Black Cross Bulletin A Los Angeles Anarchist Black Cross Federation Publication
Winter 2018
"The work isn’t done for the glory, but because we believe in Mutual Aid.” - Boris Yelensky
Vol. 1 Issue 2
African Freedom Fighter and Political Prisoner Richard Mafundi Lake Dies in Prison Captivity!by Omowale Kefing In the morning of January 21, 2018, Richard Mafundi Lake passed away in his Alabama prison cell of 31 years. While the cause of this death has not been determined, his support committee, the Mafundi Lake Support Committee, has been fighting the prison system for years, demanding adequate medical treatment for Mafundi and other inmates in Alabama. Carolyn Weyni Njeri Lake, Mafundi’s wife and chair of the committee, wrote in one complaint published by the Support Committee in response to a third stroke Mafundi had suffered. She stated: “My Husband, Richard Mafundi Lake was admitted to the infirmary at Donaldson Correction Facility where he is a prisoner. Unfortunately, there is no doctor at this facility on weekends (as a matter of fact, two prisoners recently died at Donaldson during a weekend where no doctor was present). “Not only that, Mafundi had been without his regular medication for four weeks prior to this incident.” So despite what an “official” determination might say, the fact is that Mafundi’s death is squarely on the state of Alabama and the entire colonial U.S. State that framed and put him there in the first place. At the time of Mafundi’s death, he was serving a life sentence under the “three strikes, you’re out” law. Mafundi was arrested on a trumped-up rape charge eight days following a successful, National African Liberation Day march, rally and conference in May of 1983 in Birmingham in which Mafundi was the primary organizer. The African Liberation Day activities were not the usual Birmingham civil rights mobilization. It was revolutionary activity and was contested by the state, from the FBI down to the local police. From the denial of parade permits to acquiring venue space, the government opposed this action from start to finish. Mafundi paid the price. Mafundi as a Freedom fighter and Political Prisoner Born in 1940, Mafundi grew up in
Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s in what was a political hotbed of black protests─the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the stirring of the movement for Black Power and self-defense. Mafundi, like so many young Africans at the time, was swept off the streets by the Birmingham police and Sheriffs Bull Connor’s deputies to do slave labor in the many agricultural prison camps throughout the state. As a teenager he was framed for a $34 robbery and sentenced to 14 years hard labor. The police had taken a potential organizer/revolutionary from the streets and put him in prison. It was at the Atmore-Holman prison facility where Mafundi came into full bloom as an organizer and black revolutionary. Well aware of the oppression in the outside African community, the horrors of life inside the prison walls are a gruesome reality─no medical care, guards murdering and torturing inmates, gutter food, and absolutely no rights to speak of in the fields of the prison plantations. In response to these conditions, Mafundi organized Inmates for Action (IFA), one of the first and most effective prison organizations to come out of the Black Revolution of the sixties. In retaliation for his organizing efforts, Mafundi was to spend 12 consecutive
years in solitary confinement. Despite this, however, the state was not able to break his will. To paraphrase Mafundi testimony in Brooklyn, New York before the African People’s Socialist Party organized the First World Tribunal on Reparations for Black People in the United States in 1982, he says: “For 12 years in isolation I had no books to read. I learned to play chess without a board. “It would get extremely cold with no heat or blankets in the cells. I slept on a concrete slab. And to make matters worse, the guards would throw water on the floor to make it colder. “I would shadow box until I would get exhausted near the point of passing out in order to sleep. I would take the little piece of toilet tissue they gave us, which was 3 tiny squares, put on my chest and psych myself out that it was a blanket.” This is the Mafundi I knew! Upon his release from prison, Mafundi helped to organize the first prisoner support organizations in Alabama: the Committee for Prisoner Support in Birmingham, Families for Action, African People’s Survival Committee and the Atmore-Holman Brothers Defense Committee.
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