Printed in Letters From Young Activists
http://lettersfromyoungactivists.org/
By Walidah Imarisha and Not4Prophet
Dearest Hip Hop,
What’s up? It’s been a minute since we had a sit down together. I mean, I still see you at shows, we give each other a pound, and sometimes we even kick it at my spot and listen to records. But it ain’t like it used to be. You’ve changed, and I didn’t want to admit it. I been thinking about it a lot lately. I see you everywhere I go, and you all up in folks’ mouths that don’t have no right to call you by your true name, ’cause they don’t know even half the game. Sometimes it feels like you forget where you came from, or someone’s trying real hard to make you forget who you were, and that you coulda been more than a contenda, back in the day.
Often times, I wonder if you even remember the times when we would hang out at the cement city schoolyards in the south, south Bronx, plug into a lamp post, scratch scavenged sides simmering with stolen sounds and spit street science and inner-shitty subversion all night, and say “fuck you” to the popo as they rolled by, afraid to disturb our anti-govern-mental groove, un-regimented rhymes, and anti-authoritarian azz shaking.
essays
Hasan Shakur’s Last Words Were of the Struggle
in
Written Sept. 1, 2007
By Walidah Imarisha
Another name sadly has to be added to the litany of conscious prisoners sent to their death by this government. In the tradition of Shaka Sankofa, Tookie Williams and many others, Hasan Shakur was murdered by the state of Texas Aug. 31, and pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m.
The execution came less than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected three appeals and requests for reprieves, based on affidavits stating evidence that Shakur’s co defendant Jermain Herron was the one to commit the actual murder, and an affidavit detailing jury misconduct during his original trial.
Shakur (Derrick Frazier, formerly number 999284) was sentenced to death in October of 1998, at the age of 20. He was convicted of killing Betsey and Cody Nutt. Shakur maintained his innocence in the murders until the very end, even when they had him strapped down to the death chamber gurney: "I've professed my innocence for nine years and I will continue to profess my innocence for another nine years.”
Hasan Shakur: A Maroon on Death Row
in
Written Aug. 29, 2006
By Walidah Imarisha
I am sitting in my rented Chevy Equinox outside of the Polunsky Unit, in Livingston, Texas. The middle of farm country, there are stables right next door to the prison, within pissing distance of the electrified fence and concertina wire. I wonder if they belong to the prison. How much of this farmland is the prisons? The inmates wear all white here. It is ghostly figures I see pushing wheelbarrows, carrying rakes through a manicured lawn with flower boxes shaped like the star of Texas. This place reminds me so much of the California state prison my adopted brother Kakamia is in, the town, the hotel I’m staying at, the prison itself, that I walked into the visiting room expected to see my afro-haloed hermano. But I guess maybe all prison towns start to look the same.
By Walidah Imarisha
I am sitting in my rented Chevy Equinox outside of the Polunsky Unit, in Livingston, Texas. The middle of farm country, there are stables right next door to the prison, within pissing distance of the electrified fence and concertina wire. I wonder if they belong to the prison. How much of this farmland is the prisons? The inmates wear all white here. It is ghostly figures I see pushing wheelbarrows, carrying rakes through a manicured lawn with flower boxes shaped like the star of Texas. This place reminds me so much of the California state prison my adopted brother Kakamia is in, the town, the hotel I’m staying at, the prison itself, that I walked into the visiting room expected to see my afro-haloed hermano. But I guess maybe all prison towns start to look the same.
