[News] Stop the censorship! Restore the Urban Dreams website!

[Anti-Imperialist News]

    Stop the censorship! Restore the Urban Dreams website!
    <http://sfbayview.com/2014/stop-the-censorship-restore-the-urban-dreams-website/>

May 28, 2014*
http://sfbayview.com/2014/stop-the-censorship-restore-the-urban-dreams-website/*

Open letter to Oakland School Board members:

Members of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, including (among 
others) the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), BART 
workers and AC Transit bus drivers, were appalled to hear that the 
Oakland Unified School District succumbed to pressure from the Fraternal 
Order of Police (FOP) and the right-wing Fox News by shutting down the 
educational Urban Dreams website, which includes material on Mumia 
Abu-Jamal and Martin Luther King Jr.

In effect, academic freedom was pushed to a back seat of the bus. This 
censorship is wrong. The Urban Dreams website must be restored 
immediately for all to freely visit and learn.

If not, OUSD administration has joined in with the FOP's vendetta 
against Mumia Abu-Jamal -- the target of the FOP-Fox News smears was a 
lesson plan by Oakland teacher Craig Gordon asking students to compare 
the media's wall of silence on Martin Luther King's militant 
anti-corporate, anti-war campaigning with its wall of silence on Mumia's 
writings.

To take that lesson plan down, OUSD took down the entire Urban Dreams 
website, a website containing many rich and evocative teacher-developed 
lessons, of which Gordon's is one. Several of these lesson plans were 
still in active use by teachers in Oakland and elsewhere.


      In effect, academic freedom was pushed to a back seat of the bus.
      This censorship is wrong. The Urban Dreams website must be
      restored immediately for all to freely visit and learn.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black journalist called the "voice of the voiceless," 
was framed for the murder of a Philadelphia policeman over 30 years ago 
and sentenced to death. Only recently was this innocent man removed from 
death row.

Fifteen years ago, in the best tradition of the abolitionists, Oakland 
teachers initiated a teach-in on the plight of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the 
vestige of slavery, the death penalty. Indeed, Craig Gordon was one of 
the organizers of that teach-in.

Following that stellar example in 1999, striking school teachers in Rio 
de Janeiro, Brazil, demanded his release from prison. As well, longshore 
workers shutdown all West Coast ports and led a march of 25,000 strong 
in San Francisco calling for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Workers in the Bay Area, especially here in Oakland, have a long and 
proud tradition of defending Black victims of the racist state 
oppression -- from Martin Luther King Jr. to Angela Davis to Huey Newton 
to Oscar Grant. Oakland teachers have an obligation to teach that 
history and students have a right to learn from that history.


      Oakland teachers have an obligation to teach that history and
      students have a right to learn from that history.

Stop the censorship! Restore the Urban Dreams website!

/Contact Jack Heyman, chair of the Transport Workers Solidarity 
Committee, at //TransportSolidarity at yahoo.com/ 
<mailto:TransportSolidarity at yahoo.com>/. /

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20140529/04c87a93/attachment.htm>