TRANSFORMATIONS

Compiled By: Hajj Mustafa Ali
Story by Ahmed Abdul Rahman

On the south side of Chicago, during my teens in the turbulent sixties, powerful philosophies competed for the loyalties of young black men and women. I was familiar with the un-Islamic doctrines of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam: white people are a race of devils. They had been invented 77 trillion years ago by a diabolical black scientist named Yaqub. Yaqub began the process of inventing the white devil race by grafting two albinos from the original race of black people. The black man is the Original Man, a veritable god, who once ruled the world and is destined to rule again. Allah came in the person of an Arabian silk merchant, Master Fard Muhammad, to Detroit in 1930. Allah came to deliver the so-called Negro from 400 years of physical and mental bondage in the wilderness of North America.

Upon this basic mythology Elijah Muhammad built a super structure of discipline. He taught his followers to abstain from all intoxicants, tobacco, fornication and adultery, pork and all non-nutritious foods. Mr. Muhammad encouraged hard work, higher education, thrift and strong family values.

I found Elijah Muhammad’s mythology easier to accept than the teachings of Christianity that I had heard all of my life. As the era of black pride and black awareness brought me more knowledge of my people’s history, I found the philosophy of the Nation of Islam even more acceptable. Knowing that the blond haired, blue eyed and Caucasian, made this God, Jesus, even more unacceptable to me.

I left home when I was seventeen and got a job at Bagcraft International. My job was running a machine that put wax on giant roles of paper that would be sliced and folded by another machine into potato chip bags. At Bagcraft I met two students from Lagos, Nigeria – Onyxx Olajinka and Shakiru Kensington. They were the first indigenous Africans and the first (Sunni) Muslims I ever met. We quickly became friends. I communicated best with Shakiru. He told me a lot about African culture and politics. I asked him about African Islam and told him that I was inclined toward the teachings of Elijah Muhammad.

I could see Shakiru’s reluctance to go any deeper. Hindsight tells me that he probably knew that violent conflicts had broken out between Sunni Muslims and members of the Nation of Islam when the Sunnis had tried to inform the latter that Elijah Muhammad’s version of Islam was un-Islamic. Not knowing how dedicated I was to Elijah Muhammad, or how I might respond, Shakiru probably thought silence was the wisest course.

But, unbeknownst to himself, Shakiru would play a key part in my not ever joining the Nation of Islam. I graduated from high school and sought and found a better job. I told Shakiru that I would be leaving Bagcraft. On my last working day Shakiru gave me a green, brown and orange knee-length shirt with matching pants that he had brought with him from Lagos. The colorful, soft cotton shirt and pants from Africa were to me a treasure.

I left Bagcraft. As the months progressed I became more inclined to join the Nation of Islam. I had brought a copy of the Qur’an. My study sessions in the divine revelation however were spent trying to find Elijah Muhammad’s white devils, and confirmation of Elijah Muhammad’s being a Messenger, and of the black man’s status of God. Consequently, since, as the Qur’an says, ‘no person can touch the knowledge in the Qur’an who does not come to it with pure intentions', each time I picked it up I put it down more befuddled. I did understand the books that I read that either Elijah Muhammad or his followers wrote. I concluded that the Nation of Islam was the best place for me. On a Sunday afternoon I put on my treasured African shirt and walked the six blocks to the Muslim’s Temple #2. This day I would officially join and declare my faith in Allah, as having come in the person of Master Fard Muhammad, and my loyalty to Elijah Muhammad as his last Messenger.

As I approached the front door of the Muslim temple, one of the guards stopped me. He looked down at my shirt disapprovingly and shook his head. “No, sir”, he said. “Last week the captain made a rule: without proper attire nobody can be admitted.” By proper attire he meant a white shirt and tie.

I turned around and walked home. My main stalling point, keeping me from joining the Nation of Islam, was Elijah Muhammad’s downgrading of the importance of African culture. His followers did not wear Afros, nor did they participate in the African cultural awakening then sweeping black America. The Muslim guard had struck me precisely on this sore point. In so doing, he enlarged my cultural objections to joining the Nation of Islam to the extent that I assessed his refusal to admit me because of my shirt as a sign that I did not belong in the Nation of Islam.

The Black Panther party was then arising as a strong influence among young people in Chicago. I was impressed by their stalwart stance for black community control of the educational, economic, and criminal justice institutions, which affected our lives. During the latter 1960’s, statistics revealed that the mainly white Chicago Police Department killed more citizens per capita than did any police department in the United States. Most of the dead were black. The Black Panther Party alone stood up and publicly stated that black people had a right to armed self-defense from racist attacks.

Some of my friends and former schoolmates were Black Panther Party members. They encouraged me to study the ideologies, which they had discovered, and I did. Since my early childhood I always felt a persistent yearning for some form of supreme knowledge and wisdom, which would answer for me the important questions of human existence. Marx, Lenin and Mao opened up another world of ideas to me. This trinity of revolutionaries explained to me social and economic phenomena, about which I had been long curious, but about which I could nowhere else find answers.

Since my Christian upbringing had taught me that a white man is God, and Elijah Muhammad had taught that the black man is God, I had no difficulty accepting the Marxist contention that the masses is God. The laboring masses could destroy and create whole social economic systems according to their collective will. The slogan of the Black Panther Party “serve the people” touched a part of my psyche that was self-abnegating and which sought a feeling of fulfillment by helping others. I concluded that life would never offer me a higher calling than serving my people, and I joined the Black Panther Party.

In 1969 and 1970, the Black Panther Party denounced the spreading drug plague as a holocaust that was just beginning and we felt justified in using extreme measures to prevent this holocaust. We felt especially compelled to move physically against dope houses because police forces in America’s major cities were either turning a blind eye to this burgeoning problem, or, as subsequent investigations exposed, were themselves directly involved in drug trafficking.

The Black Panther Party’s uncompromising stands caused the party’s ranks to swell with idealistic young people. As Kenneth O’Reilly noted in his book, ‘Racial Matters: The FBI’s File on Black America' 1960-1972:

“The Black Panthers attracted the nation’s attention, so J Edgar Hoover decided that they had to be destroyed…

Hoover’s pursuit of the Black Panther Party was unique only in its total disregard for human rights and life itself.” *

(*Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America” – {New York: The Free Press, 1989} p. 294.)

As a result of this FBI terror campaign, I was targeted, along with most other leading party members. Over twenty-five Panthers were killed in police search and destroy operations. In one of our operations against a supposed dope house in which I participated, one of my fellow Panthers accidentally shot and killed a man. Even though I was not present in the room when the shooting took place and even though my fellow Panther pleaded guilty to committing the shooting, on September 23, 1971 a jury convicted me of first degree murder in Detroit’s Recorders Court. That same day a judge sentenced me to spend the rest of my natural life in prison. I had just had my twentieth birthday.

Subsequently, discovered information revealed that I and my three co-defendants had been set up by an FBI plant inside the Black Panther Party. The house we raided was not a real dope house. The ranking party member who sent us to this house gave our names to the police. Nevertheless, describing the techniques of government agents-provocateur is not my purpose here. Allah is the best arranger of affairs. He knows what is before us and behind us.

What was before me then was prison. In prison I and my new Marxist and Black Nationalist comrades continued our studies of the revolutionary classics. I taught classes on dialectical materialism in which I ‘proved’ the non-existence of God.

While outwardly I was strong, and exercised a leading role in the prisoner’s movement, inwardly I began to feel the full strain of my position as a man in his early twenties in prison with a natural life sentence. My son was born two weeks after my sentencing. During the time before I joined the Black Panther Party, when I was trying to understand the Qur’an, I had read in the commentaries a definition of the word ‘Rahman’. Like a beautiful note in a musical composition, this one word ‘Rahman’ had touched my heart. I could not remember a single word from the English translation of the Qur’an that I had read. But this word ‘Rahman’ stuck in my mind and heart .I told my son’s mother to name him Rahman and she complied. But her hardship in raising this baby alone, while she also had to withstand harassment by the FBI, distressed me greatly.

Moreover, the agony that my imprisonment had brought to my parents caused me many moments of private anguish. Guards, who saw me as a threat to their cherished American white power system, never tired of putting me under extra pressure. Hatred and bitterness built up in my heart and mind. Living in a continuous state of anger, I began to alienate even persons who were trying to help me get out of prison.

The gifted black psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, taught that by pouring our energy into the struggle against the forces, which oppress us, we can neutralize the negative psychological and emotional affects of oppression. Around mid 1974, my personal stresses became so severe that this technique stopped working for me. But I had nowhere to turn for help. I did not believe in God. I could not go to any prison sociologist or psychiatrist seeking relief from my agonies. These employees of the state would have rejoiced if I had shown any sign of weakening.

Then a new prisoner moved into a cell near to me. We challenged each other to a chess shoot out and in the heat of the competition became friends. In a chess game a player reveals many of his characteristics as a person. After several games my new friend suggested that I read a book, which belonged to him. He said the book, “Christian Yoga” would show me how to relieve my tension and deal better with stress.

A French Catholic priest was the author of “Christian Yoga”. His book contained chapters on yogic stretching and bending exercises, breathing techniques, meditation, and sublimation of sexual energy. I read the book and immediately regarded yoga as a serendipitous discovery. I drastically reduced the meat I consumed. I started to gradually break my body into the bending, breathing and stretching exercises. I began trying to practice the mind clearing meditation exercises. I ignored the author’s words about communing with God. Still a confirmed atheist, my interest resided solely in yoga’s physical and mental benefits. Within weeks I could relax my entire body. I could sleep more peacefully, and I could concentrate my mind more one-pointedly on my two principal goals at that time: mastering enough legal knowledge to get myself out of prison, and getting the bachelor’s degree in the college program that Detroit’s Wayne State University established in Jackson Prison.

The benefits of yoga caused me to seek other books on Eastern systems of self-development. A professor in the Wayne State program, Dr Gloria House shared with me some of her books on Zen Buddhism. She also encouraged me to modify my hard line atheistic Marxism. She shared with me other ideas and books, which gradually began to broaden my world outlook and to humanize my understandings of the clash of social classes and the struggle of nations for liberation.

