Lest We Forget

July 17th, 2015 marks the one-year anniversary of Eric Garner’s death after an NYPD chokehold. As of now, not a single person has been held responsible. On Saturday, July 18th, join the NYCLU and other civil rights groups to demand accountability and justice for Eric Garner’s family and all the other New Yorkers who have suffered from police abuse.

Breathless

"Get away [garbled] for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today. Why would you...? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn't do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because everytime you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [garbled]. Selling cigarettes. I'm minding my business, officer, I'm minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. Please please, don't touch me. Do not touch me. [garbled] I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe..." -Eric Garner's final words

Hurricane's Last Wish

David McCallum kisses his mother after being freed from prison

"When I walked through the doors of this office in January, I inherited a legacy of disgrace with respect to wrongful conviction cases." -Ken Thompson, Brooklyn District Attorney

"A Brooklyn man convicted of murder was ordered free Wednesday after he spent 29 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. The convictions of David McCallum and his late co-defendant, Willie Stuckey, were overturned by a judge at the prosecutor’s request." -International Business Times

Related: In The Palm Of Some Fool's Hand?

Seize The Time

"You know the world. The depressed peoples of the world are very shortly going to grow tired of being wooed and lulled into passivity and quiet endurance by chromium and neon lights. The soft music from the many well-placed public-address loudspeakers and car radios will no longer serve as balm to the thwarted hopes, defeated aims, and brutal suppression of needed change. They'll come out of their coma with a bloodlust and justified indignation for social injustice that will sweep the asphalt right from under the empire builders. This is the only reason I hang on. I want to be in the vanguard."

From Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, 1970

It Stops Today!

Eric "Big E" Garner

Rest In Peace

There's Just Us

"The current criminal justice system is shaped by economic bias — crimes unique to the wealthy are either ignored or treated lightly, while the so-called common crimes of the poor lead to arrest, charges, conviction, and imprisonment. The three propositions that support this statement are that (1) society fails to protect people from crimes they fear (homicide, burglary, assault) by refusing to alleviate the poverty that breeds them; (2) the criminal justice system fails to protect people from the most serious dangers by failing to define as crimes the dangerous acts of those who are well off (white collar crime, pollution, occupational hazards) and to prosecute accordingly; and (3) by virtue of these and other failures, the criminal justice system succeeds in creating the image that crime is almost exclusively the work of the poor, an image that serves the interests of the powerful. By focusing on individual criminals who are poor, the system diverts attention from the injustices of social and economic institutions. The failure to reduce crime reinforces this situation by concentrating fear and hostility on the poor. At the base of unequal justice is the unequal distribution of wealth and income. A criminal justice system cannot hold individuals guilty of the injustice of breaking the law if the law itself supports and defends an unjust social order. To counteract this failure, steps must be taken toward domestic disarmament; criminalization of white-collar crimes; creation of a correctional system that promotes human dignity and gives ex-offenders a real opportunity to go straight; a more reasonable exercise of power by police officers, prosecutors, and judges; and equal access to high-quality legal expertise for all individuals accused of crime."

From The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class And Criminal Justice, 1979

Speak Out!

"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

Quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment In Literary Investigation

When The Ship Comes In

"We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate facilities are inherently unequal." -SCOTUS ruling, May 17th, 1954

Free Cecily!

A Jury Of Her Peers

Justice For Cecily

Letter via The Guardian

A Vision Of The Future

"The verdict in the biggest Occupy related criminal case in New York City, that of Cecily McMillan, came down Monday afternoon. As disturbing as it is that she was found guilty of felony assault against Officer Grantley Bovell, the circumstances of her trial reflect an even more disturbing reality – that of normalized police violence, disproportionately punitive sentences (McMillan faces seven years in prison), and a criminal penal system based on anything but justice. While this is nothing new for the over-policed communities of New York City, what happened to McMillan reveals just how powerful and unrestrained a massive police force can be in fighting back against the very people with whom it is charged to protect." -Molly Knefel, The Guardian

Justice For Cecily's statement

Action Is The Only Remedy

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe." -Elie Wiesel

Quote excerpted from Wiesel's 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

“They can incarcerate my body but never my mind."

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

May 6th, 1937 - April 20th, 2014

Victory For Scott Olsen!

