At 3pm on Monday Jan 16th, 100 Schools Not Jails! demonstrators held a rally outside of the Central Booking detention facility in East Baltimore City, and marched two blocks southeast to a fenced off lot that is the proposed site of a new $100 million youth jail.
On January 16th, Occupy Baltimore and the Baltimore Algebra Project, along with a enthusiastic crowd of supporters and allies, marched on the site of the proposed youth detention center in East Baltimore, and erected a wooden schoolhouse on the site to call attention to spending priorities that favor incarceration instead of education. Indyreader was on the scene to report:
Stand With Us is a new public service announcement that takes aim at violence and discrimination against transgender people. It is the collective work of the Transgender Response Team (TRT), a stakeholder's group convened in Baltimore, Maryland and tasked with reducing HIV and improving wellness in the transgender community. Ending violence and discrimination are paramount to the success of this work. The TRT welcomes new members who share our vision for health, safety, and equality.
The president of the Baltimore AFL-CIO, Ernie Grecco, along with twleve other union leaders wrote a letter to Mayor Rawlings-Blake urging the city to allow for the Occupy Baltimore encampment to continue. This comes just one day after the city declared the encampment illegal, threatening to evict the near one month protest.
Text of the Letter:
Originally published at Free Speech Radio News
Occupy encampments continue across the country, including in Baltimore, where over the weekend Pan-African theorist Max Rameau gave a teach-in and addressed the General Assembly. Rameau is an organizer with the Take Back the Land movement, which uses direct action to push for community control over land.
Indyreader caught up with community activist, Reverend Heber Brown, at the end of the Stop the Youth Jail march this last Tuesday. He spoke on some of Baltimore's fundamental issues that the majority of the city's population faces, as well as positives and potential challenges that the growing Occupation Movement may have within the city.
Several dozen people participated in an economic crisis teach-in at McKeldin Park, the site of Occupy Baltimore.
Activist and academic, Lester Spence, spoke on the relationship of neoliberalism and the black community, and Joel Andreas spoke on the economy, militarism and imperialism.
On Oct. 4, 2011, a rally was held in front of the Baltimore City Jail, in Baltimore, MD. Its purpose was to gain public support to stop the state of Maryland from building a new jail for youthful offenders of the law at a cost to the taxpayers of an estimated $104 million. Some of the activists in attendance shared their views with me To learn more, go to: http://stopbaltimoreyouthjail.
On December 30, 2010, the Baltimore Indypendent Reader’s Clayton Conn and Corey Reidy sat down with Adam Jackson, Dayvon Love, Deverick Murray, and Lawrence Grandpre, from Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle; oterwise known as, “Baltimore’s progressive policy think-tank.” A fairly recent outgrowth from a Read more
Welcome back world! This is the third segment of our Baltimore-centric (although not exclusive) headline-news-round-up called Sounds of Independent News. We are committed to posting snippets of independent news, to help equip and inform local social justice activists and organizations. We are committed to posting regular segments and updates. We solicit your important news and announcements, as well as any suggestions and ideas. Email us at: indypendentreader@gmail.com
