“BLACK & BROWN UNITY” ORIGINAL PANTHERS & LORDS 2 SPEAK IN THE BRONX: APRIL 27TH

“BLACK & BROWN UNITY” ORIGINAL PANTHERS & LORDS TO SPEAK IN THE SOUTH BRONX: APRIL 27TH 

 

ASHANTI OMOWALE ALSTON: Original Black Panther Party Member, Former Black Liberation Army POW, Revolutionary Anarchist Speaker & Writer

ESPERANZA MARTELL: Noted Human Rights Educator And Political Prisoner/POW Activist, Original El Comite & Latin Women’s Collective Member

ROSEMARY MEALY: Original Black Panther Party Member, Human Rights Speaker, Educator And Author Of “When Malcolm Met Fidel”

CARLOS ROVIRA: Original Young Lords Party Member, Revolutionary Artist, Speaker and Coordinator For “The Culture Is A Weapon Hip Hop Tour”

CLEO SILVERS: Original Young Lords & Black Panther Party Member, Labor/Community Organizer, Speaker & Political Prisoner/POW Activist

 

                                                                         

40 Years on, 1960s Black Radical Still Suffers Racial and Political Injustice

Sunday, 15 April 2012 08:26 By Rania Khalek
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8196-40-years-on-1960s-black-radical-still-suffers-racial-and-political-injustice

The consequences of America’s racist history still linger deep into the present. No one understands this better than Gary Freeman, a 1960s black civil rights activist whose life has been turned upside down by the racial and political injustice perpetuated first by the United States and now by Canada.

Freeman has spent the last four years separated from his Canadian wife and four grown children due to false allegations that he is a former member of the Black Panthers Party. This accusation stems from an incident that took place in 1969, when Freeman, just 19 at the time, shot a white police officer in the arm, which he claims was in self-defense.

Freeman, known back then as Joseph Pannell, was charged with aggravated battery and attempted murder, which carried a 30-year jail sentence. Given the racial bigotry of the time, he feared a fair trial was impossible, so he changed his name and began a new life in Canada, where he spent nearly four decades building a life as a father, husband and research librarian.

That all changed in 2004, when he was arrested at gunpoint and thrown into pre-extradition Canadian detention, where he spent four years fighting extradition to Chicago.

In 2008, following three years of negotiations with prosecutors, Freeman agreed to voluntarily return to Chicago, where he accepted a plea bargain in exchange for a 30-day prison sentence and two years’ probation, which he finished serving in 2010 without incident. He was also required to donate $250,000 to the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation, a fund for families of officers killed or injured in the line of duty.

Since then, Freeman says, “American authorities have treated me with dignity and respect.” Canada, on the other hand, refuses to allow Freeman back into the country, not because of the shootout, but based on the discredited rumor that Freeman was formerly a member of the Black Panthers Party.

Still, if not for the injustice perpetrated against Freeman by the United States, Canada would not be in the position to refuse him entry. So, let’s rewind and examine how this all began.

A White Cop Stops a Black Kid

On March 7, 1969, 19-year-old Freeman (still known then as Joseph Pannell) was stopped in the south side of Chicago by Terrence Knox, a 21-year-old white police officer. Knox claimed that he stopped Freeman to ask why he was not in school and that Freeman responded by inexplicably firing shots at him.

Freeman vehemently disputes Knox’s version of events, saying he was compliant until Knox attempted to frisk him. Freeman refused on the grounds that the officer lacked probable cause, at which point Knox threw him over his squad car, put a gun to his head and began screaming, “I’m gonna blow your head off, nigger.”

“I was waiting to be killed. I turned my head around and closed my eyes,” recalled Freeman.

 ”And then I heard a voice. We were in front of a school. Some of the black kids were hanging out at the window asking, ‘Hey brother, what’s wrong, what’s happening?’ That paused him [Officer Knox] for just a second.”

“Things were very fast, but in slow motion,” said Freeman. “So, I drew my own, I swung around and he started firing and I started firing and I happened to be more accurate. My purpose was to disarm him.”

Black and Radical in 1960s Chicago

Freeman insists that he was carrying a firearm because it was, “a dangerous time.”

“The question was and remains why self-defense is not okay for those held to be the ‘other,’ or less than that,” argues Freeman.

Chicago was indeed a scary place for African-American youth in the 1960s. As the Boston Review points out, “Chicago police led the nation in the slaying of private citizens, who were euphemistically characterized as ‘fleeing felons’ to mask the routine use of excessive force by police against racial minorities.”

In 1969, the same year the shooting occurred, 11 black youths from Chicago’s South Side were killed at the hands of Chicago police. Meanwhile, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was illegally surveilling, infiltrating and disrupting lawful political activity with the participation of the Chicago Police Department, and adhering to an obsessive focus on the Black Panther Party. John Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time, even called the Black Panthers, “the greatest threat to internal security of the country.”

In fact, in 1969, Chicago Police actively conspired with the FBI to carry out the pre-meditated murder of 21-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, whose apartment was sprayed with nearly 100 bullets in a midnight raid, two of which were fired in his head at point blank range.

Black men fared no better in Chicago’s prisons. The UN Committee on Torture has even compared the treatment of black men in Chicago jails from 1971 to 1991 at the hands of Chicago police to the unaccountable torture unleashed on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

Was Freeman on the FBI’s Radar?

