There are two types of Black Nationalisms that I am going to discuss: Revolutionary Black Nationalism and Reactionary Black Nationalism. Before doing so, let’s talk about the origins of Black Nationalism and its ideas.
Black Nationalism can be described as a few things: national liberation and self-determination for Black people, advocating for Black liberation and power. Many Black Nationalists wish to advocate for Black self-government in the form of a separate Black nation. Black Nationalism as a concept was first brought forth in the United States by the Black abolitionist Martin Delany who lived in the 19th century. He coined the slogan “Africa for Africans”. In the 20th century, Marcus Garvey furthered the ideology of Black Nationalism and was an important figure in the Pan-Afrikan movement (then called Pan-Negro). Garvey encouraged many Afrikans around the world to be proud of their race and advocated for Afrikans from the USA to go to Liberia. Marcus Garvey was also notable for designing the Pan-Afrikan flag, which has the colours, red, black and green”. Red stands for blood, black stands for Afrikans and green stands for the land.
The concept of a separate Black nation came about in the 1950s and was also popular amongst Black radicals in the 1960s and 70s thanks to Malcolm X. Until 1964, Malcolm X disagreed with Martin Luther King’s views on racial unity where Blacks and Whites live in unity. He especially criticised King’s speech “I Have A Dream” and gave a response later in the year of 1963. The speech was called “Message to the Grassroots”. During the speech, he called King a “house Negro” which is a Black person who is a sell-out to White people, a bit like the definition of a “Coon”. He also said: “You cannot have a revolution without violence, that what blacks in America need to fight for is not the right to sit next to a white man at a lunch counter but the right to a country of their own. It is a call for black nationalism, for black revolution.”
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), an important figure of the Black Power movement, was also in favour of a separate Black nation arguing that integration was harmful to the Black population because it meant that Black people had to integrate to White communities.
Now let’s get to the difference between Revolutionary Black Nationalism and Reactionary Black Nationalism. It is safe to say that all Black separatists are Black Nationalists but not all Black Nationalists are Black separatists. It is also safe to say that all Reactionary Black Nationalists are Black separatists. Black separatism isn’t always reactionary but Reactionary Black Nationalists aim for a reactionary kind of separatism. We can say that the views of Reactionary Black Nationalists mirror the views of White supremacists and there are times when Reactionary Black Nationalists collaborated with them. Examples of Reactionary Black Nationalists are Nation of Islam, New Black Panther Party and Black Hammer.
The Nation of Islam is a Black Muslim group that Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali used to be in. But both figures became disillusioned with the group because they did not believe that Whites were the devil. Additionally, Malcolm X’s views regarding Black Nationalism changed after a visit to the Middle East including Mecca turning to Sunni Islam. He did still support Black Nationalism but also became supportive of integration. The Nation of Islam is anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ+. A major member of Nation of Islam claimed that Jews were to blame for the existence of homosexuality, called Jews “bloodsuckers”, said that German Jews gave Hitler money to finance the Holocaust and believes that Jews own the banks and the federal reserve. Nation of Islam is “trying to make our children respect their own sexuality” and not homosexuality, which is “created by Satan and his manipulation of biology and chemistry.” He also said, “You don’t want to be a man anymore? And some of you don’t want to be a woman anymore? Just look at yourself. Men coming to men with lust like you should react to a female!” Nation of Islam has also called for the genocide of White babies in the United States.
The New Black Panther Party (NBPP), which has no association with OG Black Panther Party members, is a non-Marxist, anti-Semitic and another anti-LGBTQ+ party. The Huey P. Newton foundation which is run by OG Black Panther Party members and their descendants have condemned the NBPP and said they were not legitimate. It was founded by an OG Black Panther member named Michael McGee, who shifted his views from Revolutionary to Reactionary Black Nationalism. The Party is currently led by Krystal Muhammad. Whilst being anti-Zionist (in which I have no problem with), the party takes an opportunity to be anti-Semitic believing the same narratives about Jews and economic control.
