When a million youth gather for a baseball game,
No one raises a fuss,
When a million come to see the Knicks,
Not a hair gets mussed
But when a million gather for Black Power
Some folks take offense
When they gather in a show of strength,
The System gets all tense.
There are a million reasons to come together,
A million reasons to fight;
Like cop brutality, piss-poor education,
Unemployment, urban blight;
The struggle for true freedom, for themselves
and political prisoners:
For respect and equality for women,
to stop them from dissin' her"
A million reasons to get together
A million reasons to meet;
But there's always some objection,
When young black men hit the street!
Ona Move!
We say to you, to every one and all,
On behalf of my MOVE brothers and sisters,
I'm Mumia Abu-Jamal
© MAJ 1998

The deadliest form of violence is poverty.
--Ghandi

It has often been observed that America is a truly violent nation, as shown by the thousands of cases of social and communal violence that occurs daily in the nation.
Every year, some 20,000 people are killed by others, and additional 20,000 folks kill themselves. Add to this the nonlethal violence that Americans daily inflict on each other, and we begin to see the tracings of a nation immersed in a fever of violence.
But, as remarkable, and harrowing as this level and degree of violence is, it is, by far, not the most violent features of living in the midst of the American empire.
We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes;
By "structural violence" I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. --(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.)
This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--really? Gilligan notes:
[E]very fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. [Gilligan, p. 196]
Worse still, in a thoroughly capitalist society, much of that violence became internalized, turned back on the Self, because, in a society based on the priority of wealth, those who own nothing are taught to loathe themselves, as if something is inherently wrong with themselves, instead of the social order that promotes this self-loathing. This intense self-hatred was often manifested in familial violence as when the husband beats the wife, the wife smacks the son, and the kids fight each other.
This vicious, circular, and invisible violence, unacknowledged by the corporate media, uncriticized in substandard educational systems, and un- understood by the very folks who suffer in its grips, feeds on the spectacular and more common forms of violence that the system makes damn sure -that we can recognize and must react to it.
This fatal and systematic violence may be called The War on the Poor.
It is found in every country, submerged beneath the sands of history, buried, yet ever present, as omnipotent as death. In the struggles over the commons in Europe, when the peasants struggled and lost their battles for their commonal lands (a precursor to similar struggles throughout Africa and the Americas), this violence was sanctified, by church and crown, as the 'Divine Right of Kings' to the spoils of class battle. Scholars Frances Fox-Piven and Richard A Cloward wrote, in The New Class War (Pantheon, 1982/1985):
They did not lose because landowners were immune to burning and preaching and rioting. They lost because the usurpations of owners were regularly defended by the legal authority and the armed force of the state. It was the state that imposed increased taxes or enforced the payment of increased rents, and evicted or jailed those who could not pay the resulting debts. It was the state that made lawful the appropriation by landowners of the forests, streams, and commons, and imposed terrifying penalties on those who persisted in claiming the old rights to these resources. It was the state that freed serfs or emancipated sharecroppers only to leave them landless. (52)
The "Law", then, was a tool of the powerful to protect their interests, then, as now. It was a weapon against the poor and impoverished, then, as now.
It punished retail violence, while turning a blind eye to the wholesale violence daily done by their class masters.
The law was, and is, a tool of state power, utilized to protect the status quo, no matter how oppressive that status was, or is.
Systems are essentially ways of doing things that have concretized into tradition, and custom, without regard to the rightness of those ways. No system that causes this kind of harm to people should be allowed to remain, based solely upon its time in existence. Systems must serve life, or be discarded as a threat and a danger to life.
Such systems must pass away, so that their great and terrible violence passes away with them.
©1998MAJ

Whoever fights monsters must take care not to become a monster himself. For, as you stand looking deep into the abyss, the abyss is looking deep into you.
--Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

In light of the current, developing controversy over the Presidential sex scandal, the nation embarks on a trek of forgiveness, even as it enters on a discourse on the limits of power.
While, for any man, this is an uncomfortable reality, it is doubly so for a man of his stature, faced with this occurring in the harsh, merciless glare of klieg lights and in the hungry maw of the majoritarian media.
The President, faced now with a cynical and skeptical public, has begun to seek wider, public stages for his mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpas (Latin for "My fault, my fault, my most grievous faults"). It has the air of ritual in it, the stuff of play-acting on life's twirling stage.
There is an obvious problem with the most recent spate of mea culpas by President William Jefferson Clinton. It is that it comes after a long, undeniable history that goes not so much to sexuality, as it goes to power: This President's history of the treatment of his alleged allies is, in a word, troubling.

