Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: COINTELPROMutulu Shakurpolitical prisonerprisoner of warTruth and Reconciliation Commission Additional informationNotes on contributorsMutulu ShakurDr. Mutulu Shakur is a New Afrikan revolutionary nationalist, anti-imperialist, and doctor of acupuncture. Shakur has been a political prisoner since 1986.Notes1 This article was written in 2010.2 Mary Russell and Robert Kaiser, “Move to Impeach Young Killed, “Washington Post, July 14, 1978. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/07/14/move-to-impeach-young-killed/05bfd6e1-1189-44d1-bc19-dc23d5add93e/ (June 11, 2022)3 Issue Forum (Proceedings): “Human Rights in the United States: The Unfinished Story, Current Political Prisoners – Victims of COINTELPRO”, September 14, 2000, https://ratical.org/co-globalize/CynthiaMcKinney/news/if000914HR.htm (June 11, 2022)4 Watani Tyehimba, discussion with editor (June 13, 2022). Tyehimba served as a paralegal for Dr. Mutulu Shakur.5 These are questions Dr. Shakur poses to activists in terms of mounting a campaign for a Truth and Reconciliation for political repression during the COINTELPRO era.

This essay is an exploration of the critical in critical black studies.

To the memory of her parents, who are also mineFor many years now, the name Digna Castaneda has been following us relentlessly, without any possible respite, hovering over an old baobab tree on whi...

In 1983, Michael Jackson brought the world to its feet by spinning into the moonwalk while performing “Billie Jean” on live television during the Motown 25 special. In this article, I chart how the analog synthesizers in “Billie Jean” both helped facilitate Jackson's movement towards black futurity and connected him back to black rhythmic histories encapsulated in disco and funk. By unpacking how he moves with and against these synthesizers in the music video and subsequent live performance, I consider the ways in which this relatively new musical technology allowed Jackson to transmit a black queer phenomenology to his audiences.

This article examines Black communities’ engagement with practices of place and alternative figurations of land and water in the antebellum and post-emancipation periods around the lower–Chesapeake Bay. It historicizes the work of enslaved, free, and emancipated communities to create a distinctive and often furtive social architecture rivaling, threatening, and challenging the infrastructures of abstraction, commodification, and social control developed by white elites before and after the formal abolition of slavery. Practices centered in the various iterations of the plot—the site of the body's interment, the garden parcel, and hidden insurrectionary activity—fostered a vision of de-commodified water and landscapes as well as resources. Evolving in dialectic with mastery and dominion—or biblically justified total control—enslaved and post-emancipation communities claimed and created a set of communal resources within the interstices of plantation ecologies, constituting the Black commons.

The Predicament of Blackness is a critically engaging work that effectively theorizes modern Africa back into the African Diaspora. Pierre conducts an ethnography of racialization that is a result ...

In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it difficult to imagine black boyhood. While both forms of intervention are guided by good intentions, they nonetheless stymie research and critical engagement with how black boys experience boyhood. This article considers how a speech by President Barack Obama functioning as a precursor to formal announcement of the My Brothers Keeper initiative demonstrates the difficulty with distinguishing black boys from black men and, therefore, from developing interventions and research, in general, that attends to the needs, interests, and ways of being of black boys. I propose that in the absence of discursively focused research and empirical data, the inner thoughts and lives of black boys can be located in culture, specifically soundscapes created by black male recording artists that offer disruptive imaginations.

This article examines African American businesswoman Saint Charles Lockett, a self-proclaimed feminist and Ethnic Enterprizes, her company. Established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1970 at the height of deindustrialization and Black Power, as well as the dawn of neoliberalism, Ethnic Enterprizes hired mothers who received welfare benefits. Its goal was to be a “gateway to gainful employment.” After receiving numerous accolades, Lockett and Ethnic Enterprizes became mired in controversy because of its inability to pay its mother workforce more than the minimum wage. This led to its demise. Lockett and her firm deserve serious analysis because they provide an opportunity to examine a myriad of issues related to black working women, economic development, and the challenges of black capitalism in the urban industrial Midwest. Ethnic Enterprizes was Lockett’s response to black women’s exclusion from the industrial labor force, a route to black economic community development, and a vision for what could be possible for black working women. While examining the story of Saint Charles Lockett and Ethnic Enterprizes highlights the difficulties of excavating the voices of black working women who have been marginalized in the urban, industrial landscape, it also provides opportunities for theorizing about ways to magnify their voices in the historical record.