MXGM Self-Defence Manual

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Malcolm X Grassroots Movement March 2013
and documentation can be used in courts of law, domestically and internationally,
educating and informing broader audiences and shaping public opinion on various
issues. We must always organize critical monitoring and documentation teams as part
of our Self-Defense organizing work to ensure that the people’s memories and
reflections are not lost.
• Communication Teams – Communicating with our people, via autonomous media, social
media, websites, newspapers, graphic art, music, etc., is fundamental to our education
work, but just as important to our mobilization efforts whenever needed to confront
police abuse and state repression. These teams must also be organized to facilitate
ongoing communication between the various organizing committees listed in a given
area, and where and when possible, regionally and nationally.
• Media Teams: Our Media Teams must facilitate our engagement with the corporate
media. These Teams should help develop our mass messaging to make sure that much
of our politics and principles if reflected in the mainstream coverage as possible. These
Teams should also develop workshops that provide a clear orientation on how to
develop everyone’s skills to be effective spokespersons and to avoid the various traps
and distortions that the capitalist media wants to pigeonhole is in.
Elementary Demands and Campaigns
A campaign is an organizing drive intended to attain a particular strategic objective. The
suggestions listed below are not exhaustive, rather they are but a few of the many campaigns
that could and ultimately must be waged to educate people, recruit new movement members,
build mass support, and challenge the prevailing narrative that perpetuates the garrison state.
• Police Control Boards – Grassroots Police Control Board’s are intended to serve as
directly elected oversight and disciplinary committees on a city or municipal level. They
have the power to monitor and reform policies and to discipline, fire, subpoena and
prosecute police or other law enforcement agencies operating within their jurisdiction.
Campaigns to institute Police Control Boards are designed to avoid the pitfalls of
Citizen Review Boards. Over the last 50 years various movements and communities
have demanded Citizen Review Boards that have been taken over by Mayors and other
local officials. Mayors have appointed their own political cronies to protect the police
and the status quo. We propose that our movement organize electoral campaigns or
referendums that transform the Charters of Cities and Counties to establish Police
Control Boards via the limited democratic means that presently exist. Electoral
campaigns for Police Control Boards become vehicles for extensive outreach and
education to move our base and shape public opinion. Campaigns of this nature will
require grassroots fundraising to retain the integrity of the initiative and pay for media
ads, etc. They will also require forming alliances with various forces in the city or
region that share similar interests and the development of a comprehensive strategy that
builds enough power to institute this structural reform.
I advocated violent self-defense because I don’t really think you can have a defense against violent racists and against
terrorists unless your prepared to meet violence with violence, and my policy was to meet violence with violence.
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Robert F. Williams