Vicky Osterweil in Defense of Looting A Riotous History of Uncivil Action
Vicky Osterweil in Defense of Looting A Riotous History of Uncivil Action
Vicky Osterweil in Defense of Looting A Riotous History of Uncivil Action
DEFENSE Riotous
History
OF of
Uncivil
Action
LOOTING
VICKY OSTERWEIL
New York
Copyright © 2020 by Vicky Osterweil
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Osterweil, Vicky, author.
Title: In defense of looting : a riotous history of uncivil action / Vicky Osterweil.
Description: First edition. | New York City, NY : Bold Type Books, October 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022054 | ISBN 978-1-64503-669-2 (hardcover) |
ISBN 978-1-64503-667-8 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Riots. | Pillage—Political aspects. | Pillage—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HV6474 .O88 2020 | DDC 363.32/309—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022054
ISBN 978-1-64503-669-2 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-64503-667-8 (ebook)
LSC-C
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Clark, Anna, and Pablo,
see you on the other side
Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
one: THE RACIAL ROOTS OF PROPERTY 21
two: LOOTING EMANCIPATION 39
three: ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS 71
four: WHITE RIOT 91
five: LOOTED BREAD, STOLEN LABOR 123
six: NO SUCH THING AS NONVIOLENCE 149
seven: USING GUNS NONVIOLENTLY 169
eight: CIVIL RIOTS 189
nine: THE INHUMANITY OF LOOTERS 219
CONCLUSION: OUT OF THE FLAMES OF FERGUSON 241
Acknowledgments 251
Notes 253
Index 265
vii
INTRODUCTION
1
2 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
because they can control and contain the unruly masses, they are the
“natural leaders,” the people who should be negotiated with. This book
is spit in their eyes.
Looting is so unpopular not because it is an error or bad for the move-
ment but because it is often a movement’s most radical tactic. Looting
attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal ra-
cial capitalist society, and so frightens and disturbs nearly everyone, even
some of its participants. After all, we have all been raised and trained
to hold, follow, and reproduce those beliefs every day. Looting rejects
the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to
work for a living, and the “justice” of law and order. Looting reveals all
these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting
a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy, and state
violence.
That looting is one of the most racially loaded, morally abhorred, and
depoliticized concepts in modern society should come as no surprise.
From its very first usages, the word has served to re-enforce the white
supremacist juncture of property and race.
The word loot is taken up from the Hindi word lút—similar to “plun-
der” or “booty”—which first appears in Anglophone contexts in 1788 in a
handbook on “Indian Vocabulary” for English colonial officers.1 In loot’s
first recorded appearance in the English language, it describes how an
officer managed to gain consent and gather recruits for subduing Indian
resistance: “He always found the talismanic gathering-word Loot (plun-
der) a sufficient bond of union in any part of India.” The racialized idea
of an “Indian” identity did not yet exist outside the minds of the coloniz-
ers, but a natural racial tendency, one overcoming tribal, religious, and
cultural differences, could be “revealed” by the offer of plunder. In other
words, a deviant relationship to property is the “sufficient” attribute that
unifies and defines an otherwise disparate group under the sign of race.
The earliest appearances of the gerund looting, meanwhile, refer to “hir-
sute Sikhs” and “Chinese blackguards.”2 Looting is a word taken from a
colonized people and used to denigrate and racialize riotous subalterns
resisting English empire. It would from the very beginning refer to a non-
white and lawless relationship to property.
4 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
The looting that I am defending in this book is not that act that can
be described by the synonym plunder. The looting of captured territory
by armies, for example, or of colonial wealth by empire and its agents,
can be equally well described by words like robbery, pillage, booty, and
spoils. But the looting described, defended, and historicized here—that
of a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly taking things in the
midst of riot and social unrest—has no easy synonym. I personally like
the phrases “proletarian shopping” and “shopping for free” quite a lot
and use the Marxist “expropriation,” too. But all those phrases drain the
idea of looting of its racializing character. Although it is understandable
why people would want, in defending their movements, to find a less
charged word, it is precisely the fact that looting exists at the nexus of race
and class that gives it its tactical power.
Looting is a method of direct redistribution of wealth, from the store
owners and capitalists to the poor. Looting, as scholar Delio Vasquez
writes in “The Poor Person’s Defense of Riots,” “directly results (unless
you get arrested) in your acquiring the things that you are seeking.”3 It
is a practical, immediate form of improving life. Looting represents a
material way that riots and protests help the community: by providing a
way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and
by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than
doing so through wage labor. Looting is an act of communal cohesion.
But looting is also an act of excess, of property destruction. When
something is looted, that thing’s nature as a commodity is destroyed by its
being taken for free, out of the cycle of exchange and profit. Everything
in the store goes from being a commodity to becoming a gift. Less ab-
stractly, looting is usually followed up by burning down the shop. Looters
also frequently throw items out onto the streets for anyone to take or pile
goods chaotically in the middle of the store or pass bottles of liquor, bags
of food, or goods between strangers and around the crowd. Looting in-
volves not only taking wealth directly but also immediately sharing that
wealth, which points to the collapse of the system by which the looted
things produce value.
Looting is a communal practice: it cannot be done alone. Anthro-
pologist Neal Keating argues that looting creates a similar relation to
Introduction 5
These are owned by whites who live outside ‘the community.’ . . . White
power makes the laws and enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks
in the hands of white racist policemen and black mercenaries.”5
Assata Shakur, freedom fighter in the Black liberation movement
and the federal government’s most wanted fugitive, describes having
the same argument with white coworkers, who wanted Shakur to admit
“what a shame it was” that rioters were destroying their neighborhoods
and to disavow them. But Shakur instead put forward the positive case
for the destruction: “They don’t own those houses. They don’t own those
stores. I’m glad they burned down those stores because those stores were
robbing them in the first place!”6
With the post-sixties emergence of a Black business class and, later,
a Black president, and with the legal dismantling of Jim Crow, the logic
that rioters are destroying their own neighborhoods has only grown stron-
ger. Because a higher (though still small) percentage of owners, busi-
nesspeople, and politicians are likely to be Black, it becomes even easier
to imagine looting and rioting as somehow striking internally within the
Black community. As Tyler Reinhard wrote in the wake of the Ferguson
uprising: “I’m not sure how people who make this argument imagine
‘owning’ a neighborhood works, but I’ll try to break it down: we don’t own
neighborhoods. Black businesses exist, it’s true. But the emancipation of
impoverished communities is not measured in corner-store revenue. It’s
not measured in minimum-wage jobs.”7
As a Ferguson rioter put it in a viral Instagram video, “People wanna
say we destroying our own neighborhoods. We don’t own nothing out
here!” This could be said of most majority Black neighborhoods in Amer-
ica, which have much higher concentrations of chain stores and fast food
restaurants than non-Black neighborhoods. How could the average Fer-
guson resident really say it’s “our QuikTrip”? Indeed, although you might
hang out in it, how can a chain convenience store or corporate restaurant
earnestly be part of anyone’s neighborhood? The same white liberals who
inveigh against corporations for destroying local communities are aghast
when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.
Only a cop, in this case Baltimore police commissioner Anthony
Batts, prosecuting an arsonist from the 2015 Freddie Gray uprisings,
8 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
“Rioters Hurt the Media Coverage, They Make Us/Our Concerns Look Bad”
Rioters are often accused of being the cause of negative media coverage.
But this claim is always made after the cameras have arrived, without
recognition of how or why those cameras got there. If it were not for
rioters, the media would probably pay no attention at all. If protesters
hadn’t looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of pro-
tests, would Ferguson have become a point of worldwide attention? It’s
impossible to know, but all the nonviolent protests against police killings
across the country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no. It
was the looting of a Duane Reade, and not the vigil that preceded it, that
brought widespread attention to the murder of Kimani Gray in New York
City in 2013. The media’s own warped procedure instructs that riots and
looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.
But the point of a protest isn’t media attention, anyway. As a 1967
editorial on press coverage of urban riots in the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee’s The Movement magazine put it: “The white-
run daily press in America is not an objective, critical viewer of events.
Newspapers are industries. They are private property, not public utilities.
When black people revolt against their conditions, they are also revolting
against the mass media; the press.”
The essay reproduced and analyzed guidelines on covering future
instances of unrest that were given out to CBS reporters in the wake of
Watts. The editors highlight one of those guidelines, which says: “At the
outset of the disorder, broadcast newsmen should be dispatched to law
enforcement command posts, rather than directly to the scene, where
their presence may heighten the disturbance or interfere with efforts to
establish control. An authoritatively staffed command post will undoubt-
edly be in communication with the scenes of disorder and be capable of
providing newsmen with any desired information.”9
During the LA riots of 1992, national news broadcast nonstop footage
of the violent beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny by four Black
teens that was captured by news helicopters. The news did not provide
the context—that the National Guard had just driven through that inter-
section, firing live rounds at rioters, meaning Denny was in the wrong
10 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
place at the wrong time—or the aftermath, in which other Black rioters
ran out, tended to his wounds, and got him to a hospital, saving his life,
though both were also captured on camera. Instead, the violent beating
was shown on loop, out of context, across the country.
During the UK riots in summer 2011, which saw people rise up in
response to the police murder of Mark Duggan, the BBC, which had
mostly relied on helicopter and police footage, did a live interview with a
man from Croydon, one of the London neighborhoods where rioting was
intense. That man, Darcus Howe, was a respected broadcaster and writer
originally from Trinidad. The presenter asked him leading questions
about how terrible the riots were, but Howe clearly and angrily laid out
the stakes of the riot. “What I was certain about, listening to my son and
my grandson, is that something very serious was going to happen in this
country. Our leaders had no idea. . . . But if you listened to young Blacks,
and young whites in this country . . . you would know that what is hap-
pening to them is wrong.” The presenter then interrupted him, insulted
him, and accused him of being a rioter himself. The BBC was forced to
issue an apology, but it also scrubbed the footage from its websites and
future broadcasts, preferring not to allow this accidental moment of rad-
ical clarity to continue.
No matter how peaceful and “well-behaved” a protest is, the domi-
nant media will always push the police talking points and the white su-
premacist agenda. Although it can sometimes be leveraged strategically,
the mass media is the enemy of liberation, and when we shape our ac-
tions to conform to its opinions or perspectives, we will always lose. If we
riot, they will slander us. If we behave politely, peacefully, legally, they
will simply return to ignoring us.
“Looters Are Just Being ‘Consumers,’ They Are Acting on False Consciousness”
Many people—self-styled “revolutionaries”—criticize rioters for looting
flat-screen TVs or expensive sneakers. These people often claim they
would support looters stealing medicine or food, life necessities, but be-
cause they are stealing expensive commodities it reveals that rioters are
just “consumerists,” “materialistic.” As Evan Calder Williams wrote in his
essay “An Open Letter to Those Who Condemn Looting,” this analysis
was particularly prevalent around the 2011 UK riots. Even during the ri-
ots, the entire white UK Left, from the left-liberal media establishment to
the “revolutionary” political parties, basically told rioters to drop dead. As
Williams asks, are these revolutionaries to have us believe that “the poor
are not supposed to understand the fundamentals of exchange-value?
That they should have been loading shopping carts with flour and beans,
rather than with computers which could, in theory, be sold for a much
larger quantity of flour and beans?”10
The failure isn’t merely an economic one: when people make this
argument, they reveal a fundamental contempt for the poor. They share
a moral logic with conservative antiwelfare talking heads and pull-up-
your-pants respectability politicians who claim that poor people are poor
because they spend their money on smartphones or fancy clothes. These
so-called revolutionaries, who support the looting of bread, but not of li-
quor, reveal that they are only willing to support poor people in struggles
for bare survival: in other words, in struggles that keep them poor. They
withdraw their solidarity when the proletariat act on desires to have their
lives be more pleasurable and more worth living.11
These reactionaries don’t want the poor to have nice things any more
than the police who execute looters do. They see the masses as fetish
12 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
This category [of the New Poor], unlike the working class jobholders,
cannot be seen, within the economic logic of our present organiza-
tion of knowledge, as contributors to the process of production. . . .
this New Poor, seduced too, like all of us, by the clamor of adver-
tisements which urge them to consume, so that frustrated in their
consumption goals, they turn on one another, mutilate and kill each
other, or “damage themselves with alcohol and drugs” convinced of
their own worthlessness, or in brief episodes of eruption, “fire the
ghettoes, riot, looting whatever they can lay their hands on,” means
that today’s intellectuals, whilst they feel and express their pity, refrain
from proposing to marry their thought with this particular variety of
human suffering.
Instead, Wynter goes on, the rising of these masses has created the
possibility of thinking through a new, revolutionary ethics. “The eruption
. . . in South Central Los Angeles has again opened a horizon from which
to spearhead the speech of a new frontier of knowledge able to move us
toward a new, correlated human species, and eco-systemic, ethic.”12
Introduction 13
ing riots as either totally apolitical, chaotic, or beside the point, instead
of seeing them as one-off rebellions, uprisings, or insurrections that have
little interaction with everyday forms of social transformation, we can
instead see them as crucial moments in the course of revolution and as
fundamentally transformative experiences for everyone involved.
And it is this book’s contention that we need a total transformation of
our society. The society we live in under capitalism is entirely structured
around the production and circulation of commodities. It is a cruel sys-
tem, built for the creation and reification of things, not for the flourish-
ing of people. Commodities are not just any things, but a special kind:
goods and services that can be given a price and sold for more than it
cost to make them so that they produce more value, an excess: profits.
Under capitalism, those profits go to the owner of the “means of produc-
tion.” But the owner doesn’t and can’t make commodities on his own; he
must have people—workers—run his factory, farm his land, or excavate
his mine. Rather than sharing the profits among the people who created
them, however, the owner keeps as much as he can, instead paying work-
ers a wage, almost always the lowest he can get away with, in exchange for
the workers’ time and effort. In other words, he exploits them. The profits
he gains from their work he uses to live lavishly and to invest in more
commodity production, increasing the amount of profits he can grab.
The workers get the privilege of not starving to death.
This is all completely natural to us: in our daily lives, we don’t often
question that a store or factory owner should be allowed to steal the profits
we create when we work or that we should have to spend money to have
things people like us created. We don’t question that we should have to
work for a boss and pay a landlord to keep our stomachs full and a roof
over our heads. We accept that the police and the state, through laws,
courts, and violent armed action, guarantee that the owners of stores,
companies, and apartment buildings can take our money and time on
their terms, and that the boss can fire us and the police can evict us, arrest
us, or even kill us if we try to live otherwise.
But this society built around the “natural” laws of commodities and
profits is both historically novel and relatively young. It is also structurally
unambiguously colonial and white supremacist. For three hundred years,
16 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
holding a diasporic people together for three thousand years. If this has
been the long historical wake of slavery and emancipation for Jews, how
could we begin to understand the ongoing effects of four centuries of
industrial chattel slavery, which only ended—and even then, only tech-
nically—a mere 150 years ago? It appeared to me that any Jewish ethics
must directly prioritize Black liberation.
Without reckoning with the direct, lived, present past, no movement
can truly change, heal, or care for our present, let alone produce a liber-
ated future. And studying history has other advantages: with the benefit
of an overview of long historical durations, the accumulation of docu-
ments, and consistent study, it is in some ways easier to highlight the
meanings and effects of riots.
Studying history also has a vital abolitionist role. Ideology would have
us believe that capitalism, the nation-state, the police, prisons, and other
violent forms of oppression are timeless, infinite facts. If there have always
been police, across cultures, then there can never be a world without
them. But by understanding how recent these things are, and by tracing
strategies of resistance, struggle, and revolt against them, we can begin
to imagine a world otherwise.19 This book is mostly a work of history,
a history based in the desire to break with this world and destroy all its
monstrous continuities.
But the study of history also has some serious problems and limits,
problems that are doubled in the study of rioting and looting. Resistance
is consistently underreported in the historical record. Those with power
over discourse and documentation, those in the media, universities, gov-
ernment offices, churches, and corporations, prefer not to widely report
or record forms of militant struggle for fear of its spreading and inspiring
others. If they record it, they slander it, underestimate its size or power,
misinterpret it, or exaggerate its failings. Meanwhile rebels and revolu-
tionaries are often illiterate, isolated, imprisoned, killed, or otherwise
prevented from making sure their struggles end up in the archive the
way they lived them. So history must rely on stories passed down through
generations, accounts and interviews with participants, and the work of
radical archivists, historians, and academics.
Introduction 19
21
22 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
The first slaves in the “New World” were not Africans but Indigenous
Americans. Columbus had barely disembarked in the Bahamas before
deciding that the people there “would make fine servants.” It was Indige-
nous slaves who built the great wealth of the Spanish empire, mining sil-
ver from Potosí in Bolivia and from the Mexican plateau throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of this specie was siphoned
off by Dutch, Genoan, and German bankers and merchants, who had
grasped the nature of the coming market economy much better than
the Spanish monarchy did.* This mineral wealth was the material basis
and political focus of European mercantilism, the system that would give
rise to the bourgeoisie and lay the groundwork for industrial capitalism.
This wealth was produced by enslaved Americans (and Africans) under
a genocidal slave labor regime that would reduce the Indigenous popu-
lation of the Spanish colonies from fifty million at “first contact” to four
million by the end of the seventeenth century. From its very beginnings,
capitalism was built on the backs and the graves of the enslaved.2
In what would become known as the United States, the first colonial
slave trade also traded in Americans, because it was considered best prac-
tice to ship Indigenous “servants” far away from their native land, where
their knowledge of the local terrain and proximity to friends and family
encouraged both escape and violent retribution. Thus, Indigenous peo-
ples were swapped between New England and the Carolinas or sold from
the continental colonies to the West Indies, and vice versa. This trade was
crucial for the early colonies; Indigenous servants were one of the main
exports during the first century of British colonial rule.3
Despite these precautions, Indigenous escape, insurrection, raiding,
and war proved a constant threat to profit and stability. Combined with
the fact that they were a “labor supply” succumbing to genocidal depop-
ulation caused by both disease and systematic colonial policy, the Indige-
nous peoples of America were only temporarily the enslaved basis of the
British colonial economy.
*Indeed, the fact that the Spanish paid in specie and thus increased the “real” wealth of
England would be a major defense made by English slave traders of selling Africans to
the Spanish colonies, despite the fact that, according to the economic commonsense of
the period of mercantilism, trading with opposing empires was to be avoided at all costs.
The Racial Roots of Property 23
This, historian Patrick Wolfe argues, is consistent with the labor logic
of settler colonialism. A settler colony relies on the promise of “open
land” or “virgin territory” as the material and ideological basis of its exis-
tence. The problem is that this “open land” is always already occupied.
Thus, to capture the land, the settler colony must eliminate the Indig-
enous population through genocide, first by outright murder, later, by
cultural destruction and assimilation. Yet, at the same time, laborers are
required to transform that “virgin territory” into value for the colonizers,
and a large and ever-expanding population of laborers is required to pro-
duce profits.
These two requirements—genocide of the Indigenous to take their
land and justify the colony’s existence and the expansion of the pool of
laborers to increase profits—are obviously incompatible. As a result, In-
digenous labor cannot be relied upon in a settler colony. Thus, in the
early continental colonies, the colonists emphasized Indigenous “unsuit-
ability” for the brutality of plantation labor, an unsuitability that would
not, of course, protect Indigenous Americans from continued forced la-
bor, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing.4
But more labor was desperately needed by the planters and merchants
of the colonies, who had come to the New World, after all, to get rich.
The answer to this problem, for the first sixty or so years of what would
become the United States, was largely found in the system of indentured
servitude. Working alongside enslaved African and Indigenous peoples,
white and Black “indentured servants” toiled in the tobacco fields and
built the towns of colonial America.
But these servants were not yet distinguished as “white” and “Black.”
Though the word Negro appears in Virginia’s colonial records, it is used
as a national, not racial, descriptor, deployed in the same way that peo-
ple’s nationality (Scotch, Irish, English) was.5 In this “national” definition
that used “Negro” to interchangeably refer to Africans of any provenance,
be they from the Spanish Caribbean or recently kidnapped from West
Africa, we can see that the collapsing of various African nationalities into
Blackness already existed. But whiteness had not yet been fully formed
in the early seventeenth century, nor the fatal equation white-over-black
that would give both racial identities their full force in America.6
24 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*I should note here that the servant trade, though it took on many of the aspects of the
African slave trade, never reached the size and levels of technical organization present
in the African trade in later centuries. Nor would it last nearly as long or touch even a
fraction as many people. The servant trade was over before the end of the eighteenth
century. Even at its zenith, European servants were never enslaved indefinitely or hered-
itarily, could represent themselves in court, and became full citizens after their inden-
ture. There exists a white supremacist myth about the horrors of the “Irish slave trade”
that contends that enslavement of Irish people lasted well into the nineteenth century
and was equally as violent and vicious as the African slave trade. This is a historical false-
hood—a white supremacist manipulation of the facts of indentured servitude. For more
on the Irish slave trade myth, see the work of Liam Hogan, in particular: “Debunking the
Irish Slaves Meme,” a four-part series on Medium.
†
Spirits would befriend and feed the gullible, drunk, or vulnerable on English city streets,
who would wake up the next morning not in their new friend’s home but in a cage, to be
shipped to America (hence the phrase “spirited away”). So common and so hated were
spirits that in the late seventeenth century, to accuse someone on a Bristol or London
street of being one was sufficient to start a riot.
The Racial Roots of Property 25
be “packed like herrings,” locked belowdecks for weeks with barely any
food and only a few feet to move.8
Similarly, Africans in the colonies had not all been reduced to chattel
slavery. Though life terms were sometimes enforced in the Caribbean
colonies in this period, many Africans in the early United States were
not enslaved for life, but only under indenture contracts, and eventually
went on to receive freedom dues, own land, even own white servants. As
historian Barbara Jeanne Fields writes, “African slaves during the years
between 1619 and 1661 enjoyed rights that, in the nineteenth century,
not even free black people could claim.”9 African and European servants
worked together, married, and escaped tobacco plantations together. It
was not some preracial utopia of equality but rather a period of violent
domination and frontier colonialism in which the specific tenets of white
supremacy had not yet been fully developed, what Lerone Bennett Jr.
calls an “equality of oppression.”10
As the seventeenth century wore on, conditions in the colonies im-
proved, and indentured servants started surviving their terms—and re-
ceiving their freedom dues—much more regularly, thus becoming more
expensive. Plantation owners tried to squeeze more profit out of their
workers, finding increasingly spurious reasons to extend the length of
servitude, driving servants harder and harder in the fields. However, as
Fields argues, English servants were crucially “backed up” by the history
of struggle between British laborer and landowner, by centuries of con-
flict and negotiation passed down into the present as culture, precedent,
and norms of treatment. Furthermore, news of servant mistreatment that
reached England made it harder, and therefore more expensive, to cap-
ture or recruit new servants. There was thus a limit to how much planters
could exploit English workers: they could not be made slaves for life;
their progeny would not be born into permanent bondage.11
Africans had no such power in the English colonies, no such backup.
And enslaving someone for life became more ghoulishly attractive when
“life” meant more than just a few miserable years. This logic was rein-
forced by the threat of servant revolt. Bacon’s Rebellion, the largest re-
bellion in the pre-Revolutionary colonies, taking place in 1676–1677, saw
armed and aggrieved free Englishmen, joined by slaves and servants, loot
26 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
and burn the capital of Virginia and briefly take over the colony. This re-
volt, in which freemen joined servants in insurrection, increased distrust
of English servants among the planters and colonial governorship. Thus,
“the importation of African slaves in larger and larger numbers made
it possible to maintain a sufficient corps of plantation laborers without
building up an explosive charge of armed Englishmen resentful at being
denied the rights of Englishmen and disposing of the material and polit-
ical resources to make their resentment felt.”12
Though African slaves were present in the colonies from the be-
ginning, “the law did not formally recognize the condition of perpetual
slavery or systematically mark out servants of African descent for special
treatment until 1661.”13 By the end of the seventeenth century, African
laborers were cheaper, served life terms, and had children born into slav-
ery. Without the same history of struggle and thus a customary level of
expected treatment, an ocean away from their comrades, families, and so-
cieties, Africans were alone in America. White and Indigenous servitude
would continue through the eighteenth century—nearly 10 percent of
the white population of the colonies were still servants at the beginning
of the Revolution—but they were slowly and surely being replaced on
the plantations by African laborers.14
If, legally and socially, there was a space and time in which race-based
chattel slavery did not exist in the colonies, could American capitalism
have developed some other way? Some claim that Europeans acting as
tenant farmers, yeomen, and merchants might have been perfectly via-
ble in Virginia and the Carolinas, much like they were in the Northern
colonies, and that, therefore, slavery was not necessary. But the Northern
colonies’ economies were built almost entirely upon exporting their food,
livestock, and small commodities to the sugar colonies of the West In-
dies, which, as a result of slavery-based plantation monoculture, did not
produce enough of their own. Northern merchants, meanwhile, made
much of their wealth building ships for the Triangle Trade and making
rum and molasses from slave-produced sugar. New York City’s insurance
and financial institutions—Wall Street—were largely built through pro-
viding capital for the slave trade. Without the support of the continental
colonies, Britain could never have developed its sugar monopoly, but the
The Racial Roots of Property 27
reverse is also true: without the sugar monopoly, the continental colonies
would have ended in failure. Quite simply, there is no American econ-
omy, North or South, without slavery.15
Indeed, the incredible profits reaped from the English slave econo-
mies in the Caribbean and on the North American continent—a surplus
of 50 percent or more on investments made by British capital—were the
cash basis of the growth of industrial production occurring in England
and the European continent through the period, and, thus, a key factor
in the growth of European capitalism. Planters deposited their incredible
wealth with bankers and bought new luxury goods from merchants, who
would then reinvest this money in infrastructure, entrepreneurial firms,
and agricultural improvements in England. Back in England, where the
majority of the population was still transitioning out of subsistence agri-
culture, the goods produced in the colonies helped form an incentive to
drive peasants into cash markets and capitalist labor relations. As histo-
rian Robin Blackburn writes, “The availability of tobacco, brightly co-
loured cotton goods, sweetened beverages, cakes and preserves, helped to
tempt Britons into greater participation in market exchanges and greater
reliance on wages, salaries and fees.”16 Thus slavery strengthened the En-
glish bourgeoisie, enriched British and continental banking and mer-
chant firms, and helped create the modern English working class.* It’s
not just America: industrial capitalism is impossible without New World
slavery.
But capitalism is a system ideologically committed to free labor—
though the freedom in “free labor” is the freedom to starve. The max-
imum development of profit for the bourgeoisie relies on a free labor
market, on the reproduction of a proletariat with nothing to sell but their
labor power. It is necessary that individual capitalists be able to manip-
ulate their workers’ labor hours, for example, via hiring and firing, to
*As Cedric Robinson points out, even this “English working class” was hardly a unified
subject but was, as it formed, deeply riven by racial hierarchy, with Irish laborers at
the bottom, and Scottish, Welsh, and more recently West Indian and Asian workers be-
low “English” workers proper. These divisions, though briefly overcome in the Chartist
movement, were a crucial factor in limiting English working class radicalism in the
nineteenth century (Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, 2nd ed. [Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000], 45–52).
28 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
This contradiction finds its roots deep in European history and phi-
losophy. The emergence of modern, explicit racial ideology is built on
centuries of implicit racial and racialized power, a form of power abso-
lutely fundamental to creating the division of labor, the construction of
“Europe,” whiteness, and the very possibility of private property.
Cedric Robinson demonstrates that racialized hierarchies were cru-
cial to medieval European notions of nobility and the formation of serf
and slave populations—for example, in Russia, serfs were imagined to
have black bones, as opposed to the white ones of nobles. Myths about
the bloodlines of Normans, Irish, and Scots justified differing levels of
work and privilege in medieval and mercantilist England. Proto-racial
hierarchies, as framed around notions of barbarians and outsiders, were
also the key tool for structuring and disciplining the mercenary armies
and the immigrant and migratory working populations of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century mercantilist statecraft.20
The contradiction between racial power and the liberal concept of
inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property is visible throughout Amer-
ican history. One striking example occurred one hundred years before
the Revolution, in the racialized conception of freedom visible in Ba-
con’s Rebellion. In the infamous 1676 Virginia uprising, enslaved and
servant, Black and white fought side by side, and some historians there-
fore celebrate this rebellion as a proto-democratic and revolutionary up-
rising. Much like the Civil War was about slavery, but with neither side
originally fighting for emancipation, so was Bacon’s Rebellion originally
about “Indian policy,” with a disagreement about how quickly genocide
of the Indigenous people should be carried out. And, as in the Civil War,
slaves joined the fight, changing the meaning of the struggle in their at-
tempt to win emancipation.
The conflict was sparked by Nathaniel Bacon, a backcountry planter
and settler living on the border of “Indian territory.” He wanted to seize
more land, and to do so advocated a more aggressive and immediate
genocidal policy than that of the colony: total war on the natives. Berke-
ley, the English governor of the colony, disagreed. He recognized the
strategic imperative to maintain provisional and relative peace—until,
32 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*J. Sakai calls this contradiction “the dialectical unity of democracy and oppression in
developing settler Amerika” (Settlers [Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989]).
