
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.

An organizing meeting has been scheduled for Jan. 3 at 5 p.m. at Chuco’s Justice Center in Inglewood for people interested in monitoring the trial of Johannes Mehserle, the former Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer who shot Oscar Grant, an unarmed 22-year-old Black man, in the back on an Oakland BART platform on Jan. 1, 2009. Mehserle is the first police officer in California ever to be charged with murder.

The Maafa Ritual begins before dawn on Sunday, Oct. 11, about 5:30-6 a.m., at Ocean Beach on the Great Highway at Fulton Street in San Francisco. Invited are Black people interested in honoring our ancestors who perished in the European Slave Trade and its aftermath via colonialism and other forms of genocide like incarceration, terrible occurrences or reoccurring disasters felt today. Maafa Awareness Month was founded and has been organized by Bay View Arts Editor Wanda Sabir for 11 years.

Wednesday, Oct. 15, at the Prescott Joseph Center we honored the legacy of the San Francisco Bay Area’s premiere artists: Berkeley resident Joy Holland and Oaklander by way of St. Louis Casper Banjo, with featured artist Keith Hopkins, another Oaklander. The exhibit is titled “Breath of Our Ancestors.”