By Rosetta Miller-Perry “Man, I was hitting him with straight haymakers, dog,” a cop can be heard saying as his bodycam footage rolled. It went on that way for about twenty minutes, with multiple officers milling around and discussing their beating of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, who was then laying on the ground against a car. The usual narratives are in play: he should have complied (he did), he shouldn’t have run (it didn’t justify being beaten anyway), the officers feared for their lives. But it was Tyre Nichols’s life that was truly in danger. Upon viewing bodycam…
Author: Rosetta Miller Perry
By Rosetta Miller-Perry Unless you are old enough to remember the 50s and 60s, then such names as George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Ross Barnett, Richard Russell, or Strom Thurmond (before he switched parties) won’t mean anything. But to those of us who are veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and those of us who were living in that time, these people were the embodiment of legislative racism. They were governors and/or legislators who actively aided, endorsed and were advocates of Jim Crow laws, preventing Blacks from voting, protecting criminals including people who participated in murder and lynching, and being both…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry If he had not been struck down by a racist assassin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 94 this year, born January 15, 1929. But as the nation begins its annual celebration of his birthday which became a national holiday in 1993, the Tennessee Tribune feels it is more than appropriate to ask this simple question: what would Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. think if he were alive today? I think he’d be happy at the incremental progress that Black Americans have made in the decades since his death. There are more Black…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry Looking back on 2022, it was a year marked by both triumph and heartbreak for Black Americans, as well as all people of color and poor folks. This nation makes glacial progress in the areas of social justice and economic opportunity, while constantly being negatively affected by those in power who continually seek to turn back the clock, most notably led by the Tennessee Congressional delegation in Washington. This group remains determined to make Tennessee the new Mississippi, championing ideas and measures that are repressive, backward, and hate-filled, while also consistently displaying in their public discourse an…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry NASHVILLE, TN — Through politics, some citizens make decisions but there are far too many white men who have political and personal power and control the lives of many US citizens as they gain the ability to influence people so that they will have more material wealth. Politics is supposed to be about public service, yet far too many politicians serve in their own narrow ideologies to increase their bank accounts. We have a group of elected officials in Washington, as well as our governor, who believe that they were elected to be acolytes and…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry Black voters in Georgia, along with young people and some enlightened whites, prevented a disaster from happening last week in Atlanta. The Republican Party had enlisted the services of a former football hero turned disgraced front man in Herschel Walker to run for the Senate against the imminently more qualified Rev. Raphael Warnock. The GOP knew that no white man or woman was going to beat Warnock, so they decided to pick a totally inexperienced and unqualified Black front man to serve the same purpose: get Warnock out of office and put another Donald Trump sycophant in…
By Rosetta Miller Perry The calendar may say it’s 2022, but in the minds of some Tennessee Republican legislators it might as well be 1852 or 1962 in terms of how little regard they have for Black institutions and officials. A few days ago the state legislature held what amounted to the ugliest combination of a Salem witch trial and a kangaroo court in a situation where an HBCU that has historically been denied its rightful funding was now seeking legislative help for a crisis no one in or out of the state anticipated. Across the nation HBCU attendance is…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry The holiday season is a time for reflection and reunion with friends and family. But it’s also a time to give thanks, and Black America has much to be thankful for this year, even in the face of still dealing with on a daily basis the debilitating and devastating impact of systemic racism. But this nation just had an election and though everything didn’t go as we would hope, a lot more went right than wrong. The best things in terms of a direct impact on Black Americans were the victories by candidates in key offices around…
By Rosetta Miller-PerryPublisher, The Tennessee Tribune Despite all the impressive sounding rhetoric that you hear during Black History Month and some of the recent markers and streets getting new names, African American accomplishments and landmarks are not given the exposure and attention they deserve. There are some 95,000 entries across the country that carry this designation from the National Register of Historic Places as “sites deemed worthy of preservation by the federal government.” But as revealed in a recent issue of the New Yorker, Black landmarks have been horribly ignored in the National Register process. The major mission of historic…
By Rosetta Miller-Perry As editor of the longest running African-American news institution in Nashville, I have built a reputation for shining lights on the facts: how business decisions made downtown affect our community; how referendums that appear on the ballot from time to time have impact on how we live, work, and play; and yes, how important it is that we participate in the political process. This paper has both calmed the storms of politics and, more than often, ruffled some feathers. To our credit, we walk and work in the tradition of African-American newspapers who, for nearly two hundred…