Gary, Indiana, a city nearly 80% Black, went almost two weeks without power after a storm, just as its utility company NiSource announced a $140 million dividend payout to its shareholders. Indiana hosts 147 data centers, and Gary’s electric grid alone powers eight of them. If we look at South Memphis, a neighborhood that is 90% Black and working-class — first settled by formerly enslaved people in 1863 — we’ll find Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer facility running unpermitted gas turbines that have increased peak nitrogen dioxide concentrations by 79% in surrounding areas. They are drawing from the same electrical grid that left Black families without power after a recent storm. And last week, Jeff Bezos’ AI startup Project Prometheus signed a 100,000 square foot lease in West Oakland, with Elon Musk’s Tesla signing an adjacent lease the following day, while a separate developer announced a data center in downtown Oakland. The revolutionary capital of the world is being converted into the factory floor for Silicon Valley’s AI boom.

These are not three separate stories. Gary hosted the largest independent Black political gathering in American history in 1972. Memphis is where Dr. King was assassinated supporting striking Black sanitation workers in 1968. Oakland is where the Black Panther Party built the survival programs that fed 20,000 children a week and shamed the federal government into creating the national school breakfast program. The power structure is not choosing these cities by accident. It is choosing them because these are the cities where we built the most powerful organizing models in American history. Converting them into sacrifice zones for the AI boom is the most efficient way to destroy both the communities and the blueprint simultaneously.

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The founders were not confused about this. James Madison said it plainly in Federalist No. 10: pure democracy was dangerous, the problem of faction was that majorities might actually govern, and the solution was a republic where enlightened representatives filtered the passions of the masses and protected the rights of property from the threat of popular will. A republic is not a democracy with extra steps. It is democracy’s alternative — a system designed to prevent the majority from actually governing. That distinction matters right now, when we are asked to celebrate freedom in a country where you did not vote to go to war with Iran, did not vote to send billions in military equipment to Israel, and did not vote for the corporate class that buys the politicians who make those decisions. You voted for representatives who then do whatever their donors require. That is the republic working exactly as Madison designed it.

This week, in the middle of the 250th birthday party, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions that together tell you everything about whose republic this actually is: it upheld birthright citizenship — the 14th Amendment right that extends citizenship to anyone born on American soil — and in the same breath struck down decades-old federal limits on how much money political parties can spend on campaigns. One decision throws a bone. The other doubles down on the actual architecture of power. That combination is not a contradiction — it is a strategy that has been running since Reconstruction, documented with devastating precision by W.E.B. Du Bois, and it is still the only thing stopping the poor from eating the rich.

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That choice had a name. It was called modernity. And what it really meant was: find the cheapest way to mass produce something, build for extraction rather than longevity, ignore local climate and local materials, and replace everything that already worked with something that looked like progress. The reason so many people have bought into Capitalism is because it has been branded as modernity. The International Style of architecture — those identical glass towers, airports, shopping malls, and concrete apartment blocks that became the visual language of development across the entire globe after World War I — was designed for a temperate European climate and sold everywhere else as the superior way to build. Building codes in colonized nations were rewritten to mirror European standards. Local craftsmen were dismissed. Local materials were called primitive. Local techniques, refined over centuries of actual experience with actual climates, were abandoned. And most of the so-called third world already knew how to build for heat before air conditioning existed — had known for centuries, in fact — and was told that knowledge was worthless.

Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that the final aim of colonization was to convince the indigenous population that it would save them from darkness. The built environment is where that propaganda becomes most literal and the European heatwave is where it comes apart entirely. The place that colonized the world in the name of modernity, that replaced superior indigenous building traditions with cheaper, climate-ignorant construction, that burned the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis in the process, is now dying in buildings it chose while demanding the rest of the world call it development. The absurdity would be almost funny if people weren’t dying in it.

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But here’s the part of his story that I think we skip past too quickly: when he was finally free, he chose to go back into bondage. Not because anyone forced him to, but because the man who owned his wife and three children was moving to Texas to get ahead of Emancipation, and Jack Yates was not about to be free somewhere his family wasn’t. So he went with them. He worked a plantation south of Galveston as an enslaved man again, by his own request, until June 19, 1865, when word finally reached Texas that the war was over and so was slavery — and that is also, not coincidentally, the day we now call Juneteenth.

Upon Emancipation, Jack Yates and the people who walked out of bondage on Emancipation Trail from Galveston to Houston didn’t have homes, land, or a dollar to their name. Yet within a few years they built a church with hand-carved pews that are still standing, a school, the first two-story house ever owned by a Black man in Houston, and ten acres of land in the middle of the city that they named Emancipation Park. There’s a $33 million renovation of that same park completed less than a decade ago by the same architect who designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and there’s a whole history of what’s happening to the neighborhood Yates built that most of us have never heard, including a fight over literal bricks in the street that’s still going on right now. I’ll get into all of that. But first you need to understand what it actually took to build it the first time.

Jack Yates: From Bondage to Bondage by Choice

He was born John Henry Yates in Gloucester County, Virginia, on July 11, 1828, enslaved to a family whose son happened to be in school. Because his mother’s labor kept her inside that house rather than out in a field, young Jack absorbed pieces of that schooling alongside him — reading, writing, arithmetic, the foundational tools an entire legal system was built to keep out of his hands. He married Harriet Willis, enslaved on a neighboring plantation, and together they would eventually have eleven children.

When Harriet’s enslaver decided to relocate his plantation to Matagorda County, Texas, specifically to get ahead of what he saw coming — the end of slavery — Jack Yates, who was already free, asked to go with them. Asked to be enslaved again. Because the alternative was a freedom that didn’t include his wife and his children, and he had already decided that wasn’t a freedom worth having.

He worked that Texas plantation until June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were free — over two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had technically freed them, because Texas was about as far from enforcement as you could get in the Confederacy. The moment word reached him, Jack Yates grabbed his family and moved to Houston, joining a wave of other newly freed families with nowhere established to go. Together they settled along the banks of Buffalo Bayou and formed what would become the first Freedmen’s Town in America.

What He Actually Built

Jacqueline Bostic, Jack Yates’ great-granddaughter, told me plainly: “They had no homes. They had nowhere to go. But they were allowed to settle on Buffalo Bayou and they lived in tents.” Tents on a riverbank. That was the starting point.

