/10/uβ¦
RHJrod retweeted
For the first time, we're getting a look at former NYPD detective Victor Romero as he walks into court in the fatal George Washington Bridge shooting case. Romero is accused in the death of Koran Irvine. 7ny.tv/29ELN5
RHJrod retweeted
REST IN PEACE: Family, friends, and the soccer community have gathered in McPherson to lay 6-year-old Cole Adrian to rest. He is one of two people who died on Saturday, October 17, when a truck plowed onto a youth soccer field at Stryker Sports Complex in Wichita. #kwch12
RHJrod retweeted
Alexandria teen becomes first child in state functionally cured of sickle cell disease
RHJrod retweeted
Four young men were driving to a basketball tryout in a rented van when two state troopers pulled them over on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The van rolled backwards.
The troopers fired eleven shots into it. Three of the four were hit.
They were unarmed.
23 April 1998, the New Jersey Turnpike. Keshon Moore, Danny Reyes, Rayshawn Brown and Jarmaine Grant β three Black men and one Latino β were driving to North Carolina for a basketball tryout at a college.
Troopers John Hogan and James Kenna stopped the van for speeding.
What happened next, the two sides described differently, but the rolling van is not in dispute. The vehicle moved backwards. The troopers said they believed they were about to be struck. They opened fire.
Eleven rounds into a van carrying four unarmed young men. Three were wounded. One was paralysed.
No weapons. No drugs. Nothing.
And then the case did something much larger than itself.
New Jersey had spent years denying that its troopers profiled drivers by race. The litigation and the investigations that followed produced the state's own records β and in 1999 New Jersey's Attorney General published a report conceding that racial profiling was, in his words, real, not imagined.
That admission is one of the most significant in American policing. A state government examined its own highway stop data and said, in public, that it had been stopping drivers because they were Black.
The two troopers eventually pleaded guilty to obstruction-type charges relating to falsified records and paid fines. Neither served prison time. The state paid nearly thirteen million dollars to the four men.
New Jersey entered into a federal consent decree that ran for a decade.
Four young men were going to a basketball tryout.
We must continue to confront the injustices too often left out of history.
Get our book which documents over 150 cases of crimes against Black people that remain unanswered.
savvypurchase.samcart.com/prβ¦
"Those days are long gone!"
π¨ BREAKING: A Black couple showed up to tour an apartment in Queens... and the broker accidentally texted THEM instead of the owner: "Ugh. They are Black."
They'd just moved from Delaware for her new job. Now they're SUING Douglas Elliman, the agent AND the owners.
"It doesn't change the pain. It doesn't take away the pain you caused us that day."
Think about it. They were judged before they even had a chance.
They only found out because she texted the wrong person. Most people never do.
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RHJrod retweeted
Today a Clemson defensive tackle rang a bell in Greenville, South Carolina, and walked out of the building finished with chemotherapy.
He turned 21 five days ago. He was 20 when they told him.
Here is what his mother did when she found out.
Meek Brown closed her nail salon in Atlanta and went to take care of her son full time.
Then she asked for something else.
"Just give it to me because he's twenty. He's only twenty."
His grandmother Marie asked for the same thing. She is 67.
"God, look, I'm 67. Just give it to me. I'll take it."
His name is Hevin Brown-Shuler. He is from Atlanta, Georgia, and he went to Pace Academy there. He was a four star recruit who picked Clemson over Georgia, South Carolina, Michigan and ten others, and he wears 42 and plays the same position his dad Alonzo played in the NFL.
It started with a cough in the spring. He thought it was allergies.
Then chest pains. Then he could not finish workouts without being sick.
The team doctor checked him for pneumonia, and when that was not it, sent him to the emergency room in late April. That is where they found the mass in his chest.
Hodgkin lymphoma. Clemson announced it on the 19th of May.
Here is what he said that day.
"I am grateful that the prognosis is very good."
Then he went and did the whole thing without leaving.
Every day in team meetings. Every day training. He asked his position coach to keep sending him the playbooks and to keep him in the summer install. Dabo Swinney called him every week. A teammate named Cade Brannon sat beside him during treatments.
In September they let him stand on the field at Memorial Stadium in a purple cap, and he put it like this.
"I'm just excited to go watch them ball out."
Today was the last one.
"I promised myself I wasn't going to cry, but obviously that didn't happen."
Swinney hugged him. The Greenville News, describing the video of it, says the coach told him he loved him.
And here is his mother again.
"This is probably one of the best days of my life since I had him."
Now the honest shape of it. He is not finished. One scan is still to come, and nobody has used the word everybody wants to use yet. He has played seven games in his life and has six tackles. He has not been on a field in pads since 2025.
But a doctor at the hospital put his chances of a cure at about 90 percent, and in May, on the day Clemson told everybody, this is what the kid asked for.
"I can't wait to run down that hill and touch Howard's Rock again for the 2027 football season."
