Photos: The Jericho Movement\Free Russell Maroon Shoatz!
Former Black Panther member Russell “Maroon” Shoatz (above middle) has been released from prison after being incarcerated for 49 years.
They weren’t nonviolent like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or India’s Mahatma Gandhi, but members of decades-old Black revolutionary groups opposed to police brutality have been aging away in state prison systems for decades.
Last week, a Pennsylvania judge freed former Black Panther member Russell “Maroon” Shoatz from prison, according to Democracy Now!
A member of both the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, 78-year-old “Maroon” Shoatz was sentenced in 1970 to life without the possibility of parole for participating in an attack on a Philadelphia police station that left one officer dead and one wounded.
Black Panthers fade away as public perception of police changes
At a time in the 1960s and ‘70s when police brutality wasn’t regularly captured on film, members of Black revolutionary groups took it upon themselves to protect their communities and, in some cases, violently confront armed agents of the government.
Today, police officers kill 1,000 U.S. civilians per year on average, according to Mapping Police Violence.
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