In this critical phase of our struggle to hold onto the unraveling strands of democracy, I recently made the rounds to the National Action Network (NAN) headquarters in Harlem and tuned in to Dr. Ron Daniels’s show on WBAI. At NAN, it was good to encounter a number of community activists I hadn’t seen in quite a while.
I caught up with Anthony Dolci, executive director and founder of the Stop False Reporting Group and Initiative. He updated me about some of the latest developments his group has been tackling, most urgently the failure of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to release the names of the NYPD detectives connected to the framing of two innocent men, Charles Collins and Brian Boles, in a 1994 homicide conviction.
His office recently vacated their wrongful convictions. Both Boles and Collins were teenagers when they were jailed for murdering James Reid. According to the report I received from Dolci, they were “physically and verbally coerced by NYPD detectives into falsely accusing each other and falsely confessing to Reid’s murder after feeling pressured and scared.”
Dolci wrote that Bragg has implemented new investigation practices to prevent wrongful convictions, “including science-based interviews, video-taped interrogations, an emerging adult unit, and complete transparency with all police files.” I immediately sent an email to Bragg seeking his response to Dolci’s message to me, and I am awaiting a reply.
Doing God’s will
However, I don’t have to wait for a reply from Daniels. His guests, Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-director, Black Lives Matter Grassroots, and Dr. Amara Enyvia, interim co-executive for program policies and campaigns, Movement for Black Lives, Chicago, discussed a raft of pertinent issues at length. “I was listening to your editorial about what’s happening — the forced starvation, this engineered famine … in Palestine at the hands of Israel … I have to look away from watching these children being forced to starve to death,” Abdullah said, even before dealing with Daniels’s first question.
When asked what motivated her activism, she began by saying, “We’re here to do God’s will in the world, and we’re connected. You know, it’s a falsehood, but we’re a house separated from our creators, right? But we are connected to our creator, and our creator requires us to do God’s work.”
She then praised Daniels’s work on political prisoners and Pan-Africanism. Daniels also asked Abdullah to explain some of the controversy about the differences between the various Black Lives Matter groups and how they differ from her organization, Black Lives Matter Grassroots.
“Black Lives Matter Grassroots was born in response to George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin. Like Frantz Fanon said, we are here to fulfill our generational mission and not to betray it. We don’t have a lot of money,” she said, noting that a consultant hijacked all the money they had raised (more to come about that), but we are powered by our mission, not by money, and people can follow us on BLM Grassroots.org.”
Enyvia echoed many of the concerns voiced by Abdullah. We will follow up with her and others next week.