The Christopher Dorner saga may be over, but he was neither the first nor the last word on Black rage. The Gulf South is a region that throughout history has given birth to plenty of icons of Black rage. It seems as though nowhere bears the weight of white supremacy more heavily than here in the Gulf South.

Perhaps it was age, class privilege or sheer naivety, but growing up in Boston I did not feel quite so as policed, and surveilled as I do here. Of course, given the racial geography of my home city, I knew there were neighborhoods into which I dared not venture – not at night, not with friends or hosts, not ever.

But when I moved to New Orleans in 2008, with both the NOPD and the Military Police still patrolling the streets, I truly felt and understood the concept of racial terror. Perhaps not surprisingly, this city and state has given us (Black people) our most militant activists: H. Rap Brown is from Baton Rouge, Huey P. Newton is from Monroe.

Historically, there were others drawn to New Orleans from elsewhere whose actions were militant and/or heroic, and whose lives could be read as either glorious or vengeful.

At the turn of the twentieth century, one summer evening, a Black migrant laborer from Mississippi named Robert Charles sat with his roommate on the porch of a rooming house in Uptown New Orleans. As they waited for a friend, the two men were approached by two members of the NOPD who claimed to have been investigating the presence of these two “suspicious Negroes.”

Attempting to rough them up, one officer drew his weapon when Charles put up a fight. Charles drew his weapon in self-defense, and shots were fired leaving both Charles and the officer wounded. Charles fled.

Thereafter, a so-called “race riot” erupted: white men in mobs swarmed Black neighborhoods and enclaves terrorizing men, women and children. Robert Charles evaded the police and the mobs for four days; he killed four police officers and three white vigilantes while in hiding. He was killed on July 27, 1900, when the police couldn’t draw him from his hiding place and decided instead to burn it down.



Mark Essex was a navy veteran who had grown up in a lilly-white town in the Midwest. After surviving the white supremacist brutality of the military regime in California, Essex moved to New Orleans. In the early 1970s. Essex became politicized after he witnessed the so-called “Showdown in Desire,” in which New Orleans police riddled the Black Panther HQ with rounds upon rounds of bullets after they refused eviction from their Lower 9th Ward homes. Mike Davis writes of Essex’s own armed exploits:



A young Black navy veteran with almost no formal weapons training, Essex boldly attacked the headquarters of the New Orleans Police Department on New Year’s Eve, 1972. After killing a black police cadet and wounding a white lieutenant, Essex escaped to a nearby warehouse where he ambushed a K-9 unit and killed another cop. For a week he eluded a vast manhunt before suddenly reappearing in the Howard Johnson Hotel across the street from City Hall. Going floor to floor, always warning the housekeepers to flee, he shot down hotel managers and white guests, setting rooms afire as he climbed toward the roof.



Eventually, the NOPD brought in the assistance of the FBI and mowed Essex down as they fired from on board a helicopter. In the cases of Charles, Essex, and Dorner, these men were never going to see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a jail cell. These brothers had finally decided that after laboring so long for so little (Charles); that after taking so many orders (Essex); and after suffering so much slander (Dorner); they’d rather “die on their feet than live on their knees.”

Brother Malcolm might say that these are yet more examples of the “chickens coming home to roost.” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

I think now it’s appropriate and timely to re-introduce the work of Frantz Fanon and his classic manifesto on decolonization, The Wretched Of the Earth, originally published in 1961, which not only gave language and coherence to the experiences of millions of oppressed peoples worldwide, it also directly informed the work of Black american freedom fighters as well.

His first chapter, “On Violence” is one that I think is especially germane to critically interrogating the violence surrounding the Dorner affair. Fanon reminds us all that decolonization is a necessarily violent process; and this is because colonization itself was (and in the case of neocolonialism continues to be) a violent calculus of interactions.



This is a two-part series. The second part will deal with Dorner and the “guilty until proven innocent” status of African Americans.

– Fari Nzinga