Back in 2000, the campaign against California's Proposition 21(the "Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Initiative") was historically significant because it combined political activism and community advocacy from a youth-centric point of view. Much of that activism happened right here in Oakland.

Juvenile justice organizers joined with community-empowerment groups, youth advocates, hip-hop artists and DJ collectives, alternative media folks and progressive visual artists to create a broad, diverse coalition. These organizers were able to mobilize the hip-hop generation in a way that has rarely happened before or since - politicizing the issues by reframing the proposed initiative as nothing less than a war on youth, an over-reaching attempt to criminalize juvenile offenders while denying them civil rights.

For many young people, the No on 21 campaign was their first exposure to political organizing and youth culture played a major role in how the organizers approached outreach and education efforts. 

“Young people were active, they were involved in something they felt they were making a difference in,” remembers Tony Coleman, co-founder of the now-legendary Third Eye Movement. “Even the police were like, 'these young people really believe in what they’re doing.'”

A generation of hip-hop activists

Being involved in the campaign, Coleman says, “gave the young people power.” That power became evident when organizers of the time mobilized at the PG&E board of directors meeting, when they took over a high school in San Francisco and during a hip-hop concert and rally at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland attended by thousands of youth.

“All that stuff was super fun and super cool for young cats to engage in,” Coleman says. The street-level approach to mobilization the campaign took “made it more accessible to the average cat who may not be on the college campus organizing,” he adds.

What separated Third Eye Movement from other groups organizing around juvenile justice issues at that time was their willingness to embrace hip-hop and utilize the medium to deliver a message.

“That’s how this hip-hop activism was coined,” Coleman says. “Everything we did was hip-hop. Our whole flavor, our whole swag was hip-hop. But it was political. Even some of our chants were rapped. It didn’t seem like it was a stretch. People were just being themselves.”

Hip-hop is largely a youth-oriented culture, he explains, “and this was an issue, which affected all youth.”

In addition to using hip-hop as a rallying cry, organizers strategically targeted Prop. 21’s funders, including Chevron and PG&E. Facing pressure from protestors and media scrutiny, PG&E agreed to say they weren’t in favor of the proposition, although the question of why they contributed to it in the first place remains open to this day.

Speculation at the time suggested the corporate involvement was a result of businesses seeking to gain leverage with Pete Wilson, California’s then-governor and the driving force behind Prop. 21. Many of Prop. 21’s corporate sponsors also were big donors to Wilson’s ill-fated 2000 presidential campaign.

Establishing a baseline for organizing

Coleman notes that Third Eye Movement was a gender-balanced organization, with women playing key leadership roles, which was able to build solidarity with other activist groups while maintaining its own identity. Groups shared resources with each other; there was unity, he says, both among Bay Area organizations and those in Southern California. Coleman recalls traveling to Fresno and Los Angeles to meet with his counterparts down there to engage in joint actions.

“A lot of those folks are still organizing,” he says, noting the involvement of Southern California activists around the Oscar Grant trial, which was moved from Alameda County to Los Angeles.

One of those young organizers was Nishat Kurwa, who was 22 years old in 2000. At that time, she recalls, “I was riding that line between youth activism and youth media.” Kurwa covered Prop. 21 for both print and radio, writing for Youth Outlook and producing for “Street Knowledge” - a public affairs program hosted by Davey-D, which at one time ran on the Bay Area’s largest urban commercial station, KMEL.

Kurwa remembers the organizing around Prop. 21 as being a “groundswell of activism among young people who felt disempowered and politically marginalized,” which established “a new baseline for activism in the state” of California, as well as “an agenda for that generation.”

Building a social justice infrastructure

Another strong supporter of the No on 21 campaign was Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson. He took an active role, he says, because of concern about “a long-term devastating impact on African-American men, young men of color and people from a certain economic background.”

Carson helped provide office space in downtown Oakland for the campaign’s East Bay wing. The office, which also was shared by then-mayoral candidate Greg Hodge, became a headquarters for various entities: social justice organizations, labor unions, youth groups. It provided infrastructure, which allowed for effective community outreach and proved conducive to coalition-building.

