Lorenzo Komboa Ervin speaking tour
US Black anarchist Lorenzo Komboa Ervin is speaking at meetings
around Ireland this summer. Lorenzo is an ex-Black Panther who served
15 years in one of the worst US prisons. In prison he became an
anarchist and has spent his time since helping to build the anarchist
movement in the US. He has also continued striving to build a broad
grassroots movement against racism and injustice. In bringing him
over here we hope to broaden the understanding of anarchism among
people in Ireland, and underline both its internationalism and
relevance to today's struggles.
Lorenzo Komboa Ervin was born 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 National Association for the Advancement of Coloured
People youth group when he was 12 years old and took part in the 1960
sit-in protests which challenged racial discrimination.
After being drafted and serving two years in the U.S. Army, (where
he was a anti-Vietnam war organiser and was court-marshalled), he
joined the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating 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 Ku Klux Klan leader.
In order to escape prosecution on these charges Ervin hijacked a
plane to Cuba in February 1969. It was while in Cuba and later in
Czechoslovakia, that he first became disillusioned with state
'socialism', recognising it as dictatorship period, not the
"dictatorship of the proletariat", as various Stalinist governments
claimed.
In Prague, Ervin was betrayed to U.S. officials. Briefly captured
and held at the American Consulate, he fled to East Berlin where he
was kidnapped by a team of 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 defence attorneys (appointed by the court), he was sentenced to
spend the rest of his life in prison. Ervin remained politically
active in prison where he was first introduced to the ideas of
Anarchism in the late 1970's.
He read many books on the subject sent by prison book clubs, and
his case was adopted by the Anarchist Black Cross, an international
prisoner support movement. 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 1970's
prisoner union organising campaigns and the Black prisoner movement
of 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 Brothers", 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 has been active with the Concerned Citizens for
Justice, a local civil rights group, fighting police brutality and
organising against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1987 Ervin helped organise a
major mobilisation against the Klan that resulted in the hooded
racists 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. Ervin now lives
in Atlanta, Georgia.
His current project is helping to build an "anti-authoritarian
network of community organisers" all over North America.
