[1] Arnold H. Lubasch, “Key Suspect is Arrested in Brink’s Car Robbery,” New York Times, January 22, 1982, accessed October 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com.

[2] Kuwasi Balagoon, in Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21^st Century Revolutions, ed. dequi kioni-sadiki and Matt Meyer (Oakland: PM Press, 2017), 201–6; Tim Blunk and Ray Levasseur, eds., Hauling Up the Morning: Writings and Art by Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1990), 373; Kazembe Balagun, “Kuwasi at 60,” Monthly Review (December 2006), accessed October 24, 2018, mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/balagun311206.html.

[3] Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 255–6; Sharon Harley, “‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’: Gloria Richardson, the Cambridge Movement, and the Radical Black Activist Tradition,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Betty Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 174–96; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam, 1994), 290–92.

[4] Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 372, 392.

[5] Jesse Gray, quoted in Peter Noel, “By Any Means Unnecessary,” The Village Voice, September 2, 1999.

[6] Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 368–72; David Gilbert, “In Memory of Kuwasi Balagoon, New Afrikan Freedom Fighter,” see page 201 in current volume. Kuwasi Balagoon, “Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone,” see page 150 in current volume.

[7] Harold Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” Studies on the Left 2, no. 3 (1962), accessed October 24, 2018, brotherwisedispatch.blogspot.com. The first self-described revolutionary nationalist organization, the Revolutionary Action Movement, stated in 1963 that it was “somewhere between the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)”; Max Stanford, in Black Nationalism in America, ed. John Bracey, Elliot Rudwick, and August Meier (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 508; Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “From One Generation to the Next: Armed Self-Defense, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Southern Black Freedom Movement,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 15, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 224–25.

[8] Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 438; Balagoon, see page 150 in current volume.

[9] Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Set Our Warriors Free: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party and Political Prisoners,” in Black Panthers Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classics Press, 1998), 418–19.

[10] Muhammad Ahmad, We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations 1960–1975 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2007), 167–70.

[11] Murray Kempton, The Brier Patch: The Trial of the Panther 21 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 43; Sundiata Acoli, “A Brief History of the Black Panther Party: Its Place in the Black Liberation Movement,” February 4, 1985, accessed October 24, 2018, www.hartford-hwp.com; Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 463.

[12] Lumumba Shakur, in Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 463; Acoli, “A Brief History of the Black Panther Party”; Kalonji Changa, “Tupac and the Revolutionary Shakur family: Interview with Bilal Sunni-Ali,” New Afrikan 77, accessed October 24, 2018, tpmovement.tumblr.com/post/50587379244/shakur-family-tree; Ahmad, We Will Return in the Whirlwind, 191.

[13] Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 438.

[14] Kit Holder, “The History of the Black Panther Party 1966–1971” (PhD dis., University of Massachusetts, 1990), 255.

[15] James Tracy, “Rising Up: Poor, White, and Angry in the New Left,” in The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, ed. Dan Berger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 223.

[16] Holder, “The History of the Black Panther Party 1966–1971,” 227.

[17] Morris Kaplan, “Bomb Plot is Laid to 21 Panthers: Black Extremists Accused of Planning Explosions at Macy’s and Elsewhere,” New York Times, April 3, 1969, accessed October 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com; “Panther 21 Trial: Another Chicago,” February 20, 1970, accessed October 24, 2018, jfk.hood.edu.

[18] T.J. English, The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), 267–68.

[19] Sekou Odinga, in Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S. (Chicago: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, 1990), 143; Lubasch, “Key Suspect Is Arrested in Brink’s Car Robbery”; Juan M. Vasquez, “One of Panther 21 Admits Helping Anti-Police Sniper,” New York Times, October 8, 1971, accessed October 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com.

[20] Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” New Political Science 21, no. 2 (June 1999): 138–39.

[21] Thomas Courtney, Testimony of Sgt. Thomas Courtney in Hearings Before the Permanent Sub-Committee of the Committee Investigations of Government Operations United States Senate, Ninety-First Congress, First Session, Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders, June 26 and 30, 1969, Part 20, Washington, DC, U.S. Government Printing Office, 4235.

[22] Assata Shakur, Assata: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2001).

[23] Holder, “The History of the Black Panther Party 1966–1971,” 258.

