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California SHU prisoners begin hunger strike July 1
June 30, 2011
Prisoners in the Security Housing Units, SHUs, at Pelican Bay and Corcoran state prisons in California are beginning an indefinite hunger strike on July 1, 2011, to protest the cruel and inhumane conditions of their imprisonment in what is being called “an unusual show of racial unity.” Breaking news: Prisoners at Centinela have joined the hunger strike. A prisoner there reports: “Only a few inmates are walking the yard. No Blacks or Hispanics have left their cells. No one has gone to work. He said all the races are united in this fight.”
Mass arrests at Capitol rotunda
June 9, 2011
Led by students and teachers noisily chanting, “Tax, tax, tax the rich!” a crowd took over the state Capitol rotunda on May 9 to kick off a week of protest against looming draconian cuts to the California education budget.
Juneteenth: Celebrate, but remember
June 4, 2011
This June 19, millions of Americans, particularly African Americans, will celebrate Juneteenth. Yet slavery’s abolishment, under the 13th Amendment, didn’t really end slavery, as many people believe. The 13th Amendment merely codified America’s “peculiar institution” under penal statutes.
Help for homecoming prisoners: Second Chance, Last Chance to Succeed at City College
May 13, 2011
Second Chance is a unique program at City College of San Francisco that provides academic and other services to parolees. It’s the birth child of the Extended Opportunity Program or, as one of its founding fathers calls it, the Experienced Oppressed People’s Program, hard won by Third World students in the ’60s.
Tanya pleads not guilty and we march next month
May 7, 2011
Tanya McDowell, the mother in Connecticut who was charged with larceny for allegedly stealing an education for her son, faces up to 20 years in prison and a $15,000 fine for sending her child to a school outside his district.
Big pimping
April 10, 2011
Big Tobacco is the Mack Daddy of all corporate pimps. It knows when to come down hard and intimidating with its elite battery of highly paid executives, attorneys and scientists. And it equally knows when to quietly deflect attention by using – pimping – the front groups they keep on call to do their bidding.
Judge hands out tough sentences in post-Katrina killing by police
April 4, 2011
On March 31, a federal judge sentenced two former New Orleans police officers for killing Henry Glover and incinerating his body during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One got 25 years for shooting Glover with an assault rifle and the other got 17 years for torching the man’s corpse.
Transit case raises question: Can the poor ever find justice?
March 26, 2011
Sylvia Darensburg, an African-American mother of three in East Oakland, experiences the reality of transit inequality. Sylvia relies on AC Transit to get to her job during the day and to college classes at night, each trip taking an hour or more each way.
The Black mayor of Waterproof, Louisiana, has spent nearly a year behind bars without bail
March 25, 2011
A legal dispute in the rural Louisiana town of Waterproof has attracted the attention of national civil rights organizations and activists. Waterproof Mayor Bobby Higginbotham has been held without bail since May of 2010.
Public Defender appoints Matt Gonzalez as chief attorney
February 25, 2011
Matt Gonzalez, a longtime civil rights and criminal defense attorney and former Board of Supervisors president, was appointed Feb. 22 as chief attorney of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. In 2010, San Francisco public defenders won 48 percent of their trials for their clients.
AC Transit riders fight for their right to ride, 55 years after Montgomery
January 10, 2011
AC Transit routes are back on the cutting table, and once again, it will be the youth, seniors, disabled riders, and low-income families whose opportunities for work and education will feel the impact. AC Transit driver Lorenzo Jacobs said, “When you start cutting service, you’re cutting opportunities. When you cut lines, you’re affecting people’s lives.”
Surviving solitary confinement
December 20, 2010
Closed inside these units for 23-24 hours every day, prisoners have to study, write, exercise and create right in these cells. These cells are the size of big closets. This small cell must become your laboratory where you create your unshakable foundation.
Union PLAs block Blacks from construction
November 8, 2010
Construction unions have historically fought affirmative action and excluded Black hiring, and they are still getting away with it. They huddle up to the good unions and pay off our elected officials with campaign donations.
The coming Mehserle sentencing: Redrawing the line on ‘outside agitators’
November 1, 2010
With the upcoming sentencing of Johannes Mehserle on Nov. 5, the rebellions of January 2009 that brought about his arrest could very well be set off once more. And once again we expect to hear the mantra blaming “outside agitators.”
Justice for Oscar Grant Rally: Rain falls but does not end the call to rein in injustice
October 27, 2010
The threat of impending rainfall did not deter hundreds of people from showing up and calling out for justice for Oscar Grant on Saturday, Oct. 23 in downtown Oakland.
Republican candidates ignore the Black vote while the Democrats continue to take it for granted
September 6, 2010
Very little if any advertising has been done in Black newspapers or with Black radio stations in an attempt to reach Black voters via the Black media. The Black press connects Blacks around the world. Their power and influence is unmatched, unchallenged and unquestioned.
Good Americans: The dark side of the Pullman Porters Union
September 6, 2010
As we celebrate the 85th anniversary of the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, America’s first African America labor union, let us not forget that African American rail workers were instrumental in organizing not only the sleeping and chair car porters, but the dining car workers as well.
Shirley Sherrod and the dark history of Baker County
August 6, 2010
It was cowardly and wrong for the U.S. government to force Ms. Sherrod to resign without hearing her side, without understanding the whole story, without showing the slightest interest in fairness or due process. Here was Baker County rearing its ugly history all over again, 70 years later.
Racism in schools
July 5, 2010
In Alabama, a teacher uses a hypothetical assassination of President Barack Obama as an example in a geometry lesson. A North Georgia teacher allowed four students to don mock Ku Klux Klan outfits for a final project in a high school social studies class.
Latinos, Blacks join fight for civil rights in Arizona
May 23, 2010
A united front of Black and Latino Arizonans mobilized against a state law that they see as a threat to their civil rights. Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law on Friday, making Arizona the first state in the nation to make it a crime for a person to be undocumented.