Black Nationalists In DeKalb County. Again.
Black Nationalists In DeKalb County. Again.
The arrest of a Florida fugitive in a treehouse in rural DeKalb highlights a long history of radical Black activism in DeKalb County.
George ChidiJun 28, 2021
Police hauled Othal Wallace out of a treehouse on Smith James Road around 1:30 a.m. Saturday. As he walked away in the handcuffs of the police officer he shot in Florida, he said, “You guys know who I am, know what I am capable of. It could have been a lot worse," Daytona Beach Police Chief Jakari Young said.
Eight different police agencies converged on the house after a 56-hour manhunt, to find him surrounded by guns, ammo, body armor and flashbang grenades, police said.
I’m paying attention to this because the implications of armed militants viewing DeKalb County as safe ground bear examination.
Police said the property was associated with the Not fukking Around Coalition, the armed Black nationalist group that marched on Stone Mountain last Fourth of July. Later that evening, armed militants who had blocked off University and Pryor downtown in Atlanta shot and killed eight-year-old Secoriea Turner at their makeshift road barricade. I suspect, but cannot prove, that the two events are linked.
So. NFAC is in DeKalb. Apparently. Again.
Smith James Road is a part of DeKalb County with Snellville addresses. The rolling wooded hills and vestigial horse farms near Norris Lake stand as a reminder of DeKalb’s recent rural past.
The NFAC part of this story stands as a reminder that we’ve been down a radical road here before.
We could start in 1972 with Angela Davis connecting the Black Panther Party with the decidedly less-radical SCLC and pastor Joe Boone in defense of Emily Butler, a Black IRS employee accused of shooting her white supervisor in Chamblee’s mammoth facility.
Or we could talk about Cynthia McKinney’s 12-year-run in Congress, culminating in 2007 in anti-Semitic outbursts and physical force being employed against journalists by her bodyguard. Or we could talk about how that bodyguard was Hashim Akhennaten Nzinga, a New Black Panther Party leader in Atlanta who went on CNN shortly after the Trayvon Martin shooting to
offer a $10,000 bounty for the “capture” of George Zimmerman. The DeKalb County sheriff’s office picked him up a few days before the verdict on a kind of bullshyt charge for violating probation by allegedly possessing a handgun as a felon, mostly to get him off the street in anticipation of street violence after an acquittal.
I can’t be the only one who noticed the Nuwaubian cult faux-Egyptian headquarters that was open for a few years next to Your DeKalb Farmers Market, or the Black Hebrew Israelite “school” on Glenwood Avenue. About 380,000 Black people live in DeKalb County. Some are bound to have extreme political views. Few places in America provide a relatively affluent Black community of such size to disappear into or draw support from.
Wallace, known to friends as O-zone, appears in social media posts to have been a Black Hebrew Israelite. He also marched with the NFAC in Stone Mountain. His defenders in social media right now — and there are quite a few — often have the same profile.
The NFAC released a
statement after inquiries by journalists. “NFAC owns no property. Our inquiry into this has revealed that this property is owned by another ex-NFAC member who allowed the local NFAC chapter to train there months ago. We have zero knowledge of the current use by the owner. They are not NFAC members, nor is this property affiliated with this organization,” a spokesperson told Click Orlando.
The NFAC is … complicated. People who have been associated with the organization in the past
regularly deny that it exists anymore at all. Grandmaster Jay — John Fitzgerald Johnson —
publicly disbanded the militant group of Black nationalists after his arrest on a weapons charge late last year.
In 2021, I question how meaningful that is. People organize around hashtags and social networking. Activists remain friends. The assiduous denials of membership seem, frankly, like people have been told to go to ground.
The police have been characteristically difficult here. I’ve spent two days working the phones with little more than a street name in answers. I’ve driven the road. I believe I know the property owner, but I’m not certain enough to cite it.
None of the press releases from the U.S. Marshal’s service, Daytona Beach police, the DeKalb County agencies, the FBI, Homeland Security, GBI or the Georgia State Patrol explain exactly who else was at the garrison-like property in eastern DeKalb, nor how they were able to locate him. The search warrant has not been returned to the county courthouse yet. No additional arrests were linked to the case.
There do not appear to be any additional arrests associated with the case, yet, though three other people were at the house. When those names come out, I’ll update this page.
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