The Hares sign agreement with Attorney Amira Jackmon, Agent of the Archives Project

February 14, 2013, 5:28 pm

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Marvin X, Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare and Attorney Amira Jackmon, Senior Agent of the Archives Project.

Attorney Amira Jackmon will consider all bids for the Nathan Hare and Julia Hare archives. The Archives Project Senior Advisor, Poet Amiri Baraka, suggests $1,000,000.00 (one million dollars)  should be the starting point for bids from institutions such as Yale, Harvard, University of Chicago and Stanford University.

Itibari Zulu, editor of the Journal of Pan African Studies and former librarian at UCLA and Dr. J. Vern Cromartie, professor of sociology at Contra Costa College,  are also senior advisors to the Archives Project. The mission is not only to assemble the archives of high profile persons but to educate common people that their archives have value and should not be thrown into the trash upon their transition to the ancestors.

Interested institutions should contact Amira Jackmon, Senior Agent of the Archives Project, 510-813-3025.

The Archives Project founder and project director, Marvin X and his adopted aunt, Dr. Julia Hare

photo Johnny Burrell

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Billion Rise to Fight Violence Against Women and Girls

February 15, 2013, 3:06 am

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Published on Thursday, February 14, 2013 by Common Dreams

Around the World, A 'Billion Rise' to Fight Violence Against Women and Girls

Leveraging V-Day, activists on all continents dance and celebrate the power of women to stand up and speak out

- Jon Queally, staff writer

Around 2,000 Filipino women and human rights activists parade the streets of Manila as part of a global campaign to end violence against women on Thursday. One Billion Rising was initiated by Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler to end violence against women by raising awareness through creative action and dance. (Image: One Billion Rising)Across the globe today women are dancing, striking, and in other ways "rising" to call attention to the plight of violence against women and girls across the many cultures of the planet.

Long celebrated as Valentine's Day in many cultures and leveraged for the last fifteen years by women's rights activists in the "V-Day movement," today's actions are a culmination of the "One Billion Rising" campaign spearheaded by author, playwright and activist Eve Ensler and champions equal rights and an end to violence against women and young girls.

“February 14, 2013 will change the world not because it is a day of magic, although there are indeed mystical elements surrounding this campaign. It will change the world because the preparation for it and organizing for it has already created an energetic wind or wave igniting existing efforts to end violence against women and create new ones,” said Ensler in a statement.

Ensler says the campaign has brought together broad and unexpected coalitions of groups and individuals that have never worked together before, including young people and men previously unaware of how deep the problem of violence against women has been.

"We are rising together because it is in our connectedness, in our stomping feet and uncontrollable hips that the path and energy will be created to bring in a new world," Ensler said, referring to the campaign's focus on dance and public protest. "We will galvanize the will and the passion of everyone rising around the world to create change.”

According to the group, planned actions for the day include:

In Paris, the Women’s Coalition of the French Parliament is rising. The Minister of Women’s rights and hundreds of groups in India, students, teachers, and thousands of people are speaking out, and new laws and prevention education are being introduced.  Over 100 events are taking place in Italy.  InGermany, more than 100 events are planned around the country including a flash mob at the Brandenburg Gate. In Bosnia, a network of organizations and individuals in Sarajevo plan a dancing parade along the riverside, public squares and busy places.  From the north of Europe to the south, thousands of activists have planned events large and small. In Bangladesh, over 25 million are expected to rise and will form human dancing chains across the country.  The One Billion Rising anthem "Break the Chain" has been translated into Spanish, Farsi, Hindu, and many more languages.  In Cape Town,Soweto, and Johannesburg, teen girls are touring schools and teaching the flash mob dance, and all over Africa local TV stations are showing the "Break the Chain" video leading up to the rising.

The Guardian is also offering live and ongoing coverage of actions here.

The 'Break the Chain' anthem, which is has been learned by millions and will be performed at many of the events today can be viewed here:

The breadth and diversity of actions happening is being tracked on Twitter using the #1billionrising hashtag:

Confession of an Ex-Wife Beater

Confession of an Ex-Wife Beater

I beat her because she loved me

I beat her

Gouged my fingers into her eyes

Stomped her on the floor

Because she loved my dirty drawers

I beat her

Put my hands on her throat and squeezed

Until her eyes looked like marbles

I beat her

Because she loved me

Because she gave me a child

That looked just like me

I beat her

Because I stood trembling

Watching the child ooze from her womb

I beat her

Because she wouldn’t give me some pussy

I tore her panties off and took the pussy

I beat her

Then said to her, “Baby, I love you so much.

You’re so precious to me, let me kiss you.”

And she let me

Then I beat her for letting me

Because I was drunk

Too much rum

I beat her

Too much weed

I beat her

Too much coke

I beat her

My you are so precious to me

I beat her

My I love you so much baby

I beat her

Because she was faithful

Because she was patient

I beat her

While my child stood terrified

I beat her

Kicked her

Sat on her

Punched her in the mouth

In my madness

Because she said the wrong word

Because she said nothing

Because she said the right word

Because she said too many words

Because she had a thought

Independent of mine

I beat her

Knocked her too the floor

Because she called the police

I beat her

How could she call the white man on me

As Black as I was

I beat her

Because she called her mama

I beat her

Because she called the operator

I beat her

Because she picked up the telephone

I beat her

Because she left me and I found her hiding in the closet

I beat her because I took her to Mexico and she wasn’t happy

I beat her because I took her to New York

And she didn’t smile

I beat her

Because I was sick

And she told me so.

I beat her.

--Marvin X, from In the Name of Love, Laney College Theatre, 1981

I Shot Him

I shot him

Because he loved me

He loved me so much he came home smelling

Like his other bitch’s pussy

I shot him

I didn’t kill him

But I shot him

Because I got the phone bill

And saw he’d called his other bitch

On my birthday

I shot him

Cause I got papers on him

Yeah, I got papers on the motherfucker

To use his filthy language

I shot him

And I ain’t sharing him with nobody

I don’t care what the Muslims say

Bout a nigguh can have four wives

I don’t care what the Holy Qur’an say

I don’t care bout the African tradition of polygamy

I don’t care how many mo women it is for every man

I shot him

I don’t care if women are turning lesbian and bisexual

Cause they don’t want no man

I want my man. I love my man

But I shot him!

--Marvin X, from In the Name of Love, Laney College Theatre, 1981

WURD Speaks: Black Power Babies

February 15, 2013, 6:13 am

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I am free

February 15, 2013, 9:30 pm

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I am free
standing naked before God and Goddess
naked before ancestors
before elders
naked
before children
mama and daddy
naked
no shame
naked
low down funky truth
dirty truth, yeah.
Sun Ra taught me this. Space is the place. Space is the place.
Lord, do it for me right now. Thank you Lord for the blessing
of abundance and joy.

Naked. I stand with love of life. Sade said every day is xmas, every
night is New Year's Eve!

I am with her. In this fourth quarter, I am seeking joy
Live in the no stress zone, always, everyday,
no stress
live in the no stress zone
look in the mirror
your face
joy or stress?
do the rest!
look in mirror
are you the man in the mirror or some ghost, illusion
stand naked and prove yourself.
--Marvin X

Nuyorican Poets Cafe

February 16, 2013, 7:06 am

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The Nuyo on MTV! Our new heating system Poetry, music and romance this weekend   On Wednesday night, MTV featured the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in an episode of the new series Washington Heights! Click here to watch the full episode (the Cafe is featured starting at the 3:50 mark for a few minutes, and then several times during the segment from 32 minutes in to the end, all of which takes place at our venue). This week, the Cafe installed a new heating and air conditioning (HVAC) unit! Hurricane Sandy knocked out our heating in October; thanks to our fans and supporters, we finally have heat again at the Cafe! Tonight at 10pm, join us for the Friday Night Poetry Slam, featuring Eboni Hogan and hosted by Mahogany Browne! Reserved tickets are $20, unreserved tickets are $10. Tomorrow@6, C. Bravo Productions presents Poetic Romance, featuring roses for the ladies, door prizes, and an open mic. Tickets are $10 in advance/$15 at the door. Tomorrow@10, join us for WORDS hip hop/poetry showcase and open mic, featuring a live band; tix are $13 ($10 for students). On Sunday afternoon, actor/musician brothers Nat & Alex Wolff take the stage; advance tickets for their concert are sold out, but there will be a few tickets left at the door (3pm, $10).  Sunday@6, the Encyclopedia Show features experts from many disciplines who present a different verbal encyclopedia entry each month; this installment features Omar Holman ($10/$7). Sunday@8:30, enjoy verse and film by Syreeta Gates, Ericia Miriam Fabria and Queen Godis ($7/$5).  And Monday is a national holiday, but we're still open for Open Mic Monday! Join us at 9PM and share your music, poetry, comedy or monologues ($5) Tickets and details for all shows are available at www.nuyorican.org or by calling 212-780-9386.    Need the perfect present for a poet or a fan of the downtown arts scene? A year-long Nuyo membership is only $60 (or $30 for students).  Nuyo members receive discounts on admission to all events, as well as several free tickets and invites to special members-only events! *****    Don't miss our regular weekly events: Open Mic Mondays (every Monday at 9pm, all art forms welcome); the Slam Open (a competitive poetry open mic, every Wednesday at 9pm except the first Wednesday of the month); the Thursday Night Latin Jazz Jam (every Thursday at 9pm) and our Friday Night Poetry Slam (10pm every Friday).    Follow the Nuyo on Facebook or Twitter for event updates, news about our artists, submission opportunities and more.  Further information about all of our shows can be found at www.nuyorican.org. Contact Information The Nuyorican Poets Cafe 236 E 3rd Street between Avenue B and C New York, NY 10009 www.nuyorican.org Info 212.505.8183 Fax 212.475.6541 The Cafe serves beer, wine, coffee, tea  and soft drinks but no food. All ages are welcome at events, but you must be over 21 w/ valid ID to drink. ______________________________ Out of respect for our artists, there is NO video or audio recording of events without prior written permission from Cafe management. ______________________________ The Cafe is wheelchair accessible, but we recommend that persons needing assistance call in advance so that we can be ready to assist you when you arrive    The Cafe would like to thank our sponsors: NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, The New York City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, Google, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The A G Foundation and  the National Endowment for the Arts

