Race and Diversion By Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. President Donald Trump has a knack for diverting attention from his failures, often using race as the vehicle. So when Sen. John McCain came out against the cruel Graham-Cassidy Republican health care bill late Friday, guaranteeing its well-deserved crash, Trump went speeding down the racially divisive low road. At a virtually all-white campaign rally in Alabama that night, the most powerful man in the world decided to crudely attack NFL players with the courage and consciousness to follow the example of Colin Kaepernick, the African American quarterback who took a knee during the national anthem to protest police killings of unarmed black men and boys. No one should have been surprised by the latest Trump-attack. Racially charged statements and allegations are nothing new for him: a Justice Department lawsuit for housing discrimination against he and his father; the Central Park Five, birtherism, attacking the integrity of an Indiana-born Mexican-American judge in the Trump University trial, calling Mexican immigrants criminals, drug dealers and rapists when he announced he was running for president, a Muslim travel ban, Charlottesville, Jemele Hill and now attacks on Kaepernick, Stephen Curry and any other athlete with the nerve to speak out against injustice. After the murderous events in Charlottesville, President Trump said there were some “fine people” among the thousands of KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacist protesters marching with tiki torches carrying Confederate and Nazi flags. But when black athletes non-violently kneel on the sidelines during the playing of the national anthem, Trump insults their mothers by calling the players SOBs. President Trump said race had nothing to do with his name calling. He said Kaepernick was disrespecting the flag and the military protecting it, and should be denied his right to speak and earn an honest living. Kaepernick said he was protesting racial injustice. What could Kaepernick possibly have in mind? His immediate concern was a rash of police killings of unarmed black people. But I’m sure he was aware of other substantive concerns as well: racial profiling while driving and in stores; a black incarceration rate 5.1 times that of whites and in Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Vermont and Wisconsin the disparity is 10-to-1; in 12 states more than half of the prison population is black, with Maryland having the highest rate at 72 percent, in 11 states, at least 1-in-20 black males are in prison; in Oklahoma, 1-in-15 males ages 18 and older is in prison; African Americans are 13 percent of the population but since 1976 are 35 percent of executions; 1-in-17 black men aged 30-34 was in prison in 2015; black males born in 2001 had a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; and in 2015 the rate of prison incarceration for black women was double the rate for white women. I’m sure racial disparities in health care also weighed heavy on his mind and heart. African Americans have higher rates of mortality than any other racial or ethnic group for 8 of the top 10 causes of death. People of color have the highest rates of cardiovascular disease, HIV/AIDS and infant mortality. In housing African Americans were disproportionately foreclosed on during the Great Recession and are the main victims of redlining. Black unemployment has always been at least twice that of whites. Youth unemployment is often over 50 percent in poor urban areas.Economically the wealth gap between whites and black families nearly tripled from $85,000 in 1984 to $236,500 in 2009. In education blacks disproportionately attend poorly financed and segregated public schools. While there has been an increase in blacks going to college, most of this rise has been in lower-quality institutions. President Trump wanted the owners to fire any player who took a knee, but given the response of the players on Sunday that would have left them with ball boys and middle-aged coaches lining up. Instead virtually all of the owners joined with their players in support of the issue Kaepernick raised – racial injustice. That was a little perplexing – and hypocritical – considering the owners had white-balled Kaepernick, denying him a job in the NFL for kneeling – and thereby standing up for the oppressed. By taking a knee, Kaepernick stands firmly in the linage of Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics, Curt Flood, Billie Jean King and Jackie Robinson, a founding board member of Operation PUSH. Like those brave men and women, Kaepernick is not just courageous. He is good, very good at his job – throwing a football through the air on an autumn afternoon. He should be on an NFL team and until he is, every American who cares about justice and fair play should take a knee and boycott the games.
We've been witnessing a dangerous war of words between Donald Trump and North Korean officials. This does not make our nation any safer and is only serving to bring us closer to an all-out war. And let me tell you: A military conflict on the Korean Peninsula would be nothing short of catastrophic. That’s why I spoke last week from the House floor, calling for an end to Trump’s name-calling and saber rattling and for Congress to pass Representative Ted Lieu’s No First Use legislation that would prevent Trump from unilaterally launching a preemptive nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress. Please watch a one-minute video of my floor speech now. And please share this call to action with your family and friends.
(Not on Facebook? Click here to watch the video on YouTube.) A war with North Korea would put tens of millions of lives at risk, and the looming threat of nuclear war only heightens tensions. And now, there is also a very real threat that Trump could de-certify the hard-won Iran deal, which has successfully prevented an all-out war in the Middle East. In North Korea—and in Iran—diplomacy is the only answer. The U.S. must pursue diplomacy and reach a peaceful solution that does not put U.S. troops and families in danger. Direct talks are our best opportunity for resolving this conflict without the use of force. And yet Trump’s warmongering is taking us further and further away from that path forward. Please help make sure your family and friends are paying attention to what’s happening—because there is something we can do, together, to help reduce the threat of nuclear war. As always, it's good to be with MoveOn members like you, Marvin, in our common work for justice and peace. Thanks for all you do. –Representative Barbara Lee
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
marvin x says usa should send delegation of black women for peace to north korea
marvin x says the usa should send a delegation of black women peace activists to north korea. the group should include former black panther party leaders kathleen cleaver and elaine brown. fyi, cleaver's son maceo celebrated his 1st birthday at a party hosted by the wife of premier kim ii sung. madam sung also named the cleaver's daughter joju who was born in north korea. elaine brown also visited north korea as a bpp official. other black women for peace should include angela davis, congresswoman barbara lee, poet alice walker, congresswoman maxine waters, sonia sanchez and former congresswoman cynthia mckinney. "Dr. Nathan Hare says I should go first. I will go. I ain't scareed of North Koreans. Ain't never called me nigger!"--marvin x
marvin x
angela davis, marvin x and sonia sanchez
kathleen cleaver
angela davis
elaine brown
maxine waters
barbara lee
cynthia mckinney
alice walker
sonia sanchez
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
eldridge cleaver on north korea
At Pyongyang, North Korea, Madame Kim II Sung, wife of Premier Kim II Sung, gave birthday party for Maceo Cleaver, one year old. Madame named Cleaver daughter Joju, born while the Cleavers were visiting North Korea.
Joju Cleaver, age one.
Monday, 13 January 2014
ELDRIDGE CLEAVER's SUPPORT FOR DPRK / SOCIALIST KOREA
North Korea and the American Radical Left
By
Benjamin R. Young
------------------------------------- Thanks to the courageous stand taken by brothers including Dennis Rodman, the legacy of Afro-Asian Unity in Struggle, or/and the support of the Black / Afrikan Liberation Movement in north amerika and Africa is seeing a rejuvenation. I say courageous, because it is on a number of levels - 1, cos it defies, and constructs a positive Resistance in the face of the MASSIVE anti-DPRK/Socialist Korea imperialist propaganda (much of which is repeated in empire-left circles), and 2, Because doing so means getting 'witch hunted' by the white imperialists and their echo chambers. Here is a piece outlining Black Panther Leader's Eldridge Cleaver's support and admiration for Socialist Korea. - Sukant Chandan, Sons of Malcolm -------------------------------------
"Our Common Struggle against Our Common Enemy": North Korea and the American Radical Left
Introduced by Benjamin R. Young
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and the Black Panther Party (BPP) came together under the rubric of “our common struggle against our common enemy.” The Black Panther, the official organ of the BPP, produced a steady stream of commentary favorable to the DPRK, Kim Il Sung, and the Juche ideology. Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the BPP’s international affairs sector, often lauded the DPRK as an “earthly paradise” and stressed that the North Koreans were “the first to bring the U.S. imperialists trembling to their knees” (Document No. 8). Though other American leftist groups were drawn to North Korea during the “long 1960s,” the BPP established perhaps the most firm connection with the North Koreans.[i] The DPRK’s links to the American radical left have long been known, but the motivations behind this alliance—both those of Pyongyang and the BPP—have never been clear, and a deeper analysis of this relationship has long been absent.[ii] The documents introduced here and presented below, gathered from the personal papers of Eldridge Cleaver, demonstrate that the American radical left regarded Pyongyang as an important alternative from Moscow and Beijing. Likewise, these materials also show that North Korea regarded the American radicals as a cherished ally in its worldwide struggle to create an anti-imperialist front against the United States and to reunify the Korean peninsula.
The available documentary evidence, pieced together from the archives of the University of California, Berkeley, and Texas A&M University, revolves around Cleaver’s two trips to North Korea in 1969 and 1970 and his representation of the country “as a beacon in the vanguard of the struggling masses of the world” (Document No. 7). These documents also capture Cleaver’s fascination with the “Juche spirit.” Cleaver defined Juche as being a “creative stand, mean[ing] to develop and apply Marxism-Leninism to one’s own revolutionary conditions” (Document No. 3). The BPP hoped to adopt the “Juche spirit” for the eventual revolution inside of the United States and regarded Kim Il Sung’s ideology as a potent tool for the international communist movement.