From there, in the span of a handful of years, Jack Yates helped build a functioning Black community from the ground up. He helped people buy property and actually keep it — walking them through their payments, their taxes, how to hold onto land in a system designed to strip it back away from them the moment they acquired it. In 1866, he became founding pastor of what would become Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, Houston’s first Black Baptist church. The building that congregation raised — finished in 1875, built substantially through the free labor of its own members — still stands today with every pew inside hand-crafted by the people who worshipped there. In 1869, with his brother and brother-in-law, he built Black Houston’s first two-story house — Tuscan columns, decorative metal shingles, a real architectural statement. Four years removed from slavery, a man once classified as property now owned something with style and permanence built into it.

He worked as a drayman during the day, hauling freight, and preached in the evenings. Somewhere in that schedule he also established Houston Academy, a school for Black children that eventually became Booker T. Washington High School, and helped lay groundwork for what would become Texas Southern University.

Emancipation Park: Built by Nickels and Dimes

Seven years after Emancipation — seven years after the people building this park had been legally classified as property — Jack Yates organized his congregation to raise one thousand dollars. Nickels and dimes and Sunday offerings, dollar by dollar, until they had enough to purchase ten acres of land in what is now the heart of Houston’s Fourth Ward.

Then came the naming. They could have called it Freedom Park. Jubilee Park. Something celebratory, something that leaned into the redemptive feeling of the moment. Instead they named it Emancipation Park — naming the struggle itself, the legal and moral rupture of slavery’s end, rather than just the feeling that followed it. Anyone who walks through that park, then or now, is confronted with what actually happened. Not soothed by a softer word.

There’s a photograph from Juneteenth in 1908 of two of Jack Yates’ daughters, Martha and Pinkie, dressed in elaborate finery — hats, lace, the full visual language of formal celebration — standing in that same park their father’s congregation built with spare change. How many of us would take the very crop we bled over and turn it into the occasion for that kind of dressed-up joy? That is the legacy we come from: a people who made a way out of no way, and who, even with nothing, still had style.

Emancipation Park is still there today. In 2017, the community invested over $33 million in its renovation, led by architect Philip Freelon — the same architect who designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. From a handful of formerly enslaved congregants pooling spare change in 1872 to a Smithsonian-caliber architect renovating their park a century and a half later — that thread is the story of Black Houston in a single image.

Freedmen’s Town Today: Gentrification and the Fight to Remain

Freedmen’s Town is still here, and it is still fighting for its life.

The neighborhood’s signature brick streets — laid by roughly a thousand formerly enslaved people in patterns that historians say carried deliberate significance from West African cultural traditions — are one of the only intact, hand-built physical records of freedmen’s labor left anywhere in this country. For decades the city treated those bricks as an inconvenience. Street reconstruction projects ripped them up without regard for their historical weight. Some were relocated to a public works storage facility and left outside, deteriorating for years. As recently as 2025, contractors and developers illegally removed bricks during construction without following the legal process required to protect them — and it took a unanimous Houston City Council vote in 2026 just to get the city to formally return custody of the salvaged bricks to the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy.

Out of the hundreds of historic structures that once made up this neighborhood, fewer than thirty remain. Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church, standing for 68 years, literally crumbled into rubble while preservationists wept watching it happen. Freedmen’s Town — once known as Houston’s Black Wall Street, full of restaurants and jazz clubs through the 1930s — has been eaten away by the construction of Interstate 45, by decades of deferred maintenance that was never accidental, and by luxury development pressing against its borders for years. Charonda Johnson, Vice President of the Freedmen’s Town Association, put it plainly: “I’ve lived through 10 failed master plans for this community... the community was not centered in these master plans.”

There is organized work happening right now to change that. The Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, partnered with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and backed by Houston Endowment funding, is in the middle of a multi-year initiative called Rebirth in Action — restoring a full mile of the original brick streets, preserving 35 historic structures, returning salvaged bricks to their rightful place rather than a warehouse. It is slow. It is contested. It requires constant vigilance against a city and a development market that has shown, repeatedly, that it will take the path of least resistance straight through a Black historic district if nobody is standing in the way. But it is happening, because people who understand exactly what Jack Yates built refuse to let it disappear on their watch.

We’re Doing the Opposite of Jack Yates

Juneteenth became a federal holiday in June 2021, and the corporate response arrived almost before the ink was dry. Walmart released a Juneteenth-themed ice cream. An Ikea store offered employees watermelon and fried chicken for the occasion. A chemical manufacturing company attempted to trademark the word “Juneteenth” itself for use on flavor enhancers, before public backlash forced them to drop it. Companies that stayed silent for a hundred and fifty years of Black-led Juneteenth celebrations suddenly discovered, the moment federal recognition created a marketing opportunity, that they had something to say.

That critique is the easy one. The harder one: this corporatization isn’t only happening to us from the outside. A lot of us are doing it to ourselves, modeling our own celebrations after the same capitalist logic the holiday is supposed to stand against. If your Juneteenth event costs two hundred dollars to walk through the door, you had better be building something with that money — a school, a piece of land, a building that outlasts the night. Jack Yates’ congregation built a church, a park, and a school with a fraction of that, raised in nickels and dimes, by people who had been enslaved less than a decade before. If your Juneteenth weekend is mostly content for a brand partnership, mostly a backdrop for somebody’s sponsored post, mostly an outing rather than an investment, ask yourself honestly what is actually being commemorated.

Juneteenth has never been about freedom from something alone. It has always, from the very first dollar Jack Yates’ congregation pooled together in 1872, been about the freedom to build something for ourselves — something durable enough that it doesn’t get burned down or paved over or quietly left to crumble a generation later. That doesn’t require a six-figure budget or a corporate sponsor. It requires the same thing it required in 1872: people in a community looking honestly at what is actually missing, and deciding to pool what they have to fill that gap themselves. Jack Yates didn’t wait for permission, and he didn’t wait for a sponsor. He just started building. That’s the whole blueprint. That’s always been the whole blueprint.

