Dear District Attorney Zappala:

On behalf of the Black Political Empowerment Project  Planning Council, the Coalition Against Violence and B-PEP’s Regional Monitoring Project I respectfully request that the charges against CAPA High School student Jordan Miles be dropped. In our opinion this honor student, violinist and viola player has been damaged enough, both physically and psychologically from the brutal beating he received at the hands of three undercover Pittsburgh police officers while going between his mother’s home and that of his grandmother in Homewood on the evening of Jan. 11.

This week’s column is the result of the tremendous number of letters to the editors that were generally written by police, former police, police union officials, and by those who truly believe that the police can’t do anything wrong.

There are even Blacks who have blinders on that have impaired them to the extent they believe the police are always correct.

All these letters have been generated because of the publicity generated around the attack of the Black honor student in Homewood.

by Shannon Williams

Since I try to educate, support and pay homage to the Black community in everything that I do, the month of February for me, is just like the other 11 months of the year.

Nonetheless, I certainly appreciate Black History Month and all that it represents for our people as well as the general population. With that said, it’s important for us to not only reflect on our history, but also our present state of being. In doing so, I was reminded of how far we’ve come as a people and unfortunately, how far behind we are.

(NNPA)—Recently, Dorothy Height of the National Congress of Negro Women, Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, Ben Jealous of the NAACP, and Marc Morial of the National Urban League, wrote President Barack Obama asking for a meeting about the state of Black employment and with the ensuing invitation, all but Height went to the White House in a snowstorm for a one hour meeting. The clearest version of what happened was stated by Marc Morial: “We worked very hard to share with him ideas around the need for targeted relief—and that means urban communities, to areas of high employment” so, as Ben Jealous said, the focus of the talk was more on place than race.