2018 was a big year for Dr. Mutulu Shakur and there’s more in store for 2019!
After a long time coming, Mutulu, represented by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, the Post-Conviction Justice Project (USC Gould School of Law), the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and the National Bar Association, filed a federal court case challenging the government’s interpretation and application of U.S. law by the U.S. Parole Commission that has unjustly held him past his max release date. Family and Friends of Mutulu Shakur (FFMS) will update via Facebook and Twitter as it works its way through the courts.
In April, Mutulu was honored at an event in Puerto Rico organized by the SAPP (Salud y para el Pueblo) Project. This project provides essential healthcare to underserved populations in Puerto Rico, especially critical in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Colleagues of Dr. Shakur– Drs. Mario Wexu of Montreal, Walter Bosque and Urayoana Trinidad of NYC– represented him and their work at this inspirational event. FFMS is assisting with a party to benefit SAPP to be held in January in NYC, so stay tuned on social media for more information as details are finalized.
In the fall, an Atlantic magazine article and Jenna Bliss’ ‘The People’s Detox’ film– both documenting the important history of acupuncture detox especially poignant now that society is recognizing the opioid crisis– were released with contributions from Mutulu. Stay tuned for 2019 when a feature-length documentary on groundbreaking work that healers, including Dr. Shakur, accomplished in detox treatment and addiction recovery is due to premier! We also want to give a shout-out to artist Sophia Dawson who has been making waves with her #tobefreeproject featuring paintings of Mutulu. FFMS is grateful for and inspired by the artists shedding light and bringing depth to community-based healthcare and political prisoners.
We sincerely thank everyone who has already donated and who helped make all of the accomplishments of 2018 possible and sustained Dr. Shakur’s spirit and strength all this year! As we move into 2019, funds are needed for ongoing legal efforts as well as basic necessities to supplement what a prison wage is able to provide for.
To make a tax-deductible donation to Family and Friends of Mutulu Shakur send a check or money order made out to Community Aid and Development Corp. to P. O. Box 361270, Decatur, GA 30036-1270 with ‘FFMS’ as the memo.
If you do not need a tax deduction for your donation, but would like to become a monthly sustainer recurring donations can be set up through the FFMS PayPal. Even $1-5 per month would help immensely as we move into a new chapter of juggling and struggling.
Again, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being here with us along this journey!
In the words of Mutulu, ‘Go All Out,’
FFMS
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Copper was the “red gold” of Africa and had been both mined there and traded across the Sahara by Italian and Arab merchants. The early Portuguese explorers of the 1470s observed that copper bracelets and leg-bands were the principal money all along the west African coast. They were usually worn by women to display their husband’s wealth. The Portuguese crown contracted with manufacturers in Antwerp and elsewhere to produce crescent rings with flared ends of wearable size which came to be called “manilla,” after the Latin manus (hand) or from monilia, plural of monile (necklace).
Manilla. Manillas were brass bracelet-shaped objects used by Europeans in trade with West Africa, from about the 16th century to the 1930s. They were made in Europe, perhaps based on an African original.Once Bristol entered the African trade, manillas were made locally for export to West Africa.
Records of a contract between the Portuguese government and Erasmus Schetz of Antwerp, who supplied the Portuguese factory at Mina with as many as 150,000 manillas per year, are widely quoted. The standard in 1529 was supposedly about 240m long, about 13m gauge, weighing 600 gram. However, no examples of torque-shaped bracelets in this weight range are known today, and a wreck dated to 1524 carried manillas of typical form but only slightly flared, averaging 306 grams.
The K.Kinte Show Live Make America Pay Reparations/ Biafra Struggle – Haki Kweli Shakur
Objects used as currency were sometimes also in themselves desirable objects, frequently used for body ornamentation. In west Africa from the fourteenth century, copper bracelets were used as currency. After the arrival of Portuguese and other European traders, great numbers of these manillas (the Portuguese word for bracelet) were produced in Europe to trade in west Africa. This iron manilla was made in England, for trade with the Igbo people of Nigeria to obtain palm oil and ivory. The ship carrying this manilla from England to Africa was wrecked off the coast of Ireland in 1836. (http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/LGweb/coins/1884_99_42.htm)
Manilla typology is a largely unexplored subject. While trader and traveler accounts are both plentiful and specific as to names and relative values, no drawings or detailed descriptions have survived which could link these accounts to specific manilla types found today. Historians and economists emphasize patterns of trade and show no interest in the specific appearance or variations among trade goods. Collectors rely on a confusing and incomplete chart by Johansson, Nigerian Currencies, unsourced, but reproduced endlessly, including in scholarly works. When I asked Johansson in 2007 about his sources, he said he could not remember. The chart shows nine named pieces, and he cites other types by area of use, which are not shown.
Twisted Manilla. Manillas, a type of currency in Africa.
Distinguishing factors are thickness and the diameter and degree of flare to the ends, size / weight, and shape. I believe that there really are few discreet types, mainly an evolutionary process: from large to small, heavy to light, crude to finished; end flare subtle to exaggerated, and footprint wide and rounded to small and elongated. The proliferation of African names is probably due more to regional customs than actual manufacturing practices. My own approach has been to examine and sort thousands of pieces obtained from different places over time, and try to apply the names in Johansson’s chart, where possible, to varieties as found.
Attitude sketchbook detail – shackles and manillas.
The bracelet is the most common money form in Africa. It served the important monetary functions of portability and wealth display.Variants of this form were accepted virtually everywhere in Africa, with the result that today it is often difficult to know where a particular type originated or was used, and to what extent it was either money or jewelry. My essay African Bracelet Money: Unanswered Questions surveys what we do know about bracelets and manillas. For purposes of this listing I have somewhat arbitrarily sorted out the Calabar rod pieces (perhaps earliest bracelet forms), the manillas (best documented as money), and legbands (differently worn) as separate categories. Detailed Offering of Bracelet Money is under construction.
Made of copper, brass, and iron, the Portuguese, British and French modeled these metal currency “bracelets” after the heavy copper leg bands, wrist and neck bracelets early Portuguese explorers saw in the 1470’s in West Africa. The foreign made “manilla” (manus (hand) in Latin, monilia (necklaces) ), became a hot commodity used for trading in goods, especially for slaves (they weren’t made to wear on the wrist). Each local region had different names for each variety and shape of manilla, with the Africans valuing them differently. The price of slaves in exchange for manillas varied greatly depending on the season, location, and type of manilla being offered. Manillas were the first all-purpose type of currency known in West Africa, wildly more valued than cowrie shells, and used for trade or at market buying goods, for bride price, paying diviners, fines, and for burial. With the end of the slave trade, manilla production in Antwerp and Birmingham slowed down, but was still used for palm-oil trade, with the exchange rate manipulated by the native traders to favor. In 1948 the British began a recall named “Operation Manilla”, in order to swap them out with the British West African currency equal to 3 Pence for most common manilla, and possibly to halt the manipulation in palm-oil trade. Over 32 million pieces were exchanged for Pence and resold as scrap metal. On April 1, 1949, the manilla ceased to be legal tender in British West Africa; it serves as a historic reminder today of the centuries of slave trade and their role in the purchase of so many who made the Middle Passage to the New World. These British manilla range over various centuries 1600’s to early 1800’s. Sizes and ages vary from smaller at approx. 2. 3/8″ by 2. 1/4″, to 2.1/2″ plus by 2″ 5/8 inches. Weights from 1.8 ounces to 3.1 ounces vary with some small being just as heavy as large. I randomly pick but you can request large or small, I will choose the best possible for you. I do have 2 or 3 that will fit a woman’s wrist but no guarantee, these are not ‘bracelets’ though the phrase used to describe them is ‘bracelet’.
They are made something like an anchor according to Olauda Ikwuano, Ojonma was an Igbo Money as described by Olauda that “As we live in a country where nature is prodigal of her favours, our wants are few and easily supplied; of course we have few manufactures. They consist for the most part of calicoes, earthern ware, ornaments, and instruments of war and husbandry. But these make no part of our commerce, the principal articles of which, as I have observed, are provisions. In such a state money is of little use; however we have some small pieces of coin, if I may call them such. They are made something like an anchor; but I do not remember either their value or denomination. We have also markets, at which I have been frequently with my mother. These are sometimes visited by stout mahogany-coloured men from the south west of us: we call them Oye-Eboe, which term signifies red men living at a distance. They generally bring us fire-arms, gunpowder, hats, beads, and dried fish.
The last we esteemed a great rarity, as our waters were only brooks and springs. These articles they barter with us for odoriferous woods and earth, and our salt of wood ashes. They always carry slaves through our land but the strictest account is exacted of their manner of procuring them before they are suffered to pass. Sometimes indeed we sold slaves to them, but they were only prisoners of war, or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or adultery, and some other crimes, which we esteemed heinous. This practice of kidnapping induces me to think, that, notwithstanding all our strictness, their principal business among us was to trepan our people. I remember too they carried great sacks along with them, which not long after I had an opportunity of fatally seeing applied to that infamous purpose…”for more images of ancient/old biafran monies go here
The question now is, was Biafra existing before 1710? Remember before Western World came to West Africa, there was Biafra empire. So, another question is did Cameroon got their independence before 1710 or after 1710? Biafra as an empire then, who occupied a very large area of West Africa land scape including Cameroon and to say now that Biafra was in Cameroon then, not in Nigeria is absolutly rubbish.
The point here is that before 1710 both Cameroon and Nigeria was engulfed by Biafra Empire. It was as a result of Balkanizations of Africa in 1885, when the Map of Africa was spread on the table at Burling which gave rise to these countries we have today in Africa, resulting in depleting the word BIAFRA from the World History Book and World Map.
THEREFORE; TO claim that old maps show Biafra was actually in Cameroon and never part of Nigeria then is nonsense.
Copper was the “red gold” of Africa and had been both mined there and traded across the Sahara by Italian and Arab merchants. The early Portuguese explorers of the 1470s observed that copper bracelets and legbands were the principal money all along the west African coast. They were usually worn by women to display their husband’s wealth. The Portuguese crown contracted with manufacturers in Antwerp and elsewhere to produce crescent rings with flared ends of wearable size which came to be called “manilla,” after the Latin manus (hand) or from monilia, plural of monile (necklace).
While copper bracelets dating prior to 1600 AD which likely had some exchange function continue to be excavated around Jenne-Jeno and related sites, we can only guess today at what prototypes may have inspired the distinctive flare-ended crescent shape. One theory is that Europeans copied a splayed-end raffia cloth bracelet worn by women, another that the well-known Yoruba Mondua with its bulbous ends inspired the manilla shape. Much closer in form to modern manillas, however, is this type, excavated at Igbo-Ukwu. In “Die sog. Geldeifen aus Benin,” Der Primitivgeldsammler #28/1, p.29-35, Rolf Denk summarizes what is known about heavy, faceted pieces with enlarged ends such as this one (25cm across and 4.5cm gauge) from the Museum für Volkerkunde in Vienna, which may predate European manillas.
PORTUGUESE MANILLAS (TACOIS). Late Schetz Type(?), ca. 1524 Brass, slightly flared ends, average 306gms, 103 x 87mm size, and gauge increasing from 12mm at center to 22mm at ends, giving a “flare ratio” of 1.86. Found in ship wrecks, and best studied from a 1524 wreck in Guetaria Bay, Spain.
Records of a contract between the Portuguese government and Erasmus Schetz of Antwerp, who supplied the Portuguese factory at Mina with as many as 150,000 manillas per year, are widely quoted. The standard in 1529 was supposedly about 240m long, about 13m gauge, weighing 600 gram. However, no examples of torque-shaped bracelets in this weight range are known today, and a wreck dated to 1524 carried manillas of typical form but only slightly flared, averaging 306 grams. Do these heavy Schetz manillas even exist today, and if so, what do they look like? Duchateau, Royal Art of Benin, page 15 shows a plaque with a European holding two pieces with barely flared ends whose apparent size could match these specifications, while page 60 illustrates five pieces of conventional form, but without scale. Then, too, the Dutch participated in the trade. Did they get their manillas from nearby Antweerp as well, or did they use something different still?
Manillas from the 1524 wreck recently recovered from the Guetaria Bay off the Basque coast of Spain are described in detail in Der Primitivgeldsammler #26/1 p.9-12 (Manuel Artica). These brass manillas average 306gms, 103 x 87mm size, and gauge increasing from 12mm at center to 22mm at ends, giving a “flare ratio” of 1.86. The shape is thus more similar to the familiar French Popo manilla than the British, but even less pronounced in the flare. There was a falling out between the Portuguese and their supplier Schetz, with 1547 given as the date they switched their contracts to Cristoff Fugger. If correct, the Guetaria Bay finds would thus be Schetz products. The new Fugger pieces were called tacoais with different standards, of 284gm (Mina) and 241gm (Guinea), for the different trading areas.
