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Professor Jane Landers on South Carolina History
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Slavery on the new plantation by Kiilu Nyasha
San Francisco | Police State and Prisons
Longtime San Francisco-based journalist/activist Kiilu Nyasha writes that "Chattel slavery was ended following prolonged guerrilla warfare between the slaves and the slave-owners and their political allies. Referred to as the 'Underground Railroad,' it was led by the revolutionary General Harriet Tubman with support from her alliances with abolitionists, Black and White. It only makes sense that this new form of slavery must produce prison abolitionists."
SLAVERY ON THE NEW PLANTATION (updated March 2012)
By Kiilu Nyasha
"Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It's the same, but with a new name. They're practicing slavery under color of law." (Ruchell Cinque Magee)
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution retained the right to enslave within the confines of prison. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Dec. 6, 1865.
Even before the abolition of chattel slavery, America's history of prison labor had already begun in New York's State Prison at Auburn soon after it opened in 1817. Auburn became the first prison that contracted with a private business to operate a factory within its walls. Later, in the post Civil War period, the "contract and lease" system proliferated, allowing private companies to employ prisoners and sell their products for profit.
Today, such prisons are referred to as “Factories with Fences.” (/http://www.unicor.gov/information/publications/pdfs/corporate/CATMC1101_C.pdf)
The Convict-Lease System
In Southern states, Slave Codes were rewritten as Black Codes, a series of laws criminalizing the law-abiding activities of Black people, such as standing around, "loitering," or walking at night, "breaking curfew." The enforcement of these Codes dramatically increased the number of Blacks in Southern prisons. In 1878, Georgia leased out 1,239 convicts, 1,124 of whom were Black.
The lease system provided slave labor for plantation owners or private industries as well as revenue for the state, since incarcerated workers were entirely in the custody of the contractors who paid a set annual fee to the state (about $25,000). Entire prisons were leased out to private contractors who literally worked hundreds of prisoners to death. Prisons became the new plantations; Angola State Prison in Louisiana was a literal plantation, and still is except the slaves are now called convicts and the prison is known as "The Farm." (A documentary of that title is available on DVD.)
The inherent brutality and cruelty of the lease system and the loss of outside jobs sparked resistance that eventually brought about its demise.
One of the most famous battles was the Coal Creek Rebellion of 1891. When the Tennessee coal, Iron and Railroad locked out their workers and replaced them with convicts, the miners stormed the prison and freed 400 captives; and when the company continued to contract prisoners, the miners burned the prison down. The Tennessee leasing system was disbanded shortly thereafter. But it remained in many states until the rise of resistance in the 1930s.
Strikes by prisoners and union workers together were organized by then radical CIO and other labor unions. They pressured Congress to pass the 1935 Ashurst-Sumners Act making it illegal to transport prison-made goods across state lines. But under President Jimmy Carter, Congress granted exemptions to the Act by passing the Justice System Improvement Act of 1979, which produced the Prison Industries Enhancement program, or PIE, that eventually spread to all 50 states. This lifted the ban on interstate transportation and sale of prison-made products, permitting a for-profit relationship between prisons and the private sector, and prompting a dramatic increase in prison labor which continues to escalate.
As the leasing system phased out, a new, even more brutal exploitation emerged -- the chain gang. An extremely dehumanizing cruelty that chained men, and later women, together in groups of five, it was originated to build extensive roads and highways. The first state to institute chain gangs was Alabama, followed by Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Montana, and Oklahoma.
Arizona's first female chain gang was instituted in 1996. Complete with striped uniforms, the women of a Phoenix jail (to this day) spend four to six hours a day chained together in groups of 30, clearing roadsides of weeds and burying the indigent.
Georgia's chain-gang conditions were particularly brutal. Men were put out to work swinging 12 lb. sledge hammers for 16 hours a day, malnourished and shackled together, unable to move their legs a full stride. Wounds from metal shackles often became infected, leading to illness and death. Prisoners who could not keep up with the grueling pace were whipped or shut in a sweatbox or tied to a hitching post, a stationary metal rail. Chained to the post with hands raised high over his head, the prisoner remained tethered in that position in the Alabama heat for many hours without water or bathroom breaks. (Human Rights Watch World Report 1998).
Thanks to a lawsuit settled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Alabama's Department of Corrections agreed in 1996 to stop chaining prisoners together. A few years later, the Center won a Court ruling that ended use of the hitching post as a violation of the 8th Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment."
In response to the demands of World War II, the number of both free and captive road workers declined significantly. In 1941, there were 1,750 prisoners slaving in 28 active road camps for all types of construction and maintenance. The numbers bottomed out by war's end at 540 captives in 17 camps.
The Proliferation of Prisons, Jails, and Camps
In the 1940s, California Governor Earl Warren conducted secret investigations into the State's only prisons, San Quentin and Folsom. The depravity, squalor, sadism, and torture he found led the governor to initiate the building of Soledad Prison in 1951.
Prisoners were put to work in educational and vocational programs that taught basic courses in English and math, and provided training in trades ranging from gardening to meat cutting. At wages of 7 to 25 cents an hour, California prisoners used their acquired skills to turn out institutional clothing and furniture, license plates and stickers, seed new crops, slaughter pigs, produce and sell dairy products to a nearby mental institution.
Within a decade this "model prison" at Soledad had become another torture chamber of filthy dungeons, literal "holes," virulently racist guards, officially sanctioned brutality, torture, and murder. Though prison jobs were supposed to be voluntary, if prisoners refuse to work they were often given longer sentences, denied privileges, or thrown into solitary confinement. Forced to work long hours under miserable conditions, in the 1960s, "Soledad Brother," George Jackson, organized a work strike that turned into a riot after white strikebreakers tried to lynch one of the Black strikers.
The Black Movement's resistance, led by George Jackson, W. L. Nolen, and Hugo "Yogi" Pinell, eventually brought Congressional oversight and overhaul of California's prison system. (The Melancholy History of Soledad Prison, by Minh S. Yee.).
California’s prison system rose exponentially to approximately 174,000 prisoners crammed into 90 penitentiaries, prisons and camps stretched across 900 miles of the fifth-largest economy in the world, as Ruth Gilmore's book, "Golden Gulag" reports. That number can be doubled or tripled by those on other forms of penal control, probation, parole, or house arrest.
Since 1984, the California has erected 43 prisons (and only one university) making it a global leader in prison construction. Most of the new prisons have been built in rural areas far from family and friends, and most captives are Black or Brown men, although the incarceration of women has skyrocketed. Suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average, and the State spends more on prisons than on higher education. (The seeming contradiction between the official figure of 33 prisons relates to the additional buildings constructed at a given prison complex, and the various camps and county jails.)
Between 1998 and 2009, the CDCR’s budget grew from $3.5 billion to $10.3 billion (the latest figures available). At its peak in August 2007, the department had 72 gyms and 125 dayrooms jammed with 19,618 inmate beds.
"They provided an accurate and extremely graphic example of the crowding and inhumanity that engulfed the entire system," said Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office in Berkeley, which sued to force the state to ease crowding as a way to improve the treatment of sick and mentally ill inmates.
The Privatizing of Federal and State Prisons
Under court order to reduce overcrowding, by 2009, the CDCR had transferred 8,000 prisoners to private prisons in four states –Tennessee, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arizona, among the most virulently racist states in the country. The rest of the prisoners were transferred to county jails. Currently, the inmate population is about 142,000 and must remove another 17,000 prisoners to reach the June 2013 court deadline.
In 1985, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger lauded China's prison labor program: "1,000 inmates in one prison I visited comprised a complete factory unit producing hosiery and what we would call casual or sport shoes... Indeed it had been a factory and was taken over to make a prison." Burger called for the conversion of prisons into factories, the repeal of laws limiting prison industry production and sales, and the active participation of business and organized labor.
Heeding the judge's call, California voters passed Prop 139 in 1990, establishing the Joint Venture Program allowing California businesses to cash in on prison labor. "This is the new jobs program for California, so we can compete on a Third World basis with countries like Bangladesh," observed Richard Holober with the California Federation of Labor.
Currently, California's Prison Industrial Authority (CALPIA) employs, 7000 captives assigned to 5039 positions in manufacturing, agricultural service enterprises, and selling and administration at 22 prisons throughout the state. It produces goods and services such as office furniture, clothing, food products, shoes, printing services, signs, binders, gloves, license plates, cell equipment, and much more. Wages are $.30 to $.95 per hour before deductions.
For the State's highest wage, $1 hour, prisoners provide the "backbone of the state's wild land fire fighting crews," according to an unpublished CDC report. The State Department of Forestry saves more than $80 million annually using prison labor. California's Department of Forestry has 200 Fire Crews comprised of CDC and CYA (California Youth Authority) minimum-security captives housed in 46 Conservation Camps throughout the state. These prisoners average 10 million work hours per year according to the CDCR.
"Their primary function is to construct fire lines by hand in areas where heavy machinery cannot be used because of steep topography, rocky terrain, or areas that may be considered environmentally sensitive." (I.e., the most dangerous fire lines).
Now at least 37 states have similar programs wherein prisoners manufacture everything from blue jeans to auto parts, electronics and toys. Clothing made in Oregon and California is exported to other countries, competing successfully with apparel made in Asia and Latin America.
One of the newest forms of slave labor is the U.S. Army's "Civilian Inmate Labor Program" to "benefit both the Army and corrections systems" by providing "a convenient source of labor at no direct cost to Army installations," additional space to alleviate prison overcrowding, and cost-effective use of land and facilities otherwise not being utilized.
"With a few exceptions," this program is currently limited to prisoners under the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) that allows the Attorney General to provide the services of federal prisoners to other federal agencies, defining the types of services they can perform. The Program stipulates that the "Army is not interested in, nor can afford, any relationship with a corrections facility if that relationship stipulates payment for civilian inmate labor. Installation civilian inmate labor program operating costs must not exceed the cost avoidance generated from using inmate labor." In other words the prison labor must be free of charge.
The three "exceptions" to exclusive Federal contracting are as follows: (1) "a demonstration project" providing "prerelease employment training to nonviolent offenders in a State correctional facility" [CF]. (2) Army National Guard units "may use inmates from an off-post State and/or local CF." (3) Civil Works projects. Services provided might include constructing or repairing roads, maintaining or reforesting public land; building levees, landscaping, painting, carpentry, trash pickup, etc.
This Civilian Inmate Labor Program document includes in its countless specifications such caveats as "Inmates must not be referred to as employees." A prisoner would not qualify if he/she is a "person in whom there is a significant public interest," who has been a "significant management problem,""a principal organized crime figure," any "inmate convicted of a violent crime," a sex offense, involvement with drugs within the last three years, an escape risk, "a threat to the general public." Makes one wonder why such a prisoner isn't just released or paroled. In fact, the "hiring qualifications" -- makes me suspect the "Civilian Inmate Labor Program" is a backdoor draft, especially in lieu of a military already stretched to its limit.
Note: When I tried to find an updated web page on the Civilian Inmate Labor Program, there was none. The date remains 2005 for its latest report. Could the latest data be classified?
The Federal Prison Industries (FPI), a nonprofit Justice Department subsidiary, that does business as UNICOR, was created in 1935, and began supplying the Pentagon on a broad scale in the 1980s.
The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under Bill Clinton when the Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. In fact, President Clinton accomplished a record $10 billion prison building boom in the 1990s.
His program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Department’s contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates. (Global Research, 2008)
By 2003, there were 100 FPI factories working 20,274 prisoners with sales totaling $666.8 million. And currently FPI employs about 19,000 captives, slightly less than 20 percent of the federal prison population, in 106 prison factories around the country. Profits totaled at least $40 million!
