Sweet sweet codeine: Nigeria's cough syrup crisis - BBC Africa Eye docum...
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Notes on the Untold Story of the Black Student Revolution at San Francisco State University
Former San Francisco State College/University students and members of the NSA and BSU and community brothers, founders of Black Dialogue Magazine, a critical BAM journal: Aubrey LaBrie, Marvin X, Abdul Sabrey (Gerald LaBrie), Al Young; Arthur Sheridan, founding editor and Duke Williams.
Part One: The Visionary Students ine the Untold Story of the Black Student Revolution at San Francisco State University
--Marvin X
8/6/18
When we have been asked to recall the significance of our Black student revolution on campus and in the community, most of us had no idea what we were doing. Perhaps we were guided by the liberation energy in our DNA. For sure, many of us had no idea we were continuing the liberation struggle of those who came before. In our newfound white supremacy knowledge, we imagined we invented the wheel of Black liberation, after all, we morphed from Negro Students Association to the Black Student Union.
But how did we get from Negro to Black? Imagine, we members of the NSA fought the name change to BSU. I was there and even I may have put up some resistance to the name change, no matter I had just transferred from Oakland's Merritt College where I received a proper dose of Revolutionary Black Nationalism from Donald Warden's Afro-American Association and from peer group study with fellow students Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Ernie Allen, Richard Thorne, Ann Williams, Ken and Carol Freeman, Issac Moore, Maurice Dawson, et al. Peer Group study was our black studies. Then there was Rap sessions on the steps on Merritt College. Rapping meant extemporaneous speaking (free style) on political events, especially the national liberation of African states freeing themselves of colonialism, while we came to understand we were victims of domestic colonialism.
We studied E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, the writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela's writings and the Sharpesville Massacre. On the eve of Kenya's independence, we studied Jomo's Kenyatta's ethnography of his Kikuyu tribe, Facing Mount Kenya. AAA member wore sweatshirts with Kenyatta's picture.
Many of us Merritt students were unofficial followers of Malcolm X, especially after he addressed seven thousand students at UC Berkeley. I listened to him later that night at the NOI Mosque on 7th and Henry in West Oakland. Judy Juanita wrote a story about Black Nationalists at Merritt, featuring Isaac Moore and myself in the student newspaper.
Conscious parties was a most useful ritual in our revolution in consciousness at Merritt. A conscious party is when we gather for a social party but it is pre-planned that at a certain point the music stops, lights come on and we rapped on revolution, then we again played the music and turned down the lights. This was often repeated throughout the evening.
As revolutionary black nationalists, no white people were allowed, no matter than some brothers were with white women. Perhaps we were narrow minded nationalists when we refused to consider the plea from brothers with white women than their woman was black in consciousness, and she probably was, but this notion didn't work as the but erliberation movement morphed from integration to Black Power. When Eldridge and I founded the Black House Political and Cultural Center in San Francisco, 1967, and Mrs. Amina Baraka was there with Amiri who used Black House at their community headquarters (she was also pregnant at this time with their first child, Obalaji, she neveut r lets me forget how my partner and BAM comrade, Ethna X. Wyatt, aka Hurriyah Asar, told a woman at the door who said she was Native American and white, "The Native American can come in but the white got to go!"
Merritt students connected with RAM, the Revolutionary Action Movement, headed by Robert F. Williams, (Negroes With Guns) and Max Stanford to produce SoulBook, the revolutionary black nationalist magazine, featuring the early writings of Grace and James Boggs, Little Willie of South Africa, Askia Toure, Ken and Carol Freeman, LeRoi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X, et al. Soulbook was a critical publication of the BAM/BLM.
FYI, the Oakland Afro American Association's Los Angeles representative was Maulana Ron Karenga. Did Kwanza originate in Oakland. Ask AAA member Ed Howard.
As per Marvin X (Jackmon) and the West Coast Black Arts Movement, his first writings were published in the Merritt College Student Magazine and later Soulbook Magazine. Creative Writing instructor Adam Miller had the dramatic troupe Aldridge Players West before Black Arts West was founded by Ed Bullins and myself, San Francisco, 1966, Fillmore Street.
In short, the AAA had created a well of Black consciousness in the Bay, not to neglect Oakland was the end of the line for Amtrak, including the West Coast headquarters of the Pullman Porters Union, the first Black union in America, with C.L. Dellums, uncle of recently deceased US Congressman and Mayor of Oakland, Ronald V. Dellums (RIP). Most importantly, Oakland's Seventh Street and San Francisco's Fillmore were the cultural and economic Harlem of the West!
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From Crack Heads to Cell Phone Heads
They teach in Recovery that addiction is addiction is addiction. This is why I employ the harm reduction model in my own drug and alcohol addiction. Yes, I am still a dope fiend/alcoholic but I practice harm reduction, i.e., I pay my rent, wash my ass, clean my house (a little), communicate with my children and grandchildren, etc. I do revolutionary work, I write write write. If I die as a dope fiend/alcoholic, I don't mind joining my friends in Dope Fiend Heaven or Hell.Iin the words of our beloved Hillary Clinton, "What difference does it make?" In the words of Chris Rock, "Yeah, I said it, I said it!" Motherfuckas say I'm a crazy motherfucka and all my friends were crazy, i.e., Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, et al. But what did the sane, sober motherfuckas do in the revolution? You got to be a crazy motherfucka to challenge the USA, US Army, Navy, Air Force,
Marines, National Guard, FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, police, snitches and agents provocateurs. You got to be a crazy motherfucka not to care about death, prison, exile, house arrest and the plethora of amenities that await revolutionaries or anyone who challenges the capitalist system, the blood sucker of the poor, the exploiter of the 85% or 99% deaf, dumb and blind.
Sadly, Elijah was right when he said they are hard to lead in the right direction, easy to lead in the wrong direction. He said, "Why do we love the devil? Because he gives us nothing!" After 400 years in the Wilderness of North America, the socalled Negro don't want nothing but a job, the reason he was brought here in the first place, for free or nearly free labor, from chattel slavery to wage slavery. In 2018, he still lookin' for a job, good job. Give that nigga a good job and he will sell out his mama! Then when the boss fires his ass, he goes home and beats his woman. Yeah, she been by his side all the way, loving him, giving him babies, washing his dirty drawers, sucking and fucking him at his pleasure, but he wants to misplace his aggression upon her, not the white man who pimped his ass then gave his job to the white woman, or some gay, lesbian, transsexual or trysexual motherfucka and poor brother (and sister) thought they had a good job for life, thought they were part of the pimp's family. FYI, I ain't got nothing against nobody for their sexual life, but when brothers and sisters bring shit to me, I'm gonna tell it like it is. You can't fire me, don't care if you sell my books. I rather sell my books directly to the people. Fuck book stores, I rather give the people the 40% discount book stores charge. After my labor of writing, why do you deserve 40%, and wholesalers want 65 to 70%, then here come the tax man for his 10%, what the fuck!
I ain't trying to be nobody's leader, I don't want nobody to follow me around the block and I sure ain't following nobody around the block. As they say in prison and jail, ride yo own beef.
Let everybody be the leader, let everybody be the central command. When the US invaded Cambodia to destroy the Viet Cong Central Command, the Viet Cong said, "America cannot destroy the central command because we are all the central command!"
But as I recall my days as a Crack Head (documented in my play One Day in the Life, especially the scene made into a one act play by Ed Bullins and myself, Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam), I recall running through the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin and the Streets of West, North and East Oakland with Crack in my hand, rushing from the dope man to my house or hovel as it usually was, sometimes it was a TL alley or Hindu Hilton hotel room, SRO, dumps so dilapidated there was no locks on the doors, but one didn't care as long as one had a space to hit the pipe and go crazy.
But the Crack era has subsided or morphed into the Opioid zone as per chemical drugs. But, alas, there is now a drug more sinister and vile that all other drugs combined: the Cell Phone. Rather than addicts running through the streets with Crack in hand, we now see a global addiction to cell phone psychosis, yes, beyond a neurosis, yes, cell phone psychosis, a total break with reality in which the addict almost never removes the object of their addiction from their hand, literally, never: not while walking, talking to another human being, eating dinner, defecating, sexual intercourse, yes, the
entire daily round is consumed with cell phone in hand. Any any attempt to remove this vile object full of radiation may be the cause of cancer but most certainly the disconnection of human to human interaction in real time, I mean the touching, hugging, kissing, physical interaction between human beings. Lovers nor families can meet without this devil device in their midst.
The Cell Phone heads are thus addicts in a pandemic worse that all the world's chemical drugs combined. We cannot imagine the destruction this device is doing to socalled civilization. Yet, when used in the positive, most especially as a repository of knowledge and information, the cell phone is without peer, after all, it is a computer of the first order. And Becky will tell you any and everything you want and need to know, just Google her. But imagine, many have never Googled Becky, they spend their daily round stalking lovers and would be lovers with the mantra, "Where you at, where you at?" Sadly, the person asking probably doesn't know where he/she is at. Ask them, "Are you on the North East corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive? After all, Dr. Frantz Fanon told us the oppressed man/woman is disoriented, he doesn't know where he is, and most especially who he/she is. Tell him, "You are a North American African." You are not a Continental African, European African, Caribbean African, Central and South American African. Becky will tell who you are.
And if you can't spell, she will say, "Did you mean....?"
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--Marvin X
Yuba City Jail
10/6/08
Marines, National Guard, FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, police, snitches and agents provocateurs. You got to be a crazy motherfucka not to care about death, prison, exile, house arrest and the plethora of amenities that await revolutionaries or anyone who challenges the capitalist system, the blood sucker of the poor, the exploiter of the 85% or 99% deaf, dumb and blind.
Sadly, Elijah was right when he said they are hard to lead in the right direction, easy to lead in the wrong direction. He said, "Why do we love the devil? Because he gives us nothing!" After 400 years in the Wilderness of North America, the socalled Negro don't want nothing but a job, the reason he was brought here in the first place, for free or nearly free labor, from chattel slavery to wage slavery. In 2018, he still lookin' for a job, good job. Give that nigga a good job and he will sell out his mama! Then when the boss fires his ass, he goes home and beats his woman. Yeah, she been by his side all the way, loving him, giving him babies, washing his dirty drawers, sucking and fucking him at his pleasure, but he wants to misplace his aggression upon her, not the white man who pimped his ass then gave his job to the white woman, or some gay, lesbian, transsexual or trysexual motherfucka and poor brother (and sister) thought they had a good job for life, thought they were part of the pimp's family. FYI, I ain't got nothing against nobody for their sexual life, but when brothers and sisters bring shit to me, I'm gonna tell it like it is. You can't fire me, don't care if you sell my books. I rather sell my books directly to the people. Fuck book stores, I rather give the people the 40% discount book stores charge. After my labor of writing, why do you deserve 40%, and wholesalers want 65 to 70%, then here come the tax man for his 10%, what the fuck!
I ain't trying to be nobody's leader, I don't want nobody to follow me around the block and I sure ain't following nobody around the block. As they say in prison and jail, ride yo own beef.
Let everybody be the leader, let everybody be the central command. When the US invaded Cambodia to destroy the Viet Cong Central Command, the Viet Cong said, "America cannot destroy the central command because we are all the central command!"
But as I recall my days as a Crack Head (documented in my play One Day in the Life, especially the scene made into a one act play by Ed Bullins and myself, Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam), I recall running through the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin and the Streets of West, North and East Oakland with Crack in my hand, rushing from the dope man to my house or hovel as it usually was, sometimes it was a TL alley or Hindu Hilton hotel room, SRO, dumps so dilapidated there was no locks on the doors, but one didn't care as long as one had a space to hit the pipe and go crazy.
But the Crack era has subsided or morphed into the Opioid zone as per chemical drugs. But, alas, there is now a drug more sinister and vile that all other drugs combined: the Cell Phone. Rather than addicts running through the streets with Crack in hand, we now see a global addiction to cell phone psychosis, yes, beyond a neurosis, yes, cell phone psychosis, a total break with reality in which the addict almost never removes the object of their addiction from their hand, literally, never: not while walking, talking to another human being, eating dinner, defecating, sexual intercourse, yes, the
entire daily round is consumed with cell phone in hand. Any any attempt to remove this vile object full of radiation may be the cause of cancer but most certainly the disconnection of human to human interaction in real time, I mean the touching, hugging, kissing, physical interaction between human beings. Lovers nor families can meet without this devil device in their midst.
