Patterson comes from New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. Her family’s house was cut in half by the floodwaters and has since been demolished. Despite the loss of her home, she was soon back in the city, living in the Treme neighborhood. She spent much of the following years traveling the country, performing poetry and trying to raise awareness about the plight of New Orleans. But her income was not enough–her post-Katrina rent was twice what she had paid before the storm, and she was also putting up money to help her family rebuild as well as preparing for the birth of her son Jibril. “I wound up getting evicted from my apartment because we were still working on the house,” she said. “In the midst of it, you realize that you are not generating the amount of money you need to sustain a living.”

Patterson’s family had difficulty presenting the proper paperwork to receive federal rebuilding dollars–a problem shared by many New Orleanians. “We’re dealing with properties that have been passed down from generation to generation,” says Patterson. “The paperwork is not always available. A lot of elders are tired, they don’t know what to do.”

Just as the storm revealed racial inequalities, the recovery has also been shaped by systemic racism. According to a recent survey of New Orleanians by the Kaiser Family Foundation, forty-two percent of African Americans - versus just sixteen percent of whites - said they still have not recovered from Katrina. Thirty-one percent of African-American residents - versus eight percent of white respondents - said they had trouble paying for food or housing in the last year. Housing prices in New Orleans have gone up sixty-three percent just since 2009.

Eleven billion federal dollars went into Louisiana’s Road Home program, which was meant to help the city rebuild. The payouts from this program went exclusively to homeowners, which cut out renters from the primary source of federal aid.

Even among homeowners, the program treated different populations in different ways. US District Judge Henry Kennedy recently found that the program was racially discriminatory in the formula it used to disperse funds. By partially basing payouts on home values instead of on damage to homes, the program favored properties in wealthier - often whiter - neighborhoods. However, the same judge found that nothing in the law obligated the state to correct this discrimination for the 98% of applicants whose cases have been closed.

At approximately 355,000, the city’s population remains more than 100,000 lower than it’s pre-Katrina number, and many counted in the current population are among the tens of thousands who moved here post-Katrina. This puts the number of New Orleanians still displaced at well over 100,000 - perhaps 150,000 or more. A survey by the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps found that seventy-five percent of African Americans who were displaced wanted to return but were being kept out. Like Patterson, most of those surveyed said economic forces kept them from returning.

A Changed City

As New Orleans approaches the fifth anniversary of Katrina and begins a long recovery from the BP drilling disaster, the media has been searching for an uplifting angle. Stories of the city’s rebirth are everywhere, and there are reasons to feel good about New Orleans. The Saints’ Superbowl victory was a turning point for the city, and the HBO series Treme has gone a long way towards helping the story of the city’s vibrant culture and struggle for recovery get out to a wider audience. Music festivals like Jazz Fest and Essence Fest, which are so central to the city’s tourism-based economy, have brought in some of their largest crowds in recent years. Because of a combination of grassroots pressure, independent media, and federal investigations, the city’s corrupt police department seems to be on the cusp of real reform.

But despite positive developments in the city’s recovery, more than 100,000 New Orleanians received a one-way ticket out of town and still have received no help in coming back, and these voices are left out of most stories of the city. Many from this silenced population complain of post-Katrina decisions that placed obstacles in their path, such as the firing of 7,000 public school employees and canceling of their union contract shortly after the storm, or the tearing down of nearly 5,000 public housing units - two post-Katrina decisions that disproportionately affected Black residents.

Advocates have also noted that among those who are not counted in the statistics on displacement are the New Orleanians who are in the city, but not home. They fall into the category that international human rights organizations call internally displaced. The guiding principles of internal displacement call for more than return. UN principles number 28 and 29 call for, in part, “the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration.” They also state that, “They shall have the right to participate fully and equally in public affairs at all levels and have equal access to public services,” as well as to have their property and possessions replaced, or receive “appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation.”

In other words, these principles call for a return that includes restoration and reparations. As civil rights attorney Tracie Washington has said, “I’m still displaced, until the conditions that caused my displacement have been alleviated. I’m still displaced as long as Charity Hospital remains closed. I’m still displaced as long as rents remain unaffordable. I’m still displaced as long as schools are in such bad shape.” In the US, Katrina recovery has fallen under the Stafford Act, a law that specifically excludes many of these rights that international law guarantees.

Among those who are back in New Orleans but still displaced are members of the city’s large homeless population. In a report this week, UNITY of Greater New Orleans estimated from 3,000 to 6,000 persons are living in the city’s abandoned buildings. Seventy-five percent of these undercounted residents are Katrina survivors, most of whom had stable housing before the storm. Eighty-seven percent are disabled, and a disproportionate share are elderly.

Cultural Resistance

Sunni Patterson can’t remember a time when she wasn’t a poet. The words flow naturally and seemingly effortlessly from her. When she performs, it is like a divine presence speaking though her body. Her frame is small but she fills the room. Her voice conveys passion and love and pain and loss. Her words illuminate current events and history lessons - her topics ranging from the Black Panthers organizing in the Desire housing projects to domestic violence to injustice in Africa and war in the Middle East.

You can hear Sunni Patterson’s influence in the performances of many young poets in New Orleans. And in the work of Patterson, you can hear the history of community elders passed along, the chants of Mardi Gras Indians, and the knowledge and embrace of neighbors and family and friends. And Patterson is part of a large and thriving community of socially conscious culture workers. Since the late ’90s, you could find spoken word poetry being performed somewhere in New Orleans almost any night of the week. And many of these poets are also teachers, activists, and community organizers.