The Racial Roots of Property 33
the spread of culture, science, and truth. As Wynter shows, in the colo-
nial period this humanist structure was used to justify genocide of Indige-
nous Americans. Spanish colonists encountering what they understood as
senseless human sacrifice (as opposed to rational, sensible wars of religion
or conquest) used it as proof that the Indigenous societies they confronted
lacked reason. In the name of God, yes, but as He is now the God of rea-
son and un-reason’s innocent victims, Spanish colonists claimed they not
only could but also were morally obligated to conquer this society.
This is the same logic that allows Bacon’s Rebellion to expand the
franchise while advocating wiping out the “primitive” Indians. The con-
cepts of the individual and the human that constitute the basis for all
rights, for all law, for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were
already and always built on a racial definition. But the phrase is an adap-
tation of a John Locke quotation that did not mention happiness: it was
“life, liberty, and the pursuit of estate.” This inalienable right to “estate,”
to property, would be the marker of the kind of subject recognized by this
new government. But this also works in the other direction: to be able
to own property is to be human, so those who cannot own property—be
they enslaved, Indigenous, or even the children and wives of settlers—
need not be recognized as fully human by the state.
In the early decades of the colonial era, it was illegal to enslave Chris-
tians in perpetuity. But as the theological explanation of the world gave
way to reason, the justification for enslaving people also transformed:
only barbaric, uncivilized, and “reason-lacking” people can be enslaved.
And, as Wynter shows us, because this is a tautological structure that ver-
ifies itself through what has already come to pass, Africans, who were by
the turn of the seventeenth century “easier” to enslave than Europeans,
became just such a “reason-lacking” people. Africans came to stand for
lack of reason itself. Because people lacking reason were not human, they
were only capable of being property, not owning it. Although the more
liberal-minded settlers believed that with education and uplift some select
Black people might become capable of humanity, they did not challenge
the basic framework by which most Africans were deemed inhuman.
Black people became, legally, socially, and ideologically, property.
The Racial Roots of Property 35
American power and property developed along two racial axes: the
genocidal dispossession of the indigene and the kidnap and enslavement
of the African. As historian Patrick Wolfe writes in Traces of History, this
is core to the worldview of John Locke, preferred property theorist of
the Founding Fathers, who argued “in texts that would profoundly influ-
ence Euro-American colonial ideology, private property accrued from
the admixture of labor and land. As this formula was color-coded on the
colonial ground, Blacks provided the former and Indians the latter.”22
Property in America is only possible through this racial accumulation.
The stolen land and enslaved people were together by far the most
valuable property in America, from the earliest days of the colonies up to
1860. The establishment in American jurisprudence of absolute rights to
property and the inviolability of contract would occur in an 1810 Supreme
Court ruling, Fletcher v. Peck, that centered around a massive expansion
of slave territory in Georgia. That is why legal scholar Anthony Paul Far-
ley argues that “the black is the apogee of the commodity.” Blackness, he
writes, is a way of marking certain bodies as owners and certain bodies
as owned. Simone Browne calls this mutual process of racialization and
propertification the “making and marking of blackness as property.”23
Just as Blackness marks a person as (potential) property, whiteness
also cannot be understood outside of property relations: the character-
istic of “whiteness” is the thing white people have that makes them le-
gal subjects, owners, and human beings. We tend to think of property
as tangible things, items or commodities, although we also understand
ideas of intellectual property and copyright. Property, in other words, also
includes rights, protections, and customs of possession passed down and
ratified through law. Whiteness emerges as the race of people who are
neither Indigenous nor enslavable—national identities are increasingly
collapsed around the distinctions of slave/free and Black/white. As legal
scholar Cheryl Harris writes in her seminal text “Whiteness as Property,”
“Whiteness defined the legal status of a person as slave or free. White
identity conferred tangible and economically valuable benefits and was
jealously guarded as a valued possession, allowed only to those who met a
strict standard of proof.”24 Property law emerges to codify, formalize, and
36 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*A similar process occurs through patriarchal domination, whereby being head of house-
hold—legal ownership of a family’s children and women—was the basis for citizenship.
The Racial Roots of Property 37
at minimum the abolition of the entire system under which things can be
commodified. Revolution.
Such a revolution, against white supremacy, property, and their fun-
damental intersection, was taken up by the enslaved of the United States,
en masse, with the strategy of refusal that had proven most successful
across the preceding centuries: escape from the plantation. And though
this revolution would only destroy legal slavery and not everything it
meant, defended, and reproduced, it is evidence of the revolutionary po-
tential of abolishing property, of joining together and expropriating the
owners. The revolutionary potential of looting.
chapter two | LOOTING EMANCIPATION
*The Thirteenth Amendment left an exception allowing forced labor in the situation
of legal and carceral punishment. As many in the prison abolition movement have ar-
gued, this work-in-jail-for-free clause means slavery has never actually legally ended in
America.
39
40 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
and banks, as well as all currency in circulation and all federal expen-
ditures.”1 Almost entirely illiterate, forcibly barred from gathering and
organizing, ostensibly kept ignorant of current events, they nevertheless
recognized, well before the planters who enslaved them or the Union
generals who would be the instruments of their liberty, what opportunity
the Civil War really held: Jubilee, the end of slavery, and the coming of
their emancipation. They took it.
Though we may question it and struggle against it, our default sense
of history, like our default idea of politics, is a story of leaders, laws and
wars, important dates and formal treaties. Such a historical lens can’t
help but misrecognize the political will and communal intelligence be-
hind the massive, decentralized direct actions that mark all revolutionary
moments. Instead, five hundred thousand enslaved persons escaping in
the span of four years is treated like some individualistic, apolitical phe-
nomenon called “opportunism”—a crime rioters and looters are always
accused of. The history of the Black Atlantic, however, reveals that en-
slaved populations across the centuries have always recognized political
crises among their enslavers as the best moments to organize and get free.
The most famous example of this, of course, is the Haitian revolu-
tion. News of the French Revolution’s beginnings in 1789 sent the French
sugar colony of Saint-Domingue into turmoil. While different political
factions struggled, both in Saint-Domingue and in the revolutionary Na-
tional Assembly back in Paris, the enslaved workers, the vast majority of
the island’s population, watched, waited, and formed a plan of revolt. On
the night of August 21, 1791, the enslaved rose up in a coordinated and
furious attack and, within ten days, had burned dozens of plantations and
taken over the entire Northern Province of the colony.*
These masses would eventually form great armies, overthrowing the
colonial government and taking over the island. By 1804, after defeating
the colonial government, the Spanish, the British, and Napoleon Bona-
parte, the independent Black nation of Haiti had been established. The
Europeans and the United States have never forgotten this history of lib-
*The signal to rise up was famously given a week before, on August 14, at a Vodou cere-
mony in Bois Caïman, attended by representatives from the surrounding plantations and
led by a fugitive: revolutionary leader and high priest Dutty Boukman.
Looting Emancipation 41
erty at their expense, and the tiny country of Haiti, the result of the first
victorious anticolonial and antislavery struggle in the Americas, has been
punished by economic sanction, debt, invasion, war, boycott, and neoco-
lonialism ever since.
But it wasn’t only Haitians who used political conflict to break their
bonds. The overthrow of the July Monarchy in 1848 and the rise of the
Republic of France saw an abolitionist government installed in Paris.
Though this new government would formally abolish slavery in the re-
maining French sugar colonies, the enslaved of Martinique did not wait
for Paris’s help. They deserted plantations in the thousands, forcing the
colonial administrators of Martinique and Guadeloupe to abolish slavery
before the order from the new government to do so could arrive across
the Atlantic.2
In the United States, meanwhile, as many as a hundred thousand
people, near 20 percent of the colonial slave population, escaped slavery
during the course of the American Revolution—including some slaves
of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, fugitives who no doubt
had a more expansive idea of freedom than their enslaving Founding
Fathers—making it the largest slave revolt in United States history until
the Civil War.3
The American Civil War is largely remembered as a clash of armies,
but its historical meaning and significance were mostly determined by a
social revolution in the South, what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “general
strike of the slaves.” The enslaved rose up, fled the plantation, picked up
arms to destroy their former enslavers, and took history into their hands.
The fight for emancipation in the United States did not begin in the
Civil War, and neither did it end at the war’s conclusion.† The fugitive
escaping slavery is as old as the colonies. Her history is necessary to un-
derstanding the course of and possibilities for revolution in the United
States.
†
Nor, indeed, did the Civil War simply begin in 1861 at Fort Sumter and end at Appomat-
tox in 1865. For the “Civil War” here, I use Du Bois’s expanded period of revolutionary
transition and social instability, from 1854—with Bloody Kansas and the fight to expand/
contain slavery—to 1877—when the Republicans betrayed and ended Reconstruction
and withdrew troops from the South in exchange for the Hayes presidency.
42 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Similarly, the Confederate Army did not spring from thin air, but
evolved from what Du Bois called the “armed and commissioned camp
to keep Negroes in slavery and to kill the black rebel,” the proto-police
state the antebellum white South became after the Revolution.4 Nor was
this armed camp destroyed utterly in the crucible of war and defeat, but
rather reformed itself as the white vigilantes and police forces (them-
selves often indistinguishable) of the following Reconstruction and Jim
Crow eras. The white industrialist North, labor and management alike,
had gone into the war not to abolish but to contain slavery (and thus
Black people) in the agrarian South, and it would continue afterward to
attempt to restrict Black movement and resist Black migration north and
westward.
White people north and south thus united after the war to main-
tain what theorist Saidiya Hartman calls the “tragic continuities in ante-
bellum and postbellum constitutions of blackness.”5 These continuities
would mean—after a brief and often revolutionary interregnum known
as Reconstruction—such economic, social, and political oppression that
Frederick Douglass, in 1888, only eleven years after the end of Recon-
struction, would denounce emancipation as a “stupendous fraud.”*
Still, despite these bleak facts, the decades of the Civil War and the
self-emancipation of the enslaved are a crucial hinge point in American
history. The violent collapse of slavery dramatically accelerated a series
of economic and political transformations already under way: a market
driven by the rural production of agricultural staples giving way to one
driven by urban industrial outputs; political power shifting from south
to north and west, from planters and merchants to bankers and industri-
alists. The results of these changes would form the cornerstones of the
modern American state.
More important to our story and the possibility of revolution in Amer-
ica is the legal and ideological transformation of Black people from slaves
*As Saidiya Hartman asks: “How does one adequately render the double bind of eman-
cipation—that is, acknowledge the illusory freedom and travestied liberation that
succeeded chattel slavery without gainsaying the small triumphs of Jubilee?” (Saidiya
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century
America [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 12).
Looting Emancipation 43
into criminals, the formal transition of slave patrols into police, and the
increasing organization of Black people in America as a political, social,
and revolutionary force.
In the center of all these transformations is the fugitive slave. Winning
her emancipation singly, in groups and en masse, stealing through dark
swamps and across busy roads, dodging the slave catchers and outwitting
police patrols, she moves unseen on the edges of history, changing it
inexorably with her flight. To find herself, she must steal and abolish
white property, must abolish herself-as-property. She strikes fear into the
heart of white society because she reveals just how flimsy their regimes
of property, power, and domination can be in the face of her jailbreak for
freedom.
This specter of slaves freeing themselves is American history’s first
image of Black looters.
plantations, throwing down tools and often crossing Union lines to eman-
cipation. As many as two hundred thousand of them served in the Union
Army. It is this incredible act of revolution that would both decide the
war and give it its meaning.10 Du Bois called this movement the general
strike of the slaves.
This tremendous political action, this general strike, this mass loot-
ing did not appear from nothing or materialize “opportunistically” in the
face of war. Indeed, by 1860, before the general strike began, the number
of escapes had reached perhaps fifty thousand annually—many of those
escapees staying in maroon or free Black communities in the South and
some escaping for only a short time—meaning the general strike was
an acceleration and intensification of a movement already in process.11
The number of fugitives steadily grew from 1830 onward, with a marked
increase in militancy after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.*
Fugitives played a crucial role in the end of slavery well before
their great revolutionary moment. In the face of the movement of ever-
increasing maroonage, the Democratic Party pushed the Fugitive Slave
Act into the Compromise of 1850: this law was a central component of
the political crisis that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. The act not
only made harboring a fugitive in a Free State a federal crime, not only
gave slave catchers jurisdiction over the entire North, not only removed
any legal proceedings beyond the enslaver’s testimony, but also obliged
all citizens to actively participate in capturing fugitives.
This law didn’t stem the tide of fugitives, but it did galvanize the abo-
lition movement, which grew increasingly militant in the face of the law’s
overreach: across the North, former slaves and free people armed them-
selves and started speaking not just of abolition but of revolution. And it
convinced many Northern white politicians, intellectuals, and capitalists
of the fearful rise of the great “Slave Power,” an anxiety not about slavery
itself but about a lack of Northern political sovereignty within the federal
government. This fear helped lead to the rise of the Republican Party and
the political crisis that would become secession.
*Recognizing the role of the enslaved in their own emancipation is one reason to join
Du Bois in seeing the Civil War as beginning in the partisan combat of Bloody Kansas
in 1854.
46 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
In the early colonial days of what would become the United States,
those who escaped permanently fled to Indigenous tribes to the uncol-
onized west or to the sparsely colonized Spanish territory of Florida to
the south.* These fugitives also formed or joined secretive communi-
ties of escaped slaves in the swamps and hills around the plantations—
maroon communities. Although maroonage is a more historiographically
centered phenomenon in Brazil, Suriname, and the West Indies—for
example, in Jamaica, where maroon communities fought famous gue-
rilla wars with the colonizers—it was still considerably practiced in the
United States.
During the colonial period, European, African, and Indigenous en-
slaved and indentured peoples escaped the plantation together to form
maroon communities, with European maroons conveniently able to pass
as legal citizens and thus trade with the colonies on behalf of the larger
settlement.15 Particularly large communities formed in the mid-Atlantic
Great Dismal Swamp and across more sparsely colonized Florida.
The maybe six-thousand-square-mile Great Dismal Swamp, running
through the borderlands of North Carolina and Virginia, was a known
free and hostile community in the center of slavery’s heartland. Maroons
from the Dismal Swamp sent units to serve alongside the British in the
Revolutionary War, and during “peacetime” they went on looting raids
out into the surrounding slave country, stealing supplies and freeing the
enslaved. In doing so, they developed guerilla tactics that would help
them to free thousands during the Civil War.
In Florida, between 1817 and 1858, the federal government waged
four decades of war to uproot the powerful autonomous Seminole com-
munities, made up of African maroons and Creek Indians. These com-
munities often sent looting raids into Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia to
free family members and comrades, and their settlements were the desti-
nation of many fugitives from the Deep South. Remembered in history as
the Seminole Wars, the federal government’s military campaigns against
*Even in this early period, when Indigenous tribes attacked settler communities, they
often left Black people unharmed. Though in some places Indigenous people enslaved
Black people, in other places solidarity, co-maroonage, and rebellion were the norm.
48 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
them, which lasted for almost the entire antebellum period, started as
slave-catching expeditions.
The so-called Second Seminole War, from 1835 to 1842, included the
largest slave rebellion in American history outside of the Revolutionary
and Civil Wars. The role of maroons in this war has been mostly left out
of standard histories, but at least four hundred enslaved people looted
themselves from Florida plantations to join the Seminoles in fighting the
US government. A government terrified by Indigenous and Black solidar-
ity waged the Seminole Wars, and these conflicts represent an important
moment in the long tradition of armed self-defense in both insurgent
communities. It is a tradition that liberal historians often try to explain
away, but armed self-defense against the white supremacist state has al-
ways been a crucial part of movements for liberation.
Despite some victories, these protracted wars, at great cost to the US
government in lives and money, eventually saw most of the Seminoles
killed or forced to migrate to Oklahoma, Texas, or Mexico. Though
the Seminoles were never fully defeated, these campaigns, along with
the concomitant growth of plantations and white populations in US-
American Florida, meant that as the nineteenth century wore on Florida
became a less viable destination for fugitives. So, instead, many captives
stole themselves North.16
*Indeed, the Dutch gave a large area of the west side of Manhattan, from what is now
the West Village to Herald Square, as freedom dues to their African captives. But after
the English took over, their colony of New York passed a law against African land own-
Looting Emancipation 49
ership. “Manhattan was thus twice stolen from oppressed peoples” (J. Sakai, Settlers
[Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989], 8).
50 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
fugitive might encounter, if they fled slavery by foot, was a home at bor-
der points between slave and free territory, such as on the northern banks
of the Ohio River, where fugitives could hide out and wait for passage
farther north.
Their next stop might be facilitated by an urban “vigilance commit-
tee.” Vigilance committees were among the most important stations on
the railroad and were set up as major hubs in cities such as Boston, New
York, Oberlin, and Philadelphia. These small, local action committees
sometimes comprised only a handful of people and were in constant
need of funds. Nevertheless, their records furnish much of the surviving
documentary history of the Underground Railroad. When things went
easily, committee members would receive word from stations farther
south or west and greet arriving fugitives as soon as they landed. But
they also scoured the neighborhoods around ports and train stations for
apparent fugitives who had managed to gain access to transport out of the
South and who had arrived alone or without a plan.
Upon arriving in a free town or city, many fugitives described asking
for help from the first Black person they saw, who often directed them to
the vigilance committee or a local station of the Railroad. Though the re-
cords are obviously biased toward those who successfully found the com-
mittees, evidence still points to the fact that this knowledge was widely
spread in free Black communities. Urban Black communities practiced
mutual aid, protection, and self-defense: abolitionist action was not only
taken by those who considered themselves activists.
The committees gave the fugitive shelter and food, investigated
whether they were being hunted, and organized legal counsel if needed.
They set up fugitives with work and housing locally if it was safe and
the fugitive wanted to remain, or they bought them rail tickets or ship
passage farther north. Fugitives frequently went on to Canada or to cit-
ies with a strong abolitionist community—such as New Bedford, where
Frederick Douglass settled—which meant they would be better protected
from slave catchers. When they arrived, they were then helped by activ-
ists who organized work and housing for them and often reunited them
with family or friends who may have been expecting them.
Looting Emancipation 53
*It’s not just Tubman: when I visited the John Brown museum in Harpers Ferry in July
2015, the exhibit about the Black men who fought beside him during the raid was rele-
gated to a small, hard-to-find room away from the main halls.
56 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
liberal white abolitionists reacted with shock and outrage against his vio-
lent methods.
It is only the 20/20 hindsight of history—a vision corrected by the ac-
tions of the enslaved—that allows us to see property in human beings as
the evil it was. At the time, it was as natural as the prisons and police are
today. Only the thousands of abolitionists like Tubman, the millions of
enslaved who rose up in revolt, flight, and strike and who overthrew the
system of slavery, have allowed us to see slavery clearly.
and cultural center akin to Rome or Greece. To prove this, they spent
money well beyond their means, imagining elaborate displays of conspic-
uous consumption and architectural splendor made them akin to Euro-
pean aristocrats. The massive, chronic debt thus accumulated—perhaps
the main attribute they really shared with nineteenth-century European
nobility—combined with increasing market pressures, meant that they
needed to expand available plantation territory to increase their profits.
They looked hungrily toward Mexico (which then included much of to-
day’s southwestern United States), California, and the Caribbean, where
they saw the promise of endless plantations filled with African laborers.
They rejected the Northern model of development, believing that the
industrialist production of a professional middle class would mean less
wealth accumulation at the top and that, furthermore, reliance on a mas-
sive white proletariat promised class war from the bottom.
The Free Soil movement, for its part, represented a cross-class alli-
ance that, though it included abolitionists, was mostly made up of North-
ern capitalists, merchants, recent European immigrants, and organized
labor. Capitalists looked to Haiti with horror and believed that it was slav-
ery that produced unmanageably rebellious subjects. Some of America’s
first Nimbyists, they wanted to keep profiting off of plantation slavery as it
existed, restrained to the South, but to use the “new” territory for mixed
agricultural and industrial development carried out by a predominantly
immigrant white settler workforce. The workers, who wanted to settle the
land as homesteaders, joined them in this white supremacist vision: the
expansion of slave plantations across the territory would leave no space
for them to homestead.* Furthermore, just like racist anti-immigrant
rhetoric holds today, many white workers and organized labor unions of
the antebellum period believed that the mere presence of Black workers,
enslaved or free, drove down wages.
*They did not foresee that Free Soil would betray them all the same and that the best
land would be consolidated overwhelmingly by railroads and various corporations, leav-
ing poor soil and hardscrabble lives for the homesteaders, who would by debt and ma-
nipulation largely be transformed into tenant farmers in the decades following the Civil
War.
58 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Neither side saw any problem with the fact that these territories
were to be added to the United States by the violent conquest of their
Indigenous residents, many of them already multiply displaced by
America’s genocidal expansion. The political conflict around slavery
that precipitated the Civil War was, in other words, between two differ-
ent white supremacist, pro-slavery, settler-colonialist visions of Amer-
ica’s future.
Throughout this period, all branches of the federal government re-
mained steadfastly pro-slavery. Congress passed the series of bills making
up the Compromise of 1850, which, along with enacting the Fugitive
Slave Act, guaranteed that slave states would retain their disproportion-
ate power in the federal government. That compromise was the dip-
lomatic coup of the moderate liberal president Millard Fillmore, but
such mealy-mouthed liberal white supremacy would give way, in 1853,
to a fiercely pro-slavery executive branch led by Democratic president
Franklin Pierce. Pierce shepherded the disastrous Kansas-Nebraska Act
through Congress, an act that would overturn federal restrictions on
slavery’s expansion and lead to the first stage of the Civil War, when
guerilla combat between enslavers and abolitionists exploded in Kansas.
Not to be outdone by the other branches of government, the Supreme
Court in 1857 issued the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Black
people had never been allowed to be nor ever could be American cit-
izens, that Congress was constitutionally unable to ban slavery in the
territories, and that the federal government had no legal ground to free
slaves whatsoever.
But this strong governmental support for slavery, driven by South-
ern Democrats, wasn’t enough for the constantly anxious plantation
class, who feared that the actual unification of Free Soilers within a
single political party—the Republicans—threatened their goals and
their future power in Washington. Still, Lincoln’s election was more
pretense than cause. Tubman and Brown’s insurrection had flared
up only a year previously, in October 1859, and, combined with the
constantly growing movement of fugitives—reaching fifty thousand
maroons per annum by 1860—and the always increasing “disorder”
Looting Emancipation 59
*Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee would secede and join the Confed-
eracy as soon as the war fully broke out.
60 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*This is one of the many ways that the Confederacy underestimated the power of the
people. When England did not immediately support the Southern cause, the planters
organized a boycott against selling cotton to England, which was then made moot by a
Union blockade of the southern coast. Though many planters continued selling their
cotton on the black market to the North, England, and Europe—as with all capitalists,
their patriotism ended abruptly at their pocketbooks—this sudden drop in supply result-
ing from the blockade meant the price of cotton exploded in England. The textile fac-
tory owners in northwest England cut back dramatically on textile production, sending
thousands of English workers into unemployment, an event referred to as the Lancashire
Cotton Famine.
But rather than give in to this blackmail on the part of both their bosses and the slav-
ocracy, in one of history’s great moments of international solidarity the working people of
northern England organized mutual aid to see themselves through the crisis—including
a series of riots that had them looting bread—held protests demanding their employers
and the English government remain steadfast against the Confederacy and slavery at any
cost, and sent declarations in support of emancipation to Lincoln. This unrest helped
keep the English out of the war until the Emancipation Proclamation, at which point
English entry on the side of the Confederacy became politically impossible.
Looting Emancipation 61
pealed to both the West and the North; and what was then much more
significant, it appealed to the Border States.”28
Lincoln, despite whatever tale liberal historians or Hollywood ha-
giographers want to tell, was no abolitionist. Had the war not broken
out and had his most ambitious antebellum emancipation proposal gone
into effect, he would have set slavery in America on a course to legally
end . . . in a hundred years. In 1958. Furthermore, Lincoln believed
that the best course of abolition would be to “convince” Black people
to emigrate from the United States, a historical position called “coloni-
zation.” The same day that Lincoln finished drafting the Emancipation
Proclamation, December 31, 1862, he also signed a contract funding the
relocation of five thousand Black men, women, and children to Haiti as
an experimental test case for total colonization.29 The experiment failed
miserably, but he was still arguing for colonization as late as 1864. And
even in 1865, with emancipation all but completed, Lincoln opposed
giving Black men the vote.
But the Civil War was that rare historical period—a revolution-
ary period—in which the desires and goals of the powerful are swept
aside utterly by the vision and action of the masses. Just as through their
self-emancipation the enslaved gave the Civil War its meaning, so it was
their belief that Lincoln would be the Great Emancipator that would
make him appear so to history.
Lincoln’s transformation was, ironically, aided by the most rabid
Southern ideologues. In both the 1860 presidential contest and in the
state-by-state campaigns for secession in the winter of 1860–1861, the
slavocracy’s propagandists painted Lincoln a dangerous enemy of the
peculiar institution. Though this was a provocation that Lincoln would
continuously deny, it had unexpected consequences. The political cam-
paign Southern nationalists waged to confer legitimacy on peaceful se-
cession, held in the big houses of the plantations and the central squares
of Southern cities, was based on the (false) claim that Lincoln’s election
would mean abolition, and the campaign couldn’t be waged without re-
vealing this logic to the enslaved. So when secession instead came with
war and chaos, not an orderly and peaceful legal split, the enslaved did
not see some grim tale of “brother fighting brother” but rather Jubilee,
62 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*Four slave states, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland, never declared seces-
sion and thus remained part of the Union, although allegiances within the states were
split and some white men from there fought with the Confederacy. These are known as
the border states, and as a result of their presence the Union always contained slavery
within it.
Looting Emancipation 63
cally: “The policy preserved the norms of slave property even as it opened
new possibilities to resist bondage.”30
However, as soon as it became clear that the Union Army would ac-
cept fugitives, “the movement became a general strike against the slave
system on the part of all who could find opportunity. The trickling streams
of fugitives swelled to a flood.”31 In many places, fugitives did the crucial
labor in the construction of Union Army infrastructure; elsewhere they
did equally important agricultural work, gathering the crops on aban-
doned plantations behind Union lines for the army to sell. Elsewhere,
many more refused to work for the Union as a condition of their liberty,
instead squatting and claiming land, setting up agricultural communes,
or joining maroon communities. Through their flight and strike, they
dramatically transformed conditions on both sides of the front lines.
The next logical step, literally unthinkable to both sides only a few
years previously, was to arm the fugitives and hire them to serve in the
Union Army, a measure that followed quickly on the heels of the Eman-
cipation Proclamation. Virulent racism in the Union meant Black peo-
ple were seen as unfit for service, but the Union was facing an enlistment
crisis.
By 1863, two years into the combat, both sides, despite instituting a
draft, confronted considerable problems recruiting soldiers. In the North,
the poor, largely immigrant populations that represented the majority of
Union conscripts resented serving in a bloody and seemingly intractable
war fought on behalf of industrialists. But this class resentment merged
with a resurgent Northern anti-Blackness, and Black people, rather than
the slavocracy, were blamed for the conflict.
The New York City Draft Riots, among the most violent riots in
American history, began as working-class, predominantly Irish men rose
up against the draft’s incredible class bias. The law allowed a man of
draft age to hire a substitute for $300 (more than $6,000 in 2020 dollars)
rather than serve, and as a result few rich men wore the Union blue.
But the riots turned into an anti-Black pogrom, killing over one hundred
Black people and burning down abolitionists’ homes, Black bars and the-
aters, and even the Colored Orphan Asylum. In the aftermath of the riots,
64 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
almost the entire Black population fled the city, many of them settling in
Brooklyn. Though they never reached such violent extremes elsewhere,
in 1863 antiwar riots spread and racist antiwar sentiment ran rampant in
the North.
But classed resentment of the war was even more pronounced in the
South. As Armstead L. Robinson argues in his seminal Bitter Fruits of
Bondage, the very fact that the war was being fought to preserve slavery
doomed the Confederacy’s cause from the outset. To show this, Robinson
traces the social composition of the Confederacy, whose class makeup
was oligarchic in the extreme. Out of the total population of the South—
around ten million people—four million were enslaved and six million
were free. But of those free families, only 25 percent enslaved Africans,
and, of that 25 percent, only 10 percent had enough land and human
property to qualify as “planters.” Yet, thanks to the Three-Fifths Compro-
mise, that tiny cohort of planters had voting power equivalent to perhaps
two million citizens in the North. A similar form of disenfranchisement
continues in 2020, as imprisoned people are stripped of their right to vote,
even though the census counts them as residents of the (overwhelmingly
rural, white) counties where they are caged rather than the (mostly Black,
urban) communities from which they are captured.
As Robinson shows, when the Confederacy seceded, despite mak-
ing paeans to states’ rights and individual sovereignty, the planter class
doubled down on their oligarchic power, with planters and their allies
taking almost every seat in the Confederate congress and cabinet. Con-
federate president Jefferson Davis was a plantation owner, as was Vice
President Alexander Stephens and General Robert E. Lee. Though the
vast majority of Confederate citizens were poor backcountry yeoman
farmers with no human property, many living very far away even from
plantation country, they had no representation in the Confederate gov-
ernment. The planters’ interest was the only interest truly represented in
Richmond, the seat of the Confederate government from May 29, 1861,
just after the war began, until April 3, 1865, when it fell to Union forces.
This meant that in session after session the Confederate government
passed draft exemptions for planters, overseers, and their families. Mean-
Looting Emancipation 65
while, planters used their influence in local militias to keep corps of men
at home for defense against fugitives and slave rebellion. At the very mo-
ment the Confederate cause needed all able-bodied men on the front
lines, the planters schemed to increase the numbers of the slave patrols
on the home front instead.
