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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 the sense of abandonment and betrayal that barred former Panthers from communicating with anyone aligned with the demonized other faction for more than a generation. Legend, hearsay, and the lack of available factual records mar what has been passed on as “history.”

Mumia confronts these obstacles admirably in We Want Freedom, drawing his own conclusions from the available scholarship, memoirs, and government documents, and supplying an intriguing narrative that arises from his personal observations. Even though Black Panther images and slogans have been rediscovered by popular culture, creating a climate in which the historical significance of the Black Panther Party can be recognized and debated remains a slow process. The slash and burn journalistic accounts and police-thriller style portrayals have hampered the development of substantive scholarship. The profound love that thousands of community folk and former members felt for their Black Panther Party, as well as the recent publication of several essay collections that acknowledged its political legitimacy, are encouraging a more serious approach to this history. Increasingly, young scholars choose to investigate the controversial era during which the Black Panther Party soared to international prominence then crashed back into obscurity, and more and more are devoting attention to specific aspects of the Black Panther Party. Mumia’s book both complements and expands this new development; he contributes as a scholar as well as a participant, and someone whose participation changed the course of his life. His writing will make you laugh as you see what the daily existence of a young Panther was like, may puzzle you when you read something you didn’t believe happened, help you make connections you had not thought of previously, and inspire you to learn more.

The chapter entitled “The Women’s Party” was written with new material solicited by Mumia from women in the Party and made accessible through his supporters on the outside. Women who remember Mumia from his Panther days or have recently visited him in prison comment on his kindness, his innate spirituality, and his loving personality—which you will sense most clearly in this chapter on the nature of women’s participation in the Black Panther Party. The chapter, much of which is in the women’s own words, presents a nuanced and moving picture of women within a rapidly growing movement under siege, that was transforming itself and the understanding of what a woman’s life could be. As Mumia writes, the woman’s life in the party was, “Hard Work. Hard Study. Jailed Lovers. Survival. Striving. Times of promise. Times of terror. Resistance to male chauvinism. And hope.” He concludes, “The Party may no longer exist, yet much of the spirit, the essence of collective resistance, of community service, of perseverance, continues in the lives of [women] who aspired to change the realities into which they and their people were born. They were, without question, the very best of the Black Panther Party.”

Stack up what you read in We Want Freedom against the fact that the Philadelphia jury, uncertain of what motivated Mumia to allegedly kill police officer Daniel Faulkner in a murky case, was swayed to convict by learning of his membership in the Black Panther Party. Inadequate material evidence, perjured eyewitness testimony, and an attorney with a drinking problem prevented even the shadow of fairness in Mumia’s trial. This may help you comprehend the dimensions of the miscarriage of justice that led to the death sentence. This condemned man, this sensitive, thoughtful author has poured his energy into an amazing book that illuminates the truth of what his membership in the Black Panther Party was about, and reveals the extreme price extracted from him for having learned, and for now telling, that truth.

Kathleen Cleaver, an activist scholar, currently teaches at Emory University School of Law. She quit college in 1966 to join the Civil Rights movement, then served as the Black Panther Party’s Communications Secretary from 1967–1971. Cleaver co-edited the essay collection Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, edited a collection of writings by Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing, and is at work on a forthcoming memoir Memories of Love and War.