what a woman who could have joined the D.A.R. has learned about the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" by just paying attention and NOT keeping her mouth shut...
Showing posts with label Black Panther Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Panther Party. Show all posts
“Right now, we are in a peak cycle. There’s tremendous energy out there, directed against the state. It’s not all focused, but it’s there, and it’s building. Maybe this will be sufficient to accomplish what we must accomplish over the fairly short run. We’ll see, and we can certainly hope that this is the case. But perhaps not. We must be prepared to wage a long struggle. If this is the case then we’ll probably see a different cycle, one in which the revolutionary energy of the people seems to have dispersed, run out of steam. But – and this is important- such cycles are deceptive. Things appear to be at low ebb, but actually what’s happening is a period of regroupment, a period in which we step back and learn from the mistakes made during the preceding cycle.” ~ George Jackson ___________________________________________________________ NOTE: The graphic above was done by artist and social justice warrior Kevin "Rashid" Johnson More of his work can be seen here.
For the last few months, my posts on this blog have focused primarily on the criminal injustice system in the United States and how it functions related to the Black community. This is not new. In fact, many of the more than 600 posts I have published here over the past decade have specifically dealt with the topic of prison. And that's not surprising, considering that I committed myself to the prison abolition movement in this country in 1971.
In his now famous address to the prisoners at the Cook County Jail in 1902, Clarence Darrow, one of the best known and most successful lawyers in U.S. history, stated flatly: "There should be no jails," and went on to explain precisely why he thought this. But here we are, 115 years later, with more people locked up than any society in the world at any point in history. And to make it worse -- far worse -- the entire system is now privatized from the bottom to the top, turning it into a giant money-making machine, now touted as the best investment on Wall Street.
There is, however, more than one way to imprison and control individuals and this post concerns one of those ways. The documentary above tells the story of Pete O'Neal, who was one of the founders of the Kansas City Chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. In 1969, O'Neal was arrested for bringing a shotgun from Kansas City, Kansas, to Kansas City, Missouri. He wasn't actually found with the weapon, but a photograph of him with the gun was enough to get him convicted.
The 29-year-old organizer appealed the decision, but when Fred Hampton, another highly effective BPP organizer was drugged and then assassinated in his bed by the Chicago police, O'Neal left the country in fear for his life. He has now been in Tanzania, where he has become a beloved icon of service to the community, since 1972. But there are those who hope President Obama will pardon O'Neal, allowing him to return to the land of his birth. And I am unapologetically one of them.
Last October, Pete and his wife Charlotte were interviewed at their home in Tanzania about how the making of the documentary in 2004 has affected their lives in exile.
Focusing on how White Supremacy as a system uses "law enforcement" to brutalize -- or even kill -- those who resist
its power can leave us shaking in our boots. Yet there has always been resistance by Africans, other colonized People of Color, and those who fight for justice alongside the members of those groups. Here Chris Hedges gives us an opportunity to learn from Eddie Conway, former member of the Black Panther Party in Baltimore, and Ojore Lutalo, member of the Black Liberation Army, both of whom have now been released after spending long stints in prison because of their commitment to the people's struggle. They have earned our undivided attention. And we need to know what they have to tell us. Listen up.
Oh, what a long and winding road it has been for Albert Woodfox. Journalists all over the world are busily crafting magnum opus style accounts of his life, his adventures, and his thoughts as he enters a world he left in the late 1960s and re-entered on his 69th birthday two months and one day ago.
Those of you who follow this blog are already aware that I've been knowing this man -- and loving him, as many do -- for seven years now. After corresponding by mail and talking on the phone for several months, we had our first all day visit face to face, perched on the shelves on either side of thick metal mesh in the tiny CCR visiting room at Angola State Penitentiary on July 10, 2009. The energy was so high we couldn't stay in our seats. We wanted to see and hear each other better. We wanted to touch, to miss nothing, to defy the authorities that controlled our lives.
