Black Anarchism In The US: A rich, Radical Tradition

“The prison facility itself is maximum security, but society is just an extension; it’s a minimum-security prison. And that [radical insight] is at the core of Black anarchism.”

Mansa Musa for TRNN

When state violence and systemic denial of full citizenship by the state makes true belonging impossible for Black people, Black anarchists have envisioned and fought for a free life beyond the state. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, author William C. Anderson explores the rich, radical tradition of Black anarchism and its connection to prison abolitionist movements.

Guests:

• William C. Anderson is a writer and activist from Birmingham, AL. His work has appeared in outlets ranging from The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, British Journal of Photography, to Pitchfork. He is the author of The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, and co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. He’s also the co-founder of Offshoot Journal and provides creative direction as a producer of the Black Autonomy Podcast.

YouTube video here: https://youtu.be/zkT4GNXOLRg

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. When you hear the term “anarchy” and “anarchist,” what comes to mind? Joining me today is William C. Anderson, author of The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition, and a columnist for Prism News where he writes the series Another Way Out. Welcome, William. Welcome to Rattling the Bars.

William C. Anderson:

Hey, thanks for having me on.

Mansa Musa:

First start out, could you introduce yourself to our audience and share how some of your background?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. So my name’s William C. Anderson. I’m a writer, an activist, do some organizing here and there, and a person who’s just generally committed to struggle. I am from the deep south and I come from a working class background and I’ve been in movement for the majority of my life. So it’s a pleasure and an honor to be able to discuss a lot of different things with you today.

Mansa Musa:

And as we was talking off camera, this is an interesting subject matter because how you characterize what it is you’re talking about, like anarchism or anarchy and abolition. Most people have a definition and a working definition of abolition. Even if it’s not correct in terms of the overall politics of it, but they got a general idea when somebody say abolition, they can go somewhere and they hear something that somebody can publish or produce a movie or whatever. When you say anarchy and antarchism, that automatically conjure up a perspective that is constantly being perpetuated by the system to give people to define it and they define it through behavior. Right. In the nation on no map, you discussed the perpetual contradiction between black people and citizenship. Can you explain how the statelessness function both domestically and internationally as a cross class phenomenon?

William C. Anderson:

So basically, I think that the best way to start out talking about this and thinking about this would be there is a perpetual and a strong contradiction between black people and citizenship. And so I think for reference, one of the things I could quote is I would refer back to Malcolm X who said that the descendants of enslaved Africans were not brought to the Americas to be made citizens. Specifically, we weren’t brought to the United States to be made citizens. And so Malcolm also said, “I’m from America, but I’m not American.” And when you think about historical precedents like the Dred Scott case and the Dred Scott ruling,

Which was a 7-2 ruling in 1857, that ruling said that Black people were not citizens. It said that we were unable to achieve citizenship because of our Blackness. And it said that the terms citizens and the people of the United States were not synonymous terms. So the ruling explicitly lays a foundation for what Malcolm was expressing in those quotes. It codified a contradiction between blackness and citizenship that I’m working with to draw some parallels and make some other connections to statelessness. So when I’m thinking about what it means to be Black and to have had this historical precedent that said we were not meant to be citizens here, regardless of what happened later, regardless of what formal recognition might have eventually come along, that history is still there and that contradiction is still there. And Black people still experience a lot of the limitations that stem from that contradiction.

And it’s not just in the United States, it’s also across the Americas. A lot of the diaspora, the Black diaspora across the Americas experienced this contradiction too. In my book, I mentioned how it wasn’t until I think in 2015 in Mexico that Afro-descended Mexicans even achieved recognition, formal recognition in that country. And so

Thinking about what it means to try to work from this place where you might have citizenship on paper or not, but you still experience all of these questions around your place in a society, it leads me to start thinking about questions regarding statelessness and how that can actually be used to our advantage as Black people rather than have it be something that’s completely disempowering. And I think that what can be advantageous about it is the challenge to think outside of the state structure and society as we know it, and embrace alternatives that think through that and radicalisms that think through that.

Mansa Musa:

Right. I got it. And I understood that when you set it out, because it create foundation for resistance, how we resist and why we resist, as opposed to not have no vision as to why we resist, but to understand that and what we’re resisting for, am I resisting to be a citizen of the United States or am I resisting for the complete abolition abolishment of a system that treat people less than human and create a class system where racialization creates a dominant class? Sadia Hartman wrote your books forward. How have her concepts of the non-event and waywardness influenced your views of black anarchism and something people practice without using the label?

William C. Anderson:

Cydia is one of the most powerfully influential scholars of our time, I think. And her work and her prose will likely shape generations of thought to come. And I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the afterlife of slavery, which is something I reference a lot and the non-event of emancipation, not just in this text, I’ve been thinking about them a lot, but I just think about them generally a lot because I’m a

Mansa Musa:

Black

William C. Anderson:

Person who experiences all of the things that are implied. I think that when it comes to the non-event of emancipation, it is very much reckoning with a lot of those challenges and those hurdles and those limitations that we face because when we think back to what we’re told that the abolition of slavery was supposed to mean for black people, what it was supposed to mean for our lives, her framing of the non-event, again, brings a lot of those issues to the forefront that I’m trying to think through in my work. So we know that even though something could be said or done or codified and put on paper, such as the abolition of slavery or such as a formal recognition of a black person’s citizenship, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality of our day-to-day lives.

