The Black Scholar

Journal of Black Studies and Research

A Tribute to Chokwe Lumumba by Akinyele Umoja

I first met Chokwe Lumumba in 1978. I came to Detroit for a planning meeting for a 1979 march to the United Nations demanding human rights for the Black nation in the United States. I was a member of the Afrikan People’s Party (APP) and Chokwe was a Vice-President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (PGRNA). The APP and the PGRNA were partners in the National Black Human Rights Coalition that was planning the November 5, 1979 march to the UN. Chokwe was a recognized national movement spokesperson, activist, and successful lawyer. I was just a young “movement” brother and college student. He invited me to his law office and hosted me like an old friend and comrade. Chokwe asked questions about my political work in Los Angeles and discussed my perspective on things. He seemed to genuinely value what I had to say.

Chokwe and I would become close comrades. Along with other former members of the APP, PGRNA, House of Umoja and the Black Panther Party, we were co-founders of the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). Our households became close as his wife, Nubia, and my spouse Aminata also became friends. We talked intimately about personal issues, the movement, and always about sports, particularly basketball.

In over four decades of activism and researching our people’s history, Chokwe Lumumba was one of the most talented, dedicated, and sincere people and revolutionaries that I have known. He was born Edwin Taliaferro in the city of Detroit on August 2, 1947. His commitment and love for our people as an adult is attributed to loving parents, Lucien and Priscilla Taliaferro, who supported the Civil Rights Movement. Edwin was called to Black Power activism as young student athlete at Michigan’s Kalamazoo College. His elder brother Reggie first joined the PGRNA and pledged his allegiance to New Afrika-the Black Nation in North America in 1969. Edwin would soon follow and adopt the name “Chokwe” (hunter) and “Lumumba” (gifted).

The PGRNA believed that Afrikan people in North America needed land to form an independent nation-state so that we could fulfill our potential as human beings. The territory identified by the PGRNA included the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The PGRNA called the Black majority counties in western Mississippi the Kush district. The PGRNA planned to build schools, medical clinics, and economic cooperatives and also mobilize its residents to vote for independence in a UN supervised plebiscite (election) to determine the will of Black people in the Kush District for nationhood.

Chokwe came to Mississippi in 1971 when the PGRNA made an agreement to purchase land in Hinds County, Mississippi and organized a Land Celebration Day to note the eminent purchase. As the PGRNA assembled to proceed to their celebration the perimeter security informed them that contingent of local police, Klansmen, and other white supremacists formed a blockade near the only exit where the New Afrikans had gathered to intimidate them and prevent the Black nationalists from having their Land Celebration. As a leader of the security force, Chokwe was in the first car of the caravan headed to the event. He often reflected how the white blockade, “opened like the Red Sea” when faced by a caravan organized, determined, and armed Blacks. He would return later that year after his fellow PGRNA workers survived a pre-dawn raid by the FBI and Jackson police on their Jackson, MS residence. Eleven PGRNA workers, known of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) 11 were arrested and charged with felonies as a result of them defending themselves from the FBI and police assault.

The legal ordeal of the RNA 11 motivated Chokwe to complete law school at Wayne State University. After graduating from law school and passing the Michigan Bar, he successfully sued Wayne State for discriminatory practices against students of African descent. I am sure his teachers believed he learned too well! Chokwe Lumumba will be remembered as the “people’s attorney” for his service to political prisoners and those falsely accused. A former athlete, Chokwe took his athletic determination and work ethic to the courtroom. I will never forget visiting him when he represented Dr. Mutulu Shakur to fight conspiracy charges that criminalized the Black Liberation movement. Several evenings I found Chokwe had fallen asleep at his desk preparing for trial. Chokwe often commented that Malcolm X was discouraged from pursuing a legal career by his racist junior high school teacher. Chokwe was dedicated to be the lawyer that Malcolm would have become. Surely Chokwe took Malcolm X into the courtroom.

