From the Black Panthers to 2Pac to Ferguson: The History Behind the FBI’s Latest Move Against Black Activists

Two members of the Black Panther Party are met on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento, May 2, 1967, by Police Lt. Ernest Holloway, who informs them they will be allowed to keep their weapons as long as they cause no trouble and do not disturb the peace. Earlier several members had invaded the Assembly chambers and had their guns taken away.

The FBI lists nine “persistent extremist movements in the US”: white supremacy, militia, sovereign citizens, anarchists, abortion, animal rights, environmental rights, Puerto Rican Nationalism, and now “black identities.” This new addition to the list understandably raised hackles, given the FBI’s decades-long record of surveillance and dirty tricks, ranging all the way up to assassination, against black activists. The Bureau even had an entire effort—COINTELPRO, for COunterINTELligence PROgram—which sought to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” black activists and organizations, as well as many other groups. COINTELPRO began in 1956, and was officially discontinued in 1971 after it was exposed, though other efforts, identical in all but name, continued long afterwards.

The FBI attempted to use their newly created extremist movement to tie Micah Johnson, who targeted cops in a violent 2016 shooting spree, to activists concerned with police violence. (Balogun praised Johnson in a social media post, which also alarmed the Bureau). The FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit predicted that “perceptions of unjust treatment of African-Americans and the perceived unchallenged illegitimate actions of law enforcement will inspire premeditated attacks against law enforcement”—a prediction that mostly serves to give the Bureau new leeway in going after anyone who is concerned about police violence, including activists like Balogun.

The real reason Balogun was targeted, according to Kilaika Shakur, the spokesperson for the Free Rakem Balogun Defense Committee, has nothing to do with guns, protest chants, or social media.

“He trained people to learn how to use firearms, self-defense, and to create a healthy lifestyle,” she explains. “He was a very strong political activist in the areas of community organizing, self-reliance, self-determination, and things of that nature. He did believe in the right to bear arms, and felt that people should be trained with it, particularly black people. Having him around was a threat to their structure.”

And going after threats to their structure—particularly black ones—is what the FBI has been doing for nearly a century, starting with Marcus Garvey in 1919 and continuing through today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

But there was a time, not that long ago, when state repression led to a much more forceful response than chanting. For over a decade, from 1970 until the early ’80s, there was an underground black movement that was fighting “war without terms” against a police force that was killing hundreds of African-Americans a year (almost 1,000 just between 1971-73), and against a state that was committing violence on a much larger scale against non-white people abroad.

The Black Liberation Army [BLA] was an “anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-sexist” clandestine organization that grew out of an FBI-encouraged split in the Black Panther Party. Former BPP member Thomas McCreary put it most clearly in a recent interview: 

“We took the position that if there was going to be wailing in the black household, there would be some wailing in the white household, or the oppressor’s household,” he said. “There had to be funerals on both sides.”

The BLA’s primary targets at first were police, which they explained in an early statement. They spoke of “the struggle to take over, dismantle, and weaken the oppressors’ police apparatus in our community.”

This approach to battling oppression was not as out-of-nowhere as it might sound today. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, urban guerilla war was a tactic being used all over the globe against repressive regimes. There was even a how-to book, Carlos Marighella’s 1969 tract Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. The RAND Corporation staidly noted in a 1971 paper on the phenomenon that, “In recent years, guerillas have battled government forces in the cities of Algiers, Amman, Belfast, Calcutta, Caracas, Dacca, Guatemala, Montevideo, Quebec, and São Paulo… Some, like Santo Domingo and Paris, have been the scenes of full-scale urban uprisings.”

Author and professor Dan Berger, who has written about incarceration and radical political movements, connects the BLA’s birth to the worldwide movement against colonialism.

“The emergence of the BLA and some of their tactics and approaches can’t be separated from both what was happening politically, but also what was happening historically,” he explains. “Around the world there were these different anti-colonial guerilla forces that were participating in attacks on soldiers. They were often fighting for independence and socialism. I think that the BLA saw itself in that tradition and really shaped by the kind of non-state guerilla armies in places like Ireland, Palestine, and Vietnam, as well as in Angola, Mozambique, and parts of Africa. For the BLA, the police function as an occupying army—and I think that analysis was not at all unique to the BLA.”

Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers and the author of a 2010 book about the Black Panther Party, agrees. She describes the BLA’s thinking as an “anti-colonial form of politics.”

“They solidified the question of state violence and linked home violence to violence abroad,” she says. “This idea of looking at police as an occupying army and military force, and linking that to the kind of violence and mass murder seen in Vietnam, Cambodia, and South East Asia, as well as CIA and anti-communist intervention across the globe.”

This framing of police as an occupying force has been mainstreamed in recent years, especially following the rebellion in Ferguson. The idea has appeared on CNN and in outlets like the Huffington Post and Salon.

Between October, 1970 and January, 1972, the BLA conducted a number of bombings and attacks on police-related targets, and on officers themselves. The assassination of two NYC cops, Greg Foster and Rocco Laurie, on January 29, 1972 brought the total number of officers attacked to 10, with six fatalities. But attacking law enforcement so directly brought intense police pressure.

By the end of 1973, the NYPD was crowing that it “broke the back” of the BLA after they killed a group member named Twywon Meyers, who was wanted for questioning for the killings of Foster and Laurie. However, the organization was quickly moving into another phase—getting its comrades out of jail.

“There was an idea that prison was the basis of colonial states, and so of course prisons are going to be used to oppress these movements,” Berger explains. “Movements had a responsibility to get their comrades out. The BLA is both looking to Palestine and South Africa and Vietnam and all these places overseas, but they’re also drawing on the prison movement at the time. It really saw the prison not only as representative of the racist state but as something that can be conquered and overcome.”

