By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, Cleveland Urban News.Com, and the Kathy Wray Coleman Online News Blog.com, Ohio's most read digital Black newspaper and newspaper blog. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com.
Coleman is a community activist, legal and political reporter, and a 22-year investigative journalist who trained at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio for 17 years.
(www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com)
CLEVELAND, Ohio- Greater Cleveland community activists groups and area college students will rally tomorrow, Tuesday, April 14 against mass incarceration and police murder beginning at 3 pm where they will gather in downtown Cleveland outside in the back of the Cleveland Public Main Library at 325 Superior Avenue. The group will then march to Cleveland City Hall, organizers said yesterday. (Call Carol at (216) 932-3474 for more information).
The event is part of a national action in cities across the nation sponsored by the Stop Mass Incarceration Network.
One in every 31 adults of the population is under some form of correctional control, such as jail, prison, probation, parole or house arrest, a national NAACP study found, many of them of whom are low income, and people of color.
Affiliated greater Cleveland activists groups include Puncture the Silence and Revolution Books, who are the organizing groups, and Black on Black Crime Inc, the Imperial Women Coalition, the Greater Cleveland Immigrant Support Network, Stop Targeting Ohio's Poor, and the Black Man's Army.
The rally will address police killings nationally, like Sean Bell, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott, and Cleveland police killings of many, including 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Brandon Jones, Malissa Williams, Timothy Russell, Daniel Ficker, and Kenneth Smith.
Data show that Blacks are disproportionately prosecuted and sentenced, and they receive harsher sentences than their White counterparts from the majority White 34 judges of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. A Cleveland NAACP commissioned study that confirms such is gathering dust.
Cuyahoga County, which includes the majority Black major metropolitan city of Cleveland, is roughly 29 percent Black, and is the largest of 88 counties of Ohio.
Blacks are also getting harassed and are denied indigent counsel in Cleveland suburbs, including Cleveland Heights, Berea and Bedford municipal courts, all with support from officials of the Cleveland NAACP, which is essentially shut down and under investigation by national headquarters.
(www.clevelandurbannews.com) / (www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com)
