The Bandung of the North Conference brought delegates from twenty-nine African and Asian nations, to work collectively toward decolonization. Julia Wright and Jenipher R. Jones delivered these remarks on white supremacist violence and state repression of dissent.
The year 1955 when the Bandung Conference took place was a pivotal year binding the Global South and the birth of non-alignment to the history of US political prisoners. In August of 1955 two Black youths would be victims of the false accusations of attempting to rape or sexually molest a white woman - false accusations known as "southern justice.” The first child was lynched, and justice has not been served till this day. His name is Emmett Till. Date of lynching: August 28, 1955.
The second victim of such a classic white supremacist frame-up was none other than the young man who would become the longest-held political prisoner in the US: Ruchell Magee. Ruchell Magee was arrested and charged with the same crime as Emmett Till that same Summer of 1955, charges later endorsed by an all-white jury that took only a fraction of a second to send him to twelve years of forced labor in the Louisiana Penitentiary of Angola. Although paroled in 1962, he remained branded by his eloquent linking of the system of mass incarceration to slavery and was soon captured again under false pretenses. Before being released "compassionately" a few months prior to his death, Ruchell Magee spent sixty-seven years in prison.
So, 1955 was that paradoxical year of unredeemed lynchings and Brown vs Board of Education inside the United States - and outside, the year Richard Wright was just back in Paris from covering the Bandung Conference where he had met and interviewed Prime Ministers Nehru and Chou En Lai - as well as Indira Ghandhi.
Back in his Paris exile, on receiving the news of the lynching of Emmett Till, Wright wrote from the unique perspective he had gained at Bandung: " Emmett Till was the color of Nehru, and how on earth could any sensible person feel that Nehru could love a nation in which human life is so cheap. A man like Nehru feels that such could happen to him if he lived in the United States! In short, the western world pays highly when an Emmett Till is slain, and it would be wise to remember that when the people of Asia and Africa think of Emmett Till being slain, they could not think that white Americans did it, but that the white men of the western world have killed another man of colored skin. It hurts the whole cause of the West."
Wright had not received the news about Ruchell Magee but as his daughter and in the spirit of Bandung, his words were prescient... and that they apply to the frame-ups of political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier today. Today, the false narrative underpinning the frame-ups is no longer rape but allegedly law enforcement killing - but the goal is the same: nipping Black and Indigenous leadership in the bud.
The chilling of dissent as a threat to the domination of the state is an age-old colonial tact that still reverberates today in cases of all political prisoners and pretrial detainees in the United States. For it is clear, the state does not want the truth to be known of how Leonard Peltier sought to liberate his people, in the spirit of Crazy Horse, by laughing, playing, teaching, and protecting children and women in his homelands. Just as they no longer wanted Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X to engender the strident walk, upheld head, and smile wide of a united Black people.
The state cannot erase the fond childhood memories of Leonard held by so many nor what he taught them, so they choose the weak exercise of containing him with a cage that is in fact perishing. The state can never dim the bright Blackness of Malik el-Shabazz. Leonard and Mumia, like Malik el Shabazz, endures. Unconquered still.
With heads unbowed we reflect on the words of Leonard Peltier, who remains incarcerated now fifty years later, as a Prisoner of War (POW), declaring in his sentencing statement in 1977, ringing true now as ever before: “I do feel pity for your people that they must live under such an ugly system. Under your system you are taught greed, racism, and corruption, and the most serious of all, the destruction of our mother earth. Under the Native American system, we are taught all people are brothers and sisters, to share the wealth with the poor and needy; but the most important of all is to respect and preserve the earth, to me considered to be our mother.”
To quote Leonard Peltier, “I send my love and blood as a prisoner of war within the belly of the beast to those who continue the struggle.”
Thank you for elevating the names of Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal and their death by incarceration as they stand proud, innocent, elderly and ailing behind bars.
Julia Wright is the elder 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 SNCC and accompanied the BPP to the First Panafrican Festival in Algiers. She has been in the campaign to free Mumia since the mid-eighties.
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