Dylann Roof, The Fight Against Racism, And The Right To Bear Arms

On The Racist Murderer Dylann Roof
For the Fight Against Racism
In Defense Of The Right To Armed Self-Defense

By Steven Argue

Racist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people in cold blood for political reasons, hoping he would start a "race war". Yet, the racist corporate media of America and the FBI refuses to call this gunman a terrorist. Some pundits have taken up the question. Fox News has blamed the shootings on too much racial diversity in America, giving their tacit support for the shootings and any other Hitleresque style final solution. Mullins, a classmate, explained that there was nothing radical about Dylann's racist political views, explaining:

“I never heard him say anything [racist], but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs. He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that."

Indeed, it is part of American mainstream culture to blow away innocent unarmed Black people. The police do it all the time and get away with it.

Likewise, Dylann Roof's state, the racist state of South Carolina, openly flies the flag of the white racist Confederacy at the state capital. That flag was first raised there in 1962 as an act of defiance against the civil rights / Black liberation movement, and still has not been taken down.

Barrack Obama, the supreme executive of the racist American capitalist state who has done nothing to stop racist police shootings in America, is blaming the shooting on guns. Revolutionary socialists and anti-racists instead defend the right to bear arms.

Even Martin Luther King Junior, who argued against rioting and who was defended by armed Black men, recognized that “a riot is the argument of the unheard”. What Martin Luther King Junior did not recognize, however, is that politics only at its lowest level is actually an “argument”. It is an argument on that level to convince Blacks, people of color, poor people, and the working class in general to take action. Beyond that, proletarian politics is a struggle for power. Martin Luther King Jr., on the other hand, saw politics as an argument with the ruling white liberal Democrats he supported to get them to see the moral justice of taking action against white supremacist segregation and terror in the south. Yet, the capitalist Democrat and Republican parties, and the ruling capitalist class they represent, are not persuaded by moral arguments. They never have been and never will be. They are persuaded by actions and organization that threaten their profit margin or power.

Where Martin Luther King Jr’s tactics were somewhat successful were where they involved disruptions of business as usual and hit businesses in their pocket books. His heroic mass mobilizations in the face of police clubs, police dogs, fire hoses, and police and KKK murders also helped build working class and student sympathy to higher levels of struggle. Many of King’s initial successes in the 1950s were, however, met by a wave of KKK and police terror across the south. Had it not been for armed self-defense, Martin Luther King Jr's tactics would have failed.

Where the tactics of Malcolm X, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and Robert F. Williams were most successful was in the fact that they were armed both as a means of self-defense and as a threat of higher levels of action if the government and the KKK did not back down. Regarding the Deacons, Stokely Carmichael wrote, “Here is a group which realized that the ‘law’ and law enforcement agencies would not protect people, so they had to do it themselves...The Deacons and all other blacks who resort to self-defense represent a simple answer to a simple question: what man would not defend his family and home from attack?” The Deacons provided armed protection for the Civil Rights movement, including for the brave yet naive Gandhian pacifist freedom riders from the north who were part of the 1964 Freedom Summer project, the 1966 March Against Fear, and protected Martin Luther King Jr. himself. The armed defense set up at the March Against Fear was carried out under an agreement from Martin Luther King Jr. himself.

By 1965, the Deacons for Defense and Justice had 65 armed chapters defending Black people and confronting the Klan across the south and one chapter in Chicago, Illinois. Chapters carried out patrols. Arms would be concealed by day and carried openly at night to discourage Klan attacks. Flyers were left by maids and nannies at white homes warning that anyone caught burning crosses on Black people’s lawns would be shot. Under the protection of the Deacons from the terror of the KKK and police, numbers of non-violent protesters rapidly grew. In Jonesboro, Louisiana cops ordered an end to a fire hose attack on Black student protesters after 4 Deacons calmly emerged from a car and loaded their rifles. Armed self-defense had ended a violent attack by law enforcement. In Bogalusa, Louisiana the terror of white racist lynch mobs operated in full daylight until racists were shot in firefights between Deacons and the Klan. As a result of armed self-defense, Klan activity was then driven into the cover of darkness in Bogalusa and Louisiana’s segregationist governor gave into the demands of the civil rights movement.

