Black August: The History They Don’t Want You to Know

What is Black August, and why has it become one of the most significant traditions of remembrance and resistance in the Black freedom struggle?

In this special episode of Rethinking Freedom, I explore the origins of Black August, its historical roots, and why it continues to be commemorated around the world. We examine the lives and sacrifices of those whose struggles helped shape this tradition and discuss why the movement to support incarcerated activists remains as relevant today as ever.

This episode explores:

* The origins and meaning of Black August
* George Jackson, Jonathan Jackson, the San Quentin rebellion, and the birth of a movement
* The lives and ongoing advocacy of political prisoners, including Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jalil Muntaqim
* The campaign to hold the United States accountable under the United Nations Genocide Convention, from the 1951 We Charge Genocide petition led by W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, William L. Patterson, and others, to contemporary efforts
* The findings of the 2021 International Tribunal that concluded the United States has committed genocide against Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples
* Why the United States often criticizes other nations for holding political prisoners while many activists argue it does not recognize political prisoners within its own borders
* Current issues including mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings, environmental racism, educational inequity, health disparities, and economic inequality
* Practical ways you can support political prisoners, their families, and organizations working for justice

Whether you are hearing about Black August for the first time or have commemorated it for years, this episode offers historical context, critical analysis, and a call to action.

Join the conversation and share your thoughts in the comments.

Premieres Monday, August 3, 2026

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

There is a month in this country's calendar that the greeting card companies don't sell for, that most classrooms skip past, and that most Americans have never been taught to observe. It doesn't commemorate a holiday, it commemorates a rebellion. Every August, in prison yards and cell blocks across the United States of America, incarcerated men and women fast. They study. They refuse to participate in commerce inside the prison walls. They read the words of a man who was murdered before he turned 30. They remember five names most of the country has never heard. And if you are watching on the YouTube channel, I would love for you to put in the comments if you have heard of Black August. Welcome to Rethinking Freedom. I am Aya Fubara and Ellie, your host, and today we are doing something that does not come lightly at all. We are spending our next 50-so minutes on Black August, where it came from, who it honors, who is still living it right now behind bars, and why the United States government has spent more than 70 years refusing to say the word that a room full of black intellectuals used to describe what was happening to their people, to our people, to my people. Genocide. Before we go back to 1970, I want to tell you why this matters right now in 2026. Because Black August is not a museum piece, it is a living tradition, and the men whose names launched it have living successors. People who at this very moment are in cells in Pennsylvania in federal facilities, appealing to the United Nations because they have run out of options in American courts. Black August asks us to hold two things at once. First, to grieve and honor specific people who were killed by the state. And second, and may I also add, other indigenous people. And second, to understand that their debts were not random. They were and are the predictable outcome of a system. That's a hard needle to thread on the radio or on a podcast or on YouTube, wherever you're viewing us today. And we're very grateful for your support and your viewership. But it is the needle that George Jackson threaded in his own writing. And it's the needle that I'm going to try and thread today with you. George Jackson said this in his book, Soledad Brother. Settle your quarrels. Come together. Understand the reality of our situation. Understand that fascism is already here. That people are already dying who could be saved. That generations more will live poor, butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done. Discover your humanity and your love in revolution. To understand Black August, you have to understand what California's prisons looked like at the end of the 1960s. Solidide, San Quintin, Folsom. These may be names that mean nothing to you, but these were not simply places of confinement. Guards were in multiple documented incidents accused of deliberately provoking violence between black and white prisoners, of shooting into yard fights, of using solitary confinement as a weapon against political organizing. And this is not just history, because it's happening again, even now. And with some of the legislation that is coming down regarding data centers and whether people can protest and how they can protest, this is an issue we should all be paying attention to. In January 1970, a guard at Soledad shot and killed three black prisoners during a yard fight. They were Cleveland Edwards, Alvin Miller, and W.L. Nolan, a mentor and friend of George Jackson. A grand jury ruled the killings justified. Days later, a white guard was found beaten to death inside the prison. Three black prisoners were charged with his murder. George Jackson, Flita Dromgo, and John Clutchette. They became known as the Soledad Brothers. Sit with that sequence for a second, if you may. Three black men are shot dead by a Dart. A grand jury calls it justified. And when a guard turns up dead days later, it's three black prisoners who get charged with murder, including one who'd already spent a decade in prison for a $70 gas station robbery. And most of that decade he had spent in solitary confinement. