Philadelphia Apartment Building Claimed as Sovereign “Moorish” Territory on 30th Anniversary of MOVE Bombing

A new Black nationalist micronation in Philadelphia?

The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has never healed from the horrific events of May 1985, when police helicopters bombed an urban compound rented by the radical Black nationalist organization MOVE and the mayor ordered firefighters to stand aside while 65 homes burned to the ground, after a siege followed police attempts to evict the group.  MOVE, a (heavily armed) communitarian, back-to-nature movement, had been branded a terrorist organization linked to the killing of a police officer seven years earlier, though in the 1985 eviction case had done little more than torment neighbors with political diatribes delivered through bullhorns.  Last month, media and activists revisited the MOVE siege on its thirtieth anniversary, which came amid a new civil-rights movement across the United States focusing on police brutality against African-Americans.

How Philadelphia police handled an eviction complaint in 1985.

It was in this climate that four African-American activists facing eviction from another Philadelphia apartment building invoked Black nationalism last week and tried to turn a minor court hearing into an international incident.  They say the entire building is a sovereign territory, not part of the United States.

A tenant in the latest dispute being arrested last month

At the June 2nd hearing addressing defiance of an eviction order by the landlord, Francine Beyer, the four tenants of the apartment at 13th and Hamilton identified themselves as “Aboriginal Indigenous Moorish Americans,” refusing to recognize the court’s right to call them or its authority over the building, which they regard as “theirs by birthright,” according to the Philadelphia Daily News, and not subject to U.S., state, or municipal law.

Location of the apartment building on 13th and Hamilton in Philadelphia being claimed as a separate nation.

“Are you aware that the people who you have falsely called defendants,” one defendant, Nanye Amil El (a.k.a. 45-year-old Dante Morris), wearing a maroon fez cap, asked Judge David C. Shuter, “are actually heirs to this land?”  Another defendant, 65-year-old Delilah Passe, waved what the press described as a Moorish flag but was asked to put it away lest it be used as a weapon.  (If a reader can tell me which flag was used, I would be grateful.)

This (in center) may or may not be an example of the type of Moorish flag
displayed by defendants in court last week in Philadelphia.

At this point, students of the history of Black nationalism and readers of this blog will recognize the names and terminology of the tenants as indications that they are part of the Moorish Science Temple movement.  This precursor to modern Black nationalism 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 as well as the Nation of Islam’s founder, Elijah Muhammad, among others.  Many Moorish activists claim that African-Americans are actually African-featured “Israelites.”  This is known as the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which holds, against all evidence, that the Americas were peopled by ancient Africans who are responsible for the monumental architecture of the Midwestern mound-building cultures and others.

Historic photo of Moorish Science Temple of America members

Other offshoots of the group that have been reported on in this blog include the Washitaw Nation in Oklahoma and elsewhere (see an article from this blog) (whose crown is currently claimed by a Trenton, New Jersey, eccentric calling himself “Crown Prince Emperor El Bey Bigbay Bagby-Badger” (see article), the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors (whose 500-acre compound Tama-Re, in Georgia, was demolished by authorities in 2005), and a new splinter group called the United Nuwaupian Nation (see article). Yet another group, the Moorish Divine and National Movement of the World, includes among its followers Pilar Sanders, the estranged wife of the retired football star Deion Sanders, who in court last month tried to void a prenuptial agreement which would cost her millions by saying that she now calls herself Pilar Biggers Sanders Love El-Dey and answers only to the laws of the “Moroccan Empire.”

Moorish Science follower Pilar Sanders as depicted in a graphic by the celebrity gossip website TMZ

One reporter contacted Brother A. Kinard-Bey, of the largest and oldest Moorish group, the Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc., in Washington, D.C., who called the four Philadelphia tenants “impostors” and said his group is the only real Moorish Temple in the U.S.  He added, “We’re seeing a number of people claiming to be of our temple who want to know how to naturalize or how to gain to their sovereignty.  Those are not lessons that the Moorish Science Temple of America teaches.”