Virgin Soul, a novel by Judy Juanita

February 16, 2013, 9:24 pm

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We are happy to announce the publication of Judy Juanita's novel, Virgin Soul, a story about those turbulent 60s, the student movement for black consciousness and liberation, especially a woman's life in the Black Panther Party. Judy was a fellow student at San Francisco State University, scene of the longest and most violent student strike in American academic history. --Marvin X

Virgin Soul

A Novel

Judy Juanita - Author

Hardcover | $26.95 |

 ISBN 9780670026586 | 320 pages | 22  Apr 2013 | Viking Adult | 9.25 x 6.25in | 18 - AND UP

 

Summary of Virgin Soul

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From a lauded poet and playwright, a novel of a young

woman's life with the Black Panthers in 1960s San Francisco At first glance, Geniece’s story sounds like that of a typical young woman: she goes to college, has romantic entanglements, builds meaningful friendships, and juggles her schedule with a part-time job. However, she does all of these things in 1960s San Francisco while becoming a militant member of the Black Panther movement. When Huey Newton is jailed in October 1967 and the Panthers explode nationwide, Geniece enters the organization’s dark and dangerous world of guns, FBI agents, freewheeling sex, police repression, and fatal shoot-outs—all while balancing her other life as a college student. A moving tale of one young woman’s life spinning out of the typical and into the extraordinary during one of the most politically and racially charged eras in America, Virgin Soul will resonate with readers of Monica Ali and Ntozake Shange.

Click this link for an interview/reading with the author [length: 30 min.]

Radio Chronicles - The Gradual Radicalisation of a Black Woman in San Francisco - November 18, 2012 at 6:30pm

Toward Insight, new book by Foad Satterfield

February 17, 2013, 8:58 pm

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W.E.B. Du Bois: Prime Minister of the state we never had!

February 17, 2013, 10:07 pm

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W. E. B. Du Bois: 

Prime Minister

of the State 

We Never Had

 By

Bill Strickland – University of Massachusetts at Amherst

To most Americans, and especially to most black people, the name W. E. B. Du Bois triggers a moment of iconic recognition, for he is one of the most legendary figures of black history. Pressed to explain who they think Du Bois was, some will say that he was "the father of Pan-Africanism" or a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and editor, for nearly a quarter of a century, of its magazine, /The Crisis/. Others seem primarily to link Du Bois to Booker T. Washington, citing him as Washington's staunchest and most unremitting critic. He was this and much more. Du Bois's life spanned nearly a century, from 1868 to 1963, representing approximately one-quarter of all the years that black people have lived on America's shores, and Du Bois's travails, hopes, and rejections represent as well, in microcosm, nearly all the struggles and experiences that black people have waged—and endured—in their effort to overcome racial inequality (and worse) in American society.


     The Early Years

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in the western Massachusetts town of Great Barrington, the same year that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States was passed to legally guarantee the rights of citizenship to black Americans. But this constitutional "right" was swiftly abrogated by the United States Supreme Court: first in 1883 when it overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and again in 1896 when, in the infamous case of /Plessy v. Ferguson/, the court sanctioned segregation as legally permissible under the myth of "separate but equal." America's ambivalent relationship to black people was thus the context for Du Bois's birth.
Yet Du Bois's childhood in Great Barrington, in his own recollections, bordered on the ideal. He regarded himself as a "New Englander" and "a Republican" and later wrote, "Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born."
It was also in Great Barrington that Du Bois became a fledgling journalist. At the age of fifteen, he began writing about events in the town and about the life and times of the black community for T. Thomas Fortune's two New York weeklies, /The New York Globe/ and /The Freeman/. He continued to write for the next two years, submitting some twenty-four articles in all.


     The Fisk Years

In 1885, after graduating as valedictorian of his senior class the year before, Du Bois left Great Barrington to venture south and study at Fisk University, the renowned black school in Nashville, Tennessee. It was in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, that Du Bois, two decades after the Civil War, would truly discover "the soul of black folks." And there that he would be moved by "the sorrow songs" of a people still living in the shadow of slavery.
That experience kindled Du Bois's racial consciousness and cultivated in him a racial empathy that would crystallize his identity as a "race man." In the post-Reconstruction South Du Bois discovered his people, his identity, and his cause:

   I have called my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made
   it; yet there was among us but a half-awakened common consciousness,
   sprung from common joy and grief, at burial, birth, or wedding; from
   a common hardship in poverty, poor land, and low wages; and, above
   all, from the sight of the Veil that hung between us and opportunity.

With that new racial clarity, the question became, how could Du Bois best represent and alleviate blacks' common plight? The answer seemed to be: through the written word. Not surprisingly, the vehicle to which he turned was his student newspaper, /The Fisk Herald/. He became the paper's editor in his junior year and proceeded to write about the life of southern blacks and whites from his own perspective. However, in 1887, Du Bois assumed the role not of racial reporter but of racial spokesman by writing "An Open Letter to the Southern People."

In addressing his appeal to the outside, overbearing white South, Du Bois to some degree anticipated the later "Appeal to the World" of the Pan-African Conference. But the message itself, to a startling extent, mirrors the themes of conciliation and racial interdependence that Booker T. Washington was to make famous almost ten years later at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 in his historic speech "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are."
The similarities indeed approach the uncanny for, like Washington, Du Bois alleges that the interests of southern blacks and southern whites "are one. . . .Let us then, recognizing our common interests (for it is unnecessary to speak of our dependence upon you) work for each other's interest, casting behind us unreasonable demands on the one hand and unreasonable prejudice on the other. We are not foolish enough to demand social equality or amalgamation, knowing full well that inexorable laws of nature regulate and control such movements. What we demand is to be recognized as men, and to be given those civil rights which pertain to our manhood."

Like Washington, Du Bois was prepared to bargain away social equality and even impute racial differences (presumably to superior genetic endowments, i.e., "laws of nature"). But, unlike Washington, he mildly criticized southern mores, i.e., "unreasonable prejudice"; and in language quite at odds with Washington's respectful discourse with whites, he demanded that blacks be "recognized as men." Du Bois's position was inconsistent: how can one bargain away social equality on the one hand but insist upon gender, civic, and human respect on the other? He also ended his letter in a quite un-Washington-like way by warning of a possible racial confrontation:

   I might name many ways in which your policy toward us could be
   broadened to our mutual advantage in the end, but such is not my
   purpose; it is not against particular acts that I inveigh, but
   against the spirit that prompts them: it is not that I care so much
   about riding in a smoking car, as the fact that behind the public
   opinion that compels me to ride there, is a denial of my
   /manhood/... If you /correct/ this evil you will find that in the
   future, as in the past, you will have in us staunch friends in
   sunshine and storm; if you do not the breach can only widen, until a
   vast throng of fellow-citizens will come to regard each other as
   natural foes. 
The absolute uniqueness of the Fisk Manifesto, the self-confidence it exudes—and the daring—can only be appreciated when one compares it, again, to Washington's plea for racial tranquility and cooperation.
Washington at the time of the Atlanta speech was thirty-nine years old, and a college graduate. He had been the master of Tuskegee for almost a decade and a half, had toured the country fund-raising, and had spoken before Congress. Du Bois, on the other hand, was merely a nineteen-year-old college undergraduate. Yet he felt an unmistakable duty to speak out in behalf of the race and to counsel his racial "betters" not only about the racial politics they should pursue, but also to offer a mild critique of their social behavior.
Was this bravado or something more? Had Du Bois's specialness in Great Barrington—he had always been the best student and graduated valedictorian of his class, as he was soon also to do at Fisk—emboldened him beyond his years and accomplishments? Or was he paying homage to a conviction that would not be denied? We can only speculate, but there are significant clues in his 1888 commencement speech at Fisk when he, surprisingly, chose to praise the political triumphs of Count Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" of Germany from 1862 to 1890.

