9 Black Liberation Movements Subverted by Racist Governments

The Universal Negro Improvement Association vs. United States

The Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.) is a Black African Nationalist fraternal organization founded in Jamaica in 1914 by the Right Most Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey. After traveling and experiencing the injustices to Black people all over the world, Garvey started the U.N.I.A., which was the largest and most influential movement to advance Black people’s interests in the world to date.

In May 1917, Garvey started the New York Division of the U.N.I.A. with just 13 members. After only two years, the organization had grown to over 2 million members. By 1920, the association had over 1,900 divisions in more than 40 countries. According to international.ucla.edu:  ”By the early 1920′s, the U.N.I.A. could count branches in almost every Caribbean, [Latin American], and sub-Saharan African country with membership swelling to 8 million.”

After its overwhelming success, W.E.B. Dubois, A. Philip Randolph, and other Black leaders appealed to the federal government to step up investigations into Garvey’s U.N.I.A. organization. This move prompted the head Director of the FBI (called Bureau of Investigation [B.O.I.] at the time),  J. Edgar Hoover, to write a memorandum on October 11, 1919, to Special Agent Ridgely regarding Garvey:

“Unfortunately, however, he [Garvey] has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation.”

In November of 1919, the FBI intensified their investigation into the activities of Garvey and the U.N.I.A.  After years of unsuccessfully finding incriminating evidence, the B.O.I. eventually charged Garvey with trumped up mail fraud charges, where he was later convicted and jailed for almost three years. Upon being released, Garvey was deported from the United States, whichweakened the U.N.I.A. significantly.

The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) vs. South Africa’s Apartheid Government

The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was a Black social political movement created in South Africa by Steve Biko and other like-minded activists in the late-1960′s to combat apartheid.  Biko was elected as the first president of the Black Peoples Convention (BPC), which effectively unified roughly 70 different Black consciousness groups and associations in South Africa. Together they formed several organizations to advance the well-being of Blacks all throughout the country. According to sources, the BCM inspired the uprisings in the Black township of Soweto in 1976.

The organization was weakened on August 1977, when Biko was taken into the apartheid security police headquarters in Port Elizabeth. He was accused of writing inflammatory pamphlets and “inciting unrest” among the Black community.  The police badly beat Biko and then drove him 1200 miles to Pretoria, where he was thrown into a cell. On September 12, 1977, he later died, shackled naked on a filthy floor of a police hospital from his injuries.

Just a month after Biko’s murder, the Black Consciousness Movement was banned by the white South African apartheid regime and several of their activists were detained and put on trial for terrorism. They were charged with threatening the peace, order and security of the then ruling white minority government.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) vs. United States

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a Black religious movement founded in Detroit, Michigan by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad in July 1930. In June 1934, the NOI was led by Elijah Muhammad, who established places of worship called Temples, a school named Muhammad University of Islam, businesses, The Final Call newspaper, farms and real estate holdings all over the United States and abroad. Their mission was to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of primarily Blacks in the United States.

The NOI’s largest boom in membership came during the 1950s Civil Rights Movement when Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan and heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali became new members. After being appointed to the prestigious leadership of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 in New York City, Malcolm X’s national popularity helped skyrocket membership to approximately 300,000 people. Most of the members were in the United States, but there were communities in other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Jamaica, and Trinidad & Tobago.

According to the book Islam in the African-American Experience, the FBI had been planting agents in the Nation of Islam since the 1940s but as Malcolm helped the organization to grow rapidly, the U.S. government intensified its infiltration.

The FBI illegally wire-tapped the organization’s Temples, scrutinized their tax records and even illegally opened Malcolm’s letters, changing the content and re-sending them. The U.S.government’s intent was to create a riff in the inner core of the NOI. Their planned worked very well and tensions grew between Malcolm, Muhammad, Farrakhan and others in the organization.   Malcolm left the NOI thereafter, which not only split up people in the organization but also slowed the growth rate.

The Independent Party of Color (PIC) Vs. Cuba

The Independent Party of Color (PIC) was an Afro-Cuban political party founded by war veterans Evaristo Estenoz, Pedro Ivonnet, and others in 1908 in order to secure the rights of Afro-Cubans in Cuba, which had successfully marginalized them since winning its independence from Spain.

