Yearly Archives: 2017

Berkeley’s police are collaborating with some very unsavory federal police agencies. In the process, our civil rights and civil liberties have been put in jeopardy. Which side is Berkeley on? Do we really want to be part of a national police network headed by “America’s top cop,” the arch-racist attorney general, Jeff Sessions? The City Council needs to decisively sever Berkeley from a militarized surveillance state that is spreading its tentacles everywhere.

As the smoke clears from the devastating fires north of San Francisco that burned roughly 200,000 acres, incinerated more than 7,000 houses and killed 42 people, San Francisco might notice the distant roar of its own disastrous inferno approaching. More than 15 San Francisco neighborhoods could burn to the ground due to a lack of water at the SF Fire Department’s disposal after a major earthquake. A plan to expand the city’s emergency firefighting network was stalled for years because of political interference and one city agency’s refusal to ask voters for all of the money that is needed to protect neighborhoods in the southern and western parts of the city.

“My entire family enthusiastically applauds, supports and genuinely appreciates the Bayview Hunters Point community’s powerful expressions of appreciation for our mother, Ruth Williams’, hard fought struggles to insure that the neediest of the needy have access to that building, the Ruth Williams Memorial Theater Bayview Opera House, at a very nominal charge,” writes Kevin Williams. “All of my family has pledged, along with dozens of other families rooted deepest in BVHP, to simultaneously rise up in protest against Black culture being hijacked by local government controls.“

Friends and supporters of Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire are still waiting for the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights to rule on her appeal. In 2010, Victoire attempted to run for president against military dictator Paul Kagame and went to prison instead. Many Rwandans describe their country as a tinderbox, an earthquake fault, or a smoldering volcano because of its brutal oligarchy, unresolved ethnic polarization, and repressed memories of violence and loss.

Parents and community members working to open a new school in Southeast San Francisco gathered for a naming ceremony at the Bayview Opera House earlier this month. With hopes of creating a school that embodies the core values of equity and leadership, they chose to name the school Mary L. Booker Leadership Academy (MLBLA). Mary L. Booker was one of Bayview Hunters Point’s greatest community leaders.

Healthcare is a human right! I’ve heard that phrase many times in my 20 years advocating for universal healthcare. Until now, few legislators in Sacramento have spoken those words. On Oct. 23 and 24, however, California Assembly members Jim Wood and Joaquin Arambula, co-chairs of the Assembly’s Select Committee on Healthcare, said, “Healthcare is a human right.” The other Democratic members of the committee, Autumn Burke, David Chiu and Laura Friedman, all agreed.

I frequently hear correctional officers make statements such as, “Inmate, get off my table,” “Inmate, get off my yard,” “Inmate, get off my bed” and so on. The idea that they own everything in the prison sounds like they have serious ownership issues, along with superiority complex and delusions. It could also be the reason they abuse prisoners so much. If correctional officers believe we are their property, they could justify abusive treatment of “their” property.

On Oct. 13, 2017, San Francisco Bay View posted my essay “Hipsters de-Blacken Oakland, cause the encampments they abhor.” In the essay, I argued that Oakland leaders helped displace mainly native African American Oaklanders in order to make room for the hipsters and gentrifiers. Thus, the hipsters and gentrifiers have a duty to help solve the homeless crisis. However, several commenters to my essay showed ignorance or denial in defending their “innocence.”

So what is 3UFirst and how does it bring billions back to our community? 3UFirst was created specifically to solve the major problems in the Black community. The focus is on creating jobs, business and investment opportunities, building wealth, sponsoring, funding the best programs locally and across the country, solving the other problems in our community, and donating 50 percent of the net profits back into the community.

A liquor store in Bayview will soon become a school. Bayview-based nonprofit Urban Ed Academy intends to transform Sav-Mor Mart, located at 4500 Third St., into its new headquarters at the beginning of 2018. The idea for creating an educational facility at the corner of Third Street and La Salle Avenue started with Chris and Cynthia Fleming, who have owned the building since 1997.