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. That's the world George Jackson was writing from. Inside Jackson, and I mean when I say inside, I mean inside prison, Jackson read Marx, Engels, Mao, Franz Van. He became, in the words of scholars and comrades alike, one of the most sophisticated revolutionary theorists to emerge from an American prison cell. In 1970, he published Soledad Brother, a collection of his prison letters, which I highly recommend every one of you read during this month, Black August. His book became an international bestseller and made him one of the most recognized political prisoners in the world. He was appointed a field marshal in the Black Panther Party from inside prison. George Jackson said, blood in my eye. I've had enough. Six black and Latino prisoners were charged in the guards' deaths. They became known as the San Quentin Six. And after a lengthy trial, they were acquitted of the murder and conspiracy charges. Now, the official account of that day has always been disputed by those who knew George Jackson well, including basic questions about how a gun got into one of the most heavily surveilled units in the California prison system. Now, we may never have a settled answer to exactly what happened in that yard. What is not disputed though is this a 29-year-old man, convicted at age 17 for a $70 robbery, one of the most influential black political thinkers of his generation, was dead. One year to the day after his younger brother was killed trying to free him. This younger brother was Jonathan Jackson. And on August 7th, 1970, he walked into the Marin County Courthouse in San Rafael, California, armed and took over a courtroom. He was there to free his older brother. Jonathan handed guns to three imprisoned men on trial that day. James McLean, William Christmas, and Rochelle Magee. And with George Harold Haley, the prosecutor and jurors as hostages, walked them out to a waiting van, planning to drive to a radio station to broadcast conditions inside California's prisons to the world. Let me put a pin right here and say you can go and search and see some of the stories that are coming out about some of our prisons today, including the prison in Angola, Louisiana. Well, San Quentin Guards opened fire on the van. And when it was over, Jonathan Jackson, 17 years old, William Christmas, James McLean, and Judge Haley were dead. Michelle McGee, shot and badly wounded, was the sole survivor of the van. And he would remain in prison, much of it again in solitary confinement, for 53 more years, making him one of the longest held political prisoners in the world before his release and subsequent death in 2023. A 17-year-old boy. Angela Davis, who was close to the Jackson family, was later charged with supplying the weapons Jonathan used because they were registered in her name. But she was tried and acquitted in 1972. And you can go and read up more about that and read up about those who came out in support of her and helped to fund her defense, including Aretha Franklin. It's worth just pausing on the fact that a teenager decided that armed courtroom liberation was a more realistic path to justice for his brother than the legal system in front of him. My friends and detractors. This is what despair looks like when it has nowhere else to go. And if you have studied the history of policing in the United States of America and traced it rightfully back to slave patterlers, you may have an understanding of where he is coming from. And today we have ICE massed individuals paid for with taxpayer dollars who could carry out the laws in a more humane way, but instead are also being accused of murdering people. Well, William Christmas and James McLean died in that same van that same afternoon. Men who, like Jonathan, believed a courtroom takeover was worth the risk of death. Their names are held alongside the Jacksons every August, not as footnotes, but as full participants in that act of resistance. And I know this may irk and concern some of you. But I think we should all be committed to a nation and to a judicial system where justice can really be met out to people, right? That's certainly what I hope for as an attorney. That we're truly about justice. And then there is Katari Golden, sometimes remembered as Jeffrey Galden, one of the intellectual architects of what would become the Black August tradition itself. He was organizing study and political education among prisoners at San Quentin. Why political education? For the same reasons that the first executive order in this country by um the felon in chief during this second term of his regime was to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion. For the same reason that the state of Texas, where I reside, has banned what they call CRT, critical race theory, in K through 12 schools, and they're now attacking institutions of higher education as well. Because we actually do not want people to know history, we do not want people to know the truth, we do not want people to become politically savvy. Well, on August 1st, 1978, Galden died after prison officials denied him adequate medical treatment following an injury on the prison yard. His comrades called it what they believed it to be: a slow administrative execution. Five names: Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson, William Christmas, James McLean, Katari Golden. And if you remember nothing else from the next 40 or so minutes we're going to spend together, remember those five. Because everything else we're going to talk about today grows out of the tradition built to honor them. By 1979, incarcerated organizers in California's prison system, many of them former comrades of George Jackson, formalized what had been an informal August remembrance into a deliberate practice. Black August called for fasting during daylight hours, refusing to spend money in prison commissaries, intensive study of Black history, which is American history, and revolutionary political theory. It also included physical exercise and abstention from television and radio, turning inwards towards discipline and education instead of turning towards the consumption the prison system profits from. And oh, if