In September 1969, Eldridge Cleaver travelled to Pyongyang along with the BPP’s deputy minister of defense Byron Booth for the “International Conference on Tasks of Journalists of the Whole World in their Fight against U.S. Imperialist Aggression.” This conference signaled the beginning of the BPP’s relationship with the DPRK. During the conference in North Korea, Cleaver kept notes on what he witnessed and heard from both North Korean spokespersons as well as other delegates from the communist world (Document No. 1). Cleaver, explaining why the BPP was eager to establish linkages with “revolutionary” countries such as North Korea, recorded to himself that, “the revolutionary forces inside the United States must be supported by the revolutionary peoples of the whole world because the people outside of the United States will slice the tentacles of the hideous octopus of U.S. oppression. The revolutionaries inside the United States will cut out its imperialist heart and give the decisive death blow to U.S. fascism and imperialism” (Document No. 1). Publicly, Cleaver and the BPP praised the DPRK as a socialist paradise and stated confidently that North Koreans “have no worries about food, clothing, lodging, education, medicine” and that they “work til [sic] hearts content leading a happy life” (Document No. 4). In his 1978 retrospective work, Soul on Fire, Eldridge Cleaver explained that “at first” he “was amazed at the grit and zeal of the young communists of North Korea” and that “some of the most zealous had entered into a compact or vow that they would not marry or have sexual relations until their country was united with South Korea.”[iii] North Korea, despite its “subtle brainwashing and unsubtle racism,” had clearly impressed Eldridge Cleaver.[iv]
In addition to solidifying its own ties with the DPRK, the BPP also tried to rally other revolutionary organizations to the North Korean cause (Document No. 2). In a letter (written September 5, 1969) to the BPP’s Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver explained that the Panthers shall “call upon all revolutionary organizations to also send telegrams to express their solidarity with the fighting Korean people in the face of new aggressions being plotted against the Korean peoples by the imperialists” (Document No. 2). Moreover, in 1970, Cleaver invited white radical Robert Scheer to attend another anti-imperialist journalist conference in Pyongyang (Document No. 5). Cleaver and Scheer organized a delegation to represent the United States at the conference, bringing with them ten members of various leftist organizations, including the Movement for a Democratic Military, San Francisco’s Red Guard, and an activist film collective, NEWSREEL (Document No. 4). In May 1970, Eldridge even sent his wife, Kathleen Cleaver, and their son, Maceo to North Korea. In Pyongyang, Kathleen gave birth to a baby girl, Joju Younghi, on July 31, 1970.[v]
What is perhaps most interesting about the documents is that they reveal how North Korea, despite persistently targeting the United States as its main enemy and denouncing the presence of US troops in South Korea, was able to establish a clear division between the so-called U.S. imperialists and U.S. allies. Cleaver himself was emphatic that “the BPP joins hands with the 40 million Korean people in our common struggle against our common enemy- the fascist, imperialist United States government and ruling class” (Document No. 7). North Korea regarded the American radical left as an important partner during this period and believed the BPP could help sway U.S. public opinion in favor of the DPRK. While the North Koreans ultimately failed to capture the hearts of the U.S. masses, these documents shed light on a forgotten chapter in the history of relations between the United States and North Korea.
Because Cleaver often repeated what he had read, heard, and seen during his travels to the DPRK, the documents provided here also offer a glimpse into North Korean state propaganda during this period. For example, Cleaver stated that, “Comrade Kim Il Sung is the most relevant strategist in the struggle against U.S. fascism and imperialism in the world today and he has put the correct tactical line for the universal destruction of fascism and imperialism in our time” (Document No. 1). Similar statements could be found in North Korean propaganda during this period.[vi]While these documents may seem to be a simple reproduction of North Korean rhetoric, they also depict how North Korean propagandists attempted to establish Kim Il Sung as a leading Asian communist and theoretician.[vii] From 1966 through 1976, the Cultural Revolution had engulfed Communist China and, to some degree, isolated Mao Zedong from the international communist movement. As a result, U.S. radicals accepted, to a certain extent, Kim Il Sung’s status as the new leading Asian communist and theoretician. North Korea, and in turn the BPP, elevated Kim Il Sung to the level of renowned socialist theorists such as Engels, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Cleaver typed in his notes that, “Comrade Kim Il Sung is one of the outstanding leaders of [the] world revolutionary movement.” (Document No. 3). In addition to situating Kim Il Sung as a prominent socialist thinker, Cleaver also believed that the, “Motherland of Marxism is Germany; Motherland of Leninism is Russia; Motherland of Marxism-Leninism in our era is Korea” (Document No. 3). In the face of Sino-Soviet rivalry, the Cultural Revolution in China, and Soviet revisionism (Document No. 1), North Korea was a figurative escape valve for the BPP and other revolutionary organizations searching for communist leadership.
While most of these documents focus on the BPP’s depiction of the DPRK, a 1970 welcome message from the “The Committee for the Peaceful Unification of the Fatherland” also demonstrates how the North Koreans regarded their American friends. In a message addressed to Robert Scheer, Eldridge Cleaver, and Kathleen Cleaver, an anonymous North Korean speaker explained that “the struggle of the Black people and progressive people in America against U.S. imperialism is an important link in the chain of the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples across the world and a great assistance to the revolutionary cause of the Korean people” (Document No. 6). Despite the relative dearth of scholarship on North Korea’s internationalism, Charles K. Armstrong has previously argued that “the late 1960s and 1970s were a time of unprecedented outward expansion for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”[viii] Similarly, during this period, North Korean officials viewed the American radical left as an important ally in their worldwide fight against the U.S. imperialists.
The documents presented here demonstrate that the Black Panthers regarded North Korea as an “earthly paradise” and “Comrade Kim Il Sung” as a “genius” (Document No. 9). In an attempt to spread the Juche ideology and promote the North Korean cause for reunification, the BPP promoted the reading of the “political, theoretical, and philosophical writings of Comrade Kim Il Sung” in the United States (Document No. 9). Most significantly, the BPP’s fascination with North Korea reveals that Cold War international history cannot be understood merely in terms of nation-states alone. Non-state actors, such as the BPP, need to be given greater agency in the complex history of this era, and the documents presented here are among the first resources which allow us to do so.
***
Benjamin R. Young is a Master’s degree student in world history at The College at Brockport, working on his thesis, “Juche in the USA: The Black Panther Party’s Experiences and Relations with North Korea, 1969-1971,” and intends to continue at the doctoral level. His main interests are Cold War international history with a focus on North Korea, Maoist China, the Black Power movement, the radical 1960s, and Marxism in the Third World. He can be reached at byoun3@brockport.edu.
[i] Despite controversy surrounding the definition of the “long 1960s,” in this introduction I will be using Arthur Marwick’s definition of the “long 1960s” as being from 1958-1974. See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958 to c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7.
[ii] For works that have noted the American radical left’s connection to North Korea in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Curtis Austin, “The Black Panthers and the Vietnam War,” in America and the Vietnam War: Re-Examining the Culture and History of a Generation, ed. Andrew Wiest, Mary Kathryn Barbier, and Glenn Robins (New York: Routledge, 2010); Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); Eldridge Cleaver, Target Zero: A Life in Writing, ed. Kathleen Cleaver (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Fire (Waco, TX: Word Books Publisher, 1978); Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-1972), in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998); Committee on Internal Security, House of Representatives, Gun-Barrel Politics: The Black Panther Party, 1966-1971(Washington, D.C.: Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971); Floyd W. Hayes, III, and Francis A. Kiene, III, “‘All Power to the People’: The Political Thought of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered; G. Louis Heath, Off The Pigs: The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party, (New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 1976); David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993); Timothy Leary,Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era: An Autobiography (New York: Putnam, 1990 [1983]); Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Frank J. Rafalko, MH/CHAOS: The CIA’s Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011); Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered; Jennifer B. Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,1999).
[iii] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Fire (Waco, TX: Word Books Publisher, 1978), 121.
[v] There is some debate as to if this baby girl was the child of Eldridge Cleaver or Rahim Smith. “Several weeks after Cleaver’s return from North Korea [in 1969], there was a rumor that he killed Rahim Smith and buried him in some unknown location. Cleaver discovered that Smith had sexual relations with his wife Kathleen while he was visiting North Korea.” See Frank J. Rafalko, MH/CHAOS: The CIA’s Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011), 115-116.
[vi] See Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee, Communism in Korea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 865-869.
[vii] Since “Kim Il Sung clearly lacked international credentials…Beginning in the early 1970s, therefore, the DPRK took to placing large advertisements in leading Western newspapers such as The London Times and The Washington Postfeaturing extended extracts from Kim Il Sung’s major speeches (though the practice soon ceased as it became clear that it was making Kim into a figure of fun).” See Adrian Buzo, The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 265.
[viii] Charles K. Armstrong, “Juche and North Korea’s Global Aspirations,” NKIDPWorking Paper No. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, April 2009). For Armstrong’s forthcoming book on North Korea’s internationalism, see Charles Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the Modern World, 1950-1990(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
Bible, Obad. 15, "... As thou has done, it shall be done unto thee." America has done the worst work of deceiving other peoples and making false friendships with them. Now her turn has come. No one wants to trust her for friendship, for she has deceived many nations.
Rev. Ch. 12 (Bible) prophesies of America under the worst names that could be given to a human being: serpent, snake, Satan, devil, and the deceiver of the people of the earth. Therefore, the Black man is warned in Rev. 18:4, "... Come out of her, my people ..." This scripture warns the Black man to give up Babylon, which is a symbolic name, meaning America. America has tormented the Black Man. Now a tormentor is after her. The Divine Tormentor says that we should not be partakers of the divine torment coming against America from Allah (God) Who came in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad, to Whom praises are due forever. This means "separation." We must separate ourselves from America so that we will be saved from the stroke of the Master, Who Is God Himself. Allah (God) is whipping America with all kinds of calamities.
I have been writing for many years that America must be punished for her evil done to her Black once-slaves, who are so-called free slaves now, and who continue to suffer the same, or worse, punishment under the children of the White slave master, than their White fathers imposed upon our Black fathers under servitude slavery.
America has not only lost and is still losing friendship all over Asia and Africa ... but she is now losing friendship right here with her next-door neighbors, Central and South America.
The manner—the ill-treatment and dislike with which they received the President’s Fact-Finding Committee—made it seem as though they should have been on the other side of the earth. Steps had to be taken to protect their physical self in a country which is right next-door to America.
However, the scripture must be fulfilled; they shall eat America’s bread and burn her body with fire.
I quote from Rev. 17:16, "And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore ... and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire!" The "horns" here are a symbolic reference to Central and South America (America’s satellites).
This means that America’s gifts and whatnot will be accepted, but this does not mean that America has bought their sincere friendship. They will take all the gifts which America offers, but still this does not mean that America has their heart.
America is careful not to give any help to her Black once-slave for four hundred years to do something for themselves. America wants to keep her Black slave tied while she watches their movements.
If we go to her asking America for a territory so that we can live to ourselves, she turns a deaf ear to us. We helped America for four hundred years, in every respect as though we were one-half owners of the country. We have gotten nothing in return but beatings, cheatings and shootings down on the highway.
If we think that there is a God of Mercy (and there is One) ... should we not think that He will sympathize with the poor Black slave to receive justice from his master?
The Black slave helped to make America rich. Would Allah, (God) be silent forever? Being the God of Righteousness and Justice, would He not take to Himself the work of aiding the poor Black people against their evil oppressors?
America wants everyone to help her bemoan all of her set-backs but when she causes others to fall ... breaks up the countries of other peoples and destroys their independence and freedom, she laughs and prides herself as doing a great thing. She puts her feet upon their economic neck and destroys their independence as a nation.
All this now returns to America. The little nations are now awake. They had looked for true friendship from America but instead America deceived them.
