Prison Newsletter by Baba Bilal Sunni-Ali
The other day I was preparing a Political Prisoner Report for the program What Good Is A Song.?/The Friday Night Drum. The program comes on as the title suggests on Friday. Actually every Friday evening from 6:00 - 7:30 PM on Atlanta’s Community Radio Station WRFG. I got a call from a young man named Kwame Shakur. Kwame is a prisoner at the Federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He’s been there about ten years and is about thirty years. He’s currently appealing a conviction for murder.
Kwame Shakur is a political prisoner.
Kwame was calling to remind me of an agreement I had made to write an article for the PRISON NEWSLETTER. The PRISON NEWSLETTER is a new development in the movement for prison activists. It is decided to be the central focus of the developing movement. Prisoners themselves and prison activists are being asked to contribute to the PRISON NEWSLETTER. A central bank of information is to be stored at the website: www.SupportPrisonLives.org and the NEWSLETTER will be distributed from the collective of activists attending to it.
The PRISON NEWSLETTER continues in the tradition of what was once an annual single handed effort published by sister Yuri Kochiyama in New York. The story of Yuri Kochiyama deserves much more than the brief mention i’m giving it here, however if we are going to talk about Political Prisoners , Prisoners of. War, etc.. we gotta give her a necessary mention along with a directive to research her life of struggle. Yuri was a hard worker in the struggle to help support her family and in the New Afrikan national liberation struggle. In the early seventies she lived in Harlem and worked with the National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners. In the sixties she had been a companion of our martyr El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. A Japanese national by birth (a naturalized New Afrikan) by consciousness she had the childhood experience of being along with her family incarcerated in an internment (concentration)camp during the second world wide imperialist war (World War 2). Yuri wrote to almost every Political prisoner from Ruchell Magee to Dr. Mutulu Shakur and more. She almost singlehandedly maintained an annual report on just about every Political Prisoner you could think of . Finally the PRISON NEWSLETTER will succeed while complementing her gallant historic effort.
The announcement of the inaugural PRISON NEWSLETTER was made on the Friday November 27th edition on The Friday Night Drum. The staff at the Drum will make the building of the PRISON NEWSLETTER a part of its ongoing work. We were first introduced to Kwame or rather Kwame introduced himself to us a few years ago. As a leading member of the New Afrikan Liberation Collective he was directly involved in two activities which garnered out attention. The first was in July 2018 a day of conferencing and protest demonstrations. The morning conference was a collection of local and national prison activists sharing history and points of unity. That afternoon had us join a demonstration organized by IDOC-WATCH, the Indiana Department of Corrections- Watch. We found points of unity in that we were involved in the organizing and announcing the Spirit of Nelson Mandela Campaign and the International Tribunal to be held in New York in October 2021. The campaign focuses on Human Rights Violations committed against our Prisoners under the well known US government’s Counterinsurgency policy known as COINTELPRO.
The second event was the New Afrikan People's Assembly of July 18, 2020. This activity was attended by veteran-elder and current members of our broadcast collective as well as other activists in the New Afrikan national liberation struggle representing our national territory.
The PRISON NEWSLETTER will be building toward establishing a center for the growing prison struggle uniting it with the New Afrikan national Liberation struggle and the struggle of Political Prisoners.
The other important point of unity found was in our support for recently released Political Prisoner Jalil Muntaqim fka Anthony Bottom. Jalil after serving just weeks short of fifty years was recently arrested on charges related to voter fraud. The case itself is fraud. His parole officer told him to “go down to Social Services and see what they got for you”. Amidst the array of forms to assist with food, financial and medical needs was a voter registration form. The voter registration form was the form of entrapment. He is scheduled to appear in a Rochester, NY court on December 14, 2020.
FIGHT TO KEEP JALIL MUNTAQIM FREE