Noble Drew Ali, founder of the Moorish Science Temple movement

Indeed, while Moorish Science traditionally is communal and leftish in its orientation, new offshoots like the Washitaw Nation are borrowing concepts and legal strategies from the “individual sovereignty” movement more popular among alienated right-wing white American males.  One of the tenant activists in Philadelphia this month, 38-year-old Rebecca Lyn Harmon, who asked to be referred to as R. Lynn Hatshepsut Ma’atKare El, is also an attorney (under yet a third name, Rhashea Lynn Harmon), who has talked of running for mayor of Philadelphia on the Republican Party ticket.

R. Lynn Hatshepsut Ma’atKare El (a.k.a. Rebecca Harmon),
a defendant in the current eviction case

A formal arraignment will be held for the four tenants on June 23rd.

American and Moroccan flags on display at a charity event hosted by a separate Moorish group in Philadelphia recently.  Note the 48-star flag.

[You can read more about many of these and 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 special announcement for more information on the book.]

“Emperor” of Black-Nationalist “Washitaw Nation” Claims Individual Sovereignty in New Jersey Gun Case

(from The Trentonian)

A man claiming to be the newly crowned emperor of a Black-nationalist group called the Washitaw Nation argued before a judge in Trenton, New Jersey, on September 9th that a defendant in a gun-possession case was immune from prosecution because he was a “sovereign citizen.”

An example of a “Washitaw Nation” yard sign, for sale at Café Press

The “emperor,” known as El Bey, presents himself as monarch of what is also known by its longer name, the Official Empire Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah.  [See the bottom of this page for an article comment from El Bey himself, clarifying, “I never proclaimed to be the Emperor of the Washitaw Nation or Empire Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah.  Visit www.empirewashitaw.org to see my actual position within the Empire Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah and Washitaw Nation.”]  The group draws inspiration from the Islamic- and Masonic-tinged “Moorish Temple” strain of Black-nationalist activism which dates to northern urban African-American communities in the 1910s and ’20s and from the purported ancestry of its founder, Verdiacee Hampton-Goston, with Louisiana’s Ouachita Indian tribe.  “Empress” Hampton-Goston, who died earlier this year (as reported at the time in this blog), subscribed to the “Paleo-Negroid” hypothesis, which holds, against all evidence, that the Americas were peopled by ancient Africans who are responsible for the monumental architecture of the Midwestern mound-building cultures and others.  She claimed to be Empress of the entire territory of the Louisiana Purchase, though she really only governed a few scraps of land in Oklahoma.  Actual Ouachitas, who are mostly enrolled with the Caddo Nation, do not seem to want much to do with the Moorish “Washitaws.”  (See that original article on this blog for a full discussion of the Washitaw movement.  [See also comments by El Bey at the bottom of this article.])

The late empress, Verdiacee Hampton-Goston

El Bey, a 42-year-old who appeared in court in full Plains Indian regalia, including a headdress, is, according to the Trentonian newspaper, “best known in Trenton for once asserting his status as a so-called ‘sovereign’ nation allowed to keep a horse in the back yard of his row house in the Wilbur section” (two horses, actually, named Princess and Pop, and it was actually only half of a duplex.)  And El Bey told the paper that “he and allies will ride their horses through Trenton next week to make a political point.  He said he has legal papers exempting him from U.S. and local law.”  At other times, El Bey has claimed to be prince of the Abannaki Aboriginal Nation, named for an unrelated tribal group in New England but in this case another incarnation of a Moorish Science style fringe group (as identified by the Alabama-based hate-group-monitoring organization the Southern Poverty Law Center).

“Emperor” El Bey of the “Washitaw Nation.”
(Contents of peace pipe unknown, but one wonders.)

(Wikimedia Commons photo.)

The first Moorish Science Temple was founded in New Jersey in 1913 by Noble Drew Ali, who mixed Islam, Masonry, ancient Egyptian traditions, and crackpot anthropology to assert that, because the real Indians were “paleo-Negroids” from Africa, the descendants of African-American slaves were somehow the true owners of the North American continent.

