October 31, 2009
Maafa 2009 was chillier than usual, but our hearts were certainly no less warmed by the ancestors’ tight embrace as supplicants made their way through the Middle Passage to the Wolosodon rhythms, the slave march through the Doors of No Return to the beach where each person held a piece of string – symbolic of a connection … a philosophical connection to the homeland, family and history.
October 12, 2009
Last night my wife asked me if I thought I was a little too hard on Obama in my letter yesterday congratulating him on his Nobel Prize. “No, I don’t think so,” I replied. I thought it was important to remind him he’s now conducting the two wars he’s inherited. “Yeah,” she said, “but to tell him, ‘Now earn it!’? Give the guy a break – this is a great day for him and for all of us.”
September 22, 2009
The CIA report predicts “an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947-1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region.”
August 16, 2009
The recent violent and furious protests by armed sign carriers at town hall meetings, called to discuss health care reforms, recall not the democratic discussions New England used to be famous for so much as distant white protests against civil rights reforms. Cartoons disparaging the president and his family bring to mind an earlier time when Blacks were routinely ridiculed in the nation’s press.
August 16, 2009
The SF Bay View newspaper is in dire financial straits, and former presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney is bailing us out with her stimulus plan that comes by way of the Triumph Tour through Northern California that is being organized as a series of fundraisers for a very essential media outlet that amplifies the people’s voices in times of need and in times of triumph.
July 29, 2009
Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates is arguably the most prominent Black intellectual in the U.S. On July 14, cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, forced him to do a perp walk from his own home to a police car in handcuffs. The charge was disorderly conduct, but Gates’ real offense was being Black and unwilling to bow and scrape when ordered to do so by a white cop.
July 23, 2009
Cynthia McKinney, the outspoken former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, recently got out of jail.
Yeah. That’s right. Jail.
It’s possible that you had no idea she was in jail.
That’s because she was in detention for almost a week in Israel.
June 11, 2009
“Have you forgotten the holocaust? Have you forgotten the gulags in Russia? Communism, nazism, fascism did not come from Africa. … A Western country was the first to use weapons of mass destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those countries have been able to rise. Africa, there is hope,” Bishop Tutu assured.
April 20, 2009
“You could hear a pin drop” when prisoner Marritte Funches’ letter was read at the April 14 hearing of the Nevada Board of Prison Commissioners. These are four of the shocking public comments submitted to the Prison Board on April 14.
March 11, 2009
Cobalt is essential to our military industries’ ability to manufacture the modern weapons of war. So, the Congo War, a.k.a. the African holocaust, is a war for the sake of war itself.
February 20, 2009
Naturally we are outraged by Rupert Murdoch’s low rag The New York Post’s depicting Barack Obama as a monkey. That cartoon is actually calling for the assassination of the president of the United States!
February 2, 2009
What does Obama’s otherwise spectacular achievement say about the issues of police brutality, welfare to work, Reparations or Affirmative Action? What about the New Year’s Day police shooting of an unarmed Black man, Oscar Grant?
January 21, 2009
Lord, help us work for that day when Black will not be asked to get in back, when Brown can stick around, when Yellow will be mellow, when the Red man can get ahead, man; and when White will embrace what is right.
January 20, 2009
Who among us – especially those of my generation – ever dared believe that an American of African heritage would ascend to the highest office in the land in our lifetime?
January 16, 2009
Theme for the week: “Martin King to Barack Obama, from ‘I Have a Dream’ to ‘Yes, We Can.’”
January 6, 2009
An Oakland BART police officer shot an unarmed Black man, Oscar Grant, while he lay face down on the ground and was fully cooperating. Protest Wednesday, Jan. 7, 3-7pm, Fruitvale BART, Oakland.
January 1, 2009
They became their brother’s keeper in making sure that all their pot’nas registered to vote. They texted, they myspaced, they facebooked, they put the word out. They made it uncool to NOT be registered to vote.
December 25, 2008
Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace are about to begin their 37th year in the dungeon of the old slave plantation, Angola. A crucifixion. Where is the public outrage that will resurrect them?
December 1, 2008
Protest to free Mumia and Troy Davis, two innocent men facing execution, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 4:30pm, at the Federal Courthouse, 7th & Mission, San Francisco. Mumia and Troy are challenging the “law of the land” that says, “Innocence is no defense.” Pennsylvania and
Georgia seek their execution. We demand their freedom.
November 14, 2008
I know no honest, informed Congo watchers who doubt that Gen. Laurent Nkunda and his ruthless militia are tools of the U.S. and its African proxy, Rwanda, in the imperial resource war now raging in Eastern Congo.