The black liberation movement, which had been left for dead in the Nixon era, was reborn in the new millennium with the founding of Black Lives Matter.
The rhetoric, the ambitions, and even the acronym of the movement are identical: although the media and corporate public relations departments have framed the Black Lives Matter movement as an extension of the civil rights movement, the ideology of the organization is, in truth, more in line with the revolutionaries of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, and the Marxist-Leninist black liberation movement more broadly. As Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza summarized it: “BLM, BLM”1—in other words, the black liberation movement and Black Lives Matter are one and the same.
And Angela Davis, then as now, is their lodestar.
“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,” explained BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors in the Harvard Law Review. In fact, as Cullors’s essay reveals, the theory and praxis of Black Lives Matter is a basic recapitulation of the Angela Davis oeuvre, beginning with its sweeping historical claims from “the transatlantic slave trade through the prison industrial complex” and calls to “destabilize, deconstruct, and demolish oppressive systems,” including prisons, policing, borders, and immigration enforcement.
Likewise, BLM’s policy agenda is a simple reprise of the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, demanding “financial restitution, land redistribution, political self-determination, culturally relevant education programs, language recuperation, and the right to return.”2
The links between the two movements are not merely theoretical—they are deeply personal. Angela Davis herself served as a mentor to Black Lives Matter leaders, sharing the stage with BLM founders Cullors and Garza, making appearances at BLM rallies, and raising the Black Power fist in support of BLM protestors.3 Cullors spent a year studying Marx, Lenin, and Mao with former Weather Underground member Eric Mann,4 who described his Labor Community Strategy Center as the “Harvard of revolutionary graduate schools,” teaching students how to “take this country away from the white settler state, take this country away from imperialism and have an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist revolution.”5
The new movement has also absorbed the lessons of the Combahee River Collective Statement and Angela Davis’s Women, Race & Class, using identity, subjectivity, and emotion as political weapons.
Cullors and Garza have used their status as queer black women to mobilize the entire constellation of oppressed identities. In her Harvard Law Review manifesto, Cullors elaborates on her personal trauma—struggling with her brother’s mental illness, enduring abuse at the hands of her transgender partner, undergoing “bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder” that led to emotional breakdowns—and projects these personal pathologies onto society, condemning it as racist, oppressive, and cruel.6 She marshals the language of the therapeutic for political ends, and demands that the society she denounces as evil provide healing and care.
Davis, who came out as a lesbian in 1997 and acknowledged that the movement had failed to include the full range of gender identities in the past, put her stamp of approval on this new, finely tuned form of identity politics.7 Black lives matter, she told activists in St. Louis, because “Black Women Matter, Black Girls Matter, Black Gay Lives Matter, Black Bi Lives Matter, Black Boys Matter, Black Queer Lives Matter, Black Men Matter, Black Lesbians Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Black Immigrants Matter, Black Incarcerated Lives Matter.”8
If anything, BLM can be best understood as a synthesis of the major lines of the black liberation movement—the racialist dialectic of Angela Davis, the identity-first orientation of the Combahee River Collective, the Marxist-Leninist vision of the Black Panther Party—resurrected for the digital age.
The great coup of BLM was to secure the acceptance of the prestige institutions, but its philosophy, its aesthetic, and its ambitions are unchanged from the earliest days. Fifty years ago, the urban guerrillas of the Black Liberation Army summarized their ideology in a simple formula: “We are anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist”; “we must of necessity strive for the abolishment of these systems”; “in order to abolish our system of oppression we must utilize the science of class struggle.”9 The same logic underpins the philosophy of Black Lives Matter. “It’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism,” said Garza, “and it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression and gender oppression.”10
Davis, who had patiently built the intellectual framework for the rebirth of the black liberation movement, put her faith in Black Lives Matter. “I could clearly see that Patrisse and her comrades were pushing Black and left, including feminist and queer, movements to a new and more exciting level, as they seriously wrestled with contradictions that had plagued these movements for many generations,” she wrote. “They recognize that universal freedom is an ideal best represented not by those who are already at the pinnacle of racial, gender, and class hierarchies but rather by those whose lives are most defined by conditions of unfreedom and by ongoing struggles to extricate themselves from those conditions.”11
The dream is still the same dream. Alicia Garza, the BLM cofounder, has adopted as the movement’s motto the old chant of Assata Shakur, the Black Liberation Army soldier who was convicted of murdering a police officer and then fled to Cuba after escaping from prison. “When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what it’s [sic] political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context,” Garza explains.12
The chant provides the movement with a political North Star: the sense of forming the conscience of the black proletariat, the commitment to violence as a method of liberation, and a reference to the closing line of The Communist Manifesto. “There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army,” Garza reads. “We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary. It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”13
After its years in the wilderness, the black liberation movement was ready again. They had bided their time in academia and built a new street movement with a more sophisticated message. “We do this work today because on another day work was done by Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, [and] the Black Panther Party,” said Cullors.14
For this new work to succeed, they needed to lay down a new predicate for revolution.