In 2005, FPI sold more than $750,000,000 worth of goods to the federal government. Sales to the Army alone put UNICOR on the Army's list of top 50 suppliers, ahead of well-known corporations like Dell Computer, according to Wayne Woolley, Newhouse News Service.
In 2011, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a report that exposes how private prison companies are “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.” The report notes that while the total number of prisoners increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, respectively.
Government spending on so-called corrections rose to $74 billion in 2007. And last year (2011) the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — made over $2.9 billion in profits. These corporations use three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions and networking. They succeeded in getting Arizona’s harsh new immigration laws passed, and came close to winning the privatization of all of Florida’s prisons.
A relatively new ordering tool used by BOP (Bureau of Prisons) is GSA Advantage!, the federal government’s premier online ordering system that provides 24-hour access to over 17 million products and services, solutions available from over 16,000 GSA Multiple Award Schedules contractors, as well as all products available from GSA Global Supply. http://www.gsaadvantage.gov
Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the Army's Communication and Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J., has shipped more than 200,000 radios to combat zones, most with at least some components manufactured by federal inmates working in 11 prison electronics factories around the country. Under current law, UNICOR enjoys a contracting preference known as "mandatory source," which obligates government agencies to try to buy certain goods from the prisons before allowing private companies to bid on the work. This same contracting restriction applies to state agencies.
The demand for defense products from FPI became so great that "national exigency" provisions were invoked so the 20 percent limit on goods provided in each category could be exceeded. The rules were waived during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Private manufacturers say they've been hurt by such practice, as they are unable to bid on various products.
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.
By 2007, the overall sales figures and profits for federal and state prison industries had skyrocketed into the billions. Apparently, the military industrial complex (MIC) and the prison industrial complex (PIC) have joined forces.
The PIC is a network of public and private prisons, of military personnel, politicians, business contacts, prison guard unions, contractors, subcontractors and suppliers all making big profits at the expense of poor people who comprise the overwhelming majority of captives. The fastest growing industry in the country, it has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs and direct advertising campaigns. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' labor lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce.
Replacing the "contract and lease" system of the 19th Century, private companies that have contracted prison labor include Microsoft, Boeing, Honeywell, IBM, Revlon, Pierre Cardin, Compaq, Victoria Secret, Macy’s, Target,
Nordstrom, and countless others.
In 1995, there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, private companies operate 264 correctional facilities housing some 99,000 adult prisoners. The two largest private prison corporations in the US, GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) are transnationals, managing prisons and detention centers in 34 states, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
A top performer on the New York Stock Exchange, CCA called California its "new frontier," and boasts of investors such as Wal-Mart, Exxon, General Motors, Ford, Chevrolet, Texaco, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, and UPS. Currently, CCA has 80,000 beds in 65 facilities, and GEO Group operates 61 facilities with 49,000 beds, according to Wikipredia.
Employers (Read: slavers) don't have to pay health or unemployment insurance, vacation time, sick leave or overtime. They can hire, fire or reassign inmates as they so desire, and can pay the workers as little as 21 cents an hour. The inmates cannot respond with a strike, file a grievance, or threaten to leave and get a better job.
On September 19, 2005, UNICOR was commended for its outstanding support of the nation’s military. Deputy Commander of the Defense Supply Center Philadelphia (DSCP), presented the Bureau of Prisons Director with a “Supporting the Warfighter” award. The award recognized UNICOR for its tremendous support of DSCP’s mission to provide equipment, materials, and supplies to each branch of the armed forces. “We at DSCP are very appreciative of UNICOR, especially with our critical need items. With more than $200 million worth of orders during Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005, UNICOR has not had a single delinquency.”
Mass roundups of immigrants and non-citizens, currently about half of all federal prisoners, and dragnets in low-income 'hoods have increased the prison population to unprecedented levels. Andrea Hornbein points out in Profit Motive: "The majority of these arrests are for low level offenses or outstanding warrants, and impact the taxpayer far more than the offense. For example, a $300 robbery resulting in a 5-year sentence, at the Massachusetts average of $43,000 per year, will cost $215,000. That doesn't even include law enforcement and court costs."
Nearly 75% of all prisoners are drug war captives. A criminal record today practically forces an ex-con into illegal employment since they don't qualify for legitimate jobs or subsidized housing. Minor parole violations, unaffordable bail, parole denials, longer mandatory sentencing and three strikes laws, slashing of welfare rolls, overburdened court systems, shortages of public defenders, massive closings of mental hospitals, and high unemployment (about 50% for Black men) -- all contribute to the high rates of incarceration and recidivism. Thus, the slave labor pool continues to expand.
Among the most powerful unions today are the guards' unions. The California Corrections Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) wields so much political power it practically decides who governs the state. Moreover, its members get the State's biggest payouts, according to the L.A. Times. "More than 1600 officers' earnings exceeded legislators' 2007 salaries of $113,098." Base pay for 6,000 guards earning $100,000 or more totaled $453 million with overtime adding another $220 million to wages. One lieutenant guard earned more than any other state official, including the Governor, or $252,570.
California’s per prisoner cost has raised to $49,000, and that figure doubles and triples for elderly and high-security captives. That’s enough money to send a person through Harvard!
The National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), is an international nonprofit professional association, whose self-declared mission is “to promote excellence and credibility in correctional industries through professional development and innovative business solutions.”
NCIA's members include all 50 state correctional industry agencies, Federal Prison Industries, foreign correctional industry agencies, city and county jail industry programs, and private sector companies working in partnership with correctional industries.
Chattel slavery was ended following prolonged guerrilla warfare between the slaves and the slave-owners and their political allies. Referred to as the “Underground Railroad,” it was led by the revolutionary General Harriet Tubman with support from her alliances with abolitionists, Black and White. It only makes sense that this new form of slavery must produce prison abolitionists.
As George Jackson noted in a KPFA interview with Karen Wald (Spring 1971), "I'm saying that it's impossible, impossible, to concentration-camp resisters....We have to prove that this thing won't work here. And the only way to prove it is resistance...and then that resistance has to be supported, of course, from the street....We can fight, but the results are...not conducive to proving our point...that this thing won't work on us. From inside, we fight and we die....the point is -- in the new face of war -- to fight and win."
Power to the people.
--Kiilu Nyasha is a San Francisco-based journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party. Kiilu hosts a bimonthly TV program, "Freedom Is A Constant Struggle," on BAVC Commons, and many shows are archived here: http://kiilunyasha.blogspot.com/
If voting could change the system, they would make it illegal. Jamil al-Amin aka H. Rap Brown.
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Blacks 7 times more likely than Whites to be arrested in San Francisco, bastion of white liberalism
New BI Report: African-Americans 7 Times More Likely than Whites to Be Arrested in San Francisco
“S.F. study finds big disparity in arrest rates between races”
(From the San Francisco Chronicle – 6/23/15)
Black people are disproportionately represented throughout the criminal justice system in San Francisco, from arrest to booking in jail to conviction and sentencing — and the disparity is growing worse, according to a city-commissioned study set to be released Tuesday.
The study found that black people are 7.1 times more likely to be arrested in the city than white people, 11 times more likely to be booked into jail and 10.3 times more likely to be convicted. Those convicted spend more time on probation or behind bars.
The study, which examined data through 2013, was commissioned by the San Francisco Reentry Council, a multiagency group that includes prosecutors and the mayor’s office and seeks to helps incarcerated people transition back into society.
The findings come as nationwide attention turns toward racial inequity in the criminal justice system, following several high-profile, video-recorded killings of unarmed black people by police officers.
And the report comes as thousands of San Francisco criminal cases and convictions over the past 10 years are under review, following the release of racist and anti-gay text messages sent between at least 14 San Francisco police officers.
“The disparities are stark,” said Laura Ridolfi, Director of Policy at the W. Haywood Burns Institute, the Oakland nonprofit that conducted the research. The organization seeks to redress what it sees as the justice system’s biased treatment of young people of color, whose early brushes with the system hurt their ability to be successful.
“This is a clear statement to the city and county that there is work to be done,” Ridolfi said. “The disparities here undermine the notion of justice.”
According to the study, the over-representation of minorities in San Francisco courts and jails has grown more stark over the past two decades, even as crime rates trend down across all demographics.
In 1994, for every white person arrested, 4.6 black people were taken into custody by police in San Francisco. In 2013, that number jumped to 7.1, according to the study. Though black people represented just 6 percent of the city’s adult population, they made up 40 percent of those arrested.
Once arrested, black people were less likely to make bail or be freed before trial, even though black defendants were more likely to be eligible for pretrial release.
“The report makes it clear: Racial profiling extends beyond the street and into the courthouse,” said Public Defender Jeff Adachi, co-chair of the Reentry Council. “It also shows that San Francisco lags behind the rest of the state in closing the equality gap in its justice system.”
While the racial disparity gap has been closing statewide, it has been growing in San Francisco, the study said.
In 1994, 3.9 black people were arrested in California for every white person, while that number was 4.6 in San Francisco. By 2013, the statewide number had dropped to three black people arrested for every white person, while that number jumped to 7.1 in the city.
While the study’s findings are alarming, Police Chief Greg Suhr said, “We try to do our job as objectively as possible.”
Suhr said socioeconomic factors must be considered in the statistics. Black residents of San Francisco tend to be poorer, live in neighborhoods with higher crime rates and, according to the study, are 10 times as likely as white residents to have a past criminal conviction. Suhr said his department has worked to address these issues through a jobs program that employs city teens, especially from poorer communities, and a recent push to keep kids in school.
“There are so many other things that are part of the conversation,” Suhr said. “But we’re certainly not trying to arrest our way out of this situation.”
Ridolfi said limitations of the data — in many cases the races of suspects and those arrested were not available — made it difficult to analyze the reasons behind the wide discrepancy between racial groups.
The study notes that accurate figures for Latino residents were unavailable due to the disregarding of ethnicity. Moreover, the authors said, the counting of many “Hispanics” as white likely served to understate the disparity between black and non-Hispanic white people.
Max Szabo, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, said his office is “very supportive” of the study.
“This is important work that we are very supportive of, and we are not shying away from the challenges that this study depicts,” Szabo said. “As the district attorney has noted for some time, we need additional investment in data capacity so we can paint a clearer picture of disparities in the system and begin identifying policy solutions that can have a lasting impact.”
Kale Williams and Vivian Ho are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: kwilliams@sfchronicle.com, vho@sfchronicle.comTwitter: @sfkale, @VivianHo
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Comments on Marvin X's poem Fly Yo Flag, Nigguh
Yo Brother Marvin X, that poem really hit the spot... that was like a 22 rim fire to the head of the ignorant and their superstitions of patriotism. We need to get major cases of Citrom the lemon sparkling laxative and purge our communities of the bullshit and help end the love-fest of the Black face administrator of imperialism big eared official mulatto Barack "Buckwheat" Obama...
--Sekou
I love that – Fly Your Flag . . . Now there’s a poem !
--Dr. Neal Hall, India
EXACTLY!
The racist flag is the latest distraction attraction designed to protect racism. Asante sana!
