Monday, December 15, 2014
Kenneth Young received four life sentences
Eleven years ago Kenneth Young received four life sentences. He was 15 years old. The United States is the only country in the world that routinely condemns children to die in prison. This is the story of one of those children, now a young man, seeking a second chance in Florida - one of the most punitive states in the country. For over a decade Kenneth believed he would die behind bars, until in 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled life without parole sentences for children who haven't killed unconstitutional. In Tampa, Florida we follow Kenneth Young's legal battle for release. Recruited by his mother's crack dealer to rob hotels, Kenneth needs to prove that he is rehabilitated and that the judge who sentenced him to life was wrong to throw away the key. "15 to life" weaves the unfolding story of Kenneth's resentencing with the story of his difficult childhood, and the circumstances that lead to a 30-day crime spree that changed his life forever. Of the more than 2,500 children sentenced to life in prison, Kenneth's story is both exceptional and universal. Like most children who receive death-in-prison sentences, Kenneth is African American, indigent and neglected. What makes his case extreme is the brutality of his punishment - four life sentences for armed robberies in which no one was injured.
Samuel L Jackson Just Challenged Celebrities to Call Out the "Violence ...
Who would have believed that Samuel Jackson could even sing at ALL! And for a GREAT CAUSE! More power to you, Samuel Jackson. Let's see how many celebrity FRIENDS will follow him. . . .
Friday, December 5, 2014
Sunday, July 13, 2014
Eyes Of The Rainbow - a documentary film with Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur, Political Prisoner, abducted from prison in NJ and fled to Cuba for safety. She still is at large even today but is considered the most-wanted woman by FBI status. Many believe she was railroaded into prison along with another revolutionary person, even though there was not sufficient evidence to warrant it. She continues to be a beacon of light because of her brave, revolutionary conviction. She has written and published at least one book on her status, and has spoken out in several magazine articles; she is elevated and held high by those who comprehend her aims and appreciate the revolutionary spirit. Assata Olugbala Shakur (born July 16, 1947), as JoAnne Deborah Byron, married name Chesimard is an African-American activist and escaped convicted murderer who was a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA). Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was accused of several crimes and made the subject of a multi-state manhunt.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Friday, April 18, 2014
Cyntoia Brown's Story
In 2004, Cyntoia was already a veteran of Middle Tennessee's juvenile justice system. Back then, she was living out of a room at a South Nashville extended-stay dive. Her companion was a 24-year-old drug dealer and armed robber known as "Cut-throat," who had her out on a Murfreesboro Road red-light district turning tricks for coke money.
"The 16 Year Old Killer"
Cyntoia's Story (full documentary)
In 2004, Cyntoia Brown was arrested for the murder of a 43-year-old man. Cyntoia was prostituting and he was her client.
Film-maker Daniel Birman was granted unique access to Cyntoia from the week of her arrest, throughout her trial and over a period of six years. His documentary explores the tragic events in her life that led up to the murder, and Cyntoia's biological mother meets he daughter for the first time since giving her up for adoption 14 years earlier.
The film explores the history of abuse, violence, drugs and prostitution back through three generations. As Cyntoia faces a lifetime in prison, the programme asks difficult questions about her treatment by the American justice system.
By Judith Yates Nashville True Crime Examiner May 28, 2013
Cyntoia Brown found herself standing near a Nashville street, sobbing from a beating she just received from her boyfriend/pimp when 43-year-old Johnny Allen pulled up to ask her, “Are you alright?” Seeking refuge, her story of fear, abuse, and addiction spilled out to the stranger. So he solicited her: “Are you up for some action?” The 16-year-old girl’s life took a dramatic change hours later.
