Jim Brown & Me and The Serious Dangers of AI
UN Critical of US Police Brutality, Gangs in the Sheriffs Dept., Ted Cruz Investigates Beer, Laura Ingraham Won't Apologize, Paul Simon Sings
Last week, Jim Brown, my close friend for over 50 years, died. To me, it felt like a sudden power outage when an entire city goes dark and silent. Jim’s lifelong pursuit of civil rights, regardless of the personal and professional costs, not only illuminated the country. He lit a path in my life that I have been following ever since I met him.
Dozens of news stories have recounted his biographical highlights. But I wanted to bring you something more personal. Here is an excerpt from my book, Becoming Kareem, in which I describe attending the Cleveland Summit that Jim had organized. I was only 20 years old then, famous for playing basketball at UCLA, but still in search of how I could use my fame to benefit the community as much as myself.
I felt disconcerted about my fame because I didn’t yet know what to do with it. I had a lot of political opinions and now I had a national platform. But I didn’t just want to ramble on about injustice or I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I would be dismissed as just another whining college kid.
Fortunately, that changed in May when football great Jim Brown, who was now a Hollywood actor, invited me to join a group of black athletes and activists in Cleveland to discuss Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted. At twenty, I would be the youngest person at what would become known as the Cleveland Summit. The meeting was to determine whether or not we would publicly support Ali in his refusal to be drafted. This was by no means a rubber-stamp committee. Several of the participants had been in the military. Brown himself had belonged to the Army ROTC and graduated from Syracuse University as a second lieutenant. Attorney Carl Stokes, who in a few months would become the mayor of Cleveland, making him the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, had served in World War II, just like Coach Wooden.
The summit was not even supposed to happen. It had started as a simple phone call to Brown from Ali’s manager, Herbert Muhammad. Muhammad wanted Brown to help convince Ali to drop his refusal to be drafted to avoid the severe loss of income that could financially wipe Ali out, not to mention the public outcry. Muhammad was torn between his religious convictions, which were the same as Ali’s, and his desire to protect his friend from ruin. Ali was only twenty-five, so two years in the army wouldn’t drastically affect his boxing career. To Muhammad, Brown seemed like a good choice to convince Ali because he had been an outspoken activist for years, so Ali would listen, but Brown also was partners in the company that promoted Ali’s fights, so he had a financial stake in having Ali fighting.
But Brown took his role seriously. He invited me and the rest of the summit members to sit as a jury in assessing Ali’s sincerity and commitment. Every athlete responded by immediately agreeing to come at his own expense. I was excited to finally be part of the political movement in a more direct and active way. I also wanted to help Ali if I could because he made me feel proud to be African-American.
On June 4, 1967, we gathered in the offices of the Negro Industrial Economic Union (NIEU), which soon became the Black Economic Union (BEU). Brown was the co-developer of the BEU and I volunteered at the BEU Los Angeles chapter. Despite our admiration for Ali, we grilled him for hours. Many on the group had come with their minds already made up to persuade Ali to accept his military service. The discussions became pretty heated as questions and answers were fired back and forth. Pretty soon, though, we all realized Ali was not going to change his mind. For two hours he lectured us on Islam and black pride and his religious conviction that the Vietnam War was wrong.
We were all well aware that in the early days of the Vietnam War, kids who could afford to go to college were exempted from the draft, which left poor kids, many of them black, forced to go fight. Ali argued that it was a war against people of color fought by people of color for a country who denied them their basic civil rights.
In the end, he convinced us and we decided to support him. Bill Russell summed it up for all of us, “I envy Muhammad Ali. ... He has something I have never been able to attain and something very few people possess. He has absolute and sincere faith. I'm not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is better equipped than anyone I know to withstand the trials in store for him. What I'm worried about is the rest of us.”
We did our best at that Cleveland Summit to support Ali’s legal fight and to publicize the injustice of the draft, but we knew how powerless we were against those promoting the war. Nevertheless, I was thrilled that I was finally doing something important rather than just complaining. That feeling of wanting be part of a movement to ensure justice and opportunities for all Americans hasn’t left me since. In January of 2017, 50 years after the summit, Jim Brown and I joined several other athletes and activists for a “Words to Action” symposium at San Jose State University’s Institute for the Study of Sport, Society, and Social Change. Together we discussed with the audience ways to become more politically active.
