A year after Ghana gained Independence from Britain under the presidency of Kwame Nkrumah the All African People Conference was held in the capital city Accra in December 1958. Nkrumah felt that Ghana independence would be meaningless if other African states are still colonised by the European powers. In April 1958, Nkrumah as the pioneer of the ideology of Pan-Africanism convened the Conference of All Independent African States (Libya, Ethiopia, Liberia, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan United Republic of Egypt and Ghana), which was followed by the historic A A P Conference. The A A P Conference was attended by all independent and non-independent African states, liberation movements and public organisations. One of African prominent political figure attended this conference was Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was appointed a member of a permanent organisation established at the conference.
Africans Demand Liberation (1958)
The slogan for the conference was “Hands off Africa”. The A. A. P Conference met to chart a way forward on how to achieve continental freedom. The agenda of the conference entailed anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-racialism, African Unity and non-alignment. Other issues discussed at the conference included colonial boundaries, the role of the traditional and religious leaders and regional groupings. The Conference emerged with some few resolutions. The Conference undertook to use no violence in all endeavours to achieve independence in African continent. This commitment was put into practice when the conference refused to support the Algerian armed struggle to achieve its independence from France.
The African National Congress, which was South Africa leading liberation movements at the time, supported this Conference but failed to attend however had a representative present who was already in Ghana. In spite of the government refusal the ANC succeeded in sending memorandum to the conference. This Conference was followed by series of other conferences held in the continent to achieve independence and African Unity until Organisation of African Unity was born in May 1963
This year marks 60 years since the historic 1958 All-African People’s Conference held in Accra, Ghana. It was the first major Pan-African gathering organized on African soil. Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president hosted the conference. The organizing of the conference was led by long-time Pan Africanist and friend of Nkrumah, George Padmore in his capacity as Advisor to the Prime Minister on African Affairs.
The overarching theme of the 1958 conference was “Hands Off Africa.” The conference organizers issued a call to nationalist organizations, women’s groups, trade union groups, and youth groups all over Africa to come to Ghana in December to discuss the final overthrow of colonialism and imperialism. Today we are calling on the global African family to continue the fight for a free, liberated and self-determined Africa in the spirit of the 1958 All-African People’s Conference.
Conferences of Independent African States
The Accra Conference of 1958, which was held in Accra, Ghana, on April 15–22, was attended by leaders of eight independent African countries: Ghana, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Egypt, the Sudan, Tunisia, and Ethiopia. It was the first experiment in cooperation among all the independent states of the continent.
First Conference of Independent African States (1 of 3)
The Accra Conference adopted a declaration, a number of political resolutions (on peace and security, the end of colonialism, the Algerian question, a standing conference body, and the coordination of the policies of the member-countries), and several resolutions on social and economic questions. Its decisions proclaimed the determination of the African states to serve the cause of peace in cooperation with other peace-loving countries. The delegates expressed their intention to press for an end to the production and testing of nuclear weapons and a limitation on the number of conventional armaments. They pledged to remain faithful to the UN Charter and the principles of the Bandung Conference, to strengthen solidarity with the dependent peoples of Africa, and to defend their own independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. The conference urged the eradication of all forms and manifestations of racial discrimination.
First Conference of Independent African States (2 of 3)
The delegates to the Accra Conference agreed to hold conferences of foreign ministers and other representatives of African states periodically to discuss common problems. In addition, they decided to make their permanent representatives at the UN responsible for forming an African group that would be a standing conference body for coordinating the policy of the independent African states on problems involving their common interests and for preparing future conferences. Held on June 14–24 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Addis Ababa Conference of 1960 was attended by representatives of nine independent African states (Ghana, Guinea, Cameroon, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Ethiopia), as well as by representatives of the Algerian FLN.
Conference of All African States April 1958
The representatives of Nigeria, Somalia, and the Congo (Léopoldville) had the right to cast consultative votes. The Addis Ababa Conference was preceded by two preparatory meetings. On July 15–19, 1959, the heads of state and government of Ghana, Guinea, and Liberia met in Sanniquellie, Liberia, and on Aug. 4—8, 1959, the foreign ministers and other representatives of the member-countries of the Accra Conference met in Monrovia, Liberia. At Sanniquellie the Declaration of the Principles of a Future Community of Independent African States was drawn up and signed, and at Monrovia the delegates agreed on common positions at the UN.
At the Addis Ababa Conference important international and pan-African problems were discussed, and a number of resolutions condemning any nuclear weapons tests in Africa were adopted. For the first time in history, the Addis Ababa Conference drew the attention of the African states to the danger of neocolonialism, recommended the establishment of effective control over foreign firmly, and demanded that the colonial powers set dates for granting independence to dependent colonial territories. The conference postponed consideration of the question of creating a political organization of African states until the next conference of independent African states. At the same time, however, it reaffirmed the need to maintain the African group at the UN as the standing body of the conference and to establish African councils for cooperation in economics, education, culture, and science.
Biafra: Biafra, New Afrika, Catalonia, Aztlan, Struggle For Total Independence – Haki Kweli Shakur
In 1961 and 1962 disagreements among African states frustrated all attempts to call a pan-African conference. Instead, separate groups of states took shape on the continent, including the Afro-Malagasy Union and the Casablanca group (Algeria, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, and Egypt). A pan-African conference of independent states was held in May 1963 in Addis Ababa—the Addis Ababa Conference of 1963, which was at-tended by representatives of 31 states. It established the Organization of African Unity.
Haki Kweli Shakur ATC NAPLA NAIM MOI APRIL 27 53 ADM 2018
Long Live Kwame Nkrumah Long Live The Afrikan Socialist Revolution to Free Afrika!!!
In his first few days in prison, Suge Knight confided in fellow convict Sanyika Shakur (a.k.a. Monster Kody). Sanyika, now a free man, reveals what Suge told him really happened the night Tupac was shot.
I been in these stoops since i was fifteen. This is what i said to Suge as we ambled down the massive central corridor at the California Institute for Men (CIM, or Chino) in Chino, California. He and I both had our hands cuffed behind our backs as we were escorted by two correctional officers with P-24 battle batons.
“Face the fucking wall,” barked a jar-headed correctional officer in army fatigues. Prisoners who’d been traversing the corridor just prior to our exit from Segregated Housing Unit edged closer to the yellow wall while stealing glimpses in our direction.
“Man,” said Suge, swaggering in an attempt to look comfortable, “this shit is hectic.”.
Yeah, I responded, trailing behind his big frame. Welcome to the terror zone.
Constructed in 1941, Chino is not simply a prison but a complex of many prisons. A monument of razor wire and cinder block, it stands as one of the tightes maximum-security facilities in southern California. The archaic cell blocks that extend from the central cooridor stretch threee tiers above the floor with as many as thirty-six cells to a tier. Each eight-foot-by-nine-foot cells holds two men for up twenty-three hours a day.
On the east end of the corrior sits Plam Hall-or the Hole, as prisoners call it-CIM’s answer to disciplinary problems and security risks. The Guards in Palm Hall don’t wear the usual uniform; they floss around the block in army green jumpsuits, spear-proof flak jackets, and combat boots. As the guards’ gear suggests, the Hole has seen its share of warfare. It was under all this concrete, steel, and animosity that i met Suge Knight.
I knew he’d be coming to Palm Hall perhaps even before he did. I reasoned that as a celebrity he’d be held in Involuntary Protective Custody (IPC)-just as Makaveli, then known as Tupac Shakur (no relation to me), was in 1995 at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. Before my honorable discharge from the Eight Tray Gangster Crips (when i was known as Monster Kody), I had rund up a karmic debt myself-which i repaid during many years behind bars-but the poetic justice of Suge’s fate seemed even more profound.
Monster Kody aka Sanyika Shakur Beyond Hate ( 1991 Exclusive) Street Gangs
The last time I had seen Makaveli was in April of 1996 during the vidoe shoot for the X-rated version of “How Do U Want It.”. I was on the run, about to go back to prison for a parole violation, and Makaveli was blowing up. But even then his stress was evident. We both had our demons.
After Makaveli was shot, I procured an avenue for news clippings to trickle in so I could keep up with the case. On hearing of his death, my first thought was that Suge had him set up. I had no evidence but had heard that a feud was brewing over contractual matters, including Makaveli’s firing his lawyer, David Kenner, and his wanting to leave Death Row to start his own label. I read and reread all the news clippings about the shooting. Things kept fitting ill to me.
I’d read that he had no vest on and then saw a photo in VIBE to substantiate this fact. Yet in my experience, Makaveli went nowhere without a vest or his heat. And if his killers were the Southside Crips, with whom he’s supposedly fought that evening, why didn’t the shooter dump on every car in the caravan? Suge’s entourage was allegedly made up of top-ranking (Blood) Pirus, so why would a Crip pass up all those points to shoot someone who wasn’t even a Blood? These thoughts ran through my head before i met the man.
In December 1996, Suge came to Palm Hall as i predicted. On top of his never having been in prison-despite his numerous convictions-Suge was staying in the Hole, where he would find it hard to breathe. I knew I’d be able to extract some inside information on Makaveli’s shooting.
We’d never met on the streets. Although our sets don’t get along, we never had any combat because of the distance between South Central and Compton. Besides, we were both in our thirties and had no time for red and blue rivalries. Out on the street, I’d heard that Suge was “on some Piru shit.” But in here, neither his wealth nor my reputation mattered. We were equals, and that’s how I approached him.
I knew that coming from L.A. County Jail he would have nothing. I wrote him a brief letter introducing myself and explaining the politics of the Hole. With the letter I included soap, deodorant, lotion, and a few Top Ramen soups. I put all of this in a big envelope and had it rushed to him. The next day he replied:
A Monster,
Good looking out. I wish we could hook up on the streets but it is never to (sic) late. My homeboy Poc (sic) had love for you so you know how it go if he had love for somebody I did too. He told me he would have been playing you in your life story. When the time is right we will talk.
Suge
I couldn’t believe it. This man was the CEO of a hundred-and-twenty-five-million dollar company, yet his writing was no better, perhaps even worse, than my seven-year-old son’s. Perhaps the brotha was just stressed out and wrote the letter in haste. I sent him a kite-a letter weighted with soap and tied to a long strip of bedsheet that gets delivered by being thrown from cell to cell-acknowledging receipt of his note and advising him to push the issue of going to general population. The following day he responded with a note that said I should let Death Row do the soundtrack for a movie about my life. The writing, like before, was in clumsy stick fashion.
I used some prison connections to get Suge and I put on the law-library list together. This way we’d be next to one another for at least three hours a week. I was a bit apprehensive preparing for our first meeting. After all, I’d seen men in and our of prison actually tremble when speaking about him.
Tupac & Monster Kody Phone Conversation October 18, 1995
Before I’d be unarmed. I’m sure Suge had to go through the same routine: Lift your arms up; stick out your tounge; pull back your ears; lift up your nut sack; bend at the waist; spread your cheeks and cough; lift your right foot; now your left. Any false teeth, dentures, or partials? You either complied or never came out of the cell. On went the cuffs, open came the door. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw Suge facing the wall to my left. I eased over to him, noting his dimensions-six foot four, 330 pounds-in case things got out of hand.
“What’s up, homie?” I was momentarily taken aback by his jovial greeting. I expected a harsher “I’m Suge Knight” type of response. I said I was well and just taking it one day at a time. We were escorted through two security doors and out into the law library, where we were put into gray, telephone booth-size cages. After the cages were secured with Yale padlocks, the handcuffs were removed. Suge was in his cage; I was in mine.
“Eh, Monster,” he said, breaking the ice, “I heard Geronimo Pratt was here too?” I told Suge that Pratt left the same day Suge came; in fact, he had taken Geronimo’s cell. It sort of irked me that he called me Monster after I had clearly signed each letter Sanyika. What if i used his banging name and called him Sugar Bear? I asked how he was doing so far.
“Man,” he said, exhaling a tremendous amount of air, “this whole thing is a trip. I’m losing weight. I can’t use no phone or get contact visits. And what’s up with that tier they got me on? Fools be yelling and shit.” Clearly, he was going through it. They had no shoes to fit him, so his man from VNG (Van Ness Gangsters) gave him some shower shoes. In return he gave the guy a photo of a half-naked woman taken at Makaveli’s birthday party in Vegas. Suge’s orange jumpsuit was two sizes too small. And on this day, he had only one side of his head shaved.
“Ain’t that cold,” he said when I asked about it. “The razor broke. I asked the police for another one, but they never came back. Plus, how I’m s’posed to shave and shower in ten minutes?”
Perhaps I’d been in these stoops too long. Most prisoners I knew could shower, shave, masturbate, and get their shoes on before the door opened again.
“I read your book,” he said, “and seen you and your family on that documentary. Your moms is a strong woman.” I thanked him for the compliment about moms and then asked about Makaveli.
“That’s my best friend,” he said, speaking in present tense. “We go everywhere together.” He started reminiscing about the wild times he and ‘Pac had at Suge’s Las Vegas nightclub. “We used to close up 662 at twelve, lock the doors, and give out free drinks and just get our freak on!”
How was my bo, though?
“He was the happiest he said he’s ever been. Did you see the lowrider I got him?”
No, I hadn’t seen it. Why all this talk about cars?
“Yeah, we got one just alike, 1961. He never drives it, thoug. I’m gonna get the engine and all that chromed up. “Why would you have his car?” I wanted to yell at him. And why would you still be working on it now? My mind was racing. So, y’all got some lo-lo’s, huh? I asked just to see where he’d go with it.
“Oh yeah, we got everything alike,” Suge replied. “The Jags, the Bentleys. We even had the contest to see who could get the most women to tattoo our name on them.” He chuckled at this for a long while.
When we met the following week, Suge’s jumpsuit was fitting slightly looser. No sooner had we made it through the door than the library clerk named Reverend Stern started yapping. “Hey, I just saw you on the news this morning.” Both Suge and I asked who.
“You,” he answered, indicating Suge with a nod.
“Oh yeah?” said Suge, his voice indicating more concern than he intended.
“The DA says he’s filing a three-strikes case against you for an old assault charge.” To this Suge said nothing, and the silence became pregnant.
“Whatcha think about that?” asked Rev. Stern, leaning over a graffiti-scarred banister.
“That’s noting,” replied Suge, his husky voice rising an octave. “Just the same old bullshit. I ain’t worried. You know, it’s like with this violation here: At first they said it was beause I lfet the country. Then they said I had a dirty test. When that didn’t work, they brought up the fight in Vegas. They just fuckin’ with me.”
