Your Honor by Kuwasi Balagoon
Channel: AudibleAnarchist
Date: 2020-11-14

The poem can be read here https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kuwasi-balagoon-your-honor

Kuwasi Balagoon was a New Afrikan anarchist and a member of the Black Liberation Army. After serving in the U.S. Army., his experiences of racism within the army led him to tenant organizing in New York City, where he joined the Black Panther Party as it formed, becoming a defendant in the Panther 21 case. Sentenced to a term of between 23 to 29 years, he escaped from Rahway State Prison in New Jersey and went underground with the BLA in 1978. In January 1982, He was captured and charged with participating in an armored truck robbery, known as the Brinks robbery (1981). Convicted of murder and other charges and sentenced to life imprisonment, he died in prison of pneumocystis pneumonia, an AIDS-related illness, on December 13, 1986, aged 39.

Balagoon authored several texts while in prison, writings that have become influential among black and other anarchists since first being published and distributed by anarchist prisoner support networks in the 1980s and 1990s