Occupy the Hood Visits Occupy Harlem

Occupy Harlem General Assembly November 9, 2011

National Day of Action November 17

This is Sumumba from OWS (OUTREACH), below are some guides for November 17th day of action....if you have any question please call me at 646-778-6766.

On November 17, 3 pm, the National DAY OF ACTION, people will gather at subway hubs in all boroughs and head together to Foley Square. We need peopleto bottomline each of these hubs!

In all five boroughs, dozens of people at 8 main transport hubs will gather at 3:00 pm to listen to a singular story from one of our hardest-hit and most inspirational neighbors. Then they will lead their neighbors to join tens of thousands as we reclaim our democracy! They will take their own stories to the trains, using the "People's Mic". They will rise up from the underground to join thousands of others gathered in the light of day, at Foley Square, just across from City Hall.

How are they going to tell their story? And how will they get from point A to point B? Maybe you'd like to make that happen!

There will be 3 people bottomlining each hub - a contact at a local organization, and two people from OWS. The OWS bottomliners will do the following:

*Pick up flyers (and if possible a little food from Kitchen) downtown, to distribute at 3:00 and on the subway.

*Show up at 2:00 and greet the main storyteller of the day. Give them an introduction to using the 'People's Mic' - i.e. only use 4 words at a time, wait for people to finish echoing before starting the next phrase, etc.

*At 3:00, after those gathered hear this person's story, give people gathered a brief intro to using the People's Mic on the train.

*Ask people if they have stories to tell on the trains. If not, give them some paper to write on (maybe just the backs of the flyers), and take 15 minutes to jot some ideas.

*Walk people over to the trains, and assure that the area you leave behind is clean.

Main Hubs:

Bronx: Fordham Rd; and 3rd Ave/138thBrooklyn: Broadway Junction; and Borough HallQueens: Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave; and Jamaica Center Parsons Archer Manhattan: 125th St; and Union SquareStaten Island: St George/Staten Island Ferry

*Make sure everyone gets on and off the train together. Make sure flyers are handed out on the train-ride there. Assure that the People's Mic is working on the train by designating a human mic at each end of the train.

*Lead people off the train to the march at Foley Square.

That's it, plain and simple!

Occupy Harlem Author Sues Disney for Theft of Nun Story

Image from Sister Act The Musical in New York.

Image: Jeff Christensen/AP/Press Association Images

IT TURNS OUT Sister Act may have been based on a true story.
Remember that film starring Whoopi Goldberg about a pretend nun in Harlem whose former life involved a mobster boyfriend and a Las Vegas singing career?  Just this week, a nun has claimed that the movie is actually based on her 1987 autobiography, reports the Hollywood Reporter.


Nearly 20 years after the film Sister Act premiered in cinemas across the world, Delois Blakely has decided to sue Walt Disney Co. and Sony Pictures for basically stealing her book and using it as inspiration for the film.
After the autobiography was published, the Harlem nun brought it to a bunch of producers in the hopes of seeing her life transformed for the silver screen. Describing herself as a “young, Black, singing nun serving the street people and youths of Harlem”, she filed suit stating she first pitched the idea to Tri-Star Pictures.  According to Business Insider, Tri-Star Pictures expressed interest in the rights. However, Scott Rudin then took the project to Disney and the film was made without the nun’s involvement.


As far as we can tell, there was no mention of a proposal for Sister Act 2 in her lawsuit.  However, there are some similarities other than the black, singing nun in Harlem description. Goldberg’s character in Sister Act was called Deloris – just one letter off Delois…hmmm.
She is kind of bad-ass as well - currently, she is heading up the Occupy Harlem protests and has been named the community mayor of the borough.  Despite those facts, we must question whether the woman who was profiled in the New York Times as Harlem’s Queen Mother in 2003 had a murderous (and married) boyfriend or such a love-hate relationship with a mother superior (that bares a resemblence to Maggie Smith).
Here at TheJournal.ie, we also doubt that Blakely ever did this:

OCCUPY HARLEM CAMPAIGN “on the move”

Next Working Groups Meeting: Friday, Nov. 11th 2011 -

St. Mary’s Church

521 W. 126th St.

(between Amsterdam Ave. & Old Broadway)

6 PM to 8 PM.

Requested Donation for the church ….

