Born in the Storm - by Dhoruba Bin-Wahad (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book is the outcome of an archival war and a reckoning over how struggle will be remembered and narrated to future generations.

Born in the Storm is a genre-defying narrative of the life of Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, a leader in the Black Panther Party, soldier in the Black Liberation Army, and political prisoner whose nineteen-year legal struggle against the FBI proved his incarceration was the result of a COINTELPRO frame-up and resulted in his release from prison in 1990. This book tells that story while immersing us within Dhoruba's revolutionary analysis of U.S. history, global empire, political theory, counterinsurgency, media studies, and more.

A book unique in content as well as form, the text is multimodal, combining a variety of narrative styles including biography, autobiography, anthology, and documentary history. Its unorthodox arrangement is meant to provide a seamless narrative while reflecting the relentless fractures, dislocations, and imposed silences that shaped Dhoruba's intellectual and political development. Its approach compels readers to grapple with the various terrains upon which Bin-Wahad--the revolutionary, the artist, the combatant, the thinker, the man--righteously struggled throughout his life. Filled with new details and original archival material, this book will change your understanding of the 1960s/1970s, the Black Panther Party, and the prison industrial complex.

About the Author

Dhoruba Bin-Wahad is a longtime Black revolutionary activist, original Black Panther Party leader from NYC, and an original Black Liberation Army organizer. Bin-Wahad was a target of the FBI's counterintelligence program, known by its acronym COINTELPRO. He was framed for the shooting of two policemen and spent nineteen years in prison as a political prisoner before his conviction was overturned in 1990. He is a steadfast antifascist and antiracist, a staunch advocate for Pan-African geopolitical independence, and poor and working-class unity. His previous books include Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries, with Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Revolution in these Times: Black Panther Party Veteran Dhoruba Bin Wahad on Antifascism, Black Liberation, and a Culture of Resistance.

Orisanmi Burton is an associate professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression and the Long Attica Revolt.