Daniel Denvir: You argue that black radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s were obviously impacted severely by state repression, but you also say that they fell into a fetishization of revolutionary violence that was sometimes dangerous. That’s not just a retrospective assessment: many militants at the time made similar arguments, like Ken Cockrell of the Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers, for example.
Robin D. G. Kelley: There is definitely a distinction between armed self-defense and revolutionary violence. That’s not to say that revolutionary violence was limited to the North. In fact, Mississippi, the very place where armed self-defense was probably the most pervasive, also had bombings of courthouses and things like that — retaliatory violence. But I think the distinction is important for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, Ken Cockrell and others were not rejecting the right of armed self-defense. That’s a different matter. When people are coming for you, including the police, for reasons that are basically illegal or extralegal, then you have the right to defend yourself. But they were criticizing the adventurism of some organizations that were engaged in what they perceived to be guerrilla warfare or kidnappings or robberies. That didn’t help if movements had to spend all their time bailing people out.
Doing these defense campaigns was tricky because most of the people they were trying to bail out or defend in court were not the people who had actually committed the crimes. When you think about some of the most high-profile defense cases, there were people who didn’t really do what they were said to have done. Nevertheless, I understand the concern, because it was getting to be very costly to have these defense campaigns.
Secondly, the whole history of black people in North America involves assessing the strategic and tactical choices that are going to be most effective. That’s why you didn’t have a lot of massive slave insurrections during the nineteenth century in the US. You saw revolts like that in the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century, because it was more feasible in terms of security, surveillance, and policing.
When those barriers are weak, you can engage in revolt, but when they’re strong, you have to come up with something different. It’s not about fear, it’s not about cowardice. It’s not about trying to support liberalism. It’s about what’s tactically smart and effective. That was a sharp line of division in some of the movements that ended up attempting robberies or other tactics based on direct revolutionary violence. They were the ones that got derailed.
