Under Lock & Key

They say the best way to hide something is to put it in plain sight. Student-led activism in the majority New Afrikan populated area of South Baltimore has rendered this old saying no longer true. For about ninety years corporate coal companies and the city government have allowed and perpetuated landfills, and literal mountains of coal being piled up in plain sight in residential areas, and even directly behind rec centers with playgrounds and children.

For the last 100 years, coal has been brought into the port city of Baltimore by the freight transportation company CSX. In data derived from 2021, it was found that CSX transported more than 8 million tons of coal into South Baltimore, where the coal is then transported all over the world. Freight trains coming through the Baltimore transport terminal with coal on them spill black coal dust throughout South Baltimore and pollute the air.

Pollution is so outrageous in this predominately New Afrikan community that the number one cause of death is respiratory related issues. The death rate from respiratory disease in South Baltimore is more than twice the rate for Baltimore as a whole. Respiratory disease is killing more people in this section of the city than diabetes, drugs, or gun violence. A staggering 90% of youth from the area suffer from different degrees of asthma, which has been causing chronic death.

What is by now very obvious to anyone is that coal and other pollutants should not be in residential areas, but the fact that they are and have been so carelessly handled for generations now, in a predominately New Afrikan section of a predominantly New Afrikan city, illustrates major contradictions of the national oppression of so-called Black people, and Our neo-colonial relationship to the empire and certain classes within Our collective body-politic.

It is under this back drop that a youth organization was founded in 2011 at the local Benjamin Franklin High School, called Free Your Voice. In 2011 the Free Your Voice student-activists were fighting, and eventually defeated an effort to build a waste incinerator in South Baltimore. The incinerator would’ve burned tons of trash and waste, and released pollution, as well as converted electricity from the burned waste.

Today, Free Your Voice is still active and continues to replenish its pool of student-activists. Now however, the struggle with CSX and city and state officials is much more daunting. Free Your Voice and supporters from the community and local colleges have set out to get the state’s environmental regulators to deny CSX’s operations permit on the transport terminal and pay residents of South Baltimore reparations for generations of ‘environmental racism’ (Genocide).

These efforts have been hampered by what some deem as betrayal by the first ‘Black’ top environmental regulator in Maryland and her declaration that she and her agency know it’s coal and coal dust found on streets and public areas but can not act without actual proof of the identity of the substance.

Laws against air pollution are written so that oppressed and vulnerable masses of people are at severe disadvantage and would in most circumstances be dependent upon state agencies, who are in cahoots with big industrialists, to gather and test substances in question. People have to prove they’ve been or are being poisoned by specific substances before regulators can take action.

Students from Free Your Voice along with local college volunteers spent the summer of 2023 collecting and testing particles of dust found in the S. B-More area. They have and continue to go door-to-door spreading the findings of their research with the general community. Thus far, although the terminal has not been shut down and the mountains of coal still reside behind rec centers and playgrounds, Free Your Voice has achieved quantitative victories.

The student-activists’ work thus far has:

1. Made it harder for city officials, state politicians, and local residents to ignore their oppression;

2. They’ve won over neighbors to their work, elevated consciousness around air pollution and the complicity of the occupying government in environmental destruction;

3. They’ve garnered meetings with state regulators, and the fact that the head of the environmental regulation agency in Maryland is a ‘Black’ female, has elevated the class consciousness and the reality of the New Afrikan National neo-colonial status;

4. The aspirations of their movement have risen. From slight reforms like covering or pouring water on coal mountains in the ghetto, to now, aspiring to remove or shut down the train terminal.

The continuing work of Our young people is not only there to be acknowledged and supported, but more importantly in the long run there are lessons to be learned from this particular student movement. I’ll touch on some of them briefly here.

For one, while it is widely known that almost all previous moments in the generational struggle of New Afrikan people the student movement was the brain trust, and the heart of the struggle. We often fail to make the connection that these previous students were so successful in galvanizing people and nationalizing their structures because they championed causes that had nothing to do with school or education. The Free Your Voice Movement in S.B-More has connected the youth movement with environmentalism, and those two things have unearthed class oppression and national oppression. Our students must make these same connections around the empire. What is the one thing that connects the student in B-More to the student in southside St. Louis, or San Francisco, or in Cancer Alley Louisiana, or Jackson, Mississippi, or Flint, Michigan? It’s environmental issues. The organizing method We should take at organizing the student movement in the spirit of New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism (NARN) is to connect environmentalism with student activism and revolutionary nationalism.

What also struck me in my research of this issue and struggle was the fact that college students and former students of Franklin High School have continued to come back and aid and assist in the struggle there.

The college level student with a NARN orientation must make their presence and ideological-theoretical prowess available at the sites of active student movements. In these times of social media, student activists from each of the previously mentioned cities and others can and should be in direct communication, and NARN’s must take proactive steps to influence the direction of the student movement, nationalizing it and moving it in the direction illuminated by the Front for the Liberation of the New Afrikan Nation (FROLINAN)’s Programs For Decolonization, while also incorporating environmental and climate related concerns to the FROLINAN program for National Alliance of New Afrikan Students. If implemented by youthful NARN, i believe We can succeed in building a NARN centered national youth movement.