Although he was not a Black Panther, it is conceivable that Freeman was on the FBI’s radar.

During his time in Chicago, Freeman worked with the Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial alliance made up of black, Puerto Rican, white and poor people’s organizations that sought to continue the fight for social justice following the passage of the Civil Rights Act under the Lyndon Johnson administration. As it turns out, the FBI’s COINTELPRO was actively sabotaging the Rainbow Coalition as demonstrated by “The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent.”

Even more dubious is that Knox, the officer Freeman shot, was named as a defendant in a 1974 lawsuit filed by the Alliance to End Repression against the Chicago Police Department’s Subversive Activities Unit, otherwise known as the “Red Squad.” The Red Squad was the intelligence unit of the Chicago Police Department that gained notoriety in 1985 when the group was found guilty of unconstitutionally spying on lawful political organizations. Court depositions listed Knox as a Red Squad “control officer.”

Freeman would later learn that a woman he was dating in Chicago was an informant for Knox, which is likely how his whereabouts were known by Chicago authorities as early as 1974. Truthout obtained a copy of a letter dated August 1, 1974, written by Knox to the Canadian Immigration Center, specifying Freeman’s location.

Freeman told Truthout that he planned on going to trial, but as the trial date approached, he was threatened by two white men in suits at a neighborhood bar and shot at by an unknown party whom he could only assume was sending a threatening message.

An Angry Cop Seeks Vengeance

Although Freeman always planned on one day returning to Chicago to deal with his past, he says that, on at least two occasions, he had lawyers in the United States search for a warrant for Joseph Pannell, to no avail. Freeman maintains that as recently as 1997, following the passing of his father, there were no warrants out for his arrest in the United States.

Nevertheless, in 2004, Freeman was arrested at gunpoint by a Canadian tactical team (equivalent to a US SWAT team) outside the Toronto Reference Library, where he worked. He spent the next four years in Canadian pre-extradition custody fighting extradition to the United States. Earlier that year, Knox, who was a successful AT&T executive at the time, had approached Chicago police about renewing the search for Freeman. According to Knox’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune (he died last year) he never gave up on the search for Joseph Pannell.

The media immediately labeled Freeman a cop-killer, black militant and Black Panther, trumpeting the statements of Knox as fact. Even after he returned to Chicago for a plea bargain, the headline of an Associated Press article read, “Ex-Black Panther pleads guilty to ’69 police shooting.”

Still, Freeman received an outpouring of support from prominent figures like Yousuf Gabru, the deputy speaker of South Africa’s Western Cape Province. In 2007, Gabru wrote a letter to Canada’s Minister of Justice urging Canada not to extradite Freeman to the United States for fear that he, “may not receive a fair trial” and, “may be the victim to retaliatory punishment.”

According to Freeman, Chicago prosecutors began discussing a plea bargain as early as 2005. In late 2006, Freeman wrote a letter to Knox suggesting that the money Knox demanded he put towards the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation go instead to, “a Police/African-American Reconciliation Scholarship fund created to benefit the children of all those killed in police/community confrontations.” But Knox never responded, leaving Freeman to ask, “How could you not want to take part in a fund that provides for all children?”

Negotiations went on until the night before the plea bargain was made. Ultimately, it was the candidacy of Barack Obama that convinced Freeman to return to Chicago. The possibility of America electing its first black president left Freeman feeling hopeful that perhaps the United States had changed since the days of the Red Squad.

Canada Picks Up Where America Left Off

Having served his time, Freeman is considered by the US government to be a free man. He has an American passport and can travel around the world as he pleases – everywhere except Canada.

According to Access to Information (the Canadian equivalent to the US Freedom of Information Act) documents, Canadian authorities acknowledge that, “there exist considerable humanitarian and compassionate considerations” to allow Freeman back into the country to reunite with his family. They even admit that Freeman is harmless and poses no threat to national security. Despite this admission, the documents also reveal that they rejected a request for a temporary visa to attend his father-in-law’s funeral in 2009 because Freeman, “has been linked to an organization which used terror in pursuit of its goals,” a reference to the Black Panthers.

In 2010, Freeman obtained an American passport and filed for a Canadian visa under spousal sponsorship. Under Canadian law, the immigration office had two options: 1) Accept the application on humanitarian grounds, or 2) reject it based on his criminal conviction, in which case his wife would have the option to appeal to the Immigration Appeal Division. Instead, the immigration office never responded. According to his lawyer, Barbara Jackman, “By not making a decision on his case they’re preventing his wife from filing an appeal,” leaving Freeman in legal limbo.

“I think they’re acting in bad taste,” said Jackman. “They’ve picked up on this Black Panthers claim, but it was never substantiated. I think that they intended to sit on it until he was eligible to overcome criminal conviction,” which takes five years. Jackman believes that the Canadian government is punishing her client for his politics.

Although there is no evidence to prove that Freeman was a Black Panther, Jackman argues, “Even if that was the case, it shouldn’t matter.” After all, Angela Davis, a prominent 1960s activist once on the FBI’s most wanted list, was closely associated with the Black Panthers, yet travels in and out of Canada all the time.

