Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #blackliberationarmy, aggregated by home.social.
Mamdani-Backed Chevalier Praised North Korea’s Kim in Unearthed Communist-Friendly Tweets
(AP Photo/Ryan Murphy) Deleted tweets from Darializa Avila Chevalier (D) — one of the three Democratic Socialist candidates…
#EuropeSays #Korea #KR #NorthKorea #AndrewKaczynski #AssataShakur #bannedbooks #BlackLiberationArmy #communistleaders #DarializaAvilaChevalier #DemocraticSocialist #kimilsung #VladimirLenin #ZohranMamdani
https://www.europesays.com/korea/68831/
Tribute to Assata Shakur, Street Protests Denounce U.S. War Threats Against Cuba
https://world-outlook.com/2026/06/04/tribute-to-assata-shakur-street-protests-denounce-u-s-war-threats-against-cuba/
[includes publicity leaflets for upcoming #protests in defense of #Cuba]
from #WorldOutlook
June 4, 2026
A #NYC meeting to celebrate the life of Black revolutionary #AssataShakur highlighted Cuba’s internationalism and sounded the alarm about #US threats of war against the island nation. Gathering at the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan on May 30, 2026, more than 2,000 people — overwhelmingly Black — paid tribute to Shakur, a member of the Black Panther Party and #BlackLiberationArmy who died in Havana in September 2025.
Writer and activist #AngelaDavis, herself affiliated with the #BlackPantherParty in the 1970s, was among the opening speakers and the first — although not the last — to point out that the defense of Cuba was a part of Shakur’s legacy. Cuba was mentioned in numerous speeches throughout the 3-½ hour program.
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Co-Founder of Black Liberation Army, Reflects on the Legacy of Assata Shakur and Revolutionary Sacrifice
On May 30, 2026, a Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Assata Shakur was held at the Riverside Church in New York City. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, co-founder of the Black Liberation Army, wrote these words of tribute, in hopes they would be included in the program.
Solidarity and Greetings to all gathered to commemorate and reflect on the Life and legacy of Assata Shakur.
I am indeed appreciative of this opportunity to address this momentous gathering of comrades, friends, and family of my comrade Assata.
I know that many of you gathered here today may not have known Assata, but are instilled with, and inspired by, her lifelong resistance and revolutionary struggle against the white supremacist settler construct that is the United States of America.
I also appreciate that some of you gathered here today actually knew Assata, aided and supported her during her long exile in Cuba, and to these comrades I salute you and express my profound gratitude.
Finally, to those gathered in this iconic Riverside Church in Harlem, who in their own way have struggled for the liberation of African people, oppressed people, the downtrodden, the disregarded “Wretched of the Earth”, I salute all of you.
We may seem as strangers to one another, but we are only comrades who have never met.
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell the unvarnished truth about my Comrade Assata. It was during the early 1970s when our retaliatory resistance against the armed agents of racist state terrorism assumed organized intensity. Police murder of Black youth, accompanied by the plague of heroin addiction, informed the legacy and legend of Assata, you now pay homage to.
Few of you gathered here today would have ever heard of Assata were it not for the emergence of the Black Liberation Army (BLA).
I say this because, despite scholarly deceitfulness surrounding the BLA, Assata Shakur was a soldier in the centuries-old war against African peoples, a war that began with the North Atlantic Slave Trade, a racist war that continues to this very moment by violent and non-violent means.
The scholarly deceit I speak of lies in the denial of this war, and the deception that Black people fought for Civil Rights, rather than for Human Rights, and that Human Rights can be granted by the inhumane, rather than appropriated by those criminalized and defamed.
This fact is important. Because Assata was not an innocent victim of police repression, shot wantonly with her hands raised in submission. She was a revolutionary, and revolutionaries are never victims of injustice. How many freedom fighters were wantonly killed in the struggle for the liberation of their people? Medgar Evers, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, some murdered even while surrendering?
Facts speak louder than fiction: In 1971, Assata wasn’t a designated FBI COINTELPRO target. She was a medical cadre of the National Committee to Combat Fascism in Washington Heights, Harlem, New York. NCCF chapters were formations of the original Black Panther Party.
Indeed, by 1972, COINTELPRO had already achieved some of its most significant achievements with the assassination of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, and the breakup of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Earlier in late 1971, COINTELPRO was reconfigured as NEWKILL and CHESIROB. Both were acronyms for FBI repressive campaigns authorized by the Nixon White House specifically targeting the emergence of the BLA and its clandestine leadership, one of whom was Joanne Chesimard, hence the acronym CHESIROB for Chesimard Robberies.
I choose to remind everyone of these historical facts, rather than repeat historical fantasies of Assata’s victimhood. Why? Because Assata was a warrior in the tradition of Harriet Tubman, in the tradition of Denmark Vesey, and our ancestors who resisted the brutality, murder, and enslavement of African People for over 300 years.
In the struggle for freedom, revolutionaries are never victims, or innocents. Assata was not an unfortunate victim like George Floyd – or Clifford Glover – she was a conscious, committed, and revolutionary Freedom Fighter!
In this historical moment, we should be mindful that White Supremacy and the American Empire are in decline.
Besieged by the Global South’s emerging Unity, White America has become increasingly lawless. And like a rabid dog backed into a corner, capitalist White supremacist state violence knows no limits.
The land that gave Assata refuge, Cuba, now faces imminent attack by the U.S. in its attempt to reassert the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century in the Western Hemisphere.
The People of Iran are under attack by the U.S. and its Zionist White Supremacist cohort, Israel. We must demand peace in Western Asia and an end to Zionist settler expansionism.
My beloved comrades and friends, we should not merely eulogize Assata, we should live like her. In this historical moment, Revolutionary resistance to the racist, imperialistic, and violent enemies of humanity requires nothing less.
Long Live the Spirit of Assata Shakur!
Long Live the Independence of the Cuban People!
Dhoruba bin-Wahad is a former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He was a leading member of the New York chapter of the BPP, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21.
source: Black Agenda Report
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=33449 #assataShakur #blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #dhorubaBinWahad #guerrilla
“You Whisper to Us”: Racial Justice Activists and Artists Honor Assata’s Legacy
Assata Shakur's passing unleashed a flowering of hope that the freedom she fought for could one day be real for us all.
“Learning from Assata: A young Black socialist on duty and discipline
Black grassroots organizer and visual artist Rachel Domond speaks on the legacy and influence of Assata Shakur”
Natalia Marques
peoples dispatch
October 01, 2025
#AssataShakur #BlackPantherParty #BlackLiberationArmy #BlackRadicalism #BlackRevolutionary #BlackLiberation #Marxism #Communism #BlackMastodon
“A fugitive’s freedom: Assata Shakur’s exile in Cuba
A living testament to the possibility of resistance, Assata embodied the courage not only to think about change but to fight for a new world entirely.”
Manolo De Los Santos
peoples dispatch
September 29, 2025
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/09/29/a-fugitives-freedom-assata-shakurs-exile-in-cuba/
#AssataShakur #BlackPantherParty #BlackLiberationArmy #BlackRadicalism #BlackRevolutionary #BlackLiberation #Marxism #Communism #BlackMastodon
Long Live Assata Shakur, 1947-2025
On September 26, 2025, Black revolutionary Assata Shakur transitioned after leading a long and virtuous life of internationalist resistance. Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network salutes Assata’s living legacy and recognizes her lifelong struggle against global oppression as a practice to inspire countless generations to come.
Assata Shakur was the target of racist, counter-insurgent incarceration from 1973 to 1979 because of her work with the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. For years from within prison walls, she fought false accusations while bearing the brunt of settler-colonial prison and police violence. After being shot twice by New Jersey State Police, Assata testified to being choked, beat, dragged, kicked, pulled by her hair, and cuffed by her ankles so tight that the handcuffs were inside her flesh. She received inadequate medical care and was imprisoned in a men’s prison because of how “threatening” she was deemed to be by the state.
Writing of her own experience, Assata noted that political persecution and incarceration is “part and parcel of the [US] government’s policy of eliminating political opponents by charging them with crimes and arresting them with no regard to the factual basis of such charges.”
In 1979, a unit of the Black Liberation Army liberated Assata from prison and in 1984 she travelled to Cuba where she lived in exile until her recent passing. Living in exile in Cuba under the protection of the socialist Cuban government only further expanded Assata’s analysis of anti-imperialism and the interconnectedness of global struggles for liberation. Assata was a true internationalist in every sense of the word, describing Cuba as “One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) That has ever existed on the Face of this Planet.”
Since the FBI’s commencement and alleged completion of COINTELPRO — the program that targeted Assata and other Black liberation activists between 1956 and 1971— little has changed in how the settler state attacks those who fight for the oppressed masses of the world. Assata Shakur is one of many people labelled as a so-called “terrorist” by the US and other Western and allied governments.
“They wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie,” President Fidel Castro once remarked about Assata. The FBI eventually classified her as the first woman on their Most Wanted Terrorists list. A few years later, the first woman Al-Qassam Brigades member Ahlam Al-Tamimi was added to this same list illustrating the joint struggle that the Palestinian and Black liberation movements share.
Much like the case of Assata and Ahlam, Palestinian resistance factions, the Axis of Resistance, and Palestinian solidarity organizations and individual activists across the globe are designated as “terrorist[s]” for siding with the masses of the world who oppose imperialism. Those of us who recognize prisons as a colonial tool for waging warfare against a subjugated people are particularly criminalized.
Assata’s political work with the Black Panthers and the BLA specifically identified American police and prisons as racist and oppressive forces that must be eliminated. Her offerings of steadfastness remind us to continue to fight for and honour those still inside and those who have been martyred by the colonial prison system.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Abdullah Barghouthi, Free Kamau Sadiki, Free Jakhi McCray, Free Malik Farrad Muhammad, Free Ahmad Sa’adat, Free Kojo Bomani Sababu, Free Casey Goonan, Free Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Free Elias Rodriguez, and Free Them All!
Long live Assata Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Sheikh Khader Adnan, Ed Poindexter, Ismail Haniyeh, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Yahya Sinwar, and many more who have been martyred and/or have joined the ancestors.
A revolutionary freedom fighter, a political prisoner, a mother, a woman in exile— Assata Shakur’s lifelong practice of militancy and sacrifice will continue to be aspirational to all who wish to see the day that imperialism receives its final blow.
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
Rest in Power, Comrade Assata!
Read also:
source: Samidoun
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=21720
#assataShakur #blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #cuba #guerrilla #martyr #northAmerica #repression #rip #samidoun
Joanne Deborah Chesimard aka Assata Shakur, #FBI #MostWanted #BlackLiberationArmy member, and godmother of rapper #Tupac, who lived as US fugitive in exile in #Cuba dead at 78.
Her death spawns comments of scorn from current bug eyed FBI director.who was born 10 years after the bank robbery crime that made her infamous, ...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/assata-shakur-wanted-black-liberation-army-member-dies/story/
Assata Shakur and the Duty to Free Our Comrades
Assata Shakur was a radical Black feminist, revolutionary, and freedom fighter. Her life was a testament to true liberatory practice, love, and community. She taught us about the interconnectedness of our struggles as oppressed people and the necessity for resistance in the face of state and imperial violence, by any means necessary and no matter the cost to our own comforts. She also taught us that liberation cannot be negotiated; it must be seized. She stands as a hero for those of us fighting for the liberation of the global working class, and we honor the sacrifices she made to advance that cause.
After years of being targeted and hunted by police for opposing the racist, capitalist, and imperialist U.S. as a member of the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army, and after being stalked and surveilled by U.S. state agencies, including the FBI, Assata was arrested and falsely accused of murdering a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973. Despite Assata’s innocence, and the many experts who testified that her injuries during the altercation would have made it impossible for her to commit the murder, she was convicted by an all-white jury in 1977. While in state custody, the conditions under which Assata was held were nothing short of barbaric and inhumane, including solitary confinement in a men’s prison, 24-hour surveillance, and denial of intellectual nourishment and adequate medical attention, including when she became pregnant while awaiting trial in 1973.
Assata’s story is one that many living in Lënapehòkink (The Bronx) and across the U.S. empire at large may recognize or relate to. Her insistence on life and her years of fighting for the liberation of Black people living under state violence serve as a reminder to us all to remain “reluctant warriors” in the face of U.S. state terrorism. It was Assata’s militant comrades in the Black Liberation Army who liberated her from incarceration by the state; they did not abandon her after she was apprehended. They understood, as Palestinians do, that there was no future for their movement without that freedom. Let us remember the comrades who broke her out, some of whom served decades in prison and some of whom remain incarcerated. Salute to Sekou Odinga, Silas Muhammad, Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, Winston Patterson, Silvia Baraldini, Marilyn Buck, Mutulu Shakur and other BLA comrades.
It is the militants and revolutionaries who are most repressed and incarcerated. We must learn from Assata and her comrades and apply those lessons to today. We have several comrades who are currently incarcerated and must also be liberated. Free Casey Goonan, Jakhi McCray, Tarek Bazrouk, Leqaa Kordia, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kamau Sadiki, Rev. Joy Powell, Elias Rodriguez — FREE THEM ALL!
After successfully liberating herself from prison with the help of fellow BLA members in 1979, Assata was eventually granted political asylum in Cuba by Fidel Castro, and she lived out the remainder of her years as a free Black woman on liberated land, remaining vocal and devoted to Black liberation. Thank you to our Cuban comrades who protected and embraced Assata for the 41 years she called Cuba home.
We thank Assata for her relentless sacrifice, education, and fierce love and commitment to Black people and all those oppressed around the world. May her life be a continued reminder to the struggle that although we must survive, we also deserve to live. May her memory propel us forward until we are all free. May her teachings help light the path as the struggle continues.
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
Rest in Power, Comrade Assata.
source: Bronx Anti-War
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=21635
#assataShakur #blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #cuba #northAmerica
https://www.europesays.com/2448900/ Assata Shakur, Political Activist Who Sought Asylum in Cuba, Dead at 78 #AngelaDavis #AssataShakur #asylum #AsylumSeekers #BlackLiberationArmy #COINTELPRO #Cuba #havana #JoanneDeborahByron #MinistryOfForeignAffairs #PoliticalAsylum
„Es ist unsere Pflicht, zu gewinnen“
#AssataShakur
"Am 25. September verstarb die Revolutionärin Assata Shakur im Exil auf Kuba. Shakur kämpfte ihr Leben lang gegen rassistische Unterdrückung von Schwarzen in den USA und patriarchale Gewalt gegen Schwarze Frauen.
Assata Shakur – mit Mädchennamen Joanne Deborah Byron – stand für die kompromisslose, antirassistische und antikapitalistische Linie der militanten Schwarzen Bewegung in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren. Sie verband den Kampf gegen die Unterdrückung Schwarzer Menschen in den USA mit einer klaren anti-imperialistischen Haltung, beispielsweise gegen den US-amerikanischen Krieg in Vietnam. „Der Sieg eines unterdrückten Volkes irgendwo auf der Welt ist ein Sieg für die Schwarzen in Amerika“, brachte Shakur diesen Internationalismus einmal auf den Punkt.
In den späten 1960ern schloss sie sich zuerst den Black Panthers an, die für Selbstverteidigung, Community-Programme und politische Bildung eintraten. Später wechselte sie in die Black Liberation Army (BLA), die vor allem direkte Aktionen gegen Polizei und Staat durchführte."
https://perspektive-online.net/2025/09/es-ist-unsere-pflicht-zu-gewinnen-zum-tod-von-assata-shakur/
"We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA."
#Assata #Shakur, of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, has died at the age of 78 in #Cuba, where she received political asylum in 1984.
More on Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur, Black Liberation Army Legend, Passes Away in Exile in Cuba
Assata Shakur, a revolutionary Black Liberation Army fighter, who was granted political asylum in Cuba, has passed away at 78.
On Thursday, Shakur “died in Havana, Cuba, as a result of health conditions and her advanced age,” according to Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“At approximately 1:15 PM on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath. Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time,” Kakuya Shakur, her daughter, wrote on Facebook.
“I want to thank you for your loving prayers that continue to anchor me in the strength that I need in this moment. My spirit is overflowing in unison with all of you who are grieving with me at this time.”
Shakur, born in NYC, became political involved with attending Borough of Manhattan Community College. She partially traced her interest in communism to a 1964 debate about the Vietnam War with several African students attending Columbia University:
i continued saying the first thing that came into my head: that the U.S. was fighting communists because they wanted to take over everything. When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners…. I felt like a bona fide clown…. I knew i didn’t know what the hell communism was, and yet i’d been dead set against it…. I never forgot that day…. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.
She joined the Black Panther Party and became a member of the Harlem branch. Like many other NYC black revolutionaries in the Panthers, she eventually joined the underground formation: the Black Liberation Army. She was renowned for being a serious revolutionary militant, having impeccable shot accuracy and participating in several clandestine actions.
She became subject to an extensive nationwide manhunt by the fascist US state. According to Panther Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, the FBI and local police “initiated a national search-and-destroy mission for suspected BLA members, collaborating in stakeouts that were the products of intensive political repression and counterintelligence campaigns like NEWKILL.” They “attempted to tie Assata to every suspected action of the BLA involving a woman.” The JTTF would later serve as the “coordinating body in the search for Assata and the renewed campaign to smash the BLA”, after her escape from prison
Shakur claimed that she was targeted by the FBI as a result of her involvement with the black liberation organizations. Specifically, documentary evidence suggests that Shakur was targeted by an investigation named CHESROB, which “attempted to hook former New York Panther Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur) to virtually every bank robbery or violent crime involving a black woman on the East Coast.” Although named after Shakur, CHESROB (like its predecessor, NEWKILL) was not limited to Shakur.
On May 2, 1973,, Assata Shakur, along with Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike in East Brunswick by NJ state troopers, ensuing in a conflict and leading to the death of Zayd and the capture of Acoli and Shakur.
In 1979, Black Liberation Army members, under the leadership of Sekou Odinga, liberated Assata from prison and managed to help her flee to revolutionary Cuba where she was granted political asylum. This was inarguably one of the most important political actions of the century in the settler-colonial fascist United States.
The Cuban state faced tremendous pressure to release Assata and never waivered, maintaining a thorough, principled stance.
Her passing is a tremendous blow to the international revolutionary movement, but also a cause for celebration since she remained free, died in liberated terrain, and was never captured by the US slave state. We all mourn and celebrate her life, her resistance, and her memory.
Below we publish a letter she wrote to the African diaspora:
—
To My People By Assata Shakur (written while in prison)
4 July 1973
Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied.
I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heart-less robots who protect them and their property.
I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me.
I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered over fifty thousand dollars in rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.
I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.
It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals. The president, two attorney generals, the head of the fbi, the head of the cia, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the Watergate crimes.
They call us murderers, but we did not murder over two hundred fifty unarmed Black men, women, and children, or wound thousands of others in the riots they provoked during the sixties. The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives. They call us murderers, but we were not responsible for the twenty-eight brother inmates and nine hostages murdered at attica. They call us murderers, but we did not murder and wound over thirty unarmed Black students at Jackson State—or Southern State, either.
