Biography
Kwame Beans Shakur is the Chairman and Co-Founder of the New Afrikan Liberation Collective and National Director of the Prison Lives Matter Movement. He is held in the Indiana Department of Correction under inmate number 149677 and has been in solitary confinement for 23 to 24 hours a day for more than six years.
He was arrested in 2011 in Terre Haute, Indiana — his hometown and the city where his grandfather, Robert Joyner Sr., had been one of the leading 1960s and 1970s Black liberation organizers and a co-founder of what is now the Booker T. Washington Community Center. Indiana State Police, U.S. Marshals, and SWAT surrounded his fathers house with snipers and an armored vehicle. After a brief standoff he came out and was held for 33 days before being charged with the double homicide of two white men. He maintains his innocence; the only physical evidence seized in the warrantless search were the firearms that had belonged to his late grandfather. The prosecution introduced his street-organization (Growth and Development) affiliation extensively at trial. He was convicted and sentenced to 110 years.
In 2014, after being introduced by Comrade Shaka Shakur (also in this database) at the Pendleton Correctional Facility to the work of Sanyika Shakur and Jalil Muntaqim, he became a New Afrikan revolutionary nationalist. With Shaka Shakur he co-founded the New Afrikan Liberation Collective. The Jericho Movement classifies him as a politicized prisoner.