Again, I repeat, the Bible prophecy ... "As thou has done, it shall be done unto thee." There is no friend for America. Also it is written in the Bible, "In the day of thy fall, none shall help thee...."
Why? Because you, America, have been and are an aide of the destruction and fall of other peoples. So who should help you in the day of your fall? This is what Allah (God) wants to bring home to America through His prophets.
The Holy Qur’an refers to America in this kind of prophecy: "When her doom comes there will come one calamity after another." As soon as she thinks she is getting over the sore made by a previous calamity, another will attack her.
America is undergoing all that is prophesied against her. It is nothing new. It is well-known.
We have been eating the bread of affliction and suffering the poisonous bites of our white slave master. It has caused actual death of our proper mental way of thinking. The natural brain of the Black slave is poisoned and cannot think for itself.
So Allah (God) is asking us to separate from White America. But the mentally dead do not want to go from her for they have not yet gotten the knowledge of truth of our God, Allah and His Mercy for them.
The Black slave children are victimized by the White slavemaster because of the condition the white slave master brought our Black slave fathers up in. They do not readily hear the right answer to the problem. Regardless to how I cry in their midst, they are poisoned and mentally dead.
Amiri Baraka and Marvin X enjoyed 47 years of friendship and revolutionary cultural work. "Amiri was my brother, mentor, comrade, associate, elder, mentor, but, most of all, a brother like no other.Thank you, Baraka family, for allowing me to share your love and revolutionary consciousness."
Marvin X, daughter Muhammida El Muhajir, Dr. Julia Hare, Nisa Ra, mother of Muhammida, and Dr. Nathan Hare. Nisa Ra's film project Black Love Lives interviewed the Hares who enjoyed 60 years of marriage and Black LOVE! Hapi b day, Nisa Ra, 7 October, 2017. Love you and appreciate you!--Marvin X
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Black Man in America. Yes, my leader and teacher who raised me up from being deaf, dumb and blind, as he did for so many others, yes, the million X's you never heard about. Of those you heard about, let us mention Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali, Warith Din, and the millions of X's he raised from the grave of ignorance and their severe condition of deaf, dumb and blind to knowledge of self and kind. Elijah said, "Self first!Do for self and kind first, then help others."
Haki Madhubuti, the Book Publisher on the South Side
Haki Madhubuti, the owner of Third World Press, at his office in Chicago.Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times
CHICAGO — In 1956, when Haki R. Madhubuti was 14 years old and living in Detroit, his mother gave him a firm order: Go down to the public library and check out “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, the seminal memoir on growing up African-American in the segregated South.
“I refused at first because I hated myself,” Dr. Madhubuti, a poet and book publisher who is now 75, said in an interview this week at his office on the South Side of Chicago. “I didn’t want to go to a white library and ask for that book. But she persisted.”
So he did what he was told, found the book on a shelf and was immediately rapt, reading nearly half of it in one sitting. After finishing the rest at home, he came back the next day and checked out everything Wright had ever written.
It was an intellectual awakening, Dr. Madhubuti said, the first leap on a path that took him from reading in the library to writing his own poetry to founding Third World Press, one of the oldest and most prestigious black presses in the country.
“All these ideas” were “jamming my head at such a young age,” he said, sitting in the art-filled converted rectory that he uses as an office. “For the first time in my life,” he recalled thinking, “there’s something positive: Now I’m a reader, I’m a thinker at another level.”
Dr. Madhubuti, tall and elegant in a dark suit with a white pouf of a pocket square, was in a reflective mood one afternoon this week. Third World Press has just turned 50, an anniversary that will be celebrated with a week of festivities in Chicago, beginning on Saturday with an appearance by the author Ta-Nehisi Coates and his father, W. Paul Coates, a publisher of Afrocentric books in Baltimore.
That half-century has been spent at the heart of black intellectual life in Chicago, far away from mainstream, and mostly white, publishing circles in Manhattan. Third World Press has released hundreds of books of poetry, nonfiction and memoir reflecting on the black experience in America, many written by people whose work would not have been accepted by bigger, corporate-owned publishers.
Haki R. Madhubuti during a newspaper interview in Chicago in the late 1960s.Credit Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images
Third World Press published much of Gwendolyn Brooks’s later work; a best-selling guidebook of sorts for African-Americans called “The Covenant With Black America,” by Tavis Smiley, the columnist and commentator; and more than 20 of Dr. Madhubuti’s own books.
“He has told the hard truths,” said Nora Brooks Blakely, Ms. Brooks’s daughter. “He has addressed not only the relationships between blacks and other cultures here in this country and beyond, but he has also dealt with some of the more uneasy-making interrelationships between blacks: How blacks have seen each other, what expectations blacks have of other blacks, whether those are positive and uplifting or disparaging expectations.”
It was a teenage interaction in 1960 with an African-American stranger that helped lead Dr. Madhubuti to his own education and career as a poet, publisher and academic.
Going door to door selling magazines, Dr. Madhubuti — then known as Don L. Lee, his birth name — knocked at a home in Springfield, Ill.
A very sophisticated African-American man answered the door, he recalled, and invited him inside, offering him a sandwich and advice.
“He said, ‘Young man, the one thing no one can take away from you is an education,’” Dr. Madhubuti said. He urged him to enroll in community college. Then he gave him $20, which would be about $160 today, and sent him on his way.
“Tears came to my eyes,” he said. “That was the first time a black man had done anything for me.”
Dr. Madhubuti returned to Chicago determined to build something of his own.
He changed his name in 1974 to one that he felt better reflected his identity, then started Third World Press out of his basement apartment in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side, printing chapbooks with a mimeograph machine and selling them on the street. Working from Chicago, rather than New York, was an ingredient to his early success, he said.
“Being in the middle of the continent was critical because we had access to both sides of the nation,” Dr. Madhubuti said. “I remember taking books out to the West Coast in a van and selling them. I would just travel with our inventory.”
These days, he publishes about two dozen books each year. After the recession in 2008, the press’s financial situation faltered, so Dr. Madhubuti converted it to a nonprofit, Third World Press Foundation, and now he is breaking even. He has tried to seize on the cultural moment in 2017, planning to release an anthology on the Trump era this fall.
The 50th anniversary has pushed Dr. Madhubuti to think about what will come next for Third World Press, which is a beloved cultural institution in Chicago but is not widely known elsewhere, even among publishing insiders.
Getting the word out about the books he publishes has become more difficult. A bookstore he used to operate in the South Side’s Chatham neighborhood has long closed, pushed out by a nearby Borders store, which didn’t last either. He has spent little time on self-promotion and has no team of marketers and publicists that other publishers consider essential.
“Publishing independently in America is very difficult,” said Chris Calhoun, a literary agent who recently sold Dr. Madhubuti’s and the press’s archive to the University of Illinois. “There aren’t many left. For a black independent to have survived, to have contributed to the culture as he has for 50 years now, is just a remarkable achievement.”
Dr. Madhubuti’s own plan is to begin another memoir, picking up after his first one, “YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life.” The weeklong festival, beginning Saturday, will draw Cornel West, Father Michael Pfleger and others.
“I’m going to use that time to reflect and put it out there that it may be time for me to move on,” Dr. Madhubuti said. “My problem now is that I need to write.”
Note: In 2005, I posted this article on Counterpunch.org. The article took on a life of its own all over the world, including some bodies at the United Nations in research initiatives. This is likely because of the article's reference to war, food, profit and exploitation that prevails in the midst of violent confrontations and when the stage is set for corporate agribusiness to arrogantly intrude in war torn and militarized zones. In that we have recently experienced some exceptionally dangerous and violent hurricanes of late, and, as mentioned, that corporate entities generally use this as an opportunity to destroy and take over locally controlled enterprises, I thought I would share again this perspective on the devastating impact of corporate agribusiness anywhere in the world. Author Naomi Klein appropriately refers to these corporate takeovers after disasters as, in the title of her book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".
Much of the agriculture in Puerto Rico and in the Virgin Islands has been destroyed because of the recent hurricanes. All of us need to assist the small farmers in each of the countries and do what we can to prevent corporate agribusiness from invading and taking advantage of this disaster. Believe me - America's corporate agribusiness is drooling over this opportunity!!!
Corporate Agribusiness, the Occupation of Iraq and the Dred Scott Decision
The Agriculture Ministry in March installed a solar-powered irrigation pump in Karbala province in a bid to encourage the use of renewable energy technologies. Above, Iraqi farmers sort through a pile of date fruit during a harvest at a palm grove some 10 kilometres east of Karbala. [Mohammed Sawaf/AFP] http://mawtani.al-shorfa.com/en_GB/articles/iii/features/2014/04/01/feature-02
In 2005, I attended the National Media Reform Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. While there I visited the historic St. Louis courthouse and the huge Gateway Arch by the Mississippi River that symbolizes St. Louis as the gateway to the west. It was here that US corporate agribusiness, the US occupation of Iraq and the Dred Scott decision intersected in reality as well as symbolically.
The St. Louis courthouse is famous for the deliberations of Dred Scott in the mid-1800's and displays in the courthouse feature the historic documents of this renowned court case. Scott was a slave and sued for his freedom, which was denied by the Missouri Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1857. The court ruled that Scott was not a citizen and therefore could not bring a case to a federal court. In the same case, the court also ruled that the Missouri Compromise that forbade slavery in new territories was unconstitutional as it denied the rights of slave property owners. The decision had sweeping consequences, not the least of which being yet another catalyst for the initiation of the Civil War. Interestingly, two months after Supreme Court decision, Scott's present owner freed him anyway.
Standing under the Gateway Arch, and looking west, one sees the old St. Louis courthouse, and to the east, the Mississippi River. As I looked across the river there was, to my amazement, a warehouse-like building with a huge rather crass sign reading "Cargill". It was obviously a decadent marketing ploy by the agribusiness giant, the Cargill Corporation, that is the largest grain trader in the world. The Cargill sign was, therefore, in a direct path, underneath the arch, to the courthouse. I mentioned this disturbing image across the river to one of the park stewards. She said, "Yes, there are times I would like to bomb East St. Louis." I thought that was a rather interesting comment.
As is now well known, oil is but one of the major interests the US has in Iraq. Because wars are invariably a pretext for economic expansion and opportunities for corporate greed, I knew that US corporate agribusiness was not about to be left out of the picture. My concerns were realized when, in April of 2003, Bush's Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman appointed Daniel Amstutz, formerly an executive of the Cargill Corporation, to oversee the "rehabilitation" of agriculture in Iraq. With Cargill having the reputation of being one the worst violators of the rights and independence of family farmers throughout the world, I knew Iraqi farmers were doomed.
