By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on January 3, 2023 Ralph D. Malone, the owner and manager of Horizons, LLC, and John F. Carter, the founder and CEO of CarterBrothers, have teamed with Donald V. Watkins, the CEO of Masada Resource Group, LLC, to form a new special purpose limited liability company to market and promote Dake Rechsand’s desert framing technology and products in the United States. Malone, Carter, and Watkins have worked together in a number of domestic and international business ventures for many years. Collectively, these entrepreneurs have over 95 years of experience in developing, managing, and growing complex businesses and creating dynamic economic value in them. Since 2009, all three men have worked to deploy and support Masada Resource Group, LLC’s innovative waste-to-fuel technology around the globe. Dake Rechsand is the global leader in developing and deploying products on a commercial scale that address many of the devastating problems associated with desertification in the United States, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, India, and China. Mr. Chandra Dake is the Executive Chairperson and Group CEO of the Dake Group - a community empowerment driven, environmentally friendly, technology focused organization. The Dake Group’s key focus areas include Agriculture, Energy, Commodity Trading, Informational Technologies (IT), and Sustainable Technologies. The other partner in Dake Rechsand is China-based Rechsand Technology Group Co., Ltd., which is led by Mr. Qin Shengyi. Mr. Shengyi is Chairman and President of Rechsand Technology Group Co., Ltd., and Dean of Rechsand Manufacturing Research Institute, where he also serves as a Senior Engineering Professor. Dake Rechsand maintains a research and development platform at the “State Key Laboratory of Silicon Sand Resources Utilization” and the “Academician Workstation” in China. All of the company's 670 original invention patents have been successfully implemented independently and industrialized. Patented Processes and Products Dake Rechsand uses patented processes to make a wide variety of desert sand products that use selective permeability to reinvent water’s role in our world. These include: 1. Breathable Sand -- An air permeable and water impermeable product that increases water retention there by making it ideal for utilization in desert environments using less water. 2. Water Conservation Materials -- Breathable/permeable bricks, pavers and stones capable of storing water from rain or cloud-seeding and then re using such water. 3. Oil Sand -- Oil permeable but water impermeable, this sand increases the potential for production of oil from wells reducing water pumping out with oil. Teaming With Dake Rechsand On November 4, 2022, Donald Watkins teamed with the Dake Group, which is the global managing partner of Dake Rechsand and exclusive distributor of the company's products, to make desert farming a reality in the four desert regions of the U.S. Watkins has founded, owned, and managed paradigm-shifting businesses across a variety of industries and disciplines. Watkins collaborated with the Dake Group in South Africa and India on Masada's waste-to-energy projects prior to forming our current partnership. Desert farming is an economical option for entrepreneurs and Native American Tribes located in the Southwestern United States. Desert farming also bolsters food security at affordable prices and restores degraded lands. Dake Rechsand also offers forestation technology and products to complement desert farming, or as a stand-alone project. Dake Rechsand and the Watkins, Malone, and Carter team will market this innovative desert farming technology and products to Native-American Tribes (and other interested parties) in America’s four desert regions. Native-American Tribes are uniquely positioned to benefit from the Dake Rechsand products for desert farming and afforestation. In addition to a food security platform, desert farming provides another economic empowerment tool for these Tribes. Additional information about desert farming is located on Dake Rechsand’s Facebook page.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on January 2, 2023 Most of the world's surface is covered in water, in the form of oceans. The remaining landmass of Earth amounts to approximately 29 percent of the surface. Of this remaining 29 percent, deserts of all types constitute an estimated 33 percent, or one-third, of the Earth's total landmass. There are four true deserts in the United States. They are: (a) the Great Basin Desert, (b) the Mojave Desert, (c) the Sonoran Desert, and (d) the Chihuahuan Desert, all conforming to the basic definition of a desert as being a place of very low rainfall and restricted plant life. These deserts are all located in the western portion of the country and are defined to be areas that receive less than ten inches of precipitation (rain, snow, etc.) a year. About 40 percent of the continental United States is at risk for desertification. Desertification is triggered mainly by the overuse of land and unsustainable agricultural practices (overcropping, overgrazing, poor irrigation and deforestation) which lead to­ a loss of natural vegetation and healthy soil. An expanding human population and urban living area, as well as the low level of priority placed on environmental protection efforts, also contribute to desertification. Dake Reschsand One company – Dake Rechsand – is the global leader in developing and deploying products on a commercial scale that address many of the devastating problems associated with desertification in the United States, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, India, and China. Mr. Chandra Dake is the Executive Chairperson and Group CEO of the Dake Group - a community empowerment driven, environmentally friendly, technology focused organization. The Dake Group’s key focus areas include Agriculture, Energy, Commodity Trading, Informational Technologies (IT), and Sustainable Technologies. As the Executive Chairman and Group CEO, Chandra Dake took Dake Solutions from small boutique IT consulting organization, to a strong Artificial Intelligence Innovator, and through the formation of Dake Rechsand with Mr. Qin Shengyi. Mr. Dake’s 21 years of experience in varied industries led to the formation of Dake Rechsand, which is now the global leader in in innovative technologies for desert farming, water retention in desert areas, and the conservation of water/rain water harvesting. The other partner in Dake Rechsand is China-based Rechsand Technology Group Co., Ltd., which is led by Mr. Qin Shengyi. Mr. Shengyi is Chairman and President of Rechsand Technology Group Co., Ltd., and Dean of Rechsand Manufacturing Research Institute, where he also serves as a Senior Engineering Professor. Mr. Shengyi graduated from Nanjing Institute of Technology and has a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Peking University. He holds the key position as Director of State Key Laboratory of “Silicon Sand Resources Utilization.” Mr. Shengyi has dedicated 35 years of his life on the research for utilization of desert sand for various applications such as farming and water conservation. He has published six academic papers and holds 670 original patents. Dake Rechsand maintains a research and development platform at the “State Key Laboratory of Silicon Sand Resources Utilization” and the “Academician Workstation” in China. All of the company's 670 original invention patents have been successfully implemented independently and industrialized. Patented Processes and Products Dake Rechsand uses patented processes to make a wide variety of desert sand products that use selective permeability to reinvent water’s role in our world. These include: 1. Breathable Sand -- An air permeable and water impermeable product that increases water retention there by making it ideal for utilization in desert environments using less water. 2. Water Conservation Materials -- Breathable/permeable bricks, pavers and stones capable of storing water from rain or cloud-seeding and then re using such water. 3. Oil Sand -- Oil permeable but water impermeable, this sand increases the potential for production of oil from wells reducing water pumping out with oil. Teaming With Dake Rechsand On November 4, 2022, I teamed with the Dake Group, which is the global managing partner of Dake Rechsand and exclusive distributor of the company's products, to make desert farming a reality in the four desert regions of the U.S. I have founded, owned, and managed many paradigm-shifting businesses across a variety of industries and disciplines. I collaborated with the Dake Group in South Africa and India on waste-to-energy projects prior to forming our current partnership. Dake Rechsand is a world-class company that is led by a visionary CEO. Desert farming is an economical option for entrepreneurs and Native American Tribes located in the Southwestern United States. Desert farming also bolsters food security at affordable prices and restores degraded lands. Dake Rechsand also offers forestation technology and products to complement desert farming, or as a stand-alone project. Together, Dake Rechsand and my company will be marketing this innovative desert farming technology to Native-American Tribes (and other interested parties) in America’s four desert regions. Native-American Tribes are uniquely positioned to benefit from the Dake Rechsand products for desert farming and afforestation. In addition to a food security platform, desert farming provides another economic empowerment tool for these Tribes. Additional information about desert farming is located on Dake Rechsand’s Facebook page.

