A Spiritual Discovery in Little Liberia: Bridgeport’s Forgotten Gateway to Freedom

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. That thirst is not casual curiosity. It is spiritual, ancestral, and the kind of hunger that pulls you toward places you did not know were calling your name. That’s what happened when I stumbled upon the Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses in the South End of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Standing before those gated, weathered structures, I felt something I could not immediately explain. It was almost like déjà vu, as if I had been there before, or as if something from beyond time had led me to that exact spot. The houses and block were quiet, but history was not quiet. The air seemed heavy with memory as the ground seemed to speak to me. Before me stood the last remaining physical remnants of Little Liberia, one of the most important and yet least talked about Black freedom communities in Connecticut history.

Built in 1948 nearly 180-years-ago, the Mary and Eliza Freeman houses still stand in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s South End, on their original foundations (photo by David B. Adams).

Nestled in the quiet blocks of Bridgeport’s South End, surrounded today by modern buildings, traffic, industry, and the steady march of urban development, the Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses stand as witnesses. They are not simply old houses. They are sacred structures and monuments to Black independence, Black survival, Black property ownership, Black womanhood, Indigenous alliance, and the pursuit of freedom in a nation that was built while denying freedom to millions of colored people.

Little Liberia was not just a neighborhood. It was a refuge and a place where free Black people and Indigenous people built community, owned property, created institutions, raised families, and gave shape to a dream that America itself had denied them. In a country where Black life was hunted, sold, legislated against, and terrorized, this small seaside community in Bridgeport became a symbol of possibility for many who fled bondage from the American south.

When I looked out toward the waters of Long Island Sound, the moment became even more breathtaking. Those waters were not just scenic. They were a passageway and a part of the geography of escape. Historical accounts connect Little Liberia to the Underground Railroad, and oral traditions describe Indigenous watermen, including Shinnecock people from Long Island, helping freedom seekers cross the Sound by canoe under the cover of night. Imagine that. Imagine enslaved human beings fleeing bondage in the American South, moving through darkness, risking capture, torture, sale, or death, and then crossing those waters toward a community where Black people were free. That’s not just history. It’s holy ground.

A view from the southern tip of Bridgeport’s Little Liberia across the Long Island Soind (photo by David B. Adams).

As I stood there, I could almost feel the fear, the courage, the prayers, and the trembling hope of those who may have arrived on those shores. I thought about what it must have meant to see land after such a journey, the first breath of freedom, the ancestors whose names we may never know, whose footsteps may never be marked, but whose souls passed through places like this in search of a new life beyond slavery and persecution.

Little Liberia, at its peak, was considered a depot of the Underground Railroad. But it was more than a stop on a secret route. It was evidence that Black people were not merely waiting for freedom to be handed to them. They were building freedom, purchasing land, creating homes, establishing schools, churches, businesses, and community networks. They were proving that the story of Black America was never simply a story of suffering. It was also a story of genius, resistance, faith, survival, and self-determination.

An image of Main Street in Bridgeport’s thriving years of Little Liberia.

The Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses matter very deeply. They were Black women property owners in the nineteenth century, a time when both race and gender were used as weapons to limit opportunity. Yet these sisters built, owned, and invested. They carved out a place for themselves in history, not by asking permission, but by standing in their own dignity. Their houses remain as rare surviving evidence of a Black community that understood land as power, home as resistance, and ownership as a declaration of humanity.

An 1890 image of the Zion Church congregatyion in Little Liberia Bridgeport, Connecticut (Connecticut history center).

There is something deeply moving about the fact that these two houses still stand (now undergoinf revitalization).

The above images depict the actual structures and the Little Liberia community today. They have survived neglect, development pressure, and a city that grew around them while too many people passed by without knowing what they were looking at. They have survived the same American habit that has erased so many Black historical landmarks, letting them decay, then pretending their loss was inevitable.

But their survival is not accidental. It’s a demand.

They demand that Bridgeport, Connecticut, Black and Indigenous people reclaim the stories that belong to us. We should demand that our children learn that freedom did not only live in speeches, court cases, plantations, or battlefields. Freedom also lived in small coastal communities like Little Liberia, in houses built by Black women, in canoes crossing dark water, in churches and schools, in families who dared to live free while slavery still ruled much of the nation.

Standing in front of these historucal structures, I felt the presence of something larger than myself. I felt the ancestors and their pain, but I also felt their pride. I also felt the weight of being a journalist who has spent years telling stories of the missing, the murdered, the forgotten, and the voiceless, and I realized that Little Liberia is part of that same work. At that moment I realized that forgotten history is another kind of missing person.

When a people’s story is buried, their descendants are robbed. When sacred places are ignored, future generations are denied the chance to touch the truth. When Black history is reduced to slavery alone, without showing the communities we built in defiance of it, America continues to tell an incomplete and dishonest story. Little Liberia is one of those stories America has not told loudly enough.

It should be known by every child in Bridgeport and across this nation, and should be taught in schools. It’s history that must be marked, protected, funded, restored, and honored as one of the most powerful freedom sites in New England. The Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses should not be treated as old buildings waiting for preservation. They should be treated as living witnesses to the birth of Black freedom in Connecticut and Southern New England.

Standing in front of those structures, I did not just see wood, windows, gates, and weathered walls. I saw the arrival, escape, and Black women who owned property when America did not even fully recognize Black humanity. I saw Indigenous people helping guide the oppressed toward freedom across waters that once also carried hope.

Little Liberia was a community that told the world, long before emancipation, that Black people were capable of building, owning, governing, protecting, and preserving themselves, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to witness this piece of black hiostory for myself. That’s the part that made the discovery spiritual. It felt personal like I had stumbled onto a piece of my own inheritance. Not because I know that my bloodline passed through Little Liberia, but because every Black person in America is connected to these sites of survival. Every Black person who has ever searched for their history knows the feeling of finding a place that confirms what your spirit already knew. We were here, we built, we resisted, we survived.

Sometimes, when you are searching with the right spirit, that evidence finds you. Little Liberia found me and now that I have seen it, felt it, and stood before it, I understand that my responsibility is not only to remember, but to tell the story. Afterall, history does reward research, but only when the researcher is willing to listen to the ancestors when they speak. At the edge of the Long Island Sound, in the shadow of two surviving houses, I heard them.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog.

