“This is a platform for the Black girls who feel silenced.” This intrepid announcement signaled the launch of the Black at Brearley Instagram account on June 7 by an anonymous group of students at the elite all-girls K-12 school in New York. Close to 600 “hearts” poured in, and soon the page was filled with testimonials about the chilling acts of racism the girls had endured from peers, teachers, and staff. One poster recalled being called a monkey by a fellow student; another detailed a slavery reenactment where the teacher cast her in the role of the enslaved; another recounted being accused of theft by a white parent after visiting a classmate’s home. Black parents and alumni soon chimed in with their own testimonials, and group photos of Black girls from 1972 to the present who had created clubs, participated in sports, exercised leadership, and formed close bonds with their cohort testified to the perseverance the girls had demonstrated and the relationships and institutional engagements that had sustained them despite it all.

Soon enough, other accounts were created, and to date there are hundreds of posts in dozens of anonymous “Blackat” accounts from private, independent schools. The students use the power of testimony to reveal the anti-blackness they face at schools where they are hypervisible in promotional material to justify diversity and inclusion statements but are marginalized in classrooms and hallways, are tracked into less challenging math and science courses, and face guidance counselors who steer them away from competitive colleges.

The actions of students in private, independent schools are directly connected to the outpouring of protest and demonstrations that have sent millions of Americans out of quarantine and into the streets every day since the televised murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In early June, some of these schools joined corporations and other institutions in claiming allegiance to the spirit of the protests and issued statements of solidarity and support of Black Lives Matter. Popping up in the wake of these statements, the student testimonials powerfully connect the dots between the Black Lives Matter protests and the realities they face in school, challenging their institutions to join in a growing movement of systemic change. The students driving the “Blackat” protest are deeply invested in social change and understand their participation as part of a larger movement of young people.

Parenting in public and private

Black parents pursue private, independent education often because of the crisis conditions in public schools. These parents have not abandoned larger educational struggles in the narrow quest for equal treatment in spaces of privilege. They often face a landscape with few options and end up in a double bind, as their children navigate predominantly white institutions at once enamored with their children’s diversity but hostile to the full expression of the children’s humanity.

The heightened sense of double consciousness experienced by Black families who attend schools that are worlds removed from their middle- or working-class realities has been a staple in popular culture. Millions of people under quarantine tuned in to Netflix’s hit “All American” in March. In this series, Spencer James, an African American teen athlete, leaves his South Central LA neighborhood to pursue opportunities at the well funded public high school in Beverly Hills. Angie Thomas’ best selling book “The Hate U Give” pivots around Starr Carter, a Black teen who juggles life as a student in an affluent white prep school by day and her life as a resident in a close knit but impoverished neighborhood. It spent fifty weeks on the New York Times young adult best seller list and was made into a popular movie. Showtime’s hit series “The Chi” has opened their third season with Kevin and Jake, two of the main characters from close knit South Side communities, enrolled in an elite prep school on the North Side. The theme of the collision of worlds has a long history going back to Kim Fields’ role as Tootie, the only Black girl in a white boarding school, in “The Facts of Life,” one of the longest running series of the 1980s.

We are one of those families. My daughter ended up in private school because of the failings of the New York public school system. Our arts-focused public elementary school was filled with over three-quarters Hispanic children, with the final fourth made up of equal parts white, African American, and Asian children and led by largely innovative and caring teachers and administrators. There were neighborhood walks in kindergarten, class trips, and culturally relevant education including a performance of Carole Boston Weatherford’s play “Freedom on the Menu,” about the 1960 Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins. I was an involved parent, doing in-class history presentations every year, arranging a guest speaker from Tanzania, and working with the guidance counselor to share knowledge about academic enrichment programs. By third grade, however, high-stakes English Language Arts and math state testing shifted the horizons of the curriculum. There were no more trips, and afterschool programs pivoted to test prep. Test prep dominated everything, and my otherwise happy-go-lucky daughter began to use the term “stress” to describe how she was feeling. While there was a growing movement to opt out of the exam, there was no avoiding the test-centered curriculum. The fate of the art teacher reflected the shifting priorities. During our years at the school, she was moved from her own inviting classroom into a repurposed storage closet. By fifth grade, the closet had been taken away, and she was dropping in on each class with a basket of supplies.

