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22 The Burning Spear
November-December 2007
Spear
Continued from page 17
that you’ve got to have leaders,
but not the middle class.
So, they crushed the Garvey
movement. They used people like
the NAACP. They used W.E.B.
Du Bois who actually went to the
Attorney General of the United
States and tried to get the U.S.
government to give him a ship
that he could bring into the Black
Star Line and use it to destroy it.
Garvey had purchased land in
Liberia and had taken equipment
there because he intended to establish
a land base in Liberia to
take Africa back from white power.
Du Bois, working for the U.S.
government, went to Liberia and
worked with the Liberian government
to make sure that Garvey
could not get that land.
Garvey was about self-determination.
Garvey wasn’t trying to
join the white folks’ thing. He was
talking about our own constitution,
our own capacity and selfdetermination.
They defeated Garvey’s
movement and promoted in its
stead this kind of movement that
held up the U.S. It validates the
U.S.
You’ve got a slave master
who beats you, kicks you, rapes
your wife and your children, works
you from can’t see in the morning
to can’t see at night, makes sure
that you will never ever have any
freedom, and today locks up one
out of every 10 African men between
the ages of 18 and 29 in a
prison.
If you’ve got that kind of system
doing all these things to you
and you’re still running behind it
saying, “please, please, please,
can I integrate with y’all,” you validate
your own oppression.
Resistance of the ‘60s and
demoralization of defeat
So, following the defeat of the
Garvey movement what we had
now is a movement based on a
bourgeois democracy. Not the national
democratic rights that the
Garvey movement put forward,
but the democratic rights of the
U.S. government as interpreted
by the African petty bourgeoisie,
the middle class. These were the
rights that they would fight for
— the right to be a part of the oppressor.
This lasted until the ‘60s when
you saw this incredible new energy
emerge. People began to put
forward the same basic message
for national democratic rights that
was found in the Garvey movement.
It wasn’t articulated in that
fashion, but revolutionary national
democratic rights is what we were
struggling for.
We saw the emergence of
groups that you are familiar with
like the Black Panther Party.
There were others like the Republic
of New Afrika (RNA), the Junta
of Militant Organizations (JOMO),
African People’s Socialist Party
etc. These were organizations
that were about the issue of selfdetermination.
They said we want to be independent,
self-governing people,
free from white power. They had
differences in what they meant by
that, but all of them were talking
about being self-determining, independent
people.
This movement was crushed
as well. We people like Fred
Hampton who was murdered in
his sleep in 1969 by the U.S. government,
and this was symbolic of
the defeat of a revolutionary period
that we had gone through.
As far as the imperialists were
concerned, they had destroyed
our capacity to make revolution.
Then the African People’s Socialist
Party was born in 1972, right
on the tail in of this defeat, and we
have engaged in struggle since
that time.
You see, it’s not enough to destroy
a people’s movement militarily.
You can’t get rid of it with just
military defeat. So an assault was
made on the ideas of the African
revolution.
So there emerged these pseudo-communists.
We call them Ku
Klux Kommunists. These white
left organizations claimed to have
revolutionary insights unlike anything
that had ever been seen before.
They organized Africans into
their organizations. They called
themselves multi-national organizations,
and while fighting for
what they called freedom and socialism,
they began to make an
assault on the rights of African
people to be a self-determining
people.
They began to characterize
the struggle of African people for
our own power as an attack on the
solidarity of the working class.
So this kind of thing began to
happen, and the movement went
through a lot of different difficulties.
We had all kinds of contradictions
inside the African Liberation
Movement. People were underground
or pushed out of political
life. You’ll find some people who
were members of the Black Panther
Party who are still in Paris,
France afraid to come back to this
country.
Some people just got back
from places in South America
where they were in exile for many
years, and we were holding the
line inside this country trying to rebuild
a revolutionary movement.
It was a very difficult period
because you start talking about
revolution, and the last thing people
remember about revolution
was tanks in the streets of this
country. They remember the example
of Malcolm X gunned down
in public view. They remember
how they murdered Fred Hampton
and the picture of him laying
in his own blood.