They call us murderers, but we did not murder Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Nat Turner, James Chaney, and countless others. We did not murder, by shooting in the back, sixteen-year-old Rita Lloyd, eleven-year-old Rickie Bodden, or ten-year-old Clifford Glover. They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people. Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen percent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of murder victims are Black. For every pig that is killed in the so-called line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the police.
Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.
They call us kidnappers, yet Brother Clark Squires (who is accused, along with me, of murdering a new jersey state trooper) was kidnapped on April z, 1969, from our Black community and held on one million dollars’ ransom in the New York Panther 21 conspiracy case. He was acquitted on May 13, 1971, along with all the others, of 156 counts of conspiracy by a jury that took less than two hours to deliberate. Brother Squires was innocent. Yet he was kidnapped from his community and family. Over two years of his life was stolen, but they call us kidnappers. We did not kidnap the thousands of Brothers and Sisters held captive in amerika’s concentration camps. Ninety percent of the prison population in this country are Black and Third World people who can afford neither bail nor lawyers.
They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not
we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.
They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving. The rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history. They are the bandits. They are the murderers. And they should be treated as such. These maniacs are not fit to judge me, Clark, or any other Black person on trial in amerika. Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.
Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, al-though words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.
I want to apologize to you, my Black brothers and sisters, for being on the new jersey turnpike. I should have known better. The turnpike is a checkpoint where Black people are stopped, searched, harassed, and assaulted. Revolutionaries must never be in too much of a hurry or make careless decisions. He who runs when the sun is sleeping will stumble many times.
Every time a Black Freedom Fighter is murdered or captured, the pigs try to create the impression that they have quashed the movement, destroyed our forces, and put down the Black Revolution. The pigs also try to give the impression that five or ten guerrillas are responsible for every revolutionary action carried out in amerika. That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA.
There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black
Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Assata Shakur
rest in power
"Strong woman. Amazon.
Wear your scars like jewelry
cause they were bought with blood."
https://www.whatimreading.net/p/assata-shakur-political-activist-dead
#AssataShakur #RIP #BlackPanthers #BlackLiberationArmy #Cuba
Our Burning Memory: Social War & The Combatants for Black Liberation
“I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason.”
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
Our history is a history of names of the dead.
Oscar Grant, Kimani Gray, Alton Sterling, Freddy Gray, Brionna Taylor, Mike Brown, Timothy Green, Kajeme Powell, Vonderitt Myers, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, Rekia Boyd, Sonya Massey, Ta’Kiya Young, and on, and on, and on….
Since about 2015, when I first found people who were keeping track, the average number of people killed by police every year is about 1,500 people. 1,500 unique individuals whose lives were snuffed out, whose absence ripples across a whole constellation of relations – relatives, friends, loved ones, communities, etc. That, of course, is only explicit murders, not a variety of different forms of death in custody that are also murders, not harassment, not brutality, not sexual assault and rape.
So great are our dead, and at every turn they should be honored and remembered. Who remembers them and honors them better than our fighters? But…who are our fighters? Who makes note of and remembers them?
Our history is a history of defeat, and that defeat has us adopting the worldview of the enemy, has us accepting the limits of our chains. The left wing of capital, the self professed revolutionaries and yes even many anarchists, have adopted a stance of self victimization. In shock from the violence of oppression, the daily blood quota to keep a system of racial caste domination functioning, many will flee from what is asked of us, talking about safety before talking of fire and gunpowder – if they ever do. They will say “White Bodies To The Front!”, “Dismantling White Supremacy is White People’s Work!” as if someone could ever fight in place of us. They will tell people to stay out of the streets, to stay in line, to not come out before ever thinking of picking up a rock and a stick. They will talk infinitely about the strength of the police, but will never talk of their weaknesses.
When those few brave individuals, no longer accepting the daily misery and humiliation, no longer accepting the limitations thrust upon us by the color of our skin, strike out in displays of ferocity and courage, the activists and revolutionaries rush in to spit upon their memory. They’re adventurists. Individual action doesn’t do anything. Your actions are going to bring repression upon us. You’re making us look bad. You’re a fed. That was a false flag. They’re not affiliated with us, we’re the good ones. We’re the docile ones. We’re the cowardly ones who never dare to strike against our chains.
This tension is notable in looking at who is worth remembering. We talk of the innocent, the unarmed killed by the police and vigilante. If the innocent deserve our support, the guilty do doubly so. So much breath is wasted in trying to justify why so and so isn’t a criminal, was innocent, didn’t deserve to die. As though all our other kin deserve death. All the while the dominant order continues to stack our bodies because they see crime not in the action but in the origin – the birth in black skin.
I do not identify with this mythical figure of innocence – a white figure, an appeal to white morality. In the figure of the shoplifter, the drug dealer, the prostitute, the carjacker, the shooter I will always see more of myself. I know what is done is incidental, irrelevant, an excuse to play out fantasies of violence against black people, a desire to punish the Black Other to affirm the Goodness of White.
In an act of reclaiming the memory of the guilty, of uplifting our fighters I wish to talk about two particular individuals – Christopher Monfort and Korryn Gaines.
Our Memory Is A Burning Fuse
“My intentions are the best for the city and the country. The things I’m accused of are selfless acts. I didn’t get anything out of them.”
– Christopher Monfort, Seattle Times Interview
October 22nd. Smoke rises from the Seattle City Maintenance Facility – multiple cop cars have burst into flames. A note is left at the scene referencing the video of King County Sheriff Paul Schene repeatedly punching 15 year old Malika Calhoun who is held in custody.
The perpetrator gets away, the attack remains unsolved.
10PM on the 31st, a cold Halloween night, and a vehicle drives through the streets of Seattle’s Central District. It pulls up next to an SPD patrol car and the window rolls down. The officers turn their heads to look over and from the darkness of the vehicle they are greeted not with a face, but with a barrel of a rifle. It opens its mouth to speak.
KRAK KRAK KRAK.
This exchange of speech in a language the police know so well lasts less than a minute before the rifle disappears into the darkness of the car. The vehicle quickly turns around and speeds off from the direction it came.
A look back over the scene: An SPD patrol car riddled with bullets, one pig slumped in his seat dead, the other injured.
“And when we die there ain’t no fireworks or fuckin parades”
– Bambu, Since I Was A Youth
November 6th, the armed death cult of SPD hold a public memorial – a procession through the city they occupy, a show of force. Around the same time out in Tukwila a snitch, a cop without a uniform, calls in a suspicious vehicle that matches the description of the vehicle that opened fire on the occupying army. The enemy encroaches on an apartment complex, a man brandishes a 9mm Glock and flees up the stairwell. The enemy approaches, the man pops out from the corner putting the gun into the cops face and pulls the trigger – click – he forgot to chamber a round. He goes down in a hail of gunfire into his head and stomach.
The enemy enters the man’s apartment. They find a small armory – a bolt action rifles and 2 semi-auto rifles, a shotgun, another .45 handgun, homemade explosives and firebombs and booby traps.
Ballistic and DNA forensics identify this man – Christopher Monfort – as the arsonist and gunman. Despite all odds he survives, now paralyzed from the waist down with a bullet lodged in his spine and with brain damage.
“So when the system seems to break down what do we do? We march, we protest, we form groups and the police scowl at us on the sides of the road and talk about the overtime they’re getting. If you stand close enough you can hear them. They have no intent on listening to a thousand or ten thousand people marching for police to stop their brutality. When you see a couple police officers brutalizing or murdering someone there’s always a few, maybe half a dozen, of their friends around them. They’re not gonna tell on their buddies. They’re not crossing the blue line.”
-Christopher Monfort, Final Statement to the Court
Despite everything, Chris was able to speak for himself. He was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2017 in his cell at Walla Walla State prison, allegedly from overdose. Anarchists continued to support him until his death.
—————————————————————-
“’She always was a little radical, and she was hardcore about certain stuff. She did a lot of research … laws of the land,’ Rhanda [Korryn’s Mother] said. ‘And right after Freddie Gray got killed, it amplified because he was a neighbor to us. We used to see him.’”
– Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines
March 10th, 2016. A woman is pulled over for driving a vehicle with a piece of cardboard where a license plate should be. She is ordered out of her vehicle as a cop threatens to taze her. “You are not going to kidnap me, you are going to have to kill me.”
She is arrested for a disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. She is held for two days in isolation with neither food nor water.
August 1st, police come to her door to serve a warrant for missed court dates. The door is opened, the the cops are greeted with a shotgun to their face. They retreat and call for back up and a 6 hour standoff ensues.
Initially they try to frame the situation as a kidnapping but have to roll it back as a Facebook livestream of the stand off goes viral, with her calmly in her home and the occasional shot of her children in the background eating and playing. She talks about the situation while friends and followers cheer her on and tell her to hold strong.
In part of the video, Gaines asks her 5 year old son “Who is outside?” He answers “The police.” She asks why; “To kill us.” He responds.
Toward the end of the standoff, the Baltimore Police – with compliance from Facebook – gain access to her account, shut off the live stream and deactivate the account. Within moments of the live stream going down, the cops shoot through the wall, killing Korryn and wounding her child.
“’Officer shot through a wall and couldn’t even see nothing,’ Rhanda said. She describes the sentiment of the officer as, ‘Nerve of this little Black girl to stay in this house when we said to come out!’”
– Interview with the Mother of Korryn Gaines
The Black Liberation Army Is A Living Tension
“…our final consideration is whether or not these masses must centralize their organizing (not to be confused with the obvious need to coordinate their efforts!). To that I answer with an emphatic, ‘no!’ and further, I contend that such centralization will only make it easier for our oppressors to identify and level repression upon us – prolonging the crisis our generation must deal with.”
– Russell Maroon Shoatz, The Dragon and the Hydra
These two stories are a drop in the ocean – there’s a thousand stories like these. Hidden, buried, choked out by our enemies and the cowards who enable them. Names and acts we will never know. The point in recounting and connecting these stories, beyond the inspiration of individual action, is to describe a living tension.
Once is an act of insanity. Twice is a lone wolf. A thousand times begins to look like an army.
While revolutionaries waste their ink and breath talking of conditions, of “the people” not being ready, the past two decades has been the informal spread of practices and the development of ad hoc fighting formations. The shooters, the rock throwers, the looters, the arsonists, the getaway drivers. A black liberation army – a de facto informal network of fighters across the territories dominated by the american state – has been building and fighting right before our very eyes.
Many look at this and see disorganization, a child needing the strong hand of the Patriarch to guide them, whether in the form of the vanguard party or the leader, to the real means of freedom that these chaotic and ungrateful negros will never grasp on their own. But any closer look shows that we are very obviously organized and coordinated – perhaps the most organized forces in these territories and perhaps it’s the revolutionaries who need a lesson in organization.
Or better yet, the revolutionaries need to be pushed out of our way.
Yes, the organization, the coordination, the fighting spirit is all there. What is needed is for us to consciously recognize this – that we aren’t fighting alone, that to some degree or another we have built upon the ideas, strategies and practices of others, refined in the forge of street combat. This consciousness has been developing over the past 20 years and through bitter and bloody experience will continue to develop is greater and lesser degree, in different ways, in different territories.
I don’t have a plan or a great analysis to give you to beautifully close this out. All I can offer is this; I see tensions that need to be pushed, memories that need to be reclaimed, and developing practices that need to be analyzed. Through writing, through video, through music, performance, crime, and practice in the instances of street combat to come I seek to spread and clarify these and be in dialogue with the development of the black liberation army, walking alongside it as an anarchist and developing it as a participant.
If nothing else has been made more clear to me, I can clearly see that many individuals in many different territories see a similar trajectory and, like me, awkwardly stumble towards it. Just as I develop and dialogue with local and regional tensions, I hope to dialogue with you all, sharing our ideas, sharpening our practices.
I cannot say what the future holds, victory or defeat. All I can say for certain is that no savior from on high will deliver us from the position we find ourselves in; that our destiny is in our hands alone, so let’s make sure our hands are armed.
In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres.
In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder.
Peace By Piece
(A)
Our Burning Memory: Social War & The Combatants for Black Liberation
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17424
#anarchist #antiPolice #blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #northAmerica #policeViolence
Black Liberation Army Veteran Dhoruba Bin Wahad Requires Support
Peace Comrades, Friends & Community, We’re reaching out today, seeking your Support to assist with our Fundraising Efforts for Brother Dhoruba Bin Wahad.Donate here: Dhoruba
Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, 80 years old, was a leading member of the New York Black Panther Party (NYBPP). He was the NYBPP’s Field Secretary, responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast. In April of 1969, he and (20) other members of the NYBPP were arrested on charges of conspiracy. This case, which became known as the “Panther 21” was part of the illegal FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Following the Panther 21 acquittal, Dhoruba was, again, falsely arrested and spent 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. While in prison he sued both the FBI and NYPD. That litigation produced over 300,000 pages of COINTELPRO documentation. His lawsuit, Bin Wahad v. FBI, et al, remains the chief source from which COINTELPRO documentation emanated. Dhoruba was released from prison in 1990 based on those documents. He continues to write and work promoting Pan Africanism, and an uncompromising critique of US imperialism and capitalism, and freedom for his Comrades and all political prisoners.
Baba Dhoruba requires our Collective Support!!!
We are now asking you to “take a position”. A few years ago, Dhoruba was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. He receives treatments here in New York approximately four times per year. When not actually receiving treatments, he likes to spend time in his adopted home in Ghana, West Africa. While in New York or in Ghana, he continues to write and provide a critique and deep analysis of world events. We want Dhoruba to be able to continue this work. But at 80 years old and suffering the trials and tribulations of fighting cancer, Dhoruba is unable to work. We, his close friends, and longtime supporters are asking you to contribute as much as you can. We want Dhoruba to be able to live as comfortably as possible and to be able to travel between his homes in the United States and Africa.
SUPPORT FOR BABA DHORUBA BIN WAHAD:
Medical Travel Expenses: Round Trip Ticket from Accra, Ghana to NYC, (4) times per year:
IMMEDIATE NEED:
>October 2024 Tentative Flight Itinerary:
DELTA FLIGHT $1600.00 October 13, 2024 – November 11, 2024 January 2025 $1500.00 April 2025 $1500.00 July 2025 $1500.00 TOTAL: $4500.00 Monthly Living Expenses: $3,050.00 (for a year – $36,600.00): Rent $1000.00 Food $600.00 Electricity $300.00 Water $250.00 Phone/Internet $300.00 Diesel Gas $300.00Physical Therapy $300.00
“Revolutionaries do not receive a pension, they generally do not have social security allotments, they don’t have supplemental income. Our aging revolutionaries, those who have placed their liberty and lives in jeopardy for the Freedom and Liberation of oppressed peoples, don’t have health insurance, or depend on Medicaid or Medicare for medical assistance.”
Jalil Muntaqim, Comrade –
✊Please DONATE & SHARE with Comrades, Family & Community!!! https://www.gofundme.com/f/baba-dhoruba-requires-our-collective-support Cash App: $Dhoruba Peace, Thanks & Much Appreciation, Baba Dhoruba Fundraising Teamhttps://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=13349
#bla #blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #bpp #dhorubaBinWahad #northAmerica #us
Arm the Spirit Interview With Safiya Bukhari for International Women’s Day: 1995
Interview conducted in New York City, September 27, 1992 and distributed by Arm the Spirit via e-mail for International Women’s Day 1995.
Q: The first question I have is, how did you get involved with the Black Panther Party (BPP)?
I was going to college to be a doctor. The first year in college I was just into my studies. But it was right here in Brooklyn, actually, in New York City College, and the people on campus thought that I was stuck up because I didn’t associate – I was studying a lot. And so the second year, in order to break that mode, I pledged for a sorority called Hamilton House. That same year the sorority became integrated. We elected the first Black president. And one of the projects of the sorority was to adopt underprivileged children in foreign countries. Our President that year said we didn’t have to go any further than the United States to find underprivileged children. A lot of people didn’t believe that there were hungry children that needed to be fed right here in the U.S., even in New York.
So three of us were assigned to go investigate the situation and we ended up going to Harlem to see if there were really hungry children. It was Yvonne Smallwood, Wanda Davis and myself. And the first people we ran into when we got there were the Panthers. Wanda got totally involved from the beginning; she fell in love with a Panther and joined the Party and everything. I didn’t go that route. I simply didn’t believe the things that the Panthers were saying.
About the hungry children: we went back and reported that the result was that there were a lot of people who were eating out of garbage cans, that there were indecent conditions that they were living in, etc. The next question was what to do about it. Should we start our own program or should we get involved in the things that already went on – because the Panthers already had the Free Breakfast Program. So, in essence we elected to just assign various members of our sorority to work with the free Breakfast Program. We would collect the food, we cooked the food, we would help the children with their homework, things like that, but I still didn’t believe in what the Panthers were saying. I didn’t think that the violence was happening. I didn’t think that the conspiracies were going on. I didn’t believe that the police were doing what they said they were doing, etc.
Two incidents happened that made me start to think seriously about what the ideology of the Party was and take the rhetoric of the Party seriously. With the Breakfast Program, the police started putting out rumours. The children stopped coming to the breakfast program. And I wondered why – so I found out from talking to some of the parents that the police kept telling them that we were feeding the children poisoned food – so they were stopped from bringing their children to the program and that made me angry. I mean, we were getting up at outrageous hours in the morning to take care of this before going to school – I was still going to school full-time – I was cooking the food and we were eating it right along with the children. They didn’t have a breakfast program in the schools themselves, they were not making an effort to feed the children, but they didn’t want us to feed the children. And I was incensed about that.
Then, myself and my friend Wanda were walking on 42nd Street – I still hadn’t joined the Party, that still didn’t make me angry enough to join the Party – well, there we were on 42nd Street one day and going to times Square we saw this big crowd on the corner and so we went rushing to see what was going on. A Panther was on the corner selling papers and the police were harassing him. So, believing whole-heartedly in the Constitution, I asked him what he was doing. And the police said if I didn’t stop that they were going to arrest me, too. I said he had a constitutional right to sell the papers, actually, I said he had a constitutional right to disseminate political literature, and he didn’t take that too kindly. He asked me for my ID and told me to get up against the car and that he was going to arrest me for obstructing governmental process and inciting a riot. He handcuffed me, handcuffed the Panther, handcuffed Wanda and threw us into the police car and took us down to the 14th Precinct. In the back of the car they told my friend Wanda that if she didn’t shut up – she was just running off at the mouth, calling them a bunch of names – they were going to ram the night-stick right up her. That was their behaviour and when we got to the Precinct itself they talked about holding court in the Precinct. They did a search, threw us in a holding cell and kept talking … then they had a female guard come and strip-search us and they told her she should wear gloves and make sure she washes her hands afterwards because she could catch something from touching us. It was that experience that when they let me out, I called my mother and father at home and told them I was going to join the BPP. Because of the police, I told them that the police convinced me of the legitimacy of the truth of what the Panthers were saying.
