Kuwasi Speaks

In the Other Army

Excerpted from Look for Me in the Whirlwind (PM Press, 2017)

I hit it off all right later in the third platoon, being a field soldier in the field, and being in good understandings with the brothers. But there was a lot of shit that had been bugging me for a long time. Besides the ridiculous changes that all enlisted men went through, there was an added factor: rampant racism on all levels. A captain who was black was demoted to sergeant E-6 before our very eyes and shipped out. Brothers would spend 34 or 35 months of a 36-month enlistment and then get dishonorable discharges—white soldiers had to make successive superduper fuck-ups before the same would happen to them (like throw a German citizen off a bridge into the river in the month of January). If a brother whipped a white boy, under just about any circumstances, then disciplinary action was on the way—but not vice versa. And motherfuckers were still rapping that A-Company/C-Company shit. I rapped anti-American.

We blacks who felt we were marked men, on whom designs had been made to take care of 208-style, looked at the injustices on the post, had a secret meeting, and formed an organization based on fucking up racists. We called ourselves De Legislators, because we were going to make and enforce new laws that were fair. We were De Judge, De Prosecutor, De Executioner, Hannibal, and De Prophet. We said we would go to jail for a reason and not the season. We would get 208, but would make the brass go gray and bawl and stay up a whole lot of nights giving it to us.

From then on, every time a racial situation appeared, we did. Every time white GIs ganged a black GI, we moved to more than even the score. One at a time we would catch up with them and beat and stomp them so bad that helicopters would have to be used to take them to better hospitals than the ones in the area. We were not playing. We would plan things so that we could kick something off inside a club that would instantly tum into a riotous condition—once everything was in chaos it was impossible to pick us out. We then broke faces and bodies of whoever we planned to get, and made our escape. Afterwards we would have critiques, just like in the end of war games; get our alibis together; and keep the whole thing under our hats.

The CIDo began investigating us, and the Provost Marshal. We began to want 208s but were beating motherfuckers up so bad they wouldn’t name us. One of my partners, Huff, had a very high moral character, and broke me out of the habit of talking about people’s mothers. He was an earnest social student and passed on worthy literature. He and Rhodes were the best of company. Rhodes was serious-minded about the struggle; and he ofttimes related that he grew up with the four sisters who were murdered by the racists in Birmingham in the explosion of the church. […]

There were some hip dudes in De Legislators. Hannibal had earned his name by kicking ass. I had earned the name De Prophet by prophesying that so-and-so was going to get fucked up in a predetermined amount of time, and then going on and fucking the chump up. Brothers had asked how come I had never got busted. First, we were careful; and second, we were decisive, never saying, “One more ass to kick and then I’m going to stop”—always five more asses to kick. I wish that I’d kept in touch with the Legislators, and a few other brothers from that time, because sincere comrades are hard to come by.

Statement at Preliminary Hearing

September 2, 1982

As an anti-imperialist and a warrior of African descent, dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government, as an urban guerrilla in the ranks of the Black Liberation Army, i will not only resist the designs of a sham hypocritical system of law, but outright refuse to take any part in court proceedings. At large, i do not pay taxes, aid the fascist law enforcement authorities, or pass up reasonable opportunities to strike the oppressors, and find no reason to change now or any time in the future. As long as the United States government keeps the masses of Black and other Third World people as cannon fodder, and uses force to maintain its domination over us, and i am alive, i will resist, knowing that my fate as a resister irregardless of the state’s consequences is better than the fates of those who accept oppression and pass it on to coming generations.

The gang of bullies under the banner of the American flag who practice genocide against Black, Latin, and Native American peoples within its confines, while harboring nazis and secret police from other fascist regimes, and arming and training Ku Klux Klanners and domestic Nazis, deserves no respite, and it’s a sad day whenever they do. The United States, Israel, and South Africa stand as expanding imperialist settler states, rotten to their cores, from inception. Their fall will mark the end of a tragic era in history, worth all truly revolutionary efforts.

courtesy of Mary Patten and Madame Binh Graphics Collective Archives

Brink’s Trial Opening Statement

July 11, 1983

My name is Kuwasi Balagoon. The name is of Yoruba origin. Yoruba is a name of a tribe in Western Africa in what was called the Slave Coast, and now called Nigeria. Many if not the bulk of slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere were Yoruba, and throughout slavery and U.S. colonialism the religion, customs, and even part of the language were maintained in the United States and throughout the Caribbean, Central, and South America. When the people of Nigeria threw the British out, they sent representatives to Oriente Province in Cuba to relearn the culture and the Yoruba religion, which was kept intact throughout slavery, Spanish, and American colonialism. i was renamed by my peers in the Yoruba temple and was married in a Yoruba ceremony like thousands of people before and since.

The english translation of Kuwasi is “born on Sunday,” and the translation of Balagoon is “Warlord,” and it suits me to have a name which reflects what i am about and my origins, i accept that name. Donald Weems, the name that the prosecutor likes to use, is an alien european name. Donald is a Christian name—and i am not a Christian; and Weems is a Scottish name, and i am not Scottish. It’s a name that some slaver decided to brand what he considered his property with, and it is the name the state likes to use to propagate a colonial relationship. The english translation of Weems is “cave dweller.” i reject all that it means.

i am a prisoner of war, and i reject the crap about me being a defendant, and i do not recognize the legitimacy of this court. The term defendant applies to someone involved in a criminal matter, in an internal search for guilt or innocence. It is clear that i’ve been a part of the Black Liberation Movement all of my adult life and have been involved in a war against the American Imperialist, in order to free New Afrikan people from its yoke. i am not treated like a criminal, am never in the company of prisoners with nonpolitical charges. Never have i had a bail or parole once captured, and out of ten years in County Jails and prisons, seven years were spent in isolation, administrative segregation, management control, incorrigible units, or some separate, punitive arrangement or prison within a prison.

Before becoming a clandestine revolutionary i was a tenant organizer and was arrested for menacing a 270-pound colonial building superintendent with a machete, who physically stopped the delivery of oil to a building i didn’t live in but had helped to organize. Being an organizer for the Community Council on Housing i took part in not only organizing rent strikes but pressed slumlords to make repairs and maintain heat and hot water, killed rats, represented tenants in court, stopped illegal evictions, faced off with City Marshals, helped turn rents into repair resources and collective ownership by tenants, and demonstrated whenever the needs of tenants were at stake. In 1967, the U.S. Congress killed the rat bill which would have provided funding for killing rats. At that time, it was estimated that there were at least one rat for every person in New York City. So we decided to demonstrate at the U.S. House of Representatives. Once we got there we decided that instead of walking around with signs in the sun waiting for reporters, we would just go in and tell those creeps how we felt. Once we began to practice our First Amendment rights and refused to leave, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill instructed the Capitol Police to “Get those niggers out of here,” at which time the Boy and Girl Scouts and other spectators were ushered out and we and the Capitol Police had a free-for-all in the halls of Congress, down the front steps, and all over the lawn. Five of us, including myself and my sister, were arrested for “disorderly conduct,” which the FBI files advise me was lodged because of resulting publicity that court proceedings might have entailed. The U.S. Congress response to us was to have plexiglass installed between them and the gallery where people affected by their actions and inactions would have to sit.

Although i was naive, i didn’t think so, having been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and seeing countless New Afrikan and Mexican GIs dishonorably discharged after serving thirty-four months of a thirty-six-month enlistment. Being stigmatized for life and denied employment and the right to vote for what white GIs were reprimanded for. Being told by a company commander that he was told that he would have to pay graft before our combat scores would be correctly calculated. i thought i knew the U.S. government.

We found it unacceptable that the same government who drafted New Afrikans and demanded that we fight the Vietnamese who had forced the French to surrender at Dien Bien Phu and leave Indochina, and who had mauled the 1^st Cavalry Division in hand-to-hand combat in the jungles, as well as retaking Hamburger Hill at least four times, could not allocate a little money for killing rats, who were attacking countless infants and children, causing nervous disorders as well as poisoning, and traumatizing, mauling mothers nursing their infants. Members of Congress laughed straight out when the bill was brought before it and promptly voted it down.

There were people in the Community Council on Housing who worked at other jobs during the day and organized and conducted meetings at night until all matters were decided and business conducted; there were people who got up early in the morning to go with tenants to “tenants and landlords” court to argue out specific injustices, with pictures, inspection data, and building and apartment histories, and then walked all over West Harlem to organize meetings, because we couldn’t afford our fare back and forth across town. We would stop illegal evictions at the door with court orders, arranged repairs, got heat and hot water for tenants, and outright threatened and stood off City Marshals who received hundreds of dollars for each eviction. i had gone to apartments and waited with my carbine a few times.

Then i began to realize that with all this effort, we couldn’t put a dent in the problem. There’s thousands of buildings with wiring eaten away by rats, holes in the floors, ceilings that had crashed on people, bathtubs that had fallen through the floors. There were always electrical fires; in the winter, 90 percent of the people i ran into heated their apartments with their ovens. i could confront building superintendents every day and a job and a free apartment would draw a replacement just as rotten. These conditions didn’t come about through accident or people in high places not being aware. It was not even a question of the government not caring. The City of New York is the greatest slumlord, and the other slumlords get tax breaks and make superprofits on buildings that have been paid for hundreds of times over. i began to know that these inhuman conditions were not only perpetrated in Harlem, Brownsville, El Barrio, and the South Bronx where had originated and aided other organizers. These conditions were and are perpetrated in New Afrikan reservations in Washington, DC, in Miami’s Overtown, the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the Central Ward of Newark, North Philadelphia, the Southside of Chicago, and all over the confines of the U.S.

We say that the U.S. has no right to confine New Afrikan people to redlined reservations, and that we have a right to live on our own terms in a common land area and to govern ourselves, free of occupation forces, such as the police, national guard, or GIs who have invaded our colonies from time to time. We have a right to control our own economy, print our own money, trade with other nations, and enter a workforce where we are not excluded by design and where our wages and the wages of all workers can be manipulated by a ruling class that controls the wealth. We have a right to build our own educational institutions and systems where our children will not be indoctrinated by aliens to suffer the destructive designs of the U.S. government.

When i say we New Afrikan people are colonized, i mean that our lives socially, economically, and politically, with the exception of our war of liberation, are controlled by other people, by imperialist euro-americans. Imperialist euro-americans tell us where to live and under what conditions, euro-american invaders, colonizers, decide what laws we should obey and what jobs we will get. It’s no mystery why such a proportion of GIs, hospital workers, domestic workers, farmworkers, or athletes are New Afrikans or why we are 10 percent of the population within the confines of the U.S. and 50 percent of the prison population. We suffer 50 percent unemployment. Likewise, there is no mystery why the Black Liberation Army (BLA) was formed well over a decade ago and, despite captures and many instances of tortures and executions on the part of the U.S. government, has managed to continue the struggle and fill a lot of cops full of holes and continue to enjoy our people’s support, in spite of raids and threats by the U.S. government and outright political and military blunders on our part. Despite claims that our backs have been broken or that we were out of existence, we of the BLA have continued to fight. Repression breeds resistance. There is no mystery how the Fuerzas Armados de Liberacion Nacional[51] (Armed Forces of National Liberation—FALN) continues, or how the Irish Republican Army (IRA) continues in Ireland, or the African National Congress continues to oppose America’s 51^st state: South Africa. Or why, despite helicopters and bloodthirsty advisers, the guerrillas in El Salvador continue to struggle and advance or why the Palestine Liberation Organization, despite the massive invasion of Lebanon, Israeli-and American-backed massacres, and internal conflicts, struggle on.[52] We have legitimate support from peoples who have been victimized and have a right to self-determination. We are human and nobody wants to live under or bring offspring into a confined atmosphere with an artificial sky.

That is what it is all about. The state knows that of the ninety so-called felonies i’ve been indicted on against the mythical peace and dignity of New York and New Jersey, all of them have been political and military in nature, even in cases where the charges have been dropped. The only time that i’ve been charged with offenses against working-class people who were not agents of the state was during a shootout with police where i commandeered a car, and while aiding an escape, when a man mistaken for a guard didn’t follow instructions. It’s been clear since i was forced underground while in the Panther Party that i have been a partizan on behalf of the liberation of Black people and in the ranks of Black resistance. The Secret Service wasn’t issued a memo to detain, question, or at the very least monitor me in the event that i was in the same area as the president of the United States, might be because i might steal his watch, or because i ever voiced a threat; and the FBI hasn’t put me in its National Index of Agitators to be arrested by them at any time on no charge because of molesting women or children, or selling drugs, or victimizing working-class people in any way. i am on the National Index of Agitators because i am a friend of liberty, an enemy of the state, and a fighter in the ranks of the liberation army of New Afrikan people.

District Attorney Gribetz, Judge Ritter, and the state’s propaganda arm, the establishment media, have sought to obviate this by calling me a defendant, as well as my comrade Sekou Odinga, as if we were American citizens negotiating an internal domestic legal system. We reject this, as well as the insistence on calling us, as well as Assata Shakur, Abdul Majid, and other POWs by slave names. We know that it is not just a case of racist arrogance or legality and note that Zayd Malik Shakur changed his name through the courts years before he was killed by State Troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike and was still called by the state and the media by his slave name. This is to propagate a colonial relationship.

i am tired of going through towns and cities, divided into sections where the houses are bigger and more fit for habitation in one section than the other, and the police protect one section and harass and terrorize the other, the one section enjoying better living conditions always white and the section most resembling hell nonwhite. i am tired of living in a land where the highest rank a Black man or woman can attain is a token appointment, and then hearing that crap that we are all Americans! i am tired of living the life of a colonial subject, while the hypocritical oppressors and exploiters of my people make pompous declarations about our democracy. America is racist, and by no twists and turns of semantics, by no evasions whatsoever, can a racist nation claim to be a democracy.