The general strike of the enslaved made these patrollers’ presence on
each individual plantation even more necessary as, at the same time, it
made their efforts in aggregate totally fruitless. On plantations where work
continued, slowdowns and disorder increased dramatically. “Morale”
completely collapsed on many plantations, where the enslaved simply
stopped working, fled en masse, or even took control themselves. Much
was made in the Confederate press of the Black sexual menace threaten-
ing the wives and daughters of planters left alone during wartime, a cruel
and twisted propagandistic tool considering the centuries-long endemic
rape of African women by their enslavers. However, the record shows
remarkably little violence committed against planters or their families in
the period—Du Bois explains this by suggesting it was simply easier to
run away.
But even as plantation production began to break down, and with it
the economic backbone of the Confederacy, so too did soldier morale.
Hardly the popular cause its white supremacist defenders today like to
pretend, after an early burst of excitement in 1861, the yeomen of the
South began to see the Confederate struggle for what it was: “a rich man’s
war and a poor man’s fight.” Though this phrase describes most of the
wars ever fought in history, as Robinson shows, in the South this partic-
ular slogan was widespread and had devastating consequences. Entire
Confederate companies melted away to desertion. In some places, dis-
sident white yeomen assisted fugitives and spread intelligence about the
war, serving as Union spies alongside enslaved people. In other regions,
like the highlands of Eastern Tennessee, poor white Unionists resisted
the Confederacy with guerilla warfare, opening up internal fronts that
spread Confederate military forces thin. However, it is important not to
confuse our current understanding of the Civil War with the motives of
all who fought against the Confederacy: although some of these yeomen
66 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
were abolitionist, many of these Unionist forces were just as racist as their
Confederate enemies. Nevertheless, they played a crucial role in bogging
down the Confederacy and destroying its power.
Thus, a war fought to preserve slavery produced the conditions under
which the enslaved could escape and destroy it. In attempting to stop
this social upheaval and preserve the slave system, Confederate policy
exacerbated class tensions, guaranteeing the Confederacy couldn’t win
the military struggle, either.* By the time Black fugitives finally put on
the Union blue, the war was as good as over for the Confederacy. As
the Union ranks swelled with the two hundred thousand fugitives ready
to take up arms against their former enslavers, the Confederate lines
thinned, the plantations failed, and the planter class perished in a storm
of fire and blood.
*The romantic historical fictions of latter-day Confederate apologists and Union fan-
tasists that see the war being won or lost by a brave stand on a little hill in Gettysburg,
for example, or that imagine a better-organized Confederate attack winning the war are
structurally racist fantasies that focus solely on the military context. But wars are social
and political events, not merely armies meeting in combat, and much as the Russian
army in World War I was defeated not by the Imperial German Army but by revolution
at home, so the Confederacy was defeated not by the Union Army but by the revolution
of the Black people it enslaved, who used the Union as their tool of liberation.
Looting Emancipation 67
not to let it happen to themselves. They ensured that their property could
not be so easily looted; neither would they ever allow its destruction to
gain the moral righteousness and historical clarity of the struggle for
emancipation.
The revolution was begun, but not completed, and, as all partial rev-
olutions, it would eventually sink back down under a morass of repres-
sion, violence, and confusion, waiting for a future generation to lift it up
out of the muck, study its tactics, its promises, and its visions, and finally
complete the dream of Jubilee.
chapter three | ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS
71
72 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
terrorists, and police forces that had developed in the urban centers of
the South were reinforced and re-empowered. The ad hoc combination
of these forces—police, white terrorists, Southern Democrats, and North-
ern liberals—ultimately defeated the enslaved people, who had struck
off their bonds, created a social revolution in the South, and won a war
against their former masters. Anti-Black violence, carried out by the state
and its volunteers, ensured that emancipation would not mean equality,
freedom, and justice for all any more than the Constitution did. And
this continuity of racial violence did not merely harm the emancipated
people of the South.
As the United States followed its Manifest Destiny to the West Coast,
it furthered its genocidal displacement, internment, and war on Indig-
enous Americans. With the conquer and occupation of large swaths of
Mexico, the American border crossed lands inhabited by Chicanx peo-
ple, who increasingly found themselves the targets of murderous white
dispossession. So too did the Asian workers brought across the Pacific to
build the cities, railroads, farms, and mines of the West. This violence
was also turned against anarchists, communists, socialists, and radical la-
bor, many of them newly arrived German and Italian immigrants who
were not yet considered white.
It is well beyond this book to even begin to look at or analyze all
the riots, lynchings, and police violence that occurred across America
between Reconstruction and the Black Freedom movement of the six-
ties. What’s notable, though, is that the police, alongside white collective
punishments, played an increasingly central role in society and became
a crucial factor in all of the transformations occurring throughout the
country. Urbanization, industrialization, western expansion, Black in-
ternal migration, labor struggles, American imperialism, political ma-
chines, and “gilded age” financial and corporate concentration of wealth
all relied on or responded to police and vigilante violence in their daily
enactments.
Race riots and lynchings were a way of “stabilizing” white suprema-
cist settler-colonial capitalist hegemony—by terrorizing and disorganiz-
ing the American proletariat, by transferring wealth and power to white
All Cops Are Bastards 73
capitalists—while the police served as a new tool for legitimizing and reg-
ulating this violence. The historical emergence of the police, and their
relationship to fugitives, urban slave patrols, colonial administration, and
crowd suppression, helps us analyze looting and rioting in the present.
The proposition that history does not primarily happen in parlia-
ments or on battlefields but rather in workplaces, in homes, in theaters
and schools, in factories, and in the streets refers not only to the history
of resistance and revolution but also to its repression, deferral, and de-
struction. And in the United States, the forces doing that everyday work
of repression, deferral, and destruction have tended to wear a blue cap or
a white hood.
do so, we will follow the distinct but similar development of three of the
earliest police forces: London’s Metropolitan Police, the New York City
Police Department, and the Charleston City Guard.
and rents suddenly required for use of the land they and their forebears
had farmed for centuries. Without a place to farm, and thus without a
way to grow food or subsist, peasants were made homeless and plunged
into desperate poverty by these laws and land grabs.
Many left the countryside to find work in the towns, where they
ended up living in densely packed slums. This new urban poor proved
the crucial factor in growing the ranks of the rich and the merchant “mid-
dle classes,” who could profit off paying these country bumpkins terrible
wages for grueling work and charging them high rents for miserable hov-
els. Where once towns were small settlements where rich and poor often
lived more or less side by side, as cities grew, classes also increasingly
stratified in their daily lives, making for entirely different experiences of
the city in completely separated neighborhoods.
This great mass of newly impoverished people tended to resent their
bosses and landlords—who stole their lives week by week through rent
and wage—and tried to live the best they could in spite of it all. They
skipped out on work and contracts, didn’t pay their debts, drank, caroused,
gambled, and behaved in all sorts of “immoral” ways—the same leisure
and economic activities practiced by the English aristocracy, of course,
but suddenly immoral when practiced in public by former peasants. This
“immorality,” crucially, was not violent: violent crime actually dramat-
ically decreased during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
These people merely hadn’t internalized or didn’t respect the new eco-
nomic and social relations developing in the period and had to be forced
to recognize the “rational,” “natural” ways of the new system of property,
commodity, labor, and contract.
As one method of keeping these newly dispossessed in check, various
London watch organizations took up modernizing experiments, most
significantly paying watchmen, but also hiring more men, increasing
hours of operation, granting pensions, and purchasing modern equip-
ment and weapons. They also increasingly criminalized debt, unem-
ployment, gambling, drinking, and public gathering: transforming
people into criminals is one of the core methods of social control under
capitalism. But, although the night watch and other early experimental
police forces were capable of punishing individuals—public hangings
76 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*Robert Peel’s infamy includes not only brutal management in Ireland and the inven-
tion of the English police but also the founding and reinvigoration of the modern Con-
servative Party and, as prime minister, exacerbation of the Great Famine in Ireland. For
two years, he denied its effects, doing nothing while hundreds of thousands died, then,
when the suffering became too great to ignore, in 1846 he cynically used the famine to
repeal the Corn Laws and advance his cause of free trade—the repeal represents a cru-
cial governmental shift from supporting the landed aristocracy to supporting the bour-
geoisie. But, lovely man that he was, Peel set up the repeal to go into place gradually,
rather than all at once, so that its effects would not help the Irish come out of the famine
for another three years.
All Cops Are Bastards 77
*New York, with its bankers and merchants who managed business between the South/
the Caribbean and the North and Europe, had the most staunchly pro-slavery, pro-
Democrat, and actively anti-Black white population of any major city in the North.
All Cops Are Bastards 79
from both their employer and their enslaver, and their daily lives outside
work unfolded mostly in Black neighborhoods called slave quarters.
Slave quarters were spaces of relative autonomy for the enslaved, and
as such were a cause of massive anxiety to the white residents of the cities,
who feared the possibility of Black peoples’ organization and righteous
rebellion. The neighborhoods were frequently outside of white control,
a place where maroons could organize and trade, where recent fugitives
could hide out and Underground Railroad stations could form, where
African, creole, and subversive Christian religious practices could flour-
ish, and where white people weren’t respected, deferred to, or welcomed.
Such communities presented an imminent threat to the slave order.
So Southern cities developed “city guards,” militarized forces of young
white men whose large numbers and modern weaponry allowed them
to patrol and control those quarters. Rather than evolving slowly out of
the traditional and ineffectual night watch, as the police forces did in
London and New York City, the urban guards of the South were adapted
directly from rural slave patrols and put into place directly to replace the
watch.8
The first of these slave-patrol-cum-police-forces was the Charleston,
South Carolina, City Guard and Watch, incorporated in 1783. As Kristian
Williams writes, this force “represented a significant advance in the de-
velopment of policing.”9 Armed, professionalized, and uniformed, with
the same officers working every day, the force patrolled Charleston in a
company rather than as individuals. It was a modern police department,
the first, perhaps, in the world. Similar “guards” popped up across the
South in the following decades.
Though these guards were ostensibly formed to stop crime, they
largely worked by instilling terror in the Black population. They raided
Black people’s homes, monitored and controlled their movement, en-
forced a curfew (for Black people only), and regularly mustered in full
force to parade through the streets behind fife and drum, armed to the
teeth, beating anyone they could catch, sending people fleeing ahead of
them.
Unlike in the rural areas between the plantations, Southern cities
required that the enslaved be able to move freely between their various
82 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
jobs and home, so a patrol that stopped and harassed everyone moving
through the streets was undesirable and unprofitable. The enslaved were
still required to carry a pass from their employers, and failure to produce
one could result in terrible violence, but unlike their rural counterparts,
the guard didn’t stop anyone and everyone they met. Thus, the Guard
and Watch developed the essential police tactics of selective enforce-
ment and random terror, which, alongside keeping Black people from
certain places (e.g., bars and public parks), became the everyday job of
the guard. As Williams writes, “This body was responsible for arresting
vagrants and other suspicious persons, preventing felonies and distur-
bances, and warning of fires. But one guard described his job succinctly
as ‘keeping down the n***ers.’”10 The police are one of the first “color-
blind” institutions in American history: formal responsibility for urban
safety and crime prevention is simply a cover for enforcement of white
supremacy and anti-Blackness.
This emergence of a modern police force in the South was different
from that in London, which was different, again, from that in New York
City, but all three shared some clear tendencies. In all instances, the po-
lice developed as a formal governmental organization when the enslaver,
colonizer, and/or capitalist could no longer sufficiently protect their
property or control on their own the crowds of laborers they required. In
all three instances, the state stepped in to take over a repressive function
by forming an organization with a separate agenda from that of the army
or the militia: an armed bureaucracy under the aegis of stopping crime.
As we can see from the examples of London and New York City, the po-
lice did not evolve exclusively or simply in response to the chattel slavery
relation. However, police evolved and modernized earlier in cities with
slavery and appeared sooner in settler colonies than in their metropoles.
Police forces in the colonial center always took tactical, organizational,
and methodological cues from colonizing and enslaving police forces
in the outposts. The slave catcher is thus embedded in the DNA of all
modern police forces.
Many reactionaries confront abolitionists with the question: Well,
then, what do you replace the police with? But that question implies that
the police exist for generalized protection of the people. The police do
All Cops Are Bastards 83
not exist to protect citizens from crime, and they never have. As revolu-
tionary labor organizer Lucy Parsons observed, already true more than a
hundred years ago, “We have laws, jails, courts, armies, guns and armor-
ies enough to make saints of us all, if they were the true preventives of
crime.”11 America currently has more police per capita than any nation
in Europe, and the highest rates of imprisonment in the world, yet it
continues to have higher rates of crime.
So, what do the police do? The police exist to enforce the rule of the
powerful few over the weak and many. I do not see a need to replace or
reproduce that function in a liberated society. As Mychal Denzel Smith
puts it: “What do you do with an institution whose core function is the
control and elimination of black people specifically, and people of color
and the poor more broadly? You abolish it.”12
The self-looting fugitive was the spark for the genesis of the earliest
policing forces—the slave patrols—and enforcing federal fugitive slave
law was one of the earliest tasks of American police forces. Beyond the
loss of property she represents, the fugitive anticipates and precipitates
rebellion with her flight. The police have from the beginning existed to
protect racialized property relations from the threat posed by the looter,
the rebel, and the crowd. The looter is one of the historical nemeses of
the police: it is no wonder that, during antipolice uprisings, she reappears
again and again.
But if the looter reappears in uprisings against capital and the police,
hardly all rioters and looters in American history have fought against the
state, the police, or the regime of white supremacist property.
In the chaos of a collapsed economy and “way of life” in the wake
of the Civil War, gangs of ex-Confederate soldiers wandered the South,
using their soldierly skills to murder Black people and rob what little they
had. One of these groups of Confederates formed the Ku Klux Klan,
which would become America’s most powerful fascist popular movement.
First organized as a social club for white supremacist “pranksters” in
December 1865, the KKK’s racial terror, irony-drenched “pranks” quickly
transformed into lynchings, and the organization spread all across the
South. Its branches terrorized freed slaves, attacking and killing Black
leaders and occasionally the white activists who had come south to as-
sist them, in an attempt to destroy nascent Black political power and
re-enslave Black labor. They were joined in this task by other post-
Confederate Southern paramilitary white terrorist organizations, such as
the Red Shirts and the White Man’s League, which focused their attacks
around elections and taking out local Republican politicians and civil
servants.
White people behaved in the former Confederacy like apocalypse
survivors, using bare violence and terror to regain control of a South fun-
damentally shaken by social transformation. Polling places, then open to
Black people, could be sites of unspeakable violence, as white terrorists
attacked both Black voters and white people voting for the Republican
Party. The plantation owners may have been defeated in war and in law,
but they marshalled what power and wealth they had left to try to main-
All Cops Are Bastards 87
tain the system that had deemed them masters. In most of the South,
civil war continued at a lower level of violence for another decade, often
taking on the form of open combat, and even expanding into statewide
civil war in Mississippi and Arkansas.
Against these white terrorists stood the newly emancipated. A gener-
ation of Black people had realized their power through their great strike,
their emancipation, and their participation in the Union Army. Having
begun a radical transformation of society, they set about consolidating
those gains and pushing them forward. In some places they won local
and federal elections, built schools and businesses, and increased demo-
cratic participation; in others they carried on more militant insurrection,
following the outlaw traditions of maroon and Indian communities, loot-
ing and expropriating planters and owners in order to live on their own
land without bosses or work. This often took the form of outright armed
rebellion against bosses and landowners, as in the Ogeechee Insurrec-
tion of 1868–1869, when hundreds of Black rice farmers in the Ogeechee
Neck of Georgia, fed up with stalled negotiations with the bosses, armed
themselves, rose up, kicked the owners and overseers off the farms, and
occupied them, forming an autonomous commune.16 The formerly en-
slaved people of the South became, briefly, the heralds of a different
world. And they sometimes did so with the improbable support of the
federal government and Northern capital.
Whereas a portion of the support from the North stemmed from
solidarity with radical abolitionists, most of it came from capitalists and
politicians who recognized that, in the power vacuum created by the
Confederacy’s collapse, they could finally crush the planter class, cap-
turing and rationalizing the Southern economy and government toward
the needs of industrial capital in the process. As a result, federal support
tended to emphasize reforms that transformed the newly emancipated
Black people of the South into wage workers, sharecroppers, and debtors.
This worked against or deemphasized the radical autonomy and agrarian
land reform—succinctly captured by the rallying cry of “forty acres and
a mule,” promised in General Sherman’s Special Field Orders that re-
distributed land in the Sea Islands—that emancipated people across the
South anticipated and had fought for.
88 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
for the entire period, found their most powerful antagonists in the effort
withdrawn, and in the years following 1877, white “redeemers” across the
South purged Black officials—sometimes at gunpoint or amid rioting—
and ushered Democrats back into office, then putting in place laws that
foreshadowed or transformed into Jim Crow, halting and reversing the
progressive gains of the Reconstruction period.
Those who argue that reform is “more practical” or “more realistic”
than revolution forget how easily reforms are rolled back to leave the
white supremacist, heteropatriarchal capitalist state in place. The gains
made in the midst of a civil war that led to 750,000 deaths, won by the
largest uprising in American history—the general strike of the enslaved—
and consolidated in a decade of local and autonomous governance were
traded away by politicians and leaders for the four-year presidential term
of Rutherford B. Hayes, and the freedom movement was set back for
decades to come.20
Of course, this betrayal is merely the most clear and dramatic polit-
ical component of the ongoing nationwide process of white suprema-
cist retrenchment, a process that would continue well into the twentieth
century, a process of disenfranchisement, disempowerment, and work re-
gimes resembling re-enslavement that ensured a continuation of slavery-
like relations in America despite the technical end of slavery. And one of
the main agents in this process was the white lyncher, rioter, and arsonist.
The white supremacist looter.
chapter four | WHITE RIOT
91
92 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
police, and the prison-industrial complex rather than by a mix of state ac-
tors, volunteers, vigilantes, and rioters. As Naomi Murakawa points to in
her seminal The First Civil Right, one of the things that liberal civil rights
legislation ironically ended up doing was bringing the work of those vol-
unteers under the official policy of the federal government. By framing the
violence of extralegal white supremacist volunteers as a crime issue, and
Jim Crow as a question of bad laws and individual racists in government,
civil rights legislation under Truman and onward focused on producing
race-neutral criminal law and centralizing political power in the federal
government. These bills reined in de jure white supremacy and gave the
federal government authority to intervene with white vigilante violence,
but they also built the legal and political frameworks for a “color-blind”
criminal policy that would become Black mass incarceration.1
It is not that these vigilantes ever disappeared, as Dylann Roof’s mur-
der of nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church
in Charleston in 2015 shows. Indeed, vigilantism is again on the rise,
with more or less direct encouragement from the Trump administration.
But in the ninety years between the Civil War and the civil rights move-
ment, lynchings, vigilante violence, and white riots occurred regularly, a
form of oppression as common, daily, and universal in the lives of people
of color as police violence and incarceration are today. The extent and
spread of the violence can be hard to imagine, but, particularly in the
decades immediately following the collapse of the Confederacy, constant
terror was often the only thing keeping white supremacist state govern-
ments together.2
Less a formal legal regime to ensure water fountains remained seg-
regated, Jim Crow, which emerged in the South in the 1870s and 1880s
to be struck down only in the 1960s, was a reign of terror and violence,
protected by law but enforced by upstanding white citizens whose three-
piece suits hung cozily in their closets beside white robes.
And this great white supremacist terror was not contained in the
South nor restricted to anti-Blackness. Anti-Asian and anti-Mexican ri-
ots were common occurrences in the cities of the American West, cities
largely built by their labor, while the continued genocidal dispossession
of Indigenous peoples and all-out war on the Plains Indians were mythol-
White Riot 93
the North and the West, as well as general and increasing urbanization
across the country.
These migrations were political movements, or flights of freedom.
The first major wave of migration, known as the Exoduster Movement,
saw forty thousand Black people, disillusioned by the collapse of Recon-
struction and by white supremacist violence, organize and migrate from
the Mississippi valley to the Great Plains in 1879. Migrations continued
throughout the period, in waves large and small. Migration north and
west was not simply an aggregate of personal flights for safety but a politi-
cal tactic against sharecropping, lynching, and oppression—it was a form
of strike that had, after all, served effectively under slavery. Migration was
famously advocated as such by the country’s largest Black newspaper,
the Chicago Defender, as well as by other antilynching publications and
organizers.*
During high points of organization and agitation, or in the face of
particularly intense labor injustice or white violence, the majority of a
Southern town’s Black population might pack up and migrate within
days or weeks of each other, leaving white landlords with crops rotting
in their fields. In one of the contradictions of action produced by white
supremacy, racist vigilantes and police forces would ride out to try to stop
trains from leaving for the North, to try to keep the Black people they
hated in their towns and counties. This means that the concentration of
Black people in Northern and midwestern cities already represents some-
thing of a form of protection and resistance against white terror, because
it reflects both flight from the places where that terror was most concen-
trated and formation of communities capable of more ready self-defense.
It is also why urban police forces become an increasingly important force
in white supremacist domination.
The trend from lynching to riot thus also reflects resistance and or-
ganization among the Black community, whose struggles across this pe-
riod are often skipped over in standard histories. These people, who had
brought themselves out of slavery, who had struck the fetters from their
wrists, did not simply fall silent as Reconstruction collapsed, as the coffle
was refashioned as the chain gang, the slave hut rechristened the share-
cropper’s hovel. Though they and their children’s movements are less
well remembered and often less spectacular or legible as “protest,” these
generations did not live submissively and unhappily under Jim Crow,
doing little until tension and anger finally boiled over into the civil rights
struggle in the fifties. A continuity of Black armed resistance, struggle,
organizing, and self-defense against white supremacy runs through the
period that is crucial to remember and learn from.4
However, that continuity of resistance faced an organized and thor-
ough campaign of white supremacist terror. It is important to insist how
consciously lynching was used as both a political weapon of oppression
and a tool of white community consolidation, particularly because we are
living through a second era of lynching: many more Black people have
been murdered by police in each of the last few years than were lynched
in 1892, the worst year of that terror, which saw 162 people killed.5*
Usually not chaotic, sudden, or disorganized bursts of violence,
lynchings were instead prepared for days, even weeks in advance, called
for and explained by community leaders, hyped and built up in local
newspapers. Though some lynchings happened in the dead of night,
many occurred in broad daylight and appeared as nothing so much as
massive popular festivals. Free trains might be organized to bring white
people from the surrounding rural counties to the town of the lynching,
where crowds paraded the victim from jail to the site of the lynching:
there white families might picnic before or after the murder, while enter-
prising white entrepreneurs might sell popcorn and lemonade.
Though white people north and south usually claimed and believed
that the regime of lynch law was a response to sexual violation of white
women, Ida B. Wells’s investigations showed that the actual proximate
causes for lynching were various: “Of these thousands of men and women
who have been put to death without judge or jury, less than one-third of
them have been accused of criminal assault.” Wells lists the reasons for
*However, because the Black population has increased four times since then, lynching
was more common per capita, at least in 1892—though such morbid math completely
misses the way this form of terrorism operates.
White Riot 97
*This is not to make a moral distinction between looting and property destruction or to
imagine that property destruction is “worse” or more white supremacist than looting.
Property destruction has been just as much a significant part of liberatory uprisings as
looting. It is merely a historical fact that the system already guarantees that most of the
products of people of color’s labor goes to white people. When it did occur, looting often
reflected the mixed class composition of white supremacist riots: lynch mobs and rioting
masses were often led by the respectable heads of communities, but working-class white
people took part, too, and used them as occasions to literalize the wages of whiteness.
†
Massacres and white riots were a common method of repressing Black worker organi-
zation—in Thibodaux, Louisiana, in 1887, thirty-two Black sugar plantation workers on
strike, including Black union leaders, were massacred by a white mob.
100 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
pointed out, while general strikes by white labor unions were shutting
down whole cities in the North without facing mass murder, merely or-
ganizing a union and demanding the most basic economic rights proved
to be deadly for Black sharecroppers.*
The riot began when whites from Elaine and nearby counties sur-
rounded the Hoop Spur church, three miles north of Elaine, where the
sharecroppers’ union was having a general meeting, a gathering that
included children and old folks, full families. At a certain point, per-
haps once all the vigilantes had arrived, the white landlords, sheriffs, and
farmers who encircled the church fired guns indiscriminately into the
building. Though a couple of Black organizers had come armed and,
guarding the doors, fired back—killing one white man, though it’s also
possible he was shot in the back by his white compatriots—the Black
sharecroppers were significantly outgunned, and unknown numbers died
in the church. After those who could flee escaped into the surrounding
countryside, the white rioters burned the church to the ground without
removing the bodies of their victims. As so often is the case with Black
people murdered by America, the number of dead is unknown.
The next day saw a full-out murderous rampage. As Wells describes
it: “Hundreds of . . . white men were chasing and murdering every Negro
they could find, driving them from their homes and stalking them in
the woods and fields as men hunt wild beasts. They were finishing up
the job from the night before.”8 The Black residents who survived did
so by fleeing the town and hiding in the woods for days. Late the second
day, after nearly forty-eight hours of this violence, federal soldiers were
sent in; their arrival forced white rioters to return to their homes. These
soldiers promptly rounded up and arrested any Black person they found
on charges of inciting the riot, putting them in stockades. They also mur-
dered a handful of Black people who had survived the initial mobs.
Later, Elaine’s white population would claim that the death of the
one white man at the church (and another killed the next day) was the
*Indeed, it would be over a decade, and only in the depths of the Great Depression,
before a sharecropper’s union would actually spread across the South and gain real ma-
terial power. And that union, too, would be harried by intimidation, evictions, riots, and
lynchings.
White Riot 101
reason the riot happened in the first place. For these two white men
killed, twelve Black men, some of them labor organizers, were sentenced
to death for the riot. Black people were the only ones arrested or prose-
cuted for the events in Elaine.
One survivor Wells interviewed returned to her home for the first
time four weeks after these events to pack up her belongings and claim
the money owed for the cotton she and her husband had picked. Dis-
covering her house completely empty, she went to the white landlord’s
house to ask for the money owed her. The landlord told her she would
receive nothing and threatened to kill her and “burn her up” if she didn’t
leave immediately. During this ignoble exchange, she noticed her fam-
ily’s furniture and clothing in his house. As though that wasn’t enough,
after leaving with nothing but the clothes on her back, she was then ar-
rested in town by another landlord and put into forced labor for eight
days at the Elaine jail.9
The white people of Elaine rioted to prevent Black people from
successfully organizing, to keep them indebted to white landlords and
trapped in the system of neo-slavery known as sharecropping. Tactically,
the difference between how and when the looting happened is instruc-
tive: the looting that did occur didn’t appear to actually happen during
the riot but rather in its aftermath, after federal soldiers had restored or-
der. White people taking Black people’s things is what happens under the
conditions of order, not the conditions of riot. The most common relation
to property in white riots is the simple destruction of Black people’s per-
sonal property rather than any organized looting of private businesses or
commercial goods. For example, in the East St. Louis Massacre, in 1917,
white rioters entered homes Black people had fled, gathered all their
things into piles, and burned them.
Anti-Chinese rioting in the West, meanwhile, was driven by rioters’
desire to steal jobs, not property. In these rarely mentioned atrocities,
white settlers—many of them working-class European immigrants—
rioted to take over industries largely built by Chinese laborers. Violent
assaults on Chinese immigrants had been occurring with shocking reg-
ularity since the Gold Rush of 1848–1855, at which time non-Indigenous
people began settling California en masse. European Americans and
102 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Chinese people made up the vast majority of this new population. The
extreme and common violence of the “Wild West” was real, but its vic-
tims were much more likely to be Chinese, Chicanx, or Indigenous
laborers than the white outlaws and their white sheriff nemeses mythol-
ogized in westerns.
Chinese workers did the mining, construction, and, crucially, the lay-
ing of the westernmost leg of the transcontinental railroad—a task almost
entirely done by “coolie” labor—transforming access to California from
a months-long journey into and through wilderness into a quick and sim-
ple fact of life for people in the eastern United States. But this task’s
completion in 1869 was a disaster for Chinese communities, because the
suddenly easy journey west meant a flood of European immigrants from
the East. Those Europeans, with their dreams of “finding gold boulders
lying in the streams” dashed, “demanded the jobs that Chinese labor
had created.”10 They were supported in these demands by capitalists and
labor unions alike.
Chinese people were marched out of towns at gunpoint, lynched in
the streets, their businesses and homes looted and burned down, and,
eventually, they were literally outlawed with the federal Chinese Exclu-
sion Act of 1882. This bipartisan law, supported strongly by organized
labor, stopped all Chinese immigration and made reentry incredibly dif-
ficult (meaning anyone who had arrived but had left family or friends be-
hind in China had to decide to return to China permanently or give up
ever seeing their loved ones again).* Similar to Dred Scott before it, this
act held that Chinese people could not be and never had been citizens
of the United States.
