#black revolutionaries

[blackstar1887]

Photographs from the Black Panther Party series by Stephen Shames (1970s)

[reasoningdaily]

[ausetkmt]

Denmark Vesey - Black Revolutionary

[theneptunianmind]

[boof-chamber]

“At the same time that debates about “new fascisms” were polarizing radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson generated a theory of fascism from the lived experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism. Davis, the Black Marxist and feminist scholar, needs little introduction, her 1970 imprisonment on trumped-up conspiracy charges having rocketed her to the status of household name in the United States and an icon of solidarity worldwide. Fewer remember that the conspiracy charge against Davis arose from an armed courtroom attack by her seventeen-year-old bodyguard, Jonathan Jackson, with the goal of forcing the release of the Soledad Brothers, three African American prisoners facing the death penalty for the killing of a white prison guard. Among them was Jonathan’s older brother, the incarcerated Black revolutionary George Jackson, with whom Davis corresponded extensively. Jackson was killed by a prison sniper during an escape attempt on August, 21, 1971, a few days before the Soledad Brothers were to be tried.

In one of his prison letters on fascism, posthumously collected in Blood in My Eye (1972), Jackson offered the following reflection:

“When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.”

Jackson encourages us to consider what happens to our conceptions of fascism if we take our bearings not from analogies with the European interwar scene, but instead from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the “concrete and steel,” from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression.

In their writing and correspondence, marked by interpretive differences alongside profound comradeship, Davis and Jackson identify the U.S. state as the site for a recombinant or even consummate form of fascism. Much of their writing is threaded through Marxist debates on the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and capitalist crises, as well as, in Jackson’s case, an effort to revisit the classical historiography on fascism. On these grounds, Jackson and Davis stress the disanalogies between present forms of domination and European exemplars, but both assert the privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a prison-judicial system that could accurately be described as a racial state of terror.”

[simbistardis]

The Mangrove Nine (minus Anthony Innis) sat together, December 1971. Source: Getty Images.

[empireoftheblackpanther]

[mordere-diem]

“I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity."

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

[realjaysumlin]

This is the repeated history of these shit people who call themselves white and if we are smart? We don't want to have any affiliation with them. Most of their own kids are victims of some form of abuse and this is something that has gone unnoticed or reported throughout history.

If you think that you are moving to better areas because it is viewed as a white community, you should notice that living anywhere close to these shit people are just a false sense of security because you are moving you and your family into a lions den and you and your children are the prey.

[delta7of96]

Mayor Johnson Proclaims August 30 as Chairman Fred Hampton Day | Chicago Defender

Well done Mayor Johnson... well done

[shepergamy]

You can't claim that you love people when you don't respect them, and you can't call for political unity unless you practice it in your own relationships. And that doesn't happen out of nowhere. That's something that has got to be put into practice every day.

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

[ausetkmt]

[theneptunianmind]

[ebonyseuphoriatarot]

[simbistardis]

'Egbuna also presented a critique of liberalism that followed Carmichael closely. White liberals, Egbuna claimed, believed in integration. However, the price for integration was assimilation, that is to say that black people would only be accepted in white society if they renounced their own cultures and accepted the equation ‘White = Beautiful’. But in practice, Egbuna argued, the promise of integration was never fulfilled, due to the ‘unconscious’ racism of white liberals. Thus, black people in Britain were marginalized economically and socially. Much of this critique of liberalism can be found in Carmichael; for example, he was highly critical of the practice of stripping ‘non-western people’ of their culture; and of the fact that liberal arguments for integration were predicated on the notion that ‘there was nothing of value in the black community’, an attitude that he dubbed as ‘subconscious racism’. Indeed, Egbuna’s summation of his attack on the archetypal western liberal, the man who ‘wants chicken without slaughter, roses without gardening, rain-water without thunder and lightning’, is reminiscent of a passage by Frederick Douglass, which Carmichael quoted during his Roundhouse address. Carmichael compared those who argued for integration to ‘men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder or lightning.’

Obi B. Egbuna, C. L. R. James and the Birth of Black Power in Britain: Black Radicalism in Britain 1967–72 (2011), R.E.R Bunce and Paul Field

[empireoftheblackpanther]