Former political prisoners have found refuge in the socialist Caribbean-Island state
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Black August series no. 3
As far back as history, such as the period of enslavement of African people in North America, resistance and rebellion have been met with retaliatory repression by ruling interests.
Freedom fighters like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, among many others named and unknown, were either brutally executed or left with no alternative but to seek escape from oppression.
The same legacy of isolation, brutality and lynching continued into the post-slavery era of the 1920s.th and 21str centuries. Between the 1880s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of African Americans were extrajudicially killed by mobs of law enforcement agents and vigilantes.
When the Civil Rights Movement erupted on a massive scale during the 1950s with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) and other actions, activists were subjected to unjustified arrests, convictions, and bombings of homes and churches. During the 1960s, many Civil Rights workers were arrested, beaten, intimidated to leave their home areas, shot and killed. People such as Medgar Evers (1963) and Herbert Lee (1961) of Mississippi were shot for their organizing work against racism and disenfranchisement.
In Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed 16th Street Baptist Church killing four African-American girls. During the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, three Civil Rights workers: Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, were lynched by KKK members who were employed as law enforcement officers.
In later years, key leaders such as Malcolm X (1965), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969) were all killed in plots carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). working in collaboration with police agencies and mercenaries. With the emergence of armed self-defense organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Monroe, North Carolina chapter led by Robert F. Williams, Deacons for Defense (DOD) founded in Louisiana, Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), the first independent political formation to use the black panther symbol in Alabama; The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Republic of New Africa (RNA), the Black Liberation Army (BLA), among others, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies increased their disruptive tactics against the African-American liberation war.
Assata and BLA
Assata Shakur, born in 1947, joined the Black Panther Party in the New York City area while a college student in 1970. She was already active in black student organizing when she made contact with the BPP, which during the 1970s maintained dozens of chapters throughout the United States, as well as an international section in Algiers, Algeria in North Africa.
Many militant youths in urban areas joined and were influenced by the BPP during 1967-1970 as the level of repression coordinated by the federal government accelerated. A split within the Party leadership during early 1971 over tactics led to the activation of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) which advocated armed struggle as a defensive measure in response to widespread harassment and imprisonment of BPP members.
The BLA and the International Black Panther Party with its paper entitled “Right On” supported the International Section in the 1971 split. Panther leaders such as Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Field Marshall Don Cox, Connie Matthews, etc., had held office in Algiers since the Pan-African Cultural Festival of August 1969, when the Algerian government recognized the BPP as the official representative of the African-American people. . The International Section hosted an Afro-American Cultural Center during the festival and would later move into an official diplomatic residence that had been occupied by revolutionaries from Vietnam.
Panthers inside the US who were aligned with the BLA continued to work in their underground structures. There were several armed engagements with law enforcement agents between 1971-1973.
On May 2, 1973, an encounter between Assata Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli resulted in the injury and capture of Acoli and Assata Shakur and the death of Zayd. A New Jersey state trooper was killed in what was described as a routine traffic stop on the Turnpike.
This incident came amid heavy propaganda within corporate America and the government-controlled media that characterized the BLA as a violent criminal gang bent on killing police officers. However, almost no mention was made by the mainstream press about the systematic repression to which the BPP and other revolutionary organizations were subjected by the federal government.
In an open letter from Assata, which coincided with the National Jericho March on Washington, DC in 1998, calling for a blanket amnesty for all American political prisoners, she articulates her position saying: “As Sundiata Acoli and I never got a fair trial either. We were both condemned in the news media before our trials. No news media was ever allowed to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI gave news to the press every day. In 1977, I was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years. In 1979, fearing that I would be killed in prison and knowing that I would never get justice, I was released from prison, with the help of dedicated friends who understood the depth of the injustices in my case and who were also extremely kind. scared for my life.” (https://www.afrocubaweb.com/assata2.htm#Open%20letter)
By late 1981, other BLA cadres and their supporters were the subject of a nationwide FBI sting. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, an acupuncturist, was targeted by the US government claiming he was the leader of the BLA and other revolutionary organizations operating in the New York/New Jersey area. Dozens of activists were subjected to wiretapping, grand jury questioning, incarceration and imprisonment. Dr. Shakur went underground in 1980 after establishing an acupuncture clinic in Harlem. Today Dr. Shakur, unjustly kept in prison since 1986, suffers from bone marrow cancer and has only a few months left to live. A campaign to win compassionate release has been underway for several months.
Assata Shakur and the Cuban Revolution
After being released from a maximum security prison in New Jersey, Assata lived underground for five years. In 1984, she was granted political asylum by the Socialist Republic of Cuba, then under the leadership of President Fidel Castro.
Cuban revolutionaries within July 26th The movement had won true liberation for the Caribbean island nation on January 1, 1959. The revolutionary government immediately outlawed racism and national discrimination while committing to helping national liberation wars in Africa.
In 1961, Robert F. Williams and Mabel Williams took refuge in Cuba, where they fled after being threatened with arrest and prosecution in North Carolina. Williams was given a program called Radio Free Dixie, which was broadcast over shortwave deep in the US
Other political refugees were later welcomed by the Cuban Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. When Assata arrived in Cuba in 1984, there were thousands of international volunteers operating in the southern African nation of Angola in an effort to secure the People’s Liberation Movement’s revolutionary government. of Angola (MPLA) under severe attack from racist South African apartheid. Defense Forces (SADF) and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By 1988, apartheid military forces had been driven out of Angola and the then racist government based in Pretoria soon agreed to withdraw from neighboring Namibia, where they had tried to suppress the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), the only legitimate voice of the Namibian people.
The Republic of Namibia was declared independent on 21 March 1990, just weeks after the African National Congress (ANC) freed South African political prisoners, such as future president Nelson Mandela. The apartheid regime would eventually fall after the first non-racial democratic elections in April 1994. Since this time period, Angola’s MPLA, Namibia’s SWAPO and South Africa’s ANC have remained in power.
Since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, the socialist government has continued to be an example of international solidarity with oppressed and working people around the world. Hundreds of students from the African American and Latin American communities in the US have studied medicine in the Republic of Cuba at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) through full scholarships provided by the Communist Party government.
These developments since 1959 have endeared the Cuban Revolution to revolutionaries in the US, Africa, Latin America and other geopolitical regions. Assata Shakur’s political biography provides a clear reflection of the interconnectedness of revolutionary movements from the US, Latin America, the African continent, and across the globe.
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