Kuwasi Balagoon

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Kuwasi Balagoon (AKA Donald Weems)
Kuwasi Balagoon (AKA Donald Weems)

Kuwasi Balagoon (born Donald Weems) (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, 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, known as the Brinks robbery (1981), 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 murdered. Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, he died in prison 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.

“He was an anarchist in a black nationalist movement, he was queer in a straight dominated movement, he was a guerrilla fighter after it was "chic," and he never backed down from his ideals, his beliefs, the struggle or him self. And he demanded to be seen not as a revolutionary icon, but as a person, beautiful and flawed,” Walidah Imarisha.

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