Consider Labor: their millions marched in his support.
Clinton's Response: A Genuflection to Wall Street by the passage of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), a nefarious agreement that weakened labor on both sides of the Rio Grande, which strengthened the hand of capital, by giving them a powerful tool with which to threaten labor ('Sign off on this give-back, or we'll move to Mexico!'),

Consider Blacks: Who voted for him in overwhelming numbers.
Clinton's Response: His skillful use of the 'black faces in high places' strategy, while ostensibly in support of the Black bourgeoisie, masked an attack on the Black working poor, who were central, subliminal targets of a "New Democrat" attack, designed to ease White, suburban anxiety. In this context, the so-called Welfare 'Reform' Act, the Anti-Habeas Corpus Bill (so- called Anti-Terrorism Bill), and his administration's opposition to the Racial Justice Act are utterly understandable. The public dissing of strong, outspoken Black women like rapper Sista Souljah, Law Prof. Lani Guinier, and Dr. Joycelyn Elder was also a calculated effort to appeal to white ethnics, by showing he could put Blacks in their place: subordinate. His treatment of Haitians was patently immoral.

Consider Gays: From coast-to-coast, his core fans.
Clinton's Response: He supported gays in the military, only to flip when the right-wing barked.
The ulterior motive of the Democratic Leadership Conference (of which Clinton was head) was to take the Democratic Party back from the leftist hijackers. Clinton, with his great smile and homey, Southern charm, was a chief operative in this plan, to broaden (read:Whiten) party appeal. This meant consciously betraying the expendable interests of those who supported him the most and the longest, to capture the Un-Holy Grail of a right-wing that hated him with total passion.
Early in the Lincoln Administration, Journalist and agitator, Frederick Douglass lambasted Lincoln's policy as "simply and solely to reconstruct the union on the old and corrupting basis of compromise, by which slavery shall retain all the power that it ever had,..." [Douglass' Monthly (Aug. 1862),p. 692-93].
Later, of course, under the pressure of losing the War, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, not to free slaves, but to save the Union.
The Clinton Administration was built on the sands of Betrayal, a betrayal that didn't begin with a girl named Monica, and didn't end there either.
©1998MAJ

The colonialist bourgeoisie is helped in its work of calming down the natives by the inevitable religion. All those saints who have turned the other cheek, who have forgiven trespasses against them, and who have been spat on and insulted without shrinking are studied and held up as examples.--Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (1966)

