Black Liberation Fighter Russell Maroon Shoatz was a political prisoner of war in the so-called United States. Born in Philadelphia into poverty and hardship structurally imposed on Black communities by the US racist capitalist liberal democratic state, Maroon had a rough childhood and exiguous chances to get by without engaging in criminalised activities, like many other like youngsters in such circumstances. Maroon grew up in a community under terrorist siege by a murderous police-state regime. As he became pol-itically aware and conscious of histories of New African liberation struggles, he joined the brewing armed resistance. In 1968, with local peers he co-founded the Black Unity Council (BUC), a neighbourhood self-defence and self-education organisation active in assisting households in dire straits. After the Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, they decided to merge with the Philadelphia Black Panther Party (BPP) chapter. As the BPP came to be viciously assaulted and taken apart nationally by police and secret services, Maroon, as many others in the BPP, elected to regroup into an attacking force, the Black Liberation Army or BLA (Shoatz 2013, 65–75). In other words, Maroon fought back against the local police-state, eventuating in an action in 1970 the led to the death of a police officer, who had himself inflicted violence on members of the Black community. Maroon was among the six and then five charged with the killing, even as the actual killer was never identified (Law 2016; Lucas 2021).
After going underground, then being caught, arrested, and put through a travesty of a trial, he was sentenced in 1972 to life in prison without possi-bility of parole. It later came to light that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and US Attorney General John N. Mitchell had personally instigated the per-secution of Shoatz, among hundreds of other fighters for social equality, through the FBI’s Counterintelligence Programme (COINTELPRO). The Pennsylvania state and Federal governments had him transferred from one prison to another, 15 different ones, including maximum security prisons and a maximum-security mental institution. He managed to escape twice, once for nearly a month (1977) and another for a couple of days (1980) until caught. He persevered in educating himself by any means allowed him, studying histories of resistance to slavery, settler colonialism, and imperialism as well as the law, in the process becoming a jail-house lawyer (Law 2016).
Between 1991 and 2014, as retaliation for Maroon’s activism for prisoners’ rights, the prison authorities tortured Maroon with solitary confinement in the euphemistically named Restricted Housing Unit. For 23 or more hours every day, they held Maroon in a permanently lit cell of about 7.8 m2 (about 2 by 3.5 m). They allowed him no educational or group programmes or direct family contact. They shackled and strip-searched him each time he was allowed to leave the cell into an enclosed exercise cage (Law 2016). Maroon offered lucid, incisive analyses and biting critiques of the prison-industrial complex and the treatment of prisoners in the US. It should be required reading for all, especially those on the outside (see especially Shoatz 2013, 39-62).
Maroon understood he was in a death camp (2013, 40), but never relented in the struggle for Black liberation and a life-affirming, classless society, even under such perversely harsh prison conditions—conditions illegal even according to mainstream liberal democratic dogma. An avid reader and researcher, he was a razor-sharp, innovative, and sagacious intellectual of great generosity, always ready to share knowledge with others and always open to learning from others. This was accomplished by means of eventually suppressed seminars with other inmates and through whatever other means he could find to share information and debate ideas. The objective was to stay alive and not consign oneself to the tormentors.
Among the main survival mechanisms[,] we prisoners developed in the holes we’ve been forced to occupy have been our efforts to share our thoughts, ideas, and experiences. This served to mitigate our isolation[,] provide a measure of social contact, self-education, and rehabilitation (where needed)—all of which served to defeat our captors’ efforts to punish, torture, and/or destroy us by placing us in a prison within a prison.
(Shoatz 2013, 23; italics original)
Building knowledge and sharing ideas was a deliberate, self-conscious act. Many benefited from his tireless efforts at implementing that survival and political strategy. He mentored inside and outside prison, imparting the wisdom he gained especially from studying the history of maroon communities.
Many more prisoners will benefit in future thanks to his relentless struggle against solitary confinement. The eventually successful and precedent-setting legal challenge he launched in 2013 against solitary confinement is of inestimable national and international importance. But 22 consecutive years in solitary scarred Maroon in every way, leaving him permanently damaged psychologically (Law 2016).