Through Zen meditation I experienced my most intense awareness of a spiritual dimension of life. I perceived this dimension as a oneness of all creation that is not separate from myself as the perceiver. At deeper levels of meditation, when I peered into the subtle essence of reality, I perceived a living, powerful, mellow energy, which vibrated from within all of creation. But this force to me was impersonal and metaphysical, not divine.

At this time I acquired from the prison library the book “How to Know God, The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali.” A deeper knowledge of yoga was my main interest in this book, but the title presented me with a challenge. I saw Patanjali’s 2000-year-old teachings a dare: You don’t believe God exists, hunh? Patanjali challenged. I say that if you follow these instructions you will come to know God. Now step forward if you have the courage. Certain that God did not exist and that in the end I would prove Patanjali wrong, I answered the challenge.

Patenjali’s system basically involved, 1) strict asceticism to withdraw the senses from any desires for physical pleasures. 2) Meditation to withdraw the mind from attachment to any sense objects. 3) Continuously controlling the thought waves and permitting only waves of love to arise in the heart and mind. By this means the yogi strips back the layers of the physical to unveil deeper levels of the mind-soul. The yogi replaces the enjoyment of physical pleasure with the experience of an indescribably blissful spiritual pleasure and he supplants his individual love for finite creatures by communing with God’s infinite cosmic Love.

I pursued Patanjali’s system and, to my amazement, I ‘saw’ God with the eye of my heart. I perceived Allah through His divine attribute ‘Al Wadood’, The Loving. In prison’s grim ugliness, a man must struggle to maintain the humanity to love anybody or anything. But after fasting and meditating and closely following Patanjali’s instructions my heart swelled with a blissful, transcendent, divine love that was the most intense and awe-inspiring experience of my life.

In 1848, Karl Marx wrote, “Religion is the only illusory sun which evolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.“ My heart’s opening to divine knowledge instantly informed me that atheism is a failure of perceptive awareness. Atheists are like blind persons trying to convince persons who see the stars that those stars do not exist because in their blindness they do not see them. Indeed, as Allah says in the Qur’an “verily the blind and the seeing are not alike.”

Climbing the ladder of yogic advancement I gained a tremendous sense of self -mastery. Indeed this self-mastery was the purpose of yoga and hence becoming my all-consuming purpose. I gained magical powers. I could hear a person’s words in my mind moments before he spoke them. I could decrease and increase my pulse rate at will. I even convinced the prison doctor to place me on a special low sodium diet by raising my blood pressure at the moment he gave me the blood pressure test.

But I did not realize that as I opened my being and gained a super sensitivity to the positive cosmic vibrations, I simultaneously opened myself to all of the extraordinarily negative vibrations, which abound in prison. The yogic powers placed me at such an advantage over the men around me that I began to regard myself as not only a master of myself, mastered the profane, and mastered the divine.

But I turned into Sisyphus. I would roll my spiritual boulder back up to the peak, and then some negative event would cause me to lose my grip and the boulder roll over me all the way back down the mountain. Increasingly, I came to understand that my yogic relationship to the ‘It’ would remain on my spiritual peak only if I moved away from any possible negative eruptions in my everyday life. I could sustain and stabilize myself as a master only if I moved into a cave in the Himalayas. Or I would have to live as a monk in an ashram or a monastery. Even if these choices had been possible, they still would not have been desirable. For I could not participate in any spiritual path which forced me to separate myself from the struggle of my people for their collective betterment.

I began to look more closely at the men in prison whom I knew pursued spiritual paths, participated in worldly affairs, and yet appeared to have stabilized their relationship with God. Those men were either Bahais, Christians or members of the Nation of Islam.

I quickly discovered that in Jackson Prison during the middle seventies, Bahai meetings were a surreptitious front for homosexual liaisons. This prevented me from attending any of their meetings. I did, however, read one of their founder’s books.

I moved on to the study of Christianity. In a Zen story a novice swordsman visits a master seeking knowledge. The master asks him if he is thirsty. The novice answers affirmatively. The master then begins to pour water from a pitcher into a cup. He pours until the cup is full and keeps on pouring so that water is spilling onto the table. The startled novice asks the master why he is doing this. The master informs him that his mind is like the cup when it is full of water. No more water can enter because of the fullness. He tells the novice that the only way he can absorb the wisdom he has to teach is if he first empties his mind of all of his preconceived notions.

Before opening the Bible I emptied my mind of all prejudices against Christianity, and of all preconceived notions about Jesus. To my amazement I found in Jesus a teacher of the most profound and spiritually sublime wisdom. But I was concerned by the wide variance between the saintliness that Jesus’ life represented, and the inability of his followers to translate the perfection of his lofty and other – worldly teachings to the everyday realities of their lives. Jesus reminded me of the Hindu saint Shankara who taught an almost parallel system of self-denial. Jesus told his followers to give away their worldly goods to the poor and to follow him. This is precisely the way of life of the mendicant Hindu monks.

Then there were the imprisoned members of the Nation of Islam. I did not give their “Islam” any serious consideration. After years of studying pseudo-scientific atheist doctrines, I did not think that Elijah Muhammad’s pseudo-scientific doctrines – about white devils being grafted 7 trillion years ago by a black scientist – deserved any reconsideration. Then in February 1975, Elijah Muhammad died.

I began to buy the “Muhammad Speaks”, which became the “Bilalian News”, from the Muslims who sold the paper on the prison yard. I watched the ascension to leadership of Elijah Muhammad’s son, Wallace D Muhammad. I noticed Wallace’s gradual yet distinct movement away from his father’s doctrines. I noticed, too, that in Jackson Prison the Nation of Islam members began to walk around the yard in small groups practicing Arabic prayers. They ceased talking about Yaqub, white devils, and Allah coming in the person of Master Fard. They began talking about the Arabian Prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah, and his Ethiopian companion, Bilal, who was the first man to call Muslims for prayer. And they began to speak of Allah as not a man, but as Unseen, Gracious, Ever-Living. Elijah Muhammad had said that whenever the Qur’an mentioned the hereafter, it meant a Muslim’s life after he left the death of unbelief for the life of Islam. No life exists after physical death, according to Elijah Muhammad. But now I heard Muslims talking about life in the Hereafter and living their present lives in such a way that they would secure for themselves blessed places in the Afterlife.

Right at this time the Muslims in Jackson prison decided that they would put out a small newspaper called “Al Haqq”. Their former minister, Derrick Abdur Rahim Ali, who now carried the title Imam, asked me to work on the paper. I agreed to help out. Working with the Muslims up close, I gained a deeper appreciation of their metamorphosis. I had worked with members of the Nation of Islam for years so that I could detect the difference.

Before, under the teachings of Elijah Muhammad the Muslims were known for their discipline, loyalty, courage, and for always holding true to their words. Now that they were becoming Sunni Muslims, they retained their all of their old positive qualities, but now I sensed an inner peace and harmony about them that I had not detected before.

At precisely this time the host of a black arts and perspectives programmed on the Wayne State University FM station came to Jackson Prison to interview me. Her name was Nubia Kai Salaam. She had been an orthodox Muslim for over five years. I read some of my poems on her program and discussed general problems facing the black community. A couple of weeks later I unexpectedly received in the mail a Holy Qur’an, a prayer rug, and two books on Sufism. Sister Nubia had sent them.

This time when I opened the Qur’an I was not searching for any justifications for any prejudices against any race or class. I just opened my heart to whatever knowledge the book had to convey. I remember this verse striking a resonant chord in my heart: ‘Allah created the Jinn and the men but to serve Him’. I understood at once that one of the reasons for my spiritual ups and downs was my acting upon an incorrect understanding of my proper relationship to the Creator. I am not the Master but Allah is Ar Rabb (the Lord) and Al Malik (the King). I had violated my proper relationship with Allah when I had sought to make Him serve me, when He, in reality, is Master and He created me solely to serve Him.

I understood further from the Qur’an that Allah is not an impersonal ‘It’. Allah is always an intensely personal ‘Thou’. Allah is the Inner and the Outer. He exists beyond my manipulation. No matter how much I meditated, fasted, deep breathed, stretched, Allah does not change. Moreover my proper relationship with Allah, according to the Qur’an, involves a covenant. In exchange for my submission to Allah’s will and my striving with my life and property in His cause, He promised me the blessings of this world and of the Hereafter. And Allah is the best Knower about these blessings. My purpose was to submit to His will, and to accept His sustenance, not to seek supernatural powers and to predicate my spiritual practices upon seeking any particular kind of blessing.

I recall how momentous I felt on these initial occasions when I reached into the holy pages and came out with these gems. I would have to break with some of my former associates who could accept my yogic relationship with an impersonal source of energy, but who regarded as a serious weakening any declaration of faith in ‘Al Ahad’ (The One). I knew that then. But if I had to displease men to please Allah, then men would just have to suffer displeasure.

One evening after studying the Qur’an, I spread on the cell floor the green and black prayer rug that sister Nubia had also sent to me. I prostrated into sajdah, as I had seen Muslims do. I did not then know the words to any Islamic prayers, so I kept on repeating a phrase I heard the Muslims say, whose meaning I knew – “Allah Akbar” (God is Great). While down on the rug, with my forehead touching low, in this position of submission and humility, a force of infinite beauty and bliss traveled along my spine and filled my heart and brain with a starburst of incomparable joy, love and peace. I lost track of time, though I must have stayed down in sajdah for many minutes. When I stood up I knew that the yearning for supreme wisdom, which I had felt since my childhood, had led me to this Islamic destination. Indeed as Allah says in the Qur`an, “He guides to His path whom He pleases, and others He leaves wandering astray.”

I next studied the life of the Prophet Muhammad. In him I found the example I needed of a man who could balance his spiritual life, while engaging in activities in the mundane world. The Prophet Muhammad had been a husband, father, political-social leader, all while fulfilling his covenant with Allah. He had lived a spiritual life without having to permanently retire to a cave or monastery.

