When I wrote in my introduction to The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998) that, as a society, we were on the verge of “over esteeming” Muhammad Ali and thus of grossly misunderstanding his significance and deeply diminishing him as a person, I did not see myself as a revisionist but rather a seeker of a new level of nuance, an explorer.[1] Doubtless, my observation that Ali did not sacrifice any more as an athlete when he was suspended from boxing for three and a half years for his stance against the nation’s conscription laws and the Vietnam War than those athletes who were drafted during World War II was pushback against the leftist version of Ali. Those who served during World War II lost significant chunks of their athletic life spans and were, in many cases, in danger on the battlefield to boot. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis, the great crossover African American athlete of the Depression, did not fight competitively from March 28, 1942 to June 18, 1946, over four years, because of Louis’s army service during World War II. This was a longer layoff than Ali’s. What price patriotism? What price dissent? (Hall of Fame pitcher Warren Spahn had a layoff from baseball as long as Louis’ from competitive boxing during World War II. He did not seem to think it hurt his career; rather he thought he might have been aided by it. It is an open question whether the layoff helped or hurt Ali.)

In thinking about Ali’s layoff in this context, I simply wanted readers to think about it more athletically in order to reveal something ironical about it politically. What did it mean compared to other young men who lost years in their prime because of military service as he had opposing such service? But such framing was not meant to suggest that Ali was insincere or, worse, inauthentic as a dissenter, which was precisely the point of  a recent piece in the rightwing online journal, Breitbart News, that compared Ali unfavorably to Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame outfielder Ted Williams, who served as pilot in both World War II and the Korean War, the upshot of which was accusing Ali of being a draft dodger. (The only other American fighter who was publicly accused of draft dodging was heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, who avoided conscription during World War I, accused by his first wife, Maxine Cates, during their bitter divorce in 1919. Dempsey was brought up on charges in federal court of draft evasion in 1920 but was acquitted.[2])

The Breitbart article wanted to claim, in essence, that Williams made the greater sacrifice, losing time as an athlete during his prime and risking his life for his country while in combat. But the article misses the point: Ali did not dodge the draft; rather he challenged its legitimacy and was willing to pay the price for the challenge by going to prison if he lost. If he were a true draft dodger, Ali would have tried avoiding both the draft and prison by any means he could. Whether his religious grounds for opposing the draft were ethically acceptable or reasonable (he was not claiming to be a conscientious objector in a traditional sense by claiming not to believe in the morality of violence but a Muslim duty-bound to the dictates of his religion’s call to arms) is not in any way a reflection on whether they were sincere or authentic.

In the case of Ali in this instance the right wants to have it both ways with Islam: it is wrong and it is insincere as a set of religious beliefs (although with Muslim terrorists, the right underscores that the beliefs are wrong but that they are sincere which makes them all the more dangerous.) But the Breitbart article is part of a revisionist interpretation of Ali, to claim he was inauthentic, fake, a fraud, a hypocrite, a shallow man. Ali as symbol and man is thus part of the Culture Wars; the revisionism was not all generated by the right, by the all means, but also by some liberals who became weary and wary of Ali hero-worship in the fighter’s declining years and who wanted to challenge the liberal and leftist view of Ali as the grand American dragon-slayer.

In recent years, the core of revisionist criticism of Ali particularly centered on his treatment of his arch rival Joe Frazier, whom he beat twice in three fights, much of it about how unfairly and cruelly Ali castigated and belittled Frazier in the pre-fight promotions as an Uncle Tom and a gorilla, and as ignorant. Frazier was always bitter about this, about how, even when he was champion after beating Ali in 1971, he was never given his due because he existed solely as Ali’s foil. “Always able to feel the lancing invective with which Ali assaulted him, wrote Mark Kram in Ghosts of Manila, “Frazier began to see it as an orchestrated campaign to crush any respect he had in the black community.”[3]

Ghosts of Manila is the ultimate Ali revisionist book, taking Ali down a few pegs for his sexual excesses (while he preached abstinence and sex sanctified by marriage), for allowing the Nation of Islam to control his money (much to Ali’s financial detriment), for allowing himself to be bullied by the Nation about opposing the draft, almost forcing him to be a martyr, for misusing his own money in ways that were not unusual for a professional athlete but shockingly irresponsible nonetheless, and for denigrating his black opponents, largely for the amusement of his large white audience, despite his proclamations of being a loyal race man.

