“If we want to imagine the possibility of a society without racism, it has to be a society without prisons.” Who said that? Pamela Price? Nope, although it could have been. It’s from one of Price’s intellectual mentors, Angela Davis, the Black Panther and Communist, and the spiritual godmother of radical Black nationalists.
Davis was amplifying on Point #8 of the Black Panthers’ 10-point program (1966). “We believe that all Black People should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.” Note that the demand is for the decarceration of all Black prisoners, not just those imprisoned for non-violent offenses. That would include murderers, rapists, bombers, carjackers and other violent felons. And after they’ve been turned free, point #10 demands “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace” for them.
So the nonsense we’re witnessing today, from reparations and free rent for Black tenants, to coddling Black criminals and closing the prisons, is not especially new. The radical Black movement has changed in form over the decades, but its core elements remain the same. People like Pamela Price, Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife were reared on this Black Panther agenda, and they continue to promote it.
Fifty-five years ago, the Black Panthers had no political power whatsoever. Their movement fizzled when even ordinary Black people turned against its excesses and outrages. But now, here we are, in 2023, and this dangerous cadre of former Black Panthers, Communists and Black Nationalists—having wormed their way into American institutions for decades—now largely run America’s cities, including Oakland. They finally have power.
If you read the 10 Points, you’ll recognize the ur-origin of today’s Black Lives Matter agenda. Even the acronym BLM is the same as that of the Black Liberation Movement, the murderous group of gangsters active in the 1970s, which was even more violent than the Black Panthers. This is deliberate. Today’s Black Lives Matter agenda is identical, although BLM has abandoned, at least temporarily, its call for armed rebellion and killing police, and its supporters for the most part have to soft-pedal their rhetoric. But if you know how to read between the lines, Price-Brooks-Fife are still at their old game: overthrowing the American way of life through a Black-led revolution.
One of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is Patrisse Cullors, a Southern California professor and co-founder of Black Lives Matter. In an influential 2019 essay she wrote for the Harvard Law Review, Cullors references Angela Davis as her inspiration: “We draw upon the theoretical work of many before us. Professor Angela Y. Davis — philosopher, Marxist, and former Black Panther whose work on prisons, abolition, and Black struggle has proven relevant over time — has informed our movements and communities for decades.” The title of Cullors’ essay is telling: “Abolition and Reparations: Histories of Resistance, Transformative Justice, and Accountability.” At its heart is the notion of abolition, not of slavery as in the 19th century Abolitionist movement, but of prisons. As Cullors writes, “Our task is not only to abolish prisons, policing, and militarization, which are wielded in the name of ‘public safety’ and ‘national security.’ We must also demand reparations and incorporate reparative justice into our vision for society and community building in the twenty-first century.”
In other words, the far-left rhetoric we hear today from the likes of Price, Brooks and Fife, including the call for reparations, is the product of decades of effort to overthrow the cultural identity of America and replace it with a Black-centric one in which White people are always guilty of racism and Black people are entitled to pretty much anything that progressives demand for them. Of course, Price, Brooks and Fife have to be careful about the extent to which they express their radicalism; they’ve learned to use metaphors and dog whistles instead of outright calls to “off the pig.” But we can only understand current demands to defund the police and shut down the prisons as a continuation of the Black Liberation Movement’s original violent rhetoric.
The full extent of the ties between Price, Fife, Brooks, on the one hand, and Davis and Cullors, on the other, have yet to be fully understood, in part because the former group is unwilling to disclose them. But we know these ties are deep and abiding. We also know this: radical Black revolutionaries have not changed their views for more than fifty years. They’re still conspiring to shut down the prisons, go soft on Black crime, and induce feelings of guilt and shame in White people. And, having taken over so many city governments (not to mention universities, non-profits and corporations), they’re in a stronger position to actually bring about the revolution for which they’ve so long craved. Which makes our work all the more vital. That work begins with exposing just what kind of people Price, Fife and Brooks are.
Steve Heimoff