Much as the Minutemen and other militia groups voluntarily patrol
the borders of Mexico today, in the new towns of the West it fell to white
rioters and vigilantes to enforce this act. And, much as anti-immigrant
sentiments today hold that immigrants are at fault for low wages, or-
ganized labor of the American West argued that the mere presence of
Chinese laborers depressed wages. Three decades earlier, their union
†
This was in part to do with the largely decentralized and contradictory nature of the
K of L. Whereas the official leaders of the K of L—most importantly, its head, Terence
Powderly—were reactionary, racist, and totally opposed to radical industrial action, in-
cluding even simple strikes, K of L locals took action into their own hands. Thus, while
the K of L pushed Chinese exclusion in the West, radical workers in the South organized
under the banner of the K of L to pursue revolutionary agitation.
‡The cross-class, effective, and organized expulsion of Indigenous, Asian, and other
nonwhite peoples from the Pacific Northwest left a sinister political legacy: the mod-
ern American neo-Nazi movement has its roots in Oregon, and other white nationalist
currents have emerged from the now overwhelmingly white Oregon and Washington.
104 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*“You gotta hear both sides” is a century-old white supremacist obfuscation. As Ida B.
Wells wrote in 1899: “The Southern press champions burning men alive and says: ‘Con-
sider the Facts.’”
106 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
all, owned by the men who most benefited from the white supremacist
power structure. The main form of media in the period was the local
newspaper, and these papers were not bastions of democratic truth nor
some noble fourth estate of society any more than Fox News or MSNBC
are today. Owned and operated by the richest and most “respectable”
men in their communities, these newspapers directly incited lynchings,
riots, and racial violence. The infamous Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, discussed
more below, was instigated by front-page headlines that read to lynch
negro tonight.
The Atlanta riot of 1906 was similarly prompted by a series of mis-
leading and outright false headlines about Black men assaulting white
women. A month before the riot, a man had been lynched in an Atlanta
suburb for an alleged sexual attack, and violent tension had been build-
ing all summer. But it didn’t boil over into a massacre until the media
got involved. On the night of September 22, the Atlanta Evening News
released three extra editions, separated from one another by only an hour,
with headlines proclaiming an attempted assault, then a “second” and
“third assault,” the latter perpetrated by a “fiendish negro” who attacked
a white woman in her backyard. As the newspapermen knew well, these
repeated extra editions meant that newsboys on every street corner would
be shouting out the news of black-on-white assaults all evening. As white
men got off work, some ten thousand of them formed into mobs that
terrorized Atlanta for seventy-two hours.13
The Wilmington, North Carolina, riot of 1898, a coup d’état in
which two days of rioting brought down a mixed-race Republican gov-
ernment, installed a white Democratic one in its place, killed dozens,
and drove thousands of Black residents permanently out of Wilmington,
was largely made possible and given ideological force by the media. His-
torians recognize the Wilmington coup as a key moment in consolidat-
ing post-Reconstruction white supremacy, because it saw a white mob
overturn a legitimate election result, drive Black officials out of office,
disenfranchise all Black voters, and establish an officially white suprem-
acist local government. The coup was reported nationally, and the fact
that the federal government witnessed these events and did nothing to
White Riot 107
stop or overturn them demonstrated to the entire country that white vi-
olence and supremacy—not law or elections—formed the real basis of
American governance.
White Democrat newspapers unrelentingly slandering Black pub-
lic officials in their editorials laid the groundwork for the coup in the
months leading up to the 1898 elections. The day after Republicans (and
an aligned party called the Fusionists) again won the majority in the elec-
tions, a group of Democrats rallied a white mob to overthrow the elec-
tion result. The mob’s first act was burning down the offices of the Daily
Record. The Record, the local Black newspaper, had been running anti-
lynching editorials, some arguing, factually, that sexual assault on white
women was not in fact the cause of lynchings. The white papers reported
on these editorials incessantly in the days before the coup, claiming ab-
surdly that such words were encouraging sexual violence and that “white
womanhood” needed to be protected from Black Republican power as
embodied in these editorials. Creating white victimization and grievance
via willful misinterpretation of reality is one of the oldest tricks in the
settler-colonial book. The mob posed for photos in front of the burning
newspaper office, photos that would be published in Democratic papers
across the country.
The following year, the April 1899 lynching of Samuel Hose “was
suggested, encouraged, and made possible by the daily press of Atlanta.”14
Hose had killed his white boss in self-defense. When Hose had the au-
dacity to ask for months of owed back wages to help pay for his grievously
ill mother’s medical care, his boss, rather than draw out his wallet, drew
his gun and told Hose he was going to kill him. Hose, who had been
chopping wood, threw his ax at his boss, killing him, and fled. The news-
papers reported it as a cold-blooded, unprovoked, premeditated murder.
Every day for a week, the Atlanta Constitution published double-
columned headlines about Hose “predicting” that he would be cap-
tured and lynched, in particular focusing on the detail that he would be
burned to death. Pretending that it was merely reflecting and reporting
on the mood of the public, day after day the paper beat the drum for his
immolation, making it a near certainty. When Hose was finally captured,
108 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
two thousand white people gathered and burned him alive. The next day,
the paper published a gruesomely detailed blow-by-blow account of the
lynching.
Today many in the current movement claim that the widespread
sharing and distribution of videos of police violence against Black people
represent a step toward justice—with some activists calling for body cam-
eras on police—but in fact, the widespread sharing of images of white
supremacist violence and Black death was an essential part of lynch law.
Not only did newspapers write moment-by-moment accounts of lynch-
ings and riots, but also photographs of lynching victims circulated the
country in prints and postcards, while cartoons and illustrations of lynch-
ings were a common sight in papers and political propaganda. Despite
the lack of televisual mass media or internet technology, images of Black
death proliferated—though the images were also sometimes used by
activists to produce moral outrage against lynch law.15 But more often
than not, the media’s deployment of lynching images served to normalize
white supremacist violence, narrativizing it into a digestible and socially
acceptable form.
The media didn’t merely precipitate and incite racial violence, it
also defended the police and their role therein. The July 1900 race riots
in New Orleans, in which white mobs roamed the streets for a week
murdering any Black people they could find, erupted when policemen
attempted to arrest two local organizers, Robert Charles and Leonard
Pierce, for the crime of sitting on a stoop while Black. When Charles and
Pierce objected to being arrested, the officers drew guns, one putting his
to Pierce’s temple. Charles, who was armed, drew to defend himself, and
a gunfight ensued in which Charles and one cop were wounded; the cop
died of his wounds the next day.
Reporting on this in the next morning’s news, the two main papers
in New Orleans proclaimed the cops’ innocence and righteousness.
Lacking the instantaneous communications technologies and advanced
police–media apparatus of today, they failed to get their stories straight,
telling completely different tales of the gunfight. Nevertheless, just like
they do when police lynch people today, the media focused on smearing
the two Black men who had been assaulted by the police and defending
White Riot 109
*The context surrounding Wells’s declaration is this: “Of the many inhuman outrages of
this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where
the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky., and prevented it.
The only time an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a
White Riot 111
gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American
should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black
home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give” (Wells,
Southern Horror).
112 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
ity and chaos. Mass mobilization and generational war trauma can over-
turn traditional hierarchies and, as in the American South in 1861, Paris
in 1871, and Russia in 1917, create the conditions for social revolution.
In the run-up to US entry into the Great War, particularly from 1916
to 1917, the sudden increase in lynchings was no doubt linked to the
incredibly jingoistic propaganda that built the popular case for war—US
patriotism is always deadly to nonwhite people the world over. But, as
five million US soldiers demobilized at the end of World War I, white
vigilante violence made an even more dramatic upsurge. This spike in
violence reflects an attempt to reconstitute cisheteropatriarchal white su-
premacist capitalism in the face of numerous threats to its dominance
empowered and made visible during the war.
During the eighteen months of US mobilization, women had come
to play a major role in economic life and society in the absence of men,
doing men’s labor and learning “male” trades—by the end of the war,
women made up 20 percent of the industrial workforce, with much
higher numbers in health care and agricultural sectors. This empow-
erment came on the heels of the suffrage movement’s massive growth
and popularization in 1916–1917, as women were organizing politically
as women and publicly pushing for change. On the front lines, mean-
while, many soldiers, perhaps pining for suffragette fiancées back in
America, found comfort in each other’s arms: gay sex was commonplace
in the trenches, if deeply repressed, punished, and denied by military
hierarchies. No doubt many fiancées found the same queer comforts at
home. And masses of soldiers returned disabled, mentally or physically,
to reckon with and struggle against an ableist society that required neu-
rotypical able bodies to earn a living, a society that denied veterans and
people with disabilities sufficient benefits and care.*
At the same time, the revolutionary labor movement, enflamed by
the Russian Revolution and a seemingly imminent revolution in Ger-
*This group of veterans and their families would eventually form a massive protest move-
ment during the Depression. Called the Bonus Army, in 1932 they marched from all
across the country into DC and occupied the Mall in a tent city, sending out marches
and petitions and rioting against police. The movement was stopped only when Hoover
sent in federal troops, led by six tanks, to evict them in a bloody battle.
White Riot 113
†
Some of these riots took the form of white organized labor, on strike, attacking Black
strikebreakers brought in by the bosses.
114 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
violence, and who would play crucial roles in Marcus Garvey’s Back to
Africa movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Communist Party, and
the labor movement.
These race riots reflect a much more complicated and conflictual
history than the tales of Black victimization and helplessness they often
come to stand for. Whereas some, like the Elaine Massacre, were direct
and successful attacks on Black autonomy—pogroms—others involved
extensive Black resistance and uprising that changed their meaning and
their effects.
The perfect example of this is the Tulsa riot of 1921. This riot has re-
cently been brought back into public consciousness by the important work
of activists and writers, and it is remembered now largely as the moment
when “Black Wall Street” was destroyed. The Tulsa riot saw the Green-
wood district, also called Little Africa, the wealthiest Black neighborhood
in America, burned to the ground in about sixteen hours of intense fight-
ing. Sometimes a partial history of this event is deployed to argue that
white people rioted predominantly because of that Black wealth. This
segues into the argument that such success—Black achievement of the
American Dream—should be the main goal for the Black community.
These analyses tend to exaggerate the actual economic power Green-
wood represented and downplay the role of Black self-defense in the riot.†
If the riot in Tulsa saw the tragic destruction of a symbol and com-
munity of Black power, why did many Black Tulsans who lived through
it look back on it with pride?18 And if it was an emboldening victory for
white supremacy, why, after the riot, was there never another lynching
in Tulsa County, when lynchings continued for years in the surrounding
counties?
The Tulsa riot, like many of those discussed above, erupted after a
white lynch mob was thwarted in its murderous purpose. In this instance,
†
“Whites owned a large portion of the land in the district. Furthermore, black Tulsa’s
service-oriented businesses were geared toward catering to a wage-earning population.
Few of them employed more than a handful of people. Economically, black Tulsa was
dependent upon the wages paid to black workers by white employers” (Scott Ellsworth,
Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1992], 16).
116 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
the mob’s target was Dick Rowland, a shoeshine falsely accused of at-
tempting to rape a white elevator operator, which he allegedly did in her
elevator, in a public building, during business hours. The mob turned
riotous when armed residents of Tulsa, led by members of the Afri-
can Blood Brotherhood (ABB), intercepted and stopped the attempted
lynching.
The ABB, a clandestine pan-African all-Black Marxist revolutionary
organization, formed in direct response to the Red Summer of 1919. It
arose as a self-defense organization to empower and protect Black com-
munities from lynchings, collective punishment, and race riots. Though
it was founded in New York City, branches spread across the Midwest
and the South. A predecessor of the Black Panther Party, the ABB advo-
cated and agitated for armed self-defense, with a long-term goal of armed
insurrection and, ultimately, socialist revolution led by Black workers. A
chapter operated in Tulsa almost from the ABB’s inception.
Outside of the North, the ABB was an insurrectionary secret soci-
ety—being an out Black Communist in the Jim Crow South would have
been a death sentence—with an internationalist bent, working to foment
revolution while supporting and spreading information about the Rus-
sian Revolution and anticolonial struggles in Africa and the Middle East.
It did so through local organization and its newspaper, The Crusader.
Rumors of an imminent Black uprising or insurrection frequently factor
in to the buildup of white riots and lynchings—a direct legacy of lynch
mobs’ slave patrol predecessors. Such rumors were particularly strong
in white Tulsa in the months leading up to the riot and may reflect in-
creased radicalization and on-the-ground organizing in the Tulsa chapter
of the ABB.
In any case, when, the day after Rowland’s arrest, his lynching was an-
nounced and planned in the local newspaper (as mentioned above, the
May 31, 1921, Tulsa Tribune afternoon edition headline read to lynch
negro tonight), the ABB pledged to resist the lynching, and organizers
spread throughout Greenwood, urging residents to gather their arms and
head to the jail to protect Rowland.
At the jail that evening, some two thousand white people dutifully
gathered into a lynch mob. After two rounds of negotiations in which
White Riot 117
the sheriff refused to hand over Rowland, the mob prepared to storm the
jail by force. Some hundred or so Black men, some of them ABB orga-
nizers, arrived at the jail with rifles, pistols, and shotguns and offered the
sheriff assistance in protecting Rowland. As the groups faced off in front
of the jail, someone—it is not known on which side—fired a shot, and a
shootout began. The initial wave of gunfire lasted only a few moments,
but when the dust settled ten white mob members lay dead in the street.
The Black group, who had lost two of their number in the skirmish, re-
treated to Greenwood. Rowland had been successfully defended and
would survive the night in the jail.
From there a rolling gun battle unfolded across Tulsa deep into the
night, with white rioters trying to enter Greenwood but being repulsed
by Black snipers at the railroad track bordering the neighborhood. The
white rioters kept pushing, however, and on the morning of June 1, their
attack intensified as they deployed military machine guns and some even
flew decommissioned WWI biplanes over Greenwood, sniping and drop-
ping firebombs. This assault eventually succeeded in pushing the defend-
ers deeper into Greenwood and then out of the city, when white rioters
then turned to the expediency of arson. They set Black businesses and
buildings aflame, destroying much of the commercial main street and
surrounding residential district, looting and burning houses and stores
alike. The police, of course, worked through the night and the morning
to disarm, round up, and jail any and all Black people they could find,
incarcerating between four thousand and five thousand Black residents
for days. The arrival of federal soldiers meant the end of the rioting by
noon on June 1.
It had lasted less than twenty-four hours, but some fourteen hundred
buildings had been destroyed. Reports about the number of dead vary,
with some estimates claiming seventy-five dead, while others put the
number nearer three hundred. All accounts suggest that some significant
number—a third to half of those killed, in the case of the lower total
estimates—were white rioters. Although the numbers and proportions
will never be accurately known, many in Tulsa believed the true casualty
numbers were covered up because they would have become a source
of shame for the white community. It’s certainly true that the legacy of
118 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
the riot in Tulsa favors Black power: “during the 1950s and 1960s black
civil rights leaders used the threat of ‘bringing up’ the riot as leverage in
negotiations with white leaders” and, though white papers in Tulsa never
mentioned the riot thereafter, Black papers spoke of it openly and often.19
The vast property destruction in Greenwood, however, proved to be
a massive loss for the white rioters as well, because most of the Black resi-
dents and business owners rented their properties: some two-thirds of the
real value destroyed in the riot belonged to white folks. In the aftermath,
Greenwood was rebuilt and flourished again. The white community
lived in fear of another riot, which it remembered with shame and hu-
miliation. Meanwhile, “for many Black Tulsans, the riot, and particularly
the rebuilding of their community, is an issue of pride.”20
Was it only the legacy of Black Wall Street that Black Tulsans were
proud of, or was it also their armed resistance against white rioters? In
the months after the Tulsa riot, the ABB’s newspaper, The Crusader, used
the event as a point of nationwide recruitment. “What other organization
can claim that brave record?” the editors wrote about the action in Tulsa.
After the riot, there wasn’t another lynching in Tulsa County for seven
decades; only in the current era of police lynching has public white su-
premacist murder returned to Tulsa, and Greenwood was only truly de-
stroyed by a recent wave of gentrification.
This is not to deny that day in 1921 was tragic. The destruction and
loss of every Black life in that riot must be both mourned and avenged.
(I count every white rioter killed a victory.) It is a travesty of justice that
reparations committees, bills, and lawsuits failed through the nineties
and early aughts to give Black survivors recompense. But what happens
when we tell narratives of white oppression without including the stories
of brave, violent, and partially successful resistance to it?
There are thus two versions of the events in Tulsa: one that tells of a
white town destroying the Black American Dream, and another that rec-
ognizes Black armed organizers saving a man from lynching and fighting
back against a murderous white lynch mob. The former narrative em-
phasizes the Black community as eternally suffering peaceful victims of
white supremacist violence; the other, as an oppressed people organizing
and defending themselves, fighting for their lives. It is no coincidence
White Riot 119
*“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling
block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux
Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who
prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the
presence of justice” (Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail).
White Riot 121
123
124 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*Two of the biggest years of industrial action in American history—1877 and 1919—are
also two of the worst years of white supremacist retrenchment and violence in that his-
tory: the end of Reconstruction and the Red Summer. I don’t know quite what to make
of this—a number of contradictory explanations offer themselves—but it seems signifi-
cant and of serious interest for further study.
Looted Bread, Stolen Labor 125
insurrections against the police and Standing Rock and Indigenous land
defense, as they attempt to funnel energy into the sphere of workplace
organization and electoral political gains.
To tell the stories of unions, of “organization” as the story of worker
resistance, therefore, is to leave out the movements, tactics, and goals of
millions of working people, often the most radical, oppressed, and mar-
ginalized of them. The history of looting decenters these working men
without erasing the historical importance of the struggles they fought
in.* If we tell the story of the unruly, riotous masses, and their often
overlapping, sometimes conflictual and contradictory relationship to
“the labor movement” proper, we get a clearer picture of how we might
act in the present to honor and recapture that power without falling into
the same traps that doomed US American working-class movements to
liberal accommodation and repression.
*It is also the case that the history of the labor movement, even that history critiqued
here, goes largely untold in American curriculums, ignored by culture both popular and
elite. Most Americans have a big blank in their historical consciousness regarding the
years between the closing of the Civil War and the opening of World War I, a period
of both massive US imperial expansion and great social upheaval. Hopefully, this cri-
tique will drive people to investigate this incredibly important social era, one that, in the
organization of economic power under increasingly plutocratic monopoly, quite often
reflects our own.
Looted Bread, Stolen Labor 127
Though the differences between the poor and the rich have always been
an experience lived more immediately by the poor, the rise of the middle
classes and the appearance of consumer goods and mass-manufactured
commodities gave these differences a new material content and visibility
on city streets. Looting became an immediately sensible response to this
novel state of affairs.
However, if the presence of these industrial goods to loot was new,
looting as a tactic was already well established in its classical form: the
bread riot. This kind of riot, aimed at stealing the food the people needed,
lowering the price of food in the market through direct action, or forcing
official distribution or policy change, is an ancient practice. Bread riots
occurred repeatedly in ancient Rome. They usually worked by rioters
attacking the officials who controlled food policy—during the Roman
republic these were senators and various other wealthy elites, but later
crowds jeered and harassed emperors and other imperial officials—rather
than by looting, though the houses of Roman merchants and landlords
were occasionally ransacked in these movements.
The bread riot was a particularly common feature of early modern
Europe. But the cause of these riots is often treated as a simple correla-
tion: food prices go up, people get hungry, and they then “instinctively”
riot and take whatever food they need to live. Indeed, some economists
explained the uprisings of 2011 as a result of global grain price increase.
As labor historian E. P. Thompson argues, this mechanical view of the
masses simply responding to stimuli, this “crass economic reductionism,”
does not bear out in the record of food rioters’ self-explanation or in the
history of emergent food riots.2*
The rate and occurrence of bread riots exploded in the early days
of capitalism, which aimed to drive down the price of bread. As theorist
Joshua Clover argues, this price was reduced literally to zero in the imme-
*Nor, indeed, do such explanations hold in Roman bread riots, which, as Paul Erdkamp
argues, often responded to and were organized against perceived injustices, such as
hoarding corn to artificially raise prices or personal political squabbles in which certain
state actors stopped distributing or importing grain (Paul Erdkamp, “A Starving Mob
Has No Respect: Urban Markets and Food Riots in the Roman World, 100 bc–400 ad,”
in Transformation of Economic Life under the Roman Empire, ed. J. Rich and L. De Blois
[Amsterdam: Gieben, 2002], 93–115).
Looted Bread, Stolen Labor 129
diate case of looting, but rioters also frequently worked to control prices
in other ways. They would riot to stop ships laden with grain, salt, or meat
from leaving port, because they understood that growing and selling for
export drove the domestic price of food up. Clover calls these “export
riots.” Rather than inchoate expressions of material necessity, bread riots
were often directed political acts, focused on particular villains of the
market, particular modes of price gouging or food quality adulteration.3
Though bread riots became less frequent as the nineteenth century
progressed, they hardly disappeared. An oft-overlooked event in the Civil
War was the rash of two dozen or so food riots, largely carried out in the
cities of the Confederacy, in the spring of 1863.
Unable to afford the price of food, which increased exponentially
both from the terrible inflation of the Confederate dollar and the massive
supply problems facing both army and civilian organization, thousands
of Southern women rose up and looted the stores of Richmond, Atlanta,
Salisbury, and many smaller cities and towns. Groups of men formed
to watch the action, sometimes egging the women on, but rarely join-
ing in. The looting spread from city to city, where war widows, refugees,
and indigent “camp followers”—polite nineteenth-century language en-
compassing both soldiers’ wives and children and the sex workers who
could also be hired to clean and cook for soldiers on the march—found
themselves increasingly impoverished by the slaveowner’s war. Much as
CNN would today, the Confederate press blamed the riots on outside
agitators, foreigners, and career criminals, though they also called these
rioters Yankees and prostitutes, adding, for extra spice, that these female
rioters were all ugly. Like the draft riots a few months later would be to
the Union, the bread riots of 1863 were both a part and a sign of the col-
lapse of morale on the Confederacy’s home front.4
As industrial production shifted to occupy a more central role in the
American economy, however, the bread riot receded and the industrial
workplace became an increasingly central site of struggle. The goods pro-
duced there, and the modes of their production and distribution, became
the new objects and scenes of conflict: of strike, riot, and looting.
In the late nineteenth century, these new technologies had a particu-
lar apogee: an industry employing over seven hundred thousand, making
130 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*You could replace nineteenth with twenty-first and railroad with internet and the sen-
tence still makes the same sense. The ways in which society is fundamentally unchanged
over the last hundred and fifty years—particularly in meta-narratives of progress, history,
technology, and change—are as numerous and significant as the ways in which it has
changed.
†
It does not escape my attention that, by having labor struggles in a separate chapter here,
I do some of that same dividing. My hope is to tell this story of the labor movement in
such a way as to reduce that division.
Looted Bread, Stolen Labor 131
This failure emerged in part, no doubt, from the directly white su-
premacist nature of organized labor up to the moment. Even the most
pro-union histories shy away from the first decades of trade unionism in
America, ignoble years when most organized labor actively positioned
itself against emancipation and agitated in favor of genocidal colonizing
of the West. Through the 1880s, unions were tiny and weak. Wage labor-
ers made up a small percentage of the population; organized laborers, a
small percentage of them.
The Great Unrest, then, a massive, disorganized, multiracial series
of strikes, riots, and uprisings, represented as much a break with the pre-
vious labor movement as a continuation. But its historical size and rel-
evance are usually downplayed, even by historians of labor. A common
position sees the strike of 1877 as “significant primarily because it gave
workingmen a class consciousness on a national scale.”7 This perspec-
tive makes sense only if we value organization and worker identity as the
fundamental precepts of revolutionary struggle, and it lets us see how
thinking of struggle in those terms blinded previous laborers and even
revolutionaries to the mass movements happening all around them. But
viewed in tandem with the general strike of the enslaved and with Recon-
struction, the Great Unrest looks just as much like an ending: the ending
of a period of revolutionary struggle against wage labor itself and the final
victory of reactionary Northern capital in organizing American society
around industrial production.
The Great Unrest began on July 16, 1877, when the Baltimore and
Ohio Railroad (B&O) cut wages by 10 percent, the second such wage cut
in eight months. As workers gathered in frustration in the Martinsburg,
West Virginia, railyard, the crew of a cattle train struck, abandoning their
train and refusing to move it until the pay cut was rescinded. Traffic on
the line was stopped, and other workers refused to replace them.
The next day the state militia arrived and, filling the cattle train with
armed men, tried again to drive it through the yard. A workman named
William Vandergriff ran up to derail the train at a switch, and when the
militia pilot jumped down to oppose him, Vandergriff shot the scab. Van-
dergriff was in turn shot and fatally wounded. But the train crew fled, and
132 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
another could not be gathered. With news of this victory, striking spread
across West Virginia, and across the entire B&O.
Freight traffic was completely stopped, “while the workers contin-
ued to run passenger and mail cars with no interference.”8 More than
that, sympathetic workers from other industries went out in support of
the strikers, and talk of a general strike began to spread through the state.
Desperate, the governor of West Virginia and the president of B&O
begged President Rutherford B. Hayes for federal troops to suppress what
they were already calling an “insurrection.”
Hayes obliged, but, though the three hundred heavily armed soldiers
he sent managed to finally get trains out of the Martinsburg yard on July
19, four days into the insurrection, it was a Pyrrhic victory. Because in
town after town crowds of railroad men, unemployed workers, sympathy
strikers, and huge groups of women derailed, attacked, and otherwise
sabotaged the scab trains. Where trains from Martinsburg went, strikes
and riots followed, and soon all of neighboring Maryland’s railroads and
much of its industry were also on strike.
One of the most common tactics used in this insurrection was to
overturn, loot, and then burn the freight cars. This had three immedi-
ately powerful effects for the movement: it blocked the lines and the
yards, making them impassable for scab trains; gathered goods and food
to sustain strikers; and cut into the railroad’s bottom line. This tactic
reappeared in the United States in September 2016, when protesters in
Charlotte fighting for justice for Keith Lamont Scott overturned and
looted semi-trucks, turning some of the goods into burning barricades
that blocked the interstate.
Back in 1877, in response to the chaos spreading, the governor of
Maryland called out the National Guard. But the residents of Baltimore,
where the guard was stationed, rioted, attacking the guardsmen with
stones and brickbats and preventing them from boarding trains to go to
break the strike. Exasperated, the governor begged for a full federal in-
tervention. It was at this moment that Pittsburgh and St. Louis exploded
into insurrection.
How did strikes, rioting, and looting spread so widely and so quickly?
After all, barely any of these workers were organized into a national
Looted Bread, Stolen Labor 133
union. In fact, as labor historian Jeremy Brecher argues, the Great Unrest
occurred in the wake of unionism’s repeated failures to win change. The
Panic of 1873, one of the most severe depressions in American history,
saw unemployment skyrocket. As ever, capitalists used the downturn as
grounds to cut wages and enforce speedups. But the organizations that
existed, the various “Brotherhoods” (of firemen, engineers, and conduc-
tors), had been bought off, out-politicked, or frightened out of striking.
They agreed, against the rank and file’s wishes, to speedups and pay cuts.
Their membership plummeted and many of the unions ceased to exist
except on paper.
In the wake of their failure, a clandestine insurrectionary organization
formed, the Trainsmen’s Union, and spread quickly across the country.
But the Trainsmen’s Union was just as quickly infiltrated by feds, police,
and Pinkerton thugs—the infamous private police force that spied on and
sabotaged the labor movement and that was often called in to violently
break strikes—such that in the buildup to any actions mass firings of
radicals and organizers would lead to confusion and disunity within the
movement. Soon the TU collapsed as well. Union membership was at a
decades-long low when things kicked off in Martinsburg. Furthermore,
for one of the last times in American labor history, forming or protecting
a union would not be a major demand of the struggle.9
The rioters of 1877 had a different political precedent and goal in
mind: the Paris Commune of 1871. As Nell Irvin Painter shows in her
seminal Standing at Armageddon, the Commune was a common point
of reference for rioters, and their critics, across the country. US workers
fought to take control of their daily lives, their local and workplace gover-
nance in much the same way that the Communards had for seventy-one
glorious days in 1871. And conservatives and liberals alike feared that
French revolt and class war had finally crossed the Atlantic.
In St. Louis, during one week, a strike that started against wage cuts
in the railyards generalized and eventually completely shut down the
city. Political power moved into the hands of a commune made up of
. . . whoever showed up. It was run, like the Paris Commune, on genu-
inely radical antihierarchical principles. “Nobody ever knew who that
executive committee really was; it seems to have been a rather loose
134 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*Painter compares these armories to the Haussmannization of Paris in which the French
government ripped up neighborhoods of small, winding streets and replaced them with
massive boulevards that ran through the heart of Paris, enabling French troops to move
unencumbered and making barricades and rioters less effective.
136 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Samuel Gompers, dominated official labor politics until the 1930s, and
everywhere militancy and insurrection appeared, the AFL attempted to
tamp it down. Still, AFL locals were often at the heart of strikes through-
out the period: the AFL was, often, the only game in town, much to the
detriment of the strikes and struggles it came to represent. In 1892, the
bitter lockout at the Carnegie-owned, Jay Gould–managed Homestead
Steel Works in Pennsylvania would see AFL-affiliated mill workers en-
gage in and win a gun battle with a barge full of Pinkertons, who had
sailed up the Monongahela River to break the workers’ siege on the mill.
In 1892, a multiracial general strike also shut down New Orleans.