By: Donald V. Watkins December 31, 2022 The 2023 New Year promises to be an exciting one for me. These are the things I plan to accomplish in 2023: 1. I will continue to support the academic, cultural, spiritual, and professional growth of my children and grandchildren. All of them are smart, well-mannered, disciplined, strong, aspirational, and international in their view of the world. For six generations in America, Carmichael/Varnado/Watkins family members have been groomed for leadership roles in our multi-cultural society. 2. I will work with a world-class, Dubai-based, Forbes Business Council Member to deploy transformational commercial projects in the United States that: (a) redefine desert landscapes, (b) produce sustainable green deserts in parts of California and the Southwestern regions of the United States, (c) enhance food security at affordable prices, (d) promote greater carbon sequestration, and (e) favorably impact water conservation, via economically feasible rainwater harvesting (throughout America). 3. I will work on Masada Resource Group waste-to energy projects with my seasoned international business partners. Included within this scope of work is a new business collaboration with a Swiss-based company that creates and deploys technologies to: (a) purify gas and liquid streams, (b) produce hydrogen from industrial waste, (c) extract “dead” hydrogen from diluted streams of different origin, and (d) remove toxic pollutants from agricultural liquid waste, while co-producing hydrogen. 4. I will assist in the formation of a California-based Super-PAC to (a) register two million new Independent voters in six swing states and (b) educate these newly registered voters on “pocketbook” issues facing "Mainstream" Americans, immigration reform, and the importance of a strong national defense prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The funding goals for the Super-PAC are $25 million in 2023 and $50 million in 2024. 5. I will work on the launch of a California-based, Spanish version of my free online news site at: www.donaldwatkins.com. God has truly blessed the Carmichael/Varnado/Watkins family. We have overcome all of the odds stacked against us, including: (a) the enslavement of our African-American ancestors, (b) the gross abuse of our Native-American ancestors, (c) the legal and practical constraints imposed upon family members during the Civil War (1861-1865), (d) the oppression we endured during the long, ugly, and violent Jim Crow era, (e) the adverse impact that the FBI’s official COINTELPRO program (1956 to 1971) and ongoing "unofficial" COINTELPRO program in the American South has had on certain family members, and (f) the challenges resulting from modern-day racism that often masquerades as conservative political thought. We are “Bridge Builders” in America and the international world. In 2023, I plan to continue our family’s legacy in bridge-building, domestically and abroad, with the wonderful, exciting, and paradigm-shifting business and political opportunities that God has been made available to me. Happy New Year!

By Donald V. Watkins ©Copyrighted and Published on December 29, 2022 An Editorial Opinion In my lifetime, I have seen horrendous acts of violence that have revealed the inhumanity of mankind. I have seen blacks savagely beaten for trying to use a public water fountains and restrooms that was reserved for “whites only” and for trying to eat at segregated lunch counters in a local department store. State laws forced me to attend all-black schools in Memphis, Tennessee and Montgomery, Alabama. This situation lasted until I went to college at Southern Illinois University in 1966. While I was a child in the 1950s, black men in the South were burned alive by white “Christians” for alleged crimes against white women. In 1955, I saw the Jet magazine photos of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s battered, beaten and mutilated body during his open-casket funeral and listened in horror as my parents told us what happened to him. Till was lynched in Mississippi for alledgely flirting with a white woman. I watched the 1963 Birmingham church bombing on TV while I was a teenager in Montgomery. During this same period, I saw the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs turned on school children who were protesting for an end to racial segregation in public accommodations and schools. In the early 1960s, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and Rosa Parks sat in my parents’ home as I listened to them describe the rivers of blood that flowed from the civil rights protesters’ courageous acts of civil disobedience across the South. I watched the news in August 1964 when federal authorities discovered the bodies of three civil rights workers who were kidnapped by local sheriff’s deputies and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) while registering blacks to vote in Mississippi. I watched real-time TV news accounts about the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, the 1965 murders of civil rights workers Viola Liuzzo (from Michigan) and Jimmy Lee Jackson (from Selma) in Alabama, and the 1968 assassination of Dr. King in Memphis. In 1963, I watched Governor George Wallace block the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood to the University of Alabama. In 1965, I watched John Lewis and other civil rights marchers brave horrendous beatings by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. In 1974, Clarence Norris told me about the beatings and torture he and the other eight Scottsboro Boys endured after their 1931 arrest on false rape charges and imprisonment in Alabama. When I retrieved the Scottsboro Boys’ case file from state archives, the old prison records verified Norris’ account of the prison system’s brutality. As young children, our parents told us about the lynching of my maternal grandfather’s cousin in Mississippi and how my mother’s father barely escaped death in the same incident. On March 21, 1981, the Ku Klux Klan kidnapped and lynched a 19-year-old African-American teenager named Michael Donald in downtown Mobile, Alabama. This was the last recorded lynching in America. In 1966, I saw young white college students throw garbage on my brother Levi after he entered Vanderbilt’s medical school as its first black medical student. I also witnessed first-hand the isolation and hatred Levi endured during his four years as a trailblazer at Vanderbilt. When I desegregated the University of Alabama’s law school in 1970, I began the longest and loneliest three-year chapter of my life. After I graduated from the law school and started practicing law in an all-white judiciary and in front of all-white juries, some white state court judges routinely referred to me for the first couple of years as the “nigger lawyer from Montgomery”. Several federal judges did not call me by any name or title; they simply barked out orders and rulings in a nasty and demeaning tone. After I became a lawyer in 1973, I was continuously threatened with bodily harm and death because of my representation of poor, underprivileged, and disadvantaged citizens. I have lost count of the number of such threats. During the course of my legal career, I have been hauled before grand juries and harassed by rogue prosecutors, prosecuted on trumped-up criminal charges, attacked by state and federal regulatory bodies with oversight responsibility for my private businesses, and peppered with personal attacks on my character by state and federal officials whose propensity for racial animosity exceeds all known means for objective measurement. I have also been maliciously smeared by modern-day COINTELPRO news reporters in Alabama who collaborate with local federal law enforcement agents. These were not experiences I read about in scholarly journals or best-selling books; these were my real life experiences. Through it all, I have learned what it is like to be a victim of unimaginable acts of hatred, denigration, harassment, abuse of power and process, and violence by a tyrannical majority solely because of the color of my skin. These experiences have not made me bitter, but they have heightened my awareness of just how evil some people can be. As a result, I am aggressive and passionate in the way I fight to safeguard the human and civil rights of others. This is why I fought so hard to get wife-beating, marital-cheating, pill-popping former judge Mark Fuller off the federal bench in Montgomery in 2015 and 2016. This is why I exposed a hypocrite like former Alabama governor Robert Bentley and his theft of taxpayer’s money and resources to carry out his torrid love affair with married political consultant Rebekah Caldwell Mason. This is why I constantly rake former Montgomery U.S. Attorney George Beck and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange over the coals for being weak and impotent in the face of runaway public corruption committed by Bentley and other top Republican officials. Beck and former Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange had the power to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution but they did not use it. This is why I exposed the 2013 murder of an unarmed Cameron Massey by former Eufaula, Alabama Police Chief Ralph Connor and officer John Phillips while Massey sat in the passenger seat of a car driven by Joshua Keith Kelly, another unarmed black male. This is why I worked so hard to solve the 2005 murder of Pfc LaVena Johnson in Iraq by General Kevin P. Byrnes and to expose a cover-up of her death that goes all the way to the top of the Pentagon’s chain of command. This is why Byrnes will be arrested one day for Private Johnson's murder. This is why I blasted state