THE NUMBER one duty of the State is to protect its citizens but when those in power fail in that duty, communities have to stand up for themselves, says former Black Panther leader, Malik Rahim.

Malik, who set up the Common Ground Collective to support his New Orleans community when they were abandoned by the Government after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, believes black people are always “the canaries in the world’s coalmine” and that ecological and economic disasters on the horizon will hit Black communities first and hardest.

Malik believes we will only weather the storm by creating communities which are more self-dependent.

He said: “Have faith in the Most High, have confidence in yourself and be willing to make a sacrifice.

“It’s about 8% of us have enough consciousness. The other 92%, they ain’t gonna do nothing. But that 8% represent enough.

“We have to create the mechanisms to break the cycle of selfishness”

“Here in Louisiana, we used to have a thing called ‘True Friends’. If the Klan came after you, I will protect you and if they come for me, you will protect me.

“That’s what we’ve got to start doing, no matter how small scale it is, we’ve got to create that mechanism”

“We have over a trillion dollars earning power per year, as a black community in the USA but not even 5% of that stays in our community”

Malik was named as Living Legend by the Southern University in 2019 and his home is listed as an International Site of Conscience for its historical importance to the story of the Black Panthers and as a base for the Common Ground Collective.

From his Maroon, Garveyite family upbringing, Malik has always lived by Garvey’s ethos of black communities self-organising and ‘doing for themselves’.

“We have to do this. The only way we can do this by having that pride within ourselves,” he said.

“That pride that makes us say ‘there’s nothing you could do to me to make me want to kill you’.

“I will not kill you, especially not to make a dollar. And I will not stand and watch you being killed because I’m afraid of losing the ability to make a dollar.”

When, on 29 August, 2005, hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf states of the USA, the levees broke around the City of New Orleans, which was 8 ft below sea level, and over 1700 people lost their lives.

The people least able to heed evacuation warnings were poor and black and the racialised nature of the coverage saw a government more concerned with law enforcement than protecting its citizens and thousands were left with no food, water or shelter for weeks.

“What turned Katrina from a disaster into a tragedy is that it happened at the worst time of the year to be poor in New Orleans,” Malik explained.

“It happened in August right after schools opened.

“So people had spent all they had buying school supplies. They were waiting until the first of the month but Katrina hit on the 29^th.

“So when people ask why they were looting, they were looting because they were broke. But they still had to feed those kids, to put a roof over their heads, to put clothes on them because they lost everything in the flood. So they took it.”

Self-determination is nothing new to Malik he was a founding member and former leader of the New Orleans Black Panther Party and served time on death row for his part in a 1970 shoot-out with the police.

“It was September 15, which was a very special day for African Americans, because it was the seventh anniversary of the Birmingham Bombings,” Malik said.

“I truly believe, spiritually, we had four little angels protecting us because over 100-150 police shot at us for 20 minutes.

“They must have shot somewhere in the neighbourhood of 35-40,000 rounds of ammunition in that house and we all walked out without a scratch.”

The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and quickly evolved into a social movement and implemented a number of ground breaking policy programs, including their famous breakfast clubs, which fed 20,000 children each week and their free health clinics.

“People didn’t understand about no dialectical materialism but what they did understand is that we were feeding the children, we were talking about sickle-cell anaemia, we were dealing with the infestations of roaches and rats,” Malik explained.

“If the party was still in existence today, there is no way we’d be killing each other, the way we’re killing each other today.”

Within a couple of years the Party had grown to somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 active members in 38 chapters, with particular strength in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.

The decidedly Marxist philosophy of the Panthers, who believed the capitalism would always ultimately work against black interests, saw the Government label them communists and to make the group illegal.

Malik’s shoot out was just one of the many carried out by Police and FBI forces in the late 60s and early 70s, including the infamous assassination of Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Chicago branch a year earlier.

Even as the bullets rained down, Malik says he didn’t fear death.

“I was a Vietnam veteran, I lived through the assassination of Dr King,” he said.

“I would rather go down then at 22 standing up for justice rather than live to be 75 and never do nothing for the upliftment of my community.”

Malik believes the Panther’s message is as relevant now as ever.

“We have the ability to end the crisis that our community is in in 5 years,” he said.

“And it won’t take all of us, just that 8%. If just that 8% would come together we could create the model that others could duplicate.

“I truly believe that we are going to be the cornerstone in our salvation.”