“If we could get 5,000 people to give $5.00 each, we would be in business! I saw your story on the African People's Socialist Party's internet site. I'm broke, but I do want to give this little bit. The struggle continues. — W.B. aka K.O, Baltimore, MD”
Greeting Family, Friends, Colleagues, Comrades,
Asante sana (many thanks) W.B./K.O. and all who have already given. The Malcolm X Center in Greenville, South Carolina is still engaged in an emergency campaign to raise $25,000 to relocate WMXP’s radio tower, a community lifeline (http://wmxp955.com/). We urgently need your help. Your tax-deductible contribution will help us to re-locate the tower at its full 120' on its new FCC approved site.
With funds already raised, we have been able to dismantle and store the tower, locate and obtain FCC approval and zoning waivers for a new site. We have obtained the City’s building permit and began pouring the foundation. On the 10 days projected completion date, a $15,000 fee is due. Payment to the electrical and fencing contractors, $10,000, is scheduled to follow. We met our FCC deadline to be back on the air by May 20, 2012 and broadcasted the MX Festival LIVE from the historical, racially segregated downtown Cleveland Park (see photos, WMXP Community Radio, 95.5 fm, in progress…. and click "Next" above foto). But meeting these goals can only happen with your support.
As many of you know, on October 10, 2011, the South Carolina Supreme Court struck what can be, but for your support, a deadly blow against the Malcolm X Center for Self Determination and WMXP Community Radio. The South Carolina Supreme Court suspended my license to practice law for nine months. My income from the practice of law has been the Center and radio station’s primary source of financial support.
The suspension was a draconian agreement to a penalty normally reserved for cases where attorneys are the subject of as many as 23 simultaneous complaints. There were no allegations of theft nor of “ineffective assistance of counsel.” Instead, I was prosecuted for failing to use the kind of escrow accounting and hourly billing recordkeeping procedures prescribed by the State and signing an affidavit for a client, without her permission, so she could get alimony. I accepted the sanction to avoid the State’s ultimate and remaining objective, disbarment.
From my initial Bar application and “Character and Fitness Committee” examination, I have been viewed by the establishment as a “foreigner” at best, or at worst, an “outside agitator.” Although the abuses have been wide ranging and recurring, I treated them as the cost of doing unsanctioned political work here.
What the forces in South Carolina did not understand was that the commitment imbued in me by my parents and nurtured by my Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee-Atlanta Project experience steeled my determination to fight against all forms of oppression and for black liberation specifically. It is a fight that I have been able to wage, with some difficulties, over the years and with some success because of my ability to remain relatively economically independent. But, with the State’s move to cut-off my means of support, I can no longer finance that work by practicing law and the institutions that I have helped to build over the years are threatened in ways that they have never been threatened before.
The Malcolm X Center for Self Determination and WMXP Community Radio is widely known for human rights work, both in the United States and abroad. Local work has included going into the prisons as well as the public school system and churches; our annual Malcolm X and Kwanzaa celebrations; periodic retreats for a Black Agenda and October 22nd Coalition Stolen Lives Commemorations; legal services and lifeline for Katrina survivors; campaigns for political prisoner release, social prisoners’ rights, reparations, and against imperialist wars; and police intimidation and violence have informed local thinking and activities even when unacknowledged.
Internationally, we have co-authored joint reports, participated in hearings and delegations to hold the U.S. government accountable for its human rights violations and failure to comply with its various treaty obligations — particularly as it relates to its political prisoners and others in custody. It is no secret that my practice of law has funded these activities.
Today, I ask for your assistance in saving these institutions and keeping this work alive. These community-based, volunteer staffed, personal and locally funded revolutionary, human rights institutions must not fail. They must not become the demoralizing proof of the “folly” of the modern Black Liberation Struggle and Movement. I am doing all I can and ask you to do the same. No contribution is too small; all are tax deductible and essential to our survival. Please make an emergency tax deductible contribution and use your social network to ask others to donate through Community Aid & Development, Inc: Malcolm X Center /WMXP.
Sincerely,
Efia Nwangaza
Founder/Director
