Mutulu Shakur Died a Free Man
I received this note from my dear friend Jackie this weekend.
Mutulu died yesterday
Free from prison
And surrounded by love and dignity
And he had a chance to live free
And enjoy his family and friends
And be in The Black community he loved and fought for
For those who don’t know, Dr. Mutulu Shakur was a civil rights activist who was involved in Black liberation and acupuncture healthcare movements from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Shakur was incarcerated for 36 years after his involvement in a 1981 robbery that resulted in the deaths of two police officers. He was denied parole nine times before it was granted on in December 2022 due to his declining health from terminal bone marrow cancer.
Despite practicing acupuncture for over 2 decades, I only learned of Dr. Shakur a few years ago from my friends, Jackie and Phyllis - both gifted and compassionate acupuncturists who trained trained under him. Activist themselves, they spent years trying to secure his release from prison. Phyllis used her 75th birthday/retirement party as a platform to pay homage to Mutulu’s work and to recruit us all to help him.
In the midst of a drug epidemic that devastated local communities both physically and morally, the Center and acupuncture provided hope for the patients, and “the potential of self-determination.”[7] The practice restored a level of agency in the hands of patients, and it was “an important contribution to that struggle” against the drug crisis. Many patients even became practitioners, and the movement began to spread as a “barefoot doctor acupuncture cadre” where “brothers and sisters [were taught] the fundamentals of acupuncture to serious acupuncture, how it was used in the revolutionary context in China.”[8]
Less than ten years later, on November 30, 1978, a task force of 200 police officers closed down the Lincoln Detox Center. State officials claimed that the drug program was “badly mismanaged and that program leaders had threatened reprisals if there was any attempt to oust them.”[9] Mickey Melendez, the program coordinator at the Center at the time, argued that the government made the program into a “scapegoat” for the rest of the hospital’s medical and administrative chaos. Shakur believed the government and policymakers found acupuncture to be a threat:
Acupuncture in the hands of the revolutionary-minded, particularly addressing addiction, was an intervention that the government was not willing to accept at the time because it attacked and exposed the complicity of the government in imposing chemical warfare on certain segments of the community. We weren’t only providing medical care and exposing chemical warfare, we were challenging Western occidental medicine by Eastern medicine and natural healing.[10]
You can read more about the role of acupuncture and addiction here, here and here.
It has been strange and disheartening to witness how his plight was largely ignored for the last several years. He was denied parole multiple times as other inmates were released due to Covid….denied compassionate release despite being especially vulnerable and increasingly ill due to bone marrow cancer… despite the Black Lives Matters protests that should have highlighted Mutulu’s circumstances.
Sadly, it makes more sense when I recognize him as a powerful voice of dissent who exposed government agendas, recognized the “chemical warfare” on his people and threatened the medical system by introducing “the people’s healthcare.”
I didn’t know him personally. I don’t know that we would have ultimately agreed on the best path to healing or justice. But he dedicated his life to this work. He helped a lot of people who were suffering. And he introduced a system of acupuncture for addiction that we still use today.
Here is Dr. Shakur in an interview following his release from prison:
It’s good to be home. You can’t underestimate freedom.
The eras of the sixties and the seventies were a time of war, revolutionary war, and anti-colonial struggles on the continents of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. But also a war, by the hands of the United States government against Black people in this country.
The murders of our leaders, the murders of activists, men, women, and children from times that we were brought here on those boats all the way through the eras of lynchings and on through the Black power movement.
It is in that context and in that time that Dr. Shakur is born, is raised and is doing his work. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, raised in Queens, New York, Dr. Mutulu Shakur was a conscious member of the new African Independence movement and the Black Liberation struggles from the age of 15. First organizing locally around community control of schools in Brooklyn, and later nationally as a founding member of the provisional government of The Republic of New Africa.
A committed defender of our people, Dr. Shakur not only put his body on the line to protect the lives of those new Africans during the infamous attack on the New Bethel Church by the Detroit police in 1969, but worked to save and transform lives of those struggling with addiction in New York City almost a decade later through the Black acupuncture Advisory Association of North America.
Dr. Shakur is a soldier of the people and has lived a life of revolutionary discipline and revolutionary struggle, a life of sacrifice and service to the new African nation, and all oppressed people around the world.
