Book Review: Will You Die With Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party, by Flores A. Forbes

BY MARLAND X

The Black Panther Communist Party for Self-Defense (BPP) manifested itself in many forms during the era of 1966-1982. This book is a surface telling of the story of the BPP’s West Coast military arm, and especially of its underground covert operations executed from 1972 to 1977 by the “Buddha Samurai,” a politico-military organized group of BPP brothers and sisters (mostly brothers) who were so serious about their craft that comrade sister Ericka Huggins once observed that “their reputations would make [notorious 1930s Harlem gangster] bumpy Johnson shit his pants.” It is an autobiographical soldier’s story as told by brother Flores (aka Fly), former BPP Central Committee member and head of “the fold” (slang for this elite security grouping).

Brother Flores kicks off this tome by taking you on a brief journey throughout his adolescent years, during which he conveys the conditions that heightened his consciousness of the degenerate nature of the racist enemy state apparatus in north amerika, which included, amongst other things, the oak stick therapy session he suffered at age 14 at the hands of armed pig police elements, the housing discrimination his Navy family experienced in the U.S. Navy stronghold of San Diego, California, the fact that his parents struggled to survive economically in this capitalist board game even after his father “retired” from the imperialist U.S. Navy, and his introduction to the radical ideas of comrades Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X and the BPP through his college-attending brother’s book and newspaper collection which put a lot of this shit in its proper perspective for him. Flores and his brother, Fred, would eventually seek out BPP membership as a vehicle to help them rectify this oppression that their expanding political consciousness had heightened their awareness of.

History teaches that strong and effective organizations are usually composed of people who have a vision that is rooted deep down within their beings and lies at the core of what they believe themselves to be, believe in and value in life. When it comes to movements advocating socialism and communism, comrade Lenin put forth the thesis that “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movements,” and that “the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a Party that is guided by the most advanced theory.” Comrade Mao Tse-Tung echoes this truth concerning communist theory, by stating that “we should regard it not as dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases, but of learning…the science of revolution.” In this book, Fly points out one of the oft overlooked practices that made the BPP so strong whenever we hear tales of the Party at its best: the mandatory political education (“PE”) classes, where participants were led to the fountain of scientific socialism and shown how to drink deeply therefrom, with reading and explanation/comprehension sessions, until their feet were firmly planted on the rockbed of fact and pure reason.

As the Party’s San Diego Branch founder and Defense Captain, comrade Kenny Denman, states to the young Fly, “This is hard work and a dangerous thing we are doing…People are getting killed, and you need to know what this is about.” Fly relates to us that “fighting had occurred to me as a way to wage revolution, but not reading. This stuff included using your brain and having functional skills that would make the organization work smoothly.” So it is that we find Flores’ grounding, the basis that would eventually make him and other BPP cadre forces to be reckoned with. These beautiful brothers and sisters could not be marginalized because they understood what was going on socially, politically and economically, and knew that they were fighting for themselves and the people. Ergo, the Panther slogan “power to the people” always reminds people that this whole thing was about class struggle, which often broke out into hot class warfare which made the antagonism between the oppressors and oppressed very sharp and clear. A revolutionary party must be on message, and this is accomplished by achieving and uniformity and unity in the mode of thought amongst party members which deliver truths about processes in the material world.

Our method of thinking about and analyzing the world is called dialectical materialism. If you don’t do this and you just cling to generalities and assumptions, you will kill yourself with the fated “crisis in thought” phenomena, where the main thrust of the movement is on random activities rather than being based on thought, education and clear objective; the membership is espousing various opinions and compounding the problem of non-unified thought; and, the vacuum is filled with viewpoints and positions of hostile ideologies, lack of understanding among members and cliques and the breeding of mistrust and enmity among various factions in the party. Unfortunately, as time wore on during the era in question, less and less emphasis was places on the PE classes in the BPP and both the crisis in thought and the pig infiltration of the party ranks set in. We cannot afford to make this mistake again, and we would do well to remember comrade George Lester Jackson’s charge on this point: “Full commitment generally comes as a result of awareness, and awareness is the product of study and observation. The things a person has gone to the effort of reading and analyzing say a great deal about his character. In other words, very few Black intelligence agents will have studied Marx, Mao, Lenin, Fanon, cats like that in depth. You can generally tell what process a man’s mind has gone through by what he’s studied, observed.” We must move as a cohesive unit…this starts with education.

As noted earlier, this book, this weapon in our arsenal, is a soldier’s surface telling of the operations of the BPP’s West Coast military and security apparatus. Such stories are important to communicate because we, being materialists, understand that there will be no revolution in the fascist state of amerika without an army because under such conditions, politics and war are inseparable. So, we find gems dropped here such as the procurement of arms and ammo from renegade or sympathetic members of the empire’s military forces (and the necessity to immediately transfer this technical equipment (TE) to another area of the country, in order to thwart the snitches and raids); the deployment of nomadic ‘goon’ squads to conduct criticism/self-criticism sessions, impose disciplinary sanctions, root out infiltrators and conduct necessary purges; the construction of soundproof indoor shooting ranges in the basements of homes, and practicing on them with simulated bullets (plastic rounds with a smaller amount of gunpowder than usual); practicing gun safety in order to eliminate accidental discharges of weapons and just plain ole’ stupidity from the equation; and finding the right books for guidance on how to correctly execute your job. For example, an armorer should have the small arms of the world encyclopedia; particulars on conducting security guard duty/watch detail over BPP offices, so as to prevent break-ins and raids (eg. using 2-person teams at a minimum…1 inside, 1 outside, and rotating); the fortification of BPP offices and pads with wire fences, multiple 10 feet deep tunnels running away from the property, eagles’ and snipers’ nests, sandbags, gun ports with wire mesh to prevent tear gas from being tossed into your defensive location, steel plates for the windows, floodlights and the trench systems, etc; the movement of warriors who had been in shootouts with the fascist pigs to safe houses in other parts of the country or world; the creation and maintenance of safe houses; particulars on assuring the safety and security of Party members; learning to dress in and be comfortable with business attire in order to thwart easy identification by hostiles; learning to tell the difference between 7.62 mm and 7.62 x 39 ammo (former is for American m60, the latter for the Russian AK-47); moving sensitive material from place-to-place in innocuous containers such as clothing bags, briefcases and trunks; trafficking sensitive items during rush hours; learning proper combat handgun shooting techniques such as the weaver stance; and applying urban guerrilla texts’ techniques to the unique conditions presented by U.S. streets, etc. I wish he would have given the reader some specific and detailed lessons learned in this last area of concern, but alas, the tome is lacking such critical information.

But don’t get it twisted; it was not all blood and guts/fighting to destroy the enemy’s military strength for these particular Party members. Indeed, they were tasked with recognizing that as vanguard elements they were a propagandist and organizer of the revolution. So, Brother Flores doesn’t neglect to tell of how he and other Party members also undertook the arduous task of carrying on minute and detailed political and mass work by establishing Party chapters and branches in new territories; selling the Party’s newspaper organ; attempting to establish people’s red political power in the halls of city, state and federal government, so that government would administer to the needs of the people; and organizing community survival programs which helped the masses meet their daily needs and defend themselves while the Party guided them to the level of consciousness where they would seize the time, act against those who continue to oppress and exploit them, and institute a human and equitable society. Unfortunately, the BPP would eventually disintegrate and let the hourglass pass into ashes. But this reviewer sees something on the distant horizon. We as a people are destroyed, but not quite yet conquered, for the Panther spirits live on and the truth is not extinguished in our hearts, their progeny.

Flores gets into the major 1971 defection/purge that went down in the BPP, splitting the Party into factions following either Comrades Huey Percy Newton and David Hilliard, or Eldridge Cleaver. Fly states that he went with Huey’s idea which was to de-emphasize the gun and armed self-defense as its primary means of addressing the conditions which the Party confronted and relating to the community, and elevate and expand the Party’s work with the Service to the People survival programs, conquering of political offices via participation in electoral politics, and community economic development. Eldridge, on the other hand, wanted to seriously ramp up the organized offensive-defensive military actions against the enemy state (‘Babylon’ as he so eloquently styled it), making it very clear to the empire that we, as the vanguard, would indeed give body to the rhetoric of ‘by any means necessary’ in this class war of liberation. Both of these men were correct, of course, as (quoting Comrade Brother George again) “politics is violence [and] we must never delude ourselves into thinking that we can seize power from a position of weakness, with half measures, polite programs, righteous indignation and loud entreaties. If this agitation that we like to term as nonviolent is to have any meaning at all, we must force the fascist to taste the bitterness of our wrath. Nonviolence must constantly demonstrate the effects of its implied opposite. The dialectic between Narodnik and Nihilist should never break down.” and “we may advance a simple rule here: the likelihood of significant social change in the United States may be gauged by the extent to which the covert, armed, guerrilla aspect of the struggle is developed and consolidated…If on the other hand,…leadership is able to successfully do what amounts to the work of the state, that is to say, to convince most people to shy away from armed struggle, and to isolate those who do undertake to act as guerrilla from the mass of support which should rightly be theirs, then the revolution will be forestalled.” To be sure, even Karl Heinrich Marx stated on different occasions that “force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one”; and that “the weapon of criticisms is no substitute for criticism by weapons. Material force must be opposed by material force.” Even the ruling class’ running dogs and power elite understand this critical dynamic; Witness:

“Our people understand that the guys with the guns make the rules!” -Wayne LaPierre, National Rifle Association CEO and Executive Vic President, speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (“C-PAC”) February 28, 2009.

and

“You got to get a mental attitude that these guys can’t really hurt us. They’re not going to shoot us. It’s not Iraq. Worst thing can happen to us is we run up a bunch of legal fees… and might have to pay a fine…” -U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, caught on tape by the FBI in 2006 in a telephone conversation with oilman Bill J. Allen, discussing the corruption/bribery probe against them. The tape was played at his jury trial on October 6, 2008.

So, we see that the oft-stated position that Eldridge had his theory and reading of the concrete conditions messed up, and that Huey was correct and only he could be right and, thus, Eldridge was wrong, was a horrible misreading of reality. But these brothers, and the ones who followed them to the extreme of waging death matches against their BPP comrades, failed to pick up on the untenable nature of dealing in absolutes and the necessity of unifying these two concepts for the movement to progress in any significant manner, and when this was combined with the death blow concoction of COINTELPRO disinformation and disruption campaigns, super-large egos, minds clouded by too much drug usage (effective chemical lobotomies no doubt), and a paper BPP Central Committee that never voted on this critical matter and just let Huey be the decider rather than practice democratic centralism…well, history is best qualified to reward our research: everything eventually went to shit, with the Party eventually completely disintegrating and the truly committed revolutionaries in both factions either dropping out, being shot and put in earthen graves, or suffering living deaths and isolation via the cold prison doors or exiled to communities located outside of the belly-of-the-beast. Fly saw this coming, relating in his book that “I thought my world was coming apart before I even got started.” He states that he eventually backed Huey’s position because he assumed that the Party wasn’t ready to continue engaging in armed guerrilla warfare actions due to the fact that the organization had suffered significant losses of life in only a little over 3 years time and this was thought to be unsustainable when it was a known fact that wards of liberation of protracted events that span decades.

This position, which Comrade Elaine Brown took also, reminds this reviewer of an observation that one of empire’s devils made: “a few funerals tend to have a quieting influence.” It also occurs to me that, in addition to the well-reasoned analysis of concrete conditions that underlined Huey’s position, there existed some unspoken desire amongst that faction to somehow escape the destiny that held that “the revolutionist is a doomed man” (Sergei Nechaiev and Michael Bakunin’s Catechism), that “in revolution, one wins or dies” (Ernesto “Che” Guevera de la Serna) and that “A true revolutionary realizes that if he is sincere, death is imminent. The things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this realization, it is pointless to proceed as a revolutionary.” (Huey, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution” July 20, 1967, a little over 3 years before this 1971 purge mess came along). I think that this fear fully manifested itself just 6 years later, when in October 1977, Huey tells Elaine that the Party had not been all that mattered in life to him and that “I don’t want to save the world [anymore]. I just want to be Huey.” (See Elaine’s autobiography, A Taste of Power).

Fly tells us that by 1972, Huey believed the Party to be spread too thin over 42 chapters, with money being seriously drained from Party coffers, and with many BPP members, including the leadership, having no idea who most of their own Party members were, which was a recipe for easy infiltration of the Party apparatus by enemy state agents. Brother Huey had the idea that the Party should close ranks, regroup and rejuvenate along the lines of the exemplar laid down by Chairman Mao’s 1934 Long March to the southwest Shan-his province in China (of note: only 6,000 of the original 100,000 Chinese people who started this march made it to the destination alive), by executing a 5-year plan that would culminate with the BPP securing political control of the city of Oakland, California and its lucrative containerized sea port in order to “wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.” (see The Communist Manifesto)—Essentially, the effective dictatorship of the proletariat, designed to return the benefits of production, consumption and distribution to the people, the masses. After this Oakland base of operations, this socialism stronghold, was firmly established, the plan was to move to higher ground by deploying sorties to relaunch the revolutionary process in other major and strategic parts of the U.S. empire. It was, thus, that many of the chapters and branches of the BPP were shuttered and their forces concentrated in Oakland; this, in addition to the problems arising from the Huey/Eldridge split.

