The man who runs the congressional committee looking into the “insurrection” of January 6 at the U.S. Capitol was himself an insurrectionist in his salad days.
Reporting at his Just The News website, John Solomon has disclosed Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat, sympathized with a radical secessionist group called the Republic of New Africa that not only killed cops but also threatened “warfare” against the United States.
Nor had he cut ties with the group’s members as late as 2013, Solomon reported. That means the Democrats placed a known, anti-American subversive and revolutionary, posing as a patriot, in a position of power.
Forget that Thompson is running the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. He’s also chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Guerilla Warfare
Thompson’s official biography does not disclose his radical past, but Solomon did.
“As a young African-American alderman in a small Mississippi community in 1971, Thompson placed himself on the opposite side, openly sympathizing with a secessionist group known as the Republic of New Africa and participating in a news conference blaming law enforcement for instigating clashes with the group that led to the killings of a police officer and the wounding of an FBI agent,” Solomon wrote.
The FBI — when it still defended the country against its enemies, not the country’s enemies against its people — warned that RNA members were “threatening ‘guerrilla warfare’ against the United States.”
The group was around as late as 2013, when Thompson “openly campaigned on behalf of the group’s former vice president to be mayor of Mississippi’s largest city.”
The congressman’s advocacy on behalf of RNA — captured in documents, newspaper clippings and video footage retrieved from state, FBI and local law enforcement agency archives — is a pointed reminder that some of the far-left figures of a half century ago are now the Democratic Party’s establishment leaders, their pasts now a fleeting footnote in the frenzied vitriol of modern-day Washington.
For instance, Thompson’s Democratic colleague in Congress and the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, famously cofounded the extremist Black Panthers chapter in Illinois in 1968 before he entered politics. Both the RNA and the Black Panthers were avowed supporters of insurrection, and at one point in 1967, armed Black Panthers stormed the state capitol in California.
Dangerous Revolutionaries
Former G-Men tipped off Solomon about Thompson and RNA, which was founded in 1968 in Detroit, “where its first major run-in with police led to the fatal shooting of an officer in 1969. Its members were charged with the killing but acquitted,” Solomon wrote. “Thompson was never linked to the shooting.”
Two years later, the group moved to Bolton, Mississippi, Thompson’s hometown, “with an adjunct headquarters in the capital city of Jackson, Miss., where RNA members threatened to renounce their U.S. citizenship and create a separate New Africa country in the U.S. Southeast.”
When authorities arrested RNA members who were involved with a fugitive who had stolen a car, Thompson accused police of trying “to stop the Republic from building its community.”
“Thompson suggested the group be left alone if it was law abiding,” Solomon reported:
But by the time Thompson had uttered those words, the FBI had already determined the group had engaged in multiple violent crimes, and posed a national security threat with its stated plan to take over the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and Georgia to create a secessionist new country for African-Americans.
The sheriff who led the arrests told a far different story than Thompson’s, saying officers who went to execute an arrest warrant were met with resistance and that officers found a large cache of weapons and ammunition inside the group’s facility.
“They started slamming doors in our face and running against the doors and cursing us, and we advised them we was the law, we had to come in,” Hinds County Sheriff Fred Thomas is quoted as saying on the archived videotape. “…They didn’t want us to carry out our duties. So we had to make arrests upon these people. And in the meantime, we recovered numerous amounts of guns, ammunition, radio equipment, and a good many more things.”
But that was mild compared to RNA’s open warfare against state and local authorities. Months later, FBI and police raided a hideout, Solomon reported, and despite an order to surrender, RNA opened fire:
Jackson Police Department records show that William Crumley, the FBI agent on scene, reported that when the officers arrived at the house, they announced they had a warrant, gave the occupants inside the house 75 seconds to surrender peacefully and then shot a canister of tear gas into the house to flush out the RNA members.
“Firing immediately started coming from inside the house,” the police report said. “Crumley heard someone scream that he was hit.”
Yet Thompson defended RNA and joined “a justice group to support the RNA in the aftermath of the fatal shooting.”
War Against America
Wisely, Thompson never directly participated in the group’s activities:
Several members of the RNA were convicted of various crimes in the Jackson shooting, ranging from murder and attempted murder to sedition. The group’s president Imari Obadele was among those charged and imprisoned. Most served time in prison before being released. One member accused of firing the fatal shot was sentenced to life in prison.
Declassified FBI documents chronicle the U.S. government’s concerns about the RNA.
A March 1969 FBI memo described RNA as a “black extremist, separatist organization whose purpose is the formation of a black nation within the United States and a black army to defend and attack its enemies.”…
The FBI was deeply concerned, the memo said, that delegates of the group called for “guerrilla warfare against the United States and indicate that plans were being formulated to send Negroes out of the United States to be trained and equipped with the latest weapons.”
The group planned to create its “New Africa” out of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina “by arms if necessary.”
U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell even briefed President Richard Nixon about Thompson’s pals.
Yet “Thompson’s allegiance to some of its members remained strong for decades.”
In 2013, Thompson supported and campaigned for former RNA vice president Chokwe Lumumba for mayor of Jackson, then “officiated at Lumumba’s installation ceremony as mayor.”
