The Black Scholar

Journal of Black Studies and Research

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Ferguson Protest Movement Must Become Political Power by Christopher Benson

December 12, 2014

[Reposted from The Chicago Reporter with permission from the author.]

As protesters in Ferguson, Mo., look ahead, there are valuable lessons to be learned from the past — lessons that can provide guidance in transforming protest into something more impacting, more enduring.

Political power.

One such lesson comes out of Chicago, where 45 years ago this Thursday, Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by tactical police assigned to Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan, who had worked with the FBI counterintelligence program. Planning. Executing.

It all happened in the pre-dawn darkness on Dec. 4, 1969, while 21-year-old Hampton and other Panther members were asleep in their West Monroe Street apartment. Hampton reportedly had been drugged by an informant to make sure he would not awaken. Clark was on guard duty. None of the seven Panthers was given a chance to put up their hands before they were hit with a barrage of bullets.

Although Hanrahan would feed the media a self-defense narrative (the “vicious” Panthers fired first, he claimed), it later was revealed that all but one of an estimated 99 bullets had been fired by the police. Two reportedly were fired at point-blank range into Hampton’s head. One to Clark’s heart, killing him instantly. The only Panther bullet reportedly came from Clark’s shotgun in what appears to have been a reflexive act upon his death.

Adding insult to injury, the Panther survivors of that raid, including Hampton’s pregnant fiancée, Deborah Johnson, all were charged with weapons violations, aggravated assault and attempted murder. Charges later were dropped. The survivors were represented by People’s Law Office lawyers Jeffrey Haas, G. Flint Taylor and Dennis Cunningham, as well as future Chicago Corporation Counsel and University of Illinois Trustee James Montgomery. They wound up winning a $1.8 million settlement against the Chicago Police in 1983 in what Attorney Taylor would call “nothing but a Northern lynching.” But that is not the significant lesson for Ferguson protesters.

The lesson is in the African-American political organizing that followed the Hampton-Clark assassinations. As a result of massive black voter registration and turnout, Hanrahan was denied a second term as prosecutor in his 1972 re-election bid. African-Americans overwhelmingly supported Republican Bernard Carey for what historically had been a safe Democratic office. Hanrahan would never again win a political campaign.

Even more, that same engine of strategic political organizing was retuned for the successful Chicago mayoral campaign of Harold Washington a decade later, and even for Barack Obama in his successful U.S. Senate election a little more than 20 years after that.

As we reflect on Michael Brown in Ferguson and Fred Hampton in Chicago, we have to consider what has been lost in terms of the potential of a lifetime, but also what can be gained in potential organizing.

What was lost with Hampton?

He had been a community organizer. By all accounts, he was gifted in that leadership role, moving from his work with the NAACP to the newly formed Panther Party, where he was credited with successfully organizing a non-aggression agreement among Chicago street gangs —the first “Rainbow Coalition.” He also organized a People’s Clinic, free breakfast program for kids and, these, too: political education classes, community supervision of the police and advocacy of self-determination and self-defense. Because of this work, he was seen as a threat by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose agency famously embarked on a campaign of disruption and destruction of African-American organizations. And the organizers.

No one understands this as much as Dr. Charles V. Hamilton, W.S. Sayre Professor Emeritus of Government and Political Science at Columbia University. In 1967, the year Fred Hampton began his community organizing, Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), co-authored the seminal ”Black Power: The Politics of Liberation,” the intellectual and activist blueprint for self-determination in an evolving movement.

In a wide-ranging weekend conversation I had with Hamilton in his Hyde Park condo six floors up from mine, he talked of the need for a reassertion of “black power” in a new context. He talked about Hampton and about the dehumanization of the African-American and what Hamilton calls “the legitimization of violence against non-people.”

He talked about the need to reframe the discourse. “We’ve got to get people to start thinking in different narrative terms,” Hamilton believes. Citing Aristotle, Hamilton asserted the need for replacing our law-and-order obsession with a new perspective on equity, which “goes to areas the law can’t reach.” Political organizing is the path to equity.

Hamilton should know. The perspective of this 85-year-old activist-scholar might have been contextualized in the Ivory Tower in Morningside Heights, but it was formed and sharpened at ground level, deep in the heart of Dixie. It happened during an early faculty position at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he could not register to vote in the late 1950s. “The registrars never opened the office.” Not for black people, anyway. Hamilton wound up organizing voting-rights demonstrations among Tuskegee students. He worked with famed civil rights attorney Fred Gray on legal briefs leading to the landmark 1960 Supreme Court decision striking down Tuskegee’s gerrymandered voting in Gomillion v. Lightfoot.

For his efforts, Hamilton was fired from that Tuskegee teaching job. The school founded by Booker T. Washington was not ready to disrupt the status quo. Black voting rights in the Alabama of the 1950s clearly would have been a disruption.

That was true in other parts of the country, including Money, Mississippi, where 14-year-old Emmett Till had been lynched in 1955. Till, who spent his childhood in Summit, the Chicago suburb where Fred Hampton later would live with his family, had stepped out of his assigned place with a childish prank, flirting with a white woman. He was tortured and murdered to send a message to other African-Americans.

Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury after merely an hour of deliberation. These 12 angry men had been influenced by the white county sheriff who helped the accused murderers get off, when he had a sworn duty to help the prosecutors send them to prison.

Of the 30,000 residents in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi back when the trial was held, 19,000 were African-American. Yet not a single black person was registered to vote. In a county with a two-to-one black majority, black people had no political power to elect the sheriff or serve on juries. It is likely the Till murder trial would have turned out differently if black residents had the vote.

That was then. It all would change, beginning with the protests that erupted from the acquittal of Till’s murderers and the mass movement that flowed from that, starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott only two months later. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were outgrowths of this mass movement. Today, the state of Mississippi has more than 200 black elected officials, more than any other state.

Hamilton — the man who gave us the term “institutional racism” — refers to this kind of Black Power as a form of “experiential reality.” It is a three-step process. African-Americans must first become “politically literate” to understand the importance of participation, and what the struggle to gain that right has cost us historically. “There is no such thing as an uneducated free person,” he insists.

Second, they must register to vote and turn out to make enlightened choices informed by an appreciation of the background and qualifications of the candidates, as well as the significance of the offices they seek. Finally, people must realize the rewards of voting. Successful campaigns will encourage more participation. “This is a permanent struggle,” Hamilton believes. “Things change. Times change. We’re always working at it.”

The chance to work at it in Ferguson will come with the local elections scheduled there for April 2015. Three of the five City Council seats are up. Blacks make up 67 percent of the local population. Last time around, fewer than seven percent of eligible black voters turned out in Ferguson, where the local elections are the only ones on the ballot in the odd years. With a new majority on the council, maybe African-Americans in Ferguson will get some measure of Charles Hamilton’s equity. Maybe a police force that looks more like them than one that still is 94 percent white — and one that recognizes that putting your hands up is not an aggressive move.

People of color in Ferguson — and elsewhere for that matter — have to recognize their responsibility as generation rising, the latest beneficiaries of people who died to secure their voting rights — rights that can be exercised to attain responsive government. To make sure the killers of our sons are punished. In Money, Mississippi. In Chicago, Illinois. In Ferguson, Missouri.

Clearly, the protesters in Ferguson should continue to raise their hands. But not in surrender. No. They should do it as a promise, as a pledge, as a solemn oath.

“We have to use this as a springboard to not only march, but to march to the polls,” Hamilton urges. And when people get there, they should place their hands on the ballot to make sure their protest voices are heard.

 

Christopher Benson is a blogger for The Chicago Reporter.
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Filed Under: News Tagged With: Ferguson, movement, protest, racism, voting

Marion Barry, Man of the People (1936-2014) by Barrington M. Salmon

December 12, 2014

Marion Barry was Mayor of the District of Columbia for 16 years and a City Councilmember for almost 16 more years. He made significant and lasting contributions to the nation’s capital. The District of Columbia just wrapped up a three-day commemoration to the former mayor that thousands of people attended.

Since his death on November 23, 2014, Marion Barry has stayed on my mind. His death has crystallized the reservoir of love and deep respect I have for him. I have spent a good deal of time in recent days listening to those who knew him best tell little-known stories about Barry’s kindness, compassion, political savvy, survival skills, and prodigious intellect.

I came to Washington, D.C. in 1996, armed with the idea that if I were a good a journalist then the District of Columbia would be the ideal place to test that theory. At the Washington Times newspaper, local government was one of my beats so I came in regular contact with Mayor Barry. At the time, the District of Columbia, enmeshed in myriad financial difficulties, would see Congress snatch control of the city and place it in the hands of the D.C. Financial Control Board.