The media that carries stories about David Gilbert having a map of Orange County Jail while at Rockford County although no incident report was filed and the warden denied any knowledge of a map, first said to be a drawing, then a photo, ever being found. But besides justifying an incredible amount of security, this story was used as a motion to obtain a secret jury in a related federal RICO trial.[53] This court could not grant a motion to investigate this through a hearing and a hearing to find out what traitor Samuel Brown[54] told state authorities. In another instance the Rockland Journal reported that Julio Rosado was a FALN member who visited Judy Clark and David Gilbert at Rockland, when it is clear that Rosado is a public spokesperson of the Movimiento de Liberacion National (MLN), and that the FALN is a clandestine revolutionary organization of fighters. A real investigative reporter would have checked and found out readily that no visit occurred, especially since the day it was reported to have happened, a Monday, is a day that freedom fighters don’t receive visits.

The media role in this case is to help the state build fascism and is no more “neutral and detached” from the state than the judge. The ruling that the jury be anonymous is a political ruling, and we don’t really care how it affects these individuals, because the reality it communicates to everyone who knows of it is that the state and supposedly “neutral” judge have reasons to believe that we are of danger to people outside the state’s repressive apparatus, when it is clear that in no instance where a BLA member was on trial has a juror been harmed, threatened, or tampered with in any way. We only engage the enemy in combat, and we don’t consider working-class people outside of law enforcement enemies. The state’s task is to make us appear to be everybody’s enemy—however, truth and history make it clear who is the real enemy of the people.

In Newsweek, they had the nerve to state, “Nearly one half of the 157 members of the United Nations hold political prisoners of one sort or another: those of conscience, jailed for their beliefs or those whose convictions have driven them to directly challenge their governments. Some even accuse the United States of having its own, though American tradition of democracy and due process make the charge seem more metaphysical than real.” What crap! In the U.S. political prisoners are called, among other things, Grand jury resisters. They are brought before a grand jury and ordered to talk, and when they don’t they are arrested and locked up for refusing to talk. Sometimes a judge orders them to answer a DA’s question, and then, if they refuse to talk, they are tried with the aid of twelve people siding with the pigs under the guise of doing their civic duty and holding the fascist fabric of the state in place and can be convicted of contempt of court and can be sentenced to an undetermined sentence.

Aisha Buckner, Jerry Gaines, Fulani Sunni-Ali, Shaheem Jabbar, Richard Delaney, Yaasymyn Fula, Asha Thornton have been jailed for eighteen months or more; Julio Rosado, Andres Rosado, Ricardo Romero, Maria Cueto, and Steven Guerra have actually been sentenced—not for murder, not for arson or shop-lifting or any alleged crimes—but for not submitting to an evil, alien, imperialistic power … the U.S. government. There have been at least seventy-five people jailed this way since 1970 …. If these people were locked up in the Soviet Union, Poland, Grenada, or Cuba, they would be called “political prisoners.” If they were in Zimbabwe or Libya, Kirkpatrick and Shultz[55] would call them prisoners of conscience. Lech Walesa[56] didn’t do half the time that Jerry Gaines, Shaheeem Jabbar, Yaasmyn Fula, or Asha Thornton has, and they are still in, because America is a hypocritical empire. The [U.S.] propaganda machine moans each time Walesa is stopped by the [Polish] police, and when he admits to meeting with members of the underground, and then racistly and hypocritically ignores these people [grand jury resisters].

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a colony as a “group of emigrants settled in a distant land but subject to a parent country; 2. A territory thus settled; 3. Any region politically controlled by another country.” But just as the hypocritical USA claims that it has no political prisoners, it claims it has no colonies.

Let’s look at the word “genocide,” same source. “1. The systematic annihilation of a racial, political or cultural group.” The UN Convention on Genocide defines it as:

A. Killing members of a group; B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group; C. Deliberately inflicting on the members of the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The American Bar Association objected to the Genocide Convention and the U.S. signing it through its special committee on Peace and Laws, because “Endless confusion in the dual system of the United States would be inevitable with the same crime being murder in state law and genocide in the federal and international fields. Race riots and lynchings being both local crime and genocide depending on the extent of participation.”

Leader H. Perez, DA of Louisiana, stated, “All forms of homicide and personal injury cases would be brought under the broad mantle of genocide, and the mechanics of the thing would simply be that the United States Attorney would walk into state district court and move to transfer the case to federal courts. But what is still worse than the destruction of our constitutional setup and our framework of government in America is the overhanging threat that citizens of our states someday will have to face the international tribunal, where now they must face the state courts and a jury of their peers.” This constitutional setup has resulted in a white person never having been legally executed for the murder of a Black person in the history of the United States. This is not by chance, this has been contrived, the genocide and hypocrisy have been elevated into civic virtue in the U.S. empire, while death rows across the U.S. are packed with Black prisoners.

The U.S. signed the Genocide Convention, with its government leaders knowing full well that they would not abide by it, just as it stated in the U.S. Constitution, Art. 6, para. 4: “The constitution and the laws of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby.”

They wrote these things out, real official, just as they wrote the Declaration of Independence, which said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” These are noble words for slavers and rapists, and they go on to say, “but when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object evinces and designs to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

They said this while kidnapping African people en masse from another continent three thousand miles away. Between 75 million and 110 million Africans were kidnapped, with less than 10 million surviving the Middle Passage to reach these shores. By the end of slavery there were only 4 million of us. Having endured every conceivable atrocity, including the forced separation and sale of family members, rape, murder, the raping and selling of children who were themselves the offspring of rape. Olmsted reported, “In the states of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri as much attention was paid to the breeding and growth of negroes, as to that of horses and mules.”

J.E. Cairnes, the English economist, computed from reliable data that Virginia bred and exported no less than one hundred thousand slaves, which at five hundred dollars apiece (per head) yielded fifty million dollars. George Washington sold a slave to the West Indies for a hogshead of “best rum” and molasses and sweetmeats, and said it was because “this fellow is both a rogue and a runaway.” Thomas Jefferson sold slaves on the open market. To refer to Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of those hypocrites as the fathers of our country is outright provocation.

Slavery was defended thusly: it was said, except for slavery, “The poor would occupy the position in society that the slaves do—as the poor in the North and in Europe do, for there must be a menial class in society and every civilized country on the globe, beside the confederate states, the poor are the inferiors and menials of the rich. Slavery was a greater blessing to the non-slave holding poor than to the owners of slaves, because it gave the poor a start in society that would take them generations to work out; they should thank god for it and fight and die for it as they would their own liberty and dearest birthright of freedom.” This is the real justification for colonialism today.

Chattel slavery was an institution built on racism that built the USA, which for all practical purposes meant that the “owner” of a slave had complete control over the slave and also that any white person could order about any Black person. The slave patrols and militias were the predecessors of the fugitive squad, Red Squad, and the Joint Terrorist Task Force of today. The economy not only of the agrarian autocracy but of the whole south, through marshals, militias, breeders, auctioneers, overseers, slave drivers, and patrols looking for fugitives, was based on slavery, and there was much slavery in the North also: Maryland, Delaware, Washington, DC, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, etc.

The Civil War that ended chattel slavery was carried out by the North not for that purpose but to stop the separation of the U.S. and to ensure industrial domination over agriculture. “The Negro became in the first year contraband of war: that is, property belonging to the enemy and valuable to the invader. And in addition to that, became as the South quickly saw, the key to the Southern resistance. Either these 4 million laborers remained quietly at work to raise food for the fighters, or the fighters starved. Simultaneously, when the dream of the North for manpower produced riots, the only additional troops that the North could depend on were 200,000 Negroes, for without them, Lincoln said, the North could not have won the war.” (W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction).

As the North began to secure victory over the rebellious states, the U.S. government with the Union Army and volunteer organizations established the Freedman’s Bureau, which in conjunction with the treasury and newly freed slaves, lands throughout the confederacy were confiscated, and put into the hands of New Afrikans, who quickly proved they could support themselves even in the wake of war, as well as assist many people who had no land or provisions. Schools and universities were established and many New Afrikans attempted to become citizens of the United States.

On February 5, 1866, Senator Charles Sumner addressed the Senate and, among other things, said, “Our fathers futures and their sacred labor … and now the moment has come when the vows must be fulfilled to the letter. In securing the equal rights of the freedman and his participation in the government which he is taxed to support, we shall perform our early promise of the fathers, and at the same time the supplementary promises only recently made to freedmen as the condition of alliance and aid against the rebellion. A failure to perform these promises is political and moral bankruptcy.”

The moment he spoke of has long passed, the promises have not been kept and the reason for this is inherent in the very nature of the U.S. empire. This was understood by nineteen out of twenty Black leaders of a delegation that met with General Sherman. When asked if they preferred to be part of the U.S. or live separately, nineteen said, “live by ourselves.”

In short order, the U.S. government took back the bulk of the land confiscated from the Confederacy and handed it over to the New Afrikans who had been working on it. The Freedman’s Bureau was dissolved, and President Grant urged removal of all political disabilities of former Confederates in December 1871. A bill was passed in the House to serve that purpose and was tied by Sumner to a Civil Rights Bill in the Senate. When it finally passed Congress in 1872, however, the civil rights feather was omitted.

Black federal troops were disbanded and removed from the South, at which point the militia searched Black dwellings for arms and took them away. The U.S. government, now consolidated, went back to playing the same role in regards to New Afrikan people as before the war—that of users. Carl Schurz, who was an adviser to President Johnson, observed: “The emancipation of the slaves is submitted to only insofar as chattel slavery in the old form could not be kept up. But although the freedman is no longer considered property of the individual master, he is considered the slave of society, and all independent state legislation will share the tendency to make him such. The ordinances abolishing slavery passed by the conventions under pressure of circumstance will not be looked upon as barring the establishment of a new form of servitude.”

New Afrikan people could see this, and Henry Adams, testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Petitions on behalf of a petition by New Afrikans in Louisiana and Mississippi (two of the highest states in concentrations of New Afrikans) in 1874 said, “Well, in that petition, we appealed there if nothing could be done to stop the turmoil and strife, and give us our rights in the South, we appealed then at that time for a territory that could be set apart for us to live in peace and quiet.” That’s not asking for very much; however, the U.S. government rejected that petition. As it does now. The Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born and naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privilege or immunity of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Certainly, it can’t be argued that New Afrikan people have ever received equal protection under the law, and besides being another official pompous lie, the Fourteenth Amendment “wrongfully and illegally precluded New Afrikans from exercising their options fully. New Afrikans were forced to accept the label of U.S. citizenship, and they had not been asked whether or not they wanted such citizenship or such a label. In 1856, 400,000 Afrikans had not been born in the U.S. These people could not be deemed to have been made citizens by any interpretation of the 14^th amendment.”

With a substantial portion of the New Afrikan people in the country legally unaffected by the Fourteenth Amendment and petitioners from two of the most populous states in regards to Black people noting that they were not receiving equal protection of the laws and asking for “territory set apart for us,” what could have possibly been the motives of the government of the United States of America outside of deceit, war, and colonization?

Between 1868 and 1871, there were 371 cases of violence, including 35 murders of Blacks in Alabama. Six churches and many school houses were burned before the election of 1870.

General Davis of the Freedman’s Bureau reported 260 attacks, whippings, and murders of freedmen between January and November 1868 in Georgia.

In 1868, when Gov. Holden of North Carolina devised a plan to redistribute land and give ex-slaves a means to become self-sufficient, the Congressional Investigating Committee reported 260 outrages, including 7 murders and whippings of 72 whites and 141 Negroes.

A committee of the Constitutional Convention of 1868 on Partial Returns said that 1,035 men had been murdered in Texas (a part of Mexico that was invaded for the purpose of exploiting slavery) since the closure of the war, and the federal attorney said the number might have been 2,000.

Two thousand people were killed, wounded, or otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the presidential election in November 1868. “Frightful conditions prevailed up the Red River around Shevreport in Caddo and Bossier Parishes, a trading center for Texas, Arkansas and the Indian nations. A United States army officer on duty in this place saw 2 or 3 men shot down in the streets in front of the store in which he sat. He picked up the bodies of 8 men who had been killed in 1 night. Never had he heard of anyone being punished for murder in that county.” One hundred and twenty corpses were found in the woods or were taken out of the Red River after a “Negro hunt” in Bossier Parish.

“534 Negroes have been lynched by mobs in Mississippi between 1882 and 1950; 491 in Georgia; 352 in Texas; 335 in Louisiana; 299 in Alabama; 256 in Florida; 226 in Arkansas and 204 in Tennessee. Virtually no one has ever been punished for such a crime, because the courts and police collaborate with it.” Three thousand four hundred and thirty-six Negroes are known to have been lynched between 1882 and 1950, thousands of us have been murdered without it even being recorded, throughout the USA. This is a war against New Afrikan people for the purpose of colonization and genocide. i could delay the proceedings indefinitely reciting instances of “legal” murders, such as countless rape frame-ups and executions, and instances where New Afrikans have been murdered, raped, assaulted, burnt out, or otherwise victimized, without any attempt to bring guilty persons to justice and for no other reason than national oppression. However, the objective of the imperialist war must be brought to light.

United States imperialism, which drains resources and profits from all parts of the world under its domination, has as its original base of this exploitation, and still largest source of superexploitation, New Afrikan labor and talents, and this has been no less true with the shifting of the New Afrikan population.

Thus, in 1947, the median wage or salary of white wage earners was $1,980; of the nonwhite wage earners $863, or 43.6 percent as much, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. In 1949, according to the United States Census Bureau reports, while 16,800,000 Americans in 4,700,000 families had an income of less than $1,000 a year, the income of white families was two times greater than that of New Afrikans.

Using the 1947 figure, this difference of more than $1,100 in normal earnings gives a measure of the amount of extra income, of superprofits, which employers derive from the average New Afrikan worker over and above the normal profits derived from the average white worker. Whites in 1939 who had a college education averaged $2,046 annually while New Afrikans with the same education had a median wage of $1,047. About the same disparity; so much for education.

Taken altogether, an appropriate answer might be gained by regarding as extra profits the $1,100 difference between the median Negro wage and the median white wage and multiplying the difference by the number of New Afrikan productive workers in agriculture and industry. Of the 6,000,000 New Afrikan gainful workers in 1947, approximately 3,500,000 were engaged in productive labor on farms or in industry, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce labor report. This number multiplied by $1,000 gives a total superprofit of almost $4 billion. More recent figures show a similar result for 1948 and 1949.

On top of this, the jobs with the highest percentage of New Afrikans include those least desired, due to working conditions, low pay, and risk of accident and disease, such as logging, sawmills, fertilizer plants, hospital workers, nursing home workers, U.S. armed forces enlistees (especially infantry, airborne, and armor), domestics, foundry workers, and farm and migrant laborers.

As of 1950, a single block in Harlem had a population of 3,871 people. At a comparable rate of concentration, concluded Architectural Forum, “The entire United States could be housed in half of New York City.” Yet, due to redlining, being burnt out of places not permitted to us by a racist population, and a working conspiracy between banks, savings and loans associations, insurance companies, real estate corporations, police and fire departments, and other racist organizations, such as the original Southern Klans, Inc., Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Florida, Inc., National Small Businessmen’s Association, American Independent Keystone Society, Knights of the Kavaliers, Free White Americans, Inc., The Christian American, Inc., Order of American Patriots, Northern Klans, Inc., and other organizations who have state charters, corporate sanctions, tax exemption, and the right to establish subordinate lodges throughout the United States and its territories, we remain for the most part cooped up on Black reservations with rents 10 percent to 50 percent higher than comparable dwellings elsewhere.

That various states bestow these benefits of incorporation and tax exemption on these paramilitary racists is undeniable evidence of government conspiracy; that the Bureau of Internal Revenue, who harass ordinary working people, investigates who various presidents direct them to, and actually wreck homes, dig up yards, and confiscate small businesses, farms, and homes for nonpayment of relatively small sums to further this conspiracy by extending federal tax exemptions on the basis that these organizations are “nonprofit, benevolent, fraternal and educational” is outright war, hypocrisy, and deceit, second only to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Defense Department that invades the Dominican Republic and other republics under any pretense and destabilizes popularly elected governments and commits real massacres in Chili, Indonesia, and Puerto Rico and supports and aids the Israeli government in its massacres of Palestinian people and the theft of their homeland—just as the euro-americans stole this land—and supports the invaders and nazis of South Africa, who not only exist on stolen land but exploit African labor and commit massacres and other atrocities like their racist imperialistic euro-american tutors.

In this period, called a recession and marked by inflated prices and high unemployment, we are still in the same position as regards to being economic cannon fodder in these United States. As of July 17, 1983, as reported in that edition of the New York Times, the Center for the Study of Social Policy reports that the average Black college graduate’s income is about the same as the average white high school graduate’s income. Only 55 percent of Black men over the age of sixteen are employed today. Unemployment of Black men over the age of twenty-one is almost 50 percent; twenty-one years ago three out of every four Black men were employed. In 1981, the median income for Blacks was $13,266, while the median income for whites was $23,517. In other words, the Black median income is only 56 percent of the white. 54 percent of Black families are now at income levels below $15,000 a year, compared with 28 percent of white families.

As always, old age and survivors’ insurance and unemployment compensation systems do not cover agricultural, domestic, service, and self-employed persons. Sixty-five percent of all Black workers fall into these categories, compared with 40 percent of white workers.

The Presidential Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders lists as the first level of grievance police practices, unemployment and underemployment, and inadequate housing.

Police in NYC have been involved in forty-nine racially motivated murders since 1979, and police throughout the country have murdered four hundred Third World people during the year.

New York: December 22–24, 1980. Three Black males and one Hispanic male were fatally stabbed. Witnesses to at least two of the stabbings have described the assailant as a white male.

New York: October 8–9, 1980—Buffalo, Cheektowanga, Niagara Falls. Three Black males and a Black teenager were shot and killed by sniper attacks or in shooting incidents. Witnesses have described the assailant as a white man.

New York: August 8, 1979—Yonkers. The home of a Black family was firebombed. City officials describe the attack as racially motivated.

Ohio: November 1, 1980—Youngstown. A Black teenager was shot and killed by a rifle fired from a pickup truck. Press accounts indicate a group of white youths in a pickup truck had been driving around shooting randomly at Black citizens.

Oklahoma City: October 21, 1979. A Black male and a white female companion were shot and killed by a sniper attack. Police said the assailant was a white male.

Johnstown, PA. A Black male and a white female companion were shot and killed by a sniper attack.

Chattanooga, TN: October 24, 1980. A Black teenager was shot and wounded by two white males.

Chattanooga, TN: April 19, 1980. Four Black women were shot and wounded by a shotgun fired from a car. A Ku Klux Klansman was convicted and two other Klansmen were acquitted.

Salt Lake City: August 20, 1980. Two Black youths were shot and killed by a sniper attack as they were jogging with two white female companions.

Bennington, UT: October 27, 1980. One of three [assailants] was sentenced to between three months and one year in jail for his role in the abduction and stabbing of a Black teenager.

Contra Costa County, CA: November–December 1980. A series of attacks against Black families by white vandals occurred, including an attempted assault and shooting incident.

Chico, CA: January 13, 1980. A deaf Black male was shot and killed by two white males and one white female. According to press reports, the assailants murdered their victim because they could not find any animals to shoot on their hunting trip.

Manchester, CT: October 2, 1980. The home of a Black family was firebombed.

Ft. Wayne, IN: May 29, 1980. Vernon Jordan, President of the National Urban League was shot and critically wounded by a sniper attack.

Indianapolis, IN: January 1, 1980. A Black male was shot and killed by a sniper attack.

Greensboro, NC: November 3, 1980. Demonstrations protesting the Ku Klux Klan clashed with Klansmen and Nazis. Five of the demonstrators, including three white males, one Black female, and one Hispanic male, were shot and killed. Six Klansmen and Nazis were later tried on state charges of murder and rioting. An all-white jury acquitted all of the defendants.

There have been recent lynchings of New Afrikans in rural Mississippi and Mobile, Alabama, and since Wayne Williams has been in custody, there have been twenty-five more killings of New Afrikans in Atlanta.[57] In April 1982, three young retarded Black men were found hanged and castrated in Atlanta. In the Greensboro, NC, killings of the anti-Klan demonstrators, FBI “informant” Ed Dawson rode in the lead car of a ten-car Klan and Nazi convoy; Agent Bernard Butkovich participated in the planning. The armed military assault by the Klan and Nazis against the demonstrators who were unarmed was shown on national television, the acquittals were announced. What was this, if it wasn’t a case of propaganda by the deed? What did this communicate to the murderers of Willy Turks in Brooklyn? What did the five-year sentence of Bova communicate? What did the acquittal of Paul Mormando, after he admitted to taking part in the beating that led to Turks’s death by actually pulling a man who was trying to run from a fight out of his car?[58] Well, the answer to that was duly reported in the next day’s paper: a gang of white armed males attacked a Black teenager in Queens, with at least one knife and one baseball bat, with no arrests made.

But that’s only part of what is communicated. Not only are these actions announcing over and over that in the United States, Black life is cheap, and that any white racist armed with a weapon or crowd of other racists, which aren’t hard to find, can attack and even kill Blacks with little or no consequence, but that the American legal system has no problems finding jurors able to overlook words, pictures, or whatever they have to accept a racist tradition.

At Camp Fuller, on the Texas Gulf Coast, CIA-rained mercenaries, national guardsmen, and army reserve personnel train Klansmen and women. At Dekker Lake, a marine recruit is in charge of training Klansmen. There’s Klan training camps in Connecticut, New York, California, Alabama, and Georgia as well, and not only is there no effort to stop them from being armed—this government of the United States supplies them. There’s no shortage of police, jailers, or U.S. GIs in the Klan, and there’s no shortage of federal agents. In North Carolina alone, forty-one chapters were maintained by the FBI. You tell me the difference between the Germans in World War II and the euro-americans, except that euro-americans have killed more people within its confines than the followers of Hitler who were inspired by euro-americans to commit their slaughter and have been and are very often harbored and protected since by the U.S. government. Where and when in the history of this earth have there been a bigger bunch of murderers, liars, and hypocrites than the USA, and yet the war machine hasn’t satisfied the state. Twenty-four percent of Black women have been sterilized by the state; Black infant mortality rate is 23.1 percent, while white infant mortality rate is 12 percent;[59] Black life expectancy is nine years less.

The U.S., with the aid of Turkish and other UN forces, were set back in Korea and thus lost a market to exploit. They wanted a puppet government over the whole of Korea and had to settle for half. They make “fashion jeans” over there for wages people over here wouldn’t work for, and i am certain you’ve heard some of the stories by GIs returning from South Korea after the so-called police action. The U.S. lost markets in Southeast Asia. This undeclared war was not an adventure gone astray or an attempt to aid the people of South Vietnam by propping up a fascist puppet, who had a difficult time leaving after his defeat because of the weight of the gold on his plane. The Vietnam episode was a classic imperialist war, from the rubber on its plantations once under French rule, oil on its offshore—which Standard Oil had surveyed and had begun negotiations for with both the U.S.-backed government and the democratic Republic of Vietnam—and the poppy fields that provided most of the heroin during that war, for the chemical warfare against and enslavement of much of the Black and other Third World youth within the U.S. colonies, and provided extra funds for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The U.S. imperialists have lost Somoza’s grip on Nicaragua,[60] and the U.S. puppets in El Salvador and Guatemala stand on shaky ground. Imperialism must expand or die; the recession is due to lack of expansion and new supplies of raw materials, in an economy whose growth is in video games for diversion, computers for taking people out of work and storing information against them, “security” to guard the rich and intimidate the poor, and pornography and provocative violence against women and children, is the cause of this crisis.

In 1968, the Republic of New Afrika petitioned the U.S. in pursuit of secession; the Nation of Islam under the leadership of Elijah Muhammed had demanded land for a Black Nation since 1940. In the 1930s, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association organized five million people of African descent in an effort to return to Africa. The U.S. government charged this man, who bought a ship line and land in Africa and mobilized five million people into industrious self-sufficiency and one purpose and one aim, with mail fraud and deported him to the hands of the British who kept him in jail until his death (after confiscation of the ship line and rubber plantation in Liberia and selling them to Firestone, B.F. Goodrich, etc.) The Nation of Islam was dubbed by the press as “Black Muslims” to the point where few people, comparably, knew their real title. They were persecuted and special oppressive conditions and denial of their rights to religion occurred when members were imprisoned, often on framed-up charges, and yet they were accused of teaching hate. At least part of this was because their program called for land and for the building of a nation of and for Black people. Twenty-one Black Panthers were indicted on thirty-six criminal conspiracy charges in 1969; twelve of us who were captured were held in isolation in county jails, because we had established housing, medical, and food programs and had in our political program a call for a vote conducted by the UN to ascertain the number of Black people in the U.S. who want to live in a separate nation of Black people. After over two years, a jury acquitted all brought before them after ninety minutes of deliberation. But for two years, twenty-one people who were key organizers had to sit in jail or go underground. Some are still underground, as flight to avoid persecution is a “criminal” charge.

The Republic of New Afrika presented the U.S. State Department with a petition for land for the New Afrikan nation and has been hounded by the federal and state police ever since. The federal and state police attacked New Bethel Baptist Church while a public meeting was in progress, attended by 142 men, women, and children in Detroit. The New Afrikan Provisional Government was having a meeting, and although they were surrounded and surprised, the participants, including Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata and Mutulu Shakur, gave a good account of themselves, and the police got one of their own killed and another wounded for their efforts. This was a clear case of self-defense, and no New Afrikans were imprisoned with this shootout used as justification, and, of course, none of the federal or state police who had fired over four hundred shots into the church were charged with anything.

On August 18, 1971, in Jackson, Mississippi, the Mississippi State Police and the FBI attacked the headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika and got a few holes in their hides for their efforts. In fact, the head of the Jackson Police Intelligence Squad, Louis Skinner, was killed and two other euro-americans in that lily-white death squad were wounded.

Eighty years before that, Thomas Fortune and the National Afro-American League championed the cause of a separate nation for New Afrikan People. A hundred years before, New Afrikan people in Mississippi and Louisiana petitioned Congress for a separate territory. The first permanent inhabitants after the Native Americans in what is now the United States were slaves that rebelled against Spanish enslavers and colonizers and joined the Native Americans in what is now South Carolina, in the year 1526.

