LA Schools Overrun by Cops
The Los Angeles Unified School District is among the most heavily policed in the nation, with Black students 29 times more likely than white students to be charged with disturbing the peace. “Are they trying to set students up for success and education, or are they trying to set them up to go to prison?” asked Ashley Franklin, an organizer with the Labor Community Strategy Center and one of the authors of a report titled “Black, Brown and Over-Policed in LA Schools.” Despite the heavy hand of the law, students have organized throughout the district. “Our youth have read their history and they’re fighting back,” said Franklin.
Charter Schools Increase Segregation
Studies show the spread of charter schools exacerbates economic and racial segregation, said Stan Karp, of New Jersey’s Education Law Center. “Systematically, if you look at the demographics of the charter experiment, this is where you’re finding the increase in segregation, higher attrition rates, and the different populations that are being served,” said Karp, author of the recent Rethinking Schools article “How Charter Schools are Undermining Public Education.” The privatizers are deceiving inner city parents. “Investors and business interests have been able to attach their agenda for market reform in education to the urgent needs of communities that have not been well served by the existing system.”
African People’s Socialist Party Holds 6th Congress
The struggles – and defeats – of the Sixties must be put in context in order to chart a course towards liberation in the future, said Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party, which holds its 6th Congress in St. Petersburg, Florida, December 7 – 11. “We had a movement that was crushed” by state repression and assassinations, and “we’re seeing the consequences of that defeat” in the corrupt Black leadership that has emerged over the past 40-plus years. “Occasional spontaneous outbreaks” of protest after incidents like the Trayvon Martin killing cannot “substitute for real revolutionary work,” said Yeshitela.
Mumia: Where is Justice for the Living?
Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, who is serving a life term in the 1981 death of a Philadelphia policeman, noted that the State of Alabama recently granted posthumous pardons to the 9 Scottsboro Boys, convicted in a 1931 “rape that never happened.” Meanwhile, the four Black women and five men of the Move 9 are in the 35th year of prison sentences in the death of a Philadelphia policeman. “In 2058, will a future governor declare them pardoned, and grant them symbolic justice?” asked Abu Jamal, with deep sarcasm. “Justice delayed is still justice denied.”
Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: One hour.
Journalist and activist Jacqueline Luqman joins the Left Lens to discuss the two year anniversary of the BLM uprisings and her recent trips to Cuba and Venezuela.
The UK sends asylum seekers to Rwanda, the number of police killings in the U.S. continue unabated, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is threatened by U.S. client states and comprador, neo-…
The United Kingdom is paying the Rwandan government $150 million to accept asylum seekers. The UK is accelerating deportations and denial of legal rights to Global South immigrants. Fiona of the…
Police killings continue at a rate of more than 1,000 per year in the U.S., with 2022 numbers outpacing those of 2021. Sam Simyangwe of Mapping Police Violence provides analysis of the death toll and…
The Democratic Republic of Congo lives under threat of attack from neighboring U.S. client states Rwanda and Uganda. Its neo-colonial leadership acts on the direction of Washington and Europe.…