Cargill is massive. This corporate agribusiness grain trader has 800 locations in 60 countries and more than 15 lines of business. It is the largest private company in the US and the 11th largest public or private company in terms of sales.
Cargill is renowned for receiving huge subsidies from the US government to then dump vast amounts of grains in poorer countries where Cargill is trading. This process, in effect, undermines small farmers, helps to destroy the local food production systems and forces dependence of small farmers and local rural economies on corporate agribusiness.
Amstutz, however, brought additional corporate and international trade qualifications to the table. He was undersecretary for international affairs and commodity programs from 1983 to 1987 for the Reagan administration; ambassador and chief negotiator for agriculture during the Uruguay Round General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks 1987-1989; and past president of the North American Grain Export Association. None of these qualifications were encouraging for the well being of the small family farmers in Iraq.
"Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agriculture reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission. This guy is uniquely well placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country."
I also knew that, as the US was poised to invade Iraq, US corporate agribusiness companies engaged in producing and promoting genetically modified organisms (GMO's) throughout the world would be salivating.
Why would corporate agribusiness be salivating??? Some history here. It is thought that agriculture started 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent - in the area now called Iraq -
where the Tigress and the Euphrates rivers intersect. The Iraqi ancestral farmers and this fertile land brought us major crops such as wheat, barley, dates and pulses (see Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies"). The area is hugely important in world history. Given they are considered the initiators, for thousands of years the contributions of the Iraqi farmers to the world's agriculture production system have been unquestionably profound.
It is also likely that women were the initiators of agriculture. Women were the gatherers in hunting and gathering pre-agricultural societies. As women were the ones gathering nuts and roots for their communities, they would have been the observers of seeds and their growth patterns. This is likely why the majority of the African farmers today are women and throughout our human history the world's farmers have largely been women.
Now comes the corporate connection. Food is something everyone needs. There is no question about this and no need for a survey - the market is a given. Huge profits are in the offing.
Controlling all aspects of food - its production, packaging, distribution and commodity markets - is the dream world of corporate agribusiness.
The major impediment to corporate agribusiness controlling all aspects of food and then reaping all of the profits, however, is competition from the independent family farmer in the US and throughout the world.
Throughout our history, the family farmer's controlling interest has been protected by two of the most important components of agriculture - the two "s'" - soil and seeds.
Soil is not monolithic. It is amazingly and thankfully diverse. It's components and minerals differ everywhere and farmers historically have always adjusted to this through crop rotations that will add or remove certain nutrients to the soil, and/or farmers will let the soil rest and lay fallow for a specified time. Traditional farmers will also use natural nutrients like compost and manure to replenish the soil. In this way, the soil remains "alive" with organic nutrients, earthworms and the like. Seeds and plants are also selected for the type of soil and farmers themselves have performed, and still perform, this selection since the beginning of agriculture.
Seeds are also not monolithic, of course, even within the same plant family. They are amazingly diverse and the diversity of seeds is our lifeblood. Like humans, plants are vulnerable to disease. The more diverse our plants, the safer we humans are. The more diverse our plants, the less vulnerable they will be to an all-encompassing disease that could and has wiped out some crops within days or less. Without diversity there is virtually no resistance to disease. The great Irish potato famine in 1845, for example, resulted from a uniform potato production that had no resistance to the potato blight.
How have farmers maintained this diversity and therefore protected our food supply? As mentioned, they have always adjusted seeds to the type of soil in their area by selecting and saving the seeds of successful plants. This is a very "local" process. By doing so, for thousands of years, farmers have thankfully maintained the diversity of our food chain. As Martin Teitel and Kimberly Wilson note in their excellent book "Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature" (1999):
"Appreciation of the importance of biodiversity dates back a hundred centuries to the beginning of the agriculture process.Farmers remained powerless, however, when it came to the interaction between crops and their environments. No one could predict whether a season would be wet or dry. Consequently, farmers quickly learned the importance of diversity: maintenance of various crops that thrived under a variety of conditions to avoid entire crop failures and starvation."
Also, farmers have always historically saved seeds for next year's crop. Most farmers in the world don't go to the store and supply warehouse to buy seeds. The seeds are their on their farm and their grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents likely grew versions of the same seed stock.
The mission of farmers historically and around the world has always been to grow food for family and community sustenance, and not competition against each other - a mission that is much to the ire of western capitalists. Invariably, farmers will also share their seeds with their neighboring farmers. This collective and cooperative spirit of the farming community is legendary.
Vandana Shiva refers to the importance of local agriculture production in a sustainable environment and the threat of removing it from local control in her book "Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development " (1989) where she writes:
"The existence of the feminine principle is linked with diversity and sharing. Its destruction through homogenization and privatization leads to the destruction of diversity and the commons. The sustenance economy is based on a creative and organic nature, on local knowledge, on locally recycled inputs that maintain the integrity of nature, on local consumption for local needs, and on marketing of surplus beyond the imperatives of equity and ecology.."
It is well known and documented that small farmers everywhere are the best stewards and sustainers of the land. They are closer to it - they know what it takes to feed it and care for it. I've seen farmers lift soil in their hands and know exactly what is needed in the soil. In this sense, small family farmers are also the most efficient farmers in terms of crop yields, as virtually every foot on that farm is known to them. To be sure, millions of farm families - women, men and children - throughout the world from the Philippines to the US are sophisticated homegrown agronomists who work the fields.
I can easily be accused of romanticizing the farming profession, but I've seen farmers with a glow in their eye when talking about being involved in one of the most sacred of all professions the practice of nurturing and witnessing the flowering of crops from small seeds and, consequently, sustaining all of us through the production of food.
The world's family farmers now and historically are our unsung heroes!
So what has corporate agribusiness done to disrupt the powerful soil-seed mantra and erode the independence of family farmers? Chemicals were employed that neutralize and invariably have polluted and poisoned our soil, which destroys its diversity. Seed patents have been intensified, coupled with the development of genetically modified organisms (GMO's). Corporations have attempted to make farmers dependent on all of these interventions.
After WWII there were vast amounts of nitrogen left over from making bombs. Dow, Shell and Dupont decided they could sell the nitrogen to farmers for profit and thus began the now infamous "green revolution" leading to huge amounts of chemical poisons in agriculture. The complicity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the green revolution is also a major factor. The result has been a devastating farmer dependency on chemical poisons along with the destruction of our soil and leading to us humans ingesting more chemicals (read Al Krebs' excellent "The Corporate Reapers: the Book of Agribusiness" - 1992). The chemical and poison additives in soil make it easier for seed business' to disregard the diversity of our fertile soil which then paves the way for less diverse and genetically altered seed stocks.
Farmers who have used these poisons, and are now attempting to veer away from this dependency, describe their soil as "dead". It can become alive again, but it takes a few years.
GMO's are seeds composed of DNA from an altogether different species. Historically, when we have bred our plants we have done so with the same plant family. The long-term health consequences of the GMO produced crops that we now ingest are unknown at this point, yet we do know that this science leads to an irreversible erosion of genetics and encourages monoculture. As Teitel and Wilson explain:
"The genetic engineering of our food is the most radical transformation in our diet since the invention of agriculture (thousands of years ago). Genetic engineering has allowed scientists to splice fish genes into tomatoes, to put virus genes in squash, bacterium genes in corn, and human genes in tobacco (to"grow" pharmaceuticals). Normally the boundaries between species are set by nature. Until recently, those biological barriers have never been crossed. Genetic engineering allows these limits to be exceeded with results that no one can predict."
Companies will then patent the GMO seeds and encourage farmers to grow them. Once seeds are purchased farmers are required to sign contracts specifying they what cannot do with these seeds, such as save them or share them. To further complicate matters, companies, citing legal priorities due to patent rights, will prosecute farmers who save seeds rather than purchase the seeds from the seed company the next year. The major GMO crops grown since GMO soy was first commercialized in 1996 are corn, soy, cotton and canola. According to the Center for Food Safety, the Monsanto corporation, headquartered in St. Louis, "provides the seed technology for 90 percent of the world's genetically engineered crops."
There's a vicious war against family farmers right now that is relentless. Companies will even sue if farmer's non-GMO crops have been polluted by GMO pollen and are planted without permission (see the 2005 report by the Center for Food Safety entitled "Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers").
What corporate agribusiness is attempting to do to independent family farmers is not quite slavery but becoming close. It is attempting to take away the independence of farmers through basically contract farming. This harkens back to the oppressive sharecropping or tenant farmer relationships set up by southern plantation owners for freed slaves and poor white farmers in the South.
Plantation owners wanted to keep freed slaves under their yoke and make use of their labor. So they set up a sharecropping and tenant systems of farming with various types of contractual arrangements that invariably benefited the plantation owners rather than the aspiring freed slaves. So, too, it's the consolidated corporate agribusiness companies that benefit in today's scenario rather than the farmers.
Throughout southeast Asia, destabilization of traditional farming practices from corporate agribusiness intervention has been rampant. In the late 1980s, for example, I spent time with rice farmers in the Philippines. They told me that they were encouraged to grow a new higher yielding rice plant developed by the International Rice Institute, and it's affiliated corporate agribusiness companies. They were excited about growing and potentially exporting more rice. It made no sense to them that they could not set the seed aside for next year's crop, as Filipino farmers have done for hundreds of years. It also made no sense that the only way the crop would be fertile was through use of fertilizers supplied by agribusiness companies. Such chemical use was also an unknown practice for these farmers.
The next year, hundreds of the small rice farmers went out of business because they couldn't afford to purchase the seed or fertilizer. I asked them why they didn't go back to planting their old rice crops. They told me they couldn't because they didn't have the seeds anymore as the seed had always been set aside for the next year's crop. As a result they were dependent on agribusiness for their seeds there was no option. Most of the traditional Filipino rice seeds are now in U.S. seed banks.
In the late 1990s there were reports of some 4,000 Filipino rice farmers who died due to pesticide (chemical poison) use. The speculation, I was told by Food First in California, was that the higher yielding rice plant attracted a pest the farmers had never before encountered and they were then told to use chemical poisons that they also had never used. It's thought that either they didn't know how to use the poisons or they used it to commit suicide.
Most of the world has resisted, in some way, the wholesale invasion of GMO crops. No country in their right mind would turn over their food sovereignty to US corporate agribusiness. Not to be defeated, corporate agribusiness has sought loopholes in vulnerable areas in the world. They seek regions where the implementation of their insidious schemes is virtually a given and from which they can force the world to accept their devastating and destabilizing agricultural model. Currently, the US military occupied Iraq is a prime area and the continent of Africa is another.
Corporate agribusiness is enormously dangerous and the increased, sometimes forced, dependency of the world's farmers on corporate agribusiness is a threat of major proportions. Think of it! Virtually all of our ancestors were farmers and for 13,000 years we humans have fed ourselves quite well without the likes of Cargill and Monsanto that evolved just decades ago. We don't need them! To further exacerbate the problem, they make us all vulnerable for their short-term corporate greed. As Jim Hightower, the populist and former Agriculture Commissioner of Texas, once said, "We need to place our nation's growth not on the Rockefellers but on the little fellers because is we do it will be based on genius and not greed." This should be the message for every nation!
Of necessity, most agriculture advocates would agree that agriculture should remain primarily local and not global. This is the essence of food security - locally controlled and produced food.
The symbolism, much less the reality, of making Iraq's fertile crescent into one of the major areas for GMO production would be altogether too tantalizing for corporate agribusiness companies like Cargill and Monsanto. Dan Amstutz obviously had input into the disastrous "transfer of sovereignty" policies developed by the former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Of the 100 orders left by Bremer, one is Order 81 on "Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety". Most are saying that this order, if implemented, is a declaration of war against the Iraqi farmers.
"For generations, small farmers in Iraq operated in an essentially unregulated, informal seed supply system.This is now history. The CPA has made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to re-use seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law. Iraqis may continue to use and save from their traditional seed stocks or what's left of them after the years of war and drought, but that is not the agenda for reconstruction embedded in the ruling. The purpose of the law is to facilitate the establishment of a new seed market in Iraq, modified or not, which farmers would have to purchase afresh every single cropping season. Eliminating competition from farmers is a prerequisite for these companies (i.e. major international corporate seed traders such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow Chemical). The new patent law also explicitly promotes the commercialization of genetically modified seeds in Iraq."
Upon reflection, I decided this lineup of US corporate agribusiness and the Dred Scott decision is appropriate. It is appropriate that they face each other as they are obviously in league. To combine this with the US military occupation of Iraq and the attempts at corporate agribusiness abuse and control of Iraqi agriculture is mind-boggling. All three represent a combination of greed, unjust ownership (humans, seeds etc.) and violations of immense dimensions that impact the integrity and safety of the planet and its inhabitants.
We managed to legally end slavery in the United States but it took a war to do so. Today, the world's independent farmers also need to be freed from the oppressive yoke of corporate agribusiness and the on-going efforts to intensify and expand this control.
Regarding our food system overall, it is too important to be handed over to unfettered capitalists and food should not be treated like any other commodity. Agriculture and small farmers are just too important to us. Let the corporate capitalists perhaps make shoes or combs or computers, although they are probably making a mess of that as well by destroying competition. But by all means we need to keep their slimy hands off the substance of life - the world's agriculture production system.
HEATHER GRAY produces "Just Peace" on WRFG-Atlanta 89.3 FM covering local, regional, national and international news. She has been a part of the food security movement for 25 years in Africa, Asia and the United States. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia and can be reached at hmcgray@earthlink.net.
‘Resistance,’ Raising Big Money, Upends Liberal Politics
www.nytimes.com
Supporters of Indivisible, an anti-Trump group, in Olympia, Wash., last month. The so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors.Credit Steve Bloom/The Olympian, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — It started as a scrappy grass-roots protest movement against President Trump, but now the so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors, posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself.
The jockeying between groups, donors and operatives for cash and turf is occurring mostly behind the scenes. But it has grown acrimonious at times, with upstarts complaining they are being boxed out by a liberal establishment that they say enables the sort of Democratic timidity that paved the way for the Trump presidency.
The tug of war — more than the lingering squabbles between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont — foreshadows a once-in-a-generation reorganization of the American left that could dictate the tactics and ideology of the Democratic Party for years to come. If the newcomers prevail, they could pull the party further to the left, leading it to embrace policy positions like those advocated by Mr. Sanders, including single-payer healthcare and free tuition at public colleges.
The upending of the left comes amid a broader realignment in American politics, with the Republican Party establishment also contending with a rising rebellion, driven by pro-Trump populists. Just as the new forces on the right are threatening primary challenges to establishment Republicans, some groups on the left have begun talking about targeting Democratic incumbents in the 2018 midterm elections.
Entrenched Democratic groups are facing growing questions about the return on the hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent over the years. Groups affiliated with Mrs. Clinton “spent so much money based on a bad strategy in this last cycle that they should step aside and let others lead in this moment,” said Quentin James, a founder of a political committee called the Collective PAC that supports African-American candidates.
Mr. James’s committee is among more than three dozen outfits that have started or reconfigured themselves since the election to try to harness the surge in anti-Trump activism. In addition to political committees, grass-roots mobilization nonprofits and legal watchdog groups, there are for-profit companies providing technological help to the new groups — essentially forming a new liberal ecosystem outside the confines of the Democratic Party.
While the new groups gained early traction mostly on the strength of grass-roots volunteers and small donations — and with relatively meager overall budgets — they are beginning to attract attention from the left’s most generous benefactors.
“We’re in a disruptive period, and when we get through it, the progressive infrastructure landscape may look different,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberals who donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. “There may be groups that have been around that don’t rise to the challenge, and there may be some new groups that do rise to the challenge, while others fade away.”
The Democracy Alliance has helped shape the institutional left, steering more than $600 million since its inception in 2005 to a portfolio of carefully selected groups, including pillars of the Clinton-aligned establishment like the think tank Center for American Progress and the media watchdog Media Matters.
But this year, the Democracy Alliance hired Archana Sahgal, a former Obama White House official, to help the new anti-Trump groups, and it suspended its intensive vetting and approval process to recommend donations to a host of groups created since last fall’s election.
The Democracy Alliance distributed a “resistance map” to its donors in July including new groups focused on converting the anti-Trump energy into electoral wins, such as Flippable, Swing Left and Sister District, as well as legal watchdog groups and others focused on mobilizing protesters, such as Women’s March and Indivisible.
Perhaps no group epitomizes the differences between the legacy left and the grass-roots resistance like Indivisible. Started as a Google document detailing techniques for opposing the Republican agenda under Mr. Trump, the group now has a mostly Washington-based staff of about 40 people, with more than 6,000 volunteer chapters across the country. The national Indivisible hub, which consists of a pair of nonprofit groups, has raised nearly $6 million since its start, primarily through small-dollar donations made through its website.
Yet Indivisible has also received funding from the tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, as well as foundations or coalitions tied to Democracy Alliance donors, including the San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler, the New York real estate heiress Patricia Bauman and the oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix.
And an advocacy group funded by the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros, a founding member of the Democracy Alliance and one of the most influential donors on the left, is considering a donation in the low six figures to Indivisible. Mr. Soros has already donated to a host of nonprofit groups playing key roles in the anti-Trump movement, including the Center for Community Change, Color of Change and Local Progress.
Indivisible would “gladly” accept a check from Mr. Soros or his foundation, said an official with the group, Sarah Dohl. But, she added, the group is committed to ensuring that money from major donors does not become a majority of the group’s revenue “because we want to maintain our independence both from the funders and from the party.”
The group may start a political committee that could support primary challenges in 2018 against Democratic incumbents, Ms. Dohl said.
“It’s not a secret that we would like to move the Democratic Party further left,” she said, adding that “the party will only get to where it needs to go if it has groups like ours pushing them to do the right thing.” She cited her group’s aggressive opposition to Republicans’ initial efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act at a time when she said Democratic congressional leaders “didn’t really have a strategy.”
Established liberal groups like the Center for American Progress haven’t always been as forceful, Ms. Dohl said, though she added that the think tank “has gotten better at calling on Democrats to stand up and speak more boldly than they have in the past.”
The think tank, known as CAP, has engendered resentment from others on the left for casting itself as a leader of the anti-Trump movement and raising money off the resistance nomenclature. Within a few weeks of the election, CAP’s sister organization, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was offering T-shirts emblazoned with the word “Resist” in exchange for donations of $40 or more. The campaign raised about $450,000 for ThinkProgress, the journalism arm of the action fund, which had its lawyers look into trademarking the iconography.
Daniella Leger, a CAP official, explained in a statement that the group’s legal team was merely exploring “a standard question” about whether to trademark the logo. “The immediate response was no — resistance belongs to everyone,” she said.
But the embrace by CAP has some anti-Trump activists complaining privately that the group is anathema to the anti-establishment fervor animating the resistance, and it is siphoning away resources from the new groups.
The divisions have sometimes spilled into public view.
The leader of a group founded by Mr. Sanders called Our Revolution castigated the Democratic establishment as arrogant “dictators” who want to control the “terms of unity” after her group’s activists were met by barricades outside the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee when they visited in July to deliver petitions supporting a liberal policy platform.
And Ms. Hunt-Hendrix has urged progressive donors to boycott Democratic establishment-aligned groups like the centrist think tank Third Way and the nonprofits spearheaded by David Brock, the former conservative journalist who became a leading Clinton supporter and founded Media Matters and the opposition research outfit American Bridge.
Those groups represent a “neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party” that embraces “broken tactics” and an “uninspiring” agenda “more focused on defeating the right than on creating an economy and society that lifts up all people,” Ms. Hunt-Hendrix wrote in an op-ed article this year for Politico.
Matt Bennett, an official at Third Way, challenged predictions that the new wave of resistance activism would substantially shift the axis of the party. “The idea that all the energy in the Democratic Party is on the far left is premature, and is going to turn out to be the worst prediction of the 2020 cycle,” he said.
Mr. Brock and Ms. Leger both said that their groups have been providing research, polling, training and other resources to the new groups, which they cast as a boon to the left, rather than a threat to more established groups.
“The resistance is strongest when everyone has access to our resources,” Mr. Brock said. Ms. Leger said, “These grass-roots groups play a different, unique role, and their energy is something the progressive movement hadn’t seen in decades.” And a D.N.C. spokeswoman, Xochitl Hinojosa, praised the new groups for their work to “bring about progressive change and elect Democrats.”
