At Miami Correctional Facility, founder of IDOC Watch and long-term prison rebel Angaza Iman Bahar is under attack again! The unit where he is held was recently placed on long-term restrictive movement status after an incident involving only a few of the people on the unit. A similar lock down occurred around this time last summer. Then, Angaza analyzed that the prison authorities at Miami and across the DOC system are attempting to enforce the most intense restrictions possible whenever they have the opportunity, in order to control the prison population as their access to resources and programs is increasing restricted and violence increases in the prisons due to the scarcity incarcerated people face.
In the face of the plan to impose restricted movement on the unit where he’s housed, Angaza stood up and informed officers that he wouldn’t accept their mistreatment. He stood up to the authorities’ abuse despite only recently being released from solitary confinement after having been attacked by guards last fall, and despite his release date being less than a year away after spending 26 years incarcerated. Indeed, the last six years that Angaza has been incarcerated, he has been serving credit time lost to conduct reports for speaking out against abuses by the authorities.
That night, a couple of racist guards came to the cell Angaza is in and sprayed a whole can of OC spray into the cell through the food slot in the cell door. Angaza and his cell mate, who had absolutely nothing to do with the situation, were both sleeping and awoke choking on the harsh, toxic fumes.
Angaza has announced that he will be on hunger strike until these abuses are remedied.
Please call Miami CF Warden William Hyatte and IDOC Commissioner Robert Carter and demand that Angaza be moved to a different unit, and that the guards who attacked him be fired immediately!
Warden Hyatte: (765) 689-8920
Commissioner Carter: (317) 232-5711
Sample Script: “Hello, I am calling on behalf of Jimmy Jones #891782, who was attacked along with his cell mate in cell L-113 at Miami Correctional Facility by two guards. Without any justifiable reason, the guards sprayed a whole can of OC spray into cell L-113 through the food slot during their night shift while Jones and his cellmate were asleep. Obviously such an act is extremely dangerous and could have killed or seriously harmed the cell’s occupants. I demand that the officers who attacked Jones and his cellmate be fired, and that Jones be transferred off that unit immediately!”
image here is the New Afrikan independence movement flag. The Pan-Afrikan flag created by Marcus Garvey is red (top), black (middle), and green (bottom). The New Afrikan flag order is different. If We were free and independent, the Black (representing the people) would be at the top and green on the bottom. Since We are an oppressed nation, our flag is upside down reflecting We are in crisis. The green is on top and the black on the bottom. It will reverse when We achieve self-determination. The red (the blood) is in smaller proportion to the black and the green on the New Afrikan flag representing the desire and hope that We shed as little blood as necessary. I hope my explanation is clear. Ase!
The flag was inverted — this is an international signal of distress, a call for help. RNA/Republic of New Afrika National FLAG ( Green Red Black )
The New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) needs assistance from all freedom-loving people.
Our National Flag will be correctly re-set once we have won land, sovereignty, and political independence.
The symbolism of the flag as used by the Republic of New Afrika is obvious. The Black is on the bottom. We in the Western Hemisphere must obtain land, represented by the green, which is at the top. It is so placed because, until Black People in this hemisphere obtain land they will remain on the bottom; and because the acquisition of land is the highest and noblest aspiration for Black People in this continent, since without lane there can be no freedom, justice, independence, or equality. The red, or the blood, stands at the center of all things. We lost our land through blood; we cannot gain it except through blood. We must redeem our lives through blood. Without the shedding of blood there can be no redemption of this race. Yet the red stripe is slightly smaller than either the black or the green.
It is smaller because the bloodshed and sorrow will not last always. They are not the most important part of the picture. The red simply stands in our flag as a reminder of the truth of history, that men and women must gain and keep their liberty, even at the risk of bloodshed. Black is for The People and Green is For The Land! With the formation of the Republic of New Afrika, it has become in addition, the symbol of the devotion of Afrikan people in America, to the establishment of an independent Afrikan Nation on the North American Continent. Thus, the colors were not chosen at any limited convention of black persons; but have been, in centuries past and are now, the emblem of true black hope and pride, as embodied of Pan-Afrikanism and Black Nationalism.
Contraband camps developed around many Union-held forts and encampments. In 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation
Mathew Brady’s photograph of a “Camp of contrabands” near Richmond, Va., illustrates the bleak living quarters shared by many former slaves. Just across the James River from downtown Richmond, Va., is Old Town Manchester, a contraband camp established in 1865. Now an organized neighborhood with a commercial district, this camp was a series of military tents set up near the Richmond-Danville Railroad.
Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.
The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.
But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.
After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered “the largest biological crisis of the 19th century” and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.
Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right.
“In the 19th century people did not want to talk about it. Some did not care and abolitionists, when they saw so many freed people dying, feared that it proved true what some people said: that slaves were not able to exist on their own,” Downs told the Observer.
Downs’s book is full of terrible vignettes about the individual experiences of slave families who embraced their freedom from the brutal plantations on which they had been born or sold to. Many ended up in encampments called “contraband camps” that were often near union army bases. However, conditions were unsanitary and food supplies limited. Shockingly, some contraband camps were actually former slave pens, meaning newly freed people ended up being kept virtual prisoners back in the same cells that had previously held them. In many such camps disease and hunger led to countless deaths. Often the only way to leave the camp was to agree to go back to work on the very same plantations from which the slaves had recently escaped.
Treatment by union soldiers could also be brutal. Downs reconstructed the experiences of one freed slave, Joseph Miller, who had come with his wife and four children to a makeshift freed slave refugee camp within the union stronghold of Camp Nelson in Kentucky. In return for food and shelter for his family Miller joined the army. Yet union soldiers in 1864 still cleared the ex-slaves out of Camp Nelson, effectively abandoning them to scavenge in a war-ravaged and disease-ridden landscape. One of Miller’s young sons quickly sickened and died. Three weeks later, his wife and another son died. Ten days after that, his daughter perished too. Finally, his last surviving child also fell terminally ill. By early 1865 Miller himself was dead. For Downs such tales are heartbreaking. “So many of these people are dying of starvation and that is such a slow death,” he said.
Downs has collected numerous shocking accounts of the lives of freed slaves. He came across accounts of deplorable conditions in hospitals and refugee camps, where doctors often had racist theories about how black Americans reacted to disease. Things were so bad that one military official in Tennessee in 1865 wrote that former slaves were: “dying by scores – that sometimes 30 per day die and are carried out by wagonloads without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench”.
So bad were the health problems suffered by freed slaves, and so high the death rates, that some observers of the time even wondered if they would all die out. One white religious leader in 1863 expected black Americans to vanish. “Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us,” the man wrote.
Such racial attitudes among northerners seem shocking, but Downs says they were common. Yet Downs believes that his book takes nothing away from the moral value of the emancipation.
Instead, he believes that acknowledging the terrible social cost born by the newly emancipated accentuates their heroism.
“This challenges the romantic narrative of emancipation. It was more complex and more nuanced than that. Freedom comes at a cost,” Downs said.
Charles Sims Africa #AM 4975 has been in prison since age 18. He is now 59 years old and a recovering cancer patient. He has been eligible for parole since 2008 but continually denied because of his political views.
Charles has 8 codefendants. Two has died in prison, four has been released from prison onto parole. Chuck’s sister Debbie Sims Africa is one of the four codefendants released onto parole.
Since coming home from prison, Debbie is thriving. Our community of support has supported Debbie to excel and we are committed to do the same for Chuck so that he can excel as well.
by Kwame ‘Beans’ Shakur, Co-Founder and Chairman of the New Afrikan Liberation Collective (NALC)
Booker T. Washington Park Community Center in Terra Haute, IN, was originally founded in 1970 as the Hyte Center for community liberation, operating as a soup kitchen, gymnasium, classroom and library.
On Aug. 18, 2019, NALC will be hosting the “Re-Build: New Afrikan People’s Assembly” at the Booker T. Washington Community Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. This People’s Assembly is an effort to not only educate and organize the local New Afrikan-Black community around our vision to regain control over our lives, land and institutions within our own community, but a national conference for citizens of the Republic of New Afrika (The New Afrikan Nation), members of the Provisional Government (PG-RNA), and our leading formations who are in unison to create a collective struggle. It’s about turning theory into practice!