I didn’t get arrested for anything from that point on. I never got arrested for anything trivial. But my friend Wanda, she never learned not to get arrested for talking, I was with her when she got arrested for selling wolf tickets and murdermouthing the police. But to me it was much more serious than that. It was more serious because they had this authority and they had the badges and they had the guns and they abused their power. And it’s what they say and what they do that carries more weight in a court of law than what the individual does. It was that kind of corruption that made me make the decision to join the BPP.
Q: When was that?
1969.
Q: And then you worked with the Panthers in New York?
I worked with the Panthers, I worked out of the Harlem office of the BPP, from then until I went underground in 1974.
Q: Why did you go underground?
From 1969 until 1971, before the split in the BPP, I had a section. My responsibility was for organizing and politicizing that section, selling papers, organizing the various cell units and just politically educating that community. I did everything from selling papers and handing out leaflets, drug-detox work and everything else. By 1971 when the split came down, right after the split, I became in charge of Information and Communications for the East Coast Panthers. One of my responsibilities was to hold the press conferences and release communiqués from the Black Liberation Army.
And so I became a direct threat to the establishment. They thought I had the information they needed to capture BLA members. So they subpoenaed me. But even prior to this they had done a number of articles on the fact that I was the only ranking member in the Party without a felony conviction. And since I had no felony conviction, I had a license to carry arms. And I carried arms openly in public because the law allowed you to. You could carry long arms or have a Paratrooper A-1. I had an 8mm Mauser and I had these long arms whenever we had a press conference. Or I kept it at home and walked with it, carried it back and forth to the office, in a holster on the street. So the media played it up like “the Panthers with guns”, but they didn’t bother to investigate that it was licensed. When they finally got to the point that they realized I was legal, then I was the only ranking Party member without a felony conviction.
I had done my work in the community so well that I had a lot of community support and so on that level had organized my base area and also had the political astuteness to in order to play the media. They thought the fact that I had the diplomacy to play the media made me a political threat. Then in 1970/71 we started the National Committee for the defense of Political Prisoners, in response to all the arrests across the country of Panthers and BLA members. I was working with the people in prison and they put the letters that I was sending inside to the prisoners. Our political stance was very clear, we were not about reformism or anything like that. It was about revolutionary political power and how it comes to revolution, and means a qualitative change in the living conditions of the people with us, and it was not about the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – oldest liberal Black civil rights organization in the U.S.) style politics or anything like that.
The Senate Committee in the US held hearings on the kind of political literature that was going into the prisons, so that part was a threat to them also. It was basically a lot of the political work that I was doing – back and forth to the prisons – myself and Yuri Kochiyama and many others like us. And in November 1973, myself and three other people who were part of the Harriet Tubman Brigade of the BLA were arrested for trying to break out some six members of the BLA out of the Tombs (pretrial detention prison in NYC). But the arrest was premature because even though they played it up to the media like “Great Tombs Escape Fails At The sewer”, they were not able to hold us because we weren’t doing anything. The only thing they could charge us with was third degree burglary on a sewer, which was laughed out of court. And they were very angry.
Outside the legitimate system, the Police Department put a $10,000 contract on me that I wasn’t supposed to be captured. I had gotten into the position to be killed on sight. That was outside the normal system. And inside it, I got a subpoena by the Federal government to the grand Jury – about 11 other people and myself. But the difference with my subpoena was that if I showed up at the Grand Jury I couldn’t take the Fifth Amendment and therefore for any question that I refused to answer I was facing felony contempt which carried a prison sentence.
So we discussed it, myself and Nuh (Nuh Washington – now one of the New York Three) and some other people and we decided that I shouldn’t go before the Grand Jury in April 1974, that I should go underground. And at that point I went underground with the Amistad Collective of the Black Liberation Army.
Q: In order to end the chronology – when did you get captured?
I was the unit coordinator of the Amistad Collective. So, basically I was the only female coordinator in a BLA unit. We were captured in a shoot-out in Norfolk, Virginia, on January 25, 1975. One of my co-defendants, Komposi Amistad, was killed and another one was shot in the face. For the first 30 days we were facing the electric chair for felony murder. The only reason why we got out from the electric chair is that the federal government and the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in Virginia at that time, saying it was unconstitutional. So we didn’t have to go to trial facing the death penalty.
But the state of Virginia asked for 900 years on the paratrooper A-1 I told you about, they didn’t care that I had a federal license. It was a one day trial, my bail was set at 1 million dollars on each count – we had five counts, which came to 5 million dollars.
They told them not to touch the bail issue, they picked the jury, they had the trial and they sentenced us all in one day and took us off to prison in one day. When they had the trial they threw me out of court before they started the trial. So I understand well Mumia not being in court during his trial, because I was not in court either.
I was in a cell in the back and it was cold and it had a loud-speaker, but I didn’t hear a thing, because it was nothing but static. But they brought me back in court for the sentencing phase and I was given 40 years. The jury wanted to run the time concurrently – I got 10, 10, and 20 – because it was the minimum on all the charges. And the judge told them they couldn’t do it, it was not up to them to determine how high it ran on the term on what I got and he ran it consecutive, and he told me I had to do every day of it. I told him, his momma was going to do it. (laughs) They sent us off to prison that night.
We both went together because they sent me to the penitentiary for men where my co-defendant was, and then I was taken by caravan to the women’s institution in Richmond, Virginia, and spent the next 21 days in maximum security segregation, because they didn’t want me on the outside where the other population was.
Q: How did you get out of segregation?
According to their own rules the only reason why you are supposed to be on maximum security segregation is when you violate one of their rules. So, I hadn’t violated a rule, So, when they took me down there I asked them why I was down there and they said because they didn’t have an empty room in the quarantine hall. And I asked them for a manual of their rules. I read it all and I told them, if that’s the case, in 21 days then you don’t have to worry about the room in the quarantine. Just that either I’ll be out of maximum security segregation or you’ll be in court.
And so on the 19th day they sent this correctional officer down there who said that she would accept me on her hall. She asked me what my intentions were while I was in prison and I told here that my intention was to do two years and leave. (laughs).
And she said they were concerned about me organizing in prison recruiting for the BLA, and I told them I had no intentions to recruit because I don’t really believe in recruiting. I believe if a person is going to do anything they need to make the decision based on their own conditions. If you have to recruit them, they haven’t made a decision on their own and if they don’t make it on their own they’re susceptible to back out and say somebody forced them to do things and stuff like that. But if they make a conscious decision on their own that the want to be involved in something then they have nobody to blame for anything that happens.
So, I told her I had no intention of recruiting. And she said then that she didn’t have any problems with me being in her hall. And so on the 21st day they moved me to the building where this correctional officer was, but I wasn’t allowed to go out into general population without handcuffs on and an armed guard with me. I wasn’t allowed to go to school. I wasn’t allowed to work in the kitchen or in the laundry or any other place where the women were working because they said I was a security risk. So, the only place I could be was in the hall, on the tier, in the cottage where I was housed. For everything you had to be right there at that complex.
After the first year I had to do the psychological evaluation, so that they could determine how they should handle you. The psychologist that I had to go see decided that I didn’t have to do all those little stupid tests, putting blocks together, etc. He asked a bunch of questions and then he said that he understood my political “beliefs”; at least how determined I was and stuff like that. And then he wrote this paper talking about that I believed wholeheartedly in the movement and that I was adamant about that, but I would not be a disciplinary problem if they called me by my Islamic name and dealt with me in a respectful manner and then he called me “paranoid” (laughs) – that I believed that people were out to get me. But he did say that I had no need for rehabilitation – rehabilitate from what, anyway. So he told them that they had to call me by my Islamic name or Ms. Bukhari and there will be no problems. But if they try to deal with me in any other manner then they did have a problem with me. And that was the psychological evaluation.
Anyways, after almost two years exactly I escaped. It was New Years Eve 1976. And the escape was really for two reasons. First, was that I just believed as a prisoner of war that a prisoner of war’s responsibility is to escape. So, from the very beginning we took the position that we were prisoners of war, and at the time of our capture we were soldiers in the Black Liberation Army. We gave a name, rank and serial number only and invoked that the court had no jurisdiction to try us. Therefore on that premise alone that the prisons had no jurisdiction over us and it is our responsibility as prisoners of war to escape – on that level I escaped. And that was one of the reasons.
The other reason was – one of the reasons why I was going South in the first place prior to the capture was because I had medical problems and I needed surgery. At the time of the capture I made known to them that I needed to have a surgery. They kept telling me that when I go over to the state custody it would be handled then. When I got to the prison they told me – after the examination – that I had fibroids the size of oranges or grapefruits in my uterus and asked me how much time I had. I told them I had 40 years. They then told me to come back in 10 years. I filed suit. The court said that it was just a difference of opinion between me and the doctor about how the medical treatment should be. I had asked to be able to pay for my own medical care, to have a doctor from the outside, etc. And they said no.
The month before my escape I started haemorrhaging so bad that at the time of my escape I was wearing three big sanitary napkins at the time. And I would have to change them every 2 hours. I was having my menstrual cycle for two weeks at the time, every other week. I was just bleeding horrendously. That day, when I made the decision that I couldn’t wait any longer to get medical care I was standing up in the middle of the floor in the unit where I was housed and all of a sudden – I mean nothing special happened – I just started haemorrhaging from the vagina. And I went to the clinic hall in the institution and they gave me Urgatrade, that was a medication to control the bleeding and told me to go and put my feet up. That was the extent of it – there was no recommendation for to take me to a doctor, to the hospital or anything. I just felt that they were not concerned about my health at all.
The doctor at the institution was not qualified to deal with women. And he had been so bad that in once case for example he had diagnosed just a sore throat when a woman had cancer. This other woman had one ovary left and he told here she had tumours on her right ovary – she didn’t have any right ovary. There was no way that you could have faith in the competency of this doctor. So, when they told me about this Urgatrade for the control of the bleeding and go and put my feet up, I decided that I had to make arrangements to take care of my own medical care.
Those of us who were in the BLA and who were incarcerated, we had a secure communication channel, so that we were still involved in what we called consolidation, organizing, structuring and stuff like that. I was in charge of Area 2 of the consolidation work in the unit and for the country. And as being in charge of Area 2 I was responsible for all the consolidation work in that area around BLA and BPP members, and outside building that whole network in that area. My second was Mark Holder who was in prison at Marion; and he was responsible for that area. So, between the two of us we had the whole Southern regional area of the East Coast in terms of our organizing efforts. Even while we were in prison, mind you…
Part of the CC, the Central Committee of the BLA, were on the streets. There were also members of the CC that were in prison and some were underground.
When I made the decision to escape I notified through secure channels the Central Committee that I was making a move. I notified my area coordinator and I notified the people in the area who needed to know that I was not going to be where they thought I was going to be. The night of the actual escape, we left and we made contact with the underground, and I was out roughly two months. I was captured on February 27th, 1977, and returned to prison in Virginia and went to trial where I was my own attorney at this point in the trial.
During the course of the trial I raised the issue of inadequate medical care and I pleaded not guilty for the reason of “duress and necessity” – that in order to save my own life I had to escape because of the medical conditions. That was also a way of raising the lack of adequate medical care for the women in the prison itself. The jury was very sympathetic and in the town a lot of the correctional officers and the head nurse for the correctional facility were very sympathetic because they knew this man was not qualified; that people in the town where the prison was located would not use him for anything. The only place he could practice was in the women’s institution, because nobody would allow him to practice on them. So during the course of the trial this was brought out.
By the time the trial was over, the judge had to threaten the jury with contempt charges if they didn’t find me guilty, because he said escape is like murder. And so they found me guilty of escape and they sentenced me to the minimum time which was one year. I was already doing 40 years, so one year didn’t make a difference. And the jury stood outside the courtroom and apologized when I was going out … (laughs). The upshot of it was that I was given a choice at that point about doctors – they picked three doctors outside that were not part of the prison system. And they took me to a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, and I picked a woman doctor and we talked about it and they did the examination. By this time it was two years after going into prison, my condition had worsened to the point where they said there strings all across that had pulled my uterus, the tubes and the ovaries all together. And Wanda said – my doctors’s name was Wanda too – that she would do everything possible to save something, but it would be a major piece of surgery. The upshot was that I ended up having a hysterectomy and that I have only one ovary left – and it’s because of the malpractice of that doctor.
I suffered severe postpartum depression. For whole year I was out of it. I was still in maximum security segregation for the escape. I spent three years and 7 months in maximum security segregation – that was the longest time anyone ever did for escape; before that the maximum for escape was 6 months in maximum security segregation. I had to go to court to come out of it and the court ordered me out of it at the end of the three years and 7 months, they had to phase me out. But during the course of the trial the Warden said that I was a threat to the security of the free world if the were releasing me from maximum security segregation. For a minute there I thought I was Russian (laughs) …
Anyway, I came out of maximum security segregation in 1981. After I came out of maximum security segregation we founded a little organization in prisons called “Mothers Inside Loving Kids” for people with a long time, to try to bridge that gap between the children and so that they can keep their family and that continuity with their children going. And then I made parole in 1983, and in August 1983 I was already free.
Q: Did they give you conditions for parole?
Yeah. I wasn’t supposed to associate with anybody – I wasn’t supposed to associate with folks. I wasn’t supposed to ever have a gun in my hands again. I wasn’t supposed to associate with any BLA or Panthers or anything like that. They asked me questions like: “Do you believe in violence or would you do what you did again?” And I told them that based on the conditions – no right-thinking person believes in violence for the sake of violence. But there are certain instances when you have no alternative, when you have exhausted everything else – then you have to resort to violence. And then they asked me: “Would I deal with things the same way again?” And I told them, no, I wouldn’t do it particularly that, because one of the things that is very clear is that we haven’t done the necessary education and organizational work in the streets in order to deal with a movement in the ways that we moved then. We were young, we were idealistic and we were impatient.
We have to build a foundation. And we have to organize not just 30,000 people. This country has 240 to almost 300 million people in it. And a lot of people in the rural areas, and even in some of the major cities and in the suburbs, don’t even know anything is happening because they are not exposed to the conditions – they just don’t know about it. It’s like when we talk about Mumia’s situation – people have never even heard his name – and we are talking about a major situation.
So, the educational phase has to be so that when you move from one level to the next in the struggle, that it is understood that the people know what we are doing. And you lay the foundation to the point where you are not leading the people to a slaughter. And they talked about not being around people who were in the BLA and the BPP and convicted felons. And I told them that it isn’t possible to live in the Black community and not be around convicted felons. To say that I won’t do that I’d be lying to you.
And the other part is that these people of the BPP and the BLA are not just comrades, they are my family. And to tell me that I cannot associate with my family is something I will not accept. So I told them if you give me parole be clear about the fact that I am going to associate with my family. (laughs) And I did from day one when I was walking out of the prison. I was shocked – everyone was shocked – that I made parole. (laughs) The consistence was that the state of Virginia just wanted to get rid of me because it was costing them too much money lately.
The only times I did a law suit against them was when they pushed me to the point where I had no other choice but to file a suit against them. At the last when I left the prison in Virginia they had just written the first infraction ticket that I had since my escape. I was on work release and they had written the ticket because I went outside on the ground of the place where I worked at to sit down to eat lunch on the bench. And the woman who was in charge of the house, the workpolice, wrote the ticket – she was already crazy about the fact that I was a Muslim and she was a Christian and she thought that everybody in the house should be Christian …
And I didn’t eat pork, and how could you be Black in the South without eating pork? She was really ridiculous with “this is my house” and this is a prison. But when she gave me the ticket, she confined me to the house, and the only thing I could come out for were meals. I didn’t mind because at this point I had already made parole, I was just waiting for the date. But at the same time I didn’t like that she had denied me religious freedom.
And I filed a law suit – I told her the next time she will talk to me, talk to my lawyer. I made parole and came home and the suit was still pending. Then I got a call from the lawyer to tell me that they had settled; they had fired her, they had settled the lawsuit and I hadn’t even asked for damages … I just wanted them to tell her that this was not her house and she couldn’t run it as if it were her house and that she couldn’t dictate what religion people could be … I just wanted to tell her that. Because other women were scared to say anything because she was threatening with taking their rights and privileges and they were not ready to deal with that. And I just didn’t think that these people should get away with running their own little prisons.
Anyway, I didn’t mean for her to get fired, because she was the only Black woman in that position. But she got herself into a position that there was nothing to do but to deal with it. And anyway, they gave me money damages and fired her.
Q: Can you talk about how it was to be the only woman unit leader underground?
(laughs) Sexism is regardless of how political you are – in the United States sexism is part of the culture of the U.S. and this is a sexist society.
In the Black Liberation movement sexism is a strong factor not only because of the sexist society in America, but because of the African culture itself, sexism is there. And it’s there in the black culture, because of the denial of their manhood in the acculturation and deculturation that came with slavery and everything else. When the Black Power movement cam into being in the 60s and even through the Garveyites (Marcus Garvey – Black nationalist leader in the 20s and 30s with a strong slogan “Back to Africa”), the Garvey movement and the Nation of Islam and all that other prior to that, there was a search for their manhood. You know, “Rise up you mighty Black men”, Garvey said, or in the BPP the slogan was “Stand up to be Men” and so forth. So, in the Black Power movement and the cultural nationalist movement they were really blatant by saying that the place of women was in the kitchen or on their backs and having children for building the Nation and so on.
One of the things that had developed in the Panther Party and in the BLA – for us, the BLA came out of the BPP because no Party member was allowed to join any armed force other than the Black Liberation Army – was the whole machismo thing. But at the same time there was an organizational position that was anti-sexist. But the individuals themselves still had a lot of sexism within. The Party only existed for about 7 years … there was never time. You had a cultural thing that never did have time to be dealt with.
So you had all the “leaders”, even though Kathleen Cleaver was on the Central Committee, she was just there, a figure-head most on the CC She was Eldridge Cleaver’s wife. So her role was not as a Communications Secretary in the sense that she was viable and working ahead, having an independent voice .. . her role was that of – since she was married to Eldridge Cleaver and he was Minister of Information, she was the Communication Secretary. And women were still viewed more or less as secretaries. There were a few of us on the political front and at political stands and doing the same work. We were basically doing the same work in the BPP. There were a few of us who not only would do the same work, but we would not accept the sexism.
And in the years when I joined the party in 1969, one of the things I tried to make clear was that I did not come into the Party to become somebody’s sexual toy. That, if I wanted to do that I could do it outside of the BPP. Also, I was in my second year at college when I joined the Party – I had already made determinations. I was raised in a family of six brothers and endless uncles … and my mother was very strong. So there was always that leadership position.
And when I made the determination that I was going underground, it was a determination that was based on that I knew this was the next step, this is what I wanted to do. And I had the experience of the collectives that I worked with. First it was the Harriet Tubman Brigade – their sole responsibility was to liberate P.O.W.s, and then it was the “Wretched of the Earth” – and we still wanted the liberation of the P.O.W.s. We saw ourselves as a collective in the sense of a collective. There were no real unit coordinators in those years.
