Black History Month: Political Prisoners USA

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Paul Robeson - Ol’ Man River

Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, June 12, 1956

You’re listening to Back in the USSR, here on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried, and that was the great Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River” from the 1933 musical “Showboat”.  Paul Robeson, the Afro-American singer, actor, civil rights leader, internationalist, communist, and tireless fighter for the rights and self-determination of his people as well as those of colonized and oppressed peoples around the world.  He was and is a great man, along with many other great Afro-Americans like WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Harry Haywood, and so many others who were not afraid to stand up against a racist capitalist system in their own country and all over the world.  This is Black History Month and, as I’ve done before, I plan on focusing a series of shows on the particular subject of the ongoing struggle of black people for liberation.  Because it is ongoing.  Racism still exists and remains virulent in this age of Trump and rising fascism, hate and escalating violence.  Afro-Americans continue to be killed by the police.  Working class black people in particular continue to live in poverty and continue to face systemic discrimination in schools, in housing, and on the job market.  America’s prisons remain disproportionately packed with black people and African-American political prisoners remain behind bars.  It’s this issue of political prisoners that I want to begin with tonight, because America has them and has them in considerable numbers in spite of the American government’s wholesale denial of this fact.  And I want to read a passage from Michael Parenti’s text “Democracy for the Few” outlining the scope of just how much the American state has targeted people, particularly African-Americans, for political reasons:

Numerous African-American leaders involved in progressive community causes and struggles against drug pushers have been railroaded into prison on trumped-up charges.  Thus, after police planted heroin in his bookstore, Martin Sostre, an outspoken opponent of the heroin traffic, was sentenced to thirty years for drug dealing, on the word of a convict who later admitted that his testimony had been fabricated.  Sostre served nine years, mostly in solitary confinement.  After much pressure from progressive groups, New York governor Mario Cuomo granted him amnesty.

Frank Shuford, an African-American activist and anticapitalist in Santa Ana, California, developed a number of community programs and helped people organize against drug dealers and their corrupt police allies.  He was arrested for the shooting of two store clerks.  Neither clerk identified him as the gunman and no material evidence was presented against him.  At his trial, Shuford was branded a "revolutionary troublemaker" by the prosecution.  His own lawyer conducted a strangely lackadaisical defense, then was himself appointed a district attorney immediately after Shuford was found guilty by an all-White jury and sentenced to thirty years.  In prison, Shuford was drugged, beaten, denied medical care, and scheduled for a lobotomy.  Only community pressure on his behalf prevented the operation from taking place.  Shuford served over ten years.

The leaders of Black Men's Movement Against Crack, an organization dedicated to fighting the narcotics trade in New York, were imprisoned on trumped up charges of "illegal possession of weapons, attempted escape, and assault."

In Tchula, Mississippi, Eddie Carthan was elected the first African-American mayor since Reconstruction, and the first to buck the local plutocracy.  Carthan refused to appoint cronies of the big planters, declined bribes, and investigated the corruption of previous administrations.  He started programs for nutrition, health care, day care, and housing rehabilitation for poor people.  The Board of Aldermen, dominated by planter interests, cut his salary to virtually nothing and barred him from his city hall office.  The governor had all federal funds to Tchula cut off, ending most of the mayor's programs.  When Carthan retook his office with five auxiliary police, he was charged with assault and sentenced to three years, convicted on the testimony of a witness who later recanted.  The FBI targeted the mayor, combing through his records and papers, discovering only that Carthan had authorized an assistant to sign his name to a delivery receipt for day-care equipment; for this "fraud" he was given an additional four-year sentence.  Then, after a Black alderman was robbed and murdered and the murderer convicted, Carthan was charged with having plotted the murder.  He was eventually released only after protest campaigns were launched around the country.  The low-income Black voters of Tchula got a lesson is what happens to democratic leaders when they intrude - however modestly - upon an entrenched and wealthy class power.

Community activist and leader of African self-determination, Fred Hampton Jr. (son of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was murdered by law officers), was tried on a bogus charge of arson in Chicago.  During the trial no evidence was produced demonstrating that Hampton was connected to the fires or that they had ever actually happened.  Yet he was given eighteen years and later subjected to serious mistreatment in prison for organizing around inmates' rights.

Prisoners who propagate radical political views or who engage in protests regarding prison conditions have been singled out for mind-control programs, subjected to mind-altering drugs, beatings, forced rectal searches, prolonged shackling, isolation, and other tortures.  Inmates in U.S. prisons, noted Amnesty International in 1998, "have reportedly been put in supermax units because of their political affiliations."

From 1968 to 1971, over three hundred members of the Black Panther Party were arrested, many held without bail or trial for long durations.  At least ten former Panthers, convicted on fabricated evidence and testimony that was subsequently recanted, served thirty years each in prison.  Still in prison as of 2000 are three Panthers, Herman Bell, Anthony Bottom, and Albert Washington, whose trial included perjured testimony and evidence suppressed by the prosecution.  Panther leader Geronimo Pratt was charged with murdering a woman when he was a UCLA student.  The FBI conveniently lost its surveillance records showing that Pratt was actually four hundred miles away attending a Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of the murder.  The FBI chose to let the real murderer go free in order to jail a political radical.  Pratt finally had his conviction overturned in 1997, and was paid a settlement of $4.5 million.

There is the highly celebrated death-row case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, ex-Panther, radio journalist, and articulate critic of social injustice and police brutality, who had been under police and FBI surveillance for years even though he had no criminal record.  He was shot when trying to stop a cop from beating his brother.  The officer doing the beating was killed by one of the bullets fired.  In a deeply flawed trial, involving an incompetent defense, police perjury, and intimidated witnesses, Abu-Jamal was convicted of murder, even though no ballistic evidence linked him to the shooting, and several eyewitnesses claimed that another man shot the cop and fled the scene.

...Still behind bars are members of the Black Liberation Army, the Republic of New Afrika (a Black separatist movement), the African Peoples Socialist Party, Chicano and Native American anticapitalist revolutionaries, community radical organizers, and peace activists."
(Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 7th Edition. Thomson Wadsworth, 2002, pg 143-145)

To illustrate the plight of political prisoners further and the harsh realities they face, here’s a clip of former Black Panther leader Eddie Conway, who himself spent more than forty years in prison on trumped up charges after he was politically targeted by the American government, speaking at Red Emma’s in Baltimore this past week.

TRNN - The movement to release US political prisoners requires a strong legal team

That African-Americans are disproportionately targeted by the American legal system is well known.  Black American youths in particular are more likely to be arrested, held without bail, put on trial and convicted, less likely to be able to plea-bargain their way out of tough mandatory sentences and more likely to get longer prison terms than white people who commit the same crimes.  Five times as many white people use drugs in the US compared with black people, yet almost two thirds of drug offenders sent to state prisons nationwide are African-American and in some states it’s as high as 90%.  The majority of black people in American prisons are serving time for nonviolent offenses, often drug related.

This is the reality, and furthermore there is the reality of just how brutal the American prison system is, with regard to the widespread use of violence, solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, unpaid prison labor and the like.  This is a report from the Real News Network on a prison strike going on right now in Florida, where prisoners have had enough of these insufferable conditions and are fighting back – refusing to engage in prison labor.

TRNN - Florida Department of Corrections Denies Statewide Prisoner’s Strike