The Cell Phone heads are thus addicts in a pandemic worse that all the world's chemical drugs combined. We cannot imagine the destruction this device is doing to socalled civilization. Yet, when used in the positive, most especially as a repository of knowledge and information, the cell phone is without peer, after all, it is a computer of the first order. And Becky will tell you any and everything you want and need to know, just Google her. But imagine, many have never Googled Becky, they spend their daily round stalking lovers and would be lovers with the mantra, "Where you at, where you at?" Sadly, the person asking probably doesn't know where he/she is at. Ask them, "Are you on the North East corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive? After all, Dr. Frantz Fanon told us the oppressed man/woman is disoriented, he doesn't know where he is, and most especially who he/she is. Tell him, "You are a North American African." You are not a Continental African, European African, Caribbean African, Central and South American African. Becky will tell who you are.
And if you can't spell, she will say, "Did you mean....?"
Friday, March 12, 2010
Parable of the Cell Phone
Parable of the Cell Phone
We have come to the death of speech. The era of high spiritual consciousness shall make speech unnecessary because we shall be keen enough to read thoughts up close and from afar. We shall understand as we understood not so long ago the glance of an eye from mama when we were misbehaving. There was no mistaking what mama's eyes were saying to us: straighten up and fly right or face the consequences.
In the old days, lovers and friends of long time could communicate without speech: they could read each others minds. This is also true when those of high consciousness have met for a short time. It all has to do with the Oneness of being, the One Mind that propels the universe, the universe of thought and the resultant action.
Speech is thus a kind of laziness and redundancy since we already know what we are thinking. And how often have we called someone thousands of miles away to hear them say they were just thinking about us or they had just mentioned our name in conversation. Or, they knew we were sick or someone was dead.
So how strange it is that we think the cell phone is an invention of high technology when it is, in fact, already obsolete in the era of spiritual consciousness. Furthermore, 90% of phone conversations are of no importance whatsoever. It is similar to when man discovered the wheel, surely many wheels were rolled down the hill for fun and entertainment.
The cell phone is such a device, and has become dangerous to our health. The Los Angeles train wreak happened because the conductor was text messaging. So we have new technology taking us backward into danger and death, rather than forward into life more abundantly.
People are so overjoyed with the new technology they cannot eat without it, cannot have sex without their cell phone in hand. What is more important, reaching a climax or talking to another girlfriend or boyfriend or business partner? Not only should the cell phone be banned while driving, but while eating and making love. Unless you are President Obama, that shit you talking about ain't hardly important. Aristotle said long ago that there were very few things in life really important.
We have come to the death of speech. The era of high spiritual consciousness shall make speech unnecessary because we shall be keen enough to read thoughts up close and from afar. We shall understand as we understood not so long ago the glance of an eye from mama when we were misbehaving. There was no mistaking what mama's eyes were saying to us: straighten up and fly right or face the consequences.
In the old days, lovers and friends of long time could communicate without speech: they could read each others minds. This is also true when those of high consciousness have met for a short time. It all has to do with the Oneness of being, the One Mind that propels the universe, the universe of thought and the resultant action.
Speech is thus a kind of laziness and redundancy since we already know what we are thinking. And how often have we called someone thousands of miles away to hear them say they were just thinking about us or they had just mentioned our name in conversation. Or, they knew we were sick or someone was dead.
So how strange it is that we think the cell phone is an invention of high technology when it is, in fact, already obsolete in the era of spiritual consciousness. Furthermore, 90% of phone conversations are of no importance whatsoever. It is similar to when man discovered the wheel, surely many wheels were rolled down the hill for fun and entertainment.
The cell phone is such a device, and has become dangerous to our health. The Los Angeles train wreak happened because the conductor was text messaging. So we have new technology taking us backward into danger and death, rather than forward into life more abundantly.
People are so overjoyed with the new technology they cannot eat without it, cannot have sex without their cell phone in hand. What is more important, reaching a climax or talking to another girlfriend or boyfriend or business partner? Not only should the cell phone be banned while driving, but while eating and making love. Unless you are President Obama, that shit you talking about ain't hardly important. Aristotle said long ago that there were very few things in life really important.
And the last thing a woman needed was a cell phone. After all, (as if the man doesn't do the same Goddamn thing) she walks talking, sits talking, sleeps talking, eats talking, screws talking, on the toilet talking, in the bathtub talking. She will be in her coffin talking on the cell phone.
Sister
Yeah, these nigguhs is here at my funeral. Yeah, that bitch is here. Now you know I don't like that bitch. I should get out this casket and beat her motherfuckin ass. How dare she come to my funeral after I caught her and my man fucking. They can fuck forever now cause I'm outta here.
Yeah, I'm gone baby girl. But did you hear that other bitch sing that song I don't like? Yeah, how dat hoe gon sing a song I don't even like at my funeral. I should get out this casket and whip her ass too.
These nigguhs is too much for me. I'm so glad I'm outta here. And my man sittin there cryin crocodile tears. You know he gonbe at one of his other bitches house tonight. She gon be feelin all sorry for him. I should send my spirit over her house and bust up they shit. Know what I mean. I should just command my spirit over her place and fuck it up.
Now bout this heaven shit, Girl. We go see when I get there. Better be some fine nigguhs up in heaven or I'm goin down to hell. I am not gonna be where no mud duck lookin nigguhs is. And I gotta be there for eternity. Hell to the naw. Cause I know I'm cute. Did you see what I had on at my wake last night. Yeah, was I cute, girlfriend? I told dem funeral people don't be makinme look like no damn ghost wit all dat gray ass makeup. Have me lookin cute leavin here.
Well, girl they bout to close the casket. I'm so sorry you couldn't make it but everybody got up and said they little piece. They didn't stop nobody from saying what they thought about me, but you know it was all lies. Nigguhs oughta stop lyin like that. Half them nigguhs hated my guts.
You shoulda seen that hoe came dressed like mother Hubbard, crying all over my casket, bout to knock me ova. I started to raise up and slap dat bitch, but I kept my cool. I just kept lookin up at the ceiling.
Girl you take care. I hope they got some damn cigarettes in heaven, and they better have some Hennessey, I swear, or I'm going straight to hell.
Let me get off dis phone. Later, girl.
It is a new addiction and thus detox and recovery are in order. Go sit somewhere and listen to the inner self, don't be afraid, let self talk with self! You do have a self, right?
Most importantly, the cell phone may be a danger to our health, causing brain damage from radiation. In Europe, pregnant women are banned from using the cell phone. And with the I-phone and U-phone, Black Berry and Red Berry, the multi-uses include greater radiation. So keep talking, Mr. and Mrs. Negro, African, Aboriginal.
But let's talk without talking. The time has arrived to use the mind God gave you, as my mother said to me so eloquently and repeatedly, although it took at least fifty years to sink in. May you rest in peace, Mom! If you don't use it, she said, you will lose it!
So let the Divine Mind flow through us and between us. Instead of medicating on drugs, why not use and exercise our minds to the highest level. Try the silent mode rather than the incessant talking loud but saying nothing as ancestor James Brown told us.
Sometimes talking is a way of avoiding the other person because they never get the chance to speak. And this is the intent of the person dominating the conversation. Thus, constant talking is a devious attempt to block truth. The truth is often in the silence, or what you don't say.
Now some of those who are unable to shut up suffer a nervous condition and are in need of therapy and medication. Silence is probably their best therapy and medication. For sure, there is an apparent disorder in the personality that is preventing them from reaching higher consciousness, i.e., to speak without speaking, to hear without listening, to see without looking.
By the way, I cut off my cell phone service. ESP me.
Sister
Yeah, these nigguhs is here at my funeral. Yeah, that bitch is here. Now you know I don't like that bitch. I should get out this casket and beat her motherfuckin ass. How dare she come to my funeral after I caught her and my man fucking. They can fuck forever now cause I'm outta here.
Yeah, I'm gone baby girl. But did you hear that other bitch sing that song I don't like? Yeah, how dat hoe gon sing a song I don't even like at my funeral. I should get out this casket and whip her ass too.
These nigguhs is too much for me. I'm so glad I'm outta here. And my man sittin there cryin crocodile tears. You know he gonbe at one of his other bitches house tonight. She gon be feelin all sorry for him. I should send my spirit over her house and bust up they shit. Know what I mean. I should just command my spirit over her place and fuck it up.
Now bout this heaven shit, Girl. We go see when I get there. Better be some fine nigguhs up in heaven or I'm goin down to hell. I am not gonna be where no mud duck lookin nigguhs is. And I gotta be there for eternity. Hell to the naw. Cause I know I'm cute. Did you see what I had on at my wake last night. Yeah, was I cute, girlfriend? I told dem funeral people don't be makinme look like no damn ghost wit all dat gray ass makeup. Have me lookin cute leavin here.
Well, girl they bout to close the casket. I'm so sorry you couldn't make it but everybody got up and said they little piece. They didn't stop nobody from saying what they thought about me, but you know it was all lies. Nigguhs oughta stop lyin like that. Half them nigguhs hated my guts.
You shoulda seen that hoe came dressed like mother Hubbard, crying all over my casket, bout to knock me ova. I started to raise up and slap dat bitch, but I kept my cool. I just kept lookin up at the ceiling.
Girl you take care. I hope they got some damn cigarettes in heaven, and they better have some Hennessey, I swear, or I'm going straight to hell.
Let me get off dis phone. Later, girl.
It is a new addiction and thus detox and recovery are in order. Go sit somewhere and listen to the inner self, don't be afraid, let self talk with self! You do have a self, right?
Most importantly, the cell phone may be a danger to our health, causing brain damage from radiation. In Europe, pregnant women are banned from using the cell phone. And with the I-phone and U-phone, Black Berry and Red Berry, the multi-uses include greater radiation. So keep talking, Mr. and Mrs. Negro, African, Aboriginal.
But let's talk without talking. The time has arrived to use the mind God gave you, as my mother said to me so eloquently and repeatedly, although it took at least fifty years to sink in. May you rest in peace, Mom! If you don't use it, she said, you will lose it!
So let the Divine Mind flow through us and between us. Instead of medicating on drugs, why not use and exercise our minds to the highest level. Try the silent mode rather than the incessant talking loud but saying nothing as ancestor James Brown told us.
Sometimes talking is a way of avoiding the other person because they never get the chance to speak. And this is the intent of the person dominating the conversation. Thus, constant talking is a devious attempt to block truth. The truth is often in the silence, or what you don't say.
Now some of those who are unable to shut up suffer a nervous condition and are in need of therapy and medication. Silence is probably their best therapy and medication. For sure, there is an apparent disorder in the personality that is preventing them from reaching higher consciousness, i.e., to speak without speaking, to hear without listening, to see without looking.
By the way, I cut off my cell phone service. ESP me.
--Marvin X
Yuba City Jail
10/6/08
Revised 3/12/10
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Marvin X Notes on Oakland Black August Conference, 2018
Marvin X Notes on BLACK AUGUST NATIONAL CONFERENCE, Oakland CA, 2018
This Black August National Conference has been called for by various prison slavery abolitionist and youth developement activist under the unity and leadership of the founding elders of the Black August Organizing Committee.
The purpose of this Conference is to formulate legal services and litigation teams for at risk youth and longest held prisoners. Establish programs to provide housing and resource access training for homeless youth, adults and newly released citizens.
We will continue to try to stem the increasing flow of our youth to jails and prisons. The numbers of youth who are homeless or simply in the streets aimlessly can be drastically cut down with organized effort within our communities.
During the course of this Conference we will establish the necessary programs that will give us the greatest potential of achieving our goal.
This Conference will bring together in unity the working spirit of comrades of the Black August Commemoration prison movement from around the country to establish a set of tactics and strategies that will be used going forward in our collective and individual efforts to better serve our youth and to liberate our brothers, sisters, comrades, family and friends from the neo-slavery prison system.
The conference will extend into various annual Black August events scheduled in Oakland, Los Angeles and other areas around the country. There will be cultural performances, pilgrimage tours, dedications and tributes throughout the month. Events will be posted here soon.
There is no time like the present for this Black August National Conference to take place. If you or your organization have been in support of or hosted Black August Commemorations and programs in the past, you are invited and strongly encouraged to RSVP this conference by registering with the National Planning Committee here on this Eventbrite invitation as our special invited guest. Food and lodging information will be added to this invite as registration submissions are received. You can also reach us at banationalconference2018@gmail.com for additional info. Registration is strongly suggested but not required.
Hosted by Oakland BAOC.
"FOR SURE THE HOUR FOR WHICH WE YEARN
SHALL YET ARRIVE
AND OUR MARCHING STEP WILL THUNDER
WE SURVIVE"
Marvin X Notes on the Oakland Black August Conference, 2018
Oakland's National Black August Conference on Incarceration was attended by a spirited group of people concerned about the millions of North American Africans in America's jails and prisons. Yes, America, home of the brave and land of the free. America, why then do you have more people in jail and prison than any nation in the world?
After Mama Ayanna's libation to the ancestors, organizer Shaka spoke on the origin of Black August as per prisoners and the community. Black August originated around the death of prison movement messiah George Jackson.
