Mansa Musa, host of Rattling the Bars, spent 48 years in prison before his release in 2019. At the invitation of the UMD College Park Young Democratic Socialists of America, Mansa delivered a lecture on his life behind bars and the political struggles of prisoners.
Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
Mansa Musa: I hope, at the end of this conversation that we have, that y’all will be more enlightened about what direction y’all want to go in in terms of changing social conditions as they exist now. My government name is Charles Hopkins- I go by the name Mansa Musa. Before getting out on December 5, 2019, I did 48 years in prison. I was a heroin addict and a petty criminal, and that’s what got me in prison.
I went in ’72, and the ‘70s were a tumultuous time in this country. You had Kent State, you had Attica, you had Puerto Rican Nationalists taking over the hospital in the Bronx, and you had the rise of the Black Panther Party, which became one of the most formidable fighting formations in this country. A lot was going on, but the number one thing that cost every sector in society was the war in Vietnam.
Everywhere you looked, you had protests about the war in Vietnam. Every day, somewhere in this country, 75,000, 10,000, 15,000 people were coming to protest the war in Vietnam. The establishment’s response was to suppress the movement; Anybody who was anti-war had their attitude suppressed. What got people in an uproar was when the media started showing US citizens’ bodies. The coffins were being brought back in numbers. Society started looking and said this is not a good thing because a lot of people are dying.
The way they had the draft was, it was like the lottery. That’s what it was. They had balls that rolled, and your number came up, A1, A1. In my neighborhood – In the projects in Southeast – in ’68, every man who graduated from high school was going to Vietnam. This shaped the attitude of the country, but more importantly, a lot of people who were coming back from the war in Vietnam were radicalized. Since they experienced a lot of segregation, a lot of classes in the military came back and joined the Black Panther Party.
The Black Panther Party was, according to Hoover, the number one threat in the country. The response to them being the number one threat in the country was to eradicate them: Assassination. They assassinated Fred Hampton. Little Bobby Hutton, they assassinated him. And they locked up a lot of Panthers. That’s how I became a Panther: They locked up a Panther named Marshal “Eddie” Conway. They set him up and locked him up. I have some information over there, y’all can pick it up when y’all leave.
When you’ve got the encouragement of Panthers coming into the prison system, prisoners are becoming politicized; Petty criminals like myself are becoming politicized. Because now we’re looking at the conditions that we’re living under, and we’re looking at them from a political perspective. Like, why is the medical care bad, why is the food garbage, and why are we in overcrowded cells? Why is this cell designed for a dog? You’ve got two people in it. These things started resonating with people.
The Panthers started educating people and raising their consciousness to this is why these things are going on, and this is what your response should be. That got me into a space where I started reading more. That was one of the things that we did– We did a lot of reading. You had to read one hour a day and exercise. More importantly, you organized the population around changing their attitude about the conditions. Up until that point, everything in prison was predatory.
Then the Attica Rebellion created a chain reaction throughout the country. The celebrity prisoner who got politicized in prison is George Jackson. George Jackson was a prisoner in San Quentin. He spent most of his time in what they now call “solitary confinement,” but they called it the “adjustment center” back then in San Quentin. He and two other political prisoners were locked up and charged with killing a correctional officer. After the Soledad Police had killed some prisoners in the courtyard who were wreaking havoc. It was a dispute between white prisoners and Black prisoners; The only prisoners that were killed were Black prisoners, so that created a chain reaction in the prison system.
Fast forward, and this became my introduction to the political apparatus in prison. My whole thinking when I was in prison was, I didn’t want to die in prison. I had a life, and I didn’t want to die in prison. So I would probably go down in the Guinness World Records for most failed attempted escapes ever. If I were to sit here and go back over some of the things I did, it would be comical. But in my mind, I did not want to die. I could have died, I could walk, literally come out on the other side of the fence and fall out and be dead, as long as I didn’t die in prison. It was a thing about being incarcerated.
In 2001, a case came out in the Maryland system called Unger v. State, which said anyone locked up between 1970 and 1980 was entitled to a new trial. So I was entitled to a new trial because of the way they were giving the jury instructions. At that time, everybody was getting ready to come out. Eddie Conway was on his way out, everybody’s coming out. We did a lot of organizing in prison. We organized political education classes, we had forums where we had a thing where they say, say your own words. We brought political leaders and radicals in to have a political discussion in a forum much like this. It changed the whole prison population’s way of thinking about themselves and themselves with society.
All of us were coming out now. I got out on December 5, 2019. They gave me $50 and let me out in Baltimore City. I’m from Washington, D.C. They let me out in Baltimore City, and I’m standing there with $50: I don’t know nothing. I don’t know how to use a cellphone, I don’t know how to get on the bus, I don’t know how to get from one corner to another. I know the area because the area where the prison was is where I lived all my life. So I know the street name. I knew this was Greenmount, I knew this was Madison, I knew these streets, but that’s like me going somewhere I read something about something in Paris. I know the name of the street, but put me there and I wouldn’t know what to do.