Besides playing a critical role in defeating police and KKK terror and Jim Crow segregation in the south, armed self-defense has also played an important role in the labor movement. This includes the leadership of the multiracial Mississippi Woodworkers Union who demanded in 1965 that factory management "treat the members of the Negro race exactly the same as the members of the white race." As a result, one of the union leaders, Ottis Mathews, was abducted at gunpoint and tortured by the Ku Klux Klan. Local police, who were most likely working with the KKK as they were all across the south, claimed they couldn’t uncover anything about the incident. The union responded by taking an ad out in the local newspaper declaring, "Our members have been advised to arm themselves against a future occurrence of violence," further warning the KKK that any effort to impede their travel on public roads would be “met by death.” In this manner, armed workers of a multiracial union also played a role in effectively fighting back against the racist and anti-union terror of the KKK and police.

The United States has a long history of government and vigilante massacres of workers in the United States. One of these was the 1914 Ludlow, Colorado massacre of 21 men, women, and children as terror against a union organizing drive of mine workers.

Bourgeois falsifications distort history and deny the importance of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, but their confrontations with the KKK and local white supremacist governments brought victories. This eventually put enough fear into the capitalist ruling class that President Johnson was finally pushed to destroy the power of the KKK and used federal troops to enforce desegregation orders. Johnson was completely wedded to the white supremacist power structure, but he wasn’t stupid; he saw the revolutionary potential of armed Black proletarian power rising in the south. Johnson took action rather than allow an armed Black working class to further mobilize and smash the terror of racist cops and the KKK, which would have built a stronger independent Black militant leadership in the process. Instead, once pushed by that alternative, Johnson preferred to take action himself and claim credit on behalf of the white supremacist power structure, Democrat Party, and moderate Negro leaders. This, in turn, helped preserve the white supremacist power structure, its racist divide and rule tactics, and its system of capitalist exploitation.

Similarly, the 200,000 armed Black men who fought in the Union Army to smash the southern slavocracy are barely mentioned in official histories given of the liberation of African Americans from slavery. Likewise, the fact that southern Blacks were immediately disarmed after the Civil War is hardly mentioned as the first step in the betrayal of Radical Reconstruction. By disarming the southern Black population the northern bourgeoisie was able prevent needed land reform and instead set up a sharecropper system with land still under the ownership of former slave masters. Blacks being disarmed and dispossessed of what was rightfully theirs set the stage for the next step of northern bourgeois betrayal, where they allowed the white supremacist fascist terror of the White League, Red Shirts, and Democrat Party to smash Radical Reconstruction and drive southern Blacks into almost a hundred years of legal Jim Crow segregation and extreme political repression.

The right of African Americans and the working class in general to be armed for self-defense is a critical question, not to be undermined by liberal bourgeois public opinion. History has shown that the right to armed self-defense against the terror of the white supremacist capitalist state and its vigilantes has been a critical question in regards to Black liberation and Native American liberation. It was the power of armed Black people in the south in the 1960s that dismantled the official power of the KKK and Jim Crow segregation. Unfortunately, some of that terror and segregation has been replaced by increased numbers of racist, brutal, and militarized cops on the streets as well as an expansion of the prison industrial complex. Meanwhile, the Democrat Party, which opposes armed self-defense for Black people, has been a central cause of the problem. Examples include Bill Clinton who promised, and gave us, 100,000 more cops on the streets. Likewise, today Obama is spending $3 billion per year to militarize police forces across the United State.

Armed protests have taken place against recent police murders. In response to the police murder of Michael Brown, dozens of members of the Hewey P. Newton gun club have marched with rifles in hand in Texas. The Revolutionary Tendency stands in solidarity with this action, despite other strong differences we have with the New Black Panther Party that led it. Likewise, we also stand with an armed multiracial protest held in Beaver Creek, Ohio in October against the police murder of John Crawford III. John Crawford III was an African American man who was inspecting a BB gun in a Wal-Mart store when cops blew him away. Store surveillance cameras show that John Crawford III broke no laws and never even pointed the BB gun at anyone. He was no conceivable threat. As is standard operating procedure, a grand jury has also failed to indict the cops who murdered John Crawford III. The armed protest for John Crawford III marched through the store where John Crawford III was murdered. This armed protest was organized by Anonymous, Cop Block, and Ohio Open Carry.

