THE RESTORATIVE VALUE OF VIOLENCE: AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN POST-WORLD WAR II UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness (2002)

ISSN: 1543-0855

Kayode Ogunfolabi

The last interview of Malcolm X is an important place to start. This is not because of its timeliness, that is, because it’s the last before he was murdered, but because it reveals so much about the plight of the African Americans and the roles played by the government in suppressing the expression of their rights to self-determination. The following excerpt will highlight the point being made:

HALL: I think you mentioned it earlier, you’re getting in a couple of plugs...

The word is responsible, but go ahead...

He’s [Martin Luther King] a responsible American. That’s what he is...

Put up, Malcolm. You’re implying you’re a very sly implier

MALCOLM X: Because you gave me the impression, all of a sudden, that you’re the protector of the Black Muslim movement…

HALL: You never want to louse up an argument with facts, Malcolm.

MALCOLM X: Sir, I’m not commenting on what you did; it’s immaterial to me

(2001: 188-239).

One will notice that this is not an ordinary interview; there is a struggle going on, though there is no use of “arms”. However, Gordon Hall’s attitude could not escape even a passive reader. He does not hide his contempt for Malcolm X. His expressions to Malcolm X range from innuendo, sarcasm, and invectives to outright lampoon. What is queer about his attitude is not that he verbally assaults Malcolm X. He leaves the issues unaddressed and instead attacks Malcolm X’s personality on grounds for which he has no evidence to prove. More importantly, he attacks him on no ground at all. Also, the two people who interviewed him seem to share the same ideas even though Stan Bernard unsuccessfully tries to be passive.

What is equally appalling is the extent of hatred and contempt shown towards Malcolm X. The interview will be better understood as another space where the conflict between the white supremacists and the Black people is dramatized. Apparently, it falls below the object of the interview, which should clarify matters over the injustice committed on the defenseless Black people. Instead, it becomes, most accurately, an avenue to demean the activities of the Black liberation struggle and to demonize them to the gullible, uncritical white American public. Without mincing words, this is a battle. The only difference is that there is no use of armed weapons. The striking phenomenon is that the American white supremacist public has been over the years decried for its racial profiling of the Blacks and the consequent wanton violation of their human rights. In the interview, the white participants did not attempt to vindicate themselves. In actual fact, the hatred and racial antagonism seem to intensify. Once again, Malcolm X’s humanism is denied.

The interesting thing is that the media reveals itself as a failure and therefore not an adequate means by which the Black people can have redress in America. What then do we make of the interview? Why did Malcolm X come at all, especially given the fact that he believes that the battle will be fought by any means necessary? It appears that, most probably, the African Americans in spite of being so dehumanized seem to understand the inherent value in the life of human beings. In spite of being economically disadvantaged, physically brutalized and having their human rights violated, they have suffered all there is to suffer and any liberatory move they make, will be resisted whether consciously or unconsciously by the government and its agents like the police or the KKK. The resistance is not simply by employing the already repressive Capitalist institutions; there is further, with a negation of the Capitalist social order, the resort to armed conflict. In their own case, violent resistance is channeled towards humanistic values and objectives. It is expected to restore the humanity to a people who after being brutalized has no cause to seek redress in the legal institutions.

The period after World War II is chosen not because it is the only time that African Americans struggled for self-determination. In actual fact since the beginning of the 20th Century, they have vehemently fought to establish their humanity and stop centuries of violation of their human rights (Dunne, 1995: 15-26). In the case of Michael Dunne, he has limited the struggle to just one century whereas more accurately, there has never been a time that the African Americans are not fighting for their human rights. A film like Tomas Alea’s The Last Supper is a testimony to the fact that African slaves in the Caribbean as well as in the United States were not complacent. Rather, they were very revolutionary.

The Haitian revolution, which inspired the film, is a concrete testimony to the activism of African Americans in the face of the horrors of slavery. The film demonstrates that the fight for freedom and self-determination is a process that has never stopped. It ends with the achievement of freedom. In essence, the fight has always been but in the period after World War II, the violence against the African Americans quadrupled and the victims as usual will have to respond with equal tenacity. Cheikh Anta Diop (1996) raises an alarm about the condition of living in America. He says that “America is a country where, on the average, one black man is electrocuted every week” (65). In addition, many African American leaders were murdered, incarcerated in the most inhuman conditions (Jackson, 1994).

