In 2009 Blount came in my abode, carrying the mattress I just bought. I didn’t recognize him till we stood outside my front door, shaking hands.
“I know you. You play for the Ducks! You jumped over that guy to score a touchdown. I’m going to get a pic of that, frame it, and bring it over to you because you helped me.”
An hour later I am on the phone talking to a Duck manager, a woman who knew LeGarrette. She told me he was on suspension. He had been – a Bad Boy! I pleaded Blount’s case. I told her I had hoisted a mattress off the roof of my car, and was carrying it to the staircase, when I heard;
“Can I help you with that?”
LaGarrett lived in the next stairwell above the guy who plays his sub-woofers way too loud. I had seen a black man looking out his window a few times. He was checking out – his neighbors. I read his – situation! Whose idea was it to move black folks’ to Springtucky, where even Hippies are afraid to walk about? Did the Duck staff fill them in – after they signed the recruitment papers?
“WTF! You put me in Peckerwoodville? I’m from Mississippi where I knew where I wasn’t wanted – by the age of three!”
I was born and raised in Oakland. In 1976 my best friend and roommate, was Michael Harvey. We were running the artist and actors at the downtown art colony. We played tennis six hours a day. We played all over Oakland, even late at night on a court where you had to keep pushing a button to keep on the lights. If we were two white players, we would have been robbed. I understood my roomy was putting me through a test. This was a very dangerous hood.
No one messed with us, because we were tight – like brothers. They knew Michael could go – where they can’t. Everyone studied us. We were an Oakland success story. Before I could give Blount that framed photo, I see him being rushed by about ten Boise players – with his back turned to them! One grabs LeGarrette’s shoulder. The rest of this history – has not been told
Below is a pic of my other black neighbor, Terrell Turner who lived with Sarah, a student from Austria. Her eyes were Robin-eggs blue. Every time Terrell would go away, he knocked on my door;
“Watch out for Sarah while I’m away!”
I got the same look that spoke volumes about the unspeakable. Did Sarah fear for her safety? Did she read some white Americans hate mixed race couples.
Before Sarah moved into McKenzie Meadows, I had Terrell over for dinner. My daughter and grandson came to visit and wanted me to make my famous baby-back ribs. I was called The Barb-B-Que King in Oakland. We cooked and ate outside – all the time. We drank – allot of beer, and talked a lot of bullshit. I hung with Bad Boys. When I entered Serenity Lane’s New Hope program, I wore The Hat, and used the moniker ‘Oakland Johnny’.
On the news last night, I saw an old blonde white woman in MADA RED, swearing there’s going to be another Civil War – “because we’ve had it!” Was she part of the GREATER IDAHO MOVEMENT? How about those OREGON SENATORS that are not going to be able to run again, because they thought they could be…..PART TIME LAW MAKERS…..representing all the people – some of the time? I wonder what my ex-neighbors see in this BULLSHIT….another racist line drawn in the sand? And they do it in the name of Jesus?!!! Is this- something new to a young black man from Alabama, who has joined the Ducks to play at Autzen stadium down the road apiece?
All my black neighbors knew what is going on. A old black man who hung in front of Safeway told me Cliff Harris and Jeremiah Masoli were his neighbors. He felt protective of them. I knew LeGarrette Blount was A PRISONER at The Meadows. He didn’t have a white girlfriend to go places with. Blount may not be a citizen of Springfield for very long. He might get cut from the team, or transfer to another team. I doubt he saw – OUR CITY. I don’t think – HE WENT ANYWHERE. I wonder if Blount played tennis?
After the Boise game, I look out my window to see five black Ducks huddled in the parking lot. I go down and ask;
“Was there racial taunting befre the game?”
I am looking at the most powerful human face I have ever seen. As an artist I am amazed at the beauty of Blount’s face. It is – otherworldly. He should have been cast in the movie ‘Black Panther’.
“Yep!” Blount said.
I wish I was on the field. This white man would have rushed to Blount and covered his back. I would have swung with all my might. I would have tried to knock out as many Boise Boys as I could. Sure I have a chance to – go pro! Who’s going to do the fighting – in the New Civil War?
For over ten years I have been saying some evangelical law makers need to take the Iron Clad Oatch. I am running for President as a original Republican. This blog will be convering the…..
COMING CIVIL WAR NEWS
John Presco
Lawmakers have been waiting for weeks to learn how new Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade will enforce a new law enacted by voters last year.
Republican senators who walked away from this year’s legislative session will be barred from running for reelection next year, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade announced Tuesday.