Chokwe also took Malcolm’s principles into electoral politics. He ran for Jackson, MS City Council in 2009. His campaign slogan was, “The People Will Decide,” which he and the MXGM put into practice by organizing a People’s Assembly in his ward to create his platform. Chokwe was elected City Councilman on Malcolm’s birthday May 19th with 63% of the vote. The Ward 2 People’s Assembly continued to function after his inauguration and was organized into task forces around education, health, the environment, youth development, economic development, and other local issues. Chokwe received direction from the People’s Assembly in his policy decisions on the City Council. The same model was employed in his successful run for Mayor in 2013. I was with him when he received the election results. My book We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement had just been published. Chokwe turned to me and said, “Looks like you need to write a new chapter to your book.” My response was, “Brother, this deserves its own book!”

Chokwe Lumumba made his journey to the Ancestors on February 25, 2014. In the Yoruba sacred literature ODU IFA, it is stated that, “human being can become Orisha” meaning that an Ancestor can become a powerful force to work on behalf of its people. Surely Malcolm, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Ida B. Wells have become inspiration Ancestors for our people. Chokwe Lumumba will be invoked as we fight in the courtroom, fight for progressive representation of our people in electoral politics, and fight for human rights and self-determination for our New Afrikan/ Black nation. Ashe!!!

Akinyele Umoja

Ferguson, the Black Radical Tradition and the Path Forward by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Can’t you feel it? Feel the temperature dropping? Feel the icy winds blowing? It’s winter in America. Spring and fall seem to have enveloped summer. The chill comes sooner and lasts longer. It’s winter in America. There’s a blizzard coming. The first frost has already fallen, in Ferguson, Missouri, of all places. Ferguson has ripped the veil off. It is now clear for the world to see how the U.S. plans to deal with its black internal colony.

It’s getting dark; it’s nearly midnight. Yes, repressive episodes will continue to increase in frequency and grow in intensity. It’s nearly midnight. However, we should not despair. Enveloped in the darkness, the repressive U.S. regime of racial control has been exposed by the black light of African American youth rebellion and more importantly, through their defiance we can see the silhouette of a new era emerging. Don’t fear the dark. Dawn begins at midnight; midnight is “the first minute of a new day.”

I am of course referencing Gil Scott-Heron, the Black radical griot, second-generation political rapper (Langston Hughes and Oscar Brown Jr. first generation) and self-proclaimed “bluesician”. Our children are maturing in Ferguson; they are not only challenging the State, but as importantly, they are also defying the decrepit civil righters. A new movement is being born in the darkness of Ferguson, Missouri. The new reality, the new nadir has established the structural conditions for the birth of a new movement. We need to supply the consciousness. “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it” according to Frantz Fanon (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth New York: Grove Press, 1969, 206). Each generation creates new organizations, associations that address the problems they confront, that speak their language; that expresses their style and articulates their analysis and understanding of the path forward. The NAACP in the early 20th century, the National Negro Congress during the Great Depression, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s, the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, etc. This process of generational organizational formation appears to be occurring before our eyes. However, it is the dark of night, so we cannot see clearly, but however dimly, it does seem that in Ferguson, Missouri, Black generation Xers are discovering their mission.

Am I glorifying the looting, burning and indiscriminate shooting? No! Do I condemn it? Do white Americans condemn the actions of the Sons of Liberty? Do I condone it? I neither condemn nor condone it. I recognize it as an expression of working class African American youth, men and women, struggling to find their voice and discovering that actions speak louder than words. The Ferguson rebellion is an inchoate manifestation of the roiling turbulent dark water of African American resistance to white supremacy and capitalist exploitation. Will it become more? Will the young activists become politically conscious and organized? Will the youth whose dogged strength has kept the rebellion alive transform themselves into radicals and their struggle into a battle for power? It’s unclear; therefore, I don’t condemn it. It’s too soon to tell what it means in the flow history. However, professor Ashley Howard reminds us that what’s been called riots are merely the tactics of the most marginal and alienated sectors of Afro-America. Ferguson is inspired by the same conditions and in embryonic form harkens back to Harlem 1935, Los Angeles 1965, Miami 1981 and Los Angeles 1992. At this point it is less destructive. Perhaps, it is a more organized manifestation of African American urban rebellion. Possibly, it signals the maturation of urban working class Black youth.

