As a journalist, blogger and advocate, there are some positions I have taken publicly that have cost me applause, comfort, friendships, and sometimes even support from people who otherwise agree with my broader work of being a voice for the voiceless. One of those positions is my unapologetic stance on drugs, drug dealers, and the […]
When Michael Maurice Johnson was convicted a few months ago of rape and first-degree assault in a Baltimore County case, it reopened an old wound that never truly closed. For many people, Johnson’s new conviction did not create new grief. It confirmed an old fear. It reminded people of 16-year-old Phylicia Simone Barnes, the beautiful honor […]
They say history rewards those who are willing to search for it, and as a journalist, a Black man, and a descendant of people whose history was too often stolen, buried, distorted, or deliberately erased, I have developed an endless thirst for knowledge about the story of my people. Black and Indigenous people in America. […]
I’m very angry today and I am certain that I am not alone. The problem is that my anger is two-fold. How does a store owner falsely acuse a 14-year-old kid of stealing bottles of water, chase him out the store off the property, shoots him in the back as he fled, and a jury […]
It was a very emotional time last night when I message Shauntel Sallis (Phylicia Barnes’ older maternal sister) to determine if she had heard the verdict. She expressed sadness despite the conviction though, as I’m sure many who supported Phylicioa Barnes and her family did, when the relizatkiion that the man who was charged and […]
They say lightning never strikes twice. But in the case of Michael Maurice Johnson, that old saying feels less like wisdom and more like a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe. For those of us who still carry the memory of “A Flower in the River” (the tragic story of Phylicia Barnes, a bright […]
Her Dad Raheem Mustafa once told me Phylicia Barnes kept her head in the skies. Redfelecting upon the memories of when he used to take her to the airport to watch airplanes take off, and like any child still full of wonder, she looked upward toward possibility, toward hope, toward life. Her mother Janice-Sallis-Mustafa, shattered […]
The current state of affairs with the United States, it’s association and alliance with the State of israel, their current strife with other nations in the region of the the Arabian pennisula, and around the globe has the average American worried and fearful that yet, another unwanted war is on the horizon for our country. […]
Keiosha Felix was only 15 years old when she vanished from Duson, Louisiana on April 30, 2012. She was not just a missing teen. She was also a young mother. Her life matters, especially for her child, because any attempt to casually suggest that Keiosha simply “left” collapses under the weight of one brutal fact. […]
It was exactly 58 years ago today. I was only 2 years old, in my mother’s arms as she held me near the third-floor window of her apartment in the 2200 block of Brookfield Avenue in West Baltimore. Mom and Dad were only 22-years-old. Outside, the city was in chaos. I remember people coming down […]
