Armed militia calls for ‘black nation’
Violent clashes ‘inevitable’ as paramilitary far-left protesters in US confront extremists from far-right
FEARS of violent clashes in the wake of the protests sweeping across the US heightened over the weekend with a show of force by an armed black militia group.
An estimated 2,500 members of the “Not F-----g Around Coalition” (NFAC) took to the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, on Saturday, joining a protest march over the police shooting of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black nurse, in March.
Wearing black combat fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, the group outnumbered a small clutch of “The Three Percenters”, a far-right militia group who also made an appearance at the demonstration.
The two sides were kept apart by police, and the only incident came when three members of the NFAC sustained minor wounds when a gun discharged accidentally.
However, the appearance of the two armed militias raised the spectre that future confrontations may not pass off as peacefully, given the backdrop of violent protests that have swept across the US following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in May.
Entirely separate from the Black Lives Matter movement, the NFAC is willing to use violence as the group’s leader “Grandmaster Jay”, whose real name is John Fitzgerald Johnson, made clear.
“We are all ex-military, we are very disciplined, we are all expert shooters,” he said in one recent interview.
“We don’t want to negotiate, we don’t want to sing songs, we don’t bring signs to a gunfight. We are an eye-for-an-eye organisation.”
Carrying echoes of the Black Panther movement of the Sixties, the NFAC is militant and separatist, according to Mr Johnson.
“The solution is very simple. We follow a declaration of liberation, declaring every African descendant of the slave trade a political prisoner here in the United States. Then after that, the United States has a choice: they carve us a piece of land out here, we’ll take Texas and let us do our own thing, or exodus out of here and go somewhere where they will give us our own land to build our own nation.”
The group came to public attention at the beginning of the month when around 200 activists marched on Stone Mountain Park in Georgia, a site with carvings of Confederate soldiers. The location, which is associated with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the Twenties, was chosen in the hope of provoking a clash with the far-right.
However, with The Three Percenters nowhere to be seen, the NFAC claimed victory. “I don’t see no white militia, the boogie boys, The Three Percenters and all the rest of these scared-ass rednecks,” one activist shouted through a megaphone.
Clashes between extremists have seen outbursts of violence, notably at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 when a Unite the Right rally ended with the death of a counter-protester.
The emergence of the NFAC represents an escalation of tension, raising fears of a serious confrontation between Left and Right.
“I think the threat of things getting violent is very real. These are two groups of people carrying weapons,” said Julia Decook, assistant professor at the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago, who has studied the far-right.
“There has been a rise in paramilitary groups on the Right. These are people who have wanted to start a war.
“People are realising how serious the threat of paramilitary groups is.
“The fact there is a group of armed black citizens is terrifying to groups like The Three Percenters. It is a tinderbox and we really have to be ready for it.”
Elsewhere in the US, one person was shot during a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin, Texas, on Saturday night.
It is understood the victim, a protester who was carrying a rifle, was shot dead by the driver as he approached a car.
Violent clashes between police and protesters were reported in several other cities over the weekend.
In Seattle, police used pepper spray and stun grenades in an attempt to restore order. At least 45 people were arrested and several protesters and police officers were injured as Carmen Best, the city’s police chief, declared a riot.
Further north, in Portland, Black Lives Matter protests entered their 59th day.
While Chicago, one of the cities in which Donald Trump has deployed federal troops, saw a series of demonstrations with one protest calling for the police to be defunded, while another “Back the Blue” rally supported the forces of law and order.