PRISON STRIKE IN ALABAMA AND THE FREE ALABAMA MOVEMENT

It's on.  The strike by incarcerated workers at an Alabama prison is scheduled to get underway on Monday.  The strikers hope the movement will spread.  During an interview with Salon, Melvin Ray, in custody at the St. Clair correctional facility explained,

“We decided that the only weapon or strategy … that we have is our labor, because that’s the only reason that we’re here.  They’re incarcerating people for the free labor....To grow the movement we have to get them to understand: You’re not giving up anything. You don’t have anything. And you’re going to gain your freedom right here....There is not even the pretense of doing anything about ‘corrections,  they’re running a slave empire...If a prison goes down for [only] a week, we may not capture another prison.  If a prison goes down for two weeks, there’s a strong possibility that you’ll capture another prison. If a prisoner strike goes down for three weeks…there’s no telling how many prisons might get in...he best-case scenario would be that every prison in the state of Alabama joins the Alabama movement – go on, shut down.”

The movement inside the prison known as the Free Alabama Movement is supported by the IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.  The IWW was approached by the Free Alabama Movement who were building themselves on the hunger strikes in Pelican Bay and Georgia with the aim of,  "building a mass nonviolent movement inside and outside of prisons to earn their freedom, and to end the racist, capitalist system of mass incarceration called The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and others."

The IWW writes:

The conditions in Alabama prisons are horrendous, packing twice as many people as are meant to be there, with everything from black mold, brown water, cancer causing foods, and general disrepair. They are also run by free, slave labor, with 10,000 people working to maintain the prisons daily, adding up to $600,000 dollars a day or $219,000,000 a year of slave labor if inmates were paid federal minimum wage, and tens of thousands more receiving mere dollars a day making products sold by the state or to private corporations.

While unique in some ways, the struggle of these brave human beings is the same as prisoners around the country, and the millions of black, brown, and working class women and men struggling to survive a system they are not meant to succeed within. These prisoners need your support, and for you to help spread the struggle.

It's a struggle with a long history. In 1901, the state of Alabama adopted a constitution , by which they created a legal structure, necessary for building an economy with “cheap labor” as its foundation.   A good source of the cheap labor Alabama decided it needed after it "lost" it's free slave labor has come from its prison system.   Inmate labor saves the state millions of dollars each year, yet the inmates receive no benefit for the labor they provide, almost no pay.

The Free Alabama Movement which is founded as a non violent organization fighting for civil and human rights lists four main issues.  These are:

• To put an end to the system of free labor within the Alabama Department of Corrections, as free labor serves no purpose towards rehabilitation and is only a slave-styled system disguised as a system of truth, justice, and punishment for crime. The reality is that free labor of Alabama’s prison system is a continuation of the enslavement and exploitation of black, brown, and poor white people. The name changed, but cheap or free slave labor is still the game.

• To put an end of inhumane living conditions, under which Alabama’s prisoners are forced to live, which stems from Alabama’s choice to warehouse large amounts of people, overpopulating all of its facilities and refusing to put the health of the inmate above cost. These type of living conditions only make incarceration (more) dangerous, and overcrowding contributes to (more) violence, disease outbreaks, and an overall unhealthy living environment. Every aspect of an inmate environment is substandard; from food and water to health care.

• To abolish life without parole sentences and expedite the process of overhauling Alabama’s current parole system; in order to release more deserving people. Life without parole is a cruel sentence which provides the inmate with no incentive to seek rehabilitation.

• To put an end to certain laws targeting certain specific race groups, which is followed by outrageous and arbitrary sentencing. One prime example is Alabama’s drive-by shooting laws, which have been codified in the capital murder statute of 13a-5-40. Studies show that Alabama, with intent, designed these laws for young black males, as when white people have committed the same exact crime, it has been renamed “road rage.” Road rage for one and a full fledged congressional act for the other. Look up Shirley Henson and Phillip Fondren. Read House Joint Resolution 575..

They also make clear what they fighting for:

• We want an end to free labor. Providing free labor deprives us, our families, and our communities of valuable resources, which should be provided to us for our labor. Putting an end would offset the many costs incurred by inmates for every service the Department of Corrections provides.

• We want an end to overcrowding and two-men/women cells. We want a reduction in the prison population, consistent with its design to “humanely” house approximately 16,000 inmates. Today it houses approximately 30,000 inmates – almost double its capacity. It has been a topic in the media for over a decade, yet there has been no effective strategy implemented. Overcrowding contributes to the inhumane living conditions, the sub-par food and water, as well as to the increase in violent altercations.

• We want control of our money and the money our families send us.

•  We want a state-wide reform in the youthful offender law and the creation of an adult first time offense law.

• We want life-without-parole sentences abolished.

 One prisoner involved in the work stoppage and who describes himself as an anarchist writes :

I’m Michael and yes, I’m locked down in one of Amerika’s many prisons in the state of Alabama. But that does not excuse me from the struggle for a better world. And I believe that anarchism is the best alternative to what exists now. I believe this without reservations. Anarchism is not about building state power, but rather, destroying the state and building new humyn relationships based on mutual aid and cooperation and freedom.