Nevertheless, on April 12 Freeman received a letter from the Canadian Government informing him that he is permanently inadmissible to Canada “for membership in the Black Panther Party, an organization for which there are reasonable grounds to believe has engaged in terrorism.” The letter goes on to say that “no appeal may be made to the Immigration Appeal Division” because Freeman “has been found inadmissible on security grounds.” 

Freeman currently spends his days in Washington DC, where he was born, waiting to find out where his future lies and missing his family terribly. He has already missed the birth of his first grandchild, his father-in-law’s funeral and, more recently, the death of an old friend. His life has been turned upside down by a United States unwilling to confront its racist past and a Canadian government determined to punish a political dissident.

1985 Bombing of Move: Never Forget, Never Forgive

It was May 13, 1985, when hundreds of police surrounded the MOVE house in the 6200 block of Osage Avenue on Philadelphia’s west side. This was not the first police attack on members of the Black radical organization MOVE. This came after a lengthy campaign aimed at its eradication.

The timing was calculated. Police made sure the children, who went out on a daily schedule, were still at home. At 5:30 in the morning Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor shouted arrogantly through a bullhorn: “Attention MOVE! This is America!”

Police then proceeded to prove that this was indeed America, shooting thousands of bullets into the Move house. A confidential police report obtained by the media listed the ammunition expended by the police: 4,500 rounds from M-16s, 1,500 from Uzis, and 2,240 rounds from M-60 machine guns.

Police demolition teams next used explosives to try to blast holes in the walls of the MOVE house from adjoining buildings. Finally, in the late afternoon, a helicopter swooped low and dropped a bomb with a C-4 military explosive. The explosion started a fire. Now, stop and think about what happened next: The police ordered the fire department not to put the fire out. And people trying to flee the house were fired on and repeatedly driven back–people trying to escape the fire were gunned down in cold blood, others were devoured inside by flames. Then the fire spread to neighboring houses.

When the inferno was over, 11 people who had been in the MOVE house were dead, including five children. An entire city block of houses was burnt down, making 250 people homeless. From the MOVE house, there were only two survivors, Ramona Africa and a 13-year-old boy, Birdie Africa. Investigations showed the basic outline of this massacre had been well planned in advance by top police and government officials.

Why were the rulers so threatened by this group of unrepentant Black rebels living in a communal compound? MOVE refused to respect present-day America and its prevailing values. Its members openly defied official power and tirelessly preached against a system they considered utterly corrupt and destructive to life on this planet, particularly through the use of modern technology and the killing of animals. And when threatened and confronted by the authorities, they did not back down. From its beginning, MOVE has exposed the rulers of this society for the liars, racists, and murderers that they are.

In particular, MOVE vigorously exposed the prior police assault on their house in 1978 and fought against the resulting imprisonment of nine MOVE members who were sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. One of the cops attacking their house was shot, but it was never established by whom. The trial judge openly admitted that he had no idea who had killed the cop, but that didn’t stop him from handing out collective imprisonment to all those in the house who refused to renounce their allegiance to MOVE. (The political nature of all the cases against MOVE is starkly revealed by the fact that renouncing MOVE has always been made a condition for leniency or parole.)

There is a mountain of hypocrisy at work when U.S. officials today decry “terrorist bombers.” America has a history of brutal violence, up to and including bombing, against its own ghettos. In 1921 local cops flew six planes to attack the Black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma (26 Blacks killed and most of the Black community burned down). The 1960s saw the police and National Guard gun down hundreds in the vicious repression of Black rebellions such as 1967 in Detroit (with 43 killed and a particularly vicious police massacre at the Algiers Motel). And the Black Panther Party was made a special target of assassinations and military-style assaults on their offices (several dozen dead, including the police assassination of Fred Hampton in Chicago).

In the aftermath of the bombing of MOVE, capitalist law took its normal course. Were the police officers who dropped the bomb sent to jail? No. Were the police officials who ordered the bomb sent to jail? No. Was the Fire Commissioner who deliberately allowed the whole neighborhood to burn down sent to jail? No. Was the Black mayor who okayed the plan sent to jail? No.

Only one person was sent to jail: Ramona Africa, who served seven years in prison. Charged with conspiracy, riot, and multiple assaults, her real “crime” was that she survived the MOVE bombing, which had been intended to wipe out the MOVE organization.

Around the time of the bombing of MOVE, many people had placed their hopes in the election of Black officials around the country. Wilson Goode had been elected in 1984 as Philadelphia’s first Black mayor. This was after the long reign of the notorious white racist mayor Frank Rizzo and many expected Goode to defend the interests of the Black community. In reality, Goode’s role was to paralyze resistance of Black people and provide cover for the system’s further attacks. Goode did not hesitate to give the order to drop the bomb.

Some people in Philadelphia tried to oppose the police massacre and some were arrested in the neighborhood just for verbally denouncing the assault. However, taken in by an unending media and police campaign against MOVE and shocked by the scale of violence unleashed against MOVE, too many people stood by paralyzed and did not rise up in response. A “Draw the Line” statement, initiated by Carl Dix and others, was signed by more than 100 prominent Black figures and others denouncing the collusion of Black elected officials in the repression of the Black community. The statement read, in part: “When Black elected officials use their positions of power to attack Black people, or to cover up for or excuse such attacks, they are no friends of ours.”
Twenty-five years after the bombing of MOVE, Black and Latino communities are still continuously subjected to raids, brutality, and outright police murder–and building resistance against these attacks must be part of the movement for revolution we are building.