Rep. Steve Hurst for introducing a bill in the 2016 session of the Alabama legislature requiring the surgical castration of sex offenders in Alabama prisons. State-mandated mutilation of the human body simply has no place in a post-Nazi era civilized society. I have lived through barbaric times in Alabama, and I do not want to see us return to this dark period in our history. Alabama subjected its citizens to unimaginable acts of horror. ISIS and the Nazis must picked up some of their brutality and torture techniques from Alabama public officials and the state’s die-hard “Christian” segregationists during the Jim Crow era. ISIS’s practice of burning people alive came straight out of Alabama’s long and ugly history of burning black men alive during the same period. ISIS’s acts of bombing and burning churches and other places of worship came straight out of 1960s era Birmingham. The Nazis’ regiment of beating, torturing, hogtieing prisoners to posts, and murdering them came straight out of Alabama’s prison system in the 19th and 20th centuries. Nazi medical experiments on Jewish concentration camp internees were preceded by Alabama’s infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study experiments on black men from 1932 to 1972. I have seen the devastating effects of hatred and violence practiced in the name of God, religion and “states rights." Today, I am watching black-on black gun violence in Birmingham, Alabama and across the nation that is spreading like cancer. Mayor Randall Woodfin and local U.S. Attorney Prim Escalona are impotent in their ability to fight the surging gun violence in Birmingham. All that Woodfin can do is weep about skyrocketing number of homicides in his city and implement an ineffective Kumbaya approach to solving gun violence. I am passionately speaking out against this surging violence because it has no place in a civilized and progressive society. Local public officials seem to be lost on this issue. As such, I am demanding full accountability from every public officials in Birmingham and across America who is in a position to curb gun violence, but is not doing so.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 28, 2022 An Editorial Opinion On July 16, 2020, Prim F. Escalona was appointed as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama by outgoing U.S. Attorney General William Barr. The Northern District of Alabama encompasses Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Huntsville. Ms. Escalona replaced Jay Town, a Donald Trump-appointee who resigned in disgrace in 2020 after he was caught chugging down drinks with Alabama Power Company CEO Mark Crosswhite in a clandestine meeting at a secluded lounge in Birmingham. At the time, Crosswhite had been implicated in the North Birmingham Bribery Case of former state representative Oliver Robinson and two co-defendants. Alabama Power provided $30,000 of the $360,000 used to bribe Oliver Robinson. As the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and as a longtime political minion of U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), Jay Town made sure that Crosswhite was not charged and prosecuted for his involvement in the bribery scheme. Last month, Crosswhite was forced by the Southern Company to take an early "retirement" from Alabama Power Company. Crosswhite learned about his "retirement" from the news media. A Trump-Era Holdover Prim Escalona is a Trump-era holdover in the U.S. Attorney’s office. To this day, President Joe Biden has not explained why a Trump-appointee still serves as the U.S. Attorney in Birmingham -- two years after Biden was sworn-in as president. As U.S. Attorney, Escalona is responsible for the prosecution of federal criminal offenses in the district and representing the United States in civil prosecutions and collecting debts owed to the state. She oversees about 98 employees, consisting of 48 Assistant United States Attorneys, 38 support staff, and 12 contract support personnel. In my view, Prim Escalona is Mayor Randall Woodfin’s partner in failed leadership. Remember, Woodfin is also an attorney and former city prosecutor. Despite having access to (a) the full resources of the U.S. Department of Justice and (b) a vast array of federal laws designed to fight violent street crime, Escalona has joined Woodfin in ceding control of Birmingham’s streets and neighborhoods to violent gang members, drug dealers, and other ruthless street criminals. Federal, state, and city law enforcement agencies in the metro-Birmingham area have a thousand or more paid and unpaid informants who provide them with information on criminal activity in the city. When properly trained, deployed, and directed, these informants can provide a host of valuable and actionable information that prevents violent street crimes before they happen. To a large extent, this is not happening in Birmingham today solely because the executive leadership teams in the U.S. Attorney’s office and the Mayor's Office do not have the qualifications and experience necessary to effectively combat violent street crime. Escalona Looks Good on Paper, But Lacks Urban Crime-fighting Experience Prior to her appointment, Prim Escalona held multiple leadership positions within the Department of Justice, including in the Office of Legislative Affairs and the Office of Legal Policy. Prior to her tenure at the Department of Justice, Escalona served as Deputy Solicitor General in the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Alabama, was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, and worked in private practice. Escalona also served as a law clerk for Judge William H. Pryor Jr. on the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Prim Escalona received her law degree from the University of Alabama School of Law, where she graduated summa cum laude and Order of the Coif. Escalona received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Birmingham Southern College, where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Like Mayor Woodfin, Prim Escalona looks good on paper. However, she has no real-life experience in preventing violent crime and prosecuting hardcore street criminals. There is no question that Escalona is exceptionally bright from an academic standpoint. However, except for the time Escalona spent attending Birmingham Southern College (which is walled-off from the surrounding black community), it does not appear that she has spent any significant amount of time in the streets of West Birmingham. This is one of the communities where young gang members and drug dealers kill innocent victims at will. Lloyd Peeples, the chief of Escalona’s Criminal Division, was a failed Birmingham-area pizza restaurant operator in October of 2017. Peeples' financially struggling "Your Pie" restaurant closed only 11 months after he opened it. Jay Town hired Peeples, a homegrown bigot with a documented history of hostility towards women and people of color, to carry out “hit” jobs on some of Sen. Shelby's political enemies. If the judges in the Birmingham federal courthouse did not coddle Peeples in the courtroom, he would never win a criminal case. Career federal prosecutors who are experienced in fighting violent street crimes have an arsenal of criminal laws they can use to combat the skyrocketing homicides in Birmingham. Because Escalona, Peeples, and their team of criminal prosecutors spend their time “majoring” in “minors,” the killing spree in Birmingham continues unabated. The homicide numbers in Birmingham for 2022 (i.e., 144 victims, as of December 27th) suggest that Escalona and Woodfin are not doing enough to combat the skyrocketing number of murders in the city. Escalona’s background in legislative affairs and legal policy is NOT what is needed in an urban combat zone where the law enforcement battles with vicious street criminals are non-stop and escalating. The fact that Escalona is still in the U.S. Attorney's job today is Joe Biden’s fault. Biden must answer for this lapse in political and law enforcement judgment if and when he runs for re-election in 2024. Where Do We Go From Here? It’s just a matter of time before the violent street crime that is flourishing in Birmingham spills over into the neighboring suburban cities of Hoover, Vestavia, Homewood, and Mountain Brook. Sadly, this is exactly what happened in Atlanta when violent crime spilled over into the adjoining Buckhead and Sandy Springs communities. Escalona’s and Woodfin’s inexperience in criminal law enforcement is exacting a heavy toll on the innocent victims of violent crime in Birmingham. Today, the killings in Birmingham are mostly black-on-black crimes. In the near future, I expect to see a surge in black-on-white violent crime in Birmingham’s suburbs. When this surge happens, property values in the suburbs will plummet, as they have done in Birmingham.