you want to go down a rabbit hole, check out our for-profit prison system in the United States of America. Trace those organizations, those entities that own these for-profit prisons, and where else they show up, including in the music industry. Trace the agreements that some states have signed with these for-profit prisons, indicating that they would either make sure that these for-profit prisons are 80% full, so at 80% capacity, or they will pay the difference. In other words, is the state now conspiring to ensure that they criminalize enough people to fill for-profit prisons? The tradition also folded in a wider set of August anniversaries. Marcus Garvey's birthday, Fred Hampton's birthday, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the Haitian Revolution's beginning, the march in Washington, and the death of W.E.B. Du Bois in Ghana on August 27, 1963. You can mark that date too. By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Black August had spread beyond California's prison walls, into communities across the country, into hip-hop, universities, into organizing spaces. What started as a discipline practiced by men locked in cells became a month observed by people who will never spend a night in prison, and thank God, not in solitary confinement, precisely because those men insisted their story wasn't just a prison story. It was a story about what this country sometimes does to black people who organize. So, before this broadcast, had you heard of Black August? If not, what does it mean that a decades-old tradition, spread by word of mouth through prison yards and now observed by artists and organizers nationwide still isn't part of how most of us learn US and Black history? Huh. George Jackson, Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas, James McClain, Katari Golden, the movement calls them freedom fighters. The state calls them criminals. And that gap between how a movement remembers its dead and how a government classifies them is exactly where we're headed next. Because George Jackson wasn't the last person in this country who would insist that he was a political prisoner. When, as we continue to unpack this, we must ask the question what is a political prisoner? And why does the United States refuse to use that term for any One inside its own borders, and who is still sitting in an American prison cell today, decades later, waiting, although it uses that terminology on prisoners by other governments in other countries. Well, Amnesty International and human rights bodies generally define a political prisoner as someone imprisoned wholly or partly because of their political beliefs, because of their identity or activities. Someone whose prosecution is motivated by the state's interest in silencing or punishing dissent, even when the formal charge is a standard criminal one. That last part matters. Very few people in an American prison for political organizing are actually charged with a crime called sedition or treason. And of course, we recently have seen where we had the insurrectionists of January 6th, who've all been pardoned by the felon-in-chief, and for whom he's actually tried to create a slush fund, not just for them, but allegedly for others who are in his camp. So now these people are typically charged with murder, with weapons possession, with conspiracy. The FBI's CoinTel Pro Program, another one that you should go and study, which ran from 1956 into the early 1970s, look up J. Edgar Hoover, and which the Senate's own church committee later confirmed used illegal surveillance, infiltration, and disruption against civil rights and black liberation organizations, didn't need to invent a new crime. It just needed to make sure that existing charges landed on the right people with the wrong evidence in front of juries that had already been primed to convict. The Churches Committee's 1976 report documented FBI memos explicitly describing the goal of preventing the rise of what one memo called a black messiah who could unify the movement and named Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Elijah Mohammed, and Stokely Carmichael, whom some of us also know as Kwame Ture, as figures the Bureau sought to neutralize. Now here's the official position of the United States. The United States government does not recognize the category of political prisoner as applying to anyone incarcerated on its own soil. As far as the State Department is concerned, everyone in an American prison is there because of due process. Although I don't think we can make that argument anymore, given what ICE is currently doing and the Department of Homeland Security. But this due process is supposed to include a trial, a jury, an appeal. And then, of course, once the appeals are done, case closed. So this is a remarkably convenient position to hold because it means that no American conviction, no matter how tainted by coin temporal surveillance, coerced testimony, suppressed evidence, or all white juries in cases involving black defendants and black victims of police violence, can ever be reclassified on principle as political. The trial itself becomes the alibi. Now, it's important for us to hold up that position against how our government talks about other countries. The State Department publishes an annual human rights report, country by country, and it does not hesitate to use the term political prisoner or a close synonym for people held in China, in Russia, in Iran, in Cuba, in Belarus, and such, right? It names them. It calls for their release. It sometimes ties foreign aid or sanctions to the treatment of these political prisoners. The U.S. government has across administrations specifically called for the release of individuals it identifies as persons detained for their political or religious beliefs in these countries that I cited and many more, citing exactly the criteria human rights organizations use: detention motivated by belief or identity rather than legitimate criminal conduct. In other words, our government that says the category does not exist within our own borders, applies that category confidently, repeatedly, to its geopolitical rivals. That's