Yet he persevered with all his strength in overcoming the trauma and con-tinue his quest to better society for all. He had and will continue to have a lot to offer to the development of revolutionary strategy. Maroon’s 2006 sum-mation of his experiences in the BLA remains highly instructive today. Responding to an interview question about what he learned from his experi-ence in the armed underground, he had this to share:
In a nutshell, it taught me the absolute necessity of all armed actions having broad, deep, multidimensional support. Otherwise[,] they are open to isolation and destruction, which was the fate of the Black Liberation Army.
(Shoatz 2013, 72–73)
This has nothing to do with whether armed actions fall into the so-called “terrorism” category. That accusation is made on purely self-serving and hypo-critical grounds. The need for multidimensional support has to do with the simple fact that we must have the resources, energy, creativity, and enthusiasm of the people on the side of the armed struggle. Otherwise, armed movement forces have very little chance of winning against the oppressive forces that do have broad and deep support.
Calculations concerning pulling together this support and constantly increas-ing it must be very well thought out. In a multiracial, multicultural, sexist, and class-ridden country (and world!) this is a tough task!
That said, I think that we do not learn enough from the successes of the past. We have a goldmine of tried and tested successful approaches if we study how our ancestors used the Underground Railroad (UR). It’s well known that the UR is a shining example of a broad and deep multidimensional movement that set the stage for the destruction of slavery. Check out my essay [included in this book] called “The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America.”
Quite frankly, I’m fed up with so much narrow-minded, paranoid crap mas-querading as ideology being dished out to young people who are hungry for direction by a lot of cowardly veteran activists who don’t want to step out of their comfort zones. Building conscious support is the absolute first step toward militantly challenging our oppressor. These old cowards know that!Nothing is more important than putting in work to stop this global, genocidal oppression!
His critical re-examination of Black liberation and wider revolutionary struggles was based on Marxist feminist and ecofeminist principles. Maroon became highly critical of “testosterone-driven armed struggle”, which he found had also to be surmounted in himself (Shoatz 2013, 193). His re-examination was therefore simultaneously a critical self-reflection, an exemplary form of praxis emerging out of his dialectical materialism. The fight against racial capitalism and the imperialism and social divisions inherent therein became for him inescapably contingent on overcoming patriarchy. He was at one with the materialist ecofeminist insistence on a subsistence-centred economy. By the 2010s, Maroon adopted and built on ecofeminist ecosocialism, advocating for prefigurative matriarchal organis-ing and strategy (269-270).
Equally important pillars of his re-evaluation of revolutionary struggles were the concept and practice of prefiguration and the fighting form of mar-ooning (the establishment of liberated areas; Shoatz 2013, 32). These necess-arily involved the rejection of irresponsible vanguardism in favour of leadership and constructive forms of discipline (Ho 2013). His framework evolved out of his analyses of historical case studies on the egalitarian, decen-tralised, and relatively autonomous political organisation and on the devel-opment of military strategies in mixed, mainly African-Indigenous maroon communities throughout the Americas. As he saw the matter—converging with the views of CLR James—marooning anticipated and was much more highly developed politically than much of what a couple of centuries later came to be known as anarchism and, in some respects, democratic central-ism. Maroon communities, many existing to this day, amply demonstrate workable alternatives to state-oriented and vanguardist models (Shoatz 2013, 107–125).
As the comrades of the Abolitionist Law Center have expressed our collective grief,
He has left us physically on this plane, but his spirit and visions live on in the movements he inspired and animated from a prison cell, the countless hearts and minds he filled with hope and wonder when so many of us felt lost and helpless, the iconic essays he wrote that will continue to galvanize future gen-erations of young people in the struggle.
Russell Shoatz, Harun Abdul Ra’uf, the indomitable Maroon, will continue to bring light and courage among us. As he would tell us when bidding fare-well: “Straight ahead!”
References
Ho, Fred. 2013. “Prelude Fire in the Hole! Why Russell Maroon Shoatz Is Important to Creative Revolutionaries!.” In Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz, edited by Fred Ho, and Quincy Saul, 13–19. Oakland: PM Press.
Law, Victoria. 2016. “How a Former Black Panther Could Change the Rules of Solitary Confinement.” The Nation, 22 February.
Lucas, Ashley. 2021. “The End of Rage. a Black Panther in Prison Makes a Reckoning: The Story of Russell Maroon Shoatz.” Plough Quarterly 29.