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 27, 2022 An Editorial Opinion On December 26, 2022, Mayor Randall Woodfin outlined his new plan to combat the skyrocketing homicides from gun violence in Birmingham, Alabama. The plan is posted on Woodfin’s Facebook page. After identifying the circumstances involved in 6 of the 144 homicides in Birmingham, as of December 26th, Woodfin said: “There's a pattern with many of the tragedies our city has seen in recent weeks. These weren't random occurrences on our streets. These all happened in a private vehicles or residences: 12/18 – victim was riding in car with suspect(s) 12/18 – victim was in car at apartment complex 12/20 – victim visiting friends inside apartment unit 12/22 – victim in car in driveway 12/23 – victim and suspect family members at family home 12/26 – victim inside apartment complex” Woodfin said nothing about Birmingham's other 138 homicides by gun violence in 2022. He did not specify how many of these 138 homicides occurred on the streets of Birmingham and involved gang and/or drug-related activity. Street killings that arise from gang and drug-related activities constitute the overwhelming majority of Birmingham's homicides by gun violence. Finally, Mayor Woodfin was completely silent about the 12 children who have died from gun violence in his city in 2022. The weeping Woodfin exhibited at his December 21, 2022 press conference to discuss the tragic murder of 12-year-old Audriana Pearson from a drive-by shooting earlier that day is absent from the mayor's Facebook page. Woodfin’s Crime Fighting Plan After his shallow and amateurish PR spin of 6 of the 144 killings in Birmingham from gun violence, Woodfin unveiled his new plan for dealing with the gun violence. Here is Woodfin's plan in his own words: “I've said before that we can't police our way out of all violent crime in our city. That's especially true regarding crime on private property behind closed doors. Before violence escalates in your home or with a friend or person you know, please, for the sake of yourself and your loved ones, attempt to calm the situation. If you can't, walk away and seek help. Confrontation breeds tragedy. Before things go too far, de-escalate the situation. Your life, and the lives of those you love, are worth it.” That’s it. That’s Woodfin’s bold, new crime fighting plan. Unbelievably, Woodfin does not plan on policing his way out of this surging gun violence. In his own words, Woodfin says he is going to Kumbaya his way out of this crisis. On November 15, 2022, Woodfin’s crime-fighting plan, as announced in his testimony before Congress, called for the decriminalization of marijuana in Birmingham. In Woodfin's hip-hop view, making it safe and easy for city residents to get “high” all day would mellow them out. This, in turn, would reduce violent crime. Both of Woodfin's publicly announced plans are pure bullshit! A Proven and Effective Law Enforcement Plan On December 23, 2022, I presented a proven and effective 10-step plan for combatting the city’s runaway gun violence in an article titled, “ How to Curb Violent Crime in Birmingham, Alabama.” Woodfin made no reference to this plan. Today, Birmingham is an urban war zone. Nothing short of the crime-fighting plan I presented on December 23rd will curb the city's runaway gun violence. The money for my plan is already in the city’s 2023 operating budget. Today, the millions of taxpayer dollars needed to implement my plan are being spent by Mayor Woodfin to reward his out-of-state political cronies for consulting work that is of little to no value to the city. Woodfin's "pork" money is being bled out of the budget under the category of “Professional Services.” This "pork" money is parked in various department budgets, and Woodfin's cronies are feasting off of it. Meanwhile, city residents are being murdered at an alarming rate, with no end in sight. Epilogue As I stated on November 18, 2022, “Birmingham is Dying.” Birmingham’s mayor is play-acting in his role in city government. In reality, he doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on, or what he can do to save his dying city. He is, however, very proficient in handing out "pork" money under the radar of public scrutiny. What is worse, the members of the Birmingham city council have not stepped up to show any leadership in this crisis of gun violence and runaway homicides. They, too, have surrendered the streets to gang leaders and drug kingpins. At this juncture, Birmingham’s mayor and council are merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic after it has struck the iceberg.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 26, 2022 A year ago today, I published a bombshell article about the $2.5 million in secret contracts Alabama "dirty tricks" operative Joe Perkins and his company, Matrix, LLC, had with Alabama Power Company. Money from these contracts was used by Perkins and Matrix to compromise utility regulators, state and federal politicians, law enforcement officials and judges, grassroots community organizations, and news media outlets. The money flowed to Perkins and Matrix without invoicing. A copy of each contract is attached to my article. Perkins, with the assistance of retiring Alabama U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, retaliated by having the Federal Bureau of Prisons place me in the "Hole" at FCI La Tuna for five weeks, without charges. I became an American "political prisoner" in 2019 after Jay Town (Shelby's handpicked U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama) and Lloyd Peeples (a failed pizza restaurant operator who served as Town's top assistant prosecutor) manufactured phony criminal fraud charges against my son and me. These men used their connections within Shelby's office and the Department of Justice to railroad us in the Birmingham federal courthouse. After I was released from the"Hole," I exposed $96,000 in special work orders that Alabama Power issued to Matrix for the purpose of funneling money to various news organizations in Alabama in exchange for (a) favorable coverage of Alabama Power and (b) trashing critics of Alabama Power and Perkins. On August 18, 2022, I broke the story on an August 3, 2022 court filing in which Jeff Pitts stated that he was forced to resign as Matrix's CEO in December 2020 "because of Perkins' inappropriate and unethical business practices, including ....initiating and directing the creation of an explicit video in an attempt to intimidate the family of Megan Rondini, a rape victim who had committed suicide, to settle a civil claim [filed by her estate]....". Perkins had previously denied (under oath) any involvement in the Megan Rondini rape-suicide case. Life in Alabama's New Paradigm Today, Richard Shelby, who is Joe Perkins' hunting buddy and client, is leaving Washington for good at the end of the year. Shelby's tangled web of lies and deceit was exposed in an article I published on November 14, 2021. In July of 2020, Jay Town resigned as U.S. Attorney after he was photographed chugging down celebratory drinks with Mark Crosswhite (Alabama Power's CEO) at a secluded Birmingham lounge in the middle of a criminal investigation that implicated Crosswhite in the North Birmingham Bribery Case of former state representative Oliver Robinson and two co-defendants. Today, Town is working as the general counsel for a private defense contractor in Huntsville, Alabama. On April 6, 2022, Abdul K. Kallon, the judge who presided over the North Birmingham Bribery Case, abruptly resigned to take a job as a lawyer in Washington state, where he was not licensed to practice law. Kallon had reportedly barred defense attorneys in the trial of two of Robinson's co-defendants from mentioning Alabama Power Company's name during their trial. In April 2022, William Dice Lineberry, the lawyer who set up the phony non-profit entity that was used for the North Birmingham Bribery Scheme, committed suicide. On October 11, 2017, Matt Bowden, Alabama Power's then-general counsel, died. Bowden's death occurred less than two weeks after Balch & Bingham attorney Joel I. Gilbert and ex-Drummond Company executive David Roberson were indicted in the North Birmingham Bribery Case. Bowden died unexpectedly, reportedly from complications due to an ankle injury. On May 15, 2022, Joe Perkins' daughter publicly accused him of sexually abusing her when she was a child. Perkins has not denied this charge. On November 21, 2022, Mark Crosswhite learned from news media reports that he was "retiring" from Alabama Power Company after litigation between Joe Perkins and Jeff Pitts revealed a shocking scheme by Matrix to conduct video surveillance on Tom Fanning, the CEO of the Southern Company. Matrix spied on Fanning in the hopes of capturing video of Fanning in compromising sexual conduct with men, despite the fact that Fanning is NOT gay or bisexual. Today, Jay Town is under a Department of Justice investigation that is probing his handling of the North Birmingham Bribery Case. Lloyd Peeples has burrowed himself into the U.S. Attorney's Office in Birmingham as chief of the Criminal Division. In 2023, I will be publishing an exclusive investigative report on how Joe Perkins compromised Peeples (and others) in my case. On December 19, 2022, National Public Radio reported that several Alabama and Florida news organizations participated in a Matrix scheme to accept undisclosed payments from Matrix for the purpose of generating favorable news coverage for Matrix's clients and trashing the critics of its clients. Alabama Power Company provided the money for this unethical scheme in Alabama. Alabama-based participants in this scheme included the Alabama Political Reporter, Yellowhammer News, and Alabama Today. There are multiple investigations in Florida, Washington, and Atlanta that are probing the conduct of Joe Perkins, Matrix, Alabama Power Company, Mark Crosswhite, Florida Power & Light, and many others in these matters. Many participants in Matrix's various power-grab schemes in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida have lawyered up in anticipation of very turbulent days ahead. Joe Perkins, who is a confessed federal lawbreaker, is viewed by many of his clients and friends as extremely toxic at this time. They are distancing themselves from Perkins at breakneck speed. Today, I am a free man. My son is free, as well. We endured a terrible injustice at the hands of Joe Perkins, Matrix, Alabama Power Company, and their allies. We have now reunited with our family members and true friends. .We look forward to a happy New Year in 2023!

