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​​W. Bernell Brooks lll

Editor,
TheVeseyRepublic.com

Southern University, Political Science
Baton Rouge, LA ​
​
Editor, The Wire Newspaper 
Founder, Brooks Foreign Policy Review
Executive Director, Low Country & Chesapeake Society

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W.  Bernell Brooks III was born in Fort Carson, Colorado. The son of a U.S. Army Captain stationed in Europe, he was raised on his grandparents' farm in the all-Black Township of Richwood, Louisiana, until he was five.
​Richwood has a long and storied history of economic and political independence, not to mention its reputation for being downright uppity.   

Adjacent to Monroe's southern border and a mile east of the Ouachita River, Spanish explorer Hernan DeSoto sailed past Richwood three months before he died in 1542, downriver in Ferriday, Louisiana. In 1974, Bernell's grandfather, Webster Brooks Sr., voted to quit Ouachita Parish and to incorporate Richwood as a township.   ​​

The township’s first mayor, Ms. Verdiacee Hampton Goston, was elected in 1975-76. After her re-election in 1980-84), Mayor Goston began calling herself \"Empress Verdiacee Tiari Washitaw Turner Goston El-Bey.\" She claimed to be the head of the Washitaw Nation (Ouachita Tribe), a sovereign state of Native Americans within the boundaries of the United States, who didn't have to pay taxes to the United States government. 

After completing her second term as Mayor, Ms. Gosten el Bey moved to Franklin Parish, where her home was raided by the FBI, IRS, and U.S. Customs agents in 2000.  Indicted for tax evasion, the leader, whose followers in the Moorish Science Temple numbered 200 nationwide, never came to trial. The charges were suddenly dropped.  

Brook's first cousin, Gerald Brown, is currently the mayor of Richwood Township. Despite its small population of 3,884, Richwood has a large high school and middle school, a state-of-the-art public library, a multi-purpose town hall and recreation center, and a state correctional facility. Richwood has always punched above its boxing weight. As Bernell's grandmother, Ida, often said,  \"What the Negroes in Richwood want, they get.\"

Former slaves began purchasing most of the land that would become present-day Richwood Township in 1874. Half of the Brooks family farm is located on formerly unclaimed Choctaw Scrip land set aside as part of the Indian Removal Act's Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The treaty was signed on September 27, 1830, with the Choctaw tribe of Mississippi.

Most of Richwood's Choctaw Scrip land was purchased after the Civil War by Julius Lemle, a German Jewish immigrant and merchant who resold several forty-acre parcels to Richwood's founding Black families. The other half of Richwood's land consists of the Copley and Austin plantations, which the former slaveholders could no longer maintain after the Civil War. Ironically, these properties were acquired by Richwood's former slaves at Ouachita Parish Sheriff's Auctions, presided over by Monroe's Black Mayor George Byron Hamlet in the 1870s. Monroe is the parish seat of government. During Black Reconstruction, Hamlet, who was from Ohio, held dual offices as mayor of the city and sheriff of the parish. Blacks in Richwood and Ouachita Parish, extending south to the Caldwell Parish line, were active Black Republicans who voted and participated in the local self-defense Republican Rifle Clubs at the time. ​

Bernell's great-great-great-grandmother, Rebecca, was born in 1828 in Tennessee. She gave birth to her son, Sam, in 1848 in Louisiana. Their slave owner was Shadrack Brooks, from Hardin County, Tennessee. Shadrack moved to Columbia, Louisiana, in Caldwell Parish, and purchased a 160-acre farm in the 1830s. Rebecca (called Becky) came to Columbia in the 1840s with Shadrack's mother, Charity Brooks, who was born in 1776 in Amherst, Virginia. Charity's husband, Bailey Carroll Brooks, died in 1843 in a Nashville federal penitentiary at the age of 69, serving a murder sentence for shooting John Lowry.

The British Brooks clan, led by Peter Brookes, first came to America in 1638 from Devon County, England, and settled in New Kent County, Virginia. Peter and his two sons, William and John, were living in New Kent and Middlesex County in 1676 when Bacon's Rebellion erupted. A William Brookes is listed as a participant in the rebellion. However, no record has been found documenting his involvement or punishment in America's first revolution and civil war, in which an estimated 200 Black slaves participated. 

