https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/03/black-women-political-prisoners-of-the-police-state/
Black Women Political Prisoners of the Police State
by Linda G. Ford - May 3, 2019
The Rev. Joy Powell says she
was “raped, railroaded and bamboozled” by
police. Her crime? Being a poor Black woman who faced off against the police—protesting
their violent brutality against Black people in Rochester, NY. Once she
defied them, she was warned, then targeted and framed for serious crimes.
A few weeks ago, Australian Julian Assange was forcibly dragged from his
political asylum to face the American police state. His crime? Like Rev.
Powell, he dared to tell the truth about the violence and brutality that
defines the American state. Scottish political analyst Jon Wight, citing
the treatment of American political prisoners Leonard Peltier and Mumia
Abu Jamal, calls the US “justice” system the “most cruel
and callous in the world.” That system does not tolerate the exposure
of its war crimes and abuses of its police state quietly—it retaliates
against those who expose its injustice by treating them to cruel and callous
punishment.
Black women who have confronted
the abuses of America’s white authority
have suffered its punishment throughout our history. Anarchist Lucy Parsons,
born in 1853, is one of the few Black women mentioned in labor histories,
usually as the wife of the martyred Albert Parsons, who was executed in
the wake of Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886. Parsons was a dedicated “revolutionist” for
labor’s cause, leading rallies and making speeches in 43 states,
advocating the use of explosives by tramps and their taking a “few
rich people with them.” She was constantly arrested, roughly handled,
and jailed: in 1913, at age 60, she was stripped and jailed in Chicago
for “peddling literature without a license.” Another labor
radical, Claudia Jones, who headed the Women’s Commission for the
US Communist Party, was jailed in 1955. She fought the “madam-maid” relationship
of white to Black women, and felt socialism was the only hope for American
Blacks. Jones was deported to England where she continued to work for socialism.
Women who joined the
struggle against American racism in the 1960s and 70s met particularly
violent
reprisals from their government. In the early
60s, 17-year-old Ruby Doris Smith, Spelman student and eventual SNCC (Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) leader, picketed, protested, and did
sit-ins, trying to integrate Atlanta. She suffered “the indignities
of southern jails and numerous injuries.” As a freedom rider, she
underwent the vicious white punishment at the Montgomery bus station and
was arrested and jailed by Sheriff Bull Conner. SNCC’s Diane Nash
was an important member of the first Nashville sit-ins in 1960. After her
arrest, she refused to pay her fine. Six months pregnant and facing a Jackson,
Mississippi jailing, she vowed to “hasten the day when my child and
all children will be free.” The women of the Black Liberation Movement
of the late 60s and 70s faced even harsher reprisals—from the federal
government.
Black women liberation
women political prisoners included the Black Panther’s
Assata Shakur and MOVE women Janine Phillips Africa, Debbie Sims Africa,
Merle Austin Africa and Janet Holloway Africa. Janine and Janet Africa
are still in prison, and Merle died in prison in 1998. In March 2019 Jet
Blue was forced to take down a Black history month poster which included
a
tribute
to
a “convicted
murderer,” Assata
Shakur. President Trump railed against the “cop killer” and
demanded Cuba return her. Shakur was able to escape from her jail, to political
exile in Cuba, and that is unforgivable to the American police state. Assata
Shakur was a major inspiration for me in writing my book Women Politicals
in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart,
and because of that she appears on the cover of my book, shackled but defiant.
As a
member of the BPP and Black Liberation Army, Shakur was an FBI target for
a long time. As per usual with the FBI, she had been accused of a number
of serious crimes, and convicted in the media of all of them and more,
although she had committed none of them—including murdering police
officer Werner Foerster. All the evidence points to the impossibility of
her shooting him, after having been grievously shot herself. She was convicted
and treated very harshly in prison, including 20 months in solitary in
two men’s prisons under horrible conditions. Her comrades managed
to get her out, after she concluded she would be killed in prison.
Women who joined the MOVE organization
in Philadelphia in the early 70s also faced incredibly unfair and violent
treatment. These followers of
John Africa lived “naturally” in a community—very like
other 70s communes–and believed in fighting the “system.” The
Black militancy of fighting the system had them on police radar and resulted
in raids that turned violent, with people who ran out to escape fires the
authorities set being shot, and in which Officer James Ramp was killed—the
evidence indicating probably friendly fire. Four women were arrested: Debbie,
Janine, Janet and Merle Africa. Merle died in prison (her family said mysteriously).
