Marvin,
I found the copy of the Great Britain’s biggest black newspaper, which featured Dr J as the “Female Malcolm X.” Also much more. Come back soon. As you saw yesterday to some degree, we were delving in stuff piled high and deep in the closets and ignoring things right up in our face, like Negroes used to skip over things the white folks were hiding from them on the front page of the newspaper.
I’ll look to see you soon. Time is running out. Today I’ll presume to copy my master’s thesis (1957 sports sociology dinosaur, Harry Edwards) at Chicago and the PhD. at CSPP (first dissertation on black male/female relationship openly and unashamedly straight out, setting plans for the late 1970s to late 1990s black male/female relationships movement (see Newsweek, 1979 for “The New Black Struggle).” I don’t figure I need a copy of the dissertation at Chicago, though it had a breakthrough “intracohort analysis” and was a rare black scholar’s publication in a major sociology journal at the time (Social Forces). Cal Berkley and Stanford need to come back out. Whatever happened to the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California. Did the Africanas in the Ivy League ever get the news?
You keep advising Negroes to save the trash. Why do you think anybody would save trash if it really was trash? Usually it is trash, if nobody is around to make some sense of it or give some value to it; though you routinely give more value to a brother’s things than they’re worth, so I guess it balances out, but don’t hesitate to let me tell you what a piece of paper meant or means or could. Remember, we thought we were making the revolution, so a message to Garcia was vital back then, and the consequences could be deadly. But if a brother takes the message to the trash or gives it to the wrong brother in the wrong place at the wrong time, the message is lost in oblivion: ignorance is not bliss, but oblivion.
“Full many a gem of purest ray, serene the dark unfathomed caves of oceans, bare. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air”
I learned that at Toussaint L’Ouverture High School, a part of the “Creek County Separate Schools” of Slick, Oklahoma, where I as a psychological dropout became a legend in my time. while the teacher, Miss Foshee, was calling on the other kids one by one to get up and stumble through what they had memorized the night before. She had come to the realization that if she called on me last, by then I would know the lines we were to have memorized and then she could whip them over the head by pointing to me. One time we won second place in the state, by competitive white folks standardized testing, with 22 points, from 36 competitors representing Slick and I made twelve points by myself. I was going to be the welterweight champion of the world but they blocked blacks from the Golden Gloves in Oklahoma until I was a junior in college and herded me into college, where they kept me most of my life, moving me to the front of the class as a college instructor, first in white studies at a black university, Howard, and then COORDINATOR of “black studies” at a polka dot university called San Francisco State, before they had the nerve to turn around and put me out. And you wonder why I sing the blues.
So come back soon, you don’t have to look for the blues around here, it’s everywhere and in your face; cast down your storage boxes wherever you are, a change is gonna come. We will make it to the mountaintop, but I’m 80 going on 90 years old, and I want to get there with you. If you mess around until I’m gone before you get there, my ghost will be there to greet you and give you some good old fashioned chastising as soon as you squeeze through the pearly gates.
Nathan