[News] Lenore Daniels on Safiya Bukhari

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Safiya Bukhari: The War Before
Represent Our Resitance

By Lenore J. Daniels, PhD
BlackCommentator.com
2/4/2010

“Tell No Lies and Claim No Easy Victories”

Kids aren’t learning it, because we’re not 
spreading the history ourselves. In Africa, they 
had griots. So we have to be the modern-day storytellers.

Safiya Bukhari died in 2003. She was just 53 
years old. It saddens me to know this courageous 
woman no longer walks this Earth, and that I 
didn’t know of her or her work while she was physically here.

I began reading her collection of essays 
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1558616101?ie=UTF8&tag=blackcommenta-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1558616101>The 
War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a 
Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and 
Fighting for Those Left Behind, published by The 
Feminist Press and edited by political activist, 
Laura Whitehorn, just after a 7.3 earthquake 
struck Haiti. As I watched or listened to news 
reports trying to blanket the whole of 
traumatized community in Port-au-Prince and 
surrounding areas as “looters,” and I watched the 
U.S. Empire, 8 days after the man-made 
catastrophe send its U.S. Marines (some 20,000 
now) to take control of Haiti’s airport and 
“secure” the country. I am reading Bukhari’s 
account of brutality at the hands of local police 
because she decided to stand in solidarity with 
her community, and I think of the long struggle 
of Haitians against European colonists, against 
U.S. occupation, against U.S.-backed dictators 
and UN trained Haitian National Police (HNP), and 
against the U.S.’s economic agenda to privatize 
Haiti’s national resources. Then I realize her 
daughter, Wanda Jones, in the “Preface,” Angela 
Y. Davis in the “Forward,” and Whitehorn in the 
“Introduction” were mistaken - Safiya Bukhari is alive!

To an Empire, hell bent on repressing if not 
killing the spirit of love and compassion among 
and for the poor and working class communities, 
the images of Haitians using their bare hands to 
rescue fellow Haitians and organizing 
neighborhood response units warranted security 
measures just as it did when Bukhari, a Black 
woman with a young daughter, decided to take 
responsibility for an extended number of children 
in Harlem through the Black Panther’s Free 
Breakfast for Children program. The HNP, trained 
by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in 
Haiti (MINUSTAH) team, reports Kevin Pina, has 
been responsible for “summary executions, 
arbitrary arrests, and the killing of unarmed 
demonstrators,” the masses of poor and working 
class Haitians, who simply want the return of 
their president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The 
mission to stabilize Haiti with violence is one 
Bukhari would recognize as a COINTELPRO mission. 
Just as Lavalas, the Peoples’ Party, Aristide’s 
Party, has fought since 1994 to feed, educate, 
defend the Haitian poor and working class while 
exposing the brutality of the foreign police and 
military operations against the people, the Black 
Panthers, too, sought to expose how the police 
systematically targeted the Black population even 
before its members became aware of how COINTELPRO 
systematically targeted them. Safiya Bukhari’s 
collection of essays again and again refers to 
the traumatic affects of COINTELPRO on the Black 
community, particularly the Black Panthers, sworn 
to feed, educate, and defend the community.

The corporations receive a ruling from the 
Supreme Court: Give all the money you want to 
political candidates! CEO’s brag about the 
millions they will receive this year in bonuses 
after receiving trillions from taxpayers who 
saved an economic system that permits Wall Street 
and the corporations to continue their rule. In 
the meantime, Black unemployment is just over 16 
percent. Yes, nothing short of a revolution is 
needed to end the oppression of the poor and 
working people. You think that the U.S. Empire’s 
emphasis on security operations, renamed and 
globally expanded operations of COINTELPRO, is 
unrelated to the systematic targeting of the poor 
and working class people around the world? The 
U.S., says Professor Philip Brenner, recently on 
Focus on Cuba, WBAI, (1/25/2010), “doesn’t define 
security the way other countries define it.” 
Generally the term refers to an attack against 
your homeland. But Homeland Security wasn’t 
established until 2002 and that means, Brenner 
explains, that the defense Department is about 
expanding Empire. “Security is bound up in the protection of its Empire.”

