Good News - Morehouse Man Genarlow Wilson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Genarlow Wilson, freed last October by Georgia's Supreme Court after nearly three years in prison for oral sex with a 15-year old girl during a hotel party in 2003, will be attending Morehouse College in Atlanta this spring semester. He has received financial assistance from the Tom Joyner Foundation so that he can go to college.

Read the entire AJC story here.


plez sez: THIS IS GREAT NEWS!

this young man has more than suffered for his youthful indiscretion and plezWorld really wishes him the best with his studies at Morehouse. he will be the recipient of a quality education from one of the best HBCU's in the country. KUDOS to the Tom Joyner Foundation for stepping up and supporting this young man (click here to hear the Tom Joyner Morning Show).

More Good News For Genarlow Wilson

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Genarlow Wilson, freed on October 26 by Georgia's Supreme Court after nearly three years in prison for oral sex with a 15-year old girl during a hotel party in 2003, has received an offer of financial aid from the Tom Joyner Foundation so that he can go to college.

Joyner announced during a show this week that he will provide Wilson with financial aid, and Wilson's lawyer, B.J. Bernstein, confirmed the offer Wednesday. The help will come through the Tom Joyner Foundation and will cover what's needed after Wilson seeks aid from other sources, Bernstein said. Wilson, 21, said when he was released that he hopes to pursue a degree in business or sociology.

Read the entire story here.

plez sez: this is good news... no, this is really GREAT NEWS!

i've seen Genarlow Wilson interviewed after his release; he is obviously a very bright young man and he has definitely learned a very hard lesson after having to spend 3 years in jail for his indiscretion.

i really wish him the best and i have no doubt that he will succeed with the love and support of his family and generous benefactors like Tom Joyner (click here to hear the Tom Joyner Morning Show).

Genarlow Wilson Released from Prison

BREAKING NEWS: On October 26, 2007, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that the Georgia Supreme Court had ordered his release, calling his 10-year prison sentence "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Georgia state and federal constitutions.

Over four months after a judge ordered that Genarlow Wilson be freed from prison, where he had spent more than two years for receiving consensual oral sex from a 15-year-old girl when he was 17, the Georgia Supreme Court finally gets him out of prison.

Read the entire Atlanta Journal-Constitution article here.

plez sez: several plezWorld blog posts have touched on this story in the past couple of months, like this one and this one.

all along i have contended that i did not like the law with which he convicted; it was a miscarriage of justice to charge this boy with such a heinous crime. the punishment seemed to far exceed the crime and this poor boy lost over 2 years of his life for nothing.

i now hope that Genarlow can work to get his life back on track (he was planning to attend college when he was convicted), i pray that his family can heal the wounds of this horrible ordeal, and i hope the next time that i see this young man's name in the news, that the news will be GOOD NEWS!

Black Bloggers Fuel Jena 6 Protest

It is rare that I turn plezWorld over to an entire news article, but this one is so important, its presence cannot be denied. Two days ago, a story ran in the Chicago Tribune that correctly identified a cosmic shift in direction for the slowing Civil Rights Movement. As evidenced by the Shaquanda Cotton incident in Texas, the Genarlow Wilson sentence in Georgia, and now the Jena 6 Ordeal in Louisiana, the Blackosphere (Black Bloggers) have taken a leadership position normally reserved for "race baiting" reverends to enlighten the country about wrongs being perpetrated against Black people. Black Bloggers such as plezWorld, others associated with the AfroSphere, and hundreds of others, established a clarion call to the world to shine a light on the dark and miserable existence that is Jena, Louisiana... and its cold and racist underbelly.

I am privileged to have been a part of what the article calls the "viral civil rights movement." But moreso, I take solice in the fact that the AfroSphere, after only a year or so of existence, can take the credit for being a catalyst for change in this country: read the article about today's March on Jena.