Being at that summit and hearing Ali’s articulate defense of his moral beliefs and his willingness to suffer for them reinvigorated my commitment to become even more politically involved.
The great thing about great men is that long after their light has dimmed, their deeds still light our way.
US must tackle police brutality against Black people head-on, UN experts say (The Guardian)
SUMMARY: The US must move beyond piecemeal reform and slogan-making and tackle the ongoing scourge of police brutality and law enforcement’s discrimination against Black people, a United Nations mission has concluded at the end of a historic two-week tour of the country.
UN experts completed their first official visit to the US as part of a system of global inquiries set up by the human rights council after the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020. As they ended their tour on Friday in Washington DC, the experts called for a nationwide commitment to address discrimination suffered by Black Americans in their daily dealings with the law.
“In the US, racial inequity dates back to the very creation of this country and there’ll be no quick fixes,” said Dr Tracie Keesee, one of two independent UN experts who conducted the visit. “To this day, racial discrimination permeates through encounters with law enforcement – from first contact, arrest, detention, sentencing and disenfranchisement.”
MY TAKE: When I read articles like this I always heave a huge sigh of sadness. Law enforcement is such a vital part of our society. Nothing else works if we don’t feel safe—if our children aren’t safe. I think of my father, an NYPD cop who dedicated his life to helping people. Being a police officer is such difficult and dangerous work that I want to think that only the best kind of people with a passion for serving their community would step up to the challenge.
The problem comes with the phrase “their community.” Apparently, some cops believe their community consists only of people who look like them, who share the same religious and political beliefs, or who are cops.
The two areas that need attention in order to turn this dire situation around are in recruiting and in training. The testing and background checks on new recruits needs to be thorough and intensive enough to weed out those with violent and racist tendencies. We also need to prohibit the practice of firing a bad cop only to have him hired by another force. Cops fired for cause need to be placed on a national database which would then make any police department that hires them legally liable for bad behavior in their new job. That liability could be substantial when you realize that just the 25 largest police and sheriff’s departments in the U.S. had to pay out more than $3.2 billion in the past decade to settle 40,000 claims (“The hidden billion-dollar cost of repeated police misconduct”).
The second area of improvement would be in training officers in ways to deal with their biases, some of which may develop or intensify while on the job, and in using non-violent resolutions. This kind of training is not a one-class-and-done situation, but ongoing mandatory training throughout their careers.
This is not about “coddling criminals,” but making sure when cops protect and serve, innocent people do not need to be protected from them.
RELATED: L.A. Sheriff’s Deputies Ordered to Reveal Their Gang Tattoos, Rat Out Other Members (The Daily Beast)
SUMMARY: The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office finally appears to be cracking down on gangs—not on the streets, but in their own ranks. The Los Angeles Times reported that Sheriff Robert Luna on Thursday ordered 35 deputies suspected of membership in two “deputy gangs” to comply with an order from the county Inspector General, which demands they appear for questioning, reveal any gang-related tattoos, and name names of other gang members. The order comes amid an effort by department higher-ups to crack down on membership in the Banditos and Executioners deputy gangs, whose activities include domineering individual police stations and “rituals that valorize violence,” according to a special counsel report. Banditos members’ tattoos allegedly feature a skeleton wearing a sombrero and bandolier, according to the Times, while the Executioners sport a skull with Nazi iconography and an assault rifle.
MY TAKE: The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has faced so many scandals in the past (“‘The sheriff who went rogue’: Alex Villanueva’s scandal-plagued tenure ends in LA”). This policy of forcing deputies to reveal their gang tattoos is part of a welcome new-broom approach by the current sheriff Robert Luna, voted in six months ago.
Of course, some tattoos might indicate a youthful allegiance that no longer applies. But those who are still actively aligned with gangs need to be fired. Eight deputies filed an $80-million lawsuit alleging they were attacked and harassed by Banditos deputy gang members. However, there is pushback against the investigation within the sheriff’s department from the union.
When there is a legitimate attempt to reform a law enforcement agency, we need to show as much support as possible. For our own safety.