Du Bois acclaimed Bismarck as a man "of unbending purpose," a "shrewd" and "wily statesman," a leader who "hurled Prussia into war against three times her number and with the grim determination of a man who knows he is risking all, he struck the fatal blow and Austria fell. . . . But his genius did not end with the rapidity of military preparation or the audacity of attack; behind [all] . . . was the shadow of the master hand of the statesman."
Reading this speech it is impossible not to conclude that Du Bois identified with Bismarck, that he subscribed to the Great Man theory of history and aspired to be a racial statesman who might unify his race as Bismarck had unified his nation.

With Bismarck as his model, it did not seem to matter to Du Bois if people understood him or agreed with him. He too would sally forth against "the great odds," against the naysayers and the doubters because, in the end, men of vision like Bismarck (and presumably himself) would overcome. But Bismarck was the prime minister of a nation who had at his disposal the resources of a state and, when necessary, an army. What resources was the young Du Bois, then twenty years old, to call upon to attain his goal of racial statesmanship in his racially hostile land? Realizing that, ultimately, he could really rely only upon himself, Du Bois determined to seek the best education possible and arm himself intellectually for the battle ahead. He did so, inspired, more than likely, by the Bismarckian example that one man can save a nation—or a people.

The Harvard Years
Entering Harvard as a junior, Du Bois studied politics and philosophy and kept up his interest in Germany. He graduated cum laude in 1890 and was chosen to be one of Harvard's six commencement speakers. His subject this time was "Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization." As might be imagined, for a young black scholar orating before a mostly white audience that included the governor of Massachusetts and the wife of former president Grover Cleveland, to project the former president of the Confederacy as an exemplar of civilization was a surprising development that attracted widespread, and largely approving, media attention.

Du Bois drew certain parallels to Bismarck in his semi-eulogy of Jefferson Davis, whom he describes as a "typical Teutonic hero . . . an Anglo-Saxon . . . and imperious man who defied disease, trampled on precedent and never surrendered." Again, like Bismarck. Du Bois depicted Davis as the archetype "of the strong man—individualism coupled with the rule of might—and it is this idea that has made the logic of modern history, the cool logic of the Club." He acknowledged that the Anglo-Saxon approach of "might over right" had been successful but insisted that it advanced only "a part of the world at the expense of the whole . . . [that] the advance of civilization …has always been handicapped by shortsighted national selfishness." And he suggested that such "a system of human culture whose principle is the rise of one race on the ruins of another is a farce and a lie."

Thus, as in his "Appeal to the Southern People," Du Bois grants the superior achievements of the white race but bids it use its superior gifts to aid the Negro and the African. Whites should assist the rise of Negro people, who may represent a different kind of human merit, but who deserve the assistance of the mightier race in the greater scheme of things because, he argued, "You owe a debt to humanity for this Ethiopia of the Outstretched Arm, who has made her beauty, patience, and her grandeur, law."

Du Bois will eloquently enlarge on this theme of the human significance and historical contribution of a neglected and underappreciated people in /The Souls of Black Folk/. But there is something in the Harvard address besides the solicitousness and dutiful curtsying to white America that resembles Du Bois's Fisk Appeal. His remarks manifest a certain boldness and taboo-breaking confrontation with the premises of Anglo-Saxon and American greatness. Deftly but unmistakably, Du Bois, in modern parlance, "speaks truth to power." His delicately phrased but delegitimizing analysis presupposes an equal footing with his fellow Americans that would not have been out of place in a truly democratic society but was treading on forbidden soil in Jim Crow America. Nevertheless, the speech seems to confirm the fact that Du Bois had decided to pursue his ambition to be the race's spokesman.


     Rutherford B. Hayes, and the Slater Fund

After graduating from Harvard but staying on to study for his M.A. degree in history, Du Bois applied to the Slater Fund, which had advertised its willingness "to subsidize any young colored man" interested in furthering his education in Europe. He was turned down. Moreover, former president Rutherford B. Hayes alleged to the press that the fund had been unable to find any worthy applicants. Du Bois's response is a priceless demonstration of his willingness to confront the powers that be:

   The announcement that any agency of the American people was willing
   to give a Negro a thoroughly liberal education and that it had been
   looking in vain for men to educate was to say the least rather
   startling. When the newspaper clipping was handed me in a company of
   friends, my first impulse was to make in some public way a
   categorical statement denying that such an offer had ever been made
   known to colored students. I saw this would be injudicious and
   fruitless, and I therefore determined on the plan of applying
   myself. I did so and have been refused along with a number of cases
   beside mine. 
He went on to chastise the former president for being a party to this insincere charade:"As to my case I personally care little. I am perfectly capable of fighting alone for an education, if the trustees do not see fit to help me. On the other hand the injury you have—unwittingly I trust—done the race I represent, and am not ashamed of, is almost irreparable."
Then, after expounding at length on the damage to the race's reputation by such demeaning and unfounded slanders of its abilities, Du Bois told Hayes that he owed an apology to the Negro people: "We are ready to furnish competent men for every European scholarship furnished us off paper. But we can't educate ourselves on nothing and we can't have the moral courage to try, if in the midst of our work our friends turn public sentiment against us by making statements which injure us and which they cannot stand by."

To his credit, Hayes did not take offense but recommended that Du Bois reapply to the fund. Finally after a year and a half of correspondence, sterling letters of recommendation, and Du Bois's explanation of his study project, the Slater Fund, in May 1892, voted to give him a $350 scholarship and a $350 loan to underwrite his education for one year at a German university. Consequently, in the summer of 1892, Du Bois embarked for Kaiser Wilhelm's and Otto von Bismarck's Second Reich, and the University of Berlin.


     The German Years

Europe in general and Germany in particular were revelations to Du Bois. They connected him to larger humankind in a way he had not found possible in America. Traveling to Poland with a friend from the University of Berlin, for example, he discovered ethnic and religious oppression outside the United States in the case of Austrian and German prejudice against Polish Jews.

He was also exposed to a new scholarship of sociology and political economy and "began to understand the real meaning of scientific research and the dim outline of methods of employing its technique and results in the new social sciences for the settlement of the Negro problem in America." But most of all he was exposed to new racial theory in the form of Pan-Germanism as advocated by its foremost disciple, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, whose ideas about racial unity and the role of race as a motive and determining force in history influenced a generation of Germans to believe in German supremacy and Germany's destiny for world leadership.

Some of von Treitschke's teachings were clearly racist, but what seems to have most influenced Du Bois was his notion of race as a positive and undeniable force in history. Relating to that racial hypothesis led Du Bois quite easily to the kindred concepts of Pan-Negroism, Pan-Africanism, and racial idealism. Suddenly the world became comprehensible and navigable in a way that it had never been before.
In addition to von Treitschke, Professors Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner also had a profound impact on Du Bois's academic and methodological thinking. Schmoller taught him that the role of social science was to explain social phenomena through the collection of empirical data; first the research, then the interpretation. Wagner opposed the school of laissez-faire economics that Du Bois had learned at Harvard, espousing state intervention to produce desirable economic outcomes.

Armed with this new knowledge, Du Bois, on his twenty-fifth birthday, reviewed his quarter-century of existence and pledged a self-oath:

   Be the Truth what it may I will seek it, on the pure assumption that
   it is worth seeking and heaven nor Hell, God nor Devil shall turn me
   from my purpose till I die. . . . I therefore take the work that the
   Unknown lay in my hands and work for the rise of the Negro people,
   taking for granted that their best development means the best
   development of the world.

From the perspective of American racial thought, Du Bois's new views on race bordered on heresy, for to propose that there was any discernible link between the progress of Negroes and the progress of humankind flew in the face of everything that racists and the more sophisticated social Darwinists believed. Yet that was now Du Bois's basic supposition, the product of his new European enlightenment. That he returned to America a different Du Bois is without question. He describes his reaction to his return as "Days of Disillusion," which he contrasts with his years in Europe: "As a student in Germany, I built great castles in Spain and lived therein. I dreamed and loved and wandered and sang; then after two long years I dropped suddenly back into 'nigger'-hating America!" For this man of consummate language to define America thusly and so strongly condemn its racial ways is a marker of his new alienation. It also suggests that his belief in the nation's ability to racially transform itself was now a doubt-filled hope.


     Race Organization

Although he would have preferred to finish his graduate studies in Germany and was supported in this by his professors, who were willing to permit him to do so ahead of the normally required time period, other faculty members objected to this special treatment, so Du Bois returned to Harvard to get his doctorate—the first by a black—and write his dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, 1638–1870," published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Series.
The outlook represented in the dissertation shows that in the decade that had passed since his Fisk years, Du Bois increasingly had come to embrace a political-intellectual tradition of critiquing America that could be traced back to David Walker and was embodied by Ida B. Wells and the monumental Frederick Douglass, who had once asked America, "What is Your Fourth of July to Me?" Revealingly, therefore, the dissertation muses over America's moral failing in the last chapter, called "A Lesson for Americans."

   It behooves the United States . . . in the interest both of
   scientific truth and of future social reform, carefully to study
   such chapters of her history as that of the suppression of the slave
   trade. . . . The most obvious question which this study suggests is:
   How far in a State can a recognized moral wrong be safely
   compromised? And although this chapter of history can give us no
   definite answer suited to the ever-varying aspects of political
   life, yet it would seem to warn any nation from allowing through
   carelessness and moral cowardice, any social evil to grow. . . .From
   this we may conclude that it behooves nations as well as men to do
   things at the very moment when they ought to be done.

Du Bois's questioning of America's racial contradictions had grown more and more into a questioning of the nature and meaning of America itself. But he did not abandon his own pursuit of "scientific truth." Utilizing the research methods he had learned in Germany, he single-handedly conducted the magisterial social study of /The Philadelphia Negro/, the first empirical sociological study of its kind in America. But despite successfully completing this stupendous and unmatched feat, Du Bois was virtually ignored by the University of Pennsylvania, under whose auspices the study had been undertaken; nor did he receive any job offers from a white university. Therefore, he accepted a position at Wilberforce, a black college in Ohio, which turned out to be a largely unhappy experience. From Wilberforce he returned to the South, to Atlanta University, to oversee the racial research we now know as the famous Atlanta University Studies, a project that was rebuffed by white scholars when Du Bois proposed it to the American Academy meeting in Philadelphia in 1899.
In the meantime, though, he had turned to the race for intellectual succor, joining with Alexander Crummell to form the American Negro Academy, an organization of black scholars and intellectuals. In March 1897, Du Bois helped to elect Crummell president of the academy and then delivered a speech entitled "The Conservation of Races," a historical and philosophical retrospective heavily influenced by the racial ideas of German nationalist thinkers like von Treitschke. "The history of the world," Du Bois said, "is the history not of individuals but of groups, not of nations but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history." On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Du Bois had turned the Great Racial Negative into a Great Racial Positive. Races made history, and there was a place for Negroes in the Hall of Fame of Human Progress.


     The First Pan-African Conference

This, then, was the keenly racially conscious Du Bois who would answer Henry Sylvester Williams's call and venture to England for the first Pan-African Conference. The very first meeting of representatives of the African Diaspora was convened in London in July 1900 by the Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams for the purpose of renegotiating colonial and imperial relations to better the global lot of the black race. This meeting of thirty-two black men and women from Africa, America, Canada, and the West Indies represented, according to its conference chairman, Bishop Alexander Walters of the United States, "the first time in the history of the world [that] black men [and women]…gathered together from all parts of the globe with the object of discussing and improving the condition of the black race." Fully cognizant of the significance of their role, and accepting its awesome responsibility, the members issued, at the end of the three-day conference, a declaration "To the Nations of the World," penned by the conference's secretary, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, chairman of the conference's Committee on Address.
The words of that declaration, its analysis, and the accuracy of its prophecy have, ever since that day, essentially framed the discussion of race in the modern world. It read:

   In this the closing year of the nineteenth century, there has been
   assembled a congress of men and women of African blood, to
   deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and outlook of the
   darker races of humankind. The problem of the twentieth century is
   the problem of the color line, the question as to how far the
   differences of race—which show themselves chiefly in the color of
   the skin and texture of the hair—will hereafter be made the basis of
   denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost
   abilities the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.

Although Du Bois's sentence "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" has been famously, and almost unfailingly, associated primarily with his 1903 classic, /The Souls of Black Folk/, it was in London at Sylvester Williams's conference that these words were first heard. The statement spoke not only for Africans and African-descended people but also for that half of the world comprising "the darker races of mankind." This appeal was thus not one of narrow nationalism but a more inclusive racial identification for the uplift and emancipation of all the downtrodden peoples.
Moreover, the Pan-African conference was to be the forerunner of a succession of Pan-African Congresses led by Du Bois over the next half century after Williams's untimely death in 1912. In 1903, three years after the London conference, Du Bois wrote not in London but in Atlanta, the heart of the American South, in a voice that had grown more militant. Perhaps because, according to the /Chicago Tribune/, 104 black persons were lynched that year, or one every three days. Du Bois, like others before him and many others to come, had been radicalized by America's heartless racial practices. But in a sense his journey from reflection to radicalism was a road he had long seemed destined to travel.
And it is this Du Bois who we need to view not simply as the individual genius that he undoubtedly was. We need to view him and his life of struggle and achievement—and betrayal by his native land—as a metaphor for the essential meaning of black life in America. Advocate, statesman, negotiator, defender, champion, ambassador, griot, and peerless challenger of the system, Du Bois was all these things and more of—and for—our national self. . . . He was the best prime minister we ever had for our State That Never Was.
/"Your country, How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here."/
/The Souls of Black Folk/


     Bibliography

Aptheker, Herbert, ed. /The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. 1, 1877–1934./ Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.
_________. /Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961./ Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.
Césaire, Aimé. /Return to My Native Land./ New York: Penguin, 1969.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. /The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois./ New York: International, 1988.
Du Bois Central, Special Collections, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass. www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/collections/dubois/index.htm<http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/collections/dubois/index.htm>
Geiss, Imanuel. /The Pan-African Movement./ New York: Holmes & Meier, 1974.
Kinzner, Stephen. /Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq./ New York: Times Books, 2006.
Langleye, J. Ayo. /Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa./ London: R. Collings, 1979.
Lewis, David Levering. /W. E. B. Du Bois: The Autobiography of a Race, 1868–1919./ New York: Henry Holt, 1993.
__________________./W. E. B. Du Bois : The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963./ New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
Charles Ezra Ferrell
Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History
Consultant: Liberation Film Series, Program Director
248-229-6619 – www.chwmuseum.org/liberation <http://www.chwmuseum.org/liberation>

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If you can't free Mumia, maybe Mumia can free you!

February 19, 2013, 4:10 pm

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MUMIA SPANS THE NATION THIS WEEKEND     Starting Thursday and Friday of this week, MUMIA: LONG DISTANCE REVOLUTIONARY will open across the US in the first big cross-country push of the film since our outstanding two week premiere in New York City.  New York is still in the picture with showings in Hudson and Huntington (Long Island). We move into the south with openings in Miami and New Orleans and onto the Pacific Northwest with our opening in Seattle. This is another big moment for the film, where substantial turnout in these cities will help us get the film into more and more cities. Our Los Angeles March 1 premiere is imminent (also showing in Pasadena and Claremont) and we just booked Oakland opening March 8... If you are in or near South Florida, New Orleans, Seattle, Hudson or Huntington, please get out to the theater and bring a crowd. If not, reach out to your contacts in these areas and implore them to see and support a film that sets the record straight on this much maligned pillar for justice. And as always, consider buying tickets for donation (we target students) so more can see Mumia's story. Find links to theaters and showtimes below. Thank you for your ongoing efforts and commitment. Onward and upward!     If you haven't seen it yet, check out Mumia, Stephen Vittoria and Noelle Hanrahan from their appearance on DemocracyNow! the morning of the NYC premiere.           Mumia calls into Democracy Now! (click to watch interview)   Vittoria & Hanrahan on the Show (click to watch interview)     SHARE us on Facebook and write a post about the film and Mumia TWEET about us on Twitter LINK to the Trailer on YouTube     LET THE JOURNEY BEGIN New York, NY — Opens February 1, 2013 Hudson, NY — February 14-17 & 21-23, 2013 Princeton, NJ — February 16, 2013 (12:30 PM) Miami, FL — February 21-24, 2013 Seattle, WA — February 22-28, 2013 New Orleans, LA — February 22-28, 2013 Chula Vista, CA — February 25, 2013 Calgary, AB — February 27, 2013 Huntington, NY — February 28, 2013 Los Angeles, CA — Opens March 1, 2013 Claremont, CA — Opens March 1, 2013 Pasadena, CA — Opens March 1, 2013 Plainfield, VT — March 3, 2013 Oakland, CA — Opens March 8, 2013 Dormont, PA — March 21-24, 2013 Montpelier, VT — March 22-31, 2013 Toledo, OH — April 2, 2013     A Street Legal Cinema Production Written, Directed, and Edited by Stephen Vittoria Produced by Stephen Vittoria, Noelle Hanrahan, and Katyana Farzanrad FEATURING Cornel West, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Dick Gregory, Amy Goodman, Peter Coyote, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, and many others VISIT www.mumia-themovie.com     Like Us On   Follow Us On   Watch Us On     © 2013 Street Legal Cinema

Politics of Disruption in Oakland

February 19, 2013, 4:50 pm

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COUNTERPOINTS: THE POLITICS OF DISRUPTION OF OAKLAND GOVERNMENT

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

Originally published February 13, 2013 in Oakland Local online newspaper

The tactic of disruption is one of the more powerful weapon in the political and community activist arsenal. But like many weapons, it can wear out from overuse or poorly-targeted use. You can certainly make a case that political disruption in the post-Occupy Oakland era has either reached that point already, or may be about to.