There is nothing that Kram describes that is untrue; indeed, bits and pieces of some of Kram’s assertions can be found in other Ali books. But the overall impression is that Ali, like the Nation of Islam, is something of a fake, a bit of a post-modernist confidence game. Nothing underscores this as much as Kram’s description of Joe Frazier as being of Gullah ancestry, where Frazier sees himself (and Kram frames him) as a pureblood (He once called Ali “a half breed”), a black from the fields, unassimilated.

To be sure, Ali politically denigrated his black opponents (who were far more competitive threats to him than the relatively few white fighters he fought) because, first, there were few other options he had to interest the general public in a bout between two black men other than politicizing his fights. Nearly all of Joe Louis’s major fights were against whites. The political dynamic of racial and ethnic difference was built into the bouts (something which boxing has always emphasized to get fannies in the seats) and Louis really had to do nothing to stimulate the public’s fantasies about what the public imagined was at stake. In the age of the black dominance of the sports, Ali had to resort to something else and in the age of civil rights and Black Power he found a winning formula: cast himself as a race hero fighting the white man’s lackey, a feat that reshaped black disunity as the race’s own sort of culture war.

Second, Ali found this to be a way to celebrate and defend his new consciousness as a politically aware black man as a result of publicly joining the Nation of Islam in 1964. (He had actually been a fellow traveler since 1961.) Being a Muslim athlete made him a new kind of being, a reinvention, something fresh and different on the scene. In this sense, Ali was an original, even as he copied the trash talking of professional wrestling, boxers like John L. Sullivan (“I can lick any son of a bitch in the house”), and the exaggerated claims of modern advertisers and Hollywood trailers, the exaggerations of popular culture. He was both P. T. Barnum and the acts that Barnum was trying to sell. In the age of mass culture, what could possibly be authentic beyond what you asserted rhetorically was authentic? For Ali and his generation, authenticity was a belief, not a fact, a manipulation of the truth, not a quest for it. And everyone in the modern world knows authenticity to be a manipulation.

Third, as a champion athlete he was a fierce competitor who defined his greatness by his rivalries. How could he truly be great unless he could convince the public he was fighting for more than just money or even fame? Was his rivalry with Frazier really very different or worse than that between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis or between Tesla and Edison or between soul singers Joe Tex and James Brown? Would anyone, outside of professional boxing, remember Joe Frazier now if Ali had not treated him the way he did?

Notes

[1] Gerald Early (ed.), The Muhammad Ali Reader, (Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1998), vii

[2] Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler, (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1980), 77-87.  Also see Jack Dempsey with Barbara Piattelli Dempsey, Dempsey, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 126-131; Jack Dempsey as told to Bob Considine and Bill Slocum, Demspey by the Man Himself, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 118-125;   Roger Kahn, A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ‘20s, (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999), 121-166.

[3] Mark Kram, Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 55

 

Gerald Early is Professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.  He currently serves as the editor of the university’s online journal, The Common Reader.

 

Here are our editors’ top five articles from T​BS​ volume 45 (2015). Given the abundance of great material from this year, narrowing it down to only five was near impossible. We truly appreciate all the hard work our contributors put into their articles. We couldn’t have done it without ALL of you!

Alphabetical by author:

• Translating Blackness: Dominicans Negotiating Race and Belonging, by Lorgia García-Peña (45.2)
• Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure, by Joan Morgan (45.4)
• Looking Back, Facing Forward: (Re)-Imagining A Global Africa, by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (45.1)
• New Orleans Revisited: Notes of a Native Daughter, by Lynnell L. Thomas (45.3)
• If Loving Olitz is Wrong, I Don’t Wanna Be Right: ABC’s Scandal and the Affect of Black Female Desire, by Kristin J. Warner (45.1) [Free to access for limited time!]