Right now there is a struggle going on in Alabama’s prisons demanding a change in the horrendous, unsanitary, and inhumane conditions in the prisons. In the prison I’m at, Holman, birds fly around the kitchen dropping bird shit on prisoners and/or their food, industrial light fixtures are falling from the ceiling injuring at least one prisoner seriously, during the winter months the showers are cold, the dorms are also cold in the winter, inadequate medical care, inadequate outdoors exercise time, inadequate nutrition, harassment of family members during visiting hours, and a host of other serious problems too numerous to list (see Justice or Just Business for more). But most of all, we are fighting and struggling for our dignity and humanity.

Prisoners have very few options against the prison system. We have the options of: (1) filing lawsuits, (2) rioting, (3) hunger strikes, (4) work strikes. These four are the most common practices used by prisoners throughout the world. A work strike is what is going down in Alabama right now. The reason a work strike was chosen is simple. To cause the state to lose the profits it rests in off of prisoners’ labor and to force them into making the changes in the conditions that’s demanded.

In January 2014, prisoners in Alabama staged a work strike demanding changes in the laws, sentencing, and prison conditions. The present work strike is a continuation of the January 2014 work strike.

The Free Alabama Movement and the IWW's Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee  ask you to:

• Create an Incarcerated Workers Solidarity Committee in your area to raise money, take action, and spread the word of this struggle, including to local prisons.

• Amplify the voices of incarcerated workers by posting this and future updates to your website, facebook, email lists, and so on

• Join our email list so as to be kept up to date and amplify future updates. Contact us at iwoc@riseup.net and like us on facebook: www.facebook.com/incarceratedworkers

• Donate money to the Free Alabama Movement & Incarcerated Workers Organizing Cmt: https://fundly.com/iww-incarcerated-workers-organizing-committee-support-the-free-alabama-movement

• Join the IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee

Contact them at iwoc@riseup.net. Solidarity and be in touch!

The IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee in partnership with the Free Alabama Movement

• https://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-alabama-movement/1428198110745581
• https://www.facebook.com/incarceratedworkers
• http://www.freealabamamovement.com
• www.iww.org

Thus for Prison Friday, Scission calls on you to support this struggle.  The following is from  Revolution News.

Incarcerated Workers Launch Nonviolent Work Strike against “New Jim Crow” across Alabama Prisons

AMERICAS, USA

Official Press Release:

Contacts: Jim Faulkner, 601-260-8127
Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, Industrial Workers of the World
iwoc@riseup.net
Ms. Antonia Brooks-Shaw, 256-783-1044
Free Alabama Movement
freealabamamovement@gmail.com

April 18, 2014

Incarcerated Workers Launch Nonviolent Work Strike against “New Jim Crow” across Alabama Prisons

Peaceful Protest Demands Wages for Labor, End to Overcrowding and Inhumane Conditions, Transformation of American Justice System

Press Conference and Rally: 4pm Saturday, April 19th, St. Clair Correctional Facility, 1000 St. Clair Road, Springville, AL 35146

BIRMINGHAM, AL– Hidden from public view by barbed-wire fences and windowless concrete walls, a movement is brewing in Alabama that could change America. This Monday, hundreds of men incarcerated in St. Clair and prisons across the state will stop work, adding economic muscle to their demands for wages for their labor, an end to overcrowding and inhumane conditions, an end to the “New Jim Crow” of mass incarceration of African-Americans, and the repurposing the prison system as a tool for genuine rehabilitation in a wounded world. The demands of the peaceful strike action are outlined in detail in the Education, Rehabilitation, and Re-Entry Preparedness Bill (FREEDOM Bill), which was presented to the state legislature by the Free Alabama Movement in January.

Melvin Ray, spokesperson for the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) said, “When we look at our situations inside of the Alabama Department of Corrections, we have no choice but to engage in this nonviolent and peaceful protest for civil and human rights. We sleep with rats and roaches. We work for free and eat slop unfit for human consumption. We serve decades in prison solely to provide free labor and without any real prospect for parole, and without any recourse to the courts for justice or redress of grievances. Our mothers, wives, and daughters must expose their breasts and panties just to visit us. This should not be acceptable to anyone. Prison is supposed to be a place where people go to work out issues and return to society. But when there is no focus on education or rehab but solely on profit margins, human suffering is inevitable. ADOC is about free labor and the new slavery no one wants to talk about. That is no longer going to work for the 30,000 of us who suffer because of it.”

The Alabama prison system is notoriously overcrowded. Built with a capacity of 16,000, the state’s penitentiaries currently imprison over 30,000 individuals, with catastrophic results for health and well-being of the incarcerated. Over 10,000 of the 30,000 men and women imprisoned by the Alabama Department of Corrections are forced into unpaid labor, in other words, slavery.

Unpaid labor includes cooking and cleaning, production of license plates, furniture, chemicals, and linens, and farming. At minimum wage, the total value of this slave labor is calculated at $600,000 per day, or $219 million per year. The slavery analogy is more than metaphorical: African-Americans comprise only 26% of Alabama’s population, but make up more than 60% of the prison population due to reactionary legislation and racist targeting of communities of color. Reports of beatings and systemic rape and sexual abuse of women inmates by guards at Tutwiler State Prison have surfaced in the media over the last year.