It is the contention of this paper that the American society could not establish and safeguard the humanity of the African Americans and therefore they are forced to defend themselves against the wanton violence of America. The inhuman living condition that African Americans are subjected to is not the sign of the American state’s inability to maintain law and order. Rather, it is a social design that has its roots in the history of slavery. The implication of this is that the American state simply by modern means tries to perpetuate slavery within the Capitalist superstructure. Since African Americans are not the aggressors, that is, they derive no pleasure in unnecessary use of violence, their use of violence is to safeguard their lives and the only means to do this is to fight in order to bring meaningfulness into their lives. In this case, their own kind of violence is to right a wrong, and is thereby restorative. Also, social institutions like the court and the media have failed to ensure the human rights of the African Americans and this leaves no choice except armed rebellion.

Finally, the oppression of the African Americans on another level is not divorced from the capitalist agenda that makes the colonialists deny the humanity of Black people in order to justify colonialism, slavery and their economic savagery. The implication of this is racial bias that has unfortunately defined the relation of the whites to the Blacks, not only in the United States but also, the world over. The Ogunnian myth as demonstrated by Wole Soyinka (1976), even though is not the subject of discussion, shows Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, metallurgy, and war, as the defender of the afflicted people who uses violence to correct injustice. Ogun in Yoruba cosmology is regarded as the custodian of restorative justice. All African Americans might not be directly conscious of this myth but their revolutionary agenda is cast in the context of Ogun, who unleashes violence only to defend the exploited and the defenseless.

On Violence

Frantz Fanon (1963), in the opening to the chapter on violence from The Wretched of the Earth, says “[n]ational liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to a people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” (35). It should be said that the belief in the Ogunnian ethics is not a regress to reactionary tendencies. Fanon makes it clear that national liberation and struggle for freedom cannot be achieved by believing in a magical emancipation. Believing in magic, to Fanon, is an illusion that keeps the oppressed people in their dehumanizing conditions. Rather, struggle for freedom is an active and collective effort of an oppressed people who have contemplated their condition and have depended on the strategies that will effectively destroy the hegemonic class.

Most of the people who then strive for self-determination are most always condemned by their oppressors as violent. However, only the passage of time has hidden their own atrocities; and their atrocities cannot be hidden for long from the minds of those who are victims. In actual fact, as the 1960s in the United States will demonstrate later in this paper, there has not been a time that the violence is mediated. Terry Kinney (2002) in the April 4 edition of The State News writes about the gruesome murder of an unarmed African American boy, Timothy Thomas, in Cincinnati. The African Americans are demanding economic inclusion and the respect of their human rights within the legal system. He writes, “[a] year ago, 19-year old Timothy Thomas became the 15th black man to die at the hands of the Cincinnati police since 1995. Thomas was shot by Officer Stephen Roach, who was acquitted of misdemeanor charges” (8A; my emphasis). It will therefore be a grave error to limit the horror of the American state to the period of slavery or even the 1960s. It is an endemic problem that African Americans face time and time again. From the extermination of the inhabitants of Easter Island, genocide committed against the Maoris in New Zealand, the wiping out of the Australian Aborigines and three centuries of enslavement of Africans, the colonizer speaks only one language. That language is the language of violence.

Fanon describes the use of violence in the colony by saying that “the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native” (38; my emphasis). From the emphasis in the above quote, the oppression of the colonized people is a conscious act that the colonizer believes in with religious intensity. The outcome of this for the colonized people is that the oppressor towers high and is difficult to resist with all his apparatusses of intimidation and naked force. Fanon does not fail to mention the already established social division between the colonizer and the colonized. This division is both physical and economic. He says that “[t]he settlers’ town is strongly built, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about…the settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners, whereas “[t]he town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of ill repute… It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs” (39).

