Yearly Archives: 2010

Sizzurp. Purple Sprite. Lean. These are just a few of the names used to describe the deadly mixture of Sprite and a cough suppressant called promethazine-codeine syrup. This syrup sippin’ epidemic has become popular amongst young people of color, but when mixed with other drugs such as ecstasy, alcohol and marijuana it can be fatal.

With 3,500 beds in a city of about 350,000 residents, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) is already the largest per capita county jail of any major U.S. city. Sheriff Marlin Gusman, the elected official with oversight over the jail, has submitted plans for an even larger complex.

New Orleans Katrina survivor and advocate Eugenia Brown, still unable to return home, was told by her landlord in Houston that there are laws for people from New Orleans and there are laws for the people from Texas. She asks, is this fair?

Dr. Margaret Burroughs, poet and activist, teacher in schools and prisons, and founder of the internationally renowned DuSable Museum, passed Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010. She is remembered by Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee.

When parents learn and play with their children every day, it boosts a child's self-esteem and helps kids develop positive relationships. Here are some suggestions on how to give the gift of quality family time.

Closed inside these units for 23-24 hours every day, prisoners have to study, write, exercise and create right in these cells. These cells are the size of big closets. This small cell must become your laboratory where you create your unshakable foundation.

A father writes to his son from prison: Often feeling guilty / Just knowing he’s feeling all alone / Rarely seeing, visiting or talking / To my precious son these days / Still, he lives vibrantly in my heart forever / For always / Just like true love / He’s the one I’m always and forever thinking of.

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors once again approved Supervisor John Avalos’ landmark local hiring legislation requiring jobs for San Francisco residents on publicly-funded projects, sending the bill to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s desk for signature. Thousands of eyes watch City Hall Room 200 for a hint that Mayor Newsom will sign the law and help give the city’s unemployed a Christmas gift nearly 50 years in the making.

We applaud broadcasters, artists and fans of KPFA who have come together to make sure that there is a station called KPFA in 2011. I want to be up front with why we have discussed protesting tomorrow night’s event. It is a principled stand against police terrorism in the Black community, cronyism to the Bush regime and the lack of Black public affairs programming on KPFA.

This month the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council must choose: Will they hold accountable major perpetrators of continued atrocities in the Congo or collaborate with them to put the blame on a few guilty but minor scapegoats and some innocent people who are guilty only of challenging the major offenders?

What is so extraordinary about this action besides its statewide character is its unity among the prisoners — Black, Latino, white, Muslims, Christians, Rastafarians — to achieve their central demand to be treated as human beings, not slaves or animals.

We, as members of activist and community organizations in the Bay Area of California, send our support and salute you for making history as your strike has become the largest prison strike in the history of this nation. We recognize the potential that your action has to improve the lives of millions subject to inhumane treatment in correctional facilities across this country.

I hope you’ll consider giving your support to the massive prison strike going on in Georgia right now. Inmates at several institutions in the state have coordinated the largest prison strike in U.S. history as a collective fight for their rights to educational opportunity, decent health care, access to their families, and an escape from cruel and unusual punishment.

The U.N. has threatened to pull out of Haiti. Oh, what a blessed seasonal gift that would be. Bon voyage, U.N.! Goodbye. We’ll help you pack. The Haitian people on the streets demonstrating are asking for YOU, for the U.N. to go. Take Clinton, the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) and the NGOs with you, please.

One of the stories least reported has been the one about Haitians organizing for themselves. This is one woman’s story of how she, her family and the people in the various communities in which she works came together collectively to care for each other’s needs and how that struggle has become the foundation of a new movement of the poor for change in education and the material lives of women and men – a struggle for dignity.

In a protest spreading through Georgia’s prison system, inmates are striking for better conditions and to be paid for their work, which they're now forced to do for free. They've locked themselves down in peaceful protest but are being punished violently, some beatings resulting in broken ribs and one man beaten beyond recognition. Sign the petitions and learn other ways you can help.

I am back with you fighting for our jobs at a time when I should have been preparing to choose many of you to work with me to build the new Bayview Library. The contract to build our library in our neighborhood was taken from my company, Liberty Builders, and awarded instead to a white contractor, K C K Builders, whose bid included no Blacks at all. This time we won’t let the gate swing shut again for another dozen years. We’re all fighting back – and we’re winning, especially with the passage of Supervisor John Avalos’ Mandatory Local Hire ordinance.

Accused of copyright violations, the popular Hip Hop websites RapGodfathers.com, dajaz1.com and Onsmash.com have been seized by the government. This wasn’t a shutdown of a website. It was the shutdown of a community. And no matter how one feels about copyright law and how vigorously it should be enforced, shutdowns without due process should be disturbing to every last one of us.

Those of us who seek a second chance know we owe our community. Failure is not an option for a community and a people who have seen so much turmoil, who have experienced so much oppression, and yet survived only because it was group effort. I seek the shadow of a wing to survive and then thrive.

Christmas in Richmond is an event which feeds and clothes people who are less fortunate than others. It started in 2006 by one family's unselfishness around the holiday season.