So understand this demand is no fad, that this struggle for land and independence is a legitimate aspiration that has been within the national will of the New Afrikan people since we first stepped onto these shores. We are a colonized people who have a common language, culture, and history of oppression.

If the United States was a democracy it would set a date for a UN plebiscite, hold elections with no interference, and abide by the outcome. If the United States had been “forthright” in its dealings with us it would be doubtful if thirty million people would decide to move and begin anew, rather than choose what they know and have experienced, but you know and the American government knows it has not been anything but hideous.

This “criminal” trial will not settle the question, there will be a war until justice is served. Some New Afrikans feel that once America sees that it comes out cheaper to leave us alone we will achieve independence. i feel that independence will come after total revolution, when the government no longer exists or simply hasn’t the power to extend its authority over us. That there is something in the psychology of Americans that permits the continuation of the marines in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, even though it is clear that neither the Cuban government nor the Cuban people want them there.

i don’t know how many generations of migrant workers will pick through the same groves year after year, or how many children will grow hungry or worse, cynical, packed up in subhuman dwellings. i don’t know how long people will speak of officers like O’Grady and Brown[61] as if they were saints and accept photos of warriors like Mtayari lying dead under the caption “Death to Terrorists” in papers like the Daily News.

How can people talk of survivors, the wives and children of cops, and their grief as if revolutionaries come from Mars and don’t have families, when our families and loved ones are harassed and attacked? Sundiata’s wife was literally driven insane, and police went to the mental hospital to obtain a statement nevertheless. The answer must be the same as why Americans can say right off the bat that fifty-seven thousand “Americans” died in the Vietnam War without caring as to how many Southeast Asians were killed. This kind of disregard comes with the territory of being a freedom fighter in a racist, imperialist, fascist empire, but it comes, for the most part, with being Black.

Throughout slavery there were numerous rebellions and conspiracies to rebel, and laws were enacted against it, defining rebellion as criminal. Nat Turner, Cinque, Denmark Vesey led revolts and conspiracies, there were over 250 slave revolts during these three hundred years of slavery and countless cases of arson and poisonings. Just as there were slaves and jerks like Crispus Attucks who fought with the Americans against the British, there were ex-slaves who fought with the British and after the British gave up, these ex-slaves became Maroons and continued to fight. Evidence of at least fifty such communities (of Maroons) in various places and at various times, from 1672 to 1864, has been found. Today from the backlands of New Jersey through Appalachia, southward into Texas, and even across the Mexican border, the descendants of many of these Maroons who chose to cast their lots with the Native Americans can still be found, largely forgotten and often desperately poor. New Afrikans fought alongside the Seminoles against the Americans, 1,500 white soldiers and twenty million dollars. U.S. history doesn’t record our loss of life. In September 1850, three hundred Florida Maroons took flight from their abode in present Oklahoma to Mexico. This was accomplished after driving off Creek nationals sent to expose their exodus. On October 30, 1851, 1,500 former American slaves were aiding the Comanche Indians of Mexico in their fighting.

In The Conclusion of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark commented, “I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ‘43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot. I must again in candor say to you members of this Commission—it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations and the same inaction.”

Black people have attempted to be recognized as human beings in this country despite its history of murder through nonviolent marches, sit-ins, etc., appealing to America’s moral conscience, and only got more oppression for this. They couldn’t speak the right language; tell me the difference in the fates of Martin Luther King, El Hajj Malik Shabazz, and Mark Essex?[62]

Expropriation is an act of war carried out by every revolutionary army in history. The have-nots must take from the haves to support their war. Washington, even though he had slaves and was aided by the French, crossed the Delaware to raid the British. Stalin was expropriating from banks at the age of fifteen. Carlos Marighella expropriated from the North American imperialist banks in Brazil, as the Tupamaros did likewise in Uruguay. During the Spanish resistance to fascism, the banks were necessarily targets of Nosotros and los pistoleros and other guerrillas. Anyone not funded by an outside power must engage in acts of expropriation or collect “revolutionary compulsory tax” to carry on revolution. No member of the BLA has ever opened fire during an expropriation unless forced by a fool. Actually, we’d prefer not to fire a shot, because the purpose of an expropriation is to get funds and not to execute guards or police, as a retaliating action might be for, but also because shots are signals. The ideal expropriation is carried out without anyone outside of the action being any the wiser. When the BLA has assassinated police officers on purpose and by design we’ve issued communiqués explaining why and leaving no questions.

My comrade Sekou Odinga has been rejected from this case and indicted in a federal case, charged with racketeering, justified by the same incidents that leave me charged with murder and robbery, so that the New Afrikan position can be hopefully put out of focus by the state, by having one New Afrikan defending against the same criminal charges as two white anti-imperialists. i am defending the revolution, the state’s arrangements are of no consequence. It does not matter what the legal outcome will be. Our fates are not in the hands of the state, but in the hands of the masses of New Afrikan people. In revolution, one either wins or dies. This case awaits a bigger jury.

In regards to the death of the money courier and the two police officers, i am insulted that it’s thought of as such a horrendous act by the media and a population that doesn’t conclude that twenty-five murders of New Afrikan children in Atlanta since the incarceration of Wayne Williams or the drowning of a crowded boat of Haitians under the eyes of the United States Coast Guard is a big deal.

But that’s the system. Like Public Law 831–81 Congress, Title II, Sections 102, 103, 104, otherwise known as the McCarran Act, which authorizes Concentration (Detention) Camps should the president declare an Internal Security Emergency. Security is the word. The U.S. Army has 350 record centers containing substantial information on civilian political activists. The pentagon has twenty-five million cards on individuals and 760 thousand on organizations held by the defense Central Index of Investigations alone, and this information includes political, sociological, and psychological profiles of twenty-five million people in the U.S. There are special prisons in the U.S. Army Reserve’s 300^th Military Police POW Command at Kivonia, Michigan. Other “emergency detention centers” are at Allenwood, PA; Mill Point, West Virginia; Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama; Avon Park, Florida; and Elmendorf at Eilson Air Force Base in Alaska. The Air Force has one of the largest police departments in the so-called free world.

The introduction to the King Alfred Plan,[63] a plan to be utilized by the U.S. Defense and Justice Departments in the event of rebellion, reads: “Even before 1954, when the Supreme Court of the United States of America declared unconstitutional separate educational and recreational facilities, racial unrest has become very nearly a part of the American way of life. But that way of life was repugnant to most Americans. Since 1954, however, that unrest and discord have broken into widespread violence which increasingly has placed the peace and stability of this nation in dire jeopardy. This violence has resulted in loss of life and limb and property, and has cost the taxpayers of this country billions of dollars. And the end is not in sight. This same violence has raised the tremendously grave question as to whether the 2 races can ever live in peace with each other.”

The U.S. doesn’t intend to make fundamental changes, it intends to bully New Afrikans forever and maintain this colonial relationship based on coercion, or worse, a “final solution.” This means that some New Afrikan soldiers like myself must make our stand clear and encourage New Afrikan people to prepare to defend themselves from genocide by the American nazis—study our mistakes; build a political program based on land and independence; a counterintelligence program to ferret out traitors the likes of Tyrone Rison, Sam Brown, and Peter Middleton;[64] and be ready to fight and fight and organize our people to resist on every level. My duty as a revolutionary in this matter is to tell the truth, disrespect this court, and make it clear that the greatest consequence would be failing to step forward.

i have thrown my lot in with the revolution and only regret that due to personal shortcomings on my part, failure to accept collective responsibility, and bureaucratic, hierarchical tendencies within the BLA, i haven’t been able to contribute as much as i should or build a better defense against my capture due to denial of fuze. i am confident that my comrades still at large will correct their thinking and practice thorough criticism/self-criticism and begin to strike consistent blows at the U.S. imperialist. i wish i could inspire more people, especially New Afrikan people, to take the road to liberation and adequately express my contempt for the U.S. ruling class and its government. Other than that, i have nothing else to say.

This is the statement Kuwasi wrote in his defense, to explain the events that had brought them all there. He began reading this but was prevented from finishing by Judge Ritter. Unless otherwise noted, all footnotes in this and other texts in the “Kuwasi Speaks” section were added by the publishers of the first edition of A Soldier’s Story, in 1999.

Brink’s Trial Closing Statement

September 13, 1983

For the record, i’ll say right now, that this place is an armed camp. It has the trappings and props of a court. A state-issued clone in a black robe, an ambitious state-issued clone at the state table, a fenced off area, and a section for spectators with a smaller section for members of the press, who can listen to an opening statement, and between them not one mentions anything i said about America being an imperialist empire that among other things holds New Afrikan people in subjection, or that the U.S. government, while hypocritically speaking of human rights in places like Poland, never mentions the political prisoners it holds and calls grand jury resisters. The state-issued prosecutor objects, the state-issued court sustains, and the media that pats itself on the back and hypocritically calls itself free erase whatever notes they might have taken automatically and take their places beside the state-issued court and prosecutor. Although i think the press is capable of following instructions, the ruling that politics have nothing to do with this case is enough. A reporter, Van Sickle, describes the opening as a list of grievances. That New Afrikan people are subjected to living in reservations administered by an occupation force calling itself police and being systematically beaten out of wages, liberties, and our very lives is not news, and that the media is just so many state-issued clones is not news either. Their job all along has been to present the state in a false light and instill fear in the population, so that people will find fascism acceptable. And call it democracy. Under no stretch of the imagination, twist or turn, summations or evaluations can a racist, imperialist country call itself a democracy, without its victims, its enemies, calling it anything more than a hypocracy.

Taking up a couple of other rows in the court are the pistol-packing, armor-plated plainclothes cops paid to keep an eye on things. On the roofs and in the surrounding areas there’s more and a herd of hastily deputized armed clones in gas station attendant uniforms, as well as German shepherds, and of course the usual guards. There’s a lot of iron in here, state-issued iron. And in the hallway leading to this theater there’s more state-issued clones with state-issued iron and metal detectors to make sure that all the iron that enters these state domains, this imperialist theater, is state-issued. They wish to have us believe or act as if we believe that war is peace—as the press apparently believes that ignorance is strength.

Other than that are the people who braved searches, having their pictures taken and filed away by the fascist, to come here to actually be as they are designated, supporters and spectators. And one group of people that stinks of the trappings of this court is designated a jury, among them some wear sunglasses while in our midst—another has children who have Black friends whose homes they visit but who never visit them at home, and who has Black friends himself who never drop by. Another who thinks we are so ugly she turns and looks at the wall while we ride by in police cars. None of these people are racist or have any prejudice, and we know this because the court asked them, and they said they didn’t, all of them. None of the potential jurors were racist or infected by racial prejudice, and showed this to the satisfaction of a racist court.

Had i not taken the position that no court in the imperialist U.S. empire had the right to try me as a criminal, i would have demanded that this case be tried in Rockland County. One cannot hold both positions. However, i believe that the people of Rockland County and elsewhere deserve an explanation of the event, the expropriation and related actions that took place on October 20, 1981. Not a mere criminal defense in relation to it, that type of legal mumbo jumbo could have matters more confused than ever. An explanation on the other hand, by someone who might have given them directions on the subway in New York City or sweated through a basketball game with them or shared a dance floor should make things clear factually, as well as let people in Rockland who are not already our friends and everyday people throughout the confines of the U.S. know for sure that it is not the people but the United States government and its oppressive apparatus that we are at war against.

The media said that on two separate occasions members of the Black Liberation Army jumped out of vehicles shooting randomly in incidents where one guard and two policemen were killed. On the face of it, it doesn’t appear random at all according to that line. Either the guerrillas and the people around not participating were lucky; the armed money courier and the two policemen were very unlucky; or the guerrillas were armed with guided bullets. Obviously, none of this was so, but it was broadcast far and wide for a long time to taint not only people who might be jurors but everybody in a land where a war is going on between oppressed peoples and the oppressors. It’s clear the guerrillas intended to shoot police and that’s who they shot. They shot the enemy.

Expropriation raids are a method used in every revolution by those who have got to get resources from the haves to carry on armed struggle. When George Washington and company crossed the Delaware, it was to raid the British, to take money, supplies, and arms, even though he was financed by the French and owned slaves. Joseph Stalin robbed banks when he was fifteen to support revolutionary struggle. The Sabate brothers in Spain were obliged to empty the tills of banks to resist Franco during the Spanish Civil War. When Carlos Marighella in Brazil or the Tupamaros in Uruguay expropriated from banks to finance their struggles, it was clear to the press that they were revolutionaries; this government sent counterinsurgency specialists to help the juntas and dictators they resisted and expropriated from, just as they’ve done in regards to Argentina. But here in the U.S., the government doesn’t acknowledge the collection of revolutionary compulsory tax as the work of revolutionaries, just as the British do not acknowledge the IRA, just as Israel doesn’t acknowledge the PLO, and just as the South Africans do not acknowledge the ANC. It’s too close. The British called Washington a criminal and issued a reward for him dead or alive, just as the Americans put a price on the head of Twyman Myers. The state must deny revolution and call revolutionary acts and revolutionaries something else, anything else—bandits, terrorists. The state must suppress revolution and say they are doing something else. Rather than argue that there’s no need for revolution and be confronted with Harlem, the South Bronx, Bedford Stuyvesant, Newark’s Central Ward, North Philadelphia, etc. They say there is simply not a revolution, as if there is no reason for sweeping the oppressors from power. Revolution is always illegal and revolutionaries are always slandered.

There are clearly more than a few points that the state has pushed for reasons beyond that of legal that clearly go past the objective of getting convictions. The first lie is that Peter Paige, the Brink’s guard and money courier, was gunned down without a chance to defend himself or surrender. In order to portray the Black Liberation Army as cowardly and cold-blooded, bloodthirsty.

The BLA is an organization that takes credit for preplanned assassinations. In our history there are numerous instances of ambushed police where credit was clearly taken, where communiqués were issued to the media who do not broadcast them completely, if at all, because the government has directed them not to. These ambushes have always been retaliations for terrorist acts against Black people—these acts have always been responses to murders, brutalizations, and threatening against Black people, Third World people, or their forces of resistance. Never has a guard or a bank teller been shot down as part of a plan; no unit of the BLA has ever done this, including the unit involved in the expropriation of October 20, 1981. Our war is not a license and the BLA reserves assassinations for those who are combatants in opposition to the revolution and those who direct them. Money couriers are safe so long as they do not put their bodies and weapons in between someone else’s money or try to shoot their way out of a source of embarrassment or into a promotion or an early grave.

This is because the goal of an expropriation is to collect revolutionary compulsory tax and not casualties. A unit is no better off with a guard killed. Shots are signals that alert more police more quickly and directly than an onlooker’s phone call. Guerrillas prefer to take the weapons from the holsters of guards or pick them up after they’ve been dropped and complete the action without anyone except guards and guerrillas being any the wiser. Had Peter Paige not acted the fool, he would’ve lived and his coworker would not have been injured.

War is expensive, you know that; you don’t pay taxes once. And no matter how much money a unit may get from an expropriation, that unit as well as others will have to engage in other expropriations in the course of a protracted war. The BLA doesn’t want a situation where guards believe they will be shot whether they comply or not, because then there would always be shootouts. Dead guards don’t bring us a step closer to land and independence and don’t add a cent to a war chest. At the same time, the BLA doesn’t want guards to believe for an instant that they have any reasonable alternatives outside of compliance.

The only parties that benefit from a bloody shootout during an expropriation are the bankers, the bosses of the armored car corporations, and career counterinsurgency experts. The first two put their money, or what they label their money, before the lives of guerrillas, as well as their employes; the third, without New Afrikan, Puerto Rican, or Mexican fugitives to justify raids in those colonies, could find themselves in fatigues in the wilds of the Dakotas laying siege to Native American colonies. Paige died for his bosses not for himself, his family, or his fellow workers.

State clone Michael Koch issued another slanderous attack for the state. At one point in his testimony he says that one of the combatants says in regards to Kathy Boudin, “Fuck her, leave her.” On one episode of Today’s FBI, a band of “terrorists” takes a truck of 1.6 million dollars and purposely leave one of their comrades. On one episode of Hill Street Blues, a radical band gets 1.6 million dollars from another truck. In the FBI fiction the radicals mow down the guards as a matter of course; in the Hill Street Blues fiction, the beautiful white girl when faced with life in prison serves up her comrades for a deal that sounded not unlike a slave auction, with time being the medium, rather than money. Koch meanwhile hasn’t gotten a contract as a writer or an actor—i tell you, there is no justice in this world.

There’s no record of the BLA leaving comrades in hostile areas on purpose. When comrades are wounded, attempts are made to carry them. The state contends that Marilyn Buck[65] was wounded and taken to Mount Vernon with the unit in question. The state wants to have it both ways.

The BLA doesn’t work that way. We have a saying: “The lowest circles in hell are reserved for those who desert their comrades.” The BLA has a history of aiding the escapes of comrades from prisons and other detention centers. The state-issued lie that any of us said anything to the effect to leave anyone who had participated in any action with us is designed to portray us as users and racist. For the state to project that piece of propaganda at the same time that it lines the roofs with rifle-toting clowns, posts guards at each block and intersection, and transports us in armed convoys without red lights is not only an insult to us but an insult to anybody outside the state who hears it. Every day we come to court there are scores of fat middle-aged cops crouching behind trees, phone poles, and cars, guns at the ready. This is not because they think we can break out of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg chains, and then dove out of closed car windows and sprint to the next county before anyone notices what is going on. They do this because the BLA does not forfeit comrades into the hands of the enemy and does not forfeit those who struggle beside us into the hands of the enemy. There are enough instances of aided escapes, attempts at escapes, and fierce battles to avoid capture to make it clear how we feel and how we deal.

They say that veteran police officers responding to an incident where one guard was mortally wounded were convinced to put a shotgun away by Boudin, but Waverly Brown didn’t have a shotgun. They say he was the first to go in any event, that O’Grady was loading his weapon when someone ran up to him shooting, but didn’t he have six shells in his weapon when he responded? And if he was reloading, doesn’t that mean he fired six times and, for all practical purposes, missed. Lennon says he watched O’Grady get shot but didn’t Lennon have a pistol that was loaded, as well as a shotgun? Why didn’t he shoot the man who ran up and shot O’Grady? Why was Keenan so far away from the action? And didn’t hit no one? Why is it that so many police officers converged on the scene so soon after the battle?

Once they got a couple of suspects who had surrendered, who were outnumbered, handcuffed, they got tough at the action, but i suggest that they lost heart! That the odds were too even, that Koch has been spinning his yarn to his coworkers for two years, took a circular approach to the roadblock, because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Do you believe that he [lost] an opportunity to shoot someone who had been shooting at other cops because some lady’s scream broke his concentration? Or that another cop, John McCord, missed his opportunity to shoot Marilyn Buck, because just as she drove up he dropped a shell and by the time he reached down to pick it up, she zoomed right past him? What was so important about that particular shell, outside of it being a catalyst for a fish story? Why would an experienced cop and bodyguard like O’Grady try to load every shell into his revolver when someone is running up to him to kill him? Why does the state insist that we swallow all of this?

How did those cars that had been spotted and noted get out of the area? Well, i’ll tell you why; it was because the cops who got paid so much a week wanted backup in a big way. This was discernible war. One group of soldiers in opposition to another group of soldiers. One group of soldiers who ate and slept at the front and another who may not have witnessed colonialism contested so aggressively before. i don’t know. The state says there were six people coming out of the back of the truck, with pistols and an automatic rifle, and counting Koch there were five cops with revolvers and two shotguns. The insurgents left one pistol at the scene of the expropriation, one pistol and one shotgun at the scene of the roadblock. i don’t think there were any supermen or saints around that day battling it out on Route 59, or Mad Dog Killers or Cowboys, i think there were only men, mortals, one group called niggers and the other group called pigs. Lennon during his hypnotic session, when he described a Black man running up to O’Grady shooting, didn’t describe that Black man as a “terrorist” or “robber,” he called that man a nigger, “a big nigger.” He’d taken his mask off while in the car weathering the storm, and he had to push a dead nigger away from the door to get out of the car.

[District Attorney] Gribetz, the perfect representative of the United States, a pimple of a man, has tons of evidence that has been labeled, marked, and stored for two years. He has two Browning 9mms, the doberman pinscher of pistols, no prints on them, no bullets from them in bodies, but it’s important. He has a shotgun, or a picture of one, also, and shell casings that can’t be placed on anyone, but it’s important too, because niggers are only supposed to have spears. He’s got expert witnesses giving expert testimony and opinions on prints and glass. Ms. Clark[66] had five kinds of glass on her, two, in the “expert’s” opinion “consistent” with Brink’s brand glass and Honda glass, and three other kinds of glass. They mention two pistols and a shotgun of mine, which had a part missing, by the way, as if it’s evidence. When the fact is that i should have had a bomb or at least a grenade. He’s got a witness who remembers—when he asks, “Did you happen to see a white male with brown hair, a brown beard, and a big nose.” He’s got lots of witnesses. He’s got clothes, pieces of bullets, pictures of bullets, pictures of cars, trucks, and everything but our masks.

He has ski masks, and he has his own public official mask, his civil servant mask. But he doesn’t have ours, we’ve thrown them away. We are not going to act like wayward citizens in a democratic society before a just court with the duty of administering justice. We act like ourselves. New Afrikans and anti-imperialist freedom fighters in an imperialist empire that colonizes and commits genocide against New Afrikan, Native American, Puerto Rican, and Mexicano people, before an impostor in an armed camp.

In an effort to deny the issue of New Afrikan Independence that is part and parcel of the October 20, 1981, action, the state has presented its politics that we are to be confronted with. The politics of imperialism, based in their myth of justice in their colonial courts, whose function somehow should be participated in by its victims, as if this whole scheme of things is in the interests of the oppressed. It’s legal to oppress and illegal to resist.

At the helm of this myth are the police, who are the government after six o’clock p.m., are of a species above that of mortals. Whose racism is less than the general society’s, whose competence and heroism is beyond us all and is the apex of all culture. When, in fact, police are at best only human and are tools of the state who are employed to maintain an unjust, exploitative, oppressive system that holds New Afrikan and other Third World peoples under subjection and in a colonial relationship.

When i was growing up, the bulk of programs on TV were Westerns, where the heroes shot down endless rows of Native Americans, while calling them Indians, Redskins, and what not. There were other Westerns too, like Gunsmoke. Marshal Dillon shot fifty-two people a year and was the central character in Dodge City. i never remember seeing the mayor, preacher, or schoolteacher, only Dillon and his friends—Doc, Chester, and Miss Kitty—and i thought they were my friends too.

Now, Matt Dillon is Chief McCain, on the cop show McCain’s Law, and even Captain Kirk is a cop! Westerns have been replaced by cop shows. There are twenty-nine hours of cop shows on TV each week. There are more cop shows on during prime time and all the other times on TV on any week than any other type of program. There is not a single program on TV other than comedies where a Black is the central character. We are portrayed as sidekicks of cops, snitches, and sources of humor, without exception.

This is all in the interest of images. Pictures say a thousand words; they say what seems to be a fact over and over in ways that can’t be countered by reasonable argument, without investigating reality. White racism does not for the most part care what really goes on inside New Afrikan colonies, or even recognize that we do indeed live in colonies. But because white racism is politically and morally bankrupt, it is concerned about its image. That’s why people familiar with Newburgh, Harlem, and Overtown can ignore the issue of colonialism, even while Reagan speaks of free enterprise zones, Bantustans![67] That is why the U.S. with jaw-shaking righteousness can say that it doesn’t have colonies, while planning to turn the beautiful island of Puerto Rico into an industrial park.

These people who judge us should take a city bus or a cab through the South Bronx, the Central Ward of Newark, North Philadelphia, the Northwest section of the District of Columbia, or any Third World reservation and see if they can note a robbery in progress. See if they recognize the murder of innocent people. This is the issue, the myth that the imperialists should not be confronted and cannot be beaten is eroding fast, and we stand here ready to do whatever to make the myth erode even faster, and to say for the record that not only will the imperialist U.S. lose, but that it should lose.

i am not going to tell you that the Black Liberation Army’s ranks are made up of saints; it is clear that there have been impostors among us who have sold out and are worse than the enemies history has pitted us against. And i am not going to tell you that there’s no virtue among money couriers or policemen. However, i will tell you now and forever that New Afrikan people have a right to self-determination and that that is more important than the lives of Paige, Brown, and O’Grady or Balagoon, Gilbert, and Clark. And it’s gonna cost more lives and be worth every life it costs, because the destiny of over thirty million people and the coming generation’s rights to land and independence is priceless.

Brink’s Trial Sentencing Statement

October 6, 1983

The ruling class of the United States and its government colonizes the New Afrikan people; that is, Black people held within the confines of the present borders of the U.S. i’ve been brought here to be sentenced by the state partly because all New Afrikans, notwithstanding a Black astronaut and Miss America, have been sentenced to an indefinite term of colonialization and partly because of my response to genocide, exploitation, oppression, degradation, and all the elements that make up this process of colonialization.

The bulk of New Afrikan people are restricted to living in certain areas, restricted to certain areas of employment; we, as well as other Third World peoples of color in the confines of the U.S., make up the caste of captive nations within this empire who perform the menial tasks far out of proportion to our numbers in relation to whites. Although the ruling class exploits all workers, they exploit New Afrikan and other Third World people at a higher rate. Our infant mortality rate is higher, our life expectancy shorter, our unemployment rates double, and none of this is by chance. This is contrived by the enemies of my people, our colonizers, the American imperialist, and this is enforced by force of arms.

Historically and universally the counter to imperialist armies are liberation armies, the counter to colonial wars are wars of liberation, the counter to reactionary violence, revolutionary violence. As a New Afrikan prisoner of war, i have no more respect for a sentence by the colonializers than i have for hypocritical legislative rituals leading to it or the enslavement apparatus of a corrupt order that commits genocide against entire peoples and threatens the entire biosphere or the pompous proclaimers of democracy and free enterprise in a country of racists, where less than 2 percent of the population own more than 30 percent of the wealth in a pyramid whose base is made up of 50 percent of the population earning less than 9 percent of the wealth.

The United States imperialist government colonializes New Afrikan people in every sense of the word, and every New Afrikan who investigates that fact and all that it means comes face to face with a dilemma: to deal with the condition on a personal basis and do the best they can under a circumstance that’s dictated by what is in fact the enemy and leave the decision with others and perhaps to another generation, or to join with those of us committed to overturning conditions for the entire New Afrikan nation and make war with those who historically and presently make war against us for however long it takes.

