The Nation They Buried

What If Black People Aren’t American?

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For those who aren’t in the know, either you aren’t Black, which is unfortunate but probably explains why you’re sleeping better, or you aren’t in Black political spaces, which honestly might be the more respectable excuse.

Lately, some niggas have been very proudly identifying themselves as Black Americans.

Black Americans.

Incredible.

After four hundred years of slavery, land theft, segregation, racial terror, forced migration, mass imprisonment, and every other little administrative inconvenience this country has invented for us, somebody finally cracked the case.

We are Black.

And we are in America.

Black Americans.

Thank God. I was worried we were going to have to think.

Then you have the other side saying we need to return to Africa, and we tried this shit before. We had boats. We had colonies. We had arguments about where to go. History has already beta-tested this idea, and the results were, to put it politely, mixed as hell.

So I’m going to throw my hat in the ring.

I think “Black American” describes where the mail goes.

I don’t think it answers what we are.

And I don’t think telling several generations of people born here to pack up and return to a continent most of us have never seen answers it either.

Both sides are circling the same question.

What are we?

I think the better answer has been sitting in the archive this whole time.

We aren’t Amerikans.

We’re New Afrikans.

i. the settler, the k, and the country that hired itself

I started spelling Amerika with a k because I got tired of letting one word pretend to describe two countries, and I’d rather look like a crank on the internet than keep lending my mouth to a lie that’s been running since 1868.

There’s the country they mean when they tell you to be proud of being American, the one with the monuments and the veterans discounts and the mortgage inheritance, the family farm somebody’s grandfather got to keep, the police officer who looks at a citizen having a bad day and sees a citizen having a bad day. In that country, belonging is so ordinary that nobody who has it can describe it to you, the way nobody can describe the sensation of not being on fire. Then there’s the country Black people have actually lived in, the one that bought us and sold us and counted us and freed us without an acre, made us citizens without asking, and then spent the next century deciding, statute by statute and lynching by lynching, which parts of that citizenship we were allowed to touch. That country calls us equal in the courtroom and dangerous on the sidewalk, and it needs us to love it with the specific, exhausting loyalty of somebody who knows the door can still be locked from the other side.

Those aren’t the same country. They occupy the same territory, they use the same flag, they’re administered by the same government, and they’re two entirely different political experiences. The refusal to say so out loud is how several generations of Black people learned to describe captivity as belonging. That’s what the k is for. Amerika is the country underneath the civics lesson, the arrangement that decides who owns the land, who gets folded into the family, who gets paid in advance for his loyalty, and who stays permanently available for punishment. American is what the paperwork calls me. Amerikan is what I’m refusing to become.

Settler is a job description before it’s an insult, and it doesn’t mean white, and it doesn’t mean immigrant, and it doesn’t mean anybody whose ancestors got on a boat. A settler is somebody who arrives on land that belongs to other people, stays, and is paid in that land and in the labor of the people already there, and who then organizes his politics around protecting the payment. The Irish laborer who stepped off a coffin ship into a New York slum wasn’t born a settler. He became one the day the arrangement offered him a share and he took it, which he did, and quickly, because the alternative was to stay at the bottom with us. Settlerhood is a relation to property, and property is the only thing this country has ever taken seriously.

The person who put this most precisely was an anonymous Asian American communist writing under the name J. Sakai, whose book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat came out in 1983 and has been quietly ruining the political education of white leftists ever since.[^1] They’ve spent forty years complaining about his tone, which is what you do when you can’t answer the arithmetic. The United States was never a normal nation that later went abroad and picked up some colonies by accident. It was a chain of settler colonies from the first boats, it grew into an empire the way a business grows into a chain, and the settlers themselves weren’t the huddled poor of the story we all got in fifth grade. Sakai goes into the emigration records and reads them as payroll. In the stream of emigrants leaving Bristol in the second half of the seventeenth century, he puts the genuinely proletarian share at well under a fifth.[^1] The rest were the striving middle of England, younger sons locked out of land at home, artisans and yeomen who crossed an ocean because an entire continent of somebody else’s property had been laid on the table and the only qualification for a seat was a willingness to eat. The Pilgrims your teacher taught you about had already found religious freedom in Holland, where they were free to worship and free to be poor, and Holland wouldn’t give them land and servants, so they got back on the boat. That’s the whole story of the Mayflower, and it has an invoice attached to it.

Land is the reason the white nation exists, and land is the payment that’s kept it loyal for four hundred years, and every generation of Amerikan history is a renegotiation of the same contract in whatever currency was available that decade. It was stolen Indian acreage for the colonist, the Homestead Acts for his grandson, and the whites-only subdivision with the federally insured mortgage for his grandson’s grandson.[^2] If you want to know why a man in Ohio whose factory closed in 1981 still votes to keep us out of his neighborhood, it’s because the neighborhood is the last installment he ever received, and he can feel the check clearing every time his house appraises. You can build a people out of almost anything if you keep paying them. The people assembled out of those payments eventually decided to call themselves Americans, and membership was a share in the proceeds long before it was an address, which is exactly why the word could absorb the Irishman and then the Sicilian and then the Pole, each of them admitted after a probationary period spent proving he could be trusted with the whip end of the arrangement. It’s also why the word has never fully absorbed us. The books stop balancing when the asset tries to become a shareholder.

Sakai’s coldest chapters walk through every moment the white working class was supposedly presented with a choice, and they show the choice getting made the same way every time. The unions organized the wage and guarded the color line, and when those two interests collided, the color line won because the color line was worth more money. Lenin had a name for the worker who’s been bought off with a cut of the imperial take. He called him the labor aristocracy, and he imagined a layer, a stratum, a manageable minority of sellouts sitting on top of a real proletariat. Sakai’s contribution was to ask how wide that layer runs in this country and to come back with the answer white socialists still can’t metabolize: wide enough to stop being a layer at all, wide enough to become the white nation itself. The organizations we’re taught to remember as the heroic fighting proletariat spent their political energy driving Chinese workers out of the labor market.[^3] Black workers entered Northern factories on quotas, deliberately kept thin, deliberately surrounded by a much larger mass of settler labor, and then the historians wrote it up as solidarity in progress. No country fails at the same task for three hundred and fifty years. At a certain point, the failure is the job, and Amerika has been succeeding at that job the entire time, and it has the property records to prove it.

Every white person reading this is now entitled to one free ritual, which is the confession. They love this part. They’ll tell you all day how monstrous their ancestors were, how the founders held people as property, how the whole thing was built on stolen land, and they’ll say it with real feeling, as long as nothing about the present arrangement has to change and nothing has to leave their hands. The confession is a settler sacrament. It converts an ongoing robbery into a historical tragedy everyone can feel bad about together, it costs nothing, and you can post it.