The Black Freedom Movement and Chris Hedges’ Misuse of History

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On the night of January 18, 1958, the Ku Klux Klan, which the previous week had held cross-burnings on the lawns of a mixed-race couple and of a Lumbee Indian family who had moved into a white neighborhood, tried to hold a rally against race “mongrelization” in Robeson County, North Carolina.  But when the fifty Klan members showed up, they were confronted with ten times that many Lumbee Indians led by World War II veterans and armed with stick and guns.  Shots were fired, and the Klansmen scattered in fright through the woods and swamps never to return.  The same year of 1958, a couple of counties away in Monroe, North Carolina, another World War II vet, the local NAACP head Robert F. Williams, was also organizing armed defense against the Klan.  Williams would later write a memoir about his experiences entitled Negroes with Guns.  A few years later, in the Deep South, some other ex-soldiers formed the Deacons for Defense and Justice to furnish armed protection from racists for that part of the movement who were engaged in sit-ins and other forms of non-violent resistance.  (A movie has been made about the Deacons for Defense.)

Certainly most school kids in this country know a little bit about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and perhaps Thurgood Marshall.  They should!  But do they know anything about any of the above?  That’s because the history of the Black Freedom Movement AKA Civil Rights Movement is presented as a sweet little feel-good fairy tale somewhat along these lines: There were once bad white people down South (we don’t hear much if at all in this fairy tale about the white racists in the North) who were all too willing to unleash violence in the form of shootings, beatings, fire hoses, dogs, and jailings — the horrors of lynching are rarely mentioned — against anybody of the wrong color who was thought to be the least bit “uppity,” not to mention those who might have wanted to rock the segregationist boat.  It was a tough uphill struggle.  But the story has a happy and uplifting ending: Due to the actions of people like King and Parks, we are able to live today in a country with freedom and justice for all — because the power of non-violence and of loving your fellow man was all that was really needed, along with a good dollop of courage.  Goodness (and being well-mannered and well-groomed and always remembering to turn the other cheek) was able to triumph over Evil.

We’ll leave aside the question of why this movement history is generally retold in such a selective and disarming kind of way and the question of whether this country has truly gained full and genuine racial equality.  Not only does the school kids’ fairy tale leave out the exceptional circumstances of theCold War during the 1950s and 60s — when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were vying to appeal to the colored peoples of the newly-independent colonial countries — that gave peaceful protest in this country more leverage than it has ever had before or since; but also, in reality, the Black Freedom Movement had always proceeded on two tracks — two tracks that were both necessary for its success.  One freedom path was always angry and militant and it did not eschew the use of force, if necessary.  We can go all the way back to the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War.  In 1829 David Walker, a free black man in Boston issued an “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.”  In this incendiary pamphlet, Walker went beyond the usual moral criticisms of slavery; he denounced America for its hypocrisy, especially singling out Thomas Jefferson, and suggested that slaves might rebel against their masters if the country did not start living up to its professions of all men being created equal.  This was too much for the white liberal humanitarians of the day.  William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist newspaper editor who had condemned slavery as the greatest sin of the age and demanded immediate emancipation and national repentance, decried what Walker had said.  Garrison lectured the men and women in bondage that, rather than rising up in revolt, they should suffer evil“unresistingly,” as had Jesus and his apostles, in the expectation that divine justice would come.  Walker was a devoutly religious man himself who likewise believed in the inevitability of divine justice, but he also believed that “you must go to work and prepare the way of the Lord.”

Walker’s “Appeal,” followed in 1831 by the slave revolt in Virginia led by Nat Turner, reverberated throughout the South for slaves and slave-owners alike.  Southern whites totally freaked, trying to suppress the “Appeal” from reaching slaves — Walker used black sailors to smuggle it into the South — and enacting new laws forbidding slaves from being taught to read and write.  The next no-holds- barred black radical after Walker (who died in 1830) wasHenry Highland Garnet, who addressed the National Negro Convention in Buffalo in 1843 and issued an outright call for slaves to rebel.  ”Arise, arise!  Strike for your lives and liberties.  Now is the day and hour.”  Again, this was too much for the “moral suasion” (pacifist) abolitionists including Frederick Douglass.  But, with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Douglass changed his mind and argued that it might be justifiable to kill a slave catcher to save an escaped slave from being taken back into slavery.  And Douglass, along with a number of prominent white abolitionists, became secret supporters of John Brown‘s bold plan to take the fight to the South by attacking the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia — an act which catalyzed the Civil War and ended slavery as many African-Americans, free and slave, took up arms.  For southern slave-owners, this was the feared apocalyptic slave rebellion.

In the first half of the 20th Century, of course, we had the radical black nationalist Marcus Garvey and his numerous followers and the Communist Party which launched the international campaigns to save Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro Boys.  As Glenda Gilmore has detailed in her excellent recent book on the deeper radical roots of the Civil Rights Movement, the sometimes underground organizing work of the Communist Party and other hard-core left-wing radicals in the South was a key ingredient to what was able to happen subsequently in Montgomery and elsewhere.  Yet, as I discover repeatedly as a college teacher with my students who express surprise at learning about these things (and then turning in some cases to anger about never being told before), practically none of this history is included in the fairy tale fed to American school children and the general public.