--Kujichagulia Phavia
  the death of nine people to worrying bout a cracker ass punk bitch flag fly yo own flag, nigguh let the white man southern cracker northern fake smile soda cracker motherfucker fly his stars and stripes yo ass been burned by both flags fly yo flag nigguh let the white man be his white devil self his day is coming soon and very soon fly yo flag North American African ass nigguh! --Marvin X 6/22/15   October 4, 2001 |
| When I'll Wave The Flag |
By Marvin X |
| I'll wave the flag When the trillions in reparations are paid to the African American Nation For 400 years of terror in America When the bill of the Middle Passage is paid When the bill from the cotton fields is paid I'll wave the flag When the damages due the descendents of mass murder is paid Mass kidnapping Mass rape I'll wave the flag When the police stop terrorizing us for breathing while black Walking while black Loving while black I'll wave the flag When the 2 million men and women in prison are released for petty crimes And those guilty of stealing elections take their place in the cells I'll wave the flag When those guilty of stealing labor, stealing energy, stealing souls of the poor are jailed I'll wave the flag When those guilty of the miseducation of our children are jailed for crimes against humanity I'll wave the flag When those who terrorize the earth, pollute the earth, poison the food, the water, the air Inject animals with hormones Genetically alter vegetables and fruits When these people are taken before the world court for terrorizing the world I'll wave the flag Until then Kiss my motherfuckin' ass. 2001 Marvin X. |
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The 2nd Annual Sacramento Black Book Fair (SBBF)
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Sacramento Black Book Fair’s Community Read-Ins
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Marvin X interviewed by Ishmael Reed for The Complete Muhammad Ali book
Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland
photo Adam Turner
If you want motivation and inspiration, don't spend all that money going to workshops and seminars, just go stand at 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland and watch Marvin X at work. He's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland.... His play One Day in the Life is the most powerful drama I've seen.--Ishmael Reed
Chapter 28
Ishmael Reed interviews Marvin X on Ali As A Black Nationalist
San Francisco, January 2004 Black Liberation Book Fair
Some of the pioneers of the 1960s Black Nationalist movement are gathered at a book fair organized by Marvin X, a writer who is much venerated in Black Nationalist circles. Some of those gathered are die heart Maclolmites who are cool to Ali and attribute mainstream acceptance of Ali as the white public gloating over the fact that the man once called “ The Louisville Lip,” has been muzzled by a disability.
Though still regarded with respect, some black nationalists will never forgive Muhammad Ali, their one time hero, for turning his back on Malcolm X, their idol. Some of those who dismissed Joe Frazier as an Uncle Tom are giving Frazier a second look. He is no longer regarded as the usurper who deprived the exiled champion of his glorious comeback. As an example of Joe Frazier’s lack of sophistication was his mistaking “Uncle Tom,” for “Peeping Tom.”
“Malcolm gave me political consciousness. He stood up against America. Ali on the other hand is now speaking on behalf of America.”—Marvin X
Marvin X provides further evidence of the influence that the Nation of Islam had on Muhammad Ali’s decision to forfeit his duty to serve in the armed forces. He provided a biography, which gives a historical background to the presence of African-American Muslims in this country.
Marvin X
“I would like to delineate my lineage. As a spiritual descendant of West African Muslims, I begin my literary biography in the Mali Empire, among those scholar/poet/social activists of Timbuktu: Ahmed Baba, Muhammad El-Mrili, Ahmed Ibn Said, Muhammad Al Wangari, and the later Sufi poet/warriors of Senegal and Hausal and, Ahmedu Bamba and Uthman dan Fodio.
“In America, this literary tradition continued under the wretched conditions of slavery with the English/Arabic narratives of Ayub Suleimon Diallo, Ibrahima Abdulrahman Jallo, Bilali Mohammad, Salih Bilali, Umar Ibn Said. (Note:There is some suggestion that David Walker, Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington and Benjamin Banneker may have been descendants of Muslims.) In 1913,Noble Drew Ali,established his Moorish Science Temple in Newark, New Jersey, later Chicago, and created his Seven Circle Koran, a synthesis of Qur’anic, Masonic, mystical and esoteric writings.
“And most importantly, Master Fard Muhammad arrived in Detroit, 1930, to deliver his Supreme Wisdom, mythological Sufi teachings, to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, later summarized in Elijah's primers of mystical Islamic theology and Black Nationalism, Message To The Black Man and The Theology of Time.
“The next major work is Malcolm X's Autobiography, with the assistance of Alex Haley. This neo-slave narrative bridged ancient and modern Islamic literature in America. Let us also include Louis Farrakhan’s Off-Broadway drama “Organa” and his classic song “A White Man’s Heaven is The Black Man’s Hell,” anthem of the Black revolution of the 60s. Amiri Baraka utilized the Muslim myth of Yacub in his play ‘A Black Mass,’ one of his most powerful works, an examination of the cloning of the white man. Askia Muhammad Toure must be credited for his Islamic writings, along with poetess Sonia Sanchez (Laila Mannan) who served a brief tenure in the Nation of Islam. Yusef Rahman and Yusef Iman created powerful Islamic poetry as well.
Marvin X continued (Black Liberation Book Fair, January 31, 2004)
“Well, you know we both had the draft problem as Muslims. Ali followed Elijah Muhammad’s directive to go to prison instead of going into exile like I did. I went to Canada. I was there about six months. Well because I got tired of Canada. There is an expression, ‘Racism is as Canadian as Hockey.’ First I went to Chicago and linked up with the group around Black World, which was edited by Hoyt Fuller, Haki Madhubuti and others. I was in Chicago when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. After I left Chicago, I went to Harlem. This is now ‘68. I went to New York to work with Ed Bullins at the New Lafayette.
“I went to Montreal for a visit. I had met a girl from Montreal. At the same time there was a struggle at Sir George Williams University. Bobby Seale was up there and a brother from Dominique, I think it was Dominique, Rosy Douglas. There was a student struggle going on; I got busted coming back from Montreal. Coming across the border without papers. And so I [was] put in jail in Plattsburg, New York, and then released on OR [Own Recognizance] and then they gave me a trial date, a court date in San Francisco, for the draft. I was invited to lecture at Fresno State in the Black Studies Department. Richard Keyes was the chair. So actually I was going to two trials. One with Reagan at Fresno Superior Court and one in San Francisco at the Federal Court.
“In 1967, I had met Eldridge Cleaver upon his release from Soledad Prison, who was then working for Ramparts magazine. He was supposed to interview Muhammad Ali, but he couldn’t go because he was under house arrest, so he arranged for me to do the interview. I went to Chicago to wait around for the interview. Muhammad Ali was in Detroit. He finally came back to Chicago. We were at Elijah Muhammad’s house. I saw Elijah Muhammad’s wife, Clara, and Muhammad Ali, but I didn’t see Elijah. Before we got ready to do the interview, Elijah Muhammad called him into a room, and when he came out he said, ‘Elijah Muhammad said not to do the interview.’ That he had said enough about the draft. This was like ’67. Well, we were probably in the house for about an hour. He said that Elijah was ‘the man I am willing to die for so I do what he says.’ Well that’s how most Muslims felt.
Both Black Panther and NOI attitudes about the draft influenced me. That’s why I was in Canada. What I’m saying is that Elijah said, ‘Resist the draft.’ The Panthers said, ‘Resist arrest.’ So I resisted the draft and I resisted arrest. That’s where I was coming from.
“Ali asked me if I needed any money, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ He gave me a hundred dollars. Why did he? I don’t know. I guess maybe it was his personality.
I was at Merritt College with Huey [Newton] and Bobby [Seale] from 1962 to ’64 and we identified with Malcolm X and so I didn’t join the Nation until ’67. I think I was looking for something more than what the Panthers were offering, because I could have easily gone to the Panther Party because they were my friends. It was a spiritual dimension that I was looking for. But I also got some Marxist material from the Panthers. But, you know their Ten Point Program was just a rehashing of the Muslim Program and put into Marxist language.
“Malcolm gave me political consciousness. He stood up against America. Ali on the other hand is now speaking on behalf of America. That’s not really strange for him to do that and I think I say that about him in my review of the movie ‘Ali’ in my book In The Crazy House Called America. He became a follower of Wallace Deen and Wallace Deen has an American flag on his newspaper. So Wallace accepted his American identity and I guess his followers follow that. Wallace left his father before Malcolm. He never came back. Ali said he followed Wallace after Elijah made his transition, because as far as he was concerned, Wallace came with the true Islam, the spiritual Islam, after the Nation had become corrupted. And then Norman Brown told me last night that as far as he was concerned Wallace just bought into Arab Nationalism and Arab racism and turned Negroes into Arabs.”
In his book, In The Crazy House Called America, Marvin X is far more critical of Ali’s move to the right. He blames it on the champion following the teachings of the late Wallace Muhammad. In the book he writes,
“We understand that he [Ali] has been requested to make public service announcements supporting America’s war on terrorism. Would this be a more dramatic ending: the people’s champ who fought against oppression, finally broken down to a servant of the oppressor… the tragic truth is that Ali is a member of Warith Din Muhammad’s sect that was known for flag waving before 9/11. Warith had rejected the teachings of his father, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, in favor of orthodox Islam, dismissing the Black Nationalism of Elijah for Americanism, so it is not whack for President Bush to call upon Ali to be the ‘voice of America’ to the Muslim world, nor for Ali to accept. If indeed, our hero has been co-opted, let us be mature enough to realize humans are not made of stone and we know in real life people change, not always for the good—thus the danger of hero worship and thus the Islamic dictum: nothing deserves to be worshipped except Allah.”
In 1998 I received a three-year grant fromthe Lila Wallace Foundation, which required me to accompany adults, who were learningEnglish at Oakland’s Second Start Literacy Program, to the theater. In the course of threeyears, I saw a number of plays and musicals, many of which were overrated, and quite anumber of which were insulting to minorities, like “Ms. Saigon” and “Rent” and the mostreprehensible of all, “Stonewall’s House,” a play that tried to clean up the Confederateinsurgents’ reputation and which argued that blacks were better off in slavery, andthat because of political correctness, white male playwrights were oppressed. In other words, plays by blacks dominate the Great White Way. The play that I found the mostcompelling was produced by the Black Repertory Theater in Oakland. It was called “ADay In The Life,” and it was written by Marvin X. Like some of the other black revolutionaries of that period, Marvin X turnedto drugs after the disillusionment set in, and the revolution was busted, partially due toa sinister COINTELPRO operation (Counter Intelligence Program). Some of the more vibrant, charismatic and militant of the activists were permitted to morph into non-threatening positions as college professors, where they still engage in correcting those whom they feel are not revolutionary enough. All one has to do is contrast the swell-headed boastfulplay, “Big Time Buck White” in which Muhammad Ali starred, with “A Day In TheLife” to determine the corrosion of the sixties optimism and the pessimism of the currentpolitical climate. Black Nationalists and those on the black left have been among PresidentObama’s harshest critics, while black support for the president has remained in the ninety percent range.Cornel West, whom white progressives were agitating for a run in a primary against thepresident, referred to the president as “a black mascot for Wall Street,” which makesyou wonder why Wall Street backed his opponent, Mitt Romney. Marvin X has calledthe president “a black hangman.” The Marvin X play includes a scene in which the lateBlack Panther leader Huey Newton with whom I appeared on an 1988 ABC TV show (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VHL7glIcP4o&feature=share) a year before his assassination over a drug deal gone wrong. In Marvin X’s play he shares a crack pipe with the man who would laterassassinate him.
Inspired by the Harlem Book Fair, Marvin X decided to organize his own.Thus the Black Liberation Book Fair was held in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco,San Francisco’s Skid Row, on January 31, 2004. This event included a veritable Who’s Who of Black Nationalist personalities. With the tendency of the segregated media to tokenize every aspect of African-American life, some of these people are unknown to the general public, but connoisseurs of black politics and culture know about themand recognize their important contribution to the modern slave revolt of the 1960s. Ifanyone would give an unsparing portrait of Muhammad Ali, it would be they. For the 1960s, Muhammad Ali was their leader, but some, like Haki Madhubuti still resent thechampion’s betrayalof Malcolm X, who, among black nationalists, is regarded as a deity.
