Louisiana Representative Uses Racial Slur

I wonder how many people will be infuriated by this latest development. Will people vote for a white state lawmaker, who calls a black civil rights veteran 'Buckwheat'? According to the news story, Rep. Carla Blanchard Dartez, a Democrat, acknowledged that she ended a Thursday night conversation with Hazel Boykin by saying, "Talk to you later, Buckwheat." Dartez had been thanking Boykin for driving voters to the polls.

Buckwheat, a black child character in the "Little Rascals" comedies of the 1930s and '40s, is viewed as a racial stereotype.

Boykin, 75, helped desegregate restaurants and the parish school system in the 1960s. Her son, Jerome, is president of the Terrebonne Parish chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"I've never had no one talk to me that way, and I considered it a racial slur," Hazel Boykin said. "I know the meaning of it; it's just like the N-word."

On Monday, Jerome Boykin held a news conference asking voters to cast ballots against Dartez, who faces Republican Joe Harrison in Saturday's runoff.

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Then, in December, a white student was beaten up by six black schoolmates outside the school gymnasium. The black students were charged with attempted murder.

Eventually, those charges were reduced to offenses such as aggravated battery. In June, Bell was found guilty of second-degree battery charges. On Friday, the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal threw out his conviction, saying he had been improperly tried as an adult. Bell, now 17, remains in custody while prosecutors decide whether to file new charges against him in juvenile court." |Read more|

David Bowie Help Fund The "Jena 6" Legal Defence Fund

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The case has split America with its overtones of institutional racism that hark back to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

It concerns the fate of Mychal Bell and five other teens - known as the Jena Six – who were found guilty of assault by a six-member, all-white jury." |
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