DALLAS—At the tail end of a demonstration against police violence on July 7, 2016 in downtown Dallas, Texas gunshots rang out, police ran for cover and some of them fell to the ground, mortally wounded as pandemonium swept the streets.
The Dallas protests centered around the July 5th caught-on-camera police murder of 37-year-old Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the caught-on-camera and narrated police murder of 32-year-old Philando Castile in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb on July 6, 2016.
We were later to learn that an African, 26-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson, a Dallas resident would show the world that Africans too, are capable of having a military response to the military occupation of the African community by the militarized colonial violence of U.S. police agencies who are murdering our people in an effort of containment and terror.
Micah X had been trained by the U.S. imperialist military and sent to Afghanistan in 2014 where he was expected to kill and murder other colonized people who were fighting for their freedom. So it was easy for Micah to recognize what foreign soldiers were doing to the Afghan people was the same as U.S. police were doing to the African community in the United States.
It is clear in the Uhuru movement that “In Afghanistan they are called “marines” and in the black community they are called the “police.” Both are foreign occupiers whose mission is to protect the status quo of capitalist colonialism.
In fact, the legal system in the U.S. treats Afghanistan and African communities in the U.S. the exact same when it comes to immunity from prosecution for crimes committed against the people.
More than two thousand cases brought before the Obama Department of Justice under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch with not a single indictment. They are not about to turn against their troops.
Surely, Micah Johnson had eyes and ears on the barbarity of U.S. troops as they walked the streets and commanded obedience through armed violence from the Afghan people just as the U.S. police act inside the black community here in the U.S.
The questions of war and peace and police and military, however, are questions that are deliberately made murky in the narrative by those who oppress and exploit us.
They would have us believe that it is a question of more and better training of the police; Africans must be more obedient; the need for more body cameras; and we must show more love for one another; or in the words of a battered and beaten Rodney King, “Why we all just can’t get along.”
Dallas Negro police chief David Brown even suggest that we join the police and become complicit in our own brutal oppression.
It is the responsibility of the leadership of the African Working Class, the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) to define and explain war and peace, police and military and that there is war being waged against our class and nation by the white colonialist and their black minions.
We must take charge of this narrative. Even as Our Africa was being decimated and Africans stolen and murdered by the millions, they have never publicly admitted they were at war against us. In fact, they deny there was ever a war against Africa and African people.
But we know better. We can start with our very presence here in North America, throughout the Caribbean and South America and attribute this presence as a result of “war.”
The militarization of the U.S. police
It was announced at an August 8th press conference called by the Dallas Police Department and its Negro police David Brown that Micah Johnson had been cowardly killed by a military robot that delivered an explosive device or bomb to Micah’s defensive position ending in his death.
It was in August of 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri that heroic Africans forced the U.S. police to bring out its military armaments against the people.
We saw military tanks, armored personnel carriers with 50 caliber mounted big guns, all operated and maintained by the police with scopes zeroed-in on the people who had nothing but rocks, bottles and the will to be free, but who stood up and fought nonetheless.
Indeed, when the people demanded to know where this military hardware came from that was used against the Africans in Ferguson, we found that it was the Pentagon through its so-called 1033 Program.
The 1033 Program gave to local police agencies more than 5 billion dollars’ worth of “excess” military equipment since the Rodney King rebellions in 1992. This also includes grenade launchers and automatic long guns, etc.
The Black is Back Coalition called the question on “war” in 2011
During March of 2011, the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations held a national conference in Washington, D.C. called “The Other Wars”.
This very question of war and peace was at the center of discussion. The question was who defines war and peace. Certainly we don’t give the enemies of the world’s peoples that prerogative.
In one of the major documents leading up to the March 2011 Conference, Glen Ford of Black Agenda proclaimed:
“They even feel qualified to decide which conflicts are to be elevated to classification as wars, and which are something else, something less…compelling.
“The slave trade, a centuries-long crime that provided the material basis for the development of capitalism at a cost to the Africans that cannot be fully tabulated, was one long war, whose unfinished battles reverberate in our own era.
“Yet, the period of African enslavement is not called a war, or a succession of wars, but rather treated as a kind of dark and violent weather that clouds our common history.
“The purpose is to obscure the historically gargantuan fact that white Europe and America waged slavery, as they waged war, the two being inseparable. If slavery and colonialism were forms of warfare, then who won?
“If the oppressed do not believe they have won, based on their current material and other conditions, then they cannot allow the war to be declared over. And from that conclusion, many others flow. Recognizing the true facts of war is therefore, is of crucial political importance…”
But we must look at more than the facts of police murders. We have to look at “incidents” like the lynching and dismemberment of James Byrd Jr in Texas where we see for the first time in Texas history that a white man received the death penalty for the outright murder of an African.