The men and women caught in the jaws of this infernal machine have begun uniting across racial and religious lines in a movement for systemic change. In January, FAM successfully organized a two-week strike involving over 3,000 men and women at four facilities. The strike was so effective that guards were forced to take over cleaning and cooking duties. On Monday, April 20th, the imprisoned workers plan to do it again, this time with the backing of a labor union.

The workers are supported by the Industrial Workers of the World, a storied labor union known for outside-the-box organizing strategies and for welcoming workers into its ranks that other unions exclude. The IWW has come to the aid of imprisoned workers before, bringing a petition for union recognition of a bargaining unit of four hundred incarcerated workers to the State of Ohio in 1987.

“A worker is a worker, whether in prison or not, and a group of workers is a union, whether recognized by the state or not. Incarcerated workers are some of the most exploited in the United States. We are doing everything we can do to support them, and call on all people of conscience in this country to join this movement to end the New Jim Crow and abolish the prison industrial complex,” says Jim Faulkner, a member of the IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.

The movement brewing in Alabama is part of a rising tide of resistance to racist mass incarceration in America. In December 2010, incarcerated workers in Georgia staged a strike, shutting down several prisons for weeks and demanding an end to forced prison labor. Following a smaller hunger strike in 2011, upwards of 30,000 individuals in the California prison system went on hunger strike in July 2013, protesting administrative use of solitary confinement – a practice denounced by human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch. Last month nearly 1,200 immigrant detainees in the privately-run Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington staged a hunger strike to protest poor living and working conditions. This wave of prison protest has not been limited to the United States. Prison work stoppages forced several Canadian federal prison into lock-down this past October after the Canadian government announced prison labor wage cuts.

Repression of the Free Alabama Movement has already begun. Holman prison warden Walter Meyers has told imprisoned workers that they can bring knives to work with them, and that if they stab anyone trying to stop them from working, he will make sure they won’t get locked up for long. Prison administrators at Holman and Bibbs prisons have sought to sow division and stir up prejudices by spreading an untrue rumor that the strike is being organized by Muslims, a calculated ploy to turn Christians in the prison against the movement. They have are also attempting to bribe the workers out of striking with a free barbecue provided by a local religious leader.

So far, the incarcerated workers have maintained their unity and solidarity. In the days, weeks, and months ahead, they will need all the support they can get.

Via: IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee

Note: This morning, Salon ran an interview with F.A.M founder Melvin Rey

Also, there will be a “Rally and Candlelight Vigil to Support the Non-Violent and Peaceful Protest for Civil and Human Rights for the Men and Women in Alabama’s PRISONS,” as posted on the Free Alabama Movement’s Website:

We invite all to attend this event at KELLY INGRAM PARK in Birmingham, Alabama on April 26, 2014, beginning at 3:00 p.m. until 7:00 pm. The Candlelight Vigil will begin at 6:50 p.m., as we will light candles for the men and women incarcerated. We are protesting the mass incarceration and targeting of black youth, sentencing and parole reform, free labor, and long-term incarceration without affording any opportunities for education, rehabilitation, and re-entry programs. We will have a copy of our BILL for Education, Rehabilitation and Re-Entry Preparedness, our book, t-shirts, arm bands, and more.

THE MIDWEST BLACK PANTHER 22 AND THE NEVER ENDING WAR ON THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT

And the saddest thing is that so many have spent decades locked down in those hell-holes as a result of similar nonsensical charges!!
        -----Pete O'Neal, former leader, Kansas City Chapter, Black Panther Party, from Tanzania



This is a story that is more than forty years old, but didn't come to the light of day until this week.  

I remember when I was under investigation, under indictment, and in prison  for a bombing Conspiracy in Kansas City back in the 70s watching with a certain degree of humor the obvious competition and jealousy between various federal and state law enforcement agencies.  At the federal level it was the ATF, FBI, and even the Marshal Service who seemed to resent each other almost as much as they hated the likes of us.  Everyone wanted the glory.  Everyone wanted to be seen as THE agency.  Everyone wanted the TV program to be about them.

It seemed funny.

It wasn't though, not really.

Now, we learn that the ATF in a bid to outdo the FBI and become the big cheese in bombing cases in the summer of 1970 tried to create out of the air a giant conspiracy involving various Black Panthers from across the Midwest, from Missouri, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa.  The Midwest 22 were to be the show trial for these guys.  

It didn't happen.  

We learned about this from  research and a subsequent disclosure to the Examiner of an old case file from the ATF on April 14th of this year.  

The Midwest, like every other part of the country at the time (1970) had been the scene of numerous bombings, mostly unsolved.  ATF blamed the Black Panthers.  Amongst those targeted were Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa from Omaha (These two men, the Omaha Two, were eventually charged with an Omaha bombing and have been sitting in prison unjustly - as all the evidence shows - for more than forty years now).  Others targeted included Pete O'Neal and Tommy Robinson from Kansas City, Archie Simmons and Charles Knox from Des Moines, a sixteen year old from Minneapolis and many others.

