Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux: "Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement"

Charles E. Cobb (left) and Danielle L. McGuire

Originally published in The American Prospect.

On his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said.

In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, explores what he sees as one of the movement’s forgotten contradictions: Guns made it possible. According to Cobb, civil-rights leaders recognized that armed resistance was sometimes necessary to preserve their peaceful mission. Guns kept people like King alive.

Danielle L. McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, argues that armed self-defense was also far more common for black women in the South than has generally been acknowledged. In her 2010 book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, McGuire contends that the decision by women to combat sexual abuse and violence—sometimes with force—was one of the sparks that led to the modern civil-rights movement.

On the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer [in 2014], McGuire and Cobb discuss the legacies of nonviolent resistance and community organizing—and how hidden histories complicate familiar narratives about the civil-rights movement.

Party for Socialism and Liberation: "Baltimore's Rebellion: What Happens to a Dream Deferred"

Statement from the Party for Socialism and Liberation:

If the young people of Ferguson had not rebelled, Mike Brown’s name would have been forgotten. The town would still have the same mayor and police chief. The cops would still be fining and arresting Black people for every conceivable thing, including “Manner of Walking in Roadway,” “High Grass and Weeds,” and even bleeding on police uniforms during a beat-down. There would have been no Justice Department investigations or presidential commissions. If the young people of Ferguson had not rebelled, the city would be, for most of the country, just another dot on the map; just another forgotten impoverished Black community.

Now the whole world knows Ferguson. The people who rose up declare their hometown with pride. And now the whole world knows Baltimore and they will remember Freddie Gray’s name.

Henry Louis Gates: "Did African-American Slaves Rebel?"

Posted previously on PBS and BayAreaIntifada 

One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally “docile” or “content and loyal,” thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleon’s army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom.

On Baltimore, Just So You Know

Albert Woodfox Waits

On April 8th, I drove up to the West Feliciana Parish Detention Center to visit Albert Woodfox, the last member of the Angola 3 to remain incarcerated. I have now visited this dear brother of mine in three different institutions over a period of six years and it is always painful, though the joy of seeing his face and knowing I have helped release him from his closed front cell for sixty celebratory minutes made it worth it.

They have outdone themselves this time. Home to only fifty or so prisoners, the building is dirty and old and reeks of a lick and a promise. Most of the prisoners appear to be on "work release," which means they have actual jobs one place or the other in St. Francisville, a town even smaller than the one I live in. And because of the minimum security level of the "institution," I actually ran into a prisoner taking out a bag of garbage -- outside the fence, across the street, and down a ways. Not the kind of place I'm used to seeing Albert.

Dizzy Wright: "I Need Answers" featuring Kikkiya

"Columbusing"

Yesterday, I posted that violence is not only as American as apple pie, but it's as White as the cotton picked by slaves and then by prisoners for the past four hundred years in what we call Louisiana. Today, I'll step aside and let Thomas Hill and Malachi Byrd tell you about another form of violence -- taking what ain't yours.

Maybe We Need To Stop Acting White

You already know I quit blogging for months when  Ferguson blew up. And you already know why. But recently, I've begun to realize that something is happening to many of those whose views on life and power and race I most respect. I'm not sure what to call this X Factor I hear in their voices. But it resonates in my soul. And I don't know whether I'm more relieved that I'm not smoldering alone or more concerned about the greater implications of whatever is brewing inside us.

Actually, we are so bombarded by the consciousness of violence on a daily basis in this society, I sometimes worry I'm going to succumb to compassion fatigue and be found in a closet somewhere with my thumb in my mouth. Even if I'm not bleeding, I ache for those who do – all of them. And I’m hardly the only one.

So we're all on the same page here, right? We're all against violence. We abhor the shooting of a legislator, the killing of a little girl because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the heart-breaking homicides of one young Black male after another by other young Black males, military veterans returning from war only to commit tragic attacks on their own families, young people committing suicide at unprecedented rates. We hate all this, don't we? Of course, we do!

