Police in Fayetteville, North Carolina, are investigating an incident involving Ja'Lana Dunlap, a 22-year-old Black woman after she said officers assaulted and unlawfully handcuffed her while she was working in September.
On Sept. 6, Dunlap, a property manager at the time, said she was taking pictures of the property she oversees on behalf of the owner, who had recently gotten a citation from the city about people illegally dumping furniture and trash on the site.
Many were interested in watching Georgia. U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and challenger Herschel Walker (R) debate for the first and only time ahead of the November election. The debate was broadcast locally and online but many still had trouble finding the debate and missed it.
For those still interested, you can watch the entire debate below and make up yor own mind as to who won and who lost.
The Rev. Charles Melvin Sherrod, whose grassroots organizing of unregistered black voters sent shock waves through the segregated South and kickstarted the Albany Movement, has died. He was 85.
Sherrod, whose death was confirmed by his family, died of natural causes at his home in Albany (GA) on Tuesday at 3:45 p.m.
“He was a great husband, a great father and great servant to his community,” Sherrod’s wife of 56 years, Shirley Miller Sherrod, said. “His life serves as a shining example of service to one’s fellow man.”
Sherrod played a transformative role in the civil rights movement during the 1960s, cofounding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and inspiring blacks in southwest Georgia to straighten their backs and stand up for their rights.
Born Jan. 2, 1937, in rural Surry, Va., Sherrod moved with his grandmother and siblings to nearby Petersburg, where he became president of his high school student body. He earned both his undergraduate and divinity degree at Virginia Union University in Richmond before engaging in sit-ins at segregated churches and department store lunch counters.
In April 1960, he traveled to Shaw University in Raleigh, and the following February, SNCC dispatched him and three others workers to Rock Hill, S.C., where he chose jail over bail and spent 30 days on the chain gang. It was a strategy he would employ again and again throughout his civil rights career.
In October 1961, Sherrod, headed to Albany as SNCC’s first field secretary to help register blacks to vote. His mastery at organizing mass meetings and empowering black youths to stand up for their rights also mobilized parents and the status quo to get off the sidelines. The result was The Albany Movement that garnered national and international attention and attracted scores of demonstrators, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Sherrod’s civil rights work was not restricted to Albany. He helped bus demonstrators from southwest Georgia to the 1963 March on Washington and ensured strong attendance in support of the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J.
Meanwhile, back in southwest Georgia, Sherrod remained fully invested, spearheading voter registration efforts in surrounding counties, including the racially hostile Baker County. In the summer of 1965, he met the love of his life, Shirley Miller, the daughter of a black farmer who’d been gunned down in his own pasture by a white farmer who an all-white jury refused to indict for his murder.
After completing requirements for his master’s degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1966, Sherrod broke ranks with SNCC over its ouster of whites. He cofounded alternatively the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education, continuing voter registration work with his wife.
In July 1968, Sherrod traveled to Israel with seven others to explore the idea of creating a community-held farm to serve as a safe haven for black farmers thrown off their land during the movement. Ultimately serving as the leader, Sherrod took the reins, secured the needed capital and acquired the 5,735-acre New Communities Inc. in neighboring Lee County.
From 1969 to 1985, he served at the helm of what became the nation’s largest black-owned farm and first community land trust. That is, until drought and discriminatory loan practices brought about its loss.
Still, Sherrod stayed the course. He served as one of Albany’s first black city commissioners from 1976 to 1990, ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the state senate in 1996, taught on faculty at Albany State University and served as chaplain at the Georgia State Prison in Homerville.
However, he never allowed himself to forget about the loss of New Communities. In 1999, acting on behalf of the nonprofit, he and Shirley Sherrod joined other black farmers in a class action lawsuit, suing the United States Department of Agriculture for discriminatory loan practices. What they recovered in an out-of-court settlement cleared the way for the nonprofit to acquire the 1,638-acre Cypress Pond Plantation near Albany. This former antebellum plantation where the enslaved toiled is now managed by descendants of the enslaved, serving as a legacy to Sherrod.
In addition to his wife Shirley, Sherrod is survived by two adult children, Russia Sherrod of Albany and Kenyatta (Mikhiela) Sherrod of Marietta, and five grandchildren: Kourtney (Charles III) Sherrod Corbin of Auburn, Ala.; Mia Sherrod of Dallas; Kiera Sherrod of Marietta; Simone Sherrod of Marietta, and Khloe Sherrod of Albany.
Clark Atlanta University (CAU) has announced that actor, author, columnist, commentator, and sought-after speaker Joseph C. Phillips has joined the University as a professor in Theatre and Communication Studies.
Phillips-Headshot.jpg“Joseph brings a wealth of awe-inspiring talent, meaningful engagement in the community, and a portfolio of informed, decisive commentary to the University,” said President Dr. George T. French Jr. “We anticipate that he will inspire independent thinking, civic responsibility, and a passion for interdisciplinary learning in our students—which aligns perfectly with our mantra to “lift our community by lifting our voices.”
Phillips received the BFA in acting in 1983 from the acting conservatory at New York University after transferring from the University of the Pacific as a communications major. He has served as a fellow at the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian College; the Abraham Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute; and the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, where he designed, wrote the curriculum, and taught a seven-week course titled “Black Conservatism in America.”
A prolific actor perhaps best known for his role as Lt. Martin Kendall (the husband of Lisa Bonet’s character) on the hit series “The Cosby Show,” Phillips played Col. Greg Davis in four seasons of the Netflix award-winning series “13 Reasons Why,” which concluded in 2020. He is a three-time NAACP Image Award nominee for his portrayal of Attorney Justus Ward on “General Hospital” and has had guest starring roles on several television dramas, including “How to Get Away with Murder,” “NCIS” and “Good Trouble.”
His feature film credits include starring roles in “Strictly Business,” “Let’s Talk About Sex,” and “Midnight Blue.” Among his theatrical credits are starring roles in the Broadway production of “Six Degrees of Separation” and the Kennedy Center and American Playhouse productions of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He created the title role in “Dreaming Emmett,” Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s only theatrical play.
Phillips is the author of “He Talk Like a White Boy” and for eight years, wrote a widely syndicated weekly column titled “The Way I See It” that promoted conservative views such as traditional family, limited government, and a return to America's founding principles. He was also a regular commentator for NPR and American Urban Radio Network.
For ten years, he served as a director on the State Board of the California African American Museum, where he chaired the accessions committee, which was responsible for approving all art or artifacts for the museum’s collection.
On Phillips’s extensive roster of civic engagements are his work as a motivational speaker with the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s “VIDA” program designed to redirect the lives of at-risk youth; the Special Olympics, and The Green Chimneys Foundation, of which he was an advisory board member; The Red Cross; Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles; the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America; the San Fernando Valley Rescue Mission; and Project Alpha, a partnership of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., and the March of Dimes designed to address teenage pregnancy, sexual and physical abuse, and sexually transmitted disease.
