Hello. My name is brother Khalfani Malik Khaldun, Indiana political prisoner. I am calling from the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, a prison located in southern Indiana. I am presenting one of my personal pieces, “There is a storm a’coming.”
Repression breeds revolutionary resistance. We know through painful experience that freedom is never found materially given up by the oppressor it must be demanded by the oppressed. By Martin Luther king, Jr.: “Power never concedes anything without a demand. That demand has to come as a form of collective and massive revolutionary resistance.”
Today in America, still having the Thirteenth Amendment as an enforceable constitutional law, once any human being is convicted of a crime in this country, they are considered goods of enslavement. America, with 5% of the world’s population, has 25% of its prisoners.
Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners reentering society, has generated an understanding of solitary confinement’s consequence: which is absolutely negative on the human spirit, mind, and body when used as a suppressor of resistance for long-term conditions for an estimated 25,000 prisoners held in state and federal plantations.
And perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections in other prisons are being exploited through the enforcement of this arbitrary unconstitutional law, the Thirteenth Amendment. The condition of imprisonment is tantamount to enslavement. Coupled with the exploitation of involuntary servitude, i.e. forced prison labor, there inevitably becomes a time that the human spirit says “Enough is enough.”
In 1842, Charles Dickens wrote after visiting the Eastern State Prison in Philadelphia that opened in 1829, he stated these following words: “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body. And because its ghastly sad and tokens are not so palpable to the eye insists of touch as scars up on the surface, and it exhorts few cries that human ears can hear. Therefore, I more denounce it as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not raised up to stay.”
The inevitable collective movement giving birth surrounding labor exploitation in the Attica uprising last year was a calm before the storm, a universal fellowship of oppressed souls higher of their current conditions of being rendered slaves had said “No more. Power to the people. September the 9th through September the 12th will forever be recognized as the days a nation behind bars was built. When prisoncrats start walking off their jobs or refusing to be agents of prison exploitation, the movement is winning.
When we can improve our lines of communication from state prison to federal prison, to move as one, we are winning. When social media gets taken advantage of and promote a prison-wide national protest, we are winning. When a massive show of unity can foster national solidarity, we are winning. And it feels great. When we fight, we win. History has always been made. Our voices and demands have been heard. There is a storm a’coming, and nothing, and nobody, can stand in its way. Repression breeds resistance. And that resistance is you and me. All power to the people.
This is brother Khalfani Malik Khaldun, also known as Leonard McQuade, P.O. Box 1111, Carlisle, IN 47838. Please contact me if you want any responses or a copy of this. Power to the people. Thank you.