By Elinor Simek | UC Berkeley News

Last month, after years of debate, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence an urgent public health crisis and released an extraordinary report outlining its devastating consequences.

Murthy’s 32-page advisory is the first federal government report to fully acknowledge the health impacts of gun violence on Americans, whether they are direct victims, families, and friends of victims, or live in communities that face ongoing street violence or have experienced a mass shooting.

To Jason Corburn, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, gun violence has always been a public health issue, and he has just finished teaching students at Berkeley School of Public Health how to address it as one.

The class, “Urban Gun Violence Prevention: A Public Health Perspective,” was Berkeley Public Health’s first course dedicated to addressing urban gun violence.

“Regardless of where you stand on guns, there is no doubt that gun violence is a key contributor to disability, injury and of death for Americans,” said Corburn. “Gun violence is both a source of trauma and stress and a response to unaddressed traumas. Urban gun violence is a community health equity issue, since Black and Brown youth, men under 35 years old, and hyper-segregated neighborhoods are most likely to experience firearm violence.

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“Yet, this is also a population and place issue, because the impacts of firearm violence can also affect others in the community, regardless of direct or witnessed experience,” Corburn said.

Firearm-related injuries, such as suicides and homicides, are the No. 1 cause of death for children and adolescents (ages 1 to 19) in the U.S., with the heaviest burden disproportionately falling on the Black community. Homicide is the No. 1 cause of death for Black men under 44 years-old in the U.S.

Urban gun violence is sometimes called “street violence” or “community gun violence,” and is defined as violence in public spaces between individuals who do not know each other intimately. It’s distinct from domestic violence, mass shootings, or suicide.

“By offering this course, I wanted to bring attention to today’s urban gun violence epidemic,” Corburn said. “While this type of violence is often overlooked compared to the bigger headlines of mass shootings, urban gun violence is ongoing, harming the same communities over and over again.”

Corburn, a joint professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning, taught the class with Joe Griffin and DeVone Boggan. Griffin, who received his MPH and DrPH from Berkeley Public Health, is executive director of Youth ALIVE!, an Oakland-based nonprofit organization that works to reduce violence.

Boggan, also a UC Berkeley grad, is chief executive of Advance Peace and former director of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS). Corburn has worked in partnership with Richmond’s ONS and Advance Peace since 2007.

The class was structured as a seminar which combined readings, videos, and discussions with researchers and practitioners. Anchoring the course was a review of structural racism in America and how specific policies, such as redlining, dehumanizing policing, and environmental injustices, create the social, spatial and institutional conditions for gun violence.

Ten students from Berkeley Public Health and City and Regional Planning participated. The instructors co-facilitated class each week, along with students who gave presentations.

Each class also hosted a guest speaker from leading research and governmental organizations around the country. The guests, many of whom had firsthand experiences with gun violence, led students in discussions of street outreach, participant engagement, hospital-based interventions, the role of media and other potential solutions to urban gun violence.

Among the speakers was Greg Jackson, deputy director of the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, created in 2023. Other guests included Abené Clayton, a journalist who is part of The Guardian’s Guns and Lies in America project; David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, Dr. Shani Buggs and Dr. Kravitz-Wirtz from UC Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program; and Sam Vaughn, director of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS); among others.

Inspiring students

“The class was an amazing opportunity to learn of the cutting edge research within the gun violence prevention field,” said Ricardo Sarmiento, who graduated from UC Berkeley in May with an MPH in Health Policy & Management. “The guests that were invited had their finger on the pulse of the community.

“The class used the lenses of public health, city planning, policy advocacy, and community organizing,” Sarmiento said. “The presenters all provided different approaches to reduce gun violence.”

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Special to the Berkeley Post

Berkeley’s Black Repertory Group (BBRG), the only Black-owned-and-operated theater in the East Bay, is pushing for the City of Berkeley to provide the financial backing for the theater that is required by local law.

At issue is whether the City of Berkeley will contribute legally required funding to support Black theater, similar to what the city does for other performing arts and cultural institutions in the city or whether it will continue to promote gentrification and forced displacement through longtime practices that undermine this historic venue.

Founded in 1964, the theater is located at 3201 Adeline St. in Berkeley, a cultural arts center that houses the Birel L. Vaughn Theater.

“We not asking for handouts. The city should just pay what it legally owes us and also stop using city officials to harass us,” said a member of the board of the Black Rep.

Former Councilmember Cheryl Davila forcefully argues that Berkeley officials are undermining the theater as part of the city’s continued gentrification and ongoing elimination of local institutions and neighborhoods of African Americans and other People of Color.

“The City of Berkeley has continued the colonization as reflected in disparities documented in the Health Status Report, the Center for Police Equity (CPE) Report and Mason Tillman Report,” Davila said.