The current controversy over strategy and tactics in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, spurred by Chris Hedges‘s ill-informed, poorly-researched essay in TruthDig setting up the “Black Bloc” as a supposedly mindlessly-violent, window-breaking anarchist strawman to promote his moralizing pacifist agenda, is an echo of earlier movement differences and debates.  Although Hedges has been known to waffle, expressing support for rioting in Greece, Hedges seems to think that any kind of militant actions here are ipso facto “violent” and thus illegitimate.  Hedges (as well as others like him) likes to wrap his politics in the mantle of Martin Luther King (along with Gandhi’s).  But King, while following his own heartfelt path and despite his own strong philosophical differences with them, as far as I know was never once publicly critical of those within the Black Freedom Movement like Malcolm X who espoused the need for a more militant in-your-face approach.  Martin was able to understand where people like Malcolm were coming from, given the severe history of racist repression in the black community.  Many of our youth of all colors today, in this hollow materialistic capitalist world which is busy destroying the planet, also feel the same fury and uncompromising determination to stand up to Evil.

During the Sixties, it was these two paths together, sometimes at odds but mutually reinforcing each other, the one personified by King and the other personified by Malcolm X (and subsequently by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, by H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael) — in a social change movement consisting not only of sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts but also of massive urban ghetto rebellions (starting in Harlem in 1964 followed by Watts in 1965 and Newark and Detroit in 1967) — that enabled significant change to happen.  (For some of the latter history, see the new Swedish-made Black Power Mixtape documentary.)  Malcolm on his visit to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to show support for the movement there and for King who had been jailed, spoke frankly to how this was a sort of good-cop/bad-cop approach.  If the white racists did not want to deal reasonably with King, then beware; the alternative was having to deal with people like himself.  (On the Malcolm-King relationship, see the fine new biography of Malcolm by Manning Marable.)  Some members of the ruling elite got the message — King had told Kennedy on a visit to the White House that the black masses were losing their patience with him — and the Civil Rights Acts went through.

We could find similar parallels in the Women’s and Gay Liberation and the environmental movements where those who were in favor of using step-by-step means appealing to those in power to do the right thing and those calling for the System to be dismantled lock, stock, and barrel “by any means necessary” (Malcolm’s language) — the equivalent of today’s “diversity of tactics” — were able to deliver a one-two punch and make changes happen, if not necessarily to bring about an all-around revolution that the militants (and some of the pacifists like King himself at the end) desired.  We radicals can generally appreciate the sometime usefulness of liberals and their reformist approach — Malcolm X supported the black voter registration drives in the South — although considering them naive on the nature of who really rules America and what ultimately needs to be done.  Too bad liberals like Hedges seem to find it difficult to reciprocate the appreciation and sometimes even want to act like “peace police” against those who are more radical and want to push the envelope further.

This is not to advocate “violence” — non-violent direct action seems to be the best tactical choice under most current circumstances except when there is a need to defend ourselves against Oakland-style police brutality — but it is to affirm the angry, impassioned side or path which we also need to win short-term gains against inequality and corruption as well as to build for the revolutionary future.

- Jay Moore, MRZine

Black Liberation A Comparitive History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa

Black Liberation A Comparitive History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africahttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/76340296/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-1zh903ndqamzrh9sukge(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

The Ten Point Program

The Ten Point Program

1. WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
   We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.
2. WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE.
   We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full employment, then the technology and means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
   We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of our fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.
4. WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS.
   We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our Black and oppressed communities, then housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.
5. WE WANT DECENT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANT EDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY.
   We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of the self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.
6. WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR All BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.
   We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide our selves with proper medical attention and care.
7. WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, All OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES.
   We believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against black people, other people of color and poor people inside the united States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.
8. WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION.
   We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desire of the United States ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world. We believe that if the United States government or its lackeys do not cease these aggressive wars it is the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.
9. WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE NOW HELD IN U. S. FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY AND MILITARY PRISONS AND JAILS. WE WANT TRIALS BY A JURY OF PEERS FOR All PERSONS CHARGED WITH SO-CALLED CRIMES UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY.
   We believe that the many Black and poor oppressed people now held in United States prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system and should be free from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women imprisoned inside the United States or by the United States military are the victims of oppressive conditions which are the real cause of their imprisonment. We believe that when persons are brought to trial they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting trial.
10. WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.
    When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are most disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

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Training a Black Panther !

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Training a Black Panther !

Yes A PANTHER CAN BE PLAYFUL TOOO !!!!

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Radical Black Reading, 2011

Radical Black Reading, 2011

Posted: 27 Dec 2011 02:01 PM PST

While post-Black vapors have intoxicated contemporary culture, many of our favorite books of 2011 were part of a wave of scholarship that re-evaluated the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power era and took a second look at a long-ago time when “black” was still Black. In Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota), Alondra Nelson provides a smart and timely evocation of the Black Panther Party’s forgotten community health care initiatives. Art historian Kellie Jones’ lavish Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Prestel) was published alongside an exhibition of the same name that was part of Pacific Standard Time, a sprawling multisite project on postwar LA art. Howard Rambsy’s The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Michigan) offered an innovative and exciting approach to Black Arts print culture while in Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, poet Evie Shockley (Wesleyan) explored experimentation and form in Black radical verse.

