Top Quotes: “In Defense of Looting” — Vicky Osterweil
Introduction
“Looting is so unpopular not because it’s an error or bad for the movement but because it’s often a movement’s most radical tactic. Looting attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society, and so frightens and disturbs nearly everyone, even some of its participants. After all, we’ve been raised and trained to hold, follow, and reproduce those beliefs every day. Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order. Looting reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy, and state violence.”
“It’s a practical, immediate form of improving life. Looting represents a material way that riots and protests help the community: by providing a way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than doing so through wage labor. Looting is an act of communal cohesion.
But looting is also an act of excess, of property destruction. When something is looted, that thing’s nature as a commodity is destroyed by its being taken for free, out of the cycle of exchange and profit. Everything in the store goes from being a commodity to becoming a gift. Less abstractly, looting is usually followed up by burning down the shop. Looters also frequently throw items out onto the streets for anyone to take or pile goods chaotically in the middle of the store or pass bottles of liquor, bags of food, or goods between strangers and around the crowd. Looting involves not only taking wealth directly but also immediately sharing that wealth, which points to the collapse of the system by which the looted things create value.
Looting is a communal practice: it cannot be done alone. Anthropologist Neal Keating argues that looting creates a similar reaction to property as the potlatch, a communal practice of Indigenous nations in the Pacific NW. In the potlatch, held on a variety of special occasions — births, deaths, weddings, festivals — wealthy people compete to see who can give away the most possessions to the gathered celebrants and they vie with each other to destroy the most accumulated wealth in a massive bonfire. The potlatch works to level wealth in the community by consuming surplus, which might otherwise enable some to develop more permanent forms of power through excess accumulation. Rioting and looting similarly redistribute and reduce the wealth and the surplus, leveling material power differentials. The potlatch was outlawed by the Canadian government as a part of its (ongoing) genocide of the First Nations: the potlatch was considered one of the most important obstacles to their becoming ‘civilized’ and Christian. Like looting, this non-white, noncommodified communal approach to property was seen as a dangerous threat to capitalism and ‘civilization.’”
“Though the buildings destroyed may be located in a predominantly Black or proletarian neighborhood, the losses go to the white, bourgeois building and business owners, rarely the people who live near them.”
“If looters are ‘not part of the protest,’ then why do they appear again and again in liberatory uprisings? In fact, a number of sociological studies from the 70s showed that, against the common sense narrative, those who participate in rioting and looting tend to be the most politically informed and socially engaged in the neighborhood, while the most apathetic, disconnected, and alienated people riot at the lowest rates. This suggests that looters and rioters understand the stakes and meaning of the struggle, have been active within it, and see looting as a sensible escalation of possibilities.”
“Rioters are often accused of being the cause of negative media coverage. But this claim is always made after the cameras have arrived, without recognition of how or why those cameras got there. If it were not for the rioters, the media would probably pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn’t looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests, would Ferguson have become a point of worldwide attention? It’s impossible to know, but all the nonviolent protests against police killings across the country that go unreported seem to indicate that the answer is no. It was the looting of a Duane Reade, and not the vigil that preceded it, that brought widespread attention to the murder of Kimani Grey in NYC in 2013. The media’s own warped procedure instructs that riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.”
“As the study of riots in the US makes clear, one of the main aftereffects of riots is a sense of unity, togetherness, and joy not normally experienced in the urban neighborhood, a unity that leads to the blossoming of dozens of political, social, and economic projects.”
“Looting, which is, after all, akin to mass shoplifting, is treated as a crime deserving of the death penalty: during riots, police shoot looters on sight.”
Colonial Times
“Laboring on monocultural plantations, servants were beaten, starved, branded, maimed, and killed with near impunity. Even some of the horrors of the Middle Passage were practiced on English servants, who, at the height of the servant trade from 1650–80, would be ‘packed like herrings,’ locked belowdecks for weeks with barely any food and only a feet meet to move.
Similarly, Africans in the colonies hadn’t all been reduced to chattel slavery. Though life terms were sometimes enforced in the Caribbean colonies in this period, many Africans in the early US weren’t enslaved for life, but only under indenture contracts, and eventually went on to receive freedom dues, own land, even own white servants. As historian Barbara Fields writes, ‘African slaves during the years 1619–61 enjoyed rights that, in the 19th century, not even free black people could claim.’ African and European servants worked together, married, and escaped tobacco plantations together. It wasn’t some preracial utopia of equality but rather a period of violent domination and frontier colonialism in which the specific tenets of white supremacy hadn’t yet been fully developed, what Lerone Bennett Jr. calls an ‘equality of oppression.’
As the 17th century wore on, conditions in the colonies improved, and indentured servants started surviving their terms — and receiving their freedom dues — much more regularly, thus becoming more expensive. Plantation owners tried to squeeze more profit out of their workers, finding increasingly spurious reasons to extend the length of servitude, driving servants harder and harder in the fields. However, as Fields argues, English servants were crucially ‘backed up’ by the history of struggle between British laborer and landowner, by centuries of conflict and negotiation passed down into the present as culture, precedent, and norms of treatment. Furthermore, news of servant mistreatment that reached England made it harder and therefore more expensive, to capture or recruit new servants. There was thus a limit to how much planters could exploit English workers.”
“Back in England, where the majority of the population was still transitioning out of subsistence agriculture, the goods produced in the colonies helped form an incentive to drive peasants into cash markets and capitalist labor relations. As historian Robin Blackburn writes, ‘The availability of tobacco, brightly colored cotton goods, sweetened beverages, cakes and preserves, helped tempt Britons into greater participation in market exchanges and greater reliance on wages, salaries, and fees.’ Thus slavery strengthened the English bourgeoisie, enriched Britain and continental banking and merchant firms, and helped create the modern English working class. It’s not just America: industrial capitalism is impossible without New World slavery.”
“Colonial slave regimes in Africa and SE Asia expanded vastly at the very moment of American emancipation. When Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 — the last country in the Americas to do so — King Leopold II of Belgium’s genocidal domination of the Congo was but 3 years old. From 1885–1908, almost all of the people of the Congo Basin, along with thousands kidnapped from other parts of Africa, were forced into slavery.
The sinisterly named ‘Congo Free State’ saw 15 million people worked to death on rubber plantations, starved by monoculture-produced famine and drought, murdered by colonial overseers for failing to meet rubber or ivory quotas, killed on forced marches, or executed by militias for rising in rebellion. The rubber thus accumulated enabled the mass production of the bicycles and cars that would transform daily life in the Global North. Across the 19th and well into the 20th century, capitalist development relied on enslaved, colonized labor.”
“The emergence of reason and the subsequent reification of reason as the fundamental attribute of human nature is completely premised on the creation of hierarchies of reasonable and unreasonable people. The enlightened, reasoned man can only exist in distinction to the (African, Indigenous, nonmale) person who lacks reason.”
“The concepts of the individual and the human that constitute the basis for all rights, for all law, for ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ were already and always built on a racial definition. But the phrase is an adaptation of a John Locke quote that didn’t mention happiness: ‘it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of estate.’ This inalienable right to ‘estate,’ to property, would be the marker of the kind of subject recognized by this new government. But this also works in the other direction: to be able to own property is to be human, so those who can’t own property — be they enslaved, Indigenous, or even the children and wives of settlers — need not be recognized as fully human by the state.”
“Africans came to stand for lack of reason itself. Because people lacking reason weren’t human, they were only capable of being property, not owning it. Although the more liberal-minded settlers believed that with education and uplift some select Black people might become capable of humanity, they didn’t challenge the basic framework by which most Africans were deemed inhuman. Black people became, legally, socially, and ideologically, property.”
“Our default sense of history, like our default idea of politics, is a story of leaders, laws, and wars, important dates and formal treaties. Such a historical lens can’t help but misrecognize the political will and communal intelligence behind the massive, decentralized direct actions that mark all revolutionary moments. Instead, 500,000 enslaved persons escaping in the span of 4 years is treated like some individualistic, apolitical phenomenon called ‘opportunism’-a crime rioters and looters are always accused of. The history of the Black Atlantic, however, reveals that enslaved populations across the centuries have always recognized political crises among their enslavers as the best moments to organize and get free.
The most famous example of this, of course, is the French Revolution. News of its beginnings in 1789 sent the French sugar colony of St.-Domingue into turmoil. While different political factions struggled, both in St.-Domingue and in the revolutionary National Assembly back in Paris, the enslaved workers, the vast majority of the island’s population watched, waited, and formed a plan of revolt.”
“It wasn’t only Haitians who used political conflict to break their bonds. The overthrow of the July Monarchy in 1848 and the rise of the Republic of France saw an abolitionist government installed in Paris. Through this new government would formally abolish slavery in the remaining French sugar colonies, the enslaved of Martinique didn’t wait for Paris’ help. They deserted plantations in the thousands, forcing the colonial administrators of Martinique and Guadeloupe to abolish slavery before the order from the new government to do so could arrive across the Atlantic.
