From the Black Panthers to 2Pac to Ferguson: The History Behind the FBI’s Latest Move Against Black Activists

It was 4 a.m. on December 12 of last year when the FBI came for Rakem Balogun.

Balogun is a black Dallas-area activist with the Guerilla Mainframe organization. He’s also the co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which aims to “educate and arm black people in the U.S. and abroad.”

The Feds had a warrant for his .38 handgun, but that wasn’t really what they were after. The government had been following Balogun in ways both real and virtual for the prior two-and-a-half years. They saw coverage of an open-carry demonstration in 2015, and didn’t like what they claimed Balogun was chanting (“The only good pig is a pig that’s dead,” and “Oink oink, bang bang,” according to press reports).

Those chants started years of surveillance and eventually led to Balogun’s arrest. He had brought the gun on a trip out of state weeks before his arrest—in his luggage, unloaded and in a case, per airline regulations. And while Balogun thought he was licensed to bring it along, the authorities used a decade-old misdemeanor charge to determine he wasn’t. (Balogun’s attorneys are currently disputing this tactic—a trial is set for mid-May). And what did the authorities do with this clear and present danger? Took Balogun’s luggage for a day or so, gave it back (gun inclusive), and then waited another three weeks before bursting into his place in the early morning hours.

It didn’t take long before it became pretty clear that Balogun was most likely the very first person to be targeted by the FBI under their new Black Identity Extremist designation. The name is used to refer to people who, the agency believes, “in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society,” may engage in “premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.” (Complex reached out to the FBI to ask if Balogun had in fact been labeled with the BIE designation, but they refused to comment, citing the fact that “the matter is ongoing”). The classification was discovered by the media in late 2017. Civil rights activists—and even former intelligence officials—railed against the new BIE classification, saying that it was an attempt to criminalize protected speech and political activity.

'Having Him Around Was a Threat to the Structure'

The FBI lists nine “persistent extremist movements in the US”: white supremacy, militia, sovereign citizens, anarchists, abortion, animal rights, environmental rights, Puerto Rican Nationalism, and now “black identities.” This new addition to the list understandably raised hackles, given the FBI’s decades-long record of surveillance and dirty tricks, ranging all the way up to assassination, against black activists. The Bureau even had an entire effort—COINTELPRO, for COunterINTELligence PROgram—which sought to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” black activists and organizations, as well as many other groups. COINTELPRO began in 1956, and was officially discontinued in 1971 after it was exposed, though other efforts, identical in all but name, continued long afterwards.

The FBI attempted to use their newly created extremist movement to tie Micah Johnson, who targeted cops in a violent 2016 shooting spree, to activists concerned with police violence. (Balogun praised Johnson in a social media post, which also alarmed the Bureau). The FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit predicted that “perceptions of unjust treatment of African-Americans and the perceived unchallenged illegitimate actions of law enforcement will inspire premeditated attacks against law enforcement”—a prediction that mostly serves to give the Bureau new leeway in going after anyone who is concerned about police violence, including activists like Balogun.

The real reason Balogun was targeted, according to Kilaika Shakur, the spokesperson for the Free Rakem Balogun Defense Committee, has nothing to do with guns, protest chants, or social media.

“He trained people to learn how to use firearms, self-defense, and to create a healthy lifestyle,” she explains. “He was a very strong political activist in the areas of community organizing, self-reliance, self-determination, and things of that nature. He did believe in the right to bear arms, and felt that people should be trained with it, particularly black people. Having him around was a threat to their structure.”

And going after threats to their structure—particularly black ones—is what the FBI has been doing for nearly a century, starting with Marcus Garvey in 1919 and continuing through today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

‘There Had to be Funerals on Both Sides’: The Creation of the BLA

But there was a time, not that long ago, when state repression led to a much more forceful response than chanting. For over a decade, from 1970 until the early ’80s, there was an underground black movement that was fighting “war without terms” against a police force that was killing hundreds of African-Americans a year (almost 1,000 just between 1971-73), and against a state that was committing violence on a much larger scale against non-white people abroad.

The Black Liberation Army [BLA] was an “anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-sexist” clandestine organization that grew out of an FBI-encouraged split in the Black Panther Party. Former BPP member Thomas McCreary put it most clearly in a recent interview:

“We took the position that if there was going to be wailing in the black household, there would be some wailing in the white household, or the oppressor’s household,” he said. “There had to be funerals on both sides.”

The BLA’s primary targets at first were police, which they explained in an early statement. They spoke of “the struggle to take over, dismantle, and weaken the oppressors’ police apparatus in our community.”

