San Quentin News

Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

Willie O’Ree: 1st Black NHL player

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Willie Eldon O’Ree at Hall of Fame induction

Willie Eldon O’Ree, (born Oct. 15, 1935) a former professional ice hockey player from Canada, is called the “Jackie Robinson of Ice Hockey” for having broken the color barrier in the National Hockey League, https://www.nhl.com/ or NHL.

O’Ree, who played as a winger for the Boston Bruins, has said he met Robinson twice in his younger years. O’Ree was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame https://www.hhof.com/ in November 2018.

That same year, according to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_O%27Ree the NHL instituted the annual Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award in his honor, to “recognize the individual who has worked to make a positive impact on his or her community, culture or society to make people better through hockey.”

During his career, O’Ree faced many of the same challenges that Robinson faced as the first man of color in a predominately White sport. Before O’Ree, Art Dorrington was the first Black player to sign an NHL contract with the New York Rangers organization, though Dorrington never played beyond the minor league level.

“Racist remarks were much worse in the U.S. cities than in Toronto and Montreal,” O’Ree attested. “Fans would yell, ‘Go back to the South’ and ‘How come you’re not picking cotton?’ Things like that. It didn’t bother me. I just wanted to be a hockey player, and if they couldn’t accept that fact, that was their problem, not mine.”

O’Ree helped make it possible for more Black players to join the league. After O’Ree’s stint in the NHL, there were no other Black players in the NHL until 1974, when the Washington Capitals drafted Mike Marson. Like O’Ree, Marson is Canadian by birth.

By the mid-2010s, there were 23 Black players in the NHL, including P. K. Subban, one of the league’s current most popular players. The NHL requires its players to enroll in a preseason diversity training seminar and punishes racially based verbal abuse with suspensions and fines.

Since 1998, O’Ree has been the NHL’s Diversity Ambassador. He travels across North America to schools and hockey programs to promote inclusion, dedication and confidence.

The NBA Championship and Stanley Cup Finals play during the same two-week period. Many sports enthusiasts inside prison watch both, exposing the incarcerated population to the NHL and helping grow its appeal.

Colonel Allen Allensworth, founder of a town in central California

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Colonel Allen Allensworth

After slavery African Americans took their skills and begin to build thriving cities. Blacks in California were no different.

In 1908, African Americans in California built a flourishing town called Allensworth, an accomplishment seldom taught or discussed. Colonel Allen Allensworth, founded the community in a rural area in Tulare County 30 miles north of Bakersfield.

The town served as a depot station on the Santa Fe Railroad line from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The soil was fertile and the water seemingly abundant, according to history.net.com.

Within a year, 35 families were residing in the town and by 1912 the population grew to 100. Alwortha Hall was the first baby born in the town. The settlement had two general stores, a post office and comfortable homes. A school was built that also served as the center for the towns social and political activities. The public library held more than a 1,000 book.

Between 1912-1915 Allensworth generated nearly $5,000 monthly from their business ventures. Their voting registration records listed an array of occupations from colonists, farmers, storekeepers, carpenters, nurses and more.

Allensworths grain ware- houses, cattle pens and large poultry farms served the needs of the community and the railroad post. It had a 10- room hotel at 75 cents per night that included a restaurant. A cement manufacturing enterprise, plaster and carpen- try shops. The town also produced sugar beets. These successes was a way to prove to the White establishment that Black people were capable of self-determination and self-respect, said the article.

Allensworth became a member of the county school district and a voting precinct that elected Oscar Overr the first African-American justice of the peace in post-Mexican California.

The town consisted of 900 acres. It provided youth ser- vices such as: the Owl Club, the campfire Girls, the Girls Glee Club, and the Children’s Saving Association. The Glee Club became internationally known singing at various little White towns throughout the nation.

Colonel Allensworth lobbied the California State Legislature for an education- al institution for the town similar to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Allensworth envisioned a training and technical school for black youths in California and the Southwest. The town was on its way to becoming one of the greatest Black cities in the U.S. if not the world. But the school bill fail due to op- position from other Blacks in Los Angeles and San Francisco, who believed that a Tuskegee-like institution would reinforce educational and residential segregation.

The town began to face several more crises that led to its eventual decline. The Santa Fe Railroad never supported the Black community through hiring for the rail line, according to the article. The company built another line to neighboring Alpaugh allowing most rail traffic to bypass Allensworth. The railroad company also refused to change the rail line name from Solito/Solita to Allensworth. These act deprived the town of the lucrative carrying trade.

