Saturday, November 17, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
LifePieces To Masterpieces
I have decided to start spotlighting organizations that are in line with what I consider: Seeking truth. They are doing a fantastic job creating support for young black men.
Check out their website: www.lifepieces.org
Life Pieces to Masterpieces was founded in the summer of 1996 by youth advocate, Mary Brown, and native Washingtonian and professional artist, Larry B. Quick. Started primarily as an arts organization, with seven young participants on a shoestring budget, LPTM took its name from the unique style of art the participants (called apprentices) collectively created. The technique of painting canvas, cutting it into various shapes, and sewing the pieces together allowed them to tell their powerful stories. This innovative form of art encouraged the apprentices to process challenging life experiences and served as a metaphor for positive development – the “masterpiece.”
Check out their website: www.lifepieces.org
Life Pieces to Masterpieces was founded in the summer of 1996 by youth advocate, Mary Brown, and native Washingtonian and professional artist, Larry B. Quick. Started primarily as an arts organization, with seven young participants on a shoestring budget, LPTM took its name from the unique style of art the participants (called apprentices) collectively created. The technique of painting canvas, cutting it into various shapes, and sewing the pieces together allowed them to tell their powerful stories. This innovative form of art encouraged the apprentices to process challenging life experiences and served as a metaphor for positive development – the “masterpiece.”
Since its inception, Life Pieces to Masterpieces has grown into a multi-faceted developmental organization whose mission is actualized on a daily basis via the use of a unique and effective 4-part Human Development System (referred to as LPTM Basics.) It is through these “basics” – PURPOSE, PREMISE, PROCESS, and DECISION-MAKING TOOL that we give rise to a generation of youth and future adults who will influence positive change and demonstrate social responsibility.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Reading List/ Update
I went to the Capital Book Festival. I spent most of my time at the panels. The highlight was Ethelbert's interview. I didn't particularly care for the interviewer... not sure who she was but nonetheless I didn't feel like she quite fit the bill.
I was in a particularly introverted mood so I bought a few books which include the following:
CHE: A Revolutionary Life
Jon Lee Anderson
** I just got done reading Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevaras Last Mission by Richard Harris
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde ( about 300 poems... thank God I was breezing through her other books. I highly recommed Sister Outsider & Undersong)
The Listening:
Kyle Dargan
He has a new book: A bouquet of Hungers
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation
Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton
Other Books I have collected over the last few weeks:
Where are the Love Poems for Dictators
Whispers, Secrets and Promises
Ethelbert Miller
For Colored Girls who have considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf
A Choreopoem by Ntozake Shange
Impossible Flying:
Kwame Dawes
****
I was also able to unpack most of my books
I busted out a few oldies that I love
The Seagull
Anton Chekhov
translated by Tom Stoppard
Oh yeah,
The Maverick Room
Thomas Sayers Ellis
* I went to his reading at University of Maryland last week.
I was in a particularly introverted mood so I bought a few books which include the following:
CHE: A Revolutionary Life
Jon Lee Anderson
** I just got done reading Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevaras Last Mission by Richard Harris
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde ( about 300 poems... thank God I was breezing through her other books. I highly recommed Sister Outsider & Undersong)
The Listening:
Kyle Dargan
He has a new book: A bouquet of Hungers
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation
Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton
Other Books I have collected over the last few weeks:
Where are the Love Poems for Dictators
Whispers, Secrets and Promises
Ethelbert Miller
For Colored Girls who have considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf
A Choreopoem by Ntozake Shange
Impossible Flying:
Kwame Dawes
****
I was also able to unpack most of my books
I busted out a few oldies that I love
The Seagull
Anton Chekhov
translated by Tom Stoppard
Oh yeah,
The Maverick Room
Thomas Sayers Ellis
* I went to his reading at University of Maryland last week.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Selective Outrage- Mumia Abu-Jamal
SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal
"Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned and
demonstrated, among other things, to get the racist
power structure of America to right the wrongs which
have been historically perpetrated against Black
people. All of these efforts have been answered by more
repression, deceit, and hypocrisy.... City Hall turns a
deaf ear to the pleas of Black people for relief from
this increasing terror."
--Dr. Huey P. Newton, Ph. D., Minister of Defense,
Black Panther Party, _To Die for the People_ (1973)
The much-ballyhooed recent concert held in the Meadowlands,
New Jersey has become the food for many a newspaper or radio
station, hungry for the stuff of spectacle. The musicians were
assaulted by a litany of complaints, and were vilified by police
and their political agents, on the basis that for such musicians
to dare speak out in the interest of fairness and justice for a
man encaged on Death Row, was some kind of violation.
Politicians raged and sputtered, and lamented that the First
Amendment to the Constitution would not allow them to stop the
proposed concert. Why did that so-very-hallowed constitutional
principle hold when the players wanted to play, but ignored when
the young people and organizers wanted to pass out or sell
information? How special is the First Amendment? It isn't.
To the brave and principled groups which dared to play in
the bared fangs of the state's hostility, we must all send our
salutes and our kudos. They have done something that was truly
remarkable.
To the state, we must send our hisses, and wonder at their
strange sense of Selective Outrage.
When a group of young college students were enroute to
Central State University, and were shot by a cabal of state
troopers after being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, where
was the outrage?
When young men are shot by cops in the streets of Newark,
Camden, Asbury Park or any other city where Black people live,
where was the outrage?
The monstrous disparity between the state's funding for
students of poor people in Camden, and the children of wealth and
means in Princeton at primary and secondary levels--where is the
outrage?
The recent street murder of Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo
while standing in his Bronx doorway, where cops fired over 40
shots at an _unarmed man_, at which time the state's propaganda
forces of the white supremacist press called for "calm", a "wait-
and-see" attitude, --Where is the Outrage?
Given the recent attacks on poor and Black folks around the
nation, who are the unarmed victims of paramilitary police power,
who are blown into oblivion by the police with utter impunity--
where is the outrage?
If one examines these and other instances, one finds that
there is no outrage, for it is not outrageous for the political
and economic elite when Black and poor people are summarily
executed by the state. This is exactly what is to be expected. It
is nothing exceptional. It is their warped _status quo_.
When this occurs, there is no outrage. It is expectation. It
is simply the accepted way of how things are.
When people stand up to this system, when they unite against
the morbid forces of death, while the press bays "outrage" they
really reflect concern and anxiety at the unity of people, who
they think should be divided against each other.
The unity of the people is the greatest weapon against the
system's works.
Therefore, our unity is so important. Therefore, our unity
is attacked.
What makes this event so truly remarkable still, is that it
exists in the face of vicious, unprincipled, and naked attacks on
all of those on Death Row, not just one man. Several years ago,
the state and federal government cut all funding to all post-
conviction legal services to all men and women on Pennsylvania's
Death Row. They are now completely undefended, and at the "tender
mercies" of the state that wishes to kill them. That so many good
people would assemble to assist the defense of just one of that
number, is an act of resistance to the system that would deny any
meaningful defense to them _all_.
There should be outrage, against a system that dares to call
such a perverted system a fair one. There should be outrage,
against those who sit in silence when the rights of any are
denied. There should be a swelling sense of outrage, at the
system that cries alligator tears when one man is defended, and
209 men and women remain undefended.
The death penalty is an outrage, one kept in operation by a
conspiracy of state terror, a bare shadow of "defense", and the
vicious political will of base prosecutors who care more for
their career than what is truly just.
It is an outrage. Isn't it?
copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal
"Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned and
demonstrated, among other things, to get the racist
power structure of America to right the wrongs which
have been historically perpetrated against Black
people. All of these efforts have been answered by more
repression, deceit, and hypocrisy.... City Hall turns a
deaf ear to the pleas of Black people for relief from
this increasing terror."
--Dr. Huey P. Newton, Ph. D., Minister of Defense,
Black Panther Party, _To Die for the People_ (1973)
The much-ballyhooed recent concert held in the Meadowlands,
New Jersey has become the food for many a newspaper or radio
station, hungry for the stuff of spectacle. The musicians were
assaulted by a litany of complaints, and were vilified by police
and their political agents, on the basis that for such musicians
to dare speak out in the interest of fairness and justice for a
man encaged on Death Row, was some kind of violation.
Politicians raged and sputtered, and lamented that the First
Amendment to the Constitution would not allow them to stop the
proposed concert. Why did that so-very-hallowed constitutional
principle hold when the players wanted to play, but ignored when
the young people and organizers wanted to pass out or sell
information? How special is the First Amendment? It isn't.