When the oppressed bear with it, accept colonialization for the most part, or at least don’t get so upset about it as to entertain the idea of war, things are okay by pig logic. [District Attorney] Gribetz wishes out loud that there were a death penalty, but the fact that there has never been a white executed for the rape or murder of a Black in the entire history of the United States doesn’t provoke any wishes for a need for change. Not one in all of the fifty states or colonies before them during four hundred years is an incredible statistic. But although he rants and raves, he doesn’t challenge the truth of that statement or the recent murder of a Black man in Manhattan for writing graffiti on the subway or murder of a Black man in Boston or of the two in Chicago or a child in California, all by police; or the fourteen Black women murdered in Boston,[68] twenty-five Black children murdered in Atlanta since the arrest of Wayne Williams, or the beating death of Willy Turks. These crimes don’t call for the death penalty, if any penalty at all, all this is okay by pig logic: that kind of killing helps to keep the colonies in check.

When Somoza passed out the best land in Nicaragua to members of his family, sent his henchmen out to kill whoever disagreed and subjected the rest of the population to poverty, illiteracy, poor sanitation, and hunger and printed the face of an American ambassador on Nicaraguan money, everything was okay, there was no need to arm anyone to overthrow or “destabilize” that situation or bring a naval blockade to bear or talk about some other people’s nation being America’s backyard. But when the people of Nicaragua resolved to change their conditions for the better and remove all obstacles in their way, then it was time for “dirty tricks,” a War Powers Act, and reactivation of the draft.

As long as the people of El Salvador suffered their best land given to the United Fruit Company (or whatever name it goes by now) and lived clearly under the heel of American imperialism, by pig logic everything was okay. But once people said enough and really contested it, well, it was time to fortify the puppet regime’s army and send advisers,[69] and when a Salvadoran patriot blew one of those advisers away, by pig logic it was a shame before God.

When the reactionaries killed journalists and nuns, it was cause for concern;[70] when the reactionaries killed peasants and other colonial subjects, that was unfortunate, their names or even numbers were not noted. Just so many niggers. But when a career soldier, trained and armed to kill and direct intelligence for the purpose of more killings so that large corporations could continue to drink Salvadoran blood, gets killed, the culprit must be found right away.[71]

When a cop gets killed, by pig logic it’s different than when an old lady or a teenager or almost anyone else gets killed. Especially if that anyone else is nonwhite. When Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata was killed, they put a picture of his corpse on the front page of the Daily News, and then in the centerfold under the caption “Death to the Terrorist.” They did this because he opposed the colonialization of New Afrikan people, and they make a big deal out of the deaths of the cops and money courier, because they impose colonialization and this is war.

Legal rituals have no effect on the historic process of armed struggle by oppressed nations. The war will continue and intensify, and as for me, i’d rather be in jail or in the grave than do anything other than fight the oppressor of my people. The New Afrikan Nation, as well as the Native American Nations, are colonialized within the present confines of the United States, as the Puerto Rican and Mexicano Nations are colonialized within, as well as outside, the present confines of the United States. We have a right to resist, to expropriate money and arms, to kill the enemy of our people, to bomb, and do whatever else aids us in winning, and we will win.

The foundation of the revolution must rest upon the bones of the oppressors.

Destroy All Traitors

Sekou Odinga, Kuwasi Balagoon, Judy Clark, David Gilbert, Silvia Baraldini

The government is bringing forward its dirty snitches and traitors in the current RICO trial. Dealing with traitors has been a paramount issue for all revolutionary movements: from Vietnam to Che’s group in the mountains of Bolivia; from the traitorous assassination of Amilcar Cabral to the guerrilla war in El Salvador today; from the streets of Belfast to occupied Palestine. In the four hundred–year struggle of New Afrikans for self-determination and human rights, traitors have always been a key weapon for the rulers to smash righteous rebellions by the oppressed. Traitors have been a cancerous presence in the proletarian and anti-imperialist movements within the oppressor nation.

Traitors and snitches are universally hated and vilified in all people’s cultures because of the harm they do and their total violation of all standards of human decency. For example, look at Tyrone Rison. Here is a person who turned on the movement that gave him dignity and life. He readily betrays the ideals and aspirations that he once loudly proclaimed. He has become a willing tool for the government that—as he so often stated—is responsible for the murders of Black children in Atlanta. He works to destroy the movement that provides the only promise for self-respect and liberty for his children, for his children who now face the legacy of a father who turned traitor. This man has become a bootlicker and a base liar without a shred of morality.

The government’s purposes in displaying and promoting such despicable characters go beyond the effort to convict specific individuals in particular court cases. Their main purpose is to discredit and dehumanize the New Afrikan Independence Movement. In particular, they want to destroy the armed movements by piercing the shield of clandestinity, attacking the morale of freedom fighters, and creating fear that anyone who joins the ranks could be betrayed. This is the reason for their lie that Rison was a leader. They also want to drive a wedge between the masses of people and the revolutionary movements; the emergence of traitors and the line they project are designed to produce cynicism and distrust towards revolution.

The government is also trying to create a culture of snitches, create a situation where traitors are seen as commonplace and it becomes acceptable to large sectors of the population. It is a way to make people accept and participate in their own oppression. By far the greatest damage of traitors is how they are used to undermine the very spirit and fiber of the movements.

Traitors are a product not only of the power of the state but also of the penetration and internalization of imperialism’s values. The traitor displays the worst forms of individualism, corruption, and contempt for oppressed people. The proliferation of traitors exposes serious political weaknesses within the ranks which must be corrected.

CC BY Image courtesy of The Courtroom Sketches of Ida Libby Dengrove, University of Virginia Law Library.

Our goals in dealing with traitors go beyond legalism and the needs of individuals. The paramount issue is the character and integrity of the movements we are building. We must confront, vilify, and destroy traitors at every opportunity; deal with them as the dehumanized vipers that they are; instill “the greater fear.” The political terms must always be clear: discredit and destroy all traitors.

To minimize the development of traitors we must build movements based on clear principles, deep politicization, a strong commitment to oppressed and exploited peoples. We must struggle for collectivity and show that there is a scientific strategy to defeat imperialism. Would-be traitors should know that they will be destroyed. We must teach that the state is our implacable enemy and fight for total noncollaboration as a basic principle. Such movements can also spearhead a broader people’s culture that reviles traitors and snitches and that builds on strong principles, human values, and collective commitment.

CC BY Image courtesy of The Courtroom Sketches of Ida Libby Dengrove, University of Virginia Law Library

This joint statement appeared in Let your motto be…Resistance (No.4) July 1982, published by the Coalition to Defend the October 20^th Freedom Fighters.

Statement to New Afrikan Freedom Fighters Day

July 18, 1983

Revolutionary Greetings Brothers and Sisters:

On the third anniversary of New Afrikan Freedom Fighters Day i’d like to extend my feelings of comradeship and optimism.

That the government of the United States or any government has the right to control the lives of New Afrikan People is absurd and has no basis in principled reason or justice or common decency. Only New Afrikan people should govern New Afrikan people, in the manner that we collectively as a people deem correct.

This being so, and that on top of forcing us to live as a colonialized people, the government of the United States has been and is practicing genocide against us, it is our right, duty, and natural inclination to defend ourselves and provide for the safety and well-being of our people. As Marcus Garvey stated: We cannot leave the fate of our people to chance.

The necessity of building a people’s army to carry our armed struggle and a mass movement to build the infrastructure for the superseding society must be explained to the masses of our people. We must organize this, our army and our total revolution, along principled lines that will deliver us as a people to land ample enough to support our population in order to obtain our self-determination. It is either liberation and self-determination for us as a people or more colonial degradation and genocide. These are the choices.

If we choose to live, we must carry on a revolutionary struggle to completion, guard against corruption and liberalism in our ranks, and be consistent in building not only the means of cutting ourselves free of America but of securing our survival and self-determination by building the superseding society to provide for the needs of our people. As a better organized, more politicized, and security conscious approach must be developed in building our army, a more grassroots basic approach must be developed to deal not only with the political mobilization of the masses but the needs surrounding our day-to-day survival. We must build a revolutionary political platform and a universal network of survival programs, along with the army.

Imperialism must expand or die, and even as the pigs escalate their military and political offensive, they have lost their grip increasingly throughout this world, despite their wolf tickets, because the peoples of Cuba, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Libya, Angola, Tanzania, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Grenada, and other lands have put their heads and hearts together to devise no nonsense methods to drive the Americans out.

If we do the same, we will obtain the same results. In fact, we will obtain greater results, because our liberation would mean a greater decline to imperialism than any of the previous people’s victory and reaction would be weakened to a corresponding extent.

There is no way for us as a people or any of us individually to correspond our conditions to those we desire, we have never known freedom—however, we will know freedom. We will win.

Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone

Of all ideologies, anarchy is the one that addresses liberty and equalitarian relations in a realistic and ultimate fashion. It is consistent with each individual having an opportunity to live a complete and total life. With anarchy, the society as a whole not only maintains itself at an equal expense to all but progresses in a creative process unhindered by any class, caste, or party. This is because the goals of anarchy don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This is key because this is what separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist, and nationalist revolutionaries, who from the onset do not embrace complete revolution. They cannot envision a truly free and equalitarian society and must to some extent embrace the socialization process that makes exploitation and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place.

When i first became a revolutionary and accepted the doctrine of nationalism as a response to genocide practiced by the United States government, i knew, as i do now, that the only way to end the evil practices of the U.S. was to crush the government and the ruling class that shielded itself through that government through protracted guerrilla warfare.

Armed with that knowledge, i sat out the initial organizing of the Black Panther Party until the state’s escalation of the war against Black people that was begun with the invasion of Africa to capture slaves made it clear to me that to survive and contribute i would have to go underground and literally fight.

Once captured for armed robbery, i had the opportunity to see the weakness of the movement and put the state’s offensive in perspective. First, the state rounded up all the organizers pointed out to it by agents who had infiltrated the party as soon as it had begun organizing in New York. It charged these people with conspiracy and demanded bails so high that the party turned away from its purposes of liberation of the Black colony to fund-raising. At that point, leadership was imported, rather than developed locally, and the situation deteriorated quickly and sharply. Those who were bailed out were those chosen by the leadership, regardless of the wishes of the rank and file or fellow prisoners of war, or regardless of the relatively low bail of at least one proven comrade.[72]

Under their leadership, “political consequences” (attacks) against occupation forces ceased altogether. Only a fraction of the money collected for the purpose of bail went towards bail. The leaders began to live high off the hog, while the rank and file sold papers, were filtered out leaving behind so many robots who wouldn’t challenge policy, until those in jail publicly denounced the leadership.

How could a few jerks divert so much purpose and energy for so long? How could they neutralize the courage and intellect of the cadre? The answers to these questions are that the cadre accepted their leadership and accepted their command, regardless of what their intellect had or had not made clear to them. The true democratic process which they were willing to die for, for the sake of their children, they would not claim for themselves.

These are the same reasons that the People’s Republic of China supported UNITA and the reactionary South African government in Angola;[73] that the war continued in Southeast Asia after the Americans had done the bird; why the Soviet Union, the product of the first socialist revolution, is not providing the argument that it should and could through being a model.

This is not to say that the people of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe, or Cuba aren’t better off because of the struggles they endured. It is to say that the only way to make a dictatorship of the proletariat is to elevate everyone to being proletariat and deflate all the advantages of power that translate into the will of a few dictating to the majority. The possibility must be prevented of any individual or group of individuals being able to enforce their will over any other individual’s private life or to extract social consequences for behavior preferences or ideas.

Only an anarchist revolution has on its agenda to deal with these goals. This would seem to galvanize the working class, déclassé intellectuals, colonized Third World nations, and some members of the petty bourgeoisie and alright bourgeoisie. But this is not the case.

That China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Mozambique would build round a Marxist ideology to drive out invaders and rebuild feudal economies in the midst of Western imperialism’s designs and efforts to reinvade and recolonize is a point that can be argued in the light of the international situation. It is one thing that they don’t back the will of the people as much as they choose allies in the East-West wars fought on the ground of the nonwhite colonies. It is another thing that anarchy ceases to inflame or take the lead in combating fascism and imperialism here in North America, with the history of the Wobblies, the Western Federation of Miners, and other groups who have made their mark on history. It is a denial of our historic task, the betrayal of anarchists who died resisting tyranny in the past, malingering in the face of horrible conditions. It is the theft of an option to the next generation and forfeiture of our own lives through faint hearts.

We permit people of other ideologies to define anarchy rather than bring our views to the masses and provide models to show the contrary. We permit corporations to not only lay off workers and to threaten the balance of workers while cutting their salaries but to poison the air and water to boot. We permit the police, Klan, and Nazis to terrorize whatever sector of the population they wish without paying them back in any kind. In short, by not engaging in mass organizing and delivering war to the oppressors we become anarchists in name only.

Because Marxists and nationalists ain’t doing this to a large extent doesn’t make it any less a shame. Our inactivity creates a void that this police state, with its reactionary press and definite goals, is filling. The parts of people’s lives supposedly touched by mass organizing and revolutionary inspiration that sheds a light that encourages them to unveil a new day, instead are being manipulated by conditions of which apathy is no less a part than poisonous uncontested reactionary propaganda. To those who believe in a centralized party with a program for the masses this might mean whatever their subjective analysis permits. But to us who truly believe in the masses and believe that they should have their lives in their hands and know that freedom is a habit, this can only mean that we have far to go.

