The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting for Those Left Behind

by Safiya Bukhari

“It wasn’t the Panthers that made me join the Black Panther Party,” Safiya often said; as she told an audience in Chicago in 1991, “It was the police.”

Why, asked Malcolm, are you applauded for picking up a gun and killing Germans and Koreans and Vietnamese, but you’re not allowed to fight back against the Ku Klux Klan or the police who are trying to kill you?6 This was a profound argument. The point was not to attack nonviolence, but to show that it was only one tactic in an arsenal of struggle, and that armed self-defense was another.

Everything was going along smoothly until the number of children coming began to fall off. Finally, I began to question the children and found that the police had been telling the parents in the neighborhood not to send their children to the program because we were “feeding them poisoned food.” It is one thing to hear about the underhanded things the police do—you can choose to ignore it—but it is totally different to experience it for yourself. You must either lie to yourself or face it. I chose to face it and find out why the police felt it was so important to keep Black children from being fed that they told lies.

In December 1976, I started hemorrhaging and went to the clinic for help. No help of any consequence was given, so I escaped. Two months later, I was recaptured. While on escape a doctor had told me that I could endure the situation, take painkillers, or have surgery. I decided to use the lack of medical care as my defense for the escape to accomplish two things: (1) expose the level of medical care at the prison and (2) put pressure on them to give me the care I needed. I finally got to the hospital in June 1978. By then, it was too late. I was so messed up inside that everything but one ovary had to go. Because of the negligence of the “doctor” and the lack of feeling on the part of the prison officials, I was forced to have a hysterectomy. When they brought me back to this prison in March 1977, because of the escape, they placed me in cell 5 on the segregation end of the maximum-security building—the same room they had placed me in on April 16, 1975. Today I remain in that cell, allegedly because of my escape, but in actuality because of my politics.

minute, this hour (as Malcolm would say), I have come to realize that picking up the gun was/is the easy part. The difficult part is the day-to-day organizing, educating, and showing the people by example what needs to be done to create a new society. The hard, painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a new reality—this is the first revolution, that internal revolution. I

The police weren’t feeding the children. But to keep us from feeding them, they were saying we were giving them poisoned food. So the children were doing without because of the police’s own bigotry. That was a lesson for me in how the police lie, how the system lies and hurts people.

Whatever is unprincipled, incorrect, and counterproductive about you and your style of work, you have to be willing to subject to the rapier knife of revolutionary criticism if you are serious about creating a revolution.

The advent of the women’s liberation movement during the late 1960s sought to equate what was happening with white women in this society with the plight of Black women. The white women were seeking to change their role in society vis-à-vis the home and workplace. They sought to be seen as more than just mothers and homemakers; they wanted to be afforded the right to be fully active members of the workplace and to take on whatever role they wanted in society. But our situation was different. We had been working outside the home and supporting our families. We had been shouldering the awesome responsibilities of waging a struggle against racist oppression and economic exploitation since we had been brought to these shores in the slave ships. Our struggle was not a struggle to be liberated so that we could move into the workplace, but a struggle to be recognized as human beings.

I had also been privy to a lot of things being done by people who were supposed to be “saved” and “going to heaven” that made me doubt the existence of God. I had decided that there could not be a God if these people were going to heaven and others weren’t.

organize the people, work among the people and tell no lies about what we want and what we’ve done and what we have accomplished. We have to build a strong bond of trust with the people and show them by example that we’re different from the politicians and corporate businessmen and others who say anything and do anything to get the people to go along with their program.

A leftist convicted of possession of explosives can serve fifty-eight years in prison; her apolitical counterpart gets probation.

THIEL: So the only violence that’s condoned is left-wing violence, violence in furtherance of left-wing causes. KUBY: No, but it’s probably only leftists who engage in acts of violence in support of equality and liberation. The right wing, virtually by definition, engages in violence in support of dictatorship, fascism, and inequality. [And they get shorter sentences.] Contrast Susan Rosenberg, a white [leftist] woman who is serving fifty-eight years in prison6 for possession of weapons and explosives, with Raymond Malvasi, whose case was also in the Southern District of New York. Malvasi blew up one abortion clinic, tried to bomb another, financed his bombing spree through robbing banks, and stored explosives in downtown Manhattan within two hundred feet of a school. He was prosecuted by the same government at the same time as Susan Rosenberg. He received seven years. Seven years in prison, and he was released after three. So Susan Rosenberg would be better off had she blown up abortion clinics. Right-wing, lunatic, anti-choice [defendants] don’t need the political prisoner designation, because the government lets them right out of prison.

KUBY: And I’m not arguing that these political prisoners are perfect either. And I’m not arguing that they all did great things, and I’m not arguing that mistakes weren’t made. I’m saying that given the historical and political context in which they were fighting, given the enormous amount of time they’ve already served in prison, it’s time for reconciliation and amnesty.

CRUZ asks Bukhari: Who is responsible for the oppression of political prisoners? BUKHARI: It’s not oppression of political prisoners; it’s oppression of people who become political prisoners when they react against the oppression.

Mistakes were made on our side. Mistakes were made on the side of conservatives. What people did to the American Indians was terrible. BUKHARI: I’m not talking about conservatives. We’re talking about a government that has changed hands from conservative to Democrat over and over again, and it continues to be the same thing. THIEL: I’ll make it more general. America has made mistakes. I will agree with that. But the question is, What do we do today? What do we do in practice in 1998? BUKHARI: Amnesty and freedom for all political prisoners. THIEL: Well, I would suggest that what we do is, we don’t condone violence. BUKHARI: On either part—the part of the government and the part of the people. You can’t negotiate using violence because you have the means of winning, and then tell us that we have to negotiate by words only.

The further away we get from the sixties and seventies, the more likely it becomes that people will forget what happened and what we were really about. When issues are taken out of their historical place and placed into another day and time, people tend to get confused. The government banks on that. Historically, it has worked for them. In this new day and time, in the shadow of 9/11, in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the greatest historical figures of the civil rights/Black power era was convicted and sent to prison for life without the possibility of parole.