prison

Earlier this year, on the sixth anniversary of the day that the first group of prisoners were incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay camp in 2002, a couple hundred protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. Thirty-four of them then walked up the steps and engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience. They were arrested, and when that happened they did not provide the Capitol Police their "given" names but rather the names of individuals who have been held at Guantanamo for years and who have never received trial. They sought to be names and faces for the nameless and faceless.

LeAnne Clausen's prison cell: Drawn by LeAnneI just received another set of letters from prison, written by LeAnne Clausen. (Actually, they are e-mails typed up by friends of hers, based on her correspondence from prison, and sent out via a group created on the social networking web site Facebook, but no matter!) LeAnne is one of the 11 peace and justice activists who were arrested last November for "crossing the line" at the School of the Americas Watch in Columbus, GA, at the annual protest there. (She also participated in FOR's December 2007 peace delegation to Iran, and has traveled to Iraq and other countries with groups like the Christian Peacemaker Teams.)

My dear friend and brother Dedrick Muhammad, Senior Organizer and Research Associate at the Institute for Policy Studies, has written a saddening report on the state of African-American community and ultimately democracy in Post-King America. The report helps to situate the legacy of King in a concrete way within the prophetic tradition to call our nation into account.

Dr. Martin Luther King recognized that the next phase in the African American’s quest for civil rights and equality was one that would focus on the economic divide between the wealthiest Americans, the working class, and those in poverty. King’s analysis of economic inequality as the foundation of racial inequality remains as valid today as it was 40 years ago.

As we remember the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's death today, this message from ColorofChange.org serves to remind us that even as we live through these historic, politically-heady times -- there is still much work to be done.

Innocent. And in solitary for 35 years.

Take action to achieve justice for the Angola 3:

After a week of intense public pressure, officials at Angola prison moved Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox out of solitary confinement for the first time in 35 years.¹ But they're still locked up--for a crime everyone knows they didn't commit.

Together, we've started to turn things around by making it a political liability for the authorities at Angola to keep Wallace and Woodfox in solitary confinement for challenging the violence and segregation at Angola.² We need to keep the pressure on to force federal and state authorities to intervene and release these innocent men. Will you join us?

http://colorofchange.org/a3/

Last week, Mychal Bell, an African-American teenager in Jena, Louisiana, was released from jail on $45,000 bond. Bell was one of six black high school students who had been incarcerated in December 2006 and charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy in the beating of a white student in December 2006. Bell, who is 16 years old, was to be tried as an adult, and faced 22 years in adult prison; the other five defendants faced another 53 years behind bars for their alleged roles in the beating.