It was the western hemisphere’s first Black political party outside of Haiti. The organization was largely made up of veterans of the Mambi Army, the Cuban rebel force made up of recently freed Africans, who helped to defeat the Spanish in two Wars of Liberation (1868-1878 and 1895-1898).

The ruling elite in Cuba responded by banning the PIC and its mission with a law, the Morua Amendment, which prohibits parties restricted to a particular race, even though there were white members in the PIC. Despite the legislation, the party’s protests continued. Many of the leaders and activists were imprisoned for six months.

Harassed and prevented from utilizing the electoral process to achieve their goals, the PIC finally resorted to holding a symbolic armed protest on May 20, 1912. Their aim was to demand the party’s legalization. In Oriente, thousands of independents rose up to protest with very little intention of waging real war. In Las Villas, there were also uprisings. The Cuban Government responded by engaging in an intense media campaign to demonize the party.

This culminated in a massacre in 1912, where Estenoz, along with 6,000 or more other Afro-Cubans, mostly fellow party members, were murdered by Cuban troops that President Jose Miguel Gomez deployed to put down the unrest. The United States joined the Cuban government in disbanding the uprising. The incident became known as “El Doce,” “the Twelve,” and the “Guerritade Raza,” the “Little Race War.

Knowledge of the PIC and the “Little Race War of 1912 massacre was buried by the various capitalist regimes in Cuba between then and 1958. Even after Castro’s Cuban Revolution triumph in 1959, these events remained hidden from the world. The incident was rescued from obscurity when Aline Helg wrote the book Our Rightful Share in 1995 and Gloria Rolando made the film“Roots Of My Heart” in 2001.

The Black Panther Party vs. United States

The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale on October 15, 1966. BPP membership reached a peak of 10,000 by early 1969, acquiring 90% support from Black people in major cities in America. The organization is well known for advocating self-defense against police brutality.  The Panthers also organized dozens of community programs such as free breakfast for children, health clinics and shoes for children.

J. Edgar Hoover called the BPP “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and he supervised an extensive program called “COINTELPRO” that used surveillance, infiltration, raids, perjury, police harassment and many other tactics designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate party members and drain the organization of resources and manpower.

Most dramatically, on December 8, the LAPD enacted a warrant and deployed its new SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics, a militarized police unit) teams.  Using a battering ram, helicopters, a tank, trucks, dynamite, and 400 police officers, they raided three L.A. BPP facilities including the Oakland headquarters.

On December 4, 1969 in Chicago, two Black Panthers were killed when the Chicago police raided the home of Panther leader Fred Hampton. The raid had been orchestrated by the police in conjunction with the FBI.   After the raid, Hampton and Panther guard Mark Clark, lay dead.

In October 1967, Oakland police officer John Frey, along with his backup Hervert Heanes, ambushed Panther leader Huey P. Newton during a traffic stop. During the stop, a gunfight broke out leaving Officer Frey dead and Officer Heanes wounded. Newton was arrested and charged with murder and released three years later after the charges were dismissed.

Sources: wikipedia.org

Pan Africanist Congress of Azania vs. South Africa’s Apartheid Government

The Pan Africanist Congress, abbreviated as the PAC, was a South African Black Nationalist movement that was founded by Robert Sobukwe.  Drawing from the teachings of Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Anton Lembede, George Padmore, and W. E. B. Du Bois, the PAC’s main goal was to return South Africa to its indigenous inhabitants. They advocated the idea that the South African government should be constituted only by the African people who owe their allegiance to Africa and Africans, as stated by Sobukwe in the inaugural speech of the PAC:

“We aim, politically, for a government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African.”

The PAC originally advocated such methods of political pressure as strikes and boycotts. On March 21, 1960, the PAC sponsored a nationwide one-day protest against the apartheid laws requiring Blacks to carry passes. In that demonstration, South African police fired into a crowd killing 69 Africans and wounding over 180, many of who were women and children.

