EOTFW🎥

The May 19th Communist Organization (also variously referred to as the May 19
Coalition, May 19 Communist Coalition or M19CO) was a US-based far-left armed group formed by members of the Weather Underground Organization. The group was originally known as the New York chapter of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC), an organization devoted to promoting the causes of the Weather Underground legally, as part of the Prairie Fire Manifesto's change in Weather Underground Organization strategy, which demanded both aboveground mass movements and clandestine organizations. The role of the clandestine organization would be to build the "consciousness of action" and prepare the way for the development of a people's militia. Concurrently, the role of the mass movement, the above-ground Prairie Fire Collective, would include the support for and the encouragement of armed action. Such an alliance would, according to Weather, "help create the 'sea' for the guerrillas to swim in.” The M19CO name was derived from the birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X. The May 19 Communist Organization was active from 1978 to 1985. M19CO was a combination of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. It also included members of the Black Panthers, White Panthers, and the Republic of New Afrika (RNA).

In addition to the May 19th Communist Organization being made up of the Black Liberation Army, the group was formed because of infighting in the Weather Underground Organization. Following the split of the Weather Underground Organization into factions, the faction that favored more extreme actions to achieve its obiectives joined the Black Liberation Army, forming the May 19th Communist Organization. One of the founders, Laura Whitehorn, was also part of the Weather Underground Organization's predecessor, the Students for a Democratic Society. In addition to being known as the May 19th Communist Organization and the New York chapter of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the group was also known as the Armed Resistance Movement, the Red Guerilla Resistance, Resistance Conspiracy, and Revolutionary Fighting Group. Despite these other monikers, the group was most popularly known as the May 19th Communist Organization, predicated on the Communist Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh's birthday.

From 1982 to 1985 M19CO committed a series of bombings, including bombings of the National War College, the Washington Navy Yard Computing Center, the Israeli Aircraft Industries Building, New York City's South African consulate, the Washington Navy Yard Officers' Club, New York City's Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, and the United States Capitol Building. Three officers were killed during the Brinks Robbery, but no one was injured or killed in their bombings. Almost all the M19CO members were convicted in a US Court of Law for these offenses, but Elizabeth Ann Duke remains at large.

This alliance between the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army had three objectives:

• Free political prisoners in US prisons

• Appropriate capitalist wealth (armed robberies) to fund the third stage, and

• Initiate a series of bombings and terrorist attacks

The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, was a far-right survivalist anti government militia which advocated Christian Identity and was active in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s. The CSA developed from a Baptist congregation, the Zarephath-Horeb Community Church, which was founded in 1971 in Pontiac, Missouri. Over time, Zarephath-Horeb evolved into an extremist militant group and it was rechristened the CSA. The group operated at a large compound in northern Arkansas which was known as "the Farm".

In June 1982, the CSA had an estimated 90 to 120 members, men, women, and children. In April 1984, the number of members was less than 70.

The CSA believed that doomsday was imminent, and a 224-acre compound in Elijah, Missouri that it acquired from Campus Crusade became a community for its members. There it trained its members in paramilitary operations.
The group believed in white supremacy and was also anti-Semitic. Like other prominent antiSemitic groups that believed in antisemitic tropes, it called the United States government ZOG, short for Zionist Occupied Government.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) later determined that the CSA had obtained 155 Krugerrands, one live light antitank rocket, 94 long guns, 30 handguns, 35 sawed-off shotguns, and machine guns, one heavy machine gun, and a quantity of C-4 explosives. The CSA and its paramilitary arm taught basic pistol and rifle use as well as personal home defense, rural and urban warfare, weapons proficiency, general military fieldcraft, Christian martial arts, and natural wilderness survival. According to a report which was published by the California Department of Justice, the Pagans Motorcycle Club provided the CSA with training in booby trap devices and survival techniques in return for weapons and ammunition.

Beginning on 19 April 1985, the FBI and the ATF, led by the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), positioned around 300 federal agents in Elijah. The operation needed to be kept secret, but doing so was not easy in the small community.

The Black Liberation Army (BLA) was an underground Marxist-Leninist, black-nationalist militant organization that operated in the United States from 1970 to 1981. Composed of former Black Panthers (BPP) and Republic of New Afrika (RNA) members who served above ground before going underground, the organization's program was one of war against the United States government, and its stated goal was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States." The BLA carried out a series of bombings, killings of police officers and drug dealers, robberies (which participants termed "expropriations"), and prison breaks.

The Black Liberation Army gained strength as Black Panther Party membership declined. By 1970, police and FBI sabotage (see COINTELPRO), infiltration, sectarianism, the lengthy prison sentences, and death of key members (among them Fred Hampton) had significantly undermined the Black Panther Party. This convinced many former party members of the desirability of underground existence, seeing that a new period of violent repression by the U.S federal and local government was at hand. BLA members operated under the belief that only through covert means, including but not limited to retribution, could the movement be continued until such a time when an above-ground existence was possible. The conditions under which the Black Liberation Army formed are not entirely clear. It is commonly believed that the organization was founded by those who left the Black Panther Party after Eldridge Cleaver was expelled from the party's Central Committee. A fallout between Cleaver and other Panther leaders followed from his public criticism of the BPP, among other things accusing Panther social programs of being reformist rather than revolutionary. Others, including black revolutionary Geronimo Pratt (AKA Geronimo ji Jaga), assert that the BLA "as a movement concept pre-dated and was broader than the BPP," suggesting that it was a refuge for ex-Panthers rather than a new organization formed through schism. Assata Shakur, in her autobiography, Assata: An Autobiography, asserts: “the Black Liberation Army was not a centralized, organized group with a common leadership and chain of command. Instead, there were various organizations and collectives working together and simultaneously independent of each other.”

According to a Justice Department report on
BLA activity, the Black Liberation Army was suspected of involvement in over 70 incidents of violence between 1970 and 1976. The Fraternal Order of Police blamed the BLA for the murders of 13 police officers.

The BLA was active in the US until at least 1981 when a Brinks truck robbery, conducted with support from former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert and Judith Alice Clark, left a guard and two police officers dead. Boudin, Gilbert and Clark along with several BLA and May 19 Communist Organization members, were subsequently arrested.

Following the collapse of the BLA, some members - including Ashanti Alston, Donald Weems (a.k.a. Kuwasi Balagoon) and Ojore Lutalo - became outspoken proponents of anarchism. Weems died in prison of an AIDS-related disease in 1986. Alston remains active in prison support and other activist circles. Lutalo was released from prison in 2009 after serving 28 years on charges related to a shootout with a drug dealer in 1981 (and parole violation stemming from his conviction for a 1975 bank robbery), during which time he was punished with solitary confinement for receiving anarchist literature. While incarcerated, the Anarchist Black Cross Federation gave him support.