Rattling The Bars

In this episode of Rattling the Bars , former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa speaks with Mike “Cuong” Tran, a first-generation Vietnamese American whose parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1975. At age five, unable to afford store-bought toys, he began crafting action figures from paper and cardboard—using imaginary worlds to escape an abusive environment. Over time, art became cent...

In this episode of Rattling the Bars , Mansa Musa speaks with independent journalist Victoria Valenzuela, who reports for a wide range of news outlets on incarceration in California and Louisiana. Victoria’s recent articles shed light on the inhumane conditions at California City Detention Center—specifically its no-contact visitation policy, making it the only detention center in California to en...

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Dr. Kimberly Dawn Miller, Co-Coordinator of the Haiti/Americas Team for the Black Alliance for Peace. They examine geopolitical relations and the unfiltered history of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean—including economic warfare against Cuba, the state of Florida’s recent arrest warrant for former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, Trump and JD V...

October 22nd marks the National Day to Stop Police Brutality. Free DC and Pan-African Community Action (PACA) are two organizations in the nation’s capital engaged in building community and direct action against the various entities that form the policing apparatus in DC: police, FBI, HSI, National Guard, etc. While Trump boosts their funding—much like giving a steroid to the carceral machine—Free...

In the second half of this insightful conversation, former political prisoner Mansa Musa joins Black Panther Party archivist and photographer Billy X Jennings to examine the pivotal 1971 FBI office break-in by antiwar activists. The stolen documents exposed COINTELPRO—the federal government's covert operation to surveil, infiltrate, and dismantle radical political movements. Despite state-sponsore...

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa interviews archivist, photographer, and veteran Black Panther Party member Billy X Jennings. Joining the Party at age 17 after relocating from Hobson City, Alabama, to Oakland, Jennings managed BPP offices and served as bodyguard to Huey P. Newton. During Bobby Seale’s 1973 Oakland mayoral run, Jennings helped spearhead an unprecedented elector...

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, the midterms edition, we take you to the Commonwealth, where Andrea James—abolitionist, author, and organizer—is currently running for governor of Massachusetts. The countdown to November 3 is officially underway. Debates are scheduled for October, but independent and third-party candidates are being excluded from participating. Andrea James has led national c...

After running a historic campaign to unseat a criminal court judge for the first time in Nashville, Courtney Teasley created the legal education company emeffen to inform working-class communities about their civil rights. From combating police abuse to supporting vulnerable populations targeted by the criminal justice system, Teasley is a business and legal powerhouse redirecting people toward ci...

What will a DSA-led state look like — will it back defund and community control of police, or bow to the powers that block affordability? Lawrence Grandpre, political commentator for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, explores this question in his recent Baltimore Times article, "The Dangers of 'Law and Order' Leftism: Toward a Black Power Public Safety," asking whether DSA will embrace the outmoded...

Author and community organizer Dominque Conway has transformed a house at the epicenter of the 2015 Baltimore uprising into "Eddie’s Front Porch," a people’s museum dedicated to preserving the remarkable legacy of her late husband, Eddie Conway. To mark the opening of the museum, this special episode of Rattling the Bars features host Mansa Musa sitting down with Dominque to discuss the project an...

On August 8th at the Real News Studio, a screening of the new documentary Beyond the Wire—directed by filmmaker Dr. S. Rasheem—was followed by a panel discussion featuring seasoned conflict mediation organizers from the film. The participants explored their grassroots efforts to challenge the corporate media establishment’s heavy emphasis on crime—which drives city policy and the local economy—and...

Effective public safety policy is founded on preventing crime and repairing harm, but these are not the foundations of America’s reactionary criminal justice establishment. This week on Rattling the Bars, we host a roundtable discussion about the DC Justice Lab’s 2026 Public Safety Policy Agenda, which has been endorsed by 30 progressive organizations working directly with system-impacted individu...

How are hip hop and Black Liberation connected? In this special Black August edition of Rattling the Bars, former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa sits down with artist, producer, and "Panther Cub" Mopreme Shakur on the rooftop of a hotel in the nation's capital. Together, they explore Shakur’s memoir, This Thug's Life , tracing the trajectory from the rise and fall of Black Power t...

As GOP lawmakers push “tough-on-crime” policies in Washington, D.C., re-entry advocates argue these backward measures will only increase recidivism, not prevent it. In Part Two of our series on conservative attempts to use D.C. as a testing ground for harsh criminal justice policies, Rattling the Bars host Mansa Musa sits down with Chelsea Canterbury and Eric Franklin of Voices for a Second Chance...

Republicans in Congress are attempting to push policies in the District of Columbia that would charge 14-year-olds as adults, increase mandatory minimum sentences, repeal the Second Look Act, and re-institute cash bail, which was banned in 1992. In this week's episode of Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa reports from U Street and sits down with Bethany Young and Darby Hickey from the DC Justice...

A groundbreaking new report reveals a direct link between prison phone call rates and prison safety: higher rates fuel more violence within prisons; lower rates and free phone calls dramatically reduce it. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , host and former political prisoner Mansa Musa speaks with Peter Mayer, Director of Research & Data Innovation for Worth Rises. Additional links/info: W...

While calls to "abolish ICE" have exploded during the second Trump presidency, critics have been calling out the threats the agency poses to immigrants, US citizens, and democracy itself since it was created just over 20 years ago. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , host and former political prisoner Mansa Musa speaks with author and immigrant justice organizer Harsha Walia about the origins o...

On this episode of Rattling the Bars , to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, host and former political prisoner Mansa Musa speaks with Dr. Joy James and Dr. K. Kim Holder about the history of the Panthers and their unique approach to, and practice of, communal socialism. This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Watch Part 1 here . Guests: Dr. Joy...

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. On this episode of Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa speaks with Dr. Joy James and Dr. K. Kim Holder about the legacy of the Panthers today, and about the important differences and intersections between democratic socialism and the Black Panther model of communalism. This is Part 1 of a two-...

Beyond the Wire , a new, thought-provoking documentary by filmmaker and researcher Dr. S. Rasheem, offers an indespensible representation of "The Greatest City in America" and a powerful counternarrative to the popular crime series  The Wire . In this exclusive interview for Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa speaks with Dr. Rasheem about how her background in community organizing compelled her t...

Rattling the Bars host Mansa Musa, former political prisoner and Black Panther, speaks with Alberto Toscano, professor of critical theory and author of Late Fascism , about how consent and coercion operate within US civil society and abroad today. In Part 2 of their two-part conversation, Musa and Toscano unpack the history and relevance of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist imprisoned...

Imprisoned by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1926, the prison writings of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci remain essential 100 years later for understanding how fascism, policing, and incarceration function to suppress political dissent and preserve unequal systems of power. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , former Black Panther and political prisoner Mansa Musa speaks with ren...

In 2026, fascism in the US is rising while “the left” descends further into powerlessness, goofiness, and irrelevance—but, author William C. Anderson argues, it doesn’t have to stay that way. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Anderson returns to the show for an unflinching conversation with former political prisoner and host Mansa Musa about the state of the political left today and the lesson...

Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza is the culmination of a violent settler-colonial project that goes all the way back to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , former political prisoner and Black Panther Mansa Musa speaks with award-winning Palestinian author and former political prisoner Basem Khandakji about the decades-long destruction of Palestinian soci...

From the dawn of the digital age to the current era of “artificial intelligence,” the future of literacy, reading, and book publishing is facing an existential threat. But Paul Coates—legendary activist, publisher, former Baltimore Black Panther Party member, and founder of Black Classic Press—has some critical wisdom to share in these perilous times about the revolutionary necessity of books. At...