BRC Fightback Efforts: A Summary of Meetings

Sept 2001: The NC meeting occurred as planned in Raleigh, North Carolina. Due to recent events, our attention turned to the heightened repression as a result of the newly declared war on terrorism.

We decided to create a fightback committee and to convene a unity meeting—a conference of the Black Left to discuss a strategy to fightback against war, racism and repression and for peace, reparations, and justice.

January 2002: The fightback committee decided to organize a series of regional fightback meetings in order to increase representation of various sectors in our communities by making meeting sites more accessible to folks.

Meetings held and other notable events organized by BRC members:

March 3, 2002 Bay Area Fightback meeting in Oakland, California

April 4, 2002 New York United’s commemoration of the NLK antiwar speech at Riverside Church

April 20, 2002 Washington D.C. Mobilization against the War—40,000 people attended

April 27, 2002 Midwest Fightback meeting in St. Louis, MO.

April 27, 2002 Philadelphia’s 2^nd Education Not Incarceration Conference

May 11, 2002 National Women’s Alliance Conference--Black Feminist Caucus members presented a panel on Feminist responses to War, Racism and Repression

May 25, 2002 Southeast Fightback meeting in Durham, N.C.

June 15, 2002 Northeast Fightback meeting in New York City organized by New York Metro

Upcoming events:

August 17, 2002 Reparations March in Washington, D.C.

September 18, 2002 Philadelphia BRC Fightback Event (during the NC meeting)

April 26, 2003 Black March for Peace

In the fightback meetings, we asked that participants address the following objectives:

• Assessments of what radical and progressive Black organization and key people are doing now to struggle for reparations, peace and justice.

• A list of individuals from these organizations interested in serving on a continuations committee.
• Suggestions about regional and national actions all of us can get involved in.

Below, find brief reports from 3 of the 4 fightback meetings (minutes from the southeast meeting have not yet been posted) and the National Women’s Alliance Black Feminist Caucus session on War racism and Repression. Full reports are available for each of these meetings.

 

To summarize:

 

Bay area

 

The Bay area meeting was, of course, historic. And it helped us to get out fightback efforts off to a great start because of the enthusiasm of participants as well as their grounded experiences in political work.

There were 75 participants at the meeting. We spent most of time hearing from folks about what they’ve been doing in their local areas to contribute to the antiwar/pro-peace effort. Two publications: the Ahora Now Working Paper Series as well as War Times were shared as well as a reading from Ewuare Osayande’s Riots in the Sly: Poems After 11 September 2001.

The most important questions posed at the meeting were the following:

1. What are the evaluative questions about how to move forward—which types of action make sense?
2. How will we take regional difference into account in the fightback effort?
3. What is our goal in this next period and how long is each interval (e.g. the next 3 months, the next 6 months, 9 months, etc)
4. Who is our audience for the effort? This will speak to the specific tactics we use.

Fightback Strategy and Tactics Document

 

In response to these questions, members of the fightback committee have developed two documents outlining our strategy and tactics to promote peace, reparations, justice. We have circulated both a longer document and a shorter interim plan that streamlines the longer document. Both documents are available for review

 

St. Louis

 

Organizers worked hard to plan a regional fightback meeting in the Midwest. They reported that approximately 75 people attended that meeting in St. Louis on April 27, 2002. The meeting took the form of a panel presentation followed by a series of workshops. Each workshop drew from the knowledge and experiences of participants resulting in a list of excellent action steps for those involved in fightback work around the themes of:

1. building a multiracial anti-war movement
2. youth voices for peace
3. the military budget vs. the people
4. the US patriot act and its impact on Black liberation.

National Women’s Alliance Conference

 

The conference session of about a dozen Black Feminist Caucus members and other women concerned with peace, reparations, justice mostly focused its discussion on providing feedback to the longer strategy and tactics document. They stressed the need for centering gender in the document, including identifying specifically how women and children are affected by war, including rape, sexual slavery, child soldiers, social cuts, etc. They also highlighted the need for making the document more accessible. The tactics should also center women and children, so that educational materials would be developed with various groups of women and children in mind.

In regards to the question of audience, participants finally stressed the need to connect antiwar efforts to antipoverty work. They posed the following question: how do we bring in people struggling to keep a roof over their heads into the peace, reparations, justice effort?

 

New York City (Note: this summary is a little more detailed because this is the first public report of the meeting in NYC).

 

The June 15^th meeting of the northeast included individuals from throughout New York State, Connecticut, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There were about 2 dozen organizers in attendance. The Fightback committee’s interim Strategic Plan was presented and discussed. Plans for the August Reparations March were discussed as well. One of the points of dispute was whether of not the fightback Strategic Plan needs to be a BRC document as opposed to a document that is adopted by a broader coalition of the Black Left. Several important questions were addressed to the BRC’s fightback efforts including the following:
How do we address the fear factor in organizing against the war?

How will we take the issues of Peace, Reparations, Justice to the streets in our own communities (taking our resources into account).

What is the organizational form in which we’ll accomplish our fightback work?

Several suggestions were made, including:

Go on record to call for a national alliance for reparations and against war.

Call for regional groupings to build toward the reparations rally

Call a meeting of all progressive forces.

Create a leaflet that connects the liberation of Palestine and black people’s reparations.

 

Participants decided to set the following short-term tasks to be completed:

1. Draft a statement
2. Create a structure (such as the continuations committee)
3. Mobilize to do outreach work

The final activity of fightback committee members as of this report is working with Abdul Alkalimat to set up a fightback website. In upcoming meetings and for upcoming events, we request that organizers videotape events as well as to take pictures and tape record presentations. It is our goal to build a ‘democracy’ website with sound and pictures to lessen the impact of intermediaries interpreting the content of such events to other potential participants in our fightback work. We welcome any video, film, or tape-recording form the above mentioned events and meetings so that we can enliven the website.

 

Assessment

 

The fightback effort has been extremely successful in that we have gathered peace-loving people of color in various parts of the country to talk about how to fightback against war, racism and repression. However, the BRC fightback effort suffers from the other ills of the BRC—lack of BRC members who are willing or able to participate consistently on a fightback committee, limited time to devote to fightback work for those members that remain on the fightback committee, and lack of resources. The only way we can sustain the fightback effort is if we gather a fresh cadre of folks who are willing to help coordinate the fightback effort of the BRC.

 

The most important immediate tasks are to coordinate a fightback continuations committee, revise the strategy and tactics documents to imbue them with black feminist content, and to determine the BRC’s participation in upcoming public events, especially the April 2003 Black March for Peace. The fightback committee may also want to plan for a national meeting. But the lack of resources within the organization must be addressed in order to make a national meeting happen.