The death of Colonel Allensworth sealed the fate of the town. In 1914, Colonel Allensworth was ran over by two White youths on a speeding motorcycle. He died the next morning. Without.

His spiritual guidance and leadership, the community disintegrated. By 1920, the lure of jobs in Oakland further decimated the town’s population. But the colonel’s dream did not die. In 1976, the state had acquired the land and the Department of Parks and Recreation developed a state historic site.

While Allensworth existed less than 20 years it provided an opportunity for Black men and women to transcend race-based limits and thus control their own destinies.

Public Defender Brendon Woods visits SQ

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Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods

Brendon Woods, Alameda County’s Chief Public Defender, knows that prisoners take a dim view of lawyers from the PD’s office. And he wants to change that.

Woods, 48, and a native New Yorker, is the only Black chief public defender among the 58 California counties. He visited San Quentin and met with inmates and discussed how to make California communities safer—that was also a first time event.
“I’m annoyed at myself for taking so long to get here,” said Woods. “There’s a lot for us public defenders to learn.” He acknowledged the bad rap and derogatory names PDs are called, such as “public pretender” and “dump truck” and wants to change that perception.

“I didn’t ‘clean house,’” said Woods, in response to a question about his firing staff. “Some people may have chosen to leave.”

“We’ve changed our model of representation to create a system of trust, with one attorney from beginning to end,” Woods wrote on the county PD website. “We have a lot to do still,” he told the inmates.

Woods said public defenders should treat inmates as clients, not booking numbers. He doesn’t like to hear judges or the sheriff’s bailiffs say, “bring the body in” (to court). The county PD’s website states, in part: “Our client-centered practice gives a voice to those whose voices have been silenced by poverty.”

“We’ve never had a public defender inside [the news- room]”, said Juan Haines, San Quentin News senior editor. In the past, the inmate-run newspaper has arranged discussion forums with district attorneys, law enforcement, legislators and public school teachers.

Woods was given a tour of San Quentin’s media center and a brief history of San Quentin News. Later, Haines explained the forums and programs men have taken to deal with their incarceration, rehabilitation and eventual reentry to society.

Haines said he wanted Woods to hear directly from the men affected by incarceration. He said he also wants in- mates to know all a PD does. He asked Woods what public safety looks like to him.

“In the name of public safety… we’re taking Black and Brown bodies and putting them in cages,” said Haines. “That’s not going to make us safe.”

“I’m all in,” said Woods, in regard to the forum. “I was born to do this.”

But Woods didn’t come alone. He brought some of his staff along to explain the programs developed to keep charged defendants out of prison, including those with substance abuse issues and at-risk youth.

Woods’ office employs full- time social workers “to link clients with essential services throughout their criminal cases, to provide alternatives to incarceration,” according to the Alameda County PD web- site.

“We force the DA and judges to look at the person instead of the crime,” said Sascha Atkins-Loria, a social worker in Alameda County. “We get referrals from attorneys (PDs).” She added that Nancy O’Malley, Alameda County’s District Attorney, “is very supportive of our social program. Whether she is open to expansion, it’s hard to say. It’s an adversarial process.”

“Our reports are completely different than what’s in a [client’s] file,” said Marynella Woods (no relation to Brendon Woods), a social work supervisor. “If people who come to the fo- rum could come away informed and inspired, they can find ways to better assist their clients.”

Woods explained he is making an effort to pro- vide kids with information on how to deal with the police. He has developed a youth know-your-rights program called LYRIC (Learn Your Rights In California), “aimed at empowering high school students by teaching them how to safely assert their constitutional rights,” according to the PD website.

Atkins-Loria said she wants to be involved in which prison her clients are sent to and she also wants to learn more about the success rate of CDCR’s YOP (Youth Offender Pro- gram) in each prison.

“A lot of the kids just need someone to listen to them,” observed Haines.

Alameda County employs 40 support staff and 18 investigators in the public defender’s office, according to its website, and is “devoted to serving our clients.” It has 100 lawyers, many of whom have attended some of the most prestigious law schools in the United States. These attorneys are fluent in more than 12 languages, “and come from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds.”

“People need to be defended in immigration too,” Woods told San Quentin News. “The money is completely imbalanced,” he said, in regard to the funding available for public de- fenders compared to resources spent on prosecutors and law enforcement. “There’s got to be some changes. The ratio is terrible.”

