Civil Rights Leader James Forman Dies

Joe Holley, Washington Post

James Forman, 76, who as executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s dispatched cadres of organizers, demonstrators and Freedom Riders into the most dangerous redoubts of the Deep South, died Jan. 10 of colon cancer at Washington House, a local hospice.

At the height of the civil rights movement, Mr. Forman hammered out a role for SNCC among the so-called Big Five, the established civil rights organizations that included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. SNCC in those years was the edgier, more aggressive organization, pushing the South specifically and the nation generally toward change.

APOC writes:
APOC 2005

Following up a successful 2003 Anarchist People of Color conference in Detroit, Michigan, the next Anarchist People of Color conference is being proposed for October in Houston, Texas.


Since the 2003 event, there have been APOC regional gatherings new collectives and many projects, and we're still going strong. Where are we as a unified movement? Come discuss Community Action, Theory, Internal Struggles, External Struggles, with the larger theme of "We are one, we are many, and we are a part of something bigger…"

Seth Sandronsky writes:

"Critical Whiteness Studies"

Seth Sandronsky

Reviewing:

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

David R. Roediger

University of California Press (2002), 288 pp. $16.00 pb.

David Roediger’s most recent book, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, is a gem. This collection of readable essays helps us to better appreciate what W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American scholar, called the “color line” in the U.S. Colored White builds on two earlier collections of Roediger’s essays. The first is The Wages of Whiteness: Race & the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991). That was followed by Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, & Working Class History (Verso, 1994). Roediger is arguably America’s top scholar of critical whiteness studies.

'Fred Hampton Day' Declared by Chicago City Council

Monica Moorehead

Thirty-five years ago, on Dec. 4, 1969, Fred Hampton, deputy chair
of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, was brutally
assassinated by members of the Chicago Police Department as he
lay sleeping. Hampton was only 21 years old.

Mark Clark, a member of the Black Panther Party's Peoria, Ill., chapter,

was also killed. Other Panther members were injured during these
shootings, including Hampton's companion, Akua Njeri, who was nine
months pregnant.

These cowardly killings were coordinated in conjunction with the FBI's
repressive Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro), which targeted
leaders of national liberation movements like the Panthers inside the
United States. Not one Chicago police officer was ever prosecuted
for this terrible crime.

Today Hampton's son, Fred Hampton Jr., champions the release of
U.S. political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal. Hampton is himself
a former political prisoner.

The Chicago City Council unanimously approved a resolution introduced
by former Alderwoman Marlene C. Carter commemorating Dec. 4, 2004, as
"Fred Hampton Day in Chicago."

The resolution reads in part: "Fred Hampton, who was only 21 years
old, made his mark in Chicago history not so much by his death as by
the heroic efforts of his life and by his goals of empowering the most
oppressed sector of Chicago's Black community, bringing people into
political life through participation in their own freedom fighting
organization."

Hampton was one of the most dynamic, inspiring freedom fighters
of any generation. One of his most notable quotes was, "You can
kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution."

duckdaotsu writes

No Thanksgiving at My House
Remembering
Wesley BadHeartBull

Hot Springs, South Dakota is a small town located in the southernmost tip of the Black Hills. Wesley BadHeartBull started the sixth grade at Hot Springs Junior High School; he died just outside of town at the hands of a couple of cowboys — stabbed to death because he had the audacity to ask for drink at the bar. He was 22 years old.

Wesley's murder was not the first Native American murder I had heard about. It was just the first one that had happened to my friend and classmate. I was in that sixth grade class with Wesley BadHeartBull. Wes and I grew up together. We partied with the rest of the kids in town, drove recklessly on back country roads together like the other kids, and sat out for endless nights under the Black Hills sky counting stars and talking about our futures.

"Black Vote Smothered by Electoral College"

www.blackcommentator.com

"I am convinced
that the black vote is going to be not only a bigger vote
than ever before, it is the swing vote." — Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., speaking
on CNN

Rev. Jackson is right about the raw numbers of African Americans who are
expected to go to the polls on November 2. However, most of the national
Black voting population will ?swing? neither their home states nor the
presidential election. Fifty-five percent of the Black population resides
in the South, and every four years their votes are drowned in a sea of
Republican red. For presidential election purposes, except for the besieged
Black citizens of Florida, the southern African American franchise is
negated by the Electoral College ? a true 21st century vestige of slavery.

hydrarchist writes I thought this was kind of interesting because the program chose attacked the BNP as a criminal organization rather than critiquing their policies and the political background in which an audience in which an audience for them has emerged. The documentary is available for download at:
http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2176/The%20S ecret%20Agent%20-%20BNP%20-%20VCD-mpg.torrent


but you will have to register at:
http://www.uknova.com first.

Five arrested for racist boasts in television exposé of BNP

Martin Wainwright

The Guardian

Five men were arrested yesterday after an undercover television documentary featured British National party activists admitting racist violence and harassment.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Exiles: Black American Radicals in Cuba"

Eugene Robinson, Washington Post

Once they considered themselves black freedom fighters. The FBI
considered them armed and dangerous. After more than a generation as
fugitives in Castro's Cuba, they are living pieces of unfinished
business.

Genocide: Forms, Causes, Consequences

Berlin, January 13-15, 2005.

Invitation, Announcement and Call for Posters

European Network of Genocide Scholars [ENOGS]: Foundational
Meeting (Berlin, January 13-15, 2005)

Without doubt, genocide is one of the most horrific crimes
in the history of humankind. In the twentieth century, the
Holocaust proved the destructive potential of a utopian
biopolitics that aimed at an ethnically or racially
homogeneous "societas perfecta". Unfortunately, it was not
the first genocide of the last century, as in 1904 the
Herero and Nama people had been slaughtered by the imperial
German army, and ten years later during World War I, more
than 800,000 Armenians were deported and killed by the Young
Turks. Nor was the Holocaust the last. Despite the United
Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, genocides took place in
Cambodia and Rwanda to name just a few.

Remembering the Common Hood
Soweto and Runnymede
Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch

I flew from Detroit, with one stop, to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to participate in an international conference, "The Promise of Freedom and its Practice: Global Perspectives on South Africa's Decade of Democracy."

I arrived on the heels of students protesting the cut in university 'bursaries' forcing many to terminate their studies, especially the poorer students. When the university responded by calling in armed police, helicopters, and 'bouncers' from neighborhood gangs, some faculty remonstrated, "this seems very much like Bantu education in a different guise," they wrote the Vice Chancellor, alluding to the apartheid system of education that prevailed during the third quarter of the 20th century. The difference now is that the IMF-imposed cutbacks, unlike apartheid, are truly pan-African, whose effect is the destruction of the independent university in the mother continent as a whole. (The Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa has been ringing this alarm for years.)

During a break in the conference I strolled down the hill from Wits (as they call the university), across Mandela Bridge, over the railway tracks (O so many!) and mini-bus yards, down the African street with its hawkers, colors, and fragrances, in order to meet the comrades of the Anti-Privatization Forum, the Landless People's Movement, Jubilee South Africa, and the Indymedia Center who were gathering at the Worker's Library in an anti-war coalition. They were to be evicted at the end of the month from that venue by the Johannesburg city council.