By the time the Amistad Collective came together we decided that we wanted to organize it. We wanted responsibilities and discipline whereas a lot of other units did not have that organization. We wanted to set us a pattern. We had election based on qualifications – qualification and not sexuality – did we decide on who got what position. We had political education classes and we had everything – we even had “r and r” (rest and relaxation) because we found it was necessary that you had time to rest and recuperate.
Having the responsibility of a unit coordinator was more like keeping it all together and trying to make sure that decisions were made not on an emotional basis, that we looked at everything objectively in making those decisions. And making sure that there was a distribution of the work that didn’t see the women in the cell doing the “female” work and being seen as sex objects in the cells. That didn’t develop so we were able to maintain a position in our cell that we were comrades. We were comrades, we respected each other’s individuality and each other’s capabilities and we had the discipline that we didn’t violate no drug rules and not being intoxicated while carrying out our business and stuff like that. That was a very bad part of the movement, in the underground also, that developed in this country.
We had analyzed these things prior to us forming a cell. I think, that’s one of the things that came with being a female unit coordinator – it’s because women have a practical, a more practical approach to things than men do. (laughs). And that’s what I think made our cell different. Even though I was captured and my co- defendant was captured and the other unit member was killed – our unit was made up of 8 people – no one else ever got captured that was in our unit. And the person who talked, who allowed us to be captured, was eventually dealt with, so the person was incapable to put anybody else in the position to be captured. You know, my co-defendant was captured and a woman was killed and I was captured, but 5 other people survived it and were capable of moving.
And even though I didn’t particularly like being in prison, we, we were able to do work. And during the course of the trial, we were able to educate the community. The community was the support network that we had, and even when it came down to the escapes and everything else that happened in Virginia during that time – the people were there because the unit was able to continue to do the work and put the thing together.
Q: What happened to your co-defendant?
He’s out. He’s in Chicago. Yeah, after I got out first, the work to get him out was a thing that we continued. I carried it on – because one of the things I told people is that I was out, but as long as he was in, I really wasn’t out yet, you know. And that’s the kind of cohesiveness that we maintained. Because in a lot of other cases people who were co-defendants came out and they went on about their business and forgot about their co-defendants, the people that went in with them, and I think on that end our unit set a very good example, that we didn’t just walk away from the situation.
Q: And how was it for you – you already had your child before you went underground?
Yes, she was 4 years old when I went underground. Her father was killed during the split in the party. There were two casualties directly involved in the split. That was Robert Webb and Sam Napier on the East Coast, on the New York side of the split. Robert Webb, who is my daughter’s father, had been a body guard to Huey Newton. And when the split went down, because he surfaced – he had been underground – he was a liability for them. He was ordered assassinated by crews from that end.
In retaliation, people from the outside assassinated [Sam Napier]. The fratricide was the most .. the police just sat back and laughed; their thing was they didn’t have to get Panthers, the Panthers kill each other. That was a very crucial time for a lot of us. And when we look back at it – Sam was a loss to the movement itself because he was the circulation manager of the paper. And he lived and died for the paper. And Robert was a loss – just personally he was a loss, because of our relationship, but politically he was a loss, because he knew how to put together an apparatus. He had been in the armed forces of the U.S., he had come out and he was working for the liberation of our people. He had the information and the connections in order to do it; and he had the security mind – he was Deputy Field Marshal in the BPP. Anyway, at the time just before the split, my mother had taken custody of my daughter. I let her go and stay with my mother. And when Robert came back, we had intentions at the point to go back from the underground to get Wanda, my daughter – I named her Wanda too (laughs) – and to bring her back to stay with us and then he got killed, so it was very appropriate that she stayed with my mother. So, she stayed there and I would go and see her.
Robert was dead and I was in a very insecure position. By the time 1974 came around I and I already had the $10,000 contract on me, I had the Grand Jury subpoena and I had been busted in November 1973 for the other things. So I called my mother up and I told her that I wanted her to keep my daughter. And I signed guardianship over to her. One of the things the state was trying to do was to take Panther children away from their parents because they were unfit parents, etc. I didn’t want to take a chance, so I signed legal guardianship over to my mother. And I made arrangements for her schooling and everything else, and I went underground.
When I got captured, I could still see her and I had a lot of dealings with her schooling, etc. But even at that point, when the state found out about her they tried to take her, at one point just tried to kidnap her and use her for leverage against me to make me talk while I was in prison. In a lot of cases I would just call and make sure that my mother didn’t let her go with strangers or someone. One time this woman came by the house and told my mother that she will bring toys for Wanda, she will come and visit and stuff like that, told my mother that she was one of my best friends, and I had told her that Wanda could come spend the weekend with her. And it just so happened that that particular weekend I called home and Momma told me about it, and I told her that I had never heard that woman’s name before in my life. It was incidents like these that made us decide that she could go nowhere by herself, that she had to be taken to school and be picked up from school, and she couldn’t be allowed to just have a normal life really, because they were at the point where they were using children to get information from the parents. So it was very hard to do time in prison knowing that my daughter was the target for a whole lot of things.
Q: Did she understand what was happening?
She never understood. On a lot of levels she was angry because she thought my being in prison was an abandonment of her. And then she never really understood why she had to be kept under such strict surveillance or control. And even now, I tell her now it hasn’t really changed. I mean, I will get messages where someone has seen her here or done this. There is no place that she can go that people don’t know that she is my daughter, and so she has to watch herself very carefully about what she does and where she is and stuff like that.
Q: When we first started learning about the Black Panther Party and the BLA, the only woman’s name that was mentioned was Assata and no one else. Why is that?
That’s because of the media stuff. (laughs) I think the reason why you hear so much about Assata is basically because in 1973 with the shoot-out and everything that happened, the publicity was very high. So the media when they were looking for her, they called her the “soul of the BLA” and stuff like that. It was a lot of media hype and people have a tendency to deal with the media….
You know, she has survived a lot, she has learned a lot and she has studied and she has developed.
And I think on that end too, I have a real problem with the fact that people deal with Assata and there are a lot of other people out there in exile that no one ever mentions.
And then you have a bunch of them in various places that nobody knows their names. And that really works with me, because we have a tendency to build superstars and the superstars get the play. And the soldiers in the rank and file and the workhorses, whose names were never known, they languish on their own. That is not the way you build movements, if you don’t support the people in your movements who made the sacrifices then what incentive is there to anybody else to get involved. I have a real problem with that.
You know the names of Dhoruba bin-Wahad, or Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt and the New York Three, but all the other ones who are languishing in the prisons sit there with no attorneys, no nothing and no one knows their names. You can mention their names, and it goes in one ear and out the other. A lot of times they have no commissary, they don’t get visits, not even from their families do they get visits. But the families that weren’t involved in the struggles that they’re in prison for, they didn’t make the commitments. But the people who were involved in those struggles with them, they don’t even remember the names anymore.
Do you see anyone out there right now who is trying to rebuild the contacts with those comrades? It seems there are so many who need to come out just on the case that they’ve been involved in the struggle?
Well, that’s one of the reasons why we do the New York Three Freedom Campaign Newsletter, we mention those people every time we get information about them, where they are and their cases, what’s happening with them, we try to bring it up and build networking for different struggles around different political prisoners. We try and educate the people to get involved, educate them about the rank and file. And we try to raise not to get involved with the personality cult and deal with the whole issue of support for political prisoners rather than support for an individual political prisoner.
And even like dealing with the brothers inside right now – because it’s predominantly brothers that are inside, except for the MOVE prisoners and white anti-imperialists, there are more brothers; in the Black movement there are basically men that were involved at that time, especially Panthers and BLA members – to cross those boundaries and deal with the whole issue of political prisoners. They are pushing that now, too, that they went into prison as members of organizations and that they should be dealt with as members of organizations rather than as individuals.
There is a lot of work that has to be done – attorneys have to be found and our responsibility to ourselves is in building that foundation, because all of that is building foundations.
When you get involved in movements there should be a legal defense fund set up consistently and there. So when a bust goes down, there is an attorney available for the incarcerated comrade. There should be no question about having to raise defense money. It should be there. By the same token there should be a mechanism to liberate political prisoners. So, that if there is nothing to be won through the courts, there is an alternative already in place.
And for those that have done their time, there should be a fund or something set up for them. I know after 8 years and 8 months there was a lot of psychological damage done to myself personally in the time that I spent in prison. There has to be a mechanism set up so you have time to cool out and deprogram. Because that’s what time in prison is – it’s a time of programming. And so you have to be de-programmed. And after almost 9 years, it happened to me then … and those people who have done 15 and 17 and 20 or more years, they need it much more than I did – you know, to train them for things. And we don’t have those mechanisms in place.
So when I talk about the foundations that we need to build for the struggle I this country, we talk about the basic, elementary foundations to fill a military apparatus and a political struggle. On the political level, we need to have our own communication centres, so we don’t have to keep worrying and wondering about how we get information printed or how we are going to get this done or that done. Right now we should have the people with the necessary skills to put information out from the radio and television. And we have not pulled that together.
Q: This foundation, do you see it coming from people like yourself and people with a history in the BPP, or do you think there is that whole new generation that starts that on their own, or does the Nation of Islam do it? Who does it right now?
I don’t see it coming from the Nation of Islam. I don’t see it coming from any organised formation that is in existence at this point. Because there is a whole new level of thinking, a kind of way of thinking, that has to be developed. I think there are people within all those structures who have the innovative ideas and who have the foresight and who are capable of putting things together that are necessary and do it. But the question is whether or not they really know what they want.
There are a lot of times when we get thrown back in our community. In the years between elections our people see how bad the situation is and they get disenchanted with the elections and there comes along somebody saying all you have to do is to change the administration and things will be better. So they fall back into the same thing. Or you start off with leaders who are strong and audacious and they’re revolutionary or they mouth revolutionary slogans and then they find out that somebody offers them a piece of the pie and then they dilute their message. Like Sister Souljah recently, when she was busy talking about the need for a black army and so on, and then Bill Clinton attacked her about her statement about white people, that she said black people should have a week of killing white people. And her first thing was that she never had a gun, that she never advocated violence. Her whole spiel watered down to the point that we should build our own independent political party and with a technological approach to the situation.
So, even though I am not equating her with the revolutionary leaders, I am saying at that point where you have a voice and once you get attacked or anything like that or you get offered an entree into areas where you maintain your position and you can make a difference in what’s happening, you find out it was all about “this is the best for me at this point” and the amount of dollars, and it becomes different. I think we have a history of that. We have history of – when I made the door open for me, I am going through the door and then you forget about the other persons on the other side.
So, I really think that this new movement is going to be a mixture of people from the old school whose minds are open enough to recognize that they are not the end, that people do not have to come to them before they can move forward. They don’t have the absolute answer. Because some people who were in the Party think that if it isn’t done the way the party was doing it, then it ain’t rational. But it ain’t true. The Party made a lot of mistakes too.
A lot of us inside talked about how there was a need to find new blood. And if we don’t find that new blood and learn from our mistakes and build on them and move forward, then there is no hope for the struggle in this country. And if we continue to try to hold on to it and say: this is my struggle and nobody else can determine how and in which direction it goes, and you can’t do this without permission from me or this is my territory and you can’t walk on my territory. With that game turf mentality we are defeating our own purpose. I think, one of the things we have to do is to consolidate a lot of these organizations and we haven’t done this because egos are in the way.
Egos are a very, very large part of why we have such fragmentations in this movement and we are now moving apart, not moving further. And if you look at the heads of these organizations – they are all men and they splinter off from each other and form little groups with about 30 people in them and they speak to about the same constituency. We have to get past that.
What really gets me is that I hear the people saying that people are ready for this and people are ready for that and the same people who are ready for this and ready for that are the same people that they have been speaking to all the time and they haven’t educated anyone else. When you go outside a certain sector – you can’t even say all of Harlem knows what is going on. Just those people at that rally, or just those who listen to WLIB (NYC radio station) or just those people who call in might be ready. And they might be ready just to talk. And they are ready to do anything concrete. And then they assume just by listening to those few people that the masses are ready for armed struggle, which is not true. Because when you go out to the community, when I go to my mother’s house in Richmond Hill which is right here in Queens, I know they are not ready. But they travel in these little groups, these call these little demonstrations and these people come and they think that they are ready for armed struggle – it’s not true.
A lot of these people would not even know – if armed struggle broke out today – where would they go, how should you deal with treating the wounded, how would you deal with keeping the police from busting down the doors.
So, what you need to do is make those people find a way to take a victory out of the defeat. To turn it around and let people know that you don’t have to be a super-hero to be involved in the movement. But everyone wants people to believe that they’re such strong revolutionaries, that they never feel pain, they never cry, they never want to chuck it all and want to go up to the mountains and read a book or something. But it’s not true.
Jalil will tell you, with this New York Three case, I have been out of prison since 1983 and I have been on this case ever since, and on other cases and working on this and that. And sometimes I am going to say, I need a break, I am not going to do another day’s work on this. And I say that to them and I’m gone. And now, when I say that to them, they leave me alone for a couple of weeks and then they call back and say “are you ok now?” (laughs) Because you are human. You need to do these things in order to continue to be strong enough to handle the struggle. But we want people to believe that we are superhuman. We are not like everyone else…but we are. And we have to recognize that ourselves. And we need recharging. So, if I know that I am coming to the end of my rope, then I can take those precautions, so that I don’t fall a victim to the things that are out there.
Q: Is it really true that there has been no BLA since the 80s?
Not actually since, I would say, 1977/78. And what makes it so bad is that the government knew that. The government knew at that point that there was no political BLA happening out there, whose reason for being there was strictly to wage political and armed struggle in this country, where it was basically the military apparatus of the BPP.
I think you will get to the point where you recognize that in order to build a new movement that you have to expose the mistakes of the prior one, so that you don’t make those same mistakes again; that when you get to that point then we will be ready to move forward again.
Q: What happened to the women, I mean the other women, who were not under so much repression. Did they go back?
A lot of them got involved in community programs, community based work. A lot of us are in touch with each other when we do stuff around the different cases, etc. The women do the majority of that work from one end of the country to the other. Women are raising the children and making sure that they get the education, taking care of the families of the political prisoners, just surviving themselves, because they have been the victims of a lot of these conditions. And now they are educating the youth – in the schools, colleges, universities. So they are continuing the work through the community organizations, like homeless shelters, children’s programs, etc. And when we move from one point to the other we are in touch. And we talk about the women getting together and doing what need to be done. (laughs) We are starting to write books, we are doing more political speaking…
Q: It reminds me of a visit by a women comrade from the Tupamaros who came to the FRG in April, who described a similar development in Uruguay where the women are doing the community work and the men are mostly involved in the strategy discussions.
Because the real work is done by the women on a lot of occasions. The whole theory and sitting back and doing the armchair theory end – that ain’t giving anything to the children, it’s not educating them, that ain’t keeping them out of prison, it’s not doing that. And we have to keep our feet on the ground and keep moving and keep them alive while we build the movement.
Q: You said that you are involved with Islam. Does it interfere with your work at all?
I became a Muslim before I went into prison. I became a Muslim in 1971. It was in the Quran that said it was incumbent upon a Muslim to wage a struggle against tyranny and oppression wherever it may be found. That gave me the license to be a revolutionary and a Muslim at the same time.
And I take it to the extreme, to the extreme I think it is meant to be taken, that a true Muslim will not sit idly by and allow tyranny and oppression in whatever form to happen without waging struggle against it. So, I see no contradiction between being muslim and a revolutionary. I see a contradiction in the way that Islam is practiced in the world. I remember that when I was captured in Virginia, the Islamic community sent a representative to see me and told me that they would not support me as long as I did not veer my case from my co-defendant’s case. There was something totally wrong with them taking a position like that.
I know I came in a lot of conflict with people who thought because I was a woman and a Muslim that I shouldn’t do this and shouldn’t do that. And when someone is asking about my political beliefs and affiliations and how it’s not been according to the Quran, I refer right back to Sura 23.
Q: Well, I think in Europe we hear very little about the revolutionary writings in the Quran.
Well, that’s because they don’t want to do anything. The Muslims even here – for them it’s a way of separating themselves from society without taking on society. So they become different and say they are not governed by the laws, etc.
The worst thing that has ever happened is having four wives. It isn’t based on Islam, Islam is explained by men in the religion. And the women don’t read the Quran for themselves, so they are victimized by Islam. So, they don’t understand that the men cannot have four wives without the permission of the woman, you know. (laughs) So, if she doesn’t go along with it, it ain’t happening. That in order to have four wives, they have to be taken care of economically, psychologically, physically and spiritually. And I mean, I don’t know too many men who can deal with more than one woman and take care of her. (laughs) And that’s the case, and then there shouldn’t be four wives happening anyway. But these men get the women, put them on welfare and call themselves Muslims they have no understanding for themselves for they have never read the Quran.
Q: Do you want to add something to the interview?
Yes, I just want to reiterate the fact that everyone of us has weaknesses. So, the weakness that people fell into after the “leadership of the movement” went to prison or were wiped out – what you had left was a lot of people who could not function without organization. The organizations were destroyed, they were out there by themselves and then they got caught up in a lot of negative stuff.
Q: Actually, I have one more question. Do you feel you can work at all with what’s left of the white feminist movement or the white women’s movement? Is there any kind of working relationship or do you just say they don’t have a revolutionary program and so you can’t work with them?
It depends. I think in the beginning of the feminist movement in this country it was fairly progressive. Now the feminist movement in this country has just as many right-wing elements as you have revolutionary elements. As a matter of fact, I would say the right-wing elements outnumber the revolutionary elements in the feminist movement in the U.S.
And not just in the white feminist movement, but in the Black/Third World feminist movement also. Sometimes I think that they equate their individual issues with revolutionary struggle, which is not one and the same.
And even with the lesbian and gay community’s struggle in this country – a lot of them are just as conservative as their counterparts in the heterosexual community. And they don’t understand that the issue of sexuality itself is not a revolutionary issue. A lot of people don’t see the difference. They don’t see that that is not a revolutionary issue and that it is not an issue that you can impose and make it an issue of the Black Liberation movement.
When I address the issue of oppression based on sexuality, I make clear that oppression in and of itself, regardless of what reason you oppress people, is wrong. So, to oppress a person because of their sexuality, that in itself is something that we can’t contend to deal with.
Now, once you get past that, then it’s your personal choices. And I think that it doesn’t fall on the level of racism and it doesn’t on class oppression.
And then dealing with the feminist movement they have the question of reproductive rights or pro-choice, choice, and no choice. That is a movement by itself. On the Left, we take the position that a person’s body is their own; that there is a choice that they should make about themselves.
But when you get to the big question, you got just as many cops, female cops, and female judges, and female prosecuting attorneys and oppressive forces who are pro-choice and anything else. So, being pro-choice is not a revolutionary position. And so you can’t continue to equate and allow ourselves to be put in a position that we get dictated to by people who are in one-issue forces.
Q: Thank you for the interview.
Text taken from ATS-L Archives; e-mail Wed, 8 Mar 1995 17:22:29 -0500 (EST) from [email protected], Subject: IWD: Interview With Safiya Bukhari-Alston
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To commemorate Black August, read Safiya Bukhari’s essay on political prisoners and political movements. Her words resonate today.