Supposedly the case never reached an indictment because of "a trend in the judiciary...away from major complex conspiracies."  Maybe, the fact that the case was a figment of  the imagination of a bunch of agents (led by ATF goons in Omaha)  also had something to do with it.  Perhaps, the fact that by 1972 when it was decided not to prosecute the Midwest 22 too much had been made public about just how nefarious the State had been in its war on dissent. Perhaps, the Justice Department figured out they were going to spend a lot of money, get a lot of bad publicity themselves, and convict no one had something to do with it as well. We will never know.

What we do know is that many, many other fighters for Black Liberation were indicted, were jailed, and still are.  We do know that.  We also know that many were murdered.  We also know about COINTELPRO.  We also know that no one who was responsible for this massive assault upon the Panthers (and others involved in the struggle for Black Liberation, in the struggles of other people of color, and even, holy white skin privilege Batman, some white radicals and revolutionaries) has really ever faced justice themselves.  That is the crime here.


Ted Glick wrote of COINTELPRO's aims and its targets,

"COINTELPRO" was the FBI's secret program to undermine the popular upsurge which swept the country during the 1960s. Though the name stands for "Counterintelligence Program," the targets were not enemy spies. The FBI set out to eliminate "radical" political opposition inside the US. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally- protected political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world.

The most intense operations were directed against the Black movement, particularly the Black Panther Party. This resulted from FBI and police racism, the Black community's lack of material resources for fighting back, and the tendency of the media--and whites in general--to ignore or tolerate attacks on Black groups. It also reflected government and corporate fear of the Black movement because of its militance, its broad domestic base and international support, and its historic role in galvanizing the entire Sixties' upsurge. Many other activists who organized against US intervention abroad or for racial, gender or class justice at home also came under covert attack. The targets were in no way limited to those who used physical force or took up arms. Martin Luther King, David Dellinger, Phillip Berrigan and other leading pacifists were high on the list, as were projects directly protected by the Bill of Rights, such as alternative newspapers.

The Black Panthers came under attack at a time when their work featured free food and health care and community control of schools and police, and when they carried guns only for deterrent and symbolic purposes. It was the terrorism of the FBI and police that eventually provoked the Panthers to retaliate with the armed actions that later were cited to justify their repression.

In fact, according to a PBS documentary on Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton   of the 295 documented actions taken by COINTELPRO to disrupt Black organizations, 233 were directed against the Black Panther Party.



We learned about Cointelpro, by the way after a number of activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania looking for draft records and the like, and made off with loads of documents.  They discovered that amongst the documents were those  that revealed this massive abuse of power.


The following is from The Final Call.

America's War Against Black Power

BY CHARLENE MUHAMMAD -NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT- 

(FinalCall.com) - Human rights activists are calling on the government to grant amnesty and unconditional freedom to all political prisoners incarcerated because of COINTELPRO, a secret federal law enforcement program that destroyed Black and dissident organizations in the 1960s and 1970s.

Men and women who sacrificed their lives so others could enjoy civil liberties and human rights in America are now aging and suffering failing health as they languish in prison, some for 40 years, and many in solitary confinement cells, unfit even for dogs, said their advocates.

It is imperative that those they fought for remember and fight for them, said the activists.

J. Edgar Hoover, former head of the FBI, began the covert, illegalCounterIntelligence Program in 1956 to destroy militant organizations.

The National Jericho Movement, which advocates for political prisoners inside the United States, wants emergency congressional hearings on the impact and continuing legacy of America’s domestic war against soldiers in the Black Liberation Struggle. It also wants political prisoners released and some activists want the freedom fighters compensated for their unjust suffering.

“The effort to try to expose the horrible impact of the FBI’s CounterIntelligence Program has been an ongoing thing,” said Jihad Abdulmumit, chair of the National Jericho Movement. That exposure undergirds Jericho’s push for the congressional hearings. Although Mr. Hoover announced in 1971 that COINTELPRO had ended after the anonymous Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI exposed the program, secret government operations, set-ups, stool pigeon operations and political assassinations continue today, activists warned.

“COINTELPRO by any other name is still COINTELPRO. … Homeland Security as an institution of the United States security now, the Patriot Act, the Anti-Terrorism Effective Death Penalty Act I and II—all of this now has really led up to still what we have today as a CounterIntelligence Program and the War on Terrorism,” Mr. Abdulmumit told The Final Call.

The online petition, “Jericho: Congressional Hearing on Cointelpro’s Legacy and Continuing Impact,” is part of Jericho’s attempts to educate people and have the U.S. government revisit COINTELPRO’s continuing legacy.

In this April 6, 2005 file photo, Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt speaks during funeral services for attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. at the West Angeles Cathedral in Los Angeles.

In the future, the group plans to deliver the petitions to Congressional Black Caucus members and the record of a 2011 Peoples’ Tribunal Hearings on COINTELPRO. Organizers hope the campaign will inspire Black Caucus members to speak up for political prisoners. They also hope to send 100,000 signatures to the Obama administration before he leaves office.

