We Want Freedom. Mumia Abu-Jamal

vision of the role of the South. It saw the Confederacy as principled defenders of state sovereignty and upholders of national honor against the northern invaders, carpetbaggers, and assorted scalawags.

      If the past is not past to contemporary generations of white southerners, how can one presume that it is past for generations of African Americans, almost all of whom find their families little more than two generations removed from a bitter peonage in the southlands of American apartheid? For Black Americans, the unforgotten past is not a four-year war that is reflected in the ubiquitous monuments or the frequent flying of the Confederate battle flag (said to honor one’s heritage).

      To Blacks cognizant of history, what remains unforgotten is the unending war that has lasted for five centuries, a war against Black life by the merchant princes of Europe. Unforgotten is the man-theft, the wrenching torture, the unremitting bondage—bondage that occurred for centuries to ensure that the Americans could sell cotton to the British, or that the British could sweeten their tea, or that the French could sweeten their cocoa, or that the Dutch could add great sums to their bank accounts.

      This “past” is written in the many-hued faces in the average Black family, which may easily range from darkest ebony, to toffee, to café au lait, each a reflection of white rape of African women or of the tradition of concubinage exemplified by the New Orleans les gens de couleur libres. For many Blacks, the past is as present as one’s mirror.

      It is in this sense that history lives in the minds of Black folk. In people who draw their inspiration from the rebellious, resistant, liberational examples of people like Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, “Cinque,” Harriet Tubman, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey, and Sojourner Truth.

      Contrary to what is generally supposed or socially projected in an era when the civil rights model holds sway, Blacks are far more militant, and far more angry, than their “leaders” suggest.

      This was realized by Donald H. Matthews, an assistant minister of the African-American Methodist Church when he began to teach Bible classes in Oakland’s Taylor Memorial in the 1960s. As a Black clergyman, he attended a traditional seminary, where he studied the classic texts of contemporary Protestant thought, such as those set forth by Karl Barth (1886–1968) or Paul J. Tillich (1886–1965). Let us suppose that he diversified his scholarship with the relatively recent works of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968).

      One so educated would be woefully unprepared to meaningfully address the myriad depths and scope of the social, spiritual, and psychological problems facing average African Americans. Matthews writes of the revelations that emerged when parishioners brought bitter memories and equally bitter experiences to bear as they shared their collective pain with the preacher:

      I frankly never had realized the excruciating price that my elders had paid in carving out a place of dignity and humanity.

      The women told their stories of having to wear dresses of extraordinarily modest length to deflect the “attentions” of white men. This solution, however, seldom was satisfactory, and girls often found themselves on northern-bound trains and buses to protect their sexual choice and bodily integrity.

      The men spoke of resisting the efforts of land-owners who “suggested” that their wives should work alongside them in the backbreaking work of sharecropping with poor tools on poorer land. These acts of courage also tended to result in midnight train rides north, often just ahead of a lynch mob.…

      I was startled to realize their political sensibilities were closer to Malcolm X than to Martin King and that they had Christian beliefs not to be found in Tillich’s or Barth’s systematic theologies. It was this combination of deep feeling, resistance, and African-based religious concepts that I could not find in my black theological texts, either. So I was left with their powerful and profound stories without a method of interpretation that did them justice.52

      These women of Oakland, California, were poor, church-going, internal immigrants from the south. The last rivulets of the torrents that produced the great, black river that came to be called the Great Migration brought with them a searing rage that the soothing balm of Christian love and redemption could not quench. Matthews notes that his Wednesday night Bible class hailed mostly from Arkansas and Texas, with others from the Deep South, and so possessed the same history as the founders of the BPP.53

      They spoke the deep, hidden truths of millions of women and men of their generation, of the loss of homeland that all who emigrate experience, of the anger attendant with such loss, and, undoubtedly, of the loss of hope when one learns that the new land, with its own brand of harassments, fears, insecurities, and transnational negrophobia, is not the heralded Promised Land.

      That riotous, unresolved, roiling energy fed into the entity we came to call the Black Panther Party.

      Armed resistance to slavery, repression, and the racist delusion of white supremacy runs deep in African American experience and history. When it emerged in the mid 1960s from the Black Panther Party and other nationalist or revolutionary organizations, it was perceived and popularly projected as aberrant. This could only be professed by those who know little about the long and protracted history of armed resistance by Africans and their truest allies. The Black Panther Party emerged from the deepest traditions of Africans in America—resistance to negative, negrophobic, dangerous threats to Black life, by any means necessary.

      2. The Deep Roots of the Struggle for Black Liberation

      Chapter Two

      The Deep Roots of the Struggle for Black Liberation

      For you are prisoners of war, in an enemy’s country—of a war, too, that is unrivaled for its injustice, cruelty, meanness.…

      —Frederick Douglass (in an article urging Black captives to revolt against the slave system)1

      The roots of armed resistance run deep in African American history. Only those who ignore this fact see the Black Panther Party as somehow foreign to our common historical inheritance.

      Many forces converged to bring about the organization bearing the name of the Black Panther Party. One of them, of course, was the powerful psychological and social force of history. In the 60s, many books began to emerge on the theme of Black history. Long-forgotten or little-mentioned figures began to come to life to a generation that, having not grown up in segregated educational environments, was less familiar with the historical currents underlying Black life.

      The smoldering embers of Watts, a ghetto area in Los Angeles that burned just one year before the Black Panther Party’s formation, were also bright in the minds of Huey and Bobby.

      For six days in August 1965, Watts erupted in a rebellion that saw some $200 million worth of property go up in smoke. By week’s end some thirty-five people were dead, most the result of police gunfire. In Watts, as elsewhere during that decade, conflict between Black urbanites and the predominantly white police was the trigger for this explosion.

      For the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Watts was a profound eye-opener. The middle-class, somewhat genteel preacher seemed stunned by the sheer scope and rancor revealed by the Watts Rebellion. Watts appeared to mark a major turning point in his vision of what America was and what it could become.2

      Post-Watts, Dr. King would speak of the Black ghetto as a “system of internal colonialism.” In one speech before the Chicago Freedom Festival, he would exclaim, “The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness.…” He would further declare, “The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn.”3

      In a word, Watts radicalized King.

      If Watts had that effect on a man of decidedly middle-class orientation, what of people who came from, and saw life from, the bottom of the social pecking order? For them, Watts wasn’t a shock or a surprise. It was an affirmation of the same inchoate rage that boiled in their very veins.

      That radical, rebellious spirit constituted a powerful social force