A Juxtaposition to the Works of Orisanmi Burton

A spear, utilized as a weapon to engage in battle, can only be effective insofar as its tip is both sturdy and sharp. And the sharpness of its tip is maintained as part of a process of sharpening in the continuum of a protracted struggle campaign. Otherwise, what you’ll have is not an implement for war, but a stick that merely rhetorically projects a technology for combat that in actuality, is incapable of immobilizing or pushing back against a harmful, even deadly force. So considering the condition of the spear, I have no intention to deal with or re-visit the “Long Attica Revolt” with historicism, relegating the event to a time in history; nor to romanticize its existence for the purposes of psycho-emotional or intellectual masturbation. Instead, I relocate the Long Attica Revolt to the present moment in hopes of creating dialogue and theory around the fundamental question of whether the “Long Attica Revolt” (i.e the prison movement) still exists?

I start my analysis of the question at the end and (epilogue) of Orisanmi Burton’s (hereinafter Ori) text with the statement:

“For many, 1993 was a watershed in the slow disintegration of the prison movement.”(1)

If 1993 marked the crucial turning point in which the prison movement started dissipating, or decomposing, what does the reality look like in 2024, 31 years after its evocation? If we are serious about “interpreting the world to change it, there is no escape from historical materialism,”(2) requiring my analysis to stay anchored to tackle the question from my direct experience as a prisoner of 21 and a half consecutive years of carceral bondage within Michigan prisons. In so doing, I stay true to Mao’s injunction to adhere to what [Vladimir] Lenin called the “most essential thing in Marxism, the living soul of Marxism, [the] concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”(3)

The “prison movement,” according to the New Afrikan analysis that I subscribe to, marked a specific moment in time that spearheaded a qualitative change, transforming issue-based prison struggles centered primarily around conditions of confinement (reform), into a movement that was influenced by and married itself to the anti-colonial national liberation struggles being waged beyond the concrete walls (revolutionary). These circumstances, having affected colonial people on a world scale, radicalized and politicized sections of the colonial subjects in the united states to such an extent where the consciousness developed inside of penal dungeons was being disseminated to the streets where it would be internalized and weaponized by agents against the state. The impetus for this qualitative leap in the substance and character of the prison movement was Johnathan Jackson’s 7 August 1970 revolutionary act of pursuing the armed liberation of the Soledad Brothers, culminating in the 9 September 1971 Attica Rebellion. This is why Ori argued the “Long Attica Revolt was a revolutionary struggle for decolonization and abolition at the site of US prisons.”(4)

While Ori’s assessment may have been correct, his very own analysis, and a concomitant analysis of present-day Michigan, exposes a revolutionary contradiction prone to reversion and therefore revolutionary (Marxist) revision by elements that were, in fact, never revolutionary or abolitionist but only radical reformist. Revisionism spells doom (death) to the prison movement, so part of our objective has got to be how do we oppose the carceral state from an ideological and practical perspective to ensure the survival of a dying prison movement, and reap benefits and successes from our struggle. After all, Ori tells us the aim of his book is “to show that US prisons are a site of war, [a] site of active combat.”(5)

Clausewitz (Carl von) observed that war was politics by other means, just as Michel Foucault reasoned politics was war by other means. War and politics being opposite sites of a single coin, this “COIN” in military jargon is none other than “counterinsurgency.” As explained in the U.S. Army Field Manual at 3-24. It defines insurgency as:

“an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of established government, occupying power, or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”

“The definition of counterinsurgency logically follows:”Counterinsurgency is the military, paramilitary, political economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.””

“Counterinsurgency, then, refers to both a type of war and a style of warfare”(6), whose aim is, in the context of prisons, to neutralize the prison movement and the ability of its agency to build the movement into the future.

As we can see, by isolating and extracting this point from Ori’s text, u.s. prisons as combat zones where war is waged is significant if we are to gleam from this fact what the proponents, the protagonists of the prison movement must do next; how we struggle accordingly in hopes of gaining victories.

The Master Plan

The logical response of a revolutionary tactician to state repression is resistance. But not just resistance for the sake of being recalcitrant – as Comrade George (Jackson) informed us, our fight, our resistance has to use imagination by developing a fighting style from a dialectical materialist standpoint. Because

“…we can fight, but if we are isolated, if the state is successful in accomplishing that, the results are usually not constructive in terms of proving the point. The point is, however, in the face of what we confront, to fight and win. That’s the real objective: not just make statements, no matter how noble, but to destroy the system that oppresses us.”(7)

In constructing long-term insurgency repression (counterinsurgency), the scientific technology deployed by the state was “soft power” as its effective mechanism to accomplish their task. Ori tells us the federal government drafted a “Master Plan” which hinged on “correctional professionals coming to realize that the battle is won or lost not inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks.”(8) This assessment could only be true considering the question surrounding prisons and the corollary prison movement is one of legitimacy, for only through legitimacy could the state preserve carceral normalcy. So counterinsurgency, or war, to be overtly specific, and the game is the acquisition of legitimacy from the masses (national public at-large) as a main objective. This fact should be telling that the struggle for state oppression, aggression and repression within the context of the prison movement is ultimately always a struggle for the people. Thus, “in an insurgency, both sides rely on the cooperation of the populace; therefore they compete for it, in part through coercive means.”(9) These political facts, as tactics of war, envision the real terrain in which the battle for prison lives is waged: the mental realm. It is within this domain that resistance and the legitimacy on both sides of the barb wired cage will be won.