By the time my daughter graduated in 2016, I knew that I would not continue the path of public education without investigating other options. I signed up for visitation days at local Catholic schools, joined lotteries for high-performing charter schools, signed up for entrance exams at the best public middle schools, and investigated pipeline programs for independent schools. I waited in line with hundreds of Black and Brown parents to enter charter school auditoriums where we were told about regimented learning and punitive approaches to discipline that would help mold our children; and we spent our spare time studying for public school entrance exams. I attended an information session in a larger public school which had been segmented into three smaller schools. The lower tier was for children who lived in the zone of the school, and the two upper tiers were more selective and required an entrance exam and interview. The middle tier offered a more traditional classroom environment, and the highest-performing children could potentially gain admission to the more innovative student centered school on the uppermost floor. We were told not to “worry” that students didn’t eat together at the same time due to space considerations in the lunchroom. Like a slice of Neapolitan ice cream, it was Jim Crow in one building.

Looking ahead, I could see that the pathway for Black and Brown children to enter one of New York’s well regarded specialized high schools was blockaded. Many factors, including the singular reliance on the SHSAT exam for entrance, had shut the door to all but 4% of Black students. And I would not be able to homeschool like the growing number of Black parents who have turned their homes into classrooms to ameliorate the impact of racism on their children’s lives.

I knew that the education of a Black child would involve struggle for equity and access regardless of context, but I was hopeful. I learned that independent schools offered a progressive learning environment with small class sizes and did not use state tests. My daughter was accepted into one of the organizations that helps support students of color applicants to these schools. From swim lessons to summer camps to social support to application waivers to intensive test preparation, organizations like Prep for Prep, Early Steps, and A Better Chance played a pivotal role in the application process for many families. They scaffold the experience with ongoing activities, networking, and mentorship until high school graduation. When my daughter was accepted at an independent school that claimed to be rooted in an ethical mission and a commitment to equity and inclusion and included both middle and high school, we took the leap. Although we were moving away from the Black and Brown working class communities that grounded our lives and values for school, I hoped that I had found a place with some overlapping values, a community that opposed racism, supported justice, and would embrace my daughter.

We learned over the years that while our school does take a proactive approach to learning about global human rights issues, it treats racism as just another item on a long list of co-equal “isms” to “stand against.” From the school’s perspective, my daughter’s presence is all the evidence they need that they are on the path to achieving the requisite “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The DEI bureaucracy lacks the institutional power to serve as more than a thin buffer between students of color and a marginalizing environment. While the school claims a social justice commitment, transforming the curriculum and truly diversifying staff have remained unattained goals. Over the years it has fallen on me to emphasize political awareness and historical knowledge at home. I have never hesitated to reach out to teachers to express concerns, and when the students mounted their own protests to challenge racism at the school, I organized with parents. This approach to “diversity” instead of equity, instead of justice, instead of systemic change means that those students and families who “are the diversity” bear a psychic toll, while the non-Black students and families focus on an education that it is my daughter’s unspoken job to enrich.

Four years later, we are swept up in the reckoning of students demanding more from the educational institutions that have miseducated them. The “Blackat” movement has provided a window into my daughter’s world and I have been enraged and deeply distressed by the ugliness of the interactions chronicled by the students. Parents have offered their own testimonials online and are now making accounts criticizing the ways the organizations that serve as liaisons between the schools and families sometimes minimize racism, fail at emotional support and thrive on respectability politics described by one parent as the “‘be a good Negro’ vibe.”

“No longer will we be silent”

At this writing, there are over sixty #Blackat accounts chronicling the persistence and durability of systemic racism and structural barriers in educational institutions. The movement has spread beyond the independent school community. Students at Newark Charter School in Delaware have called out the failure of diversity initiatives and chronicled patterns of racism inside and outside of the classroom. Recently, the spokesperson for Success Academy, New York’s largest charter network, resigned publicly criticizing “how quickly leadership dismissed criticism of racist and abusive practices at their schools and at the network office.” Undergraduate and graduate and professional school students at Skidmore College, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Southern California, University of Michigan, NYU Medical School and Harvard Law have also created accounts.

