What were those 1870 buttons all about?

Did anyone wonder why some members of Congress were wearing “1870” buttons?

Here is Rory Murphy at Local Today:

An “1870” pin worn by members of the Congressional Black Caucus and others at the State of the Union address.

As President Biden approaches the podium for Tuesday’s State of the Union address to address the country’s most important issues before Congress, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other Democrats will make a bold statement of their own — albeit a silent one.

Many of them will be wearing black lapel pins with the number “1870,” marking the year of the first known police killing of an unarmed and free Black person in the United States. The pins are a call to action to reform the police institution that has killed thousands of black people in the 153 years since.

“I’m tired of moments of silence. I’m sick of the mourning season,” New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a Democrat who came up with the idea of ​​creating the pins, told Yahoo News. “I wanted to emphasize that police killings of unarmed black citizens have been in the news since the 1870’s and yet significant action still needs to be taken.”

On March 31, 1870, 26-year-old Henry Truman, a black man, was shot dead by Philadelphia officer John Whiteside after being accused of shoplifting from a grocery store.

Whiteside had allegedly chased Truman into an alley when at one point Truman turned to ask him what he had done wrong and the officer fatally shot him, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer report the following day. At the trial, Whiteside claimed he was mugged by a crowd while chasing Truman. Whiteside was later convicted of manslaughter. That same year, the country passed the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote.

Over a century and a half since Truman’s assassination, a steady stream of black people have been killed by law enforcement, including 1,353 since 2017, according to data from Statista, a digital insights company. In fact, black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites and are responsible for 1 in 4 police killings despite making up only 13% of the country’s population.

Read the rest here.

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