Visit
by Alicia Partnoy

On Fridays Mama breaks through
the locks and gates
to play ring-around-the-rosy with you,
counting the minutes.
Papa, from far away
in his walled-in day,
dreams of your warm skin
and your numbered minutes.
If I could, dear child,
explain to you the reason
for all the locks,
for all the gates,
for all the bars,
for the high walls,
for all…all
the numbered minutes…
My child, if I could
devour space
and play ring-around-the-rosy
far from every prison…
oh we’d be playing free
and my hands
would lose all track of time…

I’ve been restless since Thursday. A lot of other people have been too. We want to DO something about the fact that the FBI has revived its pursuit of Assata Shakur by adding her to its most wanted terrorist list and increasing the bounty for her capture.

I signed a petition demanding that the government re-investigate her case and exonerate her. What else is there to do?

So on Sunday, I put a question to my Facebook friends: “Would you host a teach-in about Assata in your home, workplace, house of worship, or community?” There was a lot of interest in the idea.

So in record time with the help of my friends Dara, Shonettia, and Nicole, there’s a site where anyone can sign up to host a teach-in about Assata’s life and case during the week of June 2 through 9, 2013.

On the Assata Teach-in site, you can fill out a form with relevant information about your planned teach-in, you can find a curriculum template for a youth teach-in and next week for an adult teach in. You can find resources about Assata’s life and her case.

Additionally, there’s a call for artists to submit posters with the message “Assata is (STILL) Welcome Here” in time for her birthday which is in July.

Anyone can participate in the week-long series of teach-ins this June either by hosting one or perhaps attending one. Anyone can participate in our attempt to replace the government’s billboard branding Assata as a terrorist with a poster welcoming her into our spaces instead.

I know that many have felt helpless and I hope that these actions are small ways to help us engage in solidarity work with each other and with Assata. I hold on to these words by Alice Walker, they serve guideposts for me:

“I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me.”

So I hope that you will choose to act. Please visit the Assata Teach-in site and share it with others who you think would be interested too.

Stay tuned in the coming days for details about how those of you in Chicago and across the country can participate in a week-long (June 2-9) series of teach-ins about Assata Shakur.

In the meantime, I am honored to share some words written by Assata Shakur to her supporters (members of the Hands Off Assata Campaign) who organized actions to celebrate her 60th birthday. Much appreciation to my friend Dara Cooper who shared these words with me and who points out that these are the most recent direct words from Assata to the public. The letter was received in July 2007.

First of all, let me say thank you, to the many people who have helped me to celebrate my 60^th birthday. Thank you for your beautiful birthday cards and for your warm and eloquent messages. Thank you for your activism, your radiant energy and most of all for your love. I am sincerely grateful for your support and for your commitment to social justice, truth and freedom.

It is somehow surprising for me to realize that I have lived on this planet for 60 years. I never imagined that I would live this long. Some of those years were very hard years, other years were happier, but I have never forgotten who I am or where I came from. For as long as I can remember, I was acutely aware of my oppression and of the oppression of my people.

In some ways it was easier for my generation. Racism was blatant and obvious. The “Whites Only” signs let us know clearly, what we were up against. Not much has changed, but the system of lies and tricknology is much more sophisticated. Today young people have to be highly informed and acutely analytical, or they will be swept up into a whirlpool of lies and deception.

Freedom, justice and liberty are words that are thrown around a lot in the United States, but for most of us, it is empty rhetoric. With each and every passing day the country becomes more repressive, the police more viciously aggressive and the so-called constitutional guarantees obliterated by scare tactics. The so-called ‘Conservatives’ are only interested in conserving their privileges and power and helping their rich friends to become richer. Black ‘Conservatives’ serve their “masters” and are basically interested in grinning, shuffling and ‘Uncle Tomming’ all the way to the bank. This is the most corrupt administration that has ever existed. They have blatantly stolen not millions, but billions of dollars. They are actively seeking to preserve the old colonial order with a new face, where the oppressed people of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East are expected to suffer happily, and sing praises to imperialism to the tune of the star spangled banner.

