It Could Happen Here - The Story of Kuwasi Balagoon Part 1 ft. Andrew

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Andrew walks us through the early years and political development of Black anarchist Kuwasi BalagoonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it.

Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that I've cooed. And yeah, welcome to the inaugural podcast where it's just christopher and andrew um i'm your host christopher long and i got i got andrew with with me today to cast the pod okay yes i have done an intro thank you for that um i had to sacrifice you for that one because i was not to do it myself um welcome to the first in a two-part exploration of the new african revolutionary known as kwasi balakun he's one of the most recognizable black anarchic radicals of the whole black anarchic radical tradition um recognized for his constant struggle um for his political journey and for his insights in the cause of you know black freedom in the u.s and so i think his very layered journey is one i believe that more people should explore and i hope that more people would come away with this episode and the following episode, the second part, with a recognition of what an inspiring person he is and what we can learn from his life.

Hell yeah, I'm excited. He's super cool. Yeah, yeah, for many reasons. And so I think we will start at the very beginning, as most humans do. I don't think we know of anybody who just kind of plopped onto the earth fully formed. His Kwasi Balagoon was not his original name. It was his chosen name.

He was born Donald Weems in the majority black community of lakeland in prince george's county maryland on december 22nd 1946 so i'm sure he got like his christmas presents and his birthday presents like combined you're allowed to laugh I was thinking my one of my oh I think it's my my uncle or something has his birthday is the 23rd is yeah December 23rd

yeah one of my uncle's birthday is the 26th I think and my girlfriend's birthday is the 20th yeah that's that's some that is some rip stuff there yeah i mean i try not to like add to that so i try and get two separate gifts but um you know it's a it's a challenge yeah and then top of that like you can't really do much for your birthday because everybody's always doing like last minute stuff yep yep thankfully i

was born in the best month so anyway well the experiences prepared the young donald williams to become an activist who would militantly resist white supremacy and unjust authority he was particularly inspired by his own parents' struggle during the Cambridge protests of 1963. You see, his dad had worked in a U.S. printing office, and his mom had worked at Fort Meade in Maryland. And so they, he and his sister were very much cared for. He and his two sisters, rather, were very much cared for. I think he was the youngest of the family and loved. And they really showed that sort of drive to provide and care for their children.

provide and and care for their children um in those work environments they would have seen he observed and he watched it he observed his parents observing the effort that they put in and the fact that they surpassed the skill and experience of a lot of the white folks who came into their type of work but then those said white folks would just go on ahead and climb the ladder and you know get these promotions and get these raises while they themselves had to like slowly and painfully drag themselves forward and fight to get ahead all so that their children could have their food and clothes and everything that they needed so the cambridge riots of 1963 were led by a young woman by the name of gloria richardson who was a key figure in the civil rights movement um their struggle had emerged as part of the you know civil rights movement um and the local chapter of the student non-violent coordinating committee that was fighting against segregation in the area organizing sit-ins and so on and so forth

but after they had organized against a movie theater that was expanding its discriminatory practices the movement started to push back and they marched and the demands were unmet and the police were called and Richardson and others were arrested for disorderly conduct and there was a whole pattern of protests and arrests and boycotts and harassment that just went on and on and on. After some youths, both 15 years old, were charged with disorderly conduct for being arrested and were arrested for praying peacefully outside of a segregated facility, even more marches were organized. And eventually the protests escalated and some white-owned businesses were set on fire. Then gunfire was being exchanged between whites and African Americans. And, of course, martial law was declared,

and National Guard was deployed. And eventually a treaty had to be negotiated between Gloria Richardson and the white power structure. The Cambridge Movement is recognized by the Nation of Islam and by Malcolm X as one of the examples of a developing black revolution. And so that militancy in that movement is what inspired and impressed the young Donald Weems who later become Kwasi Balikun. Another formative point in his life was when he had joined the U.S. Army after graduating high school and was stationed in Germany after receiving some basic training. Of course like

most black people in the military he experienced a lot of racism and physical attacks from white officers and eventually he and others formed a association known as the legislators basically based on like messing up racists and making sure that they couldn't like interfere with them any longer. Yeah. He prided himself on his ability to exact revenge on racist war soldiers. While in Europe, he was in London at one point and he connected with Africans and African descendants. And he saw his experience in London as basically like a natural tonic. Like it was something that clicked in his head. And he realized the interconnections between African descendants across the globe.