BRITISH MANILLAS Birmingham
Four types of manillas lighter than the Guetaria Bay specimens are known. Their average weights match the Fuggers’ Guinea specifications with two specimens (281, 294 grams) in the Mina range. Possibly earliest is the least flared, #937 with a modest 1.96 flare ratio and average weight of 241gm. Opitz p.213 upper left is likely this type. Other types with visibly greater end flares (#939-941) range from 226 to 294 grams, though to date few specimens have been studied. The earliest British manillas have flare ratios approaching 3.0. The Portuguese called the Fugger manillas tacois. An African name for the more flared Guinea pieces, at least, is Mkporo. As the manilla shrank in size over the centuries, the Mkporo were promoted from everyday trade use to burial money and a standard of wealth.
Although Gold was the primary and abiding merchandise sought by the Portuguese, by the early 16th century they were participating in the slave trade for bearers to carry manillas to Africa’s interior, and gradually Manillas became the principal money of this trade. By the end of the 1500s the Portuguese had been shouldered aside by the British, French, and Dutch, all of whom had labor-intensive plantations in the West Indies, and later by the Americans whose southern states were tied to a cotton economy . A typical voyage took manillas and utilitarian brass objects such as pans and basins to West Africa, then slaves to America, and cotton back to the mills of Europe.
FRENCH (POPO) MANILLA Nantes
Early in the 18th century Bristol, and then Birmingham, became the most significant European brass manufacturing city. It is likely that most types of brass manillas were made there, including the “middle period” Nkobnkob-Onoudu whose weight apparently decreased over time, and the still lighter “late period” types such as Okpoho and those salvaged from the Duoro wreck of 1843. Among the late period types, specimen weights overlap type distinctions suggesting contemporary manufacture rather than a progression of types. The Popos, whose weight distribution places them at the transition point between Nkobnkob and Onoudu, were also made in Nantes, France, and possibly Birmingham as well. They are wider than the Birmingham types and have a gradual, rather than sudden, flare to the ends.
The Africans of each region had names for each variety of manilla, probably varying locally. They valued them differently, and were notoriously particular about the types they would accept. The price of a slave, expressed in manillas, varied considerably according to time, place, and the specific type of manilla offered. Internally, manillas were the first true general-purpose currency known in west Africa, being used for ordinary market purchases, bride price, payment of fines, compensation of diviners, and for the needs of the next world, as burial money. Cowrie shells, imported from Melanesia and valued at a small fraction of a manilla, were used for small purchases. In regions outside coastal west Africa and the Niger river a variety of other currencies, such as bracelets of more complex native design, iron units often derived from tools, copper rods, themselves often bent into bracelets, and the well-known Handa (Katanga cross) all served as special-purpose monies.
AFRICAN-MADE TRADE MANILLAS
As the slave trade wound down in the 19th century so did manilla production, which was already becoming unprofitable. By the 1890s their use in the export economy centered around the palm-oil trade. Although manillas were legal tender, they floated against British and French West African currencies and the palm-oil trading companies manipulated their value to advantage during the market season. Probably for this reason the British undertook a major recall dubbed “operation manilla” in 1948 to replace them with British West African currency at a rate of 3 Pence for the commonest type. The campaign was largely successful and over 32 million pieces were bought up and resold as scrap. The manilla, a lingering reminder of the slave trade, ceased to be legal tender in British West Africa on April 1, 1949.
An unanswered question is whether “manillas” were made in Africa by native smiths during the period when European types were imported. It is hard to believe that no such attempts were made. Offered for sale below and linked to scans are obvious counterfeits, but such pieces made of lead, or underweight pieces in impure brass are rather uncommon and it is unclear where they were made. More interesting is the group of horseshoe-shaped pieces as well as gleanings from several years’ worth of poring over Africa Traders’ stocks, looking for pieces with flared ends within the known manilla weight range. Are they proto-manillas, early European manillas, or African-made pieces during the period of European importation which – deliberately or coincidentally – resemble the European type? All are copper, rough with verdigris indicating some age.
Many other things are called manillas by authors and collectors. Commonly available are many distinctive regional bracelet forms of copper, brass, nickel, and iron made in Africa in the 19th-20th centuries with varying monetary functions and ranges of use. Legbands, collars, and coiled forms made of Calabar rod. Those with flared ends are often called manillas. Other flare-end forms of large size, called “King” and “Queen” manillas, are ceremonial rather than trade manillas, and from Zaire come large copper crescents in several distinctive shapes, sometimes including flared ends, which are likely forms of bullion storage (like the Katanga cross).
A Katanga cross, also called a handa, is a cast copper cross which was once used as a form of currency in parts of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For more depth on bracelet monies in general see InfoSheet 62. There is a remarkable lack of academic interest in the tangible objects of the slave trade and African monies in general. Artica’s Der Primitivgeldsammler bibliography references a to-be-published article in “Gaceta Numismatica” (Barcelona) by A. Benito and M. Ibanez. “Copper to Africa: Evidence for the international trade in metal with Africa” by P. T. Craddock and D. R.. Hook, p. 181-193 of British Museum Occasional Paper 109 (1995), notes that the British Museum is beginning to keep samples of trade goods found on dateable wrecks, but so far has manillas only from the Duoro of 1843, and The Charles of 1684. The Duoro pieces are well known, and I am trying to get a picture of the earlier type. Another well-researched article, which I have yet to digest, is R. L.. Leonard’s “Manillas – Money of West Africa” published by the Chicago Coin Club in 1998. (source: Coins.com)
Benin bronze: Foreign trader surrounded by manillas. Photo: Ursula Kampmann.
African Ceremonial Manilas West Africa, large Mondua copper manilla
Manillas, alloyed copper in the shape of a bangle, are among the oldest forms of African gold ingots. Our piece is a Mondua manilla, a copper ring ingot from the province of Sokoto in Nigeria.
The first European manillas were transported by Portuguese boats to Africa, where traders exchanged them mainly for slaves and African pepper. The first written sources on this actually exist from the 14th/15th centuries. We know from one boat, which put into Benin in 1515 and had onloaded 13,000 manillas. No less interesting is the fact that in 1548 the agent of the king of Portugal entered into a contract for the delivery of brass manillas according to the instructions drawn up with the Fugger company.
We have, mainly from the kingdom of Benin, informative sources on how the exchange of goods between the Portuguese and the king’s house was handled. The trade was a monopoly of the Oba, the ruler. The king decided to whom the market was to be opened and granted to deserving members of the king’s house the privilege of trading with the Europeans. According to the king’s instructions the copper that was bought was mostly turned into splendid works of art, which we know nowadays as Benin bronzes.
As so often happens, the competition among the importers undermined the value of the imported goods. It came to a kind of inflation: the price of a slave rose from 12 to 15 manillas at the beginning of the 16th century in 1517.
At the beginning of the 18th century this currency had outstripped itself in Benin. Nobody there was interested in it any longer, so that a whole load of manillas had to be sent away as unsaleable. (source: Coins Weekly)
Excerpts from: Where Have All the Indians Gone? Native American Eastern Seaboard Dispersal, Genealogy and DNA in Relation to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony of Roanoke.
The following families are found in the very early records, therein identified as Indian and also bearing the surnames of colonists. The surnames bolded appear very early in records along the coastline associated with various coastal tribes, including the Hatteras, Mattamuskeet, Chowan and others. Non-bolded names are also proven Native, but may be later among the Lumbee in Robeson and neighboring counties. Payne, while a good candidate for being a Lost Colonist family has never been found in a record indicating they were Native. However, recent DNA matches between the Payne and Berry family are undergoing additional genealogical scrutiny and DNA testing.
Allen
Bennett
Berry
Brooks
Brown
Chapman
Chavis, Chavous, Cheven on roster
Coleman
Cooper
Gibbs
Harris
Hewett
Johnson
Jones
Lucas
Martin
Pierce
Scott
Smith
Of course, there is no guarantee that the above group would retain both their surname and the DNA originally associated with that surname particularly in a matrilineal culture, but to date, these are the only names that are both on the colonist list and have proven Native heritage82. Of course, the other half of this equation is finding the correct English (or Welsh or Irish or Scottish) families to test to see if the DNA matches, and that is another aspect of the Lost Colony project altogether.
The Afrikan Slave Rebellion of 1842 November inside Cherokee Nation – Haki Kweli Shakur
82 Records extracted from Roberta Estes’ data base entitled “Families of Interest Index” containing over 6500 records
——————————————————————–
The Lost Colony Genealogy and DNA Research Group project has focused in five areas.
1. The first focus area is to narrow the search to a group of surnames that are the most promising. Those surnames are derived from two sources previously discussed in this paper. The first group is the surnames which are colonist surnames and proven to be Native. The second group is the list of Outer Banks and coastal surnames. Two additional surnames are Payne and Dare. The combined list is as follows:
Allen
Bennett
Berry
Barbour
Beasley
Blount
Brooks
Brown
Buck
Carawan, Carroon, Carrow
Chapman
Chavis, Chavous, Cheven
Coleman
Cooper
Dare
Elks
Gibbs
Gurganus
Harris
Hewett
Johnson
Jones
59
Locklear
Lowrey, Lowry
Lucas
Martin
Pierce
Scott
Smith
Squires
Payne
Underscored surnames above are surnames that are proven to be native at an early date in the Outer Banks coastal NC area
Surnames without an underscore are also proven native (except for Payne and Dare), but are proven native at a later date, typically in conjunction with the Lumbee
Surnames in bold are lost colonist surnames
Given the analysis, the most promising surnames for research and DNA testing are those that are both proven to be Native in the early records in the Outer Banks areas and who are also colonist surnames. This group consists of Allen, Bennett, Berry, Gibbs, Harris, Hewett, Jones, Scott and Smith.
2. The second focus area is to research the appropriate North Carolina county and other early records for all references to the above surnames.
3. The third focus area is to begin English research on the colonist surnames, shown in bold above. Fortunately the Lost Colony project has recently obtained a liaison in England who is facilitating limited research.
4. The fourth focus area is to continue to work with surname administrators to attract appropriate participants and to work with those participants on their genealogy.
5. The fifth focus area is to collect family histories of candidate families from Eastern North Carolina working with local genealogy groups and individual families. There is still a great deal to be learned.
Each year the Lost Colony DNA Project‟s research goals are reevaluated and efforts are refocused appropriately.
Source:
Where Have All the Indians Gone? Native American Eastern Seaboard Dispersal, Genealogy and DNA in Relation to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony of Roanoke.
Exclusive Interview: Haki Shakur Educates the People About The New Afrikan Independence Movement
by Huey X
Richmond, Virgina native, Haki Shakur, has been on mission to spread awareness about what it means to be a New Afrikan and what better to state to start the movement in than Virgina. New Afrikans consider it to be part of the Black Belt South. During slavery, most Black people lived there then migrated away and are now returning back after the migration period from the racist south.
Shakur is an activist, historian and most importantly a New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalist who believes in The Land, Independence and Socialism for New Afrikan Black people in America. Much of his work is done with political prisoners with The Jericho Movement, August Third Collective, Malcom X Grassroots Movement and George Jackson University.
I recently interviewed Mr. Haki Shakur where he discussed more about this New Afrikan Movement. Check it out below:
Growing up and still to this day who are you role models? How did they impact your life?
First I would have to say my grand parents, my mother and father and my brother because they have always been examples of hardworking New Afrikan Working Class Citizens. They have impacted me in many ways such as not to give up on something you’re working hard for. Other role models would be Mutulu Shakur and all my elders of the Black Panther Party, BLA, and New Afrikan Independence Movement that came before me. Their impact on me has been tremendous because of their sacrifices, wisdom and struggles here inside the United States for Social, Political and Economic Justice and Freedom for our people, especially our political prisoners who have done over 30 to 50 years for us to enjoy this little bit of what some would call living.
At what age did you know you had a passion for social justice?
I would say my passion for social justice came in my mid-twenties. I’ve always had passion of reading and always wanting to know our history to overstand what was going on with our people and why our people were going through so much oppression, poverty, incarceration and death just to be recognized as human beings here in the United States.
I began increasing my studies in Revolutionary Science to analyze everything from that perspective to overstand our reality as New Afrikan People and a Black colony working U.S. boarders that’s not truly free, but second class citizens. It gave me an adrenaline rush to become a part of the solution and jump in this protracted struggle. I’ve always wanted to be one of those Black men that could be a baton in this generational relay marathon to end our National Oppression and free our people!
What’s your involvement and/or association with Jackson State University?
I have no involvements with Jackson State University or Association.
How did you first get involved in the activism field? Why?
I first got involved in activism based solely on the corrupt and brutal mass incarceration of our people by the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) when the Jericho Movementsprung in the late 1990s started by Safiya Bukhari (R.I.P.) former Black Panther/BLA member/organizer and current New Afrikan Political Prisoner Prisoner Jalil Muntaqimand other organizations, such as Malcolm X Grassroots and NAPO that came before them both.
I started to write political prisoners and prisoners of war so a lot of guidance came from them. They pointed me in the right direction and gave me advice on things to do and how to organize and get involved in my local community and nationwide community to help to try to bring awareness to mass incarceration! When the Clinton’s signed that crime bill in the 1990s, the genocide process of re-enslavement of our people increased at a rapid rate. Seeing family members and friends getting incarcerated and receiving illegal, long-term sentences, sparked me to not be quiet and sit on the sideline.