Black Citizens Out of Options: A South Carolina Jury Sends Latest Message Regarding Black Youth 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 in this country found the shooter “not guilty.” How doers that happen? Secondly, why is a 14-year-old walking around with a loaded gun?

Cyrus Carmack-Belton was only 14 years old. Fourteen! Old enough to be seen as a threat, but not old enough, apparently, to be seen as a child. He was old enough for suspicion to follow him out of a store, but not old enough for the justice system to protect the value of his life after he was shot in the back while running away. That is the outrage many within society posess at the center of this case.

A South Carolina jury has now acquitted Chikei “Rick” Chow, the store owner who shot and killed Cyrus in 2023 after falsely suspecting him of stealing bottled water. Let that sink in. A child was accused, chased, shot in the back, and now the man who pulled the trigger walks away from a murder charge. If this doesn’t anger you, than this should:

There were two prior Rick Chow shooting incidents reported by officials

1. May 4, 2015 — fired at a woman’s vehicle

Chow confronted a woman accused of taking two cases of Bud Light and boiled peanuts. After a struggle outside the store, she got into her vehicle. Chow reportedly pulled a .45 caliber Glock and fired about six shots at the passenger-side window. No one was injured.

2. October 12, 2018 — shot a shoplifter in the leg

Chow confronted a man accused of hiding a $6.49 can of oven cleaner in his clothes. Officials said the man assaulted Chow, and Chow fired twice, striking him in the leg. The shoplifter later pleaded guilty to charges from that incident.

Authorities said Chow was not charged in those earlier cases because investigators considered them self-defense under South Carolina law. But those incidents are important context to consider before understanding how Cyrus Carmack-Belton was killed, Chow had already used gunfire in shoplifting-related confrontations twice.

15-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by Soon Ja Du in a California Korean store over a $2 bottle of juice in 1992.

There are moments when a verdict does more than decide a case. It reveals a culture. It exposes whose fear is treated as reasonable, whose child is treated as disposable, and whose grief is expected to quietly accept the language of “self-defense” even when the dead child was running away. Cyrus’ case is eerily similar to a 1992 case in California when a 15-year-old black girl was shot in the back over a $2 bottle of juice. The teen in that case had money in her hand, but Du, just like Chow was also acquitted.

It’s history repeating itself over and over again, but the victims in these cases remain the same. America has even brainwashed other non=whites who are’nt considered black, to believe that all black people are a threat. even our children. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was not killed during a violent robbery. He was not killed while attacking the store owner. He was not killed while advancing toward danger. Prosecutors said he was chased more than 130 yards from the store. They said he had been wrongly accused of stealing water. They said he was shot in the back.

The obvious detail that jumps out at you in this case is the kid was shot in the back. How can you justify shooting a person with their bacl to you. They are obviously not a threat. Hell, law enforcement can’t even shoot a person in the back based on most police use of force standards. Typically there arte very narrow exceptions why a cop can shoot a person in the back and be justified (only if a subject has just shot a policeman because they are deemed as the most dangerous to public safety, and in instances where an inmate is escaping from custody). That’s it. So how did Chow get away with this?

A shot in the back tells its own story. It tells us direction. It tells us distance. It tells us fear was moving away from the shooter, not toward him. Yet in America, especially when the child is Black, even retreat does not guarantee survival. Running away can still be turned into a threat, and in this case, it’s alleged that this kid pointed a gun at them (while fleeing?). Even when the facts are as ridiculous as this, childhood can still be put on trial, and just like in many other cases the dead can still be blamed for their own death.

Yes, much has been made of the allegation that Cyrus had a gun, and quite frankly, that element of this case doesn’t sit well with me. Why is a 14-year-old child walking the streets with a gun? That’s alarming, but it still doesn’t justify what happened to this child. It shouldn’t result in a death sentence. This fact does matter because no child should be walking around with a loaded weapon. Just like no responsible adult should ignore the deeper crisis that places guns in the hands of children. But Cyrus having a gun and only the allegation of the shooters that he pointed it at them, cannot become a permission slip to erase everything else.

It cannot erase the false accusation. It can’t erase the chase. It can’t erase the fact that Cyrus was off of their property. It can’t erase that he was shot in the back, and it can’t erase the fundamental question. “When does suspicion become justification for execution?” That’s what this case feels like to many people watching from the outside. It feels like a child’s life was weighed against the imagined theft of bottled water, and the child lost. It feels like the old American disease again. Black children being aged up, criminalized, feared, pursued, and then blamed after they are dead.

We have seen this pattern before.

Trayvon Martin was followed and killed. Tamir Rice was seen as a threat within seconds. Jordan Davis was killed over loud music. Emmett Till was murdered behind a lie. Again and again, Black childhood have been denied the softness, patience, and benefit of the doubt routinely extended elsewhere. Cyrus Carmack-Belton deserved that benefit of the doubt. He deserved to make it home. He deserved adults who understood that no bottle of water, no suspicion, no bruised ego, and no store policy was worth a child’s life.

What makes this verdict so painful is not only that Chow was acquitted. It is that the acquittal sends a chilling message to Black families. Even when your child is running away, even when your child is shot in the back, even when the original accusation is wrong, justice may still look your grief in the face and say, “not guilty.”

That is more than a legal outcome. That is a wound. A wound that the mother’s of black children have had to endure for far too long. Some are saying that while the criminal case may be over, the moral case is not. To hell with morality. they are and continue to attack our children. I don’t want to hear about morality or any more teach your kids how to live better speeches. the line has been drawn in the sand.

The civil courts may still hear what the jury refused to fully reckon with. The community still has the right to protest. The family still has the right to demand answers. Advocates still have the responsibility to say Cyrus’ name and refuse to let this child be reduced to a defense argument. Cyrus was not a headline. He was not a talking point. He was not a symbol before someone made him one.

He was a 14-year-old boy, a son, a child, and a life still becoming. The question South Carolina must now answer is not simply how a jury reached this verdict. The deeper question is how a society keeps producing moments where armed adults chase children, shoot them in the back, and then ask the public to believe the adult was the one in danger. That part!