I began to attend the Muslim’s Friday congregational service and prayer. During Ramadan in 1977 I fasted with the Muslims. In early 1978 I took the Kalima Shahada, declaring that there is no God but the One God and that Muhammed is His Messenger.

I had studied the books on Sufism that sister Nubia gave to me. In 1981, the word ‘Wali’ persistently came into my mind for a week. Then a brother came into the prison from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to teach at the Muslim Brotherhood’s weekly ta`alim class. I was not surprised when he told me that his name was Abdul Wali, and I listened to him intently seeking to discover the purpose for our meeting. After ta`alim, Abdul-Wali chose me, from the group of assembled Muslims, as the brother with whom to leave a book containing the letters of the Sufi Shaykh Mawlay Al Arabi ad Darqawi. Shaykh ad Darqawi lived in Morocco over 200 years ago. From his letters I deepened my understanding of the special science of reliance on Allah. This understanding deepened further after Abdul Wali gave to me the word of his personal Shaykh, Muhammed Belkaid, who presently is living in Tclemsen, Algeria.

All of the sustenance that will come to us during our entire lifetimes is already with Allah. Persistently relying on Allah, and not turning to any human source, no matter how strained we are, not releasing our mind’s hold on the names of Allah, produces wonders.

Everything that I have learned from the Shayks about God-reliance has only repeated a lesson that Allah taught me as a child. One day I was feeling sorrowful about being poor. Other neighborhood children were buying candy and cookies for themselves, but I did not have a cent. I remember that a dollar is all I needed. Under a compulsion that I never understood until I studied the Qur’an and the Shaykhs, I went out of the front door of our home. I began walking without consciously thinking of where I was going. About four blocks from our home I looked down on the sidewalk in front of me and saw a dollar bill. Since a woman who was walking in front of me had just passed by this spot, I did not then understand why she had not picked up the dollar. I scooped up the money and pranced to the candy store. I had to become a man, to study volumes, to fast, to meditate, to pray, to dhikr to Allah, and to delve into the teachings of the noble shaykhs, just to relearn a lesson that Allah taught to me when I was a little boy.

As of this date (January 1990) I am 38 years old. I have been in prison since I was 19 years old. Naturally during these two decades of deprivation I have experienced countless frustrations, disappointments and immense anguish. My heart still fills with rage at the injustice of my continued confinement. Sometimes I have longed for the company of a woman – just to touch her hand or to hear her voice – which my eyes have filled with tears. But, despite all of these hardships, never once since I embraced the faith of Islam have I ceased to feel intensely grateful to Allah for guiding me to His path.

To me the perception in one’s heart of the true magnificence of Allah is the most precious jewel in the world. Even though my finding this jewel occurred during the hardships of two decades in prison, and even though I spend many of my working hours trying to get out of prison, I have always felt, after I embraced Islam, that Allah t`ala bestowed upon me a gift of incalculably greater value than any price that I have paid.

SUBHANALLAH, AL HAMDULILLAH, ALLAHU AKHBAR.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad speech

Dhoruba Bin Wahad

by Bill Weinberg

Veteran Black Panther and 19-year political prisoner


Dhoruba Bin Wahad (formerly Richard Moore) won his freedom in 1990 after a New York State judge found that the FBI had suppressed evidence that could have helped clear him of his 1971 attempted double-cop murder charge.

Since his release, he has returned to outspoken political activism, and has been particularly vocal against the War on Drugs. With his newly-organized Black Coalition on Drugs, he advocates decriminalization and "harm reduction" strategies. After 19 years in prison_seven of them in solitary confinement_Dhoruba Bin Wahad has no apologies and no regrets. He spoke to us a week after speaking at the Cures Not Wars rally against the Drug War in New York's Washington Square Park on May 6. Photographer John Penley also participated in the interview.

BW: Have you seen the flick Panther? What do you think of it?

DBW: Yeah, I saw Panther. I mean, everybody hates the movie who has some political consciousness. I see this movie in the context of my own experience, rather than in the context of where we're at now in 1995 in terms of the consciousness of African American people and people in general about radical alternatives. One of the things that people don't realize is how effectively radical analysis has been removed from the debate around issues that affect people's lives. There are very few radical or revolutionary alternatives presented in debates around issues. This is a direct consequence, of course, of the Counter-Intelligence Program. The FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program effectively changed the political landscape of this society. It delegitimized militancy, it delegitimized revolutionary consciousness. And the way it delegitimized that was by criminalizing revolutionaries and criminalizing the movement. And the criminalization process is continuing today in the African American community.

For instance, you can talk about the War on Drugs. The face of the War on Drugs in America is the face of African people, its the face of Latinos. Its the face of people of color_that's the face of the quote-unquote "criminals" who are the targets of this War on Drugs. And this image, this illusion, is perpetrated by the mass media, which plays upon people's emotions to gain support for the War on Drugs. For instance, we have this new term "narcoterrorist", which combines fear of a drug-ridden society with the image of people who hate America and just want to kill Americans. And the face of "terrorism" is usually Islamic fundamentalists, or foreign revolutionaries. And of course the ability of the state_and I think this is the bottom line_to control the democratization of technology is directly contingent upon its capacity to get the masses to subsidize and support their own repression through the creation of foreign or domestic enemies.

BW: What do you mean by the "democratization of technology"?

DBW: Because of the giant strides of technology, especially in the realm of organizing information through computers and electronic media, this technology is readily accessible to anyone. You can buy a PC and CD ROM system and tune in to some of the most sophisticated levels of organized information in the world. You can tap into mainframe information banks. This was unheard of as little as 20 years ago. As young people come up in a society that's increasingly dependent upon information, if they have this kind of access they could influence debates, they could begin to think for themselves, they could begin to search out other like-minded folks.

This you see in its most bizarre form in the right wing's use of the Internet. They were building bombs on the Internet! But this same technology means that people all over the world can exchange information and have access to the same type of information. Information is intelligence, the ability to make intelligent decisions.

BW: OK, so how is this process of the democratization of technology being controlled?

DBW: Its being controlled in a whole host of ways. You've noticed the recent brouhaha of the Clipper Chip? We know that technology is the modern means by which the rich utilize the labor of the poor to transfer wealth to themselves. Technology is now very important in criminal law enforcement. It is very important in the state's ability to control its own vast bureaucracy. So the state is completely dependant on technology, and of course the state is a creature of the rich. So, they are trying to control who has access to certain types of information. They say they have to write new laws to deal with freedom of speech in the electronic age. There's security concerns, where you might access someone's business files or bank account. They're moving away from cash to plastic, so they'll have to have a more efficient way of identifying people. They want one universal number, maybe your Social Security number. Look where we're moving. We're moving to restrict people's access to certain basic resources unless they go through a certain type of electronical processes.

And I don't want to sound like someone who's afraid of technology_I'm not. What I'm saying is that what people don't understand is that the organization of information is a revolutionary phenomenon that is happening right now as we speak. And as long as this organization of information is in the hands of a system which has had a history of utilizing its military, its police forces and any other tools at its disposal to control its people, to usurp people's rights, their lands, their lives_we should be very suspicious, at the minimum, of this process; we should question this process. And its happening on a multiplicity of levels under different guises.

For instance, you would not be able to create Robocop if you didn't have the justification for Robocop. The War on Drugs, the war against so-called terrorism, have managed to divert millions of dollars which would have gone into the defense industries of the United States and other European nation-states into the police and security apparatuses. Remember all the billions of dollars that were spent during the Cold War to develop the atomic bomb and the security apparatus to maintain it. Meanwhile, in all of the Third World nations, you have reactionary regimes tied to European nation-states like the United States, France and Britain, who are carrying out genocidal policies against their own people, who are depleting their own natural resources in order to maintain a certain economic level in the developed nations. So even between North and South, between haves and have-nots, this is being carried out. So, this is the point. Increasingly domestic policy is translated into US foreign policy, in culture, in terms of training military and police, in the development of infrastructure and institutions_they're all beginning to mimic the European nation-state model. And with that, of course, is this inherent ideology that the citizens of the state are potential subversives.

BW: What has all this to do with movie Panther?

DBW: The movie Panther_even though it is not an accurate portrayal of the Black Panther Party_shows how the police were very brutal and racist and functioned in a way that was above the law because they had a mandate to terrorize the African American community. And it shows that the way that we dealt with that was to organize in our communities around those issues that related to people's lives. And we showed that we were ready to stand fast against that type of repression, and indeed, if necessary, kill in our defense of these ideals. And three, that drugs_hard drugs, heroin_were introduced into the African American community for political reasons, to control, to misdirect and ultimately to defuse the development of revolutionary consciousness. These three messages come across clear in the movie. And it is for those reasons that I appreciate the movie.

What it didn't show was that the consequence of developing a revolutionary consciousness would inevitably mean that you were going to become the targets of the state. And once you became the targets of the state, there were no holds barred. And the way they went about doing that, of course, was to first demonize the Black Panther Party in the minds of white people, so the police would be seen as having a difficult time at best, and therefore you couldn't be too critical of how they act. And that plays, of course, off of the racist mentality that underlies this society, especially among white males, in relationship to black people and black males.

For instance, when we something like Rodney King happen, the jury can come back and acquit these individuals because they rationalize, "Well, this was a big, black dude, you know, he just wouldn't lay down, they had a hard job, so they had to do what they did, how else were they gonna survive in that ghetto, so what?" So once you realize that we are going to struggle against these conditions by any means necessary, that means that there are going to be those of you who are going to be framed, who are going to be murdered, who are going to be forced into exile.

BW: That's what happened to you.

DBW: That's what happened to me, and that's what happened to Mumia Abu Jamal. That's why Mumia Abu Jamal is on death row. Which of course brings us to another issue_the death penalty in this country. And if we really deal with the death penalty in this country, and its administration and its purpose, we can only conclude that the death penalty does not protect its citizens. In fact, it legalizes the murder of citizens under the guise of protection and law enforcement. In those states which have the death penalty, homicide is not appreciably deteriorated. But the new Omnibus Criminal statute significantly increases the crimes that are punishable by death. And they make struggle by the oppressed_when defined as terrorism_punishable by death as a means of intimidating those who would stand up against tyranny. This is what happens, you get electrocuted, you get a lethal injection.