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 25, 2022 An Editorial Opinion Residents of the City of Birmingham, Alabama pay a broad array of taxes and fees for the seven basic city services: (a) sanitation (garbage and rubbish pickup), (b) safe and clean water, together with sewer services, (c) paved streets with concrete gutters, (d) safe, accredited, and quality public schools, (e) fire department services, (f) public safety, and (g) public transportation. There is more than enough money in Birmingham’s $517 million operating budget for 2023 to have an outstanding public safety program in the city. Likewise, there is enough money in the Birmingham school system’s nearly $507 million operating budget to have an impressive K-12 public education system. Unfortunately, the money needed for a fully staffed police department has been bled off to support an army of highly-paid department heads, assistants in the mayor’s office, non-essential consultants, and pet projects for rich and powerful special interest groups. Much of this spending is pure “pork” for political cronies who bring no real value to the table. I can read operating budgets pretty good, but I don’t know where a lot of the school board’s money is going. This money is being spent by elected officials who are mostly unknown to the general public and me. Siphoning Off Neighborhood Improvement Money for the Benefit of Rich People Money to improve Birmingham’s 99 distinct communities and neighborhoods is being bled off at the rate of $3 million per year (for 30 years) to pay for a new football stadium for the University of Alabama at Birmingham. This is a reverse “Robin Hood” transaction where money is taken from the city’s poorest residents to fund a special project for its richest residents. It is a $90 million fleecing of Birmingham's tax dollars. Even though the city is funding $90 million of the stadium's $142 million cost, it does not control any of the vendor contracts that have been issued for the operation of the stadium. However, city officials get to sit in a skybox, hobnob with rich and powerful UAB football fans, and look important during events held in the stadium. City Hall’s propensity for rich people to fleece taxpayer dollars continues to this day. City officials are now considering a fleecing proposal that would take $5 million in tax dollars and shower it on Birmingham Southern College, a private college for students from America’s richest families. Again, Birmingham taxpayers will get absolutely nothing of substance from this fleecing transaction. After the skyrocketing violent crime in Birmingham was spotlighted on this media site on November 18, 2022, city officials unleashed their social media trolls to pushback on a call to reallocate existing budget dollars to implement proven crime-fighting measures in cities like Birmingham that have been turned into urban combat zones While Birmingham’s elected officials have police security details to protect them from violent street criminals, ordinary citizens do not. These officials don’t seemed to be troubled as much as we are that 12 of the 13 children who were homicide victims in Birmingham in 2022 died from gun violence. Birmingham Taxpayers are Getting Ripped Off Birmingham taxpayers are NOT getting their money’s worth when it comes to public safety and K-12 education in city schools. I have been told privately by sources inside City Hall that the mayor and council believe Birmingham residents are content with this miserable state of being. After all, they elected Mayor Randal Woodfin (twice) even though the city is dying! I do not believe that Birmingham's taxpayers are satisfied with this miserable state of being. No taxpayer with walking-around-sense would accept the city’s failure to deliver outstanding public safety and an excellent K-12 education. The City of Birmingham has an operating budget of $517,017,653 to serve 197,575 residents. The Birmingham Board of Education has an operating budget of $506,988,421 to educate 22,000 students in 42 schools. The combined amount of these two operating budgets is $1,024,006,074. Despite this reservoir of $1,024,006,074 in tax dollars, Birmingham lacks (a) an effective public safety program to combat the surging violent crime in the city and (b) a high-quality, K-12, public education system. There is no excuse for either failure. City Hall and school board officials have been very effective in using commemorative events, awards ceremonies, Facebook posts, tweets, and Instagram photos to distract the public’s attention from their collective failure of leadership in public safety and education. This distraction worked well until (a) the state board of education released its annual list of failed public schools in November, which showed two Birmingham magnet schools on the list, and (b) the homicides from gun violence in Birmingham skyrocketed to 142 last week, including 12 children who died from gunshot wounds in 2022. For the past five years, Birmingham residents have been gaslighted with empty promises and feel-good speeches from city officials who are placing the safety, educational welfare, and lives of innocent children and adults in the Birmingham at great risk. We should expect excellence in the delivery of city services for public safety and K-12 education, and we must demand it. Demanding Excellence, and Getting it In 2023, we must fight like hell to end this miserable state of being for Birmingham’s residents. Residents deserve much more from City Hall than what they are getting today for their hard-earned tax dollars. This is not a personal attack on any city official. This is business – the business of elevating the quality of life for the residents of Birmingham. Taxpayers are already paying the dollars needed for the delivery of excellent city services. They must get what they are paying for. No ifs, ands, or buts will suffice on this business matter.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 23, 2022 Another homicide occurred in Birmingham on Thursday night. This killing makes the 142nd homicide in 2022. The adult male victim died from a gunshot wound. The homicide occurred within 18 hours of another homicide early Thursday morning. It's time to get serious about gun violence in Birmingham. City residents are not safe inside or outside of their homes. The city has transformed itself into a "killing field." Here are the Practical Steps that are Needed to Curb Gun Violence in the City Mayor Randall Woodfin and the members of Birmingham, Alabama's city council can drastically reduce the skyrocketing homicides in the city by aggressively implementing the crime-fighting measures set forth below. 1. Declare war on violent crimes within the city, and mean it. Put the city’s money on the front-line of the fight against violent crime. 2. Hire the amount of new police officers needed to staff the police department with 900 sworn officers. The city's police chief has publicly stated that 900 is the number of sworn officers he needs. 3. Pay a one-time signing bonuses of $10,000 to each new officer hired and a one-time retention bonus of $10,000 to each existing officer on the force. The officers must agree to remain on the force for a minimum of three years after accepting their signing and/or retention bonuses. 4. Pay a $2,000 per month housing stipend to any police officer who is willing to relocate to the top ten most violent crime areas in the city and live in those communities/neigborhoods for a minimum period of three years. 5. Saturate high crime areas with sophisticated surveillance cameras that are actively monitored by a dedicated force of not less than 36 police department employees (i.e., 12 employees per 8-hour shift, 365 days per year). The police department’s deployment and increased use of visual information technology systems will give it a strategic advantage over street criminals. 6. Ramp up and expand the use of random street checkpoints throughout the highest violent crime areas in the city. This law enforcement tool is particularly effective between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., seven days per week. 7. Expand and enhance the use of the police department’s vast network of paid informants. Offer a cash reward of $10,000 for information leading to the prevention of a planned shootout, drive-by shooting, or gang-sanctioned “hit.” Likewise, a reward of $10,000 should be offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a person who committed an unlawful homicide within the city limits of Birmingham in cases where the suspect is not already known. Reward money is the most effective tool in the crime fighting arsenal because there is no loyalty within the ranks of drug dealers and gang members. Any one of them will sellout a relative, fellow drug dealer, or gang member for money. 8. Coordinate with the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office to vigorously oppose bail bonds in all unlawful homicide cases where a firearm, physical force, arson, or a cutting device was used to kill the homicide victim. State court judges who facilitate the easy release of violent criminals must be targeted by local political organizations for defeat in the next election cycle. 9. Use overwhelming force when arresting drug kingpins and gang leaders. These arrests should be recorded on video, when possible, and made available to news organizations in real-time. This technique will embarrass and humiliate drug kingpins and gang leaders in front of their peers and underlings. 