[Reposted from The Chicago Reporter with permission from the author.]

There were two things I saw in the media coverage of Ferguson, Mo., recently in the ramp up to the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the August shooting death of 18 year-old Michael Brown.

Two illustrations from different times and places, expressed with different intent, but, for me, carrying the same message: We are missing the story.

Ferguson is not just the story about last summer’s tragic shooting death of Brown — unarmed, hands up, according to some witnesses, who apparently were not credited by the grand jury. It is not just the story of the ugly images of a militarized police force pushing back protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. It is not just about a process many people believed took way too long to decide whether a crime was committed.

The story of this St. Louis suburb is the story of power. It is power that is enforced at street level by the police and up throughout a justice system that has been engaged in the mass incarceration of people of color. It is a political system that powers the criminal justice system in this process. It is a social system that defines people, identifies them in ways that will justify their place in society — high or low, included or marginalized.

In that process, we often come to see each other, to know each other — as good or bad — through media representations. Our reality, then, is a mediated reality. And the media portrayal of African-Americans by television — where most people get their news — has been in the negative context of crime and poverty. The mediated reality is way out of proportion to the actual reality. And the public takeaway too often is that black is bad.

These points are driven home by my two illustrations. First, as I Googled “Ferguson” this past week — with anxious headlines declaring a state of emergency in Missouri and the call-up of the National Guard in anticipation of angry public reaction to a grand jury decision — I saw a photograph on the Los Angeles Times website. The focal point was a blond-haired white woman in a group of protesters. Her sign read “Thug Protestor” and had arrows pointing to herself. I was struck by that photo, and the irony wrapped in irony.

The irony she intended is based on our recognition that she obviously is not a thug, as some people have called the protesters based on the nightly images of confrontation played out on television in connection with Ferguson.

The woman’s point is that we shouldn’t assume that protesters are thugs. After all, she is a protester and, of course, she does not look like a thug. She looks like the All-American Girl. But, in recognizing that irony, we get twisted in the embedded irony. We have to know what a thug looks like in order to know that she is not one. A thug in TV representation is a person of color — black or brown.

So, in trying to deconstruct the social construct of black as bad, she wound up reinforcing it. The second illustration is a confrontation on NBC’s “Meet the Press” between former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, during which Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, engaged in reductive reasoning. “The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70-75 percent of the time,” Giuliani said. So, in other words, it’s your fault — black people everywhere — that your kids might get shot down in the street by police. Look at how bad things are in the African-American communities.

So what is media’s role in this?

We tell people what is important to think about and we even tell them how to think about it. We set public agenda based on what we cover, we frame the stories and we represent people within that frame. Because of this agenda-setting process, people walk away thinking crime is a bigger problem than it really is. Because people of color are more likely to be seen in mug shots than are whites — far more than the numbers would justify — people like the woman in the L.A. Times photo come to see crime in blackface. Sadly, people like Giuliani — people in positions to make a positive difference — can paint by statistical numbers without getting the full picture.

The story we are missing in this process, though, is the one that provides the full context for the story we are being told — the meaning of it all. The full picture. Sure, we get the facts. We get the who, what, where and when of it all. But not the why. The why is the context.

It starts with why there is such a wide gap in black and white opinion on the case, whether Darren Wilson should have been indicted for a crime. Why do some people accept police action while others distrust it? At bottom, why are some people angry and others afraid?

Ferguson is presented as a confrontation story. The problem with that frame is that it ultimately directs our gaze away from the underlying story, which is to say, the actual story.

Even more, that very framing can determine public opinion. In a story of confrontation between people you have come to associate with wrongdoing and the police you believe are tied to law and order, the demonstrators are going to lose in the battle for public approval. We need to know why young black people see themselves as victims of prosecutorial discretion and the police as an oppressive force in the process. We need to know why they have come to believe there is a breakdown of the law in their community by people who shoot them down in the street — hands up.

We also need to know why other people see things so differently. Television is a big part of the why. It emphasizes the visual. The immediate. The impact. The confrontation between the police and demonstrators in Ferguson will “make for good TV,” President Obama said in calling for peace following the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson. Good TV. But is it good journalism?

