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“Another Wasted Life.” That’s the name of a remarkable new song by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens. She released a video of the song on October 2 to mark International Wrongful Conviction Day. The song was inspired by Kalief Browder, a Bronx resident who died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22 after being detained at Rikers Island jail for nearly three years, after being falsely accused at the age of 16 of stealing a backpack. He was held in solitary confinement for two years and was repeatedly assaulted by guards and other prisoners.
In the video for “Another Wasted Life,” Rhiannon Giddens features 22 people who were wrongly incarcerated. Together, they collectively served more than 500 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. The video includes two men, David Bryant and Tyrone Jones, who each spent 40 years in prison. Another seven of the men each spent over 25 years locked up after wrongful convictions. Rhiannon Giddens made the video in partnership with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.
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As part of our Juneteenth special broadcast, we feature our interview with pioneering musical artist Rhiannon Giddens, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her opera Omar, about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who was sold into slavery in the 1800s.
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We feature a special broadcast marking the Juneteenth federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”
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Democracy Now! Wednesday, June 19, 2024
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We host a roundtable conversation on Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s historic pardons of 175,000 marijuana-related convictions in the state, including drug paraphernalia-related convictions. Jheanelle Wilkins is the chair of Maryland’s Legislative Black Caucus; Maritza Perez Medina is the director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance; and Jason Ortiz, who was himself arrested at the age of 16 for cannabis possession, is director of strategic initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project. “It’s incumbent upon us to make sure we take action to repair the harms” of the war on drugs, says Wilkins. Maryland legalized the use of recreational marijuana in 2022, but the mass pardons provide historic relief for those who faced criminal consequences while the drug was illegal. Moore says he timed the pardons for the week of Juneteenth, the federal holiday on June 19 to mark the end of slavery in the United States — a symbolic move that underlines the disproportionate impact of drug criminalization on Black communities. Our guests call on other states and the federal government to follow Maryland’s example, as we also discuss the Biden administration’s recent descheduling of marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule III drug. “This needs to go further,” says Medina. “We want to make sure we’re also focusing on community investment and retroactive relief,” adds Ortiz.
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Headlines for June 18, 2024; Ahead of Juneteenth, Maryland Pardons 175K Pot Convictions, Seeking to Remedy Harms of War on Drugs; Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Loses Univ. of Minnesota Job Offer for Saying Israel Is Committing Genocide
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Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland says he may not attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in July, as some other Democrats have already vowed to boycott the speech. “My main commitment at this point is to see a ceasefire to end the bloodshed, to get the hostages returned and to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza,” says Raskin. He says Israel had a right to retaliate after the October 7 attack led by Hamas, but “only within the constraints of international law,” and says there needs to be a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and end “the nightmare that has been going on for decades now.”
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Former President Donald Trump returned to the U.S. Capitol last week for the first time since the January 6 insurrection in 2021, where he met with Republican lawmakers including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and reportedly discussed how to quash his 34 felony convictions stemming from his New York fraud case, as well as how to punish prosecutors involved in the various cases against him. “His return to Capitol Hill showed that he has cemented his political stranglehold over the Republican Party,” says Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland. “While they are attacking the rule of law … they’re doing everything they can to compromise the judiciary and to destroy the rule of law in our country.”
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The Israeli military on Sunday announced a daily “tactical pause” in its attacks on Rafah to allow humanitarian relief to enter the Gaza Strip, after systematically blocking aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. While a full ceasefire is still vital, “any pause in the bombing is good news for children,” says UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, speaking to Democracy Now! from Rafah. “The physical and psychological exhaustion they face is almost impossible to capture,” he says, characterizing Israel’s offensive as “a war on children.”
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Democracy Now! Monday, June 17, 2024
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We continue our conversation with Christian Cooper, author of Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World and host of the Emmy Award-winning show Extraordinary Birder. Cooper shares stories of his life and career, including his longtime LGBTQ activism and how his father’s work as a science educator inspired his lifetime passion for birdwatching. “Birding forces you outside of yourself [and] whatever your woes are,” says Cooper. “It makes you feel connected to the whole planet. It engages your senses, your intellect. It is incredibly healing. … For people whose history is about being enslaved, for us to be able to relate to this bird, it’s liberating.”
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