[Pnews] 'I Am a Revolutionary and an Optimist' - Political Prisoner Jalil Muntaqim

[Prisoner News]

http://operamundi.uol.com.br/conteudo/babel/42651/i+am+a+revolutionary+and+an+optimist+says+former+black+panther.shtml 
<http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/I-Am-a-Revolutionary-and-an-Optimist-Former-Black-Panther-20160810-0018.html> 



  'I Am a Revolutionary and an Optimist': Former Black Panther

August 8, 2016 - Breno Altman

"I lost all hope that Black people could fight without resorting to 
self-defense," said Muntaqim.

Attica Correctional Facility became famous for a bloody rebellion in 
September 1971.

The inmates took over the prison located in northwestern New York and 
took 42 staff members hostage. The state police, under the command of 
Governor Nelson Rockefeller, broke into the prison, acting ruthlessly.

When the battle ended, the dead bodies of 33 prisoners and 10 guards, as 
well as countless injured prisoners, littered the courtyards and the cells.

The uprising was caused by the murder of Black activist George Jackson, 
imprisoned in San Quentin, California, two weeks earlier. A trail of 
penitentiary uprisings served as a response to this prison guard brutality.

Attica also continued to be, over time, one of the main destinations for 
activists linked to the Black Panthers and other revolutionary 
organizations.

Nowadays it houses only one of these militants: Anthony Bottom, renamed 
Jalil Muntaqim when he converted to Islam in the early 1970s.

Announcing his name, in the identification counter, provokes tense, 
though soundless, laughter among the attendants. The guard that leads 
the reporter into the prison, however, can’t keep it to himself. "Did 
you come to interview the cop killer?" he gently pokes. "Be careful, the 
guy seems to be nice, but he’s very dangerous."

The rest of the walk up to a wide visitors salon was covered in silence, 
broken only by the instructions on how the interview would work and some 
comments on how the prison is organized.

Muntaqim would appear two hours later. The meeting was delayed, as would 
be expected, due to a brief rebellion in the wing where he is serving 
his time.

He was dressed in a white polo shirt and a white cap, moss-green 
trousers. Not even the grizzly beard reveals his 64 years of age, masked 
by permanent physical exercise and a broad smile that pushes away the 
idea of suffering.

But the records are merciless: he has been incarcerated since he was 19 
years old, almost half a century ago, by far longer than Mandela and 
other legendary sentenced leaders. The only one who beats his time in 
jail is Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, who has been living in prison since 
September 1969.

*Great-Grandfather*

"When I was arrested, my girlfriend was three months pregnant and today 
I’m a great-grandfather," he recalls in a cheerful way, more like an 
achievement than a regret.

He went through all the maximum-security state prisons, in addition to 
spending a few years in jail in California.

His most serious charge was the killing of two New York police officers 
during a shooting in May, 1971 along with Albert Washington, now 
deceased, and Herman Bell, also imprisoned since then.

He was sentenced to life, but with the right to request parole after 25 
years.

He ended up having to wait more than 30 more years for the opportunity 
to this benefit, having been transferred to San Francisco due to a 
process that ended after nearly five years, in a deal with no time to 
serve.

He could have been out since 2002 but his parole application was denied 
eight times. Whenever a hearing for his criminal progression is 
scheduled, the police officers' association mobilizes itself against it, 
recruiting the victims’ families and calling for support from the more 
conservative press, adding to the prosecution and the direction of the 
penitentiary system.

"The state is vindictive," says Muntaqim. "The goal is to demonstrate 
that any act of rebellion in the United States will be crushed and never 
forgotten."

The prosecution’s main witness, a Black Panther militant named Ruben 
Scott, incriminated Muntaqim and his companions after intense torture. 
After the first trial, that fact was revealed. Still, his testimony was 
revalidated and the request for a new trial was denied.

Statements of other three people, according to the defense of the 
accused, would also have been extracted under pressure.

A FBI ballistics report determined that the weapon with which Muntaqim 
was arrested in San Francisco was not the one that had was allegedly 
used in the killings of which he was accused. It was substituted by 
another report, from the NYPD, which offered an opposite conclusion, and 
disappeared from the court process during the appeal.

