Topics: Civil Rights, MLK, FBI, BLM
Photo: March on Washing 1963
Watch: Strong Island
As the nation considers how to move forward after January 6th, partisan headlines and opinion pieces are debating how we should remember this event; A protest went wrong? Capitol Riot? A few extremists? or was it an insurrection? or maybe a failed coup?
Historic events are built on historic roots. To understand what happened on January 6th, 2021, I will present in three parts a collaboration of public records to break down exactly what happened, and what it means for America.
This is part 1, of 3.
The Federal City
Founded in 1790 by forcing the Nacotchtank people from the land, and named in likeness, [George] Washington, D.C. was established as the Federal City.
Within a quick few years, it would grow to host a strong slave market, providing labor and support for the government officials. The officials themselves voted at work and voted back at their land, as head of the house. They weren't partially concerned with the rights of the district. This led to a tradition of power where the President directly presides over the city and its officials.
This was totally different than George Washington establishing himself as the King of the land bearing his name in some really important and specific ways. I am assured of it.
The United States Census would implement Slave Schedules starting to literally count the enslaved part of the population in 1850. The D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, passed by Congress and signed by President Abraham Lincoln, freed 3,100 individuals by effectively buying them from those who had legally owned them and giving the newly freed, now homeless, people some petty cash and telling them to leave.
With nowhere to go, freed black men and women didn’t get too far as the 1950s population peaked around 802,178. The white flight of the administrative workers pushed out the suburbs, allowing the city’s service class to emerge as the majority making our Capitol, the nation’s first recognized predominantly black city.
March On Washington
In 1963, marking the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, 200,000 to 300,000 people would organize the non-violent direct action march to D.C. for Jobs and Freedom.
In June, organizers met with President Kennedy who was concerned that so many [black] people showing up to D.C. would create “an atmosphere of intimidation”. Wilkins, King, and Young agreed to rule out civil disobedience and worked to compromise with the Washington D.C. police; But behind the scenes there was disagreement.
In the build-up to the event organizers would find themselves working to distinguish themselves from Communist groups. The FBI called celebrity backers and pressured them to withdraw support suggesting that they were supporting communists, and by association enemies of the state.
In the days leading up to the protest William C. Sullivan, Director of FBI’s Domestic Intelligence, would release a lengthy report detailing how Communists had failed to infiltrate the civil rights movement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rejected the findings, as numerous threats of violence and bombings towards Black American’s would be reported to the Bureau.
Washington D.C. mustered 5,900 police officers, including deputized firefighters. Who were joined by the National Guard’s 2,000 men, plus an additional 4,000 soldiers flown in from bases in Virginia and North Carolina. Meanwhile, outside of the city Pentagon readied 19,000 troops in the suburbs.
Rustin knew that without the ability to be heard, there would be no way to control the crowd of hundreds of thousands that was on their way; but the day before the march, in one of the most “secure” places on earth, someone sabotaged the [$19,000 (1963) | $161,732.22 (2021)] sound system. Fortunately for all, Walter Fauntroy was able to convince the U.S. Army Signal Corps to rebuild the system overnight.
"We have a couple hundred thousand people coming. Do you want a fight here tomorrow after all we've done?" - Fauntroy
Rustin and Fauntroy knew to manage an event of this scale, they needed to have the security of their own; people they could trust. So they organized more than 1,000 police officers to join on as private security.
"During that training, Julius Hobson emphasized the dangers posed by the FBI. Agent provocateurs would spread all over the Mall, looking for opportunities to start fights, Hobson said. The major task of the volunteer security guards, then, was to spot those agents and alert someone before any fights started. No one knew it at the time, but Hobson was a paid informant for the FBI.”
Meanwhile, Jerry Bruno, Kennedy’s advance man, was ready to cut power to the public address in the event of any “incendiary” remarks, as Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver his iconic off script “I have a dream” speech.
“We here today are only the first wave. When we leave, it will be to carry the civil rights revolution home with us into every nook and cranny of the land, and we shall return again and again to Washington in ever growing numbers until total freedom is ours.” - Randolph
Home Rule
Then in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson, with bipartisan Congressional agreement, replaces the three-commissioner system of Washington D.C. with a Mayor complemented by a 9 member District Council, all selected by the President.
The residents would go on to win the hard-fought rights to elect their own Council and Mayor in 1973, by extending the framework that had traditionally been used to keep slavery in the South, with D.C. Home Rule Act.
While Washington, D.C. Mayor comes to preside over a population larger than that of Wyoming or Vermont, effectively acting as a Governor, this role as the head of this Administrative District would not be permitted the federal rank and privileges.
In this way, the fight for D.C.'s self-determination has historically not been that different from that of the Financial Administrative District of Hong Kong.
Black Lives Matter
Trump building upon D.C.s framework, over the Summer of 2020, uses national guards to escalate the tensions. Including the tear-gassing protestors so that he can go hold a Bible awkwardly for a photoshoot. In continuing reaction to the summer’s events, the Capitol Area sees about 5,000 protestors who are met person to person with heavily armed officers.
Secretary of The Army, Ryan D. McCarthy told reporters that “It was necessary to bring in the support to help local law enforcement and federal law enforcement officials due to the tremendous damage [and] police officers and Guardsmen being injured.”
Troops would continue to surge into the area as protestors took a day off, building a combined agency task force of 7,600 troops; Including 2,600 members of the National Guard.
"This summer, when we had the BLM protest, it was all hands on deck,” one officer said to reporters. “I mean we had an abundance of bodies and support … The number of people that they had available was astounding. They were pretty much working us to the ground”
In the face of all of this Washington’s Attorney General, Karl Racine was never briefed or made aware of intelligence that indicated possible attacks on Capitol property. As the protestors were working with the framework the MLK and others had worked so hard to create.
The Pentagon, through some combination of pressure, would start to pull back troops as protests peaked for the summer with 10,000 protestors only slightly outnumbering an estimated 6,000 remaining troops.
Black Lives Matter protesting had taken the capitol, the nation, and the world, by storm with an estimated 15 million to 26 million people in the streets over the summer.
As a decentralized moment it spanned the world, but also took place in each city with the attendees being mostly locals, contrary to now retracted statements from city offices.
Remembering MLK
Martin Luther King Jr, whom we now celebrate as an economic holiday, was a public Socialist and considered an Enemy of the State who in 1964 was blackmailed by the FBI with the goal of sexually shaming MLK into committing suicide; A process known today within the NSA as SEXINT.
This agenda would later be laid at the feet of the founding director J. Edgar Hoover, as an abuse of power; But to say that Hoover abused the power that Progressive Republican John Calvin Coolidge Jr. bestowed upon, him would suggest that the pre-civil rights era Justice Department that Hoover so successfully came up in was equally “apolitical” of an organization.
It was in the very same 1964 that the newly elected Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, who won in a landslide after the assassination of JFK, would go on to make Hoover director of the FBI for life.
In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated at Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee.
Support The King Center
Support The Rainbow Push Coalition
Support NAACP