The book fair was held in the basement of Saint John’s Church. While themedia of the 1960s made a few Civil Rights and Black Power personalities famous, someof those who had worked behind the scenes, those who did the intellectual heavy lifting,were present at this book fair. Poet Askiá Toure, my 1960s roommate, Nathan Hare,the lateSam Greenlee, whose film version of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, about an armed uprising against the government drew the attention of the FBI, and the late Reginald Major, the author of The Black Panther Is A Black Cat, which remains one of the best books on that group’s career.
The Complete Muhammad Ali
“…it will become the truly definitive book on Muhammad Ali.” Professor Sam Hamod, PhD
“twelve solid rounds of writing… stands above its competition.” Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch
More than a biography and ‘bigger than boxing’, The Complete Muhammad Ali is a fascinating portrait of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Ishmael Reed calls it The Complete Muhammad Ali because most of the hundred odd books about the Champion are “either too adoring or make excessively negative assertions.” They also omit many voices that deserve to be heard.
Reed, an accomplished poet, novelist, essayist and playwright, casts his inquisitive eye on a man who came to represent the aspirations of so many people worldwide and so many causes. He also brings to bear his own experience as an African American public figure, born in the South in the same period, as well as an encyclopaedic grasp of American history.
People interviewed include Marvin X, Harry Belafonte, Hugh Masakela, Jack Newfield, Ed Hughes, Emmanuel Steward, Amiri Baraka, Agieb Bilal, Emil Guillermo, Khalilah Ali, Quincy Troupe, Rahaman Ali, Melvin Van Peebles, Ray Robinson, Jr., Ed Hughes, Jesse Jackson, Martin Wyatt, Bennett Johnson, Stanley Crouch, Bobby Seale, and many more.
Reed also places the Muhammad Ali phenomenon in the history of boxing and boxers from before the times of Jack Johnson, through Joe Louis and Archie Moore to Floyd Mayweather. He also includes Canadian fights and fighters like Tommy Burns, George Chuvalo and Yvon Durelle.
“The Heavyweight Championship of the World,” wrote Reed in a 1976 Village Voice headline article shortly after third Ali-Norton fight, “is a sex show, a fashion show, scene of intrigue between different religions, politics, classes; a gathering of stars, ex-stars, their hangers-on, and hangers-on assistants.”
The author of the much cited Writin’ is Fightin’ has now produced what will likely be known not only as The Complete Muhammad Ali but also “the definitive Muhammad Ali.”
Praise
“great book, a lot of hard work, and I know that it will become the truly definitive book on Muhammad Ali.” Professor Sam Hamod, PhD; Former Director of The Islamic Center, Washington, DC
Ishmael Reed is a prize-winning essayist, novelist, poet and playwright. He taught at the University of California-Berkeley for thirty-five years, as well as at Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth. Author of more than twenty-five books, he is a member of Harvard’s Signet Society and Yale’s Calhoun Society. He lives in Oakland, California.
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THE HISTORY OF BLACK HAIR
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Oakland Juneteenth, Saturday, June 27, 32nd and Market, North Oakland, 11AM--7PM
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Sun Ra Arkestra 5/21/15 pt.2
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Sun Ra Arkestra 5/21/15 pt.1
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The Roots of White Supremacy: Human, Cultural, Religious
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Killer of Malcolm X's grandson gets 27 years in Mexico City
Killer of Malcolm X’s grandson hit with 27 years
As news spread several months ago about the severe sentencing of Manuel Alejandro Perez de Jesus, 26, for the murder of Malcolm Latif Shabazz, 28, many questions remained unanswered. Details about the killing of the grandson of Black Nationalist icon Malcolm X and wife Dr. Betty Shabazz remain sketchy.
“The circumstances surrounding his death are still not clear, and it is now February 2015,” said Sabrina Green, a human rights activist with the Baltimore-based Free the Move 9.
According to prosecutor Rodolfo Fernando Rios Garza, Shabazz arrived in Mexico City at the behest of Miguel Suarez, a Mexican labor activist with the organization Revolutionary United Mexicans in Combat, or RUMEC, whom he had befriended in the United States and had been recently deported to Mexico.
On the night of May 9, 2013, while at the Palace Club, a downtown bar, prosecutors contend that Shabazz consumed several drinks, saying he had a blood alcohol level of more than three times the legal limit for driving in the U.S. Allegedly, he and Suarez ran up a $1,200 bar tab, which included the companionship of women, after being bamboozled by local hustlers, who routinely prey on tourists.
As the pair tried to leave the bar at around 3 a.m., a confrontation occurred with two waiters, David Hernandez Cruz, 26, and Perez de Jesus. Shabazz and Suarez were supposedly separated by bar employees at gunpoint, but, for unknown reasons, only Shabazz was assaulted, while Suarez supposedly slipped away unharmed to get help.
Upon his return a short while later, Suarez found Shabazz’s badly damaged body lying in the street in Plaza Girabaldi, a busy tourist spot. A blunt object was used, causing fatal skull, jaw and rib fractures. Two other bar employees also participated in the beating, reports read.
Authorities suggest the bill was excessive and was probably used as an excuse to rob Shabazz and his companion. Police said they interviewed Suarez, who could not be reached for comment.
Two days after the attack, the security cameras on the premises were turned toward the walls and the video recording equipment was mysteriously missing.
Shortly after Shabazz’s murder, protesters demanded that authorities escalate their efforts in investigating his death. Some demonstrated at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Shabazz was murdered a little more than two months after he was allegedly arrested by the FBI and harassed by law enforcement in an upstate New York town. In February 2013, Iranian state-controlled Press TV erroneously reported that the FBI had arrested Shabazz while he was en route to Iran. The story was widely reported, but two days later, Shabazz’s family announced that the report was false, and although he had been arrested, it had nothing to do with the FBI or Iran.
During a Feb. 24 interview on “Democracy Now,” Shabazz’s aunt, Ilyashah Shabazz, said that he had gone to Mexico “invited under the premise that the African-Mexicans were being discriminated and treated unfairly and that they needed him to talk to them. And so, he went thinking that he was going to speak to these people, and they ended up killing him.”
Rios Garza said he saw no evidence that Shabazz’s attackers knew his background, adding that he found no evidence that race or any motive other than robbery was in play.
In February, Perez de Jesus was sentenced to 27 years and six months. It’s not clear whether Cruz was charged.
Dr. Wilner Metelus, president of the Committee on Citizens of the Defense of the Naturalized and AfroMexicans, does not consider the sentencing “a victory” because, allegedly, five people participated in the murder. “It is a step, nothing more,” he said.
Zayid Muhammad, press officer for the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, stated, “There are some real serious questions about what happened to him, and who he was with that still need to be answered.”
Shabazz is the son of Qubilah Shabazz, Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz’s second daughter. He is survived by his mother, two daughters and five aunts. He was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, N.Y., near the graves of his grandparents.
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Parable of Nature and Spirituality by Marvin X
Parable of Nature and Spirituality
By Marvin X
Morning sun, Ra ascending, beam of light, truth. Air still. Ancient trees, rolling hills. Bird symphony. Cry of wild turkeys. Cows graze. Lizard inside my funky shoes outside door. Now he's a funky lizard. Lizard inside my house. I put him out but he finds his way inside each day as if he lives there. Snake slithers into tall grass. Geese head north following leader.
If you turn off the music you might hear the birds. Let the birds sing bye bye black bird. Turn off the music. Listen to the bird god.
When Negroes come to the country they bring the beat from the city. boom boom boom. boom boom boom. the urban jungle beat. boom boom boom. Negro say kill the lizard, kill the bee kill the fly kill the bird kill the mosquito kill the turtle. boom boom boom. boom boom boom. Negro can't be still enjoy nature, nature's God as Sun Ra used to say. Cannot connect with trees, mountains, creek, rivers. Negro not at peace. Cannot appreciate stars in the night, moon, Jupiter. Negro must have beat, jungle beat, boom boom boom, boom boom boom. Too quiet he moans. Let there be noise. Boom boom boom. Kill the cow, kill turkey, kill deer. Boom boom boom. One cow says to another, "Why don't they return to their city where they kill each other?" Boom boom boom.
Go down to the creek, talk to the water, listen to the water, be still. Listen to water crossing stones, water crossing weeds, listen. Let water fill your ears, water moves forward gushing forth, pure water.
Look up at the Hawk gliding smooth, no wings moving, still, gliding high low, stops still in sky. Move like a hawk. I am hawk, searching for prey. Chief bird of the air, controlling ground traffic, bird of grandeur, king of sky.
Look at God everyday. The tall pines, silent, still for a thousand years. God speaks loud and clear, except to deaf dumb and blind, crazy with saviors and messiahs whose message they will not heed in a thousand years. Can they fool God? The fool fools himself.
Pious pronouncements, wicked actions. Cannot be still, cannot stand tall like pine. Cannot bend in the wind.
Something is strange today. There are no birds, strange silence. No birds, no Hawk gliding. Can life be without birds, their constant song. How can one get up without birds. Is morning to be no more. What world is this, the world money bought. The world for the material boy and girl. Where are the birds?
I am in the garden. The garden is in me. Here comes the butterfly. What happened to the butterfly this year. Did man kill the butterfly. Why kill Bill. Don't you see all of nature gathers around you in the name of love. The flowers come to you in the name of love. Even the weeds are golden, full of beauty, full of love.
Look, all is still like the first morning of the world. I write naked on a bench. Squirrels watch me watching them.
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For more parables and fables by Marvin X, see his The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Black Bird Press, $19.95.
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For more parables and fables by Marvin X, see his The Wisdom of Plato Negro, Black Bird Press, $19.95.
Marvin X will receive a community service award at Oakland's Juneteenth, Saturday, June 27, 2015, 32nd and Market, North Oakland.
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Is Marvin X the father of Muslim American literature?
Dr. Mohja Kahf and Marvin X. She invited him to read at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Is Marvin X the Father of Muslim American Literature?
Teaching Diaspora Literature: Muslim American Literature as an Emerging Field
by Dr. Mohja Kahf
Is there such a thing as Muslim American literature (MAL)? I argue that there is: It begins with the Muslims of the Black Arts Movement (1965-75). The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one of its iconic texts; it includes American Sufi writing, secular ethnic novels, writing by immigrant and second-generation Muslims, and religious American Muslim literature. Many of the works I would put into this category can and do also get read in other categories, such as African American, Arab American, and South Asian literature, "Third World" women's writing, diasporic Muslim literature in English, and so forth. While the place of these works in other categories cannot be denied, something is gained in reading them together as part of an American Muslim cultural landscape. Like Jewish American literature by the 1930s, Muslim American literature is in a formative stage. It will be interesting to see how it develops (and who will be its Philip Roth!)
I suggest the following typology of MAL only as a foothold, a means of bringing a tentative order to the many texts, one that should be challenged, and maybe ultimately dropped altogether. My first grouping, the "Prophets of Dissent," suggests that Muslim works in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) are the first set of writings in American literature to voice a cultural position identifiable as Muslim. Contemporary Muslim writing that takes the achievements of the BAM as an important literary influence also belongs here, and is characterized similarly by its "outsider" status, moral critique of mainstream American values, and often prophetic, visionary tone. In contrast, the writers of what I call "the Multi-Ethnic Multitudes" tend to enjoy "insider" status in American letters, often entering through MFA programs and the literary establishment, getting published through trade and university book industries, garnering reviews in the mainstream press. They do not share an overall aesthetic but are individual writers of various ethnicities and a wide range of secularisms and spiritualities, and indeed I question my placing them all in one group, and do so temporarily only for the sake of convenience.