Tens of thousands of young Black folk gather in the capital of the Black Colony, the historic New York community of Harlem, and in direct response, the state sends out its armed agents of terror, who, in their thousands, act to smother the natural vibration of liberation pulsating in the hearts of the young.
The late great Martiniquian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, wrote eloquently of the role of the police in the various struggles of liberation, and although this was written over thirty years ago, it has some relevance to us in these days and times;
The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, institutional go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. (31)
What does it matter that one has a so-called "Constitutional Right" to a thing, if the state will treat your exercise of that so-called 'right' as an offense?
The overwhelming police presence in Harlem was the state's response to a march that it politically opposed, and wanted to antagonize with every "legal" action. The polite calls of the black bourgeoisie for a different, 'tamer' kind of march proves that the bourgeoisie do not serve the interests of the youth, but of their class. In a pre-millennial time such as now, the state, and the economic forces which drives the state, are irrevocably opposed to the Black youth, and wants to use its considerable powers to disabuse this large and disinherited generation of any notion of militance.
Sister Marpessa Kupendua, of the Afikan.net News Service, an active participant and observer of the New York MYM wrote of what she saw and heard during the event, quoting one sister's reactions to the overkill of the cops:
"Our people were penned like hogs, herded through blockades and narrow passages like cattle, a great many of us were kept from getting to the rally site. This was done as a way of tearing apart our family, like they did during slavery. Then they spied on us from the roofs of cur own homes."
Kupendua, in giving her own observations, asked questions that pointed to the state's obvious political, and military objectives:
We were to be prevented from gathering as one unit BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, and were segmented off into easy targets. What was the masterplan? Were they there to mow us down like the Sharpesville Massacre, an African attendee wondered, as we became aware of the hundreds of police sharp-shooters on the rooftops of every surrounding building, including Sojourner Truth school and even at the projects a good block away. Weapons were trained at us, at our children. Was this going to be a buck-wild Nazi hunting orgy? We were literally trapped, with no place to go, all of us a trigger finger away. [from Kupendua; "Police Acts of Terrorism Bring True Hate Message to Harlem"; 9/7/98, Afrikan.net News Service]
From her eyewitness view, Kupendua explains and relates an experience that eerily echoes what might have been written by the young men and women who were barricaded in the MOVE Home/Headquarters of August 8th, 1978, when cops peered down the deadly sights of rifles trained on the house, on black men, women and their children that dared to rebel against the racist state, or even from the murderous cop bombing of MOVE people on May 13th, 1985, for this march, an act said to be "protected" by the U.S. Constitution, was also the site of cop helicopters, armed for aerial death, where the people were not those "protected", but the victims of state terror. Again, Kupendua:
Suddenly, the helicopter that had been circling all day began to buzz the crowd, flying down so low that everyone took notice of it and pointed at them. The police blue lines began moving quickly down the middle of the street towards the back of the stage, walking right into the people in the street. Those who didn't allow themselves to be pushed back were jabbed in the ribs/stomach with batons, and a couple of bros. reported being kicked in the groin. The police continued advancing on that stage until the entire block was full of them and hundreds were behind them around the corner.
These police officers began massing down the street from the stage BEFORE KHALLID MUHAMMED EVER BEGAN TO SPEAK. A group of police split off and began advancing towards 118th St. and another group of police rushed the back of the stage, just in the blink of an eye Khallid Muhammed announced that women and children must leave the stage area immediately and just as they fled, the police came roaring up the steps of the back of the stage, throwing people out of the way and ripping through there like a pack of hungry wolves, it was an incredible sight to see. [Kupendua, M.;"Police Acts of Terrorism…", Afrlka.net News]
From the outrageous actions of the police state of 1978, to l985, to 1998, the objectives and underlying message is ultimately the same: Black rebellion will be crushed. Period.
Nor, as Sister Kupendua suggests would the election of a 'Black' Mayor radically change this picture, for political leaders are responsive, not to the people, but to the monied powers downtown. Mayor Wilson Goode of Philadelphia proved this. When David Dinkins was Mayor of New York, the cops rioted on his very doorstep, abusing Black elected officials, and even threatening their own "boss".
The MYM, and the repressive over-reactions of the state to its militance, is a clear message of intimidation. It is also, obviously, a display of the very real fear that lies at the heart of the state, of Black Emergence, and Rage.
How did your "leaders" react to this outrage? What did they say? More importantly, What did they do? Most such so-called 'leaders' (or at least those allowed to be heard through the white supremacist media) launched into invective against Khallid Muhammed's words, while virtually ignoring the state's and the city government's deeds.
This knee-jerk attack on one who speaks roughly among the oppressed, and the measured acquiescence in the "disapproval" of the nakedly fascistic actions on the part of the state, speaks volumes about how the chattering classes (or, the press) damns one, while slapping the real villain on the wrist.
The vicious, premeditated, and fascistic attack on the people is itself not attacked, or, if so, only in words! The lesson of history is that fascistic regimes are evidence of their insecurity, not their security, as Carl G. Gustavson, the noted historian writes:
An excellent indication of the actual stability of any regime is the degree to which it is compelled to resort to physical violence to keep control. A consistent display of force, such as the existence of a strong secret police, is in itself an indication that the regime faces strong internal opposition. [Gustavson, C. G., A Preface to History (1955)]
The Police Republic of New York is such a regime, where the coin of the realm is anti-Black, and anti-Latino terror unleashed upon the people by "Il Duce" Giuliani. This fascist terror reflects an intense fear that the people will rebel against the intense repression that typifies Black and colored life in the capital of Capital.
Let there be no illusions; the motto 'Serve and Protect' does not, and has never related to the People. That was proven on the day of The Million Youth March. It's always a good time to rebel.
©MAJ1998

The young man came up to the older man, and in an attitude rich with the rhythms of the street, the younger inquired:

Y.M. : Yo, old head! Dig this here, right--Was you ina Black Panthers?

