Wayne Price is longtime anarchist, author and currently a member of Bronx Climate Justice North and the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, or MACC, in New York City. After reading his book, The Value Of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (AK Press, 2013), I got excited to speak to him about his views on anarchists engaging Marxist economic concepts and some of the historical conflicts and engagements between Marxism and Anarchism. We talk about his political trajectory from a pacifist Anarchist in high school, through Trotskyism and back to anarchy. Wayne talks about common visions of what an anarchist economy might look like, how we might get there, class and intersection of other oppressions, critique of State Capitalism. Wayne sees the oppressed of the world having a chance during this economic freeze to fight against re-imposition of wide-scale capitalist ecocide by building libertarian, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and heterogenous future societies in the shell of the old.
This midweek, we’re sharing two segments. First up, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin talks about attempts in the 1960’s and 70’s at building a prisoners union in the United States and parallels with inside / outside organizing in the USA today. Then we hear from Ohio death row prisoner from the Lucasville Uprising case, Bomani Shakur (aka Keith Lamar) about his struggle to stay alive and call out the injustice in his and so many cases.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin is an author, black anarchist, organizer, former Black Panther and former political prisoner based in Kansas City, Missouri. In this segment, Lorenzo talks about prisoners organizing unions and other associations in the past, the thoughts of George Jackson and Martin Sostre and more.
JoNina Ervin, an autonomous organizer and also a former Black Panther, who is married to Lorenzo has put out a specific request for solidarity to help these elders weather the pandemic and lighten the load of mutual aid in their community which we’ll share in our show notes. Suffice to say, donations to help them get safer access to laundry can be made by sending a donation via Paypal account at: organize.the.hood@gmail.com / cash app: $CaseyGoon / venmo: @casey-R-goonan. I’ll read JoNina’s appeal after Lorenzo’s interview.
Free Keith Lamar / Bomani Shakur
Bomani Shakur speaks to us from death row at OSP Youngstown in Ohio. Bomani is accused of crimes related to the 1993 Lucasville Uprising he claims innocence of and has an execution date set for November 16, 2023. For a little over an hour we speak about his upbringing, his case, injustice in white supremacist and capitalist America, Bomani’s politicization and struggle to find himself, defend his dignity and his life. This interview was recorded on April 29th, a little over a day before the end of the month of solidarity with and direct action for Bomani Shakur. Thanks to Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement – NYC for hooking us up with the chat and helping coordinate the Month Of Solidarity. More on his case can be found at KeithLamar.Org, on the facebook page “Justice For Keith Lamar” and at the twitter account, FREEKeithLamar. On his website you can find a link to his book, Condemned, ways to donate to his phone fund, and a link to the excellent, 30 minute documentary on youtube about his case also named Condemned. If you’re on twitter, there is a twitter storm planned for April 30, 2020. Find our twitter or @FreeKeithLamar to join in.
Phone Zap about Covid-19 and North Carolina Prisons
Over the past month, covid19 has blazed through NC prisons like wildfire.
Across DPS facilities, over 600 people have tested positive — roughly the same number of cases in all of Wayne County, which has a population that is 3x larger. One person (at Pender C.I) has already died of complications, and a single facility (Neuse C.I.) has a mind-boggling 466 positive cases.
The reason Neuse has so many confirmed cases is that DPS decided to test everyone there–and they should do the same at all facilities with significant numbers of positive cases, such as NCCI Women, where 81 people have tested positive so far. This is the only way to know the full scale of the outbreak and to be able to take appropriate measures to mitigate further spread.
Please call Commissioner of Prisons Todd Ishee on Thursday, April 30 to demand universal testing at four hard-hit prisons!
Word is now coming out that today, April 30th 2020 there is a demonstration growing at Pendleton CI in Indiana by folks incarcerated there. A number of prisoners will refuse meals today due to neglect, poor treatment and prison officials’ complete lack of care and concern in regard to crisis management or emergency response during this global pandemic. Prisoners have reported receiving sparse and poorly put-together sack lunch and one small bag of cereal a day. They are demanding proper nutrition during this time that will serve to sustain and to fortify themselves against sickness as well as proper Personal Protective Equipment and cleaning supplies in order to clean and sanitize their cells and such. Word comes out from inside Pendleton despite the apparent manipulation of prisoners jpay tablets that are used for communication. It’s presumed that the disconnections are done in order to slow/stop communications with the outside world. The tablets were disconnected completely for several days about a week ago leaving prisoners with absolutely no way to contact anyone on the outside after a physical altercation occurred between pigs and prisoners when the pigs attempted to house prisoners confirmed to be covid-19 positive with those that had not been confirmed to have it.
An article discussing this topic should be forthcoming by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is incarcerated at Pendleton, some time today. You can call Pendleton CI in Indiana to lodge a complaint for this treatment, support for the hunger–strikers and express a concern by calling 1(765)778-2107
Josh Williams Parole Hearing in June
One last announcement before we get started with the interviews. Josh Williams, who’s serving an eight-year sentence connected to his participation in the Ferguson uprising, is up for parole in June 2020 and there’s a call for people to write support letters. The letters themselves should be addressed to the parole board but sent to Josh’s prison address. You can find a sample letter people can see here: https://www.freejoshwilliams.com/freejosh
If people would like to send a printed letter but don’t currently have access to printing, you can contact the co-ordinator at freejoshwilliams@gmail.com and hopefully sort something out that way. Please feel free to pass this information on to your contacts and generally share in whatever way you see fit.
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Tracks sampled in this episode:
Souls Of Mischeif and Adrian Younge – Stopped (instrumental) – There Is Only Now (Deluxe Edition)
Soul Chef – Back In The Day (instrumental) – The Kool Truth Instrumentals
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Lorenzo Komb’oa Ervin Transcription
True Leap Press: So yeah, we’re talking about the prisoner union, and this is the ‘70s?
Lorenzo Komb’oa Ervin: Yeah. ‘73, ‘74 and ‘75. It’s actually all the way up to ‘77, when the Supreme Court made a ruling that it was unconstitutional.
TLP: To have a prisoner union?
LKE: Yeah, it was unconstitutional, the United States Supreme Court. But by that time, they had signed up 1000’s of prisoners all over the country, in different states that started their own union there in that state in the state prisons. But here’s the deal all this came after the Attica Rebellion and the massacre there and everything. And the anger of the prisoners took various forms. You had other rebellions, and you had strikes, and you had a number of things like that happening in local prisons.
But thensome people organized, I think it was in North Carolina, as far as I can remember. The original prison labor unions were started by a guy, Jim Grant, who was a civil rights activist, and some other prisoners in the North Carolina state prison system. It also was going down in places like Walpole [State Prison, currently MCI Cedar Junction -ed] in Massachusetts, and that movement first was just the strike. And then after that, and they made contacts with activists on the outside — which is a common thing back in the 1970’s and the ‘60s, was to make contacts with activists on the outside — and they were able to get some support from outside. And so they just started organizing a union, they didn’t ask for a union. They didn’t say “Can we have a union warden?”
So they started organizing unions all over and it started just sweeping the country, you know. You know, California had a big, big contingent, you know, and everything, and other states as well, you know, and it just starts sweeping the country. And, and before long, 1000’s of prisoners were in these unions, and they were demanding prisoners rights, and end to the beatings in prison and long term confinement, the problem of the basic human rights and all this kind of thing. And so, as it got stronger, it tried to build a central union, and it was that point, that this is after some years of going down and having protests and organizing people on the outside putting pressure on the government, and so forth, after all this is going on, then they tried to create a central prisoners labor union. That’s when the wardens took, took them to prison, various state wardens — prison wardens — and so forth, took them to court and wound up filing in the United States Supreme Court. I think it was ‘77 or ‘78 that they got the decision against the whole idea of this, this kind of movement being unconstitutional, they said, and a threat to prison security.
So, what was interesting that, at that time, many of us, we had a split in our ranks, because someone was believed that going to court and fighting and all this was a good thing to do, and others of us felt like we should just continue organizing and build the strongest possible movement that could even resist, repression. And it didn’t matter in final analysis because they just came down on all those of us that they thought were leaders and so forth and just put us away.
Now, there’s one thing though: in the federal prison system, I knew Jim Grant, I met Jim Grant in prison, they shipped him out of North Carolina down to the Atlanta federal prison. And we had started to build a federal prisoners labor union, tried to do that. And, of course, around that time that the decision came down and everything and they isolated a bunch of us and all that.
TLP: Shit.
LKE: But here’s the deal: the prison’s labor union, the difference between it and just the strikers that we’ve seen in recent years is, it was hooked up with the Black Power movement hooked up with the Black Power movement, the civil rights movement, and other organizations that were still live on the outside, you know?
TLP: Can I ask a question?
LKE: Yeah.
TLP: What would you say, then, of the need to connect groups like Movement for Black Lives, into more radical black organizations that do like grassroots stuff on outside with the prison movement?
LKE: Well, I’ll say this, it might require some study — but I just off the head I would think that the movement has to be led by prisoners, and the movement on the outside has to be supportive of the prisoners struggle.
But like I had written myself some time ago, about how activism on the outside have got to start pressuring the state governance and the Feds and everybody else, while the movement on the inside is building. It doesn’t just mean standing on the outside with a picket sign, but, you know, as I’ve written about, going where the officials have their meetings, and, and all these corporations that make money off of prison labor, — and there are quite a few of them — expose that. And some of the stuff that the Free Alabama Movement has started to talk about in this period. We should be doing it that way.
And as far as organizations and movements, well, I’m not sure that those forces are looking for a mass campaign, a mass approach. When I was in prison what broke up everything was this attempt by organizations on the outside, to find some so-called leader or something on the inside, or make him a leader — some prisoner — and, and he was spout their line and all this kind of thing. So, I think, I’m not sure that these movements that exist right now would be willing, or able, to take leadership from prisoners. I’m not sure. I don’t know. We don’t, we can’t say this is 1970-something, and the prison movement that existed at that time saw itself, and actually people on the outside saw it as being the autonomous protest movement
TLP: You’re bringing a much needed critique right now.
LKE: Well, but in terms of that movement then, it had already reached a high stage of development, and struggle. That’s one of the things to bear in man. So you can’t just get that overnight.
Now, I think the movement now would be different and should be different. Technology or different political perspectives, and so on, some of that’s good, some of that’s bad. Some of it is, you know… I don’t know how much support on the on the inside there is with, you know, for instance Black Lives Matter and all that stuff to be quite honest. And it’s a different kind of organization from most of the groups in the 1970’s, it’s much more of a petit-bourgeois organization. And they’re very sectarian in a lot of ways, that’s what I found.
But, nevertheless, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about the ability of the movement on the inside to see the use of legitimate allies, especially in the Black community, which is really, really important, has been missing for so long. You know, I’m saying other than Attica, that moment with Attica, there has not been a mass base of support in the Black community for prisoners. You know, it just hasn’t existed.
TLP: Well, I remember when we were talking though, I remember when we were talking, and we were talking about — it had just been right after the prison strike in 2018 — and we were talking about the moment in the late ‘90s, where it was like 1998, there was Critical Resistance-
LKE: Right.
TLP: – there was the Anarchist Black Cross, it like just emerges, kind of a reemerges, as a federation and a network.
LKE: Right.
TLP: And there’s INCITE! — Women of Color Against Violence. So like, there’s this moment and then you’re also even calling, in 2002, you’re calling for a united prison front, a whole united movement across, and you actually say verbatim “Critical Resistance, the North American Anarchist Black Crosses, and all movement for like, queer, disabled, an all oppressed people, colonized people, united prison front. And so I just wanna say that, like, that moment-
LKE: Did it come though? The thing is, did it come? Did it happen?
TLP: But what what needs to be addressed is that these organizations and networks are in place, and it’s like taking those existing containers, and then doing them, right?
LKE: Well bear this in mind, it isn’t really about organizations as much as it is about prisoners and their families and the communities they come out of, versus what the state has done to communities of color ever since they resorted to the war on drugs, for instance. And the rise of the police, the paramilitary police, and all these kinds of things, you know. This was stuff that the original Black Panther Party had educated about and tried to fight about. And they been trying to explain to white radical allies and so forth, that, the party… we’ve talked about it — the party had a perspective on fascism and the state. And, you know, their thing was that they realized that prisoners could not free themselves, they could not liberate themselves, they had to be part of a broad base mass movement.
And that was actually starting to happen to some extent. And as George Jackson was laying it out, you know, he was explaining a lot of things. He was a key figure in explaining why we had to have this kind of unity.
TLP: You also talked about Martin Sostre.
LKE: I do. I, you know, Martin saucer is my mentor so what do you think, you know? But uh, you know, but but Martin was different. See, Martin, he came, well first he came along before George did and his organizing was to lay the basic foundation so that you could even read and talk about revolutionary activity, you know what I’m saying? Or revolutionary politics. He laid the foundation with is lawsuits.
TLP: He talking about the language of fascism, right? This is the language of anti-fascism. Right? He was an antifacsist, right? That’s the term he was using?
LKE: That’s the terms he was using. And, because he said “We’re not fighting the police.” He said, “we’re fighting the state.” You know, that’s some profound shit! When I first heard that, and you know, cuz the left, it was about “all these fucking cops” and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the cops are the epitome, they’re, they’re agents of the state, but they’re not the state, you know. And that’s the kind of shit, that’s the kind of shit he always would tell me, it’s important to understand the distinction between what they call police power… And it was a certain period, when the so-called police power thing came into existence in the in the 70’s and 80’s. You know, where they started creating their unions and allowed them to be autonomous from the mayor or some shit like that, or, you know, on some level. And then their rise with paramilitary policing and the SWAT teams and beyond that, you know what I’m saying?
Cause what we were talking about how there’s differences in this period, and which, you know, which reduced the strikes and the period that produced the prison labor union. And the prison labor union was a mass movement in and of itself, and it was, you know, it was an autonomous mass movement. And they went out in states all over the country. And so it took the Supreme Court to rule that this was unconstitutional. And to this day, now in this day hardly…activists don’t hardly know about it. Activists have to be charged to always know about these kinds of movements. You know what I’m saying? Because it makes, it makes our work easier in this period in our level of understanding of how we can fight and win.
