Note from Founder Marvin X:
Dear Friends, the thoughts I express below are my thoughts and not those of the BVA. As the Founder I take the liberty to express my thoughts but as the BVA is organized, we want the young team of leaders to speak for themselves since they are being prepared to assume full leadership of the BVA. I am thankful to know these young people are highly qualified to assume leadership of the BVA. With the guidance of Mutima Imani and myself, plus the support of the Black Arts Movement Business District, CDC, under the direction of Dr. Ayodele Nzinga, the support of Delores Nochi Cooper, Founder of the Berkeley Juneteenth Association, Inc., and Carolyn Johnson of the East Oakland Black Cultural Zone, CDC, we are confident the BVA leadership can navigate Bay Area Black entrepreneurs into the future.
FYI, the BVA is not limited to street vending. Our approach is holistic: vendors must invest to come up
(We have agreed to use the African/Caribbean Sou-sou investment method that allows each investors to have his/her turn to come up.)
We shall explore housing for vendors from a collective model.
We shall buy products collectively rather than individually. And we shall buy from each other as opposed to spending money with other than our own kind.
We shall consider Bit Coin and other monetary methods to avoid the sinking dollar that is backed by nothing except the ink on the paper. We shall employ barter as a traditional method of trade.
We are blessed to have a team of young people with skills in high finance so we are confident we can avoid the pitfalls of financial scams.
ASAP, we shall meet with the general membership to take our organization to the next level economically, politically and spiritually. We accept the Biblical dictum, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all things shall be added unto you."
Our purpose is to be the model of do for self entrepreneurship. We demand first class treatment of our customers and ourselves.
We call upon all Black Street Vendors to join the BVA to unify ourselves to make Good Trouble as Ancestor John Lewis said. All members must register to vote for political equity. We must be organized to combat those organized against us. As voters they can recall politicians and, when organized and registered, we can recall politicians as well. Vendors, join the BVA and register to vote. The ballot or the bullet. Fidel Castro said, "The weapons of today are not guns but consciousness!" The BVA rejects the crumbs the City of Oakland through the Dept of Parks and Rec is offering us. As first class citizens, we reject kibbles and bits offered not in the name of social justice and equity but to placate white citizen council lake residents and merchants who are determined to continue the age old tradition of denying Blacks full rights to enjoy Lake Merritt. The whites think we have no memory of their white supremacist tradition of denying Blacks the enjoyment of Lake Merritt. The BVA shall not waste our energy in fruitless political battles to enjoy the mess of pottage the Parks and Rec conspires to allocate at. the behest of City Hall, Lake Merritt White Citizen Council, (along with a few whites dipped in chocolate called post black negroes who are neither post black nor negroes but colonial elites in the best manner of African neo-colonialism, just as President Obama was a neo-colonial negro, yeah, I said it and mean it and don't give a damn about your cancel culture or your economic black listing, alas, we have suffered house arrest, prison, exile, attempted assassination for the last half century from the Left and the Right, Twiddledum and Twiddledee).
I repeat, America just passed its annual $700 billion dollar national defense budget while the Democratic and Republican parties sang Silent Night.
Oakland Black Street Vendors attempted to vend at Lake Merritt during Covid for economic survival but our presence was anathema to lake residents. The Oakland murder rate and the thousands of homeless are quite acceptable to the blood suckers of the poor. Again, I call upon Black Street Vendors to find spaces in the downtown area or in the hood to deliver food and necessary items to our people. And we reject the protests of Arab grocers and liquor store owners who never consider hiring our people but short change and take advantage of our woman for sexual pleasure but if we reciprocate they charge us with violating their family honor. It is time we step up to the front line to demand the respect of our women and young girls. Let me paraphrase Ancestor James Baldwin, "The sexual abuse of our children will not make your children safe." I remember when a young female student of mine asked me to intervene with an Arab because he had shortchanged her. I went into the store in East Oakland chanting, "Ahlan wa sahlan. La ee la hah ee lah el lah. Muhammandan Rasullah." The Arab said he would return my students money only because I chanted Arabic. We think if I had come into his store chanting "You sand nigger motherfucker, don't you ever shortchange my sister again, bitch as motherfucker!", I think he would have given her the proper change as well.
You want me continue or shut up? FYI, I am not anti-Arab. In fact I am pro-Palestinian. I want to see a Palestinian state just as I want to see a Black State under the sovereignty of North American Africans with sufficient reparations for the next 50 to 100 Years, with access to the sea and air. We might need a doom system like the Zionist so we don't suffer another Black Wall Street or a bombing like the Philly destruction of the Move Movement.
Hell no, we don't trust white people or white niggas. In the Kenyan liberation struggle, the Mau Mau had to kill more reactionary uncle tom Africans than British colonialists.
We got some niggas in America whiter than the white man. Malcolm told you the house negroes say boss is we sick? And what did Harriet Tubman say, "I could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves!"
--Marvin X/El Muhajir
1/9/22