Just as anti-police violence protests have exploded internationally to dozens of countries where statues have been toppled and anti-blackness, state violence and colonialism are being denounced, this movement has spread globally. Students in Zimbabwe have launched several accounts. Black in International Schools invites respondents to submit their stories because “the long arm of white supremacy extends to international schools.” These elite schools center Western curricula and are often populated with children of expatriates.

The nascent “Blackat” movement has the potential to coalesce a movement for educational transformation. From the unwelcome hand in the hair of a first grader; to the casual usage of the n-word by high school students, faculty and peers; to the medical student never shown images of Black skintones, the breadth of these accounts and the pattern of hypervisibility, marginalization, surveillance, harassment and racism they chronicle is a stunning indictment of the diversity model of educational reform. The testimonials reveal that Black private school children are not automatic success stories who have escaped the impact of racism on their school choices. They have simply traded the racism of segregation, limited resources and militaristic discipline in public education for the racism of low expectations, tokenism and microagressions in private schools.

Connecting the critiques of independent school students to the demands of public school students to the movement of college students who have been organizing longstanding campaigns such as Free CUNY, can fuel the growing movement for educational justice. The demands of the new Poor People’s Campaign highlight the type of overarching movement for transformation that can unite students nationwide: “We demand equity in education, ensuring every child receives a high-quality, well-funded, diverse public education. We demand an end to the re-segregation of schools. We demand free tuition at public colleges and universities and an end to profiteering on student debt. We demand equitable funding for historically black colleges and universities and for Native, Tribal and Indigenous educational institutions, whose missions have not outlived their purpose.” Scholars like Dr. Bettina Love, author of We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, have offered an alternative to reform and a path towards educational justice.

This is very much a movement in motion led by young people. Blackat accounts are still emerging and posts continue to drizzle in almost two months later. Black Students Demanding Change has emerged as a NY based formation to synthesize common demands for “systematic reform across educational institutions in America.” Their demands are far-ranging and imaginative enough to sidestep anti-racist platitudes, reading lists, consultants and workshops.

This generation of students has lived the failed promise of diversity and are demanding justice instead. While the streets still flood with protesters braving the rising tide of the pandemic, they offer their poignant posts, interspersed with poetry, quotations and declarations. They ask for testimony, witness, and accountability.

Like hundreds of thousands of people in the US, my week was defined by the opening of Ryan Coogler’s long awaited Marvel Film, “Black Panther.” Coming on the heels of the American president dubbing African countries as “shitholes” and renewed national attention on the sexual harassment and discrimination women face in Hollywood, “Black Panther” offered a stunningly beautiful technologically advanced African country that had escaped the ravages of colonialism; and storylines where Black women were central. The main character T’Challa is surrounded by Ramonda, his mother; Shuri, his brilliant younger sister; Nakia, his political comrade and ex; and Okoye, his loyal protector, general and head of his intelligence structure which includes the Dora Milaje, a group of female elite fighters. Given the often-stereotypical depictions and thin roles often available for Black women actors, any two of these characters in a film would be notable. The presence of all of them was nothing short of path breaking. I knew I had to take my 12 year old daughter.

I watched the film through my eyes and hers. In hushed tones, she marveled at the flawlessness of Nakia’s skin in one of the many closeups of the dark skinned Black women of Wakanda who effortlessly subverted Eurocentric standards of beauty. She buried her head and watched through her fingers as Black women led the charge in one explosive fight scene after the other. And she fell in love with Shuri, the millennial princess who demonstrated that technological mastery is where the real power lies and that elder brothers can be annoying, even in advanced societies.

After leaving the theater, I reflected on the portrayal of Wakandan women. I asked myself how could a Black feminist lens enrich the vibrant conversations about the political meaning and historical resonance of this film? What political messages could be distilled? What would I discuss with my daughter, the day after?

Empire is not liberation

The rivalry between T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) is a key plot point of the movie. Given Black feminism’s deep anti-imperialist roots it is important to start with a criticism of Killmonger’s plan to arm the children of the Diaspora with Wakanda’s weapons and technology. While this plan was introduced as a means to achieve liberation from oppression, it was intertwined with the language of empire — specifically a Wakandan empire where the sun never sets. The use of this infamous phraseology, which is widely associated with the glorification of the British colonial project, is a jarring reminder of the slippery slope between domination and liberation that has historically vexed masculinist visions of Black liberation. Killmonger, as a figure associated with the CIA (an organization presented uncritically in the film despite its well documented role in political repression, surveillance and disruption of foreign governments and murder of leaders), represents a flawed vision of power.