* * *
The great innovation of Black Lives Matter was not political, but linguistic. They did not change the content—anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, anti-imperialism—they changed the presentation.
The best way to understand BLM is as a delivery mechanism for Black Panther ideology, passed through a filter of marketing language that makes it palatable to American elites. Just as Marcuse and the critical theorists traded the word “revolution” for the more benign “liberation,” the new radicals have wrapped black liberation ideology in the vocabulary of euphemism and social science. They no longer pledge to unleash the “black urban guerrilla” and commit “revolutionary executions.”15 They condemn abstractions such as “systemic racism” and commit to “racial justice.” Even the movement’s eponymous slogan, Black Lives Matter, follows this shift in tone: the leaders of BLM self-consciously abandoned the masculine notion of Black Power in favor of a more feminine notion of human meaning, which creates a sympathetic, rather than confrontational, frame.
The objective of this approach is to create a new political narrative that legitimizes their ideology and leads automatically to their conclusions. The Black Lives Matter activists have built their argument to orchestrate a precise cascade of human emotions, shocking the conscience with examples of “police brutality,” abstracting those rare but salient events as “systemic racism,” and leading the public to the morally unopposable cause of “abolition.”
The first step in the process is to create the emotional preconditions for their argument. As the Black Panther Party had learned when it was still a small street gang in Oakland, the best recruiting tool for the movement is to whip up anger against the police. And for Black Lives Matter, this method has become even more powerful. Activists now have mobile phone or bodycam video for nearly every police shooting, which can be edited for maximum emotional impact and replicated across social media at a cost and scale that was unimaginable five decades ago.
The media then sears the violent images into the minds of the public and BLM activists read out litanies of the dead—“Say their names”—to establish their moral position and elicit a response in the broader population.16
The underlying technique is to drop an emotional anchor with each news cycle and to introduce a closed linguistic universe that can help shape the sequence of events that follows. Unlike their counterparts of the past, Cullors, Garza, and Black Lives Matter leaders seek to engage the emotions of guilt and shame rather than anger and fear, adopting a therapeutic rather than militant tone. The goal is no longer to rouse the fury of the black lumpenproletariat, a strategy that proved to be self-destructive, but to arouse the sentiments of the professional class, including the stratum of liberal white women who now command powerful administrative positions in corporations, philanthropies, universities, and schools, and often mimic the rituals first created by activists.
After a few years of conditioning, most prominently around the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this technique paid dividends. Affluent suburban women and Fortune 100 executives began speaking the same sanitized language of the activist class, genuflecting to Black Lives Matter, repeating the names of the dead, and posting a black square on social media to pay homage to the movement.
The next step in the process is abstraction, moving from individual incident to general principle. This is the work of theory. In the early days, Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Liberation Army identified specific, flesh-and-blood enemies. They made a direct connection between the problem of police brutality and the solution of “killing the pigs.” But this approach was a dead end.
The next generation of activists shifted to a more sophisticated strategy. They used individual incidents of police brutality as proof of the existence of “systemic racism.” The enemy was no longer the individual police officer, but an abstraction that implicates the entire society. The professional-class activists realized that they didn’t need to engage in the messy business of stalking and assassinating NYPD detectives. Instead they could publish reports, replete with color-coded statistical illustrations, that demanded society-wide changes.
Davis had established the basic contours of this approach during her campaign to free the Soledad Brothers in the 1970s. She used the emotional anchor technique, presenting the inmates as “political prisoners” who needed to be saved from “Legal Lynching.”17 But Davis also marshalled the theoretical perspective, assigning the plight of the Soledad Brothers to “the racism securely interwoven in the capitalist fabric of this society”18 and pointing out that blacks represented 15 percent of the population but 30 percent of those in prison, which, she claimed, was prima facie evidence of institutional racism.19
Fifty years later, Black Lives Matter and its allies have perfected the technique. The media lionizes criminal figures such as Michael Brown, who was shot and killed after attacking a police officer and attempting to seize his gun,20 and Jacob Blake, who was shot after resisting arrest and brandishing a knife.21 Meanwhile, activists within the universities pump out reams of statistical data, stripped of all confounding variables, that appear to corroborate the narrative of widespread racism. Never mind that the Soledad Brothers, or their modern equivalents such as Brown and Blake, were hardly innocent victims, or that disparities in criminality can explain disparities in incarceration.22
Those objections can be brushed aside. The activists had created a narrative weapon that could absorb any incident into its totalizing structure—and they intended to use it.
