The Birth of the NFAC; Amerika’s Black Militia

Black grassroots movements have led the charge throughout the history of Black Americans fighting for equality in America. From the 1954 Civil Rights movement to the Black Power movement of the ’60s, and the more recent Black Lives Matter movement.

Since the dismantlement of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1982, no other organization composed of Black men and women has disrupted America’s white comfort. Until the NFAC (Not ****ing Around Coalition) led by the 2016 independent presidential candidate, John Fitzgerald Johnson, known as Grandmaster Jay, took formation.

The NFAC is a focused, self-finance armed militia of trained Black military veterans, and according to the Grandmaster Jay, the NFAC is neither protestors nor demonstrators. “We are a Black militia. We don’t come to sing; we don’t come to chant. That’s not what we do,” says Grandmaster Jay.

The first public sighting of the NFAC took place on May 12, 2020, in Brunswick, Georgia, as a direct response to the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black jogger murder by two white males in February. Although early reports on the NFAC linked the organization to the Black Panther Party, the NFAC has denied any connection.

One of the biggest shows of arms and unity from the NFAC came on July 4, 2020, America’s Independence Day. Along with an upward of 1,000 troops, Grandmaster Jay marched in sync through the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Appearing on Roland Martin’s “Unfiltered Daily Digital Show,” Grandmaster Jay tells Martin that the Stone Mountain formation took place for two reasons: One, to exercise their constitutional rights to bear arms and to assemble peacefully. It was also to challenge the white nationalist organization after threats of lynching and shooting people of color began circulating online.

“You are not going to continue to threaten the Black Race, Grandmaster Jay says. “It was time to show folks that we can defend ourselves.

The NFAC showed another demonstration of unity and strength when they took to Louisville, Kentucky, to apply pressure on Louisville Attorney General, Daniel Camron, for his lack of urgency in bringing justice to 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. Taylor, an EMT, with no criminal history, was shot by the Louisville police officers eight times as they mistakenly raided her home. The presence of the NFAC in Louisville resulted in a conversation between Daniel Cameron and Grandmaster Jay. According to Jay, he gave Cameron an ultimatum, finish the investigation in four weeks, or the NFAC would return to Louisville. Grandmaster Jay says the NFAC presences in Louisville were not to create or add any more chaos to a city already under the public’s microscope but feels their appearance is necessary to spread a particular message. That message was justice for Breonna Taylor.

Everyone may not agree with the NFAC and what some may call an aggressive approach.  But in a country where Black people continue to be murder and threatened by local law enforcement and white nationalist organizations, the NFAC is needed as an alternative to what’s to come if America doesn’t correct their mistreatment to people of color.

“Anytime there appears to be a gross injustice against the Black community, we’ve decided we’re going to take it to the streets. We’re going to take it to their face and show them what Malcolm said was true. There are no such things as a bloodless revolution.” -Grandmaster Jay

source: https://chicagodefender.com/the-birth-of-the-nfac-americas-black-militia/

The Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole Talks To Us About Creating 50 Years of Revolutionary Culture and Art

 

On this episode of Renegade Culture the Last Poets’ Abiodun Oyewole discusses the upcoming 50th anniversary of their groundbreaking album and creating revolutionary art; the rise of Black Power and the politics of the word Nigga; celebrating and suing Hip-Hop artist who sampled their work.

Follow us on Soundcloud, Apple and social media.

Hosted by Kalonji Changa and Kamau Franklin
Produced by Naka “The Ear Dr”
Recorded at Playback Studios in the Historic West End of Atlanta, Ga

Join the Jericho Movement to Celebrate the Life of Freedom Fighter Robert Seth Hayes!

Seth walking in the forest with Nayeli Sunday, March 1, 2020 The People’s Forum 320 West 37th Street New York, NY From 1 to 4 p.m. We will also remember other fallen warriors and celebrate recent victories!