Hip Hop brother Naru was MC. Kumasi was the featured speaker. He is the griot of Black August, the undisputed historian and original source on the North American African created American Prison Movement. Life is a mother. Yesterday I was talking with a mutual friend of Kumasi's in Toronto, Canada. He told me the griot would be at Oakland's Black August. BAM! As I entered the event, there was Kumasi. We embraced and agreed to talk later.
Kumasi's lectures are a minute by minute narrative on how North American Africans navigated the American Gulags. In 1966 Black students from San Francisco State University as members of the editorial staff of Black Dialogue Magazine, were invited to the Soledad Prison Black Culture Club, chaired by Eldridge Cleaver and Alprintice Bunchy Carter. Kumasi says this Black Culture Club is the beginning of the Black Prison Movement and the American Prison Movement. As I observed and Kumasi has lectured, this club was a revolutionary military organization. Indeed, upon my visit as an editor of Black Dialogue Magazine, among several staffers who were also members of the BSU at San Francisco State University, the meeting was under military discipline.
At today's event, I asked MC Naru if I could introduce Kumasi since I deeply appreciated his role as Master Griot of Black August and the American Prison Movement. I gave Kumasi a short introduction and he took the mike, slowly weaving his story of Black August from beginning to the now.
He told how North American African Muslims had to fight to win the right to practice Islam in the jails and prisons of America, e.g., the fight to have Qur'ans, prayer rugs, imams, no pork diet. After long struggle legally and resistance within the walls to suppression of the Black identity. Kumasi told of the fight over hair styles that inmates demanded to express. Alas, only after a struggle were Black hair products allowed in the prison system.
Black August took upon itself the task of protecting Black inmates from predatory behavior by guards, white nationalists and black exploiters, those unconscious elements in the prison population.
Kumasi noted today as he has on other occasions, "It was kill or be killed, there was no other choice. You guys had your revolution on the outside, we had ours on the inside."
He said Black August let the Department of Corrections and they right wing white sycophants know, "For every one you take of us, we shall take three of yours!"
In conclusion, Kumasi called for support of the National Prison Strike on August 21, 2018. "Let
us never not connect with our brothers and sisters behind the walls."
"Malcolm X talked about the Ballot or the Bullet, well, the bullet didn't work so now we must make the ballot the bullet! Form Youth Political Organizations to get out the vote. It must not be about individual politicians but about policies in our Black Agenda. If the politicians don't do right, well...there shall be consequences!
Kumasi ended by introducing a Sister from the South Carolina Prison Movement. Sister informed us of conditions in the South Carolina slave holes, stripped suits, slave labor on the chain gang. South Carolina, Gullah Blacks, brought rice from Senegal, 60% kidnapped Africans arrived at South Carolina ports, Charleston, etc., 500 year old city of slavery and white supremacy domination.
Sister was Queen Mother of Rastas in South Carolina, former SNCC worker with Kwame Toure, Stokeley Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown, Imam Jamil Alamin.
She gave a graphic description of the recent explosion at a prison in South Carolina that left 12 inmates dead and others injured. She said the explosion was State sponsored. It wasn't about cell phones. She noted how when prison authorities recognize a natural leader, they ship him out to another facility as they did with a revolutionary brother. He departed with State troopers and a person from the Public Affairs Office. They wanted to be in charge of the narrative.
Sister said the fight for prisoner rights is a daunting task. We've fought to have African Liberation Day in prisons, Kwanza and other identifying markers of our humanity, especially while we are victims of involuntary servitude under the US Constitution.
I was asked to speak but introducing Kumasi was enough for me.
If I had seized the opportunity to speak, I would have said this:
Soldiers of the Black Liberation Army,
We have reached a critical hour in our struggle, we need a bold program to free our soldiers in captivity. I suggest we tell ole' pharaoh to let our people go. I would like to see Black August and the American Prison Movement endorse sending a delegation to President Donald Trump to kindly suggest he consider a general amnesty of political prisoners and the general population, including the violent criminals. After all, it is a sociological fact that violent criminals have the lowest rate of recidivism.
I suggest Black August issue a reply to my suggestion. No matter his right wing expressions, he pardoned Jack Johnson and a Black sister. Shouldn't any means necessary be made to free our people from the American Gulag?
We need a delegation to meet with President Donald Trump on the matter of a general amnesty for all prisoners. If you issue the statement that Black August would like to meet with President Trump on the matter of a general amnesty, I think I can make it happen, and I do not need to be in the delegation although I am willing and have no fear of dealing with Pharaoh to tell him to let our people go!
Peace and Love in Black Liberation,
Marvin X
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San Francisco's Hunters Point enjoys the Wild Crazy Ride of the Marvin X Experience at private house party
Marvin X rocks Hunters Point Private Party
![]()
He was the featured artist at a birthday party that morphed into a 1960s Conscious Party (Defined; As per the 60s, a conscious party begins as a normal party, music, food, drink, then the music stops, lights on, brothers and sisters rap revolutionary black nationalism. Music up, lights up, party back on. Later, the same rap session continues on whatever subject at hand.
Before he read, Marvin X thanked his host who requests anonymity. "First of all, I thank the brother for inviting me to his party. I had no idea he was of Black/African consciousness. He has taught me to never underestimate another Black man, especially when you know little about him, though I did suspect the brother was literate because he did accept my books. I was humbled when I entered his apartment and saw my books at the foot of the shrine to his mother.
I am totally impressed with newfound knowledge of my friend. I am impressed this conscious party happened in Hunters Point, so often derided for ignorance, internecine violence, police violence and other actions of socalled hood life. But if you know Bay Area history, Hunters Point is the only hood that revolted in the streets against white supremacy in the 60s. Yes, Oakland gave us the Black Panthers. San Francisco State University gave us the Black Student Union and Black Studies. Hunters Point gave us a mass uprising. Duncan Barber, a co-founder of Black Arts West Theatre in the Fillmore, was featured on the cover of Newsweek about the HP rebellion.
I told the conscious party goers I was impressed on my way down Third Street to the party, especially by the Red, Black and Green on light posts. When I sensed the audience really didn't understand the Red, Black and Green, I said, "Marcus Garvey gave us this flag for the Pan African nation, in conjunction with his philosophy of Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad. I read that Marcus Garvey reacted to a white racist song of the time "Everybody Got a Flag Cept a Coon."
Garvey was inspired to give us the African Universal Flag: Red for the blood we've shed after 400 years of enslavement under chattel and wage slavery. Black for us as African and Aboriginal people), green for our land, Africa. I informed them we have the Black Arts Movement Business District in Oakland along the 14th Street corridor, from the lower bottom to Lake Merritt. FYI, as a result of BAR B Q BECKY, Oakland Blacks are still occupying Lake Merritt on Lakeshore Avenue on Sundays. Vendors are there with Black art and crafts. People enjoy the sun, Sundays. Come out and check out the people's revolution. Yet, after repeated requests and offer to pay the cost, Oakland will not fly the Red, Black and Green. So kudos to Hunters Point!
--------------------------------
San Francisco's Hunters Point enjoys
the wild crazy ride
of the Marvin X Experience
San Francisco's Hunters Point residents were overwhelmed by the Wild Crazy Ride of the Marvin X Experience at a private house party. When Marvin X arrived to read, he noticed a senior woman reading intently his Mythology of Pussy. The party was for a friend's birthday, but when the friend spoke he said it was to celebrate Black people. It was the first time X heard his friend express Black/African consciousness. The friend had commissioned at artist to do a painting now hanging on his apartment wall. X didn't know his friend was into Black Art. X saw a little shrine to his friend's mother, with her coin-purse full of pennies. He told us his mother taught him to not beg for pennies but to be self sufficient.
X didn't know his friend hired musicians for the party. X asked the musicians if they would accompany his reading. They agreed but were slightly upset when X jokingly asked they not upstage him. They informed the poet they will be with him all the way and would not upstage him or drown him out as some musicians are known to do to vocalists and/or spoken word artists. The vocalist/guitarist and saxophonist/vocalist got the party started with Home Town Blues. Next tune The Sky is Crying "look at the tears roll down the street."
X grabbed the mike, told the musicians to accompany him with Home Town Blues. He read Parable of A Real Woman. The house of mostly women got silent. One sister was so fired up she joined X at the mike. He told her, "Don't mess with me while I'm reading." She eased her body off him and he continued reading. The party goers listened carefully to the Parable. When he finished to applause, one sister said, "Now, I don't know bout that Parable of a Real Woman. Seems like the woman did everything for free and gave him her money. I don't know about that." (See Parable of a Real Woman by Marvin X, The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Black Bird Press, Oakland CA.)
After hearing Parable of a Real Woman, the musicians were fired up. They told the audience X inspired them to perform another Marvin's classic What's Going On. The guitarist told the sax man to open up What's Going On with a solo, and he did a melodious rendition.
Marvin X couldn't help watching the woman reading his Mythology. When he saw she was at the end of the 18 page pamphlet that is biblotheraphy for those lacking manhood and womanhood training in the new post-patriarchal order, he asked her what she thought? She replied, "You say a lot of things I have thought about but I thought I was crazy to think some things you wrote. Now I don't feel crazy. I know I ain't crazy as you!"
After the host passed out free earrings by a local craft woman, X decided he would give out free literature to all present. Mythology was his choice. People made him autograph it. As it is much stolen, before he departed, a women told him her copy was missing and she needed another. She accompanied him to his car for another copy. X tells everyone, "Don't let your friends still it." Some people have come back three times because their Mythology disappeared. Some told him when they loaned Mythology to their friends, the friends said they were not going to return it.
A caterer was in the kitchen preparing the food. And the food was good Soulfood, except pork for me. A girlfriend told me, "You eat pussy, you might as well eat pork!" But there were Vegan dishes as well as chicken, beef salad, cobbler, cheese cake, shrimp pasta and more.
When the musicians asked if I was ready to do another number, I told them yes. I decided to read Parable of Woman on the Cell Phone. Since the scene is a funeral at which a sister is talking on her cell phone in her coffin, I requested some "Zion" music but the lead musician didn't get it, although the other musician did, as did a deacon seated next to me on the couch. I preceded my reading by apologizing to any religious persons in the audience, with my eyes on the deacon, although I think I demolished him with Parable of a Real Woman. After a few lines, the largely female audience went stone wild. I could hardly read the next line.
I finished and sat down next to the deacon. He had loosened up from his straight demeanor at the start of the party, especially after the caterer brought him some of her delicious food. They seemed to have a personal relationship. No matter, he asked my views on religion, something I suspected he would do.First he asked if I was a Mason. I said no. Then he wanted to know if I was in the Nation of Islam, which I told him I was, having joined Mosque #26, San Francisco, 1967. I told him I'd written a book Beyond Religion, Toward Spirituality. He wanted to know what I said in it. I told him I was going to read my Parable of the Heart, then said if it ain't in your heart, churches, mosques, temples don't matter. As he departed the couch, he nodded as if he understood the spirituality I laid on him.
And why should I doubt the deacon. Should I doubt him as I doubted the consciousness of the host?
--Marvin X
8/12/18
Hunters Point, San Francisco CA
He was the featured artist at a birthday party that morphed into a 1960s Conscious Party (Defined; As per the 60s, a conscious party begins as a normal party, music, food, drink, then the music stops, lights on, brothers and sisters rap revolutionary black nationalism. Music up, lights up, party back on. Later, the same rap session continues on whatever subject at hand.
Before he read, Marvin X thanked his host who requests anonymity. "First of all, I thank the brother for inviting me to his party. I had no idea he was of Black/African consciousness. He has taught me to never underestimate another Black man, especially when you know little about him, though I did suspect the brother was literate because he did accept my books. I was humbled when I entered his apartment and saw my books at the foot of the shrine to his mother.
I am totally impressed with newfound knowledge of my friend. I am impressed this conscious party happened in Hunters Point, so often derided for ignorance, internecine violence, police violence and other actions of socalled hood life. But if you know Bay Area history, Hunters Point is the only hood that revolted in the streets against white supremacy in the 60s. Yes, Oakland gave us the Black Panthers. San Francisco State University gave us the Black Student Union and Black Studies. Hunters Point gave us a mass uprising. Duncan Barber, a co-founder of Black Arts West Theatre in the Fillmore, was featured on the cover of Newsweek about the HP rebellion.
I told the conscious party goers I was impressed on my way down Third Street to the party, especially by the Red, Black and Green on light posts. When I sensed the audience really didn't understand the Red, Black and Green, I said, "Marcus Garvey gave us this flag for the Pan African nation, in conjunction with his philosophy of Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad. I read that Marcus Garvey reacted to a white racist song of the time "Everybody Got a Flag Cept a Coon."