And so this this thing was more than just them having strikes. They were organizing local groups, and in local areas they had they had outside organizers that had groups on the outside working in communities and stuff. Because I remember one of the things when I was in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, there was this group called Community Aid to Prisoners. And they used to have a radio show on college radio, in Atlanta. They used to come inside, and work with the person, or the group we had in there and everything. And the so called legalize group, the cultural group, they’d come inside, but their thing was to make sure that prisoners were not destroyed, because they seen the shit happen in Attica, and all that. So their thing was can’t let that happen again.
We also gotta link the community with prisoners and the plight of prisoners and shit, you know? And talk about the unjust and unequal condition of Black people that forces us to go to prison anyway, or allows us to be victims of prisons, you know, this kind of thing. So, I don’t know about right now, you know better about right now, about what kind of community based organizing is going on around prison support.
The thing that George Jackson was putting forward is that he said that he wanted, his idea was to have a movement where the masses of people in the streets — including the communities where the prisoners were from, and radical prisoners and revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party — could work together all over the country. And have a dynamic revolutionary perspective on the one hand, but a organizing campaign to make the prison movement into a survival movement. Like the Black Panther party organized shit.
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Bomani Transcription
TFSR: So my guest is Bomani Shakur, also known as Keith Lamar. And he’s a man who’s currently held in death row in Youngstown, Ohio as a result of Lucasville Uprising. Bomani was present at the southern Ohio correctional facility during the uprising and prosecutors have accused him of leading a death squad that killed a guard and some prisoners. Thank you so much, Mr. Shaker for taking the time to chat.
BS: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
TFSR: Would you tell us a little bit about yourself and what Ohio was like when you were coming up in the 70’s and 80’s?
BS: Well, I’m 50 years old, so I was born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the bigger cities in Ohio. I grew up in the in the 70’s, 80’s. I don’t have too much of a recollection of the 70’s per se, in terms of the political situation and whatnot. But I grew up in a small place called The Village. It was a working class neighborhood and mostly who lived and worked at steel mill, the public steel mill. My grandfather worked there and paid for his house in this little community. And oh, it was 100 houses in this community and everybody, you know, owned their own home, worked in the mills.
So my early childhood was relatively peaceful, you know. The most memorable part of my upbringing was that when I was between 5 and 10 years old when my family and I, my mother, my brother and sister — I had two brothers and a sister — still young and lived in the village. Not long after I turned 11 or 12 years old, we moved away from the village. And so that was my entrance into, like, mainstream society basically. Start going to public school, a school called Cranwood. And because, in the village, we were poor, but we didn’t really realize we were poor because that wasn’t the values or standard for that community. You can go over anybody house around dinnertime and eat. Everybody was family, literally, and figuratively. A lot of people were cousins, because of, you know, the close proximity we all was, it was like a close knit community. So you had a lot of overlap in relations and whatnot.
And that was a good thing. Because, you know, I could play with my friends, my cousins, on a daily basis, and there was really no judgment about your attire, your social economic status. Because everybody was pretty much the same, even though you had some people had more than others, but it was never really made a point, something to focus on. But when we moved away from the village, that’s when I first became aware that I was poor poor. You know, and the kids, my peers taught me that. [They] made fun of my attire a lot, my appearance a lot. I was a young kid, at the time, I 8 or 9 years old, is what I’m referring to. And so, I was more into playing than I was intoworrying about my hair being combed or anything like that. And my mother and stepfather didn’t really mess with us boys about our appearance, so I showed up this school looking like, basically like a homeless person, basically [chuckles]. And the kids basically let me have it/.
And so, gradually, in response to the ridicule and criticisms I received in elementary school I developed a complex about my appearance and started trying to cut grass, deliver papers and whatnot to make money so I can buy the various clothes I needed to stop this ridicule. And so that was really where I kind of learned — and of course, as I grew older, and went further in, in the school system, this lesson was compounded — but elementary school was basically where I learned that to have what you have is more important than who you were. I don’t know if the kids, I’m sure the kids wasn’t aware that that was a lesson that they were teaching, that we were teaching each other, but that’s essentially what I came away with when I was around 12 or 13.
And as I entered into junior high and then high school I went deeper and deeper off into that erroneous idea about having things was more important than, you know, the person I was becoming. And I fell into start selling drugs when I was 13-14 years old, and to accumulate money to buy these clothes, Polo, Ralph Lauren shirts, Guess jeans, and Michael Jordan shoes, all this material trappings that you see young kids pursuing today. It was no different back then but with the exception that we were literally dirt poor. I became a drug dealer and by the time I was 15 I was living in my own apartment, driving a Mercedes Benz, wearing Rolex watches, had a pocket full of money and a whole bunch of “friends” quote, unquote. People who wouldn’t have anything to do with me when I was had a shabby attire but now all of a sudden because I had name brand clothing I was, you know, pretty much one of the most popular individuals at my school.
And at the time I turned 17 years old had really exhausted all my options as a drug dealer basically. I mean, I was driving around in this foreign automobile and, you know, driving around the same- fill up my gas tank and just traveling around all day basically like a politician. You know, selling drugs, picking up money, shooting dice, and it was the same day over and over again. I got really like exhausted living like that. And there at the end when I was around 18 years old, a group of guys tried to rob me. I had been robbed several times leading up to that, and a group of guys came to rob me instead of turning over, giving them my jewelry as I did the first case, I pulled a gun out and engaged in a shootout. You know, I was shot twice myself, in the legs and ended up shooting the guy twice in the chest. He died and I came to prison. That’s how I ended up in prison, in a nutshell. Yeah, so….
TFSR: So fast forward, I guess, 4 years, right? To, because you went in ’89, to The Lucasville Uprising in April of 1993. Can you talk about what SOCF [Southern Ohio Correctional Facility] was like at that point, what Lucasville penitentiary was like, and and where you were when stuff popped off? What you were doing?
BS: Yeah, well, I have to go back a little bit because where Lucasville was in 1993 was a result of what it was in 1991. And 1991, white school teacher was murdered by a Black inmate. I emphasize the race because Lucasfield is located in southern Ohio, in a predominantly white community and the prisoners are a majority Black prisoners, from the inner city and whatnot. And these are kind of like, I guess you would call hicks, people who haven’t really haven’t had any day to day interaction with Black people,except through stereotypes or in the prison.
So who know when this guard, when this female guard was murdered, people in the surrounding community was calling for the prison to be locked down, calling for more severe measures to be implemented to, you know, quell some of the violence that was going on. Because Lucasville was one of the most dangerous prisons in the state of Ohio. Probably still is, though I haven’t been down there and two decades now. So they appointed the new warden, Arthur Tate, and he was brought in as someone who was believed to be a hardliner, that he will put the hammer down, restore order, and get the prisoners in line. So he enacted a whole lot of draconian standards and practices and whatnot, just forcing guys to cell with people that they didn’t necessarily get along with, you didn’t really have any say on were you cell or who you cell with. Which was something in prior administration you had, that because you living with people and so that you created a kind of unstable situation if you forced to live with somebody you don’t get along with. But he didn’t, really care about those types of things. And he wanted to assert his dominance.
Flash forward a few years after the teacher was murdered in 1993, and he had drew lines on the floor, we had to stay within the lines. It was almost like a military academy, it’s what he would seem to be after at the time. And of course, when you have your foot on people’s necks, who are already oppressed, it only created a kind of powder keg, that this building and building.
Then right before the uprising, they had, every year they came around and tested prisoners for tuberculosis. And this particular year, for some reason, the Muslims refused to take the test on the grounds that the tests contained the alcoholic substance called “phenol” and apparently, it prohibited from ingesting alcohol because of their religious beliefs. They try to have an audience with the warden and the deputy warden, to try to suggest alternative ways this test can be administered, but Tate in keeping with his hard line attitude and refused them all and gave them an ultimatum and told them they could take the test or they’re going to be locked up, you know, put it in the hole.
He told him this, I believe, on a Thursday or Friday and let him stew over on their decision over the weekend. And the Muslims on Sunday, April 11, Easter Sunday, decided that they will, take that day as an opportunity to stage what they claimed would be a peaceful protest on April 11. This is according to the record, several Muslims attacked gaurds commandeered the keys and opened up all the cell doors, like I said, to start this protest. But once they opened the doors, it was like striking a match. And things very swiftly got out of hand.
You know, when the riot first occurred, I was on the yard, on the recreation yard, and this is one of the first first few days of spring and the yard have been closed the whole winter. And so, I took advantage of the opportunity to go out and get some fresh air. I was out there running and, you know, exercising and a guard came when it was time to come back in, a guard came running out with blood streaming down his face and whatnot. So that was the first indication that I or the people on the yard had of something going wrong on the inside. As the time went on we realized that it was a disturbance that was happening. And that the Muslims, they had made it known that they had commandeered to prison and that they were staging a protest and asked if anybody wanted to participate. Because, they weren’t, they weren’t the only ones who were being oppressed. We all were. We all were living under these kind of adverse conditions, and subjected to these arbitrary rules and regulations and whatnot that Tate was implementing. For him, to his way of thinking would quell the violence that was going on. It really just made things worse, as it often does.
So, you know, eventually one of my friends came out, and he told me, gave me a hint of what was going on, and from what I initially understood was that guys was going into other guys cells stealing their personal belongings and whatnot. I didn’t have much, and I also didn’t appreciate the magnitude of what was going on, this was in the beginning of the uprising. So, you know, I’m thinking that it will probably be something, a minor skirmish, and it’d be within within an hour. As you probably know it last 11 days, and so I was way off in my estimation of how serious and severe things were.
So I went inside and I happened to be celling in L6, on L side in the 6th pod and that coincidentally was the pod where the guards had been pushed into shower stalls and later where the alleged snitches were allegedly killed. I went back into that pod before these things happen to check on my personal belongings. And I saw the guards in shower stall, and you know, of course seeing that put me on notice as to the severity as to what was going on. Because whether or not that lasted 11 days or not you have taken the step to take on hostages, this is serious now. So, once I gradually understood the seriousness of it, of course, I compared it to my personal belongings and decided to go back on the yard. I was 23 years old, at the time, wasn’t necessarily political. I had been doing some reading, like Malcolm X and Franz Fanon and things of that nature, but I wasn’t necessarily what I would call political or even necessarily aware of this that anything can be done about the oppression that we were living under. That wasn’t my mentality at the time, I didn’t really have that kind of awareness. And not a lot of people did. In fact, majority of us filed out into the yard and stayed on the yard until late in the evening, early morning, actually, until the highway State Patrol.
So, you have the Muslims commandeered the prisons, then you have the Aryan Brotherhood who joined ranks with the Muslims and another group of individuals called the Black Gangster Disciples. And so now you have three gangs or organizations presiding over this uprising, and then you have guys who, like myself, were out on the yard watching everything unfold.
A lot of people are under the impression that since I’m on death row that I was a part of one of those three factions, but I wasn’t. And I came out on the yard was actually picked up from the yard when the highway state patrol came out late early morning, April 12 and ushered us all into the gymnasium. And so I didn’t stay inside for the 11 days, wasn’t present when the murders was happening. I was on the yard when they brung bodies out onto the yard and dumped the bodies on the yard. By that time the highway State Patrol had took up stance around the perimeter fence to make sure no one escaped, but they didn’t come in to try to quell, you know, the uprising. They, you know, stood there along with us and watched as dead bodies were dumped on the yard.
So I witnessed that part of the uprising and little did I know at the time that I would ultimately be accused in killing these individuals who I was watching, whose bodies I was watching being dumped on the on the yard. That was one of the first disconnects in how, I became involved in this whole thing.
As I said, they put us in a gym early the next morning, stripped us of all our clothes and so we were naked, 10 of us, and forced us into the cell. And that’s really where, my problems started. I write about it extensively in my book so it might not do justice describe it over the phone. But while in that cell an inmate named Dennis Weaver lost his life. I was ultimately accused of forcing individuals to do that and participate in it but in actuality, it was another guy named Shabazz, who, really sparked all the confrontations in that particular situation and saw a way to shift the blame on me after he and the other two guys who helped him murder Dennis Weaver. Because Shabazz and I got into an altercation while we was in the cell, he was kind of like a bully type individual, and he was going around really trying to put his bluff down on each of the individuals in the cell and when he got to me, I just hauled off and punched him in his face. Something that I talk about in my book. And because of that altercation I think that was what gave him the incentive to really just say “Keith did it!”
And that became the reframe, you know, as I later but it wasn’t simply somebody pointing the finger at me. Later, when they put us under investigation, and for nothing, we didn’t have anything to do with the riot we was on the yard, and they put us under investigation, took all our property. And so, it was really in that context that I began to become a little political. Not knowledgeable about the politics, I don’t mean to say that, I just mean to say that to buy into that “us against them” mentality.
And so, we start, the group of guys who I was around, this after the riot is already over with, after all was said and done, the bodies and whatnot, had us under investigation for something that we had. And that got old pretty, fairly quickly. We started tearing up the cell blocks we were in, throwing our food onto the range, getting into confrontation with the highway State Patrol, suggesting or advocating that no one talks to the authorities and, and that’s how I became a target. You know, by participating in those demonstrations.
And one of the things I like people to understand about the uprising is that immediately after the uprising the state sent in their investigators and they trampled the crime scene. And they collected over 22,000 pieces of “evidence”, quote, unquote, but none of it could be matched to any victim or assailant, no fingerprints, no forensic or anything, because they rushed in and trampled the crime scene basically. They sent everything off to a crime lab to be tested and came back empty handed. And so what they had to do, the only thing they could do is create a team of informants and select people who they wanted to indictment put on.
