Tag: National Black Chamber of Commerce

Harry C. Alford leaves deep prints having innovated and inspired wide Black economic energies.

In 1996 Eva Patterson, then executive director of Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and Fred Jordan, President of the African American Chamber of Commerce, with Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Senator Diane Feinstein, opposed Prop 209. Today they are fervently supporting Prop 16 on the Nov. 3, 2020 ballot to repeal the 1996 Prop 209 with an amendment to the California Constitution.

It’s 2016, 40 years since Muhammad al-Kareem founded the New Bayview, now renamed the San Francisco Bay View, in 1976. Inspired by Malcolm X, he wanted to bring a newspaper like Muhammad Speaks to Bayview Hunters Point. He’ll tell the story of those early years, and I’ll pick it up now at the point when my wife Mary and I took over in 1992. Watching our first paper roll through the huge two-story tall lumbering old press at Tom Berkley’s Post Newspaper Building on Feb. 3, 1992, was a feel-like-flying thrill we’ll never forget.

It has been 45 years since my mentor, Dr. Arthur A. Fletcher, implemented the Philadelphia Plan. This was a federal program used to integrate unions. From the beginning, the construction trades resisted with violence and Jim Crow style segregation. Then why do most civil rights organizations and local Black elected officials support such instruments of racism? That is simple. They take donations from the very construction locals who discriminate against us.

In a number of prisons around the country, the September Bay View was banned, and we suspect the October paper will be too. If your paper was denied, the prison is required to give you and the Bay View a notice saying why banning the Bay View is constitutional, allowing you and us to appeal that decision. So the first step is to insist on a notice and then appeal it; so will we. Here is George Rahsaan Brooks’ appeal. We think he’ll win, just as he did before.

From now on we are going to connect each and every city and nation that has significant numbers of members of the African Diaspora. We will begin to communicate on a regular basis and plan economic projects to employ more and more workers and build more and more wealth via entrepreneurship. These dots of people of African descent will become the envy of the world. Oh, how resilient we have been. Now we will not only survive but begin to thrive.

On the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it comes to mind that from day one our society and culture have been heavily influenced by film. The recent slavery-related films, “Lincoln,” directed by Steven Spielberg, and “Django Unchained,” directed by Quentin Tarantino, will have a social, economic and psychological impact.

Construction unions have historically fought affirmative action and excluded Black hiring, and they are still getting away with it. They huddle up to the good unions and pay off our elected officials with campaign donations.

How could Porter Goss oversee the investigation of Congresswoman Maxine Waters in light of their conflict over the CIA-crack connection? He should have recused himself. Is Nancy Pelosi in on this political hit as well? So far, all eight suspects since she vowed to 'drain the swamp' of corruption are Black.

When the now infamous offshore BP oil rig first blew up, some called it another Katrina and many of us took that as an insult. The pain and suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) were biblical and were fanned by the slow response of our own federal government. But the BP oil spill is a monster that is growing exponentially by the day.

"We should own and operate and control the economy of our community," said Malcolm X. To make that happen, businesses in the hood should grab the new ARC loans: no-interest loans with no payments due for a year, offered beginning June 15 by the U.S. Small Business Administration, revitalized by President Obama. Merchants and residents who hire and trade with each other build peace and prosperity in the hood.

There are those who fear this warrior for justice. They are afraid of the accountability that must be applied to the transgressors, no matter who they are.