That's been my feeling for a while, a feeling that was renewed while watching the recent Oakland City Council debates over the quarter of a million dollar Strategic Policy Partnerships-William Bratton police consultant contract.

At its base, the tactic involves the orderly, or disorderly, disruption of a targeted government activity unless and until a certain political demand or set of demands is met. A radical added element of the tactic that is sometimes used-one that is part of the character of the recent Oakland actions-is the simultaneous non-cooperation with the functions of government that are normally the vehicle by which the political demand could be carried out.

A viewing of the online video of the January 15 meeting of the Public Safety Committee of the Oakland City Council, where the SPP was first considered, shows an example of this dual disruption-noncooperation tactic. Boos and shouts from several in the Council chambers audience began as soon as Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan attempted to begin his explanation of the consultant contract, causing Mr. Jordan to have to raise his own voice so that Councilmembers, others in the chambers, and the viewing audience could hear him, and causing Public Safety Committee Chairperson Noel Gallo to immediately threaten to send police upstairs to clear the balcony of the loudest protesters. While Mr. Gallo tried to restore order so that Mr. Jordan could make his presentation, a protester took the public speaker's podium and began addressing the assembled crowd. When the first speaker attempted to give a detailed analysis and critique of the police contract, protesters in the audience began attempting to shout him down whenever he appeared to make statements that could be interpreted as being pro-contract or pro-police.

The early and repeated disruption of the meeting got so bad that the father of Alan Blueford-the 18 year old shot and killed by Oakland police officers last spring and one of the police justice causes protesters have been rallying behind-had to come to the public mic to ask protesters to keep quiet in order for the business of the committee to go forward.

Either because of Mr. Blueford's appeal, or because of Mr. Gallo's hard line on removal of disruptive protesters, or some combination of the two, the remainder of the 84 public speakers and committee discussion went fairly smooth.

But the disruptive tactics carried over into the full City Council meeting the following week, when so many people showed up for the police consultant contract decision that the chambers could not accommodate them all, and viewing screens had to be set up in adjoining committee meeting rooms. The City Clerk noted that "more than" 260 members of the public signed up to speak on the item, with each person allotted one minute of speaking time to address the Council.

Under City Council rules, a person signing up to speak on a Council item can "cede" their time to another speaker, so long as the person "ceding" is actually in the Council chambers at the time. Assuming that some 60 persons signed up to speak but left City Hall before actually taking the podium, that would work out to 200 minutes of actual speaking time-a little over 3 hours-not accounting for the time taken between public speakers.

Many speakers coming out to the January 22 Council meeting in protest of the police consultant contract knew a way to stretch that time out. Some stood at the podium arguing procedural rules-which aren't counted against the one minute speaking time-while others simply continued on speaking long after their allotted time was up, refusing repeated requests by Council President Pat Kernighan to leave the podium, some turning to their backs to the Council and addressing the audience when the microphone was turned off. Some appeared to be attempting to have police arrest them, or to force either the clearing of the chambers of spectators or the suspension or abortive ending of the Council meeting altogether. Ms. Kernighan-who is far more accommodating and less decisive than Mr. Gallo in her handling of meetings-spent considerable time explaining procedure or pleading with speakers to respect the process and others in the chamber.

Public speaking on the item lasted eight hours, with the final vote coming at 2 in the morning.

Much of the opposition to the consultant contract surrounded one of the consultants-former L.A. and New York police chief William Bratton-because of his espousal of the controversial "stop-and-frisk" tactic.

Some might argue that the disruptive tactics surrounding the SPP consultant contract failed. With Mr. Gallo noting that "crime has been governing Oakland for too long," and District 3 Councilmember Lynette Gibson McElhaney adding that "We have got to change-radically. The reason I'm not afraid of the bogeyman named Bratton is that we have tremendous community oversight," Council approved the SPP contract on a 7-1 vote (Councilmember Desley Brooks voting no).

But perhaps that's what the disruptors were looking for, a defeat around which to rally and build support for other, later, actions.

This will be, obviously, a continuing discussion. More, later.

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s Novel: “Sugaree Rising”

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

“Sugaree Rising” Book Cover

By Post Staff

The many followers of the writings of local writer J. Douglas Allen-Taylor may be surprised by the subject of the Oakland journalist’s first novel, “Sugaree Rising,” but it’s going to be a good surprise.
Instead of the up-to-date Bay Area political breakdown we’re so used to hearing from Allen-Taylor, he has chosen something farther away in time and distance: the government-planned flooding out of a largely-African-American community in rural South Carolina during the Depression years.
Loosely based upon actual historical events, “Sugaree Rising” shows how Black resistance operated in the time long before the civil rights period, in an era when lynchings were common and the Klan was in power, and Black People in the Deep South risked their lives when speaking out against whites.
But “Sugaree Rising” is much, much more than a protest novel.
In the isolated fictional community of Yelesaw Neck, where the novel’s story takes place, Allen-Taylor has created a remarkable landscape in which colorful characters flourish, ghosts and haunts and spirits wander the swamps and woods, back-porch stories are common, and people still practice the old religions they brought with them from Africa.
One of the most interesting and memorable of Sugaree’s characters is Budi Manigault, grandfather to 15 year old heroine Yally Kinlaw, who we meet out on the porch one hot summer night in a scene that reminds you of the best writing of Zorah Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison:
“He suddenly stiffened on the swing, bracing his feet against the porchboards, and turning to look out into the dark towards the side yard, he put his hand up to shush her. She turned to the direction he was looking at but could see nothing in the wide expanse of the pitch-black of the yard beyond the little circle of the porch lamp.
“What wrong, Grandpa?” she asked him.
“That som’bitch been sneaking around here, of a night,” Papa’Budi said. “I’m’a catch him, though.”
“He got himself up to his feet and walked across the porch and into the house. He was back out again almost immediately with his shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. He sat back down on the swing-still careful not to make it sing out-and set the gun on his lap. Then, without any warning whatsoever, with no attempt at a sighting or an aiming but only a slight adjustment of the direction of the barrel, he squeezed off the shot. There was a bright spurt of flame from the shotgun barrel and a sharp, explosive crack. The girl jumped and, much too late to have any effect, cupped her hands over her ears.
“You ain’t got for fret no more about him,” he said. “I done gotted him good, this time. I done shotted that yellow bastard.”
J. Douglas Allen-Taylor’s “Sugaree Rising” is an instant classic, a timeless novel of insight and important human themes that highlights the author’s considerable writing and storytelling talents. It belongs on the shelf alongside those of the best of our writers.
“Sugaree Rising,” Freedom Voices Publishers of San Francisco, 400 pages, $24.95. Available Dec. 1 at local bookstores and online from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. A book release party for “Sugaree Rising” will be held on Thursday, Dec. 6, 6 p.m., at the Joyce Gordon Gallery at 406 14th St. in downtown Oakland.

Afro Horn and Marvin X will perform at the Schomburg in Harlem, Friday, Feb 22, in tribute to Elizabeth Catlett Mora

February 20, 2013, 2:04 am

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AFRO HORN @ S.O.B.s with special guests Steve Turre and Cubanos

February 20, 2013, 2:16 am

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Stanford Univ. BSU Conference

February 20, 2013, 6:22 pm

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STANFORD UNIVERSITY'S 14TH ANNUAL BCSC/BSU  YOUTH EMPOWERMENT CONFERENCE  "MOVE: Making Ourselves Voices of Empowerment" Along with keynote speaker Lissa L. Jones, performances, a college student panel, and a tour of Stanford University, the program seeks to  empower Black youth through conversations surrounding identity and acceptance, effective leadership, and tips for success from Stanford students and others. Please forward this email to any high school student, school group or community organization you think may be interested in attending the conference. We expect to reach maximum capacity!  $20.00 registration includes conference, t-shirt, breakfast, and lunch for each student.  To receive discounted hotel lodging at the Stanford Guest House, use code 1304YOUTH. Lodging details available here

Salaam John H. Doyle, theatre master

February 21, 2013, 4:57 am

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A giant genius has left us down here on the ground. John H. Doyle was a master theatre man who continued in the tradition of Black Arts West and the national Black Arts Movement. Perhaps his greatest contribution to Bay Area Theatre was producing and directing the plays of another national genius, Ed Bullins. He also directed a version of my One Day in the Life at the Malonga Arts in Oakland. We love you, John Henry Doyle!

--Marvin X, Black Arts Movement

Director, John H. Doyle has been a prolific figure in Bay Area theatre since 1969.   HIs range of theatrical experiences include: theatre management, producting, directing, acting, program development, coordination and teaching.