That question should haunt every parent, every prosecutor, every judge, every lawmaker, and every person who claims to believe that children matter. If Cyrus Carmack-Belton’s life can be taken under these circumstances and the law still finds no criminal accountability, then we are left with a terrible truth. The system did not just fail Cyrus after he died. It failed to see him as fully human while he was alive.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton. Fourteen years old. Shot in the back. Running away. No threat worth killing. No verdict strong enough to erase the truth. Black America we are out of options.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

Baltimore City Justice On Trial Again: Michael Johnson’s Rape Conviction Reopens the Wound Phylicia Barnes’ Killing Left Behind

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 ultimately acquitted for her murder, was convicted for the crime of rape in a new criminal case involving yet another teenage girl. They say justice is blind, but in Baltimore City it often feels like justice wears a different face depending on the courtroom, the jurisdiction, the evidence culture, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and whose child is lying dead in the water.

Shauntel Sallis (Phylicia Barnes’ oldest maternal sister) taking questions from reporter after testimony of rape victim in Michael Johnson’s criminal trial in Towson, Maryland. Image by CBS News

Now that Michael Maurice Johnson has been convicted of first-degree rape and first-degree assault in Baltimore County, the eyebrows are being raised across Maryland, and not simply about this new conviction. They’re about the painful shadow that still hangs over the name Phylicia Simone Barnes. The records will now show that Johnson, who had been cleared after three trials in Phylicia’s 2010 killing, is now also convicted in this new rape and assault case on April 24, 2026.

For those of us who followed, wrote about, and fought to keep Phylicia’s name alive when her story drifted in and out of the headlines, this latest conviction lands like a huge boulder on our hearts. It does not legally convict Johnson of anything related to Phylicia’s death. Unfortinately double jeopardy laws doen’t allow us to rewrite a verdict because of what happened years later. Morally, emotionally, and publicly though, this conviction forces Baltimore City to look backward and ask a painful question. “What did the justice system miss?”

Phylicia Barnes was a 16-year-old honors student from North Carolina who came to Baltimore to visit family and never made it home alive. Her body was later found in the Susquehanna River. Johnson (the last to see the teen alive) was arrested, tried, convicted once, granted a new trial, tried again, and eventually and suspiciously acquitted in 2018 after being tried a third time during a bench trial. The case became a painful example of how a family can endure a prosecution, a conviction, a reversal, a mistrial and an acquittal, only to be left with the same haunting delimma they had from the beginning, and the same unanswered question of “who killed Phylicia?”

Michael Maurice Johnson (42).

Now comes the uncomfortable political and legal twist. Ivan J. Bates, Baltimore City’s current State’s Attorney, was one of Michael Johnson’s defense attorneys during the Phylicia Barnes litigation. CBS Baltimore quoted Bates in 2013 criticizing prosecutors after Johnson’s conviction was thrown out, saying the state had “got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.”

To be fair, Bates was doing what defense lawyers are constitutionally required to do, which is to fight for his client. A defense attorney’s job is not to make the public comfortable. A defense attorney’s job is to challenge the state, test the evidence, expose weakness, and make sure the government proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the entire American legal system in a nutshell, but the public is also allowed to feel the sting of such irony.

The man who once helped defend Michael Johnson in one of Baltimore’s most painful child murder cases now sits as the city’s top prosecutor. That doesn’t mean Bates did anything wrong. It doesn’t mean he violated ethics. It doesn’t mean he is responsible for Johnson’s later conduct. But it does show how tightly connected Baltimore City’s legal culture can be. How today’s defense lawyer can become tomorrow’s prosecutor, how courtroom victories can later feel hollow, and how families of victims are often left to carry the emotional burden long after the lawyers have moved on to higher office, bigger titles, and polished political careers.

Ivan J. bates, Baltimore’s current State’s attorney, and michael Johnson’s former defense lawyer during Johnso’s criminal prosection in the murder of Phylicia Simone Barnes that Bates helped him win an acquittal.

This is where Baltimore’s justice system must be examined beyond legal technicalities, because justice is not only about whether a conviction can survive appeal. Justice is also about whether the system is competent enough to protect the vulnerable, disciplined enough to build clean cases, honest enough to admit its failures, and humble enough to understand that a botched prosecution can become a second wound to anhother grieving family.

In the Barnes case, Johnson’s first conviction was undone after the court found serious problems tied to the prosecution’s handling of evidence and witnesses. Reports at the time described disputes over key witness credibility, allegations surrounding a detective, and defense attacks on the state’s case. That matters in criminal cases, and certainly mattered on the case of Phylicia Barnes murder, because when prosecutors mishandle cases, when detectives become distractions, when witnesses are vulnerable to impeachment, and when the courtroom becomes less about the victim and more about institutional mistakes, the person who suffers most is not the lawyer. It’s not the judge. It’s not the politician. It’s the dead child.

It’s the mother, the father, the family and friends who still wants answers, and left with the burden to still wonder why and how a daughter came to Baltimore and ended up in a river.It’s every Black girl whose disappearance is treated as less urgent, less marketable, less worthy of national outrage, and it’s every citizen who has to watch the same legal system fail, shrug, rebrand itself, and ask the public to just trust the process again.

Michael Johnson’s rape conviction in Baltimore County does not close the Phylicia Barnes case. It reopens the public wound. It reminds us that technical justice and moral justice are not always the same thing. A courtroom can say “not guilty” while a community still feels robbed of truth. A defense attorney can be praised for skill while a victim’s family still feels crushed by the result. A prosecutor can rise to power while old cases continue to whisper from the grave.

Baltimore must be honest enough to hold all of those truths at once. Ivan Bates may have been a strong defense attorney. He may now be a forceful prosecutor and both things can be true, but the larger issue is not merely Ivan Bates. The larger issue is a legal culture where the public often feels that justice depends less on truth and more on which side of the gavel has the sharper lawyer, cleaner file, better strategy, and fewer mistakes.

That is a dangerous perception and in communities already wounded by violence, poverty, corruption, and distrust, perception can become its own kind of evidence. The Phylicia Barnes case should have been handled with the precision owed to a child whose life had been stolen. Instead, it became a maze of legal reversals, courtroom drama, witness problems, and unresolved grief. Now Johnson’s conviction in a separate violent sexual assault case forces Baltimore City to ask whether the system failed only in court, but whether it failed long before that.

Phylicia was more than a case file. She was a daughter. She was an honor student. She was a child with dreams. She was the flower in the river, and today, after this new conviction, Baltimore City cannot pretend the old questions have disappeared simply because the court record says the murder case is over. The record may be closed, but the wound isn’t. Neither is the demand for justice in the Phylicia Barnes murder case.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

Ther People’s Champion Blog

From A Flower In A River To Another Girl’s Nightmare: Has Michael Maurice Johnson Struck Again?