A lot of people criticize and carry out ideological struggles against Black Lives Matter and the NAACP for their national bourgeois, reformist qualities. They reason they are able to reach and organize the masses, achieve economic support from celebrities with millions in donations because they organize on a grassroots level and from city to city, state to state, their chapters are organized; their presidents and leadership are working together.
Let’s take a look at the ruling enemy class and the United States colonial government. The working class people of the world and our revolutionary forces would have long ago toppled U.S. imperialism if their elected officials and government agencies were in the state of disarray that we are. Imagine if their local and state pigs and FBI worked independently in each city, or if the Democratic and Republican Party didn’t function on a national level or campaign to “sell” their policy to each of their respective bases.
The establishment would truly be a paper tiger, each formation weak, isolated and vulnerable to attack. That’s not the way nations and parties operate, especially those neo-colonized peoples who are struggling to organize the people toward liberation and self-determination.
When you look up the definition of “revisionist” in Webster’s New World dictionary, it describes: 1. A Marxist advocating socialism by means of gradual reforms rather than through revolution. 2. A person who advocates a radically different theory or interpretation, as of particular historical events, from that which is generally accepted – adjective: of revisionist or their policy or practice.
For many years, every August the center was home to the Afrikan Festival, bringing a sense of pride and culture to our community.
The overall movement and what it means to be a revolutionary in North Amerikkka seems to be in a state of revisionism. Everybody likes to quote Lenin when he made the statement, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” but without practice and applying that theory into action, it means nothing. If a group of medical scientists discovered a revolutionary cure for AIDS or cancer, yet all they did for 40 years was write books and give lectures on the theory of curing the disease instead of creating the vaccine to heal the people, their work would have no tangible significance.
And although they seem to have the ability to rid these people of the deadly disease altogether, the people are going to see no other option but to settle for a less permanent treatment to pacify their illness. That’s where we are right now as a national and an independent movement – we seem to be ignoring the fundamental principles of revolutionary socialist theory: going amongst the masses and our community to educate and organize them around class contradictions in order to raise their consciousness and develop revolutionary mentalities.
As revolutionary nationalists, we must engage in revolutionary activity, develop programs with and for the people that meet their daily needs, while also creating autonomy within the community.
It does no good to have these discussions behind closed doors, to only hold events and distribute packets or periodicals amongst cadre and the conscious community. We already know these things. We have to organize these town hall meetings and people’s assemblies and introduce the unconscious masses to our policy.
Not much on the agenda since the city bought the Booker T. Washington Park Community Center. The People’s Assembly will work to re-instate programming here, a crucial step toward organizing our community toward collective self-determination.
We see the Democratic Party gearing up for the 2020 elections; their nominees are already holding their own town hall meetings. For us not to be doing the same thing is for us to not overstand or combat neo-colonialism in this kkkountry. Every one of their campaign strategies is going to be to point out how terrible and racist Trump is, so it’s important that everyone vote in order to prevent a re-election.
And with everything the Trump regime and the Republican Party have done to turn every colonized nation, oppressed class and gender against him, what do we think is going to happen? We aren’t giving them a cure for their disease – a majority of the “Black” community doesn’t even know that we exist.
So instead of taking all that agitation and focusing on building community, mobilizing all that energy and resources around our own needs, the neo-colonial sock puppets and political sharecroppers are going to campaign in our community and convince our people to vote for their favorite Democratic nominee.
Why does a small minority class own and control all the means and modes of production in society? Why do WE, and other lower working class people, not own and control the land, property and business relations within our community?
When a people first come in contact with colonialism, they are keenly aware of the violent process that is taking place around them to strip its people of their identity, nationality, culture, language and independence. Therefore, they naturally resist and fight to hold onto these.
At this stage, the colonizer and colonial government still has to use colonial violence in the form of physical force and military aggression in order to maintain control and implement its foreign education, economic, political and socio-cultural system into the homes and minds of the oppressed peoples. After hundreds of years of this debasing and dehumanization, the physical force is no longer necessary. The people have become a self-refueling neo-colony, subordinate to the colonist and the interest of the ruling class.
