JANUARY 17: SCHOOLS NOT JAILS ORGANIZERS WILL RETURN TO SITE, DESPITE ARRESTS

Organizers of today’s Schools Not Jails Occupation kickoff rally and action say that they have no plans to cancel the program of events planned to take place at the proposed site of the juvenile detention center in East Baltimore this week, despite arrests and an aggressive police presence earlier today. Tuesday’s program of events begins with breakfast at the site at 8AM, and ends with a 6PM dinner and a teach-in on Youth and the Prison Industrial Complex with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle at 7PM. All are invited to attend.

The Schools Not Jails Occupation, in collaboration with Occupy Baltimore and the Baltimore Algebra Project, is a five-day action designed to call into question the budgeting priorities of the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore by highlighting the unnecessary allocation of $100 million in state funds for the construction of a 180-bed youth detention facility–an amount that would cover the annual budget shortfall that threatens to close or privatize the Baltimore City Recreation Centers for 333 years.

Earlier on January 16, after a boisterous rally at the corner of Fallsway and Madison, in front of Central Booking, over 150 people marched to 600 E. Monument, where six organizers entered the enclosure and proceeded to erect a large wooden schoolhouse on the proposed site of the youth jail, and a Baltimore City high school teacher gave a lesson on Frederick Douglass. Earlier in the day, Wendell France, Commissioner of Pretrial Detention & Services at the Maryland Department of Public Safety, had told organizers that they would not be allowed onto the site of the proposed youth jail, stating safety concerns, but said that the State of Maryland’s jurisdiction ended there, and stated that he had no problem with protestors on the sidewalk outside of the site’s chain-link boundary. Baltimore City Police, however, did seem to have a problem with the Occupation’s use of the sidewalk, and brought dozens of police officers in full riot gear to create a barrier between activists and their military tent, erected on the sidewalk to provide shelter for those planning to remain at the site through the night. Police forced members of the press to leave the site, and then tore down the tent, which was taken away in a city sanitation truck. State Police then proceeded to tear down the schoolhouse that had been constructed inside the chain-link fence around the youth jail site.

Organizers say that, despite the six arrests and the loss of the tent, the first day of the action achieved their ultimate goal: calling attention to the planned construction of the youth jail, and demonstrating to the city and state governments that the residents of Baltimore City have different priorities for public spending and want to have a say in how public funds are dispersed. Organizers plan to spend the week discussing alternatives to the problems in Baltimore that the jail is intended to address, and bring proposals to the mayor’s participatory budget hearing at Cylburn Arboretum on January 21.

Video of the day’s events, as well as images, may be found at the Schools Not Jails website shortly: http://schoolsnotjails.wordpress.com | For specific photo requests, especially from the period when press were blocked from the site, please email schoolsnotjails@gmail.com.

For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact the Schools Not Jails Media Team: (410) 849-9626 | schoolsnotjails@gmail.com

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If we want the children to value the King Holiday; we must not only tell them of the Baptist preacher’s life and legacy, but we must also tell them how hard and long Black people and allies struggled to get the U.S. Government to honor him.

Enjoy the clip below.

November 2, 1983: President Reagan Approves MLK Holiday

Who knows if I can still kick it, but I used to back on the school bus. In fact, a little known Black History Fact about me was that I was the Battle Rap Champ among my peers. Punch lines for days. Those days are gone, but my love for Hip Hop remains (After all, I am an 80′s baby!)

Which is why I’m anticipating the fruit of the Bmore Mixtape Project – a competition organized by Baltimore activists, scholars, and concerned citizens to use the mixtape to spread the word about important social issues. I can really see this taking off in Baltimore. We have some of the greatest artists anywhere and soon more of the city and world will know that.

Contestants are charged to rap or produce poetry around specific themes. This year the theme is the School To Prison Pipeline.

Shout out to Dr. Lester Spence for the idea and check out his book, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip Hop and Black Politics.

Now all I need is a bangin’ track and time to get my flow together. Hey – if Dr. Cornel West can spit; you know I got to dust off my mic.

Anybody want to collab with a Pastor on a track? {straight face}

More than symbolic gestures (which certainly has its place); I am more excited to see the development of this kind of direct organizing and activism in Baltimore. There is real potential here to raise the profile of the predatory practices of banks in Baltimore and its impact upon the city’s Black community and the poor especially. It also creates opportunity for people in desperate need of housing to literally come in from the cold this winter.