On the other hand, my third group, the "New American Transcendentalists," appears to cohere, in aesthetic terms, as writers who share a broad Sufi cultural foundation undergirding their literary work. Their writings often show familiarity with the Sufi poets of several classical Muslim literatures (e.g., in Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu), as well as with American Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century, and that which tends toward the spiritual and the ecstatic in modern American poetry. Finally, the "New Pilgrims" is my term for a loose grouping of writers for whom Islam is not merely a mode of dissent, cultural background, or spiritual foundation for their writing, but its aim and explicit topic. Of the four groups, the New Pilgrims are the ones who write in an overtly religious mode and motivation, like Ann Bradstreet, Cotton Mather, and the Puritans of early American history. This does not prevent them from being capable of producing great literature, any more than it prevented the great Puritan writers. Here is an example of just a few writers in each category, by no means a comprehensive list:
by Dr. Mohja Kahf
Is there such a thing as Muslim American literature (MAL)? I argue that there is: It begins with the Muslims of the Black Arts Movement (1965-75). The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one of its iconic texts; it includes American Sufi writing, secular ethnic novels, writing by immigrant and second-generation Muslims, and religious American Muslim literature. Many of the works I would put into this category can and do also get read in other categories, such as African American, Arab American, and South Asian literature, "Third World" women's writing, diasporic Muslim literature in English, and so forth. While the place of these works in other categories cannot be denied, something is gained in reading them together as part of an American Muslim cultural landscape. Like Jewish American literature by the 1930s, Muslim American literature is in a formative stage. It will be interesting to see how it develops (and who will be its Philip Roth!)
I suggest the following typology of MAL only as a foothold, a means of bringing a tentative order to the many texts, one that should be challenged, and maybe ultimately dropped altogether. My first grouping, the "Prophets of Dissent," suggests that Muslim works in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) are the first set of writings in American literature to voice a cultural position identifiable as Muslim. Contemporary Muslim writing that takes the achievements of the BAM as an important literary influence also belongs here, and is characterized similarly by its "outsider" status, moral critique of mainstream American values, and often prophetic, visionary tone. In contrast, the writers of what I call "the Multi-Ethnic Multitudes" tend to enjoy "insider" status in American letters, often entering through MFA programs and the literary establishment, getting published through trade and university book industries, garnering reviews in the mainstream press. They do not share an overall aesthetic but are individual writers of various ethnicities and a wide range of secularisms and spiritualities, and indeed I question my placing them all in one group, and do so temporarily only for the sake of convenience.
On the other hand, my third group, the "New American Transcendentalists," appears to cohere, in aesthetic terms, as writers who share a broad Sufi cultural foundation undergirding their literary work. Their writings often show familiarity with the Sufi poets of several classical Muslim literatures (e.g., in Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu), as well as with American Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century, and that which tends toward the spiritual and the ecstatic in modern American poetry. Finally, the "New Pilgrims" is my term for a loose grouping of writers for whom Islam is not merely a mode of dissent, cultural background, or spiritual foundation for their writing, but its aim and explicit topic. Of the four groups, the New Pilgrims are the ones who write in an overtly religious mode and motivation, like Ann Bradstreet, Cotton Mather, and the Puritans of early American history. This does not prevent them from being capable of producing great literature, any more than it prevented the great Puritan writers. Here is an example of just a few writers in each category, by no means a comprehensive list:
Prophets of Dissent
From the Black Arts Movement:
• Marvin X, whose Fly to Allah (1969) is possibly the first book of poems published in English by a Muslim American author.
• Sonia Sanchez, whose A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974) is the work of her Muslim period.
• Amiri Baraka, whose A Black Mass (2002) renders the Nation of Islam's Yacoub genesis theology into drama. As with Sanchez, the author was Muslim only briefly but the influence of the Islamic period stretches over a significant part of his overall production.
Later Prophets of Dissent include:
• Calligraphy of Thought, the Bay area poetry venue for young "Generation M" Muslim American spoken word artists who today continue in the visionary and dissenting mode of the BAM.
• Suheir Hammad, Palestinian New Yorker, diva of Def Poetry Jam (on Broadway and HBO), whose tribute to June Jordan in her first book of poetry, Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996), establishes her line of descent from the BAM, at least as one (major) influence on her work.
• El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) is an iconic figure for this mode of Muslim American writing and, indeed, for many writers in all four categories.
Multi-Ethnic Multitudes
• Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, an influential figure in the mainstream American poetry scene, with a literary prize named after him at the University of Utah, brought the ghazal into fashion in English so that it is now taught among other forms in MFA programs.
• Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian American, likewise a "crossover" poet whose work enjoys
prominence in American letters, takes on Muslim content in a significant amount of her
work.
• Sam Hamod, an Arab midwesterner who was publishing poetry in journals at the same time as Marvin X.
• Nahid Rachlin's fiction has been published since well before the recent wave of literature by
others who, like her, are Iranian immigrants.
• Mustafa Mutabaruka, an African American Muslim, debut novel Seed (2002).
• Samina Ali, midwesterner of Indian parentage, debut novel Madras on Rainy Days (2004),
was featured on the June 2004 cover of Poets & Writers.
• Khaled Hosseini, debut novel The Kite Runner (2003).
• Michael Muhammad Knight, a Muslim of New York Irish Catholic background, whose punk rock novel The Taqwacores (2004) delves deeply into Muslim identity issues.
• There are a number of journals where Muslim American literature of various ethnicities can
be found today, among them Chowrangi, a Pakistani American magazine out of New
Jersey, and Mizna, an Arab American poetry magazine out of Minneapolis.
New American Transcendentalists
• Daniel (Abd al-Hayy) Moore is an excellent example of this mode of Muslim American writing. California-born, he published as a Beat poet in the early sixties, became a Sufi Muslim, renounced poetry for a decade, then renounced his renouncement and began publishing again, prolifically and with a rare talent. His Ramadan Sonnets (City Lights, 1986) is a marriage of content and form that exemplifies the "Muslim/American" simultaneity of Muslim American art.
• The Rumi phenomenon: apparently the most read poet in America is a Muslim. He merits mention for that, although technically I am not including literature in translation. Then again, why not? As with so many other of my limits, this is arbitrary and only awaits someone to make a case against it.
• Journals publishing poetry in this mode include The American Muslim, Sufi, Qalbi, and others.
New American Pilgrims
• Pamela Taylor writes Muslim American science fiction. Iman Yusuf writes "Islamic
romance." This group of writers is not limited to genre writers, however.
Dasham Brookins writes and performs poetry and maintains a website, MuslimPoet.com, where poets such as Samantha Sanchez post. Umm Zakiyya (pseud.) has written a novel, If I Should Speak (2001), about a young Muslim American and her roommates in college. Writers in this group also come from many ethnicities but, unlike those in my second category, come together around a more or less coherent, more or less conservative Muslim identity.
Websites tend to ban erotica and blasphemy, for example. The Islamic Writers Alliance, a group formed by Muslim American women, has just put out its first anthology. Major published authors have yet to emerge in this grouping, but there is no reason to think they will not eventually do so. My criteria for Muslim American literature are a flexible combination of three factors: Muslim authorship. Including this factor, however vague or tenuous, prevents widening the scope to the point of meaninglessness, rather than simply including any work about Muslims by an author with no biographical connection to the slightest sliver of Muslim identity (such as Robert Ferrigno with his recent dystopian novel about a fanatical Muslim takeover of America). It is a cultural, not religious, notion of Muslim that is relevant. A "lapsed Muslim" author, as one poet on my roster called himself, is still a Muslim author for my purposes. I am not interested in levels of commitment or practice, but in literary Muslimness.
Language and aesthetic of the writing.
In a few cases, there is a deliberate espousal of an aesthetic that has Islamic roots, such as the Afrocentric Islamic aesthetic of the Muslim authors in the Black Arts Movement.
Relevance of themes or content.
If the Muslim identity of the author is vague or not explicitly professed, which is often the case with authors in the "Multi-Ethnic Multitudes," but the content itself is relevant to Muslim American experience, I take that as a signal that the text is choosing to enter the conversation of Muslim American literature and ought to be included.In defining boundaries for research that could become impossibly diffuse, I choose to look mainly at fiction and poetry, with autobiography and memoir writings selectively included. I have not included writings in languages other than English, although there are Muslims in America who write in Arabic, Urdu, and other languages.
I have looked at the twentieth century onward, and there is archival digging to be done in earlier periods: the Spanish colonial era may yield Muslim writing, and we already know that some enslaved Muslims in the nineteenth century have left narratives. More research is needed. If one expands the field from "literature" to "Muslim American culture," one can also include Motown, rap, and hip-hop lyrics by Muslim artists, screenplays such as the Muslim American classic The Message by the late Syrian American producer Mustapha Aqqad, books written for children, sermons, essays, and other genres.There are pleasures and patterns that emerge from reading this profusion of disparate texts under the rubric of Muslim American cultural narrative. It is time! I hope, as this field emerges, that others will do work in areas I have left aside in this brief initial exploration.
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Love And War
poems
by Marvin X
preface by Lorenzo Thomas
1995
Review
by Mohja Kahf
Have spent the last few days (when not mourning with friends and family the passing of my family friend and mentor in Muslim feminism and Islamic work, Sharifa AlKhateeb, (may she dwell in Rahma), immersed in the work of Marvin X and amazed at his brilliance.
This poet has been prolific since his first book of poems, Fly to Allah, (1969), right up to his most recent Love and War Poems (1995) and Land of My Daughters, 2005, not to mention his plays, which were produced (without royalties) in Black community theatres from the 1960s to the present, and essay collections such as In the Crazy House Called America, 2002, and Wish I Could Tell You The Truth, 2005.
Marvin X was a prime shaper of the Black Arts Movement (1964-1970s) which is, among other things, the birthplace of modern Muslim American literature, and it begins with him.
Well, Malik Shabazz and him. But while the Autobiography of Malcolm X is a touchstone of Muslim American culture, Marvin X and other Muslims in BAM were the emergence of a cultural expression of Black Power and Muslim thought inspired by Malcolm, who was, of course, ignited by the teachings and writings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Cover design by Emory
Love And War
poems
by Marvin X
preface by Lorenzo Thomas
1995
Review
by Mohja Kahf
Have spent the last few days (when not mourning with friends and family the passing of my family friend and mentor in Muslim feminism and Islamic work, Sharifa AlKhateeb, (may she dwell in Rahma), immersed in the work of Marvin X and amazed at his brilliance.
This poet has been prolific since his first book of poems, Fly to Allah, (1969), right up to his most recent Love and War Poems (1995) and Land of My Daughters, 2005, not to mention his plays, which were produced (without royalties) in Black community theatres from the 1960s to the present, and essay collections such as In the Crazy House Called America, 2002, and Wish I Could Tell You The Truth, 2005.
Marvin X was a prime shaper of the Black Arts Movement (1964-1970s) which is, among other things, the birthplace of modern Muslim American literature, and it begins with him.
Well, Malik Shabazz and him. But while the Autobiography of Malcolm X is a touchstone of Muslim American culture, Marvin X and other Muslims in BAM were the emergence of a cultural expression of Black Power and Muslim thought inspired by Malcolm, who was, of course, ignited by the teachings and writings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
My interest is contemporary literature, and by literature I am more interested in poetry and fiction than memoir and non-fiction, although that is a flexible thing. I argue that it is time to call Muslim American literature a field, even though many of these writings can be and have been classified in other ways-studied under African American literature or to take the writings of immigrant Muslims, studied under South Asian ethnic literature or Arab American literature.
With respect to Marvin X, I wonder why I am just now hearing about him-I read Malcolm when I was 12, I read Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez and others from the BAM in college and graduate school-why is attention not given to his work in the same places I encountered these other authors?
