Radicals revive the Communist Party’s segregated black nation.
July 22, 2016
A separate black nation in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, which would sever Florida from the rest of the nation, might sound crazy or at least complicated. On the other hand, according to Christian Davenport, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, it’s simple and sensible.
“Actually, I think that it is fairly easily for African-Americans to form a Black nation within the United States,” professor Davenport told David Love of the Atlanta Black Star. “There are large sections of the United States that have nothing but Black people in them already. There are cults and militias as well as private corporations that do whatever they want behind their closed doors.”
Davenport, author of How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa, explained that “from my time in New York in Chicago, it is clear that organizations like the Nation of Islam occupy decent size areas in American cities. The idea of Black folk coming together thus does not seem that difficult to me.”
For the professor, also a faculty associate at the UM’s Center for Political Studies, “The Republic of New Africa actually had several innovative ways to seek territorial control. One involved something akin to electoral empowerment whereby Blacks would get individuals elected who would, in turn, deputize and otherwise bring in members of the RNA to govern. Another involved something akin to stepping into situations of state failure. Here, the RNA would find locales where the U.S. government has basically stepped out and/or can no longer maintain control. The RNA had the idea of stepping into this vacuum. Now, the difficult part becomes arming that nation in an organized fashion and getting recognition from the United States as well as other nations. This is where the difficulty will come from.”
So maybe the separate black nation is not so simple after all. “The minute you go aggressive and militaristic, you cannot wind the clock back,” the professor told the Atlanta Black Star. “Nation-building is incredibly hard to do and it involves diverse tasks.”
In the same article, Gen. Babu Omowale, national minister of defense for the People’s New Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, explained that since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, “we’ve been constantly attacked by white society and white supremacy. We’ve never been left alone, so I think it is important for Black people to arm ourselves.”
In the Daily Caller, Eric Owens explored links between Dallas murderer Micah X. Johnson, the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, and black liberation militias.
Victoria Bynum, emeritus professor of history at Texas State University, is the author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, which inspired the current Free State of Jones movie. Bynum told the Star: “Clearly, the roots of Black nationalism and separatism are present in the violently white supremacist counter-revolution that destroyed the promise of Reconstruction. Racial segregation, second-class citizenship, a renewed KKK opened the 20th century, setting in motion Black responses that frequently viewed independence and separatism as the only recourse.”
Contrary to Bynum, Davenport, Omowale and other radicals, the roots of a separate, segregated black state go back to the Communist Party USA, a Soviet-controlled party with an overwhelmingly white leadership. CPUSA doctrine held that blacks were not real Americans, and as Paul D’Amato noted in the International Socialist Review, “In 1928, the Comintern declared that Blacks in the U.S. constituted a nation, and they called for ‘self-determination in the Black Belt.’ The Black Belt was a swath of territory cutting through the South known for its rich, dark soil, in which rural Blacks at that time were concentrated in large numbers.”
Likewise, in “Communism’s African-American Soviet Republic,” Paul Kengor charted how in 1930 the Communist International called for creation of a Soviet-directed and controlled “Negro Republic” among America’s Southern states. Professor Kengor also found that the current Revolutionary Communist Party calls for black Americans to unite into a separate, autonomous republic in the American South, “the southern part of the former imperialist United States of America.” The decision would be made by “a special vote in which only African-Americans would be eligible to participate.”
“Whether CPUSA or the Revolutionary Communist Party, they never go away,” Kengor wrote. “They merely lie in wait to exploit the next crisis, whether in the Jim Crow South or in the efforts of Barack Obama and the Wall Street mob to demonize ‘millionaires and billionaires.’”
Professor Kengor, author of The Communist, also observed that CPUSA organizer Frank Marshall Davis, “would advise a Hawaiian adolescent named Barack Obama.” In the home stretch of his presidency, black belt apartheid is sure to mount a surge.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield and Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Film Industry.