10. Demand that all paid and unpaid police informants spread the word within their respective criminal networks and/or communities that the police department is implementing a new program that is specifically designed to crush drug kingpins and gang leaders and quash their violent street crimes. What's Lacking in City Hall Today is the Will to Retake the Streets from the Thugs Who Control Them Mayor Woodfin commands a police force of 700+ sworn law enforcement officers. It is obvious, however, that Woodfin has no practical experience in fighting crimes of violence. Gang leaders, drug kingpins, and other street criminals in Birmingham perceive Mayor Woodfin as weak and rudderless. To them, Woodfin is not willing to put in the work that is necessary to defeat them. These hardened criminals have taken control of the streets of Birmingham and they are killing innocent victims at will. Homicide victims in the city are now dying every 18 hours. The law enforcement tools needed to retake the streets of Birmingham already exist within the world of professional law enforcement. For reasons I do not understand, Mayor Woodfin and the city council members have been too busy entertaining “sugar-daddy” proposals for bailout money from Birmingham Southern College and other over-the-mountain hustlers to focus on the surge in violent homicides in the city. The mayor and council need to refocus their time, energy, and resources on combatting violent crime in the city. They should encourage these dressed-up and polished "panhandlers" to look elsewhere for money for their pet projects. Nothing short of these practical and effective law enforcement measures will curb the surging violent crimes in Birmingham.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 21, 2022 An Editorial Opinion There is a firestorm of controversy involving a recent proposal by state Representative Juandalynn Givan and state Senator Roger Smitherman to provide $30 million in state funding to Birmingham Southern College (BSC), a historically white college in Birmingham, Alabama. BSC is a 1,000-student liberal arts college that is in financial distress and in danger of collapsing in 2023. Givan and Smitherman are also spearheading an effort to secure an addition $5 million from the city of Birmingham and $2.5 million from Jefferson County, Alabama. All total, the proposed taxpayer-sponsored bailout package peddled by these two lawmakers for BSC totals $37.5 million. One of the main arguments Givan and Smitherman have advanced in support of their bailout package is the fact that Tuskegee University, a prestigious HBCU founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, receives an annual appropriation from the state of Alabama. This is true. However, this argument is fatally flawed because it overlooks the historical context and legal underpinnings for the state’s funding of Tuskegee University. The Flawed Argument about the State’s Support for Tuskegee University In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. This case ushered in the era of “separate but equal” with respect to racially segregated public facilities, accommodations, and educational institutions. In 1938, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. This case held that states practicing racial segregation in education had to provide equal undergraduate and graduate programs for their black citizens. Gaines frightened white state government in Alabama "because Alabama did not have graduate and professional schools to which blacks in the state could go." In response to Gaines, Alabama Governor Chauncey Sparks' administration and the State Legislature began substantially increasing the budgets of Alabama State University (ASU) and Alabama A&M University (AAMU) in an effort to gain them academic accreditation and satisfy the Supreme Court's mandate. In 1948, ASU's name was changed from Alabama State Teachers College to Alabama State College for Negroes, in order to emphasize its broadly collegiate function. In addition, the state implemented a plan to pay a percentage of the tuition for black students who could not get graduate or professional training at ASU, AAMU, or Tuskegee so that they could attend graduate and professional schools out of state. State officials continued pumping state money into Tuskegee because it was cheaper to provide limited state support of Tuskegee for graduate programs for black students in agriculture, home economics, and veterinary medicine than it was to invest the money needed to elevate AAMU to full land grant college status. During his 1942-46 administration, Governor Sparks implemented a three-prong program to respond to the Gaines decision: (1) A program was established to supplement the tuition of black students required to leave Alabama to pursue graduate and professional education. [My brother, Dr. Levi Watkins, Jr., MD, attended Vanderbilt Medical School on this program in 1966 after he was denied admission to the University of Alabama's medical school in Birmingham because of his race.] (2) In return for the state gaining the right to appoint five members of its board of trustees, Tuskegee university agreed to provide graduate programs for blacks in veterinary medicine, home economics, and agriculture, at state expense. See, Ala.Code § 16-57-1. (3) Resources were substantially increased for ASU and AAMU in order to gain them accreditation "and become acceptable alternatives in the eyes of the federal courts for the white colleges." This thoroughly documented history is laid out in a 1981 federal court opinion in the landmark Alabama higher education desegregation case of Knight v. Alabama, which was authored by former U.S. District Court judge U.W. Clemon. Fast forward to today: BSC offers no undergraduate or graduate program that is not readily available at multiple colleges and universities in Alabama to all college-bound students in the state. As such, the Tuskegee state funding model advanced by Givan and Smitherman carries no weight in the debate about state funding for BSC. Givan and Smitherman Would Force Poor Alabamians to Fund Collegiate Educational Opportunities for America’s Richest College Kids According to a 2017 New York Times article, the median family income of a student from Birmingham Southern is $133,900, and 58% come from the top 20 percent of all American families. About 1% of students at Birmingham Southern came from a poor family but became a rich adult. According to 2020 Census data, the median income of Alabama families is $54,943. What is more, 16.1% of Alabamians live in poverty. Rep. Givan’s and Sen. Smitherman’s legislative districts have a per capita income of less than $30,000 per year. Yet, Rep. Givan and Sen. Smitherman are asking some of the poorest people in the America to bail out a small, elite, private college that caters to the top 20 percent of American families. This makes no sense. The Birmingham Southern circle of family, friends, and alumni are more than capable of bailing out the college from its current financial crisis. If they don't see any economic and academic value in BSC at this time, why do Givan and Smitherman feel the need to solve BSC's financial crisis? Enough is Enough When are Jefferson County and city of Birmingham elected officials going to say "no" to the rich power-players, in and out of the state, who perpetually use them as political pack mules to carry their special financial interests? These "sugar daddy" financial arrangements must come to an end. If not, when are these elected officials going to deliver $37.5 million in tangible economic benefits to their political constituents, or to historically disadvantaged private colleges in Alabama like Miles College, Talladega College, Stillman College, and Oakwood College. Until Rep. Givan and Sen. Smitherman take good care of their political constituents, as well as the very deserving and long-suffering private HBCUs in Alabama, they should let America’s class of super-rich oligarchs take care of their privileged college-bound students and the elite private schools they attend.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 13, 2022 It was the week before Christmas, 48 years ago. Mr. Charlie W. Pollard and another survivor led me to a small shack in rural Macon County, Alabama. The man inside the shack could not come to the door, but he called out for us to enter his tiny home after Mr. Pollard knocked loudly on the door and announced our presence. The man had no Christmas decorations in or around the shack. A kerosene lamp provided lighting inside his home. The man was laying on a cot in the one-room, cold shack that had a dirt floor and cardboard tacked up where glass windows should have been. The stench from his shack was unbearable. This man was dying from the effects of 40 years of untreated syphilis and related health problems. He was old, nearly blind, laboring hard to breathe, debilitated by tumors, and suffering from liver and stomach problems. He was immobile due to searing bone and joint pain, as well as damage to his central nervous system. This man was hurting, badly. Yet, he had a profound sense of pride and dignity about himself. The man Pollard took me to see was a fellow participant in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. And, he was dying. A Racist, Unethical, Government-Sponsored and Operated, Medical Experiment on Unsuspecting Black Men In 1974, I was a young civil rights attorney with the law firm of Gray, Seay, and Langford. Senior partner Fred D. Gray, who represented Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ms. Rosa Parks, and other civil rights icons during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement, was