The Bay Area Black Community Convention will set a black agenda for the coming 12 months this Saturday and Sunday July 28-29, 2012.
The meeting is a culmination of the month-long Oakland Freedom Summer Project. It will focus on police brutality, economic development, worker and student’s rights.
The convention is a community-wide meeting featuring:
• Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and founder of the Uhuru Movement.
• Cephus Johnson, uncle of Oscar Grant, who was lynched by BART police.
• Denika Chatman, mother of Kenneth Harding (killed by S.F. MUNI police) and leader of the July transit strike, and
• Sheilagh "Cat" Polk, District 3 candidate for Oakland’s school board.
“If we are going to see real change in the black community, we must unite around one program and one strategy to liberate the black community. This is what the Black Community Convention is all about,” says convention organizer, Diop Olugbala.
The convention workshops will include:
• Building a movement to end police violence in the black community.
• The call to “Liberate the Schoolhouse and Shut Down the Jailhouse!” and to demand African community control of education.
• How to survive and prosper in the economic crisis.
The Oakland Freedom Summer Project is a national effort which includes preparing the Uhuru House of Oakland for the installation of a commercial community kitchen.
The kitchen will be available to the community as part of the economic development strategy.
The project is also conducting a free lunch program for children, developing community gardens and renovating the front of the Uhuru House.
The Oakland Freedom Summer Project is an initiative of the African People’s Socialist Party of the Uhuru Movement and Uhuru Houses nationally, founded by Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party.
This project grows out of his early activism with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which registered black voters in the south in the 1960s and played a vital role in the development of the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Power Movement in the United States.
The Black Community Convention is open to the public and will take place Sat & Sun, July 28-29, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Uhuru House, located at 7911 MacArthur Blvd. in East Oakland.
Directions, call 510-569-9620
Media inquiries, call 510-295-7834
