While many Americans celebrated the July 4 holiday and enjoyed fireworks, a heavily-armed Black militia made national headlines when it marched into Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta.
This iconoclastic brigade of nearly 1,000 Black men and women, dressed in black from head to toe and carrying black rifles, walked in synchronized steps towards America’s most prominent and famous dedication to the sacrosanct Confederacy — a 76 by 158-foot carving depicting Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
The group calls itself the “Not F–king Around Coalition” and assembled at this nationally-famous state park in Georgia to demand the removal of the colossal Confederate monument.
The group took pains to make people realize they have no affiliation with, nor subscribe to, the tenets of the more famous Black Lives Movement.
The BLM has become the de facto face of the national insurrection ongoing in America since the last major American holiday — Memorial Day — when George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin as three other officers stood idly by. The video of Chauvin’s knee crushing Floyd’s neck and choking him to death, as Floyd called out to his mother with his last breaths, went viral worldwide.
“We are a Black militia. We aren’t protesters, we aren’t demonstrators. We don’t come to sing, we don’t come to chant. That’s not what we do,” the NFAC leader Grand Master Jay told Newsweek magazine on Sunday.
“It was all Black. There were no brown people, no white people. Everyone was Black. I am not a protester, I am the commanding general of my militia, we were swearing in new members,” Jay said.
He also commented that there was a second militia “show of force” on Saturday, July 4 in Phoenix metro area.
“Our initial goal was to have a formation of our militia in Stone Mountain to send a message that as long as you’re abolishing all these statues across the country, what about this one?”
The NFAC leader expressed gratitude toward the Stone Mountain Park officials and police for allowing them to freely exercise their First and Second Amendment privileges on the holiday that celebrates America’s freedom from British rule.
There was, however, no such conciliatory tone was directed towards the White supremacist and rightwing groups who frequently meet at atop the mammoth stone mountain to espouse their racist verbiage. In fact, the NCAF called them out.
“I want the heart of the Ku Klux Klan to hear me no matter where the f— you are,” an unidentified NFAC member said in a video that has been posted prominently on Twitter and YouTube. “I don’t see no white militia, the boogie [boogaloo] boys, the three percenters and all the rest of these scared-ass rednecks. … You made a threat. We don’t threaten.”