Now, this Brother Huey, he was no fool, and Flores tells us that it was during this 1972 transition that Huey created this elite grouping of military operatives known as the Buddha Samurai to handle specialized high-vale security detail and deal with the grimy street operations that Huey styled as the “stern stuff” of organized violence aimed at the lumpen proletariat and petite-bourgeoisie elements engaged in the “illegal” drug trade. Members of this selected elite grouping were said to be some of the most trusted and talented elements of the Party and included both brothers and sisters capable of both attending to the daily administrative and traditional work of the Party (Buddha) and carrying out decisive military operations (Samurai). Fly would be appointed to this security cadre, then headed by Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, who made it a priority to train and drill these members daily so that they would be highly organized and deserving of the “elite” tagging.

However, from the surface information supplied by Flores in this book, I think that this magnificent unit was somewhat misapplied by Huey (something else I perceive could have been prevented, had the BPP’s Central Committee existed in more than political theatre form), as he directed their greatest energies to levying street taxes on the Bay Area’s unlicensed drug dealers and speakeasy owners. While I fully appreciate all of the valid justification for that tack, for reasons I have yet to see anyone explain, Huey did not aim these shock troops at the empire’s licensed drug dealers (viz., doctors, pharmacies/drug stores, monopoly pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists and the lawmakers, executive branch members and armed pig enforcers who created this class distinction and made it possible for the bourgeoisie drug trade to flourish), or the establishment elements who were misusing the sales and income taxes already being levied on the speakeasy owners and street dope boyz by the enemy state apparatus. Was such a tack a major strategic error on the BPP’s part? This point deserves greater analysis from our thinkers. not surprisingly, these street elements joined forces and not only placed a $10,000 bounty on Huey’s head, but also killed that brilliant brain of his by giving him the tried and true chemical lobotomy, getting him addicted to the very dope he was taxing and trying to suppress.

Fly relates one instance where a few members of this Buddha Samurai guerrilla clique and Huey went to a speak easy to “hold court,” and the do’ boyz laid an Al Pacino/Scarface high (6 to 8 inches) mountain of that girl (cocaine) in front of Huey and proceeded to snort a lot of that shit up his nose with a $100 bill and a straw. As I read this, I kept having flashbacks to the Fall 2008 season of BET’s American Gangster series, where the wife or daughter of Sanyika Shakur (f/k/a LA CRIP “Monster” Kody Scott) observed that a person cannot lead a revolution and be a drug addict at the same time (the sister was lamenting the fact that Comrade Sanyika had exited the hard-cell prison walls with so much scientific socialist insight and potential to lead the next great push forward because of his influence in the streets, but he had let the significant pressures of leading such a movement drive him to abusing the drugs and had, thus, missed that opportunity). These are major opportunities for true liberation that have been blown, my people, partially because of this damn cult of personality taking over (as opposed to democratic centralism and a strong no-nonsense Central Committee guiding the party) and a certain amount of selfishness on the part of our leaders. We cannot have a Party that glorifies our leaders by heaping sickening adulation upon them and cloaking them in an aura of infallibility. Taking such a course of action is akin to the sickness which is the Catholic church and their ‘infallible’ pope (no human being is without error or mistake, and you are ill if you believe otherwise) and introduces a ‘cult of personality’ into our ranks which will do infinite harm. w communists take an oath of fidelity and total subjugation not to any 1 person, but rather to the programme, party line, and the self-determination and liberation of the people. Class struggle – this is where our revolutionary duty lies. Don’t get it twisted! We must correct for this if we are to make any great leap forward any time soon, and I would urge that the movement be ever mindful of the enemy’s strategy of utilizing the drug angle in various ways to kill off our revolutionary potential.

Eventually, as told to us by Comrade Sister Elaine in her autobiography, the Brother Masai (BPP Minister of Education) called Huey and the so-called Central Committee out in 1972 for not practicing what they were preaching, viz. democratic centralism, and stated that the BPP’s Central Committee was nothing more than a rubber-stamping group of rank-and-filers in reality; Huey retaliated against this truth-telling by busting the Brother down in rank and duties, which in-turn forced Masai to walk away from the Party over principle. Fly states that it was after Comrade Masai resigned that he was appointed to head the Buddha Samurai, much to the consternation of other Party members who thought him too young and inexperienced to be charged with such great responsibility. Despite these protestations, Fly would apparently handle his duties with deft adroitness and would be promoted to the Assistant chief of Staff and Party Armorer position two years later in 1974 after Elaine assumed leadership of the Party, thus solidifying his leadership position of the Buddha Samurai security cadres, where he reports that he did everything from assuring the quality and availability of the necessary weaponry/TE to attending to the administration of the Party’s community survival (pending revolution) programs and various fundraising activities.

Karl Heinrich Marx once expounded, “Only the economic organization is capable of setting on foot a true political party of labor, and thus raise a bulwark against the power of capital.” It appears that Comrade Elaine, as BPP Chairwomyn July 1974 to October 1977, was successfully attempting to put this theory into practice, utilizing then liberal capitalists’ (viz., the Oakland Mayor and the California Governor) influence to secure the following for the Party: multi-million dollar government contracts for construction projects and control of the thousands of permanent jobs that came with them that could, in turn, be made available to poor and Black people; grants from various philanthropic groups and foundations, government programs and private contributors, which were funneled through the Party’s multifaceted 501(c)(3) non-profit apparatus to support and expand the community survival programs and people’s revolutionary education complex (these were also funded with some of the money expropriated from the unlicensed drug dealers); and to wrest some leniency from the bourgeois kourts when Party members stood before them, etc.

Of course, the capitalist-imperialist pigs would have never conceded any of this ground without the BPP possessing the threat of large-scale organized violence unleashed against the people’s class enemies right there within the belly of the beast, had their modest demands not been met, and I am confident that the anti-class-enemy examples then being set by our valiant warriors in the Black Liberation Army were not too far from the devil’s reckoning when contemplating these negotiations, but it appears that this hard power (a potent military arm) went to the heads of many of the brothers and had them practicing some very backwards bourgeois socialization tendencies towards the sisters in the party, instead of being the revolutionized new men they were destined to be.

In point-of-fact: While the administrative, overt/aboveground side of this economic and political equation was effectuated mostly by the womyn in the Party (the more familiar forces being Comrades Phyllis Jackson, Joan Kelly, Norma Armour, Regina Davis, and Ericka Huggins), the covert/underground military matters were enforced by a security cadre which was male dominated and chauvinistic in many of its practices, and this oppression of the womyn in the party (amongst other things), when left unchecked and allowed to run wild (such as when Huey was allowed to call all of the shots during the 1970-1974 and July 1977-1982 periods), would prove to be the Party’s ultimate undoing. Our lesson is that the oppression and exploitation of womyn is a politically and morally indefensible reactionary tendency which marries the movement to failure. Remember this: sex is not a class…class is sexless…class is amorphous in point of sex. The sister will not be free without the brother, nor the brother without the sister, so let us keep our shit together in this area from here on out. But back to these ugly facts: in her autobiography, Elaine described the physical beatings and compulsive/peer-pressure sexual encounters endured by some of the sisters in the Party at the hands of the Brothers, and that some of the Buddha Samurai brothers’ (post-Huey 1977 return) blatantly disregarded Party rules and discipline, as well as reverted to the physical beatings of the sisters for perceived slights (real or imagined), and rampant drug usage and abuse, all with the explicit blessings of Huey who refused Elaine’s pleas that he put these patriarchal proclivities in check forthwith. Elaine had this mess eliminated while Huey was in exile in Cuba, 1974-1977, but his return to the states was used as a cover by the brothers to start the bullshit up again, and this forced Elaine to walk away from the Party and Huey’s indifference. Elaine’s last act in the Party was to call a Central Committee meeting to discuss these matters, but in his book, Flores tells us that during this October 1977 confab (minus Elaine, who was in the wind after scheduling the meeting) the only thing that the sisters were concerned with was getting permission (reversal of a party rule) to sate and sex men who were not members of the BPP, just as the male Party members were already allowed to do. Now, that seems like a pretty narrow agenda considering the broad range of negative conditions then confronting these sisters (and even that narrow proposal was voted down by the brothers along gender lines), but that’s how it went down according to Fly in this book. I think that a transcription of the minutes of that Central Committee gathering would be a really good teaching point for us on this subject matter if we could ever procure such, but that will have to await another day. I just need to repeat here the maxims that “Brothers, the Sisters are not our stronger-halves or our weaker-halves, but are our other-halves; Our womyn hold up half the sky, and a people and their communities are not conquered until the heart of the womyn are on the ground.” Doesn’t history support this thesis?

Fly’s last days on the West Coast with the BPP would shortly follow the above-noted Central Committee meeting, when, on October 23, 1977, he and a few of his Buddha Samurai Comrades went on a modified Frantz Fanon-type “right to initiative” operation (viz., non-Central Committee sanctioned assassination action, act first and explain later) to eliminate the female pimp of a prostitute/female sex worker that they were accused of murdering (the female pimp was scheduled to testify at a preliminary hearing in the case). After supplying some quality details on how to properly carry out such a mission, Fly tells us that they nonetheless botched the job by going to the wrong door of a duplex home, where after an innocent old Black lady bust a couple of caps at them when they were coming through the door. One of Flores’ operatives panicked, shooting (with an M-16, mind you) and killing the Buddha Samurai member Louis Talbert ‘Texas’ Johnson, and wounding Fly with a near catastrophic hand wound. This event forced Flores into the Party’s underground network of extraordinary forces (made up of our black and white comrades) which provided him with food, clothing, shelter, money, companionship, entertainment, and alternative identities for 3 years, and he provides some surface details of his existence in the network. Fly would remain within the protective embrace of this red network until he came to the conclusion that the BPP was no longer about the struggle of liberating the people, the masses, from the horrors of generational poverty and class warfare. After consulting with legendary BPP attorney Charles R. Garry who confirmed this observation (placing emphasis on Huey’s drug addiction and the absence of effective Party leaders and programs), Fly turned himself in to the grips of empire’s repressive state apparatus in October 1980. Flores states that during his pre-trial jail stay, comrades still in the Party came to visit him, where he learned that the membership was down to only a handful, and that the only thing the brothers in the so-called ‘leadership’ talked about on these visits was getting fucked-up on drugs and hanging out (so much for ‘power to the people!’ huh?).

It was at this point, sometime between 1980 and 1982 that Fly states that he no longer wanted to be a Black Panther and decided to ‘reinvent’ and lookout for himself as a person. Basically, he dropped out. Fly quit. This is confirmed in no uncertain terms when he describes being emotionally shaken by the fact that capitalism’s imperialist machine seemed to have railroaded nearly all of his childhood friends into the very ails in which he was confined, but that he would no longer do anything about it. He states, “America had my entire childhood jailed all at once. Shit, if I had been the old Flores, that is Buddha Samurai, swaggering and dumb enough to think I could convince these guys that this was not the life they had chosen, I would have attempted to educate, organize, agitate, and just plain old start some shit and see how far we could push the system. But…I had changed…I decided to avoid these guys and get on with my life. I would not tell them that they had been wronged, simply because that was no longer my job or goal in life. My job and goal was to look out for me.” Can’t get no clearer than that. I may be wrong, and do correct me if I am, but that seems like some foul counter-revolutionary shit to me!

He must have either never been told, or forgotten that the eyes of the future are looking back at us and praying for us to see beyond our time. Anyway, after a 1983 jury trial, Flores was convicted of second degree murder while armed, and sentenced to 8 years imprisonment. The balance of his book deals with his jail and prison experiences and his quest for post-secondary education. Flores eventually receives a masters degree in urban planning in 1989, after his release from prison, and at the time of the 2006 printing of his book he was the Chief Strategic Officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in New York City. The brother doesn’t make clear whether he is utilizing his higher educational skills and knowledge in the service of the oppressor class or the oppressed masses before closing out his book. Maybe someone can enlighten us on this point if you are privy to this information. but what I, this Black male born in October 1969, do know, is that I sure wish that the main players would not have walked away from the Party and its righteous mission so nonchalantly. I partially blame those elements for being a factor in my not being even vaguely aware of what the principle contradiction was until I was nearly 36 years old. On the other hand, all of my love, yea my very life, to those of you who have pushed ahead with this struggle of liberation in this class war that we are engaged in, and made sure that the knowledge, wisdom, understanding and practice was there when the people needed you. Out of these ashes we shall rise again and the Black Panther will once more roar. We shall take the cat’s paw and drag the chestnut of imperialism into the fires of the depths of hell. The sacrifices of our martyrs is heavy on my mind, but their deaths only sharpen my fighting spirit, for no defeat is final…they simply reveal lessons to be learned in preparation for the next and greater attack. Out of defeat will arise a new society, and we will know then that we had the courage to once again give body to the rhetorical call: “Will you die with me?” and response: “Yes comrade, I’m with you until death or the day of final liberation.”

All power to the people! Panther power to the vanguard!

Marland Henry Gibson
#952537
Indiana State Prison
1 Park Row
Michigan City, IN
46360 USA

Media, Revolution & the Legacy of the Black Panther Party

Re blogged from Kasama

Posted by Mike E on April 5, 2009

Pete of the Kansas City Black Panther Party

This is an edited interview, featuring excerpts from Nyasha’s article: “Ruchell Cinque Magee and the August 7th Courthouse Slave Rebellion.” Thanks to Hans and the the Black Commentator for submitting it to Kasama. 

By Hans Bennett

* * * * * *

Hans Bennett:  How did you join the BPP?

Kiilu Nyasha:   I  started running into Panthers when I worked for President Johnson’s so-called “War on Poverty,” at The Community Action Institute (CAI) in New Haven, CT. We were supposed to organize the community, and of course they didn’t really mean it; but I was politically naive.  So I took them literally at their word and plunged into organizing, going to various community meetings.

