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We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation
Edited by
ed.
South End Press Collective
In his youth Mumia Abu-Jamal helped
found the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther
Party, wrote for the national newspaper, and began his
life-long work of exposing the violence of the state as
it manifests in entrenched poverty, endemic racism, and
unending police brutality and celebrating a people's
unending quest for freedom. In
We Want Freedom, Mumia
combines personal experience with extensive research to
provide a compelling history of the Black Panther
Party-what it was, where it came from, and what rose
from its ashes. Mumia also pays special attention to the
U.S. government's disruption of the organization through
COINTELPRO and similar operations.
While
Abu-Jamal is a prolific writer and probably the world's
most famous political prisoner, this book is unlike any
of Mumia's previous works. In We Want Freedom, Abu-Jamal
applies his sharp critical faculties to an examination
of one of the U.S.'s most revolutionary and most
misrepresented groups. A subject previously explored by
various historians and forever ripe for "insider"
accounts, the Black Panther Party has not yet been
addressed by a writer with the well-earned international
acclaim of Abu-Jamal, nor with his unique combination of
a powerful, even poetic, voice and an unsparing critical
gaze. Abu-Jamal is able to make his own Black Panther
Party days come alive as well as help situate the
organization within its historical context, a context
that included both great revolutionary fervor and hope,
and great repression. In this era, when the US PATRIOT
Act dismantles some of the same rights and freedoms
violated by the FBI in their attack on the Black Panther
Party, the story of how the Party grew and matured while
combating such invasions is a welcome and essential
lesson.—Publisher,
South End Press
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In this
polemic-cum-history, Abu-Jamal, "the world’s most famous
political prisoner," offers a celebratory look at the
origins and accomplishments of the Black Panther Party,
of which he was a member in the 1970s. The author, now
on Pennsylvania’s Death Row for the murder of a
policeman, mounts a wholly unreconstructed defense of
the Oakland-based group as "a bona fide revolutionary
organization of global import." He seeks to place the
Panthers within the noble tradition of African-American
armed resistance, invoking slave rebellions and the
names of Nat Turner, John Brown and Frederick Douglass.
The BPP was not criminal or sexist, he declares, but a
positive force for change that fell victim to the
"viciousness" and "lawlessness" of the FBI. In contrast
to this often hectoring tone, a charming note of humor
creeps in with Abu-Jamal’s interspersed recollections of
life as a 16-year-old revolutionary.—Publishers Weekly
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How 'Black' Is
Our History Month?
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
For years, decades
now, folks have celebrated Black History Month, with a
plethora of events. There will be movies, book readings,
poetry events, concerts and the like. Coming, as it
does, on the heels of the nation's celebration of the
life of Martin Luther King, Jr., much of what will be
heard will no doubt echo that event. But Black History
is far richer, and far deeper than King.
Rev. Dr. King, who has been edited into a safe, sweet,
nonviolent modern-day Christ-like figure and icon of
peace, forgiveness and forbearance, has himself been
transformed into a one-dimensional figure which ignores
his fullness as a growing, thinking, developing man. He
was far more radical than many of those who now call his
name are ready
to admit.
There will be little, if any, remembrance of the men and
women who fought for freedom in far more aggressive, and
militant ways. While some may hear the occasional names,
usually they too are softened and sweetened with time,
to make them safe historical morsels for white, and
corporate consumption.
It's doubtful that the name William Parker will be
shouted out, even though, over a century and a 1/2 ago,
he led the Christiana Revolt in Pennsylvania, which,
because of its nature, sent shock waves across the
country, so much so that historians of that era, like
James McPherson and Phillip Foner considered Christiana
to be harbingers of the Civil
War to come. Parker, his wife, Eliza, and other members
of "The Special Secret Committee" (a black self-defense
group) fought against slaveowners and U.S. marshals who
wanted to send people back into slavery. The Parkers and
their neighbors fought with guns, machetes, and sticks.
Parker and his clan of freedom fighters had to flee the
US to find freedom.
The Christiana Revolt of 1851 should be on millions of
lips during Black History month. But there will be no
movies, no special notices in the corporate press, and
few scattered references to this signal event in the
history of the struggle for freedom.
