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Title: Black Comeback Author: L.A. Kauffman Date: October 2000 Language: en Topics: black liberation, interview, Free Radical Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021017034302/http://www.free-radical.org/issue11.shtml Notes: Issue #11 of FREE RADICAL: chronicle of the new unrest
What if there was a revolution and nobody noticed?
OK, "revolution" is too grand a term, but the event in question is
undeniably historic: the creation, in the United States, of a
direct-action-based alliance across racial lines, between the
predominantly white movement against corporate globalization and the
predominantly people of color movement against criminal injustice.
You won't read about it in the mainstream media, but then, they didn't
see Seattle coming either. More troubling is how little discussion there
seems to be in radical and progressive circles about this nascent
alliance: its necessity, potential, and pitfalls.
Kai Lumumba Barrow has been a major figure behind the recent resurgence
of direct action within movements of color. She works fulltime as an
organizer for SLAM!, the Student Liberation Action Movement, based in
the City University of New York, especially Manhattan's Hunter College.
Since the mid-Nineties, SLAM! has been a pioneering activist force on
the East Coast, mobilizing working-class students of color in a series
of savvy and daring campaigns for educational access, economic justice,
and other issues.
This past summer, SLAM! brought the largely white New York City Direct
Action Network (NYC-DAN) and other groups together to plan a joint
action against the Republican Party Convention in Philadelphia, focused
on questions of criminal injustice. The process was a bumpy one -- in
particular, there was resistance within NYC-DAN to what some felt was a
turn away from the group's focus on corporate globalization, resistance
that many activists of color viewed as racist -- but the coalition held,
and holds to this day.
In this frank and wide-ranging interview, Kai Lumumba Barrow places this
development within a broad historical context, focusing particularly on
the troubled state of the black liberation movement over the last 25
years and its current revitalization. She sheds light both on why
African-American radicals moved away from direct-action protest
beginning in the mid 1960s, and why she and other activists of color are
experimenting with it anew today.
Kai Lumumba Barrow: I was raised by a black nationalist family, so I
came to activist struggles early. It's difficult for me to say when I
was politicized, because it seems like it's always been there. But I
guess probably '68, the Democratic Convention, stands out for me.
I was born and raised in Chicago. My parents were involved in various
organizations and we lived in a co-op building where a lot of Panthers
and Yippies and so forth came and stayed during the Convention. I was
about 10, and I remember feeling close to some of the folks who were
staying in our house before the Convention began. You know, you're a
kid, and you're the homeowner's kid, so you get a special kind of
attention. People were nice to me, and I felt they were my friends.
So when Daley turned his pigs on the people, and the people came back to
the house, bleeding and beat up, I felt personally hurt. I felt like,
they did this to my friends.
After that I read Malcolm X, and I wanted a revolution. That's it, I
thought, we're going to do this. In high school, I was a knucklehead:
conscious, but not active. But I went to college thinking, this is where
the revolution is going to happen. I went to a historically black
university in Atlanta, and I was really taken aback: It was the Carter
years, and Reagan was beginning to show his ugly head, and there was no
movement.
COINTELPRO had done a serious job on the Panther Party and then also the
Black Liberation Army. There was underground stuff happening but it was
way, way submerged. There wasn't any real movement specifically in black
communities any more. And I was on this campus with the bourgeoisie, the
black bourgeoisie, and I was really freaked out. Like, what is going on?
(laughter)
But then I got active around anti-apartheid work, building student
organizations on campus, and doing a lot of work at that time around
Assata Shakur and Joanne Little and other political prisoners.
I also became a member of the Republic of New Africa, whose full name
was the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. It focused
on establishing a nation for black people in five states in the South.
Doing a lot of institution-building, in that sense. We started a school,
a Saturday school, did a lot of political prisoner work, and a lot of
political education work. Training and that sort of thing.
I stayed with that in different capacities for several years. I went
back to Chicago and started doing a lot of police brutality work there,
still doing prisoner support work, and ended up here in New York in the
early 90s, still staying with the same issues, around police brutality
and prison work.
LAK: In the U.S., the tactics and techniques of direct action were
really pioneered by the black freedom movement of the Fifties and
Sixties, but by the early Seventies, those tactics are rarely seen in
movements of color, especially in black movements. How did that come to
be?
KLB: There was a major shift in the political expression of the black
liberation movement in the mid-Sixties. I have recollections of looking
at the civil rights movement, Dr. King, and the dogs and that sort of
thing, and I have recollections of my family saying, Why are they
allowing themselves to be beaten and attacked by these pigs, by these
racist pigs? Why are they not fighting back?
So there were two predominant tendencies regarding which way forward for
our people. It's reductionist to say it, but it was primarily Malcolm X
versus Dr. King, and you choose your camp. And I tended to be in the
Malcolm X camp - still do, frankly.
The Black Panther Party, as the heirs of Malcolm X, said we're not going
to just stand by idly, we're going to utilize self-defense in order to
get our movement forward. And at that time the Party did engage in a lot
of direct action, from taking over the state capitol in California -
that was a direct action - to various activities that were going on in
communities around the country.
