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December 27 - December 30, 2020
It took me years to understand that although she wasn’t around for me when I wanted her to be, the things she was doing instead of raising me made life a little safer for my daughter and other kids. If my mother and the rest of the Panthers hadn’t done their work, we wouldn’t have seen the gains made in Black civil and human rights.
Police never investigated nor was anyone ever charged with the murder.
Those who are most serious about change often make the biggest sacrifices.
Safiya refused to surrender during the Clinton years, which were among the most difficult for political prisoners, as well as during the early Bush years. Had she not suffered a premature death in the summer of 2003, undoubtedly she would be just as intensely involved today in all the causes she supported during previous decades.
it is not so much about the individual but rather about her bonds of solidarity within communities of struggle.
political collectivities striving for radical change can provide the kind of sustenance that enables human beings to remake themselves so that their individual consciousness is always in dialogue with a collective consciousness.
We recognize such markers as the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, the assassination of Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969, the arrest and eventual escape from prison of Assata Shakur, the development of an international campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the frame-up and imprisonment of Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt in 1970, and his release in 1997.
People of my generation tend to reflect on that era with a certain measure of nostalgia, which is not only about our youth but also about a prevailing sense of solidarity and a widespread belief that we were in the process of making a revolution. New organizations emerged and the university began to be transformed in response to demands for Black, Latina/o, Native American, Asian American, and women’s studies programs. We felt connected to the decolonization and revolutionary processes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
I hope the readers of The War Before will commit themselves to the campaign to bring Assata Shakur home, and to freeing Mumia, Leonard Peltier, and every one of the human beings for whom Safiya Bukhari so passionately gave her life.
As the Panthers and their lawyers unveiled physical evidence showing that all but one of the more than ninety shots had come from the police, it became clear that this had been a deliberate police assassination, targeting the powerful Black Panther Party leader.
In the context of a struggle for justice and freedom, hope was such a powerful emotion that the FBI and police found it necessary to use the tools of warfare to obliterate it.
They were given orders to “shoot to kill” anyone caught destroying property in the outburst of grief and rage following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. After years of standing up to the fire hoses, bullwhips, and billy clubs of southern police forces during the civil rights
movement, Black people now watched their northern communities turn into occupied territories. Instead of accepting and meeting Black people’s demands for equal rights, the government had responded by initiating a domestic war in the streets of our country.
The United States was not only waging a war against the people of Vietnam. The government had also been complicit in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961. But another global phenomenon had emerged at the same time: third world people were fighting back, refusing to accede to oppression and, in many cases, seemed to be winning their battles—China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Algeria in 1962.
“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.”4
On the way to the Fourteenth Precinct, I learned that there was no such thing as a constitutional right when it comes to Black people.”
History is made by thousands and thousands of individuals whose names you may never know. It’s one thing to read the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.—there’s no way the civil rights movement or US history would have been the same without him. But if you want to understand those times—and how change is made—you need to know of the people who shared Dr. King’s dream
Her name doesn’t come up on the list of prominent women in the Panthers; she wasn’t in front of the media. But from 1969, she was in the Harlem office of the Black Panther Party, working on all its projects—the Free Breakfast for Children Program, political education and outreach, and a health clinic to screen for sickle-cell anemia and other medical problems—and, of course, selling the Panther newspaper.
Using the politics of national liberation and independence, the Panthers probably reached further into more sectors of the Black community than other groups, building serve-the-people programs based on a class analysis.
In those years, all of us found ourselves witnessing a global revolution—one that was, amazingly, not dominated by white leftists.
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
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.
In those years, revolutionaries usually saw ourselves as too busy making the revolution to engage in standard family life. The revolution, we felt, would make life better for our families and children. So Safiya devoted herself less to personal love and motherhood than to the Black Panther Party.
It is hard to describe the impact that the concept of self-defense had on the Black community and progressive supporters. For the first time in many years, defending a community against police terror was widely promoted as a legitimate tactic. This gave teeth to the community’s demand that Black lives be afforded equal value to white.
