Introduction to The War Before
by Laura Whitehorn
For many, the iconic image of the 1960s is not a picture of hippies with daisy-wreathed hair dancing in the rain during the days of peace, love, and music at Woodstock. It is a photograph splashed across the front pages of Chicago newspapers in December 1969. Four grinning Chicago police officers, all of them white, carry a trophy: the bullet-ridden body of a young Black man.
Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was twenty-one years old when the cops murdered him. Other photos show his body lying face down on the floor of the apartment where he and fellow Panther member Mark Clark had been shot to death in their sleep. Still another depicts Fred’s blood-soaked mattress.
At first, the photos appeared accompanied by accounts from Illinois State Attorney Edward Hanrahan saying that the police had been defending themselves from bullets fired by Panthers within the apartment. But it quickly emerged that this “shootout” had been something quite different. 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. This was, in fact, a premeditated act of war conducted by police—assisted, we were later to learn, by the FBI.
Other images of Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party describe another side of that war—and help explain why the Panthers, and Fred in particular, were targeted. These photos, taken at rallies, marches, community-organizing projects and meetings, are flooded with a riot of emotions: anger, joy, humor, and most profoundly, the tremendous creative energy unleashed by a struggle for liberation. The Panthers sparked that energy. Their programs and their organizing led Black people around the country to take control of their communities. In those programs, many of the people in these communities saw themselves—not white institutions or politicians—as the source of change, achieved by working collectively.
Another emotion visible in those images—and palpable to anyone who attended a Panther rally in a park or church or on a street corner at that time—was hope. 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.
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When we learned that night that Fred had been killed, those of us in a collective of Weatherman (soon to become the Weather Underground Organization) felt fury and grief, but not surprise. We had been prepared for this. My own preparation had been short and dramatic. It had only been fourteen months since, one hot August afternoon in 1968, I had been sitting at my desk in Hyde Park, Chicago. I was then a disaffected, twenty-threeyear- old graduate student preparing for PhD exams in English literature. In my second-floor apartment, I looked up from Milton’s Paradise Lost to gaze out the open window onto a quiet street scene: a sidewalk, some trees, a fire hydrant, and a young Black man walking down the block.Suddenly a police car pulled up. Two officers jumped out and grabbed the man, throwing him up against a building, frisking him, and demanding that he tell them who he was and what he was doing on that street. Impulsively, I ran outside, where I tried to convince the cops to let him go. They threatened to arrest me as well. The young man struggled a little, then was arrested— not for anything he’d done, but for answering police questions too slowly. He was later released with a warning.
I did not go back to my desk that day. I did not return to my studies at all.
That past April, a few months before I’d moved to the city, the mayor of Chicago had called to the West Side not just the police but also the National Guard. 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 domestic war was easier to comprehend in the context of international events. I had already developed a vague sense of this context from teach-ins and rallies during those years when protests against the threat of nuclear war expanded into something broader and more radical. In stuffy, darkened high school and college classrooms, I had watched grainy newsreel films and documentaries showing how the US government habitually intervened both clandestinely and openly in suppressing democracies around the world. 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. In 1955, progressive Asian and African nations had met in Bandung, Indonesia, uniting to condemn Western colonialism and challenge the European choke hold on world history. Bandung and its outgrowth, the Non-Aligned Movement, changed the balance of world power. Eleven years later, a similar meeting—the Tricontinental Conference in Havana—brought African, Asian, and Latin American nations closer together in an anticolonial movement.
In January 1968, the Vietnamese Liberation Army had surprised most of the world by launching a general offensive and popular uprising, a massive attack on US forces known as the Tet Offensive.[1] Suddenly it seemed possible that the liberation forces could succeed in defeating the US military—as, of course, they would go on to do.
Clearly, this war had two sides. The oppressed nations were refusing to be victims.