The final point in the process is the movement’s eternal destination: revolution. Since Marcuse, the neo-Marxist theoreticians have tried to divine the phases of American history, grumbling at each other whether the United States was in a pre-revolutionary or anti-revolutionary condition. Marcuse ended his life despairing about the failure of revolutionary politics; Angela Davis and the founders of Black Lives Matter are more optimistic. “Black Lives Matter has always been about much more than police or vigilante violence. . . . It’s been about the fact that black people deserve a revolution,” said cofounder Garza.23 “I am very optimistic about Black Power and what I work to do every single day is to train our communities how to wield it.”24
In a sense, the intellectual and symbolic preconditions had already been set. By 2016, the movement had turned its loaded premise—emotional anchor, statistical rationalization, abstract enemy—into conventional wisdom. Even Davis, reflecting on the progress of Black Lives Matter, admitted some astonishment at how far the language of the revolution had come. “‘Structural racism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ all of these terms that have been used for decades in the ranks of our movements have now become a part of popular discourse,” Davis told reporters.25
She is right. The old vocabulary of the Black Panther Party has become the new vocabulary of the New York Times. Between 2010 and 2020, the paper’s usage of terms such as “structural racism,” “white supremacy,” “police brutality,” and “antiracism” has exploded.26 The Times, as the guardian of the liberal consensus, accomplished what the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party could not: persuade millions of Americans that the United States is a white supremacist nation that systematically exploits blacks and other minorities.
According to the Pew Research Center, that narrative has been cemented into the Democratic mind. In 2009, only 32 percent of Democrats believed that racism in the United States was a “big problem”; by 2017, that number had more than doubled to 76 percent.27
This dramatic change in public perception seems self-contradictory. Racism, by almost any measure, has declined in the United States from the days of the Black Panther Party. The laws have guaranteed equal treatment since the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. Racist attitudes among whites dropped precipitously following that time period, with virtually no opposition to interracial marriage, integrated schools, and integrated neighborhoods by the mid-1990s.28 Police killings of black men decreased by 72 percent between 1965 and 200529—and the absolute numbers obscure the fact that the vast majority of these incidents are in response to deadly threats and, therefore, justifiable.30 Finally, in 2008, the United States elected its first black president, Barack Obama, which, at the time, was heralded as a racial watershed.
But instead of ushering in a new era of racial reconciliation, the country plunged into racial retrograde. According to Gallup, from 2001 to 2013, approximately 70 percent of adults rated black-white relations positively.31 Then, as the Black Lives Matter narrative began building influence in response to a series of high-profile police shootings, it suddenly collapsed. By 2021, the number of Americans with a positive assessment of race relations plummeted to 42 percent. Among African-Americans, the number fell from 66 percent to 33 percent—the lowest share on record.
The evidence suggests that the Black Lives Matter narrative has succeeded in capturing the American consciousness, and that perception has become stronger than reality.
In 2021, the Skeptic Research Center conducted a survey asking Americans how many unarmed black men they believed were killed by police in 2019. The majority of self-described “very liberal” respondents estimated that the number was at least 1,000, with one-fifth of those respondents estimating that the number was at least 10,000. Even among self-described “moderate” voters, more than one-quarter believed that the police had killed at least 1,000 unarmed black men over the course of the year.32
The real number, according to the Washington Post database of fatal police shootings, was 14—one-tenth of 1 percent of the highest estimates from the “very liberal” respondents.33
In other words, the Black Lives Matter narrative, which had raised the specter of state genocide against blacks,34 was able to create a free-floating perception that served the movement’s political ambitions, even as it became untethered from the facts. The purpose, however, is not accuracy—it is activism. The movement has self-consciously built its support among the 15 percent of Democratic Party voters who describe themselves as “very liberal” and are most amenable to the catastrophic narrative.35 This is not a trivial faction. It represents more than 7 million American citizens who are committed to politics and bought into the line that the police are systematically murdering unarmed black men on an industrial scale.
