Lessons for the antifascist fight now and to come rooted in well-learned lessons from Black liberation.
Revolution In These Times delivers veteran Black Panther Party member, Black Liberation Army leader, and former political prisoner Dhoruba Bin Wahad direct in his own words to offer us an analysis of how today's resurgent right-wing agenda is an outgrowth of the ongoing and historical political struggle between the oppressed masses and settler-colonialism of America and Europe. Bin Wahad not only explores how white supremacist politics have recaptured the American imagination but also prescribes a radical grassroots response to counter this ideology and supplant the violent state repression that keeps it in power.
Bin Wahad pieces together fight-back strategies against the police and the state through a process of mobilizing in the streets, on the block, and in our communities, while gathering mass through antifascist coalition-building in a manner unrealized since the 1960s and 1970s. In this series of interviews, Bin Wahad grounds us in the now, seamlessly weaving together firsthand accounts of his own and other’s revolutionary past in the history of struggle, alongside lessons for today.
About the Author
Dhoruba Bin Wahad was a leading member of the New York Black Panther Party, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21. Arrested in June 1971, he was framed as part of the illegal FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and subjected to unfair treatment and torture during his nineteen years in prison. During Dhoruba’s incarceration, litigation on his behalf produced over 300,000 pages of COINTELPRO documentation, and upon release in 1990 he was able to bring a successful lawsuit against the New York Department of Corrections for their criminal activities. Living in both Ghana and the U.S., Dhoruba continues to write and work promoting Pan Africanism, an uncompromising critique of imperialism and capitalism, and freedom for all political prisoners.
Kalonji Jama Changa (editor), an organizer and founder of the FTP Movement, is author of How to Build a People’s Army and co-producer of the documentary Organizing Is the New Cool. Cofounder of Black Power Media, Changa serves as cochair of the Urban Survival and Preparedness Institute.
Joy James (Foreword), Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College, is the author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the After(life) of Erica Garner, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, as well as the author or editor of numerous other books and articles.
Black Power Media is a Black-radical independent media project that challenges the narrative about Black politics and the Black condition. Renegade Culture, iMiXWHATiLiKE!, RemiX Morning Show, and future programming will deliver the news and information our community and others need to break through today's mainstream propaganda machine.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Remember the Panther Resistance
Joy James
Introduction: The Storm and the Whirlwind
Kalonji Jama Changa
Glossary
List of Figures
1. Lessons from the Black liberation tradition
Black leadership, state repression, and self-defense
2. To be Black is necessary, but it ain’t sufficient
On Black encapsulation and appropriation
3. The Unstoppable power of self-determination
From “Power to the People” to the Congressional Black Caucus
4. Recollections of a Black revolutionary
On Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and COINTELPRO
5. You cannot reform the police in a police state
Antifascist organizing and community control of police
6. The limitations of a hashtag movement
Leadership by victimhood and organizing for power
7. Soldiers’ stories
A conversation with BLA veterans Sekou Odinga, Thomas “Blood” McCreary, and Dhoruba Bin Wahad
Afterword: Ode to Dhoruba Bin Wahad
Bibi Olugbala Angola