A week after I’d witnessed the cops beating that young man on my block—as if we were in apartheid South Africa—the Chicago police launched another attack, this time with tear gas and clubs, against thousands of young people who had gathered in Grant Park to protest the Vietnam War during the Democratic National Convention. The next day, I was there among the thousands shouting, “The whole world is watching,” as TV cameras filmed us being gassed and chased by police and soldiers with fixed bayonets. Soon after, I began attending rallies held by the Black Panther Party, and I joined Weatherman—a group that would flourish, then disintegrate, in less than ten years. I also became part of a larger movement that will last well beyond my own lifetime.
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Safiya Bukhari was and remains a catalytic part of that movement. According to her own accounts, Safiya was radicalized into the Black Panther Party at the business end of a billy club. Born Bernice Jones in the Bronx in 1950, she grew up among nine sisters and brothers in a devoutly Christian, middle-class family (the family moved south soon after Safiya’s birth, then back to the Bronx). The children were relatively sheltered and were raised to believe they would succeed in the world through higher education. Safiya planned on becoming a doctor. In 1968 she was attending Brooklyn’s New York City Community College as a premed student.Her life to that point had been fairly conventional; she’d even joined a sorority. Along with two close friends, Yvonne and Wonda, Safiya pledged at Eta Alpha Mu, the college’s only integrated sorority. Part of their assigned pledge duties was to show up in costumes at the Port Authority bus station, where they were instructed to entertain the crowd. “I was dressed as a ballerina,” remembers Yvonne, “and Bernice came as Charlie Chaplin.”
Even then, Bernice Jones was on her way to becoming Safiya.[2] Yvonne wrote, in a letter to Wonda Jones in 2005, “With our sorority there were parties and socials, of course. But Bernice, Wonda, and I were more interested in helping change the future for our youth. We petitioned our sisterhood about sponsoring a child in Africa. But it was Bernice who asked why we needed to invest in an African child when there were needy children in the United States.”[3]
The sorority assigned the young women a field trip: they were to visit Harlem. “Bernice, Wonda, and I took the A train to 125th Street,” Yvonne remembers. “Upon departing the train station, we encountered a member of the Black Panther Party selling newspapers. I recall that he talked about the Free Breakfast for Children Program offered to the children of the community and asked if we were interested in volunteering or contributing to the cause.”
The women went to the church where the breakfasts were offered, to see for themselves. Safiya liked what she saw and kept coming back. It was at that time that she began to notice how badly the community was treated by the police.
“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]
One time, Safiya tried to stop an officer from harassing another Panther selling a Party newspaper. “Stupid me,” she said of herself, remembering the incident. “I said to the cop, ‘He has a constitutional right to disseminate political literature.’ He took my ID, told me get up against the car, and said I was inciting to riot. He arrested me, my friend, and the Panther [who’d been selling newspapers]. 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.”
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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—those who heard his speeches and worked to carry out that vision, whose passion led them to build an entire movement.Safiya Bukhari did the work and became, over the years, a leader among many people. 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 offi ce 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.
During those years, I worked with the Panthers in Chicago and saw them as the catalyst of liberation, not only for Black people but for all progressive activists. What I didn’t fully realize until some years later is that, although they were probably the most successful in mass organizing on a countrywide scale, the Black Panthers were one of many Black groups of the 1960s and 1970s who defined their goal as trying to make a revolution. Many Black liberation groups flowered in those years—Safiya herself also joined the Republic of New Afrika, though she never left the Panthers. 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.
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The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program—their platform of goals—was modeled on Vietnamese, Chinese, and other liberatory struggles.[5] Like many progressive groups of that era, the Panthers saw other oppressed peoples rising up all over the world. In those years, all of us found ourselves witnessing a global revolution—one that was, amazingly, not dominated by white leftists. Malcolm X was saying to millions, “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.” 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. Selfdefense was, in fact, taken up by some parts of the civil rights movement, as well as by many Black nationalists in and beyond the Black Panther Party. Robert Williams, leader of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, was, for example, among the early advocates of armed self-defense—which he called “armed self-reliance”—to respond to racist violence. An integrationist, Williams was never suspected of hurting or killing anyone. He sheltered a white woman and her husband in his home for a few hours when they were threatened by a mob—for which the FBI accused him of kidnapping the couple. Williams fled to Cuba, a refugee from United States law enforcement.[7]
Back in New York, Safiya Bukhari had become a young mother. She formed a political and a romantic relationship with another member of the Panthers, Robert Webb, and gave birth to Wonda (named for Safiya’s sorority sister, Wonda Johnson) in 1969.[8] 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.