While the settler nation was assembling itself out of land payments, another nation was forming inside the same borders out of exactly the opposite material. By the War of Independence, Afrikans were about a fifth of the colonies’ non-Indian population, a captive people concentrated through the plantation belt, sharing a condition, a labor, an enemy, a music, languages we bent toward our own purposes, and memories that survived everything designed to kill them.[^4] Two hundred years in one place under one lash produces what two hundred years in any other place produces, which is a people, and the fact that this people was assembled by force doesn’t make it less real, any more than a man is less married because he was drunk at the wedding. The Black Belt, that crescent of counties running through the Deep South where enslaved Afrikans were a majority or close to it, was the territory of that people. We cleared it, we worked it, we made it valuable, and somebody else held the deed, and those two facts belong in the same hand before anybody tells me what my nationality is.

Some of the sharpest minds we ever produced spent their lives on emigration. Martin Delany chaired a National Emigration Convention in Cleveland in 1854 on the entirely reasonable premise that a nation can’t remain forever a minority inside its enemy’s house, and he later sailed to West Africa looking for territory, and he was one of the most brilliant men of his century.[^5] The problem is what happened when the idea got funded. The American Colonization Society, an organization built substantially by slaveholders who wanted free Black people out of the country before we gave the others ideas, started sending Black settlers to the West African coast in 1822. The settlement became Liberia, Liberia declared independence in 1847, and the Americo-Liberians, the descendants of the very people this country had held as property, spent the next century and a third running that country as a settler oligarchy over the indigenous people whose land it was.[^6] They had a capital named after an American president. They had a flag with one star. In 1980, the arrangement ended the way these arrangements end, with a coup and a beach and a firing squad.[^7]

So when somebody tells me the answer is to go back, I want to know back to what, and standing on whose farm, and with what relationship to the people already standing on it. The settler isn’t a race. The settler is a position. A Black person can occupy it, and some of ours did, with a flag and a constitution and a native policy. This isn’t an argument against Africa. It’s an argument that getting on a boat doesn’t answer a political question about land, because the question was never about geography. It was about whether the people who made the land valuable would ever be asked what they wanted to do with it.

Nobody asked. Nobody has ever asked, and the century that follows is the century they spent making sure nobody would.

Reconstruction is the moment both nations became visible in the same frame, and the cleanest name for what happened next is war. In January 1865, while the Confederacy was still dying, Sherman signed Special Field Order No. 15 and set aside four hundred thousand acres of coastal land for the freedpeople at forty acres to a family, and for one brief second the empire’s own pen drew a border around Black territory.[^8] Within a year, Andrew Johnson gave the land back to the planters. The freedmen on Edisto Island wrote to him directly and asked whether they were to be handed back to the men who’d owned them, in language so plain it should be carved somewhere,[^9] and the answer arrived in the form of federal soldiers walking through the Sea Islands removing Black families from soil they’d already planted. Some of those communities met the returning owners with rifles. A people shooting at federal marshals to hold their land in 1866 is a people behaving exactly the way nations behave, and the marshals shot back the way empires do. The country had already made its decision. Black land was a clerical error, and it’d be corrected with bayonets, and then it’d be corrected with the tax sale and the levee district and the loan office and the highway route, until twelve million acres had left Black hands in a single century and the historians had filed the loss under migration,[^10] as if land walks, as if a deed gets homesick, as if we just fucking misplaced Georgia.

For about a decade, in the middle of that, the nation governed anyway. Afrikans in the South voted and legislated and sat in statehouses, built Union Leagues and militia companies, created the first public schools the region had ever offered to children of any color, and ran governments that taxed planters to pay for them. Sakai reads that decade the way it deserves to be read, as the suppressed founding of a country, and what was destroyed between 1877 and the turn of the century was a government in embryo. Destroyed is still too clean a word for it. The Klan and the White Leagues and the rifle clubs carried out a counterrevolution county by county: at Colfax on Easter Sunday in 1873, at Hamburg in 1876, at Wilmington in 1898, massacres with dates and street addresses attached to them,[^11] followed by all the ones that never got names because the dead didn’t leave enough paperwork for a white university to find them interesting later. They killed legislators and voters and teachers and fathers, they killed on Easter and on election day, and they killed with such method and such bookkeeping that calling it hate misses the point entirely. Hate is a mood. This was policy, with a budget and a calendar and a plan for the following spring.

The counterrevolution won, and the settlement of 1877 was an armistice negotiated by two white delegations over the head of the nation whose land was being divided. The defeated nation didn’t evaporate. It survived inside the borders of the state occupying it, which is why Sakai uses the word occupation and doesn’t apologize for it, and why the garrison and the occupied Afrikan nation have shared a map for a century and a half and almost nothing else.

The thinkers came afterward and named what had already happened to them, the way people always do. Communists organizing sharecroppers in the Black Belt through the twenties and thirties put it into Comintern prose and resolved that the Afrikan population of the Black Belt constituted an oppressed nation with the right of self-determination, up to and including secession, and Harry Haywood spent half a century carrying that argument through every room that would have him and most that wouldn’t.[^12] Marcus Garvey had already built the largest mass movement in Black history on the premise that we were a nation without a state. A young Garveyite named Audley Moore carried the idea through the Communist Party and out the other side, into the reparations movement she built almost by herself, and finally into a Detroit meeting hall in 1968, where she signed her name beneath a declaration of independence at the age of seventy.[^13] The idea survived because the institutions kept failing it and the people kept carrying it anyway, hand to hand, the way contraband travels.

Now for the part your civics teacher was paid to skip.

In 1865, four million people walked out of bondage as a stateless nation trapped inside a hostile one, and what those four million people would become was a live question on every side of the war. Lincoln understood it perfectly well. In August 1862, he invited a delegation of Black men into the White House, the first such audience in the building’s history, and used the occasion to pitch them on leaving: Central America, colonization, anywhere at all except the country their labor had built and financed.[^14] Even the man who’d sign the Emancipation Proclamation understood that emancipation created a political question rather than answering one, because four million people bound together by history and condition were leaving captivity at once, and somebody was going to have to say what they now were.

Then Lincoln was shot, the land was taken back, and in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment answered the question nobody had asked us. Every person born on United States soil was declared a citizen of the United States. Read as civil rights law, the Fourteenth Amendment is a shield, and we’ve used it as one for a century and a half, mostly because there was never a better weapon lying around. Under the law of nations, it’s an annexation. A defeated people were mass-naturalized with no ballot, no referendum, and no exit clause written anywhere in the document.

Don’t tell me the ballot was a technology the age hadn’t invented yet. Savoy and Nice voted themselves into France in 1860, the year before our war began, and whole European provinces were asked, in writing, whose flag they wished to live under.[^15] The United States looked at four million newly freed people, considered the available instruments, and decided the plebiscite was a tool for Europeans. We weren’t invited into America. We were annexed by it, retroactively, in writing, while the ink on our freedom was still wet. They wrote us into the country the way you write livestock into a will, and nobody asks the cow.