*Behind the Scenes*

Records currently belonging to the archives of the Richard Nixon 
Library, who was the U.S. president from 1968 to 1974, reveal a little 
bit of the backstages of that moment.

Among the audiotapes, there is a record of a meeting in the White House, 
five days after the murders in New York, in which the case is nicknamed 
NEWKILL. Amid the attendees were the director of the FBI, J. Edgar 
Hoover, and the U.S. president, accompanied by national security advisers.

The president orders the federal police to solve the crime, despite its 
local character. Many suspect that the guidance given was to take 
advantage of the episode, as others in the same period, to strike the 
Black Panthers and lead its members to jail.

Thus began Jalil Muntaqim’s prison saga.

Born in Oakland, California, he came from a middle class family. His 
father was a computer programmer. His mother, a secretary, participated 
in the civil rights movement and had Martin Luther King Jr’s pacifism as 
her compass.

"My parents were followers of non-violence and criticized the more 
radical groups," he recalls with humor. "The elderly were part of the 
Black nationalist bourgeoisie."

This social condition allowed him to have a good education. He completed 
his elementary education as a grade A student, earning a scholarship to 
a high school very well known for its math and science curriculum.

One of his mentors was John Carlos, the 200-meter champion at the 
Olympic Games in Mexico City in 1968, whose picture with his fist 
raised, alongside his colleague Tommy Smith, would become a legendary 
image for the anti-racist resistance.

At eighteen, already engaged in the struggle for civil rights, he joined 
the San Jose State University engineering school.

He became one of the spokesmen of the Black Student Union and dedicated 
himself to social work in undeserved communities.

His ideas would be shaken, as those of many young people of his 
generation, on April 4,1968, when Luther King was victim of a deadly 
shooting in Memphis, Tennessee.

"I lost all hope that Black people could fight without resorting to 
self-defense, without responding to police’s and racist group’s 
violence," he recalls. "I hadn’t yet turned 17, but I decided to enroll 
myself in the Black Panthers, to my mother’s dismay."

Muntaqim would go beyond that, actually. Little more than a teenager, he 
agreed to join the armed wing of the organization that would later be 
known as the Black Liberation Army.

"Our role was to guarantee the party’s headquarters' safety, combat drug 
dealers in Black neighborhoods, face the police and obtain funds through 
bank expropriations," he explains, with large gestures and a paused 
voice, being careful with his words. "There was a war going on and we 
had the right to act with the same resources as our enemies".

*Prison*

The times of freedom would end on Aug. 28, 1971, when he was detained 
for attempted murder of a police officer in San Francisco, during a 
confrontation typical of a period when the repression aiming the Black 
Panthers was being intensified.

He was arrested with Washington and Bell, the three quickly became the 
perfect choice for the FBI and the New York police, to be held 
responsible for the crime that had occurred three months earlier.

Nearly five decades went by.

Having spent more than twice of his life in prison than he spent on the 
streets, Muntaqim graduated in psychology and sociology, before the 
university education program was cut off for detainees sentenced to life.

He also wrote novels, essays and poems, some of them collected in the 
book “Escaping the Prism, Fade to Black 
<http://www.akpress.org/escaping-the-prism-fade-to-black.html>,” 
released in August 2015.

More than anything, however, he dedicated himself to fighting for the 
rights of prisoners, in and out each jail he was sent to. He received 
numerous punishments, usually long periods of solitary confinement.

With his letters and manifestos, he soon became the main supporter of 
the solidarity movement towards political prisoners in North America. An 
appeal signed by Muntaqim led to the Jericho March 
<http://www.thejerichomovement.com/about> in 1998, when thousands of 
activists protested in front of the White House against this cursed 
inheritance of the rebel years.

"I made an effort to build an existence in prison, keeping myself 
politically active in any way possible," he says. "Prison makes you 
figure out your weaknesses and know better your enemy. You learn to 
survive through the worst situations, to be patient and determined."

/This article was originally published in Opera Mundi 
<http://operamundi.uol.com.br/conteudo/babel/42651/i+am+a+revolutionary+and+an+optimist+says+former+black+panther.shtml>./ 


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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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