Further Reading:

• BlackPast.org, “John Henry ‘Jack’ Yates (1828–1897)”

• Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, “Rebirth in Action” initiative materials

• Houston History Magazine, on the construction of I-45 and Freedmen’s Town’s decline

• Defender Network, “Preserving Freedmen’s Town: The Fourth Ward’s push for identity amid change”

• Matthew Delmont, commentary on Juneteenth and federal recognition, Dartmouth College

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I had some chuckles watching Netflix Is a Joke: The Roast of Kevin Hart — I'm not going to pretend I didn't. But I want to be honest about what happened between the chuckle and the reckoning — because there was a moment, somewhere between the third time a white comedian compared Sheryl Underwood to an animal and the George Floyd joke, where the laughter stopped feeling like laughter and started feeling like something else. Something older. Something I recognized. Mel Watkins wrote in On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy that nobody ever said minstrel shows weren’t entertaining. They just reduced us to something less than human. And the audience laughed. Kevin, I need you to understand what stage you were actually standing on — because it wasn’t just Netflix. It was history.

What you built on that stage was not just a roast. It was a cultural event that landed at a very specific political moment — the same week the Voting Rights Act was gutted, the same week Southern states began racing to eliminate Black congressional districts, the same week the executive of GEO Group, the company that owns most of our private prisons and holds a billion dollars in ICE contracts, was put in charge of ICE. The George Floyd joke didn’t land in a vacuum. It landed in that. And I have some things I need to say to you directly — about minstrelsy, about what actually happened on that stage, about Trump’s cultural strategy, and about what comedy is actually for when everything is on the line.

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If you haven’t read Parts 1 and 2, start there.

Because Part 3 is about right now. What we do with what we have. How we stay the course when they want us focused on survival instead of systems change. How we refuse to accept that what is happening is permanent — because it is not.

The Future They Want You to Believe Is Inevitable Is Not Inevitable

Federal funding is disappearing. Contracts are being cut. Organizations that have been doing this work for decades are being told to do it for free or not at all. There may be a creeping despair — a competition for scraps where there used to be collaboration. A focus on keeping the lights on rather than dismantling the building that was never built for us.

I want to name that feeling because it is real. And then I want to challenge it directly.

What is happening right now is not written in stone. It is a political project — deliberate, coordinated, and funded — to roll back the gains of the last fifty years. And political projects can be resisted. Have been resisted. Have been defeated.

They banned us from reading. We built underground schools and secret libraries and passed knowledge by firelight. And then we built 107 HBCUs that now produce 80% of Black judges, 50% of Black doctors, and 50% of Black lawyers in this country.

They burned Tulsa’s Black Wall Street to the ground. We rebuilt. And when they came for affirmative action in 2023 and DEI in 2025 — when they tried to close the doors of predominantly white institutions to our children — HBCU applications surged. Florida A&M received 20,000 applications for 1,600 spots. When they shut the door, we built another house.

They tried to chemically destroy our communities with crack cocaine and then lock us up for the addiction. For thirty years it felt immovable. And then formerly incarcerated people organized. Families who lost loved ones to addiction organized. Community advocates who refused the individual-blame narrative organized. And they ended mandatory minimums. They won decriminalization in state after state. They made the cost of the status quo too high to sustain. Not because the system wanted to change. Because the people it was crushing refused to pretend it was natural.

They gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. They finished the job just recently — Justice Kagan called it “all but a dead letter.” And within days, people were in Alabama on the Edmund Pettus Bridge — the same ground where John Lewis and 600 people were beaten on national television in 1965 until the moral obscenity became undeniable and Congress moved. Sixty years later — same bridge, same fight, same people who refuse to accept that what is happening is permanent.

They are banning Black history from classrooms. Teachers are turning every banned book into a teach-in.

They are defunding the mental health infrastructure that serves our communities. And people across this country are in rooms right now, figuring out how to build it themselves.

This is the pattern. They attack. We adapt. We build. And we do not stop.

I will tell you what actually shifts systems:

Political will created by organized people, applied to economic pressure.

That is the lesson of Montgomery. That is the lesson of every single example in this series. The powerful do not become good. They become unable to afford the status quo.

What Staying the Course Looks Like — Concretely

So what do we do? Right now. With what we have. Here are eight concrete recommendations — not abstractions, not inspiration, but tools.

1. Hit their pockets — organized.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott worked because Black people controlled where their dollars went for 381 days. We are the consumers of insurance products. We pay premiums. We are the consumers of retail, of entertainment, of every sector of the American economy. If insurance companies want our business, they need to fund the research and the infrastructure that keeps our communities healthy. This is not a request. It is a condition of the relationship. Targeted, organized boycotts of companies and industries that profit from our consumption while refusing to invest in our wellbeing are a proven historical tool. It is time to pick it back up.

2. Build your own membership base — the masses fund the movement.

Every organization serving our community has people who believe in that work. Low-cost memberships — five dollars a month, ten dollars a month — from the masses of people who have been touched by what we do can generate real, sustainable, non-federal revenue. We stop waiting for grant cycles and start building community-owned financial infrastructure. This is what mutual aid looks like in the twenty-first century. As someone who runs a museum, I am in many conversations with institutions who lost federal funding and worry about sustainability. We will always be looking for donors, grants, and large contributions, but I also remind people that when 1,000 people give $10 a month, that generates $120,000 a year. There are over two million Black residents in California alone. If 1% of them gave $10 a month, that would generate $2.4 million annually. The masses can fund the movement — but only if we build the infrastructure to collect it.

3. Train our communities to collect data and do research — for ourselves.

The knowledge that Black communities hold about their own healing is real knowledge. We need to go further than waiting for academia to validate it. We need to actively teach our communities how to conduct research, how to collect data, how to document what works. If we wait for the academy to validate our practices, we will wait forever. Our knowledge does not need their validation to be real or impactful.

4. Create our own credentialing.

If the formal system will not fund or recognize practitioners from our communities — if the pipeline to licensure remains inaccessible due to cost, time, and a curriculum that was not built with us in mind — then we build our own. Community health worker certification. Peer support specialist training. Healing practice credentials rooted in African-centered frameworks. This is not anti-science. This is what the Panthers did when they built health clinics without government permission. This is what HBCUs did when mainstream universities wouldn’t accept us. We create the institutions we need.

5. Demand that insurance companies invest in our communities.

If we are going to consume their products, they must fund the research needed for our communities to be healthy. This is leverage. We have leverage. Let’s use it.