In the aftermath of the Overtown rebellion, the Cuban community conceded as lost souls by Castro came out clearly in one instance in support of the Black colony. And predictably the Ku Klux Klan, through an honorary FBI agent, Bill Wilkinson, made no bones about supporting the rights of businesses and the business of imperialism. Third World colonies throughout the United States face genocide, and it is time for anarchists to join the oppressed combat against the oppressors. We must support in words and actions self-determination and self-defense for Third World peoples.

It is beside the point whether Black, Puerto Rican, Native American, and Chicano-Mexicano people endorse nationalism as a vehicle for self-determination or agree with anarchism as being the only road to self-determination. As revolutionaries we must support the will of the masses. It is not only racism but compliance with the enemy to stand outside of the social arena and permit America to continue to practice genocide against the Third World captive colonies because, although they resist, they don’t agree with us. If we truly know that anarchy is the best way of life for all people, we must promote it, defend it, and know that the people who are as smart as we are will accept it. To expect people to accept this, while they are being wiped out as a nation, without allies ready to put out on the line what they already have on the line, is crazy.

Where we live and work, we must not only escalate discussion and study groups, we must also organize on the ground level. The landlords must be contested through rent strikes, and rather than develop strategies to pay the rent, we should develop strategies to take the buildings. We must not only recognize the squatters’ movement for what it is but support and embrace it. Set up communes in abandoned buildings. Sell scrap cars and aluminum cans. Turn vacant lots into gardens. When our children grow out of clothes, we should have places where we can take them, clearly marked anarchist clothing exchanges, and have no bones about looking for clothing there first. And, of course, we should relearn how to preserve food. We must learn construction and ways to take back our lives, help each other move, and stay in shape.

Let’s keep the American and Canadian flags flying at half-mast …. i refuse to believe that Direct Action has been captured.

The Continuing Appeal of Anti-Imperialism

Great works measure up, inspire higher standards of intellectual and moral honesty, and, when appreciated for what they are, serve as a guide for those among us who intend a transformation of reality. Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat caused quite a stir in the anti-imperialist white left and among nationalists of the Third World nations within the confines of the U.S. empire, as well as anarchists and Muslims of this hemisphere. In short, among all of us who are ready and willing to smash or dismantle the empire, for whatever reasons and whatever reasoning. This is in spite of the fact that it is a Marxist work, because it isn’t out of the stale, sterile, static, mechanical mode of the vulgar sap rap that has carried that label.

Its historical recounting of the sequence of horrors perpetrated against nonwhite people, from the beginning of Babylon to the recent past, has not been discounted publicly, to my knowledge, by anyone, including the cheap-shot artist who offered an underhanded review of it in the Fifth Estate called “The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism.”[74] Mythology should serve as a reminder (to anyone who needs one) of the genocidal tendencies of the empire, the traitorous interplay between settler-capitalist, settler-nondescript, and colonial flunkies. The flaws and shortcomings of the IWW, which marked the highest point of revolutionary conscientiousness among whites here, the fraud carried on by the Communist Party USA, and assorted other persistent offenders of common sense and common decency. To my amazement, a couple of white anti-imperialists i know had started the book without finishing, complaining that it was old hat, but i’ve heard nothing particularly new from them, and i suggest that they take special note of detail, and i’ll remind them that this work is so accurate as to be able to serve as files on people who will say anything to support a position that doesn’t support real action.

Not being one to take figures verbatim without crosschecking and believing that class struggle or war within the white oppressor nation would be a prerequisite for complete victory of the captive New Afrikan, Mexicano, Native, and Puerto Rican nations, i decided to crosscheck with the most authoritative work available to me and perhaps anyone, The Rich and the Super Rich by Ferdinand Lundberg. This was necessary, i felt, in order to get a clear picture of the material conditions of white folks. This in order to investigate white Americans’ interest in revolution. Professor Lundberg used two graphs to illustrate his point: “Most Americans—citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most ideal-swathed country in the world—by a very wide margin own nothing more than their twin household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as automobiles and television sets (usually purchased on installment plans, many at second hand), and the clothes on their backs. A horde, if not a majority, of Americans live in shacks, cabins, hovels, chanties, hand-me-down Victorian eyesores, rickety tenements, and flaky apartment buildings.”

The second and third tables help us to make things out a bit clearer; it shows that 25.8 percent of households had less than one thousand dollars to their collective names and the third showing us that 28 percent of all consumer units had a net under or less than one hundred dollars. With 11 percent with a deficit and 5 percent holding at zero, a total of 16 percent. This goes on to show that 35 percent of all households had a net worth of less than five thousand dollars. Is this affluence?

It certainly looks like a good case for classic class struggle, with the evidence that Lundberg gives us. Sakai warns us, however, “most typically, the revisionist lumps together the U.S. oppressor nation with the various Third World oppressed nations and national minorities as one society.”

In this light, the figures check out. New Afrikan income, which today averages 56 percent of white income and stood at about the same or less in 1953, makes up a disproportion of the deficit, zero, under-a-thousand, and under-five-thousand dollar consumer units. Definitely more than 10 percent of them, which was our percentage of the population. If we could make a sensible judgment, we’d have to say that the combined captive nations—New Afrikan, Mexicano, Puerto Rican, and Native, or about one sixth of the population as of 1981—all make up a disproportionate amount of the consumer units with deficits and below five thousand dollars. This forms a cushion for the white population.

Sakai points out that “the median Euro-American family income in 1981 was $23,517,” and “that between 1960 and 1979 the percentage of settler families earning over $25,000 per year (in constant 1979 dollars) doubled, making up 40 percent of the settler population.” We may have had a general idea from neighborhood walks, but Sakai gives us an idea of the extent.

This extent, and the “conspicuous concentration of state services—parks, garbage collections, swimming pools, better schools, medical facilities and so on” and the fact that “to the settlers’ garrison goes the first pick of whatever is available—homes, jobs, schools, food, health care, governmental services and so on,” not to mention racism within settlers puts to rest an idea of a multiracial class struggle that includes whites. “Nation is the dominant factor, modifying class relations.”

Lundberg, who overlooked the national factor in the economic tables he based his argument on, notes that “in the rare cases where policy is uppermost in the mind of the electorate it is usually a destructive policy, as toward Negroes in the South and elsewhere. Policies promising to be injurious to minority groups such as Negroes, Catholics, foreigners, Jews, Mexicans, Chinese, intellectuals and in fact, all deviants from fixed philistinish norms, usually attract a larger-than-usual supporting vote,” or mandate, if you will.

“Approximately 10% of the European-American population has been living in poverty by government statistics. This minority is not a cohesive, proletarian stratum, but a miscellaneous fringe of the unlucky and the outcast: older workers trapped by fading industries, retired poor, physically and emotionally disabled, and such families supported by single women.” (Sakai)

How many of this group of whites will side with the revolution, how many whites will come to view their interests with the long-term interest of those of us who prefer to live on a living planet, and how many will fail to equate their quality of life with fifty billion hamburgers is anyone’s guess.

However, it’s a small wonder why white anti-imperialists have been giving me blank stares whenever i’ve mentioned class struggle to them.

The left in this country is very small, whatever way you might want to look at it. If you define left as those of us who stand for a decentralization of wealth and power—taking the question completely out of the realm of bourgeois civil rights and rightfully include the independence of captured nations, which is part and parcel of the decentralization of wealth and power—the left is microscopic.

We are left with ourselves. Left in homes that police drop bombs on from helicopters, and without any shared sense of outrage. We are left where murders by police and other racists are commonplace and for the most part celebrated. Left in the ghettos, barrios, and other reservations.

Let’s not forget that New Afrika has a class problem. That not only do police but politicians, poverty hustlers, and representatives from the established Black publishers and churches move up in the world when they join the ranks of the oppressors. The oppressors never have a problem finding Black leaders to condemn their blatant disregard for life, like that which took place in Philly.[75] We only have established leaders to draw us into the ranks of a Democratic Party, without being able to introduce as much as one Black plank into a white platform. Leaders who beget other leaders like Mayor Goode.[76]

Where i differ with Sakai is the assertion that “building mass institutions and movements of a specific national character under the leadership of a communist party are absolute necessities for the oppressed.” What communist party is he talking about? i feel that we must build revolutionary institutions that buttress on survival through collectives, which in turn should form federations. Grassroots collective-building can begin immediately.

In an epoch where New Afrikan nationalists and Marxists have voluntarily taken the defensive, without even a fraction of a blueprint of a party or consistent practices in the colony, it’s incredible that people outside the ranks and currents of those who believe in magic words aren’t encouraged to collectively take matters in their own hands, to build the collective institutions and superstructure of a superseding society. We must begin where we are, with each other and the time we don’t waste.

i think that the building of revolutionary collectives and forming of federations of collectives is the most practical and righteously rewarding process of preserving and enhancing life and developing the character of all nations. We can change ourselves and the world.

Why Isn’t the Whole World Dancin’?

The first time i experienced terror and was able to keep my wits enough to examine it, i was in the notorious Vroom building, watching the goon squad proceed with a shakedown and waiting for them to get to my cell, which was the last on the opposite end of the tier from where they had started.

As soon as i saw them in their bloused boots, overalls, helmets with plexiglass visors, flak jackets, and extra-long clubs, i was frightened and curious as to what all they were up to. i as well as the brother who locked next to me, got up to see just what was to happen. “What’s all this shit. Look at those punks …. It takes thirty of those motherfuckers to deal with one man?” It didn’t take long to see just what they were up to as the first man was ordered to strip, place his hands behind his head “Vietnam style” and back out of his cell. The brother next to me said something, but i said nothing, being intent on seeing what was happening, so as to have some idea what to expect. Next, the guy being searched was told to run his fingers through his hair, open his mouth, lift his balls, slowly turn around, lift his left foot, his right foot, and bend over and spread his cheeks.

The brother next to me said something else, to which i replied that he should be cool. More instructions followed: “Walk to the wall and sit on the floor cross-legged, without taking your hands from your head.” This is a pretty involved maneuver and if you don’t believe me, try it. i began to worry even more, as i’d been placed in the Incorrigible Unit of the Vroom building for interrupting a funeral, pistol whipping a “corrections officer,” shooting at another, and aiding an escape. It became clear that something extra could be in store for me. After five or so renditions of the routine described above, without them actually vamping on anyone, i began to feel a bit at ease, and at the same time felt they might be “saving the best for last.”

It was too much to think about, so i went and sat on my bed. Only to watch a pig named Sudal come down to the cell next to mine and spray mace on the brother, after he had stepped from the door and laid down on his bed. “Punk motherfucker!” he shouted through the bars. “Don’t get yourself fucked up now,” Sudal replied. The expedition was getting closer, and i tried to decide whether to come out with my clothes on or just start swinging, stay in the cell, and mess up as many as i could as they entered, after of course being soaked with mace, or coming out like everybody else and hardly being in any position to fight.

As i sat on the bed, looking out, they arrived at my neighbor’s cell and began repeating: “Strip, put your hands behind your head, back out your cell …,” etc., as the door opened. He did as he was told. “Open your mouth!” a pig instructed. When he did, the pig slapped him, causing him to stumble off to one side, as another pig punched him, saying, “Stand still!” They had tasted blood now and started getting better grips on their clubs, as one pig hit him on the arm with a stick. By now i was thoroughly terrorized; there was no fight in the brother. Their jokes about “the German army,” as they referred to themselves, just entangled in a massive knot inside my head.

i began to look at the faces. There was an Italian jailer who had caught a few good shots some time ago by the look on his face. He had never given me any trouble personally but had been assigned to escort me, standing at the ready. He was one of the guys they counted on. Another jailer who was running the show and had initiated knocking the brother around, told a rookie cop, “What do you expect?” There was a couple of Black pigs in the gang as well, which never fails to strike me strange.

My door opened. i’d decided to come out naked and follow instructions unless i got hit, in which case i would go on at least one of them who had something exposed, as the ninety-degree heat had coaxed a couple of visors up. It was a puny resolve, as i felt that an attack would spell the end, and that fear is a great source of power. The issue was decided as much as it could be. “Run your fingers through your hair, open your mouth, lift your balls, turn around, lift your left foot, lift your right foot, spread your cheeks, turn around to your right, walk to the wall, sit down cross-legged without moving your hands.”

Somehow i assumed the position and listened to the fascist chatter behind me. “That’s Harris’s partner,” i heard Sudal instigate. i’d heard they had vamped on him already. Trotman, the pig who was actually in charge of the goon squad, tapped the bandage on my back with his club. “Shouldn’t pistol whip correctional officers!” i heard a couple of more remarks about “getting more practice at the range.” i couldn’t help but picture one of those creeps hitting me in the head while i was sitting in that ridiculous position and had thought for an instant that the tap was a signal to get up. i started to, but decided to wait until told, while listening to stuff being thrown around in my cell.

Finally, i heard, “Ok, get up and go back into your cell.” The squad had begun leaving. When i got to the door a jailer named Wise, a Jewish fascist who hates “jews and niggers,” and who was later charged and acquitted of beating a prisoner, jumped in front of me and struck me in the stomach, holding the stick in both hands in the vertical butt stroke taught to Infantry. But it had no effect. Although my stomach looked out of shape since i had not been able to do sit-ups for a couple of months, it was stronger than it looked, as i’d done sit-ups and leg-raisers for years. Every muscle in my body was like a spring. As the stick rebounded off my gut and i looked him in the eye, i couldn’t help but smile. He responded by panicking: “Turn around, face the wall of your cell!”

i looked at the wall until i knew they had all left, found a cigarette, and sat down to smoke before even putting on my clothes. Later when recounting this to a prisoner who went through the same thing at the same time, i could see the recognition in his eyes. So this is state terror. The most terrifying part being watching what was happening to my neighbor, hearing what could happen to me … not what actually did.

