#dhoruba-bin-wahad — Public Fediverse posts

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

5th Pan-African Congress Commemoration 2025: Dhoruba Bin-Wahad

On the 18th and 19th of November, over 250 delegates from across Africa and African communities in the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe gathered at the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Ghana’s capital, Accra, to commemorate the 5th Pan-African Congress held in 1945 at Manchester, England.

Delegates from Algeria, Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, and China, met not only to remember the 1945 convention but to reaffirm the Pan-African vision declared at that historic Pan-African Congress.

At the original 5th Pan-African Congress, attendees W.E.B. Dubois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, and other Pan-African luminaries, who would later become anti-colonial freedom fighters, collectively called for a complete end to European colonial occupation and economic exploitation of Africa.

Ghana’s recently elected President John Mahama gave the conference keynote presentation. Not only did he pay tribute to earlier pioneers of Pan-Africanism, but he asserted “the inalienable right of Africans and people of African descent to full reparations” for “slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and systemic exploitation.” President Mahaha also announced the Accra Declaration of Reparatory Justice.

The Accra Declaration mandating the establishment of a “Pan-African Reparatory Justice Coordinating Committee” is currently being heralded as a new era of coordinated global action on reparatory justice,” said the Pan-African Progressive Front (PPF), the conveners of the conference.

Speaking later at the plenary session, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, former Black political prisoner and Black Panther Party leader, and well-known revolutionary Pan-African activist, provided a historical perspective of the current geopolitical state of affairs. Reminding attendees, that history never repeats itself – pointing out both the “historical rhyme of histories, and the contemporary reasons for today’s desperate attempts to keep Africans under the thumb of white supremacist nation-states and their neo-colonial allies in Africa and Western Asia.  Baba Dhoruba pointed out the differences between 1945 and 2025.

Baba Bin-Wahad noted that when the 5th Pan-African Congress was convened in 1945, Western Europe lay in utter ruin, devastated by the greatest conflagration humankind had ever experienced,

Baba Bin-Wahad had previously highlighted that even though World War II can be defined as the second fully industrialized war, it was nonetheless an unprecedented opportunity for American industrialists, military contractors, and finance capital’s most wealthy families to recycle the debts of WWI into unimagined profits for America’s elite and enhance U.S. military power.

The U.S. and its European Allies, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and most significantly, the  Soviet Union, (which lost over 25 million people in the fight against Nazis Germany and its Axis allies) emerged the victors of WWII with a geo-economic carte blanche to rewrite a new post-war global order, Bin-Wahad noted. The very global architecture we are subjected to today is a byproduct of the post-WWII concocted East–West rivalry, global trade manipulation by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and monetary subjugation by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. All these institutions were established after the end of the Second World War.

It was the U.S. Marshall Plan, America’s strategic economic, corporate, and industrial setup to revitalize a devastated Western Europe and amplify the West as a citadel of global financial capitalism that laid the legal framework for today’s global order. Monetizing the debts of worn-torn nations into enormous profits for America’s companies and industries, ushering in the rise of what Eisenhower called the “Military Industrial Complex”, and the “American Century” of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down cold war prosperity, were all major contributors to the 20th-century rise of the American Empire.

Re-Counting The Cost

General George C. Marshall, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff of the Army, whose name the Marshal Plan bears, laid the foundation for the rise of the modern Military Industrial Complex, which would emerge under president Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, would follow up with the moral bombast of virtuous Western democracy, and free market macro-capitalist ingenuity as the basis for political freedom and personal wealth, while demonizing fascist “crimes against humanity” and Soviet Communism in the same breath. Taking full advantage of the universal repugnance of fascism’s industrialized slaughter of millions of their fellow Europeans, the U.S. and its allies were able to camouflage their revitalization of European neo-colonialism in glowing moral and humanitarian terms of “ democratic freedom” and “universal human rights.”  Even going so far as creating an International Military Tribunal in the wake of the Nuremberg trials of Germany’s wartime Nazis Leaders. It’s worth noting that the German industrialists who backed the Nazis and built the German war machine were never prosecuted at Nuremberg and would later play a central role in Germany’s post-war economic growth as Europe’s strongest economy.

When America created the United Nations, it did so partly to ensure that the ‘New World Order’ would remain subject to European political contextualization and effectively ensure not just European post-war economic revitalization but also translate into a U.S.-dominated Western military alliance that could challenge Russian Communism while simultaneously abetting Europe’s reacquisition of its former colonial territories. Toward these perverse ends, the U.S. and its allies created the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, both were created to monetize the debts of poor developing nations. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Europe’s military Alliance created ostensibly at the end of WWII to protect Europe from Soviet invasion, would become militarily involved in backing U.S. military interventions in Asia, Africa, and the Middle-East during the entire period of the so-called “Cold War.”

