Monthly Archives: April 2018

Never thought I’d see --- the day that I’d pray --- for: Fake News; --- Never thought I’d see --- the day that I’d pray --- for: Alternative Facts --- from Boss Tweet – pray that --- scribblers screwed up tenses --- scribbling ‘bout a constant struggler – 3-time loser in capitalist Amerikkka: --- Disabled, Black and Woman – Panther to the core, --- Ida B-child soldier speaking, writing in real time – Mentoring men and women for battlefront lives --- worth living …

I have always said that if you want to understand the nature of a thing, you must research its origin. I would venture to say that the iconic freedom fighter and servant of the people Malcolm X was the first “Prison Panther,” although he was not known officially as such. However, when Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966 at Merritt College in Oakland, California, the legacy of their hero, OUR HERO, Malcolm X was on their mind.

In 1968, Joe Debro was reporting on an Oakland we would recognize today, where white arrests were down and Black arrests up, where in the first four months of 1968, police murdered about a dozen Black and Brown youth allegedly fleeing the scene of a crime, where “almost every ghetto Negro has a police record.” This is Part 18 of the report titled “A Study of the Manpower Implications of Small Business Financing: A Survey of 149 Minority and 202 Anglo-Owned Small Businesses in Oakland, California.”

To the people in California, the name Kiilu Nyasha is familiar, like an aunt or some other relative. For them, she was a voice of resistance heard on public radio and television, mostly on her show, called Freedom is a Constant Struggle. She was an endless and brilliant source of resistance to the system. She became a beloved and respected elder for young people in the Bay Area. We remember Kiilu Nyasha: mother, artist, commentator, revolutionary and inspiration.

On March 21, the Stateville Correctional Center Debate Team, hosted a public debate about bringing a parole system back to Illinois – one of two states which currently does not have parole. As Illinois boasts the No. 1 most overcrowded prison system in the US – operating at 151 percent capacity – and the system is spending $2 billion and counting each year, the time to reinstate parole was undoubtedly yesterday.

Darius Ja’Quan Thomas was a promising young scholar from Bayview Hunters Point, whose life was cut short on April 20, 2018. Darius made such a positive impact in the lives of his family, friends, classmates and anyone connected to him during his life. Darius will be missed forever. For those of you impacted by the life of Darius Thomas, you are invited to join us in celebrating his life next Tuesday, May 1, 2018, at 11 a.m. Please reach out to the family for service information.

The Eureka chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has sent out a press release regarding Humboldt State University’s recruitment efforts in minority-majority neighborhoods –telling HSU to forgo the revenue these prospective students offer until they implement substantial support for students of color. Following is the press release, dated April 25, 2018.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, or however the saying goes, which is how the District Attorney’s Office in Dallas County, Dallas, Texas has been operating from the early 1990s up to today. It’s highly possible that these same corrupt tactics have been used way before what I’m about to describe, but I choose to focus on the documented events I was able to witness and research. This includes an outright wrongful conviction campaign by D.A. Jason January.

Brie and I both have mental health issues and we helped one another in various ways. We kept to ourselves, encouraged one another and were always there to listen to one another. We both ended up in MSU, I on suicide watch and Brie on psych observation. Upon my release from MSU, I was told “go ahead and kill yourself because you will never be housed with Morris again. In fact, you need to do your time on your own because any friend you make will be moved away from you.”

Community and labor advocates rallied on Friday, April 20, 2018, at the San Francisco Potrero Hill Health Center to call for an end to the privatization of the center by Department of Public Health Director Barbara Garcia and also the retaliation against the center’s worker Cheryl Thornton, who is a member of SEIU 1021. Community members are angry that the clinic, which was founded after a long struggle, is being destroyed by city privatizers.

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Most of the dialogue regarding sentencing reform centers on nonviolent offenses. Yet it is not necessary to limit reforms to those convicted of nonviolent or minor offenses. In order to truly address our nation’s prison problem, policymakers should also substantially revise policies affecting those serving long sentences, including life with and without parole. There are important legal, moral, fiscal and public safety reasons to do so.

The recent police murders of Stephon Clark, a 22 year-old shot and killed on the evening of March 18 by two officers of the Sacramento Police Department in Sacramento, and Saheed Vassell, 34, murdered by Brooklyn police in New York on April 7, again reminds us that Black Lives have never mattered to state-sanctioned organizations popularly known as police departments. The mass responses to the murders of the two young Black men will initiate a familiar and repeated mass ritual that we have become accustomed to.

By the time you receive this, many of the prisoners housed on H-Con supermax at Polk Correctional Institution will have started a hunger strike in protest of our conditions of confinement. Being that we are imprisoned, it is sometimes easier for society and executive management at the North Carolina Department of Public Safety (NCDPS) to view us as sub-human, forget about us and assume that we are receiving quality care. This is not the case.

  Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCR) works to advance, protect and promote the legal rights of communities of...

Our story begins on any weekday morning in the mid 1940s, when thousands of men, migrants from the American South to “Frisco,” converged upon the gates of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard on their way to work. To do their jobs building and repairing ships for the biggest employer in the San Francisco Bay Area during the war time economic boom. By 1908, the San Francisco Drydock, operating at the shipyard, had become “the world’s greatest shipping yard.”

Men and women incarcerated in prisons across the nation declare a nationwide strike in response to the riot in Lee Correctional Institution. Seven comrades lost their lives during a senseless uprising that could have been avoided had the prison not been so overcrowded from the greed wrought by mass incarceration and a lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology. These men and women are demanding humane living conditions, access to rehabilitation, sentencing reform and the end of modern day slavery.

Over 200 prisoners in Santa Clara County have been on a hunger strike since April 15, 2018, to end meaningless classification reviews and the torturous practice of indefinite solitary confinement etc.. Concerned families and community countywide rallied in support of their incarcerated loved ones on Monday, April 23, at 6 p.m. in front of the Main Jail in hopes that the jail administration and/or Sheriff Laurie Smith will engage with participating hunger strikers to end the hunger strike.

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