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The Revolutionary Gun Clubs Patrolling the Black Neighborhoods of Dallas
January 5, 2015
by Aaron Lake Smith

On a warm fall day in South Dallas, ten revolutionaries dressed in kaffiyehs and ski masks jog the perimeter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park bellowing "No more pigs in our community!" Military discipline is in full effect as the joggers respond to two former Army Rangers in desert-camo brimmed hats with cries of "Sir, yes, sir!" The Huey P. Newton Gun Club is holding its regular Saturday fitness-training and self-defense class. Men in Che fatigues run with weight bags and roll around on the grass, knife-fighting one another with dull machetes. "I used to salute the fucking flag!" the cadets chant. "Now I use it for a rag!"

"A knife changes the whole game," one of the drill sergeants, who goes by the name Chief, explains, demonstrating how to perform a slash-and-stab maneuver on the torso of a wide-eyed girl in her 20s. A panhandler wanders up from the street. He is about to ask for spare change but then becomes interested. "What is this? Self-defense? That's cool." A pack of black bikers throw up their fists as they roar by.

Charles Goodson, the gun club's 31-year-old dreadlocked vegan co-founder, grew up less than a mile away. Both he and Darren X, the national field marshal of the New Black Panther Party, have been organizing around police-violence issues in Dallas for the past decade. Goodson says they worked together last year, during an armed rally in the small East Texas town of Hemphill, where they protested the police's failure to fully investigate the murder of a black man named Alfred Wright. The Dallas New Black Panthers have been carrying guns for years. In an effort to ratchet up their organizing efforts, they formed the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, uniting five local black and brown paramilitary organizations under a single banner. "We accept all oppressed people of color with weapons," Darren X, who is 48, tells me in a deep, authoritative baritone. "The complete agenda involves going into our communities and educating our people on federal, state, and local gun laws. We want to stop fratricide, genocide—all the 'cides."

his past August, the gun club staged their first openly armed patrol through Dixon Circle, a predominately African American neighborhood in Dallas where police killed a young unarmed black man named James Harper in 2012. About two weeks before the rally, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, had killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, and in July a white cop had choked Eric Garner, a Staten Island dad, to death over the alleged sale of untaxed cigarettes. In Dallas, several dozen black militants stood at attention in front of a field officer, holding assault rifles and AR-15s. "This is perfectly legal!" the leader bellowed. "Justice for Michael Brown! Justice for Eric Garner!" came the hoarse cries from the formation. "No longer will we let the pigs slaughter our brothers and sisters and not say a damn thing about it," the leader answered back. "Black power! Black power! Black power! Black power!"
Since then, Goodson says, donations to the gun club have poured in from across the country and their membership has more than doubled. Support has come from unlikely sources such as Russell Wilson, a bureau chief in the Dallas district attorney's office. "They have an absolute right to do what they do," he told me. He believes they may be "restoring some people's confidence and saying, 'We're not going to keep getting pushed around here.'"
At the park, I ask Goodson what he thinks would happen if an armed black self-defense group like his had appeared in Ferguson. As we talk, a drill sergeant behind him commands a pair of grappling members to fight for their lives. "I think it would really wake America up."

Shootings of civilians by police officers reached a 20-year peak in 2013, even as the incidence of violent crime in America went down overall. According to FBI statistics, police in the United States killed 1,688 people between 2010 and 2013. The actual number of black and brown people shot by police is almost certainly much higher, but a lack of data means that no one knows for sure how many people have been killed. Very few of America's 12,000 police and sheriff's departments report officer-involved shootings. But based on the data that has been reported, according to a study by ProPublica, young black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than young white men.
"What we see in Ferguson is just the tip of the iceberg," National Bar Association president Pamela Meanes told a Dallas TV station in August, calling for Department of Justice investigations of the police departments of 25 cities, including Dallas. Federal authorities have recently come down hard on the Albuquerque and Cleveland police departments for unnecessarily Tasering people, striking suspects after they've been handcuffed, using excessive force against the mentally ill, and drawing their weapons and shooting suspects when not in danger.
David Brown, Dallas's African American police chief, has said he will overhaul the department's use-of-force policy, and he has been openly critical of the Ferguson police department in the wake of Michael Brown's death. (David Brown's own son, David Brown Jr., was killed by a police officer after shooting at a cop in 2010.) While Brown has attempted reforms during his tenure, the Dallas Police Department has a dismal record. The city's cops have shot at least 185 people since 2002. Seventy-four percent of those shot fatally have been black and Hispanic, according to a report, "A History of Violence," compiled through open-records requests made by the group Dallas Communities Organizing for Change. Dallas police shot 14 people in 2014 alone, among them Jason Harrison, a 38-year-old mentally ill man who was killed by officers after he allegedly threatened them with a screwdriver. Harrison's brother had to mop the blood off the front steps of their home after the fatal encounter. His family filed a wrongful-death suit against the city in October.