Make no mistake: those that controlled Albert (also known inside the walls as "Shaka" and "Cinque"), held many others in abeyance through the years. We did not fight to free him for him alone, but for our desperate, frustrated, resolute selves. At some point, in all such scenarios, while the person behind bars is the focal point, the ties between him or her and all who wait on the outside looking in are so strong that no power can deny them access, can prevent their strengthening, can destroy their determination with anything short of death.
One of my students told me they saw this photo of Albert Woodfox and me on MSNBC last week while all the court news was breaking. I responded that I can't imagine anyone I'd rather appear on national television with than Albert Woodfox. The photo was actually taken in August of 2012, when -- for no reason we could come up with -- the Powers-That-Be suddenly decided we could have some pictures taken.
It hadn't been allowed before, even though others in the same visiting room were having them taken. And when I came back for my next visit, the "rule" had been changed again to not allow it. But on this particular weekend, acting like it was no big deal, they gave us the go-ahead and we jumped out there to grab the opportunity, never knowing until last week, it would put us together on prime time news.
Five years and
eleven months ago yesterday, I first laid eyes onAlbert Woodfox. He was
still in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola then, where he had been
locked up in solitary confinement almost continually since April of 1972. I had
been a prison abolitionist myself for thirty-eight years at that point, so it
was not surprising that we found each other. Despite the 6 X 9 foot cell in
which he had been held so long, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people around the
world had already found him before me. But unknown to him, when he turned 62 in
February, 2009, I threw him a birthday party and invited students on the
Louisiana university campus where I teach to come.
As a sociologist
and long-time activist, I consider it one of my principle roles to introduce
students not only to what is really going on in the world so they can become
conscious of social injustice, but also conscious of the option to develop a
dedicated willingness to work for positive social change. A few came out and
ate some cake and learned a little about Woodfox, but I had only been at the
school for three semesters and this was hardly business as usual there as yet.
Still, I thought it would only be appropriate to send him a short letter and
tell him what we had done.
I didn't fully
realize who he was until he answered that first letter, which I didn't really
expect, though I had written many prisoners over the years and they always write
back. It was then that I did what journalists do and looked the man up on the
internet. Reading his whole story, I was stunned. Here was a real live Black
Panther Party organizer and hero ninety minutes away from me, living in a cage
at the whim of a States' Attorney with what seemed to be a remarkably personal
vendetta against him. I was fascinated. I almost immediately decided this was
too romantic not to be kismet.
Albert Woodfox,
with humility and grace, declined the offer of my heart, recommending that I
readThe Prisoners' Wife,
instead, a painfully honest book about how prison relationships can grind the
soul. I read it, but I was insulted and suspected that he was not taking me
seriously or that I had simply not met his standards in some way. I did not yet
understand the effects of four decades of solitary confinement, but I came to.
More importantly, I eventually came to know the extraordinary person that
Albert Woodfox is.
In any case, I
soon gave up the fantasy of being a political icon's love interest -- but not
without some chagrin and more than a little embarrassment, which he kindly
never mentions. And we became close friends. We have shared forty visits -- or
more -- since then, even when they moved him from Angola to a smaller prison
five hours away and cut the visits to a couple of hours each. I drove it in the
pouring rain (which I loathe doing). I drove it when they put him behind a
glass shackled to the floor (for no reason). I even drove it while we were
arguing about gender issues for a while. And yesterday morning, I drove the
ninety minutes to the Parish jail where he's been held in more recent months to
share with him what could very likely be his last visiting day in prison.
Louisiana Attorney
General Buddy Caldwell's Office has filed a notice to appeal a federal judge's
ruling calling for the release of Albert Woodfox, the last
remaining imprisoned member of the Angola 3, [while] Woodfox...remain[s] in state custody in St. Francisville. Woodfox has been in
solitary confinement in Louisiana prisons for more than 40 years related to the
1972 murder of prison guard Brent Miller. Courts have twice overturned his
murder conviction, but the state is seeking to take Woodfox to trial for a
third time in the 43-year-old case.
