For weeks, D.C. has been preparing for Donald Trump’s massive celebration for the country’s 250th birthday. It was clear that he wanted a huge demonstration of patriotism with a big turnout.

Ultimately, rain would interrupt the big fireworks display for July 4th.

But even the day before, it was clear things weren’t going as planned.

On Thursday, Fox News did a number of segments highlighting Trump’s “Great American State Fair” which was meant to be a dayslong festival featuring highlights from all 50 states.

Here’s the problem.

All of the camera shots showed that almost no one was in attendence. You know the Roland Martin Unfiltered panel had to get some jokes off.

Watch the video above, for all of the laughs.

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A Fairfax parent says a Black student was called a monkey, repeatedly called the n-word, and harassed in front of school staff who allegedly did nothing to stop it.

A Fairfax County parent described repeated anti-Black harassment against a Black student, including water being poured on his head, a banana being handed to him while he was called a monkey, and the n-word being used repeatedly in front of staff.

The parent said school staff did nothing to reprimand the students involved.

Fairfax County NAACP leaders said this was not just one isolated incident and that multiple students have come forward with complaints of anti-Black bias and inequitable treatment. They say they want to work collaboratively with the district, but they also want timely action and real accountability.

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Rep. Hank Johnson joined Roland Martin Unfiltered on Wednesday, and he didn’t hold back on the all-out-assault that the Republican Party under President Trump has carried out on Black America.

“They are celebrating their one-year anniversary of the big ugly bill this week, that bill knocks millions of people off of healthcare roles,” Johnson said. “Insurance is less affordable now, about 10 million people have lost their insurance under Obamacare… they’ve cut SNAP benefits…” Johnson said. “They are trying to hurt black people, economically they want us to die.”

Johnson linked Trump’s signature legislation to the Supreme Court’s rulings that have undermined the Voting Rights Act, as well as Trump’s attacks on DEI programing.

“We are seeing the court destroying our democracy and establishing in its absence a plutocracy,” Johnson said. “And all of the Black people, all of the people of color, get crumbs off the table.”

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One of the most important Senate races this November will be in Texas, where state representative James Talarico is taking on corrupt state AG Ken Paxton, in the hopes of becoming the state’s first Democratic senator in decades.

Whether or not he can pull it off will likely come down to Black voters, specifically Black women -- many of whom supported Talarico’s primary opponent, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

Now, leading Democratic strategists have sounded the alarm about “a quiet crisis of Black disillusionment and disengagement,” both in Texas and around the country.

One of those strategists is Ashley Etienne, CEO of the Etienne & Saint communications firm and the former communications director for both Vice President Kamala Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

She joined Roland Martin Unfiltered to break it all down further.

As midterm elections take place across the country, one theme has been relatively consistent -- momentum for Democratic Socialist Candidates running to the left of Establishment Democrats.

The last two weeks have seen this play out in D.C., where DSA member Janese Lewis-George won the mayoral primary, and now in New York City, which is already home to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and, of course, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, DSA candidates have won even more New York congressional primaries, and people are freaking out.

Roland and the RMU panel break it all down in the segment embedded above.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a wave on decisions on Monday, one day before the end of its current term.

In two decisions, the court blocked President Trump, from immediately firing Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook, but backed his authority to fire a Democratic appointee to the Federal Trade Commission.

In a third decision, the court upheld a state law allowing mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be received and still counted up to five business days later, a defeat for Trump’s efforts to curtail voting by mail.

The Nation’s Justice Correspondent, Elie Mystal joined Roland Martin Unfiltered to explain these decisions, and what to expect during the court’s final day in session.

A few weeks ago, we told you about the community backlash in Tennessee after an HBCU announced plans to include a data center as part of a new campus master plan.

Students and alums of Fisk University, including State Rep. Justin Jones, protested outside the school’s gates in Nashville against its $1 billion Quantum Leap Initiative.

As part of the campus growth plan, Fisk has proposed a $400 million “Innovation Center” to give students an edge in emerging AI technologies and says the build will be eco-friendly. But critics believe the potential pollution and strain on local water and energy resources aren’t worth the investment.

Last week, Dr. Agenia Clark, the president of Fisk University, and Don Hardin, the CEO of the Don Hardin Group, which is managing the construction and development of the proposed Innovation Center, joined Roland Martin Unfiltered to answer questions, offer new details, and reassure concerned community members.