The conclusion, announced after months of speculation, might not be a surprise to voters who overwhelmingly voted last year to create consequences for legislative walkouts via Measure 113.
Terrell and Sarah
Posted on June 23, 2016 by Royal Rosamond Press
Terrell and Sarah are getting married in three days. His old friends at McKenzie Meadows wish the Turners the very best! Thanks for being part of our family.
https://www.theknot.com/us/sarah-pointer-and-terrell-turner-jun-2016
After visiting the University of Oregon, the decision had become clear. Turner would become an Oregon Duck.
“I don’t understand how anyone could turn down Oregon,” Turner told me. “It’s such a family atmosphere. Oregon is a great place to get away from a big town.”
Jon
SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — On Saturday morning, John Presco could hear the fear in his neighbor’s voice as she left a message on his answering machine.
“Hello John,” said Sandy Maricle. “This is Sandy. Are you home?”
Maricle needed someone to drive her to the hospital.
“I’m in really severe pain in my leg and back,” said Maricle.
With her sciatic nerve throbbing, Maricle barely made it to the car.
“She scooted down on her butt, all the time her face is in agony,” Presco said.
A few hours later, she was released from the hospital — but had no way to get from the car to her second-story apartment.
That all changed when her neighbor, University of Oregon defensive end Terrell Turner showed up, picked Maricle up and carried her up the stairs.
“It was a God-send,” Presco said.
“I was relieved,” Maricle said. “It was like an angel.”
“He was so kind and gentle and just the perfect good Samaritan,” Maricle said.
It’s not the first time this Duck has done a good deed. A few weeks ago, another neighbor needed help carrying a TV up three flights of stairs.
“We got it all the way up so thank God,” Turner said.
Turner said the acts of kindness are inspired by his passion for his family in California.
“I’m just making sure I can help out as if my mom was around to help,” Turner said.
Now, he’s helping his extended family here in Oregon.
“I think a lot of him,” Maricle said.
Trump is charged under civil rights law used to prosecute KKK violence© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
A carload of White men who attacked an interracial couple with rocks and bricks.
A member of the Ku Klux Klan who built a cross, wrapped it in sheets soaked in gas and oil and instructed two others to set it ablaze in front of the home of a family of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent.
And now, a former president of the United States.
When Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday and accused of trying to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, he found himself in the unenviable company of defendants charged under a criminal statute dating to the Reconstruction era.
The statute, Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, was originally adopted as part of the Enforcement Act of 1870. It was the first in a series of measures known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts designed to protect rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, collectively called the Reconstruction Amendments. Section 241 makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” exercising a right protected by the Constitution or federal law.
The 45-page indictment secured by special counsel Jack Smith accuses Trump of a “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted,” in violation of Section 241. The alleged offense under Section 241 is among four counts included in the indictment, which argues that Trump, along with six unnamed co-conspirators, eroded trust in the administration of the election and “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”
Those means, according to the indictment, included strong-arming state officials to change electoral votes won by Joe Biden and recruiting “fraudulent electors” in swing states prepared to override the will of voters.
The alleged conspiracy included using the authority of the Justice Department to create doubt about the election results and encourage the presentation of those illegitimate electors as alternatives to Biden’s valid electors.
And, according to the indictment, it involved pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to delay or thwart the certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, and capitalizing on the violence unleashed that day to “levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.”
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the former president, cast the indictment as an attempt to interfere in the next presidential election, saying, “Why did they wait 2½ years to bring these fake charges, right in the middle of President Trump’s winning campaign for 2024?”
Initially wielded against the Klan for keeping newly emancipated Black people from exercising their right to vote, Section 241 has also been used to prosecute a wider range of election subversion, including threatening or intimidating voters, impersonating voters, destroying ballots and preventing the official count of ballots. It has also become a linchpin of broader civil rights enforcement, used to prosecute hate crimes and law enforcement misconduct. Derek Chauvin, the police officer who pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis, pleaded guilty in 2021 to violating a related statute, Section 242, which makes it a crime for public officials, acting in their official capacity, to deny a person’s constitutional rights.
“For a former chief executive to be charged with a violation of not just a federal law, but a federal law about the exercise of federal rights, is astonishing,” said Frederick M. Lawrence, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the author of “Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law.”
As the charges against Trump mount, Lawrence said, “we can’t lose the ability to be shocked by this case.”
Even those who have prosecuted cases under the statute, or studied its terms, were surprised by its inclusion in the Trump indictment. It wasn’t among the offenses included in the December 2022 referral of Trump for criminal prosecution made by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Timothy J. Heaphy, the committee’s lead investigator and a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said the Justice Department may have found that Trump deprived Americans of their right to have a free and fair election under processes laid out by federal law.
