i'm not sure if this is the exact right area for this posting, please move if need be. Asante sana! The short documentary on you tube listed at the end of the posting is very instructive.
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Greetings:
The May edition of Mother Jones Magazine features an article on Take Back the Land and our Take Back the Housing campaign.
You can find the article at:
Foreclosure Nation: Squatters or Pioneers? (http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2008/05/foreclosure-nation-squatters-or-pioneers.html)
The piece describes our campaign of identifying vacant government owned or foreclosed homes and moving families into those locations, providing housing for otherwise homeless families. Here are the opening paragraphs:
"*Mamyrah Prosper* steps gingerly over ankle-high grass strewn with plastic bags and empty soda bottles in the yard of a vacant redbrick house in Miami's Liberty City. She peers through a gap in a boarded-up window. "It looks in good shape," she says. "I mean, the walls aren't falling down. This is definitely one of our stronger options."
Prosper means that if the place checks out, she and her colleagues from Take Back the Land, a local group that advocates for affordable housing, will break in, change the locks, paint and clean, innovate a way to connect water and electricity, and then move a homeless family into the house. The criminal laws they'll violate in the process range from trespassing to breaking and entering (even burglary, if the police get ambitious), which requires the organization to keep a pro bono lawyer on standby.
"We call it 'liberating the housing,'" says Take Back the Land's cofounder Max Rameau..."
Remember, you can get a copy of the book about Umoja Village entitled "Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown" at niapress.niainteractive.com , at Amazon.com or at Books and Books bookstore in Coral Gables.
Foreclosure Nation: Squatters or Pioneers? (http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2008/05/foreclosure-nation-squatters-or-pioneers.html)
forward,
Max Rameau
Take Back the Land
a project of the Center for Pan-Kmtyw Development
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i just wanted to be sure to include more info on this courageous activist group, in case you are unfamiliar. There is an excellent, excellent very brief documentary at YouTube - Umoja Village (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiY1JcCSEyI), it is mandatory viewing if you truly seek to understand the history of the article. There are also even briefer companion videos which show where the police came in and literally cut-up each of the tents and destroyed the occupants' belongings.
Updated info on the campaign is at takebacktheland (http://takebacktheland.blogspot.com/)!
Please check this info out and support however you are able! Asante sana!
Nattyreb! You are BlackNificent with this contribution!
It is BlackTastic to hear that this courageous organization is doing this work.
Obadele
Asante sana, Bro., but looks like i messed up posting the video, i definitely have no clue what i'm doing in that area. Can you or somebody else please fix it up for me? i really need to learn how to do these things myself, i've been asking people to help me do these things for far too long now and i know way better than to be like that!
BlackSolutely, I'll hook it up for you!