After Dudley’s military service concluded, he found work at a Ford plant near Lake Michigan and began engaging in Black liberation movements. He joined Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) and the Black Panther Party, offering his home as a meeting space. In the basement, Heshima sat beside his father as elders, donning black leather jackets, berets, and gloves, outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program and told stories about a time when Blacks were kings and queens.
“It made an indelible mark on my mind,” Heshima said. “I learned at a very young age—and I’m talking like six or seven years old—that self-determination and self-sufficiency had to be the primary objectives of any people seeking to be truly free.”
Heshima saw his father emerge from these meetings with concrete plans on how to implement community uplift from within. His daughter Duvon, Heshima’s older sister, remembers her father rallying workers at the Ford factory to ensure every family in the community had a feast on Thanksgiving and presents for the children on Christmas. It’s a fond memory of Dudley, who died in 2012, kept sacred by his daughter.
“Back in the sixties and seventies, people didn’t have a lot, so our communities worked together,” Duvon recalled. “Now, people try to ‘elevate’ to new communities and leave the old neighborhood to just deteriorate.”
The deterioration among neighborhoods that had been previously segregated and neglected during Jim Crow was a constant everywhere the family moved, whether it be Gary, Indiana, where Duvon spent most of her childhood, or Jackson, Mississippi, where Heshima spent his. From a historical perspective, this is likely an effect of blockbusting, a practice that profited real estate agents in a post–World War II segregationist society. Using psychologically manipulative tactics, like hiring Black women to walk neighborhoods with a baby carriage or buying entire developments only to leave them empty and give the appearance of a slum, agents and developers convinced white residents to sell their homes at below-market prices, then sold those homes at inflated prices to Black families.13 This strategy preyed on preexisting biases around desegregated neighborhoods, provoked so-called white flight, and reinforced the myth that housing prices fall when Black people move into a neighborhood—it created a situation that would ensure that outcome. In these neighborhoods, all the money that could have been spent on community development or advancement was frontloaded to the purchase of a home.
“Falling sale prices in neighborhoods where blockbusters created white panic was deemed as proof by the [Federal Housing Authority] that property values would decline if African Americans moved in,” Richard Rothstein points out. “But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbuster communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black.”14
The decline of subdivisions within the bounds of metropolitan areas was acutely felt by Heshima in Jackson, Mississippi, a place he somewhat affectionately calls “a ghetto’s ghetto.” The majority of his childhood was spent in a family home across the street from former slave quarters that had been converted into shotgun houses for people one economical step ahead of the unhoused. Jackson is where Heshima learned about the underground economy and about the world he was born into.
“I grew up with the understanding that, from a historical standpoint, I live in a society that has built institutions and structures which were not meant for me,” Heshima said. “That unbroken lineage of oppression, it really screams out at you in a place like Jackson.”
Heshima ultimately followed his father’s example and joined the military, undergoing intensive training to become a member of Seal Team Four in San Diego, California. He was discharged after a bar fight that started when a Marine called him a racial slur and took a swing at him. Heshima won the fight but lost the privilege of remaining in the military. Once he was booted from the Navy, he was alone in California with a skill set that didn’t translate well to the civilian sector.
“There was nowhere to be a military equipment operator outside the military,” Heshima said. “There was nothing for me in the mainstream US economy, but the underground economy provided a veritable cornucopia of opportunities.”
By design, Heshima’s new mode of survival—participation in the underground economy—landed him in front of a judge. Though he’d never been convicted of a crime previously, the state made up for lost time by piling on a laundry list of charges. Duvon and Dudley sat in the courtroom as the sentence was read: an indeterminate sentence of twenty-five years to life.
“The last thing my dad said to his son was, ‘I’ll see you later, son,’” Duvon said as the painful memory choked her speech. “He was in shackles, and that’s the last thing my father said to my brother.”
After a brief moment of tear-shedding, she continued steadfastly.