Not without balance, it isn’t. Not without providing some deeper understanding of the meaning behind the images, the story behind the story. Otherwise, the real confrontation is a clash of perception. A racial Rorschach.

People tend to see what they want to see, what they have been conditioned to see. We have to help them see what is. To see and to understand.

That is the media responsibility—to provide the information we need to make enlightened choices about policy, about consumption, about our social interaction. We can’t get there — enlightened decision-making — without understanding the meaning of it all. The context. The why. In the many stories that have been told since last summer’s confrontations, we have learned more as the result of follow-up reporting. However, even the background stories we are getting, like the ones about the overpolicing of a majority black community by an overwhelmingly white police force, only provide part of the ultimate truth.

Even when the media begin to tell us the more nuanced stories and try to clarify that violence during the demonstrations is being committed by only a small minority of people — people who are taking advantage of the demonstration as cover — the TV images of much larger crowds and explosive confrontations tell us something different.

The tendency among many people in the viewing audience will be to conclude that the demonstrators — overwhelmingly people of color, who already are perceived to be at fault when it comes to issues of wrongdoing — are the people who are responsible when things go terribly wrong. Even when the confrontations are provoked by police. Research shows that the mere display of a gun by one person can cause the other person to be more aggressive.

So the challenge of the media is to cut through all this and to do it with careful decisions about what goes in the frame of the story and what is left out. To do it with decisions about how to balance breaking news with more background, more interpretation, more perspectives in follow-up stories.

While we want to think we are balanced in our reporting, we must consider whether we really achieve that goal. Do you really see the world in a balanced way through a gas mask, or when you are constrained by a bulletproof vest? Is your judgment guided by a sense of journalistic responsibility or a sense of threat? The answer to that question only raises another obvious one and that is, threat by whom? The police? Or the people the police are confronting? What is the perspective you get on such a confrontation from behind police barricades, in a press pen, subject to feeds by the official sources?

Without question, reporting the who, what, where and when of it all from the frontlines is tough. But if we don’t get at the “why” through more thoughtful enterprising stories, all the rest of it has no meaning and no impact in helping people move away from biases to make more reasoned choices.

If we don’t try to do that, then the question we ultimately should be asking is, “Why not?”

The photos and videos of battered Black women’s bodies seem to be everywhere. TMZ a celebrity news website released security camera footage of Janay Palmer Rice’s then finance/now husband violently punching her in an Atlantic City casino elevator. According to national studies she is not alone. Approximately 4 out of every 10 Black women have been victims of rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetimes. This means that more than 6 million Black women are survivors. They are our sisters, friends, and neighbors.

With the assistance of a passer-by, the disoriented, disheveled Janay Rice rose to her unsteady feet. However, too many Black women never get up again, like Kasandra Perkins who was shot nine times with a .40-caliber handgun by her boyfriend Jovan Belcher, the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker. Like Janay Rice, she also was not alone. More than half of Black women homicide victims who knew their offenders were killed by former or current intimate partners, most often with a handgun during an argument.

But, it is not just celebrities. The internet is populated with images of formally anonymous Black girls and women who have been victimized, like Jada, a 16-year-old Houston native who had been drugged and raped at a party. Soon, pictures of her—bottomless, unconscious, arms slung on either side, one leg bent perpendicular—were posted on social media. Using the hashtag #jadapose, twitter uses shared photos of themselves that mimicked her passed-out pose and added the message “hit that.”

Society remains oblivious to the most horrific violence perpetrated against Black women—even when their bodies are bound with zip ties and left like litter in the street, as in the case of teenagers, and good friends, Angelia Mangum and Tjhisha Ball. “Black girls murdered, but do YOU care?” asked Jamilah Lemieux. Sadly and ironically, Black women are the targets of so much violence—in their homes, communities, and work places—that their hypervisible victimization has become normalized, such that is no longer visible or as I prefer to call it: (in)visible.

The NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell promised to “get it right” by addressing domestic violence. This means including the voices of Black women and resisting the urge to make Ray Rice and other players the “Black male boogey men” face of domestic violence, a problem that is endemic across racial groups. Instead, we must explore the complex reasons for intimate partner violence in the NFL and the wider society.

