The Kuwasi Balagoon Liberation Project was once an introductory class designed to bring in a new generation of revolutionaries. It has now been compiled into an interactive text and reader meant to be sent to comrades behind bars. It can be used to guide discussion between revolutionaries on the outside and those behind bars or it can be used on the inside as a study guide. The project goes through a brief history of revolutionary politics in the US and abroad, and details how to orient our struggle towards an abolitionist movement in the US and the anarchist movement in general.
The project is named after the Black Liberation Army soldier, Kuwasi Balagoon, to commemorate his life and commitment to the struggle. Kuwasi Balagoon was a participant in the Black Liberation struggle from the 1960s until his death in prison in 1986. A member of the Black Panther Party and defendant in the infamous Panther 21 case, Balagoon went underground with the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Captured and convicted of various crimes against the State, he spent much of the 1970s in prison, escaping twice. After each escape, he went underground and resumed BLA activity.
Balagoon was ahead of his time in several ways. He combined anarchism with Black nationalism, he broke the rules of sexual and political conformity that surrounded him, he took up arms against the white-supremacist state—all the while never shying away from developing his own criticisms of the weaknesses within the movements. His eloquent trial statements and political writings, as much as his poetry and excerpts from his prison letters, are all testimony to a sharp and iconoclastic revolutionary who was willing to make hard choices and fully accept the consequences.
Pdf’s of the project and a new reader are coming soon….