An even more violent and drastic struggle broke out in 1894, as more-
or-less military conflicts raged between strikers and strikebreakers and
militias in the coal mines, with strike action reaching from Pennsylvania
all the way to Colorado. Miners, who lived in utterly desperate poverty in
isolated rural communities owned and managed by the coal conglomer-
ates, banded together not just to fight but also to loot company stores and
groceries to keep the strike going, as they would again in West Virginia
during the infamous mine wars of 1912–1921.
The year 1894 was also when the famous Pullman Strike, a mass
boycott-cum-strike on the railroads led by Eugene Debs’s American Rail-
way Union (ARU), “rapidly came to be understood as a general struggle
between all workers and corporations as a whole.”11 The ARU exploded
in membership and power, and the strike spread across the rail lines
that Pullman cars traveled. US president Grover Cleveland sent federal
troops into Chicago, the heart of the strike, to break it, but this backfired
disastrously, as mobs of working-class people, most not strikers, formed
to fight off federal troops, loot, riot, and burn. This conflict turned the
movement into a massive upheaval that spread even more broadly across
the country, as rail traffic almost completely collapsed, particularly west
of the Appalachians. The working class was ready to fight.
But here again the leadership failed the workers. First, the associated
AFL unions, meeting in an emergency conference, rejected the demand
of the rank and file to call an official sympathetic general strike and in-
stead ordered workers back into their shops. Then, with the ARU isolated
by their compatriots and the militia, the leadership balked.
138 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
When the troops came in, making legal success impossible, workers
throughout the country responded with mass direct action. But for
the ARU to adopt such a policy would have meant a challenge to the
entire social order—a step from which it recoiled. Thus we are pre-
sented with the spectacle of Eugene Victor Debs, perhaps the great-
est example of a courageous, radical and incorruptible trade union
official in American history, trying to end the strike to prevent it from
becoming an insurrection.12
Thus, even in this moment of mass action, with the most radical
available leader at the helm, the union failed its membership and folded.
If the required next step is generalizing and socializing the revolt, and
therefore, giving up control, legitimacy, or negotiating powers, a union
will always choose to abandon a fight, even if the fight, and the revolt
it emerged from or helped create, is the very basis of the union and its
power. The logic of formal organizational power, no matter how noble or
radical the organizations’ goals, will in crisis lead it to preserve itself for
“the next fight” rather than abandon it all for this one.
But the organization that is preserved is one that, at the height of the
people’s power, turned its back on them, and the people do not forget
these betrayals. The organization will never again achieve the leverage it
had during the conflict—in other words, the organization doomed itself
all the same to collapse and crisis, though a slower, more protracted, and
ambiguous one.
was worse than being called a Wobbly (or sometimes “an IWW”), and for
many being a Wob led to arrest, torture, tarring and feathering, and even
lynching.
But it wasn’t just violent repression that held back workers. The gath-
ering storm of world war complicated the trajectory of the labor move-
ment. Although US antiwar sentiment prevailed for the first year of the
interimperial European conflict, war fever was growing, and gradually so-
cialists, trade unionists, and liberals alike unified to support the allied fight
“over there.” The continued outspoken and principled antimilitarism of
the Wobblies and anarchists, which was a common enough position in
1914–1915, led to their marginalization and even criminalization as traitors.
Still, as war production ramped up in 1916 and with the young men
of the working class vacuumed into the war machine via enlistment, big
transformations took place in the makeup of the industrial workforce as
women moved into men’s industries and Black Southerners came into
Northern industrial centers as part of the Great Migration. Labor agita-
tion again increased.
News of the Russian Revolution lent a new vigor to the radical move-
ment, and the October victory of the Bolsheviks meant the Wobbly and
the anarchist were joined and soon replaced in the fevered minds of the
foaming-mouthed patriots by the Red, the bolshie, the communist. And
with the German Revolution of 1918, it seemed the victory of radical la-
bor was inexorable.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, in the year 1919, a huge strike
wave spread across the country, the largest since 1877, including a gen-
eral strike that completely shut down Seattle. But the year also saw the
country’s first bona fide “Red Scare,” as anarchists, labor organizers,
communists, and socialists of all stripes were rounded up, imprisoned,
and deported by federal Attorney General Palmer and his goons. Reac-
tionary mobs of veterans rioted to attack socialist demonstrations; destroy
union and Wobbly halls, presses, and infrastructure; and beat, maim, or
murder organizers. The conservatives in the AFL, meanwhile, used the
Red Scare to purge what socialists and militants remained in their ranks.
As we’ve seen above, 1919 also featured the highest number of anti-
Black riots in American history, and the early twenties was a time of
140 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*Indeed, the invention of consumer debt through purchase by installment and (usually
disastrous) popular entry into stock and bond speculation kept the party going for a while.
Looted Bread, Stolen Labor 141
more and more. Gangsters quickly realized they were the true political
power: they were running labor in whole industries, even whole cities—
with the unions paying them and at their mercy—and from that position
of organization and power, they extended into “protection” and other of
their more infamous criminal activities.13
One of the first things that occurred, spontaneously and across the
country, was looting. Numerous contemporaneous accounts agree that
mass looting was commonplace around the nation, but its extent will
never be known. Mauritz Hallgren’s Seeds of Revolt, published in 1933,
describes the pattern in Detroit, in 1932, and explains why it is so little
remembered by history:
But the repression did not break the back of the movement. Huge
marches and riots of unemployed workers became a regular occurrence
across the country. They demanded work, relief, and bread; just as often,
they took it. “In March, 1,100 men waiting on a Salvation Army bread line
in New York City mobbed two trucks delivering baked goods to a nearby
hotel.” Although riots and marches like these were more common in the
large cities of the North where workers were concentrated, they were not
limited to them. “In Henryetta, Oklahoma, 300 jobless marched on store-
keepers to demand food, insisting they were not begging and threatening
to use force if necessary.”17 Hallgren describes a scene in West Virginia:
*And here, too, the new unions formed, organized into the CIO, and were co-opted,
legalized, and negotiated with by FDR and his New Deal. Whereas many of the gains
made by the sit-down wave would last longer than those made by the unemployment
movement, both times worker power was undercut as energy funneled into official
movement organs.
Looted Bread, Stolen Labor 147
149
150 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
until the war, this type of job had largely been the exclusive domain of
white men, protected and maintained as such by racist union organizing
and management hiring policy. But war destabilizes such traditions, and
Black, Asian, and Chicanx men and women, as well as white women,
were suddenly hired to fill the need for rapid production.
To get these jobs, and to escape the white supremacist violence of seg-
regationists, millions of Black people migrated out of the South in what
historians call the Second Great Migration, the largest internal migration
in American history.* They left sharecropping and domestic servitude
behind, hopefully forever, for the promise of higher-waged jobs and less
discrimination in industrial urban centers. As one woman who worked in
a factory during the war sardonically put it, “Lincoln may have freed the
slaves, but Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.”3†
But the needs of war production did not suddenly turn American
capitalists into champions of racial equity and justice. Black workers still
did the worst jobs in the plants, and at lower pay than white people in
the same positions. Black migrants ended up in redlined neighborhoods
and faced terrible treatment at the hand of Northern whites, particularly
landlords, police, and bosses.
*This migration was most pronounced on the West Coast, where Black populations grew
exponentially in San Diego, Oakland, LA, Richmond, and other cities with naval pro-
duction centers, but many laborers also went to Detroit, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and
St. Louis, as well as Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The migration con-
tinued for two decades after the war, though at a slower rate. Many of those who stayed
in the South moved out of the fields and took jobs in cities like Charlotte, Memphis, or
Atlanta. The Second Great Migration can also be understood as a movement of Black
urbanization—by its completion, 80 percent of the American Black population lived in
cities. The period also saw massive numbers of Latinx workers and families migrate to the
same production centers. Much of the racial makeup of American cities was determined
in these years, although migration from Southeast Asia, China, Central America, and
Mexico post-1970, much of it in response to the Vietnam War and other US imperialist
violence, would further transform the West, while Caribbean migration changed the
Gulf states and migration from Brazil, North Africa, and the Middle East transformed
the Midwest and East Coast. White flight and then gentrification have caused white
populations to fluctuate dramatically in contested urban cores to this day.
†
Jokes about Hitler and Tojo doing more to emancipate Black workers than FDR and
Lincoln were common in the war years (Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit,
I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution [Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
1999]).
156 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
for work and housing justice also spread throughout the country, with
pickets, boycotts, and marches among the most common tactics.4
As America fought a war in Europe against fascism, American lead-
ers were forced to publicly denounce the racist logic that animated it.
Black people called out the hypocrisy, pointing to racial discrimination
in the United States and demanding a “double V”—victory over fascism
at home and abroad. And the US allyship with the USSR meant the gov-
ernment had to stop promoting anticommunism, which since 1919 had
been a potent force of social control. Indeed, propaganda and political
pronouncements of the time praised the Soviet Union.
As a result, communists and radicals of all stripes, whose movement
had ebbed dramatically from their revolutionary heights in the mid-thir-
ties, were able to organize more openly. The Communist Party USA
(CPUSA), with a large Black membership, reached seventy-five thou-
sand strong in 1939, although much of the party’s working-class base had
left the party, and it was increasingly made up of professionals and the
middle classes. Unions that had been whites-only opened up with the
influx of Black workers into their industries and as emboldened radical
voices took center stage in the labor movement. And so a social justice
movement, involving Black Communists, reformers, and activists, uni-
fied with radical segments of labor, grew around demands for better hous-
ing, economic justice, and an end to Jim Crow and police violence.5
Meanwhile, within the armed forces, resistance grew in the ranks of
Black soldiers. It is not stressed in heroic remembrances of the war, but
the US military was segregated. The irony of a Jim Crow army fighting
in the name of antifascism was not lost on Black soldiers. As Japanese cit-
izens were shipped off to FDR’s concentration camps, the vast majority
of Black soldiers were shipped around the world as laborers, not com-
batants. Something like 90 percent of the Black men who went through
basic training spent their service in work crews behind the lines, often
doing hard, dirty work under miserable labor conditions, sometimes un-
der white army officers/overseers pulled straight out of the sharecrop-
ping South. The Black regiments that did face battle, meanwhile, were
deployed into continuous action on the front lines for much longer
158 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
stretches than white regiments, which also received more rest and lived
in better conditions in camp.6
This ill treatment of militarily trained young Black men had serious
repercussions. As historian Timothy Tyson writes, “The War Department
reported in 1943 [that] there was ‘general unrest’ among black troops all
over the country and the imminent danger of revolt; ‘most Negro sol-
diers have secreted ammunition,’ one War Department memo stated.”7
Fights and riots broke out on bases and at training sites across the country
as Black servicemen fought with white supremacist police, officers, and
locals.
The full revolt never materialized, however, and the soldiers would
not win their double V.* Nevertheless, like their World War I predeces-
sors, Black veterans returned from fighting a “war for Democracy” abroad
to a racist social system at home. Trained in armed combat, these veterans
would become “the shock troops of the modern civil rights movement.”8
When the war ended, many of the gains and concessions won by
Black activists were lost. As war production spun down, Black workers
were laid off in massive numbers—Black workers in America have always
been last hired, first fired—turning already cramped and underserved
Black neighborhoods into impoverished ghettos rife with unemploy-
ment. As white soldiers demobilized, white vigilante violence spiked.
Bosses stoked racial conflict to keep labor divided.
Still, the wartime movement, which combined labor and communist
radicalism with national Black civil rights struggle, might have survived
this and sparked a radical, even revolutionary civil rights movement ten
years earlier. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United
States, projecting itself as the victorious champion of democracy as it
occupied Japan and much of Europe, had to counterpoise these claims
*The armed forces wouldn’t be desegregated until the movement and considerable in-
ternational embarrassment forced Truman’s hand in 1948. And after World War II, as
the US Army occupied what would become West Germany, Black soldiers experienced
better freedom of movement and action and more respect in post-Nazi Germany than
they ever had in the Southern United States, an experience they would bring back with
them into the freedom struggle (Maria Höhn, “‘We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way
Again’: Germany in the African-American Debate on Civil Rights,” Central European
History 41, no. 4 [2008], 605–637).
No Such Thing as Nonviolence 159
them Black, most of them union, were fired and blacklisted, making
earning a livelihood impossible. Workers were fired for associating with
radical labor, leftist political organizations, and CPUSA front groups, for
expressing left-of-mainstream opinions, or simply for being accused of
any of the above. Radical academics, journalists, lawyers, and other pro-
fessionals lost their jobs, and often their careers, as did many Hollywood
writers, actors, and producers. The CPUSA, which had already largely
been abandoned by working-class white people bought off by the New
Deal, basically collapsed. Claudia Jones was imprisoned and deported;
Robeson and Du Bois had their passports revoked.
The Red Scare, like all anticommunist and anti-Left repressions his-
torically, included a significant uptick in oppression along other axes.
A massive outing and purge of gay men and lesbian women in the fed-
eral government occurred, sometimes referred to as the Lavender Scare.
Civil rights organizations such as the NAACP were accused of Com-
munist infiltration and collaboration, and, shamefully, they too barred
Communists from their organization and participated in purges of their
ranks. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “Socialists and communists
were so identified with the antiracist movement that antiracist organizing
was automatically assumed to be the work of communists.”10
The final transformation of major labor unions into predominantly
reactionary organizations was achieved in the period. Liberals and right
wingers within unions, insisting on their patriotism, used the Red Scare
to eliminate their political opponents on the left, while anticommunist
unions used the scare to smash radical ones and take over their shops
and industries. The CIO, little more than a decade removed from its
heroic sit-down strikes, led the way, publicly and patriotically declaring
the barring of Communists and the purging of leftists. The fact that these
radicals and their unions were often the strongest and most dedicated
organizers meant the labor movement would never again achieve the
strength it had before the scare.*
*Of course, there were moments when labor seemed to be reviving in strength, partic-
ularly the powerful antiracist labor upsurge that lasted from 1969 to 1973. We are seeing
a similar upsurge as of this writing, in 2020, with three years of increased labor activity
building into the coronavirus-19 wildcats that are tearing through the country at the
No Such Thing as Nonviolence 161
Along with the disciplining of the labor movement and the near total
collapse of the CPUSA came a general atmosphere of antiradicalism.
Being accused of Communist sympathies could cost you everything:
“These sanctions—or more commonly the fear of them—were sufficient
to keep people from joining the Left or advocating unpopular positions
in public.”11
This atmosphere destroyed the momentum of Black organizing built
during the war years. For one example, a powerful movement called the
Black Popular Front had emerged in New York City in the late 1940s. As
historian Brian Purnell writes, the Black Popular Front “brought together
many different organizations and activists—labor unions, religious insti-
tutions, fraternal organizations, women’s groups, Democratic and third-
party politicians, Communists, Socialists, and others—and pushed an
antiracist agenda into mainstream municipal and state policy debates.”12
But these alliances collapsed under the pressure of anticommunist accu-
sations, smears, and paranoia. Thus, social movements and organizations
not only kicked out radicals within their own ranks but also drifted away
from one another. The cross-racial, cross-issue alliances built during the
war died.
Gerald Horne has argued that the Red Scare, which disempowered
Black radicals and led to an absence of radical labor and Communist
organizers in Black communities, was one key factor in separatist Black
nationalism—rather than a more anticapitalist politics—becoming the
spontaneous worldview for many who rose up in the Black Freedom
movement of the sixties.13 Whatever the case, the Red Scare meant that
when Rosa Parks did sit down on that bus in Montgomery, on Decem-
ber 1, 1955, she did so in a country that had swung far to the right on
questions of economic and social justice, a country where potential allies
were largely disorganized and demoralized.
time of this writing. But radical labor would never again be the leader of a general and
nationwide movement for liberation in the United States, as it would be in Europe and
Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
162 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
and eventual victory made headlines worldwide. King and Parks, in par-
ticular, were brought to national prominence during the boycott.
Even at the time, the incredible, women-led feat of people power
was beginning to be mythologized and transformed into a story of indi-
vidual heroics on the part of King and Parks. The myth that Parks had
sparked the movement because of the singular bravery and novelty of her
action was already growing. Though incredibly brave, she was not the
first person to be arrested standing up to bus segregation in Montgom-
ery. Nine months previously, Claudette Colvin had been arrested on the
same charge for the same action. But Black organizers had decided that
Colvin would not be their test case: Colvin was fifteen, impoverished,
and pregnant out of wedlock from an affair with a married man. She was
described as “feisty” and “mouthy.” Her father had been in prison. She
did not have the dignified, middle-class life or manners of Parks. Colvin’s
resistance, they reasoned, would have taken a backseat to a trial of her
character.15
But even in portraying Parks as the definition of nonviolent, respect-
able femininity, as a quiet, demure seamstress who one day changed the
world, the narrative clouds history to deradicalize its protagonists. Parks
and Colvin were hardly alone: though theirs would become the most
famous instigating moment, dozens of direct action movements were un-
der way across the South in 1955. And Parks herself had been organizing
for more than a decade already when she sat down on that bus. Though
she was a proponent of organized nonviolent protest, she also believed in
and practiced armed self-defense. Parks was a supporter of Robert F. Wil-
liams and would later call Malcolm X her personal hero. She spent her
entire life a militant activist against segregation, sexual violence, and the
justice system; on a few occasions she resisted white racists with threats
of violence.16 To reduce this radical lifelong activist to a single quiet act
of protest serves as a good metonym for reducing the extensive spread of
cultural, political, and social movements for Black liberation to a handful
of nonviolent campaigns, protests, and sit-ins.
The choice to organize around Parks rather than Colvin was a tac-
tical one made by a small organization that could have had no idea of
164 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
its decision’s success, let alone its national or historical impact. But still,
from its very first moments of national recognition, the Southern civil
rights struggle was stage-managed to appear respectable.
This strategy emerged from the antiradical movement atmosphere of
post-McCarthyite America. Though it would win some allies and assist
in some struggles, the political logic of nonviolence, propriety, media-
focused-activism, organizational hierarchy, and internal antiradicalism
placed a massive limit on possibilities that the movement would have to
overcome. The strategy benefited middle-class leaders and middle-class
concerns at the expense of true revolutionary change. Appeals to the
movement’s image and the moral imperative of nonviolence were used
to silence and control poor Black people in their struggles, and they have
been used in the intervening years to erase the vision and contributions
of these people.
rider gets his name from his most famous activity: driving through Black
neighborhoods under cover of darkness, firing guns, throwing firebombs,
kidnapping people, and making noise to intimidate. The night rider was
no less common than his predecessors, but he did not always operate with
the safety in numbers of the popular mobs of the prewar era, making him
more vulnerable to a blast of buckshot.
The night rider gained national attention during the very first years of
the civil rights struggle as the tactic spread across the South in response to
Supreme Court decisions that pushed back against Jim Crow. In 1954 the
Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated
schools were unconstitutional. As James Baldwin noted, many Black peo-
ple at the time understood that “this immense concession would [never]
have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War,
and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had,
for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former mas-
ters.”* Throughout the era, the importance of America’s global image in
securing the allegiance of newly postcolonial African nations was para-
mount in national civil rights legislation, while links with anticolonial
struggles in Africa inspired Black activists to greater and greater militancy.
Brown v. Board applied no mode of enforcement, no road map for
integration. Nevertheless, it was a landmark decision. It provided a legal
basis for change, allowing activists to bring lawsuits that resulted in court
decisions outlawing local school segregation. But it would have remained
a mere political gesture were it not for movements enforcing its decision.
The first to move were not the forces of integration, however, but
of reaction. Immediately after the decision, Virginia senator Harry Byrd
described it as an unprecedented threat to “states’ rights”—a phrase that
always has and always will mean white power. He got to work organiz-
ing politicians around what he would famously call “massive resistance”
in which Southern state governments fought integration by all available
methods.
*The quotation continues: “Had it been a matter of love or justice, the 1954 decision
would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult
era, it might very well not have occurred yet” (James Baldwin, Fire Next Time [New York:
Random House, 1993], 75).
166 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
riders and KKK processions were often escorted and led by police cars in
the name of “public safety,” and police turned over prisoners to Klans-
men for savage beatings and lynchings.19 It has been revealed that Bir-
mingham, Alabama, public safety commissioner Bull Connor and local
police coordinated the KKK attacks on Freedom Riders in 1961 and again
on protesters in 1963, all with the knowledge and implicit consent of the
FBI. But this kind of cooperation happened behind closed doors. Most
often just enough room was left between government and assassins to
provide plausible deniability.
Another major way the state supported night riders, white rapists,
and lynchers was by not prosecuting them. In the rare instances when
charges were brought—as in the case of Emmett Till—white juries just
never found lynchers guilty. The police today have inherited not only
their predecessors’ campaign of terror and violence but also their judicial
immunity. With no recourse to the courts or the police, and with the
ever-present threat of the Klansman and the night riders, Black folks in
the South did what they had been doing since the Civil War: they armed
themselves.
chapter seven | USING GUNS NONVIOLENTLY
169
170 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
full of activists, who fired back. Surprised, the Klan fled. It appears that
the defenders killed a Klansman in the fight, but the white folks covered
it up so as not to let the news get out too widely that armed Black people
had defeated the Klan.
This gunfight largely ended white violence in Monroe, both against
demonstrators and from night riders. In Williams’s analysis, white fas-
cists are cowards: believing their lives to be more valuable than those of
whom they oppress, they are rarely willing to risk death for their goals.
Though the Klan continued to occasionally harass and threaten Williams
and other leaders, it never regained the upper hand. As Williams would
write five years later, “Our sit-ins proved that self-defense and nonviolence
could be successfully combined. There was less violence in the Monroe
sit-ins than in any other sit-ins in the South. In other communities there
were Negroes who had their skulls fractured, but not a single demonstra-
tor was even spat upon during our sit-ins. We had less violence because we
had shown the willingness and readiness to fight and defend ourselves.”1
When, in 1959, Williams declared it was time to “meet violence
with violence,” he wasn’t espousing a macho creed, he was reflecting
the learned wisdom of the Monroe movement.* And, as his wife, Mabel
*Williams’s remarks were published widely in the national press, which claimed that
an NAACP leader was calling for race war. After the controversy, the NAACP national
office sanctioned Williams and stripped him of his presidency. But the local people
organized around and protected Williams and kept him in a leadership position—where
he would help the movement in its successful desegregation of Monroe civic services
such as the pool and the public library. After a series of inspiring struggles in Monroe,
tensions built to the point when a full-on insurrection seemed in the offing. To head it
off, Williams was framed for kidnapping a white couple and chased out of the county,
and then the country, and then off the continent. Williams would go on to organize and
agitate from Cuba, where he wrote an autobiography, Negroes with Guns, a monthly
radical newsletter, The Crusader, and a radio show, Radio Free Dixie, with which he sent
increasingly militant propaganda into the South. He encouraged people to form gun
clubs and to organize around self-defense, critiqued nonviolence as a moral philosophy,
and presciently predicted and analyzed the riots of the mid-1960s. His journal gave in-
structions in guerilla and urban warfare and taught people how to make Molotov cock-
tails and explosives. But despite being hosted by Cuba and then, later, Mao’s China, he
resisted joining their official Communist Parties, maintaining an independent position
as a Black radical and becoming leader in exile of the Revolutionary Action Movement
(RAM) and then the Republic of New Afrika. For more on the incredible life of Robert
F. Williams, read his autobiography, Negroes with Guns, and read Timothy B. Tyson’s
Radio Free Dixie.
172 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Williams, remarked that same year, “Women are pushing harder than
the men. . . . That is where our drive is coming from.” In one of the first
major moments in the campaign, before even the assault on his house,
Dr. Perry had been arrested and was in danger of being lynched, so a
group of women had gathered rifles and stormed the jail, freeing him.
Monroe’s vision of an armed, self-defensive civil rights movement—
though it was officially opposed by the NAACP, CORE, and the newly
formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) centered
around Martin Luther King and the other charismatic Southern preach-
ers of the movement—had supporters across the country, including
SCLC-aligned Rosa Parks and Ella Baker. It would go on to be the inspi-
ration for many movements across the South, culminating most visibly
in the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group that formed in 1964 to
provide armed escorts to marches in Louisiana and Mississippi.2 But the
inspiration of the events in Monroe largely remained unofficial and in
the shadows because, in 1960, the students of Greensboro, North Caro-
lina, spectacularly and bravely demonstrated the power of nonviolence,
and nonviolence became the “official” tactic and philosophy of the
movement.
Images of students being beaten, spat upon, and arrested for sitting
on a stool spread nationwide and did exactly what nonviolence tactics
are meant to do: galvanize anger, support, resistance, and pity. It was an
important, radicalizing moment. To capture the energy unleashed by the
student movement, Ella Baker, frustrated with the misogyny, hierarchy,
and cult of personality dominating the SCLC she had just left, set up a
meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April that would give birth to the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The organization was infused with Baker’s organizational style, which
was structured around a simple, antihierarchical principle: “strong peo-
ple don’t need strong leaders.” In the same vein, she would never be
its official head, leaving that position to the students, though she would
remain its philosophical and organizational lodestone. The SNCC ad-
opted her grassroots approach that focused on cultivating local organiz-
ers, with the goal that an organizer eventually made herself unnecessary
as the local movement took on its own momentum. This was coupled
with internal democracy that made the organization capable of shift-
ing dynamically to reflect the changing opinions of its membership.3
This bottom-up approach, opposed to the paper-membership, media-
spectacle, mass-demonstration style that has been passed down to us as
MLK’s legacy, made SNCC perhaps the most vital force in the Southern
movement.
Nonviolent tactics again proved effective in the next massive cam-
paign, the Freedom Rides of 1961. Modeled on the 1947 Journey for
Reconciliation, in which CORE activists had attempted to test a 1946
Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on interstate travel, CORE
again organized white and Black activists to ride together on buses into
the Deep South, to test that and another Supreme Court ruling, from
1960, that desegregated restaurants and seating areas in stations.
The Freedom Riders traveled through the upper South in relative
peace, but in Alabama and Mississippi they faced terrible violence, with
a few activists beaten nearly to death. After a ferocious attack by the Klan
in Birmingham, Alabama—coordinated with local police and with FBI
knowledge—CORE withdrew its organizers. SNCC, led by Diane Nash,
was convinced such a defeat at the hands of mob violence would be
174 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*There is now an exciting group of books about this subject. For this study I’ve used
Charles Cobb’s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Lance Hill’s Deacons for De-
fense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s We Will Shoot Back, and Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free
Dixie, but more and more book-length histories of this trend continue to be published.
Using Guns Nonviolently 175
the ballot or the bullet, Kwame Jeffries writes that for most in the Black
Freedom movement, “the relationship between ballots and bullets was
both/and.”4
The advocates of nonviolence were, of course, well aware of this dy-
namic. Charles Cobb writes, “For most activists . . . nonviolence was
simply a useful tactic, one that did not preclude self-defense whenever it
was considered necessary and possible. Even King . . . acknowledged the
legitimacy of self-defense and sometimes blurred the line between non-
violence and self-defense.”5 It wasn’t just MLK. As Lance Hill records:
“James Lawson, the movement’s foremost spokesperson for Gandhian
nonviolence, admitted later that there ‘never has been an acceptance
of the nonviolent approach’ in the South and the idea that blacks had
initially accepted nonviolence and then became disillusioned was
‘nonsense.’”6
But if none of that was the historical case, how has it become such
a unified narrative? As ever, history has been written by the victors. The
Northern media and white liberals were eager to support the end of
Jim Crow, as it tainted the image of the United States in the Cold War
and, no less significantly, offered a massive potential bloc of Black vot-
ers to the party that could end it. But, just like their Republican and
union predecessors a hundred years previously, they were unwilling to
accept any fundamental challenges to the system, let alone any tactics
that might threaten their own white supremacist hegemony in the West
and the North, and so “nonviolence” became the happy and celebrated
compromise.
The tactic of nonviolence was critiqued and ultimately disproven
in the streets, but, after the movement was defeated in the early 1970s,
a huge media, academic, and governmental project of falsification via
co-optation of MLK, Parks, and the movement took place, unfolding over
decades and slowly defanging and mystifying the actual way the move-
ment moved. And the falsification involved in proving the efficacy of
nonviolence is nowhere clearer than in the history of Birmingham.
176 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*I use the rather clunky phrase not-nonviolent purposely. For some nonviolence ideo-
logues, breaking windows, lighting trash on fire, or even building barricades in the street
is “violent.” I once witnessed a group of Black teens chanting “Fuck the Police” get
shouted at for “being violent” by a white protester. Though there are more forms of vi-
olence than just literal physical blows to a human body, I don’t believe a conception of
“violence” that encompasses both throwing trash in the street and the murder of Michael
Brown is remotely helpful. Calling breaking a window “violent” reproduces this useless
definition and places the whole argument within the rhetorical structure of nonviolence
ideology. Not-nonviolent, then, becomes the more useful term. I first encountered the
term in the work of Lorenzo Raymond.
178 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
freedom. The police are helped by people theoretically on our side, who
are happy to accuse anyone who acts not-nonviolently of being an agent
provocateur and who will even turn people in for not-nonviolent acts,
damning them to the terrible violence of the police and prison system in
the name of pacifism.
But what is nonviolent resistance? It seems obvious, but, in fact,
nonviolent resistance is an incredibly nebulous and murky concept. In
practice, it can mean almost anything: Birmingham is claimed as a non-
violent success—the rioting is unmentioned or written off as unimport-
ant or as things “getting out of hand”—whereas breaking a window on a
march today, although no one is hurt, is almost always called violence.