Now, like so many other former New Orleanians, she cannot afford to live in the city she loves. “I’m in Houston,” she says, seemingly stunned by her own words. “Houston. Houston. I can’t say that and make it sound right. It hurts me to my heart that my child’s birth certificate says Houston, Texas.”

One of the hardest aspects of leaving New Orleans has been the loss of her community. “In that same house that I grew up, my great grandmother and grandfather lived,” she says. “Everybody that lived around there, you knew. It was family. In New Orleans, even if you don’t know someone, you still speak and wave and say hello. In other cities, there’s something wrong with you if you speak to someone you don’t know.”

New Orleanians were displaced after the storm to 5,500 cities, spread across every US state. Although the vast majority of former New Orleanians are in nearby cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta, many are still living in further locales from Utah to Maine. While she is sad to be gone from the city, Patterson wants to see the positive in the loss. “The good part is that New Orleans energy and culture is now dispersed all over the world,” she says. “You can’t kill it. Ain’t that something? That’s what I love about it. So we still gotta give thanks, even in the midst of the atrocity, that poetry is still being created.”

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute.

This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post.

Earlier this month, New Yorkers won a nine-month moratorium from the state Senate on the dangerous and highly-polluting drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The inspiring story of civic action that led to this decision is told by Maura Stephens in a recently published piece by Yes! Magazine.

Many fighting this battle had never before been involved in political issues. But after seeing the impacts of fracking around the country or in their own daily lives, they got active.

They organized and attended forums, panels, meetings, and rallies—sometimes alongside public figures like actor Mark Ruffalo and singer-songwriter Pete Seeger. Day after day, thousands of people called state senate and assembly offices to pressure for the moratorium. Achieving it was a first-round victory beyond expectations—a small but important win.

With their air, water, land, properties, communities, and health on the line, residents have made the campaign a priority, often sacrificing family time, leisure time, and sleep to keep abreast of developments and share information. “The petrochemical-industrial complex is stealing our land and our health,” says New York resident and architect Joe Levine. “Life as we know it will change forever if we don’t stop them.”

Levine has a home near the New York State border in Damascus, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Jane Cyphers, and their two daughters. The family has turned over their lives to this issue since they were first approached by gas companies wanting to lease their land. They soon realized that their beloved Delaware River would be imperiled by drilling. Levine cofounded Damascus Citizens, a grassroots group made up of people who are fighting to keep the Delaware safe from fracking. Their influence, and the experiences of the town of Dimock, Pennyslvania, inspired Josh Fox to make the documentary Gasland.

Sullivan County, New York, resident Larysa Dyrszka, a retired pediatrician, has also taken on the role of state-level activist for the first time.

“Nobody thought drilling would really come here, to a populated area, with technology that couldn’t ensure against harmful effects to our drinking water and health,” says Dyrszka. “Little did we know it was already happening in Texas and Colorado and in other populated areas.”

Together with her friends and neighbors, Dyrszka started SACRED—Sullivan Area Citizens for Responsible Energy Development. On January 25, Dyrszka joined hundreds of New Yorkers from all corners of the state to lobby their representatives in Albany—many, like Dyrszka, for the first time.

“I was hooked,” Dyrszka says. “Now, whenever Roger [Downs, of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter] or Katharine [Nadeau, of EANY] or any fellow foot-soldier groups suggest a lobby day, I’m there.”

For months, Dyrszka and her fellow activists continued building relationships by phone, e-mail, and in person with legislative staff, sending them scientific, health, legal, economic, and other information on fracking.

Those involved in the organizing, however, also credit the release of the powerful anti-fracking documentary Gasland with influencing the moratorium decision.

Filmmaker Josh Fox brought his award-winning Gasland to many New York cinemas in early summer. Fox, who’d traveled to 24 states to document the heartbreaking human stories behind the industry hype about a “safe, clean fuel,” has appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and other national shows. Gasland has been showing on HBO since debuting there in June. Its scene of a man lighting the water coming from his kitchen tap on fire has become iconic of fracking’s dangers to drinking water. Everywhere it shows, more people join the antifracking movement.

Having recently watched this film, I can attest to its action-stirring message. The devastating effects fracking has incurred on many rural American communities—from explosions to undrinkable water and disease—leaves little doubt that the fight must go on until a permanent moratorium is installed. Thankfully, the movement to do this seems to be growing.

In September, the New York Assembly will vote a similar moratorium bill. Activists are working to ensure it gets to the floor for a vote. Another focus is on educating outgoing Governor David Paterson, whom they expect to sign the moratorium bills (he had threatened to veto, but that’s now unlikely, given the huge majority Senate passage).The incoming governor will be the focus of attention post-election. Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins has called for a total ban on the practice. Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Rick Lazio say they are in favor of “safe” drilling. Activists are already showing up at Cuomo’s statewide rallies to let him know that fracking isn’t safe.

Antifracking advocates believe their multifaceted approach—based on educating themselves, the public, and legislators—will work. They’re optimistic that their concerns about their health, homes, and drinking water won’t be ignored.

“Cooperation from around the state made us succeed in the Senate,” says Dyrszka. “None of us are being paid. Nobody’s offering us money, now or in the future. We’re just fighting for our lives, and that ‘s why we’re winning these little battles.”

This article originally appeared on WagingNonviolence.org.

The continuing BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has refocused attention on the vast Niger Delta, home to thousands of oil and gas installations and an array of militant groups waging armed struggle against Western oil companies, a kleptocratic state and ruthless military forces.

