Stories by Katherine Lemons
To shore up the sagging number of young voters, groups like YouthVote2000, a coalition of over 60 organizations, are reaching out to politically saavy but disconnected young people, trying to educate them and get them to the polls. Can they build on the momentum of the youth activism of Seattle, A16 and D2KLA?
Posted on Aug 28, 2000
When 3,000 activists met at noon in Pershing Square to protest police brutality, the death penalty and the national growth in incarcerations, onlookers feared the worst. In the end, the first successful unplanned and un-permitted march had taken place.
Posted on Aug 17, 2000
During Day Two of the Shadow Convention, the Drug War was compared to a slave ship -- its routes moving poor Blacks and Latinos between their urban communities and upstate prisons, by way of tough police squads and unforgiving judicial systems. A tour of South Central LA rammed the point home.
Posted on Aug 16, 2000
Bewildered tourists and inconvenienced residents pushed their way through the crowd of two hundred protesters gathered outside the Gap on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica yesterday afternoon. The store was the site of a Global Exchange rally cum beach party, patrolled by police hovering above in noisy choppers.
Posted on Aug 14, 2000
George W. Bush has used his Governorship to protect certain corporations from costly and embarrassing class action lawsuits, while phony "grassroots" groups funneled money from those same tobacco, chemical, insurance and oil giants into Bush's campaign coffers. And the underhanded deals haven't stopped at the Texas border.
Posted on Aug 10, 2000
On the eve of the Republican National Convention a group of musical activists called SLAM! will be holding a concert and multimedia extravaganza -- including projections of huge images on the city's highest buildings -- to promote one of the Republican party's despised opponents: gun control.
Posted on Jul 27, 2000
Dr. Laura, host of America's most popular radio show, has a contract to launch a television show in September. But her anti-gay rhetoric has spurred a coalition of activists into a (somewhat successful) crusade to shut the show down.
Posted on Jul 6, 2000
For a new generation of student activists and spiritual searchers, '60s guru Baba Ram Dass is an icon of an era past, an elder who can teach them how to merge social activism with spirituality. In a forum at Stanford University, Baba Ram Dass proved that -- as the title of his new book proclaims -- he is "Still Here."
Posted on May 30, 2000
