Story Archives 2012

Community Newsroom/Sala Comunitaria in January 2012- Featured Juliana "jewels" Smith, creator of (H)afro-centric: the comic and Frederick Douglas Cloy- author, teacher and mestizaje revolutionary

“You can bet your last money it’s all gonna be a stone gas honey” --Don Cornelius

The sooooooooooooouuuullllllll Train! I awaited the high pitched wail of those words every Saturday morning as did my grandma, a 67 year old Irish woman who was married to my grandfather, an African descended man from New Orleans who had dancing in blood from his years as a Vaudeville hoofer.

My grandma would stand in front of the TV and take in the “Hippest trip in America”, Soul Train, as presented by its host and creator Don Cornelius. I loved Soul Train, as well as my father, a Filipino man who grew up in San Francisco’s Western Addition—The Fillmore—also known as the Harlem of the West Coast.

Dad would watch groups on Soul Train such as the Spinners, the Whispers, the Temptations and Ojays. Dad was a frustrated singer. He dressed like the singers on Soul Train. He would get up and follow the moves of the performers, gliding and gyrating across the hardwood floor of our flat on California Street. This simultaneous gliding and stepping by my father would cause me to divide my attention between him and the TV (Which, I think contributed greatly to my lifelong case of attention deficit disorder). 

It was during Soul Train that my father sang back up on “Love Train, “Can’t help but love you”, “If you don’t know me by now” and “Side Show”—some of the biggest songs of all time. On Saturdays that my father would glide across the stage in his mind, taking in the sounds of black voices, black spirits, black movement, black soul that was in his blood—his Fillmore blood that was black and brown and brown and black. It was a respite from his janitorial job and his janitorial foreman and the floors that needed waxing. On Monday he was in his car, listening to a black radio station, on his way to work where the voices were black and the dreams were too.

I loved the way Don Cornelius introduced the performers on his show. “Put your hands together for the mighty…Temptations…Spinners…Ojays…Tower of Power…Aretha Franklin…and let’s not forget the Godfather of Soul…James Brown!" Don had that rich baritone that commanded reverence from even the most esteemed performers. Soul Train was Don’s house and the stars paid homage. There were other music shows on the air at the time. American Bandstand and Hee Haw come to mind. Compared to Don Cornelius, Dick Clark came off as a door to door Gideon Bible Salesman. And Roy Clark and Buck Owen’s “Pickin’ and a grinnin’” was no comparison to the soul train dance line and the scramble board.

And Don was clean, always decked out in the best threads. My dad put a lot of money down on lay-away to get threads like Don. In fact, one of my favorite Soul Train performances was the Isley Brothers singing their hit, “Layaway”.

As for my grandma, she was in love with Al Green. I can still see her watching him, swooning over “I’m so in love with you”. Grandma would shake her hips right along with the Soul Train dancers. Grandma was no slouch. She knew dancing. She admired greatly the Soul Train Dancers. She’d tell me that those dancers were highly accomplished. “They didn’t get those dancers off the street” she’d say, explaining the difficulty and skill it took to make it look so effortless. And my grandma would shake her hips and was every bit as worthy of moving them as the soul train dancers themselves. She loved Al Green, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett—a real soul woman she was. For me, one of the most memorable moments on soul train was a duet by Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson, tearing it up on "Ooooh, baby baby". The two sat at a piano and sang to each other. Aretha had such a commanding presence, but sitting next to Smokey, you could feel her melt. We all melted.

After a while the music began to change, as it always does. It took grandma a while to adapt to the techno sound. I remember she once remarked that Roger and Zapp sounded like "dishpans in a sink". But she still shook her hips those Saturday mornings no matter what, even while washing her own dishes. Thank you Don Corneilus for making those Saturday mornings come alive. 

We wish you love, peace…and soul

Earlier this week the “decision to ban Chicano and Native American books follows the 4 to 1 vote on Tuesday by the Tucson Unified School District” and “then school administrators told Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any class units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes.”

What was the ethnic diversity of the 5 people that made this huge monumental decision and mess? Do they represent the community of Tucson?  Arizona has a large population of 1st Nations people and also a large Indigenous population.  It appears that the Tucson Unified School District wants to“white wash” us away, erase the past, and leave books that perpetuate stereotypes, and are saturated in lies.  

Interestingly enough, dominant society forgets that we are not “a minority,” we are First Nations people.  We have rights under the #United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People.  Such as under Article 8:

2. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and

redress for:

(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them

of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values

or ethnic identities;

(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;

(e) Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite

racial or ethnic discrimination directed against them.

Under this section, The Tucson Unified School District does  not have a right to ban books that might be “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” because that would be in violation of depriving First Nations people “of their integrity as distinct peoples and or ethnic identities.”