Quick question, just just for clarification, so that if I’m making a mistake I should know, do you prefer Keith, do you prefer Bomani? I know like one ties directly to the legal case and like legal support, what should I be calling you?
BS: Well, yeah, we should talk about that because that’s a question that a lot of people ask me. So, Bomani Shakur is a name that I selected, when I was thrown into the midsts of all this madness and needed something to kind of steer me through without losing hold of myself. So, it’s not so much a rebellion against my government name so, so to speak. It’s just a way to reaffirm my purpose and conviction, because it’s easy to lose track of those things when you’re in a situation like this, and that stretches over such a great length of time and difficulties.
TFSR: Yeah, especially when you’ve got a number imposed on you, like that’s attached to your name. And it seems really powerful to be able to pick something that is like, so symbolically important to you and representative of your struggle.
BS: Right right. But a number along with, you know, just the structure of this place is a reduction, right, of humanity, to just reduce you to animal. And so you know, choosing the name Bomani.
The full name is Bomani Hondo Shakur. “Bomani” is strong soldier, “Kuandaa” [possibly mispelled -editor] is preparing for war, and “Shakur” is for thankful. So those attributes, you know, so when somebody say, “hey, Bomani” it’s just a reminder, just that you have that you are a mani soldier and that whatever difficulties that I might be experiencing at that time it’s just a reminder that you can rise above those things, whatever it may be. And Kuandaa, be prepared assistance, stay focused, and to study, just try to be as prepared as you possibly can. And “thankful”, Sakur, is just no matter how difficult or dark, no, the present moment might be, to be thankful for the fact that you are alive, that you are healthy that you have a lot of good people in your life. And that, although the circumstances are out of my control to a certain degree, to be thankful that I still have my faculties that I can still stand up and fight for myself.
So, you know, I’m thankful for all the good things that are in my life that me staying the course, has produced in my life. And so, my name is not just words, it’s, like my prison number, it’s just it resonates meaning for me, you know, when somebody call me Bomani, they just really called me to remember who I am. And, so that was, it’s my freedom name, you know, a way for me to hold on to my freedom in the midst of all this, because it’s overwhelming being in a situation like this.
And a lot of times, you feel no, you know, especially in the beginning, you know, I felt like I was in this by myself, not so much now, you know, I’m 50 years old, and I’ve come a long way in terms of my development and whatnot. And so, I’ve been lucky enough, you know, to garner a lot of support. But in the beginning, when I was not who I am today, it was, ykind of a whole lot more difficult to navigate, things, and so the name started with that, you know, that was the first realization that I needed to, inject some purpose into my life, and not just drift aimlessly through my days, that I need to be about, the business of freeing myself and represent myself. The name along with writing the book, the other things have just been me putting one foot in front of the other and trying to find my way forward, basically.
TFSR: So getting back to the days of 1993, you had said that you hadn’t before, but you’ve done some reading, you hadn’t been like, what you would consider to be like, very much engaged in politics, you’ve read some Fanon and some Malcolm X. I know for a lot of people like looking back and studying the uprising between the self advocacy of the Muslims, you know, rebelling against this obvious insult to their to their strictures of their faith. And also the, the fact that those three groups in particular, the Muslims and the Black Gangster Disciples, as they were called at the time, and the Aryan Brotherhood could come together and — you know, obviously imperfect — but decrease the amount of killing and theft and harm that was occurring within the facility, possibly, and a lot of people took from it this message of like a convict race of a common shared oppression by the system. It seems like the story of what happened next what happened in the courts was was in a lot of ways a continuation of that same call the baying for blood by the neighboring communities.
Like this is happening at the same time as the Waco invasion is happening in Texas and so that’s one reason that a lot of people won’t have heard about the Lucasville uprising. That’s that’s where all the cameras are pointed.
BS: Right, uh huh.
TFSR: But I’d love to hear what you have to say about following the initial investigation where everything was trampled, how the trial was conducted, and why do you think it was so easy for these people maybe who participated in the violence to finger you, and state prosecutor Mark Piepmeier and others to target us throughout the case for blame?
BS: Well, I think they, you know, mainly I believe they were primarily interested in convicting someone for the guard’s murder. Of the 11 other people who were killed, his life was the only life that really have any real value, right? You know, they didn’t give a damn about the prisoners who was killed, as I said, they stood there and watched along with everyone else, as those bodies was dumped on the yard, I could have been one of those bodies. And no, I wasn’t political but I was extremely upset at the way that after the riots, as in the way that we were being treated. And I was vocal in my anger, treatment.
I was doing 15 years to life with the possibility for all at the time. So, when they finally, singled in on me, me focused in on me, they didn’t do so with the belief that I will go forward and demand a trial. They came to me, “Hey Keith”, you know they called me by my first name as if we was old pals or whatever, and they say, look they spelled it out for me, basically did the math for me. It’s real basic math, “if you go forward, you know, we’re going to put you on death row, if you take this deal you have a possibility to go home in your early 50’s”. But I said “but I didn’t do what y’all claiming I did. I didn’t have anything to do with it I came out on the yard.” They said “Listen, we’re not here to talk about that about what you did or what you didn’t do, obviously, it’s a moot issue at this point. We trying to figure out whether or not you want to accept this deal. It’s a good deal.” And it was a good deal! You know, 90% of people who are in prison are here because they’ve taken a deal, they’ve taken a lesser sentence than the one that they can potentially get if they demand a jury trial, you know.
But I had taken a lot of deals up to that point in my life. I dropped out of school, I became a drug dealer as I recounted. I had really, really just turned my back on my potential. And I didn’t realize that until I came to prison, until I really had to type of opportunity to slow down and see what I had done with my life. Because, you know, when I was 14 all the way to 19 it was just a blur, really that every day was a party, basically. I’m getting high, I’m selling drugs, I’m shooting dice, I’m spending money. And, I’m living what I thought, I believed at the time, was a good life.
But I had, at the end as I had mentioned, I had came to the realization that, you know, something was amiss, and right before I caught the murder case, I had disavowed the drug dealing and getting high and all that and I got baptized. Here’s the funny thing. I turned my life over to God, and that’s the second time I had done that in my life. I did it once when I was 13 when I felt like my life was coming apart, when I was losing control of the direction of my life. And I did it again, when I was 18, six months before I ultimately took somebody’s life and came to prison.
So it was always a part in me that wanted to find my way back to myself, to the self I was before I get caught up in, you know, the mainstream, I guess you could say. Before I get caught up in all the material trappings that go along with, you know, this society, you know. So when I came to prison, and when I was offered the deal I was just tired, man. I was just sick of just taking the easy way out in my life, you know? So I refused. I said “I’m not gonna do that. I’m done taking deals, I’m done going along?” Because, not only are you taking deals to get home to the possibly I could get on the stand and lied on somebody else even though a lot of guys take that route, that just wasn’t an option for me.
So the only option, that I had, because they made it plain that somebody is going to death row. In fact, before we were even put on trial, a lot of us was moved to the bottom range at the death row pod so we can get accustomed to the idea and it was it was crazy. So I had a kind of foreshadowing, a kind of glimpse of what death row would be like, because that was there before I even went to trial.
And I still made the decision to go forward. I had never had a trial, as I said, not a lot of people have. And so, I didn’t really know what to expect but, you know, they offered me a deal. I refused it, I demanded a trial. And, I got to see firsthand really what justice is about in this country, man. A lot of people look at these crime dramas on television and think from that they have a sense of what the American justice system is. But that’s TV shit. In real life, the first thing they do, especially if you Black, the first thing they do is try to strike all the Black jurors from the jury pool, so they can have an all white jury. That’s their secret weapon, to assemble an all white jury, that’s the first thing.
And they, go through this process called “voir dire”, where you’re allowed to question people, try to figure out what their political leanings are and whatnot. And it was just amazing. I was 23-24 years old at the time, and so, wasn’t really, really adapting, interpreting all these different, complicated words and processes and whatnot. But I was, you know, I grew up in the streets, I grew up with people who say one thing and do another, and I grew up around con men. And I saw the jury, that they was trying to finagle their way onto the jury so they can have the experience I guess, to tell their children one day, “I put a Black man on death row”. If you know anything about history — and I’ve seen history books about the lynching that went on in this country — you see most of those lynchings were attended by crowds of white people. Standing there with sandwiches, like it was some kind of, you know, picnic, you know, some kind of extravaganza or something, something to tell your children about that “I did this”.
So, I saw that whole thing, and then I saw the judge colluding with the prosecutor to deprive me of a fair trial, withholding evidence, coaching witnesses, all these things, [Audio interrupted here by an automated message from OSP “You have one minute remaining”]. And I was pretty much learning by trial and error. I was looking and learning, a little bit too slow, but I was learning though. So the stuff that I’m saying and sharing, I might not be the benefactor from the knowledge because it’s after the fact, it’s hindsight, is what I’m talking about.
But I’m just telling people, as somebody who has seen it with my own eyes, what the system is really about, you know, I’m one of the few who has peeked around the corner and have developed a vocabulary to talk about these things, to articulate, you know, what the reality of this system is. You know, so that’s basically what my primary objective is, is to tell people that this system is a sham. It really is. You know, from day one as they say, it’s just one big mockery, man. It’s just you know, like…
TFSR: So Bomani, I wondered if you could talk a bit about… You had a you had a Brady Hearing a few years back to attempt to get a new trial, as far as I’m aware, because there were so many instances where the prosecutors had denied potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense. And we all know that like public defense in this country anyway is perpetually like underfunded when you get a good defender who actually wants to do their job. We’ve had Niki Schwartz on the show before, which we’re very lucky for. But I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of that evidence that you’re aware of that was withheld from your ability to defend yourself and and what that Brady hearing was like too?
BS: Yeah, well, when you go to trial, one of the first things defense attorneys do is filed a motion for discovery, because the discovery is the mechanism through which you defend yourself and you want to know who said what and when. How many times they say it. And when we requested this discovery, the statements, witnesses who testified on me, and it’s not just people who said they saw me kill somebody, the exculpatory evidence of people who said they saw somebody else kill the same people for whom I was charged with.
And so what they did, and it was the first time – I haven’t heard one attorney say that they have ever seen anything like this – what they did instead is turn it over to statements, they divided the names of the individual who made these exculpatory statements in one column and put a summary of the statements in another column, mixed them up, didn’t tell us who said what or you know, what’s going on — I talked about this in my book — and they said, “Well, this the best we can do.” So it was it was a straightforward from the from the beginning.
Not only that, I found that afterwards that a guy — I was accused of being the leader of the death squad, and you remember, I said it was three groups who were, it was widely known that they were in charge of the riot Aryan Brotherhood, the Muslims and The Black Gangster Disciples. Well the leaders from the Black Gangster Disciples were basically made up the star witnesses for the state, after everything was all over said and done. Particularly a guy named Lavelle and Stacey Gordon. And Stacey Gordon – from what I’ve been able to piece together since the riot – he may have been the leader of the death squad, based on some of the people who actually saw what was going on. But, that didn’t come out till after the fact, because one of the other things that the state did, when I asked for my discovery, they gave my discovery to Jason Robb and gave Jason Robb’s discovery to me and so on and so forth, switched up, they put everything, mixed everything up.
So we didn’t find out until we got on death row proper, that what the state’s strategy had been. And I found out that a guy named Aaron Jefferson that came forward and admitted to killing somebody for whom I was sentenced to death a guy named Darrell Depina. For people who read that statement, the interviewer may have some doubts about his recollection of the death of the guard, because he admitted to assaulting the guard, Vallandingham, who was ultimately killed in the riot, and he admitted to assaulting a guy named Emanuel Newell and during that interrogation the interviewer called into questioned his recollection of these incidents, but not the one pertaining to Darrell Depina, which is the guy he admitted to killing. But they had already had me on the hook for that. And so they, they just blew over it just, buried that statement.
And not only that, you know, some of the key witnesses for the state it wasn’t till their fourth or *fifth* statements that they all agreed that Keith Lamar was the leader of the death squad. In a first generation, the first statements, the first copy of the statements, they were pointing the finger at someone else or didn’t know who did what. But what happened in there, remember, go back to what I was saying, of the 22,000 pieces of evidence that was collected: none of it, all of it was contaminated. So they didn’t have objective case. So what they did, the only thing they could have done is put together this team, they moved into this hospital called Oakwood here in Ohio, and they went over a script. They had an open door policy and all this is documented after the fact.
They had a open door policy in this prison where the informants going back and forth, sharing stories, collaborating on this narrative, and they just rode it out man. And we didn’t realize…because that’s the only thing they could do. And not only that, they put together this snitch academy – is what it was later came to be known as – but they prevented me from putting forth a proper defense. That was part of a strategy as well.
Well flash forward to 2007 that I won an evidentiary hearing, the federal courts called me back to court and allowed us to call the prosecutor, prosecutor Piepmeier, who you mentioned earlier. And we put him on the stand and he admitted on the stand that they used what was later defined as a narrow standard with regard to Brady. You know, his standard was, “okay, it’s only exculpatory if we call somebody forward and he, at the end of his statement, says ‘And by the way, Keith Lamar was not there.’ Unless he says that-” so just to just let you know what I mean by, that if a guy came forward and claimed to have saw somebody do the very thing that I was accused of, and explained it in graphic detail. Iif this person before he get up and leave that interview, if he didn’t say “Oh, by the way, Keith Lamar was not there” that statement was not turned over to my defense. And all the judges, in doing this evidentiary hearing – Hasan’s attorney, Jason Robb’s attorney, James Were’s attorney – they were present when this was going on. When the prosecutor Piepmeier made these admissions, and they jumped right on it. And they filed the necessarily briefs and then they got their cases put on hold, and some of the cases are *still* on hold.