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 young girl whose life ended in horror, and whose case I fought to keep alive through my blog), these new criminal charges do not land like some random twist of fate. They land like a chilling reminder that when the justice system fails to stop violence the first time, it risks giving that violence room to rise again.

Now, with the man accused and subsequently acquitted of killing a honors teen over a decade ago, accused again of rape and attempted murder, the question is no longer whether lightning can strike twice. The question must be how many young women have to suffer before this system stops pretending repeated danger is just coincidence.

Michael Maurice Johnson pictured with a trusting 16-year-old Phylicia Simone Barnes before she went missing, and subsequently found nude in a Maryland River. Johnson was indicted and subsequently acquitted by a Maryland judge in 2018.

Michael Maurice Johnson is back in a Maryland courtroom, this time in Baltimore County, facing charges of attempted murder, rape, and assault stemming from an alleged attack on a 19-year-old woman. Prosecutors say the victim was strangled repeatedly, sexually assaulted, and left so badly injured she could not speak normally when help arrived. Johnson has denied the most serious charges, and the case is now being tried before a jury.

For those of us who fought for Phylicia Barnes, there is something especially sickening about this moment. Barnes, the 16-year-old honors student whose life was stolen in Baltimore after disappearing in December 2010, became a symbol of how fragile justice can be when a young Black girl is the victim. Johnson was once convicted in her case, then later won a new trial, and in 2018 a judge acquitted him, ruling the state had not produced enough evidence to convict him.

While the court determined that the state failed to prove it’s case against Johnson in 2018, there is an eery similarity between the barnes teen and the current victim’s cases. Barnes was believed to have been sexually assaulted and then asphyxiated, before being discarded in the Susquehana River in Maryland. The same allegations of rape and attempted murder are being lodged against Johnson in the current 19-year-old victim’s case, as she testified before a jury in Towson, Maryland 3 days ago.

When Johnson was charged the first time back in 2011, I did not sit silently while Phylicia’s name faded from the headlines. Through my blog, I pushed, wrote, and advocated for justice in her case because too many people were prepared to move on while her family was left with grief and unanswered questions. That’s why these new allegations do not feel like some isolated shock. They feel more like a brutal reminder of what happens when violent men slip through the cracks and society pretends that legal outcomes always equal real justice.

This is the mockery of it all. The public is constantly told to trust the system, yet here we are again, watching a man once at the center of one young woman’s death now accused of horrific violence against another. Whether the courts can prove every charge in this new case remains for the jury to decide, but the pattern itself is enough to make the public sick. When the justice system fails to protect the vulnerable, the next victim pays the price for that failure.

Michael Johnson leaving Baltimore City Circuit Court after being acquitted in the murder of Phylicia Barnes in 2018.

Phylicia Barnes deserved better. This new young woman deserved better. The people who work, write, and fight to keep these cases alive should not have to keep watching the same nightmare return in different forms. People say lightning does not strike twice. But sometimes it does, and sometimes what looks like lightning is really a justice system so broken, so slow, and so blind that it keeps giving danger another chance to breathe.

For the past two years, Johnson who is now 42-years-old, has been locked up in Baltimore County, accused of a brutal crime inside an apartment in Rosedale. Prosecutors alleged he strangled a teenager in an attack that lasted six hours, using his hands and a fan cord. The victim was so badly injured, charging documents stated, she could not speak and had to communicate with police by text. That victim was in foster care and told police Johnson became enraged when he thought he heard her talking about a boy during a phone call with her sister, but Johnson claimed the victim attacked him and beat him because he was texting another woman. 

Micheal Johnson (42) \Baltimore County booking image.

We all will be watching patiently to see what the outcome of these new allegations against Michael Johnson will result in. Our hearts go out to the latest victim of such a violent sexual assault, but we can’t help but feel cheated out of justice while remebering the life of young Phylicia Barnes, the flower that ended up in a river and never got justice.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

A Flower In The River: The Child Baltimore City Allowed to Drift Into Silence

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 by fear and grief, said words that still echo all these years later: “My daughter is a flower.” That’s exactly who Phylicia was. A flower. Delicate, beautiful, alive with promise. She should have been protected but instead, she was taken, discarded, and ultimately found in the river. Now, fifteen years later, the silence surrounding what happened to this child remains one of the most disturbing indictments of Baltimore, and the Community’s failure to protect her and to deliver truth.

Phylicia Barnes will not be just another headline. She was not be a statistic. She was not just another Black child America allowed to slip from the front page and into the shadows. She was a 16-year-old honor student from Monroe, North Carolina, visiting family in Baltimore during Christmas break, a bright young girl with a future in front of her. Then she vanished on December 28, 2010, and months later, on April 20, 2011, her nude body was found floating near the Conowingo Dam in the Susquehanna River. Her death was later ruled a homicide. Fifteen years have now passed, and still this case sits like an open wound.

I called her flower in the river because that is how this case has always felt to me. A beautiful child discarded, carried away by cold water, while the world moved on too quickly and too comfortably. However, I have not moved on, and I will not (a promise I made to her family). The people who were around Phylicia in those final hours have had nearly a decade and a half to continue living their lives, building routines, creating distance, and convincing themselves that silence is something other than cowardice. It’s not. Silence in a case like this is complicity of the spirit.

A young Phylicia Simone Barnes pictured with all of her maternal siblings (image coortesy of Shauntel Sallis Ashley).

The known facts have never stopped being disturbing. Phylicia disappeared while staying with relatives in Baltimore. Police said she was last seen on December 28, 2010. After she vanished, there was no activity on her phone, no use of her credit cards, and no Facebook updates. Authorities publicly said they were “enormously concerned.” A large search effort followed. A reward grew, billboards went up, and volunteers searched. Then in April 2011, even after a major search of Patapsco Valley State Park, police admitted they were essentially back at square one. Just days later, her body was discovered near the Conowingo Dam, about 45 miles from where she disappeared in Northwest Baltimore.

