Every year when Black August rolls around, the stories we pull from the archive tend to center on Black men’s experience while the distinct warfare waged against Black women political prisoners gets reduced to a quiet whisper, if mentioned at all.
I learned to tune my ears to those whispers early on in my academic career. My education in Black political activism began on the streets of North and West Philadelphia, not far from my university’s lecture halls.
It was nearly impossible to remain oblivious to Black political struggle while living in Philadelphia, a city mired in a brutal history of police terror aimed narrowly at the Black community. Under the reign of former Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo, Black neighborhoods were targeted and regularly brutalized by his police force.
The first Black political prisoner in Philly I learned about was Mumia Abu-Jamal, the incarcerated journalist convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer whose dispatches from the bowels of Pennsylvania’s carceral system exposed the state’s incessant war against Black liberation in general and Black prisoners in particular. His name was written into the very fabric of the city, with “Free Mumia” posters lining storefront walls and plastered on trees.
At the same time, I was introduced to lesser-known Black women political prisoners through Ramona Africa’s activism. Africa was a member of the MOVE family, a radical, back-to-nature group that lived communally and fiercely resisted technology and state intervention. Africa was a regular fixture on campus, organizing and protesting to bring recognition to her comrades who had been locked away since the August 1978 police siege of the group’s Powelton Village home.
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Following a shootout during that military-style raid, a single bullet killed a police officer. Even though the MOVE members claimed the officer was killed by friendly fire and ballistics could not trace the shot to a specific weapon, the state found nine members of the commune guilty of third-degree murder.
Much of the coverage was focused on the five men who were locked away, and very little media attention was given to the four women who were found guilty and imprisoned. One of the women, Debbie Africa, gave birth to a son while in prison.
Two of the other women, Janine and Janet Africa, would go on to spend more than four decades in prison before their 2019 release on parole.
Janine’s losses stretched across those decades on both sides of her sentence. Two years before the 1978 raid, during a scuffle between the police and MOVE, Janine was knocked over while holding her baby, Life. The infant died shortly after.
While she was behind bars, Janine tragically lost another son, 12-year-old Lil Phil, in 1985 when Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the collective’s new communal home, situated just three miles away from my college dorm.
As evidenced by Janine’s experiences of having lost two children at the hands of the state, Black women political prisoners face distinct layers of reproductive and psychological injustices.
The targeted warfare on Black women is a terrifying pattern that repeats across American carceral history. To be a Black woman revolutionary meant risking your own freedom while simultaneously having to protect your children from the state.
We see this in the story of the late hip-hop star Tupac Shakur’s mother, Afeni. Afeni Shakur was a brilliant strategist and member of the New York Black Panther Party, arrested in 1969 as part of the Panther 21 conspiracy case.
Facing a seemingly insurmountable 300 years in prison, Afeni spent much of her pretrial detention inside the oppressive walls of the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village while pregnant with Tupac. The carceral conditions inside the facility were notoriously inhumane, defined by spoiled food and a lack of basic necessities like toilet paper. Afeni and her co-defendant Joan Bird reported prison doctors who seemed keen on subjecting women to invasive, non-consensual examinations.
