Y’all Didn’t Learn Then, Y’all Gon’ Learn Now: The Role of Armed Self Defense and Armed Struggle in Two Key Periods of the Black Liberation Movement BRG Follow May 20, 2018 · 18 min read

It is a truism in the revolutionary movement, meaning the movement for the revolutionary transformation of society and the overthrow of capitalism, that armed struggle and armed self-defense is a necessity. The United States knows this very well, as a country that was founded in the heat of an armed struggle of the nascent white bourgeoisie and planter class against the British. Every American schoolchild imbibes the figures, dates, and key events of the “American Revolution” as soon as they enter Kindergarten. Furthermore, Americans see their country bombing, fomenting armed rebellions of reactionaries in, and upsetting the established order in other countries through violence. In essence, it is seen as a given that any revolutionary change, ultimately, comes about only through the use or threat of use of force. For this reason, the United States has historically restricted ownership of firearms and other weapons to the white caste. Tiffany Ware of the Black Girls Project, “an initiative that aims to encourage and inspire black women and teaches them to responsibly own and use firearms”, explains in an interview given to Al Jazeera: “Throughout much of American history, gun control was a method for keeping Blacks and Hispanics ‘in their place’, for lack of a better expression.” A Black (henceforth referred to as New Afrikan) revolution, “revolution” being defined in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist sense as a struggle by which one class overthrows and suppresses another, is anathema to the American psyche because such a revolution, expressed through the highest stage of revolutionary practice, armed struggle, would of necessity destroy the United States because this country is founded and continues to sustain itself through forced labor of New Afrikan people along with other oppressed nationalities such as Chicanos (Mexicans and Mexican descendants resident in the states stolen from Mexico during the imperialist Mexican-American War). It is with this background that I have chosen to write on the role of arms and armed struggle in the New Afrikan Liberation Movement during the second half of the 20th Century and the 21st Century all the way up to the present day. Producing a thorough history of the role of armed self-defense and arms by New Afrikans throughout the entire history of the United States would result in a doctoral dissertation length text, so for the purpose of brevity I have chosen to focus exclusively on the years spanning 1954 and 1971 and 2014 and 2018, breaking my discourse and research into these two eras mainly because they are colloquially seen as the apogees of the New Afrikan liberation movement. The era spanning 1954–1971 saw the rise of organizations such as SNCC and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the birth and triumph of revolutions that inspired the New Afrikan struggle (Cuba, Algeria, and the Cultural Revolution in China) and subsequent contact with these liberation movements and socialist/progressive states, along with seeing the rise of New Afrikan luminaries of self-defense such as Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and Huey P. Newton. 2014–2018, in addition to being the present, saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter “movement” and the rebirth/re-centering of armed-self defense formations such as the Black Women’s Defense League, Huey P. Newton Gun Club (from which the former split), and various anti-fascist groups. The goal of this paper is to answer these questions: What has inspired New Afrikan people in the United States to pick up the gun to defend themselves? What is the commonality between then and now? What are the differences? What are the differences and contradictions between the Euro-American gun ownership movement and the New Afrikan gun ownership movement? What are the differences between non-male and male relations to the gun in the New Afrikan nation? What were (and are) the state responses to New Afrikan armed self-defense and gun ownership in general? For the purpose of this project, I am researching and seek to demonstrate within the brief confines of this project how New Afrikan gun ownership has borne a directly antagonistic relationship to the material interests of the United States. New Afrikan people have been seen as a “problem population” and have been subject to various restrictions on possession of firearms. There is a material reason for New Afrikan gun ownership, this being the harassment, suppression, and murder by State actors of activists and people in general and the fact that those seeking political power must become familiar with armed struggle. This analysis will span two periods (1954–1971) and (2014–2018).

Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic — by whatever means — has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society’s inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence. In other times, there has been political repression, peonage (debt slavery), wage slavery, chicanery, and the like, but always accompanied by the actual or threatened force of violence. — Huey P. Newton

The understanding laid out by the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, is essential to understanding this thesis. Violence, the use and the threat of the use of violence, is the essential foundation of this country and all others. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun. This country, the United States of America, grew from a small collection of rebellious colonies on the American Eastern Seaboard to the most economically and powerful country in the world through enslavement, land theft, and super-exploitation, and various other structurally and inherently violent courses of action that ruined and despoiled millions and eventually billions of people and brought trillions of dollars in capital to the shores of the United States. The United States is, objectively, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world since the end of WWII and its assumption, along with the Soviet Union, of its role as a superpower. Imperialist powers, following Lenin’s definition of “imperialism” as parasitic, dying capitalism, not only invade, subdue, and exploit other countries, but also super-exploit and derive super-profits from internal colonies. New Afrikans are one of these oppressed nations, or internal colonies. It is with this understanding that we discuss the ownership and use of firearms in the United States among the New Afrikan nation.

