By Kyra R. Greene
As I was preparing to start my new teaching job at San Diego State University in the fall of 2007, I got a call from my father. It was an ordinary call at first, but then he got serious.
He wanted to know if I was planning to join my university’s faculty union. I knew the answer to that question right away: “Yes, Dad.”
After all, with me, our family would enter our third generation as trade unionists — while black. [Read more…]
1968. A year of loss and hope for me.
One of my losses was my marriage which, after years of rough waters, sunk like the Titanic, unsaveable, destined for a rocky shore.
But one thing I had going for me in my depression was the love of the beautiful young people in my sixth grade class, the fun I had learning with them: writing poetry and prose with them; giving life to characters and situations in social studies with them; playing with numbers in a variety of ways, questioning current events everyday…
Did those young people ever keep alive what little hope I had for anything. They inspired me to “Keep the Faith,” to resist the madness in the war in Vietnam, to forever be “Black and Proud!” and willing to say it out loud.
But sometimes, that year, my personal life would just be too much to bear.
[Read more…]
By John Valdez / Lemon Grove Oral History Project
In 1930, a small rural community in the county of San Diego, California, called Lemon Grove was home to a hundred or more Mexican-American families. These families were mostly situated on Olive and North Avenue Streets near the central avenue called Broadway. The only elementary school was called Golden Avenue School and it’s there that this story begins.
The Lemon Grove School Board members voted to build a separate school on Olive Street for the 75 Mexican-American students who were attending the Golden Avenue School. As the Spanish speaking members of this quiet community became aware of the board’s decision to remodel an existing barn-like structure for all the Spanish speaking students, thereby creating a separate school for them, the families of these children dissented. [Read more…]
Putting a happy face on human misery. We’ve been here before. Remember how this turned out: litigation, legislation—the Civil Liberties Act of 1988—authorizing reparation payments to Japanese Americans who had been interned, eventually totaling nearly 1.6 billion, that began in 1990, with the last payment occurring in February 1999. [Read more…]
Dear Community-Based Block Program,
You all are so special to me.
I’ve come to love and appreciate you because I dream of a society, ours, that values its diversity and you are as diverse a group as I can imagine.
When I looked at you a little while ago at the Jackie Robinson YMCA, decked out in your finery, you were about the most beautiful sight I’ve ever laid my eyes on, just a hugging and pecking each other on the cheek and smiling and talking with your bodies and your hands, your love for each other aglow.
And you personified a little of everybody, gays, lesbians, bi, non-hearing, blind, skin tones from ivory to ebony, ethnicities aplenty: Mexican American; Latino; Chicano; Chicana; Filipino; Vietnamese American; Bi-racial; Native American; Afghanian American; African American; African; European American; Honduran American… [Read more…]
By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams
Lessons from the past: Last week marked the 97th anniversary of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s 1921 Race Massacre, wherein mobs of white vigilantes, abetted by complicit government and law enforcement officials, looted, burned, bombed from the air and virtually destroyed the black, thriving, middle-class Greenwood community widely known as Negro Wall Street, in the process killing at least 300 of its 10,000 black residents, and likely many more.
Then perhaps America’s most preeminent, albeit segregated, black community, Greenwood was created by post-World-War-One blacks fleeing the Deep South; divided by railroad tracks from white Tulsa, they built scores of black-owned businesses, hotels, restaurants and law offices, as well as a library and hospital even as racial hostilities, lynchings and the ranks of Klan members grew — in Tulsa, to over 3,200. [Read more…]
At 80 I find myself still pursuing the same dream in which I’ve indulged myself all my life, a dream that someday the races of people would get along in harmony. Or at least try.
I say try because it seems to me that it’s been our failure to even pursue such a dream that has gotten in the way of it becoming a reality.
But, I’d dare say, there’s no better time than now for us to find ways to embrace each other. I feel that way just because of how the world is. [Read more…]
By R. Zamora / La Voz Es Fuerza
On July 5, 2017, Christopher Villanueva, a San Diego Sheriff’s Deputy fired 16 hollow-point bullets at my unarmed cousin, Jonathon Coronel. According to the medical examiner’s report, he had 22 gunshot wounds on his very slim body. Hollow point bullets expand upon entering the tissue and cause more pain. Jonathon was tortured to death. He was willing to comply with the law.
There were 155 officer-involved shootings from 2005-2015 in San Diego and they have all been deemed justified by the District Attorney’s office.
The witness at the scene of his murder stated that Jonathon was already on the ground surrendered and shirtless to prove he was unarmed. However, even that blatant form of compliance did not stop Deputy Villanueva from executing him in such a monstrous way. I cried every single day since his death and, alongside his family and other victims’ families of police brutality, demanded justice for his murder.
As if finding out that a loved one was brutally slaughtered to death wasn’t painful enough, the villainization of his character and condoning of that violence by Interim District Attorney Summer Stephans added salt to our wounds. In March 2018, eight months after his murder, Summer Stephans held a press conference regarding Jonathon’s case and ruled the Deputy’s violence justified. [Read more…]
As part of Starbuck’s four-hour training session last Tuesday, participants watched a short film by Stanley Nelson designed to heighten the viewer’s awareness of how profiling affects diverse communities. The video features the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Sherrilyn Ifill who served as Senior Consultant for the project. During the video a narrator comments that even though discrimination in public spaces has been against the law since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, changing the law doesn’t always change reality. And being allowed in doesn’t always mean being welcomed. [Read more…]
I just finished reading a collection of essays, “La Neighbor: A Settlement House in Logan Heights,” written by a longtime friend, Maria Garcia.
Maria and I go back a ways and we’re soulmates in so many ways.
We’re writers, and activists, who’ve taken to the streets many a time in the pursuit of equality.
We’re educators who modeled, in our schools, how to treat children with respect and how to turn them on to the world of learning.
When a state law was passed requiring us, as school principals, to harass some of our families, our friends, like we were “la migra” or somebody, we, without as much as blinking, said a a loud “Hell! No!” to that.
Maria’s stories captured the spirit of Logan Heights’ old iconic Neighborhood House, a welcoming place that so many Mexican Americans considered the “heart” of their community. [Read more…]
***Update at end of article ***
The following article appeared in the Advocate Newspaper from Burnie Australia on January 9, 1934. The football field and other sport venues have long been a politicized space.
While we seldom think further back than to Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos raising a fist at the 1968 Olympics game, it should come as no surprise that the exertion of raw institutional power in sports— nationalistic as well as racialized, and I would also add gender based, is not particularly new or only an American occurrence. [Read more…]
From the NPR YouTube site:
In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act that made it illegal to discriminate in housing. Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch explains why neighborhoods are still so segregated today.
Our local KPBS station has what might be considered a companion piece to this video: Redlining’s Mark On San Diego Persists 50 Years After Housing Protections. It includes maps of San Diego showing the red-lined areas and a link to the April 5th Midday Edition podcast featuring Stephen Russell, executive director, San Diego Housing Federation and Richard Rothstein, author of “The Color of Law”. [Read more…]
