Week 8 Reading

Black army rises

  • John Fitzgerald Johnson

    • called Grandmaster Jay

    • leader of the Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC)

    • former soldier, failed political candidate, hip-hop DJ, rambling egotist, and a prolific self-promoter

    • age unknown, possibly 57

  • NFAC: Black militia group

    • subscribes to esoteric racist doctrines

    • opposes black lives matter

    • follows a leader who believes we live in a period of apocalyptic tribulation signaled by the movements of celestial bodies

    • modus operandi is to deploy a more fearsome black militia wherever white militias dare to appear

    • intends to establish a racially pure country called the United Black Kemetic Nation (UBKN)

  • Jay claims that the NFAC first appeared publicly when nine white supremacists came to Dayton, Ohio in May 2019

  • they showed up in larger numbers in 2020 (Jay claims thousands, but probably hundreds) at protests over confederate monuments and over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia; at protests over the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky; and at protests over the police shooting of Trayford Pellerin in Lafayette, Louisiana

  • distinguish themselves from two groups they loathe or deride: white militias (camo-bedecked guys who show up at the same demonstrations and, sometimes, at the behest of the president, try to topple American democracy) and Black Lives Matter, whose activists tend toward nonviolence

  • Jay believes the BLM movement accomplished nothing

  • author compares NFAC to white militias

    • if NFAC had done what white militia groups did on January 6 at the Capitol, “they’d still be bringing the body bags”

  • Jay uses January 6 to justify the existence of his group

  • only known casualties have been the NFAC’s own members, when one member fired her weapon seemingly by accident

    • “Right-wingers, gun enthusiasts, and ex-military types on social media ridicule Jay for his and his followers’ poor weapons discipline”

  • Jay makes alarming threats such as encouraging his followers to burn down government officials’ homes and murder their children (alleged)

    • “such threats hardly compare with the actual storming of the Capitol”

  • Jay holds contradicting opinions of the Holocaust, Hitler, and Jews

  • claimed he had five MOSs in the military, then later said he only had two

  • Jay has a history of violence and was dishonorably discharged from the military

  • threatened to kill his wife and her platoon sergeant at a recognition ceremony in 2003

  • managed to reenlist just to go absent without leave

  • tried a career as a hip-hop DJ, was accused of plagiarism and resume exaggeration

  • reappeared in 2015 as an advocate of the BLM movement

    • once repudiated the BLM slogan and said all lives matter

  • armed self-defense has been around at least since Cyril Briggs, who founded the African Blood Brotherhood in 1919

  • during the first World War, many black people considered peaceful protests inadequate

  • Robert F. Williams wrote the classic text of Black armed resistance, Negroes with Guns, which argues that violence against Black people calls for violence by black people

  • Jay said he does not admire or imitate any Black activists from previous generations, despite the NFAC being wildly similar to the Black Panthers

  • Jay’s rhetoric calls for Black self-reliance and segregation from white people

  • calls for “descendants of the Portuguese and Atlantic slave trade” to separate themselves from others and create a Black ethnostate

  • the NFAC aims to assemble, in one place, a million legal black gun owners, to show that the United Black Kemetic Nation can defend itself

  • Jay believes we live in an alternate timeline

NOTES:

  • this guy is crazy, but some of his ideas are no unfounded

  • he should not be allowed to own weapons

  • i like the way the author narrates the information, clearly expressing how crazy he is while contextualizing his actions and thoughts to those of white militia groups who get away with it

Leader of Not Fucking Around Coalition

  • discrepancies in how law enforcement handled the storming of the Capitol versus Black Lives Matter protests

  • lots of hypocrisy between how people treat the NFAC and how they treat white militia groups

    • NFAC has always abided by the law. they are nonviolent

    • white militia groups stormed the capitol, brought weapons to a place where it’s not an open-carry state, and killed people

  • if NFAC had raided the Capitol, the government would have pulled out all the stops and ensured they never even made it to the building

  • argues there is a difference between this coalition and others such as the black panthers

    • black panthers were mostly kids; the average age of a member of the NFAC is between 45 and 69

  • gun sales in the African American community were up 58% as of 2021

    • Jay showed them how to put boots on the ground lawfully, arm themselves legally, and exercise their constitutional rights without there being any problem

freedom and revolution without end

  • stono rebellion

    • sunday september 9, 1739

    • an african from angola, named jemi, led a band of twenty enslaved africans on a general rebellion at the banks of the stono river