This approach to battling oppression was not as out-of-nowhere as it might sound today. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, urban guerilla war was a tactic being used all over the globe against repressive regimes. There was even a how-to book, Carlos Marighella’s 1969 tract Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. The RAND Corporation staidly noted in a 1971 paper on the phenomenon that, “In recent years, guerillas have battled government forces in the cities of Algiers, Amman, Belfast, Calcutta, Caracas, Dacca, Guatemala, Montevideo, Quebec, and São Paulo… Some, like Santo Domingo and Paris, have been the scenes of full-scale urban uprisings.”

Author and professor Dan Berger, who has written about incarceration and radical political movements, connects the BLA’s birth to the worldwide movement against colonialism.

“The emergence of the BLA and some of their tactics and approaches can’t be separated from both what was happening politically, but also what was happening historically,” he explains. “Around the world there were these different anti-colonial guerilla forces that were participating in attacks on soldiers. They were often fighting for independence and socialism. I think that the BLA saw itself in that tradition and really shaped by the kind of non-state guerilla armies in places like Ireland, Palestine, and Vietnam, as well as in Angola, Mozambique, and parts of Africa. For the BLA, the police function as an occupying army—and I think that analysis was not at all unique to the BLA.”

Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers and the author of a 2010 book about the Black Panther Party, agrees. She describes the BLA’s thinking as an “anti-colonial form of politics.”

“They solidified the question of state violence and linked home violence to violence abroad,” she says. “This idea of looking at police as an occupying army and military force, and linking that to the kind of violence and mass murder seen in Vietnam, Cambodia, and South East Asia, as well as CIA and anti-communist intervention across the globe.”

This framing of police as an occupying force has been mainstreamed in recent years, especially following the rebellion in Ferguson. The idea has appeared on CNN and in outlets like the Huffington Post and Salon.

‘Movements Had a Responsibility to Get Their Comrades Out’

Between October, 1970 and January, 1972, the BLA conducted a number of bombings and attacks on police-related targets, and on officers themselves. The assassination of two NYC cops, Greg Foster and Rocco Laurie, on January 29, 1972 brought the total number of officers attacked to 10, with six fatalities. But attacking law enforcement so directly brought intense police pressure.

By the end of 1973, the NYPD was crowing that it “broke the back” of the BLA after they killed a group member named Twywon Meyers, who was wanted for questioning for the killings of Foster and Laurie. However, the organization was quickly moving into another phase—getting its comrades out of jail.

“There was an idea that prison was the basis of colonial states, and so of course prisons are going to be used to oppress these movements,” Berger explains. “Movements had a responsibility to get their comrades out. The BLA is both looking to Palestine and South Africa and Vietnam and all these places overseas, but they’re also drawing on the prison movement at the time. It really saw the prison not only as representative of the racist state but as something that can be conquered and overcome.”

The BLA engaged in a series of daring jailbreaks—from trying to cut through walls with a blowtorch at NYC’s notorious Tombs to donning wetsuits and taking rafts out to Rikers Island. A few worked, most didn’t, and some had tragic ends, like that of BLA member Rema Olubaga who attempted to climb down to freedom from the Brooklyn House of Detention but died when his rope broke.

‘Reading Her Book Helped Me to Feel Not Crazy’: The Legacy of Assata

The most famous BLA-related jailbreak of all involved Assata Shakur. Shakur, 2Pac's godmother, was one of the BLA’s most notorious members, so much so that the police suspected her of being involved in every BLA-related incident where a woman—any woman—was seen. She was arrested in 1973 following a still-contentious firefight on the New Jersey Turnpike. Despite the fact that medical evidence showed that Shakur was shot with her hands up, she was ultimately convicted of murder in 1977—after, it should be noted, having not been convicted in half a dozen other cases.

On November 2, 1979, a collection of BLA members and associates known as “the Family” led a daring escape that proved successful. In the days after she gained her freedom, “Assata Shakur Is Welcome Here” posters—mocking her appearance on the FBI’s Most Wanted list—were hung from windows and carried in marches.

In 1984, after years of living underground, Assata was granted political asylum in Cuba, where she remains. The image of a black woman who fought back against police repression and remains free is a powerful one—something both sides acknowledge.

“I think [Assata] has always been a major thorn in the side of New Jersey police and the FBI because it really exposes COINTELPRO.” Berger says. “It exposes the drama of police abuse. The US had been so adamant about denying the existence of political prisoners and denying the history of political oppression in its own country. So to have a woman who escaped from prison and is granted political exile status really shows how false those denials are, and how racist both forms of violence have always been.”