People are beginning to participate in this frenzy. With the new election of Congress, you had this right-wing upsurge in the United States, with the Newt Gingrich gang. This is an indication that people in this country, especially white people, are completely baffled by the machinations of the national security state. They are creating a society that will have nothing to do any more with democracy, if it ever did. Just yesterday in the newspaper, Giuliani was praising Mussolini!

BW: Yeah, I saw that. He met with some Italian neo-fascist legislator who is openly nostalgic for Mussolini, and he defended him to the press.

DBW: Now could you imagine if Mayor Dinkins had praised Idi Amin? If he has said that at least under Idi Amin, Africans ran their own resources because he ran all the non-Africans out... I mean, can you imagine what would have happened? You see, what I'm saying is that nobody sees these things as a contradiction no more.

BW: You did 19 years in prison for attempted murder of two New York City police. And in the interim, new evidence came to light indicating that you had been framed. How did that new evidence come to light, and what is your current legal status?

DBW: It came to light as a consequence of a long struggle to prove my innocence. In 1975, four years after I was captured. I filed a suit in federal court, in the Southern District in New York. At that time they had the Church Committee hearings on government excess as a consequence of Watergate and all that stuff, and it was revealed that the FBI had carried out this massive Counter-Intelligence Program in the African American community and especially against the Black Panther Party. So when I heard this_knowing that I was innocent, of course_I knew that the FBI must have information about my case and I filed my suit. They danced around for five years, and then in 1980, the federal judge ordered the FBI to turn over all of their documents that they had on me and the Black Panther Party in New York. And they turned over 300,000 pages. And when we went over these documents we found material that indicated that they were working with the New York City Police Department every step of the way and that at major junctures in the investigation into the shooting, they had been present, and that they had taken in the same information. But, unlike the New York City Police Department, they didn't make like they had lost theirs. Because they needed their information to be accurate. So I got some of these documents. They were heavily excised, heavily deleted. But after fighting over each deletion, we got enough evidence to go back into state court and overturn my conviction. That was another three-year process.

So in 1990, I was released as a consequence of this. I was the first and only member of the Black Panther Party leadership to overturn a conviction based on evidence received from the Counter-Intelligence Program.

BW: Is there going to be a retrial?

DBW: No, they surrendered.

BW: How's your case going? Are you still suing the FBI and the New York State prison service?

DBW: Well, yes. They're starting to surrender too.

BW: You think they're going to settle?

DBW: Yes, I do.

BW: How did you survive 19 years in prison?

DBW: Shawshank Redemption! [Laughs]

BW: I didn't see that one.

DBW: Its actually quite a good movie. How did I survive? Doing chin-ups, man. "Drink plenty of water and walk slow"_that's what they say inside. Don't let it get you. I survived by focussing my attention on the struggle, on the outside.

BW: There's a scene in Panther where the Panthers raid a heroin warehouse. You were involved in similar incidents.

DBW: Yeah, there was a place that the police let operate in Harlem; it operated with their knowledge, and their pay-offs. We, the Black Liberation Army, the underground in the black community, had a policy of anti-heroin interdiction. A lot of these guys who I grew up with in the South Bronx who were selling heroin_they knew that what they were doing was having a debilitating effect on the black community. They knew it wasn't right, but they were just in it for the money. So the only way that you could deal with these individuals was to deal with them on a level that they could understand. They understood violence. They understood intimidation. They understood controlling territory. So we had to wage that type of struggle with them. Of course, they had the police on their side.

So we would try to identify where they hung out, where their processing places were, and we would knock them off. The most heinous drug dealers, of course, we would have to try to make an example out of. I can't go into that.

But the police used the drug dealers as their network against the black underground. They would tell them, look, you're not dealing any drugs here unless you give us what we want. So they would use their network of drug dealers and informants in order to get information on the Black Liberation Army.

This is not inconsistent with the government's relationship to hard drugs and to heroin historically. We can look at the Vietnam war, look at the secret wars in Cambodia and Laos, where the US subsidized the northern war lords, many of whom were renegades from the Koumintang who were run out of China. They brought their opium to the processing labs in Hong Kong and trans-shipped that heroin to the United States and the African community. And this was subsequent to the initial contacts with Lucky Luciano and the Italian Mafia in World War II, in which Luciano, in exchange for his freedom and carte blanche to reorganize the Sicilian Mafia, promised the US they would have no labor problems with the longshoremen and that they would have in place an underground network when they invaded Italy and Sicily. And after the war, of course we all know that the mob got lots of war surplus goods, they got fat off the Marshall Plan in Italy, just like the old Nazi-collaborationist industrialists did in Germany, the Krupps and the Farbens. So its not inconsistent that the police worked hand-in-hand in the black community with the heroin dealers.

BW: So these actions against heroin dealers were carried out in 1971 by the Black Liberation Army. Did the BLA develop from elements within the Black Panther Party here in New York City?

DBW: This is true. It developed that way as a consequence of a split within the Black Panther Party. It was an ideological split, but it was also a split that was manufactured by the Counter-Intelligence Program, and in certain respects by the cocaine addiction of people like Huey Newton and David Hilliard. The Counter-Intelligence Program was able to focus in on these weaknesses in the leadership, and that led to a split in the Party which, absent the government's involvement and absent a certain amount of paranoia on the part of the leadership, could have been resolved. But because these forces were there to make sure these contradictions were never resolved, the Party was split. And then the government really went after the most militant faction, the so-called Eldridge Cleaver faction which was mainly in the eastern United States. And this was the beginning of the Black Liberation Army.

On the other hand, the West Coast faction of the party went more into electoral politics and, not ironically, into gangsterism. When they went into straight electoral politics without the revolutionary nationalist perspective that we had on the East Coast, they resorted to gangsterism. Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown ran for office, and that really set the stage for the first election of a black mayor in Oakland. I'm not saying that their involvement in electoral politics in the Bay Area didn't have a significant empowering impact on the black community there. I don't think that was ever the criticism. But its not coincidental that at the same time that they did that, they were into gangsterism. The Party lost all relationship to the organization that I had joined_politically, ideologically, morally.

BW: Tell us about the work you're currently doing in Africa.

DBW: I'm trying to set up a Database Institute for the Development of Pan-African Policy. Which basically hopes to embody Kwame Nkrumah's axiom that before Africa could achieve economic unity it first must achieve political unity. And I think that one of the keys to organizing the African American community here is to organize Africans everywhere, internationally, around a common vision and a common perception of the African condition. So I'm trying to set up an institute that will develop policies, programs, and ideas, and bring together people from the African diaspora around the world.

We have NGO status in Africa. We are trying to train Africans in the diaspora and Africans on the continent into a common language and a common organizational network, and organizing information through the Internet. It'll be a database institute much like the RAND Institute, much like any other institution that studies problems and presents solutions and analyses to heads of governments and people in positions to make these policies into viable programs. For instance, we have a center that studies the contemporary political, social and geographical problems of Africa, and presents its findings to the various governments in the Organization of African Unity.

BW: Tell us about your current work here in the US.

DBW: I work with the Campaign to Free Black and New Afrikan Political Prisoners in the US. One of the things we are doing now is raising petitions for Mumia. Right now we have about 2,000 signatures. We're going to present those names not only to the governor of Pennsylvania, but also to the president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who we have a relationship with, and hopefully encourage him to speak out against the death penalty in general and against Mumia' s execution in particular.

We also are currently starting to develop a mobilization of young people around an independent political movement in this city. Its still in its infant stages at this point. But there's a considerable amount of potential. We think the time is right in this city for an independent black political party. At the same time, we feel the time is right for a coalition in this city that transcends class and caste and gender. People in this city are sorely oppressed, whether they're black, white, male, female, gay, straight. We are all subjected to the Giuliani and Pataki economic program, which is subsidies for the rich and subjection for the poor. So I think that this city is ripe for a grassroots political movement, ripe for an insurgency within rank-and-file of organized labor. I think that all of these potentialities are here, but many of us who claim to be activists are not willing to come together and deal with them in any type of coherent fashion.

BW: What would be the stance of this party towards the left wing of the Democratic machine, Dennis Rivera, Ruth Messinger, et cetera?

DBW: Well, of course an independent political tendency in this city would have to see the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as part-and-parcel of the same thing. However, we realize that there are progressive people in the Democratic Party who are black, and who are white and who are Latino. And there may be progressive people who have gotten into the Republican Party as a means of organizing from within. That may well be. But we think that if they are truly progressive, that they will support within their own party the same kind of agenda that we support. So the presence of an independent political party can only strengthen their hand inside the Democratic or Republican party, it can only enhance their position. So we don't see them as being mutually exclusive.

I think that black folks and poor people want results. And they can't get results inside an institution that's ultimately controlled by people like Stanley Hill and other opportunists who pull $100,000 salaries, who have no relationship to the masses of people. I don't think that the communities want that kind of political representation anymore.

BW: You've spoken against the militarization in the name of the War on Drugs. What kind of solutions do you see to the drug crisis? Do you support legalization?

DBW: I support decriminalization, because I think that decriminalization is in the interests of poor people in the African American community. I think its very important for people to understand what a political pretext for repression the War on Drugs is, and how the War on Drugs has translated into a war on black America. Its important for us to understand that the entire militarization of the police department in our community has gone on in the past ten years under the rubric of the War on Drugs. The erosion of our civil rights has occurred to a significant degree as a consequence of the War on Drugs. We have to understand that 80 to 85 percent of the people in prisons, especially state prisons, are in prison for so-called drug-related crimes. So we have to take the criminal justice system out of the drug problem. We need to see the drug problem for what it is.

We need to see people who are addicted to hard drugs, first of all, as people who should have help. They don't exist in a social vacuum. The largest segment of people who are addicted to drugs are addicted to legal drugs. They are the Stepford Wives, you know, the everyday office worker who's under pressure. So the use of drugs to relieve the pressure and cope with the quality of life in the developed societies has to be seen as a consequence of the alienating process, a wholistic alienating process that we have to begin to address.