And the judges, in they respective cases, said “Listen, this is the narrow standard that the prosecutor Piepmeier used, and we’re gunna allow y’all to go back to comb the file yallselves. And if y’all find something that’s exculpatory, that y’all deam is exculpatory bring it back to me and I’ll make that determination.” My attorneys for some unsensible reason, didn’t follow those motions. I talk about this also in my book, and this is one of the main contentions around which we fell out, you know. Because after they promised that they would file the motions to put my case on hold, because, mind you it was at my evidentiary hearing that these admissions were made, and so if anybody should benefit from this new knowledge it should have been me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that other guys were able to benefit from it, but I’m just talking about the, the shabby representation that I had. And see, that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t understand about the criminal justice system. You know, if you poor you really don’t have a say in your representation. You know, you know, you know, these attorneys expect you to sit there and shut your mouth.
And a lot of times, as is my case, I was so young I didn’t really know anything about the criminal justice system. And you know, I’ve learned a great deal since my conviction, but you can’t put the wine back in the bottle as they say. You know, you know, I’m grasping at straws, basically, as you might know, I received an execution date last year for the 16th of November 2023. And one of the things: the Ohio Supreme Court issued that execution date. In 2014, the Ohio Supreme Court, the same body of judges, convened a task force to study the death penalty here in Ohio and charged them to come up with recommendations to make the carrying out of capital punishment more equitable here in this state. And one of the recommendations that the task force – and the task force was made up of lawyers, academics, ex-judges, and whatnot, so credential people paid for through taxpayer funding – one of the recommendations that they came up with, that they gave to the Supreme Court here, Ohio Supreme Court, is that no one can be sentenced to death based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of jailhouse informants.
So not only can you not put them on death row, but you cannot, you *definitely* can’t kill them based on this uncorroborated testimony. And as I said at the outset, when they came into the prison after the uprising, they trampled the crime scene. So there’s no forensic evidence, there never was. And that’s the crux of where my case stands right now. Is trying to get the Ohio Supreme Court, the people who gave me an execution date, to follow the recommendation the task force that they convened.
You know and that’s what I’m hopefully going to build my movement around. Just that fact alone. I’m not even supposed to be on death row. For the simple fact that I’m innocent first and foremost, but secondly, legally, they wasn’t supposed to be able to put me on death row because they didn’t have any corroborating evidence. All they have is jailhouse informants who they paid to say what they said, and I can prove that.
TFSR: And so those informants were paid how? Were they given like, breaks on their sentences or?
BS: Paid in early paroles. Paid in cushy prison assignments, they was moved from maximum security to minimum security. The majority of them went home early. A lot of them have blood on the hands so they were paid in reduced sentences. And Lavelle, who was the ringleader, and possibly – from what I understand – had something, had a hand in killing the guard, is on the street now. So paid, in a real way, in a real sense.
TFSR: How are you requesting for people on the outside to help with that push to get the Ohio Supreme Court, I guess, to reassess your conviction?
BS: By doing the things that we’re doing now, you know? The whole point of me doing this interview is to make people aware of my situation. That’s the whole point of writing the book, you know. Because people have to believe in, in order for a movement to sustain itself, people have to believe in what they involved in. So what I’m basically trying to do is retry my case in the court of public opinion, and just get the people to learn the particulars of my case, and not just the particulars of my case, the particulars or the MO of the system, how the system operates. Because this is a playbook that I’m actually talking about. I mean, it seems incredible for me to say, “Hey, listen, I was framed, and this is how” but if you go back to the Attica riot, if you go back to you know, they just got this movie come out Just Mercy with Bryan Stevenson and the ways that it railroaded this innocent man to death row. It’s the same thing happened in my case.
So it’s a playbook that I’m talking about. A old playbook that stretches back to slavery, after it became you know, extrajudicial murders, lynchings, were frowned upon in society. So, it’s legal lynching now. And it’s a way that they go about doing that, you know, and I’m just trying to get people to wake up to the realities of how the system actually operates. And wake up to the reality that we like to believe that we have overcome as a society, as a people, that we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country. But, you know, fundamentally, especially when you’re talking about the justice system, fundamentally nothing has changed, basically.
TFSR: Mhm.
BS: Nothing has changed. So I don’t like to talk about my story as something new, that this is something that’s only happening to Keith Lamar, to Bomani Shakur. You know this is the system that I’m talking about. I mean, for people who are, hearing this message and wondering why you should give a damn about me and what happens to my life you need to understand that this can happen to somebody that you love, somebody that you care about. And when it’s your turn, they don’t, as they say in Just Mercy they don’t need any evidence, or fingerprints or anything.
And so, you know, we have to come together to, make sure that justice is a two way street. Make sure that the people who are, you know, exacting these harsh penalties, that they are held accountable when they are wrong. And that they are held to some kind of accountability, when it’s discovered that they are wrong. Cause it can be said that, “I didn’t know” at the time. And I don’t see how in my instance they couldn’t have known, right? But what they assumed, and they had reason to believe, that I was plead guilty. Because that’s what people do if you poor, if you Black, if you dealing with a racist system. It’s not a matter of whether or not I’m innocent or not but what kind of deal I can get, I mean, that’s what it comes down to, basically.
And I knew that, I understood that. You know, I’m not saying that I was completely naive, I had dropped out before, but in that instance I was actually guilty. And I didn’t think I was getting away with anything. Like I said, I just got baptized six months before I caught the murder case, so I had an inkling that I was on the on the wrong path. And so me pleading guilty was another way to reclaim myself, to find my way back to myself. I wasn’t really trying to find the easy way out. But I pled guilty because I was guilty. And here these people come around and asked me to plead guilty to five murders! As if we’re talking about five dollars or five Big Macs, you know, five hamburgers.
Because that’s essentially what, if you poor and you Black in this country, that’s essentially what your life amounts to. Your life isn’t worth really shit. And the only value that your life has the value that you place on. So that goes back to, me selecting the name Bomani, that’s a way for me to inject value into my life into… And I intend to pursue it to the bitter end, if need be. If people, you know, hear my story and it resonates with them and they feel that, they support me because they understand that they too are caught up in the same system, then with those people I’m in solidarity. I don’t necessarily believe in fairytales, I don’t necessarily believe that, you know, that this situation will end happily ever after. More likely than not I will end up doing the rest of my life in prison, or strapped down to a gurney somewhere. So I’ve already come to terms with those realities. So that’s not really what’s guiding me now, a fear of the outcomes.
TFSR: Like, as you said, this isn’t just about you, but it is about you, and you’ve made a lot of efforts while on the inside to – while building your case, and trying to seek justice and reprieve from this injustice – you’ve also been working very hard writing the book, revising it. You participated in a number of different interviews with folks on the outside, academics and journalists, and you’ve helped to set up and run Native Sons as a program. Can you talk a bit about how you’ve been giving back to the world, while Ohio has kept you locked in a cage?
BS: That, again, goes back to me trying to redeem myself, you know? When you go to prison, you know, the idea, or the theory at least, is that you are a member of society who has ran afoul of the standards and laws of the community, and so you are sent to prison to be repaired to that community, right? But we all know that that’s not the case. And that, really, the criminal justice system is a business. It’s an $8 billion a year business. So we’re talking a lot a lot of money is involved in, putting people in these cells. And you can say whatever you wanna say, but they created the justification to lock people up in these cages. And I came to that understanding quite late in my life, but I came to it though.
So, one of the things you talk about the nonprofit getting books into younger people, part of my understanding about my life, my life is just not for myself. I come from a community, from a people, you know? And this community that I come from are oppressed. There’s some young person right now sitting at home or walking down the street right now who would be where I’m at, because that’s how the system works, right. And, and so it’s my job to try to get some kind of information to this young persons hand to try to help him interrupt this plan that is set up for him. Because it’s not anything personal and that’s really the most horrifying thing about living this this life. I mean, they don’t really give a damn about Keith Lamar, Keith Lamar is nobody. Another nigga we gunna kill. And they been killin a nigga in America for 400 years and everybody know that. You know, I mean let’s talk real about it.
But that’s how *they* feel, it’s not how *I* feel. So I have to, you know, behave in a way that reflects my beliefs and feelings. So, what I do is try to get books in these people hand, because books, or becoming into a greater awareness of who I am and what life is about, is what has allowed me to survive what I’ve been through. You shouldn’t have to learn about life- shouldn’t have to come to prison to learn about life, to learn about who you are, to be educated. And that I was mentioning to someone the other day about the root word of education is “educe”, to bring forth that which is already there. That’s not being done in the public school system. You go through all those years of education and end up at the end all of that “learning” and don’t have a *clue* about who you are. And that’s on purpose. Because your life is not your life as far as these people are concerned. As far as they’re concerned your life is just a piece of firewood that they can throw on fire when the fire [phone call was, infuriatingly interrupted yet again by an automated message from OCF “this call is originating from Ohio Correctional Facility and may be recorded and monitored”]. That’s all it is. It’s not just Black people, it’s poor people in general.
People don’t give a damn about our lives. That includes the guards that work here. I was telling a guy yesterday about when I was younger I used to hate the police, man, the guards. Because it was obvious to me that they was profiting from my pain, off my pain. Not so different than me standing on the corner profiting off the pain of these drug addicts and whatnot. See that’s how I saw it, I still see it that way but I realized that they just poor people trying to provide for they family. It’s despicable, though, but that’s what capitalism is about. It’s about degradations, it’s about bringing people down to they lowest level so they don’t have any qualms about exploiting, you know, they neighbor. That’s what it’s all about.
But you as an individual, you might not be able to change the world but you can change yourself. That’s the knowledge I’m trying to get into young people, to understand that, you know, this thing is big. Yes, it is. The universe is vast, man, it’s big. And you might not be able to change racism, because people who are far more intelligent than I am have tried. Yet here we are in the 21st century and we’re still having the same conversation. So I’m not under the illusion that I’m gunna be able to say anything to change the system, but I have changed myself. And no matter what these people say, no matter what they ultimately do, they can’t change that fact. That’s what I’m trying to get other young people to understand, you know?
TFSR: Yeah. Kind of in that same general topic about the degradation and the view that poor people are replaceable, whether they be the people that are in the cages or the people that are walking around and get to go home at night…
BS: That’s right.
TFSR: Across the US, government’s at various levels have shown themselves totally incapable of effectively dealing with the spread of Coronavirus throughout the population, particularly hitting populations of color for a lot of reasons.
BS: Yeah, right.
TFSR: And prisons are most certainly an area that we see folks really denied the means of sanitation, food, exercise, fresh air and protective gear. How have you experienced the pandemic at OSP Youngstown? Do many guards and prisoners seem stricken with COVID-19 and are there any safety precautions being offered?
BS: I’m in solitary confinement and I was already in quarantine. I’ve been in quarantine for 27 years now. You know, I already had a mask because if they sprayed mace in here we’re all connected to the same ventilation system. So if a guy is sprayed down with mace in another pod, ultimately that mace will find it’s way to me. So we already had masks. We were already you know, prepared for Coronavirus basically. Nothing much has changed where I am. And from my understanding one guard tested positive and pretty much we’ve been wearing masks openly around here now. The administration of the prison passed out masks to each of the prisoners here.
But, you know, we in a closed environment, that’s what solitary confinement is. You don’t have any contact with the outside world basically. And so, if there’s any advantage to being in this type of situation, you very seldom if ever get sick in these places. And I’m not saying that we are not concerned, we definitely, definitely are concerned about catching the virus cuz it’s not so much catching it’s about what happens to you if you do. Because the health care in these places, as you might imagine, leave a lot to be desired, man. Because, the money has been reallocated to build more prisons, the money that they have to take care of prisoners when they get sick or whatever, that money has been put in other places.
For instance, at the prison here in Marion, Ohio, my understanding that they have over 1,900 prisoners who have tested positive for the Coronavirus. Damn near 80% of that particular prison. And for when I’m understanding – it’s been hard to get the exact numbers – but from what I understand, you know, 6-10 people have died, prisoners and and some staff. And it’s my understanding, I don’t know whether or not is true or not, but I’ve been given to understand that they have shipped other guards into Marion because they are running low on workers. So there again is an example of just poor people just being thrown in the fire, man. A lot of these guards obviously don’t live with the awareness that they share something in common with the people they are guarding.
Because that comes down to narritive, right? I used to tell myself a story when I was standing on the corner selling drugs to my community. And that’s how you do those things and salve your conscience. You tell these stories, lies basically. But these are just poor people. So, you know, as I said I used to hate these people, but the opposite of a hate is not hate. The opposite of hate is understanding. And so, I just tried to keep my mind focused on that, on trying to understand what I’m caught up, and then trying to understand where I end and where there’s other shit begins and so I can protect myself. That’s what each of us are trying to do inside these places.
I wear a mask, I wash my hands, to the point now where my hands are basically raw. I’m trying not to catch it, you know, I’m trying to stay alive. The same thing I’m doing, by talking to you, this is all about just trying to stay alive because I have a right to be here.
TFSR: Yeah.
BS: My life means something to me, you know? And in as much as my life is not for these people to take, I intend to fight them. If that’s by wearing a mask or writing an essay, or whatever form that takes, I intend to fight them to the bitter end. And that’s on everything.
TFSR: So what do you plan on doing when you get out?
BS: I don’t think I think a lot about getting out, you know? I’m doing, I’m living my life right now. Trying to be true to who I am right now. And I imagine, or at least I hope, that I would be able to continue with myself should I find myself on the other side of this. But I don’t particularly like to look at life as in and out. Particularly when it pertains to all the things we’ve been talking about. I’m not the only one doing time here, we’re all doing time, in the sense that we are all, you know, kind of trapped in these dichotomies. Black, white, poor, whatever, gay, straight, whatever. Those are prisons, basically.
When I first was thrown into this place they only allowed us to have four books. And that’s been one of my major support networks in prison, having an informative library. I tell people all the time that my library is like my family, my extended family. Richard Wright, James Baldwin, particularly James Baldwin. And so, when they told us we can only have four books I was really in a pickle, because, I can’t, it’s like choosing between your brothers and your father. Like, you got to get rid of them. So, I memorize a lot of books, a lot of main paragraphs and whatnot. And James Baldwin, in particular, his book The Fire Next Time, I committed damn near that whole book to memory. His book, more than any other books, really gave me the sense that we are all in the same boat. We here on planet Earth. And just because these people who are in power, say that “oh you in prison and so you must behave in this particular way, because you are in prison,” that’s all about being imprisoned. That’s all about being when somebody else tells you “you have to be a prisoner, an inmate”. No, I’m a human being!
