A panel of academics and activists marked the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected prime minister, by agents of the US and Belgium. Texas A&M professor Ira Dworkin, author of “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State,” pointed out that it was Black women, led by singer Abbey Lincoln, who petitioned for Lumumba’s release from arrest, and later organized against US policy in Congo. These protests “did create a shift” in Black American politics towards confrontation with US policies in Africa and the world, Dworkin told the online seminar.
Assata Shakur wrote the introduction and this poem for the 1990 book Hauling Up the Morning: writings & art by political prisoners and prisoners of war in the U.S.
They called Assata Shakur a fugitive; we claim her as a compass. Her work and her words will continue to chart the path toward our liberation.
The empire has a new plan for Haiti, a return to military occupation dressed up as humanitarianism. Like past occupations, it will only increase the suffering of Haiti's people.
While Gaza burns, a collaborationist class is being handed the keys to a prison and calling it a state, all in service to western imperialism.
Western nations complicit in occupation and genocide offer a fig leaf of sovereignty by recognizing a Palestinian state that in reality would still be occupied.
