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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs01082010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs01082010.html</a><br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">January 8 - 10,
2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Safiya Bukhari's
"The War Before" <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">A
Life Worth Saving
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By RON
JACOBS<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">I</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>n 1968, Brooklyn College student Bernice
Jones volunteered to work in the Black Panther Party's (BPP) breakfast
program in Harlem, New York as part of her sorority's social service
pledge. This decision was to become the defining moment in her
life. Much like Kwame Toure's (Stokely Carmichael) decision to
attend Howard University, Jones' volunteering to serve breakfast in
Harlem would begin a life of revolutionary organizing. Unable to go
along with the BPP's politics at first, Jones' gradual understanding that
poverty and police brutality was the order of the day for many US
residents convinced her to join the Black Panther Party and become one of
its primary New York organizers. Let me emphasize, she was an
organizer. She stayed in the trenches and led by example.<br><br>
Within two years, her decision would put her in the middle of the US
government's war on the Panthers. This was a time of lies, rumors and
murder--much of it engineered by the Department of Justice and the
FBI--designed to destroy the Party once and for all. Bernice Jones
eventually took the name Safiya Bukhari and became a Muslim. She
spent time in prison and raised a child. She died in 2005.
After her mother's death, Bukhari's daughter approached former Weather
Underground member Laura Whitehorn with a collection of writings and
speeches Safiya had saved and asked if she would edit them into a
memoir. <br><br>
The book, titled
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558616101/counterpunchmaga">
<i>The War Before</a>,</i> is an unconventional memoir. It is
composed of journal entries, articles, notes and speeches. These
writings were never necessarily meant to be published as a memoir.
Instead, they are the works of a relentless revolutionary organizer,
prisoner, and modern African-American woman. There is personal
material here reflecting on Bukhari's conversion to Islam and her
understanding of its place in her life as a revolutionary. There
are also descriptions of the politics and workings of the New York
Panthers and the successor organization the Black Liberation Army
(BLA). There are speeches about political prisoners in the United
States and memories of her life in the BPP. Together, the sum is
considerably greater than the parts. Like a well-composed musical
tone poem, the reader leaves this book with a sense of understanding and
fulfillment like that experienced after a particularly rewarding
performance of such a piece.<br><br>
The history of the 1960s and 1970s remains a point of strong and divisive
contention despite the best efforts of commentators, politicians and many
historians to bury the period. The flurry of outrage in 2008 over
former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers' tangential
association with Barack Obama proves this. In general, one is
mostly presented with images of long-haired young white people smoking
pot or protesting and African-Americans getting hosed by police or
wearing leather jackets and carrying guns. These images and the
often wistful tales that accompany them ignore the essential reality of
the period. That reality being that the social, culture and
political establishment throughout the world, especially in the West, was
shaken to its foundations. Despite the best efforts to delete this
reality from history, it continues to hover around the edges of our
current conversation, occasionally taking a place somewhere close to
center stage. In the United States, the Black Panther Party was an
essential part of the elements that did the shaking. Safiya Bukhari
was an essential part of that Party.<br><br>
The contextual narrative provided by Laura Whitehorn describes the world
as it was perceived by many in the US Left during the period covered by
Bukhari's writings. It is a world where injustice exists in the
daily lives of prisoners and in the hailstorm of bullets fired into Black
Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by a death squad made up of Illinois
law enforcement with the FBI's assistance. It is also a world where
personalities, politics and paranoia combined to make a stew stirred to a
sometimes deadly boil by that very same FBI and its henchmen in the White
House and elsewhere throughout the US political and law enforcement
establishment. Simultaneously, it is a world where hope refuses to
die and the struggle for justice and freedom continues despite incredible
odds.<br><br>
In the afterword to
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558616101/counterpunchmaga">
<i>The War Before</a></i> political prisoner, journalist and former Black
Panther Mumia Abu Jamal remembers Bukhari from when he was a teenage
member of the BPP and working out of its office in the Bronx. He
writes of her relentless commitment and the lessons that such commitment
provided to all, young and old. Her untimely death was not the only
tragedy in her passing, writes Mumia. "The tragedy was that
more people didn't know her, learn from her, or grow from her fund of
hard-earned wisdom." <i>The War Before</i> helps diminish that
aspect of the tragedy.<br><br>
<b>Ron Jacobs</b> is author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859841678/counterpunchmaga">
The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground</a>, which is
just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured
in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex,
<a href="http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html">
Serpents in the Garden</a>. His first novel,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977459098/counterpunchmaga">
Short Order Frame Up,</a> is published by Mainstay Press. He can be
reached at:
<a href="mailto:rjacobs3625@charter.net">rjacobs3625@charter.net</a>
<br><br>
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