And, so, I would like to like to think that, you know, if I’m somehow blessed with the opportunity to walk through those gates that I will continue to be a human being. But one of the things that James Baldwin – and I wanted to share this with listeners – first get that book, The Fire Next Time, it’s an awesome book. It was written probably 30-40 years ago, but a lot of what he talked about in that book, especially if you Black, especially if you a young Black person in this country, a lot of it is still pertinent today. But one of the things he said that was pertaining to all of us he said life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and because the sun rises and sets, and one day for each of us it will go down for the last, last time. So that’s the reason why life is tragic. That no matter what we do that tomorrow will be Thursday. And then the day after that will be Friday. We can’t stop it. And that the sun inexplicably rises and sets and that one day for each of us, I mean, yover you know, 30-40,000 people have died on Coronavirus. Those people were not imprisoned, they were out there, on the outside. You know, so we all kind of on death row because that’s what being on this planet is about. And one of the other things that James Baldwin said, he said that that’s the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty in our lives, will imprison ourselves in taboos and totems and churches and steeples and mass and races and armies in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
So here I am on death row and we havin’ this conversation, you are in a different situation than I am and that I think it’s the misunderstanding. But your life is in just as a serious situation as mine is, if you’re looking at it properly. You only have a limited amount of time to do something righteous with your life. All of us do. And the fact that these people who are in power, who create definitions on, or limits on we can become and what we can do, you have to move beyond that. And understand that this is your one shot life, and it’s on you to make mean something. And that’s whether you in prison or on the street. You know I’m not waiting for some magical day when the doors open to live my life, I’m living my life right now. I’m doing what I feel is right, right now.
And that’s the thing about if you want to be my comrade, if you want to be somebody circulating in my circle, then that’s the understanding that I have about who I am. You know, I mean, we in the same boat. And that is we on planet Earth. And it’s a hell of a place to be. I mean, you got kids right now walking through deserts trying to get over to this country. In the middle of the fucking ocean, man. Kids in Syria right now sleeping in mud, eaten mud. So, I’m not under the the impression that I’m somehow in the worst possible situation you could be in on this planet, I don’t buy.
So that’s, I just don’t want people to come at me “woe is Keith, poor Keith” you know what I mean? This is a hell of a planet, man, it’s fierce. And you have to be strong and you have to uphold your convictions, you have to be clear, you have to be educated, you have to arm yourself, you have to be intelligent. And that takes a community effort, not just something that you just can do by yourself. You know, you gotta build circles, you know what I mean? You have to build communities, you have to reach beyond yourself in order to make your life mean something. So, yeah, if that’s the last exchange together that’s a good point to leave on.
TFSR: Yeah, I appreciate that. And thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. And with the audience.
BS: No problem.
TFSR: I wish you so much solidarity.
BS: Yeah, same here. And I just want to also acknowledge young people at RAM in New York. You know, they the ones who initiated this month of solidarity and I just want them to know that my heart goes out to them, and I’m really appreciative of them taking the time to involve themselves in my situation. And hopefully, through our exchanges, they’ve been able to understand that I feel the same way about them. We’re both in this struggle, and that putting our heads together, the least we can do is change ourselves. We might not be able to change this system, you know, because these people get nuclear bombs, you know? [laughs at the absurdity of it].
TFSR: [Laughing] That’s some perspective.
BS: You know what I mean? But we could change ourselves, though and that’s what Viktor Frankl said, when you confronted with circumstances you cannot change, the challenge is to change yourself. And so I’d encourage each and every one to take up that challenge, man, because that’s the most important thing. To change yourself, to not be a slave. And, you know, at the end of the day, not to be on the side of the executioners, man.
I’m really happy to share a chat with anarchist and historian, Barry Pateman. Barry, born in the early 1950’s, grew up in a working class coal mining town of Doncaster in the UK and became an anarchist in the 1960’s in London. He is a longstanding member of the Kate Sharpley Library which covers histories of little-known anarchists and events in history. Barry has also contributed to and edited numerous books including “Chomsky on Anarchism”, a two book document collection with Candace Falk and many more titles, many on AK Press. We talk about anarchist history, community, repression, defeat, insularity, popular front with authoritarian Marxists, class analysis and how to beat back capitalism. Find Kate Sharpley Library at KateSharpleyLibrary.Net
I’d like to recommend listeners check out a recent call to General Strike by People’s Strike, which includes Cooperation Jackson. The beginning of their call, which can be found linked to in our show notes, is:
The CODVID-19 pandemic has starkly revealed the inequalities and injustices that daily plague the world.
The triple crisis of viral plague, systemic economic breakdown, and the failure and/or unwillingness of Governments to provide necessary protections, especially for the poor and people subjected to white supremacy, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and mysogyny has thrown us into a fight for our lives.
The “Free Markets” that right-wing political figures like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and others are seeking to protect and rely upon to address the COVID-10 pandemic will continue to produce chaos and needless suffering for millions of people. The economic nationalism and imperial rivalry we see on full display in the midst of this pandemic magnify the threat of war.
In the U.S. we are fed a steady stream of lies and authoritarian posturing. From Palestine to South Africa to Brazil to the U.S. and beyond, ooppressive regimes are actively sacrificing vulnerable peoples and communities and treating frontline workers as uttlerly disposable.
We say ENOUGH! It is time to stand up! It’s Time To Strike Back – For Our Lives and Our Futures!
Anarchist Views on Pandemic
You’ll notice that in this chat we’re mostly taking a slight break from the 24-7 covid-show for our broadcast, though the topic is touched on briefly. If you’re looking to hear anarchist-relevant perspectives concerning the pandemic and organizing, we do suggest people check out Episode #33 of A-Radio Networks “Bad News: Angry Voices From Around The World” which is up at our website and also available at A-Radio-Network.Org. I would also suggest checking out some of the awesome shows in the Channel Zero Network, of which we are a member. For instance, Kite Line Radio produces a weekly show featuring the voices of prisoners and the formerly incarcerated on all sorts of topics.
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Featured tracks this episode:
Apollo Brown – The Pursuit – Trophies Instrumentals – Mello Music Group
Chumbawamba – I Never Gave Up – Showbusiness! – One Little Indian
Here’s our second lecture we’re excited to share in the Burning Books Lecture Series. We’re slowly continuing to release audios recorded at Burning Books in Buffalo, NY, to share inspiring ideas and experiences this bookstore has hosted over the last 7 or so years. This pandemic period should be one where we take account of the situation we find ourselves, hone our skills, learn from our elders and consider how to engage as the disease ravages our communities and the forces of capital and repression make their moves.
Kazi Toure spoke on March 25, 2015 on his political development, activity, engagement as a Marxist guerrilla in the USA, his time as a political prisoner, his ideas and organizing. From his bio:
Former political prisoner and United Freedom Front member Kazi Toure was imprisoned for his role in twenty bombings combating Apartheid in South Africa & US Imperialism in Central America.
The United Freedom Front has been considered “undoubtedly the most successful of the leftist [guerrilla groups] of the 1970s & 80s,” & struck powerful blows to South African Airways, Mobile, IBM, Union Carbide, & various courthouses & US military targets.
If you enjoyed this lecture, keep an ear out for more. And check out our first release of this series, Dr Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz speaking on “An Indigenous Peoples History Of The United States“. And remember, community spaces are so important, places we can engage new ideas, speakers with this wisdom, future and current comrades and co-conspirators. One way to do this, if you have the dough, is to buy books from spaces like Burning Books or Firestorm Books Coop. If you are looking to read statements by Kazi and his comrades, Leslie from Burning Books suggests checking out Hauling Up The Morning: Writings and Art by Political Prisoners of War in the U.S. which you can find at burningbooks.com . Another title mentioned, available via Burning Books or Firestorm at firestorm.coop is Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners.
A couple of notes about some of the prisoners and projects that Kazi mentions in this 2015 presentation.
Oscar López Rivera was googlereleased in 2017 by Obama.
The surviving members of the MOVE 9 were released in the last 2 years. On A Move!
Herman Bell was released in 2018 and lives in New York state.
4StruggleMag is no longer producing print editions. The latest post on it’s site announces the death from incarceration of Tom Manning, one of Kazi’s comrades from the UFF. Posted messages come from the Certain Days Collective, political prisoners Kojo Bomani Sababu, Bill Dunne, Oso Blanco, incarcerated comrade from the UFF Jaan Laaman and former political prisoner from the UFF Ray Luc Levasseur.
As corona virus spreads, the failures of capitalist states becomes even clearer and many people are forced to take some breaks from participating in the economy in the way they did before, we’d like to offer some audio we’ve been sitting on. The good folks at the radical bookstore and community space, Burning Books in Buffalo, New York, has given us a small trove of audios from presentations by authors, activists, visionaries and revolutionaries they’ve hosted over the last 7 years or so. We hope that you’ll take away some good perspectives from these luminaries, on struggle, on change, on shifting terrain and on the revolutionary solidarity impulse that they communicate. These are scary times we are living in, but we want to remind you that sometimes in scary times people bring out their best to the fore because we are stronger together.
Get involved in local efforts to organize in your area by visiting this IGD post and searching down the page for the regional mutual aid groups you can plug into.
In this podcast special series, we’re sharing a presentation by the author, historian and activist, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on September 17th, 2015, speaking about her book ‘An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States’. From the website, reddirtsite.com:
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmers. She has been active in the international indigenous movement for more than four decades, and she is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her Ph.D. in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies.
The audio cuts off rather suddenly after just about an hour due to recording device, sadly, so we lose Dr. Dunbar-Ortiz part way through a sentence. We’ll have more information at the end of this about where you can find more of her writings.
If you are thinking of purchasing any of her titles, we suggest that you check out getting them from a local bookstore rather than Amazon. And while quarantine is ongoing, if you prefer to order online from Burning Books, they are offering free shipping in the US on orders more than $25 (as of this recording on March 18th, 2020) from their website, burningbooks.com. Feel free, also, to support our local venue and regular supporter of our site, as well, Firestorm.Coop, which sells titles online as well.
This week on The Final Straw, we’ll hear a conversation from a few month back with Anthony Rayson and Mike Plosky, who have run the South Chicago Anarchist Black Cross Zine Distro since 1998. They send zines to prisoners, publish the writings and art of politicized prisoners as a project of public education, and help advocate and support prisoners organizing for their own education and liberation. You can find a full catalogue of zines at DePaul University library’s zine special collection. Donations can be made to their GoFundMe, and you can request catalogues and titles or just contact them at:
South Chicago ABC Zine Distro
PO Box 721
Homewood, IL 60430
We’ll also hear Sean Swain, who in many ways was brought to anarchism and had his books, cartoons and zines published by South Chicago ABC Zine Distro chat with Tony and Mike. More of Sean’s work, as always, at https://seanswain.org. We’re also joined in the conversation by Casey Goonan, an editor of True Leap Press which also does similar work to SC ABC Zine Distro. More of True Leap’s work, including their catalogue at https://trueleappress.com.If you’re listening to the podcast and want a more concise edition of an hour, check out our archive.org post linked in the show notes.Some of the prisoners and activists mentioned in the interview include:Sean SwainCoyote AcaboTalib RashidLeigh SavageAnastasia SmithKevin Rashid JohnsonTodd Hyung Rae TarselliRussell Maroon ShoatzTony Hunnicutt
This week on The Final Straw we’re featuring a chat with Elia J. Ayoub and Leila Al-Shami. In this conversation, Elia J. tells us of some of the history of Lebanon, since the civil war that ended in 1990 and up to the current demonstrations against the clientelist warlords in power in that country. Intertwined with this, Leila speaks about the sparking of the resistance to Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, the tumult of the civil war, and the state of anti-authoritarian and social justice organizing and media work in that country. Then the two talk about the experience of countering disinformation, conspiracy thinking and poor solidarity in the so-called Left in the West and ways to combat ignorance.
This is another long conversation, covering a lot of the last 30 years in these two neighboring nations. The guests proposed speaking about the interrelations across that border because of the similarities, differences, and shared experiences between the two places. Lebanon has Syrian refugees, it was occupied by Syria until 2005. Both spaces share Palestinian refugees, experienced war with Israel, are politically influenced from Hezbollah, mostly speak Arabic and even the flames of the recent wildfires that ignited anti-regime sentiment in Lebanon last fall crossed the border between Lebanon and Syria. We hope to have future chats that play with borders in this way to explore ways we can bridge these borders in our understanding in hopes of increased solidarity.
Lebanese Protests of 2015 & 2019 [00:21:35 – 00:31:40]
Syrian Revolution to Civil War [00:31:40 – 00:41:34]
Current Social Justice Struggle in Syria [00:41:46 – 00:45:56]
Daesh / ISIS and Syrian Civil War [00:45:56 – 00:49:56]
Solidarity with Syrians in Lebanese Protests [00:49:56 – 01:05:38]
Leila on Tahrir-ICN [01:05:50 – 01:09:18]
Educating Ourselves on Syria and Lebanon [01:09:18 – 01:23:07]
White Helmets and other Conspiracy Theories [01:23:07 – 01:32:59]
Syrian Diaspora and Western Left [01:32:59 – 01:37:19]
Rojava and the Syrian Revolution [01:37:19 – 01:41:56]
Better Practice in Solidarity with people in Syria and Lebanon [01:41:56 – 01:53:38]
Announcements
Michael Kimble Benefit
Last week we announced a fundraiser for Michael Kimble. Because of issues with the platforms, the fundraiser for Michael Kimble’s legal benefit to help raise money for his fight to get him released from prison has been moved. Now you can find it at ActionNetwork.org/Fundraising/Support-Michael-Kimble . Because the fundraiser had to be moved a couple of times, some of the initial push to get word out and initial donations may be irreplaceable. So, folks are asking for an extra push to help rasie this money to get our comrade out and organizing on the outside after 33 years behind bars.
