Common Ground IAF Solano-Napa will host a showing of the award-winning filmmaker Raymond Telles’ latest documentary, “AMERICAN AGITATORS” on Sunday, July 13th at 1:30pm at the Beaux Arts (Riverbank) building at 332 Georgia St. in Vallejo.[map]
“AMERICAN AGITATORS” demonstrates the efficacy of member-led movements built through patience and by listening. Award-winning filmmaker Raymond Telles has made American Agitators to illustrate how collective action can create long term, positive change especially at this critical moment in American history.
AMERICAN AGITATORS captures the remarkable story of organizing for social change in the U.S. through the work Fred Ross Sr. and many others such as iconic organizers Dolores Huerta, Caesar Chavez, and Fred Ross Jr. as well as current ones, all of whom have devoted their lives to the pursuit of justice and equality. The film is directed and produced by Raymond Telles, with executive producers John Heffernan and Margo Feinberg.
Fred Ross, Sr. | California Museum, Photo by Ted Sahl. Courtesy of Fred Ross, Jr.
Throughout his life Fred Ross dedicated his life to organizing and mobilizing people to challenge police brutality, fight segregation, and organize voter registration and voter turnout campaigns. He channeled anger and frustration into building member-led movements to change institutions and policies to improve the lives of ordinary people. He worked from the understanding that while protests can draw attention to create sustainable change, persistence and organization are required to build power and give people a voice in the decisions that shape their living and working conditions. American Agitators, tells a story of how today, collective action can combat racism, bigotry, and injustice and help move our nation towards a true democracy
After the screening, Common Ground will lead a discussion on the movie and how it relates to organizing in our own community.
Do you believe Black lives matter? Then answer this call to action
By email, October 29, 2021
Benicia Black Lives Matter (BBLM) is a values-driven, grassroots, volunteer organization that is dedicated to affirming and improving Black lives in Benicia and beyond. Designing and monitoring accountability structures within local government and institutions—including law enforcement—is an essential part of achieving this mission.
Incidents demonstrating a sustained pattern of racial bias, excessive force, and misconduct within the Solano County Sheriff’s Office, along with Sheriff Tom Ferrara’s open unwillingness to observe accountability and transparency norms, are too numerous to recount here. These allegations of excessive, often racialized violence as well as documented support among his staff for anti-government and white supremacist ideologies, together with the sheriff’s refusal to discipline his staff for misconduct even when recommended by neutral investigatory bodies such Internal Affairs, should concern every Solano County citizen.
When it became clear that the sheriff was not meeting the requirements of his position, BBLM initiated a cross-organizational call to action spanning multiple municipalities, collecting volunteers and allies across many diverse groups and organizations. This coalition now requests help from this same community—your help—at the upcoming Board of Supervisors meeting, to voice our shared concerns and call for change.
This Tuesday, November 2, at 9 am, the Solano County Board of Supervisors will meet to consider utilizing Assembly Bill 1185 to create a community-based civilian oversight board for the sheriff’s office. Such a board would provide a communication channel between the Board of Supervisors and the sheriff’s office, allowing the supervisors to respond to non-criminal complaints from their constituents when the sheriff’s office is involved; create a process to file complaints independent of the sheriff’s office when public trust has eroded; give our community the reassurance that review processes are thorough and bad actors are held accountable for misconduct; strengthen the sheriff and his staff’s relationships with the community they are in service to; and improve trust in law enforcement in Solano County in general.
Anyone can attend the board meeting in person or via Zoom; the details to attend are available on the Solano County website (solanocounty.com). You may also submit written comments to clerk@solanocounty.com.
BBLM strongly encourages anyone who has ever considered themselves to be an ally, supporter, or accomplice in the march toward equity for all in this city, this county, and this country to take this opportunity to be heard. Solano citizens cannot have confidence in Sheriff Ferrara’s leadership and authority until there is an open, fair discussion about the value a community-based oversight board could create when confidence in Sheriff Ferrara and the sheriff’s office is at an all-time low. We all deserve more.
At the meeting, or in your email, ask supervisors to authorize county staff to move forward with research and evaluation of an oversight board, or to allow Solano voters to weigh in.
This is your chance to be heard, and to be a part of making change happen here in Solano County, in support of Black lives, and in support of the community and the spaces we share together. Please act.
By bearing witness — and hitting ‘record’ — 17-year-old Darnella Frazier may have changed the world
Darnella Frazier is seen third from right in this image captured by a police body camera as she records the arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year. (Minneapolis Police Department/AP)Washington Post, by Margaret Sullivan, April 20, 2021
Her motivations were simple enough. You could even call them pure.