These are a couple of other quotes they said about Jewish people:
Our lessons talk about the bloodsuckers of the poor. … It’s that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, Johnny-come-lately, perpetrating-a-fraud, just-crawled-out-of-the-caves-and-hills-of-Europe, so-called damn Jew … and I feel everything I’m saying up here is kosher.
You see, everybody always talk about Hitler exterminating 6 million Jews. … But don’t nobody ever asked what did they do to Hitler? What did they do to them folks? They went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped, they turned around and a German, in his own country, would almost have to go to a Jew to get money. They had undermined the very fabric of the society.
Divine Allah, a NBPP leader, called Reed Gusciora, the first openly gay mayor in Trenton, New Jersey a f****t during a rally. Hashim Nzinga also said during a Los Angeles Times interview that “homosexuality is evil”. There isn’t much on their homophobic side but the fact that a chapter’s leader openly exposed themselves as homophobic is very telling.
In the past, NBPP members have been very intimidating threatening to OG BPP members. During an event in 2002 organised by OG BPP members, 30 NBPP members sabotaged the event, seizing control and threatening violence against OG BPP members. This incident was conducted by NBPP member Malik Zulu Shabazz.
On August 19th, 2015, Dhoruba bin Wahad, an OG BPP member and a friend attended an event organised by a faction of the NBPP. Bin Wahad confronted the group because he didn’t like the NBPP’s adoption of the name and what they stood for. Bin Wahad and his friend were ordered to leave but refused. After that, they were badly assaulted. Bin Wahad was left with a concussion and a broken jaw. It was afterwards when Elbert “Big Man” Howard, another OG BPP member denounced the group as reactionaries and thugs.
Let’s get to the final reactionary Black nationalist group and that is Black Hammer Organisation (BHO). Black Hammer is a cult organisation, who are anti-Semitic, denying the holocaust and calling Anne Frank a “coloniser”, cannot have a decent argument/discussion without calling people “crackers” out of nowhere, or saying to a non-White person that they have sold out to their “cracker friends” when they disagree with them (this did happen to me so I made fun of their unibrow and also called them a “cracker” in which they blocked me afterwards). Just like Nation of Islam and the NBPP, BHO are very anti-White, they are so anti-White that they don’t believe that marginalised White people (such as White women, White LGBTQ+ people and White disabled people) should receive rights as they are marginalised just because they are White. Additionally, on Facebook, I saw Gazi Kodzo along the lines saying that we shouldn’t care if White women get r*ped. They also bullied an indigenous Tongva person I know for not being “Native enough” when the person criticised the way they talked about landback in which the person said that they talk about it in a very colonial way. Additionally, BHO is very commandist and all members have to agree with what the leadership says otherwise they will be bullied. Leaving the BHO cult is worse because ex-members of BHO have been harassed and doxxed. They “praise” Communism, yet they call Marx a “coloniser” for some reason.
On commenting on BHO, Black political prisoner, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, who is the co-founder of the Revolutionary Intercommunalist Black Panther Party, said:
And more telling, just like Hitler, Gazi, a rabid anti-Marxist, is a rightist pushing a racial nationalist line under a false cover of Socialism. Remember, Communism was called Socialism until V.I. Lenin broke with the Social Democrats and coined the Communist name to distinguish the revolutionary Marxist line from the revisionism of the Second International.
Let’s move on to Revolutionary Black Nationalism. Revolutionary Black Nationalism seeks national liberation and self-determination for Black people by Marxist means. Revolutionary Black Nationalists are progressive, pro-democratic people who seek for a Socialist revolution with the goal of establishing a revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat led by Black and other colonised peoples. Some Revolutionary Black Nationalists think this should be done by allying with working class people of other races in order to lead to a revolution whilst others believe this should be done by establishing a separate nation for Black people. We will get to the latter later.
An example of a Revolutionary Black Nationalist group was the original Black Panther Party. Formed in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale (who is still alive), the Black Panther Party were a vanguard party for Black people. They were Marxist-Leninists following Mao Zedong Thought and created a 10-point program to serve poor Black people.