But the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) however, was another scheme altogether. It was established to regulate Global Trade between the “have and have not” nations of the world. The WTO mandate was shrewdly started to protect Western capitalist manufacturing monopolies, which favored developed manufacturing nations over underdeveloped mineral-producing nations. It was never intended to regulate genuine “free trade” between equally sovereign nations. Ultimately, all of these institutions were underwritten with the maneuver of the Bretton Woods Agreement linking the U.S. dollar to gold, making the dollar the de facto global reserve currency, a fitting tribute for the most powerful nation to emerge from the ashes of WWII. But history wasn’t just repeating events of post-WWI when a Europe, laid waste by war established the League of Nations, and Germany was made to pay reparations to its adversaries. No.

Baba Dhoruba reminded the dozens of Pan-Africans, Muslims and Christians alike, Socialists and Communists, from dozens of ethnic backgrounds gathered in Accra, to not just commemorate the historic 5th Pan-African Congress, but to understand that today we are witnessing the collapse of the world order fabricated in the 1940s. Except today, with climate change and increased consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few, the self-destruction of humanity is closer at hand than ever before and the light for humanity at the end of the long dark tunnel of endless capitalist wars, debt and industrial pollution is a United States of Africa.

President Mahama also unveiled a plan for visa-free travel between African countries in his keynote address. Proposing a practical step toward continental unity, Ghana’s President Mahama used his keynote address to unveil the plan for the establishment of the “League of African Free Movement” along with seven other African nations that would abolish visa requirements between them, and he urged other African nations to join in this new visa-free protocol.

Delegate organizations from the Ivory Coast and Cameroon, spoke of solidarity with the Youth and Student uprising in Malagasy, Tanzania, Kenya, and solidarity with the Palestinian People. While African delegates from the diaspora were present, It was Black Power Media in the U.S. that commissioned Dhoruba Bin-Wahad as an official observer for the network who described the Rise of Fascism, Islamophobia, racist anti-migrant popularism in the Metropoles of Europe as Ethnic and Racial cleansing of Latin Populations, indigenous populations and all non-European. Making America Great Again, Keeping Europe Safe from 3rd World Migrants, demonizing Islam as ‘Terroristic” are all revivals of century old European Christian jingoistic White Nationalism.

Clearly, we are witnessing, in the age of global communications, how effectively Western democracy has deluded its constituents into a false sense of superiority that’s completely at odds with Europe’s historical track record of plunder, greed, and genocide visited upon the Global South, which is the primary cause for the current global migratory crisis to begin with. This delusion has inspired racist populism across the Western World.

The Euro-Christian white supremacist global order created after WWII we euphemistically call “globalization” today is rotting from within as European Union NATO puppets of American led jingoistic entanglements against Russia unravels in the Ukraine, stressing European economies while simultaneously, the Euro-Zionist Settler State in Western Asia (Palestine) has shredded the credibility of the American-European Global “rules based order” so pragmatically reformed and defended from 1945 to the present. Today is vastly different from 1945 and the mid to late 20th century.

Dhoruba Bin-Wahad

Dateline November 22, 2025

Accra, Ghana

____________________________________________

Additional Reading:

“Inalienable right of Africans and people of African descent to full reparations for slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and systemic exploitation”, an international Pan-African conference held on November 18 and 19, 2025 adopted the Accra Declaration on Reparatory Justice.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/11/23/inalienable-right-of-africans-and-people-of-african-descent-to-full-reparations-asserts-accra-declaration/

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=24807

#africa #antiColonialism #antiImperialism #blackLiberation #dhorubaBinWahad #ghana

Black Liberation Army Veteran Dhoruba Bin Wahad Requires Support

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:

Physical 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 –

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=13349

#bla #blackLiberation #blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #bpp #dhorubaBinWahad #northAmerica #us

“Direct action loses effectiveness if there isn’t a mass movement,” Dhoruba bin Wahad, co-founder of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), told a packed room at our election night town hall on Tuesday. In under ten minutes, Wahad elegantly summarized some of the movement’s most pressing disconnects: the disconnect between underground direct actionionists and mass movements; the fact that AIPAC and police unions “have more power in the Black community than the Black community has.” Palestine has forced U.S. leftists to become internationalist and Wahad’s analysis connects American imperialism in Gaza and Lebanon to America’s internal colonies.