This was the situation I found myself in: My family knew I was coming out, but I didn’t know whether they knew what particular time. I got $50, I see somebody coming with a cellphone, and I’m like, can I use this? He said, no, I’m going to get on the bus. An elderly woman was coming off. I said Miss, I was locked up for 48 years. I got $50. You can get $25 of them. I need you to call this number and tell my people. Then I heard somebody calling from the side, it was my family. I’m out December 5, 2019. There was a major event that came during that period: COVID. Now I’m out in society, but really I’m back in prison because the whole country was locked down. For most people, it was a discomfort. For me, I was like, oh, this is all right. I can walk. I’m walking in, I’m coming back in. There’s not a whole lot going on, and I’m working out, and people are dealing with each other from afar. You see the same people, you have a group. We started having a social-distance relationship, like, hey, how are y’all doing? How are you doing, and keep it moving, right?
After I got out and COVID peaked, I was doing some organizing in the Gilmor projects in Baltimore. Backstory on that, we took a house in Gilmor projects – Which is exactly what it is, Gilmor and their projects, really notorious – We found out it was City property. We took it, renovated it, made it community property, and we started doing things for the kids. Because of Eddie Conway’s attitude, he’s like, kids don’t have a light in their face. It’s really dark.
So we started doing Easter egg hunts, showing movies on the wall, doing activities, and gardening to get the kids to be kids. We took it, and when we took it, we said we’re taking this house. We put on the city and we had a press conference. We took this house, we’re doing this for the community. If y’all got a problem with that, y’all can come down here and tell the community that they can’t have this house. So the city pretty much said, whatever, we ain’t going down there and messing with them people. So we did, we gave out coats. So this is our organizing.
Our organizing method was you meet people’s needs. So it’s not only about giving out food and giving clothing, it’s about having a political education environment where you can teach people how to… You got the analogy of Jesus teaching people how to fish. Okay, I already know how to fish, now tell me how to survive. Tell me how to store, tell me how to build out. These are the things that we were doing, and we would network with legal organizations. People had issues with their rent, and we knew it was a slum lord environment, so we would educate people about how to get their rights recognized.
So Eddie, and I’m going to talk about Eddie often because that was my mentor. He got lung cancer and passed away on February 13, a couple of years ago. He passed away the day before my birthday. My birthday is February 14. His wife called me and said, Eddie is getting ready to transition. We are in Vegas, can you come out here? I’m like, I can’t come out there. The only thing I’m saying is, man, whatever you do, don’t die on my birthday because I’m not going to be able to take it. I ain’t going to have a birthday anymore. It’s already sad for me to have to deal with it the day before, but I didn’t want that memory of him.
Long story short, this individual was responsible for changing the mindset of a lot of prisoners and getting us to think outside the box more or less. Our political education was one of the things that the Black Panther Party emphasized. So you see, we call it Panther porn: This is Panther porn for us. Panther porn for us is when you see the guns and the Berettas and the mugging. That’s Panther porn.
What we identified with is the free breakfast program, where we fed our kids. We tried to promote the hospital, we tried to promote where we were taking and giving sickle cell anemia tests to people, because we knew they weren’t doing that. We used to give them free breakfast. We were getting our food, we had clothes, and we were transporting families to prisons in California. All out of the way prisons. We were holding political education classes in the community and networking with people around their needs, and making sure they understood exactly what was going on with them.
One of the questions I saw was on the difference between abolition as it relates to prison and the police. We know we had this call for divestment, and I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t want to live in a society where there isn’t any law and order. That’s not me. I don’t want to live in a society where we don’t feel safe. So it’s not an issue of whether or not police should be in the community, it’s an issue of what their relationship is. They have ‘serve and protect’ on their car. Okay, if you’re responsible for serving and protecting me, then my interest should be first and foremost, and I shouldn’t be targeted.
It shouldn’t be like back in the ’60s – Everybody who had long white hair was a hippie, and you were treated a certain way because, in their mind, you were anti-social or anti-establishment. That’s what made you a hippie. Your identity was based on, I don’t have a lot of interest in the establishment. But they looked at it as a threat. People had afros – They looked at it as a threat. So when we look at it, it’s not about abolishing the police, it’s about the police respecting the community and the community having more control over it. So if you represent me in my community, then you need to be in my community, understand what’s going on in my community, and serve my community according to serve and protect.
Abolition, on the other hand, is about completely abolishing the prison system. What would that look like? We were having this conversation, what does that look like? You’re going to open the doors up and let everybody out? I was in prison for 48 years. There are some people that I’ve been around in prison, that if I see them on the street the day after tomorrow, I might go call the police on them because I know their thinking. At the same token, as a civil society, we have an obligation to help people, and that’s what we should be doing.
People have been traumatized, and trauma is becoming vogue now. Everybody is like, the trauma experience. So trauma is becoming vogue, but people have been traumatized and have not been treated for their trauma. So they dial it down, and that becomes the norm. We need to be in a society where we’re healing people, and that’s what I would say when it comes to the abolition. Yeah, we should abolish prisons as they exist now: They’re cruel and they’re inhumane. We’ve got the guards in Rikers Island talking about protesting and walkouts, wildcat strikes, because they’re saying that the elimination of solitary confinement is a threat to them. How is it a threat to you that you put me in a cell for 3 years on end, bringing my mail to me, and say that if you eliminate this right here, me as a worker, it’s going to be threatened by that non-existence? How’s that? That doesn’t even make sense.