When I say nobody asked, I mean it with all the contempt that sentence has earned. They’d just finished a war over our bodies, six hundred thousand of their own dead over the question of what we were, and having settled at gunpoint that we could no longer be property, they turned around and made us citizens without our consent, because the one condition this country has never been able to tolerate is Black people standing on their own land being neither. Property was intolerable to the Union. Sovereignty was intolerable to everybody. Citizenship was the compromise, we weren’t at the table when it was struck, and we’ve been told ever since that the compromise was a gift.

That reading became the legal engine of the New Afrikan case, and its sharpest modern draftsman was a Detroit organizer named Richard Henry, who’d later take the name Imari Abubakari Obadele. His 1966 pamphlet War in America: The Malcolm X Doctrine argued that the descendants of the enslaved remained a captive nation entitled to the vote we’d never received, and that until a plebiscite was actually held, United States citizenship sat on us as an imposition and never became an identity.[^16] He was writing directly in Malcolm’s line, because Malcolm spent his last years dragging the Black struggle out of the civil rights frame and into the anti-colonial one, and the difference between those two frames is the difference between asking a government to treat you better and asking what gives that government jurisdiction over you in the first place. When Malcolm told a Detroit audience in November 1963 that revolution is based on land, he wasn’t reaching for a metaphor,[^17] and by the end of his life he was trying to haul the United States in front of international bodies as a colonial power. The men who founded the Republic of New Afrika were his students, and the republic itself was unfinished homework.

The plebiscite is the entire case compressed into a single word, and it asks almost nothing of you. Nobody has to agree that separation would be wise. Nobody has to move. Nobody even has to want independence. A people annexed without consent retains the right to be asked, the asking has never happened, and every Black person who tells me they feel American is describing the success of the annexation, while every Black person who tells me they’ve never felt American is describing its limits. Neither of them settles anything, because feelings aren’t a referendum. The referendum is the referendum, and it’s a hundred and fifty-eight years late.

ii. the underground had presidents

A question that’s never called doesn’t stop being a question. It goes underground, and it gets carried by people who can’t afford to carry it, and between the armistice of 1877 and the burned Detroit of 1968 lies the stretch of time textbooks flatten into patience, as if we spent ninety years in a waiting room reading old magazines. Nothing about it was patient. The nation that lost its first war spent the next ninety years fighting an occupation with every tool available to a people without a state, and once you stop translating all of it into the vocabulary of civil rights, the record starts reading like the record of an occupied country, because that’s what it is.

The Garvey movement was a government in rehearsal. In August 1920, delegates filled Madison Square Garden for the convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, where they adopted a Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, elected officials, designed a flag, chartered a shipping line, and named Garvey provisional president of a continent.[^18] The American press treated the whole thing as comedy, while the Bureau of Investigation treated it as sedition. Only one of them understood what it was looking at. A young J. Edgar Hoover learned his trade building the mail fraud case that took Garvey off the board, and the method he worked out there has never really changed: leave the claim unanswered, put the claimant in prison.[^19]

The communists arrived at the same territory from the opposite direction, and the Comintern resolutions of 1928 and 1930 carried the Black Belt thesis into the plantation counties with a map instead of a sermon. Black sharecroppers in Alabama built a union under that thesis and defended it with rifles at Camp Hill in 1931 and again at Reeltown in 1932, where men died over seized livestock,[^20] which sounds absurd until you understand that a mule was the national economy at farm scale and the sheriff was there to repossess the nation. The Communist Party eventually traded the thesis away for wartime respectability, because that’s what parties do, and the people who actually believed it walked out of the party carrying it with them. Queen Mother Moore carried it into the reparations committees she ran for decades out of Harlem, where she taught two generations that the debt was collectible and the nation was real.

Then the nation went over the empire’s head. In 1951, William Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress carried We Charge Genocide to the United Nations in Paris, documenting lynchings and legal killings in the exact language of the Genocide Convention, while Paul Robeson delivered the same petition to the UN offices in New York, and the State Department spent those years taking their passports away.[^21] Governments don’t confiscate travel documents from citizens with strange opinions. They confiscate travel documents from a rival delegation. A decade later, Malcolm tried it again and built the Organization of Afro-American Unity to move the struggle from the church to the General Assembly. He had the charter language drafted. He was dead within the year, and three years after that his students founded a republic, because they understood the assignment was unfinished.

I didn’t learn one word of this in school, and the omission was engineered down to the footnotes. I got the boycott and the dream and the mountaintop, which is to say I got the parts with no land in them, the parts where we ask nicely and die photogenically. The rest of it, the presidents and the petitions and the rifles and the flags and the dues cards, sat in archives with my name on them while I stood in a classroom every morning with my hand over my heart, pledging allegiance to the government that would eventually shoot up a church full of us. They call that a curriculum. I call it a cover-up with a report card, and the fact that it worked on me for eighteen years is the most persuasive evidence I can offer that it was designed by professionals.

The founding has a scene, because nations remember where they were founded. On the last weekend of March 1968, in a Detroit still visibly burned from the previous summer, roughly five hundred Black nationalists answered a call from the Malcolm X Society and the Group on Advanced Leadership, two organizations built by the brothers Milton and Richard Henry, who’d soon be Gaidi and Imari Obadele. They met at the Twenty Grand, a Black-owned motel on the West Side. The gathering called itself the Black Government Conference, and the name was the argument, because they’d come to constitute a government and they hadn’t come to petition one. On March 31, they adopted a declaration of independence, which around a hundred people signed, along with the frame of a constitution and a provisional government for a nation they called the Republic of New Africa, and they claimed five states as national territory: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.[^22] That’s the Black Belt with a different name on the envelope.

The whole lineage was standing in that room in living bodies. Betty Shabazz accepted a place in the first cabinet and put Malcolm’s house inside the founding government. Queen Mother Moore signed at seventy and folded Garvey, the Communist Party, and the reparations movement into a single signature. Herman Ferguson was there, and so were Amiri Baraka and H. Rap Brown and Maulana Karenga. For president, they elected Robert F. Williams, the Monroe NAACP leader whose armed defense of his own town had made him one of the most wanted Black men in the country and who was living in exile at the time, having fled to Cuba and then to China.[^23] They elected a head of state who was a fugitive from the state he was seceding from. First vice president went to Gaidi Obadele, the Yale-trained lawyer who’d spend years trying to serve the paperwork of independence on a country committed to pretending it couldn’t see him. Their slogan was two words long.

Free the land.

