African Papers Express Outrage At US Police Lynching Of Black Men (Pictute)

For many black Americans, the election of their first black president signalled an end to the bad, old racist days and a beginning of the good, new tolerant society. But alas, 6 years on, black people’s lives – especially the lives of young black men in America – are as little valued and are as likely to end at the barrel of a white policeman’s gun in Obama’s America as they were before him.

On his way to his grandmother’s house, “Mike-Mike”, the name his family called him, was set upon by a white policeman who emptied his gun into the young man because he was jay-walking – that is, walking in the street instead of on the pavement.

For John Crawford, too, death came at the end of the barrel of a white policeman’s gun. On 5 August, four days before Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, the 22-year-old Crawford was shot and killed by two white policemen in a department store in Beavercreek, Ohio, while inspecting a toy pellet gun he was interested in buying.

“He looked as though he was going to go violently,” one of the policemen who killed John Crawford said in the local press. But a video recording revealed that Crawford was shot without warning and that he was talking on a cell phone to his family, who say they heard when he was gunned down by the police and when he took his last breath.

Like John Crawford and Michael Brown, Eric Garner was also killed by a white policeman. But Garner did not die at the end of the barrel of a gun. He died an even more primitive and brutal death.

The sickly, overweight, 43-year-old asthmatic, who also suffered from diabetes, died after being wrestled to the ground in a New York street by a gang of white policemen, one of whom locked his arm around Garner’s neck in a deadly choke-hold.

The choke-hold, which is banned by the NYPD, crushed Garner’s windpipe, stopped his breathing, and killed the husband and father of six. MOREHERE