I saw this image created by Emory Douglas for the Black Panther Party. It has a lot of resonance in our present and is reminder that these concerns about government surveillance are longstanding (especially among black people).

by Emory Douglas

According to ThinkProgress:

Drug offenses remained the single most common cause of arrest in 2012, mostly for offenses involving mere possession, according to newly released FBI estimates. Of the 12.2 million estimated arrests 1.55 million were for “drug abuse violations.” Some 82 percent of those were for possession offenses, and 42.4 percent for marijuana possession. That is the equivalent of a drug arrest every 20 seconds, and a marijuana arrest every 42 seconds, according to calculations by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of law enforcement officials who support the regulated legalization of drugs.

Also, North Country Public Radio produced a very interesting report discussing why some black leaders were initially supportive of the war on drugs. It worth listening to here.

I am thrilled today to publish this essay by my friend, Dr. Ann Russo. Ann is a professor in the gender and women’s studies program at Depaul University. She was formerly the director of that program and has now founded a new project called “Building Communities, Ending Violence” at Depaul. “Building Communities” uses peacemaking circles and safety labs to address violence. I’ve been lucky to publish another essay by Ann titled “Violence, Healing and Justice here. Ann is currently writing a book about community accountability and transformative justice. I am so excited about it that I can barely hold it in. Stay tuned for that book when it is done!

10 Strategies for Cultivating Community Accountability
by Ann Russo

My commitment to prison abolition grows daily in part because I see the possibilities for responding to abuse and violence without relying on punishment, shame, and more violence.  The possibilities lie in building communities where community members – be they friends, family members, coworkers, or neighbors – rely on one another  to heal, intervene, to take accountability, and to transform abuse and violence.  That’s the essence of community accountability as envisioned by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and Creative Interventions.

Community accountability can be creating communal support for those impacted, and/or collectively interrupting, challenging, stopping, and shifting abusive behavior and the underlying systems that support it.  The key is working collectively in community rather than relying on external authorities and systems of oppression.  It is not a formulaic set of responses, but grows organically in relation to the specific people and relationships involved.  And like transformative justice, it seeks to address the underlying power systems that ultimately form the root causes of violence.

I work with the Building Communities, Ending Violence project based at DePaul University.  We create spaces to build skills and expand our imaginations for community accountability and transformative justice.  We engage in peace circles to build community, share stories of resilience and resistance, and create support and accountability.  We create strategy sessions to brainstorm, imagine, and practice communal responses to everyday violations.  And we use creative arts for communal healing and transformation.  Here are 10 strategies we use to build skills and capacity for community accountability: 

1. Shift from “what can I do” to  “what can we do?” When faced with abuse and/or violence, people often are not sure what to do.  Instead of feeling the burden of responding solely on our own, gather with others connected to the situation – family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, peers, etc.  Recognize that each of us is impacted by the abuse/violence whether we are directly involved or not and that collectively our experience, knowledge, and skills could shift the situation.  Together we can commiserate, analyze, strategize, and take action.

With a “we”, energy shifts and possibilities multiply – more support, ideas, and capacity.  Each person has a unique role to play to shift any situation – some might be in a good position to support the person harmed, whereas others might be in a better position to cultivate accountability with the person causing the harm.  Some might have material resources to offer, others might organize community support, and still others might offer perspectives on the underlying roots of the violence.  With more people, any situation can shift toward healing, accountability, and transformation.

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September 13, 1971: Bloody Monday. Rockefeller orders thousands of National Guardsmen, State Troopers and Corrections Guards to attack the prisoners. Hundreds of prisoners are shot. The State’s forces also shoot and kill nine of the hostages. The prisoners have no guns. Many of the alleged leaders of the rebellion are selectively marked and assassinated by the State’s forces. 39 men (prisoners and hostages) die in the retaking of the prison. The Corrections Department says the hostages’ throats were slashed by the prisoners (a lie). Guards torture and beat prisoners.