Directions: #1 Broadway Local to 125th or

A to 125th/Walk five blocks west to Amsterdam Avenue.

Telephone: 646-812-5188


  Special Reports:
Research report: 477 West 142nd Street
 Columbia University Expansion: a gentrification scheme of ethnic cleansing in West Harlem:

The Payoff: a corrupt West Harlem Local Development Corporation: Where is the Community Benefits Money for the West Harlem community? Is it the latest thief by Black elected officials led by Congressman Charles Rangel?
Columbia University and the Banks: CU President Lee Bollinger, chair of the Board of Directors, the New York Federal Reserve Bank. OCCUPY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY!
Wall Street swallows Carver Federal Savings, the oldest Black run Bank for a measly 55 million dollars.

November 17th Shutting Down Wall  Street


This is a working meeting for adopted proposals to set up working groups: Housing, Media,  and other working committees folks would like to work on or introduce.

1) For a Housing Working Group General Assembly Discussion
 

A) Unanimous vote for Occupy Harlem to  adopt as its campaign the preservation of 477 West 142nd Street HDFC as a low income home ownership community asset. To that end the working group agreed to conduct research on the building; meeting with all shareholders; issue public statement on the preservation of  477 West 142nd HDFC  and all HDFC as low income home ownership community asset; hold a press conference;  


 2)  Convene a People’s Public Hearing on Gentrification in Harlem: Evictions, Predatory Landlords, Predatory Harassment, Foreclosures,

3) Adopted policy statement on gentrification and ethnic cleansing including predatory investors and predatory harassing.

4) Sponsor teach-in - including films: (a) Boom, the Sound of Eviction  (b) The Rezoning of 125th Street  (c) The Vanishing City

5) Campaign for preservation of all low-income housing housing stock and the creation of more.

6) Set up Eviction Alert


7) Set up Legal Support 

Media Working Group: immediate priority setting up website Setting up liaison  reps with working committees of OWS i.e. People of Color, Outreach, Direct Action, Arts & Culture, 

General Coordinating Working Group to execute adopted proposal, it is not a permanent working group: 

Nellie, Rivik, Tony, David, Rebecca, Laura, Jeanette, Dr. Bhya, Sabin

Harlem Poet at Wall Street Protest

Stop "Stop and Frisk"!

A new uncompromising movement against NYPD’s notorious Stop & Frisk program began yesterday as hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Harlem State Office Building to Harlem’s 28th precinct. At the station, Cornel West, author and Princeton professor, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Rev. Stephen Phelps, interim senior minister of Riverside Church, and dozens of others were arrested in an act of non-violent civil disobedience. Among those arrested and protesting was a large contingent from downtown’s Occupy Wall Street.

“We are here today to put our bodies on the line to stop this racist, immoral, illegitimate and unjust ‘new Jim Crow’ from the gateway of stop and frisk to the wholesale mass incarceration of Black and Brown people,” said Dix to the assembled marchers. “We are serious and we will continue until we Stop Stop & Frisk!” The crowd chanted, “Stop & Frisk don’t stop the crime, Stop & Frisk IS the crime,” as arrestees were carried to waiting police vans. A solidarity march to 33rd Precinct ensused, where arrestees were said to be held.

According to a New York Civil Liberties Union study, the NYPD is on pace to stop and frisk over 700,000 people in 2011, or more than 1,900 people each day. More than 85% of those stopped and frisked are Black or Latino, and more than 90% of them were doing nothing wrong when the police stopped them.

The action was organized in solidarity with #occupyharlem, which will begin on October 28th.

Occupy Harlem Campaign Launched

New York’s Harlem is in the process of occupying itself. "We need a radical transformation of the current status quo – the banks financing and controlling the political process, buying out politicians in both parties to protect the economic interest of the one percent.” The neighborhood that was once the nexus of Black political thought, and is now besieged by forces of gentrification, is making its own place in the national movement against corporate power. “Attendees eagerly came forward to propose a wide range of issues from the local to the international.”

by Donna Lamb

This article originally appeared in Black Star News.

