A group of homeless advocates held an educational meeting for occupy activists yesterday concerning Skid Row and the plight of the homeless.
It ended in an appeal to occupy.
Yesterday’s meeting, which was held on Towne Avenue south of Fourth Street, was a major step for this subset of Occupy LA, which brought together approximately 80 activists.
Kwazi Nkrumah put out the call to start occupying Skid Row. An organizer for Occupy the Hood and the MLK Coalition, Nkrumah, along with Occupy LA, has been working to keep homeowners from being foreclosed upon.
Kwazi Nkrumah speaks to activists about occupying Skid Row. (Dan Bluemel / LA Activist)
Speaking to the crowd, Nkrumah said that society’s elites are “at war on anybody who doesn’t control capital.” He spoke of people like 63-year-old Van Nuys resident Bertha Herrera who is losing her home to foreclosure.
According to Herrera, who spoke with Inside-Out News about her eviction, she was told she could qualify for a loan modification if she missed three mortgage payments. However, after missing the three payments, her mortgage provider hit her with fees, bringing her in arrears to a sum of $6,000. Because she missed the payments, the bank began the foreclosure process.
“This is the next step,” said Nkrumah. “We have got to occupy and go to battle with the elderly, the women, the poor, with those being dispossessed through out our society. We are that army, and it is time for us to mobilize now to … battle with this system until we put a stop to these outrages.”
Nkrumah said that activists must work to together to “bring the harassment of people here on Skid Row to an end.” To that he added, he would pitch a tent on Skid Row twice a month “in support of their human rights.”
“And instead of a one-nighter, which happened last night, I want to challenge the rest of our army to get your asses down here at least one night a month until we have changed the situation down here,” he said. “Likewise, make it the thing for people to do, to show up when we put up an alert that a family is being put out of their home.”
Organizers used street theater — depicting typical encounters the homeless have with police — to educate activists of alleged injustices and violations of civil rights.
Gen. Dogon, an organizer for the LA Community Action Network, or LA CAN, spoke about the Safer Cities Initiative, which is the city’s strategy for policing Skid Row. The plan was to include an increase in social services for the poor. However, according to LA CAN’s Skid Row reader “Downtown Blues,” what the homeless got instead “was the addition of fifty patrol officers, about 25-30 special narcotics officers, and additional mounted police assigned to a fifty square block area.”
Dogon said city and business leaders hatched plans to redevelop downtown, which did not include the poor and homeless, most of whom are black. The Safer Cities Initiative, or SCI, made Skid Row one of the most policed areas in the country, according to Dogon.
“The only other place where they had more pigs than Skid Row was in Baghdad, and those were military soldiers on the war path,” he said. “We were under siege.”
Gen. Dogon talks about the Safer Cities Initiative and its effects on the Skid Row community. (Dan Bluemel / LA Activist)
Dogon said when developers saw they could get $1,500 to $5,000 a month for loft space they became interested in removing the indigent who were paying much less. But community organizers fought back and won protections for low-income housing.
“They tried by any means necessary to evict us,” he said. “It was organizers from this community that stood up and fought back.”
However, said Dogon, after that victory, SCI was launched.
“The first year of SCI policing, they arrested over 18,000 people,” he said. “How the hell do you arrest 18,000 people in a community of only 13,000? By repeatedly targeting them.”
According to Dogon, residents again fought back and formed watch groups to monitor police activities in order to keep law enforcement accountable for civil rights violations.
“But right now today, we are still fighting back, and that’s how we combine with Occupy LA, the 99 percent,” he said. “It is the one percent that is doing the development over here and pushing us out. [Gentrification] is a big-ass beast, a monster, that is coming through and eating up poor folks.”
Occupy Skid Row began to take root after the city’s shut down of Occupy LA’s sit-demonstration. It has conducted small acts of civil disobedience while slowly gaining momentum.
According to Ruth Fowler, a veteran of Occupy LA, yesterday’s meeting had been on people’s minds for four months and was the first general assembly with Occupy Skid Row, Occupy the Hood and Occupy LA.
“It is really important that we don’t forget about the poorest part of the community and concentrate on these bigger class issues,” she said.