For St. Louis rapper and activist Tef Poe, who was extremely involved in the movement in Ferguson after the police killing of Michael Brown, Assata’s story serves as inspiration. “We don’t have very many black revolutionaries that have actually beat the American war machine,” he points out. “We don’t have revolutionaries that have escaped the clutches of FBI. In Assata’s case, and many of her comrades, their stories offer a place of victory versus a continuing narrative of deceit, a continuing narrative of black revolutionaries going to jail or getting a bullet in their heads.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Assata Shakur has inspired many activists of this generation. One of the most active groups in the movement for black lives is even called Assata’s Daughters. The group, according to co-founder and organizing director Page May, “organizes young black people in the black radical tradition”—a tradition in which Assata plays a major role. For May and many other organizers, Assata’s 1987 autobiography was a key text in their political education.

“I was learning a lot about the true root causes of a lot of the problems in the world around me, and her book was really grounding,” May tells me. “It helped me process the grief and the trauma that comes with the moment where you start to understand the implications of anti-blackness being global and still very real and not going away anytime soon. Reading her book helped me feel not crazy. It also helped me better understand what was going on, and it gave me many examples of what resistance looks like.”

“THEIR STORIES OFFER A PLACE OF VICTORY VERSUS A CONTINUING NARRATIVE OF DECEIT, A CONTINUING NARRATIVE OF BLACK REVOLUTIONARIES GOING TO JAIL OR GETTING A BULLET IN THEIR HEADS.

“Every meeting with BLM and many other organizations, they start with a song about how it is our duty to win, how we have to protect one another, and how we have nothing to lose but our chains. [The words] were taken from Assata Shakur in the 1980’s when she was exiled,” explains Donna Murch. “Because people don’t know the history of the BLA, they don’t know that Shakur was a political prisoner turned revolutionary fugitive. So there’s already that connection there hiding in plain sight.”

One Last Mission

By the time of Assata’s escape from prison, the BLA was already several years into its final incarnation—as a group that explicitly battled white supremacy, frequently with white allies. The group moved from getting people out of jail to preparing for, as Professor Akinyele Umoja put it, “white supremacist genocidal attack on the black community.” And where would they get the idea that was coming?

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, as now, white supremacist groups were on the rise. They had strong ties to law enforcement—still a serious, and largely ignored, problem—were building up paramilitary wings, and were engaging in attacks on black people, including children, in Atlanta, Boston, Alabama, North Carolina, and elsewhere.

So the BLA teamed up with white allies, who formed the RATF (Revolutionary Armed Task Force)—a group that, under BLA leadership, would infiltrate white supremacist organizations in order to get information it would then report back to the BLA. Their ultimate goal was to build self-defense units, along with educational and cultural programs, in black communities to combat the white supremacist surge. All of that, of course, takes money. So another thing the RATF and BLA did was engage in what they called expropriations. And it was one of those that would finally bring the BLA to a close.

On October 20, 1981, six BLA members, including 2Pac’s stepfather Mutulu Shakur, and four white allies tried to rob a Brinks armored car at a mall near Nyack, New York. The car’s guard, Peter Paige, attempted to fire at the robbers, and a shootout ensued, killing Paige and injuring another guard, Joe Trombino. The RATF and BLA members got away with the money. But cops caught up, there was another shootout, and two officers ended up dead—one of whom, in a bitter twist, was the first African-American member of the Nyack police department. The Brinks robbery marked the end of the BLA as an organization. Too many members were dead or in jail for it to continue.

‘The Kennedys of Black Liberation’: 2Pac’s Family Legacy

The fact that a relative of 2Pac was involved is of course not a coincidence. Pac was in many ways a child of the movement. His mother Afeni was a member of the Panther 21, a group of Black Panther Party members who were arrested in 1969 and accused of planning to bomb police stations and other targets. After being held for two years, they were acquitted of all charges when the state’s case fell apart. Assata Shakur was Pac’s godmother. Pac was raised around the children of people involved in the BLA and other revolutionary organizations, including the son of Twyman Myers.

“These are the people that Pac grew up with,” Mutulu Shakur (who was sentenced to 60 years behind bars for the Brinks robbery when Pac was only 11) said in an interview. “All of them have seen their fathers and mothers arrested and all of them have seen or had to bury someone they knew. These are the people that Pac had as an example. People that he knew, and not just someone that he had heard of or some character that he had read about.”

To Tef Poe, who was heavily involved in the protests in Ferguson, that’s not surprising at all. He says the Shakur family is “the Kennedys of black liberation.” And Pac’s family tree was reflected directly in his music.

“The godson of Assata Shakur grows up, becomes the biggest rapper in the world, and his music was drenched in Black Panther rhetoric, Black Panther values,” Poe points out. “He understood that we have an overarching enemy, the world is messed up, oppression is a real thing, and the days of marching, chanting, singing, and praying are pretty much over.”

In fact, Poe sees a direct line between the Pac and the movement-starting rebellion in Ferguson.

