My friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake
They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you
And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes
The ruling class will tell you that
there is no ruling class
as they organize their liberal supporters into
white supremist lynch mobs
organize their children into
ku klux klan gangs
organize their police into killer cops
organize their propaganda into
a devise to ossify us with angel dust
pre-occupy us with western symbols in
african hair styles
innoculate us with hate
institutionalize us with ignorance
hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed
to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away
And we are programmed to self destruct
to fragment
to get buried under covert intelligence operations of
unintelligent committees impulsed toward death
And there it is
The enemies polishing their penises between
oil wells at the pentagon
the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances
the old folks dying of starvation
the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs
the lifeblood of the earth almost dead in
the greedy mouth of imperialism
And my friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake
They will spray you with
a virus of legionaire’s disease
fill your nostrils with
the swine flu of their arrogance
stuff your body into a tampon of
toxic shock syndrome
try to pump all the resources of the world
into their own veins
and fly off into the wild blue yonder to
pollute another planet
And if we don’t fight
if we don’t resist
if we don’t organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is
This is an incredible speech from long term Freedom Fighter and fomer political prisoner Dhoruba Bin Wahad..It took place during the recently held National Hip Hop Political Convention in Las Vegas. Dhoruba sat on a panel that focused on the legacy of Cointel-Pro which took down the Panthers, the anti-war movement and other organizations during the 1960s.. The purpose of this panel was to see how this insidious policy of domestic spying had manifested itself within Hip Hop.
Dhoruba was scheduled to be part of a panel, and offer brief remarks, but people were so moved by him and his unwavering commitment to the freedom struggle, he was asked at the last moment to address the entire convention.. He really dropped some bombs.
He talked about this country's ascension into being an empire and starts off with the landmark year of 1968... Its interesting to note that Dhoruba's breakdown of social and political events that took place in 1968 parallels the social and political events chronicled by author Jeff Chang in his landmark book about the Hip Hop generation called 'Can't Stop Won't Stop'.
The message that Dhoruba delivers is an important one and hopefully it will motivate all of us to pay closer attention and get more involved in the day to day political discourse that impacts our communities.
Enjoy, Get Enlightened and Evolve..
PS.. The song you hear in the beginning is brand new music from the Black Panther of Hip Hop- Paris is new album Acid Reflex is due out in early September. It was almost as if he wrote this song for Dhoruba.
Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you for... I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for liberty, freedom and justice!
—Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Atlanta Prison
Feb. 10, 1925
U.S. CONSTITUTION
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
ANGOLA PRISON PLANTATION
At the heart of Louisiana’s prison system sits the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, a former slave plantation where little has changed in the last several hundred years. Angola has been made notorious from books and films such as Dead Man Walking and The Farm: Life at Angola, as well as its legendary bi-annual prison rodeo and The Angolite, a prisoner-written magazine published within its walls. Visitors are often overwhelmed by its size – 18,000 acres that include a golf course (for use by prison staff and some guests), a radio station, and a massive farming operation that ranges from staples like soybeans and wheat to traditional Southern plantation crops like cotton. Norris Henderson, co-director of Safe Streets/Strong Communities, a grassroots criminal justice organization in New Orleans, spent twenty years at Angola – a relatively short time in a prison where 85 percent of its 5,100 prisoners are expected to die behind its walls. “Six hundred folks been there over 25 years,” he explains. “Lots of these guys been there over 35 years. Think about that: a population that’s been there since the 1970s. Once you’re in this place, it’s almost like you ain’t going nowhere, that barring some miracle, you’re going to die there.”
Prisoners at Angola still do the same work that enslaved Africans did there when it was a slave plantation. “Angola is a plantation,” Henderson explains. “Eighteen-thousand acres of choice farmland. Even to this day, you could have machinery that can do all that work, but you still have prisoners doing it instead.” Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard - whether true or false - could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. Prisoners work out in the field, sometimes 17 hours straight, rain or shine. Not only do prisoners at Angola toil at the same work as enslaved Africans hundreds of years ago, but many of the white guards come from families that have lived on the grounds since the plantation days. This white overseer community, called B-Line, is located on the farm's grounds, both close to the prisoners and completely separate from them. In addition to their prison labor, Angola's inmates do free work for B-Line residents, from cutting their grass to trimming their hair to cleaning up Prison View Golf Course, the only course in the country where players can watch prisoners laboring as they golf. Nathaniel Anderson, a current inmate at Angola who has served nearly thirty years of a lifetime sentence, agrees. “People on the outside should know that Angola is still a plantation with every type and kind of slave conceivable,” he says.
