Summary: William Ware In The Banner

Introduction
On a hot summer day in August 1999, Nashville police officers arrested William Ware on the basis of state sedition charges that two white citizens had brought against him. Night judge Draper? swore out the warrant against Ware after the two citizens, who also happened to be lawyers, had consulted with each other after. Both had seemingly taken issue with a statement that Ware had allegedly made during a visit to the city’s controversial Liberation School: “black people should try to achieve political, social, and economic power by any means necessary, including violence.” The basis for the sedition charges that the unequal pair of lawyers filed seemed to be taken right out of the coverage of the Ranner, the city’s evening newspaper

known for its emotionally charged, politically incorrect coverage of anything that “smacked” of communism (and African American efforts for liberation and self-determination almost exclusively fell under this category). Spending several days in prison before a grand jury cleared him of the charges, Ware, who had gained familiarity with the city’s specific take on law and order a few months earlier, when police and young black protesters clashes, seemed not to be surprised by the random nature of his arrest. However, he was somewhat astounded that two private citizens could file such far-reaching charges against him, while stating that their ability likely correlated with the color of their skin.
The encounter with a peculiar state provision provided Ware with additional insight into the workings of a society that set few restrictions on white racial violence while closely scrutinizing each and every step or word of Black Power activists. Coming of age at a momentous phase of the black liberation struggle, Ware’s activism with S during the hot phase of black power, especially his foreign travels with Carmichael, received a lot of national attention; just as his domestic activism would receive a considerable amount of police oversight. Different than the charges that the two lawyers brought against him, the Habeas Corpus … that Ware filed was deemed unsubstantiated by the judge who was in charge of the case. When the Banner commented on the jury’s decision to drop the charges against him, it emphasized that the jurors, well-established and “trustworthy” members of the community made the decision after due consideration. In various ways, the cases heralded the end of a long phase of southern exceptionalism in the legal realm. No longer was it necessary to rely on obscure state laws from a “different” time, rather, the federal state now not only sanctioned, but provided the legal and extra-legal measures as well as the economic means to smother various forms of radical activism.
Nevertheless, Ware and other activists did not fully give up on the nation’s legal system.

In his later life, Ware showed up in court several times. But this time not as defendant, but as expert witness on behalf of black musicians and as party in a suit aimed to get religious shrines and other sacred objects returned to his congregation. Different from the more notorious black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, Ware’s life trajectory has received little attention. The encounter in Nashville was the only one in which he stood in the limelight, at least as far as the Banner was concerned. Receiving only limited attention from the nation’s most popular newspapers, Ware arrest in Nassau coincided with a wave of urban unrests unheard of in the nation’s history. Moreover, it happened during a time of consolidation, when Southern local and state governments began to cooperate with federal police agencies to “contain” the increasingly unruly masses of poor people in the nation’s urban centers. In addition, different from the two other black power proponents, whose audacious rhetoric and later life stories squarely fit into a historical narrative that long portrayed the black power movement and its most prominent protagonists as at best mentally unstable at worst as outright criminal, and responsible for both the decline of whites’ support for blacks’ civil rights and that of the nation’s cities, Ware’s later life looks, at least at the first glance, suspiciously ordinary (for the sake of a better word). It has the potential to demonstrate the more nuanced and less easily detectable reverberations of a search for black empowerment that for many, including Ware, was also a struggle to define a positive identity during a time that many cultural, social, and economic traditions of Africans or African-descendants were deemed utterly backward, if not outright

uncivilized.