Film Showing in NUI Galway

galway | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Tuesday October 07, 2003 14:07 by Sylvia Pankhurst

The film is of a speech given by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin during one of his speaking tours in Europe in '97 (part of the campaign to free Mumia Abu Jamal)it's happening in the Arts Millenuim building on Thursday 7pm October 9th (this Thursday) in one of the lecture theatres along the balcony (first floor).

The film is of a speech given by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin during one of his speaking tours in Europe in '97 (part of the campaign to free Mumia Abu Jamal)it's happening in the Arts Millenuim building on Thursday 7pm October 9th (this Thursday) in one of the lecture theatres along the balcony (first floor).

Here's a bit of a biog. of Lorenzo:

Lorenzo Komboa Ervin was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1947; what he calls the "...segregated South..." was an environment of violence, racism, poverty and rejection. A youth street gang member, Ervin joined the NAACP youth group when he was 12 years old and took part in the 1960 sit-in protests which changed racial discrimination in public accommodations in the city. After being drafted and after serving two years in the U.S. Army, (where he was a Vietnam anti-war organizer and was court-martialed), he joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee in 1967 shortly before it merged (temporarily) with the more militant Black Panther Party.

In the wake of the urban Black rebellions that rocked the U.S. after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in the Spring of 1968, an attempt was made to frame Ervin on weapons charges and for planning to kill a local Klan leader. In order to escape prosecution in these charges Ervin hijacked a plane to Cuba in February 1969. It was while in Cuba and later in the then-Republic of Czechoslovakia, that he first became disillusioned with state socialism, recognizing it as dictatorship period, not the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as various Communist governments claimed. In Prague (the Czechoslovak capital), Ervin was betrayed to U.S. officials by pro-CIA elements left over from the Dubcek regime shortly after the Soviet invasion of the country. Briefly captured and held at the American Consulate, he fled to East Berlin where he was kidnapped by a special team of by American and West German special agents sent to recapture him. He was drugged and tortured during interrogation in the basement of the U.S. Consulate for almost a week, and after almost dying from this mistreatment, he was illegally brought back to the USA where it was falsely announced by the State department and the FBI in a press conference that he had "turned himself in" at JFK airport.

After a farce of a trial in a small town in Georgia, where he faced the death penalty before an all- white judge, jury, prosecutor and defense attorneys (appointed by the court), he was sentenced to the rest of his life in prison. Ervin remained politically active in prison where he was first introduced to the ideals of Anarchism in the late 1970s. He read many books on the subject sent by prison book clubs, and the Anarchist Black Cross, an international prisoner support movement, adopted his case. Also in prison, Ervin wrote several Anarchist pamphlets that are probably the most widely read writings on anarchism and the Black liberation movement. Anarchism and the Black Revolution is still popular, and has gone through several printings.

He was also involved in many prison struggles, the early 1970s prison union organizing campaigns and the Black prisoner movement or that period. Because of years of solitary confinement and prison mail censorship, his case was kept in obscurity, and it was not until he was one of the "Marion Brothels," a group of prisoners who became well known as they struggled against the first Control Unit at Marion Federal Penitentiary, that his case became a public concern. Ervin's own legal challenges and an international campaign eventually led to his release from prison after 15 years of incarceration.

After his release Ervin returned to Chattanooga, where for over ten years, he remained active with the Concerned Citizens for Justice, a local civil rights group, fighting police brutality and organizing against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1987 Ervin helped organize a major mobilization against the Klan that resulted in the Klan being run out of town. Also in 1987, Ervin was primarily responsible for the filing of a major civil rights lawsuit that successfully forced the city of Chattanooga to change its structure of governance on the basis that it systematically disempowered the Black community.

In retaliation for his activism, the white power structure has sought to frame Ervin up on a number of charges, the last being his arrest on misdemeanor charges in the "Chattanooga 3" case. In that case, Ervin was arrested with several other activists in the Ad Hoc Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality (which succeeded the Concerned Citizens for Justice) for his participation in a demonstration against the failure of a grand jury to bring any criminal charges against policemen who choked a Black motorist, Larry Powell, to death in February 1993.