They remember the Panthers
who were attacked throughout this
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country. That’s their last memory.
People were demoralized. You
talk about revolution, and they’re
telling you, “Well, it don’t make no
sense to try to do this because every
time we get a leader the white
man kills him.”
Then the government imposed
a drug economy into our community.
They would deny Africans a
job in the legal capitalist economy
and then imposed an illegal capitalist
economy on the community.
It was just an incredibly demoralizing
situation. It was a serious
counterinsurgency.
So we were faced with the
question of how to bring people
back into political life. Nobody
was interested in revolution, but
people were interested in the fact
that the police were still beating
them up. Their children still
couldn’t graduate or they were insulted
and faced the worst kinds
of psychological assaults in the
school system.
People were fed up with slumlords
that charged us exorbitant
rents and would never do any repairs
where we lived. They were
tired of filthy merchants in our
communities who charged too
much for bad goods.
People were tired of that
kind of stuff. They weren’t talking
about revolution, but they wanted
to make some changes.
So we decided to build an NP-
DUM that would bring people back
into political life where they were
— not because they believed in
revolution, but because they believed
in having a decent place to
stay. Because they believed that
their son ought to be able to go to
the store and be gone for 15 minutes
without them having to worry
about whether he’s still alive or
not.
So we built NPDUM to deal
essentially around the question of
national democratic rights.
This issue of national democratic
rights is very important.
We’ve come to understand subsequently
that most people have
not understood what we meant
when we talked about national
democratic rights.
We say national democratic
rights because we’re talking
about our rights as a nation, not
because it’s U.S.-wide or something
like that. We’re talking about
a colonized people, a nation of
people who have been put into
captivity and have lost our rights
as national entity.
When we’re talking about the
struggle for national democratic
rights we’re not just talking about
rights according to the U.S. constitution.
The only reason things
like the U.S. constitution or the
declaration of independence are
important to us is because it’s
something we can use to raise
the contradictions between what
America says it is and what it really
is.
There are some white people
and even some negroes who actually
believe in what America
says it is.
So we raise the questions like
how they’ve got a law that says
three strikes, you’re out on the one
hand, but on the other hand, they
have a constitution that says that
a person should not be tried more
than once for the same crime.
Now that’s obviously a contradiction
because if they say on the
third time you’re out, that means
that you’re not only getting tried,
charged and sentenced for what
you did this time, but for the other
two times as well. That’s double
jeopardy in anybody’s book.
So we raise these questions
to heighten the contradictions to
help all the Africans to see that
this constitution thing means nothing
as far as we are concerned
and also to help the white people
— those who can see it and for
whom it can be of some significance
— to see it.
We call it a kind of political
jujitsu where we use the weight
of the opponent against him. We
take his own words and ideas and
use it against him to raise and
deepen the contradictions
It’s not because we believe
in American democracy. We’d be
fools to believe in American democracy
because this democracy
is a democracy that is built on stolen
land.
The native people didn’t vote
to be in concentration camps they
call reservations. African people
didn’t vote to be here. What kind
of democracy are you talking
about when in your constitution
Africans are declared three-fifths
of a person?
That is no democracy. That
constitution is as worthless as
used toilet paper. The thing that
gives it significance is because
we can use this toilet paper and
rub it in their faces to heighten
and raise the contradictions to
educate the masses of our people
and anybody else who can be educated
around it.
We want to take advantage
of it. We want all the democratic
space that we can have.
If they start trying to close it
down over here, we can say, “your
constitution says this.” We won’t
say, “Marcus Garvey told us that.”
We want to get to where Garvey
was going, but we will walk on
their constitution to get there to
the extent that it is possible.
We have a self-declared right
to be free and independent people.
They are never going to put
that on the ballot.
I don’t give a damn if they
never put it on anybody’s piece of
paper. We have a right and a responsibility
as mature human beings
to win our freedom.
Democracy is a form of the
State
So when we talk about de-
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