Monthly Archives: August 2009

The SF Bay View newspaper is in dire financial straits, and former presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney is bailing us out with her stimulus plan that comes by way of the Triumph Tour through Northern California that is being organized as a series of fundraisers for a very essential media outlet that amplifies the people’s voices in times of need and in times of triumph.

Renowned bassist Ortiz Walton was once the youngest person and first African American to play in the Boston Symphony. But at 75, not only can’t Walton play his bass, but he cannot bathe, dress, eat or move in his wheelchair without the help of his wife, Carol, and assistance from state-subsidized services designed to keep him in their Berkeley, Calif., home and out of a nursing institution.

On the first of January this year, 2009, Oscar Grant was murdered by a BART police officer. This crime gained national media attention and united a community as people from various walks of life came together to demonstrate, voice their righteous indignation and demand justice. People protested, marched, rallied and attended numerous community meetings. Thirty days later, on Jan. 30, my son was shot 17 times and his friend was murdered. There were no marches. There were no rallies. There were no protests.

It’s been 33 years, but Ed Donaldson can still see the anxious look on his mother’s face when she was told she had to move. It was 1976, and Donaldson was only 10 – the youngest of three children – when the family received word from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency that they were being kicked out of their Hunters Point apartment.

AIDS is an epidemic that we hardly talk about in the Black community, and that is a dangerous thing when we are dropping like flies from it all over the world. To all of the readers, I would say adults but adults aren't the only ones having sex, think about the last time that you had unprotected sex with someone. BAM! You could have have contracted HIV that fast. If that would have happened, you traded in your health and life for an hour of fun? How intelligent is that? And be clear although I'm writing this for the readers, I am at the same time talking to myself so I am not coming from no holier-than thou pulpit.

More and more, “progressive” San Francisco is proving its reputation for being a cold, hostile city for African Americans – gay or straight. Former Mayor Willie Brown wrote in his autobiography about San Francisco’s City Hall attack on the City’s African American politicians. San Francisco’s African American population – especially middle-class – has dwindled more than any other major city in the country. Now an article about a study by the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) exposes the negative attitude of San Francisco’s gay community towards African American same-gender-loving (SGL) men.

The Bay View has been hearing from prisoners around the country that guards, fearing the loss of their jobs, are enraged by budget cuts and plans to release prisoners and close prisons. In some cases they are intensifying their harassment and torture of prisoners and in others they are trying to incite them to riot. That may be a factor in the Chino State Prison “race riot” and fire on Sunday, Aug. 9.

America’s infant mortality rate is the highest of all industrial countries. It is no secret that a Black baby born in America has more than a two fold greater chance than a white baby of dying before its first birthday. No secret and actually a national disgrace that a baby born in the much-lambasted tiny poor communist island of Cuba has a better chance of having a healthy infancy than a Black baby born in America.

Can Americans feel proud of the results of handing over their power of government to George W. Bush? Can Californians feel proud of handing state power over to a wealthy movie actor? In both these cases, citizens can clearly see now that the state and entire country has been robbed, raped and pillaged by these so-called political leaders and elected officials.

On July 29 the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn hosted a standing-room-only report-back meeting led by several participants in the historic Viva Palestina U.S. convoy who returned July 17 and 18 from Gaza City in Palestine. The audience was majority Black.

Now 18, Terrance Scott tells Minister of Information JR in this gripping interview: "Seeing what they did to my mother, it put a rage inside me." Terrance is the son of Jamie Scott of the Scott Sisters of Mississippi, who have served 15 years of double life terms for a robbery they didn't commit that netted $11.

On Tuesday, Aug. 4, a federal three-judge panel ordered California to release 44,000 people in prison. Call and fax Attorney General Jerry Brown all day Friday, Aug. 7, and demand that he not appeal the ruling.

"We applaud your focus on the horrors of the conflict in the Congo by addressing sexual and gender based violence; however, such violence against women is a direct result of the resource war. The United States can play a key role in bringing an end to the conflict," Friends of the Congo wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Shannette Slaughter’s former Black bookstore, Alkebulan Books, is legendary in the Bay Area because of the assistance it has given thousands to educate themselves in a society where the television shows we watch and the music we listen to tries to direct our attention to strict consumerism, where we buy a whole bunch of stuff that we don’t need and we have no concern for the plight of our people. They call it “programming”; we call it “mind-control.”

“We want Oakland our way! We demand the right to stay!” Community voices in resistance to the predatory lending, eviction and foreclosure of poor folks of color rolled down 94th Street in East Oakland this week past boarded up houses – remnants of lost families, lost communities and lost cultures.

Welcome former Congresswoman and presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, the people's advocate, to your Bay Area city Thursday-Monday, Aug. 20-24. She'll discuss her stay in an Israeli prison, her triumphant trip to Gaza and the importance of independent media. Click the picture for her schedule. Check back often for updates. Cynthia is our Paul Robeson. Show her your love!

The Black Star Project is sponsoring the Million Father March 2009 on the first day of school in nearly 550 cities across America. The Million Father March has become a special day that fathers and men use to make a commitment to their children, their families, their communities and their country with their dynamic presence at a school. This is the real fathers’ day!

Los Angeles – In the tradition of the Black Press working as an opponent of racial injustice, we as chairmen of the California Black Media, West Coast Black Publishers Association and National Newspaper Publishers Association stand with President Obama in his original assessment of the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates.

Members of President Obama’s Green Cabinet and the community engagement campaign, Green the Block, met in Washington today, Aug. 4, to discuss ways to ensure that opportunities from the new green economy are available to a broad cross section of the American people. In response to the president’s call to service through the United We Serve campaign, Green the Block also presented a birthday gift to President Obama in the form of a call to action for green community service projects in underserved communities on Sept. 11, the National Day of Service and Remembrance.

Black August is a month of great significance for Africans throughout the Diaspora, but particularly here in the U.S. where it originated. “August,” as Mumia Abu-Jamal noted, “is a month of meaning, of repression and radical resistance, of injustice and divine justice; of repression and righteous rebellion; of individual and collective efforts to free the slaves and break the chains that bind us.”