    • killed sixty whites

    • ambushed by armed whites; most rebels were killed or captured and sold into slavery in san domingo and jamaica

    • resulted in policies to reduce provocations for rebellion

      • masters were penalized for imposing excessive work or brutal punishments of slaves that could sow discord and cause africans to rebel

      • created some opportunities for some blacks to learn the christian doctrine—especially the verses that would assist in keeping the enslaved from rebelling

      • new law required a ratio of one white for ever ten blacks on any plantation

      • negro act of 1740: prohibited enslaved people from growing their own food, assmebling in groups, earning money they could keep without giving it to their owners, and learning to read

  • Benjamin Banneker

    • mathematician and astronomer

    • from 1792 to 1797 perhaps the best mathematician in the US

    • calculated ephemerides (locations of the stars and planets) for widely circulated almanacs

    • popularized the use of tables of star and planet locations for farming and other uses

    • constructed the first successful clock ever made by an African and one of the first made in America

  • Ira Frederick Aldrige

    • first African actor to have a bronze plaque at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon

    • moved to europe and never returned to the us

  • African Free School: one of the first initiatives of self-determination

  • gabriel prosser’s revolt

    • “archangel of african salvation”

    • 1800

    • enslaved Africans Tom and Pharoah unraveled one of the most elaborate plots in the history of slavery by telling their master that blacks were planning a rebellion

      • Tom, Uncle Tom, and tomming became an idea illustrating the willingness of some blacks to compromise their own freedom

      • uncle tom’s cabin

  • The Haitian Revolution

    • leaders: Mackandal, Boukman, and Cecile Fatiman, Toussaint L’Ouverture, dessalines, and Cristophe

    • fought and won in 1804

  • Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy

    • inspired by haitian revolution

    • black informers told the whites about his plan to revolt

    • more than 130 africans, including vesey, were arrested

    • 47 found guilty of the plot, 37 executed and 12 pardoned

  • Louisiana German Coast Rebellion

    • Charles Deslondes: free African born in San domingo

      • could no longer stand to see women and children and fellow Africans beaten near to death for the slightest transgression

    • December 1810: Deslondes organized a close group of Africans to prepare for war with the slave-owners

    • January 8, 1811: he led a group of 30-40 men along with the German Coast of Louisiana in a killing spree against white plantation owners

      • whites captured someof the fighters and executed nearly 100 blacks

      • white executioners placed the heads of 16 black freedom fighters on posts along the road leading to the plantation where Deslondes had started the revolt

  • Nat Turner’s Rebellion

    • August 1831

  • Black Seminole Rebellion

    • 1835-1836

    • one of the major African revolts in the US

    • 400 enslaved Africans joined the Maroons

    • 1,200 Africans involved

    • 400 white deaths

    • 400 black deaths

  • Sengbe and the Amistad Mutiny

    • 53 africans mutinied aboard the spanish schooner La Amistad

    • july 1839

    • led by Sengbe Pieh

    • ended up in the united states

    • their case was sent to the supreme court

    • march 9, 1841: court ruled that the Africans had to be set free because the slave trade was illegal and they were eventually returned to their Mende homeland

  • 1848 St Croix Rebellion

    • Moses Gottlieb

      • “General Buddhoe”

    • July 3, 1848

  • Sojourner Truth

    • encouraged Abraham Lincoln to urge Northern Africans to support the war effort

    • organized a group of women to serve as nurses for wounded Union soldiers

    • militant campaigner for women’s rights as well as for the rights of her people

  • The Fugitive Slave Law

    • 1850

    • anyone who escaped from slavery would be returned to their slave owners if captured, even if they were caught in a free territory

    • integral part of the compromise of 1850

      • anti-slavery leaders gained California as a free state and the prohibition of slave-trading in the district of columbia

      • slavery party got concessions including slaveholding in texas and the passage of the fugitive slave law

  • The Anthony Burns Incident

    • boarded a ship in Alexandria, Virginia in March 1854 and made his way to boston, where he worked in a clothing store owned by Lewis Hayden, an abolitionist

    • May 24, 1854: Burn’s slave-owner snatched him under the Fugitive Slave Law as he was returning home from his job

    • a group of abolitionists, led by Lewis Hayden and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, stormed the courthouse to release Burns