It is shameful and sinful, in my opinion, to be in a city that on any given night has 3400 homeless people on the streets and at the same time have nearly 40,000 city-owned vacant properties.

The local Occupy Our Homes group draws inspiration from the Take Back The Land Movement founded by Max Rameau. I believe that the conditions are ripe for a new kind of activism in Baltimore and I believe that People of Faith need to be partner with the effort. In this clip, Max Rameau explains Take Back the Land and below you’ll find a flyer inviting you to join your power with Lila’s power to prevent her eviction from her home.

I hope you’ll be moved to support this effort. (Click the flyer for larger view)

Habari Gani? Ujima – Collective Work & Responsibility

To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together.

While preparing to write today’s reflection on Ujima, my eyes zoned in on the word “problems” in the description of this sacred value. I began to ask myself, “What are our problems that need our collective support?” One of the first things that came to mind revolved around “our children”…and more specifically our children (meaning Afrikan children) who are under the jurisdiction of the courts or are wards of the state in some way. To be clear, our children are not the problem, but they experienced problems that negatively impacted their healthy development. Now, government municipalities and their various agencies have charge over their lives with the stated goal to work in their “best interest.”

Many of these children are in foster care or tied up in some adoptive agency, group home, or department of social services and many of them are Black youth. Without even looking at the research, I know that if I walk into the Baltimore City Department of Social Services, that Black youth will be disproportionately represented. I would not be surprised if the same was true at Baltimore’s Woodbourne Center and the Baltimore office of Arrow Child & Family Ministries. Another layer of interesting dynamic is that at the latter two agencies I mentioned, while the youth population is probably majority Afrikan; the Board and Staff members of those agencies are probably overwhelmingly White. This dynamic is likely to show up no matter where you’re reading this from.

Why does that matter?

Well, I can’t argue that these “White” nonprofit agencies and government agencies don’t do some good to protect and care for youth no matter their racial or economic background. Having a wife who was a social worker and being in regular contact with those who still labor in this field, I’ve been witness to some of the horrifying scenes in which these professionals have to enter for the protection and benefit of a young person. Many of them deserve great credit and its a powerful ministry in which they are engaged.

However, these nonprofits and government agencies cannot be expected and should not be expected to support the youth in their journey toward a greater understanding and embrace of their ethnic identity. While there no doubt are exceptions among individual professionals in this field, the knowledge base of many of these organizations is completely ignorant of African culture and its import for Black youth. I agree with Dr. Henry H. Mitchell who echoes in his book, Black Preaching: The Recovery of a Powerful Art, a sentiment that is a foregone conclusion among the Afrikan “conscious” community. He says that culture is like a survival kit that speaks to the “wisdom and methods of a given cultural group, for the purpose of ensuring its survival.” He tells Black preachers (and it sure enough applies to many others) to work within the culture of a setting to communicate good news. I contend that among the many other things that youth in these systems need; they also need a firm founding in their Afrikan culture. It will help them in innumerable ways.

Well, how can these largely “White” nonprofits and government agencies support youth from within that young person’s own culture when they don’t know it – and thereby can’t value and uphold it!

That’s where we as the Black community have opportunity to engage. If I had my druthers, there would be no Black children – or children period – as wards of the state. But that ideal is not our reality at this moment. So what can we – the Black Community – do in the meantime? I raise 5 ideas for your consideration:

1. Survey those within your circle of connection who have some knowledge of the local foster care, adoptive agency, and group home scene in your town – listening especially for potential opportunities for support. These may be social workers, adoption caseworkers, group home directors, etc.

5. In addition to being a cultural advocate, talk to your church members, frat brothers or sorors, about serving as legal advocates for these youth so they don’t have to go into the American court system alone. The courts have been a place where deep injustices have been committed against Afrikan people – don’t let that tradition continue upon Black youth and you not be there to stand with them. The National Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children (CASA) can assist you in getting started.

What’s the point of being “conscious” if we don’t have a “conscience” toward our own children in these systems! We can rail against racism/white supremacy, white privilege, and legal and economic discrimination which leads to the disproportionate presence of Black youth in these agencies all day. (and rightly so!) But the fact of the matter is that our children – no matter the reasons – are in there and they need the support, love, and care of the Black Village. Their problems should be our problems and we have the opportunity to work with them to find solutions that will benefit them and us.

Ashe.

Habari Gani? Kujichagulia! which means Self Determination – To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.

