The essays and documents assembled in this special issue of Souls make a clear and convincing case for Dr. Mutulu Shakur’s immediate release. They provide overwhelming evidence that Dr. Shakur—like the many thousands caged, disappeared, dead, or still locked up—is a prisoner of war who has been treated by the U.S. government as an enemy combatant his entire adult life. For over half a century he has fought a just war for the liberation of Afrikans and all oppressed people, while the state has responded with a litany of war crimes. Lest we forget, it was not the Republic of New Afrika, the Panthers, or any Black revolutionary contingent that declared this war in the first place. Slavery, colonialism, and imperialism—these were acts of war declared on Indigenous peoples, including Africans snatched from their land.
In spite of the state’s continued attempts to silence or kill Dr. Shakur outright, he has resisted by wielding the weapons of love and knowledge inside the “plantations” officially designated as prisons, and outside in the streets and communities where the lives, livelihoods, and hopes of the oppressed are perpetually crushed. As I write these words, he remains locked up, despite his advanced age, a serious bout with COVID-19, and late-stage bone cancer.
While securing his freedom is our immediate task, the purpose of these essays is to deepen our understanding of Dr. Shakur and the movements he helped to build, and to draw critical lessons from his life and work. Like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Dr. Shakur is one of the foremost intellectuals and political visionaries of the last half century. He has given us valuable insights and direction for current and future struggles in Turtle Island and elsewhere, always reminding us that the Black radical tradition persists even when it seems there is no exit and few allies. Mutulu has been a compass for Black liberation movements, a fitting role for a man whose name in KwaZulu means “someone who helps you get where you are going.”Footnote1
Dr. Shakur is a healer, whose practice is antithetical to capitalist medicine’s tendency to mask pain and symptoms and never address the disease or its root cause. The institutions he led, such as the Lincoln Detox Collective, the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA), and the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture, fought corporate pharma and the use of methadone to control addicts, and sustained a political culture dedicated to serving the people. And in captivity, acupuncture, acupressure, and Traditional Chinese Medicine were among Dr. Shakur’s methods of care for the victims of oppression and state violence, the knowledge of which he gave away freely.Footnote2 In retaliation for his healing work, he was subjected to solitary confinement and denied care and treatment.
Dr. Shakur is a teacher. He has transformed literally hundreds, if not thousands, of lives years before his capture and for the last three-and-a-half decades inside the plantation. Applying the principles of peace, unity, and knowledge, Dr. Shakur turned young Black men deemed disposable by the state into potential revolutionaries. He taught them to see their humanity, to love their people, and recognize their capacity to change and lead when society (including other Black folks) could see only “super predators.” He recently told one interviewer, “I feel more aligned with the energies of the youth than with the defeatism of the elders… . I have a lot of love and I have a lot of respect for what I’ve learned and what I’ve been able to share, and what I’ve been able to see manifest from those experiences.”Footnote3 We are all familiar with how he embraced the Hip Hop generation, and yet he never hesitated to call out values and ideas he found unproductive or destructive. For example, he unapologetically promoted the value of community over capital, a difficult message to convey in our neoliberal era of hyper-individualism, where wealth is worshiped and the welfare state in ruins. In a searing critique of the 1994 Crime Bill, Mutulu observed, “The entire society is ensnared in the worship of the material culture. Manhood is defined in terms of how much you have, not how will you care for family, community, and nation.”Footnote4
Dr. Shakur tapped the intergenerational knowledge that has been circulating in prisons for at least a half-century. “Prison began to produce revolutionaries and visionaries,” he wrote, “who could articulate, analyze, and move forward to organize against that oppression. Many of our leaders and the rank and file of our various struggles have been influenced by their experience in jail or by mentors who did time. The mentors were able to articulate that rehabilitation was a myth.”Footnote5 The state recognized the threat and began employing various methods to neutralize this rising political consciousness and promote nihilism—methods that included the systematic use of solitary confinement, the reduction or elimination of educational opportunities, strategies of behavior modification, and the distribution of drugs in our communities which not only fueled mass incarceration but Dr. Shakur described as a tactic of “low-intensity warfare.”Footnote6 And yet, neither the heightened repression of the carceral state nor the “plague of drugs” could crush the “culture of resistance and a sense of extended responsibility to the community.”Footnote7