[24] Ibid., 258–61.

[25] Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 141; Balagoon, see page 151 in current volume.

[26] Umoja, “Set Our Warriors Free,” 421–22; Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 138–39.

[27] Balagoon, see page 151 in current volume.

[28] Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 141–43.

[29] Balagun, “Kuwasi at 60”; Balagoon, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, 494–515; “6 Are Arraigned in 1970 Jail Riots: 2 Panthers Acquitted Last Week Among Defendants,” New York Times, May 19, 1971, accessed October 26, 2018, www.nytimes.com; “Prison Struggle 1970–1,” n.d., accessed October 26, 2018, abolitionistpaper.files.wordpress.com; “Queens House Of Detention Prison Riot” (photo), October 1970, accessed October 26, 2018, www.flickr.com.

[30] Balagoon, see pages 150–1 in current volume.

[31] Gilbert (2003), p. 9; Commission on Criminal Justice Services, New York State Report of the Policy Group on Terrorism, November 1985, 99–100; “Panther 21 Trial: Another Chicago”; Mutulu Shakur, “To Our Brother Kuwasi Balagoon,” Campaign to Free Dr. Mutulu Shakur, 1986.

[32] Balagoon, see page 151 in current volume.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ashanti Alston, correspondence with author, September 7, 2013. Alston is a former Black Liberation Army member, political prisoner, and anarchist activist. See Ashanti Alston, “Propaganda of the Deed,” Workers’ Solidarity (October 1998); Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 9–22, 87, 88, 116.

[35] Ojore Lutalo, phone interview with author, October 12, 2013.

[36] Kamau Sadiki, discussion with author, Atlanta, Georgia, November 27, 2003; Cyril Innis, discussion with Charles E. Jones and author, Bronx, New York, June 5, 2013.

[37] “Bashir Hamed: Black Liberation Army Political Prisoner,” It’s About Time 5, no. 4 (Fall–Winter 2001).

[38] Clark would be killed in an attempted escape on January 19, 1976; Commission on Criminal Justice Services, New York State Report of the Policy Group on Terrorism (November 1985), 102.

[39] Ojore Nuru Lutalo, in Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.S. (Chicago: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, 2002), 132.

[40] Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 154; “Sekou Odinga—New Afrikan Prisoner of War,” Arm the Spirit 14 (Fall 1982): 1, 9.

[41] Black Liberation Army, “On Strategic Alliance of Armed Military Forces of the Revolutionary Nationalist and Anti-Imperialist Movement,” in America the Nation-State: The Politics of the United States from a State Building Perspective, ed. Imari Obadele (Baton Rouge, LA: The Malcolm Generation, 1998), 423–24.

[42] Umoja, “Set Our Warriors Free,” 425; Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 148–49.

[43] Lubasch, “Key Suspect Is Arrested in Brink’s Car Robbery”; Eileen Putman, “Jury Indicts Eighth Suspect in Brinks Robbery,” Schenectady Gazette, January 16, 1982, accessed October 27, 2018, news.google.com.

[44] Balagoon, see pages 95–6 in the current volume. In the grammar of the New Afrikan Independence Movement the first personal singular is not capitalized (“i”) and the first letter in first person plural is capitalized (“We”). This is the application of a principle of the New Afrikan Creed, “The community is more important than the individual.”

[45] See pages 148–9 in this volume.

[46] See page 152 in this volume.

[47] See page 153 in this volume.

[48] Balagun, “Kuwasi at 60.”

[49] James Watts was the notorious “libertarian” right-wing secretary of the interior during the Reagan administration, who favored turning over public lands to oil and mining interests and agribusiness.

[50] In the 1980s, Benjamin Ward became the first Black police chief of New York City. He was notorious as a hard-drinking front man for the blue mafia.

[51] A clandestine Puerto Rican nationalist organization that engaged in armed struggle.

[52] While mention of the African National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organization in this context may raise some eyebrows today, it should be remembered that in the 1980s both were considered legitimate national liberation organizations that at times faced severe government repression.

[53] This trial, the first political use of the anti-mafia RICO law, began April 4, 1983, the six defendants being Sekou Odinga, Bilal Sunni-Ali, Cecilio Ferguson, Jamal Josephs, Silvia Baraldini, and Iliana Robinson. Others, such as the then-fugitive Mutulu Shakur, were convicted in later trials.