A map of the ancient world from a Moorish Science Temple of America website not
affiliated with the Washitaw Nation.
(Trenton, New Jersey, not shown.)

El Bey is a well-known eccentric in Trenton.  Also known as Crown Prince Emperor El Bey Bigbay Bagby, but apparently born as William McRae, he tried in February to assert authority over a defunct Powhatan Renape Nation reservation in southern New Jersey, earning him from the Philadelphia Inquirer the nickname “Prince Alarming.”  (An actual Powhatan leader, Obie Batchelor, has said of El Bey, “We don’t know where he came from.  We don’t know anything about him.  He just popped up out of the woodwork.  You can’t just pop up and claim yourself chief.”)  McRae has also tried to convince the singer Kanye West to join his tribe, and in 2009 he expressed his crush on the lovely young director of the Trenton Free Public Library by arriving at her workplace on horseback to beseech her to gallop away with him and become his bride.  The library director, Kimberly Matthews, called the police instead.

Kimberly Matthews, the librarian who could have been an empress.
Ah, the road not taken.

(from The Trentonian)

What is not clear is whether the followers of the original, late “empress” acknowledge El Bey—or anyone—as her successor, or what role the defendant in the Trenton gun case, one Abdul Aziz, plays in the organization.  But El Bey’s invocation of the “sovereign citizen” movement shows affinities with Empress Verdiacee’s Oklahoma branch of the movement, which used that libertarian concept as a crude legal tool—betraying more ideological affinities with radical right-wing anarchists, Tea Party activists, and all-white militias than with the more collectivist, community-based strains of mainstream Black Islam and Black Nationalism.

Emperor El Bey, with Princess and Pop.  If nothing else, they are on his side.

(from The Trentonian)

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), will be on shelves and available on Amazon on March 1, 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

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.]

Chokwe Lumumba, Former Republic of New Afrika Justice Minister, Dies at 66

Lumumba with fellow New Afrika cabinet member
Fulani Sunni Ali in the 1980s

Chokwe Lumumba, the radical Black nationalist separatist and civil-rights lawyer who became the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, died in Jackson on February 25th, at the age of 66.

Lumumba was Minister of Justice for the provisional government of the Republic of New Afrika (R.N.A.), a proposed Black-ruled nation-state consisting of the five states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina.  (Other proposals envisioned African-American-majority counties in neighboring states included as well.)

Lumumba was born Edwin Finley Talafierro in Detroit, Michigan, in 1947.  He changed his name to Chokwe Lumumba in the wake of the trauma of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which occurred while Talafierro was attending Kalamazoo College.  The name derived from the Chokwe (also spelled Tchokwe) ethnic group, in today’s eastern Angola and neighboring regions, which valiantly resisted the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the independent Republic of the Congo (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or D.R.C.).

Congolese rebel-turned-president Patrice Lumumba,
Chokwe’s namesake

(Ironically, there are separatist connections to each of these entities.  The militant Marxist–Leninist rebel Lumumba’s rise to power in 1960 prompted the Western-backed attempted secession of two mineral-rich regions in the Congolese south, Katanga and South Kasai, and after Lumumba’s execution in a coup d’état that year, his vice-president founded a rival Republic of the Congo based in the eastern city of Stanleyville (now Kisangani).  Meanwhile, the modern Tchokwe and Lunda people of Angola are involved in a low-level movement to bring into being a declared United Kingdom of Lunda Tchokwe (Tchifudji tcha Wanangana Wa Lunda Tchokwe), which would cover the eastern half of the country.)