BADNews February 2020 (#31)
This month, the A-Radio Network released it’s monthly, international English-language podcast featuring voices from anarchist and anti-authoritarian radio shows, pirate stations and podcasts from around the world. The episode is up at A-Radio-Network.org by clicking the B(A)DNews. If you’re interested in joining the network or learning more, info’s up on that site.
Taking Down Racist Monuments and Growing New Worlds
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Gerry Broome/AP/REX/Shutterstock (9795696f) Download This Episode
This week on TFSR, we’re featuring two audios from affiliates of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Maya Little & Dwayne Dixon talking about resisting neo-Confederate monuments in the so-called U.S. south, in particular the statue called “Silent Sam” that was toppled August 20th, 2018.
Maya Little
First, we’ll hear graduate student worker and anti-racist activist Maya Little speak about their research into the racist history of the constructed landscape and neo-confederate symbols in and around Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina. Maya also speaks about the recent resistance to the the specific statue called Silent Sam at UNC Chapel Hill and the far right and cop repression faced by students and anti-racist activists to push for and eventually enact it’s removal. Maya can be found on twitter at @readkropotkin and contributes writing to the project @CuddlePotMag. Within a few days of the broadcast, we hope to have links to the pictures spoken about in Maya’s presentation and to integrate those into the youtube post of this episode. This audio was recorded at the 2019 North American Anarchist Studies Network conference in Atlanta.
Dwayne Dixon
Then, Dwayne Dixon, an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at UNC and an anti-racist activist talks about personal experiences of coming up in a white, military family in the U.S., experiences of struggle against white supremacists and their symbols in the so-called US south in recent years and the inspirational strength of those struggles interlacing and expanding into ecological defense work, disaster response and the building of autonomous, anti-capitalist community infrastructures. Dwayne is also involved in the community defense group, Piedmont Redstrings, as well as Take Action Chapel Hill and @DefendUNC on twitter.
If you listened on the radio, you can find a longer version of the show (including Sean Swain’s segment and a few announcements) as a podcast up at our website and various streaming platforms.
Announcements
New Broadcasters in VT & OR!
We’re excited to announce that The Final Straw can now be heard on Fridays from 6-7am on WGDR, 91.1fm out of Goddard College in Plainfield, VT as well as in Eugene, OR on KEPW 97.3FM on Saturdays from 9-10pm local time. Hello, new listeners, we’re proud to be in your ears. Please reach out to us if you have concerns, critiques or suggestions.
This week we had the chance to interview Matt Meyer, who, among many other pursuits, is a retired professor and an editor of A Soldier’s Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist, out from PM Press, which highlights the life and writings of Kwasi Balagoon. Balagoon was a defendant in the Panther 21 case in the late 1960s, in which 21 people were arrested and accused of planned coordinated bombing and long-range rifle attacks on two police stations and an education office in New York City. He was ultimately acquitted of this, but was caught up on charges related to a robbery some time later and passed in prison in 1986.
Sean Swain on food in prison 2:48
Matt Meyer on Kuwasi Balagoon 11:44
Support Matt Hinkston announcement 1:06:08
In this interview, Bursts and Matt discuss Balagoon’s life and writings and why this book is especially relevant right now. They’ll talk about his abiding love for his comrades, a things which seems to have driven much of his politics, and his queerness, an aspect of his life which seemed very important and also complex. Stay tuned to the end of the conversation for questions submitted to The Final Straw by imprisoned anarchist Michael Kimble, who has been a guest on this show and is an admirer of Kuwasi. To see more of Michael’s work and to write to him, you can visit anarchylive.noblogs.org
Police violence in Lucasville-Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Call Monday in support of Matt Hinkston (A724969). Matt is the brother of Mustafa, who Bursts interviewed a few weeks back.
Matt Hinkston (A724969) is being retaliated against for filing a PREA (Prison Rape Elimination Act) grievance against a correctional officer and for having gone on hunger strikes in protest of human rights violations against himself and others in the past. One of the main officers who has been mistreating him is named Officer Lawless. They’ve put him in solitary confinement without a disciplinary ticket and restricted his access to communication. Although correctional officers claim that Matt has been put in solitary confinement for his protection, they’re also denying him access to his property and to technology for communicating with the outside world.
Incarcerated people’s lives and human rights matter. Nobody should be sent to solitary for filing a PREA report against a guard. Let’s call Lucasville this weekend and Monday at 740-259-5544 to:
-ask for a wellness check on Matthew Hinkston, A#724969
-tell officials in the Warden’s area and on Matt’s block that we support Matt’s demands and oppose continued retaliation against him for filing a PREA grievance.
Support Matt in this continued struggle against police violence, racism, and rape culture!
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Finally, thank you to everyone who replied in response to our 9th anniversary podcast special in which me and Bursts interviewed each other about why we do what we do, some personal backstory for each of us, and opinions on media in general. We also used the opportunity to solicit listeners for another co host, to share the work load and extend the option in case there was anyone out there who was interested.
We got way more responses than we ever thought we would, and are working through to answer them in as complete and responsible a way as possible. If your interest is piqued and you wanna hear this episode, it’s up on our website along with all our other archived material.
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Music at the beginning of the show was an instrumental version of Hip Hop by Dead Prez off of Let’s Get Free.
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Transcription
TFSR: So your author page on the PM Press website lists you as War Resistors International Africa Support Network coordinator and a bunch of other titles that are part of these committees. And one of the commonalities among the organizations that you are listed as working with is “peace” or like an opposition to militancy. So I’m wondering if you could introduce yourself and also tell listeners a little bit about how you found yourself co-editing a book about an urban guerilla in the US?
Matt Meyer: Ok First we have to speak about “in opposition to militancy”, because I’ve never been opposed to militancy. I am in favor of militancy. And I want to say something about a leader, who is actually now… in certain parts of the US left & progressive circles, getting some more attention, I think more and more is necessary. He was an African liberation movement leader. He was a military commander, his name is Amílcar Cabral. And Amílcar Cabral was the essential center of the movement for independence and freedom of Guinea-Bissau. He was one of the great Pan-Africanist of the 60s and 70s. And he was, again, a military commander. He is probably most famous for giving the speech that contains within it the phrase, “claim no easy victories.” The idea that we can go about using a bunch of pumped up rhetoric and say “we had 10,000 people” when we only had 100 people to rally. So, claim no easy victories. He was telling it to us and he was also telling it to his troops to his armed combatants. He was saying “when we go into a town, when we go into a community, when we go into a village, whether we do it to liberate them, whether we’re doing it to defend territory, we’re looking to liberate the country. We can’t take a thing from them. We can’t take a stitch. Not a loaf of bread, we have to give back more than we take. That’s what our job is as radicals, as revolutionaries.” and Amílcar Cabral, in that same famous speech, where he said “tell no lies, claim no easy victories” also said something that’s not as well known that I go around the country and go around the world quoting, he said to these armed combatants, these troops liberating their country from Portuguese colonialism. He said, “we have to learn to be militants, not militarists.” Militants. Not militarists. So there’s a big difference between being anti-military, anti-military industrial complex, and being anti-militant. I’ve been a pro-militant all my life, we have to increase the confrontation, we have to increase we have to intensify the struggles against Empire, against patriarchy, against white supremacy. And what better way of doing it than by spotlighting the life the work the legacy of Kuwasi Balagoon: Black Liberation Army, Black Panther Party, Panther 21.
TFSR: Cool. Thanks for letting me jump into that the really awkward way. I meant to say militarism, but you took it, right there! Can you introduce yourself now that we’ve heard your hot take response?
Matt Meyer: Bursts, thank you. And it’s really a pleasure to be here, and great to be in North Carolina at the studio. Yes. My name is Matt Meyer. Yes, there are a lot of organizations after my name. I know this is only an hour show. So we won’t talk about all of them. But, you know, I was in part a student of Pan Africanist. Kwame Ture. Stokely Carmichael. And he said “you know, if there’s anything you do from whatever perspective, if you’re looking to make social change, you have to organize, organize, organize!” Sorry, Will mentioned some of the organizations because the organizations are important. Yes, for the longest time, for many decades, I’ve been involved in the War Resistance Movement, I started out as a 17-18 year old, who was called upon to register for the draft. I was one of those public registration resistors. It’s useful to note that now, because even at this very moment… Selective Service has been challenged just recently by a federal court case a few months ago. That said, it’s actually unconstitutional to register only men. So now they’re trying to figure out whether they should do away with the entire process of registration, or, of course, what they would like to register women as well. But that’s a conversation going on. And of course, those of us who are in the anti-militarist movement, say that’s a no-brainer. This whole policy has become a failure. It’s both been a failure, from a point of view of creating a more just society. But it’s also even been a failure from their own standards of creating a policy that makes us more ready for whatever it is the US wants to get ready to do. So War Resistors League in the US, and War Resistors International. And the part of War Resistors International, that for the most part has been Africa support work, supporting groups like the War Resistance movement. In every part of the continent of Africa.
I went on academically. I started when I was 18, as I say, but I went on academically to become a student of contemporary African history. I’m still a student, but I also became a professor. Now I’m a retired professor. So building the Pan-African movement and supporting African movements on the ground today, that are using war resistance and anti-militarist methods to make social change. Revolutionary social change is a big piece of my work. There are two main other organizations that I work closely with and that define me, and that are worth mentioning. And then one local project I’ll just say quickly. I am currently the national co-chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA. Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) is the US oldest interfaith peace organization.
I’m here in Asheville, doing some speaking here in North Carolina and Georgia doing a speaking tour, that FOR is co-sponsoring, along with PM Press, the publisher of Kuwasi Balagoon’s: A Soldier Story. And the FOR is not only the oldest group, but it’s a group that has been concerned for almost 100 years , actually, I’m sorry, now it’s a little bit over 100 years. The War Resistor’s League (WRL), and FOR were founded a few years away from each other. So WRL has almost 100 and FOR is just a little over 100. I am younger than that, by a long-shot. But I am one of the elders in both of those organizations. In addition to being slightly over 100 years old and concerned with peace issues, concerned with issues of reconciliation, it has also been at the forefront of movements for racial and economic justice. The very first Freedom Rides actually were 1947 (not the 50s and 60s versions that we are more familiar with). In what was called the journey of reconciliation. And we work closely by addressing who was on staff of both FOR and WRL at different times. So right now the FOR is looking at a new way of understanding racial justice, economic justice, and peace. And that new way is by understanding both the institutional and governmental, but also the individual responsibilities for Reparations. What does it mean, to build a movement deeply for Reparations within a society like the US Empire?, that may be dying. That may be really in some ways in death throes as an empire, but still has tremendous repairs to make even as more harm is being done to people of African, of Latinx, of indigenous descent. And so that’s the FOR. And that’s one piece of my work. And then the last organization, is I academically, as I said, went into teaching African Studies. And it was in the context of an emerging discipline that’s been around about 50 years called “peace studies” or “Peace and Conflict Studies”. And so last December, I was elected the Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association. So actually Do most of my work around the world. But occasionally I get to tour around the US, and especially my base.
So I’m a New Yorker by by birth, and part of my heart is definitely here in North Carolina. But academically, I’m the senior research scholar at the resistance studies initiative at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. It’s not so much the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, it’s the fact that there’s a place in this empire, called the resistance studies initiative. There are not many departments, in fact, only one called the resistance studies initiative. And so I’m happy to be a senior research scholar in that particular program looking to bridge the gaps, from the gown to the town from the Academy, to organizing, grassroots organizing. And so we put out books like this, to understand that there’s a history that we need to recover that we need to uncover, as we’re rebuilding people’s movements.
TFSR: That’s awesome. A very complex answer. So for folks with an older edition of this book, just published, originally published by Kersplebedeb. Man, I might be pronouncing that…
Matt Meyer: Wrong? You are pronouncing it correct!
TFSR: I’ve practiced it first. What differences would they find in this third edition like it’s notably thicker? The prior edition solicited additional material from readers at the end, which I thought was really clever. But can you talk about what process y’all went through in building this version of Balagoon: A Soldier’s Story?
Matt Meyer: Yes, this is one basic answer. And it’s way, way shorter than my previous answer. What is different about this version? More. It’s more, you know, the Soldier Story… and this, this is true for many things that get published in this way. It was thrown together in order to have an in print space for some of Kuwasi’s work. And again, for those who don’t know, Kuwasi, and I’m sure you’ll do, or have done a little introduction, but, you know, this is a person who’s essentially a Black Panther, revolutionary, nationalist, anarchist. This is a person who is a freedom fighter, a soldier, who is also a pussycat, lover of the people… playing with kids on the floor. So you know, Kuwasi, in some ways, is symbolic of so many of the apparent contradictions, that are really part of our whole human-ness that we like to pull together. And so even back in the day, after he passed, but you know, long after, but still, his memory was in some people’s minds, lives, and thoughts. The idea of pulling together some of his pieces of writing, some of the things that he’d put out as pamphlets or as articles in his life.. that that was necessary. And then another edition came out. And when that second professional kind of book like edition, first came out, it satisfies that need.
I guess it was two or three years ago, my co-editor called Chris Kersplebedeb, one of the founders and mainstays of Kersplebedeb, noticed that that second edition was about to run out. That it was simply going to run out of print. He said… a few of us said, “what are we going to do? because we could just simply reprinted or we could do something else!” And that something else that we decided to do was: to really go deep and get every single shred of writing, every video, audio, everything that Kuwasi did that was available, and transcribe it and type it and put it into print. And also take some space for those who knew him, or for those who most directly followed in his wake, to write about their feelings about his life and his legacy. So for example, this book has an incredible historical biographical overview, by the Georgia scholar, Akinyele Umoja. He’s he’s a great New Afrikan leader, one of the founders of the Malcolm X grassroots movement, and Akinyele’s work… the incredible, absolutely significant book We Will Shoot Back is well known. But this special piece he wrote that really brings Kuwasi’s relevance to the 21st century, is reprinted was printed in an academic journal. It’s reprinted as the front article in this new edition. There were a number of Kuwasi’s friends and extended family who had scraps of his writing.