To the brave and principled groups which dared to play in
the bared fangs of the state's hostility, we must all send our
salutes and our kudos. They have done something that was truly
remarkable.
To the state, we must send our hisses, and wonder at their
strange sense of Selective Outrage.
When a group of young college students were enroute to
Central State University, and were shot by a cabal of state
troopers after being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, where
was the outrage?
When young men are shot by cops in the streets of Newark,
Camden, Asbury Park or any other city where Black people live,
where was the outrage?
The monstrous disparity between the state's funding for
students of poor people in Camden, and the children of wealth and
means in Princeton at primary and secondary levels--where is the
outrage?
The recent street murder of Guinean immigrant, Amadou Diallo
while standing in his Bronx doorway, where cops fired over 40
shots at an _unarmed man_, at which time the state's propaganda
forces of the white supremacist press called for "calm", a "wait-
and-see" attitude, --Where is the Outrage?
Given the recent attacks on poor and Black folks around the
nation, who are the unarmed victims of paramilitary police power,
who are blown into oblivion by the police with utter impunity--
where is the outrage?
If one examines these and other instances, one finds that
there is no outrage, for it is not outrageous for the political
and economic elite when Black and poor people are summarily
executed by the state. This is exactly what is to be expected. It
is nothing exceptional. It is their warped _status quo_.
When this occurs, there is no outrage. It is expectation. It
is simply the accepted way of how things are.
When people stand up to this system, when they unite against
the morbid forces of death, while the press bays "outrage" they
really reflect concern and anxiety at the unity of people, who
they think should be divided against each other.
The unity of the people is the greatest weapon against the
system's works.
Therefore, our unity is so important. Therefore, our unity
is attacked.
What makes this event so truly remarkable still, is that it
exists in the face of vicious, unprincipled, and naked attacks on
all of those on Death Row, not just one man. Several years ago,
the state and federal government cut all funding to all post-
conviction legal services to all men and women on Pennsylvania's
Death Row. They are now completely undefended, and at the "tender
mercies" of the state that wishes to kill them. That so many good
people would assemble to assist the defense of just one of that
number, is an act of resistance to the system that would deny any
meaningful defense to them _all_.
There should be outrage, against a system that dares to call
such a perverted system a fair one. There should be outrage,
against those who sit in silence when the rights of any are
denied. There should be a swelling sense of outrage, at the
system that cries alligator tears when one man is defended, and
209 men and women remain undefended.
The death penalty is an outrage, one kept in operation by a
conspiracy of state terror, a bare shadow of "defense", and the
vicious political will of base prosecutors who care more for
their career than what is truly just.
It is an outrage. Isn't it?
Sunday, May 27, 2007
greater than race-
"On the question of racial discrimination, the Addis Ababa summit conference taught, to those who will learn, this further lesson : that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently dicredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation; that until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race; that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but fleeting illusions, to be pursued but never attained. And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in sub-human bondage have been toppled and destroyed; until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil. The basis of racial discrimination and colonialism has been economic, and it is with economic weapons that these evils have been and can be overcome. In pursuance of resolutions adopted at the Addis Ababa summit conference, African states have undertaken certain measures in the economic field which, if adopted by all member states of the United Nations, would soon reduce intransigeance to reason. I ask, today, for adherence to these measures by every nation represented here which is truly devoted to the principles enunciated in the charter. We must act while we can, while the occasion exists to exert those legitimate pressures available to us lest time run out and resort be had to less happy means. The great nations of the world would do well to remember that in the modern age even their own fates are not wholely in their hands. Peace demands the united efforts of us all. Who can foresee what spark might ignite the fuse? The stake of each one of us is identical-life or death. We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us. The problems which confront us today are, equally, unprecedented. They have no counterparts in human experience. Men search the pages of history for solutions, for precedents, but there are none. This then, is the ultimate challenge. Where are we to look for our survival, for the answers to the questions which have never before been posed? We must look, first, to the Almighty God, Who has raised man above the animals and endowed him with intelligence and reason. We must put our faith in Him, that He will not desert us or permit us to destroy humanity which He created in His image. And we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been : more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."
Haile Selassie I 4 October 1963 United Nations, New York.
Haile Selassie I 4 October 1963 United Nations, New York.
Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson
PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2003)
Website Below:
http://www.proudfleshjournal.com/vol1.2/brown.html
Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson
Elaine Brown
It was two days before his assassination at San Quentin prison, on August 21, 1971, that I saw George Jackson for the last time. He blew me a kiss through the glass divider between us, until the next visit. The radio news commentaries in the early afternoon of August 21st were scattered but wild, reporting a melee had broken out at San Quentin between guards and prisoners. There was no doubt George, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, was at the center of it, attacked, again. He would resist their assault, again. He could not die, I believed. Even shackled, as he always appeared by then, he was more powerful than the reactionaries. They could not kill him. At the end of the day, several guards would be killed, their throats slit.
That night, though, I felt an inexplicable wind that I imagined was George Jackson soaring, free. They had claimed his life that day, but death had not contained him. The spirit of the people was greater than the Man’s technology, we sloganized. The spirit of George lived.
His death became palpable when I accompanied his mother, Georgia, to the mortuary days later, after San Quentin’s pigs finally released the remains. He was her first son, who had been her only son for that last year, the second to die in one year. His younger brother, Jonathan, had been shot down at 17 years old in a valiant attempt to free him. Georgia came to the mortuary with an agenda, to see with her own eyes what they had done to him, to see the wounds, perhaps to touch or heal them, to bring him back to life, Mary at the feet of Jesus. The scalp had been pulled back, the mortician said, rendering the body unfit for viewing. She finally shrugged, resigned, with blood in her eyes, which would become the title of George’s posthumously published book, and demanded photographs be taken. Photographs were taken of the body, of the head that held the brain and the brilliance, now smashed by bullets.
As I have recounted and recalled for all these years, the most distressing moment came in purchasing the clothes for the massive frame of George Jackson. There were the black pants, accessorized by a black leather belt, an item denied him for those last years. He had been confined on a $70 robbery conviction for the last 11 years of his life, which was nearly half his life. There was the powder blue shirt, the black leather jacket and the black beret. His body would be dressed in full Panther regalia.
The 10,000 gathered in Oakland’s crisp August sunshine for blocks around Father Neal’s church, St. Augustine’s Episcopal, where one of the first Free Breakfast for Children Programs was housed, saluting Comrade George with raised fists, blacks and whites and Latinos, silently watching the Panther honor guard transport the casket, draped with the Panther flag, the black panther emblazoned on a field of blue, solemnly proceed inside the building, where four Party members with shotguns saluted the Field Marshal, Nina Simone’s recorded voice filling the auditorium: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free….
Huey P. Newton, founder, chief ideologue, Minister of Defense of the Party, now called Servant of the People, eulogized George:
George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor that’s characteristic of any soldier for the people. He inspired prisoners to put his ideas into practice and so his spirit became a living thing. Today I say that although George’s body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his ideas live…. George’s last statement, his conduct at San Quentin on that terrible day, left a standard for political prisoners and for the prisoner society of racist, reactionary America…. He demonstrated how the unjust would be criticized by the weapon…. George also said once that the oppressor is very strong and he might beat him down, he might beat us down to our very knees but it will be physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson and the people will tear his kneecaps off.
…We know that all of us will die someday. Bu we know that there are two kinds of death, the reactionary death and the revolutionary death. One death is significant and the other is not. George certainly died in a significant way, and his death will be very heavy….
(“Afterword,” George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye [Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990]: pp. 194-96.”).
Less than one month later, over one thousand inmates at Attica state prison in New York, mostly black men, rose up, in the spirit of George, and in honor of George and the Prisoner Movement he had originated: “We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.” The prisoners at Attica took over the prison in protest of the inhumane living conditions there, and took guards as hostages to exchange for promises of decent food and beds and medical care and the like.
After a four-day standoff with the state police, with press from all over the world recording the moment, the prisoners were told they had one last chance to release the guards and return to their cells. The individual, organizational and press negotiators the inmates had requested, including Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, had been ordered out of the prison. No demands would be met. It was over, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared, as his state police sharpshooters and hundreds of other state police positioned themselves to retake the prison. The sharpshooters assembled on the top of the wall surrounding the main yard, D Yard, where prisoners had fashioned a kind of tent city, had held daily rallies and press conferences, urging, demanding improved conditions.
