Book Review: The Late Glen Ford’s ‘The Black Agenda’ Lays Out Blueprint for Honest Journalism

WIKILEAKS: THE AFRICAN ANGLE

Julian Assange turns 52 today, although it's probably not one he's celebrating. The Wikileaks founder is spending a fourth year at Britain's Belmarsh prison and faces charges in the US for violating the Espionage Act. But for many, he’s an example of… pic.twitter.com/sUSewXwfo9

— African Stream (@african_stream) July 3, 2023

Julian Assange turns 52 today. The WikiLeaks founder is spending a fourth year at Britain’s Belmarsh prison and faces charges in the United States for violating the Espionage Act. But for many, he’s an example of a journalist punished for exposing shocking truths about governments and the rich and powerful. African Stream looks at his revelations on Africa.

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.

The documentary, “Ferguson Rises,” produced by Mobolaji Olambiwonnu and Films With A Purpose studios, is an important examination of how a global movement, Black Lives Matter, was sparked.

The opening scenes of happy, playing, gleeful children, mommies and daddies, and families doing what families do… abruptly cuts to a black screen and the sound of the shots that ended Michael Brown, Jr.’s life on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. From there, the documentary goes on to provide important details about the growing unrest in the small, predominantly Black community that led to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The film examines how Ferguson police called for backup from 15 police departments in the Saint Louis area to deal with a crowd that had formed after police had left Brown’s body uncovered and decomposing in the sweltering heat for more than four hours. They did that faster than how long they took to call a coroner to cover the 18-year-old’s body.

The filmmaker also casts a lens on Ferguson’s smallness. The city has just 20,000 residents and is almost 70 percent Black. It is so small that Michael Brown, Sr., knew some of the police officers on the scene and went to high school with them. Yet, they ignored him when he asked if the person lying dead in the street was his son. Michael Brown, Jr.’s mother, Lezly McSpadden, not only was ignored when she arrived on the scene—she was callously disrespected.

Whether Brown stole cigars in a convenience store as well as whether he had his hands up when police officer Darren Wilson encountered him are accurately contextualized in the documentary. The film sheds light on the then-police chief, Tom Jackson, repeatedly stating to the media Wilson was not aware of Brown’s possible involvement in the incident at the convenience store. This, of course, would call into question what reason Wilson had to stop Brown. Jackson went on to change his story. 

The irresponsibility, sensationalism and outright dishonesty of the media is on full display in the documentary. In one clip from CBS This Morning, the lower-third graphic on the screen read, “Missouri Riots,” but the footage showed Brown’s mother and neighbors crying and emotional at the scene of his shooting. No footage of actual riots. 

In chronicling the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, the documentary provides key moments in that timeline that were known only to the residents of Ferguson. They begin with an elder U.S. Army veteran walking the streets of Ferguson the day after the shooting, waving a U.S. flag, reciting with emotion the words to the spiritual song, “Oh Freedom.”

Extensive coverage of eight hours of protests shown in the documentary were uneventful. That is, until Ferguson police brought in riot gear and military equipment to assault residents because, as one man in the film commented, police wanted to stop them from marching to the police station. Yet, CNN and other media outlets throughout the country falsely conveyed the first night of protests was violent because of residents’ actions. 

The reality of two Fergusons—one Black and one white—is well conveyed in the documentary. Several white residents appeared to dismiss the anger of Black residents, with one white man reducing the protests to “tantrums.” Their cluelessness continued with comments about how the “community has been portrayed to the outside world” and how “the phrase ‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t sit well with a lot of white people” because “all lives matter.” The willful obtuseness is enraging, but this is the reality of how our struggle is viewed.

Yet, a few white residents recognized the centuries-long rift in Missouri that led to that horrible day in Ferguson. The white pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal church sees the protests as a spiritual battle between heaven and hell, good and evil. A former Ferguson police detective recognizes the racism in the police force, even though he excuses cops using tear gas on protesters. Then we hear from a white resident who was going to move out of town until he drove by the scene of Brown’s murder and realized just how horrible the murder of the young man was and how traumatizing it must have been for the embattled community to have to see Brown’s body decomposing in the street.

The documentary focuses on Michael Brown, Sr., and the trauma men endure when their children are killed. It also takes a look at residents’ clarity on the systemic nature of what they’re fighting against. They understand it is not about individual police officers or a few bad apples.

The end scenes, however, are a study in contradictions, with Cori Bush going from being a Black grassroots activist in Ferguson to an elected representative in the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, a Black man named Wesley Bell was sworn in as Saint Louis prosecutor, but did not prosecute Wilson. Ferguson elected its first Black mayor six years after Brown’s murder, but the Time magazine cover featuring Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullours as the faces of Black Lives Matter did not age well considering the enormous financial scandal that fractured the movement. Clips show Los Angeles and New York police departments announcing budget cuts. Yet, those cuts were miniscule compared to the total budgets of those police forces. Plus, claims of rising crime have fueled the rallying cry to “refund the police,” even though they were never “defunded.” Meanwhile, positive clips of Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and U.S. Vice President Kamala “The Cop” Harris, seem out of place for a documentary that for the most part condemns the system. 

“Ferguson Rises” is a very good documentary. But the triumphant and hopeful end scenes are a sobering reminder that mere representation without radical or justice-focused politics often replicates the system.

Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and on Facebook; and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary.”