Shadrack Brooks died in 1853. His wife, Axie Wooten, remarried and died in 1857. Rebecca and Sam were sold to Shadrack's neighbor and plantation owner, John J. Meredith. \"Old J.J.\" was a South Carolina-born fire-and-brimstone Primitive Baptist preacher who didn't believe in Sunday School and church missions. Meredith raised a regiment for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He also organized Caldwell Parish's White Knights of Camelia, who terrorized Black voters in Louisiana's violence-ridden 1872 gubernatorial election.   

In 1863, Sam and Rebecca witnessed something they thought they would never live to see. A Black regiment of General Benjamin Butler's Corps d’Afrique sailed up the Ouachita River from New Orleans and disembarked at Columbia's wharf. They would occupy Columbia until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Sam and Rebecca were free two years before the Civil War ended.     

​After the Civil War, Sam moved north to Monroe, where his oldest son, Alfred, purchased 40 acres in Richwood in January 1900. A tall and imposing figure, Alfred and the irrepressible Mollie McClain gave issue to Webster Bernell Brooks Sr, born in 1902 out of wedlock. Webster Sr. was a slender 6'3 southpaw who threw a mean fastball and boxed at state fairs for money. During World War ll he went to San Francisco to work in the shipyards before returning to Richwood to tend to the farm. His wife, Ida, graduated from Monroe Colored High School in the 1920s.

Webster Sr.'s mother, Mollie, was the bella figura of the Brooks line. She gave birth to Webster Sr. at the age of 17. In the 1910 Census, she was listed as a house servant in the mansion of Guy Stubbs, one of the richest lawyers in Ouachita Parish. She was rumored to be his mistress. By the 1920s, she owned a large home and rented rooms out to boarders who worked on the railroad near her house. She married four times to men who were either much older or much younger than she was. She owned a drop-top Packard with a fashionable running board. On Sundays, Mollie's son, Elias, would chauffeur her around Richwood and Monroe as she handed out candy to the kids. She died from food poisoning after eating a slice of lemon meringue pie. Bernell's grandfather never had another slice of pie afterward.  

Bernell's father, Webster Jr., and his mother, Lois, were born in Richwood and graduated from the HBCU Southern University in Baton Rouge. His father, called Bearcat by his friends, was stationed in Augsburg, Germany, in the late 1950s. As a U.S. Army Captain, his responsibilities when he had CQ duty (Charge of Quarters) included securing the city of Augsburg and the military post. On more than one occasion, he closed Augsburg's beer halls if any proprietor refused to serve Black U.S. soldiers. Eventually, they got the message. When they went shopping, Bernell’s mother said sometimes young German children would sneak up behind her and lift her coat to see if she had a tail.
      
After leaving the Army, Webster Jr. and Lois moved to Detroit, where they both became public school teachers. Their first home in the early 1960s was on Linwood Ave, a short distance from Temple No. 1, where the Nation of Islam was founded in 1930. Detroit was Malcom X's training ground, where he honed his rhetorical skills and deepened his Islamic faith after being released from prison. Bernell remembers the clean-cut Muslims coming into the local barbershop, selling Muhammad Speaks newspapers and bean pies. His father warned him not to become \"one of those people.\" Robert Williams, the father of armed Black self-defense, also worked in Detroit's auto factories before moving to North Carolina, as did influential Black socialist theorist James Boggs and his activist wife Grace Boggs. 

On June 23, 1963, Bernell's parents marched in Detroit's \"Walk to Freedom\" to hear Martin Luther King speak. The march, organized by Aretha Franklin's father, Rev. Clarence L. Franklin, was attended by 125,000 participants and was, at the time, the largest Black-led march in American history. It was a trial run for the August 28, 1963, March on Washington, D.C., and for King to work out the themes of his \"I Have a Dream\" speech.      

Four years later, Bernell watched the smoke rising from his front yard as Detroit went up in flames. His recollection of the 1967 Detroit uprising is recounted in an article he penned: \"None Dare Call it Insurrection.\" Bernell characterized the rising as the closest thing to a mass armed insurrection in America since the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791. Over a five-day period from July 23 to July 27, Detroit's Black community was confronted by a combined occupying force of 20,106 government troops. 

