Abdul Olugbala Shakur
Biography
Abdul Olugbala Shakur, whose legal name is James Earl Harvey, is a New Afrikan revolutionary nationalist, writer, and prison organizer. He has described becoming politically active as a Black Panther “cub” and later participating in the youth wing of the Black Liberation Army. Shakur received a life sentence after retaliatory attacks that followed the gang rape of a 17-year-old Black girl by three white sailors. He has said that no property was taken during the attacks and that the men targeted were not the sailors who committed the rape. Shakur spent more than three decades in solitary confinement in California prisons. He helped found George Jackson University, wrote extensively about prison conditions and New Afrikan political education, and took a leading role in the 2011 and 2013 California prisoner hunger strikes against indefinite solitary confinement.
