US Must Build Housing on a Bigger Scale than the New Deal
Organizer Tara Raghuveer, whose Kansas City Tenants group won passage of a Tenants Bill of Rights, said “One of our central demands is to return to treating housing as a public good rather than a commodity. The government must build and manage housing like never before, even beyond the scale that was seen during the New Deal era.”
Abolish Schooling As We Know It
Public schools in Black America are part of the mass incarceration system, said David Stovall, a professor of African American Studies and Criminology at the University of Illinois, in Chicago. “If you have this heavily funded carceral system, and a schooling system that is substandard, they fuel each other,” said Stovall, who wrote an article calling for school abolition in the Journal of Culture and Education. Stovall distinguishes between order-oriented schooling and genuine education.
Free All Political Prisoners, Including Julian Assange
Julian Assange must be set free, like all the other political prisoners of US Empire,” said BAR executive editor Glen Ford. The Wikileaks founder, currently locked up Britain’s Belmarsh prison, faces trial for extradition to the US on February 24. “Nobody has been pursued with more ferocity by the US national security state than Julian Assange,” Ford told radio program host Randy Credico. “It really shows how effective Wikileaks has been in revealing the crimes of US imperialism all over the world.”
Mumia Marks Release of Chuck Africa
The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, was jubilant at the release of Chuck Africa, at 59 the last of the Move 9 members to leave prison after conviction in the 1978 death of a Philadelphia policeman. Mumia called Chuck Africa “one of the feistiest” of the Move 9 members, two of whom died in prison. Abu Jamal has been imprisoned since 1981 in the death of another Philadelphia cop.
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:am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.
Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists.
If there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity, says Robin D.G. Kelley.
Jackson, Mississippi’s Black mayor is celebrated as a “radical” in some quarters, but his cops kill, maim and abuse Black people just like police forces everywhere in the US.
Inequality: The American Ethos