I think decrim has shown that it works in places like the Netherlands. Its true, these places tend to be more homogeneous. But at the same time, the Netherlands is no longer quite so homogeneous as it used to be; especially in the cities, its quite cosmopolitan. I think the breakdown of traditional borders in Europe and the creation of a new superstate is going to increasingly lead to an understanding that drug problems cannot be solved purely by law-enforcement, that its much more complex than that. I think that the United States needs to get with that program. I think there's a developing consensus within the African American community for decriminalization. The US government remains involved with the importation of cocaine and heroin. But decrim would undercut the profits.

BW: What's your take on Ibogaine, the African psychoactive plant that purportedly interrupts addiction?

DBW: I've been one of the foremost advocates in the African American community of a coherent policy towards the development of Ibogaine. I think if Ibogaine can do what people say it can do, and what some preliminary studies indicate it can do, then it can be of enormous benefit in a wholistic approach to drug addiction. Again, we're talking about decrim, we're talking about use of Ibogaine in a community-based setting in which the community determines the agenda and the program.

It now costs between 7 and 10,000 dollars to detox a heroin addict, just to clean them up before they can even enter a recovery program. Now if Ibogaine could interrupt this addiction in one or two treatments, and enormously reduce the time and money spent, that means we could take hardcore heroin addicts in off the streets, subject them to perhaps a one-week detoxification program that's safe, that's community-based, and get them into a program immediately.

I think the idea of treatment on demand is an essential component of decriminalization. I think clean needles is an essential component. All of these things go into a certain mindset that is saying, here's an individual who is strung out on these drugs, and this is what the community can do for him; if you want to get rid of this physical addiction, we can do that. You don't have to be a state dope-fiend maintained on methadone for the rest of your life, OK? If, however, you can't make that transition now, you aren't ready yet, you are not going to be busted just because you're a user. You know? You can have access to some type of treatment, you can get clean needles. I think these things are important.

JP: What's your take on groups like the Partnership for A Drug-Free America, which, now that there's an upsurge in the use of heroin, are pushing an anti-marijuana campaign on America?

DBW: Yeah, that's a political campaign. It has to do with the consolidation of the right in this country. Because marijuana use is one of the most social uses of drugs, it occurs in a very social milieu. It's also the drug of choice of an entire younger generation of urban youth who are not into so much alcohol and are not into the harder drugs.

You have to understand that hard drugs were pushed in the black community in a number of ways. There was first, of course, the heroin. Then there was the PCP, "Angel Dust", which just drove people crazy. And then cocaine, which in its original form had this glamour and glitter attached to it. It was associated with movie stars and rock musicians, because you had to have a lot of money in order to sniff coke.

BW: Until 1986, when crack came along...

DBW: Yeah, until they managed to break it down into a cheap derivative and make it accessible to poor folks, just like they did heroin. But unlike heroin, it didn't put you in a stupor. Heroin took you out of the political realm and put you in a stupor, but you weren't no threat that would justify a police army. But crackheads were likely to go out in blaze of gunfire. It became more of a justification for the police militarization.

So now going after marijuana is a way of going after a certain level of society that tends to be more conscious and rebellious and more social and participatory. Of course, abuse of any substance can lead to dysfunction. When I talk about decrim, I'm talking about understanding addiction as an illness that has its social and familial roots. And you really have to deal with it that way, as opposed to a crime. Then there are the medicinal aspects of marijuana and certain drugs, which are valid if you look at it in that context. But that's not the social context now. I think people's attitudes have to change. If the person smoking marijuana is considered a social pariah, he's not going to have the attitude to use the drug medicinally and wisely. Its a different attitude.

JP: Can you tell us about your recent meeting with the Drug Policy Foundation?

DBW: I think the DPF is beginning to realize that this struggle has to have a strong leadership and vocal component coming from the African American community, coming from the communities that are impacted by this War on Drugs. And I think that component is absent in their current struggle, because they have no relationship to the African American community. That's why we think the Black Coalition on Drugs is a very important ingredient in the whole political mix.

The Black Coalition on Drugs is still trying to struggle out of relative obscurity. We're still looking for funds. But basically the idea is to put into practice some of the things I've been discussing, putting on forums and debates in our communities so we can better understand issues around drugs and law enforcement and Ibogaine. That's the first mission of the Coalition, to educate people. Once that education occurs, then we have to have some kind of vehicle to translate that education into political utility and mobilization. This has to occur in the context of what's happening in the African American community and the poor communities in this society, in this city. We have to bring together activists and professionals in the African American community who are looking for a vehicle to express these ideas.

The sentiment for decrim becomes deeper as it becomes clearer and clearer that the War on Drugs is a sham and is not working.

JP: ...while building prisons has become one of the biggest industries in America...

DBW: ...as people realize that there is a war on them, especially on youth.

I think black people are confused by the current crop of political leaders, who are still trying to deal with making the transition from an old-style black leadership to the new-style black leadership. In the old style, your relationship to white folks was very important. In the new style, you can't have that relationship anymore, not upfront.

Now our Coalition's only relationship to white people is an equal relationship with white radicals. We don't hide our relationship to Cures Not Wars, or to the white supporters in the struggle for Mumia Abu Jamal...

JP: A lot of black nationalists don't want to have anything to do with white organizations.

DBW: I understand that. But that's because of the old-style "Negro" leadership. I mean, look at Jesse Jackson_this is why he has no credibility. It is clear that he derives his capacity to even be seen as a national leader from his relationship with white folks. But the Black Panther Party were the first ones to come up with the idea of a Rainbow Coalition. The original Rainbow Coalition was of Chicanos, white radicals and the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, and Asian radicals. We always realized that we had natural allies in communities that had the same issues with the state that we had, in communities that didn't look that much different from ours in terms of services, in terms of economic infrastructure, in terms of how the police reacted and dealt with them. So, we've always had the position that we should have a face-to-face relationship with our allies and enter into coalitions with them. We didn't believe in back-room politics, you see? Plantation politics, where secret deals are made behind closed doors. We felt that leadership should come from the grassroots up, that people should be able to mobilize themselves, empower themselves. I mean, what the fuck are we talking about? Empowerment_that's what we're talking about, right? Not so much organizing people from the top down.

The black bourgeoisie have always done that_organized from the top down. There was a time when black clergy organized from the bottom up, because they were always outside of the mainstream of white institutions. But that has changed. Increasingly, black clergy are beginning to have a top-down mentality. So the masses are basically left to shift for themselves. They are adrift in the information age with no modem.

BW: In 1995, the most well-armed, radical, uncompromising movement in America is on the right. What's your take on the militia movement?

DBW: Two weeks before the bombing in Oklahoma, who was on the cover of Soldier of Fortune? The Michigan Militia. Saying they "defend America." OK, Soldier of Fortune isn't your mainstream, you know, Life magazine.

But if you look at the current militia system, much of it was instigated and organized under the Federal Emergency Management Agency's direction. These militias grew out of the United States government. You notice that Clinton was reluctant to condemn the militia even after the Oklahoma bombing. He said, well of course they have a right to march around on the weekends in uniform and of course they have a right to bear arms, and we shouldn't paint everybody with the same brush as these two evil individuals. Now could you imagine the president of the United States saying that about the Black Panther Party?

BW: Well, do you think the militia has the right to bear arms and march around on the weekends?

DBW: I don't think that's the issue. I think the issue is that the climate that was created by the traditional right, by so-called conservatives in government, and by big business, has engendered these attitudes on the part of white males. They define these people as "angry white males with apocalyptic visions." I mean they're just making excuses for that shit.

Their vision of the US government isn't all that crazy, you understand. Its just that they go to extremes, with talk of Russian troops on the borders and all that. But their vision of government, and how government treats the small person and relates to the people, is not all that different from ours. Which gets back to my point about the development of the European nation-state into a national security model that sees all of its citizens as potential subversives.

BW: So where do you see the militia fitting into this?

DBW: They fit in just like the Ku Klux Klan fit in during Reconstruction. If you recall, during Reconstruction in this country, they used the veterans who had lost the war on the Confederate side, with the complicity of certain Union elements, to organize the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize black people away from the polls, to terrorize the newly-freed slaves back into submission and back onto the plantation under share-cropping. That was their role. And they marched on Washington a hundred thousand strong.

BW: So how do you see the analogy to the militia in 1995?

DBW: Just like law enforcement was involved in the Ku Klux Klan; law enforcement is involved with these militias. The military belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, and trained them; the military is involved in these militias_many of them from covert ops, many of them special teams, like SEALS and special commando units that are indoctrinated with the anti-terrorist theology of the state. OK? So the relationship is that whenever they needed to terrorize the African community or terrorize poor people, they have given rein to the right wing_and then used the reining-in of the right wing as a justification for repression on the left, and against poor people all over again! And that's exactly what they're doing now!

JP: And there are public figures who were part of the Ku Klux Klan who are now involved in these militias.

DBW: Right. And this phenomenon is rapidly occurring throughout the spectrum of the European nation-state. Its happening in France, its happening in Italy...

BW: With Jean-Marie LePen and the Mussolini nostalgia people...

DBW: Yeah! I mean look what happened with LePen in France, he got almost 20 percent of the vote! And what's his platform? Anti-immigration. And what's the platform of the right-wing militia here? That people of color and slime-balls from the Third World are diluting America. What's LePen's position on France? That France has to reassert itself as nation with a great mission, which is the same fascistic vision that Hitler had for Germany. What's the right in the United States talking about? About reasserting the old values that made them great. OK? These aren't coincidences. These are things that are happening in a way that accrues to the benefit of a particular elite in this society. Why are working white folks, so-called "white trash", attracted to the extreme right? What was the greatest element in support of slavery in the antebellum south? "White trash." They didn't even own slaves. But the existence of slavery was the only thing that made them special. Otherwise they would have been slaves.