For this group, the three-part formula—anchor, rationalization, enemy—proved to be a powerful feedback loop. Every headline reinforced the emotional response. Every op-ed in the Times strengthened the movement’s mythology. They believed that “white supremacy” is not a metaphor from the past, but an urgent, concrete reality in contemporary America. These are the men and women, predominantly young, white, and highly educated, who are ready to hit the streets.36
Following the steadily increasing anxieties of the post-Obama years, they were ready to explode.
* * *
The fuse was lit on May 25, 2020.
That evening in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a white police officer named Derek Chauvin arrested a black man named George Floyd on suspicion of using counterfeit currency to purchase cigarettes. Floyd, who had a long rap sheet including trespassing, theft, drug possession, and holding a gun to the stomach of a young woman during a home invasion robbery, was acting erratically and asked the officers to lay him on the ground.37 Chauvin restrained him with a knee to the neck, as Floyd repeatedly told him, “I can’t breathe,” and then “I’m about to die.”38
Chauvin did not relent. He kept the pressure on Floyd’s neck and, after a gruesome nine and a half minutes, Floyd lost consciousness. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
The killing, which was photographed by onlookers who repeatedly warned the officers that Floyd was in serious distress, sent shock waves through the country. It was the perfect confirmation of the narrative loop established by Black Lives Matter activists over the previous five years: a white police officer extinguishing the life of a poor black man, in full view of the public—brutally, senselessly, without remorse.
The night after Floyd’s death, the protests began. First, activists in Minneapolis marched through the streets, threw rocks and bottles at the police, and vandalized the Third Precinct police station.39 Then they began looting retail stores and burning down entire city blocks.40 By the following month, protests had erupted in all fifty states, unleashing a wave of riots, violence, and destruction.
The chaos presented an opportunity for a loose but powerful network of left-wing militant organizations. Prior to the riots, the FBI had released a report warning about the rise of “Black Identity Extremists” modeled on the Black Liberation Army. These radicals “have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans,” the Bureau warned.41 They had not targeted law enforcement officers for decades, but following the death of Michael Brown in 2014, they initiated a three-year violence spree. One extremist ambushed and killed five police officers in Dallas. Another ambushed and shot six cops in Baton Rouge. A third attacked four officers in New York City with a hatchet, promising “mass revolt” against “the oppressors.”42
In addition, the George Floyd riots provided an entry point for predominantly white anarcho-socialist groups, which used the ongoing disorder to promote their message and attack the symbols of the state. According to a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers, these “anti-fascist,” or Antifa, militias used decentralized online communications to recruit new members and organize violent protests. The militant groups, which resemble the Weather Underground movement from the previous era, used digital propaganda to mobilize on-the-ground units in cities such as Seattle and Portland, Oregon, where they laid siege to public buildings, fought against law enforcement, and vandalized private and public property, including historical statues.43
Their materials are reminiscent of the old Prairie Fire manifesto: the glorification of “revolutionary” violence, photographs of members armed to the teeth, illustrations of pigs with captions urging followers to “kill” and “murder” the police. Their aesthetic, too, is self-consciously derived from the radical movements of the 1960s. The Antifa-affiliated groups photograph themselves in guerrilla training camps, create block prints of Karl Marx and Kalashnikov rifles, and use the old lexicon of the underground, promising to unleash a “revolution” against the “predatory state” and its “fascist hooligans.”44
At the tactical level, the new white militant groups organized themselves into autonomous cells, or “network-enabled mobs,” with an intricate division of labor. There are “shield soldiers,” “range soldiers,” “medics,” “fire squads,” “copwatches,” “barricaders,” “frontliners,” “designers,” and “online comms” teams.45
This is a notable advancement. In 1969, the Weather Underground attempted to rouse the masses in Chicago during the “Days of Rage,” but the masses never arrived; the radicals were summarily beaten, humiliated, and arrested by police. In 2020, by contrast, the new left-wing militant groups, armed with bottles, rocks, guns, and bombs, were able to sustain more than one hundred consecutive nights of rioting and destruction in cities such as Portland, dominating the streets and putting the police on the defensive.46
As the National Contagion Research Institute noted: “One important feature of the network-enabled mob is its capacity to frustrate the ability of law enforcement to detect directed ideological attacks. A core group of actors are able to mobilize lawlessness and violence. If it becomes widespread, the network-enabled mob enables a structure capable of adaptation and evolution especially if it reappears over consecutive days of unrest.”47 The result, according to law enforcement agencies, is that these decentralized left-wing groups have initiated an “ongoing low grade insurgency with targeted, ideological attacks by anti-government extremists.”48
As the rioting spread, it seemed that Marcuse’s old two-part proletariat had been revived—and, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, it yielded devastation.
