The United States vs. Black Liberation: Watts, Zimbabwe, and the Counterrevolution of Empire

• In Event: Within the Empire: Black Liberation, Community, and Cultural Foundation

Abstract

This paper investigates how the United States aimed to subvert Black liberation by examining two events, the Watts uprising and Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial struggle. The 1965 Watts uprising was the bloodiest and most destructive urban rebellion in U.S. history to that point. In a tactical sense, the rebellion resembled the armed anti-colonial struggles sweeping across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Police and National Guard troops were befuddled by the Black rebels and repeatedly referred to their activities as “guerrilla tactics.” Given the rebellion’s strategic sophistication, state authorities began to consider both the revolt and the general suppression of Black resistance in more global terms. Zimbabweans, meanwhile, waged a struggle for liberation against the white settlers who had colonized their country. Although the United States was never directly involved in that war, the U.S. and its European allies covertly supported the Rhodesian settler state until its imminent demise.
This paper argues that the United States, Rhodesia, and their allies sought to suppress revolutionary struggles by tapping into transnational counterrevolutionary networks that would remain intact long after these events. Washington’s support for repressive regimes, like that of Rhodesia, both developed from and contributed to the U.S.’s domestic apparatus of racial repression. Racism in turn, provided the ideological foundation on which government authorities criminalized revolt and thereby legitimized overwhelming state repression. This paper also shows how the ideological and strategic connections between the world’s counterrevolutionary forces shaped the United States’ subsequent efforts to prevent future revolts and revolutions.

Author

• Navid Farnia, Wayne State University