“When you start paying attention to the Second Amendment, you start having more of a value for all of the other amendments. That creates good citizens: people who are politically active, who are going to their school board meetings, who are seeing what’s up with budgets, talking to their city councils, talking to their state representatives. We’re getting them involved politically on most angles. America would not have even been created without firearms. Some people say it’s a contradiction for me as an African-American man to have a position: “When they wrote the Second Amendment, they didn’t mean it for you.” I don’t give a fuck who they meant it for. It’s mine now.” This is the common sentiment expressed among revolutionary (those who have expressed the necessity of overthrowing the United States through armed force) New Afrikan gun owners. The United States has been diametrically opposed to New Afrikan gun ownership since its very inception. Craven tells us:

As much as America loves her guns, she has never liked the idea of seeing them in black hands. Before the Revolutionary War, colonial Virginia passed a law barring black people from owning firearms — an exercise in gun control as racial control. In 1857, in his notorious Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney summoned the specter of black people freely enjoying the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Surely, he argued, the founders were not “so forgetful or regardless of their own safety” to permit such a thing. When black people armed themselves against white supremacist attacks following the Civil War, Southern state governments passed “black codes” barring them from owning guns. After the Black Panthers open carried to signal to California police officers that they would defend themselves against racial attacks in the late ’60s, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a state ban on open carry into law.

The Black Codes and other reactionary legislation were put into place after the Civil War and the mustering out of USCT and other armed New Afrikan formations that fought for the Union in the war to liberate themselves. It was against the law for non-white people to own or use firearms in many states of the South, yet in many instances these laws were scoffed by freedmen and women who rejected the idea that they should simply sit back and watch as their homes, lands, and families were destroyed by the Redeemers, or forces of reaction that coalesced in groups such as the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and other forces, armed of course. This historical context, the knowledge that without engaging in concrete and practical self-defense and, in some exceptional instances, offensive armed struggle and retaliation against the forces of the Ku Klux Klan and reactionary institutions/state governments in both the South and North, continues to impact the growing segment of the New Afrikan liberation movement that embraces the right and practice of armed struggle as a means to actualizing their liberation.

The theory that informs this thesis and all of my writing is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (Maoism), which can be defined as the theoretical and practical heir of the Marxism-Leninism developed in practice by the struggles led by the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin and the experiment of the Soviet Union, which was the first socialist country. Maoism arises out of the application of Marxism-Leninism to the concrete conditions of China and the subsequent universal developments that arose from this experiment, along with the concrete applications of what was then termed Mao Zedong Thought to the concrete experiences of revolution in countries such as Peru, the Philippines, Nepal, India and Turkey. Key to understanding Maoist analysis is the tool of historical materialism, or histmat. Historical materialism is, essentially, the application of the theory of dialectical materialism to the social sciences and as a scientific method of analyzing, criticizing, explaining and developing concrete pathways for advancing societies. Maoist theoretician Kevin Rashid Johnson explains:

HM is DM applied to the study and understanding of social development and history. Marx saw that the past philosophical approaches to understanding history and social development were not scientific but were inconsistent and incomplete. He therefore applied DM to the study and analysis of society and history. In doing this, Marx saw that the very core of human society is the struggle for survival, which expresses itself in the systems of social production. These are the relations that a given people engage in to work up and extract survival necessities from nature for social consumption and use. In these productive processes, people become involved in definite relations that are necessary and independent of their will. These relations are the economic basis, the foundation, and root of every society. It is upon these economic foundations that the society’s social institutions or superstructure (political, legal, religious, ethical, cultural, etc.) are built.

By using the theoretical foundation provided by Maoism and historical materialism as basis for my research and the analysis of source materials, I have sought to be as objective as possible, objective meaning providing a solid basis for the arguments that I put forth in this paper and avoiding historical revisionism, idealism (the precedence of ideas over material forces and the negation of struggling for the seizure of political power) and failing to see the material forces that have driven society since its stratification into classes thousands of years ago.

The material that I have chosen for this thesis, aside from news articles/analysis, includes seminal works regarding armed self defense among the New Afrikan nation. Key works are: Black Against Empire (Bloom, Martin), That Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Cobb), Negroes with Guns (R.F. Williams), War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (Huey P. Newton), and the articles /theoretical pieces compiled in Panther Vision and Defying the Tomb (Kevin Rashid Johnson). The first provides a comprehensive, thorough history of the Black Panther Party from its rise on the streets of Oakland beginning in October, 1966, to the split between factions represented by Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, to the dissolution of both wings after burnout and fratricidal violence. The Black Panther Party is the seminal New Afrikan political formation dedicated to armed struggle and armed self defense and thus deserves attention as it influences those who today uphold the right of armed self defense. Cobb’s work is straightforwardly titled masterpiece demonstrating the uses of weapons in defending the “nonviolent” civil rights movement in the South. Negroes with Guns is a key historical account of Robert F. Williams’ organizing and continues to bear relevance today, the ideology contained therein (revolutionary New Afrikan nationalism secured by armed self-defense) is still seen as a threat to the good order of the capitalist-imperialist system. The works of Rashid Johnson and Huey P. Newton’s doctoral dissertation are essential to understanding both the lengths that the state will go to destroy New Afrikan organizations that embrace the gun and Johnson is a contemporary bridge between old and new forms of organizing.