He is the primary African American figure in the film and carries the burdens of the afterlife of slavery and the struggle for Black self-determination in the US. He greets his father’s death with a world-weary resignation about violence that demonstrates the precarities of Black childhood. His solution is to share Wakanda’s technical prowess and military might with oppressed people of African descent so they can invert white supremacist hierarchies of race and power (not be rid of these hierarchies). His vision held the promise of selective liberation, not revolution.

Killmonger is a monarch seeking a throne, a familiar figure in the history of Black protest. Despite his flawed ideas and violent actions as a CIA operative, he is presented as having a redeemable vision of Black futurity. The struggle between T’Challa’s way and Killmonger’s alternative have fueled some of the most provocative think pieces about the meaning of the movie to Black history and politics. However, it is the women of Wakanda who have offered the most justice centered view of what Wakanda can mean in the world.

Wakadan Women as Thinkers

Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) first appears in a scene where she is coming to the aid of African women and children, an unmistakable nod to Boko Haram kidnaping of women and girls and a comment on the reality of child soldiers. From the start, her character presents a challenge to the isolationist policies of Wakanda and suggests the potential of justice driven interventions into the outside world. This history follows her throughout the film as she hints at entanglements in North Korea and other places around the globe. It is this political commitment that is the wrench in the works in her love story with T’Challa. She is an ideologue hidden in plain sight, advocating a different path than T’Challa’s isolation or Killmonger’s expansionism with her praxis.

It is Nakia’s way that seems to have the most radical potential. History is not fiction but the mechanisms that silence Black women’s intellectual production even while seeming to herald their numerical presence is present in each realm. Scholars of Black women’s intellectual history have pointed to the ways that racism and sexism combine to easily dismiss Black women as “doers,” rather than thinkers. This allows commentators and pundits to herald Nakia as one of Wakanda’s most visible and brave women, analyze her character’s bold style politics and paradigm shifting beauty, while engaging with the male characters (rather than her) as thinkers.

Hidden (leadership) Figures

Shuri (Letitia Wright), Wakanda’s brilliant scientist and technological powerhouse, steals every scene she is in. She masterminds everything from T’Challa’s fight strategy to the high speed train system that will frame T’Challa and Killmonger’s battle to the death. Her centrality and power is evident in the scene where she coaches Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) through his mission to short circuit Killmonger’s plan while simultaneously fighting for her country, family and life. However, her ability to create technology and master science is narrowed in the end when T’Challa imposes his vision of skill transfer between Wakanda and Oakland. She arrives to an impoverished Oakland confused about the location and her purpose there. Taking the role of teacher, she answers the preliminary questions curious urban youth in an ending which juxtaposes her tremendous knowledge with the contested notion that STEM education is a panacea for structural inequality.

In the end T’Challa, the king of the most advanced country in the world, has purchased a few buildings and committed to a plan of education in the inner city. This is as anti-climatic as it sounds. He has positioned his sister and comrade, his two closest allies and the two characters with the broadest and most intriguing vision of Wakanda in the world, at the helm of his first attempt at outreach. However their hand in the project is unclear and the result is a cooptation of their vision and a blunting of the radical edge of their politics.

Matriarchs and Generals

While the film revolves around the loss of T’Challa’s father T’Chaka, his mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) is in a supporting role in the film. Basset brings deep gravitas to her every line in her role as a royal elder but does not serve as a strong counterpoint to her son. Killmonger’s mother, and entire upbringing, is also missing in the film. Viewers are left to surmise that it is men, through their presence or absence, who leave the strongest imprint on their boys. This is an inversion of the role that Black mothers have historically played in the lives of their children.

Okoye (Danai Gurira) is fierce as a loyal general but once Killmonger becomes king it is clear that her power is channeled through the throne, a symbol of maleness. She is trapped in a structure that leaves her with few choices until the very end when she boldly decides to help T’Challa regain power and fights for Wakanda. The notion that “we were kings and queens” (and generals) resonates deeply in an anti-Black world where Black history and culture is often presented as debased and nihilistic. But these are also deeply limiting tropes. Ryan Coogler has discussed how the film focuses on the interplay between the modern and traditional , a key reminder about the perils and possibilities of making the future out of the cloth of the past.

