Johanna Fernandez left a powerful and revolutionary legacy through her scholarship and activism.
"solidarity is emotional"
Johanna Fernandez (1970-2026)
As the tributes pour in, we are slowly, soberly and somberly putting together the Johanna each one of us knew. The collective Johanna that emerges is tall, fierce but loving, a burning passionaria with ice cold determination. A woman warrior ready to pay the price.
The intrepid biographer of the Young Lords, Johanna had joined the Mumia Abu-Jamal campaign in the late nineties. In 2023, I was honored to have collaborated with Johanna on bringing Mumia's archives to Brown University and to have co-founded with her, Professor Mark Taylor and Michael and Annette Schiffmann: the UN Mumia Liaison group. The same year, Johanna was key in obtaining an amicus curiae for Mumia which was presented to Judge Lucretia Clemons although the latter dismissed both the United Nations human rights document and Mumia's last appeal founded on solid Brady and Batson evidence found in six boxes locked away for 36 years.
Johanna was not only Mumia's PhD advisor, she was the political apple of his eye, his unfailing sister whose healing company had sustained him for decades. When he was informed of her passing two nights ago, Mumia was devastated.
Johanna had a strategic view of the struggle but she also knew tactically how to seize the time. She had that see-through vision of time that was both feline and analytic.
I remember, six years ago, when she was watching Amy Goodman interviewing Larry Krasner live on Democracy Now , she seized her smartphone, called the studio, asked that a message be passed on to Amy requesting her to raise Mumia Abu-Jamal with Krasner in real time thus eliciting from the Philadelphia District Attorney the famous response that Mumia's case remains "a microcosm" of all that was corrupt in the justice system that preceded him. That statement remains a testament to what Larry Krasner has yet to do while he is in the prosecutor's seat. Johanna had an uncanny way of holding up mirrors to double-talk.
I remember when Johanna was in remission from her last illness and the encampments of City University of New York (CUNY) and Columbia University were up in support of Gaza, frail as she was, she went in person to those campuses to air Mumia's commentaries for a Free Palestine through a megaphone she held out for the students to hear.
Johanna had a sense of historical Time and knew how not to let it pass us by. And she was more than just the teacher of her students, she was a passer-on of revolutionary ideology and practice between the generations.
Johanna was a community healer. In 2021 she organized a panel against sexual abuse targeting women in the struggle which instead of being an academic panel of talking heads gave the mic to those among us who had been abused and some of us for the first time found the words to say it. I was able to bear testimony to my own abuse and to how I felt my body had become a piece of land up for grabs. I had been taken like a colony.
After the panel, for the first time in my life, although I was almost eighty years old, was able to dance to my own ancestral music. Johanna is to be thanked for many things - and many of us did not have the time to thank her.
Like Denise Oliver-Velez, the Economic Development Minister of the Young Lords and others in revolutionary leadership, Johanna fought both the mass incarceration state on the outside and cancer within. Since Amilcar Cabral's Cancer of Betrayal speech on the death of Kwame Nkrumah in 1972, we understand that cancer can be the physical expression of the inner betrayal of the revolution. "The personal is political" is a Young Lords slogan. Both Denise and Johanna were relentlessly tracking such betrayals or festering inner contradictions, for instance the paradoxical role of capitalism's dollars in our movements.
More than ever, the losses of Denise Oliver-Velez and Johanna Fernandez leave us with the need for a Fanon who could write a psychopathology of everyday abolitionism showing us how in spite of the necessity of being in fight or flight mode day and night, in spite of the accumulation of cortisol and stored adrenaline, we can solve our contradictions before they go to our cells and we can address the root cause that prevents the unity of the new body politic we work to free our political prisoners into, from sub-dividing into rogue elements.
Yesterday my son who never met Johanna listened to her story and added: "Mum, just as oncologists have found that the sugar we are over dependent on - like our dollars - is the poison that makes cancer grow in us".
Johanna Presente!
Julia Wright is the elder daughter of Richard Wright and executrix of his estate. She worked as a journalist in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana until the coup d'etat in 1966. She was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and accompanied the Black Panther Party to the First Panafrican Festival in Algiers. She has been in the campaign to free Mumia since the mid-eighties.
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