Here’s how Carl Jones-EL recalls the events of September 13th:

“The thirteenth, everyone was in the yard and there was a lot of tension, because you could see that these people were getting ready to come in. They was going to use force. Now from where I was, I’m in the middle of the yard, so to speak, near the trench. Next thing I knowed there’s this big helicopter flying over us and tear gas coming from everyone, and there’s a whole lot of shooting and carrying on. So naturally, everyone is running for cover. So I’m next to the wall and I note that around me everyone is hiding his face and guys spitting in rags and putting it to their nose. But what I know was troopers start coming from everywhere, then I start seeing different people fall, you know, they was shot. Guys was losing their hands and shot in the head and the neck. Like it’s been stated about indiscriminate firing. I don’t see it as indiscriminate firing because the people that were shot, and the people that were killed, they were selected, man. How you going to call this indiscriminate? You take the troopers that came in, they wasn’t hurt. Now if it was indiscriminate, why didn’t some of them get hurt? You see, why was it just inmates and hostages that got shot, that got killed? At the same time the helicopter was flying overhead, the helicopter was telling everyone to surrender and they wouldn’t be hurt. A lot of people were doing this and they were still getting shot. They were putting their hands up and this helicopter just kept flying around talking about surrendering and nobody would get hurt. So after everyone seen what was happening, they didn’t come out. It was a slaughter like, man, the people were defenseless. They had sticks and homemade weapons to defend themselves, but this doesn’t compare, man, with magnums and carbines. This is ridiculous, you know .”

Below is an excerpt from a forthcoming film about the Attica prison uprising titled “Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica.”

“A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.” – Steven Biko

My father was the first person to talk with me about Steven Biko. He’s taught me the most about African revolutionaries: Lumumba, Toure, Cabral, and so many more. My dad knew many of these men (and yes, growing up all revolutionaries that I encountered through my dad’s stories were men). Biko he didn’t know personally but he admired him greatly. Dad gave me a bunch of pamphlets that included speeches and writing by Biko and others. I read them voraciously.

I was a teenager when the film “Cry Freedom” was released. I remember almost nothing about it except for the police interrogation and torture scenes. Those left their mark on my psyche. I’d of course heard the whispers about my own uncle’s interrogations, torture, and imprisonment as a kid. But the visual representations in “Cry Freedom” made that vague concept real. It’s strange writing these words because it now makes so much sense that I would became obsessed with organizing against policing and violence.

Desmond Tutu recounts the story of South African minister of police Jimmy Krueger who upon hearing of the torture and killing of Steve Biko in prison is reported to have said that his death “leaves me cold.” Tutu writes of this: “You have to ask what has happened to the humanity – the ubuntu — of someone who could speak so callously about the suffering and death of a fellow human being.”

Our capacity to dehumanize each other is seemingly boundless. And yet, we are also capable of demonstrating great compassion toward one another too. This, it seems, is the central paradox of humans. The persistent question is which part of ourselves will we feed.

The police officers who tortured and killed Steven Biko on this day in 1977 chose to feed their inhumanity. [Read the harrowing sequence of events that led up to his death here]. They thought to bury Biko’s ideas (which they found so threatening) along with his body. They failed because some of us still remember the potency of his philosophy. He was the one who said: “It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.”

Were he alive today, Biko would surely be dismayed at the fact that white supremacy & domination persist in his beloved South Africa even though its leaders have black skin. He would remind us that blackness is about more than skin color. Now more than ever, we need to re-animate Biko’s ideas and apply them to our current challenges.

So today, please do me a favor, read something that Biko actually wrote himself. Not an article about him or someone else’s testimony of who the man was. Not an out of context quote that you find on the internet. Read his original writing. Let’s recover his voice.

by Jesus Barraza (Dignidad Rebelde)

You can listen to Biko talk about the Black Consciousness Movement below:

Attica Reflections
By Hersey Boyer

It isn’t strange to awake in the silence
Of midnights,
To hear MEN weeping, in harsh and gravelly voices
That turn away your lies,
They have witnessed the slaughter
And heard your songs of merriment
As you filled your cups with blood.
Anoint yourselves in madness,
Dance with Hitler’s ghost.

