A former security guard will spend the rest of his life behind bars for murdering an unarmed black man at a supermarket gas station in Memphis, Tennessee.

Gregory Livingston was found guilty of first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 48-year-old Alvin Motley Jr. on August 7, 2021, after the couple had an argument due to loud music playing in Motley’s automobile.

At the time, Livingston was working as a contract security guard for Kroger. Motley was visiting Memphis with his girlfriend Pia Foster. Livingston was patrolling a convenience store gas station when Motley and Foster pulled up to the pump. He got here face to face with Motley and shouted at him to turn down the music.

They argued for a short while before Foster let Motley back into the automobile. As Foster began to drive away from the station, Motley got out and approached Livingston, telling him he wanted to “talk like men.”

Livingston had his gun drawn and told Motley to “stand back” before shooting him point blank in the chest. Motley only had a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. He died on the spot.

Surveillance videos captured the shooting from multiple angles. Several witnesses were also at the scene of the shooting, including Motley’s girlfriend.

Livingston’s trial lasted lower than per week. His lawyers based their trial defense on a self-defense claim, saying he feared for his life and had no idea what Motley would do when he approached him. Prosecutors showed jurors video footage and argued that Motley posed no threat, noting what items he had on him as he approached Livingston.

One prosecutor told the court that Motley was also blind and will not have seen the gun Livingston was carrying. After the shooting, Livingston called police but never provided medical attention.

One witness testified and stated that it didn’t appear that the music playing in Motley’s automobile disturbed anyone. During her testimony, Foster described Livingston’s behavior as hostile, stating that she felt he was teasing her and Motley during the dispute.

Livingston was sentenced to life in prison. Court records show his lawyers filed a motion for a brand new trial, ABC News reports.

He was initially charged with second-degree murder, but a grand jury indicted him on first-degree murder in December 2021 after reviewing cellphone and surveillance videos.

“They said what this family had felt all along – that it was not only unnecessary, not only unjustified, but it was the callous murder of a young man, armed only with a can of beer and a cigarette,” she added. attorney Ben Crump said after the 2021 hearing, as previously reported by the Atlanta Black Star.

Before becoming a security guard, Livingston worked as a police officer in Horn Lake, Mississippi, for nearly three years. He resigned in 2001.

Motley, who lived in Chicago and owned a clothing company, visited Memphis to do business and meet with relations. He had just arrived in town before he was shot. He was an aspiring actor, artist and media personality.

“My God tells me to forgive and I forgive him” – Alvin Motley Sr. he said from Livingston to WREG. “But every day for the rest of my life, every morning when I wake up, I want him to be in prison and wake up that same morning and we both think about what he did.”

Like Motley, Jordan Davis was also fatally shot for listening to loud music at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2012. The 17-year-old’s death comes just eight months after George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin and sparked protests across the country , deepening a national reckoning over racial profiling and the deaths of black teenagers. Michael David Dunn, the man who shot Davis, is serving a life sentence for the teenager’s murder.

NEW YORK (AP) – These are the hallmarks of American history: protests, rallies, sit-ins, marches, riots. They date from the early days of what became the United States, to the sights and sounds echoing across the landscapes of the nation’s colleges and universities during this activist spring.

And equally an element of American history? These same events are met with irritation, condemnation, anger, calls to stop, and sometimes using law enforcement and aggressive tactics to make it occur.

“Dissent is essential to democracy. But dissent must never lead to disorder” – President Joe Biden he said Thursday, a summary of the continuing national paradox.

Americans value the appropriate to assemble, speak out, and petition for redress of grievances. This is included in the primary amendment to the structure. They praise the social actions of the past and appreciate the progress towards equality that previous generations have made, often in danger with life and limb. However, these same actions can create anger and outright opposition when routine life activities are disrupted, in addition to fear that those speaking out are outsiders seeking to sow chaos and influence impressionable minds.

“The public didn’t like civil rights protesters. The general public disliked protesters in the course of the Vietnam War. And most of the people didn’t just like the women’s movement protesters… and all of the protests that mainly happened in the long run,” says Robert Shapiro, a professor of political science on the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a public affairs expert on American politics.

This doesn’t mean, nonetheless, that the protests haven’t had results, even in the event that they aren’t immediate. “Public opinion is changing on this issue because of the effectiveness of protests, which do one very important thing and that is raise the visibility and importance of issues.”

Take, for instance, the Occupy Wall Street protest of 2011. “It drew attention to economic inequality in the United States,” he says. “After that, people paid more attention to the conversation. The problem of economic inequality in the United States has become and remains more visible.”

The protests are growing in intensity, as is the opposition to them

Over the past few weeks, protest camps have been established and destroyed in reference to the Israel-Hamas war, which has been ongoing since early October.

The Israeli government began military operations within the Gaza Strip after Hamas militants killed roughly 1,200 people and took one other 250 hostage in an October 7 attack in southern Israel. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the Israeli offensive killed greater than 34,500 Palestinians and caused widespread damage to infrastructure.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in U.S. schools are calling on their administrations to chop economic and other ties with Israel or firms they imagine support the war. Protest camps began on April 17 at Columbia University and spread across the country.

There was also opposition to the demonstrations. Administrators, under pressure to revive order and normal operations around commencement, said they supported the appropriate to talk out but to not disrupt the lives of other students or violate the foundations of conduct. Police were called in to clear encampments on campuses across the country; over 2,300 people were arrested.