Self-Determination is such a beautiful principle which speaks to the freedom that all individuals and people-groups should be able to rightly exercise. Though not always using the term, I have been writing about “kujichagulia” on this site for a long time.

In early 2008, I was blessed to be a part of the Park Heights Community “Dry Out” campaign that sought to expel liquor stores and predatory businesses from the 5100 block of Park Heights Avenue in Baltimore. It’s beyond shameful that there are 4 liquor stores in that one block! It’s also telling that in this overwhelmingly Black community; all of those liquor stores are owned by non-Black people. Under the leadership of Derrick Compton and with the support of others like now-councilman Brandon Scott, Al Watson, and Pastor Kevin Brooks; we put weekly pressure on these establishments to let them know they were being monitored for infractions and targeted for eventual expulsion.

In November 2009, I critiqued the Emerging Christian Movement in the spirit of self-determination, for its exclusion of non-white voices as it presented theological dynamics and features as if they created them while all the while People of Color of other Faith traditions and denominations have been practicing different “emerging” principles for generations.

I wrote about “kujichagulia” back in August 2010 when I proclaimed that “Black People Should Control The Baltimore City Public School System” on the grounds that Afrikan youth make up about 98% of the student population and the city is somewhere around 65% Afrikan. This notwithstanding, Black folks are regularly begging and pleading to have substantive say in the education of their own youth.

Self-determination pushed me back in April 2011 when I talked about the general “whiteness” of the Urban Farming/Healthy Food Movement and the need for people of color to be at the lead of the food revolution just as we are in most cases the ones suffering under the brunt of America’s food deserts.

And of course, my involvement in the struggle against Governor O’Malley’s plan to build a new youth jail in East Baltimore has been fueled by my firm belief that the Black Community should decide what institutions we want or don’t want in our community just like White people and Jewish people decide what will or won’t come in their communities. If White people don’t want a business or even a church to come into their community; chances are it won’t come. If Jewish people don’t want a business to come in their community; chances are it doesn’t come. Why should it be any different for Afrikan people? We don’t want O’Malley’s multi-million dollar youth jail and many of us have committed ourselves to organize, agitate, and protest – even if it means physically impeding the path of construction trucks – until O’Malley bends to our wishes.

This, my friends, is self-determination and in different ways it’s happening all over the world.

I pray that the flames of “Kujichagulia” burn even brighter in the new year for the Global Afrikan Family. As Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. reminded us – “No one can ride your back unless its bent.” No more hunched-backness in the Black community! May we stand up straight like righteous women and men and commit to “define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves” without timidity or apology.

Ashe.

State Senator C. Anthony Muse Speaks With Baltimore Clergy

On the same day that Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was being formerly inaugurated into the office of Mayor of Baltimore, State Senator C. Anthony Muse met with Baltimore clergy at First Apostolic Faith Church to share his ideas related to a potential run for U.S. Senate.

The Baltimore-native and and Prince George’s County Pastor currently is serving his second term as State Senator representing Maryland’s 26th Legislative District. 

In a room of nearly two dozen Baltimore-area clergy, Muse shared his concerns related to challenges in the country and specifically in the Black Community. He lamented the lackluster response to Black unemployment by those representing Maryland on Capitol Hill, and pledged that his priority as a U.S. Senator would center on job creation. In familiar clergy cadence, he also spoke about education, housing issues, and his vote against the redistricting plan which, he said, negatively impacts Maryland’s Black community resulting in the potential loss of millions of dollars.

It wasn’t lost on the clergy in attendance that the 42 million African Americans in this country don’t have one Black Senator to point to on Capitol Hill. In fact, as of 2011, only six African Americans have ever served as a U.S. Senator – with the first one, Rev. Hiram Revels, having a Baltimore connection as well. The historic undertones were and are clear.

That notwithstanding, defeating the incumbent in this race, Senator Ben Cardin would be a monumental feat for any challenger. Cardin, who has been in Maryland politics since 1967, has a long political track-record, firm name recognition, and the solidified support of the Jewish community of which he is a member. 

Thanks to his congressional staffer, Jerome Stephens, who is also a Baltimore minister, Cardin has relationships with Baltimore-area Black clergy as well – providing some with material and financial support for their various ministry outreach endeavors.  A reality that may keep some Baltimore clergy in Cardin’s camp.

