For some of us in San Francisco's Black Arts West Theatre, the Summer of Love began months before when a wave of beautiful black women arrived from Chicago. One of them was Ethna Wyatt, a "fine fox" (our Black Dialogue Magazine had the fox section of women photos). She qualified for that section. But she was the daughter of a Communist mother who indoctrinated her about civil rights. Ethna attended the March on Washington and had a Peace tatto above her navel. We celebrated her 21st birthday making love.
Ethna X Wyatt/Hurriyah Asar
For sure, we were not flower children, although I hustled my writings to the white hippies on Haight Street who were thirsty for literature about black people. They would pay for a blank piece of white paper to get hipped to blackness, especially after Black Power erupted. But we had no time for white hippies. We were black nationalists and eventually organized Black Arts West Theatre on Fillmore Street. Whites were not allowed in our theatre, even though some of our co-workers were acting black but sleeping white, e.g., playwright Ed Bullins and actor Carl Bossiere. We forcibly moved Carl out of his white girlfriend's apartment.
When BAW disbanded due to male ego tripping--Ethna's feminine energy kept us from killing each other, Eldridge Cleaver and I organized The Black House on Broderick St. Again, we had to forcibly move him from his white woman's house, Attorney Beverly Axelrod, into The Black House. We thought it was a contradiction for the chairman of Black House to be sleeping at the white house!
All the props in that famous photograph of Huey Newton in the wicker chair came from Eldridge's room at the white house.
Whites were not allowed at Black House. When Amina and Amiri Baraka worked with us at BH, Amina has never forgotten what Ethna told a white woman at the door who said she was white and Native American,"The Native American can come in but the white got to go!"
Eldridge loved blasting music in his room by a white hippie named Bob Dylan. We didn't pay any attention to his lyrics, his white voice was unacceptable. We, especially Ethna and I, were into jazz, after all, we performed with jazz musicians at our theatre, Black Arts West, e.g., Dewey Redman, Donald Garret, Monte Waters, Earle Davis and Oliver Johnson. The Chicago Art Ensemble performed at Black House. Those living at BH included Ethna, Ed Bullins, Eldridge and singer Willie Dale, his wife Vernasteen and myself. Willie Dale sang the revolutionary black anthem A White Man's Heaven Is A Black Man's Hell better than the author, Louis Farrakhan. After I introduced Eldridge to the Black Panthers, Huey and Bobby, he wrote in the Black Panther newspaper, "Don't fuck with the white hippies. If you fuck with them we will fuck you up." We blacks were beating white hippies because they were white. Ethna and I used to beat up nigguhs with their white woman or man, in our narrow minded, dogmatic black nationalism. But by the time Eldridge wrote his lines as BPP Minister of Information, we artists were gone from BH and it morphed into the San Francisco Black Panther headquarters.
We were so happy when Eldridge fell in love with Kathleen.
We had one thing in common with white hippie flower children: opposition to the Vietnam War.
Soon after leaving Black House and joining the Nation of Islam, 1967, I departed America for Toronto, Canada as a draft resister. After a few months, Hurriyah joined me in Toronto. Two brothers joined me as resisters: Oswald X from San Francisco State College/University and Norman Richmond from Los Angeles. Norman still lives in Toronto.
--marvin x
10/18/17