Some speculate that easy access to guns, excessive drinking, or traumatic brain injury contributed to the Jevon Belcher murder-suicide. “When you whip those you love, it’s not about abuse, but love” said the mother in defense of her son, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson who was accused of child abuse. Historical trauma and exposure to family violence/child abuse that masquerades as “love,” has had a devastating impact on the Black community. Getting it right means creating spaces for healing that allow us to love our children and partners in nonviolent, healthy ways.

With pride, I watched citizens of St. Louis (my hometown) speak in a loud, unified voice to protest and seek justice for Michael Brown, the unarmed Black teenager who was shot by police. Yet, our outcry is muted when faced with domestic violence and sexual assault. Getting it right means responding to Tony Porter’s clarion “Call to Men” to urgently address gender-based violence. Otherwise, as Ewuare X. Osayande so eloquently wrote: “As long as the Black community silently embraces rhetoric that places a premium on the bodies of Black men at the brutal expense of Black women, we will continue to be caught in this position of indefensible contradiction. Our double standard as a community stares back at us through the battered eyes of Black women who live under a doubly oppressive system of racism and sexism.”

Millions watched the grainy Valentine’s Day video clip of what Ms. Rice described as a “horrible nightmare”—her body goes horizontal before her head slams into a handrail. Ray Rice, the 206lb former Baltimore Ravens running back had delivered the blow that rendered his future bride unconscious. Millions of Black women are victims of this (in)visible violence. For me, this reality evokes the words and spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Just like the Negro couldn’t patiently wait for an end to segregation and racial oppression, we can’t wait to end this gender-based terrorism against Black girls and women. We must get it right.

 

Dr. Carolyn M. West is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington and author of the editor/contributor of the award-winning book Violence in the Lives of Black Women: Battered, Black, and Blue (Routledge, 2003). She can be reached at www.DrCarolynWest.com

The following excerpts were transcribed from the video-recorded interview of General Gordon Baker, Jr. (September 6, 1941 – May 17, 2014) by Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell C. Stanford, Jr.). The nearly three-hour interview, recorded in 1993 at Legacy Communications in East Cleveland, Ohio, was a part of Ahmad’s doctoral dissertation research. Dr. Ahmad sent the tapes to Dr. Bracey (Distinguished Historian and Chair of Afro-American History at University of Massachusetts – Amherst) to avoid loss should his home be raided. The tapes were mailed to the author by Dr. John H. Bracey. Dr. Ahmad granted this author-editor unrestricted rights to use the referenced recorded contents. For focus and space specifications, only a few of Gen’s statements are cited here.

These statements provide a glimpse of Gen’s historic significance in our national liberation struggle and the nature of his uncompromising revolutionary activism and fearless spirit, in his own voice. For over 50 years, Gen fought for the racial, political, environmental and economic justice, freedom and human rights (self-respect, self-defense and self-determination) for the black working class and the globally oppressed. Gen was a revolutionary theoretician, strategist, tactician and leader of the highest order, an intellectual, historian, teacher, orator, union labor organizer, human rights activist, a life-long analytical student, a deeply loving and beloved father and husband, and dedicated comrade-in-arms. He was one of the most important leaders to emerge in the 1960s.

Ultimately, Gen fought to create a new cooperative society. He struggled with and for the Black working class and those oppressed and dispossessed in Detroit, nationally and globally. Gen’s life is a quintessential example of the “new man” Frantz Fanon called for in his continuously relevant work, Les Damnes de la Terre [The Wretched of the Earth, New York, 1965].

 

Purpose

“Yeah, I would just like to say, it is a real pleasure to be here today with Max, in the studio, making a recording of this past thirty years of the experience of struggle in the movement that we’ve had. This history has not been recorded in a real formal way. It’s real important for youth today and those who want to continue to struggle.”

 

Foundation

“I was born in Detroit, Michigan on September 6^th, 1941. I was raised in a family of three sisters and one nephew that was raised like a brother. My family was basically of sharecropper stock from Georgia and migrated to Detroit in the early forties seeking work in the auto factories there in the city. So, therefore my upbringing was conditioned specifically by ghetto life as it expressed itself in Detroit in the 1940’s, particularly in the old ‘Black Bottom’ section, south of Gratiot Avenue.