So in my book, I’m drawing parallels between her framing of waywardness and the way that myself and Zoe Samudzi frame the anarchism of blackness, similar concepts. And we’re talking about similar things regarding the necessity for Black people to struggle and organize and to thrive outside of institutional consideration. So I think a lot of Black people think about these things like what we were told the abolition of slavery was supposed to be for us, what we’re told citizenship is supposed to mean for us. We think about these things and what our reality is and what actually exists in the world around us. And we arrive at a place organically where we understand that it’s important for us to think outside of the systems that engulf our lives. And ultimately, what I think is so important about something like Waywardness or whether we’re talking about the anarchism of Blackness or any of these different ways that we might describe a specific condition that we experience as Black people, even Ashanti Alston, he talks about something similar.

Ashanti Alson, the former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member. He also talks about a similar condition in his essay, Black Anarchism. And Lorenzo Kambour Irvin talks about similar things in his work too. So many of these Black people who are arriving across time at this place of trying to understand what it means to be Black and what it means to think outside of the state, what it means to think about statelessness, what it means to think about this condition that requires us to think beyond it and to move beyond it, it’s extremely important. And I think that that contribution that Sadia has offered in terms of her descriptions of waywardness is very much aligned there. It’s very helpful.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And you engaged deeply with the works of George James and imprisoned intellectuals. How has their intellectual production from within the castle system shaped the foundation of black anarchism? And we have attica, we have in this country, like at one point, you had rebellions that was physical response to the dehumanization and oppressive conditions that people that was rounded up and put into captivity, so- called imprisonment responded to, but they responded to the conditions they were being subjected to and they responded in a number of ways. They organized insurrection, took over the prisons. Talk about that. How do you shape that, see that paning out as it relates to the prison movement or prison in general?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. So I would say that there’s a very strong connection because Black anarchism, as we know it, is born of the prison system. I mean, Martin Sostre, Lorenzo Kombor Irvin, Ashanti Alston, Ajoy Lurtillo, and others, both past and present and black anarchism or were former political prisoners. They are people who understand the depths of the rot of the system that rules over our lives and the true function of the monopoly on violence that we know as the state,

Because they’ve been at its core. And I know you have too. I know that you can speak to that as well. It’s something to see the core of the state from the inside out. And that’s something that you can experience in truth in the prison system. And so I always quote Martin Silstre saying that the prison facility itself is maximum security, but society is just an extension and it’s a minimum security prison. And that radicalism is at the core of Black anarchism. The former Panthers and civil rights activists, BLA members, and others who shaped it over time, they represent a radical departure from these sort of standard and doctrinaire approaches to conventional leftism because they saw and they felt and lived a lot of those shortcomings of past eras and they came to anarchism as an alternative because we’re supposed to evolve, we’re supposed to try different things, we’re supposed to learn and grow.

But so much of that journey for them, specifically in the more modern era of black anarchists in the shadow of black power and coming forth from then, they learned and came to that place through the prison system and through incarceration and through their struggles with repression and the destruction of the party and so much of the repression that happened during the black power era.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And you argued that the left must reject the state’s identifying revolutionary behavior or revolutionaries as criminal like Asada and George Jackson. I was talking to a professor who had her class read the confessions of Nat Turner, but more importantly, they was doing some work around that. And the question she offered them was, she was saying, define the act, basically define what he did, how did you see that? Did you see that as criminal savagery or what? And they say, nah, it wasn’t criminal, it was revolutionary. So why is it important we don’t identify their behavior as criminal as opposed to revolutionary? Why is that important that we do that, the left do that?

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. I think that there’s a lot of different things that we have to confront there and some of the stuff that you’re talking about. When it comes to criminality itself, it brings up a lot of things for me to be considered criminal, to be labeled criminal, it’s not something that everyone has the option of getting away from. Some people might be able to get a haircut or put on the right clothes and carry themselves in a certain way to avoid being characterized as someone who looks like they could be capable of criminality. When it comes to us Black people, our skin alone is enough to make us be considered a criminal. So we don’t really have an easy way out. It doesn’t matter what class we’re in. It doesn’t matter how much money we have. It doesn’t matter what kind of clothes we have on.

Criminality is something that we have projected onto us because we live in a white supremacist society that equates blackness with criminality. So you can have someone like the president of the United States, former president of the United States, Barack Obama, who was talked about like he was a criminal and like he was incapable of being the head of state because of his skin. And to bring it more, to connect it better for this conversation, to make a stronger connection around this, not only did he get characterized as a criminal while he was the president, he also was having his citizenship question. You remember he always had to talk about his birth certificate and where he was born. So that brings back in that point that I was trying to make earlier about black people not being considered citizens, whether we have citizenship or not. I just use that example to say that for us as black people, we can’t really seem to get out of that categorization because we live in a white supremacist society.

The other thing that is bringing up for me is the law in and of itself. Criminal acts under the law are completely subjective to the ruling class and who has power. That’s who decides what is and isn’t against the law. At one point, it was against the law for black people to be educated.