Black Panther Party PP's Wilkerson, Wallace, and Woodfox became known internationally as the Angola Three – Black Panthers held in solitary confinement because of their political activism. The US has the largest incarcerated population in the world – twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners are there. If Louisiana, which has the largest percentage imprisoned of any US state, were a country, it would have by far the world’s largest percentage of its population locked up, at one out of every 45 people. Nationwide, more than seven million people are in US jails, on probation, or on parole, and African Americans are incarcerated at nearly ten times the rate of whites. Our criminal justice system has become an insatiable machine – even when crime rates go down, the prison population keeps rising. The efforts of the Angola Three and other politically conscious prisoners represented a fundamental challenge to this system. The organizing of Wallace, Woodfox, and Wilkerson, though cut short by their move to solitary, had an effect that continues to this day. Please visit www.angola3.org for important updates on the remaining Angola 2 Bros., still in solitary after 36 years!
(excerpts from Jordan Flaherty -- www.counterpunch.org/flaherty06102008.html + Maya Schenwar -- http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=768&Itemid=1 )
"If We Must Die"
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but FIGHTING BACK!
Claude McKay, 1919
THE BLACK/AFRIKAN COMMUNITY AND THE DEATH PENALTY
by Sis. Marpessa Kupendua, 10/08 Remix
“Had it not been for slavery, the death penalty would have likely been abolished in America. Slavery became a haven for the death penalty. In Virginia, before the end of slavery, there was only one crime for which a white person could be executed. But there were 66 crimes for which a slave could be executed.” Sis. Angela Davis, 2003
Statistical data is abundant that the criminal justice system, from arrest through sentencing, impacts Black/Afrikan and Latino defendants the harshest, and the death penalty is, of course, no exception.(1) Although some political activists will concede the racist, classist and political aspects of the death penalty in specific cases, we continue to remain uninvolved in the larger struggle to abolish it completely. Black activists must dialogue and challenge that mindset within our ranks, or we continue to risk that far too many of our Bros./Sis. (such as Bro. Gregory {Ajamu} Resnover, Bro. Ziyon Yisrayah, Bro. Shaka Sankofa, and potentially Bro. Troy Davis, Bro. Mumia Abu-Jamal, and many more) will be wiped off of the planet. If we stand against racist oppression, we must fully understand that we are all under potential threat of life (unwritten death) sentences or straight up legalized lynching. We must include the abolition of the death penalty as a major plank of all of our platforms, no more treating capital punishment as a back burner issue and dismissing it as a largely white movement!
Most people in the Black/Afrikan community very understandably worry more about our children being killed on the streets than by lethal injection. We are so devastated by government-sponsored drugs, increased violence, murders, and heartache, that discussions around the uneven application of the death penalty are a glaring non-issue when our people live on the frontlines of these war zones. Each day we hear and read of horror stories that fill us with disbelief, anguish and rage; we all share in the deep sorrow of senseless acts of violence and murder and want to tightly embrace those most closely affected. Many of us want an eye for an eye and so readily identify with being victimized that we even support the executions of juveniles and the mentally disabled in particularly gruesome incidences. It also seems a preposterous topic to raise because most people just can’t foresee that any member of our immediate families could ever face a death sentence. But when this system offers to murder on our behalf, we must understand that it carries a double-edged sword; many may believe in the execution of one, but be horrified at the prospect of the execution of another. Unfortunately, we are not given the luxury to pick and choose once we support state-sanctioned murder.
