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Web Exclusives
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Haiti Celebration at the College of Alameda |
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Written by Wanda Sabir
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Tuesday, 01 June 2010 |
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Haiti Awareness Day Celebration
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at the College of Alameda During Spring Break 2010 Professor Wanda Sabir went to Haiti. She visited schools, orphanages, and other organizations devastated by the January 12, 2010 earthquake. She saw crumbled and severely damaged national monuments in Port-au-Prince and just north on her way to Cap-Haïtien. She met wonderful people like Rea Dol whose school Sopudep was damaged and the neighborhood so severely damaged that she decided to rebuild in another city nearby where the stench of death isn’t as powerful and the PTSD triggers absent. Of her staff of 50 over half were homeless three months after the quake, yet, each day they showed up along with students the week the week she was there to help build a wall around the perimeter of the new school site. The former major of Petionville also came by. He is a structural engineer and is consulting with Mrs. Dol on the new structure. Later that week Professor Sabir got a tour of Cité Soleil with a young activist, Jean Ristil Jean Baptiste, who showed her bullet ridden buildings where many more recently orphaned children’s parents were killed by the government. In an event co-sponsored by ASCOA join us in a celebration of Haitian culture and resilience as we look at a nation which can use our assistance in its move towards liberation and self-determination. We will have a blessing in the Haitian tradition with drumming and song, a slide presentation, along with a history of Haiti in the context of the rebuilding efforts headed by this government (Clinton/GW Bush). There will also be information about grassroots organizations one can assist with money and in-kind donations. Professor Sabir would like to return early June for two weeks this time to visit Port-au-Prince again and Southern Haiti: Jacmel, Les Cayes, Port Salut.
I am so excited to be here with you celebrating the legacy of the Haitian Revolution, specifically General Jean Jacques Dessalines, who on May 18, 1803, at the first Pan African Congress created the Haitian flag. Flag Day is such a misnomer; it’s like calling King Tutkhanamun: King Tut—as Professor Siri says its like saying Hey Dude to the pharaoh, god’s representative on earth. May 18, 1803 was so much more!
Jacob H. Carruthers’s The Irritated Genie is such a fine work, a preview not just for the Haitian Revolution, but for black revolutionary struggle. The Irritated Genie is an examination of the pre- and post-colonials transfers of power which are not really transfers of power if we look at the state of the Pan African Diaspora and how freedom and liberty and justice are defined outside the elite circles, those “field negroes,” whether literal or figurative. Carruthers’says in his essay, The Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution, General Dessalines used that moment 207 years ago to reconcile factions and to end the national identify crisis. His “[removal of] the white bar from the red, white and blue tri-colors under which both Toussaint’s army and the French expedition had been fighting” represented an abandoning of support for the Europeans and a reliance on black sovereignty and independent. Toussaint had been kidnapped and starved to death in a French prison (1803), the French were trying to re-enslave free Africans. The racial and class divides between free blacks and enslaved blacks, Kreyol and pure blacks was seen as it was, a way to keep Africans weak and divided. I can’t imagine the spectacle of Africans and Europeans, both marching to the “tune of La Marseillaise and other French songs under the French flag proclaiming ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.’ It was quite confusing when the enemy was doing the same. Both sides were trying to save the French Republic. Dessalines removed the white bar symbolizing the white people and the French nation in particular. He then joined the blue which symbolized the Mulattoes (or mixed race Africans). Thus, the united sons of Africa were fighting against their common enemy” (77).