Sweet Crude tells the story of the people of the Niger Delta. In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, billions of dollars of crude oil flow under the feet of a desperate people. Immense wealth and abject poverty stand in stark contrast. The environment is decimated. What if the world paid attention before it was too late?

There will be a Q&A with Indypendent editor Arun Gupta and the film’s director, John Anderson, after the screening.

To buy tickets, visit: https://www.vendini.com/ticket-software.html?e=6c65ba97193751f56e118b7d766b7b55&t=tix.

To view the trailer, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrsNbXs45Fo.

Facebook invite: http://bit.ly/9OyvgP

Location Info:
Thurs., Aug. 27, at 6 p.m.
Riverside Theatre
91 Claremont Ave.
New York, NY

 PHOTOS: SAKURA KELLEY

Outraged parents from the Coalition for Educational Justice shut down Monday evening’s school board meeting after officials refused to let them comment on recent revelations that student test scores had dropped dramatically in 2010. About 75 parents and a handful of teachers from the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM) attended the Panel for Education Policy (PEP) meeting held at Murray Bergtraum High School in Lower Manhattan. They listened patiently to Education Department Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky give an extensive power point presentation explaining how the declining test scores — a 27 percent drop in proficiency in English for the city’s third to eighth graders, a 28 percent drop in proficiency in math for the same students and a growing racial achievement gap — were not a cause for alarm but a sign of progress.

When Polakow-Suransky finished, the parents insisted on the chance to comment on the test score controversy and the impact it has had on children who are no longer deemed proficient. Told to wait until the end of the meeting, the parents began shouting and chanting. Panel for Education Policy members slipped behind the stage curtain in hopes of waiting out the protests. Parents and their supporters then came to the front of the school auditorium to share stories of frustration with how the city’s schools are being run. Unable to re-assert his authority, PEP Chair David Chang finally adjourned the meeting. The parents left a little while later vowing to return in larger numbers for the September PEP meeting.

When the Islamophobic furor against the proposed Muslim community center two-and-a-half blocks away from Ground Zero began to peak in mid-late July, some people wondered why it was occurring now, nine years after the 9/11 attacks. As the New York Times recently noted, an article published in the paper “last December about the project drew little negative comment.” Daisy Khan, the wife of the imam who is spearheading the Cordoba House, told the Times that the possibility of their project being controversial “never occurred” to them.

But there is no reason to be surprised at the anger over the community center. While others have pointed to the economy, or to the recent surge in thwarted homegrown “terror” plots, to explain the anger over the community center, one can read what’s being played out as simply a continuation–albeit a much more intense strain–of the virulent anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment that began after the September 11 attacks. Specifically, the concocted controversy over the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) in 2007 should have set off alarm bells about the power of Islamophobic activists whose aim is to shut Muslims and Arabs out of American public life. The Brooklyn academy, the nation’s first dual-language Arabic public school, barely survived an onslaught of racist right-wing attacks against the school. Unfortunately, the founding principal, Debbie Almontaser, was not spared, and fell victim to an orchestrated smear campaign not unlike the one now targeting Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.

There are many parallels between the controversies around the Cordoba House and KGIA: both of the project’s leaders–Rauf and Almontaser–are well-known and respected interfaith leaders in New York City; both campaigns were begun by right-wing, Islamophobic blogs and leaders and were only later picked up by mainstream media; and both campaigns smeared Islam and demonstrated a profound ignorance about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Imam Rauf is currently being tarred as a “radical Muslim” who supports al-Qaeda and wants to build the Muslim community center to celebrate “Islamic triumphalism.” Almontaser, too, was painted as a Muslim radical and a “9/11 denier” whose school would secretly indoctrinate students to hate America and Israel and support sharia law. The hysteria about Rauf and Almontaser misses basic, sobering facts about the two leaders: both of them have demonstrated a profound commitment to interfaith understanding between Muslims and other groups in the U.S. after 9/11 and have sought to fight anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes. Rauf is a Sufi Muslim leader in New York who, as Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek put it, “speaks of the need for Muslims to live peacefully with all other religions…emphasizes the commonalities among all faiths…advocates equal rights for women, and argues against laws that in any way punish non-Muslims…His vision of Islam is bin Laden’s nightmare.” Almontaser was described as “the city’s most visible Arab-American woman” in an excellent profile of her written by the New York Times’ Andrea Elliott:

After 9/11, Education Department officials had enlisted Ms. Almontaser to hold workshops on cultural sensitivity for schoolchildren. She spread the message that Islam was a peaceful religion. She told of how her own son had served as a National Guardsman in the clearing effort at ground zero. She was soon attending interfaith seminars, befriending rabbis and priests. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg honored her publicly.

But none of these facts seem to matter to the bigots who are trying to take down Rauf and the proposed community center, or who successfully forced Almontaser to resign as head of KGIA.

The current drive against the Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan was started by, as Salon’s Justin Elliott has shown, “third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site,” and quickly moved to the New York Post, as well as other mainstream media outlets. Republican politicians have now taken up the cause, and it’s impossible to turn on cable news and not see a racist rant directed against Muslims in the U.S. The anti-Cordoba House movement has now reached a fever pitch, but it has not yet invented the “smoking gun” that would mean the downfall of the initiative, as they did in the case of Almontaser.