At one point, it was against the law for black people to use facilities to go to the bathroom or to go in certain establishments where there was no welcoming of black people because of segregation. So if you look at how the law has been shaped and changed across time, criminality is ultimately something that has to be called into question totally because the law is not objective. It’s subjective to the whims of the ruling class and the ruling establishment. If they say that it’s illegal for people in prison to get an education, then it’s illegal. If they say it’s illegal for a person who’s seeking asylum from another country to come to the border and make an asylum request, then it’s illegal.

Mansa Musa:

But

William C. Anderson:

We can know that there’s nothing wrong with us receiving an education or people who are incarcerated at receiving an education. We should know that there’s nothing wrong with us being able to access the same resources or go in the same establishments that white people would be able to go into. We know that those things are completely reasonable, but for some reason, we also still buy into this idea that the law is the law and we have to follow it. That’s absolutely not true.

What we need to do is determine what resources and conditions we want to see for our lives and know that people like George Jackson, like Asada, like so many of the Black political prisoners and Black radicals and revolutionaries who came before us, who broke the law intentionally, including as the Black anarchist, Martin Sostri pointed out, Martin Luther King, he has an essay called Martin Luther King was a lawbreaker. That’s exactly what that essay is about. He was pointing out that even the most pacifistic and peaceful people we think of throughout Black history had to break the law in order to get us where we are. So you cannot be scared and fear criminality to such an extent that you think that following the law is going to keep you safe or is going to make your conditions better. It’s absolutely not. And again, to go back to Martin Soster and quote him again, I know I’m quoting him a lot in this interview, but to quote Martin Soster again, he says, “It would absolutely be foolish to think that the rules of your oppressor are going to be what gets you free.” And that’s in essence kind of what I’m trying to get at here.

You can’t follow these rules and laws and think that it’s going to work out for you in the end when it was created by the people who want to keep you in the place where you

Mansa Musa:

Are. And I think that’s the overarching reality of it is that they create the laws to maintain their power and to maintain the authority of Donald Trump. When he got elected, the first thing he did, he went down to the Department of Justice and weaponized it. He had a press conference at the Department of Justice say that Attorney General said, “Look, you going to have a lot of work on your hand because you’re going to be responsible for going out policing the world.” And when he weaponized the Justice Department to the extent they had never been weaponized before, you had what we see estoppel style techniques being perpetuated on United States citizens. Talk about your critique of Panther Poem and how it’s being romanticized, the Black Panther Party aesthetics. And how do you compare that evolution to the equality of women and their ability to organize?

William C. Anderson:

We don’t really have, in my opinion, we don’t really have a functioning left in the US. So people cosplaying the Panthers is the result of that, I would say, to some extent. When you don’t have formations that effectively serve and meet the material needs of everyday people, that’s what you end up with. You end up with a lot of aesthetics. And that’s kind of what leftism is today, especially amongst my generation and younger. It’s largely these competing ideological factions who attach and project themselves onto various movements and governments and stuff around the world while failing to create anything comparable at home. So you don’t really get much beyond aesthetics when you have these denominations of different leftists who aren’t really materializing anything. They’re just trying to look the part or talk the part,

Mansa Musa:

And

William C. Anderson:

They’re kind of really just a lot of rhetoric. That’s really what the left is today, in my opinion. Sister Jenina Irvin, who is also a Black anarchist, and she was the last editor of the Black Panther Party newspaper. She’s someone who’s taught me quite a lot about this, as well as you brought up this point about women. She’s taught me quite a bit about the effectiveness of women in the party. And everyone should go by her book, just came out. It’s called Driven by the Movement, but she disturbs this narrative that Panther women were all miserable and they were oppressed within the Black Panther Party. She kind of pushes back on that a little bit. And that’s not to say that there wasn’t a real threat of violence or issues around gender within the party. I don’t think that that’s what she’s saying, but what she does is she talks about the fact that Black women were the Black Panther Party, and Black women did a large majority of work within the Black Panther Party, and some of the most impactful efforts of the Black Panther Party, like the survival programs, which would later be called intercommunalism, were brought to life by Black women’s labor within the Black

Mansa Musa:

Panther

William C. Anderson:

Party. So regardless of what issues might have happened at different times throughout different eras of the party, she’s always kind of made it clear to me and taught me that no matter what, it was Black women who were making the Black Panther Party function.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah, it’s true.

William C. Anderson:

So I think that to bring those two points together, we have to have a real genuine, honest awareness of what the Black Panther Party was because even though a lot of people from my generation and younger generations might look at the Panthers with a very, very romantic view, I think that a lot of times what gets lost is the understanding that the Black Panther Party was an organization that had different eras, different chapters, and different phases throughout its life and its existence. And there was a lot of different turns. There was a lot of different splits. There was a lot of different things that occurred within the party, and it wasn’t just this one thing that you can try to dress up in cosplay. You have to learn from what happened, what transpired, what did and didn’t work, and try to grow from that, not try to mimic it, not try to claim it in the name of your ideology, not try to reduce it to something that it wasn’t.

