Black Panther Party

Black activist Debbie Sims Africa overcame a decade of parole denials and finally received her freedom after serving nearly 40 years within Pennsylvania’s prison system.
Africa and eight other MOVE members were all jointly convicted of a policeman’s murder in 1978.
MOVE is a political organization founded in 1970s Philadelphia to protest rampant police brutality.
The officer died during a raid on MOVE’s residential headquarters, detailed in a recent workers.org article. Africa, now 61, is the first of the “MOVE 9” to be released.
“They don’t really want to be so quick to let people who are accused of killing a cop out on parole,” said Mike Africa Jr., Debbie’s son. “The parole board seems to be retrying them, asking them questions about the incident that seem to have nothing to do with the years they’ve spent.”

Two of the MOVE 9, Phil and Merle Africa, have al- ready died in prison, while the other six continue to be denied parole in the face of constant opposition by The Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP holds positions on Pennsylvania’s Board of Probation and Parole and claims that members have “refused to accept responsibility,” “lacked remorse” or pose a “risk to community” as reasons to continue denying them.
MOVE arose in 1972 against the backdrop of all-out state campaigns targeting the Black Panther Party and other Black liberation groups. In May 1977, the police obtained a court order to force MOVE out of their home, resulting in a 15-month siege of the surrounding Powelton Village neighborhood.

Officers swarmed the house in the early morning of August 8, 1978, launching a full-scale assault with water cannons, tear gas and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
“We huddled together scared because we knew cops had lots of guns and other weapons,” Debbie recalled in a written account for onamove.com. “We didn’t know how they were gonna do it, but we knew their plan was to kill us.
“Cops were yelling over a loudspeaker for us to come out of the house, but we didn’t trust them, so nobody went out there.”

Debbie was 22 years old at the time of the attack, eight and half months pregnant with her son, Mike Jr., and in the house with her 23-month-old daughter, Michelle. After running for cover to the home’s basement, she described the police bombarding her family with a crossfire of powerful fire hose spray. The water broke through the windows, decimating wooden support beams, and killing their dogs.

Amidst the flurry of tear gas and smoke grenades, Michelle was ripped from her mother’s arms. Mike Jr. was born in a prison cell five weeks later.
Officer James P. Ramp suffered a gunshot wound to the back of his head during the melee. According to workers.org, although no physical evidence pointed to a MOVE member pulling the trigger, they were all convicted of third-degree murder and con- spiracy. Philadelphia police obliterated the entire MOVE residence following the raid, destroying any hope of find- ing exculpatory evidence.

Other Black revolutionaries continue to face tremendous difficulty in achieving parole, even after multiple decades of incarceration.
In 2016, 80-year-old former Black Panther Sundiata Acoli had been granted parole through a court order, but police unions and advocacy groups successfully challenged his release through higher court litigation, according to workers.org, Acoli’s sentence was extended 15 more years.

Right to Police Transparency

Revisiting Black History’s National Movement

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Kathleen Cleaver, secretary of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-DefenseParty for Self-Defense

The FBI in 1956 created its secret Counterintelligence Program—COINTELPRO—to take action against Black organizations viewed as subversive. Sixty-one years later, on Aug. 3, 2017, the FBI published an intelligence assessment titled Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers.

The two FBI approaches had striking similarities, despite the passage of 50 years.

The “official use only” Black Identity Extremists report follows the November 2014 Grand Jury decision to exonerate the police officers involved in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August of that year.

“The FBI assesses (that) it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement,” the report says.

“According to a RAND analysis, every $1 invested in such [inmate] education generates at least $4 in economic return,” reports Fast Company.

“The state typically spends $71,000 a year to house an inmate. It costs about $5,000 total to help put one [incarcerated] student through community college”, reports Fast Company.

Many scholars say the Civil Rights Movement and the revolutionary movements spearheaded by Black liberation resistance of the 1960s, similar to today’s Black Lives Matter, became the targets for the U.S. government counter-offensive to neutralize these movements.

“The full force of the state, the murderous COINTELPRO project of the FBI, had to attack the Panthers because community control of police could never be allowed,” Rick Ayers, an assistant professor at University of San Francisco, wrote in the Huffington Post in 2015. “Protests, which have existed since the beginning of police forces, which were behind all the past urban uprisings in the U.S., and are coming back with renewed focus today, are about the fundamental way that state violence is wielded and the demands by communities for a different relationship to resources and to each other.”

The U.S. government’s alleged illegal use of programs, such as COINTELPRO, to kill, imprison and disrupt what it judged as subversive activists was followed by the war on drugs. The ensuing decades ushered in a vast expansion in building prisons and imprisoning people, a phenomenon often called the “prison industrial complex.” California went from 12 prisons in 1970 to 35 institutions under the CDCR today.

In 1954 the Civil Rights Movement was still in its infancy when the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown versus the Board of Education ruled the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. Following the court’s ruling, in 1955, Blacks organized a boycott of the city bus system in Montgomery, Ala., after the city arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the “colored” section in back of a bus, and the Civil Rights Movement was born.

Long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist[s],” according to FBI documents. Those targeted included the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The government did not confine its attacks to those organizations carrying guns. The list included activists fighting to advance racial and social equality using nonviolence.

By the 1960s, Blacks around the country were protesting against segregation, discrimination and police violence. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized “Freedom Rides” so Blacks and Whites could travel together by bus. Some staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South and were beaten by mobs of angry Whites.

Many Blacks did not take this lying down. Black veterans formed the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana. Elsewhere, Robert Williams, an ex-Marine, took the view that Blacks should defend themselves with guns, if needed. Williams was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) North Carolina president. The Black Panther Party was born in Oakland in 1966.

In 1970, the FBI provided a secret report to President Richard Nixon that said, “A recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the Black population has a great respect for the Black Panther Party, including 43 percent of Blacks under 21 years of age.”

According to author Howard Zinn, from 1956 to 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO acted 295 times against what it deemed Black militant groups. The government attempted to dismantle these groups through harassment, wiretaps, sabotage and other means, including terror and murder, Zinn wrote.

In 1974, reporters learned of the existence of the “Subversive Organizations List” after Attorney General William Saxbe declared the list was ending with the exception of 52 organizations under surveillance by the FBI. The Justice Department, however, refused to reveal what groups were on the list, because it was a secret.

The list was created in 1947. At its peak, there were 300 designated “subversives” on the list, including the Communist Party USA, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, members of which fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and the fascists.

FBI director Hoover used the bureau to investigate Americans. Today, United States law enforcement and intelligence agencies have greater access to the personal information of the whole population than was imaginable decades ago.

Martin Luther King Jr., Nation of Islam’s Malcolm X, Black Panther leader Huey Newton, and former Communist Party member Angela Davis and many others fell under FBI scrutiny, particularly those who embraced Marxism, Leninism, Maoism or supported leaders such as Ho Chi Minh.

“The last thing those in power wanted was an organized underclass, ready to fight for revolution,” Davis said.

The FBI’s BIE report says Black “extremists have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans, but had not targeted law enforcement with premeditated violence for the nearly two decades leading up to the lethal incidents observed beginning in 2014 (the Michael Brown killing).”

Today the FBI applies the term Black Identity Extremist retroactively to violence that peaked in the 1960s, when Blacks rebelled against segregation. Organizations like the 1970s Black Liberation Army (BLA), formed to “take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of Black people in the United States,” are considered a BIE group.

The FBI warns that unrest among Blacks “may also lead to an increase in BIE group memberships, collaboration among BIE groups or the appearance of additional violent lone offenders motivated by BIE rhetoric.

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