Taking a Stand for Political Prisoners in the U.S.
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/146692/taking_a_stand_for_political_prisoners_in_the_u.s.
A former Black Panther's new book explores American politics and the
fight for justice.
By asha bandele
April 30, 2010
It is 1990 and I am the newly elected student government president at
Hunter College of the City University of New York. My political
worldview, largely shaped heretofore by my active opposition to
apartheid, Ronald Reagan and nuclear proliferation, is about to make
a mighty leap forward. I know, then, that racism is a vise still
choking Black people, even those of us born post the Civil Rights
movement. I know the philosophy of Martin Luther King. I love Nelson
and Winnie Mandela, and have even traveled Zimbabwe in the wake of
its liberation struggle. I know some feminist theory, some feminist
history. But for all the knowledge I have gathered at this point, I
do not know enough to predict the learning curve I am about to embark
upon, in large part because it is in this period that I meet Safiya Bukhari.
Under her mentorship I will come to have not only an intimate
understanding of which political prisoners are in the U.S., but I
will learn how to organize and run a defense campaign for them. Under
her mentorship and because she led by example, I will learn never to
downplay my leadership as a nod to the patriarchy that shapes, both
silently and loud, the role of women in too many of our movements and
organizations. Under her leadership, I will learn the power of human
touch, the holding of hand of a man or woman who is about to enter
their second generation locked down. I will learn patience; the first
political prisoner case I worked on was for the New York 3 and it was
1991 and we were fighting to get them an evidentiary hearing; we did.
But to get there, Safiya and I worked for months, including one long
night where we stood for hours in a downtown New York law school and
copied non-feedable onion skin page of transcript after another until
all the thousands of them were done and we could get them to the
attorneys who were volunteering their time. We lost that hearing but
because we came within a hair's breadth of winning, and because we
were just off the victories of Mandela on one side of the planet and
Dhoruba on another, and mostly because I had come to deeply love
Herman Bell, Jalil Muntaquim and Albert Nuh Washington, the loss
shook me in all my naivité to the core. But at the moment when I
could have given up, perhaps would have given up, I learned from
Safiya Bukhari that we do indeed soldier on, that we come from a
long-line of women and men who were kicked down, beaten down, shut
down, shut up but got up and got up and got up again. She got up
again and made me get up and went on to forge the New York Chapter of
Mumia abu Jamal's support committee and organize the Jericho
Movement, a call for the liberation of all U.S. political prisoners
and prisoners of war.
The organization exists still today and is known nationally and
internationally despite her death in 2003, a loss that put many of
us, both behind the wall and not, on our collective knees. I was a
pallbearer that mean August day we buried her and I remember feeling
so profoundly as we carried her coffin up the stairs of the House of
the Lord Church, what many of us feel when someone important to us
dies: please God, can have just one more day, one more hour, one more
hug or touch or kiss or moment in silence or laugh or cry or
anything. Anything.
My call out to the Universe didn't come to pass that day, but on this
day it has because I have my Safiya back with me when every time I
pick up this important, this urgent new collection, The War Before:
The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in
Prison, & Fighting for Those Left Behind (The Feminist Press, 2010).
Edited by former political prisoner and former Weatherman Laura
Whitehorn, this book which includes a forward by Angela Y. Davis, and
an afterword by Mumia abu Jamal, has pulled together the political
writings of woman who lived the sprit of transformation and with the
unshakeable belief that a new world was possible. After her untimely
death, Laura and Safiya's daughter, Wonda Jones, undertook the work
of collecting and collating the organizer's writings and interviews
into a comprehensive volume that is now this book, The WarBefore.
Here I sit down with Laura to discuss who Safiya was and what we can
learn from the vision of a woman, a wise and committed, loving and
giving worker woman.
asha: What was your relationship to Safiya Bukhari?
I first met Safiya in the late 1990s, when I was in prison in
California and she came to visit. She came in to see all the women
political prisoners who were there at the time -- the Puerto Rican
Independentistas Carmen Valentin, Alicia and Lucy Rodriguez, and
Dylcia Pagan; my sister anti-imperialists (and my co-defendants)
Marilyn Buck and Linda Evans; and me. It was one of many visits she
made to prisoners during the organizing for a 1998 Jericho rally at
the White House demanding recognition and amnesty for U.S. political
prisoners. After my release in 1999, Safiya and I talked together at
conferences and events, but I was not permitted to see her much
because I was on parole. She died in 2003 while I was still on parole.
What was one of the most important things Safiya taught you?
From Safiya I drew a model of how to be serious about the work of
supporting political prisoners. She knew from her own years behind
bars the danger of promising prisoners you'll do things you can't
deliver. She knew the critical importance of outside support. In her
writings she says that while she was serving her eight-plus years in
Goochland, Virginia, her biggest challenge was maintaining her sense
of her own identity as a political person--as someone committed to
fighting for justice. That is so opposite to what prisons are, it
sometimes can feel like you are in a dream world. Her hard work in
support of political prisoners, and the energy and joy--the sense of
optimism--she brought to all of us was something I felt in my bones
to be critical.
Again and again as I do this work, I remember what she said at a
party when I got out of prison: When you leave prison, and you leave
those others behind, it's like you leave part of you inside the
institution. So you have to continue to do the work, because as long
as there's a political prisoner -- any prisoner -- inside this
country, that means that you're not truly free.
