The people of Minneapolis, Minnesota have given us all a lesson in mounting resistance to authoritarianism, with their sustained marches, protests, and calls for a general strike even as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents swarm over the city, invade homes, arrest people in stores and churches, chase people down in the street, ram people’s cars, and even summarily execute people in public. Minneapolis has essentially become “ground zero” for the anti-ICE protests, much as it had become during the immediate aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, only this time not limited to a single atrocity but to a continuing string of abuses which claimed to be about rooting out “the worst of the worst” among the “illegal immigrant invasion” that, according to US president Donald Trump was “destroying our country”, but was increasingly abducting children, arresting US citizens and murdering people in the street.
As this was going on, ICE was continuing to expand its reach, which had long been active in cities across the United States even under the Obama administration, finally gaining widespread attention in 2025 under Trump with its incursion in cities from Los Angeles, California to Portland, Oregon to Maine, according to the January 28 article by Joanna Slater, Perry Stein, Marianne LeVine and Theodoric Meyer, Federal officials launch ICE operation in Maine and begin arrests
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/federal-officials-launch-ice-operation-in-maine-and-begin-arrests/ar-AA1UGlCd?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=69712d2d502e4101af7ebe790061a337&ei=59). And ICE has been spotted in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and practically any city run by a Democratic mayor or a mayor of color.
While these paramilitary-style raids, complete with armored camouflage, helmets, masks, pepper bombs, mace, tazers and military-style weapons firing live ammunition wielded by unscreened, untrained and unrestrained militia members and reputed “January 6th insurrectionists” (Speculation grows ICE hired Jan. 6 rioters to be in ‘Trump’s army’, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/speculation-grows-ice-hired-jan-6-rioters-to-be-in-trump-s-army/ar-AA1V6egf) who never should have been allowed near such armaments in the first place, were basically set up and foreshadowed by the forcible closings of federal offices by Elon Musk’s ironically named “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), the people of Minneapolis certainly did not anticipate this level of lawlessness and brutality. Still, the people of Minneapolis have, for the most part, maintained their collective composure, which has likely saved many lives and simultaneously eroded the moral and ethical standing of this occupying army. In this battle of attrition, the question lingers: Who will blink first?
We’ve all seen the videos of ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting Renee Nicole Good in the face through the window of her SUV as her wife screamed in horror, the denial of critical care as she lay dying in the driver’s seat of her vehicle, the actions of ICE agents as they removed evidence, thereby corrupting the crime scene, and the mendacious accusations from Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem (regally positioned behind a podium that featured the Nazi-inspired slogan “One of Ours, All of Yours”) that Ms. Good was a “domestic terrorist” who was using her vehicle as a weapon in an attempt to run over Ross. US president Donald Trump, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and ICE commander Gregory Bovino (“resplendent” in floor-length Nazi-style overcoat) would echo these remarks and throw in a few gratuitous threats against “insurrectionists” for good measure. Kyle Rittenhouse, who had earned infamy for his August 2020 rampage in Kenosha, Wisconsin that saw him cross state lines and illegally brandish an AR-15 rifle, then subsequently gun down two men participating in protests following the police murder of George Floyd, would insist in an interview, as described in an article by Andrew Stanton on MSN (Kyle Rittenhouse says he would have shot Renee Good, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/kyle-rittenhouse-says-he-would-have-shot-renee-good/ar-AA1UEr4E?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=6971374d22ee4654b832faad92e25ea2&ei=44), that
“Agent Ross, his identity has already been put out there publicly. He’s been doxed. His family has been forced to go into hiding. Very similar to what happened to me—immediately being doxed. My home address being put out there, calls for death threats, bounties put out on him,” he said. “Similar to me, I’ve had bounties put out against me.” …
Rittenhouse said Ross “defended himself” against Good, who he said was there to “block and impede with” ICE agents from completing duties.
He said the officer was “doing his job well.” He said he believes he was right to believe his life was in danger at the time, describing the car as a “two-ton missile coming at you with the ability to cause great bodily injury as death.”