She had been working as a prostitute to pay the bills and for a twenty-four-year-old boyfriend’s drug habit, smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine when life got too harsh. Cyntoia had hit the street at thirteen, a chronic runaway. “I wasn’t running from; I was running to,” she explains now. The streets of Nashville gave her “what I thought was freedom” versus what she felt was a cloistered life in Clarksville, where a Viet Nam veteran stepfather drank excessively and meted out punishment whenever. Her biological mother worked the streets prostituting to support a drug addiction. She and another teen runaway relied “on the kindness of strangers” who were aware of their runaway status, but did not care or used her youth to their own advantage. “I could pick up (marijuana) and smoke it whenever, I could stay out late or sleep, I was infatuated with older men who were twenty-five, twenty-six” she thought were boyfriends, but in reality were abusive pimps. She lived from seedy apartment to hotel room. The flotsam life had to end badly, and for Cyntoia Brown it did: in September 2006 she was sentenced to life in prison for killing Johnny Allen hours after he had picked her up. She will be eligible for parole when she is 67.
Today, Brown is a 25 year old, juxtaposing of street-wise youth and educated philosopher who is scoring high collegiate marks and enjoying work as a tutor, assisting inmates obtain their GED. “I’m always moving forward. I have the stigma of being an inmate,” Brown says. “But I try not to get caught up in the negative. I have to stay positive to survive.” She does not see incarcerated women following her lead. “It’s like they’ve given up. On everything, and everyone.” Outside prison, the legal jousting continues on her case: being tried as an adult, her history of mental illness and childhood abuse, the victim’s intentions, and a documentary made on her life. But inside, all she has is “to keep working to inspire people in here.”
Brown is philosophical on her life story. “Nothing bad affected me from my childhood,” she says. “I was thirteen and thought I knew it all. You don’t know half of what you think you know. You don’t think of the future consequences of your actions. But things (from childhood) stick with you. It affects your self esteem, yourself, how you view relationships.” Pimps, she says, “have a way of getting into your mind and you believe everything they say. They can mold you, shape you, break you until you’re like a puppy mill puppy, shirking and scared of everyone else.” She encourages young people to “listen to adults. They’re here for a reason. I missed getting a driver’s license, going to a prom. I wish I would have listened to people in my life that were positive.” Now that she is sentenced to life behind bars, her worries have changed: “If someone feels like something is wrong, do something about it. Write a letter. Speak out. Don’t just be outraged.” What would her victim’s family say? “I don’t know. They said (during victim impact statements) at my trial they hated me.” She ponders the question. “To hope they’ve forgiven me is naïve.” She looks away, thinking of the victim. “He was a Sunday school teacher, sang in the choir.” Then she frowns. “But he knew how old I was (16). I told him. And he still did it (solicited her for sex). I don’t get it.” Sex crimes against underage girls continue to baffle her.
Despite a youth that spun out of control, constant issues with prison rules, mental illness, and prostituting when most girls worried over school sweethearts, Cyntoia Brown pushes on. She is verbose, thoughtful, and polite. She has also proven to be combative, argumentive, and manipulative. She was one of the seventeen percent of Nashville students who did not complete high school, and one of 500,000 to 2.8 million kids living on the U.S. street (one in four of these runaways are approached for commercial sexual exploitation within 48 hours of leaving home), one of 2,250 U.S. juveniles sentenced to life without parole for an offense committed as a child. She is a statistic, an inmate, a murderer, and an example of juvenile delinquency in this state. However, “I have to remind people that I’m a person,” she explains. “I’m naïve, but I believe, somehow, I can make a difference.”
Please note that Cyntoia was moved by the Tennessee Dept. of Corrections to a different prison. She is no longer at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville.
