Tag: Martin Luther King

On Saturday, Jan. 30, at 10 a.m., the Bay Area Black Builders plan to picket the Lord’s house. Beth Eden Church, a great church in the Black community, indicates that it has contracted with a White contractor apparently chosen by the lender, to build an addition.

After Malcolm X passed on, his writings and teachings really took root in the minds of a new generation, inspiring young Black people in Oakland to create the Black Panther Party. Forty-five years later, his first male heir and grandson, Malcolm Shabazz, has come to the Bay. Meet him and Cynthia McKinney Thursday, July 22, 7:30 p.m., at Twinspace, 2111 Mission St., San Francisco.

The San Francisco Labor Council is asking people to say “Yes to Thousands of New Jobs at Hunters Point Shipyard” — an EPA Superfund toxic dump site. This is the key part of the ongoing plan and activities by the Lennar Corp., the Democratic Party and the City and County of San Francisco to gentrify Bayview Hunters Point, the last largely Black community in San Francisco.

Paul Robeson was an extraordinary and versatile individual, world famous during his lifetime, who has been deliberately erased from the dominant myth of U.S. history for speaking the truth about conditions both domestic and abroad – his opposition to racism, fascism and colonialism and his support for civil and human rights, democracy, national liberation, socialism and the day-to-day resistance of working people of all lands to oppression, knowing that his fame would allow these messages to be more widely heard.

Black British filmmaker Ishmahil Blagrove was aboard Free Gaza's Spirit of Humanity, abducted by the Israeli Navy and, like Cynthia McKinney, one of the Free Gaza 21 imprisoned in an Israeli jail. He reports: "The prison population in Israel is 90 percent Black, which is why I was so welcomed by fellow inmates. There are thousands upon thousands of Africans inside the Israeli prisons."

Cynthia McKinney, the outspoken former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, recently got out of jail. Yeah. That’s right. Jail. It’s possible that you had no idea she was in jail. That’s because she was in detention for almost a week in Israel.

By far one of the most revolutionary cultural groups to put words to music in the United States is the Last Poets. Many, including myself, trace the roots of rap music to the spoken word, lyrics and speeches of the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron and the current political prisoner Imam Jamil Al-Amin, otherwise known as H. Rap Brown.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) was assassinated 44 years ago, on Feb. 21, 1965, because of his attempt to internationalize the African American struggle for self-determination.

We need to confront our racial past - and our racial present. In things racial, we have always been and continue to be essentially a nation of cowards. This Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must - and will - lead the nation to the "new birth of freedom."

'On behalf of the Chinese people, I hereby express resolute support for the just struggle of the Black people in the United States,' said Mao, as rebellions following the assassination of Martin Luther King set 100 U.S. cities on fire.