Hundreds March in Solidarity with the Prison Hunger Strikers in Oakland

Last night, over 300 people marched in downtown Oakland in solidarity with prisoners on hunger strike throughout California. Recently, a judge has ruled that legally the state can now force feed inmates as a way to break the strike. While Brown uses cooling-off laws to break the BART strike, so too are judges using force feeding tubes to break the hunger strike. Solidarity is needed more now more than ever. Revolt on the inside, revolt on the outside.

To view a great video of the march, go here.

Statement from Hannibal Shakur as Court Proceedings Begin for those Arrested During Oakland Trayvon Rebellion

What follows is a statement posted on the site, Bay Area Intifada, from Hannibal Shakur, an organizer and writer from the bay area. He is facing felony vandalism charges after an arrest by Oakland police during one of the recent rebellions in Oakland in the after math of the Zimmerman trial. We will post more analysis of the revolt hopefully at a later time, but for right now, Hannibal's statement hits the nail on the head. What is a broken window to poverty, malnutrition, police brutality, incarceration rates, and environmental racism that black people and other poor people are forced to endure in the bay area? While demonized in the media, called out as criminals by those in power (especially the Left), those who have faced arrest in the recent revolts are brave individuals who take to the streets in the face of massive police violence. It is these forces that drive revolt, that push people to want a different world. We need to stand behind those under the gun by the state because they are standing up for us. 

Statement from Hannibal Shakur  Oakland, CA 
 

The political nature of my charges cannot be over-stated here. To give human rights to a mechanical entity constructed solely for the sake of profit and exploitation is a perversion of those rights and what it means to be a human being. In Florida, a white man walks for the obvious murder of a black boy. That young boy, that black child, wasn’t even given the rights of a dog. When the verdict is released, black people across America rise up to protest our non-citizen status. What could be called a riot ensues. A handful of people are arrested with charges of felony vandalism of whom I am one defendant. When Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin, he wasn’t even arrested. When a window was broken in Oakland, I was viciously slammed to the ground causing injury to my legs, arms and head. Even though I’m fighting cancer and the disgusting conditions of the Santa Rita County Jail are not conducive to healing, on top of being significantly injured by Oakland Police Officers, I was not allowed to be OR-ed or released to my Own Recognizance. A window is made of sand and can be replicated exactly. A rectangle window, of the dimensions I am being charged with breaking, doesn’t need to be replicated because the manufacturer keeps spare windows around for replacement. The United States justice system considers this a serious crime warranting felony charges. 

Trayvon Martin was a human being. There will only ever be one of him and we have lost him and the joy he brought to this world forever. A human life is priceless because it can never be replaced. Trayvon Martin could realistically have grown to be a political leader who would bring peace to warring nations. He could have grown to cure AIDS, cancer or diabetes. We know this to be realistic because the brother was a high achiever in school earning a 3.7 GPA. He could have developed some new treatment for drug addictions. The point I’m trying to make is, aside from being the pride and joy of his family and community, he could have made the world a better place for all of us. He could have stopped wars, cured diseases and got people off of drugs. At this point we will never know what we have lost aside from the fact that he was a beautiful young black boy who was loved and cherished. His murderer was given freedom and even got his murder weapon back with which, God forbid, he may murder another child with. This is the impotency of the US justice system, incapable of treating black people as human beings. In the same token, in Oakland, California, a place considered to have some of the strongest enforcement of civil/human rights, we are charged as felons, a charge that could land us in a penitentiary, for a Men’s Warehouse display window that was broken, yet caused no injuries to any human beings. While America is incapable of enforcing the rights of Trayvon Martin, a human child with a 3.7 GPA, corporations have been legally recognized as human beings and are being protected with the full extent of the law. I’d like to see the California ID that was issued to Men’s Warehouse. 

With the handling of my case and the endangerment to my vulnerable cancer-ridden body, combined with the acquittal of Zimmerman, it would appear that the US justice system has no value for human life or even more troubling, it has no value for black life. While Obama gives a televised speech on the oppression of black boys/men I am being railroaded for a broken window. I am the black life that he claims we need to have a higher value for. While my own plight is troubling as it is, the idea that we are setting a new precedent of violence against black men and boys is terrifying when I think of the kindergartners in Martin Luther King Elementary and the infants in Highland Hospital. I write this with teary eyes because as a grown man I understand what I’m facing: but how do we prepare children to face specific and targeted genocide against themselves?

Oakland Noise Demo Raises Ruckus Outside of Downtown Oakland Jail for Hunger Strikers in SHU

Anti-prison banner carried at noise demonstration in Oakland.