6. Stay in relationship with the church — honestly and in partnership.

Not to criticize from outside, but to build from within. To sit with pastors and deacons and church mothers and youth and help them understand what their congregation is carrying — and connect them to people who can help. The Panthers worked with churches. They held their breakfast programs in church halls. They asked for meeting space and food donations and the church said yes. That partnership is available to us too.

7. Protect our knowledge.

The data, the community-defined practices, the evidence we have built, the relationships — none of that can be erased by federal defunding or artificial intelligence. Document everything. Create records that belong to communities, not to contracts. Our knowledge is ours. And they cannot take what they cannot find.

8. Refuse to compete with each other.

The scarcity being imposed on us is designed to make us fight over crumbs. I have watched organizations that shared the same values and served the same communities turn on each other to survive the cuts. I understand it. I also know it destroys us. We have to share resources. We have to refer rather than compete. We have to build coalitions that don’t fall apart when the money does. And that requires real, intentional, sustained relationship building — not just when there is something to gain, but especially when there isn’t.

Closing

I want to end with a quote from Dr. King, from 1967:

“Nothing could be more tragic than for men to live in these revolutionary times and fail to achieve the new attitudes and the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands.”

These are revolutionary times. And the question is not whether the revolution is happening — it is. The question is who it is for. Whether the disruption of this moment will be seized by those who want to take us backward, or by those of us who know that the system as it existed was never adequate — and that we must build something better.

They want us focused on survival, not systems change. They want us competing, not collaborating. They want us believing that what they are doing is inevitable. They want us to forget what we have already done.

Do not forget.

We built mutual aid when there was no safety net. We built HBCUs when there were no universities for us. We walked for 381 days in Montgomery when they told us we had no power. We built the Free Breakfast Program and shamed a nation into feeding its children. We have organized our way to freedom before — not from positions of power, but from positions of exclusion, of violence, of impossible odds.

We have done more with less. We have healed each other without resources, built institutions without permission, shifted systems without being invited to the table.

The belly of the beast is not a comfortable place to be. It never has been. But we have ancestral knowledge. We have community wisdom. We have people across this country who have given years of their lives to understanding how to reach our people, how to heal our people, how to create the conditions for our people to thrive.

That knowledge does not belong to a grant cycle. It belongs to us. And they cannot take it.

We’ve been here before. And we are still here.

Now let’s get to work.

This three-part series was adapted from a speech delivered at the California Reducing Disparities Project — African American Hub Final Annual Convening.

If you haven’t read Part 1, start there.

Because Part 2 is about what we did anyway.

Everything significant we have ever built, we built while facing resistance. And I want to be specific — because we are too often given the that without the how. The inspiration without the instruction. The legend without the blueprint. So let me give you the blueprint.

We Built Mutual Aid From Scratch, Block By Block

When the formal economy excluded us, Black communities created parallel institutions. The fraternal orders — the Elks, the Prince Hall Masons, the Order of the Eastern Star — functioned as insurance systems long before insurance companies would cover Black people. Members paid dues. They showed up when someone died, when someone lost work, when a family needed help moving. The Black church passed the collection plate not just for the Lord but for the neighbor who couldn’t make rent, for the family whose breadwinner was just locked up, for the child who needed eyeglasses. This was not charity. This was infrastructure — organized and intentional, built community by community because survival demanded it.

Following Emancipation, the federal government built the Freedmen’s Bureau — a federal agency designed to help formerly enslaved people integrate into the economy. It distributed food, built schools, and negotiated labor contracts. Things we needed to become citizens here. And when it collapsed under political opposition in 1872, we picked up the pieces ourselves.

Our people did not give up on education. They established Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) — many under violent threat, many with barely any resources — through church fundraising, philanthropy, community sacrifice, and sheer determination. Faculty sometimes worked without pay. Communities held bake sales and fish fries to keep the lights on. And those institutions produced generation after generation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and mental health practitioners who came back to serve their communities. The system failed us, so we built our own system. Today HBCUs produce 80% of Black judges, 50% of Black doctors, and 50% of Black lawyers in this country. Built without permission. Built under threat. Built anyway.

We Built an Economic Weapon and We Used It

On December 5, 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus, Black women organizers at the Women’s Political Council had leaflets printed and distributed to Black schools and businesses within hours. Not days. Hours. The community organized. And for 381 days — over a year — the Black residents of Montgomery, who made up 75 percent of the city’s bus riders, did not ride. They walked. They formed carpools. Black taxi drivers voluntarily lowered their fares to the price of a bus ticket in solidarity. They built an entire alternative transportation system from the ground up, managed by the Montgomery Improvement Association, with a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. as its chairman.

The city’s bus system lost an estimated $3,000 a day. Downtown retail businesses lost revenue because Black people were spending their dollars elsewhere. Montgomery business leaders — a group called the Men of Montgomery — tried to negotiate an end to the boycott. But the boycott lasted until December 20, 1956, when the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. They won because they hit the pockets. They won because the community held together for over a year, despite intimidation, despite arrests, despite the bombing of Dr. King’s home. They held.

And the lesson that business leaders from that era confirmed in their own writings is this: what shifted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not moral persuasion alone. It was economic pressure. It was boycotts that directly hurt white business owners who then pressured politicians to act. Systems don’t change because the powerful become good. Systems change because the cost of not changing becomes too high.

We Built the Black Panther Party

I am the Founding Director of the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland and the Executive Director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. So let me tell you what is actually in that history — because the media has spent fifty years trying to reduce the Panthers to guns and leather jackets.

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California in 1966. Yes, they monitored police patrols. Yes, they exercised their legal right to open carry. And then they did something that terrified FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover far more than any weapon: they built a parallel welfare state from scratch.

They called them Survival Programs — with the slogan survival pending revolution. There were eventually 65 of them, operating across 45 chapters. Let me name some.

The Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program launched in January 1969 at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland with eleven children. By the end of that school year, it was feeding 20,000 children every week across 36 cities. The administrator of the federal National Lunch Program confessed that the Black Panther Party was feeding more low-income children than the entire State of California. A school principal reported: “The children weren’t falling asleep in class. They weren’t crying with stomach cramps.” The government was so threatened by this that Hoover declared the breakfast program “the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP.” Think about that. Feeding children was more threatening to the state than armed resistance.

