Petition for Renunciation of United States Citizenship by Brothers Incarcerated in the Comstock Correctional Facility, November 1991
Reported by Mumia Abu-Jamal
According to recent United States government statistics, over 50,000 people are encaged within New York prisons. Of that astonishing number, almost 50 percent are African-American, with a lesser, though significant percentage, roughly 30.7 percent, Hispanics. This is so even though only 13.68 percent of New York's state population is black and Hispanic.
In the northern districts of New York, a group of politicized prisoners are beginning to frame a unique response to this plague of black encagement.
In late November 1991, some sixty-four prisoners at New York's Comstock Prison put their signatures to a document formally renouncing their citizenship in a nation bent on spitting on their alleged "freedoms." The document expresses historical and contemporary beliefs that demand severance from the land of tortured birth:
Petition for Renunciation of United States Citizenship by Brothers Incarcerated in the Comstock Correctional Facility, November 1991:
We, the undersigned, renounce the citizenship thrust upon us without our consent.
We believe the act of incorporating Africans and Indians into the United States framework serves to nullify the war crimes against our ancestors.
We believe America is an illegitimate country founded on genocide, kidnapping, rape, theft, oppression and racism.
We believe America cannot change its nature.
We believe America's system of economics perpetuates oppression, poverty, and crime. Eurocentric capitalism cannot exist without exploitation.
We believe that this system of economics condemned Africans, Indians, Latinos, and poor whites to ghetto colonies.
We believe the Thirteenth Amendment never freed slaves. We were "released" into a totally impoverished condition wherein many of our peers were forced to engage in a desperate sub-culture in order to survive.
We believe the Thirteenth Amendment is also unconstitutional as it commits prisoners to the station of a slave, by violating the premise of rehabilitation and by not allowing the notion of self-determination.
We believe many major religious bodies should ask for the world's forgiveness for its crimes against Africans, Indians (indigenous), and poor white, and should pay an indemnity for its part in the European slave holocaust and expansionism.
We believe the names of the founding families and plantation owners should be revealed in our history books.
We believe America should tell the descendants of the slave holocaust, the nations we come from, that we can ask for political asylum there or be repatriated back to those original nations.
Signed by sixty-four black Inmates of Comstock Correctional Facility, (New York State).Denied the most fundamental rights as guaranteed by the United Nations Declarations governing the rights of imprisoned persons, subjected to daily brutality and utter humiliation, caged by a system born in racist imbalance, the Comstock Brothers' Petition touched a deep nerve.
Interested persons seeking more information may contact:
Joan Gibbs, AttorneyFebruary 5, 1992
Center for Constitutional Rights
666 Broadway, 7th Fl.
New York, NY 10003Reported by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Political Corrections
The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension