Free the Land

The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State

Edward Onaci

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469656151
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

On March 31, 1968, over 500 Black nationalists convened in Detroit to begin the process of securing independence from the United States. Many concluded that Black Americans' best remaining hope for liberation was the creation of a sovereign nation-state, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). New Afrikan citizens traced boundaries that encompassed a large portion of the South--including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana--as part of their demand for reparation. As champions of these goals, they framed their struggle as one that would allow the descendants of enslaved people to choose freely whether they should be citizens of the United States. New Afrikans also argued for financial restitution for the enslavement and subsequent inhumane treatment of Black Americans. The struggle to "Free the Land" remains active to this day. This book is the first to tell the full history of the RNA and the New Afrikan Independence Movement. Edward Onaci shows how New Afrikans remade their lifestyles and daily activities to create a self-consciously revolutionary culture, and argues that the RNA's tactics and ideology were essential to the evolution of Black political struggles. Onaci expands the story of Black Power politics, shedding new light on the long-term legacies of mid-century Black Nationalism.

1 Birth of the New Afrikan Independence Movement

A Historical Overview

On March 29, 1969, New Afrikans assembled at New Bethel Baptist Church, Reverend C. L. Franklin’s ecumenical home, during a weekend-long celebration of the Republic of New Afrika’s first anniversary. Active in grassroots organizing, Reverend Franklin at times worked on civil rights campaigns with two Republic of New Afrika (RNA) cofounders, Milton and Richard Henry, including the 1963 “Freedom March” at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” sequence. Even though Reverend Franklin never claimed to support the creation of an independent black nation-state, he sometimes rented his church for black political activities.¹

As the day’s festivities were coming to a close, between forty and fifty police officers burst into the building. According to newspaper reports, they trained their weapons on the two hundred or so attending men, women, and children; and they may have exchanged shots with a rifleman in open view near the altar, as well as someone shooting from a semiconcealed location in the ceiling. The assault came moments after officers Michael Czapski and Richard Worobec observed armed guards from the Black Legion (the RNA military) outside the church building. Newspaper accounts claimed the guards shot the two officers—one fatally—as Czapski and Worobec approached to question the black men. Detroit police suggested the armed Legionnaires then ran into New Bethel, still shooting, as more officers arrived to rescue the dying Czapski and wounded Worobec. The onslaught left four attendees injured and resulted in 143 arrests. To the displeasure of local police and the Detroit News, black judge George Crockett released most of the arrestees the following morning.²

The “New Bethel Incident” and its immediate aftermath drew national attention and sensationalistic media coverage to the year-old RNA Provisional Government (PG-RNA). Police-community relations were already tense, and the battle at New Bethel strained them severely. It seemed to confirm fears that Black Power was indeed going after Anglo America’s “mama,” as former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Julius Lester quipped.³ For some white Detroiters, the gun battle evidenced another violent clash between “black militants” and the police, and provided one more justification for their flight from the inner city to more guarded homes in the suburbs.⁴ For New Afrikans, the events of March 29 served as a reminder that the U.S. government would use its extensive resources to prevent RNA activists from bringing their version of Black Power, the attainment of New Afrikan independence, to fruition. Many New Afrikans also understood it as the first battle in what promised to be a long and drawn-out war for self-determination.

The PG-RNA and the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) it initiated developed out of Detroit’s legacy of black struggle. The PG-RNA emerged specifically from the activism of the 1960s with the goal of independent statehood. Essential in this story were brothers Gaidi and Imari Obadele (also known as Milton and Richard Henry, respectively), leading figures in the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL) and the Malcolm X Society. Their activism and ideological evolution led to the call for the National Black Government Conference, later considered a convention, that birthed the PG-RNA. Following the convention, the PG-RNA weathered two major splits, two well-known shootouts, and other forms of overt and covert repression. Nevertheless, the PG-RNA and the movement survived.

The NAIM came into existence during an era that witnessed profound shifts in America’s political atmosphere that ended Black Power and ushered in a new, more conservative sociopolitical moment. The growing state oppression and conservatism of the years that followed would effectively end the Black Power movement. New Afrikans’ success in making it through this era set the context of the “New Afrikan Political Science” and the ways that participation in the NAIM was more than just a form of political activism—it came to shape activists’ whole lives.