Through Dr. Linda Wharton Boyd, Barry lured me away from the Washington Times and for more than three years, I served as his speechwriter. I was not his friend or confidante, but I had the opportunity to sit in his office off to the corner, watch him closely, learn from him, quiz him about politics and strategies, and pepper him with questions of all kinds. I saw history unfold and watched luminaries step across the threshold including Dr. Betty Shabazz, James Farmer, Winnie Mandela, Coretta Scott King, Dr. Dorothy Height, Lawrence Guyot, and Gladys Knight.

If I had never met him, I would be left with faulty impressions painted by the media of a race-baiter, a man who presided over a corrupt empire and someone who represented the worst in a black elected official. But to see him up close was to see a thing of beauty. I saw Barry walk into a room of seniors, greet scores by name – without cue cards – inquire about their children, grandchildren and spouses. He made people feel as if they were the center of the universe. He would engage them, laugh and hug them, chat, and take pictures. The seniors loved it. We would go to parks and the mayor would be mobbed by children, hugged and loved up. Everywhere we went, I would hear people thank Barry profusely for giving them their first job, their first paycheck through his Summer Youth Employment Program. In some cases, it was multi-generational, with parents, children, and grandchildren having gone through the program.

As a journalist, it is not uncommon to come in contact with those in the public eye and see some act as if they are demi-gods, waiting for the unwashed to genuflect and kiss their rings. Mayor Barry was different. He was proud and he expected to be treated with respect but he never acted as if he were lord of the manor. My son, then about seven, would come after school and spend time at the office of the mayor. Barry never failed to greet him, inquire about school and encourage him to keep up his grades. As a father, that meant a lot and my son would always become giddy with excitement.

Well before his passing, some whites and other Barry critics would ask me why blacks loved him so and the answer was simple: he was the black community’s shining prince, warts and all.

It is good to remember that the past is prologue. When Barry came to Washington in 1965, Washington was a sleepy Southern town. Politically, socially, and economically, the city was a mirror-image of its counterparts in the Deep South. Whites dominated and controlled the city affairs and politics, and white segregationists in Congress kept the city under their boot. Color served as the dividing line between blacks and whites and a sometime brutish all-white police department kept black people in line. Black Washingtonians had no voice, no means to advance, and had to be content with a subservient role, if they had one at all.  In 1978, in a city more than 70 percent black, few blacks worked for the D.C. government, most city officials were white, and an entrenched white business community operated with impunity.

Barry’s elevation as the city’s chief executive came to symbolize the power, promise, and enigma of Washington, D.C. He represented a new breed of black politicians: brash, unapologetic, and savvy. So it is no surprise that when Barry became mayor in 1979, he tossed the status quo on its head. He brought in blacks and placed them in prominent roles throughout the city, seeking to bring parity to a city where blacks had long dominated numerically. Barry brought the best and brightest people into his administration, presided over the explosion of the District’s black middle class, and is often credited for spurring the rapid growth of middle and upper class blacks in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He awarded the city’s cable franchise to Bob Johnson of Black Entertainment Television and laid the foundation for R. Donahue Peeples to become a billionaire real estate magnate.

By demanding that 35 percent of all government contracts be directed to minority businesses, Barry pried open the door in construction and other industries tightly closed to women, non-whites, and other ethnicities. I have spoken to Barry’s colleagues and former employees who talked about him walking into a room to meet with representatives of companies seeking to do business in the city and asking why there were no blacks at the table. Many times, he made a U-turn and walked out, saying the meeting would resume when there was black representation at the meeting.

As a young man, Barry earned his civil rights pedigree, when while in his 20s, he dropped out of graduate school at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, a dissertation short of a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. He joined other young activists in sit-ins, marches and other acts of civil disobedience as he embraced the civil rights struggle full time. Barry worked alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and was named the first national president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Later, Barry moved to Washington, D.C. to work for SNCC. He formed Pride, Inc., an organization that fought for the rights of Washington’s black majority, taught life skills, and linked the unemployed – primarily ex-offenders and young people – with jobs.  He entered city politics in 1971 when he won a seat on the District of Columbia School Board, serving as president before securing an at-large seat on the first popularly elected city council, the first under Home Rule. He became the District of Columbia’s second mayor and was sworn into office on January 2, 1979 by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Barry won re-election in 1982, 1986, and 1994. He served six months for a drug offense and surprised just about everyone when he ran and won his last term as mayor in 1994. He stepped down from the mayor’s office in 1999. But in 2004, Barry won re-election to the District of Columbia City Council to represent Ward 8, a predominantly black and poor section of the city east of the Anacostia River. Barry was serving his third term at the time of his death.

Barry’s Ward 8 constituents saw him as icon, role model, and inspiration. They identified with his humanness, seeing themselves in him, flaws, foibles, and all. He, like them, could fall from grace but he never stayed down. This reality and the redemptive quality of his life drew him ever-closer to African Americans not just in Ward 8 but all over the city. The unquestioned support many blacks gave him confounded critics and others who savored the idea that Barry might tumble and stay down. Those he loved and who loved him were always rooting for him to rise like a phoenix. Simmering resentment in some parts of the black community because of the constant negative press coverage of Barry by most of the city’s newspapers did not endear them to that community. People especially chafed at the efforts of the Fourth Estate to color the mayor as some type of buffoon. But those who knew him saw a man of conviction with a lightning-quick mind, a facility to absorb and hold all types of information, a man who was always prepared, and someone possessing insatiable curiosity.

The people’s love for Marion Barry was evident in the outpouring of affection seen after his death and the three days of commemoration where dignitaries from all over the country and the world, including Jesse Jackson, Minister Louis Farrakhan and Eleanor Norton Holmes paid tribute to Barry’s life and work. In honoring Mayor Marion Barry, people honor the best in themselves.

 

 

Barrington M, Salmon is an award-winning reporter. His beats included national and local politics, crime, education,immigration, health, urban affairs, and social welfare.

Filed Under: Tribute

Media Must Tell What Happens—and why—in Ferguson by Christopher Benson

December 10, 2014

[Reposted from The Chicago Reporter with permission from the author.]

There were two things I saw in the media coverage of Ferguson, Mo., recently in the ramp up to the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the August shooting death of 18 year-old Michael Brown.

Two illustrations from different times and places, expressed with different intent, but, for me, carrying the same message: We are missing the story.

Ferguson is not just the story about last summer’s tragic shooting death of Brown — unarmed, hands up, according to some witnesses, who apparently were not credited by the grand jury. It is not just the story of the ugly images of a militarized police force pushing back protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. It is not just about a process many people believed took way too long to decide whether a crime was committed.

The story of this St. Louis suburb is the story of power. It is power that is enforced at street level by the police and up throughout a justice system that has been engaged in the mass incarceration of people of color. It is a political system that powers the criminal justice system in this process. It is a social system that defines people, identifies them in ways that will justify their place in society — high or low, included or marginalized.

In that process, we often come to see each other, to know each other — as good or bad — through media representations. Our reality, then, is a mediated reality. And the media portrayal of African-Americans by television — where most people get their news — has been in the negative context of crime and poverty. The mediated reality is way out of proportion to the actual reality. And the public takeaway too often is that black is bad.

These points are driven home by my two illustrations. First, as I Googled “Ferguson” this past week — with anxious headlines declaring a state of emergency in Missouri and the call-up of the National Guard in anticipation of angry public reaction to a grand jury decision — I saw a photograph on the Los Angeles Times website. The focal point was a blond-haired white woman in a group of protesters. Her sign read “Thug Protestor” and had arrows pointing to herself. I was struck by that photo, and the irony wrapped in irony.

The irony she intended is based on our recognition that she obviously is not a thug, as some people have called the protesters based on the nightly images of confrontation played out on television in connection with Ferguson.

The woman’s point is that we shouldn’t assume that protesters are thugs. After all, she is a protester and, of course, she does not look like a thug. She looks like the All-American Girl. But, in recognizing that irony, we get twisted in the embedded irony. We have to know what a thug looks like in order to know that she is not one. A thug in TV representation is a person of color — black or brown.

So, in trying to deconstruct the social construct of black as bad, she wound up reinforcing it. The second illustration is a confrontation on NBC’s “Meet the Press” between former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, during which Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, engaged in reductive reasoning. “The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70-75 percent of the time,” Giuliani said. So, in other words, it’s your fault — black people everywhere — that your kids might get shot down in the street by police. Look at how bad things are in the African-American communities.

So what is media’s role in this?

We tell people what is important to think about and we even tell them how to think about it. We set public agenda based on what we cover, we frame the stories and we represent people within that frame. Because of this agenda-setting process, people walk away thinking crime is a bigger problem than it really is. Because people of color are more likely to be seen in mug shots than are whites — far more than the numbers would justify — people like the woman in the L.A. Times photo come to see crime in blackface. Sadly, people like Giuliani — people in positions to make a positive difference — can paint by statistical numbers without getting the full picture.

The story we are missing in this process, though, is the one that provides the full context for the story we are being told — the meaning of it all. The full picture. Sure, we get the facts. We get the who, what, where and when of it all. But not the why. The why is the context.