Unfortunately, many of the youth who became active in this movement were not yet old enough to vote. However, in many cases, these youth politicized their parents about juvenile justice issues. Following the election, many of the youth continued to organize around community and political issues as they transitioned into young adulthood.

“After all that energy died down, there was the day-to-day legacy,” Kurwa says.

That legacy is a storied one.

From a historical perspective, the anti-Prop. 21 campaign will be remembered as a connecting link between such organizations as Third Eye Movement, the Ella Baker Center, OLEAN, CJNY, The Data Center, Underground Railroad, Black Dot Artists Collective, Hard Knock Radio, Youth Empowerment Center, Youth Radio, Youth Outlook and Youth Together. Also involved were DJ collective ((Local 1200)) and artists such as Goapele, the Coup, Zion-I, Company of Prophets, Prophets of Rage and Blackalicious.

Coalition-building, connecting movements

Many of the activists involved in the fight against Prop. 21 went on to play critical roles in the Bay Area's social justice, anti-violence, youth development and eco-sustainability movements. As Coleman says, “Prop. 21 turned a lot of people into community organizers.”

Similarly, many of the artists and DJs involved became ubiquitous to the Bay Area's independent urban music and "conscious hip-hop" scenes over the next decade.

In 2001, the Coup became national cause celebs when their unreleased album cover for their third album Party Music eerily foreshadowed the Sept. 11 bombings; the group’s frontman Boots Riley became one of the first rap artists to take a stand against the Iraq war at a time when patriotic fervor was high. And in 2008, Blackalicious, Zion-I and Goapele brought hip-hop and electoral politics together again, performing at rallies for then-candidate Barack Obama.

The youth campaign against Prop. 21 also attracted media attention from liberal outlets like the Nation, Mother Jones and Z magazine, as well as Bay Area publications like Metrowatch and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Mother Jones’ observation at the time seems chilling in retrospect: “if it passes, the proposition will almost certainly swell the numbers of juveniles behind bars.”

Demanding accountability

Although the proposition passed statewide, it was voted against by a large margin in San Francisco and Alameda counties, the No on 21 campaign’s power base. The momentum begun with the campaign did deliver one huge political victory in 2002, when Books Not Bars shut down the proposed “super jail” facility for juvenile offenders. Moreover, the tactic of demanding accountability against corporations - a hallmark of the No on 21 campaign - surfaced again in 2003, when the Youth Media Council joined with Third Eye Movement to protest KMEL’s lack of community affairs programming and refusal to play local artists, by picketing the corporate headquarters of the station’s parent company, Clear Channel. This strategy also was  evident in the 2009 protests around the killing of Oscar Grant, when youth groups and community activists mobilized at BART board of directors meetings and the Alameda County courthouse, demanding accountability and justice.

However, there were fairly serious ramifications to the initiative being approved by a statewide majority of voters. Among other things, the proposition allowed juveniles as young as 14 to be tried as adults, expanded the list of offenses, which could be considered violent crimes, widened the definition of gang-related crimes, and gave prosecutors more latitude than judges in sentencing guidelines.

Stereotyping Youth as Criminals

Prop. 21 “affected so many people I knew in drastic ways after it passed,” Kurwa says. The ripples of Prop. 21 were felt not just against the sociocultural framework, but in the media landscape as well; Davey-D cited his support of the No on 21 campaign as a factor in his eventual firing by Clear Channel in 2001. And Carson notes that the criminalization of youth he had feared did eventually come to pass.

“It unfortunately started to give a stereotype to young people,” he says.

One sobering result of the initiative’s passage, Carson says, is the high number of juveniles in San Quentin.

“That’s not some camp or juvenile hall,” he emphasizes. Jailing young people is only a temporary fix, he says, because “unless someone is incarcerated for life, you gotta return to the community you came from.”

Carson says most remanded youth come back to their neighborhoods as older, prison-hardened adults facing even bleaker economic prospects. Their criminal records make them unattractive to prospective employers, and they may have serious emotional and mental health issues, for which few services are available. Moreover, high rates of recidivism are prevalent in inner-city communities.

