Black August and the Epic Struggle to Free Mumia Abu Jamal!*
by bro Zayid Muhammad
Long live the revolutionary spirits of George and Jonathan Jackson, the courageous revolutionary cornerstones of this hot time we call Black August...a time marking some of our ugliest oppression and repression, a time marking some of our boldest expressions of resistance...
Born in the putrid and bloody walls of the California prison system in 1979, its core foundational moments are of course the assassination of field marshal George Jackson on August 21, 1971 and the death of his brave 17 year old little brother Jonathan Jackson, who was killed during an epic 'extraction mission' of some of the Soledad Brothers from a Marin County courthouse on August 7, 1970.
u wanna know why u have get your behind in line and searched entering an amerikkkan courtroom these days...Thats why! ...'cause Jonathan done been here like that!
August 20, 1619, our new world ordeal gets anchored by english speaking colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, one that would shackle and slaughter our Ancestors for their labor for several centuries and change! Capitalism?...Gdmt, our Ancestors were Capitalism's most prime capital once upon a time when we colored!
August 25, 1967, the american nat'l security state announces a 'new', 'hard hitting', 'neutralization' covert action called COINTELPRO! 'new' my big high West Afrikan *ss! It had already claimed Malcolm, and had been stalking the politically courageous among us since the criminalizing of reparations mother Callie House, our first modern political prisoner, and Black August born Mr. Garvey, just a few years later using the same playbook!
Speaking of Malcolm, u do know that he barely survived being poisoned to death by the CIA on August 4th, 1964 in Cairo Egypt! u haven't stolen The Diary of Malcolm X yet? Underground homework. Treat that as an order.
And we sure as hell are not going to forget the insanely savage and sinister lynching of Emmitt Till on August 28th 1955 and the courage of his mother Mamie Till Mobley to have an open casket funeral to xpose what they did to her sonto the entire world! That set off the modern socalled Civil Rights Mvmt like nothing else!
On the question of epic resistance, it is no accident of history that we would lose George on what happened to be the anniversary of Rev Nat Turner's most blood curdling uprising back of 1831, the time when the 'last had become first and the first became last'!
It is also no accident of history that the most epic of our Slave Uprisings, the mighty Haitian Revolution, the won our Ancestors won, sets the world on fire in August! Its spiritual sacrifice at Bois Caymon on August 14th, and its actual launching of hostilities on August 22nd 1791!
And against the cyclical scourge of police brutality came the epic Watts Rebellion of August 11th in 1965!
Mumiasizing Black August, let us remember the sinister apartheid style tank and bullet assault on MOVE on August 8, 1978, an attack that would land nine MOVE members in the klutches of the state to face 30-100 years each! Two, Merle and Phil Africa, would die in prison, the others would do between 40 to 42 years each before their freedoms!
The incredible unconquerable young warrior healer Mutulu Shakur would join this realm on August 8, 1950. He would later pioneer acupuncture to combat the heroin assault on our community and would ultimately go underground doing what a radical underground does. He too would face state kaptivity for his commitment for 36 hard years!
Have we forgotten that the upsouth state of pennsylvania used Mr Garvey's August 17 birth date to be its day to execute Mumia in 1995! 2 million of us from around the world said 'hell to the NO u aint either', but the no good bastards did try!
Sad irony occurs in August also, August 22nd 1989 would see us lose the courageous Huey P Newton to Oakland's streets in a way that we absolutely should not have!
August 24th 2003, would see us also lose his comrade from the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army, Safiya Bukhari, our 'lioness for liberation' Mumia called her, who literally breathed fire into the global movement to free mumia and to launch the Jericho Mvmt when she got out of prison!
Staying on that note, one of the most feared of the Black Panther Party and its underground, the implacable Russell 'Maroon' Shoatz, also straight outta Philly who defied captivity not once but twice was born on August 23 in . He would endure 49 years in kaptivity for his legendary courage! Courage we will never forget!
And as police brutality continues to stalk us, we got a surge of a new movement that came in young wide loud and proud called Black Lives Matter, which went buckwil' in aftermath of the police slaying of Michael Brown in the hot stanky streets of Ferguson Missouri on August 9th 2014! That mass national insurgent response would produce a profound echo of solidarity all the way from the bomb burnt and bloody rocks of Gaza as the Palestinian people would announce and pronounce loudly and proudly their profound solidarity with our children's resistance at that epic moment!
And its no accident of history that in this year on the first day of Black August of this year, the anniversary of the Harlem Uprising of 1943, the anniversary of the death of Khatari Gaulden, a cofounder of Black August, that a young brave Black labor organizer named Chris Smalls, straight outta Jersey the birthplace of racial profiling, would return to JFK Airport like Malcolm did from his Hajj in '64 to a huge sea of love after being beaten and detained by the Israeli Defense Forces for participating in a humanitarian aid mission called Freedom Flotilla that sought to take food to Gaza challenging Israel's genocidal blockade forbidding that! And when asked why he dared to do that, the young g blew a whole a lot of minds from LA to the West Bank when he said, he did so not only to call out Israel's genocide, but to also 'call out the complicity' of the still pathologically racist american labor movement for their physically transporting the u.s. aid to israel!
Cant' make this sh*t up!
This Black August finds movement legend the unconquerable Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, , enduring terminal cancer at Butner Medical Facility in North Carolina as we push for his full freedom and exoneration. This last chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was once a man once so feared that the m'frs of the u.s. congress actually had the gall to come up with the 1968 H Rap Brown Act, criminalizing anyone 'exporting riots across state lines' as a Civil Rights bill. He was framed by the State of Georgia for killing a Fulton County Sheriff and wounding another, he deserves hugely special attention this Black August for sure!** Under no circumstances can we lose this brave great man while in the klutches of the state! Under no circumstances! Follow his case here...
https://www.imamjamilactionnetwork.org/
We who like it hot...with blood still stinging in our eyes...call it 'Black August'!
*Look forward to this and more like this from a new newsletter from the global effort to Free Mumia! Get Mumia's latest book with Jennifer Black, Beneath The Mountain!...
**Follow the Imam's fight. Go to https://www.
Bro Zayid Muhammad, long time organizer and Jazz poet, is chair of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee. Hit him up at babazayid@gmail.com...
(c)2025
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