Description of We Want Freedom.
“Writing from the barren confines of his death row cell, Mumia
Abu-Jamal provides a remarkable testament about the Black Panther Party.…
His frank vignettes of unforgettable encounters—with fellow members, hostile
opponents, larger-than-life Panther leaders, and brutal police—are a sheer
delight to read.”—Kathleen Cleaver, from the Introduction
As a young Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal helped found the Philadelphia branch,
wrote for the newspaper, and began his life-long fight for freedom. In We
Want Freedom, Mumia combines his memories of day-to-day life in the Party
with analysis of the history of Black liberation struggles. The result is a
vivid and compelling picture of the Black Panther Party.
Applying his poetic voice and unsparing critical gaze, Mumia examines one of
the most revolutionary and most misrepresented groups in the United States.
His in-depth investigation of government intervention in progressive movements,
especially the deadly effects of COINTELPRO, provides timely lessons in the
USA PATRIOT Act era.
We Want Freedom focuses on the men and women who were the Party, as
much as on the leadership. By locating the Black Panthers in a struggle centuries
old—and in the personal memories of a young man—Mumia Abu-Jamal helps
us to understand freedom.
Breaking News
December 6, 2005
Breaking News: A Victory—Time to win this one! And Bring Mumia home
From the office of Robert Bryan, esq.
Dear Friends and Supporters:
Today the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued the most important decision affecting my client, Mumia Abu-Jamal, since the lower federal court ruling in December 2001. An order was issued
this morning that the court will accept for review the following issues,
all of which are of enormous constitutional significance and go to the
very essence of Mumia's right to a fair trial due process of law, and
equal protection of the law under the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth
Amendments to the U.S. Constitution:
- Claim 14: Whether appellant was denied his constitutional rights
due to the prosecution's trial summation.
- Claim 16: Whether the Commonwealth's use of peremptory challenges
at trial violated appellant's constitutional rights under Batson v.
Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986).
- Claim 29: Whether appellant was denied due process during
post-conviction proceedings as a result of alleged judicial bias.
Claim 16 concerns the prosecutorial use of racism in jury selection.
The record establishes beyond question that racism is a m...
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver
1 The Beginnings of the Black Panther Party and the History it Sprang From
2 The Deep Roots of the Struggle for Black Liberation
3 A Panther Walks in Philly
4 The Black Panther Party
5 “Huey’s Party” Grows
6 The Empire Strikes Back: COINTELPRO
7 A Woman’s Party
8 A Panther’s Life
9 The Split
10 One, Two, Many Parties
Afterword
Photos and Documents
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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 rememb...
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Excerpt
From Chapter Eight: A Panther's Life
Tens of thousands of ghetto souls came into contact with the Party daily. Elementary school students attended the morning breakfast programs, adult poor came for the free clothing and free shoes programs, the ill came to the Party's People's Medical Centers across the nation for sickle cell anemia testing, and treatment for high-blood pressure, sexually transmitted diseases, and other fairly simple ailments. To this number must be added those many people who bought the Party's newspaper, The Black Panther, on ghetto street corners, in bars, in beauty parlors, and outside high schools.
Who were these people called Black Panthers?
Much has been written about Party leadership, its so-called stars: the photogenic Newton, the charismatic (Eldridge) and brilliant (Kathleen) Cleavers, the ambitious and talented Elaine Brown, the long-suffering Geronimo, and the like. As leaders, many of these people formed the Party's public profile and came to typify a Black Panther in much of the public mind.
Most people, indeed most Panthers, never came into intimate contact with such people, for they usually traveled in a rarefied, higher strata than did the average Panther.
The average young man or woman in the Black Panther Party was between seventeen and twenty-two years old, lived in a collective home with other Panthers, worked long and hard days (and sometimes nights) doing necess...
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Praise
"This gripping revelatory account of the valiant struggles and achievements of the Black Panther Party is a superb antidote to the defamatory 'histories' put out by some earlier writers. Mumia fashions a multi-dimensional story with fine style, ideological clarity, and great humanity—as is his way."
—Michael Parenti, author of The Assassination of Julius Caesar and The Terrorism Trap"Mumia's keen analysis of the Panthers provides readers with a unique understanding of an organization J. Edgar Hoover deemed the 'greatest threat to internal security in the country.' Rewarding too is his fresh assessment of the role of women in the Party, which thoughtfully draws on the work of the late Safiya Bukhari."
—Herb Boyd, editor of Race and Resistance and Black Panthers for Beginners
"Mumia Abu-Jamal has forged from the furnace of death row a moving, incisive and thorough history of the Black Panther Party. This book is required reading for any who would seek to understand race, revolution, and repression in the United States. With now half the US population born after the years described within, and given the resurgence of o...
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Reviews
Media Mouse: Grand Rapids Independent Media
Review,
February 28, 2005
Despite both the somewhat legendary status of the Black Panther Party (BPP)
and the state's sustained campaign to destroy the Party and the black revolutionary
movement, there has been relatively little quality scholarship concerning the
Black Panther Party. While this is slowly changing as more work is published
concerning the Party and its legacy, of which Mumia Abu-Jamal's We Want Freedom
is an example, there is still not a single book that encapsulates the history
of the Black Panther Party and appraises its legacy. Although Abu-Jamal's book
is not the single volume history of the Black Panther Party that is so desperately
needed, it is one of the better works concerning the Party.
We Want Freedom is not a complete history of the Party; rather it is
one former Party member's attempt to weave his personal experiences in the Black
Panther Party into both the history of the BPP and the greater context of black
resistance to their position as an oppressed population in the United States.
Abu-Jamal opens the book with a chapter that places the BPP in the context of
black resistance in the United States from colonial times to the Watts rebellion
of the 1960s and the BPP's attempt to bring a more organized form, and indeed
revolutionary, mode...
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