Dessalines was not afraid to be misunderstood or vilified. He loved his people enough to accept their misdirected disdain. This is how Victor Schoelcher, in Colonies: Etrangeres et Haiti, 1843, cited in Steward, p. 231), a contemporary white scholar describes Dessalines: “He did not wish to borrow anything from the whites. He repelled all civilization; he would not agree to learn anything beyond rudely making some mark which represented his name. he affected to speak only Creole and to not understand French; and although born in Saint Domingo he vaunted himself as being only a ‘savage African’” (Carruthers 77). Today we look at the victory of Haiti, its successes and its failures as a microcosm of Pan African suffrage or independence movements. After reading the Irritated Genie which looks at the Haitian Revolution at a war with white supremacy, the French and by extension the Americans or Spaniards, who were not about to agree to rule where black and white, that is, formerly enslaved Africans and they are equal. Toussaint L’Overture believed the French could and would eventually see Africans as their equal, when nothing was further from the truth then and now. At its basic level, the Haitian revolution was a fight for human rights. Dessalines never said Africans were superior to another race or culture. He just said “liberty or death.” I am so happy on the eve of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz’s birthday that I am at the College of Alameda, a part of the Peralta College District, a place where Malcolm X is not only recognized, he is given a holy day. The Peralta College District has a history of black powere and black liberation with the birth of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and many of its student leaders enrolled here. The Peralta College District is also the first college district in the nation to have a black student union. Malcolm X, Stokley Carmichael or Kwame Ture, gave a speech at Merritt College when Huey P. Newton wasn’t feelin’ too much love for the brother after COINTELPRO whispered in his ear that Ture was out to get him. Ture, named for two revolutionary African leaders, post-colonialism, Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Turre, presidents of Ghana and Guinea, showed up to countradict that rumor in person.
I mention these leaders, now ancestors, because they walked in the footsteps, they stood on the shoulders of General Dessalines and the Henri Christophe and Petion and of course Toussaint L’Overture. CL James, another scholar and author of the book, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, “views Haiti as the first link in the chain of Pan-African revolts that led to independence throughout Africa.” (113). Frederick Douglas says in 1893 that the Haitian Revolution laid the foundation for the vindication of the Black race. He says: “Speaking for the Negro, I can say, we owe much to (David) Walker for his Appeal … But we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all. I regard her as the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century” (111). The independence movements in Africa do not mention the Haitian revolution. Revolutionary blacks, Curruthers says, and I agree, tend to cite Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutionaries before they reference General Dessalines. This week around the country and the world, Africans are celebrating African Liberation Day. A day instituted by Kwame Ture when he created the All African People’s Revolutionary Movement, similar to Malcolm X’s Organization of African Unity.
This is what Dessalines in the footsteps of Bookman and Mame Fatiman intended when the “irritated genie” is satisfied. On January 1, 1804, Independence Day, General Dessalines says, “It is not enough to have expelled from our country the barbarians which have stained it with blood for two centuries. It is not enough to have stopped the factions which have always reviewed each after its turn, a phantom of liberty that the French exposed to your eyes” (90). True freedom is uncompromising—it is 100 percent or nothing at all. Black history really is world history—the mistakes of the past echo in the present—Katrina wasn’t a mistake. It was intentional, just as the response to Haiti’s January 12, 2010, earthquake and subsequent tremors is intentional. The earthquake of economic sanctions and global or at least western nation nods to military coups and dictatorships resemble the policies of the 18th century when Caruthers’s states: The white phantom masquerade as Black Power (53).
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 01 June 2010 )
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Written by Wanda Sabir
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Friday, 13 November 2009 |
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Reprinting from http://wandasabir.blogspot.com
Skin opened in theatres this past week. Another film I'd highly recommend is Good Hair. Monday, October 19, 2009
