[Ppnews] Of Black Panthers, Prisons, and a Life in Struggle for Social Justice

[Political Prisoner News]

Save the date in the Bay Area for an event with Laura Whitehorn - 
Thursday, March 11th
other dates will also be announced!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Of-Black-Panthers-Prisons-by-Dan-Berger-100102-360.html

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January 3, 2010

Of Black Panthers, Prisons, and a Life in Struggle for Social Justice 
-" Review of "The War Before"

By Dan Berger

Mention the Black Panthers, and Safiya Bukhari is probably not the 
first person most would think of. Yet perhaps she should be. Bukhari 
was a dedicated and tireless organizer from the time she joined the 
Black Panthers in the late 1960s until she passed away in 2003. 
Thanks to Laura Whitehorn, a former member of the Weather Underground 
and now a journalist, new generations of activists and others can 
learn of Bukhari through the essays, interviews and speeches 
Whitehorn has gathered in "The War Before: The True Life Story of 
Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, & Fighting for 
Those Left Behind" (The Feminist Press, February 2010). The book also 
features an introduction by Angela Davis and an afterword by Mumia 
Abu-Jamal, each powerful statements in honor of Safiya's lifelong 
commitments against mass incarceration and political repression.

Bukhari was not a "writer" per se, but a tireless grassroots 
organizer who occasionally wrote along the way. She joined the New 
York Black Panthers out of respect for the work it was doing feeding 
children in black communities and standing up to police violence. 
When state repression and internal strife debilitated the 
organization, Bukhari went underground with the Black Liberation 
Army. She served eight years in prison, escaping once for several 
months and using the subsequent trial as a platform from which to 
protest the medical neglect at the prison. Later in life, she was a 
leader in the black nationalist group the Republic of New Afrika. But 
above all, Bukhari was a stalwart organizer for political prisoners. 
She was a founder and leader of The Jericho Movement and of the NYC 
Free Mumia Coalition. Her unending commitment was legendary; 
Whitehorn describes how Bukhari consistently wrote, visited, and 
agitated on behalf of those people who found themselves imprisoned 
for their activism from the 1960s and 1970s. Whitehorn writes how 
she, too, met Safiya while in prison in the 1980s, knowing from that 
first meeting that she had made a lifelong friend. Bukhari's 
unwavering dedication to freeing political prisoners, which she lived 
until her death at 53, raises the question of whether she worked too 
hard without taking care of her own health enough. Her daughter, 
Wonda Jones, describes seeing her mother's tireless organizing, and 
how she went from resenting to respecting and admiring her mother's efforts.

As the essays in this book eloquently reveal, she gave all of herself 
to the movement to free political prisoners. She was especially 
committed to her fellow Panthers, who have received the longest 
sentences and have faced the stiffest opposition to their release. 
She watched too many people die--from police violence, white racism 
(one of her BLA comrades was stomped to death in front of her by 
store owners in Virginia), intra-movement conflict, and 
imprisonment--to give anything less.

Safiya, as the book so perfectly captures, was an organizer, not a 
martyr. The book is a wonderful expression of all of these aspects of 
Safiya. It is, above all, a deeply human book. With passion and 
humility, Safiya was self-critical of how the movement's weaknesses 
enabled state repression to tear the movement apart. She routinely 
challenged the ways radicals perpetuated such violence, rejecting 
self-righteousness or posturing while remaining focused on the 
greater violence carried out by the government. She asked that social 
justice movements get smarter and more compassionate in their 
efforts. In this book, as she did in life, she eloquently describes 
how the movement needed to overcome the post-traumatic stress 
disorder that was the legacy of the internal and external violence 
that befell the Panthers and other revolutionary movements. In 
capturing the arc of her life's work, this book is a manual for 
long-haul radical struggle.

"The War Before" deserves a wide audience--by activists and 
academics, history buffs and political neophytes. It is a fantastic 
contribution to the burgeoning history of the Black Panthers, all too 
rare in its grassroots spirit and emphasis on (re)building movements 
strong enough not just to withstand state violence but to overcome 
our own egotism and individualism. It is one of few books by a woman 
member of the Black Panthers, and we see her trajectory from 
community service provider to revolutionary organizer, along with the 
many steps in between. Following Bukhari's path enables us to tease 
out the legacy of the Black Panthers, from organizing inside 
America's ever-growing prison system to the myriad battles for racial 
and economic justice in the twenty-first century. Her writings are 
both passionate and practical in their emphasis on movement building 
and freedom for those behind bars. To top it off, the stunning 
introduction by anti-racist activist and former political prisoner 
Laura Whitehorn brought tears to my eyes, weaving together her own 
story with Safiya's in a model example of Amilcar Cabral's dictum, 
"tell no lies, claim no easy victories." Such expressions of honesty 
and humility are perhaps the greatest legacy that Bukhari, in her 
life and through this book, left us.


Author's Website: www.danberger.org

Author's Bio: Dan Berger is a writer, activist and Ph.D. candidate at 
the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Outlaws of 
America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of SOlidarity," 
co-editor of "Letters From Young Activists" and editor of the 
forthcoming "The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism." He lives in 
Philadelphia, where he is completing a dissertation about 1970s 
prison radicalism.



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