“It wasn’t right,” said Darnella Frazier, who was 17 last year when she saw George Floyd pinned under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee. She said that to the jury last month as she testified in the murder trial of that former officer, Derek Chauvin.
No, Darnella, it wasn’t right, a Hennepin County jury agreed on Tuesday, finding Chauvin guilty of second- and third-degree murder as well as second-degree manslaughter.
After so many previous instances in which police officers were acquitted of what looked to many people like murder, this time was different. And it was different, in some significant portion, because of a teenager’s sense of right and wrong.
Call it a moral core.
On May 25, while taking her younger cousin on a stroll to get a snack, the high school student observed a struggle between a Black man and White police officer. After ushering the child into the convenience store, Cup Foods, Frazier stayed on the sidewalk and started recording.
We’ve seen the images of her there on the scene in her loosefitting blue pants, her hoodie and her flip-flops, eventually joined again by her little cousin in a mint-green shirt that read “Love.” Frazier just stood there, resolutely, holding her phone. Later, she posted a video clip of about 10 minutes to Facebook.
That video clip, now seen millions of times around the world, was a powerful, irrefutable act of bearing witness.
The video, showing most of the nine minutes and 29 seconds of Floyd gasping and ultimately drawing his last breath under Chauvin’s knee, was something that couldn’t be explained away.
The video became what one network legal analyst, Sunny Hostin, called “the star witness for the prosecution.”
In conversation with ABC’s David Muir last week, Hostin called it “the strongest piece of evidence I have ever seen in a case against a police officer.”
Over the months that followed Floyd’s death, Frazier hasn’t given any speeches. But she gave an interview or two. And every time I’ve seen or heard her quoted, I’ve been struck by a few things.
She is soft-spoken and understated, not trying to draw any particular attention to herself. She may have been troubled by the experience but remains clearheaded about what she saw and what it meant.
On the witness stand late last month, she also had this to say about Floyd, whom she did not know:
“He was suffering. He was in pain. . . . It seemed like he knew it was over for him. . . . He was terrified.”
And like so many of the other young Black people who took the stand in the trial, Frazier could see in him her own family members. In some way, he represented them: They were, she said, her father, her uncle, her brother.
A few months ago, Frazier found herself accepting an award from PEN America, the free-speech advocacy organization. Filmmaker Spike Lee presented it to her in a virtual ceremony noting that the award was given to recognize courage. Luminaries including Rita Dove and Meryl Streep offered kind words to the young woman from hundreds of miles away. Law professor Anita Hill — famous for accusing a soon-to-be Supreme Court justice of sexual harassment nearly 30 years ago — spoke to Darnella Frazier, too.
“Your quick thinking and bravery under immense pressure has made the world safer and more just,” Hill said. Like the others, Hill added: “Thank you.”
Again, Frazier was quiet but centered when she spoke: “I never would imagine out of my whole 17 years of living that this will be me,” she said. “It’s just a lot to take in, but I couldn’t say thank you enough.”
But it was Frazier’s early interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that has most lingered in my mind, even more than the testimony she so movingly delivered from the witness stand. She explained that she felt compelled to hit “record” because she was seeing something completely unacceptable.
She may have felt helpless. She couldn’t pull Chauvin off Floyd’s neck, but this was something she could do.
“The world needed to see what I was seeing,” she said.
Washington Post, by Reis Thebault, Hannah Knowles, Timothy Bella, Abigail Hauslohner, Paulina Villegas, Keith McMillan and Silvia Foster-Frau and Meryl Kornfield, April 20, 2021 at 5:20 p.m. PDT
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd on Tuesday, the conclusion of a closely watched trial that came nearly a year after Floyd’s killing catalyzed an international protest movement for racial justice.
“It’s not enough. We can’t stop here,” President Biden said in remarks at the White House after the conviction. The verdict is a rare example of punishment after a police killing. Advocates embraced it as an overdue measure of accountability but said they will continue fighting for justice and police reform.
“I’m going to miss him, but now I know he’s in history,” Floyd’s brother Terrence Floyd said Tuesday.
Vice President Harris urged senators to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, saying “this work is long overdue” and that racial injustice is “a problem for every American.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said that true justice for Floyd will only come though “real systemic change.”
The teenager who captured the world’s attention with her cellphone footage of Floyd’s arrest last year said she sobbed after jurors returned a guilty verdict for Chauvin.
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