not a legal distinction. That's a foreign policy tool. And it means that the people I'm about to talk about, American citizens held for decades, whose cases are riddled with the same due process problems that the State Department flags in other countries, get no such acknowledgement, no such advocacy from our own government. And we are the home of the brave in the land of the free, although some of you may not realize that our country, the United States of America, imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country in the world and has the highest number of people incarcerated or who are involved in the judicial system, you know, on parole and the like. In 1981, he was convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and he was sentenced to death. His case has drawn international scrutiny for decades. Ballistics questions, a key witness who later said police pressured her testimony. A trial judge recorded saying he would help prosecutors fry the N-word. And a jury selection process of federal appeals court eventually found unconstitutional, leading to his death sentence being overturned in 2001, and then formally vacated in 2011. So convicted in 1981, takes 20 years for his death sentence to be overturned, and then it takes another 10 years for his sentence to be formally vacated. And at that time, Philadelphia prosecutors agreed to resentence him to life without parole rather than retry the death penalty phase. He still maintains his innocence of the murder itself. Last month, his legal team filed an appeal directly to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. The same UN body that in 2022 concluded, and here's another name, that Leonard Peltier's decades of parole denials were so procedurally flawed they amounted to arbitrary detention and called for his immediate release. Mumia's lawyers are hoping international pressure can do what forty-five years of American courts would not do. He is in declining health, and his advocates say plainly he may die in prison. By the way, he has books out on the market that you can check out as well. Mumia Abu Jamal, in a commentary broadcast via prison radio, said these words. Now I'm gonna raise another name. And this gentleman has now been freed and is one that I am working hard to get on these airwaves so that he can share some of the work that he's doing now that he's been released from prison. Jalil Muntakim, born Anthony Bottom, was a 19-year-old member of the Black Panther Party when he was convicted, along with two co-defendants, in the 1971 killing of two New York City police officers. He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 22 years. So as a 19-year-old, he would have been eligible for parole in 1993. However, he was denied parole 11 times, largely on the basis of the original crime itself rather than any conduct in prison. He was finally released in October of 2020, 49 years later. In his case, he was expecting a child before he was incarcerated. And for that reason, he does have an offspring. But for many men, and too many of them, and women as well, they are incarcerated at very young ages and never have children again. Now, don't get me wrong, if you commit the crime, as we say, you should do the time. But remember, we're also talking about cases where there's a lot of tainted evidence, even by the state's own admission. We're going to come back to Jalil, Baba Jilil, because since his release, he has poured his energy into something enormous, reviving in a very literal sense a 1951 charge that the United States government is guilty of genocide against the black people. That's not a metaphor that he's just using loosely. It's a specific, documented, legal tradition he is trying to complete. Let's name a few more people. And if your head is spinning about this time, please leave a comment in the comment section on YouTube. It definitely helps us with our algorithm. And what we're here about here at Rethinking Freedom is getting people to really engage and to think about our notions of freedom, the propaganda and what we've been led to believe and what's been left out, and then taking all of that information and figuring out how we can work towards creating a society and a world where all can truly be free. Sundiada Akoli, a former Black Panther and mathematician, was convicted in the 1973 New Jersey Turnpike shooting that also led to the conviction of a name that you should know, Asata Shakur. Now she escaped custody, was granted political asylum in Cuba, and of course we know she recently made her transition. Akoli spent nearly 50 years in prison. He was first eligible for parole in 1993, denied repeatedly, until the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered his release in May of 2022. He was 85 years old. The New Jersey Supreme Court found that the parole board had unlawfully denied him parole. He was reunited with his family. Leonard Peltier, an indigenous activist and member of the American Indian movement, was convicted in the 1975 killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Go and unpack some of the work that we've done about indigenous peoples and how their land was stolen from them and the genocide on Indigenous peoples commonly known as Native Americans. Well, in a case Amnesty International and others have long criticized. And why did they criticize this case regarding Leonard Peltier? Because there was withheld evidence, there was coerced extradition, coerced um extradition affidavits. And guess what? In January of 2025, President Biden commuted his sentence to home confinement after nearly 50 years of incarceration. He has since been released outright. A case advocates now point to when they are demanding the same relief for Mumia Abu Jamal. Others named across decades of the same struggle include Dr. Mutulu Shakur, released on compassionate medical parole in 2022, who died very shortly after. Rochelle McGee, released in 2023, after 53 years, and who passed away that same year. Imam Jamil al-Amin, formerly known as H.R. Brown, and Ed Point Dexter, who died in prison in 2023 after 50 years of incarceration. And of course, I've told you that there are active