Black Bloggers = Black Power

Hat Tip Howard Witt, Tribune's Southwest Bureau Chief, based in Houston, and the Ft. Wayne African American Independent Black Woman for the link.

UPDATE: Hear an Interview with Creola Cotton, and the District Attorney who fought to put Shaquanda in jail. The host of the interview was not strong enough. I would have asked the bigoted DA why the 14 year old White girl who was convicted of a serious arson...was given probation by the same Judge. Listen to Interview

AAO says: Many Black Bloggers may not know the power they have at thier fingertips. It was once the power of the pen, now it's the power of the key board, links, discussion boards, listservs, and political blogs.

Paris, Texas

Howard Witt knows about the power of Black Bloggers and writes about this new and emerging power in a recent article - Letter from cyberspace.

He writes: "Every once in a blue moon, you write something that literally explodes across the Internet in ways no one could predict. That has now happened with a story I wrote two weeks ago, about a 14-year-old black girl from the small Texas town of Paris, who was sent to a youth prison for up to 7 years for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. A 14-year-old white girl, convicted of arson for burning down her family's house, was sentenced by the same Paris judge to probation.

If you had Googled the black girl's name, Shaquanda Cotton, the day before the story was published on the front page of the March 12 edition of the Tribune, you would have gotten zero results. On Monday afternoon, there were more than 35,000 hits.

The story has been picked up on more than 300 blogs around the country, many of them concerned with African-American affairs. It has generated thousands of postings to Internet message boards. More>

How powerful are Black Bloggers? That is a conversation to be continued -

What do you think?

Cross posted at African American Opinion and AfricanAmericanPoliticalPundit