It doesn’t say freedom, because freedom is Amerika’s favorite vapor, handed out at every ceremony precisely because nobody can repossess it, and free the land has a direct object. Whatever else the New Afrikans got wrong, and they got things wrong, they never once confused the nature of the question. It was real estate. It had always been real estate.

The woman they handed you in elementary school was built for a purpose. A tired seamstress with sore feet and no politics, one spontaneous refusal, and then history simply happened to her. That woman is one of the crown jewels of American civic religion, because her story certifies the system. A quiet Black woman declines a single indignity, the country consults its conscience, the arc bends, and she proves, in the state’s telling, that Black people are Americans whose America occasionally malfunctions.

The archive contains a different woman, and the historian Jeanne Theoharis spent years in it so nobody has to guess.[^24] Rosa Parks was a seasoned political organizer long before the bus. She was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, and in 1944 the branch sent her to Abbeville, Alabama, to investigate the gang rape of Recy Taylor by six white men, which is the kind of work she did.[^25] She was raised in a house where her grandfather sat up nights with a shotgun across his lap waiting on the Klan. After Montgomery threatened her family and helped price her out of the city, she moved to Detroit in 1957 and spent the entire second half of her life inside the political world the Republic of New Afrika came out of, and the years the textbooks skip read like a second biography.

In August 1971, after the FBI and the Jackson police shot up the RNA’s headquarters in Mississippi and hauled its people off in their underwear, Chokwe Lumumba called Congressman John Conyers’s office in a panic, trying to get somebody in Washington to keep the prisoners alive. The office got back to him almost immediately with assurances from the Justice Department. Lumumba found out later who’d made that happen. It was Mrs. Parks, who worked in that office, and who, by Lumumba’s account, “intervened and really saved their lives.”[^26] When Imari Obadele went to federal prison, she’d phone the facility to check on him and make sure the guards knew exactly who was calling.[^27] She organized for the Wilmington Ten and for Joan Little, and she spent her final decades on reparations.[^28] She kept Malcolm’s portrait, and she said her politics of self-defense sat closer to his than to the man history married her to.

Precision matters here. No document I know of shows Rosa Parks signing that declaration of independence or swearing New Afrikan citizenship, and I’m not going to invent one, because the real history is already inconvenient enough for everybody involved. The woman Amerika turned into proof that we’re Americans spent thirty years giving her body and her name and her Tuesday evenings to people whose founding document said that we weren’t. The state put her on a stamp. She put herself on the defense committees. Only one of those was voluntary.

A nation that means it writes things down, and these people meant it. The New Afrikan Declaration of Independence begins by doing something its Philadelphia namesake only pretended to do, which is to speak for the people the renounced government had been holding as property, and it declares the Black nation in North America free and independent of United States jurisdiction and of the citizenship this country imposed by its own unilateral decision. Then it says what the revolution is for. The document calls for an end to the oppression of Black people, for a cooperative society, for the abolition of color rank inside the nation, for equality for women, for the major means of production to sit in the hands of the nation rather than the hands of the men most capable of buying them, for children educated toward scholarship and service, and for common cause with every other people fighting the same war.[^29] The Declaration of Independence you memorized in the fourth grade was written by slaveholders defending their property. This one was written by the property.

The constitution came with it, and its name was already a thesis, because they called it the Code of Umoja, which means unity. It’s a basic law for a state that didn’t yet control its territory, which is no unique New Afrikan delusion. Governments in exile have been writing legal codes for longer than Amerika has existed, and several of them are sitting in embassies right now. The Code built the Provisional Government from the ground up, with a People’s Center Council and elected districts and executive officers and courts and a national creed, and the quiet radicalism is sitting in the citizenship clause, which holds that every person of Afrikan descent born in the United States is a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika by birth, while allegiance itself stays voluntary, the conscious act of claiming what you already are.[^30] Under the Code, I don’t have to join New Afrika because I was born there. Amerika’s paperwork makes the identical claim in reverse, birthright citizenship imposed on people who were never consulted, and the difference between the two documents is that the New Afrikan program ends in a plebiscite. The Code binds nobody without a vote. The Fourteenth Amendment never offered one.

The paperwork came with coordinates attached. The New Communities were to be cooperative settlements modeled on the ujamaa villages Julius Nyerere was building in Tanzania, so the nation’s economics could be tested at farm scale before anybody attempted them at state scale. Behind the farms sat Kush, the proposed first district, drawn from the Black-majority counties running along the Mississippi River. Chokwe Lumumba later described it as eighteen contiguous counties from Tunica down to Wilkinson, seventeen of them majority Black,[^31] chosen for the land and the river and the census rather than for the poetry. Then came the demand: five states and four hundred billion dollars in reparations for slavery and everything slavery turned into. Imari Obadele carried the memorandum to the State Department himself, and no answer ever came.[^32]

The founders expected the silence, which is why the Code provided for elections and ministries and a treasury designed to outlive it. Those elections happened. New Afrikans cast ballots for their provisional government through the seventies and after, in storefronts and in kitchens, a country with no recognized ground still counting votes, and Amerika found that hilarious, though its own founders once ran a government out of taverns with prices on their heads.

In March 1971, the provisional government went down to twenty acres in Hinds County, Mississippi, bought from a Black farmer named Lofton Mason near the town of Bolton, and consecrated a capital there. They named it El Malik, for Malcolm. There are photographs from that day, and they show dignitaries in dashikis and rifles at parade rest and a flag climbing above a red clay road while a cow pasture became a capital. The urge to laugh dies pretty quickly when you remember what the last country founded on this continent looked like on the day it controlled twenty acres. Then the sale fell apart. Mason came under pressure and backed out, and the capital of New Afrika went back to being a field.[^33] A farmer in Hinds County in 1971 who put his name on a deed to a Black government was risking more than anybody reading this has risked all year.

Say whatever you want about five hundred people claiming five states, and then account for the fact that they filed. Amerika’s founding generation claimed an entire continent on a document signed by fifty-six men and history calls them fathers, while a hundred Black signatures on a better document get called a fantasy, and the difference between a founding and a fantasy has never once been the paper. It’s the artillery available to the signatories.

Amerika was asked this legal question twice, once in Detroit and once in Mississippi, and both times it answered with guns.

Detroit came first. On the night of March 29, 1969, the republic held its first anniversary meeting at New Bethel Baptist Church, the pulpit of Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. The evening was speeches and elections, women in headwraps and legionnaires at the doors, a government holding its annual meeting in a rented room. Two white officers pulled up outside and confronted armed RNA security as people were leaving. In the shooting that followed, Patrolman Michael Czapski was killed and his partner Richard Worobec was wounded, by people the courts never conclusively identified. Then the Detroit police came for the building. They fired into an occupied church and stormed it, and by the movement’s own count they put eight hundred rounds through it before they were done.[^34] The church held men, women, and children. Four people inside were hit.

