Today In Labor History June 29, 1941: Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998), founder of the U.S. civil rights group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was a key figure in the Black Power movement, becoming honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party and, later, as the leader of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The FBI attempted to destroy him through COINTELLPRO, and succeeded in convincing Huey Newton that he was a CIA agent. This, and the Panthers’ embracing of white activists into their movement, led him to distance himself from the Panthers. In 1968, he married the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba and moved to Africa, changing his name to Kwame Ture and campaigning internationally for revolutionary socialist pan-Africanism.
Today in Labor History April 24, 1999: The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union shut down all West Coast shipping in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal (Black Panther, journalist), who was wrongfully imprisoned and held on death row for the murder of a cop—a crime he did not commit.
Today in Labor History April 24, 1954: Mumia Abu Jamal, death row activist, journalist and former Black Panther, was born on this date. Mumia is currently in prison on trumped-up charges of killing a cop. He is also extremely ill with congestive heart failure, diabetes, and a number of other maladies.
Today in Labor History April 15, 1986: Author Jean Genet died on this day. Genet was a novelists, political activist and petty criminal. His book, The Thief’s Journal (1949), relates his experiences as a young prostitute and thief. That same year, the authorities tried to sentence him to life in prison for his ten convictions. Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso successfully petitioned the government on his behalf. In 1968, Genet was censored in the U.S. and expelled from the country after they refused him a visa. But he returned in 1970, upon an invitation by the Black Panthers. He stayed three months, giving lectures and attending the trial of Huey Newton. Later that year, he went to Palestine and visited refugee camps. He supported U.S. political prisoners Angela Davis and George Jackson. He also supported the anti-prison, anti-police brutality work of Michel Foucault, in France.
Today in Labor History March 20, 2000: Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was arrested for murdering a Georgia sheriff’s deputy. Al-Amin had been a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers. He once said that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” Al-Amin denied shooting the deputy. His fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon. He had no gunshot wounds, though officers who were present at the shootout claimed that the suspect had been hit and wounded. Another man, Otis Jackson, later confessed to being the shooter, but the authorities have repeatedly denied Al-Amin’s requests for a retrial. He is now serving a life sentence. He had been at Florence supermax, under a gag order preventing interviews with journalists. In 2014, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He is now at the U.S. Penitentiary, Tucson. In April 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal from al-Amin.
Today in Labor History February 18, 1970: A jury found the Chicago Seven not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. However, Judge Julius Hoffman still convicted all the defendants with contempt and sentenced them to jail time ranging from 3 months to over 4 years. These were all reversed on appeal. Black Panther Bobby Seale had been a codefendant, but his case was declared a mistrial. Judge Hoffman had ordered him physically gagged during the trial.