Born: August 19, 1941. Education: 9th grade Junior High School. Birthplace: New York City, Harlem. Time: Life. Desire in life: to be a man wherever I am!

You can access several resources about the Attica Uprising (including a primer and zine that I co-wrote) here.

September 10, 1971: Uprising continues. 33 observers assemble at Attica and pay a brief visit to D yard.

A SCENE FROM INSIDE ATTICA PRISON…September 10, 1971

From A Time to Die by Tom Wicker (1975) P.96-98

But Wicker’s impatience vanished as Brother Flip took the microphone and began to speak, even though Flip’s was the same message that had been spoken so often already – men in prison were still men entitled to be treated by other men like men, not as animals or numbers. But the conditions of prison life, of Attica, made it impossible for them to be treated as human beings. That was what the uprising was about, Flip said, that was what the world should understand.

The same message, but different. Wicker could feel, as could the other observers, its gathering power as Flip talked on almost conversationally. He was different from any of the speakers who had preceded him – soft-spoken where most of them had been ranting, persuasive as against their brute force, eloquent in a more learned and sophisticated way. Brother Flip seemed an educated man with a high sense of drama. Wicker speculated that he might have been an actor on the outside; where else could he have found the style to wrap himself in a blanket as if it were the toga of a Roman senator? He had a thin, sensitive face adorned with an elegantly trimmed mustache. His head was quite bald in the glaring lights. When he gestured, his long, expressive fingers underlined his relatively quiet words.

Flip moved toward a peroration as expertly as any politician Wicker had heard on the stump – better than most. D-yard was silent, listening; the bonfires flickered on the walkways. Beyond the linked men of the security chain, the mass of the brothers surrounding the dark circle of hostages were still upon the ground or in their makeshift tents.

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From Attica Prison Uprising 101: A Short Primer written by me with contributions from Lewis Wallace and illustrations by Katy Groves:

September 8, 1971:
There was an altercation between correctional officers and two prisoners. Later that day, correctional officers led two prisoners whom they believed to be responsible to Housing Block Z (HBZ), the disciplinary housing unit where inmates were locked down for twenty-three hours per day. Ray Lamorie, one of the two, had not been involved in the altercation. Observers saw officers strike Leroy Dewer, the other prisoner, while taking him to HBZ. Prisoners believed that HBZ was a site of routine, brutal beatings by correctional officers.

September 9, 1971:
The revolt begins. Prisoners subdue Lieutenant Robert Curtiss in a tunnel that divided the prison yard into quarters. A group of fifteen to twenty-five prisoners eventually overpowered four guards and locked them in cells. The uprising quickly spread to the other cell blocks, with more than 1200 prisoners congregating in Cell Block D. Although members of the Attica Liberation Front did not participate in the initial rioting, they quickly joined in to move the prisoners toward more explicit demands for reform. The prisoners create a committee to negotiate with Commissioner Oswald and demand that outside observers be present.

Once the inmates of Attica Prison took over the facility on Thursday, September 9, 1971, a committee of inmates drew up five demands as preconditions to end the takeover. These five demands would be broadened into “15 practical proposals” that would form the basis for the attempted negotiations among the prisoners, the committee of outside observers, state prison officials, and representatives from the governor’s office.

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Last night, I spoke at an event keynoted by Dr. Angela Davis. The event titled “If You Want Peace, Fight for Justice” addressed gun violence, social justice activism, and the work we must do to build a path forward.

Each panelist had 3 minutes to offer comments after Dr. Davis spoke. These are mine as written. The comments that I delivered varied a little from my original text.

My comments tonight center on the insidious & (for too many) invisible violence deployed under the pretext of ending gun and other forms of violence and crime in our city.

I’ve lived in Chicago since 1995 and I’ve never experienced a summer like this one.

For us, in my community, the summer kicked off with intense, relentless, and surely illegal police harassment of young people and specifically of young black men.

Young people riding their bikes on sidewalks instead of being ticketed were hauled into police lockups where they were accused of resisting arrest and then funneled into Cook County jail where preparations began in April to make room for such egregious arrests.

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