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<h1 id="reader-title">'I Am a Revolutionary and an Optimist':
Former Black Panther</h1>
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<p itemprop="description alternativeHeadline"
class="subtitle">August 8, 2016 - Breno Altman<br>
</p>
<p itemprop="description alternativeHeadline"
class="subtitle">"I lost all hope that Black people could
fight without resorting to self-defense," said Muntaqim.</p>
<div itemprop="articleBody" class="txt_newworld">
<p>Attica Correctional Facility became famous for a bloody
rebellion in September 1971. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Attica also continued to be, over time, one of the main
destinations for activists linked to the Black Panthers
and other revolutionary organizations. </p>
<p>Nowadays it houses only one of these militants: Anthony
Bottom, renamed Jalil Muntaqim when he converted to
Islam in the early 1970s. </p>
<p>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." </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><span><strong>Great-Grandfather</strong></span> </p>
<p>"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. </p>
<p>He went through all the maximum-security state prisons,
in addition to spending a few years in jail in
California. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>He was sentenced to life, but with the right to request
parole after 25 years. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>"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." </p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>Statements of other three people, according to the
defense of the accused, would also have been extracted
under pressure. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><span><strong>Behind the Scenes</strong></span> </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Thus began Jalil Muntaqim’s prison saga. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>"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." </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>At eighteen, already engaged in the struggle for civil
rights, he joined the San Jose State University
engineering school. </p>
<p>He became one of the spokesmen of the Black Student
Union and dedicated himself to social work in undeserved
communities. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>"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." </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>"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". </p>
<p><span><strong>Prison</strong></span> </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>Nearly five decades went by. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>He also wrote novels, essays and poems, some of them
collected in the book “<a
href="http://www.akpress.org/escaping-the-prism-fade-to-black.html">Escaping
the Prism, Fade to Black</a>,” released in August
2015. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.thejerichomovement.com/about">Jericho
March</a> in 1998, when thousands of activists
protested in front of the White House against this
cursed inheritance of the rebel years. </p>
<p>"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." </p>
<p><em>This article was originally published in <a
target="_blank"
href="http://operamundi.uol.com.br/conteudo/babel/42651/i+am+a+revolutionary+and+an+optimist+says+former+black+panther.shtml">Opera Mundi</a>.</em>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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