The cage squeaked against his shifting body weight. The supposed third strike stemmed from the beating of a Bad Boy Records promoer at a 1995 Death Row Christmas party. The case was filed but never prosecuted. Now, all Suge’s prior infractions were being reviewed.
I’d heard that Afeni, Makaveli’s mom, had gotten a three-million-dollar royalty check from Interscope, so I asked about this. “Naw,” Suge said with a tone of disgust. “I gave here that money. She got some lawyer who says he’s been a friend of the family for twenty years, talkin’ ’bout ‘Pac had a bad contract. That’s bullshit. When he was on Interscope, he was only gettin’ four points. I got him eighteen points. And they talkin’ ’bout he was cheated. ‘Pac was happy. You seen all his jewelry, right?” I felt Suge was changing the subject again.
“Monster, listen, when I went out to New York to see ‘Pac, he was stressed out. He wanted to get out of prison. Don’t you know, he told me that I could have all of his songs for thirty thousand dollars if I just got him out of jail? I told him naw, to keep his songs, but I’d get him out. He said he’d always wanted a rag Benz, so I got him one. Plus, I got his mother a house. I’ll tell you this homie, God don’t like ugly. We’d all seen the black 500 droptop. And the house. Not one vehicle, however-not the Benz, the Jag, the Rolls, the Hummer, or the lolo-was in Makaveli’s name. All the jewelry, the limbo bills, and hotel accommodations were stacked against Makaveli like an advance. According to Suge, Makaveli left owing him-after sicty million dollars’ worth of album sales in 1996 alone. Imagine that.
Impatient, I asked about the shooting.
“Earlier that day,” Suge began in a solemn tone, “dude snatched a necklage with the Death Row coat of arms. ‘Pac was upset about that. You know how we gets: when it’s on, it’s on. Then, later that night, ‘Pac sees fool. So we touched him up a bit, you know. Still didn’t get that necklace, though. The we go on back to my spot, change, and hang out a bit; trying to find some freaks to come to the club. Tyson had won, and we was going to celebrate. ‘Pac was trippin’, though. All that day, he was talkin’ ’bout how he never wanted to go back to prison. Never.
HAKI SHAKUR, BREAKS IT DOWN ABOUT THE SHAKUR TRIBE & REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE, U.K. INTERVIEW
“Anyway, we rollin’; everything is tight. We talkin’ ’bout this and that when all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom, boom! We start takin’ heavy hits. I punch it; bust a U-turn, but realize I got a flat. Then I see ‘Pac is hit. But he still talkin’, like it ain’t nothing. My head was bleedin’, and ‘Pac said I should be the one sweatin’ it ’cause I got shot in the head. Then the Vegas police come and draw down on us; they f’in to shoot us! We trying to tell ’em that we the victims, but they make us get down on the ground anyway.”
He fell silent, as it overwhelmed by the rush of memories. I too was still talking after the shooting. Who shot him? I asked, feeling myself getting angry.
“You know who did it?” Suge said, grittin’ his teeth. “Them niggas that’s catchin’ heel right now.” I knew he was talking about the Southside Crips. In the days following Makaveli’s shooting, their ‘hood was practically overrun by shooters. Yet his answer was insufficient, and i pressed again: Who specifically dumped, though?
“Baby Lane,” he said and exhaled. I assumed he meant Orlando Anderson, the Compton resident who’d already been named as a suspect in the shooting. By the end of our conversation, Suge’s legendary bravado was gone. A humble respect descended over him that reminded me of a defeated man who’d lost his most prized possession in the game of life. For some of us, there just ain’t no sunshine.
Agnewville aka ChinnTown flourished from 1890 to 1927.
The land that became Agnewville was purchased and settled by freed slaves. The Chinn Family, freed by Henny Fielder Roe after the American Civil War, was given enough money to purchase about 500 acres of land in 1889. The U.S. Post Office in Agnewville was established in 1891, and was closed in March 1927, with the mail services transferred to the Woodbridge Post Office. The Mount Olive Baptist Church was founded in 1915 on Telegraph Road, with land donated by William Wallace Chinn. Agnewville was located along the main stage road out of Occoquan, Virginia. The decline of Agnewville came with the relocation of the main highway from Telegraph Road to the present day U.S. Route 1 through Woodbridge, Virginia. Farming and logging were the main economic activities.
Near this site lived six generations of the Chinn family. One of Prince William County’s early African-American families. The family traces its heritage to Nancy, a slave born in 1794 on the William Roe farm in Fauquier County. William Roe’s nephew, Henry Fielder Roe, who owned land near present-day Lake Ridge, eventually became the owner of Nancy and her children through inheritance. One of Nancy’s daughters, Mary Jane, married Thomas Chinn, another slave, and they had eight sons. After Emancipation, the Chinns bought several hundred acres of land along Telegraph and Davis Ford Roads (now Minnieville Road). They built homes in the area known as Agnewville, or sometimes known as Chinntown. The family has a long history of service to the County. John Chinn owned a general store, and Robert and William Chinn donated land on which Mt. Olive Baptist Church stands. Several Chinns are buried in that church’s cemetery.
The Struggle iz For Land Pt II (Organize The South / Black Belt) – Haki Kweli Shakur
Ala (also known as Ani, Ana, Ale, and Ali in varying Igbo dialects) is the Earth Mother Goddess; female Alusi (deity) of the earth, morality, death, and fertility in Odinani. She is the most important Alusi in the Igbo pantheon. The Igbo people of Nigeria call her the mother of all things, but she is both the fertile earth and the empty field after the harvest. She is present at the beginning of the cycle of life, making children grow in their mother’s womb, and she is there at the end of the cycle, to receive the souls of the dead into her own womb. Her name literally translates to ‘Ground’ in the Igbo language, denoting her powers over the earth and her status as the ground itself. Ala is considered the highest Alusi in the Igbo pantheon and was the first Alusi, daughter of Chukwu, the supreme god. Ala’s husband is Amadioha, the sky god.
As the Goddess of morality, Ala is involved in judging human actions and is in charge of Igbo law and customs known as ‘Omenala‘. Taboos and crimes among Igbo communities that are against the standard of Ala are called nsọ Ala. Army ants, who serve the Goddess, attack those who break such rules. But first, they appear in nightmares so that the wrongdoer might rectify his behavior. All ground is considered ‘Holy land’ as it is Ala herself. With human fertility, Ala is credited for the productivity of land. Ala’s messenger and living agent on earth is the python (Igbo: éké), it is and animal especially revered in many Igbo communities.
Indigenous Afrikan Spiritual Science (Spirituality didn’t Start with a Book) – Haki Kweli Shakur
“Ala’s shrine is at the center of a village, people offer sacrifices at planting, first fruits, and harvest. In the Owerri region, building called Mbari honor the Goddess. They are never occupied, the ritual of building being more important than the structure. The square Mbari are filled with painted figures of Ala, who balances a child on her knees while she brandishes a sword and is surrounded by the images of other gods and animals. Due to poverty and war, Mbari are built less frequently and are smaller than in the past.”
Earth Healing Ritual to Ala
This earth healing ritual is to Ala, the earth Mother, the highest Goddess of the Ibo pantheon of Nigeria. She is responsible for many aspects of civilization, as well as guardianship of women and children in general.
Visualise the following with me. We stand together on a rolling African plain. Behind us is a typical village, the huts made from natural, locally available materials. We can hear the laughter and voices of the inhabitants. Before us, the plain stretches as far as the eye can see. Acacia trees, dot the landscape forming little oases of shade. Herds of zebra and wildebeest are grazing. A group of hyenas circles the herds, hoping for an easy meal, and below one of the acacias, a pride of lionesses relaxes in the heat. By the powers of the four elements, our circle is raised. Let us work together within its bounds to bring healing to the Earth.
Odinani/ Omenala/Afa – Haki Kweli Shakur
Guardian to the element of air, powers of the East, the glory of the sun rising above the African plains. We welcome you to our circle this night and ask you to share your powers as we work to heal the Earth. In love and trust we bid you Hail and Welcome! Guardian to the element of fire, powers of the South, the strength of the noon-time sun shining down on the African plains. We ask you to join our circle this night and lend your power to our work. We bid you hail and welcome!
Guardian to the element of water, powers of the west, the life-giving drinking holes in the parched African lands. Come to our circle this night we ask, and lend your powers and emotion to our work. We bid you Hail and Welcome!
Guardian to the element of earth, powers of the north, the graceful silhouettes of the giraffes against the setting sun. Join us this night with our love, and lend your powers of healing to our work. With love and trust we bid you Hail and welcome!
Great Mother Goddess Ala, creator of the living and Queen of the dead; Lady of the Earth, we ask you to grace our circle with your presence this night as we raise power to heal the Earth. We bid you Hail and Welcome!
Ala is the Earth Mother Goddess of the Ibo tribe in Nigeria. She is Creator of the living and Queen of the dead, provider of communal loyalty and Lawgiver of society. The highest Goddess in the Ibo pantheon, She is the daughter of the High God and is considered to be the mother of all things. She is both the goddess of fertility and the goddess of death. She gives birth in the beginning and welcomes the dead back to her womb. She is the Divine Mother who gives life, provides all that is life sustaining, establishes laws, guides morality and finally claims her children in death. If her children live peacefully, there will be bountiful harvests from the earth and womb. She rules the Underworld, and it is believed that the souls of the dead rest within her sacred womb. Her symbol is the crescent moon and she is often depicted in works of art as a seated woman holding a small child in her arms. Each year her followers pay homage to her with an event known as the Yam Festival. In Nigeria, where she is still worshipped, she has temples situated in the centre of the villages, where she has a statue surrounded by the images of other gods and animals. She is one of the most popular Goddesses of the Ibo.
Come with me now to the Yam festival. Picture yourselves in the middle of an African Village way back in time at the dawn of civilisation. Before us stands the statue of Ibo, decorated for the day with garlands of flowers. Around us the people of the village are laughing and talking excitedly, busy preparing for the feast that will follow. Take a moment to understand the lives of these people, their closeness to the Earth, their affinity for the patterns of our world, the turn of the year, the cycle of the moon, their respect for the land around them.
A movement catches your eye. Where the statue of Ibo once stood is the living Goddess. She looks with pleasure at the festivities in her honour, and then she turns and smiles at us. She knows why we have come and it pleases her. She claps her hands, and all gather around her, including us in their circle, and we all begin to dance, moving gradually faster and faster around the Goddess Ala. Feel the happiness of the people, feel the power of the love of Lady Ala, feel the pure energy that we are raising in our dance and through our love for the land. Feel this energy as a pulsing band within our circle. Feel it grow stronger as we continue our dance. Mother Ala claps her hands again and as we end our dance we release this band of energy. See it rising now above us, a shimmering silver/white band pulsing with power. Send your love for the Earth into this band. See it grow brighter and stronger as it rises and grows until it circles the entire Earth. See it release its healing energies, restoring the damage caused by man. Hold this image for a few moments more and then turn again to the Lady Ala who smiles at us in love as she merges back with her statue.
Biafra: King JaJa Of Opobo The Exact Science of Nationalism – Haki Kweli Shakur
Let us now thank the Mother Ala by offering a chalice of wine.
Lady of the living and dead, we ask that you accept this small gift as a token of our love and thanks. Iseee!!! Blessed be!
Let us now start to close our ritual
Mother Ala, Lady of the Earth, we thank you for your presence this night. Let us part now in love till we meet again. We bid you Hail and Farewell!
Guardian of Earth, Lord of the North, we give thanks for your presence this night. As the full moon
Guardian of Water, Lord of the West, we give thanks for your presence this night. As the setting sun shines on the savannah we bid you hail and farewell.
Guardian of Fire, Lord of the South, we give thanks for your presence this night. As the noon sun burns down upon the African lands we bid you hail and farewell
Guardian of Air, Lord of the East, we give thanks for your presence this night. As the rising sun sheds light on the grasslands we bid you hail and farewell.
As we release the circle, let the excess energy return to the earth. Our circle is now open but never unbroken. Let us part in love till we meet again.
April 20, 1977 Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) is led from federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, April 20, after requesting she be transferred from a medium security prison to the minimum security Clinton prison where she had been previously housed. after the Maximum Security Unit at Alderson was closed, Shakur was transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. According to her attorney Lennox Hinds, Shakur “understates the awfulness of the condition in which she was incarcerated”, which included vaginal and anal searches. Hinds argues that “in the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in a men’s prison, under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and exercise, and without the company of other women for all the years she was in custody”
Assata Shakur Aspirations of a New Afrikan Nation with True Freedom, There Has to Be a Revolution
Shakur was identified as a political prisoner as early as October 8, 1973 by Angela Davis, and in an April 3, 1977, New York Times advertisement purchased by the Easter Coalition for Human Rights. An international panel of seven jurists were invited by Hinds to tour a number of U.S. prisons, and concluded in a report filed with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that the conditions of her solitary confinement were “totally unbefitting any prisoner”. Their investigation, which focused on alleged human rights abuses of political prisoners, cited Shakur as “one of the worst cases” of such abuses and including her in “a class of victims of FBI misconduct through the COINTELPRO strategy and other forms of illegal government conduct who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions.” Amnesty International, however, did not regard Shakur as a former political prisoner.
The Importance of Assata’s Liberation From Prison – Haki Kweli
Assata Shakur Case is a attack on New Afrikan Black Women – Haki Kweli Shakur
At a Special Election Meeting held Sunday, April 15, 53ADM (2018), the following population districts received district certifications:
1. Gabriel Prosser District ( richmond, va)
2. Olentangy Washitaw District (columbus,oh)
3. Harriet Tubman District (eastern shore, worchester county, md)
4. ft. worth, tx
Congratulations to all conscious citizens in our newly certified districts. We all look forward to strengthening our National Territory and to involve the district in the active participation in all areas of PG-RNA affairs.
“I believe in the Malcolm X Doctrine: that We must organize upon this land, and hold a plebiscite, to tell the world by a vote that We are free and the land independent, and that, after the vote, We must stand ready to defend ourselves establishing the nation beyond contradiction.
