june 6, 2020

SEVEN REFLECTIONS ON Rebellion

Exploring the connections between Detroit’s 1967 rebellion and the current Black Lives Matter uprisings

//the editors

Across the US, protests against racist state violence have reached a level of scale and intensity not seen for a half-century, spreading across at least 600 American cities and across the world, into countries like France, Brazil, New Zealand, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Kenya, Israel, and Australia. 

This flurry of protests has led many people to wonder whether what we are seeing today is a repetition of the 1960s and early '70s, when, as Robin D.G. Kelley has written, "riots erupted in some 300 cities, involving close to a half-million African Americans and resulting in 250 deaths, about 10,000 serious injuries, and millions of dollars in property damage. Police and the National Guard turned black neighborhoods into war zones, arresting at least 60,000 people and employing tanks, machine guns, and tear gas to pacify the community.” 

For many political commentators, the similarities are overwhelming. “From 1960s to a new century, the song remains the same,” reads a Chicago Tribune headline. “Echoes of 1968: History is repeated in protests at the death of George Floyd,” claims The Economist. And here is the Washington Post’s summary account: “Riots and destruction. Racial tensions. A pandemic. A law-and-order presidential campaign. Images from space so beautiful, and so far away, that people on Earth wish they could escape up there, too. All of that happened in 1968, one of the most tumultuous years in American history. And it feels like it’s all happening again in 2020.” 

Nor is it only political pundits who are turning to the late ’60s in order to make sense of their present reality. Activists are taking inspiration from civil rights icons like James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr., re-reading their books and circulating their words on social media. More ominously, President Trump is also looking to the past for answers. The political scientist Jeremy Mayer writes, “Urban rioting in American history has almost always helped conservative forces." In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president campaigning on the premise that liberal permissiveness was the cause of widespread urban "rioting," to which the only solution was "law and order." With the presidential election upcoming this fall, Trump, whose approval rating is plummeting, is making a similar political wager.

All this begs the question: with today’s uprisings, and the government’s heinously violent and racist response to these uprisings, are we merely witnessing a circular motion, an “eternal return of the same”? And if not, then how has the terrain of the country's struggle against racist state violence changed in the past half-century? Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, suggested that the circular motion of history is better understood as a spiral, which aptly describes the way past and present struggles against racial injustice are at once continuous and discontinuous, both encouraging and disappointing. 

With this in mind, below are seven reflections on the similarities and differences between the current Black Lives Matter protests and Detroit's Great Rebellion, the largest of the 1960s urban uprisings, a week of violent contestation that resulted in 43 deaths and more than 7,000 arrests. These reflections are sprinkled with a number of videos of black thinkers from decades past, so as to give the reader a sense of the political and intellectual climate of the ‘60s uprisings.

1. Each Round of Protests Began After a Rapid Flurry of State Violence

The uprisings in the '60s as well as the present uprising were both precipitated by a flurry of violence, perpetrated and facilitated by the US government; in turn, a substantial and militant response became, on the part of protesters, both emotionally and politically necessary. 

In 2019, the police killed nearly 1,100 people, mostly poor, and disproportionately people of color (in contrast, US citizens killed 48 police officers). Most of these killings prompted some kind of localized protest and organizing, or some fleeting media coverage, but the avalanche of violence against black people that occurred this spring prompted a more sustained round of protest. 

Days before George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, plain-clothes officers in Louisville broke into the home of Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician, and then, without announcing themselves, fatally shot the unarmed Taylor eight times; the officers apparently came in firing as part of a drug raid they were launching, although no drugs were found on the premises (a disturbingly common phenomenon). 

Taylor's murder came on the heels of a video which surfaced, showing the nightmarish murder of Ahmaud Arbery: Arbery, also unarmed, was jogging through his Georgia neighborhood when two white vigilantes, an ex-cop and his son, followed and then fatally shot him. Their only justification was that they incorrectly believed the unarmed Arbery to have committed some recent burglaries. 

Then there was the viral video which showed Amy Cooper using her white privilege to threaten the life of Christian Cooper, a black man who was birdwatching in Central Park. When Christian Cooper asked her to curb her dog, Amy responded by threatening that she was going to call the police, and "tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." 

All of this violence was swirling around the nation's consciousness when a video surfaced showing a white police officer in Minneapolis pin George Floyd in a prone position and kneel on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Floyd's only crime was being a black man who allegedly used false currency to buy some goods during a pandemic from a corner store whose owner admitted that Floyd may not have even known that he had a counterfeit bill to begin with. While the police kneeled on his neck, Floyd repeated that he could not breathe. Three other officers stood by and watched, doing nothing to intervene as the dying man called out to his deceased mother.  

Meanwhile, just as protests were exploding in Minneapolis, police in Tallahassee killed Tony McDade. The exact details surrounding McDade's death remain unclear. Police claimed the killing of McDade — who is (officially) the twelfth transgender or gender non-conforming person killed by US police officers this year, and who was the third person killed by Tallahassee police in two months — was justified. However, a video recorded by a bystander's cell phone presents a different story: police called McDade a racial slur and then shot his motionless body without just cause. [1]

Meanwhile, all of this horror coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the government's willfully neglectful handling of the pandemic was another key factor in inflaming the protesters. As Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor writes, "the fact that Mr. Floyd was even arrested, let alone killed, for the inconsequential 'crime' of forgery amid a pandemic that has taken the life of one out of every 2,000 African-Americans is a chilling affirmation that black lives still do not matter in the United States."

After the pandemic reached its peak in the US in May, at least 25% of the US workforce was jobless. The devastating effects of this economic crisis helps, in part, to explain the multi-racial composition of today’s uprisings.

A similar cascade of state violence precipitated the Great Rebellion in Detroit in 1967.  

In June 1967, a group of white men killed Danny Thomas, a black war veteran and former Ford employee, at River Rouge Park. Thomas was murdered after attempting to defend his pregnant wife, whom the men raped, causing her to have a miscarriage. Initially Detroit’s major newspapers attempted to silence the story, and Thomas’s murder was covered only by the city's black newspapers. As political pressure mounted, several days after the attack the Free Press published a muted story of the killing—burying it on the paper’s third page, behind a cover story about a blind puppy that white homeowners took in. The police immediately released five of the men detained for killing Thomas. Only one person was charged with the murder, and he was eventually acquitted. At that time in Detroit, no white person had ever been successfully prosecuted for the murder of a black person.

A week later, on July 1, Vivian Williams was murdered. The Free Press buried the story on the eleventh page. In the fifty-four-word report on the murder, the paper did not mention that Williams was black, nor that multiple witnesses claimed that Williams had been killed by a white police officer who had had repeated, hostile run-ins with her. [2]

Less than two weeks after William’s death, two white police officers in Newark, New Jersey arrested and viciously beat an unarmed black cab driver, John William Smith. This led to violent protests, which were brutally suppressed, ending in 23 deaths; the state was mostly responsible for these deaths, and those killed were mostly black.

Days later, the Detroit police violently raided a bar located in the deeply impoverished 12th St. neighborhood where the recently murdered Vivian Williams and Danny Thomas had lived. This raid on a party celebrating the return of two black GIs from Vietnam, was the "final straw," and it led to widespread armed resistance throughout the city.

2. Both Uprisings Were Also Police Riots

Even though today's protests are significantly more peaceful than their '60s counterparts, both rounds of protests spawned what can accurately be called riots of the police against the people.

For decades now, the police and military have been trained to treat protesters as "enemy combatants," and the result has been a predictable outbreak of state violence against protesters. The use of tear gas and rubber bullets —  which are "anything but nonlethal"  — against unarmed protesters and journalists, even youth, has been widespread. To take just one particularly heinous incident, last weekend in Austin, police shot Justin Howell, a twenty-year-old black protester, with a “less lethal” projectile that fractured his skull and led to sustained brain damage. Police also shot at the fellow protestors who carried Howell’s body to safety and, in another incident at the same protest, struck a Hispanic teenager in the head with a rubber bullet. Soon after, in New York City, police pepper-sprayed and arrested Zellnor Myrie, a black state senator. Then police in Northern California fatally shot Sean Monterrosa, a 22-year-old Latino who was unarmed and was on his knees with his hands up at the time police killed him. The list could go on and on. 

The government's crackdown on the urban uprisings of the '60s was even more severe. One reason is that this round of protesting is, on the whole, much more peaceful; protesters in the '60s were much more likely than today's protesters to initiate armed confrontations with the police, which they often viewed as an "occupation army." That said, the vast majority of the violence in the ‘60s was still committed by the state. 

During Detroit's 1967 Rebellion, the police and the National Guard initially struggled to contain the rebellion, and 4,700 paratroopers were called in to quash the uprising. These troopers were ordered  to "shoot any person seen looting." Governor Romney declared that “fleeing felons are subject to being shot at" — and many were. “The only answer is a double-barrelled approach," State Representative Arthur Law told the Free Press after he killed a black "hoodlum" who was attempting to loot his grocery store.

Predictably, this "double-barrelled approach" led to widespread murder. The most heinous incident occurred at the Algiers Motel, where officers converged in response to alleged gunfire — which turned out to be a toy gun. The police killed three unarmed black men; nine others, seven black men and two white women, were viciously beaten and forced to endure hours of what can only be described as kidnapping and torture. 

In another deplorable incident, Tonya Blanding, a four-year-old black girl, was killed when an army tank fired into her apartment building. The “flash” the tank was firing at was later confirmed to be from Tonya’s uncle, who was lighting a cigarette. According to a resident of the building, police “just started shooting and shooting. . . We yelled to them that we had children in there, but it didn’t do no good. They said there was a sniper in our building. We told him there wasn’t nobody in there but families with children, but they shot in anyway.” 

3. The Liberal Media's Representation of the Uprisings Is More Sympathetic This Time

While conservative media outlets have demonized protesters in similar ways to the 1960s, the liberal media is proving far more sympathetic to the protest movement this time around. For example, if a liberal outlet like the Detroit Free Press characterized today's protests as an "orgy of pillage," as they did to the Rebellion in the '60s, they surely wouldn't win the Pulitzer Prize this time around.

Consider how the Detroit Free Press, the city's leading "liberal" newspaper, covered the Great Rebellion in 1967. The uprising, the paper argued, was hardly about politics. It was rather an "orgy of pillage." "As the looting spread," the Free Press concluded, "so did the conviction that this riot had less to do with race than color TV sets."  This was not a protest, but rather an "anarchic, irrational and unstoppable nightmare holiday of piracy and waste." And in turn, the Free Press consistently quoted business owners and conservative black leaders who called for the state to deal with protesters more harshly. 

The remarkable fact is that the Free Press was awarded the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the uprising. 

With this in mind, we can say that: even if the mainstream media today continues to obscure the full political-economic context of the protests, and even if they still oversell the violent actions of the protesters while severely downplaying police's violence, and even if they continue to uncritically demonize “looters”, refusing to delve into the psychological and material conditions that would lead someone to "loot" a store or a police precinct — even admitting all this, it can be said without a doubt that the liberal media's coverage today is far more sympathetic to the protesters than it was in the '60s. 

Much of this surely has to do with the widespread liberal outrage against Donald Trump. During the protests in Baltimore and Ferguson in 2014–15, Obama tended to marginalize the protesters, calling them "thugs", while supporting a police crackdown against them. But Trump's authoritarian approach is far less palatable: he is a white-supremacist who has surrounded himself with a white-supremacist cabinet. With his threats to attack protesters with "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons," and his warning that, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Trump is harkening back to the brutal ways that racist white southerners dealt with the Civil Rights Movement. In other words, even if Obama also supported the criminalization of Black Lives Matter protesters, Trump's explicit racism and authoritarianism has made this round of murderous violence against unarmed black people all the more visceral, and is a big reason why the protests have captured the imagination of the world, and why the liberal press has responded with an outpouring of sympathy.  

These shifts in the liberal media are also a response to years of sustained activism by those associated with Black Lives Matter, the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the prison abolitionist movement, who have all forced the country to reckon with the political-economy of oppression. It also reflects the gains of feminists and LGBTQ activists, who are playing a much more central role in today’s protests than in the 1960s, which was comparitively much more mysoginistic and homophobic.

Although these radical activists are obviously still fighting an uphill battle, their voices have become more normalized in the political discourse. Consider the fact that Cornel West openly called American capitalism a "failed social experiment” on CNN. Or the fact that, days into the uprising, Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor, who characterized the protests in Minneapolis as a multiracial "class rebellion," was given a platform on the New York Times, the same outlet that tended to characterize the '60s uprisings as irrational "race riots." 

4. The Power of the Police/Military Apparatus Has Increased Dramatically in the Past 50 Years

Black Lives Matter protesters are coming up against police forces that are significantly more bolstered than their 1960s predecessors, and the militarization of the police must be understood as a direct response to the previous round of urban uprisings. It is thus easier for the police/military to "dominate" the protesters than it was in the '60s. 

By the late 1960s, the failures of what Robin D.G. Kelley calls “Black Bourgeois reformism” spawned a “generation of black radicals whose dissatisfaction with the civil rights movement’s strategy of nonviolent passive resistance drew them closer to Malcolm X and Third World liberation movements." As anti-colonial struggles raged in places like Cuba, Algeria, Poland, Vietnam, Mexico, Congo, South Africa, Palestine, Uruguay, Brazil, Jamaica, and Northern Ireland, many Black Power activists called on protesters to fight against the police, and many black Vietnam veterans used their military training to combat US empire at home. 

Consider this account of the Great Rebellion in Detroit: 

Those who had been sent to fight for US imperialism in the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam were turning the guns around. The war had come home. One observer testified that he’d overheard an early walkie-talkie command to spread the disorder to the east side. The authorities in their fear saw things everywhere — some real, some not. The Fire Chief believed that arsonists used divide-and-conquer tactics and that others lured his men into gun ambushes by telephoning bogus reports of fires. A survey of metro-area residents two weeks after the rebellion found that 55.5 percent thought it had been planned, and many were inclined to call it an insurrection or revolution.

As mentioned above, the police initially failed to suppress the rebels, and needed the help of the army; for the country's political elites, this served as an important lesson. In the wake of the 1967 Rebellion, Byron Engle, the head of the Office of Public Safety, the US’s international police training program, testified before the Kerner Commission, the government's official analysis of the urban uprisings. “In working with the police in various countries,” he said, “we have acquired a great deal of experience in dealing with violence ranging from demonstrations and riots to guerilla warfare. Much of this experience may be useful in the US.”

In other words, Engle was calling for the “imperial boomerang” that theorists like Frantz Fanon had long warned about: the forces of terror that the US government had unleashed around the world were now being called back home, to deal with a revolutionary threat in the “homeland.” The Kerner Commission accepted Engle’s proposal, and concluded that preventing future “unrest” would require enhanced police “training, planning, adequate intelligence systems, and knowledge of the ghetto community.” 

In turn, many of the hallmarks of the era of "mass incarceration" — including stop-and-frisk policing, SWAT raids, and Supermax prisons — were systematically implemented around the country in order to repress the militants who took part in the uprisings, and who proceeded to form groups like the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to challenge the ravages of US capitalism. 

In short, the armies that were ordered in to repress the urban uprisings never really left — they simply became the police. 

In the mainstream media, the violent aspects of the Black Panther Party are too often exaggerated at the expense of their many community programs. That said, the Panthers did organize themselves to combat police brutality. By the late '60s, Geronimo Pratt, the Black Panther's Deputy Minister of Defense and a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, had organised the Panthers into a formidable force, with sandbag fortifications, underground tunnels, sizeable arms caches, and combat strategies. When it proved difficult for local police departments to overpower the Panthers, the first-ever SWAT raid was launched in 1969. This raid saw officers fire 5,000 rounds of ammunition and prepare to detonate dynamite on the roof of the building so as to attack the Panthers from above. Internal memos reveal that the FBI intended to "neutralize Pratt as an effective BPP functionary." By 1970, he was arrested on trumped-up charges; Pratt served 27 years as a political prisoner before the charges were vacated. 

Since then, government spending on police militarization has increased exponentially. SWAT raids, which target black Americans 40 times more frequently than they do white Americans, have increased in frequency from 3,000 a year in the early 1980s, to 50,000 in recent years. SWAT operations have become routine in poor black and brown communities, where they are mostly deployed for “drug searches” — which in at least one-third of cases yield no drugs. 

Police departments now spend more than $400 million each year on military-grade equipment, compared to $1 million in 1990. Military equipment and training not only turns the police into a powerful tool of coercion, which can, in the words of Donald Trump, "dominate" protesters, it also turns the police into a highly profitable outlet of the military-industrial complex, as surplus equipment from US wars abroad can be recycled into domestic use. 

As police forces around the country have been bolstered, social welfare spending has decreased dramatically. More and more, the police are charged with dealing with issues stemming from poverty and neglect, creating more and more opportunities for police violence. Consider, to take just one example, the increased police presence in schools. According to the ACLU: 

• 1.7 million students are in schools with police but no counselors

• 3 million students are in schools with police but no nurses

• 6 million students are in schools with police but no school psychologists

• 10 million students are in schools with police but no social workers

• 14 million students are in schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist, or social worker

5. Mass Incarceration Has Happened

Today's Black Lives Matter activists are protesting against a much-bolstered penal system that was, in part, built to contain the threat of urban militancy of the kind that flourished in the late '60s. When police respond to today's protests with mass arrests, they are following a precedent set in the '60s. 

As Dan Berger argues, the arrests following the '60s protests were "dry runs in dedicating massive state resources to widespread imprisonment. As the economy began its postindustrial turn, elites changed these urban uprisings into experiments in detaining large numbers of people." 

As more and more political militants were locked up, the number of prison uprisings rose dramatically: from 5 in 1968 to nearly 50 in 1971 (the most famous taking place in Attica). The state’s response to these uprisings was to build "Supermax prisons" where militant prisoners are kept in isolation for upwards of 22 hours a day. As the prison warden of Marion, the nation’s first Supermax prison, explained in 1973, “The purpose of the Marion control unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large.” In the mid-'60s, Marion was the only Supermax prison in the country; by the turn of the century, there were at least 55. Many political prisoners from previous uprisings are still in these Supermax prisons today. 

In the '68 Presidential election, Richard Nixon made an important ideological maneuver that legitimated this "law-and-order" response. Much in the same way as Donald Trump is now deriding Democrat-controlled cities for their inability to reign in the protests, Nixon argued that liberal social programs had coddled the urban poor, and that they had in turn become morally dissolute: the people taking part in the "riots" weren't protesters, they weren't oppressed people, they were criminals. And the "crime problem" he argued, would be solved “not [by] quadrupling the funds for ‘any governmental war on poverty,’ but convicting more criminals.” In turn, when Nixon was elected, the federal government began to substantially realign its spending priorities, decreasing spending for "wasteful" liberal programs, and increasing funding for the hard-nosed criminal justice system. 

When Detroit's Rebellion occurred in 1967, the correctional population in the U.S., including all those in jail or prison, or on probation or parole, was less than 800,000. At present, the number is around seven million. As a result of this historically unprecedented rise — commonly known as “mass incarceration” — approximately one-third of U.S. adults have some kind of criminal record. This criminalized population is overwhelmingly poor and underemployed, and is disproportionately African American and Latino. 

In this fifty-year period, Republicans and Democrats have both supported criminalization as an efficient way of containing the country's poorest and most marginalized people. Indeed, although much has been made of Donald Trump's "law-and-order" stance, Joe Biden was also particularly rabid in his advocacy for law-and-order. In the early '90s, when conservatives attacked the Democrats for being too "soft" on crime, Biden responded by bragging about the severity of Bill Clinton's draconian crime bills. "The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties," he raved in front of Congress. "The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties. . . . The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells. . . . I would like to see the conservative wing of the Democratic Party!"

For decades, both liberals and conservatives have supported "law-and-order" because containing the poor with prisons and the police has proven more politically expedient than taxing the rich and using the money to fund broad poverty-alleviating social programs. When activists decry how much money is "wasted" on police and prisons, it is important to remember that it would be significantly more expensive to actually implement social-democratic policies that Black Lives Matter activists are fighting for. From a social control perspective, government elites are actually getting off cheap. 

With this in mind, just as important as the widespread demand that police be defunded is the demand that social welfare spending in turn be increased. This will undoubtedly require significantly increased taxation of the super-rich.

6. The Racial Composition of Urban Governments Has Changed Dramatically

During the urban uprisings of the 1960s, corporate and political elites were nearly all white; so too were the police. Since then, people of color have been more integrated into the American power structure; decades of piecemeal reforms have benefited some people of color, but these reforms have failed to challenge the political-economic system that renders poor people of color disposable.

In terms of political representation, the black activists in the '60s scored a major victory. Between 1964 and 1971, the number of elected black officials increased from 100 to nearly 1,900, and more than half of all black college graduates were employed by the government. By the early '70s, there were 104 black mayors in the US, and they had taken control of almost all the cities that had experienced major uprisings. 

These mayors inherited a perilous situation. Not only was the federal government cutting back on social programs, but in the wake of the uprisings, US capitalists fled the inner cities, heading increasingly for low-wage areas in formerly colonized regions in South America, Asia, and Africa. The result in black inner cities was widespread poverty and unemployment, combined with the devastating heroin epidemic that had its roots in the Vietnam War (30 percent of U.S. soldiers used heroin during their time in Vietnam, and heroin, often with the help of the CIA, was imported into the country at cheap rates during and after the war). The result was that crime became a pressing concern for inner-city residents, and newly elected black politicians tended to support and even intensify anti-crime measures as a cheap solution to the growing “urban crisis.” 

The strategies of Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, were typical. While Young integrated the police department and attempted to reform away the department's most racist excesses, he also launched a "war on crime" that targeted the city's poor black population. This "war" had the full support of civil rights groups in the city, who proceeded to launch their own "March against Crime." Similar black-led campaigns for harsher crime bills took place in New York City, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area, among elsewhere. 

The period following the Great Rebellion was marked by a dialectic of repression and integration: a small segment of a racialized community was allowed to advance at the expense of the group as a whole, which faced deteriorating living conditions. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written, “The percentage of African-Americans making at least $75,000 more than doubled from 1970 to 2014, to 21 percent. Those making $100,000 or more nearly quadrupled, to 13 percent (in contrast, white Americans saw a less impressive increase, from 11 to 26 percent).” During this same time period, a majority of black congressmen supported all of the major crime bills that gave more funds to police, more funds for prison construction, and implemented harsher laws against low-level criminals. 

The integration of more people of color into the political establishment has changed the complexion of urban protests. Consider the case of Baltimore, where protests exploded in 2015 after the acquittal of the police officers who killed Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man. President Obama and the city’s black mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, both condemned the Black Lives Matter demonstrators as “criminals” and “thugs,” and supported a swift police response to quash the "riots." As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointedly observes, “When a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle.” 

All of this helps to contextualize the speech that Cornel West gave on CNN following the outbreak of the protests in Minneapolis on May 29, 2020: 

And now our culture, so market-driven, everybody for sale, everything for sale, you can’t deliver the kind of really real nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose. So when you get this perfect storm of all these multiple failures at these different levels of the American empire, and Martin King already told us about that. . . . The system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried black faces in high places. Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens. And what happens is we have a neofascist gangster in the White House who doesn’t care for the most part. You’ve got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver’s seat with the collapse of brother Bernie and they really don’t know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces — show more black faces. But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security [Secretary] and they couldn’t deliver. So when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they’re the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion.

7. The Creation of Revolutionary Organizations 

Rhetoric and protesting aside, it remains to be seen if activists associated with the movement for Black Lives will coalesce into revolutionary organizations with the capacity to truly challenge the legitimacy of "racial capitalism." If such organizations do form, it remains to be seen whether, this time, the government will be able to pacify them in the manner they did last time: through a combination of co-optation and repression.

As Grace Lee Boggs has written, there is a qualitative difference between a protest that is simply a negative reaction, and a rebellion that creates space to reshape and overcome the thing one is rebelling against. Referencing the work of Paulo Freire, Boggs suggests that rebellions can pave the way to revolutionary politics only when people have assumed “the role of subject in the precarious adventure of transforming and re-creating the world. They are not just denouncing but also announcing a new positive.”

If the 1960s uprisings were truly rebellions in Boggs's sense of the term, that was because, in the aftermath of the uprisings, revolutionary groups formed with the intention of building an alternative kind of society. In the aftermath of Detroit's Great Rebellion, for instance, a group of young black activists launched the Inner City Voice newspaper. Its first issue contained these words: “We are still working too hard, getting paid too little, living in bad housing, sending our kids to substandard schools, paying too much for groceries and treated like dogs by the police. We still don’t own anything and don’t control anything. . . . In other words, we are still being systematically exploited by the system, and still have the responsibility to break the back of that system. . . . The Revolution must continue."

These activists would soon coalesce into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a Marxist labor union that organized around the principle that "exploitation and oppression are part of the same coin, part of that monster that is standing on our chest, and you can’t eliminate one without the other." 

Meanwhile, while the League was organizing black workers at the point of production, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense formed. The Panthers did not only organize black people in the fight against police brutality; they also launched a number of "survival programs" to serve the working class. These included: the Free Breakfast Program, the People’s Free Food Program, the Intercommunal Youth Institute, the Legal Aid Education Program, the Free Busing to Prisons Program, the Free Commissary for Prisoners Program, the People’s Free Shoe Program, the People’s Free Clothing Program, the People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic, the People’s Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation, the People’s Free Ambulance Service, the People’s Free Dental Program, the People’s Free Optometry Program, the People’s Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program, and the Community Housing Program.

The Panthers and the League both rooted the black struggle in a class framework, and argued that overcoming racist violence would require overhauling the entire edifice of economic exploitation and imperialism. In turn, they put forward a message that galvanized working-class and poor people of all races and backgrounds. 

The activism of the League and the Panthers inspired working-class people around the country, prompting a swift and brutal response from the US government. Under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover — who said, "The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries" — the FBI proceeded to use tactics like assassination, misinformation, sabotage, and infiltration to destroy these and other militant black groups.  

In recent years, black activists have put forward the Vision for Black Lives agenda, and it is not hard to see in this "agenda" the legacy of groups like the League and the Panthers. The agenda "contains an impressive list of left policy planks such as universal basic income, demilitarization of policing, an end to money bail, decriminalization of sex work and drugs, strengthening collective bargaining, and building a cooperative economy."

On the other hand, now that liberal elites have again colluded to defeat Bernie in the Democratic primaries, it is clear that the Democratic establishment will do everything in its power to co-opt the current Black Lives Matter movement. On this point, it is worth reflecting on the exchange in 2017 between Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s and a young queer activist. The activist thanked Pelosi for the Democrat’s support on issues related to identity, but then asked why the Democratic Party hasn’t been able to make similar gains in terms of wealth re-distribution. This was Pelosi’s answer: “I have to say, we’re capitalists, that’s just the way it is.” [3]

All that said, as the “class vs. race” debates rage on, there are some hopeful indications that more and more activists are coming to the same conclusion that Martin Luther King Jr. came to towards the end of his life: that racial justice is simply incompatible with an American system premised on exploitation and imperialism.

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History repeats itself, Marx once wrote, first as tragedy, then as farce. This obscene historical repetition is exactly what Donald Trump has in mind in his efforts to re-embody segregationists like Alabama's George Wallace, and to Make America Great Again. Those who hope to re-actualize some kind of mythic past are a very dangerous sort of people. The only way to defeat them is to learn from our real past, and use these lessons to develop strategies for building a different kind of future, one which does away with racism, state violence, economic exploitation, and historical amnesia.

Notes:

[1] McDade's story has unfortunately received much less attention than these other incidents. This is most likely because of the transphobia that permeates liberal and social justice circles, a fact attested to by the misgendering of McDade even in the first few media accounts that reported his death. Another factor is that McDade was allegedly armed and perhaps guilty of a violent crime: it is an unfortunate fact that protests and popular moral indignation tend to focus only on normative people who are either innocent or unarmed when the police kills them. This tends to justify the murder and stigmatization of ostensibly "guilty" criminals who are regularly killed by police with impunity. In a similar fashion, an adverse effect of the organizations like the Innocence Project is that this exclusive focus on "innocent people" tends to justify the larger architecture of mass incarceration, and also tends to marginalize the people whose poverty and alienation pushed them into crime.

That said, it is readily apparent that today’s protest movement is more “inclusive” than the movements in the ‘60s. It is inspiring to see activists in the streets leading chants like “Black Trans Lives Matter” — and this reflects the real gains made by LGBTQ activists.

[2] For the Free Press, this type of coverage was par for the course: Just a couple of years earlier, when a black woman named Cynthia Scott was murdered by the police — she was shot three times, twice in the back — the Press justified the killing by labelling Scott a “prostitute” and a “188-pound former wrestler.”

[3] There are other signs that most activists remain unprepared to embrace a “class” framework for understanding racist state violence. Case in point is the Democratic Socialists of America’s recent decision to cancel a speech by Adolph Reed, Jr.; for decades, Reed has been leading the ideological battle to connect black oppression with the broader dynamics of capitalism, and to shine a light on the ways in which black politics have been co-opted by the same system. That his perspective remains unpalatable even for many socialist activists is a worrying sign. Thanks to David Feldman for drawing our attention to this.

// The Periphery is planning a new issue for this summer.