They built People’s Free Medical Clinics in thirteen cities. They ran a free ambulance program in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They screened thousands of Black people for sickle cell anemia — a genetic condition that predominantly affects Black people — at a time when the government had no such program and had no intention of building one. When the American Red Cross earmarked only $10,000 per year for sickle cell research, the Panthers launched mass testing and research nationwide at a scale never before seen. They created Liberation Schools where children learned how to think, not what to think. They built the Seniors Against a Fearful Environment program (SAFE) to protect elderly residents from robbery and connect them to transportation for banking and medical appointments. They ran free legal aid. They distributed free clothing, shoes, and food. They provided drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

They treated health not as a personal failing but as a political condition. Long before the phrase “social determinants of health” existed in policy language — the idea that poverty, housing, and environment shape health outcomes — the Panthers were living it. They understood that hunger causes poor school performance. That poverty causes illness. That state violence causes trauma. And rather than waiting for the system to fix what the system had broken, they built alternatives — neighborhood by neighborhood, chapter by chapter.

The FBI did everything in their power to destroy the Party through COINTELPRO — the counterintelligence program we covered in a previous issue of this Substack. Surveillance, infiltration, the assassination of leaders like 21-year-old Fred Hampton in his sleep, raids where agents smashed and urinated on the food meant for children’s breakfasts. They dismantled the organization through legal persecution, manufactured conflict between leaders, and brute force.

But here is what they could not destroy: the blueprint.

The federal school breakfast program that feeds millions of children today? The Panthers showed it was possible and shamed the government into creating it. Community health clinics, peer health programs, neighborhood-based mental health outreach — all of it carries Panther DNA. You cannot kill an idea that has already been proven to work.

And that blueprint is exactly what is under attack right now.

Federal funding is disappearing. Contracts are being cut. Organizations that have been doing this work for decades are being told to do it for free or not at all. The very infrastructure our communities built — the bridges between our people and the healing they deserve — is being systematically defunded by people who have never set foot in the communities they are dismantling.

But if you know this history. If you know what we built with nothing, under threat, without permission, then you know that defunding is not defeat. It is a provocation. And we have answered provocations before.

Part 3 is about how we answer this one. Concretely. With specific tools, specific strategies, and the same spirit that built everything you just read about.

We have done more with less. We are about to do it again.

Part 3 is coming — eight concrete recommendations for staying the course when they want us focused on survival instead of systems change. The Montgomery Boycott showed us that economic pressure moves systems. The Panthers showed us that parallel institutions outlast political attacks. Part 3 is about what that looks like right now, in 2026, with what we have.

Click here to read Part 3: Staying the Course

I see you. I feel you. But I need you to hear this.

We have been here before.

Not metaphorically. Not as inspiration. Literally. Our community has faced the withdrawal of resources, the criminalization of our existence, the dismantling of hard-won gains — and we have not only survived it, we have built through it. And we will do so again.

As the Executive Director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and the Founding Director of the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland, I have spent my career studying how our people have survived the unsurvivable and built the unbuildable. This is what I know: the history they didn’t teach you is not just the past. It is a blueprint for right now. And right now, we need it more than ever.

So here is what we are going to do across this series. First, we are going to name what we have survived. Then we are going to talk about what we built outside the system and how we did it. Then we are going to talk about what staying the course looks like — concretely, with specific recommendations — in a time of political upheaval.

Let’s start at the beginning.

We Need to Name What We’ve Survived

We really went through slavery. Do you ever sit back and really think about that? We are the people who went through what the United Nations has declared the gravest crime against humanity.

Two hundred and forty-six years of it. The systematic destruction of language, family, spiritual practice, name, and self. The breeding of human beings like livestock. The torture of children in front of their parents. The selling of fathers and mothers away from children who would never see them again. The legal prohibition of literacy — it was a crime to teach an enslaved person to read. The erasure of everything that told our ancestors who they were.

That was not ancient history. That was four or five generations ago. There are people alive today whose grandparents were born into it.

And then after emancipation, a large percentage of Black people died from starvation. We had a brief moment of political power during Reconstruction — the period after the Civil War when Black men could vote, hold office, and build — and then the South passed sweeping laws called Black Codes, criminalizing our existence. If we chose not to work after centuries of working for free, we would be incarcerated and sent to convict leasing camps — plantations owned by the state where we were leased out to private corporations for profit. Sound familiar?

Then came a reign of racial terror that this country still refuses to fully reckon with. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented over 4,000 lynchings of Black people in the American South between 1877 and 1950. Four thousand. Public murders attended like festivals. Postcards made and mailed. They kept fingers and toes as souvenirs on display at general stores. And those are only the ones documented.

We went through the systematic destruction of Black wealth. In 1921, an entire thriving Black district called Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma — known as Black Wall Street — was burned to the ground by white mobs, with city and state complicity. The leveling of Rosewood. The razing of countless other communities our people had built from nothing. We built, and they burned. They wouldn’t give us two pennies in reparations but just put billions aside for those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

We fought and bled in American wars, then came home to Jim Crow. We organized, marched, were firehosed and beaten and jailed, and we won — we won — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, landmark protections for our humanity. Victories carved out of the bodies of our martyrs.

And then they came for those too.

Just recently, the Supreme Court effectively nullified Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision that had protected minority voters’ ability to elect their chosen representatives for sixty years. Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, said the majority had rendered the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” An election law expert described it as: “This is a full gut. This is burn the house down and pretend the house still exists because you can point to where the foundation used to be.”

Republican-led states across the South are now racing to redraw maps. One analysis found the gerrymandering this decision unleashes could result in white candidates taking fifteen House seats currently held by Black members of Congress — a level of racial rollback not seen since the end of Reconstruction.

The War on Drugs Was a War on Us

Right after we won the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Black elected officials rose to the challenge across the nation. But we quickly learned the limitations of legislation in a system built on our backs and rigged against us. That is why it has always been important to apply pressure on the system while building parallel institutions outside of it.

The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966 — the organization whose legacy I steward today — quickly spread across 40 states and built its own infrastructure. They fed children when the wealthiest nation on earth would not. They built medical clinics. They organized doctors and nursing students to serve communities where more Black people were dying than getting healed in public hospitals. I’ll go deep on what they built in Part 2. But first, I need to name what was done to dismantle them — and to all of us — at the height of our power.

At the height of Black political power. At the height of Black self-determination. At the height of global solidarity with oppressed peoples across the world. The U.S. government declared a new war on Black communities. They called it the War on Drugs.

