On April 25, the voting rights group Souls to the Polls called for the removal of recently appointed Republican Party of Wisconsin executive director Andrew Iverson over concerns that he was conspiring to overwhelm the group with requests for Donald Trump supporters to take to the polls.

According to reports, text messages was created when Iverson was the leader of the Wisconsin chapter of Trump Victory, a three way partnership between the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. Souls to the Polls Wisconsin State Executive Director Greg Lewis said in a press release that the messages were the most recent in a line of racist voter suppression.

“Today’s news is the latest example of voter suppression and racism,” Lewis said. Samuel Libert, Wisconsin director of All Voting is Local, and Angela Lang, executive director of Black Leaders Organizing Communities, joined in condemning Iverson and your complete Wisconsin Republican Party.

“This egregious ‘wreak havoc’ tactic not only undermines democracy, but also directly targets minority communities and perpetuates our cycle of voter suppression,” Lieber said. In the press release of April 25 this yr. he directly emphasized these points. “By targeting a Black community organization like Souls to the Polls, there is no doubt that the ultimate goal was Black voter suppression. “This threat to flood them with access to an election program that Milwaukeeans have relied on for over a decade would deprive voters of key access measures who actually need help getting to the polls.”

Lieber continued: “Such actions not only undermine our democracy, but also directly target historically disenfranchised communities and intentionally make it more difficult for them to vote.”

Meanwhile, Lang was critical of Iverson’s argument that the text messages he exchanged with former Republican operative and white supremacist Carlton Huffman were jokes. Huffman, who agrees with Lang and Lieber, is now an anti-Trump conservative.

“For communities of color to say that this is an injustice and a painful part of my ancestors’ history, then again, politics aside, why would you joke about something like that?” Lang said. “And then after all we add politics, we add different dynamics, the present political climate that we’re in – it’s all disgusting to listen to that he thought it was a joke and I felt prefer it was a lame excuse when he was attempting to turn back the clock a bit of bit .

A black mother plans to file a $40 million lawsuit against the city of Yonkers after her 13-year-old daughter was attacked at college by a gaggle of oldsters who began a fight between the girl and one among their relatives, also a student, leading to a harrowing brawl, which has since gone viral on social media.

Days after the fight, Alenna Merritt stated that she had removed the child from Yonkers Montessori Academy and filed legal documents notifying the city of the impending lawsuit, maintaining that the school was negligent and inadequately supervising students, which could have prevented the melee .

The Legal Notice of Claim, delivered to the City of Yonkers on April 25, provides formal notice of the lawsuit before it’s filed against the city agency.

Merritt’s grievance alleges negligent supervision, negligent hiring, negligent infliction of emotional distress and other related allegations against Yonkers, the Yonkers Board of Education and Yonkers Montessori Academy.

This wasn’t Merritt’s first negative experience with the academy, after she filed a lawsuit in January alleging school staff sexually harassed her daughter by asking her to remove her bra and shake her breasts, suspecting she was concealing a vape.

Four months later, the harassment case remains to be pending.

Merritt said that when the fight involving her daughter broke out in mid-April, she thought, “Here we go again.”

“We have children who are not supervised and not protected.” Merritt said New York Post Office. “I’m not going to put her in danger and throw her into the lion’s den every day.”

The 42-year-old Yonkers mother also said she plans to file criminal and potential civil charges against the adults involved while the incident stays under police investigation.

After reviewing cellphone videos, investigators determined that a few of the adults also attacked Merritt’s daughter, leading to an arrest warrant for Nancy Rosa, 55, who was allegedly one among the parents who got here to the school on April 18 to beat the underage girl, police said .

She faces charges of third-degree assault, second-degree molestation and endangering the welfare of a baby.

The Yonkers Police Department has not said whether more arrests are planned.

The fight scene was so brutal that police were called to the school to crush Donnybrook.

The girl who was targeted, a minor identified only by her initials EW, said at the least five adult relatives jumped on her when one other girl chased her on the baseball field of the Montessori school for elementary and middle school students just before classes began.

According to reports, one among the attackers is the grandfather of the other student.

“I felt confused and scared — they kept screaming in my face,” the teenager told The New York Post during an interview with the family’s lawyer. “When I was attacked, I felt alone and scared because there was no one to help me.”

One particular video of the incident circulating on Platform X shows Merritt’s daughter being assaulted by a much larger girl who overwhelms the EW with a series of untamed, excessive-force blows to the head.