I know this seems like evasion. The reader is thinking, if you mean to defend it, just do so; stop playing liberal public intellectual word games. I assure you I am not. I don’t condone the looting, burning and shooting because it promotes anarchy, is a losing tactic, and does not flow from a coherent strategy for liberation. However, like it or not, what’s called crime is generally not a question of morality, but rather a question of political economy. As Karl Marx argued, “crime” is often the first confused gestures of an oppressed class or people repudiating the legitimacy of the status quo and creeping toward a more profound resistance. My opposition to looting, burning and indiscriminate shooting is political, not simply moral. My concern is with preserving the lives and health of African Americans and our allies, not with protecting the property of the most predatory sectors of capital–convenience stores, payday lenders, and retail merchants. Despite its contradictions, in the darkness of night in Ferguson, Missouri, a new Black liberation movement may be emerging.

 

Shattering Liberal Myths

However contradictory and confused the actions of working class Black youth in Ferguson are exposing a number of myths.

Myth 1: Reconciliation. The myth of racial reconciliation is promoted by African American liberals but has its origins in distractions the African National Congress foisted upon the black South African masses to hide their betrayal to global capitalism. We don’t need racial reconciliation, what we need is the transfer of power and a redistribution of wealth and resources, in a word reparations. The only “conversation on race” that’s worth having, is a discussion about reparations, why, how and when!

Myth 2: Electoral politics. Ferguson is 67 percent African American, 14, 297 Blacks live there out of a population of 21,203, yet only one of five city council persons and none of the seven school board members are Black. Appallingly only 12 percent of the population voted in the last election. The town seems ripe for black liberal ethnic pluralist politics. However, there is this hard knot of an inconvenient fact. African Americans’ role in the economy, status in civil society, position in the polity, and representation in the culture has stagnated or regressed at precisely the same moment as the number of Black elected officials has grown to record numbers. Unlike the 1970s and early ‘80s Black elected officials can no longer be depended upon to raise issues of police brutality (http://www.theroot.com/articles/ politics/2014/08/ferguson_ what_are_black_politicians_doing.html?wpisrc=slipad). This contradiction should disabuse those presenting ethnic pluralist electoral politics as a panacea.

Myth 3: Diversification of the police force. Ferguson has 56 police officers of which only three are Black. This is perhaps more disproportionate than most places but in the U.S. police rarely resemble the people they harass and repress. Moreover, to the extent that African Americans have been incorporated into police forces, in the main the minority of Black officers have “blued” and not in the sense of the blues aesthetic. With notable exceptions, they have adapted and adopted “the blue,” rather than become change agents within its midst.

 

The Path Forward: What is to be Done

I don’t address the immediate local demands, the Organization for Black Struggle and the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Coalition have adequately addressed this question (http://obs-onthemove.org/featured/end-the-racist-police-state-in-ferguson-misery-2/). Here I address more longer-term movement building and transformative policy goals.

