Black Elites, and Many Black Voters, Supported Mass Black Incarceration
Historian, author and activist Paul Street has high praise for James Forman Jr.’s new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender in Washington, DC. His book “fills a giant hole in the literature,” illuminating the role played by “Black elites in the rise of the mass incarceration system,” said Street, himself an expert on race and the U.S. penal system. “Many ordinary, working class Black voters in the 70s and 80s have actively supported the racially disparate war on crime and drugs that ended up producing racist mass incarceration,” said Street, whose latest book is titled They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.
Slavery Was an Illegal Conspiracy of Criminal European Nations
A leading reparations activist says there is merit in pursuing a variety of legal strategies that might convince U.S. courts that Black people deserve damages for past treatment in the United States. However, Kamm Howard, of the legislative commission of NCOBRA, the national Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, doesn’t believe there is anything “novel” about the proposal by Dr. Jahi Issa and Reggie Mabry, that reparations activists recognize that slavery was legal in the U.S., and adjust their legal strategy, according. “Slavery was never legal under international norms,” said Howard. “Only a small number of nations in Europe colluded together and created some rules among themselves on how to engage in these international crimes. Those were rules amongst criminals.”
Every Black Community on Earth has Sell-Outs
Speaking on the Dead Pundits Society podcast, Haitian American political analyst Pascal Robert, a contributor to Black Agenda Report, unleashed a withering broadside against the Black Misleadership Class. “There is not a place in the world that Black people have not been sold out by class traitors in the Black community,” said Robert. Black Americans have a deep interest in wealth and income redistribution. “If you are anti-union, then you are anti-Black, because more Black people are involved in unions, per capita, than there are Black people in college.”
MOVE 9 Event in Brooklyn
In 1978, nine members of the MOVE organization were sentenced to life in prison in the death of a Philadelphia policeman. Seven years later, police bombed the MOVE residence, killing 11 members, including 5 children. On Saturday, August 5, Brooklyn’s House of the Lord church hosts a day-long event, “39 Years is Too Long: Free the MOVE 9.” MOVE Minister of Communications Ramona Africa says parole board members are the biggest obstacles to freeing the surviving members. “You will find that most of them have backgrounds in law enforcement or as prosecutors,” she told Black Agenda Radio producer Kyle Fraser. “That is definitely a conflict of interest when the issue at hand” is the death of a police officer.
Apartheid and Mass Black Incarceration Go Hand In Hand
“The question should be asked,” said Pennsylvania prison inmate Charles Diggs: “Why is America imprisoning more people than any country in the world?” -- a status once held by white ruled South Africa. The apartheid system is directly connected to mass incarceration in both countries, said Diggs, in an essay for Prison Radio.
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.
In this month’s Afghanistan News Update, the Black Alliance for Peace Solidarity Network’s Afghanistan Committee includes an interview with Obaidullah Baheer, a lecturer at the American…
Reproductive justice in the wake of SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade, campaign to free Mumia Abu Jamal, and Frederick Douglass speech "What to the Slave is the 4th of July" read by Ossie Davis.
We discuss reproductive justice in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling which overturned the Roe v. Wade decision. Loretta Ross is co- author of the book Reproductive Justice, and co-founder of…
Gwen Debrow of the Campaign to Free Mumia joins to tell us what we can do to go all out for Mumia during the July 3rd nationwide actions.
On July 5, 1852 Frederick Douglass was asked to speak on the topic of the nation’s independence celebration. Now known as What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, the speech was a stinging…
