Monthly Archives: April 2020

With more and more conventions shutting their doors, convention organizers are getting creative with online conferences. From March 30 through April 24, Clarion West is offering a series of free online classes and writing workshops. Litquake is offering Litquake on Lockdown, a workshop series utilizing the increasingly popular Zoom video conferencing software.

The Bay View is serializing the introduction to “Annotated Tears, Vol. 2,” by Talib Williams, who is currently incarcerated in Soledad, California, and has written the history of that storied place. In the spirit of Sankofa, we learn the past to build the future.

There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. I am one of them.

We’ve never had to deal with a pandemic like COVID-19 that upended our lives overnight, with schools, universities and most businesses shut down, hospitals scrambling to prepare for an onslaught of novel coronavirus victims, and government orders to stay at home indefinitely.

Civil rights pioneers like Frederick Douglass knew their activism had to include advocacy efforts centered on participation in the Census. That’s the reason Douglass made sure to count himself and his entire family in the 1860 Census. This was a particularly bold act since Douglass was one of few free African Americans who were able to participate in the Census.

Covering medical care costs isn’t part of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill passed by the U.S. government. Politicians tell us testing for the virus, when it becomes widely available, will be free. If you get sick from COVID-19, you are on your own.

Twenty years before COVID-19, poor and people of color, some with disabilities, and low- and middle-income market rate renters were subjected to the island’s high winds carrying toxins creating a respiratory disease cluster.

The housing crisis, a shelter in place order and the National Guard: It’s not just coronavirus and disaster capitalism that we need to resist in these unsure times but the increased criminalization of people simply trying to survive.

Like a deep tissue abscess, landfill systems will not promote “healing” until they are excavated and removed. All Hunters Point residents and workers screened to date by HP Biomonitoring have chemicals detected in toxic concentrations.

The time to act has come. It is right now. It is tonight and tomorrow. We must demand the immediate release en masse of half of the 47,000 people inside Pennsylvania state prisons.

Program Now Offering Up To $5,000 To Innovative Young People             Most high school and college campuses are now closed. Most students are stuck at home,...

It’s important we avoid using “violent criminal” rhetoric to justify abandoning thousands of elderly people, which endangers us all. And, it is no longer acceptable to put white folks’ fears ahead of the safety of Black and Latinx people.

It’s important we avoid using “violent criminal” rhetoric to justify abandoning thousands of elderly people, which endangers us all. It is no longer acceptable to put white folks’ fears ahead of the safety of Black and Latinx people.

San Francisco – ​In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, San Francisco Mayor London Breed has refused to use executive powers to house San Francisco’s 9,000 homeless residents living in the City’s streets and shelters.

As this story is posted, another death of a prisoner is reported at Oakdale. Officials of the guards' union there describe the prison as "ground zero" for the coronavirus outbreak in the federal prison system.

“We celebrate each commutation that Gov. Newsom granted to people who face danger from COVID-19. However, many people applied for commutations before our current health crisis and are still waiting for an answer,” says Amber-Rose Howard, executive director of CURB. “If our governor is listening to the public – whose voices have been loud on this – and to public health professionals, he has to immediately accelerate the pace and increase the number of people freed, especially older people who are in the most danger, through commutations, medical release and any other tool of freedom his vast authority grants him.”