Florida Sentinel Bulletin

Justice Clarence Thomas 

S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has hired a law clerk who faced controversy in 2017 for allegedly sending racist text messages.

     Thomas, one of two current Black Supreme Court justices, has named Crystal Clanton as a judicial clerk for the 2024-25 term, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School — Clanton’s alma mater — wrote in a statement.

      Her hiring comes more than five years after The New Yorker in 2017 obtained and published screenshots of text messages allegedly sent by Clanton, a former Turning Point USA staffer, to another staffer.

     “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like f??? them all … I hate blacks. End of story,” Clanton wrote, according to The New Yorker.

     Clanton, at the time the messages resurfaced, told The New Yorker she had “no recollection,” of the texts. She stepped down from her position at Turning Point USA in the wake of scrutiny over the text messages.

Months later in 2018, Clanton was hired by Thomas’s wife, Virginia Thomas, to assist her with right-wing media projects.

     Clanton eventually went on to law school and clerked for Judge Corey Maze with the U. S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama before being hired upon her graduation to clerk for Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., a federal appeals court judge for the 11th Circuit.

      Her position with Pryor brought the controversy back to the surface, prompting a group of seven lawmakers to voice concerns to Chief Justice John Roberts in a letter in November 2021.

     “Placing an individual with this history in such close proximity to judicial decision-making threatens to seriously undermine the public’s faith in the federal judiciary,” the lawmakers wrote at the time.

     A federal appeals panel later cleared Maze and Pryor of any wrongdoing in their hiring of Clanton when they upheld the dismissal of a misconduct complaint filed against the two Republican judicial appointees, Reuters reported.

     Pryor, in the Antonin Scalia Law School’s announcement of Thomas’s hiring of Clanton, said she “exceeded” his “high expectations” and called her an “outstanding clerk.”

Dr. James D. Griffin

Dr. James D. Griffin is the first Black graduate of the University of Texas Southwestern’s medical school to join the school’s faculty, as well as the chief of Anesthesiology at Parkland Health, a hospital located in Dallas, Texas. Griffin made even more history, recently he was elected as the first Black president of the medical staff at Parkland Health.

Griffin, as NBC DFW reported, shares a special connection with Parkland; he was born in the hospital’s segregated wing in 1958. In an interview with the outlet, Griffin reflected on that history and his parents, who he says pushed him to believe in himself, beyond the limits that society placed on Black people in the Jim Crow South. “To be born at Parkland in a time when my mother could not receive health care in any other hospital was important. At that time, Parkland’s maternity ward was segregated so the African American babies were born in one part of the hospital and everyone else was born somewhere else,” Griffin said.

Griffin continued, praising the values his parents instilled in him, “We never talked about what we couldn’t do. It was always based in faith on what was possible if we put our minds to it.” By Daniel Johnson

13 soldiers 

In the first of three courts-martial, 63 Black soldiers were charged with mutiny and murder. They shared one defense counsel, who wasn’t even an attorney. 

The Veterans Cemetery at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, looks like many others – headstones with name, rank, dates of birth and death, and wars fought. Headstones that each tell a story. Until you reach the row in which headstones, including one for Angela Holder’s great-uncle, Cpl. Jesse Moore, are memorialized only by a date: December 11, 1917.

“Ours don’t have a story; they just have name and date of death,” said Holder. “The first time I came here I touched the headstone and I said, ‘Oh, man, this should not have happened to you, but I’m going to do something about that.'”

She first heard what happened to Jesse Moore from her Great-Aunt Lovie: “She had a photograph of him in her home. And I was a six-year-old kid running through the house, and on this particular day it caught my attention and I asked my aunt, ‘Who is that? Why do you have his picture?’ and all. I was told that that was her brother who had been killed by the Army.”

Killed in the largest mass execution in the history of the Army – 13 Black soldiers convicted of mutiny and murder, and hanged with no chance of appeal. Six more hangings would follow.

“My great-uncle, to think that he was standing on a trap door that was going to fall out from under him and his body weight snaps his neck? That really gets to me,” Holder said.

John Haymond, a former soldier-turned-historian, said, “The post engineers had worked all night erecting a scaffold with a fairly unique design because it was a one large, single trap door for a simultaneous hanging. Just before sunrise they were hanged. Once the execution was over, their bodies were each placed in plain pine coffins.”

The gallows were erected on what is today the Fort Sam Houston golf course. The bodies were buried a short distance away, for 20 years their graves marked only by a number.

Haymond said, “While they were being buried, the engineers began dismantling the scaffold, and by noon there was no sign that there had been anything that happened.”

They were members of the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment, which had served in Mexico and the Philippines.

The first and largest of three courts-martial was held – 63 soldiers charged with mutiny and murder. According to Haymond, “Sixty-three men is the largest murder trial not only in the U.S. Army’s history, it’s the largest murder trial in American history.”

THOSE WHO WOULD DECIDE THE CASE WERE ALL WHITE. THE LONE DEFENSE COUNSEL, MAJOR HARRY GRIER, WAS NOT EVEN AN ATTORNEY. HE WAS ALLOWED ONLY TEN DAYS TO PREPARE HIS CASE FOR THE DEFENSE. “IF YOU SAY THAT ONE PERSON WHO’S NOT EVEN A LAWYER DEFENDED 63 PEOPLE AT ONE TIME, ON ITS FACE IT’S A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE,” SAID HOLT.