Mothering Futures

“Black Panther” reflects a deep, global and collective hunger for cultural products that represent people of African descent with dignity and power, but that doesn’t mean that one has to swallow everything uncritically. There is potential in this moment. Activists have raised awareness about the 1960s Black Panther Party, rallied for support for political prisoners and held voter registration drives at movie screenings. Fewer have asked why the African future — as imagined in “Black Panther” — and the African past — as sold by ancestry.com — is so much more appealing to some Americans than the African present. There is no better time to launch critical conversations about what liberation could look like; connect new people to pre-existing organizations and political networks; re-center aesthetics in freedom making projects and have some frank transnational diasporic dialogue.

Perhaps the best thing about “Black Panther” is that it grounds these conversations in intergenerational soil. The day after the film, I will ask my daughter to use the tools of Black feminism to re-imagine Wakanda. How should it be organized, run and led? Could she think beyond monarchy and create an alternative system of governance based on values like egalitarianism and collectivity? How might she redistribute, rather than hoard, the wealth of Wakanda for the greater good? What would she do with Killmonger, who at the end finally grasps the splendor of Wakanda yet is incapable of imagining that it had evolved beyond imprisoning vanquished enemies. (A burning question in a country where 2.3 million people are incarcerated.) Most of all, I will ask her about her favorite thinkers and suggest that the women of Wakanda might be the leaders that we have been calling for.

Robyn C. Spencer is a historian and author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

#BlackPanther #Wakanda #WakandaForever

The room, full of men huddled with their loved ones in a tender web of public privacy, faded into the background. He was in front of us, taller than I envisioned and smiling. Uncertain at first, I gave his outstretched hand a firm shake, paused, then leaned in for an embrace. Our familial grins belied this awkward dance. We had never met in person before, but we were far from strangers. He was Mumia Abu-Jamal, an award winning journalist, a former member of the Black Panther Party and the most well-known political prisoner in the U.S. We were two Black women, who were members of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home (CBMH), a grassroots organization formed by scholar-activist Johanna Fernandez in 2012 to bridge Mumia’s long standing support base in the movement to free political prisoners with a new generation of young people fighting to end mass incarceration. CBMH members had been placed on Mumia’s list of authorized visitors and serendipitously, me and Sophia’s names had been the first two to be cleared. For years we had occasionally written to Mumia and spoken to him on the phone when he called into conference calls, meetings or events. The opportunity to meet him in the flesh had pushed us out of our beds at 5am that chilly fall morning and jump started an unforgettable journey.

After the first set of greetings, Mumia immediately gave us the rundown: Visitation 101. We took photos right away. Us: shorn of money, phones and underwire, and full of purpose. Him: clad in a burgundy jumpsuit, bearded, bespectacled, easing into an unguarded pose. Next stop: snatching the salad, the one with spinach, from the vending machine. Among the chips, re-heatable nachos and candy bars, anything green was gold. We picked a spot in the rows of side by side seating and he sat between us. We could have been anywhere: a living room, a doctor’s waiting room, the departure gate of an airport, or a park bench. But our surroundings were not so benign. Over a dozen cameras clocked our every move and a guard walked around periodically to ensure food was shorn of wrappers and to disentangle lingering embraces. Violence sat cocked in the background.

We were in SCI Mahanoy, a 2,300 bed, medium security prison carved out of the harsh Pennsylvania landscape where coal once ruled and industrial development has faltered ever since. Prisons like SCI Mahanoy have filled an economic void, serving as an important employer for local residents and a magnet for visitors who purchase goods and services from struggling businesses. Frackville, the official prison zipcode, is 96% white, with a 6.6% unemployment rate and 21% of the residents living beneath the poverty line. Such areas have been fertile ground for the anti-immigrant, white supremacist message of the Trump administration and 70% of Schuylkill County turned out for Trump in 2016.

Mumia’s story

Mumia’s story of incarceration story began long before SCI Mahanoy — its sinews connect activist generations and movement genealogies in ways that point to the dismantling of America’s carceral state.