The BLA engaged in a series of daring jailbreaks—from trying to cut through walls with a blowtorch at NYC’s notorious Tombs to donning wetsuits and taking rafts out to Rikers Island. A few worked, most didn’t, and some had tragic ends, like that of BLA member Rema Olubaga who attempted to climb down to freedom from the Brooklyn House of Detention but died when his rope broke.

By the time of Assata’s escape from prison, the BLA was already several years into its final incarnation—as a group that explicitly battled white supremacy, frequently with white allies. The group moved from getting people out of jail to preparing for, as Professor Akinyele Umoja put it,  “white supremacist genocidal attack on the black community.” And where would they get the idea that was coming?

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, as now, white supremacist groups were on the rise. They had strong ties to law enforcement—still a serious, and largely ignored, problem—were building up paramilitary wings, and were engaging in attacks on black people, including children, in Atlanta, Boston, Alabama, North Carolina, and elsewhere.

So the BLA teamed up with white allies, who formed the RATF (Revolutionary Armed Task Force)—a group that, under BLA leadership, would infiltrate white supremacist organizations in order to get information it would then report back to the BLA. Their ultimate goal was to build self-defense units, along with educational and cultural programs, in black communities to combat the white supremacist surge. All of that, of course, takes money. So another thing the RATF and BLA did was engage in what they called expropriations. And it was one of those that would finally bring the BLA to a close.

On October 20, 1981, six BLA members, including 2Pac’s stepfather Mutulu Shakur, and four white allies tried to rob a Brinks armored car at a mall near Nyack, New York. The car’s guard, Peter Paige, attempted to fire at the robbers, and a shootout ensued, killing Paige and injuring another guard, Joe Trombino. The RATF and BLA members got away with the money. But cops caught up, there was another shootout, and two officers ended up dead—one of whom, in a bitter twist, was the first African-American member of the Nyack police department. The Brinks robbery marked the end of the BLA as an organization. Too many members were dead or in jail for it to continue.

The fact that a relative of 2Pac was involved is of course not a coincidence. Pac was in many ways a child of the movement. His mother Afeni was a member of the Panther 21, a group of Black Panther Party members who were arrested in 1969 and accused of planning to bomb police stations and other targets. After being held for two years, they were acquitted of all charges when the state’s case fell apart. Assata Shakur was Pac’s godmother. Pac was raised around the children of people involved in the BLA and other revolutionary organizations, including the son of Twyman Myers.

“These are the people that Pac grew up with,” Mutulu Shakur (who was sentenced to 60 years behind bars for the Brinks robbery when Pac was only 11) said in an interview. “All of them have seen their fathers and mothers arrested and all of them have seen or had to bury someone they knew. These are the people that Pac had as an example. People that he knew, and not just someone that he had heard of or some character that he had read about.”

To Tef Poe, who was heavily involved in the protests in Ferguson, that’s not surprising at all. He says the Shakur family is “the Kennedys of black liberation.” And Pac’s family tree was reflected directly in his music.

“The godson of Assata Shakur grows up, becomes the biggest rapper in the world, and his music was drenched in Black Panther rhetoric, Black Panther values,” Poe points out. “He understood that we have an overarching enemy, the world is messed up, oppression is a real thing, and the days of marching, chanting, singing, and praying are pretty much over.”

In fact, Poe sees a direct line between the Pac and the movement-starting rebellion in Ferguson.

“You can say that Ferguson was maybe, in a modernized context, one of the prophecies of 2Pac Shakur coming to life,” Poe explains. “He had a line right before he died. Someone asked him, ‘What happens if they kill you?’ He says, ‘If they kill me, they don’t wanna take me out the game because the motherfuckers after me won’t have any mercy for them. They’ll see what happened to me and be relentless about how they engage.’ That’s essentially what happened out there.”

“I felt like we were witnessing a Black Panther prophecy, a BLA prophecy, manifest through the gospel of 2Pac,” Poe continues. “We gotta take it all the way back to the beginning of the BLA which produced a 2Pac. So, they produced Pac, and then Pac produced the Ferguson generation. It’s a continuation of the same resistance that has been essentially going on since the days of the slave ships.”

While this newest incarnation of the black liberation movement grapples with the role of armed self-defense, Rakem Balogun is fighting against being targeted for simply talking about it. His defense committee is fighting on several different fronts: trying to raise money to pay a noted lawyer who wants to take on the case; lobbying Congress to investigate the use of the Black Identity Extremist designation; and even, in a move that hearkens back to Malcolm X, looking into getting the case in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The latter two efforts are being led by Dallas-area organizer Stephen Benavides.

The Black Liberation Army is not an easy organization to talk about. It leaves behind a legacy of resistance to oppression, and of attempting to, as today’s activists might put it might put it, stand up and fight back in a way that, at the time, was gaining traction across the globe. And its vision of viewing police as an occupying army in oppressed communities has only become more prominent in the decades since the organization’s demise. But the group’s ultimate failure shows the danger of engaging in violent, clandestine work without popular support.

Perhaps most crucially, though, the BLA shows us a vision of what might happen if police departments continue to grow more violent. The group serves as a warning about what may occur if cops continue to have access to more weapons (conversations about gun control in this #NeverAgain era rarely include any talk of limitations for the police, occasional Chance the Rapper tweets aside); and if they find themselves increasingly unshackled from even the little bit of public oversight they’ve had forced on them in the post-Ferguson landscape. To use one of the Black Panthers’ favorite aphorisms, repression breeds resistance—and not always in organized, predictable ways. Unless there is a drastic change, the days of funerals on both sides may return, whether we want them to or not.