  1. Organization. Whether they form something new, the Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Coalition, the Million Hoodies Movement or flow into and revitalize an existing organization, the youth must organize. In truth, with few exceptions, the Organization for Black Struggle (http://obs-onthemove.org) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (http://mxgm.org) for instance, it is better that they continue to create new generational organizations as they have been doing.
  2. The Black majority of Ferguson must take political power. However, it’s important they not repeat the errors of the past. They need to break with ethnic group pluralism (the idea that through political unity African Americans can acquire comparable power to that of white ethnic groups without changing the United States’ political economy) and liberal individualism (a system based on individual civil rights) and explicitly organize around a position of group rights, fight for a consociational state (racial/ethnic group power sharing) in which African Americans organize for self-determination, participatory democracy, and economic justice. The goal should be to acquire “dual power,” to build a sustainable liberation movement whereby African Americans can make political decisions for themselves, locally and nationally, while simultaneously electing progressive Black and nonblack candidates to local, state and national office. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, its former leader, Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor of Jackson and the Jackson Peoples Assembly have put forward the Jackson Plan as a model for “participatory democracy, solidarity economy, and sustainable development and combine them with progressive community organizing and electoral politics” http://mxgm.org/the-jackson-plan-a-struggle-for-self-determination-participatory-democracy-and-economic-justice/.
  3. Ferguson Blacks must take control of the local police. Not only do the police not look like Ferguson’s majority population but they also don’t reside in Ferguson.
    1. A civilian review board with subpoena power should be instituted immediately.
    2. There must be a local residency requirement for municipal employment.
    3. All new hires on the Ferguson police force should be African American until the disparity is corrected.
  4. Police should be treated similar to private citizens:
    1. Police officers involved in a shooting or a confrontation in which a citizen is harmed should be tested immediately for drug usage.
    2. Police officers involved in a shooting should be suspended without pay until the shooting is ruled justifiable. The union should support officer’s accused of using excessive and/or deadly force until a formal ruling is rendered.
    3. An officer that observes misconduct and/or the use of excessive force and doesn’t act to prevent or stop it should be charged along with the offending officer.

A campaign should be mounted to demilitarize police forces across the country. It begins with repeal of the Department of Defense Excess Property Program, DoD 1033 (see Joy Kress, “Obtaining Excess Department of Defense Equipment,” The Police Chief, vol. 72, no. 12, December 2005, http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm? fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=765&issue_id=122005). The militarization of the police is not accidental, it is part and parcel of the move to create a police state (see Samuel F. Yette, The Choice: the Issue of Black Extermination in America (New York: G.P. Putman & Sons, 1975), 23-31; General Raymond T. Odinero, et al., “Megacities And The United States Army: Preparing For A Complex And Uncertain Future,” June 2014).

 

Conclusion

It’s winter in America. The very prescient Lou Turner warns that the U.S. corporate capitalist are enacting a coup, through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEX) and U.S. Supreme Court, they are steadily eliminating democratic rights and disfranchising African Americans and Latino/as (Lou Turner, “Corporate Coup D`Etat,” The Black Scholar Vol. 44, No. 1, Spring 2014: 30-46). It’s winter in America.

These are dark times. It is nearly midnight. In a somewhat similar situation, the 1935 Harlem Rebellion, Langston Hughes wrote “Shepherds over Harlem/Their armed watch keep/Lest Harlem stirs in its sleep/And maybe remembers/And remembering forgets/To be peaceful and quiet.” Black youth are stirring. In Ferguson, Missouri, a new generation has awakened and they are LOUD AND DEFIANT! “Midnight is the first minute of a New Day.”

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua

Senior Editor, The Black Scholar

 

The Seductive Logic of White Supremacy, Part 1 & 2 by David Crockett

Part 1

**Reposted with permission from The Scholarly Fanatic**

So, it’s been kinda light on the posting in 2013 and 2014. No sense in lying and saying that I’m definitely gonna do better. We’ll just have to see. Lately though, I’ve been thinking a good deal about so-called “broken windows” policing, mass incarceration, and white supremacy. I needed a place to put my thinking on wax, so to speak, and remembered, “Oh yeah. I started a blog about a year ago.”

***Broken Windows Policing***

In a 1982 Atlantic Monthly essay, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling introduce their “broken windows” approach to policing. It is not a very complicated argument. It’s more of a thin intellectual veneer for collective punishment than well-developed criminology. In fact, Wilson and Kelling openly acknowledge that broken windows policing likely has no direct effect on crime but has other important merits. For them “Law & Order” is more properly “law” & ORDER. Big emphasis on order. Grant police a wide berth to establish order, the thinking goes, and crime takes care of itself.

