Learning About The Black Panthers Changed How I Saw Liberation

Michael Williams is an Atlanta organizer and member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Motivated by racist attacks targeting Black communities, he began studying the Black Panther Party and discovered its socialist roots. In this reflection, Williams explains why he believes Black liberation and socialism are inseparable and how that realization shaped his political journey.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation. It’s a revolutionary socialist organization. We’ve got branches in every major city across the country. I’m a member of the Atlanta branch, and it’s great.

As far as being a Black socialist, I think that the thing that we have to understand is there is no Black liberation without abolishing capitalism. And there’s also no abolishing capitalism without Black liberation. The two are different sides of the same coin, different sides of the same overall struggle.

So for me, it personally began with the mass killings that were happening all around the country, such as specifically with Dylann Roof, where these armed racists were just going into churches, schools, grocery stores, public places, and gunning down Black people en masse in public.

I wasn’t familiar with socialism or communism or anything like that at the time, but what I did know was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. So when I saw my people being attacked like this, I saw us just being gunned down. I said, well, we need to bring back the Black Panthers.

So I decided to read and study what the Black Panthers were about. And I found out that the Black Panthers were actually socialists. They were actually a communist party. And they weren’t just, you know, doing free clinics and free breakfast programs out of the kindness of their heart. But there was actually an overall strategy to it, which was to orient the people to the fact that we don’t need these bosses, we don’t need these billionaires. We can take care of ourselves. We can take power into our own hands.

And once I understood that the socialist movement is intertwined with my own Black history in that way, I knew I had to be a part of it.

And so the thing about it is, even though we know that our rights came from struggle and that we have earned them, and we understand, obviously, the right to vote is a basic of any democratic system, we also know that the United States has never really been a democracy.

I mean, it started with slavery. And under the Constitution, only white men who owned property could vote. So they never really cared about democracy for the majority.

Even after the Civil War and slavery was abolished, we still had to put up with a century of Jim Crow, which is basically an apartheid system. And even after we overcame that with the civil rights movement, we’re still seeing it rolled back.

Today, someone can just get in office or get appointed to a lifetime position in the Supreme Court and roll back everything that our people have struggled and bled for.

So we understand that we ultimately need a new system, a system that’s not controlled by politicians and billionaires, but that’s actually controlled by the working people.

And that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to not only secure our rights so that no politician can take them away from us again, but also expand them.

And that’s what socialism is all about. And that’s what the PSL is all about.

The racist Trump administration and the Supreme Court that he’s appointed has passed a decision recently that guts a critical section of the Voting Rights Act for Black people. And across the South, governments have already started redrawing their voting districts, trying to eliminate Black-majority voting districts.

And so the thing about it is, even though we know that our rights came from struggle and that we have earned them, and we understand, obviously, the right to vote is a basic of any democratic system, we also know that the United States has never really been a democracy.

I mean, it started with slavery, and under the Constitution, only white men who owned property could vote. So they never really cared about democracy for the majority.

Even after the Civil War and slavery was abolished, we still had to put up with a century of Jim Crow, which is basically an apartheid system. And even after we overcame that with the civil rights movement, we’re still seeing it rolled back.

Today, someone can just get in office or get appointed to a lifetime position in the Supreme Court and roll back everything that our people have struggled and bled for.

So we understand that we ultimately need a new system, a system that’s not controlled by politicians and billionaires, but that’s actually controlled by the working people.

And that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to not only secure our rights so that no politician can take them away from us again, but also expand them.

And that’s what socialism is all about. And that’s what the PSL is all about.