BHM

Along with predictions of winters staying ability and an onslaught of Hallmark cards February brings Black History month to 2012. This is the month when children in schools are bringing home Martin Luther King Jr worksheets, universities are assigning essay topics about Civil Rights, and television stations everywhere dust off their films with Black leads. While all of these reformist approaches to Black History month are happening, I like to continue my research of the Black Liberation Army. The BLA was a radical spawn of the Black Panther Party. I became aware of the group a few years ago and have continued to try and soak up all of the knowledge I can find. Which, unsurprisingly, is not that much.

The BLA came about on the tail-end of the Panther Party, when the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) was planting agents in radical groups to cause infighting and eventual collapse of organizations they viewed as a threat to the government. You can try to look up the Black Liberation Army, you can try to ask people if they remember it’s existence, and you can try to get the facts from the limited muddled information provided. But the information that is out there is few and far between. Most members are presumed dead or in prison for multiple life sentences. Assata Shakur escaped prison and is exiled in Cuba, but she remains the only free and living member, to my knowledge.

When this small radical faction formed, the USA was in turmoil. Worse than anyone not alive during that time can even imagine. The BLA was made up of revolutionaries who believed the only way to seize power from white America was through an armed militant force. They were an underground group, they were armed, and they knew the kind of revolution they wanted. They saw the Panthers ripped apart by the government and felt they would not see revolution for Black people unless violence was used.

The Black Liberation Army began in 1970. It is so troubling to me that 42 years ago there was an armed resistance here in the United States of America. And this resistance has been completely ignored. There are no lessons in school about what happens when disenfranchised people get together to discuss political climate at a radical level. There are no worksheets that link which Police Officer shot which Panther or Army member. And there are no lesson-plans designed to question why so many citizens in the USA think our society in post-racial, yet we still have a Black History month. I urge everyone (human and dog) to stick their noses into all of the places they don’t belong. Sniff out the truth, because in this political climate no one will tell you if you don’t ask