Yet Black Power and Black Arts were not the only examples of black radicalism that came across our desk in 2011. With its stylish and spirited ethnography of everyday life and everyday desire among Afro-Cubans in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, anthropologist Jafari S. Allen’s ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba (Duke) demonstrated how quotidian gestures can embody the most radical practices. Minkah Makalani reconsidered the transnational activism of Black Communists including CLR James, George Padmore, and Cecil Briggs in In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (UNC). Stephen M. Ward compiled the writings of Detroit autoworker and political philosopher James Boggs in Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (Wayne State). Louis A. Parascandola continued his fantastic work resuscitating the legacy of the enigmatic Guyanese writer Eric Walrond, co-editing, with Carl A. Wade, In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond (Florida).

Let’s not forget the independents. 2011 saw a number of wonderful releases from those presses that have fought to forge a public discourse on Black politics and Black culture that is unencumbered by either corporate imperatives or academic distractions. Black Classic Press continued their righteous mission of keeping Black history’s sacred volumes in press by re-issuing Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Pambazuka, who gave us an incredible dossier on the anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death, released Jacques Depelchin’s Reclaiming African History, a slender but powerful volume on the history and political economy of pan-African dispossession. They also published Africa Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions, a compendium edited by Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine examining the 2011 uprisings from the perspective – finally – of Africa. The legendary Présence Africaine published Moïse Udino’s meditation on the condition of Antilleans in France, Corps noirs, têtes républicaines: le paradoxe antillais. While London’s Peepal Tree Press has made available the Selected Poems of Una Marson, the great West Indian poet, publisher, broadcaster, and pan-Africanist.

Earlier in the year, our Reading Haiti post highlighted some of the notable volumes published on Haiti since the earthquake – but we completely passed over the titles of independent Montreal publishing house Mémoire d’encrier. Certainly among the most exciting publishers in North America, and rapidly emerging as critical platform for writers from the global south, in the past year alone Mémoire d’encrier has published Rapjazz: Journal d’un paria, Frankéttiene’s poetic meander through Port-au-Prince, Dany Laferrière’s earthquake memoir Tout bouge autour de moi, and Refonder Haiti edited by Pierre Buteau, Rodney Saint-Éloi and Lyonel Trouillot. Refonder Haiti brings together more than forty Haitian writers and thinkers addressing the question of reconstruction.*

Two other assessments of post-earthquake Haiti are due out early in 2012: Haiti: the Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan) by historian and Duke University Haiti Lab co-director Laurent DuBois, and the mammoth anthology Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Quake (Stylus/Kumarian), edited by anthropologist Mark Schuller and NACLA editor Pablo Morales. The contributors to Tectonic Shifts address questions of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism, resettlement and forced evictions, and women’s rights and public health – all of which move us far beyond the vapid pronouncements of a post-black condition.

All best for the New Year.

The Public Archive

*Thanks to @bulldozia for drawing our attention to these texts.

Image: “The House of Common Sense, the Home of Proper Propaganda,” Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore, 125th St. and Seventh Avenue Harlem (1964). Source: Uptown, Saturday Night. Also, this.

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We are the 99%… Because We Are Black in the U.S….

Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD

True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.

-Dr. Martin L. King, Address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association, 1955

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.

-Dr. Martin L. King, Beyond Vietnam, Riverside Speech, 1967

In Memory of Martina Correia

Here is Michael Parenti commenting on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement, November 9, 2011, in “Occupy America,” published at CommonDreams.org:

Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.

I recall learning about the Palestinians and their struggle because young Black Americans, Black Panthers to be exact, traveled to Palestine in the early 70s to share their experiences in the struggle against injustice. I recall also how we learned the meaning of the word “apartheid” and acknowledged an affinity with the struggle in Black South Africa. I recall the message of Caribbean Blacks and all of us young Blacks in the U.S. reading Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and feeling as if we were born again.

But okay! Scores of other nations are specifically pronouncing the words “Wall Street” as they gather in parks and in city squares. Never mind that many in the Arab world are saying “it’s about time, Americans!”

But okay! Predominately young white North Americans are standing up and they have come onto the streets and parks in protest, spreading across the United States. I can understand how liberals, “radicals” of the 60s protest era, want to project an image of protest that is marketable, free of historical contamination, free of the blackness of the 60s era.

Black Americans organized and lined the streets to protest against police brutality when white America believed Black violence and Black non-violence justified police violence. Blacks organized and served hungry children when white America said Blacks were asking for too much and moving too fast. They organized to fight the U.S. Empire when frightened parents and grandparents of the new OWS activists stood by and did little while the Black activists were shot down and imprisoned, marginalized.

Young white America has awakened to just catch the “echoes” of those gunshots that rang out then and even now on el platforms and in the streets, but they are without memory of Malcolm X, of Huey Newton, of Shirley Chisholm. They are not harmonizing along with a fellow Black activist Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” nor or they riding a bus from some northern college campus town, sitting alongside a Black, arriving to face a crazy sheriff and angry mobs of whites shouting “go home, Nigger…and Nigger Lover, too.”

