Studying to be a teacher in the Kansas City school district and pouring through a ton of books while hoping this will help in my attempt to promote some positive change in the somewhat bleak future of our city.

Friday, April 16, 2010

We Want Freedom (A Life in the Black Panther Party); Mumia Abu Jamal

"I started with this idea in my head, "There's two things I've got a right to, death or liberty." - Harriet Tubman

"They were looking for an organization that would represent their collective voice.  Even at this early stage, there existed positions that would later re-emerge espoused and reflected by the Black Panther Party: a questioning of the status quo; a sense of alienation not only from the US government, but, reflecting a class divide, also from the elite of the Civil Rights movement; and the germ of recognizing the importance of the international arena to the lives and destinies of Blacks in America." p. 3

"The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures and with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger.  It is an under-developed world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but also a world without engineers and without administrators.  Confronting this world, the European nations sprawl, ostentatiously opulent.  This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and the subsoil of that under-developed world.  The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races." - Frantz Fanon, p. 4 (quoted from the book Wretched of the Earth)

"It seems the young folks who established and staffed the organization came from predominatnly Southern backgrounds and therefore had to have suffered a kind of dual alienation.  First, the global, overarching feeling of apartness stemming from being Black in a predominantly white and hostile environment.  Second, the distinction of being perceived as "country," or "southern," a connotation that has come to mean stupid, uncultured, and hickish in much of the northern mind." p. 6