Category Archives: Social Justice

A Carolina Lynching, But No Carolina Justice: John Jeffress Remembrance Day, August 25, 1920

In the version of this report published in the Charlotte NC News, additional details were included:

Sheriff Story [sic] and his six assistants started with Jeffress to the courthouse one block away. Arriving at the spot where Ray was killed, a mob formed around the Officers and their prisoner. There was a sudden surge forward and in the twinkling of an eye, according to the sheriff, the prisoner had been taken from the officers and was placed in an automobile and rushed away. There was not a shot fired: not even a gun drawn during the minute scuffle between the mob and officers. 

Sheriff Storey said tonight that resistance would have been folly as the mob was made up of between 25 and 50 determined men. There were at least 150 additional men nearby whose sympathies were with the- mob, he stated tonight. Answering a. direct question, Sheriff Story declared that he did not know anyone in the mob. The man who led the mob and took the prisoner away, the sheriff said, must have just moved into the county and was not known to him. 

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Who Will Save Our Bacon? China Is Winning Its War With The U.S.

The Smithfield Packing Company has its main meat processing plant in Tar Heel NC, a hamlet just off Interstate 95 near Fayetteville.

This photo hardly does justice to the ginormous megascale of the operation. The plant covers 973,000 square feet. Inside it approximately 32,000 hogs per day are slaughtered and processed, more than 3-million plus per year. It’s credibly reputed to be the largest hog slaughterhouse in the world.

That’s a heck of a lot of bacon. And it’s owned by a Chinese company, the WH Group, which snapped it up in 2013 for a mere $4-plus billion.

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Update: Shooting Holes In Justice — Emmett Till & Jimmie Lee Jackson Memorials

Jackson was buried in a small cemetery near Alabama Highway 14 on the outskirts of Marion. His headstone is impressively carved with a figure of Jesus keeping vigil.
It too has been hit  by numerous bullets, from the one that knocked a chunk off the top, to seven or eight that close examination here reveals.
Emmett Till’s killers walked completely free. The Alabama trooper who shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Fowler, shot and killed a second unarmed young black man in 1966. But forty-five years later, Fowler was convicted of manslaughter, and served several months in jail, before being released due to ill health.

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Full-Court Press: Apres Kennedy, Le Deluge?

So let’s consider a few of those cases that are now in deeper peril.

At the top of my non-lawyer’s list is Obergefell v. Hodges, the  5-4 decision legalizing same sex marriage. Kennedy wrote that decision, which came down three years ago this week. Now the door is open for a  5-4 reversal.

This year it was wedding cakes. Next time: the whole shebang. And as for trans rights?

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