There was a similar trajectory in the case of Almontaser and KGIA. As soon as plans for the school were announced in February 2007, Pamela Geller and friends begun a campaign to shut what they called a “madrassa in New York’s public school system” down. Daniel Pipes, a neoconservative author who has made a career out of stoking fears of Muslims and Arabs in the Western world, and the so-called “Stop the Madrassa” coalition, were instrumental in the targeting of KGIA. Soon after the school was announced, assisted by columns by Pipes that mis-characterized and lied about the school, the story migrated to the New York Sun and eventually the New York Post. Almontaser’s downfall came after the Post labeled her the “‘intifada’” principal, as I reported for the Indypendent in September 2008:

The intense media focus on KGIA peaked when the New York Post picked up the story. The DOE pressured Almontaser to agree to an interview with the Post. In an Aug. 6, 2007, article, the Post declared that Almontaser “defended” the use of the word “intifada” on a t-shirt made by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), a group whose only connection to Almontaser was that she was on the board of a Yemeni-American organization that at times shared office space with AWAAM.

On Aug. 9, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, following what Almontaser says was a directive from Mayor Bloomberg, forced Almontaser to resign as KGIA principal, saying that either she or the academy had to go.

“That was the most horrendous and devastating 24 hours of my life,” Almontaser says. “To experience working with people who admired me and respected me and who believed in me, and then just to see a complete shift, basically saying that ‘you’re the problem’ … was absolutely devastating.”

The quote used by the Post to claim that Almontaser “defended” the use of the word “intifada” on a shirt was found later to have been “inaccurately reported by The Post and then misconstrued by the press,” according to a federal appeals court. In March 2010 of this year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that New York City’s Department of Education “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel, and asmall segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on the DOE as an employer.”

The conflating of Islam with terrorism and a demonstrated ignorance about the religion is another common feature of the furor over KGIA and the Cordoba House. The opposition to the Islamic community center can only be justified by asserting collective Muslim guilt for the attacks of September 11, despite the fact that many Muslims died during the attack and the fact that al-Qaeda has killed more Muslims that any other religious group in the world. Furthermore–and this is not to say that other sects of Islam aren’t also peaceful– Sufi Islam, which Imam Rauf is an adherent to, “couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. [Rauf’s] videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation,” as William Dalrymple writes today in the Times.

In the case of KGIA, Pipes claimed that “Arabic instruction is heavy with Islamist and Arabist overtones and demands.” According to Pipes, any teaching of Arabic is bound to promote Islamism–which, in Pipes’ world, is all one and the same, an ideology that promotes terrorism and al-Qaeda.

Lastly, let’s turn to the Israel-Palestine angle. Imam Rauf has been pilloried for not condemning the Palestinian Hamas movement as a “terrorist organization,” as they are labeled by the U.S. State Department. Rauf said, “Look, I’m not a politician. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question.” And he’s exactly right. The State Dept. list of “terrorist groups” is a highly politicized grouping. “Terrorism,” in mainstream parlance, has no real meaning besides armed struggle against the West and Israel. If you support the U.S. or Israel, you’re not a terrorist.

To simply call Hamas a “terrorist” group is a disservice to understanding what Hamas, an Islamist movement, is. Hamas has committed terrorist acts; but by the same token, so has the U.S. and Israel, but on a far larger scale. Hamas is resisting a brutal occupation, whereas Israel is focused on continuing their colonization of Palestinian lands.

Almontaser attempted to explain the origin of the word “intifada,” which appeared on t-shirts made by Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media. The Post, in the article that led to Almontaser’s forced resignation, spun her explanation as “downplaying” the significance of the t-shirts and the word intifada. The Post reported that the “inflammatory tees boldly declare ‘Intifada NYC’ - apparently a call for a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple.” Further down in the story, they quote Pamela Hall, who fought against KGIA, as saying, “Intifada is a war. Isn’t that what Arafat had?” Intifada, as Almontaser tried to explain in that Post article, “basically means ’shaking off.’ That is the root word if you look it up in Arabic.” The first Palestinian intifada was largely nonviolent. And the second intifada, as Neve Gordon pointed out in his book Israel’s Occupation, began as a nonviolent popular uprising, but only turned violent after Israel brutally suppressed the uprising, firing 1.3 million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israeli security forces were directed to “fan the flames”, as Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar reported in 2004.

These misunderstandings and distortions about the situation in occupied Palestine have added fuel to the Islamophobic fire.

The lesson of the KGIA controversy should have been that Islamophobes hold a disturbing amount of power in the United States and that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment needs to be combated. So it’s no surprise that Islamophobia continues to be a potent political weapon. Perhaps we should take this opportunity to double-down on our efforts to combat Islamophobia, so when the next furor over Islam in the U.S. comes–and it will–education and activism can successfully tamp down these dangerous games being played. If we didn’t learn that lesson after KGIA, we better learn it now.

This article originally appeared on Alex Kane’s blog.

Some compare the program, called “Secure Communities,” to Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 law. The entire states of Florida, Delaware and Virginia signed up in July. It is now in effect in 494 jurisdictions in 27 states, and is set to be implemented nationwide by 2013 by the Immigration and Customs Agency (ICE).

“ICE is racing forward imposing its Secure Communities program on new states and localities every day, without any meaningful dialog or public debate,” said Bridget Kessler, Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Counties that participate in Secure Communities automatically forward arrest data – such as fingerprints – to a database connected to ICE. Agents check the data for matches and can issue a “detainer” or request to hold the person who has been arrested  for 48 hours so that ICE can take them into custody.

Kessler helped several advocacy organizations file an open records request to find out more about the program. ICE released about a thousand pages of documents this week. They confirm Kessler’s concern that Secure Communities may lead police to arrest people who have not committed a crime in order to check their immigration status, a form of racial profiling.

