Tag: never forget

third-nature:

queeranarchism:

nokiabae:

The best thing coming out of Black Panther is the renewed calls for the release of jailed Black Panther members who’ve been incarcerated for decades. The FBI’s terrorism unit had labeled them “black identity extremists”, claiming that activists fighting police brutality posed a violent threat. 

An incomplete list of
Black Liberation political prisoners

(Black Panthers and other groups) still inside:

• Joe Joe Bowen, born 1946, in prison since 1971
• Veronza Bowers, born 1946, in prison since 1973
• Sundiata Acoli, born 1937, in prison since 1969
• Chip Fitzgerald, born 1949, in prison since 1970, denied parole 17 times.
• Fred Burton, born 1946, in prison since 1970
• Mumia Abu-Jamal, born 1954, in prison since 1982
• Ruchell Magee, born 1939, in prison since 1963,
• Ronald Reed, born 1950, in prison since 1970,
• Jamil
  Al-Amin, born 1943, in and out of prison from the 1970s to the 1990s on
  a series of suspicious charges, currently incarcerated
• Rev. Joy Powell, born 1962, in prison since 2006, eligible for parole in 2045
• Freddie Hilton, born 1953, in prison since 2002
• Robert Hayes, born 1948, in prison since 1973
• Russell Maroon Shoates, born 1943, in prison since 1972, held in solitary confinement for 22 years
  

these people are literally heroes. they organized a breakfast program for poor kids, hosted rent strikes, applied pressure to landlords to do their jobs cleaning up apartments. there’s even one story where two of these guys drove out to a person’s house and brought their baby to the hospital to get a cockroach removed from her ear.

these are heroes who demanded freedom for oppressed peoples and actively worked toward creating a more free world.

and so they were accused of crimes they didn’t commit, thrown in jail, and left to rot where they’d be sure never to feed a hungry kid or refill an abandoned community pool ever again.