workingclasshistory:

On this day, 7 June 2016, African-American Black Lives Matter activist Jasmine Abdullah was sentenced to prison in California for a crime which was called “felony lynching” for attempting to de-arrest a fellow protester.
While the common understanding of the term “lynching” refers to extrajudicial murders, of which there have been many thousands across the United States committed against African-Americans, in California law the term defined the term as attempting to remove someone from police custody.
After another Black woman, Maile Hampton (pictured, right), was charged with lynching on a Black Lives Matter protest the previous year, there was mass outrage. This led to California authorities renaming the crime to remove the word “lynching” in 2016, while leaving the rest of the law intact.
Prosecutors had requested a one-year prison sentence for Abdullah (left), but with the background of a widespread campaign in her support, the judge decided to sentence her to 90 days imprisonment, with three years probation and a year of anger management.
Meanwhile, racist extrajudicial murders of African-Americans continue, and continue to go unpunished. For example the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012, and more recently the case of Ahmaud Arbery, who was racially abused and shot to death by three white men. The killers were not even arrested until months of protests forced Georgia state authorities to act – and even then they were not charged with lynching.
*
This is a helpful list of places you can donate to the current Black Lives Matter protest movement in the US: https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/12y7-Wa4gi8HUeFTv17gPcbMGuVX5cqIudLJmhOrq1-k/mobilebasic https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1445253945659751/?type=3