Why don’t you let Nick Nolte ‘splain it to you in this clip from the insanely underrated 1990 film Q&A. Nolte co-stars as Detective Mike Brennan and provides the cliff’s notes version of broken windows. He’s being investigated by internal affairs (played by a youthful looking Timothy Dalton) for murdering several criminals.

It’s no secret. I believe in kickin’ ass… but things got better when I was there… If we lose control over this fuckin’ jungle we’re finished… So I break a couple a heads? You know what we’re fighting out there, and they know it.

Brennan’s language is less polite than Wilson and Kelling’s, but that’s about the only difference. Broken windows is perhaps the best contemporary example of the seductive logic of white supremacy. It generates fear of the other and offers their subjugation to whites as a palliative. Of course, white supremacy can onlyoffer subjugation–and nothing else. Shockingly, that never works for very long. The fear of the subjugated other eventually returns. Unfortunately, white America routinely double down on subjugation. Kickin’ ass is the answer to every question. It cannot fail. It can only be failed.

Jamelle Bouie over at Slate has done a nice piece about doubling down on subjugation. Hit the link. [Seriously. Go read it now and come back. I’ll wait…] What I like about Bouie’s piece is that it doesn’t pander to the white liberal fantasy about racial hostility and xenophobia being limited to NASCAR dads and the small town rabble. Nah. Bouie’s not having that. He cites academic literature that makes a strong case that anti-black attitudes are common among whites in the US and they fuel support for racially punitive policies. Let me be clear: anti-black attitudes are NOT universal, but neither are they rare. They are widely diffused throughout the population, even among the highly educated in liberal bulwarks like San Francisco and New York. Bouie forces the reader to acknowledge that blackness in the white racial imaginary is mostly negative and strongly associated with crime, an association often made below the level of conscious awareness.

If it was just about attitudes I wouldn’t be writing this post. Unfortunately anti-black attitudes constitute the microfoundations of much American policy, to paraphrase social-psychologist Lawrence Bobo. As it concerns crime policy specifically, we can see the dynamics between anti-black attitudes, policing, and mass incarceration. From Bouie:

Tell people that blacks are overpoliced and over-represented in prison, and it triggers thoughts of crime, which leads to fear, which causes a backfire effect as people follow their fear and embrace the status quo of unfair, overly punitive punishments.

These “thoughts of crime” tend to be insensitive to actual crime, persisting even where crime is declining. In their snap judgments the mere presence of black people generates the fear response in whites; not a dispassionate empirical estimate of their likelihood of criminal victimization. Whites then–again, collectively–demand that assuaging their fears be the central objective of public policy.

As a consequence, data on racial (and other) disparities that should indicate obvious and fundamental unfairness instead indicates that the systems designed to assuage their fears are doing just that. At least for a little while.

 

 

Part 2

**Reposted with permission from The Scholarly Fanatic**

by David Crockett, PhD
Associate Professor of Marketing
University of South Carolina

In part 1 I call “broken windows” policing what it is: fear-based collective punishment in the service of white supremacy. In part 2 I discuss broken windows’ most infamous policy innovations: stop-and-frisk and police militarization.

**Broken Windows Begets Stop-and-Frisk**

Broken windows policing in US urban areas traces its roots to 17th century “pre-professional” urban police forces deployed specifically to imprison the poor. In the rapidly industrializing urban centers of US in the 19th century, the “coppers” were the first line of defense against the poor, immigrant hordes, and waves of black Southern migrants. They were allowed broad discretion in use of force to defend that line. Thus, “fighting crime” has often amounted to little more than preserving nativism and white supremacy through collective punishment. James Q. Wilson and George Kelling formalized broken windows policing in the 1980s, they were mostly re-stating the views of their neoconservative mentor Edward Banfield, who in a 1969 article explicitly called for a return to the “pre-professional” policing style of the 19th century.