campaigns today which center around Moumia Abu Jamal's UN appeal and a continued push for a new evidentiary hearing alongside broader prisoner support networks, like the Jericho Movement, the new Jericho movement, which was founded specifically to win recognition and freedom for U.S. political prisoners. Every one of these people were tried in an American courtroom. And our state calls that due process. But Jalil, Munta Kim, William Patterson, W. B. Du Bois, and a room full of black intellectuals in 1951, Jamil Jalil, Jalil joining them now, but earlier we had William Patterson, Paul Roberson, W. B. Du Bois, there were others, in 1951 looked at the pattern behind these trials. The pattern behind the killings, the extrajudicial killings, the frame-ups, the deliberate destruction of black political leadership. And they gave it a name under international law. We charge genocide. That is also a book that you can purchase and read up and study for yourself. Genocide is one of the most serious accusations in international law. Unfortunately, many of us are living through multiple genocides right now, certainly here in the United States of America, according to those who are making that argument. And I think there's a lot of evidence to support that argument, but certainly in Gaza, in Western Sahara, we saw it in Rwanda, Bosnia Heshovra. We saw that uh we're seeing it in Sudan. But let's get back to the UN. The United Nations adopted a convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide on December 9, 1948, in direct response to what is commonly known as the Jewish Holocaust. Not the Holocaust in the Congo where Leopold killed, by some estimates, 10 million Congolese. But nonetheless, the UN defines genocide as one of five specific acts, including killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm. Think about being in solitary confinement for decades, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction when committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. We can talk about the Tuskegee medical experiments. We can talk about our government testing out bombs and testing out chemicals in certain areas. We can talk about environmental racism that's still going on right now. We can talk about the over policing of black neighborhoods. We can talk about how during the war on drugs, that a charge for cocaine was so much lighter than a charge for crack cocaine, which they understood from their own figures that more black people were being charged for using or possessing crack cocaine, and more white people were being charged for cocaine powder. Notice what the convention does not require. It does not require a gas chamber or a declared plan of total extermination. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group's destruction, that's already genocide under the convention's own words. If intent can be shown, that distinction is the entire legal foundation for what we're about to discuss. Which might also explain why certain entities in the government no longer want to collect statistics along racial lines. Because if you don't have the information, right, if you don't have the data, how do you prove what has been done to whom or that it was done selectively to a group of people? And how do you further prove intent? So, on December 17, 1951, a document titled We Charge Genocide, the Crime of Government Against the Negro People, was delivered to the United Nations. Not by a foreign government, nope. It was delivered by black American citizens, presenting evidence against their own country. Paul Robeson led a delegation that submitted it to the UN officials in New York, while William L. Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress, delivered copies to a UN meeting in Paris the same day. I have so many books on Paul Robeson that will cover how the United States government targeted him, targeted W.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and many others, sometimes even seizing their passports so they could not leave the country. And of course, in the case of Claudia Jones, deporting her. This petition, We Charge Genocide, documented what its authors called a consistent, conscious pattern by every branch of American government, federal, state, and local, of violence and willful neglect towards Black citizens. It cited more than 10,000 documented killings of Black Americans in the roughly 85 years since the end of slavery, alongside lynching, police killings, discriminatory sentencing, and the systematic denial of the conditions for health care, housing, education, employment necessary for people's survival. And I'm going to put this in our YouTube description a link to a conversation I recently had with the author of The Color of Law. And Mr. Bernstein, who's not black, lays out case after case after case of how the United States of America basically created segregation and blocked African Americans from accessing the very tools that have led to generational wealth for the white community and others. The We Charge Genocide Petition specifically says any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide. William L. Patterson, a black communist lawyer and the driving force behind the petition, had spent decades defending black and radical political defendants, including work with the Scottsboro boys. Go read up about that travesty. He worked on their defense. When he returned to the United States after delivering the petition in Paris, the States Department seized his passport and he was harassed by the FBI for the rest of his life. Paul Robeson, who was a world-renowned bass baritone, an actor, an athlete, international superstar of his day, outspoken anti-colonial activist, presented the petition in New York, and for his politics, the U.S. government revoked his passport for eight years. What happened to freedom of speech? And he was whitelisted from concert halls and film across the country, effectively erasing one of that era's most celebrated black artists from American public life. We can go on. There are so many other artists that come to mind. We can talk about Earth again. We can talk about Josephine Baker and so on and so forth.

