Tag: Minister of Information JR

Hozel Blanchard is the father of a prisoner in Calipatria State Prison who recently expired after the historic California prison hunger strike under mysterious circumstances. Why would a prisoner who helped lead two hunger strikes and was looking forward to an imminent parole date kill himself?

We feel it’s important to be a part of this conversation. If there’s a national and international conversation going on against capitalism and imperialism, we need to be a part of that. But folks also gotta undersand that racism needs to be talked about and that white privilege still exists.

We get criminalized in Bayview Hunters Point on the T-Train, and the police chase people down because they don’t have a transfer. I spoke before the Board of Supervisors, and a couple of days later Kenneth Harding was shot down over a $2 transfer. African American youth in San Francisco have a 70 percent unemployment rate, so our population is rapidly decreasing. It’s going to continue to decrease when the police are criminalizing our poverty. When I tried to videotape a cop, they put me under arrest, they beat me up. I was hospitalized, and I was put in jail. They gave me $95,000 bail.

Is the Occupy Movement against slavery, or is it that some people are just mad because they never get to hold the whip? Do you not see racism? Can you see it in this movement? Where is the support for justice for Raheim Brown in Oakland and Kenneth Harding in San Francisco?

My OG potna, Fleetwood from Frisco, just put out his second book, “Bloodtest.” It is an urban fiction novel that is based right here in the Bay Area. It is important for us to support the writers, media-makers and artists in our communities who tell our stories.

KPFA, 94.1 FM or kpfa.org, is a community station that needs and deserves your support. I am a broadcaster on KPFA with two weekly shows: The Morning Mix on Wednesdays from 8-9 a.m., which deals with community politics, and the Block Report every Friday from midnight to 2 a.m., where we play mostly music and do cultural interviews. Please donate during Wednesday’s Morning Mix, because your donation is your vote to keep the show on the air.

Oakland has never had a dominant rapper who’s a woman in its long rap history. Today, the Sobrante Park bred Silence the Violence activist and rapper Queen Deelah is the one who is turning heads from the Town all the way to Austin, Texas. Recently while I was in Austin, I ran into Deelah, the transplant who had taken over the sleepy Texas city in a matter of months.

Kev Choice has finally dropped his much anticipated album, “The Power of Choice.” Known today as one of the most exciting up and coming musicians, in the not so distant past he was known as the bandleader for none other than the lyrical songstress and legend of our time Lauryn Hill.

The African historian Ashra Kwesi will be bringing a level of scholarship to the Bay Area that hasn’t been seen since Professor Theophile Obenga moved back to the Congo. He will be speaking on Saturday, Sept. 3, 6 p.m., at the Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th St., in downtown Oakland.

You are listening to the Minister of Information JR on Hard Knock Radio. Today we are talking to Denika Chatman, mother of Kenneth Harding, who was murdered July 16 in Hunters Point over a $2 transfer for Muni. Denika, how are you?

Although what we call rock began with musicians from the era of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, it has long been associated with being a white genre of music, characterized more historically by the music of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. That is the reason I wanted to do this interview with the Black Houston-based rock group Peekaboo Theory.

Lynne Stewart is one of the legendary activist lawyers of our time and also one of the many political prisoners of our time, who was incarcerated because her style of lawyering was called aiding and abetting a terrorist organization, by one of the biggest terrorist organizations ever known to humanity: the United States government.

Dhanifu Karim Bey, an elder in Los Angeles’ conscious community, a former Black Panther and a long time school teacher, is being forced to fight for his life unjustifiably in court in a three strikes case. Pack the courtroom Friday, Aug. 5, 8 a.m., Norwalk County District Court, Department J, 12720 Norwalk Blvd., in Norwalk.

On the heels of the San Francisco Police Department killing of alleged bus-fare-evader Kenneth Harding, KPFA devoted the entire morning program – the Morning Mix – on Wednesday, July 20, to police terrorism aka “excessive use of force.”

“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.

Powwah and his family are some of the people that I check in with when I am in the Memphis area. Besides being one of the most politically educated entrepreneurs that I know, Powwah makes music. His new album, “In tha Wind,” is Southern conscious rap at its finest with precise lyrical content and the type of production that we traditionally think of when we think of bar-b-cues and Southern Comfort.

I came into contact with Madam T’s music first through Facebook, although we both live in Oakland. I was impressed with her business sense off of the mic: sound, production, lyricism, marketing and her street hardened demeanor in her music. I brought her on the Block Report Music Show – every Friday midnight-2 a.m. on KPFA 94.1FM in Northern Cali – and the callers loved her.

Oakland has been always full of talent. If you didn’t know, it was the home of the Black Panther Party, Andre Ward, Too Short, Bill Russell, Huey P. Newton, Toni Tony Tone, 2Pac, Ricky Henderson, Bruce Lee, Leonard Peltier and more. Now a new, up and coming duo known as the Newlyweds, are ready to show the world what they have to offer.

The SF Bay View is holding a fundraiser! Come and meet the grandson of Malcolm X, Hajj Malcolm Shabazz, on his speaking tour hosted by the Minister of Information JR.

“I Twirl in the Smoke” is a new collection of writings by Meres-Sia Gabriel, the daughter of two Black Panthers, most notably former Minister of Culture and internationally known artist Emory Douglas.