Revolution in These Times: Black Panther Party Veteran Dhoruba Bin-Wahad Speaks to Black Power Media

The well-learned lessons of the past that we need to remember in the present antifascist fight for our futures.

Revolution In These Times delivers veteran Black Panther Party member, Black Liberation Army leader, and former political prisoner Dhoruba Bin-Wahad direct in his own words to offer us an analysis of how today’s resurgent right-wing agenda is an outgrowth of the ongoing and historical political struggle between the oppressed masses and settler-colonialism of America and Europe. Bin-Wahad not only explores how white supremacist politics have recaptured the American imagination but also prescribes a radical grassroots response to counter this ideology and supplant the violent state repression that keeps it in power.

Bin Wahad pieces together fight-back strategies against the police and the state through a process of mobilizing in the streets, on the block, and in our communities, while gathering mass through antifascist coalition-building in a manner unrealized since the 1960s and 1970s. In this series of interviews, Bin Wahad grounds us in the now, seamlessly weaving together firsthand accounts of his own and other’s revolutionary past in the history of struggle, alongside lessons for today.

Dhoruba Bin-Wahad was a leading member of the New York Black Panther Party, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21. Arrested in June 1971, he was framed as part of the illegal FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and subjected to unfair treatment and torture during his nineteen years in prison. During Dhoruba’s incarceration, litigation on his behalf produced over 300,000 pages of COINTELPRO documentation, and upon release in 1990 he was able to bring a successful lawsuit against the New York Department of Corrections for their criminal activities. Living in both Ghana and the U.S., Dhoruba continues to write and work promoting Pan Africanism, an uncompromising critique of imperialism and capitalism, and freedom for all political prisoners.

Jared A. Ball is a Professor of Communication and Africana Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, and author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power. Ball is also host of the podcast ＂iMiXWHATiLiKE!＂, cofounder of Black Power Media. His decades of emancipatory journalism, media, writing, and political work is archived on imixwhatilike.org.

Kalonji Jama Changa, an organizer and founder of the FTP Movement, is author of How to Build a People’s Army and co-producer of the documentary Organizing Is the New Cool. Cofounder of Black Power Media, Changa serves as co-chair of the Urban Survival and Preparedness Institute.

Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, a Black, member-based collective of community residents and organizers. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years, beginning in New York City and now based in Atlanta. For 18 of those years, Kamau was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and the teachings of Malcolm X.

Black Power Media is a Black-radical independent media project that challenges the narrative about Black politics and the Black condition. Renegade Culture, iMiXWHATiLiKE!, RemiX Morning Show, and future programming will deliver the news and information our community and others need to break through today’s mainstream propaganda machine.