‘Black Militia’ Vows a War on Property : Milwaukee: Radio talk show host calls for ‘aggressive nonviolence’ unless the government creates jobs, improves education and housing, and takes other steps against urban poverty.

An outspoken radio talk show host and former city alderman who wants to improve conditions for blacks is talking about a revolution--by next year.

Michael McGee says he’ll recruit blacks around the country to cut phone lines, burn tires on freeways and attack other institutions unless the government creates jobs, improves education and housing and takes other steps against urban poverty by Jan. 1.

McGee calls himself the leader of the “Black Panther Militia.” He says his revolution would be a war on property, not people, because wealth is what whites in power value most.

“Most Americans are so easy to inconvenience, you just block the line at McDonald’s and they would be upset,” McGee said.

“It’s aggressive nonviolence,” he said. “It’s not aimed at people, but it’s aggressive because you’re hitting the people that really matter, like say in New York, you put Wall Street out of business for a while.”

“You can murder 100,000 people and it wouldn’t have the impact that inconveniencing a certain group of Americans would have,” said McGee, who has a call-in show on WNOV in Milwaukee.

The protests McGee envisions would owe more to the militant Black Panthers of the 1960s and 1970s than to the mainstream civil rights organizations that took up Martin Luther King Jr.’s methods of nonviolent protest.

McGee, 44, hasn’t reached out to former Black Panthers such as Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown or David Hilliard, who continue their activism today using less radical means.

He has no affiliation with the Black Panthers organization, which dwindled from 5,000 members to a few hundred in the mid-’70s after arrests, violent deaths and manipulation by police and FBI agents. The group still operates as a social service organization in Oakland, Calif., where it was founded in 1966.

Now McGee says it’s time to take up the Panthers’ militant legacy.

“People are dying. In terms of priorities, America is so messed up,” said McGee, who plans a “call to arms” meeting in New York in February.

In the past, McGee has disrupted a live broadcast of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” started a sausage scare by telling a company that militant blacks had spiked its products with rat poison and disrupted speeches by blowing whistles.

McGee has appeared with about two dozen uniformed members at demonstrations in Milwaukee. But he claims to have 1,200 supporters in the city, and similar militias in Indianapolis, Dallas, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, Los Angeles, Jacksonville, Fla., and Minneapolis.

Milwaukee police can’t tell whether McGee’s militia is as large or as organized as he claims, but they aren’t dismissing his threats, said spokesman Lt. Vincent Flores.

McGee installed a “militia commander,” Mmoja Ajabu, in Indianapolis in 1991. Ajabu says his followers--he has never said how many--will arm themselves and “go on the offensive” on Jan. 1 unless the government becomes more responsive to blacks.

Ajabu’s group tried to boycott the Indianapolis schools in late August to protest allegedly poor treatment of black students, but the protest fizzled after drawing little support.

Ajabu also organized a chapter of the Black Panther Militia in Wedowee, Ala., where the high school was destroyed by arson after the principal threatened to cancel the senior prom to prevent interracial dating.

The school burned hours after Ajabu addressed his recruits. He said he didn’t know who burned the school.