Enter neo-colonialism: The colonized peoples, in our case the “Black” community, no longer realize that they are being colonized as an oppressed Afrikan nation within this oppressor prison house of nations (U.S. empire). The unconscious masses have no knowledge of self; they no longer resist or question the illegitimacy of our situation. The status quo is all they know, so they do not question capitalist, colonial rule and its class structure.
Why does a small minority class own and control all the means and modes of production in society? Why do WE, and other lower working class people, not own and control the land, property and business relations within our community? In a neo-colonial era, the masses no longer struggle for independence and self-government to control their own educational, economic and political affairs.
Instead, they are content with solely sending their children to public schools to be trained on what to think vs. being educated on how to think. And instead of organizing amongst ourselves to change our social reality, we aspire to become, or vote for, leaders in the Democratic and Republican Party outside of our community to change things and make it better. This is an illness.
The objective of the revolutionary is to create revolution and cure this illness. The unconscious masses in their colonial mentality have been programmed to fear and disassociate themselves from the terms “revolutionary” and “revolution.”
The People were able to get behind these vanguards and national leaders because they made themselves known and available to the masses. The People’s Assembly is a clarion call for us to set an example and take our struggle to the next level for our nation’s leadership.
Revolution simply means to create change and transform the minds of the colonized woman and man, thus creating a New People to challenge the old ideas and ways of colonial society in order to develop a new, independent one. However, this cannot and will not happen unless we test our revolutionary theory by going amongst and struggling with the People!
Their consciousness is not going to grow and develop on its own. The people knew who Marcus Garvey (Universal Negro Improvement Association) was during that time period, the people knew who Bro. Malcolm was; the people knew who Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense were. In the late ‘60s and the early ‘70s they knew what the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika was – the People were able to get behind these vanguards and national leaders because they made themselves known and available to the masses.
This People’s Assembly is not just an Indiana thing; this is not just an NALC thing. This is a New Afrikan Independence Movement National Conference. This is an initiative on behalf of the Front for the Liberation of the New Afrikan Nation (FROLINAN) and those cadre individuals and formations who support our effort to re-build.
This is a clarion call for us to set an example and take our struggle to the next level for our nation’s leadership, making this trip about more than speaking on a panel and educating the local community on our policy – it’s about the connection and face to face dialogue before and after the assembly with other cadre. A nation needs to develop solidarity and a collective mastery of the restoration of nationhood to its people.
Therefore, the promotion and propaganda leading up to the People’s Assembly should be a coordinated effort from people all across the nation. The same way we all wrote articles in SF Bay View and pushed for the Millions 4 Prisoners Human Rights March in 2017; the same way we all coordinated and participated in the 2018 National Prison Strike – we should expect to see the same flood of articles for Re-Build: New Afrikan People’s Assembly.
We would hope to experience that same level of networking and energy our comrades on the outside put into Nation Day each year, and that same level of commitment from the elders as well as support from the PG-RNA.
The Booker T. Washington Community Center was first founded as the Hyte Center in 1970. Mr. Franklin Brown was a founding member and chairman of the board. My grandfather, Robert “Bob” Joyner Sr., also a founding member, was vice chairman. It served as a community liberation center, clinic, soup kitchen, gymnasium and weight room, classrooms and library.
As a kid and young teen, I attended after school programs and summer school classes there. Each and every August we had the Afrikan Festival, and it brought a sense of pride and culture to our community as New Afrikans of all ages and backgrounds would attend and set up their booths. The city owns the center now, and it is not being utilized to its fullest potential.
Just last year, Chairman Brown passed on to be with the ancestors, and up until that time he had been working with a local pastor from the Booker T. Washington neighborhood on proposals to get programs going again at the center. We are now working with this pastor as well, and the People’s Assembly is the first step toward organizing my own community toward self-determination in regards to land and community control.