Her new address is:
Ms. Cyntoia Brown, #410593
MLCC-D South, Lower 2
Mark H. Luttrell Correctional Center
6000 State Road
Memphis, Tennessee 38134
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Monday, October 28, 2013
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Free Terrell Curry
Terrell’s struggle for justice
by Free Terrell Curry on Saturday, January 19, 2013 at 3:34pm ·
My Name Is Terrell Curry
On October 24, l998, I was arrested for something I did not do. That night I was in the car with two other individuals. There were guns in the car and we stopped in front of a house for five minutes before pulling off, deciding not to comit a crime. As we turned the corner to head home some guys standing on the corner began shooting at us from behind, one of their bullets spider webbed the back window and put a hole in the front wind shield. The passenger hung out the window and fired a few rounds in the air to scare the guys off. As we passed a street there was a sheriff patrol car parked several houses from the corner. The patrol car started to follow us without their lights on. As we turned down a street called Butler, I heard a pop in a distance and the patrol car activated their red and blue sirens. Due to it raining earlier that night and the roads were wet and slippery. The car spun out at the intersection of Myrrh st. and Lime st. and was now facing the patrol car off to the side in the next lane. We attempted to pass by the patrol car and this is when they began shooting multiple rounds (16 shots) at us. I ducked down in hopes of not being shot by the deputies who were trying to kill us.
The car crashed at the corner. The other two individuals and myself jumped out. The car and ran in different directions. Me and one guy ran south and the other guy with the ponytail (who they thought was a female) ran north. The first guy was arrested then I was. The guy who they thought was a female was never caught. They were searching for this female suspect that night. The deputies broadcast over their dispatch radio to the responding officers that they were searching for a female with a ponytail, because the responding officers were asking "where is your homegirl," (a term for female friend) who ran from the suspects car. This was evidence at one time that existed before they tampered with the evidence. I first learned that I was being charged with attempted murder on two Sheriff deputies when I received a copy of the charging complaint while in custody, two months after my arrest. I couldn't believe the charges because no one ever shot at the deputies. It was a surprised to me.They never found a female suspect, because the deputies wrote a false police reports stating there was only two male suspects who exited the car and fled the scene, omitting the existing female suspect. I was made out to be the one who did all the alleged shooting. Despite the evidence showing it being physically impossible to do all that was alleged due to my disability, which wouldn't allow me to perform the impossible feats that the deputies claimed I did with an assault rifle hanging out a car window.
My Disability:
One year prior to the night of my arrest, I suffered a C-7 fracture killing the nerves in my right arm and shoulder, which resulted in paralysis in my right arm, rendering it useless. The deputies testified that they saw me in the passenger side of the car, hanging out the window with an assault rifle firing at them as the two cars were head-to-head off to the side lane. This would have been impossible with my disability condition.
Testimony from a neurosurgeon appointed at the trail:
At trial on my behalf, expert testimony from a neurosurgeon appointed by the court showed how I would be incapable of using my arm to utilize a machine gun rifle as the deputies stated they saw. Further testimony from a ballistic expert produced evidence to the effect that there was no way that anyone couldhave shot at the deputies from inside the car as they followed from behind. Based on the trajectory examination that the LASD conducted of the suspect's car. The LASD expert confirmed this evidence as well. The ballistic expert further stated I couldn't have held the rifle and fired it with my one left arm balancing myself in the manner testified by the officers. The rifle requires two hands to use.
The prosecutor, Darren R. Levine, told me He knew I couldn't have done what was alleged:
The prosecutor, Darren R. Levine, told me at one of my court hearings that he knew I couldn't have done what was alleged, but if I didn't tell him who the female was that got away, he would prosecute me to the fullest.I went to several court appearances for 3 years fighting this case. After 2 years, I decided to represent myself in August 2000, because the lawyer I had at the time, Frank Digacaimo, no longer had my best interest. Before the trial, I pursued the testing of the authenticity of the first MDT tape because when I received the transfer of evidence from the attorney Mr.
The tampered tape evidence:
Digaciamo, the MDT tape was altered omitting the mention of the female suspect. This MDT tape now said only 2 suspects exited the car. I know this because when I first was arrested the attorney visited me at the jail and let me hear the MDT tape. All the documents and evidence was delivered to a third party before I received it from the attorney. At a court hearing in May 2001, the prosecutor, Darren Levine, admitted in open court that the MDT tape did exist which made mention of a female suspect who exited the car. This admission prevented the court from granting the funds for testing because the tape existed. The court ordered the prosecutor to turn over that MDT tape. I never received the un-edited MDT tape. The original MDT tape with the female suspect reference was still not disclosed at trial.