To prevent any more protests and eradicate the PAC, the South African government employed tactics such as unlawful arrests, imprisonment, travel bans, and restrictions on speech. The apartheid regime officially outlawed the organization on April 8, 1960, by implementing a law that banned them.

Sources:
wikipedia.org
britannica.com
southerntimesafrica.com
coldwar.org

Project Move vs. City of Philadelphia

A Philadelphia-based Black liberation group founded by John Africa, MOVE members were mostly Black and all adopted the surname Africa.  MOVE advocated a ‘back-to-nature’ lifestyle and were a family of revolutionaries, founded in Philadelphia in the late 1960s to 1970s who opposed all that this system represents.

MOVE members were vegans and passionate supporters of animal rights and frequently engaged in public demonstrations protesting the “death system.” To Move, everything the system radiated was poison – from its technological waste, to its destruction of the earth, to its destruction of the air and water, to its destruction of the very genetic pool of human life.

Since their founding in 1972, MOVE had been antagonized by the Philadelphia Police Department. A major incident occurred in 1978 when the police raided their Powelton Village home. This raid resulted in the imprisonment of nine group members, now known as the “MOVE 9.”

In 1985 the world was horrified when police dropped a bomb on the Osage house from a helicopter in an attempt to wipe the group out. The explosion and ensuing fire killed 11 people, including five children and the group’s leader, John Africa. Only two occupants survived—one adult, Ramona Africa and one child. In the aftermath, approximately 60 other –non MOVE-affiliated–homes were destroyed as the entire block burned.

Sources: wikipedia.org

Mau Mau vs. England

The Mau Mau uprising was a militant African nationalist movement that originated in the 1950′s among the Kikuyu people of Kenya. Led by Stanley Mathenge, Musa Mwaria, Dedan Kimathi and Waruhiu Itote (General China), the group advocated for an armed struggle to remove British domination and European colonizers from the country. The independence movement, which at its peak was 120,000 strong, was well known for the blood oath members took to promote unity amongst themselves.

In 1950, the Mau Mau were labeled terrorists and banned by the occupying British authorities. Two years later, in October 1952, the colonial government instituted a state of emergency, rounding up thousands of alleged Mau Mau members into concentration camps and subjecting many to torture, including rape and castration. The British also implemented a policy of divide and rule to keep the Mau Mau from unifying its various fractions. The Kenya Human Rights Commission says up to 90,000 Kenyans were executed, tortured or maimed during the uprising. English historians say 30,000 Mau-Mau members were killed, 80,000 detained, while other sources speak of 14,000 Africans being killed in the uprising and over 100,000 arrested.

Following the arrest of General China in 1954 and the execution of general Dedan Kimathi in 1956, the British were able to contain the Mau Mau Uprising, but the colonial regime ultimately had to concede to demands for independence eight years later.

Sources:
maumauhistory.com
kenyalogy.com
wikipedia.org
historyinanhour.com

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the organizations fighting for the rights of Black people during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s. It emerged from a student meeting organized by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in April 1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC’s work in the South, allowing full-time SNCC workers to have a $10 per week salary. Many unpaid volunteers also worked with SNCC on projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas and Maryland.

SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins and freedom rides, a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. SNCC’s major contribution was in its field work, organizing voter registration drives all over the South, especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

In the late ‘60s, led by fiery leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, SNCC refocused their efforts on Black power, and then protested against the Vietnam War. SNCC officially changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee to reflect the broadening of its strategies.

The organization was targeted by the FBI and CIA under the COINTELPRO program, which used the services of an infiltrator who had worked his way into a position as Stokely Carmichael’sbodyguard.  The Bureau also deliberately created the false appearance that Carmichael was himself an operative.

According to a declassified FBI memo, shortly afterward the FBI proposed having “a carbon copy of [an] informant report reportedly written by Carmichael to the CIA carefully deposited in the automobile of a close Black Nationalist friend. … It is hoped that when the informant report is read it will help promote distrust between Carmichael and the Black community.”

FBI agents called Carmichael’s mother, falsely telling her that Black Panthers were out to kill her son. Soon after, Carmichael left the country.

Soures:
thirdworldtraveler.com
theguardian.com