2008 Woodie Awards
Former Black Panther decries 'New Age Racism'
Kim Stickels
Issue date: 3/17/05 Section: Campus News
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A founder and former leader of the Black Panther Party and the author of "The Condemnation of Little B" and "A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story," Brown is a prominent political and social activist for the poor and the black community.
Brown used the tale of "Little B," Michael Lewis, a 13-year-old boy from Atlanta who was charged with murder in 1997 and tried as an adult, to illustrate the concept of "new age racism."
Lewis' mother, a prostitute and crack addict, was declared unfit to raise him when he was 11 years old. He was put into a group home but then ran away and dropped out of school to work for a drug dealer. He was sentenced to life in prison at 14.
Lewis was called a "thug" and "super-predator" and associated with a growing movement to identify the "black criminal" as the scapegoat for problems with black America today, Brown said.
"The notion of the black criminal is part of the racist view we have begun to embrace and accept," said Brown. "Children should not be tried as adults, and the United States is the only country which does this."
She contrasted Lewis' case with that of Kip Kinkel, a 17-year-old Oregon student who killed both of his parents and three classmates in 1998. Instead of typifying young white adolescents as "thugs" and "criminals," community members tried to understand why he had committed the crime, hanging a sign in front of the school reading, "Why Kill?" He was just "a kid who went bad that day," she said.
"There are millions of Little B's," Brown said, kids who live in ghettoes where the only economy is drugs and "there are no Whole Foods, public libraries or movie theaters."
The United States has the largest prison population in the world, 50 percent of which is black, she said. Black infant mortality is double that of whites, and blacks have the lowest rate of house ownership and earn less than 1 percent of business revenues in the United States.