The Time and What Must Be Done

In the 1960s and 1970s era of COINTELPRO, and actually going back to the 1930s, Black leaders, activists and the community knew they were under attack and fought back, often through self-help and independent education campaigns, according to Mr. Abdulmumit.

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad introduced a Black Self-Help Program and Economic Blueprint to promote independence through pooling resources and building businesses. He opened schools to educate Muslims and children in the Black community. The Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for children and armed self-defense programs in response to deadly police brutality. 

Today in the “age of Obama,” the lines are blurred, Mr. Abdulmumit noted. The painful question Blacks must raise is how did they, after making so much progress in conscious and collective action, let that culture slip right from their hands? he noted. 

Black leaders have become beguiled by materialism, the former slave master’s system and they’ve taken their eyes off the future, said Mr. Abdulmumit.

A plan by Senators Richard “Dick” Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) sought $30 million to arrest and imprison 18,000 so-called members of the Gangster Disciples street organization and were opposed notably by Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church on Chicago’s Southside.

“That you would marshal the forces of the federal government, and come into our community and sweep 18,000 so-called members of the Gangster Disciples—and you’ve already carved out a prison that you could put them in?  How many of you have ever sat down to think of how you can solve the problem by creating jobs and employment for the young people in the inner-cities of America, particularly Chicago and Los Angeles?” Minister Farrakhan asked.

Assata Shakur

The proposal out of Chicago absolutely speaks to the evolution of COINTELPRO, Mr. Abdulmumit argued. There is no revolutionary culture as such in the U.S. as was in the 60s and the 70s, but there is still a massive powder keg and that’s Black youth today, he said. “The effort of the government and the forces that be has always been to make sure that this powder keg mass, its consciousness is never awakened, so what’s happened is that vacuum that’s been created is the demise of a lot of these revolutionary organizations either through death or imprisonment over time.”

We want freedom

Some political prisoners targeted by COINTELPRO are more well-known than others, partly because of efforts like the FBI’s million-dollar bounty against Assata Shakur, who is exiled in Cuba. Ms. Shakur, a Black Liberation Army member, has been living in exile since 1984 after she escaped from prison in 1979. Ms. Shakur, formerly known as Joanne Chesimard was convicted of murdering a New Jersey State Trooper in 1977, but she has maintained her innocence. Her supporters have denounced the FBI’s $2 million bounty and listing her as an armed and dangerous terrorist.

The late Geronimo “ji-Jaga” Pratt, a Vietnam War veteran and high-ranking leader of the Black Panther Party, served 27 years in prison and after a long-fought legal battle forced his release in 1997. His wrongful conviction for murdering a White couple was shown to be a set-up tied to a government informant.

Imam Jamil al-Amin

There’s Jalil Muntaqim, co-founder of the Jericho Amnesty Movement, a former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member. He was convicted of killing two police officers in New York and has spent 42 years in prison. Supporters are pushing an online petition to Tina Stanford, chairwoman of the New York Board of Parole, seeking his parole this year. 

There’s Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin whom supporters argue was wrongfully convicted in the 2000 shooting of two Fulton County deputies, one died, in Atlanta. He is serving life in a federal Super-Max underground prison in Colorado. 

The incarceration of Imam Al-Amin, former Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown, represents COINTELPRO finally “getting their man” in a ridiculous case where someone confessed to the crime, but the FBI will not acknowledge the confession, Mr. Abdulmumit said.

Nearly six months after his 70th birthday, Russell Maroon Shoatz was recently released from solitary confinement under court order and after the involvement of United Nations Rapporteur Juan Mendez on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment and Punishment.  His release ended more than 22 consecutive years in isolation. The former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member was convicted of murdering a cop in Pennsylvania and sentenced to life imprisonment.

On December 7, 2011, prosecutors announced they were dropping their quest for the death penalty for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist and former Black Panther, convicted in 1981 on charges of killing a police officer in Philadelphia. 

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mr. Abu-Jamal was removed from death row after his case was taken to the Supreme Court on appeal. He’s now jailed for life without the possibility of parole, but his supporters remain vigilant in their fight for his release and exoneration.

Marshall Eddie Conway, another former Black Panther Party member, was recently released due to a faulty jury instruction after serving 44 years in prison in solitary confinement. “An error in the jury instructions is a far step away from saying that Eddie Conway is a freedom fighter, which he is in our book, and he should be released on that alone,” Mr. Abdulmumit said.

“Our position is that we should be released on the fact of we were political prisoners and victims of this counterintelligence, victims of these conditions. We are freedom fighters … just like Nelson Mandela. Just like people are celebrating him as a hero now, that’s how our political prisoners should be treated.”

Many feel that’s naïve or unachievable but it’s Jericho’s position and battle, and God knows best, he continued.

Activists say getting fighters who are dying in prison out remains paramount, especially cases based on contradictions and injustices thanks to lawyers like Bob Boyle, Soffiyah Elijah, Lynne Stewart and others. 

