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You are reading the Preface of We Want Freedom
by Mumia Abu-Jamal; Kathleen Cleaver (Introduction).
We Want Freedom | Preface
Why I Wrote We Want Freedom
Mumia Abu-Jamal
We Want Freedom was written because I had tried to read everything that was written by ex-Party members and even people who were not Party members and I found so much lacking. I found the experience that I lived tended to be lacking. And there were some good histories and some were quite extraordinarily written, but they didn't give people a taste of what it meant to be at the bottom, not at the top. I've been studying and reading what is called history from below and this is a history from the bottom of the Party, certainly not the top. It isn't written from the leadership, the central committee, or the ministries. It was written from the perspective of someone who spent hours everyday selling papers, or feeding kids in the morning, or doing security at night, or doing whatever needed to be done. This is what most Panthers did everyday. And these are average people who had a very deep level of commitment. You had to because there are a lot of people who joined who never walked away from that commitment, like Fred Hampton, like Mark Clark, like Little Bobby Hutton, and many, many others. When you see that your people are suffering or oppressed you feel compelled to do something to stop that kind of evil. There are many times when I slip from the voice of a historian and go straight to first person. I did this, I saw this, I remembered this, and I smelled this. And I think it will give people some insight into what it felt like to be a member of an extraordinary organization like the Black Panther Party.
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