Mill Valley Film Festival Yesterday I watched a great film, Skin, directed by Anthony Fabian. The film is based on the true story of South African woman, Sandra Laing, born to white parents but classified as coloured during the apartheid era. Sandra is portrayed well by Sophie Okonedo, however, the child who portrays the younger Laing, was equally compelling as the child who up to the time she goes to boarding school, doesn't see any difference between herself and her parents and brother(s). When she moves into the larger society where skin color is one's racial classification, then one sees the self-hatred emerge as her father introduces his child to skin bleaching creams which burn her skin. The scene where he blows on her face to cool the fire is poignant. I hadn't read the description in advance, so I thought the work was narrative fiction. One can imagine my surprise when I learn at the end of the film that Sandra Laing really exists and this is a true story. Wow! I'd certainly recommend this film to all anthropologists. So what is race and how effective is it as a barrier when two apparently white parents can have a child who is not white? Genetically it's called a recessive gene--or a throw back, but what does this do to the psychological make-up of the family? Sandra is eventually saved from life as a "coloured" citizen, yet, nothing is ever the same for her. Back at school, the boys don't date her and at home, her father's illusion of his daughter and Afrikaner suitors who would marry her is just that, an illusion. No white boy wants a black girl as a wife. One is not surprised when Sandra decides to be with the young African she grew up with, a man whom she began to sneak off to visit at night. He is kind to her, even rescuing her from some of these dates she escapes from. However, his love is not enough to combat his hate for the apartheid system which means he cannot have a business and the government can at will bulldoze entire shantytowns--he says to friends, "They move us around like cattle." No one speaks of the community removal which displaced so many Africans and the disruption on family life. I was speaking to a friend Saturday about what "coloured" meant in South Africa and what "colored" meant to an African American. I remembered that coloured didn't mean black and white or mixed heritage, actually coloured in South Africa was purely a catch all category for non-Bantu Africans like the Khoikhoi. At the time Sandra is born, it is still against the law for white people to cohabit or have sexual relationships with black people, so when Sandra's father prosecutes her and the police pick her up from her boyfriend's home, she is imprisoned. "Skin" looks at the way Sandra's skin color challenges the whole notion of white supremacy and racism. She is obviously intelligent, so if she is classified according to her parents' classification then what's to say that the entire system is wrong, that intelligence is not bound by race, that this is false science. Okay, you might have a system of government that says certain people have certain privileges, but to say it is genetic is falsified by every "throw back" or recessive gene that produces children like Sandra from white parentage. "Skin" is also about the bond between a parent and a child. Sandra loves her parents and they love her. It gets confusing when she brings in her lover and then husband into the fold--or tries to, but there is love there. Sandra has a normal childhood, surrounded in her isolated community by people who love her. Her husband doesn't understand why she wants anything to do with her mother when she is white. He says to her, "I thought you were happy here." She says she is, but this doesn't mean she doesn't miss her mother and father, and siblings. Before she leaves home she asks her dad if he loves her. For Mr. Laing, the political gets mixed up with the personal...in the end it's not what is good for Sandra that drives his actions, it's what good for the family and his name and decision he eventually regrets. |
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Trouble the Water, Review |
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Written by Wanda Sabir
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Tuesday, 09 September 2008 |
http://wandaspicks.com
www.sfbayview.com I saw an amazing film this week, Trouble the Water, talk about Amazing Grace…its sweet sound…wretched souls once lost and finding themselves, blinded they now see. Sometimes it takes living through something as catastrophic as Hurricane Katrina and busted levees, flood waters and thoughts of dying, to shake one from the stupor one was drifting in for most, if not all, of one’s life. Trouble the Water is such a story. It’s the story of Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, Scott Roberts, who managed to survive Katrina and save others in their Ninth Ward neighborhood. Like the debris floating in the flood waters, Kim and Scott were also floating without anchors prior to a challenge that pulled on a strength they knew they possessed, but hadn’t actually utilized to its potential; but death does that—as one’s life passes in front of her eyes…one either sinks or swims. As one watches the film, Kim with a camera is interviewing her neighbors and asking them if they are leaving as she packs her freezer with ice, goes to the store to buy meat and interviews the proprietor who tells her, he isn’t leaving either. She wakes up her uncle, passed out in a stupor and he wanders off to a place where he’ll be indoors. She calls friends and relatives to alert them to elders who are alone and don’t possess phones so someone will look in on them so they don’t drown. What’s really sad is the story we see later in the film about one such relative, who drowns in a convalescent home that wasn’t evacuated, and other stories about government's response to the victims: refusing the weary rest at the empty army base--this story juxtaposed with President Bush's advice over the air in Washington, DC, admonishing people in the Gulf that "everything is being done--no resources spared which can help with the recovery." At Frederick Douglass High School, where Scott and Kimberly ended up, the soldiers laughed at the victims--the comments were, "they didn't know basic survival techniques." Excuse me?! These two people had just braved the worse natural disaster in US history! Trouble the Water, directed