My partner in fact, visited him and knew him and had an engaged correspondence. And though we didn’t reprint all of those private letters, he would often attach poems. Sometimes finished, sometimes ones that hadn’t been seen before. And sometimes just on the spot, he was bursting with poetry. He spoke in poetry from what I heard! And reading some of the letters, the letters themselves are poetic. We extracted the things that were clearly not just personal, you know “how I’m doing How you doing?” but the poems, and printed almost all of those poems in this volume. There were special little projects that may not have been completed. We think this one was. There was a “how to how to stay healthy in prison” an exercise book that we’ve reprinted in here. And yes, we’ve already heard from some people inside and people outside saying “Oh my God! we need that exercise book now! we need this more than ever.” And, so we took as many… I will tell you, this is one of the problems about being the kind of editor I am. I’ve edited other books with PM Press, and this is very restrained. This is PM Press and Kersplebedeb co-published, but some of my PM Press’ are over 1000 pages long. I’m the kind of editor that doesn’t like saying NO, who wants more and more. And I will tell you, and I haven’t said this publicly before but I’ve heard about one poem that we cannot find. And we just decided we can wait 10 more years and maybe or maybe not find it. If whenever, I don’t know… if we find it, we’ll let everyone know. But basically, we think we’ve gotten almost everything that he put into writing, including a couple of pieces that clearly were pretty unfinished, and we decided to err on the side of publishing it all. And then lastly, we collected a group of two or three of his closest comrades. There are two people wonderful, extraordinary elders. Sekou Odinga, former political prisoner did 33 years in prison, and the great jazz saxophonist and also former Grand Jury Resistor Bilal Sunni-Ali. Sekou and Bilal both each claim to have been the ones that recruited Kuwasi into the New York Black Panther Party. They debate that out a little bit in these pages, and we’ll let them continue to do that. But many, many other, you know, a good dozen other people who again, either knew him well, knew him a bit, or grew up in his legacy. I’ll just name one other person that the multi-talented poet, actress and multimedia artist, Kai Lumumba Barrow, who was based for a long time here in North Carolina, and was part of the Southerners On New Ground (SONG) organization. Kai is one of those who has both part of the conversation between people who knew him and her own poetic legacy interpretation of Kuwasi in here. So that’s the final part, some pieces by people who said, this is why Kuwasi is absolutely a person to look at in 2019 and 2020, as relevant now as he ever was.
TFSR: Can you talk a little bit about Kuwasi’s life, like a thumbnail sketch of his background and development?
Matt Meyer: Well, I wasn’t one of those who knew him, I wasn’t, and I actually have a small section I want to read that mainly quotes from Sekou Odinga because I have gotten to know and work under the leadership of, and really be privileged to be part of the current life of Sekou Odinga, who knew him when they were both youth. So I’ll quote from Sekou. But I want to say something about our orientation, our vision towards Kuwasi. And that question of 21st century relevance in putting together this book. We are at a time now, as radicals, where we clearly need, I think, more clearly than ever before: militant, radical, revolutionary social change. Whether violent, nonviolent, armed, unarmed, social change, and radical social change is an urgent task for the empire that is dying, known as the US. And the fact of the matter is, despite that understanding many of our lives, and many of our movements are in silence. We have this little group here, that group there, this campaign here, that campaign there and never really an overarching building movement.
Now Kuwasi made his decisions. He was a member of the Black Panther Party. And before that, he was a housing rights activist in Harlem. He was a member of the New York Black Panther Party. He was a member of the case of the New York Panther 21, which was the New York militants. In some ways they were really pulled together by this wild and crazy FBI investigation, and then New York State indictment and campaign. And then after that, he went underground and was part of the Black Liberation Army. And even after the Black Liberation Army, had been targeted, and in some ways had had some of its militants captured and killed, Kuwasi continued doing clandestine work underground work until his capture in the early 1980s. And so Kuwasi, despite that little thumbnail sketch, was a person who did not, who could not live in silos. He could not segregate. He had his revolutionary nationalist analysis as did most of the Panthers, but he could not live his life segregated one piece here, one piece there, one piece over there. So whether it was about sexuality, whether it was about black and white, whether it was about inter-generation, whether it was about violence/non violence… Kuwasi loved people. Kuwasi’s story is about being radical, being a militant, being a… how did you say before you know, a member of an armed you know, intensely urban guerrilla, he was all those things, but he was also extraordinarily non-sectarian and loving about the people. “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” That’s a quote from Che Guevara. But lots of other revolutionary leaders of all stripes and nationalities, violent or non-violent, have that same reflection. Kuwasi, from everything (I’ve heard everything I’ve read everything) we understand, personified love of the people.
TFSR: Yeah, and that that comes across in a lot of the reflections, as you mentioned, from a lot of the people that knew him. A lot of the things that I’m more familiar with from the second edition. But there are really moving sections about how like, you would just find him in the prison yard surrounded by a bunch of people just breaking on laughter, or, like you said, sitting on the ground playing with kids just tumbling around like nothing.
Matt Meyer: And it’s interesting, you know, Sekou, again, another incredibly, you know, and rightfully, well respected elder of the Black Panther and black liberation movement. He said, you know, the questions of white and black, we weren’t as advanced. Kuwasi, somehow, it’s not just about being naive. It’s like, understand that there are some allies that you’re going to have that connection with, you know, the Panthers were never a cultural nationalist group, they never said, they always, always build alliances, even the splits within the Panthers… West, East, whatever. You know, the entire Black Panther Party for self defense built alliances with white groups, with the Latino, Puerto Rican, Chicano groups, with Asian groups, etc. Those alliances were part and parcel of their politics. Kuwasi lived it on a very deeply personal level. So some of these issues of black and white that organizations and individuals are still struggling with now. Kuwasi had in some ways transcended. But let me actually read a little bit. So we get to hear Sekou voice about Kuwasi.
“I probably met Kuwasi in the spring or early summer of 1968. And he was always a real energetic brother. You’re always going to hear him telling a story or joke, or enjoying one. He was always full of life, always ready to volunteer for any work that needed to be done: the more dangerous the work, the more ready he was. He was real, sincere, and dependable. That was what struck me early on. He was always ready to step up, even if you didn’t need him. He would volunteer; it wasn’t something where you ever had to go find him…. Kuwasi loved life. He clearly loved life and loved living life. He was always ready to live… He was a living dude, and most of us all really loved him.”
So that’s Sekou Odinga talking about Kuwasi and that’s in that roundtable of love and reflection we did. And I’m going to read one other little piece that we the editors wrote that summarizes that reflection in some ways it summarizes this edition and why this edition, how this edition came about to be what it is bringing pieces together into one whole. UNIQUE!
“Unique. The single word most often used to describe Kuwasi Balagoon, when discussing his life and legacy, with those closest to and most affected by him, is unique. That Kuwasi. His way of living and looking at life, set him apart in special and wondrous ways, even in the midst of amazing friends and colleagues, and even while living and working in extraordinary times. Kuwasi stood out distinction surrounding other labels and descriptions. New Afrikan. Revolutionary. Nationalist and Anarchist. Gay. Bisexual and or Queer. Poet. Militant. Housing Activist. Panther. They can be discussed and debated and reflected upon. But Kuwasi’s greatest quality was surely his lasting love for the people and his ability to transform that love into tangible acts of resistance.”
Bursts: you’ve addressed a couple of the questions already up in here I get my footing again. So you’ve noted you know the the timeliness of the addition coming up the older copies being gone and that inspiring y’all in part to to produce the new edition. Kuwasi has also kind of come up in, among other people that I’ve seen, for instance, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) has a Kuwasi Balagoon Liberation School that they’ve been with their their program that they’ve been running for a couple of years now. Besides the need for being able to transcend, transcend these differences and create a movement of movements, besides like fulfilling that need, do you see any other reasons why Kuwasi’s writing would be coming to the fore, and from all these different places?
Matt Meyer: I mean, it’s interesting, I think, the idea of looking back to move forward, the idea of looking at past strengths and weaknesses, to build and rebuild. For some reason, when you were asking that question, I was thinking of my dear brother, Ashanti Alston, who is now in Rhode Island. He was in New York for a time and he always described himself as anarchist Panther. Now, Ashanti himself was a very, very young brother, who was part of the Black Liberation Army and who did some time. But when he came out, embracing Kuwasi’s ideas of revolutionary nationalism, and anarchism of being an anarchist Panther. It was something Ashanti both held on to, improved upon, but also built upon, built upon and helped grow in the movements of the 90s and the early 21st century. And so the very specific place where Ashanti did and does that most, isn’t a place called the National Jericho Movement. And the National Jericho Movement, as some may know, is a national / international campaign to free all remaining political prisoners and prisoners of war in the United States. And it’s a horror that one of Kuwasi’s own co-defendants Sundiata Acoli, a member of the Panther 21 you know, is also a co defendant of Sekou Odinga still languishes in prison after 40 years, more than 40. And after passing, you know, birthdays, people shouldn’t be in jail for the 17th and 18th birthdays. That’s ridiculous. So this man who actually was a NASA mathematician, who should have had movies about him, like “forgotten here”, you know, whatever, you know it. This is one of the great minds of our times who is in jail because he decided to use that mind and that body for the liberation of his people, by becoming a Black Panther and a militant. So the intensification of the campaigns to free all political prisoners, like Sundiata Acoli, like Mutulu Shakur, like Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, another great legacy leader from the 60s known before as H Rap Brown, who was a lead of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, student National Coordinating Committee, became a Muslim Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, in jail today.
So we talk about the 60s or the 60s & the 70s. And we talk about reconciliation. We talked about moving forward, and in fact, we have never moved forward. These brothers have been in jail Since the 70s, since the 80s. Again more decades, then mass murderers and rapists, you know, people who have committed horrific crimes against the people, these people who have fought for the people… remain in jail. So I say that both because I want listeners to, if they haven’t, look up the website, National Jericho Movement, look up what that organization is doing. And the list of all of the prisons, I only named a few, most of them from the Black Panther movement, and organization, but not just. And we have gotten some political prisoners free. I mentioned Sekou Odinga. But the fact of the matter is, they all must come out! Now it’s time to free them all. They are getting to an age where if we don’t do it soon, we will have lost the opportunity. And these are our elders and leaders who have many cases, the most profound and inspiring stories to tell us now, again, about those strengths and weaknesses of the past.
Bursts: I’d like to mention really quickly that this last week, we saw the release of Janine and Janet Africa of the MOVE organization, which is awesome. FREE THEM ALL.
Matt Meyer: Indeed, FREE THEM ALL.
Bursts: So this is an anarchist podcast, and I would like to know, and other people have asked: How, to your knowledge and as it came out in the book… how did Kuwasi’s political development come to anarchism? And how did he relate that to a revolutionary nationalism?
Matt Meyer: That’s that’s a very good question. And I think it’s, again, one of these questions of terminology. Like militarism and militancy. And the question came up: “To what degree did Kuwasi use the word anarchism?” And I think the answer to your question is best posed this way. Even in his day, and even among his comrades and his colleagues, Kuwasi was always a deep anti-authoritarianist. It wasn’t about ideology wasn’t about saying, “hey, let’s not read Marx, let’s read Bakunin.” It was about saying “we can’t create structures that chain ourselves, we can create hierarchies.” Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re not a disciplined, accountable member of an organization. And all great anarchist revolutionaries know it’s not about chaos, it’s about organization. It’s about liberating organizations. We’re accountable to one another, not to one great leader, who we decide is… you know, the king. It’s always a man. So you know, I say the king advisedly. But the fact of the matter is, that I think the best way in which he embodied it was in his life. He was a deep anti-authoritarian, always suspicious, always critical, always concerned about undue authority. That wasn’t about accountability to the collective, but was about one person or maybe a couple of people getting more power than they needed. More power than was healthy, for a well functioning collective. I think it’s worth saying it’s also an interesting piece of Kuwasi’s life and legacy.
In terms of this question of gay or queer. I think it’s pretty clear that he never self defined in those ways. And yet, it’s also clear that at some point in his life, he had a lover who was male or trans-femme. Again, that term wasn’t used at that time. So it’s hard to put words in people’s mouths that weren’t in play at that moment. But yes. So in this case, he’s not defining as gay and queer, and yet he’s living in some ways what we’d consider a queer identity for at least a piece of that time. What does that mean? Well, for Kuwasi, what it meant was loving life. It meant not making those kind of distinctions as… say.. “you are white” or “you are a white anarchist, so I can’t work with you.” The question is: “are you down with the struggle? Are you willing to do the work?” And you know, today in 2019, we see organizations. I don’t know so much about here in the south east. But you know, in New York, we have different parts of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation and former political prisoners like Daniel McGowan. And, you know, we have a group of radical anti-imperialist anarchists. I don’t care if you’re a Marxist-Leninist, I don’t care if you’re a social democrat. You know, not so many social democrats doing anti-authoritarian and political work. But nonetheless, the idea is if you’re down with the idea that this empire must fall. You don’t say “you’re into non-violence, so I can’t work with you”, or “you are in the wrong struggle, so I can’t work with you.” We have to move beyond our grandfather’s… I would say, false dichotomies. Our grandfather’s battles. It’s not about… It may have been at some moment, then, necessary to say “I’m with Malcolm, I’m not with Martin. I’m a Malcolmite.” But this moment, 50 years later, one does not have to choose. There’s an article co-written with some members of the movement for Black Lives, myself, and a couple of other comrades in a book of mine called White Lives Matter Most – And Other Little White Lies available through Kerbleblespleb, but also published by PM Press that co-published A Soldier’s Story. And the title of that chapter is “Refuse To Choose. Neither Malcolm nor Martin.” Refusing to choose between our grandfather’s battles, we have to transcend those battles to another moment. Who in some ways personified that transcendence? Kuwasi Balagoon.