And then came the ugly legal maze that so often deepens grief instead of relieving it. Michael Johnson, the ex-boyfriend of Phylicia’s half-sister (Deena Barnes, who Phylicia had been staying with while in Baltimore) and the man authorities said was the last person to see her alive, was charged in 2012. Prosecutors alleged that Michael Johnson asphyxiated Phylicia Barnes inside her sister’s apartment, put her body into a 35-gallon plastic tub, carried it out, and ultimately disposed of her in the river. They also presented testimony that he had made sexual advances toward her after letting her drink alcohol.

He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2013. That conviction was later thrown out, the case unraveled through repeated court battles, and by March 30, 2018, Johnson was subsequently acquitted after a third trial. Whatever anyone believes happened, the public record is clear on this much. Phylicia Barnes was killed, and the system failed to deliver a final, lasting measure of accountability and justice.

An honors kid just visiting family and suddenly taken from this earth. Her body was found naked in a river. Somebody knows more than they have said. Memory fades, loyalties shift, guilt grows heavier with age, and consciences do sometimes crack. Cases are not only solved by science. Sometimes they are solved because time finally breaks the silence that fear protected.

So let this be another reminder, another public record, another refusal to let Phylicia Simone Barnes be buried under the comfort of other people’s forgetting. If you were there, if you heard something, if you saw something, if you know what happened inside that apartment, after that apartment, on that day, or in the days that followed, speak up now. Fifteen years is too long to hide behind confusion, friendship, family ties, or old fear. A girl is dead. A family was shattered. The truth is still owed.

Phylicia Simone Barnes deserved better in life. She deserved better in death. She deserves better now than this long, sickening silence. Somebody knows what happened, and we knoow this because one of the females hanging around the apartment tweeted het location (“it’s trapped at the dam, don’t pull the level”) before she was even found. If no one around her had the courage to protect her then, the least they can do now is tell the truth. In her memory, while still seeking justice.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

The Killing Fields of Black America: A Forbidden Truth About Post-Reconstruction America, Part I

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. Let us be honest regarding the reality that many of our sons and daughters may be ushered into a war the country doesn’t want, and most assuredly will result in the ievitable carnage of Americans dying on the battlefield in the name of our country’s propurted fight to secure American democracy. I want to speak truthfully to the heart of such a myth, because America herself really never has.

For more than half a century, this country allowed the open, public torture and murder of Black people while the federal government stood by like a willing accomplice. From the end of Reconstruction forward, lynching was not some random outbreak of lawlessness, or the result of overly pssionate mob violence that got out of hand. It was policy by neglect. It was a custom of terrorism. It was white supremacy enforced with rope, fire, bullets, knives, crowds, cameras, postcards, and applause. In many of these incidents, was carried out on the basis of mere suspicion alone that a black person was guilty.

When the time came for the United States government to act, it refused. Congress tried again and again to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Not once. Not twice. But over 200 times, and what happened? Southern senators got up on the Senate floor and talked, and talked, and talked until the bills died. They weaponized procedure in defense of barbarism. White terror was crafted in the language of “states’ rights” and “constitutional principle,” when what they were really defending was the right of white mobs to hunt, mutilate, burn, and kill Black human beings without federal interference whatsoever, and with complete impunity.

This photo is one of a series of postcard views captioned “A Victim of the Tulsa Race Riot, June 1, 1921,” a group of male onlookers stand over the corpse of a race massacre victim (Photo by Francis Albert Schmidt, Tulsa Historical Society and Museum).

The names of the bills changed, but the moral crime stayed the same.The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House in 1922 and was strangled in the Senate. The Costigan-Wagner Bill became the next great effort, but it too was abandoned in the face of southern obstruction and presidential cowardice. Then came the Gavagan Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the House in 1937 and was buried in the Senate during the 1938 battle when segregationists again made clear that preserving white domination mattered more to them than law, justice, or human life. Think about what that means.

These were not backwoods lynch mobs acting in secret while Washington looked the other way. These were United States senators, elected officials from sovereign American states, standing in the highest legislative chamber in the land and using the rules of democracy to protect racial murder. They did not merely fail to stop lynching. They fought to continue it and keep the federal government powerless against it. The U.S. government didn’t have a stance of nuetrality, it was complicit, and the blood of black lives are squarely on the hands of American states who supported such barbarism.

The presidents of that era did not save us either. Franklin Roosevelt, despite personally condemning lynching, refused to spend the political capital needed to force the issue because he feared losing southern support for his political agenda. Black lives were often used as bargaining chips for politics in Amerioca’s history. That is the truth America keeps trying to dress up in polite language. Many elected officials chose political convenience over Black life. They chose coalition management over justice and chose legislative strategy over the torn, burned, broken bodies of Black men, women, and children hanging from American trees like a “strange fruit”.

This horrific, but iconic photo depicting the after-party at the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith by a white mob in 1930 inspired the poem and later the song “Strange Fruit.

So when people ask why many Black Americans have always had a complicated, wounded, distrustful relationship with this country, the answer is right here before your eyes.Why should Black people rush to die for a nation that spent generations refusing to protect them from domestic racial terror? Why should Black people wave the flag without question when their government allowed them to be butchered in broad daylight and then debated for decades whether their lives were even worth federal protection? Why should we pretend patriotism is simple for Black America when this republic treated Black death as negotiable?

The United States Senate didn’t even apologize for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation until 2005. I said 2005, which was 145 years after the lynching era began. Let that sink in. Not in 1925, in 1935, nor in 1955. Not even during the height of the civil rights movement. It wasn’t until 2005 and even after all that time, a federal anti-lynching law was not actually signed into law until March 2022. That’s a delay and national disgrace that stretched across generations. There is still no accountability!

Who in government was ever punished for allowing this reign of terror to continue decade after decade? What official institution has paid reparations to the descendants of those who were tortured, mutilated, hanged, burned alive, shot to pieces, castrated, dismembered, or dragged through the dirt of this so-called democracy? Who? Where is the justice for the families? Where is the punishment for the lawmakers who defended inaction? Where is the reckoning for the presidents who refused to lead? Where is the repair for a people whose suffering was not incidental, but structural? These aren’t idle questions to simply propagate antagonistically about America’s dark past for an acceptable answer. The answer is that America in all actuality has not truly resolved her race struggles, especially where her children of color are concerned.