Debbie was released in June 2018, but Janine Phillips and Janet Holloway
Africa remain in prison, serving their 100-year sentences. They are periodically
denied parole for not “showing remorse,” remorse for being
innocent and harshly, unfairly jailed.
Joy Powell is also not remorseful
for being “raped, railroaded and
bamboozled,” and unfairly jailed, by police/government authorities.
In the present-day police state, African-Americans are first in the line
of fire, incarcerated in huge numbers, trapped on the bottom of the economic
ladder, and prey to racist civilians and authorities alike. When Black
women like Joy Powell speak out against militarized police brutality against
Blacks—they go right into the belly of the beast. When in 2014, unarmed
Black teenager Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri,
the Black community had had enough of assassinations and stood their ground: “Hands
up, don’t shoot.” Black activists were energized by Ferguson
and interest in the new group Black Lives Matter intensified. Jasmine Richards
was one young woman inspired by Ferguson. Once she “picked up a bullhorn” to
organize in her hometown of Pasadena against police brutality, she became “a
target.” While trying to protect a Black woman crime victim in 2016,
she was arrested, convicted and jailed. Richards was kept in solitary and
roughly strip-searched. She said it’s “violent to be a woman
in jail.” But she was undaunted, rallying her followers in court
with “We have a duty to fight for freedom!” Illinois BLM activist
Sandra Bland also believed that. When she was pulled over for a traffic
violation in Texas in 2015, she was slammed to the ground and charged—of
course—with assaulting the officers who had slammed her down. Two
days later she was found dead in her cell. Her family suspects foul play.
Ajamu Baraka called her death “political murder” of a “defiant
Black woman.” Black women defiant of the police will pay.
Joy Powell has paid
dearly for fighting police brutality. She is in solitary at Bedford Hills,
stalked
and harassed by guards, and denied medical treatment
for her asthma and diabetes. She wrote: “I never thought in my wildest
dreams after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which supposedly freed
slaves, that in 2007 we’re still in chains and shackles. This is
far from the American dream.” Powell had a rough start in life; she
was jailed for drug dealing from 1992 to 1995 at Albion Correctional Facility.
She suffered what many women in jail suffer—she was raped by an officer.
When the man continued to stalk her, she was put in “protective custody.” She
says she developed “PTSD, anxiety and bi-polar disorder” because
of the attack. When she got out she said she wanted to “give back
to the community” instead of the destruction she felt she did as
a drug dealer. Powell became a Pentecostal pastor and a community organizer
against
violence, including police violence. She organized rallies against drugs
and violence after a 15-year-old neighbor boy, and then her own 18-year-old
son, were killed. She worked for 12 years, as she said, with only the weapon
of “non-violence protest.” In 2002, six people died in Rochester
PD custody. In 2005, a 13-year-old suicidal girl was shot several times
by police. After Powell led protests about such events, she was charged
with abusing her granddaughter (by an officer who had shot the 13-year-old
girl). The police warned her she was a “target” and should
be careful.
She was definitely a target.
In October 2006 she was a victim of a violent crime—not investigated—instead, after complaining, she was
charged with burglary and assault. Her accusers were the same people who
had attacked her! She was found guilty by an all-white jury and got 16
years. As she said, “I was like so many activists before me, be killed
or definitely set up.” In May 2011, things got worse. She was convicted
of killing a man in Rochester in 1992. She was not guilty. “I am
actually and factually innocent!” Her court-appointed lawyer ignored
her pleas for meetings or for interviewing witnesses who could have proved
her innocence. She got 25 years to life.
Rev. Joy Powell has stated: “The only thing I am guilty of is standing
up for Equality and Justice for all. . . I never realized how much of a
threat one individual could be unarmed, until I began to speak out against
police brutality.” She also wrote that she is like so many poor Black
people in prison “rotting in cages with lengthy sentences for crimes
they did not commit.” And that she had four strikes against her: “1.
I am Black; 2. I am poor; 3. I am incarcerated; and 4. I am a woman.” Black
women “politicals,” political prisoners who have stood up against
white America’s racist injustice—Lucy Parsons, Claudia Jones,
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Diane Nash, Assata Shakur, Sandra Bland, Jasmine
Richards, the still jailed Janine and Janet Africa, and Rev. Joy Powell—are defiant female rebels
against a state which will go to any lengths to punish women exposing its
crimes.