What kind of impact do you believe your teachings and movement will do for the culture?
I believe my teachings and also at the same time trying to get more of our people to learn about The New Afrikan Independence Movement/ Republic of New Afrika, will impact our culture tremendously because we believe our people need to know the other side of the struggle; the raw and uncut side of our reality which is Resistance, Self Determination and flat out Independence!
Many of our people are not aware of that side of the struggle. The struggle Omowale Malcolm X sacrificed his life for, which is The Human Rights Struggle. The Struggle to Determine and take Control of our own lives and destiny to exist as a Nation of People, so that’s what I want the impact of my teachings to have on our people, youth and future generations to come.
What are some of our race’s and cultures biggest problems and issues we’re constantly facing?
I would say some of our biggest problems we face as a people is ignorance, poverty, dyseducation (Diseased Education), dysfunctional family units, male and female toxic relationships, drugs, psychological mind-washing by certain rap music and celebrities, America dependency, external police terrorism and internal community contradictions (e.g Rape, Pedophilia, Sexism, Women oppression and Domestic Abuse and Violence). Those are the major problems we must continue to struggle to fix and work on.
What are some solutions that you have in mind for our people/culture in American society?
Some solutions I have in mind is first we must get our people proper education, meaning political education so they can overstand their national oppression. You have to overstand it to fix it; it’s this thing we call and use which is theory and practice once you get politically educated you can now create a Theory & Line that you implement in your community, amongst organizations or amongst the people in your community creating solutions then you put that theory and line into action a.k.a. practice, meaning developing political and social programs in your community and work those programs to create liberated zones in your community to help combat our internal contradictions.
As I mentioned earlier, we need New Afrikan Outreach Prisoner Programs. We Need Responder Programs like Medical and Natural disaster programs. We need relationship programs, drugs and violence programs. We need New Afrikan Community Security Protocol Programs to protect our communities from external and internal issues. Most importantly, we have to deal with the abuse of our women and children through rape, molestation and pedophilia. We have to deal with mental health, so I would like to come up with solutions on that front as well. We got a lot of work to do. Our people have to get on one accord and get it done, no excuses, it starts with us only. We the people, New Afrikans in our community can eliminate these contradictions!
Where and how can the people learn more of your teachings and beliefs?
What great advice and words of wisdom can you offer the millennials?
My words of advice and wisdom to millennials is to self-educate yourself at all times. Read, study and struggle, become self sufficient and self determined to become a idealist. We need more thinkers. We don’t need more ball players or musicians or actors. We need more inventors, entrepreneurs, teachers, doctors, workers, scientist, industrialist. And most importantly, we need more Farmers/Agriculturalist. Grow your own food and be dependent on self and help our people! Free The Land!
In 1866, Creek Treaty Abolishing Slavery Was Covered in National Press
After the Civil War ended a series of treaties were signed with the Five Civilized Tribes to officially end slavery in Indian Territory. A treaty was signed with each tribe, and the treaties are referred to as the “Treaty of 1866.”
Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but there was much resistance in Indian Territory to end the practice of black chattel slavery. As a result, the Indian slave holding tribes were each required to sign a treaty abolishing slavery. There were also expectations that the formerly enslaved people would be adopted into their respective tribes.
One can also see that there were other parts of the treaty that pertained to railroad passage rights which would make eventual westward expansion easier in future years. Additional stipulations in each treaty involved the establishment of a judicial system and references are made to the unfolding of such a system in each tribe.
In some parts of the country, signing the treaty made national press. The article above was taken from the Worcester Evening Gazette in Worcester Massachusetts from March 1866.
Masthead of Worcester Evening Gazette, Worcester MA
Those researching Indian Territory history will benefit from studying the stipulations of the treaty of each of the Five Tribes.
The Cherokee Freedmen Controversy was a political and tribal dispute between the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and descendants of the Cherokee Freedmenregarding the issue of tribal membership. The controversy had resulted in several legal proceedings between the two parties from the late 20th century to August 2017.
During the antebellum period, the Cherokee and other Southeast Native American nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes held African-American slaves as workers and property. After the American Civil War, the Cherokee Freedmen were emancipated and allowed to become citizens of the Cherokee Nation in accordance with a reconstruction treaty made with the United States in 1866. In the early 1980s, the Cherokee Nation administration amended citizenship rules to require direct descent from an ancestor listed on the “Cherokee By Blood” section of the Dawes Rolls. The change stripped descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen of citizenship and voting rights unless they satisfied this new criterion.
On March 7, 2006, the Cherokee Supreme Court ruled that the membership change was unconstitutional and that the Freedmen descendents were entitled to enroll in the Cherokee Nation. A special election, held on March 3, 2007, resulted in passage of a constitutional amendment that excluded the Cherokee Freedmen descendants from membership unless they satisfied the “Cherokee by blood” requirement.[1] The Cherokee Nation District Court voided the 2007 amendment on January 14, 2011, but this decision was overturned by a 4-1 ruling in Cherokee Nation Supreme Court on August 22, 2011. The ruling also excluded the Cherokee Freedmen descendants from voting in the special run-off election for Principal Chief. In response, the Department of Housing and Urban Development froze $33 million in funds and the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs wrote a letter objecting to the ruling. Afterward, the Cherokee Nation, Freedmen descendants, and the U.S. government reached an agreement in federal court to allow the Freedmen descendants to vote in the special election.
Through several legal proceedings in United States and Cherokee Nation courts, the Freedmen descendants conducted litigation to regain their treaty rights and recognition as Cherokee Nation members.[2] While the Cherokee Nation filed a complaint in federal court in early 2012, Freedmen descendants and the United States Department of the Interiorfiled separate counterclaims on July 2, 2012.[3][4] The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld tribal sovereignty, but stated that the cases had to be combined due to the same parties being involved. On May 5, 2014 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, oral arguments were made in the first hearing on the merits of the case. On August 30, 2017, the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Freedmen descendants and the U.S. Department of the Interior, granting the Freedmen descendants full rights to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation has accepted this decision, effectively ending the dispute.
The Afrikan Slave Rebellion of November 15 1842 Against The Cherokee Nation, Afrikans in America are Afrikan – Haki Kweli Shakur
Cherokee and Indians who sided with The Confederacy
DID YOU KNOW THAT the Cherokee Nation Allied Themselves With the Confederate States of America in 1861.
DID YOU KNOW THAT the Cherokee Nation Allied Themselves With the Confederate States of America in 1861.
Many have no doubt heard of the valor of the Cherokee warriors under the command of Brigadier General Stand Watie in the West and of Thomas’ famous North Carolina Legion in the East during the War for Southern Independence from 1861 to 1865. But why did the Cherokees and their brethren, the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws determine to make common cause with the Confederate South against the Northern Union? To know their reasons is very instructive as to the issues underlying that tragic war. Most Americans have been propagandized rather than educated in the causes of the war, all this to justify the perpetrators and victors. Considering the Cherokee view uncovers much truth buried by decades of politically correct propaganda and allows a broader and truer perspective.
On August 21, 1861, the Cherokee Nation by a General Convention at Tahlequah (in Oklahoma) declared its common cause with the Confederate States against the Northern Union. A treaty was concluded on October 7th between the Confederate States and the Cherokee Nation, and on October 9th, John Ross, the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation called into session the Cherokee National Committee and National Council to approve and implement that treaty and a future course of action.
The Cherokees had at first considerable consternation over the growing conflict and desired to remain neutral. They had much common economy and contact with their Confederate neighbors, but their treaties were with the government of the United States.
The Northern conduct of the war against their neighbors, strong repression of Northern political dissent, and the roughshod trampling of the U. S Constitution under the new regime and political powers in Washington soon changed their thinking.
The Cherokee were perhaps the best educated and literate of the American Indian Tribes. They were also among the most Christian. Learning and wisdom were highly esteemed. They revered the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as particularly important guarantors of their rights and freedoms. It is not surprising then that on October 28, 1861, the National Council issued a Declaration by the People of the Cherokee Nation of the Causes Which Have Impelled them to Unite Their Fortunes With Those of the Confederate States of America.
The introductory words of this declaration strongly resembled the 1776 Declaration of Independence:
“When circumstances beyond their control compel one people to sever the ties which have long existed between them and another state or confederacy, and to contract new alliances and establish new relations for the security of their rights and liberties, it is fit that they should publicly declare the reasons by which their action is justified.”
In the next paragraphs of their declaration the Cherokee Council noted their faithful adherence to their treaties with the United States in the past and how they had faithfully attempted neutrality until the present. But the seventh paragraph begins to delineate their alarm with Northern aggression and sympathy with the South:
“But Providence rules the destinies of nations, and events, by inexorable necessity, overrule human resolutions.” Comparing the relatively limited objectives and defensive nature of the Southern cause in contrast to the aggressive actions of the North they remarked of the Confederate States:
“Disclaiming any intention to invade the Northern States, they sought only to repel the invaders from their own soil and to secure the right of governing themselves. They claimed only the privilege asserted in the Declaration of American Independence, and on which the right of Northern States themselves to self-government is formed, and altering their form of government when it became no longer tolerable and establishing new forms for the security of their liberties.”
The next paragraph noted the orderly and democratic process by which each of the Confederate States seceded. This was without violence or coercion and nowhere were liberties abridged or civilian courts and authorities made subordinate to the military. Also noted was the growing unity and success of the South against Northern aggression. The following or ninth paragraph contrasts this with ruthless and totalitarian trends in the North:
“But in the Northern States the Cherokee people saw with alarm a violated constitution, all civil liberty put in peril, and all rules of civilized warfare and the dictates of common humanity and decency unhesitatingly disregarded. In the states which still adhered to the Union a military despotism had displaced civilian power and the laws became silent with arms. Free speech and almost free thought became a crime. The right of habeas corpus, guaranteed by the constitution, disappeared at the nod of a Secretary of State or a general of the lowest grade. The mandate of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was at naught by the military power and this outrage on common right approved by a President sworn to support the constitution. War on the largest scale was waged, and the immense bodies of troops called into the field in the absence of any warranting it under the pretense of suppressing unlawful combination of men.” The tenth paragraph continues the indictment of the Northern political party in power and the conduct of the Union Armies:
“The humanities of war, which even barbarians respect, were no longer thought worthy to be observed. Foreign mercenaries and the scum of the cities and the inmates of prisons were enlisted and organized into brigades and sent into Southern States to aid in subjugating a people struggling for freedom, to burn, to plunder, and to commit the basest of outrages on the women; while the heels of armed tyranny trod upon the necks of Maryland and Missouri, and men of the highest character and position were incarcerated upon suspicion without process of law, in jails, forts, and prison ships, and even women were imprisoned by the arbitrary order of a President and Cabinet Ministers; while the press ceased to be free, and the publication of newspapers was suspended and their issues seized and destroyed; the officers and men taken prisoners in the battles were allowed to remain in captivity by the refusal of the Government to consent to an exchange of prisoners; as they had left their dead on more than one field of battle that had witnessed their defeat, to be buried and their wounded to be cared for by southern hands.”
The eleventh paragraph of the Cherokee declaration is a fairly concise summary of their grievances against the political powers now presiding over a new U. S. Government:
“Whatever causes the Cherokee people may have had in the past to complain of some of the southern states, they cannot but feel that their interests and destiny are inseparably connected to those of the south. The war now waging is a war of Northern cupidity and fanaticism against the institution of African servitude; against the commercial freedom of the south, and against the political freedom of the states, and its objects are to annihilate the sovereignty of those states and utterly change the nature of the general government.”
The Cherokees felt they had been faithful and loyal to their treaties with the United States, but now perceived that the relationship was not reciprocal and that their very existence as a people was threatened. They had also witnessed the recent exploitation of the properties and rights of Indian tribes in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon, and feared that they, too, might soon become victims of Northern rapacity. Therefore, they were compelled to abrogate those treaties in defense of their people, lands, and rights. They felt the Union had already made war on them by their actions.
Finally, appealing to their inalienable right to self-defense and self-determination as a free people, they concluded their declaration with the following words:
“Obeying the dictates of prudence and providing for the general safety and welfare, confident of the rectitude of their intentions and true to their obligations to duty and honor, they accept the issue thus forced upon them, unite their fortunes now and forever with the Confederate States, and take up arms for the common cause, and with entire confidence of the justice of that cause and with a firm reliance upon Divine Providence, will resolutely abide the consequences.
The Cherokees were true to their words. The last shot fired in the war east of the Mississippi was May 6, 1865. This was in an engagement at White Sulphur Springs, near Waynesville, North Carolina, of part of Thomas’ Legion against Kirk’s infamous Union raiders that had wreaked a murderous terrorism and destruction on the civilian population of Western North Carolina. Col. William H. Thomas’ Legion was originally predominantly Cherokee, but had also accrued a large number of North Carolina mountain men. On June 23, 1865, in what was the last land battle of the war, Confederate Brigadier General and Cherokee Chief, Stand Watie, finally surrendered his predominantly Cherokee, Oklahoma Indian force to the Union.