Aaron Hanlon: "Racism's Sinister Word Games ~ What a White Supremacist Talking Point Tells Us About Modern Politics"

Re-posted from Salon.com (3/20/15)

In a striking recent video interview, a Guardian reporter presses Pat Godwin, president of Selma, Alabama’s United Daughters of the Confederacy, on the question of whether viewers are right to assume Godwin’s expressed views are racist. Godwin replies, “Well, you have to define ‘racist’ to me. What is a racist?” Godwin’s subsequent comments demonstrate that her question is mainly rhetorical, a gesture meant to indicate that “racist” is too subjective a term to carry any weight, ever. For Godwin,

“The word ‘racist’ is, like I say so many times, is like beauty; beauty is in the eye…the eyes of the beholder. Well, if someone is defining racist or racism, it all depends on who’s defining it, because it’s their opinion. It’s their opinion. I’m a racist in the sense that I’m white, I was born white, I’m proud to be white, I believe in my race, I want to see it perpetuated, I want it to survive on this planet. I defend, protect, and preserve my white race.”

When the reporter turns to one of Godwin’s associates and asks him, “Are you racist as well?” he fires back programmatically: “Define racism.”

Which Of These Is Not Like The Others...?

None of them. They're all the same. And they are not the problem.

The problem is White Supremacy. That's what puts men like these in uniforms and gives them permission to kill.

The solution to this problem is to dismantle White Supremacy.

This is not a complicated idea. But the process of doing it may be.

Wanna help?

Brit Bennett: "I Don't Know What To Do With Good White People"

Re-posted from Jezebel (12/17/14):

I don't know what to do with good white people.

I've been surrounded by good white people my whole life. Good white people living in my neighborhood, who returned our dog when he got loose; good white teachers in elementary school who pushed books into my hands; good white professors at Stanford, a Bay Area bastion of goodwhiteness, who recommended me M.F.A. programs where I met good white writers, liberal enough for a Portlandia sketch.

I should be grateful for this. Who, in generations of my family, has ever been surrounded by so many good white people? My mother was born to sharecroppers in Louisiana; she used to measure her feet with a piece of string because they could not try on shoes in the store. She tells me of a white policeman who humiliated her mother by forcing her to empty her purse on the store counter just so he could watch her few coins spiral out.

Federal Judge Goes On the Record About Lynching in Mississippi

Re-posted from National Public Radio:

Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, who in 2010 became the second African-American appointed as federal judge in Mississippi. He read it to three young white men [on Tuesday, February 10th,] before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., one night in 2011. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling "white power" as they drove off.

The speech is long; Reeves asked the young men to sit down while he read it aloud in the courtroom. And it's breathtaking, in both the moral force of its arguments and the palpable sadness with which they are delivered...A warning to readers: He uses the word "nigger" 11 times.

African American Policy Forum: Breaking the Silence

I thought I was going to post these various things in some kind of rational order, but after watching this video from the website of the African American Policy Forum, I see it's not going to be that kind of party. There is truly beautiful, truly important, truly well conducted work that is being done around the world every moment that we breathe. We each have our place in that world. My place, apparently, is to sometimes speak and sometimes listen; sometimes be on the stage and sometimes be in the audience or even providing the stage.

Watch this film. Then watch it again. And keep on watching it until you have no more tears left, until your sadness is overtaken by rage and your rage burns off like alcohol, leaving only the raw power with which we are all born, power that has been waiting all this time for us to understand from the depths of our souls that we do not need anyone's permission to feel it.

Well, Hello There. My, It's Been A Long, Long Time...

It's been almost five months since I posted here. I've laid low before since I started this blog over nine years ago, but not this low and never for this long. I make no apologies. What happened in Ferguson put me under the bus for a while. I was angry. I was depressed. I was frustrated. I was frightened for the young Black activists who were rising up angry (I remember what happened in earlier times and there is plenty to be frightened of). But I knew it wasn't permanent. I just didn't know when I would sit back down and write.

The fact is: the YouTube video I posted on November 17th featuring folks in Ferguson said so much so well, I didn't really have anything to add.

Yet here I am again. Finally. Hopeful that someone out there will hear me bumping around in the dark and turn the light on.

I've been saving things I found along the way to post when the time came to return and there are quite a few of them, actually. So I'll spend Spring Break cleaning out the closets, as it were -- going through the list of links, deciding which to delete and which to post as I first intended, setting the stage to become a more regular writer again.

But before I do that, I'm going to post a rant I saw on Facebook the other day. It was written by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (a pretty famous guy who teaches at Duke University and writes important books like Racism Without Racists when he's not posting rants on Facebook). Lest you worry that I'm poaching, I asked for and received his permission to present his words here before I did it.