Four young men were driving to a basketball tryout in a rented van when two state troopers pulled them over on the New Jersey Turnpike. The van rolled backwards. The troopers fired eleven shots into it. Three of the four were hit. They were unarmed. 23 April 1998, the New Jersey Turnpike. Keshon Moore, Danny Reyes, Rayshawn Brown and Jarmaine Grant — three Black men and one Latino — were driving to North Carolina for a basketball tryout at a college. Troopers John Hogan and James Kenna stopped the van for speeding. What happened next, the two sides described differently, but the rolling van is not in dispute. The vehicle moved backwards. The troopers said they believed they were about to be struck. They opened fire. Eleven rounds into a van carrying four unarmed young men. Three were wounded. One was paralysed. No weapons. No drugs. Nothing. And then the case did something much larger than itself. New Jersey had spent years denying that its troopers profiled drivers by race. The litigation and the investigations that followed produced the state's own records — and in 1999 New Jersey's Attorney General published a report conceding that racial profiling was, in his words, real, not imagined. That admission is one of the most significant in American policing. A state government examined its own highway stop data and said, in public, that it had been stopping drivers because they were Black. The two troopers eventually pleaded guilty to obstruction-type charges relating to falsified records and paid fines. Neither served prison time. The state paid nearly thirteen million dollars to the four men. New Jersey entered into a federal consent decree that ran for a decade. Four young men were going to a basketball tryout. We must continue to confront the injustices too often left out of history. Get our book which documents over 150 cases of crimes against Black people that remain unanswered. savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…

Her school told her that her hair was a distraction and that she had a week to cut it. Vanessa VanDyke was twelve. The hair in question was her own, growing out of her head, unstraightened. She said no. Orlando, Florida, November 2013. Faith Christian Academy. Vanessa had been at the school since the third grade. She wore her hair natural — a full, round afro. She had been bullied about it. Her mother went in to raise the bullying with the school. And the school's response to a complaint about bullying was to tell the child being bullied that her hair violated the dress code, that it was a distraction, and that she had one week to cut it or be expelled. Read that order of events again. The mother reported bullying. The school threatened the victim with expulsion. Vanessa, at twelve, said she would not cut it. She said publicly at the time that she liked her hair, that it was who she was, and that she was not going to change it because other people had a problem. The story went national. The school backed off. She kept the hair. Here is what connects her to every other post today. In every single one of these cases, the institution describes Black hair with the same word: distraction. Not untidy, not unhygienic, not against safety rules. Distracting. Distracting to whom? Nobody ever answers that, because the answer is the whole point.