Kuwasi Balagoon

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Kuwasi Balagoon (December 22, 1946 - December 13, 1986) was a defendant in the Panther 21 case in the late sixties, and a member of the Black Liberation Army. Captured and convicted of various crimes against the State, he spent much of the 1970s in prison, escaping twice. After each escape, he went underground and resumed BLA activity. He was captured in December 1981, charged with participating in an armoured truck expropriation in West Nyack, New York, on October 21 of that year, an action in which two police officers and a money courier were killed. Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, he died of pneumocystis carninii pneumonia, an AIDS-related illness, on December 13, 1986. Kuwasi was the first of the BLA prisoners to die in prison.

A staunch advocate of New Afrikan liberation and the eradication of capitalism, Balagoon was also an anarchist and a participant in armed struggle. Serving a stint in the U.S. army in Germany, he and other Black G.I.s formed a clandestine direct action group called De Legislators, which set out to punish racist soldiers with beatings or worse. Upon his return to North America he became involved with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Balagoon was one of the Panther 21 whom the government attempted (unsuccessfully) to frame in 1969. Many of his earliest writings can be found in the collective autobiography of the Panther 21, Look for Me in the Whirlwind. As the Black Panther Party disintegrated due to outside pressure from the police and F.B.I. as well as internal contradictions between different personalities and political lines, Balagoon joined that faction which became the Black Liberation Army, an important formation that engaged in armed confrontation with the State, breaking comrades out of prison, attacking the police and carrying out expropriations against the capitalists.