“Agent Ross did what he had to do to stay alive, and he’s being villainized by the left for defending himself because the left is trying to push a narrative that we are the side of violence,” he said.
When asked what Rittenhouse would have done had he been in the ICE agent shoes, he said he would have shot Good if it meant saving his own life.
“If somebody is coming at me with a moving vehicle, I’m going to do what I need to do to stay alive,” Rittenhouse said. “That is a two tone weapon coming at you. That is something that can cause great bodily injury or death, just as anybody with half a brain cell would do.” …
And two weeks later, ICE agents would fatally shoot Veterans Administration (VA) Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurse Alex Pretti, who had committed the mortal sin of coming to the aid of a woman who had been brutally shoved to the ground by ICE agents. After half a dozen ICE agents pepper-sprayed him, wrestled him to the ground and confiscated his legally-licensed handgun which was still holstered in his waistband, one of them fired several shots into Pretti’s back, followed by several more shots — 10 or 11 in total — to his back and head, killing him on the spot as bystanders cursed and screamed in shock. Despite the fact that the entire incident was captured on camera, from several angles that showed that Pretti never drew his weapon and was not even resisting them, he was vilified by Trump administration officials as a “domestic terrorist” who was “brandishing a weapon” as he “assaulted the officers” and had intended to inflict serious bodily harm on the ICE agents. The same officials who had, over the past several years, supported right-wing activists attending political events of “woke” politicians with rifles strapped to their backs, made references to a “good guy with a gun” as the defender of the helpless as a push-back against banning guns in schools, and supported the rights of citizens to use a weapon to defend themselves against perceived (and sometimes imagined) aggression according to their cherished Second Amendment and “Stand Your Ground” state laws, were now cautioning that “if you’re participating in a protest, you shouldn’t be carrying a gun.” And to make matters even worse, video footage has been shared of an ICE agent telling a protester on the streets of Minneapolis, “If you raise your voice, I will erase your voice,” a clear threat of retaliation against a citizen exercising their Constitutional right of questioning his actions.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned ICE and called for its abolishment in an article by Demian Bio, NYC mayor Mamdani reiterates support for abolishing ICE, says they are not showing ‘humanity’
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/nyc-mayor-mamdani-reiterates-support-for-abolishing-ice-says-they-are-not-showing-humanity/ar-AA1UCgxT?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=6971374d22ee4654b832faad92e25ea2&ei=64):
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani reiterated his support for abolishing ICE, saying the agency is not showing “humanity” and hasn’t done it for a “long, long time.”
Speaking on The View, Mamdani was asked about his stance on the agency, considering that “in light of recent events, there’s been renewed calls from prominent Democrats to abolish ICE.”
Mamdani said he supports the concept, claiming that ICE is now “an entity that has no interest in fulfilling its stated reason to exist.”
“We’re seeing a government agency that is supposed to be enforcing some kind of immigration law but instead what it’s doing is terrorizing people no matter their immigration status, no matter the facts of the law, no matter the facts of the case,” Mamdani added.
Elsewhere in the interview he said “there is a way to care about immigration in this city and in this country with a sense of humanity” but “what we’re seeing from ICE is not it” and hasn’t for a “long, long time.” …
Arizona’s Attorney General Kris Mayes cited her state’s “Stand Your Ground” laws, which in Florida had led to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin as well as Rittenhouse’s own acquittal of the Kenosha, Wisconsin shootings, as justification for citizens in her state to shoot masked and unidentified individuals who would attempt to abduct them, in an article by Michael D. Carroll, Arizona AG suggests residents may gun down masked ICE agents if they felt threatened under state law
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/arizona-ag-suggests-residents-may-gun-down-masked-ice-agents-if-they-felt-threatened-under-state-law/ar-AA1UNWch?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=697360df3b104f3aa8d368bf02e29504&ei=16). Her stance, which had been cheered when right-wing officials had used them to support gun-wielding individuals like Zimmerman and Rittenhouse, was now condemned when a Democratic Attorney General assumed it:
… She added, “I mean if somebody comes at me wearing a mask, by the way, I’m a gun owner, and I can’t tell whether they’re a police officer, what am I supposed to do? No, I’m not suggesting people pull out their guns, but this is a don’t tread on me state.”
Arizona GOP Rep. David Schweikert has blasted the attorney general, calling her rhetoric “reckless.” In a scathing post on X, the gubernatorial candidate wrote, “Let’s not pretend this was some careful legal seminar. …”
In Colorado, ICE agents allegedly left Vietnam War-inspired Ace of Spades cards, known as “death cards”, on the vehicles of those they arrested, according to the story DHS condemns ICE agents leaving ‘death cards’ on cars
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dhs-condemns-ice-agents-leaving-death-cards-on-cars/ar-AA1V6spv?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=69790e21b65040f9a3b3939f11b47c79&cvpid=70cb955b4cae466b874541723cd9047a&ei=15) by Aurora DeStefano:
The Colorado Sun reported that ICE agents have been leaving Ace of Spades playing cards — famous since at least the Vietnam War as death cards — on cars left behind after drivers and passengers have been detained by ICE in Colorado.
The Sun reported that “family and friends who went to retrieve the vehicles, left abandoned on Highway 6, found the cards, which were printed with contact information for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora.”
A January 22 Minneapolis church protest being reported on by former CNN journalist Don Lemon, Georgia Fort and two other Afrikan Descendant independent journalists was broken up by ICE agents who then arrested the four journalists, charging at least Lemon with, ironically, what had come to be known as a “Ku Klux Klan law”, implying that Lemon’s act was equivalent to those of the Klan. According to an article from National Public Radio, Feds arrest Don Lemon, Minnesota journalist and 2 others over church protest (https://www.npr.org/2026/01/30/nx-s1-5693756/don-lemon-arrest-cnn-minneapolis) by David Folkenflik, Updated January 30, 2026 and heard on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition,
Amnesty International demanded the release of Lemon and Fort, calling their arrests “a critical threat to our human rights.”
“Reporting on protests isn’t a crime — its protected by the First Amendment,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The Justice Department should drop these prosecutions or they should be thrown out.”
Also arrested at the protest was lawyer and civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, whose image was digitally altered by Trump administration officials in press releases after her arrest to show a distraught and crying Armstrong, despite the fact that she had maintained her defiant dignity throughout.
Meanwhile, the atrocities continued, with most of the attention remaining trained on “ground zero” in Minneapolis, key among them ICE agents using a five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos as bait to draw family members out of a house, then taking Liam and his father to a detention center in Texas. Texas Congress member Jasmine Crockett, one of the few members of Congress bold enough to assertively stand up to the abuse of the Trump administration and the relative fecklessness of Democrats as well as Republicans in the House and Senate, visited the detention center where she found several children even younger than Liam being held there. Video footage of a Minnesota citizen of Asian descent being detained outside in the snow dressed only in shorts and a bathrobe before finally being released, and ICE agents in an SUV ramming a woman’s car, then approaching her car with guns drawn and forcibly removing her from the vehicle to take her into custody, has also been widely circulated.
