even as questions about whether she is supporting or appropriating the movement and queer and trans culture have been posed.
The reemergence of We Went Freedom, over a decade after its birth, is a sign of the hunger among the young to examine and learn lessons at risk of being lost through the dim window glass of history. It is, after all, their history; not mine. No Panther ever thought that the Party existed for us; it existed because the People demanded we come into existence and fight the fights that needed to be fought.
I have received many letters from readers of We Went Freedom over the years. One that sticks in my mind today was from Jon, a young man who read WWF in college. He wrote, “I feel cheated because this is the first time I have heard such stories. … Your words, your insights have made me and my colleagues question society and the state.” Jon concluded by thanking me for my work and I’m happy to take this opportunity to thank him for reading We Want Freedom.
I also thank Common Notions for reaching out to me and bringing this book to the next generation. It thrills any writer to know that their work is appreciated and is still being read and I am no different in that regard.
I truly believe that there is much to be learned from the experiences lived by many in the Black Panther Party. I hope our struggles—past, present, and future—prove that the Party did not exist in vain, but made valuable, and sometimes noble contributions. I hope We Want Freedom has made, and will continue to make, a contribution to this process. For it was written precisely for times such as these.
May these pages become nourishing, enriching food for the revolution(s) to come.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
“Life Row”
Writing from the windy hills of northeastern Pennsylvania
SCI–Mahanoy, Frackville, PA
Summer 2016
Introduction, by Kathleen Cleaver
Introduction
by Kathleen Cleaver
Writing from the barren confines of his death row cell, Mumia Abu-Jamal provides a remarkable testament in his latest book to the transformative impact of being part of the Black Panther Party. A high school student when he joined, reflection now polishes Mumia’s extensively researched account that clarifies why, in his words, “the Party became the central focus of the lives of thousands of Panthers across the nation.” Frank vignettes of unforgettable encounters he had—with fellow members, hostile opponents, larger-than-life Panther leaders, and brutal police are a sheer delight to read. His portrayal of the unquenchable enthusiasm for liberation that animated the Black Panther Party, most of whose members were, like Mumia, teenagers—and over 50 percent were young women—is refreshing. But personal experience comprises only one facet of We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party.
Adapted from his master’s degree thesis at California State University, Dominquez Hills, Mumia’s book is accessible but not simple. He places the Black Panther Party in the context of the centuries-long resistance against domination and violence that Blacks have demonstrated during the unending fight to live as a free people. Some may find the way Mumia’s analysis integrates the Black Panther Party into the history of radical challenges to slavery and racism eye opening, as that past is so rarely examined it remains generally unknown. Mumia applies the “house slave/field slave” dichotomy that Malcolm X popularized to draw a distinction between what he terms the venerated “civil rights model” of black history, arising from descendants of house slaves who identified their fortune with the well-being of their master, and that disfavored history generated by the descendants of brutalized field slaves, who reacted, as Malcolm described it, to the news master was sick by praying for his death. “Much African American history,” Mumia writes, lies “rooted in this radical understanding that America is not the land of liberty, but a place of the absence of freedom, a realm of repression and insecurity.” The Black Panther Party emerges from that disfavored history as the contemporary incarnation of that spirit of rebellion and resistance—subjected to modern techniques of sabotage, retaliation, and erasure from historical memory.
Before his 1982 railroading into prison for the murder of a Philadelphia policeman, Mumia Abu-Jamal was a working journalist. His perspective in We Want Freedom is not exclusively that of a Black Panther, although he does write movingly from that perspective about being among the founding members of the Philadelphia branch in May 1969. These young revolutionaries boldly affiliated with the Black Panthers at a time when the raids, bombings, shootings, arrests, imprisonment, and death at the hands of police forces and intelligence agencies were hallmarks of their campaign to destroy the organization. Inevitably, each member picked up some regional version of Panther lore, a heady combination of things they’d been told or read about, rumors they’d heard mixed with the surreptitious “disinformation” being circulated in the effort to disrupt the organization, all grasped in the midst of an intense experience which, for too many members, turned traumatic. I know countless Panthers have written about their experience in the Party, some circulating their manuscripts solely among family, others leaving them to languish unfinished in drawers, and the most imaginative producing screenplays or novels, but few ever get published. Each of us retains a unique playlist of mental recordings from our Black Panther Party days, with gaps remaining in what we knew then and time blurring the memories slipping away. We are still piecing together that experience when we encounter former Panthers, whether in films, or in books, or in person when we attend weddings, retreats, funerals, trials, cultural affairs, conferences, demonstrations, or family gatherings—still reinterpreting that indelible relationship we had with each other in the Black Panther Party. Locked inside a Pennsylvania dungeon, Mumia is barred from going to such events, which testifies to his extraordinary talent, concentration, and spiritual strength in producing such a book.
I assure you, recreating Black Panther history is not a simple task—particularly in light of the sophisticated counter-insurgency operation we now know was being mounted against the organization, its leaders, supporters, members—and even specifically against Mumia, a high school recruit whom the Philadelphia Police Department and the FBI collaborated to destroy. Among the thousands of FBI documents released, one memorandum I’ve read sticks in my memory because of a chillingly brutal remark. The memo, dated March 9, 1968, was sent to the director of the FBI from a San Francisco–based special agent; it mentions on the second page that “the young Negro” wants something to feel proud of, but must learn that if he becomes a revolutionary, he will be a “dead revolutionary.”
Recreating Black Panther history is not a simple task because some books and newspaper articles that one consults in order to understand significant events and establish their chronology have been corrupted by deliberately falsified, or at least suspect, information, such as the misleading book that former Black Panther Earl Anthony wrote in 1969, published by Dial Press in 1970, entitled Picking Up the Gun. Twenty years later Anthony revealed in a second book that he had been working undercover for the FBI’s COINTELPRO (the acronym for COunter INTELligence PROgram) while he was in the Party. It is not a simple task because the Black Panther Party exploded across the country from a local Oakland formation into a national organization during 1968 and I saw that those of us involved had no time to record the process carefully. No one provided chapter and verse on how it happened and who did what, and too much was blurred by our deliberate glorification of imprisoned leader Huey Newton, then facing the gas chamber, as part of the all-absorbing international campaign waged for his freedom. The covert COINTELPRO operation that cracked the Black Panther Party into factions by 1971 depended upon meticulous techniques of generating distrust and paranoia, including the insidious portrayal of friends as each other’s enemy and the insertion of undercover agents into sensitive positions to help convict or assassinate key leaders. A devastating consequence of that split has been
