Books: Days of Rage (Part 2)

More on the violent radicals of the 70s.

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Welcome back for the second installment on Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, a history of violent radicalism in 1970s America. It’s a long book that covers a lot of ground, so I’ve divided my account into two parts. Part I covered some general features of the era, the sociology of rebellion, and gave a summary of some major radical organizations. This part goes over the history of these organizations in more detail.

1. The Black Liberation Army

BLA Begins

When we last left off, the Black Panthers had fragmented into two major factions. Most on the East Coast supported Eldredge Cleaver, who operated from an embassy in Algeria. Their opponents supported Panther founder Huey Newton.

The FBI actively fanned the flames of the Black Panther civil war, sending false information to each side. The 1971 killing of an East Coast, pro-Cleaver Panther might have been the direct result of their machinations, much as they cooperated with local officials in the 1969 assassination of Chicago Panther Fred Hampton.  

But as much as they hated The Man, the slain Panther’s comrades blamed the killing on Newton-supporting Panthers. These comrades included Dhoruba Moore, Sekou Odinga, and Lumumba Shakur — men who were part of the infamous Panther 21 on trial for a conspiracy. Now out on bail, they swore vengeance and started recruiting others to their side. Most of these came from three neighborhoods where Odinga and Shakur were from and where Moore had worked as a Panther recruiter.

Sekou Odinga in the late 1980s.

This was the core of what would soon be called The Black Liberation Army. Ironic, then, it was first formed to fight other black militants. In fact, their first action was the torture and killing of a black man — Sam Napier, who ran a pro-Newton Black Panther newspaper. He was bound, tortured, killed, and his corpse burned.

You’d think this would have led to further escalation with the Newtonite Panthers, but oddly enough it did not. Instead, the group swung back toward the goal that had attracted many of them to the Cleaver-era Panthers: Killing cops.