“My father belonged to the UAW. He worked at Bentley Ross plant, a steel mill in Detroit. It had a real militant local and he was an active member in that local. Other than that, my family had no other organizational expression except for the church. And my grandfather, on my mother’s side, had been a pastor from Georgia at a Christian Methodist Episcopal church and therefore my family sought out that church when they got to Detroit. And except for the church and the union, these are basically, the only organizations my family belonged to.”

“Back in the 40’s and the 50’s, most political discussions were shied away from. You got to remember, this is the period when we are making the transition from the New Deal years to the Eisenhower years during my early development. Except for discussions for the hate – generally – for Republicans and the love of Democrats, that’s about the limit of political discussions that took place in our household.”

“They [my parents] were never socially active. They mostly worked and went home and slept and expressed values of religion, the church, school, and education. Even though the U.N.I.A. [Universal Negro Improvement Association] had an active chapter, I never knew anything about them. My family never expressed anything about them.”

“I grew up like any kind of inquisitive ghetto youth in the 40’s.”

“The earliest [memory of racial injustice] would have been the Emmett Till case. To see Emmett Till’s pictures in Jet magazine mutilated…”

“My racial consciousness was beginning to develop rapidly because of the struggle.”

 

James and Grace Boggs – Apprentice

“At the time, I was sort of like an apprentice of theirs [James and Grace Boggs]. James and Grace were very active. Anyone active in Detroit would have to run into them. They were there at the Black Arts conferences. They were always there trying to give you some direction and leadership. Boggs was still working at the Jefferson plant at the time as an autoworker. He was able, often times, to give us some kind of leads in terms of how to struggle in the plants and what was available there. They always had foot in the struggle for the community. The Freedom Now Party, they were a part of that activity [and] – with GOAL, the Group on Advanced Leadership.

One of the most difficult things to learn is an oddity of Detroit. They [Boggs] were east-side based. Detroit, for some reason, has this antagonism between the east and the west side. It’s difficult to find a historical basis for it. And this lingers on today. But, Grace and Jimmy were on the east side. That was the side that probably was the most depressed. The old ‘Black Bottom’ was on the east side, south of Gratiot.

James and Grace provided some intellectual leadership. The kind of literature they had access to was important. By this time, Presence Africaine out of France was printing literature and getting access to international literature of a character that here to before we couldn’t find. I remember the discussions and reports of the Bandung Conference that was held in 1955 – that was printed on some of the Presence Africaine literature that Malcolm articulated in ‘Message to the Grassroots.’ These things become important.

We ran around internationally through R.A.M [Revolutionary Action Movement].”

 

“We will bleed Malcolm!”

“Malcolm was electrifying. I mean he was a spark. Whenever he came to town, I always found my way there. The numerous trips he made to the early Saviour’s Day at Olympia Stadium. The trip he made when he spoke at Wayne State University and all over Michigan – I was always there. Malcolm left you with a definite inspiration to continue to struggle. Yeah, we use to leave rallies where Malcolm spoke at prepared to hit the streets to take up any battle, anywhere, or to go back to the battles we had before, but do them more enthusiastically than before. So Malcolm was a real inspiration for us. A real revolutionary inspirational fighter who articulated the demands that we had [endorsed} much better than anyone on the scene at that time.”

“The conference that Malcolm [X] spoke ‘The Message to the Grassroots,’ I think it might have been around November of 1963 at King Solomon Temple. Like I said, every time Malcolm came to town, I never missed him. When he came – at that time he also spoke at a couple of other places. He spoke at Wayne State earlier that day and we went to King Solomon Church that evening. A few of us was working as security guards to provide protection for Malcolm along with the Nation of Islam. We were there in full force.

As a matter of fact, if you listen closely to the tape or the film presentation of the ‘Grassroots,’ you will hear us hollering in the audience. I think it’s at one point when Malcolm is talking about that the only revolution that’s a bloodless revolution is a Negro revolution. And he said, ‘You are afraid to bleed!” And you hear us hollering, ‘We will bleed Malcolm! We will bleed!’ So you hear us on that tape hollering in the audience. That’s the kind of – the kind of response you had when Malcolm spoke. That’s the kind of inspiration that he gave people when he spoke. That’s the kind of revolutionary fervor that he offered the movement. You know, in a national way, it was expressed so well. That was a real loss the movement suffered in a real way with his designed death.”