It starts with why there is such a wide gap in black and white opinion on the case, whether Darren Wilson should have been indicted for a crime. Why do some people accept police action while others distrust it? At bottom, why are some people angry and others afraid?

Ferguson is presented as a confrontation story. The problem with that frame is that it ultimately directs our gaze away from the underlying story, which is to say, the actual story.

Even more, that very framing can determine public opinion. In a story of confrontation between people you have come to associate with wrongdoing and the police you believe are tied to law and order, the demonstrators are going to lose in the battle for public approval. We need to know why young black people see themselves as victims of prosecutorial discretion and the police as an oppressive force in the process. We need to know why they have come to believe there is a breakdown of the law in their community by people who shoot them down in the street — hands up.

We also need to know why other people see things so differently. Television is a big part of the why. It emphasizes the visual. The immediate. The impact. The confrontation between the police and demonstrators in Ferguson will “make for good TV,” President Obama said in calling for peace following the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson. Good TV. But is it good journalism?

Not without balance, it isn’t. Not without providing some deeper understanding of the meaning behind the images, the story behind the story. Otherwise, the real confrontation is a clash of perception. A racial Rorschach.

People tend to see what they want to see, what they have been conditioned to see. We have to help them see what is. To see and to understand.

That is the media responsibility—to provide the information we need to make enlightened choices about policy, about consumption, about our social interaction. We can’t get there — enlightened decision-making — without understanding the meaning of it all. The context. The why. In the many stories that have been told since last summer’s confrontations, we have learned more as the result of follow-up reporting. However, even the background stories we are getting, like the ones about the overpolicing of a majority black community by an overwhelmingly white police force, only provide part of the ultimate truth.

Even when the media begin to tell us the more nuanced stories and try to clarify that violence during the demonstrations is being committed by only a small minority of people — people who are taking advantage of the demonstration as cover — the TV images of much larger crowds and explosive confrontations tell us something different.

The tendency among many people in the viewing audience will be to conclude that the demonstrators — overwhelmingly people of color, who already are perceived to be at fault when it comes to issues of wrongdoing — are the people who are responsible when things go terribly wrong. Even when the confrontations are provoked by police. Research shows that the mere display of a gun by one person can cause the other person to be more aggressive.

So the challenge of the media is to cut through all this and to do it with careful decisions about what goes in the frame of the story and what is left out. To do it with decisions about how to balance breaking news with more background, more interpretation, more perspectives in follow-up stories.

While we want to think we are balanced in our reporting, we must consider whether we really achieve that goal. Do you really see the world in a balanced way through a gas mask, or when you are constrained by a bulletproof vest? Is your judgment guided by a sense of journalistic responsibility or a sense of threat? The answer to that question only raises another obvious one and that is, threat by whom? The police? Or the people the police are confronting? What is the perspective you get on such a confrontation from behind police barricades, in a press pen, subject to feeds by the official sources?

Without question, reporting the who, what, where and when of it all from the frontlines is tough. But if we don’t get at the “why” through more thoughtful enterprising stories, all the rest of it has no meaning and no impact in helping people move away from biases to make more reasoned choices.

If we don’t try to do that, then the question we ultimately should be asking is, “Why not?”

Christopher Benson is a blogger for The Chicago Reporter.
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Filed Under: News

For Stuart Hall by Petal K. Samuel and Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo

October 28, 2014

Renowned Jamaican-born British cultural studies pioneer and “organic intellectual,” Stuart Hall, had a gift that many of us as scholars and activists of the African diaspora strive for: a stunning ability to historicize the present, to contextualize those contemporary phenomena that appeared to be new or unprecedented. We are endlessly indebted to Stuart Hall for his contributions to British cultural studies, sociology, Caribbean studies, media studies, his incisive criticisms of neoliberalism, and his public scholarship, among his many pressing and prescient scholarly contributions.[1] Here, however, we would like to structure our in memoriam around a period in Hall’s life that was critical to the development of his political consciousness: the period of mass migration of West Indians to Britain symbolized by the arrival of the Empire Windrush[2] and the subsequent period of civil unrest. Punctuated by a sharp increase of race-based hate crimes (most notably in Notting Hill) and race riots, the period of the 1950s through the turn of the twentieth century marked for Hall the development of a widespread “unresolved contradictoriness”[3] around issues of race. His insights about this period not only bear a striking resemblance to our contemporary sociopolitical moment in the United States, but also have important implications for the targeted increase of violent policing tactics on black communities.

One of Stuart Hall’s most remarkable analytical maneuvers was his ability to both situate what appeared to be singular “events” within a broader sociohistorical lineage and recognize what role they played in shaping a particular political present and future.[4] In John Akomfrah’s documentary The Stuart Hall Tribute, Akomfrah includes footage of the organized protests that emerged as a response to the murder of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan-British immigrant who was stabbed to death by a group of white men in Notting Hill in 1959. Stuart Hall remarks on this moment in British history, noting that it was one of the first moments that there appears a “national black presence on the streets around an issue,” and that he could see “a national black politics emerging.” Hall historicizes this moment further in his “From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence” where he includes the murders of Blair Peach, Colin Roach, Stephen Lawrence, Michael Menson, Cherry Groce, Cynthia Jarrett, Keith Blakelock, and others in a long lineage of crimes that demonstrate that “black people have been the subject of racialized attack, had their grievances largely ignored by the police, and had been subjected to racially-inflected practices of policing.”[5] The conundrum of this moment for Hall was the simultaneous rise of a discourse of “multiculturalism” in Britain, where structural racism thrived “not against, but cozily inserted within, liberalism.”[6] Hall noticed that it was possible in this moment to discuss the increasingly diverse demographic of Britain[7] in a way that made the targeted violence against black communities and the unpunished misconduct of the police appear to be aberrations, rather than the logical products of institutional racism. Put simply, Hall writes, “There has been change—but racism just as deeply persists.”[8]

It is impossible not to reflect on his words without recourse to the simultaneity of the “post-racial” discourse precipitated by the Obama presidency and what can today only be described as the targeted, state-sanctioned extermination of black life in the United States. Images of the protest marches in Notting Hill from Akomfrah’s documentary bear a strange resemblance to the protest marches we see in Ferguson, Missouri today for the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth who was fatally shot by a police officer. As Stuart Hall once reflected on the 1970s protests against stop and search laws in Britain (or “sus” laws), we now grapple with many iterations of such policies—from “stop and frisk” to “stand-your-ground” laws—which heighten and sanction a lethal suspicion of black bodies. Where Stuart Hall once decried the failure to address “how to hold officers directly accountable…how to make the ‘cost’ of proven racist behavior by police officers, witting or unwitting, directly impact on their careers, pay, promotion prospects and indeed job retention and retirement awards,”[9] we now repeatedly call for similar measures following the justice system’s failure to adequately penalize the officers responsible for the murders of countless black women and men in the past decade. While the national, sociopolitical, and historical contexts of our moments differ, we must consider: What can we learn from Stuart Hall’s assessment of his moment? How might he have characterized the march of history between his context and ours within his framework of “new” forms that act as re-castings of the old? How might we?

Widely revered for the boundlessness of his imagination and the rigor of his commitment to the study of the quotidian machinations of power, Hall has galvanized so many of us through the years with his unwavering commitment to and enactment of black radical politics. Hall once described the exigency of “a politics that is more self-reflexive, which is constantly inspecting the grounds of its own commitments, which can never hope to mobilize or inscribe support in an automatic way.”[10] In a political and cultural moment in the United States where we are witnessing the two-term governance of a black president and simultaneously witnessing, at increasingly staggering rates, both judicial and extrajudicial killings of black women and men, Hall’s call to “inspect the grounds of our commitments”[11] is more urgent today than ever before. While much of what we admire and honor about Stuart Hall’s life is about his hopefulness for the unpredictable emergence of resistant forms even within oppressive structures[12]—about underlining for us the possibilities for improvisation in the interstices between signifier and signified—it is perhaps his strategic combination of pessimism and optimism that resonates more poignantly.

The battle to preserve our spaces of criticism—especially now for those of us experiencing the effects of neoliberal austerity measures that have, in part, resulted in budget cuts to the humanities—is an urgent, and familiar, endeavor. Our work is, and has always been, an enactment of what Hall described, via Gramsci, as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” In Kobena Mercer’s tribute to Hall’s life for Soundings journal, he writes, “Stuart always conveyed a feeling of hopefulness that came from his unflinching ability to see how bad things could get politically.” Hall’s capacity for imagining the most pernicious and radical enactments of an ideology, a skill that prophetically anticipated the grip of Thatcherism in Britain, also permitted him to recognize the “emergent forces,” the “cracks and contradictions”[13] in such systems. This approach pushed him to defamiliarize his surroundings, to see himself as an eternal “familiar stranger”[14] within forms and structures that sought to articulate themselves as common and unremarkable. He recognized that commonness and familiarity often became the most important terrain for our struggles for social justice. As Hall writes in his and Alan O’Shea’s “Common-Sense Neoliberalism,” “common sense is a site of political struggle”[15]; the example of his life and work push us beyond automatic commitments to “common sense” values[16] and toward understanding what role these crystallized beliefs play in our social and political realities.