But this is the attitude that you have when it comes to the prison-industrial complex. The prison-industrial complex is very profitable. The prison-industrial complex became like an industry in and of itself. Every aspect of it has been privatized: The telephone’s been privatized, the medical’s been privatized, the clothing has been privatized. So you’ve got a private entity saying, I’ll make all the clothes for the prisons, you’ve got another private entity saying, I want the telephone contract for all the prisons, and you’ve got another company saying, I want to be responsible for making the beds– The metal and all that.
Which leads me to Maryland Correctional Enterprises. Maryland Correctional Enterprises is one of the entities that does this. There’s a private corporation that has preferential bidding rights on anything that’s being done in Maryland. Any of the tags that are on your car, that’s Maryland Enterprises. I pressed tags. So I know that to be a fact. A lot of the desks in your classroom come from Maryland Correctional Enterprises. They gave us 90 cents a day, and you get a bonus based on how much you produce. So I’m trying to get like $90 a month, I’m just starting. Somebody who’s been there for a while might be getting $2 a day. We were pressing tags until our elbows were on fire because you’re trying to make as much money as you possibly can. You’re trying to produce as many tags as you possibly can to make money.
They’re getting millions of dollars from the labor. I recently did an interview with a state senator about that because he had a bill, and I was asking him about it. Then I asked him, prisoners are going to want to work, the incentive for prisoners to work in the Maryland prison system is that you get five days off your sentence when you come through the door. Then, if you get a job, some jobs give you 10 days off, so that’s 10 days less than you do in a month. Everybody is trying to get those jobs where you get fewer days. It’s not a matter of I don’t want to work, and it’s not a matter of I like the work that I’m doing. The incentive for me to work is the reduction of my time in prison.
I asked the state senator, everybody is going to want to work, wouldn’t it be better if you try to get a bill passed that says everybody gets minimum wage? They’d be able to pay their social security, they’d be able to pay taxes, and they’d be able to earn some money. Wouldn’t that be the better approach? Because prisoners are going to work. I realized when I was having this conversation with them that’s exactly what they’re doing in Kansas prisons. They’ve got guys in Kansas prisons who have saved up to $75,000. They’re not going anywhere, but they’ve been able to have an impact on their family and have a sense of responsibility.
So another question that I was thinking about is what would be y’all’s response? What would I say to y’all, in terms of what I think that y’all should be looking at? I’m not here to lecture you, but when we look at colleges – As they relate to the struggle – The majority of people who resisted in the ’70s and ’60s came out of college. You had Angela Davis, you had Huey Newton, Bobby Seales, they came out of college at Kent State. They got rid of Angela Davis because she was teaching on campus, because of her politics.
College has always been a place where you have a propensity to be organized or start questioning things and start developing ideas about what’s going on in society today, in the country, and around the world. I don’t know how many of y’all have read George Orwell’s 1984, but we’re in a George Orwellian-type of society. Free speech is only if you talk about a subject matter that is not contrary to capitalism; You’ve got the right to free speech, but you don’t have the right to be heard. So then, who’s got control of the media?
Right now, we’re getting our voice out or taking a position, and it’s like, you’re being anti, therefore I’m going to take your grant or I’m going to take your scholarship. I only have one more semester to graduate. So what? I’m going to blackball you, or better still, I’m going to snowball you and put you in an environment where you aren’t going to be able to get a job at McDonald’s. Why? Because I’m trying to control your thinking and make sure that you don’t organize in a manner that’s going to be against anything that we’re doing.
We’re getting a lot of information coming out, and a lot of people are hysterical. Oh my god, I don’t know what I’m going to do. No, this is what you do: you organize. We don’t have the luxury of saying that what somebody else is doing is going to dictate what I’m doing. We should be in the mindset that, regardless of what you’re doing, you have a right. This is what they say to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I have the right if I want to be transgender. I have a right, I have a right to that. Your morality is not going to determine what I do with myself.
We were getting ready to do a thing on transgender prisoners. They had their biology changed, according to the law. You went to court, got an operation, they took you out of a female prison and put you in a male prison because they say that, biology aside, you were born a male, not what you are now. They rounded them up and took them to a male prison. Who does this? Did you come here from another country for a better life? Oh, by the way, everybody in Congress, their ancestors came here for a better life, so I know they should have no issue with that because they wouldn’t be where they are right now if the Statue of Liberty said “Hell no.”
But everybody – I ain’t talking about the people that they brought here, the people that were here before them, the indigenous people — Who said, everybody get the hell out. Because this is our… No. You create this false narrative that people of color, from another country, are creating all the crime in this country, therefore, we’re going to round you all up. Sounds like something they did with the Japanese when they put them in internment camps, right? When they say these are people who were fighting for this country, these are US citizens who were fighting in this country. They rounded them up and put them in internment camps because they’re Japanese and we’re fighting Japan. So your loyalty can’t be with us, your loyalty has to be with them, or we don’t care one way or the other. It sounds like that.
