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 […]
Relisha Rudd should be 20 years old today. She should be living her life, chasing her future, laughing, growing, and becoming the young woman she was never given the chance to be. Instead, more than 12 years after she vanished from a community shelter in Washington, D.C., Relisha is still missing, her case is still […]
When Iran nationalized its oil in 1953, it committed the unforgivable sin of telling Western powers that its wealth belonged to its own people. That was never going to be tolerated by colonizers lusting to conquer Mideastern wealth. So in 1953, the United States and Great Britain helped crush Iran’s leadership within it’s sovereign and […]
Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States, yet far too many children can go missing here without the kind of nonstop national alarm their disappearances should trigger. For Black children especially, the silence often feels even louder. Their faces do not always dominate the news cycle. Their names do not always trend. Their […]
Some family secrets do not stay buried because they are harmless. They stay buried because the truth is too disruptive to the story people have chosen to live with. I can’t image what was so horrible that our mother couldn’t tell us or face such truth in her life time. The sad reality is that […]