In light of his insights, we are galvanized in our own contexts to recognize the historicity of the present—to acknowledge that “history is never closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future.” We are encouraged by the clear continuities between his moment and ours to establish international solidarities around all iterations of global anti-blackness, emerging as a consequence of what Jemima Pierre calls “the legacy of European empire making in the analogous histories and experiences of African and diaspora populations.”[17] We are impelled toward a fortification of the critical link between our work in the field of Black studies and our lived experiences and to continue mobilizing creatively, strategically, and fearlessly in his memory.

______

[1] See, for example: Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Stuart Hall, “Encoding, decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1999); Stuart Hall, Portrait of the Caribbean (New York, N.Y: Ambrose Video Pub, 1992); Stuart Hall, Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices (London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997); Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, Formations of Modernity (Oxford: Polity in association with Open University, 1992); Sut Jhally and Stuart Hall, Race: The Floating Signifier (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2002); Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978).

[2] The Empire Windrush was a British ship that is known for one of its most famous voyages between Jamaica and London, carrying nearly 500 Caribbean immigrants—who became known as the “Windrush Generation”—to Britain. The arrival of this ship is viewed as critical moment in the growth of the British Afro-Caribbean community.

[3] Stuart Hall, “From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence.” History Workshop Journal 0, no. 48 (1999): 188.

[4] One notable example of this is Policing the State: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, a study that examines how the British press’ widespread coverage of “muggings” in the early 1970s—a form of crime that had existed prior to this period and was in no way “new”—served to catalyze a “moral panic” in Britain that would become the justification for an “authoritarian consensus” and a “conservative backlash” (Hall et al. 1978) against minority communities in Britain. The study recognizes this phenomenon in the press as a calculated response to the increasing diversification of Britain’s demographic. Furthermore, Policing the State proceeded from an analysis of the serviceability of conservative ideological projects across the Atlantic, between Britain and the United States. It examines how “the use of the term [“mugging”] with reference to American experience may have fostered the belief that something quite new to Britain had turned up from across the Atlantic.” (Hall et al. 1978) In this tribute, we take our signal from this methodological approach, as we attempt to understand the relationship between the political environment of the second half of the twentieth century in Britain and that of the contemporary United States.

[5] Hall, “From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence,” 188.

[6] Ibid., 194.

[7] Ibid., 188. This is a phenomenon that Hall is careful to note was not “the result of deliberate and planned policy but the unintended outcome of undirected sociological processes.”

[8] Ibid., 192.

[9] Ibid., 196.

[10] John Akomfrah et al., The Stuart Hall Project, directed by John Akomfrah (2013; London: British Film Institute, 2013.), DVD.

[11] Ibid.

[12] This is a strategy that fundamentally came to characterize not only Hall’s work, but the work of the scholars he influenced—such as Hazel Carby, Kobena Mercer, and Paul Gilroy—during his tenure as head of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. The scholarly approach the center proffered—characterized by an interdisciplinary methodological approach and an interest in quotidian and “popular” forms of cultural production—came to be known as “The Birmingham School.” Hall’s influence might, for instance, be seen in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic in his description of “countercultures of modernity” as “black political countercultures that grew inside modernity in a distinctive relationship of antagonistic indebtedness.”

[13] “Stuart Hall: On Obama,” YouTube video, posted by “ExplodedView MEF,” September 10, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKm8MW-FdX0.

[14] Akomfrah, The Stuart Hall Project.

[15] Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, “Common Sense Neoliberalism” Soundings, no. 55 (2013): 10.

[16] Hall, Representation, 3. This commitment to quotidian enactments of political ideologies, of course, undergirded his work, Representation, which thinks carefully about how meaning is produced, particularly in the popular domain of language. He reminds the reader of the link between language and social life, noting “cultural meanings are not only ‘in the head.’” They organize and regulate social practices, influence our conduct and consequently have real, practical effects.

[17] Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 222.

Filed Under: Tribute

A Tribute to Bill Watkins by W. F. Santiago-Valles

October 22, 2014

William “Bill” Watkins (19 October, 1946 – 5 August, 2014)

“When a friend departs/what remains is an empty space/that can’t be filled/by the arrival of another friend.” — Alberto Cortez, “Cuando un amigo se va”, Equipaje. Ed. Pomaire, 1977, pg. 124

 

Son of a protestant pastor, Watkins graduated from Los Angeles high school, city college and California State-Los Angeles (Political Science: 1970), receiving a Master’s (Education: 1979) and Doctorate degree (Public Policy Analysis/Education: 1986) from University of Illinois-Chicago to which he returned (after a 1986-1995 posting, at the University of Utah). While teaching in the Curriculum and Instruction section of the College of Education for twenty years, and becoming full professor (2003), Watkins wrote Race and education, (2001), The white architects of Black education (2001), Black protest, thought and education (2005), and The assault on public education: Confronting the politics of corporate school reform (2011) as well as articles in the Harvard Educational Review and Western Journal of Black Studies.

As a Cal-State Los Angeles student in the 1960s, Watkins was among the radical group of Black students, influenced by Nelson Peery, organizing the Communist League [CL] in Watts during 1968, publishing The People’s Tribune, emphasizing both the centrality of class racialization and the application of Marxist social theory to the concrete conditions of North America (1). With a group of ex-SDS militants in California, segments of both a Detroit League of Revolutionary Black Workers [LRBW] 1971 split (2) and another from Motor City Labor League, as well as “La Colectiva del Pueblo” of Mexican radicals in California who also joined the CL, the latter became the Communist Labor Party [CLP] in 1974. This new multi-racial organization emphasized the relation between class, colonialism and imperialism in a liberation strategy for all workers.

In 1974 Watkins was East Coast coordinator of the CLP meeting regularly with cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka (from the Congress of African Peoples, CAP) who were trying to understand racialized exploitation, as well as the limitations of electoral politics and black politicians answering to small merchants and production/service managers. Two years later, in 1976 the CAP became the Revolutionary Communist League.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Communist Labor Party [CLP] continued to emphasize education and comprehensive explanations of the world situation, which included the permanent replacement of manual workers by robotics and information technologies. As of 1993 the CLP became the League for a New America [LRNA] with main offices in Chicago, proposing alternatives to permanent unemployment and impoverishment, while continuing to struggle against exploitation and authoritarian exclusion of the majority from all decision making.

In 1995 Watkins returned to University of Illinois- Chicago distinguishing himself as an internationalist scholar-activist [in Sociology of Education, Politics of the Curriculum (in Africa), Contributions of Black Americans to Curriculum Thought, Epistemology, and Foundations of Social Studies Education], and as a public intellectual who participated in a) commemorations of workers’ triumphs in Asia, Africa and Latin America, b) support for the Caucus of Rank & File Educators [CORE] leading the Chicago school teachers union [CTU] since 2010, c) the People’s Tribune network, d) union local 6456 of the AAUP/AFT/AFL-CIO at University of Illinois-Chicago, and e) the campaign to replace the current mayor of Chicago’s 1%. In the neo-liberal era of public higher education as for profit knowledge factories, debt peonage of students, militarized research calendar/curriculum, exploitation of disposable athletes, administrative bloat and the recurring attack on academic freedom, it is important to remember those, like Watkins, who nurture(d) spaces not controlled by the State or financial capital (3). It is in those spaces where students, faculty and staff not only teach each other democratic decision making supported by evidence produced with those to whom public intellectuals are accountable, but also organize direct actions that verify abstract conclusions and rehearse the creation of alternatives premised on solidarity.

Death only scares those intellectuals anxious about their immortality and terrified about the ultra-terrestrial nothingness that their logic presents (4). People who show up to struggle once are good, people who show up for a semester are better, but the ones who are necessary are those who show up all the time. Bill was one of those who was necessary because he showed up every day. He died all of a sudden like soldiers in battle, against those who betray working people. While we follow his example – making the road less travelled, teaching others to follow the star we have chosen – our friend will continue to live, because like Antonio Maceo in Cuba or Elma Francois In Trinidad, Watkins is one of those dead who never dies as long as there are those among us who know who we are, what side of the fence we are on, and exemplify what we can be.