As he grounded himself more in black consciousness and culture, he stopped processing his hair, wore out his natural hairstyle, and became basically more committed to black liberation than he had been before. After being honorably discharged in 1967 after three years of serving primarily in germany he returned home to lakeland um and then he moved to new york city where sister diane had lived and in new york he got involved in rent strikes and became part of a tenant organizing movement for the Community Council of Housing. One of the principal leaders of this movement was a Harlem rent strike organizer called Jesse Gray. And he used the rhetoric of like militant black nationalism to recruit lieutenants for his activist campaigns. recruit lieutenants for his activist campaigns is his militancy when he you know pull it back and he connected with the militancy that donald was already feeling drawn to is what really pushed

him to get into that cause and so i think it makes me think as i'm you know going through his journey about like i mean his commitment to the struggle began from very early on from seeing his parents and the things they had to do with from seeing the Cambridge riots from seeing his experience in the army from connecting with um with black folks in London with um his tenant organizing and it makes me think of the political journeys of people today and how all these little points and larger points in a person's life kind of combine to create the sort of tapestry of a person that they are and a tapestry of political beliefs that they hold. I think a lot more people have been drawn to militant, radical politics, left radical politics than we give them credit for.

I think more people have that basis than we necessarily want to accept. necessarily want to accept I think the issue is we just won't have the outreach in place to you know help them get across the finish line and get to a place where they are

actively you know working for these causes yeah it seems like there's a lot of i mean partially burnout and partially just sort of i don't know you you get these you get periods where sort of just like specific movements ends and a bunch of people just kind of fall out and it's like it's not that they haven't done this stuff it's that they just sort of i don't know the movement to the thing they were in is over and now they're sort of just off doing something else. Yeah, and that reminds me of,

well, it reminds me of a script that I was working on the other day about demands. And one of the arguments people had made against making demands, you know, as a movement, is that once demands are met, it's sort of, what if concessions are even made it saps the momentum out of a movement and it saps its potential because if you you know accept concessions if you accept that you know whatever you receive and you know you go back in your laurels you don't

reach the climax of what you could have achieved as a movement compared to if you just kept going of course i have critiques of the anti-demand position but it's something that i frequently consider when i look at a lot of these social movements that are based on specific projects, based on specific focuses. And what happens when these movements get, you know, co-opted, when these movements get compromised. And the way that the potential, like the sheer manpower of some of these movements compared to like what they've actually achieved is a massive discrepancy, you know? Yeah, and I was thinking about,

it was something in a Bastards episode I did a long time ago about, I think the name of the treaty was ampo which is like there was this huge mobilization in japan in the the 60s to stop this treaty with the u.s it was a military treaty they're doing there it had a whole bunch of stuff in it like i think there was a clause that let the u.s like invade japan if there was like a civil disturbance or something stuff like that and they you know they had this huge movement like people people stormed the parliament like multiple times like you know i i think i think i think afterwards the the historians determined that like a third of

the total population of japan had been involved in this movement and then they lost because the whole movement had been about stopping this treaty and the treaty gets signed. They can't do anything about it. And then it just sort of like fizzles and it kind of becomes the Japanese new left. But like, you know, you have this like incredible high watermark of like, like you have you have so many people in the and even the Japanese new left like disappear. Yeah, yeah. And it implodes like, like yeah you go from like like Nixon like was it Nixon who tried to visit

I think there have been a couple of US presidents who tried to visit Japan and couldn't leave the airport because the mob was too large outside of it and he's like it went from that to you know everything sort of once there's sort of like immediate rallying like here is our demand here is our goal like like disappears everything just sort of splinters into these like

weird fragment groups you get like a bunch of japanese marxists just like shooting each other over nothing in the mountains and the whole thing sort of just implodes and yeah i mean even if you look at like like say fridays for future is another example or like extension rebellion or george floyd protests when you consider you just sit and you think about the shared numbers involved in those movements the potential of that large mobilization mobilization effort compared to what comes out of them you know like what other than a few minor policy changes what has you know say extinction rebellion or friday's for future achieved when you know these massive corporations are still actively fighting every step of the way and these movements are not yet willing to do what it takes to you know accomplish what needs to be accomplished

i'm not even talking about violence i am not talking about violence i am not talking about violence what i'm talking about is the efforts involved the work that goes into social revolution that goes beyond the sort of flashy easily recognizable march on the street kind of activities because there's a lot of stuff that goes behind the scenes. A lot of institutions need to be built from the bottom up. A lot of institutions need to be transformed from the inside out.