In 1981, Mumia was convicted of killing police officer Daniel Faulkner in a late night incident in Philadelphia and sentenced to death. Mumia has maintained his innocence and his legal team has pointed to witness manipulation, a biased judge, and other irregularities and bias in his trial. At the time, he was a popular investigative radio journalist who had been targeted for his exposé of police corruption, his Panther affiliation and his positive reporting of MOVE, a Black radical organization whose natural living and anti-authoritarian politics had run afoul of the Philadelphia police and whose compound would be bombed by a military grade bomb a few years after Mumia’s arrest. His supporters consider him to be a political prisoner, targeted for his dissident politics. He is not alone.

There are several dozen political prisoners in the US, most of whom are veterans of the most radical wing of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Political prisoners are an intrinsic part of the larger system of mass incarceration, which imprisons 2.3 million people, a rate that is more than five times higher than any other country in the world.

Political prisoners, according to carceral studies scholar Dan Berger, are “canaries in the coal mine.” He has argued that “some of the most distinguishing features of the American prison state — aggressive policing, hefty charges, preventive detention, lengthy sentences, parole denial and prolonged solitary confinement — were first deployed as means to stop radical social movements beginning in the 1960s.”

These movements faced repression from COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program which launched a multipronged campaign of infiltration, harassment, spurious arrest, surveillance, and disruption against Black radicals, the New Left and others in the 1960s. Members were targeted for surveillance, arrest, and conviction because of their critique of racial capitalism, US imperialism and often, their support of the use of political violence and armed self-defense. Their trials were shaped by irregularities and illegalities, they received harsh sentences and often faced punitive periods of solitary confinement and other human rights violations in prison.

Mumia has condemned the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex in dozens of radio commentaries and nine books; and advocated for collective resistance and societal transformation. The injustice of his imprisonment, the clarity of his analysis and the urgency of his writing has attracted support from veterans from the civil rights, Black Power and New Left movements; students, labor union activists, and well respected human rights champions like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, and Angela Davis.

Melding Movements

In 1971 Angela Davis wrote that: “In the course of developing mass movements around political prisoners, a great deal of attention has inevitably been focused on the institutions in which they are imprisoned.” She argued that: “the political receptivity of prisoners — especially Black and Brown captives — has been increased and sharpened by the surge of aggressive political activity rising out of Black, Chicano, and other oppressed communities.” These conditions were evident in the early 1990s. During this period, the mobilization around Mumia’s case dovetailed with a mass movement born in the face of skyrocketing incarceration rates; the war on drugs; and rising police brutality and violence epitomized the Rodney King beating. This movement condemned the carceral state, traced the history of racial criminalization back to enslavement and its aftermath, rallied against state violence and raised the question of prison abolition. It was led by local grassroots groups like NY’s Campaign to Free Black Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War, and nationwide organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Organization, Critical Resistance,the Jericho Movement and INCITE! Books like The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness (2000) by Michelle Alexander and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2003), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) provided the intellectual foundations of the movement while blogs like US Prison Culture, and research initiatives like Prison Policy amplified a strong structural critique of prisons. Incarcerated men and women using everything from their pens to hunger strikes to challenge their conditions have also played a decisive role.

After decades of appeal, Mumia’s death penalty was commuted to a life sentence by the PA Supreme Court and in 2012 he was transferred to general population in SCI Mahanoy. This partial victory reinvigorated his traditional base of support and brought his case to the attention of a new generation of activists who flooded the streets in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin that same year. The cry of Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name in the face of police killings in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities flowered into the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a network of 50 organizations representing thousands of activists. In 2016, the M4BL created a wide ranging policy platform which included restorative justice and the abolition of prison, declaring that “until we achieve a world where cages are no longer used against our people we demand an immediate change in conditions and an end to all jails, detention centers, youth facilities and prisons as we know them.”

Mumia’s case, rooted in repression, surveillance and the dismantling of 60s liberation movements, is one key to the carceral apparatus that this new generation of activists seeks to replace. These young people have supported him as he fought back against attmpts to silence his voice through the Revictimization Relief Act in 2015, and through his battle for Hep C treatment after suffering illness and almost going into a diabetic shock in 2015. These cases have shed light on prison conditions and Abu-Jamal v. Wetzel (the Hep C case) has been used by incarcerated men in Missouri and promises to continue to provide critical legal precedent for the fight for a humane standard of prison health care. Much like the cry to “Free Huey” and “Free Angela” in the 1960s, Mumia’s name has become a shorthand for the injustice of the criminal justice system. His case bridges the distance between people who are ensnared in a politicized carceral apparatus through mass incarceration and those who are considered political prisoners.