Garvey was inspired to give us the African Universal Flag: Red for the blood we've shed after 400 years of enslavement under chattel and wage slavery. Black for us as African and Aboriginal people), green for our land, Africa. I informed them we have the Black Arts Movement Business District in Oakland along the 14th Street corridor, from the lower bottom to Lake Merritt. FYI, as a result of BAR B Q BECKY, Oakland Blacks are still occupying Lake Merritt on Lakeshore Avenue on Sundays. Vendors are there with Black art and crafts. People enjoy the sun, Sundays. Come out and check out the people's revolution. Yet, after repeated requests and offer to pay the cost, Oakland will not fly the Red, Black and Green. So kudos to Hunters Point!
--------------------------------
San Francisco's Hunters Point enjoys
the wild crazy ride
of the Marvin X Experience
San Francisco's Hunters Point residents were overwhelmed by the Wild Crazy Ride of the Marvin X Experience at a private house party. When Marvin X arrived to read, he noticed a senior woman reading intently his Mythology of Pussy. The party was for a friend's birthday, but when the friend spoke he said it was to celebrate Black people. It was the first time X heard his friend express Black/African consciousness. The friend had commissioned at artist to do a painting now hanging on his apartment wall. X didn't know his friend was into Black Art. X saw a little shrine to his friend's mother, with her coin-purse full of pennies. He told us his mother taught him to not beg for pennies but to be self sufficient.
X didn't know his friend hired musicians for the party. X asked the musicians if they would accompany his reading. They agreed but were slightly upset when X jokingly asked they not upstage him. They informed the poet they will be with him all the way and would not upstage him or drown him out as some musicians are known to do to vocalists and/or spoken word artists. The vocalist/guitarist and saxophonist/vocalist got the party started with Home Town Blues. Next tune The Sky is Crying "look at the tears roll down the street."
X grabbed the mike, told the musicians to accompany him with Home Town Blues. He read Parable of A Real Woman. The house of mostly women got silent. One sister was so fired up she joined X at the mike. He told her, "Don't mess with me while I'm reading." She eased her body off him and he continued reading. The party goers listened carefully to the Parable. When he finished to applause, one sister said, "Now, I don't know bout that Parable of a Real Woman. Seems like the woman did everything for free and gave him her money. I don't know about that." (See Parable of a Real Woman by Marvin X, The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Black Bird Press, Oakland CA.)
After hearing Parable of a Real Woman, the musicians were fired up. They told the audience X inspired them to perform another Marvin's classic What's Going On. The guitarist told the sax man to open up What's Going On with a solo, and he did a melodious rendition.
Marvin X couldn't help watching the woman reading his Mythology. When he saw she was at the end of the 18 page pamphlet that is biblotheraphy for those lacking manhood and womanhood training in the new post-patriarchal order, he asked her what she thought? She replied, "You say a lot of things I have thought about but I thought I was crazy to think some things you wrote. Now I don't feel crazy. I know I ain't crazy as you!"
After the host passed out free earrings by a local craft woman, X decided he would give out free literature to all present. Mythology was his choice. People made him autograph it. As it is much stolen, before he departed, a women told him her copy was missing and she needed another. She accompanied him to his car for another copy. X tells everyone, "Don't let your friends still it." Some people have come back three times because their Mythology disappeared. Some told him when they loaned Mythology to their friends, the friends said they were not going to return it.
A caterer was in the kitchen preparing the food. And the food was good Soulfood, except pork for me. A girlfriend told me, "You eat pussy, you might as well eat pork!" But there were Vegan dishes as well as chicken, beef salad, cobbler, cheese cake, shrimp pasta and more.
When the musicians asked if I was ready to do another number, I told them yes. I decided to read Parable of Woman on the Cell Phone. Since the scene is a funeral at which a sister is talking on her cell phone in her coffin, I requested some "Zion" music but the lead musician didn't get it, although the other musician did, as did a deacon seated next to me on the couch. I preceded my reading by apologizing to any religious persons in the audience, with my eyes on the deacon, although I think I demolished him with Parable of a Real Woman. After a few lines, the largely female audience went stone wild. I could hardly read the next line.
I finished and sat down next to the deacon. He had loosened up from his straight demeanor at the start of the party, especially after the caterer brought him some of her delicious food. They seemed to have a personal relationship. No matter, he asked my views on religion, something I suspected he would do.First he asked if I was a Mason. I said no. Then he wanted to know if I was in the Nation of Islam, which I told him I was, having joined Mosque #26, San Francisco, 1967. I told him I'd written a book Beyond Religion, Toward Spirituality. He wanted to know what I said in it. I told him I was going to read my Parable of the Heart, then said if it ain't in your heart, churches, mosques, temples don't matter. As he departed the couch, he nodded as if he understood the spirituality I laid on him.
And why should I doubt the deacon. Should I doubt him as I doubted the consciousness of the host?
--Marvin X
8/12/18
Hunters Point, San Francisco CA
↧
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San Francisco State Strike 1968, Black Students & Third World Liberation...
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"The Turning Point" The San Francisco State '68 Strike
Marvin X is writing The Untold Story of the Black Student Revolution at San Francisco State University, 1968. Marvin X was a member of the Negro Students Association that became the Black Students Union. He obtained a B.A. and M.A., English/Creative Writing and later taught in the Black Studies Department, 1974-75.
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Marvin X New Poem: The People of Nowhere
Muhajir,Where is the love for the LOST people? Thank you for reminding us.--Fahizah Alim
Poet Marvin X and Muse Fahizah Alim
The people of NowhereLive lives shut in shut outSeldom venture outFrom nowhere to some where.No church no concert movieWalk in the parkEternal house arrestNo chains handcuffsA mental prisonNo guards cept boys on the blockWho go nowhereNever leave turfCept in body bagsNo motel love ballersLaundry room loveHot girl upstairsNo where girlSex on the dryerMama can't dry clothesMama go nowhereNo mama timeJail time sonsMama time at courtVisit prison sonsNo mama timeNowhere life.--Marvin X8/14/18
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Black Bird Press News Popular Posts
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Aretha Franklin - Wholy Holy
Aretha
Daughter of a preacher
Little sista of Mahalia
Bailed Angela
Aretha
Artistic Freedom Fighter
Soul songbird supreme
Queen of Soul
Queen of Rock and Roll
"If Elvis is king," Amiri Baraka said,"Who is James Brown, God?"
Classic woman
Like Bessie Billie
Sarah Nina
Let Queen Aretha sing
From heaven down
Let the Black Bird sing
Honor her crown.
--MARVIN X
8/15/18
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Maze. Joy & Pain.
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Bobby Womack - If You Think You're Lonely Now
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Luciano Pavarotti & James Brown - It's a man's world ᴴᴰ
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Aretha, Angela Davis, Marvin X and the White Farmer from the Central Valley
In 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan removed Angela Davis and Marvin X from teaching in academia: he removed Angela from UCLA because she was a black Communist; Marvin was banned from Fresno State University because he was a black Muslim who refused to fight in Vietnam.
Speaking on Aretha Franklin this morning with Amy Goldman, Angela Davis recalled that although Aretha Franklin offered to pay her bail, it was a Central Valley White farmer who put up his land to free her. This reminded me that it was this same White farmer who supported my struggle to teach in Black Studies at Fresno State University, 1969. He also spoke on my behalf at my San Francisco draft trial for refusing to fight in Vietnam. He was attacked viciously by white racists for assisting Angela and myself. They called him a nigger lover and I think he eventually lost his land. For his support, I thank him, honor and respect Roger McAfee for his John Brown consciousness.
--Marvin X
8/17/18
PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 23 —Angela Davis, jailed for 16 months while facing murder charges, was released on $102,500 bail here tonight.
As she left the North County Courthouse at 7:09 P.M. she raised a fist in salute and smiled broadly to some 100 cheering supporters before speeding off in a white Mustang automobile.
Her release came several hours after the decision to grant her bail was reached during a four‐hour closed session in the chambers of Judge Richard E. Arnason of Superior Court in San Jose, about 20 miles south of here.
Judge Arnason, who denied a request for bail for the black activist last June, ruled that a state law prohibiting bail in “capital cases” had been invalidated by the State Supreme Court decision last Friday eliminating the death penalty in California.
Miss Davis, who is charged with murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy, was required to post $2,500 bail in cash and the rest in a surety bond.
Roger McAfee, the director of the cooperative, which runs a dairy farm with 60 cows, put his property up as collateral in the belief that “the stands Miss Davis has taken will further the cooperative movement in this country.”
Miss Davis, upon learning of her impending release, was “elated and very happy to be out.”
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Davey D's Manhood training session at Marvin X's Academy of da Corner, Lakeshore
DJ, San Francisco State University lecturer, Davey D
Today, Friday, August 17, 2018, DJ Davey D enjoyed a manhood training session at Marvin X's Academy of da Corner, Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. The session began when D was standing at X's Wake Up Table conversing as many brothers do when Marvin X sets up shop. Even when Marvin X is not there, brothers gather, often with sisters too, to converse at the spot near Peet's Coffee and Trader Joe's. Brothers from throughout the Pan African Diaspora converse on a myriad topics at this liberated space, from Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo, Ghana, Jamaica and all parts of Oakland, West, North, Deep East.
Before Davey arrived a couple from Harlem, NY, stopped to check out X's literature exhibit that includes large framed pictures of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, August Wilson and Amiri Baraka. On one table is a large photo of Dr. Julia Hare, called the female Malcolm X (See her performance on Tavis Smiley's Black Forum, Youtube). Dancer Sister Amina came through and told Marvin X she and her children just saw him in Stanley Nelson's documentary film Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, PBS.
Others who have stopped at Academy of da Corner, Lakeshore, include Angela Davis, Fania Davis, Erika Huggins, Fredericka Newton, Odell Johnson, President Emeritus, Laney College, Fantastic Negrito, Kev Choice, et al.
As Davey D conversed with Marvin X on their upcoming discussion about Black Power for the benefit of D's students at San Francisco State University, an OG brother came up saying Black Power Black Power Black Power. The brothers returned the greeting. Then the OG said, "What's the word?" He was speaking to OG Marvin X and OG Randy sitting with him behind the table. Davey D stood silently as the OGs went into an automatic call and response:
What's the word?
Thunderbird!
What's the price?
Thirty twice.
Who drink the most?
Colored folks?
Then Marvin and Randy sang the Grass Roots National Anthem of the 50s and 60s:
WPLJ
really feels good to me
It's really good wine
make you feel so fine so fine so fine
W fada wine
P fada Port
L fada Limon
J fada juice
W P L J
really feel good to me
It's really good wine
make you feel so fine so fine so fine
Ohoooo ohooo ohooo.
Hip Hop Davey D was dumbfounded. He admitted he'd never heard the song before. The OGs acknowledged one had to be in a certain age-grade to know this song. They were sorry this Hip Hop Master had no knowledge of it since it is an iconic song of the 50s and 60s generation in the Hood. The song was included in Marvin X's first play Flowers for the Trashman, produced by the Drama Department at San Francisco State University, 1964. See the Black Arts Movement anthology Black Fire, 1968, and the Black Arts Movement Reader, 2014.
When one of the OGs told Davey D he was traveling in high cotton, again D was dumbfounded. "What are you OGs talking about? I grew up in New York, I don't know nothing 'bout no damn cotton!" OG Randy told him being in high cotton was a metaphor that one was doing good."
Marvin X, who partly grew up in Fresno, California, told Davey D there was more cotton in Fresno than Mississippi. "What you don't want to do is go through the cotton field for the third picking, when there is hardly any cotton left but one had to pick it none the less. I wouldn't have survived slavery, they would have killed me. I picked cotton in Fresno, my mother picked cotton, my grandparents, uncles, even my great-grandparents who were pioneers to the Central Valley from the South. Dr. Nathan Hare told me in Oklahoma they put so called Negroes on buses to Fresno to pick cotton and many never returned to Oklahoma."
Between the song WPLJ and cotton, Davey D was astounded. He had received his manhood training session for the day, a necessary lesson on Black History and Culture for the Hip Hop generation.
--Marvin X
Academy of da Corner, Lakeshore, Oakland
8/17/18
Marvin X on stage at Laney College, Odell Johnson Theatre, X's former classroom, 1981, where he taught and produced his play In the Name of Love, directed by student Ayodele Nzinga
photo Alicia Mayo
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In Memoriam: Attorney Donald Warden, aka Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour, Afro American Association, mentored Oakland Black Panthers
In Memoriam
His Black Consciousness Program
Rocked the Bay Area like no other
black panthers black arts black studies kwanza
o
Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour
AKA, Attorney Donald Warden
When I graduated from Edison High School, Fresno CA, 1962, I wanted to attend Howard University. When I came to Oakland and told my father, he suggested I go see his friend, Oakland Post Publisher Tom Berkley. When I told Tom my desire, he told me to forget about Howard, you don't need to go to Howard, we have good schools out here. I forgot about Howard and enrolled at Oakland City College, aka, Merritt College, on Grove Street, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave.