This meant embracing the Panther principle of self-defense. The Panthers patrolled their neighborhoods, keeping watch over the police and helping, when they could, victims of police brutality. At a time when police killings of unarmed Black and Puerto Rican youth in New York were frequent—and consistently went unpunished—there was much to do. 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—a prosecution by the Manhattan district attorney, cooked up by the New York Police Department, to portray the Panthers as thugs and hoodlums. Charged with attempted arson, attempted murder, and conspiracy to blow up police stations, school buildings, a railroad yard, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens, the defendants were to spend more than two years in jail before all twenty-one were acquitted by a jury after deliberating for just forty-five-minutes.[9] As Safiya helped organize support for the defendants, the case not only disrupted her life and work—and that of the entire organization—it also confirmed her worst fears: the police were out to get the Panthers.
Other Panther arrests followed. Many of them were questionable; several were later proved in court to be frame-ups similar to that of the 21. Although many activists sensed that covert police surveillance was helping to provoke internal dissention in the Party, it wasn’t until after 1975—when the US Senate’s Church Committee confirmed the existence of J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO)—that the broader community fully grasped the source of the damage: since 1967 they had been targeted and infiltrated by the FBI, whose explicit purpose was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the Party.[10] Out of necessity, the Panthers began shifting their emphasis from community organizing to legal defense work. Exposing frame-ups—when it was possible to do so, when all the evidence had not been destroyed by the police—took years of work, not to mention years of the lives of those falsely accused.[11]
Way before we knew what it was, COINTELPRO exerted a tremendous influence on the consciousness and politics of all of us who belonged to or worked with the Panthers and other radical groups. We didn’t know that it was a specific government program, but we did know that we were under surveillance and attack. Many of us were subjected to random bullets and rocks that broke our office windows; strange break-ins where only our notes and address books were taken; and odd, provocative phone calls to our homes, offices, and families. Any ambiguity about the source of these attacks ended for many of us on the night of December 4, 1969, with the assassination of Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark in Chicago.
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 tactic of warfare.
In this context, and with more and more energy going toward supporting the Panthers and other radicals in court cases, many saw the need for underground organizations to carry on community defense work. At the same time, the step many US radicals took in those years to go underground was a leap of hope: the world was in flames, and movements around the world were winning national independence by means of armed as well as political struggle. Many of us felt we were joining a global revolution, taking a chance on a strategy that held the prospect of bringing down the empire. That is why, in her writings and speeches, Safiya will sometimes refer to her years underground as a defense against repression, and sometimes as an attempt to build a national liberation struggle to contend for power.
In 1971, COINTELPRO succeeded in driving a wedge into the Black Panther Party, provoking a split that created separate organizations as well as enmities that resulted in killings. Safiya became communications director of the East Coast organization and edited its newspaper, Right On![12] She also issued statements received from the clandestine Black Liberation Army (BLA), which was aligned with the East Coast Panthers. The split was deeply troubling, revealing how severely conflicts and divisions can corrode attempts to develop new values and better human relationships. In many of her later writings, Safiya explored the question of how the FBI had been able to create the split—what were the weaknesses, the failures, that allowed such fratricide to be instigated. She also entertained ideas for how to build a more cohesive organization, one that could withstand such assaults from within.[13]
By now, Safiya had devoted her life to the movement, setting aside the ordinary adventures of youth and responsibilities of family. The decision took a toll on her daughter, one both she and her mother later worked hard to repair.
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Throughout these years, Safiya played a critical role in developing support for the increasing number of Black prisoners who had been arrested and charged with serious offenses, many tagged by police and media as actions of the BLA.[14] In December 1973, she was arrested and charged with plotting to break prisoners out of New York City jails. A few days after her arrest, out on bail, Safiya told a radio audience that her charges were bogus, an attempt by cops to stop her work on political cases. The charges against her were, in fact, soon dismissed.Then she was hit with a subpoena to testify before a New York City grand jury that was preparing charges against other Black radicals. She couldn’t bring herself to testify against her political associates. Safiya left her family and friends to continue her work underground.