It’s kind of part of the story of Black anarchism. So many of the Black anarchists who were former Black Panther Party members constantly talk about how we need to learn from the legacy of the Black Panther Party, not just try to mimic it, not try to cosplay it. So it’s a challenge for the current generation to do that and to move past aesthetics and to actually go outside and learn through praxis.

Mansa Musa:

And I think to your point, Kathleen Cleaver, she was organized the Free Huey campaign. She was instrumental in organizing that ultimately got them released. Elaine Brown, while he was in exile in the central committee, the majority of the central committee at the party at that time was women, Erica Huggins, Elaine Brown, and other sisters, they ran the party and they ran the free breakfast program. They maintained the infrastructure of the party in order for it to survive under the onslaught of the FBI. But talk about Angela Davis famously asked our prisons obsolete and has since suggested the nation state itself is obsolete. How does her abolition framework serve as a pillar for anti-state black anarchy today?

William C. Anderson:

I think that Angela Davis’s work is something that has been absolutely fundamental in terms of answering a lot of the questions that many of us have had about abolition. And the abolition conversation faces many of its own challenges because I think when we saw an Increasing popularity around conversations regarding abolition, so much of it centered on the police, the abolition of the police, the abolition of prisons, and oftentimes it stopped there, didn’t go beyond that for a lot of people. And I know that Angela Davis has also raised questions about the nation state form itself too. So I think that in much of her work, she’s provided a lot of foundations that we can learn from and grow from. And I think that with regard to how I approach her legacy, her life and her work and think about abolition, I think what’s important for me is to take abolition and think about it in a way that expands beyond prisons and policing, which is where a lot of people stop.

And I’m not saying that that’s where she stops, but I’m saying that I think a lot of people have a fear about taking that even further.

Mansa Musa:

So

William C. Anderson:

I’m working with a lot of the legacy of her life and also her scholarship and my personal work. And I’m trying to take abolition, that question of abolition further to the state. What divided the socialist movement more largely was this question around the abolition of the state. You had some people in the original historical socialist movement who wanted to reform the state, who wanted to control it, and who wanted to try to use that to create a better life for people and for the masses. Those socialists who would later become identified as anarchists were the ones who wanted to try to build outside of the state, who wanted to try to build through collectives and federations, and who wanted to try to create a life that wasn’t dependent upon, again, what we know is this monopoly on violence.

The state is a colonial construct. So I think that for me, when it comes to abolition and when it comes to my work, and when it comes to the influence of someone like Angela Davis, I’ve learned a lot from her about what the state is capable of through these institutions, through these forms of violence that it produces, like the prison, like policing. And I want to try to encourage people with my work to take it further and to not just try to reform it into something that’s absent of a few forms of violence that it uses, but instead question this construct altogether and ask why we need it in our lives. Can we not organize society free from any sort of colonial structures? Can we not try to build a society that’s liberatory for people that doesn’t centralize power in a monopoly on violence? I’m just asking these questions, and I think that it’s absolutely possible, but we have to at least be open to looking at ourselves as capable of doing so first.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah. I think Lennar, in this analysis, Lennar’s state and revolution, he identified the state as being an instrumental deoppressor and for the intent and the purpose of maintaining control over people. The whole concept of the state is to regulate people in some form, shape, or fashion that’s helpful and maintaining the status quo. Talk about-

William C. Anderson:

Absolutely. The thing that you … If I can just say something about that, I think that what you just said there is extremely important when it comes to that history. You made a great point because you brought up linen and if we go back again to the historical socialist movement, there wasn’t necessarily a disagreement on that point you just made. There might’ve been some people who thought differently, I’m not going to say everybody thought one way, but generally whether you were talking about the anarchist side of the socialist movement or whether you were talking about the status side of the socialist movement, it was generally agreed upon by many people that the state was an oppressive instrument.

It was just you had some people who said, “We need to get control of the oppressive instrument and try to use it to liberate people. ” And some people who said that’s not going to happen. And so at this point in time, I just think it’s really important to look at all of the state socialist experiments where people were able to seize the state or get control of the state and ask ourselves what happened to them, where are they at now? And if it makes sense to continue to try to take that path on a quest for liberation, on a quest for betterment. Because if people across the board were saying all that long time ago, the state is an oppressive instrument, we just need to figure out how we’re going to approach it. And we’re at this point in 2026 and we’re still asking that same question and having that same debate, that feels kind of silly to me.

The question has been answered by history. So we have to try to figure out something that is different instead of, again, just like when we were talking about with the Black Panther Party, instead of just trying to repeat these same approaches over and over and over again, that’s just rhetoric. It’s just empty rhetoric. If we’re all just saying the same thing that somebody said 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, there’s nothing liberatory about that. That’s called dogma. That just means you-

It just means you’re stuck and you don’t know what to do. And instead of admitting, I need to go outside and figure out what to do, you just repeat somebody else’s ideas and somebody else’s words and you stay stuck and nothing changes, shit gets worse. And we’re looking at the reality of that right now in the United States.