Black political organizations and other anti-imperialist groups condemned the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) raiding early Friday morning the properties of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and its solidarity organization in Saint Louis, Missouri, and in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Based on the description, APSP appears to be one of several unidentified groups and people implicated in a 25-page indictment of a Russian national, Aleksandr Ionov. The Moscow-based founder of the nonprofit Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR) has been accused of attempting to influence U.S.-based groups to turn against the United States and work in favor of Russia.

“Anyone who opposes U.S. imperialism or who has made common cause internationally is endangered,” Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley wrote on Facebook. “Not surprising that a Black organization is the first on their hit list.”

The raid began at 5 a.m. July 29 at the Saint Louis home of APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela and his wife and APSP Deputy Chair, Ona Zené Yeshitela.

Yeshitela said in a Facebook livestream later that day that the APSP was targeted for its support of Russia during the military operation the country has been undertaking in Ukraine since February 24.

Among several allegations, the FBI accused Ionov’s group of paying U.S. activists to attend two conferences in Russia. It also said Ionov helped a group conduct a tour in the United States to drum up support for a petition charging the U.S. government with committing genocide against African descendants. Yeshitela admitted meeting with Ionov twice in Russia.

“Suddenly, we’re supposed to become tools, like Black people don’t have minds of our own to find out what our reality is and who’s responsible for it,” Yeshitela said in the livestream. “It’s white people doing self-criticism and uniting to give money. That’s where the money is coming from, Uncle Sam.”

‘Crisis’ of U.S. Imperialism

Yeshitela said while the United States was targeting Black activists, it has failed diplomatically.

“They’re doing this, in part, because not a single African country—not even neocolonial sycophants—want to unite with the United States and the United Nations in terms of how they are targeting Russia in this Ukraine-Russia question,” he said, referring to the economic sanctions slapped on Russia after it entered Ukraine in February. When Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky recently held a virtual meeting with African countries, 93 percent of heads of state did not attend, despite Western pressure.

“This exposes the crisis the United States, that U.S. imperialism, is in,” said APSP Director of Agitation and Propaganda Akilé Anai in a livestreamed press conference in Saint Petersburg. Anai said FBI agents lured her outside her home early Friday morning, saying her car had been broken into. Upon opening her car, they forced her to hand over her devices, she said.

Yeshitela, 80, said he and Ona were awoken Friday morning to the sound of a voice blaring through a megaphone outside their home, asking them to come outside with their hands up. Flashbang grenades were set off throughout the working-class Saint Louis neighborhood, Yeshitela added. He also said a drone almost hit Ona’s face after she opened the home’s front door. Law enforcement agents lately have deployed drones into buildings to conduct a visual search before agents enter.

Yeshitela said FBI agents handcuffed the couple and forced them to sit on the street curb while agents scoured their home. “They indicated they had a search warrant related to the indictment,” he said. The FBI freed the couple after several hours, but not without confiscating from their home all of their devices, such as computers and phones, according to Yeshitela’s livestreamed account.

The FBI was unavailable as of press time.

Black Scare, Red Scare

Black activists have long denounced the U.S. government’s anti-communist rhetoric going back to the early 20th century, saying such calls to take down communists really have translated into attempts to dismantle Black liberation movements and other liberation movements in the United States.

“In reality, what anti-communism/anti-Marxism does is to transform anything counter-hegemonic or non-conforming into subversion, foreignness, or disloyalty by punishing it as communist, communist inspired, or communist infiltrated and therefore illegal, illicit or criminal,” said Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly in a recent talk.

Burden-Stelly, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Wayne State University, has written a soon-to-be-released book, Black Scare, Red Scare (2023). It attempts to document how the U.S. government’s anti-communist policies repress Black and other oppressed people for organizing for their liberation. This, she has said, helps to protect what she calls “racial capitalism,” in which the most degrading labor is forced upon increasingly exploited racialized groups.

U.S. Government’s ‘Hysterical Response’

Black political groups denounced large segments of the U.S. political left for believing Black activists are stooges of Russia, or the former Soviet Union.

“We agree that APSP doesn’t have to apologize for fighting for justice for all oppressed and particularly African People like our ancestors Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Black Panther Party who were spied on, jailed and assassinated for standing up for the freedom and justice for African People worldwide,” said the central committee of Pan-Africanist organization All-African People’s Revolutionary Party in a statement issued Saturday.

Activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., who were called communists, were assassinated. Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey, who advocated for the unification of Africa under Pan-Africanism and the end of European colonialism in Africa, was briefly imprisoned in Atlanta for what some consider the politically motivated charge of mail fraud. Trinidad and Tobago-born U.S.-based communist Claudia Jones—after whom Toward Freedom‘s summer editorial internship was named—was deported to the United Kingdom for her activism.

“We believe this repression to be a hysterical response to the United States’ loss of legitimacy in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism and U.S. global hegemony,” said the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP)’s Coordinating Committee in a statement released Saturday. “The unleashing of policing and counterintelligence forces domestically and increased militarism and warmongering abroad in the name of national security are the only avenues left to the U.S. ruling class that is engulfed in an irreversible economic crisis. They represent the hallmarks of a naked fascism that the U.S. ruling class appears to be increasingly committed to in order to maintain the rule of capital.”

Then BAP added a warning in its statement.

“While it is APSP today, it will ultimately be the rest of us tomorrow. Resistance is our only option.”

Julie Varughese is editor of Toward Freedom.