The Chicago Tribune article follows (in its entirety):

Blogs help drive Jena protest
By Howard Witt Tribune senior correspondent
5:14 PM CDT, September 18, 2007

JENA, La. - There is no single leader. There is no agreed schedule. Organizers aren't even certain where everyone is supposed to gather, let alone use the restroom. The only thing that is known for sure is that thousands of protesters are boarding buses at churches, colleges and community centers across the country this week, headed for this tiny dot on the map of central Louisiana.

What could turn out to be one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in years is set to take place here Thursday, when Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, popular black radio talk show hosts and other celebrities converge in Jena to protest what they regard as unequal treatment of African-Americans in this racially fractured Deep South town.

Yet this will be a civil rights protest literally conjured out of the ether of cyberspace, of a type that has never happened before in America—a collective national mass action grown from a grassroots word-of-mouth movement spread via Internet blogs, e-mails, message boards and talk radio.

Jackson, Sharpton and other big-name civil rights figures, far from leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up. So, too, has the national media, which has only recently noticed a story that has been agitating many black Americans for months.

As formidable as it is amorphous, this new African-American blogosphere, which scarcely even existed a year ago, now comprises hundreds of interlinked blogs and tens of the thousands of followers who within a matter of a few weeks collected 220,000 petition signatures—and more than $130,000 in donations for legal fees—in support of six black Jena teenagers who are being prosecuted on felony battery charges for beating a white student.

"Ten years ago this couldn't have happened," said Sharpton, who said he first heard about the Jena case on the Internet. "You didn't have the Internet and you didn't have black blogs and you didn't have national radio shows. Now we can talk to all of black America every day. We've been able to form our own underground railroad of information, and when everybody else looks up, it's already done."

Hotels are booked up for miles around Jena, the Louisiana State Police are drawing officers from across the state to help control the crowds and schools and many businesses in the town of 3,000 will close Thursday in anticipation of 10,000 or more demonstrators who are expected, organizers predicted.

The momentum for the protest did not slow even when the original reason for the event—the scheduled sentencing of Mychal Bell, 17, the first of the "Jena 6" defendants to be tried and convicted of aggravated second-degree battery—evaporated.

Last week, a state appellate court abruptly vacated Bell's June 28 conviction, ruling that he had been improperly tried as an adult rather than a juvenile. The local district attorney, Reed Walters, has vowed to challenge that decision, and Bell remains jailed in lieu of $90,000 bond.

What's animating the protesters is not merely Bell's legal predicament but the larger perception that blacks in Jena, who make up 12 percent of the population, are still subjected to the kind of persistent racial inequality that once predominated across the Old South.

In a town where whites voted overwhelmingly for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke when he ran for Louisiana governor in 1991, one local barber shop still refuses to cut black men's hair.

And the trouble in Jena (pronounced Jee-na) started a year ago with a resonant symbol from the Jim Crow past: After black students asked administrators at the local high school for permission to sit beneath a shade tree traditionally used only by whites, white students hung three nooses from the tree. The incident outraged black students and their parents, but was dismissed by the school superintendent as a youthful prank; he punished the white students with three-day suspensions.

A series of fights between whites and blacks ensued, both on and off the campus. Whites implicated in the fights were charged with misdemeanors or not at all, while the blacks were charged with felonies.

In November, someone burned down the central wing of the high school—an arson for which no one has been arrested.

And then in early December, Bell and five other black students at the high school were charged after a white student was jumped and beaten while he lay unconscious.

Although the white student was treated and released at a local hospital, Walters initially charged the six black youths with attempted murder—charges that he later reduced to aggravated second-degree battery after black bloggers and civil rights leaders from across the country raised complaints that the charges were excessive.

Besides Sharpton, King and Jackson, the NAACP and the ACLU will have contingents here Thursday, as will the Millions More Movement led by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

But many black bloggers say the Jena demonstration is really more about a new generation of civil rights activists who learned about the Jena case not from Operation Push but from hip-hop music blogs that featured the story or popular black entertainers such as Mos Def who have turned it into a crusade.