Be sure to watch the entire interview, embedded above, and to check out Roland Martin Unfiltered, weekdays at 6pm ET, on the Black Star Network.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit filed by a former prisoner in Louisiana who said that state officials violated his rights when they shaved off his dreadlocks in violation of his religious beliefs.

Damon Landor, a devout Rastafarian, had taken what is known as the Nazarite Vow, and for 20 years had allowed his hair to grow. But four months into his five month sentence for a drug possession charge, prison guards at a new facility handcuffed him to a chair and shaved his head despite the fact that he had provided them with proof of his right to religious accommodations.

Landor attempted to sue the prison warden and the guards, but both a federal judge dismissed his case, saying that Landor was not entitled to sue individual state officials for violating his religious rights. An appeals court upheld that ruling, and Landor pursued the case further to the Supreme Court, where justices voted 6-3 along partisan lines against him.

In what you might find surprising, the Trump Administration had backed Landor in the dispute, arguing that prohibiting incarcerated people from suing for monetary damages from government officials who violated their rights would undermine religious liberties. And this Supreme Court decision is a rare loss for a plaintiff who is arguing his religious liberties have been violated -- whose side the court has routinely taken in cases in recent years.

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the decision will leave prisoners like Landor whose suffer violations of their religious rights while incarcerated “remediless.”

She went on to write that:

“Encroachments on prisoners’ statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law, even if it is handed to them on a piece of paper.”

Roland and Elie break it down

Elie Mystal, legal correspondent for The Nation magazine, joined Roland Martin Unfiltered this week to break down the case, noting that the Supreme Court has readily protected religious claims from conservative Christians, but now has refused to uphold the rights of a religious Black man.

Here’s part of what he said on the show:

This is going to go down as one of the worst cases in this term.

The Supreme Court has a tradition of upholding religious liberty cases. It turns out that as long as you claim Jesus makes you a bigot, the Supreme Court is on your side. The Suprmee Court wants to hear that case. But when it turns out, when you claim you have a religious right to not bother anybody, to not be bigoted to anybody, To not refuse to bake anybody a cake, to just grow your hair?

Nah, the Supreme Court doesn’t want to hear that…

At the turn of the 20th century, Black farmers owned between 16 to 19 million acres of farmland, accounting for roughly 1.8% of the nation’s total farmland, according to Farm Aid.

But in the decades since 1910, Black farmland ownership has drastically declined.

Today, Black Americans make up just over 1 percent of American farmers, and own less than 3 million acres of farmland, just 0.3% of U.S. farmland. The decline has cost Black farmers an estimated $326 billion in lost wealth.

Last week, Wayne Swanson Jr. of Swanson Family Farm in Georgia, joined Roland Martin Unfiltered to discuss the ways that President Donald Trump’s economic policies are further imperiling Black farmers.

“The input crisis that we’re going through right now — most farms and most agricultural enterprises, the cost to operate is far exceeding the profits,” he said.

Swanson Jr. called on farms to become less dependent on government and non-profit resources.

“We have to think differently. We cannot think the way that the farmers of the 40s and 50s thought, and that’s what happened. Everybody got used to the subsidies, the commodities, and got stuck,” he said.

“We can farm as a business, the way other businesses do. We just need to sit down and do some spreadsheets and do some training.”

Community outrage have erupted in the small town of Senatobia, Mississippi after a police officer shot and killed a 1-year-old Black boy named Kohen Wiley.

Wiley was a passenger in a vehicle, along with his mother and another woman, in a Walmart parking lot when police arrived in response to a call about someone suspected of shoplifting diapers.

According to the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, an officer opened fire at a vehicle after it drove at the officer. The family and witnesses have insisted that it was driving away. Kohen Wiley was shot and later pronounced dead, while his mother’s friend was hospitalized with “critical injuries.” The officer who fired into the vehicle has been placed on leave amid an investigation into the shooting.

On Thursday, civil rights attorney Ben Crump joined Roland Martin Unfiltered to provide the latest on the case.

“If you’re taking Pampers, how dangerous can you be? Is that something that you use deadly force on?” Crump said. “If it were as they said it was, why haven’t they released the Walmart parking lot surveillance video…? Why haven’t they released the body cam video? Why haven’t they released the dash cam video? Be transparent and show us that your officer had to shoot and kill this 1-year-old Black baby.”

“The lady held the baby up, saying that I have a baby in the car,” he continued. “And they shot anyway.”

The announcement last week by Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville, that, as part of it’s new $1 billion campus growth proposal, it was going to build a $400 million data center immediately drew blowback.

