Tag: Black community

“The 16th Strike,” a documentary in progress, is directed and produced by T Alika Hickman with videographer Danny Russo. Hickman, the young survivor of a stroke and two brain aneurysms, is a Hip Hop artist with Krip Hop Nation – artists with disabilities – as well as a mother, activist, author and poet. She is raising funds to complete the film.

Contradictions in White America’s treatment of Blacks, which were exposed by the Black Power Movement, fashioned another side of King, according to his last speech and his writings. A side that began to embrace Black nationalist tactics and strategies as a means to achieve freedom, justice and equality for Black people. A side that accelerated Dr. Kings’ assassination.

Through the Justice for Oscar Grant Campaign, I met journalist and photographer Peter Maiden, who was working with IndyBay Media. He asked me to be a part of a book that he was writing on the Bay Area indy journalist movement. Many of the people that he wrote about I was familiar with their work, but I didn’t think that we had anything in common, until I read their profiles that they gave to Peter.

Going back to nature is going back to what’s natural and good for your health and wellbeing and going back to your natural selves. Going back to nature is going back to Black, Mama Nature’s original people. We should teach our children about the cycles of the moon and the difference between planting and harvesting seasons, the ancient Afrikan Sciences of the Years.

The fiery writing of JR Valrey began appearing in the Bay View a dozen years ago. JR made our original vision for the Bay View reality: to inspire Black youth to build a powerful Black community. As the Bay View’s associate editor and one of KPFA’s most popular programmers with his provocative Block Report Radio shows, JR and the youth who grew up on his empowering words and pictures are growing in influence, making a difference every day – and they’re just getting started.

On Nov. 6, a majority of the voters in California voted to amend the Three Strikes Law. In Cali alone, according to the film “Cruel and Unusual,” there are over 4,000 people locked up doing life under Three Strikes for nonviolent offenses. The Documentary Film Fest is featuring “Cruel and Unusual” on Nov. 11, 12 and 15 in San Francisco and Berkeley.

First, be more forceful about appointing federal judges. As a former constitutional law professor, you know better than most the importance of the federal bench. Second, please listen to Paul Krugman on economic policy. He was right early on in the economic crisis when he was adamant about the need to create jobs. Finally, do not abandon the needs of Black people because you will be seen as playing favorites. Black folks are out here on our own. We need you to stand up for us and to advance policies that will help us move upward, “lifting as we climb.”

The Black community is in a world of trouble. And President Obama alone cannot fix it. This is where real leadership is needed: real, un-bought, unbiased leadership. Black America’s biggest challenge, truth be told, is itself. And Black pastors are at the center of the issue. If we can get our leaders to the table – political, business, academic and community – we could create our own salvation.

In late August, Aboriginal Blackman United organized over 30 unemployed union members from Bayview Hunters Point to protest construction at Bayview’s Willie Brown Academy. We did not protest because we disagree that our public schools are much in need of repair or with the $531 million that the San Francisco School District will spend to upgrade our public schools. We protested because, despite this historic opportunity for the School District to work with local communities to rebuild our schools, there are no Black workers and no Black contractors at Willie Brown Academy. And at ABU we say that if we don’t work, nobody works.

Several days of unprecedented revolt by the most impoverished minority-populated neighborhoods of London have shaken the normally staid and reserved British aristocracy. Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his Italian vacation in sunny Tuscany to return to the red-orange glare of a burning city.

On Saturday, July 16, a 19-year-old young man, Kenneth Harding, from Seattle, Wash., came to San Francisco at the wrong time. He rode a transit vehicle to Bayview Hunters Point’s Palou station only to exit and have an encounter with two police officers about paying his $2 fare.

“The police in our community occupy our area, our community, as a foreign troop occupies territory. And the police are in our community not to promote our welfare or our security or our safety, but they are there to contain us, to brutalize us and murder us,” said Huey P. Newton, co-founder and minister of defense of the Black Panther Party. Hunters Point has stood up to the Lennar Corp. and the City about the shipyard. It is time to expand that movement to include police terrorism, put new energy into it, and claim our right to live and not be wantonly killed.

Kenneth Harding Jr., 19, was shot and killed on July 16 as he ran away from two police officers interrogating him for his alleged failure to pay a $2 fare for a ride on the city’s light-rail train. Incredibly, after originally admitting that two officers shot and killed Harding, the new story from the police some days later is that the young man must have killed himself.

Growing up with an older brother like Sean was really a very special gift. Seven years of wisdom separated us. When I was still interested in Barbie and Ken, Sean had long been interested in music. Indeed, you could hardly escape him and his body-popping, breakdancing dance moves on the living room space any time there was company around.

The new book by Manning Marable, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” will help us to get a deeper understanding of Malcolm X and the times we’re living in now. This will not be a direct result of what Marable has done, but rather of what needs to happen now because of what he has done.

Third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, was in Omaha in March 1968 to qualify his American party in Nebraska. Wallace had arrived in Omaha on Sunday, the day before, and held an angry news conference to provoke a large turnout at his rally.

Revolutionary gangsta rap artist Aisha Sekhmet is bold, passionate and intelligent. Check out this fiery much needed newcomer to the rap world in her own words.

Black Wall Street, the name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-Black communities in America, was bombed from the air and burned to the ground by mobs of envious Whites – a major African-American economic movement resoundingly defused.

“Equinox” is a ground-breaking film on Black male and female relationships by local director and filmmaker Baayan Bakari. It will be screened Thursday, Nov. 18, 6:30 p.m., at the Black Dot Café, 1195 Pine St., West Oakland. Watch the trailer and learn more about the cast and the film at http://www.equinoxmovie.com.

Malcolm spoke of U.S. imperialism in Africa when most of us were hoodwinked into believing the U.S. were the good guys. Not only did Malcolm disabuse us of those foolish and faulty notions, he railed against U.S. racism and its racist foreign policies. He envisioned dire consequences of U.S. thuggery around the world but particularly in Africa.