“1964, for us was a period of time when we tried to capture some of the gains the 1963 march [on Washington]. Clearly, there weren’t many.”

“I think the kind of climate that was set with the assassination of Malcolm and then the attack on our flank, you know, you kind of understand the type of repression back in 1965.”

 

1965

Back in Detroit, a new section of the police department was created in 1965 called the Tactical Mobile Units. The use of tactical police – was first on the scene that period. They had high level mobility, a lot of new shotguns and military equipment to be able to break up street fighting and other kinds of things that happened in that period of time.”

“In 1965, we continued to try to press at Dodge Main plant. I’m working with the African American student movement. We published a couple of publications. We started printing a publication we called Razor, a publication for the African American student movement in Detroit and we circulated it at Wayne State campus and Highland Park Community College campus. We also printed a thing called The Black Vanguard that was a publication for black workers in union shops around the city.

We had learned, as I said earlier in the tape, some of the skills from some of the Left groups in terms of how to do leaflet work with mimeograph. We’d take some of the money we had earned at the plant and rent a typewriter, rent a mimeograph machine and ran all these things out of the basement of my apartment. And we attempted to try to do agitation.

Clearly, we had a few people around us, but it had not really caught fire, in a lot of ways, early in ’65. I think a lot of it could be attributed to our understanding of how to agitate and perhaps the articles we attempted to do was more like propaganda than agitation. There were too many ideas to try to be understood by the people we were trying to reach. We spent that time doing that.

Later, that year, I told you I had wrote a letter to the Draft Board [See Note 1]. I received, sometime on June of 1965, a letter from the Draft Board saying I was drafted and that I need to report to the Draft Board on September 10^th, 1965 for induction.

Meanwhile, you got to remember in 1965 now, in August, LA erupted and the Watts Rebellion. It lasted about a week and a new point in the historical development was reached. A real proletariat uprising. And, you know, ‘Burn Baby, Burn!’ rose as a slogan and call of the day. And it kind of set tremors…tremors throughout the rest of the movements around the country about the potentialities of struggle.”

 

Robert F. Williams – Watts – September 10^th Movement

“One of the critical things Robert Williams was doing with the publication of The Crusader, was printing in its edition an article called [USA:} The Potential of the Minority Revolution that was promoting the question of how we can be victorious as minorities in an uprising in America. And so the whole movement reached a new higher level than it was before the Watts Rebellion broke out.

So Detroit – meant for us, in a lot of ways – was to prepare ourselves for the upcoming struggle that summer and particularly, so far as I was involved, to try to carry the struggle out for September 10^th, which was my induction date. What we did was to organize the September 10^th Movement. And the September 10^t was a movement that basically attempted to try to destroy the draft. We leafleted all the plants in the city of Detroit, most of the campuses, and some of the high schools to build up a resistance against the draft through general agitation around a general slogan, ‘No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.’ You know, we need to fight discrimination here at home. And we called for a protest of 50,000 people at Fort Wayne Induction Center in Detroit.

As it may be, the Watts Rebellion, by breaking a month early, gave us more fuel for agitation. We had found out from some of the people that we were working with that the city’s fathers planned to arrest everyone who showed at the demonstration on September 10^th and they were trying to try to play up new names. So tactically, what we decided to do was put out leaflets calling for people to stay as standby positions in the neighborhoods and if they attack The September 10^th Movement, you know what to do, remember Los Angeles.

What actually happened on induction day, when I appeared that morning with my duffle bag – I should say, first of all, I took military leave from work so it would be easy if I got inducted and had to go to prison I may have a job to go to after I got out. What happened, I went down and took the physical, passed the physical and got to the point of swearing in and I told them, ‘I am not going to swear in. I’m not going to the army. I want to prove that I am physically fit and I’m not dodging the draft. I’m not going.’ At that point they took me in to see the captain. He said his name was Captain Cox – that ran the Induction Center at that military base in Detroit. They took statements from me. I basically stated that I wasn’t going into the army and if they like, they can call the police. And they sent me back home and declared me a security risk.

