Red Squads and Black Radicals: Reading Agency in the Archive

Abstract

Scholarly accounts of racial formation have regularly focused on the role of state actors or non-state oppressive subjects administering racial systems against a dominated population. Challenges or resistance to state racialization practices by dissenting communities, on the other hand, have not received commensurate engagement, particularly at the level of race-making. Judith Weisenfeld demonstrates in New World A-Coming that African American religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Peace Mission were not merely protesting a racial system but also inventing new racial subjectivities. This account of Black radical agency is deeply consequential for understanding the religious dimensions of Black radical politics and the agential architecture of racialization. In this article, I apply Weisenfeld's method of mapping radical agency from the underside of state archives. The focus is on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Chicago campaign of 1966 and the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) that culminated in the summer of 1968. I argue that Black radical activists, despite being targeted by counterintelligence operations of law enforcement, nevertheless transformed the politics of race and power with lasting consequences by exceeding in specific ways the efforts of state actors to destroy Black liberation projects. The archival records of state entities themselves render the import of Black agency. This implies, among other things, that scholarship on Black religion and racialization broadly must shift significantly to account for a central argument of Weisenfeld's book: dominated peoples have been agents of racial histories and not merely objects of racial governance.