The common enemy for domestic and foreign 
struggles against oppression is, Bukhari writes, 
“racism, capitalism, and imperialism.” It is no 
accident that COINTELPRO and MINUSTAH are 
activated to respond to the poor and working 
class within and without the U.S. or that the 
U.S. sent 20,000 Marines to Haiti while blocking 
other nations from delivering water, food, and 
medical supplies to a people thirsty, hungry, 
dying of serious injuries as a result of being 
crushed by collapsing cement buildings. As 
Brenner explains, the U.S. is the only country in 
the world that maintains its “vital interests” - 
that is, “vital” as in necessary for life - are 
global! The U.S. works to save the life of the 
capitalists at the expensive of the poor and 
working class, and it is not beyond the use of 
fascist repressive tactics to achieve its goals.

I hear Bukhari reiterate that nothing short of a 
revolution “will eradicate the racism, 
capitalism, and imperialism that oppress me and 
my people as well as other exploited and 
oppressed people everywhere.” The “capitalist 
system of this country has to be destroyed and 
replaced with an economic system built on the 
premise 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’”

Freedom vs. Equality
Bukhari is a woman! It’s so refreshing to read 
the thoughts of a woman who found her 
revolutionary role as a movement thinker and 
activist. While she worked as a member of the 
Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, as 
a citizen in the Republic of New Afrika, and as a 
co-founder of the Jericho Movement, she wrote and 
re-worked her essays, as Whitehorn explains, not 
because she was “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.

The War Before is the work of a thinker, a 
theorist, a writer, and yes - an activist who not 
only tried to record the moment of action, but 
also tried to evaluate the past to understand 
what led to a specific course of behavior on the 
part of the protagonist(s) and antagonist(s) in 
the grand narrative of resistance and counter 
resistance. It wasn’t Bukhari’s intention to see 
her collection of work as text, as Whitehorn 
explains, but for Bukhari, this work of writing 
(thinking) was part of producing the revolutionary many knew as Safiya Bukhari.

I am reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King who 
re-wrote and re-told passages or Biblical stories 
in his speeches and writings, depending on 
necessity and the audience. At other times I 
thought of the novelist William Faulkner who 
spoke of his struggles to tell the story of the 
South, the story of its violent foundation, with the writing of each novel.

<http://www.blackcommentator.com/subscriptions/gift_subscriptions_menu.html>So 
it was with Bukhari. In several of her essays and 
speeches, she returns to the issue of violence 
against the poor and working class through 
educational institutions, poor health care, 
police harassment in the neighborhoods, and 
through hate-filled propaganda used to demonize 
political activists and political prisoners, in 
particular the Black Panthers. A number of the 
essays not only record what the Black Panthers 
did right (the Free Breakfast for Children 
Program and the Ten-Point Program, for example) 
but also considered how the Black Panthers were 
destroyed from within by the activities of the 
FBI’s COINTELPRO. The U.S. has become a State 
obsessed with “security.” COINTELPRO is still 
with us. It’s called the “War on Terrorism” or 
it’s a mission concerned with stabilizing the 
population through a oppressive economic agenda.

So Bukhari begins by reflecting on the definition 
of “security.” In the battle of security - 
COINTELPRO’s surveillance and assassination 
program and the Black Panther’s program to defend 
the community against violence - how did the 
former succeed? What is the meaning of 
“security”? Security, Bukhari writes, means 
“freedom from danger, fear, and anxiety.” To have 
“security” means you are enabled “to trust your 
comrades implicitly and to know with certainty 
what they will do in any circumstance is the best 
security
 [for] the basic element of security is trust.”

Secrecy is counterintuitive to security. Secrecy 
becomes a weapon the enemy can employ against the 
individual or the group. “What the police know, 
the people should know.” Like snakes, secrets 
crawl from the media, to the next-door neighbor, 
and back around to other comrades, producing a 
venomous atmosphere of mistrust, insecurity. 
“What the police know, the people should know.” 
Take one weapon from the police.

In an atmosphere of mistrust, insecurity, the 
Black Panthers and other activists, Bukhari 
suggests, lost sight of the revolutionary goals. 
Settling for easy, short-sighted gains to easy 
the suffering, too many Blacks, she writes, 
equated “freedom” with “equality.” The former 
means you want the ability to determine for 
yourself, without social and political pressures, 
tainted as they are by racism, how you want to 
live your life and what you want to achieve for your family and community.