First Nations people have dual citizenship, our Nations have Sovereign rights and we have First Amendments rights like everyone else.  Public Schools have challenged First Amendment rights before with students that did not want to salute the flag for religious reasons.  The result of that case was #Justice Robert Jackson ruling that the Supreme Court must ensure

"scrupulous protection of constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes."

Justice Robert goes on to state-

#“If there is any fixed star in our Constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

It appears that Tucson Unified School District is not being “scrupulous in protection of constitutional freedoms” and are attempting to “strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles” such as freedom of the press.  Arizona is allowing the Tucson unified school district to “prescribe what shall be done in …nationalism…or other matters of opinion”  

There has always been a sort of “intellectual blackout” regarding Native Americans.  

Dominant culture, “White America” does not want to see us as intellectual, critical thinkers.  In order to be “Experts” in anything in this country, we have to be taught (more often than not) by non-Natives, read what THEY want us to, go to THEIR schools and get “THEIR degrees.   The American government holds no respect for our Tribal ways or tribal governmental structures.  We learn about America’s finest heroes, and compassionate leaders, but we don’t often hear about how almost of them authorized deliberate acts of ethnic cleansing against Indigenous people.  The ban of books by Native American and Mexican American authors will not change history, but it is still a chilling metaphor of another type of “ethnic cleansing”.  

The United States has spent billions of dollars to vilify and criminalize Indigenous people and most recently under the disguise of “political correctness”.  Arizona gets the prize for not giving a rat’s ass about being “politically correct.” Nope! they are straight up and honest about their dislike of anyone that is brown skinned.  In one swoop, Tucson has potentially challenged the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and First Amendment Rights of the United States Constitution.  As the rest of the nation watches, Tucson is now Arizona ’s shining allstar of racist bigotry, because the censorship of literature and critical thought is only the beginning of further inherit rights being violated.

LaDuke had this to say about Arizona: “I heard someone say that if the states are the laboratory for democracy in the U.S., then Arizona is a meth lab, “I think they may be right.”

Indigenous People In the Sex Trade – Our Life, Our Bodies, Our Realities

May 9, 2009

Drawing of Political Exile Assata Shakur. Free Assata! Hands off Cuba!

Most Americans are not familiar with Assata Shakur. After all, she’s not exactly the type of Black superhero that they parade around during Black History Month. This is the type ignorance that some legislators in New Jersey hope will allow them to extradite Shakur back to the U.S. under the cover of our darkness.

Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard) was involved in a 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in the deaths of fellow Black Liberation Army member Zayd Shakur and New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. Shakur was sentenced to life in prison in 1977 but was broken out of prison by her comrades in 1979. She has been living under political asylum in Cuba since 1984.

She still remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted List with a million dollar reward for any snitch willing to give her up to the FEDS. (See the FBI’s Wanted poster for Assata at http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/dt/chesimard_jd.htm.)

However, with President Barack Obama seeking to open political channels with Cuba and ease U.S. restrictions, politicians in New Jersey have been turning up the heat on the Prez to make the Cuban government give up Shakur if they want to be in Uncle Sam’s good graces.

While the current headlines of “NJ to Press for Return of Cop Killer” would lead you to believe that Shakur is some heartless street thugstress that went around shootin’ up police stations just for kicks, the truth about the government repression by which groups like the Black Panther Party and its underground military arm, the Black Liberation Army, suffered has never really been told.

We cannot allow the media to even begin discussing Assata Shakur without putting her struggle in the context of COINTELPRO. The Counter Intelligence Program was an effort by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and its associated agencies to destroy groups that dared stand against U.S. oppression.

It was under COINTELPRO that Black leadership suffered under “dirty tricks” that ranged from political assassinations (Chairman Fred Hampton) to smear campaigns which are too many to even begin to name here. Even the good Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not immune to Hoover’s “dirty tricks.”

Could you really expect Assata Shakur to get a fair trail under such repressive policies?
According to the late civil rights attorney William Kuntsler in his book, “My Life as a Radical Lawyer,” a law enforcement agent told him that during Shakur’s trial ” a member of the New Jersey State Assembly had gone to the hotel where the jury was sequestered and talked to them about the necessity to convict.” In the book Kuntsler hints that even he underestimated the lengths that New Jersey law enforcement would go to get a conviction of Shakur.

Today, those same types of people are at it again. On April 17, New Jersey Sen. Sean King sent a letter to President Obama asking him to “delay normalizing relations with Cuba unless they agree to extradite convicted cop killer JoAnne Chesimard.” (Read the letter at http://blog.nj.com/ledgerupdates_impact/2009/04/LettertoPresObamaSenatorKean.pdf.)

Also, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram has been quoted as saying, “Obama’s move to ease sanctions against Cuba is an opportunity to bring back Joanne Chesimard.”