Declaring Muslim American literature as a field of study is valuable because recontextualizing it will add another layer of attention to his incredibly rich body of work. He deserves to be WAY better known than he is among Muslim Americans and generally, in the world of writing and the world at large.
By we who are younger Muslim American poets, in particular, Marvin should be honored as our elder, one who is still kickin, still true to the word!
Love and War Poems is wrenching and powerful, combining a powerful critique of America ("America downsizes like a cripple whore/won't retire/too greedy to sleep/too fat to rest") but also a critique of deadbeat dads and drug addicts (not sparing himself) and men who hate.
"For the Men" is so Quranic poem it gave me chills with verses such as:
for the men who honor wives
and the men who abuse them
for the men who win
and the men who sin
for the men who love God
and the men who hate
for the men who are brothers
and the men who are beasts
"O Men, listen to the wise," the poet pleads:
there is no escape for the men of this world
or the men of the next
He is sexist as all get out, in the way that is common for men of his generation and his radicalism, but he is refreshingly aware of that and working on it. It's just that the work isn't done and if that offends you to see a man in process and still using the 'b' word, look out. Speaking of the easily offended, he warns in his introduction that "life is often profane and obscene, such as the present condition of African American people."
If you want pure and holy, he says, read the Quran and the Bible, because Marvin is talking about "the low down dirty truth." For all that, the poetry of Marvin X is like prayer, beauty-full of reverence and honor for Truth. "It is. it is. it is."
A poem to his daughter Muhammida is a sweet mix of parental love and pride and fatherly freak-out at her sexuality and independence, ending humbly with:
peace Mu
it's on you
yo world
sister-girl
Other people don't get off so easy, including a certain "black joint chief of staff ass nigguh (kill 200,000 Muslims in Iraq)" in the sharply aimed poem "Free Me from My Freedom." (Mmm hmm, the 'n' word is all over the place in Marvin too.)
Nature poem, wedding poem, depression poem, wake-up call poems, it's all here. Haiti, Rwanda, the Million Man March, Betsy Ross's maid, OJ, Rabin, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and other topics make it into this prophetically voiced collection of dissent poetry, so Islamic and so African American in its language and its themes, a book that will stand in its beauty long after the people mentioned in it pass. READ MARVIN X for RAMADAN!--
Mohja Kahf Associate Professor / Dept. of English, Middle East & Islamic Studies, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville
Two Poems for the People of Syria by Marvin X and Mohja Kahf
how much water can run from rivers to sea
how much blood can soak the earth
the guns of tyrants know no end
a people awakened are bigger than bullets
there is no sleep in their eyes
no more stunted backs and fear of broken limbs
even men, women and children are humble with sacrifice
the old the young play their roles
with smiles they endure torture chambers
with laughs they submit to rape and mutilations
there is no victory for oppressors
whose days are numbered
as the clock ticks as the sun rises
let the people continue til victory
surely they smell it on their hands
taste it on lips
believe it in their hearts
know it in their minds
no more backwardness no fear
let there be resistance til victory.
--Marvin X/El Muhajir
Syrian poet/professor Dr. Mohja Kahf
Oh Marvin, how much blood can soak the earth?
The angels asked, “will you create a species who will shed blood
and overrun the earth with evil?”
And it turns out “rivers of blood” is no metaphor:
see the stones of narrow alleys in Duma
shiny with blood hissing from humans? Dark
and dazzling, it keeps pouring and pumping
from the inexhaustible soft flesh of Syrians,
and neither regime cluster bombs from the air,
nor rebel car bombs on the ground,
ask them their names before they die.
They are mowed down like wheat harvested by machine,
and every stalk has seven ears, and every ear a hundred grains.
They bleed like irrigation canals into the earth.
Even one little girl in Idlib with a carotid artery cut
becomes a river of blood. Who knew she could be a river
running all the way over the ocean, to you,
draining me of my heart? And God said to the angels,
“I know what you know not.” But right now,
the angels seem right. Cut the coyness, God;
learn the names of all the Syrians.
See what your species has done.
--Mohja Kahf
PALESTINE by Marvin X (Imam Maalik El Muhajir)
I am not an Arab, I am not a Jew
Abraham is not my father, Palestine is not my home
But I would fight any man
Who kicked me out of my house
To dwell in a tent
I would fight
To the ends of the earth
Someone who said to me
I want your house
Because my father lived here
Two thousand years ago
I want your land
Because my father lived here
Two thousand years ago.
Jets would not stop me
From returning to my home
Uncle toms would not stop me
Cluster bombs would not stop me
Bullets I would defy.
No man can take the house of another
And expect to live in peace
There is no peace for thieves
There is no peace for those who murder
For myths and ancient rituals
Wail at the wall
Settle in "Judea" and "Samaria"
But fate awaits you
You will never sleep with peace
You will never walk without listening.
I shall cross the River Jordan
With Justice in my hand
I shall return to Jerusalem
And establish my house of peace,
Thus said the Lord.
© 2000 by Marvin X (Imam Maalik El Muhajir)
Marvin X has been invited to New York
to address the Zulu Nation (ASAP)
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Marvin X calls for all Men to March who love ho's and multiple wives
Marvin X is calling upon all real men to stand up and organize themselves for the right to have as many wives as they please and unlimited ho's (sex workers). If John can marry John, Mary can marry Mary, I see no reason Billy cannot have as many wives as he pleases and unlimited ho's (sex workers). We should begin with a march to let the world know our nuts are out of the sand! If you support this project, hit me back ASAP with your comment. Haters and masculine feminists need not reply.
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Maestro Marvin X with his Black Arts Movement Poets Choir & Arkestra; David Murray on sax, Earl Davis on trumpet; Malcolm X Jazz/Art Festival, Oakland, May 17, 2014
After da nut, then what?
by
Marvin X
FROM THE MYTHOLOGY OF PUSSY AND DICK (EXPANDED VERSION): A POETIC DIALOGUE ON PSYCHOSOCIAL SEXUALITY by Marvin X, unpublished
Poets from his fatherland, Kentucky, visit Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland
If you love you
I love you
don’t make me love you
if you don’t love you
it’s yo thang
do what ya wanna do
just be true to you
to you yo life
to me mine
lakum dinu kum wa liya din.
no time to hate ya
let me live my life
don’t block me
me no block you
life is a micro second in time
moments precious
no time to hate
a waste
enjoy yourself
don’t worry bout billy and billy
sally and sally
enjoy yourself
organize yourself
like billy and billy and sally and sally
After da nut then what
satisfied bewildered overwhelmed
wow
smile to frown
a moment lost in the wind
The white boy told us
don’t live your life
like a candle in the wind.
Let people be happy
find your bliss
does it involve anyone else
except a friend who comes in love
love da one ya wit
praise them for loving you
let the other people be happy
don’t rain hate
do you know their story pain trauma
let them be
they smile
do you smile in your lover’s eyes
are you thankful and thoughtful
like Sly Stone
It’s a family affair
let lovers love
ease the pain express joy
the mystery of it all
a momentary thing
but standing tall in the night
be thankful for lovers
who know love is all there is
who find joy in the night or early morn
sing along with them their happiness
can you dance your dance of joy
can you say wow.
After da nut then what
it is the most sacred of things
precious
even among the sex workers
praise those with zest
Oriental touch
happy ending
tip for attitude
thank God he sent them to bless you in the night/early morn
treat them with kindness
God sent them to you
Didn’t Jesus love dem ho’s
they washed his feet
who touched the hem of his garment?
After da nut then what
in all your joy look for spirit person
dwelling in the higher self
a tuning fork
steel sharpens steel
water finds itself
drink from the well of love
nothing else
goin on
up in here.
—Marvin X
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Manifesto of Marvin X's Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland and other cities on his grassroots guerilla warfare rampage, stick and move
Marvin X at San Francisco Juneteenth, 2015, Fillmore
Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland.
Brazilian dancers at Academy of da Corner at San Francisco's Juneteenth
Russian woman stops to help poet collate his pamphlete Mythology of Pussy and Dick
She said, "I see what you are doing. I did it for thirty years, let me help you." Marvin let her help him.
Poet Samantha with Tarika Lewis on violin in background
performing with Marvin X's Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra at Laney College, Feb. 7, 2015
Queen Mother Kujichagulia, multi-talented master griot/jejali
Val Serrant, master percussionist from Trinidad, always at the beck and call of Marvin X and BAM
Poet Samantha in a swoon before doing her thang in a masterful manner.
Aqueila Lewis, Ms Erotica
Kalamu Chache', poet
She is about to complete the full cycle of the August Wilson plays for the first time in history
Manifesto of Academy of da Corner
14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland
"Marvin X is Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland."
--Ishmael Reed, author The Complete Muhammad Ali, including a chapter long interview with Marvin X
Academy of da Corner is a continuation of the Black Arts Movement, an educational/ performance/academic/activist project to inspire the Cultural Revolution in North American Africans, with implications for the rest of humanity that apparently follows closely every cultural move of North American Africans. We can't fart without the world copying our fart. So perhaps we should be flattered except for the fact that often imitation becomes exploitation and we become victims of our own creations, e.g., "Lord, look what they did to my song."
Nevertheless, we shall strive forward with our cultural revolution to transform the negative aspects of our lives into the positive, to reconnect our community, parents with children, males with females, brother to brother and sister to sister, yes, even enemies must reconcile in the spirit of recovery, healing and liberation of the entire community. This is the challenge of the new millennium and we shall not move forward without meeting it. Either we are brave warriors willing to face the jihad within ourselves and our community, or we're cowards prepared to tread water until we become extinct, a forgotten people, relics of a glorious past but no future except a multicultural chasm where we exist on the last rung of the ladder, simply because we refuse to transcend our differences for the greater good, thus succumbing to a low intensity war determined to destroy us politically, economically, morally and culturally.
Academy of da Corner/Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra: The Performance and Educational Arm of the Cultural Revolution
As Fidel Castro has said, our weapon is consciousness, yes, it is the only weapon we have that can defeat the forces allied against us. Consciousness is an awareness of our traditions and our mission. Our tradition is a freedom loving people, not political, economic and cultural slaves to others. We reject the slave tradition of clowning and buffoonery so evident in African American artistic expression today, especially movies and rap (now called yap, for rap derived from the tradition of revolutionary spoken word: H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Last Poets, Baraka, Sonia, Askia, Haki, X, and yes, Malcolm, Martin, Kwame Toure, Fannie Lou, Queen Mother Moore, Angela).
If one is not aspiring to be in the tradition of Paul Robeson, i.e., the artistic freedom fighter, then one has no right to claim membership in the Black Arts Movement, and is therefore merely a whore for capitalist pimps, ready to wear any clown suit, do any shuffle, say any jingle and rhyme, put on any make up and dance for the master's American bandstand, manifesting the cultural hate personified by the likes of Michael Jackson and others too numerous to mention.
No people with consciousness would allow themselves to be paraded on BET, MTV and elsewhere as naked whores, pseudo gangstas and wannabe pimps. Although we are about artistic freedom and freedom of speech, we reject phony black bourgeoisie culture police who are themselves guilty of a profane and obscene lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, yet we demand African American artists get in harmony with our tradition and mission to use our creativity to help liberate the deaf, dumb and blind, not take them deeper into the devil's den of iniquity.
Academy of da Corner/Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra Will Speak Truth to Power
Academy of da Corner/Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra will perform works that liberate not desecrate. Rappers have given us graphic descriptions of our psychosocial condition, now we must come with solutions. If you hate yo daddy and mama, show me how you turned hate into love, show me how you sought reconciliation and unconditional love. Otherwise, you are simply yapping nursery rhymes, snibbling like snotty nose babies too pitiful to wake up and release your lips from your mother's breasts, you ungrateful bastards! Grow up, did mama tell you life was a bowl of cherries—you are lucky to have a mother and father—think of all the children who are products of foster care.