Under Rockefeller’s order, on the signal from their commander, the state police sharpshooters opened fire, automatic rifle fire, onto D Yard, indiscriminately spraying the inmates gathered there. Over 40 men were slaughtered on the spot, including 11 guards. Many, many more were seriously wounded. Order was declared restored.
Even the very spirit of George, as the Prisoner Movement, seemed quelled, as it all came to be quieted over the next years. Ultimately, the Party itself fell away into non-existence, beaten down by years of suffering the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) machinations, fatigue, internal strife and a malaise that would overtake the mass black consciousness and black communities for the next decades. Somewhere in between, I wrote a song for George, a meager tribute to a powerful man:
Oh, I was so in love last year
or, rather, the year before.
And if it wasn’t death that claimed them,
it was the hard, cold prison door.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
But if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confine them.
The criminal justice system in post-Civil War America seems to have been specifically structured to contain the released members of the Slave Class. As my friend and comrade Khalil Osiris powerfully argues in his new treatise on the Black Slave Class in America, articulating finally, fully, the class nature of racism in America, prior to the passage of the 13th Amendment, blacks, African captives and their descendants, as slaves for 250 years, had been the sole members of an economic class of people whose labor was the backbone of the development and institutionalization of the American agrarian market economy. Neither a feudalist peasant class nor an industrial working class, black slaves were a free-labor force that formed a class in the American capitalist construct preceding the Marxist doctrine that the industrial working class was the engine of this new capitalism, and arguing for the dictatorship of this proletariat. As most presidents prior to Lincoln had been slaveholders, as the social fabric of America was interwoven with the Jeffersonian theory about the inherent inferiority of the black to the white, the Jacksonian declaration that America was and ought be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, and Lincoln’s attempts to colonize blacks on the island of Hispaniola rather than “free” them, and as the men of America’s developing robber baron class envisioned their domination as the nation’s, blacks became unnecessary in the industrial capitalist pyramid, a cancer on the skin of the country if not a blight on the memory of America’s wealth-building, or nation-building. America had no further use of this class or race, for this people.
While the small northern black population could be held in check by sheer numbers, unable to compete with the burgeoning population of poor Europeans pouring into New York harbor under the government’s enticement programs to cultivate its industrial fields, the massive southern black population, representing half or more of the population of the former Confederate states, was contained and restrained from entering into the scheme of things via the Black Codes. Using the 13th Amendment’s caveat that slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime,” the South passed laws, criminal laws, regulating the behavior of blacks. The most egregiously oppressive “crime” was “vagrancy,” more far-reaching than the strict definition of the word. “Unemployed” blacks were deemed guilty of vagrancy. The punishment was the chain gang, hard, free labor performed under government contracts with private businessmen to build railways and roads and other privately engineered public works. Desperately, most blacks slipped back onto plantations as sharecroppers, a euphemism at best.
If a black skirted punishment under the Codes, harsher remedies for black “crimes” awaited him or her at the hands of any number of the white terrorist bands organized in the months following passage of the 13th Amendment, and before its ratification at the end of 1865. These included the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Jayhawkers. Lynching became the common punishment reserved for blacks—men and women. The great freedom fighter Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the definitive authority on the lynching of blacks, documented that between 1878 and 1898, there were 10,000 lynchings of blacks.
Dr. Katheryn Russell, in her book The Color of Crime “(New York: New York University Press, 1999).” posits that “blackness itself” became a “crime.” Osiris argues that in America’s transition from agrarianism to industrialization, blacks went from a Slave Class to a Prisoner Class.
Once it was clear at the end of the Civil War that General Sherman’s command that every slave family be given 40 acres of tillable land to begin their lives in freedom would be completely disregarded, as the meager efforts of the Freedman’s Bureau to coordinate the distribution of such lands and effect other legal rights of blacks would be dissipated, blacks on all sides of the law came to be effectively confined and punished—and not to be free. That is, the masses of blacks, struggling to circumvent the Codes and the Klan, as supported by the federal government and the Northern industrialists and their hordes of immigrant European workers in pursuit of their interests, which were not served by the integration of blacks into the society, found themselves scraping for survival in the Sisyphean sharecropping schemes, which resembled their lives as slaves, or sentenced to terms of hard labor on the chain gang. With few, inconsequential exceptions, Northern blacks, too, found themselves confined to lesser lives, unable to overcome the racism permeating the industrial workforce, struggling along mostly as domestic service workers. Finally, this black confinement North and South of the Mason-Dixon line was defined by Plessy, introducing American apartheid and all its terrible ramifications. From that point forward, black life in America centered around a struggle for freedom and justice under the law, through mass efforts led by men like Booker T. Washington and Du Bois and Garvey and A. Philip Randolph and Malcolm X and King, through lawsuits like Brown, and through legislation like the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts.
When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, the focus of its agenda was the 7th Point of its 10-Point Platform & Program: to end police brutality in black communities. This was because the most urgent problem facing blacks was the repressive activity of local police forces to contain them, to restrain black rage over ongoing poverty and wretched living conditions. The famous government study of the time known as The Kerner Report, commissioned on account of the powerful 1965 uprising of blacks in Watts, California, had declared that the cause for such black rage, as was exhibited in Watts, was white racism, which had produced the black ghetto and a divided America, one white and one black, “separate and unequal.” By this time, of course, in the wake of the great black migration North on account of the availability of World War II work, a significant majority of blacks lived in America’s industrial centers—though unable to find work in the industrial workforce after World War II.
After the Watts uprising, the Los Angeles Police Department, in the vanguard of numerous others across the country, began a practice of regularly rounding up young black men in ghetto areas, brutally enforcing criminal codes and ordinances expediently passed in the aftermath of the uprising under which the very street corner gathering in the ghetto of two or more blacks became a crime, notwithstanding the 1st Amendment right to assembly. Young black men were massively arrested on police “suspicions” of criminal behavior, jailed for resisting, or shot down in what the Black Panther Party called a “red light trial.”
When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and the other original Party members stepped out onto the streets of Oakland wielding defensive shotguns against police abuses, urging blacks to resist, they were first identified as “thugs.” When the Party grew, on the heels of what became the Free Huey Movement that erupted when Huey was charged and put on trial for having allegedly killed a white Oakland police officer in 1967, the FBI identified the Party as a criminal organization. The Party’s work became the business of the criminal justice system, not the government or the legislatures. Indeed, it was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-term director of the FBI, who announced in 1968 that the Party represented “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” and who led the effort to eliminate that “threat.” Criminal laws were held forth to justify an agenda to destroy the Party through the assassination of Party leaders, violent police raids on Party offices around the country, and counter-intelligence operations to disrupt and undermine the organization. Numerous Party members were murdered over time and many more were imprisoned—some of whom, like Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, still languish in prison to this very day, over 30 years later. Every month in 1969, alone, there was a State-sponsored assassination of a member of the Black Panther Party, from Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles in January to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in December. Then, in 1971, George Jackson was killed by San Quentin prison guards.
As its numbers dissipated, through assassinations and jailings, fear driving away so many more, the Party concentrated its force in one city, its headquarters, Oakland, California, and de-emphasized the gun, emphasizing its Survival Programs to feed and house and attend to the medical needs of blacks, building its coalitions inside the U.S. and internationally, becoming involved in electoral politics, and focusing all it had on building a powerful, revolutionary base inside the United States of America. Approaching a plateau of victory, though, the Party apparatus seemingly slipped, unable to stand up under the weight of its past. By 1982, the Black Panther Party had become extinct, representing the demise of the last, and perhaps the greatest, effort of blacks in America to find freedom.
In 1983, Little B was born in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the Age of Reagan and the Age of Crack. By the time this black boy, Michael Lewis, called “Little B,” was eight years old, his house had become the crack house, America’s schools had been completely re-segregated, affirmative action programs were being challenged and disappearing, black poverty remained entrenched, black wealth remained an illusion, the black infant mortality rate remained double that of whites, and blacks continued to struggle to live in the ghettoes of America, like “the Bluff” where Little B was born. By the time he was 11 years old, Michael’s mother was declared unfit, and he began living on his own on the streets of the Bluff, and Bill Clinton seduced America into acceptance of his 1994 “three-strikes” amendment to the Omnibus Crime Bill.