Now one of the things that the militia talks about is how the government has bent over backward to deal with poor people, with people of color, to give things to black workers, to Latino workers, to the exclusion of white males. That's the same rationale that poor white trash used in the antebellum south about slavery_if you freed the slaves, where would that leave a self-respecting white man? That's why the Ku Klux Klan became necessary_to terrorize them back into submission.

The bombing of the federal building can be looked at from a number of perspectives. If we believe in conspiracy theories, we can say that its really a fantastic "black op" on the part of US intelligence. Or perhaps we can say that it was something that was set into motion that got out of control. Or we can say that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it because they never suspected that they would need a justification from the right in order to do what they are going to do to the American people. I think it might be a combination of all three.

Look at how the new legislation is being pushed through. They're saying, if you don't push this legislation through, you're soft on terrorism. But look at states like Israel, which is a completely militarized national security state_and they can't stop attacks on their civilians. So what makes the United States think they can?

BW: To simultaneously oppose the militia and oppose the anti-terrorist measures which are being taken to ostensibly crack down on the militia seems to put us in a difficult position...

DBW: I don't think it puts us in an awkward position at all once we understand the role of the extreme right wing in curtailing the rights of progressive movements in this country. We know that the United States is able to do what it does abroad by stealing the rhetoric of liberation struggles. They defined the Contras as "freedom fighters." They'll steal the rhetoric of liberation and they'll use the culture of the oppressed and portray it as American culture. So why should we be in a dilemma to define the right wing as part and parcel of the entire white male support apparatus of the national security state?

These rural white males see the US government as the personification of all the frustration in their lives. And the fact of the matter is that the US government is in their lives, and is in our lives, to the detriment of our interests. That's the fact.

BW: What do you think of the Zapatista revolutionaries in Mexico?

DBW: Look at Mexico's relationship to the United States. Here's a full-blown peasant revolutionary movement that came out of nowhere, nobody even knew about it. That shows you how in touch they were with the rural Indian population.

Increasingly in the Third World, and particularly in Latin America, we see the browning of the population. The population is browning again after the first wave of the European conquistadors. Every state in Latin America is a European settler state. Every one. Just like South Africa, just like the state of Israel. And almost throughout the history of Latin America, only those who resembled the light-skinned conquistadors were in positions of power, up to the point where some of them even have German names. But with the browning of the population, these light-skinned descendents of the conquistadors are becoming increasingly isolated. They are depleting their resources at a phenomenal rate to maintain their position, while the descendents of Indians and of African slaves are reasserting themselves and reasserting their rights and reasserting their majority status.

The United States talks about democracy. But what kind of democracy is there for the black kids in the shanty-towns in Brazil? What kind of democracy was there for those who "disappeared" in Chile and Argentina? And we can even see it here. Increasingly, the immigrants from Latin America are looking more and more Indian.

BW: And whites are going to be the minority here in the US in another 25 years or so if demographic trends continue...

DBW Exactly. So the only way white males can continue to control everything is if they have in place the entire apparatus of the European nation-state as a mechanism for the transfer of wealth and power to themselves at the same time that it's being subsidized by the masses of people because they believe it's there to protect them from some type of enemy.

BW: What do you have to say about so-called "gangsta rap," and people like Tupac Shakur, whose mother was a Panther but who has obviously embraced a certain kind of nihilism?

DBW: We have to understand that the reason rap is so controversial is that it reflects the reality of lower-class black youth. And this reality has come into conflict with the black bourgeoisie, the black middle-class professionals who want to portray themselves as the success story of African America. Culture is a legitimate arena of the struggle for liberation. Just like rock in its initial form was a music of rebellion, a music that expressed the nihilism of white youth who were fed up with this white mom-and-pop picket-fence reality that didn't reflect the terror that was going on behind the picket fence...you know? The rape and brutalization of youth behind the picket fence.

So look at rap music and look at where it came from. It came from out of the South Bronx. It came out of Brownsville, it came out of Harlem. These were kids who had no place to go, who had no movement to go to, because the Panthers were destroyed, to whom a hero was nothing but a fish sandwich. So they would gather together in the park or in the basement of vacant building and they would play tapes and rap over the music, or they would go get their mom's and pop's old records and scratch on them, and they created a whole genre of music that was first attacked as being transitory, irrelevant. But it was white males who controlled the music industry that made gangsta rap_the 2 Live Crew genre of rap, the misogynist rap, the homophobic rap_the type of rap that was popular. They didn't gravitate towards the positive rap, because most of the positive rap was black nationalist, that reflected the ideology of organizations like the Black Panther Party. You see? This genre of rap was completely ignored.

But at the same time it enjoyed a considerable amount of credibility in the African American community, among the youth. A lot of the DJs came from this scene. They were taken out of the clubs and put on the streets overnight, like Red Alert, Dr. Dre. Some of them came out of the black bourgeoisie and had street affectations, but many of them came up out of that milieu.

And it was activists who had a problem with misogynist rap, it was activists_myself and others_who had a problem with homophobic rap, that had a problem with reactionary rap, and criticized the rappers for this. And it was only after the rappers began to respond to us in a positive way, to search out images of Malcolm and the Black Panther Party, that the black bourgeoisie came up and started talking about how they weren't gonna take it no more. Black clergy led demonstrations against rap, and some of the major black stations like 107.5 WBLS in this city_owned by Inner City Broadcasting of Percy Sutton, who was Malcolm's lawyer and is also a big businessman in this city_started playing what they called "classic soul." Now, classic soul was the music of my generation, OK? But the "classic soul" that they played was classic soul that didn't have no political message either_I mean the love songs, ballads and so forth.

BW: What's your message today to the kids in Bed Stuy and the South Bronx?

DBW: The same message that the Black Panther Party called forth. That they organize to defend the integrity of the African American community on all levels, and that they understand that because violence is as American as apple pie, they have to organize the community's capacity to carry out revolutionary violence in its own self-interest. I say that with the proviso that as long as we don't have control over law enforcement agencies that brutalize and murder us, then we have to deal with racist attack on that level.

BW: And what's your message to white folks who are going to be reading this?

DBW: They have to really understand that the European nation-state that they live in sees all of its citizens as its enemy, and unless they stop the consolidation of those forces of the rich who are in control of this state, that are determining the parameters of debate, that are increasingly encroaching on our democratic rights_unless they wake up and deal with this, then all of us are going to be subjected to the same type of repression and control. Fascism isn't just a word. It's the organization of state power and finance capital into a system that controls everybody.

CRACK THE CIA

2pac 1992 Speech


Tupac and the Revolutionary Shakur Family
Interview with Bilal Sunni-Ali by Kalonji Jama Changa



When some people hear the name Bilal Sunni-Ali, they think of the world renown musician from the Legendary Gil Scot-Heron's Band. The Group that brought us the Liberation Classic, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and appeared on stages and screens around the globe, including a Saturday Night Live Special with the Late Comedy King, Richard Pryor. When others hear the name Bilal Sunni-Ali, they think of the Black Panther from New York who was a co-defendant in the United States vs. Dr. Mutulu Shakur case. The case that was known in the Revolutionary Community as, "The Republic of New Afrika vs the United States". In this case, the state was claiming that a "Criminal Enterprise" existed and that they were a part of it. They claim the "Criminal Enterprise" was responsible for what they called bank robberies, armored truck robberies, murder of policemen, wounding policemen, kidnapping policemen, kidnapping prison guards, etc. The defendants were charged with 31 different counts. Some of the charges were in conjunction with the liberation of Assata Shakur.



What follows is an interview that took place at the office of the International Committee to Support Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H.Rap Brown).



Bilal lays it down about Tupac and how the Shakur Family came about.





Kalonji: What is the Origin of the Shakur Family which Tupac was born into?



Bilal: The Shakur Family is a family from the East Coast, the head of the Family was El Hajj Sallahudin Shakur. We affectionately called him Abba, which means Father. He was physically the father of two of the Panther leaders on the East Coast, Zayd Malik Shakur and Lumumba Abdul Shakur. There were very few of us in the Movement that had fathers in the Movement. El Hajj Sallahudin Shakur was an associate of El Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X), he was a member of the Muslim Mosque Incorporated and also a member of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He made Hajj one year after Malcolm. As we were coming up Abba was at the top. We aspired to be like him. I became closely associated with Lumumba Abdul Shakur and I began to refer to El Hajj Sallahudin Shakur as Abba, too. As if he was my father and Abba accepted that. He accepted all of us who related to him, as his children and he was a father to us as much as he could be. He gave guidance, he gave us an understanding because he was a Muslim, he gave us an understanding of what it meant to be Muslim, as far as standing up for justice. For advocating justice and for fighting for what was right for our people. He had an understanding that anyone who is oppressed like this regardless of who it is, Muslims need to fight for them and since it is us ourselves, then for sure we need to be involved in as much struggle for our liberation and organizing as possible. A lot of people just saw religion as a way, not to be in the struggle. He gave us the understanding that to be in Islam, was the way to be in the struggle. He was also a Pan-Africanist, he worked, had property and lived part of the time in Africa. The family had property and business in Ghana and he was a business man. He taught us all to be self-sufficient. He had money, he showed us you could hustle, make money legally, and still he didn't have to let the United States Government know what his personal business was. That was a very important lesson we learned from El Hajj Sallahudin Shakur.



Kalonji: How did the Shakur Family spread?



