18 August 2014 - 03:55 PM
Legacy of Resistance to the US Police State
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Anti-colonial struggles swept the American continent during European colonization. Against new diseases, religious indoctrination and colonial order, indigenous nations of the Americas along with millions of diverse Africans relocated by the European Trans Atlantic Slave Trade launched offensives against European settlers. As early as the 1500s throughout the abolition of slavery throughout the 1800s in the Americas, people fought for their freedom, dignity and self-determination.

Slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, but racism and violence against black communities persists to date. (Photo: Reuters)

Maroons often led rebellions against slavery and helped slaves escape from plantations.

As a result, maroon societies arose across the continent in countries like Brazil, Venezuela, Jamaica, Haiti Colombia and others. Africans and indigenous peoples communally defended their territories and built democratic structures in name of their self-determination offering an alternative to colonial society. People established their own economic models, social order and government structures. Maroons also often led rebellions against slavery and helped the enslaved escape from plantations.

In the United States, political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz writes, "from the seventeenth century until the abolition of slavery in the United States, there were also maroon communities in areas stretching from the pine barrens of New Jersey, down the East Coast to Florida, also in the Appalachian mountains and later in Mexico’s northern border regions."  Perhaps the most well known and documented maroon experience in the United States are the Seminoles.

Today considered a semi-autonomous tribe within U.S. national borders, the Seminoles established by the 1800s villages between the Apalachicola River and Tampa Bay. The communities of mixed indigenous and African peoples, established their economy on shared agriculture and hunting.

Seminoles fiercely fought against U.S. military forces and slave catchers.

Eventually, the Seminoles expanded beyond Florida as they fiercely fought against U.S. military forces and slave catchers. They migrated to Oklahoma and later Mexico where they established settlements. Descendants of the Seminoles find themselves largely in Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico and Florida.  

Among some of the strongest efforts to demand dignity and an end to slave society in the United States was also the Underground Railroad (UR) organized throughout the 1800s. Led by a coalition of Black and white abolitionists, the UR was an extensive network of people that established routes and safe houses that helped enslaved people of African descent reach free U.S states and foreign countries such as Canada and Mexico.Freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman alone organized an estimated 19 trips with the UR aiding approximately 300 people to liberate themselves from slavery.

Shoatz reminds us, "Think about it: over one hundred thousand runaways, while four million were still in bondage in the South. That is roughly equal to the proportion all of today’s blacks in jails and prisons compared to the overall black population of this country!"

Slavery was legally abolished in 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, this transition did not come without significant backlash to genuine societal transformation specifically targeting the livelihood of black communities.

Push-back to Jim Crow Era           

After the Civil War the white political system in the South, passed a series of laws, called Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks and whites at nearly every moment of public life, including in railroad cars, restrooms, housing, public entertainment, schools etc. The facilities and services were almost always for blacks were severely inferior. Simultaneously, for most blacks in the South, the threat of lynching, the images of an angry white mob hanging a black man from a tree, was common. It is estimated that two or three blacks were lynched every week.

Most lynching victims were political activists or black men and women who were not deemed deferential enough to the white order. Though most victims were black men, many women were lynched as well.

Based in Harlem, New York, which was the black mecca for thousands of black migrants from the South, the Harlem Renaissance movement produced literature and music that reveled in the black experience and identity as markers of self-respect while acknowledging what an affront blackness was to white civil society.

Claude Mc Kay's poem, "If We Must Die," one of the earlier poems of the movement, written shortly after WWI, reads,

"If we must die--let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly Pack.

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back."

Jazz music, in the Harlem Renaissance, represented another form of resistance within black American cultural production. While lyrically the music was usually not overtly political, the frenetic energy, emotional depth, and musicianship defied the ways that whites were used to seeing blacks. The most popular form of musical entertainment among whites at the turn of the century were minstrel shows, that portrayed blacks as stupid, bumbling, conniving, happy slaves. The term “Jim Crow”, itself, comes from a New York City minstrel performer, Thomas D. Rice, who in 1828 introduced a song and dance number entitled “Jump Jim Crow” and he continued to perform the Jim Crow character throughout his entertainment career. “Jim Crow” became an demeaning terms for African Americans.

In contrast, jazz music began at Congo Square in New Orleans, where historically enslaved and freed blacks came together on Sundays to sing, dance and play music, and became the music for funerals and dance clubs, community parades and political gatherings.