New York’s infamous (and now illegal) stop-and-frisk policy, popularized in the 1990s, is just the latest version of these age old contain-and-punish tactics. After years of collective punishment imposed on blacks and Hispanics under the guise of fighting crime (to a degree that European immigrants never faced) stop-and-frisk was successfully challenged in federal court. In Judge Scheindlin’s takedown she essentially ruled that New York couldn’t make a compelling case that stop-and-frisk was ever about anything other than race. The fact that nearly 90% of people stopped had violated no laws precludes even a post-hocjustification for stop-and-frisk, but far more importantly this kind of collective punishment is anathema to American jurisprudence. NYC Mayor William deBlassio withdrew the city’s appeal after taking office, ending stop-and-frisk as official policy. That is a victory for clear-thinking, humane people. It should be acknowledged as such.

Unfortunately, broken windows thinking is deeply embedded in contemporary urban policing. For example, deBlassio, widely viewed as an arch-liberal who campaigned on an anti-stop-and-frisk platform, remains an ardent broken windows devotee. He tapped former Police Commissioner William Bratton to reprise his role as architect of the city’s broken windows policing strategies from the 1990s. Bratton has vowed to continue aggressively confronting minor, so-called “quality-of-life” crimes. So not surprisingly, early reviews suggest that not much is likely to change on the ground for black and brown folk in NYC. deBlassio may be quicker to settle police misconduct civil suits than his predecessors, but he is no more interested in curbing the violent police encounters that are all but explicitly called for in broken windows policing. Even supposedly liberal politicians and bureaucrats either cannot see past broken windows or cannot effectively confront it.

**This Whole Thing in Ferguson Has Gone Sideways**

As you are no doubt aware, Michael Brown was shot down by local police in the “inner ring” St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, MO. In the immediate aftermath Ferguson PD refused to release a formal incident report, or any significant details of the incident. They held out until August 15th–most likely relenting only after pressure from the Department of Justice, who was already consulting on the investigation at the governor’s request. The Ferguson PD’s initial statements appear to conflict with multiple eye witness accounts. Notably, police at the scene collected camera phones from at least some eye witnesses. Yet no law enforcement personnel took statements from anyone on the scene. Darius Johnson, who was a party to the incident along with Brown, and presumably fired upon by the officer, was never detained as a suspect in a crime. Nor was he interviewed by Ferguson or St. Louis County PD as a material witness to a shooting. (He was interviewed by federal prosecutors days later, after giving multiple media interviews.)

By Sunday night into the early hours of Monday, angry residents took to the streets in protest. They burned a gas station to the ground and engaged in other intense but sporadic looting, mostly confined to an area roughly 5 minutes from the site of the shooting. (And coincidentally about 5 minutes from my high school.) A friend and classmate left a message on my voice mail late Sunday that ended, “Man, this whole thing in Ferguson has gone sideways.”

Indeed.

Since that time, things have moved well past sideways. The St. Louis County Police Department took over primary operations from Ferguson PD by Sunday evening (even if the Ferguson police chief mostly appeared on camera). Predictably, St. Louis County PD escalated tensions. For reasons that are to date being seriously under-reported, County PD began to treat the situation as a counterterrorism action beginning on Monday. They donned their counterterrorism finery and began to run plays from their counterterrorism playbook. They started by cordoning off West Florissant Ave., the main thoroughfare, with a mine resistant armored personnel carrier. They followed by teargassing protesters. That was Monday. On Tuesday, Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal confronted the Ferguson Police Chief at a press conference about being teargassed the previous day. By Wednesday evening, County PD had began a second round of smoke bombs, flash-bang grenades, rooftop snipers and LRAD sound cannon. By late Wednesday County PD was chasing people through residential areas, tossing teargas canisters into front yards without evident discrimination. Notably, the County officers openly harassed journalists. They fired teargas directly at an Al-Jazeera America crew filming on site, dispersing the crew. As crewmembers ran, officers then turned their recording cameras to the ground.

