Biography
Safiya Bukhari, born Bernice Jones in The Bronx in 1950, was a member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, a soldier in the Black Liberation Army, and the principal co-founder of the Jericho Movement for amnesty for U.S. political prisoners. She joined the BPP after witnessing New York police harass a Panther selling The Black Panther newspaper on a Harlem street. After the 1971 split that destroyed the BPP as a national organization she went underground with the Black Liberation Army.
She was arrested in Norfolk, Virginia in January 1975 in connection with a Black Liberation Army attempted robbery and convicted of armed robbery. She was sentenced to a long term in the Virginia state prison system, escaped briefly in 1976, and was recaptured. She served nine years, much of it at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York after a transfer, before her release in 1983.
With Jalil Muntaqim and others, she founded the Jericho Movement in 1998 to demand the release of all U.S. political prisoners. She served as its first national chair until her death from a heart attack on August 24, 2003 at age 53. Her collected essays and speeches were published posthumously as The War Before (2010), with a foreword by her daughter Wonda Jones.