A young Panther named Belva, just a teenager and known as “sisterlove,” was sent to New Haven from Oakland to organize a free breakfast program.   A town hall meeting was organized to decide whether or not they could institute the breakfast program. I was employed at the teen center where they wanted to house the breakfast program.  I wound up being the Breakfast Program Coordinator after being eliminated by CPI when they closed the auxiliary Community Action Institute, absorbing those they wanted to stay into the main body, CPI.   Later on, I was recruited from the Chapter to work as office manager and secretary to the attorneys for Lonnie McLucas, Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, including the late Charles Garry, Esq.

When I found myself jobless, I applied for welfare because having worked for Yale and the government, I didn’t qualify for unemployment insurance. I had a 9 year-old son and rent for my apartment was $80/month, but they would only give me $25 a week. What was I supposed to do with that?  So I joined the second chapter of the BPP in late 1969, created after the first chapter got locked up for murder charges, along with the Chairman, Bobby Seale — basically recruited to organize around the Panther trials by Robert Webb [martyred] and Doug Miranda. At this time, I was still “Pat Gallyot”, because I changed my name later in the 1970’s.

Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, Oakland

HB:     Tell us about the BPP.

KN:     The BPP was initiated by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who were students at Merritt College in Oakland. They saw the needs of their community and began to address them with the Ten-Point Platform and community programs. They confronted police brutality by following the police around with law books and guns, because at the time, it was legal to carry arms openly. They witnessed arrests to make sure the police didn’t go into their brutality mode. Eventually, there was a shoot-out between the police and the BPP when Huey’s car was stopped, and an officer was shot and killed in self-defense. Huey himself was shot in the abdomen and the picture of him handcuffed in the hospital went around the world.  

An incredible movement swept this country like wild-fire, because police abuses were a national epidemic. The BPP developed a 10-point platform demanding self-determination for our Black community, including land, bread, housing, clothing, education, justice and peace. We started free medical clinics, and in New Haven, the clinic was staffed by doctors and nurses from Yale. In Oakland, Dr. Tolbert Small initiated the sickle cell anemia awakening with education and free tests.

We propagated revolution and formed the original “rainbow coalition.” We worked with many groups, including the Young Lords, the Young Patriot Party from Appalachia, the Peace and Freedom Party, SDS, the Red Guard, the Brown Berets, I Wor Kuen, and the American Indian Movement. History books have omitted the fact that Blacks were leading the revolutionary movement in this country. Other communities adapted our programs for themselves. We organized within our own separate communities, but we all came to the same rallies. So then you’d have this huge multicultural rally led by the BPP. It was also intergenerational. I was practically an elder at 30 because most Panthers were teenagers.

HB:     What is the BPP’s legacy?

KN:     Once instituted, our free breakfast program was in high demand because kids were hungry. Subsequently, a free school lunch program was started in New Haven, and similar free food programs were instituted across the country.

The “Black is Beautiful” campaign elevated the mentality of Black people in terms of what we thought about ourselves. Don’t forget, James Brown’s song “I’m Black and I’m Proud” came on the heels of the BPP. Music and culture reflected the Movement. That legacy has endured.

The BPP ushered in a whole crew of Black politicians, but what did that do for Black people, especially poor Black people? For example, President Obama is a friend of capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. Fascism needs a new brown face to deal with the so-called Third World.  Obama cannot and will not produce real change, like moving from capitalism to socialism, redistributing the wealth, abolishing the prison system per se, and changing domestic and foreign policies.

Oakland office after police attack

HB:     How did the BPP fare against US government repression?

KN:     We were defeated. They pulled every dirty trick in the book to wipe us out and succeeded. They organized fratricide and had us killing each other. They jailed and assassinated us. By 1969, 28 Panthers had already been murdered by the police. There was the blatant murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in 1969.

President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J Edgar Hoover orchestrated COINTELPRO and another program that was behind the walls called “NEWKILL.” We were targeted and declared the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the US. This came out when the secret programs were revealed after files were stolen from the FBI office in Media, PA.  Later, Senator Frank Church conducted hearings further documenting the repression.

HB:     What impact did the BPP have on police brutality and prisons?

KN:     We may have caused a temporary calm, but it actually got worse. For example, Panthers Harold Taylor and John Bowman (currently of the SF8) were chased down in Los Angeles by plain-clothes police and shot at. They shot back, were eventually arrested, had a capital trial, but were acquitted on grounds of self defense.  However, today we’re getting shot left and right. The incarceration rate is the highest in the world. President Clinton ushered in a prison boom that has our prison population up to 2.4 million today. Here in California there are 180,000 prisoners, with many more on probation and parole. We’re living in a police state and have a cradle-to-prison policy for our youth. We have to regroup and develop new tactics and strategies that address today’s conditions.

HB:     What can we learn from the successes and failures of the BPP, so that we can be more effective today?

KN:     Organizing worked!  As in, door-to-door street organizing, on the ground, rolling up our sleeves and going right to the people, and helping them meet their own needs. People have gotten far away from that.  Stop knocking on city hall’s door!  Why are we asking our enemies for help? Working within the system only works if you consider yourself an infiltrator. We have to draw the line and stop supporting it. Today, we should organize gardens to grow our own food.

Propaganda is a necessary tool and our job right now is to raise consciousness to educate to liberate. The BPP had regular political education classes. That needs to happen again. People need to get into small study groups and discuss politics.

Also, students aren’t organizing on the campuses like they used to. I think it’s partly because the lower class isn’t on the campuses these days because nobody can afford it.

International SolidaritHB: What do you think of recent events in Latin America, where people are fighting US domination and local ruling class power?

KN:   I’m inspired!  I highly recommend the recent documentary film about Venezuela titled “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The people’s reversal of the attempted coup is such a wonderful demonstration of people’s power and what an impact it can have. Watching it recharged my batteries. I was like “Oh my goodness!”  It’s very exciting, promising, and I hope we have sense enough to be in solidarity and support the struggles there and everywhere else oppressed people are fighting.  How else is the US empire going to be defeated?  The global economy is here to stay.

HB:     This issue of global solidarity reminds me of Huey Newton’s idea of “revolutionary intercommunalism,” emphasizing that in today’s age of transnational corporate power, the US working class’ liberation is inherently tied to that of workers everywhere. Globalization is a popular topic today, but do you think Huey gets credit for talking about it back then?

KN:     Huey’s theory was brilliant, prophetic, and is a perfect solution in today’s world. Of course Huey has not been given proper credit and it’s the same thing with Malcolm X.  Now more than ever, oppressed people around the world need to unite against the common enemy that is transnational corporations. We can’t let them divide us. We’re in the throes of a death spiral right now, and if we don’t hurry up and deal with climate change, for example, things will get horribly worse for ordinary people and we can kiss this planet good-bye, probably within this century.

HB:     When did you start working in media?

KN:     Because of my years of secretarial work, I had typing skills. At the time of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins’ trial in New Haven, on behalf of the Panther Defense Committee, we printed a tabloid and I co-wrote and typeset an article covering the story. I also wrote articles for the national BPP paper, and eventually learned how to put a newspaper together. After moving to San Francisco, I was working for a local Black newspaper called The Sun Reporter, but left in anger after they chopped up an article that I wrote about the uprising at NY State Prison in Attica that resulted in the massacre of some 39 prisoners and guards.  Afterwards, in late 1971, a bunch of us had political education classes that met at my pad in the Fillmore, and we put together a tabloid called “By Any Means Necessary.”   In ’72, I wrote and published another tabloid titled, “Niggahs of the World Unite.” 

Later, I lived in the Hunters Point neighborhood, and while practicing a very strenuous form of martial arts, my muscles started deteriorating. I wound up in the medical system for many years–a long, hairy story. Suffice it to say, I walked into the system in 1975 and rolled out in 1980, and have been in Chinatown ever since, living in a 12 story Housing Authority building that they said was the only place they could find that was wheelchair accessible.

HB:     How does the mainstream media today compare to 40 years ago?

KN:     It’s much worse! I used to see BPP leaders Kathleen Cleaver and David Hilliard on TV. The movement used to get media attention. Now you can’t get any media attention on prisoners. We can have a demonstration with 10,000 people, and they still don’t cover it. You don’t even have good journalists anymore.

HB:     Why do you think that is?

KN:     Look at all the journalists who’ve been fired for telling the truth. Not to mention all the journalists who have been murdered these past few years, particularly by the US in Iraq. It intimidates people and they need real courage to tell the truth today.

HB:     How has the alternative media changed?

KN:     It’s not anywhere as bold. We had the BPP newspaper and all kinds of badass tabloids. Today they censor you. To me, with a few exceptions, the Black press and other alternative media have fallen down on the job.

George Jackson, San Quentin

HB:     Your recent Black Commentator article titled “Black August 2008” focused on the legacy of the late prison author and BPP leader, George Jackson, who was assassinated by guards at San Quentin Prison on August 21, 1971.

KN:     I initiated a correspondence with George in early 1971, and months later, got a one-hour visit in the holding cell of San Quentin. I’ve met no one before or since more dedicated to revolutionary change. George’s book of prison letters, Soledad Brother, was a best seller, and his second book, Blood In My Eye, had just been finished at the time of his death, and was published posthumously.

George was one of the three “Soledad Brothers,” whose story began on January 13, 1970 when a tower guard at Soledad State Prison shot and killed three Black captives on the yard, leaving them unattended to bleed to death: Cleveland Edwards, “Sweet Jugs” Miller, and W. L. Nolen, all active resisters in the Black Movement behind the walls. Others included George Jackson, Jeffrey Gauldin, Hugo L.A. Pinell, Steve Simmons, Howard Tole, and the late Warren Wells. 

After the common verdict of “justifiable homicide” was returned and the killer guard exonerated at Soledad, another white-racist guard was beaten and thrown from a tier to his death in retaliation. Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and Jackson were charged with his murder, and became known as The Soledad Brothers. A campaign to free them was led by college professor Angela Davis, and George’s brother Jonathan. The three were awaiting trial, with a mandatory death sentence if convicted, at the time of George’s death.

HB:     You wrote that we should honor Jackson’s legacy by working to free two California prisoners: Hugo “Yogi Bear” Pinell and Ruchell “Cinque” Magee. Currently housed in Pelican Bay State Prison’s notorious “Security Housing Unit,” Pinell has been in continuous solitary confinement since at least 1971.  On January 14, 2009, Pinell was denied parole for 15 years, a virtual re-sentencing.

KN:     The book titled “The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison,” by Min Yee, documents how Hugo Pinell was one of the original members of the Black Movement, led by George Jackson and others in Soledad Prison. At that time, it wasn’t safe for Blacks to walk the yard. The collusion between the racist, KKK-type guards and white racist prison gangs was horrendous. These conditions were horrible.

Yogi was eventually transferred to San Quentin, and was there on August 21, 1971, when George was assassinated. That day, in what was described by prison officials as an escape attempt, George allegedly smuggled a gun into San Quentin in a wig. That feat was proven impossible, and evidence subsequently suggested a setup designed by prison officials to eliminate Jackson once and for all as they had tried numerous times. On that fateful day, three notoriously racist prison guards and two inmate turnkeys were also killed. According to an eye witness, when Jackson was shot while running on the yard, he got up instantly and dived in the direction of some bushes. He was subsequently murdered while lying on the ground wounded.

Six Black prisoners were charged with murder and assault. Hugo Pinell, Fleeta Drumgo, David Johnson, Luis Talamantez, Johnny Spain, and Willie Sundiata Tate became known as the “San Quentin Six.” Johnny Spain was the only one convicted of murder. The others were either acquitted or convicted of assault.  Hugo is the only one remaining in prison, and badly needs our support.

HB:     Tell us about Ruchell Magee.

Ruchell Cinque Magee

KN:     I first met Ruchell in the holding cell of the Marin County courthouse in the Summer of 1971. I found him to be soft-spoken, warm and a gentleman in typically Southern tradition. We’ve been in correspondence pretty much ever since. I was then working for The Sun Reporter, and covering the pretrial hearings of Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee. By 1971, Ruchell was an astute jailhouse lawyer. He was responsible for the release and protection of a myriad of prisoners benefiting from his extensive knowledge of law, which he used to prepare writs, appeals and lawsuits for himself and many others behind the walls. 

Ruchell was fighting charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and conspiracy to aid the escape of state prisoners.  Although critically wounded on August 7, 1970, he was the sole survivor among the four brave Black men who conducted the courthouse slave rebellion, leaving him to be charged with everything they could throw at him. On August 7, 17-year old Jonathan Jackson raided the Marin Courtroom and tossed guns to prisoners William Christmas and James McClain, who in turn invited Ruchell to join them. Rue seized the hour spontaneously as they attempted to escape by taking a judge, assistant district attorney and three jurors as hostages in that audacious move to expose to the public the brutally racist prison conditions and free the Soledad Brothers. 

McClain was on trial for assaulting a guard in the wake of Black prisoner Fred Billingsley’s murder by prison officials in San Quentin in February, 1970. With only four months before a parole hearing, Magee had appeared in the courtroom to testify for McClain. 

The four revolutionaries successfully commandeered the group to the waiting van and were about to pull out of the parking lot when Marin County Police and San Quentin guards opened fire. When the shooting stopped, Judge Harold Haley, Jackson, Christmas, and McClain lay dead; Magee was unconscious and seriously wounded as was the prosecutor. A juror suffered a minor injury. 

Magee had already spent at least seven years studying law and deluging the courts with petitions and lawsuits to contest his own illegal conviction in two fraudulent trials. As he put it, the judicial system “used fraud to hide fraud” in his second case after the first conviction was overturned on an appeal based on a falsified transcript. His strategy, therefore, centered on proving that he was a slave, denied his constitutional rights and held involuntarily. Therefore, he had the legal right to escape slavery as established in the case of the African slave, Cinque, who had escaped the slave ship, Amistad, and won freedom in a Connecticut trial. Thus, Magee had to first prove he’d been illegally and unjustly incarcerated for over seven years. He also wanted the case moved to the Federal Courts and the right to represent himself. 

Moreover, Magee wanted to conduct a trial that would bring to light the racist and brutal oppression of Black prisoners throughout the State. “My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery. This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.” 

On the other hand, Angela Davis, his co-defendant, charged with buying the guns used in the raid, conspiracy, etc., was innocent of any wrongdoing because the gun purchases were perfectly legal and she was not part of the original plan. Davis’ lawyers wanted an expedient trial to prove her innocence on trumped up charges. This conflict in strategy resulted in the trials being separated. Davis was acquitted of all charges and released in June of 1972. 

Ruchell fought on alone, losing much of the support attending the Davis trial. After dismissing five attorneys and five judges, he won the right to defend himself. The murder charges had been dropped, and Magee faced two kidnap charges. He was ultimately convicted of PC 207, simple kidnap, but the more serious charge of PC 209, kidnap for purposes of extortion, resulted in a disputed verdict. According to one of the juror’s sworn affidavit, the jury voted for acquittal on the PC 209 and Magee continues to this day to challenge the denial and cover-up of that acquittal.

Ruchell is currently on the mainline of Corcoran State Prison doing his 46th year locked up in California gulags – many of those years spent in solitary confinement under tortuous conditions! In spite of having committed no physical assaults or murders. Is that not political? 

George Jackson

HB:     Let’s conclude with a quote from George Jackson.

KN:     He wrote in Blood In My Eye:

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

* * * * * *

 Special thanks to Ed Mertex for help transcribing the interview.

* * * * * *

Hans Bennett is an independent multi-media journalist (www.insubordination.blogspot.com) and co-founder of Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal (www.abu-jamal-news.com). 

* * * * * * 

Kiilu Nyasha is a San Francisco-based journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Kiilu hosts a weekly TV program, “Freedom Is A Constant Struggle,” on SF Live (Comcast 76 and AT&T 99), which can be viewed live at www.accessf.org every Friday at 7:30 pm (PST), and rebroadcast Saturdays at 3:30 p.m., and Mondays, 6:30 p.m.  She writes for several publications, including the SF Bay View Newspaper and BlackCommentator.com. Also an accomplished radio programmer, she has worked for KPFA (Berkeley), SF Liberation Radio, Free Radio Berkeley, and KPOO in SF.  Some of her work is archived at www.kpfa.org. and www.myspace.com/official_kiilu.

salute: February 23rd…Stokely Carmichael

“BLACK POWER”

“It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations. “
Stokely Carmichael

“I walk in the footsteps of giants”

Black Liberation in the 21st Century: A Revolutionary Reassessment of Black Nationalism

Kevin Rashid is a political prisoner and communist revolutionary in the New Afrikan Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter, an organization formed within prison. We present present Rashid’s reassessment of the Black liberation movement for discussion. This piece first appeared in Right On! #19

“Revolution.” Artwork Courtesy of Kevin Rashid

“[T]rue revolutionary leaders must not only be good at correcting their ideas, theories, plans or programs, when errors are discovered… but when a certain objective process has already progressed and changed from one stage of development to another, they must also be good at making themselves and all their fellow revolutionaries progress and change in their subjective knowledge along with it….” -Mao Tse-tung, On Contradiction

Introduction

Some time ago comrades of the New Afrikan Maoist Party (NAMP) expressed a desire to reconcile contradictions between their line and the line of our New Afrikan Black

Panther Party—Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) on the question of Black National Liberation in the 21st Century. On this question, NAMP along with several other organizations—including the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO), the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, the Maoist International Movement (MIM) and others promote the Black Belt Thesis (BBT) as it was set out by the Comintern (Third Communist International) in the 1920s.

The NAMP comrades are correct in pointing out that our respective organizations have a major line contradiction on this question. We have as yet not publicly fleshed out our line on this, in contrast to that of NAMP and others, so it is time we did so in a formal position paper.

In developing our line on the Black National Question in the U.S. we have applied the method of historical dialectical materialism and deepened the analysis put forward by Huey P. Newton of the original Black Panther Party (BPP). This means we do not hold dogmatically and idealistically to outmoded ideas and formulations that no longer fit the current situation. Instead we base our analysis on the study of concrete conditions in the context of their actual historical development, realizing that everything is in a state of motion and development from a lower to a higher level, and that correct ideas develop in struggle and contradiction with incorrect ones.

The Black Belt Thesis and the New Class Configuration of the New Afrikan Nation

The BBT was developed by the U.S. “Black Bolshevik,” Harry Haywood, in his 1928 and 1930 “Comintern Resolution on the Negro Question,” which was adopted by the Comintern and the U.S. Communist Party with support from V.1. Lenin. It holds that Blacks in Amerika (New Afrikans) constitute a nation within the territorial U.S. and that we should establish our own sovereign national territory in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina (the “Black Belt” also known as the “Cotton Belt”). The states were chosen because we slaved there and developed and evolved as a national group and “internal colony” where Blacks made up the majority. The principle factors which supported the BBT were economic and demographic that existed in the 1920s but no longer exist today.

No one can sensibly deny that Black people were forged into a “nation within a nation” because of their loss of Afrikan national identity under slavery and exclusion from the white Amerikan nation under conditions of “Jim Crow” segregation. Nor can one deny that this nation is bound to its Afrikan origin and defined by the imposed value that a drop of Afrikan blood sets one outside of the “melting pot” of white Amerikan society.

But where the BBT breaks down is that our present situation doesn’t fit into the neat definition used by the Comintern in the 1920s. The reality is more complex today.

At the time the BBT was developed, Blacks in the “Black Belt” were a predominantly peasant (sharecropper) nation tied to cotton production. This condition was also shared by many poor whites and some Indians and mixed bloods. The BBT was based on Comrade J.V. Stalin’s analysis of the National Question as essentially a peasant question. Unlike the analysis put forward by Lenin, and more fully developed by Mao, Stalin’s analysis limited the National Question to essentially a peasantry’s struggle for the land they labored on geographically defined by their having a common language, history, culture and economic life together. Hence the slogans “Free the Land!” and “Land to the Tiller!”

Indeed, ALL the national liberation struggles of the 20th Century occurred in peasant-based societies in opposition to colonial or neo-colonial domination and feudal or semi-feudal class oppression. Today, however, the Black population within the U.S. is no longer a rural peasantry. It is overwhelmingly a proletarian nation (wage slaves) dispersed across the U.S. and concentrated in and around urban centers in predominantly Black or multi-ethnic oppressed communities.

The trend since World War I has been towards migration away from the “Black Belt” South and from the rural to the urban setting (even within the South). Check this out from “1001 Facts” on Black History:

“African Americans continued to move northward and cityward after World War I in 1918. In fact, the migration increased during the 1920s as another million southern African Americans picked up their bags and left southern living conditions. The migration expanded in the 1930s as the New Deal Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 forced many more to migrate once the AAA paid white southern farmers not to produce crops and made it profitable to dispense with Black sharecroppers. Technological advances such as the cotton picker machine made large numbers of unskilled agricultural laborers obsolete in southern agriculture. Then, as World War II began, Black mass migration exploded and nearly 5 million African Americans left the South for the North from 1940 to 1960… [This] Second Migration created huge ghettos in all the major American cities. Whereas in 1890 close to 90 percent of African Americans lived in the South, by 1960 only 50 percent of African Americans still resided there. Moreover, the movement north was also a movement toward urban rather than rural living. By 1990 over 84 percent of African Americans lived in urban areas, making ‘African American’ and ‘urban’ almost synonymous in modem America.”

Therefore, without need of pursuing a struggle to achieve a New Afrikan nation state, we have achieved the historical results of bourgeois democracy, at least as far as transforming ourselves from a peasant to a predominantly proletarian national grouping through the “Great Migration.”

Of course the Amerikan liberal democratic revolution begun in 1776, which was continued by the Civil War (1861-1865), remains unfinished—in particular as far as Black people are affected. Pre-capitalist forms of exploitation continue to exist, such as the “slave status” of U.S. prisoners, institutionalized torture, legalized “lynching” as embodied in the racist death penalty, and all manifestations of racism, sexism and discrimination that prevent all from enjoying the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” promised by liberal democracy.

To complete the liberal democratic revolution and move forward to socialist reconstruction the proletariat must lead the struggle which is stifled by the increasingly antidemocratic, fascistic and reactionary bourgeoisie. The bourgeois are no longer capable of playing a progressive role in history.

The Revolutionary Advantages of Our Proletarian National Character

That we New Afrikans are now a predominantly proletarian nation—and one without a national territory—is an advantage to the cause of building a multi-ethnic, multiracial socialist Amerika. Indeed, it thrusts us into playing a vanguard role in leading the whole working class and the broad masses in pulling down the capitalist-imperialist system and achieving social justice for all.

This conception of our historical role corresponds with Lenin’s and Mao’s lines on the National Question which we contrast with Stalin’s and dogmatic continuation of the BBT. Lenin and Mao saw the national question primarily as a matter of building the ranks of the proletarian revolution to pull down the system of imperialism. In fact, in all of his writings on Black liberation in the U.S. Mao consistently talks about merging the Black liberation struggle with the proletarian revolutionary struggle in the U.S. He doesn’t mention the land issue once. In A New Storm Against Imperialism, (April 16, 1968), he stated:

“Racial discrimination in the United States is a product of the colonialist and imperialist system. The contradiction between the Black masses in the United States and the U.S. ruling circles is a class contradiction. Only by overthrowing the reactionary rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class and destroying the colonialist and imperialist system can the Black people in the United States win complete emancipation. The Black masses and the masses of white working people in the United States have common interests and common objectives to struggle for.

“Therefore, the Afro-American struggle is winning sympathy and support from increasing numbers of white working people and progressives in the United States. The struggle of the Black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American workers’ movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.”

In his August 8, 1963 article, Oppose Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, Mao’s emphasis is on racial discrimination, not “Free The Land!” He sees Black liberation as driving forward the United Front Against Capitalist-Imperialism and pulling white workers and other strata towards socialist revolution in the U.S. The issue is not integration versus separation but revolution.

Even Malcolm X came to embrace this position. In fact, every popular, independent Black leader who came to hold this view and actively advanced it was promptly assassinated. Why? Because neither separation nor integration threatens the imperialist system—socialist revolution does!

Separation, Integration or Revolution?

Take Brother Malcolm; in his early stages of political development, he promoted Black separatism. Based upon his observation of independence struggles across the predominantly peasant-based Third World of the 1950s and early 1960s, he adopted the view that revolution was about land, and he embraced the slogan “Free The Land!”, which he elaborated on in his Message to the Grassroots speech given in 1963. However, in an April 6, 1964 speech given in Harlem, he expressly rejected both Black separatism and integration, in favor of revolutionary change of Amerika as a whole. He stated:

“We have to keep in mind at all times that we are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition… for the right to live as free humans in this society” [my emphasis]

Malcolm increasingly came to identify capitalism and imperialism as the ultimate enemy—embracing the need of Afrikan people everywhere to consolidate their struggles into a united Pan-Afrikan movement, and for Blacks in Amerika to unite in a common struggle with all the “have-nots”, regardless of their skin color, against the common exploiters who try to divide everyone and play us against each other. It was at this crucial stage of his development as a revolutionary that he was silenced with a bullet.

A few months before his assassination, Malcolm X criticized his earlier views on separatist Black Nationalism, finding that:

“I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary…. I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of Black Nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black Nationalism? And if you notice, I haven’t been using the expression for several months. But I would still be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of Black people in this country.”

At the opposite pole, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—who was initially pro-integration and pro-capitalist—also came to identify capitalism and imperialism as the ultimate enemy, expressly rejecting integration and privately promoting socialist revolution in Amerika as the way forward. He stated in November 1967: “Something is wrong with capitalism as it stands here in the U.S. We are not interested in being integrated into this value structure.” During later 1967 and 1968, shortly before his assassination, King repeatedly promoted socialism to his inside circle, but he refused to make this stand publicly for fear of government assassination. But his private statements, public opposition to U.S. imperialist wars abroad, and support for the rights of the poor and workers’ strikes were enough for the imperialist ruling class to mark him for death.

George Jackson, pursuing the same path and arriving at the same conclusions in a more developed way, was likewise cut down by an assassin’s bullet. He observed:

“It’s no coincidence that Malcolm X and M.L. King died when they did. Malcolm X had just put it together…. You remember what was on his lips when he died, Vietnam and economic, political economy. The professional killers could have murdered him long before they did. They let Malcolm rage on Muslim nationalism for a number of years because they knew it was an empty ideal, but the second he got his feet on the ground, they murdered him.”

Despite Malcolm X’s and even King’s clearly-stated revolutionary positions that New Afrikan liberation lies neither in assimilation (accommodation) nor separation (running away), but in fundamentally changing Amerikan society as a whole, so that we can live as a free people right here, the Black Movement, and those purporting to lead it, have remained deadlocked between these two less than revolutionary positions. The original Black Panther Party has been the notable exception.

The Panthers recognized that the New Afrikan Nation can neither effectively separate from nor integrate into capitalist imperialist and white supremist Amerika. Neo-colonialism precludes the former and racist national oppression precludes the later. Our path to liberation—which even the Panthers found a bit difficult to consistently articulate—is to overthrow U.S. imperialism and play a leading role in the global proletarian revolution and socialist reconstruction. We must be the tip of the spear and rally everyone who has contradictions with imperialism to unite with us.

