Street Soldiers Radio

A riot at the Nation’s Capitol! A second impeachment! What’s going on? Youth voices speak out. Youth guests: Masiyah Edwards, Kymber Gastinell, Siyani Bell, Ahlaya Martin, Mario Goins, Malcolm Mobley, Jyairrah Martin and Reggie Williams.

We catch up with Street Soldiers Demetra Jones who just won an Emmy Award for helping to to produce Black Women Own The Conversation on the Oprah Winfrey network. We also catch up with Donte Clark who is publishing his second book of poetry called Closed Caskets.

The Northern California Innocence Project and Fresh Lifelines for Youth visit Street Soldiers Radio. Guests: Lori Stone, Kelley Fleming, Zavion, Ronnie Carmona, Vinson Chew, Nick Jasso, Luca Fazal, Brandon Aguilar-Cisneros, Areli Ceja and Miracle Teo.

Street Soldiers Radio has touched and transformed many lives over the airwaves. We have some special guests who share their unique stories with you on our 28th Anniverary!

Honored Guests: Ann Marie, Marquex Boynton, Gary ‘GBiz’ Bizer, Corey Monroe, Jermaine King, Heather Starnes, Khalid Elahi, Leilani Ching, and Kino Carson.

Street Soldiers Radio catches up with Tamisha Walker as she helps to serve Antioch and Alive & Free alum, Michael Gibson, who highlights a new EMT program, City EMT, in San Francisco.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Joseph Marshall, host of Street Soldiers Radio on 106 KMEL, interviewed Tamisha Walker, Executive Director of Safe Return Project and newly elected City Council Member for Antioch, CA, about her campaign. It has been condensed and edited for clarity

Dr. Marshall:

We have a very, very special guest, Madam city council woman Tamisha Walker. First of all, congrats. Let’s just start there. Congratulations! You are now a city council person in Anitoch, California. Her first job as the president and director of the Safe Return Project in Richmond, California. Let’s just jump right into this new thing that she has taken on. And I got to ask you what made you want to run for political office?

Tamisha Walker:

I didn’t want to run and I think a lot of people don’t understand when I say it takes a lot for me to consider myself in that space, just because being on the front line is where I feel the most free and being in the community. And I hate red tape and bureaucracy. And when I’ve seen some change as possible for our people, I just do not like negotiating with politicians. It’s been a couple years now having conversations about my next level of leadership and activism and, you know, I thought about philanthropy, but then I was like, no. Then just started talking to a lot of women like Lateefah Simon and women who are really leading amazing organizations who ran for office to represent people who don’t have a voice in those places. And just having these deep conversations with other black women who ran and were successful and even women who ran and didn’t win. But what were like, the run was the win, just by inspiring other folks. So I pulled my papers and I filed the day before the deadline. 

I was, I actually was telling myself “I’m waiting for somebody progressive to emerge that I can support”. Richard, who is a good friend of mine, he always was like, why not YOU? I was like, nobody progressive is stepping up. And folks was like, cause you haven’t pulled your papers yet! I wasn’t going do it. And then I had a young man shot up the street from my house and nobody on the city council mentioned the shooting. And then I knew that I needed to do this. And so I knew it was going to be hard, but I knew I needed to do it.

Antioch has diversity now. There’s about a little over a 100,000 in population. What happened was that this city grew seemingly overnight and the local government has still hasn’t caught up. And so it’s been a big challenge for people of color, black people, poor people documented and undocumented families out here to really participate in democracy. I’m trying to figure it all out at this point. 

Dr. Marshall: 

What was the campaign strategies?

Tamisha Walker:

I feel so corny because I was saying “Walker: the Right Choice for Change”. I was doing fundraising events, I was saying “every dollar literally makes change”. It was fun and it was totally run by volunteers. I didn’t have any money. I had to take from my savings to start the campaign. I wouldn’t say I’m a no-name obviously, but you know, in the political world, you’re considered a no name if you run up against incumbents. We had all my friends from Richmond who were happy to support. We did the best we could. I got up there and knocked on doors and talked to people and asked people what they wanted. That was our thing, the right choice for change and moving forward. And I had some battles around my record, but they were small. I was a little concerned about the police associations, but I think just being in public about my history and my record over the last 10 years, it wasn’t like I had anything to hide. There were no rocks to overturn, so I could just be honest with the community. We did tea time with Tamisha every Friday at 10:00 AM, where we brought on partners and community members to talk about possible solutions and models. It was an amazing experience,

Dr. Marshall:

I called tonight’s show, A Street Soldier Becomes a City Council Member, a politician. We know you and your history, but maybe some of the folks watching don’t. Can you share the work you’ve been doing the past 10 years with the Safe Return Project? 

