Artist(s) Needed for Murals at African Community Organizing Center

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Have Artistic Skills? Want to contribute towards self-determination by and for the African Community? Donate your skills to the Oakland Freedom Summer Project!

The murals on the front of the Uhuru House, East Oakland community center, need revitalizing! These murals present the likenesses of great African Internationalists and revolutionaries of the past and present including Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Huey P Newton and Chairman Omali Yeshitela.

WHAT IS THE OAKLAND FREEDOM SUMMER PROJECT?
The Uhuru Movement calls on students, artists, computer technicians, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, health care workers, teachers, young people and workers in general of all ages to come and participate in the Oakland Freedom Summer Project (OFSP) 2012, scheduled from July 9 to July 29.

The Summer Project will initiate a serious renovation of the Uhuru House (7911 Mac Arthur Blvd), revitalizing this popular community center for meetings, events and programs as well as preparing it for the future installation of Uhuru Jiko, a commercial grade community kitchen that will stimulate economic development in the African community. Uhuru Jiko will be a place where our people can come to expand or start food businesses, on a sliding scale. It will also offer hands-on nutrition, cooking and small business classes.

Through the All African People’s Development Empowerment Project, the Summer Project will launch community gardens in the East Oakland area. The first of which will be established in the backyard of the Uhuru House.

Future programs for political and economic self-determination will include a clothing drive, multi-media and street journalism classes to expose the U.S. government’s policy of police containment of the black community, martial arts training and basic training on how to be an effective grassroots organizer.

The conditions for the African community in Oakland have gotten worse since the 1960s

The present day conditions are evidence of this:

• One in five families in Oakland lives on $15,000 a year.

• 40% of Oakland’s billion dollar annual budget is spent on police, while only half of one percent is spent on economic development.

• In 2007, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) murdered five people. In 2008, the OPD murdered seven people. The State has failed to punish a single officer who has shot someone.

According to a 2008 report by the Alameda County Health Department, an African born in West Oakland, as compared to a white child born in the Oakland hills:

• Will live 15 years less.

• Is one and a half times more likely to be born premature with a low birth rate.

• Is seven times more likely to born into poverty.

• As an adult, will be five times more likely to be hospitalized with diabetes, twice as likely to die of heart disease, three times more likely to die of a stroke and twice as likely to die of cancer.