Free the Land,
Mama Ayo
PCC Secretary
Republic of New Afrika, PGRNA 50th Year Commemoration, 3- 31-68 – 2018, Land, Independence, Ujamaa
The Preamble We Govern Ourselves, New Afrika is The Only Solution
Haki Kweli Shakur ATC NAPLA NAIM MOI 4-19-53 ADM 2018
The Black Panther newspaper reported the shootings this way:
Spurgeon (Jake) Winters, 19, member of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party, paid the most that one can pay towards the liberation of oppressed people in his life. At 3:30 AM, November 13, Jake was murdered in a shoot-out in Chicago where three Pigs were killed and seven were wounded. The shoot-out was precipitated by an ambush made by the standing Army of Chicago (Chicago Police Department) on an abandoned building at 5801 S. Calumet. Arriving on the scene with the armaments and men (more than 1,000 policemen equipped with .12-gauge shotguns, M-1 carbines, .357 magnums, billy clubs, mace, tear gas, paddy wagons, helicopters, and canine units) for domestic warfare against the people in the Black colony, these fanatical pigs started their attack by opening fire on the brother in the building. Party comrade, Lance Bell, 20, was wounded by the pigs as they shot wildly in that area…. Jake defended himself as any person should do. In essence, he had no choice; it was kill or be killed.
There may be some room for doubt whether the police were in fact mounting an “ambush,” as the Panthers claim, or were simply responding to a call originally issued in the belief that James Caldwell’s life was in danger, but the Panthers and the police agree that after the police arrived at least eight policemen were shot before Winters was shot.
Jake Winters, a brother, a much beloved brother, a revolutionary, a Black Panther made of red-hot nigger steel, and the baddest son of slaves that ever came from the womb of woman. I have said these things about Jake Winters, because they are already fact. It’s objective reality, proven by words and actions in defending the Black community.
Jake Winters stood face to face and toe to toe, his shotgun in hand, with pig Daley’s murderous task force. He defined political power by blowing away racist pig Frank Rappaport and racist pig John Gilhooley and retired 8 other reactionary racist pigs before he was shot down.
It is also a proven fact and reality that Daley’s task force makes daily and weekly raids on the Black community. They murdered little John Soto, 16 years old. They murdered Michael Soto, 20 years old, and shot wildly and unconcerned through every window in one of the buildings in the Henry Honer project, injuring scores of children. They murdered Jimmy Tucker and untold others.
Jake Winters understood that the only way to stop fascist pig forces from invading and slaughtering Black people and people, period, and that is by defending yourself with arms in hand! He didn’t talk about Black capitalism for surviving nor did he talk about teaching “pork chop” cultural nationalism for surviving like Ron Karenga US organization in L.A. Jake Winters was 18 years old and he made a far greater commitment than most men will ever make in their entire life time. This brother was an honor student, a graduate of Engleworth High School who turned down five scholarships to work for the people. He helped as much as he possibly could at the free breakfast for children centers, plus he worked 7 days a week at the post office to bring in money to keep the center operating.
Jake Winters is the highest personification of Huey P. Newton and Malcolm X. The spirit of these revolutionaries is manifested in each member of the Black Panther Party and we will always remember Jake Winters. Because of Jake Winters we will intensify the struggle, because of Jake Winters we will continue serving the poor oppressed people–the proletariat.
Long Live The Spirit of Jake Winters
All Power to the People
Right On Jake
Seize The Time
Deputy Minister of Information
R. Chaka Walls
Illinois Chapter Black Panther Party
2350 W. Madison, Chicago Illinois.
Between 4:40 and 4:52 A.M. on December 4, 1969, plainclothes police in Chicago, while executing a search warrant for illegal weapons, shot to death Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Black Panther Party of Illinois, and Mark Clark, a member of the Party, in Hampton’s apartment. Four days later, at about the same hour of the morning, the Los Angeles Special Weapons Tactics Team, dressed in black jumpsuits and black hats, moved on the Black Panther Party headquarters in that city with another search warrant for illegal weapons and, in a heated gun battle, shot and seriously wounded three more Panthers. Commenting on these events, in San Francisco, Charles R. Garry, chief counsel and spokesman for the Black Panther Party, whose membership at the time was estimated at between eight hundred and twelve hundred, declared to the press that Hampton and Clark were “in fact the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth Panthers murdered by the police,” and that the deaths and the raids were all “part and package of a national scheme by various agencies of the government to destroy and commit genocide upon members of the Black Panther Party.”
Garry’s assertion that twenty-eight members of the controversial black-militant group had been killed by the police was widely reported. On December 7 and December 9, 1969, the New York Times reported as an established fact, without giving any source for the figure or qualifying it in any way, that twenty-eight Panthers had been killed hy police since January, 1968. On December 9, 1969, the Washington Post stated flatly, “A total of 28 Panthers have died in clashes with police since January 1, 1968.” In a later article, the Post declared, “Between a dozen and 30 Panthers have been killed in these confrontations.”
On the basis of what had been reported about the police killings and predawn raids, civil-rights leaders expressed an understandable concern. Roy Innis, director of the Congress of Racial Equality, called for an immediate investigation of “the death of 28 Black Panther members killed in clashes with the police since January, 1968.” Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded Martin Luther King, Jr., as the chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, attributed the death of Panther leaders to “a calculated design of genocide in this country.” Julian Bond, a member of the Georgia state legislature, said, “The Black Panthers are being decimated by political assassination arranged by the federal police apparatus.” And Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, urgently requested the Attorney General to convene federal grand juries in those “jurisdictions where nearly 30 Panthers have been murdered by law-enforcement officials.”
Garry’s theory about “a national scheme … to destroy” the Black Panthers was also taken up by the press. Pointing to a “growing feeling (particularly in the black community)” that the “Federal Administration has had a hand in the recent wave of raids, arrests and shoot-outs,” an article in the Times by John Kifner concluded that statements made by officials of the Nixon Administration “appear to have at least contributed to a climate of opinion among local police . . . that a virtual open season has been declared on the Panthers.” Time reported, on December 12, 1969, that “a series of gun battles between Panthers and police throughout the nation” amounted to a “lethal undeclared war,” and concluded, “Whether or not there is a concerted police campaign, the ranks of Panther leadership have been decimated in the past two years.” In the very next issue, Time, repeating Garry’s claim that “28 Panthers have died in police gunfire,” asked, “Specifically, are the raids against Panther offices part of a national design to destroy the Panther leadership?”
The K.Kinte Show With Guest Haki Kweli Shakur “ The Origin of The Term Black Power 1919 “
The answer was more or less left open. That same week, Newsweek began a news report entitled “Too Late for the Panthers?” with the same question: “Is there some sort of government conspiracy afoot to exterminate the Black Panthers?” The article then proceeded to portray a guerrilla war between “the gun-toting Panthers and the police,” in which the Panther “hierarchy around the country has been all but decimated over the past year,” and concluded that “there is no doubt that the police around the nation have made the Panthers a prime target in the past two years . . .” A few weeks later, Newsweek reported that “the cop on the beat has been joined by Attorney General John Mitchell’s Justice Department, which believe the Panthers to be a menace to national security and has accordingly escalated the drive against them”– a drive that “has taken a fearful toll of the Panthers.” The Washington Post, noting in an editorial that the “carnage has been terrible” in the “urban guerrilla warfare” between Panthers and police, concluded that “recent events” had given “added currency” to the Panther charge that “there is a national campaign under way to eradicate them by any means, legal or extra-legal.” Picking up the theme in his syndicated column, Carl T. Rowan observed, “We have seen this nationally orchestrated police campaign to turn the guns on the Panthers and wipe them out,” and referred to an “obvious conspiracy of police actions across the country that has produced the alleged killings of 28 Black Panthers.” The Nation, in an editorial titled “Marked for Extinction,” asserted, “It is becoming increasingly apparent that a campaign of repression and assassination is being carried out against the Black Panthers.” Evcn a paper as cautious as the Christian Science Monitor, after a telephone interview with Garry, cited the Panther charge of “police murder” and “genocide” and expressed “a growing suspicion that something more than isolated local police action was involved.”
Confusion about the alleged murders began to set in early, and on December 21, 1969, the Times reported that Garry had put the number of Panthers killed by the police at twelve, although it later returned to the figure of twenty-eight. While an Associated Press dispatch in the San Francisco Examiner on December 9th reported that twenty-seven panthers had been killed by police in “Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Detroit and Indianopolis,” a UPI dispatch, on December 12th, listed twenty Panthers killed in “cold blood” by police in Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, New Haven and Chicago. Life, in a single issuethat of February 6, 1990, presented three figures: Eldrige Cleaver, a Black Panther official was quoted as saying that the police “ambush” had led to “28 murders of Panthers,” but, at another point, the magazine declared “at least 19 Panthers are dead,” adding parentheses, that “it is uncertan more than a dozen have died of police bullets.” While articles in the New Republic, Ramparts, and The New Statesman have, at various times, put the figure at twenty, an article in Newsday by Patrick Owens asserted that no more than ten Panthers had been killed by police. The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois declared, according to the Washington Post, that twenty-eight Panthers had died in clashes with police since January 1, 1968, while the Los Angeles branch of the same organization said that it was possible to document twelve cases in which Panthers had been killed in such encounters. In a column in the Post, a few days earlier, Nicholas von Hoffman had written “The Panthers alone claim that 28 of their top people have been murdered in the past couple of years and there is no stong prima facie reason to disbelieve them.”
Even one victim of deliberate police murder would be too many, but if twenty-eight Panthers had been murdered by the police in two years, as Garry claimed and many publcations reported, it might indeed represent a pattern of systematic destruction. The implications would be so dreadful that one would expect the figures to be checked out with the utmost scruple. Since the number of Panthers killed would seem to be an ascertainable fact, how can such widely differing figures be accounted for?
When A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor of the Times, was asked about the discrepancies in his paper, he explained that the December 7th report, which stated, “Twenty-eight Black Panthers have been killed in run-ins with the police since January 1, 1968,” was taken from a December 5th story by the same reporter, which said, “According to Charles Garry … [Hampton and Clark] were the 27th and 28th Black Panthers killed in clashes with the police since January of 1968,” and which was itself based on a telephone conversation with Garry. In the December 7th story, the qualifying phrase “according to Charles Garry” had been deleted, Rosenthal said, because “the reporter probably felt the source was unimportant in the second story” although Rosenthal, in discussing the matter, said that he personally felt that the reporter should not have turned an assertion by an interested party into a fact. The figure of twenty-eight had subsequently been reported as fact because the reporter “inadvertently referred to the first figure,” and this had happened because “no flag was placed on the error.” (Whitney Young’s assertion that “nearly thirty Panthers have been murdered by law-enforcement officials” was based on the Times, according to his research assistant, and the Times was then able to report in a Sunday summary that the charge of a “national conspiracy” against the Panthers “has been echoed by more moderate civil rights leaders.”)
Ben Bagdikian, the national editor of the Washington Post, also named Garry as the source for his newspaper’s assertion that twenty-eight Panthers had been killed by police– though the only “specific documentation” on the subject was the UPI bulletin of December 12th. The bulletin, which went out to more than four thousand subscribing domestic newspapers and broadcasting stations, came from the news agency’s San Francisco bureau, which, according to its manager, H. Jefferson Grigsby, obtained the list of “victims of cold-blooded murder by the police” from Panther sources. “There was no further dispatch modifying the December 12th story,” Grigsby has noted. Garry’s list apparently provided publications such as the New Republic, Ramparts and the New Statesman with the “fact” that twenty Panthers had been killed by police, and Ramparts,in turn, furnished an organization called the Committee to Defend the Panthers with what the committee called the “grim statistic” of twenty Panthers dead.
And so it went. Although Garry was certainly an interested party in the controversy over what came to be called the war between the Panthers and the police, it is clear that his assertions were widely accepted at their face value, so even when modifications were made in the lists of casualties it was Garry’s story that was being modified, and practically no independent checking was done.
How, then, did Garry arrive at his figures? In September, 1970, Garry explained to me that he chose the number twenty-eight when newsmen called him for a statement after the shooting of Hampton and Clark because that “seemed to be a safe number.” He added that he believed the “actual number of Panthers murdered by the police is many times” that figure.” When pressed for the names, however, Garry found he could “document” only “twenty police murders” of Panthers.
The list of “twenty murders,” which was sent to me from Garry’s office, along with a warning that “facts are not necessarily empirical,” actually comprised only nineteen Panther deaths, and one of the deaths — that of Sidney Mille in Seattle, is attributed by Garry not to police but to “a merchant who claimed he thought Miller was going to rob the store.” In the coroner’s records, the statement of the Seattle police is that “the deceased and an unknown person were robbing the Seven-Eleven store at 8856 35th Ave. S.W., and in the progress of the robbery the deceased was shot with a .38-caliber snub-nosed Smith & Wesson by the store owner, Donald F. Lannoye.” Lannoye does not dispute the statement that he fired the fatal shot.
That leaves eighteen “documented” cases involving Black Panthers who Garry claims were murdered by police in pursuance of a policy to “commit genocide upon” the Black Panthers. Garry’s list of eighteen Panthers allegedly murdered by the police is as follows:
THE CASE OF ALEX RACKLEY
On May 21, 1969, John Mroczka, a twenty-three-year-old factory worker, stopped his motorcycle near a bridge on Route 147 outside of Middlefield, Connecticut, and while walking along the edge of a stream looking for trout saw a “set of legs” and “body” partly submerged. State police were called to the scene by Mroczka, and they recovered from the Stream the body of a black male whose wrists were tied with gauze and whose neck was encircled by a noose fashioned from a wire coat hanger. An autopsy, conducted immediately afterward, indicated that the man had been severely burned on wide areas of the chest, wrists, buttocks, thighs, and right shoulder and had also been beaten around the face, the groin, and the lumbar region with a hard object before he was shot in the head and chest. The victim, who was subsequently identified by his fingerprints as Alex Rackley, had died, a pathologist concluded, within the preceding twelve to twenty four hours.
Just after midnight on May 22nd, New Haven police acted on a tip supplied by an informant who identified a Polaroid photograph of the corpse as a man who had been tortured with scalding water in an apartment that served as the headquarter of the Black Panther Party. Around 12:30 A.M., they raided the apartment and arrested Warren Kimbro, thirty-five, one of the leaders of the New Haven chapter of the Black Panther Party, and five women members. Eventually, eight other Black Panthers, including Bobby Seale, the national chairman of the Party, were arrested, and all of those arrested, except two who were remanded to a juvenile court, were charged with complicity, in varying degrees, in the kidnaping or torture or murder of Alex Rackley, a twenty-four year old teenage member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther party.