Mansa Musa:

And in terms of we recognize that francism being what it is, you had this perspective that in terms of the state, how is a movable phenomenon based on the need of the oppressor, state rights when the narrative is suppress the rights of people, but then Trump turned around and say, “No, the federal government need to get in there because your state is operating outside the norm and interfering with our ability to be repressed.” So the whole concept of the state is designed to meet the need of the oppressor and not design for the purpose of helping people self-actualize, get independence, get sovereignty, get stability. Everything is regulated in the state. Talk about in your conclusion when you talk about Gail Scott Herron, you say question was, who will survive America? And given the rise of fascism, wealth and inequality, you suggest that if we have to ask that question, perhaps America shouldn’t exist.

Talk about that.

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty evident to me that the United States is probably the biggest threat to the planet

Mansa Musa:

That

William C. Anderson:

Exists in the world today. I mean, when you look at what’s happening currently with the Imperialist War and attack on Iran, when you look at the exploitation of the global South through capitalism, when you look at the relentless onslaught that the US military has on the environment with its pollution, with its degradation and destruction, when you look at the genocide in Palestine, when you look at all of the destruction in Haiti and everywhere, the indigenous genocide that created this country, all of it tells us that it is our central role as radicals and as people who are freedom seeking people and who are interested in liberation to focus on making sure that empire is not safe, that it’s not something that continues to stand. Empire is something that shouldn’t exist. So you can’t sit there and say, “Perhaps we can continue trying to reform it and make it more palatable for different groups of people to be included.” That is not something that is really feasible, in my opinion.

I think that ultimately we have to be having a conversation that is questioning the utility or the purpose of its existence at all.

If we think that its existence is something that is going to be safe for the world, then maybe it would be a different conversation, but we all should be able to agree at this point. I mean, it seems like a reality that we could see, or it seems like it’s something that’s quite plausible rather, that we could see nuclear warfare in the near future in our lives, and we should not be tolerating anything that even makes that possible. We shouldn’t be tolerating anything that makes the state of Israel and its actions possible. It’s a country that has for sure led a lot of people to think that it is inevitable and indestructible and untouchable, but that’s not the case. The rise of Donald Trump and the current situations that are playing out in the United States tell us that this country is actually very vulnerable and it is made up of a lot of different elements and a lot of different groups of people in the far right who aren’t necessarily strategic or intelligent, but they’re just brutal.

And we have to be able to differentiate between the two. So the challenge for us to actually confront empire and be a real threat to it, it requires some honesty about, again, ending the existence of empire and accepting the fact that a lot of the people who declare us enemies and who you’ll be in opposition to, that they’re not invincible, but they are ruthless and they have to be thought about as such. When you’re going against ruthless people, vindictive and evil people, you have to make a decision to be just as willing to confront them in opposition and be realistic about what it takes to actually defeat something like that instead of being overly optimistic that maybe they’ll just figure it out and change. So that’s really the point that we’re at. Empire is not going to change, fascism’s not going to change, and we have to be truthful and honest about what it’s going to take for us to figure out the solution domestically and internally inside of the United States instead of getting caught up on other things that aren’t necessarily the task at hand.

The task at hand for radicals in the United States is to figure out how to bring an end to empire.

source: Anarchist News

Oregon DOC Appears to Have Disappeared Portland Political Prisoner Malik Muhammad

The Oregon Department of Corrections appears to have effectively disappeared Malik Muhammad, a Black Palestinian anarchist and antifascist prisoner serving one of the longest sentences handed to a protester after the 2020 George Floyd uprising.

According to court documents, Muhammad threw a Molotov cocktail at police in Oregon in 2020. In 2022, they pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and received a concurrent 10-year federal and state sentence in Oregon State Prison.

On Monday, March 30, 2026, members of Muhammad’s support team noticed something alarming: their profile had vanished from the prison messaging system GettingOut. Around the same time, their name no longer appeared in Oregon’s inmate search database. This disappearance happened in the wake of a call-in campaign to once again get Muhammad out of solitary confinement.

Since then, family and supporters have been scrambling for answers, calling Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution (EOCI) and multiple Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) offices. They’ve gotten almost nothing in return.

WWFU has also made dozens of calls across the Oregon prison system in an attempt to locate them and have been unsuccessful in getting any of our questions answered.

Calls to Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP), including the Special Management Housing (SMH) unit where Muhammad had previously been held in solitary confinement, suggested they may have been at court, but provided no confirmation.

One official in the Office of Population Management confirmed only that Muhammad had been moved to a “confidential location,” a designation repeatedly invoked while officials declined to provide any verifiable information about their whereabouts.

Staff at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution (EOCI) confirmed that Muhammad is no longer housed there. The Oregon Department of Corrections’ Public Information Officer did not provide answers, instead directing further inquiries elsewhere.

What followed was a bureaucratic loop: multiple phone numbers, referrals, and repeated contact attempts, none of which produced verifiable information about Muhammad’s location or condition.

Muhammad’s mother was given the same explanation. When she pressed for clarification, she was told that placement in a “confidential location” is determined on a case-by-case basis and could be due to medical, mental health, safety, operational, or court-related reasons, according to the Office of Population Management. No further details were provided.

These explanations, or lack-thereof, raised more questions than they answer.

People in state custody do not simply disappear from public records. Prison transfers generate paper trails. Locations are logged. Systems update. None of that appears to have happened here, or, at the very least, none of it is being disclosed.

