Kuwasi Balagoon was a participant in the Black Liberation struggle from the 1960s until his death in prison in 1986. A member of the Black Panther Party and defendant in the infamous Panther
21 case, Balagoon went underground with the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Captured and convicted of various crimes against the State, he spent much of the 1970s in prison, escaping twice.
After each escape, he went underground and resumed BLA activity. Balagoon was unusual for his time in that he combined anarchism with Black nationalism, he broke the rules of sexual and
political conformity, he took up arms against the white supremacist State—all the while never shying away from developing his own criticisms of the weaknesses within the movements. His
eloquent trial statements and political writings, as much as his poetry and excerpts from his prison letters, are all testimony to a sharp and iconoclastic revolutionary who was willing to
make hard choices and fully accept the consequences. Balagoon was captured for the last time in December 1981, charged with participating in an armored truck expropriation in West Nyack, New
York. The first part of this book consists of contributions by those who knew or were touched by Balagoon; the second consists of court statements and essays by Balagoon himself, including
several documents have never been published before. The third section consists of excerpts from letters Balagoon wrote while in prison. A final section includes a historical essay by Akinyele
Umoja and an extensive intergenerational roundtable discussion of the significance of Balagoon’s life and thoughts today.