Mr. Doyle has produced productions in South Carolina, Texas and throughout California.  He's directed for numerous production companies including: The American Conservatory Theatre, Marla Gibbs' Cross Roads Theatre (Los Angeles), The LA Theatre Center, LA's Theatre Row on Santa Monica, The Oakland Ensemble Theatre, The Julian Theatre, The Magic Theatre, The Black Repertory Theatre, The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, City Theatre, The Julia Morgan Theatre and The Buriel Clay Memorial Theatre. 

He coordinated statewide tours with Grassroots Experience Theatre Company, a theatre troupe devoted to training actors and mounting productions that expressed the concerns of African-American community.

BLACK REVOLUTION ON CAMPUS & THE ROOTS OF BLACK STUDIES

February 22, 2013, 7:06 am

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Left of Black S3:E19 | The Black Revolution on Campus & the Roots Black Studies

In January of 1969,  WCBS-TV in New York City began to broadcast a series of half-hour lectures under the banner of Black Heritage: A History of Afro-Americans.  The series, which ran six days a week until June of 1969 (108 episodes in all), was produced by historians John Henrik Clarke, Vincent Harding and political scientist William Strickland—the later two who were founding members of the Institute of the Black World, a groundbreaking thinking tank that was based at the Atlanta University Center.  According to historian Martha Biondi, by providing “ordinary Americans access to the Black history courses beginning to be offered on college campuses…these men personally bridged the gap between scholarship and activism.”

Left of Black is proud to be of the many progeny of this visionary project, born during an era in which Black student activism on American college campuses helped transform institutions that less than a generation earlier, Black students were largely denied access to.  This moment is chronicled in Martha Biondi’s new book The Black Revolution on Campus (University of California Press).  A historian at Northwestern University, Biondi joins Left of Black via Skype to talk about what she describes as “an extraordinary chapter in the modern Black freedom struggle.”  Biondi is also the author of To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Black Love Lives Conference, Philly, March 16, 2013

February 23, 2013, 7:04 pm

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Meet the Black Love Doctors: The Expert Presenters at The Black Love Lives Conference 3.16,13 THE BLACK LOVE LIVES CONFERENCE March 16, 2013 9:00am – 5:00pm Houston Hall University of Pennsylvania 3417 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19107 The Black Love Lives Conference will be presented at The University of Pennsylvania on Saturday, March 16, 2013 in an effort to encourage strong families, healthy relationships and healing in the African American community. The conference will utilize dynamic workshops facilitated by leading experts aka 'The Black Love Doctors' who will address transformational mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional aspects of sustaining lasting relationships. "We received an overwhelming number proposals from presenters across the country and selected those we felt would provide a diverse transformational experience for individuals and couples.  These 'Black Love Doctors" are the experts doing the important and groundbreaking work of healing in our communities," says Nisa Ra, conference organizer and director of the documentary that inspired the event, Black Love Lives. A selection of presenters and their workshops below.  The full schedule will be posted on www.blacklovelives.com. FOR INFO and to REGISTER for The Black Love Lives Conference Media & Sponsorship Inquiries: press@blacklovelives.com | 718-496-2305 Dr. Derrick L. Campbell Workshop: Leading Your Marriage into the Promised Land Dr. Akosua Ali-Sabree Workshop: Clear Communication the key to Harmonious Relationship Kyle Morris, Mo Stegall, Ricardo Suber, The Royal Flyness Workshop: Love & Social Media Dr. Naketa Thigpen Workshop: Passing Ships- Keeping the Love Afloat Montsho & Nwasha Edud Workshop: Akoma Day: the Sacred Science of SoulMating William Webb & Dr. Latisha Webb Workshop: Keep Black Love Alive: Demystifying Sexuality & The Impact of Trauma Nisa Muhammad Workshop: Why Marriage? Tips to wedded bliss  follow on Twitter @blacklovelives | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  Copyright © 2013 Black Love Lives, All rights reserved.

Beyond White Supremacy Thinking

February 24, 2013, 9:23 am

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Yes, we can: Non-European thinkers and philosophers

Walter Mignolo weighs in on the debate on the relative strength's of Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric philosophy. Last Modified: 19 Feb 2013 11:34

While Zizek may be the most important European philosopher today, his work is less relevant for many people than the work of other philosophers like Lewis R Gordon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Wang Hui and Enrique Dussel [Getty]

The exchanges between Santiago Zabala and Hamid Dabashi published in Al Jazeera brings about one of the crucial issues of the 21st century: the increasing process of re-westernisation (the revamping of Western ways of thinking, from Christianity to Liberalism and Marxism), de-westernisation and decoloniality in all sphere of life, politics, economy, religions, aesthetics, knowledge and subjectivity. The exchange focuses mainly in the last two. The exchange was prompted by Zabala's article on the role of the philosopher celebrating Slavov Zizek. In his response, Dabashi took up on the meaning differential between the names of Western philosophers and the countries where non-European philosophers are supposed to dwell or "come from" to Euro-US academy.  Zabala's responses to Dabashi opted to emphasise Zizek's refreshing Communism. I will focus on the issues that emerge in the borders of the exchange. I am, after all, a border and decolonial thinker. Beliefs in hierarchies  The response by Hamid Dabashi to Zabala's article on the role of the philosopher, contributed to the circulation of the piece in areas of the public domain where it would not have otherwise been circulated. Dabashi's response was a reflection on the initial paragraph of said article on Zizek written by Santiago Zabala. There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United States, Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and in Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China.  Dabashi's strategy parallels his argument: he doesn't mention the name of the article's authors. Dabashi's silence brings to the foreground the meaning of naming. His response is a sign among many that we, on the planet, are living a change of epoch rather than in an epoch of changes. The change of epoch is announced, in the sphere of knowledge, in the process of delinking from long lasting effects of epistemic colonial and imperial differences. According to this frame, Native Americans have wisdom and Anglo-Americans science; Africans have experience and Europeans philosophy; the Third World has culture and the First World social sciences, including anthropology who study the cultures of the Third World; Chinese and Indians have traditions, Europeans modernity; Islam dwells in religion, Europeans in secularism. Those beliefs in such hierarchies are gone among a growing number of non-European scholars, intellectuals, thinkers, activists. This is for me the implicit call made by Dabashi. What non-European thinkers think  I read Zabala's article on the role of the philosopher not because I am interested in Zizek (I am not), but because it was Santiago's article. We coincided in several conferences over the past three years, listened to each other, talked to each other and established an email correspondence and exchange of articles. Talk to Al JazeeraSlavoj Zizek My readings of continental philosophy are not in search of guiding lights to deal with issues of non-European histories, but an interest in what are "they" thinking, what are "their" concerns, what are "they" up to. I spend most of my time engaged with non-European thinkers. It is from the light and guidance I've found in non-European thinkers that, when necessary, I engage with European philosophers. One example is "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocentrism'" (1998). I read this article not because it was written by Zizek, but because it was on Eurocentrism. I am always first and foremost interested in the problem, and secondly, in what people confronting the problem have to say about it. As a non-European thinker, my senses reacted to the first sentence of Zizek's article: When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture - to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy?  I discussed this article in more detail elsewhere. Here I am just interested in underlying one point. My response to that paragraph, published in a couple of places, is the following: When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting decolonial intellectual has not as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture - to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism.  A self-respecting decolonial intellectual will reach instead to Frantz Fanon: "Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night, which has enveloped us, and reach, for the light. The new day, which is dawning, must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. So, my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow that Europe's footstep."  With these comments, I do not intend to dispute Zabala's evaluation of Zizek as a philosopher. What I am saying is that we, decolonial intellectuals, if not philosophers, "have better things to do" as Fanon would say, than being engaged with issues debated by European philosophers. Relevance is not universal  The question raised by Dabashi is not new among us, thinkers of the ex-Third World (even if some or many of us are based in the US). Saying that it is not new, I am not implying that Dabashi's response is outdated. I mean that the issues at hand were debated in Africa, the Caribbean and South America at least since the late 50s and 60s. But they were debated "among us" and not "with them". Now the differential of epistemic power has begun to be debated among "us" both, non-European thinkers and European philosophers. The exception in the domain of diplomacy was Kishore Mahbubani who raised the issue in his polemical book Can Asians Think? (1999). Now, if we want to use the term "philosophy" to identify thinkers whether European and non-European, I would say that while Zizek may be the most important European philosopher today, his work is less relevant for many people than the work of Jamaican philosopher Lewis Ricardo Gordon; Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr; Chinese philosopher Wang Hui; Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi; and Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel. And if behind Zizek there is Derrida in continental philosophy, behind Gordon is Fanon in Africana philosophy; behind Seyyed Hossein Nasr is Ali Shariati in Muslim philosophy, behind Wang Hui there is Liu Xun in Chinese philosophy, behind El Sadawi the legacies of Muslim falsafa and behind Dussel is Rodolfo Kusch in Latin American philosophy. Relevance is not universal, but depends on the universe of meaning and the belief system under which relevance is determined. We have here a pluriversal world of thinkers and philosophers in the process of de-westernising and decolonising the imperial legacies of Western philosophy. The question of philosophy in the non-European world has been and is a vexing one. African and Latin American thinkers trained in philosophy debated, around the 1970s, this crucial question: "Is there an African/Latin American philosophy?" This question would have been unthinkable in Germany during the same years. Robert Bernasconi, elaborating on African-American philosopher Lucius T Outlaw, summarised the dilemma as follows: Western philosophy traps African philosophy in a double bind: either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt. (Bernasconi 1998, 188;Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader).  This is simply the entanglement and the puzzle that tormented thinkers with an academic training in philosophy in Africa, South America and the Caribbean. Communism is an option  All of the above take me to the question of communism, which is the focus of Zabala's response, the four powerful antagonisms that - according to Zizek - could prevent capitalism's indefinite reproduction: 1. "The looming threat of ecological catastrophe." 2. "The inappropriateness of the notion of private property for so-called 'intellectual property'." 3. "The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics)." 4. "New forms of apartheid, new walls and slums." In the past two decades, I have heard a lot about the four points mentioned by many different people, if not philosophers, serious thinkers and doers. I am not suggesting that Zabala is saying that Zizek is original in thinking about these issues, but that is it very important that Zizek is bringing these issues to the European philosophical debate. For it would be an unnecessary arrogance to think that the world, particularly the non-European world, needs Zizek to tell us that the world is on fire.   Inside StoryDemanding 'economic justice' For Zabala, "Being a communist in 2012 is not a political choice, but rather an existential matter. The global levels of political, economic and social inequality we are going to reach this year because of capitalism's logics of production not only are alarming, but also threaten our existence." Now, recognising the problems doesn't mean that the only way to go is to be communist. However, as we know from history, the identification of the problem doesn't mean that there is only one solution. Or better yet, we can coincide in the prospective of harmony as a desirable global future, but communism is only one way to move toward it. There cannot be only one solution simply because there are many ways of being, which means of thinking and doing. Communism is an option and not an abstract universal. At the same time, it is necessary to recognise that, in Europe, communism is one strong option. Perhaps not the option for immigrants from Asia and Africa (perhaps yes for migrants from Latin America, mostly of European descent) would choose or that Tariq Ramadan (European Muslim and Muslim philosopher) will promote. But certainly, it is an unavoidable choice in Europe: it was in Europe, after all, that communism originated. In the non-European World, communism is part of the problem rather than the solution. Which doesn't mean that if you are not communist, in the non-European world, you are capitalist. The point of reference in this debate was and continues to be the Bandung Conference, convoked by Sukarno in 1955. The legacy of Bandung is neither capitalism nor communism but decoloniality and de-westernisation (which means, delinking from both capitalism and communism.) A case in point today would be Bolivia. The Bolivian State formula "Communitarian socialism" is rejected by CONAMAQ (Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu), an organisation led by Aymaras and Quechuas, who are working on the reorganisation of Ayllus and Markas of Tawantinsuyu. I do not have space here to explain what all of this means (which is precisely a problem of Eurocentrism - occupying space and silencing whatever doesn't fit the interest of the European, from the right or from the left), but basically it means that there is a way of being based on the communal, on the prospect of harmony grounded in the history of Andean civilisations and not in European history. So the fact that Zizek, and other European intellectuals, are seriously rethinking communism means that they are engaging in one option (the reorientation of the Left) among many, today, marching toward the prospect of harmony overcoming the necessity of war; overcoming success and competition which engender corruption and selfishness, and promoting the plenitude of life over development and death. Building harmonious future In sum, the exchanges of ideas - in this publication - between Santiago Zabala and Hamid Dabashi, brings to the foreground a fundamental issue in building global and harmonious futures. There is a parallel between the growing convictions of the failure of neo-liberalism in the non-European world that parallels the growing conviction of limits (at the same time the value) of continental philosophy. Sartre summarised it all in his prologue to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961), when he states, addressing a French and European audience, "listen, pay attention, Fanon is no longer talking to us". Walter D Mignolo is William H Wannamaker Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University. His most recent book, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011, Duke UP) is the third of a trilogy that includes The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995, Michigan UP) and Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000, Princeton UP). The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