The social division between the settler and the colonized, as seen here, is in the control of the instruments of force. He has built his house as a stronghold not because of mere luxury, but because he has to show the colonized that he is the controller of force, of instruments of violence. With his house fortified, it will be extremely difficult to attack him or much less eliminate him. The house does provide not only physical protection for the oppressor. It also provides symbolic image of him to the oppressed. He is almost synonymous with his fortress and sometimes might be interchangeable with it. In the mind of the oppressed, the sight of this stronghold is both physical presence and symbolic presence of the destructive power of the oppressor. However, it will be interesting to know that the fortified house of the colonizer emphasizes his vulnerability. He knows he is weak without the force of violence and always strives to show this power all the time. This is not because he simply wants to inflict punishment, or kill or destroy; but by mercilessly treating the colonized, he covers up his weakness almost in the parlance which says that attack is the best form of defense. So, in actual fact, the oppressor is weak, defends himself by attacking weaker people. In the heartless violence against the colonized is an insidious acknowledgement of the colonized’s potential for resistance.

The colonized is not only capable of resistance alone but can use the instruments of violence as mightily as the colonizer. In order to prevent this, the aggressor fortifies himself; the quarry is left defenseless. But the moment the oppressed has taken steps towards self-emancipation, the oppressor is alarmed and condemns the oppressed as violent. At this point, he resorts to the use of rhetoric together with the existing mindless savagery to fight the disillusioned oppressed. It is therefore understandable why the American government has to use all it can to get rid of Malcolm X when he declares that the liberation fight will be carried out by any means necessary. The aim of his own violence is to restore meaning to the lives of African Americans and to assert their humanity in the hostile condition of the United States. The life of Malcolm X and his activities in the America of the 1960s show that the condition of life, of existence, has hardly changed. There is still “slavery” and there is still wanton use of force to the disadvantage of the African Americans and it will not be surprising when George Jackson (1994) says that “[t]he forms of slavery merely changed at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation from chattel slavery to economic slavery (68).

The economic conditions of the United States do not empower the African American. The plantation has suddenly metamorphosed to the enslaving factory where the workers, that is, the African Americans are mere cogs in the wheel. C. L. R. James (1993) observes that like in slavery of the past centuries, the factory disempowers the workers, the African Americans and they are not in control of their own production. It is what Malcolm X (2001) calls “[b]enevolent colonialism or philanthropic imperialism” (58). However, in fighting the establishment, someone like Malcolm X decides not to kill a tree by attacking the leaves. Instead, he attacks the root. What then can we call the root?

It might be difficult to say categorically what the root actually is but a study of Malcolm X’s philosophy will define his focus. He says that “all of it stems from what the Western powers do to the image of the African continent and the African people. By making our people in the Western Hemisphere hate Africa, we ended up hating ourselves. We hated our African characteristics. We hated our African identity” (54). The reason this quote is important is that the theory of the West for colonizing and enslaving the Africans is still operative in the United States. The Black people are made to hate themselves and to see themselves as inferior to the white man. It is with racial bias that they legitimated his colonization of Africa, slavery of African Americans and the continual conflict between the Blacks and the white people is a contestation of the erroneous belief of the whites about Black’s humanity. The white denies this but the Black people are determined to restore their values.

Again, Fanon (1963) says “[t]he native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values. He is, let us dare admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil…he is the depository of maleficient powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces” (41). In essence, “the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessential evil” (41). This wrong and negative image projection is what Malcolm X tries to fight and let the people understand that their color, texture of hair and the color of their eyes have nothing to do with their inner being, their humanness. It will also be recalled that Cheikh Anta Diop in The African Origin of Civilization (1974) also tries to inform African people that the culture that the white man denies Africans actually originates from Black Africa, thereby restoring confidence in the people who have always known both physical and verbal violence. The two might produce the same effects because they try to alter the psyche of the African so that he or she loses confidence in himself or herself and becomes malleable for the economic and political oppression plaguing us. So, the struggle of the African Americans in fighting racism is like attacking the roots of oppression.

It is interesting that when African American leaders like Malcolm X, Claudia Jones and many others attack the basic foundation of American imperialism with equal tenacity, white Americans are alarmed. They use one of the strong instruments in the capitalist state that is the media, to demonize them even though violence continues unmediated. For instance, when Malcolm X, not to mention others, says and preaches that he cannot love someone who does not love him in return the media labels him “racist[…] in reverse” (80). This is a demonstration of the oppressor’s awareness of his own rhetoric. Interestingly, he does not try to deny his own racism. By accusing Blacks of racism, though unjustifiably, he wittingly or unwittingly, admits his own crime of racism. Because of its own public vulnerability, the American government distorts information in order to weaken the revolutionary energy of the insurgent African Americans.