“My brother shouldn’t be in there, and anyone who knows him knows he shouldn’t,” she said. “You can’t really have feelings in there, but I know it hurts Shannon because it hurts me every day, that memory of their last interaction.”
Trial and Tribulation
After he entered the prison system in 1994, Heshima became a proliferator of Black liberation politics. He also continued to learn, associating with the New Afrikan revolutionaries who complemented his knowledge of Jackson and Fanon with Mao and Dr. Frances Cress Welsing.
“With each book, with each text, each talk, I began to get a clear perception of both the system I lived in and my relationship to it, and I got a greater understanding of the historical ideology and the oppression that we suffer every day,” Heshima said. “In fact, it got worse . . . the desire to know. I had to know so I could change the social reality of myself, my people, and all of humanity.”
The philosophy contained in these texts, combined with the values he learned from his father and lessons from the Pelican Bay hunger strike, helped Heshima create the Autonomous Infrastructure Mission. Working with Adam, his connection to the world outside prison, he began looking for leaders and regions where the elements of AIM could be implemented.
There were fits and starts in various locations around the country; Duvon, who lives near Dallas, struggled to find a community partner. (“As far as donations of time and resources . . . they don’t like that very much here,” she told me). Other individuals pegged as “coordinators” turned out to be more of the “lip service” types Adam bemoaned. But in Grand Rapids, AIM took root—quite literally.
It began with community surveys, which Bri and some local volunteers distributed to residents in Heartside and Baxter in 2019. The neighborhoods are unique, both in relation to Grand Rapids itself and to each other. Heartside, a neighborhood in downtown, once had a large African American community but now consists only of 11 percent Black homeowners or renters. It also counts five city missions within its borders, which provide temporary shelter to the numerous residents who were displaced after the neighborhood underwent gentrification.15 Baxter, located in the southeast region of the city, is still a near-majority African American (41 percent) neighborhood with middle- and low-income families.16
When the surveys came back, Bri discovered a dominant interest in the Sustainable Agriculture Commune among residents from both communities.
“One of the biggest concerns was food stability,” Bri said. “For many residents in these neighborhoods, the closest store is the minute mart down the street, where there aren’t a lot of options for fresh produce and healthy food.”
She began connecting with local nonprofits and sought material donations from places like Ace Hardware. Bri and several volunteers familiar with AIM—a collective of roughly fifty individuals—used the donations to create “grow boxes,” planters contained within wood planks. Twenty-three families have signed on to “host” these grow boxes, tending to the garden, distributing the food to the most needy members of the community, and rotating with volunteers to cook meals made of surplus food for upward of 100 families who congregate every Monday for the AIM soup kitchen.
According to the AIM charter, each contributor to the agricultural commune—whether contributing financially or in the form of labor—is part of its collective ownership, entitling them to 50 percent of the produce and 50 percent of dividends. While the preliminary focus of the agriculture commune in Grand Rapids has been to feed the community, Heshima’s outline envisions the commune selling 50 percent of its produce at farmers’ markets once the program has scaled up.
“The ultimate goal is closed economics,” Bri explained. “Once the SAC gets off the ground, we’ll be able to buy our own land and build our own businesses.”
Other elements of AIM have also been enacted in Grand Rapids including the Community Safe-Zone, a site, according to Heshima’s plan, “where Our Youth, Women and Elders can go about the daily activities of social life without the fear of violent death, assault or abduction.” The CSZ embodies several programs within the AIM ecosystem, and the Grand Rapids zone was a kind of pilot program for what AIM on a larger scale might look like. Like the preliminary hunger strikes in Pelican Bay, the Grand Rapids CSZ became a test of grit, and a teacher of hard-earned lessons.
Bri and other AIM members established an autonomous zone in a section of Heartside Park in 2020 by setting up tents to serve as a food pantry, sleeping quarters, showers, and social service areas. The Heartside residents who had been pushed into tent cities, shelters, or dilapidated homes were invited to seek refuge within the zone, the only rule being no hard drugs allowed within its boundaries. The CSZ operated similarly to Occupy movement spaces, particularly the George Floyd Square occupation in Minneapolis, where concrete barriers were erected to protect protestors.17 Rather than walls, the Grand Rapids community implemented another component of AIM: the Secure Communities Mandate, a trained security force charged with protecting the integrity and safety of people within the autonomous zone.