This ushered in a new wave of black arrests, in seemingly greater disproportion as to black population figures than ever before. Indeed, under Clinton, more people came to be incarcerated than under Reagan and Bush before him, combined. Blacks were being criminalized and arrested for drug use, particularly for crack cocaine, for petty theft responses to ending poverty that rose to the definition of robbery and “armed” robbery, for “driving while black.” Blackness itself still seemed to be a crime. While the black population was approximately 13%, blacks came to represent nearly 50% of the prison population. Among them, by 1997, was Little B, sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14.
One could barely recall his name by then, George Jackson, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, assassinated at San Quentin prison. I went to see about Little B. Hearing of his case, I wanted him to forgive me, all of us who had promised and meant to change the world for him, and for the millions of black children like him in yet another generation. I went to see about him with no more than the memory of George and the Party and our dream about freedom. I swore I would work for him until he was free, knowing there was no real agenda for all the rest, confined for “breathing while black.” I would fight with an organization I helped form called Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice (MAJJ) to overturn the laws providing for the adjudication and incarceration of children as adults, sentencing them to harsh mandatory sentences and even life in prison. Needless to say, in Georgia, most of those children so adjudicated were black, indeed, 94% were. Needless to say, this reflected a national norm. I would fight for Michael’s appeal, raise money for a lawyer who would get his railroaded conviction overturned. By extension I would fight for all the other boys whose mothers were a part of MAJJ, knowing freedom was more than a parole date. I spoke out in a loud voice, everywhere, and worked with all the others rising up against the new prison-industrial complex and its mass incarcerations, particularly of blacks. I wrote a book about Michael, for him, to him, The Condemnation of Little B. And I cried watching him grow behind the wall, like “E” and Chuck and Lyndon and Dantae and all the other fine young men whose mothers wept every day for the loss of their sons’ lives behind the wall.
Somewhere in this oppressive fog, in the twilight of my life, I suddenly felt the presence of George rising. Khalil Osiris called me and came to talk to me about George, all of whose words he had read and studied, and about the Party, and about freedom. Where had he been? I wondered. He answered: in prison.
In the 15 years he spent in prison, he had read not only George but Huey and Amilcar Cabral and Marx and Mao and Sartre and Gandhi and Audre Lorde. He had educated himself inside, and, almost incidentally, had earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees inside. He had also co-founded an organization while inside: The National Black Herstory Task Force, based in Atlanta. Almost a generation removed, he had not only educated himself about the Prisoner Movement, he had come out four years before ready to resurrect this Movement, to resurrect the spirit of George and organize the soldiers.
I began recalling the second stanza of my song for George:
I was in love with many soldiers,
for they were a part of me,
a part of all I’d grown with,
though they’d somehow grown free.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
And if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confined them.
Then, as George did on August 19, 1971, Khalil Osiris kissed me, as sister, comrade, woman. He brought the power of so much love from behind the wall. I introduced him to Little B, and he became his father, as I had become his mother, as we became an African family lost in America, separated, segregated, chained, on both sides of the wall.
The spirit of George has not died. With Khalil and other former prisoners and others like me, I have become part of the organizing committee of the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, the goals of which are to repeal “three-strikes” laws, those putting our children in prison for life, and all the others used to justify the high black incarceration rate; to produce programs guaranteeing human rights to prisoners and their families; to develop effective programs for the re-entry, re-enfranchisement and economic self-sufficiency of former prisoners. We do this knowing that all black people in America are members of a Prisoner Class, and recognizing that revolutionary love can tear down the walls that divide us, toward ending this oppression and finally finding freedom.
Website Below:
http://www.proudfleshjournal.com/vol1.2/brown.html
Love Beyond the Wall: The Resurrection of George Jackson
Elaine Brown
It was two days before his assassination at San Quentin prison, on August 21, 1971, that I saw George Jackson for the last time. He blew me a kiss through the glass divider between us, until the next visit. The radio news commentaries in the early afternoon of August 21st were scattered but wild, reporting a melee had broken out at San Quentin between guards and prisoners. There was no doubt George, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, was at the center of it, attacked, again. He would resist their assault, again. He could not die, I believed. Even shackled, as he always appeared by then, he was more powerful than the reactionaries. They could not kill him. At the end of the day, several guards would be killed, their throats slit.
That night, though, I felt an inexplicable wind that I imagined was George Jackson soaring, free. They had claimed his life that day, but death had not contained him. The spirit of the people was greater than the Man’s technology, we sloganized. The spirit of George lived.
His death became palpable when I accompanied his mother, Georgia, to the mortuary days later, after San Quentin’s pigs finally released the remains. He was her first son, who had been her only son for that last year, the second to die in one year. His younger brother, Jonathan, had been shot down at 17 years old in a valiant attempt to free him. Georgia came to the mortuary with an agenda, to see with her own eyes what they had done to him, to see the wounds, perhaps to touch or heal them, to bring him back to life, Mary at the feet of Jesus. The scalp had been pulled back, the mortician said, rendering the body unfit for viewing. She finally shrugged, resigned, with blood in her eyes, which would become the title of George’s posthumously published book, and demanded photographs be taken. Photographs were taken of the body, of the head that held the brain and the brilliance, now smashed by bullets.
As I have recounted and recalled for all these years, the most distressing moment came in purchasing the clothes for the massive frame of George Jackson. There were the black pants, accessorized by a black leather belt, an item denied him for those last years. He had been confined on a $70 robbery conviction for the last 11 years of his life, which was nearly half his life. There was the powder blue shirt, the black leather jacket and the black beret. His body would be dressed in full Panther regalia.
The 10,000 gathered in Oakland’s crisp August sunshine for blocks around Father Neal’s church, St. Augustine’s Episcopal, where one of the first Free Breakfast for Children Programs was housed, saluting Comrade George with raised fists, blacks and whites and Latinos, silently watching the Panther honor guard transport the casket, draped with the Panther flag, the black panther emblazoned on a field of blue, solemnly proceed inside the building, where four Party members with shotguns saluted the Field Marshal, Nina Simone’s recorded voice filling the auditorium: I wish I knew how it would feel to be free….
Huey P. Newton, founder, chief ideologue, Minister of Defense of the Party, now called Servant of the People, eulogized George:
George Jackson was my hero. He set a standard for prisoners, political prisoners, for people. He showed the love, the strength, the revolutionary fervor that’s characteristic of any soldier for the people. He inspired prisoners to put his ideas into practice and so his spirit became a living thing. Today I say that although George’s body has fallen, his spirit goes on, because his ideas live…. George’s last statement, his conduct at San Quentin on that terrible day, left a standard for political prisoners and for the prisoner society of racist, reactionary America…. He demonstrated how the unjust would be criticized by the weapon…. George also said once that the oppressor is very strong and he might beat him down, he might beat us down to our very knees but it will be physically impossible for the oppressor to go on. At some point his legs will get tired, and when his legs get tired, then George Jackson and the people will tear his kneecaps off.
…We know that all of us will die someday. Bu we know that there are two kinds of death, the reactionary death and the revolutionary death. One death is significant and the other is not. George certainly died in a significant way, and his death will be very heavy….
(“Afterword,” George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye [Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990]: pp. 194-96.”).
Less than one month later, over one thousand inmates at Attica state prison in New York, mostly black men, rose up, in the spirit of George, and in honor of George and the Prisoner Movement he had originated: “We attempted to transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality.” The prisoners at Attica took over the prison in protest of the inhumane living conditions there, and took guards as hostages to exchange for promises of decent food and beds and medical care and the like.
After a four-day standoff with the state police, with press from all over the world recording the moment, the prisoners were told they had one last chance to release the guards and return to their cells. The individual, organizational and press negotiators the inmates had requested, including Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, had been ordered out of the prison. No demands would be met. It was over, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared, as his state police sharpshooters and hundreds of other state police positioned themselves to retake the prison. The sharpshooters assembled on the top of the wall surrounding the main yard, D Yard, where prisoners had fashioned a kind of tent city, had held daily rallies and press conferences, urging, demanding improved conditions.
Under Rockefeller’s order, on the signal from their commander, the state police sharpshooters opened fire, automatic rifle fire, onto D Yard, indiscriminately spraying the inmates gathered there. Over 40 men were slaughtered on the spot, including 11 guards. Many, many more were seriously wounded. Order was declared restored.