Herman Wallace, diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, died at age 71, less than a week after being released from prison. He was one of the Angola 3 convicted of stabbing a prison guard.  He served more than four tortuous decades in solitary confinement in a Louisiana prison, but maintained his innocence until his death. Mr. Wallace and Albert Woodfox said they were targeted for helping to set up a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party at Angola State Prison in 1971. International supporters of the Angola 3 are still fighting for Mr. Woodfox’s release.

Activist Efia Nwangaza, director of the Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination in Greenville, S.C., feels America must not only remedy wrongs against political prisoners, but also compensate victims and survivors of government plots and targeting.

Jericho’s list includes hundreds and many are Muslims, according to Mr. Abdulmumit. It also includes Native American freedom fighter Leonard Peltier,  Oscar Lopez Rivera and other Puerto Rican nationalists, as well as some White anti-imperialists, he said.

“It’s important that we keep that challenge before the U.S. government kind of the way that the Jewish community keeps before the public the wrongs that it suffered at the hands of the Germans and its holocaust. We must be as vigilant in reminding our oppressors of the wrongs of our holocaust or Maafa as we call it.”

Unfortunately, the often apathetic response to U.S. political prisoners, the notion they must have done something wrong if they’re behind bars, is symptomatic of the pathology living under White Supremacy engenders, Ms. Nwangaza said.

But what’s worse, she continued, is most Blacks aren’t aware of COINTELPRO or the existence of political prisoners. Many are blinded by a harsh, daily economic, social and political struggle to survive, others embrace willful ignorance, she noted.

“It’s sort of like the question of reparations. As we get generations away from the actual violation of the holocaust of enslavement, the less we know about it and therefore the less we are outraged by it and the less we feel entitled to compensation for it,” Ms. Nwangaza continued.

Most aging political prisoners are enduring excessive sentences, disproportionately held in solitary confinement, suffering from severe illnesses and prisons are not responding to their needs, activists added.

There must also be an investigation into deaths that occurred during the COINTELPRO-civil rights-Black Power era, activists said.

Harry Farrell peers out from between Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale in a photo that became a Black Panther poster. Photo: AP/Wide World photos

“Who killed Bobby Hutton? And whatever was done about that?” asked Ms. Nwangaza. Bobby Hutton was a teenage member of Panther Party killed in California. Likewise the 1969 killings of Chicago Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the relationship to the larger national campaign of the U.S. government must never be forgotten, she said. The dynamic leader Hampton and comrade Clark died in a hail of bullets fired into their West Side apartment. The Panthers were asleep, drugged by a sedative put in their drinks by an informant, activists have long charged. “While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: that the FBI, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton,” said Juan Gonzalez in a broadcast of the news program Democracy Now in 2009. The program marked the 40th anniversary of Black Panther Fred Hampton’s death.

JUAN VAZQUEZ GUZMAN LIVES: A CALL FOR GLOBAL ACTION

On 24 April, 2013, Juan Vázquez Guzmán, indigenous Tzeltal, aged only 32, father of two small children aged four and seven, human rights defender and much-loved community leader, was gunned down in the doorway of his home. The territory and community for which Juan gave his life was the communal landholding (ejido) of San Sebastián Bachajón, in the jungle region of the state of Chiapas in South-East Mexico. 

Juan was the Secretary General of the adherents to the Sixth in San Sebastián Bachajón, Chilón municipality.

At the time of his assassination neighbors said  that Juan was attacked just when he was arriving at his home, and the attackers escaped aboard a red double-cabin pickup truck, which took the highway that leads to the Sitalá municipal headquarters.

Describing what led up to his murder the  Wellington, New Zealand Zapatista Support Committee wrote:

Since 2007, the ejidatarios of San Sebastián Bachajón have suffered violence and repression at the hands of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-backed authorities and paramilitary organizations. Their resistance to the take-over of Tzeltal traditional lands for transnational projects, particularly the site of the Agua Azul waterfalls which the ejidatarios have been responsibly and sustainably managing for many years, has placed them squarely in the firing line of those who seek to dispossess them of their lands for commercial gain.

Concerted attempts to break up the community and its resistance began in 2009, with the detention of eight ejidatarios and adherents to the Other Campaign by state and federal police, and the arrest and vicious assault of Ricardo Lagunes at a PRI paramilitary checkpoint after he left a meeting in Bachajón. Two years later in 2011, 117 ejidatarios were arbitrarily detained by police during an eviction attempt at the toll booth at the entrance to the Agua Azul area. Ten, including Pérez Álvaro, remained political prisoners for an extended period of time.

Physical violence and repression have been coupled with legal and judicial abuses, including court decisions denying the rights of ejidatarios, and their arrests and eviction in 2011 enabling authorities to take control of the collectively-owned lands.

The ongoing assaults on Bachajón autonomy culminated on the night of April 24, 2013 in the assassination of Juan Vázquez Guzmán in the doorway of his home.

