Yearly Archives: 2016

In response to the escalating community outcry over the falsification of radioactive soil samples and concerns about reports of possible illegal dumping of radioactive soils by the U.S. Navy’s contractor Tetra Tech at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund Site in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California Department of Toxic Substances Control and the U.S. Navy have agreed to put on hold any further transfers of Navy property at the Shipyard.

State and federal regulators asked the Navy to stop transferring land from the Hunters Point Shipyard to San Francisco’s control while investigators look into reports that contractor Tetra Tech misrepresented its work cleaning up the toxic Superfund site. In a Sept. 13 letter to Navy official Lawrence Lansdale, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Angeles Herrera and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control’s Janet Naito requested confirmation that the Navy will not propose any land transfers for the time being.

Since Sept. 13, 2016, when Warden Raybon released approximately 20 people from segregation, most of whom were there for violent incidents – only to see several stabbings take place, including one person critically injured and another losing an eye – a total of eight more officers have either quit or given notice. Now officers are expressing concern that ADOC commissioners are intentionally exacerbating violence at the expense of human life in efforts to push forward their plan to extort the public for $1.5 billion to build new prisons in next year’s legislative session.

Anyone relying on mainstream media wouldn’t know it, but the U.S. prison system is shaking up right now. No one knows how big the initial strike was yet, but the information is slowly leaking out between the cracks in the prisons’ machinery of obscurity and isolation. Over the weekend more than 50 protests erupted across the country and around the world in solidarity with the Sept. 9 nationwide prisoner work stoppage and protest.

Iris Canada, who just turned 100, was hospitalized early yesterday morning, just a day before the sheriff was set to evict her from the Page Street flat that she has called home for over half a century. She is in guarded condition. Ms. Canada, who made national headlines earlier this year with her fight to keep her home, was rushed to the hospital after seeing the sheriff’s notice warning her that she would be locked out of her place on Wednesday, Sept. 14. We are asking people to send emails urging that Iris be allowed to stay in her home.

Please join The National Day of Action to Exonerate and Free Imam Jamil Al-Amin on Friday, Sept. 16, 2016, hosted by the Oakland Islamic Community Center in association with Imam Jamil Action Network. The National Day of Action will comprise a series of nationwide initiatives designed to educate some and re-acquaint others on who Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin is, where he is, and how he got where he is.

On Sunday, a small group of National Football League players risked their careers, their endorsements and their livelihoods. They did so through the simple act of refusal. They stood in the proudest tradition of athletes who have used their platforms for social change, and they have already felt a backlash that would ring familiar, almost note-for-note, to anyone acquainted with what that last generation had to endure.

On Friday, Sept. 9, activists chained themselves to the entrances to the Alameda County Fairgrounds to protest Urban Shield, the highly controversial SWAT training and weapons expo hosted annually by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. Twenty-three activists were arrested, cited and released. Over 500 community members from many cities across California, joined the Stop Urban Shield Coalition in a massive mobilization, march and rally.

Our Kunsi of Brave Heart, White Buffalo Calf Woman Society and Stone Boy Society, are calling on President Obama to intervene in the horrific incident at Standing Rock in which vicious dogs and pepper spray were used by Dakota Access Pipeline security to attack protectors of sacred sites near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, and to require the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies to live up to their trust responsibility and stop this pipeline immediately. Our children deserve a thorough environmental impact statement based on meaningful tribal consultation. We are not invisible and will not be erased.

Today and every day throughout this struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline, I prayed in thanks to the spirit of my orphaned Taino-Boriken mama, the Ohlone relatives of this (Oak)land and so many of our ancestors from all four corners who I pray to every day, as word from Obama came through that he has finally listened to us all and suggested the halting of this corporate desecration called the Dakota Access Pipeline.

I had the true honor of attending a welcoming reception for Albert Woodfox, the last of the Angola 3, on Sept. 7 in San Francisco. Albert spent 43 years of his 44 years in prison in solitary confinement, mostly in Angola, Louisiana State Prison, a former slave plantation, actually still a slave plantation-prison. Not only did Albert look wonderful, with a big smile on his face, but he looked relaxed, happy and full of revolutionary optimism and resistance.

Sept. 9, 2016, is the day that many people in America are wholeheartedly organizing, mobilizing, taking action, standing and locking arms in solidarity against what we know as prison slave labor – yes, legalized slavery – and people are saying, “No more!” Even though there are many taking action and answering the call to cure this particular ill of society, there is an overwhelmingly larger portion of the U.S. population who are absolutely clueless to the fact that slavery still exists.

On Sept. 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Sept. 9, 1971, Attica Rebellion, the Free Alabama Movement kicks off the National Non-Violent and Peaceful Prison Shutdown for Civil and Human Rights at Holman Prison in Atmore, Alabama. After launching its movement in 2014 with the first coordinated work stoppages and shutdowns in Alabama prison history, Free Alabama Movement issued a call in 2015 for the first coordinated nationwide prison work strike in U.S. history.

On Sept. 9, a series of coordinated work stoppages and hunger strikes will take place at prisons across the country. Organized by a coalition of prisoner rights, labor and racial justice groups, the strikes will include prisoners from at least 20 states – making this the largest effort to organize incarcerated people in U.S. history. The actions will represent a powerful, long-awaited blow against the status quo in what has become the most incarcerated nation on earth.

Since May 2016, citizens of the Bay Area have been shocked and appalled by revelations of abuse of power by police officers in six different law enforcement agencies. The central figure caught in the eye of the storm is a teenage girl, who says that she has lived in the Bay Area’s commercial sexual exploitation marketplace since she was 12. This photo is who she really is and how she looked when she was just 13 years old.

On Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016, San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church was the place for all to see and hear San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick – or so said the word that had spread like wildfire the previous day. The church was packed and the media attended in droves, but Kaepernick had to cancel. Still, The remarks of John Burris and Willie Brown especially, recorded here in their entirety, made attending the service well worthwhile.

Basic logic dictates it is the community who should be vested with the power to parole, pardon or grant clemency to those who, in their determination, would have a positive impact on their communities and society as a whole if released. This is a concept developed by George Jackson University known as strategic release. To this end, we are announcing our campaign to develop – and establish nat­ionally – New Afrikan Community Parole, Pardon and Clemency Review Board.

On Tuesday, Sept. 6, Bay Area Green Parties will protest the Commission on Presidential Debates’ youth engagement function at Dominican University in San Rafael. The CPB is a private, corporate-funded corporation controlled by the Republican and Democratic National Committees that excludes third parties. Dominican University is partnering with the private entity to produce College Debate 16, an event they say will encourage student involvement.

Sept. 30 marks the 25th anniversary of the coup that overthrew Haiti’s first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide was the candidate of Haiti’s popular movement Lavalas in the 1990 presidential election; he won with 67 percent of the vote. Aristide’s Feb. 7, 1991, inauguration marked a huge victory for Haiti’s poor majority after decades living under the Duvalier family dictatorship and military rule.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has vowed to donate “$1 million” to community groups who are dedicated to the fight against Black oppression and police brutality. I hope Kaepernick will consider financial support for the work of the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and its commitment to keeping the Black community – as well as prisoners and oppressed people throughout the world – informed in print and online. The Bay View has been fighting against Black oppression and police brutality since 1976.