“I must admit that at times I wonder and question the intentions and knowledge of the death penalty activists (abolishers) who are horrified and oppose the killing of human beings, but whom are not horrified at the very system in its totality, which renders such biased and unjust sentences upon its citizens and which contributes to the dehumanizing of its citizens. I say in turn that its not just the death penalty which must be overturned, but the whole institution of criminal justice as we know it (that) must be overturned.”—From Bro. Adullah Hameen’s “What is a Death Sentence?” (Legally Lynched by the State of Delaware on May 25, 2001)
We can’t advocate against the death penalty and expect people to be able to feel where we’re coming from without talking about the prison industrial complex in its entirety, the cradle to prison pipeline. While the vast majority of us very definitely agree with addressing the much-needed healing within our collective family and reclaiming our community from violence from within, we must also deal with increased police aggression against our children in the form of violent police terror attacks and their snatching up of our children, some even at elementary school ages! The oppression of the Black community via the criminal justice system and its agents intensifies by the day as prison cells are inhumanely overcrowded and the prison warehouses are bursting at their seams. The police attacks that lead to incarcerations can now be more openly viewed in all their sick glory via the internet with its videos and on-the-scene accounts, putting their hate speech, beatings, shootings and murders on full blast before the world. We are also all too familiar with the massive oversentencing of Blacks vs. their white counterparts, manufactured evidence, tortured confessions, deliberate confusion and lies, and even more. Our children are seen as sub-human, easily manipulated, undomesticated and unemployable, sent down a conveyor belt straight to these dungeons and thus insuring the financing of their own encagement. State and private prisons are among the largest employers in many towns and the profiteers are plentiful, including the phone companies and the many, many corporations who provide and receive untold services and benefits from these hellholes, it is mindblowing.
Organizers are too often painted as “siding with criminals” when addressing the disparities within the system and at times are even accused of being in denial about inmates’ culpability in the commission of crimes; after all, they will argue, they did wrong, they knew they were doing wrong, and they should pay! Even though many folks will concede that some captives may be innocent, at least of lesser counts than which they’ve been charged, and that some belong in drug or psychiatric treatment and not prison, and that of course some are becoming more hardened and callous than when they went in, and that yes some will be raped, beaten, tortured, enslaved for corporate profit while in prison and even killed—the bottom line for many remains that our community cannot be seen as making excuses for crime, ala Bill Cosby. As a result, many of our Bros./Sis. will advocate even harsher punishments than the system already has in place and mimic those who would call for the jailing of our children for “crimes” such as wearing sagging pants or violation of noise ordinances. We still yet believe that this system’s laws are designed to protect us, when nothing could be further from the truth! When presented with evidence that the death penalty is race and class-based and not evenly applied, many will respond that yes, it needs to made fair, but it doesn’t need to be gotten rid of, not in all cases. Unfortunately, however, this system’s very foundation of racism and corruption can never be reformed or “made fair,” so it definitely cannot be trusted to determine who lives and who dies!
“As I sit here on my bed, exhausted yet full of joy and uncertainty, feeling the affects of 7 ½ years of constant chemotherapy, I am reflecting on the day of September 23, 2008, as we entered the grounds of the Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, where I wanted to cry but I could not, I wanted to yell but I could not, I wanted to leave but I could not. Then I watched the expression on my son’s face, that for the first time in his 14 years of visiting death row, he witnessed, more than 100 SWAT, Tactical Squad officers, corrections officers with dozens of dogs, shot guns in hand, all because the state of Georgia wants to kill his Uncle Troy. I have only seen such force on television from the civil rights era.” -- (9/25/08 from “Silencing our Joy” by Sis. Martina Correia, sister of innocent death row prisoner, Troy Davis)
When addressing the needs of families of victims of crime, we must include the families of death row inmates. They are among the most underserved and unspoken of as they, too, cope with the tremendous depression suffered by all grief-stricken victims. These families, adults and children, are barely able to function while on the dizzying legal rollercoaster leading up to their family member’s date with death. Some are treated as pariahs within their own community while struggling to carry on with work and school—simultaneously acting as their loved one’s source of emotional and financial support, travelling sometimes incredibly long distances to visit through glass or even by video, gouged by outrageously over-priced phone calls, and advocating for these inmates with inadequate legal representatives(2), politricians, and god-complexed prison officials. These families are not offered comfort or treated with even the most basic human dignity.