Now, do I think that Obama would sacrifice Assata Shakur on the alter of “Democracy” for political expediency? You’re darn right!

To appease middle class white America, President Obama will throw Shakur under the same Greyhound that he threw Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That is, if we don’t raise our voices.

There are organizations that have been fighting to keep the plight of Assata Shakur in our faces for years. See especially http://www.assatashakur.org/.

Black bloggers must start an immediate, emergency mass education campaign to tell the true story of Assata Shakur and COINTELPRO to combat the efforts of the miseducation of the mainstream media.

We must make sure that our local and national “urban” radio stations inform their listeners about this issue.

We must arm ourselves with information about Assata Shakur and COINTELPRO through websites, DVDs and books such as “Show Down” by the late Del Jones and “Racial Matters” and “Black America: The FBI Files” by Kenneth O’Reilly.

Finally, we must appeal to the Hip Hop artists who have the ears of the people to raise the issue if only for the reason of reppin’ for “Tupac’s kin folk.” (If that will motivate them to take action.)

If we do not raise this issue, loudly, Assata Shakur will be back in a U.S. prison or worse before she knows what hit her.

We owe this much to a sister who, as the rapper Common said in “A Song for Assata,” “went through all this … so we can be free.”

Paul Scott

Paul Scott writes for No Warning Shots Fired. He can be reached at info@nowarningshotsfired.com or (919) 451-8283. Watch “A Song for Assata” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrWxrFr7TL4.

It was Dead Prez day in Amerikkka. February 20th to be exact. To "celebrate" I took PoorNewsNetwork/FAMILY Project youth skolaz (including my 8 yr old son) to San Quentin Plantation aka Prison to support the action "Occupy4prisoners". San Quentin, where thousands of men, mostly poor, many with undiagnosed disabilities, mostly of color, reside, in the 21st century plantation/prison system. Oddly, due to a deeply Po'Lice state cooridinated (Not Your)Homeland Security effort, we almost didn't make it there.

From the moment we drove in with the POOR Magazine "news" truck we found not one, but FOUR off-ramps off of 280 and 101 closed to ALL traffic from Richmond, San Rafael and San Francisco. This was done for the sole purpose of confusing or completely blocking all traffic to and from the plantation. We got through, as did hundreds others, due to sheer refusal to give up. By ANy Means Necessary!

"I am here for the woman who is doing 25 to life for stealing a .99 lemon lime soda from the store," One of the powerful speakers, a prison industrial complex survivor and member of All of Us or None addressed the crowd of over 500 people who gathered at the mouth of San Quentin today for a herstoric rally called "occupy4prisoners. There were poets, survivors, youth and elders speaking about the plantation system and the direct actions we must do to make change happen.

For me, a formerly incarcerated poverty skolar, and criminalized mama, this powerful event resonated deeply, bringing meaning to the "occupy" movement and showing that its power is to support existent fights and organizing efforts for silenced peoples that have been raging on for years as well as to shed light on the increasingly po'Lice controlled state that we all live under.

The plantation system rages on around us, incarcerating every poor person it gets...

From the po'lice to the kkkourts millions of dollars are made by the 1% white supremacist informed system to arrest, adjudicate and eventually incarcerate folks for countless non-violent crimes under the insanity of "three strikes" and other sweeping legislations created by politricksters across Amerikkka.

Occupy vs Decolonize
As an indigenous person living on these "occupied" lands i find it hypocritical to use the "empires" words, i.e., "Occupy" especially in relation to the stolen and occupied native land upon which San Quentin plantation dwells and the sad reality  that a large number of the occupied peoples inside the plantation are indigenous peoples, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, from Mexico to Africa whose lands and resources were stolen by European immigrants with guns,poisons and paper trails.

"This day is beautiful - but its also about action." Prison revolutionary and PIC survivor and member of All of us or None, Dorsey Nunn, addressed the crowd, reminding us all that we must use whatever energy we had to start speaking up to politricksters and legislators, in California that meant  to the Governor about what needed to be done, what we heard and what we had the power to change. Together.

The Solidarity Steps for Decolonization/Occupation Efforts across the country

1. Abolishing unjust sentences, such as the death penalty, life without the possibility of parole, three strikes, juvenile life without parole, and the practice of trying children as adults.
2. Standing in solidarity with movements initiated by prisoners and taking action to support prisoner demands, including the Georgia Prison Strike and the Pelican Bay/California Prisoners Hunger Strikes.
3. Freeing political prisoners, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Lynne Stewart, Bradley Manning and Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, a Black Panther Party member incarcerated since 1969.
4. Demanding an end to the repression of activists, specifically the targeting of African Americans and those with histories of incarceration, such as Khali of Occupy Oakland, who could now face a life sentence on trumped-up charges, and many others being falsely charged after only exercising their First Amendment rights.
5. Demanding an end to the brutality of the current system, including the torture of those who have lived for many years in Security Housing Units (SHUs) or in other forms of solitary confinement.
6. Demanding that our tax money spent on isolating, harming and killing prisoners instead be invested in improving the quality of life for all and be spent on education, housing, health care, mental health care and other human services which contribute to the public good.

