Kuwasi Balagoon

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Kuwasi Balagoon

Kuwasi Balagoon (1946-1986) was a Black Panther, a member of the Black Liberation Army, a New African anarchist, and a defendant in the Panther 21 case in the late sixties. Captured and convicted of various crimes against the State, he spent most of the 1970s in prison. Balagoon escaped from prison several times, going underground and resuming BLA activity. He was finally captured and charged with participating in an armoured truck armed robbery in West Nyack, New York, on October 21, 1981, an action in which two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O'Grady, and a money courier (Peter Paige) were killed. Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, he died of pneumocystis pneumonia, an AIDS-related illness, on December 13, 1986.

Balagoon authored several texts while in prison, writings that have become influential among Black and other anarchists since first being published and distributed by anarchist prisoner support networks in the 1980s and 90s.