For access to our upcoming 2016 content, subscribe now! For more information on subscriptions and accessing the above articles, see here.

 

[Reposted from The Public Archive]

July 28, 2015 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the landing of US Marines in Haiti and the beginning of a military occupation of the Black Republic that lasted until 1934 — nineteen years in total. With its massacres of Haitian peasants, its control of Haiti’s finances, its suppression of the Haitian press, and its dissolution of the Haitian legislature – all backed by a combination of Jim Crow ideology and Monroe Doctrine exceptionalism – the US occupation represents a searing annotation in the history of Haitian sovereignty. Yet the memory of the US occupation sits awkwardly in the context of the Haitian present where a new, second occupation of Haiti is currently in its eleventh year. It begs the question posed by @public_archive, “How do you memorialize occupation in the middle of occupation?”

The second occupation began June 2004 and was established under the pretext of “stabilizing” Haiti after the U.S.-sponsored ouster of the country’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. During the 2003 “Ottawa Initiative on Haiti” France, Canada, and the US hatched a plot to overthrow Aristide. The following February their plan was implemented. Aristide was kidnapped by US marines and sent to a military base in the Central African Republic. US President George W. Bush announced afterwards that he was sending US forces to Haiti to “help stabilize the country.” As Peter Hallward documents, the invading “Franco-American” force targeted and killed Aristide supporters, installed a puppet Prime Minister, and enabled the formation of a paramilitary force that organized anti-Aristide death squads. The United Nations, then led by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, then cleaned up. According to Hallward, UN Security Council voted unanimously on April 29, 2003 to send, “an 8,300-strong UN Stabilization Force from 1 June, under the leadership of Lula’s Brazil.”

The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is a multi-billion dollar military occupation that has had in any given year between 6000 and 9000 military troops and police in addition to thousands of civilian personnel. While there is no civil war in Haiti, and while crime rates are higher in other nations in the Western hemisphere – including Jamaica and the U.S. – MINUSTAH has had its illegal mandate renewed and extended every year. During this second occupation, the US and its allies, France and Canada, have been able to install another puppet government, the neo-Duvalierist Michel Martelly. Martelly, who has been ruling by decree since January 2015, has opened up Haiti to radical economic fleecing, including the giveaway of land and the Republic’s gold and mineral resources. He has also diligently worked to reinstate the Haitian military. And in a horrific parallel to first US occupation of Haiti, MINUSTAH has committed numerous acts of violence against the Haitian people – including rape and assassination. MINUSTAH is also responsible for bringing cholera into the country, a disease that has killed more than 9000 Haitians and infected hundreds of thousands. Despite the deaths, and despite the evidence proving their culpability, the United Nations has enjoyed immunity from prosecution.

While the current occupation was initiated and continues to be largely funded by the U.S. and the United Nations, Haiti’s sovereignty has been extinguished by a multiracial coalition of Caribbean, Latin American and African countries. This may be the most sinister and least talked about aspect of the occupation, but it is perhaps the one that most requires our attention and contempt. In the first instance, there is Brazil. Brazil has been in charge of the military wing of the occupation since its inception. It has spent upwards of $750 million on maintaining military control. For Brazil, the country in Latin America with the largest Black population and a supposedly leftist government, Haiti is its “imperial ground zero.” Brazil has used its contribution to the occupation of the Black Republic to demonstrate its credentials as a regional power and to show the Americans and Europeans that it is ready for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. For Brazil, Haiti is also a training ground for domestic security and enforcements; its Haitian forces return to the country and deploy the tactics of military terror on its own poor Black and Brown favela dwellers.