We will dedicate a portion of the People’s Assembly to Mr. Brown, my grandfather and their comrades by having family members and surviving elders who were around during that time reflect on the work and sacrifices they made for our community – including armed confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan, as well as what the Hyte Center meant and means to us as a community, and why it’s important that we struggle to regain access to it and control over our own institutions. Let’s Re-build! ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
Chairman Kwame “Beans” Shakur
Send our brother some love and light: Michael Joyner, 149677, WVCF, P.O. Box 1111, Carlisle IN 46391
OUR FELLOW COMRAD BROTHA Abdul Olugbala Shakur/ James Harvey NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT RIGHT NOW!!!… HE GOES BEFORE THE PAROLE BOARD IN A FEW MONTHS WE NEED TO WRITE LETTERS TODAY IN SUPPORT OF HIS IMMEDIATE RELEASE… SEND ALL CORRESPONDENCE TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA PAROLE BOARDS…
THIS IS HIS INFORMATION…
ABDUL OLUGBALA SHAKUR
(J. HARVEY)
C-48884/B-2-128
P.O. BOX 5102
DELANO, CALIFORNIA
93216
KERN VALLEY STATE PRISON…
YOUR SUPPORT IS NEEDED NOW…
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE ✊🏾✊🏾✊🏾💯💯💯💯
FREE THE LAND!!!!
Send all letters to this address:
Free Abdul Olugbala Shakur Network.
c/o BPPRM
P.O.Box 972085
El Paso,TX 79997
It is our belief that Abdul Olugbala Shakur represents the role model for Strategic Release, not only due to his tireless commitment to improving the daily lives of those in society, but through the broad body of work he has developed and contributed to creating.
For more than 25 years, Mr. Harvey has consistently served the Afrikan-Amerikan community and has been at the forefront in combatting gang violence criminality in the Black community. His release would have a major impact positively, not only in the Black community, but in society as a whole. We’ve provided a brief list of some of his contributions in support of our request.
Brotha Abdul has no long criminal history. This is his first time in prison, and he has never been incarcerated or arrested prior to his controlling offense.
He has served 33 ½ years in prison – the last 32 years spent in solitary confinement due to his political activities and ideology and alleged membership in a prison group. But in spite of all this, Mr. Harvey has discovered his true humanity, and this is reflected in his daily contributions to the Black community and the Human Rights Movement for over 25 years.
Eligibility for Strategic Release must be demonstrated both by a proven record of positive work product on behalf of the people and society, but also by a desire for and by the community to see the subject released, which will depend on community-based parole boards. Those released as a condition of release are pledging the remainder of their lives to community and social service.
Strategic Release is the pinnacle of social restitution where the PEOPLE themselves are directly benefitting from the restorative justice. Current modes of so-called “restitution” give funds – mostly culled from the funds sent by loved ones and families of prisoners – to the state, not the victims (where there are any), and it is doled out as the state sees fit to whom and what they see fit.
Strategic Release will have a direct impact on reducing the crime in the underclass communities of Amerikka, thus starving the Prison-Industrial Slave Complex of the most vital resource it needs to function: OUR PEOPLE. When something starves, it ultimately dies.
This is why the state will fight tooth and nail to stop the concept of Strategic Release from taking root in the consciousness of the people and being transformed into a material force, and this is why we must start now pushing it on blogs, social media and every platform we can possibly access, engaging in dialogue and gaining feedback from as broad a cross-section of the population – especially the New Afrikan Community that is most affected both by victimization and offending – as humanly possible.
I believe we can tap into the anti-mass incarceration forces of society to rally around this concept and begin organizing to bring it to life.
We are suggesting that those with significant sentences or offenses will have to have at least 20 years served before they are eligible for Strategic Release. Strategic Release will also serve as a model for other prisoners to develop themselves, transform their consciousness and commit themselves to serving their communities and society.
Brotha Abdul’s body of work
Brotha Abdul was the original author of the historic “Agreement to End Hostilities”adopted within the CDCr and many affected communities, and he continues to work tirelessly to end racial rivalries and group conflicts.
Brotha Abdul is the author of one most effective blueprints to end Black-on-Black gang violence in U.S. society: “Operation Hip-Hop Rescue.” Following the systematic failures in governmental response during Hurricane Katrina, Brotha Abdul authored one of the most comprehensive emergency response plans to ensure that such a tragedy never visits our communities again.