We know now it was a war on us. President Nixon’s own domestic policy advisor admitted on the record that it was a deliberate political project — designed to target Black people and the anti-war left. They flooded our communities with crack cocaine and then criminalized the addiction. They built a carceral system — a prison system — that has imprisoned more Black people than were enslaved at the peak of slavery. That is not a metaphor. That is a statistic.

Drugs and guns didn’t hit our communities at the height of Black political power by accident. It was chemical warfare.

The Mental Health Gap Is Not an Accident

And here is what I need you to sit with, because it connects everything:

They taught us to blame ourselves.

Just like they taught individual crack users to blame themselves for their addiction — while our entire community was under coordinated chemical attack — they have taught us to see our mental health struggles as personal failures. Individual weakness. Spiritual deficiency. Something to be ashamed of.

We went through slavery. We went through terror and lynching. We went through the destruction of our wealth and our neighborhoods. We went through mass incarceration. We are right now watching the rights we bled for stripped away in real time. Every single one of those things is retraumatizing. Every single one of those things lands in the body, in the nervous system, in the mind — and across generations. Researchers call this intergenerational trauma. We call it Tuesday.

And then we are told: there is no money to treat it. There are not enough providers who look like us. The system that was built without us — and in many ways against us — cannot serve us. And when we suffer, we are told that is our fault too.

The 2012 California Reducing Disparities Project report — a landmark community-based mental health study titled “We Ain’t Crazy! Just Coping with a Crazy System” — told the truth about this. The formal mental health system, as it relates to our community, has offered inaccurate diagnoses, disproportionate findings of severe mental illness, and greater usage of involuntary commitments. It has pathologized our grief and criminalized our trauma. As early as 1765 in Virginia, public policy was built on the unscientific fiction that Africans were immune from mental illness — which meant we were excluded from care before care even had a name.

A 79-year-old Black community activist named Helen Rucker said it plainly in that report: “It’s amazing to me that Black people are not in an insane asylum. Some of the things I have had to put up with in my 79 years just to survive is amazing to me... I should have been in counseling a long time ago.”

That is not a clinical statement. That is a testimony.

The report also pointed to the Black church — and this must be held with love, because the critique matters. For generations, the Black church has been the mental health infrastructure for our community. When the formal system excluded us, the church held us. And for that we are grateful. But there is a gap. Too often the message has been “take it to God” rather than “get some help.” Spiritual care and clinical care are not opposites — but when someone is in crisis, prayer alone is not a treatment plan. The gap between the church and the clinical system has left too many of our people suffering in silence, calling their depression weakness, calling their PTSD faithlessness, hiding their children’s diagnoses because “we don’t talk about that.”

We need both. We have always needed both. The work of advocates and practitioners across this country has been to build the bridge that the system refused to build for us.

And now they want to defund the bridge.

Part 2 is coming — and it’s about what we built without them, and how we did it. The Black Panther Party’s survival programs. The Montgomery Bus Boycott. HBCUs. The mutual aid networks that kept us alive when the government would not. The blueprint is real, it is documented, and it belongs to us.

Click here to read Part 2: What We Built Without Them

Today is May Day — an official holiday in 80 countries, celebrated by workers across the world, born from a labor uprising on American soil. In 1886, workers in Chicago went on a national strike demanding eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for themselves. A stick of dynamite went off during the protest. The police blamed the workers. The workers said it was agent provocateurs — the same tactic used against our movements to this day. Labor organizers were arrested and executed. The incident, known as the Haymarket Affair, gained international attention and ignited a global movement — by 1889, workers across the world had declared May 1st International Workers’ Day. Five years later, Pullman railroad workers shut down U.S. transportation in one of the largest labor uprisings in American history, demanding relief from wages so low and rent so high that the company controlled every aspect of their lives. The federal government sent in troops and killed the strikers. Then immediately after crushing the uprising, it gave workers a holiday. Not May 1st. September. Labor Day. Because May Day connected American workers to workers everywhere, and that was the threat. May Day said workers of the world. Labor Day said American workers only. The ruling class has always understood that an international working class is ungovernable. That is why they buried the holiday they created — and why today, on May Day 2026, it is worth knowing exactly what was at stake and what still is.

Class War, Black Labor, and the Holiday They Didn’t Want You to Have

The Haymarket Affair of 1886 did not begin as a confrontation. It began as a demand so simple it should have required no negotiation at all: that working people have sixteen hours of their day back. American workers in the 1880s routinely worked twelve to sixteen hour days, six and seven days a week, in conditions that maimed and killed them at rates that would be unthinkable today. The eight-hour movement was not radical. It was survival.

The national strike of May 1, 1886 brought hundreds of thousands of workers into the streets across the country. In Chicago, the center of the movement, a rally at Haymarket Square turned deadly when a bomb exploded in the crowd of police and protesters. No one has ever definitively established who threw it. What happened next, however, was entirely deliberate: the state used the explosion as justification for a sweeping crackdown on labor organizers, arresting eight anarchist leaders and executing four of them despite no direct evidence connecting them to the bombing. The message to working people was clear — organize at this level and we will kill your leaders and call it justice.

But the crackdown backfired internationally. The executions of the Haymarket martyrs galvanized labor movements across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. In 1889, the Second International — a global federation of socialist and labor parties — declared May 1st International Workers’ Day in their honor. The demand for an eight-hour workday was now a global movement, connected across borders, languages, and industries. This is precisely what the American ruling class feared most: not workers organizing within a single country, which could be managed, but workers recognizing that their interests were identical across national lines.

The Pullman Strike and the Government’s Answer

Eight years after Haymarket, the Pullman Palace Car Company provided the next great test of that fear. George Pullman had built a company town outside Chicago — literally owning the houses his workers lived in, the stores they shopped in, the churches they worshipped in, and the wages they earned. When a depression hit in 1893 and Pullman cut wages while refusing to lower rents, workers walked out. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, called a sympathy boycott that spread to 27 states and effectively halted U.S. rail transportation — the circulatory system of the entire American economy.

