PRLF Call to Brothers and Sisters
in the Dungeons of AmerikkkaJoin the October 22 National Day of Protest
Revolutionary Worker #974, September 20, 1998
To Our Brothers and Sisters in the Dungeons of Amerikkka,
We are calling on you to join us on October 22 for the National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, Oppression and the Criminalization of a Generation. The October 22 Coalition has issued a call that states in part: "1998--The epidemic of police brutality continues to intensify all across the U.S. Every year hundreds are shot down in cold blood, beaten to death or suffocated with pepper spray... 1998--1.7 million people are in prison across the country, most of them young, Black or Latino, and most are in prison for non-violent offenses. Congress is debating lowering the execution age to 15 and imprisoning juveniles with hardened adult offenders. A whole generation of our youth is being treated like criminals based on how they dress, their attitude, the color of their skin or where they live. Who will stop the criminalization of a generation?...More than 100 overtly `political prisoners' languish in U.S. jails--people like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier--simply because they dared to resist this brutality and repression. Who will stop this growing government repression?"
On October 22, we call on prisoners to find the ways to be part of forging a national movement of resistance against police brutality. Some of us will be marching and demonstrating in the streets, others at rallies, speaking at churches, mosques and synagogues, and still others from behind the bars of prisons. We all will be WEARING BLACK that day.
Brothers and Sisters:
To those of you who have suffered at the vicious hands of this oppressive and racist system, the police, the courts, the prison guards...who have endured the beatings, the tortures, the isolation, the adjustment centers and death row in the hell-holes the government calls correctional institutions...and who have stood up and resisted this brutality, WE SAY JOIN US ON THIS DAY OF PROTEST.
To the YOUTH who have been railroaded and warehoused in prison, who have refused to submit to authority by a system that offers you nothing, WE SAY JOIN US ON THIS DAY OF PROTEST.
To the WOMEN who have been forced into jails for trying to keep yourselves and your families alive and for your rebellious attitude to this patriarchal system, whose "crime" is poverty, who have been abused and raped at the hands of the prison authorities, who face the loss of your children, WE SAY JOIN US ON THIS DAY OF PROTEST.
To our IMMIGRANT BROTHERS AND SISTERS, whose only crime is trying to escape the desperate poverty of your home countries, dominated by the U.S., only to find more grinding poverty and brutality right in the belly of the beast, WE SAY JOIN US ON THIS DAY OF PROTEST.
To those who are incarcerated for your POLITICAL BELIEFS AND CONVICTIONS, who have refused to capitulate to the prison authorities, who have been denied parole year after year, WE SAY JOIN US IN THIS DAY OF PROTEST.
We, on the outside, have not forgotten you and your struggle. We will stand with you and with the hundreds of thousands who fill the prisons. Our hearts, our minds and our determination are with you. Your voices, your stories, and your protest must be heard and felt on October 22, 1998.
One important way of participating will be by sending us your words, your art, your reporting of events on the 22nd.
Call on your friends and families on the outside to join in the day of protest.
The Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund (PRLF) will continue to struggle to raise the funds necessary to shine the light of revolutionary literature behind the walls of prisons throughout the U.S. Ask your friends and families on the outside to contribute to these efforts.
Send your correspondence to PRLF, P.O. Box 3486 Merchandise Mart, Chicago, IL 60654.
WEAR BLACK, OCTOBER 22nd!
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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