Woods said with the passing of Senate Bill 1437, which changed the felony murder rule, all the PDs are getting “crushed” by it because they haven’t received up-front funding for it. However, he added, “I think 1437 is a better operation of law because it’s clear cut.”

However, Woods did say that Alameda County is “pretty well funded” compared to other counties in California. He said laws like Proposition 47 (the Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act) helped change things.

Prop. 47 reduced some non-violent and non-serious property and drug offenses to misdemeanors. “You don’t need a hammer to get people treatment,” said Woods, adding 88 percent of the social worker program’s clients in his county don’t return to prison.

Rodney Brooks, Executive Programs Manager for the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office, has visited San Quentin before. He compiles reports that assess the money saved by defendants not going to the prison system. “I think I learn the most when I’m here,” he said.

According to the PD’s website, Chief Public Defender Woods is “actively engaged with the media to shed light on instances of local law enforcement misconduct.” He and his staff “led public defenders around the Bay Area in holding a Black Lives Matter rally…”

While in office, Woods created its Racial Justice Committee, “charged with addressing the impacts of racism in the criminal justice system and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities,” the PD website noted.

Woods has worked in the Alameda County Public Defender’s office for 23 years, six of those years as its Chief. He graduated law school at the University of San Francisco. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“Ideas spark change,” said Woods. “I like to work. I like to fight. “We’ve got to make this [the discussions and forums] more of a routine.”

Police continue to shoot about 1,000 people a year

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Child holding a gun and ammo

987 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2017

Police across the country shot and killed approximately the same number of people in 2017 as they did in each of the previous two years.

Because there is no official nationwide tally of fatal police shootings, The Washington Post took charge and has compiled the most accurate accounting of these incidents – 2,945 shooting deaths in all since 2015, with roughly 1,000 each year. According to the Post’s report, 987 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2017.

“The numbers indicate that this is not a trend, but a robust measure of these shootings,” said University of South Carolina criminologist Geoff Alpert, who specializes in the study of police use of force. “We now have information on almost 3,000 shootings, and we can start looking to provide the public with a better understanding of fatal officer-involved shootings.”

Intimate partner violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime. One in three women and one in four men in the United States has experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. Husbands are five times more likely to kill wives than vice versa. A third of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate male partner or ex-partner, according to FBI reports. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndv0312.pdf

Deadly police shootings came to the forefront of national attention in 2014 when an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, was killed by a White police officer in a suburban community outside St. Louis, Mo.

The controversy surrounding his death sparked a huge public outcry that contributed to the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Post reported.

The number of unarmed persons killed by police has shown signs of decreasing, according to the Post’s data. After 94 unarmed persons were fatally shot in 2015, that amount dropped to 51 people killed in 2016 and inched back up to 68 in 2017.

“African American families comprise 42 percent of welfare recipients…but are 59 percent of poor people shown on television are African American.” “Sustaining Stereotypes” by Lanien Frush Holt in QUILL Summer 2018 www.spj.org/quill

“The national spotlight on this issue has made officers more cautious in unarmed situations,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank. His group developed training for dozens of departments aimed at de-escalating potentially violent encounters.

“We are giving officers more options like slowing the situation down and using time and distance to gain a tactical advantage,” Wexler said.

In a 2015, the Los Angeles Police Department began to emphasize that their officers strive to preserve life in all encounters. In 2017, the LAPD started to award Preservation of Life medals to officers that demonstrate exemplary action in avoiding a fatal shooting. Local police unions were derisive, but top managers in the LAPD think de-escalation training has made a difference.

“Our officers are in 1.5 million volatile encounters a year, so shooting someone is an incredibly rare event,” LAPD First Assistant Chief Michel Moore told the Post. “Yet we pull each instance apart to see what factors might have played a role and train our officers to make that rare event even more rare.”

“Police departments in 13 of the 25 largest U.S. cities did not post their (operating and use-of-force) procedures online.” “The Opaque Blue Line” by C.J. Ciaramella in Reason magazine May 2017

About one out of four fatal shootings in 2017 involved persons experiencing some form of mental health crisis.

“We call 911 for other medical emergencies, and they bring specially trained medical technicians, but when it’s a mental health crisis, we send the police,” said Ron Honberg of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

For each of the last three years, the Post documented more than twice the number of fatal police shootings than were recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is limited by its reliance on voluntary data submissions from police agencies.  The Post did its own research by sifting through local news coverage, public records, and social media reports.