County police also ordered reporters from the Washington Post and Huffington Post to stop filming before detaining them for several hours without charge before releasing them. They initially declined to provide the reporters an incident report naming an arresting officer before relenting to provide a report in 4-6 weeks. This is important, as both reporters allege that the officers were unduly violent when detaining them. County PD also arrested St. Louis Alderman Antonio French as he recorded events from his car and live tweeted while parked at the scene.

**This Ain’t Irony. This Ain’t Even Coincidence**

On my twitter feed I saw tweets of solidarity with the people of Ferguson, MO coming from Palestinians, coupled with helpful hints on dealing with teargas and other so-called counterterrorist tactics. Many people pointed to the irony of a US city reduced to a war zone while people in an actual war zone looked on in shock and horror. But they are wrong to call the events in Ferguson irony. Irony’s defining quality is the unexpected, but willful blindness in the face of the unpleasant does not make the unpleasant unexpected. Ferguson is what collective punishment can look like, and increasingly does look like. What is happening in Ferguson is not irony. It is the burlesque of white supremacy. Extra-legal law enforcement killings and forcefully quelling the rage of those at the bottom of the order is the entirely foreseeable cost of maintaining such an order. Not everywhere, but anywhere. Not all the time, but anytime.

**Posse Comi–What’s That Now?**

Local law enforcement has been steadily militarizing for years now. Much of the build-up of military grade equipment has gone unnoticed, as much of it finds its way to local law enforcement from or through the Department of Homeland Security. This business in Ferguson has put it on full display. Of course, black and brown communities have seen militarization from the gun barrel end for quite some time. The War on Drugs has local police serving simple (and often outrageously broad) search warrants, and even chasing down rumors from informants, with full-on SWAT teams.

The enormous scope of federal agencies with broad authority to operate with local law enforcement on issues like drug trafficking, immigration, natural disasters, and terrorism threatens to render posse comitatus effectively meaningless as local police departments increasingly see themselves as para-military organizations. They are already equipping and training officers as paramilitary soldiers. For example, in a 2011 report centered on the Occupy protests, Raw Story, citing work by journalist Max Blumenthal, noted that Israeli-style counterinsurgency training has become the latest thing in urban policing. Police departments nationwide are sending officials to train with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). These “exchanges” have become a something of a cottage industry. Interestingly, it does not appear that law enforcement from areas of that include white separatist and militia groups known to engage in terrorism are lining up for these exchanges. Rather, law enforcement from the large cities (e.g., New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, Washington, DC.) and college towns (e.g., Ann Arbor, Berkeley) are lining up for counter-insurgency training.

Coincidentally, former St. Louis County police chief, Tim Fitch (who just resigned in December 2013), traveled to Israel for counterterrorism training. Not so coincidentally, County PD serves as the regional counterterrorism “fusion” center, where they coordinate counterterrorism strategy across all levels of law enforcement. As I noted earlier, St. Louis County PD began coordinating operations on the ground in Ferguson within hours of the shooting. So any suggestion that police response to the citizens of Ferguson resulted in any way from incompetence or boobery just doesn’t seem to square with what we know. This has always been a counterterrorism action.