In the US, meanwhile, as many as 100k people, near 20% of the colonial slave population, escaped slavery during the course of the American Revolution — including some slaves of Jefferson and Washington, fugitives who no doubt had a more expansive idea of freedom than their enslaving Founding Fathers — making it the largest slave revolt in US history until the Civil War.”
“Fugitives played a crucial role in the end of slavery well before their great revolutionary moment. In the face of the movement of ever-increasing maroonage, the Democratic Party pushed the Fugitive Slave Act into the Compromise of 1850: this law was a central component of the political crisis that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. The act not only made harboring a fugitive in a Free State a federal crime, not only gave slave catchers jurisdiction over the entire North, not only removed any legal proceedings beyond the enslaver’s testimony, but also obliged all citizens to actively participate in capturing fugitives.
This law didn’t stem the tide of fugitives, but it did galvanize the abolition movement, which grew increasingly militant in the face of the law’s overreach: across the North, former slaves and free people armed themselves and started speaking not just of abolition but of revolution. And it convinced many Northern white politicians, intellectuals, and capitalists of the fearful rise of the great ‘Slave Power,’ an anxiety not about slavery but about a lack of N. political sovereignty within the federal government.”
“The most reliable form of resistance was flight. The very first known enslaved Africans in what would become the US, kidnapped and brought to a small Spanish colony in the area of the Carolinas around 1526, revolted, escaped their bondage, and lived out their lives among Indigenous tribes. Flight wasn’t always permanent: the record is full of the enslaved leaving only to visit family members and friends on nearby plantations, to attend social events and religious gatherings, or sometimes to strike, refusing to return to the plantation until demands were met.
In the early colonial days of what would become the US, those who escaped permanently fled to Indigenous tribes to the uncolonized west or to the sparsely populated Spanish territory of FL to the south. These fugitives also formed or joined secretive communities of escaped slaves in the swamps and hills around the plantations — maroon communities. Although maroonage is a more historiographically centered phenomenon in Brazil, Suriname, and the West Indies — for example, in Jamaica, where maroon communities fought famous guerrilla wars with the colonizers — it was still considerably practiced in the US.
During the colonial period, European, African, and Indigenous enslaved and indentured peoples escaped the plantation together to form maroon communities, with European maroons conveniently able to pass as legal citizens and thus trade with the colonies on behalf of the larger settlement. Particularly large communities formed in the mid-Atlantic Great Dismal Swamp and across more sparsely colonized FL.
The maybe 6,000-square-mile Great Dismal Swamp, running through the borderlands of NC and VA, was a known free and hostile community in the center of slavery’s heartland. Maroons from the Dismal Swamp sent units to serve alongside the British in the Revolutionary War, and during ‘peacetime’ they went on looting raids out into the surrounding slave country, stealing supplies and freeing the enslaved. In doing so, they developed guerrilla tactics that would help them to free thousands during the Civil War.
In FL, between 1817–58, the federal government waged 4 decades of war to uproot the powerful autonomous Seminole communities, made up of African maroons and Creek Indians. These communities often sent looting raids into VA, AL, and GA to free family members and comrades, and their settlements were the destination of many fugitives from the Deep South. Remembered in history as the Seminole Wars, the federal government’s military campaigns against them, which lasted for almost the entire antebellum period, started as slave-catching expeditions.
The so-called Second Seminole War, from 1835–42, included the largest slave rebellion in American history outside of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. The role of maroons in this war has been mostly left out of standard histories, but at least 400 enslaved people looted themselves from FL plantations to join the Seminoles in fighting the US government. A government terrified by Indigenous and Black solidarity waged the Seminole Wars, and these conflicts represent an important moment in the long tradition of armed self-defense in both insurgent communities.”
“The North didn’t abolish slavery out of some liberality of spirit. Instead, it saw slavery mostly materially destroyed by fugitives in the years of the American Revolution. Early in the war, the British promised emancipation to any slaves who joined their cause. Eventually, seeing the incredible effectiveness of this promise, so did colonial forces. Wherever the war went, the enslaved escaped behind its lines. But, as Russell Shoatz writes, though liberal historians ‘are fond of reminding everyone that Blacks provided 5,000+ fighters to the colonist cause during that struggle,’ the enslaved favored the British, joining with them over the colonials at a rate of more than 10:1. At the war’s end, some 10k black people fled the colonies with the defeated army they’d fought alongside, leaving the ne US on British ships.
This doesn’t mean that the British, still reaping massive profits from the slave trade and enslaving hundreds of thousands across their empire, had suddenly become the friends of the enslaved: the Crown’s forces were merely the simplest and easiest vehicle of emancipation. Those who joined neither army fled otherwise. Tends of thousands used the confusion to flee to Indigenous and maroon communities, if not to FL, then to Canada. Perhaps 100k, 20% of the entire colonial enslaved population, escaped during the conflict. And because much of the fighting happened in the North, a much higher percentage of the enslaved in New England, NY, NJ, and PA, though a smaller absolute number, made it to freedom.
N. slavery, thus considerably reduced from its relatively small position, was legally abolished in the years following the Revolution, with the last state to formally do so NJ in 1804. And yet, even this economically safe, mostly after-the-fact legal abolition wasn’t carried out immediately and totally but rather was instituted gradually and partially by state governments. The law that abolished slavery in NY, passed in 1799, protected enslavers such that slavery only actually ended in the state in 1827. There were still hundreds of legal slaves in PA & NJ in the 1840s.”
The Underground Railroad
“The Underground Railroad was extensive in the N, but it also led into Mexico, a W. branch aided and organized in large part by Indigenous tribes and displaced Seminole maroons. This route became less viable, however, after the Compromise of 1850 made TX an official slave state.”
“When things were easy, committee members would receive word from stations farther S or W and greet arriving fugitives as soon as they landed. But they also scoured the neighborhoods around ports and train stations for apparent fugitives who’d managed to gain access to transport out of the S and who’d arrived alone or without a plan.
Upon arriving in a free town or city, many fugitives described asking for help from the first Black person they saw, who often directed them to the vigilance committee or a local station of the Railroad. Though the records are obviously biased toward those who successfully found the committees, evidence still points to the fact that this knowledge was widely spread in free Black communities. Urban Black communities practiced mutual aid, protection, and self-defense: abolitionist action was not only taken by those who considered themselves activists.
The committees gave the fugitive shelter and food, investigated whether they were being hunted, and organized legal counsel if needed. They set up fugitives with work and housing locally if it was safe and the fugitive wanted to remain, or they bought them rail tickets or ship passage farther N. Fugitives frequently went on to Canada or to cities with strong abolitionist community which meant they would be better protected from slave catchers. When they arrived, they were then helped by activists who organized work and housing for them and often reunited them with family or friends who may’ve been expecting them.”
“Born into slavery, Tubman never learned to read, but she became a brilliant military tactician. She planned and carried out 19 separate raids into slave territory, usually going twice a year, often on foot, without ever being caught: one of her major strategic insights was to continue moving S. some distance with the newly fugitive before heading N, because enslavers never suspected groups would head deeper into slave territory. Tubman bore a massive bounty on her head until the fall of slavery; she was the most wanted, and hated, woman in the South.
Tubman falling ill delayed John Brown — who called her ‘General Tubman’ — from attempting to loot the armory at Harpers Ferry on the planned date of July 4, 1859. Had she been present when Brown carried out their plan on October 16, 1859, some have argued, she would’ve prevented Brown from making the tactical blunders — most notably, allowing a mail train to leave Harpers Ferry and thus bring news of the raid to the federal government — that led to his becoming a martyr and symbol rather than a victorious freedom fighter. And had Tubman and Brown’s raid succeeded, the terms of the Civil War might not’ve been set by the slaveocracy’s secession but rather by a revolutionary slave army.”
The Civil War
“Tubman is known as a spy for the Union Army, but again this is individualized and taken out of context. She’s seen as ‘a lone superwoman spy for the white man’s army’ when instead she organized an intelligence network of river pilots, Black scouts, and slaves that kept the Union Army informed of enemy movements. Indeed, the importance to the Union effort of maroon intelligence and knowledge, both of local terrain and Confederate movements, cannot be overemphasized.
And Tubman’s most dramatic military action, the Combahee River raid, is sometimes left out of popular histories altogether. In June 1863, during the height of Civil War combat, Tubman guided 300 Black soldiers up the Combahee River in the middle of the night, deep in S. Carolina’s plantation country. As a reporter’s dispatch at the time described it, they ‘struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton and lordly dwellings, and striking terror into the heart of rebeldom, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch.
They set fire to 4 plantations and 6 mills and looted property and slaves from wealthy Confederates. Such an act, within the context of war, was celebrated by white supporters of the Union Army.”
“Lincoln was no abolitionist. Had the war not broken out and had his most ambitious antebellum emancipation proposal gone into effect, he would’ve set slavery in America on a course to legally end…in 100 years. In 1958.”