What happened when we got back out was have a demonstration with about 10 people for about a half hour. We tactically decided to carry signs that said, ‘Destroy the Draft,’ and nothing else. But, in the process of developing the work for the September 10^th confrontation, the police had tipped their hand when they arrested us for posting signs on the walls. And they dropped the hint they were going to arrest us for criminal anarchy. What we did then was decide to have a slogan ‘Destroy the Draft’.”

 

League of Revolutionary Black Workers

“We are in the period of 1969. The main event that led to the formation of the League was the Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle Plant strike. I will never forget the date of the strike was January 29^th, 1969 and it was after the distribution of leaflets from about nine to seven weeks. The people – the workers at Eldon had demanded we take some kind of action.

We had learned a few things from the Dodge Main strike. One was, once we strike, if it was successful, we are going to have to have some places for workers to go to retreat. It was not like a summer day, like the original Dodge Main strike. It was a cold January day. So we secured a hall we could go to. We sent picket lines to the plant that morning. Held down all four gates. The strike was an overwhelming success. We moved the workers back to the hall. We rallied them, fed them, prepared them to go back out and take out the afternoon shift when they came in about three o’clock that evening.”

 

Note 1:           Gen’s Letter to the U.S. Draft Board

Gentlemen:

This letter is in regards to a notice sent to me, General Gordon Baker, Jr., requesting my appearance before an examining station to determine my fitness for military service.

How could you have the NERVE knowing that I am a black man living under the scope and influence of America’s racist, decadent society??? You did not ask me if I had any morals, principles, or basic human values by which to live. Yet, you ask if I am qualified. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT, might I ask? What does being “Qualified” mean: qualified to serve in the US Army?

. . . To be further brainwashed into the insidious notion of “defending freedom”?

You stand before me with the dried blood of Patrice Lumumba on your hands, , the blood of defenseless Panamanian students, shot down by U.S. marines; the blood of my black brothers in Angola and South Africa who are being tortured by the Portuguese and South African whites (whom you resolutely support) respectively; the deal people of Japan, Korea, and now Vietnam, in Asia, the blood of Medgar Evers, six Birmingham babies, the blood of one million Algerians slaughtered by the French (whom you supported); the fresh blood of ten thousand Congolese patriots dead from your ruthless rape and plunder of the Congo—the blood of defenseless women and children burned in villages from Napalm jelly bombs . . . With all of this blood of my non-white brothers dripping from your fangs, you have the damned AUDACITY to ask me if I am “qualified.” White man; listen to me for I am talking to you!

 

I AM A MAN OF PRINCIPLES AND VALUES: principles of justice and national liberation, self-determination, and respect for national sovereignty. Yet you ask me if I am “physically fit” to go to Asia, Africa, and Latin America to fight my oppressed brothers (who are completely and resolutely within their just rights to free their fatherland from foreign domination). You ask me if I am qualified to join an army of FOOLS, ASSASSINS and MORAL, DELINQUENTS who are not worthy of being called men! You want me to defend the riches reaped from the super0exploitation of the darker races of mankind by a few white , rich, super-monopolists who control the most vast empire that has ever existed in man’s one million years of History—all in the name of “Freedom”!

Why, here in the heart of America, 22 million black people are suffering unsurmounted toil: exploited economically by every form of business—from monopolists to petty hustlers; completely supported politically; deprived of their social and cultural heritage.

But all men of principle are fighting-men! My fight is for Freedom; UHURU, LIBERTAD, JALAUGA, and HARAMBEE! Therefore, when the call is made to free South Africa; when the call is made to liberate Latin America from the United Fruit Co., Kaiser and Alcoa Aluminum Co., and from Standard Oil; when the call is made to jail the exploiting Brahmins in India in order to destroy the Caste System; when the call is made to free the black delta areas of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina; when the call is made to FREE 12^TH STREET HERE IN DETROIT!: when these calls are made, send for me, for these shall be Historical Struggles in which it shall be an honor to serve!

 

Venceremos!

   General G. Baker, Jr.