Art work by Carina Lomeli www.carinalomeli.com

Yes, I want peace. Yes, I want change.

The message is good. Let the elite give back what they took from all people.

As the rain crept in and out of the Day of Action, January 20th had come. I arrived at the 5 o'clock march, the last march that would lead us into "action".

I looked for a pole underneath the big Bank of America building to lock my soaking bike to, while carrying my DECOLONIZE EVERYTHING sign.

It's the only message that means anything to me, keeping in mind they have not changed their name... yet. I walk around the crowd taking photos, singing & chanting. Only guessing what the next move was. The group then walked up Market toward where I thought was City Hall, but to my surprise we ended up on Van Ness and took a right on Geary, stopping right in the middle of the intersection. The man with the speakerphone yells, "Are we gonna take this Building?!"

Another witness and participant in the Occupy protests, known as Bad News Bruce, explains his side of the story while he stood in the front lines:

'You have all seen the San Francisco Occupy. I, Bad News Bruce as a field reporter for Poor Magazine, knew about this action but never said anything. This action was planned to show the cuts in arts and education. The three theaters they chose to protest were in use that day. These theaters were not known to the general public. So this reporter's conclusion was that there was spies in the organization or moles listening in, informing the police of the location. So the last day we had to do something about it.

"I didn’t care where they had their secret site because I wanted to be a neutral reporter, but I was getting texts and e-mails all day long from people that shouldn't have known the key locations in the first place. I was taking all info as gossip. As the March arrived at Cathedral Hill the entire riot squad of 200 or 300 police was waiting for us in front of the entry. My own private investigation found there were tear gas canisters with tear gas grenades.

"A few people people tried rushing the gate of the designated building takeover, including this reporter, but it got us nowhere. We decided to march to find a safer route into the hotel. This is where things got ugly. Some the protesters broke into a luxury dealership but did not enter. It's strange cause in Latin America where they have revolutionary marches they do the same, but also take pictures in the car to claim the car in the name of revolution.

"The windows were all broken, these kids were acting like provocateurs or cop informants. Everyone else stood around watching and marching. With their crow bars in their hands, nobody wanted to start dialogue with them. This is a violation of the codes of the 99%, which is against violence. Everybody had to take the oath. We went down 2 blocks on Eddy and Franklin, made our way back to the hotel where the back fire escape was magically opened. I went to the 3rd floor, a few people were acting like brat kids. This I'm opposed to cuz you're adding a bad dimension when the press is following you around. At this point in the building takeover they should have acted with restraint.

"After, we went into the swimming pool area where people were acting normal, talking about doing a General Assembly and plans, but as I walked back out to the hallway I saw an idiot taking a door from inside as a souvenir. Then I saw the melee (violence) start from the west side of the building. This is also not a sign of good communication, it is a sign that you are not trying to be friends with the state. In an interview with the press I told the truth when I said they were acting like 'frat brats when there was no need.'

"At this point banners were supposed to go up, never to put graffiti, because press takes pictures and they can use it to their advantage. Other colleagues have seen the damage, as you will see in the pictures provided. I hope next time we try to take over a building it will be less violent. Sincerely yours, Bad News Bruce."

POOR News Network has been reporting and supporting all the things that are still not even talked about at these progressive movements. We even voluntarily (without money) published The Decolonizers Guide to a Humble Revolution in October of 2011. This was after we noticed how people who were not white or students, were getting silenced and detached in the Occupy Movement, among other things. It lists some of the most useful contacts for organizing in the Bay Area, and introduces work like poetry and teachings about how the most oppressed people have been resisting systematic political abuse for centuries...before slavery, before the recent big awakening. It's about fighting the cult of individuality and making movements safe for all people, children and elders and disabled folks and folks in the prison system alike.

The safety of our elders and children should be the most important goal. This march was not only an unsuccessful building takeover, and unsafe for elders and children, but it gave the Occupy movement a bad rep for throwing things out the windows onto cops' heads, and for making graffiti and destruction of property. I do understand that aggression is caused by the authority and brutality of police, but if we the people react in the same manner, than how much better are our ideals. When people destroy property during a march it puts everyone in danger. Even though some are willing to give their lives, not all are, much less trying to get arrested. How can we prevent this expression of aggression? How can we keep this movement a safe place for all the 99% not just the 12% that yell, "kill the rich"? Until this is addressed properly, I will not feel safe. Destruction is not the answer.