These young white activists of the OWS Movement have not been tortured, mutilated and then killed alongside a Black southern activist in a car on a dark road.

There are beatings and arrests as there has been since the end of enslavement and the beginning of Jim Crow and again during the Civil Rights era. But no police force would think of killing OWS leaders, if they had leaders, while they slept after being drugged by a police informant nor would even a Bloomberg give the thumbs up to an all-to-willing police force to drop a C-4 bomb over the home where 8 children died and where the adults were unarmed.

The young protesters today have been saturated with the image of a gentle Dr. Martin L. King and the Dream (colorblindness) and have been captivated by the American Dream (class blindness).

So here is Parenti again and what is so troubling to me:

We need to explicitly invite the African-American, Latino, and Asian communities into the fight.

We need to invite them, explicitly invite them – to the fight as he reminds the “we,” the “everyone” that is not really everyone that “the Great Recession,” the economic crisis of the 2008 (which struck white America and everyone who advanced economically above the fray) “victimized everyone” but especially hit hard “the ethnic poor.”

This latest crime of capitalism “victimized everyone” and everyone who consciously or unconsciously advanced as a result of capitalism’s victimization of the “ethnic poor” should be mindful of those invisible ones in the nooks and crannies, mindful of those useful step ladders and necessary scapegoats. The Ethnic poor!

These are who the liberals such as Lyndon Johnson ultimately dismissed in order to escalate the killing in Vietnam, and the Lover Boy Clinton disenfranchised through major eliminations of public assistance to children, while the corporate world is still thankful for the advancement of prison construction throughout the U.S. to house the parents of these children. Affirmative Action for Black Americans, a blemish on the American landscape, morally outraged white men.

I can’t imagine why or how things have turned around, but “explicitly invite” them, calls out to those who once lead the movement for civil and human rights to join the “fight.”

Bring them reluctant and screaming from what remains of public housing and their grassroots campaigns, from the unemployment lines, from the rank and file of McDonald’s workers, from the kitchens and nurseries of your parent’s homes, and from the tomato fields in Florida. Please drag them kicking and screaming from those inadequate public schools where despite the protest of parents and communities, their children slowly become damaged goods, left behind to be transported to prison as discarded waste. Over 2 million targeted by law, charged and incarcerated as criminals, segregated for non-violent crimes while Hollywood producers, celebrities, fellow college classmates, friends, neighbors, someone you know, enjoys a “hit” or a “line” or even a meth or ecstasy trip regularly.

And racial profiling does not help!

Tell them the fight is on! The Movement is here! Tell them to come away from their homes occupied by Fox News blasting lies and depictions of criminals that look like them. Tell them to delete the corporate subsidized rappers from their iPods and respectfully bring their mothers, sisters, and daughters to the fight. Tell them the time is now! Join the fight! But warn them: don’t come angry like their parents and grandparents before them!

“As is the case with so many of the tropes that are repeatedly deployed in our media environment, the practice of disparagingly labeling select people as ‘angry’ has a documentable history,” writes Thomas S. Harrington, in “Anger and Angry People,” (CommonDreams, November 2011). This we know.

Return to your ‘ghettoes’ and turn the anger inward and self-destruct!

Are the angry invited to the fight? Are the ethnic poor really being invited, explicitly or otherwise “into the fight”? As Harrington rightly notes, “the further down the social totem pole you are, the more angry you are likely to be.”

But I disagree with Harrington’s depiction of King. So many of the tropes on the Left forget the King who said “there comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” August 1963). And they did, but America rejected the racial make-up of the protest and the anger of a King, first and foremost, turned Americans off to any genuine movement to end political and economic injustice.

It is not an accident that, as Harrington argues, the OWS Movement is obsessed with “appearing good-humored and positive,” following the “noble examples of Gandhi and King,” but also attempting to “avoid being tarred as ‘angry’ by the country’s right wing media machine.”

But it is not as simple as that, is it? Some right wing media machine is the sole culprit of 45 years of repression? The safe and squeaky clean “Black” emerges from so-called liberal institutions, too.

The young white American, for the most part, has not experienced life in the U.S. in the same way the Red, Black, Brown, and Yellow has experienced this government’s rage. College tuition is high in the U.S. A college loan means debt for years to come. But for many Red, Black, Brown and Yellow citizens, however curious, intelligent or talented, a college education is out of reach.

The emergency room is the health care plan and diabetes and high blood pressure is on the rise along with the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

Good humored and positive – they are not, but then neither was Dr. King; the angry Dr. King who condemned the violence and the use of taxpayer’s money to conduct the Vietnam war, and to hell with the religious clergy and civil rights careerists; the angry Dr. King who said he was standing with the Memphis garbage workers and preparing for a poor peoples’ march in Washington D.C., and to hell with President Johnson and the liberal class determined by then to protect their families from the angry Blacks! But few are courageous enough to refer to this angry Dr. Martin Luther King!

I remember reading about Blacks who were not so angry and who tried to be “good humored and positive,” as the young protesters are urged to be today, and masses of people in celebration of their freedom, lynched these good humored and positive people by the hundreds, for years.

