“Our Backs Are Against the Wall”: The Black Liberation Army and Domestic Terrorism in 1970s America

This article addresses the gap in the literature on U.S. domestic terrorism and counterterrorism in the 1970s by examining a once-notorious but now largely forgotten terrorist group, the Black Liberation Army (BLA). An outgrowth of the Black Panther Party, the BLA was directly responsible for at least 20 fatalities, making it amongst the most lethal “homegrown” U.S. groups of the period. This article seeks to shed new light on the BLA by exploring its relatively short but violent trajectory. By focusing on the group's origins, operations, ideology, and structure, the BLA can be understood as part of a wider landscape of homegrown political violence. The BLA emerged during the waning phase of a protest cycle that included the civil rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements. Like other terrorist groups before and after, the BLA claimed to be acting in self-defense and on behalf of the people, presenting itself as an army resisting police occupation of minority communities. With the collapse of the extreme Left in the mid-1970s, the BLA's prospects for creating a broader revolutionary base became remote. The article also examines law-enforcement responses to the BLA and the competing ways in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police (and in particular, the New York Police Department) framed and countered the BLA threat.