The George Floyd protests were the most widespread since the height of the New Left in 1968. There were more than ten thousand demonstrations nationwide, with protestors engaging in violence, looting, arson, and vandalism in all fifty states.49 Police arrested more than ten thousand protestors and recorded twenty-five deaths connected with the unrest.50 Rioters inflicted more than $2 billion in property damage—the single largest insurance loss due to civil disorder on record.51
The brute violence and destruction captured headlines in American newspapers, but the patterns and details of the Black Lives Matter riots reveal another layer of interpretation. The physical war was an expression of a deeper symbolic war. The individual acts of violence—the sacking of urban police stations, the Molotov cocktails thrown at police cruisers, the toppling of historical statues, the wholesale looting of big-box stores—were, in fact, the representations of a long-running cultural revolution.
The rioters were unconsciously following the formula Angela Davis had once suggested to students in her first lectures at UCLA: erase the past, demolish the present, control the future. They sought to wage war on the symbols and historical memory of the nation’s founding. They vandalized and tore down statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, spray-painting “slave owner” on Jefferson and “1619” on Washington. “You’re doing something by taking down this image,” said one man. “I’m just raking in unemployment, so I might as well have the government pay me to dismantle themselves.” The authorities, rather than defend the statues, removed them.52
Davis, too, saw the power of this narrative reconstruction. As the George Floyd riots raged, she told Vanity Fair magazine that the street demonstrations were “rehearsals for revolution” and praised the destruction of the historical statues. “Those statues are our reminders that the history of the United States of America is a history of racism. So it’s natural that people would try to bring down those symbols,” she said. “If it’s true that names are being changed, statues are being removed, it should also be true that the institutions are looking inward and figuring out how to radically transform themselves. That’s the real work.”53
In other words, the purpose of toppling statues was not simply to exert power in the streets, but to undermine the fundamental myths of the society—or, in the words of Eldridge Cleaver, to turn America’s “white heroes” into the “arch-villains” at the root of an oppressive society.54 When those myths are undone, they believed, the population would seek to fill the void with new ones and the revolution could finally proceed. “The protests offered people an opportunity to join in this collective demand to bring about deep change, radical change. Defund the police, abolish policing as we know it now,” Davis concluded. “These are the same arguments that we’ve been making for such a long time about the prison system and the whole criminal justice system. It was as if all of these decades of work by so many people, who received no credit at all, came to fruition.”55
For a stretch in the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement was able to achieve a major tactical victory: street dominance.
In city after city, BLM activists, including its paramilitaries in the black nationalist and anarcho-socialist factions, shut down urban neighborhoods, intimidated residents, and established their ideology as a social requisite. Mobs of BLM supporters marched through the streets and bullied residents and outdoor diners into submission.
In Washington, D.C., dozens of masked activists, with their fists raised in the Black Power tradition, surrounded a woman sitting at a dinner table. They chanted, “No justice, no peace,” and shrieked threats within inches of her face. “Are you a Christian?” screamed one. “Raise your fucking fist!” yelled another.56 In Pittsburgh, black protestors smashed bottles and shouted down white diners: “Fuck [the police] and fuck the white people that built the system set against mine!”57 In New York, activists stood on top of tables and hurled invective against a white restaurant owner: “We don’t want you here! We don’t want your fucking taqueria! Owned by fucking white men!”58
In all of these cities, the mobs turned violent after sundown: looting, arson, vandalism, and destruction. As these threats escalated, national retail chains began publishing statements of loyalty to the movement and local shopkeepers hung “Black Lives Matter” placards and photographs of George Floyd in their windows—in some cases, out of conviction, but in most cases, out of fear. The message: “We submit. Please do not burn down this establishment.”59
Meanwhile, the national media adopted the BLM line. Even at the news wires, such as Reuters, reporters mimicked the style and substance of the streets. “Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Freddie Gray,” Reuters intoned. “Their names are seared into Americans’ memories, egregious examples of lethal police violence that stirred protests and prompted big payouts to the victims’ families.”
Although some of the reports covering the first days of chaos in Minneapolis were straightforward about the violence—“Protests, Looting Erupt in Minneapolis Over Racially Charged Killing by Police,” read one headline—the coverage quickly passed through a filter of ideology and euphemism as the summer progressed. The stories began to frame the unrest as a “new national reckoning about racial injustice” and to describe the protests as “mostly peaceful” or “largely peaceful,” despite widespread violence, looting, and crime.