Capital punishment is itself premeditated murder! It’s about keeping alive this country’s bloodthirsty passion for legalized lynching, a passion which they will fight to feed even in the face of overwhelming innocence, recantations of perjured testimony, even to the point where an unheatlhy inmate will be cured just so that they can be healthy enough to be murdered on death day! But how many police officers and/or other officials were given the death penalty for the terrorist murders of 11 members of the MOVE family, men, women, and children, when police dropped a BOMB on their home in Philadelphia on May 13, 1985?! How many police officers and/or other officials are given the death penalty for the murders of people in our communities, period? That is unacceptable! Their badges, guns, tasers and titles do not give them the right to murder our people with impunity, on the streets, or in their prison death chambers!
The good news is that more and more community activists, and most significantly our creative and genius-filled young Bros./Sis., are not only adopting a community-wide view that eclipses the media and societal pressure to be consumed with self and self alone, but even understanding the broader significance of our people’s global struggle for liberation and self-determination! There exists an incredible potential to seize the time and build a strong anti-death penalty contingent within our organizations, and/or to make certain that a representative of our groups become involved with existing anti-DP organizing in our area, lest we continue to scramble and scurry when emergencies arise. There is an immediate need for education and discussion around the issue of capital punishment and there is an abundance of anti-DP information on and off-line to be disseminated within any gathering of our people. Furthermore, these politricians have to be made to feel that their continued allegiance to capital punishment will negatively impact their careers, and so will anyone else who purports to act as a religious or other type of representative spokesperson for our communities.
Addressing police/prison issues is critical to rebuilding grassroots activism in any real and meaningful way, and the issue of state sponsored murder is a crucial part of that. This is the system that far too many of our families are touched by and, as Bro. Hameen wrote, not just the death penalty but “the whole institution of criminal justice as we know it must be overturned.” We must make it “un-hip” to be down with the death penalty, particularly amongst our own ranks!
ABOLISH THE RACIST, CLASSIST DEATH PENALTY!
FORWARD EVER!
(1) From www.deathpenaltyinfo.org
* Even though blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers of crimes, 80% of people executed since the death penalty was reinstated have been executed for murders involving white victims.
* More than 20% of black defendants who have been executed were convicted by all-white juries.
(2) More at: http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Bad-Lawyering.php
Please also check:
http://www.troyanthonydavis.org
http://www.onamove.com
http://www.freemumia.com
TO ONE OF MY MOST BELOVED SHEROES, ONE OF THE STRONGEST, MOST LOVING, DEDICATED, BRILLIANT, CREATIVE, TIRELESS AND FEARLESS SISTA-WARRIORS I EVER HAD THE HONOR TO KNOW AND TO ORGANIZE WITH, A REVOLUTIONARY WOMAN & FORMER POLITICAL PRISONER WHO, LIKE MAMA HARRIET TUBMAN, DEDICATED HER LIFE TO THE LIBERATION OF OUR PEOPLE, AND PARTICULARLY OUR PP'S/POW'S, SIS. SAFIYA BUKHARI. PLEASE SUPPORT HER LEGACY BY VISITING http://www.myspace.com/safiyanuh.
Jericho -- at 10{speech writ. 10/7/08} (c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Ona Move!
I greet you all who've gathered here today, at the 10th anniversary of the Founding of Jericho-the Movement to free all political prisoners -- and also to remember the life and work of an extraordinary sista -- the late, great, Safiya Bukhari.
When she was here, all we could see was her in motion, working, leafleting, explaining, organizing -- all of these things -- ceaselessly!
She was a quiet, intense, ubiquitous presence who seemed like a force of nature -- a cloud, a ray of summer sun, a force that would be there -- for quite a while, if not forever.
But, in a blink, she was gone -- and only then did we recognize her strength, her iron will -- for with her gone, we felt a great void.
And all of our movements suffered from her loss.
But her passing shouldn't immobilize us; it should inspire us!
For, though many of us thought of her as a Superwoman, she was, to quote Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human."