But in terms of protest activity, it’s about disruption, says Celeste Faison, co-national director of the Movement for Black Lives network, a coalition of organizations that united after the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests that were catalyzed by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri .

“Change is always possible in those uncomfortable moments and uncomfortable impulses,” he says. “What has historically created change in the United States are those who are willing to put their bodies on the line, their voices on the line, their communities on the line.”

That resonates with Andrew Basta, a fourth-year undergraduate student on the University of Chicago who frolicked at the varsity’s camp on Tuesday. Basta, 21, said: “Not only is it fair, but I think it is our duty to disrupt the order, change our lives accordingly and resist.”

Where is the road drawn?

Rabbi Moshe Hauer would disagree that disruption is essential. He points to demonstrations and rallies which have taken place over time with permits and required consents, during which individuals expressed their voices without blocking roads or disrupting life.

People’s right to talk out is a right that “we absolutely recognize as part of being an American, as part of being serious people who know that no one has a monopoly on the truth,” says Hauer, executive vp of the Orthodox Union, a Jewish organization. “We must allow ourselves to listen to other voices and people raising their voices, clearly expressing their opinion – whether we like that opinion or not.”

However, he’s one in all those terrified by the present wave of protests on campus. He says they’ve descended into anti-Semitism and created an environment that’s dangerous for Jewish students and the community. He says it is a cause for concern when there is a movement that “chooses to define its tactics based on things… that are intimidating, threatening, that clearly, clearly, clearly lead to violence.”

Calls for orderly protests have been common throughout American history, sometimes accompanied by nostalgia for previous eras that might be lost.

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“It’s a romanticization of the past where it’s not actually true. For example, the media portrays Martin Luther King with great love and respect. But we know: back then, he was portrayed in the media as this anarchist destroyer,” Faison says. “Ultimately, we have a really bad pattern of defaming protesters when they get into a fight and then celebrating protesters when they win or when they take a risk.”

It’s a type of “ideological appropriation” when individuals who were considered radicals or crazy on the time of the protests are later considered “on the right side of history,” says Charles McKinney, an associate professor of history at Rhodes College who studies the Civil Rights Movement . “The role of the state is therefore to embody these values ​​while being ambivalent about the process by which these values ​​were implemented in the nation.”

This reinforces the concept that the facility of protest isn’t necessarily about persuading people in the current, but about influencing conversations within the culture. The strongest protest in American history – from the Boston Tea Party of 1773 onwards – resonated far beyond its time and became successful due to its enduring fame.

“It works, right?” says Robert Widell Jr., a history professor on the University of Rhode Island who has studied political movements. “It is effective at least in changing the terms of the debate and changing the way people think about a particular issue or set of issues, or just drilling into people’s brains that something is going on here.”

President Joe Biden’s virtue signaled to the nation his strong and continued support for Israel’s unjust occupation of Gaza and its brutality against the Palestinians.

On May 2, the Commander-in-Chief addressed the press and voters regarding the violence that occurred on May 1 during protests at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The 81-year-old president expressed his belief that folks had the proper to protest and assemble peacefully, but using violence wouldn’t be tolerated. He also stated that the United States just isn’t a “lawless country” and that there have to be order in “civil society.”

“The first is the right to freedom of speech and the right to peacefully assemble and express one’s voice. The second is the rule of law. Both need to be maintained. We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people and suppress dissent. The American people are heard. In fact, peaceful protest is the best tradition of how Americans respond to the problems that arise. But… but we are not a lawless country either. We are a civil society and there must be order,” Biden said.

“We have often encountered moments like this throughout our history because we are a large, diverse, free-thinking and freedom-loving nation. At times like these, there will always be those in a hurry to score political points. But this is not the moment for politics. This is a moment for clarity.”

Biden continued: “Let me be clear. Peaceful Protest in America – Violent protest is not protected; is a peaceful protest. When violence occurs, it is against the law.”

He maintained his support for Israel, although he expressed that Palestinians, Arabs and their supporters didn’t should be persecuted.

“But let’s get this straight too. There should be no place on any campus in America for anti-Semitism and threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it is anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.”

When a reporter asked Biden whether pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses had modified his support for Israel, he replied: “No.”

Although Biden alluded to protesters inciting violence and chaos against Jewish students, pro-Palestinian supporters don’t seem like a gaggle causing violence on various college campuses.

On May 1, roughly 150–200 pro-Israel supporters apparently attacked a pro-Palestinian camp on the University of California, Los Angeles, attacking students and others standing with Palestinians in Gaza. Aggressive supporters of the colonizers were armed with sticks and tried to remove the barricade from the protester’s headquarters.

The disturbing footage shows various men kicking and punching others while they were on the bottom.

At Columbia University in New York, Palestinian students and their supporters sharply criticized the varsity for calling SWAT on its students.

Jewish Columbia University student Cameron Jones revealed that there have been numerous Jewish students on campus who had renounced their Zionist faith and Israel’s egregious actions.

Guardian indicated universities, including Columbia, Harvard, and Penn State, have demonstrated incredulous bias against students supporting Palestinians in Gaza. When teachers and administrators could empower their students to fight for what they believed in, they called the police. Specifically, there have been students at Columbia in April detained and tied up zippered, although there have been no violent explosions. A recent Gallup poll found young adults’ support for Israel dropped dramatically.

Biden’s virtue signaling adds further fodder to the continued saga between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza.