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B. Kwaku Duren (born April 14, 1943; a.k.a., Robert Donaldson Duren and Bob D. Duren) is a controversial African American lawyer, educator, writer, editor, Black Panther, long-time social, political and community activist; and a former convict who now lives and practices law in South Central Los Angeles. He has run for United States Congress three times and once for Vice President of the United States.〔New York psychologist and independent party activist Lenora Fulani ran for President of the U.S. in 1988 on the New Alliance/Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The campaign was historic inasmuch as she was the first woman and first African American to run for president and achieve ballot access in all 50 states and in the District of Columbia. As a result, she received over one million dollars in matching federal funds. Fulani chose seven vice-presidential candidates to run with her, including a Latino, a gay, and an African American (Duren).〕 As a young man, he spent nearly five years in California prisons for armed robbery.〔Duren, 1976, p. 108.〕 He began reading extensively and taking college classes while incarcerated and after his parole in the fall of 1970, he founded and chaired the National Poor People’s Congress. A couple of years later, he and his younger sister, Betty Scott, along with Mary Blackburn and other community activists, founded an alternate school – the Intercommunal Youth Institute (1972–1975) – in Long Beach, California. In the wake of the shooting death of his sister by a California Highway Patrol officer during a routine traffic stop, Duren helped found and was a co-chair of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) from 1975–77. From 1976 to 1981 he was the Coordinator of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party (SCC/BPP). From 1979 until 1991 he worked for the Los Angeles Legal Aid Foundation, beginning as a Community Outreach Worker; later, as a paralegal and attorney; he was one of the founding members and first president of the Union of Legal Services Workers of Los Angeles (AFL-CIO/UAW). Duren attended law school at the Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles. He graduated in fall of 1989 and was admitted to the California State Bar on August 8, 1990.〔(California State Bar membership records )〕 He has worked as a “people’s” lawyer and community activist in South Central Los Angeles ever since. A founding member of Community Services Unlimited, Inc., he was its Executive Director from 1977–2008. As Chairman of the New Panther Vanguard Movement – since 1994 – Duren was co-editor-in-chief, with his ex-wife, Neelam Sharma, of The Black Panther International News Service, a quarterly newspaper published in Los Angeles from 1995 to 2001. ==Early life== B. Kwaku Duren was born in Beckley, West Virginia, the hometown of his father, William Preston “Brack” Duren, and his mother, Willie Wade Bennett. Duren is the only son in a family of four children. His father worked as a miner, a prizefighter, and a steel mill worker. During the Second World War, when Duren was an infant, his parents moved to Cleveland, Ohio. They lived in various places around Cleveland until settling into some new “housing projects." His mother was a housewife for many years but also worked as a housekeeper and seamstress. When “Brack” Duren had his hand severely mauled in an industrial accident at Midland Steel (he lost two-and-a-half fingers of his right hand), and the company dismissed him with a tiny settlement, Willie Duren was forced to seek work cleaning the houses of whites to help support her family. In 1959, Duren’s mother relocated from Cleveland to Long Beach, California. Her husband followed his family to Long Beach shortly thereafter. In 1960, Brack Duren was arrested in a house raid by the FBI and charged with committing armed robberies of illegal gambling joints in Cleveland, which he had done after being injured and unable to find work. He was extradited to Ohio where he served many years in Chillicothe Correctional Institution before becoming a jailhouse lawyer, doing research on his own case (with the help of his eldest daughter, Joyce), appealing, and ultimately winning his release on a technicality. He rejoined and remarried his wife after his release from prison and lived the remainder of his life in Long Beach. At the age of 17 years, Kwaku Duren was arrested for breaking and entering into a television shop. He served six months in an L.A. county jail facility before being placed on probation. Following his release he worked in a pool hall in Long Beach, sold drugs, and, with a partner, committed a series of convenience-store holdups over several years. In spring of 1966, he was arrested for sticking up a cab driver, convicted, and sentenced to five years to life. He spent four-and-a-half years in Chino and Soledad prisons. (In a bit of irony, he worked as a cab driver while putting himself through law school.) During his three-and-a-half years in Soledad, a black counselor introduced Duren to the writings of the African American historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois – especially ''The World and Africa''. Even before his slide into criminality, Duren had been a voracious reader. He thus began an intensive study of African–American history while in prison, reading books such as ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X.'' He also devoured works by writers such as J. A. Rogers, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin. He ordered these books through the California State Library and the U.N’s UNESCO library. One particular area that he devoted himself to was the history of slavery and its effects on, and reverberations in, contemporary life. In addition to his autodidact pursuits, Duren enrolled in and completed classes in economics, sociology, and psychology, as well as astronomy, at San Francisco State University. He was paroled in September 1970 at the age of 27. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「B. Kwaku Duren」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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