American Despotism: Black Radical Activists vs. Law Enforcement – The American Spectator

Editor’s Note: This piece on black radicals and law enforcement is the fifth installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the speaker here. Find the rest of the series here.

Through the 1960s and early 1970s, black discontent grew. Although progress was made, the level of discontent was increasing. Black Americans put up with a lot when they thought there was no alternative to segregation and embedded discrimination. When they knew they could be jailed — or killed — for speaking out, there was an understandable reluctance to try to change things.

But the century-long repression of legal and de facto segregation was being challenged by a broad coalition of black civil rights leaders, white activists, and the federal courts. This coalition was knocking down repressive laws that maintained segregated society. The broad effort of sit-ins, freedom rides, and marches was being answered by a series of federal laws and actions. Real progress was being made. The FBI and the military were knocking down racial barriers, but they were not changing the quality of life for black citizens — or eliminating the underlying patterns of repression fast enough.

Now that black Americans found they could openly challenge the old order, the level of anger grew. The activists became more unwilling to wait and be patient. This combination of progress and frustration was the same kind of unstable, combustible social setting that led to revolutions in 18th-century France and 20th-century Russia. And the pressure to change things faster and deeper led to heightened fear among the formerly unchallenged dominant elements of society. The result was a struggle between black activists and radicals on one side and institutions of law enforcement (including the local police, the FBI, and, in some cases, the military) on the other.

I’m addressing all this in this series, because these struggles in the 1960s and 1970s led to the first weaponization of the FBI against Americans who were not agents of foreign powers. It led to publicizing police brutality in a way that shocked average Americans of all backgrounds. Police repression had occurred in the past, but it had not been on newspaper front pages or the evening news. In many ways, this period led to the FBI and other federal agencies feeling they had the authority to spy on, punish, and work to thwart American citizens and their political activity. 

There was a dynamic interaction between increasingly aggressive black activism and overt and covert policing to curtail it. These patterns would lead to the anti-police movement of the last decade — including the riots of 2020, activist prosecutors, flash gangs, car jackings, and the stunning rise in crime we are living through. But they also would lead to an FBI feeling empowered to treat concerned parents as terrorists, an IRS that believed it could punish conservative groups, and other political government activity. All have roots in the 1960s and the struggle between black radicals and traditional society. 

The Rise of Radicalized Black Activism

While Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, John Lewis, and thousands of other African American opponents of segregation were advocates for an integrated American society, there were some black activists who had given up on America and become increasingly radicalized. When Young ran for governor in Georgia, he said the only color that mattered was green and focused on the economy rather than race. The black radicals could not have disagreed more intensely. For them, the only color that mattered was black. 

While these radical opponents of America as it existed were small in numbers, they had two profound impacts. First, they were much more frightening and polarizing than the larger civil rights movement. Their use of violent language and actions made them appear as much more of a threat to everyday Americans. They rejected the positive, integrating language and goals of the classic civil rights movement. It was much harder for everyday pro-integration, pro–civil rights white activists to join with a group that insisted that white people and society were incurably evil. Second, the more aggressive black activists established radical lines of thinking and analysis. These would go on to become key building blocks for increased hatred of police, contempt for the law, and a dedication to tearing down and destroying the existing American system rather than trying to join it. This has morphed into current anti-white racism, the 1619 Project’s rewriting of American history to center it on slavery, demands for redistribution of wealth and reparations for black Americans, and so on. (WATCH: Speaker Gingrich Reveals America’s Current Crisis)

In a broader sense, the opposition to whiteness became an opposition to middle-class standards of education, discipline, work ethic, lawfulness, and even dress. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told me when my wife Callista was sworn in as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, he observed absolute opposition to studying while he was growing up in segregated Savannah, Georgia. He was ridiculed for reading books and “trying to be white.” In fact, when he was young, Thomas went to the white library because his peers would harass him at the black library for studying and reading too much.

From the perspective of black radicalism, saluting the flag, saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and standing for the National Anthem were all examples of subservience to a racist system of oppression. (Does this sound familiar?) The rejection of the American system, the interpretation of law and order as repression and racism, and impatience with gradualist solutions led to violence and threats of violence. This led to a sense of insecurity and fear in the white community — which then led the established order to react with repression and hostility to what it perceived as a direct threat to its survival.

Two Wrongs Make it Worse

The struggle between black radicalism and law enforcement would rage throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The struggle of black radicals would attract wealthy white radicals who felt guilt-ridden (the first real examples of white privilege as a sign of self-flagellation). The often wealthy (and almost always college-educated) white radicals were eager to be validated that they were really “radical enough.” Their validators were the leaders of the black radical movement. 

The big civil rights fight of the period was, of course, largely focused on legal segregation and the South. However, in California, Illinois, New York, and other legally integrated states, there was deep discontent about poverty and police repression. This was growing out of an anti-American Marxist ideology that insisted that America was a bad country. The sense of a separate black experience had largely been built around the Nation of Islam. It had an estimated 500 to 1,200 followers until Malcolm X became the charismatic leader who attracted between 25,000 and 75,000 members.

X was a remarkable public speaker and one of the era’s most influential black leaders. His autobiography, which he wrote with Alex Haley (who would become famous for writing Roots), became one of the most influential books in defining the modern era for African Americans. But make no mistake — X was a genuine radical. His reaction to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was captured in a speech he gave in New York City on Dec. 4, 1963, entitled “God’s Judgement of White America.” He asserted that we lived in “this evil Western world, the white world…a wicked world, ruled by a race of devils.” He said that “[r]evolutions are destructive and bloody.” When he was later asked about the assassination, X said: “Chickens coming home to roost never made me sad; they always made me glad.” He said that the United States had been involved in killing Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and leaders in Vietnam, and that it failed to protect Medgar Evers from being killed by a white extremist.

X’s comments on Kennedy were terribly received. The New York Times headlined “Malcolm X Scores U.S. and Kennedy; Likens Slaying to ‘Chickens Coming Home to Roost.’” To give you a sense of throughlines, almost 38 years later, on Sept. 16, 2001, the first Sunday after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, again used the “chickens come home to roost” metaphor during a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she…