Given that this book was published posthumously, would you please
talk a little bit about the process of gathering her papers and
putting them into one collection?
Safiya had left a small manuscript of essays, including her own
autobiographical narrative and a paper on sexism in the Black Panther
Party, among other articles. Once those were all put into the
computer and edited, though, it became clear that a huge part of
Safiya's work was missing -- years of speeches, articles, and
interviews reviewing the history of the Panthers and arguing that the
people still doing time from those years should be supported and
freed. We found some little-known pieces, such as a debate over
whether the U.S. should grant amnesty to political prisoners -- the
opposing team included some high-power government attorneys. We also
found an article Safiya wrote describing post-traumatic stress
disorder as a result of the government attack on the Panthers.
The first round of challenges was to choose amongst all these
materials. At first I tended to want to include everything, because
finding the items was sort of a process of discovery, and so many of
them are historic. But it was clear that what was needed was not a
recapitulation of every word Safiya had written or spoken, but rather
a selection, to reflect the development of her thinking and, more
importantly, the history of the movements she was part of. For
example, Safiya considered at various points the nature of divisions
within Left organizations, and how those allowed the government to
use provocateurs and informants to divide groups and ultimately
destroy them. She returned several times to that theme, and to the
question of how individual weaknesses played a role. She tied those
themes, again and again, to the overriding theme of how Black people
and other oppressed people can struggle for justice in this country.
No small task.
At each point, Wonda and I tried to be objective and yet faithful to
what Safiya might have wanted. She did not set out to write a book;
she was an organizer. We hope that the book will not only be
educational but also agitational--that, as Angela Davis writes in the
foreword, "readers of The War Before will commit themselves to the
campaign to bring Assata Shakur home, and to freeing Mumia, Leonard
Peltier, and every one of the human beings for whom Safiya Bukhari so
passionately gave her life."
What makes this book different than other books written by Black
Panthers?
This book is unique precisely because Safiya did not try to write a
book. The War Before consists of primary source material--Safiya's
accounts of life in the Black Panther Party as it was happening; her
thoughts and reflections at several points during her history --
rather than a retrospective summing up of the history and her
conclusions about it. Safiya's writings about the Panthers have an
in-the-moment quality that I think is similar only to Mumia
Abu-Jamal's book, We Want Freedom. Safiya allows the reader to
participate in the conclusions she is suggesting, rather than
presenting a summary of those conclusions.
The War Before is also not a polemic. Safiya considers various points
of view about the history of the liberation movements. She is above
all self-aware, self-critical, honest. She is not protecting her own
decisions and role, she is questioning those, looking for answers
rather than asserting them. Unlike many books about the 60s and 70s,
Safiya's writings assert again and again that the history of that era
is not frozen in the past. She talks intimately about the members of
the Black Panther Party who remain in prison, and how that reality
belies any sense that the battles the Panthers fought are over and
done, relics of the past. One of the most moving sections of the book
involves a discussion between Safiya and a former Panther who was
then dying in prison, Albert Nuh Washington. In the discussion, only
a few months before his death, Nuh talks about their shared history
and its significance. He, too, is re-evaluating, considering the past
as living history that continues to exert influence on what we do now
and how we see the world.
What do we learn as women about the Panthers and the Black Power
movement from this book?
In addition to a thoughtful essay on sexism and the Black Panther
Party, Safiya writes and speaks frequently about the role of women.
From those specific writings, we glean a sense of how women
influenced the Party toward programs dealing with the basic needs of
the Black community. But her writings elucidate a much deeper
importance of the role of women in the Black Power movement: She
shows that militancy is much more than standing up to U.S. state
power in demonstrations, or with guns. By the end of "The War Before"
I think readers will understand that true militancy does not exist in
how we act, but in what we struggle for--and in how consistently we
struggle. Safiya's power lay very much in her willingness to keep
fighting. She kept fighting for political prisoners when many others
had given up. As Cleo Silvers, another former Black Panther, put it,
Safiya showed not only how to be a revolutionary woman during a
revolutionary period but, more important, how to be a revolutionary
woman during a very non-revolutionary time. The other thing I think
Safiya teaches us about the role of women concerns the nature of
solidarity. The way Safiya writes about political ideals is not
abstract. What we are fighting for, she shows us, is an extension of
the best in human beings who rise out of oppression and construct
liberation. She shows us her feelings, too, and reflects a depth of
collectivity very different from what we see in other histories of
the second half of the twentieth century.
What do you think Safiya would say the most urgent issue for people
to be working on today is?
For Safiya, the continued incarceration of people like Herman Bell
and Jalil Muntaqim, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Russell Maroon Shoatz and Eddie
Conway -- former Black Panthers who remain behind bars for up to 40
years and more--demanded urgent attention and action. I think she
would say that many struggles are critical, but that if we do not
fight to release our comrades then our movements will suffer. But
from Safiya's writings you get a sense of an ongoing struggle. And I
think you get a picture of a struggle that has not been won, but has
not been lost. That is a very different sense of the history of the
Black Panther Party than you get from many other sources. So I think
that really Safiya would say, if you are fighting for justice, you
are doing the most urgent work there is to be done.
.
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