Bilal: Abba was our father. There were many people on the east coast who were involved in not only the Black Panther Party, but other organizations around at that time that gravitated towards El Hajj Sallahudin Shakur. The Shakur family is all of those young brothers and sisters who were involved in struggle, not all were Muslim, but the majority were Muslim. It may have been at one time maybe 50 of us. A lot of people who weren't part of the Shakur family, the police would refer to them as Shakur anyway, because it was a big group and the influence was felt by many people who were not a part, but wanted to be down with us. Afeni Shakur, joined the party and then she was married to Lumumba Abdul Shakur for a few years. They were both part of the New York 21 case. So when she married Lumumba Abdul Shakur, that made her part of the Shakur family, then she legally changed her name to Shakur. Even after her and Lumumba broke up, she kept the name. Later on her and Mutulu Shakur were married. Mutulu Shakur was a younger brother in the same area where they lived in Jamaica Queens, who had adopted the revolutionary lifestyle when he was about 14 or 15. He was a legionnaire. He was involved in the first big shoot out at New Bethel Church in Detroit. At the Second Annual Convention of the Republic of New Afrika. There was a shoot out when the police assaulted that gathering. Mutulu was one of the legionnaires at the time in the military forces of the Republic of New Afrika, that was responsible for and actually defended the lives of many of our leaders that were there. A lot of them owe it to Mutulu for his level of discipline in saving their lives. Baba Herman Ferguson and Mama Iyaluah Ferguson were directly protected by Mutulu when things broke out. These are some of the figures that were members of the Shakur Family. Three of them that I named were directly involved in Tupac's life.



Kalonji: What about Assata Shakur, where did she fit into the family tree?



Bilal: Assata Shakur became part of the family when Abba adopted Assata like he did the rest of us. It wasn't through marriage, a lot of people who were attracted to our lifestyle of work and our style of living, accepted the name Shakur. Formerly she was known as Joanne Chessimard, she became part of the family. Around the time of her arrest, that's when I first remember her using the name Assata Shakur, in '73.



Kalonji: At what point did you personally come in contact with Tupac Shakur?



Bilal: When he was an infant. I used to give flute lesson to two of his first cousins and I would listen to their poetry, but i would never hear anything from Tupac in his early years. It caught me totally by surprise, him becoming a star. I remember we were in the house and my children were playing this music and it had all this cussin' in it and I said " Who the fuck is that?" and they said, " That's Tupac daddy", and I said " I don't give a fuck who it is, turn that shit off". Listening to my response, I was thinking well damn, if that's Tupac and I'm upset at what he is saying I said well, I can't be upset, I need to change my style, because I can't say I'm upset with him, because obviously he got part of that from me. I heard myself respond like that and that's what really made me pay attention to Tupac as an artist. I guess when you move around a lot, some kids in the family you miss. I just missed his talent til' it was later on. He dug me as a musician. I didn't realize that til' he became a star, and he asked me to do a Sound Track for him, for a story he and his brother put together called Thug Life. Even though I hadn't paid attention to him, he had heard my music all his life.



Kalonji: So you were involved in the Soundtrack?



Bilal: I became involved in the soundtrack and then I became more involved in having discussions with him, whenever I could. He was on the right track, a lot of people say he wasn't. A lot of people don't pay attention to his music, so when they listen to it they say, ' oh it's all about' killing people, but if you really listen to it a lot of the negativity, it's a commentary on it. He actually denounces it and points to a better way in most instances.



Kalonji: How did he relate to the Elders in the Family?



Bilal: Tupac as a person was very respectful. I remember times seeing Tupac places where I didn't even notice him. Then I would see somebody stop, turn around and give me a hug and it would be Tupac. Being in the business myself, I would be on a lot of sets that he would be coming to and he would always see me and give me props and tell people who I was in relation to him and his family. So a lot of young people would have respect for me, just based off of how they saw Tupac treating me.



Kalonji: What do you think of Tupac as an Organizer?



Bilal: As an organizer, I think he was very good and influential, particularly around those things that were gang related. People often accused him of creating gang warfare. He was the type of person that can walk in any hood or turf and get props. People would listen to him. He had that gift to be able to move around in a manner that we needed. We needed someone to move around and talk to young brothers in the street and in every area. Because he had grown up in different areas. A few months here, a few months there; he was rooted in Harlem, in the Bronx, in Baltimore, in Oakland, California, any one of these place he could call home. He knew the industry life there, he knew the street life there, he knew the gang life there and he was working, he wasn't just hanging out partying. He was explaining to young people what it meant to have a set of values. Tupac was a Kwanzaa baby from birth. I remember the first Kwanzaa ceremonies that were celebrated in this country, he was there, as a baby and as a youth. He had a very keen understanding about what the whole struggle was.



Kalonji: Who was Geronimo Pratt in relation to Tupac?



Bilal: Geronimo Ji-Jagga was his Godfather. Geronimo was very influential in organizing youth. He was in the joint out there when the Bloods and Crips started. So when the first few members started going to jail, he knew them because when they would come up thru the jail, they would come up under him. He knew a lot of the shot callers on the West Coast and 9 times out of 10 he knew the parents of these shot callers. Most of them became Panthers or were affiliated or part of the community that was enlightened by the Panther Party. A lot of people that were in the street tribes came out of the loins of people who were revolutionary.



Kalonji: Do you think his death was an assassination or some random act of violence?



Bilal: There is no way that I can ever think it was a random act of violence.



Kalonji: So do you think it was an East Coast, West Coast beef?



Bilal: A lot of that East Coast- West Coast stuff, was the police. The same thing was done with the Black Panther Party. We never had any animosity with anyone just because they were from the West Coast and we were from the East. So it's ridiculous to even suggest that people accepted that. But when people see it printed so much and then read it in print over and over again, just like when you hear someone saying it over and over, they began to believe it and they began to internalize it. I don't even see that there was an East Coast-West Coast beef for him to be caught up in the middle of. If there was, I welcome someone to explain to me what that East Coast-West Coast Beef was. I know that during the Panther Party it was nothing. It was purely something that was made up, that was an attempt to get us to go at it with each other. An effective attempt, I had Comrades who were killed by close Comrades because of this. But it was nothing that any of us could point to and say, we don't like the West Coast because of this and we don't like the East Coast because of that. It was all contrived. If you examine the origination of the Bloods and the Crips you find a lot of it was contrived and they were made to fight each other. If you examine what they all are based on from their groups, they ain't got no beef with each other. The way they were organized they shouldn't have any beef with each other. That's what the whole Crip thing was about, following in the foot steps of the revolutionary organizations to stop gang warfare amongst the youth. That was a heavy priority in organizing the original Panther Party. A lot of our recruitment was done and a lot of political education was given to the gang members.



Kalonji: Why would there be an interest in assassinating Tupac from a political standpoint?



Bilal: He represented so much unity in the fact that he could associate with all the people that the forces that are against us wanted to keep fighting, amongst each other. He was clear through his actions that it would stop and they didn't want it to stop. Just like Martin Luther King, he represented a way where people can come together peacefully. So you say, " Why would the FBI murder someone who wanted peace?" Because they don't want peace. If they wanted peace, they would have protected Martin Luther King, they wouldn't have killed him. They don't want unity in the hood. They don't want peace in the hood. They want continued strife, because that's how they make their money. The more people go to jail, more money is made. It's more than just the prison itself, it's on the stock market, people invest in it. Prison industry, you can tell your stock broker put $50,000 or $100,000 on the prison industry, because that's growing fast. I want some of that. And because it's growing fast, stock holders began to demand certain things, so it can keep growing fast. One of the things they demands is more people locked up. So if you got unity in the community, if you got peace in the hood and people stop slingin' in the hood, then you ain't got no reason to lock people up. So take one person that's responsible for that and assassinate his character and then you assassinate him, then people are confused about his character. They become confused about his character, further confused about his character assassination and even more confused about his actual assassination.



Kalonji: For people who wanted to learn more about Tupac's legacy what do you suggest?



Bilal: I would encourage them to see the movie The Resurrection of Tupac Shakur, better yet buy it. Because that is his legacy. It is in his own words, the narration is in his own words. It's not about anyone talking about what they feel about Pac. For people who doubt or are confused about what I have said, they should see that movie.



Bilal is currently the Coordinator of the International Committee to Support Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin and has a radio show on WRFG radio in Atlanta, Georgia that airs on Fridays at 5:30 pm. He is also still a touring musician.

Tupac - Changes

A Girl Like Me

2Pac - Brenda's Got A Baby

Tracy Chapman - Talkin' 'Bout A Revolution

We Need to Exterminate White People.

OFFICIAL AND ONLY STATEMENT
OF
DR. KAMAU R. KAMBON


I made a statement on a panel in Washington, D.C. on October 14, 2005 and today I am prepared to bring remarks on my original comments:

My Official Statement today is that, “I speak for No One”

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the Ancient Afrikans of Kemet- the original name that was changed by the greeks to Egypt- who were invaded and murdered in mass numbers, over the course of centuries by: the hyksos, the assyrians, the libyans, the persians, the turks, the greeks, the romans, the spanish, the portuguese, the french, the british and the arabs-all of whom desecrated and pillaged Kemetic Temples, Royal tombs, and robbed from these Afrikan sanctuaries priceless artifacts and sacred texts that now sit in european museums, “prestigious” university basements, and the private homes of the rich throughout the world.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all of the Afrikans who were enslaved, shackled, made to march miles and miles over the Sahara by the Arabs who committed this atrocity for a period of approximately 1,300 years. According to some research, over 50 to 80 million Afrikans were murdered during this Arab enslavement. The survivors of this savage devastation were forced onto slave ships by these same Arabs and exported over the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to parts of Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of the Afrikans in West Afrika who were terrorized and kidnapped by the europeans and enslaved in the dungeons of El Mina, Cape Coast, and in the hellholes of dungeons in Senegal.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan men in those dungeons who refused to submit and were put three to four in a cell and were left there for all of the other enslaved Afrikans to see them die a slow and painful death

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan women who were put 200, 300 and sometimes more in a stone room no bigger than small auditorium where they had to fight each other to get air that came only through a hole in the rock cell no bigger than the size of a soccer ball.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan women who were selected by the white commander of the dungeon to be raped repeatedly and sometimes left to die in their own blood.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan men and women who survived the dank, cold dungeons only to face being forced through THE DOOR OF NO RETURN and onto waiting ships that would transport them to places of grief and agony beyond their own Afrikan comprehension

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikans who were shackled to the bowels of stink ships where they had to ride next to their dead uncle, dead brother, dead sister, or dead mother on the long journey to lands where incomprehensible anguish awaited