President Grover Cleveland sent in 12,000 federal troops over the objections of the Illinois governor. Strikers were killed. Debs was arrested and imprisoned. The strike was broken. And then, in a move whose cynicism is almost breathtaking, President Cleveland signed legislation creating a federal Labor Day holiday, placing it in September, specifically and deliberately distanced from May 1st. The calculation was explicit: give workers a holiday that celebrates American labor in isolation, disconnected from the international movement, stripped of its radical history. Keep them national. Keep them grateful. Keep them from looking across the border and recognizing their brothers and sisters.

Black Workers, Class War, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

The history of American labor cannot be told honestly without confronting the ways the labor movement itself reproduced the racial hierarchy it claimed to oppose. Many of the unions that won the eight-hour workday explicitly excluded Black workers through formal clauses or informal practice. Black workers were locked out of the trades, the factories, and the protections that white workers were fighting for and winning.

No industry illustrated this more clearly than the Pullman railroad system. George Pullman had built his luxury sleeping car empire on the labor of Black men — almost exclusively formerly enslaved people and their descendants — who worked as porters, serving white passengers around the clock for wages so low they depended on tips to survive. The Pullman porter became one of the most iconic figures in Black American life — simultaneously a symbol of dignified Black labor and of its systematic exploitation. These men traveled the country, carried newspapers and ideas between Black communities from Chicago to Harlem to New Orleans, and built the connective tissue of the Black middle class through their networks and their earnings.

In 1925, A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first major labor union organized and led by Black workers in American history. What Randolph understood was precisely what the ruling class had always feared about May Day: that workers organizing across lines of race and nationality were ungovernable. He spent twelve years fighting Pullman, the AFL, and the federal government simultaneously. In 1937, the Brotherhood won — securing a contract that raised wages, reduced hours, and established the union as a legitimate bargaining force. It was a landmark victory not just for Black labor but for the American labor movement as a whole, proving that the workers the movement had tried hardest to exclude were capable of its most disciplined and sustained organizing.

Randolph went on to become one of the architects of the 1963 March on Washington, formally titled the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Not just freedom. Jobs. Randolph never let the civil rights movement forget that political liberation without economic liberation was incomplete. The class analysis was always there, embedded in the labor tradition that ran from Haymarket through Pullman through the Brotherhood to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

What They’re Still Afraid Of

The ruling class of 2026 is afraid of exactly what the ruling class of 1886 was afraid of: workers recognizing their common interests across the lines that divide them. The tactics have been updated but the logic is identical. Union membership in the United States has fallen from 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to under 10% today, a decline engineered through decades of legislation, union-busting, and the deliberate export of manufacturing jobs to countries where labor costs less and workers have fewer protections. The gig economy has reclassified millions of workers as independent contractors, stripping them of benefits, overtime protections, and the right to organize. And the same federal government that crushed the Pullman Strike in 1894 has spent the past several decades systematically defunding the regulatory agencies that protect workers on the job.

What is different in 2026 is that the class war has become impossible to hide. When the wealthiest people in human history hold more wealth than the bottom half of humanity combined, the argument that the system rewards hard work and punishes laziness becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The workers who built the eight-hour workday understood something that is becoming newly visible to a generation that has never known economic security: that the conditions of working people are not the result of individual failure. They are the result of deliberate policy choices made by people who benefit from keeping labor cheap, disorganized, and afraid.

May Day exists because workers in 1886 decided that intolerable conditions required collective action. The Haymarket martyrs were killed for that decision. The Pullman strikers were killed for that decision. A. Philip Randolph spent twelve years fighting for that decision. And every year, 80 countries stop work on May 1st to remember what that decision cost and what it won. The United States doesn’t celebrate May Day because the ruling class correctly identified it as the most dangerous idea in the history of capitalism: that workers everywhere have more in common with each other than they do with the people who own the companies they work for. That idea did not die in 1886. It did not die in 1894. And on May Day 2026, with workers across the world in the streets, it is very much alive.

Further Reading:

• Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (1984)

• Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (1972)

• Eugene Debs, Unionism and Socialism (1904)

• Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (1982)

• Tera Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1997)

• Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker (1974)

When Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser — the first Egyptian to rule Egypt since the time of the Pharaohs — became the most important voice in the Arab world overnight. He had told his people that 120,000 Egyptians died building that canal and its revenue would finally flow back to them. Across the Arab world and the colonized Global South, people heard that and understood exactly what it meant. Britain, France, and Israel invaded to take the canal back. They were stopped by a rare Cold War alliance between the U.S. and Soviet Union — not out of any love for Egyptian sovereignty, but because the U.S. correctly calculated that if the West looked like the colonizer from a century ago, the colonized world would move toward communism. Empire was forced to evolve. Kwame Nkrumah named the new architecture in 1965: don't occupy the land, control the system. Build the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to offer loans with conditions. Build military bases instead of colonies. Support coups of leaders who don't cooperate. Sanction countries that resist. Thousands of miles away in Libya, a young military officer named Muammar Gaddafi had been listening to Nasser's voice on the radio since childhood — and when he led his own revolution in 1969, he followed that blueprint exactly. When Gaddafi later proposed a Gold Dinar to free Africa from the dollar — the direct heir to everything Nasser and Nkrumah had built — NATO killed him in 2011. That proposal is now being approximated through the yuan and BRICS payment infrastructure at the Strait of Hormuz in 2026, where Iran is charging yuan-denominated transit tolls for oil tankers carrying 20% of the world's petroleum supply.

This is not foreign policy news. Here is the connection: the same banks that loaned Egypt money at predatory interest rates until Britain could swoop in and take the country — those same financial institutions, rebranded as the IMF and World Bank, have been doing the same thing to Black and brown nations for decades. But the machine doesn't just run overseas. Redlining locked Black families out of homeownership while federally backed mortgages built white suburbs. The war on drugs flooded our communities with incarceration. When the 2008 crisis hit, private equity swept in and bought our foreclosed homes at pennies on the dollar — then charged us rent on the houses we used to own. This is one machine running the same play at home and abroad. The Suez Canal, the petrodollar, the Strait of Hormuz are not distant events — they are chapters in the same story as redlining, the war on drugs, and the 2008 foreclosure crisis. The paid brief goes deep into that architecture: Nasser at Bandung, Nkrumah's prophecy, Gaddafi's Gold Dinar, and what the de-dollarization happening right now at Hormuz means for the future of empire and our place in it.

