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Partisan Defense Committee
The Partisan Defense Committee describes itself as "a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people." The PDC works in accordance with the political orientation of the Spartacist League. The committee organizes demonstrations and performs legal work in defense of "class struggle" prisoners. Its longest standing campaign has been in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal. It has also organized counterdemonstrations in response to rallies planned by the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists. Campaigns The PDC describes the following 15 people as "class-war prisoners" and provides small stipends to them: * Mumia Abu-Jamal * Leonard Peltier * 7 members of MOVE ** Chuck Africa ** Michael Africa ** Debbie Africa ** Janet Africa ** Janine Africa ** Delbert Africa ** Eddie Africa * Albert Woodfox of the Angola Three * The remaining 2 of the Ohio 7 ** Jaan Laaman ** Tom Manning (prisoner) * Ric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), earlier known as the International Spartacist tendency is a Trotskyist international. Its largest constituent party is the Spartacist League (US). There are smaller sections of the ICL (FI) in Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Greece and the United Kingdom. The group originated within the Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States and, upon its expulsion from the SWP, it named itself Spartacist in 1964 in homage to the original Spartacist League in World War I Germany, co-led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Publications The central theoretical journal of the ICL(FI) is ''Spartacist'' which is published in four languages approximately once a year. Apart from the above the ICL(FI)'s American section, the Spartacist League, operates the Prometheus Research Library in New York City. The library has published a number of bulletins and boo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Class Struggle
Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society because of socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor. The forms of class conflict include direct violence such as wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations or revolution; indirect violence such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness and unsafe working conditions; and economic coercion such as the threat of unemployment or the withdrawal of investment capital (capital flight); or ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political forms of class warfare include legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery of legislators. The social-class conflict can be direct, as in a dispute between labour and management such as an employer's industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect such as a workers' sl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook; April 24, 1954) is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. While on death row, he has written and commented on the criminal justice system in the United States. After numerous appeals, his death penalty sentence was overturned by a federal court. In 2011, the prosecution agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the general prison population early the following year. Beginning at the age of 14 in 1968, Abu-Jamal became involved with the Black Panther Party and was a member until October 1970, leaving the party at age 16. After leaving, he completed his high school education, and later became a radio reporter. He eventually served as president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists (1978–1980). He supported the Philadelphia organization MOVE and covered the 1978 confronta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Catholics, as well as immigrants, leftists, homosexuals, Muslims,and abortion providers The Klan has existed in three distinct eras. Each has advocated extremist reactionary positions such as white nationalism, anti-immigration and—especially in later iterations—Nordicism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, Prohibition, right-wing populism, anti-communism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and anti-progressivism. The first Klan used terrorism—both physical assault and murder—against politically active Black people and their allies in the Southern United States in the late 1860s. The third Klan used murders and bombings from the late 1940s to the early 1960s to achieve its aims. All three movements have called for the "purification" of Ame ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier (born September 12, 1944) is a Native American activist and militant member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who, following a controversial trial, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents in a June 26, 1975, shooting on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment and has been imprisoned since 1977 (currently ). In his 1999 memoir ''Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance'', Peltier admitted to participating in the shootout but said he did not kill the FBI agents. Human rights watchdogs, such as Amnesty International, and political figures including Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the 14th Dalai Lama, have campaigned for clemency for Peltier. At the time of the shootout, Peltier was an active member of the AIM, an Indigenous rights advocacy group that worked to combat the racism and police brutality experience ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MOVE (Philadelphia Organization)
MOVE, originally the Christian Movement for Life, is a communal organization that advocates for nature laws and natural living, founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by John Africa (born Vincent Leaphart). The name, styled in all capital letters, is not an acronym. MOVE lived in a communal setting in West Philadelphia, abiding by philosophies of anarcho-primitivism. The group combined revolutionary ideology, similar to that of the Black Panthers, with work for animal rights. MOVE is particularly known for two major conflicts with the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). In 1978, a standoff resulted in the death of one police officer and injuries to 16 officers and firefighters, as well as members of the MOVE organization. Nine members were convicted of killing the officer and each received prison sentences of 30 to 100 years. In 1985, another firefight ended when a police helicopter dropped two bombs onto the roof of the MOVE compound, a townhouse l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angola Three
