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Black August–a movement that honors the legacies of Black revolutionaries, freedom fighters, and Black militants who have been martyred–calls for community organization in support of the freedom of political prisoners.
Kazi Toure is a distinguished activist and former member of several significant movements, including the Black Panther Party, the United Freedom Front, and the Black Liberation Army. He is a founding member of the Boston chapter of The National Jericho Movement, which he established in 1992. Having spent 10 years as a political prisoner, Kazi now dedicates his efforts to supporting folks who are currently politically incarcerated in the US.
Kaliab Tale, a local organizer working in housing and anti-imperialist struggle, interviewed Toure to learn how his experiences with radical organizing have profoundly shaped his understanding of and commitment to liberation.
Kazi Toure; image sourced from Philly ABC
Kaliab Tale: How would you tell the story of how you came to organizing, and to the work you’re currently involved in?
Kazi Toure: I don’t know where to start; I guess I'll start with refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag when I was in junior high school. I stopped pledging in the seventh grade. First they said just sit down at your desk; I wasn’t standing up so they didn’t say nothing. Then they said go out in the hallway and stand in the hallway so I said, “alright.” After that, they were like, “nah, fuck it, go to the principal's office and report to them,” because they saw I wasn’t budging. And they kept giving me detention for not standing up, all the way through high school.
I grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. My senior year, I started organizing a Black History class because we weren’t learning anything about Black people beyond slavery. Afterwards, I went to college, found out there were 120 different uprisings, slavery revolts that they never told us about. They only talked about Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner, and Gabriel Prosser, as if there were only three. But there were just so many of them, and most of them were in the month of August–because it's the hottest month and they refused to go out in them fields.
After I graduated from high school, I went to Oakland; I went to junior college out there because if you lived in California for a year, you could go to school for free. Plus, I wanted to check out the Black Panther Party: I didn't know it at the time, but Huey and Bobby was at Merritt College, the sister campus to my school. I lived on MacArthur Boulevard, three blocks from Panther Headquarters, so I was right there, man, right where I wanted to be.
I went to classes with some Panther Party study groups and sold the paper [The Black Panther] at 18, 19 years old. We were learning shit about the system, learning how to be dynamic: after you try one tactic, try another tactic, if that don't work, you gotta change it again.
One night, we was getting ready to go into the Panther headquarters and the pigs started riding around, shooting inside. They had three cars, four of them in each car, and they were unloading into the Panther headquarters–that was in 1970, might’ve been 1969. There were sandbags around the headquarters because they did it a lot. We was at war; we still at war, people just don't know it. But, you know, they killing us slowly. I'm looking for people to start fighting back; I'll talk about it later, but we had a different attitude back then.
Anyways, I ended up coming back here to Boston and robbing a bank, and then going back to the west coast, and I got busted out there. I had to do two-and-a-half years in West Virginia and Petersburg, VA, both federal joints.
After I got out, I came back north and I read about this dude that I knew from before who had blown up the Dover police station in New Hampshire; I read where he was being held, I contacted the New England Prison Association, and asked to be taken on a visit. I went in and I asked him, “you're going to be doing the same shit when you come out?” And he's like “hell, yeah”. And I said “all right, I'll be in Boston waiting for you, and we'll hook it up,” because that's all I wanted to do.
By 1978, I was working at a place called the Haymarket People's Fund. It had only been founded two years before I joined and they had two white men and two white women working there. They wanted to diversify so they hired me. I talked to them about hiring a black woman, so they hired a black woman, and then we hired a brother from South Africa. In the year before I left, we started talking about organizing an event for liberation movements; we wanted to see something change because we were giving away money all the time, but we're in protracted struggles where it's rare to see any real change. We were looking around the world, asking: "how can we fund something that's gonna mean something?" We turned to the liberation struggles in Southern Africa: there was the Zimbabwean African People's Union and the Zimbabwe African National Union, which had been in a 30-year struggle there against Rhodesia; there was South West Africa People's Organisation in Nambia; and People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola in Angola; the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania and the African National Congress in South Africa. We was planning on funding them all, but we didn't raise enough money. We only raised around $11,000 from the Amandla Festival of Unity concert that Haymarket put on in 1979, so we sent it to Zimbabwe; they were closest to making a change, and in fact, they had a Mexican-style revolution in 1979. Bob Marley wrote a song about it, called Zimbabwe.
I feel good about being involved with something that produced the Amandla concert; we also screened films throughout Roxbury and Dorchester on public housing project walls. We went there and brought drinks for the kids and showed films about Africa, talking to them about what's going on on the continent. We trained physically, too; 225 people in a year, we got them to let us go in the Harvard stadium and we would run the stairs, we was getting motherfuckers in shape. We trained in martial arts: we had four senseis and we trained one day in Dorchester and one day in Cambridge. We also had a lot of political education. In 1978, there were 14 Black women who got killed in Boston. Five black men had their hearts cut out in Buffalo. Twenty-eight Black babies was missing in Atlanta this same year: so we started training people in martial arts in '78 because all this shit that was happening.
July of ‘79 was the Amandla concert, and the people that trained and organized with us got to go to the concert free. At the end of the concert, I went on the ground with one of the other instructors to recruit people; we would have probationary cells for people who we thought had some potential, but we weren't sure about. Their politics would be right, their spirit was kind of right, but their practice was shaky because a lot of them was academics. They had gone to Harvard but they weren't bangers. A lot of them had choices: they didn't have to do this shit, they had choices for better jobs and all that. I didn't want no choices. I didn't want to put myself in that situation. My mother used to always say, "these people offering you good jobs!" But I would have to change. I didn't have dreads then, I had an Afro, so I would have to cut my hair, put on a suit and tie, shuck and jive and shit, you know, I ain't fucking trying to do that shit with these people. But I can understand it from her perspective, too, because we was poor. We was eight kids man, I was shoveling coal when I was seven years old.