The prisoner population must take cues from these facts. The very first recognition has got to be that prisons, deployed as war machines, cannot possibly be legitimate if we (the prisoners) have been cast as the enemies the state seeks to annihilate as human beings by re-converting us from second-class citizens back to slaves. This was the very point Ori lets us in on regarding Queen Mother Moore’s August 1973 visit and speech in Green Haven Prison in New York, that New Afrikans were in fact enduring “re-captivity.”(10) Blacks have long hoisted this argument, lamenting an amendment to the 13th Amendment to the u.s. constitution, and a host of case law, like the case of Ruffin v Commonwealth cited by Ori, have declared “incarcerated people slaves of the state.”(11) And as slaves, to borrow the words of George, “the sole phenomenon that energizes my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution.” In this vein the prison movement is partially about the survival of the humanity of prisons, their dignity, which requires the survival of the spirit of the prison movement. This is what Chairman Fred Hampton meant when he said “You can kill a freedom fighter, but you can’t kill freedom fighting. You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill revolution.” It is this very same deprivation of human dignity that Huey talked about resulting in what I’m experiencing among Michigan prisoners, who are largely “immobilized by fear and despair, he sinks into self-murder”.(12) But even more dangerous to Huey than self-murder, is spiritual death, what Huey witnessed become a “common attitude… driven to death of the spirit rather of the flesh.”

So the very idea (spirit) of the prison movement must survive, must be kept alive, or, “your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing.”(13). And this is precisely the reality Michigan’s male prisoners have succumbed to, death of spirit, death by de-politicization.

All this begs the question posed by George: What is our fighting style in face of political death? This question can only be answered against the background of the statement: “For many, 1993 was a watershed in the slow disintegration of the prison movement,” because the reality shouts out to us that the prison movement has diminished to such a degree, it’s in desperate need of being incubated back to life (if it still exists at all).

Thus far it has been made clear that at issue is the survival of the prison movement which means by extension a revival of the political life of prisoners. The catalyst breeding political consciousness can only be education. As Ori illuminates, part of the prisoner war project requires guerrilla warfare, the life of which itself is grounded in political education.(14) Ori himself writes in the acknowledgment section of Tip of the Spear that he sharpened his spear (political analysis) by tying himself to a network of intellectuals and study groups, like Philly-based podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism.

The Role of Outside Supporters

The “Master Plan” developed by the state concluded “that the battle is won or lost not inside the prison, but out on the sidewalks,” and this leads directly to the utility of individuals and organizations outside the confines of prison life to be leveraging against the subjects inside the walls. Yet, it must not be lost upon us that by virtue of the state’s “Master Plan”, they seek to weaponize outside organizations as tools to drive a nail in the coffin of the prison movement once and for all. Proponents of the prison movement, accordingly, must also utilize and weaponize outside agency to advance the prison movement. When asked, although George said, “A good deal of this has to do with our ability to communicate to people on the street,” we must nevertheless be sure not to allow this communication or the introduction of outside volunteers to stifle the spirit of the movement.

Ori hits the nail on the head when exposing the “Master Plan” to absorb outside volunteers as part of the “cynical logic of programmification, with well-meaning volunteers becoming instruments of pacification.”(15) I spoke to this very phenomena in 2021 essay entitled “Photograph Negatives: The Battle For Prison Intelligentsia”, in response to a question posed to me by Ian Alexander, an editor of True Leap Press’s “In The Belly” publication, on whether outside university intellectuals could follow the lead of imprisoned-intellectuals? There I mentioned how Michigan’s outside volunteers near absolute adherence to prison policy, designed to constrain and be repressive, retarded our ability to be subversive and insurgent, called into question the purpose of the university-intellectuals infiltration of the system in the first instance. And while “many of these volunteers undoubtedly had altruistic and humanitarian motives, they unwittingly perpetuated counterinsurgency in multiple ways.”(16)

The battle for prison intellgentsia itself creates an unspoken tension between the inside (imprisoned) and outside (prison) intellectuals to the detriment of the prison movement, benefiting the state’s “Master Plan.” As I cited in “Photograph Negatives,” Joy James correctly analyzes that it is the imprisoned intellectuals that are “most free of state condition.” Scholar Michel-Rolph Troillot’s insight also champions that imprisoned intellectuals, “non-academics are critical producers of historiography,”(17) yet, as Eddie Ellis told Ori during a 2009 political education workshop, “We have never been able to use the tools of academia to demonstrate that our analysis is a better analysis.”(18) This fact further substantiates my position in response to editor Ian Alexander that outside university-based intellectuals must take their lead from imprisoned intellectuals because (1) we are the experts, validated through our long-lived experiences; and (2) most university-intellectuals are clueless they’re being used as tools within the state’s “Master Plan” against the very prisoners that altruism is directed.