The full history of the 99% is forgotten these days. “Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten” (King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? 1967).

The “we” representing the long-standing protected privilege of many Americans cannot “invite” representatives of the long-standing struggle without implying that the continuation of the same hierarchical structure will remain in place. The later are already present and have been present but “underprivileged” or “lower economic class” has made them and their continuing fight for human rights invisible. They are still in the back of the bus, still at the segregated lunch counter, still partitioned in non-gated communities serving the privileged as janitors, security guards, garbage workers, housekeepers, and nannies. Before September 2011, before the OWS Movement, they tried to steady the boat. And to what end – their bosses sunk it!

But now there is an open invitation! Join this fight against the U.S. Empire’s manipulation of “allies” and “enemies,” against capitalism’s production of poverty, against white supremacy.

Because you are Black, we are inviting you, “explicitly inviting” you, to experience with us the brutality of the militarized police’s uses of tear gas, pepper spray, and horses (no dogs yet!). We invite you to spend a night or two in jail.

We are inviting you to the Struggle, to the repressive tactics used against protesters, dissenters, those seeking justice and human rights, earth rights.

Join us – who are so new to the fight – and maybe, together, again, we can forge a revolution! Stamp out the blackness of injustice and brutality against humanity, against Mother Earth! And work toward a future of democratic socialism!

***

Long live the fighting spirit of Martina Correia, 1967-2011, who fought the good fight on behalf of her brother Troy Davis and all those sentenced to the death by the Just-Us system of injustice.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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[TheBlackList] FOR THOSE WHO LOVE BLACK YOUTH

_________________________________________    _____________________      __ This is for those who truly love and respect for the Black community and who also have a real desire to build a community where young men know who they are, are ready to maintain, respect and protect their community and are willing and ready to fight for our liberation.     To do this we must elevate the minds and spirits of our youth and develop them into those strong, conscious committed individuals, princes and soon to be Kings that  lay dormant within their very DNA     S.T.E.P. Inc.is a pro-active organization offering pro-active solutions for our young men and community. The STEP brotherhood is 100% serious about what we do.   “Raising strong, young leaders for our community”.   Areas ofdevelopment include:  ______________________________________________________________________ Knowledge of Self..   Physical Fitness.. Boxing.. Martial Arts.. Grappling.. Unity Healthy Food Preparation.. Nutritional Supplementation & Juicing..   Urban Survival Skills.. Community Organizing        And also a very special emphasis on:       How to treat young Black women..   How to protect young black women..   How to treat and protect the Elders..   And so much more!   ___________________________________________________________________________________  Afrikan proverb: “If the children are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.”   ___________________________________________________________________________________   As you can see our mission is clear…   If you or someone you know would be willing to participate in this building process contact us at:   STEP Inc (973) 842-8212 step_incnj@yahoo .com     We’re on the move! _______________________________________________   You can see STEP up close and personal on fackbook at: Striving Together Equals Progress (STEP), Inc. Or click on the below link for our page. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Striving-Together-Equals-Progress-STEP-Inc/110722776907  ______________________________________   You can help support this unique youth program with a financial donation.   The STEP organization has launched its “Annual Fundraising Drive” and ask that you and or your organization give a tax deductable contribution to this most worthy cause.   See what you are donating towards at: www.steptothefuture.org     You can help by giving to a mission that continuesto give so much  to our community.      Please send all checks or money orders to:    STEP Inc P.O. Box 22192 Newark, New Jersey 07101   To make a donation online please go to: www.steptothefuture.org  ____________________________    __  ______  _____________________________   Have your spirit been touched by the STEP mission?   Would you like to know more about STEP Brotherhood and exactly what we do?   Click on the facebook link below: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Striving-Together-Equals-Progress-STEP-Inc/110722776907     Visit on site at: www.steptothefuture.org to get all the details   This group of brothers are not playing around! ______________________________________  For additional info about STEP www.steptothefuture.org   To volunteer with our organization http://steptothefuture.org/Volunteers.html To register a young leader for our next session contact us at:   STEP Inc (973) 842-8212 step_incnj@yahoo .com   (new registration is taking place now)     Going to college and would like to donate some quality time to a local youth organization? Give a call and get on board…   There is plenty of work to do!   “Let’s S.T.E.P. to It” ___________________       _____    ___________________    ________    ___________    Also..you don’t want to miss our… Kwanzaa 2011                                            Acknowledgement ceremony Celebration and Dinner ___________________________________________________________________________ WHEN: Sat. Dec. 17th WHERE: The Newark YMWCA  600 Broad St. Newark New Jersey   Time:  5-8pm  Our Kwanzaa acknowledgement ceremony is scheduled at the end of each second session in December for the continued cultural involvement and awareness of our participating youth. Our Rights of Passage Accomplishments Ceremony & Dinner is also held at that time where all participants, staff and their families attend to acknowledge the accomplishments of our youth during that session. Join us as we share and embrace Afrikan Culture and the spirit of commUNITY.   _______________________________________________________________   For more info, to volunteer or vendor space contact:    STEP Inc. (973) 842-8212    E-mail: step_incnj@yahoo.com www.steptothefuture.org __________________________________________________________