Indicted by the empire on charges of expropriations of armored cars and the liberation of Assata Shakur, Dr. Shakur served way too many years behind the walls.
Through the tireless work of so many people: The New African People Organization, The Malcolm X Grassroots movement, The Shakur Squad, comrades, activists and most importantly his family, Dr. Shakur was released late last year in 2022. No struggle in the history of the world has ever been successful leaving their people behind. Black Men Build is honored to welcome the General Dr. Mutulu Shakur back home.
Dr. Shakur on choosing acupuncture as a way of fighting back:
I didn’t choose. The condition chose us.
You used to be able to walk down the streets in our neighborhoods, and to see a dope field shooting up with some dope would be rare… in the mid 60s… these years make a difference. They make a difference because the consciousness of the people flip-flopped so fast during that period of time that we lost control of our respect.
…Our hearts suffered when our brothers and sisters came back from Vietnam… all strung out. Quinine bodies… from the cut of the heroin. We suffered because we lacked any control over that genocide.
But like we do, the brothers and sisters started taking brothers and sisters and putting them in basements, cleaning up the basements so that the sisters and brothers could cold turkey… feed ‘em, wash their face, wash their hair… do everything we could to save their life. And that work felt good. That work felt real good…
Capitalism plus dope equals genocide.
…We talk about manhood. We talk about New Afrikan manhood… It was on the verge of extinction. So when we came across a concept of health that could be used to intervene in this chemical warfare we jumped on it with all fours. And we began to learn the difference between the state’s health care and the people’s healthcare.
So the principle of healthcare for the people became a very important aspect of our manhood. Because we could give something to our community. We could make a difference.
On counterintelligence operations:
The opportunity to participate in our struggle … we knew it would be rough. We knew it would mean full participation. But before we went underground we were with the people… United States vs. blah blah blah… Panther 21… Wimbleton 10, New Haven 17… everywhere you looked there was a postcard of how the state was taking community activists and sending them to jail for many, many years for nothing but an alleged conspiracy. That was the tactic used by the FBI to establish a foundation for counterintelligence operation…
The things I’m talking to you about now, even though we call it struggle, they was calling it “low intensity warfare”. Counterintelligence was low intensity warfare. The explanation of counterintelligence warfare was that the participants in most cases didn’t know they were at war.
The government was very clear that they were at war with us who were then 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 years old… The FBI files are clear when you can look back and see Jeral Wayne Williams being followed and the report on Jeral Wayne Williams to J Edgar Hoover every 6 months when he’s only 15-16 years old. They spent their money on their enemies. They demanded that their agents concentrated on their enemies… This is a war and when you in war you treat your prisoners a certain way. You treat your prisoners in a certain way so that anybody who believed in him or thought the prisoner made a rational sense or a rational narrative for their sacrifices, you wanted to kill that possibility. And it was a people’s war that they didn’t know they were involved in until it was too late.
Because by the time they finished dissembling our organizations for basic human rights, our petitions to the world for basic human rights, we had been involved in so much horizontal aggression… we’d been involved in disrespect by foreign nations, we had destroyed the concept of allies…we lost faith in them, they lost faith in us… so we could not unify when it was the appropriate time to do so. We could not use and international instrument because we used an ideological divide to prevent what should happen in the interest of the whole.
On freedom:
My family has done without me for 38 years and the sacrifice of not seeing them has affeted them I’m sure. To have them all together helping me and working by my side and I by their side is very joyous. I’m looking forward to what the future brings. Every time I ride around here I keep saying, man, this is a beautiful country. The sun is shining. The trees are swaying. Man, it’s fantastic… Nature is a companion to freedom and I’m down with it. And I thank all y’all. If I haven’t said it before, or if you haven’t heard it before, I thank everybody that has done anything to help me get out of prison. And I hold up your banner because I know it’s not easy… but it’s a glorious struggle though. It’s a glorious struggle. I wouldn’t be nobody else but who I am, with sacrifices and all. And holding my mother in my arms was one of the greatest things that I could think of since I’ve been free.
To freedom and the people who fight for it.
Rest in Power and in Peace, Mutulu.
Interested in that as I am a retired medico and for some years practiced acupuncture following the methods of Dr.Felix Mann, of London.
I remain amazed how I cured migraine sufferers with a few seconds suppercial needling of Liv 3.