The great Frederick Douglass later wrote of Christiana,
that it "more than all else" destroyed the fugitive
slave law. Douglass wrote:
"It became almost a dead letter, for slaveholders found
that not only did it fail to put them in possession of
their slaves, but that the attempt to enforce it brought
odium upon themselves and weakened the slave system."
[Cited in: Forbes, Ella.
But We Have No Country: The
1851 Christiana Pennsylvania Resistance. (Cherry Hill,
NJ: Africana
Homestead Legacy, 1998) , p. 114.]
And while we may know the name of the famous rebel, Nat
Turner, how many of us actually celebrate his memory?
His fight for freedom echoed around the world, for it
showed that the violence of slavery would be answered by
the violence of the oppressed. For what was slavery but
violence, and resistance against that violence but
self-defense?
I doubt that the name Charles Deslondes will elicit the
least flicker of recognition, but he was the leader of a
slave revolt that rocked New Orleans in 1811.
The revolt aboard the Amistad is known to many (due in
part to movies). But the Amistad wasn't the only one.
Ships like the Little George were seized over a century
before the Amistad, but, today, who knows its name? Here
in 1730, some 96 captives seized the craft, and in 9
days, successfully sailed back to Africa. Two years
thereafter, Africans aboard the William did the same
thing, set the crew adrift, and sailed back home.
The late, great Herbert Aptheker, in his classic
American Negro Slave Revolts, recounted over 250 such
rebellions against the vile slave system.
Coming closer to our time, how many of us will look
back, not centuries, but mere months, to the horrors and
hypocrisies of Hurricane Katrina? For Black History
didn't end centuries ago; and didn't begin with the
Civil Rights Act. It's an ancient history, and also as
present as yesterday.
Katrina—the ravages, not of weather, but of
government, as Black Arts Movement poet, playwright, and
essayist Marvin X put it so eloquently in his recent
Beyond Religion -- Toward Spirituality: Essays on
Consciousness (Cherokee, CA: Black Bird Press,
2006):
"We have tried their sham democratic elections to no
avail, as we saw in the 2000 general election when our
votes were discounted. Between our treatment in the 2000
election and Katrina, what else do we need to know about
American democracy? What part of no don't you
understand? Both events revealed America to be nothing
more than a banana republic with respect to us: we were
treated worse than dogs in both respects." [p. 192]
Another poet, Palestinian-American Suheir Hammad, used
her art to pose a potent question raised by Katrina:
Black History Month—a time to remember that which the corporate culture
wishes is forgotten. A time to remember rebellion,
resistance, and what it means to be Black in the White
Nation—today.
Copyright 2007 Mumia Abu-Jamal
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What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the
Nation
Edited
by
South End Press Collective
Cambridge, MA:
South End Press,
2007
In August 2005, thousands of New Orleans
residents-overwhelmingly poor, largely people of color,
the majority black-were left to face one of the worst
"natural" disasters in US history on their own. They
were left to die in prisons, in nursing homes, and on
the street. Survivors were criminalized as "looters" for
struggling to obtain food, water, diapers, medicine, and
other essentials of life that no one else could or would
provide. As Katrina's waters receded and the body count
soared, an ugly truth (re)surfaced: The lives of those
who are poor, who are vulnerable, and who are not white
are not valued by the US government.
While commentators across the political spectrum,
celebrities, and other observers expressed outrage that
the US government would let this happen to
Americans-even "those Americans"-millions outside of New
Orleans live without adequate health insurance; clean
air and water; decent education, housing, nutrition,
health care, and work; and freedom from police brutality
and state repression. And thousands are deported,
displaced, and dying in prisons and illegal wars from
coast to coast, gulf to gulf.
Short and accessible, this anthology, featuring such
voices as Vandana Shiva, Glen Ford, Jordan Flaherty, and
Robert Bullard, takes readers beyond the Superdome. It
explores the complexity of this turning point in US
history as representative of the nation's direction and
priorities.—Publisher,
South End Press
posted 7 March 2007
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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