San Quentin News World Travels

Right to Police Transparency

San Francisco DA Gascόn stands apart from law enforcement to endorse bill

50 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of peace

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Martin Luther King, Jr walking with marchers

Martin Luther King, Jr walking with marchers

“King’s Dream was to end class divisions and racism”

The message of peace and racial justice from Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago is still being echoed in 2018 America. Nonviolent protests around the country are seen in recent Occupy Movements, Black Lives Matter, #METOO, Time’s Up, and March for our lives movements.

King was assassinated April 4, 1968. And every year Americans remember him on his birthday, now a national holiday. We’re reminded that King was a civil rights pioneer in places such as Alabama and at the historic March on Washington in 1963. His “I Have A Dream” speech has been played and replayed.

One enduring message has been that King was “passive” and “nonviolent.” He is also credited with energizing the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

According to A Companion to African American History, edited by Alton Hornsby, Jr., “The push to acknowledge African-American agency started a gradual shift in the discourse on (civil rights) movement origins. Rather than Brown v. Board of Education, scholars began to point to…the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1955 as having jump-started civil rights struggles.”

“We have known humiliation, we have known abusive language, we have been plunged into the abyss of oppression,” King said. “And we decided to raise up only with the weapon of protest.”

King’s activism made him “a chief target of the FBI” through its counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO), according to author Howard Zinn. The FBI tapped his private phone conversations, sent him fake letters, threatened him, and blackmailed him, Zinn wrote.

“According to a RAND analysis, every $1 invested in such [inmate] education generates at least $4 in economic return,” reports Fast Company.

“The state typically spends $71,000 a year to house an inmate. It costs about $5,000 total to help put one [incarcerated] student through community college”, reports Fast Company.

This came as King became outspoken politically. He warned that Americans couldn’t hope to dream, or to be free, as long as the people in Indochina remained under siege by the American military and its machines of war.

Against the advice of other civil rights leaders, who were afraid of King losing support in Washington, he connected war to poverty.

“The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America,” King said, cautioning the United States about its involvement in Southeast Asia in the 1960s.

King was jailed for his crusading. In his famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” he described how members of the local clergy asked why he was there. His response was “because injustice is here.” But he was also “concerned about problems untouched by civil rights laws,” Zinn wrote.

“Since before the Civil War, the alliance of Southern racism and Northern reaction has been the major roadblock to all social advancement,” King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here? “This explains why the United States is still far behind European nations in all forms of social legislation.”

King’s dream was to end class divisions and racism.

“A productive and happy life is not something that you find,” King wrote. “It is something that you make.”

King questioned America’s “tragic mix-up in priorities,” according to Zinn, He said the United States spends money on “death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development.”

Fifty years ago, King’s political messages were spoken. Today, they stand as a testament to why he said peace is necessary. He said we need peace to be free and that “Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering.”

A look inside the bustling San Quentin prison library

Trump credited with expansion of hate groups


 

SQ volunteer creates lasting values

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chris wilson

Chris Wilson

San Quentin volunteer Chris Wilson says violence is no way to solve racial issues in America.

“I believe that no movement that is based on anger alone can create anything of lasting value. Even if I weren’t a Buddhist, I would argue that persistent nonviolent protests and civil disobedience are the ways to change our troubled and badly divided country,” Wilson said in an interview.

“When an inmate surprises me with his wisdom about life, I ask him, how in the world did you come to have such wonderful insight?” said Wilson. “The answer I usually get is, ‘Well, I have had a lot of time to think about who I am, what I have done, and what I want to be,’” 

Having participated in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, “insight” is an attainment that Wilson is well-qualified to talk about. “I had just completed my freshman year at Stanford when I decided to go to Mississippi and join the effort to register Blacks to vote,” he said.

The plan was organized by SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), an organization of southern Black students who were active in the sit-in movement to integrate lunch counters in the Carolinas. A key part of the strategy was to enlist White students from universities including Yale and Stanford who could assist with registering Black voters in Mississippi. At the time, Mississippi was the state with the worst track record of Black voter intimidation.

“Though I was plenty scared, I went,” said Wilson, recounting that there had been reports of violence.

“Incidentally, during that summer, some members of our group were beaten bloody with pipes, and some of our cars were shot up,” he added.

Reflecting more generally on the stresses, pressures, and challenges that life is certain to bring, Wilson then said, “Practicing zazen (formal sitting meditation) with inmates who are in the process of remaking their lives has been one of the greatest satisfactions of my long lifetime.”