Dr. Shakur is an internationalist. He understood the movement as a struggle for national self-determination in a world of nations fighting a U.S.-led imperial order. He consistently called for independence for Puerto Rico, the “socialist reunification of Mexico,” the restoration of sovereignty for Indigenous nations, and he consistently linked the condition of Black people in turtle island with that of colonized people around the world.Footnote8 But he also recognized how the geo-political landscape had shifted since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Global South nations committed to neoliberalism. In a 2010 essay calling for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look into the condition of political prisoners, he conceded that “when the nonaligned nations bloc dissolved and unity unraveled around the world, our struggle in the U.S. suffered the consequences because there was no International forum to support our struggle. Few nations or NGOs wanted to incur the wrath of U.S. foreign policy by pleading our cause.”Footnote9
What remains, besides the force of the masses in motion, is the regime of international law. As Natsu Taylor Saito makes clear in her essay, Dr. Shakur’s defense as a prisoner of war is neither a rhetorical stance nor an evasion. It is codified in international law, which essentially trumps domestic law. He has charged the U.S. with violating the Geneva conventions by killing and brutalizing freedom fighters, manufacturing evidence to obtain convictions, and using torture to elicit confessions. “Those kinds of things,” he observed not long after his capture, “represent the cornerstone of fascism.”Footnote10 Particularly relevant were the 1977 protocols added to the Geneva Convention, spearheaded by Algeria, extending protections to national liberation movements even if the colonizing or occupying nation does not formally recognize them or their claims. Not surprisingly, the U.S. never ratified these protocols, and Congress voting them down in 1986, the year Mutulu was captured.Footnote11 He has also invoked the Nuremberg defense, which states that it is the “duty” of citizens to act against international crimes, such as genocide, racial subjugation, etc., even if it means violating domestic laws. And he has invoked the principle of “Sovereign Immunity,” noting that the Republic of New Afrika had declared its independence and thus as “officials of another foreign government must receive immunity for local prosecution.”Footnote12
Care, heal, teach, defend, unite, build. These are the principles driving Dr. Mutulu Shakur’s practice, and these ought to be the principles driving today’s movements. When he speaks of building a nation, he is not promoting a narrow nationalism, chauvinism, or exclusion. He is acknowledging what W. E. B. Du Bois recognized in 1944, when he tried in vain to convince the newly formed United Nations to declare colonialism a crime against humanity. There are many reasons why it didn’t happen, but two stand out. First, the UN was designed to recognize nations and not peoples. Second, because only nations had standing, an attack on colonialism was interpreted as an assault on the sovereignty of the colonizing nations, and preserving the Anglo-American alliance after World War II was far more important than the plight of 750 million people in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Dr. Shakur understood that our people are a captive nation with a right to freedom, and thus should be able to stake a claim for rights and justice in an international community. “Our position, within the context of our struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms to secure those sublime human functions is that human rights and fundamental freedoms belong to the totality of universal humanity.”Footnote13 Not just the West but the rest of us. Or to put it differently, this is what it means to say Black Lives Matter.
Photo taken in USP Victorville (2016). Photo from the personal collection of Dr. Mutulu Shakur.
Free The Land. Free the People. Abolition Now!
Robin D. G. Kelley
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Robin D. G. Kelley
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Notes
1 See Akinyele Umoja’s essay in this issue
2 “Mutulu Shakur: On the History of The Use of Acupuncture by Revolutionary Health Workers to Treat Drug Addiction, and US Government Attacks Under the Cover of the CounterIntelligence Program (COINTELPRO),” NewAfrikan77 (July 30, 2017),
3 Daniel Burton-Rose, “Organizing in Prison and Control Unit Sanctions: An Interview with Dr. Mutulu Shakur,” transcript in author’s possession, p. 10.
4 Dr. Mutulu Shakur, We Want Our Freedom Anyway!: On Political Prisoners, Human Rights, Genocide, the Crime Bill & Control Units (Anarchist Black Cross Federation: Paterson, NJ, 1997), 30.
5 Shakur, We Want Our Freedom Anyway!, 31.
6 “Mutulu Shakur: On The History Of The Use Of Acupuncture”; Anthony X. Bradshaw, Malik Dinguswa, Terry D. Long, Mark Cook, Mateos Adolpho, and James Haskins, “Genocide Waged Against the Black Nation Through Behavior Modification/Orchestrated by Counterinsurgency and Low-Intensity Warfare in the U.S. Penal System,” (Presented to the Research Committee on International Law and Black Freedom Fighters in the United States, orig. draft 1988).
7 Shakur, We Want Our Freedom Anyway!, 31.
8 “Speech by Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Chitepo Day, March 18, 1979,” typescript.
9 Dr. Mutulu Shakur, “Towards a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for New African/Black Political Prisoners, Prisoners of War and Freedom Fighters,” 7.
10 Terry Bisson and Sally O’Brien, “For Mutulu Shakur, the Revolution Isn’t Over,” City Sun (April 9-15, 1986).
11 Trial of Dr. Mutulu Shakur and Marilyn Buck Continues,” The Insurgent: Newsletter of the Committee to Fight Repression 4 no. 1 (Winter 1988), 25.
12 Dr. Mutulu Shakur, “The Struggle for International Political Recognition for New Afrikan/Black Freedom Fighters,” 9–10.
13 Dr. Mutulu Shakur, We Want Our Freedom Anyway!, p. 6.