New Afrikan Anarchism, Yesterday and Tomorrow
To benefit the release fund of New Afrikan Anarchist Prisoner of War, Ojore Lutalo!

Saturday November 8th
7:30pm at the Sixth Street Community Center
638 E 6th St, between Avenues B and C, in Manhattan
8-10$ Suggested Donation
with Kazembe Balagun, writer, activist, teacher, and biographer of the late New Afrikan Anarchist freedom fighter Kuwasi Balagoon

Screening of FRAME-UP: THE IMPRISONMENT OF MARTIN SOSTRE (1973)

Refreshments will be served

This is event is brought to you by NYC Anarchist Black Cross and friends and is part of the fundraising weekend for Ojore Lutalo called for by the Anarchist Black Cross Federation.

Longtime New Afrikan Anarchist Prisoner of War, Ojore N. Lutalo, is set to be released after 26 years of confinement in the New Jersey State Prison, having completed the maximum amount of time the State of New Jersey could hold him. While his exact release date is not finalized, it will most likely be late November or December. Money is needed to help Ojore secure housing, food and clothing. This financial assistance will allow Ojore to make the transition more smoothly, knowing that money and housing isn’t an immediate pressing matter and giving him the needed time to adjust to the outside world he hasn’t seen since 1982. The ABCF, anarchists and many PP/POW activists who have maintained contact and supported Ojore over the years have benefited immensely from the example that he has set as what it means to be a revolutionary. His untiring advice and criticism have helped many of us and our organizations grow politically and deepen our commitment to the struggle to free political prisoners and prisoners of war, as well as the broader struggle of building of a revolutionary movement. It’s our revolutionary duty to ensure Ojore has all the support he needs when hits the streets!

Frame Up! follows the story of Afro-Puerto Rican political activist Martin Sostre who served time in Attica prison during the early 1960s. There, Sostre embraced doctrines as diverse as Black Islam, Black Nationalism, Internationalism, and finally anarchism. Arrested on July 14, 1967, at his Afro-Asian bookstore in Buffalo for sale and possession of narcotics, riot, arson, and assault–charges later proven to be fabricated and part and parcel of a COINTELPRO program in full swing–he was convicted and sentenced to serve forty-one years and thirty days. Sostre became a jailhouse lawyer and regularly acted as legal counsel to other inmates, including winning two landmark legal cases involving prisoner rights: Sostre v. Rockefeller and Sostre v. Otis. According to Sostre, these decisions constituted “a resounding defeat for the establishment which will now find it exceedingly difficult to torture with impunity the thousands of captive black (and white) political prisoners illegally held in their concentration camps.”

Ojore Lutalo is locked down in Trenton, New Jersey, for actions carried out in the fight for Black Liberation. In Ojore’s own words, he is “serving a parole violation sentence (we received 14 to 17 years) stemming from a 1977 conviction for expropriating monies from a capitalist state bank (in order to finance our activities) and engaging the political police in a gun battle in December 1975 in order to effect our departure from the bank, and to ensure success of the military operation…”

Ojore was a comrade of the late Kuwasi Balagoon, a New Afrikan anarchist P.O.W. “I’ve been involved in the struggle, the war against the fascist state since 1970. I’ve been an anarchist since 1975 without any regrets. Prior to my involvement in the struggle, I was just another apolitical lumpen (bandit) here in Amerika.”

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