“There was a very old man, an old white man out in the crowd, and he started screaming and crying like a baby, and he kept crying, and he said “God damn, God damn, what is this God damn country coming to that the niggers have got guns, the niggers are armed and the police can’t even arrest them?” This statement by a white fascist regarding the presence of armed New Afrikan activists at a demonstration in Monroe, North Carolina, is a perfect encapsulation of the attitude of white reactionaries both inside and outside the government to the upholding of the Second Amendment and the “natural right” of self defense by revolutionaries. There has historically been no real material basis for unity between Euro-American and New Afrikan armed self-defense organizations. The ownership of guns by New Afrikan people has historically been seen and currently is seen as an antagonistic tendency and efforts to disarm New Afrikan people have been supported by Euro-American dominated governments and civilians alike. A historical materialist analysis looks for the class nature and basis of all legislation and laws passed by governments, and we can determine that the United States, a State which developed its foundation as the world’s number one imperialist superpower through the forced transportation and enslavement of Africans and the mass, systematic genocide and land theft from the indigenous residents of what would become the United States, passes laws in accordance with the material interest of the settler class or caste who founded and continue to derive most of the material benefits from the existence of this state of affairs. There can be said to be a double standard in responses to New Afrikan victims of State violence and suppression while armed, and European descended people. There is much sympathy for white cult groups such as the Branch Davidians which was destroyed by the ATF, but little for Philando Castile, a legal gun owner who was murdered by the police. The shooting was notable because it shamed the NRA: After coming under criticism for their silence immediately following the incident, the NRA issued a statement last July without naming Castile, calling the incident “troubling” and vowing that “the NRA will have more to say once all the facts are known.” But the group has said nothing since. This habit of a double standard, defending white reactionaries who often commit reactionary acts of violence while attacking New Afrikan people who have armed themselves in defense against white violence, is an historical trend of groups such as the NRA. This is in accordance with the status of New Afrikan people of the US as an internal colony in the Leninist sense and the necessity of an oppressor nation to disarm and subvert an oppressed nation. Adam Winkler exposes the reactionary nature of the 1960s era gun control legislation when he points out Reaganite hypocrisy in response to the armed demonstration of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense at the California State Capitol building in 1967.

“The Panthers’ methods provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol. Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.” The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.”

In essence, the “niggers” that the elderly white man nearly had a stroke over in Monroe, NC, were arming themselves, organizing themselves, and disciplining themselves, and the forces of reaction were enforcing their will through the passage of legislation that curbed what were supposedly “natural rights” in response to the fear of “negro rule and revenge” that has consistently dogged and stalked European America. This was unconscionable to the white supremacist political order and was answered with repression. The same repression is seen today with the FBI’s development of the black identity extremist (BIE) label, eerily similar to the labeling of the Black Panther Party not only a threat to national security, but the greatest threat to national security. This was simply because, as Waldo and Bloom put it, “The politics of armed self-defense had tapped the wells of resistance among black youth, and the national organization had mobilized broad support from a spectrum of black, antiwar, and international allies. This support in turn allowed the Party to flourish in the face of government repression and to sustain its anti-imperialist movement.”

A truism in New Afrikan revolutionary organizing is that without those who were committed to armed self defense against attacks from the Ku Klux Klan and other reactionaries, the struggle for civil rights would have been derailed or crushed. Even Martin Luther King himself possessed firearms and applied for a concealed carry permit and was subsequently found “unsuitable” for the required permit after having his house bombed by reactionaries. Cobb in That Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed explains the contradictions between working class New Afrikans in the South and the middle class (petit bourgeois) college students mainly working through SNCC that went there during Freedom Summer and stayed with these working class people while working to organize them to demand civil and political rights. To quote: “Violence continued to be the main tool of white-supremacist authority during the first half of the 20th century, because the white power structure had not yet completed construction of the more sophisticated legal edifice it would use to protect white supremacy from the 1950s on. Across the rural South, moreover, a system of debt peonage not far removed from slavery was firmly in place. Still, whites were perpetually wary of any black display of self-reliance or assertion of human rights, and their fears frequently erupted in hysterical rampages.” Into this context stepped the middle class SNCC students of the North, people such as Bob Moses. As opposed to changing the political line developed from lived experiences of the masses of the New Afrikan South, these organizers had their own political lines changed through constant contact with violent sheriffs, vigilantes, and other reactionaries and the subsequent embrace of armed self defense by the masses of New Afrikans in the South. People like C.O. Chinn, who was held with a grudging respect even by the white supremacist sheriff as “one of the two bad motherfuckers in this county, the other being me” and TRM Howard, who protected witnesses in the Emmett Till murder case and slept with a Thompson machine gun at the foot of his bed, showed how the exclusively nonviolent line promoted by those who had no real experience among the masses of the South was baseless and deadly in practice. Without the embrace of and familiarity with the gun, it was impossible to organize in the South because white supremacy reserved the brunt of its vitriol and violence for the “nonviolents”, seeing them as easy targets. In many instances, activists who were arrested and then released were subsequently tortured to death by Klan with police connections, the most famous example being the case of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in 1964.