The 2011 revolution in Egypt is still sometimes described as a non
violent victory, despite the vast arson of police and government buildings;
massive rioting in Suez, Alexandria, and Cairo; widespread looting; and
the killing of over a dozen police officers. Meanwhile, the Movement for
Black Lives, which, despite including looting and arson, has killed no
one, is roundly condemned as too violent. Nonviolent ideologues tend to
claim militant movements as evidence of their philosophy’s power if the
movements happen far away—geographically or historically—but they
attack any and all militancy that occurs closer to home.
This open-ended definition provides for much of nonviolence’s au-
thoritarian character. Gandhi, the racist, misogynist founder of modern
nonviolent philosophy, firmly kept for himself the power to determine
what was violent in the Indian independence movement. On two oc-
casions he called off strikes by his followers by calling them “violent”—
forcing the movement into months of introspection, self-critique, and
reorganization—because friends of his owned the factories being struck
against. His anti-Blackness is now widely known: as an advocate for In-
dians in South Africa, he continually expressed his hatred and disdain
for Black Africans, worrying that European colonizers were degrading
Indians to “their level.” He also believed menstruation was a sign of cor-
ruption, campaigned against contraception, believed fathers were right
to honor-kill assaulted daughters, and made young female followers sleep
naked in bed with him to prove his purity. All of these positions are appar-
ently in accord with nonviolence.
180 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Nonviolence puts the entire moral weight of politics onto the backs
of the oppressed. It takes the history of white supremacy and settler colo-
nialism for granted and says that the responsibility for changing the vio-
lent nature of that history lies entirely with the people who are currently
crushed under that violence. But any serious engagement with history
should lead us to see the wisdom in the claim made by Stokely Carmi-
chael (later Kwame Ture) that “responsibility for the use of violence by
black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them, lies with the
white community.” Black people wouldn’t even be in the United States,
nor, indeed, would there be any United States, were it not for chattel
slavery, white supremacy, and settler colonialism.
Nonviolence turns this historical accounting upside down. As anar-
chist theorist Peter Gelderloos writes, nonviolence advocates often argue
that the state will use militant struggle or armed resistance to “‘justify’
violent repression. Well, to whom is this violent repression justified, and
why aren’t those who claim to be against violence trying to unjustify it?”11
The nonviolent worldview, focusing entirely on protesters and not on
police, ultimately obscures the responsibilities of the state, racists, and
fascists, because it frames their much more extreme repressive violence
as “natural” and normal. Nonviolence lets the police, and the systems
that they defend, off the hook.
I want to make clear that this discussion is not meant to denigrate
anyone who uses nonviolent tactics in their struggles. Most of the tactics
available and desirable to us fall within the parameters of “nonviolence”:
discussion, education, study, community organizing, mutual aid, protest.
Indeed, it is recognizing the extent of the horrible violence of the state,
capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, cisheteropatriarchy, and set-
tler colonialism that makes me believe revolution is the only way forward.
But I do not believe that my refusal to attack property, fight physi-
cally, or make a ruckus helps us toward radical change: that refusal does
not lessen the degree to which I benefit from systems of domination. It
may assuage my personal aversion to violence, but history shows that it
ultimately limits my ability to get free. By not lighting fires at a protest, by
not defending myself from police attack, I am not successfully avoiding
182 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
stay on the Mall for only a day—they all left that same evening!—to be
shipped out without doing any damage. It would be nonviolent, racially
mixed, and even the signs and chants would be controlled. Malcolm
called it the “farce on Washington.”12
This co-optation was intensified by the internal misogyny of the civil
rights organizations. Dorothy I. Height, Pauli Murray, and Ella Baker
record, from their positions within the leadership’s inner sanctum, how
the mainstream leaders were evasive and dismissive when it came to
questions of gender and representation. As the major organizations came
together to plan the big day, women advocated for their place at the po-
dium. Height describes the situation:
We women were expected to put all our energies into it. Clearly, there
was a low tolerance level for anyone raising the questions about the
women’s participation, per se.
The men seemed to feel that women were digressing and pulling
the discussion off the main track. . . . It was thought that we were mak-
ing a lot of fuss about an insignificant issue, that we did not recognize
that the March was about racism, not sexism.13
Women were the core organizers of the civil rights movement. Na-
tional organizers like Baker, Parks, Murray, Height, and Septima Clark
did constant, thankless work building organizational infrastructure,
discovering grassroots leaders, and building voting drives and freedom
schools (which taught reading and basic political literacy) in towns all
over the South. Meanwhile, organizers like Gloria Richardson, Daisy
Bates, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruth Batson, and Amelia Platts Boynton
emerged from their communities to lead the most exciting and militant
local struggles in the country.
But as planning for the March on Washington was coming together,
despite the fact that much of the work for the march itself was being car-
ried out by women, it was made clear that no women were going to be
allowed to speak at the dais. Despite the angry protests of many women
leaders, “the organizers gave a number of us prominent seats on the plat-
form. We were seated. In all the March on Washington pictures, we’re
Using Guns Nonviolently 185
right there on the platform. There were several women who just refused
to do anything. Some were so angry that they didn’t really want to take
part.”14
Pauli Murray sums up this anger well: “It was bitterly humiliating for
Negro Women on August 28, to see themselves accorded little more than
token recognition in the historic March on Washington. Not a single
woman was invited to make one of the major speeches or to be part of
the delegation of leaders who went to the White House. The omission
was deliberate.”15
The patriarchal erasure of these women from the struggle’s most his-
toric moment is of a piece with the anti-militancy of the affair, which at
the last minute refused SNCC’s John Lewis his speaking role until he
removed language promising revolution and criticizing JFK’s civil rights
bill. Patriarchy and anti-militancy are part of the same political program.
These days, however, those who violate absolute nonviolence and
act militantly are often accused of being macho, immature, middle
class, and in league with the police. The fact is, the nonviolent wing
of the movement was most pronounced in its misogyny, most middle
class in its leadership, and most complicit with the state. Whereas the
overwhelming majority of famous figures in the pantheon of the Black
Freedom movement are men, it is Black Power, and in particular the
Black Panther Party (BPP), that is singled out for accusations of misogyny
and machismo.
But the idea that the BPP was particularly misogynistic is simply not
true. At its height, two-thirds of the BPP membership were women. The
vast majority of BPP activities, a wide range of “medical, housing, cloth-
ing, free breakfast and education programs,” were run and organized
by women.16 It was this work, in support of the armed self-defense, that
J. Edgar Hoover thought made the BPP particularly dangerous, because
with these programs the Panthers could win mass appeal and receive
support from many sectors of society. As Panther Frankye Malika Adams
said, “Women ran the BPP pretty much. I don’t know how it got to be a
male’s party or thought of as being a male’s party.” BPP rallies featured
women standing shoulder to shoulder with men wearing the same uni-
forms. It was, furthermore, the only major organization of the period to
186 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
be publicly led by a woman: Elaine Brown chaired the BPP from 1974 to
1977, and it was one of the only organizations to officially take a position
on women’s liberation.17*
This is not to deny or excuse the fact that the BPP was afflicted with
patriarchal and misogynist views and practices we would find objection-
able today (nor to say that there aren’t many of the same problems in our
movements now; they’re just not as explicitly expressed). Women still did
the vast majority of the caring, cooking, and cleaning and were expected
to raise children and do the social services and administrative work while
men were chosen for media appearances and glamorous direct actions.
The BPP traded in macho rhetoric, and Eldridge Cleaver’s best-selling
Soul on Ice, written in 1965 before he was a party member but published
in 1968 and associated widely with the Panthers, has a horrific passage of
rape apology and misogynoir in its opening pages.
But even though these facts are relatively common knowledge about
the Panthers, we rarely, if ever, hear about the rampant misogyny of the
white middle-class peace movement, hippie culture, or the civil rights
mainstream. It is not to deny the misogyny of the party to ask: Why is the
BPP so often singled out for its machismo? I believe that it is partially
because of its mass lower-class character.† But it is also the result of a
*SNCC, the most militant of the civil rights groups and the organization that first de-
clared and popularized Black Power, was founded and coordinated behind the scenes
by Ella Baker, cultivated women leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, and had women in all
ranks of its leadership. On the other hand, the “cultural nationalist” organizations within
the Black Power tendency, such as Ron Karenga’s US (United Slaves) and the Nation of
Islam, had strongly proscribed positions for women built into an explicitly chauvinistic
ideology of “natural” gender roles. But these organizations were opposed to political
struggle, let alone revolutionary politics, believing instead in individual uplift, Black cap-
italism, and cultural cohesion as the goal. Historically, the less militant or revolutionary
the organization, the less liberatory its gender politics tended to be. This is not without
exceptions and is definitely not an excuse for male revolutionaries to rest on their laurels
and not explicitly struggle against patriarchy within themselves, their communities, and
other organizations. It is, however, reason to question received narratives around mili-
tancy and machismo.
†
The poor, less sophisticated at hiding their patriarchal opinions and more frequently
punished for their violence, are always accused of greater misogyny than the rich and
middle classes, who can more easily keep their violence behind closed doors and who
organize and systematize their patriarchy through fraternities, business clubs, family life,
sexual control of employees and staff, and other such strategies.
Using Guns Nonviolently 187
189
190 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*Richardson was also controversial for her anti-elections stance. In an attempt to buy off
the movement, the Cambridge town government put a desegregation bill up for refer-
endum. But Richardson “opposed this measure because she believed that equality had
already been guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.” She pointed to the fact that many in
her movement were Korean War vets—they had already earned the right to vote by fight-
ing for the United States. “In addition, Richardson pointed out . . . that African Amer-
icans in Cambridge had been participating in elections for nearly one hundred years
and it had not significantly changed the quality of their life.” She argued this directly
against the NAACP, Adam Clayton Powell, Robert Kennedy, and MLK. On her advice,
the Black community boycotted the vote and refused to legitimize the local government.
This move kept the movement in the streets and kept it focused on its core principles of
economic justice, jobs, homes, and food for all. A year later, when the Voting Rights Act
made desegregation the law of the land anyway, she was proven right not to have traded
a street movement for such concessions (Jeff Kisseloff, Generations on Fire: Voices of
Protest from the 1960s, an Oral History [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007]).
Civil Riots 193
have, because their tactics worked: the Cambridge movement was wildly
successful, winning desegregation of transportation, schools, the library,
the hospital, and other public accommodations within a year. They
demonstrated, even more clearly than Monroe, the continuities between
fighting for civil rights and economic justice and between protest and
violent insurrection.
Cambridge also shows that urban riots were hardly a Northern phe-
nomenon: the first two famous ones in the movement, after all, took place
in Birmingham and Cambridge. A riot had broken out a year earlier, in
1962, in Kinloch, Missouri, a small suburb of St. Louis, after police killed
a Black teenager, with another in North St. Louis in June 1964. A riot in
Jacksonville, Florida, in the spring of 1964 gained nationwide attention,
because Black students attacked police and vigilantes with rocks. But these
uprisings are not always included in histories of 1960s urban riots, which
traditionally begin in the North with the famous Harlem Riot of 1964.
That riot began on July 16 after police killed a fifteen-year-old boy,
James Powell, shooting him down in the streets. CORE had planned a
rally in Harlem that day for three civil rights activists whose disappear-
ance in Mississippi was provoking national outrage: James Chaney, Mi-
chael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.† At the last minute, CORE
changed the subject of the rally to justice for James Powell and against
police brutality. This is a crucial moment of continuity and connection.
The struggle against Jim Crow and white violence, for civil rights and
economic justice, in North and South directly transformed—through lit-
erally the same demonstrations, infrastructure, and organizations—into
urban rebellions, rebellions that would bring the United States seem-
ingly to the edge of revolution by 1968.
Because that day in July 1964 people didn’t just want to rally. They
marched and then ran through the streets, fought with police, smashed
†
The three activists had gone south to participate in SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Sum-
mer, but they had been arrested by Mississippi police and then turned over to the KKK
and lynched. Their disappearance was a huge news item all summer and focused the
nation’s eyes on Mississippi’s horrific violence. Their bodies were found at the end of the
summer, and only decades later would the real story of police and KKK collusion come
out, though it was widely suspected at the time.
194 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
store windows, and lit fires. Rioting lasted for two nights when no charges
were brought against the cop, at which point Brooklyn CORE called
a rally in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood in north Brooklyn. That
rally also turned into a riot. For six nights total, fighting with police, loot-
ing, and arson spread across Harlem and Bed-Stuy.
Inspired by the events in New York and sparked by local outrages, up-
risings against white supremacist police violence ran rampant across the
country. First upstate to Rochester, New York, then across the Hudson to
Jersey City. The next riots also took place in New Jersey, first in Paterson,
then Elizabeth. A riot popped off in Dixmoor, a Chicago suburb. Next a
major riot erupted in Philadelphia. All of these riots occurred within six
weeks of each other, July–August 1964.
Activists and revolutionaries participated in and pushed forward
these uprisings. As we’ve seen, CORE called the rallies that began the
New York riots. Martially trained Black Muslims deployed their skills
in the streets, playing a particularly important part in Rochester. Mal-
colm X had just split from the Nation of Islam and, rejecting its pol-
icies of separatism and political disengagement, was in the process of
building an independent, revolutionary Muslim tendency: his followers
were most present in the fighting. Members of the Revolutionary Action
Movement—a Marxist Black nationalist revolutionary group—agitated,
propagandized, and fought as well, particularly in Philadelphia, where
they had a large presence as a result of organizing successfully there for
two years.
Though these riots were sparked by instances of police brutality, riot-
ing isn’t simply a mechanical reaction to police violence: it’s not a knee
unbending beneath a doctor’s hammer. If it were, riots would occur ev-
ery day in every city in the United States. Riots, instead, emerge out of
movement.
Sometimes they come out of that subterranean, invisible but ongoing
movement for freedom, justice, and Jubilee that Karl Marx called the
“historical party” that runs through the entire history of capitalism, reap-
pearing seemingly suddenly and spontaneously (though specific histories
of uprisings always tell a more complicated story of rising local tensions
and grievances). But uprisings occur much more frequently when social
Civil Riots 195
that going on inside her, that somehow she has lashed out at every white
store owner on the Avenue, has gotten back all the hurt she suffered; you
quickly dismiss this idea, and call her a thief.”5
Reducing looting and rioting to a question of crime, calling the
looter “just a thief,” as Fuller ironically suggests, serves to mask the lib-
eratory content of the action taking place.6 In the midst of the uprising,
onlookers and participants alike begin to question the ideology support-
ing property and commodity, order and law. As such, looting represents a
fundamental threat to a society ordered by white supremacy, a threat that
often goes beyond the boundaries that activists or even self-proclaimed
revolutionaries feel comfortable with.
These riots all came immediately after the passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, which finally, legally declared the end of segregation. The
Harlem Riots took place only fourteen days afterward. As liberals de-
clared victory, and an end to racial discrimination, Black people north
and south called bullshit.
But the riots did more than just express a voice. Riots are more than
just the “language of the unheard,” as MLK called them. Riots give
birth to revolutionary transformation. The three largest riots of the pe-
riod, Watts, Newark, and Detroit, created three different but powerful
revolutionary movements in their wake, each indicating the degree to
which riots expand and empower political consciousness and action, and
the three together demonstrating how they can do so in unpredictable
directions.
a much more mixed group, split between men and women, young and
old, would arrive and work to empty the store. The store would only be
set alight once credit records had been destroyed and goods had been
fully looted. Rioters usually remained nearby to make sure the building
burned, attacking firemen with bricks and bottles if they tried to put out
the flames before the fire had fully consumed the hated business.8
Tactics reflected effective communication and mobility among
the rebels. Rioters transmitted information over the radio waves, used
payphones to spread intel, and listened in to police broadcasts to see
where cops would be deployed. False reports were called in to send po-
lice scrambling, at which point areas they’d just “pacified” could be re-
taken. In areas they didn’t entirely control, rioters focused on hit-and-run
strikes, then dispersing quickly to reappear elsewhere. All of these tactics
would be adopted and practiced, with local modifications, in other riots
throughout the period.
The media described these as guerilla tactics, and police and reac-
tionaries compared the situation in Watts to fighting the Viet Cong or
the Mau Mau of Kenya. Rioters often appreciated the comparison: many,
encouraged by the thought of Malcolm X, Revolutionary Action Move-
ment (RAM), Robert F. Williams, and local militants, understood their
actions as guerilla warfare, too. Other rioters tied their actions to antico-
lonial struggle via resistance to imperialist war. Many men of draft age
interviewed afterward said something very similar to what one rioter told
SNCC newspaper The Movement: “I’d rather die here than in Vietnam.”9
The predominantly white, middle-class, university-based antiwar
movement failed, however, to see the crucial anti-Vietnam dimension of
the riots, and therefore failed to form unity with rioters, which it might
have done by creating defense committees or solidarity demonstrations.
The Vietnam War and the movement against it were ramping up across
the years of the urban rebellions, and this connection might have helped
transform the antiwar movement in a truly revolutionary direction. Rather
than listen to or organize with rioters, all but the most radical tended to
see Watts only as a “race thing,” failing to understand the links among
revolution, antiracism, and anti-imperialism—links that had been at the
Civil Riots 199
forefront of Black radical theorizing for decades and that were increas-
ingly spreading through the Black Freedom movement at large.
Only too late, once the riots had mostly subsided after 1968, did
large sections of the antiwar movement recognize these connections.
This same fatal reactionary error is being made today by members of the
social-democratic Left who say focusing on race (or “identity politics”)
is wrong, that we should focus instead on class. They fail to recognize
the degree to which Black Freedom struggles are already about class and
race, something they would realize if they simply listened to the people
taking part in those struggles.
As in Philadelphia, the action in Watts greatly increased feelings of
strength and unity. As Jimmy Garrett recorded in The Movement: “The
unity came out in the words ‘Burn baby burn.’ It expressed itself Friday
night on 42nd street and Avalon boulevard when a young Negro stood in
front of a Negro business shouting ‘Don’t bother this one, He’s a brother.
He’s a brother.’ It showed when another young Negro politely asked a
woman her size, then stepped through a broken window of a dress shop
to pick out ten or twelve dresses. It was seeing people with their heads up
and smiles on their faces.”10
Not some dour, grim thing, Watts, like most major riots, took on a
carnivalesque, celebratory atmosphere. Participation was widespread.
Gerald Horne quotes one report that said one in seven residents of the
affected area took part. The Kerner Commission, formed to study the
riots of 1967, indicates that 18 percent, or nearly one in five residents, par-
ticipated in those urban uprisings. Not some tiny cabal of troublemakers,
rioters were the community: those numbers mean nearly everyone had an
active participant in either their family or among their friends.
The cops, for their part, practiced vicious collective punishment on
Black people. The first thing the police did when looting broke out was
deploy to protect the banks, which they prioritized over pawnshops full
of guns and even their own precinct houses. After the second day, the
governor declared a curfew, enabling police to carry out mass arrests
of anyone on the streets. On top of police, fourteen thousand national
guardsmen were sent into the curfew zone. Two days after rioting ended,
200 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*This party was not originally connected to the Black Panther Party for self-defense that
emerged in Oakland, California. Both groups independently took their name from the
Mississippi Black Panther Party, led by Stokely Carmichael, which emerged in 1966.
The LA group was largely led by RAM militants, but it would eventually be subsumed
by the Oakland BPP, a final moment in the collapse of RAM power and influence; the
group was largely defunct by 1967.
202 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*The range of programs was immense. They “eventually included the Free Breakfast
for Children Program, liberation schools, free health clinics, the Free Food Distribu-
tion Program, the Free Clothing Program, child development centers, the Free Shoe
Program, the Free Busing to Prison Program, the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Founda-
tion, free housing cooperatives, the Free Pest Control Program, the Free Plumbing and
Maintenance Program, renter’s assistance, legal aid, the Seniors Escorts Program, and
the Free Ambulance Program” (Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013]).
Civil Riots 203
plained the party’s purpose, “those rebellions, from Harlem to Watts, had
been endorsed by the entire black underclass, shouting ‘Hallelujah.’ The
party intended to educate and politicize that mass of energy, creating
vanguard soldiers from the hard core and a mass of black people ready
for revolution.”14
The Watts (and other) riots demonstrated to the BPP that the time
was right for a revolutionary party, an organization with an explicitly not-
nonviolent philosophy and one aimed toward total social transformation.
The Panthers’ strategy was based on directly organizing the poor, the
unemployed, the socially marginalized, and the criminal gangs of the
ghetto into a revolutionary party. This may seem to make their politics
a “natural” fit with riots, which we are taught to incorrectly presume
are carried out by the most isolated, alienated, and criminalized in so-
ciety. But it was hardly the only form of organization born in the flames
of looted department stores. In Newark, a movement focused on gain-
ing local political power and pushing cultural and social transformation
through control of existing city structures—a favorite dream of reformers
and those revolutionaries who disdain insurrection—rose out of a mas-
sive riot’s ashes. A few weeks later, insurrection in Detroit gave birth to
a radical labor movement, precisely the kind of movement that many
“socialists” who condemn rioters claim they would support.
predecessors had done with the New Deal. This had partially worked in
1963 and 1964, when CORE and SNCC activists in the South focused
their efforts on voter registration despite the fact that locals consistently
wanted them to tackle economic issues; they were receiving much of
their funding from Democratic Party organs anxious to keep their hold
on the South, and so kept the focus on elections.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s attempts to tackle the racial and
economic crises of the period, his War on Poverty and Great Society pro-
grams, were despised by white reactionaries, while in radicalized poor
and Black communities they were recognized as insufficient and ineffec-
tive Band-Aids. In most cities, War on Poverty programs just increased
funding to existing infrastructure, thus doubling down on education,
youth, and job training programs that were already failing Black ghetto
residents. Mired in bureaucratic problems, based in an analysis that
saw both unrest and racial discrimination as crime—which is to say, as
problems caused by individuals—Johnson’s programs couldn’t offer the
fundamental transformation and empowerment the movement pointed
toward. And anyway, the cost of the War on Poverty paled in compar-
ison to the cost of the war on the impoverished people of Vietnam; as
many activists pointed out at the time, imperialist war in Vietnam kept
the ghetto poor.
The lead-up to the Newark uprising was marked by conflict around
all these problems. Increasing grassroots activity and increasing aware-
ness of the limits of political participation marked the years before the
riots in Newark. From 1965, Black women, as they always do, had taken
the lead in organizing, pushing for maximum benefit from the new War
on Poverty programs. They tried to take control of the local Area Boards
that distributed funds, they educated their neighbors and communities
on how to apply for grants and foundations, and they built programs for
housing stock improvement, social centers, and other such projects. But
all of this required constant, exhausting struggle with the government
bureaucracy, struggle that often failed to achieve activists’ goals.
There was also an ongoing, powerful antipolice movement in New-
ark, which had organized massive rallies and memorials for Black resi-
dents murdered by police. Only a few weeks before the uprisings, police
206 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
on the East Orange–Newark border had raided, fought with, and arrested
Nation of Islam militants, increasing tensions. And Amiri Baraka and
his Spirit House group were transforming and politicizing the culture of
Newark with Black nationalist poetry readings and street theater, perfor-
mances that not only featured political themes but also became, them-
selves, rallies and protests.*
It is in this context that Newark police ruthlessly beat and arrested
cab driver John Smith on the night of July 12, 1967, setting off six days of
massive rioting. The police and National Guard killed 24 people. “More
than 1,100 sustained injuries; approximately 1,400 were arrested; some
350 arsons damaged private and public buildings; millions of dollars of
merchandise was destroyed or stolen; and law enforcement expended
13,326 rounds of ammunition.”17 As in Watts, the people held the initia-
tive on the first few days, after which point massive violence, collective
punishment, and repression on the part of police and the National Guard
began to win the struggle.
Looting was massive and organized. The rioters used Molotov cock-
tails in attacks on police and property. A few months before the riots, an
anonymous pamphlet had circulated with instructions on how to make
them. Despite this militancy, though, the rioting in Newark was experi-
enced as a massive party. Indeed, “on a profound level, the gleeful spirits
of the riot crowds disturbed public officials as much as the prospect of
violence. When Newark’s police director Dominick Spina toured the riot
scene with Mayor Addonizio and Governor Hughes . . . Hughes was said
to have been particularly ‘appalled at the holiday air he felt in the ghet-
to.’”18 The experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom in the midst of a riot,
an experience we almost never have in these city streets where we are
exploited, controlled, and dominated, is a force that transforms rioters,
sometimes forever: the experience of such freedom can be unforgettable.
And it was movement people fighting in the streets. The riots kicked
off after demonstrations were organized and CORE activist Robert
*This tradition has been powerfully continued in the current movement by political
prisoner Ceebo Tha Rapper, an LA artist who, after the August 2011 murder of his cousin
Ezell Ford, spearheaded the movement for Ford, writing songs and shooting music vid-
eos about the movement that were themselves staged as protests.
Civil Riots 207
after the riots. The movement’s center formed around the Community
for Unified Newark (CFUN), an umbrella organization that had begun
life as the United Brothers. The United Brothers literally formed as con-
cerned activists gathered at Amiri Baraka’s bedside while he recovered
from the police beating he endured in the riots. As Komozi Woodard
writes, “The Black Power movement rose like Phoenix out of the ashes
of the Newark Rebellion. CFUN came to symbolize the politics born of
the urban uprisings.”19
Rather than forming a national, militant revolutionary party like the
Panthers, CFUN took a different approach to addressing the political and
economic crises of the ghetto. As Woodard records, CFUN
The full story of CFUN, and the inspiring struggle for political trans-
formation in Newark, is beyond the remit of this book. But the move-
ment in Newark points to the fact that hardly an instigator of only openly
insurrectionary politics, riots, and uprisings can inspire and expand
movements that are based around predominantly nonviolent commu-
nity campaigns for political, cultural, and social power. There is nothing
“riot-like” about the activities or tactics of CFUN; nevertheless, it was
born as Newark burned. And insurrection in Detroit would move out
of the streets and into the factories, giving birth to one of the last major,
radical US labor movements of the twentieth century.
Civil Riots 209
Late in the night of July 23, 1967, six days after the smoke had
cleared over the Newark skyline, Detroit police raided an unlicensed
after-hours drinking club (a “blind pig”). Rather than a few drunks, po-
lice were surprised to find more than eighty partiers, celebrating two vet-
erans’ safe return from Vietnam. Rather than disperse the crowd, police
decided to arrest and brutalize them all.
Five days later, 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, and 7,200
were in jail; 1,300 buildings were utterly destroyed, and 2,700 businesses
had been looted. Other than the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the New
York City Draft Riots of 1863, this was the largest riot in American history.
The American auto industry, centered in Detroit, was the engine and
center of American capitalism for the first half of the twentieth century,
and, as is inevitable in major centers of capitalist dynamism and power,
Detroit featured some of the most dramatic social conflict in the coun-
try. The Detroit strike of 1933 and the Flint sit-down strikes in 1936–1937
against General Motors were among the hardest fought in the Great De-
pression. The Detroit race riots of 1943 had been the largest and most
violent of the twentieth century.
But white flight, automation, and deindustrialization meant Detroit
was in trouble by 1967. Detroit and the car industry were no longer the
driving economic power in American society, although it was hard to
recognize this from the inside at first. The full fallout and effects of these
trends would only be recognized in the decades following the riots. (As
a result, white folks have often blamed Detroit’s decline on the riots, de-
spite the simultaneous industrial decline of the entire Midwest.)
It’s not surprising the riots traumatized and terrified the white powers
of Detroit. Unlike in Newark and Watts, where fear of snipers was mostly
unjustified, Detroit saw some actual sniping. The first night they were
deployed, the National Guard indiscriminately fired machine guns from
the street into apartment buildings, claiming they were fighting snipers,
killing nine—none of whom were proven to have weapons. Looters were
shot on sight—a direct order from the National Guard command hier-
archy—and police and guardsmen were caught moving and rearranging
bodies to indicate the people they killed had been looting. In the face
of this violence, snipers started shooting back. Things got so serious in
210 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Detroit that LBJ sent in the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions of the US
Army, which had seen combat in Vietnam. Rolling through Detroit in
tanks and armored personnel carriers, soldiers came straight from mur-
dering Vietnamese people to attack and murder Black Americans.
Many radicals fetishize military-style conflict as the sign of true rev-
olutionary potential. This was especially true of the movements of the
late sixties and early seventies, that all proclaimed armed struggle and
saw the “guerilla” as something of a revolutionary saint. But the revolu-
tionary content of the riots does not lie mainly in these military aspects.
The shooting is a small piece, not the main component of the attack
on white supremacy, the state, property, and the commodity. Whereas
armed self-defense will always be an important part of struggles for liber-
ation, the arms themselves have no magical property to make our move-
ments more serious, more revolutionary, more powerful. The power of
the attack on white settler society is seen instead in the broad lawless-
ness, property destruction, looting, and cop-free zones produced by the
riot and is reflected in the attendant sense of freedom, unity, and radical
safety felt by the rioters.*
Detroit was in full-blown insurrection. Arsonists in Detroit controlled
their fires much less effectively than rebels had in Newark and Watts, as
a strong wind was blowing off Lake Erie throughout the days of the riot.