Say the word church until it means something again. A church has a nursery and a coat closet and a mimeograph in the basement and hymnals in the pew backs and a casserole dish somebody’s mother left behind and meant to collect on Sunday, and the police of an American city stood outside one in the dark and fired through the glass and the wood and the plaster and the air over children’s heads, and nobody who gave that order spent one night in a cell for it. This country will cage you for a joint and cut a pension check for that shit.

Then they arrested everybody: a hundred and forty-two people, an entire congregation booked in one night, held incommunicado in a police garage, and swabbed for gunpowder residue without a lawyer anywhere in the building. Some of the women were pregnant. Some of the children were under five. Reverend Franklin got word to State Representative James Del Rio, and at five in the morning, the two of them turned up at the home of Recorder’s Court Judge George Crockett, who drove down to police headquarters, convened court at a desk inside the station, and told the state to produce charges or produce releases.[^35] By the end of the day, roughly a hundred and thirty people had walked. Crockett’s apparently radical legal theory was that habeas corpus applies to Black people. He said afterward that he wouldn’t lend his office to practices that deny justice to people because they’re poor or Black.[^36] The police union picketed the courthouse and much of white Detroit tried to run him off the bench. The men eventually tried for the shooting were acquitted.[^37] The bullet holes in a Black church stood as the state’s closing argument. Eight hundred rounds went into a church. I keep typing that sentence because it keeps refusing to become normal.

Mississippi answered next. The republic moved its center south in 1970, onto the claimed territory itself, and Imari Obadele’s faction went into Jackson to build the capital, establish the New Communities, and organize the plebiscite county by county. Mississippi understood that move immediately, because Mississippi had spent a century making sure no Black institution stood on its soil taller than a church. Before dawn on August 18, 1971, FBI agents and Jackson police surrounded the RNA residence at 1148 Lewis Street with an armored vehicle and warrants for fugitives who weren’t there. An agent gave the house one minute over a bullhorn. Seventy-five seconds later, the FBI fired tear gas through a window and both sides started shooting. Lieutenant William Skinner of the Jackson police was killed, another officer and an FBI agent were wounded, and eleven New Afrikans were seized, several of them beaten on the pavement in front of cameras, one of the women pregnant.[^38] The photographs ran nationwide as proof of Black menace, which is a remarkable caption to put under a picture of eleven people and a flag standing in front of an armored column.

Obadele wasn’t in the house. He was picked up at an office nearby, and nobody ever put a weapon in his hands that morning. The murder charge against him collapsed after seventeen months, at which point federal prosecutors convicted him of conspiracy to assault a federal officer and he served five years.[^39] Amnesty International counted him among its prisoners of conscience, in a country that insists it doesn’t have any.

Underneath both of those battles ran the quieter war, and we know about it because Obadele sued the files loose from a prison cell.[^40] In August 1967, seven months before the founding convention, the FBI opened a counterintelligence program against what it called Black Nationalist Hate Groups, and the written purpose of that program included preventing the rise of a leader who could unify the movement. The Bureau ran informants inside the republic, planted stories with cooperative reporters, and worked the same playbook it was running everywhere else that year, which included forging correspondence between Black organizations in the hope that the recipients would kill each other.[^41] The army has a word for that class of operation, and the word is counterinsurgency, and nobody runs counterinsurgency against a book club.

The state’s behavior is the evidence. You don’t fire into a church over a fantasy. You don’t bring an armored vehicle to serve paperwork on a metaphor. You don’t put informants inside a government you consider imaginary. Amerika’s lawyers have never answered the plebiscite argument on the merits, and Amerika’s police answered it twice in four years, and the empire understood the claim perfectly, which is why it shot at it.

There are two ledgers, and they’ve never agreed. On Amerika’s books, the war ended in the middle of the seventies and Amerika won. The president of the rival government went to federal prison, the first vice president left after the split, the founding president came home from exile on terms the empire could live with, the capital went back to being a cow pasture, Kush stayed inside a filing cabinet, the plebiscite never happened, the reparations memorandum went unanswered, and the story got buried so thoroughly that Black children grew up inside the claimed territory without ever learning anyone had claimed it. Half of that work was done with guns and the other half was done with a syllabus, and the syllabus lasted longer. I’m angrier about the syllabus than I am about the guns, because a gun is honest and a syllabus shakes your hand.

The nation’s books read differently. The Code of Umoja never lapsed. The provisional government kept holding its elections and swearing in its officers, a state apparatus running at idle for half a century. The citizenship survived the prisons built to kill it. Assata Shakur took hers to Havana and called herself a New Afrikan woman in a book this empire has never managed to recall.[^42] Political prisoners carried the nationality into cells designed to bury it, and some of them are in those cells tonight while you read this.

Then the land answered. In 2013, the republic’s former second vice president, Chokwe Lumumba, was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, on the claimed territory, by the votes of the very people whose consent the movement always said was the whole point. He was sworn in on the first of July and he was dead by the following February, eight months into the job, with the program barely started, and Jackson buried him like a head of state.[^43] In 2017, the city elected his son, who stood at his inauguration and announced he intended to make Jackson the most radical city on the planet.[^44]

I’m not going to hand you a triumph. Federal prosecutors charged the younger Lumumba with bribery in November 2024, the voters of Jackson turned him out in the 2025 primary, and the water still doesn’t run right.[^45] The sentence he spoke at that inauguration still belonged to a tradition with a paper trail. The cooperatives working in Jackson today still build off the ujamaa blueprint the New Communities drew fifty years ago, and the reparations demand this government ignored in 1969 reached congressional hearings within living memory, carried there by a movement whose intellectual lineage runs directly through Queen Mother Moore. The original demand was four hundred billion dollars. At current estimates, that number looks like the friends-and-family discount.

The claim didn’t die. It changed clothes, and then it got elected, and even that didn’t force anybody in Washington to call the question. So the honest score reads like this. The empire won every battle it fought, and it never won the argument, because it never showed up to the argument, and after a hundred and fifty years of refusing to hold the vote, the refusal has become its own kind of ballot. A country answers a political question by suppressing it the way a man answers a paternity test by fleeing the state.

iii. the argument I take seriously

There’s exactly one argument against the New Afrikan claim I can’t dismiss with a joke, and it was written by a man who learned it in a room while his own son laughed at him.

A Black professor is standing at a table in a tribal meeting hall in South Minneapolis, because the university sent him there to work out a dispute, and the hall doesn’t want him. A Native man sharing a windowsill with the professor’s young son gets up and says they don’t want a Black man telling them what to do, and he uses the word, the oldest one in this country, and the walls detonate with applause. The professor looks up, and the pain doesn’t reach his eyes until he finds his son’s face, because his son is jeering too. The boy has joined the applause. Jeering his own father made him part of a we, and the we was worth it, and he’ll spend the rest of his life understanding what he bought that afternoon. In the parked car afterward, the boy asks his father why they can’t just give those people what they want, since the land is theirs and the money is theirs, and the father starts the car and says nothing at all.