Conditions on a slave ship, as imagined by Johann Moritz Rugendas in 1830. Photograph: Museo Itaú Cultural.

They were the ships that carried enslaved Africans on hellish transatlantic voyages through the 18th and 19th centuries, with up to 400 in a single vessel. Now the wrecks of 14 ships have been identified in the northern Bahamas, marking what has been described by a British marine archaeologist as a previously unknown “highway to horror”.

The fate of the African men, women and children trafficked in their holds is unknown, but if a vessel was sinking, they were often bolted below deck to allow the crew to escape.

Sean Kingsley told the Observer that this extraordinary cluster of wrecks reveals that enslavers had used the Providence Channel heading south to New Providence, Cuba and around to New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico.

These ships, which date from between 1704 and 1887, were mostly American-flagged, and profited from Cuba’s sugar and coffee plantations, where enslaved Africans faced a life of cruelty.

Kingsley said: “Cuba pretended to accept rules to end the slave trade, but pursued the largest trafficking [of enslaved people] in the world, making massive profits in sugar cultivation.”

The wrecks have been identified during research by the Bahamas Lost Ships Project, managed by Allen Exploration, founded by Carl Allen, a philanthropist and explorer with two passions – the Bahamas and its sunken past.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A Rhode Island man was arrested Thursday and charged with using gasoline to set several fires around the exterior of a predominantly Black church in North Providence early Sunday morning.

Kevin Colantonio, 34, of North Providence, was charged with maliciously damaging or destroying by means of fire or explosion a building or other real property, according to Zachary Cunha, U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island.

Colantonio set several fires around the exterior of the pentecostal Shiloh Gospel Temple early Feb. 11, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Providence, which said police and firefighters were sent to the church at 12:12 a.m. for reports of an individual trying to set fires.

The building was vacant at the time, and the fires were quickly extinguished by members of the North Providence Police and Fire departments, investigators said. The fires caused significant property damage, officials said.

No injuries were reported.

Rachel Dolezal

A former NAACP leader in Washington state who was exposed for pretending to be Black in 2015 is now making headlines for a different controversy.

Rachel Dolezal, who legally changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016, was fired by the Catalina Foothills Unified School District in Arizona over her OnlyFans account, NBC News confirmed.

Her account had also made headlines in 2022, when leaked photos of her posing in lingerie circulated online.

The 18-and-up platform, which hosts millions of content creators, is known primarily as a service where sex workers share explicit photos behind a monthly paywall, although creators can share anything from cooking tutorials to fitness routines. Subscribers can also pay extra fees to receive personalized pay-per-view messages from their favorite creators.

Though the controversial figure has been active on the content subscription platform for years, the district didn’t learn of Diallo’s OnlyFans posts until Tuesday afternoon, according to Julie Farbarik, a spokesperson for Catalina Foothills Unified School District.

Nicholas Buamah

Nationwide — At 12 years old, Nicholas Buamah is a young African American author, producer and philanthropist who continues to defy expectations in the literary world with the release of his 4th book, The Sky Is Not The Limit, Positive Affirmations To Help You Rise Above The Sky. This remarkable achievement marks yet another milestone in the young author’s career as he becomes one of the youngest writers to have multiple works archived in the esteemed Library of Congress.

Inspired by his passion to motivate and inspire his peers, Nicholas’s latest book showcases positive affirmations. He wants his readers to understand that they don’t have to be confined by others’ limits and beliefs. He wants them to know that it’s okay to be a dreamer, a topic he spoke about during his latest keynote speech at The DoSeum Dream Leader Award Ceremony in San Antonio, Texas.

Also, visit his official website at NicholasBuamah.com

To book Nicholas as your next keynote speaker or for a school visit to inspire and motivate your students, please contact (404) 740-7835 or MotherHubbardCo@gmail.com

For press inquiries, contact Mother Hubbard & Co. LLC at (404) 740-7835 or MotherHubbardCo@gmail.com

A Florida House panel has approved legislation to preemptively set potency caps on recreational marijuana ahead of a potential vote on a legalization initiative on the November ballot.

The legislation, which would prohibit dispensary sales of adult-use cannabis flower with a potency of greater than 30 percent THC, cleared the House Health and Human Services Committee on a 14-6 vote on Thursday.

All other cannabis products would be limited to 60 percent THC under the legislation, and it would mandate a serving size on edible products of 10 milligrams THC or less, with the total amount per package no more than 200 mg.

“It’s important for us as elected representatives to protect the public from potential harms, including harms that might occur through adult-use marijuana,” he said.

Massullo’s legislation as introduced would have initially set a potency limit of 10 percent THC for flower cannabis, but that was raised to 30 percent during a subcommittee hearing earlier this month.

Similar marijuana potency restriction legislation is also advancing in the Senate.

Florida’s medical cannabis dosage limits, meanwhile,—which were revised under controversial rules adopted in 2022, despite pushback from then-Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried (D)—are not based on the percentage of THC in a given product.