“Lincoln’s transformation was, ironically, aided by the most rabid S. ideologues. In both the 1860 election and in the state-by-state campaigns for secession in the winter of 1860–1, the slavocracy’s propagandists painted Lincoln a dangerous enemy of the peculiar institution. Though this was a provocation that Lincoln would continuously deny, it had unexpected consequences. The political campaign S. nationalists waged to confer legitimacy on peaceful secession, held in the big houses of the plantations and the central squares of S. cities, was based on the (false) claim that Lincoln’s election would mean abolition, and the campaign couldn’t be waged without revealing this logic to the enslaved. So when secession instead came with war and chaos, not an orderly and peaceful legal split, the enslaved didn’t see some grim tale of ‘brother fighting brother’ but rather Jubilee, the bible-ordained day of emancipation, and they fled the plantation in their hundreds of thousands.”
“Throughout the first years of the war, the administration refused Black volunteers, and Lincoln was deliberating with this cabinet whether or not to attempt an army-wide return of all fugitives. Even through 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union Army was returning fugitives in the border states to their enslavers (the proclamation hadn’t free border-state slaves anyway).
But the enslaved kept striking. Fugitives arrived in the tens, in the hundreds, some fully fit, many in terrible physical condition. What was to be done? Gen. Benjamin Butler hit upon a happy solution in Ft. Monroe in VA. When asked by enslavers to return 3 men who’d escaped to the fort, he refused, declaring the fugitives ‘contraband of war’ and putting them to work. As the war turned more serious, and as the Union Army desperately needed labor, the soundness of this strategy was recognized, and it was taken up for the year and a half of combat preceding the Emancipation Proclamation. The fact that the Union Army at first would only accept emancipation on terms that continued to regard fugitives as property — contraband or not — reveals just how little this war began as one of emancipation. David Roediger puts it more optimistically: ‘The policy preserved the norms of slave property even as it opened new possibilities to resist bondage.’”
Origins of Modern Policing
“They skipped out on work and contracts, didn’t pay their debts, drank, caroused, gambled, and behaved in all sorts of ‘immoral’ ways — the same leisure and economic activities practiced by the English aristocracy, of course, but suddenly immoral when practiced in public by former peasants. This ‘immorality,’ crucially, wasn’t violent: violent crime actually dramatically decreased during the 18th and early 19th centuries. These people merely hadn’t internalized or didn’t respect the new economic and social relations developing in the period and had to be forced to recognize the ‘rational,’ ‘natural’ ways of the new system of property, commodity, labor, and contract.
As one method of keeping these newly dispossessed in check, various London watch orgs took up modernizing experiments, most significantly paying watchmen, but also hiring more men, increasing hours of operation, granting pensions, and purchasing modern equipment and weapons. They also increasingly criminalized debt, unemployment, gambling, drinking, and public gathering: transforming people into criminals is one of the core methods of social control under capitalism.”
“In 1819, in response to 2 failed slave revolts, a law was passed in SC that required all white men 18–45 to serve in slave patrols without pay.”
“Police evolved and modernized earlier in cities with slavery and appeared sooner in settler colonies than in their metropoles. Police forces in the colonial center always took tactical, organizational, and methodological cues from colonizing and enslaving police forces in the outposts. The slave catcher is thus embedded in the DNA of all modern police forces.”
“Convict leasing was a horrific regime. As Angela Davis writes, ‘Scholars who’ve studied the convict lease system point out that in many important respects, convict leasing was far worse than slavery…Slave owners may’ve been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the probability of a convict crew.
The transitions from slave to criminal, from overseer to officer, aren’t always improvements for those caught within the system, although they’re ‘reforms.’”
Reconstruction
“In the Ogeechee Insurrection of 1868–9, when hundreds of Black rice farmers in the Ogeechee Neck of GA, fed up with stalled negotiations with the bosses, armed themselves, rose up, kicked the owners and overseers off the farms, and occupied them, forming an autonomous commune.”
“Few are happy to talk about the extent to which the great white supremacist capitalists of the post-Reconstruction South also came from the North. We can’t forget that after the plantation class disappeared almost entirely, it wasn’t replaced by entrepreneurial S. yeomen. Instead, N. industrialists and bankers, many of whom saw an opportunity in the collapsed region, moved into the S. in the years following the Civil War. The sharecropping, convict leasing, and segregation that so resembled re-enslavement were carried out on behalf of the Northerners as much as for S. white supremacists.”
“In the ‘compromise of 1877,’ Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, troops that had been the guarantors of Reconstruction, in exchange for the Democrats conceding the presidential race.”
The Media
“In Turkey in July 2016, a failed coup against president Recep Tayyip Erdog an ended with him calling calling people into the streets and into Taksim Square to ‘protect democracy’ (i.e. his regime), despite the fact that he had been brutally prosecuting, imprisoning, and murdering people involved in the democratic uprisings of 2013 against him that were first centered in Taksim. Indeed, Erdog an used the coup attempt to push through the redevelopment of Taksim that had sparked the 2013 uprising in the first place.”
“The dominant media is a tool of white supremacy and steadfast ally of the police. It repeats the lines the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically, even when the police story changes upward of 9 times, as it did in the murders of Mike Brown, Tyrese West, and Sandra Bland. The media uses phrases like ‘officer-involved shooting’ and switches to passive voice when a white vigilante or police officer shoots a Black person (‘shots were fired’). Journalists claim that ‘you have to hear both sides’ in order to privilege the obfuscating reports of the state over the clear voices and testimony of an entire community, members of which witnessed the police murder a teenager in cold blood.”
“Quite frankly, many lynchings and white riots were directly instigated, encouraged, and even produced by the media, which was, after all, owned by the men who most benefited from the white supremacist power structure. The main form of media in the period was the local paper, and these papers weren’t bastions of democratic truth nor some noble 4th estate of society any more than Fox News or MSNBC are today. Owned and operated by the richest and most ‘respectable’ men in their communities, these newspapers directly incited lynchings, riots, and racial violence. The infamous Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was instigated by front-page headlines that read TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT.
The Atlanta riot of 1906 was similarly prompted by a series of misleading and outright false headlines about Black men assaulting white women. A month before the riot, a man had been lynched in an ATL suburb for an alleged sexual attack, and violent tension had been building all summer. But it didn’t boil over into a massacre until the media got involved. On Sept 22, the Atlanta Evening News released three extra editions, separated by one another by only an hour, with headlines proclaiming an attempted assault, then a ‘second’ and ‘third’ assault,’”
“The Wilmington, NC, riot of 1898, a coup d’etat in which 2 days of rioting brought down a mixed-race Republican government, installed a white Dem. one in its place, killed dozens, and drove thousands of Black residents permanently out of Wilmington, was largely made possible and given ideological force by the media. Historians recognize the Wilmington coup as a key moment in consolidating post-Reconstruction white supremacy, because it saw a white mob overturn a legitimate election result, drive Black officials out of office, disenfranchise all Black voters, and establish an officially white supremacist local government. The coup was repoted nationally, and the fact that the federal government witnessed these events and did nothing to stop or overturn them demonstrated to the entire country that white violence and supremacy–not law or elections–formed the real basis of American governance.
White Dem. newspapers unrelentingly slandering Black public officials in their editorials laid the groundwork for the coup in the months leading up to the 1898 elections.”
“The following year, the April 1899 lynching of Samuel Hose ‘was suggested, encouraged, and made possible by the daily press of ATL.’ Hose had killed his white boss in self-defense. When Hose had the audacity to ask for months of owed back wages to help pay for his grievously ill mother’s medical care, his boss, rather than draw out his wallet, drew his gun and told Hose he was going to kill him. Hose, who’d been chopping wood, threw his ax as his boss, killing him, and fled. The newspapers reported it as a cold-blooded, unprovoked, premeditated murder.
Every day for a week, the Atlanta Constitution published double-columned headlines about Hose ‘predicting’ that he would be captured and lynched, in particular focusing on the detail that he would be burned to death. Pretending that it was merely reflecting and reporting on the mood of the public, day after day the paper beat the drum for his immolation, making it a near certainty. When Hose was finally captured, 2k white people gathered and burned him alive. The next day, the paper published a gruesomely detailed blow-by-blow account of the lynching.”
“Off-duty officers joined white mobs, while on-duty police gladly gave prisoners up to white mobs, though they’d later claim, with unquestioning support from the media, that they were outnumbered and unable to do anything. Sometimes this ruse was quite elaborate: police would secretly inform Klansmen that they’d be transporting their prisoners, making it appear that the mobs had intercepted and overwhelmed them, allowing them to look ‘innocent’ and separate from the lynchings in official accounts. Journalists and newspaper owners, themselves often members of lynch mobs, would then dutifully repeat these stories of the noble police being overpowered, thus clearing the state of responsibility for vigilante violence and masking the deep interconnections of the vigilantes, the media, and the police.”
“The police give the media ‘access,’ special treatment in the street, direct reports, and dramatic stories that sell papers. The media is a necessary part of the state apparatus in a liberal democracy, and though it might very occasionally ‘speak truth to power,’ it usually just speaks power’s truth.”
“Ida B. Wells was a journalist-crusader against lynching who focused national and international attention on the facts of white terrorism and was one of the most prominent writers, thinkers, and activists of her day. She confounded the NAACP and spent her later life campaigning for women’s suffrage.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that her antilynching activism was largely liberal, pointed outward from the Black community toward ‘raising awareness’ among powerful white people or bringing legal action from the federal government. But that wasn’t so. Her popularity and reach arose not only because she brought attention to and preserved empirical evidence on the horrors of lynching but also because she proposed and argued vociferously for more immediate solutions to lynch law: she urged Black people in the South to migrate north, boycott white businesses, and arm themselves and get organized on the basis of self-defense.”
Post-WWI
“US patriotism is always deadly to nonwhite people the world over. But, as 5 million US soldiers demobilized at the end of WWI, white vigilante violence made an even more dramatic upsurge. This spike in violence reflects an attempt to reconstitute cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist capitalism in the face of numerous threats to its dominance empowered and made visible during the war.
During the 18 months of US mobilization, women had come to play a major role in economic life and society in the absence of men, doing men’s labor and learning ‘male’ trades–by the end of the war, women made up 20% of the industrial workforce, with much higher numbers in healthcare and agriculture.”
“War production brought employment almost up to 100%, which meant bosses couldn’t easily find replacements for strikers, and so labor action became more effective. And increased war production meant hundreds of thousands of Black migrants from the S. found work in N. industrial centers and entered industries once dominated by white labor. The Great Migration had one of its peak years in 1916. Black veterans, trained in combat, who’d experienced greater freedom and power overseas, were radicalized in large numbers after serving and gaining respect abroad in a war they were ostensibly fighting for democracy, only to return to a racist and oppressive society.
A generation of young white men, both empowered and traumatized by their experience of war, felt enraged to return to an Amer. society struggling against their power on all fronts. Studies show that incidence of domestic violence increases appreciably after sports matches and increase much more dramatically among the fans whose team has won the game. Victory is an emboldening experience for violent patriarchs–part of why both war and victory are such highly valued principles in fascist movements. In the same way, victory in WWI may well have further inflamed the white men of America in their repressive activity.
The government saw the threats to the system clearly and initiated what would eventually be known as the First Red Scare, which saw an upsurge in both government repression and collective vigilante violence against anarchists, communists, and labor organizers.
Simultaneously, the white people of America engaged in the biggest wave of anti-Black collective punishments and riots in Amer. history. White veterans’ groups and patriotic associations most frequently formed the core of the angry white mobs that participated in this violence.”
The Tulsa Riot
“Sometimes a partial history of this event is deployed to argue that white people rioted predominantly because of that Black wealth. This segues into the argument that such success–Black achievement of the Amer. dream–should be the main goal for the Black community. Such analyses tend to exaggerate the actual economic power Greenwood represented and downplay the role of Black self-defense in the riot.
If the riot in Tulsa saw the tragic destruction of a symbol and community of Black power, why did many Black Tulsans who lived through it look back on it with pride? And if it was an emboldening victory for white supremacy, why, after the riot, was there never another lynching in Tulsa County, when lynchings continued for years in the surrounding counties?
The Tulsa riot erupted after a white lynch mob was thwarted in its murderous purpose. In this instance, the mob’s target was Dick Rowland, a shoeshine falsely accused of attempting to rape a white elevator operator, which he allegedly did in her elevator, in a public building, during business hours. The mob turned riotous when armed residents of Tulsa, led by members of the African Blood Brotherhood intercepted and stopped the attempted lynching.”
“When, the day after Rowland’s arrest, his lynching was announced and planned in the local paper (the headline read TO LYNCH NEGRO TONIGHT), the ABB pledged to resist the lynching and organizers spread throughout Greenwood, urging residents to gather their arms and head to the jail to protect Rowland.
At the jail that evening, some 2k white people dutifully gathered into a lynch mob. After 2 rounds of negotiations in which the sheriff refused to hand over Rowland, the mob prepped to storm the jail by force. Some ~100 Black men, some of them ABB organizers, arrived at the jail with rifles, pistols, and shotguns and offered the sheriff assistance in protecting Rowland. As the groups faced off in front of the jail, someone–it’s not known on which side–fired a shot, and a shootout began. The initial wave of gunfire lasted only a few moments, but when the dust settled 10 white mob members lay dead on the street. The Black group, who’d lost 2 of their number in the skirmish, retreated to Greenwood. Rowland had been successfully defended and would survive the night in jail.
From there a rolling gun battle unfolded across Tulsa deep into the night, with white rioters trying to enter Greenwood but being repulsed by Black snipers at the railroad track bordering the neighborhood. The white rioters kept pushing, however, and on the morning of June 1, their attack intensified as they deployed military machine guns and some even flew decommissioned WWI biplanes over Greenwood, sniping and dropping firebombs.”
“Reports about the number of dead vary, with some estimates claiming 75 dead, while others put the number nearer 300. All accounts suggest that some significant number–a third to half of those killed, in the case of the lower total estimates, were white rioters. Many in Tulsa believed the true casualty numbers were covered up because they would’ve become a source of shame for the white community. It’s certainly true that the legacy of the Tulsa riot favors Black power: ‘during the 50s and 60s black civil rights leaders used the threat of ‘bringing up’ the riot as leverage in negotiations with white leaders’ and, though white papers in Tulsa never mentioned the riot thereafter, Black papers spoke of it openly and often.
The vast property destruction in Greenwood, however, proved to be a massive loss for the white rioters as well, because most of the Black residents and business owners rented their properties: some ⅔ of the real value destroyed in the riot belonged to white folks. In the aftermath, Greenwood was rebuilt and flourished again. The white community lived in fear of another riot, which it remembered with shame and humiliation. Meanwhile, ‘for many Black Tulsans, the riot, and particularly the rebuilding of their community, is an issue of pride.’”
“After the riot, there wasn’t another lynching in Tulsa County for 7 decades; only in the current era of police lynching has public white supremacist murder returned to Tulsa, and Greenwood was only truly destroyed by a recent wave of gentrification.”
“There are thus 2 versions of the events in Tulsa: one that tells of a white town destroying the Black American Dream, and another that recognizes Black armed organizers saving a man from lynching and fighting back against a murderous white lynch mob. The former narrative emphasizes the Black community as eternally suffering peaceful victims of white supremacist violence; the other, as an oppressed people organizing and defending themselves, fighting for their lives. It’s no coincidence that the narrative of total innocence and victimhood also foregrounds peaceful economic advancement–Black Wall Street–as the real form and goal of racial justice.
But this fantasy comes up against the fact that, under the white supremacist imaginary, Black people are never and can never be innocent.”
Unions and Movements
“Instead of the orderly formation of dues-paying union members and party cadre, we see how often leftists ‘organize’ working-class folks already taking their lives and their power into their own hands. We also see how often those unions and parties, once established, immediately begin to repress the ‘unproductive’ ‘anti-social’ activity that gave birth to them, and in the process often cripple the power of the people they claim to fight for.
By tracing looting and rioting through the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, therefore, we arrive at a necessarily harsh critique of unionism and reformism in America. Again and again, the movements of workers and unemployed persons, immigrants, and internal migrants were betrayed by trade unions and party orgs. These betrayals were made more bitter by the fact that the workers themselves demanded, fought for, and built these orgs and unions to help them usher in a better world.”
“To tell the stories of unions, of ‘orgs’ as the story of worker resistance, therefore, is to leave out the movements, tactics, and goals of millions of working people, often the most radical, oppressed, and marginalized of them.”
“If the presence of these industrial goods to loot was new, looting as a tactic was already well established in its classical form: the bread riot. This kind of riot, aimed at stealing the food the people needed, lowering the price of food in the market through direct action, or forcing official distribution or policy change, is an ancient practice. Bread riots occurred repeatedly in ancient Rome. They usually worked by rioters attacking the officials who controlled food policy–during the Roman republic these were senators and various other wealthy elites, but later crowds jeered and harassed emperors and other imperial officials–rather than by looting, though the houses of Roman merchants and landlords were occasionally ransacked in these movements.”
“Unable to afford the price of food, which increased exponentially both from the terrible inflation of the Confederate dollar and the massive supply problems facing both army and civilian organization, thousands of S. women rose up and looted the stores of Richmond, ATL, Salisbury, and many smaller cities and towns. Groups of men formed to watch the action, sometimes egging the women on, but rarely joining in.”
The Great Unrest
“The Great Unrest began on July 16, 1877, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) cut wages by 10%, the second such wage cut in 8 months. As workers gathered in frustration in the Martinsburg, WV, railyard, the crew of a cattle train struck, abandoning their train and refusing to move it until the pay cut was rescinded. Traffic on the line was stopped, and other workers refused to replace them.
The next day the state militia arrived and, filling the cattle train with armed men, tried again to drive it through the yard. A workman named William Vandergriff ran up to derail the train at a switch, and when the militia pilot jumped down to oppose him, Vandergriff shot the scab. Vandergriff was in turn shot and fatally wounded. But the train crew fled, and another couldn’t be gathered. With news of this victory, striking spread across WV, and across the entire B&O.
Freight traffic was completely stopped, ‘while the workers continued to run passenger and mail cars with no interference.’ More than that, sympathetic workers from other industries went out in support of the strikers, and talk of a general strike began to spread through the state. Desperate, the WV governor and the B&O president begged Pres. Hayes for federal troops to suppress what they were calling an ‘insurrection.’