“The Tillman report revealed bids are awarded to white men only,” she continued. “The CPE report demonstrated the bias in policing and the Health Status Report, health disparities due to racism. The (city) has not fairly distributed funding or support for organizations that are located within the red lines.

“Redline disinvestment has been the practice in the Black, indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) institutions in the City of Berkeley. It’s crystal clear, the city, which has invested in Caucasian institutions, outside the red lines, providing emergency and other funding passed on the consent calendar with no opposition, nor illegal break-ins for building inspections, or harassment, unlike the Black Repertory Group,” she said.

“Now, these same redlined communities are recognized as “prime” real estate, so the fines, inspections, and eviction process began some time ago and continues to eliminate “Blacks” from our communities. The attempts to confiscate the historical institutions that were never given the full support to live and thrive in a city (that upholds) a façade of being “progressive.”

Dr. Omowale Fowles, a former Berkeley health commissioner, said: “Today, in the 21st century post-Jim Crow America, a so-called ‘progressive’ Berkeley City Council has continued to perpetuate the unfair, unjust and inequitable funding practice that drove the Black Repertory Theater out of the South!

“Berkeley has not lived up to its contractual agreements to provide an annual baseline of economic support for the BBRG, nor has the city responded, in a timely manner, if at all, to BBRG’s requests for consistent maintenance sanitation, and renovations interventions,” said Fowles.

However, the Berkeley City Council has managed to award several other theaters in Berkeley tens of thousands of dollars to enable their theaters to stay alive and thrive, specifically, the Berkeley Repertory Theater in downtown and the Shotgun Players’ Theater is South Berkeley, he said.

“Such malevolent behaviors (are what we have come to expect) from a government entity that prides itself on its quasi-liberal and progressive beliefs particularly toward the arts music heritage of Berkeley,” he said.

Lady AfiTiombe A. Kambon, a longtime Berkeleyan elder who is an oral historian and actor, traced the roots of the Black Rep to historic resistance to violent racism and the KKK.

“The Berkeley Black Repertory Group Theater (BBRG) escaped Vicksburg, Mississippi, from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) for holding artistic storytelling events for Black people in the 1940s. The Black Rep fled from hatred and the threat of lynching to a city known to practice humanity and democracy,” she said.

“Now, the theater continues to be under attack from city officials and Neighborhood Watch organized to eliminate the Black community,” Kambon said.

The Berkeley Equity Summit Alliance urges all Citizens throughout the City of Berkeley and beyond to support the Black Repertory Group and ensure that the City of Berkeley treats all the theaters equally and equitably distributing services and funding.

For more information, reach out to tiombe47@gmail.com or Dallascowboy52@yahoo.com

@PaulCobbOakland @PostNewsGroup @NNPA_BlackPress @BlackPressUSA

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By Ken Epstein

AC Transit Board Director Jovanka Beckles came in second place in the six-way primary race for state Senate District 7 seat to represent Oakland and Berkeley, placing her in the runoff race in November against Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín to replace Sen. Nancy Skinner, who termed out.

Beckles, writing on social media, emphasized that she had won with community support though the leading candidate was way ahead in campaign spending.

“Despite being vastly under-fundraised, we have emerged victorious in the State Senate primary! This victory is not just about me. It’s a victory for our working class, our poor, our disenfranchised Black and Brown communities, our Palestinian siblings fighting for liberation.”

In the March 5 primary, Arreguín came in first with 32.81% of the vote, while Beckles received 17.48%. Oakland Councilmember Dan Kalb was third with 14.89%, while Kathryn Lybarger followed with14.46%. Sandré Swanson received13.36%, and Jeanne Solnordal captured 7%.

Born in Panama, Beckles immigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was 9. She attended Florida A&M University on a full-ride basketball scholarship, majoring in psychology as an undergraduate and later earned an MBA.

She worked for decades in public health as a mental health clinician, serving impoverished and marginalized children and families in Contra Costa County.

In a speech at a recent victory celebration, she emphasized her progressive record of working for her East Bay constituents.

“I’m here today because of you, your belief in me, a Black, Latinx, immigrant, gay woman,” she said. “We did something historic. Grassroots candidates don’t (often) beat millions of dollars.”

“When I get to Sacramento, I will continue delivering results for you,” she said, pledging to continue working on tenant protections such as supporting the ballot measure to remove a ban on rent control in California.

Beckles plans to propose expanded legal protections for seniors and disabled tenants; create educational opportunities to make public school and university education fair and available for all students; provide transfers for AC Transit and make public transportation affordable for seniors and people with disabilities; and enhance environmental protections.

She also supports a Gaza cease-fire.

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