
The international news has been inundated with urgent appeals on the famine in the Horn of Africa. Here in the U.S. not enough attention has been paid to it. While it is critical to support and contribute to famine relief, we believe it is equally important to understand the nature and political reality of the famine and what U.S. militarism and corporate land grab have to do with it.

MacArthur Fellow Lateefah Simon, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, will deliver the keynote address at the Fifth Anniversary Dinner and Awards Ceremony of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI).

With Arizona’s harsh new immigration law threatening to unleash a wave of racial profiling, Bay Area African-American clergy and community leaders traveled to Phoenix late last month on a four-day solidarity mission.
Saint Calogero, an African priest, is the patron saint of the Sicilian town of Agrigento. But in the 21st century, African refugees who traverse the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean Sea find Calogero’s city, indeed the entire country, unwelcoming, even hostile to them.