Hayes obliged, but, though the 300 heavily armed soldiers he sent managed to finally get trains out of the Martinsburg yard on July 19, 4 days into the insurrection, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Because in town after town crowds of railroad men, unemployed workers, sympathy strikers, and huge groups of women derailed, attacked, and otherwise sabotaged the scab trains. Where trains from Martinsburg went, strikers and riots followed, and soon all of neighboring MD’s railroads and much of its industry were also on strike.
One of the most common tactics used in this insurrection was to overturn, loot, and then burn the freight cars. This has 3 immediately powerful effects for the movement: it blocked the lines and the yards, making them impassable for scab trains; gathered goods and food to sustain strikers; and cut into the railroad’s bottom line This tactic reappeared in the US in Sept 2016, when Charlotte protesters fighting for justice for Keith Lamont Scott overturned and looted semis, turning some of the good into burning barricades that blocked the interstate.”
“How did strikes, rioting, and looting spread so widely and so quickly? After all, barely any of these workers were organized into a national union. In fact, as historian Jeremy Brecher argues, the Great Unrest occurred in the wake of unionism’s repeated failures to win change. The Panic of 1873, one of the most severe depressions in Amer. history, saw unemployment skyrocket. As ever, capitalists used the downturn as grounds to cut wages and enforce speedups. But the orgs that existed, the various ‘Brotherhoods’ (of firemen, engineers, and conductors) had been bought off, out-politicked, or frightened out of striking. They agreed, against the rank and file’s wishes, to speedups and pay cuts. Their membership plummeted and many of the unions ceased to exist except on paper.
In the wake of their failure, a clandestine insurrectory org formed, the Trainsmen’s Union, and spread quickly across the country. But the Trainsmen’s Union was just as quickly infiltrated by feds, police, and Pinkerton thugs–the infamous private police that spied on and sabotaged the labor movement and that was often called in to violently break strikes–such that in the buildup to any actions mass firings of radicals and organizers would lead to confusion and disunity within the movement. Soon the TU collapsed as well. Union membership was at a decades-long low when things kicked off in Martinsburg. Furthermore, for one of the last times in Amer. labor history, forming or protecting a union would not be a major demand of the rioters.
The rioters of 1877 had a different political precedent and goal in mind: the Paris Commune of 1871. As Neil Painter shows, the Commune was a common point of reference for rioters, and their critics, across the country. US workers fought to take control of their daily lives, their local and workplace governance in much the same way that the Communards had for 71 glorious days in 1871. And conservatives and liberals alike feared that French revolt and class war had finally crossed the Atlantic.
In St. Louis, during one week, a strike that started against wage cuts in the railyards galvanized and eventually completely shut down the city. Political power moved into the hands of a commune made up of…whoever showed up. It was run, like the Paris Commune, on genuinely radical antihierachical principles. ‘Nobody ever knew who that exec committee really was; it seems to have been a rather loose body composed of whomsoever charged to come in and take part in its deliberations.’ This ‘disorganized’ assembly managed commerce in the city, halted all railroad traffic, and requisitioned food for strikers–whose numbers encompassed more than a dozen professions outside of the rails, constituting an almost total general strike. But after 8 days, 3k federal troops and 5k deputized police officers descended on the city, killed more than 2 dozen people, and shut down the commune.”
“This lack of official organization and union leadership also meant that Black workers were widely involved in the Great Upheaval. In the border states, Black and white workers banded together to shut down roads and coal mines. A Black worker made one of the crucial speeches opening the St. Louis General Strike with a demand to white laborers to support Black steamboat and levee workers. ‘Will you stand behind us regardless of color?!’ Black workers ran the movements in the South, leading particularly massive strikes in Galveston and Marshall, TX. Black sewer workers in Louisville marched through the sewers and then the city, beginning a 3-day-long general strike that brought all industry in Louisville to a halt.”
“The rioting in the industrial city in W. PA followed a couple days of striking on the railroad. Sent in to repress the strike, local national guardsmen instead fraternized with strikers, and police were unable to break the strike, which left thousands of full boxcars sitting idle in the Pittsburgh yards. The railroads, panicked by the thought of all that property and profit languishing, brought in national guardsmen from Philly, knowing they wouldn’t hesitate to fire on the working men. These outside agitators promptly did their bosses’ bidding, massacring 20 strikers. They even brought a Gatling gun to mow down rioters.
But the massacre backfired. Though the company technically retook the yards, no one, not even those workers who hadn’t originally gone on strike, would drive trains captured in such blood. The entire Pittsburgh guard switched allegiance to the side of the workers, giving over their weapons to the workers, and in response to the capture of the rail depot ‘the entire city mobilized.’ A massive crowd formed and attacked the yards, forcing the Philly National Guard to flee. Having driven away the guard, the crowd broke into and looted all of the freight cars left in the yard. Then they burned them, alongside all railroad property, letting the fire devour huge swathes of railroad and capitalist property, but organizing fire breaks to prevent the conflagration from spreading to nearby residential areas. This tactic of controlled arson would return in the major urban riots of the 60s and in LA in 1992.
By the time the various riots, strikes, and insurrections had been quelled by repression, over 100 lay dead, and millions of dollars in property had been looted and destroyed. In some cities and workplaces, demands were met; in many they weren’t.”
“It was in response to the property destruction, looting, armed rebellion, and general strikes of 1877 that almost every city in America built a huge armory to garrison weapons and guardsmen–buildings that remain to this day, massive movements to anticommunal politics and glaring symbols of the bosses’ power over daily life. And though these armories are now mostly decommissioned, when riots get too powerful for police to handle, it’s still the National Guard, armed to the teeth, that is called in to face down rebels.”
The Great Depression
“Organized crime syndicates of bootleggers in the 20s built their model and got ‘organized’ as part of labor ‘rackets’ that used violence–and ‘slugging,’ fire bombing, even assassination–to enforce control of a local employment space.
Though these hired criminals began as off-the-books employees of the union, as unions increasingly followed the AFL lead and shied away from collective action, striking, and industrial unionism, they lost all leverage beyond this professional violence. Unions came to rely on it more and more. Gangsters quickly realized they were the true political power: they were running labor in whole industries, even whole cities–with the unions paying them and at their mercy–and from that position of organization and power, they extended into ‘protection’ and other of their more infamous criminal activities.”
“When the bottom fell out, it fell very far. Within 12 months of the Black Tuesday crash of Oct. 1929, the official count of the unemployed went from around 500k to 8 million people (though these numbers themselves are probably low, because the unemployment count was one of the demands won by the movement, so unemployed persons weren’t reliably counted until after 1929). The unemployed in America faced a crisis exacerbated by an Amer. ideology that rejected and minimized social services, pushing most relief onto churches and other private charities; an utterly unprepared and fundamentally unsympathetic federal government; and a plutocratic gang of billionaire monopolists who uttered patriotic pieties and predictions of imminent economic recovery while laying off tens of thousands of workers. The people were, as ever, on their own.
One of the first things that occurred, spontaneously and across the country, was looting. Numerous contemporaneous accounts agree that mass looting was commonplace around the nation, but its extent will never be known. Mauritz Hallgren’s Seeds of Revolt (1933) describes the pattern in Detroit, in 1932, and explains why it’s so little remembered by history.
Windows of small retail shops were smashed at night and relieved of their goods. Children from the poorer districts were frequently observed snatching bundles from customers coming out of grocery stores. They ran off to barren homes with their booty or ate it themselves in out-of-the-way alleys. More frequently, grown men, usually in twos and threes, entered chain stores, ordered all the food they could possibly carry, and then walked quietly out without paying. Every newspaper in the city knew of this practice and knew it was spreading, but none mentioned it to print. The press excused itself on the ground that these occurrences weren’t a matter of public record. And the chain-store managers refused to report such incidents to the police lest the practice be encouraged by the resultant publicity.
In NY, ‘bands of 30 or 40 men regularly descended upon markets.’ The scope of this organized, spontaneous looting has largely, therefore, been lost to history. However, we must imagine that looting kept not a few people alive during these tragic years. And it wasn’t only grocery stores. ‘In a few cities…there were spontaneous raids on restaurants.’ This looting wasn’t always done in small groups.”
“The unemployed movement took shape in a recognizably national form around the Mar 6, 1930, ‘International Employment Day’ demonstrations. These shocked even their Communist Party organizers in their size and ferocity, with the CP claiming 1.25 million people protested across the country on the 6th. Immediate, mass, violent repression sprang up: hundreds of policemen charged into the crowd, viciously beating dozens and shattering the demonstrations in NYC’s Union Square.
But the repression didn’t break the back of the movement. Huge marches and riots of unemployed workers became a regular occurrence across the country. They demanded work, relief, and bread; just as often, they took it. ‘In March, 1,100 men waiting on a Salvation Army bread line in NYC mobbed 2 trucks delivering baked goods to a nearby hotel.’ Although riots and marches like these were more common in the large cities of the North where workers were concentrated, they weren’t limited to them. ‘In Henryetta, OK, 300 jobless marched on storekeepers to demand food, insisting they were not begging and threatening to use force if necessary.’”