Charles Garry immediately charged that “Rackley was killed by the police or by agents of some armed agency of the government.” Holding that the murder victim was in “good standing” in the Party, he further declared, as quoted in Newsweek, “We have every reason to believe, and we intend to prove, when the time comes, that Rackley was murdered by police agents.”
Even without proof, Garry’s version of the events gained wide currency. The U.P.I.’s listing of Panthers alleged by a Party spokesman to have been killed by the police cites “Alex Rackley” simply as ” ‘tortured and killed’ by the police in New Haven, Conn., in May, 1969.” At Yale, where a national May Day rally was held in the spring of 1970 to support the Panthers charged in the case, William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, described the trial of the accused Panthers as “Panther repression,” and said, “All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers, and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these acts.” At the same time, the president of Yale, King man Brewster, Jr., told striking students who were demanding, among other things, the release of the Black Panthers awaiting trial for Rackley’s murder, that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States,” adding, “in large measure, the atmosphere has been created by police actions and prosecutions against the Panthers in many parts of the country.”
At this point, the three Black Panther officers who were specifically accused of taking Rackley to the stream near Middlefield, Connecticut, where his body was found had long since admitted their participation in the killing. George Sams, Jr., a twenty-three year old Panther who had once held the rank of field marshal in the National Black Panther Party, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, which In Connecticut carries with it a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, and testified that in the early morning of May 21, 1969, he and Warren Kimbro and Lonnie McLucas, using a car that McLucas had borrowed, took Rackley, bound and gagged, from Black Panther headquarters in New Haven to a deserted spot off Route 147; there Kimbro, under Sams’ direction, shot Rackley in the head with a .45-caliber pistol, and a few minutes later McLucas fired another shot into the body. Sams testified that he was acting under orders from the “national” Party personally given to him by Bobby Seale. Kimbro pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in January, 1970, and testified in open court that he fired the first shot into the back of Rackley’s head after Sams said, “Now.” Kimbro, however, refused to implicate Seale in the crime, testifying that he himself was asleep at the time Seale was said by Sams to have visited the headquarters. McLucas, twenty-three, a captain in the Black Panther Party and a founder of the Bridgeport chapter, gave the same general account of the killing to New Haven police detectives and F.B.I. agents two days after he was captured in Salt Lake City in June, 1969. During his own trial, at which he pleaded not guilty to the charge of conspiracy, McLucas testified that he drove Rackley, bound and gagged, along with Sams and Kimbro, from New Haven to Middlefield; after Kimbro had shot Rackley, McLucas said, Sams ordered him, McLucas, “to make sure he was dead.” McLucas said he then fired a second bullet into Rackley. McLucas, like Kimbro, has not implicated Seale, although he acknowledged under cross-examination that at the time of the killing he believed be was acting under orders from “national headquarters.” (McLucas was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in prison.)
The testimony of Sams, Kimbro, and McLucas was consistent with physical evidence that has not been contested in various legal proceedings having to do with the case: a .45-caliber pistol that the police found in Panther headquarters on the night of the raid ballistically matched the bullet and the bullet casing found at the scene of the murder, and fingerprints found on the car that McLucas borrowed that night matched those of Sams and Rackley and also with the statements of other Panthers who were present in the apartment on the night of the killing.
For example, Loretta Luckes, who had stood guard over Rackley while he was tied to a bed in the Panther headquarters for two days, described, in testimony during bail hearings, having helped to dress Rackley on the night of the murder while Sams and Kimbro stood over him with a pistol and rifle because, one Panther said, “he might go crazy”; then, she said, “Lonnie McLucas, Warren Kimbro, and George Sams” went out the door” with Rackley. If so, Rackley was shot not by the police but by two officers of the Black Panther Party, and since both have refused to implicate Seale, the suggestion that they might be “police agents” seems shaky at best. From what evidence has been established, police did not murder Rackley.
THE CASE OF NATHANIEL CLARK
Nathaniel Clark, Jr., a nineteen year-old Black Panther, is listed by Garry as having been “killed by a police agent.”
He was in fact killed by his wife, who told investigating officers that she had shot her husband in self-defense with his revolver after he had, in her words, “shot up with heroin and beat me.”
Because of her age, seventeen at the time, the case was remanded to a juvenile court, which adjudged the death to have resulted from involuntary manslaughter.
THE CASE OF ARTHUR MORRIS
On March 13, 1968, while out bail on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder, Arthur Glenn Morris (also known as Arthur Coltrale) was killed by a blast from a 12-gauge shotgun in a friend’s back yard. According to the friend’s wife, Mrs. Henry Daily, Morris and a companion, Donald Campbell, were in the back yard talking with her husband, who had taken his 12-gauge shotgun out there with him. She heard the men arguing, then heard a volley of shots. Rushing out, she found all three men fatally shot. Apparently, there had been a shootout, in which either Morris or Campbell had shot Daily with a .32-caliber automatic (the gun found at the scene) and he had shot both men with his shotgun. None survived to tell their stories. And there was no police involved prior to the shooting.
THE CASES OF JOHN HUGGINS, ALPRENTICE CARTER, SYLVESTER BELL, AND JOHN SAVAGE
Of the fifteen remaining “homicides” on Garry’s list, four Panthers. John Jerome Huggins, Jr., Alprentice Carter, Sylvester Bell, and John Savage were actually shot to death, according to both the Black Panther Party and California authorities, by members of the US, a rival black militant organization, headed by Ron Karenga, with which the Panthers had once temporarily allied themselves in a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department.
The dispute began at the University of California at Los Angeles in the fall of 1968, when Ron Karenga attempted to select the director of the Black Studies program through the Community Advisory Board, of which he was a director. A number of Black Panthers, including Huggins and Carter, who were at that time enrolled in the black section of the “high potential” program, vigorously opposed Karenga’s attempt, despite the warning of a Karenga spokesman, who said, that “this is not a decision that anybody is going to take out of our hands…. Anybody that is involved in this is going to have to come back to the community after dark.”
On January 17,1969, some hundred and fifty members of the U.C.L.A. Black Students Union met in Campbell Hall on the U.C.L.A. campus to resolve the dispute over the directorship. Five members of the elite guard of the US — known as Simbas, shortly after noon, in the student cafeteria, Huggins and Carter cornered a young Simba named Harold Jones, who had been accused of manhandling a female Panther earlier in the day, and began pummeling him. Suddenly another Simba, dressed in a dashiki, stepped up behind Huggins and fatally shot him in the back. A gun battle ensued, in which Carter was also shot to death before the Simbas fled.
Black Panthers who had been present at the meeting were reluctant to supply information at first, but they cooperated fully with the police and the prosecutor in identifying the assailants and finding witnesses after the prosecutor spoke to Garry, who, the prosecutor later reported, “instructed the local Panthers to help us in our investigation.” Two of the Simbas, George Phillip Stiner and Larry Joseph Stiner, were brought to trial on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, were convicted, largely on the basis of the testimony of five Black Panther witnesses, and sentenced to life imprisonment. A third Simba, Donald Hawkins, was also convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, and was sentenced to an indefinite term in the detention program of the California Youth Authority.
In the aftermath of the gun battle in Campbell Hall, two more Black Panthers were killed by members of the same US organization, according to both the Black Panther Party and the police. “At about 3:30 p.m. on May 23rd in San Diego, California, Lt. John Savage, Black Panther Party, was murdered by a white-washed Karangatang, a member of the US organization led by Ron (Everett) Karenga,” the Black Panther newspaper reported, and it went on, “Mr. Karenga, better known as pork chop, is leading his culturalized pork chops in a futile attempt to destroy the Black Panther Party.” The US member who shot Savage was eventually arraigned and pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter.
A few weeks after Savage’s death, another Panther, Sylvester Bell, who was selling the Black Panther newspaper in Otto Square in San Diego, was approached by three members of US, who, according to the Black Panther account of the incident, asked him, “Are you talking about us this week?” A fight broke out, during which Bell was joined by two fellow-Panthers, and one of the three members of US drew a gun and fatally shot Bell. The San Diego police arrested three members of US and indicted them for murder. One was convicted of murder, and the two others were convicted as accessories. Since Garry himself and the Panthers assisted the authorities in the identification and prosecution of some of those involved in the killings, his subsequent inclusion of these four names in his list of Panthers murdered by the police is, at best, erroneous.
THE CASE OF FRANKO DIGGS
Franko Diggs, forty, who was a captain in the Black Panther Party, was found fatally shot in the Watts section of Los Angeles on December 19, 1968. No witnesses to the shooting could be found, but the police identified the murder weapon from the bullets as a foreign-made 9-mm. automatic pistol. Almost a year later, when the Los Angeles police crime laboratory was doing routine ballistics tests on eighteen weapons seized in a raid on Black Panther headquarters early in 1969, it was found that one of the confiscated Panther automatics ballistically matched the bullet that had killed Diggs. The chain of ownership could not be established, however, so the owner at the time Diggs was shot could not be identified. According to the police, the crime remains unsolved, but Garry, almost a year after Diggs’ death, added his name to the list of Black Panthers killed by police. So 18 panthers on Garry’s list were not, according to evidence so far discovered, killed by the police.
The ten remaining Black Panthers on Garry’s list were in fact killed by the police: five in 1968 and five in 1969. Whether these deaths were deliberate murders carried out as part of what Garry called a “national scheme” to wipe out the Panthers depends, of course, on the circumstances under which each of the deaths occurred.
THE CASE OF LARRY ROBERSON
In summarizing the deaths of various Black Panthers, the Times quoted “sources in Chicago” as saying that Larry Roberson “died in jail after being wounded in [a] shoot-out during a police raid — a statement suggesting that he was shot during a planned police action against a Panther office.
The picture of what happened that can be pieced together from police records, independent witnesses, and even the Black Panther newspaper is very different. At 2:01 A.M. On July 16, 1969, the Chicago police received a “citizen’s complaint” that a fruit stand had been burglarized at 610 California Street, in the West Side ghetto. A radio dispatcher routinely recorded this information on a computer card used for statistical analysis of complaints and crime patterns, and dispatched the patrol car that his electronic map indicated was nearest to the scene Car No. 1124, manned by Officers Kenneth Gorles and Daniel Sampila. According to Sampila’s subsequent report, the officers arrived at the fruit stand at about 2:05 A.M. and were met by Mr. and Mrs. Burman Jenkins, friends of its owner, who pointed out a hole in the door of the stand. The two policemen, led by Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins, then followed a trail of apples and oranges to a passage way, where they found two empty fruit baskets. While the police were flashing a searchlight around, the group encountered Larry Roberson, twenty one, and Grady Moore, twenty-eight, who identified themselves as “community leaders, ”and were told by Sampila to “mind their own business.” The group, followed by Roberson and Moore, then returned to the fruit stand, where they were met by the Reverend Edmond Jones, who owned the fruit stand, and another of his friends, the Reverend Clarence Edward Stowers, who was the pastor at the nearby Mars Hill Missionary Baptist Church. A few minutes later, the two policemen and Jenkins were shot. In a statement Stowers made later, he described what happened this way:
“Reverend Jones, Jenkins, myself, and the two officers were standing there talking about boarding up the door. Two men walked up and started looking in the hole in the door and asking what had happened. The officers told them that every thing was taken care of and they should leave. One of the men had his hand in his pocket, and the officer shined his light on the man. The man asked him why was he shining the light on him and don’t be doing that. Then the shooting started. The officers had their guns in their holsters so it must have been the men that were shooting. One of the officers fell down and the other one got hit in the shoulder. I remember it was only one of the two men that was shooting. He turned and ran up the alley. I don’t know where the other one went to. Well, anyway the policeman that had fallen to the ground got up and started chasing the man that was shooting at us. They ran down the alley and I heard more shots.”
Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins agreed with this account, Mr. Jenkins adding:
“One man shouted something and started shooting … after the first shot one officer fell to his knees, the second shot hit officer Gorles, and the third shot hit me.”
Roberson, pursued through the alley, was shot in the ankle, in the thigh, and in the abdomen by Sampila before he surrendered. According to the Chicago crime laboratory, the bullets that struck Gorles (in the left shoulder and collarbone, Sampila (in the head), and Jenkins (in the right side) all came from a .38-caliber snub-nosed Smith & Wesson taken from Roberson. This turned out to be a stolen weapon. Roberson was arrested on charges of attempted murder and was admitted to the Cermak Memorial Hospital, where he underwent surgery. Seven weeks later, be contracted jaundice and died in the Cook County Hospital.
A somewhat different version of the incident was provided by the Black Panther newspaper, which reported, in August:
“On July 17, 1969, two brothers in the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party were returning to their community after finishing a day of revolutionary work for the people’s Party. On this particular night they noticed the pigs had nine brothers on the wall next to a storefront, harassing them. Five of the brothers were in ages ranging from 50-60 years old. The pigs claimed they were answering a burglary in process call. Can you imagine men 50-62 years old burglarizing a store in their own community? Well, after investigating the matter and coming to the conclusion that this was just another racist act of harassment committed by the pigs on the people, Larry Roberson and Grady Moore walked over to the scene where the majority of the people had gone and asked an officer what was going on. The pig then demagogically replied “This is none of your damn business.”
Larry then stated “I am a member of this community and even by your laws I have the right to know what’s going on.” The crazy pig then said “smart bastard, you’re under arrest for disorderly conduct.” The people of the community immediately got between Larry and the pigs, and the pig drew his gun and ordered them aside while his pig partner radioed for help. Larry then (with the instructions from the people) was told to go home because the people hadn’t seen him do anything, so he and Grady started away and the pig deliberately shot Larry in the leg. Grady grabbed Larry to help him to try to escape with his life. This whole area was sealed off with crazy, drunk, inhuman pigs. Larry was then cornered in an alley, unarmed and wounded. As the pig approached him, he oinked “I’ll teach you and your partner how to interfere with pig matters.” He then aimed at Larry’s head. It was true that Larry was unarmed, but being a Panther and a stone revolutionary, he had educated the true power— the people. As the pig was ready to squeeze the trigger, the power of the people was demonstrated. A voice quoted Huey: “You racist pigs must withdraw immediately from the black community and cease this wanton murder and brutality of black people or face the wrath of the armed people.” Then, the shots from the people rang out from everywhere for about 30 seconds: then it ceased. One pig shot in the head and one pig shot in the shoulder. Larry and Grady then started to make it when more pigs arrived. Larry and Grady turned and raised their hands. “The pig that was shot in the shoulder raised his gun and shot Brother Larry in the stomach, thigh and leg trying to kill him. Grady, evidently escaped death when the people in the community came out to witness the action.”