U.S. District Judge James
Brady issued a ruling Monday (June 8), listing five "exceptional
circumstances" in Woodfox's case that prompted him to grant the New
Orleans native unconditional release, thereby barring a third trial…
A federal judge in Baton Rouge has
called for the unconditional release of Albert Woodfox, the only
remaining imprisoned member of the Angola 3. For more than 40 years,
Woodfox, 68, has been in solitary confinement at Louisiana State
Penitentiary at Angola, and other state prisons, for reasons
related to the 1972 murder of prison guard Brent Miller. Woodfox
has twice been convicted of Miller's murder, but courts later
overturned both the convictions. U.S. District Judge James Brady
issued a ruling Monday
(June 8) afternoon calling for the unconditional release of Woodfox from
state custody and barring a third trial of the murder charge.
I've written more than a few words about the Black Panther Party since I first visited Albert Woodfoxsix years ago and I've met some pretty interesting people in the process. Brothers and sisters from another mother, some people would say. And it just keeps unfolding.
Having dinner with Angela Davis last fall when she was brought to speak on the campus where I teach, I was made to realize that it was only a couple of months after she was incarcerated back in the day that I found my way to a prison abolition collective that kicked ass nationally for a couple of years and affected the rest of my life. And I didn't even know who Angela Davis was at the time.
Last week, when I was honored to appear on the George Jackson University Radio show, it gave me an opportunity to do some reflecting on the past, present, and future of my beliefs and commitments. It's a process that continues. But suffice it to say (once more) that if you pay any attention at all, consciousness will getcha. And while not everybody is as open to Universal Truth as I can't seem to help but be, I was asked to speak just the week before to a totally different group on the topic of "Steadfast and Dedicated." I couldn't run if I wanted to.
While I figure all this out, though, and try to make a dent in the six different piles of work in my office at home, I want to let you know that the times,,,they are a-changing.
On April 8th, I drove up to the West Feliciana Parish Detention Center to visit Albert Woodfox, the last member of the Angola 3 to remain incarcerated. I have now visited this dear brother of mine in three different institutions over a period of six years and it is always painful, though the joy of seeing his face and knowing I have helped release him from his closed front cell for sixty celebratory minutes made it worth it.
They have outdone themselves this time. Home to only fifty or so prisoners, the building is dirty and old and reeks of a lick and a promise. Most of the prisoners appear to be on "work release," which means they have actual jobs one place or the other in St. Francisville, a town even smaller than the one I live in. And because of the minimum security level of the "institution," I actually ran into a prisoner taking out a bag of garbage -- outside the fence, across the street, and down a ways. Not the kind of place I'm used to seeing Albert.
This past weekend, I visited Albert Woodfox for the umpteenth time in the last five years. All but one of the visits have been at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, Louisiana, five hours from where I live. At the beginning, it was a grueling trip because I wasn't used to it and I have to go up on Saturday and come back the following day for a total of ten hours behind the wheel in one weekend. Sometimes it rains and once, it poured all the way up and all the way back.
I know I could take someone else along, but visiting somebody that's been in solitary confinement for what has now been forty-two years is emotionally draining and I don't want to have to be nicer than I really am for two solid days when I've been visiting people in prison since 1971 and every visit eats my lunch.
This statement was released yesterday by the Campaign to Free the Angola 3:
As we mark the 42nd year since the tragic and as yet, unsolved murder of Angola
correctional officer Brent Miller, and the 42nd year since Albert Woodfox was
first put in solitary for a crime he didn't commit, we are confident that it
will be the last. We remain hopeful that the 5th Circuit will finally side with
justice and affirm Judge Brady's second decision to throw out Albert's
conviction once and for all. Although he will then have to petition for bail
and potentially face a retrial, freedom will not be far behind. With the civil
case only months from trial, thousands of others who languish in long-term
solitary could soon have the necessary legal precedent to challenge their
conditions as constitutionally cruel and unusual.
For the past few days, I've been examining how the criminal not-just, not-legal system is used against people of color, with special attention to how it targets young Black men. At 9:30 a.m. this morning, a panel of three judges will be hearing arguments related to the case of Albert "Shaka" Woodfox. Albert has been held in solitary confinement for 42 years because he was convicted of killing a White guard at Angola Prison in 1972.