On Sunday evenings behind the high walls of San Quentin, Wilson takes his place among a group of prisoners and volunteers assembled in a small room – this is their zendo (meditation den). All persons present have come to rigorously examine the processes going on within their own minds.

“I believe that no movement that is based on anger alone can create anything of lasting value”

With the characteristic scent of earth-toned incense subtly infusing the air, a calm vibrancy sets in over the space, which, with its close dimensions, offers a distinctive intimacy. Here, contemplation, concentration, and most important, introspection, are taken up in earnest. This is a Zen Buddhist group, and disciplining the mind – taming its impulsive tendency to “react” nonstop – is the principal effort.    

Nationally, some 64,000 Americans died from overdose last year, up 86 percent from 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:  “Friends of Overdose Victims Become Prosecutor’s Targets”  Dec. 18, 2017

On the subject of “tendency to react,” Wilson is quick to use his experience as a way to elaborate. “The first real step I took toward active engagement in the Freedom Summer movement was a training course in ‘nonviolence,’ which took place the week before the activities got going,” he said.

Wilson recalled how that same week, three SNCC organizers who had gone to Mississippi earlier had disappeared. “Robert Moses, the charismatic Black leader of SNCC, warned us that they had undoubtedly been killed. He said that any of us who wanted to go home were welcome to go.” Wilson’s decision, however, was to stay. 

Having been raised in California, Wilson said he knew that Jim Crow existed, but it was something that he had only “heard” about.

But at age 15 his naiveté came to an end. “On a trip through the Southern states I saw segregation for the first time. At a rodeo in Beaumont, Texas, I noticed the rope dividing White and Black people in the stands,” said Wilson. “And as we headed eastward through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, it got worse.”

Combined experiences such as this one and others would eventually prompt Wilson to make a personal vow to oppose racism nonviolently for the rest of his life.

Making a sort of comparison between then and now (“past” and “present”), Wilson voiced his belief that there is a connection between the earlier civil rights work in the South that he was a part of and the struggle to regain voting rights for prisoners today.

“The rash of killings of African-Americans by police in many northern and southern cities has forced us to confront the fact that race still plays a huge role in how African-Americans are treated in our country,” he said.

Wilson added that he believes movements such as Black Lives Matter are important elements of the continuing struggle against racism in our society. “I do understand why younger African-Americans may feel that the recent spate of police killings of Black citizens is literally intolerable and must be met with anger rather than a more patient long-term approach.” 

Wilson used the word “devotion” to describe the attitude that one should possess in pursuit of the things that are most important in life. The one-time lawyer turned computer software marketing executive, who is long retired, said for him, that means “family, Zen practice, and helping people in general.”

It is a formula that he has been sharing with the men of San Quentin for four years. 

8th Day of Peace celebration held on SQ’s Lower Yard

San Quentin mourns Dr. Davida Coady long time friend and volunteer

Trump credited with expansion of hate groups

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President Trump

A recent report credits President Donald J. Trump’s administration with boosting the recruitment and expansion of hate groups in America.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Year in Hate and Extremism report identified 954 hate groups in America, more than 600 of which are devoted to some type of White supremacy.

“President Trump in 2017 reflected what White supremacist groups want to see: a country where racism is sanctioned by the highest office, immigrants are given the boot and Muslims banned,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

The report chronicles 300 incidents of racist flyer distributions on 200 college campuses nationwide.

Neo-Nazi groups had the highest increase, from 99 groups to 121, and Anti-Muslim groups increased for the third straight year, from 101 groups to 114.

Black Nationalist hate groups increased from 193 in 2016 to 233 in 2017.

However, in the wake of the resurgence of a Black liberation resistance, an increase in police shootings, the report clarified the difference between militant Black Nationalist groups and activist groups like the Black Lives Matter that advocate for civil rights and an end to systemic racism.

The report also identified two new male supremacy groups in the hate group list: A Voice for Men from Houston, Texas, and Return of Kings in Washington, D.C., both of which demean and vilify women.

Another SPLC investigation reported that within the past four years, young men associated with the alt-right agenda have killed 43 people and wounded 67 others.

The Hate and Extremism report also lists 689 active antigovernment groups, of which 273 are armed militias that fear gun-control measures and federal law enforcement.