Equality (uniformity, conformity, likeness), on 
the other hand, is not the same as freedom. Do 
you want the same things, the “same access to 
things that the next door person has”? Or do you 
want freedom? I see that the Black community 
doesn’t ask this question anymore. We seem to 
want equality in the Empire! We want to be equal 
partners in racist, capitalist, imperialist 
agendas. What kind of victory does equality represent for the many?

“What is out goal?” The enemy never loses track 
of its goal to eliminate the Black Panthers then 
and now. It never loses track of its goal to 
eliminate political activists and ultimately stifle the movement for freedom.

What’s left of the movement, Bukhari writes, has 
been “bogged down in a quagmire of infighting, 
backstabbing, manipulation, and one-upmanship.” 
Instead of remaining steadfast in revolutionary 
convictions, Bukhari writes, the Black Panthers 
“practiced liberalism.” The split in the Black 
Panther Party in 1971 was the result, she writes, 
of members harboring ill will and believing 
rumors “without investigation.” In turn, we 
allowed this to go on until it grew so large that 
we believed the only way out was fratricide. If 
we had nipped it in the bud, COINTELPRO would not 
have been able to do its job. A lot of comrades 
would not have been killed, many more would not 
have ended up in prison for all those years, and 
countless others would not be members of the class of walking dead.

For Bukhari some members of the Black Panthers 
and other political activists took their eyes off 
the goal of freedom, in a war to eradicate 
racism, capitalism, and imperialism. I hear her 
saying that ultimately as activists, many of us 
deserted the struggle for the rights of the poor and working class.

Bukhari redoubled her own efforts to achieve the 
goal of freedom realizing war for substantial 
change in human relations doesn’t yield easy victories for the few.

“They Create a War Atmosphere”
In 2002, Bukhari wrote an Afterward to the first 
essay in The War Before, “Coming of Age: A Black 
Revolutionary” which was written in 1979. She was 
asked to attend a conference organized by 
Professor Joy James who was a professor then of 
Afrikana Studies at Brown University. The 
conference was titled “Imprisoned Intellectuals: 
A Dialogue with Scholars, Activists, and (Former) 
US Political Prisoners on War, Dissent, and 
Social Justice.” Bukhari writes that she had not 
thought of herself as an “intellectual” or a 
“prison intellectual.” The term “intellectual” 
had been an “anathema” to her. But she was forced to “face a reality.”

I was there because I had spent time in prison 
writing and thinking. Thinking and writing. 
Trying to put on paper some cogent ideas that 
might enable others to understand why I did some 
of the things I had done and the process that had 
brought me/us to the point we were at. I had come 
to the conclusion that if we didn’t write the 
truth of what we had done and believed, someone 
else would write his or her version of the truth.

She realized that so many citizens of the U.S. 
including Blacks believe what they have been told 
by the police and other governmental agencies 
about the Black Panthers, activists in general 
and political prisoners of the struggle. “The 
government and the media,” says Bukhari in a CBS 
TV video, CBS Tries the New York Three, “have 
conned us into blaming the victims for what was 
done to them under COINTELPRO.” At one point she 
asks: How do we (re)engage this war? How do we 
push back the State? Well, we must speak; we must 
write; we must intervene in that narrative of 
violence compiled by the U.S. government.

Bukhari’s role as a revolutionary hadn’t been 
planned. One of 10 children, Bukhari’s parents 
taught her and her siblings to believe that with 
the “right education” they could “make it.” 
Bukhari tells us that she had decided to be a 
doctor. In her second year of college, she joined 
a sorority whose yearly projects included “work 
in the ghettoes of New York” among the 
“disadvantaged.” At the time, Bukhari didn’t 
think there were “disadvantaged” people in the U.S.

In Harlem, she volunteered with the Black 
Panther’s Free Breakfast program to serve food to 
hungry children. Soon after she began this work, 
she realized fewer and fewer children were coming 
to receive food. Bukhari says she questioned the 
children and discovered that the police had told 
parents that the program was feeding the children 
“poisoned food.” This incident was followed by another.

On a corner in Harlem, a Black Panther was 
attempting to sell the Panther newspaper on the 
corner when two policemen insisted he move away. 
Bukhari was walking by with a friend; both of 
them stopped to listen. The young man insisted he 
could sell the paper there. Then “without 
thought,” she writes, “I told the police that the 
brother had a constitutional right to disseminate 
political literature anywhere.” The police turned 
on her, asking for her identification and 
proceeded to arrest her, her friend (another 
woman) and the brother. She had never been arrested before.