After all this, I hooked up with a group called the United Freedom Front. We ended up robbing about ten banks, and we had about fourteen bombings, targeting multinational corporations that had investments in South Africa and the like. Before I joined, they hit the Boston Superior Courthouse and blew that shit up. People could do a lot of shit, man. It's just people aren't mobilized or organized enough to do it now.
One thing about our group: the FBI said that our group was the only one they couldn't infiltrate. All the people we had in the United Freedom Front came from prison, we recruited from jail and it was only through people we knew because it's dangerous: you could get killed or go to jail for the rest of your life. I'm only going to move with people that I know. The key to urban guerrilla warfare is you should do it with people that you know, that you grew up with, that you know ain't gonna rat if they get busted.
We was ready to die, man. Until people are ready to die, they ain't going to change nothing. If you ain't sacrifice nothing, you ain't changing shit.
Kaliab: What does Black August mean to you?
Kazi: It means a lot, man. The year after Attica, we had been talking about how February was the shortest month, and how Black History month grew. First it was like two days or something, and then it was like a week, and then it was like two weeks, then we got the whole month of February–the shortest month in the year. And then they watered it down talking about Benjamin Banneker, Phyllis Wheatley and people like that. They was cool, but where was the struggle, the people that was actually fighting back? Mostly in the month of August, because it was the hottest month. And that's when the uprisings was happening. Plus George and Jonathan were killed, Jonathan was killed on August 7th of 1970, and George was killed, August 21st, 1971, one year and two weeks later. So we start our calendar, we start marking our time from the day after Jonathan was killed. That was day one. Jonathan was two years younger than me at the time. So I feel you, George; Blood in My Eyes. I feel you. That was my Bible back then, and a lot of things George said are still true.
Leonard Peltier’s birthday was September 12th. He's gonna be 80 years old and they just gave him a 15 year hit. He's 80, they said come back and apply for release when you're 95. Get the fuck out of here, man. He's been inside for 49 years. You can't keep the motherfucker locked up; that's some fucked up shit, man. But that shows people who we’re dealing with. The prisons were saying they don’t want to get letters from us because we’re intimidating them with letters. Man, fuck them and their intimidation. I'll flood that motherfucker with letters. And they don't want phone calls; I'll tie their line up. Whatever they don't want, I will do it. Just to irritate them. Just to fuck with them. You ain't gonna have a nice day if my man inside ain't having a nice day.
Kaliab: What is your relationship with Jericho, and with present-day Black August organizing?
Kazi: Well inside prisons and jails, people will fast, study regularly, give up certain things for the month. It's different from out here, where we’ll have an event, maybe two events; but we don’t have a center where everybody comes every day and we can do shit together.
I don’t go to Jericho Boston meetings anymore. I'm trying to get other people, the youth, to take over; I don't need to be telling them what to do, they can figure it out. If they run into an issue or a problem, I'm here. I’ll come in and talk about whatever you want to discuss.
Kaliab: How did you engage with electoral politics and elected leaders?
Kazi: I wasn't thinking about electoral anything, not even on the local level. It wasn't until after I got out of prison that I started working with Chuck Turner, Mel King, Gloria Fox and Byron Rushing and all them people on City Council. I pulled them all together and asked, “can we form a rapid response team to go into jails and prisons whenever something happens?” And they was a little hesitant at first, but after more and more shit happened, people getting killed inside, they said, all right. Three or four of them would go out to the prisons whenever there was an issue as a rapid response team.
Kaliab: What are lessons you learned around organizing with intention that you would want folks to know?
Kazi: I just think you always gotta keep pressing them. We gotta keep pressing them. On their own shit, their own First Amendment. They’re telling us that we can't exercise our rights? As for electoral politics, I would press the Democrats; what the fuck are they doing, saying that whatever the president does is within their official business and they can't be tried for it, it's above the law. What the fuck are they talking about? So, they can go out on official business and say, “take this motherfucker out,” and then not get charged for murder. That's straight up gangsterism. They put a hit out on Assata’s head for two million dollars. That's gangster shit; that ain't government shit, man. And if an elected official is doing some shit that you don't like, get somebody else to run against them and say “we put you in, we’re going to take you out now.” That's on the local level.
I would also form collective partnerships with other groups, decide on what we need to get implemented, and just pick this shit apart. That's how we did it. I mean, do you know how long we worked on getting weed legal? We formed these motherfucking committees to get weed legal. We organized to get that.
We fightin’ the system. Do we really think we’re going to educate them out of power? They've been doing it for 400, 500 years. Sometimes, I don't know what people are doing. They’re just putting on demonstration after demonstration. Nowadays, they tell you where you can demonstrate and where you can't. Some things gotta be changed–the tactics, obviously, because it's not the same material conditions anymore. We can't do the same thing in these times that we could do back then.Y'all got different challenges ahead of you; you gotta figure it out though. The next generation is going to have to figure some shit out.
Lastly: we always did shit respectfully in the community. Back then, the people in our communities loved us. They would hide us from the police, 'cause we did shit for them. I remember one time we commandeered an oil truck; see some people didn't have no oil, no heat in their house. We snatched the truck, tied the driver up, delivered the fucking oil. You gotta do whatever. Take their shit; just don't leave no fingerprints.
Kazi Toure (he/him) is a former member of the Black Panther Party, the United Freedom Front, and the Black Liberation Army; he is the founder of the National Jericho Movement's Boston Chapter, and currently resides in the Greater Boston Area near his family.
Kaliab Tale (he/him) is an organizer with roots in North Cambridge, currently engaged in anti-gentrification struggle (in concert with Heal The Hood) and anti-genocide action.
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