blackalliance2020

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The city wants to redevelop the historic Mafundi Institute in Watts. Can the community save it?

BY SAM RIBAKOFF • JANUARY 27, 2021

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Malaika Jabali Speaks on America’s Racial Caste System

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The Black Arts Movement began—symbolically, at least—the day after Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. The poet LeRoi Jones (soon to rename himself Amiri Baraka) announced he would leave his integrated life on New York City’s Lower East Side for Harlem. There he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, home to workshops in poetry, playwriting, music, and painting.

The Black Arts, wrote poet Larry Neal, was “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” As with that burgeoning political movement, the Black Arts Movement emphasized self-determination for Black people, a separate cultural existence for Black people on their own terms, and the beauty and goodness of being Black. Black Arts poets embodied these ideas in a defiantly Black poetic language that drew on Black musical forms, especially jazz; Black vernacular speech; African folklore; and radical experimentation with sound, spelling, and grammar. Black Arts Movement poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti wrote, “And the mission is how do we become a whole people, and how do we begin to essentially tell our narrative, while at the same time move toward a level of success in this country and in the world? And we can do that. I know we can do that.”

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In 1981, Omowale launched an organization known as the Black Alliance Movement (B.A.M.). The organizing strategy was to establish a network of student, youth and community projects with a focus on networking and coalition building instead of membership organizations. This network has grown over the past thirty eight years, reaching millions of youth through grassroots and social media campaigns and community projects. B.A.M. was an outgrowth of the work Omowale was engaged in after leaving the A-APRP after ALD ‘81. This work focused on Pan African organizing centered on support of the South African liberation movements, as well as the anti-apartheid movement in the United States and the African Diaspora. It was in this light that Omowale was involved in the South African Task Force at UCLA, as well as the African Education Project and NOMMO. Omowale’s own activism dates back to his freshman year at CSUN (1975-76) and the student protests after the Soweto Uprising in 1976. It was at that time when Omowale became involved in supporting the work of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) of Azania, and its leader Steve Biko. Please join our group on Facebook. Omowale is currently an academic instructor based in South Los Angeles.

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“I am told every day that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel,” she tweeted. “I find that to be problematic, and I am not alone. I just happen to be willing to speak up on it and open myself to attacks.” Ilhan Omar

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We Absolutely Could Give Reparations To Black People. Here’s How. A step-by-step guide to paying the descendants of enslaved Africans.

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Potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidates in the early stages of assembling campaign staffs are running into an uncomfortable truth: Among the already small pool of capable operatives, there’s an even smaller pool of nonwhite campaign managers and senior advisers.

The shortage could have serious repercussions given the large number of expected candidates and the diverse makeup of the Democratic electorate.The party’s base is increasingly young and diverse, and candidates, especially older ones, need staffers who understand how to stitch together coalitions across racial and economic lines.

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CARACAS, VENEZUELA — The United States’ various forms of intervention in Venezuela have generally been dressed up and sold to the American public in pro-democracy and humanitarian costumes.

The high-minded rhetoric notwithstanding, here are the top five real reasons the U.S. wants regime change in Venezuela.

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ARCH 2, 2019

This week, representatives from peace organizations throughout the United States announced they had formed a delegation to visit Venezuela on March 10. On this four-day trip, the delegation intends to gather information from Venezuela’s elected leaders and civil society groups to demonstrate what is missing from the U.S. mainstream media narrative: Most Venezuelans oppose the U.S. intervention and CIA-trained puppet Juan Guaidó, who has announced himself Venezuela’s “interim president.” Watch the press conference and read the official statement.

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Michael B. Jordan and his Outlier Society production company have announced the Outlier Fellowship. It’s an internship and mentorship program providing access, opportunity, and community to underrepresented young people entering media, arts and entertainment. Jordan announced the news at The Obama Foundation’s MBK Rising!, an event of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance in Oakland.

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“There is a higher law than the law of government. That’s the law of conscience.”

- Kwame Ture

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Patrice Lumumba: Remembering ‘Africa’s Che Guevara’

The US-sponsored plot to kill Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), took place on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.

Lumumba wanted to free the country from its colonial shackles. He wanted to unite the ethnic groups and retain control of the country’s natural resources rather than let foreign countries manage them. Belgium and the US in particular could already sense their waning influence. “That is why they decided to get rid of the new government and Lumumba himself,” said Ludo de Witte, a Belgian sociologist who wrote a book on the assassination.

Since the United Nations refused to help subdue Katanga, Lumumba sought Soviet aid in the form of arms, food, medical supplies, trucks, and planes to help move troops to Katanga. His decision to turn to the Soviet Union alarmed the West, particularly the United States.

The CIA had tried to poison him, but eventually settled on local politicians (and Belgian killers) to do the job. He was captured by Mobutu’s mutinous army and flown to the secessionist province of Katanga, where he was tortured, shot, and killed.

theguardian/dw/africasacountry/wikipedia

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December 21, 1949: Birthday of Comrade Thomas Sankara, Marxist revolutionary, pan-Africanist and President of Burkina Faso from 1983 until his assassination in 1987.

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Black Panthers & Palestinian delegation at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. July, 1969.

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GARVEY: SALUTE