The statements that Roberson was unarmed and that the “people” did the shooting were contradicted by a subsequent report in the Black Panther newspaper, which said that “determined to defend himself even after he being shot, Larry managed to get his gun out and wound two of the attacking maniacs.” But the Panther version and the police version agree in a number of significant respects: the encounter was accidental, not planned; the Panthers approached the police rather than the other way around; and two police officers were shot before Roberson was seriously wounded in the abdomen.
Even accepting the Panther version, Roberson was wounded in an incident no one had planned.
THE CASE OF BOBBY HUTTTON
According to Life, Bobby Hutton. the seventeen-year-old minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, was killed and Eldridge Cleaver was wounded in an “Oakland police ambush” in 1968. The Times quoted Garry as attributing Hutton’s death to a “Police ambush.”
Shortly after 9 p.m. on April. 6, 1968, Officers Nolan R. Darnell and Richard R. Jensen, while on patrol in the area of Oakland, California, that is predominately inhabited by blacks, stopped their patrol car on Union Street next to a parked 1954 Ford when they caught a glimpse of a man crouching at the curb side of the car. In their report, they said that they suspected he might be trying to steal it. Moments later, while investigating the situation, both officers were hit by bullets fired from behind them. Afterward, forty-nine bullet holes were found in the police car, the rear window had “two large areas shot inward,” and the side windows and the open door, next to which Darnell was standing at the time, had also been hit numerous times. According to medical reports prepared by Dr. William Mills, Jr., of Samuel Merritt Hospital, Darnell was wounded in the “upper right back.” Jensen, apparently hit by a shotgun blast from a 12-gauge shotgun, suffered multiple wounds in the “lower right back,” in the “right arm,” and in the “right ankle and foot.” According to Darnell, a number of men armed with shotguns and rifles ran from cars parked behind and ahead of the 1954 Ford, some of them through an alley into the block across the street, while Darnell urgently called for help on the police radio.
An account of the incident in the Black Panther newspaper said, “Several Panthers in cars in West Oakland on Saturday night, April 6th, were approached by two pigs and menaced with guns. When the Panthers tried to defend themselves, shooting began, and the Panthers ran into a nearby house…. Two pigs were wounded slightly.” Four Black Panthers gave statements to the police in which they said that they had been patrolling the neighborhood with guns, in three cars, to protect Negroes against police brutality”‘ and had just parked their cars on Union Street in order to stow their weapons in a nearby house when the patrol car pulled up, but the four disclaimed any knowledge of how the shooting began. Cleaver later said in an interview that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, “I don’t know how those cops got shot. There were so many bullets whizzing around they may have shot themselves.
In any event, after the two police men were shot, police from other parts of West Oakland and even from nearby Emeryville, responding to the radio alarm, surrounded a building on Twenty-eighth Street that the Panthers had entered, and there ensued a ninety-minute gun battle, in which a third policeman was wounded. Finally, after an exploding tear-gas canister had set fire to the building, two Panthers emerged: Cleaver, naked, and wounded by a tear-gas shell, and Hutton, fully clothed. According to police witnesses, Hutton suddenly bolted down Twenty-eighth Street, whereupon at least half a dozen policemen opened fire, fatally wounding him. Cleaver, in the Chronicle interview, gave a different version of the shooting of Hutton. He admitted that Hutton had fired some shots at the police, but said that he himself “took Bobby’s gun and threw it out” of the window, that is, and that they both came out unarmed. “The cops told us to get up and start running for the squad car,” Cleaver continued. “Bobby started running — he ran about ten yards — and they started shooting him.” The grand jury, after hearing thirty-five witnesses, concluded that the police had “acted lawfully,” shooting Hutton in the belief he was trying to escape.
Eight other Panthers, including Cleaver, who were allegedly involved in the shooting of the policemen were arrested that night and then were released on bail. Two of the eight were subsequently convicted of assault with deadly weapons; one was released to a juvenile court; one was tried and convicted for an unrelated armed robbery and sent to state prison; one, Cleaver, jumped bail and fled the country.
THE CASES OF STEVEN BARTHOLOMEW, ROBERT LAWRENCE, AND THOMAS LEWIS
At about 4:45 p.m. on August 5, 1968, in a predominantly Negro section of Los Angeles, three Black Panthers were fatally shot and two policemen were wounded, one critically, in a shootout at Ham’s Mobil Service Station.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Police Officers Rudy Limas and Norman J. Roberge were on a routine patrol when, according to their reports, they saw a black 1955 Ford with four men in it start up a private driveway, stop suddenly, then back down the driveway.
Finding the movements suspicious, the policemen began following the Ford, whose occupants, Limas noted, kept “‘looking back.” Limas then called the police communications center on the patrol car’s radio and gave the Ford’s license number, to ascertain whether it had been reported stolen. Before a reply could be received, the Ford pulled into Ham’s service station and stopped by a gas pump. The police car stopped a few feet behind it, and Roberge, according to his statement, asked the driver of the Ford for his license. The driver, Roberge reported, “replied that they didn’t have a driver’s license,” whereupon Roberge “instructed the driver to go back to the police car and place his hands on top of the police car.” Roberge then ordered the three other suspects out of the Ford and over to the police car. “At this time,” Roberge stated, “the suspects were standing in a row facing the police vehicle” between the two police officers.
Limas gave the following description of what happened next: “Suddenly, the guy in front of me, who I think was wearing a yellow shirt and dark pants, spun around and pointed a gun at me, and the others moved at the same time. The guy in the yellow shirt said, ‘O.K., m-f-‘ and then he shot me.” According to medical reports and testimony, Limas was shot in the abdomen and the thigh, with a bullet lodging in the hip. Roberge stated, “As I walked toward the police vehicle, I saw my partner, Officer Limas, standing to the left rear of the police vehicle on the other side of the group, facing me. Suddenly I heard some shots and I was knocked to the ground.” According to the medical evidence, Roberge was shot in both legs. In the gun battle that followed, Limas fatally shot “the guy in the yellow shirt” and a second suspect, who was “trying to load a 9mm pistol,” and Roberge “emptied” his gun at a third suspect. The fourth man who had been in the car fled on foot.
There were two independent witnesses to the shooting — the service station attendants, Shoji Katayama and Eugene Oba. Katayama, who explained that he was standing US the pumps,stated in a deposition:
A black 4-door Ford pulled into the station, pursued by a police car. There were 4 Negroes in the Ford. The driver and front passenger both got out and opened the hood of the car. The two officers immediately got out and ordered all four to the police car with their hands leaning on it. The driver of the Ford looked like to me he hesitated a while and was smoking a cigarette. As the driver with the cigarette came to the car, the Mexican officer [Limas] ordered him not to put out the cigarette [near the pumps], and at that point I heard a couple of shots and I looked up and saw the Mexican officer on the ground and the male Negro with the khaki shirt (Army type) with the gun in his hand….
The other attendant, Oba, had been returning to the office when the shooting began. He gave a similar account of the incident, adding only that after the first round of shots, he”saw the Caucasian officer shooting at the Negro men.”
When the shooting stopped, a few minutes later, three men were dead or dying — Thomas Melvin Lewis, eighteen, “the guy in the yellow shirt;” Robert A. Lawrence, twenty-two; and Steven Kenneth Bartholomew, twenty-one. The Black Panther Party stated that they were all Black Panthers. The fourth suspect, who was subsequently identified by his palm prints on the police car as Anthony Reno Bartholomew, the nineteen-year-old brother of Steven, later surrendered voluntarily to a judge, and was arraigned on two counts of assault with intent to commit murder. Anthony Bartholomew’s lawyer, Gary Bellow, a well-known civil rights attorney who has handled a number of Black Panther cases in Los Angeles, noted in a memorandum filed with the court, “There is no dispute that the police officers, Norman Roberge and Rudy Limas, were criminally assaulted on August 5, 1968,” but went on to argue that his client had not in fact taken part in the gun battle. Anthony Bartholomew was found not guilty.
THE CASE OF WALTER POPE
Walter Toure Pope, whom Garry listed simply as “killed by Metro Squad,” was shot to death by Officer Alvin D. Moen in a vacant lot across from the Jack-in-the-Box drive-in restaurant in Los Angeles on October 18, 1969.
On that night, Officer Moen and his partner, Officer Don Mandella, were assigned to a robbery stakeout of the Jack-in-the-Box, which had been robbed fourteen times in the previous seven months. Sitting in an unmarked car, which they had parked across the street from the restaurant, the officers began their watch shortly after dark.
At about 10:45 p.m., Moen later testified, he heard a noise behind him and “turned around and saw a man standing with what appeared to be a burp gun … pointed in my direction.” Shouting, “Look out!” to Mandella, Moen, who was sitting behind the wheel, drew his service revolver. Then, according to his testimony, the man fired a shot, and Moen returned the fire. Suddenly, from the other side of the car, there came what Moen called “another loud explosion,” which he identified as a shotgun blast. According to medical reports, Moen was hit in the back of the right shoulder and the back of the left hand by shotgun pellets. Although he was badly wounded, he managed to get out of the car, empty his revolver at the man with the burp gun, and then run to the restaurant for help. Mandella gave a similar account, testifying that after his partner shouted, “Look out! ” two shotgun blasts were fired into the car from the passenger side as the man with the burp gun approached from the opposite side. Mandella then turned and fired three shots at the assailant with the shotgun, who fled. Picking up the microphone, he urgently requested assistance, saying that he and Moen had been “ambushed.” When other policemen arrived, they found Walter Pope, twenty, who was subsequently identified by the Black Panthers as their “distribution manager” for Los Angeles, shot to death beside the police car. He had a two-inch revolver tucked in his belt, and there was a .30-caliber carbine, or “burp gun,” lying under his left arm. A sawed-off shotgun, both barrels of which had been fired, was found a few feet behind the police car.
The only witnesses to the shooting were those who took part in it, and thus the question of who shot first may be open to doubt. The medical evidence that Moen was hit by a shotgun blast in the back would seem to suggest that the police were approached from behind.
THE CASE OF WELTON ARMSTEAD
In Seattle, at about 4:10 p.m. on October 5, 1968, Welton Armstead, seventeen, was shot to death by a police officer in front of a house at 1706 Melrose Avenue. A few minutes earlier, Officers Erling Buttendahl and Charles Marshall, on a routine patrol, had received a radio message directing them to help car No. 128 in a stolen auto case at 1700 Melrose Avenue. When they arrived on the scene, they helped the policemen in Car No. 128 apprehend two of three suspects they had been pursuing. According to Buttendahl, while he was searching for the third suspect he came around the side of a house and was confronted by a man, later identified as Armstead, a Black Panther, standing next to the garage, “holding a rifle with both hands and pointing it” at him. According to the coroner’s report, the armed man was asked four times to “drop the rifle” but refused to do so; instead, with one hand he grabbed the barrel of Buttendahl’s revolver, raising his rifle with the other, whereupon, Buttendahl says he himself fired, hitting Armstead in the midsection. An inquest jury, after hearing fourteen witnesses and considering the medical evidence, ruled the shooting “justifiable homicide.” Garry does not dispute the fact that Armstead faced Buttendahl with a rifle.
THE CASE OF SPURGEON WINTERS
On November 13, 1969, Spurgeon (Jake) Winters was shot to death by police on Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Earlier that evening, James Caldwell, a black prison guard at the Cook County jail, had told his wife, Ruby, that he needed some money to rent a room for the night, because “some guys are looking for me and they want to kill me.” The night before, he had been in a brawl outside the Rumpus Room tavern with Lawrence (Lance), Bell, a Black Panther, and had taken Bell’s gun from him, and he feared reprisal from Bell and his friends. A few hours after Caldwell parted from his wife, someone entered the building where they lived and began pounding on apartment doors and calling Caldwell’s name. Looking out a front window after the pounding had stopped, Mrs. Caldwell saw what she subsequently described as “four or five men leaving my building … one of them … carrying a long gun.” She then went across a connecting porch to her sister-in-law’s apartment in an adjacent building where she asked a friend, Lee Wesley, for advice. Wesley said, she later told police investigators, that she “didn’t have any choice but to call the police,” because “if James came back they would kill hin.” Wesley himself then called the police.
At 2:49 A.M., a police dispatcher received a report that there were “men on the street with shotguns,” and at 2:53 p.m., according to the police computer cards and radio tapes, the dispatcher ordered the nearest patrol car, No. 226, manned by Officers John Gilhooly and Michael Brady, to 324 East Fifty-eighth Street, the sister-in-law’s apartment. Three other policemen joined them at the sister-in-law’s apartment, which was at the rear of the building, and all five were then taken, across the connecting porch, to Mrs. Caldwell’s apartment, where, from the front window, Mrs. Caldwell and Wesley pointed out to them three men lurking in an abandoned building across the street. Leaving by the front door, the policemen crossed over to the vacant building, and Gilhooly started to go in through a gangway. Mrs. Caldwell stated, “We could hear the policeman by the gangway shouting ‘Halt!’ about three times. Then we heard a loud shot, and it sounded louder than a pistol shot. Then we heard some more shots…. Then we saw the policeman come out of the gangway. He was saying ‘Oh! Oh!’ and he was holding his face.” Gilhooly was fatally wounded, a shotgun blast having severed his carotid artery and his jugular vein, Brady had suffered minor lacerations of the forehead from the ricochet of a shotgun blast.
Mrs. Caldwell called the police to report that a policeman had been shot. At 3:04 AM, the dispatcher issued an emergency call: “Police officer needs help.” Twenty-one patrol cars in the area immediately responded.
Another policeman was wounded almost immediately by shotgun blasts, according to police reports, and one police car was “demolished” by carbine fire. One of the gunmen, who was allegedly carrying a carbine, and who was later identified as Bell, was shot in cross fire, and was captured. Meanwhile, three policemen had chased another man, carrying a shotgun, down an alleyway paralleling Martin Luther King Drive. He wounded all three and, taking refuge under the porch of a house on the Drive, shot another policeman, Frank Rappaport, in the chest and head, killing him, and wounded another. Two policemen, including the one who had just been wounded, emptied their revolvers at him, fatally wounding him.
The dead gunman was later identified as Spurgeon (Jake) Winters. In all, two policemen were killed and seven wounded or hurt. Bell was indicted by a grand jury for murder.