At the start of trial in June 2001, a different prosecutor took the case who did not know anything about disclosing the existing MDT tape previously admitted by Mr. Levine in open court. I complained to the judge, but to no avail. Trial proceeded without the evidence, against my objections. I again made issue of this MDT tape at the sentencing hearing in August 2001.I pursued the disclosure of the original MDT tape even after being convicted. I tried to raise this issue myself on a habeas corpus in September 2001, but was denied by the Appeals court who said the issue has to be addressed on direct appeal by the appellant attorney, William Flennekin, Jr., who was appointed to me by the court. He never raised this issue in my appeal, even when I asked him to.
Destroy the MDT tape evidence:
I again filed another habeas corpus in the state court when my direct appeal was concluded, because the direct appeal attorney Mr. Flennekin did not raise this issue. I exhausted my writ through the state court.The state or county of Los Angeles Superior court destroyed the exhibits that was admitted into evidence at trial, this included the original MDT tape in question that was tampered with. No authority contacted me or my attorney to give notice that they were going to destroy the MDT tape exhibit.
Attorney, Frank Duncan:
In 2004, my family hired an attorney, Frank Duncan, to file a habeas corpus in federal court to review the unconstitutionality of my conviction, challenging the misconduct by the prosecutor regarding the false evidence and testimony surrounding the MDT tape that was tampered with. Mr. Duncan failed to properly address the matter. The U.S. Ditrict court judge denied my petition, missing the point of the argument, international side stepping the issue. I tried to contact Mr. Duncan between May 2005 and September 2005, so he can argue the important point of how the credibility/exculpatory evidence [the MDT tape] effected the outcome of the trial in the traverse, (opposition papers) before submitting to the judge. Mr. Duncan ignored all letters from me, and calls from my family for months. The judge ruled against me without the correct argument being presented. I wrote the attorney several times without a response from him. In December 2006, I filed a complaint with the California State Bar against the attorney Mr. Duncan because he failed to keep me informed on the case, failed to return my family's phone calls, or answer my letters. He also refused to send me the files regarding my case, even after I made several request. When I learned that the District Court made their ruling on my case and the attorney's work was concluded, he still failed to forward the files. The California State Bar had to order him to send me the file on my case sometime in the end of 2008, some several years after the case was closed. I was kept in the blind for several years.On or about October 2007, I found out that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal had already ruled on my case.
The sentencing 2 terms of 15-Life sentences, plus 45 years:
Two years after their order, on my own behalf [In Pro-Se], I then prepared a Federal Rules of Court, Rule 60(b) motion, and an Equitable Tolling motion, and filed it on January 9, 2008, with the U.S. District Court, Central District of California (case #cv-04-01344 GPS (PLA)). That court granted equitable tolling, heard and denied the 60(b) motion on October 05, 2008. Even after explaining in my equitable tolling motion they granted, the problems with the attorney Frank Duncan, the court still mailed the court order to the attorney, failing to inform me of their decision. For this reason, I missed important time limits I had to meet to file an appeal with the Ninth Circuit Court, who also denied my motions for relief, and again mailed their court order to Mr. Duncan, when I was acting In Pro-Se, on my own behalf. One of the major points that must be mentioned here is that, even though my case is classified as an attempted murder, not one person was injured, let alone suffered a scratch, yet I was convicted to serve 2 terms of 15-Life sentences, plus 45 years, to be served consecutively.
These are a few of the many obstacles in the struggle for justice and freedom in an unjust system.
No person was killed or injured, yet he is serving 2 life sentence plus 45 years for something he did not do, for something he couldn't have done because of his disabilities.