The issues as the Cherokees saw them were 1) self-defense against Northern aggression, both for themselves and their fellow Confederates, 2) the right of self-determination by a free people, 3) protection of their heritage, 4) preservation of their political rights under a constitutional government of law 5) a strong desire to retain the principles of limited government and decentralized power guaranteed by the Constitution, 6) protection of their economic rights and welfare, 7) dismay at the despotism of the party and leaders now in command of the U. S. Government, 8) dismay at the ruthless disregard of commonly accepted rules of warfare by the Union, especially their treatment of civilians and non-combatants, 9) a fear of economic exploitation by corrupt politicians and their supporters based on observed past experience, and 10) alarm at the self-righteous and extreme, punitive, and vengeful pronouncements on the slavery issue voiced by the radical abolitionists and supported by many Northern politicians, journalists, social, and religious (mostly Unitarian) leaders. It should be noted here that some of the Cherokees owned slaves, but the practice was not extensive.
The Cherokee Declaration of October 1861 uncovers a far more complex set of “Civil War” issues than most Americans have been taught. Rediscovered truth is not always welcome. Indeed some of the issues here are so distressing that the general academic, media, and public reaction is to rebury them or shout them down as politically incorrect.
The notion that slavery was the only real or even principal cause of the war is very politically correct and widely held, but historically ignorant. It has served, however, as a convenient ex post facto justification for the war and its conduct. Slavery was an issue, and it was related to many other issues, but it was by no means the only issue, or even the most important underlying issue. It was not even an issue in the way most people think of it. Only about 25% of Southern households owned slaves. For most people, North and South, the slavery issue was not so much whether to keep it or not, but how to phase it out without causing economic and social disruption and disaster. Unfortunately the Southern and Cherokee fear of the radical abolitionists turned out to be well founded.
After the Reconstruction Act was passed in 1867 the radical abolitionists and radical Republicans were able to issue in a shameful era of politically punitive and economically exploitive oppression in the South, the results of which lasted many years, and even today are not yet completely erased.
The Cherokee were and are a remarkable people who have impacted the American heritage far beyond their numbers. We can be especially grateful that they made a well thought out and articulate declaration for supporting and joining the Confederate cause in 1861.
The largest force in Indian Territory was commanded by Confederate Brig.Gen. Stand Watie, who was also a chief of the Cherokee Nation. Dedicated to the Confederate cause and unwilling to admit defeat, he kept his troops in the field for nearly a month after Lt. Gen.E.Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans- Mississippi May 26. Finally accepting the futility of continued resistance, on June 23 Watie rode into Doaksville near Fort Towson in Indian Territory and surrender his battalion of Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Osage Indians to Lt.Col.Asa C.Matthews, appointed a few weeks earlier to negotiate a peace with the Indians. Watie was the last Confederate general officer to surrender his command.
Certainly the most famous American Indian of the War of Northern Aggression and the first American Indian to ever earn the rank of a general officer was Stand Watie. On the wild frontier of the Trans-Mississippi west he earned a reputation as one of the most daring and courageous warriors to ever ride a horse. He was born on December 12, 1806 near Rome, Georgia to David Uwatie and Susanna Reese who was of mixed Cherokee and European blood. He was named Isaac S. Watie or Degataga which can be translated as “standing together as one” or “stand firm” which in either event led to him being known as Stand Watie. Educated by missionaries and instilled with a sense of his southern as well as Indian heritage, he and his brother Buck Watie, along with Major Ridge and John Ridge were in favor of moving the Cherokee to Oklahoma but were opposed in this by their Chief John Ross though both sides knew that their position in Georgia was unsustainable. Ultimately the Cherokees were moved to Oklahoma in 1838, but the feud between the Ross and Ridge factions and of the two Ridge brothers and two Watie brothers Stand was the only one not assassinated by Ross partisans.
Stand Watie became a prominent man in the Indian Territory (as Oklahoma was called) where he established a flourishing plantation on the Spavinaw Creek (numerous Native American elites were slave owners) and from 1845 to 1861 he served on the Cherokee Council. When the War Between the States commenced in 1861 the Indian tribes were somewhat divided. Some feared that a failure to support the Union would lead to the revocation of the treaties they had signed with the federal government while others were quick to take up arms against the government which had already broken numerous treaties and seemed to regard them as enemies anyway. Questions of states’ rights and other political controversies also existed, though not to the same degree since the Indian Territory was not a state and there were relatively few slaves west of the Mississippi.
Ultimately, most of the Cherokees favored the Confederacy, but fear of having their treaties with the Union nullified led Chief John Ross to try to remain neutral in the conflict. For Stand Watie, however, there could be no neutrality and he left no doubt about his sympathy being with the Confederate States. As more Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek Indians expressed their desire to ally with the Confederacy, Chief John Ross altered his position and the Cherokee Council voted for an alliance with the Confederate States of America. Stand Watie had pushed for this development and had constantly urged his countrymen to join with the Confederacy in fighting their common enemy; the United States government. As soon as the choice was official Stand Watie organized the First Cherokee Mounted Rifles of which he was commissioned colonel in October of 1861. He was on his way to becoming the most legendary American Indian of the war.
With his hard fighting Cherokee cavalry Stand Watie battled Union incursions into the Oklahoma territory was well as Creek and Seminole Indians who had sided with the United States. His first major engagement and rise to notoriety came at the battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas where the Confederate Army of the West attempted an attack on Union forces that would allow them back into southern Missouri. The battle was a southern defeat, but Stand Watie and his men acquitted themselves bravely, charging Union artillery and fighting hard to cover the retreat of Confederate forces. On the home front, however, there was to be no unity to back up the heroic actions of Stand Watie and his men. Many of the Indians dropped their support of the Confederacy at the first indication that the north might win, nonetheless, others remained committed to the cause they endorsed and in 1862 the Confederate sympathizers or Southern Cherokee elected Stand Watie their chief. In 1863 pro-Union Cherokees captured the tribal council headquarters at Tahlequah which Watie and his men later burned.
Stand Watie led his cavalry in constant raids against Union forces, tying down thousands of federal troops that could have been employed elsewhere. He was so successful that General Samuel B. Maxey promoted him to brigadier general, the first American Indian to achieve that rank, and gave him command of a brigade of two regiments of mounted rifles, three Cherokee, Seminole and Osage infantry battalions based just south of the Canadian River. General Watie led these men in daring attacks all across Oklahoma and into parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas and Texas. No brigade west of the Mississippi fought more battles that General Stand Watie and his Indians. All Confederate units were undersupplied but the situation was even worse on the western frontier and Watie had to sustain his men almost totally off of captured Union supplies. One raid saw the capture of a federal supply train loaded down with 16,000 pounds of bacon which his troops put to good use. On another occasion General Watie was wearing a captured Union overcoat that was much too large for him. As he sat outside his tent with his head down one of his soldiers tried to make off with the prize only to be startled when Watie shouted, “Hold on! There’s a man in this coat!”
Despite all of the efforts of the vastly more numerous Union forces, they could never catch or defeat General Watie and his men and his harassment continued until the end of the war. Ultimately, Stand Watie fought on longer than any other Confederate general of the war. It was not until June 23, 1865 that he signed a cease-fire agreement with Union forces at Fort Towson in the Choctaw area of Oklahoma, bringing his troops in to lay down their arms worn and weary but never defeated. After the war, Stand Watie continued to work on behalf of his people as Chief of the Southern Cherokee and negotiated the 1866 Cherokee Reconstruction Treaty which aimed at helping the Indian Territory recover from the devastation of the war. He died in 1871 and is buried in Polson Cemetery, Oklahoma. Among all of the accounts of the Civil War out west the name of General Stand Watie will always be remembered for his boldness, courage and dogged determination which knew no equal in the territory.
First, and and always, peace and love to everyone.
I sat down with my chronic care doctor and we came to an agreement on future options concerning my feet. I’m scheduled for the first phase of the options that my chronic care doctor and I had agreed to. In fact, it should be this Thursday (tomorrow).
Kamau
From Jericho National Chair Jihad Abdulmumit
Dear Comrades,
As-salaamu ‘alaykum.
Please reference the message from Kamau’s daughter. It appears that Kamau will be receiving additional attention and options besides amputation of his foot. Please hold off on any more calls and letters to the prisons, as now that may defeat the purpose.
I have spoken directly to Ksisay and Kamau’s attorney.
Jericho will remain vigilant and ready to respond to what comes next.
It’s a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West. This is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus, and we’ll never be caught up in intellectual masturbation on the question of Black Power. That’s the function of the people who are advertisers but call themselves reporters. Incidentally, for my friends and members of the press, my self-appointed white critics, I was reading Mr. Bernard Shaw two days ago, and I came across a very important quote that I think is most apropos to you. He says, “All criticism is an autobiography.” Dig yourself. Ok.
The philosophers Camus and Sartre raise the question of whether or not a man can condemn himself. The black existentialist philosopher who is pragmatic, Frantz Fanon, answered the question. He said that man could not. Camus and Sartre don’t answer the question. We in SNCC tend to agree with Fanon–a man cannot condemn himself. If he did, he would then have to inflict punishment upon himself. An example is the Nazis. Any of the Nazi prisoners who, after he was caught and incarcerated, admitted that he committed crimes, that he killed all the many people he killed, had to commit suicide. The only ones able to stay alive were the ones who never admitted that they committed a crime against people–that is, the ones who rationalized that Jews were not human beings and deserved to be killed, or that they were only following orders. There’s another, more recent example provided by the officials and the population–the white population — of Neshoba County, Mississippi (that’s where Philadelphia is). They could not condemn Sheriff Rainey, his deputies, and the other fourteen men who killed three human beings. They could not because they elected Mr. Rainey to do precisely what he did; and condemning him would be condemning themselves.
Original Black Panther Parties – Haki Kweli Shakur
In a much larger view, SNCC says that white America cannot condemn herself for her criminal acts against black America. So black people have done it–you stand condemned. The institutions that function in this country are clearly racist; they’re built upon racism. The questions to be dealt with then are: how can black people inside this country move? How can white people who say they’re not part of those institutions begin to move? And how then do we begin to clear away the obstacles that we have in this society, to make us live like human beings?
Several people have been upset because we’ve said that integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks, and that in fact it was an insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. In the past six years or so, this country has been feeding us a “thalidomide drug of integration,” and some negroes have been walking down a dream street talking about sitting next to white people. That does not begin to solve the problem. We didn’t go to Mississippi to sit next to Ross Barnett (former governor of Mississippi), we did not go to sit next to Jim Clark (sheriff of Selma, Alabama), we went to get them out of our way. People ought to understand that; we were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. In order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves blacks after they’re born. The only thing white people can do is stop denying black people their freedom.
I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being. Therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people don’t know that. Every time I tried to go into a public place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, “He’s a human being; don’t stop him.” That bill was for the white man, not for me. I knew I could vote all the time and that it wasn’t a privilege but my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill to tell white people, “When a black man comes to vote, don’t bother him.” That bill was for white people. I know I can live anyplace I want to live. It is white people across this country who are incapable of allowing me to live where I want. You need a civil rights bill, not me. The failure of the civil rights bill isn’t because of Black Power or because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities. That failure is due to the white’s incapacity to deal with their own problems inside their own communities. And so in a sense we must ask, How is it that black people move? And what do we do? But the question in a much greater sense is, How can white people who are the majority, and who are responsible for making democracy work, make it work? They have never made democracy work, be it inside the United States, Vietnam, South Africa, the Philippines, South America, Puerto Rico, or wherever America has been. We not only condemn the country for what it has done internally, but we must condemn it for what it does externally. We see this country trying to rule the world, and someone must stand up and start articulating that this country is not God, and that it cannot rule the world.
Stokely Carmichael- Black Power Speech 1966
The white supremacist attitude, which you have either consciously or subconsciously, is running rampant through society today. For example, missionaries were sent to Africa with the attitude that blacks were automatically inferior. As a matter of fact, the first act the missionaries did when they got to Africa was to make us cover up our bodies, because they said it got them excited. We couldn’t go bare-breasted any more because they got excited! When the missionaries came to civilize us because we were uncivilized, to educate us because we were uneducated, and to give us some literate studies because we were illiterate, they charged a price. The missionaries came with the Bible, and we had the land: When they left, they had the land, and we still have the Bible. That’s been the rationalization for Western civilization as it moves across the world–stealing, plundering, and raping everybody in its path. Their one rationalization is that the rest of the world is uncivilized and they are in fact civilized.
But the West is un-civ-i-lized. And that still runs on today, you see, because now we have “modern-day missionaries,” and they come into our ghettos–they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society. They don’t want to face the real problem. A man is poor for one reason and one reason only–he does not have money. If you want to get rid of poverty, you give people money. And you ought not tell me about people who don’t work, and that you can’t give people money if they don’t work, because if that were true, you’d have to start stopping Rockefeller, Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, the whole of Standard Oil, the Gulf Corporation, all of them, including probably a large number of the board of trustees of this university. The question, then, is not whether or not one can work; it’s Who has power to make his or her acts legitimate? That is all. In his country that power is invested in the hands of white people, and it makes their acts legitimate.
Willie “ Mukasa “ Ricks – Black Power
We are now engaged in a psychological struggle in this country about whether or not black people have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction. We maintain the use of the words Black Power — let them address themselves to that. We are not going to wait for white people to sanction Black Power. We’re tired of waiting; every time black people try to move in this country, they’re forced to defend their position beforehand. It’s time that white people do that. They ought to start defending themselves as to why they have oppressed and exploited us. A man was picked as a slave for one reason–the color of his skin. Black was automatically inferior, inhuman,. And therefore fit for slavery, so the question of whether or not we are individually suppressed is nonsensical, and it’s a downright lie. We are oppressed as a group because we are black, not because we are lazy or apathetic, not because we’re stupid or we stink, not because we eat watermelon or have good rhythm. We are oppressed because we are black.
In order to escape that oppression we must wield the group power we have, not the individual power that this country sets as the criterion under which a man may come into it. That’s what is called integration. “You do what I tell you to do and we’ll let you sit at the table with us.” Well, if you believe in integration, you can come live in Watts, send your children to the ghetto schools. Let’s talk about that. If you believe in integration, then we’re going to start adopting us some white people to live in our neighborhoods.
So it is clear that this question is not one off integration or segregation. We cannot afford to be concerned about the 6 percent black children in this country whom you allow to enter white schools. We are going to be concerned about the 94 percent. You ought to be concerned about them too. But are we willing to be concerned about the black people who will never get to Berkeley, never get to Harvard, and cannot get an education, the ones you’ll never get a chance to rub shoulders with and say, “Why, he’s almost as good as we are; he’s not like the others”? The question is, How can white society begin to move to see black people as human beings? I am black, therefore I am. Not I am black and I must go to college to prove myself. I am black, therefore I am. And don’t deprive me of anything and say to me that you must go to college before you gain access to X, Y, and Z. That’s only a rationalization for suppression.
The political parties of this country do not meet the needs of the people on a day-to-day basis. How can we build new political institutions that will become the political expressions of people? How can you build political institutions that will begin to meet the needs of Oakland, California? The need of Oakland, California, is not 1,000 policemen with submachine guns. They need that least of all. How can we build institutions that will allow those people to function on a day-to-day basis, so that they can get decent jobs and have decent houses, and they can begin to participate in the policy and make the decisions that affect their lives? That’s what they need, not Gestapo troops, because this is no 1942, and if you play like Nazis, we’re not going to play Jew this time around.
Get hip to that. Can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it exists? It is you who live in Cicero and stopped us from living there. White people stopped us from moving into Grenada, Miss. White people make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. White institutions do that. They must change. In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die. The economic exploitation by this country of non-white people around the world must also die.
There are several programs in the South where whites are trying to organize poor whites so they can begin to move around the question of economic exploitation and political disfranchisement. We’ve all heard the theory several times. But few people are willing to go into it. The question is, Can the white activist stop trying to be a Pepsi generation who comes alive in the black community, and be a man who’s willing to move into the white community and start organizing where the organization is needed? Can he do that? Can the white activist disassociate himself from the clowns who waste time parrying with each other and start talking about the problems that are facing people in this state? You must start inside the white community.
Willie Mukasa Ricks Talks Black Power
Our political position is that we don’t think the Democratic Party represents the needs of black people. We know that it does not. If, in fact, white people believe that they’re going to move inside that structure, how are they going to organize around a concept of whiteness based on true brotherhood and on stopping economic exploitation in order to form a coalition base for black people to hook up with? You cannot build a coalition based on national sentiment. If you want a coalition to address itself to real changes in this country, white people must start building those institutions inside the white community. And that’s the real question faction the white activists today. Can they tear down the institutions that have put us all in the trick bag we’ve been into for the last hundreds of years?
Frederick Douglass said that the youth should fight to be leaders today. God knows we need to be leaders today, because the men who run this country are sick. We must begin to start building those institutions and to fight to articulate our position, to fight to be able to control our universities (we need to be able to do that), to fight to control the basic institutions that perpetuate racism by destroying them and building new ones. That’s the real question that faces us today, and it is a dilemma because most of us don’t know how to work.
Most white activists run into the black community as an excuse. We cannot have white people working in the black community — on psychological grounds. The fact is that all black people question whether or not they are equal to whites, since every time they start to do something, white people are around showing them how to do it. If we are going to eliminate that for the generation that comes after us, then black people must be in positions of power, doing and articulating for themselves. That’s not reverse racism; it is moving onto healthy ground; it is becoming what the philosopher Sartre says, an “antiracist racist.” And this country can’t understand that. If everybody who’s white sees himself as racist and sees us against him, he’s speaking from his own guilt.
We do not have the power in our hands to change the institution of war in this country–to begin to recreate it so that they can learn to leave the Vietnamese people alone. The only power we have is the power to say, “Hell, no!” to the draft.
The war in Vietnam is illegal and immoral. The question is, What can we do to stop that war? What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of America, are killing babies, women, and children? We have to say to ourselves that there’s a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk; there’s a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not murder anybody who they say kill, and if we decide to kill, ‘were’ going to decide who it shall be. This country will only stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, “Hell, no, we aren’t going.”
The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. You cannot do that. It is sometimes ironic that many of the peace groups have begun to call SNCC violent and they say they can no longer support us, when we are in fact the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today.
There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. No man has the right to take a man for two years and train him to be a killer. Any black man fighting in the war in Vietnam is nothing but a black mercenary. Any time a black man leaves the country where he can’t vote to supposedly deliver the vote to somebody else, he’s a black mercenary. Any time a black man leaves this country, gets shot in Vietnam on foreign ground, and returns home and you won’t give him a burial place in his own homeland, he’s a black mercenary.
Even if I believed the lies of Johnson, that we’re fighting to give democracy to the people of Vietnam, as a black man living in this country I wouldn’t fight to give this to anybody. We have to use our bodies and our minds in the only way that we see fit. We must begin, as the philosopher Camus says, to come alive by saying “no.” This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. The marines are at ready disposal to bring democracy, and if the Vietnamese don’t want democracy, well then, “We’ll just wipe them out, because they don’t deserve to live if they won’t have our way of life.”
There is a more immediate question: What do you do on your campus? Do you raise questions about the hundred black students who were kicked off campus a couple of weeks ago? Eight hundred? And how does that question begin to move? Do you begin to relate to people outside the ivory tower and university walls? Do you think you’re capable of building those human relationships based on humanity when the country is the way it is, when the institutions are clearly against us.
We have found all the myths of the country to be nothing but downright lies. We were told that if we worked hard we would succeed, and if that were true we would own this country lock, stock, and barrel. We have picked the cotton for nothing; we are the maids in the kitchens of liberal white people; we are the janitors, the porters, the elevator men; we sweep up your college floors. We are the hardest workers and the lowest paid. It is nonsensical for people to talk about human relationships until they are willing to build new institutions. Black people are economically insecure. White liberals are economically secure. Can you begin to build an economic coalition? Are the liberals willing to share their salaries with the economically insecure black people they so much love? Then if you’re not, are you willing to start building new institutions that will provide economic security for black people? That’s the question we want to deal with!
American students are perhaps the most politically unsophisticated students in the world.
Across every country of the world, while we were growing up, students were leading the major revolutions of their countries. We have not been able to do that. They have been politically aware of their existence. In South America our neighbors have one every 24 hours just to remind us that they are politically aware. But we have been unable to grasp it because we’ve always moved in the field of morality and love while people have been politically jiving with our lives. You can’t move morally against men like Brown and Reagan. You can’t move morally against Lyndon Baines Johnson because he is an immoral man. He doesn’t know what it’s all about. So you’ve got to move politically. We have to develop a political sophistication that doesn’t parrot (“The two-party system is the best system in the world”). We have to raise questions about whether we need new types of political institutions in this country, and we in SNCC maintain that we need them now. Any time Lyndon Baines Johnson can head a party that has in it Bobby Kennedy, Wayne Morse, Eastland, Wallace, and all those other supposed-to-be-liberal cats, there’s something wrong with that party. They’re moving politically, not morally. If that party refuses to seat black people from Mississippi and goes ahead and seats racists like Eastland and his clique, it’s clear to me that they’re moving politically, and that one cannot begin to talk morality to people like that.
We must question the values of this society, and I maintain that black people are the best people to do that since we have been excluded from that society. we ought to think whether or not we want to become a part of that society. That’s precisely what the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is doing. We are raising questions about this country. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We are the generation who has found this country to be a world power and the wealthiest country in the world. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else. And because black people are saying we do not now want to become a part of you, we are called reverse racists. Ain’t that a gas?
White society has caused the failure of nonviolence. I was always surprised at Quakers who came to Alabama and counseled me to be nonviolent, but didn’t have the guts to tell James Clark to be nonviolent. That’s where nonviolence needs to be preached — to Jim Clark, not to black people. White people should conduct their nonviolent schools in Cicero where they are needed, not among black people in Mississippi. Six-foot-two men kick little black children in Grenada — can you conduct nonviolent schools there? Can you name on black man today who has killed anybody white and is still alive? Even after a rebellion, when some black brothers throw bricks and bottles, ten thousand of them have to pay the price. When the white policeman comes in, anybody who’s black is arrested because we all look alike.
The youth of this country must being to raise those questions. We are going to have to change the foreign policy of this country. One of the problems with the peace movement is that it is too caught up in Vietnam, and if America pulled out the troops from Vietnam this week, next week you’d have to get another peace movement for Santo Domingo. We have to hook up with black people around the world; and that hookup must not only be psychological, but real. If South America were to rebel today, and black people were to shoot the hell out of all the white people there, as they should, Standard Oil would crumble tomorrow. If South Africa were to go today, Chase Manhattan Bank would crumble tomorrow. If Zimbabwe, which is called Rhodesia by white people, were to go tomorrow, General Electric would cave in on the East Coast.
How do we stop those institutions that are so willing to fight against “Communist aggression” but close their eyes against racist oppression? We’re not talking about a policy of aid or sending Peace Corps people in to teach people how to read and write and build houses while we steal their raw materials from them. Because that’s all this country does. What underdeveloped countries need is information about how to become industrialized, so they can keep their raw materials where they have them, produce goods, sell them to this country for the price it’s supposed to pay. instead, America keeps selling goods back to them for a profit and keeps sending our modern day missionaries there, calling them the sons of Kennedy. And if the youth are going to participate in that program, how do you begin to control the Peace Corps.
This country assumes that if someone is poor, they are poor because of their own individual blight, or because they weren’t born on the right side of town, or they had too many children, or went in the army too early, or because their father was a drunk, or they didn’t care about school–they made a mistake. That’s a lot of nonsense. Poverty is well calculated in this country, and the reason why the poverty program won’t work is because the calculators of poverty are administering it.
How can you, as the youth in this country, move to start carrying those things out? Move into the white community. We have developed a movement in the black community. The white activist has miserably failed to develop the movement inside of his community. Will white people have the courage to go into the white communities and start organizing them? That’s the question for the white activist. We won’t get caught up in questions about power. This country knows what power is. It knows what Black Power is because it deprived black people of it for over four hundred years. White people associate Black Power with violence because of their own inability to deal with blackness. If we had said “Negro power” nobody would get scared. Everybody would support it. If we said power for colored people, everybody’d be for that, but it is the word “black” that bothers people in this country, and that’s their problem, not mine. That’s the lie that says anything black is bad.
You’re all a college and university crowd. You’ve taken your basic logic course. You know about major premise, minor premise. People have been telling you anything all black is bad. Let’s make that our major premise.
Major premise: Anything all black is bad.
Minor premise or particular premise: I am all black.
Therefore…I’m never going to be put in that bag; I’m all black and I’m all good. Anything all black is not necessarily bad. Anything all black is only bad when you use force to keep whites out. Now that’s what white people have done in this country, and they’re projecting their same fears and guilt on us, and we won’t have it. Let them handle their own affairs and their own guilt. Let them find their own psychologists. We refuse to be the therapy for white society any longer. We have gone stark, raving mad trying to do it.
I look at Dr. King on television every single day, and I say to myself: “Now there is a man who’s desperately needed in this country. There is a man full of love. There is a man full of mercy. There is a man full of compassion.” But every time I see Lyndon on television, I say, “Martin, baby, you got a long way to go.”
If we were to be real and honest, we would have to admit that most people in this country see things black and white. We live in a country that’s geared that way. White people would have to admit that they are afraid to go into a black ghetto at night. They’re afraid because they’d be “beat up,” “lynched,” “looted,” “cut up,” etc. It happens to black people inside the ghetto every day, incidentally. Since white people are afraid of that, they get a man to do it for them — a policeman. Figure his mentality. The first time a black man jumps, that white man’s going to shoot him. Police brutality is going to exist on that level. The only time I hear people talk about nonviolence is when black people move to defend themselves against white people. Black people cut themselves every night in the ghetto — nobody talks about nonviolence. White people beat up black people every day — nobody talks about nonviolence. But as soon as black people start to move, the double standard comes into being. You can’t defend yourself. You show me a black man who advocates aggressive violence who would be able to live in this country. Show him to me. Isn’t it hypocritical for Lyndon to talk about how you can’t accomplish anything by looting and you must accomplish it by the legal ways? What does he know about legality? Ask Ho Chi Minh.
We must wage a psychological battle on the right for black people to define themselves as they see fit, and organize themselves as they see fit. we don’t know whether the white community will allow for that organizing, because once they do they must also allow for the organizing inside their own community. It doesn’t make a difference, though — we’re going to organize our way. The question is how we’re going to organize our way. The question is how we’re going to facilitate those matters, whether it’s going to be done with a thousand policemen with submachine guns, or whether it’s going to be done in a context where it’s allowed by white people warding off those policemen. Are white people who call themselves activists ready to move into the white communities on two counts, on building new political institutions to destroy the old ones that we have, and to move around the concept of white youth refusing to go into the army? If so, then we can start to build a new world. We must urge you to fight now to be the leaders of today, not tomorrow. This country is a nation of thieves. It stands on the brink of becoming a nation of murderers. We must stop it. We must stop it.
We are on the move for our liberation. we’re tired of trying to prove things to white people. We are tired of trying to explain to white people that we’re not going to hurt them. We are concerned with getting the things we want, the things we have to have to be able to function. The question is, Will white people overcome their racism and allow for that to happen in this country? If not, we have no choice but to say very clearly, “Move on over, or we’re going to move over you.”
The Weather Underground Organization(WUO), commonly known as the Weather Underground, was a radical left-wing militant organization founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. Originally called Weatherman, the group became known colloquially as the Weathermen. Weatherman organized in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their supporters. Their political goal, stated in print after 1974, was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow U.S. imperialism.
WKOG Editor: In the 1960s we had the emergence of the weather underground and the black panthers … who the state feared. Today, we have the corporate sycophants 350.org and Avaaz – coaxing us ever so closer to our self inflicted mass-annihilation.
Weather Underground Bombs the Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department
On March 1, 1971 a bomb exploded in the Capitol building in Washington D.C. Members of the Weather Underground claimed responsibility. The group stated it was in protest of the government’s involvement in the country of Laos. On May 19, 1972 a bomb went off in the Pentagon . The Weathermen stated it was in celebration of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday (a North Vietnamese communist revolutionary). On January 29, 1975 the Weathermen set off a bomb in the Department of State’s building. The bombing was in protest of America’s support for South Vietnam and Cambodia. On the same day another bomb was set to go off in a federal building in Oakland, California.
Weather Underground Announces Fall Offensive
October 1970 – Bernardine Dohrn announces a “fall offensive of youth resistance.” Two days later three cities were bombed on the west coast.
WKOG Editor: In the 1960s we had the emergence of the weather underground and the black panthers … who the state feared. Today, we have the corporate sycophants 350.org and Avaaz – coaxing us ever so closer to our self inflicted mass-annihilation.
Weather Underground Bombs the Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department
On March 1, 1971 a bomb exploded in the Capitol building in Washington D.C. Members of the Weather Underground claimed responsibility. The group stated it was in protest of the government’s involvement in the country of Laos. On May 19, 1972 a bomb went off in the Pentagon . The Weathermen stated it was in celebration of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday (a North Vietnamese communist revolutionary). On January 29, 1975 the Weathermen set off a bomb in the Department of State’s building. The bombing was in protest of America’s support for South Vietnam and Cambodia. On the same day another bomb was set to go off in a federal building in Oakland, California.
Weather Underground Announces Fall Offensive
October 1970 – Bernardine Dohrn announces a “fall offensive of youth resistance.” Two days later three cities were bombed on the west coast.
WKOG Editor: In the 1960s we had the emergence of the weather underground and the black panthers … who the state feared. Today, we have the corporate sycophants 350.org and Avaaz – coaxing us ever so closer to our self inflicted mass-annihilation.
Weather Underground Bombs the Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department
On March 1, 1971 a bomb exploded in the Capitol building in Washington D.C. Members of the Weather Underground claimed responsibility. The group stated it was in protest of the government’s involvement in the country of Laos. On May 19, 1972 a bomb went off in the Pentagon . The Weathermen stated it was in celebration of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday (a North Vietnamese communist revolutionary). On January 29, 1975 the Weathermen set off a bomb in the Department of State’s building. The bombing was in protest of America’s support for South Vietnam and Cambodia. On the same day another bomb was set to go off in a federal building in Oakland, California.
Weather Underground Announces Fall Offensive
October 1970 – Bernardine Dohrn announces a “fall offensive of youth resistance.” Two days later three cities were bombed on the west coast.
How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World
On the FBI side, then, bureaucratic interests and imperatives, not merely fears for national security, fostered a disproportionate effort to eradicate the group. Yet the fact is that FBI never permanently caught a single major Weatherman figure.
The Weathermen remained at large until 1977-1980, when most of them simply gave up their revolution and surfaced, resuming lives within mainstream society. There they have lived peacefully (if on the far Left) for the last 40 years.
Why did the Weathermen stand down?
The Weathermen thought of themselves as revolutionaries—that is, not merely as students acting out of anger over Vietnam and racism, but as politically minded organizers. They yearned to expand their numbers beyond a tiny revolutionary cadre. While they worried that the bulk of the white working class was corrupted by relative prosperity, and ineradicable racism which they called “white skin privilege,” they hoped that in the counterculture, made up of disaffected young people, they might find a constituency capable of eventually empowering their revolutionary project. But the Weatherman bombing policy had not won support even on the extreme Left. Even the Berkeley Tribe, the most radical underground newspaper in the country, publicly warned that lethal bombings would discredit Weatherman and isolate the would-be guerrillas from potential supporters—if they killed, they would be alone.
Yet however large Weatherman’s constituency of radical students became, it turned out to be too small to be politically effective. By 1974, the leadership realized the problem. In an 186-page book called Prairie Fire—clandestinely printed by Weather, and clandestinely distributed with great success, despite the FBI—the leadership concluded that the only way to mount a revolution in the United States was to win over the American working class.
The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was founded to prepare the way. But Prairie Fire set off an ideological struggle within the Weather organization itself, one that culminated in the spring of 1976 in the triumph of the more radical wing, which insisted on continuing the guerrilla war. From late 1976 onward, those who favored an aboveground mass organization—including Jones, Dohrn, and Ayers—either drifted away from Weatherman or were expelled. The charge was “rightist deviationism,” that is, moderation.
But the new leader—the elderly Stalinist Clayton van Lydegraf—was utterly incompetent, and the core of his group ended up being caught in 1977 and sent to prison. And over the next three years, the vast majority of the Weathermen, with no serious federal charges now pending against them, came up voluntarily from the underground and returned to mainstream society.
And yet the ‘60s Movement was, broadly speaking, a success, in that it helped to create a society where there was far more individual choice. Thousands of New Leftists agreed with the Weathermen’s analysis of what had gone awry in America. The surviving Weathermen are old now, but the last 50 years have seen remarkable progress in black rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Hispanic and Asian rights; and to that extent Weatherman’s violence—limited, as it eventually was—did not impede that progress. Like the enormous prestige of the FBI—which proved itself hapless in the pursuit of Weatherman—the myth surrounding this small group is bigger than the reality.
The thesis of Weatherman theory, as expounded in its founding document, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, was that “the main struggle going on in the world today is between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it”,[25] based on Lenin’s theory of imperialism, first expounded in 1916 in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In Weatherman theory “oppressed peoples” are the creators of the wealth of empire, “and it is to them that it belongs.” “The goal of revolutionary struggle must be the control and use of this wealth in the interest of the oppressed peoples of the world.” “The goal is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism”[26]
The Vietnamese and other third world countries, as well as third world people within the United States play a vanguard role. They “set the terms for class struggle in America …”[27] The role of the “Revolutionary Youth Movement” is to build a centralized organization of revolutionaries, a “Marxist-Leninist Party” supported by a mass revolutionary movement to support international liberation movements and “open another battlefield of the revolution.”[28][29]
The theoretical basis of the Revolutionary Youth Movement was an insight that most of the American population, including both students and the supposed “middle class,” comprised, due to their relationship to the instruments of production, the working class,[30] thus the organizational basis of the SDS, which had begun in the elite colleges and had been extended to public institutions as the organization grew could be extended to youth as a whole including students, those serving in the military, and the unemployed. Students could be viewed as workers gaining skills prior to employment. This contrasted to the Progressive Labor view which viewed students and workers as being in separate categories which could ally, but should not jointly organize.[31]
FBI analysis of the travel history of the founders and initial followers of the organization emphasized contacts with foreign governments, particularly the Cuban and North Vietnamese and their influence on the ideology of the organization. Participation in the Venceremos Brigade, a program which involved US students volunteering to work in the sugar harvest in Cuba, is highlighted as a common factor in the background of the founders of the Weather Underground, with China a secondary influence.[32] This experience was cited by both Kathy Boudin and Bernardine Dohrn as a major influence on their political development.[33]
Terry Robbins took the organization’s name from the lyrics of the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,”[34] which featured the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. By using this title the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of US youth inspired to action for social justice by Dylan’s songs.[35]
The Weatherman group had long held that militancy was becoming more important than nonviolent forms of anti-war action, and that university-campus-based demonstrations needed to be punctuated with more dramatic actions, which had the potential to interfere with the US military and internal security apparatus. The belief was that these types of urban guerrilla actions would act as a catalyst for the coming revolution. Many international events indeed seemed to support the Weathermen’s overall assertion that worldwide revolution was imminent, such as the tumultuous Cultural Revolution in China; the 1968 student revolts in France, Mexico City and elsewhere; the Prague Spring; the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association; the emergence of the Tupamaros organization in Uruguay; the emergence of the Guinea-Bissauan Revolutionand similar Marxist-led independence movements throughout Africa; and within the United States, the prominence of the Black Panther Party, together with a series of “ghetto rebellions” throughout poor blackneighborhoods across the country.[36]
The Weathermen were outspoken critics of the concepts that later came to be known as “white privilege” (described as white-skin privilege) and identity politics.[37][38] As the civil disorderin poor black neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn said, “White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.”[3]
Anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and white privilegeEdit
Weather maintained that their stance differed from the rest of the movement at the time in the sense that they predicated their critiques on the notion that they were engaged in “an anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle”.[39] Weather put the international proletariat at the center of their political theory. Weather warned that other political theories, including those organizing around class interests or youth interests, were “bound to lead in a racist and chauvinist direction”.[39] Weather denounced other political theories of the time as “objectively racist” if they did not side with the international proletariat; such political theories, they argued, needed to be “smashed”.[40][41]
Members of Weather further contended that efforts at “organizing whites against their own perceived oppression” were “attempts by whites to carve out even more privilege than they already derive from the imperialist nexus”.[39] Weather’s political theory sought to make every struggle an anti-imperialist, anti-racist struggle; out of this premise came their interrogation of critical concepts that would later be known as “white privilege”. As historian Dan Berger writes, Weather raised the question “what does it means to be a white person opposing racism and imperialism?”[42]
Shortly after its formation as an independent group, Weatherman created a central committee, the Weather Bureau, which assigned its cadres to a series of collectives in major cities. These cities included New York, Boston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Chicago, the home of the SDS’ head office. The collectives set up under the Weather Bureau drew their design from Che Guevara‘s foco theory, which focused on the building of small, semi-autonomous cells guided by a central leadership.[43]
To try to turn their members into hardened revolutionaries and to promote solidarity and cohesion, members of collectives engaged in intensive criticism sessions which attempted to reconcile their prior and current activities to Weathermen doctrine. These “criticism self-criticism” sessions (also called “CSC” or “Weatherfries”) were the most distressing part of life in the collective. Derived from Maoist techniques, it was intended to root out racist, individualist and chauvinist tendencies within group members. At its most intense, members would be berated for up to a dozen or more hours non-stop about their flaws. It was intended to make group members believe that they were, deep down, white supremacists by subjecting them to constant criticism to break them down. The sessions were used to ridicule and bully those who didn’t agree with the party line and force them into acceptance. However, the sessions were also successful at purging potential informants from the Weathermen’s ranks, making them crucial to the Weathermen’s survival as an underground organization. The Weathermen were also determined to destroy “bourgeois individualism” amongst members that would potentially interfere with their commitment to both the Weathermen and the goal of revolution. Personal property was either renounced or given to the collective, with income being used to purchase the needs of the group and members enduring Spartan living conditions. Conventional comforts were forbidden and the leadership was exalted, giving them immense power over their subordinates (in some collectives the leadership could even dictate personal decisions such as where one went). Martial arts were practiced and occasional direct actions were engaged in. Critical of monogamy, they launched a “smash monogamy” campaign, in which couples (whose affection was deemed unacceptably possessive, counterrevolutionary or even selfish) were to be split apart; collectives underwent forced rotation of sex partners (including allegations that some male leaders rotated women between collectives in order to sleep with them) and in some cases engaged in sexual orgies.[44][45][46][47] This formation continued during 1969 and 1970 until the group went underground and a more relaxed lifestyle was adopted as the group blended into the counterculture.[48]
Life in the collectives could be particularly hard for women, who made up about half the members. Their political awakening had included a growing awareness of sexism, yet they often found that men took the lead in political activities and discussion, with women often engaging in domestic work, as well as finding themselves confined to second-tier leadership roles. Certain feminist political beliefs had to be disavowed or muted and the women had to prove, regardless of prior activist credentials, that they were as capable as men in engaging in political action as part of “women’s cadres”, which were felt to be driven by coerced machismo and failed to promote genuine solidarity amongst the women. While the Weathermen’s sexual politics did allow women to assert desire and explore relationships with each other, it also made them vulnerable to sexual exploitation.[49]
On February 21, 1970, at around 4:30 a.m., three gasoline-filled Molotov cocktails exploded in front of the home of New York Supreme Court Justice John M. Murtagh, who was presiding over the pretrial hearings of the so-called “Panther 21” members of the Black Panther Party over a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores.[70] Justice Murtagh and his family were unharmed, but two panes of a front window were shattered, an overhanging wooden eave was scorched, and the paint on a car in the garage was charred.[70]“Free the Panther 21” and “Viet Cong have won” were written in large red letters on the sidewalk in front of the judge’s house at 529 W. 217th Street in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan.[70] The judge’s house had been under hourly police surveillance and an unidentified woman called the police a few minutes before the explosions to report several prowlers there, which resulted in a police car being sent immediately to the scene.[70]
In the preceding hours, Molotov cocktails had been thrown at the second floor of Columbia University‘s International Law Library at 434 W. 116th Street and at a police car parked across the street from the Charles Street police station in the West Village in Manhattan, and at Army and Navy recruiting booths on Nostrand Avenue on the eastern fringe of the Brooklyn College campus in Brooklyn, causing no or minimal damage in incidents of unknown relation to that at Judge Murtagh’s home.[70]
According to the December 6, 1970 “New Morning—Changing Weather” Weather Underground communiqué signed by Bernardine Dohrn, and Cathy Wilkerson‘s 2007 memoir, the fire-bombing of Judge Murtagh’s home, in solidarity with the Panther 21, was carried out by four members of the New York cell that was devastated two weeks later by the March 6, 1970 townhouse explosion
After the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, per the December 1969 Flint War Council decisions the group was now well underground, and began to refer to themselves as the Weather Underground Organization. At this juncture, WUO shrank considerably, becoming even fewer than they had been when first formed. The group was devastated by the loss of their friends, and in late April 1970, members of the Weathermen met in California to discuss what had happened in New York and the future of the organization. The group decided to reevaluate their strategy, particularly regarding their initial belief in the acceptability of human casualties, and rejected such tactics as kidnapping and assassinations.[citation needed]
In 2003, Weather Underground members stated in interviews that they wanted to convince the American public that the United States was truly responsible for the calamity in Vietnam.[3]The group began striking at night, bombing empty offices, with warnings always issued in advance to ensure a safe evacuation. According to David Gilbert, who took part in the 1981 Brink’s robbery that killed two police officers and a Brinks’ guard, and was jailed for murder, “[their] goal was to not hurt any people, and a lot of work went into that. But we wanted to pick targets that showed to the public who was responsible for what was really going on.”[3] After the Greenwich Village explosion, in a review of the documentary film The Weather Underground (2002), a Guardian journalist restated the film’s contention that no one was killed by WUO bombs.[74]
In response to the death of Black Panther members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969 during a police raid, on May 21, 1970, the Weather Underground issued a “Declaration of War” against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the “Weather Underground Organization” (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pursuing covert activities only. These initially included preparations for a bombing of a U.S. military non-commissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in what Brian Flanagan said had been intended to be “the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory”.[75]
Bernardine Dohrn subsequently stated that it was Fred Hampton’s death that prompted the Weather Underground to declare war on the US government.
In December 1969, the Chicago Police Department, in conjunction with the FBI, conducted a raid on the home of Black PantherFred Hampton, in which he and Mark Clarkwere killed, with four of the seven other people in the apartment wounded. The survivors of the raid were all charged with assault and attempted murder. The police claimed they shot in self-defense, although a controversy arose when the Panthers, other activists and a Chicago newspaper reporter presented visual evidence, as well as the testimony of an FBI ballistics expert, showing that the sleeping Panthers were not resisting arrest and fired only one shot, as opposed to the more than one hundred the police fired into the apartment. The charges were later dropped, and the families of the dead won a $1.8 million settlement from the government. It was discovered in 1971 that Hampton had been targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO.[77][78] True to Dohrn’s words, this single event, in the continuing string of public killings of black leaders of any political stripe, was the trigger that pushed a large number of Weatherman and other students who had just attended the last SDS national convention months earlier to go underground and develop its logistical support network nationally.
On May 21, 1970, a communiqué from the Weather Underground was issued promising to attack a “symbol or institution of American injustice” within two weeks.[79] The communiqué included taunts towards the FBI, daring them to try to find the group, whose members were spread throughout the United States.[80] Many leftist organizations showed curiosity in the communiqué, and waited to see if the act would in fact occur. However, two weeks would pass without any occurrence.[81]Then on June 9, 1970, their first publicly acknowledged bombing occurred at a New York City police station,[82] saying it was “in outraged response to the assassination of the Soledad BrotherGeorge Jackson,”[3] who had recently been killed by prison guards in an escape attempt. The FBI placed the Weather Underground organization on the ten most-wanted list by the end of 1970.[16]
On June 9, 1970, a bomb made with ten sticks of dynamite exploded in the 240 Centre Street, the headquarters of the New York City Police Department. The explosion was preceded by a warning about six minutes prior to the detonation and was followed by a WUO claim of responsibility.[83]
On July 23, 1970, a Detroit federal grand jury indicted 13 Weathermen members in a national bombing conspiracy, along with several unnamed co-conspirators. Ten of the thirteen already had outstanding federal warrants.[84]
Investigators search for clues after the May 19, 1972 Weatherman bombing of the Pentagon.
On May 19, 1972, Ho Chi Minh‘s birthday, the Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women’s bathroom in the Air Force wing of the Pentagon. The damage caused flooding that destroyed computer tapes holding classified information. Other radical groups worldwide applauded the bombing, illustrated by German youths protesting against American military systems in Frankfurt.[16] This was “in retaliation for the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi.”[87]
In 1973, the government requested dropping charges against most of the WUO members. The requests cited a recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that barred electronic surveillance without a court order. This Supreme Court decision would hamper any prosecution of the WUO cases. In addition, the government did not want to reveal foreign intelligence secrets that a trial would require.[88]Bernardine Dohrn was removed from the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on 7 December 1973.[89]As with the earlier federal grand juries that subpoenaed Leslie Bacon and Stew Albert in the U.S. Capitol bombing case, these investigations were known as “fishing expeditions”, with the evidence gathered through “black bag” jobs including illegal mail openings that involved the FBI and United States Postal Service, burglaries by FBI field offices, and electronic surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency against the support network, friends, and family members of the Weather Underground as part of Nixon’s COINTELPRO apparatus.[90]
These grand juries caused Sylvia Jane Brown, Robert Gelbhard, and future members of the Seattle Weather Collective to be subpoenaed in Seattle and Portland for the investigation of one of the first (and last) captured WUO members. Four months afterwards the cases were dismissed.[91][92][93][citation needed] The decisions in these cases led directly to the subsequent resignation of FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray, and the federal indictments of W. Mark Felt or “Deep Throat” and Edwin Miller and which, earlier, was the factor leading to the removal of federal “most-wanted” status against members of the Weather Underground leadership in 1973.
With the help from Clayton Van Lydegraf, the Weather Underground sought a more Marxist–Leninist ideological approach to the post-Vietnam reality.[94] The leading members of the Weather Underground (Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn) collaborated on ideas and published a manifesto: Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.[16][95] The name came from a quote by Mao Zedong, “a single spark can set a prairie fire.” By the summer of 1974, 5,000 copies had surfaced in coffee houses, bookstores and public libraries across the U.S. Leftist newspapers praised the manifesto.[96]
Abbie Hoffman publicly praised Prairie Fire and believed every American should be given a copy.[97] The manifesto’s influence initiated the formation of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in several American cities. Hundreds of above-ground activists helped further the new political vision of the Weather Underground.[96] Essentially, after the 1969 failure of the Days of Rage to involve thousands of youth in massive street fighting, Weather renounced most of the Left and decided to operate as an isolated underground group. Prairie Fire urged people to never “dissociate mass struggle from revolutionary violence”. To do so, asserted Weather, was to do the state’s work. Just as in 1969–1970, Weather still refused to renounce revolutionary violence for “to leave people unprepared to fight the state is to seriously mislead them about the inevitable nature of what lies ahead”. However, the decision to build only an underground group caused the Weather Underground to lose sight of its commitment to mass struggle and made future alliances with the mass movement difficult and tenuous.[94]:76–77
By 1974, Weather had recognized this shortcoming and in Prairie Fire detailed a different strategy for the 1970s which demanded both mass and clandestine organizations. The role of the clandestine organization would be to build the “consciousness of action” and prepare the way for the development of a people’s militia. Concurrently, the role of the mass movement (i.e., above ground Prairie Fire collective) would include support for, and encouragement of, armed action. Such an alliance would, according to Weather, “help create the ‘sea’ for the guerrillas to swim in”.[94]:76–77
According to Bill Ayers in the late 1970s, the Weatherman group further split into two factions — the May 19th Communist Organization and the Prairie Fire Collective — with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding and establishing an above-ground revolutionary mass movement. With most WUO members facing the limited criminal charges (most charges had been dropped by the government in 1973) against them creating an above ground organization was more feasible. The May 19 Communist Organization continued in hiding as the clandestine organization. A decisive factor in Dohrn’s coming out of hiding were her concerns about her children.[98] The Prairie Fire Collective faction started to surrender to the authorities from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The remaining Weather Underground members continued to attack U.S. institutions.
In April 1971, the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.[99] The group stole files with several hundred pages. The files detailed the targeting of civil rights leaders, labor rights organizations, and left wing groups in general, and included documentation of acts of intimidation and disinformation by the FBI, and attempts to erode public support for those popular movements. By the end of April, the FBI offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups.[100] The files were a part of an FBI program called COINTELPRO.[101]
After COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover,[102] the FBI continued its counterintelligence on groups like the Weather Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the “Special Target Information Development” program, where agents were sent undercover to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons- and bomb-related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The most well-publicized of these tactics were the “black-bag jobs,” referring to searches conducted in the homes of relatives and acquaintances of Weatherman.[96] The Weather Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in with minimal charges against them.[96] Additionally, the illegal domestic spying conducted by the CIA in collaboration with the FBI also lessened the legal repercussions for Weatherman turning themselves in.[96]
After the Church Committee revealed the FBI’s illegal activities, many agents were investigated. In 1976, former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt publicly stated he had ordered break-ins and that individual agents were merely obeying orders and should not be punished for it. Felt also stated that acting Director L. Patrick Grayhad also authorized the break-ins, but Gray denied this. Felt said on the CBS television program Face the Nation that he would probably be a “scapegoat” for the Bureau’s work.[103] “I think this is justified and I’d do it again tomorrow,” he said on the program. While admitting the break-ins were “extralegal,” he justified it as protecting the “greater good.” Felt said, “To not take action against these people and know of a bombing in advance would simply be to stick your fingers in your ears and protect your eardrums when the explosion went off and then start the investigation.”
The Attorney General in the new Carter administration, Griffin B. Bell, investigated, and on April 10, 1978, a federal grand jury charged Felt, Edward S. Miller, and Gray with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens by searching their homes without warrants. The case did not go to trial and was dropped by the government for lack of evidence on December 11, 1980.[104]
The indictment charged violations of Title 18, Section 241 of the United States Code. The indictment charged Felt and the others “did unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to injure and oppress citizens of the United States who were relatives and acquaintances of the Weatherman fugitives, in the free exercise and enjoyments of certain rights and privileges secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.?[105]
Felt and Miller attempted to plea bargain with the government, willing to agree to a misdemeanor guilty plea to conducting searches without warrants—a violation of 18 U.S.C. sec. 2236—but the government rejected the offer in 1979. After eight postponements, the case against Felt and Miller went to trial in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on September 18, 1980.[106] On October 29, former President Richard Nixonappeared as a rebuttal witness for the defense, and testified that presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had authorized the bureau to engage in break-ins while conducting foreign intelligence and counterespionage investigations.[107]
It was Nixon’s first courtroom appearance since his resignation in 1974. Nixon also contributed money to Felt’s legal defense fund, with Felt’s legal expenses running over $600,000. Also testifying were former Attorneys General Herbert Brownell Jr., Nicholas Katzenbach, Ramsey Clark, John N. Mitchell, and Richard G. Kleindienst, all of whom said warrantless searches in national security matters were commonplace and not understood to be illegal, but Mitchell and Kleindienst denied they had authorized any of the break-ins at issue in the trial.