Lumumba with his first wife, Anasi, in 1974

The New Afrika movement, which Lumumba joined in the late 1960s, was, as one might expect, not popular with federal authorities, who were in that era of the Black Power movement infiltrating and undermining Black nationalist groups.  Police raided the first R.N.A. national convention, in the Detroit church hosted by the Rev. C. L. Franklin (Aretha Franklin’s father), and the movement also attracted attention in 1968 by orchestrating the attempted secession from the United States of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhood during the New York City teachers’ strike.  But the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) lost patience when, in 1971, the R.N.A. established a heavily-armed provisional government headquarters in the middle of Jackson, Mississippi.  As justice minister, Lumumba was closely involved in smoothing out relations as far as possible with neighbors and the police.  But he was out of town when SWAT teams with an armored vehicle launched a full assault on the compound, in which one policeman was killed.  The R.N.A. president, Imari Obadele, was given a long prison term and became one of the first Americans designated by Amnesty International as a political prisoner.  Lumumba and New Afrika’s First Vice-President, Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz, who was also not present during the raid, both evaded prosecution as the separatist movement was dismantled.

An early Republic of New Afrika press conference.
(I believe President Obadele is standing with arms folded on the right
and that Lumumba is in the glasses with the leopard-print accessories.)

Later, with his law degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, Lumumba gained fame for civil-rights cases in which he defended, among others, Fulani Sunni Ali, the R.N.A. information minister, charged in a New Afrika–linked bank heist, and, in 1993, the rapper Tupac Shakur, charged in a shoot-out with police.  He also successfully negotiated the release from prison, in 1996, of the sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott, who had been given life sentences 16 years earlier for stealing $11.00.

The flag of the Republic of New Afrika,
based on the pan-African tricolor first designed by Marcus Garvey

Lumumba had practiced law in Mississippi since 1988.  Last year, he won an election for mayor of Jackson, an 80% African-American city, with 87% of the vote.  Conservative critics attacked him for his radical past, but he was by all accounts a relatively moderate and pragmatic politician in his short tenure.

Lumumba as mayor, in 2013

In its heyday, the Republic of New Afrika was in some ways an elaborate publicity stunt, designed to draw attention to pressing issues African-Americans faced in that era.  As a republic, it was unworkable.  But Lumumba never gave up the dream.  At his mayoral inauguration, he raised his fist and shouted, “Free the land!”, the R.N.A. nationalist slogan.  And through an organization he founded, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), he developed what became known as the “Jackson–Kush Plan” which aimed for establishing “self-determination” through “People’s Assemblies” in an eighteen-county strip along the majority-black, western, riparian edge of Mississippi—to be called “Kush.”  The idea was not quite an independent state but a grass-roots, ethnically-defined “autonomous region.”  The idea of Kush had first been put forward by the New Afrikan Peoples Organization (NAPO), an R.N.A. offshoot, and some old R.N.A. maps show Kush as a sub-region of New Afrika in the same general area, and named, of course for the ancient kingdom on the Nile, with its symbolic resonances of the Old Testament flight to freedom after a period racially based slavery along a floodplain.

Upon hearing of his death, the civil-rights leader Ben Jealous said, “Chokwe Lumumba was one of the greatest civil rights lawyers of our time.  In the tradition of Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Darrow, he was steadfast in his determination to defend the rights of those who the system too often pretends have none.  I have worked with Chokwe to free wrongly incarcerated people since I was 21 years old, most recently the Scott Sisters.  He was a giant.  He will be sorely missed.”

[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.]

Tales of Two Racial Supremacists—One of Them Working for Homeland Security

Two different racial supremacists made headlines within the past week, one white and one black.  Both operate online and have ambitious agendas.  One is even working for the United States government.  First, we’ll look at the white supremacist.

In late August, the “Hatewatch” service of the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit which monitors and prosecutes hate groups of all stripes, revealed that a 61-year-old white supremacist named Paul Craig Cobb and his associates were buying up cheap property in Leith, North Dakota—population 24 (officially, 16)—with plans to make the area into a whites-only enclave.  Posting on a supremacist web-forum called White Nations, Cobb has announced plans to locate in Leith, for example, a Dr. William L. Pierce Pvt. Park of Leith, named for William Luther Pierce II, the late Oregon State University physics professor who founded the high-profile neo-Nazi hate-group National Alliance.  Some of Cobb’s admirers are even talking about buying up property elsewhere in North Dakota in order to make the entire state an all-white enclave.  North Dakota is one of the whitest states in the U.S.  Ninety percent of the state’s population is white, mostly German-American and Norwegian-American.  African-Americans are 1.2%.

