Tag: Detroit

I came into contact with Madam T’s music first through Facebook, although we both live in Oakland. I was impressed with her business sense off of the mic: sound, production, lyricism, marketing and her street hardened demeanor in her music. I brought her on the Block Report Music Show – every Friday midnight-2 a.m. on KPFA 94.1FM in Northern Cali – and the callers loved her.

The new book by Manning Marable, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” will help us to get a deeper understanding of Malcolm X and the times we’re living in now. This will not be a direct result of what Marable has done, but rather of what needs to happen now because of what he has done.

"We must call for, agitate for and, if all else fails, create a new popular movement that struggles to break this caste system once and for all." Mumia Abu-Jamal addresses the "Imprisonment of a Race" Conference at Princeton University.

Happy Mother’s Day to Yuri Kochiyama! I’d like to also wish the women who haven’t seen their children in a long time, some since birth, a special Happy Mother’s Day. Our prayers are with you even if you feel alone at a time when in America prisons systematically separate mothers from their children, often permanently.

When Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis, he was about to join the sanitation workers in their protest for a union and more decent wages. The movement for civil rights was taking hold in the North and America didn’t like it – so off with King’s head.

In 1910 there were over 1 million African-American farmers, and today there are fewer than 17,000. Now, an emerging movement is sweeping across urban areas to reclaim abandoned lots, under-serviced public parks and vacant lots to grow fresh food for the people.

“So much energy is coming from all over. I’m just trying to hang on and ride the wave,” wrote political prisoner Bomani Shakur Jan. 6, the third day of his hunger strike at Ohio State Penitentiary.

Eight days after the start of Georgia’s historic prisoners’ strike, advocates met with state corrections officials and visited a prison. “The prisoners have done all they can do now. It’s up to us to build a movement out here that can make the changes which have to be made,” said Rev. Kenny Glasgow of The Ordinary Peoples Society (TOPS).

“This system treats us like throw-away people,” says Carolyn Brown, a Seattle volunteer with prison reform group Justice Works! An African American with a record, her effort to find a job is deeply frustrating due to systemic racism.

Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, otherwise known as Malcolm X, explains why he does not support the inclusion of three chapters omitted from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

A small group of poverty and indigenous scholars from POOR Magazine, bleeding internally from our own wounds of eviction, landlessness, budget genocide, racism, po'lice brutality, incarceration and violence, arrived in Detroit on a hot Saturday in June to attend the U.S. Social Forum. Leaving, again we passed the empty homes, silent neighborhoods and shuttered businesses and yet this time I saw something else: real change and land reclamation not rooted in capitalist ownership.

Mertilla Jones, 46, and her grandaughter, Aiyana Jones, 7, were asleep on a couch in their lower flat’s front room at about 12:30 a.m. when police tossed an incendiary stun grenade through the window directly above the couch. Aiyana was severely burned and then shot in the head and neck by an unidentified police officer standing on the porch.

As the G-20 summit prepares to descend upon Pittsburgh, the city has been thrust into the spotlight and is being highlighted for its “commitment to employing new and green technology to further economic recovery and development.” It has been and is being denoted as the city that got it right, where pollution has been eroded, the rivers cleaned and the jobs in industry thoroughly replaced.

Most successful Black entrepreneurs that I know would never publish themselves in the so-called Black Enterprise Top 100 Black Businesses. To many it is perceived as a “target list” for the IRS, large competitors and others with bad intentions. Allow me to discuss a few of the horror stories that successful Black entrepreneurs have experienced.