Even the very spirit of George, as the Prisoner Movement, seemed quelled, as it all came to be quieted over the next years. Ultimately, the Party itself fell away into non-existence, beaten down by years of suffering the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) machinations, fatigue, internal strife and a malaise that would overtake the mass black consciousness and black communities for the next decades. Somewhere in between, I wrote a song for George, a meager tribute to a powerful man:
Oh, I was so in love last year
or, rather, the year before.
And if it wasn’t death that claimed them,
it was the hard, cold prison door.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
But if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confine them.
The criminal justice system in post-Civil War America seems to have been specifically structured to contain the released members of the Slave Class. As my friend and comrade Khalil Osiris powerfully argues in his new treatise on the Black Slave Class in America, articulating finally, fully, the class nature of racism in America, prior to the passage of the 13th Amendment, blacks, African captives and their descendants, as slaves for 250 years, had been the sole members of an economic class of people whose labor was the backbone of the development and institutionalization of the American agrarian market economy. Neither a feudalist peasant class nor an industrial working class, black slaves were a free-labor force that formed a class in the American capitalist construct preceding the Marxist doctrine that the industrial working class was the engine of this new capitalism, and arguing for the dictatorship of this proletariat. As most presidents prior to Lincoln had been slaveholders, as the social fabric of America was interwoven with the Jeffersonian theory about the inherent inferiority of the black to the white, the Jacksonian declaration that America was and ought be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, and Lincoln’s attempts to colonize blacks on the island of Hispaniola rather than “free” them, and as the men of America’s developing robber baron class envisioned their domination as the nation’s, blacks became unnecessary in the industrial capitalist pyramid, a cancer on the skin of the country if not a blight on the memory of America’s wealth-building, or nation-building. America had no further use of this class or race, for this people.
While the small northern black population could be held in check by sheer numbers, unable to compete with the burgeoning population of poor Europeans pouring into New York harbor under the government’s enticement programs to cultivate its industrial fields, the massive southern black population, representing half or more of the population of the former Confederate states, was contained and restrained from entering into the scheme of things via the Black Codes. Using the 13th Amendment’s caveat that slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime,” the South passed laws, criminal laws, regulating the behavior of blacks. The most egregiously oppressive “crime” was “vagrancy,” more far-reaching than the strict definition of the word. “Unemployed” blacks were deemed guilty of vagrancy. The punishment was the chain gang, hard, free labor performed under government contracts with private businessmen to build railways and roads and other privately engineered public works. Desperately, most blacks slipped back onto plantations as sharecroppers, a euphemism at best.
If a black skirted punishment under the Codes, harsher remedies for black “crimes” awaited him or her at the hands of any number of the white terrorist bands organized in the months following passage of the 13th Amendment, and before its ratification at the end of 1865. These included the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Jayhawkers. Lynching became the common punishment reserved for blacks—men and women. The great freedom fighter Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the definitive authority on the lynching of blacks, documented that between 1878 and 1898, there were 10,000 lynchings of blacks.
Dr. Katheryn Russell, in her book The Color of Crime “(New York: New York University Press, 1999).” posits that “blackness itself” became a “crime.” Osiris argues that in America’s transition from agrarianism to industrialization, blacks went from a Slave Class to a Prisoner Class.
Once it was clear at the end of the Civil War that General Sherman’s command that every slave family be given 40 acres of tillable land to begin their lives in freedom would be completely disregarded, as the meager efforts of the Freedman’s Bureau to coordinate the distribution of such lands and effect other legal rights of blacks would be dissipated, blacks on all sides of the law came to be effectively confined and punished—and not to be free. That is, the masses of blacks, struggling to circumvent the Codes and the Klan, as supported by the federal government and the Northern industrialists and their hordes of immigrant European workers in pursuit of their interests, which were not served by the integration of blacks into the society, found themselves scraping for survival in the Sisyphean sharecropping schemes, which resembled their lives as slaves, or sentenced to terms of hard labor on the chain gang. With few, inconsequential exceptions, Northern blacks, too, found themselves confined to lesser lives, unable to overcome the racism permeating the industrial workforce, struggling along mostly as domestic service workers. Finally, this black confinement North and South of the Mason-Dixon line was defined by Plessy, introducing American apartheid and all its terrible ramifications. From that point forward, black life in America centered around a struggle for freedom and justice under the law, through mass efforts led by men like Booker T. Washington and Du Bois and Garvey and A. Philip Randolph and Malcolm X and King, through lawsuits like Brown, and through legislation like the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights acts.
When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, the focus of its agenda was the 7th Point of its 10-Point Platform & Program: to end police brutality in black communities. This was because the most urgent problem facing blacks was the repressive activity of local police forces to contain them, to restrain black rage over ongoing poverty and wretched living conditions. The famous government study of the time known as The Kerner Report, commissioned on account of the powerful 1965 uprising of blacks in Watts, California, had declared that the cause for such black rage, as was exhibited in Watts, was white racism, which had produced the black ghetto and a divided America, one white and one black, “separate and unequal.” By this time, of course, in the wake of the great black migration North on account of the availability of World War II work, a significant majority of blacks lived in America’s industrial centers—though unable to find work in the industrial workforce after World War II.
After the Watts uprising, the Los Angeles Police Department, in the vanguard of numerous others across the country, began a practice of regularly rounding up young black men in ghetto areas, brutally enforcing criminal codes and ordinances expediently passed in the aftermath of the uprising under which the very street corner gathering in the ghetto of two or more blacks became a crime, notwithstanding the 1st Amendment right to assembly. Young black men were massively arrested on police “suspicions” of criminal behavior, jailed for resisting, or shot down in what the Black Panther Party called a “red light trial.”
When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and the other original Party members stepped out onto the streets of Oakland wielding defensive shotguns against police abuses, urging blacks to resist, they were first identified as “thugs.” When the Party grew, on the heels of what became the Free Huey Movement that erupted when Huey was charged and put on trial for having allegedly killed a white Oakland police officer in 1967, the FBI identified the Party as a criminal organization. The Party’s work became the business of the criminal justice system, not the government or the legislatures. Indeed, it was J. Edgar Hoover, the long-term director of the FBI, who announced in 1968 that the Party represented “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” and who led the effort to eliminate that “threat.” Criminal laws were held forth to justify an agenda to destroy the Party through the assassination of Party leaders, violent police raids on Party offices around the country, and counter-intelligence operations to disrupt and undermine the organization. Numerous Party members were murdered over time and many more were imprisoned—some of whom, like Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, still languish in prison to this very day, over 30 years later. Every month in 1969, alone, there was a State-sponsored assassination of a member of the Black Panther Party, from Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in Los Angeles in January to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in December. Then, in 1971, George Jackson was killed by San Quentin prison guards.
As its numbers dissipated, through assassinations and jailings, fear driving away so many more, the Party concentrated its force in one city, its headquarters, Oakland, California, and de-emphasized the gun, emphasizing its Survival Programs to feed and house and attend to the medical needs of blacks, building its coalitions inside the U.S. and internationally, becoming involved in electoral politics, and focusing all it had on building a powerful, revolutionary base inside the United States of America. Approaching a plateau of victory, though, the Party apparatus seemingly slipped, unable to stand up under the weight of its past. By 1982, the Black Panther Party had become extinct, representing the demise of the last, and perhaps the greatest, effort of blacks in America to find freedom.
In 1983, Little B was born in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the Age of Reagan and the Age of Crack. By the time this black boy, Michael Lewis, called “Little B,” was eight years old, his house had become the crack house, America’s schools had been completely re-segregated, affirmative action programs were being challenged and disappearing, black poverty remained entrenched, black wealth remained an illusion, the black infant mortality rate remained double that of whites, and blacks continued to struggle to live in the ghettoes of America, like “the Bluff” where Little B was born. By the time he was 11 years old, Michael’s mother was declared unfit, and he began living on his own on the streets of the Bluff, and Bill Clinton seduced America into acceptance of his 1994 “three-strikes” amendment to the Omnibus Crime Bill.
This ushered in a new wave of black arrests, in seemingly greater disproportion as to black population figures than ever before. Indeed, under Clinton, more people came to be incarcerated than under Reagan and Bush before him, combined. Blacks were being criminalized and arrested for drug use, particularly for crack cocaine, for petty theft responses to ending poverty that rose to the definition of robbery and “armed” robbery, for “driving while black.” Blackness itself still seemed to be a crime. While the black population was approximately 13%, blacks came to represent nearly 50% of the prison population. Among them, by 1997, was Little B, sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14.