Maya Angelou – (April 4, 1928 – May, 28, 2014)

As tributes poured at the announcement of the death of our beloved Dr. Maya Angelou, it was clear that many of us felt a kinship with her. It was more than her clear gaze, rich voice, and erect carriage that drew our attention as children gathered around an elder, pupils hovered around a griot. That gaze took our measure and commanded us to be better. That voice, rich with calloused life experience, laid that life bare. Her unapologetic honesty resonated with those silenced in their own pain and helped to give them voice. Her physique was a mystery; a dignified expression of survival that we could also achieve. Even her name, “Maya,” a nickname given to her by her brother, Bailey, seemed to make her ours. It emphasized that fictive kinship so widely understood. It was as if a favored aunt had died on May 28, 2014.

Born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, Angelou epitomized the term Renaissance woman. As a poet, playwright, actress, dancer, singer/songwriter, director, civil rights activist, teacher and most notably a memoirist, Maya Angelou lived a life of rebirth. Childhood rape, poverty, and teenaged motherhood did not limit her possibilities. Instead, she made her life a roadmap of wondrous transformation and shared it with a viewing public who read her work, attended her lectures, and witnessed her performances. At the time of her death, she claimed a catalogue of seven (7) memoirs beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, penned collections of countless poems, including the inaugural poem On the Pulse of the Morning under then-President Bill Clinton, received a Tony Award nomination for her performance in “Look Away”, won three Grammy awards for spoken work production, and was presented with the 2011 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Angelou, who never attended college, was an educator who intoned famously to Oprah Winfrey, “When you learn, teach, when you get, give”. She was awarded over thirty doctorates and received the Reynolds Professorship at Wake Forest University, where she taught American Studies. These are only a portion of the mark she made in the world.

Angelou was primarily a humanitarian, working both in front and behind the scenes. This is demonstrated in the simple way she determined to learn the languages of the international places she visited. In the 1960s she performed and raised funds for civil rights organizations, and became the Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She lived and worked for a time in Cairo, Egypt and Accra, Ghana, as a free-lance journalist, university administrator, and theatrical performer. Back in the United States in the mid to late 1960s, Angelou aided Malcolm X in forming the Organization of Afro-American Unity shortly before his assassination in 1965 and was tapped to organize a march for Martin Luther King prior to his own assassination in 1968, which happened to be her 40^th birthday. International acclaim for her writing began after this painful period with the publishing of Caged Bird in 1969. She spent subsequent years producing additional memoirs and poetry that speaks to the human experience, primarily the black woman’s human experience. She went on to act in film, including Alex Haley’s “Roots” (1977) and her poetry has been featured, along with her own appearances, in John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice” (1993) and Tyler Perry’s “Madea’s Family Reunion” (2006). Angelou also directed “Down in the Delta” (1998). Human dignity is the thread woven throughout all of her performances and work experience.

Maya Angelou was a quotable resource. Her truth telling gave instructions. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”. Her inspirational words were developed into a Hallmark greeting card collection in the early to mid- 2000’s. Additionally, young women across the nation recited her poems “And Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman” in talent shows, pageants, and poetry performances. She was touted for instilling, through her poetry, esteem in black women concerning their bodies, beauty, and behavior.

Only a humanitarian of the highest caliber could earn a publically televised funeral, in the way the Coretta Scott King was memorialized. It was no celebrity spectacle; perhaps the spectacle was me, viewing the services, along with a friend, on my living room couch. We participated in the service by proxy, with the urgent need to witness the homegoing. On Saturday, June 7, 2014 we attended to her – like we had her poetic renderings while on tour across the nation – one last time. Our attention was our greatest respect. We all suffered a generational loss, and the weight loomed large. We, her actual and fictive kin, mourned her public and private personas, and her resulting relationships with all of us, separately and together.