“You can say that Ferguson was maybe, in a modernized context, one of the prophecies of 2Pac Shakur coming to life,” Poe explains. “He had a line right before he died. Someone asked him, ‘What happens if they kill you?’ He says, ‘If they kill me, they don’t wanna take me out the game because the motherfuckers after me won’t have any mercy for them. They’ll see what happened to me and be relentless about how they engage.’ That’s essentially what happened out there.”

“I felt like we were witnessing a Black Panther prophecy, a BLA prophecy, manifest through the gospel of 2Pac,” Poe continues. “We gotta take it all the way back to the beginning of the BLA which produced a 2Pac. So, they produced Pac, and then Pac produced the Ferguson generation. It’s a continuation of the same resistance that has been essentially going on since the days of the slave ships.”

At What Point Do We Actually Fight Back?

Members of the BLA may have inspired today’s activists in Ferguson and beyond, but their tactics by and large have not. Donna Murch attributes that to the very different—and even scarier, in many ways—political climate. She notes the existence of the Patriot Act, indefinite detention laws, and a seemingly never-ending War on Terror.

“The country is infinity more repressive than it was in the 1960s,” she says. “The kind of activism that not only the BLA but the Black Panther party engaged in—which is armed self-defense, police patrol, the legal use of unconcealed weapons, and carrying them as a symbol of their right to prevent state violence—that’s unimaginable today. Armed rebellion and armed struggle given the whole modification of laws over the last 60 years is very dangerous for black people.”

Tef Poe, who tells me he’s constantly wrestling with the question, “At what point do we actually fight back?”, saw the beginnings of armed resistance in Ferguson.

“I saw what that looks like,” he explains. “I saw what happens when the gang bangers meet and formulate a truce and decide that tonight, when the police try to enforce the curfew, what happens if we don’t go in? What happens if, when they bring out their guns, we bring out our guns? And what happens if, when the helicopter comes across Canfield [Drive], what happens if we shoot at the helicopter? Many people would suggest that that’s insane, but seeing the militarized police force five minutes away from my mother’s house, seeing buildings and schools that I grew up in inhabited as safe houses for people in the community that were protesting, and seeing teenagers walking around two summers with gas masks on, I would suggest that it’s not insane. I would suggest that it is very logical at that point.”

“The BLA produced Pac and then Pac produced the Ferguson generation. It’s a continuation of the same resistance that has been going on since the days of the slave ships.”

Page May makes sure to teach the young people in Assata’s Daughters about the BLA so that they can be aware of the complete history of black resistance.

“We are concerned with our young people understanding the history of what has come before them, both in terms of how did we get here, and also what have our people done and what worked and what didn’t,” she explains. “We’re not trying to say this is how we’re going to get free—because we don’t know—but we want to make sure young folks understand all the different ways that people have fought back, because that’s not what you learn. You don’t learn about the ways that black people actually ended slavery, and you don’t learn that the non-violence of the civil rights movement was a strategy. For some people it was also a morality, but we study it as a strategy and we can compare that strategy to the strategies of groups like the BLA without making moral judgments about it. We can talk about why the strategy shifted, did it need to shift—we can have those debates and young people can decide for themselves what they make of it. We have a conversation about the tactics of the BLA as a part of a conversation about power and how we’ve challenged power.”

Stand Up, Fight Back: Reckoning With the BLA’s Legacy

While this newest incarnation of the black liberation movement grapples with the role of armed self-defense, Rakem Balogun is fighting against being targeted for simply talking about it. His defense committee is fighting on several different fronts: trying to raise money to pay a noted lawyer who wants to take on the case; lobbying Congress to investigate the use of the Black Identity Extremist designation; and even, in a move that hearkens back to Malcolm X, looking into getting the case in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The latter two efforts are being led by Dallas-area organizer Stephen Benavides.

The Black Liberation Army is not an easy organization to talk about. It leaves behind a legacy of resistance to oppression, and of attempting to, as today’s activists might put it might put it, stand up and fight back in a way that, at the time, was gaining traction across the globe. And its vision of viewing police as an occupying army in oppressed communities has only become more prominent in the decades since the organization’s demise. But the group’s ultimate failure shows the danger of engaging in violent, clandestine work without popular support.

Perhaps most crucially, though, the BLA shows us a vision of what might happen if police departments continue to grow more violent. The group serves as a warning about what may occur if cops continue to have access to more weapons (conversations about gun control in this #NeverAgain era rarely include any talk of limitations for the police, occasional Chance the Rapper tweets aside); and if they find themselves increasingly unshackled from even the little bit of public oversight they’ve had forced on them in the post-Ferguson landscape. To use one of the Black Panthers’ favorite aphorisms, repression breeds resistance—and not always in organized, predictable ways. Unless there is a drastic change, the days of funerals on both sides may return, whether we want them to or not.