And, you know, without that basis in place, we're just spinning our top in mud. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks

while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.

This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But back to Weems.

Like many in his generation, he was ready to join an uncompromising movement for Black freedom and human rights. for black freedom and human rights he joined jesse gray in protesting the conditions in new york housing particularly the infestation of rats in public housing in fact and this is probably one of my favorite stories of his entire you know like lifetime as an activist as an activist, as an organizer. In 1967, Jesse Gray, Donald Weems, his sister Diane, and two other tenant activists were arrested for disorderly conduct in Washington, D.C. when they, unannounced and uninvited, attended a session of Congress and brought a cage of rats to the assembly to highlight the urban housing condition. Hell yeah. attended a session of Congress and brought a cage of rats to the assembly to highlight the urban housing condition.

Hell yeah. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall or something to have witnessed that. Yeah. I mean, it's such an impressive thing, even just on a sort of like, just like a logistical level of where did they get this cage of rats from like i mean clearly they got the rats from

the housing the housing was so bad they had rats running around everywhere imagining like they oh we're we're not going to use kill traps we're going to use like capture traps specifically so we can drop these rats on congress like this rules it's perfect it's perfect it's that sort of energy that you know helped him to create that group the legislators while he was in the army you know but anyway because they you know dropped some rats in congress and they got arrested. The CCH lost its fund. The community council on housing lost its funding. And Jesse Gray lost his ability to pay his organizers. And just that line alone just kind of stood out to me.

At the moment, that is. Because these movements, you know, back in the day, they were serious about getting change done. And they recognized that to get change done, you need to have people who are full-time involved in getting that change done. It can't be a part-time thing. And so, you know, these movements had, these groups, they had, like, staff that, you know, were paid to, like, put in the work,

who could focus all their efforts and energy in it. And, of course, that took fundraising, that took donations, that took support from their local communities to get that sort of support that they needed to get things done. I think right now what we have is a lot of groups that often fizzle out or burn out before they can even get started because they don't have the resources to support the kind of effort that they will need to get things done when everybody is working one two three jobs

everybody's burnt out and stressed out and this was my organizing experience at least it's very hard to get stuff done when everybody's tired all the time yeah it's very hard to get things off when everybody's tired all the time. It's very hard to get things off the ground when everybody's busy all the time. I think there's another kind of interesting thing here too, which is like, it's like, well,

because they're like, now we do have organizations where you can get paid to be full-time staff, but it's, it's, it's NGO-ified. Yeah. It's NGO stuff. And, and the thing I think is it's,

it's, it became this question of sort of – I mean, A, partially it's about legal structures of how you could have – part of it I think is, yeah, it's about the sort of legal requirements about who can actually have and what kinds of organizations and what you have to do to like have an organization that has a bank account for example and then also i think there's this there's this kind of trap that people fill into where okay so you need funding right and you know the places you can get funding from usually tend to be either you're spending your entire time doing donation drives or you're doing these this grant stuff and it's like well okay, the problem with both of these basically have giant strings attached to them. And so it sort of falls away from

the like, hey, we're sort of like paid revolutionary organizers and just degrades into more NGO stuff. Exactly. Exactly. And then the incentive structure completely changes. And of course, there are also power dynamics involved in

paid versus unpaid organizers and that sort of thing. But I mean, if these liberal organizations are getting all this funding, getting all this support, they're able to sustain themselves and keep pushing their cause. And all radical movements

and militant movements are floundering. Again, where are we going with this, you know? Yeah. But afterwards, with the loss of funding, Weems left the CCH. And then he joined the Central Harlem Committee for Self-Defense in solidarity with the student protests in Columbia University. That committee would bring food and water to the students who occupied the buildings in the Columbia campus. And that's another important thing to point out.

And I was talking about the less flashy work that goes into it. Because people are talking about a general strike because they have this vision of this general strike, that everybody's, you know, standing out in the streets and this big crowd's out in the streets, and we all out in the streets we all refuse to work and it's woo and it's wonderful but a general strike can only be pulled off if there's a strike fund in place if there's a strike bank in place where resources are available for people to draw from. Because in a strike, contrary to some perspectives or I guess some misled approaches,

it's not when you tell your boss, hey, let me get a day off so I can go on strike real quick. A strike is a refusal to work. It is unpaid. It is a risky endeavor. You don't just walk out without It is a refusal to work. It is unpaid. It is a risky endeavor. You don't just walk out without organized support from your fellow co-workers at the very least.