Last July, the Fray Bartolome de Las Casas Center for Human Rights (CDHFBC) released a statement in which it stressed that,

“Juan Vázquez together with thousands of ejidatarios who adhere to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle have distinguished themselves through their struggle for the defense of territory, despite the reprisals of the Mexican government by means of the legal repression of their process toward autonomy.  It is important to stress that before the murder of Juan Vázquez, a branch of the large tree of the conscious and dignified struggle of the Ch’ol and Tseltal peoples of the region had been cut.  However, this branch has left its remnants and pathway which has eased the process and sprouts elesewhere in other struggles and comrades who join the defense of their people in the construction of autonomy and self-determination for life: a life that flows through the rivers, the wind of the jungle, smell of dignity that is inspired in each breath taken by humanity.”

On March 21st, 2014, Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano, aged only 22, was shot down.  At the time of his death, he held the post of regional Coordinator of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle for the ejido San Sebastián Bachajón and was the father of a baby aged six months.


A Communiqué from the Ejido San Sebastian Bachajon, Adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas Mexicoa read in part,

They, those from above, think they know how to damage our rebellion, they are almost certain that by ravaging our compañerxs, tearing up their bodies, they will spread fear and terror and we will stop fighting. We, those from below, we think that dignity, strength, and fighting in the defence of the reproduction of life have deep roots, and cannot be finished off with bullets because the body is something other, it is a collective body, remembering our dead not with nostalgia but by naming them when walking in confrontation against the bad government and the economic groups who exploit, dispossess, despise and repress us.

Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano was killed yesterday, March 21^st, in the official municipality of Chilón in the state of Chiapas, trying to stain the spring with blood. They pierced his body with more than twenty bullets of power, bullets of profit, bullets of deception, the bullets of the war against the people which does not end. But they have not killed his history of struggle.

Since we founded the communities of Nah Choj and Virgen de Dolores in 2010, our organization has been harassed at various times by the army and state preventive police, threatening us with eviction because of pressures from those who say they are the owners of the property, among them a former municipal president of Chilón, fomenting division and buying the consciences of some ex compañeros with their crumbs, like they did with Carmen Aguilar Gómez and his son of the same name who, when he sold out to Noé Castañón León, the Secretary of Government of Juan Sabines Guerrero, organized for the eviction of our ticket booth on February 2, 2011 and dispossessed us of our lands in complicity with the ex ejidal commissioner of San Sebastián Bachajón Francisco Guzmán Jiménez (alias el goyito).

The bad government wants to finish us off completely by assassinating our compañeros, like they did with Juan Vázquez Guzmán on April 24, 2013, using their paramilitary gunmen, who with complete impunity, whether by night or in the full light of day, are capable of vilely murdering our compañeros who are working and struggling to construct a world in which other worlds fit, and who are daily resisting the attacks of the capitalist system which wants to make us disappear so they can take over our mother earth, water, rivers, waterfalls and all that will serve to make them more money at the cost of our lives and suffering.

The real criminals, assassins and corrupt ones are the party politicians who, despite reaching their position through fraud and buying votes, consider that they are the owners of all that exists in our lands. Every day they want to get richer and it doesn’t matter how many indigenous they have to kill to achieve this. Like the current mayor of Chilón, Leonardo Guirao Aguilar, a member of the Green Ecologist Party, and one of the authors of the dispossession of our lands, because he financed the weapons of the group led by Carmen Aguilar Gómez the elder, Juan Alvaro Gómez and Manuel Jiménez who evicted our compañeros from the ticket booth in February 2011.

There is now a call for a worldwide action this month in the names of these men and to demonstrate that there is nothing that the State, Global Capital, or anyone else can do to stop the struggle of the world's multitudes.  At the same time the action will demand justice for the deaths of these two men, and many others like them.

The following is from The Flower of the World Will Not Die.

Call for the “Two Weeks of Worldwide Action: Juan Vázquez Guzmán lives! The Bachajón struggle continues!”

From Thursday, April 24th to Thursday, May 8th, 2014
 

To our sisters and brothers of the ejido San Sebastián Bachajón:

To our compañer@s adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón
Jungle:

To our Zapatista sisters and brothers:

To the people of Mexico and the world:

To the independent media:

To the Committees of the True Word:

Movement for Justice in El Barrio, Dorset Chiapas Solidarity Group, the Committee of the True Word from Kolkata, India and the Committee of the True Word from Alisal propose that we join together our hands, our voices and our struggles to carry out the

“Two Weeks of Worldwide Action: Juan Vázquez Guzmán lives! The Bachajón
struggle continues!” from Thursday, April 24th to Thursday, May 8th, 2014

This initiative is supported by the ejidatarios of San Sebastián Bachajón, adherents to the Sixth.

Compañeras and Compañeros:

We send you greetings and embraces from New York, Dorset, Kolkata and Alisal.

On April 24th, 2014, it will be a year since the cruel and cowardly assassination of our beloved compañero Juan Vázquez Guzmán, activist, community leader and spokesperson for the indigenous Tzeltal community of the ejido San Sebastián Bachajón, in the municipality of Chilón, Chiapas, Mexico. He was killed by six gunshots in the doorway of his home.

Still there is no justice. There has been no effective investigation into his murder, and Juan’s killers and those who ordered his execution remain safe in impunity. Meanwhile the efforts continue to dispossess Juan’s people, the ejidatarios adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle from the ejido San Sebastián Bachajón.