For example, a review of the total cases submitted to the Secure Communities database from around the country found that a quarter of those who were later deported had no criminal record. But in specific counties, such as Travis County, Texas, 82 percent of the deportations resulting from the program involved non-criminals.

“This indicates police officers are picking up people on pretext, the criminal charges are getting dropped or dismissed, and they’re getting shuttled into deportation,” said Kessler during a conference call with reporters about the newly released data.

For those immigrants who believe they were unlawfully arrested, the options to avoid deportation can be slim.

“When someone is unlawfully arrested, there is the ability to contest the arrest when you’re in front of a criminal court judge,” noted Sunita Patel, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “But detainers prevent the criminal proceedings from happeneing, or hide the unlawful conduct.”

ICE promotes Secure Communities as a way for police to help the agency target immigrants with serious criminal records. But their own data indicates that 79 percent of those deported due to the program are non-criminals or were picked up for offenses listed as Level 2 or 3, instead of the most serious Level 1.

“These are day laborers, street vendors, domestic violence victims,” said Sarahi Uribe, from the National Day Laborer’s Organizing Network.

Lower level offenses could include driving without a license or petty juvenile mischief – hardly the bad guys Congress likely had in mind when it allocated more than $1 billion in funding for Secure Communities.

In San Francisco County, Sheriff Michael Hennessey tried to opt-out of the program because he already had a program to notify ICE when his department had immigrants in custody who were charged or convicted of felonies. He estimated ICE picked up about 100 people a month. But he said ICE told him there was no possibility of opting out.

“At this point it appears it is a program that is forced upon individual law enforcement agencies no matter what the community wants or cares about,” said Sheriff Hennessey.

A fact sheet of some of the main findings from documents about Secure Communities that were released in response to the open records request is at UncovertheTruth.org.

You can read the documents in their entirety – and help highlight and make notes on their contents via an interactive PDF reader – on DeportationNation.org.

This article originally appeared on DeportationNation.org.

The Shirley Sherrod controversy, like the Van Jones incident one year ago this month, demonstrates the power of the right-wing media to rock the Obama White House when it comes to racial matters. On July 19, 2010, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who has a long history of producing carefully doctored videos, posted a video clip on his Web site, Biggovernment.org. That clip reportedly showed a black U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee stating that she had discriminated against a white farmer because he was white and arrogant. The employee, Shirley Sherrod, says in the two-and-a-half minute clip, that she did not give “the full force of what I could do” to help a white farmer who came to her for assistance. Her remarks were given at an event held by the NAACP in Douglas, Georgia. On Monday morning, July 19, the story was picked up by Fox News and began to rapidly spread to other news organizations and on the Internet.

Racial tensions were in the air because the previous week had witnessed a public scuffle between the NAACP and the tea party movement. On July 14, 2010, the NAACP passed a resolution at its annual convention that called for tea party leaders to denounce the racist behavior that had manifested at some of its events. The response of some tea party leaders and activists was to incorrectly accuse the NAACP of calling the entire tea party movement racist. The controversy was furthered intensified when one tea party leader, Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, wrote a supposedly satirical letter from a black individual to President Lincoln using racist imagery and language. He wrote, “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop.” He and the Tea Party Express were subsequently booted out of the 85 member and affiliated National Tea Party Federation. Tea party leaders from Sarah Palin to Michelle Bachman defended the virtually all-white movement against the NAACP mostly by not addressing the issue that had been raised but by accusing the NAACP of being racial hustlers or worse.

When the Sherrod story first broke, officials at the USDA panicked believing that the administration was about to be attacked for sanctioning reverse racism. Within hours, Sherrod came under intense pressure from high officials in the department including Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to resign without delay. At one point, Undersecretary Cheryl Cook caught up with Sherrod as she was driving. Sherrod stated that while she was attempting to explain her side of the story, she was asked to pull to the side of the road and immediately submit her resignation via text because the issue was “going to be on Glenn Beck” that evening. Sherrod did resign but did not go down passively. Meanwhile, the NAACP issued a statement denouncing Sherrod and applauding her resignation. It wrote, “We concur with US Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod for her remarks at a local NAACP Freedom Fund banquet. Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race. We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.”

Suspicious of the source, some news organizations, in particular MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and CNN raised questions about the legitimacy of the tape and tried to locate Sherrod to interview her. As it turns out, by Tuesday morning, the clip was exposed to be entirely misleading and in fact Sherrod was using the story to tell how she overcame whatever prejudicial feelings she had realizing that people of all races needed help. In fact, the incident had occurred twenty-four years earlier when she worked for a local non-profit and not while she was working as an employee of the U.S. government. In the full version of the speech, she states, “God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people–it’s about poor people.” In speaking about her work helping the farmer in question, she stated, “Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic.” She ended up playing a decisive role in helping the farmer, Roger Spooner, save his farm, a fact that he and his wife, Eloise, testified to in subsequent media interviews. Calls and emails began to flood into the White House and Agriculture Department demanding Sherrod reinstatement.

The cruel irony of the situation, in which a black USDA employee is accused of racism against a white farmer and is forced to resign, was that in the long history of struggle around black land ownership and fairness for black farmers, the USDA had never fired a single white employee for virulent, overt, and persistent racism against blacks and other people of color. That the USDA has a dishonorable record of racial discrimination is indisputable. In its long history of documented racism the USDA has denied loans to black and minority farmers, gave loans that were too late in the farming cycle, conducted excessive supervisions of loans that white farmers did not have to endure, ignored black farmers’ claims of discrimination, disrespected individuals, and had a mostly whites-only hiring policy. In 1983, President Reagan eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights that would not be re-opened until 1996, but even then did little to address the concerns of farmers of color.