By the time I graduated from OCC, I had to admit maybe Tom Berkley was right, especially after I was initiated into revolutionary black nationalism that I would carry with me to San Francisco State College/University and beyond for the remainder of my life. en
But unlike Howard, there were few Black instructors and no Black Studies. My Black consciousness came from listening to brothers and sisters rapping on the steps of OCC. Rapping was not beats and rhymes, but extemporaneous speaking on revolution by a variety of speakers, including Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Ernie Allen, Maurice Dawson, Richard Thorne, and Attorney Donald Warden, head of the Afro American Association.
I was fascinated at the brothers rapping. I don't recall sisters rapping but sisters were involved. There was Ann Williams, partner of Richard Thorne. Richard Thorne introduced me to Huey Newton. Carol Freeman, Mississippi poet, married to Ken Freeman, aka, Mamadou Lumumba. Sisters Ellendar Barnes, Judy Juanita, and others whose names I can't recall. There were elder sisters like Mother McKenya, Mother Ruth Hagwood, et al.
From the steps of the college, the rap sessions would move to a campus room for an AAA meeting, or across the street to a greasy spoon .cafe for hamburgers, fries, milkshakes and more rapping. From the cafe we might gather in a fellow student's room. From the steps of OCC, AAA meetings, greasy spoon cafe sessions and meetings in our rooms, we had non-credit independent peer group study, discoursing on black nationalism, the black bourgeoisie (Dr. E. Franklin Frazier), Dr. Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, the writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. We discussed Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Congo, assassinated by African neo-colonialists at the behest of the West, Belgium, America, et al. We talked about the Sharpesville Massacre in South Africa, about Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.
In Cultural Anthropology, we studied Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography of his Kikuyu tribe. Outside of class we were enthralled by the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya, guerrilla fighters who attacked the European colonialists and the reactionary colonial elite who resisted the call for independence. "They" say the Mau Mau had to kill more African resisters to independence than Europeans.
In order to extricate North American Africans from this American matrix, quagmire, conundrum of tricknology, lies, fake news, world of make believe Hollywood CIA propaganda films, arresting our development, keeping us on the low information vibration, we must confront our domestic neo-colonial elite, if necessary with the Mau Mau model. See my Parable of Black Man and Block Man.
Imagine the Catholic Church has sexual psychopathic priests abusing children. Aw, we say the Black Culture Police are even worse, Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, et al., moral hypocrites. I was a moral hypocrite once. I spoke at Berkeley High School about Crack addiction. A few days later I was buying Crack in North Oakland. The youth selling me the Crack recognized me from his class at Berkeley High, "Hey teach, wasn't you in my class at Berkeley High talking against Crack? How could I lie? I was busted. I vowed to myself to never be a contradiction. From reading my critics, I know I am my worse critic. I seem to learn best by experience. At OCC we also studied the writings of Ho Chi Minh, leader of the North Vietnam national liberation movement. We saw our struggle and theirs as one international movement for the nation liberation of oppressed peoples. Not only did our peer group independent study sessions include dialouge on the Cuban revolution and the writings of Che Guevara. We especially like Fidel Castro's court speech History Will Absolve Me!
Malcolm X was our hero on the West Coast, not Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, although we connected with student Rights workers in SNCC, Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Toure, John Lewis, H. Rap Brown/Imam Jamil Alamin, Kathleen Neal Cleaver.
The Afro American Association sold sweat shirts with revolutionary fighter Jomo Kenyatfta on the front. Kenya won independence 1963. The AAA rapped on the streets of the Bay Area, from Oakland to San Francisco's Fillmore District, usually on corners, speaking on liberation, cultural consciousness and do for self economics. Aside from students, the AAA had some heavy minds, intellectuals, lawyers: Donald Hopkins, Fred and Mary Lewis, Henry Ramsey and Eleanor Mason, Paul Cobb, Ed Howard, et al. It may have been too many great minds in one space that was the ultimate undoing of the AAA. Khalid was charismatic, for sure, and a great speaker. He was humorous. I recall him saying if you can make the people laugh, you got your audience.
Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour and the Afro American Association was critical to the spread of revolutionary Black and African consciousness in the Bay Area. We must give thanks and praise for the AAA, from which the Black Panther Party leaders were nourished; the West Coast Black Arts Movement evolved from the AAA influence that impressed Marvin X, Judy Juanita, Ellendar Barnes and others who were budding artists and writers. Surely the AAA inspired the call for Black Studies, along with students who were not associated with the AAA, although the AAA's influence was pervasive. Revolutionary students, inspired by the AAA and the explosive world revolution for national liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism, when the colonial elite take power without decolonizing their Euro-African minds, connected with the national black student revolution, from SNCC in the South to RAM in the North. RAM or Revolutionary Action Movement was founded by Robert F. Williams, North Carolina NAACP leader who believed in arm self defense (see his classic Negroes With Guns). Max Stanford/Muhammad Ahmad was a co-leader from Philadelphia, helped organize RAM at Howard University, connecting RAM with SNCC in the South. At OCC RAM had members and associates who helped publish SoulBook, Edited by Kenny Freeman/Mamadou Lumumba, Donald Freeman (Kenney's brother, although there is another revolutionary brother Donald Freeman of Cleveland, Ohio. Other editors included Isaac Moore, Ernest Allen, Caroll Holmes Freeman, Bob Hamilton. My first published story won a prize in the Merritt Student Magazine, actually I won a prize for Delicate Child, and Soulbook published it. Growing in Marxism and black revolutionary nationalist thought, the AAA was not a place for Soulbook people, so they/we moved on. Donald Warden held us in his tender caring arms until we could walk on and we did. Thank you Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour for your leadership. Thank you for your talks on Black and African consciousness on radio stations KDIA and KPFA. Thank you helping brothers in San Quentin Prison, at the request of Malcolm X. We were among the seven thousand students outside Sproul Hall when Malcolm X addressed seven thousand students.
Maulana Ron Karenga was the Los Angeles representative of the AAA. AAA member Ed Howard says Kwanza came from Oakland. Mother MrcKenya is said to have produced the first Kwanza ceremony in Oakland.
At some point Donald Warden converted to Islam, in fact, became a lawyer for OPEC, the oil cartel, then a lawyer for the Saudi Arabian royal family. At the direction of the Saudi Royal family, Khalid is said to have steered Barack Hassien Obama into Harvard. Khalid wrote many books you can Google.
Our last interaction with Khalid was 1979 at the Oakland Auditorium, a rally to protest the OPD killing of 15 year old, Melvin Black, actually they were killing a Black monthly, until they killed my close friend's Melvin Black. While teaching English, Creative Writing and Technical Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno and Nevada Community College, I read the San Francisco Chronicle Newspaper to keep up on events in the Bay. One morning I looked at the SF Chronicle to see another killing of a Black man by the OPD. I threw the paper down in disgust, but later I turned to the back page to finish the article and their was a picture of my close friend and best Elementary Arabic student, Mustafa/Lawrence McKinney, along with his sister Charla Black, outside Oakland City Hall protesting the OPD murder under the color of law of their 15 year old brother Melvin Black.
We formed a planning committee for the rally. Speakers included Minister Farakhan as featured speaker, along with Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Cobb, Dezzie Woods Jones, Jo Nina Abram, Oba T'Shaka, et al. The rally was from noon to midnight, five thousand attended. Journalist Edith Austin wrote about the rally in her Sun Reporter column, said it was without incident.
But let me give you the untold story. We were behind schedule and running late, it was ten o'clock when Minister Farakhan sent an FOI with a message to come to the Green Room. 'When I got there, the Minister said, "Marvin, if you don't get Khalid off the mike, I'm leaving for Chicago right now."
"Yes, Sir, Brother Minister," I said. As MC, I went up on stage and gently grabbed the mike from Khalid who had been rambling on and on about a Wakandan style state in South Africa. Minister Farakhan came on stage with his entourage, Minister Khalid Muhammd, Minister Billy X/Rabb Muhammad.It was the last time I saw Khalid Muhammad Tariq Al Mansour.
--Mavin X/El Muhajir
8/19/18
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2012
A Dialogue on the Afro American Association
'Arif Khatib is the main host of this show, a discussion of the historic Afro American Association in Oakland. Arif, Donald Warden, aka Dr. Mansour, and Oakland Post Publisher Paul Cobb were founders of this organization, along with Ed Howard, Donald Hopkins, Henry Ramsey et al.
This program features the living legend Donald Warden, aka Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour,
Paul Cobb, publisher of the Oakland Post and founding member of the African American Association along with Donald Warden. One of the hosts is Afrif Khatib, also a founding member of the AAA.
This organization was the pivotal group that gave black consciousness to students at Oakland's Merritt College, including Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Ernie Allen, Mamadou Lumumba, aka Kenny Freeman, and Marvin X. The AAA thus influenced the founding of the Black Panther Party, Black Studies and the Black Arts Movement. Maulana Ron Karenga was the Los Angeles representative of the AAA. The Kwanza ritual came out of the AAA in Oakland.
A white view of Dr. Khalid
A native of Texas, Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour earned a bachelor's degree from Howard University and a law degree from UC Berkeley. Today he is an attorney who has sat on numerous corporate boards, including those of the Saudi African Bank and the Chicago-based LaGray Chemical Company. Mansour made headlines in 2008 when it was revealed that he had formerly been a patron of a young Barack Obama, whom he recommended for admission to Harvard Law School in 1988.
It is likely that the two first met at Columbia University in the early 1980s, when Obama was a student there and Mansour was a guest lecturer.
Before converting to Islam, Mansour (whose original name was Don Warden) was heavily involved in San Francisco Bay Area racial politics as founder of the African American Association in the early 1960s. He also served as a personal mentor to Huey Newton andBobby Seale, helping the pair establish the Black Panther Party; a subsequent falling-out, however, caused Mansour to end his association with them.
In the mid-1970s, Mansour met and became an advisor to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Tatal, who today is best known for having offered a $10 million donation toward 9/11 relief efforts in 2001 – an offer that was rejected by New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani when the prince suggested that the terrorist attacks were an indication that America “should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.” Not long after meeting the prince, Mansour in 1977 was introduced to the king of Saudi Arabia and became his attorney.
A friend of the late professor Edward Said, Mansour -- a black nationalist -- is an outspoken hater of the United States, Israel, and white people generally. In recent years he has accused the U.S. of plotting a "genocide" designed "to remove 15 million black people, considered disposable, of no relevance, value or benefit to the American society." He has told fellow blacks: "Whatever you do to [white people], they deserve it, God wants you to do it, and that's whether you cut off the nose, cut off the ears, take flesh out of their body, don't worry. God wants you to do that." Alleging further that Palestinians in Israel "are being brutalized like savages," he accuses Israel's Jews of "stealing the land the same way the Christians stole the land from the Indians in America."
Mansour's has written numerous books, including such titles as The Destruction of Western Civilization as Seen Through Islam and Will the West Rule Forever?
Obama and Al-Mansour:
Another Radical Connection
What is the connection between Obama and Al-Mansour?
Much has been reported recently about the long list of Barack Obama's questionable relationships, and how they affect his qualifications to be President of the United States. They also reflect his judgment and tell us a lot about who he is.
It is true that like attracts like. We tend to gravitate towards other people who share our beliefs and values. We all know that from our own lives. That's especially troubling in the case of Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama.
Update: At the bottom of this article, you will find a 2012 update.
We wrote earlier that because of just one of those relationships, Barack Obama could not pass the background investigationrequired for members of "The President's Own" Marine Band!" Yet millions of Americans want to trust him with our country's most sensitive classified information.
So we continue our exploration of Barack Obama and his radical connections.
Many have asked who or what is behind Senator Barack Obama's meteoric rise onto the national political stage. It seems odd to many people that someone with so few "real" accomplishments could be so quickly propelled to status as a major party nominee for President.
Jack Cashill, at WorldNetDaily.com wonders if perhaps that meteoric rise could be attributed to "an affluent and unseen political godfather, someone with a grander vision than Bill Ayers or Tony Rezko." That certainly sounds like a plausibleexplanation. The question we have is this: Is there only one?
There have been many stories about wealthy Obama supporters including billionaire George Soros, David Geffen, and others.
Whether one or more, it is possible one of Barack Obama's "political godfathers" is Khalid Al-Mansour.
Who is Al-Mansour?
Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, describes himself as "an internationally acknowledged adviser to heads of state and business leaders in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America."