According to the claim, a gaggle of adults got here to the school looking for a fight and intended to find EW’s friend, but since that person wasn’t there, they turned their anger at EW as an alternative, Merritt’s lawyer, Mark Shirian, explained.

Shirian questioned whether the school’s security staff intentionally selected not to move in during the fight as a type of retaliation against Merritt for her other outstanding claim against the school.

He said Merritt and her daughter had been “traumatized by this ordeal” and urged the school to take “decisive action to rectify this situation and prevent such occurrences in the future.”

Shirian accused Montessori of “gross failure to ensure student safety,” calling it “totally unacceptable.”

In the recording, parents may be heard screaming and cursing at EW, before one other student suddenly attacks, punching EW repeatedly, while adults encourage the hitting and EW tries to defend herself by punching her in the back.

According to the initial legal filing, EW “was left unattended” and “violently attacked on the grounds of Yonkers Montessori Academy by students, parents and relatives of current students during school hours.”

The document states that the teenager “was brutally attacked and beaten, as a result of which he suffered serious physical, emotional and mental injuries.”

Merritt said she was “horrified” when she received a call around 7:30 a.m. from her daughter, crying that she had been beaten by a gaggle of offended parents moments earlier.

Merritt’s daughter is now participating in distance learning and can receive help from a tutor for the remainder of the school yr.

Merritt stated that she had no plans to return EW to school, fearing for her safety, and revealed that the girl had already been accepted into a non-public Catholic all-girls school, where she would attend school next yr.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee’s Republican-dominated House of Representatives introduced latest laws on Wednesday that may prohibit local governments from paying for tuition or spending money on reparations for slavery.

The move marked a rare defeat for a GOP-backed proposal originally introduced nearly a yr ago. It was easily approved by the Republican-controlled Senate last April, but lawmakers ultimately stalled because the House was engulfed in controversy over the chamber’s expulsion of two Black Democratic lawmakers for participating in a pro-gun control protest. This protest followed the fatal shooting at an elementary school in Nashville.

Interest within the reparations bill resurfaced this yr as lawmakers and GOP Gov. Bill Lee were within the means of finalizing the removal and substitute of all board members of the state’s only historically publicly funded public university for Blacks, Tennessee State University. That has sparked more outrage amongst critics who say white GOP leaders in Tennessee have long distrusted black local leaders.

As the results of TSU intensified, House members appeared hesitant to carry a potentially explosive debate on compensation. The bill was briefly debated within the House of Representatives last week, but support remained unclear.

“The idea of ​​studying reparations doesn’t take anything away from you,” said Larry Miller, a black Memphis resident, during a temporary debate within the House of Representatives. “What’s inside you that lets you say, ‘Listen, we won’t study our history. We cannot even discuss our history, we won’t even study it with money from local taxes. It’s so outdated.

Ultimately, House leaders waited until the last week of the session to revisit this measure. But as Rep. John Ragan, the bill’s sponsor, moved to the front of the House to start his opening remarks, one other Republican demanded that the assembly “table” his proposal – which might effectively shut down the Legislature for the yr.

Nearly 30 Republicans joined House Democrats in filing the bill, including House Speaker Cameron Sexton.

Before the vote, Ragan maintained that the bill was vital, arguing that reparations advocates desired to “take money out of our grandchildren’s pockets as a judgment for the actions of someone else’s great-great-grandfather.”

“Is it correct to say that all Americans today must bear the guilt of a small percentage of generations long past? NO. Punishing an innocent person for an act committed by another person is never appropriate,” Ragan said Wednesday.

Under House rules, no other lawmakers could speak through the vote.

“We decided to move on and do something else,” Sexton later told reporters. “You can always come back.”

Tennessee lawmakers began seriously considering banning reparations consideration only after the state’s most populous county, which incorporates Memphis, announced it will spend $5 million to check the feasibility of reparations for descendants of slaves and find “actionable items.”

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The decision by Shelby County leaders was prompted by the fatal beating of Tire Nichols by officers in January 2023.

However, the concept of ​​banning reparations has emerged in other states.

A Republican lawmaker from Florida proposed a constitutional amendment this yr that may prohibit state and local governments from paying damages, however the measure was not adopted. The Missouri Republican has introduced a bill that may prohibit any state or local government entity from spending money on compensation based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or economic class. This has not progressed up to now.

Meanwhile, other states, including California, New Jersey and Vermont, have eagerly moved to check reparations.