The Context: Watch Shabazz’s Entire ‘We Ain’t Forgiving Nobody’ Speech

CHARLESTON, South Carolina—Last week, Breitbart News brought you an explosive, exclusive video that showed excerpts of longtime New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz giving a speech just a block away from the scene of the Charleston massacre of nine black churchgoers.

The lead paragraph of our initial article read:

In an angry call to arms just a block away from the site of the Charleston massacre, former New Black Panther Party chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz told a group of about 200 African American Charlestonians that they need to “finish the mission” of killing “slave masters” and their families.

Shabazz discussed Denmark Vesey, one of the founders of the Mother Emanuel AME Church and the mastermind of a failed 1822 slave revolt in Charleston.

Denmark Vesey and 34 others were executed and the church was burned to the ground after a nervous slave revealed Vesey’s plan for slaves to kill their masters while they slept and then take boats to Haiti. President Obama made an oblique reference to this incident in his nationally televised Charleston eulogy.

This past Sunday, Shabazz held another rally and lashed out at our reporting. We interviewed him afterwards, and, yesterday, Breitbart News published an exclusive interview in which Shabazz claimed Breitbart News misrepresented his remarks.

He said:

Y’all took it out of context. I went over Denmark Vesey’s whole life history. I went over what kind of man he was, what kind of character he had. I went over…I did go over the revolt and what he was planning. First of all, I never said to anybody to kill anybody. Now, y’all know that that’s not right, to say that Shabazz said to kill anybody. That’s not right. I never said that. I gave honor to his history.

For the record, Breitbart News never reported that Shabazz said directly to kill anyone. Shabazz, an attorney and experienced public speaker, made no such direct claim.

Now for the first time, we’re publishing the complete comments of Shabazz at that Tuesday rally so Breitbart News readers can make up their own minds about whether they hear a message of hate and revenge by Shabazz towards “the white man.”

Was Shabazz taken out of context? Or was his speech properly portrayed as a carefully crafted call to action that stayed within the legal bounds of free speech but was designed to whip up the all-black audience’s emotions toward white people?

Watch Shabazz’s entire speech and decide for yourself:

His discussion of Denmark Vesey begins at the 13:48 mark. You’ll note that at no point does he refer to Vesey as a liberator or emancipator, but focuses on violent—often gruesome—language in discussing him.

You’ll also note that Shabazz constantly skirts back and forth between the past of slavery and present-day America, smearing the two together in emotional language designed to make the past seem like a living force of oppression.