by Jared Ball
January 11, 2003
We have watched the right-wing business world take the peace sign for Verizon, the Beetle's song Revolution for Nike and Dr. King for some computer company. But the Left can also apparently misuse symbolism and with just as much flare.
Let me say first and foremost that I am a big supporter of The Nation magazine. I think by and large it offers some of the better commentary and information on world politics and history. I subscribe to, recommend and cite The Nation with great regularity. However, even the good ones can be overwhelmed by desires to catch the eye often sacrificing accuracy and substance. This is the case with their most recent issue (January 27, 2003) which ignorantly displays the Black Power Fist holding a fig leaf to highlight writer Walter Mosley's cover article calling for a new peace movement.
Mosley's article is a strong one. His views are as valid as any that are offered. But they have little to do with the ideology and practice of Black Power. The choice by Nation editors to co-opt this particular symbol as a logo for Mosley’s article is a tremendously poor one. We do not have the luxury and cannot afford to have the importance of Black Power reduced to or compared with a peace offering made to an enemy even if that message is directed at stopping America from pursuing unjust wars as is Mosley’s point. Mosley and the movement, for which the Fist is a symbol, have fundamental differences which make the symbol a poor choice for the article. Black Power was an appeal to people to take up their own defense - by any means - against a powerful and abusive enemy. Mosley’s is an appeal to that very enemy to learn from those it has abused to be peaceful in finding resolutions to its own problems. This point must be made and remembered. The fact that the United States has never been one to solve its problems peacefully is what caused the need for a Black Power Movement in the first place. Regardless of what some may feel about that movement or those in it, the history must be accurately discussed and placed in context. Putting a leaf in the Fist and running it underneath text calling for peace is as disrespectful to that movement, in fact it is worse than having Nike connected to a song about social change.
Black Power was about taking control over the economics, politics, culture and society of communities already separated legally and/or socially within America’s borders. It was about forming ideological links between foreign-held European colonies in the African diaspora and the Black American colonies held in the United States. Black Power was about recognizing that if freedom was given it could be taken away so therefore it must be seized, held and defended by each succeeding generation. Black Power was about Black unity, pride and accountable, uncompromising leadership. It changed the struggle in America and sent many white liberals into environmental and peace movements. Black Power was about separation rather than segregation or social integration. Black Power was about white support not leadership. It was about audacious and proud pan-Africanism and socialism not peaceful coexistence within a white supremacist capitalist state.
While there has always been a peaceful wing of African struggle in America the Black Power Movement was not its descendant. The ancestral movements of Black Power were the Maroons who waged war against their enemies and changed the course of international relations, geography and the system of enslavement. Black Power’s ancestors were warriors like Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner. Black Power was the descendant of the Deacons for Self-Defense and other African people in America who would defend themselves by any means necessary. Black Power was the descendant of all the brave American born Africans who stood by windows or sat on front porches with guns - as did the great thinking man W.E.B. DuBois during the Atlanta riots saying that he would shoot the first white man to step on his lawn. Black Power was the descendant of Malcolm X whose peace meant power not silence or acquiescence. Black Power was a descendant of those whose response to the enemy was not always peaceful. Not because violence was the preferred course but the only one seen as viable. As Kwame Ture, who is generally credited with coining the phrase “Black Power,” once said, “the choice of violence or peace is not up to us, it is up to our oppressors ”
And we must remember that it was the Black Power Movement that challenged good people to be great and great people to be greater. It was this movement that challenged Dr. King to evolve analytically to the point where he was hated, hunted and killed by the very country that now claims to honor him. It was Black Power that brought into being the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army and Guerrilla Family whose members were (and are) hunted down, imprisoned or killed as a result of their unrelenting desire for power, i.e. freedom. It was Black Power that brought about Black Studies and academic insurrection. It was Black Power that encouraged students to, at times violently, take over universities and administration buildings demanding that they be offered courses that taught the history, politics and economics that we still need and do not get. This perpetually assaulted academic movement is attacked to this day not because it is intellectually inferior but because it is a living descendant of uncompromising Black Power.
Black Power influenced the world. From Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, Sekou Toure in Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, to Fidel Castro in Cuba and Maurice Bishop in Grenada. Black Power touched all who sought revolution. In America it influenced the American Indian Movement (AIM), Latin American groups such as the Young Lords and supportive white radicals. To this day its influence reaches younger generations through organizations, some educators and musicians from Dead Prez and The COUP to Blackstar and Jill Scott. But it needs to be properly studied and discussed. We cannot let yet another symbol be diminished regardless from where it comes. The Black Power Movement was not a peace movement. It was an assertive response to a lack of justice, a lack of freedom and a lack of peace and its symbol should remain an unblemished example to today’s struggling people.
-Jared Ball, aka The Funkinest Journalist, is a founding member of Organized Community Of United People (COUP) a Washington, DC-based organization for total change (www.voxunion.com/coup). He has a master's degree in Africana Studies from the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University and is currently a Ph.D. student in Journalism at the University of Maryland. He is also a host of Chaos Or Community a weekly radio foray into funk, news, history and politics.