Ferguson: It is Right to Resist, By Any and All Means Necessary
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“Had the brothers and sisters on the streets of Ferguson not ‘done something’ in response to the Murderers’ Law laid down by McCulloch, then the embryonic movement might have been still-born.”
You know that a genuine movement is being born when it becomes necessary to draw lines within the circles that purport to support that movement, in order to defend the political space that has already been claimed by the popular struggle. That moment definitively arrived on Monday night when young people in Ferguson, Missouri, responded to the state’s rigged grand jury absolution of Michael Brown’s executioner with outraged defiance, bricks and fire – in accordance with the actual logic of the slogan “No Justice – No Peace.”
The St. Louis County prosecutor’s embrace of Officer Darren Wilson’s lethal aggression against Black Ferguson – a “not well liked community,” in the killer’s depraved testimony – was answered on the streets with limited, non-lethal counterforce. It was Zero Hour. The authorities had just spoken through the voice of prosecutor Robert McCulloch, affirming that Instantaneous Lynch Law was the order of era. The teenagers and young adults of Ferguson gave McCulloch their answer, in perfect synch with the spontaneous outcry of Michael Brown’s step-father, Louis Head. "Burn this M.F. down, burn this bitch down," he shouted, cradling the head of his distraught wife in his arms. “I think he was expressing a sentiment that a lot of folks in that crowd felt,” said St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, who was standing nearby.
When Zero Hour came, the Brown family, despite their own previous admonitions, could not adhere to the spirit of strict non-violence; the nature of the struggle makes it impossible. The nationwide movement that has coalesced around the events in Ferguson is a response to the routine violence of the Mass Black Incarceration State that feeds on the murder and imprisonment of Black youth. It is a movement to confront and resist the police, the arbiters of what passes for law in the current capitalist order. Any movement that defies police power and rejects the legitimacy of the state – including its prosecutors and grand juries – will inevitably commit acts that are deemed illegal and which are accompanied by some level of violence. The people of Ferguson’s mass violations of the curfews and countless decrees of the militarized city, county and state police were, by definition, illegal acts – which is what made the small town a model of resistance.
“The nationwide movement that has coalesced around the events in Ferguson is a response to the routine violence of the Mass Black Incarceration State.”
On Monday night, demonstrators in a score of cities launched their own actions in solidarity with Ferguson, many with the intent to break the law and disrupt relations of property and the flow of commerce – at the risk of engendering physical violence by actors other than the state. By Tuesday night, more than 100 localities were engaged, evidence that the decades-long demobilization of Black America (an extended “Winter in America,” as Gil Scot-Heron put it) might finally be at an end. Had the brothers and sisters on the streets of Ferguson not “done something” in response to the Murderers’ Law laid down by McCulloch, then the embryonic movement might have been still-born.
The Mass Black Incarceration State, or the New Jim Crow, as Michelle Alexander calls it, has methodically criminalized a whole people. When Walking, Talking and Breathing While Black is punishable by death – a sentence carried out daily in the United States – then organizing for genuine social transformation is beyond the pale of civil protections. The only defense is a militant people’s movement that exacts its own consequences when the state exercises its claims to, essentially, limitless powers. There must be some kind of payback; otherwise, as we have witnessed over the past 40-plus years, the people succumb to self-destructive diversions, demoralization and despair, while the state steadily expands its machinery of social and physical death.
You know the state is worried when it suddenly starts assuring the oppressed that they have certain, limited rights that will be recognized. President Obama, who early in his first term succeeded in legislatively abolishing due process of law, has responded to the threat of a genuine people’s movement by endorsing peaceful protest – by which he means protest within parameters of time and space and behavior laid down by the very same police against which the grievances are directed. This constitutes “ways of channeling your concerns constructively,” says the president.
Monday night, the political poetry played out on CNN’s live split-screen. One side showed the first tear gas canisters landing among the protesters, while on the other President Obama intoned the lie: “We have made enormous progress in race relations over the course of the past several decades. I’ve witnessed that in my own life, and to deny that progress I think is to deny America’s capacity for change.”
Six years into the Age of Obama, it has finally dawned on Black people that Frederick Douglass was right when he said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.” Douglass did not say: “Power concedes nothing without the consent of the legislature and a nod from Democratic Party hack in the Oval Office.” Had Obama not been sharing the screen with the youth of Ferguson, few would have watched his speech. It has required a mass movement in-the-making to focus Black people’s attention on the war waged against them by the state, rather than living vicariously with the family in the White House.
“The burned-out businesses, some of them Black-owned, are collateral damage in a grossly asymmetrical struggle.”
No sooner had the fires and looting commenced in Ferguson, than Obama henchman Al Sharpton and the entire multigenerational cadre of handkerchief heads and New Age opportunists sprang into action, to delegitimize the youth and funnel Black peoples energies into official channels that go nowhere.
CNN’s Van Jones denounced the “small number of knuckleheads” that “are causing the problem.”
Local Black clergy met with the white mayor of Ferguson and tried to shame the youth involved in Monday night’s rebellion. Then they bowed their heads and asked God to solve the problem, as always.
Congressman William “Lacy” Clay, who misrepresents the district and was among the 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus that opted, back in June, to continue the Pentagon’s transfers of weapons to local police departments, denounced The Race as a whole for the destruction of 12 businesses, the night before. “It hurts me to my heart to see what we have turned into,” he said.
Sharpton declared, “Michael Brown will not be remembered for the ashes from the buildings burned in Ferguson. He will be remembered for new legislation and the upholding of laws that protect citizens in the country.”
The burned-out businesses, some of them Black-owned, are collateral damage in a grossly asymmetrical struggle – one in which the insurgents must battle a murderous state, a pervasively racist white society, plus the most backward, opportunistic and comprador elements of their own community. It is true that, in a small town like Ferguson, the loss of jobs, investments and amenities associated with these small “martyred” businesses is significant. In comparison, however, the costs inflicted on African Americans by the Black Misleadership Class since the demise of the last mass people’s movement, in the late Sixties, have been catastrophic. Black family wealth is one-twentieth of median white family wealth, the lowest since slavery. Great Black metropolises have been turned into wastelands, bare of employment, affordable housing, recreation, adequate education, cultural enrichment, and even healthy food. One out of every eight prison inmates in the world is an African American – an arguably genocidal outcome arrived at with the full collaboration of much of Black elected officialdom and the preaching class. Absent a fundamental change in power relationships in America – which can only come about through mass action, within and outside the law – the destruction of the Black social and physical environment can only escalate.
By attempting to delegitimize Black youth – who definitely will break the law and destroy property in their enthusiasm for immediate payback as well as lasting change – the Misleaders seek to corral and, ultimately, kill the movement.
In the coming days and months, activists must be diligent in drawing lines between those honest elements that counsel against violence for moral or tactical and strategic reasons, and those who, like Sharpton, Van Jones and Rep. “Lacy” Clay, seek to destroy the budding mass movement by ostracizing and alienating its youthful core.
It does appear, however, that it’s “Movement Time” at long last. In the words of activist Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, with much of Black America and its allies on the march, “We have already won!”
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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