Biography
Joseph Shine White Stewart, North Carolina Department of Public Safety inmate number 0802041, has been incarcerated in the North Carolina state prison system for sixteen years. Originally entering prison as what he describes as a former street tribe member, he was politicized inside through the writings of George Jackson and the broader New Afrikan Independence Movement tradition; he became National Spokesperson of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) and is a former leader of the White Panther Organization.
His political work inside has focused on raising the political consciousness of white prisoners in particular, attempting to counter the white-supremacist organizing that dominates U.S. prison yards and to confront the divide-and-conquer strategies that pit white, Black, and other prisoners of color against each other. In recent years he has lost much of his outside support network because of internal movement disputes — including his condemnation of another prisoner-organizer he believed to be an informant, a split inside the NABPP, and his identification with the writings of James Yaki Sayles, which some movement participants have considered taboo for a white organizer to claim. The Jericho Movement classifies him as a politicized prisoner.