 

End Notes

1) Kelley, R. (2002). Freedom dreams. The Black radical imagination (pp. 103-104). Boston: Beacon Press

2) Georgakas, D. & Surkin, M. (1999). Detroit I do mind dying: A study in urban revolution (p. 164). Boston: South End Press. 1st edition 1975, 3rd Edition 2012

3) Wolf, S. (2014, Spring). Why the faculty fell? International Socialist Review, Issue 92, pp. 142-145; Newfield, C. (2008). Unmaking the public university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P.; Bailey, M. & Freedman, D. (Eds.). (2011). The assault on universities. A manifesto for resistance. London: Pluto Press; Schrecker, E. W. (1986). No ivory tower. McCarthyism & the universities. NY” Oxford U.P.; Tuchman, G. (2009). Wannabe U. Inside the corporate university. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

4) Unamuno, M. de (1980). El caballero de la triste figura. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. 1st Edition 1951.

 

The author W. F. Santiago-Valles is emeriti faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University-Kalamazoo, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (History Department, and African & African American Studies) in the U.S., and Visiting Professor- Graduate School at Cheikh Anta Diop (National)   University-Dakar, Senegal, West Africa.

Filed Under: Tribute

(In)visible Battered Black Women, and Why We Can’t Wait by Carolyn M. West

October 13, 2014

The photos and videos of battered Black women’s bodies seem to be everywhere. TMZ a celebrity news website released security camera footage of Janay Palmer Rice’s then finance/now husband violently punching her in an Atlantic City casino elevator. According to national studies she is not alone. Approximately 4 out of every 10 Black women have been victims of rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetimes. This means that more than 6 million Black women are survivors. They are our sisters, friends, and neighbors.

With the assistance of a passer-by, the disoriented, disheveled Janay Rice rose to her unsteady feet. However, too many Black women never get up again, like Kasandra Perkins who was shot nine times with a .40-caliber handgun by her boyfriend Jovan Belcher, the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker. Like Janay Rice, she also was not alone. More than half of Black women homicide victims who knew their offenders were killed by former or current intimate partners, most often with a handgun during an argument.

But, it is not just celebrities. The internet is populated with images of formally anonymous Black girls and women who have been victimized, like Jada, a 16-year-old Houston native who had been drugged and raped at a party. Soon, pictures of her—bottomless, unconscious, arms slung on either side, one leg bent perpendicular—were posted on social media. Using the hashtag #jadapose, twitter uses shared photos of themselves that mimicked her passed-out pose and added the message “hit that.”

Society remains oblivious to the most horrific violence perpetrated against Black women—even when their bodies are bound with zip ties and left like litter in the street, as in the case of teenagers, and good friends, Angelia Mangum and Tjhisha Ball. “Black girls murdered, but do YOU care?” asked Jamilah Lemieux. Sadly and ironically, Black women are the targets of so much violence—in their homes, communities, and work places—that their hypervisible victimization has become normalized, such that is no longer visible or as I prefer to call it: (in)visible.

The NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell promised to “get it right” by addressing domestic violence. This means including the voices of Black women and resisting the urge to make Ray Rice and other players the “Black male boogey men” face of domestic violence, a problem that is endemic across racial groups. Instead, we must explore the complex reasons for intimate partner violence in the NFL and the wider society.

Some speculate that easy access to guns, excessive drinking, or traumatic brain injury contributed to the Jevon Belcher murder-suicide. “When you whip those you love, it’s not about abuse, but love” said the mother in defense of her son, Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson who was accused of child abuse. Historical trauma and exposure to family violence/child abuse that masquerades as “love,” has had a devastating impact on the Black community. Getting it right means creating spaces for healing that allow us to love our children and partners in nonviolent, healthy ways.

With pride, I watched citizens of St. Louis (my hometown) speak in a loud, unified voice to protest and seek justice for Michael Brown, the unarmed Black teenager who was shot by police. Yet, our outcry is muted when faced with domestic violence and sexual assault. Getting it right means responding to Tony Porter’s clarion “Call to Men” to urgently address gender-based violence. Otherwise, as Ewuare X. Osayande so eloquently wrote: “As long as the Black community silently embraces rhetoric that places a premium on the bodies of Black men at the brutal expense of Black women, we will continue to be caught in this position of indefensible contradiction. Our double standard as a community stares back at us through the battered eyes of Black women who live under a doubly oppressive system of racism and sexism.”

Millions watched the grainy Valentine’s Day video clip of what Ms. Rice described as a “horrible nightmare”—her body goes horizontal before her head slams into a handrail. Ray Rice, the 206lb former Baltimore Ravens running back had delivered the blow that rendered his future bride unconscious. Millions of Black women are victims of this (in)visible violence. For me, this reality evokes the words and spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Just like the Negro couldn’t patiently wait for an end to segregation and racial oppression, we can’t wait to end this gender-based terrorism against Black girls and women. We must get it right.

 

Dr. Carolyn M. West is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington and author of the editor/contributor of the award-winning book Violence in the Lives of Black Women: Battered, Black, and Blue (Routledge, 2003). She can be reached at www.DrCarolynWest.com

Filed Under: News

A Tribute to General Baker by Charles Ferrell

October 11, 2014

The following excerpts were transcribed from the video-recorded interview of General Gordon Baker, Jr. (September 6, 1941 – May 17, 2014) by Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell C. Stanford, Jr.). The nearly three-hour interview, recorded in 1993 at Legacy Communications in East Cleveland, Ohio, was a part of Ahmad’s doctoral dissertation research. Dr. Ahmad sent the tapes to Dr. Bracey (Distinguished Historian and Chair of Afro-American History at University of Massachusetts – Amherst) to avoid loss should his home be raided. The tapes were mailed to the author by Dr. John H. Bracey. Dr. Ahmad granted this author-editor unrestricted rights to use the referenced recorded contents. For focus and space specifications, only a few of Gen’s statements are cited here.

These statements provide a glimpse of Gen’s historic significance in our national liberation struggle and the nature of his uncompromising revolutionary activism and fearless spirit, in his own voice. For over 50 years, Gen fought for the racial, political, environmental and economic justice, freedom and human rights (self-respect, self-defense and self-determination) for the black working class and the globally oppressed. Gen was a revolutionary theoretician, strategist, tactician and leader of the highest order, an intellectual, historian, teacher, orator, union labor organizer, human rights activist, a life-long analytical student, a deeply loving and beloved father and husband, and dedicated comrade-in-arms. He was one of the most important leaders to emerge in the 1960s.

Ultimately, Gen fought to create a new cooperative society. He struggled with and for the Black working class and those oppressed and dispossessed in Detroit, nationally and globally. Gen’s life is a quintessential example of the “new man” Frantz Fanon called for in his continuously relevant work, Les Damnes de la Terre [The Wretched of the Earth, New York, 1965].

 

Purpose

“Yeah, I would just like to say, it is a real pleasure to be here today with Max, in the studio, making a recording of this past thirty years of the experience of struggle in the movement that we’ve had. This history has not been recorded in a real formal way. It’s real important for youth today and those who want to continue to struggle.”

 

Foundation

“I was born in Detroit, Michigan on September 6th, 1941. I was raised in a family of three sisters and one nephew that was raised like a brother. My family was basically of sharecropper stock from Georgia and migrated to Detroit in the early forties seeking work in the auto factories there in the city. So, therefore my upbringing was conditioned specifically by ghetto life as it expressed itself in Detroit in the 1940’s, particularly in the old ‘Black Bottom’ section, south of Gratiot Avenue.

“My father belonged to the UAW. He worked at Bentley Ross plant, a steel mill in Detroit. It had a real militant local and he was an active member in that local. Other than that, my family had no other organizational expression except for the church. And my grandfather, on my mother’s side, had been a pastor from Georgia at a Christian Methodist Episcopal church and therefore my family sought out that church when they got to Detroit. And except for the church and the union, these are basically, the only organizations my family belonged to.”

“Back in the 40’s and the 50’s, most political discussions were shied away from. You got to remember, this is the period when we are making the transition from the New Deal years to the Eisenhower years during my early development. Except for discussions for the hate – generally – for Republicans and the love of Democrats, that’s about the limit of political discussions that took place in our household.”

“They [my parents] were never socially active. They mostly worked and went home and slept and expressed values of religion, the church, school, and education. Even though the U.N.I.A. [Universal Negro Improvement Association] had an active chapter, I never knew anything about them. My family never expressed anything about them.”

“I grew up like any kind of inquisitive ghetto youth in the 40’s.”

“The earliest [memory of racial injustice] would have been the Emmett Till case. To see Emmett Till’s pictures in Jet magazine mutilated…”

“My racial consciousness was beginning to develop rapidly because of the struggle.”

 

James and Grace Boggs – Apprentice

“At the time, I was sort of like an apprentice of theirs [James and Grace Boggs]. James and Grace were very active. Anyone active in Detroit would have to run into them. They were there at the Black Arts conferences. They were always there trying to give you some direction and leadership. Boggs was still working at the Jefferson plant at the time as an autoworker. He was able, often times, to give us some kind of leads in terms of how to struggle in the plants and what was available there. They always had foot in the struggle for the community. The Freedom Now Party, they were a part of that activity [and] – with GOAL, the Group on Advanced Leadership.