The point I’m making is we don’t have the luxury to sit back and allow the hysteria that’s going on in this country around some fools to make us say, I’m not going to do nothing, or get into a position where I don’t know what to do, I’m giving up. No. Resistance is possible; It starts with political education. It starts with understanding the history. Lenin said that imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. We’ve seen imperialism taking shape; This is based on the capitalist drive for greed. It’s about greed, a lot of this.
When you talk about a country and say we’re going to take Gaza and turn it into Disneyland, what are you going to do with the people? We already bombed them into oblivion, so they’d be glad to work. They’d be glad to put on Donald Duck suits and Mickey Mouse hats and get some money. That’s your reality. Their reality is, I want to live a human life. That’s my reality. My reality, I want to be human. I don’t have a problem with anybody. I want to be human and be treated like a human.
But when you say something like you’re anti, you ain’t got the right to say nothing like that. And if you say it on campus and you try to get them to take a position on campus, their masters, who they invest with, corporate America, is going to tell them to say no. And Congress is going to say any money we gave you, we’re taking it back. Money is more important than people’s lives. That’s our reality.
As we move forward, my message to y’all is don’t settle for mediocrity, don’t settle for anything less. Whatever you’re thinking should be done, do it. More importantly, in doing it, make sure that it’s having an impact. We took that place, we knew that neighborhood. The drug dealers in the neighborhood, this is what they used to say to us when we’d come through, they’d say it ain’t a good time to be down here today. And they’d give us a warning like y’all can’t come down here today.
We were good with that because they knew that it was their children that we were creating a safe environment for. They couldn’t get out of the grips of their insanity, and we weren’t trying to get them out of it. Our focus was on the community and people. We felt that if we educated the people enough, if we educated the mothers, the girlfriends, and the wives to say y’all deserve to be safe. The people that aren’t making y’all safe are your boyfriend, your father, and them. Y’all need to talk to them and tell them that they are making our lives unsafe; All we’re doing is educating you that you have a right. What we’re doing is coming down there and telling you we’re taking your children out of the neighborhood on trips that they’ve never been on before. We’re making them feel like they have some value. We’re making them feel like, yeah, you can get a hug today, and there won’t be anything unusual about it. This is what we were doing, and it had an impact.
What they wound up doing with that neighborhood – As they did with all of Baltimore – They started tearing down places, boarding up places. You might be on the block, or you might be in the projects, and you might live in this house; the next four houses are boarded up, another house, and the next two houses are boarded up. How can you have a sense of community with all that blight? The trash bins for the area become public trash, and people would ride by, see the trash bin, and throw trash in the area. How can you live in that blight?
When somebody would come and say I’m going to give you a voucher to move somewhere that you aren’t going to be able to afford in a year, you’re going to take it on the strength that you ain’t factored in: I ain’t going to be able to afford it. You say, I want to get out of here. When they get you out of there, next thing you know, they come in and demolish it. They’ve got condominiums and townhouses, and it’s affordable housing for somebody that’s making $90,000-$100,000 a year, but it definitely ain’t affordable housing for somebody that’s making less than minimum wage. So that’s my point. I’m opening the floor for any comments or questions.
Student: I was going to ask what everyday citizens, meaning not politicians, can do to help prisoners?
Mansa Musa: Okay, that’s a good question. We had a lot of people from the community come into the institution. What you can do is educate yourself on some of the issues that are affecting them. Like right now, in Maryland, they have what they call the Second Chance Act, and they’re trying to get this bill passed to say that after you do 20 years, you can petition the court for a reduction in sentence. It’s not guaranteed you’re going to get it, but it opens the door for a person to have hope. When you get first locked up, they give you a designated amount of time to file a petition for modification. After that, it’s over with. The only thing available to you then is parole. If you don’t make parole, then you’re in there forever and ever and ever.
This is a bill that’s being sponsored by people whose family members are locked up and have been locked up for a long time. It’s a good bill because it creates hope. When you have hope in an environment, it changes the way people think. Case in point, then Governor Glenn Denning came in front of the Jessup Correction Institution because a guy was out on work release, had killed his girlfriend, and he had a life sentence. So he sent all the lifers back; Took them all out of camp, put them back in prison, and then stood out in front of the institution to say from now on, life means life. Let me tell you that any of you who have a life sentence, you’re going to die in prison.
When he left that prison, the violence went up like that: Stabbings, murders, and everything, because there was no hope. Because now people are saying, I’m going to be here for the rest of my life, so I’ve got to dominate this environment. When the Unger case came out, bills were passed about juvenile life. They got bills passed saying if you have a drug problem, you can get drug treatment, and people started going. To your question, monitor some of these things and look at some of the websites of the institutions, and see what programs they offer. They might need some volunteers to come in and help teach classes. They might need volunteers to come in to help with some of the activities they’re doing that support prisoners. Thank you.
