Blog post # 3

How the Six Freedoms and Clauses Relate to Black Lives Matter Protests.     

    

     After the black lives matter protests took place this past summer (June 2020), when a man by the name of George Floyd was killed by two police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was major news headlines for days, and it opened the eyes of many fellow Americans on what the Black Lives Matter Movement was really about. For several days following George Floyds death, the streets of Minneapolis and several other major cities across the United States were flooded with protestors burning, looting, and rioting city restaurant's, and retail stores in cities such as, Salt Lake City Utah, New York City, Los Angeles, Fargo, North Dakota, and Lincoln Nebraska. And even major government building in Washington D.C.       

   These protests were meant to start out as peaceful protests, but soon after they led into grocery stores windows being boarded up, graffiti on US government buildings, and even family companies being burned and losing their livelihood. Unfortunately, for many it was also right in the middle of a global pandemic (Covid-19), so many people were already losing their businesses because of this. 

     But this also brings me into my topic about the six freedoms of the first amendment, and how this may relate to the black lives matter movement. I'm going to first start off with the 3rd freedom, which is "the right to free speech". I feel like this is certainly easy to relate to black lives matter because the protesters, when you think about it had a "right to freedom of speech". Because they marched the streets, with freedom signs and yelled slang words to police officers, and went as far to push police officers over. Overall, after gaining more knowledge about the black lives matter movement from reading these articles, I believe it is still in existence especially in major cities. 

                            https://www.idahostatejournal.com/news/local/us-cities-assess-damage-from-rioting-looting-and-violence-as-nationwide-unrest-continues/article_e5164ab4-a001-5265-950c-95bfdb0330d6.html

https://puffinwest.org/our-first-amendment-and-its-six-yes-6-clauses/#:~:text=The%20words%20of%20the%20First,speech%2C%20(4)%20the%20right                                  

 

 

 

Blog post #2

The History of the Supreme Court 

   

After reading about the history of the supreme court that goes all the way back to 1789, I learned many new things that I didn't know about the supreme court until taking this class. Such as, that if needed the court that is made up of nine justices can use their power to check the actions of the two other branches of government, the executive branch of the president, and the legislative branch that belongs to Congress. 

    What was fascinating to me was that George Washington would make a a pact or law that the six justices would have to serve on the court until they died or retired. I also learned that even though the court first met on February 2, 1970 it actually never heard any cases in its first term it was just for standard organizational procedures. 

  I had never heard of the court case West vs. Barnes which is a case involving a financial dispute between a farmer and a family he owed debt to, even in my prior history courses I had never of this which is why I decided to read more up on it. Even a 100 years after the making  of the Supreme Court, the justices were still required to hold a "circuit court" twice a year for judicial reasons, but the justices found it unnecessary, therefore Congress did away with it in 1891.

https://www.history.com/topics/us-government/supreme-court-facts