The Black Panther version of the incident was similar to the police version in a number of respects. A “special news bulletin” put out by the Illinois chapter stated:
On November 13, 1969, Jake Winters stood face to face and toe to toe, his shotgun in his hand, with Pig Daley’s murderous task force. He defined political power by blowing away Frank Rappaport and racist pig John Gilhooly and retired 8 other reactionary racist pigs before he was shot down.
THE CASE OF FRED HAMPTON AND MARK CLARK
The final case on Garry’s listis certainly the most important one, since it is the one that prompted Garry to speak of a pattern of “genocide.” It involves the fatal shooting of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by policemen attached to the State’s Attorney’s office in Chicago on December 4, 1969. While there may be varying degrees of uncertainty about dome of the other deaths on Garry’s list, these two unquestionably resulted from a deliberately planned raid on a Black Panther headquarters.
On December 3rd, Sergeant Daniel Groth, a twelve-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department who had been assigned to the State’s Attorney’s Special Prosecutions Unit, told Assistant State’s Attorney Richard S. Jalovec, who was in charge of the unit, that he had received information from a “confidential informer” that a cache of illegal weapons, including sawed-off shotguns, and also riot guns stolen from the Chicago police, was stored in a Black Panther apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street. Having received information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation just the day before that the Panthers had recently moved weapons to that address, Jalovec immediately ordered Groth to plan a raid on the Panther apartment, and Jalovec prepared a search-warrant complaint. Circuit judge Robert Collins signed a warrant later that afternoon.
Groth and thirteen other policemen assigned to the Special Prosecutions Unit assembled at the State’s Attorney’s office at four the next morning. They were heavily armed: five had shotguns, one had a Thompson submachine gun, and one — James Davis, one of five black members of the raiding party — carried with him a .30-caliber carbine of his own. The raid was planned for dawn, to achieve the maximum surprise and minimum potential for neighborhood interference, according to Groth’s later testimony.
The raiding party arrived at the West Monroe Street apartment in three cars and an unmarked panel truck, and Groth, Davis, and three of the other members proceeded to the front door of the apartment, which was on the first floor; six members went around to the back door; and the three remaining members were stationed at the front of the building. At approximately 4:40 a.m., Groth pounded on the apartment door with his revolver butt. There are markedly different versions of what happened next.
In the police version, which was published in the Chicago Tribune, Groth shouted, “This is the police! I have a warrant to search the premises!” After a delay, he had Davis kick the door open.
The two men entered a small hall, where they were faced with another closed door. Suddenly, the police said, a shotgun blast from inside was fired through this door and “narrowly missed the two policemen.” Davis then plunged through the inner door into a darkened living room, with Groth behind him, as a “second round went right past” him. Groth fired two shots at a woman who, he said, had fired the second shotgun blast, while Davis, after also firing at the woman and wounding her, turned and shot to death a man sitting behind him with a shotgun, who was later identified as Mark Clark. Moments later, three of the members of the raiding party who had gone around to the back broke in through the kitchen door of the apartment. Despite a number of calls for a cease-fire from Groth, the Panthers kept firing shotgun blasts, according to the police version of the events, and a “fierce fire fight” ensued, in which Hampton was killed and four other Panthers and one policeman were wounded.
In the Panther version, as it was reported in the Washington Post, the police burst into the apartment almost simultaneously through the front and rear entrances, without first identifying themselves, and although no Panthers fired any shots whatever, the police opened fire, also without warning. A Black Panther spokesman was reported in the Post to have said that Mark Clark was fatally wounded as he attempted to dodge police submachine gun fire, and others were wounded. Meanwhile, according to the spokesman, the police entering from the rear went immediately to Hampton’s bedroom and fired into it, and Davis then went into the bedroom and fired more shots at Hampton. In Chicago Today, the Black Panther spokesman added that “Hampton was murdered in bed while he slept” by a policeman who “must have come in the back door and murdered him with a silencer.” A few days later, a private autopsy, performed at the request of Hampton’s family, concluded that hours before Hampton was shot to death he had been heavily drugged with Seconal, a barbiturate, which the spokesman deduced had been administered by a “pig agent” before the raid. The independent autopsy also concluded that the bullet that killed Hampton was missing, for the Panthers’ pathologist found an entrance wound in the head but no exit wound and no bullet in the head. Lawyers for Panthers intimated that the missing bullet had been secretly extracted and disposed of by the police, because it constituted evidence of murder.
A third version was rendered by a federal grand jury that had been specially empaneled to investigate the December 4th shootings. After having all the physical evidence recovered by both the police and the Panthers analyzed by the F.B.I. Laboratory in Washington and evaluating additional ballistic evidence uncovered by the F.B.I., and after hearing all the witnesses willing to testify, the grand jury concluded, among other things, that the Chicago police investigation of the raid was “so seriously deficient that it suggests purposeful malfeasance.”
When Groth and Davis forced their way in through the inner door, according to the grand jury’s assessment of the events, a 12-gauge slug was fired from inside the apartment and passed through that door as it swung open to a forty-five-degree angle. There were indications that the shotgun was no more than fifteen inches from the opening door. A 12-gauge slug found at the scene proved consistent with a shotgun that was next to Mark Clark’s body and was stained with blood of Clark’s type; the slug was also found to match the hole in the door. Moreover, an empty shell found nearby was “positively identified” as having come from the shotgun. Piecing together the physical evidence, the jury posited that Mark Clark, sitting behind the door, fired a shotgun blast through the door just as the police burst in. This, however, was the only shot that could be definitely traced to a Panther weapon.
The grand jury concluded that Groth and Davis apparently came in shooting, for one pistol shot had been fired through the door. Davis shot Clark, who was sitting behind the door holding a shotgun, and a woman then in the room, Brenda Harris, who was holding another shotgun. Minutes later, after the officers claimed they heard a shotgun blast from a bedroom adjacent to the living room, the wall between the living room and the bedroom was “stitched” with forty-two shots from a carbine and a submachine gun. One of these bullets passed through the first bedroom into a second bedroom, where it fatally wounded Fred Hampton in the forehead. Another bullet, apparently from the same volley, since it was traveling at the same angle, struck Hampton in the right cheek, and another struck him in the left shoulder. This last, the only bullet recovered from his body, proved to be a .30-caliber bullet from Davis’s carbine. Aside from Hampton and Clark, four of the seven other Panthers in the apartment, as well as one police officer, were wounded by police gunfire in less than twelve minutes after the raid began. Eighty-three empty shells and fifty-six bullets were recovered from the apartment by the police, the Panthers, and the F.B.I., of which all but one shotgun slug and one shell had been fired from police weapons. Although the police steadfastly maintained that at least ten or fifteen shots were fired at them by Panthers, a painstaking reconstruction by the grand jury suggests that, following the first shot by Clark, police entering from the back of the apartment mistook Davis’s and Groth’s shots in the front of the apartment for Panther gunfire, and the police in the front of the apartment similarly mistook the return fire from the rear of the apartment for continuing resistance. According to the grand jury’s version, the officers very probably fired through the living-room wall under the erroneous impression that they were in a gun battle with Panthers.
The grand jury also attempted to resolve conflicts between the findings of the Panthers’ private autopsy and those of the police autopsy by ordering Hampton’s body exhumed and yet a third autopsy performed, by an out-of state medical examiner in the presence of both a Chicago pathologist from the coroner’s office and a pathologist retained by the Hampton family. Two points were clarified by the third autopsy. First, despite the statement of the Panthers’ pathologist that there was no exit wound for the fatal bullet that entered Hampton’s forehead, this autopsy plainly showed an exit hole in front of the left ear when the sideburns were shaved. Second, the Panthers’ claim that Hampton was heavily drugged with Seconal before the shooting was not supported either by this autopsy, which showed “no trace of drugs in the body,” or by the report of the F.B.I. Laboratory in Washington, which had also tested the sample used in the Panthers’ private autopsy. The toxicologist who performed the analysis for the Panthers told the grand jury he had not performed the most specific test for Seconal, the gas-chromatography test but had relied instead on a less sophisticated test, which required some “subjective evaluation.” In performing the gas-chromography tests on the same sample that the Panthers’ toxicologist had used, the F.B.I. found no Seconal or other drugs, but did find deterioration in the blook that could have been partially responsible for a mistaken analysis.
Are these ten cases of Black Panthers killed by police part of a nationally coordinated pattern? Although Hampton and Clark were the only Panthers killed as a direct result of a planned police raid, or even in a situation in which the police could reasonably be supposed to have had advance knowledge that they would confront Black Panthers, it still might be maintained that the police involved had instructions of some sort to kill Black Panthers whenever the opportunity presented itself. The theory broached by John Kifner in the Times that the Nixon Administration had, through the statements of public officials, “at least contributed to a climate of opinion among local police … that a virtual open season has been declared on the Panthers” seems historically inaccurate since five of the ten Panther deaths that can be directly attributed to police action occurred before the Nixon Administration took office. And, as far as I have been able to determine, no Black Panthers have been killed by the police since the Hampton-Clark shooting.
In all of the ten cases to which Garry’s list has been reduced, at least some of the Panthers involved were armed and presented a threat to the police. Six of the ten Panthers were killed by seriously wounded policemen who clearly had reason to believe that their own lives were in jeopardy. In none of these cases, moreover, is there any positive evidence to support a belief that the wounded policemen knew they had been shot by Black Panthers. According to the evidence that is available, Bartholomew, Lawrence, and Lewis were stopped as burglary suspects; Pope approached a robbery stakeout at night; Winters opened fire when two policemen entered an abandoned building to investigate a citizen’s complaint; and although it is agreed that Roberson took it upon himself to challenge the behavior of the police investigating the burglary of a fruit stand, it is not reported that he identified himself as a Black Panther.
In the four remaining cases, the fatal shots were fired by policemen who had not themselves been wounded. A further distinction might be made to take account of the fact that in two of these deaths — those of Armstead and Clark — the police state that in each instance they were confronted by an adversary with a lethal weapon and had reason to presume that their own lives were endangered. Armstead pointed a rifle at a policeman and refused to disarm himself; Clark confronted a policeman with a shotgun, which, in fact, he had previously fired.
In any event, there are two cases in which Black Panthers were killed by policemen whose lives were not being directly threatened by those men. These are the cases of Hutton, who was shot while allegedly running from the scene of a ninety-minute. gun battle in which three policemen had been wounded, and Hampton, who was apparently hit by stray bullets in a reckless and uncontrolled fusillade.
Four deaths, two deaths, even a single death must be the subject of the most serious concern. But the basic issues of public policy presented by the militancy of groups like the Panthers and by the sometimes brutal police treatment of angry and defiant black people in general can be neither understood nor resolved in an atmosphere of exaggerated charges whether of “genocide” against the Panthers or of “guerrilla warfare” against the police that are repeated, unverified, in the press and in consequence widely believed by the public. The idea that the police have declared a sort of open season on the Black Panthers is based principally, as far as I can determine, on the assumption that all the Panther deaths cited by Charles Garry — twenty-eight or twenty or ten — occurred under circumstances that were similar to the Hampton-Clark raid. This is an assumption that proves, on examination, to be false.
Haki Kweli Shakur ATC NAPLA NAIM MOI 4-16-53 ADM 2018
The Black Panther Party just closed out its 50th anniversary year. On this occasion, the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project spoke with Panther women about leadership, electoral politics and what we should be doing today.
The year 2016 marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Facing repression and at great sacrifice, more than 5,000 mostly young Black people joined the BPP between the 1960s and ‘70s to work for “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” They built institutions, ran electoral campaigns, created social programs, transformed culture and tried to create a framework of justice that would impact oppressed people worldwide.
One often-overlooked component of the Panthers was the leadership of women. At one point, women made up the majority of the BPP’s membership but their contributions are frequently written out of history.
We at the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project believe there is value in amplifying the voices of Black women who served on the front lines of the BPP. We asked former members of the now-defunct organization to provide guideposts for activists responding to this political moment and to share their thoughts about how Donald Trump’s election could impact communities of color.
Barbara Cox Easley
I would not be so bold as to suggest what activists should do now. So much has changed since the ’60’s. But I do like the way that today’s activists use social media, the marches and the “rainbow coalitions” across race, culture, etc. I remember meeting with many non Black groups, such as the Brown Berets, the Red Guard, White Panthers and many others. Yes, we, the early BPP members, did have coalitions and partners. This was a method of spreading the BPP’s message, across race, culture and theory. We were working together to [focus] attention on the true enemies of oppressed people around the world.
Due to the racist uprising, as shown by the elections, I would suggest some caution. It appears the oppressor has gotten bolder and will kill or knock off, in some fashion, the leadership of opposition movements. Why not have three or four persons representing organizations? Let us suppress our egos.
All power to the people.
Barbara Cox Easley was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1967 to 1971. She worked in the Party offices in Oakland, Philadelphia and New York. She worked in Germany from 1971 to 1973 with the Voice of the Lumpen educating GI’s about the Vietnam war. She volunteers as a consultant for a community housing group in Philadelphia and she played a pivotal role in organizing the city’s first Panther Film Festival in 2005.*
Judy Juanita
I’ve been a Buddhist for 37 years, practicing [with] Soka Gakkai International (SGI). Once, when an SGI peer visited the Palace of Versailles in Paris, he stood outside at a circular pool with floating goldfish. The caretaker told him that these fish are content to stay in place, get fat and die young. So occasionally staff throw in a barracuda to get the fish moving swiftly. And they live longer. Donald Trump is the barracuda in the pond outside our palace of democracy.
Already, Trump has announced initiatives and policies to redesign the American social contract in place since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. I would expect that the barracudas set loose will get many people all over the country, even the world, moving, protesting and organizing, as we did in the ‘1960s, in earnest. The ‘60s don’t seem so ancient now that the specter of state repression is casting its shadow over the hyper-materialism that has sedated many Americans. As the ACLU reminds us, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Judy Juanita was a one-time editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper and was an instructor in the first Black Studies program in the nation at San Francisco State University. She is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. For more than three decades she has practiced Nichiren Buddhism, a philosophy devoted to peace, culture and education.
Kiilu Nyasha
Frankly, I’m relieved that Trump won instead of [Hillary] Clinton. Had she won, folks would be singing “Kumbaya” and celebrating the first woman president of the United States. We could have looked at another four to eight years of a warmongering Clinton Administration with our people pacified like they were behind the first Black president, [Barack Obama].
What have we gained from the latter? We know what we got with the first Clinton Administration — welfare de-form and mass incarceration; Rwandan genocide and Bosnian bombing.