One of their biggest successes was the free breakfast program. The program started in Oakland, California and spread to 36 cities by 1971. It was more successful than the breakfast programs that the United States, mainly because the Panthers’ version were free for impoverished kids rather than low-cost. Even in a 1969 US Senate hearing, the national School Lunch Program administrator admitted that the Panthers fed more poor school children than did the State of California.
This drove J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time, angry. Because of what happened, he declared the Black Panther Party to be a threat. He called the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” just because of the breakfast program. What made the group an even bigger threat to him was that the program also gained the support of moderate Black people as well as White liberals.
As a result the FBI, under an illegal ongoing operation called COINTELPRO to stop Black liberation movements, conducted raids, arrests and murders of Black Panther members. There were lots of FBI informants in the Black Panther Party who would purposely cause infighting which caused the downfall of the party.
Even though the Black Panther Party were Revolutionary Black Nationalists, they did not believe in separatism. Huey P. Newton talked about this in his book “Revolutionary Intercommunalism” where he explained that he and his friends before the Black Panther Party believed there should be a separate nation for Black people. He said:
When we started in October 1966, we were what one would call Black Nationalists. We realised the contradictions in society, the pressure on Black people in particular, and we saw that most people in the past had solved some of their problems by forming nations. We therefore argued that it was rational and logical for us to believe that our sufferings as a people would end when we established a nation of our own, composed of our own people.
But after a while we saw that something was wrong with the resolution of the problem. In the past, nationhood was a fairly easy thing to accomplish. If we look around now, though, we see that the world — the land space, the livable parts as we know them — is pretty well settled. So we realised that to create a new nation we would have to become a dominant faction in this one, and yet the fact that we did not have power was the contradiction that drove us to seek nationhood in the first place. It is an endless circle you see: to achieve nationhood, we needed to become a dominant force; but to become a dominant force we needed to be a nation.
So we made a further analysis and found that in order for us to be a dominant force we would at least have to be great in number. So we developed from just plain nationalists or separatist nationalists into revolutionary nationalists. We said that we joined with all of the other people in the world struggling for decolonisation and nationhood, and called ourselves a “dispersed colony” because we did not have the geographical concentration that other so-called colonies had. But we did have Black communities throughout the country — San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Haven — and there are many similarities between these communities and the traditional kind of colony. We also thought that if we allied with those other colonies we would have a greater number, a greater chance, a greater force; and that is what we needed, of course, because only force kept us a colonised people.
We saw that it was not only beneficial for us to be revolutionary nationalists but to express our solidarity with those friends who suffered many of the same kind of pressures we suffered. Therefore we changed our self-definitions. We said that we are not only revolutionary nationalists — that is, nationalists who want revolutionary changes in everything, including the economic system the oppressor inflicts upon us — but we are also individuals deeply concerned with the other people of the world and their desires for revolution. In order to show this solidarity, we decided to call ourselves internationalists.
Here, “Black Nationalist” refers to a Black person who supports a separate nation for Black people but they became “revolutionary nationalists” because they felt like a separate nation for Black people was very unscientific.
The Black Panthers were also the first Communist party to support gay rights in 1970. Actually Huey P. Newton led a speech in New York talking about Women’s liberation and gay liberation and called people “insecure” if they did not support them.
To come back to what I said earlier about some revolutionary black nationalists believing that seeking a revolution should be done by allying working class people of other races, that is exactly what Fred Hampton did. Fred Hampton was a very young person who was assassinated by the police at aged 22. He was the leader of BPP’s Chicago chapter and convinced gangs to form revolutionary groups instead and eventually formed a coalition called the “Rainbow Coalition”. The coalition involved the Black Panther Party, the White Panther Party and the Brown Panther Party. The White Panther Party were formerly White non-Latino gangsters known as the “Young Patriots” and the Brown Panther Party were formerly Latino gangsters known as the “Young Lords”. Because the White Panther Party were an all-White party, many people confused them as White supremacists, an easy assumption to make. They had to make sure to people that they were not White supremacists, that they were a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist group who supported Black liberation.
