by JR Valrey
Ever since I was 11 years old, I’ve noticed the terror that police conducted in the Black community. I saw it happening outside my grandparents’ house on 83rd and Holly in East Oakland with my uncles and cousins. All of them were suspected of selling drugs when some were and some weren’t. The year was 1989 and the cofounder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, was murdered in West Oakland. This was also the climax of the CIA-sponsored Crack Era, which started, according to the book “Dark Alliance” by the late Gary Webb, in the Bay Area to provide a cash fund for the CIA’s off-the-books counter-revolutions that they were funding against the people of El Salvador and Nicaragua.
We also commonly know in the local community that the Crack Era was started in the Bay to subvert the Oakland-born Black Panther-inspired trend of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary political action to that of a dope dealer/dope fiend mentality. In political terms, the government fuelled the drug epidemic, killed the growing socialist mentality and replaced it with hyper-narco-capitalism. The Crack Era was also being used to power the classroom-to-prison pipeline, which has decimated the Black community in the US for decades.
An older cousin joining the Nation of Islam as a teenager inspired me to begin to acquire a knowledge of self, history and politics. At the age of 17, I met Kevin Weston, who was a brilliant writer with Pacific News Service, and also the editor of a teenage magazine called Youth Outlook. I later found out that he was also an organizer with a newly formed revolutionary youth organization based in Oakland called the Young Comrades. We became close; Kev was the first editor who worked with me constantly to get my journalism into shape to be printed.
At an early point of us knowing each other, he invited me to a Huey P. Newton Birthday Party at Castlemont High School in East Oakland that was organized by the Young Comrades and veterans of the Black Panther Party. 2Pac was supposed to perform there for the first time on a stage in Oakland. He didn’t make it, to my disappointment, but the Dark Sun Riders, a subsidiary of the legendary political rap group X Clan, filled in and held a political education class after. I was intrigued, in part because of the perspectives of the organizer and people present, as well as this was going on at the school where my parents met, and it was the high school local to my maternal grandparents’ house in what we call Deep East Oakland.
The year was 1996. I kept in touch with the Young Comrades, be it that I worked with Kev doing journalism but i also went to school with him, his girlfriend at the time, and two other members at San Francisco State. I later joined the organization with my comrade and one of my best friends at the time, Abdul Haqq. As members of the organization, we had to read political literature from an approved reading list that included the writings of Monster Kody, Karl Marx, Huey Newton, George Jackson, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Winnie Mandela, Steven Biko, Assata Shakur and others.
I read Assata’s book in three sittings and later found her aunt Evelyn Williams’ book about Assata’s ordeal. Her story gave me a strong sense of pride and purpose because her early life was similar to mine. Then she hooked up with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army and made giant steps on behalf of our people, Black people.
So while I was going to school, i had a job tutoring youth after school at Cleveland Elementary School, which is in the Mission District of San Francisco, and which is also heavily Latino populated. One day a group of my first grade boys were fighting and the battle-lines broke down between Black and Brown. I broke it up, and scrapped my lesson for the day and freestyled a lesson about Black and Brown solidarity, because we have the bigger monsters of capitalism and white supremacy that want to enslave and kill us all, is what i told them.
I ended the lesson telling them the story about how Malcolm X invited the Fidel-led Cuban UN delegation to Hotel Theresa in Harlem after the Waldorf Astoria in New York kicked the Cubans out right before their first visit to the United Nations after their successful revolutionary war. As I taught, I didn’t notice tjhat the teacher whose classroom I was using was listening. When I was wrapping up to go home, the teacher introduced herself and told me that she was Cuban, and that she was touched by my lesson. She asked me if I would be interested in the World Youth Festival, which was coming up in a few months in Havana. I had not heard of it, so she gave me some information. She ended up giving me half of the money for the trip.
At the time, the Young Comrades were involved in organizing “Geronimo Day” at Lowell Park in West Oakland to honor Geronimo Ji Jaga, formerly Pratt, for his many years of service in the Black Panther Party as the Deputy Minister of Defence, as well as for the 27 years he did as a political prisoner, which he’d been released from a month before. This was the first community political event that I had a hand in helping to organize, alongside the rest of the Young Comrades, veterans of the Black Panther Party and veterans of the Black Guerrilla Family.
One of the veterans, Shabaka Ji Jaga took me under his political wing and was one of my biggest political mentors in my early days. He was Geronimo’s right hand man when he came to the Bay, and he was also one of two men authorized by Geronimo to be in the Ji Jaga tribe, similar to the Shakurs. When I told him that I was going to Cuba, he said that, if by chance you meet Assata Shakur, ask her to write a piece to be read at Geronimo Day in Oakland.
Before going, I talked to three other members of the Young Comrades who were also going to the World Youth Festival. This was before the cell phone era, so we didn’t know how we were going to find each other.
Miraculously, Janine, Kevin, Manny and I all found each other within the first couple of days in the streets of Old Havana. Due to the last minute nature of me coming, I did not register. I don’t know what I was thinking. I ended up roaming around Old Havana the first few days, exploring my surroundings. In those first few days, I met members of the December 12th Movement and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and made life long connections, as well as I met everyday Cubans. It just so happened that after telling one of my new Cuban friends about wanting to get in touch with Assata, a few days later he told me that he was working at an event that she would be attending with the conference.
He got me in. And as soon as I walked into the courtyard where people were talking, there she was talking to the late Nehanda Abiodun, another political exile from the Black Liberation Army who lived in Havana also. I approached them, introduced myself, and they both greeted me warmly. Assata had a stern grandmother feel, while Nehanda had that young, cool, auntie feel. I told Assata my mission from Geronimo Day, and asked her if she would write a salutation greeting Geronimo home. She said she would, and to call her the next day, so we could arrange for her to give it to me. This was before email was widely used. I called her the next day, and she told me that she had given it to her trusted Black Panther comrade Dr. Small, who was also from Oakland and working on the event. In later years, he would become my doctor.
A day later, Assata was speaking to the youth at an event, and my contacts got me in again. There were about 150 young organizers who were mostly under 30. She had on a Black “Free Sundiata Acoli” t-shirt, sat on a table wiggling her legs, and held court.
She had a very small frame, but you could look in her eyes when she was speaking and you could see and feel her dedication to the liberation of Black people in the US, her passion for righteousness, and her justified rage at the oppression she saw, experienced or just knew about. You could sense a revolutionary razor sharp mind and a heart bigger than Africa.
It was an unforgettable political education class that she orchestrated, and I even had the opportunity to ask her a question in the college classroom setting gathering. The whole session was taped, without my knowledge at the time.
A decade later, in ’07, Stic.man of the revolutionary rap group dead prez asked me randomly if I was at an Assata speech in Havana before. Before I misspoke, I inquisitively answered, “Yeah, a long time ago.” He told me he saw the speech on film and that I could get it on 125th Street in Harlem from the vendors who sell the Black Power movies and docs. I was never able to secure a copy for myself.
The highest salute goes out to the Cuban government and people for housing Assata, and principally never wavering before and after Bush II put a $1 million bounty on her head and Obama increased it to $2 million. Because of the principled position of Cuba granting Assata exile, while being placed on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List in part because of this decision, they deserve our highest respect, appreciation and solidarity. Free Mumia! Free Imam Jamil! Free Kamau! End the blockade against Cuba. And to the spirit of Assata Shakur, you are finally free. Thank you for your life – in service to our liberation. Straight Ahead!
JR Valrey is a veteran journalist who can be heard weekly on Wednesdays on 89.5FM KPOO or KPOO.com from noon to 3 p.m.. His work can also be heard on www.blockreportradioworld.com.