The report comes on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the assassination on April 4, 1968, of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the prominent Civil Rights leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

Dr. King’s nonviolent resistance against systemic racism and marginalization was directed toward addressing the social issues still prevalent today.

In “Where Do We Go From Here,” Dr. King wrote that “racism is a doctrine of the congenital inferiority and worthlessness of a people,” which is why he encouraged Blacks to “be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”

The increase in hate groups, whether intentional or reactionary, as the report shows, is due in part to the underlining race issues that have historically led to conflict.

“When you consider that only days into 2018, Trump called African countries ‘s***holes,’ it’s clear he’s not changing his tune. And that’s music to the ears of White supremacists,” Beirich said.

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Trump’s federal staff cuts hurt

Black incarceration on the decline

139 prisoners nationwide were exonerated in 2017

FBI report reflects historical similarities

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Kathleen Cleaver, secretary of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

Kathleen Cleaver, secretary of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-DefenseParty for Self-Defense

The FBI in 1956 created its secret Counterintelligence Program—COINTELPRO—to take action against Black organizations viewed as subversive. Sixty-one years later, on Aug. 3, 2017, the FBI published an intelligence assessment titled Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers.

The two FBI approaches had striking similarities, despite the passage of 50 years.

The “official use only” Black Identity Extremists report follows the November 2014 Grand Jury decision to exonerate the police officers involved in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August of that year.

“The FBI assesses (that) it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement,” the report says.

“According to a RAND analysis, every $1 invested in such [inmate] education generates at least $4 in economic return,” reports Fast Company.

“The state typically spends $71,000 a year to house an inmate. It costs about $5,000 total to help put one [incarcerated] student through community college”, reports Fast Company.

Many scholars say the Civil Rights Movement and the revolutionary movements spearheaded by Black liberation resistance of the 1960s, similar to today’s Black Lives Matter, became the targets for the U.S. government counter-offensive to neutralize these movements.

“The full force of the state, the murderous COINTELPRO project of the FBI, had to attack the Panthers because community control of police could never be allowed,” Rick Ayers, an assistant professor at University of San Francisco, wrote in the Huffington Post in 2015. “Protests, which have existed since the beginning of police forces, which were behind all the past urban uprisings in the U.S., and are coming back with renewed focus today, are about the fundamental way that state violence is wielded and the demands by communities for a different relationship to resources and to each other.”

The U.S. government’s alleged illegal use of programs, such as COINTELPRO, to kill, imprison and disrupt what it judged as subversive activists was followed by the war on drugs. The ensuing decades ushered in a vast expansion in building prisons and imprisoning people, a phenomenon often called the “prison industrial complex.” California went from 12 prisons in 1970 to 35 institutions under the CDCR today.

In 1954 the Civil Rights Movement was still in its infancy when the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown versus the Board of Education ruled the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. Following the court’s ruling, in 1955, Blacks organized a boycott of the city bus system in Montgomery, Ala., after the city arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the “colored” section in back of a bus, and the Civil Rights Movement was born.

Long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist[s],” according to FBI documents. Those targeted included the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The government did not confine its attacks to those organizations carrying guns. The list included activists fighting to advance racial and social equality using nonviolence.

By the 1960s, Blacks around the country were protesting against segregation, discrimination and police violence. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized “Freedom Rides” so Blacks and Whites could travel together by bus. Some staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South and were beaten by mobs of angry Whites.

Many Blacks did not take this lying down. Black veterans formed the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana. Elsewhere, Robert Williams, an ex-Marine, took the view that Blacks should defend themselves with guns, if needed. Williams was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) North Carolina president. The Black Panther Party was born in Oakland in 1966.

In 1970, the FBI provided a secret report to President Richard Nixon that said, “A recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the Black population has a great respect for the Black Panther Party, including 43 percent of Blacks under 21 years of age.”

According to author Howard Zinn, from 1956 to 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO acted 295 times against what it deemed Black militant groups. The government attempted to dismantle these groups through harassment, wiretaps, sabotage and other means, including terror and murder, Zinn wrote.

In 1974, reporters learned of the existence of the “Subversive Organizations List” after Attorney General William Saxbe declared the list was ending with the exception of 52 organizations under surveillance by the FBI. The Justice Department, however, refused to reveal what groups were on the list, because it was a secret.

The list was created in 1947. At its peak, there were 300 designated “subversives” on the list, including the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, members of which fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and the fascists.

FBI director Hoover used the bureau to investigate Americans. Today, United States law enforcement and intelligence agencies have greater access to the personal information of the whole population than was imaginable decades ago.