What about the infant mortality rate where black babies die at twice the rate of white babies; what about black men’s life expectancy being almost 10 years less than a white man; what about the murders of Malcolm and Martin and the more than 30 members of the Black Panther Party?
What about the draft riots of 1863 where mobs of white people roamed the streets of New York randomly look for and murdering African people?
What about Rosewood, Florida and North Tulsa, Oklahoma where Africans were murdered in mass just because of their economic independence?
What about the MOVE Family Africa that were persecuted and bombed and murdered in 1978 and 1985, respectively?
In addition, the murder of Alton Sterling has to bring back the horrible specter of the deliberate slayings of our people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina which should lay bare the question of whether or not the U.S. government is at war with Africans in the U.S.
And what about our contact with the police that has resulted in more than a million of us being kidnapped and jailed and nearly 7 million of us having some ongoing relationship with the criminal justice system of the colonizer.
But probably the most insulting of this non-war relationship we have with the U.S. government is their legal ability to give us the “death penalty.” How insulting!
And there is an African U.S. president who holds a state funeral for the murderous police and has yet to attend a funeral of the many thousands of Africans that have been murdered on his watch.
We must not have any allusions that the U.S. government and the white world have and are waging war against the Africans throughout the world.
The counter-insurgency implanted by the white ruling class State is real. The so-called “war on drugs” which was in reality a war on the African community has pretty much run its course, but its devastating affects are still in place: prisons, busted up families and joblessness.
The U.S. police are even bringing back the so-called Decoy and Stake-out squads who were point men in the deliberate murders of Africans in the 60’s and 70’s.
The Decoy and Stake-out squads were police who would come into the African community dressed as derelicts, wreaking of alcohol, with money sticking out of their pockets. As soon as an African reached for the money they would shoot them dead.
Atlanta and Detroit were notorious for this practice. They called it fighting crime, but it was war.
They didn’t have Program 1033 back then but they had the Law Enforcement Assistant Association (LEAA) that funneled funds into the colonial police to put down black insurrection.
Micah Xavier Johnson is a martyr and patriot of the African Revolution
Clearly, Micah Johnson understood the question of war and peace. He could not see peace as a slave. He was correct on that. And there will be many thousands who will rise up in defense of our people and the African Revolution and we applaud that. Because like Malcolm said, “I can’t stop it because I didn’t start it.”
There are also those of us who are committed to the long view which is to organize the masses into the political organization that will seize power and end the oppression and exploitation of Africans and the suffering masses of the world once and for all time.
The Revolution is the people in arms. The goal is to destroy the capitalist economic system.
As we go forward in the revolutionary project we understand what Micah and Mark Essex understood––Africa is our future.
Mark Essex made a similar attack as Micah beginning on December 31, 1972 in New Orleans, Louisiana where he declared “Africa greets you” as he revealed the warrior mentality and instinct of the African as he mounted a heroic attack on the New Orleans Police Department in guerilla warfare style.
Mark Essex, whose African name was Mata, sent the following message to a New Orleans Television station. The note stated:
“Africa greets you. On December 31, 1972 approximately 11pm, the downtown New Orleans Police Department will be attacked. Reason: Many. But the death of two innocent brothers will be avenged. And many others. P.S. Tell pig Giarrusso the felony action squad ain’t shit.” ‘Mata’
When the smoked cleared, Mata had attacked the New Orleans police headquarters fought his way out of a warehouse, killing two cops, then making his way to the Downtown Holliday Inn a week later on January 7, 1973.
All toll, Mata killed 9, 5 of whom were cops. In addition, 9 others were seriously wounded.
Police initially reported that they were fighting a squad of people from atop the Holiday Inn. But it was only Mata!
Like Micah X Johnson, they had to resort to the use of a U.S. Marine Vietnam styled helicopter to dislodge Mata from his fortified position. An autopsy revealed they shot him more than 200 times.
And of course there was the heroic military fight-back of the Black Liberation Army which our courageous sister Assata Shakur was part of along with Sundiata Acoli and others who are still imprisoned.
The Black Liberation Army and Mata came at the end of a revolutionary period. Micah X Johnson is beginning an era of revolutionary upheaval.
Micah X was praised when he killed in the name of the oppressors, but as soon as he extracts justice for his people, he is demonized by those who praised him.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela said back in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri: “The genie is out the bottle and it won’t be put back in.”
Long live Micah Johnson!
Long live Mark Essex!
Long Live Gavin Long!
We are winning!
We will win!