by Carl Deal (Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11) with director, Tia Lessin, used the early and priceless footage Kim took prior to their meeting her and Scott, in Alexandria. Kim and Scott had the safe house; their attic supplied with ice, food and cheer. Her cousin Larry, along with Scott, rescued people during the storm floating in without anchors in the storm waters. There they all stayed until the men evacuated them one at a time to higher ground. As Kim’s footage showed the storm and the people inside the small room, frightened –Kim always positive and cheerful, while other archival footage: radio streaming were voices of other New Orleans residents calling 911 and asking for help. The operators answered the frantic callers with, “When the water level decreases we’ll be able to help you." The distressed caller's response was, “So I’m going to die?” Silence greeted this conclusion. Once the water receded and the Kim and Scott and the others left the shelter they headed to Alexandria to Kim's favorite uncle's house. The Roberts’ couple packed a truck with 20 people and their pets (cat, and dogs) and headed north. When they arrived, all Kim and her uncle could do was hug. One could feel the relief mixed with sorrow. He told them they could stay in the house as long as they liked. There they stayed the night and then went to an American Red Cross Shelter as there was no electricity or plumbing at the house. Her uncle had lost his mother, Carrie Mae in the storm. The Convalescent home hadn't evacuated her and the bodies had decomposed. It was hard to identify the remains. That was so sad. Kim and Scott made sure everyone was settled, before continuing on to Memphis; it was the first time Scott had been out of New Orleans. The couple hoped to make a new start. Throughout the entire crisis, Kim shows how she can think on her feet. It was cool witnessing the extended family taking care of one another; this is how these folks were able to survive. Early footage of Katrina showed black folks and white folks looking for water and other resources like food to survive, yet the black folks were called thieves and the white folks, survivors. Trouble the Waters is a more balanced look at a population off the radar. As Kimberly says often enough, "no one cares about the 9th Ward and its inhabitants. No one came looking for the dead;" death’s stench is unbearable from the porch where Kim and Scott went into homes of friends and family to see if they’d gotten out. Many hadn’t. Nor has the recovery been any better, three years later. Just as another friend, adopted along the way, Brian, who couldn’t get any FEMA money because he’d been in a half-way house and didn’t have an address, was told by Kim not to worry, people are still in the streets –those who stayed because the housing supply is insufficient--I saw them--long lines of homeless men crowded on the sidewalks, waiting outside the doors, spilling into the streets at a shelter near Ashe Cultural Center in New Orleans, just this summer when I went home for a family reunion. On the one year anniversary, Kim and her friends are commemorating the dead and their survival and police roll up and tell everyone to put their hands in the air. Kim is ordered to stop taping. The 9th Ward two years after that looks relatively the same…the neighbors Kim speaks of gone, the neighborhood-- formally occupied homes are, if not gone, are vacant. For miles and miles, all one sees are weed covered foundations where The Road Home and other such programs that penalize the victims, have prevented people from returning. Blight notices are posted on vacant lots...homes, signaling preemptive demolition. Many of the owners are still in the Diaspora and not able to return. Kim’s mother died from AIDS when she was 13, yet earlier than this she learned to survive the streets, stealing food to feed the family and then selling drugs to support them. It was a rough life, but not one, one hasn’t heard of before. Often one’s choices are almost made for you….When a child has to take on the responsibilities of an adult, in America; it’s not possible to do this legally when one is a certain age. Kim speaks of the need in her eyes which went unanswered. It is a call she responds to as an adult when she sees it in other's eyes--no more heroically than when the storm approaches and she and her husband are caught, even now in the storm’s aftermath one, two, three years later--she is still advocating for her neighbors, her friends, her relatives, her people. The 9th Ward was like a world unto itself…similar to other urban enclaves throughout America, South Central, Bayview Hunter’s Point, West Oakland, East Oakland, South Berkeley, North Richmond, East Philly, Southside Chicago, South Bronx…as long as the life didn’t spill into the economically affluent side of town, the folks under siege –the siege of poverty and unrequited opportunities, it was allowed to fester and grow. Katrina was the headlights on a vehicle left idling too long. It was the vision of all these American citizens drowning, then crowded on highways, outside the Superdome, fainting from heat and exhaustion…dying, that should have created a greater need to address this uneven recovery that continues to this day, even after hurricanes Rita and now Gustav...Ike. Trouble the Water is troubling, yet it is people like Kimberly, Scott, Larry and Brian that give me hope. I know Kim is not going to let the government sleep on them…they are going to raise hell until the high water is no longer a threat to life and liberty for all, especially the more vulnerable like her little brother who was left to die along with other prisoners in the Parish Prison. His