Carceral Compradors Inside

But sadly, it’s not just the outside volunteers being positioned as pawns in the state’s war against prisoners. To be sure, prisoners themselves have become state agents, be it consciously or unconsciously, pushing pacification through various behavioral modification programming that intentionally depoliticizes the prisoner population, turning them into do-gooder state actors. It is in this way that the prison state “strategically co-opted the demands of the prison movement and redeployed them in ways that strengthened their ability to dominate people on both sides of the wall.”(19)

In Michigan prisons, these compromised inmates function as “carceral compradors,” and part of the plan of this de-politicizing regime is to convince the prisoner population to surrender their agency to resist. It has been the state’s ability to appease these, what Ricardo DeLeon, a member of Attica’s revolutionary committee, said was the elements of “all the waverers, fence sitters, and opponents,”(20) exacerbating already-existing fissures, exposing the deep contradictions between a majority reformist element, and the minority revolutionary element. This success effectively split and casted backward the “prison movement” to its previously issue-based conditions of confinement struggle model by “exposing a key contradiction within the prison movement, ultimately cleaving support from the movement’s radical edge while nurturing its accomodationist tendencies.”(21)

All of this was (is) made possible because “a sizable fraction of the population that saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as gangsters: outlaw capitalists, committed to individual financial gain”(22), and radical reformist, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, focused rather exclusively on conditions of confinement, instead of materializing a revolutionary goal. If the prison movement is a revolutionary movement, then the revolutionary element must manage to consolidate power and be the final arbitrators of the otherwise democratic decision-making processes. Ori cites Frantz Fanon to make clear that political parties serve as “incorruptible defenders of the masses,” or, the movement will find itself vulnerable to neocolonial retrenchment.(23) The schism that emerges between these two factions, ideologically, paralyzes the prison movement. These implications obviously extend beyond the domain of prisons to the collective New Afrikan struggle on the streets, as the prison movement was fostered by national liberation struggle on the outside, lending the credence to the victory from the sidewalk notion. But in order to secure a revolutionary party-line, the revolutionary party must be the majority seated element in the cadre committee.

Perhaps this is precisely why Sam Melville, a key figure in the Attica rebellion, said it was needed to “avoid [the] obvious classification of prison reformers.”(24) This is significant because otherwise, reformists would dominate the politics, strategies and decision-making, killing any serious anti-colonial (revolutionary) ideology. Again, this is true for both the inside and outside walkways. As a corollary, this reality should cause the revolutionary-minded to seriously rethink ways in which our struggle is not subverted from within the ranks of fighters against the state who, contradictorily, are okay with the preservation and legitimization of the prison machine and its “parent” global white supremacist structure, so long as remedial measures are taken to ameliorate certain conditions.

Our Road

In advance of summarizing, let me just say I do not at all intend to imply a reformist concession can’t be viewed as a revolutionary advancement within the overall scheme of carceral war. I pivot to Rachel Herzing, co-founder of Critical Resistance, that

“an abolitionist goal would be to try to figure out how to take incremental steps – a screw here, a cog there – and make it so the system cannot continue – so it ceases to exist – rather than improving its efficiency.”

But that’s just it. The Attica reforms did not, as Rachel Herzing would accept, “steal some of the PIC’s power, make it more difficult to function in the future, or decrease it’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people.” On the contrary, the Attica reforms entrenched the system of penal legitimacy, seeded the proliferation of scientific repression, and improved upon the apparatus’s ability to forestall and dissolve abolitionist resistance. In addition, the reforms were not made with the consent of the Attica revolutionaries, but by a splintering majority of radical reformers who, in the end, the present as our proof, greased by the levers of power assenting to the machine’s pick up of speed and tenacity.

As inheritors of the prison movement, and as we consider the de-evolution of the Long Attica Revolt and all it entails, specifically its survival, we are called upon to meditate on Comrade George’s essential ask – What is our fighting style? At minimum, I suggest our task is implementing a twofold platform: (1) political education; and (2) internal revolutionary development.

First, those equipped with the organization skills and requisite consciousness, as a methodology of guerilla war, should construct political education classes. These classes should operate within study group formats. We must return to the injunction of prisons functioning as universities, that “The jails (and prisons) are the Universities of the Revolutionaries and the finishing schools of the Black Liberation Army.”(25) We align ourselves with the Prison Lives Matter (PLM) formation model and utilize these study groups to engage in:

“a concrete study and analysis of the past 50+ years, and in doing so, We learn from those who led the struggle at the highest level during the high tide (1960s and 70s), where and how the revolutionary movement failed due to a lack of cadre development, as well as knowing and maintaining a line.”(26)

Our political education study groups must also instill a pride, courage, and will to dare to struggle along the lines of New Afrikan revolutionary ideology. For desperately, “Our revolution needs a convinced people, not a conquered people.”(27) The quality of courage in the face of impending brutality by what Ori calls the state’s “carceral death machine”(28) will be necessary to put in gear the wheels of guerrilla resistance. The invocation of this spirit sets apart the human prepared to demand and indeed take his dignity by conquest, from the weak, pacified slave who rationalizes his fear, which is in fact “symptomatic of pathological plantation mentality that had been inculcated in Black people through generations of terror.”(29) This terror in the mind of Black males inside of Michigan cages is displayed at even the mention of radical (revolutionary) politics, inciting a fear drawn from the epigenetic memory of chattel slavery victimization, and the propensity of master’s retaliatory infliction of a violent consequence. This thought has frozen and totally immobilized the overwhelming majority of Black Michigan prison-slaves, not just into inaction, but turning them into advocates of pacified slave-like mentalities. But these niggas are quick to ravage the bodies of other niggas.