The right to open carry was outlawed in California in response to the armed anti-police brutality patrols of the Black Panther Party (BPP). These patrols were set-up by the BPP after the racist police murder of Denzil Dowell on April 1st, 1967. The BPP responded to this murder by exposing it with their press and setting up armed self-defense patrols. The patrols would listen in on scanners to the police and arrive on the scene of police abuses in the Black community with loaded weapons and legal experts to advise and defend victims of racist police arrests and violence. The successes of these patrols quickly caught the attention of the state government with Governor Ronald Reagan signing the Mulford Act (widely dubbed the Panther Bill) into law. Don Mulford who submitted the bill, like Ronald Reagan, was a Republican. The Mulford Act of 1967 prohibits the carrying of loaded firearms in public in the sate of California. Obviously, the Republican Party does not support the right to armed self-defense. In fact, they are an even more virulently racist party than the Democrats and only support the right to bear arms as long as the weapons stay in the hands of white people. Nationwide coverage of an armed open carry protest carried out by the BPP in Sacramento against the Mulford Act in 1967 gave birth to the BPP as a nationwide organization because young Black people were fed up and wanted to join a group willing to take such bold action.

Similarly, the 1934 ban on automatic weapons came when three important strikes lead by reds shook the foundations of the capitalist status quo in the United States. While gangsters like Al Capone were cited as the need for such a law, gangsters then were just as capable of getting illegal Thompson submachine guns as they are of purchasing illegal Uzis today. The purpose of gun control in 1934 as in 1967 was not to disarm criminals, but instead to disarm rebellious Blacks and the working class in general as they fought back against their oppression and exploitation. During the Great Depression the specter of working class revolution loomed greatly in the fears of the ruling class as capitalist economics and strike breaking had ground much of the working class into unacceptable conditions. Those fears were greatly amplified in 1934 as three ground shaking strikes were led to victory by revolutionary reds.

Before 1934, the working class of the United States was getting pulverized, in part due to the ineffective tactics of the union bureaucracy. It was a situation very similar to today. In 1934 this all changed with three major strikes led by reds. These were the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, led by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America, the San Francisco Longshoreman's strike, led by the Communist Party, and the Toledo Auto Lite strike, led by the left socialists of the Workers Party (which later joined the Trotskyists). In Minneapolis and San Francisco these strikes escalated to general strikes after cops killed workers. In Minneapolis, deputies were also killed in fighting at the Battle of Deputies Run. These three strikes were the beginning of a labor upsurge that greatly improved the lives of the working class of the United States through collective bargaining. It also forced the ruling class to begin giving us the New Deal in 1935 which included a minimum wage, an end to most child labor, Social Security, and jobs programs. While this was only a beginning to what we deserve, they were still victories, and those victories were won through militant industrial actions with the essential leadership of communists.

Despite the victories in 1934, government brutality continued. This included the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in South Chicago when the Chicago police opened fire on marching steel workers and their families. Ten workers were murdered and 40 more were injured. All of them were shot in the back. An additional 101 protesters were injured from police beatings, including an 8 year-old child. In that strike, which was unfortunately not led by class conscious communists, the union misleaders told workers that they should welcome these cops sent in by the Democratic Party.

The push for gun control largely comes from white well off liberals who trust the police and Democrat Party to protect them. Arguments against cheap “Saturday night special” handguns are an argument to make guns more expensive and to keep them out of the hands of working class and poor people who need them the most. In addition, arguments that so-called “assault weapons” are not needed to kill deer miss the entire point of the Second Amendment for the right to bear arms. That amendment was added to the constitution because the poor plebian masses that had just made a revolution didn’t trust the ruling class and demanded that this right be put in the constitution, not to kill deer, but to kill oppressors as the need arises. The right to bear arms was a fundamental gain of the American Revolution. Likewise, U.S. government attempts at gun control are a counterrevolutionary act similar to British attempts at gun control that sparked the American Revolution in the first place.

The Revolutionary Tendency stands with the right to armed self-defense and opposes racist anti-gun laws like the Mulford Act. Likewise, we stand for the right of people to form armed self-defense militias and point out that in places where it is not legal to carry a loaded gun, it is still legal to carry other weapons like tasers.

