BLACK ARMS TO HOLD YOU UP: A History of Black Resistance, by Ben Passmore
So much sneering and posturing passes for radicalism at our uneasy political moment that it’s a shock to come across the real thing, but here it is: a thoughtful, funny cartoon history of Black activism that sets aside nonviolence. Ben Passmore’s “Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance” delights in ambiguity, as you might have already gleaned from the title. Are Black folks lifting you? Or do Black people with guns have you at their mercy?
Passmore begins by drawing himself looking at his phone, watching the death of Philando Castile, a Black man fatally shot in 2016 by a Minneapolis police officer in front of his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her daughter. Reynolds taped the incident on her phone and posted it to Facebook; it was the second police killing of a Black man captured on video and circulated on social media that week.
As Ben watches Castile die, he sinks deeper into despair, wondering how he can live in a country where so many people seem to want to keep him from doing just that. Some commentators suggested that Castile would still be alive if he hadn’t been armed and hadn’t frightened the M.P.D. officer into a tragic mistake. Passmore arrives at a less palatable conclusion: For centuries, authorities official and unofficial have killed Black people with impunity, and Castile was simply another of them.
Countering such pessimism is Ben’s father, Ronnie, an old man with white dreadlocks who wears a dashiki and a beret covered in pins, and who educates Ben about the long struggle against this impunity. The story of resistance is a rich one, he notes, and its champions have tried Black separatism, hippie communes, even campaigns of assassination to carve out a space for themselves. Ben is skeptical. “Meanwhile you’re over here lookin like you robbed a whole failed bookstore,” he tells his dad as Ronnie unpacks a bag of radical literature.
Together, the pair follow six activists, beginning in circa-1900 Louisiana with Robert Charles, who was beaten by police officers before he pulled out his revolver and fought back. The ensuing days-long manhunt and gunfight had the police and a white mob of thousands on one side, and on the other, Charles, who was determined to sell his life as dearly as possible.
Passmore’s persistent skepticism is refreshing. It’s undisputed that the 1985 police bombing of the Move commune in Philadelphia killed five children and six adults and left hundreds homeless. It’s also true that Move was rife with cultish internal violence and child abuse for decades.
Passmore suggests that if we want to take government anti-radicalism seriously as an infringement on Americans’ rights to assemble and speak their minds — I do, and I would say that Passmore certainly does as well — then we have to look with clear eyes at the self-dealing, sexism, colorism and corruption that can aid the infiltration of groups devoted to defending Black liberty.
Of course, sincere internal disagreement can be a strength as well as a weakness, and the plasticity of Passmore’s cartooning gives the book’s competing ideologies their own distinct appearances.
To introduce the anti-Klan activist Robert F. Williams, there’s a virtuosic sequence drawn with the specific fluidity of a racist cartoon from the 1930s. For the story of Assata Shakur, he shifts to an angular, almost Cubist style. Every element seems packed with meaning: When guns fire and bombs explode, they do so with a DAYUM, and when police helicopters fly overhead, they go “whip whip.”
In the book, Passmore’s surrogate is in search of a way out of his despair, and the author is not quite willing to give him one, except to suggest that individual liberation might come from further reading. “Black Arms to Hold You Up” follows a sort of downward spiral, as the more militant factions of the 1960s civil rights movement encounter persecution, imprisonment and death.
Sometimes the radicals shoot back, and sometimes infighting devolves into outright gang warfare — one of Passmore’s most sympathetic subjects is Sanyika Shakur (no relation to Assata), a former Crip who became involved with Black nationalism while in prison. “There’s no process for getting out of Crippin,” he tells Ronnie. “I was still in prison and I still had all the same enemies.”
The book’s subjects have such passion and vision that the persistence of violent oppression seems unbearable. When Passmore arrives at the nadir of his despair, he wonders whether violence is the only answer to violence. Is Robert Charles’s bloody demise the best-case scenario?
The book closes with the story of Micah Johnson, the Afghan war veteran who killed five Dallas Police Department officers at a rally protesting on Castile’s behalf. The police finally killed him with a robot-controlled bomb. Johnson was a murderer who was given an other-than-honorable discharge from the Army for sexual misconduct. Was he also on the right side of history? Passmore declines to answer this question, but he asks it loudly.
BLACK ARMS TO HOLD YOU UP: A History of Black Resistance | By Ben Passmore | Pantheon | 224 pp. | Paperback, $22
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