Black Struggle in Detroit and the Prehistory of the RNA

Detroit’s story is one of migration, racial conflict, and black liberation struggle against a backdrop of industrial growth and decline. From the 1880s through World War II, the opening of new industries in Detroit prompted a migration that dramatically changed the city’s population density and demographic makeup. Detroit’s renown as the “Motor City” beckoned immigrants from all over the nation and world whose residency, in turn, helped the city become the fourth largest in the United States by 1920. In one period of tremendous growth between 1910 and 1920, black migrants increased the city’s African American population by 611.3 percent. This dramatic increase resulted partially from the expansion of the auto industry and the “relaxation” of discriminatory employment practices. Detroit met steady streams of black migrants originating from almost every state in the Deep South and several northern Atlantic states. With World War I and the anti-immigrant legislation that followed, black migrants found unprecedented success in Detroit’s labor market. Despite new work opportunities and growth in the African American population, black Detroiters had not overcome the major racial obstacles that characterized their quest for employment and decent housing in the wartime era and its aftermath. Companies hired black job seekers out of desperation and fired them at whim, and tensions between black workers and their white peers often led to violence.⁵

In their search for economic security, some African Americans began joining and organizing within labor unions such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Black union participation gained momentum during the 1930s following President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act, which gave more flexibility to workers trying to collectively organize for their rights. Although many black workers were initially skeptical of unions, talented organizers in Detroit managed to recruit enough of them to give black laborers some presence and power.⁶

Notwithstanding these opportunities in industrial workspaces, factors such as restrictive covenants, discriminatory loan practices, racialized violence, and “blockbusting” kept black Detroiters packed tightly in the city’s East Side. When African Americans like Ossian Sweet moved into white neighborhoods, they were greeted with enmity and violence. Sweet was a gynecologist who moved into a segregated neighborhood in September 1925. Anticipating a hostile welcome into his new home, Sweet and his family arrived with several guns, ammunition, and food. As he expected, a group of white Detroiters gathered outside his home and at one point surrounded and threatened Sweet’s brother and a friend. During this tense moment, someone fired a weapon from Sweet’s house, killing a white man who was standing on a porch across the street. Sweet and ten others were arrested and charged with murder. An all-white jury ruled in Sweet’s and his ten codefendants’ favor. The historic victory encouraged some African Americans to continue pushing to live where they pleased and to remain resolute in their right to enjoy all aspects of life uninhibited. Still, the antagonism toward black Detroiters’ ambitions continued, and tensions erupted into anti-black violence during the race riot of 1943, the worst disturbance the United States had seen to date.⁷

Black Detroiters’ campaigns included strong showings of African American women activists and met with government repression of the early Cold War. As they did in other cities throughout the 1940s, African American women fought thoroughly for economic security, demanded equal access to public accommodations, hosted voter registration drives, and contested police brutality, among other activities. For example, the Detroit Association of Women’s Clubs sponsored “voters’ institutes” to educate its members about the voting process, pressing social issues, and political candidates. These women involved the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (DCCR), and other national and local organizations in their often successful enterprises.⁸ However, black women and men’s activism was complicated by coordinated repression against communism and anything mainstream politicians could label as “subversive.” As a defense attorney for the Communist Party and lead attorney with the U.S. Department of Labor, George Crockett experienced high levels of repression, including a four-month sentence in federal prison for contempt after defending future Detroit mayor Coleman Young and other targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Crockett’s work made him ineligible for public elected office until 1966, after nationwide black civil rights activism pushed enough reforms for him to operate freely.⁹

White people, too, gave varying levels of support to black equality. Henry Ford began implementing a seemingly more egalitarian business strategy, and the UAW and other unions became more open to promoting civil rights. Together, such shifts, when combined with the efforts of black activists, helped bring welcome changes. Although these efforts did not end racism in Detroit, by the 1950s, the city’s African Americans achieved more economic and political power than ever before. Together, the various factors prompted some to revere Detroit as a “Model City” and “one of the major centers of black progress.” As scholars August Meier and Elliot Rudwick point out, “this [progress] came at the very time that the multiplying NAACP legal victories and the dramatic rise of Martin Luther King to public prominence signified a revolution of expectations that was spawning a new militancy among black Americans.” New modes of struggle that favored direct confrontation instituted a new era in black activism.¹⁰