It is impossible to tell the truth because telling the truth means accepting all the crimes they have been committing and also accepting African Americans as human beings and legal citizens of the United States. This trend is not surprising. Geronimo ji Jaga (2001) declares, “…when war begins, truth is the first casualty” (76). One can see that in the bombing of Malcolm X’s house, if the government was not the one responsible, its role in the “(un)publicity” is very suspicious. It appears that the government is only interested in one aspect of the story, that is, the false accusation of Malcolm X as the one responsible for the attack. Apart from the fact that it appears puerile, no matter how stupid information appears, it has great significance in the operation of the Capitalist society.

In the first place, in the Capitalist society, the media is not established to safeguard the interests of the downtrodden. In actual fact, it is to continue the business of economic domination that strengthens the capitalist but deprives the common people their human rights. By and by, the media already creates an image of African American leaders like Malcolm X and Robert F Williams as devils incarnate. Even Aubrey Barnette (see Malcolm X’s February 1965:The Final Speeches, 2001) knew he is only echoing the philosophy of the capitalist hegemony when he says that “[a] mass movement can exist without a god, but it can’t exist without a devil” (2001: 220). The implication of this is that while being unable to substantiate any incident of crime committed by Malcolm X beyond groundless assumptions, he has demonized him. The unfortunate thing is that the public is not critical enough to puncture the lies in this negative image. More unfortunate is the fact that the oppressed African Americans cannot seek redress by using the same mechanism of information dissemination and this is the reason why all efforts directed towards a peaceful resolution of the crisis in America could not produce any positive yield for the trampled-upon African Americans. It simply means that they will have their own means of airing information, a means capable of avoiding the drudgery of the media.

Jonathan Jackson Jr. understands the complexity of the situation and how physical violence in a capitalist society does not exist without the distortion of truth. In the “Foreword” to the 1994 edition of George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, he says, “[i]t is the existing political system that is responsible for the information that reaches the general public. The state’s control of information created the system, and it continually recreates it. Propagated by schooling and the media, information that reaches the public is subject to three chief mechanisms of control: denial, self-censorship, and imprisonment” (xvii). He elaborates further by saying that denial is the easiest and therefore the commonest form of control but it goes hand in hand with self-censorship in which “they emphasize certain personal characteristics and events and de-emphasize others, in a pattern that supports U. S. hegemony” (xvii-xvii).

The other one for which the United States is incurably notorious is imprisonment. Again, Jonathan Jackson says that political incarceration functions by removing the immediate and potential threats to the political and economic hegemony of the United States. But if we go by the conception of imprisonment articulated by Michel Foucault (1980) the prison, like the media is an apparatus of the capitalist class. He also says that it is not only where one sees scenes of violence that there is violence. The prison, for him, is a center of power and it is a point of violence. In order to understand how power operates, he advocates the study of the prison. In short, it is his belief that in a capitalist system, most of the people who end up in prison are innocent but end up in prison because they constitute threat to the system. This is merely a theoretical affirmation of George Jackson’s prison experience where a little of it has been documented in Soledad Brother. In spite of the fact that the revolutionary African Americans are demonized, the government is very silent on its own atrocities. The prison condition is a dehumanizing one and this is the reason that George Jackson, from his own experience, concludes that there are two sets of people who leave the prison: one, those who boot-lick their way out in utter humiliation and betrayal of the resolve to fight oppression; and two, those who are broken in heart, body and spirit. This is part of the government’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) designed to crush African American resistance.

The experience of George Jackson in prison, the shooting of Assata Shakur, and her later imprisonment all testify to the government’s resolve to annihilate the militants. The routines of torture, random gunshots and cudgeling reduce the prisoners to a mockery of human forms. The case of George Jackson is a historical example; he was shot while still on a trial on trumped-up charges. Although the system is corrupt enough to send Jackson to the gallows, he is summarily murdered because the establishment cannot tolerate anybody with the kind of revolutionary obstinacy as Jackson’s. Jackson’s indictment of the establishment’s a priori assumption of the culpability of prisoners is evidence that the prison is not actually a reformatory but simply an apparatus to contain and silence the people who understand of the exploitative nature of the system. He says the textbooks on criminology already conclude that prisoners are mentally defective and there is no suggestion that the system itself might be responsible (25).