The Angola Three are three African-American former prison inmates (Robert Hillary King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace) who were held for decades in solitary confinement while imprisoned at Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola Prison). The latter two were indicted in April 1972 for the killing of a prison corrections officer; they were convicted in January 1974.John Schwartz, "Herman Wallace, Freed After 41 Years in Solitary, Dies at 71" ''The New York Times'', October 4, 2013; accessed March 12, 2019 Wallace and Woodfox served more than 40 years each in solitary, the "longest period of solitary confinement in American prison history". [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ohio 7
The United Freedom Front (UFF) was a small American Marxist organization active in the 1970s and 1980s. It was originally called the Sam Melville/ Jonathan Jackson Unit, and its members became known as the Ohio 7 when they were brought to trial. Between 1975 and 1984 the UFF carried out at least 20 bombings and nine bank robberies in the northeastern United States, targeting corporate buildings, courthouses, and military facilities. Brent L. Smith describes them as "undoubtedly the most successful of the leftist terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s." The group's members were eventually apprehended and convicted of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, and other charges. Activities The group was founded in 1975 as the Sam Melville/Jonathan Jackson Unit, setting off a bomb at the Massachusetts State House under that name, but changed its name to the United Freedom Front the same year.Smith 110 The initial members were Raymond Luc Levasseur (the UFF's leader), Tom Manning, and their r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jaan Laaman
Jaan Karl Laaman (born March 21, 1948) is an Estonia-born American criminal, convicted and imprisoned on various charges including a 1982 attempted murder of a police officer, and activist. He was a member of the United Freedom Front. Laaman grew up in Roxbury, Massachusetts and Buffalo, New York. His family emigrated to the United States from Estonia when he was a child. He had a son who died in 2011. Laaman served a major portion of a 53-year prison sentence for his role in the bombings of United States government buildings while a member of the United Freedom Front, an American leftist group in the 1980s. In the 1960s, Laaman worked in Students for a Democratic Society and community organizations and advocated against the Vietnam War and racism. As a student at the University of New Hampshire, he was a leader in the SDS. He was also a leader in the student strike in May 1970 in reaction to the bombing of Cambodia and the deaths of six protesting students at Kent State Univers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Manning (prisoner)
Thomas William Manning (June 28, 1946 – July 29, 2019) was an American Marxist militant convicted of killing New Jersey State Police trooper Philip J. Lamonaco during a traffic stop in 1981. Before and after the murder he was involved with a Marxist organization, the United Freedom Front (UFF), which bombed a series of US military and commercial institutes and committed bank robberies in the 1970s and early 1980s. Early life The son of a Boston postal clerk, he shined shoes and raised pigeons, in his early youth, before finding work as a stock boy. He joined the US Military in 1963, and the following year was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba before being transferred off to spend the following year in the Vietnam War. Some time shortly after 1965, he was sentenced by a Massachusetts state court to five years in prison for armed robbery and assault, serving the last ten months in MCI-Cedar Junction. He later claimed that during these years that he became heavily politicized ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rice–Poindexter Case
David Rice (1947 – March 11, 2016) (also known as Mondo we Langa) and Edward Poindexter were charged and convicted of the murder of Omaha Police Officer Larry Minard. Minard died when a suitcase bomb containing dynamite exploded in a North Omaha home on August 17, 1970. Officer John Tess was also injured in the explosion. Rice died on March 11, 2016. He was 68 years old and had been in poor health. Poindexter and Rice had been members of the Black Panther Party. Their case was, and continues to be, controversial. The Omaha Police recommended withholding exculpatory evidence, a tape of a 911 call, from being played at the trial. The two men had been targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), which operated against and infiltrated anti-war and civil rights groups, including the Omaha Black Panthers. Amnesty International has been following the case and recommended a retrial or release for Rice and Poindexter. The state's parole board have recommended the m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
San Quentin Six
The San Quentin Six were six inmates at San Quentin State Prison in the U.S. state of California who were charged with actions related to an August 21, 1971 escape attempt that resulted in six deaths and at least two persons seriously wounded. They were Fleeta Drumgo, David Johnson, Hugo Pinell, Johnny Larry Spain, Willie Tate, and Luis Talamantez. The dead included George Jackson, a co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family; two other inmates, and three guards. The trial of the six men cost more than $2 million and lasted 16 months: the longest in the state's history at the time. It was dubbed "The Longest Trial" by ''Time'' magazine. Of the six defendants, one was convicted of murder, two were convicted of assault on correctional officers, and three were acquitted of all charges. During the escape, which sparked a prison riot on the cellblock, Jackson had possession of a .32 caliber pistol allegedly smuggled into the prison by his attorney Stephen Bingham. Immediately after th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
