Editor’s note: The Aug. 20 brutalizing of longtime KPFA programmer Nadra Foster by police who were called to KPFA by station and network management has the Black community and all justice seekers seething. How could managers, including two Black women, of the radio station that proudly considers itself the most progressive in Northern California not know the dangers of calling the police on a young Black person? As KPFA programmer Weyland Southon exclaimed on the Block Report that broke the story on Flashpoints the next day, “Situations like this get us killed.”
The first priority now is for all charges against Nadra to be dropped and for KPFA to make her whole. The cost of justice isn’t cheap and should inspire some deep soul searching by KPFA and Pacifica management.
Rumors that Nadra had been “banned” because a white programmer said she felt “threatened” by this young Black woman who’d been trained at KPFA and has worked there as unpaid staff for over a decade are not unprecedented. Other young Blacks in recent years have been banned and locked out of KPFA merely because white programmers complained they felt threatened by the young people’s presence. Racism runs deep at KPFA.
Reparations must include revising KPFA’s program schedule to include a prime time public affairs show covering African American news and views. The one hour a week allocated to the esteemed show Africa Today is nowhere near enough time to cover the far flung African Diaspora.
News from the Black community inevitably features police terrorism because it is perpetrated every day in every hood in the U.S. That’s the “War at Home” – hidden in plain sight because powerful media, including KPFA with its 59,000 watts reaching a third of California, refuse to recognize and report on it.
The fact that the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, which does report the news from Black communities across the country, is not currently in print makes coverage of that news by KPFA imperative. KPFA’s signal reaches most of the 100,000 people who used to read the printed Bay View every week – the majority unable to read it on the web because they can’t afford internet access or are locked behind enemy lines.
Be sure to attend and speak out at the town hall meeting Sunday, Sept. 7, 3 p.m., at the Black New World, 836 Pine St., West Oakland. Demand as reparations a prime time program on KPFA that’s of, for and by the Black community – a show that covers police terrorism unflinchingly so that listeners and KPFA and Pacifica management know the terrible consequences of calling the police on a young Black person. KPFA, where the memory of the Black Panther Party is revered, must remember that the purpose of the party was to defend the Black community against police terrorism!
The journalist best known for his coverage of police terrorism and other life and death Black news is POCC Minister of Information and Bay View Associate Editor JR, who wrote the story that follows and broke the story of the attack on his colleague at KPFA, Nadra Foster. He asked that word of another tragedy suffered by the Black community be included in this message to emphasize the unbreakable ties that bind KPFA to the Black community:
A member of the Sideshow collective whose program is broadcast on KPFA every last Friday at midnight, August “Fef Mitti” McCoy, was murdered in Vallejo on Saturday night. His funeral will be Friday, Sept. 5, 11 a.m., at Wilson & Kratzer Mortuary, 455 24th St. in Richmond. Please pay your respects by attending or by sending your condolences to the family via MOI JR at
blockreportradio@gmail.com.
Meanwhile, watch for the impending relaunch of a redesigned website for the Bay View newspaper at
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