The three levels of government, with their army, their police, their allies in transnational corporations, their locally-funded paramilitary groups and their lackeys from the political parties, do not cease their attacks and their plundering, using deceptions and lies, threats,violence, imprisonment, torture and even murder to achieve their ambition to seize the ancestral common lands of the ejido in order to construct a luxury tourist complex beside the beautiful waterfalls of Agua Azul.

Now there has been a second assassination, another vile attempt to force our compañer@s to give up their just and dignified struggle and resistance.  On March 21st, 2014, Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano, aged only 22, was shot down with over twenty bullets. Juan Carlos worked in the construction of autonomy in the recuperated land of the Virgen de Dolores. He was a regional coordinator of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle of the ejido San Sebastián Bachajón. No one has been arrested or charged with his murder. We respond with sorrow, but also with rage.

We demand justice! The killers must not remain unpunished! No more impunity!

Compañeras and Compañeros,

Although the war against the people does not end, neither does the resistance of those from below.

Despite the continuing racist repression directed against the original people of these lands, despite displacement and occupation, aggression and murder, the tireless struggle of the indigenous Tzeltal people of Bachajón to defend the basis of their life, the mother earth, the land and the territory, also has no end.

The ejidatarios will not give up their common lands, which they inherited from their grandparents, so they can be used for the building of hotels and golf courses, roads and helipads. They will not allow the mother earth and her richness of nature, jungle and water, to be destroyed by the greed and rapacity of those who would be lords of all.

For our sisters and brothers in struggle from San Sebastián Bachajón, Juan Vázquez Guzmán still lives, he is still there beside them, fighting, so they can never give up their resistance. He often told them that their struggle was “for the life of the people and to continue being what we are”.

Juan Vázquez Guzmán denounced repression and corruption everywhere, and he fought for the rights of his people and for the liberation of their prisoners. On a national and international level he made people aware of the threat to the lands of Bachajón from those from above and their plans to build an “eco” tourist megaproject.

His words had strength and his vision and heart were free from fear in the struggle for the defense of the territory. We remember his warm smile, his contagious laughter, his love for the land and the people and his commitment to the creation of another world.

But the capitalists, the governments and the corporations, in their greed for more money, more plunder, more profit, plan to destroy the whole of the mother earth, and to rip out the heart of the planet. They want to turn the water, the trees, the earth, the air into commodities. It is only the organized resistance of the autonomous communities, from below and to the left, against the wars and the destruction of our natural resources, which can save the mother earth for our children.

Compañeras and Compañeros,

We call on all people of good heart and all the children of the earth who strive, day after day, to construct another, better, world, one with freedom, justice, respect and dignity, each according to their own customs, ways, times, and geographies:

1.     To carry out the “Two Weeks of Worldwide Action: Juan Vázquez Guzmán lives! The Bachajón struggle continues!” from Thursday, April 24th to Thursday, May 8th, 2014

2.     To show our solidarity with the just and dignified struggle against dispossession of the women, men, children and elderly of the ejido San Sebastián Bachajón

3.     To screen the film Bachajón – Dispossession is death, Life is resistance, available in Spanish and with English subtitles, in as many countries and places and as many times as possible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJkVziBk214

4.     To keep alive the memory of Juan Vázquez Guzmán and to commemorate  the anniversary of his savage assassination on April 24th, 2014, along with his compas, who here invite us to join them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqvq9SSiGrw

5.     To organize any other solidarity activities that you may choose, in your own places and according to your own different methods of struggle

We ask you to please let us know as soon as possible if you are able to accept our proposal and if you will be able to participate in the “Two Weeks of Worldwide Action: Juan Vázquez Guzmán lives! The Bachajón struggle continues!” from Thursday, April 24th to Thursday, May 8th, 2014

Please confirm your participation by email to: laotrany@yahoo.com

Juan Vázquez Guzmán, beloved compa, we embrace you. We will always be thankful to you for having given so much inspiration to each of us in our own struggles.

You are the heart of your people, and you gave your life for your people.

Your life is like a seed of hope that is growing in the hearts of every child, woman, man and old person from San Sebastián Bachajón and in the hearts of compañeras and compañeros from around the world.

We believe that everyone should know of your dignified life and the dignified resistance of your people.

We demand a full investigation of your assassination, and punishment of those responsible.

Your voice will not be silenced, nor will the work of your heart be ended.

Juan Vázquez Guzmán, beloved compa and brother, guardian of the land, the struggle continues.

Land, Freedom and Justice for the Ejidatarios of San Sebastián Bachajón!

Stop the aggressions against the adherents to the Sexta!

No more impunity!

No more forgetting!

Juan Vázquez Guzmán Lives!

Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano Lives!

The Bachajón struggle continues!

With love and solidarity,

Movement for Justice in El Barrio, Dorset Chiapas Solidarity Group, the Committee of the True Word from Kolkata, India and the Committee of the True Word from Alisal

For further information in English:
http://vivabachajon.wordpress.com/en-ingles/