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254 Conclusion Looking Back So We Can Move Forward I grew up in Compton, Watts, and South Central Los Angeles, California. I embraced the Black Power Movement as a teenager. Malcolm X, George Jackson, Robert Williams, Max Stanford, and the Black Panthers were my heroes. I was recruited into the African Peoples Party and the House of Umoja, two successor organizations of the Revolutionary Action Movement , after graduating from high school in 1972. One of my first introductions to the armed resistance tradition of the southern Black Freedom Struggle was in 1976, when I traveled to Atlanta for a national Black student activist assembly. One of the advisors for our student association was Dara Abubakari (who was called Sister Dara) of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. Sister Dara was the child of members of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and a veteran activist in the Movement from New Orleans. I “bummed” a ride from Atlanta to New Orleans with Sister Dara, her son Walter Collins, and a mutual friend, Joe Taylor. Walter was a former political prisoner due to his resisting the Vietnam War–era draft, a SNCC activist, and a leader of the Southern Conference Education Fund. Taylor was serving as the driver and security for Sister Dara. When we drove from Atlanta through Birmingham, Sister Dara and Walter began to reminisce about the campaigns there. They told me that caches of weapons had been buried outside of the city by defense networks. Sister Dara and Walter also explained how armed sentries protected people from the periphery of marches and demonstrations in the early 1960s. I was amazed hearing their stories. In 1978, my comrades and I invited Skip Robinson and Lewis Myers to come to Los Angeles to speak about the work of the United League of Mississippi. We organized a tour for Robinson and Myers at colleges and universities, churches, and community events in Southern California. I went to Atlanta the following year for a meeting and decided to catch the Conclusion 255 Greyhound to northern Mississippi to observe the work of the UL. Most of the UL members were either armed or had security. My comrades and I believed that self-determination for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States would be manifested in the southern Black Belt, counties in the region where Blacks were the historic majority. One Sunday, we participated in a forum hosted by another Black nationalist organization in Los Angeles. Our hosts disagreed with our belief that a self-determining Black nation could rise up in the South. One of their leaders and spokespersons berated the lack of militancy of Black southerners. He harangued, “[H]ow y’all going to build a nation in the South? Black people down there are so passive and nonviolent.” One customary stereotype that young Black militants in the northern and western urban centers embraced was that our elders and people in the South, particularly in rural areas, were docile and intimidated. Additionally, there was a misconception that the southern Movement was solely “nonviolent.” I responded on the basis of my limited study and experiences listening to Sister Dara and Walter as well as observing Skip and the UL. I countered that the notion of southern Blacks being docile and passive was a myth. The southern Black Freedom Struggle produced Robert Williams and the Deacons for Defense. Skip Robinson and the UL were the latest manifestation of this tradition. The principal leader of the host organization intervened in the debate to acknowledge the tradition of armed self-defense in the South and their organization’s familiarity with Robinson ’s advocacy and practice of armed self-defense. The organization had a photo of Robert Williams displayed prominently in its building. However, the stereotype of Black submissiveness to White supremacy overcame the historical reality of armed resistance in the southern Black Freedom Struggle in the minds of many northern, urban Blacks and nationalists. Challenging this stereotype is one of the motivations for this work. Much of the recent literature on armed resistance in the South focuses on the utilization of armed self-defense in the early to mid-1960s. This work describes the use of armed force by Black activists in Mississippi until 1979, during the Black Power Era (1965-1975), and after the decline of the national Black Power Movement. Some scholars who write about armed resistance after the Civil Rights Movement do not see its efficacy. As mentioned in the introduction, historian...

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