More generally, the racism that denied assistance to black farmers continually for more than 100 years has been a central factor in shaping the economic fortune of millions of African Americans resonating in the disproportionate levels of poverty that exist in the black community today. On January 16, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Field Order 15 that promised 40 acres off the South Carolina Sea Islands and plantations from Charleston, South Carolina to Jacksonville, South Carolina, and a federal mule to those who had left slavery and were working with the Union army. This pledge was given further legal support when on March 3, 1865 Lincoln signed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which assigned “not more than 40 acres” to the freed to rent with an option to purchase after three years. Lincoln also had created the USDA in 1862 referring to it as the “people’s department.” Indeed, more than 40,000 African Americans had settled on confiscated land by June 1865. However, after Lincoln’s April 14th assassination, President Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in his effort to reintegrate southern rebels back into the nation. At the expense of African Americans, Johnson issued an amnesty order that included property restoration and blacks were subsequently forced off these lands. Despite the broken promise of the U.S. government, by 1900, African Americans owned 15 million acres of land mostly in the South. By 1910, this would grow to 16 million with a peak of 925,000 black farmers a decade later. This would represent a high point as discrimination and racism including by the USDA would reduce significantly this ownership over the next 100 years. By 2000, according to a statement made by Judge Paul Freidman in the successful lawsuit against the USDA by black farmers, there were only about 18,000 black farmers left on less than three million acres.

A number of black farm organizations would rise over the years to fight back against the unjust and racist policies of local, state, and federal officials. This would include the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union, Black Land Fund, Black Farmers Alliance, Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFAA), and Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) with whom Sherrod had once worked as a staff member. In 1997, black farmers filed a lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, against the USDA for discrimination. In 1999, the black farmers won over $2.3 billion in what has been called “the largest civil rights settlement in history.” However, there were many black farmers who were left out of the suit because it only covered those who had been discriminated against between 1981 and 1996. And some estimate that close to 90 percent of even those farmers were denied when they applied for restitution. That figure is probably accurate given that the Bush administration spent more than 56,000 office hours and $12 million fighting the claims made by black farmers. Duped Pigford II, first members of Congress and then the Obama administration won an agreement that included an additional payout to more than 65,000 black farmers who were excluded from the original suit.

Indeed, Vilsack himself stated soon after coming to office that “civil rights is one of my top priorities” and “[I] intend to take definitive action to improve USDA’s record on civil rights.” Obama proposed $1.25 billion in his 2010 budget to pay what is owed to the black farmers, a proposal that Republicans in Congress have repeatedly blocked as of August 2010.

It is also notable that Sherrod herself has been a critical actor in this history. As a child growing up in Georgia, she lived through the experience of having her father, Hoise Miller, murdered–shot in the back no less–by a white neighbor who suffered no punishment for his crime. Rather than leave the South, however, she decided to stay and try to bring about much needed social and racial justice. Her activism was enhanced when she married Charles Sherrod, a founder and leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Albany, Georgia. They both remained activists on issues of fairness and anti-poverty. She worked for a number of organizations and movements earning a stellar reputation as a strong, reliable, articulate, and committed leader of the region’s poor, traits that were revealed in her media interviews as the controversy unfolded.

Given this history and the discredited record of Breitbart, both the administration and the NAACP should have acted more cautiously before going after Sherrod. Vilsack and USDA officials clearly violated her right to due process let along simply giving her the benefit of the doubt as opposed to that of her accusers. At a minimum, they owed her the responsibility to do an investigation prior to initiating such strong action against her. So did the NAACP. The incident in question happened at the meeting of one of their chapters giving it immediate access to witnesses of the speech as well as videos of the event. In fact, once the leadership did look at the entire speech, it immediately issued an apology stating that it had been “snookered” by Breitbart, and called for her reinstatement.

Strong letters of support were sent from the FSC and BFAA. FSC Executive Director Ralph Paige in a blistering letter charged the USDA with not reviewing the facts before it acted and, in noting Sherrod’s “remarkable career,” argued that she deserved “to be honored” rather than persecuted. BFAA President Gary Grant also called Sherrod “honorable and hard working” Vilsack’s statement that the USDA does not tolerate racism “a complete lie.” Sherrod would later state, “It hurts me that they didn’t even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn’t care.”

Meanwhile, on Tuesday July 21, 2010 USDA officials vacillated even as the evidence mounted that Sherrod had been framed. Vilsack stated that regardless of the context, her comments–or more honestly the right-wing hysteria about them–”compromises the director’s ability to do her job.” In other words, conservative accusations of reverse racism whether true or not were enough to have someone dismissed from the employment in the Obama administration. However, Sherrod’s powerful interviews in the media, letters and emails from around the nation, and even a retreat by Breitbart himself, disingenuously claiming that he did not know the clip was incomplete, forced the administration to change its position. On Wednesday, both White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Vilsack issued apologies. Gibbs stated, “On behalf of our administration, I offer an apology.” Vilsack remarked, “This is a good woman. She’s been put through hell. She was put through hell and I could have done and should have done a better job,” and even offered Sherrod a new position at USDA focused on civil rights. On July 22, Obama called Sherrod to apologize as well. Reportedly, he expressed his regrets about the whole situation and told her “this misfortune can present an opportunity for her to continue her hard work on behalf of those in need, and he hopes that she will do so.”

