Dhoruba bin Wahad

Dhoruba bin Wahad was born Richard Earl Moore on June 30, 1944, in a South Bronx tenement. His father's family had come to Harlem from Georgia in the 1920s, and his mother's family came from Antigua. His father enlisted in the Army when he was an infant and was never a presence in his life. He grew up in street gangs, received an undesirable discharge after six months in the Army, and rejoined the Disciples in the Bronx. In May 1962 he fired a pistol during a skirmish with a rival gang. No one was hit, but he pleaded guilty to felonious assault and served a five-year sentence at Elmira, Coxsackie and then Comstock.

At Comstock, starting in 1964, his political education began. A Muslim inmate mentored him and gave him books and pamphlets. He met the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman for the first time, and he read and listened to Malcolm X. He had no interest in joining the Nation of Islam, which he found too dogmatic. He admired Malcolm because Malcolm was funny, witty and analytical, not just a talking head. When Malcolm was assassinated in February 1965, Moore resolved to honor him by learning to think like Malcolm and to apply that message to his own daily reality. He converted to Islam and took the name Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad. Dhoruba is Swahili for 'he who is born in the storm.' He kept reading widely, including Gibbon, Marx's Das Kapital, and historical fiction.

He was out of prison by 1967 and living in Manhattan's East Village. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he joined the Black Panther Party in August 1968. Within months he was New York field secretary and head of Eldridge Cleaver's security detail. As Field Secretary he organized chapters along the East Coast. He also worked with tenants in Harlem and on drug rehabilitation in the Bronx. The FBI and NYPD soon marked him as a key agitator and placed him on their security and agitator indexes. On April 2, 1969, a pre-dawn NYPD raid arrested him and twenty other New York Panthers on more than 200 conspiracy counts. After a seven-month trial, the Panther 21 were acquitted. During the pretrial hearings and trial, the national Panther leadership was split by quarrels, including between Huey Newton and the New York Panthers.

In June 1971 he was arrested again and later convicted of attempted murder of two New York police officers. He always maintained his innocence. He served nineteen years. He spoke from jail in 1973 in defense of the Black Liberation Army and the revolutionaries imprisoned or killed in the struggle. He argued for the tactical necessity of mass movements to support political prisoners. He criticized the Rx behavioral modification program in prisons and tied drug addiction in Black communities to the question of the proper response. He criticized parts of the progressive movement that distanced themselves from armed struggle. Litigation on his behalf produced over 300,000 pages of COINTELPRO documents. A judge ruled that his arrest was part of the illegal COINTELPRO operation and that the prosecution had withheld crucial evidence, and he was released in 1990. He then won a lawsuit against the New York Department of Corrections.

After release he divided his time between New York and Ghana. He wrote and spoke on the criminal justice system, Pan-Africanism, a sharp critique of imperialism and capitalism, and freedom for political prisoners. His works include Still Black, Still Strong (1993, with Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal), Look for Me in the Whirlwind (reprint edition 2017, with Sekou Odinga and Jamal Joseph, edited by Matt Meyer), and Revolution in These Times (2025), interviews with Kalonji Jama Changa on antifascism, Black liberation and a culture of resistance. His method joins first-hand movement history to present strategy: mobilizing in the streets, on the block and in communities, and building antifascist coalitions.