Join Katrina Johnson, Michael Bennett, Nikkita Oliver and Jesse Hagopian to talk about justice for Charleena Lyles and Black Lives Matter.
Katrina Johnson, Charleena Lyles' cousin, will join Michael Bennett, Nikkita Oliver and Jesse Hagopian to talk about the struggle for justice for Charleena and the new uprising for Black Lives.
The mass uprising in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd around the world has created bold new possibilities for the Black Lives Matter Movement. Bold incentives are being taken around the country to defund, disarm, and dismantle policing.
As the African American Policy institute raised by launching #SayHerName, much of the focus of police violence has been given to the killing of Black men, and Black women and transgendered people have not received the same attention. The recent murder of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American emergency medical technician, who was fatally shot by Louisville Metro Police Department by police is one case that deserves more attention. Another is Charleena Lyles.
On June 18, 2017, two Seattle police officers entered the apartment of Charleena Lyles. The police had been called by Charleena because she feared someone was breaking into her home. Within minuets of entering the apartment, the officers shot her down in a hail of seven bullets, with at least three of them in the back. The officers alleged they had to use lethal force because Charleena had a paring knife. One of the officers was supposed to have a taser, but had not properly charged it, so he did not bring it with him–a violation of department policy. Charleena was pregnant and was killed in front of three of her four kids, who had to be carried over her body to leave the apartment.
Join a conversation about next steps in winning justice for Charleena and her family and how her story connects to the new movement for Black Lives in the streets today.
Katrina Johnson works for the Public Defenders Association as a Project Manager diverting people out of the criminal legal system into community based resources—instead of jail and prosecution. Katrina became a social justice activist/advocate and spokesperson for her family in June of 2017, after her first cousin Charleena Lyles was killed in her home in North Seattle after police officers responded to the location to investigate a theft Charleena had reported. Katrina works with other families who have lost loved ones to the use of lethal force in Washington State and around the county.
Michael Bennett is a three-time Pro Bowler, Pro Bowl MVP, Super Bowl Champion, and two-time NFC Champion. He has gained international recognition for his public support for the Black Lives Matter Movement, women’s rights, and other social justice causes. In 2017, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential African Americans by The Root, was the Seattle Seahawks nominee for the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year award, and was honored along with his brother Martellus with a BET Shine a Light award for exceptional service. He is the author of Things That Make White People Uncomfortable.
Nikkita Oliver is a Seattle-based creative, community organizer, abolitionist, educator, and attorney. Nikkita is the co-executive director of Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration and a healing engaged youth-led community-based program.
Jesse Hagopian is an award-winning educator and a leading voice on issues of educational equity and social justice unionism. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine and is the co-editor of Teaching for Black Lives, and editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/vAM_XkdCXJY
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More Episodes
Nov 29, 2022
Freedom Dreams Episode 1 with aja monet & Robin D.G. Kelley
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The first discussion features aja monet.
Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars.
Speakers:
aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 20072007 and aja monet follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. Her first full collection of poems is titled, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter on Haymarket Books. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, and spirituality. In 20182018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 20192019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. aja monet cofounded a political home for artists and organizers called, Smoke Signals Studio. She facilitates “Voices: Poetry for the People,” a workshop and collective in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders. She is currently working on her next full collection of poems entitled, Florida Water. aja Monet also serves as the new Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls.
Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Join the upcoming events in the Freedom Dreams Series: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/freedom-dreams-with-robin-dg-kelley-1288129
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/BBoQI9HU1rk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Nov 30, 2022
On Political Violence: Fascist Mobilization & Queer and Trans Self-Defense
For most of the left, political violence is a forbidden topic. But at this moment, queer and trans people face the real threat of violence from a growing movement of armed fascists in America. How can we think about this, and what steps are necessary to defeat them? What do existing projects to keep us safe have to teach us?
Note: This discussion occurred on November 2, 2022.
Speakers:
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (published by Verso); and the co-director of They Won't Call It Murder (executive produced by Field of Vision). She has reported on violence against massage workers in Flushing; attacks on trans rights across Texas; resistance to police killings in Columbus; and the global movement for sex workers’ rights. She’s currently at work on a new book, A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice of America (to be published by Little, Brown and Company).
sheila t is a huge nerd and trans feminine person and anarchist living in philadelphia. She’s been participating in anarchist and queer struggles since around 2010.
LV is a communist living in Los Angeles. She organized with Bash Back Denver and with the 2010 Bash Back Convergence as well as a number of militant queer groups in Los Angeles such as the Trans Liberation LA, Trans Undocumented Rapid Response Network (TURRN) and 2014 Queerpocalypse. She is a practicing conflict mediator and developing an eco defense video game.