While Vilsack took personal responsibility for what occurred, Obama and the White House blamed the media environment for the rapid spread of the story and reactions of his administration. There is no argument that some in the media played a harmful role in the controversy, Fox News and conservative media outlets in particular. But many believe it was the fear of right wing media that created the milieu in which there is a knee-jerk reaction to even the slightest threat of bad news, particularly on the issue of race, which drives the administration’s actions. As some noted, it would be difficult to believe that the former Bush administration would have fired a staffer because of an unsubstantiated (or even substantiated) report that was going to be discussed on the left-leaning Countdown with Keith Olbermann or Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!. The incident revealed that the Obama administration gave undo power and influence to the likes of Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh to shape their agenda. The embarrassing fact that the president himself had to express his regrets to Sherrod made it more likely that those in his administration who believe any discussion about race should be taboo will continue to hold sway against those who argue that pro-active words and actions are needed more than ever. It is possible, however, that the Sherrod incident represents a turning point where it is clear to the Obama White House that it must stand on principle and fight for racial justice and fairness regardless of the rantings of its opponents or even the political costs at stake.

This article is an excerpt from The Black History of the White House forthcoming in the Open Media Series by City Lights Books

PHOTOS: SAKURA KELLEY

More than 400 garden activists came out for a midday hearing on Tuesday, Aug. 10 to protest the city’s proposed regulations to govern community gardens.

With the 2002 Community Gardens Agreement set to expire on Sept. 17, advocates fear that the city’s nearly 300 gardens will no longer be protected from land developers. While many of the new regulations are identical to the 2002 agreement, the new regulations do little to ensure the future of these green spaces throughout the city.

“If you put the agreement and the new regulations side by side, they mirror each other. Passages from one were lifted straight into the other. Except when it comes to the question of garden preservation,” said Karen Washington, the president of New York City Community Gardens Coalition (NYCCGC).

The hearing, which was held at Chelsea Recreation Center, was preceded by a rally in a nearby park where activists from the NYCCGC spoke over a bullhorn and led chants for more gardens. About 150 people turned out for the rally armed with floral signs, vegetables, hula-hoops, and even Superman costumes.

“We are thankful to the city,” said Aresh Javadi, a member of NYCCGC and an environmental activist in the South Bronx, “because this brought the gardens together and made us remember how important we are.”

Community gardens are no strangers to fighting with City Hall. In the late 1990s, the Giuliani administration threatened to auction off hundreds of community gardens to developers. However, the gardening community organized effectively to stall and eventually defeat these auctions by gaining the support of the City’s then-Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer.

“It’s not like we just stuck our heads in the soil and let the mayor do what he wanted,” Washington, a long-time community garden activist, said.In 2002, in the first year of the Bloomberg administration, an agreement between the city and the Attorney General was reached in which community gardens were granted protection from development. But many activists worry that those protection will vanish when the agreement expires on Sept. 17, 2010.

“We don’t feel that the rules go far enough to protect the gardens,” Washington said.

Some gardens have more protection than others. Gardens on land owned by the Parks Department are apparently under little threat, even though the proposed rules do not include provisions to make them permanent. Gardens on land owned by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, on the other hand, are afforded less protection.

Those who had fought for the 2002 agreement had a particularly strong showing. “The proposed rules and regulations are of concern to me, because they allow our gardens to be destroyed at a moment’s notice in total disregard for all the hard work that has gone into them,” said Magali Regis, a gardener from the Lower East Side.

In testimony after testimony, gardeners spoke about the wealth that gardens have brought to their communities. There were stories of gardens keeping kids off the streets, allowing immigrants to maintain their relationship with the land, creating community and simply adding beauty.

Lynne Serpe, a gardener from Astoria, Queens, told the panel, “At our garden, we grow food, flowers, friendship, and fun. And those are things worth making permanent.”

When the hearing began at 11:15 a.m., there was still a considerable line outside of the building, snaking down West 25th Street. However, despite the abundance of empty seats, the last group of audience members were not permitted upstairs until 12:30 p.m. This proved to be a constant theme as names were called, but the speakers were unable to testify because they had not yet gained admittance.

When Harry Bubbins, a gardener from Brook Park in the Bronx, was called to speak, he went forward with about three other gardeners and demanded that the people waiting in line outside be admitted into the hearing. The panel insisted that people were being allowed in as space was made available in compliance with the fire code capacity of 299. In the brief ruckus that ensued, Bubbins led a group of about 15 audience members outside to be with the crowd that had yet to be allowed upstairs.

“This hearing was a distraction. These rules are a distraction,” Bubbins told The Indypendent. “What we need is legislation to keep all gardens permanent. They [the city] will have to respond to the overwhelming demand for permanent gardens that now exists.”

To get involved or to learn more, join NYCCGC for a public meeting on Thurs., Aug. 19 at the Garden of Happiness from 6 to 8 p.m. The garden is located on Prospect Avenue between East 181st and East 182nd Street in the Bronx.

You may also join gardeners from across the city on Saturday, August 21st at 4 p.m. at Generation X Garden, located on East 4th Street between Avenue B and Avenue C, for a barbecue, celebration and teach-in.

The Emergency Committee went first, with a menacing spot that asked, “Does congressman Joe Sestak understand Israel is America’s ally?” J Street’s defensive response was telling. “In Congress, Sestak consistently votes to aid Israel,” the group informed Pennsylvanians.

The ad, needless to say, didn’t bother to question why the U.S. should be spending so much money on Israel in the first place. So much for challenging the assumptions of the pro-Israel establishment.

J Street, which launched in April 2008 to great fanfare under the helm of Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, was founded in part to “ensure a broad debate on Israel and the Middle East in national politics and the American Jewish community.” That debate has largely been dominated by unquestioning supporters of Israel and all its actions.