This was terror. Done for the purpose of producing terror as the search was, in fact, a justification and had anything been found considered contraband, it indeed would have been incidental and only by chance of ridiculous proportions. Just as the “shakedowns” taking place at Marion now, after that prison has been locked down for nine months, have nothing to do with finding contraband and everything to do with attempts by the state at “behavior modification.” With making prisoners so fearful for so long that their personalities change to that of wimps who will accept whatever the state has in mind without resistance or retaliation. They are looking for hearts, and they believe their slogan: “When you got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

Of course, the New York Times has not carried an article on terrorism at Marion. Nor has any of its partners in Newspeak, such as the Post, Daily News, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, publications of the Hearst empire, or any of the other establishment papers. They are not really interested in “terrorism.” What they are interested in is changing the definition of terrorism from (American Heritage Dictionary) “the political use of terror and intimidation” to “armed acts carried out by political partizans on behalf of captive nations.”

The Klan, whose violence at the voting booths is all but too well documented, are often accused of committing racial violence, but they are never accused of terrorism. Nor are the Jewish Defense League (JDL), American Nazis, or any of their people. The CIA imports losers from fallen fascist regimes. Iranian students used to wear masks while demonstrating against the shah, but SAVAK (the Iranian secret police) was never accused of terrorism, nor was Alpha 66, though they, among many other reasons, were brought here to attack the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and to kill Orlando Letelier. He was exiled from Chili after the CIA-and ITT-sponsored coup took the lives of thousands and placed thousands more in concentration camps, where they suffered cruel tortures.

These people, who have a license and a free hand to kill in this empire, are never called terrorist nor are they accused of terrorizing anyone. At the same time, if members of the Black Liberation [Army] kill a couple of cops who are, by whatever your politics, armed men or women trained to do battle against lawlessness—and revolution is against the law—this is defined by the media and blasted until the senses are bombarded as an act of “terrorism” by their definitions. The endless raids of apartment buildings and vehicles supposedly for suspects is not terrorism. The bombing of police headquarters is “terrorism,” but the arrest of people who have nothing to say to the FBI or to the federal and state grand juries is not.

Nothing that the right wing, the establishment, the people who “got it” already do is terrorism—the political use of terror and intimidation—and likewise nothing that their lackeys do is terrorism. By that logic, the only Black people victimized by terrorism are those Fosters and Browns who join police departments to do Black folk a good turn! There is nothing terroristic about being burned out of your home that you bought in the wrong community. There is nothing terroristic about the murders of Neville Johnson,[77] Michael Stewart,[78] or any Black victims of the police; or what about the deaths of Willy Turks or the murder of Sundiata and the photo of his corpse under the caption “Death to the Terrorist” in the center of the Daily News; or the twenty-five children (at last count) killed in Atlanta since the arrest of Wayne Williams; or any of the murders across the U.S. of New Afrikans, Natives, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, or Asians. These things have no effect on us. We feel safe in our communities within alien communities and have no inhibitions in regards to securing our human rights. All this murder of Black and other Third World peoples is just human nature. We kill a cracker, its terrorism.

Klanners and Nazis gun down five unarmed people on national TV, and it is just one of those things. SLA members are surrounded and their dwelling is torched on national TV, and again it is just one of those things.[79] Thirty fires in a couple of months in the women’s dormitory at the University of Massachusetts, and the FBI comes to investigate links with the women’s community and the “Brink’s suspects.” This is not terrorism either because the state and the state’s media defines terrorism as any attempt by the oppressed and exploited nations and allies to pry loose the grip of imperialism. (By the way, the FBI arrested a New Afrikan woman and charged her with arson.)

South Africa, which has just signed treaties with Angola and Mozambique after years of invading these countries, is not called “terrorist.” But the South Africans have killed and maimed civilians in these attacks by cutting off their ears, a habit the Americans practiced in Vietnam. And they have killed scores of thousands of Azanians[80] in the territory they presently occupy. But the SWAPO guerrillas who detonated a bomb in Namibia, which is occupied illegally by South Africa, that killed two South African Intelligence officers and an American military attaché are called terrorist loud and clear—as is the African National Congress. But what on earth is the domination and superexploitation of 80 percent of the population based on? One would be hard-pressed to find a regime as repressive as South Africa, but it is the indigenous peoples who resist tyranny who are branded terrorist.

The difference between Steve Biko’s death on Robben Island[81] and George Jackson’s death in San Quentin’s Special Housing Unit is simply that the South Africans are not as hypocritical as the Americans. It is clear that Robben Island is for holding political prisoners and prisoners of war who resist or are suspected of resisting the settler regime. Americans are not so clear as to the purpose of their Special Housing Units, Incorrigible Units, and maxi-maxis. The United States is no less a settler regime, just more genocidal. Instead of maintaining apartheid (segregation) as the South Africans do—who got their ideas about reserves (Bantustans) from the American Indian reservations—the Americans systematically reduced the population of original inhabitants from 50 million to 1.6 million. With the sterilization of half of Native women and living conditions designed to bring about the destruction of Native peoples, the policy is still intact.

We all know the criminalization of the Native American Warriors, who were branded as “savages” by the euro-american press for defending their peoples, and most of us know that Crazy Horse was murdered in prison. But who recognizes the struggles of Native peoples as anti-imperialist? The policies developed in the genocidal campaigns against the Native Americans—wars against the entire population forcing the Natives into small, scattered, confined areas—has been repeated in Vietnam in the infamous Phenix program brought to light by the Pentagon Papers. Similarly, the criminalization of the defenders of the people by the press and the military and justice system was repeated by the FBI’s Cointelpro program, as brought out in the Freedom of Information Act files from the 1978 secret conference in Puerto Rico against the left in general.

One doesn’t have to be a political scientist to see the parallels in imperialism’s war against the Palestinian people: the robbing of the land, the branding of those who resist the tyranny of the Israelis as terrorists, the forcing of people into ghettos (the West Bank) or reservations (refugee camps), the massacre of unarmed civilians, the special confinement of political prisoners and prisoners of war. The fact that all of Palestine has been overrun doesn’t make the Palestinians any less of a colonized people any more than the fact that North America has been overrun makes Native Americans any less colonized, or the New Afrikans brought here to replace the Native population and enrich the euro-american oligarchy with free identifiable labor.

However, the pigs will argue that time and persistence okays any wrongdoing. “Israel exists,” they argue, “the white man is here to stay, and as soon as the Palestinians or Indians realize it, the better off they’ll be.” Well that’s not acceptable; when the victims accept the victimizers and cease to resist, how can the victims be better off? How can anyone be better off, other than the victimizers? History shows that the Greeds are never satisfied.

In the U.S., white anti-imperialists have supported the right to self-determination of captive nations, and it is clear by the use of grand juries and sham trials that they indeed have political prisoners in their ranks. A look at the Canadian left since the capture of the Vancouver Five[82] and the means employed to suppress it draws many parallels with the recent RICO trials in Manhattan. Two of the biggest differences: there were no traitors on the stand, and the actions of the Five established the right of citizens in Canada to stand up against tyranny, just as a colonial subject or an ally of the armed forces of a captive nation have the same right here. As citizens of oppressor nations stand up against tyranny on their own behalf, the state’s definition of terrorism will expand as it has already. But as in other state definitions, the expansion of the definition is in the other direction.

In closing, i’d like to address the question of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which reactionaries like to throw in when someone of my political bent addresses American imperialism. i resent this a bit, because i haven’t been advocating Russian foreign policy and certainly don’t share the relation to Russia that i do with the Americans. They kidnapped my foreparents for the purpose of enslavement and rape and continue to colonize, oppress, and exploit New Afrikan people and insist that we celebrate their sadism.

The Soviet Union, by invading Afghanistan, is of course carrying on imperialist aggression, since it is an internal conflict to which the Russians were invited. It is no less so than the American presence in South Korea, the Philippines, West Germany, Panama, Haiti, the Congo, Thailand, Grenada, Puerto Rico, Guanatanamo Bay, or any other place an oppressed nationalist may have missed whose mind may have been dulled by weight training and running around in the same damn circles in the yard.

As my people of my nation are colonized by the Americans, it is not an academic question to be balanced out by someone who intends to do nothing about it. This colonization is a challenge and an affront, taken personally and politically. As i am not suffering the effects of the Russian but American imperialism, which incidentally is more rampant, i oppose the American ruling class and puppets to whatever extent i can. That bullshit about “land of the free and home of the brave” provokes me a bit.

A Letter to Overthrow Newspaper

Back in—on or about 1971, after the jailhouse rock rebellion in NYC, where every house of detention was taken over by prisoners who had not been disarmed of their sense of outrage, a few of us were transferred from Branch Queens House of Detention to Riker’s island and placed in the segregation unit, where Sekou Odinga sits sharpening his sword now. Among us were some brothers who—indicted in the famous, or infamous, New York Panther 21 case, along with thirty-one other brothers—simply refused to surrender and submit to the systematic beatings and torture that pigs with baseball bats, ax handles, and night sticks issued, as the brothers who surrendered stepped out offering no resistance. Those of us who didn’t give up were not made to kneel on the ground with our hands cuffed behind our backs while the state-issued robots struck us. Among us was the brother Dr. Curtis Powell.

One night when we went to “sick call,” Doc and I happened into this state prisoner he’d met earlier in his incarceration, who had recounted when he had first met Doc he took for granted that the brother was insane, because he had listed his occupation as a physician. He was really amazed to discover that “by golly,” Powell was indeed a doctor after all. After telling us that story, he asked Doc how he was doing—or something to that effect. Doc replied, “We are being railroaded …. I am on the train.” The practitioner’s brows arched and lost for a moment, he turned to find relief in the face of a “correctional officer” who had just entered that section of the hallway. After speaking, the state practitioner asked the jailer, “Do you know Powell here? The doctor?” the jailer answered, looking at Doc, “Weren’t you in C-76?” To which the Doc answered, “I’m in 1-a.” To which the state practitioner replied, “He doesn’t know where he is, he thinks he is on a train.”

We all had a good laugh at that, the practitioner at the irony of a member of his profession being a crazy nigger after all. Doc and I had a good laugh, because it shows just how an interpretation sticks; he was crazy when he tried to convince the interpreter that he was in fact a doctor of medicine. And now that that fact was confirmed, he was crazy because he thought he was on a train. A lot of such interpretations have resulted in trips to the mental wards, shock therapy, thorazine, and psychosurgery performed by real psychos, and under a dominant alien culture there is bound to be misinterpretations. The fact that one group of people are to be a society’s menial class and be subjected to institutional put-downs and sanctioned to violence is a misinterpretation of common decency, or, better put, a misinterpretation of acceptability, for sure.

There is not one social topic that can be discussed free of the stench of racism. Social problems such as housing summon visions of our colonies called ghettos. Unemployment raises the specter of what the media terms “discrimination.” Health care brings to mind that infant mortality among New Afrikans is double that of Americans, that 50 percent of Native American women have been sterilized; not by one Ronald Reagan running from one reservation to the next with a knife but by thousands of dedicated practitioners who were at work under the regime previous to what has been termed a mandate, and have sterilized over 20 percent of New Afrikan and Puerto Rican women as well. How can we address crime in a land where there has never been a white executed in the murder or rape of a Black? How can a victim of Diana Ross concert mugging or a rape or a mob attack see such an experience in the light of historical conditioning, and how can the sheepish mob behind the crimes of Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and South Africa not take responsibility for these crimes and not take responsibility for stopping them? Who can believe that this condition can go on indefinitely?

The United States was founded on the genocide of Native Americans, which continues. Out of the 50 million who inhabited this land only 1.6 million remain. The economic structure based on the subjection of a caste continues. The colonization of our brothers and sisters and neighbors to the south and barefaced denials, the innumerable invasions and occupations with the same shameless justifications, continue.

Pick up an almanac and read the short historical sketches of Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other nations in that region while the synopsis are still in print and it will be clear what the invasion of Grenada, Harlem, El Barrio, and Wounded Knee continue to be, with the approval and aid of duped citizens and colonial subjects alike.

The highly polished “news” shows, the ruling class presses, the airwaves guarded by the FCC manipulate our cultures into commercials, filter out much of that which challenges them, and flood our senses with subliminal attacks to maintain racism. Rock reflects progressive and liberating tendencies, as well as backward and fascist tendencies. It has challenged our thinking and that of those around us, sensitizing us to our doings, and it has packaged subtle and rank racism which are untitled. Anybody who believes they have rights over others is part of the problem. Anyone who believes they have the rights to use and abuse and attributes these rights to simply being born a particular species or gender and not on these beliefs or promotes them must be contested, as there is no trait worse, save accepting evil nonsense of that type.

This progress, which has devoured entire peoples and poisoned the biosphere of those of us remaining, must be attacked spiritually and culturally, as well as fought physically and resolutely in all its aspects, if we are to maintain our sovereignty as human beings rather than parts of the machine. Self-determination, the freedom to be ourselves, only conflicts with the interests of a tiny percent of the population that controls.

So Rock Against Racism, imperialism, and sexism. It’s a good sign that the new age art form, indigenous and ingenious, can be acknowledged piercing the net of commercialism and clearly out of the use of the state’s arsenal.

Let the good times roll, and let the chips roll where they may.

From Overthrow 6, no. 4 (December 1984–January 1985).