David Crockett, PhD
Associate Professor of Marketing
University of South Carolina

Why Ferguson Isn’t the Tale of Two Protests by Ashley M. Howard

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

A fallacy circulates in the local and national conversations about the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Two separate and distinct protests are not taking place.  Mayor James Knowles attempts to bifurcate these actors as those individuals marching and assembling in prayer “in an organized and respectful manner” and those who go out at night “co-opt[ing] peaceful protests and turn[ing] them into violent demonstrations.” This dichotomy is false and wrongheaded. The activists that march in the sunlight and those that loot under streetlights are born of the same righteous indignation.  Outrage and responses to injustice are fluid. In the on-going discussion of the current turmoil, the efficacy, omnipresence, and symbiosis of violent protest throughout American history has been forgotten. Social unrest and peaceful protest are neither discreet nor disconnected, but interrelated tactics on a protest continuum.  After memorandums, petitions, and marches fail, insurrection becomes a direct line of communication from the downtrodden to the power structure that benefits from ignoring them.  Gazing back on previous uprisings, we clearly see Ferguson in their reflection.

Between 1965 and 1968, 329 urban rebellions took place in 257 American cities, resulting in nearly 300 deaths, 60,000 arrests, and hundreds of millions of dollars in property loss.  The precipitating factors for these events were complex and often intertwined.  Clearly many Blacks felt embittered following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  These laws transformed the South but had limited impact in the urban North.  High wages and stable employment dwindled due to deindustrialization and automation. Economic and race oppressions acted as co-conspirators, systematically shutting out Black working-class people.   African Americans resided in substandard housing, learned in outdated classrooms, played in unequipped parks, and suffered abuse at the hands of municipal police.  These deficiencies alone were despicable.  African Americans’ lack of opportunity for genuine redress, however, made their situation untenable.  For working-class African Americans violent protest came to be viewed as a viable and necessary option.

Black America’s dissatisfaction and disillusionment did not end in the era of dashikis and naturals. African Americans face similar or worse obstacles than they did in 1967.  Whereas much has changed in America since the Black Freedom Movement, glaring inequalities remain. Over the past fifty years the Black unemployment rate has consistently been twice that of white Americans.   Educational inequality remains prevalent.  Black students are three times more likely to be expelled from school than their white counterparts. 33% of secondary schools with the highest percentage of Black and Latino students do not offer chemistry, a quarter do not offer Algebra II.  Police harassment remains a constant threat.  African Americans are incarcerated at a rate of nearly six times that of whites.

Despite such stark evidence, many Americans congratulate themselves on conquering racism (as seemingly evidenced by Barack Obama’s presidency) but remain deaf to the real legal, political, and economic barriers that prevent African Americans from achieving equal status.   Unfortunately the only time the general public pays attention to the ongoing efforts of the most marginalized and disillusioned Black Americans are when buildings begin to burn.  The taking of a young Black man’s life does not garner much attention; but the stealing of junk food from a QuikTrip over the same issue thrusts police brutality into the laps of those who choose to overlook it. Protestors and witnesses around the world are asking themselves an important question: Is this what it takes to get noticed?

History seems to indicate the answer is yes.  Urban rebellions, both in the contemporary moment and the 1960s, must be understood as a continuation of previous political jockeying and protest through so-called “legitimate” channels. If activists judge traditional mechanisms for change as ineffective, they will employ noninstitutional tactics.  In shifting protest outside of the established spheres of power, non-traditional political actors are placed on parallel footing with the State. The sixties’ revolts brought a swift though short-lived change, affirming to many that only in the fires of rebellion could a new political order be forged.  In response to the revolts, funding flooded Black urban communities bringing job programs, educational opportunities, and recreational facilities with it.  This influx of cash, however, represented a liberal patch to treat the symptoms of racial oppression, not a cure for the disease itself.  Ferguson ignites in the relapse of this illness.

The rebellions regardless of their era constitute a complex beast: part mirror, part springboard, part dirge. Violent revolts reflect society’s socioeconomic, racial, and gendered disparities in the most profound way.  Insurrections launch articulate action and foment revolution.  Uprisings also intone the closing of this very avenue for change, as the State becomes savvier in containing these events. Day or night, nonviolent or violent, communal protest symbolizes a taking back of power, an assertion of worth, the ultimate cry for justice and acknowledgment.

Ashley M. Howard
Loyola University-New Orleans
Book Review Editor, The Black Scholar