Pulled the trigger, didn't pull the trigger, an active participant, not an active participant, it matters little in the final analysis.
She is from a time when African Americans were taking hold of their destiny in this country. For generations they had had every aspect of their lives controlled by others. They lived where they were told to live. They worked at what they were told to work at. They had no choice concerning the whereabouts of their immediate family. If they didn't submit to these demands they were whipped, sold, shot, hung, beaten to death, whatever their owners felt like doing to, or with, them. When the 60s arrived most of these relatives of former slaves demonstrated peacefully. Sure, there were some riots, but by and large they followed Martin Luther Kings lead.
Is it surprising though that a few would take a different path? That movements like the Black Panthers would spring up? That these movements would use the revolutionary model of insurgency, and Guerrilla warfare? After all, this was the time of Castro, Che Guevara, the Viet Cong, and so forth. But, who were they going to go to war against? Certainly not the 101st Airborne. So, they fought the police, the FBI, and State Troopers. Were they misguided? In many ways, of course. Were some of them more criminal than revolutionary? Absolutely. But was their raison d'etre purely for the purpose of executing criminal activity for profit? Definitely not.
So now, a generation later, a ballader, a story teller, sings of a perceived injustice regarding one of these "revolutionaries" who is related to him via a common ancestral experience. Why the world is full of such ballads, poems, and stories. It has been a part of human culture, art, etc., for thousands of years.
BSB