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B. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP, a sociologist, and by then in his 80s, was slated to accompany Patterson to Paris to help deliver the petition. The State Department, having classified him as an unregistered foreign agent amid Cold War prosecution, blocked him from traveling. Twelve years later, Du Bois, who had moved, who then moved to Ghana once he got his passport back, died in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963, and that's where he's buried. He died on the very eve of the march in Washington. A date Black August observances still mark today. There's so many more I could tell you about, but I'm conscious of the time that we have, although who knows? I might end it at a certain place for those of you who watch on the radio or who listen on the radio because we only have 60 minutes with you. And I may continue this on the YouTube section because we have a limited time over there. Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born Harlem-based communist organizer and journalist who wrote powerfully on the specific position of black women under what she called triple oppression, was among the roughly 94 signatories to this petition we charge genocide. She would later be deported from the United States during the same red scare crackdown that targeted Patterson and Robeson. And W. Alpheus Hunton, a scholar and co-founder of the Council on African Affairs, alongside Robeson and Du Bois, and his wife Dorothy Hunton also signed this petition. So did Benjamin J. Davis Jr., a black communist who had been elected to the New York City Council before being imprisoned under the Smith Act for his political affiliations. Himself, notably, a kind of political prisoner. Also among the signers, historian and civil rights leader Shalotta Bass, Mary Church Tyrrell, who was then in her 80s and was one of the founders of the NAACP, and a figure who definitely bridged the older black liberal establishment and this so-called radical left petition. There was a Detroit judge to be George Crockett Jr., National Maritime Union Leader Ferdinand Smith, and mothers and widows of men executed in racially charged rape cases, including Rosalie McGee and Josephine Grayson. 94 signatures. And this brings us back to the work of Baba Jalil Muntaquim today. And again, I'm hoping to get him on these airwaves. Since his release in 2020, after 49 years of incarceration, he has made it his central work to revive and complete the unfinished project of WeChar Genocide, arguing that the 1951 petition was never actually resolved, only buried by Cold War repression, and that the evidence is that it presented has only grown heavier in the 75 plus years since then. There is so much that is going on. One of the things that happened in 2021, this strategy of trying to revive this petition is that organizers in October of 2021 convened the We Still Charge Genocide, the Spirit of Mandela International Tribunal in New York City, explicitly invoking the 1951 petition's language and legacy. A panel of international jurists heard testimony over three days on five categories of harm: police violence, mass incarceration, environmental racism, public health inequities, and the treatment of political prisoners and prisoners of war. At a press conference at the United Nations Church Center on October 25th, 2021, the panel of jurists announced their findings. They found the United States government and its federal and state institutions guilty on all five counts and concluded that there were grounds to find that acts of genocide, as defined under the UN Convention, had been committed. Now I want to be precise here, and this is probably where we're going to end for those of you who are on the radio, but please come over to the YouTube side, go to Rethinking Freedom. Of course, like subscribe share because I'm going to spend the next few minutes on the YouTube side talking about what we can do now that we have all this information. So as we wrap up on the radio side here, let me say this. This was not the United Nations issuing a binding ruling. It was not the International Court of Justice. It was an independent tribunal, a body with deep roots in the same tradition, going back to a 1990 Tribunal on Political Prisoners and a 1992 Tribunal on Indigenous Rights, made up of credentialed international jurists and human rights lawyers, following a legal proceeding they conducted themselves, but without formal enforcement power, just so that we are all clear about this. It carries moral and political weight and it stands in direct sorry, it stands in a direct line from the work that Patterson and Robeson's 1951 petition sought to achieve. But what it does not do is it does not carry the force of a binding international court judgment. Both things are true. It wasn't an international court of justice, but these were also jurists, international jurists looking at the evidence. Now, a body of qualified international jurists reviewed testimony and evidence and concluded that the United States of America is guilty of genocide against black, brown, and indigenous people. And that finding got almost no coverage in major American media. What, if anything, does that silence say to you? So in this month of August, I hope that I've given you enough to get you thinking, researching, learning, and choosing what actions you want to take and how you want to speak up, especially in these times that we live in. Why talk about this? Because the entire argument from 1951 to 2022, one when that tribunal was held, and now to 2026, rests on a single claim that what looks category by category like a series of separate American problems, police violence, incarceration, pollution, lack of health access to health care, poorly funded schools, the wealth disparities, the wage disparities, the environmental