The Marvin X Papers, UC Berkeley Bancroft Library

February 24, 2013, 10:33 am

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Finding Aid to the Marvin X Papers, 1965-2006, bulk 1993-2006

BANC MSS 2006/217  

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Collection Overview

Table of contents 

Description

The Marvin X Papers document the life and work of playwright, poet, essayist, and activist Marvin X during the nineties and the first decade of the 21st Century. The papers include correspondence; Marvin X's writings; materials related to the Recovery Theatre; works by his children and colleagues; and resource files. Correspondence includes letters, cards, and e-mails; correspondents include Amiri Baraka and other prominent African-American intellectuals. Marvin X's writings include notebooks, drafts, and manuscripts of poetry, novels, plays, essays, and planned anthologies. Documents from the Recovery Theatre include organizational and financial records and promotional material. Writings by others include essays, scripts, and academic papers by his three daughters. Resource files include academic articles, e-mails, flyers, news clippings and programs that contextualize and document Marvin X's involvement as an activist, intellectual, and literary figure in the African American community in the Bay Area in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Photographs include snapshots of family, friends, colleagues, and productions at the Recovery Theatre.

Background

Poet, playwright and essayist Marvin X was born Marvin E. Jackmon on May 29, 1944 in Fowler, California. He grew up in Fresno and Oakland, in an activist household. X attended Oakland City College (Merritt College), where he was introduced to Black Nationalism and became friends with future Black Panther founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. X earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from San Francisco State University and emerged as an important voice in the Black Arts Movement (BAM), the artistic arm of the Black Power movement, in the mid-to-late Sixties. X wrote for many of the BAM's key journals. He also co-founded, with playwright Ed Bullins and others, two of BAM's premier West Coast headquarters and venues - Oakland's Black House and San Francisco's Black Arts/West Theatre. In 1967, X joined the Nation of Islam and became known as El Muhajir. In the eighties, he organized the Melvin Black Forum on Human Rights and the first Annual All Black Men's Conference. He also served as an aide to former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and attempted to create the Marvin X Center for the Study of World Religions. In 1999, X founded San Francisco's Recovery Theatre. His production of "One Day in the Life," the play he wrote about his drug addiction and recovery, became the longest-running African-American drama in Northern California. In 2004, in celebration of Black History Month, X produced the San Francisco Tenderloin Book Fair (also known as the San Francisco Black Radical Book Fair) and University of Poetry. X has taught Black Studies, drama, creative writing, journalism, English and Arabic at a variety of California universities and colleges. He continues to work as an activist, educator, writer, and producer.

Extent

Number of containers: 8 cartons, 1 box Linear feet: 10.2

Restrictions

All requests to reproduce, publish, quote from or otherwise use collection materials must be submitted in writing to the Head of Public Services, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94270-6000. Consent is given on behalf of The Bancroft Library as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission from the copyright owner. Such permission must be obtained from the copyright owner. See: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/reference/permissions.html.

Table of contents 

Container List

 

Series 1 Correspondence 1974, 1977, circa 1998-2005

Physical Description: Carton 1

Arrangement

Arranged in order received.

Scope and Content Note

Consists of incoming and outgoing correspondence. Correspondents include Amiri Baraka and other prominent African-American intellectuals; subjects include the 2004 San Francisco Tenderloin Book Fair and University of Poetry, Black Bird Press, and the Recovery Theatre.

Carton 1, Folder 1-3

Letters circa 1998-2005

Carton 1, Folder 4

Letters #4 - Black Radical Book Fair (San Francisco Tenderloin Book Fair) circa 2000-2004

Carton 1, Folder 5-14

Letters circa 1998-2005

 

Series 2 Writings circa 1993-2006

Physical Description: Cartons 1-6

Arrangement

Arranged in order received.

Scope and Content Note

Consists of notebooks, fragments, typescripts, manuscripts, page proofs, drafts, production notes, grant materials, and publicity materials. Includes poetry, drama, essays, novels, the literary journal Chickenbones, broadside poems, his autobiography, Somethin' Proper, and his long-running play about addiction and recovery, One Day in the Life.