One of the most difficult things to learn is an oddity of Detroit. They [Boggs] were east-side based. Detroit, for some reason, has this antagonism between the east and the west side. It’s difficult to find a historical basis for it. And this lingers on today. But, Grace and Jimmy were on the east side. That was the side that probably was the most depressed. The old ‘Black Bottom’ was on the east side, south of Gratiot.

James and Grace provided some intellectual leadership. The kind of literature they had access to was important. By this time, Presence Africaine out of France was printing literature and getting access to international literature of a character that here to before we couldn’t find. I remember the discussions and reports of the Bandung Conference that was held in 1955 – that was printed on some of the Presence Africaine literature that Malcolm articulated in ‘Message to the Grassroots.’ These things become important.

We ran around internationally through R.A.M [Revolutionary Action Movement].”

 

“We will bleed Malcolm!”

“Malcolm was electrifying. I mean he was a spark. Whenever he came to town, I always found my way there. The numerous trips he made to the early Saviour’s Day at Olympia Stadium. The trip he made when he spoke at Wayne State University and all over Michigan – I was always there. Malcolm left you with a definite inspiration to continue to struggle. Yeah, we use to leave rallies where Malcolm spoke at prepared to hit the streets to take up any battle, anywhere, or to go back to the battles we had before, but do them more enthusiastically than before. So Malcolm was a real inspiration for us. A real revolutionary inspirational fighter who articulated the demands that we had [endorsed} much better than anyone on the scene at that time.”

“The conference that Malcolm [X] spoke ‘The Message to the Grassroots,’ I think it might have been around November of 1963 at King Solomon Temple. Like I said, every time Malcolm came to town, I never missed him. When he came – at that time he also spoke at a couple of other places. He spoke at Wayne State earlier that day and we went to King Solomon Church that evening. A few of us was working as security guards to provide protection for Malcolm along with the Nation of Islam. We were there in full force.

As a matter of fact, if you listen closely to the tape or the film presentation of the ‘Grassroots,’ you will hear us hollering in the audience. I think it’s at one point when Malcolm is talking about that the only revolution that’s a bloodless revolution is a Negro revolution. And he said, ‘You are afraid to bleed!” And you hear us hollering, ‘We will bleed Malcolm! We will bleed!’ So you hear us on that tape hollering in the audience. That’s the kind of – the kind of response you had when Malcolm spoke. That’s the kind of inspiration that he gave people when he spoke. That’s the kind of revolutionary fervor that he offered the movement. You know, in a national way, it was expressed so well. That was a real loss the movement suffered in a real way with his designed death.”

“1964, for us was a period of time when we tried to capture some of the gains the 1963 march [on Washington]. Clearly, there weren’t many.”

“I think the kind of climate that was set with the assassination of Malcolm and then the attack on our flank, you know, you kind of understand the type of repression back in 1965.”

 

1965

Back in Detroit, a new section of the police department was created in 1965 called the Tactical Mobile Units. The use of tactical police – was first on the scene that period. They had high level mobility, a lot of new shotguns and military equipment to be able to break up street fighting and other kinds of things that happened in that period of time.”

“In 1965, we continued to try to press at Dodge Main plant. I’m working with the African American student movement. We published a couple of publications. We started printing a publication we called Razor, a publication for the African American student movement in Detroit and we circulated it at Wayne State campus and Highland Park Community College campus. We also printed a thing called The Black Vanguard that was a publication for black workers in union shops around the city.

We had learned, as I said earlier in the tape, some of the skills from some of the Left groups in terms of how to do leaflet work with mimeograph. We’d take some of the money we had earned at the plant and rent a typewriter, rent a mimeograph machine and ran all these things out of the basement of my apartment. And we attempted to try to do agitation.

Clearly, we had a few people around us, but it had not really caught fire, in a lot of ways, early in ’65. I think a lot of it could be attributed to our understanding of how to agitate and perhaps the articles we attempted to do was more like propaganda than agitation. There were too many ideas to try to be understood by the people we were trying to reach. We spent that time doing that.

Later, that year, I told you I had wrote a letter to the Draft Board [See Note 1]. I received, sometime on June of 1965, a letter from the Draft Board saying I was drafted and that I need to report to the Draft Board on September 10th, 1965 for induction.

Meanwhile, you got to remember in 1965 now, in August, LA erupted and the Watts Rebellion. It lasted about a week and a new point in the historical development was reached. A real proletariat uprising. And, you know, ‘Burn Baby, Burn!’ rose as a slogan and call of the day. And it kind of set tremors…tremors throughout the rest of the movements around the country about the potentialities of struggle.”

 

Robert F. Williams – Watts – September 10th Movement

“One of the critical things Robert Williams was doing with the publication of The Crusader, was printing in its edition an article called [USA:} The Potential of the Minority Revolution that was promoting the question of how we can be victorious as minorities in an uprising in America. And so the whole movement reached a new higher level than it was before the Watts Rebellion broke out.

So Detroit – meant for us, in a lot of ways – was to prepare ourselves for the upcoming struggle that summer and particularly, so far as I was involved, to try to carry the struggle out for September 10th, which was my induction date. What we did was to organize the September 10th Movement. And the September 10t was a movement that basically attempted to try to destroy the draft. We leafleted all the plants in the city of Detroit, most of the campuses, and some of the high schools to build up a resistance against the draft through general agitation around a general slogan, ‘No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.’ You know, we need to fight discrimination here at home. And we called for a protest of 50,000 people at Fort Wayne Induction Center in Detroit.

As it may be, the Watts Rebellion, by breaking a month early, gave us more fuel for agitation. We had found out from some of the people that we were working with that the city’s fathers planned to arrest everyone who showed at the demonstration on September 10th and they were trying to try to play up new names. So tactically, what we decided to do was put out leaflets calling for people to stay as standby positions in the neighborhoods and if they attack The September 10th Movement, you know what to do, remember Los Angeles.

What actually happened on induction day, when I appeared that morning with my duffle bag – I should say, first of all, I took military leave from work so it would be easy if I got inducted and had to go to prison I may have a job to go to after I got out. What happened, I went down and took the physical, passed the physical and got to the point of swearing in and I told them, ‘I am not going to swear in. I’m not going to the army. I want to prove that I am physically fit and I’m not dodging the draft. I’m not going.’ At that point they took me in to see the captain. He said his name was Captain Cox – that ran the Induction Center at that military base in Detroit. They took statements from me. I basically stated that I wasn’t going into the army and if they like, they can call the police. And they sent me back home and declared me a security risk.

What happened when we got back out was have a demonstration with about 10 people for about a half hour. We tactically decided to carry signs that said, ‘Destroy the Draft,’ and nothing else. But, in the process of developing the work for the September 10th confrontation, the police had tipped their hand when they arrested us for posting signs on the walls. And they dropped the hint they were going to arrest us for criminal anarchy. What we did then was decide to have a slogan ‘Destroy the Draft’.”

 

League of Revolutionary Black Workers

“We are in the period of 1969. The main event that led to the formation of the League was the Eldon Avenue Gear and Axle Plant strike. I will never forget the date of the strike was January 29th, 1969 and it was after the distribution of leaflets from about nine to seven weeks. The people – the workers at Eldon had demanded we take some kind of action.

We had learned a few things from the Dodge Main strike. One was, once we strike, if it was successful, we are going to have to have some places for workers to go to retreat. It was not like a summer day, like the original Dodge Main strike. It was a cold January day. So we secured a hall we could go to. We sent picket lines to the plant that morning. Held down all four gates. The strike was an overwhelming success. We moved the workers back to the hall. We rallied them, fed them, prepared them to go back out and take out the afternoon shift when they came in about three o’clock that evening.”

 

Note 1:           Gen’s Letter to the U.S. Draft Board

Gentlemen:

This letter is in regards to a notice sent to me, General Gordon Baker, Jr., requesting my appearance before an examining station to determine my fitness for military service.

How could you have the NERVE knowing that I am a black man living under the scope and influence of America’s racist, decadent society??? You did not ask me if I had any morals, principles, or basic human values by which to live. Yet, you ask if I am qualified. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT, might I ask? What does being “Qualified” mean: qualified to serve in the US Army?

. . . To be further brainwashed into the insidious notion of “defending freedom”?

You stand before me with the dried blood of Patrice Lumumba on your hands, , the blood of defenseless Panamanian students, shot down by U.S. marines; the blood of my black brothers in Angola and South Africa who are being tortured by the Portuguese and South African whites (whom you resolutely support) respectively; the deal people of Japan, Korea, and now Vietnam, in Asia, the blood of Medgar Evers, six Birmingham babies, the blood of one million Algerians slaughtered by the French (whom you supported); the fresh blood of ten thousand Congolese patriots dead from your ruthless rape and plunder of the Congo—the blood of defenseless women and children burned in villages from Napalm jelly bombs . . . With all of this blood of my non-white brothers dripping from your fangs, you have the damned AUDACITY to ask me if I am “qualified.” White man; listen to me for I am talking to you!

