“The Movement for Justice Against Police Violence,” published by City Lights, an Open Media series. What makes a movement a movement? What social forces come together to make it cohere, to build it into something that can stand in the world like a newborn thing, able to drop, rise, on unsteady legs, breathe deeply, and then run its course. Consider this: there has never been a time since the founding of this government that there has not been a movement but, like any other thing in life, it has been weak or strong, in ebb or flow, depending on the social conditions it faced.
We live in an era where the very notion of a movement seems strange or oddly out of time. That is so because, over the last half century the State has worked hard to disappear the memory of the movements of the sixties, or, for that matter, any other time in US history. It has utilized the media, the academy, and public schools to present a false, misleading historical narrative; to confuse people so that they could not see how movements grow, interact, swell; and finally present such positions into the public square that they cannot be refused.
Thanks to movement scholars, we know of the deep hatred and venomous methods employed against the late Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, a man who was pressured by the U.S. government to kill himself. His greatest enemy was his own government, as personified by the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, an unabashed racist, used his powers to try to destroy any movement which questioned the status quo. But, he reserved his most deadly assault for members of the Black Freedom movements. That was his historical role and function.
This may be perhaps best seen in the program code named COINTELPRO, code speak for the Counter Intelligence Program, operated for decades by the FBI, which attacked Black leaders from M.L. King to Dr. Huey P. Newton, of the Black Panthers. All were treated, in the words of one high ranking FBI official William Sullivan, Assistant Director, FBI, speaking to staffers of the US Senate committee investigating COINTELPRO as, “Enemies of the State.” Indeed, as if they were foreigners in the land of their birth. He said, “This is a common practice, rough, tough, dirty business. To repeat, it is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. No holds were barred. We have used that technique against foreign espionage agents, and they have used it against us.”
Question: “The same methods were brought here?“ Answer: “Yes, brought home against any organization against which we were targeting. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.” That’s from the US Senate report known as, “Hearings Before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Operations.” It was published in 1976, volume six. Nor should we forget how the FBI viewed M.L. King. Again, Sullivan, “We regard Martin Luther King as the most dangerous Negro leader in the country.”
Why is this important to us now, at the womb of what may be another emergent social movement? It is vital for it teaches young activists and revolutionaries in the making, that this is the real essential nature of the State. It opposes any social force that seeks to change it, to make it more democratic, that threatens to establish popular power over the conservative, jealous powers of the State. If you try to begin a social movement and fail to understand that central history, you will run into a buzz saw that will leave you in pieces. This is an excerpt from the booklet the “Movement for Justice Against Police Violence,” published by City Lights and Open Media San Francisco, and this is the author, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