O.M. : Yeah-

Y.M. : Well uh; What's up with y'all? Was y'all a gang or somethin'? What's up?

O.M. : What? Are you serious? Who are you?

Y.M. : Oh! My woman's Mama say she knew you, and you was with them. What's up with that?

O.M. : Yeah, young buck. But it wasn't no gang. It was a revolutionary organization, dedicated to the freedom of Black people, and to their defense.

The conversation was surreal, and an unexpected reflection of the erosions on communal memory worked by the young of a new generation.
I found the young man earnest, acutely intelligent, aggressive, but woefully uninformed, asking him, "Well, didn't your woman's Mama tell you about the Black Panther Party?"

"Yeah. But, I didn't listen to what she had to say. I thought she was just rappin'. So I, like, tuned her out."

The younger man, with no real connections with the movements of the recent past, had rejected information from one who lived in the midst of it, and thus, truly knew next to nothing about a grass-roots organization that covered the country and had international, radical impact.
His mother-in-law, who worked closely with the BPP, and who knew the people who lived as Panthers, tried to talk to the brash youngster, but, like that of most adults, her words were taken as so much static, noise from a passed generation, and virtually ignored. The schools, the captive of a generation that lauded the Civil Rights generation, while denigrating or ignoring the Black Liberation movement, were no more helpful. So, a young Black man, rich in innate and learned intelligence, would not learn anything meaningful about the Black Panther Party, until he came to Death Row.
Still now, locked into a steel and concrete box, he gained some sense of a hidden history, learning of some of his hidden birthright. He read of the birth of the party, it's heady heyday, and it's tragic decline. He learned of a history that was his own, of the family of Africans resisting repression in America.
Scholars Jones and Jeffries, writing in the remarkable The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998) describing the impact of the Party:
Arguably the leading Black leftist organization in the African American liberation struggle, the BPP captured the imagination of oppressed people throughout the world. Its organizational life span lasted sixteen years from 1966 to 1982. Although not widely recognized, the Party produced a rich and multifaceted legacy that significantly impacted the Black Liberation struggle. The legacy of the BPP consists of four components: (1) the sa1iency of armed resistance, (2) a tradition of community service, (3) a commitment to the self-determination of all people, and (4) a model of political action for oppressed people. (p.27)
How does this reality transform into one where a young man can reach his twentieth year and ask, honestly, "Was y'all a gang or somethin'?"
If the system has it's way, that is the only question that young minds will ask about the BPP, for the radical and revolutionary history of the Party, which is the common history of all Black folk (and all radicals) can only be let out in dribs or drabs, in bits and bunches, mediated through the madness of a media that paints Black people's history as little more than a joke.
In an age when a major American TV network makes a comedy about the horrific Slave era, what can the revolutionary movements of the 1960s mean?
History is a powerful tool for an oppressed people, for it can provide a people with hope. Scholar Farideh Farhi writes:
Concrete historical forms of ideological mobilization have given us clues about several sources the revolutionaries can draw on to mobilize. The most important source seems to be the "dangerous memory" of conflict and exclusion. This memory has two dimensions: suffering as well as resistance and hope. The former draws from concrete memories of specific histories of oppression and suffering....Past suffering hence becomes an indictment of existing economic and political systems. Memory of resistance and hope, on the other hand, chronicles actual or imagined instances of resistance and liberation. These accounts are a declaration of the possibility of change, and they are examined continuously in an attempt to understand what enables resistance in specific historical situations. [Farhi, F.,States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua (Urbana: Univ. of Ill. Press, 1990), p.85]

"No, young buck. The Black Panther wasn't a gang. That's what they want you to think, man. It was an active group of Black brothers and sisters who fought and battled for our people's lives and human dignity during the '60s."

"Learn your history, young man. Learn it so that you can teach young dudes like yourself, so that you won't hear that question."
©1998MAJ