"Although many Americans have never heard of Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour (his full name), he is well known within the black community as a lawyer, an orthodox Muslim, a black nationalist, an author, an international deal-maker, an educator, and an outspoken enemy of Israel.
A graduate of Howard University with a law degree from the University of California [Berkeley], al-Mansour sits on numerous corporate boards, including the Saudi African Bank and Chicago-based LaGray Chemical Co. LaGray, which was formed to do business in Africa, counts former Nigerian President General Abdusalam Abubakar on its advisory board.
He also sits on the board of the non-profit African Leadership Academy, along with top McCain for President adviser Carly Fiorina, and organized a tribute to the President of Ghana at the Clinton White House in 1995, along with pop star Michael Jackson.
But his writings and books are packed with anti-American rhetoricreminiscent of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s disgraced former pastor."
Born Donald Warden, al-Mansour changed his name after studying Islam and learning Arabic. Said al-Mansour, "I found that Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, if you put ’em together, it means that, if I’m eternally the slave of God, and I follow the right path, I will always be victorious. I liked that. So that became my name.'
During his days at Berkeley, Donald Warden served as a mentor to young Black Panthers Huey Newton and Donald Seale.
According to Timmerman:
"Al-Mansour’s rise to fame and fortune began with an introduction to the Saudi king in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1977.
'I was asked by a Saudi friend – he was a student down in Newport (Calif.) – to go home with him to Riyadh,' al-Mansour told Newsmax.
His friend was a member of the royal family and planned to ask the king for money to help with his studies in the United States. But the king was in no mood to be generous.
'He was mad. And then my friend told me that the basis of his anger was that OPEC was being sued," al-Mansour said. 'This was a very nasty conspiracy that involved some of the biggest respected political names in America. The king didn’t know all of that, but he knew he wasn’t happy.'
Al-Mansour’s friend told the king he (Al-Mansour) was a lawyer. 'The King didn’t know if I was a good lawyer or bad lawyer, but said, 'Will you do it?' I said, 'I’d have to study it.' He said, 'Just take it, and get out!''
The king required that only one lawyer represent the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. 'So you win or you lose, based on the outcome because no one’s going to listen to any excuses. You’re either a loser for life, or a winner for life,' al-Mansour said.
Al-Mansour was a winner – big time.
. . .
He met and befriended Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the world’s 19th-wealthiest person, when the prince was studying at Menlo College in California in the late 1970s. Al-Mansour’s law partner was representing the prince in a court case in California.
After getting a degree in business administration from Menlo in 1979, Prince Alwaleed went back to Saudi Arabia determined to become extremely successful, al-Mansour recalled.
The two began to work together, and the prince asked him to help him invest in Africa. 'He said, let’s make our focus turning Africa around. He has never told me until today where this idea came from, but it became an obsession.'
Al-Mansour says he and the prince flew from country to country as he introduced the prince to heads of state. 'It was easy for me, because I knew all the presidents.'"[How?]
So where did Al-Mansour run into Barack Obama?
The only reports we've been able to locate speculate that the two may have met at Columbia, when Obama was a student there and Al-Mansour was a guest lecturer. Obama refuses to discuss anything about his days at Columbia. There is also speculation that he may have met Williams Ayers there as well.
Timmerman says:
"Asked specifically whether he had 'spotted' Barack Obama while he was an undergraduate at Columbia as a promising student he wanted to help get into Harvard Law School, al-Mansour pleaded a faulty memory.
'I give a lot of speeches on college campuses, in the US and abroad. So I meet people all the time…. But I can’t say that I remember that.'"
Last March, one-time New York City mayoral candidate Percy Sutton recalled that Al-Mansour contacted him some 20 years ago to write a letter of recommendation to support the admission of a young man named Barack Obama to Harvard Law school. Sutton says Al-Mansour thought perhaps a letter from Sutton would carry more weight because Sutton was a frequent lecturer there.
Sutton did so, and said he believed that Al-Mansour was also raising money to help support Obama's education.
↧
In Memoriam: Notes on Oakland Afro American Association founder, Attorney Donald Warden, aka Khalid Abdullah Tariq al Mansour, mentor of the Black Panthers
His Black Consciousness Program
Rocked the Bay Area like no other
black panthers black arts black studies kwanza
Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour
AKA, Attorney Donald Warden
January 1, 1936--December 15, 2016
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January 1, 1936--December 15, 2016
El Muhajir/Marvin X:
Thank you for all of this important history!! Of course I grew up listening to Bro. Khalid (Donald Warden) on Sunday evenings broadcast from his Afro American Historical Society on KDIA. When I entered Berkeley, I frequently saw him and Donald Hopkins in academic and social settings. After he converted to Islam, he came to Sacramento in the early 90s to lecture and offer evidence to the African American Muslim community of the presence of Africans in ancient Arabia. The last time I saw him was in the 2000s at Yoshi’s when Pharoah Sanders was performing. He was walking swiftly past the restaurant and i didn’t get a chance to greet him. May this Giant Rest In Peace and Power.
--Fahizah Alim
Marvin X and his Muse, Fahizah Alim
When I graduated from Edison High School, Fresno CA, 1962, I wanted to attend Howard
University. When I came to Oakland and told my father, he suggested I go see his friend, Oakland Post Publisher Tom Berkley. When I told Tom my desire, he told me to forget about Howard, you don't need to go to Howard, we have good schools out here. I forgot about Howard and enrolled at Oakland City College, aka, Merritt College, on Grove Street, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave.
University. When I came to Oakland and told my father, he suggested I go see his friend, Oakland Post Publisher Tom Berkley. When I told Tom my desire, he told me to forget about Howard, you don't need to go to Howard, we have good schools out here. I forgot about Howard and enrolled at Oakland City College, aka, Merritt College, on Grove Street, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave.
By the time I graduated from OCC, I had to admit maybe Tom Berkley was right, especially after I was initiated into revolutionary black nationalism that I would carry with me to San Francisco State College/University and beyond for the remainder of my life. en
But unlike Howard, there were few Black instructors and no Black Studies. My Black consciousness came from listening to brothers and sisters rapping on the steps of OCC. Rapping was not beats and rhymes, but extemporaneous speaking on revolution by a variety of speakers, including Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Ernie Allen, Maurice Dawson, Richard Thorne, and Attorney Donald Warden, head of the Afro American Association.
I was fascinated at the brothers rapping. I don't recall sisters rapping but sisters were involved. There was Ann Williams, partner of Richard Thorne. Richard Thorne introduced me to Huey Newton. Carol Freeman, Mississippi poet, married to Ken Freeman, aka, Mamadou Lumumba. Sisters Ellendar Barnes, Judy Juanita, and others whose names I can't recall. There were elder sisters like Mother McKenya, Mother Ruth Hagwood, et al.
From the steps of the college, the rap sessions would move to a campus room for an AAA meeting, or across the street to a greasy spoon .cafe for hamburgers, fries, milkshakes and more rapping. From the cafe we might gather in a fellow student's room. From the steps of OCC, AAA meetings, greasy spoon cafe sessions and meetings in our rooms, we had non-credit independent peer group study, discoursing on black nationalism, the black bourgeoisie (Dr. E. Franklin Frazier), Dr. Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, the writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. We discussed Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Congo, assassinated by African neo-colonialists at the behest of the West, Belgium, America, et al. We talked about the Sharpesville Massacre in South Africa, about Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.
In Cultural Anthropology, we studied Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography of his Kikuyu tribe. Outside of class we were enthralled by the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya, guerrilla fighters who attacked the European colonialists and the reactionary colonial elite who resisted the call for independence. "They" say the Mau Mau had to kill more African resisters to independence than Europeans.
In order to extricate North American Africans from this American matrix, quagmire, conundrum of tricknology, lies, fake news, world of make believe Hollywood CIA propaganda films, arresting our development, keeping us on the low information vibration, we must confront our domestic neo-colonial elite, if necessary with the Mau Mau model. See my Parable of Black Man and Block Man.
Imagine the Catholic Church has sexual psychopathic priests abusing children. Aw, we say the Black Culture Police are even worse, Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, et al., moral hypocrites. I was a moral hypocrite once. I spoke at Berkeley High School about Crack addiction. A few days later I was buying Crack in North Oakland. The youth selling me the Crack recognized me from his class at Berkeley High, "Hey teach, wasn't you in my class at Berkeley High talking against Crack? How could I lie? I was busted. I vowed to myself to never be a contradiction. From reading my critics, I know I am my worse critic. I seem to learn best by experience. At OCC we also studied the writings of Ho Chi Minh, leader of the North Vietnam national liberation movement. We saw our struggle and theirs as one international movement for the nation liberation of oppressed peoples. Not only did our peer group independent study sessions include dialouge on the Cuban revolution and the writings of Che Guevara. We especially like Fidel Castro's court speech History Will Absolve Me!
Malcolm X was our hero on the West Coast, not Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, although we connected with student Rights workers in SNCC, Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Toure, John Lewis, H. Rap Brown/Imam Jamil Alamin, Kathleen Neal Cleaver.
The Afro American Association sold sweat shirts with revolutionary fighter Jomo Kenyatfta on the front. Kenya won independence 1963. The AAA rapped on the streets of the Bay Area, from Oakland to San Francisco's Fillmore District, usually on corners, speaking on liberation, cultural consciousness and do for self economics. Aside from students, the AAA had some heavy minds, intellectuals, lawyers: Donald Hopkins, Fred and Mary Lewis, Henry Ramsey and Eleanor Mason, Paul Cobb, Ed Howard, et al. It may have been too many great minds in one space that was the ultimate undoing of the AAA. Khalid was charismatic, for sure, and a great speaker. He was humorous. I recall him saying if you can make the people laugh, you got your audience.
Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour and the Afro American Association was critical to the spread of revolutionary Black and African consciousness in the Bay Area. We must give thanks and praise for the AAA, from which the Black Panther Party leaders were nourished; the West Coast Black Arts Movement evolved from the AAA influence that impressed Marvin X, Judy Juanita, Ellendar Barnes and others who were budding artists and writers. Surely the AAA inspired the call for Black Studies, along with students who were not associated with the AAA, although the AAA's influence was pervasive. Revolutionary students, inspired by the AAA and the explosive world revolution for national liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism, when the colonial elite take power without decolonizing their Euro-African minds, connected with the national black student revolution, from SNCC in the South to RAM in the North. RAM or Revolutionary Action Movement was founded by Robert F. Williams, North Carolina NAACP leader who believed in arm self defense (see his classic Negroes With Guns). Max Stanford/Muhammad Ahmad was a co-leader from Philadelphia, helped organize RAM at Howard University, connecting RAM with SNCC in the South. At OCC RAM had members and associates who helped publish SoulBook, Edited by Kenny Freeman/Mamadou Lumumba, Donald Freeman (Kenney's brother, although there is another revolutionary brother Donald Freeman of Cleveland, Ohio. Other editors included Isaac Moore, Ernest Allen, Caroll Holmes Freeman, Bob Hamilton. My first published story won a prize in the Merritt Student Magazine, actually I won a prize for Delicate Child, and Soulbook published it. Growing in Marxism and black revolutionary nationalist thought, the AAA was not a place for Soulbook people, so they/we moved on. Donald Warden held us in his tender caring arms until we could walk on and we did. Thank you Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour for your leadership. Thank you for your talks on Black and African consciousness on radio stations KDIA and KPFA. Thank you helping brothers in San Quentin Prison, at the request of Malcolm X. We were among the seven thousand students outside Sproul Hall when Malcolm X addressed seven thousand students.
Maulana Ron Karenga was the Los Angeles representative of the AAA. AAA member Ed Howard says Kwanza came from Oakland. Mother MrcKenya is said to have produced the first Kwanza ceremony in Oakland.
At some point Donald Warden converted to Islam, in fact, became a lawyer for OPEC, the oil cartel, then a lawyer for the Saudi Arabian royal family. At the direction of the Saudi Royal family, Khalid is said to have steered Barack Hassien Obama into Harvard. Khalid wrote many books you can Google.
Our last interaction with Khalid was 1979 at the Oakland Auditorium, a rally to protest the OPD killing of 15 year old, Melvin Black, actually they were killing a Black monthly, until they killed my close friend's Melvin Black. While teaching English, Creative Writing and Technical Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno and Nevada Community College, I read the San Francisco Chronicle Newspaper to keep up on events in the Bay. One morning I looked at the SF Chronicle to see another killing of a Black man by the OPD. I threw the paper down in disgust, but later I turned to the back page to finish the article and their was a picture of my close friend and best Elementary Arabic student, Mustafa/Lawrence McKinney, along with his sister Charla Black, outside Oakland City Hall protesting the OPD murder under the color of law of their 15 year old brother Melvin Black.
