Black lives don’t matter.


It was there when the U.S. Supreme Court said black people had no rights that white people were bound to respect, and when Nazi POWs were seated at a Southern diner while black soldiers were sent to the kitchen, and when federal researchers in Tuskegee experimented on unwitting black men to find out what happens when syphilis goes untreated.

It was there when Emmett Till’s eye was gouged out and Sam Hose’s face was skinned, and when the good people of Valdosta, Georgia, carved Mary Turner’s baby from her womb and stomped it into the dirt.

And it is there in Fort Pierce, Florida, where a jury just decided a wrongful death lawsuit against a St. Lucie County sheriff’s deputy.

The deputy, Christopher Newman, was called to the home of the victim, 30-year-old Gregory Vaughn Hill Jr., because of a complaint in January 2014 that he was playing his music loudly. Newman and his partner say that when they banged on the door of the garage, where the music was coming from, Hill raised the door, gun in hand – a contention that his daughter, who was across the street, denies, according to CNN. She says her father’s hands were empty.




For the loss of your father, here’s 4 cents.

For the loss of your child, 4 cents.

For the loss of your fiance, 4 cents.

For pain and suffering, for mourning and tears, as an expression of our corporate regret for this tragedy, 4 lousy cents.


Better the jury had given his relatives nothing than to give them 4 cents. Yes, they would have been disappointed, but that would have been better than this, a calculated insult on top of a fatal injury.



It is hard work, trying to help a black child value himself in a nation where his worth is ever in question. Now there’s this. You can’t buy candy for 4 cents. You can’t buy a stick of gum.

But a federal jury just bought Gregory Hill’s life.


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