Rent Riots
“This spread to the question of housing, as rent and anti-eviction riots became one of the most common forms of resistance to Depression conditions. Groups of unemployed people, usually Black activists, often Communists, formed anti-eviction flying squadrons. These squadrons, sometimes called ‘black bugs,’ would march through poor neighborhoods gathering crowds, then arrive at the eviction, often thousands strong, replace furniture inside the house and forcibly keep the marshal from carrying out the eviction. ‘Sometimes the flying squadron arrived before the police, and directed the family and bystanders to sit on the furniture to prevent its removal. An old spiritual ‘I shall not be moved’ became the theme song of resistance.
This movement was widespread, and wildly successful. The unemployed movement stopped or reversed literally ⅓ of the evictions in NY–77k households! — during the early 30s. When a rent riot in Chicago ended with 3 Black people killed by police, the fierce, combative funeral march the following day saw unified crowds of Black and white protesters, which terrified the city government. ‘If it had been an out-and-out race riot it would’ve been understandable, but here was something new: Negroes and whites together rioting against the forces of law and order.’ Chicago City Hall declared a moratorium on evictions. By 1931, the movement had more or less ceased evictions in Detroit as well.
These tactics soon broadened to demanding relief and welfare, as thousands of poor and unemployed people would descend on city halls and state houses, relief agencies, charities, and anywhere else demands could be leveraged. Often, these marchers then stationed themselves inside the offices, refusing to leave until relief was given and further plans made. They won radical expansions of relief, and, where they couldn’t, they often just looted what they needed.”
WWII
“By centering looting, and seeing its frequent sidelining, rejection, or even repression by the organizers, historians, and bureaucrats of the labor movement, I hope we can begin to shake loose certain conceptions of what revolutionary activity can and must look like to succeed.
Meeting the needs and desires of the proleterian, the worker, the unemployed, and the downtrodden through direct struggle isn’t a mistake or a deviation from the real fight. It’s not a failure that must be corrected by a militant, nor an opportunity to be seized by an organizer. It’s the thing itself, the new world opening up, however, briefly, in all its chaotic frenzy. It’s uncontrollable, and as long as those who fight for freedom fear that uncontrollability, as long as they measure their success by their ability to direct, to dictate, to marshal, and to focus, they will never be able to achieve the liberation they seek. They must allow the real movement to change them, or they can only live to see themselves become its enemy.”
“As one woman who worked in a factory during the war sardonically put it, ‘Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.’”
“As Japanese citizens were shipped off to FDR’s concentration camps, the vast majority of Black soldiers were shipped around the world as laborers, not combatants. Something like 90% of the Black men who went through basic training spent their service in work crews behind the lines, often doing hard, dirty work under miserable labor conditions, sometimes under white army officers/overseers pulled straight out of the sharecropping south. The Black regiments that did face battle, meanwhile, were deployed into continuous action on the front lines for much longer stretches than white regiments, which also received more rest and lived in better conditions in camp.”
“The final transformation of major labor unions into predominantly reactionary orgs was achieved in the period. Liberals and right-wingers within unions, insisting on their patriotism, use the Red Scare to eliminate their political opponents on the left, while anticommunist unions used the scare to smash radical ones and take over their shops and industries. The CIO, little more than a decade removed from its heroic sit-down strikes, led the way, publicly and patriotically declaring the barring of Communists and the purging of leftists. The fact that these radicals and their unions were often the strongest and most dedicated organizers meant the labor movement would never again achieve the strength it had before the scare.”
The Civil Rights Movement
“At a mass meeting–a boisterous, joyful meeting that featured the inspiring oratory of a young preacher recently moved to Montgomery, MLK, Jr. — the crowd unanimously voted to extend the boycott indefinitely.
The boycott lasted an entire year. Demonstrating the possibilities of grassroots organization in practice, the people of Montgomery and the Montgomery Improvement Association maintained the boycott by organizing and dispatching caravans of care that brought 30k working people to and from their jobs in white homes and businesses in downtown Montgomery every day. As Parks describes it, ‘Quite a sophisticated system was developed. There were 20 private cars and 14 station wagons. There were 32 pickups and transfer sites, and scheduled service from 5:30am to 12:30am.’ It was an incredible achievement: the entire community organized and mobilized for a full year, overcoming police harassment and waves of arrest, intimidation, and bargaining.”
“Though incredibly brave, Parks wasn’t the first person to be arrested standing up to bus segregation in Montgomery. 9 months previously, Claudette Colvin had been arrested on the same charge for the same action. But Black organizers had decided that Colvin wouldn’t be their test case: Colvin was 15, impoverished, and pregnant out of wedlock from an affair with a married man. She was described as ‘feisty’ and ‘mouthy.’ Her father had been in prison. She didn’t have the dignified, middle-class life or manners of Parks. Colvin’s resistance, they reasoned, would’ve taken a backseat to a trial of her character.”
“Parks herself had been organizing for more than a decade already when she sat down on that bus. Though she was a proponent of organized nonviolent protest, she also believed in and practiced armed self-defense. Parks was a supporter of Robert Williams and would later call Malcolm X her personal hero. She spent her entire life a militant activist against segregation, sexual violence, and the justice system; on a few occasions she resisted white racists with threats of violence.”
“As James Baldwin noted, many Black people at the time [of Brown v. Board] understood that ‘this immense concession would [never] have been made if it hadn’t been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Throughout the era, the importance of America’s global image in securing the allegiance of newly postcolonial African nations was paramount in national civil rights legislation, while links with anticolonial struggles in Africa inspired Black activists to greater and greater militancy.
Brown v. Board applied no mode of enforcement, no road map for integration. Nevertheless, it was a landmark decision. It provided a legal basis for change, allowing activists to bring lawsuits that resulted in court decisions outlawing local school segregation. But it would’ve remained a mere political gesture were it not for movements enforcing its decision.”
“The struggle in Monroe had begun in earnest in summer 1957 when a Black boy drowned in a swimming hole outside of town. Monroe had a swimming pool, but it was whites-only, and so Black children beat the summer heat in unsupervised and often dangerous swimming holes in the countryside. As a result, drownings were a regular occurrence: pool segregation was lethal. So Robert Williams and local chapter VP Albert Perry gathered a group of young folks and went to ‘stand-in’ at the pool.”
“Williams hadn’t merely revived the Monroe NAACP, he had also chartered an NRA chapter. Many Black folks in Monroe who didn’t already have guns acquired some, and men and women learned to shoot straighter as members of a gun club Williams organized.
These guns reflected the fact that Monroe was also one of the main centers of KKK activity in NC. As the summer went on, white crowds outside the pool and Klan night riders intensified their attacks. Rumor spread that the KKK was going to attack Perry’s home. Activists reinforced his house with sandbags and stationed an armed guard there. The rumors were right: one night, the Klan showed up to shoot up the place, but the Monroe movement was prepared and the house was full of activists, who fired back. Surprised, the Klan fled. It appears that the defenders killed a Klansman in the fight, but the white folks covered it up so as not to let the news get out too widely that armed Black people had defeated the Klan.
This gunfight largely ended white violence in Monroe, both against demonstrators and from night riders. In Williams’ analysis, white fascists are cowards: believing their lives to be more valuable than those of whom they oppress, they’re rarely willing to risk death for their goals. Though the Klan continued to occasionally harass and threaten Williams and other leaders, it never regained the upper hand. As Williams would write 5 years later, ‘Our sit-ins proved that self-defense and nonviolence could be successfully combined. There was less violence in the Monroe sit-ins than in any other sit-ins in the South. In other communities there were Negroes who had their skulls fractured, but not a single demonstrator was even spat upon during our sit-ins. We had less violence because we’d shown the willingness and readiness to fight and defend ourselves.
When, in 1959, Williams declared it was time to ‘meet violence with violence,’ he wasn’t espousing a macho creed; he was reflecting the learned wisdom of the Monroe movement. And, as his wife remarked that same year, ‘Women are pushing harder than the men…That is where our drive is coming from.’ In one of the first major moments in the campaign, before even the assault on his hosue, Perry had been arrested and was in danger of being lynched, so a group of women had gathered rifles and stormed the jail, freeing him.
Monroe’s vision of an armed, self-defensive civil rights movement–though it was officially opposed by the NAACP, CORE< and the SCLC (centered around MLK and other charismatic S. preachers) — had supporters all across the country, including SCLC-aligned Rosa Parks and Ella Baker. It would go on to be the inspiration for many movements across the South, culminating most visibly in the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group that formed in 1964 to provide armed escorts to marches in LA and MI.”
“As many recent historical studies have demonstrated, although the major orgs — SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC — all declared themselves officially nonviolent, guns kept their activists safe in the South while they carried out agitation, organization, and movement. Akinyele Umoja argues that Robert Williams was an exception because he advocated armed tactics publicly, not because he used those tactics — most of the movements and activists in the S. had recourse to guns during their struggle. As SNCC member Charles Cobb wrote, ‘Willingness to engage in armed self-defense played an important role in the S. Freedom movement, for without it, terrorists would’ve killed far more people in the movement.’ Rather than the stark distinction polemically laid out by Malcolm X, that it was either the ballet or the bullet, Kwame Jeffries writes that for most in the Black Freedom movement, ‘the relationship between ballots and bullets was both/and.’