“We must organize for our own economic and political defense.”

As Occupy Wall Street continues to galvanize America and numerous Occupy movements keep springing up in cities, towns and communities across the nation, it was only a matter of time before Harlem residents and activists took the bull by the horns and brought the initiative uptown.

On the evening of October 28, about 150 people, many of them born and raised in Harlem, attended the first Occupy Harlem general assembly, held at St. Philip's Church in Central Harlem. Nellie Bailey, who is with Harlem Fightback Against War at Home and Abroad as well as a member of the United National Antiwar Coalition, was a co-convener.

There were many proposals dealing with economics and jobs, including a request to endorse "Jobs for ALL," a massive public works and public service program to create 25 million new jobs at union wages, to be paid for by new taxes on the wealth and income of the rich, on financial transactions, and on corporate profits.

Two political proposals sought endorsement of the Occupy Congress campaign to occupy the local offices of members of Congress unless they sign a pledge to vote down any proposed cuts to working people's programs and for a congressional hearing in Washington, DC to address the second-class status of independent voters, which make up 41 percent of the electorate.

There were also important proposals regarding issues affecting Continental Africans, such as the Nuba Mountain peoples in southern Sudan, and people of African descent throughout the Diaspora, including Haiti.

“Participants proposed to occupy the local offices of members of Congress unless they sign a pledge to vote down any proposed cuts to working people's programs.”

"Occupy Harlem can only survive as a people's movement with the direct involvement of the 99 percent to affect change," Nellie Bailey said. "We need a radical transformation of the current status quo – the banks financing and controlling the political process, buying out politicians in both parties to protect the economic interest of the one percent. Poor and working class people in Harlem and throughout the country are suffering," she continued. "We aren't going to take it anymore. Occupy Wall Street is our blueprint."

Joining Bailey was Black Agenda Radio commentator Glen Ford. "We can't just wait for the people downtown in Occupy Wall Street to stand up for us. We must organize for our own economic and political defense," he said.

Added Larry Adams of the People's Organization for Progress, "We must take action because the recession in America is a full-blown depression for Black America."

Focusing attention on one of Harlem's grave concerns was guest speaker Carl Dix, national spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party. He stressed the urgent need to end the NYPD's "stop and frisk" policy that is harassing and humiliating countless innocent people.

Dix told of one Black young man who was stopped and frisked on his way to get some chicken. After the police officer found that the young man had no record, instead of just releasing him, the officer told him to do the chicken noodle soup dance and then he would let him go. "I don't want to live in a country where our Black young men are treated like that," declared Dix. "It is a burning injustice, and we want to tap into a supportive mood around resisting it and to link in with people who are trying to deal with it on other levels."

“We recognize the need of the Harlem community to freely express itself.”

The microphone was opened to all, and attendees eagerly came forward to propose a wide range of issues from the local to the international that they thought should be supported or endorsed by Occupy Harlem.

For instance, at the local level there were proposals to support the continued opposition to the planned 50-year expansion of Columbia University that threatens to take over Harlem; to endorse the struggle against the privatization of Harlem's public housing; and to fight the closing of the Harlem post office, which will devastate many Harlemites who don't have bank accounts and must rely on postal money orders to pay their bills. There was also a proposal to support Harlem's community gardens that provide food, making the community less dependent on outside sources.

Along with the many issues proposed, there was robust discussion regarding procedures and a number of other items. Said Bailey: "As we feel our way in these uncharted waters, we recognize the need of the Harlem community to freely express itself. That is what we tried to do tonight instead of going by a format that others may use in their Occupy movements. As we move forward, we will work these issues out through a democratic and transparent process."

At its next general assembly Occupy Harlem will begin considering the proposals voiced at this first meeting and organizing working committees, a crucial step forward to sustain and coalesce the movement.

For further information call (646) 812-5188 or email OccupyHarlemgeneralassembly@gmail.com.