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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 11, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Albert Nuh Washington, revolutionary fighter for justice
By Greg Butterfield
New York
Albert Nuh Washington, one of the New York 3 defendants and a lifelong fighter against racism and capitalism, died of liver cancer April 28 at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in New York. The political prisoner had served 28 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence.
His comrade Sundiata Acoli said of him: "Nuh is beloved by all of us PP/ POWs, and he's highly respected."
Nuh, Anthony Jalil Bottom and Herman Bell were framed for the murder of two New York police officers as part of the U.S. government's war against the Black liberation movement.
After the revelation of the FBI's covert domestic terror campaign COINTELPRO, new evidence came to light proving the three men's innocence. But New York continues to hold Bottom and Bell behind bars.
Gov. George Pataki refused a community appeal for Nuh's release on grounds of terminal illness.
In a 1998 essay Nuh recalled: "I became exposed to Pan Africanism at an early age in the house of my grandmother, who rented rooms to African and West Indian students. For the African students the subject of independence was always at the forefront of their conversations.
"Words like communist and socialist were used to describe persons who wanted a government based upon social and political equality. So at a young age I became socially conscious."
He remembered: "In my teens I began to listen to the Nationalists who spoke on the street corners of Harlem, while Black newspapers reported the lynchings of Blacks in the Southern states.
"Long before Malcolm X said there should be an eye for an eye, my mother impressed upon me the right of self-defense and like for like. So it was inevitable that I would end up at odds with the system of white supremacy."
Nuh went on to become a member of the Black Panther Party. Later he went underground with the Black Liberation Army.
After his capture Nuh continued to closely follow world political developments. He devoted much of his time to analyzing the lessons of the BPP and BLA experience in order to help future revolutionary generations.
Nuh will have a traditional Muslim burial. For information readers can call the Jericho Movement at (718) 657-9572. A public memorial service is also planned.
Comrade Albert Nuh Washington,
presente!This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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