La. Black Panther Party leader, activist honored
28th January 2019 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
The crowd sat waiting patiently for the processional to begin at SUNO-Lakefront’s newly opened Millie M. Charles School of Social Work. The inaugural Living Legend event, hosted by SUNO’s Center for African & African-American Studies (CAAAS) and Southern University’s Louis A. Berry Institute for Civil Rights & Justice this month honored Malik Rahim, a community activist and founding member of the Louisiana Chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP).
The auditorium seats held at least 100 onlookers, spanning at least three generations across all racial, social, and economic lines.
Dr. Clyde Robertson, associate professor and director of SUNO’s CAAAS, welcomed the assembly. “The Living Legend Award is presented to a grassroots member of New Orleans’ African American community for exemplary and lifelong service in educational//youth development, community activism, community-based health & wellness, cultural enrichment, and collective economics. Mr. Rahim was selected because of his lifelong commitment to community activism,” Robertson tells audience members.
After Dr. George Amedee, political science professor, leads the African Libation Ceremony (a spiritual call out to the ancestors for blessings on all assembled), a procession of children chanting “The Revolution Has Come,” escorts Malik Rahim into the building’s auditorium.
The ensuring program, complete with speakers and traditional African and African American performances, offered glimpses of Rahim’s life in five chapters.
“From the U.S. Navy to activism, from Piety Street to an anti-poverty campaign, from Desire Street to social justice, from a jail cell to environmental justice, from politics to anti-death penalty efforts, from civil rights to human rights… the audacious visual perception of a Living Legend,” wrote attorney Angela Allen-Bell, director, Louis A. Berry Institute for Civil Rights & Justice, in a tome entitled, “The Living Legend Malik Rahim: A View from the Observation Deck.”
Rahim sat among fellow Black Panther members, who would later describe their work in New Orleans, Oakland, New York and Angola State Penitentiary. In the film “Sooner or Later, Somebody’s Gonna Fight Back,” a young Rahim explained the work of the New Orleans’ based National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), which became a subsidiary of the national Black Panther Party. “We have told the drug dealers, pimps, and others they can’t do business here. We are making sure our elderly are respected and our children are safe,” Rahim, known as Gypsy then, related. He
Muhammad M. Ahmed (formerly Green Stevenson Jr., aka Steve Green), founder of the National Committee to Combat Fascism, who was recruited into the Black Panther Party by Geronimo Pratt, and Mariama Curry, founder and artistic director, N’Kafu Traditional West African Dance, who at 14, became the youngest Black Panther in the U.S., recalled the work of the Louisiana Black Panther Party. “We had the breakfast program, a free clothes program, and we kept our communities safe,” they said. They routinely fed breakfast to 300 children.
They told about the infamous 1970 stand-off between the Louisiana Black Panthers and the New Orleans Police Department.
Ahmed, a Vietnam veteran said seeing confederate flags and swastikas shaped his actions in founding the anti-fascism group. He remembers a young man named Donald Guyton coming into his office, with wife and children in tow. Rahim (nee Donald Guyton) became the organization’s Head of Security.
Regarding the stand-off, he said, “I knew how to prepare from being in Vietnam. We put up bunkers and no one got hurt. There were 500 officers surrounding the BPP Desire Street headquarters. “
The BPP members were arrested and imprisoned. The following year, they won their court case and the charges made by the police were dropped. At the event, Ahmed thanked Rahim for his service to the BPP.
Attorney Bell had worked with Rahim’s National Coalition to Free the Angola Three. Robert King, Albert Woodfox and the late Herman Wallace, the Angola Three, were inmates who were put in solitary confinement; the latter two after being convicted in April 1972 of the killing of a prison corrections officer. Each was kept in solitary for more than 25 years; two of the men served more than 40 years each in solitary, the “longest period of solitary confinement in American prison history,” according to Wikipedia.
Rahim met them while serving time for the Desire Street incident. There he established the BPP-Angola Chapter. They organized the prison library and an inmate counsel to stop the Black inmates from disrespecting each other. After his release, 10 months later, Rahim’s efforts to free the Angola Three brought international support and eventually the three were released.
Robert King and Albert Woodfox were at the SUNO hosted ceremony.
Fellow Navy veteran and Black Panther Party member, Parnell Hebert, a community activist, playwright & producer told stories of fighting in Vietnam; while confronting racism in the barracks. Like Herbert, Rahim enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17. Reco Forbes, president of the Republic of New Afrika, said of his fellow Black Panther member, “He always did the right thing. Every brother and sister can learn from him. Malik would say, ‘We are there to struggle; there to win.’ He had an unwavering dedication to his community.’” Forbes ended his comments with the oft heard Black power mantra, “All Power to the People.”
Rahim would go on to help Sister Helen Prejean found the anti-death penalty campaign Pilgrimage for Life, a group immortalized in the film “Dead Man Walking.” He founded and operated the Algiers Development Center and Invest Transitional Housing, an ex-offenders’ program, which housed over 1,000 men, women, and children. He also was a co-founder and outreach coordinator of the San Francisco-based affordable housing program, Housing is a Human Right. The community organizer ran unsuccessfully for a New Orleans City Council-at-Large seat on the Green Party ticket.
After Katrina, Rahim founded the Common Ground Collective (CGC), a New Orleans based organization that offered free healthcare, legal help, and rebuilding and clean up services in nine parishes. Nearly one-half million people benefitted from the CGC services.
Rahim, 72, is a current resident of Algiers on New Orleans’ Westbank. The New Orleans native is one of four children born to Eugene Guyton and Lubertha Johnson. His dedication to social and racial justice can be traced back to his grandparents. His grandmother taught him about 19th and 20th century African-American heroes who fought against injustice, among them his grandfather, Sylvester Lewis, who was a lieutenant for the Black Legions, a part of Marcus Garvey’s organization known as the United Negro Improvement Association.
Like most African Americans, Rahim, at a young age, confronted racism. It came in the form of a white cop who ran Rahim and his friends off of a whites-only school’s playground. It was Saturday and the school was closed. The playmates wanted to use the swings. Back then there were no playgrounds in New Orleans for Black children, according to Rahim’s biographer, Trent Smith.
Malik Rahim would confront racism throughout his life, including in the military. These experiences launched his civil and human rights career. However, Rahim never allowed the racists to distort his view of others. He worked well with and recruited many Euro-Americans to his causes.
“From the 1970s to the present, Mr. Rahim has been a fierce and committed advocate for environmental and social justice, housing and prisoner rights and civil and human rights,” Bell concluded.
This article originally published in the January 28, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
