“...white paranoia is here to stay/The white boy's scheming night and day/What you think about the King Alfred Plan?”
They say truth is stranger than fiction. But what happens when fiction becomes the truth? Take, for instance, the case of the “King Alfred Plan.” The King Alfred Plan was a fictitious U.S. government memo that writer John A. Williams incorporated into his 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am. In the novel, the character Harry Ames discovers a classified document that outlines a multi-agency contingency plan for the mass detention, and eventual “vaporization,” of the African American population. The King Alfred Plan was to be activated “in the event of widespread and continuing and coordinated racial disturbances in the United States.” The Plan was part of a broader project by the “Alliance Blanc,” a coalition of the white western powers, led by the United States, formed in response to the independence of Ghana from England, growing Black militancy, and fears of the threat of Pan-African unity to global white supremacy.
Although fiction, the King Alfred Plan quickly took on the patina of truth. In his attempts to publicize The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams’ publisher made copies of the plan and left them on subway cars in New York City. Those who discovered the copies believed the plan to be real.
Yet the fictional King Alfred Plan could only be read as real because it was not far from the truth. Black folk, of course, have had a long history of surveillance and detention by the state. The anti-Communist Internal Security Act of 1950, otherwise known as the McCarran Act, targeted, among others, Black radicals and immigrants for surveillance, detention, and deportation. The deployment of state troopers and the National Guard to cities like Detroit during the uprisings of 1967, the year The Man Who Cried I Am was published, appeared to affirm the tactics described in the King Alfred Plan. So too did the vicious strategies of the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program and the intensification of Black mass incarceration in the 1970s and 1980s.
Today, evidence of the “truth” of the King Alfred Plan seems more evident than ever. The occupation of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and now Chicago by the National Guard and federal troops, deployed at the behest of the U.S. President, appears to come directly from the King Alfred Plan playbook, as do the nation-wide raids by ICE thugs and the rapid expansion of concentration camps across the United States. Most recently, the Trump administration awarded a $1.2 billion contract to Acquisition Logistics LLC to build the largest immigrant concentration camp in the country, at Fort Bliss in west Texas – a site previously used for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Williams, in The Man Who Cried I Am, seemed to predict these events. A line in the “King Alfred Plan” reads:
In case of Emergency, Minority members will be evacuated from the cities by federalized national guard units, local and state police and, if necessary, by units of the Regular Armed Forces, using public and military transportation, and detained in nearby military installations until a further course of action has been decided.
In 1972, poet, singer, and musician Gil Scott-Heron recorded a track titled “The King Alfred Plan” that was included on the album Free Will. Scott-Heron’s song takes up John A. Williams’ fiction as fact. But as with Williams’s “King Alfred Plan,” Scott-Heron’s fiction is truer than truth. “Brothers and sisters there is a place for you in America,” raps Scott-Heron, “Places are being prepared and readied night and day, night and day.
Gil Scott-Heron’s “King Alfred Plan” is reprinted below.
The King Alfred Plan
Gil Scott-Heron
Uhm, it's 1972, an election year, and, once again
Black people are running for their lives
Reasons are things like the King Alfred Plan
The concentration camps that we used during the second World War
To house oriental-Americans are now being refurbished to
Uhm, confine their new residents, i.e. black people
Brothers and sisters there is a place for you in America
This is the King Alfred Plan
Ha! Brothers and sisters, there is a place for you in America
Places are being prepared and readied
Night and day, night and day
The white boy's plan is being readied
Night and day, night and day
Listen close to what rap say about traps like Allenwood P.A.
Already legal in D.C. to preventively detain you and me
How long you think it's going to be
Before even our dreams ain't free?
You think I exaggerate?
Check out Allenwood P.A.
Night and day, night and day
The white boy's scheming night and day
The Jews and Hitler come to mind
The thought of slavery far behind
But white paranoia is here to stay
The white boy's scheming night and day
What you think about the King Alfred Plan?
You ain't heard? Where you been, man?
If I may paraphrase the government notice reads:
"Should there at anytime become a clear and present danger initiated by any radical element threatening the operation of the government of the United States of America, members of this radical element shall be transported to detention centers until such time as their threat has been eliminated—code King Alfred."
"Bullshit" I bet you say
"There ain't no Allenwood P.A."
And people ain't waiting night and day
Night and day, night and day
There will be without the Motown sound and Thunderbird
Wallowing in the echoes of Malcolm's words
There must be black unity
There must be black unity
For in the end, unity will be thrust upon us
And we upon it and each other
Locked in cages, pens, hemmed in, shoulder-to-shoulder
Arms outstretched for just a crust of bread
Watermelon mirages, an oasis that does not exist
Conjured up by the bubbling stench
Unwashed bodies in unsanitary quarters
Concrete and barbed wire, babies screaming
Stumbling around in a mental circle
Because you never cared enough to be black
In the end, unity will be thrust upon us
Blanketed, stifled, a salty taste in your mouth
From blood oozing from cracks and wooly heads
Red pools becoming thicker than syrup slow down your face
Birds matted by the life force sprung loose from wells
Welled deep by the enforcers of mock justice
Of the red, white, and blue
In the end, unity will be thrust upon us
Let us unite because of love and not hate
Let us unite on our own and not because of barbed-wire death
You dare not ignore the things I say
Whitey's waiting night and day, night and day
Night and day, night and day
Gil Scott-Heron, “King Alfred Plan,” from Free Will (Flying Dutchman Records, 1972)
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