World News Report Today

World News Report Today August 27th, 2020! Radical parents Her family’s political legacy, though, stretches further back, to India, where her grandfather was active in the fight to gain independence from British colonial rule and her grandmother walked the streets with a bullhorn, telling poor women how to access birth control. “Both of my grandparents impressed upon me their conviction that we each have the capacity and the responsibility to work for a better and more just society,” Harris writes in her 2009 book, Smart on Crime.[1] “I was born,” Kamala Harris declares, “as a daughter of the civil rights movement.” The year was 1964. Donald Harris, Kamala’s father, had come from Jamaica to pursue a doctorate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley; Shyamala Gopalan, her mother, had come from India to do doctoral work in endocrinology. They met in one of the many small activist study groups then forming off campus, and they kept protesting as Berkeley became ground zero for pretty much every left-wing movement of the 1960s and 1970s. “My sister, Maya, and I, we joke that we grew up surrounded by a bunch of adults who spent full time marching and shouting for this thing called ‘justice,’” Harris said Berkeley Despite its revolutionary reputation, Berkeley wasn’t always a radical place. In the 1950s, the city was ruled by Republicans; its population was only 12 percent black. Over the next decade, that changed dramatically because of people like Harris’s parents. It was also where she would meet her husband. Unlike Shyamala, Donald Harris didn’t come from a political background. But he too had experienced colonial oppression firsthand — Donald was a young man when Jamaica gained independence from Britain in 1962 — and in his academic work he explored how Marxist economics could both explain and revive struggling Third World economies.[2] Afro-American Association At the start of the 1960s, however, Donald Harris’s search for “alternative approaches” would bear more fruit off campus than on, where fewer than a hundred of Berkeley’s 20,000 students were black. United by a sense of isolation and displacement, a dozen of them began to gather at the Harmon Street house of Mary Lewis, an undergraduate from Detroit. Shyamala and Donald soon joined the group; Lewis eventually became Shyamala’s “closest confidante” and Kamala’s godmother, according to “The Truths We Hold.” “I was awed by them,” says early member Aubrey LaBrie, whom Kamala eventually came to know as “Uncle Aubrey.” (Lewis was “Aunt Mary.”) “They were intimidatingly smart. They had a determined kind of posture about them.” Every Sunday, Lewis would host student intellectuals as they “socialized and talked politics incessantly,” writes Donna Jean Murch in “Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.” “Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were the heroes of some of us,” Labrie recalls. “We would talk about Black Muslims, the liberation movements going on in Africa, everything.” They would also read. As both Murch and Harris note in their books, the initial syllabus was full of “classic black history texts” such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” Carter G. Woodson’s “The Miseducation of the Negro” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” But it was the more contentious readings — the ones Harris doesn’t mention — that proved most influential: E. David Cronon’s “Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey,” which celebrated Garvey’s pioneering emphasis on racial pride and self-determination; Melville J. Herskovits’s “The Myth of the Negro Past,” which championed pan-Africanism in culture and religion; E. Franklin Frazier’s “Black Bourgeoisie,” which criticized a compliant black middle class. As they discussed and debated these books, Murch writes, the study group gradually developed “its own antiassimilationist ideology”: “a reinvigorated, anticolonial Black nationalism,” more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1963, the organization, now called the Afro-American Association, had quadrupled in size; guest speakers included Fannie Lou Hamer, LeRoi Jones and Maya Angelou. The AAA’s de facto leader, a Berkeley law student named Donald Warden, would go on to mentor Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two young AAA members from Oakland; Newton and Seale would, in turn, co-found the Black Panther Party in 1966. Please see the information here… https://keywiki.org/Shyamala_Gopalan