She stayed under for almost two years, until 1975, when she was arrested at the scene of a grocery store shooting in Norfolk, Virginia. Convicted of robbery and felony murder, and sentenced to forty years, Safiya began serving her time in the prison for women at Goochland, Virginia.[15]
Long before her arrest, Safiya had developed massive fibroid tumors. In prison, her condition worsening, she received frighteningly little medical care. In late 1976, Safiya escaped.
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.
True to form, Safiya organized, even when she was in the hole. She provided support to other women prisoners; once released into the general population, she created a group called Mothers Inside Loving Kids (MILK) to help long-term prison- ers regain custody of their children. She edited a book of BLA poetry, The Soul of the Black Liberation Army. In fact, many of her early writings were produced in prison. Above all, calling on an enormous reserve of psychological strength, she fought to maintain her political identity.
In August 1983, after eight years and eight months in prison, she was, to her surprise, granted parole and released. She rejoined her daughter and her mother (who had been raising Wonda) in New York City and began the process of rebuilding a relationship with her daughter. She got a job as a social worker in the Bronx office of the Legal Aid Society, an organization providing legal services to indigent people. After years of stress and trauma, she found that she had more political work to do than ever.
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Radical movements had grown and, by the time of Safiya’s release, there were more than forty leftist political prisoners in the United States. They represented movements in the Black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Native American, and white progressive communities. Within the following three years, some forty others would join them.[16] Between 1984 and 1998, numerous national and international conferences, publications, organizations, and events focused attention on these cases. Safiya was intimately involved in the efforts, becoming more central to them as time went on.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. Safiya was one of the people prisoners counted on. Sometimes, when fewer people were doing the work, Safiya—like Yuri Kochiyama for years before her—was the one.[17] 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.
I say “we” because I was one of those prisoners.
In 1985, I was arrested with five other white activists for conspiracy to bomb several government buildings that were symbols of domestic racism, such as the office of the New York City Police Benevolent Association (known for supporting cops who had killed innocent civilians) following the murder of Black grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs. We were also charged with bombing buildings emblematic of US foreign policy—most famously the Capitol Building, after the US invasion of Grenada and shelling of Lebanon in 1983. We stuck to specific targets and planned with care: No one was hurt in any of the bombings.
Without adopting a consistent name for our group, we chose that moment to carry out these acts partly because the government and the police were hot on the trail of Puerto Rican and Black movement undergrounds, and we wanted to throw a distraction in their path. As white radicals, we refused to leave these liberation struggles to fight alone. We didn’t want to say, “Go, defeat the enemy! We’ll be sitting here on the sidelines, clapping for you!” Supporting the struggles of people for freedom means that you take some risks yourself. It means stepping beyond your political comfort zone.
The six of us were charged with “conspiracy to influence, change, and protest policies and practices of the United States government by violent and illegal means.” I received a sentence of twenty years. And it was in the visiting room of the federal women’s prison in Dublin, California, that I met Safiya Bukhari.
She was there doing her work, visiting prisoners across the country, getting to know me and the six other women political prisoners in Dublin at that time.[18] She found out what we thought and what we needed, then met with activists outside, encouraging them to support us and all the political prisoners she encountered.
Out of this work she, along with political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim and former political prisoner Herman Ferguson, decided that a national mobilization to demand the release of political prisoners was needed. They created the Jericho Movement and called for a November 1998 rally in front of the White House to make the demand. The name Jericho was used to conjure up the image of massive resistance that would succeed in bringing down the walls of the prisons, freeing the more than one hundred political prisoners behind those walls at the time.