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The news last week of the FBI increasing its bounty on Assata Shakur seems to have reignited (for at least a couple of days) a discussion about current U.S. political prisoners. Matt Meyer edited an excellent book titled “Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners” that I often use for reference. Anyway, today I wanted to share an essay from the book written by Ashanti Omowali Alston that offers a mini-primer about contemporary American political prisoners.

After the Afterword:America Means Prison
by Ashanti Omowali Alston, 2008

Dear to our hearts: the political prisoners. In fact, not just dear to our hearts, but—in the words of New Afrikan People’s Organization founder Ahmed Obafemi—they are the heartbeats of our movements. They are the red ink dripping on the pages of our ongoing, unfolding stories of liberation within the confines of this prison called the United States of America.

Whether we are talking about Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement or the Black/New Afrikan liberation fighters, the Chicano/Atzlan liberation fighters or the independentistas of Puerto Rico, the white anti-imperialists or the earth/animal liberation fighters, we are essentially raising up the very foundational horrors of the American Empire. It’s a fact that nothing can be truly done about changing our world or creating a new one without acknowledging and joining with these representatives who stood up to resist.

Land? “Free Leonard!” is also about coming to terms with the theft of this land and continuing genocide of the Indigenous peoples. ”Free the San Francisco 8!” is also about coming to terms with the kidnapping, enslavement, and continuing judicial and social mass confinement of people of African descent. “Free Alvaro Luna Hernandez!” is also about coming to terms with the U.S. war on Mexico, the theft and incorporation of Mexican lands into the present-day U.S. You’ve heard the slogan: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”

“Free Oscar López Rivera!” is about coming to terms with the 1898 U.S. war with Spain, taking as its spoils the islands of Puerto Rico—still a colony to this very day. “Free Marilyn Buck!” is about coming to terms with revolutionary white folks who are not only post-modern-day Jane and John Browns giving unconditional support to folks of color liberation struggles, but who totally understand that their own humanity and liberation is tied to their frontline sacrifices. And “Free the shac 7!” is about coming to terms with new generations of folks who link their vision for nonoppressive, liberatory relations between human beings with all living things and the very planet. We have here the most ancient messages and wisdoms. Think of this, these political prisoners and their visions—their political vision quests—in light of all that is going on in the U.S. and the world empire today. In spite of how bad it looks, folks come forward to act. How can we not support them and work for their total freedom from judicial confinement?

Movements today extend from our political prisoners. Antiwar activists, do you know David Gilbert and the Vieques political prisoners? Environmental and animal rights activists, do you know Rod Coronado and Lauren Gazzola? Do you know the move 9? Cop-watch activists, do you know Abdul Majid and Bashir Hameed, the Queens Two? Do you know Chip Fitzgerald? International solidarity supporters, do you know Leonard Peltier? You, who feed the hungry, demand housing for the homeless, and work for the best and free treatments for those with hiv/aids, do you know who came before you?

The political prisoners tell us by their very presence that the Empire will not disappear or give in. It will not even compromise. Whatever it offers as a solution will only “fix it” to last a little longer. Those crumbs will solve or resolve nothing. Yet the political prisoners say that “Power to all the Peoples” is the only solution. And victories, real victories, can only happen when those who came before us are put on the top of our agendas. We cannot just fight for the future. We must fight for the past, present, and future.

We must figure out how to bring it all together. This issue is not just about freedom for the confined revolutionaries. It is about freedom with dignity for all of us that can only come about through rejuvenated struggle. Freedom for the political prisoners can only come about when grassroots movements are organized for our lives and use the act of putting political prisoners on the top of our agendas as a momentous and monumental seizing of hearts from judicial confinement. This issue is for communities and for the people’s institutions in our communities. It is for the revival of dignity amongst the Elders. It is for nurturing a dignified and righteous anger amongst the young. At the bottom line, we are at war!

We are at war, and they are closing in on us. They are using all the mechanisms at their disposal: the prison-industrial complex, the continued segregation and militarization of the police, the increased police occupation and murder of our communities, the underground drug economy’s use as mass social control, and the increasing distance put between people and formal mechanisms of power. We are living under a system that has no more need for Black, Asian, Latin@, and Indigenous peoples and poor Whites. It is a system that criminalizes youth, hip-hop culture, attempting to unravel any hope for self-determination. It is a system that uses the “drug war,” the “war against terrorism,” and the patriot Act to stimulate fear of so-called dangerous people. It is obvious that one key function of the democratic fascist state is to pre-empt revolutionary consciousness and organizing from gaining any ground. And one key to turn this back has to be free all political prisoners.