Max (they/them) is a grassroots, abolitionist and antifascist, community organizer from Sacramento, California. Their work primarily revolves around the abolition of private property and prisons, but their efforts to stand up against fascist violence, including state, but specifically far-right and christo extremism have looked like participating and organizing active confrontations to their platforms since 2016, and most recently throughout 2020 to now.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/45JZURd1dGo
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This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Pinko: https://pinko.online.
Dec 1, 2022
Fight Like Hell: A Tribute to Mike Davis, with Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Geri Silva
¡Mike Davis, presente! Three longtime allies of Mike Davis (1946–2022) will discuss the life and legacy of the author, geologist, historian, and organizer—and the inspiration we take from his life and work for the struggles ahead.
Speakers:
Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire. Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement. Davis’s memoir was recently published in a new edition by Haymarket Books.
Geri Silva, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, has spent the past 40 years in all forms of struggle for human, political, and economic rights. Her activity covers the span from immigration rights to welfare rights to the right to decent housing for all in need. For the past 20-plus years she has fought against the rampant and ongoing abuses in the courts and at the hands of the police. Silva is a founding member of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) in 1992, Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes (FACTS) in 1996, Fair Chance Project (FCP) in 2009, California Families Against Solitary Confinement (CFASC) in 2011, and FUEL—Families United to End LWOP (Life Without Parole) in 2017.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso), and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/u5xtmUWdWbc
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Dec 5, 2022
On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century
Join Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt as they discuss Bacevich's new book, On Shedding an Obsolete Past. The book provides a much-needed and comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the Trump and Biden administrations. These policy decisions have produced a series of costly disappointments and outright failures that have destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world and cost US taxpayers astronomical sums of money.
Bacevich and Engelhardt will analyze how these failures occurred and what needs to be done to prevent similar failures in the future. He reminds us that, by understanding the past, we can alter our current trajectory and transform the world for the better.
Get the book from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1949-on-shedding-an-obsolete-past
Speakers:
Andrew Bacevich is president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. A graduate of West Point and Princeton, he is also professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. Among his many books are The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, America's War for the Greater Middle East, and most recently, After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed.
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the TomDispatch.com website, a project of the Nation Institute, where he is a fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War and The United States of Fear, both published by Haymarket Books, a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the cold war, The End of Victory Culture, and a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Many of his TomDispatch interviews were collected in Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. With Nick Turse, he has written Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001–2050. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, a collection of pieces from his site that functions as an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Dh8KFTRsr7Y
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 5, 2023
Freedom Dreams Episode 2 with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor & Robin D.G. Kelley
Join Robin D.G. Kelley for the Freedom Dreams discussion series. The second discussion features Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Freedom Dreams is a classic in the study of the Black radical tradition that has just been released in a new 20th anniversary edition. In this live event series, Robin D. G. Kelley will explore the connections between radical imagination and movements for social transformation with pathbreaking artists and scholars.
Speakers:
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an award-winning scholar and public intellectual. Taylor is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semi-finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2021. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Taylor’s scholarship examines racism and public policy, inequality, Black politics, radical politics and social movements in the United States, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Taylor is working on two projects, one that look at the dynamics of race, class and politics in the first generation after the Black social movements of the 1960s and a book that examines the Black radical tradition mediated through the life and politics of Angela Y. Davis. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, Guardian, The Nation and Jacobin, among others. She is a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times. Taylor has been named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians. For eight years, Taylor was a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University.
Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Join the upcoming events in the Freedom Dreams Series: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/freedom-dreams-with-robin-dg-kelley-1288129
Watch the live event recording: youtu.be/BBoQI9HU1rk
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: @haymarketbooks
Jan 10, 2023
Super Sad Black Girl w/ Diamon Sharp, Eve Ewing, Jamila Woods, Raych Jackson
Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free?Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.Join us for this livestream of the in-person book launch event for Super Sad Black Girl with Diamond Sharp, Eve Ewing, Raych Jackson and Jamila Woods.
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Speakers:
Diamond Sharp is a poet and essayist from Chicago. Super Sad Black Girl is her debut collection of poems.
Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, and most recently a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and performer. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube. She is the 2017 NUPIC Champion and a 2017 Pink Door fellow. Jackson recently voiced 'DJ Raych' in the Jackbox game, Mad Verse City. She voices Tiffany in Battu, an upcoming animation recently picked up by Cartoon Network. Her latest play, “Emotions & Bots”, premiered at the Woerdz Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Jamila Woods is a Chicago-bred singer/songwriter and award-winning poet whose inspirations include Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Morrison. Following the 2016 release of her debut album HEAVN, Woods received critical acclaim for her singular sound that is both rooted in soul and wholly modern. Her 2019 sophomore release LEGACY! LEGACY! featured 12 tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced her life and work. She is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and co-editor of BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic (2018).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/W_yl0SZR050
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
