1. THE NATION'S #1 BLACK NEWSPAPER 5A THE MIAMI TIMES, DECEMBER 23-29, 2015
By Brooke Henderson
Special to The Miami Times
The first time she came to
Miami, she was running from the
FBI. The second time, she was
“shot at by some right-wingers.
“So,” said Angela Y. Davis, “its
really great to be here.”
For the first time in 15 years,
Davis came back to Miami for
a fundraiser that was held on
Thursday, Dec. 17. “America’s
Most (Un)Wanted Fight Back:
Ending Criminalization and the
Prison Industrial Complex” was
held at Barry University’s Shepa-
rd & Ruth K. Broad Perform-
ing Arts Center. This sold-out
fundraiser ran late but raised
$16,000 of its $30,000 goal.
This event was a blending of
generations in activism that
benefited three heavy-hitting
organizations dedicated to the
realization of true liberation of
Black and brown people: Criti-
cal Resistance, Power U Center
for Social Change and Dream
Defenders.
“We are an organization of
young people dedicated to end-
ing the criminalization of our
people, Black people, Latin
people, poor people,” said Umi
Selah, organizer of the Dream
Defenders, a local organiz-
ing group based in Miami but
reaching statewide. “We are here
to have a conversation that is
long, long overdue. And what
better place than Miami, a city
where over half of the founders”
were labeled ‘colored.’”
The dialogue ranged from the
school-to-prison pipeline, the
limitations of only focusing on
individual police officers as if
incidences were completely iso-
lated, and the abolition of jails
and prisons as ways of address-
ing the deep social problems
in this country—an issue that
brought Critical Resistance all
the way from the west coast, to
the east.
“One of the most recent vic-
tories among all the struggles
that CR [Critical Resistance]
has been involved in took place
… when the San Francisco
board of supervisors refused to
allocate $250 million for a new
jail. What the board of supervi-
sors said was that instead, the
city should invest this money
in mental health care services,”
Davis said.
She has been involved with
the organization since its in-
ception along with working on
the Dream Defenders Advisory
Board. She is also a Distin-
guished Professor Emerita of
History of Consciousness, an
interdisciplinary Ph.D. program
and of Feminist Studies at the
University of California.
“We also want to stop the
daily policing that are terror-
izing our communities. We want
to also decouple police from
healthcare. Every time there’s
a medical emergency we have
to have the police involved …
We also do work around-raising
awareness about the torture of
incarceration. We stopped soli-
tary confinement in California
prisons,” said co-founder Kim
Deahl.
They are currently building a
campaign to close Attica in New
York. They are creating a docu-
mentary focused on the stories
of Attica survivors in the hopes
that it will become a resource to
support prison closure organiz-
ing.
PowerU Center for Social
Change is just as in tune to
the voices of their community.
“We see ourselves as not just a
community organization but an
organization that is struggling
for the liberation of our people.
And when I say ‘our people’,
I mean all people. Our model
of organizing really focuses on
leadership development, devel-
oping consciousness, because
we believe that the people most
directly impacted by the social
injustices that we see have to be
at the forefront of that struggle
to change,” said Hashim Ben-
ford, director of PowerU Center
For Social Change.
“Back in 2007, there was an
incident at Miami Edison High
School where a student was
put in a choke-hold by one of
the school administrators …
A young person comes into a
building where he is supposed
to be safe, where the adults
there are supposed to look out
for his well-being,” he explains.
The next day, students of Miami
Edison High School organized a
peaceful protest, a self-organized
walkout.
“The response of the school
administration to this peace-
ful protest was to send in the
school police and additional
school resource officers. The
headlines were essentially, and
this is what gets me, ‘Students
At Edison Riot,’” said Benford.
This situation is not unique.
The organizations believe that
the media tend to celebrate
reaction in the face of these
crises. These organizations,
conversely, represent the upris-
ing of youth of color, fighting
against the violence of policing,
criminalization and imprison-
ment.
They are “fighting for a word
without policing and imprison-
ment as what pretends to be
solutions,” said Jess Heaney,
Critical Resistance.
“It is impossible to under-
stand the dynamics behind
the record growth of the prison
population for both women and
men without considering the
impact of structural racism and
the profit-generating role of the
prison industrial complex. And,
of course, when we talk about
gender we also have to recognize
that the struggle for trans-
prisoners’ rights have revealed
in new ways the centrality of the
prison apparatus to the develop-
ment of backward ideologies in
this country and throughout the
world. Prison is a gendering ap-
paratus, and so increasingly we
begin to see the links between
the institution of the prison and
many other social and political
issues,” Davis remarked.
To get connected visit Power
U at www.poweru.org/, Dream
Defenders at www.dreamdefend-
ers.org/ and Critical Resistance
at www.criticalresistance.org/.
Grassroots groups tackle social justice
Prison system, police violence topics
of Angela Davis’ speech at fundraiser
Community activists attend a fundraiser at Barry University entitled “America’s Most (Un)Wanted Fight Back.”
Angela Davis,
second from
left, sits on a
panel.
—Photos courtesy of Courtney Henderson