At best, Carson says, incarceration is a “band-aid” which doesn’t solve the underlying issues and causes of juvenile crime: undereducation, underemployment, economic challenges and a dearth of social programs for at-risk youth.

A decade later ... what's changed?

Ten years after the passage of Prop. 21, Carson says, “the problem still exists.” On a societal level, he says, “we are at a crossroads as far as how we address this issue.”

Tough-on-crime measures aimed at young people - like the recent gang injunction covering a 100-block radius in North Oakland - continue to be mandated in California and other states. Yet, Carson says, “we haven’t yet engaged [youth] on a regular, consistent basis.”

On a more positive note, the echoes of the No on 21 organizing efforts continue to resound in 2010, through such current organizations as Bikes 4 Life, Youth Movement Records, Urban Peace Movement, Green For All, the Oakland Hip Hop Dance Institute, Grind For the Green, Green Youth Media Arts Center and Youth UpRising, many of which have a direct connection to the activism around Proposition 21.

Where are they now?

Although the coalition assembled to combat Prop. 21 hasn’t remained unified over the last 10 years, nearly all of its participants are still involved in community-based activism to some extent.

Tony Coleman now runs Bikes 4 Life, a West Oakland youth-operated bicycle shop that uses salvaged and recycled materials to provide green jobs for kids; Carson remains a go-to guy for youth  and community issues in local politics; Davey D has become one of the foremost experts in hip-hop politics on a national level; former Youth Together organizer Kevin Weston is now the editor of Youth Outlook, which has brought the subject of juvenile justice into the mainstream media discourse, by engaging at-risk youth in the journalistic process; Former Third Eye Movement organizers Jakada Imani and Nicole Lee, now Executive Director and Political Director, respectively, at Ella Baker Center, have supported both on-the-ground organizing and policy change efforts to address juvenile justice and youth violence; Ella Baker  co-founder Van Jones has become a nationally-known expert on green jobs policy and social justice issues and briefly served in Obama’s cabinet; and Company of Prophets’ Rashidi Omani is the musical director at Youth Movement Records, which has successfully created a youth development program around a hip-hop curriculum.

Local ((1200)) DJs Willie Maze, Namane and Sake 1 have remained at the forefront of the Left Coast’s urban music and hip-hop scene, frequently promoting positive hip-hop events such as Dream Day (the 10 year anniversary celebration of the passing of legendary, influential Oakland graffiti artist Mike Dream) and the hip-hop dance cipher/battle at Oakland’s annual Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival.

Kurwa, currently News Director at Youth Radio, notes that mainstream media support for youth activism is basically nonexistent these days. Yet she says this is balanced somewhat by independent, non-corporate and alternative outlets that have emerged with the rise of the Internet and social media platforms.

The loss of public affairs programming on commercial radio is regrettable. However, “You have to look at what kind of access we do have, in terms of self-publishing and the blogosphere,” Kurwa says.

A new call to action

For his part, Coleman maintains that the grassroots activism around Prop. 21 has in some ways fallen pray to systemic issues associated with what he calls the “non-profit industrial complex.” He says the involvement of foundations and an economic dependency on funding cycles has taken some of the immediacy out of the movement and made it more difficult for organizations to combine resources or generate the same level of solidarity they achieved in the past.

“We’re all still doing the work, but it’s broken up into little segments,” Coleman says.

While policy work is important - “we need that too,” Coleman says - he adds he feels that an academic approach shouldn’t overshadow “folks that’s actually on the frontline.” He views the anniversary of the No on 21 campaign as nothing less than a call to action to meet the challenges of re-establishing the unified coalition, which created the movement in the first place.

“How do you recreate that Prop. 21 legacy?,” Coleman ponders. “That’s been my whole mission: how do we get back to that?”

Though that legacy has had a seminal influence on the Bay Area’s progressive nonprofit community, and has extended all the way to the White House, Coleman opines that the movement’s real strength lay in “the complexion, the diversity, the multiculturalism. That came straight from the streets.”