the lead counsel in a class action lawsuit filed in 1973 on behalf of 623 black men who were duped by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and Alabama Department of Public Health officials into participating in nontherapeutic human experimentation on syphilitic patients, without their valid, competent, voluntary, and informed consent to such experimentation. The official name of this human experimentation project was the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." For 40 years, the United States government sponsored, financed, and operated medical research that callously experimented with and risked the very lives and health of these 623 black citizens. All of the participants in the Study were poor, rural, and mostly illiterate residents of Macon County, Alabama. All of them had been told that they had "bad blood," a local term for several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, bone and joint pain, and fatigue. The USPHS and state health officials promised the men treatment for their ailments, physical examinations, hot meals, transportation to and from the hospital (at Tuskegee Institute, which was misled into believing the Study participants were being properly treated), and burial insurance. Researchers also lied to the participants in order to get their permission for painful spinal taps during the physical exams and autopsies after their deaths. Mr. Pollard was the lead plaintiff in the class action case. He and the other 622 Study participants were the unwitting human subjects in this unethical medical experiment that lasted from 1932 to 1972. The sole purpose of the Study was to examine, in detail, the effects of untreated syphilis in human subjects until the last man was dead. The USPHS never gave any consideration to conducting this experimentation on white men, nor did it consider including white men in the Study. Over the 40-year period, 445 men with confirmed cases of syphilis and 178 men in the control group participated in the Study. All of the participants were given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements. The syphilitic participants were never given penicillin, even after it became the recommended treatment protocol for syphilis in 1943. USPHS researchers and state health officials convinced local doctors in Macon County to forego treating the Study participants for their ailments. A Slow, Painful Death The syphilitic man in the shack was nearing the end of his life when we met. For 40 years, this man had been on a long, slow, descent into a living hell, all in the name of some USPHS medical experiment of dubious value. Yet, this man still had hope that he would be cured. I gave this man an update on the lawsuit that Attorney Gray had filed on their behalf. I explained to him that a settlement that had been reached between the plaintiffs and the United States government. He listened to me talk, asked questions about the case, and he agreed to the settlement. As time passed, it became clear to me that this man was more focused on his health and on getting better than he was on the settlement. The man knew he was in bad shape, but he wanted to live. I did not address the man's hope of getting better because I knew he was dying a slow, painful death. I also knew his condition was irreversible at this stage in his life. Instead, I grabbed a Bible that was near his cot and asked the man if I could read a Biblical passage to him. He said, "Yes." I read him the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3-12. Then, I led the four of us in the shack in a prayer. I asked God to transform this man -- a metaphorical "caterpillar" on earth -- into a beautiful "butterfly' with eternal life whenever he was received in Heaven. Until that time, I begged God to give this dying man a measure of freedom from pain and peace on earth. On our ride back to Attorney Gray's Tuskegee office, I did not say a word to Mr. Pollard or the other survivor who was riding with us. I was filled with bitterness and rage at the inhumanity of the federal and state officials towards the 623 black men in the Study and their families. These 623 Black Lives Did Not Matter, Until 1972 Under the 1974 settlement in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study case, 70 living syphilitic participants received $37,500 each. The 46 living men in the control group got $16,000 each. The 339 deceased syphilitic participants received $15,000 each. The deceased members of the control group got $5,000 each. Attorney Gray was not able to locate 36 syphilitic participants and 8 members of the control group, but we continued looking for them for several years. The total value of the settlement for the 579 Study victims Mr. Gray represented was $9,066,000, which was a record for the monetary value of black lives in Alabama in 1974. Attorney Gray had also negotiated free healthcare for life for the participants who were still living, as well as healthcare for their infected wives, widows, and children. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not end because USPHS and Alabama health officials suddenly valued black lives in 1972. The Study ended only because Washington Star reporter Jean Heller wrote an article about the Study that the Associated Press (AP) published worldwide on July 25, 1972. The New York Times published a front page article about the Study the next day. This press exposure rightly and grievously embarrassed the U.S. government. Alabama public officials remained unconcerned. After all, the Macon County men were just poor, rural, illiterate "niggers," and no white men were involved. By the time the AP and New York Times articles were published, 28 Study participants had died from syphilis, 100 more had died from related health complications, and 40 spouses had been diagnosed with syphilis. Additionally, congenial syphilis had been passed on at birth to 19 of the men's children. On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal Presidential Apology for the Study. Only six Study participants were alive when Clinton apologized to these men. Mr. Pollard was one of them. Mr. Charlie W. Pollard died on April 29, 2000, at the age of 94. He was a fearless warrior for justice and one hell of a man. The last Tuskegee Syphilis Study participant died in 2004. No USPHS Doctor Involved With the Study Was Prosecuted for Crimes Against Humanity In 1947, the U.S. Military Tribunal at Nuremberg adopted the Nuremberg Code in 1947 and used it to charge, try, convict, and execute Germany scientists for their human experimentation on Jews, Gypsies, Gays, and Black Germans during World War II. The Tribunal characterized the German scientists' nontherapeutic human experimentation as "crimes against humanity." In America, the white medical community knew about the Study for decades and condoned it. Researchers even published articles about the Study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. White doctors working with the federal and state health officials, together with those doctors in private practice in Macon County, acted in concert with each other to make sure that the participants did not receive any medical treatment for syphilis and/or its related medical complications throughout the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, not a single doctor who participated in this unethical and illegal human experimentation was prosecuted for "crimes against humanity." Furthermore, no flag-waving "law and order" politician in America has ever demanded that the perpetrators of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study be charged and tried for "crimes against humanity" for the murdered of the 445 syphilitic victims. Likewise, in the past four decades, no "right to life" advocacy group has ever voiced a word of support for the children of the syphilitic participants who were born with congenital syphilis. Epilogue To this day, my visit to the man in the shack in Macon County 48 years ago this week was the worst experience in my life. That moment in time was the closest I have ever come to hating those whites who viewed and treated blacks as something less than human beings. The only thing that pulled me back from the brink of this hatred was my memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holding my little hand in our Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Sunday School class while he quoted this verse from Matthew 5:44: "[L]ove your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you." Dr. King, who was my Sunday School teacher in the early 1950s, followed this verse by leading us in singing, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so....". I used the hurt, bitterness, and anger I experienced at that Macon County shack 48 years ago to fuel my passionate fight against all forms of white racism in Alabama, a state that had what one federal judge described in 1986 as "an unrelenting historical agenda, spanning from the late 1880s to the 1980s, to keep its black citizens economically, socially, and politically downtrodden, from the cradle to the grave." For nearly five decades, I used my skills as a civil rights attorney to lift the yoke of oppression from the necks of downtrodden men, women, and children. I have pursued this mission with a vengeance and have won numerous high-impact, landmark legal civil rights cases in Alabama. I know that my job as a civil rights advocate is far from over. Fortunately, I still have a raging fire in me for equal opportunity for all and the fair administration of justice that cannot be put out.

