South Dallas Blacks, Guns and Common Sense

In war, sometimes, to delay means to decease. But the opposite could also be true. If delay gives birth to death, haste may give rise to life.

Perhaps that delicate balance sparked the rage of hundreds of black residents in South Dallas, Texas, who raced out of their apartments and homes, swarmed the parking lot of Eva’s House of Bar-B-Q, chanting “Black Power,” and shouting and vowing to protect their neighborhood and the Muhammad Nation of Islam Mosque on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard from white supremacists.

Courageous and brave blacks responded to a protest against the Nation of Islam by the white, racist anti-Muslim group The Bureau of American Islamic Relations, which showed up in the South Dallas community around 1:00 p.m. on April 2 wearing camouflage uniforms, carrying guns and waving an American flag.

Yet, unlike what some fearful and docile civil rights blacks and establishment negroes might do, some South Dallas blacks, including members of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and the New Black Panther Party, also showed up carrying guns and wearing black uniforms—men and women, standing like an iron wall, ready to shoot down the racist enemy.

What did the white racists do when they saw this entourage of black bravery? They skedaddled out of there as quickly as possible. How did the emotional black crowd react? With cheers and comments like those from Yafeuh Balogun of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, “It’s a people’s victory here in South Dallas today.”

We also should cheer with them, not because the racists backed down, but because, finally, blacks with guts and common sense, blacks with guns, who were willing to die for black self-preservation, undertook a prudent act, as well as a courageous act.

To protect yourself from mosquito bites and bee stings, it’s natural to spray on your arms and legs insect repellant. And when your laser printer prints documents whose words have faded, who would not drive to a Walmart or Kmart to buy toner, instead of printing until the words don’t show at all?

Similarly, if white supremacists protest gunless in black neighborhoods, blacks can counter-protest nonviolently. But if the KKK or white Christian evangelical racists show up with shotguns and rifles, why should black protesters respond with only placards, singing and yells of “Black Lives Matter”?

If you’re going to get shot, it doesn’t hurt to protect your family and friends from getting shot too. If a neo-Nazi fires at you with his shotgun, you could delete one less white supremacist from the database of neo-Nazism by returning fire with an AK-47.

Thus, the armed response by South Dallas blacks to the gun-carrying racists was not only prudent, but necessary.

President Barack Obama finds it so necessary to protect America from the brutality of ISIS that he authorized sending military special forces and beginning a bombing campaign on ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria.

Russia was so alarmed by the U.S. and European Union instigation of a coup in the Ukraine, which overthrew the legally-elected leftist government and replaced it with a neo-Nazi-infested rightist government, that it took back Crimea from the Ukraine and armed Russian-Ukrainians in East Ukraine so they could protect themselves and eventually establish their own government.

Are blacks so passive as to think that the Republican Party, white Christian evangelical racists and the KKK are any less brutal, any less terrorist, any less solemnly committed to lynching and hacking off the hands and feet of blacks and Latinos with machetes than ISIS or the neo-Nazi government in the Ukraine do to gays and Russians?

The blacks in South Dallas don’t think so. The winds of armed defiance carried the aroma of apple incense and the sweet freshness of an Hawaiian Breeze air freshener from distant continents to South Dallas’s warm, cozy community.

As such, along with necessity, that act of bravery also demonstrates common sense.

Employing the strategy of common sense, the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey and Syria have learned how to deal with extremists who threaten their existence. They slit their throats. May the sun continue to shine his rays on their example for their children and the black community to emulate.

Or rather, we should ask, is it better for black America to follow the example of the Kurds? For some, it’s better to drive a Humvee at full speed through a mob of white supremacists than to suffer one more day of indignity locked in the prison of a docile mind. Others might find it more advantageous to act like the Charleston nine just before racist and neo-Nazi Dylann Roof gunned them down with his Glock 45.

Whatever the choice, courage to resist, prudence to implement, necessity to defend and the loveliness, the rose and pearl, of common sense earns the blacks of South Dallas a wreath of honor that racism can never erase.