racism is not in fact separate at all. It's a pattern sustained over generations by policy choices that were made and remade by our nation's elected officials who had other options. That's a serious claim. It deserves serious evidence, not just moral outrage. So let's cover a little bit of that. Let's get into the numbers so you can weigh the arguments for yourself. Right? It just seems only fair that we do that. And as we're going through this exercise, think of what you know as well, what you have been privy to yourself, right? So let's take a look at police violence. Research on lethal use of force consistently finds that black Americans are killed by police at several times the rate of white Americans relative to population share. Studies using data from mapping police violence and similar trackers have found black Americans are roughly two to three times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police. And unarmed black men, in particular, are disproportionately represented among those killed while posing no clear threat. Our federal government still does not maintain a single mandatory comprehensive national database of police killings. Independent journalists and nonprofits have had to build that record because the government has chosen not to. Let's talk about mass incarceration. The United States incarcerates a larger share of its population, like I said earlier, than any other country in the world. And black Americans are incarcerated at roughly five times the rate of white Americans nationally. And no, it's not because they commit more crimes. In some states, this disparity is far steeper. Black men specifically are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white men. One in three black boys born today under current trends can expect to spend time in prison in this lifetime compared with roughly one in 17 white boys. And this is a projection from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That's not just a policing statistic anymore. That's a life course statistic. That's a prediction made before a child has done anything at all. And we see it with the school-to-prison pipeline, where school districts, by their own statistics, disproportionately send black children, brown children, into alternative education, into juvenile detention, and so on and so forth. Let's talk about environmental and racism. Black communities are significantly more likely to be located near industrial polluters, highways, and toxic waste sites. Again, go back to our conversation on the color of law. This was deliberately done in just about every major city in the United States of America. That was with black people in communities where black people were thriving. That was specifically the area where the federal government decided to put highways right through it, destroying those communities. Researchers have traced this pattern directly to 20th century redlining maps, which determined where black families could buy homes and where industry and highways were laid around it. Studies have repeatedly shown that black Americans, African Americans, are exposed to significantly higher levels of fine particulate air pollution than white Americans, even after controlling for income. Meaning it's not simply about poverty, it's about race independent of wealth. In housing, black home ownership sits around 44%, compared to roughly 77% for white Americans. A wider gap, researchers note, than existed at the time that the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. Why? Because redlining contract buying schemes stripped black families of home equity. Do you live in a place that has a homeowners association? That has homeowners sign these covenants? Go back and trace the history of those homeowners' associations. They were designed to keep black Hispanics out. And as we can see, if you again look at the research, continued mortgage lending disparities have compounded across generations. Now, the federal government, in what seems like a race neutral policy, is limiting what graduate programs, what college programs, what loans you can take for different degrees, thereby forcing people to go out into the private force, you know, the private lending marketplace, if you will, which will saddle people with even more debt, primarily black and brown people who tend to have higher loans than school loans than white people, because we simply don't have the same generational wealth. And then once you're saddled with those loans at higher interest rates than what the federal government was offering, then imagine how that affects your ability to then be able to own a home. It goes on. Health disparities in maternal mortality. Black women in the United States die from pregnancy-related causes at roughly three to three and a half times. Let's pause on that. Three to three and a half times the rates of white women. A disparity that holds according to the CDC and the National Institute for Health funded research, regardless of income or education level. So just by being black, regardless of your income or educational level, we face serious disparities in terms of our maternal mortality. And I can speak to that directly. Because with my last child, despite advocating for myself as an attorney, and despite having a husband who is very well versed and is a member of the medical field, the doctor ignored the information I was sharing, and we almost lost our son. Statistics show that a black woman with a graduate degree is still statistically more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than a white woman who never finished high school. Income does not erase the disparity. Education does not erase it. Let's go to education. Black students are suspended from schools at roughly three and a half times the rate of white students. And this is according to federal civil rights data collection figures. And this is