It’s been quite a week. Lots to talk about. Get it said on “Free Your Mind Friday,” the best open forum on the planet.

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He was “on the job” in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, rallying support for some 1,300 Black city sanitation workers two months into a tension-filled strike over unequal pay and poor and unsafe working conditions. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was to be the featured speaker at a church that evening, but King and a small group that came with him to Memphis would first have dinner.

A courtesy car was waiting downstairs, and moments after King came out his second-floor room, a sniper-assassin’s bullet took him down.

Leid Stories commemorates the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with the sober reminder that his work can be kept alive, if we make it so.

Winnie Madikizela Mandela, who died yesterday afternoon at a hospital in Johannesburg after a long illness, will be honored with a state funeral on April 14, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced yesterday. The announcement touched off new waves of emotion over whether such an honor should be bestowed on the nation’s former first lady, a freedom fighter who came to be known as the “Mother of the Nation,” but who also emerged as a central figure in several major plots to grab power and ruthlessly target political enemies.

However history sees Winnie Mandela, it cannot erase her role in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and beyond its borders. Leid Stories, conceding that we do not know all there is to know about Winnie Mandela, discuss her place in modern history.

Of the 20 shots fired at 22-year-old Stephon Clark by two Sacramento police officers on March 18, eight ripped through his body, almost all of them through his back, a forensic pathologist said at a news conference on Friday, a day after Clark’s funeral.

Dr. Bennet Omalu also found that bullets Struck Clarke in the neck and thigh, breaking bones, piercing a lung, and caused him to “bleed massively,” although death was “not instantaneous.” It took between three and 10 minutes before Clark died of his wounds, Omalu said. Clarke received no medical helpduring that time,

Omalu’s report added fire to the community’s red-hot fury over the officers’ killing of Clark. But except for a few reports of minor confrontations between protesters and police, the tone of news coverage has been conciliatory.

This means that serious “negotiations” have begun. But with what objectives? Once again, the troubling question arises: Will there be justice or a settlement?

It’s been quite a week. No doubt you have something to say about the issues and events that made the headlines. Or, maybe you’d like to share your thoughts about something altogether different. Either way, there’s plenty of room for your information, opinions and ideas on Leid Stories’ “Free Your Mind Friday,” the world’s best open forum.

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Funeral services are being held today for Stephon Clark, the 22-year-old father of two shot dead on March 18 by two Sacramento Police Department officers investigating a complaint about broken car windows. Clark was in the back yard of his grandmother’s home, where he and his family also lived, at the time of the shooting. The officers, when they came upon him, thought he had a gun and fired 10 shots each at him, killing him instantly. But the object Clark had in his hands was a cell phone.

The community erupted in protest, as did others within and outside of Sacramonte, after Clark’s death, charging a coverup and demanding an open investigation that would lay bare all the facts.

Leid Stories returns to an earlier discussion—a need for new tactics in civil-rights advocacy, especially in police killings.

Leid Stories tackles an uncomfortable but increasingly evident truth: We are not ready to face and deal with our collective reality and, worse, we are afraid to be.

Linda Brown’s parents, Leola and Oliver Brown, wanted to enroll their 9-year-old daughter in an elementary school just a few blocks from their home in Topeka, Kansas. The school refused to admit her; instead, Brown’s parents were advised to send their daughter to an all-black school clear across town.

Thus began a protracted legal battle that confronted, and finally broke, educational apartheid in America, with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in 1954, that outlawed the “separate-but-equal” doctrine that states routinely used to keep intact their systems of educational apartheid.

Preferring a quiet life, Brown eschewed attention, although she occasionally would give talks on the landmark case. She died on March 25; her family gave no further information.

Leid Stories honors Linda Brown in the continuum of struggle for equal education in the United States of America.

Saturday, March 24, 2018 was a historic day. More than 2 million people in 830 cities across the United States—and tens of thousands more in cities all over the world—staged a coordinated populist protest demanding aggressive government action in closing loopholes in gun-sales laws and more strictly regulating gun ownership.

The protest, themed “March for Our Lives,” brought together several groups that had been working on gun issues for years, but the Feb. 14 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.—in which a troubled former student killed 17 with an assault rifle before he was apprehended—was the catalyst for aggressive legislative action. The Stoneman Douglas students vowed to move legislators beyond their customary “thoughts and prayers” statements in the aftermath of disasters.

Leid Stories discusses the emergence of a new generation of leadership, born literally under the gun.  

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