And part of what makes a strike successful, part of what makes a protest or a sit-in or any kind of movement successful is having a network of care work instituted so you see that the central holland community for self-defense in solidarity with another movement brought food and water to the students who were occupying the buildings and because they brought food and water to the students who were occupying the buildings. And because they brought food and water, those students are able to continue occupying those buildings and continue struggling for the causes they were struggling for. I don't think there are enough people,

and not to discount people that are, if it doesn't fall in your garden, you don't have to water it. I think there needs to be more people who are going into that care work, which is marginalized because it's associated with women and non-men really. But it's something that we need to account for. Something that needs to be one of the principal arms of our strategy.

Yeah. Like when I was doing tenant organizing it's like i did so i was like what did i do the tenant organizers like well okay so i went around and put signs up and moved chairs around i took care of people's kids like that was like really most of it there's just a lot of like i don't know i mean like child care, like, that kind of stuff, like, is a vital part of any, if you're, if, is a vital part of any political movement that's actually going to succeed that you're trying to run, and nobody wants to talk about it or do it because it's not the, like, exciting, like, we're throwing a brick at a cop or whatever stuff. Yeah, exactly. or whatever stuff yeah exactly and so on a more personal note and this is the part where he changes his name donald weems would associate himself with the yoruba temple in harlem it was organized by nana or sir jiman adefumi the detroit-born adefumi was initiated in cuba

in the lukumi right of the Yoruba origin. And he saw the West African religious and cultural heritage as a means of cultural self-determination and peoplehood for African descendants in the United States. Recently, there was a Netflix documentary about the ways that Yoruba traditions have been kept alive across the quote-unquote new world. And so you will see in Cuba and in Brazil and in Churna, Tobago, and in the U.S.,

Yoruba practices and cultural components have just been sustained. And so when Adepumi established the Yoruba temple in New York, sorry, in Detroit, was it Detroit or New York? In Detroit, I'll just say Detroit. He saw it as an institution, a nationalistic institution, meant to advance the cause of the civil rights movement,

the black liberation movement. You saw it to Africanize everything, names and hats and clothes and clubs and churches. And so a lot of people in Weems' generation, and so you see people like Malcolm X adopting a new moniker, they rejected these European names and adopted African or Arabic or arabic names so when we got associated with the european temple he would no longer be donald weems he took an erudite name kuwasi meaning male born on a sunday and the european name balgun meaning warlord and so that again ties into his whole

passion for militancy because he is basically a warlord born on a Sunday and I don't know about you but that's kind of a metal name yeah it's like now

ready to fight fresh out the womb all kind of thing but it's pretty sick exactly exactly but you know along with finding his cultural bear in the yoruba temple he got his black power politics of you know revolutioning black nationalism from the black power movement the 1960s black power movement they realized that you know black liberation is not possible without the overthrow of the u.s constitutional order and capitalist economic system and they also recognized and a significant number of black militants in 1960 1960s, the Black Power Movement recognized, that the classical Marxism-Leninism was not a framework that they identified with.

It is something that a lot of them did adopt and adapt, but it's not something that they just consumed wholesale. and i think that's honestly some nuance that is often obscured when people take this sort of blindly nostalgic approach to to past uh you know movements because even even back then even in the early stages of black power movement there was you know political diversity in terms of the aims and intentions and beliefs, different perspectives, even within the same political philosophy, different approaches. The West Coast Black Panthers and the East Coast Black Panthers took different approaches.

The West Coast Black Panthers were more class-focused, whereas the East Coast Black Panthers were more Pan-African in their approach. And that honestly caused a lot of tension between the two of them. Many of them were inspired, you know, across the board by the influence of Marxism, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, by other national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Because this was a time, of course, where a lot of movements, a lot of countries were gaining independence from Britain and France and

all the other colonizers. This is also a time where more and more people were building their criticisms of the racism present in the old left. And so they wanted a theoretical vehicle that gave them the self

determination, the ideological self determinationdetermination that they needed. Like, they were with the whole civil rights movement, they were fighting within it, but they wanted more than what the civil rights movement was offering. They wanted more than just civil rights within a settler colonial state. And they were not going to sit back and just be satisfied with nonviolence as a way of life. A lot of them saw the civil rights movement as well as something integrationist, as something pro-assimilationist.

Whereas they wanted something more insurgent, more revolutionary. And so they brought together all these different things. Black nationalism and self-determination, Marxian critiques of capitalism, and a direct action approach that was in the civil rights movement from the beginning. And so Bala Goun

became a revolutionary. He began to read literature, like the autobiography of Malcolm X, and Robert F. Williams spoke Negroes with guns. And he also learned from the leaders that surrounded him, like the leader of the SNCC and the leaders of the Black Panthers. What he recognized

as someone long inspired by militancy is that Black liberation would only come about through protracted guerrilla warfare. I don't think I have to go over, like, the origins of Black Panthers in detail. But just to summarize, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in response to the abuses of the police upon residents of Oakland. And so after Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party,

and one of his comrades got in a shootout with the Oakland Police Department and survived, and one of the officers actually got fatally wounded, Newton basically became a national hero to all the urban black youth who couldn't even conceive that this guy fought the state and won he had like a small win but he won and so that's when you see like the whole free huey movement kick off because you know he was charged with free his murder for his name the cop he shot and free huey was the rallying cry black power in left circles eventually bpp came to new york in summer of 1968 and i mean people had tried to kick off a black panther in New York beforehand in 1966 but it didn't work out so this new Black Panther party in New York kicked off and began to build support in the hundreds the same month that Dr. King was assassinated he had a lot of members of the BPP coming together he had a lot of the members of the bpp coming together to sort of figure out a direction because although they may have been critical of the civil rights movement the last dr king was a major blow to everyone because even if they disagreed with him he was still an inspiration

so bobby seal and kathleen cleaver came to new york and they appointed 18 year old 18 year old yeah sncc member judon ford as acting captain of defense of the bpp that's another thing a lot of people forget like these people were young like real young fred hampton died when he was 21 assassinated of course and so it's like an inspiration honestly and also like a rallying cry for all young people who feel disempowered and disenchanted disheartened by all the different aspects of collapse that are surrounding us you know like we can stand up and and fight back but anyway so judon ford became the acting captain defense of the bpp of the east coast and he was soon joined by david brothers and they founded the bpp in brooklyn in 1968

national leadership of the bpp also sent r Pennywell to give directions to New York chapter and so Pennywell was there and he was involved and he became a captain in the ranks and he was very grassroots in his approach the Harlem branch of the New York chapter would be founded by Lumumba Shakur who was the son of Malcolm X associate Saladin Shakur and that same Saladin Shakur he served as a mentor and a surrogate father for many of the members of the New York

of New York's Black Panther Party and so you know all these different people and all these different groups and stuff were mixing and molding and melding and getting together and eventually the New Yorkork chapter the bpp would grow to become among the largest if not the largest in the entire organization with approximately 500 members so when baldigoon found out that bpp was organized in new york he went and he joined he felt you know like empowered by

the black panther party's 10 point program and for those who don't know the 10 point program was you know pretty straightforward one we want freedom two we want full employment three we want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black community. Four, we want decent housing. Five, we want education that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. It teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society. Six, we want black men to be exempt from military service. Seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. Eight, we want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.

Nine, we want all black people to be brought to trial, to be tried in a court by a jury of their peers from black communities. Because at the time, and it still exists today, and even affected Durorenda Irvine you're being tried for these things it's not a single black face in the entire jury it's entirely white, middle class upper class jury members

and lastly 10 we want land, bread, housing, education clothing, justice and peace and so Balagoon was drawn to this he identified with the organization's Maoist axiom

that political power comes from the barrel of the gun and was inspired by the ways that the Chinese revolution inspired the Black Panther Party however the structure that the Chinese Revolution inspired the Black Panther Party. However, the structure from the beginning, the structure of the Black Panther Party did pose some challenges for Balagoon.

And it really only got worse from there. So the Black Panther Party was structured with the National Central Committee, the NCC, as the highest decision-making body in the entire organization across the entire country. Even though the New York chapter was the largest in the entire party, the NCC was concentrated in Oakland, which is where the party was founded. And so most of the body was associated with people who knew Huey Newton.

There was a whole chain of command and, like I said, that whole style and structure of governance became a factor in Baldo Goon's attraction to anti-authoritarian politics. And of course course he was not alone in being critical of the structure of the party Don Cox Ashanti Alston Lorenzo Cumbo Irvin and many others would also develop similar critiques drawing them from a similar direction because Baldergoon had this experience organizing beforehand and he recognized the good that the party was doing, but he also had taken issue with how the party was structured. So when he got involved, he was ready to participate and work with oppressed black communities on these basic issues.

For example, in September 1968 1968 the Black Panther Party members participated in a community takeover of Lincoln Hospital which at the time was dilapidated and disinvested and was not able to serve the predominantly black and Latino residents of South Bronx

and so the BPP in New York would work with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the provisional government of the Republic of New Africa to take over and reform the detox program at Lincoln Hospital. And that boldness, again, so inspirational, because how many of us are willing today to just like so boldly just walk in and take over these broken institutions, to put them in the hands of the community, to make them whole, powerful institutions for the people. I think we need more of that boldness.

So the New York Panthers were very much involved in tenant organizing as well, which is right up Balagoon's alley. Or I guess we could call them rat catcher. or I guess we could call them rat catcher and they were also involved in fights for community control over the school system and the police

eventually Valdekun and another Panther Richard Harris would be arrested in february 1969 on bank robbery charges in new york new jersey on april 2nd 1969 less than one year after the founding of the new york chapter of the bpp 21 panther leaders and organizers including balagoon and harris who indicted 12 arrested on conspiracy charges and a 30-count indictment. And of course, this case became known as New York Panther 21.

The charges included conspiracy to bomb the New York Botanical Gardens and police stations and to assassinate police officers. And after the arrest, most of the defendants were released on $100,000 bail, but balagoon was held without bail so they were being charged for this like claim that they were going to ambush new york police um based on the testimony of one 19 year old panther member joanne bird who had been beaten by the police in order to you know make a statement that was favorable to the prosecution like beaten as her mom pulled up to the police station to hear her daughter screaming visibly beaten with her black eyes swollen lip bruises on her face everything

is going to face everything. And so, Balgun and, well, the other person who was being charged with this attempt to ambush the police was a guy named Odinga. And he had escaped and went underground. But

Balgun did not. Oding England ended up going fleeing the United States settling down in Algeria and all that jazz but Balagoon not only was he charged

with what the others were charged with but he was separated from the others and faced charges in New Jersey while the others

were in New York and so he was behind bars for two years the other defendants were acquitted and as a result of you know all this legal battling and maneuvering since a lot of the key organizers and leaders of the New York Black Panther Party were incarcerated, the organization was pretty badly crippled. And as with, you know, activities and general momentum. I think that's something that the Panther Party

had to struggle with very often, having its key members, its leaders, and members incarcerated and charged and facing trial and so as a result the panther party was almost for almost its entire existence was basically fighting charges and trying to get its members out of jail and this that and the other and a lot of its efforts ended up draining towards that and so i think seeing how the new york panther party was crippled i think it highlights the importance of distribution and decentralization when it comes to organizing it highlights the importance of as the afrofuturist abolitionists of the americas say moving like mycorrhizae mycorrhizae are basically a mutual relationship between fungi and plant roots so they move

nutrients between plants they're connected to and they basically create this kind of fungal network that that spreads across an ecosystem and it prevents researchers from basically being able to see where they begin where they end they you know they grow slowly sometimes they pop up above ground there's like mushrooms and stuff but primarily they exist underground and so what the our future establishments are talking about is basically creating a movement that is primarily underground that spreads and is interconnected and cannot be pinned down with such a clear pinned down or easily infiltrated

like how the party was able to with such a clear structure and chain of command so basically move like my core is a work from the ground or underground and work for the roots work from the roots eventually after most of his comrades were acquitted um balgun pleaded guilty to the charges that he and somebody else did attempt to shoot the police officers.

So then he became the only one of 21 original defendants who was actually convicted. So while that was going on, while the New York Panther 21 case was being played out, Balagoon's politics were starting to shift. Revolutionary nationalism and the democratic centralism of the party were beginning to be viewed as a healthy critique, I'd say.

And Balagoon was starting to shift more towards anti-authoritarian politics. At the same time that Balagun was going through that political journey. More generally speaking, the New York Black Panther Party was beginning to feel disenchanted with how the national leadership was handling things. Like the tension had already existed because of the differences in focus, you know, with the New York Panthers being more Pan-African and the Oakland Panthers being more class-focused. But after one of the leaders of the Panther Party,

Geronimo Pratt, had been purged from leadership for his quote-unquote counter-revolutionary behavior, tensions started to build because Pratt was seen as a hero to a lot of the members of the New York party because he had been very much paramilitary, he had been very much paramilitarily organized and he had taken it upon himself to train Panther members in paramilitary tactics. And so after he was purged from the leadership and a few other leaders were also purged.

And a few other leaders were also purged. The New York Panthers began to feel disconnected from the national movement. Because the whole reason they were attracted to the Panther Party is because of this image of armed Panthers patrolling against the police, of underground guerrilla warfare um so you know the new york panther movement was very much associated with that but

once they saw the sort of purges that were taking place um some of which they looked up to. When they saw that the national leadership sent these other guys, Robert Bay and Thomas Jolly, to New York to assume leadership of the chapter, to basically import leaders from outside the movement rather than sort of bring up new ones from within the local community, it basically worked to destabilize what the New York Panthers were working for. Because when these guys rolled up, they had a very autocratic, hierarchical style of leadership,

unlike, you know, the Pennywell guy, who was very much grassroots in his approach. And, I mean, even Assata Shakur had like basically critiqued the quality of the West Coast leaders sent to New York when she spoke about how Robert Bae and and Jolly who were from the West Coast had a very aggressive and she said belligerent way of talking and dealing with people. And so that really is what built up towards, from simple initial differences of opinions and misunderstanding, leading towards the disillusion of the connection between the national leadership and the New York chapter.

Welcome. I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

Thank you. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. The New York chapter wanted to focus on things of a more national orientation. focus on things of a more national orientation.

They wanted to work on the tenant issues that they had started with in the first place. But the nationally appointed leadership was not interested in tenant issues and did not want to place so much focus on nationalist-oriented issues,

Pan-African issues. And so when these groups were reassigned from their tenant organizing to the Save the People programs that were working in the West Coast, that was also resented by the New York Panthers. Because New York Pan panthers they were you know working on certain things they had like tenant organizing behind their belt and they had like these different mutual aid projects and stuff going on these you know sort of support and solidarity things going on and to be told from the outside hey stop doing this tenant organizing

stuff do these things as working where we are coming from it didn't play out well yeah i mean i the last time an org told me to do that i left like literally had this happen to me but just like no yeah yeah yeah it it doesn't work out not to mention and i mean this was a criticism I mentioned earlier, about how a lot of the focus ended up being toward getting people out of jail and, you know, dealing with legal defense. One thing Balogun criticized was the fact that the national leadership selectively determined who would be released from bail. Like, it didn't matter, you know, what the rank and file

or fellow prisoners of war or who had the lowest bail or whatever. What mattered was what the leadership, who the leadership wanted to be chosen to bail out. And of course,

it should also be noted that part of what was building these tensions and building these divisions was COINTELPRO and, you know, the FBI working at every step of the way to foment divisions

and to fire up divisions within the national leadership, within the New York chapter, even within the New York Panther 21 defendants. So you can't erase that aspect of it. Yes, we can criticize these organizations and these movements for their missteps, but we also have to keep in mind the context that they were in, the tensions they were facing, and the fact that they were being openly assaulted and clandestinely assaulted by the u.s government on all you know angles at all corners

i think sometimes it's like they both kind of fit together in that like if you look at what the US intelligence services were good at, the very specific thing they'd become incredibly good at because they'd been doing it basically since the end of World War II is that they were really, really good at hammering down these centralized party apparatuses like that's how they basically turned uh cp usa from like a genuinely really powerful political movement in the 30s to like by the 50s it's entirely run by like the fbi and so yeah it's like this is kind of mismatch here because it's like on the one hand you're suffering incredibly heavy repression but then also it's like the the political form that you're taking is a form that the u. US state has gotten really really good at fighting so the two issues sort of like compound each other exactly exactly and so of course like it's not like the rank and file were necessarily just going to roll over and that these things happen right so they were trying their best to like submit these criticisms to the national leadership through

the like black panther newspaper but eventually the new york panther 21 defendants took a public position that was seen as critical of the national leadership when they sent an open letter to the Weather Underground, which they published on the 19th of January, 1971. For those who don't know, the Weather Underground was basically a bunch of white radicals who basically were trying to fight the US government by doing a bunch of bombings and fighting in solidarity

with national liberation movements like in Vietnam. Yeah, the stuff ranges from pretty funny, like they kept blowing up the statue for the Haymarket cops to like what are you guys doing? It was a very weird organization.

