Stanford student activist runs for KPFA Local Station Board
Throughout history, students have played a crucial role in furthering social change. During the Vietnam War, there was a nationwide youth rebellion in the U.S. against America’s imperialist war in Southeast Asia and the ensuing atrocities. On university campuses across America, from the University of California, Berkeley, to Columbia University, students organized sit-ins, teach-ins and rallies, printed flyers and occupied campus buildings to protest against the injustices occurring at home and abroad. These protests were not only a sign of moral outrage; they were also strategically designed to end the involvement of American universities in perpetuating the atrocities in Vietnam and other social ills.
California’s mean streak, from Native annihilation to Oscar and Lovelle: Ishmael Reed on history
Ishmael Reed is one of the most read writers of his generation, along with Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka, living in America. In 1962, Reed co-founded “East Village Other,” a well known underground publication at the time, and was a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop, which helped to give rise to the Black Arts Movement. He has published nine novels, four collections of poetry, six plays, four collections of essays and a libretto. He currently lives in Oakland, and I approached him one day while he was visiting KPFA’s studios to ask him what he thought about the state of affairs between the police and Oakland’s Black community, with the backdrop of the police murder of Oscar Grant and, in a separate incident, the police murder of Lovelle Mixon, after Mixon allegedly killed four Oakland police officers.
From U.S. to El Salvador, ‘gangs’ and the ‘global war on terror’
“We’re under domestic insurgency. If we don’t get it, it will get us.” – California Attorney General Jerry Brown, Anti-Gang Conference, Riverside, Calif., December 2007
“We’re mounting a coordinated, aggressive suppression strategy that targets the worst offenders and the most violent gangs. We’re converging local, state, federal and even international efforts … coming at them with everything we have.” – Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Feb. 8, 2007, press conference
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