We formed a planning committee for the rally. Speakers included Minister Farakhan as featured speaker, along with Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Monsa Nitoto, Paul Cobb, Dezzie Woods Jones, Jo Nina Abram, Oba T'Shaka, et al. The rally was from noon to midnight, five thousand attended. Journalist Edith Austin wrote about the rally in her Sun Reporter column, said it was without incident.
But let me give you the untold story. We were behind schedule and running late, it was ten o'clock when Minister Farakhan sent an FOI with a message to come to the Green Room. 'When I got there, the Minister said, "Marvin, if you don't get Khalid off the mike, I'm leaving for Chicago right now."
"Yes, Sir, Brother Minister," I said. As MC, I went up on stage and gently grabbed the mike from Khalid who had been rambling on and on about a Wakandan style state in South Africa. Minister Farakhan came on stage with his entourage, Minister Khalid Muhammd, Minister Billy X/Rabb Muhammad.Khalid departed the stage. I handed the mike to Minister Farakhan. It was the last time I saw Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour.
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Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour speaking at the 1979 Melvin Black Forum on Human Rights at the Oakland Auditorium, attended by 5,000 folks to protest the OPD monthly killing of Black men in Oakland. He went off focus about a Pan African Republic, sounded like the Kingdom of Wakanda, but inside South Africa? No matter, we love you Khalid and may Allah be pleased with you.
--Mavin X/El Muhajir
8/19/18
This essay will appear in the forthcoming Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X, Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Bird Press, Oakland CA., Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, PhD., 2018.
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Marvin X reading from his play Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam, about his last meeting with Huey in a West Oakland Crack House, Odell Johnson Theatre, Laney College, Oakland CA.
photo
This essay will appear in the forthcoming Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X, Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Bird Press, Oakland CA., Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, PhD., 2018.
Marvin X reading from his play Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam, about his last meeting with Huey in a West Oakland Crack House, Odell Johnson Theatre, Laney College, Oakland CA.
photo
↧
↧
When God speaks to you
Left to right: Marvin X's son, Ancestor Abdul El Muhajir, aka, Darrell Jackmon; MX's father Owendell Jackmon I (RIP), and Marvin K. Jackmon, Hakim El Muhajir, oldest child.
When God speaks to you
His name won't matter
Allah, God, Jesus, Jehovah, Jah, Krishna, Nigga
but you will know it is God
for the wisdom He spits into your ears
so powerful, you know for sure
it is the voice of God/Allah
Sami Allahu liman hamida
God hears those who praise Him
Rabbana laka al hamd
Our Lord to Thee is due all praise!
God speaks through men and women
God/Allah appears in the person of man
speaking loud clear in your ears
Today God/Allah spoke,
"Your son is a martyr. He died the death of a martyr."
SHAHID
This was shocking to me, rocking my world
a puzzle
it putting his life in the sacred space of my mind heart soul
special child
far beyond the crowd
took my travels higher
he went to
Egypt, Jerusalem, Damascus, London
Brazil Japan
then he was gone to eternity at 39.
I am so grateful for the 39 years I knew him
I couldn't understand why he walked into a train
manic depression
white man drugs depression
situational disorder oppression
God/Allah told me today he entered martyrdom
I am satisfied.
warrior son
martyrdom
As-salaam-Alaikum.
--Marvin X/El Muhajir
7/21/18
↧
In Memoriam: Notes on Oakland Afro American Association founder, Attorney Donald Warden, aka Khalid Abdullah Tariq al Mansour, mentor of the Black Panthers
His Black Consciousness Program
Rocked the Bay Area like no other
black panthers black arts black studies kwanza
Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour
AKA, Attorney Donald Warden
January 1, 1936--December 15, 2016
Comments from the people on Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour
Marvin -Wonderful historic overview of those important times - thanks for continuing to chronicle our history.
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January 1, 1936--December 15, 2016
Comments from the people on Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour
Marvin -Wonderful historic overview of those important times - thanks for continuing to chronicle our history.
Dezie Woods Jones
BWOPA
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BWOPA
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Marvin,
My career started with the shooting death of Melvin Black where I concluded that the shooting was wrongful. Like most I listened to Don Warden aka Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour every Sunday evening. The last time I spoke with him which was 5 to 7 years ago, I told him that his words and deeds were an inspiration for my career as a lawyer representing people abused by the police and various radio programs that I have hosted. Long live his memory in our minds and hearts.
John Burris
Brother Marvin,
Thank you for the thoughtful tribute to Khalid Al Mansour . I had the unique opportunity to be present during the formative time of the Afro-American Association while attending Oakland City College in 1961-1963. Although, I have no pictures or documents to share, there is yet an abiding place in my heart and soul filled with powerful and positive images of this most trans formative period in my life. The AAA discussion meetings, debates and street corner speeches by Khalid Al Man-sour and others awakened me and set my life on a different path toward personal growth and development. I am grateful for the consciousness-raising experiences that helped inform my educational and career decisions which always included the thought of how my actions could benefit my family and my community. My involvement in the Movement expanded my vision beyond the few blocks in West Oakland where I grew up. I give thanks to Khalid Al Mansour, the AAA, and all the sisters and brothers of the SF Bay Area civil rights and Black Nationalist movements who helped raise my social and cultural awareness, stimulated my intellectual curiosity and made me a better person. What we all experienced is worthy to be remembered, valued and shared with the generations of now and those that follow. Peace
--Ann Williams Willis
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I still have the papers of the Association that were written in the 1960s. Some of the Association's philosophy came froleft out the 7th keym several other people besides Khalid, including some from the original 12 members of the "book club", which evolved into the Association.
A few of us are planning to have some sort of gathering to express the legacy of the Association, probably within 6 months. Time is needed to collect as much info as possible and get the word out to as many people as possible.
I am writing a book about the Association because many of us are very old. This book will contain some information; but no one book could contain all information about the Association. Each attendee has his/her perspective and memory about this vital organization. Originally I did not want to write this book because I knew we were still being watched. An example: Loye Cherry introduced Roger Holmes to the Association and Don. Roger and John Anderson at San Jose State College in 1968 presented "Black is Becoming" conference, where Don debated Shockley (who stated that Black people were inferior). Others on the panel included Mr. Forman of CORE, Al Poussaint. However Don stole the audience with his excellent debating skills. Roger went on to attend law school at Santa Clara University. While attending this school, Roger played tennis with a young man who he found out was a Prince in Kuwait. Roger told Don and they shortly thereafter got involved with the Arabs. Roger and Don became law partners. Both changed their names. I could go on and on. Don and Roger left out the 7th key....the dark side. We always used RISEPE; but I added the dark side. OPEC is controlled. The Saudi Family was enhanced by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s, under the condition of controlling the oil in exchange for protection. The darkness continues. Another ex.: Knorvel Cherry was responsible for getting McClymonds to allow the Association to hold the "Mind of the Ghetto" Conferences in 1963 (Malcolm X) and 1964 (Cassius Clay). Knorvel also got Tillman to to produce the Association's newspaper in 1964.
Anyway, my book is being reviewed.
Please, gather whatever information you have, so we can share our information with each other.
Thank you,
Lee O. Cherry
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Very missed. Dr. Al-Mansour took personal interest in my international pursuits back in the 90's. I remember receiving a call from him on a Sunday evening back in 1998 and saying to meet him in the lobby of the Shangrila Hotel in Kuala Lumpur that Wednesday. I scrambled things together and made it. Although many influential people also arrived there from various parts of the world, he was quite attentive to my needs and introduced me to the Chariman of Renong Berhad, Tan Sri Halim Saad. That company was responsible for, what was at that time the tallest building in the world, Petronas Towers. Everything went well and if not for the fact that just 2 months later, the Asia money crisis hit, the project I was developing in China would have become a reality.
His books opened my interest in ancient African history, and his contribution to the Black world was enormous.
--Barry Pierce
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Very missed. Dr. Al-Mansour took personal interest in my international pursuits back in the 90's. I remember receiving a call from him on a Sunday evening back in 1998 and saying to meet him in the lobby of the Shangrila Hotel in Kuala Lumpur that Wednesday. I scrambled things together and made it. Although many influential people also arrived there from various parts of the world, he was quite attentive to my needs and introduced me to the Chariman of Renong Berhad, Tan Sri Halim Saad. That company was responsible for, what was at that time the tallest building in the world, Petronas Towers. Everything went well and if not for the fact that just 2 months later, the Asia money crisis hit, the project I was developing in China would have become a reality.
His books opened my interest in ancient African history, and his contribution to the Black world was enormous.
--Barry Pierce
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El Muhajir/Marvin X:
Thank you for all of this important history!! Of course I grew up listening to Bro. Khalid (Donald Warden) on Sunday evenings broadcast from his Afro American Historical Society on KDIA. When I entered Berkeley, I frequently saw him and Donald Hopkins in academic and social settings. After he converted to Islam, he came to Sacramento in the early 90s to lecture and offer evidence to the African American Muslim community of the presence of Africans in ancient Arabia. The last time I saw him was in the 2000s at Yoshi’s when Pharoah Sanders was performing. He was walking swiftly past the restaurant and i didn’t get a chance to greet him. May this Giant Rest In Peace and Power.
--Fahizah Alim
Marvin X and his Muse, Fahizah Alim
When I graduated from Edison High School, Fresno CA, 1962, I wanted to attend Howard
University. When I came to Oakland and told my father, he suggested I go see his friend, Oakland Post Publisher Tom Berkley. When I told Tom my desire, he told me to forget about Howard, you don't need to go to Howard, we have good schools out here. I forgot about Howard and enrolled at Oakland City College, aka, Merritt College, on Grove Street, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave.
University. When I came to Oakland and told my father, he suggested I go see his friend, Oakland Post Publisher Tom Berkley. When I told Tom my desire, he told me to forget about Howard, you don't need to go to Howard, we have good schools out here. I forgot about Howard and enrolled at Oakland City College, aka, Merritt College, on Grove Street, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave.
By the time I graduated from OCC, I had to admit maybe Tom Berkley was right, especially after I was initiated into revolutionary black nationalism that I would carry with me to San Francisco State College/University and beyond for the remainder of my life. en
But unlike Howard, there were few Black instructors and no Black Studies. My Black consciousness came from listening to brothers and sisters rapping on the steps of OCC. Rapping was not beats and rhymes, but extemporaneous speaking on revolution by a variety of speakers, including Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Ernie Allen, Maurice Dawson, Richard Thorne, and Attorney Donald Warden, head of the Afro American Association.
I was fascinated at the brothers rapping. I don't recall sisters rapping but sisters were involved. There was Ann Williams, partner of Richard Thorne. Richard Thorne introduced me to Huey Newton. Carol Freeman, Mississippi poet, married to Ken Freeman, aka, Mamadou Lumumba. Sisters Ellendar Barnes, Judy Juanita, and others whose names I can't recall. There were elder sisters like Mother McKenya, Mother Ruth Hagwood, et al.
From the steps of the college, the rap sessions would move to a campus room for an AAA meeting, or across the street to a greasy spoon .cafe for hamburgers, fries, milkshakes and more rapping. From the cafe we might gather in a fellow student's room. From the steps of OCC, AAA meetings, greasy spoon cafe sessions and meetings in our rooms, we had non-credit independent peer group study, discoursing on black nationalism, the black bourgeoisie (Dr. E. Franklin Frazier), Dr. Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, the writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. We discussed Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Congo, assassinated by African neo-colonialists at the behest of the West, Belgium, America, et al. We talked about the Sharpesville Massacre in South Africa, about Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.
In Cultural Anthropology, we studied Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography of his Kikuyu tribe. Outside of class we were enthralled by the Mau Mau fighters in Kenya, guerrilla fighters who attacked the European colonialists and the reactionary colonial elite who resisted the call for independence. "They" say the Mau Mau had to kill more African resisters to independence than Europeans.
In order to extricate North American Africans from this American matrix, quagmire, conundrum of tricknology, lies, fake news, world of make believe Hollywood CIA propaganda films, arresting our development, keeping us on the low information vibration, we must confront our domestic neo-colonial elite, if necessary with the Mau Mau model. See my Parable of Black Man and Block Man.
Imagine the Catholic Church has sexual psychopathic priests abusing children. Aw, we say the Black Culture Police are even worse, Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, et al., moral hypocrites. I was a moral hypocrite once. I spoke at Berkeley High School about Crack addiction. A few days later I was buying Crack in North Oakland. The youth selling me the Crack recognized me from his class at Berkeley High, "Hey teach, wasn't you in my class at Berkeley High talking against Crack? How could I lie? I was busted. I vowed to myself to never be a contradiction. From reading my critics, I know I am my worse critic. I seem to learn best by experience. At OCC we also studied the writings of Ho Chi Minh, leader of the North Vietnam national liberation movement. We saw our struggle and theirs as one international movement for the nation liberation of oppressed peoples. Not only did our peer group independent study sessions include dialouge on the Cuban revolution and the writings of Che Guevara. We especially like Fidel Castro's court speech History Will Absolve Me!
