23 October 2014 — Black Agenda Report
Detroit: The Dispersal of Urban Black America Begins
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Detroit’s bankruptcy drama is a cover for ethnic and class cleansing. The city’s accelerated Black-removal plan came under scrutiny of United Nations rapporteurs, who found evidence of racial discrimination and human rights abuses. “The water disconnections and housing foreclosures are coordinated prongs of a hyper-aggressive gentrification pincer movement.”
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Black Agenda Report has been nearly alone in pointing out first lady Michelle Obama’s leveraging her image to boost Wal-Mart as the solution to urban food deserts. The Black Agenda Report crew was writing about mass incarcerationback in 2005, a full five years before the debut of Michelle Alexander’s book on the subject, and long before the black attorney general allowed the phrase to pass his lips. We were also the first to run a pre-publication interview with Michelle Alexander as well.
Black Agenda Report also pointed out how the Congressional Black Caucus has leased itself out to banksters, telecommunications corporations, for-profit colleges and other interests.
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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
Police don’t murder Black people all by themselves; they have accomplices in media. The New York Times routinely “gives aid and comfort to American lynch law.” In the case of Michael Brown, the Times impugned Brown’s character and muddied facts to favor the accused policeman. The cop had other friends in media. “Charles Blow and Van Jones disgracefully made the case for Wilson on CNN and acted as a defense team for him and for all of white America.”
by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and Kevin Berends
“Policing” in America is an outgrowth of the slave patrols of yesteryear, terror-squads that protected and served the slave master and his profits. The U.S. Criminal Injustice System’s hostility to Black people’s claims to citizenship and dignity remains implacable. “The Black Panther Party was correct in its analysis of the police as an occupying force in the black community.”
by Danny Haiphong
A strong, independent movement for genuine social transformation, needs its own, battling media. “It was Black Agenda Report that condemned Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and the entire Black Misleadership class for supporting Israel, expanding the American empire’s domestic and international war machine, and protecting the rule of Wall Street.”
by BAR Poet-in-Residence Raymond Nat Turner
Mass rallies, strikes, pickets, voter registration, armed
Self-defense; from flash-mobbing miserly Wal-Marts,
To slipping “Which Side Are You On?” in on the St Louis
Symphony, to unfurling anti-racist banners on Monday Night
Football, National TV, revealing inconvenient truths about cold-
Blooded murder…
by Dr. Jahi Issa
Black enrollment at historically white universities continues to plummet, while federal support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) crumbles at an accelerated rate under the First Black U.S. President. Meanwhile, many historically Black institutions boast majority white faculties and student bodies – paid for with moneys intended for the education of African Americans. “The end is near as it regards America’s HBCUs.”
by Karen J. Greenberg
The U.S. response to Ebola already bears similarities to its “war on terror”: the deployment of thousands of troops for an “Ebola surge” in Africa; beefed up border protection and screening; massive security at airports; the tracing of people’s of contact patterns; resort to a policy of detention, i.e. quarantine; and an aura for secrecy about the nature of the “threat.” The mood is becoming eerily similar to the post-9/11 period.
by Mandisi Majavu
Cuba’s phenomenal response to the Ebola crisis is just the latest in a half century of unwavering commitment to the people of Africa. “Havana’s involvement in Africa has always been based on solidarity, while European colonizers like the Belgians plundered Congo and murdered millions of Congolese in order to gain access to its natural resources.”
Fear-mongeringPennsylvania Enacts Bill to Silence Prisoners – Especially Mumia Abu Jamal
A new law would curtail the speech of prisoners held by the State of Pennsylvania on the grounds that their utterances and writings might cause “mental anguish” to crime victims. “It’s a backlash, it’s a repressive law,” said Dr. Johanna Fernandez, professor of history at Baruch College and a supporter of Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner. “It suggests that authorities are feeling the heat of emerging movements against police brutality and mass incarceration.”
Speaking from Frackville State Prison, Mumia Abu Jamal said the legislation proves Pennsylvania’s government “doesn’t give a white about their own Constitution, nor about the United States Constitution. I welcome that, because it proves that they are the outlaws.” Police organizations were outraged that Abu Jamal was allowed to give a commencement speech at Vermont’s Goddard College.
Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration
Police and FBI personnel have reverted to throwing around the old term “outside agitators” to describe activists that have journeyed to Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the U.S. criminal justice system. “They’re picking up the terminology of George Wallace, Bull Connor and the like,” said Carl Dix, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, who was arrested along with fellow co-founder Dr. Cornel West, in Ferguson, last week. The point “is to divide the movement to transform the status quo.” Nationwide actions to resist police brutality, mass incarceration and criminalization of Black people are set for October 22.
Prop 47 Would Dramatically Reduce Incarceration in California
The online activist outfit Color of Change has thrown its weight behind passage of Proposition 47, a ballot initiative that would reclassify some nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and redirect prison funding to programs for transition to life on the outside. “It would impact up to 10,000 people who are currently incarcerated” and spare thousands more from being “overcharged” for offenses, said Matt Nelson, organizing director for Color of Change. Moreover, said Nelson, passage would go far to “make it unacceptable to have such high rates of incarceration, which really start in a racially biased culture.”
Next Round: Rev. Pinkney vs. Whirlpool in Benton Harbor
Community activist Rev. Edward Pinkney goes on trial October 27 on charges of altering signatures on petitions to recall the mayor of Benton Harbor, Michigan, a mostly Black town long dominated by the giant Whirlpool Corporation. “They’re counting on an all-white jury that is motivated by something other than the truth,” said Pinkney, leader of the fight to recall Mayor James Hightower. Whirlpool and county police authorities “would do anything – I believe they would even kill – to keep him in office, because he is the corporate puppet,” said Pinkney.
Temple University Students Supplement “Africology” with DuBois
Students at Philadelphia’s Temple University are holding their own W.E.B. Dubois lecture series to make up for what’s missing from the new “Africology” courses instituted by Dr. Molefi Asante, chairman of the recently renamed African American Studies department. Asante refused to renew the contract of Duboisian scholar Dr. Anthony Monteiro. “We feel a critical analysis, historically, politically and economically, through the vantage of African American struggle, is lacking” under the Africology regime, said student organizer Sabrina Sample. Asante’s agenda has been to “eliminate any competition with Afro-centric ideology within the department.”
The New Dark Age 
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