Student 2: First of all, thank you for coming out, and I really appreciate it. It’s great to hear you speak. I have a question. You briefly alluded to it already, but how would you compare the political conditions during Black Power in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s and the repression that everyone faced – Especially from COINTELPRO, FBI, and the police – To today and what students and people on the street are facing right now?
Mansa Musa: Back then, the difference was technology, the internet, where we get our information from, and AI; That is becoming the thing now. Huey Newton made this analysis, which he called intercommunalism. He talked about how at some point in time, technology will become so advanced that we ain’t going to have any more borders– Which we don’t when it comes to information, right?
So the difference is that the fascists are more advanced, and pluralism is more insidious. Back then, you had a lot of repression around class, so Black people were being subjected. You had the war in Vietnam, we had so much going on that it was easy for people to come and find a commonality. Hey, we live in this squalor here in Puerto Rico and New York, we live in this squalor down here in Brooklyn, and so and so. What’s our common thread? Our common thread is that we’re being treated inhumanely. So it was easy to come together and organize around social conditions.
Now, because of so much misinformation and so much control, it’s hard to get a read on what is real and what’s not real. You had the president give everybody an ultimatum to give a report card or something at the end of the week, and they didn’t do it. So when they put the mic in front of his mouth, he said the reason why they didn’t is because the people who didn’t submit it don’t work there anyway. So somebody is getting a check in their name; In other words, fraud was the reason why you got 100 workers and only 10 people work there. The other 90 don’t exist anyway, so where is that money going? That money is going into somebody else’s pocket. That was the narrative he painted. When he painted the narrative, the media was so dim with it that it’s almost like you’re asking them a question, and it’s like, no, you’re dumb, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb, no you’re dumb. I got a Pulitzer and I’m going back and forth a whole stop. I’m not even going to ask you any more questions. That’s what we’ve been relegated to; that’s the difference.
In terms of our response… I’m going to give you an example. When those little kids got killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, the children said they were going to do something about it. They asked their parents, they went on social media, and they started finding that everybody had the same attitude. Next thing you know, they had 40,000 kids who said they going to Washington. Now I’m telling my mother I’m going to Washington, whether you’re going with me or not. The parents say, we’re going to chaperone you. That’s how quickly they organize; that’s the difference.
Our ability to organize is quicker now; We can organize quicker if we come to a consensus on what we’re trying to get done. Our response can be a response of hysteria, but we’ve got to be focused. We’ve got to sit back and say, they’re going to do what they’re doing, they’re going to do what they’re doing. If I’m around workers, I’m getting with every federal worker. I’m organized. I’m not going to sit back and say, no, organize. You’ve got a right to organize. Get together, organize, bump Congress, bump, bump, filing lawsuits, bump them doing whatever they’re doing. They’re the problem. Get organized and say we’re going to organize, we’re going to mobilize. We’ve got midterms coming up, we’re getting in your ass. In the next presidential election, you don’t have to worry about the count, we aren’t going to give one vote. That’s going to be your vote. That’s what you do, organize.
We get caught up in these things, like with Trump– I don’t have a problem with him. He is what he is. My problem is making sure to tell, organize, and help people get some sense of security. We should be building food co-ops because $99 for a dozen eggs? No. We should be building a food co-op. We should be doing things where we are looking at each other to start a network. On campus, we should be looking at how we’re going to organize ourselves into a block where, once we decide on an issue then we’re forced to deal with that issue and try to make a difference.
Some fights are not worth taking because all it’s going to do is cause a loss. You’ve got to be strategic in your fights. We put a 10-point platform program together to identify the social conditions that exist in society for oppressed people. We chose to police the police because that was the number one issue affecting people. Our main things were feeding the children, medical, housing, and education. Those were the main things we did. We took over educational institutions. Our main thing wasn’t walking around with shotguns and guns. Those were things we did to protect the community. Our main focus was programs that directly related to serving people’s needs.
Student 2: Thank you. Thank you.
Mansa Musa: You’re welcome.
Student 3: Hi. I do have a question. First of all, I want to say great job, amazing conversation, and the topics are so important. My question to you is, how do college students on campus build morale and boost momentum? It can be a little iffy and hard to do, especially if you have that backside fear of, this could cost me my entire college education and the future I was wishing to build for myself.
Mansa Musa: Right. That’s something that should be taken into account. I invested in this, and I invested in it for a reason. I spent the money my parents put in, they aren’t going to be sitting back like, you did what? All of that money is going down the drain? Nah, that ain’t happening. The reality is you’re educating yourself, raising your consciousness, and understanding historical conditions like Kent State and what college students did back then.
The Vietnam War and groups like Young Democrats or Socialists of America came to create political education classes and bring in speakers much like me. We’d pass around literature, books, and videos, and look at those things and develop a space for y’all; Coming together to discuss how that’s going to become a direction and look at issues off the campus. Around this area right here, how many homeless people exist? How much property does the campus, the school, own?
I’m not going to say don’t mess with the Middle East because that’s wrong. No, I’m going to say, damn, y’all got all this land and property and within this radius you have homeless people sleeping on the ground. We’re asking that you take some of this property and turn it into homeless shelters in the name of Ms. Snyder or a name of somebody. Now we’re moving into the area and asking that you take this money and feed some people. In this area, we’re talking about that. We’re asking that you help people who don’t have medical insurance but need certain things that you can get done, like dental. We’re asking for things like free dental health. So you can say we’re providing free medical assistance at this level. We test people for sickle cell, we test people for HIV.