The wire’s data-based reporting and “fact checks” did no better, consistently recontextualizing accurate information about racial violence and policing in order to blunt counternarratives and align its coverage with Black Lives Matter rhetoric.60
The climax of the riot season occurred on June 6 in Minneapolis. That afternoon, the city’s progressive mayor, thirty-eight-year-old Jacob Frey, dressed in a blue and gray Henley shirt and a face mask with the slogan “I can’t breathe,” arrived at a demonstration in support of abolishing the police. Thousands of protestors lined the streets, with signs reading “Defend Black Lives” and “Police Abolition Now.”61
The organizers rallied the crowd in call and response: “We are here! We won’t leave! We’ll build a new state! Defund MPD!” Later, the protest leaders, perched on top of a makeshift stage in the middle of the intersection, summoned Mayor Frey to their feet. The activists below, wearing matching “Stop Killing Black People” masks, surrounded him with their fists raised.62
“Jacob Frey, we have a yes-or-no question for you. Yes or no, will you commit to defunding Minneapolis Police Department?” they demanded, as Frey lowered his eyes. “We don’t want no mo’ police. Is that clear? We don’t want people with guns, toting around in our community, shooting us down. You have an answer! It is a yes or a no!” thundered the black woman onstage, with the crowd roaring in a crescendo around her.
Finally, Frey, assuming the posture of a shamed child, whispered into the microphone: “I do not support the full abolition of the police.”63
The mob erupted. “Get the fuck out of here! You wasted our time!” Then they broke into a chant—“Go home, Jacob, go home!”—and jeered at Frey as he snaked back through the crowd toward the exits. “Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!” they shouted. “We’re not here for police reform bullshit. Abolish the police, then the prisons!”64
The entire spectacle was loaded with symbolic significance: the elevation of the mob; the public humiliation ritual; the furious march of the dialectic. For a moment, the activists had reenacted the fabled events of the Paris Commune. They had turned the evanescent spirit of revolt into a moment of flesh. The bodies, pressed together, believed that, after burning down the Minneapolis Police Department Third Precinct, they could “build a new state” in its place.
The presence looming above it all—above the melee of the street demonstrations, above the signs and signifiers of the propaganda war, above the violence unleashed in the name of social justice—was Angela Davis.
After the death of George Floyd, Davis, at seventy-six years old, was resurrected by the press and restored to her position as the conscience of racial revolt. Her photograph graced the pages of Time magazine, where she was celebrated as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the year. “She dared to stand against a racist system. She’s seen and witnessed it all, and she continues to inspire, educate and resist oppression,” remarked one commentator.65 “An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend,” gushed another.66
Like the Soviet news organizations in the old revolutionary time, the American media heralded the Black Lives Matter movement as a march toward liberation. Their transgressions—the burned-out shopping malls, the victims of reprisals, the dead police officers—were to be minimized, papered over, pushed aside. None could be held over the heads of BLM, which, they said, was not an organization, but a movement.
They had adopted the refrain of Assata Shakur, who, standing before a judge on charges of kidnapping and armed robbery, told the courtroom: “The Black Liberation Army is not an organisation: it goes beyond that. It is a concept, a people’s movement, an idea. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement. The Black Liberation Army stands for freedom and justice for all people.”67
As Davis had explained many decades before, the revolution would require a certain amount of violence. Back then, her comrade Jonathan Jackson carried the dog-eared and monogrammed pages of Davis’s copies of Violence and Social Change and The Politics of Violence into the Marin County courthouse. Today the young radicals carry the ideas of Davis’s Autobiography and Women, Race & Class into the burned-out buildings of Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle. The concrete harms perpetrated by her followers—then as now—are subsumed into the narrative of abstract goods. When that fails, the crimes are justified as an automatic reaction to oppression.
For Davis, this was the price of progress. “I’ve always recognized my own role as an activist as helping to create conditions of possibility for change. And that means to expand and deepen public consciousness of the nature of racism, of heteropatriarchy, pollution of the planet, and their relationship to global capitalism,” she told Vanity Fair. “And so there has to be a way to think about the connection among all of these issues and how we can begin to imagine a very different kind of society. That is what ‘defund the police’ means. That is what ‘abolish the police’ means.”68
For a moment during the summer of 2020, it appeared that she could finally turn this long-stalled dream into a reality.