Bursts: I’m curious, also, like I see the importance of the point that you’re making. I think that for me, an exciting part of this conversation is that and about reading this edition is that he made conscious choices that differed from so many of the people around him. And the uniqueness and what have you. And so exploring the reasons as to why he would have been drawn to… like, if you are deciding if you’ve gone through the national split in the Panther organization, and have chosen to not side with the national leadership and have critiques of centralized authority. And you’re drawn towards the writings of Malatesta, or of Kropotkin, or like others, some of the other names that are mentioned in the book. It’s interesting for me, it’s like not not a political development that most people describe, and also the kind of thing that more doctrinaire members of a movement could like conflict around, right? So I kind of wonder, and also, I brought this question from Anarchist Prisoner, Michael Kimble, who’s also gay and black, in Alabama politicized inside the system.
“What sort of conflicts did come? Or how did how did that jive with his co-defendants or with his comrades inside? Did it lead to conflicts? Or were people able to be like, ‘well, you have your way of approaching things you ask important questions. Labels are aside, we’re in movement together?’”
Matt Meyer: Wow. And thank you, Michael Kimble, and an all power to you. Not just for continued survival on the other side of the wall, but but bringing out a profound question like that one to us here today. That is a complicated and interesting question. And I’m already spinning with three different directions and actual citations to go. Because also, Bursts, you spoke about the splits. And and I think that’s worth talking about. But let me deal with Michael’s question first, as as best as I can. My understanding of the history, my reading of Kuwasi is that that latter piece was the most common. Kuwasi because of his commitment, because of his extraordinary work ethic, because of his love, which just was bursting out. Again, in the writings I’ve seen, you know, in his writing and his every moment, it just was uncontainable. So that energy, I think, put him in a place where most people were not saying, “Oh, these ideas are too challenging. This is too crazy. This is too outside of the box.” I think Rather, they were like, “it’s crazy. We’re going to figure out a way of working with it, you know, Kuwasi is unique. Kuwasi is amazing.” But So I think that’s the main answer in terms of his life. But I think it’s also very important to know that our versions of the history of back then are often way more over simplified than they should be. And so as a movement, historian as a peace researcher and justice researcher, I want us to look much more carefully at the nuances of what happened back then. And now I’m going to give three citations about that.
Another book that PM Press put out that I was involved in, and no, I’m not just doing a public service announcement to sell copies of my books. But this is one that I co-edited with a sister. She’s got to be one of the greatest organizers in my tough city: New York City, within the black movement. Today, she’s the chair of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee. And her name is Déqui Kioni-Sadiki. And Déqui and I co-edited a book called Look For Me In the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st Century Revolutions. Now, some listeners may think “oooh, Look For Me In the Whirlwind! I think I kind of remember that was a book that Panther 21 wrote and published, you know, autobiographical, back in the day.” Yes. And that book had gone out of print and even members of the Panther 21, who were still alive and out of jail would go on eBay and be like “$400?! I can’t pay that I was at what I was in that book!!” So we took the entire book from cover to cover and republished it, but like this book A Soldier’s Story. We added in many, we actually doubled the size of the thing, we added in another 100-200 pages of contemporary reflections and analysis. And so that was especially done under the leadership of and with surviving members of the Panther 21. Like especially Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba bin Wahad when he’s not in West Africa. He’s based here in the southeast in Georgia. Jamal Joseph and others. And the reason I bring out that book, because it talks about the Panther 21 case, is that while understanding in some deep ways about the east/west split, it also understands that some of the nature of that should be more understandable than we make it. There are nuances we miss. One of the simple ones. Simple? complicated? simple. complicated. Internationalism. The New York Panthers and the Panther 21 were especially internationalist. They were the ones mainly, Sekou himself, and others who went to Algeria, and founded and built the Black Panther Party International. And that internationalism, which now we have technology and tools that should make it easier for us to communicate across the borders. There’s an anarchist concern, what are these borders anyway? Well, we have the technology to be true internationalists. But, we haven’t necessarily freed our minds. We haven’t necessarily freed our consciousness. We haven’t necessarily freed our history, in order to understand the level of internationalism that they were doing back then, and how we need to build upon that, understand it and deepen it today.
I’ll give a second example. Even the West Coast, even the other side of the split, the leadership of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, it should be known, and it is often not known and forgotten, put out ahead of their time, a statement in favor of gay and lesbian liberation. It’s not the most publicized of the Black Panther documents, but it’s there. And it’s there because of their own visionary struggle. So people like Kuwasi Balagoon may have been visionary 10 times further out the field. But there was still more vision, more analysis, more depth, more nuance, and conversation and debate within those structures there, then we have come to really believe and understand. So even as there were splits, and even though there were harsh debates, sometimes those debates could be contained in a place where we loved one another anyway. And again, my reading for Michael and for your question is, when Kuwasi was in those debates with his comrades in the New York and East Coast Panthers, they weren’t primary contradictions. They were all “we’re gonna work together, we have our differences in personality and character and approach. But ultimately, our eyes are on the same prize.”
I said three, I’m going to name the third and last of them. And it’s another PM Press book. Kuwasi wasn’t the only Panther who was way ahead of his time. And Sekou is not the only, and Dhoruba and Jamal are not the only surviving Panthers, who are way ahead of their time. So I would like to name another of the still remaining Black Panther black liberation movement political prisoners who is inside. Whose work is so visionary, and so proficient and so profound, and so necessary for advocacy, especially, but also all people looking to make real deep struggle. That man’s name is Russell Maroon Shoatz. Maroon, we had a successful campaign some years ago, to get him out of solitary confinement. 22 plus years of torture. State sponsored torture, under solitary confinement. He’s in general population, but he’s still in prison. His health is not so great. And he is a visionary of little equal. His understanding of an analysis of economics and eco-socialism, of anti-authoritarianism, of looking at building Maroon cultures of resistance. And why he took the name Maroon, are absolutely reading for 21st century revolutionaries. So looking at Russell Maroon Shoats, his book from PM Press is another place I’d look to for the kinds of things that Kuwasi epitomized. This idea that one can have struggle within an organization, even at the moment, and certainly upon historical reflection 40 years, 50 years later, we have to have that kind of struggle to build a stronger, better, richer, deeper, more effective movement that will smash the state.
Bursts: And that’s Maroon the Implacable.
Matt Meyer: That is the name of the book. Yes.
Bursts: Well if you know anyone, I’ve talked to Russell Shoats III to try to get him on the show, and it just hasn’t worked out. But if you have anyone who would ever want to come on and talk about his case, and try to amplify Maroon’s words, and also his case, and a push to actually get him out of prison, please send it my way.
Matt Meyer: I will say this now. And I appreciate that and we’ll make it happen. I was with with Maroon’s daughter, Teresa Shoats, I was a national co-chair of the campaign to free Russell Maroon Shoatz in that year, year and a half when we were doing the work to get him out of solitary. And I actually just came back from Sri Lanka, where Quincy Saul one of the co-editors that book along with the late, Fred Ho. But Quincy is now in Sri Lanka and Fred’s no longer with us. But I will tell you that in addition to absolutely pledging to help get Russell or Sharon or Theresa Shoats on the show, I think we’re going to see very soon in the next maybe month or so, a re-intensified a reinvigorated campaign for compassionate release around Maroon in particular. Look, it’s one of the complicated things, because again, we’re individualists and we’re institution builders, we believe in the collective and we believe in our own hearts and minds. So yes, we build movements that are focused on individual political prisoners and their release. That was just a very strong campaign. That was put forth that’s building now for release of New York State prisoner. Jalil Muntaqim. So I think I’m telling you now a little preview, there’s going to be a re-intensified campaign for compassionate release for Russell Maroon Shoats, at the same time, all of these movements from Mumia Abu Jamal, etc. all say, FREE THEM ALL. And so when I say look at the National Jericho movement, and its website, it is going to ultimately be about freeing them all.
Bursts: So I know we’ve only got a few minutes left. But Michael Kimble had another question, or he had a couple of other questions, but one of them is:
“I’ve read much of Kuwasi story, but never anything about organizing in prison. Was he involved in organizing his fellow prisoners?”
Matt Meyer: And give me Michael’s other question, because it’s so profound, I want to get them all and see how many as I can cover
Bursts: The other question:
“What roadblocks, if any, did Kuwasi encounter from those he struggled with because of his sexuality and adherence to anarchy? And how did he deal with it?”
But so the the part of that that we didn’t talk about was in terms of his sexuality.
Matt Meyer: Right? It’s a very similar answer to the previous question around differences in general. I also think, for a certain amount of time, as I understand it, Kuwasi’s relationship was when he was in prison at the very end of his life. So it was less about his comrades in the Panthers who were out, and more about the people around him in prison. So in some ways, that segues into the previous question about his life in prison. And I think it’s very, very good to lead into that question as one of our later questions, because it leads into another political prisoner whose name I’d like to mention and who has books written or published by PM Press. And that’s David Gilbert, North American, anti-imperialist white dude. David Gilbert. David’s a close personal friend of mine, and of course, we want David to come out as well. The last years of Kuwasi’s life were spent in prison in the same in the same institution as David and and so they had… not an ability to have that much depth or closeness, you know, prison still constraints you even with fellow prisoners. But there was an understanding that Kuwasi’s relationships like the relationships of most people in prison are individual or personal and not about judgment. So I think that’s the main answer to that question about the sexuality and sexual orientation.
But the more question about organizing is key. Like Maroon, Kuwasi was a master organizer. I think in some ways Maroon actually has built cadre. That’s what he’s in solitary confinement for, he was in solitary because he kept producing within the prisons that he was mini-revolutionaries or maybe not so mini. He also escaped from prison twice. Kuwasi was known to escape from prison. So the fact of the matter is, the essence of conversation was about organization. And though there may not have been a particular campaign, what he did in his work inside prison, was to explain what revolutionary nationalism, anti-authoritarianism, black liberation, was. Black liberation, black liberation, what did it mean to free the people? What did it mean to free the land? What did it mean to be a black revolutionary in the spirit of Malcolm? What did it mean to have armed self defense and self defense in general, as a principal? What did it mean to create programs like the free breakfast program? To understand that housing, that education, that food that these are rights and that people shouldn’t have to beg from within their own country for rights. People should be able to free themselves and provide for themselves. And so that organization, that consciousness raising that education was part of what Kuwasi did probably every waking hour of the day, and that was his organizing in prison.
But I also bring David Gilbert’s name up not because he just witnessed some of that and described some of that, but also because Kuwasi died of AIDS. And he died in prison of AIDS. When it became clear to the fellow inmates and to the large community of people outside, who loved Kuwasi, that he died, he died of AIDS. There was a certain shock, the way, there’s always a shock when you lose someone who is vibrant and is alive and who’s there. And then they’re not there. Even if someone’s ill for some time. But there’s also that shock of recognition that doing something about the AIDS crisis in prison, was absolutely vital. And so David began at that point, in the light of Kuwasi’s death, and in the years after Kuwasi’s death of developing in New York State, what ended up being one of the first national programs of peer education within prisons, around HIV/AIDS and HIV/AIDS prevention. And, you know, we can’t say how many, countless lives that saved and and how many people inside and outside had their own understanding of what it meant to have safer sex and what it meant to have protection and even within the prison walls and outside of the idea that HIV/AIDS could be contained, not because of any conspiracy theory of how it was created, or who was created, but simply because of the way and by the way we relate to one another. And that peer program that David helped pioneer, was absolutely part of, I would say Kuwasi’s legacy. And it’s an organizing legacy that affected the New York state prison system. And unfortunately, as we know, two steps forward one step back, sometimes it feels like two steps back, but you know, the the struggle for creating humane programs within the prisons is a difficult one at best. But we do have brothers inside like Michael, who’s asking these profound questions, obviously doing his own work. And I think when and where it’s possible, creating little breathing spaces, or more than that, is still important and imperative as much as we need to be militants and revolutionaries. No revolution in the history of the world has ever been made without many, many, many reforms. So of course, we want to abolish prisons, we want to abolish the prison industrial complex. But on that road, reforms to make Michael’s life a little bit easier, is definitely something we need to do. We also want to free them all.
And lastly, I’ll say this, we have a little call in that I got from Lynne Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, great black liberation leader and educator in his own right, and people hopefully know Lynne’s too, with the great people’s lawyer who was herself a political prisoner, and passed away some years ago, outside. But, you know, Ralph said and he is right to remind us that in addition to all of these key figures we named. Be they those who have gone before Like Kuwasi Balagoon those were inside we need to fight for their freedom. Sundiata Acoli, Russell Maroon Shoats, David Gilbert, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, etc, etc. There are hundreds and hundreds of unnamed heroes and sheroes who are languishing inside. Often for nonviolent offenses, often for non-offenses for trumped up charges. If their name is Trump, they wouldn’t be inside they’d be outside. And we have to work both to enable their survival, but mainly to free them. Because Freeing them all is in part, how we free ourselves.
Bursts: Cool. Well, that’s a great note to end on. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to be in this conversation with me. I really appreciate it and I hope you have a great presentation tonight.
This week, Paulette D’auteuil speaks about the life and case of Leonard Peltier. Peltier is one of the best known political prisoners currently held in the U.S. Paulette is the Director of the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, based near Coleman, FL, where Leonard is incarcerated and also is an advisor to the National Jericho Movement.
For the hour, Paulette tells about Leonard’s life, his case, his health, the resistance that Leonard was and continues to be a part of, COINTELPRO, and Leonard’s art. You can learn more about Leonard Peltier by visiting the ILPDC’s website, http://whoisleonardpeltier.info, where you’ll find lots more info, Leonard’s artwork, ways to plug in and do events to raise awareness of Leonard’s case and keep up on updates. You can also find the ILPDC on twitter and fedbook.