Yet one major Democratic donor, the Virginia real estate developer Albert J. Dwoskin, said the fluidity in the universe of liberal groups would cause some donors to sit on the sidelines “to wait to see which ones have any legs whatsoever.” And veteran Democratic operatives are concerned that the proliferation could further fracture the left, widening ideological divisions and leaving groups fighting for resources.
That doesn’t bother Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to Mr. Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, who has brought a venture capital approach to politics, seeding a wide array of new groups on the left.
“The Democratic Party has been fractured,” Mr. Mehlhorn said. “We believe that by investing in different people and groups to try different techniques that good ideas will emerge.”
Among Mr. Hoffman’s donations are at least $1 million each to two of the groups suing Mr. Trump’s campaign, his administration, businesses and associates — United to Protect Democracy, started this year by a former Obama White House lawyer, and Integrity First for America, which will be unveiled later this year by the pioneering New York trial lawyer Roberta A. Kaplan.
A Silicon Valley-like competition between start-ups might not be the best thing for the left right now, warned Rob Stein, a longtime Democratic strategist who helped create the Democracy Alliance to provide structure to the institutional left.
“Having a thousand flowers blooming at the beginning of a new era is generally a good thing,” Mr. Stein said. “But when you’ve got your back against the wall, too many new blooms can cause message and operational cacophony.”
He warned that the combination of ideological and structural divisions, along with a national party weakened by changes in campaign finance laws, could “make it very, very difficult for progressives and Democrats to drive a coherent message in 2018, and to align behind a single candidate in 2020.”
Sunday October 15th, 2017 - 2pm Fergie's Pub, 1214 Sansom Street Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse by Grace Bauer (Editor) and Julie Kane (Editor)
An anthology of poems from women who proudly celebrate their own nastiness and that of other women who have served as nasty role models; poems by and about women defying limitations and lady-like expectations; women refusing to be "nice girls;" women embracing their inner bitch when the situation demands it; women being formidable and funny; women speaking to power and singing for the good of their souls; women being strong, sexy, strident, super-smart, and stupendous; women who want to encourage little girls to keep dreaming.
This timely collection of poems speaks not just to the current political climate and the man who is responsible for its title, but to the stereotypes and expectations women have faced dating back to Eve, and to the long history of women resisting those limitations. The nasty women poets included here talk back to the men who created those limitations, honor foremothers who offered models of resistance and survival, rewrite myths, celebrate their own sexuality and bodies, and the girlhoods they survived. They sing, swear, swagger, and celebrate, and stake claim to life and art on their own terms.
With Grace Bauer, Kim Bridgeford, Emari DiGiorgio, Corie Feiner, Ona Gritz, Harriet Levin, Lynn Levin, Carolina Morales & Nancy Reddy
Each participant will read her own poem and at least one poem by another contributor not in attendance. Books will be available for purchase
GRACE BAUER's history of resistance began when a nun told her that the greatest thing a girl could grow up to be was a virgin. Having failed at that particular life goal, she became a poet instead. She hates being called Miss, Ma’am, or Little Lady, but these days, takes nasty as a compliment. The idea for this anthology came to her in the shower. Her books include MEAN/TIME, The Women at the Well, Nowhere All At Once, Retreats & Recognitions. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Arts & Letters, the Colorado Review, Poetry, Rattle, and the Southern Poetry Review. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, Individual Artist’s Grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Nebraska Arts Council, and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. Bauer is currently a senior book prize reader for Prairie Schooner and teaches at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
KIM BRIDGFORD is an award-winning poet, editor, college professor, fiction writer, and critic. She writes primarily in traditional forms, of which the sonnet is her form of choice. She is the director of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. She is editor-in-chief at Mezzo Cammin, a journal of poetry by women and was formerly the editor of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a poetry fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her book In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records received the 2007 Donald Justice Poetry Award.
EMARI DIGIORGIO is the author of Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018), the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She's the recipient of the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She's received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers' Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.
ONA GRITZ is the author of the poetry collections, Geode, (Main Street Rag 2014), and Left Standing, (Finishing Line Press, 2005). Together with her husband Daniel Simpson, she is co-author of Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and co-editor of More Challenges For the Delusional: Prompts, Poetry, and Prose Celebrating 25 Years of Murphy Writing Workshops (forthcoming, Diode Editions). She is also an essayist, memoirist and children's author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
COROE FEINER is an award-winning poet, performer, and educator. Called, “wonderful” by The New York Times, and “stunning,” by Backstage Magazine, she is the author of the poetry collection, Radishes into Roses, and the children's book, Who Was Born at Home? Corie is the former poetry editor of The Washington Square Review, and the esteemed Bellevue Literary Review. She was the 2011 Poet Laureate of Bucks County, PA..
HARRIET LEVIN is the author of Girl in Cap and Gown, which was a National Poetry Series finalist, and The Christmas Show, which was chosen for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She is coeditor of Creativity and Writing Pedagogy: Linking Creative Writers, Researchers and Teachers. Levin’s honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Catagnola Award, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, and a PEW Fellowship in the. She currently teaches and directs the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing at Drexel University. Her debut novel, How Fast Can You Run is an IPPY and Living Now Awards winner.
LYNN LEVIN is a poet, writer, translator, and the author of six books. Her most recent collection of poems is Miss Plastique, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry. She is the co-author of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in education/academic. Levin has received 13 Pushcart Prize nominations, two grants from the Leeway Foundation, and is a Bucks County, Pennsylvania poet laureate. She teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.
CAROLINA MORALES is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (2015), Dear Monster (2012), In Nancy Drew’s Shadow (2010), Bride of Frankenstein and other poems (2008) each published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, Nimrod, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Presence, Spoon River Poetry Review and other journals. Awards include scholarships from the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA along with honorable mentions for an Allen Ginsberg Award and a Mill Wills Fellowship. Her one-act plays have been produced/staged in California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx, selected by Alex Lemon for the National Poetry Series and her chapbook Acadiana won the Black River Chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Linebreak, Memorious, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Walter E Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a New Jersey Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. She is Assistant Professor of Writing and First Year Studies at Stockton University in southern New Jersey.
The new reality of old age in America “I’m going to work until I die,” says one 74-year-old in a generation finding it too costly to retire. By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
Joanne Molnar, 64, and husband Mark, 62, pictured on June 22 in the RV that has been their home for several years, managed a camping park in Trenton, Maine, for the summer season. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
Richard Dever had swabbed the campground shower stalls and emptied 20 garbage cans, and now he climbed slowly onto a John Deere mower to cut a couple acres of grass.
“I’m going to work until I die, if I can, because I need the money,” said Dever, 74, who drove 1,400 miles to this Maine campground from his home in Indiana to take a temporary job that pays $10 an hour.
Dever shifted gently in the tractor seat, a rubber cushion carefully positioned to ease the bursitis in his hip — a snapshot of the new reality of old age in America.
People are living longer, more expensive lives, often without much of a safety net. As a result, record numbers of Americans older than 65 are working — now nearly 1 in 5. That proportion has risen steadily over the past decade, and at a far faster rate than any other age group. Today, 9 million senior citizens work, compared with 4 million in 2000.
While some work by choice rather than need, millions of others are entering their golden years with alarmingly fragile finances. Fundamental changes in the U.S. retirement system have shifted responsibility for saving from the employer to the worker, exacerbating the nation’s rich-poor divide. Two recent recessions devastated personal savings. And at a time when 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every day, Social Security benefits have lost about a third of their purchasing power since 2000.
Joanne Molnar, 64, and husband Mark, 62, are part of a growing number of older Americans traveling the country in their RVs for seasonal jobs. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) Jeannie Dever, 72, and husband Richard, 74, are among a record number of Americans older than 65 who are still in the workforce — out of necessity. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
Polls show that most older people are more worried about running out of money than dying.
“There is no part of the country where the majority of middle-class older workers have adequate retirement savings to maintain their standard of living in their retirement,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist who specializes in retirement security. “People are coming into retirement with a lot more anxiety and a lot less buying power.”
As a result, many older workers are hitting the road as work campers — also called “workampers” — those who shed costly lifestyles, purchase RVs and travel the nation picking up seasonal jobs that typically offer hourly wages and few or no benefits.
Amazon’s “CamperForce” program hires thousands of these silver-haired migrant workers to box online orders during the Christmas rush. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Walmart, whose giant parking lots are famous for welcoming RV travelers, has hired elderly people as store greeters and cashiers. Websites such as the Workamper News list jobs as varied as ushering at NASCAR tracks in Florida, picking sugar beets in Minnesota and working as security guards in the Texas oil fields.
In Maine, which calls itself “Vacationland,” thousands of seniors are drawn each summer to the state’s rocky coastline and picturesque small towns, both as vacationers and seasonal workers. In Bar Harbor, one of the state’s most popular tourist destinations, well-to-do retirees come ashore from luxury cruise ships to dine on $30 lobsters and $13 glasses of sauvignon blanc — leaving tips for other senior citizens waiting on oceanfront tables, driving Ollie’s Trolley buses or taking tickets for whale-watching tours.
The Devers have noticed this economic divide. They found their campground jobs online and drove here in May, with plans to stay until the season ends in October. On a recent day off, they took a bus tour near Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, where the tour guide pointed out the oceanfront Rockefeller estate and Martha Stewart’s 12-bedroom mansion.
“The ones who go on these ritzy, ritzy cruises to all these islands in Maine, I don’t know how they got all that money. Maybe they were born into it,” said Jeannie, 72. “And then you see this poor little old retired person next door, who can hardly keep going. And he’s got his little trailer.”
On Election Day last November, the Devers expressed their frustration. For more than 50 years, they had supported mainstream candidates in both parties, casting their ballots for John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. This time, they concluded that the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, would be no help to them. And they found the Republican standard-bearer, Donald Trump, too “mouthy.”
So, for the first time in their lives, they cast protest votes, joining legions of disaffected voters whose aversion to Clinton helped propel Trump into the White House. Richard voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson. Jeannie left her presidential ballot blank.
“We are all talking about this, but not politicians. Helping people build a nest egg is not on their agenda,” Jeannie said. “We are the forgotten people.”
On their day off, Richard and Jeannie Dever wash their clothes at a laundry. They are living a new reality of old age in America: Millions have so little savings that they keep working to pay the bills. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
‘This job is a blessing’
The Devers first hit the road in their 33-foot American Star RV when Jeannie turned 65. Since then, they have worked jobs in Wyoming, Pennsylvania and now Maine. In addition to their $10-an-hour paychecks, the couple receives $22,000 a year from Social Security, an amount that has barely budged while health-care and other costs have soared.