President Lyndon Johnson, standing next to the Secretary of Defense McNamara, invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 in a midnight televised press conference, saying, \"Law and order have broken down in Detroit.\" Forty-three people were killed in the insurrection. The revolutionary nature of the uprising was captured in the city-wide offensive in Black communities that targeted the state and federal security forces despite their massive presence. Cells in Detroit's Black communities set up ambushes of police patrols, engaged in sustained gun battles, launched direct assaults on police stations that put them under siege for hours, and sniper teams pinned down National Guard forces in multiple locations. When the smoke cleared, one Detroit Police Officer, one National Guardsman, and two Detroit firefighters were killed. Over 478 law enforcement and military personnel were injured. Twenty-six percent of the 1,889 people injured during the insurrection were state security forces. No other urban rising from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Rodney King revolt matched the conscious determination of Detroit's Black community to openly challenge the security state.        

It's no coincidence that Detroit hosted the national founding conventions of the two most revolutionary Black nationalist organizations that emerged from the Black Power era of the 1960s: the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in 1964, and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika in 1968 and 1969. Bernell has long regarded Detroit as the ideological and political center of the nation-state Black Nationalist movement, with deep organizational ties to RAM's Black liberation front in Philadelphia.       

In his family's tradition, Bernell also attended the HBCU Southern University in Baton Rouge before returning to Detroit, where he worked with the African Liberation Support Committee for two years in the late 1970s. In 1980, Bernell was in Atlanta when the 28 murders of Black youth occurred over a 22-month period. Known internationally as the Black Child Murders, the bodies of Black youth were found tied to trees, left in abandoned buildings, dumped in the woods, and recovered floating in Atlanta's Chattahoochee River. A 23-year-old Black Atlanta man was ultimately convicted of two of the murders in the first case to admit DNA evidence. The other 26 cases were immediately closed and never reopened. 

Bernell was arrested several times, leading protests in Atlanta, and was sentenced to three years in prison in Alpharetta, Georgia, on three misdemeanor counts of “Failure to Disperse,” “Use of Profane and Abusive Language,” and “Misdemeanor Assault on a Police Officer.” Inside Alpharetta, Bernell was called \"Fess\" (Professor).\" After working on the road crew sinking manholes and laying pipes for suburban Alpharetta's new sewer system, Bernell would spend most of his evenings writing letters to families, girlfriends, wives, and lawyers of the inmates.  

After his release, Bernell moved to Washington, D.C. in 1989. In the District, Brooks launched his first publishing venture as founder and Editor of The Wire, a radical monthly Black news journal. The paper hosted a controversial debate at Howard University, viewed by millions on C-SPAN, titled \"Staying Black or Becoming African Americans: What's in a Name?\"​

He also dipped his toes in the steamy Potomac waters of Washington, D.C's mayor's race. He ran as an independent candidate to expose the U.S. government's so-called War on Drugs in the Black community, the same year D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was busted in a cocaine sting operation.  Labeled a \"radical populist\" by the Washington Post, he predicted the district's bid for statehood would vanish, and D.C.'s municipal government would go into receivership with the continued mismanagement of its budget. Five years later, Newt Gingrich and the new Republican House majority formed the District of Columbia Financial Control Board and assumed complete authority over Washington, D.C.'s day-to-day spending and finances.

After relocating to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1994, Bernell got his first chance to direct election campaigns. He ran the get-out-the-vote operations for City Treasurer Denise Nappier, who won the September Democratic primary with the most votes of any candidate and was unopposed in the November general election. Later in September, he accepted an offer to manage Veronica Airey-Wilson’s first city council run. The Jamaican-born Republican was the top vote-getter among all candidates in the November general elections, with a city electorate that was 85 percent American-born Blacks, West Indians, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans.  
Bernell went on staff for Councilwoman Airey Wilson, who chaired the Economic Development Committee. 
Two years later, Bernell accepted the position of Chief of Staff of the Hartford Board of Education, during which the board implemented a regional and citywide public school choice program. Working inside local government, closest to the people, and with state and federal government agencies gave Bernell invaluable insights that shaped his thinking about the Vesey Republic's government structure, drafted by New Black Nationalists.    

