| Black Agenda Report

Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Yes, Defund the Cops – And Put Them Under Community Control
25 Jun 2020
Community control of the police means empowering the people to shape and oversee the mechanisms of their own security and end forever the armed occupation of our communities by hostile forces. ‘’Street power’ will be dissipated if organizers leave the levers of power in the hands of local Democrats…
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, BAR editor and columnist
How Do You Spell Desecration of African Burials?: “Nigger!”
01 Jul 2020
Much of the nation may be repudiating white supremacy, but not Montgomery County, Maryland, which is paving over sacred Black ground in an attempt to bury its own racist history. “Scattered pieces of ‘light-colored elongated material consistent with skeletal material’ may be our ancestors.”
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Amiri Poem for Boss Tweet
01 Jul 2020
Who tolt us ‘bout an unknown 19th of June— who the TikTok teens cast as buffoon? Who? Who say Douglass alive and doin’ good work— who turn the War House into a grifter perk? Who? Who be grabbin’ pussy and standin’ they ground— who think they farts have symphonic sound? Who? Who say Mexicans are…
Jahan Choudhry BAR Comments Editor
Letters from Our Readers
01 Jul 2020
This week community control of police and the failings of the Biden campaign were on your minds. We share your letters for “Yes, Defund the Cops — And Put Them Under Community Control” and “Freedom Rider: Democrats Move Right and Towards Defeat.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Nicole Fleetwood’s “Marking Time”
01 Jul 2020
Incarcerated activists have so many tools and skills to teach about resisting brutal regimes. “Penal space is both the built environment of carceral facilities and also the social relations structured through cacerality.”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Edward Onaci’s “Free the Land”
01 Jul 2020
The desire for US citizenship was never the sole consideration of African and African-descended people. “Many of the sociopolitical problems African-descended peoples experience in the U.S. could be solved through political independence and territorial sovereignty.”
Robert Greene II
A Southern Vanguard, The Lost History of Communism Below the Mason-Dixon Line
01 Jul 2020
Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s. “An ever-growing number of radical Southerners agreed that the struggle against white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too.”
Garrett Felber
The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New
01 Jul 2020
Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. “Struggles for black freedom have always had to contend with prisons and police as the enforcement arm of the racial capitalist state.”
Jeremy Scahill and Robin D.G. Kelley
A Black Scholar on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country
01 Jul 2020
If there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity, says Robin D.G. Kelley. “It’s not simply: better jails, better police, better training. It’s: no police, it’s no jails, no prisons.”
Adofo Minka
The Self-Confessed Bankruptcy of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba
01 Jul 2020
Jackson, Mississippi’s Black mayor is celebrated as a “radical” in some quarters, but his cops kill, maim and abuse Black people just like police forces everywhere in the US. “The mayor’s reform efforts are meant to reconcile Black toilers with the Black led police state.”