He didn't do it. Prison administrators disappeared bloody footprint and fingerprint evidence so that the real killer wouldn't be identified, making it possible for them to railroad and persecute Albert and two other men, all of whom were active and effective members of the Black Panther Party. They are now world renowned as the Angola 3.
Robert King was released from prison in 2001. Herman Wallace died in October, shortly after being released as a result of a habeus corpus ruling. And Albert's conviction was overturned for the third time last year. He should have been released immediately, of course, but State's Attorney Buddy Caldwell has made it abundantly clear in the international mainstream media that he takes this case personally and will ride it to the bitter end.
Thus, the three judge panel must decide how things will unfold from here.
Two years ago today, Angola 3 icon Herman Wallace sat on his bunk in the solitary confinement cell where he had spent nearly 40 years of his life and penned me a letter in which he wrote: "If we are to teach our children the need for social change,
then we must ourselves have some understanding of what is taking shape – not only
on Wall Street or in states around the country – but the fall of Egypt, Iraq,
Tunisia, Libya, and now the threat points at Syria. It is capitalism that is in
a financial crisis, so what makes people think more capitalism or imperialistic
rule is best for the world?
"There are people out there demonstrating and, for the life
of them, cannot tell you what they are demonstrating for. That is because they
lack real leadership. Conditions will create their leaders and the 1% is going
to be in a world of trouble.
"It is hard for people in America to accept positive change
since we have benefited from the exploitation of underdeveloped countries for
nearly 300 years. It’s going to take a lot more than peaceful demonstrations to
make change. Americans don’t want change; they want reform. Big difference."
When he was released from prison and almost immediately passed to the other side last month, I spent a few weeks grieving and then began looking through the stacks of A3 papers in my office for a message Herman may have left me after the fact -- something he sent me before, but which might now take on a stronger meaning. I found it in the form of this handwritten missive which I'm posting here today in memory of Herman and his long-standing commitment to true justice for all. But I'm also posting it to give me an opportunity to discuss in fuller detail what he wanted us to consider about the connection between the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" and our current global economic system: capitalism.
I have resisted writing this blog post for thirteen days. I know my readers have been waiting for a while now for me to suit up and show up again. I couldn't write about anything else until I wrote about this. And if I wrote about this, it would make it real. And I didn't want to face that.
So here I am up against a deadline and not taking no for an answer. Sigh.
The thing is: I've been blogging about the Angola 3 for five years now and visiting Albert Woodfox for four. In a nutshell, the Angola 3 are a trio of Black Panthers who organized the then infamous Angola Prison back in the early 1970's to stop the prisoner to prisoner violence there. They were successful, which meant to insiders that they had more power than the prison administration. Not something the warden was happy about. And the guards (whose corruption and criminality typically subsidized their meager earnings) were furious.
Then state legislators in Baton Rouge started looking into increasingly well-documented and well-presented prisoner complaints about the institution and the Powers-That-Be decided that something had to be done. So when somebody stabbed a White guard to death in April of 1972, it didn't take administrators a hot minute to recognize this as the opportunity they had been waiting for.
There were bloody footprints and fingerprints, but in an institution where everything is "handled" inside by insiders, those footprints and fingerprints were never matched to anyone. They were cleaned up and deep-sixed. And almost immediately, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace were in solitary confinement charged with the murder, later to be joined by Robert King, who wasn't even in the prison at the time of the crime, but had the misfortune of also being a Black Panther and automatically deserving "special treatment."
Of course, there were "grand juries" called and multiple "trials" conducted and "witnesses" (one of which was legally blind, one of which eventually recanted, and one of which -- a serial rapist and acknowledged snitch -- was paid off and released from prison). Nevertheless, through it all, the Angola 3 have staunchly maintained their innocence. Yet, forty-one years later, Woodfox and Wallace are still in solitary. King was released a decade ago and has spent everyday since stumping around the world, raising awareness of his brothers still in torment.