[54] Samuel Brown was a member of the BLA arrested in relation to the Brink’s action who cracked and started cooperating with the police.

[55] During the Reagan administration Jeanne Kirkpatrick was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and George P. Shultz was secretary of state.

[56] Leader of the anti-communist Solidarity trade union in Poland, which was at the time a satellite of the Soviet Union and was used as a constant example of human rights violations in the capitalist media.

[57] In the 1980s, Atlanta was hit by a wave of serial killings of New Afrikan children. Under immense public pressure, the Atlanta police arrested and convicted Wayne Williams, a young Black music producer who had no previous criminal record. The evidence was largely circumstantial, and many people have believed Williams to be the victim of a coverup to protect a white cop child molester.

[58] On June 22, 1982, Willy Turks, a thirty-four-year-old city transit worker, was one of three Black transit employes driving home after work through Brooklyn when their car was attacked by a white mob. Turks was savagely beaten to death and his coworkers injured. Of the approximately twenty white men in the mob, the police and prosecutors indicted only six, and none were ever convicted of murder. One had his charges dropped, one died before his trial, the others received terms of five, three, three, and two years, and served less than that—Paul Mormando, who was only convicted of assault and sentenced to two years, was released after only nine months.

[59] This sentence is as it appears in the New Jersey ABC edition of Balagoon’s Opening Statement. While accurate regarding sterilizations, Balagoon’s infant mortality statistics may have been the result of a typo as the correct statistics for 1980 are roughly 23.1 per thousand (Black infant mortality) and 12 per thousand (white infant mortality), not per hundred.

[60] Anastasio Somoza’s brutal dictatorship in Nicaragua was overthrown by a popular left-wing revolution in 1979. Balagoon was writing at a time when Nicaragua was ruled by the left-wing Sandinistas and was the victim of military attacks by the CIA-backed Contras.

[61] Waverly Brown was the only Black cop on the Nyack police force and Edward O’Grady was his white sergeant in the NPD. Both were killed at the roadblock during the Brink’s action.

[62] Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. El Hajj Malik Shabazz is better known by the name Malcolm X and was assassinated on February 1, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Mark Essex was a Black revolutionary in New Orleans who got fed up, armed himself, and started shooting cops. He was killed after a day-long siege on January 7, 1973.

[63] The “King Alfred Plan” was detailed in a radical Sixties novel, The Man Who Cried I Am by John Williams. It involved using the army to physically exterminate the entire Black population of the U.S. It was published in the Black Panther newspaper as if it were fact, and was widely discussed in radical circles and believed by many (including Balagoon) to be an actual existing government plan. Nevertheless, it was a work of fiction.

[64] New Afrikans arrested in connection to the Brink’s expropriation who flipped and cooperated with the police and prosecution.

[65] Marilyn Buck was a white political prisoner. During the 1960s, as an anti-racist activist in California, she was convicted of helping former Black Panthers. Federal prosecutors often referred to her as “the only white member of the Black Liberation Army.” After years in prison, she escaped but was later recaptured and convicted of helping to free Assata Shakur and other revolutionary acts. Update to 2019 edition: In 2008 Marilyn was granted a parole date in February 2011, then won an advance to August 8, 2010. With less than twelve months left to serve, she was diagnosed with a rare and very aggressive uterine cancer. Despite surgery and chemotherapy, treatment came too late to save her life. She was granted an early release on July 15, 2010. She paroled to Brooklyn, New York, where for the next twenty days she savored every moment of her freedom.

[66] Judy Clark, another of Balagoon’s white codefendants in the Brink’s case.

[67] The name given by the South African government of the day for the reservations that Blacks were confined to under apartheid.

[68] Victims of a serial killer.

[69] In the 1980s and early 1990s, a popular left-wing guerrilla force, the FMLN, was active in El Salvador. With U.S. aid in the form of military “advisers,” mercenaries, and arms, the Salvadoran military and paramilitary death squads carried out a scorched earth policy against the entire peasant population and those suspected of left-wing sympathies.

[70] A Salvadoran death squad raped and murdered three American nuns and a female religious worker in 1980; in 1982 a death squad killed four Dutch journalists who had written articles critical of the government.