Apparently, George Jackson was right when he said, “The holder of so-called high public office is always merely an extension of the hated ruling corporate class. It is to our benefit that this person be openly hostile, despotic, unreasoning.”
Trump’s election prompted mass demonstrations immediately all across the country. Students are walking out of class. Coalitions are being formed and plans made for a huge mass protest on January 20 in [Washington], D.C. Folks are talking about reorganizing a United Front Against Fascism, an effort of the ‘60s. I agree that something like that needs to happen and suggest we go more positive by calling for a United Front for Social Revolution (picking up on the slogan made popular by Bernie Sanders).These are just ideas. I’m [also] thinking, along with others, that we do need something like the United Democratic Front of South Africa, the umbrella group that brought together all the anti-apartheid organizations. We must all unite and organize, organize, organize! Dare to struggle! Dare to win!
Kiilu Nyasha has been a revolutionary artist, activist and journalist in the liberation struggle for more than35 years. A former Black Panther, she is a radio and newspaper journalist who has done much to keep political prisoners in the public eye.
Frankye Malika Adams-Johnson
This two-party system does not seem to work in the best interest of the masses. The election of Donald was clearly an example of the White power structure, the 1 percent flexing their muscles to maintain their power base. Although Donald Trump was not their likely choice, their sexism would not and will not ever allow them to even entertain the thought of a woman running the country.
Those of us who are activists must begin to explore our own understanding of a capitalist system and explore whether it is the best system for the masses. In the meantime, on the question of what we do in this political moment, I think more than ever activists need to begin massive political education among the masses around the issues of self-determination so that we as a people don’t fall any deeper in despair waiting on government to improve the quality of our lives.
Frankye “Malika” xAdams-Johnson served with the Black Panthers in New York City, helping to educate and feed young people and make a difference in the areas of human and civil rights.Today she is an educator at Jackson State University. She has donated papers from her time in the Black Panther Party to lJackson State, which are on display in the Margaret Walker Center.
April 11 marks the 25th anniversary of the heroic uprising at the Southern Ohio Correction Facility in Lucasville, Ohio. It began with a protest by Muslim inmates against being forced to take a tuberculosis test that violated their religious beliefs against alcohol. It quickly turned into a full-scale rebellion that left a guard and several inmate hostages dead. It ended with prison authorities agreeing to a list of 21 demands.
Later the authorities scapegoated a group of 50 inmates, giving most harsh sentences of 5 to 25 years and sending five to death row, including prisoner leaders who had actually negotiated the peaceful surrender. The five — Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Keith Lamar (aka Bomani Shakur), James Were (aka Namir Mateen), Jason Robb and George Skatzes — remain on death row. Imam Hasan, spoke to Workers World Contributing Editor Martha Grevatt on April 2-3.
From April 11 to 21, 1993, what appears to have been the longest prison rebellion in United States history took place at the maximum security prison in Lucasville, in southern Ohio.1 More than four hundred prisoners were involved. Nine prisoners and a guard were killed. After a negotiated surrender, five prisoners in the rebellion were sentenced to death.
The single most remarkable thing about the Lucasville rebellion is that white and black prisoners formed a common front against the authorities. When the State Highway Patrol came into the occupied cell block after the surrender, they found slogans written on the walls of the corridor and in the gymnasium that read: “Convict unity,” “Convict race,” “Black and whites together,” “Blacks and whites, whites and blacks, unity,” “Whites and blacks together,” “Black and white unity.”
The five prisoners from the rebellion on death row—the “Lucasville Five”—are a microcosm of the rebellion’s united front. Three are black, two are white. Two of the blacks are Sunni Muslims. Both of the whites were, at the time of the rebellion, members of the Aryan Brotherhood.
Difficult as it may be for someone outside the walls to understand, George Skatzes states that he joined the Aryan Brotherhood because he perceived whites at Lucasville as a minority who needed to band together for self-protection. A majority of prisoners were black. The deputy warden, the warden, and the head of the statewide Department of Rehabilitation and Correction were black as well. On the one hand, all prisoners at Lucasville were oppressed. Conditions in the cell block used for administrative segregation were such that a petition was sent to Amnesty International and several prisoners cut off their pinky fingers and mailed them to the federal government. On the other hand, in Skatzes’ experience, white prisoners like himself were punished for conduct that was condoned when committed by blacks.
PRISON LIVES MATTER with KWAME SHAKUR : Police Brutality Inside the Department of Corrections
Still insistent that these were the facts, Skatzes now says that joining the Aryan Brotherhood was “the biggest mistake of my life.” In the course of responding to the day-by-day events of the rebellion, he found himself speaking not for white prisoners or for those white prisoners who belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood, but for the entire inmate body.
The disturbance at Lucasville was triggered by an attempt to force prisoners to submit to tuberculosis testing, by means of a substance containing alcohol injected under the skin. A number of Muslims said that receiving the injection was contrary to their religious beliefs, and suggested alternative means of testing. The warden responded that he was running the prison. He made plans to lock down the prison on the day after Easter and, if necessary, to force all prisoners to be injected. These plans became common knowledge. Accordingly, on the afternoon of Easter Sunday, prisoners returning from recreation on the yard overpowered a number of guards and took them hostage, occupying the L block of the prison.
During the next several hours, black prisoners killed five white prisoners believed to be snitches. A race war, like the one during the Santa Fe prison riot a few years earlier, seemed imminent.
At this point, two Muslims approached George Skatzes. George had not taken part in planning the rebellion. He celled in L block and had stayed there when the riot began, in order to protect his property and to look after his friends. The black men who spoke to Skatzes were aware that, as a physically imposing older convict (in his late forties), “Big George” had often been asked to mediate disputes among prisoners. Siddique Abdullah Hasan and Cecil Allen told Skatzes that whites and blacks had gathered on different sides of the gymnasium and the atmosphere was very tense. They asked “Big George” to help them ensure that the protest would be directed against the prison administration, their common oppressor.
Skatzes agreed. He went to the gym and spoke to both the blacks and whites. He put his arm around the shoulders of a black man and said, “If they come in here, they’re going to kill us no matter what color we are.” He appealed to members of each group to mix with members of the other group.
The next day, April 12, George Skatzes (with a megaphone) and Cecil Allen (carrying a huge white flag of truce) went out on the yard to try to start negotiations. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, April 13 through 15, Skatzes was the principal telephone negotiator for the prisoners. He took part in meetings of a leadership council representing the three main organized groups in L block: the Muslims, members of the Aryan Brotherhood (ABs), and the Black Gangster Disciples. On the afternoon and evening of Thursday, April 15, he negotiated the release of a hostage guard who was experiencing extreme emotional trauma, accompanied Officer Clark into the yard, and released him to the authorities. He made a radio address in which he said: “We are a unit here. They try to make this a racial issue [but] it is not a racial issue. Black and white alike have joined hands at [Lucasville] and have become one strong unit.”
You see the point. The things that Skatzes did, in calming racial antagonisms, in working cooperatively with blacks, in characterizing the rebellion publicly as the work of “one strong unit,” both black and white, hardly expressed the worldview of the Aryan Brotherhood. In part, Skatzes’ actions expressed his personal decency; they also responded to a practical situation that called for racial cooperation. Experience ran ahead of ideology. Actions spoke louder than organizational labels.
George Skatzes and the black prisoners among the Lucasville Five stand in solidarity publicly and struggle privately to understand each other. During a fast that they undertook together, their list of demands, drafted by one of the blacks in the group, began with a concern for proper medical treatment for Skatzes. At the super-maximum-security prison in Youngstown where the Five are now housed, a number of prisoners began another fast. After about a week, only Skatzes and Siddique Abdullah Hasan were still going without food. The prison approached each one with assurances that their complaints would be addressed. Each refused to break his fast until told directly by the other that he was ready to eat again. Hasan wrote to me: “I chose to stay on the fast to let them know that I was down with George’s struggle, too, and I would not sit quiet and allow the system to mess over him . . . [T]hey got the message and know that we are one.”
From Prison Resistance to Class Struggle
How, if at all, can this experience of prisoners overcoming racism be extrapolated? What is the relationship of prison resistance to the wider movement for social change?
A good deal of the recent writing about racism calls on white workers to give up “white-skin privilege” voluntarily in order to become legitimate participants in the class struggle. Such a voluntaristic approach to racism is unsatisfactory for exactly the same reason that Marx and Engels found Utopian Socialism to be inadequate. Workers do not become socialists because agitators have gone house to house preaching the virtues of common ownership. Workers become socialists in action, through experience. Thus, Eugene Debs first recognized the need for the broadest possible unity of the working class in economic struggle and founded the American Railway Union to take the place of the separate unions of the railway crafts. Then, after the Pullman strike, Debs came to understand that in a capitalist society, government will always intervene in the economic class struggle on behalf of the capitalist class, and helped to organize the Socialist Party.2
Racism, too, will be transformed through experience and struggle. We should anticipate that the objective contradictions of capitalism will again and again call on workers somehow to set aside their antagonisms toward one another, so that they can effectively act together against the common oppressor. As workers’ actions change in response to the need for a solidarity in which the survival of each depends on the survival of all, attitudes will change also.
There are at least two obvious differences between resistance in prisons and forms of struggle outside the walls. First, a prison is a total environment. Black and white workers in the larger society typically leave behind the integrated workplace setting when they punch out, returning to segregated living situations in the community. Inside a prison, blacks and whites must survive in one another’s company twenty-four hours a day.
Second, anything good inside a prison must ordinarily be brought about by the prisoners themselves, from below, through self-organization. In this respect, prisons differ from the military. Like prisons, the military is a total institution, but in the military, desirable social change can come from above, and did come from above, when the Armed Forces were integrated after the Second World War.
I know another George—George Sullivan, a truck driver from Gary, Indiana—whose experience illustrates the effectiveness of the equal status contract imposed from above in the Armed Forces. George Sullivan grew up in southern Illinois, the same racist setting recalled by David Roediger in the opening pages of The Wages of Whiteness.3 George Sullivan describes the racism he absorbed as a child:
There never was any question in my mind that niggers weren’t any good. I knew that, but it didn’t necessarily mean they were bad people because everyone knew that a nigger’s a coward and he won’t cause you any trouble. There weren’t any around where I lived.
One did come to the house one time, scared me to death. I saw him at the door, there he was, and I didn’t know what to do. Any time we would be doing something wrong, one of the comments my mother would make was, “I’ll have some big nigger come and get you if you don’t stop that.” So I went to the door and there was this big nigger. I just knew that he had come after me. But that’s the only association I had. I wasn’t taught to hate them. It was like the feeling about animals. Their place is not in the house or it’s not where you are. Animals live in the woods. Niggers live somewhere else4.
George Sullivan’s relationship with blacks changed when he went into the military. The new policy of integration had just gone into effect. George reported to a barracks where he found that he was the only white. After informing the sergeant that there had been a mistake, he was told, “No, we’ve been having some problems about not integrating enough. As new white guys come on the base they’re going to be put in there. You just happen to be the first.” Then this happened:
I was a meat-cutter and I got a bit careless. I cut three or four of my fingers. I had them all bandaged up. I had just been promoted to sergeant but I still had my corporal stripes. I was sitting out in front of the barracks and the sergeant came by and he said, “Sullivan, get your stripes on.” “I can’t sew with one hand,” I said, “and I don’t have any money to take them over to the PX.” He said, “You’ll have stripes on your uniform by tomorrow or we’ll take the stripes away from you.”
I was sitting there by myself just wondering what to do. One of the guys in the barracks who’d heard it, he came out and said, “Have you already got your stripes?” I said, “Yeah, I bought them already.” He said, “Well, if you’ll go get them I’ll sew them on for you.” So that was the first thing that really broke the ice. He sat and sewed those stripes on my uniform while we got to know each other.5
Neither George Skatzes nor George Sullivan were, or are, ideological radicals. But they are white workers who have substantially overcome the racism that surrounded them. Both learned through their experience to deal with people as individuals rather than to judge them by the color of their skin.
We need a synthesis of the pressure for social change illustrated by the military policy of integration, with working-class self-emancipation. Prison resistance begins to suggest such a synthesis. There, the common need to survive creates the pressure to cooperate. But prison administrators will not organize that cooperation from above. In fact, prison administrators do all that they can to forbid and break up self-organization by prisoners. Therefore, black and white prisoners must depend on themselves to build solidarity with each other.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the self-organized protest movement of blacks created a model for students, women, workers, and eventually, soldiers. In the same way, the self-organized resistance of black and white prisoners can become a model for the rest of us in overcoming racism. Life will continue to ask of working people that they find their way to solidarity. Surely, there are sufficient instances of deep attitudinal change on the part of white workers to persuade us that a multi-ethnic class consciousness is not only necessary, but also possible.
Haki kweli Shakur ATC NAPLA NAIM MOI 4-11-53 ADM 2018
Second to former president Nelson Mandela, Chris Hani was the most famous and iconic leader of the struggle for liberation in South Africa during the late 1980s. Hani said he had lost faith in the church‘s ability to right the wrongs of apartheid, and relied on Marxism, philosophy and science.
Quotations of Hani
Here are some of his most famous quotes.
1. This pretty much sums it up.
What we need in South Africa is for egos to be suppressed in favour of peace. We need to create a new breed of South Africans who love their country and love everybody, irrespective of their colour.
2. A good reminder of what the ANC stands for.
Socialism is not about big concepts and heavy theory. Socialism is about decent shelter for those who are homeless. It is about water for those who have no safe drinking water. It is about health care, it is about a life of dignity for the old. It is about overcoming the huge divide between urban and rural areas. It is about a decent education for all our people. Socialism is about rolling back the tyranny of the market. As long as the economy is dominated by an unelected, privileged few, the case for socialism will exist.
3. Cabinets, hey.
The perks of a new government are not really appealing to me. Everybody would like to have a good job, a good salary…..but for me that is not the all of struggle. What is important is the continuation of the struggle… the real problems of the country are not whether one is in Cabinet …but what we do for social upliftment of the working masses of our country.
4. Education is critical.
We need to create the pathways to give hope to our youth that they can have the opportunity through education and hard work to escape the trap of poverty.
5. A reminder to us all.
If you want peace then you must struggle for social justice.
6. And now…
What I fear is that the liberators emerge as elitists, who drive around in Mercedes Benzes and use the resources of this country …to live in palaces and to gather riches.