$4.5 Million Tentative Settlement Reached In Scott Olsen’s
Lawsuit for “Less Lethal” Shooting by Oakland Police

“After serving two tours of duty as a US Marine in Iraq, Scott Olsen could never have imagined that he would be shot in the head by an Oakland Police officer while he was peacefully exercising his First Amendment rights in support of the budding Occupy economic justice movement... Scott was 24 years old when the shooting and ensuing brain damage robbed him of what had been a promising career as a computer network and systems administrator.” -Rachel Lederman, Esq.

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters... This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -Frederick Douglass

The Worldwide Wave Of Action begins April 4th and runs through July 4th. During this three-month cycle, people throughout the world will be protesting corruption, rallying around solutions and taking part in alternative systems. The new paradigm will be on full display.

Studies have proven that it only takes 3.5% of the population taking nonviolent action to create meaningful and positive change. The Worldwide Wave Of Action gives all of us who want change a powerful opportunity to make it happen and move society forward. Change-makers all over the world will be engaged at the same time in an unprecedented wave of transformation.

On April 4th, there will be Worldwide Wave launch celebrations at hundreds of former Occupy locations globally to honor Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy of nonviolent action. The day will be spent connecting with allies and strategizing Spring action campaigns. This campaign will become what you, the people, make of it, self-organizing and organically evolving, a new culture will emerge.

What are you most passionate about? What are you doing to be the change? Whatever it is, passionately be it in public this Spring. We have power in numbers. United we are unstoppable.

Protest And Survive

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

The Gifted Hunter... One Aim, One Destiny

Chokwe Lumumba

1947 - 2014

"Capitalism, at its rankest form, is not a humanistic economic system. It allows the most powerful to tear into the economic fabric of the least powerful. It allows people with big money to control people with no money, low money and small money in many ways including politically because the people with the money the determinant of who runs for office." -from Jackson Free Press interview

In The Palm Of Some Fool’s Hand?

"You may remember me from my other life as a middleweight boxer. But fate had other plans for me; I was wrongly convicted of a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey, and spent 19 years in prison trying, along with generous friends and good people from every walk of life, to right this wrong and gain my freedom. I am now quite literally on my deathbed and am making my final wish to those with the legal authority to act. My single regret in life is that David McCallum of Brooklyn — a man incarcerated in 1985, the same year I was released, and represented by Innocence International since 2004 — is still in prison. I request only that McCallum be granted a full hearing by the Brooklyn conviction integrity unit, now under the auspices of the new district attorney, Ken Thompson... McCallum was incarcerated two weeks after I was released, reborn into the miracle of this world. Now I’m looking death straight in the eye; he’s got me on the ropes, but I won’t back down. I ask Thompson to look straight in the eye of truth, a tougher customer than death, and not back down either." -Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, excerpted from Hurricane Carter’s Dying Wish (NY Daily News)

Watch: Reasonable Doubt: The Story Of David McCallum (trailer)

Justice for Daryl Kelly Sr.

"My father, Daryl Kelly Sr., has been in prison since 1998 for a crime he never committed — based on a lie I told. When I was just 8 years old, my drug addicted mother forced me to make an accusation of sexual abuse against him. But the truth is that my father had never laid a finger on me. Even my mother has admitted she forced me to lie about this during one of her drug binges. But my father is still in prison, 15 years after being wrongfully convicted… My dad needs to be freed and this wrong must be righted. I will not stop until it is. So far, all of his appeals have been denied  — the courts need to listen or Governor Cuomo should grant my father clemency" -Chaneya Kelly

Sign Chaneya's petition

Endless Contempt

"I refused to testify at that time based on the assertion of my First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights, as I will be doing again for the duration of this grand jury." -Jerry Koch

"After being held two hundred and forty-one days in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correction Center without being charged with a crime, Judge John Keenan decided to answer a motion filed by [Jerry Koch's] lawyers last month and release Koch on the grounds that the state would not be able to coerce him into cooperating with a federal grand jury… The judge issued a 20-page decision granting his release pursuant to a Grumbles Motion, so-called after the grand jury resister who first successfully employed the argument that since they would never agree to testify, their incarceration had become punitive, in violation of their rights." -Shawn Carrié, The New School Free Press

Photograph via Jerry Resists