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Some chose each other even at greater cost than that. There are documented cases of free Black people — people who had escaped or purchased their freedom — who returned to slavery rather than be separated from the people they loved. One man, freed and legally required to leave Virginia, moved to Ohio and then came back. He said, in his own words, he “would prefer returning to slavery to losing the society of his wife.” Freedom without her was not the freedom he wanted. This is what Stephanie Camp means when she argues in Closer to Freedom that enslaved people created rival geographies — secret worlds, hidden spaces, relationships that existed beyond the reach of the plantation and its logic of commercial death. The state said these people were property. They said: we belong to each other.

Saidiya Hartman reminds us that this love was never simple or free of the terror that surrounded it — that joy and danger were always entangled under slavery, that even in the rival geography there was no pure refuge. And that is precisely the point. They loved anyway. They walked miles at night anyway. They danced in the dark anyway. They married in ceremonies the law would not recognize and kept those marriages for decades. Black love under slavery was not romantic in the soft sense of the word. It was a political act. It was infrastructure. And every system of control — from the plantation to the prison to the surveillance state — has always understood this, which is why they have always targeted it first.

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For sixty years that dream was deferred — by assassinations, coups, debt traps, and the deliberate fragmentation of any movement that got too close to real sovereignty. But something has shifted. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger expelled the French military and formed a mutual defense bloc. The African Continental Free Trade Area — 54 signatories, 1.5 billion people — is the largest free trade zone in the world by member countries and it is operational. Ghana is building a direct trade corridor with Colombia, cutting out the European middleman that has always sat between Africa and the rest of the world. Rwanda is eliminating visas for Africans across the continent. The DRC is asserting control over its cobalt. This is not a collection of isolated policy decisions. This is a continent doing what Nkrumah said it had to do.

What we are watching is the fulfillment of what Marcus Garvey organized for, what Nkrumah theorized, what Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara were assassinated for. The people who built the world’s economy from the outside have waited long enough. And for those of us in the diaspora — living inside a falling empire that has robbed us of nearly every opportunity it promised — this is not someone else’s revolution to observe. It is ours to join.

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Because every time this country has gone to war, Black people have been handed the same promise — fight for freedom abroad and you’ll finally get it at home. We fought in the Civil War. Still got Jim Crow. We fought in World War I. Still got lynched. We fought in World War II. Still got segregated. And by Vietnam, something had shifted. Black soldiers were being sent to the front lines at disproportionate rates, dying at disproportionate rates, and people started asking a different question: why are we fighting for a country that won’t fight for us? Why are we being sent overseas to kill people who are also fighting imperialism? Muhammad Ali answered that question publicly. Huey P. Newton answered it theoretically. And the answer they both arrived at came from the same place — an understanding that the enemy was never across the ocean.

In his 1967 essay “In Defense of Self-Defense,” Newton wrote that an unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment. But by 1970, his analysis had deepened into something more expansive and more urgent. Newton had concluded that the United States was no longer a nation-state — it was an empire that had reduced the entire world, including Black America, to a collection of communities under the control of a small ruling circle. The Vietnamese, the Palestinians, Black people in Oakland — all communities under the same siege, all being managed by the same force. That is what he called intercommunalism. And that framework answered the draft question completely: sending Black soldiers to kill Vietnamese peasants fighting that same empire was not service — it was the machine using itself against itself. Newton said we are the people who built and continue to oil this machine. We can make it malfunction. And the GI resistance movement of the Vietnam era proved he was right.

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Now Africa is cutting them off. Burkina Faso nationalized its gold. Niger expelled France’s nuclear corporation and nationalized its uranium. Mali rewrote its mining code and seized control of its largest gold operations. France’s prime minister proposed drawing from national reserves to close a 60 billion euro budget deficit — and was removed from office. Their energy sector is in crisis. Their economy is in freefall. And western media is blaming the budget structure, the parliamentary system, the social programs. Walter Rodney told us exactly what this was in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa back in 1972: Africa developed Europe at the same rate Europe underdeveloped Africa. The bill has come due.

What is happening in the Sahel right now is not a regional news story. It is the most significant decolonization movement since the 1960s — and it has direct implications for every member of the Black diaspora who has ever been called a welfare queen, a burden, a drain, while the empire that built itself on our ancestors’ backs spent centuries acting like the colonies would always be there. They weren’t managing their money. They were spending ours. And Frantz Fanon warned us that when the empire starts to fall, those of us who have internalized its narrative about ourselves will be the last to understand what we are actually watching.

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What most people don’t understand is that this program didn’t target criminals. It targeted consciousness. The FBI’s own documents show that J. Edgar Hoover’s deepest fear was not armed Black men — it was organized Black men and women connecting their struggle to decolonizing movements around the world. A movement that understands itself as part of a global revolution is exponentially more dangerous than one that doesn’t — and the FBI knew it before we did.

And here is what we have to reckon with today: the Ghetto Informant Program was officially terminated in 1973. But its informants were simply reclassified. The surveillance didn’t end — it evolved. From paid community informants to COINTELPRO to the digital architecture of behavioral data harvesting that Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, the infrastructure of control has never been dismantled. It has only become more sophisticated, more invisible, and more profitable. Understanding how we got here — from the sit-ins of 1960 to the Panthers to your smartphone — is how we learn to move with the clarity our movements require.

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To understand why Trump is banning books, gutting schools, and dismantling DEI programs, we have to understand something Cedric J. Robinson argued in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) that most Western historians still refuse to reckon with: the Dark Ages were not an accident of history. They were a feature of an emerging social order — and the forces trying to maintain that order today are operating from the same blueprint. But every time that blueprint has been broken, it has been broken by people-powered knowledge — from the Moors of Al-Andalus to the Black Panther Party of Oakland, California.

Robinson’s central argument was that capitalism did not break from feudalism — it evolved directly out of it, inheriting feudalism’s racial logic intact. Capitalism and racism “did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.” The land-owning elites of medieval Europe did not simply lose power when Rome fell. They reorganized it — burning books, criminalizing literacy, and concentrating knowledge inside monasteries and palaces where it could be rationed and weaponized. Ignorance was not a byproduct of the Dark Ages. It was the policy.

What Robinson helps us see is that this was not merely a European class dynamic. It was a racial one — and it required the suppression of African and Arab intellectual life to sustain itself. Because while European elites were engineering darkness at home, the Muslim world was building one of the greatest civilizations in human history.

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