Within days, two separate online petitions were circulating in opposition to the plan, which had collected thousands of signatures.

On Friday evening, State Rep. Justin Jones, himself a Fisk alum, joined Roland Martin Unfiltered. Here’s what he had to say:

The Fisk administration is proposing to build a 30-megawatt, 70,000-square foot data center in the heart of North Nashville, the heart of the Black community, just across the street from our public housing, right next to the dormitory where our students live, right next to MLK high school.

This is a community that has already been victimized by red lining and now it is going to be victimized again with this proposal by digital redlining. Another source of pollution. North Nashville has some of the highest rates of asthma, respiratory illness, because they forced the interstate through the Black community in the 1960s, to break up the Black community, and now they are trying that same tactic with these A.I. data centers under the guise of innovation. But we know this is not about innovation, it’s about extraction and exploitation of a school and a community that is already being subjugated to being treated as second class and underinvested in. This is not the type of investment that the community wants.

Jones went on to say that his teaching fellowship at Fisk was cancelled after a meeting with the university president in which he acknowledged the course he was set to teach —“Climate, Colonialism, and the Fire Every Time: Towards a Global Environmental Reckoning.” — would likely conflict with the data center plans.

While Jones was on air speaking with Roland, officials from Fisk sent a statement.

“Fisk University understands and appreciates the community’s response to and interest in Quantum Leap and the Innovation Center. Fisk’s 160-year legacy in 37208 has always been defined by excellence, and our North Nashville neighbors have played a critical role in that history but also remain essential to our future. We would never cause harm here. To continue elevating the community Fisk calls home, we seek to advance our Innovation Center alongside our broader Quantum Leap Campus Master Plan, which has been thoughtfully developed over the past two years and informed by the voices of students, faculty, alumni, board members and partners.

Fisk is actively extending invitations to community leader to learn more about Quantum Leap and welcomes open dialogue with anyone who wants to better understand the facts of this project…As technology advancements continue to outpace access, institutions like Fisk must embrace this new era of technology to ensure our community doesn’t get left behind. Since Quantum Leap’s inception, our plan for the Innovation Center has been guided by a “do no harm” philosophy, and we remain fully committed to total transparency, disclosure and accountability every step of the way. The facility will be designed to operate within the community without burdening our neighbors. That was a non-negotiable design requirement.”

Back in 2022, six students from Florida A&M University filed a class action lawsuit against the the state of Florida alleging that their Tallahassee-based HBCU had been been underfunded compared to traditionally white colleges.

“Throughout its history and up to the present day, Florida has purposefully engaged in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination, principally through disparate funding, that has prevented HBCUs, including FAMU, from achieving parity with their traditionally White institution (“TWI”) counterparts,” they argued in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida. It goes on to note that FAMU received a smaller state appropriation per student than the University of Florida, amounting to a roughly $1.3 billion shortfall between 1987 and 2020.

The suit came amid an HBCU underfunding fight that has been going on for decades.

A 2013 study by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities found that 61 percent of Black land-grant institutions did not receive 100 percent of the matching funds from their states from 2010 to 2012. In 2021, Maryland agreed to provide $577 million to the state’s four HBCU’s in order to make up for previous underfunding. A 2022 investigation by Forbes magazine found that HBCUs across the country have been shortchanged $12.8 billion. And in 2023, the Biden Administration sent letters to 16 states chiding them for not properly distributing federal money to their HBCUs.

In 2024 a federal judge in Florida tossed out the FAMU case. While the judge acknowledged disparities in per-student funding (In the 2018-19 academic year, FAMU was given $10,300 per student, compared to $14,574 per student provided to the University of Florida), he argued that the FAMU students had not proven those disparities can be traced back to legally-mandated segregation.

But this last week an appeals court revived the lawsuit, arguing that the court improperly weighed the evidence instead of simply determining whether or not a factual dispute existed. Now, the former FAMU students will see their case move forward, allowing them to collect and present additional evidence.

What happens next?

Thursday night’s episode of Roland Martin Unfiltered featured an interview with Josh Dubin, the civil rights attorney working with the former FAMU students.

“It was shocking to me that the case was dismissed in the first place,” Dubin said. “I’m just relieved and grateful on behalf of these brave students that I’m representing that we’re going to be back in court and proceeding with this trial.”

The appeals court ruling returns the suit to district court, where both sides will now continue presenting evidence and expert testimony. “Our case is very straightforward…FAMU has been chronically underfunded,” Dubin continued. “To me, this was one of the most obvious, egregious violations.”