“We did not put that … statute in our referral, but I could see a path to charging it,” Heaphy said. “They’re trying to identify the crimes that most fit the conduct.”
The Reconstruction Amendments, and the legislation passed to enforce them, marked a dramatic expansion of federal power to protect civil and political rights — a remaking of the Constitution so profound that historians have called it the nation’s “second founding.”
Courts soon defanged Section 241 and other cornerstones of Reconstruction. In 1876, the Supreme Court reversed the criminal convictions of several members of a White mob that killed Black men during the infamous Colfax massacre, an insurrection against Louisiana’s Reconstruction government. The decision, in U.S. v. Cruikshank, was the most notable in a series of rulings narrowing the scope of rights covered by the provision.
Expansive civil rights legislation and vigorous enforcement in the mid-20th century breathed new life into Section 241, which was used to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan who carried out the 1964 Freedom Summer murders. In 1981, four White men, who assaulted a young Black man and his White wife driving through Alabama, were charged under the statute. A Ku Klux Klan member who oversaw the burning of a cross in the front yard of a Puerto Rican man and his Mexican wife was indicted in 1999 under the law.
For more than a century, meanwhile, the law has been used to punish election interference, in cases as disparate as an Oklahoma election board’s omission of precincts in a congressional election and a Kentucky mayor’s involvement in fraud, vote buying and identity theft. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that passed the House in 2021 included $25 million for increased enforcement of Section 241 and the companion Section 242, but the legislation stalled in the Senate.
Federal prosecutors this year won a conviction under Section 241, and court filings and judicial rulings in the case could be informative for the Justice Department’s case against Trump, according to Quinta Jurecic, a Brookings Institution fellow who has written about the case. Douglass Mackey, also known as “Ricky Vaughn,” is set to be sentenced in October after being found guilty by a Brooklyn federal jury of plotting to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.
Mackey was an influential far-right Twitter user active during the 2016 election. He routinely retweeted accounts such as @TEN_GOP, named for the Tennessee Republican Party but run by a Russian troll farm, prosecutors have said. He also promoted a fraudulent social media campaign to suppress Black voter turnout for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by encouraging supporters to “vote from home” via text message or social media, a legally invalid method.
Mackey was charged Jan. 22, 2021, and prosecutors said Mackey’s online activity crossed the line from protected free speech to a criminal scheme “to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote.”
In pretrial filings, prosecutors defended use of the 1870 law, citing Supreme Court precedent that defended both the right of citizens to cast a ballot and to have that ballot counted: “We regard it as equally unquestionable that the right to have one’s vote counted is as open to protection by Congress as the right to put a ballot in a box.”
Mackey argued that he lacked “fair warning” that his conduct was illegal because of the novel use of the statute. But the government argued that the law could apply to “new means” to infringe the rights of others. Mackey’s trial judge agreed. “For more than a century, courts have held that this statute flexibly proscribes conspiracies to injure the right to vote in a variety of contexts and undertaken using a variety of mechanisms,” concluded the U.S. District Court judge.
Violations of Section 241 are felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison or longer if someone is killed and, significantly, don’t require the conspiracies to be successful.
Tor Ekeland, a defense attorney who represented Mackey before his case went to trial, said he shares neither his former client’s nor Trump’s politics but fears that prosecutors have taken advantage of the “elastic” nature of the statute. “It’s a prosecutorial blank check,” he said.
“There’s a big difference between showing up at a polling site with your buddies with guns and posting a Twitter meme,” Ekeland said.
Still, he said prosecutors have a “stronger causal case with Trump than with Mackey.”
Jeannine Bell, a professor at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law who has studied the significance of the law in penalizing anti-integrationist crimes such as cross burnings, said its application to the former president is not entirely unorthodox.
“The statute is best known in the context of extremists and Klan violence, but it has been used for people who are not robe-wearing extremists,” she said.
Rachel Weiner contributed to this report.
Confederate Traitors Wanted To Rename America
Posted on September 14, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
Many famous ministers in the South gave pro-slavery sermons that led to men gathering together, and in some fashion, they agreed to be Traitors to the United States of America, and take up arms with intent to commit acts of wholesale murder. This is how the Radical Republicans saw it, and they wanted to put the top Confederate Brass before a firing squad – when the Evil Ones – lost! They wanted these Traitors to sign the Iron Clad Oath. Lincoln nixed this traditional form of Justice. I ask this day, why didn’t Lincoln run for Governor of Oregon – and put Joseph Lane out of power? He knew he was the top leader of the Pro-slavery Rebellion that was festering. Was Joseph Lane happy when the Confederate Traitors of South Carolina fired on Fort Sumpter, signaling the evil plan to RENAME THE UNITED STATES IN THE NAME OF JESUS! To read Outlaw, Roger Stone, accuse Senator Lindsey Graham of “willful sabotage” because he wants the Supreme Court Ban on Abortion to go FEDERAL – is the last straw for me! Let me put words in Graham’s mouth..