 

I AM A MAN OF PRINCIPLES AND VALUES: principles of justice and national liberation, self-determination, and respect for national sovereignty. Yet you ask me if I am “physically fit” to go to Asia, Africa, and Latin America to fight my oppressed brothers (who are completely and resolutely within their just rights to free their fatherland from foreign domination). You ask me if I am qualified to join an army of FOOLS, ASSASSINS and MORAL, DELINQUENTS who are not worthy of being called men! You want me to defend the riches reaped from the super0exploitation of the darker races of mankind by a few white , rich, super-monopolists who control the most vast empire that has ever existed in man’s one million years of History—all in the name of “Freedom”!

Why, here in the heart of America, 22 million black people are suffering unsurmounted toil: exploited economically by every form of business—from monopolists to petty hustlers; completely supported politically; deprived of their social and cultural heritage.

But all men of principle are fighting-men! My fight is for Freedom; UHURU, LIBERTAD, JALAUGA, and HARAMBEE! Therefore, when the call is made to free South Africa; when the call is made to liberate Latin America from the United Fruit Co., Kaiser and Alcoa Aluminum Co., and from Standard Oil; when the call is made to jail the exploiting Brahmins in India in order to destroy the Caste System; when the call is made to free the black delta areas of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina; when the call is made to FREE 12TH STREET HERE IN DETROIT!: when these calls are made, send for me, for these shall be Historical Struggles in which it shall be an honor to serve!

 

Venceremos!

   General G. Baker, Jr.

Filed Under: News

A Tribute to Maya Angelou by Shanna L. Smith

October 1, 2014

Maya Angelou – (April 4, 1928 – May, 28, 2014)

As tributes poured at the announcement of the death of our beloved Dr. Maya Angelou, it was clear that many of us felt a kinship with her. It was more than her clear gaze, rich voice, and erect carriage that drew our attention as children gathered around an elder, pupils hovered around a griot. That gaze took our measure and commanded us to be better. That voice, rich with calloused life experience, laid that life bare. Her unapologetic honesty resonated with those silenced in their own pain and helped to give them voice. Her physique was a mystery; a dignified expression of survival that we could also achieve. Even her name, “Maya,” a nickname given to her by her brother, Bailey, seemed to make her ours. It emphasized that fictive kinship so widely understood. It was as if a favored aunt had died on May 28, 2014.

Born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, Angelou epitomized the term Renaissance woman. As a poet, playwright, actress, dancer, singer/songwriter, director, civil rights activist, teacher and most notably a memoirist, Maya Angelou lived a life of rebirth. Childhood rape, poverty, and teenaged motherhood did not limit her possibilities. Instead, she made her life a roadmap of wondrous transformation and shared it with a viewing public who read her work, attended her lectures, and witnessed her performances. At the time of her death, she claimed a catalogue of seven (7) memoirs beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, penned collections of countless poems, including the inaugural poem On the Pulse of the Morning under then-President Bill Clinton, received a Tony Award nomination for her performance in “Look Away”, won three Grammy awards for spoken work production, and was presented with the 2011 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Angelou, who never attended college, was an educator who intoned famously to Oprah Winfrey, “When you learn, teach, when you get, give”. She was awarded over thirty doctorates and received the Reynolds Professorship at Wake Forest University, where she taught American Studies. These are only a portion of the mark she made in the world.

Angelou was primarily a humanitarian, working both in front and behind the scenes. This is demonstrated in the simple way she determined to learn the languages of the international places she visited. In the 1960s she performed and raised funds for civil rights organizations, and became the Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She lived and worked for a time in Cairo, Egypt and Accra, Ghana, as a free-lance journalist, university administrator, and theatrical performer. Back in the United States in the mid to late 1960s, Angelou aided Malcolm X in forming the Organization of Afro-American Unity shortly before his assassination in 1965 and was tapped to organize a march for Martin Luther King prior to his own assassination in 1968, which happened to be her 40th birthday. International acclaim for her writing began after this painful period with the publishing of Caged Bird in 1969. She spent subsequent years producing additional memoirs and poetry that speaks to the human experience, primarily the black woman’s human experience. She went on to act in film, including Alex Haley’s “Roots” (1977) and her poetry has been featured, along with her own appearances, in John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice” (1993) and Tyler Perry’s “Madea’s Family Reunion” (2006). Angelou also directed “Down in the Delta” (1998). Human dignity is the thread woven throughout all of her performances and work experience.

Maya Angelou was a quotable resource. Her truth telling gave instructions. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”. Her inspirational words were developed into a Hallmark greeting card collection in the early to mid- 2000’s. Additionally, young women across the nation recited her poems “And Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman” in talent shows, pageants, and poetry performances. She was touted for instilling, through her poetry, esteem in black women concerning their bodies, beauty, and behavior.

Only a humanitarian of the highest caliber could earn a publically televised funeral, in the way the Coretta Scott King was memorialized. It was no celebrity spectacle; perhaps the spectacle was me, viewing the services, along with a friend, on my living room couch. We participated in the service by proxy, with the urgent need to witness the homegoing. On Saturday, June 7, 2014 we attended to her – like we had her poetic renderings while on tour across the nation – one last time. Our attention was our greatest respect. We all suffered a generational loss, and the weight loomed large. We, her actual and fictive kin, mourned her public and private personas, and her resulting relationships with all of us, separately and together.

 

Shanna L. Smith is author of “Being Neighborly: Performance in Seen It All and Done the Rest”, Pearl Cleage and Free Womanhood (McFarland & Company, 2012). She is a Frederick Douglass Teaching Scholar in the English Department at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Filed Under: News

Antiblack Racism and Moral Panics by David J. Leonard

September 20, 2014

A National Pastime: Antiblack Racism and Moral Panics

America is a nation bound together by moral panics; in the absence of an actual moral center or a compass of justice, we find power in collective outrage in the absence of self-reflection. And race or antiblackness is often what anchors these fits of moralism.

It is an expert at racial moral panics, a truly exceptional world power when it comes to moral posturing, collective outrage, and the resulting finger pointing.   From the culture wars of the 1980s to debates regarding hip-hop into the 1990s, from discourses around “black homophobia” and “black on black crime,” and far deeper into history, moral panics are often wrapped up discourses of blackness. James Baldwin spoke of this quintessential American tradition in 1960: “I think if one examines the myths which have proliferated in this country concerning the Negro.” Accordingly “beneath these myths a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine. In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities, with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race” (quoted by Bouie)

Writing about the 1980s and the demonization of “welfare queens,” George Lipsitz (1995) identifies this history as one where “Americans produce largely cultural explanations for structural problems.” With a long history of scapegoating and locating moral imperatives and cultural impurities through bodies of color, it should come as no surprise that the release of video footage of then Ravens Running Back Ray Rice striking his then girlfriend Janay Palmer has sent America, from The Capital to the American media landscape, from NFL stadiums to Starbucks, into a perpetual state of moral outrage.

The effort to reduce social ills to individual failures, to individual pathologies, and cultural dysfunctions comes through a centering of blackness within these discourses. “What is forbidden in American culture often seems to be projected outward onto the outsider or scapegoat,” writes James (1996). “Blackness has come to represent sex and violence in the national psyche. Although they gain notoriety as the most infamous perpetrators of unrestrained criminality, African Americans are given little recognition in media, crime reports or social crusades as being victims.” The refusal to see or hear Janay Palmer, Kasandra Perkins and countless more makes this all too clear.

Directed at Rice (and several other players), and Roger Goodell for failing to properly control, discipline, and punish the NFL’s “out-of-control,” the moral panic feels less and less about intimate partner violence (IPV), hyper masculinity, a culture of violence, misogyny, or patriarchy, but instead yet another moment to locate social ills within the bodies of black men. Blackness, especially in the sporting world, is “legible” (Neal 2014) only as signifiers of dysfunctional, danger, criminality, and corruption. This has been the case with IPV, and equally evident in the aftermath of Adrian Peterson’s arrest. According to Jamelle Bouie, “It’s reminiscent of other conversations around broad-based behaviors or beliefs that become pathological and purely “black” when displayed by black Americans in elevated numbers.”

As black bodies are ubiquitously imagined as essentially disruptive, uncontrollable, as a source of “cultural degeneracy” the problem of IPV becomes not an American problem and not even one belonging to the NFL — but a problem of blackness. Blackness exists as “a problematic sign and ontological position” (Williams 1998, p. 140). The outrage resulting from Ray Rice reflects the logics of anti-black racism, perpetuating a culture that sees blackness as the problem, one that needs to be contained, purified, controlled, punished, and ultimately eliminated.

