Tag: Shakur

On this 50th anniversary of the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program, let us meditate on the incredible legacy of the original Black Panther Party. Although this is a plea for help and a call to action, this piece is also a dedication.

As a 16-year-old kid, given a 30-year sentence for attempted robbery, I used to think that maybe I just fell through the cracks, that I could have been saved as a kid and rehabilitated. Then I was educated, then my consciousness was raised and I realized that it wasn’t meant for me to be saved or rehabilitated.

Class war prisoner, freedom fighter, man of the people, man for the people, long held political prisoner Thomas William Manning died on July 30 of a heart issue at the federal penitentiary in Hazelton, Kentucky.

Clear your calendar for the third Sunday in August 2019 and make your way to Terre Haute, Indiana. Kwame “Beans” Shakur is a revolutionary scholar and activist who is organizing the First Annual REBUILD: New Afrikan People’s Assembly Conference at the Booker T. Washington Community Center on Aug. 18, 2019, in beautiful Terre Haute, Indiana.

From a very young age, I was taught by my father who my grandfather was and what he did for our people. He made sure I knew the history of our local and national leaders.

Thousands of people are losing their lives and livelihoods around our planet – from Mozambique to Missouri – due to intense storms, record wind speeds and massive flooding in areas that should not have been developed and other catastrophes caused by the corporate-for-profit-accelerated climate chaos.

Now that we’re supposedly free, Blacks have become the majority of the U.S. prison population. And that is because the free labor of Black slaves built this country into a profitable, prosperous enterprise for whites who are trying to keep it that way.

Black women who have confronted the abuses of America’s white authority have suffered its punishment throughout our history. Anarchist Lucy Parsons, born in 1853, is one of the few Black women mentioned in labor histories – usually as the wife of the martyred Albert Parsons, who was executed in the wake of Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886.

Under the aegis of repressing a “gang” called the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), the administration carried on a witchhunt against the political thinking of many Black prisoners and punished them by solitary confinement. This article, the second in a series of three, looks at the notion of prison gang, its relation to the prisoner’s need for defense and how that affects us beyond the prison wall.