While in Connecticut, Bernell organized a small Black think tank, The Low-Country and Chesapeake Society, to support Black independent political candidates, including an exploratory draft committee for Colin Powell in 1995. He briefly hosted the Brooks Foreign Policy Review, a podcast focused on Middle East and Eurasian geopolitics. As a political analyst, Brooks appeared on C-SPAN frequently and in numerous radio interviews as a contributor and commentator. 

Always interested in Black history projects, Bernell organized a 1864 Vintage Baseball team, the Hartford Homestead Grays, that participated in New England tournaments in honor of the Negro Leagues. Bernell served as Secretary of the Descendants of the Connecticut 29th Colored Civil War Regiment. The 29th was the first Union Army unit to enter the Confederate capital of Richmond on April 3, 1865. On September 20, 2008, Bernell stood with the Descendants of the 29th  at the dedication of a monument to the regiment at Criscuolo Park in New Haven.     

Brooks was also a member of the John Rogers Historical Society of Hartford, which celebrated Connecticut's tradition of enslaved and free Black people electing 22 Black governors from 1725 to 1856. The group revived the 140-year-old electoral tradition by holding a community election for Black Governor in 2006, featuring six candidates from the Harford Metropolitan area. Over 500 votes were cast for the new Black Governor.       
​
​In 2016, the Republican Party's Maximum Leader, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, won the presidential race. Bernell and a small circle of Black Nationalists immediately set to work creating an informal network to conduct a threat assessment of the shadowy Alt-Right. The working group concluded that the Alt-Right was a movement of white ethno-nationalist intellectuals that operates largely outside the Republican Party and white \"conservative\" movement on Greg Johnson's counter-currents.com website. The Alt-Right's shared interests with Nero Germanicus were engaging in an aggressive race-based cultural war against Blacks and Hispanics, and immigrants, and displacing the Republican Party establishment's national and state party apparatus. 

In August 2017, after the Battle of Charlottesville, Bernell released an article upgrading the growing white nationalist authoritarian movement as an existential threat that was bent on establishing an extralegal authoritarian American Apartheid system and preparing to prosecute a civil war. The working group also observed that after Nero's new regime disposed of the GOP establishment, they would engage in a soft civil war to divide white Americans into pro and anti-white nationalist camps. The report warned that Black progressive, radical, and nationalist organizations lacked a strong organizational center, numerical strength, strategy, and sufficient political influence within the Black community to lead a resistance movement to defeat the Fourth Rome.

The working group also assessed the international situation and concluded that the economic power shift from Europe and America to the Pacific Rim was tilting the global balance of power to the East. Brexit's victory in the UK's 2015 referendum and Europe's lurch to the right had thrown the EU into turmoil. Euro-scepticism was exacerbated by the Maximum Leader Nero's disdain for EU elites and NATO. The analysis held that the debate over whether Nero was Putin's asset or his useful tool was immaterial; the emerging Russian/Chinese imperial condominium was winning the war of position on the global chessboard. 

Nero's obsession with burning down the administrative state and prosecuting a civil war against the Republican establishment to consolidate his white nationalist regime had created an opening for Russia and China to expand their international influence. Having deposed the GOP Old Guard, Nero unleashed a frontal assault on America's fragile core institutions, which weakened the economy and fractured America's body politic. Nero, in the working group's view, is an accelerationist, hastening the disintegration of American Empire.   

In 2018, Bernell authored a year-end brief projecting that the American Empire's new Fourth Rome regime was on an unsustainable path, leading to self-immolation and an existential crisis that would collapse the federal government in the 2020s. Given the rapidly changing confluence of events, the working group called for a full reassessment of the political, philosophical, cultural, and programmatic assumptions of 5th Wave Black Nationalists from the post-1960s Black Power era to the present.