To this point, Ori writes

“Balagoon suggests that the primary barrier to the liberation of the colonized was within their minds – a combination of fear of death, respect for state authority, and deference to white power that had been hammered into the population from birth. Liberation would remain an impossibility as long as colonized subjects respected the taboos put in place by their oppressors.”(30)

To be sure, liberation struggles can only be “successful to the extent that we have diminished the element of fear in the minds of black people.”(31) Biko, speaking to this fear as something that erodes the soul of Black people, recognized “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.”(32)

Secondly, hand-in-hand with our political education must be the material engagement in the first revolution, the inner revolution. This is “The hard painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a new reality.”(33) This first, inner-revolution consists of “a process of rearranging one’s values – to put it simply, the death of the nigger is the birth of the Black man after coming to grips with being proud to be one’s self.”(34)

The ability to transform oneself from a nigga to an Afrikan man of character is perhaps the most important aspect of developing concordance with a New Afrikan revolutionary collective consciousness. Commenting “On Revolutionary Morality” in 1958, Ho Chi Minh said that “Behavioral habits and traditions are also big enemies: they insidiously hinder the progress of the revolution.” And because niggas, unbeknownst to themselves are white supremacists and pro-capitalist opportunists, the vanguard security apparatus must forever remain on guard for the possibility of niggas in the rank-and-file corrupting the minds of other niggas who have yet to internalize New Afrikan identity.

May these be our lessons. Ori’s Tip of the Spear text is important in the overall lexicon on the history of the prison movement, and must be kept handy next to the collection of Notes From New Afrikan P.O.W and Theoretical Journals. Tip of the Spear should serve not just as reference book, but a corrective guide for the protagonist wrestling the prison movement out the arms of strangulation, blowing spirit into the nostrils of its decaying body until it’s revived, and ready to fight the next round. And We are that body. Let’s dare to do the work.

Forward Towards Liberation!

We Are Our Liberators!

^*Notes: 1. Orisanmi Burton, October 2023, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, University of California Press, p. 223 2. Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros, and Walter Chambati, January 2020, Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo, Tulika Books, p.22 3. Mao Zedong, 1937, “On Contradiction”, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung 4. Burton, p.52 5. Burton, p.224-226 6. Life During Wartime, p.6 7. Remembering the Real Dragon - An Interview with George Jackson May 16 and June 29, 1971, Interview by Karen Wald and published in Cages of Steel: The Politics Of Imprisonment In The United States (Edited by Ward Churchill and J.J. Vander Wall). 8. Burton, p.175. 9. Life During Wartime, p.17. 10. Burton, p.1 11. Burton, p.10 12. Huey P. Newton, 1973, Revolutionary Suicide, p.4 13. Steve Biko, I write What I Like, p.150 14. Burton, p.4 15. Burton, p.179 16. Burton, p.175 17. Burton, p.8 18. Burton, p.7 19. Burton, p.150 20. Burton, p.41 21. Burton, p.150 22. Burton, p.99 23. Burton, p.92 24. Burton, p.82 25. Sundiata Acoli, “From The Bowels of the Beast: A Message,” Breaking da Chains. 26. Kwame “Beans” Shakur 27. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987, p.417 28. Burton, p.105 29. Burton, p.42 30. Burton, p.42 31. Biko, p.145 32. Biko, p.92 33. Safiya Bukhari 34. Burton, p.62

In mid-February on H-pod here in the ECB [Expansion Cell Blocks] prisoners got together and submitted 30 grievances about lack of dayroom and outside rec which G-5, G-4 and G-2 are all experiencing here in the ECB. The response from Warden Smith was that they are “understaffed”. I may submit my own grievance just to see if I get the same response though I have to be careful as the guards are using the gangs to police the prisoners and some of these fucking “Homeboys” do the pigs’ work for them violently. But I thought I would call your attention to an interview of Bryan Collier in the Nov-Dec 2023 and Jan. 2024 Echo Newspaper. In the January edition Collier admits to having “staffing” problems. So both Collier and Smith are aware of this understaffing but still it continues and they are not releasing anybody or hiring enough to quell the problems.

Two weeks ago it is rumored that a prisoner was raped by his celly. The word is this is the reason one of my classmates has been missing. I don’t know if a FOIA can be filed and help his family to get these motherfuckers? But being understaffed is dangerous and cruel for all of us.

These 30 grievances from G-4’s in H-pod on ECB and the January 2024 interview of Collier show corroborated “Deliberate Indifference.” Maybe I should also grieve this and send my copies to a supporter who can coordinate with prisoners, legislators, and the D.O.J. I’m sure Genocide Joe would love to get a piece of Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton for the bad press they have given him on the border?? We should take advantage of these asshole politicians whenever we can!!! Anyway, if you have any extra ULKs sitting around and can afford to send me another bulk mailing, please do so, so that I can distribute them here.

Securus advertises package pricing for movies I think that are about $12 a month but they are not offering these packages. Instead we have to pay from 6-12 dollars per movie rental! And they blame Hollywood Studios for this price gouging. I wonder if Hollywood knows about how they are exploiting us and our families? We should get Netflix for $16/month or something but 4.99-19.99 before tax is too much to charge “slaves” who do not get paid for their mandatory work!

MIM(Prisons) responds: It’s ironic that Abbott is fighting to militarize the border, but can’t find enough people to run his prisons. Though it’s our understanding that many Texas prisons are already being staffed by Nigerian immigrants working on visas. Meanwhile they have gangs working for the state, implementing repression and keeping the population sedated on drugs, while the staff sit around doing nothing. Though Biden has no qualms about supporting genocide, he does like scoring political points on Greg Abbot. This comrade might have a good idea here.