The prisoner, the oppressed become more and more powerless because of the claustrophobic institutions created around them. The prison is also part of the repressive order according to Louis Althusser (see Nick Mansfield, 2000: 52-53). He identifies it with other Ideological State Apparatuses like the church, school and the media. It is a complement of Repressive State Apparatuses like the army and the police. The only point of caution here is that Althusser still believes in developing a counter-truth that is predicated on the philosophical foundation of capitalism, science. The example of the United States shows that the capitalists, the government and the oppressive institutions cannot be distinguished.

In the first place, the people are always attacked as arsonists and hoodlums because they destroy the property of the capitalist but it is the government who determines the language of description. The government does not want to admit racial uprising and positively channeled violence; therefore the struggling people are called hoodlums. Malcolm X makes it clear that the people are pent up with anger and the anger must find expression. They cannot unleash such anger on themselves and since the oppressor is so far-removed from their ghettos, the only thing they could attack is the property of the oppressor. It is unfortunate that property is the index of the government and it is the property that the government values so much because it continues to make profit out of the poorly employed people. Their relationship is that of economic slave to the modern boss and the only thing they can attack when they cannot reach the boss is his property. This kind of conflict situates the American society as a capitalist one and the government is in complicity with the capitalists, if the two of them are not two sides of a coin. The excerpt below will clarify the point being made.

The pig is an instrument of neoslavery, to be hated and avoided; he is pushed to the front by the men who exercise the unnatural right over property. They’re protecting the unnatural right of a few men to own the means of all of our subsistence (George Jackson, 1994: 253).

The policemen, agents of government, carry out orders that are in the interests of the capitalists and even in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1995) the capitalist are overtly involved in the political maneuver. In the end, it is the decision of the capitalists that is forced on every American. There is hardly any African American activist who does not have an experience with Ku Klux Klan. The government makes people believe it has got nothing to do with Ku Klux Klan and that it is unable, not unwilling, to stop the mindless savagery of the Klan. In actual fact, the Ku Klux Klan is in collaboration with the police or to hit the nail on the head, the Klan is the police. One can then say that the Klan is the civilian police while the police are the uniformed Ku Klux Klan. The government is not able to check the Klan because it is like fighting itself. The Klan belongs to the government’s social apparatus of violence against the African Americans. Robert Williams (1998) shows how the sheriffs ride in the same motorcade with the Ku Klux Klan to carry out acts of violence on the Black community. In essence, the oppressive network involves the police, the justice department and the government itself and all of them are inseparable.

It cannot be overemphasized that the working condition in America is that of slavery and George Jackson does not mince words about this. He talks about African Americans as slaves and still sees coming generation as slaves! He explains further by saying that “[c]hattel slavery is an economic condition which manifests itself in the total loss or absence of self-determination…The new slavery places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades) working for a wage” (1994: 251). He demonstrates this further by showing that the slave is not in control of his time and does not live a meaningful life because the wage paid him is just to stick him to the machine by which he becomes automated, unable to wrest free. Still in the so-called modern society, as was at the time of colonization and centuries of slavery, slavery has been legitimated by racial discrimination and this is why Robert Williams (1998) succinctly says it that “the fundamental core of racism is more than atmosphere-it can be measured in dollars and cents and unemployment percentages” (38). Capitalism represses African Americans in order to maximize profit and keep the underprivileged permanently in squalor. Without access to information, without truthful report on the conflicts generated by inequality, unemployment, complicity of the government with the aggressors, imprisonment and sporadic murder of militant African American men and women, the only option left for the African Americans is to defend themselves.

It is not surprising to hear how the government condemned the determination of African Americans to defend themselves by any means necessary, even with resort to violence. The government, according to Malcolm X, termed this action as “violence in reverse” (2001: 89). As stated earlier in the paper, this is a stupid acknowledgement of the government’s violent activities. But when the same method is deployed towards the cause of self-determination it is condemned. Looking at the make up of the state, one will still discover that Thomas Hobbes’ theory of the state as a monopoly of the instruments of violence is still in operation. The possession of this right is symbolic and physical as well. Keith Faulks (2000) says:

Hobbes’s concern was the rights of the sovereign, not the individual. Hobbes was highly skeptical of participatory citizenship. The only ‘right’ for individuals that Hobbes speaks of is that of self-preservation, which turns out not to be a right in any meaningful sense, since Hobbes accepted that the sovereign shall have power of life and death (22).