Shifts in direction and strategy caught the attention of the forty-first, forty-second, and forty-third governors of Michigan, G. Mennen Williams, John B. Swainson, and George Romney, respectively, who each utilized the power of the position to aid civil rights causes. From 1948 through 1969, they gave state-funded efforts unprecedented power to investigate and address violations of their constituents’ civil rights, thus making the state one of the most racially progressive in the nation. In Detroit, this racial progressivism manifested through the Civil Rights Commission’s involvement with housing and employment discrimination and police brutality. Though the Michigan governors, particularly Romney, deserve some credit for their willingness to use their executive powers toward the advancement of black civic equality, it was the national civil rights movement that determined Detroit activists’ successes.¹¹ Where the governors and civil rights activists failed, discrimination and racial violence persisted. Those oppressive tendencies influenced how black political organizations in Detroit evolved into the 1960s.

One organization that attempted to create a more equitable Detroit was the Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC), created in 1957 with the help of Horace Sheffield, an international representative for the UAW, to improve the conditions of black workers in their workplaces and unions. In a field of labor veterans who were still recovering from recent anticommunist assaults that spread to and weakened a range of left and liberal activists and organizations, Sheffield and the TULC’s role in the black community resulted from political assaults on the National Negro Labor Council’s Detroit body and the Local 600. Carrying on the work of those radical organizations, the TULC made visible the rifts in the “liberal-labor coalition, which had grown out of the black-union alliance during and after World War II.” This coalition included the NAACP, Detroit Urban League, UAW, Jewish Community Council, various black churches, the Civil Rights Commission, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), among others. The TULC fought racism within labor unions and staged frontal attacks on racist restaurants, skating rinks, bars, and many other accommodations and recreational facilities, all while providing financial support to the southern movement. The council also supported the election of racial liberal Jerome Cavanaugh as mayor in 1962. In some ways, the undertakings of the TULC proved to be a liberal dress rehearsal for the activism staged by black leftist groups, including those that would involve Milton and Richard Henry.¹²

One such group was the Freedom Now Party (FNP), an all-black political party founded by journalist William Worthy and others just before the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Party organizers sought to make the FNP national but gained momentum primarily in Michigan.¹³ Grace Lee and James Boggs, Reverend Albert B. Cleage, and several other activists helped create the Detroit FNP directly following the 1963 Grassroots Leadership Conference at which Malcolm X delivered his speech “Message to the Grassroots.” They sought to make the FNP a recognizable force in Detroit city and Michigan state politics. With the hopes to transform U.S. party politics, several fairly well-known black Detroiters ran for local and state offices, including Milton Henry for Congress, radical lawyer Christopher Alston for senate, and Reverend Cleage for governor. With the interracial support of the Socialist Workers Party, the membership of GOAL, and Uhuru, a militant black student group whose leaders would later play instrumental roles in the creation of the Revolutionary Union Movements (RUMs), it seemed the FNP would achieve its desired results. However, disappointment reigned as the primary victor when all FNP candidates lost their respective elections. The party quickly declined thereafter but was succeeded by the RUMs, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (the League), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Malcolm X Society, and the PG-RNA.¹⁴

The League was a coalition of RUMs that formed at various auto manufacturing plants (e.g., Dodge or DRUM and Ford or FRUM) and sought to organize black workers as the revolutionary vanguard of the United States. The League’s ideology fused activists’ understanding of the capitalist exploitation of workers with theories concerning the racial exploitation of the black colony in the United States. League members argued that if black workers could take control over the means of production, these laborers would provide leadership to oppressed groups and eventually create a society free of racial, economic, and gender oppression. The League also anticipated that revolutionaries in the United States would aid similar movements against imperialism abroad. Moreover, leaders from the League were central participants in the National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC). Resolutions from the conference allowed the League to secure funds for the creation of the Black Star line of press, publications, film productions, and a bookstore. They also made a film, Finally Got the News, which documented the League’s struggles and ideals. Although the League and the PG-RNA disagreed on the issue of reparations, they had a generally amicable relationship and even worked together on activities related to Robert F. Williams.¹⁵

RAM was another important organization in Detroit. It was a revolutionary organization created by Donald Freeman and Maxwell Stanford Jr., student activists from Cleveland and Philadelphia, respectively. It had a national and largely underground membership, and it boasted the support of Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams. Stanford (later known as Akbar Muhammad Ahmad) established a RAM group in Detroit in 1963 and maintained close relationships with many...