Bernell argued for a more organic interpretation of the Black nationalist experience, stripped of the Marxist, Pan-Africanist, Afrocentric, and religious separatist eclecticism that rendered the nationalist project ideologically amorphous and programmatically indigestible. A restatement of Black Nationalism was needed. Who are the self-identified nation-state Black Nationalists? What do they want? How are they going to get there? And what would a new Black republic look and feel like?         

In 2018, the thought circle launched NewBlackNationalism.com as the nerve center for generating alternative analytical products and theories to support the creation of a majority-led Black multiracial nation-state. In 2022, NBN adopted the corpus of works by Martinican revolutionary Frantz Fanon as its guiding philosophical system. Alician Womanism was endorsed as its social change perspective on the liberation of Black and indigenous women, building on the poetics of author Alice Walker and Professor Layli Phillips Maparyan's scholarly body of work. Dr. Maparyan, the Editor of the Womanist Reader (2005) was recently appointed as the President of the University of Liberia.   

The NBN working group drafted a statement of principles and affirmed that the movement's central task was to build a new movement of organic Black Nationalist intellectuals — a Sixth Wave to support the creation of a sovereign breakaway Black republic in the 2020s. 

To prepare for such a contingency, New Black Nationalists undertook two vital tasks. The first was drafting a series of thought papers called The Vesey Republic of Letters. The series of drafts outlined the philosophy, rationale, and organizational structure of an Estate Parliament government, conceived as a majority-Black-led, multiracial, secular state. With the completion of the Republic of Letters, it was decided to change the website name to theveseyrepublic.com to embody the vision and program of the future republic. The Vesey Republic of Letters series included drafts of the following:

​
The second task was to develop a political strategy for Black Nationalists to manage the transition period between the federal government's collapse and the creation of the Vesey Republic — the interim period when most revolutions fall apart due to insufficient preparation and being overwhelmed by the accelerated pace of events in an existential crisis.

In 2023, Bernell drafted a four-part series supporting growing interest in National Divorce proposals to voluntarily dissolve America's federal government and form a new concert of sovereign states. He noted that with the exception of some of the smaller Nordic countries, Canada may be the most peaceful, tolerant, well-managed, prosperous, and educated large nation in the world. Still, in 2026, serious secession movements erupted in the provinces of Quebec, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. 

The dissolution of American Empire could produce a new configuration of nation-states that includes proposed Red states and Blue states, expanded homelands for indigenous First Nations, autonomous regions in the Southwest for Mexican Americans and descendants, and an independent Black nation-state.

New Black Nationalists are confident that a significant number of the Black Commons would prefer to live in a new, majority-Black-led, multiracial, polyglot state. A self-determination referendum would provide voluntary choice for the Black Commons to exercise its options. The process of dissolution would include negotiated population-transfer policies and agreed-upon formulas for the equitable division of debts, assets, business interests, portable pensions, and health-care portfolios.

\"Dissolution is not rocket science. The USSR dissolved an empire of 15 constituent republics in 1989, including the division of Czechoslovakia into two countries, with relatively little violence. These are issues we need to consider now. Every empire in human history has come with an expiration date and collapsed,\" said Brooks. There will be no American Exceptionalism in this regard. Since 2018, New Black Nationalists' predictive crisis model has projected that Washington's Fourth Rome will collapse in the 2020s.  The projection came within a whisker of being realized on January 6, 2021. The Fourth Rome  Barristers' Coup Plot at the U.S. Capitol came earlier than Bernell and NBN expected. Although the coup failed, it laid the basis for Nero's victory in the 2024 election. Bernell maintains that the total collapse of the American Empire is now more likely than ever in the 2020s. 
​
Further, Brooks argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Texas v. White (1869), which held that the United States is “an indestructible union” from which no state can secede, was wrongly decided as a constitutional issue and is subject to further legal challenge. The Constitution is silent on the issue of state succession.     

National Divorce has significant minority support among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, and solid core bases of support in California and Texas. The Sixth Wave now has a government model outlining its structure, the powers and duties of the Vesey Estate Parliamentary model, the rights of its citizens, and a vision of its national destiny. New Black Nationalists are positioned to expand their influence and the social discourse.                