The next group I’m going to talk about is the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party (RIBPP), which are a party that exists today. I mentioned about this party earlier in this article when I spoke about Black Hammer. This party was formed in December of 2020. It was formed after a split from the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. On his website, political prisoner, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson explains why the split happened and it was because of the NABPP’s alleged commandist nature. He said:
This separation was compelled by maneuverings of Tom “Big Warrior” Watts (aka Xing Eela) the present General Secretary of the NABPP, and Shaka Zulu (aka Zulu Sharod), the NABPP chairperson, to expel and silence anyone who questioned or challenged their behavior or self-appointed and self-validating holds on power over the NABPP.
He also explained that there was a mistreatment of women by Shaka.
So together with imprisoned and non-imprisoned comrades, he formed RIBPP. They also formed a coalition similar to the Rainbow Coalition in which NABPP had too (called the United Panther Movement). Rashid and his comrades named this new coalition the “Panther Solidarity Organisation” that also contain the Brown Panthers and the White Panthers.
The Party upholds Marxism-Leninism-Maoism which is what they call “revolutionary proletarian ideology” and they are very progressive. They even accused the NABPP of being homophobic and transphobic.
The final example I will be giving will be the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). The RNA was formed in 1968 and is a provisional Black nation located in the Southeastern United States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina where there is a high density of a New Afrikan (“Afrikan-Amerikan”) population. The demonym of RNA is therefore “New Afrikan”. New Afrikans refers to Black people who are descendants of slavery in the Amerikas. Although their nationalities are Amerikan or US Amerikan and they were born in the USA, they don’t identify with that sort because the United States was found on stolen land and slavery. There are three main goals of this movement:
- Creation of an independent black-majority country situated in the Southeastern United States, in the heart of an area of black-majority population.
- Payment by the federal government of several billion dollars in reparations to Afrikan-Amerikan descendants of slaves for the damages inflicted on Afrikans and their descendants by chattel enslavement, Jim Crow laws, and modern-day forms of racism.
- A referendum of all Afrikan-Amerikans to determine their desires for citizenship; movement leaders say their ancestors were not offered a choice in this matter after emancipation in 1865 following the American Civil War.
Nothing hints that RNA is reactionary and I believe what they follow a kind of revolutionary kind of Black separatism. In the book, “The Basic Tenets of Revolutionary Black Nationalism”, the author Muhammad Ahmad believed that one of the downfalls of the Black Panther Party was the failure to create a separate nation for Black people and follow that line. You can read a PDF version of the book here.
To conclude this, the difference between revolutionary Black nationalism and reactionary Black nationalism is important to look out for. Revolutionary Black nationalism is a progressive nationalism for Black people. It supports revolutionary socialism to support struggles of Black people, a movement for national liberation and self-determination for ALL Black people, no matter their identity. It recognises that Black Capitalism isn’t the solution as it only provides for the Black middle and upper class but not the working class, the vast majority of Black people. Revolutionary Black nationalists are not anti-White or anti-Semitic and support the working-class struggles of all people, especially also non-Black colonised peoples.
Reactionary Black nationalists are the contrary. They are NOT progressive. They are bigots which prioritise mostly Black cis straight men, projecting their misogyny, transmisogyny and homophobia on the Black people who are less privileged than them. They are anti-Semitic and some of them may be racist to non-Black colonised peoples too. They are also anti-Socialist and usually support Black Capitalism as the alternative to White Capitalism. Reactionary Black nationalists block the path to Black liberation.
Relevant book recommendations:
“The Basic Tenets of Revolutionary Black Nationalism” by Muhammad Ahmad.
“False Nationalism, False Internationalism” by E. Tani.
“Revolutionary Intercommunalism and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” by Huey P. Newton and Vladimir Lenin.