Even though Hobbes’s conception of the sovereign is the monarchy, the operation of American democracy does not display any significant difference from the autocratic structure of monarchy. Since it holds the agents of force in possession, the state is able to violate African American human rights at will. However, this monopoly is challenged when African Americans decide to defend themselves and their community. The challenge is not to compete with the state but to assert the right to life that the state does not allow them. The establishment praises African Americans, who are rather disposed towards “peaceful” methods. The irony of it all is that praising the people of non-violence does not mean that they exhibit any values that the American state may respect. Rather, non-violence ensures the consolidation of the state. In fact, it reassures the state that its authority is unthreatened. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. who believes in “non-violence” is referred to by Gordon Hall as “responsible”. He says, “[h]e’s a responsible American, that’s what he is” (Malcolm X, 2001: 227). One cannot but see the fraud of Hall because he knows himself that no Black American can exist who has no right to his life and whose humanity is denied. The main problem with the activities of Martin Luther King Jr is that he sees the oppression of African Americans as a civil rights problem. By positing the problems as civil rights, he limits them to internal matters only. The fault in this position is that it is unrealistic to expect a state that is capitalist, racial, and imperialistic to address the social conditions of African Americans positively. This is because the violence committed against the Black people is conceived and executed by the same oppressive system. It will therefore be unreasonable to expect the American state to restore the dignity of humanity to the African Americans or to ensure equality, both socially and economically. In the case of Malcolm X, he understands the problem much further that this. In most of his speeches, he addresses the problems of human rights violation and not civil rights. In order to justify the authenticity of his position, he links American domestic injustice with its international colonial agenda. This is very apparent in the CIA collaboration in the murder of Patrice Lumumba. The murder of Lumumba and American capitalist agenda in Congo is not our only example. Malcolm recalls US intervention in Korea and Vietnam. All over these areas, the US is fighting unjust war, subjecting civilians to horrors of genocide, homelessness, hunger and perpetual presence of fear of war, death and fear of the unknown. Claudia Jones (1995) buttresses the point when she decries the hypocrisy of the US. She says, “…no nation can be free if it oppresses other nations” (75). This is the reason why Walter Rodney believes that slavery and colonialism must be situated in the context of capitalist violence and exploitation (Rodney, 1990: 27). The reality here is that the US parades itself as defender of human rights when it is not able to ensure the freedom of its own “citizens”. Jones and Malcolm X understand that there is an international conspiracy against the Black people. The international publicity given to the kissing case mentioned by Robert Williams (1998) is an indication that America wants to protect its “democracy” but the anxiety of the government confirms their guilty violation of human rights. Judging from this point, limiting American injustice to civil rights crisis will simply empower the state to intensify its violence. To compound the case, the supporters of civil rights action are the ones adopting non-violence. The contributions of Malcolm X, Robert Williams George Jackson and Assata Shakur should then be appreciated since they have understood the workings of American capitalist state as a repressive system that can only be challenged by armed resistance. It will be clear now that there is not much to be expected from the advocates of civil rights or the Black middle class whose members are best described as quislings. Even the few intellectuals who have climbed the social ladder are kept there to deceive the people and the international community into believing that there is no racism in the United States. Malcolm X also points out that the middle class is a sell-out class. He dramatizes the relationship of the African American middle class and his boss thus:

“How do you feel, boy?” He’s going to tell the man that we are satisfied.

That’s what they do, brothers and sisters. They get behind the door and tell the white man we’re satisfied. “Just keep on-keep me up here in front of them, boss, and I’ll keep ’em behind you.” That’s what they talk behind closed doors. Because, see, the white man doesn’t go along with anybody who’s not for him (101).