Having completed the Vesey Republic of Letters series in the winter of 2024, the 6th Wave New Black Nationalist project turned its attention back to the international situation. Fanon Global was created as the 6th Wave's foreign policy arm. In June 2025, NBN issued the final draft of Fanon Global's geostrategic analysis of the international system's balance of power. Fanon Global concluded that a new international system has emerged, which it characterized as an Apolar World Order. 

The analysis emphasized that no single superpower acts as a unitary hegemon, nor do the U.S. and China exert bipolar dominance over two competing spheres of influence. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that America's unipolar dominance has devolved to a new multipolar world order, Bernell observed that no combination of big and medium-sized powers exercises complete domination over a hemisphere or even a region of the world. Spheres of influence, in the context of imperial domination, are defined as the ability to shape the rules-based order in a given hemisphere or region and enforce it through military power or credible military and economic coercion.

Bernell observed that the Apolar world order, however temporary, is novel, dangerously unstable, and at the same time filled with revolutionary possibilities for oppressed nations to shatter the grip of neocolonialism. Bernell said metaphors and analogies have their limitations, but the current international situation somewhat resembles the Interwar Years 1918-1939.

The Maximum Leader acts as if the American Empire is Germany in the 1930s, constrained by the Treaty of Versailles from exercising its imperial writ through unfair trade and tariff practices, and underwriting the financial costs of defending Europe. Surrounded by hostile imperial powers along its horizon and southern border, the United States has adopted a new Fortress America doctrine that seeks the restoration of the Fourth Rome as the world's preeminent hegemon. Nero is purging the country of its internal \"vermin,\" and preparations for an imperial breakout to dominate the Western Hemisphere have been set in motion.      

Following the 2024 reelection of the Republican Party's Maximum Leader, Fanon Global reviewed the regime's foreign policy portfolio and concluded the American Empire is spiraling toward global decline. The U.S. is not economically, militarily, or politically formidable enough to decouple Russia from China. Nor does America possess the technical capability to defeat China militarily in East Asia's Pacific Rim theater, because of its current reliance on China's economic supply chain. The administration's incompetence and illusions of reestablishing American unipolar dominance are accelerating its disintegration by pursuing risky policies that lead to further imperial overreach in peripheral geopolitical theaters rather than competing in the South China Sea.

The Fourth Rome's prosecution of the war in Ukraine and sponsorship of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza are Necropolitical ventures that further weaken its ability to take down China, its peer strategic competitor. The Fourth Rome regime, as an amalgam of Republican Party white nationalist leaders, the Israeli lobby, and Silicon Valley oligarchs, is intensifying its efforts to manufacture internal crises to justify establishing a state of permanent emergency rule.  

Bernell has argued that the 2025 White House National Security Strategy, which shifted U.S. priorities from direct competition with China to the Monroe Doctrine seeking total dominance over South America, validated Fanon Global's analysis of America's spiraling global descent. 

The National Security Strategy's doctrine of exercising domination and control over the Western Hemisphere’s energy resources, critical minerals, and rare earth elements (REEs) to develop its own military supply chain is a dollar short and a day late. China is too far ahead. Neither will punishing countries that resist coercive resource extraction tactics with higher tariffs and threats of regime change be successful.  Quite the opposite, it encourages countries in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia to enter more trade agreements with China and Russia.     

Amid these shifting international dynamics, Fanon Global appealed to the Black Diaspora to pause and reflect on its usage of the Global South as a cultural, economic, and political identifier. Bernell wrote that despite the term's popular usage, there is no consensus or definitive description of what it means in terms of geography, race, ethnicity, nationality, economic systems, or historical development. 

Fanon Global's proposed pause asks Black activists, social influencers, intellectuals, journalists, educators, and the diasporic Commons to consider whether alternative phrases to Global South can more accurately reflect the composition and character of the planet's constellation of nations. On January 15,  Fanon Global announced that it is replacing Global South with the Pan-Indigenous Bloc in its communications and analyses and called for discussions to begin to form a new Black Diaspora anti-imperial international front.     

Bernell is currently working to complete a publication in 2026 outlining a final program for the creation of a new Black nation-state in the 2020s. Bernell resides in Florida with his wife, Melissa Bynes-Brooks. 
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