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After two years away at junior college, James Mungin II had just returned home to Miami’s historic African American neighborhood, Liberty City, when a white neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, went on trial for fatally shooting an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin.
Mungin knew Martin in passing—the 17-year-old lived in Liberty City with his father but was visiting his mother at her suburban Orlando home when he was killed—and had friends who’d joined the throngs of activists pressuring reticent prosecutors to charge Zimmerman with second-degree murder.
And so Mungin, 23, curious and unemployed, settled in for a morning ritual in the summer of 2013, brushing his teeth and retreating to the bedroom where he slept as a child to recline on a black futon and watch Zimmerman’s trial as intently as others watched O.J. Simpson’s 18 years earlier.
“I just remember being glued to the TV all day,” Mungin told Black Voices Network. “If the trial was on for eight hours, I was there for eight hours.”
And although Zimmerman’s acquittal did not come as a complete shock, it was a thunderclap. He remembers calling a friend immediately after the verdict was read and shouting:
“We got to do something!” We can’t just sit here. We got to wake the city up!”
Then, referring to a mall in a Tony Miami suburb, he said:
“Let’s go to Aventura where they gotta hear us and they gotta see us.”
And so they did, rounding up nearly three dozen African Americans dressed in hoodies—like Martin—and demonstrating in the dead heat of a South Florida summer.
By his own admission, watching Zimmerman walk free raised Mungin’s consciousness and set in motion a chain of events that has commissioned him as an officer in a growing army of young, Black activists in South Florida, reminiscent of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the Black Panthers 60 years ago. Now 35, Mungin has spent the last decade organizing the constellation of historically African American and immigrant neighborhoods in North Miami—Liberty City, Overtown, Miami Gardens, Opa-Locka and Miami Gardens– to provide direct social services, lobby for gun control, and challenge racist policing and environmental policies, gentrification, and discrimination in education and housing.
In concert with childhood friends and organizations like the Dream Defenders, Mungin has, over the years, created an advocacy group known as Peace in the ‘Hood; opened a clothing line and creative space for artists known as the Roots Collective; and started a food pantry. This month, he launched the Community Newsroom, a citizens media project to “let the community tell its own stories.”
Continuing, he said:
“We’re just trying to build community and for a lot of us in my generation in South Florida, Trayvon was that guy who got us thinking differently and moving differently. That activated us.”
For Ryan Sorrell in Kansas City, the “guy” was different but the results were the same. Sorrell, who is 29, quit his job at a Chicago PR agency to return to his hometown and start the independent media platform. The Kansas City Defender. Its website reads:
“We were birthed from the ashes of the 2020 uprisings. As Black people, as young people, as organizers and abolitionists, it became glaringly apparent during 2020 that we could not depend on white media nationally or locally to serve our best interests, or to empathize and advocate for us.”
Earlier this month, Sorrell and the Defender’s staff doubled down by launching the B-Real Academy, a radical education and organizing initiative that is a response to growing right-wing extremism and is modeled on the radical Black political tradition, SNCC’s Freedom Schools and classic texts such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
What’s taking shape across the U.S. is the rebirth of a new civil rights movement led by a hip-hop generation of African Americans who were as radicalized by the slayings of their peers as their grandparents were by the lynching of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the proliferation of lunch counter sit-ins across the South.
From Kansas City to Kenosha, South Florida to Southern California, Boston to Baltimore to Birmingham, African Americans whose first vote was cast for Barack Obama are abandoning traditional career paths for militant, grassroots activism that consciously parrots the politics of the Black Power Movement as articulated, chiefly, by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
Baba Zak Kondo, a history professor at Baltimore City College and expert on Malcolm X, told Black Voices Network:
“It’s clear to me that there is some sort of new energy out there. . .I think something has shifted where a lot of what Malcolm was talking about is no longer seen as radical by this younger generation but natural. . . I think hip-hop has played an important role in helping to radicalize this generation in that it has integrated their consciousness with their music. Organizing for self-defense was seen as radical in Malcolm’s day but because of hip-hop, it’s no longer seen that way.”
Activists such as Mungin and Sorrell attribute the new militancy to a confluence of events, beginning with Obama’s election; the Great Recession, the ensuing housing crisis and gentrification; the proliferation of videotaped police murders broadcast on YouTube; the genocide in Gaza, and Trump’s return to the White House. Sorrell told the Black Voices Network:
“The year I graduated high school, 2013, was the year that Trayvon Martin was murdered, followed by Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald.”
In college at Loyola University in Chicago, he said:
“My political consciousness and political worldview was opened up even more by Palestinians on campus who introduced me to Black revolutionary politics.”
But it was Floyd’s lynching that was a game-changer. Sorrell quit his job to launch the Defender; his fiancée founded another grassroots abolitionist organization in the city. In a recent article, Sorrell described the impact of Trump’s cutbacks on a community garden in a historic African American community in Kansas City. Continuing, he said:
“After George Floyd, I was just really eager to do something. . .I think social media has had an enormous impact on my generation. We saw that in the 2020 uprisings and then again in the student intifada last year on college campuses in response to the genocide in Gaza. Young people from communities of color are growing increasingly radicalized due to the conditions on the ground.”
Sorrell said that he first began planning his abolitionist school more than two years ago when it became apparent that white voters would return Trump to the White House. He reached out to the W.E. B. Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction in Philadelphia.
“They sent us their entire curriculum,” Sorrell told Black Voices Network. “We started with that but made quite a few changes just to customize it for an all-Black program. For instance, we replaced Karl Marx with a Black Panther critique of capitalism.”
What’s more is that the intersection of political causes—police violence against African Americans, immigrant rights, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, and climate change—signals the revitalization of the Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton was creating in Chicago before his assassination. Mungin said that he and his peers are conscious of the history of resistance in the African American community.
“Malcolm spent a lot of time down here in Miami,” Mungin said. “We want to channel some of his ideas and energy into our own movement to build community. My generation decided that we’re fed up and we’re not just going to sit back and let these things happen to us.”
Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post foreign correspondent in Africa and South America, a former radio and television producer for the popular documentary program, This American Life, and the author of three books including Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and most recently, Class War in America: How the Elites Divide the Nation by Asking ‘Are You a Worker or Are You White?’
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