Sophia and I literally embodied this history. Born in the 70s, I had been politicized in the 1990s activist upsurge and had learned about Mumia when the death penalty loomed over him. I joined the Free Mumia Coalition, helmed by former Black Panther, Safiya Bukhari in New York and over the years I had remained connected with his case. I joined the CBMH in 2014. Sophia was born in 1989 and had learned about Mumia through a class in college. She had been a part of the CBMH from its inception. Together, we reflect the intergenerational nature of the movement to free Mumia, its many waves, its connection to state violence and its regeneration in the crucible of Black Lives Matter. Our gender is not incidental. Just like vocal women of color and femmes have been at the helm of the M4BL, the free Mumia movement is led by women like Pam Africa, Ramona Africa, the late Safiya Bukhari and Johanna Fernandez.

Sitting with Mumia

What does one say to the most well known political prisoner in America? Sophia and I had prepared appropriately political topics to stuff into any holes that might appear in the conversation, had memorized greetings and messages from other CBMH members and had questions ready for the book party we were planning for his latest release, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?. But it turned out that we didn’t need the scaffolding. The three of us fell into an easy rapport. Mumia immediately dubbed Sophia “Wisdom” and asked me both about my child and my recently published book, referring to them both as my babies. He seemed eager to not just talk but to ask questions and listen.

Our conversation unfolded languorously. Mumia turned the “Italian Sicilian” dressing on the salad into a dissertation on Hannibal, general of the Carthaginian army. We moved from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. Junot Diaz’s brilliance in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao led us deep into the battlefields of French defeat in the Haitian revolution which led to Algeria, Fanon and neocolonialism. We moved from there to 1960s New York and Panther Afeni Shakur’s role in the defense of the Panther 21. Here, our voices became a chorus, upholding the brilliance of Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” the powerful 1995 tribute song to Afeni. We moved to the importance of women’s activism, then and now. From Maxine Waters latest clapback to Trumpism; to the cancellation of WPNs “Underground” and the power of seeing Harriet Tubman portrayed on television; to the cultural impact of Nichelle Nichols as Uhura on Star Trek; to Safiya Bukhai and Afeni Shakur’s role in the NY Panthers; to Black Lives Matter activist Ash Williams’ confronting Hillary Clinton on her famous quote that “we have to bring them to heel” and the role of the Clintons in accelerating mass incarceration. It was clear that he had remained a sharp analyst of mainstream news, popular culture and grassroots activism.

Like Malcolm, Mumia had a ready smile and a quick wit. Although cut off from social media, he was as aware of Trump’s tweets and eccentric mannerisms as he was about his disastrous policies for people of color. He was a skilled impersonator who replayed dramatic scenes from his life complete with critical and often comedic commentary. He told us that he was deeply inspired by the young activists in M4BL and enjoyed hip hop citing TI, Lupe Fiasco, and Jay Z as favorites. Like the discovery that he was a Trekkie, these revelations were profoundly humanizing.

We shifted through comfortable pauses; mini lectures; intense dialogue and blackity black non-verbals. It seemed like every topic was a morsel to be savored; every shared opinion was a revelation; every divergence was an invitation to drill deeper; and every new bit of information needed to be tucked away for future research. We talked with deep political purpose and with light hearted abandon. We forecasted him traveling, teaching and getting back into the studio after he was released. We were liming (the art of doing nothing, hanging around, gathering, socializing, Trinidad); gyaffin’ (informal, meandering talk, Guyana); skinning our teeth (grinning, Jamaica, Guyana) and shooting the shit, in diasporic defiance of the ways that we were governed by the clock, patrolled by watchful eyes and disciplined by the institution. We turned those three chairs into a classroom, a church, a kitchen — a place where our words melded like gumbo.

Somehow it was easier to talk about everything but where we were. But soon enough we dared to ask him about life behind the walls. Mumia has been locked up since he was 27 years old. He is now 63. He spent 30 years on death row, 28.5 of them in solitary confinement in a room the size of your average parking space. He’d been in general population since 2012 and was facing life. In our conversations, he’d often used the term “when I was in the world,” to describe the time before his arrest. Yet, prison was also his world. What could he — would he — tell us about being inside?