“[Our purpose is] to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind.” (1)

This feature, “The Culture Corner,” is a space designated to highlight and share cultural content that expresses revolutionary ideals and principles. “The Culture Corner” appears in the newsletter Power Moves, an internal newsletter distributed in certain Texas prisons, and is being reprinted here.

In 2024, the hip-hop genre has evolved to be the most influential genre of music in the world. As such, it is incumbent upon revolutionaries to utilize this genre to express revolutionary ideals and to advance revolutionary consciousness and solidarity.

One artist that has done this prolifically, while steadfastly maintaining a revolutionary nationalist and anti-capitalist political line, is Bay Area lyrical comrade The Revolutionary Eseibio The Automatic.

Just as important as eir content, in my view, is the accessibility of the music to the captive population. In the prison climate today, dominated by tablet devices with their purposely indoctrinating content, Eseibio’s content does its job by providing a revolutionary alternative. Eir content can be accessed on J-pay/Securus tablets on the media store app. Simply search music and type the artist’s name as spelled above. Eseibio has an extensive catalog of music, spanning over a decade worth of material with a wide number of albums and mixtapes.

While all of Eseibio’s material is revolutionary with an underground flavor, there are certain albums and songs that stick out more than others. These include the albums “Black Panther” and “African Revolutionary”. The former’s tracklist reads like a history lesson on the Black Panther Party. Standout tracks like “10 Point Program,” “Hands Off Assata,” “Red Book,” “Letter to Afeni,” “Smile 4 Pac,” “Off the Pigs,” and “George Jackson Day of the Gun” are bangers that also educate the listener. Other standout tracks like “Juche,” “Che Guevara,” “Bust A Cap,” “Kwame Nkrumah,” “Black Boots,” “In Defense of Self-Defense,” “Free The Land,” “Free Em All,” and “C.R.E.A.M-Capitalism Rules Everything Around Me” should be in steady rotation.

Most important of all is that Eseibio, and other artists that shall be featured in “The Culture Corner” in the future, provide a platform for political prisoners to bring brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers who were left by the wayside into the revolutionary movement. It is not good enough to complain of the maneuvers of the enemy. We have to be good at improvising on the new realities. This is only one way of mixing up the necessary improvisation.

A clenched fist salute to The Revolutionary Eseibio The Automatic and all other revolutionary and conscious artists using their talents for the advancement of the class and national struggles.

“The Culture Corner” will put the spotlight on other artists in future issues, We recommend you to go check out the comrade Eseibio.

^{Notes: (1) Mao-Tse-Tung’s Selected Works III p.84, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art.”}

A guy walked into special housing on HCON [High Security Maximum Control Unit] in 2022 with a head swollen to the size of a bowling ball, with skin hanging off deep face wounds above his eyebrow. He could barely walk. After the shield team beat him in the cell, then in the hallway on camera, they took him to medical and chained him to a table before beating him in front of the doctor and nurse.

Then they took him to the dry-cell and put his head against a concrete bench (like a chopping block) in a kneeling position and began beating and kicking him in the head. One officer beat him on the ass with a night-stick. Then they stomped him out of consciousness. When he awoke they were still beating him. They left him there for about two hours til shift-change.

Right before shift-change they walked him back down the hall, past the nurse station where a second-shift nurse spotted the offender and asked what happened to him because he didn’t look like that when he went into the dry-cell. The Sergeant Wilson tried to make excuses but nevertheless the nurse had another assessment report done.

The guy was put in a special-housing cell next to mine. At shift-change the replacing sergeant who happened to be at competition with Sergeant Wilson for a lieutenant position reported the prisoner’s conditions to the Administration and Operating Lieutenant.

When the Lieutenant arrived the prisoner refused to take pictures – until I told him to take the pictures and go to medical. The prisoner was later taken to outside medical and diagnosed with a concussion and broken temple bone in his skull.

I myself and many other captives coached this prisoner with legal advice but he refused to appeal the grievance to step 3 in an attempt to arrange a deal with administration to be released from HCON status. He was not released.

In the process the Sergeant Wilson was transferred along with several other officers and one was fired. Shortly after being placed to work in the gate-house away from prisoners Sergeant Wilson quit. Only one of the officers is still here which is one too many.

This prisoner basically saved the officers by refusing to speak with the Warden about the incident or write statements. The prisoner later stated that writing a grievance or statement is snitching, but as I mentioned above he wrote both a grievance and statement, only to turn around and sell himself short, copping pleas and leaving everyone else hanging; while he turns his back and blind eye to fellow comrades who will suffer the same fate from these officers, he sold us out and left us to the wolves for false promises and that’s not what brothers do. Real brothers wouldn’t let any abuser anywhere near their brothers or sisters. Those were cynical decisions without revolutionary consciousness for the betterment of the people, the same people who helped him to medical treatment when he was lying on his deathbed.

Why settle to copping deals with the same foes who watched orders being carried out to kick your head in? I’m not taking anything from this prisoner’s will to self-sacrifice for others, but on an overall standpoint collectively concerning the prison population, the message here is,

“Don’t knock others for their foresight in advancing the people by any means necessary, including pen and paper.” -The Ballot or the Bullet, Malcolm X

Snitching:

1. As long as what you say does not include someone else it is not snitching.
2. Giving a hint that someone did something is dry snitching.

Collaborating: 1. Siding with, taking up for, or covering up for the police.