As of publication, supporters say they have no idea where Muhammad is. They have not spoken to them since they were placed in solitary confinement prior to their disappearance. No federal agency, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has acknowledged taking custody.

Muhammad is, for all practical purposes, gone.

A Record of Isolation and Torture

Muhammad’s disappearance comes after years of extreme isolation.

Their support committee documented on Muhammad’s blog that  they had spent more than 250 days in solitary confinement in 2024 alone, cut off from any meaningful human contact and communication.

Solitary confinement on that scale is not just punitive, it is widely recognized as torture.

The United Nations’s “Mandela Rules” state that more than 15 days in isolation constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, and can amount to torture. Decades of research have shown that prolonged isolation can cause severe psychological damage, including hallucinations, paranoia, cognitive decline, and suicidal ideation.

Muhammad has already endured conditions that meet that threshold many times over.

Now, supporters say, even the minimal visibility that remained has been stripped away.

“This is entirely different,” members of Muhammad’s support network say. “We are scared. We know nothing about Malik’s condition, location, or why ODOC has taken the extraordinary step of blocking all access and information.”

From Prosecution to Disappearance

Following Muhammad’s sentencing, prosecuted by Nathan Vasquez, their supporters exclaimed the severity of the charges and sentence already reflected a broader political crackdown on antifascist and anti-police protesters, believing that sentence was never just about the alleged conduct, but was about making an example.

An antifascist and anarchist protester. A moment of mass uprising. A state eager to reassert control.

Now, they argue, that same logic has escalated beyond prosecution and punishment into something even more extreme: disappearance.

Political Repression by Design

The use of secrecy inside prison systems is not new. “Confidential” placements and communication blackouts are often justified under the language of security.

But advocates say that when the state refuses to disclose even the most basic information, such as where a prisoner is being held, whether they are safe, whether they are alive, it crosses a line from control into outright repression.

Without transparency, there is no accountability. Without contact, there is no oversight.

And without public pressure, there is nothing to stop it from happening again.

Supporters are now calling for urgent action. They are urging people to contact the Oregon Department of Corrections, elected officials and to amplify prior reporting on Muhammad’s treatment.

Because what is happening is no longer ambiguous.

A prisoner has been removed from public record.
Their location is being withheld.
Contact has been cut off.
And the state is refusing to explain why.

Under international human rights standards, this pattern has a name: enforced disappearance. The detention of a person followed by a refusal to disclose their fate or whereabouts. It is a practice historically associated with authoritarian regimes and political repression.

The Oregon Department of Corrections may use bureaucratic language such as “confidential placement,” “operational reasons,” but the effect is the same: a human being has been made to vanish behind the walls of the state.

This is not a clerical error. It is not a routine transfer. It is an escalation.

And if it is allowed to stand, it sets a precedent: that the state can make political prisoners disappear, and face no consequences for it.

This is bigger than one case. When the state can make a prisoner vanish and refuse to account for it, it exposes a system built not on justice, but on control and impunity. Naming it matters. Resisting it matters more. Because what is happening here is not an anomaly, it is an escalation.

Who to call:

ODOC– (503)945-9090

OSP General Line– (503)378-2453

OSP SMH– (503)378-2597

Brynne Xin at the Office of Population Management–

(503)871-5496

EOCI– (541)276-0700

From We Will Free Us, by Alissa Azar

Read the original article here: https://www.wewillfreeus.org/oregon-doc-appears-to-have-disappeared-portland-protester-malik-muhammad/

BAP’s 9th Anniversary: Turn Imperialist Wars into Peoples’ Wars Against Imperialism

For the past nine years, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) has sought to advance the radical Black, anti-war, pro-peace, and anti-imperialist movements through practice and uncompromising analysis grounded in our Principles of Unity and a People(s)-Centered Human Rights approach. The U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination’s imperialist brutality and lawlessness currently on display on both domestic and global fronts is intended to demobilize and destabilize us – in just the last few months, this lawlessness has enabled the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Combatant Cilia Flores, and the bombing, invasion, and ongoing intervention in Venezuela; the heightened strangulation and attacks on Cuba; the war on Iran; continued occupation and destabilization of Haiti; and murders and occupations of U.S. cities by federal agents. However, this very brutality and lawlessness heightens the contradictions brought on by the Pan-European colonial/capitalist patriarchy and clarifies the stakes of our commitment to challenging and defeating the war against our people.

Importantly, BAP was founded on April 4, 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech that reconnected with the Black Radical Peace tradition by adding his voice of opposition to the murderous U.S. war machine unleashed on the people of Vietnam. In this, he argued that the U.S. was the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet, and that a radical revolution of values was needed to defeat “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism [i.e. capitalism], and militarism.” BAP’s work is part of Dr. King’s unfinished fight against these forces that have only intensified in the last 59 years and continue waging war on our people.

To understand the nature of such warfare is to see through the veil of imperialist global conflict and recognize it for what it fundamentally is: a continuation of class war. The United States’ recent global wars, particularly the full-throated illegalities of the post-9/11 era, represent a qualitative shift. This external aggression has a direct domestic byproduct: intense repression and the engineered splintering of the population, all while funneling working-class tax dollars into the military-industrial complex that supports imperialist violence globally.