On Thursday, July 4th, a group of about 100 people marched from Oscar Grant Plaza to the Glen E. Dyer Detention Facility as riot police staged inside the Oakland Police Department Headquarters. Marchers were acting in solidarity with hunger strikers in the SHU (Special Housing Units), 'prisons within prisons,' where inmates are kept in solitary confinement. Hunger strikers in the SHU are calling for an end to hostilities between racial groups within prisons all the way down to county jails in order to call attention to inhuman and tortuous treatment of prisoners. This is the latest in a series of hunger strikes that have been started by SHU prisoners that have gone on to include thousands of inmates. Several have already died from previous hunger strikes. Prisoners within the SHU can only leave the isolation units after they inform on others, a policy called, 'debriefing,' even if they have no information to give to prison authorities. According to an article posted on truthout.org:

On July 1, 2011...thousands of other prisoners went on hunger strike to protest such draconian conditions. As reported in Truthout last year, for three weeks, at least 1,035 of the 1,111 inmates locked in the SHU refused food. In the SHU, which comprises half of California's Pelican Bay State Prison, prisoners are locked into their cells for at least 22 hours a day. Over 500 people have been confined in the SHU for over a decade, over 200 for more than 15 years and 78 for over 20 years. The only way that a person can be released from the SHU is to debrief, or provide information incriminating other prisoners. Even those who are eligible for parole have been informed that they will not be granted parole so long as they are in the SHU. "They are told they can debrief or die..." The Pelican Bay hunger strike spread to 13 other state prisons and, at its height, involved at least 6,600 people incarcerated throughout California.

Fireworks outside of Alameda jail.

Tonight, marchers played music, passed out informational flyers, wrote graffiti slogans and put up informational stickers, and upon reaching the jail on 7th and Clay streets, shot off fireworks for about 20 minutes. The fireworks lit up the night sky and prisoners responded by throwing up raised fists in the window and turning lights on and off to let those know outside that they could hear them. Someone spray painted in large letters across the front of the building, "Fire to the Prisons!" After the fireworks had been shot off, people returned to the plaza and held the intersection of 14th and Broadway for about 20 minutes before dispersing. 

For more information on the hunger strike, go to:

Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity

Oakland Police Shoot and Kill Man in East Oakland

This Wednesday, police shot and killed a man who attempted to flee from police in the East Oakland area. Against Hired Guns, a group that was interviewed in the first issue of FireWorks, distributed a flyer in the surrounding neighborhoods that talks about the recent police shooting and puts the killing in a context of racist police power as a tool of social control. Recently, Oakland has seen a series of police killings and shootings of young men in the last several weeks with almost no uproar from the communities where they have happened; be it 'radical' or not. The text from their flyer is reproduced below.

Police at war. Against Hired Guns.  

On Wednesday afternoon, the Oakland police shot and killed a man at the corner of Bancroft and Ritchie. According to police statements, they found out that “occupants of a particular vehicle may be armed.” The cops chased the car until people hopped out and ran in different directions. A cop shot and killed one of them, who the police now say had a gun.  

The police haven’t even claimed that any of those men threatened them, which they always do in order to justify murder. That’s what they said when they killed Gary King, Andrew Moppin, Oscar Grant, Raheim Brown, Alan Blueford… The list goes on, and it’s an old story that they always repeat to justify murder.  

The only person who was hurt in the entire situation was the person the police murdered. Had the cops not chased them, there's no reason to believe anyone would have been hurt. When Derrick “Deedee” Jones was murdered by cops near Bancroft and Seminary in 2010, they said that he took out a gun. They told us later that he NEVER had a weapon, and one of the cops who killed him said: "We were just doing our job, as we were trained to do.”  

Just as that cop said, it is part of the job of police to kill people. It is a mistake to think that they kill people to make us safer, which is what they tell us. The reason they kill us is the same reason they lock us up. It’s the same reason they target us with stay-away orders, gang injunctions, Operation Ceasefire, or whatever their latest scheme is.  

In the 1970s, 44% of Oakland’s population was Black. The Black population has steadily decreased. Between 2000 and 2010, 25% of Oakland’s Black population left the city.  

Every time they kill someone and almost every time they lock someone up, the person is Black or Brown. Every time they make a new policy, it is enforced in working class Black and Brown neighborhoods but never in wealthy or white areas.  

The police are here to kill, contain, harass and cage. That is not how we make public safety. That is how we make war. There is a war against the people of Oakland and it is being facilitated by the cops.  

Fuck the Police. Know Your Rights. Never Snitch.