To mark Black August, we reprint “On the Question of Political Prisoners” by Safiya Bukhari (1950 – August 24, 2003 ). Born in the Bronx, Bukhari came to political consciousness during college, joining the Black Panther Party and, later, the Republic of New Africa. Targeted by the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO, Bukhari went underground but was captured, charged with weapons violations, and convicted and sentenced to forty years in prison during a sham trial. Bukhari spent almost a decade incarcerated. She was refused medical care by the prison authorities and segregated from other prisoners as she was deemed a “most dangerous” inmate.
Upon her release, Bukhari dedicated herself to advocating and organizing support for incarcerated Black Panthers and the hundreds of other political prisoners and prisoners of war locked up in state and federal penitentiaries in the US. She helped form the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition and the Jericho Movement . Abu-Jamal called Bukhari a “Lioness for Liberation.”
Bukhari’s “On the Question of Political Prisoners,”originally appeared in the magazine Crossroad: A New Afrikan Captured Combatant Newsletter, published by Chicago’s Spear and Shield Publications. It is a concise and pointed analysis not only on political prisoners, but on political organizing, especially at a time when, as she puts in “the movement is totally fragmented and in a state of disarray.” To begin the long process of rebuilding the movement Bukhari reminds us of some fundamental principles: posturing is not politics, jockeying for a position is not a position, consciousness raising takes time and patience, and the conditions inside a prison are an indictment of the society beyond the prison walls.
Bukhari writes: “Revolution is not about gaining name or organizational recognition at the expense of building a foundation for a movement that will lead us to victory. In order to create the conditions for revolution we must go back to basics and deal with the fact that revolution is protracted, it doesn’t happen overnight therefore we have the time to make sure we lay the correct foundation and build a strong movement based on work.” As we face down a long night ahead, Safiya’s Bukhari’s resonate today. We reprint her “On the Question of Political Prisoners” below.
On the Question of Political Prisoners
Safiya Bukhari
There is no question that support for political prisoners and prisoners of war should and must be an integral part of any movement for liberation. There is no question, that is, for people who have dedicated their lives to the struggle for freedom in this country and realize that it is not possible to talk about a movement for liberation if you fail to liberate people who are incarcerated as a result of that struggle for liberation.
What is called into question, therefore, is whether or not we are serious about revolution and liberation.
I remember sitting in the back room of the Harlem office of the Black Panther Party on Seventh Avenue and listening at political education class while Mao Tse Tung’s Red Book was being discussed. This particular day the passage under discussion was Tell no lies and claim no easy victories. I interpreted that to mean, go to the people, organize the people, work among the people and tell no lies about what we want and what we’ve done and what we have accomplished. We have to build a strong bond of trust with the people and show them by example that we’re different from the politicians and corporate businessmen and others that say anything and do anything to get the people to go along with their program.
This lesson, Tell no lies and claim no easy victories, has been the cornerstone of my understanding of what this struggle is supposed to be about. If we take the Tell no lies approach to organizing, then we take the time out to build a foundation for a movement that is destined to bring us the victory we say we’re fighting for. There would be no need to organize separate programs to educate the community to the existence of political prisoners because as we work to organize rent strikes and take control of abandoned buildings to create decent housing in our community through our sweat equity. We would be talking while we’re working about how Abdul Majid and others organized tenant associations in the East New York and Brownsville sections of Brooklyn such as the Oceanhill Brownsville Tenants Association. While we’re organizing around the issue of quality education that teaches our true history and role in this society we could talk about Herman Bell and Albert ‘Nuh’ Washington and their work with the liberation schools. While we’re organizing food co-ops and other survival programs we can talk about Geronino Pratt , Sundiata Acoli , Robert ‘Seth’ Hayes and all other political prisoners and prisoners of war who worked in the Free Health Clinics, the daycare centers and went to prison as a result of their active participation in organizing efforts around issues that directly affected the Black and oppressed communities.
Because our ‘movement’, for lack of a better word, has deteriorated to the point that the majority of our organizing is done through demonstrations, rallies, conferences and press conferences; the only way we feel we can talk about the issue of political prisoners is when we drag them out for show and tell time or when we need to legitimize what we’re doing. This raises the question, “Are we serious about struggle? Or are we just profiling?” If we’re not serious then we need to let our political prisoners off the hook and tell them to “Do what you think is best for you!” If we are serious then we need to stop ego tripping, stop profiling, stop rabble rousing and get down to the serious work or organizing. Talk is cheap, action is supreme!
Political prisoners didn’t become political prisoners out of a vacuum. They went to prison, for the most part, as members of political formations. There are over 150 political prisoners in jail across this country. The majority of these brothers and sisters are serving upward of 25 years to life and at least one, Mumia Abu Jamal, is facing death. At the time the majority of these people went to prison there was a thriving movement on the street. They are sitting there now and the movement is totally fragmented and in a state of disarray. They are being pulled in a lot of directions by fragmented organizations that are more interested in posturing as the ‘vanguard’ and jockeying for position than doing the work of organizing the people. I constantly wonder why it is necessary for them to be fighting among themselves to be the titular ‘vanguard’ of a ‘movement’ when there are millions of people that have to be organized? If they all got down today to the talk of organizing New York City, or any of the other communities across the United States, there would still be room for more help. We wouldn’t even step on each other’s toes and would be glad to share the work because that’s how much work that has to be done. That is, if we were serious about the job of organizing for liberation.
The term ‘political prisoner’ means nothing to the average brother or sister on the block because the terms ‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’ mean nothing. The words have no meaning for our people, no real meaning, because we have done no real organizing, and educating for liberation. This lack of consciousness among our people, and the lack of support for political prisoners is a direct result of our lack of concrete work among our people. The days of people getting involved in struggle for great socialist ideas is long gone, if they ever existed. Our people require examples of what concrete changes will occur in their condition if we collectively fight for change. Once they are shown the example of what could be achieved, they are more likely to support struggle. When they are confronted by how the state – government – police respond to people who dare to speak out and organize and educate against a system that has consistently exploited, brutalized and oppressed them, they are more likely to support political prisoners.
Some of us mistake the people’s anger at, frustration with and distrust of the system as meaning they are ready for revolution. It is true that they possess a deep seated anger at the system, that they distrust the system, but it’s also true that they have not made the connection between the source of this anger and distrust and creating a revolution.Our people are more inclined to participate in a race riot than a revolution. They would support a drug dealer before they’d support a revolutionary. Why? For a number of reasons, chief being that the drug dealer is in the community constantly, is known by the community and has picked up on a lesson that the revolutionary used to know. The drug dealer understands that he has to give something back to the community. He employs the local people and therefore, even if it’s pennies, makes a difference in the life of the community.
This is not an indictment of our people, but rather an indictment of the deterioration of the movement and our complete loss of direction. At some point we should have been able to stop and take an assessment of the state of the movement, especially following the major offensives against the revolution brought on by the government; i.e. COINTELPRO and the destruction of the Black Panther Party . We seem to have forgotten everything we ever learned about revolution, that it’s about the people, making qualitative and quantitative changes in the conditions of our people. Revolution is not about gaining name or organizational recognition at the expense of building a foundation for a movement that will lead us to victory. In order to create the conditions for revolution we must go back to basics and deal with the fact that revolution is protracted, it doesn’t happen overnight therefore we have the time to make sure we lay the correct foundation and build a strong movement based on work. This is the only real way we can build the necessary support to free our political prisoners and prisoners of war.
A final word, to our political prisoners, we used to know that prison was a microcosm of society. That is, we recognized the truism that the conditions of the people that came through the doors of the prison reflected the state of the society without. If you think back to what was happening on the streets at the time you were incarcerated and the activities that were going on among the prisoners in the institutions and compare that to what the people who are coming into the institutions are talking about and doing now, you can deduce for yourself the state of the movement today. Just as we have a job to do out here, you have a job to do in there. Being in prison does not release you of your obligations to educate to liberate some of you seem to have forgotten that. What being in prison does is change the venue from which you organize–change the playing field.
I remember another class that took place in the Harlem office of the Black Panther Party. This lesson had to do with the 10-10-10 Program. This was a lesson on organizing. We had to learn the 10-Point Program and Platform of the Party. We had to learn the 26 rules of the Party. We had to learn the 8 points of Attention and the 3 Main Rules of Discipline. We had to learn the motto and internalize all of it. We had to learn it for the day when we would be on our own without other Panthers so that we could carry out the tasks of the revolution. Once we internalized these teachings we were ready to go out and organize. The theory was that if each one of us organized ten people, and those people organized 10 people–, and those people organized ten people–the third group, if each one of them organized 10 people, would number 10,0000 people. It’s a time consuming method of organizing, but it’s tried and true. This was the approach to organizing that I used in my section when I was in the Party. During the time I was incarcerated in Goochland, Virginia the people that were in my section in the community were the ones who stood by me and sent me packages and cards and were there waiting when I was released from prison in 1986.
Organizations come and go, but we have to create within our people the spirit of struggle. We have to build a movement to liberate our people. The issue of political prisoners is part of that movement we are building and in building that movement we must understand that this is not a separate issue. It is an integral part of that movement, it can’t be put in front of the movement and can’t be an afterthought. It must be woven into the very fibers.
Safiya Bukhari, “On the Question of Political Prisoners,” Crossroad 5 no. 4 (January-March, 1995), 6-8.
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This interview is with social movement veterans who have sacrificed much, and learned a great deal, in trying to change the world. Each in their own way have gained valuable insights into the personal, interpersonal, and structural dynamics at play when confronting established power and have essential lessons to convey to those newly radicalized. The interview was conducted in 2024 for Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, by collective member Paul Messersmith-Glavin.
Paul Messersmith-Glavin: Tell us about yourselves, in particular, how were you first politically radicalized?
Ashanti Alston: Born, Michael Alston. Plainfield, New Jersey, 1954. Just this February, I celebrated the big 7-0. I’m an official elder now.
I came of age in that period of the sixties when there was the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement, which was the key moment for me. I was a Black teenager understanding that there were people fighting for our freedom in the Civil Rights movement. And then here comes the Black Power movement and the rebellions of ’67 all over the United States.
Plainfield is a small town that’s racially divided like so many other places. But what was unique about what happened there was that Black folks had got hold of arms from a gun manufacturing plant, including crates of M-1 rifles. So, during the rebellions part of the Plainfield Black community in the West End was actually liberated for at least seven days. Even as this thirteen-year-old, I understood the importance of the movement and felt connection to it. This was serious and way different from Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.
The main rebellion was about a mile from the projects where I lived as a child. We could often hear the gunshots. Then one day there was a black car in front of the house and on the top of it in white letters was “Black Power.” And the guy in the car was giving out goods to people. That struck me, because I heard the term “Black Power,” but this was so bold. I understood the Civil Rights movement, but I didn’t know if I could deal with getting water-hosed down the street, spat on, called “nigger” in my face and just taking it. I wanted to fight back. So, this was my entry.
I don’t even think I had turned fourteen yet. And I wasn’t much of a reader at that point, but now I wanted to read! The Malcolm X autobiography. The stories of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. I wanted to go find out about them. Then when school started back up, others were also interested in fighting back. In junior high school there was no Black history. So, there was a coordinated effort to walk out of the two junior high schools and the high school and to march down to City Hall to demand it. And enough of us came out, so that when the next school year started, we had Black history.
That showed me that there was this powerful unity if we organized. We could make demands and have them met. The rebellion after that lasted a week. When the armored cars came in from the National Guard, they regained control. But it didn’t stop us. The was a community center down the street and folks were in there and they’re talking, organizing, strategizing. I was just so excited, especially to see folks from the areas that I grew up who I looked up to in getting involved.
Eventually, I found out about the Black Panther Party and my friend’s father took us all over to the different offices—from Newark, Jersey City, to Brooklyn and Harlem—to learn what we could do. So, we went to the political education classes and learned the terminologies; this revolution the Panthers were talking about required study, engagement in the community, and organizing. It was different from the spontaneous rebellions. It was more like the organizing when we demanded Black history; you had to have a sustained view and understand that this is a long-term struggle against the system.
Most of us who formed that chapter were high school students and active inside the high school where the rebellion took place. It was in that same area that we did most of our outreach—speaking with folks, selling the Panther paper, and at a certain point starting a storefront and a free clothing program. So, here we are, learning how to work amongst the people in this Panther style . . . Every time I look back at it, I’m like, “Oh my God, we were so young, but we were so ready!”
We had so many folks helping us learn the different things involved with carrying out revolutionary struggle. And it was great because coming out of the Black Power ideology, I didn’t have too much love for white folks. But the Panthers always remembered they’re human beings, too, and had relationships with so many different people. They were nationalists, but revolutionary nationalists and didn’t just chop white folks off because they’re white. It all depends on their practice.
So, it helped me to challenge some of my own limitations and to open up to what this new ideology was telling me about struggle, the history of struggles, the possibility of winning, believing in ourselves, and organizing from below. That carried me for a long time, even up into prison.
Helia Rasti: I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1980. That was at the start of an eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, on the heels of a revolution that ousted a dynasty, the last Shah of Iran. It was part of a popular uprising that brought in theocratic Islamists and started over four decades of Islamist rule.
I was born into a solidly middle-class family. My parents were really scared of having to raise a daughter in the growing patriarchal environment and decided to leave as did many at that time. This was very difficult for them because they loved Iran and didn’t want to go but felt forced to. We were able to attain resident status in Germany and I lived there from age five to ten. Being a foreigner in Germany is not easy and my parents (who are both well-educated) wanted access to better opportunities like they had in Iran. So, they left Germany the first chance they could and came to the United States—the “land of opportunity.”
I was ten years old when we moved to California and had no idea about the political environment and the history of oppression, genocide, enslavement, and exploitation that the US is founded on. I think a lot of immigrants come here seeking better opportunities because whatever they left behind was so grim. And then you come here and you’re like, “whoa.” Even though I was raised with this backdrop of intense political activity and very strong anti-imperialist sentiments, I was clueless. But I could just tell this is not right. Something is not right.
I’ve always been sensitive and empathic. And I knew that despite being an immigrant, being a brown child who experienced racism, I could still always seek out love and support from my parents. But I remember encountering figures about how every five minutes a girl or a woman is raped, and feeling, “Wow, I’ve been really protected.” So, I felt it was important for me to step up for people who were more vulnerable and for voices that were being silenced.
I grew up in the Bay Area and, after high school, I went to Humboldt State in Northern California. I’ve always been drawn to nature. I was a biology major initially and I learned about Native American history, the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism, and that Native people are still around and have been resisting genocide and erasure for all these years. I also learned about different resistance movements by listening to lecture series like Michael Parenti who broke down imperialism and Marxism, US foreign policy, and how the CIA and the United States played a huge part in destroying the fabric of different cultures. And, in my country, how they stood against democratic movements to support regimes to access resources for more global power.
I was sitting with all that in the late 90s when the anti-WTO, anti-corporate, globalization movements emerged. I was on the periphery of this, but learning. And then September 11th happened, and I was just like this is it. Ward Churchill wrote this essay about the chicken coming home to roost and I was feeling, “Oh, of course, this is going to come back to us to us. The United States is going to reap the repercussions of its global policies.” I got on the phone with my mom all excited about this and she said, “What are you saying? You’re going to get in trouble, you’re Iranian!” But I still felt these were historic times and decided that I had to leave the forest. I realize now it was a spiritual journey that led me to take on political action. It was my love for life, for the earth, for people. This is what kept me seeking out different answers when faced with the contradictions that are presented to us in society . . . So, I came home to the Bay as I realized my work was there and transferred to San Francisco State.
Within the first week of school there were student organizations tabling, including a Students for Peace group that did gorilla theater. I got in and became really involved with them. At the time we were organizing these huge demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan, and it was already clear that they were gearing up to start invading Iraq. I was a part of this mass movement; hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people globally, crying out against war.
That became my world. I spent all my time at school organizing and eventually dropped all my classes because that’s the only thing that mattered to me. I then became a part of this woman’s center that was helping to open up space for coalition building. San Francisco State has a very radical history, but since the time of the sixties and seventies, the administration has built all these guards and policies against student activism. So, we were organizing this coalition, bringing together different organizations like Ethnic Studies, the Black Student Union, and different cultural groups. We were also doing that with City College.
Eventually I dropped out of school and started doing organizing work full-time. I got involved with the Not in Our Name movement and Direct Action to Stop the War, focusing on street blockades and holding war profiteers accountable by going to them and shutting down their operations. I was especially jiving with these queer anarcho-punx doing public blockades and shutdowns. And it was like the work became my life. It’s the thing that kept me going. It felt like, this is what I was brought here for.
So, I continued to seek to deepen my understanding of what the work really was. And it was Critical Resistance that really helped to do so, especially with learning about abolition and how prison industrial abolition was a way to build against the state. At the time, I was doing environmental justice work, focusing on shutting down power plants. But I continued to encounter contradictions within organizing communities and felt I needed to do something else. I needed to figure out what my role was and not necessarily as a public or professional organizer. Again, I was always driven by my spirituality and my love. Rose Braz was a mentor of mine—what an immense, powerful woman and organizer she is—and I sought her out about some of these contradictions. And she said, “You know, you feel called to heal and you’re doing this medicine work; we need more abolitionists, more radicals to do that work. If you feel like that’s where life is taking you, go for it!” So, I did. I left the Bay and came to Portland to study natural medicine. Now I’m licensed as a clinician. But my love is still very much for the earth, for people, and dismantling obstacles to our collective liberation to allow for our ability to just live.
P M-G: You both have decades of political consciousness and organizing experience. Retrospectively, what are your biggest takeaways? What lessons have you learned that you’d want to pass on to someone just getting involved in social change work?
AA: I’ve been around for a while and when I’m speaking with young folks, I want to make sure I’m giving the best advice and encouragement that I can because I still believe that we can change this world. The thing is, you want to make sure, no matter what you have been through—the ups, the downs, the things that work, things that didn’t work—to be as honest as you can about it. When I look back on the early years—the Black Power movement to the Panthers, even up to the prison experience—then I get to see, “Oh, we could have been better in this area or that area.” The time I spent in prison was a lot of that looking back period for me. Before that it was 24/7 revolutionary work . . . not a lot of time for reflection.
But now I’m there in prison and thinking about what happened: “Why am I here? Why are so many of the comrades now in prison?” I wanted to know where we went wrong, why we lost, why the counter-intelligence program was eventually successful, and how to avoid making the mistakes again. And I got access to other readings. You know, in my head I’m still this Panther. A Marxist-Leninist. Maoist even. But the Critical Theory crew, from Eric Fromm to Herbert Marcuse and others; they had some different analysis about these revolutionary struggles that wasn’t the canon of Stalin. Then I started reading not only the critical theory, but other radicals. And, at some point, little bits and pieces of the anarchism started getting in there. These different perspectives allowed me to really think about the way we saw this struggle. What we (the Panthers) had believed was revolutionary in a sense, but with some limitations. It wasn’t great how we saw the struggles of women; it wasn’t great how we saw internalized oppression . . . Our own behaviors also contributed to our downfall. A lot of people don’t want to hear that, especially your comrades. But if you want to win, then you’ve got to let that ego shit go and say, “Where else might we have done better?” And that’s where the critical theories and anarchism and radical feminism began to help me to see things differently.