Tamisha Walker:

I came home from incarceration in the summer of 2009 and just kind of struggled a little bit, trying to get my bearings and re-entry and got a great opportunity to become a part of the Safe Return Project. Then for the last 10 years, as a co-founder I’ve been hyper-focused on ending mass incarceration and mass criminalization of black people and poor people and communities impacted by criminalization and justice, and also really having great opportunities to heal from past experience. We do participatory action research. We do policy advocacy, leadership development for frontline communities impacted by the criminal legal system. It’s amazing cause we’ve been able to do all of this work from Richmond, but we have been nationally recognized for some of our policies, for reducing barriers for folks. A lot of what we launched with the fellowship was leadership development with help from Alive & Free.

When I left my first training with you Doc, I was still sick. I couldn’t be out in the community, helping people when I needed to get well. And just really thinking about how do we do frontline leadership mobilization, organizing and healing and not healing being last but first. That’s been what we really hyper-focused on over the last 10 years. Just so you know Doc, my cousins still bring it up when I first came on your show with Safe Return years ago. I said publicly that I would tell on people if they came to my house and they committed a crime, I’m telling. I ain’t going back for nobody. I had to be honest with myself and my family. We partnered with Alive & Free and have been able to train our folks tothink about the decisions that we make and the opportunities that if you make the wrong decision, , it doesn’t just impact you. And so that has been a great thing for us. Safe Return Project turned 10 years old in October. And I raised my first 1 million dollars as a first time director!

Join Street Soldiers Radio as we celebrate Thanksgiving with our Alive & Free Consortium members from all over the world!

Guests: Jeri Marshall, Khalid Elahi, Llowellyn Syce,

Stefan Wilson, DeVitta Briscoe, Heather Starnes,

Tamiko Ferguson, Garey Thompson, Roderick Stevenson,

Diane Gray and Kristina Thompson.

Street Soldiers Radio has a family discussion centered around the 2020 Election, how we felt about the outcomes, and what we would like to see. Our Featured Guests include: Larry Chatmon, Adrienne Riley, Demetra Jones, Murrell Green, Malcolm Mobley, Nashira Talley, Leila Mariano, and Erika Morris

Street Soldiers Radio talks with Dr. Andre Campbell about Covid-19 and how communities of Color are impacted by the virus. 

Dr. Campbell Trauma Surgeon/Educator/General Surgeon,Trauma & Acute Care Surgeon, Professor of Surgery, at UC San Francisco, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center

Editor’s Note: Dr. Joseph Marshall, host of Street Soldiers Radio on 106 KMEL, interviewed Dr. Andre Campbell, an ICU doctor and trauma surgeon at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, about COVID-19 and how the virus is impacting the community. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Dr. Joseph Marshall: What’s the state of the virus today? What does it look like right now? We know it’s exploding, but what can you tell us about how it looks now here in the United States and worldwide? 

Dr. Andre Campbell: We are about nine months into a pandemic. The last pandemic we had was one hundred years ago in 1918, but the 1918 pandemic went on to 1920. We are really in the first couple of innings of what’s going to be an extra-inning fight against this virus. In the United States, as of today, we have 10 million cases. We have 237,000 deaths. Every day, about a thousand people die.

What’s going on is in the middle of the country — it’s like a forest fire out of control. Much like the fires that we had here, that’s what’s going on with the virus. It’s pretty much everywhere now.

The problem is, we’ve had an absolute lack of national leadership. There is no national plan. The plan is let it go, and that is not a plan. The plan has to come from the federal government. They have the dollars. They can turn on the [Defense] Production Act to make enough masks, to make enough vaccines when it comes time. In the meantime, everything we’re doing is a stopgap. But simple things like masking, social distancing and making sure we wash our hands, those are the things that will protect all of us. If we all mask in the United States, we probably would save 800,000 lives.

This thing is really totally out of control, and we have had an absolute national failure. Now, what is encouraging is the president-elect will have a team of expert physicians, led by Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general. So we will listen to the science. All this stuff has become political, and there’s nothing political about wearing a mask and keeping your distance.

JM: It doesn’t seem like we, in the United States, have taken this thing seriously. Do you have any idea why? I know some parts of the world have.

AC: This thing became very real in March when one of my good friends, who’s a doctor, his wife’s a nurse, she went to a baby shower in Louisiana, and the four of them got it and two died in the hospital. This was in March. And she’s dead. This is somebody I know. The virus is disproportionally affecting the African American population. One in 920 African Americans have died from the virus. One in 1,100 Native Americans have died from the virus. One in 1,300 Latinx people died from the virus.

