Award-Winning Journalists and Community Organizers visit Atlanta Sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee

KENNESAW, GA, September 09, 2010 (Press-News.org) The Community and Resistance Tour is an exciting project organized by several book publishers and independent media makers. The tour brings a multimedia presentation involving short films, inspiring speakers, and exciting dialogue. Organizers hope to communicate about current social justice struggles, from nooses hung in the northern Louisiana town of Jena to women organizing inside prisons, from battles around school privatization to post-Katrina community organizing and cultural resistance. "This tour is for anyone interested in issues of health care, education, criminal justice, housing, or the ways in which racism and other forms of systemic oppression intersect with these struggles," says tour participant and author Jordan Flaherty.

Tour participants include: Award-winning journalist Jordan Flaherty, who has reported from the Gulf Coast for a range of publications, including the New York Times, Al-Jazeera, and Huffington Post; nationally-known blogger and reporter for The Final Call Newspaper Jesse Muhammad, and former prisoner and author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, Victoria Law. See below for more detailed information on tour speakers.

Jesse Muhammad: Energetic, inspiring and effective are just some of the words audiences have used to describe the writings and messages delivered by writer, news reporter, artist, publicist and photojournalist Jesse Muhammad. Brother Jesse, a native of Houston, Texas, started contributing to the Final Call Newspaper in 2004 and was appointed as its Southwest Regional Correspondent. In 2005, after receiving rave reviews for his reporting on stories that mainstream media tends to over look, he was appointed as an official Staff Writer for the FCN, which is the only national Black-owned newspaper. He has been a featured commentator on various television and radio shows in Houston, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and as far as Ghana.

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Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and community organizer based in New Orleans. He was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the Jena Six case, and played an important role in bringing the story to worldwide attention. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, and audiences around the world have seen the news segments he's produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now. Jordan has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, Grit TV, and both local and nationally-syndicated shows on National Public Radio. As a white southerner who speaks honestly about race, Jordan Flaherty has been regularly published in Black progressive forums such as BlackCommentator.org and Black Agenda Report, and is a regular guest on Black radio stations and programs such as Keep Hope Alive With Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Victoria Law is a writer, photographer and mother. After a brief stint as a teenage armed robber, she became involved in prisoner support. In 1996, she helped start Books Through Bars-New York City, a group that sends free books to prisoners nationwide. In 2000, she began concentrating on the needs and actions of women in prison, drawing attention to their issues by writing articles and giving public presentations. Since 2002, she has worked with women incarcerated nationwide to produce Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison and has facilitated having incarcerated women's writings published in larger publications, such as Clamor magazine, the website "Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance" and make/shift magazine. Her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press 2009) is the culmination of over 7 years of listening to, writing about and supporting incarcerated women nationwide and resulted in this former delinquent winning the 2009 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award.

DATE: Tuesday September 28, 2010
TIME: 7pm-9:30pm
PLACE: AFSC Atlanta Regional Office
60 Walton Street, NE
Downtown Atlanta