The advocates of nonviolence were, of course, well aware of this dynamic. Charles Cobb writes, ‘For most activists…nonviolence was simply a useful tactic, one that didn’t preclude self-defense whenever it was considered necessary and possible. Even King…acknowledged the legitimacy of self-defense and sometimes blurred the line between nonviolence and self-defense. It wasn’t just MLK. As Lance Hill records, ‘James Lawson, the movement’s foremost spokesperson for Gandhian nonviolence, admitted later that there ‘never has been an acceptance of the nonviolent approach’ in the South and the idea that blacks had initially accepted nonviolence and then became disillusioned was ‘nonsense.’’”
“The black youth who came in to dominate the campaign’s street action were ‘the children of Malcolm X’ and their escalation to ‘a burning, car-smashing, police-battling response’ marked Birmingham as ‘the first of the period’s urban rebellions.’
Rioters took over and held the downtown for days, smashing storefronts and successfully beating back the police. This rioting not only defined the campaign but also proved crucial to its historical effects and relevance. It was this riot and the fear of it spreading to other cities — combined with international relations problems caused by images of Birmingham police violence — that forced Kennedy into giving his famous speech calling for civil rights legislation and compelled his administration to draft what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The rioting wouldn’t have happened without the organizing, marches, and rallies of the movement, and that effort wouldn’t have won without the rioting.
But in the wake of Birmingham, national civil rights leaders downplayed the violence. The official text of the moment became MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, while the images that broke through the national consciousness are dogs snapping and firehoses blasting Black children — images of Black victimization — not images of those children getting up and throwing rocks at police.”
“But what is nonviolent resistance? It seems obvious, but, in fact, nonviolent resistance is an incredibly nebulous and murky concept. In practice, it can mean almost anything; Birmingham is claimed as a nonviolent success — the rioting is unmentioned or written off as unimportant or as things ‘getting out of hand’ — whereas breaking a window on a march today, although no one is hurt, is almost always called violence.
The 2011 Egypt revolution is still sometimes described as a nonviolent victory, despite the vast arson of police and government buildings; massive rioting in Suez, Alexandria, and Cairo; widespread looting; and the killing of over a dozen police officers. Meanwhile, the Movement for Black Lives, which, despite including looting and arson, has killed no one, is roundly condemned as too violent. Nonviolent ideologues tend to claim militant movements as evidence of their philosophy’s power if the movements happen far away — geographically or historically — but they attack any and all militancy that occurs closer to home.
This open-ended definition provides for much of non-violence’s authoritarian character. Gandhi, the racist, misogynist founder of modern nonviolent philosophy, firmly kept for himself the power to determine what was violent in the Indian independence movement. On 2 occasions he called off strikes by his followers by calling them ‘violent’ — forcing the movement into months of introspection, self-critique, and reorganization — because friends of his owned the factories being struck against. His anti-Blackness is now widely known: as an advocate for Indians in S. Africa, he continually expressed his hatred and disdain for Black Africans, worrying that European colonizers were degrading Indians to ‘their level.’ He also believed menstruation was a sign of corruption, campaigned against contraception, believed fathers were right to honor-kill assaulted daughters, and made young female followers sleep naked in bed with him to prove his purity. All of these positions are apparently in accordance with nonviolence.”
“I don’t believe that my refusal to attack property, fight physically, or make a ruckus helps us toward radical change: that refusal doesn’t lessen the degree to which I benefit from systems of domination. It may assuage my personal aversion to violence, but history shows that it ultimately limits my ability to get free. By not lighting fires at a protest, by not defending myself from police attack, I’m not successfully avoiding violence. I believe it demonstrates a much deeper complicity with the carceral system when I could prevent it, than it is to shove a cop in order to let that person get away.
And though I don’t believe that we can cleanly separate means from ends, I also think violence is much too broad and imprecise an idea to be a metric of tactics in and of itself. There is, in my opinion, no legitimate moral or political equivalence that can be made between the police murdering Freddie Gray and protesters breaking a cop car’s windows in response, and yet both can be called ‘violence.’”
“Pauli Murray sums up the anger well. ‘It was bitterly humiliating for the Negro Women on August 28, to see themselves accorded little more than token recognition in the historic March on Washington. Not a single woman was invited to make one of the major speeches or to be part of the delegation of leaders who went to the White House. The omission was deliberate.’
The patriarchal erasure of these women from the struggle’s most historic moment is of a piece with the anti-militancy of the affair, which at the last minute refused SNCC’s John Lewis his speaking role until he removed language promising revolution and criticizing JFK’s civil rights bill. Patriarchy and anti-militancy are part of the same political paradigm.
These days, however, those who violate absolute nonviolence and act militantly are often accused of being macho, immature, middle class, and in league with the police. The fact is, the nonviolent wing of the movement was most pronounced in its misogyny, most middle class in its leadership, and most complicit with the state. Whereas the overwhelming majority of famous figures in the pantheon of the Black Freedom movement are men, it’s Black Power, and in particular the Black Panther Party (BPP), that is singled out for accusations of misogyny and machismo.
But the idea that the BPP was particularly misogynistic is simply not true. At its height, 2/3 of the BPP membership were women. The vast majority of BPP activities, a wide range of ‘medical, housing, clothing, free breakfast, and education programs,’ were run and organized by women. It was this work, in support of the armed self-defense, that J. Edgar Hoover thought made the BPP particularly dangerous, because with these programs the Panthers could win mass appeal and receive support from many sectors of society. As Panther Frankeye Adams said, ‘Women ran the BPP pretty much. I don’t know how it got to be a male’s party or thought of as being a male’s party.’ BPP rallies featured women standing shoulder to shoulder with men wearing the same uniforms. It was, furthermore, the only major org of the period to be publicly led by a woman: Elaine Brown chaired the BPP from 1974–7, and it was one of the only orgs to officially take a position on women’s lib.”
“Gloria Richardson, the respectable manager of a local pharmacy, was voted leader of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (a local branch of the SNCC), the org at the center of the Cambridge movement.
The Cambridge movement started with sit-ins against business segregation, but its demands always included economic justice as well, in particular, economic justice related to poor housing and hiring opportunities. The movement was incredibly active. At its height from 1962–4, Cambridge activists ‘regularly sat-in at movie theaters, bowling alleys, restaurants, and other public places; marched in the streets of Cambridge; picketed downtown businesses; wrote letters to newspaper editors; and occasionally responded to violent attacks with violence of their own.’ But it was the last fact that made Richardson (and her movement) both famous and a kind of pariah.
Richardson and the Cambridge movement openly disavowed nonviolence, choosing to fight back against white racists who attacked their sit-ins, pickets, and marches. On June 12, 1963, protests turned into full-fledged rioting, with Molotov cocktails and shootouts between Black activists and white racists and police. The National Guard was sent in and would remain in Cambridge for months. Nevertheless, Richardson refused to disavow the riot or her participation in it. Nor should she have, because their tactics worked: the Cambridge movement was wildly successful, winning desegregation of transportation, schools, the library, the hospital, and other public accommodations within a year.”
Post-Civil Rights Movement
“These riots all came immediately after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which finally, legally declared the end of segregation. The Harlem Riots took place only 14 days afterward. As liberals declared victory, and an end to racial discrimination, Black people north and south called BS.”
“The passage of the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6, 1965, was widely described as a revolution in race relations, an epochal victory of the civil rights movement. 5 days later, on August 11, something that looked like an altogether different kind of revolution broke out.
That afternoon, 21-year-old Marquette Frye was pulled over by a CA Highway Patrol officer not far from his house in South LA. In the passenger seat was his younger brother Ronald, just home from the Air Force. As Marquette was interrogated outside the car, a crowd gathered, mostly watching and cracking jokes. Ronald ran home to get their mom, Rena, who arrived and began berating Marquette for drunk driving. A second cop car arrived. Those officers began to harass and yell at the Fryes. One officer bashed Marquette on the head with a baton. Rena jumped forward at him, and an officer slapped her, twisted her arm behind her back, and handcuffed her. Another beat Marquette and arrested him. The crowd jeered as all 3 were beaten, stuffed in the back of cop cars, and driven away. As news and rumors of the beatings spread, people poured into the streets in protest.
What followed was 6 days of ‘insurrection against all authority,’ as the local CBS radio station reported it. ‘If it had gone much further,’ the news report said,’ it would’ve become civil war.’ 950+ buildings were damaged, and 260 were totally destroyed. Looting and property destruction amounted to $40 million+ in damages — nearly $350 million adjusted for inflation.
But the destruction was hardly wanton or senseless. Almost no homes, schools, libraries, churches, or public buildings were even partially damaged. The use of arson was strategic and controlled. The majority of Black-owned businesses weren’t looted, nor were those businesses that were seen as dealing fairly with the community. Signs went up saying ‘Black-owned’ or ‘soul brother’ and the like, which would (usually) protect a shop from rioters. On the other hand, businesses that had traditionally exploited people, in particular pawn shops, check-cashing stores, and department stores that operated aggressively on credit, went up in flames. Credit records were usually destroyed before anything else took place. Brave rioters even made attacks on police stations; one was set alight.