    • 13 people had been arrested and 1 guard had been killed

    • June 2, 1854: 50,000 people lined the streets to watch 2,000 marines escort a shackled Anthony Burns to a waiting ship to be taken back to Virginia

  • Martin Delany States his Case

    • advocated for a separate country for black people

    • one of the original leaders of self-determination and self-definition among blacks

  • Mary Ann Shadd and Henry Bibb

    • Shadd worked for the equality and integration of blacks in all institutions

    • second black woman to earn a law degree (circa 1883)

    • first black woman to cast a vote in a national election and one of the first to testify before a committee of the House of Representatives

  • henry mcneal turner

    • greatest african methodist episcopal leader since richard allen

  • hamburg massacre

    • south carolina - july 4, 1876

    • two white men in a buggy happened upon a black militia drilling in the center of town during the centennial celebrations

    • democrats demanded that the black militia be disbanded as they did not want black men walking the streets with guns

    • one white man was killed

    • 29 blacks taken as prisoners

    • 5 blacks considered leaders were shot down in cold blood

  • Leading Reconstruction Riots

    • 1868 Opelousas, Louisiana

    • 1868 Camilla Massacre, Georgia

    • 1869–71 Jackson County War, Florida

    • 1870 Eutaw, Alabama

    • 1870 Laurens, South Carolina

    • 1871 Meridan, Mississippi

    • 1873 Colfax Massacre

    • 1874 Vicksburg, Mississippi

    • New Orleans, Louisiana (Liberty Place

      Riot)

    • 1874 Coushatta, Louisiana

    • 1875 Yazoo City, Mississippi

    • 1875 Clinton, Mississippi

    • 1876 Ellenton, South Carolina

    • 1876 Hamburg, South Carolina

  • threats and reactions

    • 1868: white legislators voted to expel all black members of the house of representatives on the grounds that office should not be held by those who came from servile backgrounds

    • Henry Mcneal Turner organized the International Migration Society

      • organized 2 ships with more than 500 emigrants to travel to Liberia in 1895 and 1896

  • Harriet Tubman and Revolutionary Seizure of Property

    • credited with personally escorting 300 Africans to freedom on more than 20 separate missions

    • married John Tubman, a freeman who did not approve of her desire to be free

    • first trip was to retrieve her sister, nieces and nephews, and other members of her family from Baltimore

    • worked in Philadelphia and Cape May to gain money for her missions

    • on at least 8 missions she collaborated with Thomas Garett and William Still

    • Still wrote the book Underground Railroad

    • none of her people were ever recaptured!

    • during the civil war, harriet tubman worked as a spy for the union army

  • The Dred Scott Decision

    • march 1857: all africans, as well as free, were not and could never become citizens of the united states

    • supreme court said that the 1820 missouri compromise was unconsitutional and therefore slavery was permitted in all states and territories

    • dred scott:a slave who ahd lived in the free state of illinois and the free state of wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of missouri with his slaveholder

    • since scott was black he was not a citizen and therefore had no rights before the court

    • “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit”

    • this decision was seen as one of the saddest moments in the struggle for a progressive society

  • John Brown and the Raid on Harpers Ferry

    • october 16, 1859: white abolitionist John Brown marched into Harpers Ferry to take over the US Armory

      • there were 5 africans in his group of 22 men

        • Lewis S. Leary, Dangerfield Newby, John A. Copeland, Shields Green, and Osborne P. Anderson

      • Brown executed by hanging on December 2, 1859

      • storer college was founded in the harpers ferryafter the civil war in honor of john brown

      • 1881: Frederick Douglass delivered one of his most powerful panegyrics in praise of John Brown

      • second meeting of the niagra movement was held at storer college in 1904 in recognition of the importance of the location for african american freedom

  • The Epic of the People:Out of the Fire of Brutality

student pres:

NFAC and Capitol Riots

  • hypocrisy within the government

    • right-wing extremists

      • over 1500 charged, over 1000 pardoned

    • NFAC

      • Jay convicted and sentenced to federal and state charges

  • “still be body bags”

    • compare January 6 to BLM movement

      • significantly more Black deaths from BLM

      • Nat Turner’s Rebellion

        • 36 black individuals killed

  • growing numbers

    • NFAC numbers have grown exponentially

    • hypocrisy leads more people to join

    • gun sales have gone up in the African American community

african american people chap 4