DHORUBA BIN WAHAD, EX-BLACK PANTHER LEADER ENDORSES
CEASE FIRE: STOP POLICE TERRORISM CAMPAIGN
Dhoruba Bin Wahad (formerly Richard Moore) was born in the South Bronx in 1944, joined the Black Panthers in 1968. He was arrested in 1969 as part of the New York Panther 21 conspiracy case (charged with conspiring to blow up department stores, subway stations, police stations). While freed on $100,000 bail, and after receiving numerous death threats, Moore fled to Algeria and returned to the U.S on May 14, 1971 following the full acquittal of all Panther 21 defendants. On May 19, two police officers guarding District Attorney Frank Hogan's home were shot following a car chase. On May 21, two officers were shot and killed in a Harlem housing project. In June, Moore, while in custody for an un-related armed robbery, was accused and later indicted for the shootings. The first trial ended in a hung jury. Following a second mistrial (due to the illness of a juror), a jury voted to convict on April 28, 1973, and Moore was sentenced to 25 years to life. While in prison, he changed his name to Dhoruba Bin Wahad. In 1988, Bin Wahad appealed his conviction, drawing on uncovered FBI COINTELPRO documents as well as other documents revealing prosecutorial misconduct (in particular, evidence withheld by the prosecution from the defense). After a series of appeals, his conviction was overturned in March, 1990. In October 1991, the state appealed. Between 1991 and the present, a series of appeals have occurred and the courts continue to consider his case, while Dhoruba Bin Wahad remains out of prison.
The following is a statement released today in his words.
TAKING CONTROL OF OCCUPIED AFRICAN
AMERICA
One analysis and concept that seemed to have died with the original Black Panther Party was not just the innate human right to self-defense, but clear understanding that people of African ancestry in the United States possessed a unique history and were posited in a specific way within the process of the European conquest and subjugation of the Western Hemisphere. That so called “age of exploration” so fondly referred to in Euro centric historical curricular.
Our unique history and role in facilitating the ascendancy of European settler colonies to contemporary white supremacist national-security states is not shared with any other “migrants” to the land now politically defined as the United States of America. Failure to remember who we were and what we’ve become has resulted in the domination of notions of class and gender over a fundamental understanding that in a white supremacist power paradigm race always matters, while class is relative and gender is always specific.
Perhaps the greatest participatory deception that both Blacks and Whites engage in is the delusion that African and non-African America, that is Euro-America, share a common historical experience and therefore can arrive at an equitable sharing of a common national pie and assuage the spiritual and psychological chasm, that hole in humanity left by white supremacy’s rape of this planet. We believe reparations are a “pipe dream” but have faith in a piece of paper that represents debt – the dollar. We believe education is a universal panacea, so we have a generation of educated fools who believe in getting over by any means available. Our population is conned into believing we can secure our future and our children’s future through participation in an oligarchic two party minuet disingenuously defined as “democracy”.
Racist America, the equal opportunity exploiter has its Black gate-keepers and we know their names so well. Ironically, messianic mitt men draw attention to the moral bankruptcy of the American empire while providing pipe dreams of their own. Our history and struggles for freedom and equality have been turned on their heads. For a Black person to resist violent and non-violent white supremacy without his or her defense being classified as a “hate crime” is in itself a cruel example of this. Failure of African leaders, Black leaders, to base their principle actions on our unique history, and rationalize rather than emphasize the consequences of Europe’s genocidal rise to global economic and technological supremacy has weakened us both psychologically and ideologically it is like taking a shower with a raincoat on- an absurd proposition!
Yet it is the consequences of our own delusional belief that our freedom dreams polished White America’s tarnished humanity and thereby proved our “souls worthiness” to the dominant white culture (that has disavowed African’s even had souls to begin with). It is delusional thinking, not even wishful thinking that would assert that our dehumanization and exploitation constituted sufficient capital investment in the monster that has evolved from the duplicitous heritage of European colonial rebellion and racist genocidal conquest. Whites no more want to share their wealth and privilege with non-whites than they wish to partake in our pain. When Black men and grandmothers are gunned down by the police in white America, the white middle-class, or working class doesn’t take to the streets in indignation and outrage. African-American leaders are delusional. Indeed such a delusion presupposes one’s own inferiority and stops the sovereign thinking process in its tracks we instead think and behave like another “ethnic” minority in a “multi-racial” nation – not a unique people with a right to self-determination and the right to self-defense. We pretty much forgot that we are Africans whose culture, language, spoken and unspoken were forged in the crucible of renegade European settlers pursuing their national, racial and cultural ambitions.
The demographics of Africans in the United States, the economic, political, and social patterns of areas with predominately Black populations fit the profile of a colonized people. White supremacy at the root of the American Republic has created and nurtured an internal Colony of over 30 million people of African ancestry. This internal colony is occupied day and night by militarized police and armed counterinsurgency units masquerading as “Street Crime Units” “Anti-Gang Task Forces” and “Community Policing Units”. Today the “Black Experience” in America, regardless of your class status, has as its core feature the malevolent and omnipresence of the Police state and terror of racist police brutality. Black people control nothing in their territorial enclaves defiantly labeled “the Hood”. It is time that people of African ancestry pursued their own interests, took control of their immediate environment, and reigned in the occupying armed forces of police who murder with impunity, beat, brutalize, and demean without censure. It is time for direct community control of Public Safety. It is time for Decentralization of Urban Police Departments. It is time the police live, love, and die in the communities they take an oath to protect. It is time that local communities, along with street organizations, determine Public safety policy. It is time to reign in the Gangs in Blue, and reorganize street gangs, by any means necessary.
In the age of “Shock doctrines” and “Disaster Democracy” People of African ancestry should take control of Urban Police Departments that are out of control. If Black elected officials, Black cops, and Clergy of all stripe are serious about reigning in the terror and anxiety rife in African-American communities, then they should be the first to heed the cry of the suffering and powerless urban poor and help insure that come the national election referendums demanding decentralization of Police and Public safety are on the ballot.
It is no longer about reform, police sensitivity training, community complaint review boards, and increasing black faces in blue uniforms – we “done been there, done that - it is about power – the power to control the legitimate organs of state violence and make defend the integrity of our community, families, and children.
Join The Cease Fire in our Communities – Take control of the Police in our Community by any means necessary!
DBW