So, I want young people to understand revolution from a very personal perspective. How is it really going to impact you? What is it really opening you up to? Like, who’s Ashanti as a part of this? I’m still a part of this heterosexist, evil society and it’s been a part of my peoples’ struggle for the last 400 years. There’s no way that I can deny that. The shit of this system is also a part of me. In this struggle, it’s on two fronts; it’s not only the larger system, but also what it looks like inside of us. I want young people to see what their own connection is to this system is and to see their possibilities.
The best thing that really helped me to see this was when I started reading about anarchism. Now, not only do I want to be the best anti-sexist, but I want to open myself up to how life expresses itself. I joke about it at times when I say that when I first came out of prison I wanted to work with Love and Rage folks, but they had these spiked hair styles and I was like, “What the fuck is this?” But another part of me wanted to learn; “I don’t care how crazy they look. I want to learn.” And it showed me that there’s all kinds of folks who are oppressed by this society and who want out from under that oppression. If their lives don’t match mine, that’s okay.
The Zapatistas have that idea, too; a world where many worlds exist. Our lives are very diverse, and we all want our liberation. We just have to figure out how it’s going to work in this monstrous, US imperialist empire. So, Black folks’ struggle takes on particular characteristics, but it’s not divorced from all the other struggles—the Chicanos, the Indigenous folks, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the workers, the environmentalist movement, Palestine. It’s never simple, but it’s doable.
H.R.: I’d say never stop questioning; question your questions. Get with mentors, but also make sure that your mentors hold space for questioning and grapple with those questions with you. Recognize that you are a part of something immense. The Earth is all about life and death is a part of it, right? You are a part of something so much greater and when you take steps towards that collective health and life and love, you’re bringing with you something so much deeper. Trust that. The ongoing genocides around the world, that’s real. But the little steps that you are a part of, the little acts of kindness and love and the ways that you are showing up in support of community and life. That’s real, too. Movements are about cultivating and nourishing life as steps towards collective liberation. That is a part of that picture, too. It’s important to have this perspective that goes back and forth between the local and the global. So, continue to get involved, but don’t lose sight of your own care and holding that deep sacred space within you to stay in alignment with the goodness of life.
P M-G: Where should those of us who are dedicated to transforming society be putting our energies? And what role do you see collective care and nurturance playing in sustaining radical social movements?
H.R: We can’t be human without our connection to other humans. We’re social creatures. We’re part of a community of life that’s not just human. So, understanding your role in terms of community within that greater scheme of life, of ecological life, is important. And building these connections is so important because industrial culture has severed our connection to nature. But nature is what makes us human. We learn what it means to be human by learning from the earth. That’s something I’ve learned from Indigenous movements, writers, and activists.
It’s hard because we internalize oppression, which can be a toxin that is spread through community. And yet, community is an extended family and an extended circle of love. So, you can choose how to build community and how to engage with it. If it weren’t for my communal ties with the people who have come before me who I’m still connecting with, who inspire me, I wouldn’t be here. They keep me going. It’s hard though, and I know for me, sometimes I need to retreat in times to find my connection and to continue to show up. I need to have good boundaries and some guard up. We need to have collectively permeable boundaries. There’s a difference between having a wall, which is a tool of war, versus boundaries, which are important and healthy for life. Finding that balance is essential, especially now in a time of pandemics. I see the coronavirus as an expression of an ecological crisis. We’re going to continue to see viral storms take shape and we need to understand this balance.
A.A.: People in this struggle need to understand that this is long term. You have to have a place within you that you go to with all that you’re going to experience being in this struggle. Because it’s tough.
I just came back from an indigenous retreat in Texas at a sweat lodge that’s women led. I watched the process of building that lodge and what became so important for me was how everything they did had purpose and intentionality. This helps us to see all that is sacred. There are some important lessons in there, whether you’re Marxist, an anarchist, or just a rebel who wants change. This is still Turtle Island to Indigenous folks. And I think our objective is really to figure out how to pry this empire off the back of the Turtle so that we can all be fucking free!
What we went through back in the sixties and seventies, we got too scientific, and we missed out some things that are really about our humanity. A lot of the revolutions we put on a pedestal for being successful—like the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution—but they end up recreating some other form of oppressive society. Part of anarchism for me is to be open. So, we have to figure out how to nurture the spiritual as a source of power in this struggle. It reminds me of in the days of the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention that the Panthers held in Philly in 1970, with the idea of bringing all these movements together within the Empire. To see how we can all be free.
P M-G: What advice would you give about how we should relate to each other and accept differences of opinion without condemning each other? How do we nurture a community, while engaging in collective self-care and transformation?
H.R.: Allow principles to guide our work and have space for accountability. I know I’m not going to get along with everybody and I don’t need to work closely with everybody. I don’t need to know what the nitty-gritty of that work is. If the larger structure is being maintained and bringing us together in unity and if everyone is acting in ways that are principled and towards a shared mission, I can trust that. We’re all super different and that’s a beautiful thing. We’re not always going to get along and that’s a part of the friction and tension. But we can create a lot of forward momentum from that if it’s being guided by something that is principled and shared.
A.A.: We have to figure it out as we go, but a thing that has always attracted me to anarchism—is that part about how we are with each other. This is so key to the vision we have for the world that we want. If we don’t want a sexist world, we have to practice anti-sexism within our relations. If we don’t want an ageist or ableist world, we have to practice it now . . . When we come together now, we have to practice it, and be willing to admit we make mistakes when we practice this. It doesn’t just change automatically. And this takes compassion. When we begin to accept each other with compassion, this will be easier. Then we will learn to transform these relationships.
Young folks need to know not only how to organize in the community, but how they can change themselves and have better relationships with each other, which is part of community care. That’s why transformative practices need to be incorporated into what we do. It can’t just be you got an ideology now and you think that’s it for you. Now you are the revolutionary that can change the world. No, don’t work that way. It takes courage to be vulnerable, to say, “Yo, I need some help working through my shit ‘cuz that Empire is in me . . . so we can really build authentic revolutionary relationships that can transform the world.”
But the younger generation, they want to do better than what we did. And the level of solidarity we’re seeing in Gen Z’s pro-Palestinian support, anti-genocide is blowing my mind. I can’t remember this level of solidarity even with the anti-Vietnam War. I get a sense that they want to figure out ways how to be better with each other as they’re doing their work.
P M-G: I want to get into a little bit about what y’all think about the state of radical movements today. There’s the genocide in Gaza, there’s a major election coming up in this country . . . It’s a time of change around the world. What should we be paying attention to and doing?
A.A.: Part of my concern is security state; the state of surveillance, the continuous growth of the prison industrial complex. I think those things are still closing in on us, to the point where they have the ability to know so much about what we’re doing that it limits possibilities. But the spirit of the people is greater than man’s technology. This system is constantly trying to control the possibilities of insurrection and rebellion. We’ve still got to make this happen, but with a sense of urgency because they are determined to keep this empire going for as long as they can.
H.R.: I think it’s important to do that spiritual work and recognize that we’re all connected, intertwined. It can be really easy to project onto other people tendencies you might not like about yourself. That’s why doing that shadow work is so important. Also, globally, xenophobia is a way we separate ourselves from others and say, “Oh, but I’m not like that. My ways are better.” Getting past that illusion of superiority is important. None of us have the answer. There’s hope and uncertainty and we need to go where we’ve never been. It’s scary, but on the flip side there’s a sense of awe and mystery.
I think it’s also important to focus on infrastructure, both socially and physically. Socially, I mean, in terms of all the systems of domination that keep us in place and force us into submission with the prison industrial complex and State apparatus. I think the prison industrial complex is an expression of social infrastructure. Then there’s also the physical infrastructure and how it’s being destroyed by the neoliberal scheme to divest from it. Everything is literally falling apart. But there’s also a shift that’s taking place that’s allowing us to hone in on what really matters—how we can create systems that bring us closer together to collectively build cohesion and new infrastructure that is in line with serving life as a whole. I see people playing more with ideas around ecology. That’s what de-growth is; it’s about actually shifting the economy to value life and recognition that we don’t need to continue growing, but need to grow inward, downward, back to the earth, into society and community. That makes me feel hopeful.
We should be focusing on the Earth and climate catastrophe, while creating more points of connection because things are going to continue to unravel. The Earth is going to continue to try to shock us into making some real global changes. And that doesn’t all have to be bad. If we have systems in place that enable us to take care of each other—like mutual aid—that will allow us to pull together resources locally as things start to unravel and have better plans in place. So, connect with the people who are thinking about those things, arming and strengthening themselves with the knowledge that allows us to build out of the chaos. Do that shadow work, connect with your own source energy, and trust that it’s connected to the goodness of love and life that you were born into. Move from that place. And don’t lose heart!
A.A.: We used to talk about temporary autonomous zones. That can be any time you take a moment with other people to talk with each other and interact in ways that helps you to reconnect. Just as human beings and with the earth. You’ve got to realize that you’re not just an independent activist. In this thing here, you are connected to all that that is; from history to the future or as the Indigenous folks say, “the next seven generations.” When we talk about changing the world it’s not just the oppressive structures in the name of some revolutionary rhetoric. The change is within. We are a part of shaping culture. And culture, as a practice, is changeable. It’s always changing and that’s a beautiful thing.
source: Anarchist Studies
#anarchism #ashantiAlston #blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #northAmerica #us
(This Q+A interview was conducted in 2006 by Comrade Sobukwe and Marcus Schell, both supporters of the Russell “Maroon” Shoatz Defense Committee. Marcus Schell is the son of the late Reggie Schell, a founding member of Philadelphia’s Black Panther Party. The interview is part of the 2013 book Maroon The Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz, edited by Fred Ho and Quincy Saul and published by Oakland’s PM Press. Light editing was done on this excerpt.)
*****
How did you get involved with the Black Movement of the 1960s and 1970s?
As a Black male who was born in Philadelphia in 1943, I can honestly say that until the age of twenty I was “dumb-as-do-do” so far as political and broad social issues go. Moreover, my father was a long-distance truck driver and he made very good money. So outside of eating some surplus cheese here and there, my family and my working/middle-class neighborhood was not a place of economic hardship. Thus, there was no incentive there.
In fact, my parents, and the adults in this neighborhood in general, were all on the go-to-school, go-to-church, and be-home-at-a-respectable-time kick. Social and political issues were never discussed or hinted at in the homes, churches, and schools!
All these Negroes (that’s what we were all then known as) were busy trying to get ahead as best a Negro could, even though in Philly just about everything was dominated and controlled by whites: city hall, police stations, firehouses, all the schools, neighborhoods, downtown businesses, and transportation. A Negro couldn’t even become a Boy or Girl Scout!
So, although there was no out-front segregation, like in the South, Philly’s Blacks were segregated in neighborhoods and allowed to leave only in order to work, shop, pay bills, and travel—sort of like apartheid South Africa.
Until I was twenty, that was my life, with the addiction of being deeply involved in gang activities.
Although by 1960 I could see some of the southern Civil Rights Movement struggle being played out on TV, I couldn’t relate to the nonviolence that they practiced. Everybody I knew believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth—except when it came to the police. We were uniformly scared of them.
Consequently, I can put my finger on the exact instant, the exact circumstance that began my awakening and journey into political life: going to a rally in Harlem, New York, and listening to Malcolm X speak.
In 1963, I was twenty and had moved to Harlem to live with an aunt, to get away from my Philly gang and find a job. I was also running from an arrest warrant for a rape, which is a whole another story. Anyway, my aunt warned me not to go around to 116th and Lenox Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard) because “the nationalists are having a rally, and there might be some trouble.” Now I had no idea what a nationalist was, but trouble was my thing. I was still steeped in the gang culture’s way of viewing things.
Malcolm, flanked by Nation of Islam security, talked on an outdoor stage for hours. The streets were shut off and throngs of people were on the sidewalk, in the street, in the adjoining park and hanging out of buildings and high-rise projects—all alternately evenly engrossed in his words, then shouting, clapping and screaming at the top of their voices!
But not me. I was, instead, oscillating between being mesmerized by his A-to-Z explanation of things, and a nagging fear. I was like Neo in The Matrix when Morpheus told him he had been living in a dream world. My whole world was being blown away and reshaped as I listened. What put the icing on the cake was the actions of the police, who were dispersed throughout the crowd. They were smoking and joking like they were not listening to Malcolm take apart everything they and the entire American system commonly indulged in!
And although I couldn’t understand everything, I still knew he was challenging them to either come up there and prove him wrong or come up there and shut him up. Never had I seen anyone handle the police like that.
And although nobody could tell me that I wasn’t a tough guy, that was some deliciously scary shit that won me over to begin following politics and important social issues.
But like Neo, I wasn’t ready just then to become actively involved. In fact, it wasn’t until after a squashing of the rape allegations, a return to Philly, a failed marriage that produced four offspring, and a horrible stint as a drug-dealing hustler that I finally ran out of places to hide. In order for me to begin living like a full human being, I had to cast all fear to the wind and start following Malcolm’s example.
What was the Black Unity Council and why did you help found it?
The years 1967-1968 found me completely fed up with being a modern-day slave—a conclusion I had come to since Malcolm had begun my awakening. It was doubly maddening became damn near all my friends, family, and neighbors seemed content to go along with the bullshit that by then was being exposed and attacked in Black communities, on college campuses, and elsewhere, from one side of the globe to the other. They were still trapped in the Matrix.
A former gang buddy named Points, however, had reached the same conclusions that I had, so we decided to put out the word that we were gonna have an open meeting and form an organization to address some of our concerns. Of course, by that time there were other organizations in Philly that we felt good about, but none of them were in our immediate neighborhood.
So one weekend we held the meeting at the house of another gang buddy named Brick and, surprisingly, about fifteen to twenty people showed up, male and female—including my blood sister Gloria, who I had no idea shared my concerns and ideas. Indeed, we all were experiencing feelings of frustration and isolation.
So right there the name Black Unity Council was chosen and the group was formed, although no officers were selected, nor would the BUC ever choose any officers. We always worked by consensus—at least up until we got deeply involved with paramilitary activity about two years later.
In fact, outside of current events and local concerns, the BUC never discussed political theories, ideologies, or much about Black history. Most of us were nevertheless very impressed with the Black cultural nationalists. We admired their knowledge of Black/African history and their choice to dress in African garb—especially how beautiful and graceful it made women look.
We especially liked their emphasis on armed self-defense! At that time the Revolutionary Action Movement, known as RAM, was very active in Philly. Their cultural workers and semi-clandestine paramilitary arm called the Black Guard had a center close to our neighborhood, and we would always hang out there. They had regular seminars, history/cultural classes, karate classes (for women and men with some very sharp sisters along the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon vibe!) In addition, they had a “liberation school” that the BUC planned to emulate.
At the time, the BUC had about thirty regulars—mainly in southwest Philly and Germantown. We were able to assemble enough people to fill a gym or large church and also in each other’s homes. Eventually, we rented a large house and furnished it with the necessities for our own liberation school. We charged each person a can of food to attend our affairs, which we would give to needy families.
Since a number of us had gang backgrounds we also became involved in citywide efforts to get gangs to sign a truce.
Yet all of that was brand new to everyone in the BUC. We didn’t have any experienced political/social workers to work with us on a regular basis. As a consequence, I know now that our emulation of RAM’s emphasis on armed self-defense—not balanced with other considerations—caused many in the BUC to push it to become a strictly paramilitary group. On the other hand, the extremely brutal and terrorist Philly police, coupled with our newfound consciousness that freed us from our fear of them, also played a major role!
We had listened to Malcolm chide Blacks for being ready, willing, and able to kill each other, and, while in the U.S. Army, kill hundreds of millions of Chinese, but being essentially cold cowards when it came to defending themselves right here at home. And RAM hammered that same message home by preaching that Blacks had to stop believing that the police were bulletproof!
Regrettably, although many in the BUC were no longer afraid of the police, most of the community members that they sought to serve still were—sort of like Morpheus telling Neo that he must remember that those they were trying to free from the Matrix were not ready for that. On the other hand, the police no doubt couldn’t imagine that we had lost our fear of them!
Anyway, within two years the BUC had turned into a paramilitary group containing about fifteen and male and female members, fully armed with shoulder-fired weapons, sidearms and even hand grenades. We belonged to shooting/hunting clubs, practiced karate, went on outdoor maneuvers, and fortified all of our homes. In fact, think about today’s survivalists and you’ll see where the BUC was at: food, water, first-aid stocks, and all.
Undoubtedly, today’s readers may also have a hard time understanding the BUC’s zeal unless they view a documentary like the acclaimed Eyes on the Prize. Only then will they get a proper feel for the type of social, political, and psychological ferment that surrounded the BUC.
Thus, when the paramilitary BUC first learned about the Black Panther Party we had already been established for close to two years. Indeed, we liked what we were learning but, on the other hand, we grieved for their comrades being killed off in the streets and in their offices like sitting ducks. So we decided to contact them in order to see if we could assist them in their work and staying alive!
Hold up! I need to backtrack for a minute in order to elaborate on the BUC’s decision to become a paramilitary-style group. Otherwise, the reader may be left with the impression that the BUC was some kind of nutball formation.
The fact of the matter is that in 1968, Philly had similar Black paramilitary-style formations all around the city. Essentially, all of them were motivated by a heightened consciousness, a need to make more sophisticated their neighborhood’s defenses against adjoining white neighborhoods, which had always displayed aggression but were now more fearful due to the rising Black pride on display. We also wanted to prepare for the inevitable showdown with either the police or the National Guard in the event of another rebellion (a so-called “riot”), as had happened in North Philly in 1964, the first of the nation’s “long, hot summers.”
Certainly, most of these groups could easily be identified by their military-style clothing, which, unlike today, signaled to everyone that the wearers were paramilitary elements of the Movement. In that regard, RAM was the largest and best-known local practitioner of this approach. Around that time, moreover, RAM had a very large youth group, militant Black males and females known as the Liberators. They always wore black berets, jackets, pants and combat boots. This is before most people in Philly knew that the West Coast-based BPP also dressed in the same way. And the police didn’t wear black back then!
The BUC was in negotiations with the Liberators’ leadership about merging forces, with the more mature BUC members being asked to serve as officers for the younger Liberators.
Obviously, the police were always aware of this paramilitary-style activity, especially due to RAM’s open agitation and spray-painting of “Join the Black Guard” all over the city. Another formation threw hand grenades into a police parking lot, damaging patrol cars and provoking heavily-armed police to raid Black neighborhoods all over the city.
By the time the BUC decided to contact the local Black Panther Party, many of RAM’s leaders and many of the other paramilitary formation leaders had been jailed, forced underground, or decided to become less militant. As Malcolm said, a lot of people were not clear on what they were doing. He told us that once they found out, they would get back in the alley and change their names.
Anyway, in mid-1969, the BUC contacted the local Panthers, who were headquartered in North Philly. Although by then we had learned a lot about the national organization, our talks left us disappointed. In a nutshell, it was apparent to us that the BUC cadre was much more advanced than the local Panthers—militarily, anyway. Since we were the strongest of the two in this regard, we felt that we could negotiate a relationship the same way we had done with RAM. It was possible since the BUC was governed by consensus.
We found out, however, that the local Panthers couldn’t do that, since the Black Panther Party was a tightly-controlled, top-down organization. Our disappointment arose from the fact that they were getting killed all over the country and their leaders couldn’t come up with a strategy to combat that. In addition, the Panthers were being too rigid to allow local leaders the flexibility needed to create such a strategy. So the talks broke off, more or less, because the BUC never gave up supporting the local Panthers, and around that time some things occurred that cannot be revealed here because that would endanger the freedom of others. If this was not the case, I could give up some raw, hardcore rap that is usually hidden from this generation. Like Malcolm used to say, “Those who know don’t tell; those who tell don’t know.” As a result, a lot of cockeyed urban legends have sprouted up and become accepted as historical fact. I will attempt to set the record straight as much as possible.
First off, people must understand that in dealing with the history of the Black Panther Party, nobody knows it all—not the Panthers, not the police or FBI or other repressive arms of the state! This is because a whole lot of activities happened on a need-to-know basis. In other words, a lot of stuff was so delicate that it was known and handled both by who needed to know about it, with the downside to that being that you were on your own if things didn’t go right or if you got caught. That’s how it worked in the real world. Cadre who went on those types of missions accepted that upfront.
So why did the BUC merge with the Black Panther Party?
In December of 1969, the Chicago police led a deadly raid that resulted in the death of Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the wounding of others. When members of the BUC heard this on the news, we were furious, sad and disgusted all at the same time. Certainly, our fury was directed toward the killers and our sadness for the dead, wounded, and terrorized Panthers. Our disgust was reserved for the Panther leadership that persisted in an unimaginative strategy that was getting some of the best and most sincere youth in urban areas killed and jailed. We were not experts, but even we had reached the conclusion that Panthers shooting it out with more heavily armed police from fixed positions was downright ludicrous! Even if they survived, it still left them in jail or hospitalized, causing everybody else to have to drop important work to bail them out and raise money for their legal defenses.
Consequently, after some discussion, we essentially decided to again get in touch with the local Panthers. But this time we planned to stick to them closely, no matter what. We just wanted to be around when their turn to get “vamped on” (raided by police) came. Of course, they had already been subjected to home raids, but nothing deadly. We planned to be in a position to upgrade their defenses and react to the expected attacks.
Rightly or wrongly, the BUC had reached the conclusion that in order for Blacks in the United States to be truly free, we would have to wage armed struggle. We believed that our oppression had many facets—social, political, economic, cultural and psychological. We did not have a handle on the intricacies surrounding these aspects, but we did know that in general Blacks did not have any substantial political power. Economically we were last-hired-and-first-fired and culturally we had been stripped of everything that would anchor us to our African past. We knew that it was up to us to prove we were as much man and woman as anyone else!
Can you describe your experience working within the Black Movement’s underground?
In a nutshell, it taught me the absolute necessity of all armed actions having broad, deep, multidimensional support. Otherwise they are open to isolation and destruction, which was the fate of the Black Panther Party.
This has nothing to do with whether armed actions fall into the so-called “terrorism” territory. That accusation is based on purely self-serving and hypocritical grounds. The need for multidimensional support has to do with the simple fact that we must have the resources, energy, creativity, and enthusiasm of the people on the side of the armed struggle. Otherwise, armed movement forces have very little chance of winning against the oppressive forces that do have broad and deep support.
Putting together this support must be very well thought-out. In a multi-racial, multi-cultural, sexist and class-ridden country and world this is a tough task!
That said, I think that we do not learn enough from the successes of the past. We have a goldmine of tried and tested successful approaches if we study how our ancestors used the Underground Railroad. It’s well-known that the Railroad is a shining example of a broad and deep multi-dimensional movement that set the stage for the destruction of slavery. Check out “The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America,” my essay in this book.
Quite frankly, I’m fed up with so much narrow-minded, paranoid crap masquerading as ideology being dished out by a lot of cowardly veteran activists who don’t want to step out of their comfort zones. They are misleading young people who are hungry for direction. Building conscious support is the absolute first step toward militantly challenging our oppressor. These old cowards know that! Nothing is more important than putting in work to stop this global, genocidal oppression!
How did the split in the Black Panther Party affect the local organization?
In my opinion, the “split” in the BPP is of secondary importance. We must instead look deeper into the BPP, the Movement in general, and toward those forces opposing us for a better understanding of what occurred and what should have been done.
Certainly, many splits in organizations during every historical period are more common than not. Splits serve good ends just as often as bad. The 1971 split in the BPP helped destroy it as a revolutionary organization.
From the ashes of the split, the Huey Newton-led West Coast faction showed its true intentions: to gut as much of the old BPP as possible and guide the remainder along clearly reformist and less threatening lines in exchange for some breathing room from the government repression and the campaign of terror that COINTELPRO was leveling against the party.
Perhaps this was a necessary “strategic retreat.”
On the other hand, the East Coast faction never got on his feet, essentially due to the sheer lack of experience of its youthful cadre in attempting to do the following:
True, they did begin publishing their own paper called Right On! But nobody ever heard of it, and it was shortly plagued with all types of problems hindering its organizing utility.
Their role in fielding the armed wing, however, served as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the escalating terror leveled against the entire BPP hit the East Coast faction hard. Another batch of bogus arrests was planned to decimate their ranks, like the earlier New York 21 case, when twenty-one BPP members were jailed, tortured for two years, and finally found not guilty by a jury. But this time the arrests would be connected to a COINTELPRO-provoked “shooting split” in the BPP.
On the other hand, instead of chancing arrests and trials in this (by then) well-known conspiracy-to-commit-a-grocery-list-of-crimes dance, many BPP cadre decided to take the courageous decision of joining the fledgling armed wing that came to be called the Black Liberation Army. Although the BPP started off in an armed self-defense mode, by 1971 it had essentially gotten rid of that tactic, on Newton’s orders, except in a ceremony mode such as funerals.
Thus, the BPP who became the BLA chose to continue down the revolutionary path as fully armed members of the Movement. It was a positive decision under the circumstances. The separate armed wing would take away the government’s ability to justify its ongoing oppression of those BPP members who didn’t go underground with the BLA. And the BLA could still use armed members to help protect the Movement and the community from rampant police terror and murders, as well as provide the oppressed with a sense of hope that one day they might build up a counterweight to the armed might that they had always been crushed by—an evolution of the BPP’s mission.
Still, so many BPP members going underground, coupled with the ongoing repression and all-around lack of experience in handling such a complex maneuver, all but brought the expansion of the political base to a halt. This was because most of the veteran organizers were either in the BLA or providing it with support.
Finally, the handful of East Coast BPP members not fully occupied with the above were easily intimidated and subsequently demoralized by the repression. They opted to either give up or try to join the underground.
Plus, and I hate to say this, but it’s hard for me to see how an inexperienced group of young people could have surmounted all those obstacles except with the charismatic and visionary leadership of a few key BPP members. This would have at least given them—us—enough time to adapt to such a task!
We did, however, prove Malcolm and others right: the oppressors ain’t bulletproof!
What can we learn from the strengths and weaknesses of the armed underground?
For my part, I’ve written an essay on that entitled “Black Fighting Formations: Their Strengths, Weaknesses, and Potentials,” included in this book. In that piece, I generally critique Black armed groups in this country from 1960 to 1994.
How were you treated by the prison authorities after you were initially captured, given that you were charged with a “crime” that was highly publicized and political but was a direct assault upon the system?
Well, of course the jailers at Philly’s Detention Center locked me and my comrades who had been captured with me in our cells all day. But for some reason, in a few days, they sent a high officer to let us into the general prison population—after threatening us sufficiently, of course.
Actually, that move might have been because of the presence in lockup of Shamsuddin Au, Philly’s Nation of Islam power, who was known as “Captain Clarence” back in 1972. The so-called “Black Muslims” had hundreds of members in that and other local jails. I believed they wanted him in the general population in order to keep them under control. So we were also let out so it wouldn’t be obvious that the jailers were using him in that manner.
In places such as California, New York, and New Jersey, the BPP/BLA had a tremendous presence and influence in the prisons. To what extent did the BPP/BLA have a presence inside the Pennsylvania prison system?
Regrettably, by 1972, the local Black Panthers in the streets had all either been ordered to move to Oakland, California, expelled on bogus allegations connected to Huey Newton’s attempts to distance the BPP from its militants, left to form other organizations, had just retreated altogether or gone underground to form BLA movements.
And connected to that was an aggressive recruitment strategy undertaken by the Nation of Islam and orthodox Muslim groups that essentially swallowed up most of those in the Philly jails and later in the Pennsylvania state prisons who were most susceptible to revolutionary-sounding ideas and organizing.
Moreover, just about all of my own comrades from the BUC/BPP merger had become Muslims, as well as other local BPP/BLA soldiers who had been captured in armed activities, along with those political-minded prisoners under their sway. Indeed, the feeling was that joining those religious groups was simply the next step in our collective evolution toward true self-determination. This, however, proved not to be true. But that’s a story that’s best left for later.
Nevertheless, BLA recruitment and activity still grew in the midst of this situation, and was only eradicated after a protracted struggle within the state jails and prisons.
What are your ideas about prison organizing and what should forces on the outside be doing?
It would help to first give a few reasons why we must see this as a crucial strategic task for our times. Quite frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone living in this country who is not simply terrified by the thought of falling victim to any combination of circumstances that would leave them into the clutches of America’s jails and prisons! And the gatekeepers, the paramilitary police, and paparazzi-style prosecutors will come down on you whether you’re eight or eighty, blind, crippled, rich, or crazy!
So if for no other reason we must not allow ourselves to be held hostage by those in power through the use of the police, prosecutors, jails, and prisons.
Yet that’s still too abstract, especially since most people just think that they can stay out of the way. On a real level, the Black and Brown communities of this country, in particular, are the victims of an extremely callous set of political and economic calculations in which the jails and prisons play a controlling role. This situation invariably leads to the “normalization” of a reality in which a huge segment of its population is simply fuel for the prison-industrial/depressed-communities hustle.
Furthermore, we have to do our homework so that we’ll see beyond the obvious racial aspects of all this. In truth, it’s not race that’s the determining factor as to why Black and Brown people populate the jails, detention centers, and prisons in such overwhelming populations. No! It’s a matrix of foreign policy concerns, immigration control, government/CIA-controlled drugs, money, political corruption, racism and prisons.
To be sure, this is not an easy thing to fully come to grips with. Of course, most of us have strong suspicions about how it fits together, but I know it’s still murky in the minds of most people. The matrix of drugs, money, political corruption, racism, and prisons equals genocide! Go research for yourself and see if I’m right or not! We have to start educating people about this, about the fact that the overwhelming majority of today’s prisoners—Black, Brown or otherwise—are pawns in a giant domestic and international con game. This is the exact thing that I and other political prisoners were seeing, describing and fighting against in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
We must also refine our ideas about how many political prisoners this county holds and just who they are. Then we can actively move to integrate efforts to free the ones already recognized as well as those who have not been recognized.
Check out my essay “Twenty-first-Century Political Prisoners: Real and Potential” elsewhere in this book. No doubt, such an analysis and its recommendations will not fit comfortably with some, who may think it’s too broad and too diverse to include those imprisoned for distributing drugs, for example, as political prisoners. To these individuals, I can only shake my head and wonder: where do they think we’ll amass the counterweight to overcome those powerful and self-serving elements controlling this hustle, if not from other “self-interested” elements? And this says nothing of one’s moral and ethical responsibility to struggle and fight against the real gangsters in the White House, State Department, banks, police agencies, U.S. military, along with all the other bloodsuckers.
So unless you have an analysis and plan that can convince me that my own eyes are lying to me, let’s get started!
-30-
From “The Black Liberation Struggle in Philadelphia” chapter in Maroon The Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz, edited by Fred Ho and Quincy Saul and published by Oakland’s PM Press. © Copyright 2006, 2013 and 2021 by Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, Comrade Sobukwe and Marcus Schell.
source: https://imixwhatilike.org/2021/12/17/russell-maroon-shoatz-1943-2021-speaks-the-black-liberation-struggle-in-philadelphia-a-2006-qa-interview-with-comrade-sobukwe-and-marcus-schell-book-ex/
#blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #blackPanthers #northAmerica #philadelphia #russellMaroonShoatz
The Schomburg Center for Research & Black Culture hosted an event on June 8th with family, friends & comrades of Sekou Mgobozi Abdullah Odinga. It was a memorial tribute to the life and legacy of Odinga who was a devout Muslim, beloved husband, father, third generation grandfather, veteran of the Black Freedom Struggle, and former u.s. held Political Prisoner of War. He was in Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity, a founding member of the NYC branch of the Black Panther Party, and a founder of the Black Liberation Army.
Abdush Shakur:
So far as memories of Sekou; Sekou and I did his last two trips together – one to Philadelphia and one to South Carolina that ended up in Mississippi – he later said after we returned that, of all the trips in his life – and it meant a lot to me when he said it and I really didn’t understand it then – he said that this was the best trip that he’d ever taken in his life. And I’m thinking, wow, you know, after 79 years and you talk about Sekou in his life you’re talking about trips to Cuba. Y’all know he went to Cuba on his own. This is when the United States didn’t have planes flying back and forth to Cuba; he went to Cuba on his own because he took a plane. No, he took a plane! He didn’t talk about it he, wouldn’t talk about it because, even though the statute of limitation had passed, Sekou was always wondering that these folks would try to find a way to double back on him and say, “well, you know, even though the statute of limitations for what they called hijacking at the time, there still might have been counts of kidnapping.”
But he had to go to Cuba in order to get to Algeria. He wanted to get to Algeria because Donald Cox had sent for him, he said I want to see you. Sekou was underground so he made the effort. Sekou was a diplomat for the Black Panther Party in terms of establishing things not only in Algeria, but with Cuba, also with the Palestinian Liberation organizations. Sekou has stories where he – again, these are things that he wouldn’t tell because he didn’t want, as he’s sitting back enjoying himself he got a knock at the door saying “you need to come see u.” Sekou, when he was in Algeria, made his way into the Beqaa Valley, worked with some folks in the different Palestinian Liberation organization freedom fighters there. He wouldn’t talk about it publicly but now that he’s free from the grasp we can share these stories.
He said one day they went out in the Beqaa Valley and he was interested in the RPGs -the rocket propelled grenades – and they said we can take it with us, and so it’s heavy and they’re lugging it along and then they want to fire it and they fired it, but when you fire the RPGs you have to yell in order to maintain your hearing. Because if you don’t yell the noise from the RPG can take your hearing out. So he fires it and yells “AHH” and then he decided, “man I don’t want to fire this no more, this is this is not a good thing to fire,” and so he turns to the section leader and lets him know that “I’m not real thrilled about this.” And the section leader wasn’t real thrilled about that, saying “you made us lug this thing all the way out here.” So they got mad about that, but Sekou was willing to share that story.
In regard to where he traveled; there, the Beqaa Valley, down in Namibia he was there, as we said in Cuba, when he took the plane and he maintained contact with the Cubans so when it was necessary to revitalize that contact. Which is to say that when our sister Assata Shakur needed a place to land he was able to reach out to them and say we have something we want to send your way they said, “look, we can’t help you get her here but if you get her here we got her.” And they were true to that promise and they’ve been true to that promise. Many times when we talk about Sekou and the liberation of Assata Shakur, a lot of times we mention him but I don’t think that we really understand the role that he played. And many times it’s almost like brushed over like it was something that she organized and he participated in. No, it was something that he organized and she participated. He went and got her.
It was a type of thing that the brothers that he was working with – and we can say these things now because most folks that were affiliated with that action have moved on and are free from the clutches – but he said when they were visiting her, when the first folks were visiting her they walked up in the prison in New Jersey just like you walked into this auditorium. You understand what I’m saying? There was not a search, ain’t nobody put no hands on you, no “let me look in your bag”, there wasn’t wanding, there was not a metal detector and they said, “these folks have lost their minds.” They said, “these folks have lost their minds, we got to take advantage of this! Our sisters in here and all they’re going to do is let us walk from the door all the way to the visiting hall and they’re not going to do anything. Man, we got to get em.”
So they sat back and they made a plan. They saw the holding area where they had her at, what they needed to do, they said the only obstacle – well, there was a couple obstacles – was the lady in a booth with glass, thick plastic glass, we got to get her cooperation. How we going to get her cooperation? They looked at the glass and how thick it was, brought a pistol that was able to shoot through the glass, “it’ll take a couple shots but with this 357 it’ll open it up, but we don’t want it to get to that. We’re going to bluff our way through.” So, they took some dynamite in there. Yes, took some dynamite in. Two pistols and some dynamite. Assata got one, he got one, he got the dynamite, they’re talking to the lady in the booth. Assata had been there so long that the people in the prison knew her and they were, you know, having conversations with her. So when Sekou shows up and says “it’s time for you to open this door and let her out” and he’s got the dynamite pressed up against the window, saying “come on let’s go” and they go, “oh lord, lord, Assata, come on honey! I got these grandbabies…” “Well, you better open the door, you got to open the door.” They were bluffing them!
The reason why I say that he had to bluff em is because the dynamite… was three flares. And when I asked Sekou about it he said, “you know, nobody ever asked me about that.” He said, “you the first.” I said, “yeah, that’s some flares isn’t it?” He said, “yep.” He said, “but just in case you didn’t open it, we had the pistol but we didn’t want to make a whole lot of noise.” But it was able to get her to open the door. They had other brothers in the van, other folks in the van were able to jump in and then it became one of those chases, you know? Because now they got to get off of the compound but they were fortunate enough that they had a mental institution at the far end of the compound, that if they got to the mental institution they could get out through there and not have to worry about the guards and the rest is history.
Yeah, “wow!” But these are the stories that shared that that he wouldn’t come out and just say, he would say, you know, “I participated in the liberation of Assata Shakur.” No, they went up there and did what we used to call back in the day, a Steve Brody, for those who are familiar with that term. They did a Steve Brody. They were audacious. This was one of his terms – audacious – he like that term; audacity.
The folks that know, me and Sekou would stay up all night. I used have to do two shifts in regards to watching Sekou. We would do one shift talking all night and then the next shift sleeping after breakfast, so he could get some sleep, I could get some sleep and go on back to where I was coming from. One quick story about Sekou. This goes back to his childhood and in relation to just discernment, because Sekou was a very discerning individual in terms of, as we say, knowing when to hold em and knowing when to fold em. Sekou had three older Brothers and they used to work with their father on a coal truck picking up 100 lb bags of coal. His father was just strong from picking up 100 lb bags of coal. And I’d envisioned his father looking one way then I saw a picture of him and realized that who I envisioned and who his father was were two different people. His father looked like Sr. Walker,. Who’s Sr. Walker? Jr. Walker’s father. He looked like he could have been Jr. Walker’s father, Sr. Walker; big strong man. And his brothers got tired of working for his father and so they devised the plot and said, “when Daddy comes in today and tells us that we need to get on that truck and start working, we ain’t having it. We jumping on him.” That man be picking up 100 lb bags every day.