The generations before us put in decades of paperwork to get where we are today. They wrote newspaper publishers and fought for things we take for granted like bail, trials, showers and recreation etc. Nothing is final until it’s on paper. Any legal case won becomes precedent (law).

Last, police yourselves (nations, neighborhoods, etc). The reason overall Brothers in Islam are more righteous is because we police ourselves to keep each other in-line. If the brothers’ gambling and breaking bread on our watch then we are just as guilty.

“Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win.”

In Under Lock & Key 83, my article Ruchell Magee was published with the line:

“He would later impregnate her before his demise, with a son his mother would deny. A son that would grow into a polar opposite of George Jackson.”

This was a mistake as i intended to write that Jonathan Jackson’s son looks like a polarized version of George Jackson. This was merely a reference to the son’s appearance.

I wanna add my voice to the ongoing conversation on Sex Offenders (S.O.’s) and LGBTQ people from a revolutionary perspective.

One key hurdle I think has to be constantly attacked and can only be attacked through criticism and self-criticism: so-called revolutionaries, activists, and political prisoners self-identifying as these things but still holding to the vestiges of their gangster, reactionary world views that make them comfortable.

A political activist analyzes people, places, and things from a political perspective. What is this person, place, or thing’s worth, or lack thereof, to the political programs that political group/individual is striving for? The military activist analyzes people, places, and things from a military perspective, analyzing what will be most advantageous to the military goals of their army, militia, unit, etc.

Because of this, morals and standards in political and military groups, among such people are constantly shifting. When one is on the battlefield, even the most avowed racist, sexist, homo-transphobe, sex offender bigot, will not allow their hate or disdain for the “other” to cost them their lives. The primary concern for the soldier or military commander would be can this person maintain discipline in battle, can they perform under pressure, will they desert their comrades in battle or go AWOL, are they reliable. If the S.O. or non-heterosexual was saving your life on a battlefield, no one would say “let me die I don’t like your kind” or “you’re irredeemable.” At that moment, the equality of humankind will shine bright and true and all the self-gratifying lies we tell each other will shrink in comparison with the truth.

I am not saying you should have no concern about the moral fabric of comrades. Usually morality and politics overlap. What I am saying is that a person/group’s political line and commitment should be of deciding and primary concern if you yourself are indeed a political activist or military activist.

How many times in prison have we seen the “rules” of organizations bent for certain “stomp down” individuals. How many times have we seen people look the other way when a member of their org partakes in sexual gratification that the org prohibits or has a case that’s frowned upon by the org? When this occurs it is usually because those in the org recognize the person in question is a practitioner of violence and that violent aggression is better with you than against you. So people make a tactical or strategic decision to condone, accept what they would otherwise attack or shun. For better or worse, this is political maneuvering at its core and it’s done every day in every prison. I am not promoting it, simply stating truths. The purpose of pointing these truths is to say that if the apolitical populace can discern these nuances then why can’t the politically do so when our causes are so much more noble and worthy of forgiving of one another’s trespasses (real & perceived).

Try a new way of relating to the people on the compound with you. If we’re revolutionaries then we should be revolutionizing the social relations and castes in prison. The prison culture fosters a caste system based on criminal history, skin color, material wealth, propensity for violence, and sexual orientation. As revolutionaries we must check ourselves if we’re not actively establishing a new prison culture and eliminating the hard-line caste structure. How? It starts with building and maintaining relations based on ones level of revolutionary ideology and practice.

Instead of greeting people with “Where you from, what you in for?” or being concerned about who they’re attracted to or intimate with, your greetings, concerns, and inquiries should be, “What are your politics? What do you think about capitalism? How do you think we could organize against the issues we face? Check out this political program, and tell me what if anything you’d be willing to contribute to advancing it.” If you aren’t doing that in some form or fashion you need to engage in self-criticism, are you a revolutionary or a convict bound by the rules and ideas of prison culture?

Lastly, the notion that any group, or person is exempt from recovery, rehabilitation, or transformation is metaphysical, subjective, and thus incorrect. Despite the subject matter, the universe and everything in it, including one’s ideas and impulses, attractions, are in constant movement and development. Nothing remains stagnant. This universal truth is the only universal truth, that nothing remains the same. Therefore to predetermine that anyone or anything is irredeemable is out of compliance with reality and is therefore incorrect thinking, and merely a reflection of one’s biased and narrow analysis. Another small point I want to turn on from ULK #82, ‘Thugs Are Sex Offenders Too’, where the writer says:

“The problem is that most transgender men-women in prison are sex offenders, they are in for preying on children.”

This statement is obviously biased and subjective, and leads to flawed analysis. It is possibly true that the trans people that writer has encountered in prison are all S.O.’s, but it is the exact opposite for my own lived experience. No transgender person I’ve encountered has ever been locked up for a sexual offense, outside of soliciting prostitution. Here’s what I mean by a purely subjective analysis, one that is narrow and one sided relying on one’s own experience only. The truth is that trans people are most often victims of sexual predators in and out of prisons. Those who’ve become predators themselves, whether trans or not, are most often victims of prior sexual abuse. Though this may not align with the writers lived experience it is the majority experience in society as told by polls and statistics. Yet the metaphysical, subjective, nature of postmodernist philosophy has us giving more credence to our own individual lived experience than that of the society at large or a wide array of the population. If we’re in the business of transforming society at large that sort of analysis will not work well.