With gun culture comes machismo. This goes for the revolutionary movement as well as the counterrevolutionary movement. This is always the implication of putting the gun before political organizing. A perfect example of this is the split in the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and the subsequent formation of the Black Womens’ Defense League, which has attracted attention for protesting the abuse perpetrated against New Afrikan women within the revolutionary movement. The group’s political line is a good synthesis of the necessity faced by the doubly/triply oppressed (as workers, as non-men, as New Afrikans):

For black women who are caught in the crossfire between racism from outside of the community and patriarchy from within, the Black Women’s Defense League encourages women to stand their ground and defend themselves. According to the group’s Facebook Page, “BWDL focus’ on self-defense through martial arts and other hand-to-hand combat techniques armed training with various types of artillery including knife fighting, marksmanship, and weapons of opportunity. BWDL also engages in emergency preparedness, urban survival training, …and battered women’s rescue.” The self-described womanist organization’s mission extends beyond black feminism. “We believe in protecting our families and communities alongside our brothers and all oppressed people worldwide. In our communities, black men and women must function as two vital parts of the same body. BWDL seeks to refine, train and prepare women for a symbiotic relationship that will truly enrich our children, our lives and make a positive impact on our collective realities.”

Black Women’s Defense League

The necessity for struggling against patriarchal violence within movements is a commonality, yet another continuity from the movements of the 1960s and the movements of today. Elaine Brown achieved renown for struggling against patriarchy and the relegation of women cadre within the Black Panther Party to “the kitchen”, oftentimes being criticized for using brutal and unnecessary violence to “earn her place”. This must be placed into the context of the environment surrounding the Party and the atmosphere of brutality into which the cadre, particularly women, were placed. The Combahee River Collective developed what is commonly known as “identity politics” after going through the organizations and movements of the 1960s, particularly the Black Panther Party. Key to the success of the current-day iteration of the armed New Afrikan Liberation movement is acknowledging the necessity of putting the struggles of non-men, particularly trans women, front and center and accepting their leadership. Without this, the same mistakes will continue to be made and the movement will again fracture into many small pieces. Unity, it has been shown, is predicated on respect for the masses and the centering of the most oppressed, taking into account their positions when formulating political line.

State repression is the go-to response of the American State to armed self defence movements of oppressed nations people. This is why it smashed the Lakota at Wounded Knee, destroyed the lives of countless Borinquen (Puerto Rican) independence activists, and used COINTELPRO to pit Black Panther Party cadre against each other, even going so far as to use poison pen letters to manufacture splits that would lead to violent reprisals. Dialectical materialism teaches us that the main cause of change, all change, is internal, meaning that when movements are destroyed and wrecked, there is an internal problem (contradiction) that allowed external contradictions (like the police, or rival organizations) to come in and destroy them. Settling these things requires principled struggle and learning from the past. It is obvious that the liberation of the New Afrikan people in the United States must come from a familiar relationship with weapons and their use, and, most importantly, learning the lessons of those who picked them up before us. We must come to understand that America is not our country, we were forcibly torn from our homelands and sent here to work land stolen from the indigenous of this country. This country was founded in violence, and Maoism teaches us that it will perish in violence as well. It has no interest in perishing without a fight, and to this end all who seek true liberation must work and strive to learn from history and resolve our internal contradictions and problems, namely, inter-organizational rivalries, splitting tendencies, male chauvinism, patriarchy, and egoism. Without this, the armed struggle movements of the New Afrikan people will continue to be subject to state suppression and destruction due to their failures to learn the lessons of the past. There are similarities and differences between the movements of then and now. The material conditions that gave rise to the birth of the Black Panther Party have only worsened. Entire communities exist without clean water, adequate schooling, and under the abusive rule of police departments that lynch New Afrikan people for free. This is why armed self-defense and armed struggle continues to bear relevance and attract the most proletarianized/lumpenized of revolutionaries, because they learned through practice and experience Mao’s dictum that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun”. Without this knowledge, there is no hope for national liberation of the New Afrikan people.