The Freedom Movement left an enduring legacy by overcoming a brutal and seemingly all-powerful form of segregation that Vincent Harding calls a “terroristic system” of violent subjugation. Its legacy now extends far beyond America’s shores, for it has ignited the hopes of millions of people waging struggles for freedom overseas.
The Patron Saint of Charity and Justice
Martin de Porres was a defender of homeless people, a healer of the sick, a protector of unwanted animals, and the patron saint of all victims of racial prejudice. Martin broke through all the stereotypes and racial prejudices of his society and offered charity wherever it was needed.
The Street Spirit Interview with Vincent Harding
Martin was attuned to the Hebrew prophets, and that was their constant message: Don’t talk about loving God or being religious unless you stand with the outcasts and the weak. Jesus said the same thing. There’s no way to understand Martin’s urgency about standing with the poor without taking into consideration his deepest religious grounding.
A Poet’s Sendoff for ‘Saint Carlos the Melodious’
In a city full of poets, there are few whose very lives are poetry. Carlos was one whose whole life was poetry. He radiated kindness and good will. No one can remember hearing Carlos say an unkind word about another person. His phone message was a musical invitation that included waltzing bears.
First Victory for Homeless Person’s Bill of Rights in California
Rhode Island has already passed a Homeless Bill of Rights. Oregon, Vermont, Connecticut and Missouri are joining California in calling for one. A Homeless Bill of Rights is particularly significant today. The federal government has abandoned any pretense of its responsibility to “ensure safe, decent and affordable” housing for the poorest people.
Nationwide Protests Demand That Congress Uphold Immigrant Rights
Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin accused ICE of undermining her city’s devastated economy in the middle of a recession. “Their firing is a violation of their human rights. When they say that [immigration] raids are targeting criminals, it’s not true. People who are just trying to make a living are being targeted big time.”
The Street Spirit © 2013. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 
Busting Berkeley’s Favorite Myths
by Carol Denney
Reporters routinely call Berkeley the “home of the free speech movement,” or “the birthplace of the free speech movement,” forgetting that it was Berkeley’s 1964 repression of free speech that engendered the backlash creating the free speech movement in the first place.
Those who love this mythology rarely test the parameters of free speech in Berkeley, where on a recent Sunday (on August 19), I was threatened with arrest for putting up a poster in Constitution Square. The Free Speech Movement didn’t secure free speech for the world; it just underscored the problem.
The largest, most powerful business lobby in town, the Downtown Berkeley Association, currently taxes downtown businesses to fund its own website, utilizes city services to put up its own banners, and hires a crew of lime-green-costumed people to tear down your fliers and posters within seconds.
Their speech and communications about matters of public interest are respected, even funded. But yours? Yours are considered graffiti.
Berkeley residents similarly embrace the myth that Berkeley is generous to poor and homeless people, so generous, in fact, that it has done more than its “fair share.” with the alleged result that this has begun to “attract” poor people from other areas.
Cracking down on people who might sit down in commercial areas is “the next logical step,” according to Mayor Tom Bates and a majority of the City Council.
Generous? Berkeley has systematically replaced single room occupancy (SRO) housing with condominiums, high-end penthouses, and housing unaffordable to people with the most pressing housing needs. This is a simple recipe for homelessness and hardship.
Berkeley’s unwillingness to address the obvious necessity of low-income housing is reflected in the fact that anyone lucky enough to have a full-time, minimum-wage job will fall about $500 short of being able to pay the average monthly rent on an apartment, and that’s without any money left over for food or shoes.
Berkeley has no public campground. Berkeley has no day shelter, so that unwanted people the moneyed interests decide shouldn’t be able to enjoy the sights and the public commons downtown have nowhere but the residential areas to go, and you can imagine how welcome they are there.
Berkeley has the same approximately 240 shelter beds it had 20 years ago, when then-Mayor Loni Hancock sent trash compactors to People’s Park to destroy the belongings of people for whom the park was the only refuge, preferring instead to pave the way for volleyball.
Berkeley’s Downtown Ambassadors prevented Carol Denney from posting this flyer.
Berkeley is a college town which once was served by the Berkeley Inn, 77 units of affordable housing that people could rely on to have no first-month-last-month-plus-deposit commitment.
The deliberate arson which destroyed that building also ensured that at least 77 people would find it hard to find a low-cost roof for a short stay. And if we don’t hang onto our institutional memory of that SRO building’s importance to the housing stock, it runs the risk of being replaced with high-end housing.
Berkeley wants young people here — as long as they’re lucky enough to afford an increasingly unaffordable education, as long as they’re lucky enough to find increasingly unavailable jobs, and as long as they don’t hit hard times.
Berkeley isn’t generous toward the poor. Systematically destroying low-income housing stock and creating inventive ways to target the poor is mean-spirited, not generous.
Tags: attacking free speach, Berkeley home of the free speech movement, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, Berkeley's Constitution Square, Carol Denny, destroying low-income housing, Downtown Berkeley Business Association, targeting the poor