Revolutionary Suicide

Chapter 6 examines how the absence of hope and the collapse into black pessimism were driven by the exposure of white liberalism’s collaborations with anti-black political rhetoric through the language of “law and order,” through the expansion of the FBI’s harassment and surveillance of Black Power activists, and through the expansion of mass incarceration. Using Huey Newton’s writings, this chapter charts how revolutionary suicide operates both as a Black Power meme as a well as a repository of feelings about black Being in a colonial state where blacks have been denied both thinking and feeling as avenues of expression. With specific focus on the rhetorical form of the eulogy, this chapter describes how Newton’s revolutionary suicide is an attempt to reconcile assassination and repression with possibilities for black agency through what Corrigan calls “necromimesis,” but it demonstrates how little room there was for black activists to politically maneuver by 1971 as the nation consolidated racial feelings around law and order politics and new conservatism.