The jury returned guilty verdicts on November 6, 1980. Although the charge carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, Felt was fined $5,000. (Miller was fined $3,500).[108]Writing in The New York Times a week after the conviction, Roy Cohn claimed that Felt and Miller were being used as scapegoats by the Carter administration and that it was an unfair prosecution. Cohn wrote it was the “final dirty trick” and that there had been no “personal motive” to their actions.[109]
The Times saluted the convictions, saying that it showed “the case has established that zeal is no excuse for violating the Constitution”.[110]Felt and Miller appealed the verdict, and they were later pardoned by Ronald Reagan.[111]
The Weather Underground was referred to in its own time and afterwards as a terrorist group by articles in The New York Times, United Press International, and Time.[126][127][128] The group also fell under the auspices of the FBI-New York City Police Anti Terrorist Task Force, a forerunner of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The FBI, in a 2004 news story titled “Byte out of History” published on its website, refers to the organization as having been a “domestic terrorist group” that is no longer an active concern.[129] Others have disputed the “terrorist” categorization, and justify the group’s actions as an appropriate response to what it described as the “terrorist activities” of the war against Vietnam, domestic racism and the assassinations of black leaders.[130]
In his 2001 book about his Weatherman experiences, Bill Ayers stated his objection to describing the WUO as terrorist. Ayers wrote: “Terrorists terrorize, they kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated. Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate. No, we’re not terrorists.”[131] Dan Berger, in his book about the Weatherman, Outlaws in America, asserts that the group “purposefully and successfully avoided injuring anyone … Its war against property by definition means that the WUO was not a terrorist organization.”[132]
The late 1960s and early 1970s were tumultuous times, with the FBI attributing 1500 bombings in just 1972 to “civil unrest” by radical groups.[133] The Weather Underground would claim responsibility for a total of about two dozen bombings. The observation that Weather Underground never attacked or harmed people, and only targeted property, is criticized by some who point to the bombs which caused the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, which could have been used to harm people if they hadn’t exploded prematurely.[2][134][59] Former Weather Underground member Mark Rudd, reminiscing in 2005 about that explosion, said:
Prompted in part by claims made by informants working for the FBI within the Weather Underground, grand juries were convened in 2001 and 2009 to investigate if Weather Underground was responsible for the San Francisco Police Department Park Station bombing, in which one officer was fatally wounded, one maimed and eight more wounded by shrapnel from a pipe bomb. Ultimately, it was concluded that members of the Black Liberation Army, whom WUO members affiliated with while underground, were responsible for not only this action, but also the bombing of another police precinct in San Francisco, as well as bombing the Catholic Church funeral services of the police officer killed in the Park Precinct bombing in the early summer of 1970.[133][137]
Mark Rudd, now a teacher of mathematics at Central New Mexico Community College, has said he doesn’t speak publicly about his experiences because he has “mixed feelings, guilt and shame …”.
The forced removal of the Five Tribes from their homelands in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory in the 1830s also included the African American slaves owned by many tribe members. The transition of these slaves to American citizenship is unique in the history of race relations in the United States. It was a journey filled with contentious negotiation among factions of the Indian nations, the federal government, capitalist developers, black and white agricultural colonizers, and the freedmen themselves. Efforts to secure the rights of the freedmen represented one aspect of the struggle that ultimately opened Indian lands to non-Indian settlement.
By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the tribes’ members owned approximately ten thousand slaves. Unlike slavery in the southern states, the form of slavery in Indian Territory widely varied. The Creek and Seminole often intermarried with their slaves and allowed a broad range of freedoms. The Cherokee resisted intermarriage but pursued benign relationships on their small farms. The Choctaw and Chickasaw more closely approximated the system of white slaveholders on the cotton plantations. In all cases the slaves adapted to the patterns of the Indian cultures in dress, food, language, and communal landholding. Episodes of mistreatment and violence occurred, but more often, runaway slaves came to Indian Territory because they believed it to be a less race-restrictive environment.
As the Civil War began, tribal factionalism that had begun at the time of removal resurfaced in violence over the issues of slavery and sectional loyalty. Some Indians declared their allegiance to the Union, but other groups from all of the Five Tribes signed agreements with the Confederacy to provide supplies and troops. The slaves were caught in the crossfire. The war in Indian Territory began with an attack on loyal Creeks, Cherokees, and runaway slaves retreating toward Kansas in 1861. In the next four years guerrilla raiding by both Union and Confederate Indian units and desperate foraging destroyed many of the prosperous farms, businesses, and homes of the territory.
The Cherokee national government freed their slaves in June 1863, the only one of the Five Tribes to do so until after the war, although few slave holders acknowledged this law. Black Indians joined both the Union and Confederate armies, leaving their elderly, women, and children behind. Many slaveholding Indians sold their slaves and left the territory. Others remained on their lands until the violence forced them to retreat with their slaves to Arkansas or south to the Red River and into Texas. Black Indian refugees fled to Kansas, moved onto the farmlands previously occupied by their owners, or huddled for protection near Fort Gibson. Hunger, disease, exposure, fear, and violence marked their lives. When the war ended with Cherokee Brig. Gen. Stand Watie’s surrender in June 1865, the Five Tribes no longer exercised the autonomy over their own tribal affairs.
Federal government officials refused to recognize the divisions within the tribes’ leadership or the contributions of the loyal factions to the war effort, choosing instead to deal with them all as rebels and to enact a punitive peace agreement. Tribe leaders met first at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and later in Washington, D.C., to conduct treaty negotiations. Sizeable land cessions, railroad right of way, and a unified territorial government were among the government demands, but the most complex issue dealt with the fate of the freedmen. The government insisted on the abolition of slavery and the incorporation of the freedmen into their respective tribal groups with full citizenship rights. All of the Indian nations were willing to end slavery, but citizenship rights conferred access to land and tribal monies as well as political power. This issue prolonged the negotiations. When reports reached Washington that the freedmen were being mistreated and kept in bondage, Maj. Gen. John Sanborn was dispatched to investigate the charges, distribute supplies to alleviate some of the suffering, and make clear the government’s position with regard to freedmen’s rights. Indian leaders resented Sanborn’s interference and the elevated status of their former slaves.
Each treaty dealt with the freedman problem in some way. The Seminole promptly concluded their treaty in March 1866, granting full citizenship to their freedmen. After extensive negotiations, northern and southern Creek factions agreed to a similar treaty. The Choctaw and Chickasaw remained opposed to the adoption of the freedmen. Their treaty, signed in late April, held $300,000, proceeds from the sale of their western lands, in trust until the tribes passed laws recognizing the rights of their freedmen. If these laws were not forthcoming, the government would remove the freedmen from Choctaw and Chickasaw lands and use the money on their behalf. The Choctaw did not grant citizenship rights to their freedmen until 1883, and the Chickasaw never adopted theirs. The government refused to carry out its responsibility of removing the freedmen as well, leaving them in helpless limbo. In July 1866 the Cherokee were the last group to conclude their treaty. They allowed adoption of the freedmen residing in the Cherokee Nation at the time of the treaty signing and those who would return within a six-month time period. In November the Cherokee amended their constitution, granting full citizenship to their freedmen.
Life for the freedmen, their acceptance and assimilation, generally followed patterns set before the war. The children of Seminole and Creek freedmen attended segregated schools, and freedmen voted and served in political posts in the tribal governments. The Cherokee offered the best educational opportunities, operating seven freedmen schools by 1875 and opening a high school in 1890. Cherokee freedmen voted in the national elections, and Joseph Brown was elected to the National Council in 1875. Choctaw freedmen had no tribal-affiliated schools until 1887 and then only one, Tuskalusa Colored Academy. The Chickasaw refused to support any education for freedmen. Inasmuch as both the Choctaw and Chickasaw labored intensively to remove any freedmen from their lands, voting and political participation were nonexistent. Social interaction, outwardly peaceful in most of the territory, sometimes changed to racial violence when freedmen attempted to exercise their rights.
In the last two decades of Indian Territory Indians and freedmen faced complicated choices about citizenship and land ownership that ruptured any remaining ties between the two. Both Cherokee and Creek freedmen waged lengthy challenges through the United States courts for their rightful share of tribal monies gained in land sales. Both cases were decided in favor of the freedmen. In 1879 Cherokee attorney Elias C. Boudinot publicized the possibility of occupying unassigned lands in Indian Territory. This set off a rush of colonization schemes that included among them the Freedmen’s Oklahoma Association, headed by J. Milton Turner and Hannibal C. Carter. Agitation for an all-black state gained an audience. Freedmen from adjoining states had slipped into the territory for years, intermarrying with their black Indian counterparts or homesteading illegally, but now the opening of Indian lands to non-Indian settlement gained momentum and brought hundreds of migrants both black and white. Railroad construction, mining operations, and economic development brought in hundreds more. The Indian freedmen initially resented the black immigrants, called “state Negroes,” fearing that they would aggravate the already uneasy relationship with the Indians. Racial solidarity grew, however, as Indian hostility toward all African Americans increased under the influence of large numbers of white southerners moving into the territory.
The General Allotment Act of 1887 created the Dawes Commission to bring about the dissolution of tribal governments and the allotment of land to individual tribal members. The commission had no authority to override the Indian governments, however, until the passage of the Curtis Act in 1898. The enrollment process became a nightmare of bureaucratic paperwork that placed the burden of proof of tribal membership on the applicants themselves. Mixed-blood black Indians were all enrolled as freedmen with no Indian blood. When stalling tactics failed the Indian governments, they used every measure at their disposal to limit the number of freedmen admitted to the rolls. Once again the freedmen challenged the obstruction of their citizenship rights through the United States courts, and the litigation dragged on long after Oklahoma statehood. When the rolls closed in 1907, freedmen eligible for land allotments numbered 23,415. Oklahoma statehood brought new challenges for the African Americans who had been slaves of the Five Nations, but their history as citizens of their respective tribal groups represented a unique period in American race relations.
October 1966 Black Panther Party
Platform and Program
“Our ten point program is in the midst of being changed right now, because we used the word ‘white’ when we should have used the word ‘capitalist.'”
-Fred Hampton, Chicago Black Panthers
What We Want
What We Believe
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
Original Black Panther Party – Haki Kweli Shakur
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
The Richmond Black Panther Party Case of The Richmond Five – Haki Kweli Shakur
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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 to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to supper, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design 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.
Rules of the Black Panther Party
Every member of the Black Panther Party throughout this country of racist America must abide by these rules as functional members of this party. Central Committee members, Central Staffs, and Local Staffs, including all captains subordinated to either national, state, and local leadership of the Black Panther Party will enforce these rules. Length of suspension or other disciplinary action necessary for violation of these rules will depend on national decisions by national, state or state area, and local committees and staffs where said rule or rules of the Black Panther Party were violated. Every member of the party must know these verbatim by heart. And apply them daily. Each member must report any violation of these rules to their leadership or they are counter-revolutionary and are also subjected to suspension by the Black Panther Party. The rules are:
1. No party member can have narcotics or weed in his possession while doing party work.
2. Any part member found shooting narcotics will be expelled from this party.
3. No party member can be drunk while doing daily party work.
4. No party member will violate rules relating to office work, general meetings of the Black Panther Party, and meetings of the Black Panther Party anywhere.
5. No party member will use, point, or fire a weapon of any kind unnecessarily or accidentally at anyone.
6. No party member can join any other army force, other than the Black Liberation Army.
7. No party member can have a weapon in his possession while drunk or loaded off narcotics or weed.
8. No party member will commit any crimes against other party members or black people at all, and cannot steal or take from the people, not even a needle or a piece of thread.
9. When arrested Black Panther members will give only name, address, and will sign nothing. Legal first aid must be understood by all Party members.
10. The Ten-Point Program and platform of the Black Panther Party must be known and understood by each Party member.
11. Party Communications must be National and Local.
12. The 10-10-10-program should be known by all members and also understood by all members.
13. All Finance officers will operate under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance.
14. Each person will submit a report of daily work.
15. Each Sub-Section Leaders, Section Leaders, and Lieutenants, Captains must submit Daily reports of work.
16. All Panthers must learn to operate and service weapons correctly.
17. All Leaders who expel a member must submit this information to the Editor of the Newspaper, so that it will be published in the paper and will be known by all chapters and branches.
18. Political Education Classes are mandatory for general membership.
19. Only office personnel assigned to respective offices each day should be there. All others are to sell papers and do Political work out in the community, including Captain, Section Leaders, etc.
20. Communications–all chapters must submit weekly reports in writing to the National Headquarters.
21. All Branches must implement First Aid and/or Medical Cadres.
22. All Chapters, Branches, and components of the Black Panther Party must submit a monthly Financial Report to the Ministry of Finance, and also the Central Committee.
23. Everyone in a leadership position must read no less than two hours per day to keep abreast of the changing political situation.
24. No chapter or branch shall accept grants, poverty funds, money or any other aid from any government agency without contacting the National Headquarters.
25. All chapters must adhere to the policy and the ideology laid down by the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party.
26. All Branches must submit weekly reports in writing to their respective Chapters.
8 Points of Attention
Speak politely.
Pay fairly for what you buy.
Return everything you borrow.
Pay for anything you damage.
Do not hit or swear at people.
Do not damage property or crops of the poor, oppressed masses.
Do not take liberties with women.
If we ever have to take captives do not ill-treat them.
3 Main Rules of Discipline
Obey orders in all your actions.
Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the poor and oppressed masses.
Turn in everything captured from the attacking enemy.