There are countries that are taking this very seriously. China took it very seriously and got it under control. They were ruthless. But my best example, I think is, is New Zealand. The prime minister, [Jacinda Ardern,] she’s an amazing woman and a great leader. She is tough. And she stamped it out. They’re living normally in New Zealand because there’s so few cases. There are places you can do it. But we have to have a collective will to do it. And that’s part of the problem. We have all this mixed messaging. When the president gets it, he gets a million-dollar drug. He gets the antibodies. He got steroids, and then he got some other antiviral treatment. Not everybody gets access to treatment. He got the best treatment in the world, and not everybody can get that.

The virus attacks you, and you have this massive response. It basically attacks the lungs. That’s why people can’t breathe, and the blood circulation causes clots. I mean, there’s all these things. There’s COVID toes; that’s associated with people having strokes. There are people who have had the disease, now six months ago, but they are still having symptoms, and those are called long-haulers.

This disparity for African Americans and Latinx is just really a function of what has been amplified in the real world, because we know that the outcomes for cancer are different for African Americans and trauma for is different. And the outcomes with other diseases are different, and COVID-19 just amplifies that.

JM: Is it an illness where you can’t predict how it’s going to actually affect a person? 

AC: Well, the problem is that we don’t know. They think that something like 30% of people are asymptomatic. When the ICUs get overrun, the hospitals get overrun. That’s when you get in a situation where you have refrigeration trucks outside of hospitals. Basically with remains of people who expired as a result of that because the hospital is just overwhelmed. New York is still in shock from that. We never had that here. I mean, at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, we’ve had about 113 cases in the ICU. We’ve had 17 deaths or so. We’ve had probably 35% of the hospitalizations in the city and county of San Francisco roughly. A lot of people come to the hospital, and they don’t go in the ICU with that. It’s really hard to predict who’s going to get it and who’s going to die. I mean, young kids are dying, teenagers dying. You know, it’s not just people are over 65 with comorbidities of high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, it’s everybody. So it’s a complicated disease and we’re still learning about it.

JM: What if the public doesn’t want to participate in the vaccine trials?

AC: Anthony Fauci — who I think is a foremost expert on this — he and the CDC director, [Robert] Redfield, estimate that in second quarter of 2021, we’ll have a vaccine for everybody. It’s not going to be soon, but it’ll be there.

The reason why people aren’t participating in the trials is because they’re scared. It became politicized. They need to get a certain number [of participants]. They’ve got to have underrepresented minorities involved, and they were having trouble getting that. People were like, ‘I’m not going to be a guinea pig,’ but we’re going to have to sort of do it. In the spring, it may become partially available to healthcare workers.

In the meantime, we’re going to have to wear a mask and protect each other by doing that. That’s the way they did it 100 years when they didn’t have all the stuff that we have now.

JM: Is a federal mask mandate the way to get this under control?

AC: Now, the problem is the federal mandate is going to be up to governors to in place, which is the problem because there’s all these mixed messages. We don’t have to shut things down if we wear masks and we do a targeted approach where, let’s say there’s an outbreak in [San Francisco neighborhoods] the Mission or Western Addition or downtown or South of Market or Sunset, you go in and trace the outbreak, and then shut things down locally. In the short term, it should be normal for people to wear a mask. This is not political. This is about science. You can reduce your incidents of infecting others or getting infected significantly by wearing a mask.

JM: Can you talk a bit about testing? When should we get tested? How often? 

AC: To get out of this, we need to test upwards of a million or 2 million people. And we’re probably about [800,000] or 900,000 last time I heard, although it sort of came down and it’s gone up. So you have to be testing more people. We have to have a national mandate for testing, and we can test our way out of this by figuring out who has it and who does not. We have to get organized, we have to test people, and we have to make sure that we’re doing it the right way. The test is very uncomfortable, but you’ve got to get the thing if you think you have it. If you’re sick, stay home. Don’t go to work if you have  a fever or other problems, like shortness of breath or cough. And it’s sometimes indistinguishable from the flu. So that’s why it’s so complicated.

We need to test more. We need to have universal masking. People need to wash their hands. We need to stay away from each other.

I’m always trying to shake people’s hands. That’s how we are — we shake hands. In my office, I have Purell, I have alcohol wipes, I have Clorox wipes, I got everything. I’m trying to do it as best I can, but it is hard. It is very difficult to get through this. This is something that’s going to require a lot of intestinal fortitude, particularly [from] folks who are just tired of this. You have to think twice before you do stuff. You’ve got to make sure you’re trying to protect people. You’ve got to wear the mask.

Join us as we visit with entertainer Nate SoulSanger and Alive & Free alum Dr. Daija Foster.

Street Soldiers Radio continues our discussion about voter suppression and the documentary Rigged with our featured guests Kentfield Taylor, Adrienne Riley, Lowell Davis, and Malcolm Mobley.