PIERCING THE SILENCE* ON: THE HATE U GIVE 4 $$
Lexicographer Kory Stamper notes that by the 1930’s, in the US, the word “thug” meant a gangster but in the 1960’s and 70’s, civil rights protestors began to be branded with the label, as well as those a part of the anti-Vietnam War movement—usually one and the same. The racial revolts of the 60’s—more commonly known as the race “riots”—which spread across the urban and rural U.S were caused by the racial inequalities that the civil rights movement protested against.
The revolts began with the Harlem race “riot” in 1964, when a Black 15-year-old was killed by a white off-duty cop; escalating year by year into the “Long, Hot Summer” of 1967. In the first 9 months of the year, 164 racial revolts had taken place across the country, a violently clear message addressing the plight of African-Americans. The revolutionary spirit had inspired the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense the year prior in Oakland, California; an organisation built to protect their communities from the invading police forces, known as “pigs” to members of the “counterculture movement.” The Panthers analysed the situation in the country and understood that racial segregation and discrimination had left African-Americans in the Black Colony within the wider Mother Country, known as “Babylon.” Using the biblical city as a metaphor for the US, following in the traditions of Rastafarians for whom Babylon represents western imperialism. James Baldwin would come to a similar conclusion in their 1966 essay A Report from Occupied Territory, writing “Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.” The experiences of African-Americans as second-class citizens found kinship in the struggles faced in places like the bantustans and townships of Apartheid South Africa; and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, this extended to the Palestinian territories and enclaves in the apartheid state of Israel.
Malcolm X had been an ally of the Palestinian cause since the 1950’s, advocating for Afro-Arab unity and making trips to Gaza to form relationships in resistance. His last being in September 1964, before he was assassinated on the 21st of September 1965 in Manhattan; Malcolm had by then left the Black nationalist Nation of Islam (NOI) and embraced Sunni Islam, adopting the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. During that final trip to the Middle East, Shabazz had a written piece published in the Egyptian Gazette, a leading English language newspaper in Egypt. In Zionist Logic, Shabazz writes “The modern 20th century weapon of neo-imperialism is…dollarism: the ability to come posing as a friend and benefactor, bearing gifts and all other forms of economic aid and offers of technical assistance.” The piece points to the “ever-scheming European imperialists wisely [placing] Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, [infiltrating] and [sowing] the seed of dissension among African leaders and also [dividing] the Africans against the Asians.”
Towards the end of the piece, Shabazz questions, “Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the "religious" claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation...where Spain used to be, as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?”
For the African-Americans, did the Europeans have the legal or moral right to kidnap their ancestors from Africa and enslave them to build on the graves of those native to North America, who have been raped and pillaged by European settlers, in the creation of the settler colonies: the United States and Canada, dispossessing the land known to the indigenous as Turtle Island. The report by the Kerner Commission—created in July 1967 to dissect the causes of the urban “riots” and to recommend solutions—agreed with the analysis by these African-American voices, claiming “[the U.S] is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
Also erupting from within the Bay Area, alongside the Black Power movement, was the rise of radical student politics emanating from the campus of UC Berkeley, beginning the decade making a mockery of the McCarthyism (anti-communist paranoia) of the 1950’s. The campus would host Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the 17th of May 1967, in the wake of the growing anti-war movement, calling the students “the conscience of the academic community and our nation.” King had led his first anti-war protest in Chicago in March and delivered his influential “Beyond Vietnam” speech in April in New York; protests continued across the country through the month, including in San Francisco. Juxtaposed, in many ways, across the Bay Bridge was the flood of thousands of youths, with likely nowhere to stay, into the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood. Intrigued by its residents' rejection of materialism and their experimentation with drugs, sexuality, and alternative religions, the youths hoped to experience this community's idealised view of enlightenment.
In 1967, the media-defined “hippie” identity of the neighbourhood was finding its peak in what became known as the Summer of Love. Worries about the media attention surrounding the community go back to 1965 when the de-facto community centre, The Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, began issuing leaflets about the “Unicorn Philosophy: It is nothing new. We have a private revolution going on. A revolution of individuality and diversity that can only be private. Upon becoming a group movement, such a revolution ends up with imitators rather than participants…It is essentially a striving for realization of one's relationship to life and other people…” For the most part these newcomers were white and from middle and upper-middle class backgrounds, they might’ve been frustrated by the conformity of the so-called “American Dream” but the majority that now fell under the “hippie” umbrella were, if not pacifists, apolitical. The Diggers, a radical community-action group, provided significant support through this period of influx via their initiatives such as the Free Store: a store where everything is free. Later in the year, on New Years Eve, the Youth International Party, or better known as Yippie, was founded. In describing the difference between “hippie” anD Yippie to Chairman of the Black Panther Party Bobby Seale, co-founder of Yippie Jerry Rubin positions the group as the political aspect of the “hippie” movement, “[hippies] mostly prefer to be stoned but most of them want peace, and they want an end to this stuff.”
On the 4th of April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee standing amongst his entourage on the balcony of the motel he was residing in. King was in Memphis supporting the Black sanitation workers strike which had begun on the 12th of February; the workers had attempted strikes to improve their conditions in the past but received little support. The breaking point for workers came when 2 Black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were seeking shelter from the rain in the back of their truck's compactor when it malfunctioned, crushing them to death. The mayor was antagonistic towards the strike, rejecting the City Council-approved deal and using the police to repress the workers, which helped gain the support of civil rights organisations and the community. Reverend James Lawson, leader of the strike committee, felt his good friend Dr. King would be able to help further the workers’ efforts; King had recently launched his Poor People’s Campaign, a multiracial nationwide campaign aimed at addressing broadly economic inequalities with non-violent direct action.