By: Donald V. Watkins Copyrighted and Published on December 17, 2022 On December 16, 2022, my former law firm, Donald V. Watkins, P.C., and I petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the $1.5 million judgment entered in favor of Alabama “dirty tricks” operative Joe Perkins and his public relations firm, Matrix, LLC, on August 20, 2021 by a state court judge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Tuscaloosa County Circuit Court judge Allen May awarded Matrix and Perkins $1.5 million on the plaintiffs’ state law defamation claims without conducting the jury trial demanded by my law firm and me. On September 23, 2022, the all-white, nine-member, all-Republican, Alabama Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Judge May’s $1.5 million judgment without issuing a written opinion that addressed the legal issues we raised on appeal. You may read my Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court by clicking on this link. The Petition lays out the facts in this case that were completely ignored by the Alabama state courts. Is Truth a Defense to a Defamation Claim in Alabama? In September, October, and November of 2017, I published a series of exclusive articles on my Facebook page that exposed the role Joe Perkins and Matrix played in the rape-suicide case of Megan Rondini, a well-liked and highly-respected University of Alabama honors student. On July 2, 2015, Megan Rondini reported to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama Sheriff’s Office deputies that she was raped at the home of local playboy T.J. "Sweet T" Bunn, Jr., a Tuscaloosa County businessman and then-member of the Alabama State Conservation Board. Rondini also made the same report to a rape counselor at the University of Alabama. "Sweet T" is the son of a powerful Alabama Crimson Tide football program booster, who has since died. His wealthy family was also friends and supporters of disgraced former Alabama governor and Perkins political "puppet," Robert Bentley. Sheriff’s deputies quickly turned against Megan Rondini once they realized "Sweet T" was the designated rape suspect. Additionally, the University's rape counselor withdrew from counseling Rondini after she learned that "Sweet T" was the accused rapist. Once she realized there would be no criminal justice in her rape case, a distraught Megan Rondini committed suicide. In July 2017, Buzzfeed News featured Megan Rondini's tragic story in a widely disseminated international article. My investigative articles followed. They reported undisclosed details of the police cover-up and failure of criminal justice in Rondini's rape-suicide case. My articles also presented the cold, hard, truth about what happened to Megan Rondini, why, and who was involved. Sweet T never sued me for defamation, nor did he demand a retraction of any statement in the published articles. Perkins/Matrix Sued Watkins for “Defamation” On November 13, 2017, Joe Perkins and Matrix sued my law firm and me for “defamation.” We asserted First Amendment freedom of speech and freedom of the press defenses. Perkins and Matrix claimed that my articles portrayed them in a false light by describing the role they played in the Megan Rondini rape-suicide case. The articles in question were based upon my conversation with Joe Perkins, my independent research, multiple background sources, interviews with Megan Rondini's father, information supplied by confidential and credible news sources, and forensic evidence. The sources for these articles were described in a deposition I gave in the case, which was part of the evidentiary record in this case. This evidence was ignored by Judge May and the Alabama Supreme Court. Joe Perkins gave the court a sworn affidavit in the case in which he simply stated: "I have never taken any actions to obstruct the truth in any rape case, including the rape allegations raised by Ms. [Megan] Rondini and her family." Perkins’ affidavit was sufficient to persuade Judge May and the Alabama Supreme Court to rule in favor of Perkins and Matrix. Jeff Pitts Confirmed Perkins'/Matrix’s Role in the Rondini Case On August 3, 2022, Jeff Pitts, Matrix's former CEO, filed an Answer in a lawsuit Perkins filed against him in Jefferson County, Alabama Circuit Court. The Answer contained a bombshell revelation about the Megan Rondini rape-suicide case. In his Sixth Defense, Pitts stated: "Defendant Pitts was compelled to resign [his job as chief executive officer of Matrix] because of Perkins' inappropriate and unethical business practices, including, but not limited to, initiating and directing the creation of an explicit video used in an attempt to intimidate the family of Megan Rondini, a rape victim who had committed suicide, to settle a civil claim [filed by her estate]....". Pitts' statement confirms what I reported about Perkins’/Matrix’s role in the Rondini case. On October 26, 2017, I broke the news about Perkins' fake video in an article titled "Matrix, LLC, Implicated in Threat Against Megan Rondini Family." The article stated: "On October 4th, Matrix created a big problem for the Bunn family and itself. On this date, Matrix surreptitiously delivered a plain envelope addressed to the law office of the Rondini family's Birmingham attorney that contained an EMTEC M700 16GB flash drive with two nude photos -- one of a male and another one with a male and female in bed -- and a one-minute-long 'video diary Number #1' recorded by Megan while she was home alone, sitting up in her bed, playfully talking about her evening at Harry's Bar, and eating a snack..... The purpose of the flash drive was to threaten and intimidate the Rondini family, which has a federal court wrongful death lawsuit pending against Sweet T and other defendants for causing or contributing to Megan's suicide after he escaped criminal justice in the case .... Information technology forensic experts examined the flash drive and found that it contained a host of information from a laptop used by Matrix employee Robert Taylor ....”. In an October 29, 2017 article titled, "Bunn Family PR Firm Linked to Recent Cyber Attacks," I again discussed Matrix's creation and delivery of the fake video to the Rondini family's law firm. This is the same video that Jeff Pitts referenced in his Answer to Perkins’ complaint in their litigation. Despite my introduction of the flash drive photo, Metadata, and other credible evidence of Matrix's direct involvement in the Megan Rondini rape-suicide case, Judge Allen May and the Alabama Supreme Court convinced themselves that they needed to side with Perkins and Matrix in the lawsuit. Alabama's Judicial System Gave Birth to New York Times v. Sullivan Most people do not realize that Alabama's judicial system gave birth to the use of defamation lawsuits as a weapon to chill the First Amendment freedom of speech of political progressives, independent journalists, and social justice activists. The famous New York Times v. Sullivan case arose from the concerted efforts of white Alabama elected officials and state court judges to use defamation lawsuits to quash local, state, and national support for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1960s civil rights movement. Not only did state officials indict Dr. King on two felony counts of perjury in connection with his state tax returns for 1956 and 1958, but they also joined local officials in naming Dr. King and four other prominent black ministers -- Reverends Ralph Abernathy, Solomon S. Seay, Fred L. Shuttlesworth, and Joseph Lowery -- as defendants in their defamation case against the New York Times. The state court trial judge "homecooked" the defendants during the trial. An all-white jury ruled against all of the defendants, who were ordered to pay a $500,000 judgment. The all-white Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the jury verdict and judgment against the New York Times, Dr. King, and the other four black ministers. The defendants thereafter appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. On March 9, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling because the plaintiffs in the case, who were public officials, failed to prove that the defendants acted with "actual malice" in publishing the statements at issue or that the statements were published with a "reckless disregard of whether [they were] true or false." In subsequent cases, the U.S. Supreme Court imposed this same "actual malice" burden of proof on "public figures" like Joe Perkins and Matrix when they sue members of the press and public for defamation. Judge Allen May and the Alabama Supreme Court engaged in the same old fashion "homecooking" in Perkins' case that was viewed with disfavor in New York Times v. Sullivan. What is worse, the Alabama courts abandoned the “actual malice” standard and used a lower “negligence” standard to rule for Perkins and Matrix. The state courts also ruled against my law firm, even though my firm had no Facebook page and did not write or endorse any of the editorial views expressed in my articles. Nothing tied my firm to the published articles. Epilogue Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Reverends Ralph Abernathy, Solomon S. Seay, Fred L. Shuttlesworth, and Joseph Lowery, I had to appeal my case to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to protect freedom of the press and freedom of speech in Alabama. The Alabama state courts are, once again, using state defamation laws to suppress freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This time, they are attacking the voice of a social justice advocate who stood up for a rape-suicide victim after the Alabama criminal justice system failed her. In an ironic twist of fate, Jeff Pitts' attorneys issued a subpoena to Harry Pasisis, the manager of Five Star Preserve (Plantation) in Kellyton, Alabama, for records, documents, and written communications relating to Joe Perkins. Five Star Preserve is a secluded hunting lodge with 13 extravagant rooms and a world-class shooting range. I now know who gathered at Five Star Preserve, why, and what plan of action was hatched at this retreat to besmirch the name and character of Megan Rondini and her family. All cover-ups have a shelf-life. Fortunately, this one is about to expire. The fallout from this cover-up will be catastrophic on so many levels and for so many people. "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again," said William Cullen Bryant. It always does.