Malcolm X was our hero on the West Coast, not Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, although we connected with student Rights workers in SNCC, Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Toure, John Lewis, H. Rap Brown/Imam Jamil Alamin, Kathleen Neal Cleaver.
The Afro American Association sold sweat shirts with revolutionary fighter Jomo Kenyatfta on the front. Kenya won independence 1963. The AAA rapped on the streets of the Bay Area, from Oakland to San Francisco's Fillmore District, usually on corners, speaking on liberation, cultural consciousness and do for self economics. Aside from students, the AAA had some heavy minds, intellectuals, lawyers: Donald Hopkins, Fred and Mary Lewis, Henry Ramsey and Eleanor Mason, Paul Cobb, Ed Howard, et al. It may have been too many great minds in one space that was the ultimate undoing of the AAA. Khalid was charismatic, for sure, and a great speaker. He was humorous. I recall him saying if you can make the people laugh, you got your audience.
Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour and the Afro American Association was critical to the spread of revolutionary Black and African consciousness in the Bay Area. We must give thanks and praise for the AAA, from which the Black Panther Party leaders were nourished; the West Coast Black Arts Movement evolved from the AAA influence that impressed Marvin X, Judy Juanita, Ellendar Barnes and others who were budding artists and writers. Surely the AAA inspired the call for Black Studies, along with students who were not associated with the AAA, although the AAA's influence was pervasive. Revolutionary students, inspired by the AAA and the explosive world revolution for national liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism, when the colonial elite take power without decolonizing their Euro-African minds, connected with the national black student revolution, from SNCC in the South to RAM in the North. RAM or Revolutionary Action Movement was founded by Robert F. Williams, North Carolina NAACP leader who believed in arm self defense (see his classic Negroes With Guns). Max Stanford/Muhammad Ahmad was a co-leader from Philadelphia, helped organize RAM at Howard University, connecting RAM with SNCC in the South. At OCC RAM had members and associates who helped publish SoulBook, Edited by Kenny Freeman/Mamadou Lumumba, Donald Freeman (Kenney's brother, although there is another revolutionary brother Donald Freeman of Cleveland, Ohio. Other editors included Isaac Moore, Ernest Allen, Caroll Holmes Freeman, Bob Hamilton. My first published story won a prize in the Merritt Student Magazine, actually I won a prize for Delicate Child, and Soulbook published it. Growing in Marxism and black revolutionary nationalist thought, the AAA was not a place for Soulbook people, so they/we moved on. Donald Warden held us in his tender caring arms until we could walk on and we did. Thank you Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour for your leadership. Thank you for your talks on Black and African consciousness on radio stations KDIA and KPFA. Thank you helping brothers in San Quentin Prison, at the request of Malcolm X. We were among the seven thousand students outside Sproul Hall when Malcolm X addressed seven thousand students.
Maulana Ron Karenga was the Los Angeles representative of the AAA. AAA member Ed Howard says Kwanza came from Oakland. Mother MrcKenya is said to have produced the first Kwanza ceremony in Oakland.
At some point Donald Warden converted to Islam, in fact, became a lawyer for OPEC, the oil cartel, then a lawyer for the Saudi Arabian royal family. At the direction of the Saudi Royal family, Khalid is said to have steered Barack Hassien Obama into Harvard. Khalid wrote many books you can Google.
Our last interaction with Khalid was 1979 at the Oakland Auditorium, a rally to protest the OPD killing of 15 year old, Melvin Black, actually they were killing a Black monthly, until they killed my close friend's Melvin Black. While teaching English, Creative Writing and Technical Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno and Nevada Community College, I read the San Francisco Chronicle Newspaper to keep up on events in the Bay. One morning I looked at the SF Chronicle to see another killing of a Black man by the OPD. I threw the paper down in disgust, but later I turned to the back page to finish the article and their was a picture of my close friend and best Elementary Arabic student, Mustafa/Lawrence McKinney, along with his sister Charla Black, outside Oakland City Hall protesting the OPD murder under the color of law of their 15 year old brother Melvin Black.
We formed a planning committee for the rally. Speakers included Minister Farakhan as featured speaker, along with Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Monsa Nitoto, Paul Cobb, Dezzie Woods Jones, Jo Nina Abram, Oba T'Shaka, et al. The rally was from noon to midnight, five thousand attended. Journalist Edith Austin wrote about the rally in her Sun Reporter column, said it was without incident.
But let me give you the untold story. We were behind schedule and running late, it was ten o'clock when Minister Farakhan sent an FOI with a message to come to the Green Room. 'When I got there, the Minister said, "Marvin, if you don't get Khalid off the mike, I'm leaving for Chicago right now."
"Yes, Sir, Brother Minister," I said. As MC, I went up on stage and gently grabbed the mike from Khalid who had been rambling on and on about a Wakandan style state in South Africa. Minister Farakhan came on stage with his entourage, Minister Khalid Muhammd, Minister Billy X/Rabb Muhammad.Khalid departed the stage. I handed the mike to Minister Farakhan. It was the last time I saw Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour.
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Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al Mansour speaking at the 1979 Melvin Black Forum on Human Rights at the Oakland Auditorium, attended by 5,000 folks to protest the OPD monthly killing of Black men in Oakland. He went off focus about a Pan African Republic, sounded like the Kingdom of Wakanda, but inside South Africa? No matter, we love you Khalid and may Allah be pleased with you.
--Mavin X/El Muhajir
8/19/18
This essay will appear in the forthcoming Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X, Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Bird Press, Oakland CA., Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, PhD., 2018.
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Marvin X reading from his play Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam, about his last meeting with Huey in a West Oakland Crack House, Odell Johnson Theatre, Laney College, Oakland CA.
photo
This essay will appear in the forthcoming Notes of Artistic Freedom Fighter Marvin X, Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, Black Bird Press, Oakland CA., Introduction by Dr. Nathan Hare, PhD., 2018.
Marvin X reading from his play Salaam, Huey Newton, Salaam, about his last meeting with Huey in a West Oakland Crack House, Odell Johnson Theatre, Laney College, Oakland CA.
photo
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Prison Lyrics of Marvin X, 1970, in honor of the 2018 Black August National Prison Strike
In Honor of the Black August
National Prison Strike, 2018
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National Prison Strike, 2018
Marvin X: The Prison Lyrics, 1970
Marvin X underground in Harlem, NY, 1968.
photo Doug Harris
He was wanted by the FBI for refusing to fight in Vietnam. In Harlem he worked at the New Lafayette Theatre as Associate Editor of their Black Theatre Magazine. His Black Arts Movement associates included Amiri Baraka, Askia Toure, Sonia Sanchez, Sun Ra, Last Poets, Nikki Giovanni, Milford Graves, Haki Madhubuti, Ed Bullins, Robert Macbeth and the Lafayette Theatre family, Larry Neal, Mae Jackson, Barbara Ann Teer, et al.
His chapbook Fly To Allah is a seminal work of the BAM and Muslim American literature, according to Muslim American literature scholar, Dr. Mohja Kahf.
When he was captured returning from a visit to Montreal, Canada, after his release and knew his Harlem sojourn was ended, he penned the following poem before his departure for a court appearance in San Francisco.
Al Hajj Harlem
In sha-allah
I go from here
soon
studied theory practice of blackness
University of Harlem
greater than Timbuctu
farewell Harlem
Mecca of the West
saddened moved
smile
see my children
I am a child
rising taking control
I am moved to be here
a star
Allah's heaven
As Salaam Alaikum
wa rah matu llahi
wa barakatuh.
--Marvin X
After the court convicted and while awaiting sentencing, Marvin X went into his second exile (first was Toronto, Canada), this time to Mexico City and Belize, Central America, from which he was arrested for teaching Black Power and suspected of being a Communist. When the plane from Belize landed in Miami, Florida, he was taken to Dade County Jail, later Miami City Jail, then San Francisco County Jail and sentenced to five months at Terminal Island Federal Prison. He wrote the following lyrics while in San Francisco Country Jail and Terminal Island, 1970.
We are the revolutionaries!
In memory of James McClain, William Christmas and Jonathan Jackson. In their slave revolt of August 7, 1970, at the Marin County Courthouse, shouted, "We are the revolutionaries!"
We are the revolutionaries
Days go slow in here
don't let us out for air
can't even tell morning night
they read our mail
don't have no rights
try to make us feel less than man
don't work don't work
I know who I am
We are the revolutionaries
We are the revolutionaries
They got us down
not for long
feed us food fit for pigs
put us in cells with the insane
never go outside can't tell when it rains
nobody comes to see us, nobody seems to care
in spite of everything we hold on
We are the revolutionaries
jails filled with brothers black and brown
must be conspiracy to keep us down
won't work won't work won't work
gonna break out free the town
Can't make me feel less than man
bars mean nothing
I know who I am
Days go slow in here
don't let us out for air
what kind of people are these
really make you wonder
hurry Allah fire and water
Devils won't give up
til six feet under
We are the revolutionaries
We are the revolutionries
They got us down
not for long
power to the people death to the devil
power to the people death to the devil
We are the revolutionaries
We are the revolutionaries
We're going to make a new world for everybody
We're going to make a new world for everybody.
--Marvin X
Chained and Bound
for Luciano Marcellius 15X Bel-Lee, Terminal Island FOI Captain.
Three of us NOI brothers held an election on the Big Yard. Marcellius said I was
the minister since I was the smartest. He appointed the other brother secretary
and himself Captain. Next Sunday we met in the chapel and I lectured on Africans in the Americas, based on Africa's Gift to America, J.A. Rogers, a book I found in the prison library that was marked Contraband, but I put it in my property when I was released from Terminal Island.
You got me chained and bound
but can't keep me down
Born to be free
have my liberty
by any means necessary
Our time has come
our day is here
black man stand
have no fear
got me chained and bound
but can't keep me down
Dare to struggle dare to win
then the world will be ours again
devil is a paper tiger
rules with the gun
no law and order
til black justice done
Got me chained and bound
can't keep me down
Come my brothers
seize the time
no more dope no more wine
no no no no no no
Got me chained and bound
but you can't keep me down
Come my brothers
breako the chains
no peace til freedom reigns
You got me chained and bound
can't keep me down
no no no no no no no no no.............
Allah Loves a Warrior
Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
Want to serve the Mighty God
Got to be a mighty man
Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
When battle gets rough
got to be more tough
Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
When the deal goes down
Don't turn around
Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
If you can't give everything
Can't serve this King
Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
Total submission
He asks of you
Make His will your will
that's what you gotta do
Cause Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
You gotta be strong in times like these
can't turn around
can't try to flee
Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward
If you say you believe
don't you know you will be tried
cause Allah loves a warrior
hates a coward.
--Marvin X
from Take Care of Business, musical drama, Black Educational Theatre, San Francisco, 1972, music arranged by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Choreography by Raymond Sawyer. Directed and produced by Marvin X.
Afterword
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Marvin X in Georgetown, Guyana, South America, interviewing Prime Minister Forbes Burnham at his residence, 1972. PM Burnham gave North American Africans citizenship upon request, especially those escaping US white supremacy. Julian Mayfield, Tom Feelings and other artists joined his government. Herman Ferguson was a political refugee from NYC, along with Nassar Shabazz from San Francisco. Other North American Africans who found refuge in Guyana were Mamadou Lumumba and others associated with RAM or the Revolutionary Action Movement.
Marvin X in Georgetown, Guyana, South America, interviewing Prime Minister Forbes Burnham at his residence, 1972. PM Burnham gave North American Africans citizenship upon request, especially those escaping US white supremacy. Julian Mayfield, Tom Feelings and other artists joined his government. Herman Ferguson was a political refugee from NYC, along with Nassar Shabazz from San Francisco. Other North American Africans who found refuge in Guyana were Mamadou Lumumba and others associated with RAM or the Revolutionary Action Movement.
After enduring exile twice and jail, prison, Marvin X was awarded a writing fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities that enabled him to visit Afro-Mexicans in Southern Mexico and attend Carifesta, the Caribbean Festival of the Arts, Georgetown, Guyana, 1972, at which he interviewed Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, a socalled Black Power advocate we later learned the American CIA used to forestall another Cuban-style Marxist regime in the Americas. Black Power was more favorable to the USA than Communism. One of our greatest Pan African scholars, Dr. Walter Rodney, was assassinated under PM Burnham's watch, along with the Rev. Jim Jones massacre of 900 mostly North American Africans so desperate to escape US White supremacy they fed their children poison laced Kool Aid. Marvin's interview was published in Black Scholar Magazine and Muhammad Speaks Newspaper.
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