for comparable behavior, often for subjective infractions like defiance rather than objective ones. Again, as a mother of five children, I can speak to numerous occasions where I have had to go to the school and advocate for my children and say, oh, you are going to have to provide evidence before you put this mark in my child's record. Nationally, over half of Black students attend schools where more than 90% of their classmates are also students of color. A pattern of resegregation researchers have documented that has accelerated over the past two decades, even as the country becomes more diverse overall, which by the way is what's driving these white nationalists crazy. Wealth and inequality. A gap that traces back to slavery and is widening. Traces back to the exclusion of black veterans from the GI Bill benefits after World War II. Traces back to redlining, traces back to lending discrimination that continued well past the civil rights era, even to the 2008 mortgage debacle that this country experienced. This is generational. It's not something that resolves itself through individual hard work, although, of course, we will always extol the virtues of the one or two who have made it out, so to speak, in spite of. And why can it not be solved by individual hard work? Because it was never created by individual choices in the first place. It was created by policy, enforced by law over centuries. Remember? The Plessy V. Ferguson case. So, does the evidence support the word genocide? Well, here's where I again have to be honest, and I am an attorney. Most international law scholars agree that the specific intent in the UN Genocide Convention is the hardest legal bar to clear, proving that officials acted with deliberate intent to destroy a racial group, as opposed to indifference, negligence, or even racist policy that produces devastating but unintended in the legal sense, harm. It's a lot of words. But that is precisely why the 1951 petition and then the 2021 tribunal both leaned so heavily on the convention's broader clause, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction in whole or in part. And they're making the argument that sustained generations-long policy patterns, not any single decision satisfies that standard. Now, critics, including some who share every one of the underlying statistics we just gave you, argue that the term genocide requires proof of intent. That this evidence, however damning, and which by the way, we still don't want to pass any policies with any teeth to ensure that we don't continue to perpetrate, right? That they they would argue that this evidence, however damning, doesn't by itself establish genocide, and that using the word risks the claim being dismissed rather than being taken seriously. Well, it wouldn't mean taken seriously anyway. So let's go for broke. Both positions are held by serious credential people who agree on the underlying facts, but disagree on what those facts amount to under a very specific and demanding legal definition. So we're not going to resolve that today, not on this, not not in not in this capacity, not on this show. But what we can tell you without any hedge at all, what I am saying to you right now without any hedge at all, is that the underlying conditions, the killings, the incarceration, the poisoned air, the dying mothers are not in dispute. Only the legal label is.org. George Jackson's Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye are both still in print. Read the sources. Don't just take my word for it. And of course, you can support organizations doing the on-the-ground work behind today's statistics. Maternal health advocates working on black maternal mortality, environmental justice groups fighting facilities sitting in black communities and increasingly now fighting these data centers even in white communities. You can advocate and assist with, advocate for and assist with bail funds and public defender support organizations addressing incarceration at the front end before decades are lost. I'm very proud of clinics across the country at different colleges of law where they are training our young lawyers to go out and provide free legal defense to people who don't have the means to pay for their own defense. It makes a difference. So I opened this program with five names, five names carved into a prison tradition that most Americans have never heard of. And I'm going to close with a question instead of an answer. If a body of international jurists can review this evidence and reach a guilty verdict, and if this country that so many profess to love applies the word political prisoner freely to people held in other nations under far less scrutiny, what does it cost us as a country to keep refusing to use that same word and that same reckoning at home? And what, if anything, does it cost you personally to keep looking away from it? And as um Mumya Abu Jamal says, where you stand or where you sit determines where you stand. So Black August asks incarcerated people to fast, to study, to refuse business as usual for one month a year in memory of people who died, refusing to accept the conditions in front of them. You don't have to be behind bars to take that seriously. Write the letter, read the petition, say the names, and then say the names of those who are waiting. And however you observe Black August, don't let it end without you asking what you did this year to move one person closer to freedom. I'm your host, Aya Fabarinelli, and this has been Rethinking Freedom. Thank you for spending the extra time beyond the initial hour with me. I hope that we get some rigorous conversation going around these issues. But that you do this respectfully and with facts. Thank you again for your support. Please donate. Please support what we're trying to do here on this platform. And we look forward to seeing you next week. Same time.