Chris Hani as a Revolutionary
1. On extending the struggle to the white areas
“I want to elaborate on this question of extending the armed struggle to the white areas. We don’t want to be misunderstood. Unlike Botha, Le Grange, Malan and Chris Heunis, who go out of their way to butcher children, defenceless and unarmed children, women, old people, black civilians, Umkhonto we Sizwe is a revolutionary army and it is not about to embark on mayhem against whites, civilians, against children, but we are going to step up our attacks against enemy personnel we are referring to the members of the police forces, to the members of the SADF, to those in the administrations terrorising and harassing our people to those farmers and other civilians who are part of the defence force in our country, of the military, paramilitary and reserves. But comrades we are realists. The theatre of these actions are going to be in the white residential areas, and it is inevitable that white civilians will die. We are going to step up attacks against those factories, transnational corporations and monopolies, which exploit and maltreat the South African working class and in the process it is more than probable that white civilians will lose their lives. They should be warned, comrades, because they support that regime, they vote for that government, they condone and justify, rather, the murders committed by that regime, committed in their name and committed in the name of preserving the white domination.” – Radio Freedom broadcast, 26 February 1986
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2. On the ultimate goals of the ANC/SACP:
“[The] imperialists have been very fast to learn that it is not the colour of the man which is important but the sort of social system that a given people also after independence [adopts]. In other words the question whether the means of production in a given country that is the wealth, the mines, the factories, the land belong to the people or are they still controlled by foreigners, by the imperialist countries. So then African independence no longer threatens the man in Washington, London and Bonn as well as in Pretoria. Now the crime that Mozambique and Angola have committed is [ ] to place the destiny of their country in the hands of the people in other words deciding that the means of production will belong within the hands of the people of these countries…. Going to our country, I believe that the imperialist countries have no problem with a black government in South Africa. They do not think there would be a problem. But I think their basic problem is the ANC, in fact it is the national liberation alliance in our country, especially the alliance of the ANC [and] the South African Communist Party. They want to destroy this alliance because they can see the product of this alliance namely, genuine freedom, democracy and prosperity in our country, and namely that the wealth of our country, the mines of our country, the factories and the land in our country will be given back to the people from which they were stolen.” Radio Freedom broadcast 31 July 1986
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3. On the role of the youth in the People’s War
“The youth, for instance, in our country recently in the same period have been actually carrying out the aspects of the people’s war. They have been cleaning our townships of collaborators of the black police and black councillors, those puppets and agents of the regime who make it easy for the regime to implement its policies. That is people’s war. It is not a complicated concept. It is the people, all of them, participating in dealing with the enemy, in destroy ing his buildings those administration buildings where the enemy, for instance, plans all his punitive measures against us…. We must not just confine our activities against the enemy where we stay. We must take this people’s war into the ranks of the enemy.” – Radio Freedom broadcast, 16 September 1986
Haki Kweli Shakur ATC NAPLA NAIM
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4. On what workers should do in the People’s War
Interviewer: The ANC has also called on the workers from the factory floor to be engaged in people’s war. How could they be involved in people’s war when they are only in the factory? Hani: Well, the workers must use revolutionary violence. They must plant mines, they must flood [unclear], they must deal with all managers, directors and captains of industries who display hostility to the workers’ demands. We move to another element to the workers’ struggle to the workers’ unity in the factory. Workers must not feel that without TNT, plastic explosives, without the limpet, without an AK, that there are no other ways of breaking down the machinery. There is what you call cold demolition. – Radio Freedom broadcast, 20 October 1986
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5. On People’s Courts
Announcer: The people’s courts: we pointed out to the army commissar that these organs that had emerged in several townships, from the Transvaal down to the Cape, and have been regarded by all democratic and progressive forces as the rudimentary organs of people’s power, have however been labelled by other people as mere kangaroo courts, where people are summarily sentenced to death without any measure of justice, and he disagreed. Hani: I would think that is an extravagant and rather irresponsible way of looking at the people’s courts. The people’s courts are a new beginning of [defence and justice]. Our people are used to [unclear] the defence counsel and the prosecutor. They say this is justice. This is not justice. This is justice of the ruling class to protect the interests of the regime. Now our people are coming with the people’s courts, in other words they are coming with a new form of justice, a people’s justice where the judges, where the lawyers if there are any, where the prosecutors are elected by the people themselves and are accountable to the people.” .Radio Freedom, 30 November 1986
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6. On necklacing
Interviewer: Can you comment briefly on the necklace? Hani: Why the necklace? You know for a long time South Africa, being a colonialist power of a special type, has depended on the continued repression of our people through active collaboration by puppets. We know that even in the classic colonial situation in countries like India, Kenya, the old Tanganyika and elsewhere, the colonialist has always depended on the African askari. Similarly, in our country, we know ourselves that the colonialist, the racist, regime if you like has always depended on the active collaboration of the oppressed, on the recruitment of the Black policeman, the Black special branch. Because the Black policeman, the Black special branch and the Black agent stay in the same township as we are, have have been the conduit through which information about our activities, about our plans has been passed to the enemy.This has made the process of organisation and mobilisation very difficult. So the necklace was a weapon devised by the oppressed themselves to remove this cancer from our society, the cancer of collaboration of the puppets. It is not a weapon of the ANC. It is a weapon of the masses themselves to cleanse the townships from the very disruptive and even lethal activities of the puppets and collaborators. We do understand our people when they use the necklace because it is an attempt to render our townships, to render our areas and country ungovernable, to make the enemy’s access to information very difficult. But we are saying here our people must be careful, in the sense that the enemy would employ provocateurs to use the necklace, even against activists. We have our own revolutionary methods of dealing with collaborators, the rnethods of the ANC. But I refuse to condemn our people when they mete out their own traditional forms of justice to those who collaborate. I understand their anger. Why should they be cool as icebergs, when they are being killed every day? – Sechaba magazine, December 1986
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7. On the people arming themselves
“A lot of attention should be paid to the question of people arming themselves. There are arms everywhere in that country. The white community is a militarised community. Every shopkeeper, every dealer, every farmer has got weapons. The people must grab those weapons and use them against the enemy.” – Radio Freedom, 30 December 1986
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8. On Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi
“Gatsha must be exposed for what he is. He is not a leader of the Zulu people. He is not following the traditions of the heroic kings of Natal, of the Zulus. Gatsha [unclear] Zulu. He is a stooge placed there by imperialism and the reactionary circles in our country. That is why now and again Botha sends him to America to argue for more and more investment to go and campaign against the disinvestment in America and the Western countries. That is why we see him hugging Margaret Thatcher from time to time, because he is their running dog, he is a lackey.” – Radio Freedom broadcast, 29 May 1987
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9. On attacking the white areas and farmers
“Now we say the country is in a state of civil war, but people who have seen this civil war are blacks, because the theatre of the action has been the townships and they have been the rural areas, the homelands and the bantustans. Very few whites, except on TV screens, have seen the reality of the civil war. For us, for this war to go to its logical development, the whites also must feel what the blacks are feeling. By this, we don’t mean an indiscriminate attack on whites.
We mean that we must go for the white personnel which is responsible for the repression of our people, for those who have been manning the instrument of repression, for the white policemen, for the white members of the SADF, for those who are in the reservists and in the commando groups. We must go for installations in the white areas. We are already going for the farmers, because the farmers are an important element of the SADF…. So what we are saying is that MK units must begin to systematically attack in white areas, so that the whites will not have a false sense of security, but our units are political units. They are revolutionary units. They are not terrorists. They are not just going to go and pounce, for instance, and crash, or attack a white church while whites are praying or just go blindly [in. When they] go there we must have done a lot of reconnaissance and they probably would be assured that people who are there, who are in the cinema, are members of the police or the army.” Radio Freedom broadcast, 11 July 1987
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10. On sabotage
“How many of us have experienced ourselves in that situation that we throw a spanner into that machine there and let it crash. In fact that is one of the problems. It goes on day to day. It is not called sabotage but it is in fact a form of action that is sabotage and I would never discourage the worker today from doing that. In fact, if you tried to discourage them you would be smashed. This is how the word sabotage comes about in fact.
It comes about from a wooden shoe that French workers wore and that in the 18th century in the struggle against mechanisation they threw their wooden shoes into those machines. That is how we have the word sabotage. It is inherent in the practice of workers in waging their struggle. Why should we fight the enemy with so-called clean hands when the enemy fights us all the time with dirty hands We have no choice of the weapons we use. The enemy decides that and therefore we, when the enemy commands the state, the economy, the army and the police force, we use the weapons that are best suited to our condition.” – Radio Freedom broadcast, 19 July 1987
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11. On extending People’s War to white areas
“So now you get the black police, the black councillors, the bantustan chiefs, the homeland governments, being used, you see, to keep our people in enslavement, in subjection. So all these people, though they are black, in fact are an active instrument of the whole system of oppression. Now what you see in our country, that our people are acting against these people who are actually in terms of their day-to-day life are responsible for the implementation of the oppressive measures of the regime, of the racist regime. And they deal with them, because it is not a question of colour.
It is a question of that these people to all intents and purposes are part of the system of oppression. So our people, the militants in our country, correctly deal with these people. By dealing with these people, they are not in fact stopping dealing with the enemy as well. They are dealing with the enemy. But it is important for us, the vanguard of the movement, the ANC which leads national liberation, to call upon our people, and it has done so, that action against the enemy must also spread to the white areas. They must begin to deal with the ruling class, deal with the white police, deal with the members of the army, deal with all those who are taking part in the administration of oppression. So what we are saying is the struggle should be intensified to destroy all those who are oppressing our people, black and white.” – Radio Freedom broadcast 26 September 87
Chris Hani (28 June 1942 – 10 April 1993) born Martin Thembisile Hani, was the leader of the South African Communist Party and chief of staff of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). He was a fierce opponent of the apartheid government, and was assassinated on 10 April 1993.
At age 15 he joined the ANC Youth League. As a student he was active in protests against the Bantu Education Act. Following his graduation, he joined Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC. Following his arrest under the Suppression of Communism Act, he went into exile in Lesotho in 1963. Because of Hani’s involvement with Umkhonto we Sizwe he was forced into hiding by the South African government during which time he changed his first name to Chris.
He received military training in the Soviet Union and served in campaigns in the Zimbabwean War of Liberation, also called the Rhodesian Bush War. They were joint operations between Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army in the late 1960s. The Luthuli Detachment operation consolidated Hani’s reputation as a soldier in the black army that took the field against apartheid and its allies. His role as a fighter from the earliest days of MK’s exile (following the arrest of Nelson Mandela and the other internal MK leaders at Rivonia) was an important part in the fierce loyalty Hani enjoyed in some quarters later as MK’s Deputy Commander (Joe Modise was overall commander). In 1969 he co-signed, with six others, the ‘Hani Memorandum’ which was strongly critical of the leadership of Joe Modise, Moses Kotane and other comrades in the leadership.
In Lesotho he organised guerrilla operations of the MK in South Africa. By 1982, Hani had become prominent enough that he was the target of assassination attempts, and he eventually moved to the ANC’s headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. As head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, he was responsible for the suppression of a mutiny by dissident anti-Communist ANC members in detention camps, but denied any role in abuses including torture and murder.
Having spent time as a clandestine organiser in South Africa in the mid-1970s, he permanently returned to South Africa following the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, and took over from Joe Slovo as head of the South African Communist Party on the 8 December 1991. He supported the suspension of the ANC’s armed struggle in favour of negotiations.
Chris Hani was assassinated on 10 April 1993 outside his home in Dawn Park, a racially mixed suburb of Boksburg. He was accosted by a Polish far-right anti-communist immigrant named Janusz Waluś, who shot him in the head and back as he stepped out of his car. Waluś fled the scene but was soon arrested after a white Afrikaner housewife, Margareta Harmse, who saw Walus straight after the crime as she was driving past, called the police. A neighbour of Chris Hani’s also witnessed the crime and later identified both Walus, and the vehicle he was driving at the time. Clive Derby-Lewis, a senior South African Conservative Party MP and Shadow Minister for Economic Affairs at the time, who had lent Waluś his pistol, was also arrested for complicity in Hani’s murder. The Conservative Party of South Africa had broken away from the ruling National Party out of opposition to the reforms of P.W. Botha. After the elections of 1989, it was the second-strongest party in the House of Assembly, after the NP, and opposed F. W. de Klerk’s dismantling of apartheid.
Historically, the assassination is seen as a turning point. Serious tensions followed the assassination, with fears that the country would erupt in violence. Nelson Mandela addressed the nation appealing for calm, in a speech regarded as ‘presidential’ even though he was not yet president of the country:
Tonight I am reaching out to every single South African, black and white, from the very depths of my being. A white man, full of prejudice and hate, came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now teeters on the brink of disaster. A white woman, of Afrikaner origin, risked her life so that we may know, and bring to justice, this assassin. The cold-blooded murder of Chris Hani has sent shock waves throughout the country and the world. … Now is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those who, from any quarter, wish to destroy what Chris Hani gave his life for – the freedom of all of us.
While riots did follow the assassination, the two sides of the negotiation process were galvanised into action, and they soon agreed that democratic elections should take place on 27 April 1994, just over a year after Hani’s assassination.
Assassins’ conviction and amnesty hearing Both Janusz Waluś and Clive Derby-Lewis were sentenced to death for the murder. Clive Derby-Lewis’s wife, Gaye, was acquitted. The two men’s sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the death penalty was abolished as a result of a Constitutional Court ruling in 1995.
Hani’s killers appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, claiming political motivation for their crimes and applying for amnesty on the basis that they had acted on the orders of the Conservative Party. The Hani family was represented by anti-apartheid lawyer George Bizos. Their applications were denied when the TRC ruled that they were not acting on orders. After several failed attempts, Derby-Lewis was granted medical parole in May 2015, after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer; he died eighteen months later, on 3 November 2016.
On 10 March 2016, the North Gauteng High Court of South Africa ordered that Waluś be released on parole and given bail conditions. The Department of Justice and Correctional Services lodged an appeal against the parole decision to the Supreme Court of Appeals in Bloemfontein. The Department of Home Affairs has indicated that Waluś may have his South African citizenship revoked.
Conspiracy theories surrounding assassination Edit
Hani’s assassination has attracted numerous conspiracy theories about outside involvement. The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, however, said that it “was unable to find evidence that the two murderers convicted of the killing of Chris Hani took orders from international groups, security forces or from higher up in the right-wing echelons.”