The hinge on which this election may swing just may center on the question of whether the Black community will get solidly behind Muse as the Jewish community is solidly behind Cardin.  

Muse won’t likely win the fundraising contest, but if Blacks unite behind him, he has a real chance of becoming the next U.S. Senator of the United States – essentially representing not just Maryland’s Black Community, but being a voice at the table for Blacks across the Nation.

Perhaps this is why President Obama offered a very early endorsement of Senator Cardin.

In the 2006 U.S. Senate election, Cardin defeated Lt. Governor Michael Steele in the general election by 10 percentage points, but lost by wide margins in Baltimore City and Prince George’s County – Maryland’s most populous Black districts that are overwhelmingly democrat. Perhaps the more ominous numbers from the 2006 campaign are that Cardin only garnered 257,000 votes in the democratic primary against Kweisi Mfume. Since that time, upwards of 300,000 new Black voters have come on the rolls in Maryland – most in 2008 to support then-candidate Obama for president. These same voters are more likely to return to the polls in the presidential election of 2012 to vote on a ballot that in addition to Obama, may also have C. Anthony Muse’s name on it.

What does all of this mean? Well, it means that a strong Black candidate with solidified and enthusiastic support from the Black community has a real chance of defeating Senator Ben Cardin and making history for the Black community once again on April 3, 2012 – the date of the Primary Election.

The Black Community will not only have the opportunity to send a Black Man back to the White House as president, but to send a Black Man to the Senate too.

This should be quite an interesting race.

“I think I have some sense of what neighborhoods in Baltimore are like and what they need.” That was, in part, M.J. Brodie’s response to my critique of his agency’s impact on Baltimore’s Black Community. He knows what our neighborhoods are like and he knows what we need. Really?

In an open-air, public meeting with him organized by Another BDC Is Possible (an offshoot of Occupy Baltimore) I, along with others challenged him on the lack of participation, lack of transparency, and lack of commitment to economic justice within the Baltimore Development Corporation. I told Mr. Brodie that his agency operates from a “just trust us to do what’s best for you” mentality, however, that unearned trusts that the Black Community has given the BDC and other Baltimore agencies has produced some strange fruit.

I used that line in my words to Brodie – “strange fruit” – and I almost wished I hadn’t now because he seemed more concerned about proving to me that he knew where the reference came from rather than addressing the central concern of my challenge to him in that the majority demographic of Baltimore – the Black Community – has in essence an extremely limited “official” role in helping to give voice to the vision and future of the city.

I spoke at the mic that night feeling a certain responsibility to the silent workers of Baltimore who clean the skyscrapers downtown while smiling at “Boss” and enduring dehumanizing dynamics because of the economic dependence on less than suitable wages. I spoke with responsibility to the folks who are bused into the Inner Harbor to make sure tables are clean, doors are opened, food is warm, and a pleasurable experience is created for the monied, and privileged “upper economic class” that are said to be so key to the advancement of this Black City. I spoke with responsibility for the Black Youth whose very presence at the Inner Harbor is a protest against a city that creates enjoyable spaces for tourists while closing schools and threatening to shutter recreational centers. I spoke to Brodie with responsibility to 80 acres of a Black Community in East Baltimore that was summarily moved out of their homes in a gentrification project to make way for “other people” who are treated as if they are the promise of a “better” East Baltimore – and those grandmothers, grandfathers, and Black Families that they replaced were a curse that caused the dilapidation of the infrastructure around the behemoth that is Johns Hopkins.

Just trust us, he says. “I know what’s best for you.”

That night I left the polished skyscrapers of the Inner Harbor which stand like monuments to White privilege and power in this Black town and went back to my community where there are about four liquor stores and a dingy Murry’s that serves as the community’s food depot. “Tobacco and Groceries” reads the banner announcing the latest business coming to the block. Vacant buildings, liquor, check cashing, and stale food are the staples of the area of the community where I live which is just south of Belvedere Square – a posh, boutique, and restaurant area partly financed by the Baltimore Development Corporation and definitely designed with the local higher income, White community in mind. To see it and then look at the businesses and buildings in my immediate neighborhood, one would think you’re looking at two different cities – not two pictures of the very same street!