The story of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a co-founder of the famous street gang, Crips

Stanley “Tookie” Williams. Photo Credit: Sfgate.com

It is impossible to miss who the Crips are if one is familiar with American gang culture. The idiosyncrasies – the color blue, the graffiti, avoiding the letter “b” – are comprehensive synecdoches.

What however often goes undiscussed in our conversations on gangs is their origin story or even the founders of these organizations.

That is where Stanley “Tookie” Williams comes in. He is one of the founders of the Crips in partnership with Raymond Lee Washington.

Washington was killed in 1979 shortly after he was released from the Deuel Vocational Institute in San Joaquin County, California.

The popular theory that gangsters are usually individuals who were denied the benefit of growing up in a functional family was true for Williams.

He was born to a teenage mother in 1953 in Louisiana. When Williams was just one, his father abandoned the family and in 1959, the young Williams and his mother moved to Los Angeles.

In effect, the South Central area in LA where Williams lived, prepared him for the kind of life he would be known for. By his own account, he played with children with similar family situations as his in vacant lots and on the streets.

They saw drunk adults and every sort of debauchery on the streets. The learning curve was mild from that point.

But the 1960s was also a turbulent time in the United States for black people. The argument of civil rights was becoming as forceful as its opposition.

California’s law enforcers became suspicious of the pockets of young black people, especially men. Incidentally, the state record of juvenile crime from those times hit high numbers.

For young black people who were to be found in disenfranchised communities, the future was bleak. But what also happened was that many gangs realized the futility of their crimes.

If the point of crime was for poor black boys to have something on which to live, the Black Power Movement offered a legitimate platform to challenge the system that kept people poor.

This is why some of the earliest affiliates of the Black Panther Party were ex-gangsters.

Williams was, however, caught up in the mess of his time. In 1969, he was jailed two years for car theft.

When he got out in 1971, Williams went back to the life that had sent him to juvenile prison. Only this time, he would gain notoriety as a stout and strong bully tapping from his bodybuilding adventure while incarcerated.

He was known to be a brawn for hire. But the story of his fearlessness against groups such as the L.A. Brims and the Chain Gang unsurprisingly spread.

And so Washington came calling. He had a proposal for Williams – the two of them can come together and cajole other small gangs into their influence and control.

Washington’s idea was a sort of a confederacy of gangs headed by him and Williams. The two of them thought that if gangs had more central control, somehow, and paradoxically, crime would be cleaner.

It is better to have an organized plan to commit crimes that would eliminate free willing marauding gangs. The Crips were thus born in 1969.

But it was a group that was first known as Cribs. When the members of the gang started carrying walking canes to portray their “pimp” status, people in the South Central neighborhoods began to call them “Crips”, as in cripples.

Interestingly, other less popular theories exist as to why they are called what they are.

It is not known how many people would describe themselves as Crips some 50 years on but conservative estimates put them over 50,000. Some Crips have even become quite famous for very non-gang related but legitimate activities.

In 1979, Williams was convicted on four counts of murder and sentenced to death. He maintained that these were not crimes he committed but several appeals were turned down.

In 2005, by lethal injection, Williams’ death penalty was carried out. Before his death, he tried in his own little way to give back some good through his work as a youth counselor.

source: https://face2faceafrica.com/article/the-story-of-stanley-tookie-williams-a-co-founder-of-the-famous-street-gang-crips?

Stokely Carmichael, A Philosopher Behind The Black Power Movement

By KAREN GRIGSBY BATES

 

Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, speaks to reporters in Atlanta in May 1966. That year, his use of the phrase “black power” at a rally in Mississippi grabbed the nation’s attention.

Bettmann/Corbis

 

Before he became famous — and infamous — for calling on black power for black people, Stokely Carmichael was better known as a rising young community organizer in the civil rights movement. The tall, handsome philosophy major from Howard University spent summers in the South, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, to get African-Americans in Alabama and Mississippi registered to vote in the face of tremendous, often violent resistance from segregationists.

Historian Peniel Joseph’s new biography of Carmichael, titled Stokely: A Life, shows that for a time, the Trinidad-born New Yorker was everywhere that counted in the South, a real-life Zelig: “He is an organizer who had his hand in every major demonstration and event that occurs between 1960-1965.”