We were not brought to America to create families, but to be mules, donkeys and horses, to have our families utterly destroyed for capitalism and slavery. And we can only overcome America's plan for us by putting on the armour of God and standing tall together, defying America's hope for our continued subservience and debauchery. Aw, Jesus said be in this world but no of this world. After all, it is an illusion, a world of make believe, a world of materialism and conspicuous consumption.
Poets and spoken word artists have an obligation to speak truth to power, not submit gleefully, yapping nonsense around the world to make a dollar and make mockery of the elders, calling them "broke heroes," although the so-called broke heroes are the reason you are among the newly rich because of their sacrifice and unconditional love for your punk bitch little asses.
The American Educational System Is An Abysmal Failure
Since the American educational system has failed to teach Johnny and Johnnymae how to read, write and most of all, think, the Academy of da Corner shall see it as a priority to teach basic skills. How can we have a drama class in which students are unable to read the script. I have taught such classes on the college and university level, so I know the degree of the problem. Don't try to cover ignorance and mental retardation as a result of America's public school miseducation.
Academy of da Corner/Black Arts Movement Poets Choir and Arkestra will train students with talent in the arts: drama, dance, music, creative writing, nonfiction, poetry and spoken word, for these are serious crafts that take discipline and training, not a jack in the box game of jingles and rhymes produced because one can memorize words that are full of sound and fury signifying nothing, although audiences are enraptured by the nothingness and babble, rewarding the jester with money at poetry Slams/Scams, deluding the person that he/she is a poet and spoken word master because of his/her natural talent as a product of the ancient African oral tradition.
Racism 101
Racism is the abomination of the new world, but Elijah Muhammad used racism and black supremacy as an anti-toxin to white supremacy. The Black Arts Movement did the same. Whites were often banned from attending performances and certainly from performing in productions. Harold Cruse noted how this marked a radical departure from traditional Negro theatre (see Crisis of the Negro Intellectual). Thus BAM was of, for, and by Black people, if only for a moment, time enough to get “ourselves” together. This moment was necessary to raise a people from the dead, who were full of fear after being terrorized for centuries by white supremacy.
Why is this so difficult to understand, perhaps because there are those in denial about the ravages of white supremacy on North American African minds, to say nothing about what it has done to delusional white minds. Why should victims of liars and murderers want them in our presence? How can we recover with them in our midst? Can the rape victim recover with the rapist in her bed?
Even today, American racism and capitalism/globalism is the scorn of the earth, blood sucking the poor in the name of global free trade, caring nothing for the rights of poor nations to economic parity. You consume the world’s energy for the greedy privilege of driving SUVs and having a television in every room, left on 24/7. You have no intention of dealing with the root causes of terrorism: poverty, ignorance, and disease.
Until you do so, you will become a prisoner in your own land, afraid of those outside your borders and those within whom you’ve equally mistreated, abused and falsely accused of being criminals, unworthy to share in the fruits of their labor and that of their ancestors, while white descendants enjoy the surplus capital from centuries of slave labor.
Our primary concern was then and is now ourselves. You are dangerous to our health, mental, physical, and spiritual, unless you have radicalized your consciousness, or shall we say become blackenized, certainly all vestiges of white supremacy must be processed out of your consciousness. Those whites who have worked on themselves we welcome as allies, brothers and sisters in revolution.
It is not the nature of North American Africans to hate and exclude. We can be nationalists and internationalists, i.e., Pan Africanists, Aboriginial Black Man, without hating and excluding. But we do have the human right to do for self as others do, whites, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians, and others of every race, sex and creed.
We must not be afraid to become economically self-sufficient. We were in better economic shape under segregation, yes, when we were Negroes, now we’re black and don’t have a decent restaurant or hotel in any American city.
We have thousands of religious houses where the people receive their dose of opium as a form of social control to delay the day of our liberation, where people are taught fairy tales and nursery rhymes about a sky god who died on the cross for our sins. What have African Americans done but be loyal slaves, down to this present moment we are dying in Iraq defending liars and murderers.
Finally, racism is a component of capitalism. We cannot be capitalists because we have no capital! We hardly have one black bank in America. Where are our African American global markets? We might sell a few raps songs in Europe and Asia, but do we sell a blackmobile, trucks, socks, toilet paper, matches? At least Mexico produces their own oil, gasoline, soap, toilet paper. Why can't 40 million North American African produce one roll of toilet paper?
Black Studies and Academy of da Corner
Although black studies derived from the efforts of black revolutionary students, with the demise of the liberation struggle, radical instructors and scholars were removed and replaced with academically "qualified" collaborators and trusted colonial servants, unconcerned with the original mission of black studies: to uplift the community. As a result, for every one brother going to college, four go to prison. For the most part, black studies is a sham, a place for tenured Negroes to keep a job for life unless they rock the boat by teaching radical ideas found to be politically incorrect by their academic masters.
Black Studies began in revolution, but has succumb to reaction and irrelevance with respect to providing a leadership role in uplifting the community. Where is a truly radical black studies department? Where in America is one black radical college or university? Even under Zionist occupation, Palestinians have their radical universities.
Please don't mention the Negro colleges and universities, mainly outhouses for training house slaves who escape the hood into corporate America and never look back. Of course the white colleges and universities do the same. Isn't it interesting that Dr. Ben couldn't find a black academic institution to donate his thirty thousand volume library? He gave it to the Nation of Islam, which is very ironic in light of his history of anti-Islamic pronouncements.
As a consequence of the above, the Academy of da Corner must step to the front line of community education; it must become an institution for the training of radical scholars and social activists who will fulfill the original mission of black studies by attacking illiteracy, joblessness, economic empowerment, addictions, mental and physical health issues and spiritual poverty caused by excessive religiosity. Academic subjects will be considered for their relevance to life issues as we confront America's low intensity war on a daily basis.
Gender Studies and Academy of da Corner
The Arabic word nisa has two meanings depending on syllable stress. One meaning is woman, another meaning is to forget. Long ago, Warith Din Muhammad gave a lecture on how men forget women. More recently, Amina Baraka exhorted me and her husband, Amiri, not to forget women, to respect them always, especially for their contribution to our liberation struggle: "Remember the women of history, remember Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, remember Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Queen Mother Moore, remember Ella Collins," Amina cried.
Academy of da Corner must address problems in male/female relations since such problems directly impact healthy family and community development. Mrs. Baraka was addressing two poets, both having the artistic sensibility and insensitivity to become emotionally detached from women, children and men in our quest for creativity, thinking a poem is more important than the human being. (Of course Amiri Baraka is qualified to speak for himself, but since I know him, I'm taking the liberty to place him in the boat with me, other poets and artists in general.)
If men of intelligence can be so detached, imagine the behavior of men with lesser intelligence. Perhaps this is why the divorce courts and the anger management programs are full. Men just don't get it and some have no intention to "get it." It will take generations before the patriarchal mentality subsides, if then, although great strides have been made in male/female equality. Now we are in danger of women getting revenge after coming into power situations. They want to oppress. Go before a female judge with a domestic violence case!
But the socialization of males and females must be examined to explore better, healthier methods of interpersonal relations. How can women who love talking endlessly, communicate with men who will go silent when approached on critical matters? "Do you hear me, man," the woman says, "Then why don't you say something?" In the TS Eliot poem the women say, "That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all. . . ."
Male education must involve manhood rites that allow them to explore male psychology and female psychology, and the same for women. So often we come together not knowing a damn thing about each other, until it is too late, two or three children later, several ass whippings later.
Men must learn to understand and treat females as equal but different human beings. The idea is not to make men more feminine, but to understand their natural selves and gain a more precise understanding of the opposite sex. Mythologically speaking, understand the function of the sky god and the earth mother goddess. One is the protector, one the nurturer. Today the situation is such that the woman needs protection from the protector!
And the man feels his nurturer is somehow his enemy, the very person he sleeps with he is terrified of, and often the woman feels the same. What kind of horror story is this?
Moving from myth to nature, roosters will not become hens, bulls will not become cows, so stop trying to reverse nature, although it is urgent that we understand the nature of human psychology, understand different functions of each sex, responsibilities, desires, drives and dreams. Often men are indeed lost in the stars, while women are usually forced to stay grounded in reality. As Joseph Campbell explains, men must be taught they are approaching manhood. Women know they are approaching womanhood at the first cycle—they can see, feel, touch, smell womanhood, but men need a ritual: they must come out of the sky and go into the bush to be terrified into the reality of manhood.
Men must at least listen to the dreams of women, even if we reject their dreams, and women must do the same—ultimately a compromise can and must be found. It shall never be again, "Your way or no way," although men will attempt to maintain male privilege until the sky falls—look up, brother, the sky is falling!
And women, in their new found aggression and power positions, will push their agenda at every turn, forcing men to react violently, "Bitch, I don't want to hear nothing you got to say. Shut the fuck up." But she's not going to shut up and she ain't going away—you may leave her for another woman but strangely it will be the same woman with another name. A woman is a woman is a woman is a woman, stupid!
So before there can be unity, there must be understanding. The main thing is not to oppress each other, especially since we're both freshly out of slavery. Men often feel the double-edged sword of oppression from the black woman and the white man. And women feel the same sword blade from the white man and the black man. If we, males and females, would recognize we're not enemies but friends and lovers, sailing in the same love boat, we'll be at least halfway free!
When women are at the top of their game, they have the unique ability to get anything they want from men, sometimes with the glance of an eye, a stride, a smile, the tone of her voice can totally disarm a man. Call it feminine charm or whatever, but women have been successful throughout the ages. With her newfound power, do not forget her ancient secrets that worked for thousands of years, giving her the ability to be a helpmate to great men and tearing down great men when in rage and frustration.
Consider the Children
These twisted male/female relationships have profound implications for the children. When the male departs from the jungle to the forest, the child, especially the male child, is soon out of control, usually by age 15. He is in absolute rebellion against his mother's agenda, although her agenda is often bisexual because she is forced to don the persona of the female/male. The young man's hatred is directed at the female side of the mask, although he harbors a distinct hatred for his missing father as well. So consider his rage, just as his hormones are kicking in. Again, the need for manhood training. But even with females, there is a need and desire for father's love that she will search for in fatherless young men or dirty old men!
Likewise, with young males, the hatred is transferred to girlfriends whom they verbally and physically abuse. This hatred is expressed in the poetic language of rap songs. Healing such shattered young lives is the task of mental health specialists such as Dr. Nathan Hare's Black Reconstruction mental health group sessions that he is calling to be established across America. In the interim, hip hop youth use poetry, sometimes unconsciously, for peer counseling, and this is all good. The University of Poetry must address such stress and strains in the personality of males and females, urging them to use poetry as a healing tool in their lives, let poetry be a bridge for reconciliation rather than a vehicle to only express pain and rage between the sexes and the generations.
Poetically Gay
If we were against gay and lesbian poets, there would be little poetry to read, since the arts seem to be the home of many gay people. Imagine a world without Langston Hughes or James Baldwin, or Audre Lorde and June Jordan. So my attitude is what does sex have to do with being a poet—nothing! A poet must understand human sexuality in general. A poet stuck on being gay is not a poet, for what happens when he or she must put on the persona of a man or woman, or a tree for that matter. A poet must transcend all sexuality in order to understand the universal human spirit that is, yes, beyond a particular sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians might sometimes have a more sensitive spirit, but every poet, whether gay or straight, must have a sensitive spirit.