At the 14th Precinct, the women were strip 
searched. “After the policewoman searched me,” 
writes Bukhari, “one of the male officers told 
her to make sure she washed her hand so she would not catch anything.”

When Bukhari was released the next day, she went 
back to Harlem, and “joined the Black Panther 
Party.” This was 1969. In the next two years, she 
writes that she “had seen friends and loved ones 
killed or thrown into prison.” Others, she 
believed, “would never turn state’s evidence” do 
so and melt “into the woodwork.” In the meantime, 
by 1973, the police were becoming more suspicious 
about her and what she “might be doing.” She was 
“actively and vocally supported BLA members.”

And so the authorities wait. Then the day came.

January 25, 1975. Bukhari is in Virginia with 
members of the Amistad Collective of the BLA to 
practice night firing in the country. The group 
had to start out for Jackson, Mississippi that 
evening, so they decided to stop at a store “to 
pick up cold cuts for sandwiches.” The men were 
to stay in the car while Bukhari offered to enter the store.

I entered the store, went past the registers, 
down an aisle to the meat counter and started 
checking for all-beef products. I heard the door 
open, saw two of the brothers coming in, and did 
not give it a thought... but out of the corner of 
my left eye, I saw the manager’s hand with a rifle pointed toward the door.

Bukhari hid in the aisle. Shooting began. Then 
she saw Kombozi Amistad walking toward her. “As 
he approached, he told me he had been shot. I did 
not believe him at first, because I saw no blood 
and his weapon was not drawn.” Just then, she 
witnessed another Panther, Masai Ehehosi, who 
became her codefendant, receive a bullet in the 
face. While she tried to comfort Kombozi, the 
store manager and his son approached her and 
Kombozi. Paul Green Sr. and Jr. begin stomping 
Kombozi to death, as Bukhari records, “in front of my eyes.”

The authorities declared the killing of Kombozi 
“justifiable homicide.” The next day, the FBI 
held a press conference to announce to the public 
that Bukhari “was notorious, dangerous, etc., and 
known to law enforcement agencies nationwide.”

“They create a war atmosphere.”

Sentenced to 40 years for armed robbery, (she was 
released in 1983), Bukhari was placed in maximum 
security at the Virginia Correctional Center for 
Women in Goochland. The following year, she 
writes, she began hemorrhaging from tumors. 
Bukhari tried to seek medical attention but was 
repeatedly denied. “The general feeling was that 
they could not chance hospitalization for fear I 
would escape; as such, they preferred to take a 
chance on my 
life<http://www.blackcommentator.com/subscriptions/subscriptions_menu.html>” 
(my emphasis). Bukhari considered escaping and 
ultimately did so only to be captured and 
returned to isolation once again in a maximum 
security cell. But she didn’t give up. As Bukhari 
writes, the private/personal became a 
public/collective struggle to expose the “the 
level of medical care at the prison” and to put 
pressure on the prison to give her the care she 
needed. Finally, in 1978 she underwent a 
hysterectomy because, as she explains, by then, 
“I was so messed up inside that everything but one ovary had to go.”

But the following year, Bukhari found the power 
of the pen! She began to write because women in 
the prison had to be organized. Organizing 
thought precedes organizing people. As Bukhari 
writes, she observed the oppressor “play a 
centuries-old game on Black people - divide and 
conquer.” As Bukhari explains, under pressure, 
Black women sold Black men “down the river” while 
the State follows up by separating these women from their children.

She witnessed Black women no longer focused on 
family and community, and “us as a people.” 
Instead, the younger women were “about looking 
good, having fun, and ‘making it.’” As detached, 
lost elements of the collective spirit, these 
women become difficult to educate and to organize 
because they have become more manageable clogs of 
the Empire. The State, Bukhari acknowledges, 
prefers this anomaly rather than the Black 
mother, wife, daughter, and woman in general, who 
stand by and, in many cases, fight “beside their 
men when they were captured, shot, or victimized 
by the police and other agents of the 
government.” Frightened of “the potential of 
Black women to wreak havoc when these women began 
to enter the prison and jails in efforts to 
liberate their men,” she concludes: the State’s 
war attempts to destroy any concept of 
family/community (private/public resistance 
campaigns) outside as well as inside the prison walls.

