What came from the state after Hurricane Katrina was not aid. It was armor. On August 29, 2005, the storm breached New Orleans's levee system in more than fifty places, killing more than eighteen hundred people across the Gulf Coast, while National Guard troops arrived under orders to shoot and kill and food and water took days longer to reach anyone.

Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, and three fellow organisers founded the Common Ground Collective six days after landfall, with no funding and no authorization from anyone above them. This episode doesn't look away from what the state's own agents did that same week either: the Danziger Bridge shootings, the Gretna bridge blockade, and white vigilante patrols in Algiers Point who shot at least eleven Black men. Common Ground's actual record, a free clinic that has logged sixty thousand patient visits, twenty-two thousand volunteers over six years, sits against Naomi Klein's account of the "disaster capitalism" that fired 7,500 teachers and demolished public housing HUD's own inspectors had called structurally sound.

It closes with an honest complication: one of Common Ground's own founders became an FBI informant, and the pattern this show traced through COINTELPRO two episodes earlier reached even here, at the founding table.

Further reading: Scott Crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (PM Press, 2011) Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books, 2007) A.C. Thompson, "Katrina's Hidden Race War," ProPublica/The Nation, 2008–2009 Democracy Now!, "Prominent Austin Activist Admits He Infiltrated RNC Protest Groups as FBI Informant" (January 6, 2009) Elena Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake (Temple University Press, 1995)

Tags: Hurricane Katrina, Common Ground Collective, Malik Rahim, mutual aid, disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein, Danziger Bridge, Algiers Point, New Orleans, Mexico City earthquake, brigadistas, state failure, anarchism

Show notes: Black Flags in the Flood: Katrina, Common Ground, and What the State Left to Drown. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 6

Hurricane Katrina wasn't a natural disaster so much as a test the state failed on camera, in real time — the anarchists and one longtime Black Panther who built the rescue the government didn't, and what happened to New Orleans once the water receded.

In this episode:

• Malik Rahim, Scott Crow, and the founding of Common Ground Collective
• The Algiers Point vigilante shootings and Donnell Herrington
• The Danziger Bridge shootings and the Gretna bridge blockade
• Common Ground's free clinic, 22,000 volunteers, six years of work
• Naomi Klein, disaster capitalism, and the firing of 7,500 teachers
• The demolition of New Orleans's "Big Four" public housing
• The 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the topos who dug survivors out by hand
• Brandon Darby's FBI informant betrayal, and what survived it anyway

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On August 9, 2014, a Ferguson, Missouri police officer shot and killed an unarmed eighteen-year-old named Michael Brown and left his body in the street for four hours. What happened next did not come from a headquarters. A rapper helped found Hands Up United. Three young women formed Millennial Activists United days later, because the loudest microphones in the street kept finding their way to men. Nobody asked anybody's permission first.

That organising sits alongside the founding of Black Lives Matter a year earlier by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who insisted the movement was "leaderful, not leaderless." Ferguson organisers had already absorbed the lesson from COINTELPRO and the assassination of Fred Hampton, that a movement with no single leader has no throat for the state to reach for — the same structural instinct that shows up half a world away in Hong Kong's 2019 "Be Water" protests.

What decentralisation doesn't solve gets an honest accounting too: a foundation that quietly bought a $6 million house, and a media apparatus that, when a leaderless movement declined to supply a face, simply invented one anyway.

Further reading: Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement (Little, Brown, 2016) "Whose Streets?" (2017), directed by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World, 2020) Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) Ming Sho Ho, "Solidarity and Implications of a Leaderless Movement," Communist and Post-Communist Studies (on Hong Kong's 2019 protests)

Tags: Ferguson, Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, decentralized organizing, leaderful movement, Hong Kong protests, Be Water, COINTELPRO, Mariame Kaba, We Charge Genocide, anarchism

Show notes: Ferguson and the Streets. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 5

Ferguson produced a horizontal, mutual-aid-driven uprising with no headquarters and no single leader, and then the press, the politicians, and eventually the market went looking for a face anyway. This is what happened when they found one.

In this episode:

• Hands Up United, Millennial Activists United, and the Organization for Black Struggle
• Water, milk, and legal observers: how a leaderless response actually organises itself
• Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and "leaderful, not leaderless"
• COINTELPRO, Fred Hampton, and why decentralisation is a strategy, not an accident
• Mariame Kaba, We Charge Genocide, and UN testimony that echoed a 1951 petition
• Hong Kong 2019 and the "Be Water" protests
• The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation's $6 million house
• DeRay Mckesson and the leader the media invented

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In 1979, a man named Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin sat in a cell at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, serving a life sentence, and wrote a pamphlet arguing that Black liberation did not need a new state built in place of the old one. He called the alternative the Black Commune. He did not arrive at that idea through a European text. He arrived at it through SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and years of watching the American state hunt him personally.

Ervin's argument runs through Kuwasi Balagoon, a Black Panther and Panther 21 defendant who called himself a New Afrikan anarchist and was also, openly, bisexual at a moment when almost no one in the armed Black liberation movement was saying that in public; through Ashanti Alston's insight that the Panthers' own slogan, "all power to the people," was already anarchistic before he ever read the theory; and into the present, at Cooperation Jackson, a federation of worker cooperatives built in Jackson, Mississippi on the same argument Ervin made forty-five years earlier.

Two centuries earlier, at Quilombo dos Palmares, a self-governing Brazilian community survived six Portuguese military expeditions and lasted nearly ninety years. And there's the Haitian Revolution, the only nation in world history founded by a successful uprising of enslaved people, forced afterward to pay for the privilege of having won.

Further reading: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kuwasi Balagoon, A Soldier's Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist (Kersplebedeb/PM Press) William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018) BlackPast.org, "Palmares (ca. 1605-1694)" and "Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)" Cooperation Jackson — cooperationjackson.org

Tags: Black anarchism, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Black Panther Party, New Afrikan anarchism, Palmares, Zumbi, Haitian Revolution, Cooperation Jackson, Anarchist People of Colour, Black radical tradition, anarchism

Show notes: Black Anarchism: The Tradition the White Left Keeps Forgetting. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 4

The anarchist canon this show quotes most either ignored Black radical thought entirely or engaged with it only once it had been filtered through a European vocabulary — this one follows the radicals who built anti-authoritarian politics from lived experience of the state, and the self-governing communities that predate the theory by centuries.

In this episode:

• Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin and Anarchism and the Black Revolution, written in a Marion, Illinois cell
• Kuwasi Balagoon, the Black Liberation Army, and New Afrikan anarchism
• Ashanti Alston and "Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It"
• William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi's As Black as Resistance
• The Anarchist People of Colour conference and Pedro Ribeiro's "Senzala or Quilombo"
• Quilombo dos Palmares — ninety years of self-governance in Brazil
• The Haitian Revolution and the 150-million-franc debt that followed it
• Cooperation Jackson and the Jackson-Kush Plan, built today

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