Did Baldwin write as a gay or as a writer of the human condition? After my 1968 interview with him, I remarked to Ed Bullins, “He talked like a man.” Ed said, “He damn sho did.” Alas, Baldwin wrote the script for Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X. If he had been trapped in his gayness, how could he have written a script about a hero who symbolized black manhood? When people questioned whether he was qualified to write the script because of his gayness, Baldwin said, “Hey, I pay my rent, I write what I want to write.”
In the video version of my play One Day In The Life, a gay actor portrays my son. If he had not transcended his gayness, he wouldn’t have been in my play. So he was in my play because he was a great actor. At the audition for my play in New York, a gay brother tried out for the part but couldn’t transcend his sexuality. My daughter was casting director, and when I told her to let the guy read the part again, she said, “No, Daddy, no. Let me handle this. He got to go!”
So we have no time to condemn people for their sexual orientation. We might thereby condemn the goose laying the golden egg. We could use another Baldwin or Langston right about now to help free us from this precipice.
But I say to those who passed legislation permitting sex between consenting adults, and in California one of them was then Assemblyman Willie L. Brown, if gays can be with gays and lesbians with lesbians, then men who love prostitutes should be allowed to be with their sex workers in peace, not sneaking around in the alley like a broke dick dog, arrested and cars seized. Yes, legalize prostitution. Lakum dinu kum waliya din: to you your way and to me mine.
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We will shoot back!
‘We Will Shoot Back': Meet The Black Activists Who Aren’t Ready To Forgive
Taurean “Sankofa” Brown
In the days after white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine black congregants during a Bible study at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Americans of various racial and socioeconomic backgrounds across the country have joined together in remembering the group now known as the Charleston Nine. At the gatherings, onlookers sing hymns and light candles as speakers call for prayer and forgiveness of aggressors.
As noble as that philosophy might be, an often ignored but growing number of African Americans aren’t buying into it — perhaps out of a frustration with the litany of state-sanctioned violence against black men and women for whom the courts have held none responsible. Some black people have instead adopted the ideology of militant self-defense, arguing that they have no choice but to take up arms against those who threaten their livelihood and that of their family.
“There’s a campaign to pacify black people,” Brown, 28, said. “The point of this movement is to educate and let black people know that we too have the right to protect our families and communities by any means necessary.”
That opportunity may be around the corner. Black people across the country will learn about gun laws in their state and attend community trainings where instructors will show them how to use and clean their weapons as part of National Gun Registry Day, tentatively scheduled for early August. In preparation for the daylong event, Brown said he reached out to Akinyele Omowale Umoja, chair of American-American Studies at Georgia State University and author of “We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.”
“There will be black trained firearms instructors who are able to give our people that education. This message resonates with black youth who have seen that reformism does nothing and generally other black people — especially older black people who remember the violence before, during, and after the Civil Rights movement,” brown said. “That mindset hasn’t died, but folks have tried to erase it from history.”
The growing sentiment around armed self-defense may be unable to be ignored. A survey by the Pew Research Center earlier this year showed that 54 percent of black people view gun ownership positively, describing it as a means of protection — an increase of 29 percentage points from just two years prior. While African Americans living in rural regions may feel neutral about gun ownership, some of their counterparts in urban centers with strict gun laws have found a change of heart in recent years, initially out of fear for their lives in high-crime neighborhoods.
Particularly after the Charleston massacre and other acts of violence against black people, the focus among some African American clergy and civil rights officials has shifted. Numerous threats prompted members of a Minnesota church to tote registered pistols and sit throughout the chapel in preparation for a probable attack. In April, the head of the Georgia chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gave a similar call a week after police officers killed a mentally ill black man, telling protestors at a rally in Atlanta that “we’re going to have to do something in our community to let the rest of America know that we’re not going to be victimized.”
Many black people, perhaps frustrated by the media’s lukewarm treatment of Roof, couldn’t stomach any talk that didn’t involve punitive recourse for last week’s massacre. Not long after family members of the Charleston Nine said they forgave Roof, Stacey Patton of the Chronicle for Higher Education wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that black people shouldn’t have to be kind in moments of absolute tragedy in order to have their humanity recognized.
Such action and commentary, however, hasn’t come without backlash — with some critics calling to mind the civil rights movements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, both stalwarts of nonviolent resistance who said “an eye for an eye makes the entire world go blind.”
However, some religious leaders, like Kadir Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam (NOI)’s Mid-Atlantic region and Mosque No. 4, located in Washington, D.C., lampoon such arguments. Muhammad counted among more than 500 people who filed into Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in the District to hear the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the NOI, officially announce the observance of the Million Man March’s 20th anniversary to be held on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in October during an event aptly themed, “Justice or Else.”
Days earlier at a candlelight vigil, Muhammad told onlookers that too much has happened to young African American men and women in recent years for black people to appeal to the whims of the majority power structure and the white people who benefit from systemic inequality, regardless of whether they want to be allies.
“Throughout the whole country, a lot of black people are upset because we are too quick to forgive. It’s not working,” Muhammad told ThinkProgress. “We have forgiven white people for 400 some odd years and continue to get nothing but disrespect. Black folks aren’t going to keep tolerating this. Someone’s going to have to stand up and change the picture. We have to stop this. The slave master’s children always outnumber us at the rallies because they want us to forgive them. But you can’t trust them. One of them might act crazy and shoot us again.”
Those fears of white violence prompted previous black militant self-defense movements. To the chagrin of his colleagues, Robert F. Williams turned the local chapter of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP into an armed self-defense unit, a move that placed him under federal government surveillance until he exiled to Cuba. Residents of the a Cairo, Illinois housing project also picked up their guns when police officers didn’t protect them against white people who retaliated for their boycott of stores that didn’t hire African Americans. The Deacons for Defense, an armed civil rights based in parts of the South, also took up arms to protect their communities against the Ku Klux Klan, even acting as security during the March against Fear , a demonstration in 1966 during which protestors marched from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi.
At the height of its existence, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense had more than 40 chapters across the country, each with armed police patrol groups and community programs for children and adults. Civil rights leader Stokeley Carmichael said this tradition of Black Power spoke to the desires of people of African descent to achieve self-determination — direct involvement in their daily affairs and the recognition of their value as black people. Slain civil rights leader Malcolm X espoused similar values of self-defense years and self-determination a few years before, imploring his followers to act within the bounds of the law but “send [aggressors] to the cemetery” if they inflict violence against them.
While students of these movements see its leaders as symbols of protection and grassroots activism, history has been less kind. Unless they do their own research, today’s students will more than likely learn to see the stalwarts of armed resilience movements as violent. School curricula in the post-civil rights era has often juxtaposed them alongside their nonviolent peers, especially King — whose birthday the U.S. government recognizes as a federal holiday.Additionally, today’s history books rarely mention events after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in essence downplaying the suffering of black people decades after the 1960s and writing the Black Panther Party out of the prevailing narrative. In her 2010 blog post, Rhodes Scholar Caroline Mulloy reflected on how her miseducation about the Black Panther Party didn’t allow her to understand the black struggle in a deeper context.
“These programs, established by the Black Panthers, are details that were too easily skipped over by teachers who taught the master narrative version of the Civil Rights Movement,” Mulloy wrote. “Many poor African Americans were still suffering from poverty and few opportunities as a result of discrimination. The Black Panthers play a profoundly important role in improving the lives of African Americans in these poor communities as well as further pushing the issue of not just civil rights, but human rights in the United States.”
That shallow understanding about the systemic racism has allowed racial and socioeconomic disparities to persist decades later. The same holds true for the justice system, leaving some to wonder what course of legal action would proponents of armed self-defense take if they find themselves in police custody.
According to a study conducted by the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, the odds aren’t in black people’s favor. The findings of that research show that white people living in “Stand Your Ground” states have a 354 percent greater chance of being found justified in their killings than their black counterparts. In states without “Stand Your Ground” laws, that disparity only goes down to 250 percent. Marissa Alexander, a Florida woman who fired a “warning shot during an argument with her husband, learn that reality firsthand when a judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison in 2012. Even as members of the Ku Klux Klan members threatened to use lethal force against Ferguson protestors, authorities arrested members of the New Black Panther Party and charged them with purchasing handguns and conspiring to detonate pipe bombs last November.
While Brown admits that situations like the aforementioned cannot always be avoided, he advises black people to learn the intricacies of their local gun and self-defense laws. But he said that even the command of complex legal language won’t suffice if people — particularly African Americans — fail to understand that armed resistance movements aren’t antagonistic. Rather, they’re a means of protection when the systems in place have failed to work for marginalized communities.
“’We will shoot back’ doesn’t mean initiating violence,” Brown said. “Nobody shamed cattle rancher Clive Bundy but when black people talk about using self-defense, it’s a national worry. That’s the hypocritical nature of nonviolence in this country. We’re just defending ourselves to ensure our humanity.”
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Notes from Poet Neal Hall, MD, in Hyderabad, India
Hello Friends:
Yesterday, I had the honor of being invited to speak before 46 members (40 men, 6 women; 30 of whom represent the governing body) of the African Student Association of Hyderabad, India. asa-telangana.org
The talk ( 20 minutes) and Q&A went on for four hours straight.
The 46 individuals represented 16 African countries to include: Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Republic of The Congo, Uganda, Yemen.
The Association is 5,000 members strong representing numerous African Countries with students attending universities in the greater Hyderabad area. The organization was created, in large part, to establish a united front and mutual support against racism and discrimination African students are experiencing at the hands of Indians during their studies in India.
It was absolutely an amazing experience for all involved.
NealHallpoet.com
Marvin X and Neal Hall, MD, at Sacramento Black Book Fair
Comment from Vasanth Kannabiran:
Listening to Neal Hall for the first time was an experience. The dispassionate description of what it still means to be black was breathtaking. Hall’s poetry shocks you to the core sets you beating your breast and gasping with rage while he reads on calm and matter of fact. Reading and rereading his poems again gives you a glimpse of the range of betrayal and shock that blackness carries on its back.
Halls poems shock and transform your understanding. Black poetry, Feminist poetry and Dalit poetry also reveal the gamut of emotions, the rage, betrayal and invisibility that tear down the veils here. What is significant about this poet is that while relentlessly, brutally hammering at the boundaries that define black he stands aside calmly to let his words speak. Prophetically. It is difficult to reconcile the poet, patient and calm, fielding questions, detached and dispassionate, untouched by the lava that pours out of his pen. His poems Veneer, Dr. Nigger are masterpieces that need several readings to unravel the intricately knotted weave to reach the core of his truth. When he says I have given you my soul, leave me my name your heart skips a beat. And when he says I want to be someone who does not want to be any more you choke. And the short walk to freedom stretches to infinity. This is poetry that scalds you into waking up to the possibility that you are perhaps one of those silent spectators. All in all he is a poet. And unquestionably one of the most significant voices of the century.
Vasanth Kannabiran, Nobel Nominee, Writer, Chairperson, Culture, Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Hyderabad, India
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Eugene Redmond poem Baltimoor
Kwansaba: “Baltimoor” Blues Forges Us Ntu Ankh-People
Roiled blood, rising like Katrina, floods “Baltimoor,”
harbor of bitter succor that once bore
Cullen's “furnace” & Billie's lore. (Next door--
in Duke's D.C.--Obamas feel Fahrenheit's roar.)
Still, phat mamas sing Juneteen. Blues &
gods zag & zing: “fruit” of Lady
Day's labors that songify/signify our ankhors.
Eugene B. Redmond
Collage art courtesy of the Eugene B. Redmond Collection: Southern
Illinois University-Edwardsville (eredmon@siue.edu)
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