A few days ago, I was messing around on the FBOP website. For once, it was good news: one of the brothers to whom I wrote regularly, at Lewisburg U.S.P., named Abdul Mumit (slave name: Lincoln Heard), was released some years ago.
Originally incarcerated for armored car heist(?), he was not a political prisoner in the sense of Sundiata Acoli, Geronimo Pratt, or the Sheikh. Like El-Hajj Malik Shabazz, he'd reverted to Islam while in prison. Because he stood up against the dehumanizing ("cruel and unusual") treatment accorded him and other prisoners, he was considered a "trouble-maker" and was repeatedly relocated from one prison to another. In between transfers, he was periodically thrown in the Hole. The relocations and the lockdowns created severe mental stress for Mumit, and he wrote me long letters expressing his fear that he would be murdered while in solitary. I did what little I could, writing letters of complaint to the prison bureaucracy, and letters of concern and support to him. He, like many Muslim inmates, felt isolated from the Ummah and craved Islamic literature, delighting when I sent him copies of New Trend (then in paper format), In the Shade of the Qur'an, the Burning Spear, and other literature.
I'd lost touch with him after my own (relatively insignificant) trials and tribulations, and so wasn't aware of his release. I exult in the thought that physically, he has survived, and is (technically) free. But, he is in his fifties now, robbed of his youth by the System, which continuously builds prisons for black youth, while closing libraries and cutting school budgets. I pray Allah help Mumit to survive the unemployment, disenfranchisment, and (more) racism which undoubtedly greeted him outside the gates of Lewisburg, and allow him to walk strong on the Sirat al-Mustaqeen.
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