The people in that hall were speaking as sovereigns to a man who wasn’t one, and the slur mattered less than the arrangement that made it available to them: Indigenous people with something left to salvage on one side, a Black man with nothing left to lose on the other, dispatched by the settler institution to do the settler institution’s work, discovering that the room would rather have the settler than have him.

That boy grew up to write the most serious argument against everything I’ve just told you. The book is Afropessimism, published in 2020 by Frank B. Wilderson III,[^46] and it deserves to be stated at full strength, because a claim you have to weaken before you can beat it was never beaten at all. Slavery, Wilderson says, is a relation and not an event, and it didn’t conclude in 1865. Blackness, in his phrase, is coterminous with slaveness.[^47] The worker’s suffering has a grammar, and the words in it are exploitation and alienation, and the worker wakes up in the morning asking how much of his labor they’ll take from him today, while the slave wakes up asking what these people will do to her body, and no answer to that second question has ever had a limit written into it anywhere. Marx had a phrase for the slave, the speaking implement, and you don’t exploit an implement. You consume it, you trade it, you use it up, and you buy another one. So the grammar of Black suffering runs on accumulation and fungibility instead, and every attempt to set that suffering beside the settler’s war on the Native or the colonizer’s war on the colonized ends up making Black suffering legible by quietly making it somebody else’s. An injury with no analogue has no remedy inside the world that produced it, which is why the only demand adequate to it is the one Wilderson takes from Fanon, which is the end of the world.

Wilderson’s claim, at its hardest, is that no writ runs for us. Not anywhere, not ever, not in any courtroom on this earth.

Give him the point. The radical legal theory at that Detroit booking desk was that habeas corpus applies to Black people, and the line is funny for about four seconds, until you count what it cost to make it true for one single night: one Black man in a robe, awake before dawn, willing to spend himself, with the police union coming for the robe inside the week. A writ that has to be carried into a precinct in the dark by one Black judge and then defended from the men trying to remove him for carrying it is a favor wearing the clothes of a right. Favors are weather. They taught us in school to call this war weather, and here’s a Black man from Minneapolis telling me the sky itself is the enemy, and I can’t pretend I’ve never looked up.

He’s right about the analogy. The white worker was offered a share of the loot and he took it, at the exclusion acts and at the factory gate, and every time the color line and the union card were laid side by side on the table, the color line outbid the union card. He’s right that inclusion has functioned as the technique rather than the cure, and the Fourteenth Amendment is the exhibit, a whole people naturalized without consent and then handed the paperwork like a welcome mat. And he’s right where it costs me the most to say so, because the sovereignty critique cuts straight through the middle of my own case. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations held Black people as property, and by 1860 Cherokee citizens owned 2,511 of us.[^48] In 1861, the leadership of those nations signed treaties with the Confederacy, and the continuation of Black chattel slavery is right there on the page. The treaty of 1866 promised the Freedmen all the rights of native Cherokees. In 2007, the Cherokee Nation held a vote and struck roughly twenty-eight hundred Freedmen descendants from its rolls on the theory that citizenship runs by blood,[^49] and it took a federal judge in 2017 to put them back, ruling that the Nation could define itself however it liked as long as it did so “equally and evenhandedly” across native Cherokees and Freedmen.[^50] The Cherokee Supreme Court finally struck the words “by blood” from the constitution in 2021.[^51] Fourteen years is a long time to be told you’re a stranger in the nation your ancestors were owned by. Anti-Blackness rides inside the demand for sovereignty as comfortably as it rides inside the demand to keep the settler’s title, and any Black nationalism that borrows the anticolonial frame owes an answer at that address. Saying we’re all colonized is a way of changing the subject in a nice voice.

I stop agreeing with Wilderson at exactly one place, and the whole disagreement turns on one distinction. History can be lost. Ontology can’t be fought. If the antagonism is structural and permanent and seated outside of time, then nothing anybody has ever done to us or for us has actually touched it, and the men who died at Colfax died inside a story with no ending, and the sharecroppers who fired on a sheriff’s posse at Reeltown over a mule were performing a ritual instead of defending an economy, and the eleven people dragged off Lewis Street at dawn were a formality the empire owed itself. The curriculum taught me there was no war. Afropessimism teaches me the war can’t be won. Both of them leave the tank idling in the driveway and the plebiscite unheld, and the empire has never needed to defeat the claim, because it only ever needed to keep the claim from being called.

Speaking implements don’t shoot back over a mule, and nobody’s ontology has ever signed a tax deed. Land changes hands through instruments, instruments carry names and signatures, and they sit in county courthouses in Georgia and Mississippi where a clerk will still pull them for you if you know the parcel number. An ontology doesn’t require informants. An ontology doesn’t require a counterintelligence program with a budget line and a stated objective. The state spent money on us, and money is the most honest thing this country produces, and every dollar in that budget is a signed confession that somebody in the building believed there was something real on the other end of the letters they were reading.

And then there’s the front matter of Wilderson’s own book, which he wrote and which nobody made him write. The dedication runs three lines: his wife, his parents, and then Assata Shakur and Winnie Mandela, “for everything.”[^52] One of those women is alive because a nation gave her asylum. The other spent her life inside a national liberation movement that took a country back from the people who were holding it. Wilderson was in that movement. He joined the ANC in South Africa in the late eighties, worked with its armed wing writing what needed writing, and voted for Mandela in 1994. Mandela’s government later named him a threat to national security and he left in 1996.[^53] Then he wrote a book explaining that national liberation belongs to the category of the Human, and that the Black holds no key to that door.

He knows the contradiction better than I do. The party came to power, white hegemony and capitalism weren’t destroyed, and his answer to me is that the flag changed and the position didn’t. Everything he watched in Johannesburg after 1994 is his evidence, and I’m not going to insult the man by pretending his evidence is thin. The outcome he watched had been written down before it happened, because the same man Wilderson takes the end of the world from wrote a chapter in The Wretched of the Earth called “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” and that chapter predicts, in advance and in detail, the national middle class that inherits the state, leaves the mines exactly where they are, and rents itself to the old owners as management.[^54] Fanon aimed that warning at a particular kind of nationalism, and he didn’t write it as a reason to stop. The proof is his calendar. He spent his last years working for the FLN, writing for its paper, serving as its ambassador to Ghana, and dying at thirty-six with Algeria one year from independence.[^55] The world he wanted ended did end. It ended with a border and a flag and a name.

