Monthly Archives: August 2015

Black August adds another hero and martyr to the roll. By some accounts, it was his first day on the yard after 46 years in solitary confinement when Hugo “Yogi” Pinell was assassinated Aug. 12. Prison guards celebrated on social media: “May he rot in hell” and “Good riddens” (sic), they typed. Yogi was the only member of the San Quentin 6 still in prison, and his role in the events of Aug. 21, 1971, the day George Jackson was assassinated, has earned the guards’ incessant enmity ever since.

I was the founding chairman and national organizer of the Black Panther Party. Our first organizing tactic was to legally observe the police in our Oakland and Berkeley Black communities. During those hard core late 1960s racist, fascist times, we took a big chance with our lives patrolling the police. It was a time of rampant vicious police brutality and murder of Black people by police that was 10 times worse than today.

Loud pounding exploded on Liz Washington’s townhouse door on Treasure Island one day in 2005. A large African-American woman stood outside on the stoop. When her children's father cracked open the door, four burly male cops stormed in from behind her and pushed their way into the house. The worker announced coldly, “Someone at the school called CPS on you. I’m here to take your kids.”

I’ve seen Khoree the Poet perform at Geoffrey’s Inner Circle in Oakland, at the Historic Bal Theater in San Leandro and in venues around the Bay with D’Wayne Wiggins of Tony, Toni, Tone! The Bay has launched the careers of many great poets. Khoree the Poet is next in line to bust out of the Bay onto the national and world scene. Check him out in this exclusive Q&A for the Bay View.

On the weekend that marked the one year anniversary of the police killing of Michael Brown, there was another disturbingly similar case making the social media rounds: another unarmed young black man shot dead, another police officer on administrative leave holding the smoking gun, another rush to convict the dead. But there was one difference.

Do they think that we are stupid? We were there. We have the pictures. We have the video. We heard what they said. We saw what they did. Yet, publications blatantly misrepresent the truth, posing serious harm to Black lives. These misrepresentations actively push forth a narrative that absolves law enforcement of the brutality and racism they inflict and, ultimately, blame victims for their own repression. We are not here for it.

Just five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Watts Rebellion erupted, lasting several days. Today urban rebellion remains a key element in the struggle of the African American people against national oppression and economic exploitation. Since 2012, with the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin and the resultant acquittal of George Zimmerman, a rising consciousness and intolerance for racism has been rapidly accelerating.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power is on a mission to save Africans from African savagery. She wants you to call 1-800-GENOCIDE so she can send in the Marines or other U.S. Special Forces. Her entire career is based on a historically inaccurate, decontextualized and grossly oversimplified account of the 1994 Rwandan massacres, during which the U.S. stood by.

St. Louis County declared a state of emergency for Ferguson on Monday due to the officer-involved shooting that took place on Sunday. Protesters were mourning the anniversary of the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown when shots rang out. The shooting victim is Tyrone Harris Jr. of St. Louis, 18, who was “real close” to Brown, his father says. In a rally the next day, dozens of protesters were arrested during a demonstration against police brutality.

Jocko is the name of the boy who froze to death holding horses in place for the slave-holding president George Washington. Years later when having statues of Jocko on the lawn became trendy, abolitionists working with the Underground Railroad used to covertly decorate these statues with different color cloth to signal to runaways where the safe houses were.

Graduating from Antioch University’s PhD program in Leadership and Change on Aug. 1, 2015, Cynthia McKinney fulfilled a lifelong dream to complete her education with a terminal degree. In keeping with her interests in U.S. policy, Dr. McKinney wrote her dissertation on the leadership challenges faced by President Hugo Chavez as he asserted the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s right to sovereignty.

When New York billionaire and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump launched into his anti-immigrant tirade against Mexicans crossing the border, he was using a long known political technique of plugging into the live wire of American resentment of “the other.” Today, it’s Latinos, of course – more precisely, those from South of the border: Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans and the like.

The Third Annual Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey B’Earthday and Community Celebration is Saturday, Aug. 15, 2-5 p.m. Gather at the “Abundant Knowledge” mural at Marcus Books. Please bring your immense wisdom, families, original books by Garvey, red-black-green items and drums. And don’t forget to bring some funds – as each participant will receive a 10 percent discount on every item purchased that afternoon.

In 1999, San Francisco cops pounded on Liz Washington’s door and burst in with their hands on their guns. “It was like they were going to be in a shoot-out,” said Liz. Flourishing an unreadable paper that she could not identify as a warrant, they snatched her three children, literally grabbing her nursing infant from her arms. This brutal act began the chain of events that ended with the family’s long imprisonment on Treasure Island.

Residents, community groups and faith leaders will hold a rally for justice to protest the proposed sale of the 104-unit Frederick Douglass Haynes Gardens’ apartment complex. Residents are facing possible eviction or relocation from their longtime homes. The rally is Sunday, 6:30 p.m., at Third Baptist Church, 1399 McAllister St., San Francisco.

Earlier this week, supporters of iconic Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire, including her daughter and new granddaughter, gathered to protest her inhumane prison conditions. Members of her party in Kigali report that prison authorities have painted her only cell window black, taken away her books and put her in harsher isolation than before. Prison authorities are denying her legal right to meet with the Rwandan lawyer who’s representing her in her appeal to the African Court of Human and People’s Rights.

On Aug. 3, 2015, political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s lawyers filed an amended lawsuit suing Pennsylvania state prison staff for medical neglect. Two days prior, Abu-Jamal was informed by prison medical staff that he has active Hepatitis C, which his outside doctors believe is the underlying cause of severe medical conditions. The prison is currently refusing to provide Abu-Jamal with any treatment for Hepatitis C.

When Bree Newsome pulled down the Confederate flag from in front of the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia on June 27, she gave brief, heroic expression to an anger felt far beyond the Lowcountry over the bloody massacre in Charleston 10 days earlier. The young Black activist’s exemplary act of protest recalled a series of events three decades ago, not in a bastion of the Old South ruled by Republican nut jobs, but 2,500 miles away in liberal San Francisco.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, let’s not ignore the “elephant” in New Orleans, notwithstanding the pressure to do just that. The elephant in our city is the rampant land grab displacing predominantly African American residents to the outskirts of the city, where public safety, reliable transit, nearby schools, accessible job opportunities and neighborhood amenities are lacking.