Biography
Joe Kuhn, interviewed in Oakland at age thirty-four in 1976, described being jailed as a teenager in the South after defending himself against a racist police officer’s abuse. He alleged police organized a mob that tried to remove him from his cell until other Black prisoners raised an alarm. He separately described a later imprisonment during which he won a lawsuit for access to Nation of Islam literature and joined a socialist study group. He had recently been released before joining Oakland’s Socialist Workers Party and organizing tenants. The report supplies no exact state, prison, charges, dates or measured duration for either imprisonment, and does not establish the basis of the second conviction. Source: https://www.themilitant.com/1976/4040/MIL4040.pdf#page=23