White separatism?  There’s an app for that.  Paul Craig Cobb, in Leith, North Dakota

North Dakota, of course, is experiencing a demographic and economic boom right now as Americans from all over, and of all political orientations, move there to take advantage of the new economy based on “fracking”—hydraulic fracturing—for natural gas and oil in the North Dakota area.

Cobb moved to North Dakota last year from Canada, where he had faced charges for inciting hatred, and then Montana.  He was fired last month from a construction firm in North Dakota when his views became known.  He is suing for wrongful dismissal.

Leith, in Grant County, North Dakota

Cobb told media that he developed his views earlier, reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf at age 11, and he also claims he once worked in Hawaii as a taxi driver in the early 1980s and gave Barack Obama a ride.

Bobby Harper, Leith’s one African-American resident (how many other North Dakota towns are officially over 6% black?), has been targeted by Cobb’s vitriol.  Online, Cobb has called Harper’s wife Sherrill a “filthy race-mixing white woman.”  But the Harpers are staying put, and the other residents say they “have his back.”

The Harpers are determined not to move out of their home town.

It is a credit to the tiny community of Leith that its residents have banded together to let a separatist hate-monger know that he is not welcome there.  Unfortunately, the same cannot yet be said of the second racial supremacist profiled here, Ayo Kimathi, an African-American militant who works at, of all places, the federal Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.).  (That’s his photo at the top of this article.)

It was not until the S.P.L.C. broke the story of Kimathi’s secret second life as an inciter of race war that D.H.S. too notice and, on August 23rd, put him on administrative leave.  Kimathi’s position is as a small-business specialist for D.H.S.’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but by night and on weekends he is a minor celebrity named “the Irritated Genie” speaking to radical separatists the nation over through his online organization War on the Horizon (W.O.H.), which bangs the drums for a violent showdown between American blacks and whites.  W.O.H. preaches hatred of gays and lesbians as well as ethnically cleansing North America both of European-Americans and of “black skinned Uncle Tom race traitors.”

An image from the War on the Horizon website

After being put on administrative leave, Kimathi ranted on the W.O.H. Facebook page, “The war is on!  The smallhats (white so-called jews [sic]) have stepped it up.”  Kimathi appears, here, to adhere to views first promulgated, ironically, by white supremacists, to the effect that Jews are impostors who only pretend to be descended from tribes of Israel, while the true Chosen People are (fill in name of group supremacist making the argument belongs to here).

No fan of Obama, Kimathi calls him “a treasonous mulatto scum dweller ... who will fight against reparations for Black people in amerikkka, but in favor of fag rights for freaks in amerikkka and Afrika.”

Craig Cobb (second from right) posing with Estonian neo-Nazis.
Can someone identify this flag?

Right-wing commentators often criticize the S.P.L.C. for going easy on black nationalist radicals and condemning white racists with disproportionate vigor.  Nonetheless, the S.P.L.C. outing of Kimathi is not a new development for them.  They have long listed Nation of Islam as a hate-group for example, and loudly condemned the bounty the New Black Panthers placed last year on the head of George Zimmerman, the part-Hispanic vigilante who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida.

One thing you have to give Louis Farrakhan: at least the trains run on time.

As for the Nation of Islam, which preaches racial segregation and anti-Semitism and calls white people the product of a genetic experiment by a black scientist gone awry millennia ago in the Middle East, the S.P.L.C. does not like them, but they do have one unlikely fan: Paul Craig Cobb of Leith, North Dakota (see above).  In his view, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan may be an Untermensch, but “he organizes people and they’re for themselves.”  Actually, maybe not such an unlikely fan.  Despite Cobb and Kimathi’s enthusiasm for segregation, birds of a feather do indeed flock together.

[You can read more about Cobbsville 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.]