Safiya traveled around the country and abroad, speaking to anyone who might be interested, talking herself hoarse and exhausting herself in the process. She produced buttons, posters, fliers, mouse pads, T-shirts—anything that might generate awareness of political prisoners and make the Jericho rally a success. At the same time, she worked with Sally O’Brien on the weekly radio show Where We Live, on Pacifica station WBAI, delivering news and information about political prisoners. She was often seen at various conferences and events, behind a card table piled with leaflets, fliers, buttons, and books about the comrades in prison, handing out information, talking to anyone who stopped to look, asking people to sign a petition or attend an event. Along with her work in the Jericho Movement, she continued to work on the campaign to free Mumia Abu- Jamal. She had founded the New York Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition a few years earlier and was still co-chairing the group. She never stopped. The people who worked most closely with Safiya during these years—including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jalil Muntaqim, Yuri Kochiyama, Herman and Iyaluua Ferguson, Herman Bell, Pam Africa, Cleo Silvers, Suzanne Ross, Paulette d’Auteuil and Anne Lamb, Sally O’Brien, and Sundiata Sadiq— all now say the same thing when asked to remember Safiya: no one worked harder than she did.
Above all, Safiya was a passionate and effective organizer. In the summer of 2009 I discussed Safiya with Lumumba Bandele, who was raised in a politically aware and active family and community and is now a leading member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). He said, “Safiya was the reason I do work supporting political prisoners.” With other young activists, Lumumba remembers that “in 1994 or 95” he arranged an organizer training session, The Azabache Youth Leadership Conference, for young people. Seasoned organizers were asked to speak, offering guidance to the several hundred younger activists who attended the session. A prearranged plan was to be presented at the end of the session, outlining the next steps everyone would take together, “but Safiya diverted those plans,” Lumumba said. “She gave a fiery speech, ‘Which Way Forward?’ in which she convinced everyone to join together in work for Mumia. She swept us all up, and we spent the following months plastering the streets of New York with posters, talking to everyone who would listen—organizing support for Mumia. Someone asked her why people should support Mumia and other political prisoners. Safiya said, ‘anyone who is truly passionate about social justice has the capacity to become a political prisoner.’ Listening, I recognized in her words all the people from my childhood who were like that—the elders of our struggle, the people who’d worked so hard and given so much of themselves. As she spoke, I felt she represented me and my history and identity.”[19]
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By the end of the twentieth century, some of us began to get out, having completed our sentences or been released on parole. In 1999, I “maxed out,” having served the bulk of my sentence (the two-thirds mandated under then-current federal law). In 2000, as he left office, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of eleven Puerto Rican independentista prisoners in federal custody, along with those of Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, two of my codefendants. To Safiya, this was a miracle—and a blow: 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]Today, I look at the videotape of the “coming out” party that friends threw for me a week after my release. Safiya, of course, was there. Getting up to speak, she tells us that she is talking from the point of view of someone who had been in prison. Then she says: “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.”
Watching the tape now, I see Safiya’s pain and grief, mixed with joy, fueling her buoyant delivery. And I notice that she’s organizing me. I could show it to you. 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.
In the early years of this century, Safiya’s health deteriorated. Not many of us knew how badly she suffered from a variety of ailments connected with hypertension. A week after the death of her mother in 2003, Safiya died of a pulmonary embolism to the lungs. Her death at the age of fifty-three was mourned by leftists and progressives across the globe.
Safiya’s life is a story that stands for all of us who have not been defeated but have yet to win. In the speeches and writings you’ll find here, two emotional strands compete. There’s the excitement and energy she brought to her life’s work, motivated by her desire for social change and her awareness that imprisonment is one consequence of any serious struggle for liberation. But there is also the sorrow of losing people and leaving others behind—what Safiya once called the hole in her heart caused by the deaths and imprisonment of so many comrades.[21] As she spoke over the years, that sorrow crept in more frequently. The years pass, and she sounds angrier, talking about a lack of organizing, the absence of what she calls a “serious” movement for change.
I understand those feelings. Even though I’m out of prison, a part of me remains there. Political prisoners are, in fact, a part of all of us who were part of the 1960s. I hold them the way I hold myself. And I forgive the mistakes we made along the way and their human toll, or how we might have been too extremist at times. I forgive us the simplistic “us/them” binary (reflected in our use of “them” to mean anyone associated with the ruling class or the state), our failure to specify who was being held responsible for crimes of oppression and greed. I forgive us the stances that look silly in hindsight—the posturing, the drama, the self-seriousness. 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.
