Groups calling themselves the BLA carried out bombings, killings of police officers and random Caucasians,[3] robberies (which participants termed "expropriations"), and prison breaks.

One such organization was the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), founded in 1962 in close association with self-defense advocates like Queen Mother Moore and Robert F. Williams, but also communist intellectuals like James and Grace Lee Boggs.

[12][13] The Black Panther Party on the West coast "differed with RAM's clandestine posture" but nonetheless "organized an underground from its earliest days."

This underground armed wing was decentralized, formed out of cells communicating on a need-to-know basis, all "part of a movement concept called the Black Liberation Army.

Bunchy Carter, as the BPP's Southern California Minister of Defense, incorporated some of the Slausons, a gang which he had formerly led, to build a clandestine armed wing for the Party.

FBI counterintelligence operations were designed to inflame existing tensions and prevent cooperation between disparate representatives of the black liberation movement.

Because it was not an official organization, was not centrally coordinated, and consisted of multiple groups with different timelines, it is difficult to note exactly when and where the BLA emerged out of the pre-existing underground.

"[26] The BLA was initially decentralized and autonomous, split geographically and without pretense to ideological unity beyond endorsement of black liberation and typically revolutionary socialism.

The majority of the BLA who accepted consolidation formed a completely separate group" referred to as the Black Liberation Army - Coordinating Committee; these members largely deferred to imprisoned leadership for strategic guidance and were "involved in the factional struggle" within the PG-RNA.

[27] The call to consolidate outlined the majority group's political stance, rejecting reformism as "based on unprincipled class collaboration with our enemy"[28] and asserting the following principles: In this 1976 statement, the BLA-CC allowed "principled" and "tactical" unity with revolutionary whites; this would guarantee that the revolutionary Black organization made determining decisions both strategically and tactically during the collaboration and guarded against whites using the BLA for their own benefit.

[28] A substantial number of New York Black Liberation Army members did not accept this consolidation effort, and continued to release communiques under the auspices of the BLA in general.

By the 1980s, this minority grouping had formed the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, a fusion of veterans of the BLA on one hand and the Weather Underground Organization on the other.

It sought to re-energize the armed struggle in the United States and fund a retrenchment of Black nationalist revolutionary politics that had been eclipsed by the defeat of the movement in the mid-seventies.

[29] The alliance between the white anti-imperialist underground and the Black revolutionary nationalist underground caused a great deal of controversy among other groupings in the BLA and PG-RNA, amid accusations that members of the RATF were trafficking drugs and running prostitution rings, Kathy Boudin's guilty plea and dissociation from the movement in exchange for a more lenient sentence, and unsubstantiated accusations that the RATF had been a counterinsurgent 'pseudo-gang' directed by US intelligence.

[38] On January 27, 1972, the Black Liberation Army assassinated police officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie at the corner of 174 Avenue B in New York City.

Two suspects died in "unrelated shootouts with cops — one in New York, and one in St. Louis, with Laurie's gun in his car" and a third was sentenced in 2016 to 21 years for selling heroin to undercover police.

[41] On July 31, 1972, five armed individuals hijacked Delta Air Lines Flight 841 en route from Detroit to Miami, eventually collecting a ransom of $1 million and diverting the plane, after passengers were released, to Algeria.

[46] The BLA was active in the US until at least 1981 when a Brink's truck robbery, conducted with support from former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert and Judith Alice Clark, left a guard and two police officers dead.

Lutalo was released from prison in 2009 after serving 28 years on charges related to a shootout with a drug dealer in 1981 (and parole violation stemming from his conviction for a 1975 bank robbery), during which time he was punished with solitary confinement for receiving anarchist literature.

[49] On January 26, 2010, Lutalo was arrested for endangering public transportation while on an Amtrak train to New Jersey, after attending the Anarchist Book Fair in Los Angeles, being mistakenly identified as making terrorist threats on his cell phone.

The charge was dropped for lack of evidence, and Lutalo settled a suit against the city of La Junta, Colorado, where his arrest was made, for an undisclosed amount.