Follow Us
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.”
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.
One year after Haiti earthquake, corporations profit while people suffer
January 12, 2011
One year after an earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the promised relief and reconstruction aid has not reached those most in need. Less than 2% of the $267 million spent so far has gone to Haitian firms, the rest to “masters of disaster,” big U.S. firms that hire Haitians to do the back-breaking work for $5 a day.
The Scott sisters’ ‘debt to society’ and the new Jim Crow
January 10, 2011
Jamie and Gladys Scott walked out of prison Friday into the free world. Yet the sisters’ “debt to society” is still far from paid. The conditions of their release stipulate that Gladys Scott must give Jamie Scott a kidney, and the sisters will have to pay out money to maintain their freedom.
On the fifth anniversary of Katrina, displacement continues
September 6, 2010
Just as Hurricane Katrina revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New Orleanians by the Kaiser Foundation, 42 percent of African Americans – versus just 16 percent of whites – said they still have not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American residents – versus 8 percent of white respondents – said they had trouble paying for food or housing in the last year.