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In the five years since the murder of George Floyd, where does the movement against racist police violence stand, locally and nationally? Please join us for this Sunday’s panel with two renowned guests, Steve Martinot and Walter Riley.
Steve Martinot has been a human rights activist for most of his life, as union organizer, community organizer, and anti-war organizer, including Latin America solidarity work. He has worked as a machinist and truck driver, and taught literature and cultural studies at the University of Colorado and San Francisco State University. His latest book is “Police Brutality: A Study of Police Culture in the US”. Some of his previous books, published by Temple University Press, include, “The Machinery of Whiteness,”, “The Rule of Racialization” and “Forms in the Abyss: a philosophical bridge between Sartre and Derrida.” He l ives in Berkeley and has led seminars on the structures of racialization in the US, and was active in a neighborhood assembly and with participatory budgeting.
Walter Riley is a renown civil rights attorney and organizer. Walter grew up in Jim Crow North Carolina; first being active in the NAACP there around desegregation and voter registration campaigns, then a leader in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), in the era of the freedom rides and their strategy of mass direct action.
Walter moved to the Bay Area in 1965, attending SF State and was very involved in the 1968 strike there around ethnic studies a nd a Black Student Union, and was afterwards, working in support of a Black Caucus amongst SF Muni bus drivers. He was also involved with the Black Panther Party and other community political groupings, and has been active in fighting the racist system and violent police culture here ever since. For example, Walter was attorney for Black Livers Matters protestors.
He has also received awards for his legal work from the California Black Legal Association and the National Lawyers Guild. He is a founding member of the Coalition for Police Accountability, as well as the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund and has been active lately in the fight against removing Pamela Price as County DA and against the corporate political offensive in Oakland.