Sekou thought about it, he said, “no I don’t think it’s a good idea.” They said no you with us tonight. He said, “no.” So his father came in and he told him, “load up the truck and let’s go.” And they said, “no daddy we’re not going.” He said, “what you mean you’re not going? Get on that truck and let’s go.” They wouldn’t go. Father shut the door, they charged their father, the three of them charged the father. Sekou had enough sense to sit that one out. And after the father finished tossing them around like he did the bags of coal; they loaded it up. That discernment stayed with Sekou all of his life, he knew when to go and when not to go.
Alhamdulillah. I give thanks and praise for Sekou and for the opportunity to be with Sekou and I’m glad that you are all here to honor him and remember him, and remember him as a warrior, remember him as your brother, remember him as Baba, remember him for all the good and gracious things that he did. He was a good and gracious brother. I’m going to turn this over, I’ve been on here too long, my watch stopped working.
#blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #blackPower #northAmerica #nyc #sekouOdinga
The United States continues to grow the police state to serve as a bulwark of counterinsurgency.
Since the mid-1960s, the militarization of U.S. police, counter-insurgency, and the surveillance capacity of the civilian law enforcement establishment, then relatively new, has today reached extraordinary levels of sophistication and questionable degrees of constitutionality.
The accelerated militarization of America’s police agencies began exponentially to explode during the later years of the Vietnam War, as widespread student anti-war protests of the late sixties reached their zenith. During the same period, the Civil Rights mass movement of Black people for social and political equality in the South began to be co-opted with symbolic government electoral concessions like the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Urban militancy, cries of “Black Power”, and “Power to the People” reverberated in the Northern, Eastern, and West Coast domestic colonial enclaves, today euphemistically called the “hood” striking alarm in America’s white political establishment.
But even as campuses erupted in student protests, and cities burned from Black rage, the U.S. government, FBI, CIA, and military intelligence units, had revitalized their covert Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) tricks initially deployed during the fifties to disrupt and infiltrate the old white left at the height of the Cold War, and redeployed it to disrupt, neutralize or otherwise destroy Black organizations and the “new left”.
By 1970 fully 70% of the FBI COINTELPRO operations were aimed at Black organizations, from the non-violent SCLC led by Dr. King to SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panther Party (BPP). Ultimately, the majority of the 70% of COINTELPRO operations that focused on Black groups and Black leaders collectively were directed exclusively at the BPP. Why was this?
In the early morning of December 8, 1969, just four days after Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party was murdered in a drug induced coma administered by an FBI/police snitch in Chicago, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) attacked the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party’s Office, and the acronym SWAT, Special Weapons And Tactics, first came into the public lexicon. The police deployment of military like tactics against a Black organization openly dedicated to the self-defense of the Black community was intended to send a message to Black America. The message was violently simple: resistance to the Police occupation of the Black Community, to racist Police violence, and opposition to the monopoly of violence by the State could not and would not be tolerated or allowed to exist.
However, unlike the Chicago Panther residence, SWAT’s initial attack met with unanticipated consequences. The Los Angeles Panther Office was fortified and the initial SWAT assault was repulsed, with no Panther casualties and a day-long siege ensued, highlighted by the police dropping explosives on the roof of the office – with no effect. Ultimately the Panthers achieved their goal – negotiated surrender, in broad daylight, before the entire Black community and on national television. Organized Black self-defense from police terror was vindicated.
Despite the limited victory of the Los Angeles Panthers, they survived), the concept of military style police assaults would be politically justified, first during Nixon’s “war on drugs”, then in Reagan and Clinton’s “war on crime”, and ultimately evolving into that immaculate rationale, Bush’s “war on terror”. Each politically expedient self declared “war” would require more and better military hardware, and innovative police training first taken straight from the battlefields of Vietnam, and the racist colonial Zionist occupation of Palestine. By the late Seventies most police agencies, large or small, had to have a SWAT team. Millions of dollars were provided by the Federal government to provide for training police officers in urban military style tactics, providing facilities for police civilian riot control, and mass arrests, techniques for isolating entire communities as designated areas of “criminal activities”. SWAT teams are now employed routinely for any number of mundane police arrests. An overwhelming percentage of “no-knock” invasions of people’s homes by heavily armed police officers (SWAT teams) who tended to shoot first and ask questions later has led to hundreds of people mistakenly or inadvertently killed.
Building the Police State
As of February 17, 2024, there were over 69 sites under construction or opening, renovation, or expansion of facilities for “Public Safety”, SWAT Team police training, mostly near predominantly Black communities. These facilities, or fledgling “Cop Cities” will train militarized police units (SWAT) Bomb and Explosive Units in the finer arts of counter urban guerilla warfare, along with U.S. partners like the Israeli National Police. These Cop Cities will hone the skills of close quarter sniper techniques to eliminate “identified high value targets”, Search and Capture (arrest) Operations in densely populated environments, as well as Population Control.
Black Activists and journalists In mid-October, 2023, conducted a search by state, alphabetically to identify police training sites for SWAT team urban tactics. At that time, 47 cities/counties were found, with documents (meeting minutes, construction/architecture firms, news articles, and/or press releases) confirming the existence of such projects. Tens of millions of dollars were being allocated for the development and maintenance of these militarized Police Training facilities. Major manufacturers of weapons, and heavy duty armored vehicles have secured tens of millions of dollars of government, state, and local contracts to arm SWAT teams and maintain and support militarized police.
The confirmed range for the size of these “Cop City” projects is as low as a 3,500 square foot structure on 3 acres to a 366,000 square foot village on 146 acres. The largest being planned did not include details on the actual facility, but the proposed site is a whopping 800 acres. Historically, a basic prerequisite for autocratic Fascist rule is a national militarized police force, backed by an all-pervasive civilian police intelligence apparatus with a singular national Database. It hasn’t been a long time coming but corporate America and its political power structure have fashioned a police state under cover of a spurious “electoral college” democracy and chauvinistic white nationalism. It’s called Democratic Fascism.
Dhoruba Bin-Wahad is a former Black Panther Party Leader from Harlem, NY. He was also a Black Liberation Army (BLA) member. He spent 19 years in prison as a Political Prisoner. And was a designated COINTELPRO target, on the FBI Agitator Index. While in Prison Bin Wahad was an FBI/NY Correctional PRISACT target until his conviction was overturned in 1990. He is an activist Pan-African and currently resides in West Africa. Found at Black Agenda Report.
#abolitionism #blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #copCity #dhoruba #northAmerica #repression #us
Transcribed text from a recent discussion with Black Liberation Army (BLA) and Black Panther Party member Dhoruba bin-Wahad. In this short segment he discusses the BLA and parallels with the Hamas movement.
The people that came into the BLA, some of them, many of them were never in the Black Panther Party. Because everybody assumed that everybody that was in the BLA came from the Black Panther Party.
That’s a misassumption. So I started talking about, before we went underground we were in the community. We were in the pool halls, we were in the barber shops, we were selling papers by the subway, we were at Miss so and so’s crib in the backyard. You understand, at the barbecues and we were among, and we were a part of, the people.
You see, so when we go underground the people that know us, you understand, you know, “I’m going to see my aunt for the weekend. Here’s the key (To a safe house),” she says. “You know we going to be back six oclock Monday now.” She says, “okay, baby cool.” So now I got a safe house for the weekend. She knows what’s going on. “They looking for you. You know they looking for you, boy. But don’t worry, don’t worry them crackers can’t find shit.”
So if we understand that Hamas, just like the BLA, is an expression of the people’s relationship to power and the status quo. It’s just that we took a position and the community knows that whenever the status quo does something bad to our community we will retaliate in kind. And black folks appreciated that!
Yeah, if you stick a mic in their face from CBS and say, “two cops was just killed just yesterday by these black extremists and these radical revolutionaries. What do you think about them?” They might say well, “that’s a shame you know. I don’t think police should be killed.”
What else they going to say. “Yeah they should have killed that motherfucker.” You understand what I’m saying. But if you took a survey of the people there, people would say “Yeah them cops always coming in here beating up on people. Good somebody got their ass! Especially that white one that’s always bullying people. It’s good they killed his ass.”
And they might not say that on CBS. But that’s what they feel. It’s just like the Palestinians when Hamas went across that border and defeated all of that surveillance and snatched them ‘Israelis’ they were cheering! They were dancing on the tanks with their cell phones!
They couldn’t cheer when they were occupied and ‘Israeli’ soldiers standing at the checkpoint. They had to humble themselves. They had to let these people push them around. But yeah our boys got them! Our boys got them! Yeah when they see when they see the rockets coming over from Iran and dropping from from Hezbollah, dropping on them ‘Israelis’ they start talking about, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
People identify with resistance. You see. And who are the ones in Lebanon talking about Hezbollah in a negative way; it’s the Christians talking about Hezbollah is endangering Lebanon. Like Lebanon is safe with “Israel” on your border. And if it wasn’t for Hezbollah, Lebanon would be cool? American imperialism wouldn’t have any problem and ya’ll would be good?
So justifying the BLA only means understanding psychologically what Frantz Fanon talked about the native; when the native kills a colonist he’s reinventing himself. He’s asserting his humanity. Now the act may seem inhumane, but that’s the psychosis of it. Look at how they changed the struggle around when the FLN started blowing up cafes in Paris. How could they just blow up innocent people sitting in the cafe getting coffee? The same way you could bomb a village in the mountains in Algeria and don’t give a fuck. The same way you could kill goat herders.
When you are suffering what you inflict on others, now you understand, that what goes around comes around. That your humanity is just as valuable to you as it is to them. And the fact that they will come here and kill you tells you that they are far more braver and straightforward than you are. Because they come in here just to make sure that you understand, we ain’t getting mad, we going to get even.
That was the BLA’s mantra: blood to the horses brow and woe to those who cannot swim. That’s what we said every time we went out and did something. Blood to the horse’s brow bro, woe to those who cannot swim. Bang! Bang! Then we gone. That’s it.
Didn’t make make any difference if you were a black cop, a white cop, if you was a female cop. If you took the life of a black boy in our community and shot him down like a dog you were going to die.
Of course they are going to portray us as just these criminals. Every slave revolt, the one’s who revolted were criminals. They were inhumane. Even your homeboy Finkelstein said he went back and looked at Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and how the abolitionist dealt with that. Because he was in a conundrum about how to respond to Hamas, and how to respond to these things. And he realized out of all of these abolitionists not one of them condemned Nat Turner. They all said, “we told you so.” “We told you this was going to happen.”
And so, what I’m trying to point out is, we used to have an axiom, that repression breeds resistance. All of this murder and killing you see these young kids, that are watching their whole families get murdered in their sleep. Them babies that are starving and watching their mama cry and watching their daddy and their siblings die. If you think that that is not the next generation of Hamas, you’re a goddamn fool.
And they’re going to be far more ruthless than the ones that you got now, so you better negotiate with these motherfuckers you got now, cause when that baby grows up….
This is why the Egyptians are like, “I ain’t letting these motherfuckers in here. You know what I’m going to have on my hands in 10 years with a population that experienced this and they live in the desert and Gaza is suffering, and we are the ones that’s keeping them there suffering.” Whoa!
Transcribed by Abolition Media
From Black Power Media/I Mix What I Like
#blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #gaza #hamas #palestine #panthers #resistance #revolution
Black Liberation Army: Sekou Odinga Has Joined the Ancestors
https://archive.org/details/dhoruba
Écrits Politiques / Politische Schriften / Political Writings : When you look for him in the whirlwind, he's already gone by Dhoruba Bin Wahad; Greg Thomas; Jann Marc Rouillan
Topics
#BlackLiberationArmy, #antiimperialism, #antiimpérialisme, #Antiimperialismus, #BlackPanthers, #BlackPantherParty, #antiblackness, #négrophobie, #rassismus, #libérationnoire, #SchwarzeBefreiung, #Blackliberation
« Ces textes de Dhoruba Bin Wahad, écrits tout au long des dernières décennies, connectent ces luttes et les analysent en faisant toujours l’effort de les lire à l’aune des réalités matérielles des populations Noires aux Etats-Unis, de la population carcérale, du peuple palestinien et des autres peuples africains du début des années 1970 à aujourd’hui. »
Mutulu Shakur, Former Political Prisoner and BLA Member, Dead at Age 72
#MutuluShakur #BlackLiberationArmy
https://archive.org/details/sunviews
Sunviews by Sundiata Acoli
Topics
#BlackLiberationArmy, #Blackliberation, #revolutionaryarmedstruggle, #guerrillawarfare, #bookreviews, #politicaltheory, #politicalphilosophy, #prisonwritings, #Blacknationalism, #revolutionarynationalism, #prisonstruggles, #prisonersofwar, #politicalprisoners, #revolutionarysocialism, #politicalrepression, #staterepression, #armedstruggle, #revolutionaryguerrillawarfare
"SENSATIONAL READING!
A must reading for all conscious people who want an indepth understanding of the movement for Black liberation, social justice and change."
- back cover
https://archive.org/details/cant-jail-the-spirit-4
Can't Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S., A Collection of Biographies by Committee to End the Marion Lockdown (CEML)
Topics
#politicalprisoners, #politicalrepression, #unitedstatesofamerika, #prisons, #incarceration, #biographicaldictionaries, #biographicaldictionary, #colonialism, #antiblackness, #imperialism, #antiimperialism, #anticolonialism, #blackliberation, #AmericanIndianMovement, #BlackLiberationArmy, #GeorgeJacksonBrigade, #BlackPantherParty, #MOVEOrganization, #RevolutionaryArmedTaskForce, #FuerzasArmadasdeLiberaciónNacional, #PuertoRicanindependencemovement, #Blackliberationmovement, #UnitedFreedomFront, #armedclandestinemovements, #leftwingpolitics, #leftistpolitics
Fourth Edition
It's Day 8 of #inktober, so here's a drawing of Assata Shakur. She's a former member of the Black Liberation Army and fled to Cuba after being framed for murder in the United States as part of her organizing work. While in Cuba she wrote "Assata: An Autobiography," which you can find here:
https://libgen.gs/edition.php?id=4806767
#AssataShakur #BlackLiberationArmy #MastoArt #BlackPower
Assata Shakur is an American political activist who was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and who later escaped prison, eventually finding refuge in Cuba.
#LBOE #art #MastoArt #AssataShakur #BlackLiberationArmy
https://archive.org/details/armed-struggle-pnw
The Theory and Practice of Armed Struggle in the Northwest by Ed Mead
Topics
#armedstruggle, #revolutionaryarmedstruggle, #urbanguerrillas, #urbanguerrillawarfare, #PNW, #PacificNorthwest, #unitedstatesofamerika, #washington, #washingtonstate, #oregon, #CoastSalishterritories, #marxism, #antiimperialism, #leftism, #theleft, #antiprison, #prisonermovement, #GeorgeJacksonBrigade, #GJB, #revolution, #revolutionaries, #massmovements, #counterinsurgency, #terror, #communism, #clandestineorganization, #portland, #seattle, #BlackLiberationArmy, #BLA, #SymbioneseLiberationArmy, #SLA, #undergroundorganization
a revised version of a text originally written in the 1970s discussing revolutionary strategy on the u.s. left, by a veteran of the George Jackson Brigade who was at the time imprisoned for putting the theory into practice.
https://archive.org/details/right-on-articles
Selected articles from Right On! Black Community News Service by Right On!; Chango Caribe; Pedro Monges; Muhammad Abdulluh Malik Hassen; Dessaline; Denver Chicano Liberation Defense Committee; DCLDC; New Jersey State Chapter, Black Panther Party
Topics
#RightOn, #BlackPantherParty, #BlackLiberationArmy, #armedstruggle, #urbanguerrillawarfare, #revolutionaryjournalism, #journalism, #unitedstatesofamerika, #staterepression, #policerepression, #antiblackness, #revolutionarynationalism, #blacknationalism, #blackliberation, #portuguesecolonialism, #portugueseimperialism, #NATO, #NorthAtlanticTreatyOrganization, #lumpenproletariat, #agitprop, #агитпроп, #guerrillawarfare, #revolutionaryarmedstruggle, #FTP, #ACAB, #prison, #urbanguerrillas, #BLA
A selection of pages from the Right On! Black Community News Service archives hosted by the Wisconsin Historical Society. Some (not all) of the included articles are:
https://archive.org/details/history-will-not-absolve-us
THE LESSONS OF THE WUO: HISTORY WILL NOT ABSOLVE US, A Critical Analysis of the History of the WUO by former members of the Weather Underground Organization
Topics
#WUO, #WeatherUnderground, #armedstruggle, #communism, #selfcriticism, #whitesupremacy, #antiblackness, #misogyny, #rapeculture, #antiLGBTQIA+, #homophobia, #BlackLiberationArmy, #PrairieFire, #RevolutionaryCommittee, #PFOC, #patriarchy, #fascism, #antifascism, #Osawatomie, #antiimperialism
This essay, written by ex-Weather Underground members, is undated. It responds directly to “The Split of the Weather Underground Organization”, which was published in 1977.
https://archive.org/details/BLA-history
Thomas McCreary - Black Liberation Army History by Field Up Productions; Thomas McCreary
Topics
#ThomasMcCreary, #BlackLiberationArmy, #armedstruggle, #guerrillawarfare, #urbanguerrillawarfare, #urbanguerrillas, #unitedstatesofamerika, #history, #interview, #interviews
original YouTube upload here.
https://archive.org/details/assata_images
Assata. Eine Autobiografie aus dem schwarzen Widerstand in den USA by Assata Shakur; Lennox S. Hinds; Regine Geraedts
Topics
#AssataShakur, #autobiography, #schwarzenwiderstand, #autobiografie, #misogynoir, #memoir, #memoiren, #revolutionaries, #BlackPantherParty, #BlackLiberationArmy, #unitedstatesofamerika, #rassismus
Assata Shakur, Mitglied der Black Panther Party und Mitbegründerin der Black Liberation Army, erzählt in ihrer Autobiografie mit kraft voller, authentischer Sti mme vom tief verwurzelten Rassismus in den USA und vom Aufbruch der militanten schwarzen Bürgerrechtsbewegung in den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren. Sie zeichnet ein bewegendes Bild ihrer Kindheit bei den Großeltern im South Carolina der frühen 1950er-Jahre und ihrer Jugend in den Straßen der Bronx, berichtet detailliert über ihre Zeit im Gefängnis und über die rassistische Struktur des US-amerikanischen Justizsystems. In den Text eingestreut sind Gedichte Assata Shakurs, die erahnen lassen, was es bedeutet, schwarz, Frau und Revolutionärin zu sein.