 

Shanna L. Smith is author of “Being Neighborly: Performance in Seen It All and Done the Rest”, Pearl Cleage and Free Womanhood (McFarland & Company, 2012). She is a Frederick Douglass Teaching Scholar in the English Department at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Amiri Baraka

(October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014)

A Black Scholar

Amiri Baraka’s death on January 9, 2014, caused the Black ecosystem of institutions, intellectuals, artists and activists committed to our century’s long fight for human rights to stagger under the weight of the loss and its possible meanings. Even as we gathered ourselves to publicly mourn and honor him, to write and read our thoughts and feelings, there was a sense that a significant change had occurred in our world of resistance and struggle. In the weeks after his death, when we had not quite found our footing, our brother–Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba–transitioned suddenly, followed by one of our great historians Vincent Harding, our beautiful storyteller Maya Angelou and the relentless advocate for African people Elombe Brath. It was as if Baraka’s death was not enough to force us to see we are reaching the end of the era of the Warrior Generation.

Imamu Amiri Baraka was many things to our people, we collectively and us individually. He was an artist with exceptionally deep perception and talent, an educator, a political and spiritual leader, a revolutionary strategist and institution builder, a fearless warrior against all who would diminish black people, an insightful teacher, a scholar of African American history and culture, a determined advocate for Black self-determination, a husband and father, and a prolific writer who created a significant body of work that included poetry, plays, essays, fiction, music and scholarly articles. The many forms in which he came to us were the result of his never ending quest to find a way to give everything he had in service of the people he loved, Black people and humanity. Even his names reminded us of his changes: LeRoi Jones, Ameer Baraka, Imamu Baraka, and Amiri Baraka. We were inspired and sometimes confused by his shape shifting. Sometimes we were angered by it and in opposition to it. But we never doubted it was him. We were never unsure of his voice or that he was our warrior, that all of his prodigious gifts were focused on and fueled by our demand for self-determination and justice.

Amiri Baraka was one of many intellectuals of his generation whose scholarly research and study, writing, teaching and work actually influenced the political struggle of African Americans and called countless young artists, activists and scholars to work on behalf of our people. But Baraka’s political influence is extraordinary in his generation of exceptional thinkers and workers because of his direct involvement and leadership of significant historical events in the Black Liberation Movement. That leadership grew from an underlying principle that remained consistent in his activism.   Baraka’s work has always been based on building institutions that would engage greater numbers of people in an organized effort to advance the struggle. Some of these institutions were local, community-based organizations and some also had national and international scope and impact. He believed that where ever we are it is necessary to build, strengthen or expand structures that will help us wage and sustain our efforts.

Throughout his public life he founded or co-founded newspapers, theatre companies, cultural centers, community organizations, national liberation organizations and numerous coalitions and united fronts. While he is widely acknowledged as the most influential artist of the Black Arts Movement, for the past 50 years he also built cultural institutions including The Black Arts Repertory Theatre, Spirit House, Kimako’s Blues People and Blue Ark as platforms to nurture, engage and organize actors, writers, directors, poets, musicians and cultural workers. The political formations he co-founded and played significant leadership roles in included the Committee for Unified Newark, Congress of African People, National Black Political Convention, National Black Assembly, African Liberation Support Committee and many others. He also formed and supported several publications including Black NewArk, Unity and Struggle and Black Nation Magazine. In the days preceding his death Baraka was still organizing, supporting and building another political formation, the mayoral campaign of his son, Ras Baraka. Ras won the election and is now the Mayor of Newark 44 years after his father organized the first Black Nationalist led electoral movement in a major city that succeeded in electing Newark’s first Black mayorm Ken Gibson.

Amiri Baraka left more than forty published works as a record of his research, thought, and constantly developing consciousness. It is evidence of his dedication and seemingly boundless capacity for productivity. It is also evidence of his understanding that we, the writers and artists, the intellectual warriors, the scholars and teachers, have a sacred, crucial role in our people’s history and future. There are many pages of his writings that have never been published and hopefully will begin to make their way to us in the near future so we may further benefit from his thought and work and a life of struggle that is worthy of the ancestors who inspired him to give his life and gifts to us.

“When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people.”–Amiri Baraka

 

Michael Simanga is author of Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory (Palgrave Press, 2015 and co-editor of Brilliant Fire! Amiri Baraka: Poetry, Plays, Politics for the People (Third World Press, 2015). He is a Visiting Lecturer at Georgia State University in the Department of African American Studies.

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 19^th 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

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.

Looters stealing camera equipment in Ferguson: pic.twitter.com/S6C7mAPjZ7

— Jason‮ (@XaiaX) August 14, 2014

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