Author: Carma Henry

Carma Lynn Henry Westside Gazette Newspaper 545 N.W. 7th Terrace, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33311 Office: (954) 525-1489 Fax: (954) 525-1861

The Supreme Court opened its nine-month term Monday by hearing a conservative challenge to the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands under a landmark environmental protection law, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asking multiple questions on her first day on the bench Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, was quick off the mark, asking a series of questions early on in the nearly two hours of arguments indicating sympathy for maintaining expansive federal authority over wetlands. The conservative majority seemed more skeptical, although there appeared to be no consensus about how to draw a line that would limit federal jurisdiction over sometimes hard-to-define patches of wetland.

     Oblivious to his surroundings and circum-stances for 20 years, I am not sure if Rip was sleep as we know sleeping to be or he was most likely simply walking around ignorant, unaware, and disenfranchised. In Spike Lee’s biography of Malcolm X, Denzel Washington gives this line: “Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!” Whichever one that I choose to represent the total neglect of the possible progress that can be made in the state of Florida is overshadowed by the non-messaging that appeals to the Black voters.

     Often called “forever chemicals,” PFAS (per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances) represent a group of compounds that do not break down naturally with the ability to remain in the environment almost indefinitely and to build up in people’s blood. Manufacturers commonly use them to make products waterproof, non-stick or, as in the case of school uniforms, stain resistant.

     “Maintaining an accurate account of our history, and history in general, is essential for the present as well as for posterity, as it offers an accurate understanding of the worth of people and society,” Congressman Green explains. “It explicates the present and provides the foresight to sculpt the future. It allows for introspection and extrospection of our triumphs and tragedies. It is the lodestar to unity and the lodestone for justice.”

     Emmett Till was born on July 25, 1941, and was murdered August 28, 1955. Emmett,as most Americans know, was violently tortured and murdered in Money, Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a married, White woman named Carolyn Bryant. This rule was a long held racial taboo in the Southern States. Black males were not allowed to even look at White women in their eyes in public let alone whistle at them or around them. Such racist, classist unjust social rules were a result of the terrible slavery system and were passed down as the Jim Crow racist injustice system of the South. Being born and raised in Chicago, Till wasn’t accustomed to such public social rules. Although racist outliers existed against Blacks in Chicago, they were not as rigid and as violently enforced as in the Southern States.