One could barely recall his name by then, George Jackson, Comrade George, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, assassinated at San Quentin prison. I went to see about Little B. Hearing of his case, I wanted him to forgive me, all of us who had promised and meant to change the world for him, and for the millions of black children like him in yet another generation. I went to see about him with no more than the memory of George and the Party and our dream about freedom. I swore I would work for him until he was free, knowing there was no real agenda for all the rest, confined for “breathing while black.” I would fight with an organization I helped form called Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice (MAJJ) to overturn the laws providing for the adjudication and incarceration of children as adults, sentencing them to harsh mandatory sentences and even life in prison. Needless to say, in Georgia, most of those children so adjudicated were black, indeed, 94% were. Needless to say, this reflected a national norm. I would fight for Michael’s appeal, raise money for a lawyer who would get his railroaded conviction overturned. By extension I would fight for all the other boys whose mothers were a part of MAJJ, knowing freedom was more than a parole date. I spoke out in a loud voice, everywhere, and worked with all the others rising up against the new prison-industrial complex and its mass incarcerations, particularly of blacks. I wrote a book about Michael, for him, to him, The Condemnation of Little B. And I cried watching him grow behind the wall, like “E” and Chuck and Lyndon and Dantae and all the other fine young men whose mothers wept every day for the loss of their sons’ lives behind the wall.
Somewhere in this oppressive fog, in the twilight of my life, I suddenly felt the presence of George rising. Khalil Osiris called me and came to talk to me about George, all of whose words he had read and studied, and about the Party, and about freedom. Where had he been? I wondered. He answered: in prison.
In the 15 years he spent in prison, he had read not only George but Huey and Amilcar Cabral and Marx and Mao and Sartre and Gandhi and Audre Lorde. He had educated himself inside, and, almost incidentally, had earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees inside. He had also co-founded an organization while inside: The National Black Herstory Task Force, based in Atlanta. Almost a generation removed, he had not only educated himself about the Prisoner Movement, he had come out four years before ready to resurrect this Movement, to resurrect the spirit of George and organize the soldiers.
I began recalling the second stanza of my song for George:
I was in love with many soldiers,
for they were a part of me,
a part of all I’d grown with,
though they’d somehow grown free.
They were all such young and fine men,
such well-defined men.
And if we remain reminded of them,
then no wall or grave can confined them.
Then, as George did on August 19, 1971, Khalil Osiris kissed me, as sister, comrade, woman. He brought the power of so much love from behind the wall. I introduced him to Little B, and he became his father, as I had become his mother, as we became an African family lost in America, separated, segregated, chained, on both sides of the wall.
The spirit of George has not died. With Khalil and other former prisoners and others like me, I have become part of the organizing committee of the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, the goals of which are to repeal “three-strikes” laws, those putting our children in prison for life, and all the others used to justify the high black incarceration rate; to produce programs guaranteeing human rights to prisoners and their families; to develop effective programs for the re-entry, re-enfranchisement and economic self-sufficiency of former prisoners. We do this knowing that all black people in America are members of a Prisoner Class, and recognizing that revolutionary love can tear down the walls that divide us, toward ending this oppression and finally finding freedom.
George Jackson: Black Revolutionary November 1971
8/24/2005
George Jackson: Black Revolutionary
By Walter Rodney, November 1971
To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of
George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the
official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in Americas toughest
jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape
this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to
the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson
was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was black,
and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that
blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary
struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George
Jackson was political prisoner and a black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.
Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point
is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders
graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of our
brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days
of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this
prison, black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin
prison authorities who are responsible to America’s chief prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go
beyond the generalities and to understand the most significant elements attaching to George Jackson’s life and
death.
When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was twenty nine years of age and had spent the last
[correction: 11 behind bars—seven of these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen.
He was not part of the regular producer force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the system of
production, lumpen elements in the past rarely understood the society which victimized them and were not to be
counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen
proletariat was originally intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic
working class.
Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point
where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective
frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him. Jackson’s survival for so many years in
vicious jails, his self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were tremendous personal
achievements, and in addition they offer on interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the black mass
in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.
Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the alienation of part of the product of his labor. For the
African peasant, the exploitation is effected through manipulation of the price of the crops which he labored to
produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival
depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of industrialization, workers coined the
slogan the right to work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of this basic right. At best they live
in a limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The line between the
unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.
The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black
people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is
concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched
among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.
Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this
most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In
Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last few
years. Some of the more recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On February
27th this year, black and brown (Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World Coalition. This
came in the wake of such organizations as a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of
SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of mobilization of the nonwhite prisoners was
resented and feared by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-
declared Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white authority on the side
of the Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty on the
side of the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a majority of white prisoners either refused to support
the Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the first principle to be observed was unity in
struggle. Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win allies.
The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true
revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the
movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry,
essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to
learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social
register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.
Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel threatened
by the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from
any form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their bearings
from the street forces of the black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.
Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a response from white America. The small band of white
revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen decried Jackson’s murder by placing a few bombs
in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther
Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed.
The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the
established capitalist press has come out with exposés of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black
prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator Muskie out with a cry of enough.
Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a
whole have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders and
against Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of defense and solidarity
have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of
international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended
with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.
For more than a decade now, people’s liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held
conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective
responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-
colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the
capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world
imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the
beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression.
George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the
belly of the white imperialist beast.
International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities. This is the truth so profoundly and simply
expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three - many Vietnams. It has long been
recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-
imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world imperialism transformed organized labor
in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely, the black struggle is internationally significant because it
unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home
ground. This is amply illustrated in the political process which involved the three Soledad Brothers—George
Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as well as Angela Davis and a host of other blacks now behind
prison bars in the U.S.A.
NOTE: George Jackson also authored Blood In My Eye which was published posthumously, or after this article
was written.
NOTE: Biography of the articles author
WALTER RODNEY: A BIOGRAPHY
Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23, 1942. His was a working class family-his
father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. After attending primary school, he won an open
exhibition scholarship to attend Queens College as one of the early working-class beneficiaries of
concessions made in the filed of education by the ruling class in Guyana to the new nationalism that
gripped the country in the early 1950s.
While at Queens College young Rodney excelled academically, as well as in the fields of athletics and
debating. In 1960, he won an open scholarship to further his studies at the University of the West Indies
in Jamaica. He graduated with a first-class honors degree in history in 1963 and. he won an open
scholarship to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1966, at the age of 24 he was
awarded a Ph.D. with honors in African History.
His doctoral research on slavery on the Upper
Guinea Coast was the result of long meticulous work on the records of Portuguese
merchants both in England and in Portugal.
In the process he learned Portuguese and Spanish which along with the French he had learned at Queens
College made him somewhat of a linguist.
In 1970, his Ph.D dissertation was published by Oxford University Press under the title, A History of the
Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800. This work was to set a trend for Rodney in both challenging the
assumptions of western historians about African history and setting new standards for looking at the
history of oppressed peoples. According to Horace Campbell "This work was path-breaking in the way in
which it analyzed the impact of slavery on the communities and the interrelationship between societies of
the region and on the ecology of the region."
Walter took up his first teaching appointment in Tanzania before returning to his alma mater, the
University of the West Indies, in 1968. This was a period of great political activity in the Caribbean as the
countries begun their post colonial journey. But it was the Black Power Movement that caught Walter's
imagination.
Some new voices had begun to question the direction of the post-independence governments, in particular
their attitude to the plight of the downpressed. The issue of empowerment for the black and brown poor of
the region was being debated among the progressive intellectuals. Rodney, who from very early on had
rejected the authoritarian role of the middle class political elite in the Caribbean, was central to this
debate. He, however, did not confine his activities to the university campus. He took his message of Black
Liberation to the gullies of Jamaica. In particular he shared his knowledge of African history with one of
the most rejected section of the Jamaican society-the Rastafarians.
Walter had shown an interest in political activism ever since he was a student in Jamaica and England.
Horace Campbell reports that while at UWI Walter "was active in student politics and campaigned
extensively in 1961 in the Jamaica Referendum on the West Indian Federation." While studying in London,
Walter participated in discussion circles, spoke at the famous Hyde Park and, participated in a symposium
on Guyana in 1965. It was during this period that Walter came into contact with the legendary CLR James
and was one of his most devoted students.
By the summer of 1968 Rodney's "groundings with the working poor of Jamaica had begun to attract the
attention of the government. So, when he attended a Black Writers' Conference in Montreal, Canada, in
October 1968, the Hugh Shearer-led Jamaican Labor Party Government banned him from re-entering the
country. This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed
and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed..