The second occupation’s new Black leadership is, however, as egregious as Brazil’s involvement. The head of the MINUSTAH mission in Haiti is Sandra Honoré, of Trinidad and Tobago. A career diplomat and former ambassador to Costa Rica, Honoré takes up the post previously held by Mariano Fernández Amunátegui of Chile. Her deputy is Carl Alexandre, an African-American attorney who previously worked as the “Resident Legal Advisor” for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti. This Black leadership is accompanied by a multinational military force made up of a number of South American, Caribbean, and African countries, including Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Jamaica, Grenada, Benin, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Guinea, Cameroon, Niger, and Mali.

One hundred years after US Marines landed in Haiti, it seems as if the entire world is colluding to undermine the sovereignty of the world’s first Black nation. Under these circumstances, we cannot memorialize Haiti’s first occupation without rebuking those responsible for the second.

 

Jemima Pierre (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests are located in the overlaps between African Studies and African Diaspora Studies and engage three broad areas: race, racial formation theory, and political economy; culture and the history of anthropological theory; and transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Winner of the 2014 Elliot Skinner Book Award in Africanist Anthropology) and is currently working on a project on the racialized political economy of multinational resource extraction in West Africa. Dr. Pierre’s essays on global racial formation, Ghana, Haiti, immigration, and African diaspora theory and politics have appeared in a number of academic journals. She has also served as editor and columnist for the online news magazine Black Agenda Report.

She can be reached at pierrej[at]ucla.edu.

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

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison. “Nothing special,” he would say in response to questions I had sent along with family members who made the trip down from Chicago to Danville Correctional Center to surprise him.  Two-hour drive. Four-hour visit. Two days later.  “Just the same old stuff,” Anthony told me through his cousin, Rick Dear.  “Just another day cleaning outside the prison; picking up trash and taking out the garbage.”

A plum job, to be sure.  With a title.  Lawn and Grounds Specialist.  Status for a model inmate.  “I get to be outside and look at the cars as they drive by.”  A breath of fresh air.  A flirtation with freedom.  Or, perhaps, a cruel tease.

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison.  “Same old stuff,” he said.  “I ate turkey bologna, mashed potatoes, green peas and apple pie. The only thing that was special or different was the apple pie.  They don’t give us that around here.  Only on holidays.”

In Chicago, Anthony’s family gathered around the table for Christmas dinner to celebrate the moment.  His Aunt Bernice, who has been hospitalized, suffering with bone cancer, was able to come home for the day.  The family blessing offered by Anthony’s Aunt Ollie expressed hope that Anthony, too, would come home one day soon.

Anthony Dansberry spent Christmas in prison.  “Nothing special,” he said.  Not just this Christmas.  But every Christmas for the past 22 years on a 75-year sentence, paying for a crime he did not commit.  The death of 77-year-old Edna Abel resulting from a 1991 mugging.  There was a questionable confession — with limited reading skills, Anthony believed he was signing a form for his release from interrogation.  There were forensics that didn’t add up, dots that didn’t connect.  (A palm print proved not to be Anthony’s.)  And there was conflicted eyewitness testimony: Of the six eyewitnesses, only one was able to make a positive ID. Two of them said he wasn’t the one. The only witness called to testify appeared to have changed elements of her story by the time of trial.

Lawyers from Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions argued all this before the Illinois Prison Review Board in 2010 and in the court of public opinion since then.  Hoping to persuade public officials that Anthony’s murder conviction was tragically flawed.  Hoping to add the public voice of support for their clemency petition awaiting decision by Gov. Pat Quinn — the only person now who might free the 50-year-old Anthony.  The last appeal.  The last hope for a man who has become something of a poster child for a broken criminal justice system.  One that can go terribly wrong even while trying to right a wrong.  One that blindly allows innocent people to languish in prison, while the guilty go free.

Anthony has been riding a roller-coaster-of-a-hope for the 14 years his case has been represented by CWC, led by co-director Jane Raley, attorney of record on the 2010 Prison Review Board brief; Margaret Soffrin, of counsel; investigator Susan Swanson, who brought the case to CWC in 2000; and former Northwestern law students Rami Fakhouri and Rachel Freyman, who worked on the brief.

