March for Trayvon July 15, 2013

The organized part of the march.

Solidarity With Hunger Strikers.

On Thursday, July 4th, a group of about 100 people marched from Oscar Grant Plaza to the Alameda County Jail 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.

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:

http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/

http://baywaters.blogspot.com

Oakland police kill again. Against hired guns.

"Early on Monday morning (July 8th), Oakland cops beat a 53-year old man to death on the 2300 block of East 21st Street. When the police first came, they reportedly targeted the man because he was dealing with a psychological issue. Cops tried to stuff him into the back of a squad car and, according to the police story, he resisted. The police tussled with him on the ground and when they stopped fighting, he stopped breathing. Stuffing someone in the back of a police car never supports their mental health and we can only imagine what this man was going through in his mental state, which the cops had identified as needing a “psychiatric evaluation.” But really, we can only imagine what was going through his mind because he can’t tell us. He is dead. If it weren’t for the Oakland police’s actions last night, he would still be breathing.

Police should not be first responders to people dealing with mental health crises!

The police haven’t claimed that the man had a weapon or offered a direct threat to 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. When Derrick Jones was murdered by cops near Bancroft and Seminary in 2010, they said he took out a gun. They told us later 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.

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 working class people of color. That is not how we make public safety. That is how we make war.

Fuck the Police. Know Your Rights. Never Snitch."

Local Resources:
Against Hired Guns – http://againsthiredguns.wordpress.com/
A People’s Hearing on Racism & Police Violence – http://peopleshearing.wordpress.com/
Story Telling & Organizing Project (STOP) http://www.stopviolenceeveryday.org/
Critical Resistance –http://criticalresistance.org/
Eastside Arts Alliance – http://www.eastsideartsalliance.com/
Justice 4 Alan Blueford – http://justice4alanblueford.org/
ONYX – http://onyxbrief.blogspot.com/

ONYX's first doorknocking campaign

Last weekend ONYX and a group of our comrades conducted a door knocking campaign in the highland park neighborhood surrounding San Antonio park in east Oakland. we were able to make a few positive contacts and distribute some very valuable information about public safety and police brutality. A few of the people we spoke with mentioned the rise in police occupation in their neighborhood. However when asked if this rise in policing agents made them feel any safer and none of the people i spoke were able to identify safety with the rise in police presence in the hood. One woman I spoke with said that she knew of 50+ incidents of police brutality involving people she knew personally. I looked into the eyes of a beautiful little girl in my neighborhood this week who looked at me when i asked her grandmother about a recent officer involved murder and said "I saw him shoot 5 times too!" I told her as beautiful as she was she shouldn't have ever had to see a single one but how many times will we see those same eyes in a day? or a week? way too many no matter what the number.

We'll be back at it again next month and would love to see the community turn out and support us. The strongest weapon we have in the fight for liberation is education. It doesn't matter what our physical makeup is or how popular we are in the world education is the one bullet we all can fire. this government strives to keep us misinformed, disenfranchised, and disconnected from the lives we deserve. It is our responsibility as an organization to educate the masses as much as possible about the current conditions we face and how to overcome them. One part of the ONYX acronym means NEVER Ceasing to Struggle. We mean that! We will never cease in our struggle against oppression, poverty, racism, ignorance, false imprisonment, cultural kidnapping, and  government sponsored terrorism. As we continue to meet our obligations of education to the people and fight for solutions to the problems we face as a people, we would only hope that more and more folks come out and support our efforts in the movement to liberated all oppressed peoples around the globe....GP-

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