testimony is stunning; especially his comparison of what it was like in those prisons...locked up and left to die...to the slave ships. He’s still having nightmares. Kim’s music comforts her. One of the songs on the soundtrack which is played towards the end of the film when Kim and Scott are back in New Orleans, is "Amazing." It’s about her life, which is pretty amazing…amazing that she’s alive and that she’s so upbeat and positive. When I think about this 24-then, now 27 year old woman and what she has survived I am also reminded of our ancestors and what they survived and witnessed and lived through so we could witness their spirit and keep striving for freedom. Scott talks about this a lot. He wants a job, but doesn’t have a high school diploma and a couple years of college. No one is hiring, even though he wants to work. The potential for stereotypes cast on Kim and Scott, Brian and others we meet are instructive…if nothing else, it tells us to not believe what we read and see on TV. We need to withhold judgment until we can have a more primary experience, which is what film and theater is so good at. At the end of the film, one loves Kim. She is our sister. She is our daughter. She is our granddaughter. Watching this film, more so than Fauberg Treme and When the Levees Broke, was like being in the hull of that ship crossing the Atlantic. Second Line (dir.John Magary) came closest to the feelings invoked by Trouble, but even then, the protagonists were in a FEMA trailer park, not in the water. Perhaps because "Trouble" starts the day before and we’re there with the captives in the dank darkness and can hear their thoughts, see their faces, the experience is one that stays with you hours later. I am dreaming about Kim and Scott. I wake up with them on my mind. When I close my eyes I see them, along with the others stranded. I hope they get away. At the screening in Berkeley, Saturday evening, I’d hoped they would have had a moment of silence for the departed. I’d planned to mention it and then I forgot. These are people whose lives could have been spared. People are still dying and it is just as much a shame today as it was three years prior. A lot went wrong regarding government’s response to Katrina. Trouble the Water is an excellent organizing and teaching tool FEMA, the American Red Cross and the state of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans needs to watch this and take notes. The opportunity to see other places, to travel to Memphis to start over again, was also an opportunity to see what they left behind…both the good and the bad and make some tough decisions about the direction they want their lives to take post-Katrina, Kim and Scott said. Scott and Kim were not eager to return to the destructive behaviors of the past. Kim’s writing and belief in God were anchors that held her steady with head above water during and after the storm. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and it will win your heart. Volunteer to help in the rebuilding of New Orleans, and support the Gulf Coast Recovery Bill, HR 4048, by writing your Congress woman and asking her to do so. I’m trying to get Kim on my show, Wanda’s Picks at BlogTalkRadio.com this Friday, Sept. 12, during the first hour, 8-9 AM. The URL is http://www.WandasPicks.ASMNetwork.org
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 09 September 2008 )
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The Marin County Showdown: Ruchell Cinque Magee and the August 7th Courthouse Slave Rebellion |
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Written by Kiilu Nyasha
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Friday, 08 August 2008 |
“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today, it’s the same but with a new name”.-- Ruchell Cinque Magee
I first met Ruchell Cinque Magee in the holding cell of the Marin County courthouse in the Summer of 1971. I found him to be soft-spoken, warm and a gentleman in typically Southern tradition. We’ve been in correspondence pretty much ever since.
I had just returned to California from New Haven, Connecticut, where I had worked as an organizer and a member of the legal defense team of three Black Panthers, including Party Chairman Bobby Seale, on trial for murder and conspiracy. The second trial resulted in a true people’s victory, May 24, 1971. We had kept the New Haven courtroom jam-packed throughout the joint trial of Seale and Ericka Huggins that resulted in a hung jury. But the obviously racist judge had to dismiss it due to the enormous publicity and state expense incurred due to huge crowds and tight security.
In my correspondence with George Jackson, author of the bestseller, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, he had advised me to seek a press card in order to visit him at San Quentin. In so doing, I wound up working for The Sun Reporter, a local Black newspaper (byline Pat Gallyot), and covering the pretrial hearings of Angela Davis and Magee.
Already familiar with courtroom injustice, racism and bias against Black defendants witnessed in two capital trials, it didn’t come as a surprise that Ruchell was getting a raw deal in the Marin Courtroom where he was frequently removed for outbursts of sheer frustration.
By 1971, Ruchell was an astute jailhouse lawyer. He was responsible for the release and protection of a myriad of prisoners benefiting from his extensive knowledge of law, which he used to prepare writs, appeals and lawsuits for himself and many others behind walls.
Now Ruchell was fighting for all he was worth for the right to represent himself against charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and conspiracy to aid the escape of state prisoners.
