U.S. Officials Devise to Murder Political Prisoners by Medical Neglect: My Continued Denial of Cancer Care (2022) By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Protect our Leaders

Since receiving a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer I have received an outpouring of love and support from many individuals, and organizations and their supporters, including the Panther Solidarity Organization, the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, the Third World People’s Alliance, Prison Radio, Prison Lives Matter, and many others too numerous to list here by name.

I want to thank each and every one of you who have sent kind words and/or raised your voices in protest during this trying time, where prison officials have been blatantly denying and delaying me medical treatment in a clear ploy to ensure that my condition spreads and proves fatal.

I am of course not the first to experience this sort of attempted murder by medical neglect. It’s almost the standard U.S. official response, in particular to political and politically-active New Afrikan/Black prisoners. Even highly visible and well known Black political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal, Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, and Dr. Mutulu Shakur, needed massive outside protest campaigns just to receive basic care for deadly diseases like hepatitis C and cancer, which would have proven imminently fatal of left untreated as U.S. officials had devised. Indeed, because of denied treatment, Dr. Mutulu Shakur is on his death bed as I write this, and Comrade Maroon passed on to the ancestors last December.

My cancer condition has similarly gone untreated. It was a year ago, in early October 2021, that blood tests showed a likelihood that I had cancer, but Virginia prison officials did nothing for over six months. It wasn’t until over eight months after these results were known that diagnostics tests were given which confirmed the cancer and that it had by then spread throughout my prostate and possibly beyond. Yet, it is now a year later and no treatment has been given nor is scheduled. Even laymen know that left untreated cancer can spread quickly and kill in a matter of weeks to months.

Contrary to the findings of international tribunals and human rights organizations, Amerika has long denied holding political prisoners. Not only does it hold and inhumanely abuse hundreds of political prisoners, who are primarily people of color, but it devises to assassinate us by medical neglect, especially when we contract potentially fatal medical conditions, which as an alternative to violent assassination gives them plausible deniability for causing our deaths.

From outright lynchings, to direct and proxy assassinations like the murders of Fred Hampton Sr, Martin Luther King Jr, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Medger Evers and many others, Amerika’s designs to suppress and ultimately execute influential independent Black political voices that organize and speak out against it’s racism, militarism, lies and capitalist exploitation is well-established.

Similarly well-established is that the masses are our only real defense against these designs. In my own experience it is to the masses that I am beholden for their effective resistence against numerous well-documented official maneuvers to dispose of me by more traditional violent means. Now, with my cancer diagnosis, officials are devising to murder me by medical neglect. But I wholly trust and rely on the people, who are truly the ocean in which we revolutionaries as fish must completely submerge ourselves and swim in order to survive.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

All Power to the People!