Following the release of the book “The Bell Curve,” a pseudo-scientific work that sought to criminalize the Black community in general and the Black male in particular, Abdul spearheaded the campaign to debunk this attempted criminalization of his community and people. Out of this campaign came a series of pamphlets which were collected into the perennial work, “New Afrikan Criminology 101,” a textbook used not only in the classroom of Professor Dorothy B. Fardan at Bowie State University but by activists and scholars in prison and society alike as a tool to combat the racist criminalization of the Black community.
Brotha Abdul is the founder and creator of the Black August Memorial Commemoration Committee (BAMCC), which is a movement that is spreading all across the country. He appointed Akili Mwalimu Shakur to chair the BAMCC, and he gives all credit to Brother Akili, Abdul Jabbar Caliph, Sista Kilaika Baruti and others for the success of this movement.
Brotha Abdul is also the founder and creator of the George Jackson University (GJU), which is a movement designed to eradicate:
Functional illiteracy among Black prisoners
Criminal “gangster” mentality among Black prisoners
Cultural ignorance among Black prisoners and
It also prepares Black prisoners for release back into the Black community.
Dr. Donald R. Evans, Dr. Ali Rashad Perkins and many others have played a crucial role in the development of this concept. Unfortunately, because Brotha Abdul chose to name the project after George Jackson,the project for the last 12 years has been under attack, even though multiple court decisions ruled in favor of the GJU. There is ongoing and pending litigation in multiple courts on this very issue, and on Feb. 19, 2015, a Superior Court judge granted an evidentiary hearing on the George Jackson University (GJU) issue.
Brotha Abdul has developed a number of very important proposals that have had an influence in the Black community, such as “The New Afrikan Community Security Protocol Mandate.” This proposal is a basic blueprint designed to stabilize the Black community; activists across the country are using this blueprint.
Then in 1996 he produced a comprehensive blueprint for eradicating hunger in the Black Diaspora. In 2012, he revised that plan, which is now known by “The Pan-Afrikan Global Commission Against Hunger.”
Another one of his proposals is “The New Afrikan Prisoner Outreach Resource Center.” This proposal is designed to prepare Black prisoners for release and put an end to Black recidivism.
Brotha Abdul is also the creator of the “Free Speech Society” (FSS) along with Mutope Duguma, Zaharibu Dorrough, Joka Heshima Jinsai and Kijana Tashiri Askari. The FSS is a movement designed to protect and defend the First Amendment rights of imprisoned and society-based activists as well. This project is currently being coordinated by Steve Martinot (martinot4@gmail.com). For more information on the FSS, visit Freespeechsociety.wordpress.com.
Brotha Abdul is the co-founder and co-creator of the “Insurrectionists Art Collective” with co-founder and co-creator Joka Heshima Jinsai (Denham), a platform for activists and art lovers to support the resolution of some of the most pressing social ills facing us as a society today, such as breast cancer prevention, treatment and research, child abuse and exploitation treatment and services, Alzheimer’s Disease research and services, domestic violence prevention and intervention services, homelessness prevention and services, child hunger prevention and services, including food security initiatives. The IAC also supports the Abdul Olugbala Shakur Literary Scholarship Fund and the Joka Heshima Jinsai Artistic Scholarship Fund, which provide literary and artistic scholarships for our youth.
Brotha Abdul has served as an active member and supporter of the National Afrikan-Amerikan Family Reunion Association (NAAFRA) with founder and CEO Dr. Donald R. Evans, a movement designed to rebuild the Black community and family while promoting entrepreneurship, Black business ownership and commerce within the Black community in order to create economic systems where residents spend their money with and within their own community, thus cultivating self-sufficiency and prosperity (NAAFRA.org).
Brotha Abdul has contributed to the expansion of New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism (NARN), the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) and the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) across the U.S.
Brotha Abdul has written for a number of publications, such as the San Francisco Bay View newspaper in particular (sfbayview.com), a newspaper that has provided a medium for prisoners to speak and reach the people. Abdul has served as one of its most powerful embedded activist reporters. Many of his articles have gone viral, e.g.
The piece, “What is solitary confinement?” is being used by prison rights activists all across the country to educate the public on this modern horror.
We have provided a strong case for Strategic Release. There is no doubt that Brotha Abdul’s release would have a major impact on society, not just the Black community.
On our most recent visit following our dad’s hospital stay, we had the privilege and fortunate opportunity to meet, speak with, and embrace Chuck Africa. Ironically, it was Chuck Africa who put the word out to inform the family of Maroon’s medical dilemma and transport from SCI Dallas to an unspecified hospital.
The family is pleased to bring you Maroon’s latest message after his recent surgery:
“Had my first visit since my operation, with Theresa, Sharon, and Russell. Since I’m still in the prison infirmary, it had to be approved by the doctor, and I was in a wheelchair; though I CAN and DO walk a little every day. Medically, all I choose to say is that it has been like NOTHING I have ever experienced! More pain than I have ever had to deal with; though A LOT of PRAYER has made it EASIER. During my two-week stay in the outside hospital, the ENTIRE hospital staff treated me in a professional manner, as did the prison security details that accompanied me. (Written while laying on a reclining hospital bed after the dressing was changed on the navel-to-sternum gash from my surgery. Thankfully, it’s healing well, and there is less and less pain with the daily changes.)”
Straight Ahead!
Maroon
Maroon and the Shoatz family will continue to keep people updated about his health. If you are planning to visit Maroon, he is still in the prison infirmary. All visits should be confirmed with Maroon via phone (267) 456-7882.
Write Maroon at:
Smart Communications
PADOC/SCI Dallas
Russell Shoats AF3855
PO Box 33028
St. Petersburg FL. 33733
——————————————–
Want to leave a voice message for Maroon?
etta cetera, friend of Maroon, is collecting voice messages to play to Maroon over the phone. Don’t tell him – It’s a surprise. If you would like to leave him a voice message please text recorded voice memos to 443-603-6964 (this is not the iphone recorded text message – it is a voice memo that is sent as an MP3.) You can also send an MP3 recorded message to writealetta@gmail.com from your computer or phone.
Please say your name, where you are calling from and a brief message.
Try to keep it around 30 seconds or less. This does not have to be a “get well” message – it could be a general ‘LOVE who you are and miss you’ message! Get well’s are fine tho too.
Veronza Bowers is an internationally known man of peace, famous for his mastery of the Shakuhachi bamboo flute that he plays to relieve the suffering of sick and dying prisoners. Now 73, this former Black Panther who has proclaimed his innocence during 46 years of incarceration, has just learned that once again he has been denied parole.
According to Wikipedia, his sentence dictated that “he was eligible for mandatory parole after 30 years.” When that day arrived, he was dressed to leave to join his family at the prison gate when they were bitterly disappointed.
“In February 2005,” reports Wikipedia, “10 months after he’d served 30 years in prison, his parole was postponed in order to give the victim’s relatives a chance to express their opposition at a new parole hearing. Bowers was denied parole in December 2005.”
At that parole hearing, Veronza’s unit manager testified: “I have been with the Bureau of Prisons for 25 years in March and this is my first time ever speaking on behalf of an inmate. … Incident reports are very easy to get and he has set the standard for not getting any incident reports. I can address the fact that as a Bureau of Prisons employee, we all wish we had an institution full of inmates who can go 21 years without an incident report.”
In a message received May 30, Veronza writes: “The way I look at news is that it is neither bad nor good; it just IS what it is. And once received, then we can move forward.
“I do appreciate very much that people are very concerned about me. Please let folks know that I am fine. I talked with my Freedom Team today and they are busy preparing our next step.
“In short, we are not giving up. And I am confident that truth and justice are on my side and that I will be taking my long overdue long walk to FREEDOM in the not too distant future.
Please let folks know that I am fine. I am confident that truth and justice are on my side and that I will be taking my long overdue long walk to FREEDOM in the not too distant future.
“It is the Bay View, my legal team, all of you supporters who continue to show your love and concern and, of course, my entire family and all my friends who provide the WIND under my wings that allows me to hold my head high and soar to the heights where only eagles dare fly – on wings unbroken!”
Send our brother some love and light: Veronza Bowers Jr., 35316-136, Butner FMC, P.O. Box 1600, Butner NC 27509.