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of captive Afrikan women aboard those ships who felt compelled to murder their own beautiful babies so these infants would never know or experience the nightmare of enslavement.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of captive Afrikan men who tore off their own legs from the shackles to dive overboard from those stinking vessels and who would rather face death in the jaws of man-eating sharks than remain enslaved

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for those millions of Afrkan men, women and children who suffered THE MIDDLE PASSAGE and whose bones are in the watery burial ground called the Atlantic Ocean- better known to those who know their history as THE AFRIKAN OCEAN because it overflows with the blood and life force of over 100 MILLION AFRIKANS

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikans who landed in the Caribbean Islands where they underwent THE SLAVE MAKING PROCESS of further de-humanization and the breaking of their arms, legs and AFRIKAN SPIRITS in preparation for the long and hard work and burdens they were to bear

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of the Indigenous of the americas who were savagely brutalized, tortured, raped, secretly given smallpox in blankets, and murdered, simply for opening their hearts, minds and arms to white strangers coming off a long and weary journey. Impact of christopher columbus, as written by Father Bartolome De Las Casas in his book, “The Disruption of the Indies", highlighted that, directly or indirectly, columbus was responsible for the deaths of between 12 to 25 MILLION indigenous. The population of the indigenous was reduced from 100 MILLION to 25 MILLION, according to T. Browder, Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all those Afrikans who arrived in North America bewildered, brutalized, weak, robbed of their culture, language, religions, families, cosmologies and longing for their own homeland

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the Haitians who soaked the earth with their own blood in war by giving their lives to defeat Napoleon, who led the mightiest army of that time. I speak for Boukman, for Toussaint, for and Dessailines, the leaders of the Haitians who never gave up their struggle for Freedom and Independence

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for Harriet Tubman, who made 19 trips to free enslaved Afrikans, forcing some, as she said, “to be Free or Die” In her moments of contemplation, she was overheard saying, “ I freed hundreds of slaves, and would have freed hundreds more, if only they knew they were slaves”

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Fredrick Douglass, and all the Black people who begged and petitioned the american government to intercede to stop white people from the wanton beatings, murdering, lynching, raping and terrorizing of Black men, Black women and Black children-the government did nothing-the deaths continued

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all of the thousands upon thousands of the enslaved Afrikans who were set “free” by the emancipation proclamation but given absolutely nothing by their former slave masters: no food, only the clothes on their backs, and no way to get away

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the thousands of newly “freed” enslaved Afrikans who were arrested en masse as vagrants, panhandlers, and bums; then hired out to corporations and chain gangs to be forced to work for free, again, and these men literally worked themselves to death

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the thousands of Black soldiers who gave their lives in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the Gulf War only to return to their america and be lynched, physically, economically or socially, while wearing their u.s. uniforms as white people sang “America the Beautiful"

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the over 2 THOUSAND Black people, mostly men, who, at the turn of the 19th century, were lynched, castrated, some burned alive, and others whose fingers, toes, penises and eyeballs were cut from their living bodies and used as souvenirs and trophies by white people

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the many men, women and children who were murdered in Wilmington, North Carolina and Tulsa Oklahoma-both considered BLACK WALL STREETS- and their land stolen from them with the sanction of the american government. Mention here about Las Vegas where Black people lost their land, like they did in Tulsa, Oklahoma

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the Tuskegee men who were experimented on by the white doctors who intentionally gave the Black men syphilis while the antidote was withheld as the experiment went on for some 40 years

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the 7,600 Black and poor women in North Carolina, and two other states, who were sterilized without their knowledge or permission in clinics as part of the population control program. These sterilizations went on from 1929 to 1974- 65,000 Black and poor women, in this country, were sterilized during this period.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the over 6 million Black people in america who were members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and who mourned the arrest, trumped-up trial and deportation of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey. This man, the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, was a man who wanted only to give his people back their true BlackNificent history, teach them meaningful skills, teach them to love their BLACK SELVES, and return to AFRIKA and resurrect the Black Woman and the Black Man to their rightful place of glory and majesty among the families of the earth

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all those Black people around the country who watched in anguish as the u.s. government harassed Elijah Muhammad, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and many others and drove one of our greatest politicians, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., out of office on concocted charges. That night, October 14, 2005

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the 1,227 Black troops who were SLAUGHTERED, BY THEIR OWN WHITE SOLIDERS, AND BURIED IN a MASS GRAVE-at Camp Van Dorn, a military base in southwestern Mississippi and near a small town called Centerville. The full story is outlined in the book, “The Slaughter”, by Carroll Case.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the many Black people who supported William Patterson and Paul Robeson who were two of the many authors of a petition to the United Nations entitled ‘WE CHARGE GENOCIDE”, that catalogued the evidence in the form of names, dates, times and places of Black people murdered around america at the hands of savage white people, while no one in government did anything to stop the violence or improve the social, housing, educational or health conditions of under which Black people lived..

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the Black Panthers who were killed under COINTELPRO, and for Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Imam Jamil- Al- Amin, and all the MANY BLACK POLITICAL PRISONERS who languish in the maximum-security hell pit jail cells of america. I speak for those Black political prisoners who have been held for over twenty to thirty years and are tortured, experimented on and put on hallucinogenic experimental drugs because their crimes include trying to stop the police murders of young Black men, implementing breakfast and food programs for those in their communities, trying to provide decent housing and good health care for all those in need and trying to educate the children so they don’t grow up ignorant.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the dead members of M.O.V.E., in Philadelphia, who the city decided to drop a bomb on and kill babies, children, women and men in an act of premeditated murder

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for Emmitt Til and the countless Black boys and Black men who have been murdered by white men and their bodies thrown in swamps, rivers, streams or whose lifeless Black bodies now rest in shallow, unmarked graves all around the country

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the mothers, and grandmothers, who have lost their sons to the streets, drugs, prisons and graveyards, and their daughters to a concocted white standard of beauty that is absolutely impossible for them to attain. These inherently beautiful Black girls and women have spent millions and millions of dollars every year in an industry that helped to create an inferiority complex in them and then profits from it.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the untold numbers of young Black men who write to me from prison cells asking me to send them books, or who are on death row, soon to be executed, screaming to me through their letters, “I DIDN’T DO IT, MY LAWYER OR JUDGE MADE MISTAKES DURING THE TRIAL”

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the young Black men who come to me, just released from prison who, like the newly freed enslaved Afrikans under emancipation, have no where to go, no job possibilities, and no hope for a brighter future. Those who have skills and are working, are fired when it is discovered they have a prison record. The only place that will accept them is the newly built prison I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the beautiful Black children who are so excited to start school and have big plans for success, only to get there and find that the white female teachers already have quite a different plan for them.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions, upon millions of Black babies who died from poor health care during pre-natal term and for those who came to term but died from poor nutrition or malnutrition. And for the many children, teens, young adults and adults today who are raised eating techno-food, fast food, and who have never tasted any real food. And for those whose brains are short-circuited, from a lack of proper minerals and vitamins, who are labeled “special education”, mentally retarded or hyperactive-the new code words that replace those used in the early eugenics movement.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the elderly Black people, who have struggled most of their lives to navigate through a system that was against them all the way, only to reach eldership status and find they have inadequate health care, no decent food, and are trapped in a system that considers them disposable people

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the Herrero people of Namibia who were eradicated by the germans, the Tasmanians, eradicated by the white australians, the 130 million southern Afrikans murdered by cecil rhodes so he could control diamond and gold mines, the 13 million Congolese whose arms, legs and ears were cut off and murdered by leopold, of belgium

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the Black people who marched-and got murdered by whites, those Black people who voted and got murdered by whites, those Black people who tried to go to school to get an education and got murdered by whites, those Black people who have tried to start their own businesses and got murdered by whites, those Black people who have become politicians to try to make a better way for Black people and got murdered by whites, those Black people who have tried to set up their own little independent groups and got character assassinated.

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the worldwide Afrikan victims of A.I.D.S and any and all man-made diseases, who have died and are in the process of dying

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for myself, as I watch while white people, who have power, guns, information and influence, ride around in 60-70 thousand dollar cars, waste millions of gallons of water watering lawns and golf courses, run off on luxury cruises, conceal their identities and criminality by hiding behind “Inc”, make 80 billion dollars in profits off of oil, while ordinary people and the elderly freeze to death in small apartments, while the government bails out (code word for welfare) airlines that lose millions in one fiscal quarter yet, simultaneously, cutback on financial aid to Black students, while Black professors in white higher educational institutions have to struggle for fairness in the hiring and tenure process, while Black students seek constantly for fairness in grading and assessment, while Black faculty and Black staff have to seek constantly for fairness in evaluations, while white people window shop in malls, play golf, play bridge, sit in T.V. studios watching Dr. Phil or at home watching foolishness, and, by their actions, convey, generally, they just don’t give a damn about the great, great, great grandchildren whose Ancestors’ blood is soaked in the very ground on which we all stand

I speak for no one EXCEPT for the 600 million to ONE BILLION Afrikan people killed worldwide, from the time the Afrikan first encountered the white man, in the greatest atrocity this earth has ever seen – some call it “The Black Holocaust”, others call it “The Maafa”, but in the realm of this context and reality, there is no word for it. And when all is tabulated about what has happened, AND STILL HAPPENING, to the Afrikan, Black people, it defies and goes well beyond human comprehension. Some have asked white people, referring here to the government and corporations, to just consider talking about reparations, and those requests have fallen on deaf ears. Are there no reparations for Black people? Who is the best qualified on this earth, other than the Afrikan, Black people, to receive justice, compensation, due process and whatever else the reparation people are proposing? Why are white people not listening to, and implementing, the National Urban League when it issues the annual report, “The State of Black America”? Why are white people not listening to, and implementing, the suggestions of all the civic groups trying to advance the social, economic, educational, health and cultural concerns of Black people?

I speak for no one, EXCEPT for my Ancestors, our dead, and for myself and I am saying that I don’t even know half of the true history of Black people, but I have seen and know enough to be able to say, “the war and genocide against Black people, in all of the areas of life activity, worldwide, must stop."

Do you have a better solution to offer to solve this problem?

I am Kamau R. Kambon