New Black Panthers in Dallas Are Responding to Police Brutality With Armed Community Patrols
The militias on the left edge are far outnumbered by those of the right edge of US politics, but they still do exist. Like the open carry demonstration wingnuts, they perform political theater too.
On a warm fall day in South Dallas, ten revolutionaries dressed in kaffiyehs and ski masks jog the perimeter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park bellowing “No more pigs in our community!” Military discipline is in full effect as the joggers respond to two former Army Rangers in desert-camo brimmed hats with cries of “Sir, yes, sir!” The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is holding its regular Saturday fitness-training and self-defense class. Men in Che fatigues run with weight bags and roll around on the grass, knife-fighting one another with dull machetes. “I used to salute the fucking flag!” the cadets chant. “Now I use it for a rag!”
“A knife changes the whole game,” one of the drill sergeants, who goes by the name Chief, explains, demonstrating how to perform a slash-and-stab maneuver on the torso of a wide-eyed girl in her 20s. A panhandler wanders up from the street. He is about to ask for spare change but then becomes interested. “What is this? Self-defense? That’s cool.” A pack of black bikers throw up their fists as they roar by.
Charles Goodson, the gun club’s 31-year-old dreadlocked vegan co-founder, grew up less than a mile away. Both he and Darren X, the national field marshal of the New Black Panther Party, have been organizing around police-violence issues in Dallas for the past decade. Goodson says they worked together last year, during an armed rally in the small East Texas town of Hemphill, where they protested the police’s failure to fully investigate the murder of a black man named Alfred Wright. The Dallas New Black Panthers have been carrying guns for years. In an effort to ratchet up their organizing efforts, they formed the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, uniting five local black and brown paramilitary organizations under a single banner. “We accept all oppressed people of color with weapons,” Darren X, who is 48, tells me in a deep, authoritative baritone. “The complete agenda involves going into our communities and educating our people on federal, state, and local gun laws. We want to stop fratricide, genocide—all the ‘cides.”
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