The Struggle Continues
We are fighting to be human beings, to not have 
to accept roles as the tamed Negro, someone who 
acknowledges and submits to the superiority of 
the rulers by adjusting and conforming to 
comfortable embodiments of the familiar but still 
Other entity. We should reject the rulers’ plan 
to create us in their image. The role of the 
adjusted and conformed 
<http://www.blackcommentator.com/sendpage/recform.php>Black 
today employs the same blueprint use to mold the 
images of Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and 
Jezebel. In the essay titled, “Lest We Forget,” 
Bukhari reminds of the “fallen heroes of the 
People’s War of Liberation. Author Morris, bobby 
James Hutton, Nathaniel Clark, Alprentice 
“Bunchy” Carter, John Jerome Huggins, Fred 
Hampton, Jonathan and George Jackson, Sandra 
Pratt, Twymon Myers and so many others didn’t die 
for the resurrection of Sambos and Jezebels.

The revolutionary begins at home with the 
individual and collective of individuals fighting 
for the right to be - to be human, to be Black. 
As Bukhari writes, “no concrete change in the 
very real condition of Black people occurred. 
We’re still at the bottom of the totem pole.”

The movement to bring about radical change is a 
process as Bukhari reminds us. That process 
begins by envisioning a “new society.” “if we 
truly are to create a new society, we must build 
a strong foundation.” I think for Bukhari, 
thinking and writing was her way of creating a 
strong foundation in which to envision something 
new. Building a movement, requires that the 
workers “do it the hard way” - “slowly and 
methodically, building
step by step and block by 
block” - much like the process of observing, 
thinking, and writing necessary to see the road 
to freedom. “The difficult part is the day-to-day 
organizing, educating, and showing the people by 
example what needs to be done to create a new 
society.” This is now a task left to us to continue.

It’s not so radical to think and re-think a 
vision of that “new society” without racism, 
capitalism, or imperialism. What’s so radical 
about ending the need for wars and war 
profiteers? What’s so radical about ending 
narratives of domination that call for the 
control of the majority of humanity and this 
planet? Think of where we are now with jobs 
outsourced to the so-called “developing” world 
where those fellow workers are paid slave wages. 
Think of the repressive state of K-12 in urban 
areas throughout this country. Blacks and 
Latino/a youth are introduced to law enforcement 
and detention before they can read or write! 
Think of protesters challenging the status quo of 
undemocratic laws and procedures coming 
face-to-face with fascist forces equipped with 
high-tech weaponry. Think of the increase power 
given to the corporations by the U.S. Supreme 
Court. Think of the Earth as the battlefield of 
the U.S. Empire where enemies and wars, 
militarization and oppression are the best the U.S. can offer the world.

<http://www.blackcommentator.com/contributions.html>Just 
as the revolution is a work in progress, 
Bukhari’s writings were a work in progress, 
reflecting her thoughts on organizing for an end 
to capitalism and working toward a new society. 
In the “Afterword,” political prisoner and 
journalist Mumia Abu Jamal states that Bukhari’s 
“passing wasn’t the only tragedy; the tragedy was 
that more people didn’t know her, learn from her, 
or grow from her fund of hard-won wisdom.” While 
I acknowledge the tragedy of her physical death, 
I prefer to see her passing as a transition. 
Among the ancestors now, she offers us her wisdom 
in 
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1558616101?ie=UTF8&tag=blackcommenta-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1558616101>The 
War Before. This is a collection of essays, 
speeches and interviews, reveals a strong spirit, 
and should be read like a textbook, again and 
again. Returning to how Safiya Bukhari thought 
and how she fought on behalf of political 
prisoners keeps her spirit close to us while we continue the struggle.

We call and she responds

“A People’s War of Liberation is like the points 
of a starfish. When a soldier (guerilla) dies, 
another grows and takes his or her place in the 
struggle, or in the body of the army.”

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, 
Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for 
over thirty years of commentary, resistance 
criticism and cultural theory, and short stories 
with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of 
cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, 
resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication 
to justice and equality, she has served as a 
coordinator of student and community resistance 
projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea 
of an equalitarian community and facilitator of 
student-teacher communities behind the walls of 
academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels 
holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with 
a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, 
class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago.







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