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who were greatly influenced by Malcolm X, were organizing in this direction, in implementing the BPP’s 10 Point Program and Serve The People (STP), survival programs while carrying out revolutionary agitation, education and political organizing to build community-based people’s power. Huey saw that Blacks were an oppressed nation inside Amerika, but his ideas on charting our path to liberation took a quantum leap forward when he visited and toured Mao’s revolutionary China. There he found that numerous racial and ethnic minorities had attained genuine liberation within China’s socialist state, without separating or integrating in the classic sense.

What Huey observed in China gave him a blueprint for organizing Black folks to become self-reliant in the very urban communities where they were concentrated in preparation for revolution in the U.S. The BPP’s implementation of these ideas quickly earned it the label of the “greatest threat to imperialism’s security, and the U.S. government concentrated its forces in an all-out campaign to destroy the Panthers. Here’s what Huey found in People’s China that inspired the BPP’s STP survival programs and illuminated his ideas about Black liberation in Amerika:

“I saw, crystal clear, how we can start to reduce the kinds of conflicts that we’re having in [Amerika]. I saw an example of that in China… what I saw was this: when I went there, I was very unenlightened and I thought I knew something about China. I thought, as it has been said so often, that China would be a homogeneous kind of racial/ethnic territory. Then I found that 50 percent of the Chinese territory is occupied by a 54 percent population of national minorities, large ethnic minorities. They speak different languages, they look very different, and they eat different foods. Yet there is no conflict. I observed one day that each region—we call them cities—is actually controlled by those ethnic minorities, yet they’re still Chinese…. I’m talking about a general condition in China where ethnic minorities I’ve observed control their whole regions. They have a right to have representation in the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time they have their own principles…. The cities in this country could be organized like that, with community control. At the same time, not Black control so that no whites can come in, no Chinese can come in. I’m saying there would be democracy in the inner city. The administration should reflect the people who live there.”

While Huey proved less than adept at linking together, organizing and leading a multi-racial anti-imperialist united front in Amerika, Fred Hampton, the leader of the BPP in Chicago, successfully pulled together a revolutionary coalition of poor whites (Rising Up Angry and The Young Patriot Party), Puerto Ricans (the Young Lords Organization), Mexicans (the Brown Berets) and various student groups known as the “Rainbow Coalition.” He was being considered for promotion to national leadership when he as killed in his bed by FBI and Chicago police in a planned assassination.

Around the country the Black Panthers did inspire and forge alliances with many different ethnically-based groups including the White Panther Party, I Wor Kuen (Chinese), Ang Katipunan (Filipino), the American Indian Movement (AIM) and many others. This was paving the way for a revolutionary united front against imperialism rooted in the oppressed communities.

The NABPP-PC also finds relevance in Huey’s theoretical concept of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism”, which recognized that the U.S. no longer fits the classical definition of a nation state nor do the countries under its neo-colonial domination. Using “Dollar Diplomacy”, along with covert operations and outright invasions, the U.S. has successfully imposed itself upon all of the former European colonies and overthrown the socialist-oriented governments brought to power by national liberation struggles in the 3ed World. This paved the way for the U.S. becoming the world’s sole imperialist superpower. Amerika’s consolidation of global power since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the increasingly globalized economic interdependence gives greater credibility to Comrade Newton’s theory of “Intercommunalism,” but we embrace this theory conditionally, recognizing that nation states still exist in the geo-political sense under various political and military set ups of “reactionary intercommunalism,” although they exist within a system of relative dominant and subservient positions with the U.S. in the position of “Top Dawg.” The shackles of bourgeois nationalism still bind the productive forces of the various nations to some degree, from which world proletarian socialist revolution will liberate them, creating the conditions for “revolutionary intercommunalism.’

Reassessing the National Liberation Question

As every national liberation struggle in the 20th Century has demonstrated, genuine national liberation and self determination have been unattainable. In each case the capitalist-imperialists have created and appealed to aspiring native bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements within the oppressed national groups and used these puppets to derail their own people’s liberation struggles. They have used “Dollar Diplomacy” to forge neo-colonial bonds upon these new republics.

Through their neo-colonial designs, the budding socialist and non-aligned Third World blocs were undermined and overthrown (sweeping the tillers off the land) and their natural resources and productive forces were brought under U.S. imperialist domination (with other imperialist powers getting a share). In this world of U.S. imperialist hegemony, any New Afrikan struggle for independence and separation from the U.S.—along the lines of the BBT—would suffer the same fate in spades. Even if we did manage to reconstitute ourselves as a territorial nation in the “Black Belt,” we would only join the ranks of imperialist dominated Third world nations—and with the imperialist U.S. right on our border.

At a time when few within the Third World national liberation struggles foresaw the danger of U.S. neo-colonialism, Amilcar Cabral sounded a warning to other leaders of anti-colonial national liberation movements in the Third World. He questioned whether the national liberation movements were altogether born of the colonial peoples’ determination to be free or if they were also to some degree instigated by imperialism to create and “liberate” Third World bourgeois and aspiring petty bourgeois forces to serve as imperialist agents and “front men” to impede and counter the growth of world socialism and create global U.S. imperialist hegemony. Few took heed to his words—then or now. Here is Cabral:

“In Guinea, as in other countries, the implementation of imperialism by force and the presence of the colonial system considerably altered the historical conditions and aroused a response—the national liberation struggle—which is generally considered a revolutionary trend; but this is something which I think needs further examination. I should like to formulate this question: is the national liberation movement something which has simply emerged from within our country, is it a result of the internal contradictions created by the presence of colonialism, or are there external factors which have determined it? In fact I would even go so far as to ask whether, given the advance of socialism in the world, the national liberation movement is not an imperialist initiative. Is the juridical institution which serves as a reference for the right of all peoples to struggle to free themselves a product of the peoples who are trying to liberate themselves? Was it created by the socialist countries who are our historical associates? Let us not forget that it was the imperialist countries who recognized the right of all people to national independence.”Cabral went on to point out the inherent contradiction in the imperialists “promoting” Third World national independence if indeed such struggles were a threat to imperialism:

“This is where we think there is something wrong with the simple interpretation of the national liberation movement as a revolutionary trend. The objective of the imperialist countries was to prevent the enlargement of the Socialist Camp, to liberate the reactionary forces in our countries which were stifled by colonialism, and to enable these forces to ally themselves with the international bourgeoisie. The fundamental objective was to create a bourgeoisie where one did not exist, in order specifically to strengthen the imperialist and the capitalist camp.”—Amilcar Cabral. The Politics of Struggle, (1964)

Cabral found that “what really interests us here is neocolonialism,” which he observed was a new phase of imperialism devised after World War II to replace the old colonial system, by “grant[ing] independence to the occupied countries plus ‘aid.”

Witnessing the failed promises of ‘national liberation’ Cabral recognized that to be genuinely revolutionary and ‘liberating’ the struggles for national independence had to be joined with the struggle of the international proletariat. He concluded:

“… that imperialism is quite prepared to change both its men and its tactics in order to perpetuate itself. it will make and destroy states and. as we have already seen, it will kill its own puppets when they no longer serve its purposes. If need be, it will even create a kind of socialism, which people may soon start calling ‘neo-socialism.’ if there has been any doubts about the close relations between our struggle [for national liberation] and the struggle of the international working class movement. neo-colonialism has proved that there need not be any.” -Ibid.

Even the U.S. imperialists admitted using such “new tactics” of neo-colonialism as Cabral observed in supporting Afrika and Asia’s various national liberation movements. In the words of Vice President Richard Nixon on his return from a 1957 tour of Afrika:

“American interests in the future are so great as to justify us in not hesitating even to assist the departure of the colonial powers from Africa. If we can win native opinion in this process, the future of America in Africa will be assured.” Quoted in Dirty Works 2: The CIA in Africa, edited by Ellen Ray, et al. (Seacaucus; Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1979, p. 58)

Accord this statement of the U.S. National Security Council:

“We must recognize, although we cannot say it publicly, that we need the strong men of Africa on our side. It is important to understand that most of Africa will soon be independent…. Since we must have the strong men of Africa on our side, perhaps we should in some cases develop military strong men as an offset to Communist development of the labor unions.” Quoted verbatim from the record of a January 14, 1960 meeting of the NSC

So clearly the U.S. government favored pushing its European rivals and their colonial governments out of Afrika by supporting the Afrikan national liberation struggles, by backing or placing native puppets at the head of those anti-colonial movements. In doing so:

‘The stage was set for the transition to neo-colonialism: formal political independence for the African countries, but continued economic domination by imperialism, with imperialist political control exerted indirectly through bureaucratic African governments more or less subservient to imperialism, and military control exerted indirectly through covert links between imperialist powers and African military/police hierarchies” Daniel Fogel, Africa in Struggle: National Liberation and Proletarian Revolution, (ISM Press: CA, 1982, p.116).

National ‘Liberation’ has therefore proved empty of substance to oppressed Third World peoples, absent the defeat of imperialism, just as it would be in a struggle for New Afrikan national ‘liberation’ in the southern U.S. territory absent the defeat of imperialism.

Moreover, any such struggle would almost certainly degenerate into an imperialist-sponsored race war, similar to what went down in the Kosovo conflict (1998-1999), and present day Sudan. In any such struggle, Blacks would be at a decided disadvantage—witness our helplessness in the face of the Hurricane Katrina Crisis and attendant martial law in Louisiana and Mississippi (both “Black Belt states). And in that crisis we didn’t have to contend with angry and desperate whites fighting to keep their land and homes. Or do our proponents of the BBT expect whites in the “Black Belt” to passively concede the territory and leave? Or do they think we will just grab the imperialists by the throat and demand that they give us five states, make all the arrangements, and then let us run the show there without interference?

And what about the white proletarians who live in the “Black Belt?” What stake would they have in this? Or would we want to just push them into the arms of the reactionaries opposing us? Such a plan would only divide the proletarians along racial lines, set them against each other and give the imperialists a free hand to play the “Divide and Rule” game ‘Willie Lynch” style.

Furthermore, our migration back to the “Black Belt” would be “a leap from the frying pan into the fire” for how would we survive in the already poor economy of the rural South? “Returning to the Land” may sound romantic, but trying to bust a living out of the depleted soil of the Deep South was a dead end that caused the “Great Migration” in the first place.

And what a loss it would be to the international proletariat for us to give up our strategic positions within the urban centers across Amerika. Of course revolutionary work should be done among the people of the “Black Belt” South (including the poor whites and others) as well, as part of building the revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalist-imperialism.

The BPP did not promote a mass exodus of New Afrikans back to the “Black Belt; rather they correctly looked to New Afrikan self-determination right in the oppressed urban communities where Black people are concentrated. It really wasn’t until Harry Haywood’s book Black Bolshevik was published in 1978 that the BBT was revived among the New Communist Movement in the U.S. The name New Afrikan was adopted by a convention of 500 Black Nationalist leaders in Detroit in March of 1968 at a Black government conference.

For the NABPP-PC “New Afrikan” is more than the latest in a series of monikers given to Black people in Amerika. Afrika is our common heritage. It (not the “Black Belt) is our common historic homeland. When a Black person comes to Amerika from the Caribbean, Brazil or from Afrika they become a part of the New Afrikan Nation in Amerika—and suffer national oppression and discrimination—even though their ancestors never set foot in the “Black Belt.”

As proletarians, our relationship to production and the world economy makes us “New” and different from the peasantry of the Third World and our ancestors in the Old South. Even if we could go back it would be a retrogressive step—and we doubt this is what the Black masses want.

We Have Not Liquidated the National Question

By our pointing out that the shift from peasantry to proletarian and from rural to urban has fundamentally changed the National Question for New Afrikans, we expect some critics will accuse us of having “liquidated” the National Question. For those who dogmatically apply Stalin’s analysis, the problem is: “How can we be a nation without a land base?”

We reiterate that the issue is a bit bigger and more complex than that.

If we look at the New Afrikan Nation as being part of a greater Pan-Afrikan Nation, inclusive of the peoples of Afrika and the Afrikan Diaspora (as Malcolm X did, and this liberation struggle in the context of world proletarian socialist revolution, then we shall see the issue a bit differently. Then we can also see our struggle within the context of a future socialist Amerika that is multi-ethnic and a strong ally of the oppressed peoples internationally.

The proletariat fundamentally has no country and seeks to create a world without boundaries or nation states. So to the proletariat national liberation is not an end in itself but a stage to pass through on the road to World Communism. It is a stepping stone to greater unity and the ending of all oppression.

There are many white comrades (Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Radicals and Progressives) who are committed to supporting Black liberation because it serves the cause of liberating all of humanity from imperialism and exploitation, and because it strengthens the workers’ movement. The cause of uniting the Black liberation struggle with the proletarian class struggle is a step towards the total liberation of humanity and the whole world becoming one people.

Just as the proletariat seeks to abolish itself as a class by abolishing all classes, we must seek to abolish ourselves as a nation by abolishing all nations—all national divisions and all national oppression. But this has to begin with liberating ourselves as nations from the grip of colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism. Just as the proletariat must rise as a class and “pick up the gun to put down the gun” (what is the state but a special body of armed men and wimyn?), we create nation states only to render them obsolete and allow them to fade away when they are no longer necessary. The transitory nature of nation states under socialism is clear.

Comparing Racial and National Oppression

We can only speak of New Afrikan national liberation because we suffer from national oppression. National oppression is linked to but not the same as racist oppression. The people of Haiti don’t just suffer national oppression as citizens of a Third World nation but also racist oppression because they are black. Iceland is a small island nation too, but if an Icelander family emigrates to the U.S., they will be accepted as whites. If a Haitian family moves here they will face racial oppression. All people of color, to one degree or another, suffer racist oppression because of the institutionalization of the ideology of white supremacy.

The Haitian family will suffer oppression and discrimination in the U.S. because they are immigrants, because they are Black, and because they are not white. A Korean family will have to face the first and the last but not the specific oppression and discrimination leveled at Blacks (New Afrikans in Amerika). This oppression is rooted in the history of slavery (not just in the “Black Belt” South) and colonialism that spawned the white racist mentality.

Whereas in Amerika, the oppression of the indigenous people is a bit different. People with Indian features (“Skins”) suffer from national oppression and so do Indians with black or white-skinned features. Black Indians are also oppressed as New Afrikans. White-skinned Indians (if they are identifiable by their dress) may be subjected to racial slurs and discrimination, but this is really national oppression. There is a difference between “white Indians” and “white people” in Amerika, but the difference is national rather than racial.

Within the Indian nations there are divisions between “Bloods” and those who are perceived as “Black Indians” and “White (or mostly white) Indians.” These contradictions (which can be antagonistic) between “Red: “White” and “Black” members of the same oppressed indigenous nations are a reflection of the culture of racism that permeates Amerikan society (a colonial settler state) and projects throughout the world.

We do not (as many Black nationalists do) confuse race with nationality. Nationality is not confined by race. One can change their nationality. One can also have dual or multiple nationalities. One can be a Puerto Rican and a New Afrikan (and also a Taino Indian). One can be a Palestinian, an Arab and a New Yorker all at the same time. National identity is a complex issue.

Do not some New Afrikans identify primarily as Amerikans? What is Obama trying to sell us? Yet look around any prison and what do you see? Look at the statistics on poverty, infant mortality, hunger, unemployment, and violent deaths. These tell a very different story—one of continued (and intensified) national and class oppression for the Black masses in the U.S.

I have written before that:

“As revolutionary New Afrikan nationalists, we realize that there is a contradiction between race and nationalism, and moreover, that there is no nation composed of a single race. All existing nations, like the Indian nations here in North Amerika, include whites and mixed bloods, even though there are contradictions. It was the policies of white colonialism created by the ruling class that produced these contradictions, and indeed the New Afrikan Nation. In this regard, we say all people of Afrikan heritage, regardless of skin tone, are part of a single New Afrikan Nation a Pan-Afrikan Nation. Indeed, most “Blacks” in Amerika are “mixed bloods; mixed with white and/or Indian bloodlines.

“We therefore move beyond black and white dogmatism Native Americans have always done this in adopting any “race” of people into their nations who embrace and respect their heritage and culture. All non-chauvinistic nations have done this. We also accept that nationalities can overlap and are not merely an either/or situation. People the world over embrace multiple nationalities, and so can New Afrikans. One can be a Venezuelan and a New Afrikan, or a Lenape and a New Afrikan, etc. This concept becomes practical revolutionary internationalism that has all nationalities struggling for both national self-determination and united multi-national, anti-imperialist cooperation…

“From our point of view, the key question is building alliances between the oppressed nations [and nationalities] within the U.S. and abroad and the multi-national proletariat.”—Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, On the Questions of Race and Racism, Revolutionary National Liberation, and Building the United Front Against Imperialism, 2007 U.S. Revolution as an Advance Towards Global Communism

The success of socialist revolution in the U.S. would “break the back” of global imperialism and create conditions for successful revolution in every other country. This eventuality will create the conditions for a global dictatorship of the proletariat and move the struggle decisively towards rendering nation states obsolete. What then will be the need for national boundaries or militaries?

Could we not then move forward towards classless society at an accelerated pace? Could we not, for example, create a single international currency and globalized planning of production and distribution of goods? Would it not be possible to have a World Health Organization that really provides for people’s health needs and a global commission with clout to address the issues of ecological preservation and balance? Could we not standardize wages and prices and ensure a decent standard of living for everyone on the planet—eradicating poverty?

Conclusion

Most theories on the National Question do not address the dialectical relationship between New Afrikans in the Diaspora and Afrikans in Afrika, the contradictions between Afrikans everywhere and imperialism in the Age of Neo-Colonialism and the Crisis of Capitalist-Imperialism, and between New Afrikans in the U.S. and the white-supremacist, imperialist U.S. ruling class. These questions demand a reanalysis of the BBT and our strategy for Black Liberation.

Kwame Nkrumah’s concept of an AII-Afrikan (Pan-Afrikan) Revolutionary Party (supported by a military arm) is the correct answer to neo-colonialism. We can take a lesson in this from the struggles going on in South Asia. India contains many nationalities with their own languages and regions, yet they are being led by a united Communist Party of India (Maoist). Likewise we can look to Nepal where the Maoists have won the support of many national minorities and have created autonomous regions. In Afrika, neo-colonialism had an advantage because it was able to play the various budding nation states and tribal groups against each other. Our strength is based on unity and common purpose.

Our concept of Afrika as a Pan-Afrikan nation departs from the Comintern’s definition of the National Question which confines the nation to the boundaries already in existence (even though these only reflect the imperialists’ carving up of Afrika). We don’t expect that the New Afrikan Nation will ever constitute itself again in the “Black Belt,” but we can play a significant role in the constitution of a Socialist Afrikan Union, and in the creation of a Socialist U.S.A.

We believe that it is the historic destiny of the nation of New Afrikans in Amerika to play a leading role among the oppressed peoples of the World in overthrowing capitalist imperialism and advancing humanity to a higher stage of political-economic organization based on the principles of social justice and equality.

Our unique history and position within the “Belly of the Beast” gives us the opportunity to deal the coup de grace to U.S. imperialism. Our long suffering at the hands of white supremacist Amerika gives us a bond with all who have suffered racist and national oppression and enables us to be truly internationalist in outlook.

As Mao predicted:

“The struggle of the Black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American workers’ movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.”

This is the mission of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party Prison Chapter and our position on the National Question.

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win! All Power to the People!

February 15, 2012

by Sanyika Shakur, s/n Kody Scott
Robert Williams, who first came to prominence as president of the Monroe, N.C., NAACP, later wrote “Negroes with Guns” and advocated Black self-defense. Friends of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Robert and his wife Mabel lived in exile for many years, traveling the world and befriending Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. His book inspired Huey Newton and the Black Panthers.
We are the ones who refused to be captured in Afrika without a fight, who staged daring raids on enemy supply lines and brought our nationals back to freedom. We are the ones who made longer, sharper spears, thicker shields and turned our backs on collaborating kings.

We are the ones who, on the high seas enroute to the “New World,” brought new forms of combat to bear on our oppressors. We are the ones who couldn’t be broken, who kept our languages in circulation, our spirits alive and our minds free of foreign gods and hostile demons. We are those who, on a move, became Maroons, who settled the Geechi Islands, fought alongside the indigenous nations, until we, too, became indigenous.
We are the ones who couldn’t be broken, who kept our languages in circulation, our spirits alive and our minds free of foreign gods and hostile demons.

We are the ones who, in the midst of the first Two Thousand Seasons (a thousand dry, a thousand wet), birthed new ideas of national existence and national continuity.

We are the ones that whispered, “Strike now!” to Nat Turner, who plotted and planned with Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser. We are of the same blood as General Harriet Tubman.

We are the ones who didn’t need to be freed by the 13th Amendment because we had never been anyone’s slave. We are the same ones who laughingly rejected the 14th Amendment to make us citizens of the oppressor nation. And, when the so-called Negroes fell for the farce of “Reconstruction,” we had long been organized and waiting for the Klan.

When bourgeois Negroes formed the NAACP, we formed the African Blood Brotherhood and Universal Negro Improvement Association. When the White Citizens Councils attacked the Civil Rights Movement, we struck back as the Deacons for Defense. We are the ones who left the right wing reactionary Nation of Islam with Malcolm X.
When the White Citizens Councils attacked the Civil Rights Movement, we struck back as the Deacons for Defense.

We are the ones who organized the ghettos, from California to Philly, as the Revolutionary Action Movement. We were in Monroe with Robert and Mable Williams. We sat at the feet of Queen Mother Moore, Ella Baker and Dara Abubakari. We are the ones who adopted the attacking Black Panther as our symbol, those who stared down pigs, created Black Student Unions and fed free breakfast to children. We sharpened the contradiction.

We are the ones who, realizing the neo-colonial nature of the term “Negro,” changed our national identity to Black. When that term, too, had been co-opted by opportunists and counter revolutionaries, we are the ones who converged on Detroit 500 deep and brought into existence the New Afrikan national identity. We are the ones who said Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina is the national territory.

We are the ones who breathed life into the Black Liberation Army, who proceeded to combat our historical enemies from coast to coast and all areas in between. We were on the roof in New Orleans with Mark Essex, in South Central L.A. with Geronimo ji Jaga, in El-Malik at the Capitol with the RNA-II. We are the ones who were in Chicago with Santa Bear and Spurgeon Jake Winters; in Attica with L.D. and Sam Melville. We were in Soledad with George, Fleeta and John; in the Marin County Courthouse with Jonathan, William, James and Ruchell. We are the ones who were with George, Hugo and Bato in San Quentin.
We were in Soledad with George, Fleeta and John; in the Marin County Courthouse with Jonathan, William, James and Ruchell. We are the ones who were with George, Hugo and Bato in San Quentin.

We are the ones from the George L. Jackson Assault Squad of the BLA in San Francisco. We are the ones in both Olugbala and Amistad Collectives of the BLA. And that was us in the Five Percenter-BLA units, too. We invaded the tombs to free our comrades and went underwater to assault Riker’s Island as well. We are the ones who made Nicky Barnes run to the Italian mob for protection.

We are the ones who were in support of the United Freedom Front, the May 19th Communists Organization, the George Jackson Brigade, the Sam Melville-Jonathan Jackson Unit, and the Prairie Fire/John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. We are the ones who introduced comrade-sista Assata Shakur to Fidel and Raul. We hooked Robert Williams up with Mao and Chou En Lai.

We are the ones who defended the people in a raging gun battle against pigs at Aretha Franklin’s father’s church in Detroit. We are the ones who brought you Kuwasi Balagoon, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Nehanda Abioudun, Fulani Sunni Ali, Safiya Bhukari, Yassmyn Fula, Afeni Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Maliki Shakur Latine, Sekou Odinga, Jalil Muntaqim, Herman Bell and all the other stalwart standard bearers of liberation.

We are the ones who speak truth to power, who practice our theories, who are the messages we bring. We are the ones in the Provisional Government Republic of New Afrika, Peoples Center Council, The Peoples Revolutionary Leadership Council, New Afrikan Peoples Organization, New Afrikan Panthers, New Afrikan Scouts, Spear and Shield Collective, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, August Third Collective, New Afrikan Security Forces, Revolutionary Armed Task Force, New Afrikan Peoples Liberation Army and New Afrikan Women for Self-Determination. And we’ll be in many more to come.

We are the ones who support Puerto Rican Independence, the Mexicano/Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement and all other revolutionary struggles for freedom against capitalist imperialism. We are those who stand firm against patriarchy, heterosexualism and liberalism. We are those that study Butch Lee, J. Sakai, Owusu, Yaki Yakubu, Chokwe Lumumba, Makungu Akinyele, Che, Cabral, Fanon and Dr. John Henrik Clarke. We are the ones who know that “revolution without women ain’t happenin’”!

We are the ones the enemy calls, “criminals,” “terrorists,” “gangs,” “militants,” “leftists,” “separatists,” “radicals,” “feminists,” “worst of the worst,” “America’s Most Wanted” and enemy combatants. Whatever.

We call ourselves Humans. We are New Afrikan revolutionaries. Those who weren’t afraid.

Who are you?

Free the Land!

Send our brother some love and light: Sanyika Shakur s/n Kody Scott, D-07829, PBSP-SHU C-7-112, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532.

Glen Ford: Black Agenda Report: Mass Black Incarceration: Damn Right, We Charge Genocide

Revolution Books presents

A Talk by Carl Dix

Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide

Saturday, February 18  4pm   Free Admission

The Riverside Church, Assembly Hall, 490 Riverside Drive NYC

http://blackagendareport.com/content/mass-black-incarceration-damn-right-we-charge-genocide

Mass Black Incarceration: Damn Right, We Charge Genocide

Tue, 02/14/2012 – 21:38 — Glen Ford

A Black Agenda Report commentary by Glen Ford

The United States resisted signing the international treaty against genocide until 1988 – because it was guilty of the crime, and not necessarily finished. Mass Black incarceration, in both its past and present forms, provides much evidence of U.S. genocidal intent. The bodies have been piling up for forty years – although mainly warehoused, rather than deceased. “The criminalization of genocide was intended to be much more than a kind of legal epitaph for the dead; it was designed, like all laws, to prevent the crime.”

Mass Black Incarceration: Damn Right, We Charge Genocide

A Black Agenda Report commentary by Glen Ford

“Guilt of genocide does not require that the great bulk of the victims be physically wiped out.”

It is well known that the United States is the unchallenged leader in mass incarceration, and that nearly half of the 2.4 million inmates of the American Gulag are Black. Many in the Black Freedom Movement have long contended that mass Black incarceration, as practiced in the United States, fits the legal definition of genocide. Others, because of fear or denial, insist on absolving the United States of the ultimate and ongoing crime of genocide. This is not a semantic question. The charge of genocide differs in international law from war crimes and crimes against peace, in that genocide can occur when a country is technically at peace with the rest of the world.