The tactics were simple but effective. One common tactic saw a group of rioters, usually young men, drive up to a business, hop out, break the windows, and then drive away. Then cars of looters, a much more mixed group, split between M and W, young and old, would arrive and work to empty the store. The store would only be set alight once credit records had been destroyed and goods had been fully looted. Rioters usually remained nearby to make sure the building burned, attacking firemen with bricks and bottles if they tried to put out the flames before the fire had fully consumed the hated business.
Tactics reflected effective communication and mobility among the rebels. Rioters transmitted info over the radio waves, used payphones to spread intel, and listened in to police broadcasts to see where cops would be deployed. False reports were called in to send police scrambling, at which point areas they’d just ‘pacified’ could be retaken. In areas they didn’t entirely control, rioters focused on hit-and-run strikes, then dispersing quickly to reappear elsewhere. All of these tactics would be adapted and practiced, with local modifications, in other riots throughout the period.”
“A young Negro politely asked a woman her size, then stepped through a broken window of a dress shop to pick out 10 or 12 dresses. It was seeing people with their heads up and smiles on their faces.
Not some dour, grim thing, Watts, like most major riots, took on a carnivalesque, celebratory atmosphere. Participation was widespread. Gerald Horne quotes one report that said 1 in 7 residents of the affected area took part. The Kerner Commission, formed to study the 1967 riots, indicates that 1 in 5 participated. Not some tiny cabal of troublemakers, rioters were the community: those numbers mean nearly everyone had an active participant in either their family or friends.”
“Over the course of the riots, 3,438 people were arrested, the vast majority with no criminal record. 1,000+ people were injured, mostly civilians beaten or shot by police forces. And 34 people died, all but 3 of them civilians killed by LAPD or National Guard, while the remaining 3 included a firefighter killed by a falling wall and 2 police officers killed by friendly fire.
Most of those killed were shot for looting. But all the police and National Guard murders were ruled justifiable homicides. As Horne writes, reviewers ‘weren’t concerned about the propriety — legal and otherwise — of a shoot-to-kill procedure directed at unarmed suspects in the midst of committing what were arguably misdemeanors.’ Property is always valued over life, particularly Black life, in this society. But in the liberated, carnival atmosphere of the riot, the enjoyment of everything by everyone — looting — overturns this logic. The celebration of freedom and life overcomes all notions of law, property, and commodity. Police make looting a capital offense in a riot precisely to reassert their system of values. The media, police chain of command, judiciary, and local and federal governments all support them: this is the essence of their job. Killing for property is restoring order, because worship of property at the expense of Black death is what American order is.”
“The LAPD instituted constant helicopter flyovers, ‘eye-in-the-sky’ policing, which persists today, and introduced a comprehensive computerized control center for tactical domination of all of LA.
The most famous result of this is the SWAT — special weapons and tactics — team. These famous paramilitary police squads developed in LA in response to the riots. But they were introduced on the national stage when they first went into action in a 1969 standoff and raid of the offices of another major organizational legacy of the riots, the Black Panther Party.
The Watts rebellion helped launch Black nationalism and more militant revolutionary Black politics into the mainstream. Polls showed that after Watts, ‘civil rights’ replaced Vietnam as the #1 political concern of Americans.”
“MLK grew increasingly radical and pessimistic about reform. He began believing that Black people were ‘integrating into a burning house’ and that a more fundamental, socialist transformation of society was required. By 1967, he was arguing for radical, fundamental change, because ‘only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather than in man or faulty operations.’ As he’d put it in a 1967 speech: ‘It didn’t cost a penny to deal with lunch counters and integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote…It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to eradicate slums.’ The country wasn’t willing to do the latter, and, as more and more activists recognized the fact, they started proclaiming their allegiance to revolution.
Those in power were forced into giving concessions and they did so with money: federal funding to cities, towns, and social initiatives increased dramatically. Liberals hoped to mitigate the effects of rioters’ victory by buying off the rioters’ allegiance, producing government programs that would co-opt and contain activist energy, bringing their grassroots organizing effort into working for government programs, as their predecessors had done with the New Deal.”
“President Johnson’s attempts to tackle the racial and economic crises of the period, his War on Poverty and Great Society programs, were despised by white reactionaries, while in radicalized poor and Black communities they were recognized as insufficient and ineffective Band-Aids. In most cities, War on Poverty programs just increased funding to existing infrastructure, thus doubling down on education, youth, and job training programs that were already failing Black ghetto residents. Mired in bureaucratic problems, based in an analysis that saw both unrest and racial discrimination as crime — which is to say, as problems caused by individuals — Johnson’s programs couldn’t offer the fundamental transformation and empowerment the movement pointed toward. And anyway, the cost of the War on Poverty paled in comparison to the cost of the war on the impoverished people of Vietnam.”
“Less than 9 months after the Detroit riots, MLK was assassinated in Memphis, on April 4, 1968. Memphis rose up in rebellion. Within a week, riots had spread to 125 cities, where massive rioting was met with equally massive deployments of the US Army and National Guard. The insurrection in DC got within 2 blocks of the White House, ‘and machine guns were mounted on the Capital balcony and the White House lawn. 46 people were killed across the country, 2,500 were injured, and it took 70,000 federal troops to restore order.”
“A massive power failure on the brutally hot night of July 13, 1977, instigated by lightning striking electric lines N. or the city, plunged NYC into darkness. People spilled into the streets to help one another, to party, and to loot, burn, and fight with police. Over 1,600 business were looted in the 24 hours of blackout, and 4,500 people were arrested — the largest mass arrest in NYC history.”
“Arson and looting were so dire in Bushwick that business owners refused to move back into the neighborhood for a decade after the blackout, but more than 30 neighborhoods in the city were affected. The most brazen acts of looting included teens driving 50 Pontiacs directly out of a showroom in the Bronx. The widespread looting of otherwise unaffordable turntables and mixing equipment is often cited as a crucial moment in the birth and growth of hip-hop and DJ culture.
During the looting, Black businesses were targeted just the same as white ones.”
“The 120 hours of rioting and looting that shook LA in 1992 seemed to inaugurate a new era of resistance. Whereas Miami had largely been fought along Black vs. white racial lines, the LA riots quickly became ethnically diverse. ‘Of the first 5,000 arrests 52% were poor Latinos, 10% whites, and only 38% blacks.’ The riots were an uprising of working-class Angelenos that were initiated by a clear instance of anti-Black oppression and violence.”
“In the aftermath, the LAPD immediately focused on breaking the gang truce. They attacked and broke up intergang unity rallies, shut down ‘truce BBQs’ going on all summer, and infiltrated deep into the various gangs, working to instigate conflict. Nevertheless, the truce held, and a grassroots-led movement of gang de-escalation spread across the country, one of the main material victories of the riots. This led to an immediate, dramatic drop-off in gang violence in LA: homicides fell 44% in the first 2 years of the truce. Police, of course, took credit for this drop, all the while working to undermine the peace. Though the police couldn’t dismantle the truce directly, they did in the intervening years manage to loosen and weaken gang organizational structure and discipline.
The police work romanticized in The Wire — studying the ins and outs of gang politics, personalities, and hierarchies in order to arrest lieutenants and crush leaders — is a fantasy version of the process of dis-organizing the gangs the police developed in LA after the riots and that spread to police departments across the country. 25 years later, most US gangs now are small, decentralized, highly localized groups of kids beefing over a few blocks, nothing like the massive, tightly organized, pseudo-paramilitary forces formed in the 70s and 80s.”
The 21st Century
“Constructing a narrative of lawless Katrina survivors justified the horrifying actions of police and white residents. Police murdered families fleeing New Orleans, most infamously killing 2 and seriously wounding 4 unarmed refugees on the Danziger Bridge and murdering Danny Brumfield in front of the convention center — crimes for which cops were actually prosecuted, although only a decade later. When 2 Black men went to a police outpost looking for an ambulance to take their friend Henry Glover, dying of a gunshot wound, to the hospital, police instead arrested and brutally beat the 2 men, left Glover to bleed to death in the back of the car, then drove the car to a levee and lit it on fire as as to not deal with the body.
These cases garnered a lot of media attention, and so prosecutors focused all their energy and resources on them. But similar crimes went pointedly uninvestigated. In white, middle-class Algiers Point, a militia formed ‘to protect the neighborhood from looters and criminals’ that in fact hunted Black refugees.”
“When street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire on Dec 17, 2010, in protest of humiliation and harassment at the hands of municipal authorities, he initiated a wave of struggle that would spread across Tunisia, through the whole of N. Africa, and eventually out to the entire world in what would be called the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring’s most significant victories came in the fall of the Tunisian government of Ben Ali and dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.”
“In 2016, a huge strike wave engulfed China, including a massive wildcat strike across Walmart factories throughout the country: strikes, despite being outlawed, have been increasing in size and number year on year in China, as have protests.”
