Marvin X, "Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland!" (Ishmael Reed) returns to the Academy of da Corner #1, downtown Oakland, 14th and Broadway, center of the Black Arts Movement Business District he co-founded, made official by the Oakland City Council, January 19, 2016

Marvin X took a break from finishing his Notes of an Artistic Freedom Fighter

to return to his Academy of da Corner #1, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland across the street from City Hall and Oscar Grant Plaza. Marvin X says it is the most dangerous classroom in the world. In what classroom do US Marines get shot in the head by police and the cased closed? If US Marines can get shot in the head by police, what chance did Oscar Grant have? My involvement with murder under the color of law began with the first case the Black Panther Newspaper headlined The Richmond Police Killing of Denzill Dowell, 1966. Of course Denzill was hardly tahe first Black killed in California history by police under the color of law. In 1979 the OPD were killing a Black man a month, until they killed my best friends baby brother, Melvin Black. I was teaching English at the University of Nevada, Reno part-time and working as a planner/data analyst for a community services agency, plus teaching in Upward Bound at UNR and teaching technical writing at Nevada Community College. The Nevada Committee for the Humanities gave me two planning grants via the National Endowment for the Humanities. I had a theory that when one enters a town, there are two people to know immediately: the preacher and the banker, afterall, the preacher knows everybody and the banker will, to my surprise, let one get overdrawn but continue to withdraw money. But as a dramatist, I know all dramas come to The End.

So I was living the good life until the OPD killed my friend's baby brother. How could I enjoy my joy while my friends and comrades are in trauma and grief from the low intensity eternal battle with the forces of evil, no matter what color in this global conspiracy to bleed to death the 85% oppressed who are deaf dumb and blind to ultimate reality, a step above the low information vibration. In this era of the cellphone computer, there is no excuse for ignorance. Google Becky and she will tell you everything going on in the world. Becky will say Did you mean that....? But if one is stuck in the world of make believe and conspicuous consumption (Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie); if one dresses like an NBA player while one paycheck away from homelessness, there is a serious problem here. The question is how sick is the patient: mild, moderate or severe? 

Time to leave Reno, the biggest little Mississippi in the world
 
My revolutionary comrades in Oakland demanded I leave Reno immediately and help my friend and his family in their hour of grief. I didn't want to return to the battle field, after all the Mormon mafia in Reno was treating me royally. I was one of the two or three Blacks teaching and/or working at UNR. When Eldridge Cleave came to stay with me, as per the ladies,  he said I'd picked all the lilies in the field. Yes, I was single and living a licentious life. I gave him a white girl student who was having sex with Black athletes, me and anyone else with a dick, she told me. She couldn't boil water without burning the pot. In the players manner, I gave her to Eldridge, telling him she gave good head, which was a lie and Eldridge, being a connoisseur of sex, chided me for claiming she gave good head. The connoisseur claimed nine out of ten women were an insult to a dick.For sure, not every woman will describe herself as a beast, those who do, usually are a beast!

When my daughters visited me that summer, they really  didn't like Efetayo. Nefertiti said, "Dad, you take one and bring another. And please don't let Efetayo cook. She burns up everything." And about my young student from UNR Upward Bound, Bernice, Nefertiti said, "Dad, she's just a baby." Bernice was 18 when I "caught her" while teaching Upward Bound. Ok, I have a love for young people. FYI, I married two of my students, Nisa from UC Berkeley and Barbara/Hasani from my controversial lectureship at Fresno State University. Nisa is mother of my daughter Muhammida, Barbara/Hasani is mother of Nefertiti and Amira. 

Bernice was victim of sexual abuse from her male relatives, so traumatized when we tried to have sex she went into convulsions. We have no clue what trauma our children have experienced. Often men don't care about the woman's trauma and grief, for htmen have an insatiable desire to stick their penis in any hole, even a hole in the ground. At the end of Upward Bound, Bernice called me in the middle of the night saying she was going to kill herself. I told her I would drive the hundred miles to Hawthorn to keep her from killing herself. Is there recovery from sex with father and brother in law?
Is there recovery from having sex with your three brothers until they are no longer brothers but  boyfriends who this sister/now girlfriend sets a schedule for her brothers/boyfriends.

See my memoir My Friend the Devil. FYI, Nevada is the most conservative state in the union. Ronald Reagan's campaign for president was operated out of Reno. His best friend was Senator Paul Laxalt of Reno. Head of the Republican National Committee  was Attorney Frank Fahrenkopf of Reno.

My boss at the Community Services Agency where I worked as a planner, came from a meeting with State officials and told me to tell Eldridge if he didn't leave Nevada they were going to kill him, even though a black AME preacher had given him land near Lake Lahontan, Silver Springs Nevada, near Reno, where Cleaver wanted to establish his ministry. The residents in this conservative community wanted no part of Cleaver and as his chief assistant, he sent me to the planning committee to address his presence in the area, especially since the land donated by a Black AME preacher and his white wife was adjacent to Lake Lahontan.

The planning committee meeting, open to the public, was like a lynching party but they wanted Cleaver not me, so he stayed alive and I did as well although in the old days any nigger would have been fine. Do you think I was saved from the lynching tree because I was teaching at University of Nevada? I don't think so. But they didn't want me, they wanted Nat Turner.

Soon after my boss delivered the message from Massa that Eldridge Cleaver had to go, and with  Rev. Chicken Wing reversing his land donation, probably on pain of death, Cleaver packed up and left my house in Reno. At the same time I concluded my days of lasciviousness  were over and it was back to the battlefield. The final straw came after Cleaver departed and shortly after I did as well to help organize a response to the killing of 15 year old Melvin Black, my best friend and top Arabic student's tragedy. Even though I was living a good life (I do better around Conservative whites--I didn't care that a reporter from the Reno Gazette let me know he was a Red Neck. Just give me respect. I am a Blackneck. I don't want your woman. Will you want to agree not to mess with mine, I will surely agree to leave yours alone. Now I must be honest and say that since I had a class full of white girls who were fucking the Black athletes and reported their activities to me, yes, despite their parents, who included UNR professors, told their children, "Niggers are bad news." For sure, the white girls found out Niggers are good news and came after me as well.   The most important thing I learned from working with Eldridge Cleaver was he demanded I arrange first class accommodations whenever we traveled. It was a great lesson to demand first class treatment since we are addicted to second class service.  I had no choice since teaching and working in Reno, I read the San Francisco Chronicle daily, along with the LA Times and the NY Times. The catalyst was picking up the SF Chronicle that morning then throwing it down after seeing the headlines about another Black man killed by the OPD, but later that night I flipped to the back page and there was pic of my friend Lawrence McKinney, aka Abdul Rahim and his sister Charlotte Black protesting at City Hall.

We formed a community planning committee that decided on The Melvin Black Human Rights Conference at the Oakland Auditorium. According to Edith Austin, the master journalist and political organizer, she said 5,000 Blacks attended from 12 Noon to Midnight without incident. I called my friend Minister Farrakhan who agreed to be the featured speaker. Other speakers included Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Cobb, Oba T Shaka, Dessie Woods Jones, et al. After a monologue by Khalid Abdullah Tarik Al Mansour, aka Att. Donad Warden, founder of the Afro American Association that gave birth or consciousness to the Black Panther Party, Black Arts Movement, Black Studies and Kwanza (Maulana Karenga was the Los Angeles representative of the Afro American Association).

I will close with this: after the Melvin Black Human Rights Forum, the OPD killing of Blacks subsided, but what followed was drive by killings with UZIs and the epidemic of Crack cocaine that took us backward beyond slavery.

--Marvin X

6/1/18