Imagine This!

Our grandfather’s parents (#GREATGrandparents) were slaves. He was fortunate enough to have earned a $ or two #sharecropping…🪙🪙💰 On the back…both coins read #InGodWeTrust….#Amen. 🙏🏽 Thank you GrandDaddy for your BEing 🧬 #August2023 🌞👁️🧘🏽☮️

The library was not open yet, so he sat down on the grass outside to wait for it. Somebody looked out of a window and called the police to report a suspicious Black male who might have a gun. Neli Latson did not have a gun. He had autism. Stafford, Virginia. The morning of 24 May 2010. He was eighteen. At 8:37am the sheriff's office took a call about a suspicious male possibly in possession of a firearm. Investigators later confirmed the caller had not actually seen a gun. There was no gun, because there was no gun to see. He was waiting for the library. A school resource officer approached him and asked for identification. What happened in the next minute is genuinely disputed and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The deputy said Latson attacked him, breaking his ankle. Latson said the deputy used racial slurs and assaulted him. A jury believed the deputy. He was convicted of assaulting a law enforcement officer and related offences. Here is what is not disputed. He is autistic. A psychiatrist testified he had Asperger's, intermittent explosive disorder and attention deficit disorder. His IQ was measured at 69 — one point above the line for intellectual disability. A young autistic man with an IQ of 69 was approached without warning by an armed stranger demanding identification, and reacted badly. Then the system took him apart. After a later jail incident he was tasered, strapped into a restraint chair for close to nine hours, and held in solitary confinement — altogether, across his incarceration, for something approaching a year. Solitary confinement. For an autistic man with an IQ of 69. Governor Terry McAuliffe granted him a conditional pardon in 2015. Governor Ralph Northam granted him a full pardon in June 2021, which ended his supervision but left the convictions on his record. Two governors of Virginia looked at this case and decided it should not have happened. It started because a man sat down on some grass outside a library that was not open yet. Neli Latson was 18, autistic, and waiting for a library to open when someone called police on him for looking “suspicious.” No gun was found. He was arrested, convicted, and subjected to prolonged solitary confinement. If this hit you hard, get our Ebook to discover more stories of injustice that must never be forgotten savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr… Image source: Neil's family

….heard of ‘Shit’s creek without a paddle’…✅ have you heard of him/her before? 🤔🤫🤫🤫🙏🏾🙌🏾🫶🏾☮️🫴🏾🍎

He drove his wife to one of the best hospitals in America for a planned caesarean. A routine one. Her second. Charles Johnson watched her blood collect in a catheter bag for ten hours while he asked for help. Kira Johnson died at 2:22am. Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, 12th April 2016. Kira Johnson was 39. She spoke five languages, raced cars, ran marathons. The caesarean was scheduled. Everything about it was routine. Her son Langston was delivered at midday. By the afternoon her husband could see blood in her catheter. He told a nurse. He was told they would check. He asked again. And again. A CT scan was ordered and then not performed. He has described being told, at one point, that his wife was simply not a priority right now. He stood in a corridor for ten hours asking people to look at his wife. They took her back to theatre just after midnight. There were three litres of blood in her abdomen. She died shortly after. Her son Langston was twelve hours old. Charles Johnson has spent the decade since as one of the most effective advocates in American maternal health. He founded 4Kira4Moms. He has testified before Congress. The federal Black maternal health legislation introduced in recent years carries work he pushed for. He talks about one thing more than any other, and it is not the medicine. It is the ten hours. He was standing right there, in the building, awake, articulate, asking. And it made no difference at all.