Any help that can be provided would truly be a blessing.
justice for Terrell Curry https://www.facebook.com/FreeTerrellCurry
Life without parole, is a judgment that says, this person is beyond hope, beyond redemption,beyoned rehabilitation. “Prejudices are what fools use for reason. Terrell Curry is is an innocent man in p…
Posted by Shai Dune on January 19, 2013 at 6:31am
Life without parole, is a judgment that says, this person is beyond hope, beyond redemption,beyoned rehabilitation. “Prejudices are what fools use for reason. Terrell Curry is is an innocent man in prison, that is fighting for justice since 14 years, he was sentenced to two life plus 45 years without the possibility of parole, no one was hurt or killed in his case
The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution."american prison industrial complex system, is the Mother of evil, that is happening in America.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary'
The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’
By Chris Hedges
I am sitting in the visiting area of the SCI Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pa., on a rainy, cold Friday morning with Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner and one of its few authentic revolutionaries. He is hunched forward on the gray plastic table, his dreadlocks cascading down the sides of his face, in a room that looks like a high school cafeteria. He is talking intently about the nature of empire, which he is currently reading voraciously about, and effective forms of resistance to tyranny throughout history. Small children, visiting their fathers or brothers, race around the floor, wail or clamber on the plastic chairs. Abu-Jamal, like the other prisoners in the room, is wearing a brown jumpsuit bearing the letters DOC—for Department of Corrections.
Abu-Jamal was transferred in January to the general prison population after nearly 30 years in solitary confinement on death row and was permitted physical contact with his wife, children and other visitors for the first time in three decades. He had been sentenced to death in 1982 for the Dec. 9, 1981, killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His sentence was recently amended to life without parole. The misconduct of the judge, flagrant irregularities in his trial and tainted evidence have been criticized by numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.
Abu-Jamal, who was a young activist in the Black Panthers and later one of the most important radical journalists in Philadelphia, a city that a few decades earlier produced I.F. Stone, has long been the bête noire of the state. The FBI opened a file on him when he was 15, when he started working with the local chapter of the Black Panthers. He was suspended from his Philadelphia high school when he campaigned to rename the school for Malcolm X and distributed “black revolutionary student power” literature.
Stephen Vittoria’s new film documentary about Abu-Jamal, “Long Distance Revolutionary,” rather than revisit the case, chronicles his importance and life as an American journalist, radical and intellectual under the harsh realities of Pennsylvania’s death row. Abu-Jamal has published seven books in prison, including his searing and best-selling “Live From Death Row.” The film features the voices of Cornel West, James Cone, Dick Gregory, Angela Davis, Alice Walker and others. It opens in theaters Feb. 1, starting in New York City. In the film Gregory says that Abu-Jamal has single-handedly brought “dignity to the whole death row.”
The late historian Manning Marable says in the film: “The voice of black journalism in the struggle for the liberation of African-American people has always proved to be decisive throughout black history. When you listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal you hear the echoes of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and the sisters and brothers who kept the faith with struggle, who kept the faith with resistance.”
The authorities, as they did before he was convicted, have attempted to silence him in prison. Pennsylvania banned all recorded interviews with Abu-Jamal after 1996. In response to protests over the singling out of one inmate in the Pennsylvania correction system, the state simply banned recorded access to all its inmates. The ban is nicknamed “the Mumia rule.”
“I was punished for communicating,” Abu-Jamal says.
Cornel West says in the film: “The state is very clever in terms of keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones that are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em, dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition to ’em.”
“If you tell them the truth about the operation of our power this is what happens to you,” he goes on. “Like Jesus on the cross. This is what happens to you.”
During my four-and-a-half-hour conversation with Abu-Jamal I was not permitted a pencil or paper. I wrote down his quotes after I left the prison. My time with him mirrors the wider pattern of a society where the poor and the destitute are rendered invisible and voiceless.
The breadth of his reading, which along with his writing and 3,000 radio broadcasts has kept his mind and soul intact, is staggering. His own books are banned in the prison. In conversation he swings easily from detailed discussions of the Opium Wars between 1839 and 1860 to the Black Panthers to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the series of legislative betrayals of the poor and people of color by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. He cites books by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Huey P. Newton, Assata Shakur, Eric Foner, Gore Vidal, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, James Cone and Dave Zirin. He talks about Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, “Cinque,” Harriet Tubman, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey and Sojourner Truth. He is reading “Masters of War” by Clara Nieto, “How the World Works” by Noam Chomsky, “The Face of Imperialism” by Michael Parenti and “Now and Then” by Gil Scott-Heron. He wonders, as I do, what shape the collapse of empire will take. And he despairs of the political unconsciousness among many incoming prisoners, some young enough to be his children.