Liberalism Versus the Right to Struggle by Any Means Necessary

As part of Martin Luther King Junior’s liberal pacifist strategy, he tried to prop up the Democrat Party. For most of his political career, Martin Luther King Jr. was even silent on the U.S. slaughter in Vietnam carried out by two successive presidents of the Democrat Party; This included being silent about Black people being slaughtered in that war. It wasn’t until soon before King’s murder when King finally broke his silence and spoke out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1967.

In opposition to the liberal pacifist strategies of the Civil Rights movement emerged the leadership of Malcolm X which advocated the right of Black people to self-defense, denounced the Democrat Party as racist, advocated Black self-determination, and opposed U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, the Congo, and elsewhere.

Martin Luther King Jr. did play a courageous role in leading the Civil Rights movement from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott up until his assassination in 1968. Yet, in all of Martin Luther King Jr.’s glad handling and support for the racist and mass murdering Democrat Party, of Malcolm X, King stated, “in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice.”

Yet, this was false. Malcolm X did offer solutions. When King was desperate due to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence he begged for federal troops from his friend Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ refused. Malcolm X responded:

“If the federal Government will not send troops to your aid, just say the word and we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize self-defense units among our people and the Ku Klux Klan will then receive a taste of its own medicine. The day of turning the other cheek to those brute beasts is over.”

Martin Luther King rejected the offer, calling it “immoral”. In 1965 Malcolm X traveled to the south and spoke out at the Tuskegee Institute and in Selma. At a Civil Rights gathering in Selma, Civil Rights leader and close associates of King, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King, tried to prevent Malcolm X from speaking. Yet, participants at the event insisted Malcolm X should be allowed to speak and he was allowed to do so. From the podium, Malcolm X proclaimed he was:

“One hundred percent for the effort being put forth by the Black folks here. …they have an absolute right to use whatever means are necessary to gain the vote. ….I pray that all the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out, and when you look at that man, if you know he’s nothing but a coward, you won’t fear him. If he wasn’t a coward, he wouldn’t gang up on you… . They put on a sheet so you won’t know who they are—that’s a coward. No! The time will come when that sheet will be ripped off. If the federal government doesn’t take it off, we’ll take it off.”

Malcolm X was giving voice to a movement that at that time was in fact beginning to be highly armed. In fact, federal troops were not sent into the south until after Blacks were armed. FBI infiltration in the Nation of Islam was then used to successfully push for the assassination of Malcolm X.

Andrew Young, for his part, moved on in his career from trying to prevent militant action in the Black community to becoming the oppressor as the Democrat Party’s mayor of Atlanta, then Congressman, and then finally serving under the racist imperialist presidency of Jimmy Carter where he served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations. In that position, Andrew Young worked for Jimmy Carter’s imperialist policies which included direct support for the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, carrying out the U.S. imperialist economic blockade of Cuba, direct support for the Shah of Iran, direct support for the mujahideen holy war against women's rights and literacy in Afghanistan, (which gave birth to the Taliban) and direct support for the genocide of East Timor.

By murdering many of the best Black leaders and promoting hand pick leaders like Andrew Young, Barack Obama, Reverend Al Sharpton (a self-admitted former FBI informant), the U.S. government has managed to channel much of America’s justified Black anger into support for Black oppression in the Democrat Party. Similarly, the conservative labor bureaucracy misleads workers through losing tactics on the picket lines while promoting support for anti-union Democrats as the only way forward for labor. To combat these problems, a revolutionary workers party must be built that advocates winning strategies by the multiracial working class and opposes support for our oppressors in the Democrat Party on principle. Along the road to revolution, among the most important tools we have to pressure for changes are strike actions. Yet, to bring about this kind of effective action takes the patient organizing of a revolutionary party of the multi-racial working class that challenges the legitimacy of most of the current leadership of the unions and left in general in the United States. While strikes by the multi-racial working class are the most effective strategy of resistance we currently have, the current rarity of such actions insures that frustration also spills over and takes other forms. These other forms of resistance should not be ignored and should not be condemned.

-Steven Argue for the Revolutionary Tendency​

For solutions to fight back against racism and rampant police murders, please see the Revolutionary Tendency's in-depth four-part article:

Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, & Revolutionary Solutions
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/222482/index.php

Closing Our Eyes Won’t Make Racial and Ethnic Inequalities Disappear
by STEVEN ARGUE
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/21/18473855.php

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