“If we didn’t work, our money would run out real quick,” Richard said.
On a recent Friday, the Devers met for lunch back at their RV, Richard’s plaid shirt and suspenders dusty from mowing the drought-dried grass. Jeannie had spent the morning working the front desk in the campground office, where she checks people in and sells bug spray, marshmallows and other camping essentials.
As usual, she had arrived a half-hour early for her 9 a.m. shift to make sure everything was tidy for the first customer. Full of cheer and wearing white sneakers, she shies from talking about her macular degeneration and arthritic knuckles. “This job is a blessing,” she said.
President Trump is one year younger than Jeannie and, she said, “has more money than we can even imagine.” She muses that he probably “will hand a lot down to his kids” — another generation of rich people who, Richard and Jeannie believe, tend to be born that way.
The Devers know how hard it is to make it on your own.
In 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were running for president, Richard started repairing homes and Jeannie made root beer floats in a drugstore back home in southern Indiana, near the Kentucky border. Later, they ran a business that put vinyl siding on homes and a little start-up called Southwest Stuff that sold Western-themed knickknacks.
They raised two children and lived well enough but never had much extra cash to put away. After a lifetime of working, they have a small mobile home in Indiana, a couple of modest life insurance policies and $5,000 in savings.
The Devers are better off than many Americans. One in 5 have no savings, and millions retire with nothing in the bank. Nearly 30 percent of households headed by someone 55 or older have neither a pension nor any retirement savings, according to a 2015 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
From the camper’s compact refrigerator, Jeannie pulled a tub of meatloaf she had cooked in her crockpot a couple of days earlier.
“Are you good with just a sandwich?” she called to Richard.
“Just a sandwich, thanks,” he said, emerging from the bedroom in a fresh plaid shirt, bought for $2 at Goodwill. His blue-striped suspenders dangled below his waistband.
Without a word, Jeannie leaned over and slipped them over his shoulders — a daily task that keeps getting harder for the man she married 55 years ago.
Mark Molnar cleans the restrooms at the campground he and his wife manage. After the Great Recession, they liquidated their assets, bought an RV and hit the road looking for work. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
A Wall Street gold mine
While most Americans are unprepared for retirement, rich older people are doing better than ever. Among people older than 65, the wealthiest 20 percent own virtually all of the nation’s $25 trillion in retirement accounts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Employers have gradually shifted from traditional pensions, with guaranteed benefits for life, to 401(k) accounts that run out when the money has been spent. Those accounts work best for the wealthy, who not only have the extra cash to invest but also use 401(k)s to shelter their income from taxes while they are working. People with little financial know-how often find 401(k)s confusing. Millions of people opt not to participate, or contribute too little, or take money out at the wrong time and are charged huge fees.
Even people who manage to save for retirement often face a grim calculation: Among people between 55 and 64 who have retirement accounts, the median value of those accounts is just over $120,000, according to the Federal Reserve. So people are forced to guess how long they might live and budget their money accordingly, knowing that one big health problem, or a year in a nursing home, could wipe it all out.
The system has been a gold mine for Wall Street. Brokerages and insurance companies that manage retirement accounts earned roughly $33 billion in fees last year, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Ted Benna, a retirement consultant who is credited with creating the modern 401(k), called those fees “outrageous.” Many people — especially those who need the money the most — don’t even know they are paying them, he said.
Compared with the old system of company pensions, the new retirement system does not serve the average American well, said Ghilarducci, the labor economist, who teaches at the New School in New York. “It’s as if we moved from a system where everybody went to the dentist to a system where everybody now pulls their own teeth,” she said.
Photos of Mark and Joanne Molnar’s children and grandchildren adorn a wall in the couple’s camper. After finishing work this fall at the campground they manage in Trenton, Maine, they expect to look for work in Texas or Wisconsin. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
‘The rich help the rich’
A few miles up the road from the Devers, Joanne Molnar, 64, and her husband, Mark, 62, live in their RV and work at another campground.
For 21 years, Joanne worked as a manager for a day-care company in Fairfield, Conn. She said she paid regularly into a 401(k) account that, at one point, was worth more than $40,000.
By the time she left the company in 2008, however, its value had fallen to $2,000.
Molnar said the company’s owner thought he was doing his 100 employees a favor by managing their retirement accounts. “But he didn’t know what he was doing,” she said. Instead of being angry with him, she’s furious with the 401(k) system.
“It stinks,” she said.
As Joanne’s retirement account was further battered by the Great Recession in 2008, the Molnars sold Mark’s share of his piano-restoration business and their home in Connecticut, which had lost value but kept attracting higher and higher property tax bills.
They bought a 25-foot RV for $13,000 and started looking for work near their three sons, one of whom lives near Bar Harbor, and their six grandchildren. After finishing at the Maine campground this fall, they plan to look for work in Texas or Wisconsin, near their other children.
Like the Devers, the Molnars say they are frustrated that the problems of older Americans do not seem to register in Washington.
“The little people are drowning, and nobody wants to talk about it,” Joanne said. “Us middle-class, or lower-class, people are just not part of anything politicians decide.”
Last year, the Molnars grew more optimistic when they heard Trump promising in campaign speeches to help the “forgotten people.” Like a majority of older voters, Joanne voted for Trump. She said she thought maybe a businessman, an outsider, would finally address the economic issues that matter to her.
But the Molnars said that with each passing week of the Trump presidency, they are growing less hopeful. “We’ll see. I’m just getting a little worried now,” Joanne said. “I just think he’s not going to be helping the lower class as much as he thought he would.”
The recent battle to repeal Obamacare was “kind of scary,” she said, noting that Trump supported legislation that would have slashed Medicaid and left more people without government-subsidized insurance. Although the effort failed, Joanne and Mark remain nervous.
“The rich help the rich, and I’m starting to think that not enough will fall down to us,” Mark said, as he methodically bolted together one of 170 new picnic tables.
Mark signed up to begin collecting Social Security this summer. Even with those monthly checks, he figures he’ll have to work at least 10 more years.
“Forget the government. It’s got to be ‘We the People,’ ” he said. “We’re on our own. You have to fend for yourself.”
After a lifetime’s work, the Devers have a small mobile home in Indiana, $5,000 in savings and a couple of modest insurance policies. Still, they are better off than many other Americans: Millions retire with nothing in the bank. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)
‘It’s not fun getting old’
At the end of a long day at work, Richard and Jeannie Dever met back at their RV. After mowing the grass in the hot sun, Richard, who is just shy of his 75th birthday, was sweating under his baseball cap. He was tired. “It’s not fun getting old,” he said.
Asked whether he was more worried about dying or running out of money, Richard thought about it, then said with a shrug, “I guess it’s a toss-up.”
Jeannie took off her sneakers and rested her swollen ankles. Richard recently cut back to 33 hours a week, but she was still working 40 hours, sometimes a few more.
A few days earlier, she had spent four hours cleaning a trailer where the guests had used a fire extinguisher to put out a small stove fire. She got down on the linoleum floor and lay on her stomach to reach the dust under the stove.
In the years ahead, Jeannie said, she hopes to find a job where she can sit down.
EDITED BY ABDUL ALKALIMAT, ROMI CRAWFORD, AND REBECCA ZORACH
The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago is the first in-depth, illustrated history of a lost Chicago monument. The Wall of Respect was a revolutionary mural created by fourteen members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) on the South Side of Chicago in 1967. This book gathers historic essays, poetry, and previously unpublished primary documents from the movement’s founders that provide a visual guide to the work’s creation and evolution.
The Wall of Respect received national critical acclaim when it was unveiled on the side of a building at Forty-Third and Langley in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Painters and photographers worked side by side on the mural's seven themed sections, which featured portraits of Black heroes and sheroes, among them John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Wall became a platform for music, poetry, and political rallies. Over time it changed, reflecting painful controversies among the artists as well as broader shifts in the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements.
At the intersection of African American culture, politics, and Chicago art history, The Wall of Respect offers, in one keepsake-quality work, an unsurpassed collection of images and essays that illuminate a powerful monument that continues to fascinate artists, scholars, and readers in Chicago and across the United States.
About the Author
ABDUL ALKALIMAT is an activist and the founding chairperson of the Organization of Black American Culture, which led the creation of the Wall of Respect in 1967. He is an emeritus professor of the School of Information Sciences and the Department of African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ROMI CRAWFORD is an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Critical Studies and in the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
REBECCA ZORACH is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art and Art History at Northwestern University.
Reviews
"The Wall of Respect is, hands down, the most recognizable urban mural in the United States. It is a revolutionary work of collaboration created in revolutionary times. It is a memorial that has been memorialized in poetry and song and photography. It tells an incredible history of Black creativity and struggles for freedom, dignity, and power. Yet, its own history has never been told. That is, until now. An extraordinary work of reconstruction and illumination, The Wall of Respect is one of those rare books that reveal the deep links between art and politics, movement and imagination, community and creativity. And rest assured, this book will not gather dust on the coffee table." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago makes a valuable contribution to discourse about this important mural, the Black Arts Movement, the history of Chicago, and broader histories of civic engagement. Unlike earlier, brief histories of the Wall that were incomplete or lacked deep historical awareness of OBAC, this book offers the most comprehensive history of this specific period in OBAC’s influential life and their role in the creation of the Wall. I have no doubt that this book will have a significant impact on future scholarship in the areas of black aesthetics, community engagement and art, and the history and sociology of Chicago’s south side." —Greg Foster-Rice, co-editor (with Katherine Bussard and Alison Fisher) of The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, 1960—1980
"Finally, The Wall of Respect gets the comprehensive attention it deserves!With this volume, Alkalimat, Crawford and Zorach have made a tremendous contribution to both Art History and African-American Studies. Like OBAC’s creative mural, this book is a beautiful example of interdisciplinary collaboration. By combining original essays with photographs and archival documents, it sets an impressive benchmark for the study of public art in social movements. The editors have breathed new life into the poetic words of Gwendolyn Brooks, ensuring that, 'All worship the Wall.' —Jonathan Fenderson, Assistant Professor of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and Associate Editor of The Black Scholar
"Long overdue, The Wall of Respect is a major work that chronicles a time that transformed the concept of public art and mural art in America. Original and remarkable, this book illuminates the love of art and history expressed by black families, community leaders, activists, and artists-collectives, and builds upon the research of some of the early art activists that shaped the Black Arts Movement. A compelling and critical story.” —Deborah Willis, author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers
"This book recovers The Wall of Respect, a pivotal piece of public art conceived by Chicago artists and neighbors that effectively spurred a new mural movement nationwide in the 1960s. Detailed analysis and personal recollections of this incredible object and its milieu provide nothing less than a new and expansive framework for understanding the impact of this vital work. A dazzling collection of primary documents—poetry, letters, articles, and photographs—are at the book’s core. The significance of photography, as part of The Wall itself and as indispensable documentation, sheds light not only on the role of photography in shaping our understanding of this public project and its context, but illuminates the influence of Chicago’s photographers and other artists in the postwar era." —Kellie Jones, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor offers his vision of an emerging new economic system that can save humankind and the planet
Muhammad Yunus, who created microcredit, invented social business, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in alleviating poverty, is one of today's most trenchant social critics. Now he declares it's time to admit that the capitalist engine is broken--that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, massive unemployment, and environmental destruction. We need a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force just as powerful as self-interest.
