When I heard that Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown announced that an independent audit of Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner found that at least 36 police custody deaths should have actually been ruled as homicides, I immediately thought of Tawanda Jones.
“Tawanda Jones, the sister of Tyrone West, has spent every Wednesday since West’s death calling for accountability for her brother’s death and all victims of police brutality,” Madeleine O’Neill writes in her story about the audit. West died in 2013 after he was pulled over by Baltimore City Morgan State University police officers. That’s hundreds upon hundreds of Wednesdays spent without her brother. Hundreds of hours spent organizing, speaking out, and trying to move powerful people to pay attention to her cause.
This country has always presented Black people with an extraordinary number of horrors and then demanded of them an extraordinary amount of patience that at some point, those horrors would be addressed.
“Gov. Wes Moore also announced several executive actions in response to the audit results, including granting the Attorney General’s Office the authority to review the 36 cases where reviewers unanimously agreed a death should have been ruled a homicide. Moore also established a task force on in-custody restraint-related death investigations,” O’Neill reports.
In our arts section, Bry Reed introduces us to Katie Mitchell and leads us on a journey through the interconnected community that makes up Black-owned bookstores. Mitchell’s book, “Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores,” unpacks systems of mutual aid that keep Black bookstores alive, and the constant government scrutiny that these bookstores have always endured.
“Being in the archives, I realized that the FBI probably has the most complete archive of Black bookstores because they were being surveilled so much,” Mitchell told Reed. “A lot of the ephemera that Black bookstores have probably wouldn’t be around if the FBI hadn’t archived it. It’s kinda like great that I get to see this flyer about the Black bookstore George Jackson movement. However, the reason I get to see it is because [these stores] were getting spied on!”
With “Sinners” back in theaters and once again dominating the box office, Dominic Griffin encourages us to take a more clear-eyed view of the film.
“We may have to work twice as hard to get half as much as our white counterparts. Still, true progress would be allowing a piece of Black art to exist outside of the insecure need to insist that something flawed is literal perfection, robbing it of the chance to exist as anything less than a victory lap against the establishment,” he writes.
Be sure to also catch images of a beautiful public mural project that has been unfolding under I-83, just in time for a newly revamped and city-controlled Artscape weekend. You’ll also find June tarotscopes from Iya Osundara Ogunsina, and a poem from a participant in the organization Writers in Baltimore Schools.
Thanks, as always, for reading.