Martin Luther King Jr., Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X, Black Panther leader Huey Newton, and former Communist Party member Angela Davis and many others fell under FBI scrutiny, particularly those who embraced Marxism, Leninism, Maoism or supported leaders such as Ho Chi Minh.

“The last thing those in power wanted was an organized underclass, ready to fight for revolution,” Davis said.

The FBI’s BIE report says Black “extremists have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans, but had not targeted law enforcement with premeditated violence for the nearly two decades leading up to the lethal incidents observed beginning in 2014 (the Michael Brown killing).”

Today the FBI applies the term Black Identity Extremist retroactively to violence that peaked in the 1960s, when Blacks rebelled against segregation. Organizations like the 1970s Black Liberation Army (BLA), formed to “take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of Black people in the United States,” are considered a BIE group.

The FBI warns that unrest among Blacks “may also lead to an increase in BIE group memberships, collaboration among BIE groups or the appearance of additional violent lone offenders motivated by BIE rhetoric.

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Black Lives Matter protests Los Angeles jail expansion

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California County Jails

A Black Lives Matter coalition gathered at the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration to protest the expansion of county jails, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, led the demonstrators and launched the Justice L.A. campaign by asking county leaders to redirect funds allocated for new jails to community services instead.

The Los Angles Police Department (LAPD) doled out almost $81 million in the last fiscal year to settle lawsuits, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“We can find $3.5 billion to build more jails, but we can’t find money for schools. We can find money for Olympics, but we can’t find money for parks. If you’ve got $3.5 billion, invest it in the people,” said Greg Akili, who is also with Black Lives Matter L.A.

Some activists wore prison-orange T-shirts that read, “I am not the property of L.A. County jail,” as they stood among 100 steel-frame jail bunks set up on the street outside the Hahn Hall of Administration.

“These beds represent trauma, embarrassment, isolation, shame and death,” Jayda Rasberry of the Group Dignity and Power Now told the L.A. Times at a news conference.

Despite the protest going on outside, county supervisors approved a budget of $2 billion to build a 3,885-bed replacement for the downtown Men’s Central Jail and a 1,600-bed women’s facility at the now-vacant Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster reported the L.A. Times.

After the budget vote, Cullors and others asked the board to delay construction until a review is completed on the effects of recent criminal justice reforms. “We don’t know what our projected prison population will be in the next 10 years. What we should be doing is getting a clear understanding of who’s in our jails,” said Cullors.

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SQ Celebrate Annual Black History Month

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In the midst of mass incarceration, Black Lives Matter and an election year, San Quentin prisoners celebrated their Second Annual Black History Month program.
“It was a success,” said Shai Alkebu-lan, the inmate program coordinator. “I wish more people would have come, but those who did, I think, would go out and spread the light.”
With the blessing of Father George Williams, the Catholic Chapel hosted the 50-plus prisoners at the Feb. 26 event. The group consisted mostly of older men — the younger generation was noticeably absent.
“Those who were here were meant to be here; truth is not for everybody,” said Bilal Hamilton, who spoke on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Hamilton used a map to demonstrate the hardship of the journey and how the people were settled in Haiti, Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
From the past issues to the present, Bryant “The Truth” Harrison gave a brilliant spoken word poem called “Hypocritical Oath.”
His poetic words weaved in and out of the hypnotic sound of the band “Just Us.” He called the people to “Wake up, self-destruction is the case.” He touched on issues of greed, disease and the state of politics. “Can you smell the insanity?” Harrison would repeatedly ask.
Ira Perry gave a gripping spoken word on what it means growing up African-American, highlighting police brutality, the names of slain people over the past years and not knowing if you would live from day to day.
Harun Taylor was master of ceremonies and performed “I am 3.0,” a third poem in a series. Using meta-physical word play about positive energy and the principle that everyone is one, and “we are those who came before us.”
“We are Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the mathematicians, architects and scientist who built the pyramids,” stated Taylor.
He said the men in the audience were black diamonds — those who have been formed under different life pressures.
He stressed that Blacks here are American and that loving Black people doesn’t mean hating someone else.
“The Just Us” band provided soothing melodies throughout the event. It consists of Charlie Spencer on guitar, drummer Paul Oliver, and Terrence Slaughter, bass.
They performed a jazz version of “Living for the Love,” by the Isley Brothers, and a classic Bill Withers tune, “Using Me.”

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