Monthly Archives: August 2020

LA ABCF’s Running Down the Walls is September 6th

Donate to Running down the Walls 2020 at
https://fundrazr.com/LA-ABCFrunningdownthewalls2020

This year’s Running Down the Walls is a 5K run/walk/bike/roll/exercise to raise awareness and funds for political prisoners incarcerated in North America. With the devastation and uncertainty that came with Covid-19 (especially among already oppressed and imprisoned communities) Los Angeles Anarchist Black Cross has decided to host this year’s RDTW (2020) decentralized and online. While we host this run online, we hope people participate in exercising however they can, while acknowledging their solidarity and connection with Political Prisoners inside the walls who historically participate in Running Down the Walls.

By being online we hope to bring wider access to people who could not make it out to select events before. No matter where you are, we hope you will be joining us this year in making Running Down the Walls 2020 a success and supporting our Political Prisoners inside, many who have been struggling even more in this moment.

Join us for Running Down the Walls – September 6th from 11am – 1pm PST we will be hosting a Twitter Storm (@La_ABCF). Please join us and participate in both the exercising portion and in Tweeting out support for Political Prisoners. Feel free to make noise all day for those imprisoned.

All funds raised will go to the ABCF  Warchest, The Warchest program was created in November of 1994. Its purpose is to send monthly financial support to Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War (PP/POWs) who have been receiving insufficient, little, or no financial support during their imprisonment. Since its inception, the Warchest has raised over $120,000 with all the money going directly to those behind the prison walls.

Donate to Running down the Walls 2020 at
https://fundrazr.com/LA-ABCFrunningdownthewalls2020

Statement by David Gilbert on Running Down the Walls

In the Spirit of George Floyd – 8/11/20

My warm embrace goes out to the bright spirit and good politics of running down the wall… in these most dire and yet promising of times. I know you are building support for a new generation of political prisoners. A key reason for political prisoner support is to show the continuity of the struggles for social justice. That understanding is acutely important today. The alternative to police who act with disdain and violence toward the people is community control, which is based on developing strong, caring, cohesive communities. Groups like the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords were working on that until they came under withering attack by the police and FBI. Some are still in prison today… today when we now have a new, better opportunity to move toward self-determination and a priority on meeting human needs in the oppressed communities. 

One Love

David

David Gilbert 83A6158

Shawangunk Correctional Facility

PO Box 700,

Wallkill, New York 12589 

Statement by Bill Dunne about Running Down the Walls

Salutations ABCF Running Down the Walls Comrades!

We gather under trying times. But we gather! We gather without proximity, sacrificing hugs and shared physical space to protect our community so we can emerge from the Covid-19 era stronger. But we gather! And we gather not only in resistance to repression but in sad memory of comrades fallen along the road to revolution – Comrade Sekou Kambui, for one, whose entry into this vale of all things we mark today. But we gather!

We gather to fan the embers of revolution that still burn in all our hearts. We gather to celebrate the life of Sekou Kambui and each of the comrades born in other days who’ve laid down their teaching for us to carry into the future we engineer. We gather to build that seismic wave that will rattle the foundation of every prison with our footfalls from myriad disparate points. We gather because the future we will create by gathering together tells us we must. 

So, let us sally forth from whatever kind of lockdown afflicts our bodies, plug into that radical record that gathers us all, lace up our shoes or grease our wheels, and Run Down the Walls! I’ll be with you, stepping up (& down!) on my plastic chair, a reasonable approximation of running in the Covid-19 lockdown here at Victorville FCI-I. 

Bill Dunne

10916-086

FCC Victorville FCI-I

PO Box 3725

Adelanto, CA 92301

Philly ABC Birthday Event for Russell Maroon Shoatz

Sunday, August 23rd, 4:30pm at Malcolm X Park –

This month’s letter-writing event will be a special Black August edition on Sunday August 23rd, the 77th birthday of Black Liberation prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz. Join us in signing conscious birthday cards, talking about his case and history of struggle, and engage in political education through a raffle!

The PE raffle prizes are four pairs of sneakers that were donated in support of this event. If you win a pair of shoes in your size, great! Otherwise you can trade or give to someone that fits them. The raffle is a way to engage in Black August study, with each ticket containing information on related topics. We look forward to the discussions that carry on after!

We’ll also be making announcements about the upcoming 5K in Maroon’s honor, as the registration deadline is the following day (Aug 24). If you want to participate but haven’t registered yet, you can do it here! We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have and go over logistics. This will also be a good opportunity to submit tabling requests for the event, if you have material you would like to share.

We look forward to seeing you at this special, Black August edition card writing event for Maroon

On the Death of Stuart Christie

The Anarchist Black Cross Federation wishes to send our love and support to Stuart Christie’s family. Stuart was loved and revered by us. His loss has been a tremendous blow to our community. He was significant in the rebirth of the Anarchist Black Cross movement and we can honestly say this organization would not exist if it were not for him. He was an icon and inspiration for the global anarchist movement for nearly sixty years. There have been few that have been able to match his contribution. For him, we mourn.

Stuart Christie 1946-2020 Anarchist activist, writer and publisher

Stuart Christie, founder of the Anarchist Black Cross and Cienfuegos Press and co-author of The floodgates of anarchy has died peacefully after a battle with lung cancer.

Born in Glasgow and brought up in Blantyre, Christie credited his grandmother for shaping his political outlook, giving him a clear moral map and ethical code. His determination to follow his conscience led him to anarchism: “Without freedom there would be no equality and without equality no freedom, and without struggle there would be neither.” It also led him from the campaign against nuclear weapons to joining the struggle against the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco (1892-1975).

