Race

Allensworth Freedom Colony

An Experiment in African American Self-Determination
By Mickey Ellinger
Photos by Scott Braley

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The Art of Protest: the Oscar Grant Memorial Arts Project

By Christine Joy Ferrer

“The role of the revolutionary artist is to make revolution irresistible.”
—Toni Cade Bambara, Writer and activist

People are angry. Sometime after the midnight hour, a 22-year-old black man was murdered on New Year’s Day—another innocent victim of police brutality. His name was Oscar Grant, shot and killed in Oakland, California by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) agency policy officer. Onlookers video-phoned the horrific spectacle: Grant surrounded by officers, unarmed, bleeding to death on the station platform, his arms shackled behind his back, his face pressed against the cement.

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Dirty Cops

Kill Dirty Cops

By DZYER

The Oscar Grant Memorial Arts Project is Co-Sponsored by Media Alliance

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Slide Show

Slide Show (January 2009) by Carrie Leilam Love
It can be read in rows left-to-right or in columns top-to-bottom.

this is Oscar Grant bending. being bent.	this is me waiting at the window for her to come home. heart elephant. weighing down one side, teaching the other what empty is.	this the biggest boss that we have seen this far, with the baddest bitch in the game dancing to an old song, at last love, at last love, at last at last thank god almighty we are president at least.	this is Oscar Grant, bent and headed to the ground. hit and head to the ground.
this is me waiting at her heart for the window to open.	this is Palestine. these are the dead weighing down one side, holding up the lighter dead. this is the bad math of mass murder, equation un-justified.	here we go laughin, cause on a MTV cribs re-run, only thing in Missy Elliot's bedroom sides a Ferrari bed is a life-size cut-out of Janet Jackson half-naked.	this Annette Garcia, this the Sheriff who shot her in the back. These are her children, and this is just how they looked, shocked not surprised, this just how they looked: tough and into distance.
these are my dead: bowler hat and big belly, bowed legs and bright smile, big hands & mad to the marrow.	this my grandmama mean as vinegar and picked through, preserved against men in the bone-yard calling: dear wife, dear mother, dear mother, dear grandmother, come join us in the loam.	here we are underground, swinging on bulb roots, waiting for the lilies to tell us it's July.	this is Oscar Grant's heart, opened and filling his empty. this is his back, softer, in this case, than his belly.
this is her back. she welts easily when I scratch.	this is a speckled brown egg, narrow end down, yok weighing into the point. This is my back.		this is me, learning empty is full of breath, shoutin: Please don’t shoot!