FLINT TAYLOR—Fifty-one years ago this past week, Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were slain by the Chicago police in a murderous pre-dawn raid. Over the next five decades the Hampton and Clark families, their lawyers, the Black Panther Party, movement activists, honest reporters and documentary filmmakers, and peoples’ historians have waged a continuous battle to uncover and speak the truth about Fred Hampton, the BPP, and the December 4th raid. These intergenerational and interracial efforts have led to a changing of the historical narrative from a shoot-out between the Panthers and the police, to a “shoot in” where the police fired more than 90 shots to one by the Panthers, then to a murder of Fred Hampton while he slept, drugged, in his bed, and now, to a political assassination orchestrated by the FBI under its notorious COINTEPRO program.
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MARGARET KIMBERLEY—The presidency is a powerful office. If he wants to, Biden can make every fatal encounter with police subject to federal instead of local prosecution. He can issue an executive order forgiving student loan debt. Biden can direct the Department of Labor to stop wage theft, including the misclassification of workers as managers which deprives them of overtime pay. The new president can do all of these things without congressional approval and that is what the CBC and NAACP ought to demand but won’t.
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JEFF J. BROWN—It is hard to describe what has transpired with Mumia Abu-Jamal, since 6 June 2020, when I sent him my first message via his prison’s for profit “email” system.
Like an uninformed goober, I sent him hyperlinks to my website and books, only to learn that Mumia is completely cut off from the internet. This “Prison Connect Network” is the only way I could communicate with him, and to stifle the exchange of information, you can only send 2,000 characters – not words – characters per message. That’s like three paragraphs at a time, and it costs money for each message.
Not only that, but it’s crap quality, like using Microsoft DOS 30 years ago. I learned quickly to copy and save all my messages, since half the time I have to start over, as the system crashes frequently. The vendor, GTL must pay some handsome sunshine bribes to get this contract for concentration camps all over the USA, charging monopoly rates for prisoners to telephone and be called by loved ones. For friends and family members struggling to put food on the table and pay the rent, it’s a vexing situation. Thus, our now four-month long journey to work together through this dog-end messaging system began and continues. Including our interview below, I have 25 pages of communication between us.
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A Minneapolis judge is moving forward with jury selection in the 2nd degree murder trial of the cop that killed George Floyd. Ai the height of protests, Minneapolis city council members vowed to disband the local police force. However, “there’s nothing being disbanded, dismantled or defunded, unfortunately, at this time,” said Sam Martinez, of the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice for Jamar Clark, a young Black man killed by cops five years ago. “We let the community know that what happened to George Floyd wasn’t going to stop unless the community has control of the police,” said Martinez.
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RUSSELL RICKFORD—Black is King is, of course, a Disney venture. One would hardly expect a multinational corporation to sponsor a radical critique of social relations in the Global South. (It is worth mentioning that in recent years the Disney Company has come under fire for allowing some of its merchandise to be produced in Chinese sweatshops.) Small wonder that Disney and Beyoncé, herself a stupendously rich mogul, have combined to sell western audiences a lavishly fabricated Africa—one that is entirely devoid of class conflict.
