The nation’s best known political prisoner, Mumia Abu Jamal, marked the 45th anniversary of the MOVE organization with recollections of when MOVE members were undergound in Rochester, New York. There, they “lived a life of peace that was unthinkable in Philadelphia,” because “they lived out of the eye of a merciless media,” he said. “Absent the ‘zone of negativity by the media, people met MOVE as people, and loved them.” In contrast, police and media hostility to MOVE in the City of Brotherly Love led to life sentences for nine MOVE members in 1978, and the bombing of the MOVE residence in 1985, killing eleven members, including five children.
The Brits practiced a nonjudicial form of Jim Crow against non-white immigrants from their colonial empire.
We as Black people must keep pushing, organizing, and demanding a Black agenda centered on reparations.
For 350 years, California has imprisoned and disenfranchised its Native peoples like few other places.
We need to continue building power from the bottom up through organizing, political education and community assemblies.