However, within this grim reality lies a critical opening for forces like BAP and all others who struggle for a revolutionary transformation of society, such as the communal economy and governance within the Bolivarian Revolution or the development achievements through national sovereignty in Iran. The system’s brutality via imperialist domination, while intended to demobilize, must sharpen the resolve for us and all the African/Black, colonized, and oppressed working masses of the globe. What we have witnessed, particularly since the Al-Aqsa Flood and the subsequent U.S.-Israeli genocidal campaign on Gaza, is the removal of remaining liberal pretenses that thinly disguised the theft of land, labor, and life that capitalism requires to sustain itself. We must name the truth, that this process, this structure of U.S.-led imperialism, seeks only death to establish and maintain “full spectrum dominance”.

In this context, we focus on defeating this war against our people. This requires not merely exposing the contradictions of U.S.-led imperialism, but turning imperialist wars on our people into peoples’ war against imperialism. The radical, revolutionary, and progressive forces that understand this must find ways to strike strategic blows against the imperialist war machine that is intent on destroying our lives, livelihoods, environments, and the planet. For BAP and other forces in the radical African/Black movement, this can only be done effectively by engaging and supporting the masses of our people to prepare for and conduct a peoples’ war for liberation.

In our ninth year, BAP recommits to this protracted struggle through our consistent campaign frameworks that are increasingly focused on moving from simply exposing the contradictions of imperialism toward political clarity and consciousness expressed as organized, sustained activity that builds legitimate resistance to U.S. imperialism and militarism:

• No Compromise No Retreat: Defeat the War Africans/Black People in the U.S. and Abroad. Our core campaign framework, which includes emerging efforts such as the Climate, Environment, and Militarism working group.

• U.S. Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM

• U.S./NATO Out of Our Americas: Make Our Americas a Zone of Peace!, and

• “MOVE THE GAMES”: Boycott the World Cup and Boycott the U.S and Israel

In the context of this protracted collective struggle, BAP continues to forge a path between analysis and action through these campaign frameworks that are the trenches in which we fight for a future beyond the logic of capital.  The decade ahead demands that we deepen this struggle, sharpen our ideological clarity, enhance our activity, and continue to build a movement capable of not only opposing the machinery of death but of building a new world in its place.

Not one drop of blood from the poor and working class to defend capitalist dictatorship!

No Compromise No Retreat!

souce: Black Alliance For Peace

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Jacksonville SDS holds teach-in on the Black Panthers

Jacksonville, FL – On Wednesday March 12, Jacksonville Students for a Democratic Society held a teach-in on the history of SDS and the Black Liberation Movement.

[...]

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Brother Khalid, Presente! — BAP

The Black Alliance for Peace mourns the transition of Brother Khalid Raheem on February 14, 2026, and sends our condolences to his family and his comrades. Brother Khalid was part of many organizations and formations throughout his revolutionary life, including the Black Panther Party, National Council for Urban Peace and Justice, the New Afrikan Independence Party, the National Black Radical Political Congress, the Jericho Movement, the Gang Peace Council of Western Pennsylvania, the National Black Liberation Movement Unity Initiative, and many others. He was a revolutionary organizer, a prolific writer, and a dear comrade.

Brother Khalid joined the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1970. Involved in various campaigns and programs of the BPP, Khalid was arrested and incarcerated for over ten years. As a political prisoner, he embraced the teachings and practices of Islam, and struggled from inside to fight for the rights and liberation of all prisoners. After his release, Brother Khalid organized extensively in community in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area and continued involvement with local and national initiatives and organizations

BAP had the honor of collaborating with Brother Khalid and participating alongside him and many other revolutionary comrades at the most recent National Black Radical Political Convention in October 2025 in Philadelphia. There, Brother Khalid articulated as clear as ever the need for an independent and revolutionary Black political process based in principled unity. He was an elder who never gave up in the struggle for the liberation of oppressed peoples, and he contributed to our people’s liberation and anti-colonial struggle until his last breath. We salute Brother Khalid and embrace his example of committed, principled struggle.

Today, we celebrate his life and honor his struggle. Brother Khalid Raheem, presente!

Image: Khalid Raheem, at the front of the line, marching with the Black Panthers. Photograph: Stephen Shames/Polaris

source: BAP

The Anti-Imperialist Imperative: Confronting Globalized Fascism

Comrades, friends, colleagues—

We are living through a decisive historical rupture.

This is not a moment of policy disagreement. It is not a moment of partisan confusion among anti-imperialists or even simply a crisis of democracy. We are in the midst of a deepening capitalist crisis so profound that capital has abandoned even the performance
of its commitment to liberal enlightenment values.

The institutions it created—
the United Nations system,
the so-called rules-based international order,
the human rights regime—
have been stripped of their moral veneer.

What remains is naked power.

The doctrine now is simple: Full spectrum dominance — by any means necessary.

And when empire adopts that posture, clarity becomes a revolutionary obligation. It is imperative—especially for those of us operating in the imperial core—that we understand something fundamental.