The outrage has little to do with the pervasive and endemic problem of IPV within the NFL and society as a whole. In a nation where 1 in 3 women report having experienced IPV, where 1 in 5 men admit to having committed violence against a partner, one has to wonder why now, why did Ray Rice prompt a national soul searching regarding the problem of IPV? In a nation, where the media and the court system routinely rationalize the prevalence of IPV through victim blaming and excuse making, forgive me if I ain’t buying this feigned outrage. The political power structure, particularly the GOP, should have a seat; they should delete their press releases and their demands for “zero tolerance” and simply look in the mirror.   From its foot dragging with the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act to its budgetary PRIORITIES, it is clear that the political structure is perfectly fine with domestic violence. Combatting violence against women is not a priority, at least if it requires more than a press conference. In 2013, the National Domestic Violence Hotline was unable to answer “77,000 calls due to lack of resources.” And this isn’t the only example of how the GOP, and the Congress as a whole, has no moral standing with respect to IPV.

“The Republican romance with gun rights has proved deadly. More than 60 percent of women killed by a firearm in 2010 were murdered by a current or former intimate partner. The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by an astonishing 500 percent, writes Katie McDonough. “The Republican-led assault on reproductive freedom has major implications for victims of domestic violence. Republican resistance to mandatory paid leave policies means that women who need time off to leave an abusive relationship or are hospitalized after a domestic violence incident can lose their jobs for missing work.” Congress and their friends at the NRA, like the NFL, is reflective of a culture of domestic violence and a complicit actor in the daily injustices experienced by all too many women and children in this society. In a nation where judges and police officers (“family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population”) engage brutal acts of violence against women with impunity, where ESPN and other sports media, routinely mock and reduce women to dehumanized objects of consumption and ridicule, it is hard to believe in this feigned and surely short-lived outrage about Domestic Violence (DV).

The rampant hypocrisy, the racist moralism, and the scapegoating are equally evident in the types of “solutions” being proposed. In the face of rightful, even when misplaced, outrage, the NFL created a VP position in charge of “social responsibility” (to be filled by Anna Isaacson, the league’s current VP of community affairs and philanthropy) and hired three domestic advisors (Lisa Friel, Jane Randel and Rita Smith). Goodell, the benevolent white father figure whose primary responsibility was disciplining the league’s “unruly” black bodies had failed. In this context, 4 white women have replaced him. The focus on punishment, the embracing of the language of mass incarceration, and the moral posturing should give us pause in that the logics, tropes, and policies that have compelled mass incarceration are the center of the NFL’s reclamation project.   The focus on individual accountability (which needs to be part of the process) at the expense of collective transformation and societal cultural change, the concern with response rather than dealing with root causes highlights the systemic failures to truly address intimate partner violence.

At its core, the post-Ray Rice discourse is not about IPV; it is not about concern for Janay Palmer or collectively saying #blackwomenslivesmatter or #womendeservejustice. It is about racial paternalism and the historic efforts to imagine sports not as exploitation, big business, profits, and a health risk, but one of disciplinarity and moralism. Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson put these narrative rationalizations in question, resulting in panic and further reimagination of sport as a source of good. According to King and Springwood (2005), “Perhaps such public concerns and panics are best understood as a form of racial paternalism in which white America struggles to come to terms with its (exploitative) enjoyment of the African American athlete by advancing a linkage between the ostensibly moral and disciplinary space of … big time sports.”

The selective outrage at players within the NFL (and the league for not controlling them) and not Major League Baseball or Hollywood (Charlie Sheen) or mainstream music industry, or the police, or the military, or every American institution is revealing. The silence regarding Hope Solo, who stands accused of domestic violence, playing for the U.S. National Team is telling: whiteness matters.

So is the lack of moral outrage for Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, Rekia Boyd, and countless others. One has to look no further than Marissa Alexander, who faces 60 years in prison for firing a warning shot against an abusive husband whose history of violence has been well-documented, to understand the nature of today’s moral panic. One has to look no further than at the thousands of women locked up for defending themselves against an abusive and violent partner. America’s (so-called) moral center bends not toward, but away from the arc of justice. It is guided by racism and sexism; its compass is profit before people. We need a new compass not a new policy; a moral center of justice not more of the same: we need a new pastime

***

David J. Leonard is an associate professor and chair in the department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington State University, Pullman, and the author of a forthcoming book on race, media and gun violence. Follow him on Twitter.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Adrian Peterson, antiblackness, domestic violence, IPV, Janay Palmer, Marissa Alexander, NFL, racism, Ray Rice, Roger Goodell, violence against women, whiteness

A Tribute to Amiri Baraka by Michael Simanga

September 17, 2014

Amiri Baraka

(October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014)

A Black Scholar

Amiri Baraka’s death on January 9, 2014, caused the Black ecosystem of institutions, intellectuals, artists and activists committed to our century’s long fight for human rights to stagger under the weight of the loss and its possible meanings. Even as we gathered ourselves to publicly mourn and honor him, to write and read our thoughts and feelings, there was a sense that a significant change had occurred in our world of resistance and struggle. In the weeks after his death, when we had not quite found our footing, our brother–Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba–transitioned suddenly, followed by one of our great historians Vincent Harding, our beautiful storyteller Maya Angelou and the relentless advocate for African people Elombe Brath. It was as if Baraka’s death was not enough to force us to see we are reaching the end of the era of the Warrior Generation.

Imamu Amiri Baraka was many things to our people, we collectively and us individually. He was an artist with exceptionally deep perception and talent, an educator, a political and spiritual leader, a revolutionary strategist and institution builder, a fearless warrior against all who would diminish black people, an insightful teacher, a scholar of African American history and culture, a determined advocate for Black self-determination, a husband and father, and a prolific writer who created a significant body of work that included poetry, plays, essays, fiction, music and scholarly articles. The many forms in which he came to us were the result of his never ending quest to find a way to give everything he had in service of the people he loved, Black people and humanity. Even his names reminded us of his changes: LeRoi Jones, Ameer Baraka, Imamu Baraka, and Amiri Baraka. We were inspired and sometimes confused by his shape shifting. Sometimes we were angered by it and in opposition to it. But we never doubted it was him. We were never unsure of his voice or that he was our warrior, that all of his prodigious gifts were focused on and fueled by our demand for self-determination and justice.

Amiri Baraka was one of many intellectuals of his generation whose scholarly research and study, writing, teaching and work actually influenced the political struggle of African Americans and called countless young artists, activists and scholars to work on behalf of our people. But Baraka’s political influence is extraordinary in his generation of exceptional thinkers and workers because of his direct involvement and leadership of significant historical events in the Black Liberation Movement. That leadership grew from an underlying principle that remained consistent in his activism.   Baraka’s work has always been based on building institutions that would engage greater numbers of people in an organized effort to advance the struggle. Some of these institutions were local, community-based organizations and some also had national and international scope and impact. He believed that where ever we are it is necessary to build, strengthen or expand structures that will help us wage and sustain our efforts.

Throughout his public life he founded or co-founded newspapers, theatre companies, cultural centers, community organizations, national liberation organizations and numerous coalitions and united fronts. While he is widely acknowledged as the most influential artist of the Black Arts Movement, for the past 50 years he also built cultural institutions including The Black Arts Repertory Theatre, Spirit House, Kimako’s Blues People and Blue Ark as platforms to nurture, engage and organize actors, writers, directors, poets, musicians and cultural workers. The political formations he co-founded and played significant leadership roles in included the Committee for Unified Newark, Congress of African People, National Black Political Convention, National Black Assembly, African Liberation Support Committee and many others. He also formed and supported several publications including Black NewArk, Unity and Struggle and Black Nation Magazine. In the days preceding his death Baraka was still organizing, supporting and building another political formation, the mayoral campaign of his son, Ras Baraka. Ras won the election and is now the Mayor of Newark 44 years after his father organized the first Black Nationalist led electoral movement in a major city that succeeded in electing Newark’s first Black mayorm Ken Gibson.

Amiri Baraka left more than forty published works as a record of his research, thought, and constantly developing consciousness. It is evidence of his dedication and seemingly boundless capacity for productivity. It is also evidence of his understanding that we, the writers and artists, the intellectual warriors, the scholars and teachers, have a sacred, crucial role in our people’s history and future. There are many pages of his writings that have never been published and hopefully will begin to make their way to us in the near future so we may further benefit from his thought and work and a life of struggle that is worthy of the ancestors who inspired him to give his life and gifts to us.

“When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people.”–Amiri Baraka

 

Michael Simanga is author of Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory (Palgrave Press, 2015 and co-editor of Brilliant Fire! Amiri Baraka: Poetry, Plays, Politics for the People (Third World Press, 2015). He is a Visiting Lecturer at Georgia State University in the Department of African American Studies.

Filed Under: News

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