WANTED: AMNESTY FOR BLACK PANTHERS

By Grace Lee Boggs Michigan Citizen, Feb. 2 5-March 3, 2007

The outrageous arrest in San Francisco this month of eight 50-70 year old men, believed to be former members of the Black Liberation Army, for the alleged killing of police officer John V. Young nearly three decades ago, provides movement activists with a unique opportunity to ask ourselves new questions and begin a new kind of organizing.

Should we continue to fight these cases individually and defensively, as in the decade-long struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal?

Or has the time come to launch an overall campaign to demand amnesty for Black militants incarcerated 20-40 years ago or now threatened with incarceration?

The main goals of such a campaign would be to (1) restore to the community activists who have been incarcerated or are now threatened with incarceration, and (2) bring an end to the relentless cycle of violence and incarceration that has devastated black families and the black community over the last forty years.

An overall Amnesty campaign could

* give everyone, and especially a younger generation of activists, a deeper understanding of the horrific violence of the 1960s when millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of U.S. men and women were killed in southeast Asia, while here at home, John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy (to name only the most famous) were gunned down.

* remind us of the profound implications of this statement in MLK’s 1967 anti-Vietnam speech: “I could never raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”

* initiate a discussion about the role of violence in past, present and future struggles. For example, did adopting “Meet violence with violence” as a general strategy by the black movement (and the Weathermen) and reducing Malcolm X’s legacy to “ by any means necessary” weaken the movement by making it much easier for the police and Cointelpro to infiltrate movement organizations with agents-provocateurs to instigate acts of violence and sow distrust between comrades,

*launch local programs of Restorative Justice or Truth and Reconciliation to re-integrate those who have been incarcerated into the community and to keep young people now accused or convicted of anti-social acts in the community instead of being sent off to prison.

Restorative Justice, as contrasted with Retributive or Punitive Justice, is a process of individual and community self-criticism and transformation that provides a way for individuals who have committed anti-social acts to regain their place in the community, while also enabling the community to evaluate the role that its actions or inactions played in facilitating the anti-social acts. Thus, instead of sending some one who commits an anti-social act to prison, a group of community people is set up to meet with the individual for a process of mutual evaluation, ending with proposals for actions to transform both the individual and the community. Through this process both the individual and the community are “restored.”

One of the reasons why the black community has not been able to play a more meaningful role in the present crisis is that it is difficult for any group to move ahead without a recognition of the contradictions that have developed in the course of past struggles.

Restorative Justice organizing is profoundly different from the leftist/Alinsky-type organizing that views the oppressed mainly as “warm bodies” or victims to be mobilized against the oppressor. It involves a transformation of our hearts and minds, a profound change in ourselves as well as our institutions, a paradigm shift in our beliefs and assumptions.

In our schools young people, in order to resist the “zero tolerance” or punitive policies of administrators, have already begun to create a form of Restorative Justice by demanding and/or creating peer juries. For information on how peer juries function, see www.illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/communities/youthadvocacy/ iyca_peerjury.html

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