It is no longer seriously disputed that Native Americans are victims of deliberate, genocidal policies of successive U.S. governments. The proof is in the raw results: millions of dead Indians. But guilt of genocide does not require that the great bulk of the victims be physically wiped out.Otherwise, the charge of genocide would be nothing more a post-mortem, like an autopsy report. The criminalization of genocide, which only began in 1946, was intended to be much more than a kind of legal epitaph for the dead; it was designed, like all laws, to prevent the crime.

For that reason, the four categories of criminal acts cited in the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide include, not just the physical killing of members of “national, ethnical, racial or religious” groups, but also the infliction of serious harm to members of the group; imposition of conditions of life that are calculated to bring about destruction of the group, in whole or in part, or measures intended to prevent births among the group. It is also genocide to transfer children of the group to another group, as happened to Native Americans and natives of Australia.

“Genocide can occur when a country is technically at peace with the rest of the world.”

As in most systems of law, it is the intention to cause harm that is key. In the United States, the criminal justice system established in the post-Civil War South was designed to put Black people back into a kind of bondage. That is the lesson of the recently broadcast PBS documentary “Slavery By Another Name,” which points out that African Americans made up 90 percent of the inmates in some southern states. And it is Michelle Alexander’s position, in her book The New Jim Crow, that modern mass Black incarceration, beginning around 1970, is calculated to create a caste of Black people with no rights, and to stigmatize Blacks as a group as criminals.

At New York’s Riverside Church, this Saturday, revolutionary communist activist Carl Dix will argue that “Stop-and-frisk and other policing policies” that enmesh Blacks in the criminal justice system amount to “a slow genocide which could easily accelerate into fast genocide.”

Even a Being from another planet would conclude that Carl Dix is right. ET would quickly learn that one out of every eight incarcerated persons in the world is African American – about 12 percent of the inmates on Planet Earth – although Black Americans make up less than six tenths of one percent of the global population. ET would recognize that such numbers can only mean that a genocide is in progress, that African Americans have been singled out for some horrible fate by the U.S. government. We cannot sit and wait for the post-mortem. We charge genocide, now!

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendareport.com.

2/21 Albany Occupy Prisons Action for ending PP Jalil Muntaqim’s solitary confinement!

NOTE: The Free Mumia Coalition will be driving up to Albany for this Occupy Prisons Action, call our hotline if you want to join us.  212 330-8029

 

Justice For Jali!

 

End Prison Abuse and Solitary Confinement!

 

Attica “Correctional” Facility, January 23, 2012.

 

Jalil Anthony Bottom, a former Black Panther, was sentenced to SIX MONTHS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT (called SHU or Special Housing Unit) for possession of PHOTOS OF MEMORIAL SERVICES FOR 2 FORMER BLACK PANTHERS.

 

We call on Governor Cuomo, the NYS Legislature, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Department of so-called “Corrections”

 

ISOLATION = TORTURE. END IT!

 

“Long term solitary confinement in excess of 15 days could amount to torture and should be banned.” — Juan E. Mendez, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. New York locks people in isolation at almost twice the national rate.

 

REVERSE JALIL’S DISCRIMINATORY TICKET AND INCREDIBLE 6-MONTH SENTENCE.

 

Six months in solitary confinement for photos of a memorial service exposes the arbitrary and cruel over-use of SHU for targeting, harassment, and abuse.

 

STRIKE DOWN THE “UNAUTHORIZED ORGANIZATIONS” REGULATION, written so vaguely that it invites abuse and harassment based on prisoners political beliefs or staff whims

 

ATTICA = ABUSE. SHUT IT DOWN! “Attica has clearly been unable to cast off its violent past, and has proven, time and time again, to be an unsafe and inhumane place for prisoners… The only possible remedy is to close the facility.” –The Correctional Association of New York

 

JOIN THE PEOPLE’S MIC FOR JALIL & AGAINST CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT in solidarity with occupy4prisoners national occupy day in support of prisoners

 

Tuesday, February 21, 12:00 noon

 Capitol Building, Washington Ave. entrance, Albany

 

Protest Jalil’s sentence (Anthony Bottom #77A4283) and the abuse of solitary confinement: Call your NYS

legislator or Commissioner of Corrections Brian Fisher.

 

The Radical Caucus of Occupy Albany

 

In Honouring memory of Claudia Jones

Remembering Claudia Jones – Visit her grave in Highgate Cemetery on 19th February @ 1pm- Rape as a Weapon of War – Public Meeting – 21st February called by the The Pan-Afrikan Voice

Claudia Jones, Pan Afrikanist, revolutionary Communist, and mother of the Notting Hill Carnival was born in Trinidad on 21 February 1915. She emigrated to USA at a young age but was imprisoned as a result of her political activism and deported to Britain in 1955 where she continued to organise fight for socialism.

Visit Claudia Jones’ grave at Highgate cemetery. Meet at the main gate, Swains Lane, N6 at 1.00 pm on Sunday 19th February 2012. There is a £3.00 entry charge to the cemetery.

Meeting to commemorate Claudia’s revolutionary legacy will be held at 7.00 pm on Tuesday 21st February 2012 (details above). Speakers from Congo and Haiti plus showing of film Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy.

Currently in Congo there is a genocide taking place. Over the last decade over 6m people have been killed in a proxy war as transnational companies vie to control the vast mineral deposits of the country. Over the same period 800,000 women, children and men have been raped. The current President Kabila has lost legitimacy in the eyes of many Congolese who are calling for him to go. Women are fighting back against the grotesque violence they are facing and playing a leading role in resistance to the Kabila regime.

As Haiti marks the second anniversary of the earthquake which took 300,000 people’s lives, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, 600,000 people still live in tents. Only a fraction of aid money collected has reached the Haitian people who are under UN occupation. Ravaged by cholera (brought in by UN troops) over 600 have died from disease. The situation is further compounded by an epidemic of rape against women. Like the Congo, Haitian women and organising to fight back against this kind of warfare and brutality.

Notes and quotes from Huey Newton’s autobiography

• By agentofchange

 

Since today is the 70th anniversary of Huey P Newton’s birth, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on his autobiography, ‘Revolutionary Suicide’. In my opinion, Revolutionary Suicide is a crucial contribution to the field of revolutionary strategy and tactics, particularly for those working in the ‘belly of the beast’ – the imperialist countries of Europe and North America.

What made the Black Panther Party and affiliated black/brown power organisations so special? What made them stand out from the myriad of other radical/progressive/socialist organisations? I think the main thing is the fact that they were able to mobilise the *masses* – they were able to move beyond the usual middle-class left dogmas and outdated methodology (“fanning our flames to the hurricane”, to use George Jackson’s vivid expression) and really engage oppressed people in the struggle for their own freedom. Yes, they were smashed by the state; yes, many mistakes were made; but nevertheless they made unprecedented gains which we should actively learn from.

If you haven’t read it yet, I’d strongly recommend you to read ‘Revolutionary Suicide’, along with Huey’s ‘To Die For The People’, Bobby Seale’s book ‘Sieze the Time’, Assata Shakur’s autobiography and Mumia Abu Jamal’s ‘We Want Freedom’. That’s a minimum Panther reading list. Trust me, it’s worth it!

In terms of learning from Huey’s ideas about building a revolutionary movement, I think the following points from ‘Revolutionary Suicide’ are some of the key things for us to consider:

• BUILD UNITY THROUGH REAL STRUGGLE. Learning to fight the oppressor is the way to stop fighting each other. Huey communicates this idea by relating the story of how, at his high school, the black students created unity in response to the dominance of white racist gangs.
• BUILD UNITY THROUGH SHARED GOALS. Nobody agrees on everything, and yet left organisations insist on defining themselves on the basis of petty differences with each other. Work out a basic platform and move on it.
• BUILD A SENSE OF COMMUNITY. Modern capitalism takes away our sense of community, of togetherness, or shared purpose. It promotes individualism and fear. Any revolutionary organisation or movement must seek to build unity and cooperation in the communities it works within. Socialism is built from the ground up.
• BUILD ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION. The education system fails oppressed people. It teaches self-hate and subservience. The revolutionary must be an educator. Raising consciousness is a long-term, arduous, essential project and needs constant attention.
• MOBILISE AMONG THE MOST OPPRESSED. Although the traditional US left was focusing its attentions on the industrial working class, the Panthers realised that this was not the most revolutionary class in society, as it had largely been bought off and was enjoying the fruits of imperialism and racism. Huey points out that a revolution must be built on the basis of those elements in society that have nothing to lose; that are ready to go against the system.
• REVOLUTION STARTS NOW. Meet the survival needs of the people, in the here and now. Build power in the communities. Take responsibility. Political power doesn’t drop from the skies; it is built in real life, and that process begins now with the fight for survival. “Revolution is not an action; it is a process.”
• ACTION SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS. You can’t engage people with a load of talk and dogmatism. Find ways to get the attention of those people you want to revolutionise. Be relevant, be visible, get people moving in the struggle for real goals. No left-wing organisation that I know of in Britain gets anywhere near to this, as they have no roots in oppressed communities and therefore are not on the right wavelength.
• BE RELEVANT. You don’t have to dumb down your ideas to be acceptable to the masses; you don’t have to take ‘popular’ positions; but you *do* have to be relevant. Many groups fail because they are completely divorced from the masses, and because they adopt an alienating, doctrinaire, superior attitude in relation to oppressed people.
• STUDY THE ART OF REVOLUTION. Learn how others have developed movements and won freedom, and let their strategies inform yours.
• BUILD YOUR OWN PLAN. While learning from others, remember that your struggle has its own unique characteristics, and therefore you must develop your own unique strategy based on a deep analysis of concrete conditions, rather than relying on blueprints or dogmas.
• FIGHT THE POWER. Develop the skills to deal with the system on a daily level. Know your rights – with police, in school, with bailiffs etc. This is key for building pride, confidence and solidarity.
• THE OPPRESSED MUST LEAD. Organisations have a definite need for people with what Huey calls “bourgeois skills” – middle class radicals with good writing, computer, administration skills etc. In many organisations unfortunately these skills bring leadership status to those that have them. This should be avoided!

Here are some quotes I thought were worth typing out:

On being a revolutionary

“I will fight until I die, however that may come. But whether I’m around or not to see it happen, I know that the transformation of society inevitably will manifest the true meaning of ‘all power to the people.’”

“By surrendering my life to the revolution, I found eternal life”

“The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.”

“The oppressor cannot understand the simple fact that people want to be free. So, when a man resists oppression, they pass it off by calling him ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’”

“You can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.”

On building a movement

“We discussed Mao’s program, Cuba’s program, and all the others, but concluded that we could not follow any of them. Our unique situation required a unique program. Although the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is universal, forms of oppression vary. The ideas that mobilised the people of Cuba and China sprang from their own history and political structures. The practical parts of those programs could be carried out only under a certain kind of oppression. Our program had to deal with America.”

“Che and Mao were veterans of people’s wars, and they had worked out successful strategies for liberating their people. We read these men’s works because we saw them as kinsmen; the oppressor who had controlled them was controlling us, both directly and indirectly. We believed it was necessary to know how they gained their freedom in order to go about getting ours. However, we did not want merely to import ideas and strategies; we had to transform what we learned into principles and methods acceptable to the brothers on the block.”

“To recruit any sizeable number of street brothers, we would obviously have to do more than talk. We needed to give practical applications of our theory, show them that we were not afraid of weapons and not afraid of death. The way we finally won the brothers over was by patrolling the police with arms.”

“Mao and Fanon and Guevara all saw clearly that the people had been stripped of their birthright and their dignity, not by any philosophy or mere words, but at gunpoint. They had suffered a holdup by gangsters, and rape; for them, the only way to win freedom was to meet force with force. At bottom, this is a form of self-defence.”

“We came to an important realisation: books could only point in a general direction; the rest was up to us.”

“Interested primarily in educating and revolutionising the community, we needed to get their attention and give them something to identify with.”

“It was my studying and reading in college that led me to become a socialist. The transformation from a nationalist to a socialist was a slow one, although i was around a lot of Marxists. I even attended a few meetings of the Progressive Labour Party, but nothing was happening there, just a lot of talk and dogmatism, unrelated to the world I knew. It was my life plus independent reading that made me a socialist – nothing else.”

“The street brothers were important to me, and I could not turn away from the life I shared with them. There was in them an intransigent hostility toward all sources of authority that had such a dehumanising effect on the community. In school the ‘system’ was the teacher, but on the block the system was everything that was not a positive part of the community.”

“[When we started patrolling the police] many community people could not believe at first that we had only their interest at heart. Nobody had ever given them any support or assistance when the police harassed them, but here we were, proud Black men, armed with guns and a knowledge of the law. Many citizens came right out of jail and into the party, and the statistics of murder and brutality by policemen in our communities fell sharply.”

“If we developed strong and meaningful alliances with white youth, they would support our goals and work against the establishment”

“Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervour destroyed by mass media. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that – not heroes, not celebrities, not stars. A star’s place is in Hollywood; the revolutionary’s place is in the community with the people.”

“Revolution is not an action; it is a process.”

“The survival programs are a necessary part of the revolutionary process, a means of bringing the people close to the transformation of society.”

“The Breakfast for Children program was set up first. Other programs – clothing distribution centres, liberations schools, housing, prison projects, and medical centres – soon followed. We called them ‘survival programs pending revolution’, since we needed long-term programs and a disciplined organisation to carry them out. They were designed to help the people survive until their consciousness is raised, which is only the first step in the revolution to produce a new America. I frequently use the metaphor of the fact to describe the survival programs. A raft put into service during a disaster is not meant to change conditions but to help one get through a difficult time. During a flood the raft is a life-saving device, but it is only a means of getting to higher and safer ground.”