Our people wrote the pitfall into the founding document as a clause. The Declaration adopted in that Detroit hall doesn’t leave the mines where they are, because it puts the major means of production into the hands of the nation, and it was adopted twenty-six years before the ANC took Pretoria and left the mines alone. On a mimeograph, in a burned city, with a hundred signatures and no army, they legislated against 1994. Nobody in that history is naive except the people who’ve never read it.

So the difference between Wilderson and me is total, and it isn’t a difference about how bad things are. He looks at a church shot to pieces and reads a position. I look at the same wall and read a decision. Men with names made that decision, a city with a budget paid for it, and they made it against people who’d just finished holding an election inside that building. A position can’t be repealed. A decision has authors, and authors can be made to answer. He says the writ doesn’t run for us anywhere on earth, and he may be right, and I’ve read enough history to know how thin the paper is and who has to stay up all night to serve it. I’m going to walk them to the question anyway. Let them say it out loud, let them put their names on it, and let them say it in the five states where our dead are buried.

Nationality is a historical fact before it’s ever a feeling. Citizenship is paperwork, and any state can issue paperwork to a captive. Race is a sorting technology, and it tells you what was done to us and who was authorized to do it, and it doesn’t tell you what we are. Nationality is the word Amerika works hardest to keep out of our vocabulary, because a people formed over centuries through shared land and economic life and language and memory and struggle constitutes a nation whether or not another state agrees to recognize it, and by the standard this world grants to nearly every other nation on earth, the descendants of the enslaved in the United States are a nation. New Afrika is the name that nation gave itself, and almost every other word ever used for us arrived in somebody else’s mouth first. This one we chose.

The claim doesn’t require you to feel foreign here. Plenty of us feel at home, and a cage occupied for four hundred years gets curtains and a good chair by the window, and the feeling settles nothing either way. What settles the question is the vote nobody scheduled, with independence on the ballot, the vote the Fourteenth Amendment preempted and every administration since has somehow forgotten to hold. You can plan to vote no and still be owed the ballot. Most of the New Afrikan theorists believed most Black people would probably choose to stay, which tells you the demand was always about the choosing, and the injury was that remaining was made compulsory and then renamed belonging.

The claim isn’t a costume either. The republic’s early documents carried the masculinism of their period on their face. They imagined a standing army before they imagined a functioning school system. They wrote compulsory military service for men into papers that promised equality for women, and they didn’t always practice that equality in the rooms where the papers were being discussed. The split between the Obadele brothers, Gaidi’s institutional patience against Imari’s territorial urgency, broke the movement at precisely the moment the state was counting its strength. A government of a few hundred people sometimes spoke as though it already held the allegiance of thirty million, which is a serious problem for a movement whose entire argument is consent, and the smartest people in it knew that and said so. Chokwe Lumumba spent much of his life trying to answer that problem, which is why he joined the republic at twenty-one, served as one of its vice presidents, and then carried the New Afrikan program into a city council seat and finally into a mayor’s office, elected on the claimed territory by the people whose consent the movement said mattered. He died eight months into the job with the program unfinished. The plebiscite still hasn’t happened, and the mayoralty of Jackson is the closest thing to a precinct report we’ve ever been handed. The precinct went for New Afrika.

The claim isn’t mine either. I inherited it from Moore and Haywood and Malcolm and the Obadeles, from Assata in Havana, from the political prisoners who carried a citizenship into cells built to bury it, and from Sakai, who wrote the settler half of the ledger so thoroughly that white radicals have spent four decades complaining about his tone because answering him would require reading a property record. My contribution is smaller than any of theirs. I’m saying it out loud, I’m attaching the paperwork, and I’m saying it in a decade when the empire’s own citizens have started to wonder aloud what their citizenship is even worth.

A retrospective is supposed to end at a grave, and this one refuses, because a war ends when the losing side signs and nobody has ever produced our signature. Black people aren’t Amerikans. We’re New Afrikans: a nation formed in the hold and the field and the quarter, consolidated through the Black Belt, visible for one armed decade during Reconstruction, driven underground by the counterrevolution, named by our own children in a burned city in 1968, and never once in more than three hundred years asked the political question that’s owed to a captive people. American names our custody arrangement. It doesn’t name our nationality, and every institution you were raised inside needs you to believe otherwise.

I understand why the opposite is comforting, because the opposite comes with Rosa Parks on a stamp. The real woman spent her evenings on defense committees for people this country called subversives. The church the myth calls a sanctuary was fired into by the police of an American city. The judge who freed that congregation nearly lost his robe for doing it. The president of the paper nation went to federal prison over a morning when nobody ever proved he held a gun. The government that insists none of this constituted an answer had informants inside the ministries and a program with a written objective, so that the question would never reach daylight. Amerika has answered the New Afrikan question with everything except a ballot since 1868, and a country that confident in the outcome would hold the vote and put it on television.

American is what they made us on paper we never signed. New Afrikan is what we made ourselves on paper we did. A nation doesn’t stop existing because its occupier refuses to recognize it. It buries its presidents, it elects a mayor on its own soil, and it teaches its daughters the history.

And I’m one of the daughters. I’ve been broke for half my life, I’ve been run out of two cities that swore they loved me, and I was raised on a history with the nation cut out of it, and I found the nation anyway, late and furious and grateful in a way that has teeth. They never asked us, not once, not fucking once, and the asking was the entire debt, and they knew it, and when somebody finally stood up in a rented room with the invoice in her hand, they shot up her church and rolled a tank to her door.

So I’m not going to soften this ending. I won’t hand you a candle, and I won’t tell you that deep down we’re all Americans, because deep down we are what we’ve always been, which is a nation standing on its own land holding a question the size of five states.

Free the land.

If this essay was worth something to you: https://ko-fi.com/bundleofstyyx

Sources

[^1]: J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (Morningstar Press, 1983; repr. PM Press, 2014), ch. 1. Sakai’s reading of the seventeenth-century Bristol emigration registers appears in his opening chapter. ooo

[^2]: Homestead Act of 1862; Federal Housing Administration underwriting practice, 1934-1968. See Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (Liveright, 2017).

[^3]: Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, supported by organized labor on the West Coast, notably the Workingmen’s Party of California and later the AFL.

[^4]: U.S. Census of 1790: Black people were 19.3 percent of the enumerated population. https://www.census.gov/history/

[^5]: Martin R. Delany, National Emigration Convention, Cleveland, 1854; Niger Valley Exploring Party, 1859-60. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/delany-martin-1812-1885/

[^6]: American Colonization Society founded 1816; first settlers landed 1822; Liberian independence declared 1847. https://www.loc.gov/collections/american-colonization-society/

[^7]: The 1980 coup led by Samuel Doe ended Americo-Liberian rule. https://www.britannica.com/place/Liberia

[^8]: Special Field Order No. 15, January 16, 1865. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/40-acres-and-a-mule.htm

[^9]: Committee of Freedmen, Edisto Island, petition to President Andrew Johnson, October 1865. https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/reconstruction/

[^10]: Vann R. Newkirk II, “The Great Land Robbery,” The Atlantic, September 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742/

[^11]: Colfax Massacre, Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873; Hamburg Massacre, July 1876; Wilmington coup, November 10, 1898. https://eji.org/reports/reconstruction-in-america-overview/

[^12]: Comintern resolutions on the “Negro Question,” 1928 and 1930; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik (Liberator Press, 1978).