Wahad’s wisdom comes from decades of struggle, including 19 years of incarceration on charges of attempting to murder two NYPD officers in 1971. In prison, Wahad learned about COINTELPRO, the covert FBI operation used to break up anti-Vietnam protests, feminist groups, and Black liberation organizations like the Black Panthers, from which the paramilitary BLA emerged. Wahad sued the FBI in 1975, forcing the federal government to release 300,000 pages of confidential documents that Wahad would eventually deploy to overturn his own conviction. Today, as the U.S. and Canada label Samidoun a “terrorist” group, and as Georgia officials charge Stop Cop City activists under RICO and domestic terrorism laws, it’s crucial to study the history of state repression in order to battle evolving forms of counter-insurgency. Wahad’s work and life are a model of steadfast invention in the fight against what he has dubbed “democratic fascism.” Below is an excerpt of his speech: 

We have to organize people where they are at, in the streets, around issues that impact their lives. We have to be able to create centers of people’s power and control in the urban areas where we can access the electoral system and use it to our advantage. All politics is local, you see. So we’re in a moment right now, as the genocide is proceeding in broad daylight, every day we pick up the news, we see 53 children and women slaughtered with American bombs and American military hardware.

But we need to understand that the trillions of dollars and millions of dollars the U.S. spends on its proxies never leave the United States. It goes to the corporations and the companies that manufacture the weapons of mass destruction in war. They go to the Boeings and McDonnell Douglas and they go to all of these corporate agencies.

And this is the working class. This is the class of technicians that underwrite and support and make the fascist nation-state possible. We have to understand the police are not workers, so why do they have a union? So that’s a struggle right there. That’s part of our mass line in the united front, that the armed agents of the state are not workers. They kill workers when workers get out of line. They beat students when students protest against the policies of their schools and the policies of government. They enforce the policies of the white supremacist nation state.

And the state is involved into what I call democratic fascism; the delusion of democracy.

Why do African people who have been brought here as an act of war and declared slaves and chattel, why are we paying taxes when these crackers that started this country, this nation, said no taxation without representation. And Africans aren’t, Black folks are represented in the halls of Congress. They are not represented. AIPAC has more power in the Black community than the Black community has. The police unions exercise more power in urban governments in New York, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in Seattle than the people that live in those communities.

This is the militarized, corporate national security state.

So I just want to say to you, when you consider direct action, you have to consider: where to strike, who to strike, and how to strike, and it has to be attached to the needs and the requirements of a mass movement.

We have to build a mass movement first. We have to be clear about our role domestically and clear about our connection to other oppressed people around the world and their struggle and how the U.S. empire uses proxies in order to suck the resources of the Third World and North Africa and use it for the benefit of the elites and the powerful here in this country.

So you are in the belly of the beast so you have a unique opportunity to strike blows that nobody else can strike. And these blows have to constitute a monkey wrench.

We have to understand, we have to put a monkey wrench in the machinery of war, in the machinery of death and destruction that’s dissolving our planet right before our eyes.

Source: Writers Against the War in Gaza

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2024/11/10/put-a-wrench-in-the-machinery-of-war-dhoruba-bin-wahad/

#bla #blackLiberation #blackPanthers #dhorubaBinWahad #northAmerica #panthers #us

Beggars On Horseback: Creating a Pan-African Power Paradigm for the 21st Century

#DhorubaBinWahad #FinanceCapital #Imperialism

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/04/23/beggars-on-horseback-creating-a-pan-african-power-paradigm-for-the-21st-century/

Beggars On Horseback: Creating a Pan-African Power Paradigm for the 21st Century

#DhorubaBinWahad #FinanceCapital #Imperialism

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2023/04/23/beggars-on-horseback-creating-a-pan-african-power-paradigm-for-the-21st-century/

RT @[email protected]

#DhorubaBinWahad est l’antithèse exacte de ce problème. Il est toujours dans le moment de l’action, avec l’endurance, la cohérence et l’audace qui doivent être la marque de la véritable révolution.

Greg Thomas

http://indigenes-republique.fr/ecrits-politiques-de-dhoruba-bin-wahad-introduction-par-greg-thomas/

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/PartiIndigenes/status/1570848171265490944

RT @[email protected]

#DhorubaBinWahad a passé 19 ans en prison pour son activisme politique. Depuis 2021, on a lui a diagnostiqué un cancer du poumon. Soutenez ce combattant et enseignant dans la lutte contre l'injustice et l'oppression ! @[email protected] https://bit.ly/3BsCXa9

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/PartiIndigenes/status/1568559409214722049

A History of the Life of Dhoruba Bin Wahad
#DhorubaBinWahad

Support the fundraiser for Dhoruba's medical expenses:https://www.gofundme.com/f/qd8dz-dhoruba-bin-wahad-medical-fund

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/post/2022/04/14/a-history-through-the-life-of-dhoruba-bin-wahad/