She laughed, she cried; she got angry, she was joyous; she got tired, she was energetic -- she was brilliant, and she made mistakes. But what made her remarkable was her commitment to all Political Prisoners (PP) and Prisoners of War (POW).
On this, the 10th anniversary of its founding, let us all, in the spirit of Safiya, work to rebuild Jericho into a true social force.
We owe it not just to Safiya Bukhari, but to ourselves.
We owe it to our brothers and sisters in Bablyon's dungeons, like the MOVE 9, Jalil Muntaquin, Ruchell Magee, Russell 'Maroon' Shoatz, Hugo 'Yogi' Pinnell, Jamal Hart, and many other brothers and sistas, from various movements -like Leonard Peltier, the still -caged Puerto Rican independentistas -- and beyond.
We must salute and join the efforts of Ashanti Alston and Kazi Toure, to help Jericho grow into a true liberation movement.
Ona Move!
Mumia Abu-Jamal - (www.freemumia.com)
(More info on Jericho is at www.thejerichomovement.com -- the below video features Sis. Safiya at the initial Jericho March in 1998)
**URGENT SUPPORT NEEDED, PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!**
WE MUST SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA
THEY ARE OUR INSTITUTIONS, TOO!!
SFBAYVIEW.COM is online ! But the hard copy paper is gone... APPEAL FOR SUPPORT !!!
[Save the SF National Black Bayview Hard Copy !]
"In July 2001, hardly a month after my only child idriss Stelley
was executed by SFPD at the Sony Metreon, I knocked on the
Ratcliff's door on 3rd and Palou for the first time, to find out if
they would be willing to cover a story on my son.
Mary Ratcliff, in spite of dreadful deadlines to get her paper out,
opened her arms, sat with me, fed me, and let me tell her at
great length who Idriss really was.
Mary and her husband Willie, publisher of the SF Bayview, soon
allowed me to regularly publish law enforcement accountability
news in their paper to this very day.
Mary patiently helped me refine my writing and investigative
reporting skills, and tremendously contributed to my education
(a work still in progress...) on how the SF "liberal" and
"conservative" political chess game is played out...
They also generously hosted Idriss Stelley Action and Resource
Center on their property for five years, and allowed us to use
their fantastic backyard in the very Heart of beautiful
DOWNTOWN BAYVIEW (3rd &Palou !) to host a number of
Racial and Social Justice cookouts, press conferences and
poetry slams, attended by hundreds of our Sisters & Brothers at a time.
We do not always agree on political issues,
but I look up to Mary and Willie as some of my most powerful,
insightful Mentors and Elders, Movers and Shakers !
The saddest part of losing the hard copy edition of the SF
National Black Bayview Newspaper is that myriads of prisoners,
nationwide, also tragically lose their lifeline to "penpals", hope,
compassion, understanding, education & resources....
But WATCH IT NOW !
The Ratcliff may have lost a battle, but by far have not
lost...(not :"the War").. their mighty pursuit of.Justice and
Peace for us all on their Revolutionary Path! .
Now let's see how:
* the business community,
* the faith community,
* the National Community at large
* our Poor, Black & Brown Communitites,
* the thousands of folks who read the SF National Black Bayview paper, delivered to their very door, every week, for almost two decades, FOR FREE, will step up to the plate and show equal commitment and solidarity to the Ratcliffs, RIGHT NOW.
Show your Love to these two Peace and Justice Giants my People ! Willie and Mary Ratcliff always did, oblivious to their own quality of life issues, working for you around the clock, still do...
I once asked Willie: "Hey Mr. Ratcliff, when are you going to retire?"
He laughed out loud, his head tilted back, and replied without hesitation: "Well, NEVER ! Mary and I are in this for the Revolution until we die !"
So, are WE gonna quit on the SF Bayview ?
In Unity &Respect,
meshá Mongé Irizarry, director,
* ISARC,
* Education Not Incarceration, SF Chapter, ENI_S
* Black&Brown Equitable Drug Policies Coalition, BEDPC"
VISIT www.sfbayview.com AND DONATE!!
(415) 671-9789
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXCITING SUNDIATA ACOLI / NY 21 FILM PROJECTS!