Amnesty International has climbed on the bandwagon. Severalfilms have been released. Mother Jones magazine, Democracy Now, and even MSNBC have made an art form out of covering the story. But Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell seems hell bent on personally keeping the key in these particular locks. One can only wonder what demons Caldwell is hiding that won't let him let them go. He means for Woodfox and Wallace to die in a 9 X 6 foot cell. And just now, Caldwell must be excited indeed.
In a ruling on February 26th, Albert Woodfox (one of the Angola 3 that I have written about before) had his conviction overturned for the third time. As a proud supporter of the Angola 3 and the campaign to free them, I urge you to read the following article written by Jim Ridgeway and Jean Casella, the material linked within it, and my posts linked above. Then, if you agree that the continued brutality visited on these men represents an unconscionable miscarriage of justice in a nation that touts itself as the land of the free, I hope you will decide to sign this petition calling for the State of Louisiana to refrain from appealing the new ruling. The world is watching not only "Buddy" Caldwell, but all of us. Are we going to stand for justice wherever it is under fire -- or are we not?
This semester, I'm teaching a Racial and Ethnic Relations class, which I present more or less as a course in White Supremacy 101. Last week, I showed "Passin' It On," the story of Dhoruba bin Wahad, a Black Panther Party member who was targeted by the criminal justice system and spent nineteen years in a cell until he was finally acquitted and released. Reading the startled reactions written by my students after watching the film, I was caused to think about another Black Panther: Lil' Bobby Hutton.
Bobby was the first recruited member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, joining in December of 1966 at the age of sixteen. Sixteen months later, two days after Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down by a police officer in Memphis, Tennessee, the Oakland, California, police department attacked the BPP office and shot Lil' Bobby more than twelve times when he walked out into the street in his underwear so they would know he was unarmed. Long live Lil' Bobby Hutton and all people who unite to fight those who carry on the traditions and practices of White Supremacy.
In honor of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which celebrates its 45th year this month; in remembrance of all the brothers and sisters (Black and White) who struggled, suffered and died to advance the goals and aspirations of the Party; and in solidarity with those brothers and sisters (Black and White) who remain in the belly of the beast in prisons and jails throughout the not-just, not-legal system in the United States because of their political beliefs and most particularly Albert "Shaka" "Cinque" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace who have spent their last forty years in solitary confinement, I am posting this recent interview with Billy X, one of the earliest organizers for the Black Panther Party. Learn more here or here.
Eight days ago, facing surgery, I decided to spend the weekend visiting Albert "Shaka Cinque" Woodfox, one of the Angola 3. Of all the places I might have gone and all the ways I might have spent that time forty-eight hours before going under the knife, I never really considered anywhere else.
I'm not alone in this. Another A3 supporter who had to drive even farther than the five hours I spent on the road (each way), came tearing into the visiting room at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, announcing, "I know I won't get to stay long, but it's my birthday and I just had to see Woodfox on my birthday!"
The guard at the gate, knowing I was already inside, had asked her coming in, "Why do so many people want to come visit this man?"
I had heard of the Angola 3 before moving to Louisiana more than three years ago. Even so, I didn't immediately think to plug into the campaign to release Albert "Shaka" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace, who were both still in solitary confinement in Angola when I got here. But when Albert's birthday rolled around the next February, I got it in my head to throw him a little party -- complete with cake -- and tell him so. And we've been communicating ever since.
The following fall, the sociology student club I advise decided to plan and execute a big two-day Angola 3 awareness event. They worked their butts off, plastering the campus with announcements for weeks in advance and even inviting Robert King (the third member of the Angola 3, who was released in 1991) to speak, as well as supporters and former Black Panther Party members from as far away as California. It put the club on the campus map for certain, but the turn out was disappointing, at best. Still, hundreds of postcards with information about the Angola 3 were distributed by sociology club members wearing handcuffs in the student union breezeway. And you can still see the Angola 3 t-shirts we had made at that time bobbing around the campus occasionally.