When David Brown and Craig Watkins, Dallas's outgoing district attorney, who is also black, held a series of town-hall meetings after Michael Brown's death, they were met with stories about racial profiling, shouts of "killing our innocent young men," and bereaved mothers attempting to get copies of police videos. If Dallas, with its diverse command staff and plans for a civil rights unit can't stop shooting black and brown men, it's no wonder that more radical solutions, like the Huey P. Newton Gun Club's call for an armed black citizenry, are gaining traction.
Dallas earned the nickname the "City of Hate" after John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dealey Plaza in 1963. But eleven months earlier, it was Martin Luther King Jr. who was terrorized by the city's convulsive mix of enraged whites, anti-communists, and John Birch Society members. His speech on segregation and the American dream at the Music Hall at Fair Park in January of that year was met with a bomb threat and large protests. According to The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City, Jim Schutze's history of Dallas race relations, in the 50s and 60s the city's black leadership and clergy allied themselves with the white business elite to keep the civil rights movement at bay. "There was no movement in Dallas," said veteran Texas civil rights leader Reverend Peter Johnson. "Jackson was a movement town, Biloxi was a movement town, Selma, Birmingham, Louisiana. Texas was the only state with no civil rights movement." King was boycotted and rejected by black clergy leaders in Dallas because of a dispute within the Baptist church involving his father. "There were bad feelings between the ministers and MLK Sr.," Schutze told me when I met him at his home in Old East Dallas. "When MLK Jr. came with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was received very badly."
Dallas race relations remained suspended in a kind of arrested development at least until the 1980s. "We called it the time warp," Schutze said. "Dallas was always about 20 years behind the rest of the country. You could tell it hadn't really happened—the awakening—black people and white people meeting eyeball to eyeball. I had come from Detroit, and here, in the late 70s and 80s, it was just bizarre, like a fifties black-and-white Colonel Sanders chicken ad."
In 1984, Dallas was the host city for the Reagan reelection convention—a risky move, given the city's history, but it was the "star of the Republican universe," according to Schutze, who covered the event. "The tone of it was, 'This is the city that never made the mistakes the rest of the country made,'" Schutze said. "They never took the boot off. God favors Dallas because Dallas has done things the right way. In particular it has done things the right way racially."

The Huey P. Newton Gun Club was formed partially as a response to a grassroots gun-advocacy group called Open Carry Texas. Texas is one of only six states in the country that still outlaws the open carrying of handguns, but it legally permits brandishing assault rifles and shotguns. Open Carry Texas garnered national attention last May after pictures from its "open-carry walks" went viral: Groups of schlubby white guys schlepping AK-47s into Chipotle, Target, and Starbucks provided a convenient opportunity for Northern liberals to mock Texan gun culture. Yet the movement attracted so much attention and support that it looks like Open Carry Texas will achieve its advocacy goal of getting state legislators to pass a new open-carry bill this year, adding handguns to the list of firearms citizens can legally tote.
Riding this wave of enthusiasm, Open Carry Texas announced in July that it would stage a walk through Houston's Fifth Ward, a predominately black neighborhood and the birthplace of the rap group the Geto Boys. "The black community has got its butt kicked for some time," David Amad, a white Open Carry Houston leader, told a local TV station. "We're going to go in there and help with that, put a stop to that." C. J. Grisham, the president of Open Carry Texas, then compared himself to Rosa Parks, telling another paper that the heavily armed group needed to walk through a black neighborhood because "somebody's got to stand up and sit in the front of the bus."
Fifth Ward community leaders and Houston's New Black Panther Party, led by the charismatic Quanell X, were not impressed by the group's offer of assistance. The New Black Panther Party has made news in the past couple of years for putting a bounty on the head of George Zimmerman and intimidating voters in Philadelphia, where they canvassed for Obama and one member allegedly brandished a nightstick and shouted, "You are about to be ruled by a black man, cracker!" (The Department of Justice dropped the case.) Recently, the group has been pilloried—mostly on Fox News—as outside agitators in Ferguson. Since Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown, escaped indictment, two New Black Panthers in Ferguson have been brought to court on gun charges, though right-wing news outlets claim the men were actually planning to blow up the Gateway Arch and murder the Ferguson police chief. The surviving leadership of the original Black Panther Party has also repudiated the movement for inflammatory and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Bobby Seale, a founder, speculated to me that this new incarnation of his group is a front organization funded by right-wing money, "maybe by the Koch Brothers." But despite the New Black Panther Party's dismal reputation, in Dallas its members are, at least, the most thoughtful and professional revolutionaries around. They have a platform, an ideology, work as barbers and electricians, and are serious about their politics and the importance of being armed. "What you see in the media relates to them on a national level, but their organization is a lot different here on a local level," Goodson tells me. Darren X says that his Party is trying to move away from the inflammatory rhetoric of its leadership and "transition from black power to all power to all the people."