[71] While less than two dozen U.S. “advisers” were killed during the Salvadoran dirty war (1980–1993), the army and paramilitaries killed some fifty thousand people, the vast majority of them peasants.

[72] This was the case of the New York Panther 21.

[73] UNITA was an anti-communist army controlled by the South African apartheid regime that worked to destabilize the Marxist Angolan government in the 1970s and 80s.

[74] The essay Kuwasi is referring to here, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, was written by the late Fredy Perlman and is available as a pamphlet from Black and Red Press.

[75] On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police bombed a home belonging to the radical group MOVE, while eleven Black people, including four children, were trapped inside. All but two, Ramona and Birdie Africa, were killed in the police attack.

[76] Wilson Goode was the first Black mayor of Philadelphia and, as such, presided over the MOVE bombing.

[77] Neville Johnson was a 20-year-old Black man, shot through the head and killed by a Miami police officer while playing a video game in an arcade, on December 28, 1982. (Note to 2019 edition.)

[78] Michael Stewart was a 25-year-old Black man arrested on September 15, 1983, for spraypainting graffiti in a New York City subway station; he was beaten while in custody, went into a coma, and died of his injuries thirteen days later. (Note to 2019 edition.)

[79] The Symbionese Liberation Army was an armed group active in California in the 1970s. It carried out assassinations and bank robberies, and was made famous through the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst. On May 16, 1974, police surrounded and attacked the group’s safehouse in Los Angeles. The house caught fire; six guerrillas were killed, either by the fire, or shot by police as they attempted to flee or surrender. (Note to 2019 edition.)

[80] Azania was the name given to what is still today the country of South Africa by the radical anti-integrationist wing of the anti-apartheid liberation movement of the time.

[81] Steve Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, was in fact murdered by police while being interrogated in Port Elizabeth. Kuwasi mistakenly situates his death in Robben Island, the notorious maximum security prison that housed many anti-apartheid political prisoners in South Africa. (Note to 2019 edition.)

[82] In 1981 and 1982, bombings against a hydro substation and an arms manufacturer were carried out in Canada by a group called Direct Action, while a sister organization known as the Wimmin’s Fire Brigade firebombed several video stores specializing in pornography. When five members of the Vancouver anarchist scene were arrested in relation to these actions they became known as the Vancouver Five.

[83] The Guardian was the historic main weekly newspaper of the U.S. socialist left. Started in the 1940s to provide a broader voice for pro-Moscow independent socialists, it became a voice of the 1960s New Left, and then pro-Maoist before its final collapse.

[84] The Equal Rights Amendment would have made sex discrimination unconstitutional in the United States. It was defeated in a referendum in 1982, largely as a result of the New Right’s first major political mobilization.

[85] The Reagan Administration had sent eight hundred marines into Lebanon in 1982 to support the pro-U.S. Lebanese Army and Israeli armed forces that were fighting against pro-Palestinian groups. The marines stayed until 1984.

[86] In 1983 the U.S. invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada to suppress its Marxist government and establish a pro-American regime.

[87] United Freedom Front and United Fighting Group were names used in bombing communiqués by anti-imperialist underground groups.

[88] The Reverend Moon is the head of the far-right Unification Church (“the Moonies”). In the 1980s, he was briefly jailed for income tax fraud.

[89] DINA was the Chilean secret police during the right-wing Pinochet dictatorship, and Alpha 66 is a paramilitary Cuban exile organization sponsored by the CIA. Both were involved in violent attacks against their opponents internationally, the most infamous in North America probably being the assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letellier in Washington, DC, in 1976.

[90] The sole survivor of Jonathan Jackson’s raid on the Marin County Courthouse on August 7, 1970, Ruchell “Cinque” Magee remains in prison today. He is one of the longest-held political prisoners in the world.

[91] The New Afrikan People’s Organization December 21, 1986, memorial for Kuwasi Balagoon, held in Harlem.

[92] BLA member Assata Shakur was liberated from a New Jersey prison in November 1979. She now lives as a political refugee in Cuba.

[93] Kuwasi means “Born on Sunday”; Balagoon means “Warlord.” Kuwasi died at Auburn prison on Saturday, December 13, 1986.