Rodney's encounters with the Rastafarians were published in a pamphlet entitled "Grounding with My
Brothers," that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.
Having been expelled from Jamaica, Walter returned to Tanzania after a short stay in Cuba. There he
lectured from 1968 to 1974 and continued his groundings in Tanzania and other parts of Africa. This was
the period of the African liberation struggles and Walter, who fervently believed that the intellectual
should make his or her skills available for the struggles and emancipation of the people, became deeply
involved. It was from partly from these activities that his second major work, and his best known --How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa - emerged. It was published by Bogle-L'Ouverture, in London, in
conjunction with Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972.
This Tanzanian period was perhaps the most important in the formation of Rodney's ideas. According to
Horace Campbell "Here he was at the forefront of establishing an intellectual tradition which still today
makes Dar es Salaam one of the centers of discussion of African politics and history. Out of he dialogue,
discussions and study groups he deepened the Marxist tradition with respect to African politics, class
struggle, the race question, African history and the role of the exploited in social change. It was within the
context of these discussions that the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was written."
Page 4 of 5
8/24/2005
Campbell also reports that " In he same period, he wrote the critical articles on Tanzanian Ujamaa,
imperialism, on underdevelopment, and the problems of state and class formation in Africa. Many of his
articles which were written in Tanzania appeared in Maji Maji, the discussion journal of the TANU Youth
League at the University. He worked in the Tanzanian archives on the question of forced labor, the
policing of the countryside and the colonial economy. This work-- " World War II and the Tanzanian
Economy"-- was later published as a monograph by Cornell University in 1976".
Rodney also developed a reputation as a Pan-Africanist theoretician and spokes person. Campbell says
that "In Tanzania he developed close political relationships with those who were struggling to change the
external control of Africa He was very close to some of the leaders of liberation movements in Africa and
also to political leaders of popular organizations of independent territories. Together with other Pan-
Africanists he participated in discussing leading up to the Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Tanzania,
1974. Before the Congress he wrote a piece: "Towards the Sixth Pan-African Congress: Aspects of the
International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America."
In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of
Guyana, but the government rescinded the appointment. But Rodney remained in Guyana, joined the
newly formed political group, the Working People's Alliance. Between 1974 and his assassination in 1980,
he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian PNC
government. He gives public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political
consciousness in the country. During this period he developed his ideas on the self emancipation of the
working people, People's Power, and multiracial democracy.
On July 11, 1979, Walter, together with seven others, was arrested following the burning down of two
government offices. He, along with Drs Rupert Roopnarine and Omawale, was later charged with arson.
From that period up to the time of his murder, he was constantly persecuted and harassed and at least on
one occasion, an attempt was made to kill him. Finally, on the evening of June 13, 1980, he was
assassinated by a bomb in the middle of Georgetown.
Walter was married to Dr Patricia Rodney and the union bore three children- Shaka, Kanini and Asha.
George Jackson: Black Revolutionary
By Walter Rodney, November 1971
To most readers in this continent, starved of authentic information by the imperialist news agencies, the name of
George Jackson is either unfamiliar or just a name. The powers that be in the United States put forward the
official version that George Jackson was a dangerous criminal kept in maximum security in Americas toughest
jails and still capable of killing a guard at Soledad Prison. They say that he himself was killed attempting escape
this year in August. Official versions given by the United States of everything from the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to
the Bay of Tonkin in Vietnam have the common characteristic of standing truth on its head. George Jackson
was jailed ostensibly for stealing 70 dollars. He was given a sentence of one year to life because he was black,
and he was kept incarcerated for years under the most dehumanizing conditions because he discovered that
blackness need not be a badge of servility but rather could be a banner for uncompromising revolutionary
struggle. He was murdered because he was doing too much to pass this attitude on to fellow prisoners. George
Jackson was political prisoner and a black freedom fighter. He died at the hands of the enemy.
Once it is made known that George Jackson was a black revolutionary in the white mans jails, at least one point
is established, since we are familiar with the fact that a significant proportion of African nationalist leaders
graduated from colonialist prisons, and right now the jails of South Africa hold captive some of the best of our
brothers in that part of the continent. Furthermore, there is some considerable awareness that ever since the days
of slavery the U.S.A. is nothing but a vast prison as far as African descendants are concerned. Within this
prison, black life is cheap, so it should be no surprise that George Jackson was murdered by the San Quentin
prison authorities who are responsible to America’s chief prison warder, Richard Nixon. What remains is to go
beyond the generalities and to understand the most significant elements attaching to George Jackson’s life and
death.
When he was killed in August this year, George Jackson was twenty nine years of age and had spent the last
[correction: 11 behind bars—seven of these in special isolation. As he himself put it, he was from the lumpen.
He was not part of the regular producer force of workers and peasants. Being cut off from the system of
production, lumpen elements in the past rarely understood the society which victimized them and were not to be
counted upon to take organized revolutionary steps within capitalist society. Indeed, the very term lumpen
proletariat was originally intended to convey the inferiority of this sector as compared with the authentic
working class.
Yet George Jackson, like Malcolm X before him, educated himself painfully behind prison bars to the point
where his clear vision of historical and contemporary reality and his ability to communicate his perspective
frightened the U.S. power structure into physically liquidating him. Jackson’s survival for so many years in
vicious jails, his self-education, and his publication of Soledad Brother were tremendous personal
achievements, and in addition they offer on interesting insight into the revolutionary potential of the black mass
in the U.S.A., so many of whom have been reduced to the status of lumpen.
Under capitalism, the worker is exploited through the alienation of part of the product of his labor. For the
African peasant, the exploitation is effected through manipulation of the price of the crops which he labored to
produce. Yet, work has always been rated higher than unemployment, for the obvious reason that survival
depends upon the ability to obtain work. Thus, early in the history of industrialization, workers coined the
slogan the right to work. Masses of black people in the U.S.A. are deprived of this basic right. At best they live
in a limbo of uncertainty as casual workers, last to be hired and first to be fired. The line between the
unemployed or criminals cannot be dismissed as white lumpen in capitalist Europe were usually dismissed.
The latter were considered as misfits and regular toilers served as the vanguard. The thirty-odd million black
people in the U.S.A. are not misfits. They are the most oppressed and the most threatened as far as survival is
concerned. The greatness of George Jackson is that he served as a dynamic spokesman for the most wretched
among the oppressed, and he was in the vanguard of the most dangerous front of struggle.
Jail is hardly an arena in which one would imagine that guerrilla warfare would take place. Yet, it is on this
most disadvantaged of terrains that blacks have displayed the guts to wage a war for dignity and freedom. In
Soledad Brother, George Jackson movingly reveals the nature of this struggle as it has evolved over the last few
years. Some of the more recent episodes in the struggle at San Quentin prison are worth recording. On February
27th this year, black and brown (Mexican) prisoners announced the formation of a Third World Coalition. This
came in the wake of such organizations as a Black Panther Branch at San Quentin and the establishment of
SATE (Self-Advancement Through Education). This level of mobilization of the nonwhite prisoners was
resented and feared by white guards and some racist white prisoners. The latter formed themselves into a self-
declared Nazi group, and months of violent incidents followed. Needless to say, with white authority on the side
of the Nazis, Afro and Mexican brothers had a very hard time. George Jackson is not the only casualty on the
side of the blacks. But their unity was maintained, and a majority of white prisoners either refused to support
the Nazis or denounced them. So, even within prison walls the first principle to be observed was unity in
struggle. Once the most oppressed had taken the initiative, then they could win allies.
The struggle within the jails is having wider and wider repercussions every day. Firstly, it is creating true
revolutionary cadres out of more and more lumpen. This is particularly true in the jails of California, but the
movement is making its impact felt everywhere from Baltimore to Texas. Brothers inside are writing poetry,
essays and letters which strip white capitalist America naked. Like the Soledad Brothers, they have come to
learn that sociology books call us antisocial and brand us criminals, when actually the criminals are in the social
register. The names of those who rule America are all in the social register.
Secondly, it is solidifying the black community in a remarkable way. Petty bourgeois blacks also feel threatened
by the manic police, judges and prison officers. Black intellectuals who used to be completely alienated from
any form of struggle except their personal hustle now recognize the need to ally with and take their bearings
from the street forces of the black unemployed, ghetto dwellers and prison inmates.