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When Wonda Jones first asked me to help edit her mother’s papers for publication, we both thought it would be a small task. Safiya, after all, was an organizer, an activist, not an author or scholar. Safiya was all about the work; she rarely seemed to have time for writing.But our project quickly grew. As soon as we began looking, we realized that recordings of Safiya’s many interviews and speeches must exist somewhere. In addition to the packet of essays Safiya left, all written in prison or late at night, additional articles and interviews began turning up. Ashanti Alston, Safiya’s longtime comrade and fellow activist (and former political prisoner), found his and Safiya’s marriage contract along with Safiya’s articles from old, yellowing issues of Panther news- papers. Wayne Lum, who had worked with Safiya on behalf of leftist US-held political prisoners, furnished the unique tape of a TV interview. Claude Marks and Billy X Jennings in the San Francisco Bay Area; Jalil Muntaqim and Herman Bell, then held in the San Francisco County Jail; Nancy Kurshan and Hondo T’Chikwa in Chicago; Herb Boyd, Michael Tarif Warren, Barbara Zeller, Sundiata Sadiq, Robert Boyle, Sally O’Brien, Lumumba Bandele, and Matt Meyer in New York; and Roz Payne in Vermont all contributed recordings and documents from their own archives. The themes here are disparate; they were determined not by a plan for a book, but rather by Safiya’s need to argue for various positions at various times and, more than anything else, to urge people to join her in supporting political prisoners.
What you see in this book is not a verbatim version of everything Safiya wrote or spoke, nor are the pieces ordered as they were in her papers. Her goal was not so much to leave a print record, but rather to organize. Each essay or speech was directed at a particular audience at a particular moment, producing a lot of repetition in the compendium of texts and speeches she left behind. I have tried to cut, combine, and edit these in a way that reflects her ideas and her goals. I have tried to make this Safiya’s book—the one she might have wanted to see published. Many of the original texts can now be found in their entirety at safiyabukhari.com and freedomarchives.org. The videos of several speeches can be viewed at thejerichomovement.com.
I am certain that there are other materials, more of Safiya’s words, out there. There are also oceans of memories held by her family, her friends, and all the people whose lives she touched— those who worked with her and benefited from her activism. This book doesn’t include those. It lacks the full, vivid portrait of Safiya that would emerge from such remembrances—by pris- oners as well as family members and political associates on the outside. That book, the one about Safiya, remains to be written.
As I typed and edited, I often talked aloud to Safiya, telling her how badly I miss her and how badly the movement misses her, and sometimes arguing with her about things she’d written. Transcribing her essay on Islam and revolution, for example, I came across her comment about resisting the “temptation” of homosexuality in prison and chastised her for failing to update the essay to reflect her own changing attitude about this issue. “I know you don’t think that way anymore,” I argued, wondering how I would make it clear to readers that this negative connotation doesn’t represent what Safiya believed in the years before her death. I knew this from my own comradeship and talks with Safiya, but also because so many of us have evolved in our thinking from some earlier rigid and limited viewpoints.
But of course Safiya didn’t take the time to go back and rewrite old articles and essays, for the same reason she wrote many of them in the first place. She wasn’t thinking about leaving her papers to posterity; she was thinking about writing in the moment as part of her organizing work. She wrote these pieces and gave these speeches and interviews out of her enormous passion for change and her rock-solid loyalty to political prisoners. Over and over, when Safiya told her own story, she made it serve the purpose of organizing. Her account of her early years doesn’t include many personal details that would depict her particular life experiences. Rather, she consistently recounts the parts of her own history that elucidate general political points, such as how events pushed her to realize the necessity to fight for justice. She’s not particularly interested in telling her story; she’s interested in how her narrative might help others see that a struggle for justice is necessary—and worth joining. A clear portrait of Safiya the woman does, however, emerge from these writings. If you read the chapters from first to last, you will meet a woman who was not afraid to grapple with hard questions stemming from the heady days when we saw revolution on the horizon. In particular, Safiya wrestles over and over with the problem of how our own weaknesses allowed government repression to confound our work and divide our organizations.