With the BDC’s support, some get high-end food, dining, furnishing, and events and others get….this:

STRANGE FRUIT INDEED

FROM: Baltimore Solidarity with Palestine Facebook Event Page:

On November 15, 2011, young Palestinian activists are planning a bold new assertion of their human rights in the face of Israeli state-instituted segregation, and they are reaching out to American allies for support, especially in cities like Baltimore which know segregation and anti-segregation activism. On Tuesday, November 15, these Palestinian activists will attempt to board segregated local public buses headed to occupied East Jerusalem. Their act of civil disobedience is directly inspired by the Freedom Riders of the US Civil Rights Movement, and activists across the US are planning solidarity actions for the same day.

In Baltimore, there will be a demonstration at Penn Station during the evening rush hour, telling the story of the current Palestinian Freedom Rides through dramatic art and song. We will also explore the connections between the Palestinian and American struggles for human rights and against racism and exploitation. For example, the governments of both Israel and Baltimore City outsource large and unfair infrastructure projects to Veolia, a multinational corporation. In Palestine that looks like these bus lines which only serve Jewish-only settlements and solidify the settlements’ illegal land grabs. In Baltimore, Veolia’s projects are those like the Charm City Circulator, which serves only central, privileged neighborhoods, and heating and cooling systems for the highly subsidized, yet exclusive corporate projects of the Baltimore Development Corporation.

Tuesday’s action promises to be fun, educational, and a strong way for us to show our solidarity with these courageous and historic Freedom Rides.

Please mark your calendars and plan to join us on Tuesday, November 15th between 5:00 and 7:00pm.

Click here for more background on the Freedom Riders Protest in Palestine/Israel.

Also read the Open Letter below:

OPEN LETTER TO THE BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

We, the undersigned authors and endorsers of this letter, feel that it is time to have a little talk.

The Baltimore Development Corporation should, as a publicly-funded organization entrusted with the public mission of promoting local economic development, be accountable to this city’s residents. Instead, we find that the BDC uses technicalities and legal loopholes to hide from democratic control and accountability behind its technical status as a private non-profit, making deals ostensibly in the name of Baltimore—and more often than not involving Baltimore’s tax dollars—without Baltimore getting any real, effective say in what those deals are. This is an unacceptable and untenable situation.

More specifically, there are three core problems in the operations of the BDC that must be urgently addressed:

1) The BDC’s lack of transparency

Despite a landmark 2006 ruling which established that the BDC is legally obligated to comply with the Maryland Open Meetings Act, no real transparency in the BDC’s operations has been established. Exemptions and omissions have kept the BDC’s operations squarely hidden from public scrutiny. If you are going to be funded with public money, and use public money to advance a development agenda, the public has a right to know what it is you are doing and how.

2) The BDC’s lack of commitment to economic human rights

For decades, the Baltimore Development Corporation and its predecessors have focused on redeveloping Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and central business district, on the assumption that economic well-being and prosperity would trickle down to the city’s residents through the jobs new projects in these areas would create. What we’ve seen, increasingly, is a Downtown where labor standards are next to nonexistent, and where developers and employers are never held to account on failing to live up to their promises. The BDC needs to insure that all city-supported development results in good jobs with living wages and dignity, through binding agreements with “clawback” provisions that take back subsidies when these benefits don’t materialize.

3) The BDC’s lack of vision and popular participation

There is no meaningful participation of any Baltimore community in the operations of the BDC, except for the seat at the table reserved for the well-connected elite business community. We need an economic development agency that works for us, and with us, letting us determine the priorities to be pursued and the strategies to be followed. In an era of extraordinary financial crisis which has shattered economic assumptions and revealed the practical and moral bankruptcy of the development status quo, the need to reinvent and reconstruct the way local economic development works is of paramount importance. We need a BDC that works for a better Baltimore, and not just a better Inner Harbor; a BDC that supports green jobs and sustainable infrastructure, a BDC that operates to democratize wealth in Baltimore’s local economy rather than subsidizing the profits of the 1% and the multinational corporate sector. In order for this to happen, Baltimore’s neighborhoods, unions, and community groups need a seat at the table and a voice in the development process.

We thereby call upon the Baltimore Development Corporation to account for their conduct and their shortcomings in the areas above, and to work with the residents of the city in whose interest they claim to operate to address these pressing problems. Because so many of these problems have the BDC’s lack of transparency at their root, we we are calling upon officials of the BDC to meet with us in public, outside their offices at 36 South Charles Street, on Monday, November 7th, at 5PM, where some sunlight can hopefully be cast upon these matters. If the BDC refuses to meet, we will meet without them at the same time and place to collectively discuss what further actions their refusal merits.

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