But despite the hysterical rhetoric from the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Commentary magazine, who like to claim that J Street is agitating for radical policy change, the new group has done little to broaden the constricted U.S. debate over Israel/Palestine.

Instead, J Street has largely given a liberal cover to more right-wing groups like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose line seems to be one of supporting Israel no matter what.

The Goldstone report, a landmark U.N. document that accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the 2008-09 Israeli assault on Gaza, and the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to pressure Israel to live up to its obligations under international law, are two areas where the J Street line has differed little from AIPAC.

The debate over the Goldstone report was an early indicator of things to come for J Street. When a largely fact-free congressional resolution denouncing the report was about to pass, J Street, which aired some concerns about the resolution and urged Congress to modify it, still ultimately agreed with the thrust of it: “J Street supports passage of a resolution by the U.S. Congress calling for the United States to oppose and work actively to defeat one-sided and biased action in the United Nations when it comes to Israel and the Goldstone Report.” That statement was similar to AIPAC’s position on the report, who called it “deeply flawed” and “rigged.”

J Street’s acquiescence to the establishment line on Israel/Palestine reached its zenith during the University of California at Berkeley debate in March/April 2010 over a student effort to divest from two companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. When the president of the student government at Berkeley vetoed the measure, which was passed earlier by an overwhelming margin, J Street joined AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the local Israeli consul general in pressuring the student government. J Street joined a wide coalition of groups such as the David Project and the Jewish National Fund that authored a letter labeling the divestment measure as “misleading” and “dishonest.” (J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has since said that the group won’t be signing on to similar letters with “organizations like that in group settings again.”) Their effort worked — a measure to override the veto failed by just one vote.

This timidity has earned J Street harsh criticism from the left. An Israeli-authored letter circulated on an activist listserv called on the group to “stop trying to gain political capital at the expense of dedicated peace activists.”

It is also creating a vacuum that older, more left-leaning groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are poised to fill. This third pole, which has emerged underneath the surface, is challenging the pro-Israel lobby’s hold on the debate. The future battle, especially in the Jewish-American community, will not be J Street vs. AIPAC, but rather the pro-Israel lobby vs. critical Jewish groups who are questioning the desirability of the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.”

The divestment debate at Berkeley and the criticism of J Street is a prominent example of the new battle that is coming to a head within the Jewish community over Israel/Palestine and the Palestinian-led call to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. The BDS movement started in 2005, and calls on global civil society to use the tactics of boycotting, divesting and sanctioning Israel until it adheres to its obligations under international law. The movement demands that Israel withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, implement equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel and recognize the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their descendants who fled or were expelled from Palestine during the 1947-49 Israeli-Arab War.

The debate over BDS is heating up. Recently, Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief at Slate, called the BDS movement “a weapon designed not to bring peace but to undermine [Israel]” and “hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism.” The smearing of the BDS movement as anti-Semitic, though, is increasingly losing credibility, especially because groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and others are backing aspects of the movement. In its latest issue, Tikkun magazine published a debate on BDS between Ben-Ami, Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rebecca Vilkomerson and others, an indication of the growing importance of the movement.

During the Tikkun debate, Ben-Ami argued that those opposed to the Israeli occupation should not engage in BDS tactics that alienate Israelis and should instead “double down on our movement to try to get particularly President Obama to be deeply and actively engaged to outline what a solution is.” But with peace talks at a standstill, and President Obama averse to pressuring Israel, the BDS movement will only gain steam — with or without J Street on board.

The momentum was evident just a few months ago, after the Israeli Navy raided an aid flotilla on its way to Gaza and killed nine people, when a wave of music acts honored the cultural boycott, and garnered attention from major media outlets like the Associated Press and CNN.

While it’s hard to predict when mainstream discourse will allow candid discussion about Israel/Palestine, cracks in the wall are appearing, and they’re only going to get bigger.

This article originally appeared on Salon.com.

Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner addresses a press conference preceding the August 5 fundraiser for the U.S. boat to Gaza. PHOTO: ELLEN DAVIDSON

The capacity crowd on the fundraising boat ride August 5 heard from speakers including journalists Chris Hedges and Max Ajl, retired U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright, singer/songwriter Gaida, lawyer and activist Lamis Deek, and Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi.

Former New York Times Mideast correspondent Hedges began his remarks by addressing any possible Israeli spies in the crowd: “I would like to remind them that it is they who hide in darkness. It is we who stand in the light. It is they who deceive. It is we who openly proclaim our compassion and demand justice for those who suffer in Gaza. We are not afraid to name our names. We are not afraid to name our beliefs. And we know something you perhaps sense with a kind of dread. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government.

Singer/songwriter Gaida at a fundraiser for the U.S. boat to Gaza August 5. PHOTO: ELLEN DAVIDSON

Hedges concluded: “Let me close tonight with one last name. Let me name those who send these tanks and fighter jets to bomb the concrete hovels in Gaza with families crouching, helpless, inside, let me name those who deny children the right to a childhood and the sick a right to care, those who torture, those who carry out assassinations in hotel rooms in Dubai and on the streets of Gaza City, those who deny the hungry food, the oppressed justice and foul the truth with official propaganda and state lies. Let me call them, not by their honorific titles and positions of power, but by the name they have earned for themselves by draining the blood of the innocent into the sands of Gaza. Let me name them for who they are: terrorists.”

For more information or to contribute toward the U.S. boat to Gaza, go to ustogaza.org.

Activists prepare to board a fundraising boat ride in New York Harbor August 5. PHOTO: ELLEN DAVIDSON