He moved to London and got in touch with the clandestine Spanish anarchist organisation Defensa Interior (Interior Defence). He was arrested in Madrid in 1964 carrying explosives to be used in an assassination attempt on Franco. To cover the fact that there was an informer inside the group, the police proclaimed they had agents operating in Britain – and (falsely) that Christie had drawn attention to himself by wearing a kilt.

The threat of the garotte and his twenty year sentence drew international attention to the resistance to the Franco regime. In prison Christie formed lasting friendships with anarchist militants of his and earlier generations. He returned from Spain in 1967, older and wiser, but equally determined to continue the struggle and use his notoriety to aid the comrades he left behind.

In London he met Brenda Earl who would become his political and emotional life partner. He also met Albert Meltzer, and the two would refound the Anarchist Black Cross to promote solidarity with anarchist prisoners in Spain, and the resistance more broadly. Their book, The floodgates of anarchypromoted a revolutionary anarchism at odds with the attitudes of some who had come into anarchism from the sixties peace movement. At the Carrara anarchist conference of 1968 Christie got in touch with a new generation of anarchist militants who shared his ideas and approach to action.

Christie’s political commitment and international connections made him a target for the British Special Branch. He was acquitted of conspiracy to cause explosions in the “Stoke Newington Eight” trial of 1972, claiming the jury could understand why someone would want to blow up Franco, and why that would make him a target for “conservative-minded policemen”.

Free but apparently unemployable, Christie launched Cienfuegos Press which would produce a large number of anarchist books and the encyclopedic Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review. Briefly Orkney became a centre of anarchist publishing before lack of cashflow ended the project. Christie would continue publishing, and investigating new ways of doing so including ebooks and the internet. His christiebooks.com site contains numerous films on anarchism and biographies of anarchists. He used facebook to create an archive of anarchist history not available anywhere else as he recounted memories and events from his own and other people’s lives.

Christie wrote The investigative researcher’s handbook (1983), sharing skills that he put to use in an exposé of fascist Italian terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie (1984). In 1996 he published the first version of his historical study We the anarchists : a study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927-1937.

Short-run printing enabled him to produced three illustrated volumes of his life story (My granny made me an anarchistGeneral Franco made me a ‘terrorist’ and Edward Heath made me angry 2002-2004) which were condensed into a single volume as Granny made me an anarchist : General Franco, the angry brigade and me (2004). His final books were the three volumes of ¡Pistoleros! The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg, his tales of a Glaswegian anarchist who joins the Spanish anarchist defence groups in the years 1918-1924.

Committed to anarchism and publishing, Christie appeared at many bookfairs and film festivals, but scorned any suggestion he had come to ‘lead’ anyone anywhere.

Christie’s partner Brenda died in June 2019. He slipped away peacefully, listening to “Pennies From Heaven” (Brenda’s favourite song) in the company of his daughter Branwen.

Stuart Christie, 10 July 1946-15 August 2020

Oso Blanco’s Statement on Running Down the Walls

Well I must say things are more crazy. More dangerous. More Sad. More lockdown than ever. In my 20 straight years for my radical actions to get funds for supplies to send SE Mexico – 2020 is the worse yet. 

But I am the SACRED PIPE holder here for all the Natives. So, I can’t fail or get sick. I have a lot of prayer requests. As you all know why. My people are highly affected by Covid 19. So, Run Down These Walls. It must be done. I love you all and I truly mean that. You are powerful. So, don’t give up! And Black Lives Matter! 

So, Let’s all Rock This!

Run the Walls Down…

Yona Unega

Oso Blanco

NYC ABC statement on Running Down the Walls 2020

SUPPORT RUNNING DOWN THE WALLS

Since 2008, NYC ABC has been organizing annual events in solidarity with Running Down the Walls (RDTW), started by ABCF-Los Angeles in 1999. Over the years, our RDTW events have become more than fundraisers for the ABCF Warchest and local organizations: they’ve become hubs where folks from overlapping radical and revolutionary communities—multigender, multiracial, and multigenerational—come together and socialize after an enthusiastic five kilometers of running, walking, biking, skating, and rolling. Many of the folks who anticipate each year’s event do so knowing they will see folks they might not see more than once a year. So, with all that said, we regret to announce that for 2020 we will not be organizing a physical Running Down the Wall event. The stakes are too high and we have too many close comrades who are elders or otherwise at higher risk if exposed to Covid-19.

While recognizing the importance of the local event to various communities, it is ultimately the way by which we help build the warchest and directly support out political prisoners and prisoners of war (PP/POWs). Therefore we are calling on those communities to help us reach a goal of $3,000. Unless otherwise noted by the donor, all donations to paypal.me/nycabc through September 6th will go directly to the warchest.

Just as we support those facing repression in the fallout of recent uprisings, we must also support the PP/POWs who have been imprisoned for years, even decades. Please help us spread the word and direct your friends, loved ones, and colleagues to paypal.me/nycabc

Questions to [email protected]

LA-ABCF announcement on socially distanced/virtual Running Down the Walls 2020

Since 1999, the Los Angeles Anarchist Black Cross has organized our annual Running Down the Walls 5k run to raise awareness and support for political prisoners. This year, due to concerns over the coronavirus, our run will be done a little differently than our normal event. LA ABC wants to ensure the safety and health of our local community. As such, we will be organizing a social distance/virtual run. Details will be released as we get closer to the event on how you can participate.

But please, save the date and join us on the street all throughout Southern California and with all our comrades throughout North America cities and prisoners. Together we can raze the walls. We can make the walls crumble with every foot that hits the ground. Free All Political Prisoners.