The incidence of breast cancer among African-American women, which has typically been lower than among white women, increased 0.4 percent in the past 10 years, according to a 2015 report by the American Cancer Society. The Bayview Imani Breast Cancer Support Group meets on the third Wednesday afternoon of the month. Their website describes these meetings as “a place where women can find comfort, feel safe, gather information and understand that they are not alone in the fight against breast cancer.”

In mid-October, 125 prisoners at the Glenn Dyer Detention Facility in downtown Oakland – over 30 percent of the prisoners housed there – participated in a five-day hunger strike to protest what they say are abusive conditions of isolation and poor healthcare in Alameda County jails. On Oct. 17, over 30 supporters rallied outside of the Alameda County administrative building, where the county supervisors’ offices are located, to draw attention to the striking prisoners.

The ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to the superintendent of the Alameda Unified School District urging him to reconsider a ban on Black Lives Matter signs and stickers. The ban violates the California constitution by placing unlawful restrictions on student speech and conduct, as well as the First Amendment. “Black Lives Matter stickers and signs are protected speech and censorship of them is illegal,” said ACLU of Northern California staff attorney Abré Conner.

On Oct. 26, the nonprofit Innovate Public Schools released a new report that reveals a deep conflict between San Francisco’s image as a bastion of progressivism and the reality playing out in its public schools. Concerned parents and community leaders gathered on the steps of City Hall for a press conference on the findings of “A Dream Deferred: How San Francisco schools leave behind the most vulnerable students.”

I would like to propose it is time to organize a new international campaign to persuade the U.N. International Jurists to initiate a formal investigation. This investigation would be based on discovering U.S. human rights violations as they pertain to our long-held political prisoners. I am proposing this campaign be organized under the slogan of “In the Spirit of Nelson Mandela,” as it is believed this slogan will resonate with progressives around the world. It will inspire them in international solidarity to join our efforts to persuade the U.N. International Jurists to initiate this call for a needed investigation.

On Saturday, Dec. 2, 2017, community will gather in the Bayview to honor Mario Woods on the second anniversary of his execution by San Francisco Police. We will come together once again to show the city of San Francisco that we will NEVER forget, and until such time as our demands for justice are met, we will never stop seeking Justice for Mario Woods and justice for all victims of police violence.

A drug that prevents HIV infection has been available for five years. But even in San Francisco, a city where one might expect information about the drug to be easy to come by, only some people have heard of it – and it’s not the communities that remain disproportionately affected by HIV. PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis, commercially called Truvada) helps prevent individuals who are HIV-negative from contracting HIV.

A video calling for an Islamic State jihad in the Democratic Republic of the Congo appeared online and in a few news reports last week. It was purportedly made in Beni Territory, within Congo’s North Kivu Province, where a phantom so-called Islamist militia, the Allied Democratic Forces, has been blamed for massacres of the indigenous population that began in October 2014. I asked Boniface Musavuli, a native of Beni and author of “The Massacres of Beni: Kabila, Rwanda, and the Fake Islamists” to help contextualize the so-called news.

Prisons are corporate entities. We can make the calls to End Prison Slavery and Amend the 13th all we want, but the fact remains that if we don’t organize around defunding the enterprise, nothing is going to change. The Campaign to Redistribute the Pain 2018 is more than just a boycott against prison contractors. It is more than just a call for the next salvo in the struggle to end slavery. It is, among other things, the next step in the process to forge our struggle into a national movement.

In response to a recent S.F. Chronicle report detailing horrendous conditions suffered by female detainees in the West County Jail in Richmond, today I sent a “cease and desist” letter to Contra Costa Sheriff David Livingston. Despite massive opposition from Richmond residents and elected officials, the Contra Costa Sheriff’s office contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the use of the West County Jail to house people suspected of immigration violations.