This set of people has collaborated with the system and have betrayed their suffering people. Therefore, there is no hope for them as long as they continue to be subservient to the authority of the white man. Quite apt is their description by Amiri Baraka (1996) when he takes on the members of the comprador class that simply “uses” blackness as commodity and unfortunately reinforce American imperialism. He writes, "[f]or these, Black struggle is mainly commercial, economic as a pay raise" (745). Their hypocrisy is revealed when they, at convenient times, want to align themselves with the legacy of Malcolm X. They are reactionaries and, for their own benefit, consciously undermine Black liberation struggle. The importance of Baraka’s point lies in the fact that the Black middle class is a doubtful ally in liberation struggle and it hardly can resist American imperialism because that is its trade. They seek advancement within an exploitative power structure. The truth of the matter is the fraudulent nature of the system itself. Therefore, their position perpetuates the system. Since they want to struggle and “make it”, as Walter Rodney observes, “they fall into the trap which the system sets” (Rodney, 1990: 4-5). It is also conscious of the efficacy of armed resistance in American revolution but this class is not willing to give up rotten privileges for a total liberation of a people. These set of people have been blanchified and their consciousness is actually white. Their position seems to be much worse than non-violence because there is no direct or indirect condemnation of the atrocities of the white man. As a result of unchecked bloodshed, the Black community decides to take their lives in their own hands. Robert Williams (1998) believes that the violence of the Black people is in self-defense. To him, the “Afro-American ‘militant’ is a militant because he defends himself, his family, his home and dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there” (76). His encounter with Ku Klux Klan shows that he and the other retired marines value human life and will only kill if they are given no other option. The Ku Klux Klan could not do anything to them when they saw “40 black men leveled their rifles, taking aim at the line of cars” (xviii). Of course, “the Klansmen simply weighed their chances and drove away” (xvii). Because of the effectiveness of resisting through violence, Robert Williams advocates urban guerilla movement to combat the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and their state collaborators. More so, legal victories simply fueled white terrorism and there is no way for him to adopt any non-violent action. In fact, for Amiri Baraka (2001) in his poem “Afrikan Revolution,” violence is not only to be directed at the white enemies. He sees the Black collaborators as enemies. In fact, he does not mince words, they are to be killed if that would return America to meaningful life. The killing of the white enemies and the Black collaborators is like a purgative to dispel the diseases of racial discrimination, inequality, unjust imprisonment and violence against prisoners and civilians.

George Jackson (1994) believes that blaming the white people for the plight of the black people is a reactionary attitude because they just become incapacitated. He, with Robert Williams, believes in the urban guerilla warfare because it targets specific enemies and only the enemies are killed. This is the reason it is called organized violence. It is not a wanton display of cruelty; it is violence as the last resort. Although it is employed as a last resort, it is essential to the successful implementation of any cause of self-determination. One cannot but agree with the African American militants that violence can be restorative, curative and therapeutic when used as Jackson and Williams have theorized it. For Frantz Fanon (1963), violence is an inevitability. This is obvious the way he concludes the chapter on “Spontaneity”:

Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of the trumpets. There’s nothing save a minimum of readaptation, a few reforms at the top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom an undivided mass, still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time (147).

Moreover, Fanon makes it clear that no nationalism can take place without engaging in violence. However, African Americans are actually driven to the wall and they have to fight back in the only language of struggle. This is the language of violence. It is the more eloquent language to the oppressive state. As a result of their militancy, the state responded with more violence and repressive measures. Apart from the numberless men and women coldly murdered, the state uses the prison as a means of containment. The prison probably wasted as many African American militants as lynching. The terrible thing about the prison experience is that it takes out the value and virtue in the militants. Those who still retain their life are those who manage to break out like Assata Shakur. Her poem about the “Rhinoceros Woman,” where she says

They say you’re crazy
Cause you not crazy enough
To kneel when told to kneel (1987: 63),

is a testimony to the repressive nature of the capitalist America with its determination to humiliate and repress African Americans. In these three lines, the whole of slavery is dramatized up till this very moment that chattel slavery has been replaced by economic slavery according to George Jackson (1994). It is the defensive rebellion of African Americans against the repressive system formed by the capitalist America, its biased judicial system and the violence of Ku Klux Klan with the complicity of the police force. Urban guerilla warfare will continue to be a useful means of liberation in the United States and it is the constant awareness of this that can ensure the respect of African American human rights, where non-violence has failed. The Cincinnati murder is a contemporary example of the reality of state violence and it can only be checked with the renaissance of the revolutions of the 1960s where violence actually proved an adequate force to restore value to human lives and turn the aggression back on the heads of the aggressors.

References

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Citation Format

Ogunfolabi, Kayode (2002). THE RESTORATIVE VALUE OF VIOLENCE: AFRICAN AMERICAN LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN POST-WORLD WAR II UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. PROUD FLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness : 1, 1.