Reading: We Want Freedom (Mumia Abu-Jamal) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State
Unrelated to Peter's book, I'm glad I'm reading Mumia; his writing is so beautiful, and it's a bizarre feeling to experience the joy of reading about such troubling material. Truly, I would recommend it.
Last night, I began reading chapter two. This is one of the chapters where Peter pulls from Mumia, beginning with the very first line of the chapter (after the Frederick Douglass quote). He contextualises it as if Mumia is saying that all nonviolence doesn't work and only focused on violent resistance, which isn't really true for what's being said.
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. (p82)
This sentence is being used by Mumia to start a historical discussion about the resistance that has been happening within Black communities in white Euro colonies (specifically white America) for centuries. It says as much, but Peter doesn't use it to mean this despite the fact that that is what Mumia means. Further supporting this understanding is literally the next paragraph:
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. (p82)
Emphasis mine.
Mumia continues to do a lot of other contextualising for things that happened in the 1960s. Part of it focuses on MLK Jr, discussing the impact that the Watts Riot in August 1965 had on him (as well as others). I'm just going to quote the whole passage here because it's worth reading on its own, even without critiquing another book in the process:
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.”
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 that would attract tens of thousands of alienated ghetto folks to either join or support the Black Panther Party. Yet that radical spirit did not begin in Watts, but came from much older, much deeper roots. (p83-84)
This whole section—there is more after it that discusses Huey Newton—culminates in a final point that highlights the primary discussion within this historical narrative:
Watts raises the question of the social role of mass violence in the shaping and formation of public policy.
Mumia's very clear about what this chapter will be about and what his framing of it is, which is not to highlight the failures of nonviolence with the successes of violence. Mumia's entire discussion is to look at that history, understand it within its context, understand what happened, and understand how that history influenced movements later on. His point is, in some places, to comment on or explore some of the problems within that history that led to failures; his point is to understand what helped maintain part of those movements.
You can see this in the opening of his discussion about the Christiana Resistance (often referred to as the 'Christiana Riot'), where he says:
With this historical perspective on riots, we will look at an event when Blacks engaged in radical liberational violence, not to hurt whites, but to preserve their own freedom. This event also demonstrates how a term like riot can prove misleading by masking the objectives of acts of mass violence. (p86)
And then he goes on to explain that most riots were actually committed by white people to informally reinforce the social hierarchy (giving examples of newly-white Irish folks attacking Black people to “put them in their place” and to participate in showing their support for the white supremacy that “helped” the Irish).
This paragraph highlights a potential issue:
It is unclear why the Gorsuch posse, consisting of Edward Gorsuch, his son Dickinson, his nephew, his cousin, two neighbors, a newly appointed US deputy marshal, Henry Kline, and two other paid officers, knew to target the Parker home. Perhaps he had intelligence gleaned from the omnipresent snitches in the area that steered him to the dwelling.
(Also, yes. Edward Gorsuch is a brother to one of Neil Gorsuch's direct ancestors. I did look into that.)
It's almost like Mumia is hinting that snitches (and people who make good informants like, oh, racists... and misogynists, but definitely racists in this moment of history) were part of the problem. (Just to note, William Parker—one of the leading members of Christiana's Black self-defense group, along with his wife Eliza—was also forewarned of the Gorsuch posse coming to him. Again, the way Mumia writes about this event is very engaging; I'd recommend reading his words in their entirety.)
Mumia then shifts back to the 1960s:
Beneath the fact of Watts, beyond the existence of the Black Panther Party, was a seething anger, a bubbling cauldron of Black rage, that Martin Luther King’s somewhat sweet, ethereal speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, several years before, could hardly assuage.
More to Black urban appetites was the cutting, insightful, militant speech of Malcolm X, whose critique of theheralded March on Washington was widely read, and heard over Black radio. (p94)
Which leads into a long quote of Malcolm X (which is one that Peter draws from and credits Mumia with, though he doesn't credit Mumia with the above discussion about perspectives of MLK and Malcolm X to urban Black folks. This quote of Malcolm's discusses how the government sought a way to take control of the march on Washington and how they'd supplant the original anger and frustration with the passivity of the chosen nonviolence movement. Part of the Malcolm quote that Mumia uses says:
It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in … these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, “Call it off.” Kennedy said, “Look you all are letting this thing go too far.”
And also (again Malcolm):
This is what they did at the march on Washington. They joined it … became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.…
This isn't so much that nonviolence protects the state but that people who view themselves as being part of or helped by the state are willing to shatter our movements, every last one of them.
None of my commentary on this opening part of the chapter (which I still need to finish at this point) is to say that we should be purely nonviolent or violent, but it is to say that Mumia goes to a lot of effort to contextualise that history... And it's not so some edgy white manarchist can throw the nuance in the trashcan whenever he wants, just to make a point that isn't entirely true or even useful.
Edit: The following bit is almost directly lifted without ever crediting Mumia:
Martin’s “dream” is better known to most Americans, but to Black people, especially those teeming millions barred within US ghettos, Malcolm’s words were closer to the mark, closer to the heart.
And the only reason that Peter's variation on this feels like he lifted it is because it comes immediately after him citing Mumia citing Malcolm X. It's also being used in a way that isn't at all similar to what Mumia is saying, which is that “Black resistance has historical roots and Malcolm X's more incendiary speech resonated more with many Black people than MLK's 'dream'.” (And the implication given is that too much of that 'dream' is that there was a lot of sit-and-wait for someone to give you what you needed, rather than taking under your own power within a movement.)