Thirdly, the courage of black prisoners has elicited a response from white America. The small band of white
revolutionaries has taken a positive stand. The Weathermen decried Jackson’s murder by placing a few bombs
in given places and the Communist Party supported the demand by the black prisoners and the Black Panther
Party that the murder was to be investigated. On a more general note, white liberal America has been disturbed.
The white liberals never like to be told that white capitalist society is too rotten to be reformed. Even the
established capitalist press has come out with exposés of prison conditions, and the fascist massacres of black
prisoners at Attica prison recently brought Senator Muskie out with a cry of enough.
Fourthly (and for our purposes most significantly) the efforts of black prisoners and blacks in America as a
whole have had international repercussions. The framed charges brought against Black Panther leaders and
against Angela Davis have been denounced in many parts of the world. Committees of defense and solidarity
have been formed in places as far as Havana and Leipzig. OPAAL declared August 18th as the day of
international solidarity with Afro-Americans; and significantly most of their propaganda for this purpose ended
with a call to Free All Political Prisoners.
For more than a decade now, people’s liberation movements in Vietnam, Cuba, Southern Africa, etc., have held
conversations with militants and progressives in the U.S.A. pointing to the duality and respective
responsibilities of struggle within the imperialist camp. The revolution in the exploited colonies and neo-
colonies has as its objective the expulsion of the imperialists: the revolution in the metropolis is to transform the
capitalist relations of production in the countries of their origin. Since the U.S.A. is the overlord of world
imperialism, it has been common to portray any progressive movement there as operating within the belly of the
beast. Inside an isolation block in Soledad or San Quentin prisons, this was not merely a figurative expression.
George Jackson knew well what it meant to seek for heightened socialist and humanist consciousness inside the
belly of the white imperialist beast.
International solidarity grows out of struggle in different localities. This is the truth so profoundly and simply
expressed by Che Guevara when he called for the creation of one, two, three - many Vietnams. It has long been
recognized that the white working class in the U.S.A is historically incapable of participating (as a class) in anti-
imperialist struggle. White racism and Americas leading role in world imperialism transformed organized labor
in the U.S. into a reactionary force. Conversely, the black struggle is internationally significant because it
unmasks the barbarous social relations of capitalism and places the enemy on the defensive on his own home
ground. This is amply illustrated in the political process which involved the three Soledad Brothers—George
Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette—as well as Angela Davis and a host of other blacks now behind
prison bars in the U.S.A.
NOTE: George Jackson also authored Blood In My Eye which was published posthumously, or after this article
was written.
NOTE: Biography of the articles author
WALTER RODNEY: A BIOGRAPHY
Walter Rodney was born in Georgetown, Guyana on March 23, 1942. His was a working class family-his
father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress. After attending primary school, he won an open
exhibition scholarship to attend Queens College as one of the early working-class beneficiaries of
concessions made in the filed of education by the ruling class in Guyana to the new nationalism that
gripped the country in the early 1950s.
While at Queens College young Rodney excelled academically, as well as in the fields of athletics and
debating. In 1960, he won an open scholarship to further his studies at the University of the West Indies
in Jamaica. He graduated with a first-class honors degree in history in 1963 and. he won an open
scholarship to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1966, at the age of 24 he was
awarded a Ph.D. with honors in African History.
His doctoral research on slavery on the Upper
Guinea Coast was the result of long meticulous work on the records of Portuguese
merchants both in England and in Portugal.
In the process he learned Portuguese and Spanish which along with the French he had learned at Queens
College made him somewhat of a linguist.
In 1970, his Ph.D dissertation was published by Oxford University Press under the title, A History of the
Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800. This work was to set a trend for Rodney in both challenging the
assumptions of western historians about African history and setting new standards for looking at the
history of oppressed peoples. According to Horace Campbell "This work was path-breaking in the way in
which it analyzed the impact of slavery on the communities and the interrelationship between societies of
the region and on the ecology of the region."
Walter took up his first teaching appointment in Tanzania before returning to his alma mater, the
University of the West Indies, in 1968. This was a period of great political activity in the Caribbean as the
countries begun their post colonial journey. But it was the Black Power Movement that caught Walter's
imagination.
Some new voices had begun to question the direction of the post-independence governments, in particular
their attitude to the plight of the downpressed. The issue of empowerment for the black and brown poor of
the region was being debated among the progressive intellectuals. Rodney, who from very early on had
rejected the authoritarian role of the middle class political elite in the Caribbean, was central to this
debate. He, however, did not confine his activities to the university campus. He took his message of Black
Liberation to the gullies of Jamaica. In particular he shared his knowledge of African history with one of
the most rejected section of the Jamaican society-the Rastafarians.
Walter had shown an interest in political activism ever since he was a student in Jamaica and England.
Horace Campbell reports that while at UWI Walter "was active in student politics and campaigned
extensively in 1961 in the Jamaica Referendum on the West Indian Federation." While studying in London,
Walter participated in discussion circles, spoke at the famous Hyde Park and, participated in a symposium
on Guyana in 1965. It was during this period that Walter came into contact with the legendary CLR James
and was one of his most devoted students.
By the summer of 1968 Rodney's "groundings with the working poor of Jamaica had begun to attract the
attention of the government. So, when he attended a Black Writers' Conference in Montreal, Canada, in
October 1968, the Hugh Shearer-led Jamaican Labor Party Government banned him from re-entering the
country. This action sparked widespread riots and revolts in Kingston in which several people were killed
and injured by the police and security forces, and millions of dollars worth of property destroyed..
Rodney's encounters with the Rastafarians were published in a pamphlet entitled "Grounding with My
Brothers," that became a bible for the Caribbean Black Power Movement.
Having been expelled from Jamaica, Walter returned to Tanzania after a short stay in Cuba. There he
lectured from 1968 to 1974 and continued his groundings in Tanzania and other parts of Africa. This was
the period of the African liberation struggles and Walter, who fervently believed that the intellectual
should make his or her skills available for the struggles and emancipation of the people, became deeply
involved. It was from partly from these activities that his second major work, and his best known --How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa - emerged. It was published by Bogle-L'Ouverture, in London, in
conjunction with Tanzanian Publishing House in 1972.
This Tanzanian period was perhaps the most important in the formation of Rodney's ideas. According to
Horace Campbell "Here he was at the forefront of establishing an intellectual tradition which still today
makes Dar es Salaam one of the centers of discussion of African politics and history. Out of he dialogue,
discussions and study groups he deepened the Marxist tradition with respect to African politics, class
struggle, the race question, African history and the role of the exploited in social change. It was within the
context of these discussions that the book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was written."
Page 4 of 5
8/24/2005
Campbell also reports that " In he same period, he wrote the critical articles on Tanzanian Ujamaa,
imperialism, on underdevelopment, and the problems of state and class formation in Africa. Many of his
articles which were written in Tanzania appeared in Maji Maji, the discussion journal of the TANU Youth
League at the University. He worked in the Tanzanian archives on the question of forced labor, the
policing of the countryside and the colonial economy. This work-- " World War II and the Tanzanian
Economy"-- was later published as a monograph by Cornell University in 1976".
Rodney also developed a reputation as a Pan-Africanist theoretician and spokes person. Campbell says
that "In Tanzania he developed close political relationships with those who were struggling to change the
external control of Africa He was very close to some of the leaders of liberation movements in Africa and
also to political leaders of popular organizations of independent territories. Together with other Pan-
Africanists he participated in discussing leading up to the Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Tanzania,
1974. Before the Congress he wrote a piece: "Towards the Sixth Pan-African Congress: Aspects of the
International Class Struggle in Africa, the Caribbean and America."
In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of
Guyana, but the government rescinded the appointment. But Rodney remained in Guyana, joined the
newly formed political group, the Working People's Alliance. Between 1974 and his assassination in 1980,
he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly authoritarian PNC
government. He gives public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political
consciousness in the country. During this period he developed his ideas on the self emancipation of the
working people, People's Power, and multiracial democracy.
On July 11, 1979, Walter, together with seven others, was arrested following the burning down of two
government offices. He, along with Drs Rupert Roopnarine and Omawale, was later charged with arson.
From that period up to the time of his murder, he was constantly persecuted and harassed and at least on
one occasion, an attempt was made to kill him. Finally, on the evening of June 13, 1980, he was
assassinated by a bomb in the middle of Georgetown.
Walter was married to Dr Patricia Rodney and the union bore three children- Shaka, Kanini and Asha.
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