Although critically wounded on August 7, 1970, Magee was the sole survivor among the four brave Black men who conducted the courthouse slave rebellion, leaving him to be charged with everything they could throw at him.
“All right gentlemen, hold it right there. We’re taking over!” Armed to the teeth, Jonathan Jackson, 17, George’s, younger brother, had raided the Marin Courtroom and tossed guns to prisoners William Christmas and James McClain, who in turn invited Ruchell to join them. Ru seized the hour spontaneously as they attempted to escape by taking a judge, assistant district attorney and three jurors as hostages in that audacious move to expose to the public the brutally racist prison conditions and free the Soledad Brothers (John Clutchette, Fleeta Drumgo, and George Jackson).
McClain was on trial for assaulting a guard in the wake of Black prisoner Fred Billingsley’s murder by prison officials in San Quentin in February, 1970. With only four months before a parole hearing, Magee had appeared in the courtroom to testify for McClain.
The four revolutionaries successfully commandeered the group to the waiting van and were about to pull out of the parking lot when Marin County Police and San Quentin guards opened fire. When the shooting stopped, Judge Harold Haley, Jackson, Christmas, and McClain lay dead; Magee was unconscious (See photo)and seriously wounded as was the prosecutor. A juror suffered a minor injury.
In a chain of events leading to August 7, on January 13, 1970, a month before the Billingsley slaughter, a tower guard at Soledad State Prison had shot and killed three Black captives on the yard, leaving them unattended to bleed to death: Cleveland Edwards, “Sweet Jugs” Miller, and the venerable revolutionary leader, W. L. Nolen, all active resisters in the Black Liberation Movement behind the walls. Others included George Jackson, Jeffrey Gauldin (Khatari), Hugo L.A. Pinell (Yogi Bear), Steve Simmons (Kumasi), Howard Tole, and the late Warren Wells.
After the common verdict of “justifiable homicide” was returned and the killer guard exonerated at Soledad, another white-racist guard was beaten and thrown from a tier to his death. Three prisoners, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and Jackson were charged with his murder precipitating the case of The Soledad Brothers and a campaign to free them led by college professor and avowed Communist, Angela Davis, and Jonathan Jackson.
Magee had already spent at least seven years studying law and deluging the courts with petitions and lawsuits to contest his own illegal conviction in two fraudulent trials. As he put it, the judicial system “used fraud to hide fraud” in his second case after the first conviction was overturned on an appeal based on a falsified transcript. His strategy, therefore, centered on proving that he was a slave, denied his constitutional rights and held involuntarily. Therefore, he had the legal right to escape slavery as established in the case of the African slave, Cinque, who had escaped the slave ship, Armistad, and won freedom in a Connecticut trial. Thus, Magee had to first prove he’d been illegally and unjustly incarcerated for over seven years. He also wanted the case moved to the Federal Courts and the right to represent himself.
Moreover, Magee wanted to conduct a trial that would bring to light the racist and brutal oppression of Black prisoners throughout the State. “My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery.. This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”
On the other hand, Angela Davis, his co-defendant, charged with buying the guns used in the raid, conspiracy, etc., was innocent of any wrongdoing because the gun purchases were perfectly legal and she was not part of the original plan. Davis’ lawyers wanted an expedient trial to prove her innocence on trumped up charges. This conflict in strategy resulted in the trials being separated. Davis was acquitted of all charges and released in June of 1972.
Ruchell fought on alone, losing much of the support attending the Davis trial. After dismissing five attorneys and five judges, he won the right to defend himself. The murder charges had been dropped, and Magee faced two kidnap charges. He was ultimately convicted of PC 207, simple kidnap, but the more serious charge of PC 209, kidnap for purposes of extortion, resulted in a disputed verdict. According to one of the juror’s sworn affidavit, the jury voted for acquittal on the PC 209 and Magee continues to this day to challenge the denial and cover-up of that acquittal.
Ruchell is currently on the mainline of Corcoran State Prison doing his 46th year locked up in California gulags - many of those years spent in solitary confinement under tortuous conditions! In spite of having committed no physical assaults or murders. Is that not political?
Write him at: Ruchell Magee # A92051, 3A2-131 Box 3471 , C.S.P. Corcoran, CA 93212=
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