Alice Walker’s new poem just released on her website… GATHER ©2014 by Alice Walker for Carl Dix and Cornel West It is still hard to believe that millions of us saw Eric Garner die. He died with what looked like a half dozen heavily clad policemen standing on his body, twisting and crushing him especially his head and neck. He was a big man, too. They must have felt like clumsy midgets as they dragged him down. Watching the video, I was reminded of the first lynching I, quite unintentionally, learned about: it happened in my tiny lumber mill town before the cows were brought in and young white girls on ornate floats became dairy queens. A big man too, whom my parents knew, he was attacked also by a mob of white men (in white robes and hoods) and battered to death by their two by fours. I must have been a toddler overhearing my parents talk and mystified by pieces of something called “two by fours.” Later, building a house, i would encounter …