The Black Alliance is working in coalition with communities across the Bay who’ve developed study/action circles on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Our Bay Area New Jim Crow Study/ Action Coalition is composed of Alameda and Contra Costa County residents primarily involved in activist and faith communities. All members of the coalition are deeply committed to addressing core issues that have created and bolstered today’s system of mass criminalization which has sustained and reinforced racial caste in the U.S., making our struggle one against the New Jim Crow. read more

It is important for people to understand that on a basic level the imagery of Ferguson does not reflect the reality of Ferguson. We are looking, from our varied distances, at a trick mirror positioned by a media complicit in the echoing violence of of Kajieme Powell’s murder. Media complicity is not just in conservative outlets like Fox News who rhetorically rehearse the violent sentiment that fired, at the very least, six shots into Michael Brown’s body but also in liberal and alternative media that cannot grapple with antiblackness that is as American as enslavement. read more

Strategic programs and activities include:

1. Black Alliance (coupons) Organizing Committees (BOCs): A leadership program and organizing mechanism for directly affected Black immigrants and African Americans. Developing a core of leaders in the local cities where Black Alliance (coupons) has staff is imperative to deepening engagement with community members, establishing the capacity for advocacy goals, and for the overall effectiveness of Black Alliance (coupons). Volunteers from the local community agree to join the Black Alliance (coupons) Organizing Committee (BOC) and engage in internal political education and participate and/or initiate campaigns or other related work. read more

The recently released Senate immigration reform bill had a mix of carrot and stick approaches to providing the long-awaited path to citizenship for millions of undocumented people living under repressive conditions.  While the bill has several good features, it weighs heavily toward very bad and very ugly provisions that will leave out millions of people and will continue the mass detentions and deportations that have become normalized in U.S. society. read more

First, I was illegal
An identity is given to me
By a socio-political complex
Hell-bent on forcing me to
Reject my notion of self. Illegal is illegal, they said –
More than my age
More than my gender/sexuality
More than my humanity –
I was now this thing, an ‘it’
No longer a human being. I stay silent. read more

Isabelle Wilkerson’s best-selling book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” is a remarkable chronicle of the historical and inspirational movement of millions of African Americans over many decades. Reading it reconnected me to my own family’s migration story and reminded me of the parallels between The Great African American Migration from the U.S. South and the current immigration of peoples from the Global South. read more

February is Black History Month, and to celebrate Drop the I-Word and Black Alliance (coupons), are partnering and invite members of our communities to join us as we read Isabel Wilkerson’s monumental book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

The book, newly available in paperback, chronicles the Great Migration, in which some six million black people migrated to cities in the north and west from the south’s Jim Crow caste system between 1915 and 1970. Current anti-immigrant rhetoric hinges upon dividing communities of color and explicitly pitting African Americans with roots in the south, against migrants today. It’s important that we build bridges and continue to foster respect and knowledge about one another’s experiences. read more

Practically every African American has been touched in some way by the great Black Migrations out of the Southern states between 1914 and 1960. Most everyone has a parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt or some family relative who was a participant in that historic migration. In the case of the author, my mother’s family came from small towns near Memphis, Tennessee, while my father and his father migrated from Macon, Georgia. Both parts of my future family ended up in Cleveland, Ohio, where I was born. read more