[^13]: Audley “Queen Mother” Moore (1898-1997). https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moore-audley-queen-mother-1898-1997/

[^14]: Lincoln’s address to a deputation of free Black men, August 14, 1862. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/

[^15]: Plebiscites in Savoy and Nice, April 1860, ceding both to France. https://www.britannica.com/place/Savoy-region-France

[^16]: Imari Abubakari Obadele, War in America: The Malcolm X Doctrine (Malcolm X Society, 1966).

[^17]: Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” Northern Negro Grassroots Leadership Conference, Detroit, November 10, 1963.

[^18]: UNIA convention, Madison Square Garden, August 1920; Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/declaration-rights-negro-peoples-world-1920/

[^19]: Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923 and deported in 1927. Hoover’s early memos on Garvey date to 1919. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/garvey-fbi/

[^20]: Alabama Share Croppers Union; Camp Hill, July 1931; Reeltown, December 1932. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/share-croppers-union/

[^21]: We Charge Genocide (Civil Rights Congress, 1951); Patterson presented it in Paris, Robeson in New York. Robeson’s passport was revoked in 1950; Patterson’s was seized on his return. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/we-charge-genocide-historic-petition-united-nations-relief-crime-united-states-government-against/

[^22]: Republic of New Afrika founding, Detroit, March 29-31, 1968; roughly five hundred attended and about a hundred signed. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/republic-of-new-afrika/ and https://search.freedomarchives.org/collections/128

[^23]: Robert F. Williams fled the U.S. in 1961 and lived in exile in Cuba and then China. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/republic-of-new-afrika/

[^24]: Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2013).

[^25]: Parks was Montgomery NAACP secretary and investigated the 1944 rape of Recy Taylor in Abbeville, Alabama. https://www.democracynow.org/2022/10/17/the_rebellious_life_of_mrs_rosa

[^26]: Chokwe Lumumba’s account of Parks’s intervention through Rep. John Conyers’s office after the 1971 Jackson raid, in Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. https://rosaparksbiography.org/bio/the-arrest-of-imari-obadele/

[^27]: Obadele’s account of Parks phoning the prison. https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/imari-abubakari-obadele-i-1930-2010/

[^28]: Parks helped found the Detroit chapter of the Joanne Little Defense Committee and organized for the Wilmington Ten. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks

[^29]: New Afrikan Declaration of Independence, March 31, 1968.

[^30]: Code of Umoja, constitution of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika.

[^31]: Chokwe Lumumba describing the Kush district, interview with Laura Flanders, YES! Magazine, February 2014. https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2014/02/27/remembering-lumumba

[^32]: The RNA demanded five states and four hundred billion dollars in reparations; Obadele delivered the memorandum to the State Department and received no response. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/republic-of-new-afrika/

[^33]: The RNA bought twenty acres from Lofton Mason near Bolton, Hinds County, and named the site El Malik; the sale later collapsed. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/republic-of-new-afrika/ and https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/republic-new-africa

[^34]: New Bethel Incident, March 29, 1969. Officer Michael Czapski was killed and Richard Worobec wounded; police fired into the church and arrested 142 people. https://policing.umhistorylabs.lsa.umich.edu/s/detroitunderfire/page/republic-new-africa. The figure of eight hundred rounds comes from New Afrikan movement accounts rather than from the police record or the mainstream press; it is attributed as such in the text.

[^35]: Rev. C. L. Franklin and Rep. James Del Rio reached Judge George Crockett around 5 a.m.; Crockett convened court at police headquarters. https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/77-april-17-30-1969/the-new-bethel-incident/

[^36]: Crockett’s April 1969 public statement. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/judge-crockett-defends-equal-justice/

[^37]: The men tried for the shooting were acquitted. https://time.com/archive/6636832/judges-fallout-from-a-shootout/

[^38]: Raid on 1148 Lewis Street, August 18, 1971; Lt. William Louis Skinner killed; another officer and an FBI agent wounded. https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2014/mar/05/jackson-tragedy-rna-revisited/

[^39]: Obadele was not at the residence; the murder charge was dropped after seventeen months, and he was convicted in 1973 of conspiracy to assault a federal officer, serving five years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imari_Obadele

[^40]: Obadele used the Freedom of Information Act from prison to document that COINTELPRO had targeted the RNA. https://finding.mdah.ms.gov/manuscripts/t027

[^41]: COINTELPRO “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” opened August 25, 1967; its stated aims included preventing the rise of a unifying leader. The forged-letter tactic is documented most fully in the Bureau’s operations against the Black Panther Party. Church Committee, Book III (1976). https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/resources/intelligence-related-commissions.

[^42]: Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill Books, 1987).

[^43]: Lumumba was sworn in July 1, 2013, and died February 25, 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokwe_Lumumba

[^44]: Chokwe Antar Lumumba, inaugurated July 3, 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokwe_Antar_Lumumba

[^45]: U.S. Department of Justice, “Mississippi District Attorney, Mayor of Jackson, and Jackson City Council Member Charged with Bribery and Other Offenses,” November 7, 2024; John Horhn defeated Lumumba in the April 2025 Democratic primary runoff. Charges, not convictions.

[^46]: Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020).

[^47]: Wilderson, Afropessimism, quoted in Vinson Cunningham, “The Argument of ‘Afropessimism,’” The New Yorker, July 2020.

[^48]: Cherokee Nation citizens owned 2,511 enslaved people in 1860. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Freedmen_Controversy

[^49]: March 3, 2007 referendum; 76.6 percent voted to limit citizenship to those “by blood,” expelling roughly 2,800 Freedmen descendants. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17597902

[^50]: Cherokee Nation v. Nash, U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan, August 30, 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/31/547705829/judge-rules-that-cherokee-freedmen-have-right-to-tribal-citizenship

[^51]: Cherokee Nation Supreme Court removed “by blood” from the constitution in February 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/25/us/cherokee-nation-ruling-freedmen-citizenship-trnd/

[^52]: Dedication, Afropessimism. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/afropessimism-wilderson-critical-race/

[^53]: Wilderson’s ANC membership and his 1996 departure from South Africa. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-afropessimism/

[^54]: Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

[^55]: Fanon served the FLN, wrote for El Moudjahid, was its ambassador to Ghana, and died December 6, 1961, at thirty-six. Algeria became independent in July 1962.