King arrived in Memphis on the 18th of March and delivered a speech to a crowd of more than 15,000, promising to return to lead a huge march. The march took place on the 28th but quickly turned violent with the police presence, giving opportunists a chance to loot; a 16-year-old was killed by the police in the chaos. The blame for the violence was pointed at a Memphis-based Black Power group known as the Invaders; founded by College graduates, Charles Cabbage and Coby Smith; and Vietnam veteran, John Smith in 1967.
Created out of anger for the plight of African-Americans but galvanised by the political climate, the group became the student component of a larger city-wide effort known as The Black Organizing Project; attempting to establish reading programs, writing seminars, breakfast programs and health examination programs. The group denied the claims of causing violence, to prove their value to the cause, the group had spent the lead up to the march trying to recruit 5,000+ young marchers; co-founder Smith cites the source of the violence to a scuffle he witnessed between a police officer and a young Black man. King had a productive meeting with 3 members of the Invaders a few days after the march, working out an agreement for them to serve as marshals at the next march on the 5th of April.
King returned to Memphis on the 3rd in preparation for the march, addressing several thousand supporters who had come out despite the pouring rain that night, he gave one of his most famous speeches. King aligned the struggles of African-Americans as a global struggle against imperialism, saying “Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee—the cry is always the same: We want to be free.” Towards the end of the speech King lets the crowd know, “We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.” Speaking to their own mortality, he tells the crowd “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
The Invaders met with King again the next day, however this time the meeting included his entourage, causing friction as attention became divided; a few hours later King was shot and killed. At this point, white America had long turned its back on King, illustrated by a 1966 Gallup poll which rated public perception of the civil rights leader as 63% negative. Which is exactly why his image had to first be sanitised into an empty, soulless, white-washed caricature of “peace,” to be able to be for use by many seeking personal gain within US hegemonic capitalism. Becoming, as journalist Jamil Smith describes, “some kind of racial Santa Claus,” not unlike the image that Nelson Mandela, it can be argued, crafted of himself on his reconciliatory path towards the “Rainbow Nation;” the former president remained on the US terrorist watch list until 2008. “It is precisely because their lives have remained comfortable that many whites could make a cuddly patron of Mandela without confronting the revolutionary part of his legacy,” writes professor Herman Wasserman. For the many African-Americans that loved the man for the radical that he was, King’s death came as a huge blow; revolts erupted across the US, known as the Holy Week Uprisings.
The streak of revolts in the 60’s coincided with the sprouting of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in police departments across the US, the first established in the aftermath of the 1965 LA Watts “riots;” Author and journalist Radley Balko points to LAPD inspector Daryl Gates and how the events that had unfolded “seemed [to him] like a type of guerilla warfare on the part of the people participating in the uprising. And he thought that Los Angeles was going to need a sort of military response…” However, Gates wasn’t the “inventor” of SWAT, but was in a position of seniority in its creation, either way, cities across the US responded similarly as these paramilitary SWAT teams became somewhat common in the 70’s.
In Vietnam, the actual US military was fighting an unconventional war it wasn’t prepared for; like the MK soldiers in exile, US troops smoked marijuana to “escape from the social conditions of the war,” says author and professor Jeremy Kuzmarov. That was all stopped by military command after a high-profile article revealed the common use of the drug and caused public panic in 1968; the unintended consequence became the increased use of heroin, particularly for its accessibility and being odourless to detection. The US military itself had already been pumping soldiers with amphetamines and steroids for battle, while also prescribing sedatives and neuroleptics to prevent soldiers from having mental breakdowns. However, this was short sighted as the psychological anguish was being delayed rather than treated, soldiers would return from war suffering from PTSD and possibly heroin addiction.
While the Vietnam War waged on, the CIA led a secret war in Laos, fought by the US backed-ethnic Hmong against the communist Pathet Lao and funded by the illegal trade of opium; utilising Air America planes for distribution of the drug—an airline covertly owned and operated by the CIA. The CIA in Vietnam also coordinated the Phoenix Program, a counterinsurgency against the communist Viet Cong in South Vietnam, between 1967 - 1972; gathering intelligence for the targeted detention, torture and killing of suspected Viet Cong. This occurred alongside a CIA led counterinsurgency program in Guatemala that featured bombing, kidnapping, torture, and murder of “communists and terrorists;” following the CIA led assisination of the Guatamalan head of state and the subsequent coup in 1954. This developed a long relationship of the US, in Latin America, teaching local intelligence and police agencies how to create death squads to target “political activists.” This developed through institutions like the notorious School of the Americas (SOA), where graduates would later commit torture, rape, assassination, forced disappearance, massacres, and forced displacement of communities.
Following the coups of the 70’s, those graduates were put to use by the right-wing military dictatorships of the southern cone of South America, who collaborated on a covert global campaign of violent repression—against those perceived to be enemies of the state—known as Operation Condor, which the US sanctioned, facilitated, and encouraged; from 1975 - 1983. This formed part of a global anti-communist campaign initiated by the U.S, in Western Europe, the U.S created and backed a NATO-led “stay-behind” program, which consisted of a network of local right-wing paramilitaries to carry out a campaign of assassinations, destabilisation, and general political violence in their home countries; from 1952 - 1990, when it was exposed. Its existence having been brought to the public by the Italian Prime Minister, the entire program would become synonymously known as Operation Gladio, the codename for the Italian unit. These operations are continuously mentioned as being necessary in the fight against communism but it is very clear, this violence was carried out in the name of exploitation aka capitalism.