In some speeches and writings, when Safiya discusses events she’s talked about elsewhere, she provides what at first seems to be a conflicting account. But what these discrepancies represent, I think, is a search for the whole story: we don’t always take action for just one reason, and we sometimes see our own life stories from differing angles at different times. Taken together, Safiya’s accounts provide a multifaceted view of her life and politics.
In her later writings, you can feel an undertow of frustration that the prisoners—particularly the Black prisoners—were not being released, that all the hard work to generate support for them was not opening up the prison gates. Her heart continually expanded to embrace all the political prisoners, as well as her friends, family, and clients at Legal Aid who needed her help. It expanded until it broke, and we all lost a champion.
Safiya found it frustrating and ironic, as I do, that there is so much interest in the 1960s and the years of revolutionary movement, but so little interest in the plight of the political prisoners who were among the revolutionaries of those years. 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. I hope that this collection of her writings helps provide some context for all of us to address this contradiction and to build successful campaigns in support of political prisoners. I hope that the collection would make Safiya happy, as I hope it makes Wonda even more proud of her mother.
Abiding thanks go to Wonda Jones and her family for offering me the wonderful opportunity to work on this project; to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Frances Goldin for reading the original manuscript and offering helpful advice; to Amy Scholder for her vision and her faith in this book, her insights, and her editing skills; and to the wonderful staff at the Feminist Press for their clarity, generosity, and hard work. Jalil Muntaqim, Michael Tarif Warren, Ashanti Alston, Herman and Iyaluua Ferguson, Masai Ehehosi, Herman Bell, Pam Africa, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Claude Marks, Lumumba Bandele, Sally O’Brien, Billy X Jennings, Cleo Silvers, Diana Block, Sundiata Sadiq, Suzanne Ross, and Eve Rosahn deserve my gratitude for generously sharing their memories of working with Safiya, and for discussing this project. Appreciation is also due Barbara Zeller and my late comrade Alan Berkman for their consistent, soulful assistance and support as I talked out ideas about the book—even as they faced, with grace and courage, Alan’s final illness and death, and as Barbara has mourned.
Thanks don’t seem quite enough to offer my partner Susie Day for her extensive, expert aid in editing (and helping to write), her work in preparing the manuscript, her always open ear and mind, and her infinite patience over the four years this project has required.
Laura Whitehorn New York City 2009
Notes
1. Tet is the Vietnamese lunar New Year; the offensive was begun on January 31, 1968. [return to text]
2. In 1971 Safiya became a Muslim and took the name Safiya Asya Bukhari. See chapter 7, “‘Islam and Revolution’ Is Not a Contradiction,” p. 64. [return to text]
3. In a 1996 interview with Kim Wade, a student at Hunter College in New York, printed in the Black Student Union newspaper, The Shield, Safiya said: “I would have to say my first involvement with the movement was with the Brothers and Sisters for Afrikan-American Unity on the campus at [New York City Community College], now [New York City] Technical College in Brooklyn. That was more cultural than anything.” So her political consciousness was in process even as she joined Eta Alpha Mu. [return to text]
4. See chapter 12, “Talks on the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Struggle,” p. 119. [return to text]
5. 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.” For the complete text, see blackpanther.org/TenPoint.htm. See also chapter 10, “On the Question of Political Prisoners,” note 4, p. 102-3. [return to text]
6. The first quotation is a frequently cited statement that Malcolm made in various ways in several speeches and interviews. The argument referring to Germany, Korea, and Vietnam is found in his “Message to the Grassroots,” a speech delivered to the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit, November 1963. [return to text]
7. There are many sources for these facts, including BlackPast.org, University of Washington, Seattle. See also Timothy B. Tyson, “Robert F. Williams, NAACP: Warrior and Rebel,” New Crisis, December 1997. [return to text]
8. In one 1996 interview, Safiya mentions that she was previously married to one of the Panther 21, Abayama Katara (Alex McKiever). [return to text]
