Opening Plenary: ABOLITION NOW!!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
6.30­-8.30
Scottish Rite Center Auditorium

1547 Lakeside Dr. Oakland, CA
Doors open at 5.30pm, arrive early for seats.
Overflow will be seated in separate room.

ABOLITION NOW!!

What does it mean to live our vision of PIC abolition in our every day life, work and activism? How can we create the world we want to live in today, even as we work toward abolishing prisons, policing and punishment in the future? CR10 kicks off with a celebration of the PIC abolition movement incorporating spirituality, the arts, the power of personal experience, and groundbreaking political analysis. Come celebrate the energy and power of the movement!!


SPEAKERS AND PERFORMERS INCLUDE:

All Nations Drum is an Oakland based traditional Pow Wow singing group that brings together members from a variety of tribes to sing and drum in the Northern style. All Nations Drum was founded nearly 20 years ago, and performs at Pow Wows and social justice events, as well as training Native youth in traditional song and drumming.

Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet, author and political activist who was born in 1973 in Amman, Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents and immigrated with her family to Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old. Her newest book, breaking poems, is out this October from Cypher Books. Her award winning work has appeared in anthologies, on stage, in her own books and on screen.

Lenny Foster (Ki'yaa'aanii) is a spiritual leader who has spent the last 28 years fighting to ensure that incarcerated Native Americans have the right to worship with access to their traditional ceremonies. Lenny is the Program Supervisor for the Corrections Project with the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona and is the spiritual advisor for approximately two thousand Navajo and Native American inmates in ninety-six state and federal prisons across the United States. He is also National Coordinator for the National Native American Prisoners Rights Advocates Coalition and a member of the American Friends Service Committee Native American Task Force. As a member of AIM, Lenny was involved in the occupation of Alcatraz and, in 1972, in the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan and the Bureau of Indian Affairs take-over in Washington, D.C. He took part in the 71-day protest at Wounded Knee in 1973 and he participated in the Longest Walk, a seven-month journey from Alcatraz to Washington, D.C., in 1978.

Hank Jones is one of the SF8, a group of eight former Black community activists - Black Panthers and others - who were arrested January 23rd in California, New York and Florida on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar charges were thrown out after it was revealed that police used torture to extract confessions when some of these same men were arrested in New Orleans in 1973. Hank Jones currently is out on bail, and along with his comrades, is awaiting a preliminary hearing scheduled to begin in San Francisco September 8. Soon after their arrest, the SF8 formed the Committee for Defense of Human Rights (CDHR), the mission of which is to oppose human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of the United States and law enforcement authorities.

Lisa Ortega is Co-Director of Rights for People with Psychiatric Disabilities, a grassroots, direct action organization that works to demand justice and social change for imprisoned people with disabilities. RIPPD's membership is made up of people with psychiatric disabilities that have been in jail or prison as well as family members and friends of people with psychiatric disabilities who are, or who have been imprisoned. Lisa has served time in jail and has been been a passionate organizer for over 15 years. She is a single mother of 4 and grandmother and has 17 years of recovery from addiction.

The Welfare Poets are a collective of activists, educators, and artists who have been together since 1990. Through teaching residencies and workshops, through activism around community struggles and through sharp-edged performances of music that incorporates Hip Hop, Bomba y Plena, Latin Jazz and other rhythms, the Welfare Poets bring information and inspiration to those facing oppression and those fighting for liberation. The Welfare Poets have produced three independent albums, "Project Blues," "Rhymes for Treason" and "Cruel and Unusual Punishment," a Hip Hop compilation against the death penalty, and are working on a CD compilation to raise funds and awareness about the Puerto Rican political prisoners. Over the collectives' 15-year existence, they have taken a direct stance in the struggle for social justice, most notably against police brutality, in defense of political prisoners, and in opposition to environmental injustice and the death penalty, the colonial status of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Naval occupation of the island.

Miss Major is an elder, black, formerly incarcerated transgendered Male-to-Female person. She has been involved in the trans community as an activist and advocate for over thirty-five (35) years. In NYC, she worked with fellow performers in local bars trying to establish an equal pay scale for their performances and also worked on the streets with other hookers keeping track of license plates of the cars they got into. In Sing Sing and other prisons, she helped the girls inside hold on to who they were and not cave in to the wishes and desires of fellow inmates and guards. At the onset of HIV/AIDS, the opportunity arose to work and get legitimate money to do prevention, education, counseling, and outreach to her community. She has received numerous awards and accolades for her activism in her community. Most recently, she spoke at the Committee to Eliminate Racial Discrimination (CERD) at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on the abuses of transgender women of color. Currently, she's working as Community Organizing Director of TIP (Trans and gender variant in Prison Committee) and TGIJP (Transgender, Gender-variant, and Intersex Justice Project), where she instills hope and belief in the future and a sense of some kind of justice for the girls that are currently incarcerated and those coming home.

Andrea Smith (Cherokee) is a longtime anti-violence and Native American activist and scholar. She is co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a national grassroots organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue, and grassroots organizing. She is also co-founder of the Boarding School Healing Project, a coalition that is documenting boarding school abuses so that Native communities can heal and demand justice. Andy is the author of Conquest, Sexual Violence, and American Indian Genocide (South End Press, 2005), Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Duke University Press, 2008), editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (South End Press, 2007) and co-editor of Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (South End Press, 2006).

Linda Evans is a former political prisoner who spent 16 years in federal prisons. Granted clemency in January 2001, she continues to work for the freedom of other political prisoners in the United States. The co-author of the groundbreaking essay, "The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy," Evans draws links between economic globalization, state repression and the increasing use of incarceration throughout the world. Evans' own activism dates back to the late 60s, when as a regional organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) she led efforts against the Viet Nam war and in support of Black liberation struggles. She was also active in the lesbian and women's communities and in solidarity movements for struggles in South African, Palestine and Central America. Evans continued her activism behind bars, leading AIDS education and other prisoner support efforts. Linda is a co-founder of All of Us Or None, a national organizing initiative of prisoners, formerly-incarcerated people and our families, to combat the many forms of discrimination people face as the result of a felony conviction.

The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company (DAYPC) is a multicultural group of teens who create original performance art pieces, in collaboration with professional artists, that combine hip-hop, modern, and aerial dance, theater, martial arts, song and rap. The productions are a dynamic, creative forum for the young people to express their fears, hopes and strategies for confronting challenging personal and social issues. The company has performed locally and nationally since 1993 for thousands and thousands of audience members. DAYPC comes out of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based nonprofit violence-prevention and arts education organization that has been serving youth for over 20 years, through after-school, summer and weekend programs in dance, theater, martial arts, conflict resolution, self-defense, and youth leadership at their Oakland center and in over 25 East Bay public schools and other community centers. DAYPC Artistic Directors are Sarah Crowell & Simón Hanukai.

Angela Davis has been deeply involved in our nation's quest for social justice over the last decades. Her work as an educator - both at the university level and in the larger public sphere - has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender equality. Professor Davis' has spent the last fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is Professor of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and Professor of Feminist Studies. She is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her most recent books are Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is now completing a book on Prisons and American History.

The Freedom School Collective is a collective of young queer, transgender and gender non-conforming survivors of state violence, particularly of police, prison and jail violence. Based out of the the West Village in New York City, the Freedom School Collective organizes through political education workshops, coalition building and support for movement building spaces, to challenge the prison industrial complex and link PIC abolition with gender liberation and self determination. Speakers: Nai Fowler Timir, Tamika Johnson and Reg Gossett.

Music and graphics by: Black Arts Collective and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.