“When I first got out in the yard and I heard groups of men talking about how Sarah was going to marry Jim or how Frank had betrayed Susan, I thought, ‘Damn, these cats all know each other and their families. That’s odd,’ ” he says. “But after a few minutes I realized they were talking about soap operas. Television in prison is the great pacifier. They love ‘Basketball Wives’ because it is ‘T and A’ with women of color. They know how many cars Jay-Z has. But they don’t know their own history. They don’t understand how they got here. They don’t know what is being done to them. I tell them they have to read and they say, ‘Man, I don’t do books.’ And that is just how the empire wants it. You can’t fight power if you don’t understand it. And you can’t understand it if you don’t experience it and then dissect it.”
Abu-Jamal’s venom is reserved for politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he correctly excoriates for speaking in the language of traditional liberalism while ruthlessly disempowering the poor and the working class on behalf of their corporate patrons. And he has little time for the liberals who support them.
“It was Clinton that made possible the explosion of the prison-industrial complex,” he says, speaking of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill.
He looks around the visiting area at the 30-odd prisoners with their families.
“Most of these people wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Bill Clinton,” he says of the other inmates. “He and Barack Obama haven’t done anything for poor people but lock them up. And if our first African-American president isn’t going to halt the growth of the prison-industrial complex, no president after him is going to do it. This prison system is here to stay. The poor and the destitute feed it. It is the empire’s solution to the economic crisis. Those who are powerless, who have no access to diminishing resources, get locked away. And the prison business is booming. It is one of the few growth industries left. It used to be that towns didn’t want prisons. Now these poor rural communities beg for them. You look down the list of the names of the guards and see two or three with the same last names. This is because fathers, brothers, spouses, work here together. These small towns don’t have anything else.”
The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world—742 adults per 100,000. There are some 2.2 million adults incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails. About 5 million are on probation or parole. Seventy percent of the inmates are nonwhite.
The Omnibus Crime Bill, pushed through the Senate with the help of Joe Biden, appropriated $30 billion to expand the nation’s prison program. It gave $10.8 billion in federal matching funds to local governments to hire 100,000 new police officers over five years. It provided $10 billion for the construction of new federal prisons. It expanded the number of federal crimes to which the death penalty applied from two to 58. It eliminated an existing statute that prohibited the execution of mentally incapacitated defendants. It instituted the three-strikes proposal that mandates life sentences for anyone convicted of three “violent” felonies. It ordered states to track sex offenders. It permitted children as young as 13 to be tried as adults. It set up special courts to deport noncitizens alleged to be “engaged in terrorist activity” and authorized the use of secret evidence. The prison population during the Clinton presidency jumped from 1.4 million to 2 million. The United States has spent $300 billion since 1980 on the prison system.
Abu-Jamal talks in the interview about being a Black Panther and the use of violence as a form of political resistance throughout history. He speaks of visiting the Chicago apartment where Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was shot to death by Chicago police and the FBI while he slept on Dec. 4, 1969. He calls Hampton, who was 21 when he was killed, “one of the bright lights.” Abu-Jamal chokes up and his eyes glisten with tears. “Fred … ,” he says as his voice trails off.
“It used to be that a politician promised jobs, a chicken in every pot,” Abu-Jamal says. “But in our new national security state they promise law and order. They get elected by saying they will be tough on crime and by calling for the death penalty. Death sells. Fear sells. What was a crime by the state in the 1960s is now legal. The state can wiretap, eavesdrop, listen to phone calls and break into homes. And there is nothing we can do about it. The mass incarceration and the mass repression impact every community to make people afraid and compliant.”