Dare to Invent the Future

There is a duality in regards to the existence of the victimization in the New Afrikan nation and generally among oppressed people. The duality expresses itself when oppressed people avoid struggle, avoid acknowledgment of their colonization and oppression, because of a psychosocial tendency to align one’s self with strength, victory, privilege, excess, and power. This tendency is deeply rooted in one of the characteristics of the “colonial mentality,” which is a lack of dignity, pride, and self-worth. In this case of identity crisis and pathology, the oppressed chooses to derive its pride, dignity, self-worth (and perceived social, political, and economic interests) from the upper echelons of empire, from the imperialist power structure.

There is another side of this duality which thrives, not on its own victimhood per se, but more aptly on its ability to resist, thwart, and overcome the complexities of the colonial-imperial oppression. These are “the people,” so often refereed to in radical discourse, “the people’s” collective will in movement fighting, struggling ceaselessly.

The basic truth is that in every contradiction there are winners and losers. Losers, by default, die victims. Winners are victimizers. The issue, from my humble point of view, only arises when We have a social group, or a broad mass within a social group after long periods of oppression, become content with their own status as victims. So content in fact that they themselves have rendered all resistance and tactical victories among themselves as illegitimate expressions of the oppressed experience. This is indeed an issue because war has a sole purpose to destroy the will and/or ability for the opposition to resist our advancement.

“War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a war, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: his first object is to throw his adversary, and thus to render him incapable of further resistance… Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science [cognitive, neuro sciences, behavioral sciences] in order to contend against violence.”(1)

The inherent danger and crippling effect of the pathology of New Afrikan Victimization can be seen in many instances, but i will highlight one in particular.

i am speaking here of the case of Brother Othal “Ozone” Wallace, a New Afrikan man in Florida currently fighting against the State’s death penalty. Ozone is a father and was an active participant in the efforts of liberation for New Afrikan and other oppressed people. Prior to his current captivity Ozone was active in search and rescue missions of suspected human trafficking victims. As a craftsman by trade he helped rebuild communities damaged by hurricane disasters. Ozone was also on the front lines of armed demonstrations advocating armed self defense and armed struggle against the oppression of New Afrikans.

In June 2021, Ozone was exiting his vehicle while in a residential area, when he was approached by a Daytona Beach Police officer who asked a question common to colonial and oppressed subjects globally, “Where are you going? Do you live here?” Body cam footage shows the officer repeat, “Do you live here? Yes or no?” While he grabbed Ozone by the shoulders. At that point the footage becomes shaky and blurry, but it should be understood that this entire incident, from the Police’s observation as someone “unwelcome”, “suspect”, “threatening”, is a textbook chain of events in the efforts of occupation and counter-insurgent forces. This “regular” treatment of New Afrikans is contrary to the U.$. constitution’s Fourth Amendment right to protection from illegal search and seizure, but its regularity showcases that New Afrikans are still a colonized population whose existence is situated outside the general legalities of the empire.

Somehow during the physical struggle, initiated by the officer’s arrogant choice to grab Ozone, the officer ended up shot in his face, while Ozone escaped the scene. He was captured days later, in a wooded area in Georgia, where state agents also allege to have found multiple flash bangs, rifle plates, body armor, two rifles, two handguns, and several boxes of ammunition.

In the ensuing “legal” drama, once the officer died in a hospital as a result of his wounds in August of 2021, Prosecutors began seeking the death penalty, the family of the officer filed a civil suit, suing Ozone for $5 million, specifically the money accumulated by Ozone’s criminal defense fundraiser page. Prosecutors have sought to have his GoFundMe account shutdown. In short, Ozone was and remains under attack, and his experience is synonymous with New Afrikan liberation in general.

My reason for highlighting Ozone’s experience is that i see it as an example and a dividing line question among “the left” and New Afrikans particularly and Black liberationists (of many stripes) generally. My question to the movement(s), to Our People, why is Ozone not as known as Michael Brown or George Floyd? Why is he not garnering support and attention from the Black and radical press? Why is he virtually unknown to the common persyn of the street? The simple answer is that New Afrikans, generally speaking, even within so-called radical circles, have become infected with that colonial pathology that i call New Afrikan Victimization. Some of us are too content with Our imagery and association with victimhood. Others delude themselves into behaving as if this victimization doesn’t exist on an institutional and systemic level. Instead opting for the “boot straps” mentality which is also a socio-pathology.

Too many of us have failed to acknowledge that We are at war, that we’re subjects, not free and liberated citizens of a free democratic society. We’ve failed to realize the there are no “rights” only power struggles, and those who dictate power subsequently dictate what “rights” are respected or discarded. Most important, We’ve failed to realize the implications of these failures. Thus We have Ozone, and other Political Prisoners of War lost in captivity without support or even acknowledgment from even elements of Movement(s) that are supposed to be supporting Political Prisoners of War. Such groups, generally, have forgotten the current epoch of struggle, that there are Political Prisoners being captured almost daily. That yesteryears “Black Nationalist hate group” designation that fueled COINTELPRO and PRISACTS has been replaced by today’s “Black Identity Extremist” designation that is fueling present day surveillance, sabotage, and imprisonment of movement activists. While we should never forget or relinquish support of BPP/BLA Political Prisoners or others from earlier eras of struggle, We also should not exclude or ignore those currently active in the streets (even if We do not agree with their political line).

Free Ozone and All Political Prisoners

^{Notes: 1. Carl von Clausewitz, 1832, On War.}