Is this a pipe dream? Not at all. In the last decade, thousands of people and organizations have already embraced Yunus's vision of a new form of capitalism, launching innovative social businesses designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate wealth. They are bringing solar energy to millions of homes in Bangladesh; turning thousands of unemployed young people into entrepreneurs through equity investments; financing female-owned businesses in cities across the United States; bringing mobility, shelter, and other services to the rural poor in France; and creating a global support network to help young entrepreneurs launch their start-ups.
In A World of Three Zeros, Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations. And he invites young people, business and political leaders, and ordinary citizens to join the movement and help create the better world we all dream of.
We, the Black lost-found of our people here in America live under the shadow of death by way of cowardly enemies. Every one of us—the cowardly enemies seek our deaths, one way or another.
The cowardly enemies will not fight you as a brave man would fight you if they think that you would fight back. They will steal on you when you least expect an attack from them.
We live under the shadow of death. We fled from the cowardly enemy devils of the South, seeking refuge in the same cowardly enemies’ brother in the North. The enemy devils of the South followed us to the North to see that his brother of the North does not treat us any better than they did in the South.
They seek police jobs so that they can beat and kill us who are trying to escape. They seek to kill us, or get us killed, at any price. They do not care about our loyalty to them. In their hearts there is death for us, the Black Man in America.
Today, they hold out promises to you only to deceive you. They know that Allah (God) is here offering to seat us in heaven at once. And since hell is their appointed place, they are trying to get us to go to hell with them on false promises.
I have told you. Believe it or let it alone. We live "Under The Shadow of Death."
UC Berkeley is receiving funding for the project, “Black Panther Party Research, Interpretation & Memory Project,” expected to last from Aug. 30, 2017, to Sept. 30, 2019. “This cooperative research project between the National Park Service and the UC Berkeley on the Black Panther Party is anchored in historical methods, visual culture, and the preservation of sites and voices,” says the funding announcement made public last week. The overall goal is to build “diverse voices and communities together to understand their collective past and inspire a better future,” says the announcement. Dr. Ula Y. Taylor, incoming chair of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, will lead the effort, joined by consultants who know Panther history. J. Tarika Lewis, the first woman to join the Party in Oakland, and Paul Lee, consultant on Spike Lee‘s film “Malcolm X” and “Eyes on the Prize II,” will work with Taylor.
]“Committed to truthfully honoring the legacy of [Panther] activists and the San Francisco Bay Area communities they served, the project seeks to document the lives of activists and elders and the landscapes that shaped the movement,” the Park Service said. “Bay Area sites that shaped the [Panther Party] will be identified in an effort to memorialize a history that brought meaning to lives far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area,” the agency added. The National Park Service awarded the $97,999.70 grant outside the normal competitive bidding project, saying that Berkeley is uniquely qualified to produce the collection that honors Black Panther history.
The project will build an annotated bibliography with materials from diverse sources, including video oral histories, photographs, new coverage and other media, and will be available for future scholars in their research.
The Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, and originally championed self-defense and the arming of African Americans in California. The party quickly moved left, advocating for revolutionary inter-communalism and for abolishing capitalism.
Party founder Huey P. Newton introduced a 10-point platform, calling for “an end to the robbery by the capitalists of the black community,” and for black men to be immediately released from prison. The 10-point platform has served as a model for modern anti-poverty programs. The Park Service said it will have a “substantial involvement” in the project, including providing staff and doing regular reviews of progress and materials. To review the award announcement, click here.
The matter of sexual improprieties transcends patriarchal culture, race and gender into pure power relationships between human beings. Yes, sexual improprieties are pervasive in the arts, academia, the corporate workplace, in all religions and every other social institution and/or environment. As per Hollywood and the casting couch, let us be honest, Hollywood is not the only villain, but all the arts: even in the Black Arts Movement, and alas, in the Black Liberation Movement, such sexual improprieties were pervasive, and I repeat, in academia as well, including Black studies, along with all other academic studies.When I taught English at a certain university and a student complained to my dean, and after I denied all charges, the dean made me agree to have sexual encounters with grad students only, leave the freshman girls alone. She noted that I had been under surveillance and was observed in a restaurant having dinner with the freshman student who complained about my sexual behavior as an instructor.
As a writer, director, producer, actor and lecturer and visiting professor in academia, I took full advantage of my position saturated in male privilege. If Harvey Weinstein is guilty, let me be hyperbolic: so is every man. As I examine global patriarchal culture, I conclude men are predators, women are prey. In war, we know men are expendable and disposable but women are booty or spoils of war.
But as I said at the outset, sexual domination transcends gender. We have known gay men in theatre who demanded sexual liberties with young gay actors or said in classical language, demanded the young brothers join them on the casting couch. And don't think for a moment lesbian women in the arts do not take full advantage of their power positions as per young females, demanding sexual improprieties for career advancement. Of course this madness goes on in the corporate workplace. The American South has a sordid history of black women performing sexual acts to keep their jobs, alas, with full knowledge of their husbands! As they say in Houston, Texas, "You better AX somebody!" And not to put this madness on the "Dirty South," years ago Jet Magazine (the Negro Bible), revealed a great percentage of Black women confessed to having sex with the boss on the job! This entire matter is about power and privilege, not gender, although in the majority global patriarchal culture, men are the villains, though other genders are on the rise. Again, this is a global pandemic that encompasses all religions, no matter Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Yoruba, Hindu, et al. Certainly, we must note the pedophilia in the Catholic church, Muslim madrassas, Yoruba manhood training rites, etc. It is well known America allows Afghanistan soldiers to have sexual relations with young boys as a cultural rite. And it well known 30% of USA soldiers are victims of rape, alas, male and female! I asked a former female member of the US Army, why and how was she violated since she was armed when she was raped, she replied, "We are not trained to retaliate!" So the Mythology of Pussy and Dick continues and no solution is in sight as long as the patriarchal culture dominates, and again, it is quite doubtful the matriarchal culture will deconstruct this abomination. Alas, did not Hillary Clinton, socalled champion of women's rights, defend her husband's sexual improprieties and try to destroy the women he debased? So much for the feminine mystique!
Without the total destruction of mythological religiosity in all spiritual institutions, along with the deconstruction of white supremacy capitalism and its newborn babe globalism that transcends racism, pathological sexual relations shall persist! There is a light at the end of the tunnel: women will soon be able to drive in Saudi Arabia! --Marvin X/El Muhajir 10/10/17
The matter of sexual improprieties transcends patriarchal culture, race and gender into pure power relationships between human beings. Yes, sexual improprieties are pervasive in the arts, academia, the corporate workplace, in all religions and every other social institution and/or environment. As per Hollywood and the casting couch, let us be honest, Hollywood is not the only villain, but all the arts: even in the Black Arts Movement, and alas, in the Black Liberation Movement, such sexual improprieties were pervasive, and I repeat, in academia as well, including Black studies, along with all other academic studies.When I taught English at a certain university and a student complained to my dean, and after I denied all charges, the dean made me agree to have sexual encounters with grad students only, leave the freshman girls alone. She noted that I had been under surveillance and was observed in a restaurant having dinner with the freshman student who complained about my sexual behavior as an instructor.
As a writer, director, producer, actor and lecturer and visiting professor in academia, I took full advantage of my position saturated in male privilege. If Harvey Weinstein is guilty, let me be hyperbolic: so is every man. As I examine global patriarchal culture, I conclude men are predators, women are prey. In war, we know men are expendable and disposable but women are booty or spoils of war.
But as I said at the outset, sexual domination transcends gender. We have known gay men in theatre who demanded sexual liberties with young gay actors or said in classical language, demanded the young brothers join them on the casting couch. And don't think for a moment lesbian women in the arts do not take full advantage of their power positions as per young females, demanding sexual improprieties for career advancement. Of course this madness goes on in the corporate workplace. The American South has a sordid history of black women performing sexual acts to keep their jobs, alas, with full knowledge of their husbands! As they say in Houston, Texas, "You better AX somebody!" And not to put this madness on the "Dirty South," years ago Jet Magazine (the Negro Bible), revealed a great percentage of Black women confessed to having sex with the boss on the job! This entire matter is about power and privilege, not gender, although in the majority global patriarchal culture, men are the villains, though other genders are on the rise. Again, this is a global pandemic that encompasses all religions, no matter Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Yoruba, Hindu, et al. Certainly, we must note the pedophilia in the Catholic church, Muslim madrassas, Yoruba manhood training rites, etc. It is well known America allows Afghanistan soldiers to have sexual relations with young boys as a cultural rite. And it well known 30% of USA soldiers are victims of rape, alas, male and female! I asked a former female member of the US Army, why and how was she violated since she was armed when she was raped, she replied, "We are not trained to retaliate!" So the Mythology of Pussy and Dick continues and no solution is in sight as long as the patriarchal culture dominates, and again, it is quite doubtful the matriarchal culture will deconstruct this abomination. Alas, did not Hillary Clinton, socalled champion of women's rights, defend her husband's sexual improprieties and try to destroy the women he debased? So much for the feminine mystique!
Without the total destruction of mythological religiosity in all spiritual institutions, along with the deconstruction of white supremacy capitalism and its newborn babe globalism that transcends racism, pathological sexual relations shall persist! There is a light at the end of the tunnel: women will soon be able to drive in Saudi Arabia! --Marvin X/El Muhajir 10/10/17
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