Yeah, yeah. Quite the characters. And so the open letter applauded the insurgent actions because keep in mind, New York party was very much into that militant sort of stuff. So the open letter applauded the insurgent actions of the Weather Underground and acknowledged them as part of the vanguard of the revolutionary movement

of the United States. They never mentioned the national leadership of the BPP, but they also critiqued kind of like a subtle sort of unspoken kind of thing, shady, they kind of threw shade basically. They were like critical of self-proclaimed vanguard parties that abandoned the actions of the radical underground struggle and the political prisoners I mean that's as open as you could be

without actually saying it but yeah so of course and Balakun was he agreed with this criticism and so because the national leadership wasn't actually attacking the occupational forces

of the central colonial state anymore. And because a lot of the money being collected was going towards bail. And a lot of people were also criticizing the fact that some of the leaders were beginning to live pretty comfortably while a lot of the rank and file was basically we were sitting all in jail once the letter went out newton basically expelled the panther 21 and basically declared the panther 21 enemies of the people jesus yeah a lot of them and not just panther 21 but also the New York BPP leaders in general just all of them branded enemies of the people

some of the defendants like Richard Torubo Moore and Setawayo Tabo and a few others also ended up going to Algeria late in the month members of the New York Black Panther Party

would hold a press conference and basically call for the purge of Huey Newton and the Panther Party Chief of Staff David Hilliard and the formation of a new National Central Committee. And basically, like I said, officially split from the national

organization. What I find interesting about that approach to it is they basically fought fire with fire for one so you're like oh you want to call us enemies of the people we're gonna call you enemies of the people and then on top of that you also have to deal with the fact that their solution to the problem of the national central committee being too big for their britches and interfering with their um grassroots politics was like you know what we need?

A new National Central Committee. You know what this reminds me of a lot? It reminds me of a lot of the stuff that happens in the early cultural revolution where it's like you have a bunch of people well I mean okay the big difference in the early cultural revolution is that

every single group is claiming that they're loyal to Mao but you get a lot of people well i mean okay the the big difference is the early cultural revolutions that like every single group is like claiming that they're loyal to mao but like you get a lot of these things where you know people people will be like hey the party has been becoming incredibly overbearing and then you get like most of them are just like okay like our solution to this is we are now the party but then you you get these sort of like ultra left groups who are making sort of like not exactly anarchist, but are making sort of structural critiques of it. And those guys just get like purged and killed. I don't know. The,

the, the dynamics and the critiques remind me of it. Yeah. I think it's something that we see just in general in politics honestly it's a sort of limitation of the imagination wait people aren't conceiving of things like outside of what has already been done i mean i myself am guilty of this because a lot of my inspirations are like pre-colonial cultures and, you know, societies and stuff. But still, I try to like bring those into a new context and think of ways that can be applied differently. I just, when you think about this approach here where you have the issues of the National Central Committee,

your solution is to create a new Central Committee rather than consider an approach that does not involve a national central committee um i think that's something we see all too well too often or even like just nostalgia politics in general where people's whole approach to politics is trying to replicate past movements yeah but anyway so as you've seen balagoon's involvement you know well as a child with his parents you know with the cambridge protests with the army and his involvement in that with the new york tenant organizing um with the panther party with the yoruba temple all these things helped to inform his political development. It inspired him to be part of a dynamic revolutionary movement that he respected and he loved and

he trusted, but it also helped him to question the decision-making and the nature of organizations and how the structure of organizations relates to state repression. So money in jail, you tend to have a lot of time to think and consider. a lot of time to think and consider. And so Balagoon wanted to sit and think and basically correct all these ideological weaknesses that are stirring in his head that basically compromised the militant liberation movement

that he wanted to see liberate his people. So I conclude by saying that we must learn from the past in this you know short foray into balagoon's life we've ended up coming to a lot of different conversations about the nature of movements today and i think that sort of critical approach to people's history is something we should be doing more often in our modern discussions of the past. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Anyway, join us for part two of Valigoon's journey as we explore his path toward new African anarchism. You can find me, Andrew, on youtube.com slash

andrewism, and on twitter at underscore stdrew. This has been It Could Happen Here. And Chris was here too. Yeah, you can find us at happen here pod on twitter and instagram follow us at the cool zone yeah i'll see you next time it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit

our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com sources thanks for listening you should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Wrath. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.