“We captured the moral HighGround from the North – alas! We – CAPTURED JESUS! Are we going to let all THIS POWER – go to waste?”
How come Justice Clarence Thomas did not suggest – THEY PUT IT TO A VOTE? This is not 1864. We have the internet and smart phones. The Supreme Court could have taken a poll. But – now they turn on each other? THE PLOTTERS to overthrow my Democracy, compete with other INSURECTIONISTS! Really! They can’t get along? Have you read about Deadly Religious Schisms?
When I saw that black woman standing behind Graham, I wondered why Liberal black women are not trying to get her – to change her ways! The answer is – she’s got Jesus! She has a right to believe in what her church tells her is the truth. Instead, we got black radicals in a huff over ‘Coon Lake’. I want to give the Black People of America – ALASKA – with their own Navy! I protested when Sarah Palin came to town and stayed at the Eugene Hyatt. I dressed like the Anti-Christ! I still – still my neck out…..
WATCH THIS SPACE
I don’t recall seeing any black people there.
John Presco
Another Black History Month
Posted on February 14, 2023 by Royal Rosamond Press
It is 4:24 A.M. in Springfield Oregon – and it’s snowing. Sunday morning I awoke and my Angel-Muse bid me to post on LeGarrette Blount, my ex-neighbor. I just read that Jeremiah Johnson was Blount’s roommate. I was told there were four Ducks living here in total. Terrell Turner would move in later. I talked to all four days after the disastrous game in Idaho, where LeGarrette defended himself when half the Boise team – rushed at him when his back was turned! Bryan Hout slapped Blount on the shoulder and shouted the words “Ass-whoopen!” The Boise coach shoved Hoyt away – hard – he letting him know this was breaking a cardinal rule regarding Good Sportsmanship.
The winner never goes after the loser – and taunts him or/her! Never be a Bad Sport! Be a Gracious Loser! Let the losing team leave the field – in dignity! Do not spoil – the victory!
The main lesson black folks have learned in America, is, if you lay a hand on a white person – you die! Don’t even look confrontational – or you will die! I understand that the Boise game was considered – a duel, a, showdown. There was talk before the game! Pundits say – our President suckered his opponents in, then delivered a great shot. Rope-a-Dope! Nancy Pelosi may have – gone too far when she did her hand-jive with Grabby Don Juan. – who can’t keep his hands to himself?.
My kin, Thomas Hart Benton wrote ‘In Defense of Dueling’ that ended up with Andrew Jackson getting shot. Benton fought several duels. In the Civil War, blacks were bid to pick up arms and fight for the North – and the South! The Radical Germans, and other Forty-Fighters, did much of the fighting. Many authors are saying….”There’s going to be another Civil War!”
The Greater Idaho folks say Democrats don’t share their “Republican values!” These are Red State Democrats – at the core of their soul. They pretend they are not instigating a New Civil War, and ask Oregonians to hand over half their State – for their own good. They say – above board – Western Oregon Folks have no values, and thus they deserve to be – SEPERATED! Is Apartheid – a value?
In my ideal world, I would have like LeGarrette to have become a OAKLAND Raider running back, which means, they would have not moved to Las Vegas – and put an end to Raider Nation. I miss the the ol Oakland-Kansas City rivalry. They talked about two Black Quarterbacks facing each other in the Super bowl. For the most part – we want to see everyone play fair! Have Republican politicians – and their crazy backers – been playing fair? Why are so many going to jail, and employing attorneys to keep the truth – their precious secret. Will Mike Pence come to Greater Idaho – as the next President – and shake hands with ex-Oregonians? Why was he afraid to get in that car with THE SECRET service?
John Presco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeGarrette_Blount
Blount called Hout and Boise State coach Chris Petersen to apologize on September 5. Kelly participated in the calls.[52] Hout was not suspended for his taunting, though Petersen stated that he did receive disciplinary action.[53] Petersen accepted the apology as sincere, and expressed the wish that Blount would be able to go on playing football, and that many parties would learn from the experience.[54]
Rosamond Press 
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