“We had the base now on which to construct a potent social force in the country. But some of our leading comrades lacked the comprehensive ideology needed to analyse events and phenomena in a creative, dynamic way. We [formed the] Ideological Institute, which has succeeded in providing the comrades with an understanding of dialectical materialism. About three hundred brothers and sisters attend classes to study in depth the works of great Marxist thinkers and philosophers.”

“I dissuade party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realised that their understanding had to be developed.”

“My experiences in China reinforced my understanding of the revolutionary process and my belief in the necessity of making a concrete analysis of concrete conditions. The Chinese speak with great pride about their history and their revolution and mention often the invincible thoughts of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. But they also tell you, ‘This was *our* revolution based upon a cornet analysis of concrete conditions, and we cannot direct you, only give you the principles. It is up to you to make the correct creative application.’ It was a strange yet exhilarating experience to have traveled thousands of miles, across continents, to hear their words. For this is what Bobby Seale and I had included in our own discussions five years earlier in Oakland, as we explored ways to survive the abuses of the capitalist system in the Black communities of America. Theory was not enough, we had said. We knew we had to act to bring about change. Without fully realising it then, we were following Mao’s belief that ‘if you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.’”

“We must never take a stand just because it is popular. We must analyse the situation objectively and take the logically correct position, even though it may be unpopular. If we are right in the dialectics of the situation, our position will prevail.”

On education

“During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience.”

“Throughout my life all real learning has taken place outside school. I was educated by my family, my friends, and the street. Later, I learned to love books and I read a lot, but that had nothing to do with school. Long before, I was getting educated in unorthodox ways.”

“The clash of cultures in the classroom is essentially a class war, a socio-economic and racial warfare being waged on the battleground of our schools, with middle-class aspirating teachers provided with a powerful arsenal of half-truths, prejudices and rationalisations, arrayed against hopelessly outclassed working-class youngsters. This is an uneven balance, particularly since, like most battles, it comes under the guise of righteousness.” (quote from Kenneth Clark, ‘Dark Ghetto’)

“Strong and positive influences in my life helped me escape the hopelessness that afflicts so many of my contemporaries. My father gave me a strong sense of pride and self-respect. By brother Melvin awakened in me the desire to learn, and because of him I began to read. What I discovered in books led me to think, to question, to explore and finally to redirect my life.”

“I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was affecting the black race in America.” (quote from the Autobiography of Malcolm X)

On community

“When people in the congregation prayed for each other, a feeling of community took over; they were involved in each other’s problems and trying to help solve them. Here was a microcosm of what ought to have been going on outside in the community. I had the first glimmer of what it means to have a unified goal that involves the whole community and calls forth the strengths of the people to make things better.”

“Among the poor, social conditions and economic hardship frequently change marriage into a troubled and fragile relationship. A strong love between husband and wife can survive outside pressures, but that is rare. Marriage usually becomes one more imprisoning experience within the general prison of society.”

“Those in the community who defy authority and ‘break the law’ seem to enjoy the good life and have everything in the way of material possessions. On the other hand, people who work hard and struggle and suffer much are the victims of greed and indifference, losers. This insane reversal of values presses heavily on the Black community. The causes originate from outside and are imposed by a system that ruthlessly seeks its own rewards, no matter what the cost in wrecked human lives.”

On prison

“The state believes in the power of euphemism, that by putting pleasant name on a concentration camp they can change its objective characteristics. Prisons are referred to as ‘correctional facilities’ or ‘men’s colonies’, and so forth; to the name givers, prisoners become ‘clients’, as if the state of California were some vast advertising agency. But we who are prisoners know the truth; we call them penitentiaries and jails and refer to ourselves as convicts and inmates.”

“I have often pondered the similarity between prison experience and the slave experience of Black people. Both systems involve exploitation: the slave received no compensation for the wealth he produced, and the prisoner is expected to produce marketable goods for what amounts to no compensation. Slavery and prison life share a compete lack of freedom of movement. The power of those in authority is total, and they expect deference from those under their domination. Just as in the days of slavery, constant surveillance and observation are part of the prison experience, and if inmates develop meaningful and revolutionary friendships among themselves, these ties are broken by institutional transfers, just as the slavemaster broke up families.”

“Many white inmates are not outright racists when they get to prison, but the staff soon turns them in that direction. While the guards do not want racial hostility to erupt into violence between inmates, they do want hostility high enough to prevent any unity. This is something like the strategy used by southern politicians to pit poor whites against poor blacks.”

“The whites are not only duped and used by the prison staff, but come to love their oppressors. Their dehumanisation is so thorough that they admire and identify with those who deprive them of their humanity.”

“The spirit of revolution will continue to grow within the prisons. I look forward to the time when all inmates will offer greater resistance by refusing to work as I did. Such a simple move would bring the machinery of the penal system to a halt.”

“James Baldwin has pointed out that the United States does not know what to do with its Black population now that they ‘are no longer a source of wealth, are no longer to be bought and sold and bred, like cattle.’ This country especially does not know what to do with its young Black men. ‘It is not at all accidental,’ he says, ‘that the jails and the army and the needle claim so many.’”

“The great mass of arrested or accused black folk have no defence. There is desperate need of nationwide organisations to oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the poor, friendless and black.” (Quote from WEB DuBois)

“The masses must be taught to understand the true function of prisons. Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the real underlying economic motive of crime? The people must learn that when one ‘offends’ the totalitarian state, it is patently not an offence against the people of that state, but an assault upon the privilege of the few.” (George Jackson, ‘Blood in my Eye’)

“Giving a prisoner a number is another way of undermining his identity, one more step in the dehumanisation process. Of course, it has historical roots: the SS assigned numbers to prisoners in Nazi concentration camps during World War II”

On Malcolm X and black consciousness

“White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books. The bravery of hundreds of our ancestors who took part in slave rebellions has been lost in the mists of time, since plantation owners did their best to prevent any written accounts of uprisings.”

“Malcolm X’s life and accomplishments galvanised a generation of young Black people; he helped us take a great stride forward with a new sense of ourselves and our destiny. But meaningful as his life was, his death had great significance, too. A new militant spirit was born when Malcolm died. It was born of outrage and a unified Black consciousness, out of the sense of a task left undone.”

“IQ tests are routinely used as weapons against Black people in particular and minority groups and poor people generally. The tests are based on white middle-class standards, and when we score low on them, the results are used to justify the prejudice that we are inferior and unintelligent. Since we are taught to believe that the tests are infallible, they have become a self-fulfilling prophecy that cuts off our initiative and brainwashes us.”

“As far as I am concerned, the party is a living testament to Malcolm’s life work. I do not claim that the party has done what Malcolm would have done. Many others say that their programs are Malcolm’s program. We do not say this, but Malcolm’s spirit is in us

“Malcolm X impressed me with his logic and with his disciplined and dedicated mind. Here was a man who combined the world of the streets and the world of the scholar, a man so widely read he could give better lectures and cite more evidence than many college professors. He was also practical. Dressed in the loose-fitting style of a strong prison man, he knew what the street brothers were like, and he knew what had to be done to reach them.”

On black nationalism

“All these programs were aimed at one goal: complete control of the institutions in the community. Every ethnic group has particular needs that they know and understand better than anybody else; each group is the best judge of how its institutions ought to affect the lives of its members. Throughout American history ethnic groups like the Irish and Italians have established organisations and institutions within their own communities. When they achieved this political control, they had the power to deal with their problems.”

“The most important element in controlling our own institutions would be to organise them into cooperatives, which would end all forms of exploitation. Then the profits, or surplus, from the co-operates would be returned to the community, expanding opportunities on all levels, and enriching life. Beyond this, our ultimate aim is to have various ethnic communities cooperating in a spirit of mutual aid, rather than competing. In this way, all communities would be allied in a common purpose through the major social, economy and political institutions in the country.”

“Blacks are a colonised people used only for the benefit and profit of the power structure whenever it suits their purposes. After the Civil War, Blacks were kicked off plantations and had nowhere to go. For nearly one hundred years they were either unemployed or used for the most menial tasks, because industry preferred to use the labour of more acceptable immigrants – the Irish, the Italians and the Jews. However, when World War II started, Blacks were again employed – in factories and by industry – because, with the white male population off fighting, there was a labour shortage. But when that war ended, Blacks were once again kicked off ‘the plantation’ and left stranded with no place to go in an industrial society.”

On China

“What I experienced in China was the sensation of freedom – as if a great weight had been lifted from my soul and I was able to be myself, without defence or pretence or the need for explanation. I felt absolutely free for the first time in my life – completely free among my fellow men. This experience of freedom had a profound effect on me, because it confirmed my belief that an oppressed people can be liberated if their leaders persevere in raising their consciousness and in struggling relentlessly against the oppressor.”

“The behaviour of the police in China was a revelation to me. They are there to protect and help the people, not to oppress them. Their courtesy was genuine; no division or suspicion exists between them and the citizens.”

“The Chinese truly live by the slogan ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,’ and their behaviour constantly reminds you of that. For the first time I did not feel threatened by a uniformed person with a weapon; the soldiers were there to protect the citizenry.”

On democracy

“Institutions work this way. A son is murdered by the police, and nothing is done. The institutions send the victim’s family on a merry-go-round, going from one agency to another, until they wear out and give up. this is a very effective way to beat down poor and oppressed people, who do not have the time to prosecute their cases. Time is money to poor people. To go to Sacramento means loss of a day’s pay – often a loss of job. If this is a democracy, obviously it is a bourgeois democracy limited to the middle and upper classes. Only they can afford to participate in it.”

The Challenge of Black Nationalism

One of the biggest challenges African people face in America is to rejuvenate Black Nationalist thinking as struggle to determine for ourselves as a people what is in our best collective interests.

There are far too many African people in this country who think what is good for other people should be good for us. Nothing could be further from the truth. We can only determine what is good for us by reestablishing Black Nationalist thinking and developing a Black Nationalist program of action. This is the missing link to the liberation of African people in America. Let us briefly review the development and impact of Black Nationalism in America.

Black Nationalism is a tradition that emerged in the early nineteenth-century among those Black leaders who understood the need for African people in America to develop a national entity as the only solution for Black people in North America, Latin America, or the Caribbean.

These nineteenth-century Black Nationalist leaders such as Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, James T. Holly, Martin R. Delany, Pap Singleton, Edwin McCabe, and Henry McNeal Turner understood that African people in America were a “nation within a nation” and should organize to collectively struggle for the liberation of Black people in this country and throughout the world.

During this era, there were some Black Nationalist leaders, before and after the Civil War, who led movements for people of African ancestry to leave this country and establish a homeland somewhere else. These proposals included Africa, Canada and the Caribbean.

Other Black Nationalist leaders led movements for Black people to control the towns where they lived and others led movements to the western region of this country to establish all Black towns in Kansas and Oklahoma.

The core of this Black Nationalist tradition has been to defeat and overthrow the system of white supremacy, seize control of land (somewhere) and to achieve self determination for the oppressed Black masses.

The Black Nationalist tradition has always been opposed to integrations, assimilation, and accommodation as a solution to the problems of people of African ancestry in America. In this regard, Black Nationalist tradition has rejected the strategy and tactics of appealing to the morality of white people and their white supremacy system.

Black Nationalists have been historically clear that people in power don’t teach powerless people how to get power. And they certainly don’t give power away, even though, when challenged, they may give up some concessions.

As Black Nationalism emerged in the twentieth-century, the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the establishment of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the African Communicates League (ACL) became the leading spokesman for Black Nationalist ideas and organizing.

Garvey used his varied skills to become on of our true twentieth-century freedom fighters. Garvey arrived in Harlem, New York on March 16, 1916. By 1919, Garvey was well established as the President General of the UNIA/ACL that had membership of over three million people with more than three hundred branches in the United States.

Perhaps Garvey’s greatest contribution to the upliftment of our people, through Black Nationalism, was his ability to find a formula for organizing African people around the African principle: the greatest good for the greatest number.

This was reflected in the First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, in Madison Square Garden, in 1920. Over twenty thousand Black people from all over the world witnessed the choosing of Red, Black, and Green as the colors of the Provisional Government.

In this context, Garvey and the UNIA/ACL had established an economic arm, the Negro Factories Corporation, with cooperative stores, restaurants, steam laundry ships, tailor shops, dressmaking shops, millinery stores, a doll factory to manufacture Black dolls and a publishing house. Also, Garvey formed a Steamship Corporation.

The Black Nationalist tradition was continued in the twentieth-century through the Nation of Islam and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who utilized many of the Garvey and UNIA/ACL organizing tactics and strategies.

It was during the 1960s Black Power explosion that the Black Nationalist tradition reemerged through the influence of Malcolm X, who adopted Black Nationalism as the political philosophy, economic and social philosophy of the organization of Afro American Unity in 1964 after he left the Nation of Islam.

Finally, the Black Nationalist tradition, today, is spearheaded through the African Centered Education Movement. The mass acceptance of Kwanzaa, African Liberation Day, Buy Black Campaigns, the Reparations Movement, and Controlling Our Own Communities Campaigns are all part of the ongoing Black Nationalist tradition.

Without vigorous Black Nationalist thinking and an aggressive Black Nationalist program of action, we will continue to chase false dreams created by our oppressors. We must put an end to this!

Once Black Nationalism is understood by all Black people, it will be the foundation upon which the true liberation of people of African ancestry in America will take place.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF).