Empress of Moorish “Washitaw Nation” Dies in California, Age 87

A Louisiana woman who founded a Native American–inspired “empire” with elements of both 1960s-style Black nationalism and the modern “sovereign citizens” movement died on April 26th at her home in California at the age of 87.

Flag of the Washitaw Nation

Verdiacee Hampton-Goston, as she was legally known, was an African-American from Louisiana who also claimed ancestry in the local Ouachita tribal group and preferred to be known as Verdiacee Washington-Turner Goston El-Bey, Empress of the Washitaw Nation—though the federally recognized Caddo Nation of Louisiana and Oklahoma, which represents most Ouachitas, had no formal connection with her.

“Moorish Science” religions date to the 1920s.

The Washitaw Nation (in full, it is called the Official Empire Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah) is in many ways an offshoot of the “Moorish Science” movement, a precursor to modern Black nationalism which emerged in the ferment of religious and political ideas in 1920s and ’30s Detroit, Michigan, where Islam, Freemasonry, offbeat anthropological theorizing, and an infatuation with all things Egyptian and occultic gave rise to Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, among others.  Hampton-Goston believed that her Washitaw ancestors were actually African-featured “Israelites” (this is known as the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis) and that she was their rightful empress and thus sovereign of traditional territories that she felt were illegitimately transferred from Napoleon Bonaparte to Thomas Jefferson in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase.  She spent most of her imperial career living in Oklahoma and was even for a while mayor of Richwood, Oklahoma.

The Empress’s territorial claims were not particularly modest,
but she didn’t press them.

Hampton-Goston claimed to be rightful empress of the entire territory of the Louisiana Purchase, which includes four U.S. states, parts of nine others, and even a decent slice of Canada.  She claimed this right through “matriarchal descent.”  (Most of the indigenous nations in the Louisiana Purchase territory have always, unlike the Ouachita and Caddo, practiced patrilineal, not matrilineal, descent, but, listen, this was hardly the most serious vulnerability in her arguments.)

Looks official—but don’t try using it as I.D.

The number of those who counted themselves Hampton-Goston’s imperial subjects is unknown, but they certainly included a large extended family.  In later years, the Washitaws adopted legal strategies that borrowed heavily from the “sovereign citizens” movement, a vaguely anarcho-libertarian tax-protest phenomenon which otherwise mainly attracts disaffected conservative rural whites.  But—unlike a more high-profile Moorish Science splinter group, the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, which was shut down by authorities in Georgia in 2005—Hampton-Goston stayed clear of troubles with the authorities.  She was once investigated for tax evasion, but the charges were dropped.  (She claimed identity theft caused the misunderstanding.)  She was also once arrested for shooting two pigs in Monroe, Oklahoma.  But charges were brought instead against the animals’ owner, for keeping them within city limits.

How to get pulled over in rural Oklahoma

The Empress was also the author of a book called Return of the Ancient Ones, which encapsulated many of her ideas.

The idea of “indigenous” “Black Israelites” appeals to many politically disaffected
African-Americans in places like Atlanta.

A long-time friend, Vicki Williams, said of Hampton-Goston, “She had her strong beliefs that everybody was supposed to be treated equal no matter what their color, what their race was or what they believed in or what kind of valuable they had.”  Another friend, Umar Bey, of Los Angeles, was quoted as saying, “She was a very spiritual woman.  She had a direct connection to God.  She could think about something and go to sleep and wake up with the information she needed.”  Hampton-Goston niece, Zelia Logan-Smith, age 66, said her aunt’s ashes would be returned to Monroe and scattered in a private ceremony.  Logan-Smith added, “She was one step from a genius.  She would say, ‘When you walk through the jungle, you have to be as harmless as a dove, but as wise as a serpent.’”

[You can read more about the Washitaw Nation, the Nuwaubians, and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Her anthropological theories were a tad wonky,
but the woman knew how to accessorize.

Who Murdered Chokwe Lumumba? Farrakhan, Others See Foul Play in Death of ’60s New Afrika Radical Turned Mississippi Mayor

The specter of assassination has been raised in the death on February 25th of Chokwe Lumumba, the 1960s-era Black separatist militant who became mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, in the last year of his life.  (See the report on his death from this blog.)

On March 2nd it was reported that the supervisor of Hinds County, Mississippi, Kenny Stokes, says he believes Lumumba was murdered and wants an autopsy performed.  (Jackson is the seat of Hinds County as well as the state capital.)  At a local event, Stokes stated publicly, “We gonna ask a question: who killed the mayor?  We’d feel a lot better if there was an autopsy.  First they say it’s not a heart attack and not a stroke, then what was it?  You don’t just die like that and you’re healthy.”  Afterward, he told a reporter, “So many of us feel, throughout the city of Jackson, that the mayor was murdered.  I’m not going to sugar coat it.”  (Watch a video of Stokes’s statements here.)

Sharon Grisham-Stewart, the Hinds County coroner, had declared Lumumba’s death to be from natural causes, though would not elaborate for reasons of privacy.  Previously, the mayor, who was 66 when he died, had battled cancer, but Stokes emphasizes what he calls conflicting statements from authorities and the fact that Lumumba was feeling fine shortly before his death.

Jackson police say they have seen no cause to investigate any possible foul play.  But Stokes’s suspicions are echoed by Louis Farrakhan, leader and “prophet” of the Nation of Islam (N.O.I.), who said he would pay for an autopsy.  Farrakhan stated during his annual Savior’s Day address, “Chokwe, I’ve known him for nearly 40 years.  ...  And he died under circumstances that we don’t know what it was.  He became the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi.  And any of you who know Mississippi and know Jackson—a Black man being mayor and trying to do right by all the people is not a mayor that those people want.  He was in the hospital.  He was on the phone doing mayoral business.  He was laughing.  He was in good spirits and within a few hours, he was dead.  ... Medical examiners—we can’t trust them when our babies are dead and they make it seem as if it were under ‘natural circumstances.’  They lie to protect the government.  We have to have our own independent pathologists and whatnot to look after us, so I understand they’re trying to raise the money.  I told them don’t even waste time, call me.  I will give you whatever it takes to get our own forensic specialist to go in and make sure that our brother died under the right circumstances.”

Louis Farrakhan

The Nation of Islam is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.) as a hate group.  Farrakhan, who believes that he has been contacted by extraterrestrials and that whites and Jews were created in a breeding experiment by a Black mad scientist in ancient Greece, has in the past praised Adolf Hitler at length, called Judaism a “gutter religion,” and asserted that crack cocaine was invented by the federal government and introduced into the ghettoes in the 1980s as a direct response to his own popularity.  He also believes in an active secret plot to recruit a Muslim to assassinate President Barack Obama.

The five states of the proposed Republic of New Afrika

Lumumba, who was born Edwin Finley Talafierro in Detroit, Michigan, served as minister of justice in the provisional government of the Republic of New Afrika (R.N.A.), a radical Black nationalist group which aimed to create a separate nation-state for African-Americans out of five states in the Deep South.  The group (which did not share N.O.I.’s anti-Semitism or other extreme views) was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), but Lumumba was absent from the heavily-armed R.N.A. “government” headquarters in Jackson when they were raided by the authorities in 1971 and so escaped prosecution, unlike his comrades.  Later, he became a prominent civil-rights attorney, whose clients included the rapper Tupac Shakur.

Flag of the Republic of New Afrika

Lumumba’s son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, and daughter, Rukia Lumumba, seemed to leave open the possibility of murder in their own statement released to the press on March 3rd, but he was careful not to echo Stokes’s air of certainty.  “We know that our father was loved and appreciated by many and a number of people both in Jackson and around the world have inquired into the manner of his death,” the younger Lumumba said.  “At this time, there has been no information provided to the family other than that provided at the time of his death by the doctors.  The family will explore all possible causes of his death.”

Lumumba with his son Chokwe Antar and daughter Rukia when he was elected mayor last year

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]