Mumia spoke in broad strokes. He had successes as a jailhouse lawyer helping himself and advising others despite the 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act which made it harder for incarcerated people to file lawsuits against prisons in federal court. He had developed a respectful relationship with some of the other incarcerated men, some of whom nodded, shook his hand and introduced him to their family in the waiting room. From commissary to contraband, from inflated prices to exploited labor, from the employees to the contractors, his words illuminated the bowels of the prison industrial complex — the economies within. He talked about the quotidian survival strategies he had snatched out of the jowls of death row and about the last 6 years in general population. His tone was dispassionate and he was open about the realities of outmoded technology, lousy food, hyper-surveillance, endlessly shifting rules and regulations and constant roadblocks. Gallows humor and books had armored him.

Yet, heartbreaking details spilled out from the crevices of his matter-of-fact telling. That moment when he felt wind unfettered by walls for the first time and thought it was going to “turn him around.” The flowers that caught his eye, whose delicate, fragrant petals he had not wanted to disturb with a touch. The baths, a hard-won medical prescription for the chronic skin condition left behind in the wake of Hep-C, doled out only on Mondays. Our visits had been punctuated by the muted soundtrack of his insistent scratching. The exposed skin on his neck, shin and forearm was darkened and discolored by shades of red and pink. Damn, I thought. Water and wind on hungry skin, flowers that lingered in the full bloom of eyes used to shades of gray — it was a sensorial reminder of all that prison takes. Of course, what it takes most of all, is time.

The inhumanity of 36 years — over 13,100 days in prison, over 10,400 of which were spent in solitary confinement — lay between us like a rancid odor no one wanted to claim or acknowledge. My mind thought: but how do you survive this? My lips said nothing. Instead, I thought of my own life. I was 11 the year Mumia was incarcerated. I was all elbows and knees, lived for “Fame” on TV and rode my bike on endless loops around my Brooklyn neighborhood. Thirty-six years was the yawning gulf between the much-coveted beeper of my tween years and the apps on my phone calibrating my middle aged life. While he was incarcerated Mumia’s children had grown up and he’d lost both parents, a sibling, and a child. In single file, in that grim room, I silently mourned for Mumia’s yesterdays and all that could have been.

It was love — of friends and family, of the worldwide movement determined to secure his release — that provided his oxygen. He told us that more than once, looking deep into our eyes almost willing us to understand that it was not a platitude. Supporting court appeals, organizing street actions, and grassroots political education are a crucial part of what the political prisoner movement describes as “the work.” But the movement’s lifeblood are the many unseen acts of humanity that nurture the spirit of political prisoners: writing letters and sending birthday cards, amplifying their writings, raising money for their commissary, visiting them, sending books, accepting phone calls, and emotionally supporting their families. In that moment, Mumia radiated gratitude.

We ended the visit by asking him for our marching orders. He advised us to pivot from the spectacle of the daily headlines to the news unfolding under the radar, especially the stories of successful acts of resistance and victories. He reminded us to keep an eye on judicial appointments at the federal and state level, and keep the pressure up through direction action in the streets. In January 2018, Mumia’s contention of judicial bias in his case was given new life as newly sworn in District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office has begun to review the role Ronald Castile, former DA and PA Supreme Court Justice, played in Mumia’s case. One scenario could be that Mumia’s legal appeals could be reinstated, potentially resulting in a new trial. The outcome of this investigation remains uncertain but it represents a major breakthrough. Activists and supporters are packing the courtrooms in February and March even as they continue to challenge the legitimacy of the larger criminal justice system.

At the end of the visit Mumia walked us back to the processing desk and made a joke about us getting our freedom papers, the documentation that was our ticket to the outside. Under the guard’s watchful eyes, we leaned into the second allowable embrace. We had spent a total of 8.5 hours together on our two visits and likely, we would not meet again inside those walls. We locked eyes and instinctively, I started nodding over the tightness in my throat. “Good-bye” was not an option. Instead, our movement salutations tumbled over each other. “Stay strong.” “Ona move.” “Long live John Africa.” “All power to the people.” To this, we added our “I love yous.”

Robyn C. Spencer is a historian and author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.