Even this Christmas season was marked by the ups and the downs.

The upside.  Anthony, along with other DCC inmates, heard the local television report of Quinn’s Christmas Eve decision granting 179 clemency petitions.   Hope.   Even though names were not included in the TV report, it seemed to Anthony that the CWC work on his behalf finally had paid off.  Surely he was on the Christmas list.

The downside.  This past Saturday, Anthony heard from his Aunt Ollie, and cousin, Rick, that his name was not included.  But that was not the worst of it.  His attorney of record, his advocate, his champion, Jane Raley, had died.  On Christmas Day.  She had succumbed to cancer.

“His whole demeanor changed,” recalls Rick, 51, a film set builder and Studio Mechanics Union member. “He didn’t cry or shed a tear,” because, well, you don’t do that in prison.  But the impact was palpable.  “He looked as though he’d just been hit by a truck.”

True to form, though, according to those who know him best, Anthony put aside his own concern about clemency, about how his appeal would proceed. “It’s not about the release right now.”  He only expressed concern about Raley’s family.  “It’s not about me anymore because she sacrificed so much, she sacrificed being with her family to take time out for me and to be with me.”  Of all the lawyers on his case before CWC took it on, Raley had been “the only one I could trust, who didn’t lie or do anything for their own benefit,” he said.

“When some of the things didn’t go the way they were supposed to, she always kept trying and looking for something else.  She told me not to worry.  ‘We’re gonna do this’ or ‘I need to talk to this person,’” he recalled.  Or “‘I need to look into this thing.’”  Like Edna Abel’s purse that mysteriously had disappeared from evidence for awhile.  “‘I will get you an answer,’” Raley would tell Anthony.  “And she always answered my calls.”

In his Saturday conversation with family, Anthony wanted to know about funeral arrangements.  (Jan. 3.)  He wanted to reach out to Raley’s family.  Somehow.  To let members know how much he appreciated their sacrifice.  All the hours Raley had put into his case.  An innocent man racked with a sense of guilt over what proving his innocence had cost others.  All the quality time Raley had lost with her family.  Not just in working on legal representation.  But also the time she spent in guiding him through it all.  Giving him hope.  Encouragement.  No guarantees, she had advised.  But at least “a fighting chance” that one day he might be released.

On Sunday, the day after his family visit, Anthony told his cousin Rick by phone that he had not been able to sleep after they left.  He had begun to write a letter to Raley’s family.  He had sought help from a fellow inmate.  He needed that help.  The writing part.  That literacy problem again.  The one that had led him to sign a confession believing it was a release form.  Half his lifetime ago.

In the draft letter shared with me by Rick, Anthony expresses his deepest sympathy along with his appreciation for Raley’s “caring and loving spirit.”  He acknowledges that she went beyond “what other attorneys in situations would have done for their clients,” showing “patience” in going over his case with him repeatedly when he didn’t understand.  In the letter, which he writes was “as difficult for me to close as it was to open,” he expresses gratitude to Raley’s “loving family” who “shared her with me for as many years” as they did.

Somewhere between the words, though, is something even deeper than all of the very moving emotions.  There is the sense that Jane Raley still is counseling Anthony.  Assuring him.  Encouraging him not to give up.

Anthony has learned the power of the possibility.  Of hope.  Of believing in the unseen.  With little more than the inspiration of people he has come to trust.

He has not given up any of that.  Hope that the work and the sacrifices of people like Jane Raley still will pay off.  Hope that his appeal finally will be considered.  Hope that more petitions for clemency will be granted by Gov. Quinn before he leaves office on Jan. 12.

Hope that Anthony Dansberry has spent his last Christmas in prison.

 

[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?”

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

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 6^th, 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 10^th, 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 10^th 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 10^th, which was my induction date. What we did was to organize the September 10^th Movement. And the September 10^t 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 10^th 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 10^th 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 10^th 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 29^th, 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 12^TH 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.

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 40^th 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.