Love & Rage Archive

by Meg Starr

During the 1960s Bill Sales was a radical student activist. His experiences show how the Black student movement was shaped by the overall Black liberation movement, and how Black students in turn helped shape the white student movement.

It is interesting to compare Bill’s version of the early stages of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Columbia Strike (an important occupation of buildings at New York City’s Columbia University by Black and white students in 1968) with more mainstream and white-centered accounts of the same period. His stories also bring to life the incredible radical diversity and power of the Black Liberation movement. Readers interested in learning more should read Bill’s latest book, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (South End Press, Boston, 1994).

by Ashanti Omowali

In the Black Panther Party, when someone said, “Power to the People!” the response would be “ALL Power to the People!” After many years of political imprisonment, employing the easy-to-use Malcolm-Eldridge Educational Super-charger, that call/response would take on more anarchistic meaning. This is about my experience in the Now as an anarchist (a baby one) within a generally hierarchical Panther formation.

It was just this year, Jan. 1995, that I decided to publicly identify myself as anarchist. In playing around I came up with a term to identify me fully: @narcho-pantherista (thinking about the word Sandinista, ha!). Though, just in fun, I decided to keep it. It’s me. Silly, anarchistic, for real.

by Suzy Subways

On Apr. 25 a diverse group of activists successfully shut down four major New York City bridges. Traffic was blocked, during rush hour, from 15 minutes to an hour at each location. The locations were divided between 4 groups: ACT-UP and neighborhood groups protesting Medicaid Cuts and hospital closings; CUNY (City University of New York) students and public school teachers protesting budget cuts in public education; and groups opposed to police brutality and racist and homophobic violence (including the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, the Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, and families of those killed by police). 185 people were arrested.

by joel

A neo-nazi skinhead concert scheduled to take place on May 20 in St. Paul was cancelled after the combined efforts of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), various independent activists, and community members of West St. Paul forced the police to cancel the show.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME

Members of ARA were tipped off about the show in mid-March and began organizing against it immediately. Because nazis know the public will shut their shows down if they know about them, they have to keep the address of the gig a secret until the day of the show.

They discreetly distributed fliers telling fellow white supremacists to meet at Mounds Park in St. Paul between noon and 6:00 P.M. to pick up tickets and a map to the hall where the gig would take place.

“True justice requires more than a stay of execution-it requires a complete dismissal of this clearly political persecution! It requires more: it requires the committed mobilization of our communities to resist a system that is more repressive than South Africa’s—to abolish this racist death penalty! It requires freedom—for all MOVE political prisoners, and all political prisoners of whatever persuasion! Now! It requires a continuing revolution—to beat back the forces of the neo-apartheid state. Organize! Mobilize!”

—-Mumia Abu-Jamal, July 12, 1995

by the Love and Rage Prison Abolition Working Group

by brad

On May 6-7, there was a conference organized by three ABC collectives—Claustrophobia ABC from DC, Nightcrawlers ABC from NY, and New Jersey ABC. The conference was hosted by Claustrophobia ABC in DC, and was also attended by members of Baltimore ABC, 4th World ABC from New Jersey, and other anarchist prison activists from Pennsylvania and New York.

The purpose of the conference was to solidify a new regional ABC federation that had informally begun with the three sponsoring collectives in Dec. 1994. We left the conference with unforeseen results, well beyond what we had initially set out to achieve.

This article appeared in Love & Rage Newspaper in August / September 1995.

Demise of the Beehive Collective:
Infoshops Ain't the Revolution

By brad