“In this place, a dark temple of fear, an altar of political ambition, death is a campaign poster, a stepping-stone to public office … ,” Abu-Jamal has written. “In this space and time, in this dark hour, how many of us are not on death row?”
“The brutality of the empire was exposed under George W. Bush,” he says to me. “The empire desperately needed a new face, a black face, to seduce the public. This is the role of Barack Obama. He is the black face of empire. He was pitched to us during the most recent presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, the same Clinton who gave us NAFTA in 1994 and abolished good-paying manufacturing jobs for millions of workers. The same Clinton who locked us up. Clinton and Obama represent the politics of betrayal at the heart of the corporatist machinery. And they have fooled a lot of people, especially black people. During slavery, and even post-Reconstruction, there were always a few black people who served the system. The role of these black servants to white power was to teach passivity in the face of repression. This is why Obama is president. Nothing has changed.”
It is only by stepping outside the system, by carrying out acts of civil disobedience, by defying both of the major political parties, that we have any hope of resisting the rise of an oligarchic and totalitarian corporate system that will finally enslave us all. Abu-Jamal sees hope in the Occupy movement, largely because white middle-class youths are beginning to experience the cruelty of capitalism and state repression that has long been visited on the poor. But, he adds, we must recover our past. We must connect ourselves to the revolutionaries, radicals and prophets who fought injustice before us. We must defy the historical amnesia the corporate state seeks to cement into our consciousness. His book “Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People” sets out to do precisely this, to recover a past intellectual and spiritual life for African-Americans that is trivialized, ignored or censored by the dominant culture. He is worried that the mindless diversions of popular culture and the assault by corporate power on education are keeping many from grasping not only what is happening but the continuity that modern systems of oppression have with older systems of oppression.
“We would not be who we are as African-Americans of this date were it not for the Reverend, the Prophet, Nat Turner—who brilliantly merged the religious with the political,” Abu-Jamal says in the film. “Who didn’t just talk about the world to come but fought to transform the world that is. You know, he is honored and revered today—not because he could quote the Bible well, he could do that, but because he worked in the fields of life to get the slave master off of his neck, off of all of our necks.”
On the far side of the visiting area are vending machines that dispense White Castle hamburgers, soda, candy and Tastykake cupcakes. We drop in the prepaid tokens—no money is allowed inside the prison—and the fast food is dumped in the vent. To Abu-Jamal, forced to eat prison food, it is a treat, especially the Hershey’s bar. He watches as a boy darts past him toward his father.
“I didn’t see children for 30 years on death row,” he says softly. “It is a delight to see them here. They are what is most precious, what the struggle is finally about.”
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/unsilenced-voice-long-distance-revolutionary-1355242481. All rights are reserved.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Send letters of support for Marshall Eddie Conway
Send letters of support to the Maryland Parole Commission
Good news! I was just told that I have a parole hearing on November 1, 2011. We will need as many letters of support as we can get. I would appreciate any assistance you can give in our pursuit of a favorable recommendation from the parole board. If you need any information please call Dominique Stevenson at 410-948-6302.
Please encourage people to send letters on my behalf. They can simply say they believe I should be granted parole based on my many contributions to the prison population through mentoring projects and other activities, and my record as a "model" prisoner. For those of you that know me personally, please speak to the work I have done for prisoners and the community.
Send letters of support for Marshall Eddie Conway's parole to:
Maryland Parole Commission
Attention: Mr. Blumberg
6776 Reisterstown Road
Suite 307
Baltimore, MD. 21215
(Letters should be mailed no later than Weds 10/26)
Or Call
1-877-241-5428
Or Fax
FAX 410-764-4355
Please send an additional copy to Eddie for his records at:
Marshall Eddie Conway #116469
P.O. Box 534
Jessup,MD
20794
For more info about Eddie Conway, former Black Panther and political prisoner, add Eddie as a friend on Facebook or go to the Causes page Free Eddie Conway and All Political Prisoners!
Sunday, October 16, 2011
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