At moments like this,
positions that appear nuanced, balanced, moderate—
positions that seek compromise with reaction,
that dilute anti-imperialism in the name of complexity—
do not remain neutral.

They objectively amplify the forces of reaction. They legitimize the structures of domination. They align, whether consciously or not, with Western and U.S. imperialism. Intentions do not negate political effect. In periods of fascist consolidation, confusion is not accidental.
It is produced.

As one left formation in Iran and its diaspora has correctly stated:

At this stage of Western imperialist domination, the global contradiction between labor and capital is embodied in the contradiction between the masses of the world and imperialism. The main axis of struggle today is the defense of nations and peoples against imperialism’s political, economic, and military domination.

That does not erase secondary contradictions. But determining which contradiction is primary—
which contradiction must define the agenda of struggle— is a matter of political life and death. This requires dialectical clarity. It requires precision. It requires the ability to analyze the totality
and not be trapped in fragments. Because imperialism thrives on fragmentation.

Imperialism advances a fatal illusion. It tells the oppressed:

You can achieve social justice
within the framework of imperial domination.

You can secure democratic freedoms
while remaining subordinate to empire.

You can fight for human rights
without confronting the global system that negates them.

And perhaps most dangerously—

It tells us that struggle can remain purely national.

That what happens domestically is separable from the global architecture of domination. This is ideological mystification. The domestic and the global are fused.

Look at the United States.

What we are witnessing is not random authoritarianism. It is the maturation of a coherent architecture of repression. A national security state that fuses: Intelligence agencies.
Militarized policing, surveillance systems, and ideological discipline into a single integrated mechanism of control.

This system is not reactive. It is proactive. It does not wait for crisis. It anticipates it. It prepares for it. It disciplines populations in advance of rupture.

This is not about safety. It is about managing dissent. It is about stabilizing imperial order
in a moment when consent is no longer sufficient. Because a system built on exploitation, extraction, and endless expansion cannot govern through consent when its contradictions sharpen, it must govern through coercion.

Consider immigration enforcement in the United States.

ICE raids in cities, mass arrests, workplace sweeps, collaboration between federal agents and local police. This is not merely about deportation. It is about terror. It is about deterrence. It is about instilling fear so pervasive that communities retreat into silence.

Migrant communities become laboratories of repression. Spaces where techniques are tested. Where methods of fragmentation are refined. And once perfected— those techniques do not remain confined, they are generalized, expanded, normalized.

Now consider the training relationships between U.S. police forces and Israeli security forces.

This is not symbolic. Israeli policing is shaped by occupation. By counterinsurgency, by the management of a population defined as a permanent threat. It is not designed to serve a public. It is designed to dominate an enemy.

When U.S. police import these models, they import more than tactics. They import a political logic, a logic that declares:

Certain populations are not citizens.

They are risks.

They are problems.

They are enemies to be contained.

This is the fusion of foreign and domestic repression.

The techniques used to occupy abroad are now fully integrated into governance at home. Sanctions logic becomes economic discipline, counterinsurgency logic becomes urban policing and military doctrine becomes domestic policy.

The empire has come home. Not because it prefers to— But because it must.

And this is what we must understand. We are not facing isolated authoritarian tendencies. We are confronting the consolidation of globalized fascism. A system in which:

International gangsterism is normalized.
State terror is justified.
Genocide is rationalized.
Sanctions are weaponized starvation.

And all of it is framed as defense of democracy.

When barbarism becomes normalized at the global level, it will not remain external. It returns inward. It reshapes the domestic terrain. It produces a Hobbesian international order— where the most powerful impose medieval forms of domination to preserve their interests. And once that normalization is complete— The descent accelerates.

Beyond Iran we have Venezuela, we have Cuba, occupation in Haiti, continued colonization in Puerto Rico, and increasing domestic terror within the imperialist core of the U.S. 

So what is the task before us?

It is not reform within this globalized architecture of repression. It is not pleading with multilateral institutions that have already revealed their impotence or complicity. It is not technocratic adjustment. The task is confrontation – political confrontation, ideological confrontation and organizational confrontation.

Because only organized resistance can disrupt a system that has abandoned pretense. Anti-imperialism is not optional in this moment. It is not one tendency among many. It is the central organizing principle of the conjuncture. To misidentify the primary contradiction
is to disarm the masses. To equivocate in the face of imperial consolidation
is to assist its stabilization.

We must say clearly:

There can be no authentic struggle for human rights
that does not confront imperial domination. There can be no democratic renewal
that leaves the imperial war machine intact. There can be no social justice
inside a global order structured by extraction and control.

The choice before us is stark. Either we align our analysis with the realities of global power, or we retreat into comforting illusions.

History will not reward ambiguity. It will not excuse hesitation. The imperative is clear:

Confront imperialism.

Expose the unity of global and domestic repression.

Build movements that understand
that the fight for national liberation,
the fight against sanctions and militarization, the fight against racialized policing and migrant terror— Are not separate fights. They are one struggle. And only by confronting the totality
can we begin to dismantle it.

And for this programmatic imperative at this historical moment  – there must be:

No Compromise, No Retreat! 

All Power to the people! 

Thank you.

Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).

source: Black Agenda Report