When Huey and them decided to do the Black Panther Party, they looked at Malcolm, and they picked up where Malcolm left off. That’s how they got into the space. They took the social conditions and said these are areas you need to focus on. You’ve got what they call objective and subjective conditions. Objective conditions are what you see every day. The subjective conditions are what we do, how we organize, how we develop ourselves, and what we’re doing. That’s going to determine how effective we’re going to be when we go out. So if we can’t come to a consensus on direction, then we ain’t going to be effective when we go out because somebody is going to be saying do this and somebody is going to be saying do that, but that ain’t going to be the problem. The problem is going to be I don’t like what you’re doing, so now you’re my enemy.
Student 3: Thank you.
Student 4: In response to student concerns about Maryland Correctional Enterprises… President Pines said students’ concerns are that inmates are underpaid; That’s out of our control, and we have to abide by state law. The other side of the story is that the inmates want the employment because it gives them skills. How do we combat this messaging?
Mansa Musa: The basic thing, and somebody asked earlier, what can you do? It’s legislation. The argument is, why can’t you give them minimum wage? Back in the ’70s – It’s a celebrity case, North Carolina versus somebody – We tried to unionize and they said no. The reason they said no is because now you’re talking about… The whole prison system in the US started to unionize; You’ve got 2.9 million people in prison, or better, so you’re saying we’re in the union and we’ve got the largest union in the country.
The issue is legislation and advocating for prisoners to get minimum wage, a livable wage, no matter how much time they’re serving. That allowed for MCE… We’re not opposed to them making money, we’re opposed to them profiting off us and getting the benefit of it. If I had left prison and had my quarter paid into social security, I would have had my quarter three times over. Now I’m forced to work; I’ve got to work for 3 years or more before I get my quarter. When I left the streets, I hadn’t worked maybe three years, all in all. If a person can get their quarter while they’re in, get minimum wage, or is allowed to save money, they can contribute to their family. A lot of guys who are locked up have children, and they could do something for their children. Their families travel long distances to see them- they could pay for that transportation. They could pay for the phone calls. They’d be able to take a burden off their family.
It doesn’t cost MCE anything. They get preferential treatment and contracts for all state institutions. Any institution that’s under the state of Maryland can do them. Whatever they make – Clothes, chemicals, signs you see up and down there – They do all that. Tag all the furniture. All the furniture you see in the state cabinet, they do it all. That’s the alternative: for the legislator to pass a bill that says prisoners can get minimum wage from any prison industry. If you’re hired in the prison industry, then you should be given minimum wage. And they got meat cutting, they do the meats, they do the furniture, they do the laundry for different hospitals, and they do the tags. Them tags, I’m telling you, I realized how people felt on the plantation doing them tags. Yeah. That was labor.
Student 4: This isn’t on the responses, but this is one of the questions that we’ve thought about: In your previous podcast episode, you interviewed the state senator, and he mentioned the 13th Amendment and the connection between prison labor and slavery. What do you think are some of the connections between the prison abolition movement and the historical movement for the abolition of slavery?
Mansa Musa: The 13th Amendment says slavery is illegal except for involuntary servitude, if you’re duly convicted of a crime. The difference between that and the abolition movement was the justification: The justification for it now is that you’ve been convicted of a crime. Back then, it was I kidnapped you, brought you here, and made you work. The disconnect was, you’re taking people and turning them into chattel slaves, versus the reason why I can work you from sunup to sundown– You committed a crime. But the reality is, you put that in there so that you could have free labor.
All of that is a Jim Crow law, Black Codes. It’s the same. It’s the same in and of itself. It’s not any different. In some states, they don’t pay you at all: South Carolina, they don’t pay you, but they work you. In Louisiana, they still have police, they’ve got guards on horses with shotguns, and they’re out there in the fields. In some places in Alabama, they work you in some of the most inhumane conditions. Like freezers. Women and men are put to work in a meat plant in the freezer and aren’t given the proper gear to be warm enough to do the work.
If you complain, they’ll use coercion and say, you don’t want to work? We’ll take the job from you and transfer you to a prison where you’re now going to have to fight your way out. You’re going to have to go in there, get a knife, and defend yourself. This is your choice. Go ahead and work in these inhumane conditions, or say no and go somewhere to be sent back to a maximum security prison where you have to fight your way out. It’s no different. The only difference is that it’s been legalized under the 13th Amendment.
In response to abolition… We’ve been trying to change the 13th Amendment. In California, they put a bill out to try to get it reversed, and the state went against it. The state was opposed to it because why would I want to stop having free labor? The firefighters in California do the same work as the firefighters right beside them. They do the same work, the same work: They’re fighting fire, their lives are in danger, they’re getting 90 cents a day, maybe $90 a month. They don’t have a 401k, they don’t have a retirement plan, and they’re being treated like everybody else: Go out there and fight the fire.