Free those whose armed points-of-entry into the brain of the Monster in the 1960s and 1970s led directly to their political confinement. They gave their all to struggle, to glorious revolution, to (as the Indigenous Elders would say) the next seven generations still unborn. We must fight aggressively for their total freedom, as powerful, organized grassroots movements!

In asking you to join us, we are asking you also to reclaim the honor of the phrase “revolutionary” for yourself. We must join together as revolutionaries who still believe in the dreams of our peoples. Our peoples… with many dreams flowing like rivers. We are asking that you not only be able to envision wonderful “after” scenarios, but that you also envision ourselves as daring to take on this Monster empire more assertively, more daringly. We are about reclaiming our lives, reclaiming the desire to live dignified lives. We are diverse peoples, respectful of each other and all living things. That’s all, that’s all. But to be willing to resist like a Geronimo, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Brad Will, Richard Williams, Nuh Washington, Safiya Bukhari, Judi Bari, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos is a way of honoring those who sacrificed so much to prepare the way. To be willing to sacrifice like an Assata Shakur is a way of preparing your way, preparing our ways.

Thus we say that revolution ain’t over, that no empire is invincible, and that the final determinator of all social dreams is the people, all the people.

FREE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS,
BECAUSE WE WANT OUR HEARTS BACK.

FREE ALL THE POLITICAL PRISONERS,
BECAUSE WE WANT TO NOURISH OUR DREAMS.

FREE ALL THE POLITICAL PRISONERS,
BECAUSE WE ARE STILL EXCITED ABOUT THE NEW WORLDS.

WE WILL CREATE ON THE ASHES OF IMPERIAL EVIL.

THE STORY CONTINUES… WE WILL WIN!

Source: Let Freedom Ring:A Collection of Documents From the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners. Edited by Matt Meyer (2008)

I received a couple of kind emails from readers who reached out to say that they appreciated my post about the false child molestation charges leveled against Zora Neale Hurston in the 1940s. One person asked if I could share the letter (written to her friends Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff) referenced in my original post. It’s taken a couple of weeks for me to get to this because the letter is fairly long and I couldn’t find the time to re-type it. Well today, I present the letter transcribed as it appears in Carla Kaplan’s book “Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.” If you didn’t read the original post, it’s a good idea to read it before the letter for some context.

[October 30, 1948 — library dated]
974 Ca[u]ldwell Ave
New York City.

Dear Carl and Fania:

No, you by no means invaded my privacy. A dozen times since this horror struck me, I have crept to the phone to talk about it with you, but the horror and the loathing of the filth that had been spewed upon me was so great and so unbelievable, that I could not bring myself to take it in my mouth.

The thing is too fantastic, too evil, too far from reality for me to conceive of it. I am charged with meeting this boy at 4:30 every Saturday afternoon in the basement of a house where I have never been and in company with two other adults whom I have never seen. This was said to be going on for more than a year, the very time when I was in Honduras. In spite of the fact that the woman who is doing this lying knows that I was not in the U.S. because I went from her apartment to Honduras. I laughed when Alexander Miller, [of] the SPCC (Children’s Society) told me that. Then he said, with a look of disappointment on his face, “Oh, but I understood differently.” I urged him to make an investigation of the matter, even give me a lie-detector test, but he brushed it aside. Then he went out into the room where the boy was, and came back to me and said, “but the boys say that it has been going on since then. You say that you returned in the Spring. William says that you have been meeting him early in August.” I laughed at that too, and said that I was not in New York City early in August. I was upstate, and could not have returned earlier than the middle of the month. “Oh maybe he could be off a week in his dates,” Miller countered. When [t]he hearing came, I found that he had fixed the date, the ONLY positive one as August 15th of this year. Then the horror took me, for I saw that he was not seeking truth, but to make his charges stick. Horror of disbelief took me. I could not believe that a thing like that could be happening in the United States and least of all to me. It just could not be true! I must be having a nightmare.