But the year 1969 was also the beginning of the Panther 21 case—
Not only did the police lie, claiming that Fred and Mark had been killed during a shoot-out initiated by the Panthers; it was also revealed that Fred and other Panthers had been drugged by William O’Neil, an FBI informant within the organization. The police had unleashed a firestorm against the Panthers that was both unprovoked and carefully premeditated. Here’s what else we were sure of: Fred Hampton had been targeted for nothing other than his ability to articulate the problems, dreams, and goals of masses of Black people. Another Black leader had been killed. This was counterinsurgency—a
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Captured within a year, she was tried for escape and used her defense to garner attention to the appalling neglect of her medical condition. The result was that she finally got the operation she needed. But she was also placed in detention and spent nearly all of the following four years in solitary confinement.
Safiya continually visited prisoners, wrote to them, and always accepted their collect phone calls. She communicated their needs and ideas to the outside world, and she wrote and spoke on their behalf, while the government, refusing to call them “political” prisoners, kept trying to bury them.
When you’re inside, it means everything to know that there’s someone who will care when you get thrown in the hole or when you don’t have money in your commissary account—someone who will call people to help.
Voices from Inside OH
In years when radical movements are in disarray or when activism is absent, work in support of political prisoners can be a way to keep some political issues alive. For prisoners, though, it is more than a tactic—it is a lifeline. That is why every current and former US-held leftist political prisoner knows and reveres the names of Yuri and Safiya in particular. Their work made it possible for political prisoners to have a voice, which meant we were still politically active human beings.
Supporting the struggles of people for freedom means that you take some risks yourself. It means stepping beyond your political comfort zone.
exhausting herself in the process.
is it possible to do the work of liberation from a place of rest?
Safiya said, ‘anyone who is truly passionate about social justice has the capacity to become a political prisoner.’
Clinton did not release any of the Black prisoners,
nor did he release Native American leader and internationally recognized political prisoner Leonard Peltier (whose conviction arose from a historic event of the 1970s, the Native American takeover of Wounded Knee).20
“Every time a freedom fighter comes home, it’s like a part of us is out there again, it’s like a ray of hope for everybody else. But when you leave, and you leave those others behind, it’s like you leave part of you inside the institution. So you have to continue to
do the work, because as long as there’s a political prisoner—any prisoner—inside this country, that means that you’re not truly free.”
She stands up there, revealing her own pain because she knows that helps other people deal with their pain—and because she wants them to join, to do the work with her.
Safiya’s life is a story that stands for all of us who have not been defeated but have yet to win.
I forgive us the arrogance that allowed us to think we could create revolution by sheer force of will and example—a tendency we sometimes called “voluntarism.” Those were parts of our attempt to find our own place in the whirlwind of change swirling across the globe. We stepped forward, saying, “Okay, I’ll risk. And if we fail, I won’t abandon our principles or those who fall.” It’s what it means to live in this world, what underlies solidarity, that wonderful quality of being human. That, in Safiya’s words, is worth fighting for.
So much enthusiasm for the radicalism of the 1960s, but so little progress in winning the release on parole of Black political prisoners who have served more than forty years in prison and counting.
The Ten-Point Program was the founding document of the Black Panther Party. The demands ranged from, “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black and oppressed communities,” to, “We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression,” and, “We want land, bread, education, housing, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community control of modern technology.”
The maturation process is full of obstacles and entanglements for anyone, but for a Black woman in America it has all the markings of the Minotaur’s maze. I had to say that, even though nothing as spectacular takes place in the maturation process of the average Black woman. But the day-to-day struggle for survival and growth reaps the same reward in the end in ten thousand different ways. The trick is to learn from each defeat and become stronger and more determined, to think and begin to develop the necessary strategies to ensure the annihilation of the beast.…
The sorority decided to do what we could to help the children. The Black Panther Party was already running a free break-fast program to feed the children. I had a daughter of my own at this point and decided that I would put my energies into this.
It is difficult to think of reading and arithmetic when your stomach is growling. I am not trying to explain the logic of the Free Breakfast for Children Program, only showing how I had to be slowly awakened to the reality of life and shown the interconnection of things.
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. I went back to the Bl...
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The police were telling the Panther he could not sell newspapers on the corner and he was insisting that he could. Without a thought, I told the police that the brother had a constitutional right to disseminate political literature anywhere, at which point the police asked for my identification and arrested the sister and myself, along with the brother who was selling the papers.
I had never been arrested before and I was naive enough to believe that all you had