PLEASE HELP TO TELL **OUR STORY**, IT CAN'T HAPPEN WITHOUT YOUR SUPPORT!
We need you…
And, once you consider what we are accomplishing to keep our history alive, our story told, our victory won…
… I hope that you will need us, too!
Greetings to All!!!
Our message is simple. We need your help to tell the true story of the continuing efforts of African-American movements by supporting our monumental documentary film projects.
Our project is told by actually members who experienced the movement. A Power Sun and Wrack 21 are very important projects to be shared with the community at large. The voices and stories of actual members of the New York Chapter of the Black Panther Party drive the documentary, as well as dramatic elements and interviews with scholars and others involved in the case. It is rare that an almost forgotten part of the past is told with such passion and a sense of urgency. But the past is not forgotten by those who continue to work for the liberation of all people from poverty and violence, who love freedom, and who want to ensure that the sacrifices of our forefathers and mothers were not in vain.
WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT AND CONTRIBUTION!!!!!
Traditionally, docufilms were low on the pole in the entertainment industry. While they are informative and educational tools, they have never had the funding of the “big box office” investors. Today, with films like American Gangster, Fahrenheit 911, etc., docufilms are becoming a large portion of viewer’s choice. However, films like these, including A Power Sun and Wrack 21, still rely on the private donations to make them come into fruition. These are two very important stories that need to be told. And it needs to be told by the people who were there. You can help TODAY by mailing your donation to:
Cashier’s checks/money orders payable to:
Field Up Productions LLC
PO Box 41329 Dallas, TX 75241
Field Up Productions POB 41329 Dallas, Texas 75241.
Or
Donate using our secure online donations form at www.fieldup.com. By your gift, you will know that you have helped us to tell our own stories and to keep the struggle for democracy and human rights alive.
Our Story…………………………Our Victory
“A Power Sun” – The Sundiata Acoli Docufilm
and
“Wrack 21” – Tribute to the New York 21 & Liberation Movement
These projects are not supported by grants or any major corporation. We have taken a grassroots and community approach to raising the funds to produce these projects. We need your donations to ensure this film will be completed by March, 2009.
Our principle cast is ready to aboard the ship to victory! As many of you are aware, we beginning the dramatic re-enactments this month. Irma P. Hall, Omar Wiseman, and Mutulu "M1" Olugabala as Sundiata Acoli, and Stic.man as Zayd Shakur are excited and ready to perform. Words are not enough to express our sincerity and appreciation to these individuals giving their time and talent to help us tell our story. It's commitment like theirs as others on board that show us how committed to Victory they are...
We've only just begun... So let's pull together our resources and spread the word to family, friends, colleagues, and others to visit the website and donate!!!!
Their and your help is greatly appreciated by political prisoner's, prisoners of war, exiled comrades, the community, and of course, Field Up Productions.
Yours in sincerity.... Dawn
ALL SUPPORTERS PLEASE VISIT: www.fieldup.com
Field Up Productions LLC
Dawn McGhee | Rita Acoli
POB 41329 Dallas, TX 75241
For more info contact: fieldup@gmail.com, www.myspace.com/apowersun, or SAFC @ www.sundiataacoli.org
Ex-Black Panther Rejected by U.S. Supreme Court in Murder Case
By Greg Stohr
April 6 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former radio reporter and Black Panther whose conviction for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer sparked international controversy. The justices, without comment, left intact a federal appeals court ruling that upheld Abu-Jamal’s conviction, turning away his contentions that prosecutors sought to exclude blacks from the jury. He was convicted in 1982 by a jury of 10 whites and two blacks.
The case is Abu-Jamal v. Beard, 08-8483.
Just a small change (Changeless change) Real change that you could believe in' would be an end to Empire, and an end to wars for corporate greed, not just a change of the shade of the political managers. That change, I'm afraid, is still to come. - Mumia Abu-Jamal
thank you ditto! you are beautiful you are my inspiration i am proud to be your fellow natty rebel warrior i and i love you like jah do!....nahmean? smile peace alicia banks OUTLOOK http://aliciabanks.blogspot.com
Also, check us out at 