Billie Holiday, international jazz singer, put a melody to a haunting poem about lynching. The Lyrics of "Strange Fruit," described the horror that Black Americans, especially in the South, understood viscerally,

"Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck...”

Like Holiday, Paul Robeson, the famous athlete, singer and actor, saw his art as a means of defying Jim Crow. His last words in the 1935 essay, "What I want from Life," read, "Meanwhile, in my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea--to be African. Multitudes of men have died for less worthy ideals; it is even more eminently worth living for."

The  black Women's Club Movement, began as a means of fighting Jim Crow. In every town and city in the U.S., black women's clubs, often grounded in local church meeting groups, pushed for anti-lynching legislation, women's right to vote, and temperance measures in their communities. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the famous anti-lynching community organizer, was castigated by white women for focusing too much on anti-lynching rather than women's right to vote, during her European speaking tours, black American women responded by forming the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). It's motto was “Lifting as We Climb.”

Black Liberation’s Fight for Self-Determination

The Civil Rights Movement and Third World Liberation Movements of the 1960s and 1970s definitively challenged the foundations of U.S. society and racism. Across the African continent nations were fighting for independence from European rule and in the Americas a wave of socialist led rebellions were underway. Inspired by global movements and enraged by the continued persecution of black leaders and communities in the United States, communities across the country began organizing in the name of self-defense, self determination and liberation.

Shoatz explains, "Black youth elevated the civil rights movement to become black power and black liberation movements. Puerto Rican youth energized their elders’ ongoing struggle to win independence for their home island. Euro-Amerikan youth attacked the lies, hypocrisy, and oppression their parents were training them to uphold in the schools, in society and overseas. Native Amerikan youth were returning to their suppressed ancestral ways and fighting to regain control over some of the land. Asian youth were struggling to overcome a system and culture that had always used and abused them."  

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was perhaps the most well known liberation organization at the time. The BPP organized black communities across the United States and globally as they aligned themselves with the liberation struggles of the world, namely from  Africa and of the African diaspora. The BPP’s political platform included some of the following demands: an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people,  freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails, land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

The BPP’s ten point political program urged black communities and allies to fight for their rights and pushed back against U.S. perpetrated genocide against people of color domestically and abroad since colonialism. Many organizations including the BPP were targeted and infiltrated by the United States. The FBI considered the BPP at the time, ‘the biggest threat to America’ for their capacity to mobilize, inspire and take action.

The U.S. government’s efforts to dismantle the Third World Liberation and Black Liberation Movements with their infamous operation COINTELPRO successfully incarcerated leaders, separated communities and assassinated countless freedom fighters of the 1960s and 70s. The vestiges exposed the United States as a growing militarized police and prison state.

The Reagan Administration decimated black communities across the U.S.

Hip Hop Generation

In the 1980s as the Reagan Administration pushed forward the so-called “War on Drugs” that brought a generation of blacks into the prison-industrial complex and decimated black communities across the U.S., a new form of cultural expression was emerging on the streets of Black America, hip-hop. It quickly evolved into what Chuck D. of the rap group, Public Enemy referred to as the “CNN of the ghetto.”

The music expressed multiple and contradictory facets of Black people's experiences, including a visceral analysis of police brutality in Black neighborhoods. One of the most famous hip hop artists, Tupac Shakur, was the son of a former Black Panther, who died at the age of 25 from gun violence, and rapped in his short life about racial-profiling, poverty, racism, police brutality, and the allure of gang life in the face of these structural and street violences. In his single “Trapped” he says:

They got me trapped

Can barely walk the city streets

Without a cop harassing me, searching me

Then asking my identity

Hands up, throw me up against the wall

Didn't do a thing at all

I'm telling you one day these suckers gotta fall

Cuffed up throw me on the concrete

Coppers try to kill me

Out of the generation that grew up listening and creating hip hop music, emerged hip hop activists whose grassroots organizing focuses primarily on ending the prison-industrial complex and police brutality against black and brown bodies.

Hip hop over the past four decades has gone from being a local New York phenomenon to being the voice of generations globally. In part that is because hip hop has become representative of being the music from those who are most marginalized and most subject to state violence. Longtime hip hop activist, Rosa Clemente described the influence of the generation and the music, “Hip hop was created in the poorest congressional district in America, the south Bronx, where I was born and grew up. These were young people who had nothing and have created not only a multi-billion dollar industry but have created an international way that we can all speak to each other.”

In the past decade hip hop has merged with social media online as forms and tools that communities use to reveal, globally, and resist, locally, police and state violence.

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