Freedom is a Constant Struggle

Summary, part 2

The Black Liberation Movement

Davis provides several examples of how movements in the United States have been or could have impacted movements abroad. For Davis, the more connected movements can be, the better.

The Civil Rights movement.

Davis flags that the radicalism of the Black freedom movement of the 1960s has been watered down to just the Civil Rights Movement. This is concerning because the movement itself was not only concerned with civil and legal rights, but also substantive rights such as health care, jobs, housing, and quality education.

These needs were well articulated by the Black Panther Party, which itself had been falsely categorized by the government and public as a terrorist organization, in their Ten Point Program:

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our real history and our role in present-day society.

6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.

8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.

9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.

These points are still fought for today, decades later. Davis flags that in the 1960s, we were confronted with issues that should have been handled in the 1860s, so what will we see in the 2060s?

Black radical tradition.

Davis stresses the importance of the Black radical tradition, which is a way of organizing against racism and colonialism. It is a way of connecting struggles that everyone can claim everywhere, regardless of race, nationality, and location. Davis describes this using several examples, such as how the Black American freedom movement inspired anti-apartheid activists in South Africa.

She also points out that her hometown of Birmingham, AL, was known as the Johannesburg of the South and how Palestinian activists organized their own freedom rider movements. Today, Black radical tradition must fight for immigrants’ rights, against Islamophobia, for poor people, and much more.

Police brutality.

Davis also talks about Ferguson in the context of the systemic problem of police brutality. Black people dying at the hands of police is nothing new, but she is not sure if the officers responsible for being formally charged is the kind of justice needed.

Instead, Davis advocates for systemic change, which would look like reconceptualizing the role of police, creating community control of the police, addressing racism, changing how police use violence as a first resort, and demilitarizing the police. She argues that we need to focus less on individual punishment and more on the structural character of state violence.

Calling Black liberation terrorism.

Davis regularly brings up Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur’s case as an example of how racism exists in the United States government to this day. Shakur had been living peacefully in Cuba through political asylum decades after her involvement in the Black Power movement.

But in 2013, Shakur was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. Shakur, who was arrested in the 1970s on false charges, had been retroactively placed on the terror watch list.

Davis and many others found this to be bizarre, mainly because the concept of terror today has been shifted by George W. Bush’s war on terror after 9/11. The retroactive association of the Black Power movement with terrorism, as seen during and after 9/11, wrongfully associates fights for Black liberation with violence and terrorism.

Global Ramifications of the Black Liberation Movement

Ferguson, MO, and Palestine.

The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in Ferguson, MO in the wake of Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police had global ramifications. In a speech in Ferguson, Davis thanked the movement for inspiring people worldwide concerned with justice, antiracism, and anticolonialism.

She applauds Ferguson for not dropping the torch of struggle and for creating a “broad consciousness of the work that will be required to build a better world” (p. 84). 

Davis uses the relationship between Ferguson protestors and Palestinian activists as an example of transnational solidarity. In photos of Ferguson, Palestinian activists noticed that the tear gas canisters used there were the same used by Israeli police and military. So, they Tweeted at Ferguson protestors with advice on how to deal with those tear gas canisters.

We Charge Genocide

In a speech delivered in Istanbul, Turkey, Davis articulates how those who advocated against the genocide of Armenians could have done something similar to the We Charge Genocide petition. The petition was brought to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress, which charged the United States with the genocide of Black Americans.

The United Nations’ Geneva Convention defines genocide as…

“...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;

• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Presented by W. E. B. Du Bois, the petition argues that the Black ghettos, cotton plantation economy, racial killings, the violence of the Klu Klux Klan, and so much more are acts of genocide against the  Black population in the United States.

Davis mentions this because Black people’s experiences were similar to Armenians’ experiences during the Armenian genocide. For example, both Black grandmothers and Armenian grandmothers had been documented killing their grandchildren out of fear that they would experience the same kind of brutality that they had.

Her point with this example is that there are opportunities for transnational solidarity that can topple the neoliberal ideology that encourages us to focus on ourselves, individual victims, and individual perpetrators.