Mondoweiss, 3/8/25: “‘Most of the time, the people inside the banks weren’t afraid at all,’ former political prisoner Jihad Abdulmumit* tells me, describing the experience of doing ‘bank expropriations’ to gain funds for the Black Liberation Army during the 1970s.

‘In fact we would receive rounds of applause and cheers a lot of the time from the bank customers, sometimes the bank tellers too,’ Abdulmumit says. ‘One time I remember we dropped some of the cash and a customer on the ground eagerly helped us put it back in the bag!’

The Black Liberation Army (BLA) emerged as an underground organization, waging guerilla warfare in response to the U.S. imperialists’ bloody assault on Black liberation. Composed of former Black Panther Party and Republic of New Afrika members forced to take their work underground, the BLA was a logical response to the FBI’s monstrous COINTELPRO operation, which waged brutal, bloody, all-out war on every aspect of the Panthers’ movement.

As Panthers across the country were being assassinated, framed, incarcerated, maligned in the media, and hunted by armed agents of the colonial state, the extreme violence by the imperialists had to be met with a material response—not victimhood.

‘In the Panthers, I helped form a free community health clinic in Plainfield,’ said Abdulmumit. ‘We had free breakfast programs, distributed newspapers, and helped run the gangs and drug dealers out of the neighborhoods. This is what the government was so afraid of, why they went to war with us.'”

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*Jihad Abdulmummit is an ALC board member.