The names of black victims who fell prey to racial violence in modern times (although some cases were disputed to be about racism) since the 1970s is a benchmark that clearly illustrates that America’s view of black lives continue to be expendable. For Example:

Here is a representative list, not a complete one, of Black people whose deaths drew national attention because they were tied to racial violence, vigilante violence, police brutality, or police-related deaths since the 1970s. I am excluding people like Rodney King, whose case was nationally pivotal but who was not killed.

Late 1970s–1990s: Arthur McDuffie, Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Yusef Hawkins, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Oscar Grant are among the best-known names from that period and its immediate aftermath. McDuffie’s 1979 killing by Miami-area officers helped trigger the 1980 Miami uprising; Yusef Hawkins’s 1989 murder became a national symbol of racist mob violence; Diallo’s 1999 shooting became a national flashpoint over racial profiling and police brutality; Sean Bell and Oscar Grant likewise became nationally recognized symbols of police violence.

2010s: Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, and Atatiana Jefferson are among the most nationally recognized names. Trayvon Martin’s killing and George Zimmerman’s acquittal helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement, and the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014 helped expand it nationally; Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile became major national rallying points in the years that followed.

2020s: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Tyre Nichols, and Sonya Massey are among the names that drew especially broad national attention. Britannica identifies Floyd’s killing, along with the earlier 2020 deaths of Arbery and Taylor, as central to the wave of nationwide and international protest that year; Tyre Nichols’s death again ignited national outrage in 2023, and Sonya Massey’s 2024 killing after she called 911 for help quickly became another nationally watched police-violence case.

In this photo, an armed white man strides authoritatively between Black detainees being moved to a detention center. During the race massacre on June 1, 1921 in Tuilsa Oaklahoma, as many as five hundred white men were appointed as special deputies with the power to arrest and even kill Black people (Tulsa Historical Society and Museum).

Despite these alarming volume of cases, America wants credit now for finally doing in 2022 what it should have done generations earlier, but you don’t get moral applause for arriving at justice nearly a century late. You don’t get to celebrate yourself for finally outlawing what you deliberately tolerated. You certainly don’t get to call yourself righteous when the record shows that, for decade after decade, this nation protected a system of racial violence more than the victims who suffered from it.

This is why many Black Americans hear lofty speeches about freedom and democracy here and abroad, and feel nothing but insult. We know this country’s other language, like abandonment, selective justice, white tears, white innocence, white delay, white excuse, and Black graves. We know the language America, but they expect and demand patriotism from those of us who have been betrayed.

The lynching era was not an unfortunate side chapter in American history. It was America’s history, its original sin, and the foundation from which the American economy was initially built. Not just that though, but it was a domestic theater of racial terror that helped define the nation after Reconstruction. It was a long-running campaign of public cruelty meant to discipline Black existence, crush Black ambition, erase Black citizenship, and remind Black communities that freedom on paper did not mean safety in practice.

The federal government knew. The Senate knew. The presidents knew. America knew. Still, it let it happen. That’s the forbidden truth about the United States. The foundation beneath the myth of “justice and equality for all.” Why would any conscious Black person willingly paricipate in a war to protect a nation whose history of brutality and barbarism agionst them has been perpetuasl since the birth of this nation? Fighting in a war? For who? who what cause? This is why this blog series must be written.

America can preach to anybody else around the globe about civilization, law, order, democracy, or human rights, it must answer for the killing fields it allowed here at home. America did not merely fail Black people during the lynching era. It protected the machinery of our slaughter. It gave killers time, cover, custom, and confidence. It allowed senators to filibuster our humanity, presidents to sidestep our suffering, and generations of white America to pretend that Black death was somebody else’s problem.

So no, Black people do not owe this country blind loyalty, automatic patriotism, or unthinking reverence for symbols that flew over our terror. A nation that let thousands be tortured and murdered without justice does not get to demand devotion from the descendants of the betrayed. They don’t get to request our blood for their wars to perpetuate a system that has never loved her Black citizens. Until America fully tells the truth, fully owns its guilt, and fully repairs what it deliberately allowed, every sermon it preaches about freedom is stained with the blood of Black Americans.

I’m Journalisty and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

The Shame of Duson, LA and It’s Rotten Justice System: Who Failed Keiosha Felix, the Mising Teen Mom Who Vanished 14 Years Ago

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. She left behind her little girl. The FBI and other public case summaries still list her as missing, and nearly fourteen years later, there has still been no justice, no closure, and no honest accounting for how badly this case was handled.

From the beginning, this case carried the stench of failure. Public records shows that several people tied to Keiosha’s disappearance were arrested in 2012, including her aunt Patricia Andrus, her cousin Portia Felix, and Leon Wilkerson Jr., the boyfriend of Keiosha’s aunt. Public case summaries also state that Keiosha had allegedly accused Wilkerson of sexually assaulting her before she disappeared. there also were rumors that Wilkerson may have fathered Keiosha’s child. Those are not small details. They’re flashing red lights that should have sent state case workers into action, if only to insure the protection of a teen mother under state custody.

The weekend before she vanished, Keiosha got a weekend pass to visit her paternal aunt Patricia Andrus. She was last seen leaving Patricia’s Duson, Louisiana home. She has never been seen or heard from again. Keiosha was initially classified as a runaway just as most cases involving missing Black kids are. She had run away once in the past, but she was back after two days. Additionally, Patricia’s daughter (Keiosha’s cousin) Portia Felix claimed to have heard from Keiosha after April 30th, and that Keiosha allegedly said she was “just fine”.  Yet, despite arrests, headlines, and all the noise that surrounded this case, Keiosha was never found.

From left to right: Leon Wilkerson (aunt’s boyfriend), Patricia Andrus (her aunt), and Portia Felix (the cousin).

However, many relatives on Keiosha’s mother’s side have stated that Keiosha would not leave her one-year-old daughter behind. Keiosha was also a frequent social media user, yet she had not accessed any of her social media accounts since the day she was last seen.That information makes the case even more alarming and creates suspicion whether something happened to the teen. There should also be public outrage, not because it was another missing Black teen, but because the manner in which the teen’s case was fumbled by the authorities.

It all of three months, before Keiosha was reclassified as an endangered missing person. Throughout the investigation, the Duson Police Department learned more information about Keiosha’s relationship with her aunt Patricia and Patricia’s boyfriend, Leon Wilkerson Jr. It was discovered that prior to her disappearance, Keiosha had allegedly told her aunt Patricia that Leon had sexually assaulted her. Patricia never reported this to the authorities, nor did she tell investigators about it after Keiosha went missing. That alone should disturb anybody paying attention to this child’s case.