As a result, fires spread much farther in Detroit, destroying many homes,
not just businesses. But despite this, participation in rioting was truly
*The shooting of a few cops and soldiers may well be necessary in the course of a rev-
olutionary struggle, but the emphasis on snipers by the police and media isn’t merely
a repressive justification strategy; it is also a kind of strategic optimism: the state wants
to face its enemies in a military conflict, not a social one; the state wants to fight an
army, not a mob. Armies, even (perhaps especially) guerilla ones, are shaped around
technical expertise and organization, supply lines/chains and logistics, hierarchy, the
harshest discipline, right to punishment up to and including death, laws of conduct, and
an overarching force of social unification. These are all core factors of a state: any army
must become a functional state in miniature. Thus, even if the revolutionaries win the
war, the state will persevere, merely transferred to more progressive bureaucrats. Real
revolution will have been prevented in the militarization of the conflict, which really
means the bureaucratization of the revolutionaries. This, no doubt, must be one of the
basic lessons of the twentieth-century revolutions and anticolonial victories that in many
places dramatically improved daily life but everywhere failed to revolutionize it.
Civil Riots 211
of the Black Madonna, had organized and led what had been to that
point the biggest civil rights march in history. In the spring of 1963, he
and Dr. King marched at the head of 200,000 people through downtown
Detroit—a crowd only surpassed by that of the March on Washington.
But after the March on Washington, and in particular the violence of
Birmingham, Cleage’s thinking took a dramatic, militant turn, and he
began arguing for a “strategy of chaos”—rejecting nonviolence, his strat-
egy called for using retaliatory violence and escalation, increasing the
intensity and spread of riots until demands were met. “We’ll get what
we’re after or we’ll tear it up!” was the strategy’s summation. In the years
leading up to the riots, he was increasingly involved in organizing with
the workers in Detroit factories.
So when the army finally succeeded in putting down the uprising,
political organizers, including Cleage, got to work. As activist-historians
Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin write in their seminal Detroit, I Do
Mind Dying:
Less than nine months after the Detroit riots, Martin Lu-
ther King was assassinated, shot down on a motel balcony in Memphis,
Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. Memphis rose up in rebellion. Within a
week, riots had spread to 125 cities, where massive rioting was met with
equally massive deployments of the US Army and the National Guard.
The insurrection in DC got within two blocks of the White House, “and
machine guns were mounted on the Capitol balcony and the White
House lawn. Forty-six people were killed across the country, 2500 were
injured, and it took 70,000 federal troops to restore order.”24
The April uprisings in 1968, taking place during Holy Week leading
up to Easter, created the largest disorder in America since the Civil War,
214 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
*As recently as 2018, in a book on the riots of the 1960s, historian Peter Levy could write
that, beside a single volume written in the immediate aftermath of the riots, these upris-
ings “have received remarkably little attention . . . scholars have virtually ignored them”
(Peter Levy, The Great Uprising [Chelsea, MI: Sheridan Books, 2018], 154).
Civil Riots 215
they were and tore shit up, trying to dismantle the system that murdered
King—the very face of the respectable, peaceful movement the white
power structure claimed it wanted to do business with.
With Dr. King’s death, as Stokely Carmichael put it, “Nonviolence
was dead.” At that point, organizing for the revolution seemed to be the
most realistic way forward. This sense was not purely an American one,
though: the feeling was global. The Cultural Revolution in China was at
its height, and around the world radicals were taking inspiration from the
apparent deepening of the Chinese revolution. Although Che Guevara
had been killed the previous summer in a disastrous guerilla campaign
in Bolivia, where he and his comrades were executed by CIA-backed
forces, he had become a global martyr and symbol of the era. The Cuban
Revolution he helped win was going strong, forming a new pole of radical
leadership distinct from China and the USSR, the latter of which most
revolutionaries in the sixties recognized as a reactionary, capitalist state.
And while many of the revolutionary pan-African and socialist move-
ments were on the back foot in Africa—particularly devastating was the
ousting of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966 and the col-
lapse of the revolution in the Congo—others, such as the struggle of the
PAIGC and Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, the increasingly success-
ful war for independence in Angola, and the ongoing socialist collectiv-
ization of “Ujamaa” practiced by Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere,
seemed to point to an African continent in the midst of revolution. The
riots of April 1968 in the United States were followed closely in May by
massive riots and a general strike in Paris that almost toppled the gov-
ernment. Salvador Allende would be elected in Chile in 1970 on a wave
of socialist agitation already making itself felt. Meanwhile, the Tet Of-
fensive, launched in January 1968, saw the peasants of North Vietnam
winning a war against the world’s great imperial power.
And so in the wake of the April uprisings, and in light of all these facts,
explicitly revolutionary movements across the country exploded onto
the scene. Following the Black “screaming queens” of the Compton’s
Cafeteria rebellion in 1966, Black trans women again pushed forward
the revolution, leading the Stonewall uprising in New York City in 1969
216 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
that gave birth to the queer movement. Within a few years, hundreds
of queer advocacy organizations had sprung up across the country. The
American Indian Movement, formed in the summer of 1968, occupied
Alcatraz Island in San Francisco in November 1969, centering national
attention on their militant demands and the continued colonial genocide
of Indigenous people. The Alcatraz occupation would only be forcibly
evicted by federal troops nineteen months later, and the movement built
strength and power, climaxing in the occupation of Wounded Knee in
1973. The Black Panther Party achieved its meteoric moment of national
prominence from 1968 to 1971. As the state increasingly turned to repres-
sion to tackle these growing movements, the prisons, too, exploded into
organization and action, most famously with the riotous takeover (and
police massacre) at Attica in 1971. That was only one of dozens of prison
uprisings in the period.
The antiwar movement also radicalized. Students, sometimes armed,
occupied and took over university campuses across the country—this
reached its apotheosis with the National Guard massacre of four pro-
testing students at Kent State on May 4, 1970. The Chicanx wing of the
antiwar movement organized a march under the banner of the Chicano
Moratorium and rioted in East LA in August; police killed four of their
number. Although popular histories sometimes point to the Weath-
ermen—a group of white antiwar radicals who favored pursuing riots,
bombings, and guerilla attacks on the state—they were more exemplary
of a trend than the crazy radicals at the fringes they are usually described
as. It is little remembered now, but the period was one of massive left-
wing terrorism: between January 1969 and the spring of 1970 there were
4,330 bombings in the United States.
Massive movements emerged from within Chicanx, Asian American,
and Puerto Rican communities—most famous among them the Young
Lords, Asian Americans for Action, and the Brown Berets. Workers or-
ganized an awesome wildcat strike wave from 1967 to 1974, feminism
was transforming awareness across the country as consciousness-raising
groups, books, and demonstrations proliferated, people with disabilities
were organizing and fighting for accessibility and freedom, and a mil-
Civil Riots 217
itant movement of poor mothers was fighting a winning fight for wel-
fare. American soldiers in Vietnam were refusing their orders and killing
their officers at record rates; “fragging” was such a problem that the army
seemed on the verge of total collapse. Everywhere you looked America
seemed ready to explode.
A wide range of movements were thus radicalized and activated by
national Black insurrection and international Third World revolution.
As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “When the Black movement goes
into motion, it destabilizes all political life in the United States.”25 Black
struggle had opened the door for revolutionary movements to blossom
across the country, and it was the riots of 1964–1968 that seemed to indi-
cate that the end of American empire was imminent and that the revolu-
tion only needed to be organized.
But the riots didn’t come back: there were no more long, hot summers.
Without the mass energy and intense threat to the state the riots posed,
white retrenchment and reaction slowly retook control. The COINTEL-
PRO program, run by the FBI and police across the country, would kill
more than twenty Black Panthers and imprison more than a thousand,
would murder dozens of American Indian Movement militants, would
attack, disrupt, and infiltrate the Puerto Rican independence movement
and the radical antiwar groups. Rather than social reform, the United
States built its massive prison system, which grew partially as a way of
guaranteeing the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s would
not be repeated. Though America lost the Vietnam War, the main lesson
the military learned was that a mass, drafted army in a long, drawn-out
war was too dangerous for morale. So the United States abolished the
draft and developed a volunteer army made up of only the poor and the
patriotic, and it increasingly privatized its military, pointing future US
strategy toward global police action, assassination, and special forces in-
tervention rather than massive ground war.
Without increasing street action, the movements of the late sixties
and seventies fell to repression, fizzled out, or devoured themselves
through splits and infighting. Most of the political gains of the sixties have
since been taken away by generations of “tough on crime” politicians,
218 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
Republican and Democrat alike, and the successive crises of the global
capitalist economy, expressing themselves in more and more dramatic
debt bubbles since 1973, have wiped out much of the social progress.
Another revolutionary period ended in defeat. Although many of the
victories have been wiped away, we can resist the suppression and defor-
mation of its history. The centrality of rioting and looting to the period
was intimately understood by its activists, rebels, and revolutionaries. But
their voices have all too often been silenced or co-opted by liberal histo-
rians and conservative politicians.
The question of nonviolence and the efficacy of rioting has once
again been put on the table in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Ba-
ton Rouge, in Charlotte, Chicago, Oakland, and Minneapolis, in Char-
lottesville, Berkeley, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. We can no longer afford
to misunderstand the sixties, to excise the riots and refuse to recognize
the vital role they played in the upheavals that shook America to its core.
We must do away once and for all with the myth of nonviolence and with
the false moral divisions between uprising and social transformation, be-
tween insurrection and movement, between looting and boycotting, be-
tween rioting and community organization. As Shakur Assata reminds us,
it is our duty to win.
chapter nine | THE INHUMANITY OF LOOTERS
219
220 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
cycle. All of this was made possible only by the neocolonial extraction of
raw materials from the Global South. But even with continued imperial
domination, American and European consumerism hit serious limits.
At some point near the end of the “golden years” in the sixties, workers
started saving and investing their money rather than spending it on ever
more elaborate and senseless consumer goods. Meanwhile, the manufac-
turing economies in Japan and Germany had recovered from the rubble
of World War II, providing serious competition for US corporations. Just
as importantly, class struggle was winning victories for workers, forcing
increasingly expensive concessions from both state and capital.
As rioters, protesters, and strikers continued to force wages higher and
increase state programs, and as automation increased global productiv-
ity to be faster than consumption could absorb, corporations suddenly
couldn’t sell enough of their products and profits began to stall out. This
crisis came to a head in the crash and recession of the early 1970s—most
of that decade saw severe economic retrenchment, stagnation, and col-
lapse, as municipal and state governments went broke and jobs disap-
peared. But a total reckoning was staved off by the ending of the Bretton
Woods agreement and the “floating of the dollar,” which decoupled the
value of the dollar from real value in gold, fully transforming the US state
and the Federal Reserve into the backbone of global capital.
The crisis of profitability has never been resolved, but floating the
dollar gave space for a number of strategies to manage it. The violent
impact of the earliest of those strategies—globalization, consumer debt,
service economy development, financialization—was at first lessened
by domestic concessions won by the uprisings of the sixties and seven-
ties and papered over by consumer debt. But in the late seventies and
through the eighties, as working-class power faded, capital took the of-
fensive—most infamously in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher—and pushed forward strategies of austerity, union
destruction, repression, and privatization. These strategies all combined
to more or less guarantee profit and GDP growth in the medium term at
the expense of long-term social stability.
The inability of the government and the market to truly provide a
response to this crisis became obvious in the widespread destruction and
The Inhumanity of Looters 221
slow recovery initiated by the 2008 financial collapse. Finessing the un-
employment numbers has become the only jobs program the govern-
ment takes seriously, as stable, long-term jobs are replaced with low- and
minimum-wage, part-time, precarious, and seasonal work. People who
work three jobs but can barely pay the rent or who only get fifteen hours
a week at Target and live one illness away from total penury are gleefully
declared “employed!” by liberal metrics of economic health. The dis-
abled, imprisoned, undocumented, long-term unemployed, and other-
wise marginalized people are permanently cut out of the “official” labor
force statistics, further reducing unemployment numbers without chang-
ing material conditions.
The official poverty threshold is similarly kept absurdly low, not track-
ing changes in costs of education, health care, rent, or debt levels to hide
the fact that some 30 percent of Americans live in poverty while another
20 percent have a higher income but are only three months of unem-
ployment away from total poverty. Misery spreads everywhere while poli-
ticians, economists, and the media gaslight the population with reports of
recovery and economic strength. Wealth concentrates in an increasingly
small and increasingly rich capitalist class. At the time of this writing,
it seems the dam has finally broken on this strategy, as the shock of the
coronavirus shutdown has popped the fragile bubbles resting atop five
decades of debt and logistic schemes and created unimaginable unem-
ployment alongside mass death.
American triumphalism over the fall of the USSR, the victory of
global capitalism, and the “end of history”—the idea that political trans-
formation is over and that instead we will merely witness the global spread
and increase of liberal democracy and wealth—has been revealed for the
farce it always was. In truth, capitalism is gorging itself on the planet, de-
stroying the earth in a horrific ecological crisis that, rather than attempt
to solve, it merely schemes to profit off of even further. It is also killing
off the nation-state, the main form of political power it has relied on over
the last century and a half; governmental bodies such as the EU and
concepts such as “global cities” are testament to the fact that capitalism
requires openness to a total system of global flows more than it does the
development of profits through social spending and trade imbalances.
222 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
to stand with them as they acted outside and against white supremacist
commodity society, even when they were not legibly “protesting” it.
But the riots not only lacked an obvious political content, they also
lacked a movement. The rise of the Black middle classes after civil rights
victories had, by 1977, reinforced and widened a significant class line
within Black communities. Income, wealth, and unemployment rates of
poor folks in the late seventies were often worse than they had been in
the sixties, but a small class had benefited. Black middle-class business
owners and politicians, who had replaced movement leaders as “repre-
sentative voices,” disavowed the looting: after all, it attacked their inter-
ests. The editorial board of Harlem’s Amsterdam News led the charge for
the Black middle class, writing an excoriating denunciation of the looting
that was reprinted in papers throughout the country to provide cover for
more openly racist antilooting positions.
Arrested looters, meanwhile, were processed with a deliberate slow-
ness that left thousands in horribly overcrowded cells for five or six days
in the middle of a record heat wave. Given rotten food and insufficient
water, they languished in collective punishment. “We slept on the floor
with our hands next to our body like the slaves brought over from Africa,”
one arrestee testified. It was a rather direct example of what Christina
Sharpe calls Black life “in the Hold.” As a way of reasserting property re-
lations after an act of looting, the state turns to its foundational strategies
and reintroduces the logistical techniques of the slave ship. Looters are
punished for their act by the traumatic (re)experiencing of the condi-
tions of the slave ship, an experience that shadows all racialization and
all property relations in America.2
But police, judges, and the mayor played down this horrific violence,
instead participating in a broad dehumanization of the looters. They
used the fact that the municipal government of New York City was in
dire financial straits—nearly bankrupt, it had been devastated by white
flight and by the general economic downturn of the seventies—to falsely
claim they couldn’t afford to process looters in a timely fashion.
The poverty in the city was immense. Liberal economic and social
welfare policies had utterly failed to rectify the situation, as Great Society
programs, already too small to combat the problems of the late 1960s,
The Inhumanity of Looters 225
and aired widely, were acquitted on April 29, 1992, at a trial moved from
LA to lily-white, hyper-conservative Simi Valley.6 As that famous chant
that spread nationally from the LA uprising goes: “No Justice, No Peace!”
But the acquittal was only one instigating incident. The LAPD is consis-
tently rated as one of the most violent, racist, and fascistic police forces
in America, and police abuse, racism, and murder had escalated in the
years leading up to the riot. Another important incident had occurred six
months earlier, when a Korean store owner, who had murdered fifteen-
year-old Latasha Harlins for supposedly stealing a bottle of orange juice,
was convicted of manslaughter but received only a $500 fine and com-
munity service. The murder was caught on camera, and the $1.79 to pay
for the juice was found in Latasha’s hand.
These meant one angle of the riots was a racial battle between Black
people and the Korean immigrants who had come to own and manage
most of the businesses in South Central. Rioters systematically attacked
Korean businesses, and a television crew happened to be present for a
gunfight between Korean store owners and Black rioters. But much as
Watts was sometimes described as an anti-Semitic uprising, because
Jewish businesses were frequently targeted for destruction, actual “anti-
Korean” sentiment was contingent and largely beside the point. Instead,
just as Jews were in 1965, Koreans in 1992 were “on the front-line of the
confrontation between capital and the residents of central LA—they are
the face of capital for these communities.”7
This racial pattern is a common strategy settler-colonial society uses
to deflect and misdirect tensions in the urban environment. Forming a
“buffer class” of ethnic entrepreneurs with easy access to small business
loans and support, these small shop owners perform the daily exploita-
tion of capital and as such perpetuate and absorb much of the violence
of the system in exchange for generational entry into the middle class
and whiteness. Black people are thus constantly kept at the bottom of the
racial hierarchy, while immigrant participation in American citizenship
is predicated on the expropriation of Black communities and the repro-
duction of anti-Blackness.
The media further attempted to frame the riots as race riots by focus-
ing on the beating of Reginald Denny. Denny, a white truck driver, had
The Inhumanity of Looters 229
*As is one of the core arguments of this book, such a clean distinction between class and
race is untenably problematic. But this does show that the strategy of explaining every-
thing solely through a nonclass, nonintersectional white–Black racial lens had failed.
230 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
The main aspect the rioting took was looting and arson: direct ex-
propriation of wealth and attacks on property. Unlike in Detroit in 1968,
there was little sniping at police (though rioters were definitely armed).
As journalist Mike Davis recorded at the time, “The gangs have refrained
from the deadly guerrilla warfare that they are so formidably equipped
to conduct.” As with every uprising, while (often gang-affiliated) youth
performed most of the combat, the looting crowd was diverse. “Men and
women, Black and white, young and old. People have brought their chil-
dren out here!” one gobsmacked TV journalist reported. A rioter inter-
viewed on live TV said, “Look around you! These people are not thugs
and gang members, these are women, children, babies, people that live
in this community who are tired of the constant oppression, the con-
stant abuse they have been served.” Reporters quickly turned to another
interview.
Whereas the uprising generalized across the working class, the riots
were led by a new group of the urban poor. Members of a new underclass
of the near permanently unemployed, cut adrift by the Reagan-driven
destruction of social services and the collapse of manufacturing jobs, ex-
isting largely outside of the circuits of production and consumption, this
class lives at the very margins of the market and of society. At the time
of the uprising, the LA court bureaucracy was referring to cases around
impoverished Black males as “NHI”—“No Humans Involved.” As Sylvia
Wynter writes, Rodney King was a member of these new Black masses,
who, in distinction to the Black middle class that had grown since the
sixties, “have come to occupy a doubled pariah status, no longer that
of only being Black, but of also belonging to the rapidly accelerating
Post-Industrial category of the poor and jobless.” People the state con-
sidered NHI led the LA uprising, and in thinking through and fighting
alongside their rebellion, Wynter argues, we can begin to overturn the
current system that constructs “humanity” in such a way as to exile them
from its protections and care.10
Many Black radicals in the sixties foresaw this economic and social pro-
cess of double dehumanization: radical movement journals such as Soul-
book, The Movement, The Crusader, and Inner City Voice, to name only
a few, wrote consistently of the danger of coming automation and Black
The Inhumanity of Looters 231
In the weeks before the riot started, two warring sets within
the Crips and a major crew of the Bloods negotiated a truce. The truce
was finalized at a peace summit at the Imperial Courts Project gym in
Watts the day before the riots began, ending a gang war that had gone on
for two decades in which hundreds of people were killed. They called the
truce to build capacity to fight their real enemies, the police. This truce
was a significant factor in the growth of the uprising, as the gangs’ high
level of organization and pseudomilitary training would come in handy
in battling the police and opening up new areas of rebellion. As the fires
burned, most of the other gangs in LA declared peace as well.*
As Gerald Horne traces in his history of the Watts Uprising, Fire
This Time, three major organizational trends emerged in the wake of
Watts: the revolutionary activism of the Black Panther Party (and other
*Ryan Gattis’s All Involved, a widely renowned 2015 novel that frames the LA rebellion as
a moment of total lawlessness in which gang members settled scores and murdered peo-
ple indiscriminately—consistently implying that the only thing keeping gangsters from
going on killing sprees is the presence of the police—is a horrific inversion of these facts
and gets the meaning and effect of the riots on LA gang violence almost exactly wrong.
232 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
excuse for intervention and repression.* We see this in the widespread po-
lice practices of gang injunctions, gang databases, and mass arrest sweeps,
the most famous of which was the 2016 Bronx 120, when NYPD arrested
120 Black and Latinx youths in a series of massive raids; a huge number of
arrestees were unaffiliated. Gang injunctions name certain blocks, street
corners, or neighborhoods as “hotbeds” of gang activity, allowing police to
act with even more impunity in impoverished urban areas, banning pub-
lic gathering and prima facie criminalizing any young folks they want to
harass on the street. Gang databases, meanwhile, are little more than lists
of the poor urban youth who have had any interactions with law enforce-
ment, inventing gangs whole cloth to churn people more seamlessly into
the prison-industrial complex. But in uprisings against the police, gang-
bangers frequently become frontline soldiers, doing the most dramatic
and dangerous tasks in a riot. This danger—that peace between the gangs
could mean war on the pigs—became a reality during the LA rebellion.
And so, in the aftermath, the LAPD immediately focused on breaking
the gang truce. They attacked and broke up intergang unity rallies, shut
down “truce barbecues” going on all summer, and infiltrated deep into
the various gangs, working to instigate conflict. Nevertheless, the truce
held, and a grassroots-led movement of gang de-escalation spread across
the country, one of the main material victories of the riots. This led to an
immediate, dramatic drop off in gang violence in LA: homicides fell 44
percent in the first two years of the truce. Police, of course, took credit
for this drop, all the while working to undermine the peace. Though the
police couldn’t dismantle the truce directly, they did in the intervening
years manage to loosen and weaken gang organizational structure and
discipline.
The police work romanticized in HBO’s TV series The Wire—study-
ing the ins and outs of gang politics, personalities, and hierarchies in
order to arrest lieutenants and crush leaders—is a fantasy version of the
*This excuse, however, is just that—gang violence is as much a myth the police use as
an actual cause of their action, and, were it not for gangs, they would use something else.
As we have seen, police violence in Black neighborhoods is one of the few constants in
American history, and gangs and the drug war are merely the most recent iteration of the
ongoing explanation of that violence.
234 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
process of dis-organizing the gangs the police developed in LA after the ri-
ots and that spread to police departments across the country. Twenty-five
years later, most gangs in the United States now are small, decentralized,
highly localized groups of kids beefing over a few blocks, nothing like
the massive, tightly organized, pseudo-paramilitary forces formed in the
seventies and eighties.
Meanwhile, that form of gang organization and violence grew in
Latin America. These gangs were often direct products of US govern-
ment policy. The most famous example is in El Salvador, where hun-
dreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the US-backed, -militarized, and
-funded twelve-year civil war between left-wing guerillas and the govern-
ment crossed into the United States throughout the eighties. Living here
in poverty, and already once exiled by US policy, many boys joined gangs
as a way of staying safe in the streets of US cities, only to be sent back to
El Salvador under a Clinton-era scheme—initiated in 1995, only three
years after the end of the civil war—that deported any immigrants con-
victed of gang felonies.
So, boys, some of whom had no memory of El Salvador and many
of whom didn’t even speak Spanish, were sent back to a “home” coun-
try they had fled as children or even infants, places where they often
had no or only distant family. They then re-formed gangs based on those
they’d participated in in the States as a way of surviving their new, equally
hostile environment. These gangs have since become massive, terribly
violent, powerful actors. MS-13, one of the gangs transplanted directly
from LA, has, in yet another turn of this self-reinforcing cycle, become a
favorite racist bogeyman of the US anti-immigrant Right.
In other places, such as Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Af-
ghanistan, the enforcers of right-wing state structures put in place by or
emerging after US destabilization become drug warlords, cartels existing
as basically sovereign powers, pseudo-states funded by the more or less
infinite demand for drugs and immigrant laborers in the United States
and Europe. The war on terror is merely a continuation, into different
theaters, of tactics, strategies, and effects developed during the war on
drugs, which was itself an extension of the war on Black communities of
resistance.
The Inhumanity of Looters 235
But rather than focus on the tragedy or the governmental crimes, me-
dia, both local and national, summoned instead the image of the Black
looter. They reported sniping at helicopters, widespread arson, the kill-
ing of rescue workers, mass rape and murder in the Superdome—“thug-
gery,” they called it. Almost all of these stories were false and had to be
retracted. Studies have consistently shown that in the wake of natural
disasters people come together and help each other, and crime and vio-
lence drop dramatically, and Katrina was no different. But the retractions
all came much too late. The enduring story of Katrina was of lawlessness,
criminality, riot.
White vigilantes and police officers, stewing in the paranoia and the
summer heat, responded with murder and mayhem, though the full ex-
tent of their crimes is unknown (much of the evidence appears to have
gone carefully unrecorded by police or was destroyed by the coroner and
other governmental offices). Oppressive actors, such as property own-
ers, the state, and white supremacists, use natural disasters to “restore”
law and order through brutal violence. It is hard not to see in their vio-
lence in the face of governmental collapse the shadow of the violence
of ex-Confederates in the chaotic early years of Reconstruction, and
in particular in the New Orleans riot in 1866, when police and other
ex-Confederate whites massacred forty-four Black delegates to the Loui-
siana Constitutional Convention.
Constructing a narrative of lawless Katrina survivors justified the hor-
rifying actions of police and white residents. Police murdered families
fleeing New Orleans, most infamously killing two and seriously wound-
ing four unarmed refugees on the Danziger Bridge and murdering
Danny Brumfield in front of the convention center—crimes for which
cops were actually prosecuted, although only a decade later. When two
Black men went to a police outpost looking for an ambulance to take
their friend Henry Glover, dying of a gunshot wound, to the hospital, po-
lice instead arrested and brutally beat the two men, left Glover to bleed
to death in the back of the car, then drove the car to a levee and lit it on
fire so as to not deal with his body.
These cases garnered a lot of media attention, and so prosecutors
focused all their energy and resources on them. But similar crimes went
238 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
241
242 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
But still, liberation struggles spread. Many see the revolutionary ex-
periment in Kurdish Rojava as the Spanish Civil War of our time. In the
summer of 2014, Palestinians again rose up against the Zionist occupation
in Jerusalem, and solidarity marches and actions proliferated globally.
Movement has exploded in France: 2016 riots against a vicious reactionary
labor law were joined by the Nuit debout movement—a movement of the
squares that seemed to arrive three years past that tactic’s expiration date.
The year 2017 saw weeks-long antipolice #JusticepourTheo uprisings, and
in 2018–2019 the Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement, featuring the most
destructive rioting in Paris since 1968, as struggle blazed across the entirety
of France, including the neocolonized African island nation of Reunion.
In 2016, a huge strike wave engulfed China, including a massive wild-
cat strike across Walmart factories throughout the country: strikes, despite
being outlawed, have been increasing in size and number year on year
in China, as have protests. The 2017 Gasolinazo movement in Mexico
followed in the footsteps of #OccupyNigeria, as, just as Nigerians had
exactly five years previously, widespread rioting and unrest flared against
cuts in gasoline subsidies, including significant looting and highway and
border shutdowns. Gasoline price rises also drove a huge rebellion in Su-
dan, which eventually saw the government of President Omar al-Bashir
toppled. The second half of 2018 included increasingly dramatic strug-
gles erupting across Haitian society, and these have continued into the
present. As this book was nearing completion, the world has seen another
wave of action akin to the struggles of 2011, as Chile, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon,
Algeria, Jordan, India, Indonesia, Colombia, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Ecua-
dor, Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii have all had massive uprisings,
many verging on revolutionary upheaval.
And in the United States, alongside the struggles in Puerto Rico and
Hawaii, the historic #NoDAPL pipeline struggle, the largest prison strike
in American history, the generalization of militant antifascism, the anti-
ICE movement, and the movement that directly gave rise to this book,
the antipolice uprisings of the Movement for Black Lives, have all con-
tinued to agitate.
These American movements have been on the defensive under
the administration of Donald Trump. His first act in office was to push
244 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
through the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and his police state agenda
has emboldened police officers and Immigration and Customs Enforce-
ment (ICE) agents: the first days after his election huge gains in correc-
tions and military-industry stocks kept market indexes from suffering a
drop. The question of reforms, both of police departments and of the
prison system, seems moot. But, as Angela Davis puts it, “We cannot
simply call for reform. The entire history of police, the entire history of
prisons is a history of reform.”1
A new energy of resistance is building across the country: the rate
and spread of struggle, at least as of this writing, seems to be intensifying,
as a wave of labor actions and rent strikes surges in response to the new
economic crisis. Combined with the impossibility of reform—symbol-
ized most recently in the Democratic Party’s defeat of the Bernie Sanders
campaign—it brings with it the growing sense that a more imaginative
solution is required. Abolition of the police and the prisons, as part of
the destruction of the state and the communist transformation of society,
seems to be the only path out of an otherwise fascistic future.
But as we enter a new period of heightened struggle, we must learn
the vital lessons of our history if we hope to truly shape our future. There
is quite simply no freedom without an end to white supremacy and settler
colonialism, without the victory of Black and Indigenous liberation. Cap-
italism, settler colonialism, and whiteness are so deeply intertwined that
any resistance against capitalism that fails to take on white supremacy is
doomed to repeating the failures of the past or, perhaps more horrifyingly,
to a reactionary victory that would innovate and reinvigorate capitalism
with new forms of settler domination under the guise of revolution.