The abolition movement is trying to change the narrative and get the 13th Amendment taken out of state constitutions. A lot of states adopted it in their Constitution: A version of the 13th Amendment that says, except if you’ve been duly convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. If you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. That’s basically the bottom line of it. Thank you.
Student 4: I saw two questions talking about state repression and attempts to divide solidarity movements. How do you feel state repression has changed over the decades, and how can we respond to those situations?
Mansa Musa: The thing with state repression now is it’s a little bit more insidious. It’s not as overt as it was back in the ’60s when they crossed the Edmund Bridge and beat them, or put dogs on them. They took a move in Philadelphia, they burned the house down, burned the whole block down. There’s one house here we’ve got a problem with. You had no business living in that neighborhood. We burned the whole neighborhood down, dropped a bomb on it.
Or in California, they shot up the headquarters of the Black Panther Party. They ran down and killed Fred Hampton. Drugged him and went in and shot him. His wife was in the bed with him; They put like 90 holes in him and not 1 in her. You had the diagram where he slept at– You knew he was drugged because the agent provocateur spiked his milk. He was drugged, he was knocked out, and you came in there and killed him and said he fired out the window.
The difference is because of the media and the propaganda, you have a different slant on things, and the fear of corporate America, in terms of perpetuating this fear. So you change the narrative. You can’t say certain things. You can’t. If you say certain things about certain people or certain countries, you’re going to be blackballed, labeled.
The pressure is going to come in the form of, you don’t care? Okay, I’m going to attack your family. I’m going to find somewhere in the scenario where I can get you to back up. If that don’t work, then I’m going to round your ass up and send you to Guantanamo Bay. I can make up something. We’ve got the illegal combatants. You’ve got people that have been in Guantanamo Bay since the Gulf War and have not been sent anywhere, have no due process. You’ve been labeled an illegal combatant, state-sponsored terrorist.
They’ve got so many different things they can say to make it seem like an issue of you resisting and your right to protest and demonstration. It becomes that you’re a threat to society or you’re a threat to the government. This is how we’re saying it: We’re saying you were on the internet with somebody who’s been branded a terrorist. And that becomes enough to get them to say, lock them up.
When they had COINTELPRO, they were doing all these things and setting people up and killing them, but we knew what was going on and we made people aware of it. Now, with all this misinformation, it’s hard to get a read on what’s going on. We’ve got to organize ourselves and develop our information source, and all the misinformation, be prepared to identify it and put it into perspective. This is misinformation. And start educating people to be mindful of where they’re getting their information from. We’re addicted to social media. We’re addicted to, how many likes did I get today? They don’t like me. Oh my God, I’m having a fit. No, I don’t care if you don’t like me because if they lock you up and send you to another country, you ain’t want to be liked by anybody. I don’t know.
In terms of supporting countries and movements that are fighting for their liberation in the Congo, in the hemisphere, South America, we support a person’s right to self-determination. Our position right now should be to politically educate ourselves to understand social, economic, and political conditions and the relationships they have with people. People are going to resist. People are going to be hungry. They’re going to go to stores and take whatever the hell they want to take because they have nothing to eat. That’s the reality. It’s got nothing to do with I have a propensity to steal. No. I don’t have the ability to pay to feed my children versus somebody who has the ability. Food is high.
They’re talking about Medicaid and all that. If they take that and poor people rely on that, how are you going to get the medical treatment that you need? How are you going to get the medicine that you need? When you’re talking about organizing people, you’ve got to look at what they’re doing and how they’re trying to repress people, and organize around the counter to that. What’s the counter to this? What’s the counter to the medical? Do y’all have medical students here? What are their attitudes towards providing services for people?
What’s the problem with mental health? Do y’all have social workers in that field? Then your responsibility is to say we need you to go into the community to organize, to help us organize this. Show us how to organize this for the community to get them to be more proactive. What’s the purpose of your education? The purpose of my education is to get a degree and make some money. Okay, and what? The federal government? What are your chances of getting a job in the federal government?
They find people who are on probation, a person who’s got 20 years in one job, gets a better job, and they put them on probation. They say you were fired because you’re on probation. No, I took a better job. But the arbitrariness of this thinking is that I’m putting fear and I’m turning people into snitches because I’m making you, to keep what you got, you got to tell on somebody as opposed to us saying, take the institution of higher learning and look at the different departments and see how you can go into new departments and get them to become more proactive in doing some things in the community. And that’s the whole thing about higher learning.
Look at these other disciplines and start asking yourself, how can I get them to start doing things in the community to help raise people’s consciousness? How can we come together to do a plan, a program, around how we can invest in the community? How can we get a plan to start dealing with getting trauma recognized as a national mental health issue and get the government to do what they are supposed to do in terms of providing services for people that’s been traumatized. And stop, oh, oh yeah, you’re traumatized, but you shouldn’t have done what you did. But you’re saying that trauma, I’m in trauma, that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Yeah, but we don’t recognize that because you did it. All we recognize as a problem, we’re not recognizing as it relates to you. Double talk.