In July of the same year, Leon was arrested and charged with rape and second-degree kidnapping in connection with Keiosha’s disappearance. Patricia was arrested and charged with improper supervision of a minor and accessory to rape. Keiosha’s cousin Portia, who told investigators that she heard from Keiosha after her disappearance, was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice. Also,  in August 2012, Leon’s brother Ronald Wilkerson was also arrested and charged with kidnapping in connection with Keiosha’s case. It seemed that investigators were closer to getting their answers about what happened to Keiosha. Then, the following month, the investigation took an unexpected turn. This is where the focus from finding out what happened to a missing teen mother, shifted the following month, and the investigation took an unexpected turn

At that time, the Duson Police Department was handling the case, and the police chief was Frank Andrew. Lt. Gerald Credeur, who was then the assistant chief, was the lead investigator, but instead of this case moving toward truth, it spiraled into controversy. Credeur was suspiciously removed from the investigation, suspended, and later fired. Public records says he was accused of unlawful arrests, illegal searches and seizures, and false testimony. After that, the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office took over the case.

The Board of Alderman determined that Credeur did, in fact, make the searches and the arrests without probable cause and he was fired the following month. The charges against Leon and Ronald Wilkerson were dropped. The charges were eventually dropped against Andrus and Felix also. This leaves so many unanswered questions related to this missing teen case. Did Lt. Credeur botch the case on his own? What did Credeur falsely testify about? What basis were the Wilkerson brothers arrest on? Were the rape allegations true? Did Patricia Andrus actually tell investigators that Keiosha told her about the alleged rape? Way too many unanswered questions, and it appears that the public has heard more about Credeur’s firing than the progress of the teen’s case.

When a missing child investigation turns into a mess of arrests, internal discipline, firings, and a transfer of control to another agency, that is not justice working smoothly. It’s a warning sign that something went terribly wrong. There have long been rumors that Chief Frank Andrew may have had some relationship or connection to people initially arrested in the case. But based on the publicly available reporting I could verify, I did not find confirmed evidence establishing that Frank Andrew was related to those suspects. That point should be stated plainly and clearly. But,the rumor exists, it remains unverified in the sources I reviewed. What is verified is that the investigation became compromised, the lead investigator was fired, the case changed hands, and Keiosha Felix is still missing.

Whether the rot in this case came from incompetence, internal politics, bad police work, or something even darker, the result has been the same. A missing Black teenage mother has gone almost fourteen years without answers. That’s not just tragic. It’s disgraceful.

Images of young Keiosha Felix pictured with her baby.

What makes this case feel even more troubling is what happened in August 2025. I personally made contact with former lead investigator Gerald Credeur. In our messages, he agreed to a telephone interview and even discussed timing, saying he would be willing to talk. But when the scheduled time came, it passed without a word from him. No call. No explanation. No follow-up. That silence does not prove wrongdoing, and I will not pretend it does. But in a case already soaked in unanswered questions, his failure to follow through only adds another layer of unease. It leaves the public to wonder: is it simple avoidance, or is there still fear about what might be said. or what might happen if people start talking too freely? That is food for thought.

Keiosha Felix was not some disposable child whose life should be buried beneath departmental drama, legal technicalities, and whispered rumors. She was a young girl. She was a mother. She was someone whose life mattered, and the system that should have protected her instead delivered confusion, contradiction, and collapse.Fourteen years later, the central truth remains unchanged, Keiosha Felix did not fail the system. The system failed Keiosha. Until the full truth comes out, the stain of that failure belongs not to the missing child, but to every institution and every adult who let this case drift into darkness. I remain committed to finding out what happened to Keiosha and will speak with anyone regarding her disappearance. there is something seriously rotten in the Louisiana justice system.

I’m Journalist and Blogger David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

Not Far removed: I Remember the Fires of 1968, and America Still Refuses to Learn

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 our block carrying items they had looted from the business district up on Whitelock Avenue at the top of our street. I remember National Guardsmen walking down the middle of the block with rifles pointed in the air while clearing the street. I remember fires burning across the city. I remember fear. I remember unrest. I remember a country coming apart in real time at just 2-years-old.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated on April 4, 1968, and by April 8, the pain, rage, and hopelessness in Black communities had spilled into the streets. That era was not ancient history. It was in my generation. Too many people speak about the Civil Rights era as if it belongs to some long-dead America, as if racism was buried with the past, as if the hatred, exclusion, police abuse, economic deprivation, and racial contempt that fueled those uprisings somehow disappeared. It has not. We are not far removed from that America at all. In truth, many of its foundations and social ideologies are still standing.

What some white Americans still refuse to understand is that riots and looting do not happen in a vacuum. They are not born simply from “bad behavior,” moral failure, or some manufactured idea that Black people are naturally disorderly. That kind of thinking is itself rooted in racism. What happened in cities like Baltimore after Dr. King’s murder was the explosion of generations of injustice, neglect, humiliation, and pain.

When people are locked out of power, denied dignity, brutalized by the systems sworn to protect them, and then told to remain peaceful while their lives are treated as disposable, eventually something breaks. Yet, even today, some still talk about the rioting and looting of 1968 with more outrage than they ever speak about the racism that gave birth to it. That’s the hypocrisy.

They condemn the response, but remain silent about the conditions. They criticize broken windows, but not broken humanity. They mourn property, but rarely mourn the decades of racial terror, segregation, disinvestment, and systemic abuse that made those streets a powder keg in the first place. That’s why America still struggles with race now. Too many people want the comfort of reconciliation without the truth of accountability. Too many want racial peace without racial justice. Too many want to lecture Black communities about behavior, while refusing to confront the historical and present-day forces that have poisoned relationships between the races for generations.

If we truly want to live better together, then honesty has to come first. We must tell the truth about what racism has done to this country. We must tell the truth about why cities burned. We must tell the truth about how white supremacy shaped housing, schools, policing, employment, and opportunity. We must tell the truth that racial wounds do not heal just because time has passed.

Living better together requires more than slogans. It requires empathy. It requires humility. It requires that people stop asking only, “Why were they rioting?” and start asking, “What kind of nation creates the conditions where despair and rage become that deep?” That is the real question we should be asking.