Volunteers who had been vetted and who had attended an eight-month de-escalation course, settled disagreements within the boundaries of the CSZ, but the outer perimeter was guarded by the Secure Communities Mandate. For two months, the Mandate held the space designated as the Safe-Zone, pacing the boundary in black, bulletproof vests with walkie-talkies clipped to the shoulder straps. Some wore black berets, an homage to the Panthers. Some were armed, while others had trained in martial arts and did not carry a weapon.
The defense force’s mettle was put to the test as soon as the autonomous zone was established at Heartside Park. Almost daily, they stood face-to-face with police in military-grade riot gear, but they outnumbered the cops by a large enough margin to stave off any confrontation. Instead, the police department tracked their schedules, watching them from nearby rooftops, and waited to infiltrate until the defensive line had thinned. When that moment came, almost sixty days after the zone had been established, fifty militarized officers tore down tents, destroyed or confiscated supplies, and threw people in jail for charges ranging from obstruction to trespassing. Bri was not on-site that day, so she, as she puts it, “unfortunately” did not get arrested. Instead, she received sixteen tickets for minor infractions, such as refusal to leave and feeding the unhoused.
In the wake of the destruction, the city’s first order of business was to charge as many people as it could with criminal actions. For Bri and the Mandate, safely relocating the 100 or so individuals who needed safe housing was top of mind. They rented U-Hauls to transport both people and belongings for those who had either come off the streets or left an unsafe living environment, but the police tailed the vehicles and blocked public access roads.
“We had to rent those U-Hauls for three days because we couldn’t get through,” Bri said.
I asked Bri what kind of lessons she learned from the Safe-Zone and its ultimate demise. Was there something the community could have done differently, or was it just bad timing?
“It’s always the right time for the Community Safe-Zone,” she replied. “Unity is our path to power, but it only works with all hands on deck.”
“When we restructure, it will need to be an impenetrable space,” she continued. “We need to make it impenetrable with community participation, safety patrol, and controlling the resources and people moving in and out.”
Infiltration is something Heshima and most activists in this space are keenly aware of, though not many organizations have learned the lesson to the point of implementing a counteroffensive. All local AIM coordinators receive a detailed analysis of COINTELPRO tactics, including a note to expect infiltration and potential criminalization of AIM initiatives. This explicit effort to curb intrusions is complemented by a covert vetting process in which potential members or coordinators are sent a questionnaire and current members fact-check their answers.
“Anyone who has done a cursory examination of history understands the depths and the lengths the ruling class will go to destroy movements that have the potential to create fundamental change,” Heshima said. “You won’t get far in transforming the nature of a society if you don’t think in terms of protecting the structures you build.”
As of this writing, Bri is still looking for a location to rebuild the Community Safe-Zone. In the meantime, she’s begun implementing some of AIM’s youth initiatives. The Grand Rapids Youth Community Action Program has been offering school-age children free after-school political education classes and unity-building workshops. One project that was particularly successful asked youth participants to come up with their own community surveys, distribute them to their local peers, and come up with action plans based on the responses.
“Their eyes lit up because they were understanding how they could connect to the community,” Bri said.
While Bri seems to be constantly engaged in AIM—responding to community crises like the loss of the Safe-Zone, harvesting produce from the grow boxes, or empowering the next generation—she does have a day job. She bartends at a local pub, picking up extra shifts if needed to make ends meet.
“We’re forced to participate in this fascist system for survival until everything in AIM comes together,” Bri said. “Revolution is grasping problems at the root, taking everything you see and the social effects and analyzing it to prevent it from happening again. A full disconnect from the system might be years down the road, but the importance of planting the seed and educating the youth on developing these elements of a new system are essential to our liberation as people.”