Student 5: I had a question about the role of electoralism, because one part of the Black Panther Party’s historical activism that’s somewhat forgotten is elections and campaigns, like Bobby Seale running for mayor of Oakland. A lot of the modern American left is starting to be more wary of the use of elections because we’ve seen people who maybe are supposed to represent our values get elected, and then do things against what their constituents want, things like that. But I was wondering if you had any thoughts about whether there’s still a role for elections to be agitational and grow the organization, or how we can make sure that we’re still being agitational against the establishment.
Mansa Musa: Tip O’Neill said, “All politics are local.” And Tip O’Neill was the speaker of the House, the Democratic Party, back in caveman days. But my position, and to reflect on what you said about Bobby Seale, when the party took that position of running Bobby Seale for mayor, we knew that he wasn’t going to get elected. But the objective was, this was the ability to mobilize people around, educating them around what this government, what the city government is supposed to do, what your government is supposed to do. So now we are on the campaign trail saying, “No, the budget is the people’s budget. The money is the people’s money. The budget has to be like this. If I’m elected, I’m going to do this,” and make him respond to it.
But then, on the same token, we started looking at local elections; our institution of elected officials. Ericka Huggins, who was a member of the Black Panther Party, ran for the position of director of the Juvenile Services. And when she got in that position, she changed the whole narrative of how they treated the kids. So that was one way we got in there and changed policy.
What we recognize, though, is that in terms of the electoral system, there’s no such thing as two parties. It’s one party, the capitalist party. That’s it, that’s all. They knew that this is reality, this is the reality we are confronted with. If you know Biden ain’t going to be able to cut the mustard for two years, hypothetically, you know he ain’t going to cut the mustard for two years. Why didn’t you, in two years at the end there say, listen, the Democratic Party’s responsible for putting all the money up, let’s start getting a candidate now. We’re going to have open primaries, whoever comes out there.
No, you put Kamala Harris, the top cop, in this position. They’re going to put a woman in there. Hillary Clinton was more qualified and more fascist than all of them put together. And they ain’t put her in there more qualified. She’s the secretary of state. The senator, her husband, Obama, Biden, Trump, Bush – One, two, and three – She was more qualified than all of them. They definitely weren’t putting her in there. And then they’re going to turn around and put Kamala Harris in there. That wasn’t happening.
It ain’t make no difference. Trump, they got somebody come on – I don’t know if it’s AI-generated or not – Where he’s saying that he stole the election. That yeah, Elon Musk knew how to work the computers, so that’s why I won Pennsylvania. All right. What did we do on that? Ain’t nobody in their right mind think they won’t let this woman get in there. This is a two-party system. Now you’re putting the pressure on everybody to donate, donate. Her position was, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? I’m going to do something, but my thing is, I’m telling y’all don’t, I’m here. This is your alternate. Vote for me, don’t vote for him.
Why? Look at him. Yeah. It wasn’t like what I’m offering y’all, what am I offering y’all? How am I changing? Food was still high, gas was high. People’s everyday needs. He did a whole bunch of crazy fire, too, but he played, he ran on that. Oh, he ran on that record. Y’all can’t put gas in y’all’s cars? Y’all can’t put food on your table? Oh man, y’all ain’t safe? Yeah, we weren’t safe when you were in there, we didn’t have food on our table when you were in there. But you’re saying, forget what I did. Look what they’re doing to y’all now. Yeah. Come on.
I look at the electoral politics like this here, certain municipalities where you can make an impact policy, where you can organize people, and put people in there who are going to be responsible for that. Yeah. But when you look at Congress and they beholding to corporations, they are beholding to them. You ain’t going to find a Ron Dellums. You ain’t going to find a Clayton Powell. You ain’t going to find these people like this here, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer. You ain’t going to find these people that’s like, I’m here, I’m here as a representative of the people.
Ron Dellums was the first one to hold congressional hearings about what was being done to the Black Panther Party. This was when he was in the office and Hoover was in power. And so everybody was scared of Hoover, but Ron Dellums wasn’t scared of him. So when you look at the electoral politics, we’ve got to take the position of Malcolm, too. Malcolm said that we’re going to register as independents, and we’re going to put our agenda together. You sign off on our agenda. If you don’t represent what you say you’re going to represent, then we’re going to be calling you. The same way we got you in, the same way we’re going to get you out. And make them sign on to that.
All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I got some stuff over here on Eddie Conway. I got my card over there. We can take a picture of the QR code: Rattling The Bars, The Real News. I appreciate this opportunity. My call to action for y’all is to go out, sit back, get together, start brainstorming, and look at some of these institutions. That’s where you go. Go to these bodies of work. What are you doing? What’s your position on trauma? Oh, this is my position on trauma. All right, will you be willing to do a trauma workshop in a Black community, in a neighborhood where they have been traumatized? Would you be willing to help set that up?
Then go out there and find a community where they’re traumatized. Get somebody to say, we want to come down here and educate y’all on trauma, but more importantly, we want to get the other part of our institution to get them to create a wellness program for y’all to do, and make the institution pay for it. Yeah, you ain’t got to tell them don’t invest in somebody. Say, invest in this.
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