One inconceivable horror after another swept over me. I went out of myself, I am sure, though no one seemed to notice. It seemed that every hour some other terror assailed me, the last being the AFRO AMERICAN sluice of filth. You should know that a Negro who works down in the courts secured the matter and went around peddling it to papers. That is the blow that knocked me loose from all that I have ever looked to and cherished. Louis Waldman, my lawyer, assures me that the thing is so patently false, that I will have an excellent chance to sue both the Children’s Society and the paper.

But listen, Carl and Fania; I care nothing for anything anymore. My country has failed me utterly. My race has seen fit to destroy me without reason, and with the vilest tools conceived of by man so far. A Society, eminently Christian, and supposedly devoted to super-decency has gone so far from it’s announced purpose, not to protect children, but to exploit the gruesome fancies of a pathological case and do this thing to human decency. Please do not forget that this thing was not done in the South, but in the so-called liberal North. Where shall I look in this country for justice?

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Below is an antique colorized chain gang postcard. This is one of the new additions to my personal collection.

From my collection

Conundrum
by Carl Clark

I am my prison;
Encapsuled in my biases,
Caught up in my fevers,
Tightly bound by my loves

And holding all who love me
(I entrapped them with honeyed
words and dollars hung on weeks.)

Leave while you can
Before the ties grow too tight.
I cannot free you.
I am inside myself.

photo of Kiera Wilmot

Kiera Wilmot got good grades and had a perfect behavior record. She wasn’t the kind of kid you’d expect to find hauled away in handcuffs and expelled from school, but that’s exactly what happened after an attempt at a science project went horribly wrong.

On 7 a.m. on Monday, the 16 year-old mixed some common household chemicals in a small 8 oz water bottle on the grounds of Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida. The reaction caused a small explosion that caused the top to pop up and produced some smoke. No one was hurt and no damage was caused.

Prosecutors have charged her with several felonies and are considering potentially trying her as an adult. Read more from the post here.

I was outraged last night but then had to run to the police station overnight to address an issue that came up with a young person. I spent part of this morning searching for more information about the case. WTSP in Florida filed this report about the incident. The principal said that this was not a malicious act:

“She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone. She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked too.”

For those who want to speak up and take action to rectify this outrage. You can do a few concrete things:

1. Someone has launched a petition demanding that charges be dropped against Kiera and that she be re-instated at her school. You can sign here.

2. You can contact FL State Attorney Jerry Hill and tell him not to prosecute 16 year old Kiera Wilmot as an adult. Call him at 863-534-4800 or email his office here.

I personally called the office this afternoon and spoke to a woman who said that the case is still under investigation and that the office would have no comments at this time. I let them know that the entire country is watching to see what they will do. I expressed my outrage that they would consider charging her with felonies and as an adult.

3. You can also call the school district’s Superintendent: Dr. John Stewart –(863) 534-0521 to ask that he intervene on Kiera’s behalf and ask law enforcement to drop the charges. Ask him to re-instate Kiera in school.

4. To learn more about the increasing criminalization of black girls at school, read Monique Morris report.

You should also read Sesali Bowen’s blog post published at Feministing today that addresses this incident & raises important points about the criminalization of youth in schools.

5. For those who are interested in reading in greater depth about the criminalization of black & brown youth in the U.S., I put together a short bibliography of articles to read a couple of years ago here.

There are some updates to the story that can be found here.

The Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been in the news lately because of prisoners’on-going hunger strike there. In fact, just this week, the U.S. government has ordered medical reinforcements to the prison in order to assist with the force-feeding of Guantanamo hunger strikers. The hunger strike began in early February with a couple of dozen people and has spread to over 100 men now. The New York Times editorial page characterized the strike as “a collective act of despair.” The prisoners are being held, some innocent and many without charges, at Guantanamo indefinitely.

I was recently brought to tears in reading an op-ed in the New York Times written by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel. al Hasan Moqbel has been a prisoner at Guantanamo for over 11 years and is one of the hunger strikers. He wrote:

“I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.”

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