Nevertheless, one revolutionary contradiction that always faces these
movements in the United States is that the majority of proletarians are
neither Black nor Indigenous, but are white, Latinx, or Asian. Those
people, oppressed by various forms of discrimination and left behind by
capital, are already primed to turn their rage against the system into rage
against Black, Indigenous, and revolutionary movements, and they are
vulnerable to capture by fascist, state, and other reactionary actors. We
saw this reactionary capture when Asian American activists took to the
streets to defend Chinese American cop Peter Liang, who was convicted
Out of the Flames of Ferguson 245
in 2016 for the 2014 murder of Akai Gurley in a housing project stairwell;
in the victory of Donald Trump among white exurban and Rust Belt
voting blocs; and in the spread of the militia and three-percenter move-
ments in the rural West. (The alt-right was much more homogenously
urban middle and upper class.)
This danger is greatest among white proletarians: as this book has
argued, an attack on the systems of property is an attack, ultimately, on
that axiomatic property whiteness, and this property-in-whiteness is the
only property many poor white people know. They see this piece of prop-
erty threatened by the abolition of whiteness and react with disgust at
the idea that they might be privileged by it—many are after all suffering
in deep generational poverty—at the same moment that they move to
defend it. The tendency among many leftists to disown rioting, property
destruction, and looting, in particular, and to attack “identity politics”
more generally as a way of appealing to liberals and the white working
class is ultimately a defense of whiteness, a way of building a rotten and
reactionary solidarity on behalf of the system.
A material appeal to these non-Black or non-Indigenous proletari-
ans cannot come in any form that downplays the seriousness, centrality,
and power of white supremacy and settler colonialism or that disavows
the leadership and righteousness of Black and Indigenous freedom fight-
ers. To ignore the situation of these proletarians completely, however,
threatens to leave in the rear a mass base for reactionary politics, raising
the specter of civil war. The struggle for the abolition of the police, pris-
ons, and borders offers one potential path through this contradiction, the
struggle against pipelines and ecological destruction in the name of In-
digenous sovereignty linking up with Appalachian pipeline defense offers
another, and the multiracial looting and rioting in solidarity with Black
Angelenos in LA in 1992, yet a third.
A revolutionary movement must reduce the value of whiteness to
zero while simultaneously demonstrating the possibility of better lives for
all of us stuck under its horrifying system—no small task, but not an im-
possible one, either. The very least revolutionaries can do is not disown
and disavow these moments of uprising but instead recognize in them
the wisdom and power of the Black revolutionary tradition, turn toward
246 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
these moments of rupture with joy, attention, and solidarity, and fight to
spread them to every corner of this globe. One tiny piece of that, which
this book hopes to contribute, may well be recognizing the revolutionary
history and potential of looting.
When the rebels of Ferguson stood up for Michael Brown, when they
fought back against continued police violence, domination, and control,
they gave birth to the most militant sustained struggle seen in the United
Stated since the seventies. They rose up both in the midst of a broad
international moment of struggle and crisis and out of the long Black
radical tradition in its specific American forms and its Black Atlantic
internationalism.
When Darren Wilson gunned down Mike Brown for the crime
of being Black in the middle of the street, Wilson’s actions represented no
great break with American history, no change in the nature of American
policing. When the Ferguson Police Department left Brown’s body lying
in the middle of the road for four hours, they practiced an anti-Black
white terrorism as old as the country. But when Brown’s friends, fam-
ily, and community rose up and fought back, when they rioted, looted,
marched, occupied, and organized in the streets of Ferguson, they pulled
us toward a definitive break with that history.
The riots in Ferguson gave birth to a new era of militant resistance in
America, the reemergence of the long movement for emancipation and
Black liberation. Where previous rioting, from Miami in 1980 to LA in
1992 to Cincinnati in 2001 to Oakland in 2009, had burned out in inten-
sity after a few nights, rioting in Ferguson was sustained for nearly two
weeks, with protests, marches, and street organizing continuing there-
after for months. Massive rioting recurred in November, when a grand
jury refused to indict Darren Wilson (despite the fact that, if a prosecutor
wants, a grand jury could “indict a ham sandwich,” as Sol Wachtler, chief
judge of the New York Appeals Court, once claimed).
The rioting in Ferguson became national news with the looting and
burning of a QuikTrip gas station on the first night after Mike Brown’s
Out of the Flames of Ferguson 247
death. But the riots went far beyond looting and arson. Shooting back at
the police—armed self-defense—and Molotov cocktail attacks on troop
carriers were tactics of the movement, though they were barely reported.2
This lack of reporting has obvious explanations on both sides, as dis-
cussed in the previous sections on armed self-defense. For the organizers
focused on the outward appearance of the movement, already worried
about media framing of Black criminality and violence, the fact of shoot-
ing at police threatens to completely derail the argument of movement
nonviolence and innocence. For the police and the media, widespread,
organized retaliatory shooting absolutely cannot be reported on because
it represents an utter breakdown of respect for police power and threatens
to spread and generalize that disregard, to give rioters in other cities ideas.
Shooting at police is only reported (and, in these instances, exaggerated)
if and when police or national guardsmen kill rioters, because then it is
needed for justification. But it was through the consistent use of guns,
along with the creative use of cars to broaden chaos and jam up West Flo-
rissant, the main avenue of the uprising, that rioters managed to maintain
a mostly cop-free riot and protest zone for two weeks.
Knowledge of the armed aspect of the rioting should no longer be
kept a shameful secret but instead should be understood and celebrated
as action directly in line with self-defense movements of the Black tradi-
tion, from the Underground Railroad to the antilynching defense forces
to the armed participants in the southern Freedom Movement.
Rioters had more to contend with than only the uniformed police.
Nonviolent de-escalation, coming in the form of various peacekeepers,
politicians, and nonprofit organizers, emerged quickly as a policing prob-
lem from within the movement. Whereas Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson
were booed off stage and out of town, homegrown peacekeepers were
harder to deal with. Though some, particularly in the early days, blocked
looting or arson in the hopes of advancing the struggle ethically, others
did so on behalf of the police, the system of property, or their own politi-
cal power. In Ferguson, local politician Antonio French, the New Black
Panther Party (NBPP), and ministers were the most active peacekeepers.
Raven Rakia describes their actions: “Instead of focusing on the violence
of the police, peacekeepers are focused on silencing and quelling the
248 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
crowd—to the point where they pinpoint the issue being a person throw-
ing a plastic water bottle at a police line in riot gear, equipped with hel-
mets, body armor and armored trucks.”3
Again, nonviolence emerges to put a brake on Black resistance, to
discipline and silence people rising up, while providing cover for the
intense violence of the state. We can no longer let the police, that despi-
cable occupying army, seem “natural,” nor let anyone paint resistance
to the settler state as an enemy of peace. Their peace is the peace of the
grave.
In Ferguson, such “peacekeepers” provoked immediate and direct
antagonisms. Many protesters saw clergy directly informing the police. In
at least one crucial instance, peacekeepers formed a wall in front of the
cops, preventing attempts by protesters to break police lines because they
were unwilling to charge into the clergymen.
Whereas socialist and pan-African Black nationalisms animated
some of the most important movements from the twenties through the
seventies, the most visible nationalist organizations have proven to be
reactionary forces in the current wave of struggle that use riots as oppor-
tunities to demonstrate their leadership and expand their control. NBPP
and Nation of Islam (NOI) leaders proudly bragged in press conferences
that it was they, and not the police, who were enforcing the curfew and
“controlling” protesters in Ferguson.
The most egregious example of their peacekeeping came in Balti-
more. During the 2015 uprising for Freddie Gray, the Nation of Islam
brokered a peace between gang leaders, not to fight police as in LA 1992,
but instead to stop the riots. TV crews caught scenes of NOI members,
obvious in their suits and bowties, chasing looters out of stores and then
protecting the stores from further looting. The NOI appealed to gang
members’ natural leadership as men in the community, and, “united
as Black men”—in many instances forming a human shield for the po-
lice—they quickly snuffed out instances of looting. Appeals to patriarchy
can always be used to protect private property, because without property
patriarchy is much weaker: the originary and only property guaranteed to
all men are, after all, the wife and children in his family. Here again we
see how often anti-militancy is patriarchal.
Out of the Flames of Ferguson 249
And then there are the co-opters of a more subtle variety, the “lead-
ers” and nonprofiteers who try to build careers off of media appearances,
who try to channel spontaneous uprisings into single-demand-based pro-
test models that can appeal to funds and funders, into electoral or re-
formist campaigns more easily controlled. And then there are the writers,
thinkers, activists, and revolutionaries—like me—who, in the name of
pushing the struggle forward, wrench it into theories, arguments, and
texts incapable of truly recapturing the fire and always, as such, threaten-
ing to extinguish it like a wet blanket.
As the flames rose above the Ferguson QuikTrip, those who would
put out the fires were, for the moment, outgunned by those who fought
for Michael Brown. In their moment of rage and mourning, they heard
that famous cry from Watts echoing down the decades: Burn, baby, burn.
After NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo’s acquittal for the murder of Eric
Garner, the flames leapt from Ferguson to New York and the Bay. Then
to Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Milwaukee, and Charlotte.
It seems likely that, with the even further emboldened and empow-
ered police under pig-in-chief Trump, and the global wave of mass re-
sistance and insurrection, a massive antipolice uprising is in the offing.
Maybe this summer, maybe next. Maybe when this book is published
it will already have happened.* When it does, we need to stand fast be-
side looters, rioters, and street fighters and struggle with them against
the liberal commentators, de-escalators, nonprofiteers, right-wing trolls,
vigilantes, and, of course, the police. We need to argue for and defend
every tactic that might help us to overturn this miserable world of white
supremacy, anti-Blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, empire, and
property.
Justice for Mike Brown, for Freddie Gray, for Oscar Grant and Tan-
isha Anderson! Justice for Keith Lamont Scott, Sandra Bland, Sylville
*Author’s note: I handed this book’s final manuscript to the publisher on May 29, 2020.
On May 27, the Minneapolis riots for George Floyd began. As final touches were put on
the manuscript, late in the night as the 13th precinct burned to the ground, solidarity up-
risings had spread to Louisville, LA, Denver, Portland, Columbus, and Phoenix. I hope
by the time this book comes out to have already met some of you in the streets. As I write
this, I have no idea what political world this book will emerge into, and that’s beautiful.
250 IN DEFENSE OF LOOTING
For a variety of reasons, some due to my deep and cultivated laziness, most
due to frustrating factors outside my control, it took five years between begin-
ning this book and publishing it. In those five years I’ve lived in three differ-
ent cities in two different countries. To try to name all the people who have
inspired me, helped me, supported me, struggled beside me, and thought
and theorized with me in that period would be impossible: I could only end
up leaving someone out, and it would break my heart to do so. Instead, if you
think you might be one of the people described above, know that you are.
Thank you so much, this would’ve been impossible without you.
Next I want to acknowledge the rebels of Ferguson who taught me to
strengthen my critique and understanding of anti-Blackness, white suprem-
acy, capitalism, and the police, who inspired me to deepen my commitment
to abolition, revolution, and rebellion, who reignited the fire that’s been
burning as long as this settler colony has existed but have felt in recent de-
cades that it had been reduced to embers. The last six years have been cruel
to many of those activists and fighters, some of whom have been murdered
under mysterious circumstances. I hope this book honors their memory and
acts as a gift of gratitude to all who take the streets.
251
252 Acknowledgments
I also want to thank the people who helped the original essay come to-
gether. To Hannah, Rob, Monalisa, and Ayesha, who worked on the original
piece in 2014 in different capacities, thank you so so much. This piece ended
up changing my life, and it wouldn’t have done so without all of your edits,
your time, your energy: while writing the book, I would frequently reflect on
the edits and interventions you made. And to the rest of the team at the New
Inquiry: thank you for the years of support, inspiration, and mutual creation.
You are some of the most talented writers, editors, and thinkers I’ve ever
known. It’s so great to know, all these years later, that a new generation of
editors is keeping the project alive.
Thank you to Rachel for suggesting I pitch the essay to an editor as a
book (and then, when I was too lazy and disorganized to do it, kicking my
ass into gear), and thank you to Katy for (eventually) being that editor. Your
deft editing and constant support over the last year have made the previous
four of frustration seem more than worth it, and you helped me believe that
there was something here when I was on the verge of giving up. Thanks to
the whole Bold Type team, Jocelynn, Miguel, and James. And special thanks
to Ian, who rescued the manuscript from stagnation and helped put it into
their capable hands.
I’d like to thank my family, chosen and bio-fam, who have been there
for me through this whole process. My parents and brother have been cheer-
leaders and supporters despite my decidedly antisocial topic of interest.
Thank you so much. Thanks, too, to Lala and Robespierre, who nestled in
laps, luxuriated in sun puddles, climbed all over the various keyboards on
which this was written, and generally demonstrated that the best life is one
without work, by example (and occasional demands for attention) gently
encouraging me toward that kind of life. And thanks, finally, to Sophie, my
best friend, my beautiful comrade in struggle, in thought, my sexy partner
in crime, my bestie for life. I love you so much. I can’t imagine what my life
would look like had you not come into it. I do know, however, that without
your love, your support, our stupid jokes, and your absolutely inspiring abil-
ity to hold me and all our friends accountable to our own best selves, I never
could have finished this book. Thank you.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 20 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), s.v. “loot.”
2. Oxford English Dictionary, “loot.”
3. Delio Vasquez, “The Poor Person’s Defense of Riots,” in Taking Sides, ed.
Cindy Milstein (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015).
4. Neal Keating, “Rioting & Looting: As a Modern-Day Form of Potlatch,” An-
archy: A Journal of Desire Armed 39 (1994).
5. Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power and the Third World” (address of the Or-
ganization of Latin American Solidarity, Havana, Cuba, August 1967).
6. Assata Shakur, Assata (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1988), 212.
7. Tyler Reinhard, “hey, step back with the riot shaming,” Mask Magazine, no.
7 (July 2014).
8. For more, see Bobby London, Looting Is a Political Tactic, on her website
thisisbobbylondon.com.
9. Terrence Cannon, “Riots, SNCC, and the Press,” The Movement 3, no. 7
(1967).
10. Evan Calder Williams, “An Open Letter to Those Who Condemn Looting,”
AudioZine (2012).
11. Williams, “An Open Letter.”
12. Sylvia Wynter, “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,”
Knowledge on Trial 1, no. 1 (1994): 42–71.
253
254 Notes to Introduction
13. Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now (London: Verso Books, 2019).
14. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (New York: Verso
Books, 2019).
15. Malcolm McLaughlin, The Long Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in
America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
16. Huey Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution” (speech, 1967).
17. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History (London: Verso Books, 2016).
18. James Baldwin “White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965; Christina Sharpe,
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016);
Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The Battles of History,” Workers World, September 10, 2017,
www.workers.org/2017/09/33140/.
19. The concept of “otherwise” as used throughout this text is indebted to the
work of Ashon Crawley, as in the essay “Otherwise, Ferguson,” and further elabora-
tion of the concept in Black Pentecostal Breath.
20. Mauritz Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933).
21. I want here to mark my deep gratitude to open internet archives like Free-
dom Archives, the Anarchist Library, History Is a Weapon, Marxists.org, and more
focused archives such as Rutgers the Newark Experience, Collective Punishment
mapping project, and a few pirate communities I won’t name here for their se-
curity. My work is guided by a number of incredible books and thinkers. The
most central of those academics and theorists to this project are W. E. B. Du
Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Barbara J. Fields, Armistead Robinson, Kristian Williams,
Ida B. Wells, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Cedric Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, Assata
Shakur, Anthony Paul Farley, Eric Foner, Christina Sharpe, Jeremy Brecher, Bar-
bara Ransby, Huey Newton, J. Sakai, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard.
Equally important are the theorists of Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland, Charlotte,
and Minneapolis.
1. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000).
2. Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971).
3. J. Sakai, Settlers (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989), 8; Eric Williams, Capi-
talism and Slavery, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994),
7–9.
4. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History (London: Verso Books, 2016).
5. Lerone Bennett Jr., Shaping of Black America (New York: Johnson Publish-
ing, 1975), 18.
6. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso Books,
1997); Anthony Paul Farley, “The Apogee of the Commodity,” DePaul Law Review
Notes to Chapter 2 255
53, no. 3 (2004): 1229; Theodore Allen, Invention of the White Race, Vol 1 (London:
Verso, 1994).
7. Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America,” New Left Review, May/June 1990, 102.
8. Quote from Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 14; see also Robinson, Black Marxism.
9. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology,” 104.
10. Bennett, Shaping of Black America, 22.
11. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology.”
12. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology,” 102.
13. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology,” 104.
14. Robinson, Black Marxism.
15. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 108–110.
16. Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery.
17. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; reprint New York:
Penguin Classics, 2003).
18. Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the
Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
19. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology.”
20. Robinson, Black Marxism.
21. Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” bound-
ary 2 13, no. 1 (1984): 36.
22. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History (London: Verso Books, 2016).
23. David Roediger, Seizing Freedom (New York: Verso Books, 2015), 28; Edward
Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 33; Farley,
“The Apogee of the Commodity,” 1229; Browne, Dark Matters, 42.
24. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8
(June 1993): 1726.
25. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1726.
1. David Roediger, Seizing Freedom (New York: Verso Books, 2015), 25–26.
2. Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible (New York: Verso Books, 2011).
3. J. Sakai, Settlers (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989), 18.
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; reprint, New York:
Free Press, 1998).
5. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
6. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 65–66.
7. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 65–66.
256 Notes to Chapter 2
22. Butch Lee, Jailbreak Out of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman
(Chicago: Beguine Press, 2000).
23. Sakai, Settlers, 22 (emphasis mine).
24. Quoted in Lee, Jailbreak Out of History, 75.
25. Armstead Robinson, The Bitter Fruits of Bondage (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2004), 15.
26. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, chap. 3.
27. Douglass, quoted in Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, chap. 4.
28. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 56.
29. Michael Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Coloniza-
tion,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14, no. 2 (Summer 1993).
30. David Roediger, Seizing Freedom (New York: Verso Books, 2015), 37.
31. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 64.
32. Bennett, Shaping of Black America 172.
33. Roediger, Seizing Freedom, 17.
34. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 54.
1. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, rev. ed. (Oakland, CA: AK Press,
2015), 55.
2. David Whitehouse, “Origins of the Police,” Libcom.org, 2014, https://libcom
.org/history/origins-police-david-whitehouse.
3. Whitehouse, “Origins of the Police.”
4. Ben Brucato, “Fabricating the Color Line in a White Democracy,” Theoria
61, no. 141 (2014).
5. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1980).
6. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 63–65.
7. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 56.
8. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 42.
9. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue.
10. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 77.
11. Lucy Parsons, “The Principles of Anarchism” (lecture, 1905), cited in Gale
Ahrens, ed., Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity (Chicago: Charles H.
Kerr, 2004).
12. Mychal Denzel Smith, “Abolish the Police,” The Nation, April 9, 2015.
13. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2012), 28.
14. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80.
15. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003),
32.
258 Notes to Chapter 3
16. For more, see chapter 2, “Ogeechee Till Death,” in Neal Shirley and Saralee
Stafford’s Dixie Be Damned (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015).
17. Noel Ignatiev, Introduction to the United States (pamphlet published by
Sojourner Truth Organization, 1980).
18. Ignatiev, Introduction to the United States.
19. Shirley and Stafford, Dixie Be Damned, 116.
20. The history of Reconstruction and its failure is a crucially important one
that is unfortunately outside the purview of this book. For more on Reconstruction,
see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; reprint, New York:
Free Press, 1998); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; and Eric Foner, Recon-
struction: 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
1. Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
2. Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005).
3. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Ra-
cial Terror, 3rd ed., 2017, https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/.
4. Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed.
5. Amy Louise Wood, “Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction
of White Supremacy,” American Nineteenth Century History 6, no. 3 (September
2005).
6. Ida B. Wells, Lynch Law in Georgia and Other Writings (Atlanta: On Our
Own Authority! Publishing, 2013),113, 114.
7. Hazel Carby, “On the Threshold of Woman’s Era: Lynching, Empire, and
Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 270.
8. Wells, Lynch Law in Georgia.
9. Wells, Lynch Law in Georgia.
10. J. Sakai, Settlers (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989), 35.
11. Sakai, Settlers.
12. “The Solstice,” Ultra, April 27, 2014, www.ultra-com.org/project/the-solstice/.
13. Walter C. Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton, eds., Encyclopedia of Ameri-
can Race Riots (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007).
14. Wells, Lynch Law in Georgia.
15. Wood, “Lynching Photography.”
16. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Ba-
ton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
17. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Com-
munist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975).
18. Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land.
Notes to Chapter 5 259
1. This is the central thesis of Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor
People’s Movements (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), which is a foundational text
for this chapter.
2. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eigh-
teenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971).
3. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (New York: Verso
Books, 2019).
4. Michael B. Chesson, “Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond
Bread Riot,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 2 (April 1984).
5. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Pro-
gressive Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 37.
6. Noel Ignatiev, Introduction to the United States (pamphlet published by So-
journer Truth Organization, 1980).
7. Joseph G. Rayback, A History of American Labor (New York: Free Press,
1966), 136.
8. Jeremy Brecher, Strike! Revised and Updated Edition (Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 1997), 15.
9. Brecher, Strike!, 15.
10. Painter, Standing at Armageddon.
11. Brecher, Strike!, 102.
12. Brecher, Strike!, 114.
13. Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (Oakland,
CA: AK Press, 2008), 235–250.
14. Mauritz Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 99.
15. Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, 49.
16. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt, 133.
17. Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, 49.
18. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt, 58.
19. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt, 58.
20. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton Jr., Black Metropolis (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1993).
21. Roy Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed: The Early Years of the Great
Depression 1929–1933,” in Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present: A “Radical America”
Reader, ed. James Green (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 86.
260 Notes to Chapter 5
1. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Groundwork: Local Black Free-
dom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
2. This quotation was taken from an online presentation by Robin D. G. Kelley.
3. William Smith, The Invisible Soldiers: Unheard Voices (documentary, VHS,
2000).
4. C. E. Wilson, “Whatever Happened to the Negro’s Friend?” The Liberator
IV, nos. 5+6 (June 1964).
5. Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black
Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
6. Smith, The Invisible Soldiers.
7. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 37.
8. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 48.
9. Ellen Schrecker, “McCarthyism: Political Repression and Fear of Commu-
nism,” Social Research 71, no. 4 (2004).
10. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
11. Schrecker, “McCarthyism,” 1045.
12. Brian Purnell, “Drive Awhile for Freedom: Brooklyn CORE’s 1964 Stall-In
and Public Discourses on Protest Violence,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom
Movements in America, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York:
New York University Press, 2005).
13. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Boston:
Da Capo Press, 1995).
14. Rosa Parks, “Tired of Giving In: The Launching of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott,” in Sisters in the Struggle, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin
(New York: New York University Press, 2001).
15. Parks, “Tired of Giving In.”
16. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and
Resistance (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
17. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 212.
18. Charles Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed (New York: Basic
Books, 2014), 123.
19. Chana Kai Lee, “Anger, Memory, and Personal Power: Fannie Lou Hamer
and Civil Rights Leadership,” in Collier-Thomas and Franklin, Sisters in the
Struggle.
Notes to Chapter 8 261
1. Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani & Munsell,
1962).
2. I regret that I do not have the space to really discuss the Deacons, who are
vital to any radical history of the civil rights movement. Lance Hill’s The Deacons
for Defense (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) is an excellent book
and a great place to start learning their history.
3. For more on Baker’s life and her inspiring style of organization, read Barbara
Ransby’s indispensable Ella Baker & The Black Freedom Movement (Raleigh: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2005).
4. Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mis-
sissippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Charles
Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed (New York: Basic Books, 2014);
Kwame Jeffries, “The Ballet and the Bullet: Armed Self-Defense in the Alabama
Black Belt, 1965–66” (paper presented at the American Historical Association 119th
Annual Meeting, 2005).
5. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, 8.
6. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 26.
7. Lorenzo Raymond, “Bloodless Lies,” New Inquiry, November 2, 2016.
8. C. E. Wilson, “Whatever Happened to the Negro’s Friend?” The Liberator
IV, nos. 5+6 (June 1964).
9. Hill, The Deacons for Defense, 8.
10. Williams, Negroes with Guns.
11. Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State (Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 2007).
12. Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots” (speech, November 10, 1963).
13. Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard: Black
Women and the 1963 March on Washington,” in Sisters in the Struggle, ed. Bettye
Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 86.
14. Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” 87.
15. Pauli Murray, quoted in Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be
Heard.”
16. Joy James, “Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency,”
in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed.
Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, and Dayo Gore (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2009).
17. James, “Framing the Panther.”
1. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016).
262 Notes to Chapter 8
2. For more on the Mississippi movement, read Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s ex-
cellent We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
(New York: New York University Press, 2013).
3. Sharon Harley, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Gloria Richardson, the
Cambridge Movement, and the Radical Black Activist Tradition,” in Sisters in the
Struggle, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
4. Harley, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold.”
5. Charles Fuller (as C.H.), “Philadelphia After the Riots,” The Liberator IV, no.
11 (November 1964).
6. Fuller, “Philadelphia After the Riots.”
7. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History
and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2013).
8. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Boston: Da
Capo Press, 1995).
9. “Watts: A Conversation: If I Go, I’ll Take Whitey with Me,” The Movement 1,
no. 9 (September 1965).
10. Jimmy Garrett, “The Negro Revolt in LA—from the Inside,” The Movement
1, no. 9 (September 1965).
11. Horne, Fire This Time, 83.
12. Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (1973; reprint, New York: Penguin
Books, 2009).
13. Huey Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution” (speech, 1967).
14. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 136.
15. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air (New York: Verso Books, 2002), 21.
16. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Three Evils” (speech, Hungry Club Forum,
Atlanta, May 10, 1967).
17. Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights and Riots in America
(New York: New York University Press, 2007), 125.
18. Malcolm McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in
America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
19. Komozi Woodard, “Message from the Grassroots,” in Groundwork: Local
Black Freedom Movements in America, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard
(New York: New York University Press, 2005).
20. Woodard, “Message from the Grassroots,” 80.
21. McLaughlin, The Long, Hot Summer of 1967, 91.
22. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in
Urban Revolution (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999).
23. Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, 13.
24. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 25.
25. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
Notes to Conclusion 263
1. For more on this new urbanized organization of global capital, see Hinter-
land, by Phil A. Neel (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).
2. James Goodman, Blackout (New York: North Point Press, 2005), 115; Chris-
tina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2016).
3. This page has since been removed.
4. Manning Marable, “The Fire This Time: The Miami Rebellion, May 1980,”
Black Scholar 11, no. 6 (July/August 1980): 14.
5. Mike Davis, “In L.A., Burning All Illusions,” The Nation, June 1, 1992.
6. Akinyele Umoja, “From Columbus to Rodney King: The Los Angeles Rebel-
lion and Beyond,” Breakthrough 16, no. 2 (1992).
7. Aufheben Collective, “The Rebellion in Los Angeles: The Context of a Pro-
letarian Uprising,” Aufheben 1 (August 1992).
8. Max Anger, “From Gulf War to Class War, We All Hate the Cops,” Anarchy:
A Journal of Desire Armed, no. 34 (1992).
9. Anger, “From Gulf War to Class War.”
10. Sylvia Wynter, “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,”
Knowledge on Trial 1, no. 1 (1994): 42–71.
11. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Boston: Da
Capo Press, 1995).
12. Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching (New
York: Nation Books, 2016).
13. A. C. Thompson, “Post-Katrina, White Vigilantes Shot African-Americans
with Impunity,” Pro Publica, December 19, 2008.
1. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003).
2. Anonymous, “Cars, Guns, Autonomy: On the Finer Points of the Recent
Revolt in Ferguson, MO,” Avalanche 3 (November 2014).
3. Raven Rakia, “Between the Peacekeepers and the Protesters in Ferguson,”
Truthout, September 9, 2014.
Index
ABB (African Blood Brotherhood), 116, anti-Dakota Access Pipeline protest, 243
117, 118 anti-ICE movement, 243
Abbott, Robert, 111 anti-Korean sentiment, 228
abolition movement, 45 anti-Mexican riots, 92
Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 17 anti–Vietnam War movement, 198–199,
Adams, Frankye Malika, 185 216
Addonizio, Hugh, 206 antiblack violence, covert actions of,
African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), 116 164
African laborers, as replacement for white anticommunist purges, 154, 159, 160, 161
servants, 26 antifa, 6
Against Innocence (Wang), 119 antifascism US, 243
agent provocateurs, 6 antipolice uprisings, 5, 17, 86, 99, 99(n),
agitators, outside, 2, 5–6 104, 195, 222, 235, 243, 249, 249(n)
al-Bashir, Omar, 243 armed self-defense advocates
Albany, Georgia, 176 A. Philip Randolph, 111
Alexander, Michelle, 83 Ida B. Wells, 110, 110–111(n)
All Involved (Gattis), 231(n) Universal Negro Improvement
Allende, Salvador, 215 Association, 111
American Indian Movement, occupation W. E. B. Du Bois, 111
of Alcatraz Island by, 216 Asian Americans for Action, 216
“An Open Letter to Those Who Atlanta Constitution, “predicting”
Condemn Looting” (Williams), 11 burning of Samuel Hose, 107
Angola, 215 Atlanta Evening News, three extra
anti-Asian riots, 92 editions on alleged assault by Black
anti-Black riots in 1919, 109, 113–114, 139– men, 106
140. See also Red Summer of 1919 Atlanta riot of 1906, 106
265
266 Index