North America

HOUSTON—Hurricane Harvey made landfall upon Rockport Texas on Friday, August 25th at 11pm local time as a Category 4 hurricane. The storm, which is expected to last for a next few days, is déjà vu for African (black) people, reminding us of Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans 12 years ago.

This familiarity which one may feel about Hurricane Katrina when looking at Hurricane Harvey is the yet another slap-in-the-face evidence that the State does not care about African people.

ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA—Today is a historic day for the people of St. Petersburg as they gear up excitedly, ready to make real change in the city by voting in two of the most radical elections that the city has ever seen.

The race for District 6 City Council and Mayor of St. Petersburg has reached its climax as the masses head to the polls to cast their votes for the candidates with the best plans to bring real, material change to the city.

CHICAGO—The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations (BIBC) held their annual national conference at Chicago State University in Chicago, Illinois on Saturday and Sunday, August 12-13, 2017.  The theme of the conference was “The Ballot and the Bullet: Elections, War and Peace in the Era of Trump.”

The conference was attended by African people from throughout the U.S. including Philadelphia, Texas, Washington D.C., Florida and Chicago itself.

The program was filled with important reports from the coalition working groups, resolutions for action and cutting edge analysis.

As the theme stated, the focus of the program was on raising up strategy for African people to engage in resistance for self-determination through the electoral process, while also recognizing that doing so cannot serve as a substitute for anti-colonial resistance through armed struggle.

“Millennials” is a generalized and imprecise term used to describe people born between the years of 1981 and 1997. This generation lives in a time where access to information is both endless and extremely suppressed. A time when paid leave is the system’s response to videos of police shootings that have live coverage, millions of views and instant commentary. A time where hashtags can start movements and end careers.

We are a generation that demands an immediate stance in response to the world and its developments. We are a generation that was sold a message of hope and change only to be betrayed by the status quo of a corrupt system that had been turned against the interests of the people.

Presented one piece of evidence after the other, millennials are suspicious, looking to differentiate between genuine representatives of progress and those who would sell out at the expense of the people.

Despite what corporate media would have you think who millennials are, we are invested and often participate in politics. Locally this is evident from the huge millennial support of Eritha Akilé Cainion’s campaign for District 6 and Jesse Nevel’s campaign for Mayor.

With the discussion of Donald Trump and his defense of white nationalism, our people are focusing on neo-nazis, the KKK and alt-right but the real face of white nationalism are right in front of us from the politicians that set policies to criminalize and occupy black communities, to the police who murder us in the streets, and to the media who depict us as criminals and subhuman.

Lisa Gartner (@lisagartner) and Zachary T. Sampson (@zackthompson) of the Tampa Bay Times @tampabaytimes wrote an article entitled “Wrong Way: At 15 Isaiah Battle was the County’s No. 1 car thief. He had every reason to stop.”

It is a defamatory article centered around a 16-year-old child, Isaiah whose sister, Dominique Battle, was drowned to death after being chased by the Pinellas County Sheriff's office. Over 19 Pinellas county sheriff deputies watched them drown, all caught on video while deputies laughed and joked.

The Tampa Bay Times called Isaiah the “No. 1 car thief” in Pinellas County despite the fact that these were arrests not convictions. Theft is a legal conclusion that a judge or jury makes, everyone has a presumption of innocent until proven guilty, there statements are blatant libel.

This article is part of a special Black August series on TheBurningSpear.com. We encourage all our readers to help “Keep The Spear Burning” during our Black August Fund Drive. Support your black power newspaper! Sponsor a prisoner or donate today at Burningspearmarketplace.com

Black August is a commemoration begun in 1979 by Africans in prison to raise up those who have died struggling for African liberation from within prison walls or in attempts to liberate Africans from the colonial prisons like George and Jonathan Jackson.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department released to the city on the morning of Aug. 6th that six African teenagers were involved in a fatal car crash in Palm Harbor. As a result, three of the young boys were killed; one placed in critical condition and two arrested.

When I heard this, I couldn’t help but find a bit of myself dying as well, knowing that three lives were taken from this community that morning. Unfortunately, that feeling got a lot worse when I found out that these boys were illegally chased by an aggressive and trained cop squad forcing them to crash into a billboard pole, spiraling through the air and ending their short lives.

Pinellas County opened its gates for our K-12 grade public school students on August 10th. Popular television shows and local news programs portrayed the last few days of summer vacation as parents going out to look for the new deals on school supplies, engaged in the struggle of finding the perfect outfit for the first day back or reinforcing bedtimes again, but let’s not forget that back-to-school time isn’t the same for everyone.

August 9, 2017 marks 3 years since the police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. Young Michael was murdered by Ferguson, MO copy, Darren Wilson. 

Witnesses stated that Mike Brown was shot eight times while his hands were in the air. His rotting body was then left on the concrete for more than eight hours as an example to the Ferguson community of what the police will do if we disobey their colonial orders. 

What the police did not expect in this suburb of St. Louis, MO was resistance from the African working class community. This powerful display of African Resistance on August 9, 2014 marks one of the critical dates in Black August.