Political Media Review

Jalil Muntaqim (a.k.a. Anthony Bottom) was nineteen when he was sent to prison. He’ll turn 60 this year. He’s serving two concurrent sentences of 25 years to life.

The position of women as organizers seems under continuous scrutiny. For women of color, the clashes they face are compounded by questions of loyalty as well as privilege and struggling within communities that have been subjected to historic miseducation and troubles.

Among some circles, Fred Hampton is a luminary without peers. Though new generations may only catch his reference in a song, his legacy in Chicago and to the Black liberation movement is without question.

Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton perhaps explained Black revolutionary nationalism best when he drew lines against what he called reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is a force that sees capital and the ruling order in a fundamentally different way;

Letter to the President: The Streets Get Political, produced by Russell Simmons, directed by Thomas Gibson, composed by Quincy Jones, and narrated by Snoop Dogg, is a wake-up call to the world that hip-hop and rap does not mean money, ignorance, and violence, but a voice from a imprisoned, oppressed, and repressed community. This is an excellent film on the history of hip-hop and rap in the U.S. in relation to race, class, and sexism.

It is no secret that the United States does not hesitate to incarcerate. While the US only represents 5% of the global population, it cages nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners-approximately 2.3 million people. Of these 2.3 million people, approximately half are African American (13% of US population). Of course, the vastly disproportionate caging and state coercion of African Americans in the US has a long and brutal history. This bloody legacy is made manifest in prisons like Angola, named for the country from which many southern plantation slaves were abducted.

Presenting one’s memoir consciously as that of a former Black Panther Party member, even as simply a factual statement, is bound to bring any such book into some heady company. Think Assata Shakur’s Assata, George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time and nearly a dozen other autobiographies and biographies. And though From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography Of Black Panther Robert Hillary King (nee Robert King Wilkerson) is no Soul On Ice (Eldridge Cleaver’s bubbling personal manifesto), King’s words percolate with the urgency and determination that made the Panthers once one of North America’s most revolutionary units.