All of this, and the acrimony that has increasingly been inspired against ICE from the general public, has apparently impacted the morale of ICE agents who, enticed by the $50,000 signing bonuses offered, an apparently lax screening process, and the opportunity to play urban soldiers “Call of Duty”-style, had apparently expected to be welcomed by the community only to be reviled for their cruel, brutal and murderous tactics. A story by Tom Latchem, ICE agents want out of Minnesota: Trump’s ‘battle is lost’
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-agents-want-out-of-minnesota-trump-s-battle-is-lost/ar-AA1V57iE?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=69790e21b65040f9a3b3939f11b47c79&ei=27), discusses the “collapsing” morale of ICE agents and the consequences for Border Control Commander Greg Bovino, the on-the-ground “little commandant” of the ICE forces:
… ICE and Border Patrol agents are said to have turned on the operation—and on their colleagues who blasted Pretti. The 37-year-old VA ICU nurse was shot multiple times in the back in a confrontation captured on video last Saturday. …
“This is a no-win situation for agents on the ground or immigration enforcement overall,” one Border Patrol agent wrote in a private chat obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein and published on his Substack mailout. “I think it’s time to pull out of Minnesota, that battle is lost,” they added. …
Morale inside the ranks is described as collapsing. One veteran ICE agent—one of six Klippenstein reportedly spoke to for the article titled “ICE Unloads”—bemoaned that “the brand new agents are idiots.” He blamed what he saw as lowered hiring standards for the chaos in Minnesota. …
Agents also gripe that Washington has dragged them away from immigration work and into street confrontations with protesters by labeling demonstrators as “impeding” federal functions and branding “Antifa” and other leftists as radicals and terrorists.
Threat briefings are now fixated on alleged “retaliatory” plots against ICE and Border Patrol after the deaths of Pretti and Good. “Lots of people are freaking out,” one officer told Klippenstein, saying agents are “getting seriously paranoid, afraid of being targeted by ‘retaliators,’” and talk as if “we are fighting insurgents,” turning Minneapolis into a domestic Baghdad. …
Their anger is colliding with a political crisis already engulfing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, 54, who has reportedly seen her handpicked “commander at large,” Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, 55, demoted by President Donald Trump, 79.
The Daily Beast reported Monday that Trump’s immigration czar, Stephen Miller, and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had turned against Noem. They blame the Homeland Security secretary and her chief adviser and rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski, for the decision to make Bovino and his masked “Green Machine” squads, who have been regularly filmed manhandling civilians nationwide, the public face of Trump’s deportation blitz.
Hours later, Bovino was gone, his official government social media accounts suspended, and border czar Tom Homan parachuted in to take charge on the ground. …
The Importance for Pan Afrikan Activists
The impulse might be to look at these events and sound the alarm that fascist dictatorship is here, in the fashion of Hitler’s Third Reich. But what should concern Afrikan People in particular is the fact that this is not evidence that America is reverting to Nazi Germany, but that America is actually returning to its own post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-racist roots.
Analyses of these events have tended to stress Nazi Germany as the inspiration for Trump’s rampages by ICE and by DOGE stemming from early 2025. It has been said that the administration is following lessons learned from Hitler’s rise to power as the Nazis embarked on their campaign to run roughshod over Europe, beginning with the demonization of the press, the targeting of immigrants and those designated as the “other”, continuing with the construction of detention camps, and culminating in mass murder and genocide. As a number of analysts have explained more recently, however, these tactics did not initiate with Hitler and the Nazis, because they learned many of their tactics by studying the United States, its near-extermination of the Indigenous First Nations, its enslavement of Afrikans and its responses to post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Black Codes and the early Jim Crow Era, a major feature of which was the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, which authorized the “slave patrols” that hunted Black People across the North to forcibly transport them back to the South to be re-enslaved, and the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution), which provided the loophole of enslavement when convicted of a crime and led to the mass incarceration of today that has largely impacted People of Afrikan Descent.
Right wing racist ideologues, their political operatives and their “Angry White Male” militias who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and have been training with military-style weapons in the country’s backwaters for years have been anticipating the day when they could “take their country back” to the “good old days” (basically, antebellum slavery) when their women were useful only as breeding stock, “minorities” were kept in their place of hard labor and servitude, and the land (though stolen from the Indigenous people) was all theirs to plunder and do with as they wished. To them, the Abolitionist Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement and the Women’s Movement took from them what they had come to consider their (ill-gotten) birthright: a land which, despite their abject unworthiness, was theirs and theirs alone, promised to them by God, free from the inconvenience of having to deal with the rights of Blacks, women, Indians, foreigners and other groups. Losing the advantages that had been provided to them through treachery and wars was seen by them as a betrayal; the equal and respectful treatment of the “others” was akin to actual oppression to many of them. The crusade to “take back America” has been a long time coming for them, from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (a White Supremacist himself, but at least one who did not fully believe in the cruel treatment of those he considered inferior to him) to the post-Reconstruction terrorism of the Klan to the Black Codes to the struggle to enforce segregation during the Civil Rights era to COINTELPRO’s war on Black Power to Nixon to Reagan to the “Contract On America” to the Project for a New American Century (the Heritage Foundation) to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus to “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush’s “Shock and Awe” to the rise of Trump and MAGA to Project 2025 (the Heritage Foundation again) and Agenda 47 all have been part of a continual campaign to re-establish White Supremacist right-wing pseudo-Christian ideology in the United States, and Trump’s ICE offensive, set up at least in part by Elon Musk’s DOGE raids in early 2025, are the culmination of those efforts as Trump, Miller and Nome’s masked, heavily-armed, practically unrestrained agents have been given guns, badges and armor to trample citizens’ rights in “woke” American cities like soldiers patrolling “enemy territory” in the streets of Baghdad or the rice patties of Vietnam, letting everyone know, as Trump administration cheerleader Tucker Carlson had crowed during an October 2024 presidential campaign rally (Tucker Carlson Gives Truly Disturbing Speech About “Daddy” Trump, https://newrepublic.com/post/187485/tucker-carlson-daddy-trump-spanking-speech), that “When dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.’” America, you’ve been a bad little girl, and Daddy Trump is home now to spank America’s bad little woke behind. And ICE is the belt that’s gonna give your bottom that spanking that you deserve. A belt decked out in military cammo, armor, high powered weapons and the color of God-given and Trump-bestowed authority.
Resistance
While it took a World War to finally vanquish Germany’s Nazis and a Civil War to defeat the Confederacy, the answer to America’s current wave of totalitarianism against its own people, in the end, might come down, as it often did when the slave catchers hunted Black People in certain areas of the North, to the refusal of citizens to participate in the repression of those they had come to see as neighbors and important members of their society. Author and analyst Jelani Cobb, writing for The New Yorker on January 30, 2026, points out that “Americans took to the streets to defend their neighbors in the nineteenth century, too” in his article What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act
(https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-ice-should-have-learned-from-the-fugitive-slave-act):
… The Fugitive Slave Act was rhetorically useful for a certain element of the political class, but for most people it took an issue that they may have felt ambivalent about—or hadn’t much thought about at all—and gave them a direct, visceral reason to feel very strongly about it. Slavery might have been an abstract national concern, but the fate of a neighbor, whom people may have depended upon as a part of their community, was very much a personal one. Something akin to that reaction is occurring in communities across the U.S. now, as social-media feeds fill with images of children being harassed by ICE agents as they leave school and of a five-year-old boy being detained, and of adults being shoved to the ground and pepper-sprayed or pulled from their cars after agents smash the windows. The Fugitive Slave Act is remembered by historians for its ironic effect: designed as a means of cooling the simmering regional tensions over slavery, the law effectively made it the most contentious issue facing the nation. It pushed Americans toward the realization that the nation was bound in what William Seward later termed an “irrepressible conflict.”
Sometimes the resistance calls for direct confrontation; other times it may simply require a refusal to acquiesce to the demands of a despotic regime. An example of this form of resistance was shown when a Canadian business refused to sell a warehouse it owned in Virginia upon learning what the US government planned to do with it, as detailed in the article DHS deal to buy warehouse collapses after company learns of ICE’s plans
(https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dhs-deal-to-buy-warehouse-collapses-after-company-learns-of-ice-s-plans/ar-AA1VlUh1?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=697e582635ac425d9682ddb138d1a638&ei=42) by Matthew Chapman:
A Canadian business has backed out of a deal to sell a Virginia warehouse to the federal government, after learning the building would be used as a detention center for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
According to the Vancouver Sun, “Jim Pattison Developments says it won’t sell a warehouse in Virginia to U.S. Homeland Security to be used by its Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as a detention centre. In an email Friday, the company said ‘the transaction to sell our industrial building in Ashland, Virginia, will not be proceeding.’ The company did not comment further about why that decision had been made.”
Further comment was probably not necessary. The odious nature of ICE’s mission is finally sinking in with a large swath of the American body politic. It’s unfortunate that this awakening did not come when the victims of official brutality were Black: Fred Hampton, Eleanor Bumpurs, the MOVE Family, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Freddie Gray, Sonya Massey, George Floyd and so many others. Not even the recent ICE murder of Keith Porter, Jr. (pictured above) by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve after Porter had fired a gun off in celebration (Shocking New Development in Case of ICE Agent Killing Keith Porter Jr. on New Years Eve, https://www.theroot.com/shocking-new-development-in-case-of-ice-agent-killing-k-2000082368) drew much attention. It’s a tragedy that the estimated thousands of wrongful detentions, many of them US citizens and children, and the murders that were never exposed to the public because they weren’t committed on camera, were not enough to rouse the citizenry and the political mis-leaders into action before things got to this point. It’s too bad that it took the public, in-broad-daylight murders of Nicole Renee Good and Alex Pretti, live and on camera for all the world to see, for many in White America to realize that what we in Black America have been telling them for so many years was the truth. It’s a shame that, after this crisis has finally died down, many of those who momentarily understood our pain and are now confessing that they were lied to and “can’t believe I ever supported these right-wing kooks” will soon revert back to their “politically safe” haven of “if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about” and “just go along to get along.” An old saying goes, “Every now and then man stumbles over the truth, but rest assured he will pick himself up and carry on.” But for now, for right now, the self-described “real Americans” are beginning to understand. And we may have to settle for this brief moment of clarity to help us extract ourselves from this current crisis.
The morale of ICE and its agents is crumbling. As activists attempt to keep tensions manageable, convinced that Trump’s plan all along has been to inflame passions enough that someone commits a truly violent act against ICE agents to give him an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and try to cancel future elections as he imposes complete martial law on the country, the resilience of the people of Minneapolis will either cause the resolve of many of the administration’s enablers in Congress and the Supreme Court to collapse or will provoke Trump into committing an act so heinous that it sparks a revolution that topples his regime that 
way. While we harbor no illusions about morals or ethics within this administration, our hope is that staring its own cruelty in the face (“The cruelty is the point!”) will finally cause it to implode of its own weight and allow justice to prevail, by the administration’s minions losing their nerve or by others in government growing a spine or a pair of testicles at last. The alternative, the path of increasing xenophobia and repression, can bring nothing but destruction.
As Afrikan People, we must take this moment of alarm to convince our people to finally come together, unify and organize. The Baltimore-based Pan Afrikan organization Reality Speaks/Solvivaz Nation has often coined the exhortation “Unify Or Die”, holding a series of six annual conferences under that slogan that started 20 years ago. While some might advocate an immediate resort, in our current disorganized state, to armed struggle and the resulting anarchy that will, at this point in time, likely result in numerous unwanted casualties, we must practice discipline, and the resolve, at least as of this writing, of the people of Minneapolis, as we build organization with each other, reconcile our differences, and finally come together as we have been ourselves calling for all of these years so we can build something positive to lift our community up, instead of succumbing to the panic this administration wants to provoke to tear our community down.
“A revolution is bloody, but America is in a unique position. She’s the only country in history, in the position actually to become involved in a bloodless revolution. The Russian Revolution was bloody, Chinese Revolution was bloody, French Revolution was bloody, Cuban Revolution was bloody. And there was nothing more bloody than the American Revolution. But today, this country can become involved in a revolution that won’t take bloodshed. All she’s got to do is give the Black Man in this country everything that’s due him, everything. I hope that the White man can see this. ‘Cause if you don’t see it you’re finished. If you don’t see it you’re going to become involved in some action in which you don’t have a chance.”
– Malcolm X, The Ballot or The Bullet, April 12, 1964
https://vermonthumanities.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/MalcolmXSpeech.pdf
“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
– George L. Jackson