WTF Just Happened Today

Monday, July 24, 2023

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1/ Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. The monument will consist of three protected sites in Illinois and Mississippi central to the story of Till’s life and death at age 14. In August 1955, two white men abducted, tortured, and killed Till, a Black teenage from Chicago, after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Till-Mobley insisted on an open coffin at his funeral, asserting that “the whole nation had to bear witness to this.” (New York Times / NPR / NBC News)

2/ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that Black people benefited from slavery by learning skills like “being a blacksmith,” which they applied to “doing things later in life.” The comment, said to a nearly all-White crowd of supporters, follows state’s new public school curriculum that middle school students should be taught that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” DeSantis said he “wasn’t involved” in writing the new curriculum standards, but credited “a lot of scholars” with creating “the most robust standards in African American history probably anywhere in the country.” (Washington Post / Yahoo News / New York Times)

3/ Alabama Republicans defied a Supreme Court order to create a second majority-Black district in the state. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the state’s previous district lines marginalized the state’s Black population in violation of the Voting Rights Act and ordered a second district with either a Black majority “or something quite close to it” to give Black voters an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice. Instead, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and increased the share of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to about 40%, from about 30%. Additionally, the percentage of Black voters in the existing majority-Black district dropped to about 51% from about 55%. More than one-quarter of Alabama’s residents are Black. (NBC News / New York Times / CBS News / Reuters / Washington Post / CNN)

4/ The Justice Department sued Texas and Gov. Greg Abbott for building floating barriers in the Rio Grande. Abbott has argued that the new floating barrier of buoys is intended to deter migrants from crossing into the U.S. The Justice Department, however, said the large buoys “violate federal law, raise humanitarian concerns, present serious ris...

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