Now, though, the black liberation movement is at a really crucial stage
in its development. We've seen a lot of our leadership and a lot of our
comrades killed and imprisoned and driven crazy, exiled, because we
stood up against oppression. And at this point there seems to be a
reassessing of which way we should we go. We've engaged in a critique
around the standard leadership model, the hierarchical leadership model;
we've done a critique around the party model; we've done a critique
around every possible model that we know exists, and at this point we're
in the process of re-building.
So as a people, within different movements, we've been stunned to some
degree for a really long time. Since the early to mid Seventies. I think
the experiment with armed struggle models, underground models, hit us
really hard. The Party as a large movement kind of stopped at that
point. There have been smatterings of different things that have
occurred since then, but I don't think we've really been able to capture
the imagination of our communities in any broad way since that period.
So we've been kind of in this stalemate, and I think what's happening is
that we're starting to look back to, well, the Fifties. (laughter) This
dawned on me maybe about a year or so ago, and I was really pissed. I
was like, damn it, we're going backwards. (laughter)
So we're starting to reassess the utilization of direct action and civil
disobedience, but we're coming at it, I think, more militantly than in
the Fifties. We've seen it as a way to engage more of our community.
Primarily what we've been doing since the Seventies is rallies and
permitted protests and those sort of things, that have been more or less
non-confrontational. I think we're starting to say, wait a minute. We've
been using a multitude of non-confrontational tactics, and I think at
this point some of us are starting to escalate some of the tactics that
we're utilizing, understanding that we're also the most victimized by
the state for participating in those tactics.
We took the position in the past that nonviolent civil disobedience
placed us in a very passive position, so we started engaging in armed
struggle or at least self-defense. We didn't have enough experience with
that perhaps, or we didn't have enough support for that, and we were
beat. We were beat pretty badly.
We're trying to come back from that, get it together and figure out how
we're going to move forward. Taking the best of both self-defense and
militancy while still being accountable to our communities.
LAK: What were your feelings about Seattle when it happened?
KLB: Why the hell am I in New York at a SLAM! meeting? I had planned to
go - I was so mad!
For all the obvious reasons, I thought it was great. I was really
disappointed by the coverage - I don't know if there were more people of
color in Seattle than the none I saw in the media.
The morning after, my partner and I were on the train, reading the
paper. And we were smiling and high fiving each other. I lived at the
time in Bed Stuy, so the train was filled with black folks - and
everybody was smiling.(laughter) I had some good conversations with a
couple of folks on the train, about how this is necessary, and it's
about time, and this reminds me of the old days. People were
overwhelmingly supportive. Nobody said, "Oh, they shouldn't have thrown
the rock at the Starbucks." (laughter)
But, in terms of their weaknesses, Seattle, D.C. - even Philly and
L.A. - these mass convergences require a week's worth of time in order
to participate, dollars in order to travel, support. If a whole group of
people go somewhere for a week, there's a whole lot of work that's not
getting done, and who's going to do it? Whether that's taking care of
the children, or working 9 to 5. It's very difficult for people of
color, even young people of color, young working-class people of color,
to participate in mass convergences.
I thought Seattle was a great experiment, and it was great that labor
came out. But there was clearly a class distinction between the people
who organized and participated in Seattle versus where I come from.
Access to cell phones? Please, we're just getting walkie-talkies. The
utilization of technology, organizing on the Internet: What's that
phrase, the digital divide? It's there. Make no mistake about it, it's
there.
So the organizing and the building for that action clearly indicated
that an intelligentsia, a bourgeois class, had organized it. They had
the equipment, they had the contacts. That's not necessarily a bad
thing, but it's really important to acknowledge that.
So to some degree, I thought it was great to see it, and I felt really
heartened that people were in the streets. I also felt disconnected, and
I felt envious - player hate. (laughter) I felt like, you know, why
don't we have the resources to do this kind of work?
If we look at the Vietnam War protests, we see how those protests -
because of a capacity to utilize the system, and money, and resources -
tended to overtake and co-opt the black liberation movement, the
American Indian Movement, the Chicano movement and the Puerto Rican
movement. I'm worried that this network of people doing direct action
around corporate globalism is going to do the same thing to emerging
movements around criminal injustice. These are issues where people of
color are saying no, this is genocide, and we're building a movement. I
worry about globalization issues knocking that out of the box.
That's why I think the predominantly white anti-globalization movement
has got to engage in a domestic anaylsis of corporate globalization and
what effect it has on disenfranchised communities of color. The movement
against corporate globalization has to engage in an ongoing analysis
about race and imperialism, and how they play out in the United States,
or else it will completely undermine our work and continue to propel a
racist and classist system.
That's why I wanted to really look at how we could unite with the Direct
Action Network, or build a parallel alliance or network of people of
color that were focused on issues that affect people of color, and unite
the two major issues - corporate globalization and criminal injustice -
as a place that we can spring from.