9. For more on this case, see Kuwasi Balagoon et al., Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21 (New York: Random House, 1971); Murray Kempton, The Briar Patch: The Trial of the Panther 21 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973). [return to text]
10. COINTELPRO was computer shorthand for the FBI’s secret counterintelligence program against the Black Panthers and other progressive groups in the United States. The existence of the program was first discovered in 1971 by activists who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. For more on the Church Committee, see chapter 11, “Building Support for Political Prisoners of War Incarcerated in North America,” note 10, p. 117. See also Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988). Various former informants and FBI agents have confirmed the existence of COINTELPRO and their roles in it. For example, Earl Anthony, who joined the Party and then became an FBI informant, wrote Spitting in the Whirlwind: The True Story Behind the Violent Legacy of The Black Panther Party (Malibu, CA: Roundtable, 1990). [return to text]
11. Geronimo Pratt spent twenty-seven years in prison while law enforcement and government lawyers withheld evidence that he was innocent of a murder (see also chapter 11, “Building Support for Political Prisoners of War Incarcerated in North America,” note 3, p. 116.); Dhoruba Bin-Wahad was in prison for nineteen years. Both men were released by courts that recognized that the two had been falsely imprisoned; both received large sums in recognition of the injustices. In other cases, the truth is only now being documented, after many years of imprisonment for the defendants. For one example, see the case of the Omaha Two, detailed in articles by Michael Richardson at opednews.com. These and other former Panthers remain, however, behind bars. [return to text]
12. “The newspaper Right On! was published beginning in March 1971 by the East Coast Black Panther Party” (New York Public Library, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY). [return to text]
13. See, for example, chapter 4, “What is Security? And the Ballot or the Bullet . . . Revisited,” p. 36, chapter 5, “Enemies and Friends: Resolving Contradictions,” p. 43, and chapter 6, “On the Question of Sexism in the Black Panther Party,” p. 52. [return to text]
14. Between 1970 and 1975, literally hundreds of articles in New York newspapers suggested that various acts had been committed by BLA members. See also chapter 1, “Coming of Age,” notes 2 and 3, p. 15. [return to text]
15. For details of these events, see chapter 1, “Coming of Age,” p. 1. [return to text]
16. See Dan Berger, “The Real Dragons,” in Matt Meyer, ed., Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free US Political Prisoners (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2008). Some of those prisoners (for example, Grand Jury resisters) were released before 1998, when Safiya noted that there were “more than sixty” political prisoners. See Chapter 20, “Q&A on Jericho,” p. 206. [return to text]
17. Yuri Kochiyama is perhaps best known as an associate of Malcolm X and the person who held him as he died at the Audubon Ballroom in 1965. She has for many decades been a tireless and inspiring advocate for political prisoners and freedom struggles. For many years she was also the person you would call if you were arrested or there was trouble. See Diane Fujino, “Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama,” in Fred Weihan Ho and Bill Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans” (Durham, NC: Duke, 2008). [return to text]
18. These were the Puerto Rican independentista prisoners Lucy and Alicia Rodriguez, Carmen Valentin, and Dylcia Pagan, and two of my co defendants, Marilyn Buck and Linda Evans. [return to text]
19. Conversation with Lumumba Bandele, New York City, August 24, 2009. [return to text]
20. Clinton did not have jurisdiction to grant release to any of the political prisoners in state jurisdiction. [return to text]
21. Kim Wade, a student at Hunter College in the late 1990s, had a similar impression of Safiya: “For Safiya Bukhari, to give of herself, her time and her essence is about all she can do to heal the scars and wounds she’s attained from the war of liberation” (Kim Wade, introduction, “Interview with Safiya Bukhari,” The Shield, December 1996). [return to text]
Laura Whitehorn is a former political prisoner, who spent fourteen
years in prison for activities which directly challenged u.s. imperialism at home. She was released on parole on August 6th 1999. Since her release she has remained active in the struggle for social justice, and to support those who remain behind bars. She is currenty senior editor of POZ magazine, the leading u.s. publication about HIV/AIDS.
