Durham, NC – Another Durham resident has now died in a controversial encounter with the Durham Police Department. This time it was teenager and local Riverside High School student, Jesus Huerta. An official response from Durham Police Chief Jose Lopez claims that 17-year-old Jesus Huerta died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while under arrest in the back seat of a police squad car. After Durham police officer Samuel Duncan arrested Huerta, reports state that Officer Duncan heard a loud noise from the vehicle’s rear seat and jumped out of his moving patrol cruiser. Duncan’s squad car then slammed into a parked van, leaving Huerta shot and killed in the process. This incident occurred right outside of the Durham Police Department headquarters parking lot.

Durham, NC – On Aug. 28, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom galvanized hundreds of thousands in the streets of the nation’s capital. On Aug. 25, 1925, A. Philip Randolph helped to establish the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Harlem, New York. It was in August 1791 that the Haitian Revolution first broke the chains of French colonialism. August marks the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831 and Watts Uprising of 1965. It was on Aug. 8, 1978 that the Philadelphia Police Department first raided the MOVE Organization, giving way to the MOVE 9. August also bears the births of Fred Hampton, Marcus Garvey and Mutulu Shakur. Ironically, August has always been a month of African American struggle and radical resistance.

In its original format, Alabama’s Beason-Hammon Act granted school resource officers the right to badger fifth-graders on the basis of their immigration status. The state of Alabama, which passed the Beason-Hammon Act (or HB 56) in June of 2011, was the only state in the country requiring public school administrators to verify immigration data for new K-12 students. However, just two months ago in August of this year, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the student provision of HB 56, declaring it unconstitutional and a legal breach of Plyer vs. Doe, which mandates that states provide an education to all children, regardless of their immigration status. The 11th Circuit also struck down Georgia’s HB 87, a state proposal to criminalize the “transporting and harboring of illegal immigrants,” a statute with anti-Latino written all over it, a proposal with no parallel within the U.S. system of federal law.