Feature Archives

On Wednesday, November 7th, the movement to free the Jena 6 will face a challenge. On that day, four of the six -- Theodore Shaw, Robert Bailey, Bryan Purvis, and Mychal Bell -- are expected in court for pre-trial hearings. The ANSWER Coalition is organizing rallies in front of local courthouses across the country that day with the demand to "free the Jena 6 and drop all the charges." In San Francisco, supporters of the Jena 6 will gather on Wednesday at 5:00pm for a rally outside of the Federal Courthouse at 7th and Mission Streets. There will also be a teach-in about the Jena Six on Saturday, November 10th at Evergreen Valley College.

On October 22nd, Riva Love of the Watsonville Brown Berets interviewed Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, the longest incarcerated Black Panther Party member. Chip discusses his early days in the streets, how he came to join the Black Panther party, and his words for young people oppressed by the current power structure. Currently housed at Imperial Valley State Prison in Southern California, he has had two parole hearings scheduled in the past six months, but neither have taken place.

Members of the Native community and their allies are protesting UC Berkeley’s decision to dissolve an autonomous unit that handles compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Activists charge UC Berkeley and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, which house 13,000 native ancestral remains, of not complying with NAGPRA and of failing to include Native representatives in their decision-making processes. An October 5th rally protested the university’s move to dissolve the NAGPRA unit and called for the repatriation of all ancestral remains.

Over 60,000 people from across the country gathered in Jena, Louisiana on Thursday, September 20th, to protest the pending charges against six African American high school students. The six students were charged with felonies after a fight that started after nooses were hung outside their high school. Protests were also held in cities across the United States. At UC Berkeley, over 1,000 protesters gathered in Sproul Plaza at 12pm. In San Francisco, over 200 people rallied at Powell and Market.

Chauncey Bailey was shot to death in downtown Oakland on August 2nd. Bailey was killed around 7:30AM on 14th Street near Alice Street, in what police described as "an assassination". Chauncey Bailey was an editor for the Oakland Post and had previously worked as a reporter for The Oakland Tribune.

On August 4th, Devaughndre Broussard was booked in connection with the shooting. Broussard was a handyman at Your Black Muslim Bakery and has reportedly confessed to having killed Bailey because of the journalist's coverage of the group.

In a small, still mostly segregated section of rural Louisiana, an all-white jury heard a series of white witnesses called by a white prosecutor testify in a courtroom overseen by a white judge in a trial of a fight at the local high school where a white student who had been making racial taunts was hit by black students. The fight was the culmination of a series of racial incidents starting when whites responded to black students sitting under the "white" tree at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree.

Corbin Harney, Spiritual Leader of the Western Shoshone Nation, crossed over at 11:00 a.m. in the morning of July 10th, in a house on a sacred mountain near Santa Rosa, California (Turtle Island). He dedicated his life to ending nuclear testing and dumping. That battle claimed his life through cancer.