Joseph, a professor at Tufts University, says Carmichael was ever-present in what he considers “the second half of the civil rights movement’s heroic period.” (After the Montgomery Bus Boycott and before the attempts to integrate the North.)

Photographs from the time show him walking down dusty highways with Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi, chatting easily with farmers in Lowndes County, Ala., listening to elderly black ladies who plied him with sweet tea on their front porches while he (often successfully) charmed them into joining him in organizing their neighbors. Joseph says Carmichael had “amazing charisma.”

A Call For Black Power

Carmichael spent the early ’60s firmly embracing nonviolent protest: sit-ins, marches, assemblies. But the soaring victories of the late ’50s and early ’60s seemed to bog down after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Joseph says Carmichael began to wonder if new methods needed to be considered.

In 1966, he used the phrase “black power” at a rally in Mississippi. It caught the nation’s attention, but it meant different things to different people.

Many whites who heard the phrase were uneasy, Joseph says. “They assumed that black power meant being anti-white and really sort of violent, foreboding.”

Black listeners, on the other hand, heard a call “for cultural political and economic self-determination,” Joseph says. The phrase, he adds, resonated powerfully for a people who’d long been measured by arbitrarily set white standards and aesthetics.

“We have to stop being ashamed of being black!” was the first point in a four-part manifesto he often used in his speeches. Black, Carmichael told his audiences, was survivor-strong. It was resourceful. And beautiful.

Tall and thin, with limpid eyes and a dazzling smile that contrasted with his deeply brown skin, Carmichael walked like he thought he was a good-looking guy — in an era when, for many blacks, lighter was better.

“That was really one of his most important legacies,” Joseph says. “He was really defiant in declaring ‘black is beautiful’ well before that became popular in the late ’60s.” In other words, Carmichael was black and proud years before James Brown turned the concept into a best-selling R&B hit.

‘The United States Has No Conscience’

He was also rethinking the practicality of nonviolence in an environment where black life was often viewed as disposable.

Martin Luther King Jr., shown here with Stokely Carmichael during a voter registration march in Mississippi in 1966, regarded the younger Carmichael as one of the civil rights movement’s most promising leaders.

Lynn Pelham/Time

The 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner in Neshoba County, Miss., the assassination of Malcolm X and the crushing government response to the unrest that had blazed through several cities by the late ’60s caused Carmichael to rethink his beliefs.

King (who regarded the younger Carmichael as one of the movement’s most promising leaders) believed in the concept of “redemptive suffering” and thought the sight of protesters accepting beatings, dog bites and fire-hosing would soften America’s heart and inspire the country to reject segregation. But after seeing so many of his comrades maimed and killed, Carmichael no longer shared that belief.

King had gotten a lot right, Carmichael said, but in betting on nonviolence, “he only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States has no conscience.”

And it was becoming increasingly hard for him to live in the United States. Hounded by the FBI at home, tracked by the CIA when he went abroad, Carmichael had had enough. He changed his name to Kwame Ture in homage to two African heroes — his friend Kwame Nkrumah (the first president of independent Ghana), and Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea, the country that had welcomed the former civil rights worker as an honored citizen.

Ture would live for another three decades, visiting the United States frequently as he traveled the globe preaching the merits of pan-Africanism and scientific socialism. People listened — but not in the same numbers as they had in the early days. Ture, with his modest lifestyle and reminders of communal responsibility seemed … quaint. “It’s interesting,” biographer Joseph notes: “Times changed, but Stokely didn’t.”

The former civil rights warrior died in Guinea in 1998 at age 57, of prostate cancer. And while he’s no longer a household name in most places, Peniel Joseph says, Stokely Carmichael’s legacy is the very notion of black power, “which was enormously successful in redefining the contours of African-American identity but also race relations in the United States — and globally.”

source: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/10/287320160/stokely-carmichael-a-philosopher-behind-the-black-power-movement