Carton 1-3

Notebooks - #1-60 circa 1993-2006

Carton 3

Production Notes circa 2001

Carton 3

Writings/Notes - #1-6 circa 1993-2006

Carton 3

Chickenbones: A Journal and Broadside Poems circa 1995-2005

Carton 4

In the Crazy House Called America: Essays - Drafts and Page Proofs 2002

Carton 4

Somethin' Proper: The Life and Times of a North American African Poet - Drafts and Page Proofs 1994-1998

Carton 4

Muslim American Literature (Printed Texts, Compiled for an Anthology) undated

Carton 4

One Day in the Life (A Drama of Addiction and Recovery) - Draft 1996

Carton 4

"In the Name of Love: A Poetic Drama" - Typescript 1999

Carton 4

"Book Project #4: Fables Parables" - Manuscript and Typescript 1999, undated

Carton 5

Abstract for a Publishing Grant 2006

Carton 5

In the Crazy House - Drafts (#1 and Final) 2002

Carton 5

Love and War: Poems - Corrected Page Proofs 1995

Carton 5

"Why Don't You Say You Love Me" (Poem) - Manuscript (Photocopy) 2005

Carton 5

Mama Said: A Novel (Photocopied Manuscript) and Manuscript (Books 1-3) circa 2006

Carton 5

"Marvin X: 5 Plays" ( Flowers for the Trashman, Take Care of Business, Blackbird,One Day in the Life, and Sargeant Santa) circa 1965, 1997, 2002, undated

Carton 5

Sweet Tea, Dirty Rice: Poems - Manuscript and Typescript undated

Carton 5

Toward Radical Spirituality - Parts 1 and 2, Manuscript 2005

Carton 6

"Marvin X: A Critical Look into the Mouth of a Poet" (A Collection of Essays About and Reviews of Marvin X) undated

Carton 6

Up from Ignorance: Essays (Manuscript and Typescript) circa 2003-2006

Carton 6

In Sha' Allah: A Personal History of Black Muslims in the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area - Typescript circa 2003

Carton 6

Press Releases circa 1998

Carton 6

Promotion (Includes Playbills) circa 1997-1998

 

Series 3 Recovery Theatre circa 1998-2004

Physical Description: Carton 6

Arrangement

Arranged in order received.

Scope and Content Note

Consists of materials related to the San Francisco Tenderloin Book Fair and University of Poetry, organizational records, grant applications, financial records, and programs, playbills and promotional materials for Kings and Queens of Black Consciousnessand One Day in the Life.

Carton 6

Recovery Theatre #1 - Black Book Fair 2004

Carton 6

Recovery Theatre #2-#10 circa 1998-2004

Carton 6

Programs, Playbills and Promotional Materials 1998, 2000-2001

 

Series 4 Writings by Others 2003, undated

Physical Description: Carton 7

Arrangement

Arranged in order received.

Scope and Content Note

Consists of manuscripts by Marvin X's three daughters, Amira Jackmon, Muhammida El Muhajir and Nefertitti Rhodes and a film script based on Marvin X's play, Flowers for the Trashman.

Carton 7

Amira Jackmon - "Notes from San Diego" and "Reparations for African Americans: A Distributive Justice Model" 2003, undated

Carton 7

Muhammida El Muhajir - Color Lines and Around the Way Girl undated

Carton 7

Nefertitti Rhodes - "This Is His Love" undated

Carton 7

Mel Stewert [Stewart?] - "Flowers for the Trashman, a Film Script" undated

 

Series 5 Resource Files circa 1993-2006

Physical Description: Cartons 7-8

Arrangement

Arranged in order received.

Scope and Content Note

Consists of approximately 26 folders organized by Marvin X as "Articles, Leaflets" and "Ephemera." These consist of news clippings, academic articles, programs, brochures, e-mails, flyers, ephemera, and Xeroxed photographs. These materials document Marvin X's involvement as an activist, intellectual, and literary figure in the African American community in the Bay Area and cover a broad range of topics, including the Black Panther Party, African American writers, African American politics, the Black Arts Movement and African liberation movements.

Carton 7-8

Articles, Leaflets circa 1993-2006

Carton 8

Marvin X - Ephemera circa 1999-2002

Carton 8

Marvin X - Literary Biography circa 2001-2003

 

Series 6 Photographs circa 1993-2006

Physical Description: Box 1

Arrangement

Arranged in order received.

Scope and Content Note

Consists of snapshots and Xeroxed copies of photographs of family, friends, and colleagues, as well as photos of productions at the Recovery Theatre and Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness.

Box 1

Family Photos circa 1993-2006

Box 1

Recovery Theatre circa 1998-2004

Box 1

Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness circa 2001

Box 1

Black Radical Photos circa 1993-2006

Oakland's New Deputy Mayor Sandre Swanson

February 25, 2013, 3:51 pm

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New Deputy Mayor Swanson to continue his career after mayor's term ends

Published on Monday, February 25, 2013
Last updated on 02:26AM, Monday, February 25, 2013

New Deputy Mayor Sandre Swanson

Sandre Swanson is not ready to give up on politics.

Despite being termed out of the California State Assembly, the new deputy mayor of Oakland said this won't be his last political rodeo.

"Before I left the Assembly, I said that four years from now, when Senator Loni Hancock has served her turn, that I would considerrunning for the (state) senate," he said.

Swanson is a long time politician with a pedigree resume. Before his election to the state assembly, Swanson served five years as Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s chief of staff after working for 25 years as the district director and senior policy advisor to former Congressman Ron Dellums. Swanson held his state assembly seat for six years.

Swanson's recent appointment as deputy mayor keeps his political career humming while he waits for the state senate seat to open up.

"That would be four years from now, two years after (Mayor Jean Quan) finishes this term," he said. "So I'm committed to this term for the mayor."

Like most of the leading city officials, he said he will focus much of his energy around the city's crime problem.

"I think Oakland is at a very serious crossroad," he said. "We are having what I like to call an historic crime wave. As a community it is incumbent upon us and moral imperative that we come together as a community and address this."

Former Alameda Vice Mayor Rob Bonta won Swanson's seat in November. Bonta said Swanson is a perfect fit as Oakland's deputy mayor.

"He's a leader," Bonta said. "He fights for social safety net programs that are critical for many Californians."

Swanson, who has a 30 year friendship with Quan, said he admires the work she has done as the mayor of Oakland.

"I feel from a historic point, she's probably one of the hardest working mayors that the city has ever had," he said.

Swanson said that although he is good friends with Quan, he has no plans to hold back when giving policy advice.

"I'm not an inexperienced young advisor," he said. "I'm a seasoned veteran and it's been my job to tell those senior elected officials when they are wrong."

Swanson said that in his political work he has carried with him an adage from his grandfather.

"My grandfather told me, 'Son whatever you do, follow your passion'. And my passion has been public service," he said. "I believe that it is an honorable service and it's a service that can bear significant fruit for the people."

Essence Magazine at Black Love Lives Conference

February 26, 2013, 6:52 pm

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Essence magazine Relationship editor to host the Black Love Lives Conference - University of Pennsylvania 3.16.13 Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. REGISTER Now » Follow Us On Twitter @blacklovelives Friend Us On Facebook Forward To A Friend The Black Love Lives Conference Saturday, March 16, 2013 The University of Pennsylvania Houston Hall 3417 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 A day of inspirational and interactive workshops with leading experts providing tools, resources and strategies to fortify, build and maintain vibrant, loving and mutually fulfilling relationships. We are pleased to announce that Charreah K. Jackson, the Relationships Editor at ESSENCE magazine will serve as the hostess for the conference and join our esteemed circle of experts: Charreah K. Jackson – Host Dewey and Cherron Thomas -  The Health & Wellness Lifestyle Dr. Akosua Ali Sabree - Clear Communication the key to Harmonious Relationship Dr. Derrick Campbell - Leading Your Marriage into the Promised Land Dr. Latisha and William Webb - Discovering Intimacy on 6 Domains of the Authentic Self Dr. Naketa Thigpen - Keeping the Love Afloat Kyle D. Morris - Love in the Social Media Age Mo Stegall – Love in the Social Media Age Redi Williams - Love in the Social Media Age Ricardo Suber - Love in the Social Media Age Muneer Abdul Hameed –Get Moving! A Physical Transformation Nisa Muhammad – Pathways to Wedded Bliss Nwasha and Montsho Edu - The Sacred Science of SoulMating Ras Ben - The Power of Contentment in a Media-saturated World Wayne B. Chandler –Heightening your personal power and power of attraction "The goal of the Black Love Lives film, Conference and Black Love Awards is to contribute to healing in African American families and communities and to highlight and celebrate positive African American couples/relationships that serve as an inspiration for all," says Nisa Ra, film producer and conference organizer. LOVE. HEAL. GROW. Workshops Complimentary Lunch Black Love Awards Presentation Cocktail Reception Black Love ESSENCE Magazine Editor to Host Conference Charreah K. Jackson Charreah K. Jackson is a certified family life educator and the Relationships Editor at ESSENCE magazine. Charreah provides relationships workshops and coaching nationwide and is a featured love expert on VH1, WEtv, CNN’s Headline News and the Huffington Post. The Black Love Lives Resource Guide BE INCLUDED! This insightful souvenir guidebook will be produced for attendees of The Black Love Lives Conference and  will be a keepsake  representing a valuable collection of progressive businesses, services, practitioners, restaurants, social venues,  educational institutes and proponents of healthy lifestyles. For more information on placing your ad, pleasevisit BlackLoveLives.com GROUP RATES Bring your school, social or religious group to begin the personal and relationship transformation!  For group rates, contact:press@blacklovelives.com VOLUNTEER We need dedicated volunteers leading up to and on site at the conference.  Interested?press@blacklovelives.com MEDIA INQUIRIES For more info, press credentials  and interview requests, contact: press@blacklovelives.com

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