My memory of Baltimore in flames is not just a memory of destruction. It is a memory of unresolved pain in America. And 58 years later, this country still has not fully dealt with the sickness that put those flames in the streets.

We are not far removed from that racism. We are still wrestling with it. Still suffering from it. Still being divided by it. Until this nation develops the courage to understand the why behind the anger, not just condemn the anger itself, we will keep repeating the same cycles under different names.

Dr. King is gone. The smoke from 1968 has long cleared. But the moral failure that helped ignite it still lingers, and that should disturb every one of us.

Relisha Rudd Would Be 20 Now: A Child Vanished, and the Silence Still Echoes

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 unsolved, and this country still has no answers for what happened to an 8-year-old Black child who disappeared in plain sight.

Relisha was last seen on March 1, 2014. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children still lists her as missing, and the FBI still offers a $25,000 dollar reward for information leading to her location and return. That alone says everything that needs to be said. The years have simply passed, the headlines have faded, but Relisha has still not been found. This should trouble every adult with children.

There is something especially cruel about the passage of time in cases like this. Every birthday becomes another open wound. Every year that goes by is another reminder that a vulnerable child vanished, and the system that should have protected her couldn’t. Relisha’s name should have never become a symbol of neglect, indifference, and institutional failure, but that’s exactly what happened. Her disappearance exposed a devastating truth, that some children are failed long before they are ever reported missing.

Let’s tell the truth plainly. If this had been a child of a different ethnicity, from a different background, this case would have drawn outrage on a national level. Relisha Rudd was a little Black girl, and like far too many missing Black children, her pain never received the sustained national urgency it deserved. Her life mattered. Her disappearance matters, and the fact that she remains missing in 2026 (12 years later) is a moral indictment of a society that too often looks away when Black children vanish.

Today, Relisha would be 20. That fact is as heartbreaking as it is infuriating. Because behind that number is the life she never got to live. She is a child who was supposed to be protected. Behind that number is a family still waiting, still hurting, still carrying the unbearable weight of not knowing what happened to her.

The sad reality is not just that Relisha Rudd disappeared. It’s that she still has not been found after all these years, after all the public promises, and until she is found. This case remains an open wound, not just for her family, but for every person who still believes missing children deserve more than candlelight memorials, faded posters, and empty words. Relisha Rudd would be 20 now, and America still owes that little girl answers.

The Suspicious Adults Around Her Still Cast a Dark Shadow

This case has always carried a deeply disturbing cloud over it, because the circumstances around the adults in Relisha’s life were troubling from the beginning. Authorities say Relisha was last seen with Kahlil Tatum, a 51-year-old shelter janitor who had become close to her family while they were living at the D.C. General shelter. He was not some random stranger who crossed her path for a moment. He was someone who had access, familiarity, trust, and that makes this case even more chilling.

The suspiciousness surrounding the situation only deepens from there. NBC Washington reported that Relisha’s mother had allowed Tatum to take her, and police said Tatum even posed as a doctor to explain Relisha’s absence from school. On top of that, no one, not family, not shelter staff, nor school officials reported Relisha missing until March 19, even though she had already been out of school for weeks. Those are not small details. They are the kinds of facts that leave the public asking hard, painful questions about who knew what, who ignored what, and how a vulnerable little girl was allowed to slip so far out of sight.

Then there is Tatum himself, the so-called family friend at the center of this nightmare. The FBI says authorities believed Relisha was with him before he was later found dead. Investigators also searched intensely after video showed Relisha with him at a D.C. motel, and reporting from local news outlets said that investigators believe he killed her before taking his own life, even though her body has never been recovered. That is a brutal, unfinished horror of this case. The man at the center of suspicion is dead, but Relisha is still missing, and the truth was buried with too many unanswered questions.

Relisha Rudd & Khalil Tatum



This is why Relisha Rudd’s case still stings so deeply. It is not only the tragedy of a missing child. It is the tragedy of a child surrounded by adults, systems, and circumstances that all raised red flags and yet she still vanished. The suspicious behavior, the delayed reporting, the false explanations and the easy access this older man had to her life! All of it paints a picture that is as enraging as it is heartbreaking.

Relisha would be 20 now. She should be somewhere living, growing, becoming. Instead, she is still missing, still waiting to be found, and still waiting for the full truth to come to light. That’s the sad reality and until she is brought home, this case remains an indictment of every person and every system that failed to protect her.

I’m Journalist And Blogger David B. Adams\

The People’s Champion Blog

Iran’s Oil, American Greed, and the Continued Desire to Expand Western Imperialism: How the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis May Be Reborn

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 democratic nation, removed Mohammad Mossadegh (who was democratically elected) from power, jailed him, and propped up the Shah of Iran, a ruler many saw as an American puppet placed in Iran to protect foreign interests, not Iranian freedom.

For years, Iran lived under that arrangement, with its resources and future tied to the demands of outside powers. Then in 1979, the pressure finally exploded. The Iranian people revolted and Revolution came, the Shah fell, and 66 American hostages were initially taken (14 of those hostages were African-American and were released by the Iranians). But that hostage crisis did not come out of nowhere. it didn’t start at the front gate of the U.S. Embassy. It came out of years of foreign interference, control, and the bitterness that grows when a nation and it’s indigenous people are denied the right to truly govern themselves.

A scene from the movie documenting the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-81.

This is the part that Western Media and powerful Zionist has never wanted said too loudly. Instead, our Zionist controlled media has always painted the Iranians, those of Mideastern ethnicity, and just about any foreign civilization resisting and refusing to bow to Western Imperialism, as terrorist or fanatical. It’s not difficult to see how America’s enemies are always other countries with vast resources imperative to Western interest. They are always the bad guys while America never paints herself as the bully.

More importantly. the struggle over Iran has never just been about diplomacy, peace, or security. It has always been about oil, power, and who gets to control both (the old Imperial playbook mirroring the colonization of other mineral and natural resource enriched nations). The rich and the Western elite have been chasing the control over Iranian resources ever since Iran tried to take its own wealth back. What we are seeing today is not some new conflict. It is the continuation of an old one, rooted in greed, impirialism, and the refusal to let Iran stand fully on its own.

Let the record be told clearly, plainly, and pray that the lives of young serviceman won’t fall as ponds in a war rooted in the pursuit of wealth by the Western Imperialist.

I’m Journalist David B. Adams

The People’s Champion Blog

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