"In traditional civil rights groups, there's a pattern—you call a meeting, you see when everybody can get together, you have to decide where to meet," said Shawn Williams, 33, a pharmaceutical salesman and former college NAACP leader who runs the popular Dallas South Blog.

"All that takes time," Williams added. "When you look at how this civil rights movement is working, once something gets out there, the action is immediate—here's what we're going to write about, here's the petition, here's the protest. It takes place within minutes, hours and days, not weeks or months."

This new, "viral" civil rights movement now taking shape still benefits from the participation of well-known leaders like Jackson or Sharpton—it just doesn't depend on them, bloggers say.

It was black bloggers, for example, who first picked up the story of Shaquanda Cotton, a 14-year-old black girl from the east Texas town of Paris who was sentenced to up to 7 years in youth prison for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. The judge who heard her case had given probation to a 14-year-old white girl charged with the more serious crime of arson.

After the bloggers and their readers bombarded the Texas governor with protest letters and petitions, Texas authorities freed Cotton—days before Sharpton had scheduled a rally on her behalf.

"When Rev. Jackson or Rev. Sharpton or other recognized leaders get involved, that's helpful, and it helps them—they can see where momentum is building around an issue," said James Rucker, the 38-year-old founder of Color of Change, an Internet-based civil rights group that has more than 280,000 subscribers. "You can argue they came late to Jena, but they are here now, which is good."

The blogs also serve as watchdogs over more traditional civil rights groups. When the NAACP first began featuring the Jena case on its Web site and claimed to be soliciting contributions for the teens' legal defense, it was a black blogger who quickly pointed out that the donation link directed visitors to the generic NAACP fundraising page, with no way for donors to direct their funds to the Jena defendants.

Within days, the link was redirected to a bona fide Jena 6 fundraising site.

I'm not physically in Jena, Louisiana today, but I'm there in spirit!

WTF - Girl's Momma Defends Genarlow Wilson

OK, we're all in agreement... the 10 year sentence for Genarlow Wilson because of his New Year's Eve indiscretion (receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old) was too harsh. Even Thurbert Baker (the Georgia Attorney General who filed an appeal that is keeping Genarlow Wilson in jail pending the outcome of the appeal) says that the sentence was too harsh!

But now I read in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the mother of the young lady who performed "lip service" on the night in question has gone public saying that the sentence was too harsh. She regrets that she didn't get the prosecutors to drop the charges.

Excerpts of the article:

The tape shows Wilson having intercourse with a 17-year-old. Both appear intoxicated in the video. Wilson was charged with raping the 17-year-old but was acquitted.

In another part of the video, Wilson is lying on his back in one of the motel room beds and receiving oral sex from Cannon's daughter. Wilson does not appear to be forcing the girl in the video. [Ms.] Cannon said her daughter told her the sex was consensual.

Read the entire article here.

plez sez: HUH?!? Come again?!? Veda Cannon, 39, of Douglasville, GA said the sex between her daughter, Wilson and four other teens was consensual and regrets she didn't ask prosecutors not to charge them. What mother, no, what parent in their right mind would condone their daughter having an oral sex train being run on them? What the f**k is going on with these people! Now I'm thinking: the girl's mother is the one who should be in jail.

Her 15-year-old daughter had FIVE funky, drunk boys run their nasty little dicks up in her daughter's mouth and she doesn't think that's criminal? She's quoted as saying, "She did not want any of this to happen. She was friends with all of them."

Word to the mother: friends don't let friends skeet in their friend's mouth!

But I guess that's why she was a 37-year-old grandmother; her daughter (who is now an 18-year-old girl) is the unmarried mother of a 2-year-old son! Count 'em... that's 3 generations of one family that's shot to HELL!

It makes me want to holla: WTF!

Genarlow Wilson Freed - Justice Served?

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